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A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies
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Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Programme in English York University
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NAYANTARA SAHGAL'S NOVELS: GAM3faAN IDEOLOGY AND A FEMALE SUBEiCT
a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of York University in partial fulfillment of the requirernents for the degree of
DOCCOR OF PHEOSOPHY
0 1998
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Abstract
This study examines Gandhian ideology in the works
of Nayantara Sahgal and the resistance she offers to that
ideology. The study focuses on the following narratives:
Prjson and Chocolate Cake, From Fear Set Free, This Tjme
, Storm
Qdhji, Rich Like Us, as taken Tdentitv, and Re'Lationshj~:
tracts from a Corres~ondence.
Each of the chapters examines a specific subject
position in these texts: the daughterkelf (Chapter 1:
The ïnterpellated "1": Gandhian Ideology and the
~utobiographical Genre), wife (Chapter II: The Virgin and
the ~ation), widow/sati (Chapter III: Sita as Mahasati in
Ramrajya: A study of A Sj,tiiation in New Delfi and R,ich
~ . k e Us), and mother (Chapter IV: Motherfs Space in
staken Ident The chapters uncover the major
elements which mark strategies of resistance to
patriarchal and nationalist ideologies.
The
presented
study argues that the female character is
as an object within Gandhian ideology and that
the resisting female character moves toward subjectivity
within that ideology. The study concludes that pain
causes the resistance, that pain often creates the
" thinking sub j ec t . " The cri tical methods employed are
developed from Louis Althusser's theories of ideology and
subject formation and £rom pierre Macherey's work on the
relationship between ideology and literature.
Feminist resistance to Gandhian ideology has
received scant attention in the studies of Indian womenfs
novels. This study treats a critique of this ideology as
a crucial part of an analysis of feminist fiction in
India.
My gratitude goes to rny supervisory committee, especially Prof. Terry Goldie, Prof. Jamie Scott, P r o f . Malcolm Blincow. 1 also tharik Prof. Frank Birbalsingh, Prof. Hollis Rinehart, Prof. Sheila Embleton, P r o f . Michael Cummings, and Prof. Ray Ellenwood.
1 thank Jan Pearson and Linda Wallace in the English graduate department.
1 thank my family and friends for never-failing support. Above, all, 1 thank God.
T a b l e of Contents
Abstract . . . . . . . . . - . . - . . . . iv
Acknowledgement. . . . . . . - . . . . - . vi
Dedication . - . . . . . . . . . . . - . . . . vii
Introduction: Ideology and Narrative . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter 1 : The Interpellated ' I f ' : Gandhian Ideology and the Autobiographical Genre . . . - . . . . . 39
Chapter II: The Virgin and the Nation . . . . . . 89
Chapter III: Sita as Mahasati in Ramrajya: A study of A Ih;F and Pich L i k e Us . . . 135
Ident i tv Chapter IV: Mother's Space in Mistaken . . 177 Conclusion: A Gandhian Subjectess . . . . . . . . 220
Cited
viii
Introduction: fdeology and Narrative
This study examines how ideology functions in the
novels of Nayantara Sahgal as well as how these novels
perform within a dominant ideology. The focus is the
relationship between Gandhian ideology and the position
of the female subject as a literary character. The
larger question is, what is the possibility for a
feminist literature within a specific patriarchal
ideology?
Social and literary critics of Gandhian feminism
usually regard G a n d h i s r n as directly contributing to the
liberation of women. So, throughout the three editions
of his book on the role of women in India's freedom
struggle Manmohan Kaur defines Gandhi's satyagraha
movement as a major support for women's role in the
nation. "Mahatma Gandhi had faith in women," the miter
stresses (143) . Aparna Basu and Bharati Ray point out
the difference between the violent suffragettes' movement
of England and the womenl s movement in India: ''~ndian
women were encouraged by men social reformers and leaders
like Gandhi and Nehruff (11). In a n d h i and the
. . . xinat-r.on of Indian W o m e ~ , S. Shridevi sees Gandhi as
the impetus behind the post-independence feminist
movement - - "Mahatma Gandhi instilled the spirit of
nationalism into women which had brought about an
awakening in women" (84). However, in spite of these and
other similar declarations, the status of women in India
is still that of a second-class citizen.l
h o n g those few critics, chief ly female, who have
criticized Gandhi ' s reluctance to change the plight of
women within the farnily are Kumari Jayawardena, Lata
Mani, Suruchi Thapar, and Ketu H . Katrak. Jayawardena
notes how Gandhi reinforced patriarchal control by
extolling women as models of sacrifice during the
satyagraha movement (95). Mani explains sati as a
continuation of a male and nationalist perspective (a
view that Gandhi subscribed to) that labeled women as
keepers of national tradition. Thapar points out that
Gandhi's feminism was over-protective of "men's
masculinity" (87) . In her article, "Decolonizing
Culture: Toward a Theory for ~ostcolonial Wornen's Texts",
Katrak examines the political agenda of Fanon and Gandhi
in order to expose some of their perspectives that are
detrimental to wornen. In the case of Gandhi, Katrak
SaYs , "nonviolence ironically reinforced the most
regressive aspects of female subordination" so that any
repression of violence was invariably temporary (163) .
The much eulogized female submissiveness continued to
attract abuse.
Current Gandhian studies of novels, however, ignore
this conflict between Gandhism and feminism, For
example, Rama Jha ' s Gandhi an Thouaht and Indo - && an
ovel~.sts and Sudarshan Sharrna's The Influence of
G a n a a n Jdeolouv on Indo - Analian Fiction focus on the
respective novelists' 'accuracy' of presentation of
Gandhian thought. In the process, these authors submit
reverentially t o the 'nobility' of Gandhian ideals.
Consequently, in the preface Sharma defines Gandhian
ideology as follows: "what has corne to be known as
Gandhian ideology is nothing but what is good and noble
in life." M.K. Bhatnagar's chapter on "The Treatment of
Gandhism as a Political Ideology," considers ideology as
a synonym for thought or ideals, and uses literary
criticism to confirm Gandhian values in art.
The present analysis of the novels of Nayantara
Sahgal rather s e e s nationalist and patriarchal forces
within Gandhian ideology as suppressing, not liberating,
wornen in India.
A Definition of Tenns:
Ideology
This study is grounded in an understanding of two
fundamental concepts: i d e o l o d and subjectivity. In For
PIarx, Althusser defines ideology as "a system (with its
own logic and rigour) of representations (images, myths,
ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a
historical existence and role within a given society . .
. distinguished £rom science in that in it the practico-
social furiction is more important than the theoretical
function (function as knowledge)" (231). Later on he
4
contir?ues, 'Ideology, then, is the expression of the
relation between men and their 'worldff that is the
(overdetermined) unity of the real relation and the
imaginary relation between them and their real conditions
of existence* ( 2 3 3 ) .
Althusser identifies the compelling points of his
definition in "Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses" under the theses of imaginary representation
and the materiality of ideology. There is an allusion to
illusion, yet the consequence of ideology is definitely
empirical. The thesis acknowledges a distance between
life and lived life in terms of the '(overdetemined)
unity of the real relation and the imaginary relation."
The sum total of this relationship is felt in life as it
is lived. Ideology is thus not unreal. It has
significant and concrete results in society.
When Althusser separates the socio-political from
the theoretical and when he brings together the real and
the imaginary, ideology is defined not as a coherent
philosophy consciously imposed on or accepted by a group
of people but as a complex discourse that maintains
systems of domination. As John B. Thompson explains,
"ideology operates, not so much as a coherent system of
staternents imposed on a population £rom above, but rather
through a complex series of mechanism where-by meaning is
mobilized, in the discursive practices of everyday life,
for the maintenance of relations of dominationn ( 6 3 ) .
Althusserfs ideological subject is the result of this
relation of domination.
The Subject
The materiality of ideology is specifically evident
in the existence of the subject. According to Althusser,
a sub j ect is always already interpellated by ideology .
Interpellation is the act of hailing -- 'Wey you there!"
-- the individual responds and in responding becomes a
subject . The 'reality' of ideology is in this
subjectivity -- in this impact of ideology on the
subject.
In 'ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,"
where he defines the subject, Althusser does not explain
the case of an individual not responding to such hailing.
He mentions 'class struggle' as a form of refusal, but
does not elaborate on the process of resistance. Paul
Smith, accordingly, reads Althusser's subject as the non-
divided 'individual' incapable of resistance. Smith
alternatively uses the terrn 'agent' to signify the
resisting subject. But, Althusser's theory of
"overdetermination" admits contradictions and plurality,
the possibility of ideologies in the theory of ideology.
The possibility of contradictory and multiple
interpellation emanating £rom the ideologies acknowledges
the complexity of the subject. Althusser's subject is an
agent.
In For Marx Althusser theorizes resistance on the
basis of the unconsciousness of ideology (in its
' structural ' f orm) and its historicity (where ideology
' 5 s not an aberration or a contingent excrescence of
History: it is a structure essential to the historical
life of societies" [ 2 3 2 ] ) . Recognizing the necessity of
ideology and becoming aware of its unconscious nature is
the way to resist or transfom that ideology. Althusser
explains the conditions of resistance as follows: "Only
the existence and the recognition of its necessity enable
us to act on ideology and transfom ideology into an
instrument of deliberate action on historyn ( 2 3 2 ) .
Althusser indicates reflection or thought processes
as the medium of resistance. The subject is the thinking
subject. This is Althusser's "new form of specific
unconsciousness called 'consciousness'" ( 2 3 3 ) . The
process of resistance can even be passive in the face of
interpellation -- what Thompson refers to as 'a lack of
consensus at the very point where oppositional attitudes
could be translated into political action." This, once
again, announces a resisting subject. As Rajeswari
Sunder Rajan notes, 'Resistance is not always a
positivity; it may be no more than a negative agency, an
absence of acquiescence in one's oppression" (1993 : 12 ) .
Thus, resistance and the consequent creation of a subject
are possible through both action and inaction.
The unresisting subject can be the object.
object is by definition that which is acted upon. A
subject can be (re)invented or represented as the 'other'
object and as such it is, unlike the subject, a finished
product. Subjectivity, on the other hand, is a process
(Sally Robinson, 20) de£ ying and de£ erring
comodification ad infinitum. 'Ob-" is a prefix meaning
'in the w a y , ' ' agains t , ' ' toward, ' 'on account
off(Webster); 'object' modifies the subject. While
'subject' recognizes authority, 'object, ' incapable of
active 'recognition,' is interrupted, even violated.
This object is not Althusser's subject.
The current study discusses woman as the subject as
well as the object of ideology. The subject retains the
space of agency; the object is acted upon by the dominant
ideology. As subject the wornan can resist or respond and
sometimes transform the very ideology compelling it to
change, to include the resisting subject. As object, the
female is dependent on the significations of the dominant
ideology . That is, the ideology defines her and
reinstates her not on the basis of her existence (about
which she has no voice), but on the signifying capacity
and interests (the desire) of the dominant ideology.
According to Jacques Lacan, there is no subject
prior to language. In the Althusserian sense the subject
is "always already interpellated." It then follows that
ideology and the subject convene at the point of
language. In other words, 'representation' in ideology
becomes a mediator term between imaginary and real where
representation indicates the symbolic entry of language.
As such, literature or history becomes a textual medium
which represents ideology. Ideology, in this sense, is
not disembodied thought, but (textually) embodied
discourse signifying power structures.'
Gandhian Ideology
In "The Individual as the Lynch-pin - A Gandhian
Perspective," Manmohan Bhatnagar defines Gandhian
ideology as a combination of "satya, ahimsa, satyagraha,
swadeshi [ , 1 sarva dharma samana tva and sarvatra
bhayavarjana" (1996:85). However, 1 prefer to cal1 these
conscious values the sum total of "Gandhism. "
Gandhian ideology is a system4 of beliefs with a
political action that anticipates struggle which, in
turn, necessitates the successful interpellation of
subjects. It is a dominating cultural discourse that
10
gets the 'buy-in' of its subjects through apparently
'universal' terms such as 'the kingdorn of God,'
nationalism, truth, and justice. Gandhian rneanings
sustain relationships of domination.
Gandhi defines Gandhian ideology, but to conclude
that it is only the point of view of Gandhi is to reduce
ideology to (individual) thought. Gandhian ideology is
mediated by other ideologies and so it is as well the
culmination of a series of dissatisfactions and conflicts
with and within dominant ideologies. mainly the religious
ideologies and political ideologies dominant under
imperialisrn. According to Clifford Geertz, ideologies
corne into being when other cultural "rationales" for a
way of life have toppled, likely under political pressure
(Eagleton 1991:151). In The Indian National Conaress:
Bioaranhv Om P. Gautum notes how
historically, Gandhian ideology was preceded by Brahmo
Samaj, the Arya Samaj, the Ramakrishna Mission, and other
revisionist movements in Hinduisrn, such as, for example,
Theosophy . 'Modernization' of Hinduisrn became a
necessity under interna1 and external pressures, chiefly
from imperialism. Elite urban cultures controlled this
religious reformation so that the majority (consisting of
laborers and farmerç) were rarely included. Religious
refomation gave w a y to what Gautam terms "political
nationalism" (47) and the mushrooming of associations,
beginning with "Young Bengal" (a student body) and
climaxing in the Indian National Congress. The panacea
for several of the lacks in the other movements seemed to
lie in G a n d h i s r n .
Gandhi prioritized the Congress and, through the
Congress, British imperialism. Historians note that
India has been colonized about twenty-six times in
imperialisms of the Aryans, Mauryas, Greeks, Guptas,
Moslems, . . . and finally the British. Considering the
irnrnediacy of the English invasion, it seems natural to
emphasize the Raj. But, the upheavals of Partition, and
even the more recent riots in Bombay in connection with
the dernolition of Babri Masjid by a Hindu mob, reveal not
only the aftermath of British ruleS but the far w i d e r
implications of other imperialisms -- the A r y a n and the
Mughal .
To make of the ~ndian independence a unique and
overdetermining event is also to privilege Gandhi's role
in India. in spite of severe opposition to the person,
thought, and practice of Gandhi, during his life and
after, the hold that the man had on the nation and his
reputation abroad are unparalleled. It is therefore not
surprising that Sahgalfs novels are based on the 'logic'
of Gandhism. Nehru, in his autobiography, records the
immense influence of Gandhi on the masses: "he has
changed the face of India, given pride and character to
a cringing and demoralized people, built up strength and
consciousness in the masses, and made the Indian problem
a world problemm (258). Not al1 Indians adhered to
Gandhi, nor did even those closest to him always
comprehend his words or ways. Note the repeated
bewilderment of his own sons or of Nehru who mites,
What a problem and a puzzle he has been not only to the
British Goverment but to his own people and his closest
associates ! " (190) . But the concept of Truth, although
variously interpreted, the symbols of fasting, charka,
flag, bonfires, khadi, non-cooperation used to different
ends and the structure of the congress held out as
representing the nation were al1 influential. Not that
people and institutions always adhered to these concepts,
symbols, and structures, but that these in various ways
sustained relationships of unequal power.
Gandhi does not appear even as a minor character in
the novels of Nayantara Sahgal. But this absence of the
figure of Gandhi adds to the figuration of his ideology.
Gandhian ideology makes its presence felt in the novels
in the following several forms:
a) narrative references to the Truth and non-violence
of Gandhi;
b) the presence of Gandhian syrnbols of k h a d i , charka,
flag . . . ; C) the focus on the Congress and a separation of
elements of that institution into 'good' and 'badf
(where the 'good' types are invariably made of
'Gandhian characters');
d) the presence of characters who have conspicuous
Gandhian traits6;
e) the representation of the nation as "Gandhi's
India" ;
f) the multiple positive references to Gandhi;
g ) the marginalization of the cornrnunist party and the
role of other (non-congress) or non-elite groups in
the f reedom s truggle7.
In Sahgalfs novels, the dominance of Gandhi's 'Truth' and
the absence of Gandhi as an individual support the
analogous statement: Gandhi's silences are el~quent.~
Thus, what an ideology says is what it does not Say
(Macherey 1978:132).
Althusser does not explain how ideology works to
interpellate effectively. But, to use capitalist
ideology as an example, the predicted utopia
interpellates individuals as subjects. In capitalism the
utopia is enormous success based on merit. within
Gandhian ideology, it is the utopia of Ramrajya, the
kingdom of Rama, India in its pristine traditional
status, that succeeds in interpellating the subject.
Gandhi- ideology faced resistance particularly £rom
a few 'other' subjects -- the Muslims, who dogmatically
had nothing to do with a 'Rama, the untouchables, who
feared the implications of caste divisions within that
tradition, and eventually the women, who found thernselves
going through 'test by £ire,' like Sita. While much has
been written on Muslim and untouchable resistance, not
sufficient research has been conducted on the pain and
subjection of the female subject within Gandhian
ideology. 1 do not daim that Muslims, untouchables, and
women always resisted Gandhism or that they were the only
ones to do so. It is well known that there were Muslims,
untouchables, and women in the Congress (although, women
had to lobby for entry into the Congress for quite a
while before they were allowed membership) . Whole
sections of the elite, workers, and peasants rejected
Gandhian thought outright. But the ideology had its
unmistakable influence and became hegemonic.
The Fanale SUbjectg
Gandhian ideology, in making imperialism the central
opponent, situates women as the site of national contest.
For the British the plight of women, especially marked by
syrrtbols of the purdah, the religious rites constricting
the widow, and sati and child-marriage, al1 became alibi
for the R a j on the rationale that Indians who subjugated
their women were un£ it for independence. Thus within
Gandhian ideology, the same argument needed to be
configured within nationalist slogans rather than be
pursued through an independent discourse of feminism.
Gandhi blamed the poverty and low status of women,
especially widows, for the enslavement and emasculation
of Indians. Ironically, on the other hand, nationalists
excluded women £rom 'home rule' on account of their
different vocation. In Women and Social Injustice Gandhi
writes, '1 do not believe in women working for a living
or undertaking commercial enterprises" (6) . So,
analogous to 'the white man's burden' was 'the man's
burden' of taking care of the woman .
Sahgal's novels present diverse subject positions
which are simultaneously overdetermined by other, namely
bourgeois, religious, western, feminist, and literary,
ideologies t h a t result in both subjection and resistance
to the dominant, here Gandhian, ideology. According t o
Paul Smith, the subject is c o n s t i t u t i v e of multiple,
often contradictory 'subject-positions.' Where the
sub j ec t is always already interpellated and where the
interpellating ideologies are multiple, the subject woman
is a far cry £rom the homogeneous 'citizen' of the state.
Both wornan and the dominating ideology change in the
course of the.
Sahgal's novels represent the problematic of
representation of the female. Indian culture represents
women generally in two ways: a) in the ancient sense
(also the Garidhian sense) as goddess and vesse1 of
tradition: woman is rnodest, gentle, and service-oriented
b) in the modern sense as ' the new woman' : still
beautiful but now ambitious, with excellent tas tes in
style, successfully managing household and office duties,
and possessing the traditional ability to be persistently
an honor to her husband (Sunder Rajan 1993:130-38).
Sahgal in turn represents wornen as often floundering
under the weight of both representations, but Sahgalts
own subject position as an elite, North Indian, western-
educated, woman also shapes narrative representation.
Regresentation
Althusser de fines ideology
representation. Life accordingly is experienced as
represented by and within a dominant ideology, i-e-,
always mediated in representation. But then, because of
the eternal interpellation of the subject, reality
becomes a myth as representation controls the
understanding of life. This is the basis of my defense
of women in this study. Gandhi equating woman with
goddess is an attempt t o establish her as representing
(or capable of representing) the perfect. Here, woman
can only be an imperfect simulacrum, forever rebuked for
not quite achieving it (where it stands for goddess
mother, goddess wife, etc.) A representation can be
compared only to other representations.
Representations are rareiy neutral or innocent as
they embody power relationships. In imparting knowledge
about the represented subject, images and discourses
become the locale of power. The knowledge itself
generates power within a self-other relationship where
the self is privileged over the 'other.' Partha
Chatterj ee traces such power to certain "interests" in
the sciences -- interests that motivated the human
conquest of nature and, later, led to a transference of
that phenomenon into a victor-victim relation between
self and other (1986:14). In the context of
'interpellation,' the 'othert is not only subjected but
also represented as subjected.
Nationaliam and Patriarchy
In an understanding of Gandhian ideology in terms of
power relationships, nationalism and patriarchy dorninate
the female subject. Both nationalism and patriarchy
function in society as structural apparatuses of
hegemony ,
The nation is an idea with material consequences.
Benedict Anderson attempts to understand the nation when
he de£ ines it as 'an imagined political comrnunity" in
which both the lirnits and the sovereignty of the nation
are imagined (6) . The concept of 'imagination" is itself
problematic when confronted by questions of freedom,
authenticity, and power. For instance, in The Nation and
Its Fraqments, Chatterjee examines the 'ownershipf of
Andersonf s " imagination. " in 'Whose lmagined Communi ty? "
Chatterjee questions the 'freedom' of that imagination
which is, according to him, 'forever colonizedff by
'modular' western foms (5). However, Chatterjee retains
Anderson's theory of the ideational origin of the nation.
In Natjonaljst Thouaht and the Colon orld:
scourse?, he identifies "thought" as a power
equal to military might (11). Gandhism becomes a
political ideology in that it thinks the nation as the
expression of a tradition and in pursuit of a specific
future.10 The result of such an idea is the marginalizing
of the minorities, Although not a minority as a
demographic fact, women function as such a minority.
The Indian nation claims to be secular. Secularism
in India rneans not '5ndifference to or rejection or
exclusion of religion and religious considerationsw
(Webster) but rather a tactful accommodation, hence
inclusion, of many religions. In practice, this
tolerance spells actual pref erence for communal and
religious rules, especially those which are cornmon to
rnany religions. Feminists take issue with most religions
on the ground of exclusionary and derogatory policies
regarding female members. The unjust divorce settlement
of Shahbano under the Muslim bill, discussed by Sunder
Rajan among others, is only one case in point.
Privileging religious rules over national court laws
maintains sexist limits on individual rights. While the
nation or state will direct its policies toward equality
and peace for all, the several procedures (Conne11 146)
of the nation, specifically evident in the court, favor
the male rather than female citizen. Within the family,
the cormnunity, and the nation, men are empowered in ways
that women are not so that the latter are subordinated by
the former. "A name was coined to denote the universal
domination of women by men - patriarchy" (Nye 95). Heidi
Hartman defines patriarchy as:
A set of social relations between men, which have a material base, and which, although hierarchical, establish and create interdependence and solidarity among men which enable them to dominate women. Though patriarchy is hierarchical and men of different classes, races, or ethnic groups have different places in the patriarchy, they also are united in their shared relationship of dominance of
their women; they are dependent on each other to maintain that dominance. (qtd. in hrans 73)
In this study. the term "patriarchy" is used to
r e f e r to institutionalized male dominance" in the family
and public areas in a rnanner that is harmful to its
fernale members (Conne11 142-3). The emphasis on
'institutionf goes beyond indicating persona1 attitude
problems of 'prejudicef to exposing organized structures
of legal policies and activities inherent in the various
units of the nation. T h e family is one such basic unit
of the nation where male dominance is institutionalized
so as to guarantee the very existence of the nation.
Sahgal's representation of the family as dependant on the
shaky foundations of the paternal breadwinner and his
authority point to a questioning and unmasking of the
hegemonic apparatus.
Some critics argue that the term 'patriarchy' is too
universalist, implying that men rule in the same way in
al1 cultures. But in India and especially the India
described by Gandhi, 'patriarchyf suggests the inordinate
importance given to the father-led family as the basis of
the nation. For the nation, the family is the basic unit
that supports order and discipline at the persona1 level.
This root-level order is maintained through the hierarchy
of father, mother, sons, and daughters respectively. The
place of woman is carefully demarcated within this family
where her role is fundamentally defined as daughter,
sister, wife, and mother -- Le,, in relation to the
dominant male. In other words, the social system is such
that woman is always the secondary and complementary
other in a binary where son, brother, husband, father --
man -- is the privileged tem. Gandhian thought sees as
'natural' the social situation of the nurturing mother.
Gandhi holds women responsible for the education and
moral upbringing of the children. Although he insisted
on the equality of sons with daughters, Gandhi did not
envision a family where the wife would seek a career
beyond wife or motherhood. In a letter published in the
. . ariim (included in Nomen and Social Tniustice), Gandhi
wrote:
1 do not envisage the wife, as a rule, following an avocation independently of her husband . The care of the children and the
upkeep of the household are quite enough to fully engage al1 her energy. In a well-ordered society the additional burden of maintaining the family ought not to fa11 on her, the man should look to the maintenance of the family, the woman to household management, the two thus supplementing and complementing each other's labours. (16-17)
In such a set-up the body of woman, bound by reproduction
and 'household management,' is subordinate to man in an
endless rite of self-sacrifice and service so that he can
'maintain the family' and the nation. While religion and
culture play major parts in subjugating women, to ignore
the complicity of the government in marginalizing women
is to reduce the significance of the politics of gender
relationships in India. Contextualizing 'patriarchy'
within historical, class, and regional frameworks helps
to escape the fallacy of treating the concept as either
universal or monolithic.
Thesis
There are two major trends or patterns in the
narratives of Sahgal:
+ As the nation takes over the narrative space, the
female characters become increasingly silent;
The female character speaks or gains lifelike
dimensions as the nation takes less narrative space;
this is invariably accompanied by increasing pain
and discomfiture for the female character which
paradoxically culminates in promises of freedom,
Nationalkm and patriarchy within Gandhian ideology
define the lirnits of female freedom even as the ideology
interpellates the nation as Mother India. This study
wi11 examine various subject positions of women
characters, such as the self, wife, widow, and mother, in
the various narratives to show how their subjectivity
relates to men and the nation within Gandhian ideology.
