- Interactions Forum

Transcription

interactions
An International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences
Volume II Issue I
Jan. 2013
Coordinating Editor:
Mahesh Londhe
Advisory Board:
Dr A. M. Sarwade,
Assistant Professor in English
Department of English,
Shivaji University, Kolhapur, Maharashtra
Dr. U. Gayathri Devi
Astt.Professor of English,
Rajiv Gandhi Arts & Science College,
Puducherry, India
Capt. Dr Arvind Nawale
Head, Dept of English,
Shivaji Mahavidyalaya, Udgir, Maharashtra
Gonsum Christopher Longji
Department of English,
Plateau State University, Bokkos
Plateau State, Nigeria
Dr B .O. Satyanarayana Reddy
Associate professor, Dept of English,
Veerashaiva College,Bellary,Karnataka
*Interactions is a refereed journal.
Published by: Barloni Books, Pune (India)
Printed By: Barloni Books, Pune (India)
Official Address:
Interactions Forum,
19, Bhosale Garden, MIT Road,
Near Hotel Pooja, Kothrud, Pune,
Maharashtra-411038
Email: interactions.if@gmail.com
Website: www.interactionsforum.com
Dr Nibedita Mukherjee,
Assistant Professor of English,
Bankura Chrisitian College, Bankura, West
Bengal
Welcome to Interactions Forum!!
Pune based Interactions Forum (IF) is established formally in the year 2010 with the objective to
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© Interactions: International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences
CONTENTS
1. HIGHER EDUCATION IN INDIA: NEED TO BE INJECTED WITH
NEW DYNAMISM
Dr. Arvind M. Nawale
1
2. POSTFEMINISM, POPULAR CULTURE AND PAPERBACKS
Srijanee Roy
11
3. SCARS AND TRIBULATIONS OF BLACK SLAVE MOTHERS IN TONI
MORISON’S BELOVED
Dr. Samina Azhar
Dr. Vinita Mohindra
15
4. ROSIE- THE TRANSFORMED REVENGE GHOST
Deepthi.S
22
5. TAGORE: AS AN EDUCATOR
Dr. Asha Rai
27
6. FOOD MEMORY, IDENTITY AND DIASPORA: AN EXPLORATION
OF CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI’S ‘THE MISTRESS OF SPICES’
Mr. Soumyajyoti Banerjee
Amrita Basu
34
7. DECULTURE AND DEHUMANIZATION: RECIPES OF
APOCALYPTIC DISINTEGRATION IN NATHANAEL
WEST’S MISS LONELYHEARTS
Dr Payal Khurana
44
8. TREATMENT OF MARGIN IN ROHINTON MISTRY’S WORKS
Dr. Richa Bijalwan
55
9. THE VULTURES: AN ANALYSIS
Gaganpreet Walia
61
10. INDO-ANGLIAN POETRY: AN IMAGE-HOUSE
Chowdhury Omar Sharif
66
11. QUEST FOR WOMEN-SELF IN THIONG’O’S MINUTES OF GLORY
Biman Mondal
74
12. ‘QUEST OF HOLISTIC REDEMTION THROUGH PRIMITIVISM’:
A STUDY IN ARUN JOSHI’S THE STRANGE CASE OF BILLY BISWAS
Sushil Sarkar
82
13. NEW PARADIGMS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING: WEB 2.0
TOOLS
Mr. Pushpendra, C. Sinora, & Mr. Kaushik Trivedi
86
14. WORDSWORTH: AN ECO-HINDU POET
Raj Kumar Mishra
93
15. CULTUAL AMALGAMATION IN DIASPORIC STUDIES: A STUDY
IN SELECTED SHORT STORIES
B.Sreekanth Reddy
101
16. EMERGENCE OF MIDDLE CLASS PROTAGONISTS IN THE PLAYS
OF ARTHUR MILLER
Dr. Pawan Kumar Sharma
105
17. THE CHHAMAK CHALLO AND THE GLASS BOTTLE
Viswas Viswam KC
109
18. CHANDU MENON’S INDULEKHA: THE HARBINGER OF
A PARADIGM SHIFT
Dr. Asha Susan Jacob
122
19. QUEST FOR IDENTITY IN THE MIDST OF HOLOCAUST:
SYLVIA PLATH’S “DADDY’’ “LADY LAZARUS”
Dr.P.K.Debata
128
20. OBESITY AND WOMEN: A STUDY OF MARGARET ATWOOD’S
LADY ORACLE
Leena Pundir
134
21. INNOVATION AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN INDIA
Prin. Dr. Seema Malankar
137
22. THE ROLE OF ICT IN EDUCATION
Gaikar Vilas B
144
POEM
1. The Restless Soul
Ambri Shukla
149
Interactions (ISSN 2277-3940)
Vol. II Issue I, Jan. 2013
1
HIGHER EDUCATION IN INDIA: NEED TO BE INJECTED WITH NEW DYNAMISM
Dr. Arvind M. Nawale
Head, Dept. of English
Shivaji Mahavidyalaya, Udgir,
Dist:Latur (Maharashtra) INDIA
Introduction:
India is slowly but surely being viewed as a budding global power, a power which will figure the
global equilibrium of the power in days to come. However, India has to overcome over a number of
blockages in order to sustain its present flight of economic growth. One of the most important and crucial
of which is the crisis in India’s higher education system which is plaguing the overall economic growth
of India. There appears a never-ending list of problems with the higher education system in Indian. The
present higher education system of India is producing graduates that are unemployable. The quality of
academic research is near to the ground. An cumbersome affiliating system, rigid academic structure,
improper obligation of subject options, imbalanced teacher-student ratio, eroding sovereignty of
academic institutions, low level research, interference of politics in education sector, corruption, lack of
innovations and inadequate sources of public funding are some of its crucial problems. Due to such
numerous systemic deficiencies, higher education system of India is suffering.
Recently, in a conference of vice chancellors of central universities, organized by President
Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan, our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged in his
speech that “the quality of higher education in India has left much to be desired”. Calling for an ‘overriding emphasis on quality’, Singh admitted that “the unprecedented growth in higher education could be
happening without any commensurate improvement in quality”. He further said,
We must recognize that too many of our higher educational institutions are
simply not up to the mark. Too many of them have simply not kept abreast
with the rapid changes that have taken place in the world around us in
recent years, still producing graduates in subjects that the job market no
longer requires… … It is a sobering thought for us that not one Indian
university figures in the top 200 universities of the world today. (Singh,
2013)
President Pranab Mukherjee, too, observed that “the standard of higher education was declining in the
country”.
More than 42 years ago, on his talk on ‘The Crisis in Indian education’ in Lal Bahadur Shastri
Memorial Lectures, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, while examining the crisis in Indian education said:
The grave failures in policy-making in the field of education require the
analysis of the characteristics of the economic and social forces operating in
India, and response of public policy to these forces… … due to the
government’s tendency to formulate educational policies based on public
pressure, often wrong policies are pursued. (Sen ).
2
It clearly indicates a dire need to enhance measures of quality in Indian higher education and to make
innovative amendments in its policy to make them it globally competitive.
Higher Education: Global Scenario
Several countries are reshaping their systems of higher education for making them globally
competitive. The USA has the supreme system of higher education in the world till made provision of
major plans for higher education with a directive to ensure that America should remain the world’s leader
in higher education also. The UK, too, introduced several new innovations which helped the UK to
become one of the best systems of higher education. China has undertaken a package of comprehensive
reforms in higher education. “The government in China has stated education, science and technology to
be the strategic driving forces of their sustainable economic growth” (Agarwal 2). Australia initiated
wide-ranging restructuring in higher education. Pakistan replaced its University Grants Commission
(which found ineffective) by a Higher Education Commission which instigated wide-ranging systemic
reforms. Public funding for higher education was increased significantly from Rs 3.8 billion in 2002 to
Rs 33.7 billion in 2007. Apart from these countries, some other developing countries also undertaking
new initiatives in their higher education sector to meet with global challenges.
Higher Education in India: Present Scenario
In view of the advancement in the above-mentioned countries, India, obviously is still lazing
around in matter of the higher education sector. Let’s have a glance over measures undertaken and
policies implemented by India regarding higher education. India has the third largest higher education
system in the world, after the US and China, which are producing around 2.5 million graduates every
year. Though, India is third largest higher education system in the world the quality of output is poor and
near to the ground. If we leave aside the IITs, the IIMs, All India Institute of Medical Science, the Indian
Institute of Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and a few more, we will see that the higher
education sector is failed to meet the growing expectations of an emerging India. The Indian colleges and
universities, which should have to be the centre of quality research and academic activities, are more in
the news for other non-academic things. Almost all universities have failed to meet global standard and to
provide top-quality education to their students. We can find only quantitative rising scale instead of
qualitative!
