Sudha Bhandari Anand

The Feminine Image in Fiction By Women

 

The role of women in Indian society and the iconic image of the female in India have continuously passed through an evolutionary process and Literature has always been the principal medium to create and articulate this feminine image. It would, therefore, be wrong historically to consider that the great part the women of India played in the non-cooperation movement and the position they have achieved for themselves in modern Indian life was the result of a sudden transformation. The process of emergence of an Indian Feminist Consciousness, based on principles inherently different from Western feminism, has been at work for over a century. The most significant difference between this evolutionary process in India and the revolutionary suffragette movement in the West is that in the West the movement was directed for equality with men, in India it was directed against social evil. Its intention and objective was and remains the achievement of equal human rights for women.

Mahatma Gandhi is credited with bringing about the true emancipation and modernization of the Indian woman. And so also are women such as Sarojini Naidu, Capt. Laxmi, Bikaji Cama, with their forward-thinking ideology. However, In the Mahatma’s eyes the political reform of women did not necessarily mean the liberalization and modernization of women. The credit for this goes to the Brahmo Samaj, the Prarthana Samaj and the Arya Samaj that played a much more significant role.  The Reform Movement of Raja Ram Mohan Roy against the caste system elevated the status of women by removing their social and legal inequalities, giving them the right to inherit property, eliminate sati and child marriage; it encouraged widow remarriage and brought women into the main stream of education. Keshav Chandra Sen, Telang, Ranade and Bhandarkar, espoused the cause of women; Maharishi Karve started the first university for women. Swami Dayanand Saraswati (Arya Samaj) decried purdah, prohibited child marriage and advocated remarriage of the child widow.

These movements, however, were not without their weaknesses. A possible reason for their limited success is that they were all begun and motivated by men, not by women. Also, the outreach of these reform movements remained limited because they were either religion based or territorial in appeal. The Brahmo Samaj, for example, was Bengal based, the Arya Samaj North Indian centred and the Prarthana Samaj predominantly Maharashtra bound. Had these movements been pan Indian their appeal would have been universal and the social emancipation of woman would have been hastened. Finally, with the exception of the Brahmo Samaj, these movements viewed woman in the context of the extended or joint family and none of them really aimed at making woman an equal partner of man outside of the family.

Added to this, British impact on Indian national life during the last quarter of the nineteenth century was almost traumatic; the struggle for freedom was not merely a political one, it was deeply rooted in emotional and ideological schisms within the psyche of each and every sensitive Indian and literature became instrumental in projecting contemporary social reality and national fervour. Expressed another way, a milieu had been created during the Freedom Struggle within which writers were charged with constructing an imagined, ideal community and moulding the new citizen- woman.

Indian women began writing in English towards the middle of the 19th century, soon after English was introduced into the `antahpuras’ of some aristocratic, liberal Indians like Dwarka Nath Tagore.  Poems, stories and novels, all written by women, although sporadic and hesitant, began to be visible.  The larger changes in intellectual, socio-cultural reconstruction, and multidimensional redefinitions of woman's image, role and status that were part of the widespread social movements of the entire 19th century gave women's writing clear focus and purpose. With regard to socio-economic problems, many of the novels written by men and published between 1930 and 1947 deal with the freedom struggle. Such novels include K. S. Venkataramani's Kundan, Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable, Coolie, Two Leaves and a Bud and The Sword and the Sickle, ' Raja Rao's Kanthapura, K.A. Abbas' Tomorrow is Ours, Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers and C.N. Zutshi's Motherland .

The Post-Independence period brought into prominence a number of talented women novelists. Swarnakumari Devi, Toru Dutt, Pundita Rama Bai, Cornelia Sorabji, and Rokeya Shekhawat were among the earliest writers to agitate against stereotypical representation of woman in creative writing. One cannot over-emphasize the contribution of Toru Dutt’s `Bianca’, Raj Lakshmi Debi’s The Hindu Wife, Krupabai Sathianathan’s Kamala and Saguna, Nikambe’s Ratnab and Swaranlata Ghoshal’s The Fatal Garland, An Unfinished Song and An Indian Love Story for creating women characters who explore the possibilities of social change. Without posing a threat to patriarchy, some autobiographers like Durgabai Deshmukh, Amrita Pritam, Vijaylaxmi Pandit, and Dhanvanti Rama Rau achieve great heights in their careers. Other famous autobiographies are those of Ramabai Ranade, Laksmibai Tilak, Shudha Mazumdar, Urmila Haksar and Sharanjeet Shan. 

