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Chapter 2

Thwarted Desires: Emotional Crisis

Diverse cultures, societies and situations do make women diverse in nature,

but there are certain issues which are universal to the whole of womankind. A woman

of any origin, belonging to any strata of society goes through emotional upheavals in

life. In her work The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan who is regarded as the

harbinger of the second wave of American feminism brings out the fact that women,

who apparently have everything to make them happy and comfortable, cannot trace

the source of dissatisfaction and the cause of the emotional distress that they suffer.

Friedan realizes that this happens because women can not gratify their basic needs,

and can not fulfil their desires or exist as human beings.

An attempt has been made in this chapter to focus on the emotional aspects of

the conflicts experienced by the heroines and the manner in which they are resolved in

Shashi Deshpande’s A Matter of Time and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Sister of My

Heart. Social, cultural and mainly psychological factors are the perpetuators of

emotional crisis in the female. She is eager to do a number of things but is thwarted

by the various pressures of life. Shashi Deshpande’s and Chitra Banerjee

Divakaruni’s works deal with modern middle class urban women’s problems in an

authentic and sympathetic manner. They deftly portray the needs and demands of new

women and their inability to fulfil them because the age-old traditions expect them to

be obedient, passive, submissive and self-denying. These contradictory demands of

the self and society create conflicts in their lives and make them neurotic.

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Both the novels taken up in this chapter describe the peculiar problems of

women who have for one reason or the other lost the support of their husbands. They

brace themselves up to the situation and the process through which they pass reflects

how the social situation determines a woman’s thinking. Life is not a bed of roses for

any of them and the way in which they respond to the problems of their lives reflects

the difference in the manner in which women of different generations respond to the

thwarting of their desires. A Matter of Time describes three generations of women.

While the first Kalyani compromises with a husband who never speaks to her, the

second Sumi does not try to patch up with her alienated husband Gopal, and the third

Aru wishes to take her father to task for having abandoned them. In Sister of My

Heart one witnesses how the two mothers cope up with widowhood and sacrifice their

own needs and desires for the sake of their daughters. Anju and Sudha (the daughters)

in turn experience upheavals in their lives which makes them more like the post

feminist women who are powerful and not influenced by emotional judgements alone.

They derive strength from their inner resources.

The basic view of feminism is that civilization is pervasively patriarchal. It is

male- centered and is organized and conducted in such a way as to subordinate

women to men in all cultural domains: familial, religious, political, economic, social,

legal, and artistic. Simone de Beauvoir notes,

Since patriarchal times women have, in general, been forced to occupy

a secondary place in the world in relation to men… in spite of the fact

that women constitute numerically at least half of the human race”, and

that “this secondary standing is not imposed of necessity by natural

feminine characteristics but rather by strong environmental forces of

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education and social traditions under the purposeful control of men.

(233)

We can say that while one’s sex is determined anatomy, the prevailing concept

of ‘gender’ – of the traits that constitute what is masculine and what is feminine, are

largely cultural constructs that were generated by the omnipresent patriarchal biases

of our civilization.

Myths and legends that are also products of a male-oriented culture play an

important role in formulating the ideas on which woman is to base her life. Certain

role-models in every society determine the attitudes and expectations of women and

the inherent contradictions in culture make it difficult for women to indulge in their

desires. The conflict for Indian women arises when they try to carve out a viable

space for themselves in the society which is suffering from Sita-Savitri Syndrome. In

the debate on nationalism and colonial history as well, gender and sexuality have been

central to the conceptualization, expression and enactment of such relations across the

colonial spectrum. The nation/state or its guiding principles have often been imagined

literally as a ‘woman’, e.g.

The world's two primordial great epics, Ramayana by Valmiki and

Mahabharata by Ved Vyasa, both centre around the characters of Sita & Draupadi,

who are the archetypes of ideal womanhood from the male view point. The role

women play in literature and life in the past and present in both parts of the globe is

almost similar. In ancient Vedic literature, women were deified and there is a patron

goddess for every aspect of life but in reality a contradictory state of affairs exists in

India. Various questions arise regarding the actual status of woman such as who is the

real woman? Where is the real woman - What is her real entity? Has she an identity of

46

her own? The primordial myths gave woman an identity that is stereotypical and has

been reinforced by archetypes for ages. Sita of Ramayana and Draupadi of the

Mahabharata are considered to be the two poles of feminine experience in the world.

Sita absorbs all inflicted misery and humiliation of the male ego whereas Draupadi

challenges the male ego to the epitomic limits of human excellence. Sita accepts,

accommodates and withdraws. Draupadi resents, rejects and involves herself in the

process of life as a protagonist and yet never transgresses the rules. These two

feminine archetypes define the limits of feminine experience in reality, especially the

Indian Reality. There may not be an open articulation of the necessity for Indian

women to follow the examples of Sita and Savitri but these figures being an

inseparable part of our psyche make it mandatory for women to do so. The female

protagonists of A Matter of Time and Sister of My Heart are also supposed to tolerate

the whims of their male counterparts like their mythical predecessors. Respectability

will be granted to them only if they conform-that perhaps explains Kalyani’s

desperate desire to be able to apply kumkum and Sumi’s pretence that everything is

normal in her broken marriage. It is the necessity to appear ideal Indian women that

determines the behavior of the two mothers, as well as Anju and Sudha in

Divakaruni’s Sister of My Heart. This is done at the cost of personal happiness and

under great emotional duress.

