Clara A.B. Joseph

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in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Programme in English York University

North York, Ontario

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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.

To Mammai & Pappai: Merina Joseph Veetuvelikumel George Joseph Anandasserry

v i i

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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