Higher Education in India: Quantitative Rising Scale
As per the report of the Higher Education Summit 2012, supported by Planning Commission and
published under title “Higher Education in India: Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012-2017) and Beyond”, the
following statistical data is given regarding present scenario of higher education in India.
The growth in the number of universities is shown as increased six times in last four decades with 659
universities in 2011-12.
3
The growth in the number of colleges is shown as increased one third in last five years with 33023
colleges in 2011-12.
The growth in the number of students is shown as increased 12 times in last four decades with 25.9
million students enrolled in 2011-12. India achieved second position in the world in enrolment of
students in higher education.
4
(Source: FICCI Higher Education, 2012)
The above statistic shows that India has given a lot of attention to higher education sector in the past few
years and tried level best to meet the demands of growing population of young people and their
aspirations.
Higher Education in India: Qualitative Falling Scale
It seems that many steps like increasing number of higher education institutes, student enrolment etc have
been taken by Indian government to fix the problems faced by higher education. The National
Knowledge Commission (NKC) recommended a good number of constructive and significant reforms.
The Government has made provision of good amount of funds in the Eleventh Five Year Plan. All these
pains, however, appear to some extent not well received to meet global competency. In the QS World
University Rankings for 2012, none of the Indian universities figures in top 200. The Quacquarelli
5
Symonds (QS) rankings — the most reputed global rankings of institutes for higher education had
featured IIT-Bombay in 2010 which was ranked 187, but dropped to 225 in 2011 is down to 227 in 2012.
Noting the continuous decline in Indian institutes ranking, Danny Byrne, editor of topuniversities.comthe QS rankings website said “India remains the only BRICS nation without a university in the top 200.
Two of the leading three institutions, IIT- Delhi (212) and IIT-Kanpur (278), have improved on their
2011 positions. Yet the comparison with other BRICS nations remains unflattering.” (India Education
Review, News, “No Indian University in World’s Top 200: QS Rankings 2012, 12 Sep 2012.). In the Asia
rankings as well, India has only 11 institutes in the top 300 while China, Singapore and South Korea
continue to surge ahead. The U21 Ranking of National Higher Education Systems of 2012, University of
Melbourne, also indicates qualitative falling scale of Indian higher education. Out of the 48 countries
studied, India ranks last in the U21 rankings of national higher education systems:
(Source: U21 Ranking of National Higher Education Systems, University of Melbourne, May 2012, 24.)
6
The following statistics of the report of the Higher Education Summit 2012, published under title “Higher
Education in India: Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012-2017) and Beyond”, shows reasons for falling
qualitative scale of higher education in India.
The growth in the number of students is increased 6 times in last four thirteen years but faculty strength
is grown only 4 times. It means faculty strength is not increased in proportion of student enrolment.
No steps to meet global standard regarding student-teacher ratios have been taken and 40% faculties in
state universities and 35% faculties in state universities are not filled.
The relative impact factor of citations for Indian higher education research is half of that of the world
average.
7
As of March 2010, National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) had rated 62% of the
universities and 90% of the colleges as average (B) or below average (C) on specified quality parameters.
It clearly indicates that the overall state of affairs of higher education in India does not match with the
universal quality standards.
Higher Education in India: Need To Be Injected With New Dynamism
Any institution of higher education is and should be an integral organ of the state and economy
of particular country. Institutes of higher education, through their curriculum, are expected to provide
knowledge, know-how, wisdom, and character to the students so that it will boost up overall development
of particular country. However, in case of India, it is being observed that most of the educational
institutions hardly pay any attention to the development of these aspects. Quality results from the
institute's administration and education management systems. People working in the system cannot do
better than the system allows. The system should allow their faculty, office bearers, and staff for their upgradation, overall development and progress and should give them freedom to implement their own
measures to enhance quality. People in positions, power or in chair of decision making often prefer
sycophant. The system should promote the quality people to maximize their contributions to the whole
8
organization. Administration must create an environment that fosters a team-oriented culture, which can
prevent problems and make continual improvements.
During the preceding Five Year Plan 2007-12, India announced many new publicly funded
higher education institutions including few Indian institutes of technology (IITs) and few more Indian
institutes of management (IIMs). However, many institutions are yet to start and about 40% of faculty
posts are yet to fill. Obviously it will be carried forward to in the new plan. But all rest work should be
carried with new enhanced quality measures and new dynamism. State universities seem being neglected
in every education budget to compare other higher institutions and central universities. In coming days,
Indian government should have to focus on improving the quality of central as well as state-funded
institutions and universities so that they can compete with the global best. Intensifying state universities
and improving their quality and providing them with more funds should be the focus of India's higher
education policy in the coming year.
The quality of teaching faculty is a key aspect that has been suffering in India due to dilutions of
selection standards. The faculty recruitment in universities and colleges and other higher education
institutes should be impartial and preferences should be given only to quality. But political interference,
monitory forces, back-door activities are being observed even in filling posts of Vice-chancellor,
Directors, Professors and Asst/Assoc Professors. In a recent seminar organized on ‘The Idea of a
University’ by Delhi University Teachers’ Association in March 2013, Prof. Roop Rekha Verma, former
VC, Lucknow University said, “Vice-chancellors were being appointed to serve the political interests of
ruling parties” (Verma. India Education Review). The position of university affiliated colleges is worst in
this regard. The worst elements of favoritism, cronyism, nepotism, political involvement, monitory forces
and back-door activities in faculty recruitments are subsiding quality teachers away and this is hampering
to the growth of higher education. There is a dire need to take initiatives with new dynamism in this
regard. New method and techniques should have to be introduced in the field of higher education, to
identify potentials for enhancement.
Higher education should be oriented with some higher goals to improve the standards of academics.
There is an ample gap between the industry expectations and the university standards, on account of
which millions of people are unemployed/ unemployable while thousands of jobs are lying vacant for
want of the right personnel. The curriculum, content, teaching methods, assessment standards, research
and methods have all to be upgraded. In order to make higher education competitive and global, the
credit system should be introduced. Research facilities have to be improved. Good salary packages and
benefits to the faculty should be given so that good brains can be attracted to this profession. If the worst
of the graduates opt for teaching and the cream is going elsewhere showing no interest in research or
academics many problems will occur to enhance and sustain quality in higher education in India.
To meet the challenges in the higher education sector, several initiatives have been proposed in
the Twelfth Five Year Plan 2013-2017. The most important of them includes: shift from input-centric to
learner-centric, promotion of innovation and research by creating synergy between teaching and research,
development of faculty, movement toward internalization, creation of alliances and networks between
academic and research institutions and industry, enhancement of institutional autonomy and
transparency, co-ordination of regulatory reforms, increased public and private funding, linking of
funding with outcomes, overcoming faculty shortages, undertaking faculty training and development,
shifting from annual to semester examination system, revamping the accreditation system,
9
internationalization of higher education and so on. Through, Government’s focus on ‘Excellence’,
‘Expansion’ and ‘Equity’ in the Twelfth Five Year Plan, the government is expected to concentrate at
following key levers for enhancing the quality of India’s higher education institutions as per
recommendations of Twelfth Five Year Plan.
If our government implements above observations and recommendations and takes initiative through
above key levers to create a high-quality impact as per the report of the ‘Higher Education Summit
2012’, the higher education of India will surely be able to stand in competence with the global quality up
to 2017.
Conclusion:
There is a lot to be done in the field of higher education in India to meet the global demands in
terms of quality. Our higher education should be injected with such new dynamisms. The government
should have to encourage these initiative to improve the quality of higher education. We can take Indian
universities in top by implementing above recommendations. We need to concentrate on quality
education. We need to stop corruption. We need to utilize our talents for our country. That’s all.
10
Works Cited:
Agarwal Pawan, (2006). Higher Education In India: The Need For Change. ICRIER.
_____. (2009). Indian Higher Education : Envisioning The Future. 1st. New Delhi: Sage
India.
FICCI Higher Education. (2012). Higher Education in India: Twelfth Five Year Plan (20122017) and Beyond. Kolkata: Ernst & Young.
Singh, Manmohan. (2013). Our Higher Education Has Hit a Low: -PM Manmohan Singh.