Even in the present day literature woman is presented an unresisting tolerant

person. The traditional values of feminine grace and order are not eschewed

completely. She is now a more dignified Sita who shows her strength of character by

absorbing all male atrocities or an intellectual Draupadi protesting and revolting

against all humiliation. The gender divide in modern Indian literature moves between

new iconizations of these two bold and primordial figures who dominate over it since

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ages. There is silent suffering coupled with utmost loyalty to man in the Sita type and

woman as an individual demanding social justice in the Draupadi types. The latter has

got greater appreciation. As Deshpande also says that:

Myths are still important to us. We do not want to demolish them, we

need them to live by; they have shaped our ideas for a great many

years, they embody our dreams. To destroy them would be to leave a

large rent in the fabric of our culture…In India, specially, myths have

an extraordinary vitality, continuing to give people some truth about

themselves and about the human condition. (Deshpande, Writing from

the Margin and Other Essays 99)

It is not arejection of myths but an adaptation of them to suit the needs of a

modern woman that is desirable. To quote Shashi Deshpande again, “We don’t reject

the ideals, but we know we can’t approximate to these pictures of ideal womanhood.

And we will not bear any guilt that we cannot do so. More important than knowing

what we are not, is to know what we are, what is possible for us.” (100)

In Deshpande’s works the contexts, figures and situations are mythological but

the responses and reactions of her protagonists are akin to those of contemporary

women. The characters are portrayed as reactionary. She deconstructs the ideal male-

devised mythological models to search and create what Chaman Nahal calls

“replacement models.” Elaborating on the term “replacement model” he writes:

It is very difficult to construct a replacement model. One cannot escape

the myth-the conditioning myth with which one has grown up. Unless

we construct new myths, we cannot construct replacement model. We

all revere Sita and Savithri; they did something out of loyalty, out of

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dedication. We may not like it today, but can we disown them? We

cannot escape the myths. So, the replacement models are to be

constructed in the context of the myths we already have. (18)

We can easily draw parallels between the archetypes of woman and the

protagonists of both Shashi Deshpande and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. The image of

woman in literature emerges out of the existing world. The existing world obtains in

the mind and imagination of the visualizers of reality. In India, which has been

regarded by sociologists as a traditionally male dominated society, both men and

women writers have seen woman in relationship with man, primarily as mother, wife,

mistress and sex object. Woman as an achiever is either non-existent or considered an

exception. A woman's individual self has been given very little recognition, and her

emotional turmoil generally results out of the frustration resulting from this.

Carol Gilligan, professor of Gender studies at Harvard University since 1997,

opines that women are sensitive to the needs of others and play the role of a nurturer,

caretaker and helpmate instead of paying heed to their own needs. But men neither

value their love, care and concern nor reciprocate these values. Her seminal work, In

a Different Voice (1982), is based on the interviews “about conceptions of self and

morality, about experiences of conflict and choice” (2). Her study is highly

illuminating when study of the causes of conflicts in the minds of female protagonists

of A Matter of Time by Shashi Deshpande and Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee

Divakaruni is undertaken. The protagonists Sumi in A Matter of Time and Sudha in

Sister of My Heart are the victims of devaluation of desired feminine virtues- care,

nurturance, self-denial, self-sacrifice, tolerance which brings their life to a standstill

and they find themselves unable to move on. Deshpande opines that when the

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expectations based on role models and ideals to be followed are belied by the realities

of life, stress and depression set in.

The role models and ideals come down to them through traditions, faith,

dogma and mythology. As Madhu Kishwar opines, the mythical ideal woman is

presented

as a selfless giver, someone who gives endlessly, gracefully, smilingly,

whatever the demand, however harmful to herself. She gives not just

love, affection and ungrudging service but also, if need be, her health

and ultimately her life at the altar of duty to her husband, children and

rest of the family. (In Search 48)

The image of the ideal woman the so called ‘angel in the house’ exists in

Western patriarchy as well. Besides, this sense of duty in the woman makes her

practice a morality that makes her feel responsible for the welfare of the family.

Cultural constructs also teach her to feel guilty if anything goes wrong whatever the

reason for this may be.

Gilligan opines that man’s morality has ‘justice orientation’ whereas woman’s

morality has ‘responsibility orientation’ as it is more relational and based on the ethics

of care. Sumi, the female protagonist in the novel A Matter of Time, provides an

excellent example of ‘responsibility orientation’ of women’s morality as explained by

Carol Gilligan. Her husband Gopal faces certain conflicts in his personal life, finds

himself unable to move on, decides to leave home and easily turns his back towards

family responsibility. He is bothered about his own conflicts regarding life and death,

morality and futility of life but does not think about the impact of his decision on the

family. In spite of being in a shocked state, Sumi decides to fulfill her responsibility

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towards her three grown- up daughters. Forgetting her distress, she proves to be a

strong support to her daughters. To the astonishment of the daughters Sumi’s behavior

on the day her husband announces their separation is so routine like that it makes it

“so difficult for them to understand the enormity of what has happened” (10). She sets

the tone for them; they go through the motions of their normal routine. Sumi’s

calmness and normality, makes it possible for them to think that it was a usual fight

between the parents and makes it possible for them to hope-‘he will come back’. In

