Desire of the Moth for the Star: Quest for Organic
Living
In
Hemang Desai
“Loneliness is part of all human beings.”1
-Shashi Deshpande
Modern as well as post modern Indian
English short stories written by women writers mark a signal departure from the
network of themes like nationalism, the cultural conflict between the East and
the West and confrontation of tradition and modernity, which frequently
informed the pre-independence literary gamut, in favour of personal and
individualistic themes dealing with the secretive problems and predicament
besetting the lives of women. The thematic and the ideological preoccupations
of the modern Indian short story by women…reflect the efforts of female mind in
India to redefine women in the context of the tremendous economic, social and
to some extent intellectual changes which have characterized the development of
last fifteen to twenty years.2 Shashi Deshpande is one such literary
voice which is pointedly devoted to the task of unearthing and unbosoming a
well-estimated account of deep-seated reality of female psyche and its
operation in post-colonial context. She does this by an exploration of the
myths and the stereotypes that they indubitably entail upon women and by
showing how entirely fallacious these stereotypes are. Simultaneously she tries
to furnish the reader with quintessential woman by closely analyzing the
woman’s psychological, emotional and intellectual needs and aspirations,
cravings and desires and the conflicts and catastrophes that they inevitably
bring in their wake. She explains,
“This has made it possible for us to
ask a great many questions, questions which had never been asked before.
Writers in
The artistic zoom lens through which
she approximates the social reality as well as the reality of the working of a
woman’s mind is tinctured with a finely honed sensibility – a refined and
heightened sense of perspicacity – that acts as a catalyst in charting out the
oscillograph of the woman’s inscape. Her stories center on ordinary Indian
women and verbalize their most intimate experiences and deal with issues that
are often buried in women’s silences with unprecedented candour. She has
ferreted out cogent truth of the woman’s emotional and cognitive manoeuvre: her
responses to situations and ideas, her thought-processes and nostalgia, her
vulnerability and daredevilry, her cravings and aversions all of which in turn
are shaped and affected, by and large, by the social milieu in its partial
manoeuvre. By shattering the matrix of man-made stereotypes into which women so
far have been stiflingly cast and by bringing the reader face to face with
their real nature, Shashi Deshpande tires to carve out the effigy of a new
woman who is more palatable and real to the mind of the reader. She seems to be
breathing life into what Elizabeth Cady has termed women of future.
“Thus far women have been mere echoes
of men. Our laws and constitutions, our creeds and codes, and customs of social
life are all of masculine origin. The true woman is yet a dream of future.”
Thus emotional estrangement and
temperamental incompatibility in man-woman relationship, a woman’s sense of
suffocation and alienation, their mute miseries and helplessness, inner
conflicts and trauma of ostracized existence are repeatedly explored by her in
a majority of her short stories. In her consummate delineation of miseries of
women’s life, she has held her spotlight on the collective forces of female
subordination such as sexual differentiation, denial of socio-economic
privileges, restrictive patterns of behaviour and lack of emotional and
intellectual life, under the shattering effects of which a woman gets
marginalized and in turn segregated from the mainstream of life.
The
story which, as the writer admits, wrote itself and which made the writer
conscious of her own voice is “The Intrusion” in which the protagonist writhes
under the ravages of psychological alienation, which assumes lethal proportions
when it is juxtaposed with physical union. With stethoscopic expertise the
writer endeavours to plumb the abstruse abysses of the psyche of pusillanimous,
just-married, dainty lass whose female sensitivity gets overshadowed by a
sex-maniac husband who heaves contumelies of ‘marital rape’ on her self on the
very first night of honeymoon. The husband is an accurate typification
of all those obtuse patriarchs whose only possible apprehension of marriage is
utilizing the otiose hours of solitariness into indulgence in the game of
‘relentless pounding’ and clawing. The husband quite guiltlessly extorts what
is due to him by the way of a forcible rape if it is not given to him
consent. He gets flabbergasted when she
denies him sexual access on account of their being unknown to each other. “Know
each other? What has that to do with it? Aren’t we married now?” (TIAOS p.40)
On the other hand her aspirations are diametrically different.