The thesis does not assume an absolute adherence to
Gandhian thought throughout India, nor is there a d a i m
that Indians today consciously follow Gandhi. The study
analyses the lirnits and limitations of Gandhi's widely
recognized male-initiated rnovement of female liberation
within a nationalist project. As art, Sahgal's
narratives serve to reveal some of the gaps in Gandhian
ideology, especially as they relate to female
subjectivity.
This study does not judge how well the fiction
documents historical reality, nor does it judge 'good'
versus 'bad' ideology. The question is not how
successful Sahgal is in propagating Gandhian thought, or
whether she consciously undermines that 'ism.' As
Macherey says , 'writers are not here to construct
ideologiesff (115). This study examines how Sahgal
'encountersf Gandhian ideology in her work. The reading
assumes that the narrative is mediated in ideology even
while representing it, so that the text presents
"ideology in a non-ideological form" (Macherey 133),
confronthg the "ideological utterance with a fictional
utterance" (261). The process in turn demands a
combination of political and artistic readings (297).
While literature functions as an ideological State
Apparatus (ISA) interpellating on behalf of the dominant
ideology, its status as completed literary product causes
it to reveal "the gaps in ideology" (60) . The role of
ideology-critique is to search for the absences -- that
which the text does not Say, that which can be found in
the margins . As Macherey notes, "Even though ideology
itself always sounds solid, copious, it begins to speak
of its own absences because of its presence in the novel,
its visible and determinate formn (132).
Arnong the many other indian writers in English
influenced by Gandhi are Ahmad Abbas, Mulk Raj Anand,
Manohar Malgonkar, R. K. Narayan, Mukunda Rao, and Raja
Rao . In rnost of their novels, Gandhi is either the
unchallenged central deity or a milepost in the margins,
a prop to mark the historical time period. Thus, Raja
Raofs Kantha~ura which liberally substitutes Hindu gods
with the figure of Gandhi rightly acquires the name
"Gandhi-purana" (Pathak 57) -- the devotion is complete.
Malgonkar's A Rend j n the Ganaes on the other hand is the
story of the freedom struggle climaxing in the gory
partition of the nation with limited reference to a
futile Gandhi. For R.K. Narayan, in Waitina for the m .
-3, the urge is to depict a Gandhi who reflects
(Gandhian) ideals rather than history. Mukunda Rao's The
mhatrna is comparatively adventurous in narrating the
controversial episodes, such as Gandhi's celibacy
experiments with his niece or Gandhi's hardships in
'Kurushetra'; the narrative closely follows historical
events and ends abruptly with the assassination of Gandhi
in a fictional place and t h e . Nayantara Sahgal is
unusual in focusing on private and public episodes that
represent in fiction the working of Gandhian ideology.
An ûverview of the Cbapters
The dissertation is divided into four chapters based
on various female subject positions. Chapter One
examines the autobiographical writings of Sahgal, Prison
a n d C h o c o l a t e F F r o m F e a r S e t andel ationshi~ :
from a Correç~ondence and argues that the female
self as a resisting subject of Gandhian ideology defines
the genre of these narratives as autobiography. A
relationship is drawn between ideology and genre. The
study takes direction £rom Macherey's theory of literary
production; especially from his insight into literary
fom and ideology.
Thi s T h e of M o r n b , Çtom in Ch-aarh, and A Dav
ln Shadow are analyzed in the second chapter. The
subject position of the Indian woman as wife, especially
as virgin wife, is examined in the context of the nation.
Certain Gandhian aspects of nationalism threaten to
objectify women for the sake of a nation that depends on
the family and virgins. The chapter traces foms of
resistance to the ideology within narratives that
celebrate the female body.
The third chapter considers the female subject as
widow/sati. The widow and sati in A Situation in New
Delhi and Rich Like Ug are examined as cultural
representations as well as metaphors of inequali ty and
suppression in the context of a changing Congress rule,
where th\e hiergency becomes a foi1 to the freedom
struggle. The texts challenge the patriarchal roots of
Gandhi's R a m r a j y a and collapse the Sita and Sati legends
in a single narrative. In Delhi, and Jtich, the Gandhian
Ram-Sita legend interpellates the female subject as sati;
the ideology valorizes widowhood at the expense of
woman's (sexual) body; subordinates the female subject to
the nation by extolling her as sufferer; and
spiritualizes social and political injustices to her.
The political situation of the hiergency becomes a period
of pain that displaces center and margins: the nation is
challenged as the wounded woman d r a g s herself inwards.
The figure of the mother represented in the context
of the British Raj is a marginalized yet politically
crucial need for both the colonizer and the colonized.
Identitv An analysis of Mistaken focuses on the various
modes of cultural effacement of this character through
realities of the womb and the purdah. The chapter argues
that the objectification of the mother is completed when
Gandhian ideology accommodates the patriarchal
divisioning of men's and women's space. As a climax to
the preceding chapters, this final section traces the
figuring forth of the body of the suppressed mother.
The chapters follow the 'natural' movement of women
in India through the categories of daughter, wife, and
mother . The second last chapter on sati and widow
intervenes between those of wife and rnother to point out
first of al1 the total absence of single mothers,
secondly to suggest the survival only of that widow who
is a mother, and thirdly to hope for her movement beyond
national and literary stereotypes.
Conclusion
Gandhian ideology sustains a contradictory
relationship between the female citizen and the female
nation wherein their separate freedorns conflict. The
stated agenda of Gandhian ideology to include a
consenting female subject within the matrix of
nationalism and within the program of national struggle
conflicts with the patriarchal aspects of such an
ideology which limit her movement beyond the precincts of
the family. Sahgal, herself a subject of that ideology,
submits and resists within the space of her narratives to
represent female characters within and without family and
state. This study examines fictional representation as
a signifier of that social reality.
Notes ( Introduction)
1. See M e h r a Masani's article, Yndian Women -
Second-Class Citizens," in Nomen in india and i n the
C h m . Also, the wide range of literature lamenting the
steady decrease in womenrs participation in Indian
politics, attributed chiefly to the hooliganism in
politics, serves to bring home the paradox of Indian
independence and fernale dependence. A~SO, see Carole
. . Pateman's The Disorder of Women: Democracv, Feminism and
Poli tical Theorv for similar stories in North American
history .
2 - Terry Eagleton's chapter What iç Ideology" in
Jdeoloav: & Introduction off ers perhaps the most
comprehensive and exhaustive definition of ideology.
Eagleton proceeds to provide a history of the scholarship
in ideology.
3 . For Macherey, laquage is almost equai to
ideology. See p 52 of Theorv of Literarv Prodtlctiori. In
other words, the subject of criticism is the
'ideological' sense of the text.
4 . Macherey denies ideology the quality of 'system.'
According to him ideology is a "non-systematic ensemble
of significations" (133). But Macherey ' s theory of
critique is based on the ability of reading to combine
these 'significationsf as "signs." 'Signs' presupposes
a system. That is, while ideology, theoretically, is not
a system, our 'reading' or awareness of ideology is
'systernatized. '
5. Pro-Congress (pro-Gandhian) historians, such as
Nanda, are anxious to point fingers at the British for
India's communalism. According to B.R. Nanda, the
British made hay while Jinnah's sun shone. However,
religious intolerance has always been a part of the sub-
continent (as of rnost countries). Historians
highlighting times of 'religious tolerance' (for example,
marking the rule of Kumaragupta [415 - 4551 or Ashoka
[268 - 233 BC] [Kulke and Rothermund 923) are choosing to
show just the other side of the coin of communalism. To
continue to blame the past for today's (second
generation) strife between indus and Musiims is to
overlook the nation's own desire for hornogeneity. This
study examines the problematic of this desire in terms of
the 'otherf subject.
6 - Sahgal says: "One politician in This Tirne of
was an old Gandhian, a breed that has died out
but is there in my consciousness because that whole aura
was what 1 grew up in. So 1 try to convey that in the
best way that 1 know, according to my best instinctstf (S.
Varalakshmi, 15 ) .
7. Numerous articles in Subdtern Studies detail this
aspect of Gandhian ideology.
8. It is in this sense that Macherey quotes Lenin's
\\Tolstoyfs silences are eloquentw (132).
9 * The Oxford English Dictionary refers to an 18Ch
century usage of the term 'subjectess" for the fernale
subject. Later, in my concluding chapter, 1 use this
term in order to highlight the importance of gender in
any subject definition.
10. 1 do not imply that there was no sense of the
uniqueness, homogeneity, and particularity of the nation
prior to Gandhi. Kulke and Ruthermond record several
historical attempts at nationhood of which a significant
one was during the reign of the Nanda dynasty (c. 364 BC)
w h e n Mahapadma. an untouchable, bore the title
'Ekachattra". meaning ''he who has united the country
under one umbrella'" (58). My point, however, is that
nationalism within Gandhian ideology worked to the
detriment of female and other minority subjects . Subsequent chapters prove this through a reading of
literary and historical narratives.
11. This study recognizes the successful
interpellation of women as well into patriarchy. That
is. women cari be equally complicit in dominating 'other'
women so as to support and sustain male rule.
Chapter I : The Interpellated "IR : Gazadhian Ideology and
the Autobiographical Genre
Introduction
In Prison â n a b t e Cake Sahgal writes about her
childhood by focusing on her family members and her
friends and acquaintances. Similarly, in From Fe= Set
Free she writes about her youth and adulthood by writing
more about the people she meets. She is reserved about
her own feelings and sense of 'growth,' so that the text
reveals more about others than about the autobiographical
' 1 . If traditionally the autobiography is life-writing
of and by the self, of the 'auto,' then extensive writing
about others might seem a problematizing of the genre.
Interestingly, it is in the "Preface" of Prison, in
that literary space outside or in the margins of the
text, that Sahgal speaks (comparatively) more about her
self. But even here she uses the to signify herself
as author and narrator; when she becomes the subject of
the narrative, the plural "weM subsumes the individual.
37
Also, the plural self apparent in the first book fades
from the preface of the second book. Here, the self
vacates even the margin.
Significantly, the preface to Fear concludes:
The survival of India's people can matter only as long as her spirit survives -- the spirit of Gandhi, and, older than this, the fathomless spiritual reservoir £rom which he drew his faith and inspiration. (6)
Sahgal envisions a free people -- From Fear Set Free --
and she hopes that the spirit of Gandhi wi11 bring
freedom to the people. She recognizes the weight of
tradition that in t u m formed Gandhi's 'spirit.' What is
not recognized is the identity and individuality of the
narrator within and in spite of the "spirit of Gandhi."
Ideology and Genre
The text is mediated in ideology. For Macherey, the
place of the "literary project" is between the
"historical pro jectm and the "ideological pro j e c t " (268) .
According to him, "al1 literary works are determined by
their relation to an ideologyu (261). Gandhian ideology
has a 'say' in the production of Sahgal's autobiographies
and to an extent it decides the content as well as the
form of the texts. Macherey draws a direct relationship
between the form of the literary work and ideology --
"The history of forms" he says, "corresponds to the
history of ideological themes" (91) .
Studies on Prison and Fear refer to these texts as
'autobiographies. "' However, in both, the narrative
focus on others rather than the self suggests
characteristics of the memoir, not of the autobiography.
Sahgal's education in British and American schools in
India and later at Wellesley College in the ~nited
States, combined with her use of the vernacular only as
an oral medium, demands a study of her writing in the
context of western rather than Indian theories of
literature.
Philippe Lejeune tentatively defines autobiography
as "~etrospective prose narrative written by a real
person concerning his own existence, where the focus is
his individual life, in particular the story of his
personality." A memoir is different in that it does not
focus on individual life and personality (4). For James
Olney, an "autobiography is at once a discovery, a
creation, and an imitation of the self" (19) . ' Memoirs
adrnirably celebrate the penetrating insight and ski11 of
famous men who, appearances to the contrary
notwithstanding, were never wrong" (36). Or, for Donald
Winslow, "Mernoir ordinarily differs from autobiography in
being less formally organized and in centering more upon
social and historical background, less upon private life"
(39) . Roy Pascal thinks that anyone can mite memoirs
while autobiography can be written only by 'men and women
pledged to their innermost selves" (195).
Placed under the above noms, Prison and Fear pose
generic problems. These texts reflect more than the self
the times of the narrator, where the "1" is an identity
subsumed wi thin sys tas. The 'problem' is not the
essential dividedness or plurality of the self
(discussed, for example, by critics like Paul Jay, Bella
Brodzki, Celeste Schenck or Doris Sommer) that is
produced by either the text or by l i f e . The focus is
rather on the interaction of ideology and narrative in
the production of a textually decipherable self. In her
article, "The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women
Writers," Mary G. Mason discusses the "delineation of
identity by way of alterityu (Brodzki and Schenck 41) ,
the textual realization of the self through other
characters, as a convention in female autobiography. It
is useful to examine the causes of this 'convention' in
Sahgal's writinga2
mile Prison shows l i t t l e girls in Gandhi caps
braving the taunts of school friends, Fear strategically
sublimates the struggle of the narrator as new wife away
from her matriarchal household by focusing on other
people (on the squabbles of servants, for example). In
Fear there are cornparatively more anecdotes involving the
narrator as character, which expose the effect of the
alienation of the self in relation to the patriarchal
other . In her chapter on life in Kanpur, the narrator notes
an instance when she was so often referred to in the
third person, even in her presence, that she herself fell
once to referring to herself as 'she" (74) . This
hurnorous incident is grave in that it signifies the
objectification of the female self on a wider scale
within a patriarchal ideology and society. AiI exclusion
or renunciation of the "1" in these narratives is a
cornpliance to (fernale) self-negation demanded on behalf
of the nation, within Garidhian ideology.
As noted earlier, Gandhian ideology is shaped by the
pressures of a patriarchal nationalisrn that requires
subordination of the citizen to the nation and the
further subordination of the female to the male citizen.
Significantly, in For Marx Althusser summarizes the
unforseen effects of ideology: "the men [like Gandhi] who
would use an ideology purely as a means of action, as a
tool, find that they have been caught by it, irnplicated
by it, just when they are using it and believe thernselves
absolute masters of it" (234). The ideology, in turn,
reinforces these relationships with the nation and
between the sexes. In the production of fernale
autobiography3 this interpellation manifests as a
narratorial reluctance to speak about the self at the
level of content and as an inclination toward the memoir
at the level of fom. The first person female narrator
who experiences her citizenship as second-class becomes
a subject of Gandhian ideology through silence about the
self.
The self manifests as "1" in autobiography. The
form of an autobiography is largely decided by the
position of this " I D in the very center of the text or in
its margins.
A Case for the '1"
Several photographs of the author, her family, and
acquaintances appear in the many pages of Pri,son. These
pictures, especially of the author as a girl, rule out
the possibility of the voice of a woman (an adult) . One
particular and captivating picture, of Sahgal in her
twenties, looking a lot younger, as if in her teensI4
reappears on the cover of ~ear, suggesting once again
the author's identification with the narrator as well as
the continued possibility that the narrative voice is of
that 'girl,' whose life-writing rnay 'naturallyr lack the
maturity of what Pascal calls 'self-knowledgeM (184).
The publications con£ late the author, narrator, and
character, encouraging a reader to move among al1 three
within the single space of the textual '1."
A search for the autobiographical ''1" in Sahgalfs
autobiographies, a posing of the Pascalian question: '5s
this persona 'sufficiently consistent and developed to be
the ruling theme of the story'?" (191), meets with
uncertainty about the 'consistency' and 'development' of
the '1. " At the age of twenty-seven, Sahgal published
ison as 'the story of its [the freedom çtniggle's]
influence on our lives" [emphasis added] (vii) . When
Sahgal mites about the self, it is the plural self of
\tus, IJ \ ~ w e , ~ \lourw -- the family of sisters, parents,
grandparents, uncle, and aunt, and the servants, into
which she also draws the political family whose parent
head is Gandhi. Her communal sense and satisfaction are
such that her gaze is forever turned to these others in
her family as a sure solace and confirmation of her own
existence. Their absence, it seems, threatens her
identity, although there is no clear image of that
identity, as yet.
Traditional definitions of autobiography (founded on
the çarifessions of St. Augustine) tend to interpret the
as unified so that a representation of the "1" must pass
a test of veracity. Such criticism presumes an essential
self that is male and white, what David Lloyd calls 'the
imperial Manr (qtd. in Smith and Watson xxix) . This "1"
is centered and it rnarginalizes the other subjects. In
his essay on "Freud and Lacanf' in Lenin and Philoso~hv,
Althusser interprets this centering of the subject as
"ideological misrecognition." He explains that the
subject has no center: any perceived center is
"imaginaryf* (referring to ideology as ' illusionf ) ; the
center is recognized (read misrecognized) only within
ideology (201).
&I analysis of Sahgal's autobiographies shows that
in the process of centering the male subject within the
nation, Gandhian ideology de-centers the female subject
to place her at the margins of the nation6 as well as to
expose her as, to use Paul Smith's phrase, 'a divided and
provisional entity" (22). Sahgalfs autobiographies act
like memoir in focusing on especially male figures like
her uncle, Nehru, her father ( 'Papu') , Bapu, Tensing, and
her husband, Gautam.
mother, grandmother,
Narratives about her sisters,
and aunts include her as
participant, while narratives of the men, along with
accounts of the nation, usually position her as
spectator. Significantly, when the Father of the Nation
dies, Sahgal becomes aware of her exclusion. "My
sisters, and 1, . had been merely onlookers" ( 2 3 3 ) ,
she says.
In w o n , Sahgal reminisces on the crowds that
gathered on the lawn of their home, Anand Bhavan, to get
a vision of Nehru and if possible to hear him. She
especially remembers one time when the "noise" of the
crowd shouting "Panditji ki jai! and the sight of them
gave her, in the middle of her af ternoon nap, 'a queer
sensation" of being with that crowd. Yet, she
simultaneously realizes the impossibility of that
displacement i n t o the crowd.
Al1 at once 1 became one of those anonymous faces outside, gazing with cornplete belief and affection at the man who stood before them. The little girl behind the window was on the wrong side of it. She should have been out in the garden with those others, with whom she felt a strange and sudden kinship. (40)
First of all, the passage exemplif ies the f lexibility
between the historical and textual "1" by the further
switch £rom first person to third person -- "1 became one
. . She should have." Secondly, the character is
"the little girl, " blending well into a marginalizing
ideological field. Thirdly , there is a confusion
between desire and lack -- the desire to be with the
crowd and the absence of that position in the crowd -- " 1
became one of those . . . She should have been out in
ths garden with those others." In relation to the crowds
and in relation to Nehru, she is always on "the wrong
side." The gap between the two (between "those others"
and 'the man") is the space of the 'divided' and
'provisional' I M In the Lacanian sense, the "1" as
subject enters the symbolic order of the autobiography as
text only to become an effect of a meaning that defines
itself. As such, the subject confronts its own
'otherness' as \\sheOf' The subject is now excluded from
the imaginary of self-definition (as one with the other
- - the
evident ,
crowd
as one
and, perhaps what is not imediately
with "the m a n " ) . This exclusion or lack
gives way to desire for the other.
Sahgal's desire to be with the people (the crowd) is
limited by her class in the western-educated elite. So
the attempted relationship is "strange and sudden. "
Despite nationalist feelings, the elite are not the
masses, but clearly its leaders. The narratorrs father
mites to her: "We are a great nation, and the Brahmans
among us have had a great tradition of peace, tolerance,
and culture, also courageous resistance to evil" (91) .
Here, the mere mention of '~rahmans"~ privileges itself
over the Hindu body in India. "Evil" is a tem that can
be applied and legitimized according to tradition and
custorn both of which are interpreted only by the (male)
Brahman. The non-Brahrnan elite, like Gandhi, enter the
ranks of leaders through their 'manhood' whose mission is
to redeem the nemasculated" masses. Sahgal's own subject
position as elite but not male explains her place on the
margins of the people and its leaders.
Nor does Sahgal make any attempt to represent
' Woman ' (a romanticized, universal, hornogeneous,
biological and social entity). In Relationshig the
author shares her difficulty in having close friendship
with wornen because according to her they expect her to
share confidences, which her "reticencew does not allow
(21).8 She recognizes no affiliation to a universal
sisterhood other than in the very physical phenomenon of
mothering. A rare occasion when the narrator of Fear
feels part of the female community is at the hospital's
maternity ward. She can not only empathize with the
woman who tells her '1 scream . . . . How else would my
husband know what 1 am going through [in child birth]?lf
(96), but she also testifies to a growing sense of
identity as part of the group, "1 had lost my identity
and become everywoman" (103). She is acutely aware of the
difference between some women, who group thernselves under
categories of custom and dress, and herself. She says,
"The repetition of 'among u s r exiled me to another
community, another set of customs and food habits, and
firmly barred the door behind me to prevent reentryM
(70). The narrator/character has no illusions of a
female homogeneity and unity. She will be "everywomanM
only at the biological level, in the physical processes
of parturition and lactation. After that, even her
materna1 instincts wi11 have nothing to do with her
giving birthg (See Fear 109).
A case for the autobiographical "1" is made at the
margins and in the space between the text and society.
Gandhian ideology functions as a (nationalist) structure
that tries to give coherence to the structurally divided
I M ; ideological discourse creates a sense of "unity and ,
continuity," which even d a i m s the centrality of the
female subject . l a The ideology centers the female as
"Mother India' and interpellates women at the crux of
national freedom and future. But the subject's entry
into language causes a split of the subject. In her
essay, 'Constructing the Subj ect : Deconstructing the
T e x t , " Catherine Beisey calls this, after Ernile
Benveniste, 'a split between the 1 of the discourse. the
subject of utterance, and the I who speaks. the subject
of the enunciation" (359). The autobiographical \81'f,
which is the I of language, resists the unifying
'strategiesf of the dominant ideology through its own
dividedness. According to Lacan, the subject divides
itself into numerous "agencies" (51) .
In its relationship with andh hi an ideology the "1"
of the autobiography responds to the ideology £rom two
positions, as object and as subject. The "1"'s 'objectf
response is made apparent in the speech of the tf
Conformity characterizes the object position.
Speech and the Object of Gandhian Ideology
In P r j . s o q as well as in Fear, Sahgal ' speaks ' £rom
memory and a certain consciousness. The tem "speech" is
used in opposition to "silence' in the autobiographies.
"Speech" refers to frank and detailed writing on topics
usually related to others and the extemal. This speech
partly gives the text characteristics of the mernoir.
Silence, on the other hand, refers to the reluctant
engagement of certain other topics, usually related to
the 'self' of the "I", which give the text
characteristics of the autobiography. As 1 shall show,
however there is speech in the silence too. The metaphor
of speech also follows the Althusserian understanding of
ideology in which ideology 'hails ' the subject into
being .
Sahgal tries to be true to herself by recording the
outside more than the self so that there are pages and
pages of "scene making" (Benstock 29). On reading Prison
one gets various impressions of the life and tirnes of an
elite family converted to Gandhism but fails tu gather
what the 'prison' and 'chocolate cake,' the difficulties
and pleasures, meant to the "author's developing self."
The narrator of Prison is mainly a child and
teenager for whom, in spite of assertions to the
contrary, decisions are made by adults. A major decision
to send the children to the United States, for example,
was opposed by the authorts older sister, but the
parents' plan prevailed (Pandit 1945:96). So, from
wearing Gandhi caps to being deprived of family, children
had no Say. They were, in other words, objects of the
adults' and nation's agenda. The narrator's memory of
this period is on the whole rosy.
The self is objectified to simply reflect the ideal
of the dominating Gandhian ideology. As an object of her
parents' world, Sahgal fails to picture the drab
childhood she later tells Rai (in Relatjonshig) she had.
She mites to Rai:
Darling, what rnakes you think I t d miss al1 the conveniences of modern living on a trek? If you knew the way I grew up, the way we travelled, third class in the dust and heat of sumer, living in Congress camps, hardly knowing what it was to sit in a car -- the two cars my parents owned at different times were confiscated during two di£ f erent non- cooperation movements -- and we used cycles and tongas throughout childhood. We lived in a big house, it's true, but within it life was simple, in preference to one that accumulated possessions. The first inkling 1 had of what possessions meant was after my engagement to Gautam. ( 9 3 )
In prison this same period is represented as full of fun
and comf orts (except
parents or death of
interpellation is so
c m honestly declare,
advice upon us" (see
for the separation £rom imprisoned
f amily members or f riends ) . The
complete that the young Nayantara
'Not once had our parents inflicted
Preface to Prison, p. xiii) . Her
objectification is perceived as 'choicef and 'freedom.'
The narrator1s consciousness acknowledges the "logical
coherence" of the narrative and supposes a parallel
"logical coherence" in 'real life."' For Georges Gusdorf
this is the "original sin" of autobiography (see Olney p.
The narrator speaks of national politics only in
terms of Gandhi and the Congress. She recognizes the
Indian National Congress as the representative party of
India. In Prison, the narrator accepts the deliberations
of the Congress at Anand Bhavan as "the mind of India"
(139). She acknowledges its tool status in the hands of
Gandhi. "Gandhiji himself was never a member of it [the
Indian National Congress], but it soon became the
instrument through which he was to carry on his novel and
startling method of non-violent warfareM (Prison 19). In
his autobiography, Nehru too testifies to the supreme
power of Gandhi over the Congress: "In 1921 he carried
the Congress almost single-handed and plunged it into
non-co-operation. In 1930 it would have been quite
impossible to have any aggressive and effective direct
action movement if he had resisted it in any w a y " (235).
In prison, the guiding presence of Gandhi combined with
the leading power of the Congress allows the narrator to
proc lah : 'we are truly the children of Gandhi's India".
Children expressed nationalisrn through the suffering of
parents who were members of the Congresç -- everything
was a function of \\Gandhi's magic" (20).