Divakaruni’s Sister of My Heart we notice similar traits in Gauri Ma, Anju’s mother

who not only takes the responsibility of Anju, but also her husband’s cousin’s family

on her shoulders, after her husband’s death. Sudha in few words brings out her

character

Lines of hardship are etched around her mouth and on her forehead, for

she was the one who shouldered the burden of keeping the family safe

on that thunderclap day eight years ago when she received the news of

our fathers’ death. But her eyes, dark and endless- deep- they make me

think of Kaldighi, the enormous lake behind the country mansion our

family used to own before Anju and I were born. (5)

The basic nature of woman is that she is emotional; this is an essential element

of her femininity. She experiences emotional disturbances due to various reasons. In

the process of life, it is the selflessness of woman, societal and family pressures which

give rise to emotional turmoil. This chapter discusses emotional upheavals of Chitra

Banerjee Divakaruni’s and Shashi Deshpande’s heroine’s whose response to crises is

different from that of their predecessors. With greater freedom of expression being

granted to them, the woman novelists of today bring out the emotional stress of their

protagonists and try to resolve it as best as possible.

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Both the novelists depict the emotional lives of their protagonists from various

angles. The causes for emotional stress are many-they are daughters, mothers and

individuals in their own right. So the ups and downs of life have their repercussions

on their relationship with the world around them. A study of A Matter of Time by

Shashi Deshpande and Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni will verify

the fact that women both as writers of fiction and as characters in fiction have

acquired a new face. We no longer witness the sentimental outbursts that preoccupied

the mind of Anita Desai’s early heroines and made them revel in their misery.

Running away from home, taking a more desperate step as committing suicide are

some of the ways in which women put an end to their emotional problems. In Shashi

Deshpande and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni however, the resolution of emotional

issues is different.

Sometimes the woman is an activist who wields justice and power with self

controlled detachment. Deshpande’s woman characters are activists though Shashi

Deshpande is not professedly a feminist. She protests in a paper presented at a

seminar

It is curious fact that serious writing by women is invariably regarded

as feminist writing. A woman who writes of women’s experiences

often brings in some aspects of those experiences that have angered

her, caused her strong feelings, I don’t see why this has to be labeled

feminist fiction. (Deshpande “The Dilemma of Woman Writers”, 33)

Men and women in her novels fight shoulder to shoulder against a common foe, the

establishment. The women break through the tradition of home, hearth and veil to

fight the establishment with whatever weapons they can wield-or with sulking

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detachment. In Deshpande’s novels women are all domesticated characters who revolt

against the dogma ridden society to find solutions for their emotional turmoil. Though

their voice echoes in the far horizon the rebellion remains inside the four walls of the

household. She depicts through her bold and reformist woman characters the

declining values and transformative adjustment between tradition and modernity,

between desire and decision, with natural psychological stress that ensues. Her

woman characters are not mute; they are ever questioning and cannot be daunted by

any pretext. This may also mean that she is a “revisionist questioning the adequacy of

accepted conceptural structures.”(Showalter 333) This may be taken to mean that

“Deshpande converts a muted woman into a “talking woman” and provides the cause,

will strength and means to articulate the silence of woman.” (Pandey 82) Her women

confront the problems of modern life but they basically stick to the roles of being

ideal wives and mothers. In fact most of the woman writers in India themselves attach

utmost value and dignity to their biological and social roles. Only sometimes while

retaliating or taking revenge do they transcend all limits of dignity even probability.

Shashi Deshpande does not go to the extreme because she knows that the “wails of

anguish or thunder of curses or growls of anger do not by themselves turn into great

literature.” (Kripalani 109)

There are of course many writers projecting the image of the new woman and

there are as many writers writing in the traditional vein about the meek suffering,

devoted wife and self abnegating mother. Literature of rebellion in India has to be

therefore understood with great care in the context of the heritage of our social laws,

our literary audience and its relationship to the inherent social code. Over years, the

age old image of the woman seems to be slowly blurring and gradually shading off in

to a new image. What is now needed is that a new man/or society must arise and then

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with an equal partner the change that is going on in the new woman at home and

outside home could be portrayed with fulfilling experience. Where is the new man

who must welcome comparatively vocal women characters who boldly protest and

assert their right in the society with firmness and dignity? They have presented a

psychological insight into the inner character of woman with all its conflicts and

contradictions with authenticity and truthfulness in such a way as to carry our

conviction. It must be kept in mind that mostly it is the middle class educated urban

woman who has carved a niche for herself. Women in the rest of the country are for

the most part still dogma ridden due to lack of education.

There is the enlightened brave new woman and there is the helpless, illiterate

male-dominated woman existing side by side in life and in literature. An image of

woman in Indian literature is characterized by contradiction - there is a conventional

image and there is a protesting voice. Post independence literature reveals the

woman's quest for her identity giving rise to a number of issues. The new woman is

emerging and there are a number of new themes and issues to be taken by the future.

But we have to remember that family plays a pivotal role in the Indian scheme

of life. The new woman in Indian literature does not ever want to break the family but

dreams of how to make it "Home Sweet Home". If woman is absent, there is

ultimately no life in this world. But she is still walking on a tight rope to achieve her

right and social justice. Anees Jung in her book, Unveiling India rightly holds the

view:

In this complex pantheon of diversities the Indian woman remains the

point of unity, unveiling through each single experience a collective

consciousness prized by a society that is locked in mortal combat with

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the power and weakness of age and time. She remains the still centre,

like a centre in a potter’s wheel, circling to create new forms,

unfolding the continuity of a racial life, which in turn has encircled and

helped her acquire a quality of concentration. (26)

Indian woman at the turn of the century is in a transitional phase vis-a-vis the

interface of tradition and modernity. Indian literature shows that the situation of

woman is not free from the influence of family, history and social modernism which

causes the conflict between her desire for self-fulfillment and the necessity of doing

her duties and the two are often opposed.