Thus, the feminine perspective in the writing of this period clearly reflects social constructs about female morality and proper conduct for women. Society's serious involvement with defining women's relation with the patriarchal state and tradition was highly complex, with significant political and cultural issues at stake.  There was strong ideological resistance to efforts by liberal thinkers to recast the image of woman on more westernised, egalitarian and humane principles. 

The use of ancient texts, scriptures, myths and customs emphasized images built on the ancient mythical figures of Sita, Draupadi, Savitri, the Goddess Durga in all her manifestations and promoted these figures as role models for growing girls and women.  This exercise of image construction was guided by a strong need to create a new type of Indian woman: Sanskritized but different from her counterpart of Vedic traditions. Both, the liberals and conservative thinkers acquiesced to this image in the interest of patriarchy.  And women's writing of the early 20th century reflects these concerns, before gradually moving to a clear feminine perspective, and a sense of a separate sub-culture reposed within a male-dominated, mainstream culture.

The impact of Western culture on India, however, completely revolutionized the entire outlook of Indian intellectuals. Western education brought new scientific and social ideas. The Indian mind, engrossed in seeking spiritual moorings, for the first time became aware of the blessings of materialism and democracy. Evolutionary changes in the life of women in India came with the Reform Movement that ultimately produced the modern Indian woman in the twentieth century. Some outstanding women authors writing in post-Independent India were Venu Chitale's In Transit, is an image of India in transition; Zeenuth Futehally's Zohra grapples with Hyderabad in the Gandhian age; Shakuntala Shrinagesh's The Little Black Box, Lotika Ghose's White Dawns Of Awakening and Bani Ray's Srilata And Sapna are all single works of creative writing by women that deserve mention.

The Nineteen sixties saw the publication of Attia Hossain's Sunlight On A Broken Column, Vimala Raina's Ambapali, Tapati Mookerjee's Six Faces Of Eve, Padmini Sengupta's Red Hibiscus, Veena Paintal's Serenity In Storm, Muriel Wasi's Too High For Rivalry, Hilda Raj's The House Of Ramiah, and Perin Bharucha's The Fire Worshippers. Indeed, the 1970s was the decade when there was a veritable flood of writing by women- Nargis Dalal, Raji Narasimhan, Mrinalini Sarabhai, Rama Mehta, Uma Vasudev, and Anita Kumar. The number of novels that were published during this period proves that fiction by women writers gathered sudden momentum in the late seventies and early eighties. Shanta Rama Rau’s Remember The House, Veena Nagpal's Karmayogi, Jai Nimbkar's Temporary Answers, Shanta Rameshwar Rao's Children Of God, Shashi Deshpande's Roots And Shadows and The Dark Holds No Terrors, Namita Gokhale's Paro: Dreams Of Passion, andKamala Das’ Alphabet Of Lust and A Doll For The Child Prostitute are only a few examples.

If one were to undertake a perceptive study of Indian English fiction mainly from a thematic point of view, one observes that the bulk of Indian fiction in English has been written primarily in response to such historical experiences as the Gandhian movement, the imperial rule, the Independence struggle, the Partition, the emergence of 'New India' and India's relations with the West and her immediate neighbours. Within the wider spectrum of the Indian literary tradition, then, the growth of the modern novel has involved a shift in emphasis from religious aestheticism to socio-political concern. Ushering this change has been a galaxy of accomplished women novelists, whose works are now an integral part of literature. Till a few years ago some critics, both Indian and international, dismissed women’s writing as ‘melodramatic’, femininity being regarded as something derogatory—that anything coming from a woman could only be sub-standard. However, novelists like Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Attia Hossain and many others have evinced remarkable artistic skill for satire, humour, criticism, irony wit, pathos, serious tragic emotions, fantasy and a lyrical quality that is outstanding. The content of their novels has accomplished immaculate advancement of the image of the then contemporary Indian woman with remarkable ease and excellence though each author is different from the other. Each one of them has her own world of experiences, her own way of looking at things and her own way of portraying her protagonists.