The narrator of F e declares that Gandhi
transformed the nation into \\the people." "For the first
tirne in India's history the words 'the people' had
acquired a dynamic significance" (25). In the narrative,
Gandhi and the Congress are represented as the sole
powers that Yashioned an amy" of the people. The
narrative chooses to focus on the Gandhian rnovernent and
the Congress as the history of Indian independence and in
so doing it equally chooses to silence alternative
histories of freedom fighting that rejected both Gandhi
and the Congress, as, for example, the other 'amies of
peoplef under Ambedkar (whose book is, significantly,
titled What Gandhi and the Conaress D i d t.0 the
Untouchables) or Jinnah or Bose, to name just the obvious
f ew. In Malgonkar' s A Rend in the Ganges, Debi-dayal
asks his friend Basu if the Congress had failed j u s t as
the "Freedom Fighters" had failed in the face of
Partition. Basu's reply is thought-provoking:
Tt is an even greater failure. But will they
ever admit it? They will take al1 the credit for achieving independence when the British finally leave, as though al1 that the others have done, the Mahasabha , the League even, means nothing. (285-86)
Another 'spoken' topic of Sahgal's autobiographies
is space, as in a place to stay after marriage (a hotel
or a flat), the geographic space of the Himalayas, or
'khali,' the sunmier resort of the family, a garden, -and
Bhavan, the national space of India. Focus on external
space exempts the narrator £rom attention to the inner
space of the self. ~rnidst guiding the reader through the
maze of India (and later criticizing the foreigners'
curiosity for an essential india), the narrator of Prison
shares her own startling discoveries: "For the first the
in Our 1ives we found ourselves in a wholly fndian
environment, untouched by foreign influence" (109).
Later. in Prison, the narrator modifies the 'discovery'
to a "new awareness of india's loveliness" (114), where
the emphasis is on an aspect and not on the essence of
India. Through al1 this talk, the national space evades
the understanding of the narrator while silencing the
self .
The talk of space is ideological in its privileging
of familial and national space. Gandhian ideology
subordinates the individual to the citizen and the farnily
to the nation. Sahgal's autobiographies reflect this
hierarchy so as to represent the individual chiefly as a
patriot; the narrative largely hides the individual's
discontent with the family or the nation. Sahgal's
narrative mirrors and announces/confirms the ideological
supremacy of the nation -- India as spiritual (hence not
needing the mission of the [Christian] white man) -- in
the 'discovery' of India in the 'pure' (mystical) dance
of Uday Shankar.
Sahgal's individual and nation stand for non-
violence. The position partly explains why Sahgal does
not record hatred for the British on account of whom her
father's medical treatment was fatally delayed. Nor does
she document bitterness for her father's family who used
the Hindu Code to deny her mother property rights.
Vi jaya Lakshmi Pandit notes in her memoir that she had
especially striven to re-establish kinship with her
husbandfs family so that the children would grow without
resentment towards that family. Does Sahgal's book
testify to this 'real' lack of rancor, or could the
absence irnply a narrative design to silence the
individual's individuality, which can run contradictory
to the nationrs identity of ahimsa?
The 'speaking' "1" in both Prison and F e a s reveals
a situation of subjection to Gandhian ideology. This
subjection indicates an object position in so far as it
is devoid of agency: it does not question or resist the
ideology, but betrays an eagerness to submit and conform
to dominant ideological agenda. In this sense, the texts
function as Gandhian ISAs. However, the 'logic,'
'relevance,' and 'consistency' of the speech break at
certain junctions. These breaks are themselves made up
of speech that is incomprehensible or of silence. This
second kind of speech or silence ruptures both language
and ideology. Instances of the silent-speech are related
to the (inner) 'self' and a subject status.
Silence and the Subject of Gandhian Ideology
Macherey emphasizes the all-important role of
silence in ideology critique. He explains that we reach
a point where speech tells nothing and silence starts
speaking. 'Silence reveals speech -- unless it is speech
th& reveals the silence" (86) . Choice precedes speech
-- a choice to speak which is also a choice to be silent.
The spoken and the unspoken are simply two sides of the
same text. Sahgal ' s choice to speak about others
contains her choice to be silent about her self.
At times, the speech ruptures to point to that which
is not said. The reader confronts such 'ruptures' partly
as incomprehension.12 At the end of Prison the happy-go-
lucb young narrator makes an uncharac teris tic conclusion
in the context of the death of Gandhi -- "1 felt at sea,
and 1 think the reason was that rny feeling of loss went
deeper than consciousness. It was as if the continuity
of a long process begun before my birth had suddenly
snapped like a dry twig, leaving me entirely without a
sense of directionM (233). While the death of Gandhi
means the loss of a family friend and national leader,
the social function of the character as an 'onlooker'
does not warrant registering a "loss" ("leaving me
entirely without a sense of direction") of such serious
persona1 implications. (Note that during her four years
in the United States, not once does the narrator mite to
Gandhi or ask for "direction") . But the expression of
loss points to some silence of the "I."'3
Similarly, at the end of Feu, without any warning
or context, the narratorkharacter asks her Prime
Minister uncle the secret to a successful rnarriage (192).
When she speaks she is aware of the restriction on time
that demands her to ask only the most important question.
The narrator positions her upcoming question in the false
context of world peace and then narrows it to peace
between any two people. Even here she is careful to hide
the relevance of the question to her own failing
marriage .
The narrator of the autobiographies is reserved or
digressive when it cornes to expressing or comunicating
persona1 pain. In Fear Sahgal ' s ref erences to the
difficulties of married life are elliptical. The good-
humored narration of occurrences hides the loneliness and
disappointment of the bride : "Having solicitously
provided me with a drink and settled a cushion at my back
they [Gautam and Somy] were once again oblivious of my
presence"; or, "In Gadanpur they left me standing in
tall, bristly grass . . . could 1 turn £aster than
boars?" (64). Later on, the narrative lingers on
national news by aborting the following comment on
private predicament: "Bombay represented an unrelieved
and at times chaotic domesticity, ruled by the wants of
young children" (190) . Only in Re1 ationshig does she
reveal these broken narratives in the autobiographies as
the deceptive tips of fatal icebergs. Still, such
references are an irnprovement to Prison, where the prison
appears as more of an attractive topping on the cake.
However , the narrator of Fear as well marginali zes
persona1 agony and centers the story of the nation,
complete with country, flag, and citizens. Her tirne of
rest £rom husband and children in the Himalayas is
material for one whole chapter. Interes tingly , this
chapter turns into a brie£ biography of Tensing and an
impressive description of the landscape. If the female
narrator must speak of her self, she narrates incidents
£rom her childhood -- usually pertaining to patriotism
and her sense of nationalism or, again, of her awareness
of the native land. For example, she remembers her
Anglo-Indian friend telling her, "Woulün't it be terrible
if English people had to pull rickshaws?" (120). Or, she
paints the geography of the nation: "mammoth mountains .
. . straggled two thousand miles across Asia, forming our
northern frontier" (121) . What she chooses not to
narrate is her own increasing sense of disillusionment
with her marriage and her guilty need for escape from it.
Whereas the 'choice' of silence, forbidding
disclosure of negatives of family and nation, is an
ef f ect of ideological interpellation. the '1" as
agentkubject invokes precisely this 'other' reading of
the text -- a reading of the silence to reveal the
collapse of the family and the potential collapse of the
nation through the female body.14 By the dual discourse
of not saying yet stating, "1" as a specific female body
within the textual and historical space becomes a subject
of Gandhian ideology. The subject resistç and
establishes its own identity, and the act of subjectivity
further defines the autobiographical genre.
Pain and a ~esisting "1"
Points of rupture in the autobiographical discourse
are also points of pain for the female
author/narrator/character. The pain is directly related
to gender, where gender is a behavioral and cultural
trait designed by ideological interpellation. More than
a 'status,' gender is a ' r o l e ' that the female character
must play in order to survive within the unifying
structure of ideology. The narrator ensures her place
within this structure by ignoring gender problems and by
refusing to mention that which questions the structure.
Thus the child narrator of Prison sustains the Gandhian
'magic . ' l5 Nevertheless , when the '1" is conf ronted by
pain the structure cracks to reveal resistance t o the
ideology . Pain makes the narrator represent herself in a
manner that resists the ideology. Within Gandhian
ideology it is only natural to subordinate the self and
its suffering to the nation. Gandhi acknowledges women
chiefly as sufferers; he himself aspires to wornanhood
through suffering. As Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, another
Gandhian, tells her neighbors in Fe-, \'Therets no other
way [than suffering] to build a nation" ( 4 8 ) . The
nation's body is the citizen and the ideal suffering body
is that of woman. mile women are invited to suffer for
the nation (through jail going, lathi charge,
demonstrations, non-violence), men too are called to the
same vocation in their identification with the female
body of the nation. Within the family, while men's
direct relationship with the nation. in administration
and maintenance, gains approval in family, society, and
nation, womenfs service to the nation is mediated through
men and the family, unless in a crisis and at a time that
specifically calls for suffering. Also, note Gandhi's
definition of 'sou1 forcer as 'the conquest of the
adversary by suffering in one's own person" (qtd in Brown
56). The sad irony of this principle is that it is more
often the female subject who undergoes the suffering
within a patriarchal society.
Fear is complicit in this ideology in not only what
it says (about Partition and the Congress), but also in
what it does not Say (about the narratorts own thoughts
on divorce or her suffering). Within the ideology, it is
acceptable to speak about the nation and about the
family, but only in a manner that expresses cornitment to
both. Gandhian chastity forbids any denial of the family
or a questionhg of the sanctity of marriage. The result
is a long silence and some ellipses.
In this sense, 'reticence' is a necessary choice for
the female '1" in the presence of a threatening
patriarchy. 'One word £rom you and you die!' Fear and
need combine to hegemonize the '1" : fear of annihilation,
a need to conform and be accepted. In Relationsu
Sahgal fears again and again a process of annihilation.
'1 think some part of me actually prays for blindness and
deafness . . . 1 wonder what's left of me" (22) or
"sornething died in me" or "myself suf f ered" (35) . While
the author lived 'normallyf according to the criteria of
society, as mother and wife, her self lived in chaos,
close to disintegration. In retrospect, the period of
writing Fear was this tirne of trial by £ire, ironically
for the same reasons that Sita was tested (see
onshia 152 -3 ) .
The ' reticence' is also a 'reluctance. ' As a
refusal to speak (more than as a denial of speech) it is
a form of resistance, an exercise of power. As J.B.
Thomps on says , 'If complicity cari be a sign of
assimilation to the social order, it can also be a way of
circumventing or even disrupting that order by employing
the means which are proper to it' (61) . The narrator's
position is similar to that of the wornan in purdah who
has the upper hand in so far as she can see without being
seen. The reticent ''1" cari hear without being heard and
be more in control of the situation; she will have no
slip of the tongue.
Pain forces the text, more than the character, to
talk so that the textual silence and interruptions
portend what is confirmed in RelationçhiD: that female
experience of internent within the family is irrelevant
to any contribution to the nation. In Relationshi~, the
writer speaks of her experience of claustrophobia within
the walls of her family and marriage. The casual
references to divorce and peace suggest that the female's
subjection to her husband will not set matters right, but
may, on the contrary, only obstruct service to the
nation. The narrator remains within the ideology of
nationalism, but with a different sense of the place of
a woman in the nation. pain does not place the "1"
outside Gandhian ideology. Instead it allows the 'I", as
Sally Robinson observes, "to occupy, self-consciously and
critically, a position of marginality that enables
women's self-representationw (19). What national
ideology propagates and what the narratorfs female body
eventually discovers through pain are contradictory; pain
begets resiçtance in the subject.
Suffering brings the narrator to an increased level
of consciousness and places her in the position of
'thinking subject.' The rnemory of hardships as a
Congress child, notably. cornes up only when the female
body realizes it has been submitted to, for her, 'ten-
year battering" (93) in the experience of marriage. As
a conscious subject of Gandhian ideology, Sahgal
announces her adherence to non-violence or satyagraha.
In Relationshig she testifies to the conversion she
experienced:
1 don' t know of any in£ luence stronger in rny life t h m Gandhiji's non-violence, as a way of resisting wrong. But 1 took no interest in it as an actual approach to living until 1959 when in my devastation 1 floundered for something that would sustain me. And this did. 1 studied it carefully, proceeded to apply it to my life, and the difference it has made is simply that I'm not afraid. (90)
Faced with the cruel reality of an unfair divorce
settlement, Sahgal shares her mental struggle: "1 find it
hard not to feel bitter toward him [Gautam], a thing I
have tried to avoid" (171). For the author, satyagraha
becomes a legal weapon to defeat patriarchal legalities
around marriage and divorce. Satyagraha becomes a female
instrument of legal retribution on male legal injustice.
Sahgal's very method of survival, just being "not
afraid," is intended to defeat at least some patriarchal
policies. The female subject of Gandhian ideology thus
responds in a way different frorn her male counterpart in
these narratives -- she uses a weapon of Gandhian
ideology to resist that very ideology.
The narrator of Eear is closer to a resisting
position than the narrator of risoq, and this
subjectivity is apparent in the very title, "From Fear
Set Free. " Nehru mites in his autobiography that for
the female "freedornn has the double meaning of national
independence and redemption from udomestic slavery"
(227). The narrator's search for freedom beyond
Independence Day points directly to her plight within the
f amily .
Also, to borrow a prevalent interpretation of FEAR
as an acronym for False Evidence Appearing as ~eal'~,
Sahgal's title indicates her conscious literary project
to break the mirror of appearance which began in Prison,
actually on every "Naoroz, " the Kashmiri New Year , when
the narrator's mother got each person to look at their
own auspicious reflection (84). This adult-guided view
of the self in a reflected image -- an appearance -- is
re-affirmed year after year, every Kashmiri New Year,
giving way to an illusory (Lacanian) unity and F m of
nationalist 'reality' (vs . provincial [Kashmiri]
desire) .17 In the narrator who has outgrown her
childhood by being pushed into the symbolic realm of
language, and hence of ideology, prays for freedorn from
FEAR, of losing agency, and strives to identify the "1"
beyond 'appearance.'
Discornfort makes the narrator 'speak' i n a different
voice and in a language which she cornplains, in
that no one else spoke (38). Fear reveals
to a greater degree the distress that the female subject
endures within the family. The text registers a greater
sensitivity to the burden of patriarchy. Away from her
materna1 household, the narrator notices at once that at
a party " [t] he room had divided itself i n t o male and
fernale halves" (69). She also chooses to tell the reader
how the 'people' who visited Anand Bhavan were extra
polite on hearing that she had given birth to a boy,
suggesting that the birth of a girl would not have
procured as much reverence for the mother (105) . The
repeated pain encountered within the family (especially
from the presence of a possessive husband) reveals to the
narrator the 'di£ f erence' within patriarchy -- " 'chota
pegs' f o r the men, sherry or tomato juice for the ladies"
(76). The narrator is now aware of "the many unavoidable
difficulties that cropped up when one was half of a
couple and not just an individual" (80) . Here it is not
silence but speech that alludes to the discornfort of the
f male gender wi thin a patriarchal ideology . la The
narrator exposes gender as an ideological construction
and sets in motion resistance to the dominant ideology.
When the female subject resists, she shakes the very
foundation of the nation. When she questions her unequal
responsibility of chastity, her subordination to a
selfish and possessive husband, her denial of a place
outside the family, she paves the way toward something
that has no existence in Hinduisrn -- divorce. Gandhian
ideology evolves also from the patriarchal religions of
Hinduism, ~hristianity, and Islam, and so allows no
possibility for woman-initiated divorce. The ideology
recognizes only the family as the basic unit of the
nation. For a woman to rnove against the family is to
challenge the nation. The persona1 resistance is
interpreted as political defiance of national import.
Sahgalfs separation £rom her husband is discussed even in
the Lok Sabha -- a further indicator that the nation has
its stake in families, Fear alludes to potential
defiance by randomly referring to divorce, without a
story to tell; Relationshia tells it al1 through letters.
Not only does the female subject resist the
ideology, but she proceeds to remold her relationship
with the nation on unconventional terms. The new
relationship with the nation is that of a lover -- an
empowered lover. In Relationçhi~ she explains her new
citizenship :
Nothing has ever had the power to move me intellectually or emotionally as the image of India has done, and does, a vision that filled my being to bursting. Beloved was a word that applied only to my country. It leads one to wonder what country is and means. I'm not sure, only there is not a day when a m not aware of it in some form. 1 think 1 would stay my ground here whatever happened. 1 feel as if 1 were indispensable here, and some thing dreadful would happen to the controls if 1 went away! (200)
The female nation, Mother ~ndia, is addressed by the
female author as "Beloved." There is no established
familial basis for this appellation. The family as ISA
is heterosexual at the parent level and patriarchal in
Indian society so that, as noted earlier, the female
subject of ideology normally finds her relationship with
the nation patriarchally mediated. The author, on the
other hand, seeks not only a close bond in female
(ferninist) terms with the nation, but also assumes its
"controls."
Contrary to patriarchal logic, the author feels
"indispensable" to the nation. When the narrator
concludes Fe= by aborting her private story so that
"india might live in light and freedom" (195), her tone
of irony redeems the otherwise false position. The
author (in Relationshin), more than the narrator (who is
still inactive), through breaking free £rom what she
feels to be shackles of a traditional rnarriage, begins an
unmediated discourse with her nation.
For the female writer the very act of writing in
private is a form of resistance; the nation. including
her husband, is at the mercy of her Pen. It is now for
her to make what she will of this literary world. Her
choice of the autobiographical genre gives her the
privilege to tell her own story -- to tell the 'truth' --
and yet to modify her rnemory with the written word of a
learnt and (theoretically) alien language. ~riting is
her method to go beyond the walls of her house and yet
not be reprimanded by the patriarchs. It is also her
means to feel the nation that she loves and to re-create
that world in a manner politically denied to her. Sahgal
furthers this second function through her biting
j ournal i sm. The female miter's process of writing
becomes an act of agency and auto-bio-graphy.
Conclusion
Re-defining the autobiography in terms not of the
centered self, but of the marginalized '1" who speaks
within the gaps of the memoir, both Prison and Fear
represent a form of writing that is increasingly
conscious of its own ideological and subj ect position.
This writing is feminist in so far as it relies on and
underscores the experience of sexual subalternity within
the space of family, society, and nation. This is not
'écriture féminine,' with its emphasis on the biological
sex of woman. Sahgal's autobiographies are best
interpreted in the light of 'gender,' Le., as a cultural
and historical definition of a woman. The "In, hidden in
the margins, manipulates its own limited space to mark
itself as a meaningful presence in the gaps of the text.
The initial absence of the self in the text,
signifying its repression within the dominant ideology,
does not m e a n that the self has been eliminated. The
self reappears in other forrns, as daughter, wife, lover,
mother. Like Freud's 'return of the repressed,' these
corne-backs of the self are s t i l l repressed hence
distorted and threatening (forms) in their public
presence within the field of the patriarchal repressor.
The preceding discussion has traced the slow revelation
of the female '1" within the repressed space .
Ultimately, writing or the text is the locale of the
defining '1." If the female makes a career of writing in
a man's world, çhe also discovers her self in it. About
thirty years later, Sahgalr s search for the self (she
says) ends as follows in A Point of View:
A wornan, an Indian, a citizen of the world -- in the course of a lifetime one is many things -- but not until 1 had shaken off the labels others had given me, become a cheerful traitor to my origins, unlearned much 1 had been
taught, and put experience together quite differently in words on a page, did 1 know who 1 was. (92)
Her identity depends on her writing, on her discarding of
some words -- 'labels" -- and a different putting
together of experience in other "words on a page."
Gandhian ideology continues to hegemonize the " I "
through the nation. As a citizen, this female subject
sustains her relationship with India; she resists only an
unequal citizenship. She will try to break away £rom the
repressive modes of patriarchy and record her on-going
attempts in her novels.
Meanwhile, speech and silence will enter her text as
modes of resistance on the margins and begin one slow
movement of the female ''1" toward the center, never quite
reaching the destination. The text itself will "walk
alone" (Macherey 194) in an evolution, a 'production'
(not just representation) , of the '1" (~obinson 13 ) . The
production of the "1" as a resisting subject of Gandhian
ideology defines the genre as autobiography.
Notes (Chaster One)
For example, see: Jain 86; Bhatnagar 44-45; Sharma
Chadha 268; Kirkpatrick 731; Pontes 25-6. The New
Yorker's reference to Prisoq as a "merno i r " (qtd. in
Pontes 69) as well as Eleanor Wachtel's reference to it,
again, as 'memoir" (in a recent CBC interview) are
exceptions.
Mary G. Maçon concludes her article lauding the
capacity of female autobiographers to 'transcend' what
she calls "the Western obsession with self." Mason reads
her autobiographical subjects as achieving a "self-
realization and self-transcendence through the
recognition of another" (44) . The current study reads
this 'transcendence' in the case of Sahgal's writing as
a revelatory gap and symptom within Gandhian ideology.
Regardless of the various and varying conclusions on
whether the autobiographical self is fact or fiction,
this study proceeds to analyze the self as what Paul
Eakin calls "experiential fact" (Lejeune xiv) . 3 . In Auto/Ethnoar&w: Rewr~tlna the Self and the . .
Social, Deborah E. Reed-Danahay defines autoethnography
as 'a form of self-narrative that places the self within
a social context" (9). The term as used by Reed-Danahay
suggests levels of consciousness and control that are
held suspect in the current ideological critique of
Sahgalfs texts as "autobiography." Again, neither the
ancient Indian tradition of hagiography nor the l g C h
century trend of female smrtikatha or memoir (Chatterjee
1993338-9) f o m Sahgal's literary tradition.
4 . Ideology functions as representation. In Fear
Sahgal mentions her \problemr of being mistaken for a
school-girl even after she had given birth to her first
child. The photographs in the autobiographies represent
"lived 1ife.I' In "Representing Women: Re-presenting the
Pastu Gillian Beer notes that representation
"ackilowledges the extent to which ideologies harden into
objects and so sustain themselves as real presences in
the world. The objects may be books, pictures, films,
advertisements, fashion. Their encoding of asçumptions
and desires re-inforces as natural and permanent what m a y
be temporary and learntm (Belsey and Moore 64).
5 . See the following edition -- Set Free.
78
London: Gollaric~, 1962.
6. Some political critics interpret Vi jaya Lakshrni
Pandit's foreign assignments as a ploy to keep her out of
Congress home politics. Pointedly, in spite of her
experience and acumen since the freedom struggle, she was
denied any place in the home government inside or outside
Jawaharlal Nehru's or Indira Gandhi's Party. Also, see
Sahgal's coments in Point pp. 16-36, especially
her concluding sentence, "Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit did India
proud. I am not sure if India did as well by her."
7. The author's father, Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, uses
the term \ \BrahrnansM and not "Brahmins . " "Brahrnan" means
'Great Soul" and as such need not denote the class
distinction of "Brahmin. " However, he uses the unusual
plural f o n "Brahmans" (great souls) and not 'Brahman. "
(The singular fom would undoubtedly signify God.) A~so,
his use of "among us" (a phrase resented by the narrator
a few pages earlier, in the context of community making)
conflates Brahman with Brahmin.
8 . Ironically, her lover Mangat Rai demarids precisely
such sharing of confidences as part of their friendship
which he rationalizes as follows: "1 want to know al1
that happens to you, and within you, not as a matter of
curious knowledge or morbid data collecting, but because
of the warmth of being with a whole person" (~datjonshi~
5 7 ) .
9. In Nation and Narration, Rachel Bowlby notes how
"materna1 feelingsff is a separate issue £rom
"motherhood." She argues that materna1 instinct is a
response to 'social injunction' rather than a 'natural'
condition. (Bhabha 210)
10. As Ragland-Sullivan notes. "Any final insight
into al1 meaning-systems serve a humble purpose: to give
a sense of unity and continuity to a structurally divided
subject" ( 9 3 ) . 11. For Georges Gusdorf this is the "original sin" of
autobiography (Olney 41) .
12. Catherine Belsey explains, "absences . . . reveal
the inability of the Ianguage of ideology to create
coherence" (1993:364).
1 3 . For the author the silence may refer to her
unsureness about a life-partner -- perhaps something she
had thought of discussing with Gandhi (the 'expert' on
sex and family life). H e r silence is a strategy to
shield her privacy. For the narrator, the speech and
silence picture the '1" as a divided entity, somewhere
between what is said and not said. As a result of al1
this silence, we are given a character who 'states what
she will not Say and says what she will not state'
( M a c h e r e y 88) . 1 4 . See Doris Sommer i n Nation and Narration: "If
marriage is a 'cause' of national stability, it is also
an effect of the nation. Without the concept of
nationhood the alliances and the stability they brought
would be beside the pointff (Bhabha 88-89).
15. Discussing the memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir,
Leah Hewitt points to the deproblematization of gender as
a function of "the distance between the adult narrator
and the child character" (29).
16. See for exarnple, Peter McWilliamsf Do It! Let's
Get O f f Our Buts (California: Prelude Press, 1991, 31).
17. Together with a nationalist spirit, the Nehru
family is proud to preserve their provincial roots as
Kashmiris . men though the author's father is a
Maharashtrian, the farnily is brought up the materna1
Kashmiri way.
18. Here speech functions as silence by 'alludingf
instead of t e n t a Speech is now 'a relative
silence which depends on an even more silent margin"
(Macherey 89 ) .
Chapter II: The ~irgin and the Nation
Women were not a subject for discussion. They were wives, daughters, mothers. They belonged to their men by contract or by blood. Their sphere was sexual and their j ob procreation. They were dependents, not individuals.