The women in Indian literature are more educated, sophisticated and even rebellious,

wary of shedding off the traditional values which form part of their inherited

consciousness. Moreover western culture, which has had a dominating influence on

India in the pre and post independence years, is not necessarily the alternative heaven

for the new generation in India. Arundhati Roy's God of Small things, in spite of the

sophistication of the Kerala women does not advocate a "jumping off" for personal

fulfillment. Velutha and his woman still wait for a "tomorrow" without trying to ride

rough on traditions. Indian women often are pre occupied with the idea of soul, moksa

and bliss. These militate against concepts of freedom, self-fulfillment and personal

moksa.

A Matter of Time has a failed marriage as its narrative crux. Gopal, a

university professor, walks out of his twenty year old marriage, leaving his job and

almost all his material possessions. He starts living a near monastic, spare life in a

single room over the ramshackle printing press run by his former student, making

something of a meager living from the occasional copy-editing he does for the latter.

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The novel is more significantly about his wife, the beautiful and detached Sumi, and

about their eldest daughter, the eighteen year old politically inclined, self-identified

feminist Aru. Gopal is in fact the male character who gets the maximum sympathy,

well-roundedness and discursive space in all of Deshpande’s fiction. Sumi and her

family remain in touch with Gopal, a behavior rather inexplicable in the aftermath of

his abandonment of them. Keeping in view the society’s values, their attitude, is

strangely open and relatively uncritical, almost sympathetic of the spiritual and

philosophical turmoil within Gopal. Only Aru is occasionally harsh in her criticism of

the father. Caron Gilligan’s theory is apt here she says:

Since masculinity is defined through separation while feminity is

defined through attachment, male gender identity is threatened by

intimacy while female gender indentity is threatened by separation.

Thus males tend to have difficulty with relationships, while females

tend to have problems with individuation. (8)

A Matter of Time gives an account of four generations of women who look at

life from different points of view. It reflects the changing attitudes of women that are

changing with the passage of time. Manorama, the grandmother is completely

orthodox and would like her daughter Kalyani’s husband (who has deserted her) to

return home, even if his return is merely that of a presence in the house. Kalyani too

accepts his reinstatement in the household because this gives her the satisfaction of

being able to wear the ‘kumkum’ the sign of respectability, which married women

adorn and treasure. Living as an estranged wife is easier for her than to live as a

separated wife. However, when history repeats itself in the case of Sumi and Gopal,

Kalyani’s daughter and son-in-law, Sumi does not try to goad her husband into any

kind of compromise. Her eldest daughter Aru is ready to sue her father for his

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desertion of the family. This surely reflects the changing response to the emotional

upheavals in life- the younger generation is obviously more aggressive in its reaction

to the turmoils of life.

The tension experienced as deserted women is further complicated with the

responsibility of motherhood. Being a single parent is not an easy task for a woman to

handle alone. In A Matter of Time we notice the stress on Kalyani and Sumi who have

daughters of their own to look after. Their strength as individuals is put to test and the

capability proved by the fact that these women do not give up or surrender themselves

Kalyani very bravely bears the burden of bringing up her daughters Sumi and Premi,

even after experiencing the trauma of losing her son, and her husband Shripati’s

withdrawal. Her husband’s silence pricks her all the more when she sees her daughter

Sumi going through a similar phase in life. In turn Sumi who is also separated from

her husband has a more difficult task to accomplish, because she is afraid that any

exhibition of emotions will affect her daughters who are still in the process of

growing up. So it is necessary for her to maintain her outer calm. “She shows no

outward sign of distress, but the girls notice a new habit in her, of touching them,

holding their hands, smoothing their hair, as if this physical contact is a manifestation

of some intense emotion within her.”(33)

But within, Sumi is in mayhem as she has to take major decisions about

settling down and about the future of her daughters. Aru notices in her mother a kind

of “purposeless extravagance about her movements, an exaggeration that is different

from her normal vivacity and quickness.” (33) The abrupt disintegration of her family

does not crumble her, desertion leaves Sumi seemingly unperturbed. But beneath the

façade of quietude is the suffering which she faces bravely. She undertakes the

journey of her life with her three teenage daughters and readjusts her lifestyle to suit

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the situation she is in. Aru, Sumi’s daughter who is obsessed with the idea of suing

her father, is however, too proud to show her grief to her father or request him to

come home. Kalyani, Sumi and Aru all three of them face emotional tumult due to

various psychological factors that disturb their mental state but it is their acceptance

of their situation and stoicism that helps these characters tide over their disturbed

emotional lives. Shashi Deshpande in her talk on ‘The Indian woman-Stereotypes,

Images and Realities states: “The good woman-whether she is the wife, mother, sister

or daughter-in-law doesn’t matter-is always so selfless that she negates herself to the

point of extinction.”