India Today. Available at http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/higher-education-in-india-has-hit-a-low-primeminsiter-manmohan-singh/1/249035.html
Sen, Amartya. The Crisis in Indian Education. Lal Bahadur Shastri Memorial Lectures.
. Speech.
Verma, Roop Rekha. (2013). The Idea of a University. Seminar of Delhi University
Teachers’
Association.
Delhi,
Lecture.
India
Education
Review,
Available
http://www.indiaeducationreview.com/news/vcs-are-appointed-serve-political-interests-ruling-parties-ex-vclucknow-univ
at
11
POSTFEMINISM, POPULAR CULTURE AND PAPERBACKS
Srijanee Roy
PhD Scholar and UGC Junior Research Fellow
Jadavpur University, Kolkata
There remains an extensive ideological gap and a definite conceptual breach between the
formulation and application of the term ‘postfeminism’ by agencies of popular culture and its
appropriation by the mass media on the one hand, and its formal theoretical coinage on the other. Ann
Brooks notes that postfeminism occupies a critical position in regard to earlier feminist frameworks at the
same time as it critically engages with patriarchal and imperialist discourses. She adds: “In doing so it
challenges hegemonic assumptions held by second wave feminist epistemologies that patriarchal and
imperialist oppression was a universally experienced oppression”1. Postfeminism, in regard to this
standpoint, does not differ much from the postulates of the third wave feminism:
Postfeminism expresses the intersection of feminism with postmodernism,
poststructuralism and post-colonialism, and as such represents a dynamic
movement capable of challenging modernist, patriarchal and imperialist
frameworks. In the process postfeminism facilitates a broad-based
pluralistic conception of the application of feminism, and addresses the
demands of marginalised, diasporic and colonised cultures for a nonhegemonic feminism capable of giving voice to local, indigenous and
postcolonial feminisms.2
The popularly acknowledged and media accentuated definition of the same term differs much from the
above classification. Linda Mizejewski summarises: “The term ‘postfeminist’ woman in popular culture
refers to the savvy woman who no longer needs political commitment, who enjoys feminine consumerist
choices, and whose preoccupations are likely to involve romance, career choices, and hair gels”3. By the
1990s the second wave feminism came to be held responsible for all the problems allegedly plaguing the
women since the 1980s, form privation to low self-esteem to hair loss, alcoholism and nerve disorders,
and therefore there brewed a strong reaction against the ‘feminazis’, almost exclusively by women below
thirty. The virulent tirade against male-run media, sexist billboards, beauty pageants that the feminists of
the sixties so enthusiastically engaged in, was now substituted by what can be called a hyper-culture of
commercial sexuality where the ‘new woman’ in her heels and make-up served as the willing subject of
male gaze. As Shari L. Thurer puts it, “[…] smart young women are now resurrecting every stereotype
of female sexuality that their feminist mothers attempted to banish, such as sex as currency, tyrannical
standards of beauty, […] consumerism as meaningful, carrerism as selfish, and physical appearance as
the centre of self worth”4.
But as soon as this celebration of the revival of ‘feminine’ sensibilities gained impetus, there also
rose a sharp appeal for the denunciation of the same. Whereas cultural theorists like Christina Hoff
Sommers, the self professed ‘equity feminist’, wanted to break free of what she called the cultivated
irrational hostility towards men of ‘gender feminism’ or the second wave, critics like Naomi Wolf and
12
Susan Faludi insisted on the continual subjugation of women by the standards of beauty and body-image
as propagated by media leading to health disorders and emotional trauma, the rising monopoly of popular
constructs such as the fight for equality had largely been won, the single woman grieving of ‘man
shortage’, the unwed woman becoming hysterical, and the childless woman becoming depressed and
confused as an after-effect of the ‘infertility epidemic’5. Sociologist Ruth Sidel traced the emergence of a
new class of young womanhood in the American context, namely the ‘neotraditionalists’, denoting
women who either wanted to balance their private and public lives or to immerse themselves in
‘traditional’ female roles.6 This phenomenon was widely viewed as a disturbing postfeminist retreat to a
conservative profamily vision, one that assumes the inevitability or superiority of heterosexual marriage
and motherhood. The postfeminists, as Tania Modleski puts it, by “assuming the advent of postfeminism,
in effect, delivering us back into a prefeminist world”7.
And then came Bridget Jones, the mouthpiece for all the ‘neotraditionalists’, an exponent of
‘downsizing’ or ‘retreatism’8, the woman who was once again ‘reassuringly feminine’9, not particularly
career-minded, childishly incompetent for her publishing house job, obsessed with weight-control,
romance and family. Helen Fielding in this 1996 bestseller presents a reworking of Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice (1813) and significantly, by equating the major concerns of the two protagonists, she
happily undermines the feminist developments that marked the span of the two centuries in between.
Both Bridget and Fielding in this context can be said to comply with Alice Echol’s definition of
postfeminists as a generation of women who have enjoyed “the benefits of feminism and [are] often
oblivious both to feminism’s role in achieving change and for the need of continued struggle”10; the
benefits of feminism referred to in this context being higher education, economic independence and most
importantly freedom of choice. Bridget Jones showed the path and innumerable others followed the suit:
not only the British and American production of chick lit flourished, but other ethnic subgenres also
evolved – the Asian, Brazilian and Black chick lit (significantly enough here the racial distinctions served
as the basis of classification). The logic that determines the further categorization was definitely inspired
by the traditional compartmentalisation of a woman’s life on the basis of her age, marital status and the
level of permitted socialisation: ‘workplace tell-all’ [about the careerist single young woman facing the
heat of the boss (who is a woman with family issues and a hyperactive career, the ‘feminist’ prototype )
or hopelessly infatuated with the boss (who is a man with extreme good looks and a complete lack of
comprehension of the protagonist’s feelings)], ‘bride lit’ [about the married woman waking up to her
restrictions and responsibilities], ‘mommy lit’ [about the new mother either handling negligence and
infidelity of the husband or looking for new relationships and at the same time adjusting to motherhood]
and ‘matron lit’ or ‘hen lit’ [about the woman with her mid-life crisis]. The focus centres exclusively on
the affluent heterosexual educated working woman, and in the process the images endorsed by the massmedia and home culture are fortified and validated. These protagonists are so engrossed with the
consumerist culture and egoistical individualistic issues that the critical understanding of the self as a
social being is completely negated. Elayne Rapping notes that postfeminism, utterly personal and selfserving, is critiqued to be a monstrous deviation from the demands of a global society to be radically
reconstructed so that women everywhere, no matter their race, class, or sexual orientation, might have
freedom, opportunity and ability to fulfil their dreams and desire.11
The ‘Material Girl’ phenomenon, one of the major postfeminist developments, with women
sanctioning the consumer culture, the one that entails the consumption of not only the goods available in
13
it but also the mass produced images that are its currency12, extends itself beyond the frontier of the west.
The young Aisha Bhatia, the protagonist of Advaita Kala’s Almost Single (2007) portends the stance to
be adopted in her adult life of high heels, hangovers and husband hunts by dancing to Madonna’s 1985
pop hit at the family banquet much to her mother’s dismay. The indulgence of the Indian counterparts of
Bridget in the consumerist culture of high life evolves as a subtle commentary on the neo-colonial
glorification of the commercially generated image of the white woman, a chimera that is neither feasible
nor advisable to be aspired for in the context of the developing nations. The thematic fabric of this
rapidly developing genre shows sustained and conspicuous difference from the novels by Indian women
writers produced mainly since the 1950s. The socio-psychological impact on the women of being
incarcerated within the patriarchal institution of marriage and domesticity [as in Kamala Markandaya’s A
Silence of Desire (1960), Anita Desai’s Cry, the Peacock (1963) and Sashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds
No Terrors (1980)], the psycho-sexual concerns of girlhood and adolescence and the conception of
‘sisterhood’ [as in Markandaya’s Two Virgins (1973), Desai’s Fire on the Mountain (1977) and later
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Sister of My Heart (1999) and its sequel Vine of Desire (2002)], a wider
panoramic view of the socio-political context though the eyes of the woman protagonist [as in
Markandaya’s Some Inner Fury (1955) and Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us (1985)], the question of
diaspora, ethnicity and cross-cultural conflicts of the immigrants [as in Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife (1975)
and Jasmine (1989), Divakaruni’s Mistress of Spices (1997) and Jhumpa Lahiri”s The Namesake (2003)]
and sometimes a feminist reworking of myths and epics [as in Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions
(2008)] were the leading thematic trends of literature as developed by the Indian women novelists. Indian
chick lit takes a different route altogether – the feminist concerns are blatantly overlooked, the body
becomes the acknowledged site of attraction of male gaze rather than being the location of power play
and sexual politics. The nexus of neo-colonialism, capitalism and consumerism, along with the body
image and socio-economic standpoint as standardised by popular culture, serve as major determinants for
this drastic literary makeover. Rajashree, Swati Kaushal, Anuja Chauhan, Sushmita Bose, Nirupama
Subramanian, Mandar Kokate among others produce these tales of the cosmopolitan Indian woman and
her overwhelming owes of compulsive shopping, weight gain, designer heels, branded make-up and most
importantly finding husbands. Still they cope with the feminist issues of asserting individual rights and
structuring a female homosocial nexus in their own way, thereby presenting a conspicuous document of
postfemenist development altogether – a dubious account that is, worth both celebration and censure.