Nayantara Sahgal, for instance, depicts her world of experiences in her own very individual style: Sahgal’s novels deal with men and women in eternal search for freedom-freedom to express themselves, freedom to be their own selves, although they fail to sustain that freedom. Her women resent the restrictions laid down for them, for they are aware of the injustice in having a dual morality, one for men and another for women, but they depict no counter model to the repression and suppression.  What emerges from a close reading of Sahgal’s novels is an understanding of the suffering and agony of women that results from uneven power-division in marriages but the resolutions are missing.  Nonetheless, even an awareness of this pre-determined inequality in marital relationships is a necessary step towards the development of a feminist consciousness.

Kamala Markandaya is important from many angles. She has tried to articulate the then contemporary philosophical and sociological strains in her novels: hunger, human damnation, racial recalcitrance, cultural chaos, assaults of modernity on traditional faith and individual inner crisis form the content of her fiction. Kamala Markandaya’s novels reveal the triumph of human nature and the innate dignity of woman in the midst of varied conflicts, trials and tribulations at a time when Indian women were transiting from a purely orthodox definition of their boundaries to a less conservative environment. The author is remarkable for the manner in which she recalls the consequences of industrialization and commercialisation of a rural population: with great restraint, avoiding histrionics, moralization and false rhetoric.

The tragic pathos in Markandaya's novels is a product ofher awareness of the utter waste that accompanies great social change. A fine feminine sensibility pervades the fictional world of Kamala Markandaya. Ruk­mani, Ira, Mira, Premala, Roshan, Sarojini, Nalini, Saroja and Lalitha all show unusual courage, endurance, determination and stoicism. In this sense they are all emancipated women, who can cut across the barriers of race and religion and go beyond tradition and customs and envisage a new world. They are all well drawn characters who are both ‘types’ and individuals but mostly they are conformists and traditionalists.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s works evoke vividly the first decade of Nehru's India -- its political idealism, its vitality and confusion and go on to develop parallel to India’s growth. Jhabvala, with her European sense of irony, was well placed to put this “unlovely chaos” into fiction. She was probably the first writer in English to see that India's Westernising middle class, so preoccupied with marriage, lent itself well to the style of Jane Austen’s comedies of manners. She succeeds in giving us an astonishingly true picture of the stereotypical woman of Hindu households within the joint family system. On the one hand we witness how even in their constricted world, which is carefully segmented from the male world, these women carry on their day-to-day living with nothing else to occupy their minds except matters like food, clothing, marriages, childbirths and deaths. On the other hand there are indications that things will not remain so for long. Faint stirrings are felt of a rebellion against the life that Indian society has chalked out for its women. The seeds of courage to revolt against deadpan social mores are visible even through something as inconsequential as having one's long hair cut short. (To Whom She Will). If a husband's way of life does not suit his wife, it is not necessary for her to stay with him; in fact, divorce and separation are hinted at and is the proverbial Excalibur perpetually hanging over the man’s head. If a widow, even though a grandmother, happens to like a man, there is nothing to stop her from marrying him; if a husband neglects his wife and expects her to sit passively at home, it is too much to ask and revolt is to be expected. However, if we desire a three-dimensional or multifaceted picture of the Indian woman, covering all aspects of her personality, ranging from Annapoorna the provider, to Kali the destroyer, then Jhabvala's novels fall sadly short of it. But if one does not personify the woman and sees her for what she is, I would say Jhabvala justifies her inclusion, in this study, on the Indian side of the globe because one sees in her works the first indication of a desire to overthrow bondage and the yearning to be independent. Her women protagonists are the forerunners of women one is introduced to in the fiction of Namita Gokhle, Shashi Deshpande and Shobha De.