In the extended family that Shashi Deshpande presents, two or three

generations live together. Deshpande has looked into woman’s changing perspectives

and their search for bonding within family as a mode of strength. Her young heroines

rebel against the traditional way of life and patriarchal values. Jaya, Sarita and Sumi

perceive the structuring of men and women in gendered roles, restricting their human

potentiality and fullness. They struggle to transcend the restrictive roles. They rebel,

reject and seek freedom from the traditional norms and way of life. Shashi

Deshpande’s portrayal of the women of different generations presents the world of

women divided into the traditional and modern.

Feminism is at the core of her novels. She deals with the woman’s psyche and

the way she is made to feel an inferior being, an unwanted child, a burden on the

family, especially in case of Kalyani. There is conjugal relationship between Kalyani

and Shripati. The lack of communication between them impinges on the wider issues

of patriarchy that influences the successive generations. While clearing the cupboard

one day Sumi comes across a photograph of her parents which she feels is unnatural

and obscene. Her mother Kalyani is dressed in heavy bridal silk sari and looks

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childishly thin and the heavy necklaces seem to make her neck droop. Whereas her

father, “The man on the other hand is stern, his eyes hooded, arms folded across his

chest in the usual ‘manly pose’ demanded by the photographers for such pictures.”

Sumi can speculate looking at the picture that the sternness “here is not a pose, it is

real. And the way he is standing, he gives the impression of being by himself, wholly

unaware of the girl sitting by him. His wife.” (26) History repeats itself in the life of

Sumi. But on both occasions Kalyani and Sumi are silent. Kalyani suffers silently.

She fears a similar fate for Sumi. Kalyani’s fears are based on patriarchal oppression

that condemns women to the margins of silence. She is made to realize that while

losing her son, a male heir, she had abandoned her motherhood as well as her right as

a wife. Her punishment is that she has to live with this psychic wound. She is

compelled to accept her passivity. For nearly thirty-five years she remains a passive

silent sufferer. Her body becomes a ‘sight of colonizing power.’ Like colonized

subjects, women too have been ‘colonized’ by various forms of patriarchal

domination. They share with colonized races the politics of oppression and repression.

Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood have portrayed the

similarities between colonized races and women.

Undue importance is given to motherhood, especially giving birth to a male

child, makes a woman more respected in society. This is yet another form of male

domination. A childless woman is discriminated against by both men and women. In

this context P.G.Joshi says that “What is ironic is that owing to the long tradition of

such discrimination such unfortunate women themselves feel that they are barren and

handicapped.” (121) Shripati never forgives Kalyani because their male child is lost

through her negligence. In Deshpande’s other novels also one can witness similar

reactions. In Binding Vine also Sulu feels that her husband is justified in his threats to

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throw her out on the streets and marry another woman who can give him a child. In

Long Silence Nayana is one such woman whose husband threatens to marry another

woman for a male child. During every pregnancy Nayana hopes to have a son.

Kalyani is also worried about her daughter Sumi, in Sumi’s life there is

vaccum because of Gopal’s abandonment. She tries to find out clues to the probable

motives of his past acts and utterances. She recalls that Gopal once mentioned that Sa-

hriday in the sense of oneness is an impossible concept. One day he realizes that he is

failing the idealistic expectations of his marriage. He can not feel himself a Sa-hriday

with Sumi and is getting out of step with her. The break down of their marriage has

circumscribed Sumi in an unexpected condition. Gopal’s absence leaves her in a state

of vast emptiness. She feels, “I can’t find my bearings, there are no markers any more

to show me which way I should go.”(63) Yet it is from the depth of her despair that

she tries to transform her emptiness into meaning in order to redefine her identity. She

does not remain a passive mother, but becomes an active agent. We cannot forget that

Sumi, like her mother, is a suffering oppressed and wronged woman. Yet she does not

question the man, her oppressor.

In the web of family history, Sumi and Shripati are killed in an accident. No

solution is found to their problem. The ‘Big House’ watches one more generation

going down in history and one generation struggling under the impact of a relentless

fate. Sumi’s daughter Aru is a rebel, she refuses to remain passive. She approaches

her father Gopal not expecting any sympathy from him, but because she wants to

expose the strange behavior of her father.

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Silence is a major cause of emotional distress in women, the most striking

example of this is Kalyani who spends nearly forty years without speaking with her

husband, Shripati. Sumi also at times wonders

is that what has helped Kalyani to endure everything, the fact that she

is a wife and not a widow? The fact that she has the right to all the

priveleges of the wife of a living husband? Sumi remembers the tray of

kumkum, paan-supari and coconut Manju brought her, she thinks of

the old woman’s words, ‘What is a woman without her husband? (167)

Sumi further questions whether it is enough to have a husband who has never

looked at you or spoken to you for decades “but her kumkum is intact and she can

move in the company of women with the pride of a wife.” One of the major reasons

for the thwarting of women’s desires is the restriction on their freedom of expression.

Regarding silence in women Adrienne Rich states that

speech, assertiveness, even confidence, are discouraged in women

during processes of socialization, because such qualities are assumed

to be unfeminine, and therefore threatening to the status quo. For a

woman to break free from such constraints requires grappling with and

overcoming socialization and societal expectations of gender roles, and

also language, because the very language that surrounds us is a male–

dominated discourse, and of language of male domination over

women. (Qtd. in Greenberg 26).