(Storm b Chmdia- 191)
Introduction
me of Morninq handiaarh and L D i U
in Shadow represent the subordinate yet key position of
the "virgin wife" in an Indian family. The importance of
the family is measured by its significance to the nation
-- as the basic unit of the indian nation. Gandhi upheld
the sanctity of the family along with the gendered roles:
the husband outside the family and the wife inside the
family, the former as administrator and the latter as
nurturer, as essential to the nation. In Wmen and
ial Justice Gandhi takes for granted the role of the
wife as cook and the husband as bread-winner (82) . The
assumption affirms the general situation of families at
that tirne. A ~ s o , while fighting against purdah, Gandhi
is obliged to emphasize 'modesty' as a natural
characteristic of women that will produce "good wives",
"worthy mothers" , and 'useful servants of the country"
(102). ~emarcating women as first wives and mothers and
then as citizens positions the family as the 'natural'
foundation of the nation.
Within the family an Indian girl (across classes and
cultures) is brought up to be a 'good wife.' This 'wife-
breeding' is marked by simultaneously stressing qualities
of modesty and sexuality as a result of which the girl is
supposed to have sufficient sexual appeal to obtain the
approval of a prospective groom, and yet be exaggeratedly
subdued in order to discourage adventures on her own as
well as to appear incapable of such initiatives. This
mix of breeding bestows on the natal family of the girl
the good fortune of having a beauty, while ensuring that
only a marriage convenient to the parents takes place.
Where the appearmce of dependence is (rnis)taken for
a certain naivete in sexual matters, the semblance of
independence in a female is easily associated with
libertinism. AR independent woman will take even her
sexuality into her own hands, and this is dangerous.
While independence in a man indicates ability and
maturity, including the (practical and sexual) right to
other women as well as his wife, such freedom is severely
punishable in wornen.' Sahgal investigates the
intricacies of female chastity in the context of the
Indian nation.
Within Gandhian thought chastity or brahmacharya is
the duty of patriotic men and women. Gandhi asserted
that he himself took to brahmacharya when he realized his
"sacred missionfl (80) . According to him, sexual
intercourse within marriage must be for the sole purpose
of producing children. 'Sexual intercourse for the
purpose of carnal satisfaction is reversion to
animality, " he said (76) . In Gandhian ideology, both men
and women are bound by the demands of fidelity and self-
control so that sexual aberration reflects on one's
nati~nalism.~ Here, it is interesting to note that
Gandhi was j u s t a little more concemed about the direct
impact of the men (than of the women) on the nation.
Radha Kumar reports Sucheta Kripalani as having been
asked by Gandhi to 'marry someone else" in a bid to
preserve the brahmacharya and patriotisrn of J.B.
Kripalani (1993 : 84-5) .
In India, ideology has worked to produce a second-
class female citizen by rnixing Gandhian nationalism with
religious perspectives on woman as goddess/temptress.
Nationalist thought functions only within historical and
social contexts. As Partha Chatterjee notes in
st Thouaht and the C d o n i a l WorJ.d, "nationalist
thought does not, and indeed cannot, constitute an
autonomous discoursew (10). Within a socio-historical
background, nationalist discourse is a "battleground of
political power" marked by the impact of thought (11) .
Gandhian nationalism is thought and enacted within a
patriarchal tradition and society where power struggles
are gendered and women effectively (even tenderly)
marginalized.
Whereas protecting women's virtue is consistent with
Gandhian teachings as well as with the tradition of
absolute allegiance to the husband, called p a t i v r i tyam,
the political consequences of such an emphasis amount to
a seclusion of the wife within the four walls of the
family. M e h r a Masani points out that Hindu society was
a lot to blame for Gandhi's failures in emancipating
women (29). Sahgal's novels elaborate on the tragedy of
the wife in a patriarchal family. To quote Sahgal:
Al1 but a few societies make a ruthless cult of male honour and female virtue. D o m the ages the halo of virtue has extracted an awesome range of self-denial in return, from the sacrifice of life, as in sati, to the sacrifice of personality, expression and ambition, depending on the times, and more crucially, the culture of the home, especially of its males.
(Re1ationshi.n vii)
The Virgin Wife: An Object of Discourse
me of Morn, nq tells the story of a wife
separated £rom her husband, but does not disclose the
reason for the separation. A D a v in Shadow presents some
general and vague sense of dissatisfaction which leads to
divorce. Stom in Chandiaarh presents the central reason
for marriage failure as loss of virginity before
marriage . The following excerpt highlights the
predicament of the family when the woman is not a virgin.
When Inder could not sleep he resurrected the other man, the one who had known Saroj before he had, making her marriage a mockery and a betrayal. . . .
He was sitting hunched in bed, staring straight ahead of him at the shadows the lamp threw on the opposite wall. Look at me, she begged mutely, speak to me, touch me. Even in extremity she had never said, Forgive me. For each time she had lived through a night's tonnent, she could wake to the sunlight and find herself unsullied in it. There's nothing but you yourself between us, she wanted to cry out. But she could say none of it aloud any more. . . .
'How many thes?" he repeated in the flat, taut monotone of illness. 'Four, five, It was so long ago. I'm not sure. " \'Youf re not sure." The voice, remote and dangerous , unpredic table as a rawhide whip , flicked at her nerves. 'But it's such a signal event in a girl's life surely. The first man. A woman never forgets her first man. The experience must have been a shock, a physical shock. Wasn't it a shock?" A part of her mind prayed, Gad, Gad, Gad, G o d , G o d . She had learned that terror was not external catastrophe. It was a failure of reason . %nswer me. Was it a shock?" "1 don't know. 1 think so. 1 don't remember." She tried to keep the stammer out of her voice. \'But you didn't protest." "No-yes-1 don't remPrriber." " ~ n d then, there must have been others. " "There were no others. " \'No others who went that far. But there rnust have been others."
"There were not." She turned to h i m wildly, "Itfs finished. What do you want me to do about it now? What do you want?" "You should be ashamed of what you did. Arenft you? " "Ifm not, I'm net." (95-97)
Both the man and the woman suffer through this ordeal of
questions and ariswers . The husbandrs voice when he
speaks fluctuates between "illness" and threat. The
topic of virginity implicates both husband and wife; the
womanfs appeal to 'reasonM falls on deaf ears.
Of the three novels, only one focuses on virginity
as an issue; in the other two novels, a wornan's
infidelity and marriage after divorce are problematized.
A detailed study of the significance of fernale chastity
assists an understanding of the social significance of
the narratives.
The virgin is an object of discourse. Religion is
one field of discourse, where ideology has been
institutionalized so as to appear as given and natural,
that has informed and shaped womari as victim. According
to Kautilya's Artha - sastra (321-296 B.C. ) the rejection
of a non-virgin bride is valid. However, the text holds
a 'blemished' bride-groom equally accountable. Although
there is no provision for rejecting a husband, the fine
for hiding the pre-marital promiscuities of the man is
double that of the woman (Radhakrishnan and Moore 204).
But the emphasis on female purity is heavier in the
-stra and in the Bhaaavad - ai,ta . TheCodeof
Manu is that '[hle who carefully guards his wife,
preserves (the purity of) his offspring, virtuous
conduct, his family, himself, and his (means of
acquiring) merit" (190) and "Though destitute of virtue,
or seeking pleasure (elsewhere), or devoid of good
qualities, (yet) a husband must be constantly worshipped
as a god by a faithful wife" (191). The Gita announces,
"when lawlessness prevails, O Varsneya (Krsna), the women
of the family become corrupted, and when women are
corrupted, confusion of castes arises" (105).
Within religious discourse, women are fully
objectified within fields of ultimate power that belong
to patriarchy: the human priest as well as the divine
Brahma both being male. For Hindu wornen, purity is their
only path to salvation. "No sacrifice, no vow, no fast
must be performed by women apart (from their husbands);
if a wife obeys her husband, she will for that (reason
alone) be exalted in heaven" (191) . The visible body
(which alone the man can practically control) must be in
a state of perpetual purity -- virginity or chastity,
besides cleanliness. For peace and prosperity in this
life and in the life after -- to avoid entering the womb
of a jackal and becoming diseased (191) -- a woman will
be a pure object.
Socially, the success of this discourse is necessary
to avoid "confusion of castes." A man's wild oats will
never accidentally follow him into his house; al1 the
children given birth by the wife will inherit the lineage
of the husband. As such, the wife becomes the vested
property of the husband, what Jane Schneider refers to in
"Of Vigilance and Virgins" as "contested resources much
like pastures and water" (18) , bound to ensure the
rightful paternity of the ~hildren.~ Ideo logy
interpellates the woman as privileged to be the custodian
of her husband and children through her body, or rather
through the denial of her body.
Since man is womanfs spiritual, mental, and physical
superior, w o m m can becorne worthy of marital alliance
only through moral uprightness, manifest in her sexual
loyalty. According to the Hindu scriptures it is the
duty of the wife to ensure salvation for her husband4 and
for herself via him. Generally, the material benefit of
a home and the spiritual benefit in death have been
considered sufficient to keep women in place. Moreover,
lapses do not go unpunished.
The demand of virgini ty renders wornen anonymous
within the four walls of her house. Saroj with her
husband, children, house-keeping, and pregnancy has no
identity beyond that of her family. In Tirne, Leela, who
is on a student visa in the United States, dares to break
traditional taboos. She goes out with men and pays
tragically by committing suicide, unable to face the
consequences of what has happened to her. Conditioned by
nationality she prefers the erasure of death to the
exposure of life. What Virginia Woolf sensed of the
nineteenth century stands true for certain cultures in
the twentieth: 'It was the relic of the sense of chastity
that dictated anonymity to womenN (75).
According to Sherry B. Ortner virginity is
especially important in hypergamous or upwardly mobile
marriages. In such marriages, the move is always upwards
for the woman -- the alliance is between lower women and
upper men. Dowry is important, and added to dowry is the
exclusivity of the woman as virgin. 'A virgin is an
elite female among females, witheld, untouched,
exclusive." Ortner points out that the imagined elite
status of the virgin stands for not the actual status of
the family or group but the desired level. Through the
virgin, the family and group move upwards toward the
upper "unattainable status." Ortner concludes that it is
this unattainabili ty which arouses 'sadism and anger"
towards women (32 ) .
The world of the three novels is divided by the tug-
O-war between two equally dominant values -- conscience
and honor. Conscience is the sphere of those who give
importance to principles and the spiritual, such as, in
S m , Dubey, Saroj, and the American missionary who
brought up Gyan. On the other hand, for Inder and Gyan
honor "was a badge, the insignia of hardihood, the sign
of man's standing inhis community. It must at al1 costs
be upheld and it could never be shared" (119) . Inder and
Som strike at their wives, and Lalli killed his wife and
maimed her lover for honor. As the narrtor of Çtom
sarcastically comments, conscience lacked the clarity and
definiteness of honor.
Wornen's honor needs protection5 and so, as Gandhi
states in no uncertain terms, " M e n must do their duty of
protecting women" (CWMG, vol 3 3 : 4 3 4 ) . He then appeals to
wornen to use their moral uprightness as an armor against
thieves and rapists. Comenting on the abduction of
Sita, Gandhi writes that if a woman's mind is pure she is
inviolate even if raped: "Neither will the world reproach
her, nor will there be anything against her £rom the
point of view of dharmav (435). What Gandhi forgets is
that the world, her world, was suspicious and reproached
Sita even though she was not raped. He concludes his
letter on the topic thus, "Wherever there is imorality
in the forests, both the man and the woman fa11 through
their own free will" (435). Unfortunately, then, rape
c m be explained only in terms of consent and irnpropriety
rather than crime.
Often, protection by man is con£ inement for woman.
In the elite society that Sahgal describes, the housewife
spends most of her day within her house. When she
travels it is in her husband's (normally chauffeured)
car, and she is home before dark, Her acquaintances and
friends should have the approval of her husband; if she
fails O find a close woman friend her social life is
restricted to parties attended with her husband, usually
associated with his business. She will play hostess at
several of these gatherings. In al1 this her
associations with men should be strictly formal and
distant. Her chastity, like herself, is thus a thing
secured.
When G a n d h i mites in Youna Indi a, "Let her forget
that she ever was or cari be the object of man's lust.
And she will occupy her proud position by the side of man
as his mother, maker and silent leader" (Hingorani 377)
the premise is that women do not (or must not) lust after
men. Wornan's materna1 role is elevated at the expense of
her other roles, as daughter, sister, or wife. As
mother, she will (pro)create and her leadership will not
offend as it will be a silent one. Hers will be a "proud
position." Here, Gandhian discourse objectif ies woman
by zooming in on her motherhood, to the exclusion of her
'proclivities. '
Any aggressive sexual act within or without marriage
objectifies woman: " M a n fucks wornari; subject verb object"
(MacKinnon 1982:541). Like the rape (outside marriage) ,
marital sex is a burden for the female characters when
the act is marked by aggression and a lack of affection.
Simrit helplessly thinks, T a n ' t we just hold hands?
Can't we lie side by side like brother and sister, like
friends, and talk? Can't a husband and wife be friends?
1s that forbidden?" ( O 96) Simrit searches for a
'non-fuck,' non-object experience.
Saroj's and Simrit's restlessness is interpreted as
imorality and illness. In Dav a doctor is recomended.
Why would a woman complain if she is well-fed? Why would
an elite woman complain at all? Reasonable husbands like
Jit or Vetter too are at a l o s s to understand this.
Simrit ought to give her husband a "plain" answer and not
"that high-flown stuff" about 'friendship' (97). Her
cornplaints are 'unreasonable, ' therefore she is either
mad or bad.
Ultimately, the female character of literary
discourse confronts the object of religious, social, and
political discourse. Further legitimized by Gandhian
ideology, the virgin-wife is institutionalized within
these discourses. As the novels illustrate, when
confronted by unjust legal settlements, the wife finds
herself turning, ironically, to that same law and nation
for justice within the family.
The virgin wife: Object of the Nation
Sahgal's novels are generally analyzed as political
novels because of the presence of politicians as
characters6, and also because of her insights into
national politics, through representations of the Indian
nation, the Congress party, reminders of colonialism and
Partition. No other female writer and very few male
writers in India elaborate on political themes to the
extent that Sahgal does. As Sahgal herself claimed in a
recent interview, having been born and bred in national
politics, especially at a historic time, politics is
"natural to ber. 7
But the female characters of her novels strangely
remain within the political happenings yet outside
politics: they do not make politics, politics makes them.
In , Rashmi, like her mother, is affected by the
frequent jailing of her father. The most they learn from
the experience is to cope. On the other hand, Rakesh,
who is only a neighbor, builds on the experience: he
joins the administrative services and is soon in a
position to influence the politics of the nation. In the
other two novels as well the characters who have a direct
Say in political matters are al1 male.
A female character invariably enters the narrative
and the nation £rom her position within the family. A
reader gets to know her through her role (as wife,
mother, daughter, or sister). A male character is
introduced usually in relation to his job; the office is
often his physical background. The entrantes of the two
genders into the nation are marked by this difference.
A female character's entrance is informal, a male's more
businesslike. The female enters the nation exclusively
through the family. At the same the as the man appears
as a member of a family, he usually is immediately
defined as an administrator, which opens other doors to
the nation.
The superior position of the male within the family
as well as the inferior place of the female within the
same family are both interpellated by the nation. Sexual
dominance of the male and sexual submission of the female
are institutionalized in the family. As Mary McIntosh
observes in 'The State and the Oppression of Women":
The level of analysis that is needed is one on which we ask not simply 'How does the state oppress women?', but 'mat part does the state play in establishing and sustaining systems in which women are oppressed and subordinated to men?' (259)
A wif e' s victirnization takes place "in broad daylight,
amid laughter and conversation while the sun shone"
(Storm 244) . In the case of characters like Saro j and
Simrit, when they should have sex as well as how m a n y
pregnancies they should undergo are decided by their
husbands. Hari's wife appears as a caricature: "The
silent spectre of a woman who went about al1 day with one
end of her sari pulled low over her face and cowered in
a corner when he went into their room at night made no
change in his life. She was there to be used and he used
her, but he paid no more attention to her than if she had
been a block of wood" (191) . The reality of the other
women is not far removed. Their abuse is generally
understood in ternis of the social construction of what a
wornan is .
Elaborate socialization transmits the pattern of
patriarchy from generation to generation. Not only are
children brought up according to gender differences, but
they are also familiarized with the patriarchal situation
so as to become immune to the victimization of women (for
example, the wrong done to a mother, or sister, or female
friend) . The son in pav can hence gloss over the
injustice done to his mother. He can also feel what the
narrator calls 'the ancient male prerogative" (61) that
somehow gives him the right to bully his sisters or
inherit the larger share.
Once women's sexuality is controlled within the
apparatus of the family, wornen are objectified to serve
the 'higher' purposes of nationalism. For example, in a
nation state like India the maternal role of woman is
emphasized so that woman as nurturer matters politically.
inder states, 'A wife was one half of an enterprise, the
compliant partner who presided over home and children and
furthered her husband's career" (55) . Female nurturers
make possible patriots such as Kailas (of 3im)and
Gandhi. "She [Mira] and Rashmi would be allowed to visit
him [Kailas] in jail before his trial and that would be
the time to get her fil1 of his face and think, but never
voice, the aching ernptiness within heru (44). Even other
men, such as Arjun, may expect their service. '' HOW
desirable, how cornfortable and maternal she [Mira] was,
the all-woman upon whom a [read "anyN] man could depend"
(169). Even though India has no virgin mothers, the
sexuality of such female maternal characters is
downplayed so that they are represented as harmless, in
an aura of chastity, with the biological and
psychological capacity to breed but incapable of taking
its controls.
Life is made difficult for those women who seek
divorce because divorce threatens the stability of the
nation. Gandhi was staunchly against divorce:
if a man and his wife cannot get on after marriage, is that reason enough for a divorce? The bond between father and son does not corne to an end on account of disagreement; 1 regard the bond between husband and wife as similar. If they canriot s e e eye to eye, they may well have recourse to non-CO-operation. But once the marital bond has been established, it can never be dharma to act contrary to it. That a man may indulge in sex pleasures with one woman and none other and that too for the sake of progeny and similarly a woman with one man is, 1 believe, the farthest limit that he or she can have ('Letter to D.B. Khoja" CWMG 31:122- 23).
This is a view approved by Mira. By extending the
naturalness of f ather-son relationship to marriage, the
husband-wife bond is conceived as eternal as well as
secure precisely because patriarchal. The indian nation
relies on such a family. Not surprisingly, Ram Krishan
compares Simrit to a Partition refugee. Although Ram
Krishanrs reference is to the hopelessness of both
victims, the choice of simile suggests the disruptive and
divisive impact of divorce on the nation's wholeness.
The Hindu Code Bill of 1955 that legalized divorce
in a tradition within which marriage w a s perpetual has
several loopholes to the disadvantage of wornen. While
society treats divorced women like sick people, 'as if
divorce left pock marks" (4), legal divorce settlements
were no better and often worse. Simrit compares the
Consent Ternnç of her divorce to the 'consent' of a sati,
pointing to the lack of freedom (to consent) as an equal.
The abuse of women gets obliterated by the social
definition of woman. Confronted by Som's lawyer
Moolchand, Simrit realizes the myth of legalities:
What a lie the facts could ber what an appalling lie. No-thing, almost nothing was ever negotiated. Negotiation was a myth -- except among equals -- and w h e r e on this earth did equals exist? The side with the bargaining power called the tune, while the other signed on the dotted line.
Decades later, the myth continues in indian society -- in
the case of the Muslim divorcee, Shahbano, who,
'protectedl by the Muslim Women Act of 1986, is forced to
forfeit her victory in the Supreme C o u r t of india. The
observation of the Supreme Court judge, Justice
Chowdhary, that "we have to protect ourselves from such
protectionw (qtd. in Pathak and Sunder Rajan 263).
denotes the full extent of irony in nation-women
relationships. The despair sets in when 'protection'
becomes a disguise for aggression by vested interests.
As the poet Ghan Shyam Shailani sings:
m a t if the fence itself wrecks the field? if the water itself ignites the £ire?
(qtd. in Agarwal n . p . )
The nation functions in 'sentiment and custom."
Al though law introduced divorce into the age-old Hindu
tradition, the concept has not been domesticated.
Consequently, Som cari be merciless to Simrit and the
court can justify his terms. The impact of the court
decision on Simrit is that she is made liable to pay her
ex-husbandls taxes while never directly benefitting £rom
his income. Raj, who tries to help Simrit, faces the
impossibility of getting people to empathize: "Now which
way do 1 hang up this bloody problem so that the blood
shows" is his practical problem. "The Republic of India
has passed many laws, Simrit rny love, but people like
N.N. Shah live in it, friendly, God-fearing fellows who
wouldn't harm a fly but who can't for the life [of ] them
see when a woman is bleeding to death w i t h taxesN (146).
in the protector-punisher function of the nation, "the
state as coercion and the state as legitimizing ideology
are indistinguishable" (McKinnon 1982:543), and women are
caught in the fou1 play of national politics.
As in the story, in real life Sahgal was used as a
tax convenience by her ex-husband. The tems of the
divorce were such that further punishment awaited her
should she marry. That the entire situation was legal is
no fiction. Like N . N . Shah, the nation too f a i l s to see
innocent blood in these legal documents. Indira Gandhi's
explanation for similar situations was that there is a
wide rift between 'social laws" and "actual practice" --
"There is a lag between the legislation of wornen's rights
and the social sanctions required to make the legislation
a reality. This is certainly true in terms of the status
of women." She recornmended "door-to-door work" (116)'
Le., affecting policies by accessing families al1 over
again.
The intended subject of the nation is male. Raj's
conversation with Shah exemplifies the eclipsing of the
female object by the male subject. The divorce
settlernent is just because the male progeny benefits
immensely front it. The mother should be happy on this
count alone; it is only natural that she be expected to
bear some inconveniences for his sake. Hindu traditions,
with no divorce, can elicit no more pity for the woman.
Under pressure of tradition it happens that some citizens
are 'more equal. "
Government officiais also use social pressure to
influence political decisions. Women are key to this
tactic. When Gyan Singh wants to discourage Dubey's
political presence, he publishes the following in a local
newspaper :
It has been noticed and rnentioned before in these columns that a senior government official keeps Company with a married woman. This of ficial, an outsider, does not understand the importance we, in this state, attach to the sanctity of marriage.
Gyan Singh is admittedly corrupt but it is the sexist
society which enables the corruption.
Not only does the nation favor men, the nation
itself is male. The label "Mother India" is rendered
rneaningless. Roushan Jahan, in her essay, "Hidden
Wounds, Visible Scars: Violence Against Women in
Bangladesh", finds fault with the Constitution for
descriminating against women. "The emphasis on women's
role as reproducers in national development policies and
the F i r s t Five Year Plan are al1 indicators of the
State's underlying concern in preserving the existing
patriarchal social order" she says (Agarwal 217). In her
article \'Ferninisrnt Marxism, Method, and the StateMt
Catherine McKinnon argues that the nation's so-called
policy of objectivity and neutrality hides a male
perspective -- "the state is male in the feminist sense"
(644). In the wife battery scene in Çtom the woman
cannot even defend herself, physically or morally. The
male nation has provided the conditions for dominant and
violent husbands and subrnissive and helpless wives.
In Storm, Dubey states that male dorninance is 'the
most formidable of cultsw and that it should be ended.
However , he is himsel f enmeshed by the \'unaccus tomed
desire to l i f t her [Saroj] up and carry her somewhere to
saf ety. " Althusser's words are ominous : 'The men who
would use an ideology . . . have been caught by it,
implicated by it, just when they are using it and believe
themselves to be absolute masters of it" (For Marx 234).
Dubey's subject position as a Gandhian savior of
distressed women is firmly grounded in his male
superiority, as is Raj ' s announcement "We are going to
get marriedu (Béy 231). This undermines his statements.
The historical female freedom fighter is absent frorn
Sahgal's narratives. ~uring the independence struggle,
women were in the forefront to receive l a t h i charge and
internent. The wornen also signified to the colonialist
a native tradition of female power or strishakti . Once
freedom came. wornen are duly returned to the precincts of
the farnily and to their traditional roles where they are
now encouraged to use their aptitude for satyagraha. The
kind of women who made national freedom possible are no
longer visible. The question then is, do the women gain
freedom -- do they stop being objects?
The Virgin Wif e as Subject
A woman's awareness of her objectification in the
family leads to resistance. When Rashmi complains of a
lack of communication, or when Saroj or Simrit desires a
life beyond the family, the wornen show an awareness of
their fetters which makes them want to be free. men
bef ore the actual situation changes, the awareness is
sufficient to provide the female victim a subject status
- - the position of a thinking subject -- outside the
patriarchal paradigm of 'virtue.'
mowing is the tlrisk" that Sahgalts characters must
undertake to become free subjects. Neil is confused by
"Why do we spend our time together, then? Why do w e talk? Don't you want to know me better? 1 want to know you," she sounded almost distraught .
"ïtm getting to know you," he pointed out.
"Me without any past or future, just me lying here on this grass. That's not me, Neil. Arid 1 want to know more about you, al1 about you, don't you see? Does that make you uncomfortable?"
Tan t we take things as they corne, Rashmi? "
"Yes, but we must want to know each other before we ever can. We have to invade each otherfs privacy a little, force things a little, or we shall stay just where we are." (159
Finally, Rashrni can leave Neil for he had not really
"held" her (218). R a s h r n i , like the other £male
characters, is glad to rnake love. But whereas the male
characters, except the Gandhians, regard sex experience
as central to their relationship with women so that
'knowing' is strictly a physical, 'biblical,' act that
sanctions afterwards their movement away and into a
(public) life indifferent to their women, the female
characters demand another process of knowing and
understanding within the private domain.
For Sahgal's female characters sex is meaningless
when without corrunitment, intimacy. and respect, and a
meaningful relationship does not happen naturally or
spontane~usly~ but requires effort and tirne; it has to be
worked at; it is a lengthy and often boring process, but
it finally pays off. This is a theme that is repeated in
al1 ber novels. The individual is important.