In the context of contemporary Indian writing in English, Shashi Deshpande is one of the most understated yet confident voices exploring individual and universal predicaments through the female psyche. The operative sensibility in her stories is distinctly feminine and modern. Deshpande catches on the subtle psychological complexities of the individual mind.  In treating woman as an individual, she highlights subtleties of human behaviour based on the subconscious and conscious mind rather than on high fluted resolutions to National problems. Deshpande’s women protagonists negotiate their identities within their families and societies. She depicts her protagonists in search of self-fulfilment that almost always eludes them. Her palette is unapologetically domestic: she is the mistress of the well-rounded novel rooted in the nuances of a middle-class mind-set. An important concern underlying almost all her works is either an ingrained element of prudishness or a sense of trauma brought about by sex: in book after book sexual experiences debase the intimate relationship between man and woman. Physical love, more important ‘marital love-making’, therefore, is not the binding force between the male and the female protagonists in Deshpande’s works.  Yet, Deshpande does not come across as an author who is describing subservient women. So one might safely assume that Deshpande is not consciously presenting a male-female role dichotomy but is rather narrating a sequence of events that is not uncommon to the class about which she writes. Therefore, the woman as represented by Deshpande is an entity in herself who is neither mystical, nor mythical, nor exotic, nor different.

It is with controversial writer Shobha Dé, that the Indian woman comes of age: While the majority of Indian women still lack many basic freedoms, they are far more aware of their rights in the last two decades of the 20th Century, than at any time in history -- and they are increasingly ready to demand them. Serious critics trash De’s novels for being racy and raunchy in style and content, but the numbers they sell make her one of the most widely read English novelists in India. She presents a woman's world, a new exciting feminine world revealed through a whole spectrum of women. De’s ‘New Woman’ is a saga of an isolated woman frustrated by male absolutism, groping for some emotional anchorage. She offers a vivid portrait of woman's encounter with patriarchy and a rigid social system and her psychic potential in dealing with the crippling effects of the circumstances that prevent her proper de­velopment. All her women protagonists suffer in their attempt to settle themselves in an ordered world. De sees woman especially, and life generally, as submerged in the decadent, materialis­tic and intensive male world. But the protagonist, like her author, concludes that the role of man in woman's life as an ex­ploiting force exists on several levels and she has to depend on her own degree of tolerance for survival. Shobha De’s characters are both, exploited in India and liberated in this country; they do not need a Western ethos of feminism to break their bonds and offer them new definitions of freedom. De’s great service to the world of Indian fiction is that she has shown the Indian woman as being something other than the Sati- Savitri of tradition, steeped in orthodoxy, hemmed in by taboos and leading a life of subordination.  She depicts the modern Indian woman as someone who can overcome handicaps, can live with pain and come out of it, can live as a twenty first century woman, modern in outlook, Indian in origin and with a mooring in traditional values. 

There has been a spurt of new women writers after Namita Gokhale, Kamala Das, Shashi Deshpande and Shobha De and almost all take their cue from these role-models: Manju Kapur, Arundhati Roy, the young Radhika Jha and Sagrika Ghosh etal.  Thus, till about the end of the twentieth century, fiction by women represents a true renaissance in the world of letters. The common denominator of this new literature is that it mirrors a subject seldom documented truthfully in literature-- the entire gamut of female experience. The shadow-figure, the tagged self has now come out of her solitary confines of domesticity, to interpret, face and live life on her own terms. The feminism that now predominates is the feminism of educated, urbanized, westernised middle- class women. It is a feminism that privileges questions of gender over questions of class, race, and sexuality. The kind of feminism at work here is one that favours the dominance of universalism over ‘particularism’ and the global over the local. Yet, strangely enough since the last decade of the 20th Century, there is a distinct paucity of such books being published in India. The younger writers now on the scene are writing but intermittently; more often than not we have ‘stand alone’ novels because the writers do not subsequently follow up with more works. They tend to produce a flash in the pan and then rest on their laurels.  This makes it difficult to have any in-depth study of the literature being produced by them because there are no points of reference against which the writer can be reviewed longitudinally.  A ‘stand alone’ work is just that.  It may be good or bad fiction, but it does not tell us anything about the writer and her talents, her views, her long-term perspectives because there are very few works produced by her against which her writing can be compared over time.