For Deshpande, the privileged unit of the private sphere is the Indian extended

family, usually middle and upper-middle class, in its huge, sprawling expanse of

kinship networks that are nonetheless intricately woven. The shapes and structures of

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Deshpande’s families seem deeply moored in the verisimilitudes of a realist tradition

that is also rooted in a very local soil, with regional values and cultural politics.

Rooted in specific cultural and geographical spaces that deeply shape their texture,

usually locales in Karnataka and Maharashtra, the two states of peninsular India

where Deshpande has spent most of her life. The family looms large as a powerful

and a paradoxical structure, replete in equal amounts with love, care, pettiness,

rivalry. Within the discursive space of the narrative framework such family structures

often seem near-complete by themselves, contained in their local, private lives, and

the upheavals in the public sphere seem very far away. It is perhaps not coincidental

that almost all of these fully-rounded private lives that are fore grounded as the

principal motifs in Deshpande’s novels belong to women. They are usually well-

educated, sometimes professionally established, often torn between the visible and

invisible networks of tradition that center on the overarching family-structures, they

are a part of on one hand, and a liberal bourgeois modernity on the other, neither of

which is spared a persistent critique.

The web of patriarchy, both obviously constructed and intricately spun, in the

minds of these female protagonists causes the dilemma. These characters variously

battle, aid, rebel against or are complicit with, and respond to it with anger, despair,

resentment, resignation, reflection, acceptance. The lives of the protagonists often

move back and forth between the turmoil-ridden spaces of home and family networks

on one hand and larger public or professional spheres on the other. The professional

sphere is like an indirect shadow which is rarely given adequate discursive space

within the narrative frameworks.

But interestingly, most of the incidents that cause emotional upheavals are

usually placed outside the narrative frameworks of the novels, from where they

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trigger off a series of tremors that propel the fractured movements of the internal

consciousness. The narratives, deal with the deeper issues of women’s consciousness

and the reasons for this emotional turmoil but they are rooted in the mundanity of

their daily routine existence.

Deshpande’s protagonists, especially Urmi and Sumi share something of a

detached composure that makes such returns to the banal and reassuring texture of

everyday life both a natural and a necessary process. In A Matter of Time, After Gopal

has left his family and Sumi and her three daughters leave their home and come and

start living with Sumi’s parents, the enormity of the sudden change in their lives is

refracted through the minute nuances of everyday physical, domestic life, probably

because such verisimilitude is the easiest to admit in the middle of such loss and

shock.

‘We’re staying the night,’ Sumi had said, but it is obviously going to be a

much longer stay. The girls who have brought nothing with them but a nightdress and

a toothbrush each, have to keep moving up and down between the two houses,

getting the things they need for each day, living, not out of suitcases, but out of plastic

bags. Aru, with her innate sense of order, has to work hard at not becoming part of the

house, putting things in a kind of temporary order, so that the mattresses, rolled up

each morning, are left on the floor and the clothes, folded as soon as they are dried,

are not put away but piled on the table. “The room is like a guest’s, who, having to

catch a train in the evening, is almost packed and ready to leave. Kalyani enters the

game, too; the extra cups, plates and glasses go back into the storage after every meal,

from where they have to be retrieved each time they are needed.” (12)

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Objecting to Aru doing housework, Sumi’s mother Kalyani says that she

should rather be spending time studying and having fun; she shouldn’t get involved in

“this mustard seed of domestic life” (36). But neither Aru nor the other two daughters

really end up staying away from the mustard seed of domestic life; as days go by and

it becomes clear that their grandparents’ house is going to be their home for an

indefinite period, perhaps permanently, they give up the charade of playing guests and

become insiders, immersing in the dailiness and the minute banalities of their lives

there. The loss of their home and family remains a permanent displacement — both

physical and psychological — but as in all Deshpande’s novels, life always falls into a

pattern. The humblest detail of one’s daily routine has its own, unique place and these

women return to the very site of loss and displacement no matter how intense the

feeling of these may be. The desire to keep one away from the mustard seed of

domestic life is therefore, a larger metaphor for the drift between the life-changing

upheavals and the predictable, routine rhythms of the everyday whose very texture is

identifiable by its banality as much as its indispensability.

The routinely patterned everyday is the site where most of the narrative

present of her novels is constituted, outside whose immediate framework the upsetting

tremors of private lives are located. Banality and locality are therefore mutually

contingent in Deshpande’s novels, in that, like much modernist fictions, they define

and constitute each other. The very constitution of banality is at least partially a

cultural phenomenon, as an object or a practice is established as banal, ordinary,

insignificant or a negligible part of the everyday only within the parameters of

specific cultures. The ‘banal’ and the ‘colorful’ or ‘exotic’ can therefore occupy the

same sites, depending on the perspective and the cultural position of the viewer. Many

of Deshpande’s women, and almost all the protagonists are caught in such interstitial,

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conflict-ridden spaces between indigenous traditions and a liberal bourgeois

modernity, simultaneously appreciating and critiquing both.