NOTES AND REFERENCES:
Ann Brooks, Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms (London: Routledge, 1997), p.2.
Ibid, p.4.
Linda Mizejewski, ‘Dressed to Kill: Postfeminist Noir’, Cinema Journal, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Winter, 2005), p.122,
JSTOR. Web 7 February 2011.
14
Shari L. Thurer, ‘Feminism Meets Postfeminism’, The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 120, No. 3 (Fall,
2007), p. 502, JSTOR. Web 7 February 2011.
The books referred to in this context are Christina Hoff Sommers’ Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have
Betrayed Women (1995), Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (1991)
and Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991). Referred to by Susanne B.
Dietzet and Polly Pagenhart in ‘Teaching Ideology to Material Girls: Pedagogy in the “Postfeminist” Classroom’,
Feminist Teacher, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1995), p. 129, JSTOR. Web 7 February 2011.
Quoted by Emily A. Zakin in her review of Tania Modleski’s Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a
“Postfeminist” Age (1991), Hypatia, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Autumn, 1993), p.166, JSTOR. Web 7 February 2011.
Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, Introduction to Cinema Journal, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Winter, 2005), p. 108, JSTOR.
Web 7 February 2011. Tasker and Negra explain the postfeminist phenomenon of ‘retreatism’ or ‘downsizing’,
where a female professional displays her ‘empowerment’ and caring nature by withdrawing from the workforce,
and therefore symbolically from the public sphere, to devote herself to husband and family.
Angela McRobbie, ‘Post Feminism and Popular Culture: Bridget Jones and the New Gender Regime’ in
Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, ed. by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra
(United States of America: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 28.
Quoted by Susanne B. Dietzet and Polly Pagenhart, ‘Teaching Ideology to Material Girls: Pedagogy in the
“Postfeminist” Classroom’, Feminist Teacher, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1995), p. 129, JSTOR. Web 7 February 2011.
Elayne Rapping, ‘You’ve Come Which Way, Baby? The Road That Leads from June Cleaver to Ally McBeal
Looks a Lot Like a U-Turn’, The Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 10/11 (Jul., 2000), p. 21, JSTOR. Web 7
February 2011.
Dietzet and Pagenhart, p.130.
15
SCARS AND TRIBULATIONS OF BLACK SLAVE MOTHERS IN TONI MORISON’S
BELOVED
DR. SAMINA AZHAR
Assistant Professor
Department of Humanities Maulana Azad
National Institute of Technology, Bhopal
&
DR. VINITA MOHINDRA
Associate Professor
Department of Humanities Maulana Azad
National Institute of Technology, Bhopal
The history of America is full of barbaric violence and bloodshed against African-Americans.
The brutal and inhuman phase of American history began in 1619 when a large number of Blacks were
brought to Jamestown, Virginia to work as slaves on the plantations of white American. White
Americans living in awe of superiority of their race created complicated cultural and legal system in
order to justify discrimination against the African-American. The slaves were denied human rights as
they were never considered as a human being. Therefore the history of Afro –Americans is the history of
suppressed human emotions and aspiration. The first seed of Afro-American literature was sown in the
form of songs and narratives of African slaves working on Jamestown plantations. Writers like Fredrick
Douglass, a freed slave turned writer and Martin Delany are considered as the most significant
contributors to the Black American Literature. Though before Beloved came on the literary scene Toni
Morrison had already established herself as one of the most successful black female writers of her time
but with the publication of Beloved, she received worldwide critical acclaim till date it remains one of the
author's most celebrated and analysed works. Her identity as black female gives a unique perspective to
her writings.
Beloved (1987) when first appeared was received with immense curiosity and appreciation, but it
did not win any literary recognition in the form of any national award (National Book Award or the
National Book Critics Circle Award). This neglect of a black writer’s literary skill led to controversy and
accusations of racism. Later Beloved got its due in the form of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction Robert F.
Kennedy Award. The secretary of the jury stated that it "would be unfortunate if anyone diluted the value
of Toni Morrison's achievement by suggesting that her prize rested on anything but merit." (Dennis
Hevesi,1988,April01). Appreciating the novel in the Los Angeles Times Book Review John Leonard,
wrote that Beloved"belongs on the highest shelf of American literature, even if half a dozen canonized
white boys have to be elbowed off.... Without Beloved our imagination of the nation’s self has a hole in it
big enough to die from."(John Leonard1988, January 24). While Morrison was doing research for The
Black Book, a collection of Nineteenth and twentieth century black memorabilia she came across a
newspaper item about a fugitive black slave Margaret Garner who killed one of her three children in
order to save them from the clutches of slavery. The novel, set during the reconstruction era in 1873,is
16
aboutthe subjugation of slave women, represented by –Sethe, an escaped slave, Baby Suggs, a freed
slaveand other minor characters likeNan,a slave nurse and Ella, anothervictim of slavery. The other
woman characters are Denver,Sethe’s daughter and a Beloved, ghost of murdered daughter of Sethe.It
examines the enduring mental and physical damage caused to the psyche by slavery on women as well as
men. This lingering trauma has destroyed their past and present and now they struggle hard to save their
future from its inflictions.The past of Sethe, the female protagonist of the novel haunts her as it is deeply
rooted in her memory. The sufferings of her slavery days and her guilt of killing her own daughter, whom
Sethe killed in order to save her from the tribulations of slavery, could not let her live in peace.
When Sethe arrives at Sweet Home she has an obscure memory about her parents. Nan though a
minor character exhibits maternal instincts in her care and love that she shows towards Sethe. “Nan was
the one she knew best, who was around all day, who nursed babies, cooked had one good arm and half of
another”. (Beloved 87) Nan who came to America on the same slave ship along with Sethe’s mother tells
her about the story of her birth.She tells Sethe that she has been named after her black father. Sethe was
the only child she kept and threw away all the others who were fathered by white men: a mother can
throw her children only when the circumstances in which they are conceived are humiliating for her.
Calvin Hernton believes “The sexual atrocities that the Negro woman has suffered in the us south and
north, and what these atrocities have done to their personality as a female character, is a tale more bloody
and brutal than most of us can imagine” (Hernton,123). Sethe yearns for her mother’s love and affection
when Beloved asks her did her mother comb her hair she recalls how hard her mother worked. Her slave
mother was not even given the privilege to nurse her child. She says She must have nursed me two or
three weeks--that's the way the others did. Then she went back in rice and I sucked from another woman
whose job it was. (Beloved 85)When Sethe meets her mother by chance she shows her a mark under her
left breast, a mark which is the only identity of a mother for her daughter. The mark represents the
debasing and degrading effects of slavery, for when Sethe tells her mother “Mark me, too” (Beloved 86)
she slaps her, though the chains of slavery doesn’t allow her to live with her daughter to care for her as
ordinary mothers do but nobody can stop her from feeling like a mother. No mother wants her children to
be marked as private property. Sethe witnesses her mother’s horrific persecution as she was hanged and
burned which further prepared her for future violent reaction.
Sarah Moore Grimke, a member of a prominent South Carolinian family in her Letters on the
Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman wrote: “Our southern cities are whelmed beneath a
tide of pollution; the virtue of female slaves is wholly at the mercy of irresponsible tyrants, and women
are bought and sold in our slave markets, to gratify the brutal lust of those who bear the name of
Christians” (Smithand Berenice 195). White man treated female slaves like chattels they were child
producing machines for them and their children become a source of expansion of their slave empire.