Directly in contrast to this phenomenon, however, around the mid-eighties of the last century one finds that there is a whole body of fiction in English emanating from expatriate Indian women novelists.  Unlike the current writers in India, the expatriate women writers seem to be feeding the market with novels at regular intervals.  Therefore, if one has to study the image of the Indian woman in contemporary fiction being written by Indian writers, focus has necessarily to shift to the United States of America.  Prominent amongst the émigré writers are Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Gita Mehta, Chitra Divakaruni, Meena Alexander, Anjana Appachana, Bharati Kirchner and others who are writing about India, and the protagonists of their works are Indian women.  In other words, there is a distinct feminine imagery emerging in fiction by Indian women writers living and working in the United States. The authors owe their entire career to the liberating influence of India, its society and the social changes that have occurred here. 

Desai’s works, to begin with, span a period of forty years. Her earlier novels mostly explore tensions between family members and the alienation of middle-class women, her later novels, however, deal with such themes as German anti-Semitism, the demise of traditions, and Western stereotypical views of India.It is almost shocking to realize that in all her books, Desai portrays with remarkable adroitness only women who live in separate, closed, sequestered worlds of existential problems and passions. The truth is that Desai’s heroines are the traditional un-intellectual women who depend on their husbands for subsistence. This feature alone underrates her archetypal image. Moreover, Desai dwells only on the handling of maladjusted marriages and uses psychoanalytical ideas to do so. The picture of Indian society she presents is, perhaps, one-sided and skewed because increasingly the voices of women are being heard and there is visible, a definite departure from traditional orthodoxy. It comes as a surprise, therefore, that Anita Desai, writing well into the last decade of the twentieth century, should advocate isolation and suicide as sensible choices for women making wrong marriages. The entire movement of narrative and characterization seems retrogressive and retro sexual.

A few years younger than Desai, Mukherjee’s goals, aims, themes, methods, and especially her intention to “astonish, even to shock” are very like the more sty­listically restrained Desai’s. Mukherjee, like Desai, writes about India from the perspective of being an outsider in India and also writes about the West from being an outsider in the West. Both, Desai and Mukherjee belong to the first generation of immigrants to align themselves with America. Moving beyond Desai, however: Mukherjee often represents India in her fiction as a land without hope or a future. She has also been criticized for a tendency to overlook unavoidable barriers of caste, education, gender, race and history in her tales of survivors of a ‘wasted’ society. The general descriptions of historical events are not only exaggerated to suit her purpose but she is known to give her characters more opportunities than their social circumstances would realistically allow. Identity within these texts is malleable and uncertain, but Mukherjee further deconstructs a unified andconcrete notion of the self by suggesting that the very categories that we use to construct identity are themselves indeterminate. Similarly, the definition of sexuality changes when juxtaposed with different notions of race and nationality. Even culture, the crux of the diasporic experience is not an established entity, and as the women of these texts move between the conflicting cultures of India and America, one sees that culture itself is as manifold and ambiguous as the women are.

All in all, Mukherjee presents the complex consciousness of the South Asian Diasporic woman and her process of identity formation, in distorted and convoluted terms. In Mukherjee's Jasmine, for example, identity is as liminal as the space in which Jasmine lives; her identity continuously transforms as Jasmine's geography and love-life changes; in Desirable Daughters identity is constantly moving, as quickly as cultural connections are lost and found in the diasporic experience, resulting in the creation of selves that are endless in their possibilities and uncertain in their futures. This is a familiar pattern throughout her works.