Undoubtedly, tolerance, love, kindness and faithfulness are widely

acknowledged traits of female nature, but self assertion is not to be viewed as contrary

to these values. It is on this point that the feminist in Shashi Deshpande steps in, she

presents the woman’s picture of woman. She brings to surface the protesting and

defiant aspect of her character. These are the protagonists who consciously resolve to

fight and overcome domination which obviously leads to emotional upheaval in their

lives

In Divakaruni’s Sister of My Heart Anju and Sudha’s mothers are living

together with Pishi in the same house and the task of bringing up two daughters is not

an easy one. Nalini, Sudha’s mother is the typical traditional woman who allows

herself to drift along in life but Anju’s mother is not one to be cowed down by

circumstances. She runs the bookstore and tries to provide the best kind of upbringing

to the two girls born after their fathers had gone away from home. Bad health does not

prevent her from doing her best for the girls. She wants them to be settled before she

dies. She takes things in her stride and unlike the rest of the society does not condemn

the two daughters for the fact that they were born the day their fathers died. If

motherhood is difficult it is also satisfying, Sudha runs away from her in-laws home

because her motherhood is threatened when her mother in-law wants her to abort her

female foetus. For her child she is ready to bear any amount of emotional stress,

because motherhood compensates for all other setbacks in life. Sudha having tried

assiduously for a baby, but with no success is desperate she says,

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I felt motherhood was my final chance at happiness. Perhaps I believed

it would give me back what wifehood had taken away. Or perhaps it is

just that desire lies at the heart of human existence. When we turn

away from one desire, we must find another to cleave to with all our

strength-or else we die. (183)

Simone de Beauvoir’s observation: “It is much more difficult, as things are,

for her to escape from her woman’s past, to attain an emotional balance that nothing

in her situation favours”, sums up a major cause of disturbance in life of women.

Echoes from the past cause emotional stress in the novel, Anju and Sudha the

heroines in this novel fight with their emotions as young girls because they both were

born the day their father’s died. Sudha could not forget the whispers she had heard

umpteen times and her mind goes over the words she has overheard that Bidhata

Purush doesn’t come for “girl babies who are so much bad luck that they cause their

father’s to die even before they are born.” (6) The taunts they have to face in school

from their classmates. The distrust Sudha feels about not being able to share with her

cousin Anju, the family secret and carry the weight of it all her life, the truth that her

father Gopal brought the catastrophe to the Chatterjee family. Pishi tries to vindicate

her of her guilt by saying, “whatever your father did it’s not your fault.” (21) But

Sudha still takes the whole burden upon herself.

Unlike the magic realism used in her first novel, Sister of My Heart (1999) is

written in the realist mode and describes the complicated relationships of a family in

Bengal. Born in the big old Calcutta house on the same tragic night that both their

fathers were mysteriously lost, Sudha and Anju are distant cousins, and are brought

up together. They are more intimate than sisters, and they share clothes, worries,

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dreams. The Chatterjee family fortunes are at low ebb, as there are only widows at

home– the girls’ mothers, and their aunt. The novel’s forty-two chapters are set as a

sort of extended dialogue that is multi-tiered and over-layered. The chapters

themselves are alternately titled, Anju and Sudha, and contain within their folds,

techniques that are epistolary, and topography that is trans-cultural.

Love is a major cause of emotional stress in women’s lives. In Sister of My

Heart Sudha and Ashok have a strange courtship and given a chance Sudha would

marry him. But, societal pressures and her loyalty towards her mother prevent her

from succumbing to the temptations offered by love. She ends up getting married to

Ramesh, a respectable man, belonging to her own caste and class, and the problems

that follow are dealt with bravely. Sudha is unhappy with her condition but she does

not take any drastic step in life lest it should have an evil effect on her family. She

does not leave her home and come away because this could also put Anju’s marriage

at stake.

At every stage love poses a problem for Sudha. Her falling in love during the

school days deprives her of her freedom. She is not allowed to leave the house, not

even for school. And when she is marriageable age, she is of the belief that if Ashok

really loves her, if he really wants to marry her, “he’s got to make the first move.”(99)

Anju cannot comprehend Sudha’s stubbornness. Sudha who is madly in love with

Ashok has an ‘unfocussed look in her eyes’ when it actually comes to standing against

her mother’s wishes. Sudha contrasts her life to the fairy tale dreams, where she is

rescued from monsters by the prince and “when in some place impervious to logic,

she turned Ashok into the prince who has to save her from the clutches of the wicked

king.” (100). It is very difficult to understand her psyche. She wants to spend her life

with Ashok but being a fatherless child she cannot afford to take a radical step of

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getting married against her mother’s desires. This is a major cause of emotional

distress for Sudha. She is bound by her own psyche and the Sita Savitri syndrome

which tells her that it is wrong to go against her mother’s wishes and make her

unhappy.

Nalini Ma Sudha’s mother actually finds a suitable match for Sudha in their

own caste and a respectable one, that’s when she realizes that it is too late and she

should write to Ashok. They even make plans of secretly getting married but her

realization that eloping would have an adverse effect on Anju’s lately fixed marriage

to Sunil prevents her from doing so. Sunil’s father would never let him marry a girl

whose cousin eloped with a man she met in a movie house.