“I
had a great longing to go down, to scuff my bare toes in the sand, to pick up
shells and sit on the rocks, letting the friendly waves climb up my bare legs.
He would swim, I thought, and call out to me in a lazy way and I would respond
with a wave and a smile.” (TIAOS p.37-38)
Shashi
Deshpande has masterfully pinpointed the discrepancies in the ways in which
both sexes decipher the meaning of love, to wife love should cater the opiate
of soothing companionship rife with fervent reciprocation of affection and
loving care but the husband’s understanding is profoundly tinged with sheer celebration
of somatic union. Through this story the authoress seeks to sensitize the
reader to the pathetic condition of women entrapped in nuptial system where
they have to mutely countenance scores of humiliations, intrusion into privacy
and glum servility inflicted by gratuitous fiats.
The same theme gains resonance in
another story “It was Dark” where the writer castigates the matrimonial system
legalizing the acts of physical violation of a woman’s right to herself. The story is set in a tenebrous environment, which
palls over the house as a result of the rape unleashed upon the young and
innocent daughter. The girl was inveigled into taking a lift from the unknown
man and then fell a prey to his concupiscence. The flummoxed father scolds his
wife for not warning their daughter against the pitfalls, which a girl is
umpteen times vulnerable to. The wife revealingly ponders, “Do you rage against
the inevitable?” (TIAOS p.31) The dictum pungently demonstrates that the
harrowing experience is inevitably common to every woman’s life; the
regrettable difference between her and her daughter’s experiences is that in
the latter’s case it came earlier and out of wedlock. But that doesn’t palliate
the degree of horrendous sadism, brutal violence and subsequent feel of
humiliation that both the nightmarish experiences unmistakably exert. The
comment of the husband about the criminal has telltale bulge of irony: “This
man isn’t known offender-this seems to be his first offence…” (TIAOS p.31) The
husband himself is yet another reprobate but with a license for violence and
his crime doesn’t get publicized. But in the tribulations of both sorts the
woman has to submit taciturnly to make ‘things easier’. Speaking about ‘marital
rape’ Shashi Deshpande said:
“It
is part of the male idea of owning a woman’s body, of worst kind of violence
because it violates the woman’s inner self. It also destroys the delicate
fabric of between the two sexes.”3
The same vein of strangulating sense
of sequestration and helpless reticence runs through the story “My Beloved
Charioteer” where Arti’s mother, the protagonist, is
extremely surprised when she eavesdrops to the tête-à-tête of her daughter and
son-in-law. “And I stood outside and wondered- what could you be talking about?
I felt like I did when I looked at a book as a child before I learned to read.”
(TIAOS p.59) Her stupefaction emanates from her interminable training in
unfailing observance of wifely duties, like self-effacing, non-covetous,
demure, obedient and most importantly being
‘available’ to her husband all the time. The sheer loveless monotony and the
uncommunicative dreariness of the experience are mortifying. “
When he wanted me, he said ‘Come Here’. And I went. And when he
finished, if I didn’t get out of his bedfast enough, he said, ‘You can go.’ And
I got out.” (TIAOS p.59) The protagonist of the story unfailingly epitomizes
the stereotype of ‘good woman’ who uncomplainingly accepts her miserable lot as
definitive and irrevocably correct. Shashi Deshpande says,
“We may laugh at the crudeness with
which the movies present us with these stereotypes, but there is no doubt that
these women from the myths are a very powerful influence on us even today. To
be as pure as Sita, as loyal as Draupadi,
as beautiful as Lakshmi, as bountiful a provider as Annapoorna, as dogged in devotion as Savitri,
as strong as Durga - these are all the ultimate role
models we cannot entirely dismiss.”
In the story “An Antidote to Boredom”
lovemaking to a bland and stolid husband becomes obnoxious chore for the
protagonist. She fills like fill de joie as physical unification gains
upper hand over the concord of souls. She has a feeling “of being cheated, of
being defrauded of something that was the right of our womanhood.” (TIAOS P.