Chitra Divakaruni’s emphasis in all her four novels- The Mistress Of Spices, Sister Of My Heart, The Vine Of Desire and Queen Of Dreams, is on discarding one's roots and assimilating into the mainstream American society. This has been the backbone of Bharati Mukherjee's fiction, and now one sees the same equation of Western values vs. Emancipation in Divakaruni's work. Like Bharati Mukherjee before her: Divakaruni showcases the experiences and struggles involved in women trying to find their own identities. Like Mukherjee, Divakaruni deals with issues of racism, interracial relationships, economic disparity, abortion and divorce. More important, her stylistic devices too are similar. Bharati Mukherjee has exploited her audience’s revulsion of ‘Sati’ for the instant success of Jasmine, Divakaruni shows widows who prefer to stay inAmerica rather than go back to India to “serve their in-laws and become doves with cut off wings."

Like Mukherjee, much of Divakaruni's work is partially autobiographical. Not only are most of her stories set in India and the Bay Area of California, but she also deals with the immigrant experience in much the same manner as Mukherjee: where the immigrant's voice is rarely heard. Divakaruni’s women too, constantly struggle with dual identities and values. Living in sin, indulgingin extramarital affairs, they grapple with issues of personal space and the real meaning of love. Exotic Indian words are sprinkled generously throughout the texts, adding to the mystery of the oriental for the American reader. Multiple selves vying for unification, conflicting with each other but ultimately, to one degree or another, existing together in their contradictions by the women who possess them, characterize the foundation of identity within these texts. Such fiction chooses not to accept the fact that to have the market’s demand in mind makes sound business commonsense but it does not create good literature.

Set on the border between modernity and tradition, where personal freedom and cultural identity are at stake, Gita Mehta is convinced that her books are about the merging of cultures. Because of her journalistic background all of her books feature keen political insight and because of her family history- she is the daughter of Biju Patnaik- her books are smart investigations into Indian ideas, history, mythology and personalities. She has the unique opportunity to collect the richness of living on three continents and it is this rarity of perspective that gives her a uniquely witty and frank ability to define her vision of India through her work. Though Mehta's narrators are predominantly men, her themes often centre on expectations for women. The male narrator is an appropriate choice for a feminist perspective as it highlights the disparity in power between Indian men and women. She recognizes her power as a storyteller without trying to draw the reader to her side while she projects and defines a set of ideas, places, smells and traditions that make up modern India. It is, however, beyond comprehension why Gita Mehta ignores our traditions and represents us as a society in which the most peculiar personal behaviour is acceptable.

In Meena Alexander’s works, the dislocation of her protagonists results in her description of the English language as a suffocating mask that needs to be torn off for her to speak freely. Like other authors, mainly Mukherjee and Divakaruni, Meena Alexander is concerned with migration and its impact on the writer’s subjectivity, and with the sometimes-violent events that compel people to cross borders. Meena Alexander's texts use a feminist vision to question patriarchal narratives of nationhood and empower Indian traditions depreci­ated by a colonial past.Both Mukerjee and Alexander have tried to create a stereotype in which blame for the backwardness of the Indian woman is transferred to the colonial period and its education system. The meeting point of the two authors is that such resistance is a reaction to perceived racism, a desire for a nostalgic past and, most importantly, a strong bond with a feminine tradition that urge the authors to explore their cultural roots. The implication, however, is that if one were fortunate enough to transfer oneself to the United States, one would become free of the tyranny of Indian society and become instead a thoroughly modern young woman. In effect this extols the virtues of a western upbringing vis-à-vis the backwardness of an Indian upbringing.
Alexander writes of political repression and terrorism, feminism and personal politics in a manner that is mystical and dreamlike, but ultimately self-absorbed and claustrophobic. Eventually, after all the turmoil and self-searching, this is exactly what the protagonists of Desai, Mukherjee and Divakaruni also do.

One of the most challenging tasks an immigrant writer can face is recreating a world with its sounds and scents, its voices and images, while living in a totally different environment. But Anjana Appachana insists that writing about India while living in the United States has never hindered her creativity. As her only novel, Listening Now, slowly unfolds each life, layer by layer to reveal the secret that defines their existence, one begins to hope that by the end of the book there might be a positive spin off to the unrelieved bleak lives led by the main women characters, that the dreary atmosphere might suddenly be relieved by the presence of one understanding husband or a kind hearted mother-in-law, but Appachana points out that that was not her focus.  In order to develop a more woman oriented discourse Appachana has to eschew the instinct to fit women between the lines of male literary expectations and focus instead on the visible world of female culture- she has to break away from her ingrained ideologies regarding women.