They were given very little time to regain their health, after childbirth. They had to come back to work
only after two weeks of childbirth. These black and marginalized women lived in constant fear of losing
their children as they become property of their masters which can be sold or sent to any other plantation.
They serve as servants to white women and wet nurses to white children while their own children live in
neglect or being nursed by black women like Nan. Barbara Christian describes that “some slave women
were so disturbed by the prospect of bearing children who could only be slaves that they did whatever
they could to remain childless”.(Christian220)
17
Sethe confined to a plantation in Kentucky named Sweet Home was a cook housekeeper,
seamstress, and nurse to Mrs. Garner. Living with five slave men and a slave woman Aunt Phyllis she
was contented with the sense of community that had been built around the black slaves. “Enslaved
Africans were property, and they resisted the dehumanizing effects of slavery by recreating African
notions of family as extended kin units. Bloodlines carefully monitored in West Africa were replaced by
a notion of an extended family/community consisting of their black brothers and sisters. For black
women, the domestic sphere encompassed a broad range of kin and community relations beyond the
nuclear family household” (Collins 49).Sethe was fortunate enough to be given the option to select her
husband out of the five slave men on the plantation. She selected Halle as her husband in spite of her
desire to have a proper wedding ceremony she had married hack- awedding of slaves. Like any ordinary
woman she looked forward to have a future with her husband and her children but destiny had something
dreadful in store for her. After Mr.Garner’s death his sick wife calls her School-teacher brother-in-law
who along with his two nephews takes over the administration of Sweet Home in his hands. The cruel
Schoolteacher is vehemently racist who treats the slaves as animals and gives teaching lessons to his
pupils on the animal features of the slaves. The treatment which Sethe got at the hands of School
teacher’s nephews sends chills down the spine of a real human being. Six months pregnant Sethe, like a
cow, was taken to the barn, where School teacher’s nephews pressed all the milk out of her breasts. Later
in the story when Sethe tells Paul D about this ignominious treatment he asks her
They used cowhide on you?"
"And they took my milk."
"They beat you and you was pregnant?"
"And they took my milk!"(Beloved 25)
She keeps repeating “And they took my milk", whichshe thinks rightfully belongs to her
children.When Sethe informs Mrs. Garner about this heinous act, vindictively the schoolteacher lashes
her back with a leather whip. Amy Denver the white woman, who helps Sethe to give birth to Beloved,
when she sees her back she says “It's a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here's the trunk--it's red and
split wide open, full of sap, and this here's the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches.
Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain't blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your
back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What God have in mind, I wonder. I had me some whippings, but I
don't remember nothing like this. Whoever planted that tree beat” (Beloved 110). The terrifying effects
of slavery is not only limited to the black people but also to the whites who created it. Though Amy is a
white woman yet she is a victim of violence and debasement “Mr. Buddy had a right evil hand too. Whip
you for looking at him straight. Sure would. I looked right at him one time and he hauled off and threw
the poker at me”. (Beloved111) The bodily injuries and mangled back could not stop Sethe from breaking
the shackles of slavery but others were not so successful, Halle and Sixo were killed and Paul D was
captured by the man who kept him underground for sixteen years. Stamp Paid, who ferried slaves from
slavery into freedom, took her to her mother-in –law in Ohio. Sethe’s miraculous escape in spite of the
profound suffering and the murderous assault on her body was a testament to the stillness of her soul and
her strength. Her daughter Denver calls her “a quiet, queenly woman,” The one who never looked away,
who when a man got stomped to death by a mare right in front of Sawyer's restaurant did not look away;
and when a sow began eating her own litter did not look away then either. And when the baby's spirit
picked up Here Boy and slammed him into the wall hard enough to break two of his legs and dislocate
18
his eye, so hard he went into convulsions and chewed up his tongue, still her mother had not looked
away. She had taken a hammer, knocked the dog unconscious, wiped away the blood and saliva, pushed
his eye back in his head and set his leg bones”.(Beloved18)
Sethe decides her children are not going to be beasts of burden for the slave owners and being a
mother she is entitled to take the best decisions for them. She verbalizes to herself: “That anybody white
could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you.
Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and
couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it
happen to her own. The best thing she was, was her children . Whites might dirty her all right, but not
her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing—the part of her that was clean. . . .” (Beloved 251).Seth
considers her children as her "best thing," but fate and circumstances destroy them all, her two sons run
away, Denver her daughter is so terrified that she refuses to step out of the house and now the return of
murdered Beloved becomes a cause of Sethe’s distress. Sethe’s knows that “the only grace they could
have was the grace they could imagine” (Beloved 121) She dreams to have a bondage free future for her
children. She decides that her children will not live the way she has lived:they willnot be marked with the
curse of slavery. It is the fear of being marked which forces Sethe to commit the grisly crime of killing
her infant daughter. When Schoolteacher comes to Ohio to take her back to Sweet Home Sethe must have
recalled the insidious treatment that she suffered at the hands of the School teacher’s and his nephews.
The intense anger and disgust leads her to the crime which cannot be “perceived as a senseless crime but
necessity” (Samuel and Hudson106), infanticide is her way of protecting her children from gradual
destruction wrought by slavery. Sethe goes through the pain of self-hatred as she abuses her body to give
a loving send off to her child. Shefulfils the physical need of an engraver to get Beloved, engraved on the
headstone of her daughter’s grave. She expresses her love for her slain daughter when while struggling
hard along with her mother to control Beloved anger Denver tells Sethe "For a baby she throws a
powerful spell," (Beloved6) to this Sethe replies. “No more powerful than the way I loved her,"
(Beloved6)
When Beloved comes back to her mother she wants Sethe's to reveal everything about her past ;
about her life before and after Sweet Home. Beloved presence reminds Sethe of her humiliating past
whose “hurt was always there-like a tender place in the corner of her mouth that the bit left” (Beloved 82)
yet she is ready to talk of her past. She rejoices the fact that her child is with her when she says “Beloved,
she my daughter. She mine. See. She comes back to me of her own free will and I don't have to explain a
thing... She had to be safe and I put her here she would be. But my love was tough and she back
now.”(Beloved 273) Sethe quits her job to stay with her day and night.“ Sethe was flattered by Beloved's
open, quiet devotion. The same adoration from her daughter (had it been forthcoming) would have
annoyed her; made her chill at the thought of having raised a ridiculously dependent child. But the
company of this sweet, if peculiar, guest pleased her the way a zealot pleases his teacher.’’(Beloved 80)
Beloved blames Sethe for not coming to her, not smiling and not waving goodbye before she left her. She
wants her mother to pay back all the attention that Sethe would have paid to her had she been alive,"Sethe
was licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved's eyes."(Beloved 80)from the weak and helpless child she changes to
a ruthless and possessive, tormenter. She doesn’t understand that her murder was the only option her
helpless mother had to protect her child from the evils of slavery. Earlier slavery now repercussions of
slavery in the form of her past and her daughter haunt Sethe’s soul. Sethe becomes the slave and Beloved
19
her slave driver. Beloved wants to own her mother as she says “She is mine”. (Beloved 86). Beloved is
unforgiving as she feels betrayed by her own mother. She has returned to claim the love that has been
denied to her and to inflict guilt on her mother. She thinks her mother’s act of over protection caused her
death. She blames Sethe for abandoning her and for leaving her all alone. “Three times I lost her: once
with the flowers because of the noisy clouds of smoke; once when she went into the sea instead of smiling
at me; once under the bridge when I went in to join her and she came toward me but did not smile. She
whispered to me, chewed me, and swam away. Now I have found her in this house. She smiles at me and
it is my own face smiling. I will not lose her again. She is mine.”(Beloved 292)This image of a mother
leaving her little girl instead of smiling at her can be compared to Sethe’s painful memories for her
ma'am but for Sethe it is also “remembering something she had forgotten she knew.”(Beloved 86)Some
critics consider this as signs of severed mother-daughter relationships but if Sethe has buried memories
of her mother it is because they are painful and agonizing and her act of killing her own daughter is a way
of expressing her love for a child.Her act of violence is in fact an act of protection from the
dehumanizing effects of slavery. Now when Beloved is back as corporeal ghost Sethe decides to explain
hostile circumstances which led to her killing and to relive some moments which she would have lived
with her child if she would not have been killed:
I won't never let her go. I'll explain to her, even though I don't have to. Why
I did it. How if I
hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear
to happen to her. When I explain it she'll understand, because she
understands everything already. I'll tend her as no mother ever tended a
child, a daughter”. (Beloved 272)
Sethe’s act of murder keeps her mentally and emotionally enslaved even after eighteen years of freedom.