65) Consequently she traipses down the path of perversion as an inevitable
backlash against asphyxiating privation and enters a liaison with a man whose
genial liveliness presents a propitious contrast to her crass husband. This
vivacious man is solicitously mindful of each and every trivialities
appertaining to the physical as well as emotional metabolism of the
protagonist. He gives her what she craved for, “And the thought of meeting him
kept me keyed up to a more intense pitch of living…until then, nobody had cared
what I wore, how I dressed.” (TIAOS p.64)
If we get down to the bedrock of the
generic connubial discord which significantly underscores these stories, we can
infer that all the female protagonists unerringly pine for emotional
cohesiveness and its unmitigated absence in their post-nuptial life renders
them morose, disconcerted and sometimes insurgent. Their dolorous psychological
syndrome is a corollary of the pitch-dark pall of the loneliness and seclusion
that cloud their emotional firmament depriving them of the sunshine of love in
which they wish to bask. The loneliness of her heroines is much more
nerve-racking because it is tendentiously inflicted. The trivialization of self
and the reduction of individuality to insignificant marionette are greatly distressing
to them. Their marginalization is reminiscent of Tillie Olsen’s observation on
woman’s condition:
“Cabined,
Cribb’d, confin’d; the
private sphere. Bound feet: corseted, bedecked; denied one’s body, powerless.”5
The protagonist of the story “The Stone
Women” is shown to be sincerely dubious about the reality of “…the joyous, playful, narcissistic
existence” of the women who were dancing, playing on musical instruments,
hunting, looking into mirrors, dressing up and who were chiseled into ‘beautiful’
shapes on the wall of a temple. She asks,
“Were they really like this? Could
any woman ever have been like this?” (TIAOS p.143)
To Shashi Deshpande, as she admits,
it was “… a picture far removed from the picture I have of women's daily lives.
And as I thought of this, it came to me - but these are women created by men.
They are male fantasies which they have worked out into stone!”7
The silver bracelet, which the
protagonist unwillingly puts away on the bidding of her husband, suggests that
so far women have been what men have wished them to be. Again the “…galaxy of
gods…dressed like gods in TV serials in plastic heads and tinsel crowns” in
front of whom the royal queen is reported to have been dancing are none but men
of society who make the woman dance to the tune of their whims like a puppet.
Many of her short stories are laid
against the background of Hindu mythologies like Mahabharata. In these short
stories Shashi Deshpande has breathed in life in the mythical women characters
and has made them retell their tales of agony and privation. In these stories
she tries to analyze what myths mean to women and how they affect their lives.
She said:
“Myths condition our ideas so
powerfully that often it is difficult to disentangle the reality of what we
perceive from what we learn of ourselves through them. In
The story “Hear me Sanjaya…” records the monologue of Kunti,
a character of Mahabharata, who outpours a piteous account of the segregation
and commoditization she suffered at the hands of her father, husband and
providence. Her father considering her a displeasing substance gave her away to
his friend. “And I thought – what if I displeased this man too? Will he give me
away to some one else?” (TIAOS p.137) Her husband preferred Madri,
her co-wife, to her, as she was ugly. She sadly tilts,
“He
needed her more, even in that other world he would
have pined for her. I remember some times I used to listen to them talking; he
had so many pet names for her…for me there was only one name.” (TIAOS p.136)
Even providence deemed her negligible
and so rashly manipulated against her and deprived her of the joy of motherhood
by bludgeoning her into setting her son drifting along the course of a river.
After years of penitence when her son appeared before her eyes, he was too
angry to understand her. Shashi Deshpande here disrobes Kunti
of the garb of glorification that the writer of the Mahabharata has
deliberately thatched her in. She has made her speak as a common woman with
desires and pining, with dissatisfactions and grievances, with frustrations and
repentance.
“Inner Rooms” written in the same
mythical vein articulates the feelings and emotional reaction of Amba as a
woman to the injustice and humiliations hurled upon her by the male chauvinists
of her time. Bhishma abducted Amba along with her two sisters, as brides for Vichitravirya, the boy King of Hastinapur.