Bharti Kirchner is yet another Indian émigré to the United States who, among the conglomerate of novelists still grappling with the connection between place and identity, harks back to her cultural boundaries, mainly its taboos, and deals with arranged marriages and the lack of love therein. All her books deal with the trials of immigrant identities dealing with displacement and collision of cultures: collision of the old and the new. In each case it is a collision, not compatibility. Kirchner writes most convincingly when delineating the frustrated lives of Indian immigrants in America. The final impression is the dissolution of her characters into soulless, aimless and self-pitying individuals incapable of connecting with fellow Indians, except through aliases and assumed personalities.

So, one has to admit that the slant might be different, but the end-result is common in the works of Indian-American women writers, despite the growing number of literary texts by South Asian writers such as Sara Suleri, Bapsi Sidhwa, and, more recently, young writers such as Shauna Singh Baldwin and Pulitzer Prize-winning Jhumpa Lahiri. It is interesting to study how the landscape of contemporary Immigration literature has been transformed by the rising tide of globalisation; texts are now crossing the borders of nations and cultures, as newly emerging authors express myriad voices of those once considered the subaltern. At the crest of this new literary wave is a new generation of Indian women writers who have begun to make their unique mark upon the world of the novel. Their accounts of the experience of immigration present a model with which minority and regressive identities are constructed. There is, some would say, a special irony in the literature of the Indian Diaspora, as it highlights critical points of deep and significant difference which con­stitute ‘what they really are’ or rather—since they have moved to the west—‘what they have become’. Cul­tural identity for the Indian expatriate writer is a matter of ‘has been’, ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being’.* Because of these dislocations, no single émigré writer can claim the cultural modes of one national identity. This multiplicity of identities is apparent in the choice of theme, its content and the control over language and expression in the writers studied. This could be the reason why, in all their novels the woman protagonist finds herself still in quest of a `home’, a permanent centre of authority as opposed to temporary lodgings of body and soul. `Home’ here is a metaphor for peace and rest for all of their protagonists who plunge into a moral and religious vacuum. And in each case it is a search, a groping into a void and an attempt at discovery of self. They call themselves émigré writers and they write immigration narratives; however, our expatriate intellectuals are all guilty of the constant breast beating about India and its drawbacks.

I conclude, therefore, that the experience represented in the expatriate novel is best characterized by a state of ‘liminality’*- a condition, common to all immigrant communities, that is created by the contradictory conceptions of race and culture, time and geography. These texts are mostly burdened with all the negative connotations of inferiority, irrationality and exoticism. Their blending of fiction with autobiography results in a hybrid literary form popular amongst expatriate women writers because it serves as an effective way to recapture the richness of an ancient culture, to enact the preservation of that culture, to allude to esoteric concerns, to set up contrasts, or to zoom in on sensory details. But most importantly, nostalgia enables these authors to introduce "eastern influences", such as arranged marriage, joint-family, rites and rituals that mainly represent the obsolete in India’s cultural matrix with the intention of reflecting a particular era of her mythological past. The result is that the Indian woman in these novels is undergoing a crisis of character, conscience and womanhood and a sense of ‘the loss of self- identity’ all over again. While the literature written in India shows her as having come out of such restrictive situations to develop an independent identity of her own, expatriate authors continue to depict her as a victim of social taboos and patriarchy. The glimpses of the new feminism are totally missing. The romance of writing that drew Nayantara Sahgal or Shashi Deshpande to the art is totally absent.