Communication is important. According to Sahgal, the
failure of relationships suggests the dearth of
cornunication -- the lack of "the oxygen of
understanding" (Stpam 222)
For patriarchy, marital unity is equal to male
identity and so, for some of the male characters, knowing
a woman means recognizing a certain 'oneness. ' For
instance, "There were times when Salem did not think of
his wife as a separate person" (Times 105). The
assumption of unity, however, is built on male
prerogatives, so that the wife experiences such
'affection' as a threat to her own identity, an
experience akin to rape. Several of the women characters
compelled to such a merge in marriage fear degradation,
or even annihilation, and rebel. They daim a
separateness which their male partner opposes.
Characters like Inder and Som know what to do with
a woman, i . e. , with the social concept 'woman' -- keep
her, as a character announces in Dav, "under lock and
key" ( 2 7 ) . If such a woman is raped, it is not rape; as
another character confirms in T h e , "It was what one did
with a womanu (193). 'Woman's' identity is a public one.
Individuality in women disturbs the societal life of
familiarity and predictability. When Arjun becomes aware
of Uma'ç individuality, he is "afraid of what he might
learn" (28). Individuality, especially that of a woman,
constitutes the terrifying unknown. Sahgal ' s women
characters continue to invite their partners to know this
unknown .
The complexity and difficulty of 'knowingl is
picturesquely and philosophically conveyed in the
metaphor of Plators cave. In Storm, Dubey calls it a
l~cave~ -- The four of us here -- in total ignorance
about whatrs happening to each other" (133). The
philosopher has understood reality and returns to explain
it, only that the listeners, caught up in shadows, will
not believe other than what they see. Jit opines that
such talk is nonsense. He sees complaining, silly women.
What is visually appropriated is objectified in the cave.
Marxist feminists maintain that women are excluded
from state politics because national economy is
calculated on the basis of public labor, usually of men,
thereby excluding the domestic labor and reproduction of
women. From a feminist point of view, what has not been
% n o m t is the non-public, the private, realm of women.
Both the production and the re-production of the domestic
life of the nation must be politicized through knowing.
Women politicize their traditional space of the
private and challenge male monopoly of the public by
abolishing the difference between public and private. On
the one hand, women characters in the three novels are
allotted the family and the house as their private world;
on the other hand, none of these wornen has, in the
Woolfian sense, a room of her own -- although they live
in the "private world," they lack privacy. In F e a ~ the
writer works in their bedroorn. Privacy for woman is
often limited to the bedroom.
Women's consent to everything that happens within
that private space is a~sumed.~ But for women, 'the
measure of the intimacy has been the measure of the
oppression. To see the persona1 as political means to
see the private as public" (McKinnon 1983:656). The
decision of several of the wornen characters to çhare
their private problem. 'the inviolable secrecy of
marriage" (stonq 190). with an outsider (and that too
with a man! politicizes the private. The husband
suspects infidelity and feels threatened by this mixing
of public and private. According to Mary O' Brien, only
some social turnult can expose the private-public divide
as male invention (Evans 113). Sahgal believes that even
a single (private) individual standing up for principles
will unmask the artificiality of the divide.
The women resist through their privatized bodies.
A womanls body is not just a biological fact; it is a
social situation as well (Benhabib and Corne11 14).
Simrit assumes a subj ect position through her body -- her
objectified/privatized body. Her frigidity becomes an
act that communicates to her husband what her reasoning
will not. When a woman freezes up every time her
husband touches her it's time to cal1 it a d a y U ( 9 8 ) .
Frigidity is not what happens to the woman; it is what
the woman does to her partner.
In Stem, Saroj has proven incapable of using birth
control methods effectively: she is once again pregnant.
Though she initially attempts to destroy the foetus,
Saroj soon becomes obsessed with it, to the annoyance of
her husband. It is her third successful pregnancy. She
names it "£lutterw, because of its life-announcing
movement in her. The baby's movement in her, the 'oozef
of her breasts, are al1 'private' phenomena she invites
Indes to share, but he can only feel threatened. At once
wife and mother in the body, the pregnant woman is not
normal. The husband fears knowing her 'abnormalcy.'
By not obstructing pregnancy and then by actively
cherishing it, Saroj's resistance is two-fold: she
resists her husband as well as the nation. Inder has no
financial motivation to add to the two sons he already
has. The nation, too, is concerned with bi r th control as
a means of national growth.1° A woman such as Saro j ,
ultimately, uses her stipulated role as wife and mother
to undermine the vested patriarchal agenda of family and
nation.
unconventional movements of the female body disrupt
social harmony . When Saroj insists on walking and
talking ("extramarital talk" [IO41 ) with Dubey, the
balance of the household is lost. The wife's attempts at
conversation are thwarted, misinterpreted,
misunderstood, violated. What had been guaranteed by the
wife's inertia and silence can no more be taken for
granted. Similarly, Simrit's plans to re-rnarry further
threaten the little peace around her. Both family and
nation react violently to the trespassing f emale body.
But the female character, having "renounced her begging
bowl" (Çtom 2 0 4 ) , resists through stubborn postures of
talking and walking.
In "Coercion and Rape: The State As a Male
Protection Racket", Susan Rae Peterson argues that rape
primarily restricts movement for women: "The practice of
rape effectively 'keepç women in their placesr; indeed,
because many women fear being raped, they remain much
more stationary and sedentary than men" (363). Women who
m o v e around may get raped, and then police are concerned
why she was where she was and at such a time. \\A freely-
moving woman forfeits her right to protection by the
state, even where there is elaborate machine- set up for
the purpose" (364) . Peterson concludes that the state
degenerates to 'racketeering" when the woman who refuses
to cornply to the coercive rnethod of the state discovers
that her use of the constitutional right to movement puts
her in need of state protection.
A freely moving woman is rejected by family and
nation. For example, several Bengali women captured and
raped by Pakistani soldiers during the war of 1971 were
not taken back by their families, nor did the respective
governments formulate policies ensuring their immediate
return and rehabilitation. The women had 'moved' out of
their bands; there was no corning back. For the sake of
the family and the nation, it is, therefore, important
that wornen's physical movernent be monitored and
restricted.
The Gandhian symbols of 'walkingl and 'talking' mark
the government as alien. More successful than Gandhi's
salt satyagraha, the non-violent activities of the wives
shake the family and the nation. The women slowly but
surely question and expose the corruption of patriarchs
and gather the support of others in a bid to remove the
alienation of the nation and change their second-class
citizenship.
Women are victims of a comon silencing. The
resisting female character, like the narrator of the
autobiographies, learns to talk. Her speech is brief but
dissident. She will no longer hold her tongue to be
loved .
In Tirne, ~ i t a breaks in one stroke
house-wives (by getting herself a job),
silence (by having secret talks with
tradition of virgin-wives (by choosing
Gyan, to break her hymen). If she will
escape marriage, she will at least deny
virginity and be satisfied on that
represents a generation of women who seek
a tradition of
a tradition of
G y a n ) , and a
her employer,
not be able to
it the myth of
count . Nita
freedom beyond
the nation's "midriight", even into the \\morningM of their
chores. The novel that begins with an epigraph from
Nehru ' s f mous Independence hre speech -- 'At the s troke
of the midnight hour when the world sleeps, India will
awake to life and freedom." -- sadly pictures the absence
of freedom for women exposed to the glaring light of a
man's day, a light that brands them 'flirt1 and
'prostitute.' The women characters begin to break their
silence to redefine and reproduce themselves as free
subjects of text and nation.
Conclusion
As an apparatus of Gandhian ideology, the novels
depict the domesticated woman as a social reality, while
questioning the desirability of that category. In al1
three novels, the female characters who fail to uphold
'family values' are liberated at the end within contexts
alien to the traditional family system: they have access
to male lovers, the husband is absent, and the children
are only secondary to the woman's self-esteem. As Sahgal
told S. Varalakshmi in an interview, even those women
characters who are deeply attached to their children
ultirnately have no choice: "1 mean there is only one
option at that point, and that is self-respect" (Dhawan
4:lO).
In the face of interpellation, the woman character's
move £rom object to subject status, with potential to
resist, is complicated by a certain concurrent and
contradictory self-awareness. Society's view of her is
accosted by how she sees herself. The moment of Nita
preparing to meet her future husband is the moment also
of thiç double self-knowledge -- the chasm between what
she leams about herself and the category she is made to
fit, so that she cari 'disinterestedly" think, 'How
beautiful 1 am" (153) . Susan Stanford Friedman calls
this "dual consciousne~s,~~ L e . , "the self as culturally
defined and the self as different £rom cultural
prescription." (Benstock 39). Renouncing "the begging
bowl" has not been easy when representation is not the
same as self-representation.
Even when these women supposedly throw away the
begging bowl, there is the danger of their replacing it
with another in the various suggestions of marriage at
the end of these novels. Rashmi with Rakesh, Saroj with
Dubey, and Simrit with R a j are some of the possibilities.
The continued message is that the woman will find the
right man and that finding the right man will set things
right for her. It is as if the narrator experiences at
first hand the illusion of setting things right through
the right man and yet fails to get out of some tradition
that has taught her of redemption by becoming a wife and
mother. The narrator is implicated by an ideology that
she resists.
Yet these women wi11 walk, though they initially
have to ' grope in the darkness' "like the newly blindN
(98). They will soon throw chastity to the winds not as
a mere symbol of their defiance of a crushing tradition,
but as a need of their unrecognized, hence urirealized,
individuality. They will know entirely, not in prudent
parts. They, like the caricaturist Jeevan, can only
laugh (through their tears) at a world where "[nlice
people don't have sex organs" (Time 122).
Notes (Chapter Two)
1. ISAs such as the police-station and society are
sufficient to inflict the worst types of punishrnent on
women. Madhu Kiçhwar's and Ruth Vanita's collection of
news in Manuçhi as well as in their book fn Search of
Answers is a convincing list of what happens to
'independent' wornen in the different states of India.
Within the Indian cultural context (a context that is
beyond the geography of the nation) the worst form of
punishrnent on women is the label of being immoral
(specifically unchaste). ushi illustrates the extent
to which Indian women suffer on account of the ideology
of female virtue.
Arundathi Roy's God of Small Thinas tells similar
stories of police 'concem' in female honor and chastity
in India.
2. Compare Doris Sommer's conclusions about romance
in Latin American novels: "Unproductive eroticisrn is not
only immoral; it is unpatriotic and often related to the
barbarous prehistory of the Arnerican mission and can be
represented by 'unnaturalf women for whom sensuality is
power" (87).
3 - "In order to make certain of the wife's fidelity
and therefore of the paternity of the children, she is
delivered over unconditionally into the power of the
husband" (Engels in Rossi 480).
4 . Thakazhi Shivashankara Pillai's popular
cinematized novel Chemmeen [Shrimps] is about a
fisherman's wife who because of infidelity fails to
prevent Mother Sea £rom swallowing her husband.
Perhaps, Sahgal's reference to the literature of a
Comunist Kerala with its stories of a 'Y isherman's
daughter" suggests Thakazhi (See Tirne 122).
5 . The following is the commentary on chapter 1, text
- 42, verse 40 of the Bhaavad aita: "The V e d i c religion's
principles were so designed that good population rnight
prevail in society for the all-around spiritual progress
of state and comunity. Such population in society
depends on the chastity and faithfulness of its
womanhood. As children are very prone to being misled,
women are also very prone to degradation. Therefore,
both children and women require protection by the elder
members of the familym (Prabhupada 14).
A feminist story like Mahasweta Devi's "Douloti the
Bountiful" opens Our eyes to the irony of honor when
applied to women.
Until the beginning of this century, in the Nayar
community of Kerala, those women made to have intercourse
with Kings and Brahmins were considered to bring material
and spiritual fortune to their families. Kinsmen often
pressured Nayar women into sexual relationships with men
of the upper caste. Those women who introduced royal or
b r a h i n i c blood into their families through
'illegitimate' births were considered superior to those
who did not. Similar to the predicament of Mahasweta
Devi's female character, the custom of the Nayar
community clearly shows that not only was virginity
unrelated to honor but also that virginity could be
dispensed with or rnanipulated to bring honor to the
group.
6 . In n ~ i c t i o n t a r a Sahqgl, Manmohan
Bhatnagar provides an interesting list of historical
figures who appear thinly disguised in Sahgal's novels.
(See p. 60).
7. Eleanor Wachtel interviews Nayantara Sahgal. "Re-
inventing India: writing Since Independence.' Wrjteys and
Copany. CBC, Toronto. May 17 1998. The logic of the
'natural' may stay suspect.
a. Obviously, Sahgal does not subscribe to l'art pour
l'art. As she demands in wIllusion and Reality", "what
else is consciousness composed of but the age it lives
in, and if writers do not in some way reflect that age,
what are they writing about?" (geint Q£ Vjew 5 8 )
9 . Not surprisingly, Mary Mathew, an Indian nurse
working in New York was found murdered in their bedroorn
on July 13, 1997. Post-rnortem reports show that the
wornan had suffered severe damage to head and ribs. The
ribs were broken into several pieces. There were also
signs that some ribs had broken and then healed in the
past. (See m3avalam P a t m , July 23, 1997)
It is interesting to note that commentary in
response to this incident, on the topic of family
violence, published in the same newspaper on July 30,
1997, gives 'arrogance' of women as a cause for marital
problems (20). To mention 'arrogance' in the context of
violence is to confuse attitude with crime. The
insinuation is that the wornan 'asked for it,' that there
was some form of unspoken consent. The patriarchal
nation follows the native beyond geographical boundaries.
10. Not long after S t o r m was published, Indira Gandhi
launched her sterility program during the hiergency.
Chapter III: Sita as MWzasati in Ramrajya: A study of A
4 ituation in New D e l h i and Rich Like UR
Introduction
Language always has power and the capacity to
'sustain relationships of dominationm (J.B. Thompson 5).
Reiigious words such as 'Ram-Sita, " "Ramrajya, " and
'sati" function in society to distribute power to the
advantage of certain groups and classes.
and Rich Like Us reveal how this discourse
interpellates women in order to subject them to the
privileged groups and their ambitions.
Feminist writers like Maria Mies and M a d h u Kishwar
point out that it was Gandhi who brought popularity to
the idea of Rama and Sita as the ideal couple. In Nomen
ce Gandhi mites, "My ideal of a wife
is Sita and of a husband Rama" (81). Traditionally, the
ideal couple has been Shiva and Parvathi. Rama is a far
cry from Shiva, the doting husband whose fearsome thandav
around the world carrying the corpse of his wife, Sati,
12 7
confirms a conjugal bond stronger than any fraternal or
national allegiance. Rama on the other hand is the
husband who rejected his wife more than once apparently
for the sake of his kingdom.'
Gandhi extolls the Rama-Sita pair within a certain
context -- the context of Ramrajya whose basis is the
family and goal the kingdom. ES tablishing R a r n r a j y a
requires a strong familial foundation, with Sita being
chaste and ever-subordinate to her husband who is,
tellingly, the king. Rama, here, embodies the patriarchy
in an unmediated relationship between family and nation.
Within this politico-religious infrastructure, Sita is
the weakest link whose endurance alone, paradoxically,
determines the strength of the kingdom.
In the writings and speeches of Gandhi, Ramrajya
denotes the political and the religious at once.
Ramrajya would corne to India when the British left,
although the absence of the British alone could not
guarantee Ramrajya . In his poli tical speeches Gandhi
hoped to impart "A glimpse of dharma." According to him,
~ndian Home Rule or Hind Swaraj is the rule of dharma, a
spiritual state, which is Ramrajya (CWMG 32:489).
In the presence of women, Ramrajya takes up an
exclusively spiritual sense. Women have a key role in
Ramrajya, more so because of its spiritual connotations.
As Gandhi himself reveals, "At women's meetings 1 have
always used the word Ramrajya in place of swaraj" (CWMG
32:489). The political/materialist denotation of swaraj
is downplayed to fit women, the other world being
imagined more natural to women than men. Hence, we can
understand the speaker's consistent zeal for the kingdom
of god when in women's gatherings.
Both Delhi and R A allude to the legend of S i t a and
Ramrajya in suggestions of a past golden age and a
suffering female body. The widow in D e l h i is named Devi,
meaning \'goddess." She is sometimes described as a
'creaturer (50; 8 6 , suggesting her otherworldliness.
Cornparisons of women in Rich to the goddess Sita are even
more explicit. In the maze of these similes, though,
Sahgal collapses the legend of S i t a with that of Sati,
thereby exposing the injustices to women within
patriarchal and nationalist values.
Sita's successful trial by £ire is placed alongside
Sati's death by fire. While Sita was obviously asked by
Rama to go through the f ire, Sati threw herself in the
£ire, unable to bear her fatherf s contempt for her
husband. In the end, Sita's c h a s t i t y a n d Sati's goodness
are equally proven. The bringing together of Sita and
Sati is traditionally made possible in the recognition
given to sita as mahasati (the great sati). In Sahgal's
narratives, this confusion of traditions paves the way
for Gandhian ideological discourse which eulogizes the
'good' wife of Ramrajya.
The \Rnptyg widow
The Sanskrit word for widow is 'vidha,' meaning
'without,' 'ern~ty.'~ The widow is the one devoid of
husband, hence simply empty. Tradition ensures that she
stays thus, empty, without husband; remarriage is not for
her . When Gandhi asks that adult widows practice
brahmacharya, it is this tradition that he falls back on.
Hindu scriptures present widowhood as a spiritual
phase. ~ i t h her seen god3 (her husband) dead, the widow
is encouraged t o dedicate her life to the memory of her
husband. In Women and Social Iniustice, the reformist
Gandhi forbids the burning of widows with this
admonition:
Self-immolation on the death of a husband is a sign not of enlightenment but of gross ignorance . . . . She would prove her satihood not by mounting the funeral pyre at her husband's death, but she would prove it with every breath that she breathes from the moment that she plighted her troth to him at the saptapadi ceremony by her renunciation, sacrifice, self-abnegation and dedication to the service of her husband, his family and the country. She would shun creature cornforts and delights of the senses. (122)
He continues,
Such a s a t i would refuse to give way to wild grief at the death of her husband, but would ever strive to make her husband' s ideals and virtues live again in her actions and thereby win for him the crown of immortality. Knowing that the sou1 of him whom she married is not dead but still lives, she will never think of rernarrying. (123)
The sirnilarity between Gandhi's noms for widows and
the patriarchal law of Manu is unmistakable. The
following are some of the dictates of Manu:
A faithful wife, who desires to dwell (after death) with her husband, must never do anything that might displease him who took her hand,
whether he be alive or dead.
At her pleasure let her emaciate her body by (living on) pure flowers, roots, and fruit; but she rnust never mention the name of another man after her husband has died.
A virtuous wife who after the death of her husband constantly remains chaste, reaches heaven, though she have no sons, just like those chaste men.
(Radhakrishnan and Moore, 191)
Gandhi asks the widow to live on and asks society to
treat widows kindly. According to him the child-widow
should, however, be re-married. '1 do not look upon the
second marriage of a child-widow as remarriage" (CWMG
Delhi presents an adult widow who is the Education
minister. This widow requires no 'protection': she is
economically self -suf f icient, educated, and of service
to her family and the nation. Her eligibility for the
other world is doubtful, considering her sexual
adventures. Al1 the same her spirituality is stressed:
she alone of al1 the ministers swears by God (25) . An
aura of romance surrounds this othemise down- to-earth
character.
A 'curse' çeems to shadow this character throughout
the narrative. She smells of the death of men; first her
husband, then her brother, and finally her son dies. The
widow lives on in a world falling apart, a nation dying
under the Emergency, itself the work of yet another
widow.
The body of the widow is the abode of the dead in so
far as the widow keeps alive the rnemory of the beloved
within an ascetic body. For Devi the memory of her
brother is dearer to her than that of her husband of four
years. Pointedly, Michael wonders about the Pharaohs
marrying their own sisters (52). And, failing to possess
Devi, he shouts, "What are you, the ghost of your
brother?" (52) The widow must preserve the memory of the
dead by renouncing re-marriage.
Devi's private and physical life is emphasized over
her job or public life. The insistence on her chastity
is paralleled by forces that suck her into private and
familial relationships. In s p i t e of Devi being a
minister, the novel alrnost never represents her in her
public office as minister. She is represented in grivate
settings, in the role of mother, sister, and lover. Her
visit to the rape victim, Madhu, takes the form of social
service more thm an assertion of a political position.
Her contribution to the nation gets mediated through her
family and society, leaving any direct political
intervention unavailabie for her.
Within the narrative context, the Emergency removes
political power £rom the hands of most public workers,
including the woman rninister. The Gandhian vice-
chancellor Usrnan Ali's own helplessness indicates this.
However, Usman is able to take distinctly political steps
against the status quo, while Devi can only plan her
resignation. The memory of Shivraj is sufficient for
Devi in the absence of political power.
Shivraj as memory works on multiple levels in the
text . The narrative that begins "Shivraj was dead" (5)
is the authorrs pronouncement on the political situation
of India during the Rnergency. Shivraj (Nehru being the
prototype) is declared "dead, " history . His progeny has
failed to keep his values, him, alive. Devi (Vijaya
Lakshrni Pandit being the prototype), and the few like her
will strive to live by his principles. Not surprisingly,
Delhi is censored in India.
The announcement of the news of Shivra j ' s death in
a British newspaper signifies also the death of another
ra j -- the British ra j . The English will read the news
with nostalgia for their own rule in the colony.
In the midst of the Emergency, the death of Shivraj
reminds Indians of yet another rule, Ramrajya, still
fresh in their memories through Gandhi. The whole event
of the freedom struggle, that struggle for Ramrajya,
immediately becomes a point of reference and comparison
with what Sahgal calls in A Voice for Freedom, "the Delhi
delusion" (13 ) .
Again, "Shivraj" alludes to the Rarnrajya of the
Ramayana -- apparently the golden age of India's past,
where peace and justice prevailed. The allusion serves
to envision the rule of Shivraj and that of Rama as
equally 'golden." The grand vision sustains the widow in
the form of "Duty." Duty to Shivraj, Devi explains to the
bewildered Michael, 'is a big word . . . . It is almost
religious. Without it, my l i f e would have no meaningM
(54)
Like the goddess Sita, Devi will live her life as a
vanaprastha (forest-d~eller)~. Her widowhood will assume
for her meaning only in this waiting for the rule of
justice. Textual ironies arise: will Sita ever find
justice in Ramrajya? Will not Ramrajya continue without
Sita? Or, in other words, is there a Ramrajya? The
narrative here borders on questions of gender and power
which are explored in depth in W h . It appears that
under the pending threat of censorship during the
Emergency, a lot is left unsaid in Delhi. Questions of
gender and nation are extensively dealt with only in
Rich-
Shivraj also denotes the rule of someone who is not
Rama, Shiva. Shiva, husband and lover of Parvathi,
intrudes into the legend of Ramrajya. While Rama is an
avatar of Vishnu, the preserver, Shiva is the actual
destroyer himself. To cherish Shiva is to desire the
destruction of the current state of affairs which is
understood as 'evil' or sornething short of perfection.
Shiva is also the regenerator: in the long procession of
time, in the cycles towards perfection, nirvana, he
regenerates a new system out of the ashes of the old.
One such as the goddess Parvathi alone can cherish Shiva.
Devi becomes Parvathi in love with her Shiva. Perhaps
her association with Panrathi occasions her several love
scenes. However, within nationalist ideology, the image
of Sita is restored: the narrative concludes with Devi,
the mother figure, dressed in white, entering the forest
of her private life.
The ideology of widow chastity prevails in the novel
in spite of Devi's initial sexual encounters with Usman
and ~ichael. Usman cornes to her in her time of
loneliness soon after the death of her husband; Michael
reaches her later. But neither man can get cornmitment
£rom Devi. The impossibility of re-marriage is stressed.
The sexual need of the wife and lover is shelved to meet
the nation's need for mothers6, for the emptied non-
carnal mother alone can be the 'good' wife, even though
a widow.
That suffering and annihilation underlie the so-
called 'goodness ' of the wif e within a patriarchal
culture is further proven in Biçh. As Sonali8 s
grandfather mites about his mother, 'She was a good
wife, 1 used to think. But now 1 believe al1 wives are
good because they have little choice" (128) . Soon the
diary explains the 'making' of a widow when the father of
the house dies. During the funeral ceremony, the mother
is silent 'as though she had lost her voice for ever"
( 1 3 0) . Her bangles are broken for her . Her earrings
taken away. The son sees a ghost of his mother in "white
sari" -- an emptied woman. "But," he consoles, "she sat
erect, in the cross-legged posture of work and prayer,
not in the huddle of the weeping widow" (131). Yet, the
son's pride for his mother adopts the patriarchal
paradigm of seeing widows at their best in strictly two
postures -- the posture of work and prayer -- both
admissibly respectable postures. What the son fails to
see is the inevitable movement of the widow into
satihood.
The Evaporated Sati
In &ch the Rama-Sita legend is a motif that addç
1 3 8
irony to plots on the freedom struggle and the Emergency.
The character Ram, his suffering wives (Rose and Mona),
the other women who also suffer, al1 are eventually
related to this over-ruling legend. The women characters
are considered satis in the tradition of the mahasati
Sita,
Rich, published almost ten years ' a£ ter the
Emergency, goes into the once suppressed details of
torture of political prisoners, the Maruti car scanda1 of
Sanjay Gandhi, illegal police raids, imprisonrnent without
trial, censorship, forced vasectomy, and al1 the things
that effectively remove any distinction between private
and public l i f e by a suspension of civil liberties.
Sahgal had predicted the political situation as far back
as A Dav in shadow7.
Sttmg by the violence of the miergency, the narrator
cherishes the rule of the Prime Minister's father,
Jawaharlal Nehru, shown in Delhi. In Rich she notes how
far apart the father and daughter are in their values :
the father a champion of democracy and the press, the
daughter a despot who either silenced or manipulated the
press. The ~ehruvian era, the narrator indicates, is a
continuation of the Gandhian, Indira Gandhi's main
rivals, Jayprakash Narayan and Morarji Desai, are called
''apostles of non-violence. "' ~ostalgia for the 'golden ager of Gandhi and Nehru alone sustains the narrator
through these 'evilr times. Yet the narrative is in
conflict with the ideology.