She tells Beloved how she waved flies away from her in the grape arbor, how it pained her to see her
baby bitten by a mosquito, and how she would trade her own life for Beloved's. Sethe desperately wants
her child to understand her predicament but Beloved becomes mean-spirited and exploits her mother's
pain. Beloved can also be called a story of disconnection between mother and child. Sethe’s and
Beloved’s agony and distress of losing their mothers or being abandoned and discarded by them make
them unforgiving. But in both the cases the mothers are helpless slaves doing in their own way what they
think is the best for their children. When Paul D reminds Sethe that Denver is almost grown, she says: “I
don’t care what she is. Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older,
but grown? What’s that supposed to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing” (Beloved 45). When
questioned what will happen when she dies says she replies "Nothing! I'll protect her while I'm live and
I'll protect her when I ain't." (Beloved 64)She vehemently reacts when Paul D complains about Denver’s
behavior and asks him to leave her daughter alone. Her refusal to listen anything against her daughter
projects her efforts to protect her child. Sethe possessiveness towards Denver surprises Paul D as he
thinks it is risky: “For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially
if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit;
everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd
have a little love left over for the next one.” (Beloved 45)
Sethe does not tell about her past to Denver because she doesn’t want her child to get associated
with pain and sufferings. Sethe’s self-hatred and disgust are reinforced with the appearance of the
20
Beloved. Denver identifies her mother’s self-hatred and the danger that Beloved presents to her mental
health. She even accuses Beloved of trying to choke her mother. When Denver steps out of 124 she
finally breaks away from the past memories. She finds work and seeks help for her mother from the
community. Denver efforts consequently free her mother from the clutches of Beloved’s ghost. Baby
Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in–law having endured brutality of slave owners all her life now as a freed slave
has earned the title of “holy” for her unorthodox religion. “She did not tell them to clean up their lives or
to go and sin no more. She did not tell them that they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or
its glory bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.
That if they could not see it, they would not have it”(Beloved 122).Halle’s profound love for his mother is
depicted through his sacrificing gesture when he works on weekends for five years in order to purchase
her freedom. She expresses love and thankfulness to her son when she says “a man ain’t nothing but a
man, but a son? Well now, that’s somebody” (Beloved 23). Baby Suggs eight children had six fathers
which in itself state her exploitation. Sethe clings with grit and stubbornness to the lives of her children,
but Baby Suggs resigns herself to the fate as she witnesses the loss of each of her children while they are
sold to various owners. “Halle she was able to keep the longest. Twenty years. A lifetime . Given to her,
no doubt, to make up for hearing that her two girls, neither of whom had their adult teeth, were sold and
gone and she had not been able to wave goodbye. To make up for coupling with a straw boss for four
months in exchange for keeping her third child, a boy, with her--only to have him traded for lumber in
the spring of the next year and to find herself pregnant by the man who promised not to and did. That
child she could not love and the rest she would not. "God take what He would," she said. And He did,
and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn't mean a thing.
(Beloved 34)
Baby Suggs is a motherly figure for Sethe as she offers a momentary solace to Sethe’life of
misery. She loves and nurtures Sethe’s children and yearns for her runaway grandsons Buglar and
Howard .After the killing of Beloved Baby Suggs took to sick bed “Her past had been like her present-intolerable--and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her
for pondering color”. (Beloved 5) Baby Suggs calls Sethe lucky as she has three children left with her
but Suggs herself has no one. The painful memories of her lost children never leaves her tortured heart
she remembers how her first-born child loved to eat the burned bottom of bread.The black women in the
novel yearn for a normal domesticated life, a life with their families. They want to nurture their children
as any ordinary woman likes to do. Toni Morrison’s novel portrays the internal struggle of the mind and
the spirit of a slave woman. Beloved depicts a ruthless society where a “witless colored woman is jailed
and hanged for stealing ducks she believed were her own babies”.(Beloved 22) Its universal appeal
establishes it as an everlasting presence of Africanist writings in the world literature. The novel is “a
conscious act toward healing a painful wound: a studied memorial to the great social wrong of the
enslavements of Africans. Her powerful words, on behalf of millions, give voice to a profound lament:
the absence of a historical maker to remind us never to let this atrocity happen again”. (Leake, 3)It is a
tribute to particularly those women who suffered the horrors of slavery, those whose identities were
violated as they were treated as a commodity, bought and sold like animals. They lived a life, which was
not theirs, with no shred of basic integrity or dignity as: “Slaves not supposed to have pleasurable
feelings on their own; their bodies not supposed to be like that, but they have to have as many children as
they can to please whoever owned them”. (Beloved 288)Under slavery the best way for a mother to
21
express her love for her children is to abandon them, do not let themselves remember them, when they
are thrown into the abyss of slavery, or murder them. They are physically, emotionally and
psychologically abused to such an extent that if they are fortunate enough to free from captivity, they
remain enslave to the excruciating memories of their past.
WORKS CITIED:
Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon Press,
1985.
Hare, Bruce R. 2001 Race Odyssey: African Americans and Sociology.Syracuse University Press, Syracuse
NY.2002
Hernton, Calvin. The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers: "Adventures in Sex, Literature, and Real Life,"
Anchor Press, New York 1986.
Hevesi, Dennis. Toni Morrison's Novel 'Beloved' Wins the Pulitzer Prize in FictionTheNew York Times April 01,
1988
Leake Andrews, William. & McKay, Nellie Y. Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Casebook Oxford University Press,
1999
Leonard,John.Los Angeles TimesBook ReviewJanuary 24, 1988.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin, 1998.
Samuels, Wilfred &and Hudson-Weems, Clenora. Toni Morrison.Twayne Publishers, 1990
Smith, Hilda L &Berenice, A Carroll. Women's Political & Social Thought: Anthology Indiana University Press
2001.
22
ROSIE- THE TRANSFORMED REVENGE GHOST
Deepthi.S
Assistant Professor in English
Government First Grade College for Women
Ramanagaram
Exploiting the popular genre of the ghost film, the movie Talaash reinvents the ghost movie as more than
a Slasher film catering to b- grade cinema halls. The movie exploits the medium of the ghost to justify
the return of the ghost as a medium for truth telling and an agent of justice and redefines the revenge
ghost according to the changing demands of a modern world. “While the rationality of the industrial age
denied the existence of the supernatural, such a simple claim is no longer easy to uphold in the times
when we are expected to believe in artificial intelligence, virtual reality and online banking involving
invisible funds. No wonder then that in our contemporary world of ghosts, ghosts have become more real
than ever” . Ghosts are as relevant, perhaps even more than they were in the modern world as the success
of the movie proves. However, ghosts in their earlier avatars are obsolete in a changing world. They
cannot expect to haunt old bungalows, open ground in a world which is constrained for space. As Sandip
Roy in his blog says, “(g)hosts feel terribly old-fashioned in our new India. That’s not because we have
become a more scientifically rational country but because we literally have less and less space for them” .
This paper argues that Talaash attempts a redefinition of the ghost story, attempting to extend its
boundaries, refashioning it to suit modern requirements. “21st century ghosts can be seen as a curious
combination of original religious beliefs, social and cultural rituals, rural and urban folklore, literary
traditions and cinematic representation, re-fashioned and transformed to fit the demands of the
materialistic but immaterial post-industrial society we live in” . The ghost in Talaash thus is a
transformed and refashioned revenge ghost of the earlier ghost films.
The revenge ghost is a type which is often found in stories with female ghosts but it is interesting
to note that a majority of these ghost stories with the female revenge ghost are written by men. The
female revenge ghost often figures in ghost stories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but more
specifically in the other genres like films and folklore. Films are replete with representations of the
revenge ghost. The trope of the female revenge ghost undergoes a transformation in the movie to imbibe
modern sentiments. Such a refashioning results in greater visibility and agency to the female ghost. This
paper examines the growth and transformation of the female revenge ghost in a post modernist society. In
most of the visual texts, the woman who has been victimised through some injustice returns as a ghost
with supernatural powers to wreak vengeance against her oppressors. The victimised woman returns not
only to avenge her death by killing her own killers but she also ends up killing a number of innocents
perpetrating horror and bloodshed and violence. A number of films portray this ghost as a temptress, a
witch, a demon out to destroy the entire male race. In this movie however, the ghost returns within the
world of the living and employs the resources of the living to wreak her vengeance instead of resorting to
supernatural and unbelievable means. Thus with ghosts continuing to hold a sway on popular
imagination, it is natural that the revenge ghost re-emerges in a modified form to seek justice, to tell her
23
story to a world which is more open to listen to non materialistic voices. This resurgence of the ghost
film in a world preceded by rationality and materialism is achieved only by refashioning Rosie, her
appearance, her actions and her methods for revenge.