Divakaruni’s heroines also face emotional constraints, for they also are unable

to express themselves. Sudha becomes strangely silent, particularly after marriage

about her mother-in-laws behavior towards her. The letters she would write to Anju

were as cheerful as ever, without any mention of her mother-in-law’s accusations, for

not being able to give her a grandson. Anju in whom Sudha always confided, wonders

I could understand her not wanting to bad-mouth her mother-in-law,

but why couldn’t she have written to me of how she felt about not

becoming pregnant? Together we would have grieved and raged and

thought up a way of coping, as we used to do as girls. (191)

The protagonists of both Deshpande and Divakaruni become even more silent

after they are married. As girls they grow up negotiating their mothers’ traditional

Indian value systems and desires with the Westernized philosophies influencing their

own generation, and afterwards compromise with their spouses. Anju in Sister of My

Heart follows her husband to America and grows stronger and more independent as

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she undergoes acculturation processes, while Sudha, whose marriage is unhappy,

stays in India but leaves her husband to raise her child on her own, thereby drawing

cultural disapproval upon herself. The acculturation process might make a woman

more self-governing and autonomous but it does affect her emotionally and

psychologically. Divakaruni’s protagonists undergo emotional restraint because they

are positioned in the adopted country. Divakaruni constantly observes herself as an

immigrant in between Indian and American cultures, and she observes how other

women in her community, both Indian and Indian American, face the issues of culture

shock, old world and new world values, and acculturation. She illustrates the same

through her protagonists, who in the course of becoming self-determined are

emotionally shattered.

The intense pressure to conform to American ideals, and to retain ethnic

backgrounds pull immigrant children in two conflicting directions, resulting in mixed

and complex emotions. Anju and Sudha both feel that they had greater opportunities

for education, choice of studies in the U.S. but they realize that the freedom available

to women does not necessarily solve all their problems.

Anju and Sudha are not carried away by emotions as the earlier Sita Savitri women

were. Later on, when Anju feels cheated by her husband and leaves him to lead an

independent life, he regrets his infedelity and makes efforts to patch up with her. But,

Anju remains unrelenting. She does not return to seek refuge in her mother’s home,

nor does she get carried away by her husband’s desperate and persuasive efforts. She

decides to seek out some independent paths of survival and not break down. Sudha

too shows strength of character right from the beginning. She represses so many of

her desires for the sake of Anju and her mother and later on her child. She is married

to Ramesh and is forced to throttle a large number of her wishes. When she comes to

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America and realizes that she cannot fulfil her secret desires she goes away from

Anju’s home. And finally, she decides to return to India with her daughter. She also

refuses to marry the men who are now ready to accept her along with her daughter so

that she can bring up Dayita in a convent as freely as she wishes. She thinks she will

be able to escape the constraints of a life lived among family and community.

Distancing themselves from the influence of the homeland enables both Anju and

Sudha to take the difficult decision of leading independent lives.

As women, the protagonists of both Shashi Deshpande and Chitra Banerjee

Divakaruni face similar emotional constraints. In patriarchy, men come to assume the

dominative, and women assume the dominated mode. The protagonists of both prefer

to remain silent about their condition. In the case of Divakaruni, the silence leads to

separation. The silence of the protagonists in Shashi Deshpande’s novels has negative

connotations. It stands for passivity, fear, inactivity and escapism. Sumi’s silence

results in surrender and the loss of self. We notice similarities in Divakaruni’s

protagonist Sudha, who is silent and makes compromise after compromise, when she

should have spoken and asserted herself.

In Sister of My Heart Sudha is emotionally distressed because of lapsed

communication, inarticulate love and redemptive memories. Sudha remains silent on

her love for Ashok because she knows that it would affect Anju’s marriage. She

remains mute before her mother-in-law’s inscrutable and objectionable actions. She

carries out her duties of running the household without questioning anything the way

her mother-in-law wants. She is even voiceless when she is asked to undergo various

tests because she could not get pregnant in three years of her marriage. Though she

and her mother-in-law know that the problem lies in her husband and not her.

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To recognize Sudha’s character fully it would indeed fascinating to watch the

unveiling of the face of woman in Indian literature. Ancient Indian literature has an

esthetic vision and it goes beyond the hard reality of socio-economic facts. In ancient

Puranic literature Sita the heroine of the Great epic Ramayana and wife of Ram was

the embodied form of love devotion and purity. But she was also rebellious, and

revolted against the society's distrust of her character and entered into the earth. This

should not be misunderstood as suicide but rejection of the dogma- ridden society.

Sudha also ultimately runs away from her husband’s house because her mother-in-law

wants her to abort the female feotus.

The mothers in the Sister of My Heart face a major emotional dilemma. They

were pregnant when they get the telegram of their husbands being dead which sends

them both into early labor. They are blessed with the baby girls, which brings a lot of

responsibility for them. The responsibility of bringing them up in the finest way

possible, arranging their marriages and having them settled. They have to live with

comments from the people “For girl-babies who are so much bad luck that they cause

their fathers to die even before they are born.”(6)

The common ground of emotional stress in the protagonists of Deshpande and

Divakaruni are the ideological markers of modernism, the tension between tradition,

myth and memory on one hand and socio-politico-economic modernities on the other.

It is the love-hate relationship with the values and rites of her own society. And yet

their novels remind us that the relation between traditions and the epistemological

adventurousness of modernism can be a seamless one, where they do not so much as

rupture or overthrow the former. The fragmented interior monologues on part of their

protagonists minds are one evidence of this modernist strain on the process of

representation.

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The clear narrative tension between tradition and modernityon one hand and

the internal, fragmented life of the mind and its fluid movements through uncharted

territories on the other constitutes one of the most interesting elements of such fictions

and a reason for emotional crisis in lives of heroines of both writers. Both Deshpande

and Divakaruni find solace in returning to traditional solutions. They do not resort to

desperate methods of escape but look for solutions within themselves.

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