Rich represents in the female body the crumbling of
the public-private barrier when the violence and
corruption of the Ehergency set in. Thus, Rose becomes
a victim of the Emergency as well as a sati. In an
interview wi th S. Varalakshmi , Sahgal explains, 'Sonali
gets thrown out of her job because of the hiergency,
while Rose gets eventually murdered because of it . . .
. She becomes a modern day 'Sati'" (11). The political
and national disaster is explained here in terms of the
private space of a victirnized woman's body.
The term 'sati' permits the son-in-law's explanation
that the woman got drunk and fell into a near-by well.
A certain voluntariness and privacy are assumed, allowed.
But the political plot of the Emergency intrudes into the
private story to expose the hand of coercion and the
public. The possibility of her political victimization
reveals the lie of suicide and the truth of murder. Biçh
illustrates through several incidents the horror of sati
and the economic manipulation behind it. The suffering
and private wontan's body is represented as the public and
the political.
The removal of the division between the private and
the public is further seen in Delhi when Madhu, the
student gang-raped, becornes an 'issue' on which political
groups clash. The Gandhian vice-chancellor who had
dismissed the culprits faces hooliganism and a government
order to take them back. Meanwhile, Madhu, dreading a
pending rnarriage, submits herself to kerosene oil and
flames in the privacy of her room. The violated female
body occasions displays of patriotisrn. The body of the
woman is intertwined with the nation within nationalist
discourse.
A sati emerges in the interpretation of a chaste
woman averting the humiliation of her future husband (on
account of her mis£ ortune) by voluntarily burning
herself . The picture of a heroine, courageous and
graceful poses in the act of voluntariness.
Working unhurriedly she smeared her face and arms generously with kerosene and spread it over her clothes as we11 as she could. She massaged the oil lovingly over her hair and feet and fingers and then she soaked the rags with what was left of it and tied these around her legs and body. She placed the sticks in a big empty tin in the center of the room . Madhu sighed deeply and lit the sticks. She had nothing to be afraid of because she knew £rom reading about witch-burning in the European Middle Ages that often the smoke srnothered the witch and choked her unconscious, so that she did not feel her death by £ire. She bent, inhaling deeply, exaltation possessing her as she invited the bitter smoke into her lungs and let the fire reach up and catch her clothes and hair. (156-7)
The representation is innocent of any confusion or
struggle on the part of the doer. Words like "lovingly"
and \\exaltationw attempt to mask the compulsion of the
woman; they point either to voluntariness or to insanity.
Thus the deed tends to lose the sense of violence.
Within a wider context of European and Christian witch-
burning (a context that also reminds readers that female
suffering is beyond 'Indian barbarisrn'), the absence of
pain is stressed. The heroic consciousness of Madhu, it
appears, belittles the immensity of her act.
Simultaneously, the narrative exposes the cultural
and patriarchal forces against the girl, invoking another
reading -- Madhu as a victim of men and the nation. Her
rape by men who are, later, supported by the government;
the situation of the nation, the Emergency, that drives
her into further defeat and death (as the narrator
suggests) -- these are represented as acting on her,
objectifying Madhu, rnaking her into a victim. The
victimizing process denies any identity to "the girl" :
Madhu, who is apparently of marriageable age, freezes as
"girl" -- even her female identity as woman is denied
her . Between both these readings, though, is yet another
picture of Madhu as not simply bandied across platforms,
but as one negotiating her own future even within crudely
restrictive options. Her frantic visit to the minister's
house (requiring a lot of initiative and will), later on
her half-demented defying of police orders to leave a
campus during the government ' occupation' of the
University (154-55), her redeeming a picture of Shivraj
(which, symbolically, b a s with her own body later), and
finally her suicide are points of negotiation involving
her sub j ectivity . In 'Reading Eyewitness Accounts of
Widow Burning," Lata Mani discusses the objectifying of
the sati as either heroines or victims. She notes that
such extreme conclusions exclude 'a f exnale sub j ectivity
that is shifting, contradictory, inconsistent" (276).
Madhufs subjectivity is entrenched within severely
lirniting circumstances.
The Madhu-episode is, however, relegated to the
margins of the narrative. The incident cornes up a few
times chiefly as asides. "She told him in between about
Madhu . . . " (95). Critical works on D a tend to skip
the character of Madhu, perhaps because of the lesser
space she occupies in the novel. The marginalizing of
this character is in keeping with the suppression of the
Emergency question as well in the same text , where the
minimal representation accrues the effect of the
proverbial tip of the iceberg. Once again the unsaid
states a lot more than the ~ a i d . ~
The situation in New el hi is represented, not
interpreted. As Chaman Naha1 observes in The New
riteratures in Enal ish, 'This seems to be the basic
premise of al1 political ideologies and therefore al1
political novel [sic]: not to interpret the world but to
remake it" (147). As such, the narratives on the
Emergency are parodic in that. in various w a y s , they
actually repeat the 'situation." According to Macherey,
"Experimenting with language rather than inventing it,
the literary work is both the analogy of a knowledge and
a caricature of custornary ideology" (59). Macherey here
refers to the parodic power of literary language to mimic
theoretical discourse using the language of ideology. He
argues that in this process literature reveals the
"truth." The (literary) capacity of fiction to expose its
own repetitive function makes critique worthwhile.1°
Both D e l h i and Rach reveal the chasm between the
literal rneaning of 'satif and the social event. The word
denotes goodness, but it represents social practice that
is violent, death-dealing. Women who become satis are no
more. The only good wife is a dead one. Not only must
the good wife die; she must suffer (by slow burning) in
the process. In the face of that social reality, good
means evil, Sita suf fering, and the spiritual a dubious
goal for the sati.
Another social twist of linguistics is that 'satif
specifically denotes the 'good wife' who is a widow.
Ironically, a lot of cultural emphasis is placed on the
non-widow status of the sati. For example, the sati is
the avidhava nar i " (the non-widow woman) : she can never
be a widow as she is never separated £rom her husband;
she joins her husband on the pyre (Hawley 13). Her non-
widow status is also stressed in the 'marital' form that
the sati ceremony adopts: the sati is dressed as a bride
and the pyre symbolizes the conjugal bed. But the sati
who is rescued or changes her mind becomes a social
outcast, a cursed widow (see Datta 229-30) . The widow
ceases to be a sati. Yet, only the tragedy of widowhood
or its potential creates a sati. The widow dies to
become the non-widow.
The power of the word threatens to subdue, indeed
erase, the social reality. Consequently , we can
understand Gandhi's use of the term. In references in
Rich to sati, patriarchal and nationalist discourse
substitutes for the crime of violence the virtues of
forbearance, self-renunciation, and chastity. The
unwavering loyalty of Rose (in Rich) to her fickle
husband is expected, naturalized. The possibility of
metaphorizing the wife's satihood looms large. But in
the murder of the female characters the narrative reveals
the gap between goodness and violence. The narrative
ensures the representation of the social reality vis-à-
vis the linguistic suggestion. The word of fiction
undermines 'real' words through the technique of
representation.
~ i c h further includes selective colonial historical
discourse to expose the extent of violence in sati. For
example, the selections from the National Archive
reporting cases of sati focus on what happens to the sati
clinically:
A h o s t every inch of her body had been burnt off, her legs and thighs, her arms and back, were completely raw; heu breasts wexe dreadfully torn and the skin hanging from them in threads; the skin and nails of her f ingers had peeled wholly off, and were hanging to the backs of her hands . . . We had her sent to
the hospital where every medical assistance was imediately given her, but without hope of her recovery . She lingered in the most excruciating pain for about twenty hours and then died. (125)
In "Reading Eyewitness Accounts of Widow Burning," Lata
Mani comments on the same and similar excerpts from the
National Archives as being "exceptional in their
attention to the palpable, visceral effects of sati"
(284). In Rich there is one more historical reference
involving 'voluritary' sati, where the sati still cannot
tolerate the pain of slow burning:
The widow behaved with the utmost calmness and composure as long as the attackç of the flames were confined to her lower extremities, but when they reached her breast and face the torture seemingly became intolerable, and her fortitude gave way; by a violent exertion she disengaged herself from the faggots with which she was encumbered, and springing £ r o m the pile fell dom nearly insensible . . . - (125)
In the latter case, the widow apparently asks to be
returned to the flames which now "speedilyM" reduce her
to ashes.
These historical references are soon followed by a
fictional reference to the sati of Sonalifs great
grandmother. Like the two events from the national
archive, this narrative too is from an archive, from the
diary of Sonalif s grandfather. As such, the sense of
authenticity is shared between the three narratives. The
fictional representation is remarkably free of the
explicitness of the historical reports, but it still
partakes of that general sense of pathos. In the diary
the incident is reported by the son, who as a nineteen-
year-old witnessed the burning of his mother:
When 1 got to the river bank where we had crernated my father a new pyre was blazing where the old one had been. 1 saw her fling her arms wildly in the air, then wrap them about her breasts before she subsided like a wax do11 into the flames. (134)
The son of a reformist father has learned to hate sati
and treasure the life of his mother; but within
patriarchal paradigms, the son's report expedites the
death by burning. Within a single sentence the mother is
'speedily' consumed by the flames. Further, the woman is
objectified; she is "like a wax doll" -- a plaything of
the men around her, ironically including her son.
By gloçsing over the incident of murder/suicide the
narrative marks the gap between suffering and morality.
The terseness in describing sati contains a desire to
evade the gravity of the act; an escapism similar to
Gandhi's own response, in Nomen and Social Justice, to a
report of sati: ''1 hope that the incident as reported in
the press is not true. and that the lady in question died
through illness or through accident, not by suicide"
(121). Gandhi then goes on to define a sati and to
condemn suicide. "A sati , Ir Gandhi repeats , "would regard
marriage not as a means of satisfying the animal appetite
but as a rneans of realizing the ideal of selfless and
self-effacing service by completely merging her
individuality in her husband's" (122). The fernale body
continues to be at stake in a patriarchal/nationalist
insistence on a certain loss of the self.
Both &iSà and Pelhi represent the 'evaporation' of
the sati within Gandhian ideology. The reality of pain
and suffering is forgotten or ignored when the sou1 and
the spirituality of the w i d o w are emphasized. The
spiritual goal that Gandhi sets before the sati is
consistent with the traditional insistence on
selflessness of the sati. The visible and imagined
'self' should be negated, as in the ceremony of burning,
for the sake of the husband, his family, his nation. The
body of the sati, even of the Garidhian kind, must be no
more. A true sati is spiritual, like [the] spirit.
In Delhi and Rich the omission of the details of the
suicide/murder helps to create the sense that the woman
has somehow 'evaporated' in the process -- that in
reality sati is a spiritual event rather than a gruesome
instance of the killing of a human being. Both Radha
Kumar and Rajeswarari Sunder Rajan point to this
prevalent comforting sense of the 'evaporation' of the
sati by re-presenting photomontages of Roop Kanwar's sati
to illustrate the popularity of this myth. The photos
show not the charred remains but, ironically, the
unscathed and beautiful woman (whose body matters now)
dressed in brida1 attire posing, like Sita, in
celestial12 flames in what appears to be a mixture of
sexual and religious ecstasy.
But by moving a sati £rom traditionally acknowledged
circumstances to a house, a tomb, and, in the case of the
cremation ground, by positioning the men around the sati
as murderers rather than devotees, the narratives resiçt
the social deification of female suffering and
annihilation. Brief, but pointed, references to the
coercion of motherhood13 (206) , dowry deaths14 (30) , rape,
al1 join the Sita-Sati narrative within a single metaphor
of widow-burning. ~ithin this metaphor, the peasant
women raped by the police and dispatched to the kilns for
manual and sexual labor are like those satis who were
buried alive (a traditional alternative to being burnt
alive) . Perhaps Rose's death in the tomb too is j u s t
such a sati, death by burial. The characters are linked
once again with Sita, who also was buried alive -- Mother
Earth having swallowed her.
Again, the female characters are likened to Sita and
Sati in that their husbands are al1 alive when they
themselves die. The tradition invoked is that of jauhar,
the immolation of the wife before the expected death of
the husband. While tems such as sati and jauhar suggest
voluntariness, the narrative never fails to expose the
external forces on the women in the context of a certain
rule, the rule of the landlords and the capitalists who
were, according to the narrator, connived and abetted by
Indira Gandhi ' s governrnent . As the beggar explains to
Sonali: "It's the landlord's raj in my village, record or
no record . . . . They [the political parties] are al1
landlords at heartM (227) . Forces other than sat burn,
bury, violate the female body. In R a m r a j y a , Sita
suffers, dies, unobtrusively.
The Language of Ramrajya
in the presence of suffering and death the talk of
a golden age, preferably culled out of the past, out of
tradition, sustains the order of things and renders
meaning to otherwise questionable systems. The Gandhian
need for non-violence, the proclamation that of al1 human
beings women are the best at that (by suffering), the
extolling of wornen as capable of spiritual superiority
(and by default worldly inferiority), indeed that shakti
(female creative power) is unparalleled -- these thoughts
combine to form the discourse of Ramrajya. Delhi and
Rich testify to the need for this discourse at a time of
political instability.
As discourse Ramrajya becornes a system of language
that paradoxically announces its own absence.
Colonialisrn and the Ernergency -- the Kaliyug (the
current sinful age that Shiva/Shivraj alone c m destroy)
-- are the times most appropriate for the discourse of
Ramrajya. The discourse beckons the times to that which
is not currently true, the rule and kingdorn of Rama.
Macherey explains: "Discourse implies the absence of its
object, and inhabits the space vacated by the banishment
of what is spoken" (59). As a system of language
Ramrajya becomes a utopia, desirable because unavailable.
The desirability of Ramrajya is strategically
structured by a certain bias, 'the bias of laquagew
(Macherey 59) . The utopian quality of Ramrajya cornes
£rom its king, Rama, and a certain favoring of that
figure. The religious and political centering of Rama
interprets royal proclamations as 'just," "honorable."
When Ramrajya is desired as an antidote to the Emergency,
there is a bias toward Rama's justice and honor. In a
parodic presentation of this world-view, Rjch recognizes
the conflict between justice and honor when the narrative
in turn focuses on Sitafs misery after Diwali, the
festival that celebrates the return of Rama to his
kingdom. The narrative proceeds to tell the tragic tale
of Rose in the days after Diwali.
~amrajya is that which keeps one hoping. It is
Rose's Cythera -- meaningful in its unreality. It is her
'rosy' picture of life with her husband, Ram. The
postcard captioned "L'marquement pour l'ile de Cythere"
functions as an image that calls her into an unknown life
in India as a second wife. The voyage to Cythera is "a
quest, . . . and C-ythera a paradise, an impossible dream,
towards which pilgrims journey but never arrive" (181).
The postcard acts as a foi1 to Rose's loneliness and
anxiety and, later for Sonali, as the only worthy memento
at her death. (224)
Ideology often functions through a belief in utopia.
The Politacal . .
As ~rederic Jameson points out in
Unconçciouç, "the effectively ideological is also, at the
same tirne, necessarily Utopian" (286) . In this case,
utopia consists in creating a sense of collectivity where
none exists (291). Thus, the R a m r a j y a of Gandhian
ideology proposes the inclusion of women in that
collectivity of happy patriarchs based on the dictum that
Ramrajya will corne to the Sita-like woman. In Rich, Rose
knows that "myths w e r e the most indestructible of al1
things" (182).
Images of prosperity, the abundant gold in Rama's
kingdom, a sure sign of spiritual blessings, replicated
in the novels in the prosperity of Devi, Nishi, Mona, and
Rose; the presence of chilàren, Sitars, once own or
another'~'~ -- al1 signify the abundance of Ramrajya. The
images comunicate the possibility of Ramrajya: not that
Ramrajya is present, but that the images are capable of
beckoning, hailing.
The utopian supplies the hegemonic element of
'agreement' that invokes characters as subjects. Alerted
by pain, abused f male characters resist political,
patriarchal manipulation: Devi seeks solitude, Mona
attempts suicide; Rose asks for legal aid; Sonali
resigns. Their function of resistance is, however, still
within the paradigm of the d o m i n a n t ideology. Their
collective need for justice rnakes them subjects of that
ideology even as they resist it. Thus they continue to
be motivated by Cythera. Ramrajya.
The ideal of Ramrajya proves to be a myth that is
consistent with the çtatus of the female body within the
ideology. In other words, Ramrajya and the ideology are
not contradictory. ideology, according to both Althusser
and Macherey, suçtains contradiction. As noted earlier,
Sita will continue to be banished and killed within this
utopia of Ramrajya. For example, sati is not an
exclusive trait of either the hiergency or of
colonialism. Ramrajya accommodates sati.
The language of Ramrajya is not equally shared by
Rama and Sita. It means different things to different
groups. Values are not shared. To borrow Lacanian
terms, Ramrajya is marked by desire and lack, located.
though, at different points. The lack experienced by
Sita cannot be reciprocated by the desire of Rama's ego
and kingdom or vice versa. The utopia maintains the gap
between the genders which is also the gap between the
subject and the object. The relations of domination do
no t change .
Yet, once again the possibility of change suggested
by ideal principles and values interpellates the fernale
characters through the process of knowing. Mona finds an
ally in Rose and, therefore, meaning in life. Rose
uncovers corruption in Dev's dealings. Sonali becomes
aware of the large scale injustice around her. The
language of Ramrajya provides the characters with an
entrance into the symbolic order and subjectivity. For
Lacan the subject is an effect of the symbolic (279).
The subject's exclusion £rom the patriarchal imaginary of
Ramrajya causes the lack in the subject, which in turn,
according to Lacan, initiates desire.
The imaginary of Ramrajya is the \'illusory unity,
mastery, and plenitude" (Belsey and Moore 245) that is
unavailable to the symbolic order of the subject, that
Sita lacks. Even when interpellated into the symbolic
order as subj ects , the f male characters f eel their
exclusion £rom those very ideals. As the narrator
discovers in JlichI \'It al1 depends on whether you are on
the right s i d e of power and omnipotence. Sita wasnft and
it was banishment to the wilderness for hern (198). The
fernale character who is, apparently, 'saved' is Draupadi
(142), the one who had not one but £ive husbands, so that
she is not as significant a figure in Gandhi's Ramrajya.
But even her miraculous saving was limited by the
humiliation experienced at the hands of her husbands and
their enemies. The knowing subject resists: Sita refuses
to return to Rama, Sonali to her job and a romance.
Conclusion
This chapter has examined the political use of
religious tems in Delhi and R i c f i especially as they
relate to female characters. The words function within
the larger tradition of Hinduism, as well as within the
teachings of Gandhi, to eulogize female suffering. This
rhetoric dictates the strategic positioning of women
within the family and the nation and has dire
consequences on these characters.
Within the larger context of Hinduism, widows have
been treated as 'empty' and sati, the means of filling
that emptiness, has been conceived as spiritual
'evaporation' rather than physical, emotional, and mental
violence. This state of things has been maintained
unchallenged by the creation of a certain spiritual
utopia. Within the nationalist ideology of Gandhi these
same paradigms have been kept intact. Within Gandhian
ideology it is possible to çee as natural the emptying of
the widow and the spiritualization of satihood in the
speech of Ramrajya . Sahgal's novels reveal the
contradictions within that world-view.
B o t h Delhi and Rich were published before the much
publicized sati of 1987. That both these novels deal
with that experience point as well to the symbolic
significance of sati in India. The topic of sati in
these novels indicates at once the annual average of one
sati in 1ndia16 as well as the thousands of cases of w i f e
abuse in india and around the world. The novels confirm
what is established in the scriptures -- namely, woman's
rnovement from the hearth into the £ire on account of
language. Datta supports H.H. Wilson's interpretation of
scriptural interpolation: \'&-ohantu Yonim agre" became
"Arohantu Yonim AgnehW (2) ; the ascension of mothers from
agre or dwelling into agneh or fire. Both novels
represent the spiritualizing as well as the nationalizing
of injustices to women.
What evolves are not stories of defeat, but of hope.
Through what Althusser, in For Ma-, calls "the politics
of practical reappropriation" the female character Ire-
grasps' as subject her own 'essence alienated in
property, religion and the State to become total [wolman,
true [wo]man" (226). Sahgal's novels represent this 're-
grasping' of the fernale characters. However , the
subjectivity of these women indicates by no means either
a "total" or "true" wornan. As the novels end,
subjectivity continues as a process rather than as a
culminating event.
Notes (Chapter Three)
Kishwar's article, "Yes to Sita, No to
Ram! : The Continuing Popularity of Sita in India" in
anushi. No. 98. January - February 1997. Kiswar's is an
interesting study on the social necessity for a Sita
image for todayls women in India. Her concluding remark
that women who aspire to the Sita image end up with
"enormous clout and power over their husbands and
family," however, relies on women's 'mothering' by Indian
men.
Maria Mies notes that andh hi replaces the vibrant
Draupadi with the domesticated Si ta as the ideal woman
(124). ~nterestingly, Gandhi does to Draupadi what he
does not do to Sita, he allegorizes Draupadi: 'Draupadi
is a symbol of the mind. And the five Pandavas are the
f ive senses brought under its control" (CWMG 32 : 486) . in
Bicà, Sahgal points to the misfortune of Gandhi's mode1
woman, 'God had saved Draupadi , not Si t a w (142 ) . 2. Noted in Mary Daiyls 'indian Suttee: The Ultimate
0 . Consumation of Marriage" ( 189 ) in F-nist Frontj ers :
Sex. Gendex, and Socj etv. Eds. Laurel
Richardson and Verta Taylor. (Massachusetts: Addison-
Wesley Publishing Company, 1983)
See section on the 'The Virgin W i f e : An Object of
Discourse" in chapter II. The idea of the husband as god
is perhaps an unfortunate inversion of Mira's
declaration, " G o d alone is my husband -- none else." Qtd.
in Women and Social Iniustice, p. 122.
4 . A rather prevalent superstition in India was that
educating girls would make
This is the second
being sannyasa (wandering
Moore 100).
need
6. See chapter IV for
for mothers.
widows of them.
last stage of life, the last
ascetic) (Radhakrishnan and
an analysis of the nation's
7. Sahgal writes in Voice,
Fiction often foreshadows fact. The Day in Shadow had had as an accornpanying backdrop to Simritts divorce settlement, the growing Soviet influence on our subcontinent and a definite Indian tilt in that direction. 1 finished writing the book in February 1971. The Indo- Soviet Treaty, a landmark of its kind, embodying this tilt, was not signed until August that year. The "situation" creeping up on us in A Situation in New Delhi -- a book 1 had completed writins in Januarv 1975 -- was
upon us in June, and 1 myself hung with it. (20)
8. See Voice 28 These politicians appear as
characters in R k h
9. Speech relies on its silent margin for meaning.
See endnote 18 of chapter 1.
10 * Sahgal has often been criticized for not taking
a more revolutionary position regarding nationalism,
feminism, and so on. Harveen Sachdeva Mann, for example,
criticizes the "debilitating ellipsest1 (103) in Sahgal's
nationalism and feminism. She interprets Sahgal's novels
as subscribing to, rather than deconstructing, the
eurocentric and patriarchal ideologies. Such a reading
is inevitable if one loses the irony and satire in which
the narrative is couched. Sahgal represents not a
utopia, a romanticized panacea to national and familial
problems, but lived life, life within the world-view of
Gandhi- ideology. In fiction she imitates life to
instigate criticisrn of it, while her non-fictional
writing, books such as Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power
and her journalism, judges that life.
11. It is interesting to note that soon after the
magistrate is convinced of the 'voluntariness' of the
act, the speed of the consuming flames dramatically
increases. The act of government justification here
involves rephrasing violence with expediency.
12. The belief is that the flames burst forth from
the sat (the power of t ru th) that the sati possesses.
In sati: A Stitdv of Widow Burnina - in r n d h ,
Sakuntala Narasimhan mentions an incident in which sati
was wittily obstructed by the police in March 1985.
Apparently. the superintendent of police announced that
if the wornan was a real sati the £ire would ignite itself
from the sat of the sati. As at the end of an hour there
was still no sign of flames, the death was prevented.
(96-97)
1 3 . Interestingly, Karen McCarthy Brown sees the
posture of the sati cradling her husband's head in her
lap as a "breastfeeding posturea (Hawley 97).
1 4 . The connection between the ritual of sati and the
incidents of burning brides for dowry is made apparent
when attempts by the Rajasthan University Women's
Association to prevent dowry deaths and handle cornplaints
of harassment were threatened by the state should the
same group work against sati. (Reported in Tri al bv Fi re,
a publication of the Women and Media Committee of the
Bombay Union of Journalists.)
15. When Devi's son dies there is Swarnapriya; and if
Rose has no children of her own there is Mona' s to take
care of; Nishi with two has one too m a n y .
1 6 . V.N.Datta Sat.i : A ~istorical.
* cal E n c n n r v nto the H te of Widow
~ur- ( ~ e w Ilelhi: Manohar, 1998). See pp 229-31 for
recent cases of sati.
Chapter IV: Motherf8 Space in m- rdentitv
Introduction
The word "motherW often stands for 'motherhood,'
referring not to the woman but rather to her role as
reproducer and nurturer. Her biological capacity to
beget offspring in her womb and then to nurse the baby at
her breast is understood in terms of female 'prerogative'
and interpreted as the function of a woman. A woman who
does not 'rnother' is inferior to other women, while any
woman is inferior to man. istaken Jdentity represents
"Mother" as a proper name for the mother of the narrator
and yet identifies her as a person beyond her role.
The nation announces the inferiority of the non-
mother. Mothers replenish not only an aging family but
also a developing nation. While the family relies on the
rnother to provide children, the nation depends on mothers
for population expansion and control. The nation also
relies on mothers for the quality of its citizens, so
that it soon feels justified in governing the body and
life of t h e mother through eugenics or sterilization.