Henry James’s definition of a ghost story insists that a good ghost story has to have a pretence of
truth, a pleasing terror, no unnecessary bloodshed or sex , no explanation of the machinery and a setting
which is the same as that of the writer’s and the reader’s times . Talaash, although a celluloid text has all
the characteristics underlined by James except one. Although there is a pretence, the pretence is different
from the one James meant. The ghost does appear real and its presence has a semblance of reality.
Where it differs is in making Rosie’s ghost so real that till the end no one suspects that Rosie is a ghost.
She is as real as any real person. And it is here that the revenge ghost achieves greater agency than other
ghosts from the past. By appearing as real as the living, as ordinary as the ordinary she discards all
supernatural powers invested with her identity and reinvents herself to fit into the modern rationalist
world. By merging with the world of the living, Rosie blurs all boundaries between the dead and the
living, and wreaks her vengeance without any associated horror, fear or disgust. She is as suave as the
escort girl she is while living, as well dressed even after her death and as seductive and appealing as she
was when alive, thus an antithesis to the loud, vengeful, evil women ghosts of the past. The central story
in the movie is of Surjan Singh Shekawat, a police inspector who is fighting with the nightmares of a
personal trauma. Having lost his son in a drowning accident, Suri blames himself for his son’s death. He
is asked to investigate the death of a budding movie star Armaan Kapoor whose vehicle crashed into the
wall and drowned in the sea. While investigating the case, Suri unearths a grimy and sordid tale of sleazy
deals and hidden crimes. Tied to this case closely is the death of Rosie, an escort girl. Rosie dies in a
freak car accident when she is being taken by a group of three friends, one of whom is the movie star,
Armaan Kapoor. While she lies on the road injured and crying for help, the men abandon her, rescuing
only their friend who lives in a comatose state. One by one the men involved in Rosie’s death die. The
two men who were involved in her death die in car accidents. They drive their car into the sea and it is
left to Suri to find out if they committed suicide or there was something else driving them to suicide. The
other pimps involved in the business die in cross fighting. Finally Rosie’s ghost is laid to rest when all of
them are killed and her body is found and subjected to a proper cremation. This ghost story features
neither seductive white saree clad ghosts nor grotesque looking horrific women. The female revenge
ghost cannot afford the space of the tamarind tree or even an old bungalow. “Today’s ghosts do not linger
aimlessly in deserted castles, nor do they hover impatiently over burial places. More and more often we
see them invade virtual worlds of the new media, haunting computers and telecommunication devices,
feeling very much at home within the immaterial realms of modern technology we have come to take for
granted” . Hence one sees Rosie in seedy hotels, on the streets, on the beach overlooking the café,
practically in places that are not hidden but which are very public. The story doesn’t have exotic locales,
or inhospitable bungalows. Instead it is set in the busy buzzing locales of Mumbai. There is no space for
human beings, especially for human beings in the margins, the prostitutes and the physically challenged.
The ghosts therefore need to merge with the mainstream crowd in Mumbai. They need to be
unrecognizable; they should be one among the living to walk along the streets. They need to look
different and behave differently from their ancestor ghosts. Thus Rosie as the revenge ghost has to
reinvent herself and transform herself to fit into the modern world. She is not an innocent young virgin
brutally raped and hence seeking supernatural intervention to avenge her death like her ancestor from
24
ghost movies. Rosie is the modern revenge ghost. She rewrites the conventions of ghost films and gains
entry into multiplexes instead of being relegated into old dilapidated theatres. Thus the modern ghost
finds a place for herself not only in multiplexes but also among the mainstream cinema. This reinvention, recasting of the female revenge ghost is an effort at making her voice audible, her struggle for
justice, the mainstream’s voice rather than the voice of the marginalized. She doesn’t seek supernatural
means which fail to scare the modern audience. She doesn’t scare her audience through her invisible
visibility.
The fear of the modern revenge ghost is in her presence as one among the living, in her
unrecognizablity as a ghost. Rosie is real till the end of the story. The audience is not given a ghost right
at the beginning thereby creating in the spectator a suspended sense of disbelief. The disbelief occurs
only at the end when the audience realizes that the one they thought to be real is actually a ghost. Thus by
challenging the expectations of the audience, the ghost movie creates new boundaries. The ghostly is as
real the living. Rosie cannot look for supernatural means for revenge. She needs to carry out her revenge
in this world not in a make believe world. To do this she cannot exploit her supernatural powers. She
needs to exploit her human power, by bringing to fore her story, by exposing the real tale within the
mainstream tale of her victimisation, she wreaks vengeance. Through another human being, Rosie
ensures her tale is told. By manipulating the human natures in perfectly believable ways and a series of
coincidences, Rosie ensures that her story is told though rejected at the end. She also ensures that the
oppressors are punished for their crimes through perfectly plausible explanations. The death of both her
oppressors is explained away towards the end by Suri’s boss as suicide to avoid ignominy and shame.
The ghost has not killed them. They died and yet the audience knows Rosie is behind the killing. In the
end Rosie’s story is dismissed, he doesn’t even acknowledge there is a story and yet the modern female
revenge ghost has got her justice. In her article on justice and female revenge, Janet Strobbs quoting
Maley says that there is a difference between the adversarial system of trial proceedings and the
inquisitorial system (Wright, 2002). The reader is taken through an inquisitorial system of enquiry where
the spirit of inquiry gains ascendance and there is a search for the truth of the matter. She says that,
“Foucault considers this 'inquiry' as a political form of exercising power, and that it functions in judicial
institutions as a way of establishing and authenticating truths, and ultimately as a way of extending social
discipline (Third Conference)” (Wright, 2002) . The inquisitorial system of justice is found within this
story and I argue that it is crucial in authenticating truth and also extending social discipline by proving
that truth will be revealed and the wrongs avenged. As Janet says quoting Foucault, “the re-enactment of
the crime also provides the opportunity for an empathetic view of the motives and circumstances of the
accused” (Wright, 2002), and in this story there is a re-enactment of the crime, although it is not a
repetition of the same crime but a different one in similar circumstances. This trial does not happen
within the law court and yet I argue that the return of the ghost is connected to this system of trial, is
meant to draw the reader in a participatory and unconscious trial so that truth is revealed and the
punishment accepted. This is a means of social discipline, the ghost establishes that wrongs will be
avenged and not necessarily in the other world, but within the living world and within the patriarchal
language of justice, yet subverting it at the same time.
Within the genre of the ghost story, it is the male imagination that construes a female revenge ghost out
to avenge the injustices meted out to the woman while alive. This probably is a guilty consciousness
trying to salvage itself from guilt by giving agency to a woman after her death. The female revenge ghost
25
thus not only becomes a source of entertainment in male writers but also a kind of moral guide,
reminding them of the horrors awaiting them if women are not treated with respect. This fear is also on
account of a mythical understanding of women as destructive when powerful. The negative power
associated with women is the source of actual fear since it can get uncontrollable. Hence in several
stories by men, the female revenge ghost thirsts for blood and is not satisfied in killing only the oppressor
but also other innocent men. Thus the female revenge ghost returns after her death to avenge the
injustices meted out in real life through supernatural powers. This revenge happens in another world not
identified within the justice system of the living world. Hence justice is done to women by invoking the
fear of another world which is frightening on account of the power it gives to someone who is beyond
life and death or good and bad.