Amba is in love with another King. In deference to the code of conduct, she is
sent to that king, who refuses to accept her as he had lost her in battle with Bhisma and thus legally he could claim no right to the
girl. Amba goes back to Bhishma and the boy King, but
the boy King this time refuses to marry her as the code of conduct forbids him
to marry a woman who is in love with another man. Flustered Amba turns to Bhishma who in turn refuses saying it would be a
contravention of his vow of life-long celibacy. Finally, Amba kills herself. By
the motif of inner rooms the writer quite unequivocally manifests the truth
that women in society don’t have any access to the world of reality beyond
their household harems. They are “left behind in the inner rooms, stoically
waiting for their husband(s) to visit them at night, living in the constant
hope of bearing him sons.” They are forced to live substandard life as
playthings and pawns of men. Amba says that the freedom accorded to her to
choose a husband of her own liking is illusory as finally it is the man’s will
that is done. When women dare even to wish to have things their own way,
denying to be duped into accepting the foisted image of a good woman, they are
deliberately ostracized, by machinations and iniquitous rules fabricated by
them exclusively for women.
Neglected and ignored, Amba complains
helplessly,
“Oh,
god to be and not to be seen; to speak and not to be heard…trapped in those
inner rooms…” (TIAOS p.99)
Thus to Bhishma
on his way back to Hastinapur after kidnapping Amba , her pleadings were quite immaterial whereas a shout
from Shalva was sufficient for him to stop and
listen. A woman has no say in the matter concerning her own life because,
“She
was only a woman, she was to be disregarded, ignored; her will, her
determination had to be set aside as nothing because she was a woman” (TIAOS
p.98)
Shashi Deshpande wrote:
“All these incidents are there in the
Mahabharata, narrated straight. I narrated them through Amba and saw her anger,
her utter disgust of the games men play, of her despair at having become a pawn
in their game and finally, her decision to kill herself, not as a defeat, but
because she thinks that if she cannot control her life, at least she can
control her own death.”
By
exploring the myths the writer brings out the sad truth, that most of our
literature is the creation of men and unfortunately women themselves have
brought themselves to accept it as the truth. The writer seems to be
disgruntled about the fact that women don’t try to peep into their hearts to
identify their true selves but they accept the things they read in fictional or
mythological books and see existing in society. Shashi Deshpande said:
‘The point is that all these stories
in myths legends and oral literature have been created by men to fulfill their
various needs. There is the eternal child to be protected and controlled, the
self-sacrificing mother to nurture and cherish the man, the chaste partner to guarantee
exclusive sexual rights and an undoubted paternity of the children and the
temptress to titillate and provide sexual gratification.”
“Why a Robin?” treats of the
predicament of a woman who feels that her existence in her house is on
sufferance as there was no point of contact between her world and those of her
husband and her little daughter. Even after drudging indefatigably for them and
whittling down all her hopes, her presence remained unacknowledged. “They…talk
of many things, ignoring me…An outsider in my own home. Have they locked me out
or have I locked myself in?” (TIAOS p.12) But one day the gulf between her and
her daughter is bridged when the daughter serendipitously encounters puberty
and the neglected mother provides the necessary comfort and assurance.
After providing her convictions a
cutting edge of fictional reality, it is quite unfortunate and even farcical that
Shashi Deshpande eschews being called a feminist. Women in
1. Shashi Deshpande in Ink in the
veins – An interview by Menaka Jayashankar which appeared in Mumbai Newsline
of July29, 2001.
2. Deiter Riemenschneider,
Indian Women Writing in English: The Short Story in “World literature
written in English” volume-25, No.2 (1985), p.312-318.
3. Ibid.1 above.
4. Quoted in Elien
Moers’ “Literary Women” in Mary Eagleton,
ed. Feminist literary theory: a reader (Oxford: Blackwell publishers Ltd.,
1986) P. 294
5. Tillie Oslen, Silences in.
Mary Eagleton, ed. Feminist literary theory: a reader
(Oxford: Blackwell publishers Ltd., 1986) p.81.
6. Shashi Deshpande in Ink in the
Veins… as above.
7. Shashi Deshpande in Ink in the
Veins… as above.