Thus, because of its apparent adherence to an outmoded aesthetic, this body of fiction can surely be labelled as ‘Kitsch’*. The identification of an object as kitsch typically assumes an implicit framework of periodization; kitsch is that product of a contemporary technological society that simultaneously denies its own modernity by adhering to a regressive traditionalism.  Moreover, because this fiction engages with the past in a heightened, self-serving manner, the result is that a western reader is led to believe in an India built aesthetically and ideologically on the writer’s memory and nostalgia, as an obsolete notion that needs to be reformed by the more developed west. However, for all these writers- Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Divakaruni, Gita Mehta, Meena Alexander and others, their muse lies in India and they still draw inspiration from their Indian background. Despite the fact that they constantly interact with the India of today and are well aware of the ground realities, they prefer to pursue the exotic and present to the world the picture of an India in which the country is hide-bound and conservative. The central image of the women in all their works is one of root-less-ness and their characters are archetypal strangers; the ideology of émigré women writers is retrogressive; they have created such an aura of chaotic misinterpretations that the ancient spiritual tradi­tion of this country is being constantly reinvented and reified to Western liking.

In the foregoing analysis of the authors, the gender question has been sufficiently focused though different in tone, texture and treatment. While the women writing in India break certain conventions but, on the whole, remain well within the traditional canon that is continually evolving, expatriate women writers break all conventions and have no one aesthetic for a scholar of literature. Taken together, these novels present a variety of responses to the question of feminine Identity. Significant differences exist between the two portrayals- one at the Indian end the other at the American end. Establishing a common paradigm of contemporary rather than period representation is perhaps the only possible way to deal with the multiple issues that surround the authenticity of the feminine image in Indian writing in English. Unless this is understood and the new Indian woman is accepted and appreciated, her depiction in west-based literature as a semi literate, orthodox, hide bound chattel of the superior Indian male will always be a distortion. The undeniable truth is that the Indian woman has come out of the shadows of her largely forgotten history, which encompasses narratives of Sati, of Purdah and of repressed existence. She is increasingly being viewed as an important and intrinsic part of society as India joins the sweep of trans-national economic and cultural exchanges, modernity and globalisation.

 

 

References

*Madhulika S. Khandelwal, Becoming American, Being Indian (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,2002), p. 138. She adds: the sexuality of an Indian woman is complicated, tied to many different social and cultural expectations of marriage and its duties, and leading to the repression of females in the sexual realm simply because the stakes of expression are so high. Evidence of this gendered repression is present not only in the sexual realm, but also in the very space of the domestic itself.

* ‘Liminality’- Du Bois, "The Souls of Black Folk" in The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 102. Du Bois, though best known for his work on the psyche of the African- American male, did in fact have a deep interest in India, and more specifically, the relationship between African Americans and Indians in light of racial oppression. Du Bois lamented India's "temptation to stand apart from the darker peoples and seek her affinities among whites," for "European exploitation desires the black slave, the Chinese coolies and the Indian laborer for the same ends and the same purposes, and calls them all 'niggers." Du Bois worked to unite African Americans and Indians together in the struggle against racism.In Against Racism, Du Bois wrote: "Peculiar circumstances have kept Indians and American Negroes far apart. The Indians naturally recoiled from being mistaken for Negroes and having to share their disabilities.The Negroes thought of Indians as people ashamed of their race and color so that the two seldom meet.

* ‘Kitsch’ -Rita Felski-The term "kitsch" identifies yet simultaneously dismisses a real socio-historical phenomenon - the "democratisation of luxury" in a consumer culture, which makes possible general access to forms of aesthetic pleasure and experience previously the privilege of a few. The kitsch object does not enable an emancipatory de-auraticization of art (Benjamin), precisely because it conceals its own technical reproducibility, cloaking it in a nostalgic and mystificatory appeal to the aesthetic - and by implication, ideological - values of the past. Hermann Broch in "Notes on the Problem of Kitsch," p. 73, also states that the symbolic gendering of mass culture is a phenomenon that is not simply reducible to the prejudices of a few mandarin intellectuals. Rather, its roots lie in a history of processes of structural differentiation - between the ideologically constitutive features of "masculine" and "feminine" subjectivity, between the perceived status and functions of "high" and "mass" culture - which continue to have real and multiple effects. Even if sweeping distinctions between "authentic" art and "kitsch" no longer appear quite so unproblematic - one of the markers of what has become known as a postmodern consciousness - a nexus of associations between mass culture and femininity continues to influence the contemporary cultural imaginary, even if at a more subterranean level.