The womari outside the family environment, the non-mother,
the one whose dominant xole is neither that of wife nor
daughter e . not a potential mother), finds that her
citizenship is questionable. She will continue to be
defined by her sexual activity or its lack -- as
prostitute or recluse. She will be placed in the fringes
of the nation o r i n i t s midst according t o the plausible
absence or presence of a 'motherly' (meaning nurturing)
vocation.
Woman's central role in t he family and the nation is
further stressed by associating her with the earth. Her
direct relationship to the land of the family and her
nation is implied in adjectives such as 'barrent or
'fertile' applied to her denoting her reproductory
capability. The imagery of 'produce" surrounds her in
the various secular and religious literatures. A bad
woman is barren, sterile. Gandhi himself made abundant
use of the metaphor. Significantly, one of h i s severest
criticisms of England in H i n d was that she
(England) was like 'a sterile woman and a prostitute"
(30). A whore was a bad woman; so was one who was
incapable of child-birth -- both equally unproductive.
A barren woman is a curse to the family and the nation --
if al1 women were barren there would eventually be
neither family nor nation.
The mother reproduces not only biologically but also
ideologically. She reproduces not just people, but also
ethnicity, culture, and religion, or whatever else that
marks the people as belonging to a family and a nation.
In Woman - Natj on - State , Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis
note that women are "controlled in terms of the 'propert
way in which they should have [children] -- i. e. in ways
which will reproduce the boundaries of the symbolic
identity of their group or that of their husbandsw (9) .
They find that the "proper way" includes state
restriction of marriage to within comunities (the
authors quote the recent instance of South Africa) , as
well as the legitimizing of marriage controlled by social
tradition. Women, here, serve to reproduce the
boundaries of ethnic and national groups. By transmitting
a way of life to the Young, mothers are 'cultural
carriers," reproducers of the ideology of the group.
Their ideological reproduction entails preserving
differences of communities and nationalities as well (9).
Gandhi recognized the seminal role of woman as
mother. He has the following to Say in Women and Social
Iniustice:
The duty of motherhood, which the vast rnajority of women will always undertake, requires qualities which man need not possess. She is passive, he is active. She is essentially mistress of the house. He is the bread-winner, she is the keeper and distributor of the bread. She is the care-taker in every sense of the term. The art of bringing up the infants of the race is her special and sole prerogative. Without her care the race must become extinct. ( 2 6 )
By extolling what he believes are 'naturalf materna1
instincts -- of preserving, nurturing, teaching -- Gandhi
first of al1 finds a logical place for mothers within his
nationalist agenda. '~ithout her care the race must
become extinct." What is politically threatening is not
the extinction of human life, but the disappearance of
that which identifies a race, the 'traditional,'
' ~ndian, ' cultural symbols . Mothers are set apart as
sole preservers and transmitters of these symbols; the
natural space of these women will be "the hearth" (28) .
Even when circumçtances force women to work, they will be
"part-the workers, their primary function being to look
after the home" (29). Gandhi's women will find freedorn
at the hearth. They, of course, will then require
qualities not exacted of men.
In andh hi an thought , women' s relationship wi th men
as well as with the nation (race) is starnped by the
difference in role and space. Women's space (the hearth)
is different £rom the (public) space of men. The space
of wornen is linked to, even identified with, the space of
children, an environment of 'safety' and 'innocence.' So,
a military space is male. "Since 1 do not regard the
rifle as a permanent feature in the new order, its use
will be progressively restricted even so far as men are
concerned. It will be tolerated as a necessary evil
while it lasts. But 1 would not deliberately contaminate
women with the evil" (29). Women's space is private and
spiritual, therefore it is susceptible to 'contamination
with evil. ' The implication is that men are more
'hune' than women. Their public space sanctions roles
that a private space would not. In other words, space
determines gender role.
The mother is the marker of national boundaries.
She is the upholder of culture, religion, and tradition
-- all, within the private space of the family. She is
the one responsible for the physical nurturing of the
sons into able-bodied citizens and daughters into future
mothers as well as carriers and transmitters of a
national heritage. in the face of colonialism, she is
politically compelled to pursue that which gives her
family a national identity. The identity of the nation
often changes according to whether it is deemed
advantageous to uphold certain ancient ways to mark off
the nation versus the foreigner, or if it is better to
renounce or reinterpret tradition to earn equality with
the colonizer. Gandhi, as welI as other ~ndian
reformers, opposed purdah at least partly to prove the
'civilized' character of the native to the alien. The
status of the women of the colonies should prove to the
colonizer the native's ability for self-rule.
The women in the zenana and under the purdah or
within the burka are the sites of national self-
definition. According to Agamal, state ideology has two
focuses on the female: "the domestication of women and
the control of female sexuality" (14). The evolving
nation mites itself on the female body. The nation
either approves and encourages certain conditions of the
women (such as the gendered capacity to suffer, women's
patience, . . . ) so as to prove to the colonizing nation
the native's equality or superiority, or reaffims or
retrieves forgotten customs, especially those in which
women are participants, to engrave the line of difference
and uniqueness deeper . In women, the nation makes the
following staternent to another people: 1 am not you. 1
am a nation. (See Kandiyoti 380).
The nationalist agenda tends to domplay the non-
childbearing worth of the woman. When women are
considered primarily as housewives and mothers and only
secondarily as workers, state policies contribute to
sustaining a discriminatory material condition for them,
as when women are legally paid less for the same work,
and women have less access to technology, information,
and resources (Agarwal 14). Gendered restrictions on
space act to the detriment of the female citizen.
The National Ideology of M e r and the Mother in
w 8 xntaken Identztv
The time period of Mjstaken Identitv is pre-
Independence. Therefore, there is no Indian state in itç
present form to control or assist either men or women.
However, the concept of the nation exists prior to the
formation of the Indian state. (The earliest known
version of an Indian nation dates as far back as the
fourth century B.C. during the Nanda dynasty. S e e
\'Introduction," note 10). The presence of a common
colonial enemy and the leadership of men like Gandhi and
Subash Chandra Bose support national awareness. The
nation is further created through the commonality of
patriarchy . The patriarchal aspects of various
religions, especially Hinduism and Islam, make women the
site of national definition. The supreme rule of
patriarchy is made apparent in this novel by the
kingshipf of the unseen father. The rajah is the
unquestioned patriarch; a woman can never be a rajah:
Vijayagarh has not been ruled by ranis.
"Mother" in Mistaken Identitv is not just a mother,
a universal mother, who can be imagined in any part of
the world. She is a product of Vijaygarh, a "countryr'
(23), the narrator tells us, close to the native place of
Rama and Lord Krishna. A place, we are reminded, that
was also part of a historic Muslim invasion -- "a Mongol
victory over Prithviraj that made Mohmed Ghori master
of m el hi in 1192" (61) -- the tragic site of several
communal fights, with high potential for sirnilar
conflicts in the future. This land, repeatedly and
confusingly occupied by varied and inimical groups, is at
a certain risk of mistaken identity. The 'country,'
therefore, looks to the mothers to mark ethnic boundaries
and to supply bodies inside the national borders.
Gender roles are often institutionalized by a nation
and forexnost of these roles are those of father and
mother, where the mother is subordinate to the father.
In examining the history of motherhood, Elisabeth
Badinter recognizes the origin of husband-father
authority in the "religiousn family of ancient India (6).
~iscussing the legal situation of India, Pathak and Rajan
note that "under al1 persona1 laws, the male is the head
of the family and succession is through the male lineM
(258). The mother exists for the sake of the father; she
must reproduce for the father and his family and
community or country. So, when the family and community
look at a barren woman as a curse, and the nation
propagates good mothering, the lonely woman of listaka
Identitv begins her nine-year pilgrimage by praying for
fertility. Bhushan grows up convinced that he had spent
nine years, instead of nine rnonths, in his motherfs womb
( 2 2 ) *
The fertility search is described in terms of
traversing great expans es of land and the
culmination/consummation in a cave. The narrative
proceeds £rom the son's imagination of what had been told
and retold to him: '1 felt 1 had actually seen Mother
prostrate hewself into a state of nervous exhaustion
across the subcontinent, uprighting herself after one
shrine only to lay herself flat in front of another"
(23). By associating the mother with the earth that she
has to cover, the predominant sense is of the oneness of
the mother with the goddess and mother earth. It is also
as if the human rnother earns her right to reproduce by
comuning with the earth mother -- in a woman-to-woman
relationship. The 'naturalness' of reproduction is
emphasized in the association with the earth and nature.
The actual consummation takes place in a cave, symbol of
the womb .
But, the cave is transgressed by a fertilizing,
authoritative male figure -- the cave man. The man has
power over female reproductive organs. The cave man
represents at once religious authority as well as male
potency. As ultimate decision-maker of fertility, he
symbolizes the nation's (male) right over female
sexual ity . Medicine becomes another ISA through which
men control women's bodies. In Vi j aygarh, medicine
combines with religion to subjugate women.
However, at this point the narrative strikes at the
very root of the nation by exposing the possibility of
'illegitimate' birth, of the role of a man other than the
husbarid, of a place other than the family house, and of
the choice of the pilgrim mother in the act of mothering.
The prospect looms large that "father's stray droplets"
had nothing to do with the birth of the son (156) . The
secret of paternity that belongs only to the mother makes
it possible to threaten the nation's inheritance laws, to
keep to the letter of the rule while dismantling its
spirit -- to provide a son with no patrilineal rights.
Yet, in spite of this exclusive knowledge, Mother is
reduced to an object status. In ~Poststructuralism,
Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value," Spivak explains
the 'logic' of this inversion:
The woman is the subject of knowledge; çhe knows the name of the father in the most literal way. This scandalous power is modified and shifted into 'a strange reversal': power is consolidated in the name of the father and the woman is reduced to the figure who cannot know. (237)
The patriarchal appropriation of woman's knowledge is
also the emptying of female subjectivity, the making of
her objectivity. Ironically, Mother lays daim once
again (to subjectivity) by giving birth to a son.
Fertility means the woman's ability to produce sons.
So, it is not enough that the mother become pregnant.
She must have sons, not daughters. The narrative reveals
that the problem is not infertility in the strict sense
of the word, for the mother had in the past given birth
to not just one but two girls who either had died or been
disposed of. The birth of a girl is non-birth and the
mother remains non-mother . By making inheritance
patrilineal (makkathayam instead of the pre-state
tradition of matrilineal or marumakkathayam), the nation
too has a stake in female infanticide and preference for
the male child. The father's desire to see his wealth
and property inherited by his own seed Fs vouched by the
nation's strategy of gender-based roles.
The nation-state may not hire officiais to kill the
fernale born. But connivance becomes state policy
allowing non-officials, specifically women, to do the
dirty j ob . 'There are records of strangling with the umbilical cord. Another popular method was a pi11 of bhang.' Very safe and simple this was. The midwife put the pi11 on the infant's tongue and it slid d o m the throat like a sweetie, or she smeared the mother' s nipple with it and the infant
swallowed it with the first suck. However, if they buried the infant alive as sorne did, first they filled the hole up tenderly with milk. (Mistaken Identitv 63)
Killing of girls falls by default into the hands of
women. If girls are born it is the fault of women and
therefore it is for women to remove the 'mistake.' Also,
belonging to the margins of the nation, wornen cannot
represent the 'policy' of the nation, but they can
contribute to national 'welfare.'
Again, the nation's policy of accomodating
religions, so that practices like polygamy are sanctioned
under religious law, often favors the male sex and
conflicts with the fernale's right to equal citizenship.
The male privilege to own is basic to al1 other male
rights and overshadows the female fundamental right to
birth, sex, and inheritance. Whereas Marx ' s '\ las t
instance" of econornic detemination is, according to
Engels, a never-arriving phase, religion as an ISA
functions within the cultural situation of Vijaygarh to
make economic determination a reality and a political
reason for the subordination of women. The father can
marry twin sisters. and, later, to ensure that
inheritance goes to a worthwhile son, marry again and
again while the former unlucky wife stagnates. This
situation is preserved in the Indian state by acceptance
of persona1 laws, L e . , religious laws that control the
cornmunity .
Nationalist ideology places the woman as subordinate
to man and yet appears to ensure the redemption of the
woman t hrough man. On the one hand, the mother in
is passed over by the family,
especially the father (in the practice of polygamy); on
the other hand, the mother knows only too well the
political clout of man and proceeds to the non-
nationalist realm of the colonist to procure the
hereditary title of "rajah" for the man of her choice.
her son. The mother here functions within the
limitations of her gender to obtain for herself, through
her progeny, economic and political rights otherwise
denied her. The patriarchal ideology of redemption of
mother through son is engineered by the mother so as to
also deny those privileges to the women and family of the
fatherts choice.
The relationship between the nation and the colonist
is to the detriment of women.' The indigenous
patriarchal setting has its own support systems for the
women. In the clash with colonialism, not only are the
patriarchal setups shaken, but several of the support
structures also collapse. For instance, in Estaken
1rlenti.t~~ the title that is 'naturalt under native rule
is threatened under colonialism. Colonial displacement
of power jeopardizes native structures that once offered
at least some f o m of protection for women. A colonial
theory of probability, an 'iff theory, dismisses what for
centuries had been a reality for the rajah of Vi jayagarh:
If there was a title, and if t was made hereditary, I would presumably succeed to it. if 1 didn't -- for some entirely unforeseeable reason -- only then would Fatherfs third wife's son, if she had a son, be the next raja. But, if 1 carried on as 1 was doing, working hard at my books and keeping out of trouble, well my mother had nothing to worry about, did she? (87
The net result of this deliberation is that it is a
'mortal blow" for Mother (89). Denying traditional
rights and privileges to the son is, ironically, denial
of life to the rnother. in various ways the native
government and the foreign government hold women subject
to patriarchal authority.
In the patriarchal society of india, the mother has
no subject status devoid of the son. In her relation to
her husband she is object, positioned to serve the ends
of both family and "countryn through motherhood. The
rnother of Mj.staken Identitv exerts traditionally defined
gender roles to claim the son, but this is an over-
extension of her role as mother. The rules which
distance the grown-up son £rom the space of wornen,
including the mother, prove futile before the mystery of
motherhood, the ultimate effect of which is to
rnarginalize the father in the son's narratives. The son
is accessed and controlled through rnotherhood.
Motherhood in turn effaces fatherhood. Bhushan does not
remember his father "figuring rnuch in accounts of actual
exertion" during the pilgrirnage (23).
It may be argued that the predicament of the son is
sirnilar to that of the mother under patriarchy.
Bhushan's choice of ambitionless life and free love is
limited by his father. Perhaps this restriction allows
him to empathize with his mother, who is similarly
repressed by the same man. However, while the son is a
subject in family and national discourse, most clearly
in h i s inheritance right/legal recognition, the mother is
a non-entity whose object status is only further proved
in motherhood.
Because of class, the "mother function" is sometimes
performed by other people. The task of mothering is
shared among the women of the household so that for the
son the nursing breasts seemed 'a soft, vast, collective
mattress of a breastw (26) . It takes the son a while to
understand the separateness of each woman and the
identity of the woman he loved most, his mother. Thus
"mother" retains an individuality and separateness
distinct from the servants who do the job of mothering.
Her class excuses the mother £rom breast-feeding. But
her class gives her no protection against patriarchy: the
quali ty of her continued existence continues to be
modified and determined by the existence of the son.
Abnormalcy of a wornan is equated with that which
does not fit the pattern of motherhood. This, Badinter
notes, is a concept based on observation of female apes
(xxii) . In Mistaken Tdenti tv the head-servant, Bittan,
is at a loss to understand the unpredictable change of
"the shy thirteen-year old rosebud bride" to a "woman in
£lamesw from whose dancing feet the two year old son had
to be rescued (27). Anger is condoned in the father; an
angry woman is considered an anomaly. Only class
difference will compel the servants to tolerate "Mother's
energy" ( 2 9 ) .
The nation tightens its hold on the female gender by
highlighting roles as well as by stressing space.
Although the nation need not be limited to one language
or religion, languages and religions forrn part of the
adhesive portions of a nation spirit. India adopted a
principle of silence in the case of a religion's
treatrnent of women. Through the silence, later called
"secularism, " the nation participates in discriminatory
positioning of women in separate and gender-based spaces.
The purdah is only one such space and there are various
ways and instances of 'purdahing.'
The Purdah of Confinement and the Mother
In "Identity and Its Discourse,'' Deniz Kandiyoti
argues that "the regulation of gender is central to the
articulation of cultural identity and difference" (388).
When provinces rally against a common enemy, and when the
western notion of nation takes hold, gender becomes a
national strategic site for claiming a national
"identityn and a 'differenceN from the invading
foreigner. As service providers, women becorne the site
for establishing national identity. There are
similarities across cultures and religions, in the
treatment of wornen and in their material condition in
various classes. An examination of two major spaces
occupied by the women of two significant cultures --
Hinduism and Islam -- represented in Mistaken Identitv,
reveals that wornen belong to enclosed and imer spaces.
In M- ~dentitv there are two obvious spaces in
which women are restricted -- the zenana and the purdah.
The zenana is the women's part of the house. Within the
zenana there is no illusion of universal sisterhood, as
class hierarchy divides the apparently common space.
class
Bittan is subordinate to Mother and the others are
subordinate to Bittan within the zenana. The sense of
class difference is preserved in spaces within the
general space -- the women of the zenana lie on the
floor, they never occupy the privileged space (the bed)
of Mother. The presence of a zenana also indicates the
economir status of the household: the family can afford
the extra and separate space.
Another female space which indicates
differences is the purdah (Papanek and Minault 4). The
purdah, which means "curtain," is the enclosed attire of
women. Usually, the purdah covers the entire body of the
women, including the head and face, excluding only f eet
and hands. Both Hindus and Muslims Wear the purdah and
have zenanas. The religious reason for these physical
restrictions is ultimately based on the sense of danger
associated with women. A freely moving woman is the
source of a man's destruction. The wiles of women have
to be held in check through restrictions on their space.
Also, since women's natural space is the 'private'
domain, even in the rnidst of public space privacy is
created through the "portable seclusion" of the purdah
and the burka. (See Papanek and Minault 10.)
This could create a specific analogy to motherhood
in that the life of women is made constantly less mobile,
like an advanced state of pregnancy. Both religion and
custom lhit the movement of women. Restricted movement
because of the purdah only reaffirms the cultural picture
of wornen. According to Pananek, the veil suggests "that
the social distance imposed by the covering enhances what
is already seen as feminine in the culture: sexuality, a
special sense of vulnerability, and an inability to move
freely in public" (11-12). Purdah supports the n o m that
"proper" women should not use public spaces freelyw
(12). Feminine etiquette consists of disappearing.
The restriction of space in the purdah and the
zenana is also the restriction of female voice. Papanek
notes how lower class Muslim women who cannot afford
their own purdah observe purdah by "veiling the face or
lips with the . . . dopatta" (qtd. on page 1 3 ) . The
purdah of the eye (nazar ka pardah) and the purdah of the
voice (avaz ka parda) (Papanek and Minault 71) are
simultaneously ef fected t hrough clothing and
architecture. The veiling of the face or lips is the
restriction communication and voice.
~ d e n t i tv, the multitude of servants who f il1 Mother8 s
zenana are voiceless . The most they produce is a
'suf focated sq~awk'~ that make 'captive geese, " not
humans, of them ( 2 5 ) . According to Cora Vreede-De Stuers
The parda of seclusion can be expressed in even more symbolic fashion: by downcast eyes, by the bowing of the head, by the complete silence a woman observes in the presence of a man, or by the hasty gesture of veiling her head with a corner of her sari or dupatta if she is caught unawares. Parda may be observed with a pair of dark glasses [by modern urban Muslim women] [sic]
(qtd. in Papanek and Minault 70).
Even Mother has no Say in the presence of the father.
And, as noted earlier, the little sway she has over a son
is effectively removed by the British.
The woman manipulates the restricted space. She
develops strategies of exclusive freedom within that
space -- this is a freedom that can interfere with the
male space while remaining above and beyond male
intervention. The burka, the enclosed carriage in which
wornen travel, is one such space. Through the slit in the
burka and the purdah, wornen see the world and yet are not
seen. In "Algeria Unveiled, " Fanon notes, This woman
who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer"
( 4 4 ) - Fanon interprets the unveiled woman as
'disintegrating' on account of the gaze of the
colonialist. In his forthcoming article, "Saint Fanon
and "Homosexual Territory," Terry Goldie questions this
object position of the woman who is, according to Fanon,
being unveiled:
Fanon would certainly reject my claim but it seerns possible that the reason the removal of the veil leads to disintegration is not just because of the desire of the European male but because of the subjectivity of the Algerian female. As the veil is removed neither she nor the males of either ethnicity cari control al1 the different eruptions of desire. [Emphasis added ]
Goldie argues that the veil announces the culture but
also structures the subjectivity of the wornari.
Women experience patriarchy as colonizing. They in
turn try to change the 'colonizer's' sphere by a
'lifting' of the purdah, by renouncing the purdah, by
adopting 'western' ways. They dare to l i f t its
enclosures to reveal, at their whim, body and 'spectacle'
otherwise denied to the public. in &staken Jdentj tv,
Bhushan falls victim to one such manoeuver of enclosed
space. Bittan out-argues vendors "with the end of her
sari pulled right down over her face" (27). Mother talks
to men front the other side of a dividing curtain.
Finally, she, like Rushdie's Naseem Ghani, falls in love
in spite of (and perhaps because of) the ' sheet . ' The
attire of modesty cari also become the source of feminine
power in a world run by men in fear of that power.
Purdah parties, of which Mother was the "life and
soul" (30) , are sessions in which Muslim women, usually
of the same class, get together, chat, and have tea, all
without the purdah. No men are allowed. The natural
talents of the women corne out in this exclusively female
environment, where there is no gender conflict.
Katherine Mayo quotes one woman saying at a purdah Party,
'1 must stay within the zenana, keeping strict purdah, as
becomes our rank, seeing no one but the women, and my
husband. We see nothing. We know nothing. We have
nothing to say to each other. We quarrel. It is dull"
(115). The purdah party is another instance of the
manipulation of fernale cloistered space -- a manipulation
in a certain breaking of the silence.
Women who transgress the limits of the private space
are punished. According to Bhushan, a man killed his
wif e because he saw her through an open door ( 66) . A
woman must not be seen. She is best if she remains a
mystery, the supreme rnystery being that of motherhood.
The enclosed spaces serve to sustain the mystery of
women. Exposure will demystify.
Men control women's lives as well as the lives of
children, including boys. When the Razia-Bhushan couple
fa11 in love, a band of men separate them and resort to
communal violence. According to Amrita Chhachhi, in
those Muslim states where religious fundamentalism rules,
"The State . . . gives every and any man on the street
the legitimate right to stop any woman who does not
conform to the 'traditional and proper' role assigned to
her" (qtd. in Agarwal 21). Although Chhachhi refers
specifically to the state of Iran, the general
patriarchal attitude prevails in India.
The enclosed space preserves notions of shame and
honor. It is honorable for Mother to wemain behind her
purdah and burkha and zenana. It is shameful for Razia
to remove her purdah. Razia's act further confirms that
removing the purdah is equal to physical violation and
disrepute to the family and nation. Violated in dress
and body she is a "ruined girl" (60). She can be
perceived even by Bhusan only as an object who has to be
acted on, redeemed. The enclosed space becomes "symbolic
shelter" as an indicator of shame and honor. It acquires
the capacity to protect the wearer, the resident, £rom
"strong impulses such as sexual desire and aggression"
(Papanek 3 5 ) .
In her essay, 'Purdah Revisited: A Cornparison of
Hindu and Muslim Interpretations of the Cultural Meaning
of Purdah in South Asia," Sylvia Vatuk discusses the
place of sharam (shame) and i z z a t (honor) in the social
responses of women in Uttar Pradesh (incidentally, the
home state of Sahgal) . Because of sharam a wornan will
avoid her husband in her natal home, she will not visit
her parents during the last stages of pregnancy, and her
children will refer to her as bhabhi (elder brotherf s
wife) and not "rnother." (The last fact is commented on
by the outspoken Rose in R i c h Like Us.) Wornan ' s
sexuality is consistently downplayed (Papanek and Minauit
74). Significantly, questions of honor and shame
dominate the vocabulary of Gandhian teachings even in
Gandhi's rejection of the purdah system. In his letter
on the Kathiawar Rajput Conference, where women were
placed behind the curtain, Gandhi asks the Rajputs to
renounce purdah. But, words such as 'decorum" and
"morality" find their way into discussions on purdah-free
women. Gandhi burdens women once again with the task of
teaching purity to men (CWMG 24 :277-8 ) .
The zenana adds to the appearance of distance
between the husband and wife. The traditional
architecture ensures that the two shall not, apparently,
meet. Nationalismfs stress on motherhood reduces women
to a womb and breasts which civility forbids touching.
At the end of the narrative, when the woman in Mother
breaks through, or rather when the mother spreads beyond
the traditional definition by "eloping," an act of choice
and defiance, of flesh and mind, the effect is 'scandal.'
The family and the nation have been scandalized by a
disruption of the definition of rnother.
The woman's social role is more anti-social. When
she leads a life of obedience her social function is
defined by its absence. It is when she disobeys,
'threatens the public realm as an excluded figure, as
criminal, prostitute, or vagrant, that she fulfills her
(anti) -social role" (Pathak and Rajan 271) . Thus,
Motherfs elopement, her position as 'vagrant,' gives her
subject status as anti-social. Similar is the case of
the 'fallen sisters," who have an identity (that is a
dubious one) and a subject status that allows them to
consort with those beyond their class and sex. When the
congressman, Bhaiji, dies in prison, the prostitutes are
given the responsibility of overseeing his cremation.
These wornen, who do not fa11 within the boundaries of
religious or social rules, cannot be easily controlled
within zenana or purdah. Their use of the purdah and
female tradition becomes a mockery of persona1 law. They
continue to defy the label of \\£allenu and become in the
narrative the sole support of the brothers who have
'fallen' into prison. These women are also "unsheltered"
(see Papanek 4 4 ) , where unsheltered means unprotected by
male relatives. Ironically enough, there appear to be a
few privileges in being "unsheltered" and outside the
pale of male protection.
The narrative of Mistaken Tdenti tv shows the
breaking of the sense of ' decorum' and 'honort through
shamelessness. The shamelessness of ~azia not only
removes her out of the purdah, but it also moves her £rom
object to subject status. Sharneless, she is no more a
victim. Similarly, without the honor of the purdah,
Mother too walks out as a subject with the ability to
execute her choice as never before. Both Razia and
Mother transgress and are not punished but awarded.
Where common (enclosed) space should encourage the
development of sisterhood, issues of gender and class
intervene. When t w i n sisters are married to the same
man, each is the otherrs rival; they are no longer
sisters. Similarly, in the zenana, the widows who assist
Mother are subordinates, not equals. There is no
sisterhood. The only relationship is that between Mother
and her son. This too is discouraged on grounds of
gender -- the son is rernoved £rom the zenana a£ ter the
age of seven to be brought up by men and to be developed
as a male. But the mother-son bond withstands the worst
restrictions and turmoil.
Finally, it is the son who recognizes the mother as
a wornan. The shift of paradigm that allows the son to
recognize his mother as a woman, not just mother, is made
possible when the son in turn transgresses male space --
he has entered the zenana. Bhushan furthers his
intrusion into female space by riding in his Mother's
burka. '1 saw what Mother saw of Vijaygarh through the
eye-width panel between the curtain" (88). His entrance
into space set apart for the opposite gender gives him
the capacity to understand the artifice of gender -- the
mystique of motherhood cracks under his embrace to reveal
the woman (85).
Bhushan enters the space of Razia also -- he dons
her purdah, experiences the discornfort in movement, calls
it ' thingamajig' (which Razia endorses) and uses it as a
bed for love-making in the desert, which the narrator
enjoins has been its only worthy use. Later on, when the
lovers have been separated by adults, and Bhushan
conf ined, his nightmares consist of visions of the purdah
enshrouding Razia:
The burka she had tossed on the thorn bush skulked up to enshroud her again. The hood descended like the lick of a long black tongue over her face. She was sucked back entire into the monster, beyond the reach of love or rescue. It was unthinkable, unacceptable that as long as she lived she would live in that coffin, and however long 1 lived 1 might never see her again. (113)
The purdah is pictured as having a monstrous life of its
own. Bhushan's denouncement of the purdah is accompanied
by his chivalrous (male) desire to ' save' the helpless
woman. As the narrative unfolds, we find that Razia has
been able to Save herself and that, ironically, she is
not the victim of Bhushanrs desire.
A manly man does not enter the zenana. But Bhushan
does and he feels 'ferninine, " He takes on the
stereotypes of a woman when with Sylla: "Men have
mistresses and enough has been said on that tired topic,
but if anything, I was Sylla's. 1 was more feminine,
more gentle and compliant than her" (121). The narrator
confirms that having entered gendered spaces the spaces
in turn serve to create gender.
The suppressed headwoman of the zenana favors in one
voice indu-Muslim unity and the breaking d o m of the
male-female divide. Not surprisingly, she sees communal
fights as instigated by the British, the same British who
denied the kingship to her son (92). Persona1 law
dictated by religious heads directly affects the female
sex. As Luce Irigaray notes, "religion, too, is a civil
power" (62). Also, communal differences are expressed in
the attire and positioning of men and women and
especially by the restrictive and exclusionary space of
women. in none of the major religions are women allowed
priesthood; much less are they permitted the extent of
public appearance enjoyed by the opposite sexe2 Not
surprisingly, Mother and the narrator favor Hindu-Muslirn
unity. The narrator Bhushan thus describes the zenana in
terms of gender division:
Until 1 was seven I lived in Mother's apartment in the zenana. High walls blocked it off £rom the rest of the sprawling mansion, and every
house al1 over the estate. Hindu or Muslim, rnud or marble, was subdivided like it into male and female. There were two sexes, no doubt about it. (25)
He draws parallels between gender and community in their
commonal i ty of differences and m m u f ac tured
exclusiveness. Both gender and community are determined
by the element of space -- the "mud or marble."
The male narrator with obvious female qualities
challenges gender distinctions through his very
existence. When asked his identity (of difference),
~hushan can refer to himself only as devoid of
difference, as Hindu-Muslim whose mother tongue is
poetry, the result of a m i x of materna1 Hindi and
paternal Urdu (144). The question and answers, however,
take place in the dream of the narrator. The dream, like
Lacan's imaginary, is a state of unity and mastery that
is at bottorn an illusion. According to Lacan, the
imaginary is located between the object and the subject.
It is as well outside the symbolic, where the symbolic
detemines the subject. The dream indicates the
impossibility of the unity, its unreality. However, the
presence of the dream in the symbolic order of
narrative (in the novel) continues to challenge
construction of meaning, of community and,
association, of gender, as natural and eternal.
The purdah is a symbol of "difference" -- of
the
the
by
the
dif ference in gender and the di£ ference in religion or
community. The unity of communities and gender need not
be the policy requirement of a nation. Where the nation
is concerned, minority communities should be preserved as
minorities. Gandhi, who insisted on Hindu-Muslim unity,
saw the need to maintain the differences. He also saw it
as necessary to maintain the interna1 distinctions in
Hinduism. Thus, he upheld varnashramadhama as the holy
code for class distinctions, although he insisted on
mutual respect between these divisions. Gandhi was open
about his objections to inter-caste and inter-communal
marriages (CWMG 30:358) . His son's love for a Muslirn
woman in South Africa never received the fatherts
approval .
The characters in Histaken Identitv resist the
world-view that sees communal and sema1 division as
natural: they marry across comrnunities. In marrying her
commu~ist lover, Mother breaks the restrictions of
communal difference as well as the walls of her zenana.
Although it is the communists who make Gandhi "sound like
a comma in the rniddle of a sentence which would run a lot
faster without it" (69), the narrative seems to endorse
this view, ever so subtly, through constant references to
comrnunalism and gender inequalities. According to
Shahida Lateef , the Muslim women ' s movement "as always
overshadowed by Muslim separatist politics, so bitterly
fought through the critical decades of 1920-1947" (94).
Further, the narrative highlights the artificiality
of motherhood by placing Mother in light made
artificially green by tinted glass. Mother in the green
light looks like the earth goddess in her reproductive
natural greenness. But the light is not natural. So too
motherhood. When Mother elopes with her communist lover,
it is not with the intention of giving birth again. She
is beyond the age of becoming a rnother. Motherhood is
displaced with womanhood in the space of untinged
daylight .
Conclusion
In point of V 4 . e ~ ~ Sahgal writes that there are ~ w o
heroines" in Mistaken IAenti,tv -- Mother and Razia (51).
These two wornen, who are represented most of the time as
under their purdah or in their enclosed womenJs rooms,
are also least 'exposedr as characters in the narrative:
they rarely appear before the reader. How do they
deserve the appellage of 'heroines ' ? What socially
happens to these women -- the fact that these women
'ferninine' and sexual powers to escape the purdah and
zenana -- places them in the category of heroines.
Bhushan says about his discovery of Razia, The joke
on me. 1 had gone in search of a victim and events
use
the
As
was
had
revealed a goddess of surpassing splendeur" (168). In a
rejection of the \'hearthJW though not of rnarriage, by
refraining from chastity, both the female characters
acquire agency . The novel enacts the breaking of Gandhian paradigms
in the breach of brahmacharya. By displacing the female
body outside traditional religious spaces, the narrative
represents the plausibility of change and growth for even
the nationalized mother figure.
The nationf s need for mothers is rejected by the
"trespassing" Mother in uistaken Identjtv. By renouncing
decreed spaces and entering spaces that are forbidden,
she resists the national objectification of the female
body. Al1 along, the narrative reveals the Gandhian
world-view, which positions women by the hearth in order
to keep the nation intact. There is enough 'proof' in
the text that (mis)placement of women outside female
space can lead to the disintegration of the family and to
communalism -- the breaking of the nation. In spite of
this, the novel concludes in an un-Gandhian rejection of
that space by Mother and her communion with a
Congress, communist lover.
In al1 this, the naturalness of the ideology
restricts mothers to the hearth is questioned.
narrative proves that the ideology can be resisted.
transgression of space challenges the belief that
primacy of reproductive labor is located in the female.
By extolling a woman's, especially a motherfs, sexuality
the narrative revives her traditionally buried roles.
non-
that
The
The
the
-
Notes (Chagter Four)
1- A çimilar çtudy can be made on the character Anna
in m. In "Imperialism and Motherhood,"
Anna Davin explains the major role that the mothers of
Great Britain w e r e required to play in empire building in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She
says that during the period of imperialism the belief
w a s , "if the sumival of infants and the health of
children was in question, it must be the fault of the
mothers, and if the nation needed healthy future citizens
(and soldiers and workers) then mothers must improve"
(12). The state, therefore, practiced eugenics and
undertook welf are schemes for mothers and children.
"Child-rearing was becoming a national duty not j u s t a
moral one." Mothers became "mothers of the raceu and a
ski11 called "mothercraft" evolved (13). The empire
turned to llmothercraft" when young men lost their lives
in the Boer war of 1899 and the army had to be
replenished, and also when the invaded countries had to
be filled with the "Imperia1 race."
Thus the colonizer and the colonized both turned to
mothers to m a k e national history. Both nations stressed
the Kinder, Kuche, Kirche as the foundation of future
citizens, hence the exclusive domain of mothers. As Ann
Oakley observes in i, "Mothers exist to
serve chilàren's needs, amorphously but normatively
defined, and whatever children become is traced to the
character of their mothering"
was emphasized for the sake of
women were objectif ied by the
nations.
(79) . Quaiity mothering
the nation. Either way,
colonizing and colonized
2 . Increasingly, more and more 'reformedr groups
arnong Christians and Hindus permit female priests.
However, these still remain a minority. Also, in the
major religions, while women are allowed public
appearance in the 'audience,' they are usually excluded
as key performers in rites and rituals.
Conclusion: A Gandhian Subjectess
This study has argued that Nayantara Sahgalfs female
characters positioned within a patriarchal and
nationalist "Gandhian" ideology are represented as
objects often acquiring subject status and agency through
specific experiences of discornfort and pain. Through its
emphasis on womenfs resistance £rom the space of the
family and within the context of national freedom
struggles the narratives substantiate and make visible
their location in what has been called "post-colonial
literature."
The resistance apparent in these narratives
expresses a re j ection of sexual domination, especially
the nation's manifestation of control within the family
itself. This resistance rejects the nation's creation of
gendered identi ties that not only slot wornen within
Manuvian categories of daughter, sister, wife, and
rnother, but also marginalize and silence women within the
nation. The female characters' rejection of the 'purityf
of roles rather than the roles themselves, their
purposeful polluting of the categories, suggests a form
of emancipation for them that is generally labeled
scandalous or, in the context of the freedom struggle and
the rule of the Congress in an independent country,
'unGandhian. '
This study on the novels of Sahgal concludes that
Gandhian ideology is a world-view with several
patriarchal and nationalist prerogatives that dominate,
sometimes manipulate, seldom assist, the fernale
character. The ideology naturalizes roles and spaces,
hence the ernbedded restrictions and discomforts for the
wornen. The naturalization is so effective that their
resistance to that ideology is often delayed. One impact
of the ideology is to reduce the women to objects or
unthinking characters. However, usually, experiences of
discornfort and pain awaken the power to resist and think
so that a thinking subject evolves in the process of
resistance.
It may appear that the critique is itself implicated
by the ideology it proposes to criticize. The theme of
suffering proceeds from the critiqued source of Gandhian
ideology itself . Hence, in the ideology as well as in
the critique of ideology it seems that suffering has a
redemptive role . The important dif f erence, however, is
this: Gandhian ideology presents pain as the natural and
desirable condition of women that contributes to the
prosperity of the nation; this study has argued that not
only is pain unnecessary and undesirable but also that
when patriarchal and nationalist needs cause suffering on
women, women prove to be resistant to suffering. This
resistance, more than the pain, is seen as a redemptive
process.
In Sahgal's narratives, traditional images of the
chaste wife, widow, and mother are violated when the
female character opts for illicit sex and relationships
outside the accepted categories. The Gandhian insistence
on brahmacharya is, obviously, thrown to the winds. Yet,
for these women the categories contaminate relationships
while the scandalous space in-between sanctifies those
same relationships. As Mangat Rai mites to his "Tara,"
in R p l a t i o ~ & . & , 'the only sin is a broken relationship"
(16). The female characters often return to the same
roles but now tinged, rather tinted, by scandal.
The narratives show how by institutionalizing the
family the nation curbs movements of the female body
outside the home. Even the space within is defined,
allotted, reduced, to service areas. Women's initiatives
to independence are restricted, even punished, within
environrnents of male presence and power. Where
patriarchal and nationalist needs are well-aligned,
women's need for freedom and development is fomd to be
incompatible with and often detrimental to the agenda for
national independence and growth.
The focus of this study has been, first, to identify
that the dominant ideology in Sahgal's narratives is
Gandhian and to define it in tems of traditional,
religious, historical, political, and persona1 belief
systems. Gandhian ideology creates a certain sense of
coherence and wholeness in life. In attempting to show
life as self-sufficient and 'total' the ideology smooths
over the gaps of the unthinkable making it natural not to
see discrepancies. That is, ideology re-presents a
holistic view of life which hides conflicts and
contradictions even from itself so that only a
symptomatic reading of narratives cari reveal the blind
spots. For instance, Gandhian ideology allows for
stereotypes that cater to nationalist values. Within
this ideology, women are natural sufferers and perfect
mothers .
In their capacity as completed texts, the narratives
are capable of revealing the gaps in ideology in the
process of enacting. The novel is complete in that it is
published. And yet, it is incomplete in its relation to
an ideology which assumes a 'totality' that has gaps.
The narrative contains in its completeness the
contradictions of that which it 'encounters,' the
ideology. Ideology is exposed in the novel. The novel
does not interpret the ideology; it facilitates its
definition.
The presence of a patriarchal Gandhian ideology
within Sahgalfs feminist literature is itself
problematic. The narratives are caught up in the
ideology by continuing to tell tales of female characters
retuning to once re j ected roles . Regardless of
conclusions, the roles themselves refuse to be dislodged.
But, the narratives as we11 indicate the lacunae of
unequal relationships of power. They expose the artifice
of the 'natural,' the maneuver of gender and space.
Gandhian ideology exceeds definitions on account of
chronological change. Ideology changes with t h e
acquiring historical and cultural nuances en route.
Although still called "Gandhian" the ideology goes
through and beyond the thoughts and principles of Gandhi
in a m o v e m e n t toward hegemonic relationships with
subjects. However, the ideology s till retains the
"Gandhian" aspects within a general framework of Congress
rule, emphasis on the nation, creation of gendered roles,
and the goal of Ramrajya.
The study has been based on an understanding of the
fundamental place of representation. ~ithin ideology,
representation is the privileged mode of life. Life is
forever mediated: the dominance of an ideology, the
positions of object and subject, all, are represented.
The reality of this representation is rooted in material
consequences. Representations can be resisted, although
only to be re-presented.
As literary representations, Sahga18s narratives
parody ideology. The novels create ideological fields
that reflect the "realf' and yet are not (real) on account
of itç own status as fiction. It is in this sense that
Macherey speaks of the hidden presence of ideology "at
the edge of the text" (60). He explains how in literary
discourse the fiction of ideology collides with the
fiction of literature to reveal the gaps in ideology.
Literature's ability to parody ideology facilitates the
critique of ideology.
A major argument of this study has been that the
unresisting female character is an object within Gandhian
ideology . The 'objectn status is neither that of
'ground" nor "~ubject.~' In Tontentious Traditions:
Debate on Sati in Colonial ïndia, ,, Lata Mani contends
that in colonial discourses on sati, women are not only
denied agency, but are also not even the real topic of
the discourse -- that they are simply "the ground of the
discourse" (Sangari and Vaid 117). Partha Chatterjee, on
the other hand, concludes in his essay, 'The ~ationalist
Resolution of the Women's Question," that the Indian
women's speeches and writings of the nineteenth century
indicate that they indeed had a voice of their own --
that the speaking woman w a s "an autonomous sub j ect"
(246). Chatterjee assumes that the sound of the speaker
is a sufficient index of ownership and authority. Both
Mani's and Chatterjee's arguments relate to the
nineteenth century and to the colonial period. This
study, in focusing on the Gandhian discourses, has argued
that the default position of women within Gandhian
ideology is that of the object . Gandhian ideology allows
women the 'respectf of object, not ground. Sahgalfs
resisting women characters, though, acquire subject
status . The study has also demonstrated the relation between
ideology and genre. ideology redefines the genre of the
autobiography in terms not of the center but of the
margins. Through speechlessness, rather than through
speech, Sahgalfs narratives on the self become eloquent
autobiography .
diminish them as citizens in an independent india -- to
rnake them second-class citizens.
As thematized in Sahgal's early novels, the
insistence on virginity for women further creates
relationships of domination where women are inevitably
victimized. The patriarchal need for honor produces the
fentale object of ideological discourse. However, in the
forbidden physical act of 'kmowingf the female characters
resist and transform themselves into subjects capable of
agency within the dominant ideology. Sexual knowing then
becomes a means of acquiring self-respect -- honor within
and for the self rather than for others. For the wornan,
the act often involves pain that is both physical and
emotional. Self-respect it seems is directly related to
resistance and a subject status.
Sahgal's novels highlight the centrality of the
family in the context of the indian nation. The plots
evolve in the space of families and rnove into the
complexities of relationships. When traditions are
celebrated and a nation is announced, contradictions
become evident in the nation's use of women to define
itself. Women are first of al1 slotted in the family.
Secondly, their roles increasingly cater to national
goals (of [eugenically] 'better' citizens for India, for
instance). Finally, they are caught between a co~iving
govemment and merciless persona1 laws that consider
women as the (less significant) "other" of men.
The nation itself functions through metaphors of the
farnily. ~ational terminology incorporates familial
relationships such as 'father, " "mother, " "sons, " and
"daughters." (India even has an uncle -- the author's
uncle is "Chacha Nehru" of the nation. ) Thus, there is
"Mother India" and the "Father of the Nation. " The
mothering of the nation as well as the glorification of
Gandhi as the nation's father are functions of national
and patriarchal ideology. Gandhi's own insistence that
the Congress party represented the entire nation together
with his position in the Congress as its 'dictator"
(Brown 163) have assisted the elevation of Gandhi as
India's 'Bapu." According to Patrick Colm Hogan, 'the
elevation of some individual to a position of infallible
authority, most often upon the basis of that person's
position of dominance within an institution," is a
function of the dominant ideology (159).
in the family of the nation, women are keepers of
tradition. The nation is built on tradition especially
as a way to mark itself as different from the colonizer.
The past is part of the definition of a nation
(Chatterjee 1986:9). The national tradition insists on
a homogenous culture, religion, and language. Sahgal's
novels indicate that this insistence is made on the body
of woman. Religion, for example, is to be transmitted by
the mother to the child within the bounds of the family.
Women are preservers of ancient culture, often lucrative
museums of that tradition. Anderson says, \\museums, and
the museumizing imagination, are both profoundly
political" (178) . When the nation is 'thoughtM
predominantly by a certain race, class, and gender, there
is further ignoring of the 'other' which adds to the
problematic of Anderson's "imagined" nationalism. Where
the nation is run largely by men, the risk of policies
being more favorable towards that gender is high.
The study has, as well, demonstrated that language
is a powerful ISA that naturalizes relationships of
doninat ion. The mixing of political and religious
discourses within Gandhian ideology creates a utopia that
in turn invokes subjects toward grave risks. The glitter
of Ramrajya dictates death to m a n y a sita.
Gandhian discourse accormnodates the spiritualizing
and nationalizing of injustices to women. This is
specifically evident in the Gandhian use of the terms
'satin and 'Sita" to denote \8goodness." Once again
suffering is seen as a female virtue. Simultaneously,
the discourse celebrates women's dependance on men and
men's pivotal place in the life of women.
Sahgal's novels A Situation in New De1.h; and Rich
lke Us have a further relevance to the situation of
women in India today. The focus on sati as a ritual as
well as a metaphor for suffering opens the door to
discussions on burning brides for dowry in India. The
dowry act of 1961 and its amendment of 1985 rneant to
protect women are loopholed by the provision for gifts in
marital transactions. For al1 practical purposes the
dowry system is well presenred under the name of "giftsM
today. 'Dowry deathsr (as it is usually called, although
the term hides the atrocity of burning) continue to be
almost a daily occurrence in parts of India.
Interestingly, many of the controversial Bills are also
those directly effecting the family: examples are laws
regarding dowry, divorce, and labor. The family and the
state, as Sahgal narrates, have few walls between thern.
The study has also examined the relationship between
space and gender within Gandhian ideology. An analysis
of ~staken Tdentitv reveals that the materiality of
space defines and is i n turn defined by culture and
community. Ari extended connection is ürawn between
communalism and gender politics in India. Space appears
to be the comon denominator defining differences of
community and differences of gender. As such there is no
neutral space: al1 space -- the womb, the home, the £am,
the nation -- iç political.
The narratives use movement to explain the
redemptiveness of transgression. The novels present
cultural situations that forbid the free movement of
women, making the act punishable. Women ' s movement
across and into certain spaces is defined as
transgression. While admitting the inconveniences of
punishment, transgression becomes a motif that emphasizes
the desirability of the act. To transgress is to resist.
In al1 cases, a transgressirig woman character is on her
way to becoming a subject.
This study has chosen to focus on the private lives
of women as represented in Sahgal's novels. The choice
is grounded in the contention that the private is indeed
a public and political space. By lirniting itself to the
fictional representation of upper middle-class women this
study examines the marginalizing of citizens on account
of their gender as well as the potential for them to
relate to the nation from subject positions. As one
female character concludes in Rich Like rJs, "1 was young
and alive, with my own century stretched out before me,
waiting to be lived" (234). This awareness bourne out of
the discornforts of objectification explains the evolution
of women as Gandhian "subjectesses.
This study does not pay attention to the pre-
Gandhian years of colonialisrn. It does not, for
instance, include an in-depth analysis of
De~arture which narrates the exploits of Bal Gangadhar
Tilak and anticipates the arriva1 of Gandhi £ r o m South
Africa. The author's own immersion in Gandhian politics,
however, makes "pre-Gandhian" a practical impossibility.
P . l a n s can be interpreted as containing a fernale
protagonist who is a pre-Gandhi- Gandhi: Anna is too
much like Gandhi in her love of walks and children, and
yoga, her insistence on non-violence, and a vegetarian
diet to allow any pre-Gandhian analysis of ideological
representation in the novels of Sahgal.
Again, several of the themes that Sahgal details in
her later novels -- the subservience of women to their
husbands, the dilemma of Gandhian characters in a
changing Congress party, forbidden sex, the national
invisibility of women in an Independent India -- are as
well the subject of A Tirne to be H a ? m v . The text has
been excluded from this study precisely on account of the
repetition of these themes.
The critique itself mimics the structure of the
family: the chapters have moved from studies of the
daughter to that of wife and then widow/sati and finally
mother. The chapters represent the life of Sahgalls
female characters within Gandhian ideology. Once again
the critique of ideology, it may be said, is caught up in
the ideology it critiques.
The conclusion of this study is an understanding of
the thinking female subject of Gandhian ideology. The
subject of ideology is, according to Althusser,
interpellated by the ideology. The act of interpellation
presupposes a subject. Lacan, however, points out a
difference within interpellation -- the difference
between 'calling' and 'choosing': 'It is the subject who
is called - there is only he, therefore, who can be
chosen. There may be, as in the parable, many called and
few chosen, but there will certainly not be any others
except those who are calledu (47) . This study has
highlighted the location of the object and the subject
within processes of calling and choosing. Both object
and subject are effects of the ideology. While the
object is the effect of the imaginary order, the result
of what Lacan calls a ~~misconstructiona (meconnaissance)
(281), the subject is the consequence of the symbolic
order of ideology. As has been pointed out earlier, this
study works within the framework of Althusser's own
theory of ideology as illusion as well as allusion.
The thinking female subject is the knowledgeable
subject -- the woman who "knows" in the Cartesian sense
of 'cogito, ergo sum" as well as in its significant
parodic sense of "coitus. ergo sum." Once again, the
imaginary and the symbolic combine in the act of knowing.
Lacan uses the tems "connaissancew (where connaissance
may include meconnaissance) for the imaginary aspect and
"savoir" for the symbolic side of "knowledge" (281).
Sahgal's novels represent the evolving female
character within a Gandhian paradigm. The character is
a literary intervention that registers the conflict
between the author's feminism and her Gandhian
nationalism. Where Gandhian programs of the emancipat ion
of women are subordinate to nationalist goals. the kind
of freedorn envisioned for India doeç not actually require
equal f reedom for women. An "independent" India not only
hides its dependance on its women rather well but also
promises comfort for those women who will be "good" (in
their subservience). Sahga18s female characters resist
this goodness to claim for themselves an equal
citizenship within a Gandhian nation.
Within Gandhian ideology there is a "responsibility"
to "save the nation." This onus lies in the ferninine.
Gandhi referred to himself as \'motherM and \\womanf' during
his years of service to the nation. On the other hand he
dreaded the \'emasculation" of the nation by the British.
The practical space of compromise is the female body --
not just the ferninine, but women. The responsibility of
saving the nation thus lies on women, specifically,
"good" women. Sahgal rewrites social narratives with
newly found hope and not so 'good' women.
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