Rosie is revenge ghost like her other ancestors. She seeks revenge. But to her revenge is attached a need
to tell the truth, a desire for justice. Her story would have been subsumed under the more important tale
of a superstar’s death. However, she ensures that her story is told to the audience. Her revenge having
been achieved, she could have left the story with an air of mystery. However she doesn’t do that. She
achieves greater agency and visibility by telling her story to the audience. She doesn’t kill the innocents
like her malevolent and evil ancestor. She kills only her tormentors; she saves the innocent. She saves the
inspector from drowning; she also saves a co-worker from the prison house by leading the inspector to
her. The revenge plot is thus only one aspect of the ghost story. Although the victim is dead and returns
as a ghost, it is more to tell her story and to reveal the injustices than to merely horrify, terrorize, kill and
thus become a source of uncontrollable passion and power. The ghost is therefore there to give her
testimony, to ensure that justice is done to her memory, to support and give strength to her sisters in their
struggle against injustices within a patriarchal system. Ironically what she reveals is the world of the dead
within the living. Though the primary story is that of the death of the hero, the story that actually gets
told is that of Rosie and her world of everyday struggles. It is her world where the women in the brothel
have no identity and as she herself reveals, do not even count as people. She makes the viewer aware of
the inspector’s hesitancy in being seen with her in such a seedy place. She shows how people find it
uncomfortable to carry on a conversation with her. She reveals a world in which women like her are
valued not as real people but as bits of flesh. It is by becoming a ghost that she achieves justice
according to the conventions of the traditional ghost story. Her tormentors die in similar circumstances.
She appears when they least expect her in the middle of the road and the suddenness causes their vehicle
to swerve suddenly and cause accident. But is not just revenge that the ghost achieves. The ghost
achieves visibility, that which was denied to her when she was alive. All the men see her before their
death; acknowledge her, whether it is the pimp Shashi, or the superstar. In spite of her death she has
reminded her tormentors and the viewers of her story. Her story is told on her return, something which
might not have happened had she been alive. Her story is unwittingly told, she doesn’t expect it to be
told, but it is as it is tied to the story of the main story. From being a minor thread, in the story, from
being a sub plot of the main plot, Rosie’s story starts occupying the main slot of the movie. Rosie, the
ghost thus becomes the central character, and her story becomes the main story of the movie.
26
END NOTES:
1
retrieved from http://al.comm.louisville.edu/iic/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/FF-Chapter11NEW.pdf
1
retrieved
from
http://www.firstpost.com/living/a-talaash-in-new-india-no-place-left-to-haunt546544.html
1
1
retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._R._James
1
WORKS CITED:
Wright, J. S. (2002). Law, Justice, And Female Revenge In "Kerfol", By Edith Wharton, And Trifles And
"A Jury Of Her Peers", BY SUSAN GLASPELL. Retrieved from
dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/759801.pdf.
27
TAGORE: AS AN EDUCATOR
Dr. Asha Rai
Associate Professor
Department of Humanities
Technocrats Institute of Technology, Bhopal
“The highest education is that which does not merely give us
information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.”
-Rabindranath Tagore
The word education is derived from Latin word educare which means "bring up" or "bring forth
what is within". Education in the largest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on
the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. It provides a foundation for a child to base the
rest of his or her life on. The first and foremost aim of education is to give an all round development,
ensuring the progressive development of natural abilities. It gives us the power to control and guides us
in the right direction. Education civilizes man and inculcates moral values and principles for living out a
better social life in the world. The process of imparting education is as old as human race itself. The
mode of spreading education has experienced many phases and it has modified with the virtues of
changing times. Today we all know that whatever the child experiences and imbibes at home and in
school is more fruitful than what he studies at school and college, that learning through activity is more
genuine than through the books and that wholesome education is not merely cramming the brain with
memorized knowledge but it is actually the training of all the senses along with the mind. But few people
took notice of Rabindranath when he made his first experiments in education in 1901 with less than half a
dozen pupils, most of them thought that it is just ‘A poet's whim’.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), an Indian Bengali scholar, a creative genius, was not only a
poet but was a renowned philosopher, musician, writer and a great educator. He is the first Indian Nobel
Laureate for Literature (1913). He is esteemed as the “King of Poets” for his beautiful and exquisite
poetry. His works are frequently noted for their rhythmic, optimistic, and lyrical nature. He was perhaps
the most widely regarded Indian literary figure of all time. He was a spellbinding representative of the
Indian culture whose influence and popularity internationally perhaps could only be compared to that
of Gandhi, whom Tagore named 'Mahatma' out of his deep admiration for him. His novels, stories, songs,
dance-dramas, and essays spoke to political and personal topics. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (FairFaced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short
stories, and novels were acclaimed for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and contemplation.
Tagore was perhaps the only writer who penned anthems of two countries: India and Bangladesh: Jana
Gana Mana and Amar Shonar Bangla. He started writing poems at the early age of eight. At sixteen, he
published his first substantial poetry under the anonym Bhanushingho ("Sun Lion") and wrote his first
short stories and dramas in 1877. Through constant study and incessant experimentation he surmounted
the modifications that had taken place in world literature, culture, civilization, philosophy and knowledge
over the ages. Consequently, one can trace the content and form of his art developing incessantly. Having
28
an innovative bent of mind Rabindranath was not satisfied with the traditional educational system.
Discussing the problems of education, he said that a boy should be allowed to read books of his own
choice in addition to the prescribed text books he must read for his school work. Tagore wrote. “A boy in
this country has very little time at his disposal. He must learn a foreign language, pass several
examinations and qualify himself for a job in the shortest possible time. So what can he do but cram up a
few text books with breathless speed? His parents and his teachers do not let him waste precious time by
reading a book of entertainment, and they snatch it away from him the moment they see him with one."
Present system of education does not allow us to cultivate the power of thought and the power of
imagination. He also wrote, "To read without thinking is like accumulating building materials without
building anything. We instantly climb to the top of our pile and beat it down incessantly for two years.
Until it becomes level and somewhat resembles the flat roof of a house.”
Economic forces compel the teachers of today to look for pupils, but in the natural order of thing it is the
pupil who should look for the teacher. The teacher is now a tradesman, a vendor of education in search of
customers. Our education system is joyless. Small children are burdened with tons of books. Tagore
wrote. "From Childhood to adolescence and again from adolescence to manhood, we are coolies of the
goddess of learning, carrying loads of words on our folded backs."It has no relation to our life; the books
we read have no vivid pictures of our homes and our society. Our first twenty two years are spent in
picking up ideas from English books. But these ideas are of no use because these do not resemble with
our society. Education and life can never become one in such circumstances and are bound to remain
separated by a barrier. Tagore laid equal emphasis on development of body along with that of children to
take care of their body should be treated as very important. Tagore writes in this concern, "Human beings
need food and not air to satisfy their hunger but they also need air properly to digest their food.”
According to Tagore, “Freedom is essential to the mind in the period of growth and it is richly
provided by nature”. He had fostered in himself for a long time a strategy for an educational system that
would be orientated towards both the spiritual and practical life. It was to achieve this scheme that he
established Santiniketan School. It was his goal to make it an ideal institution of learning. His endeavors
persist in his vast canon and in the institution he founded. In 1901, Tagore left Shilaidaha and moved to
Santiniketan and found an ashram which grew to include a marble-floored prayer hall ("The Mandir"), an
experimental school, groves of trees, gardens, and a library. He established a school in Santiniketan
which would later be transformed into Visva-Bharati, one of his outstanding creations. The school started
with five students. Rabindranath's son Rathindranath was the first student of this school, the poet's wife
Mrinalini looked after the welfare of the students. Life in Santiniketan School was modeled on the life
led in ancient Indian forest hermitages. It was a simple life where the disciples were very close to their
master. Here, Tagore implemented a brahmacharya pedagogical structure where gurus provide individual
attention and guidance to their pupils. Tagore worked hard to raise funds for the school, even
contributing all of his Nobel Prize wealth. Tagore’s duties as custodian and mentor at Santiniketan kept
him busy; he taught classes in mornings and wrote the students' textbooks in afternoons and evenings.
Tagore also fundraised extensively for the school in Europe and the U.S. between 1919 and 1921. A
Roman Catholic Vedantist priest named Brhamobandhav Upadhyay assisted Rabindranath in running this
hermitage. It was he who first called Rabindranath 'Visva Kavi', i.e world-poet.
Santiniketan School was set up at the offset of the Swadeshi era. The end of the First World War
transformed it into Visva-Bharati that soon became a bridge to the world. He wanted to express through
29
Visva-Bharati India's openness to the world, encourage the study of India's past, stimulate India's
curiosity about international cultures, and develop the love of humanity in his students. Taken together,
Santiniketan ashram and School and Visva-Bharati are the main incarnations of Rabindranath's
educational doctrine. Of the three, the first is more purely spiritual; the second one is devoted to giving
students education and introducing them to life, and the third is contrived to establish a bridge between
the East and the West through humanistic and useful study. In addition, he wanted to unite purposeful
education with the pursuit of the ideal life. The education imposed by the British in India at this time was
one that was split up from the realities of life. To overcome this split, he had established Sriniketan. The
poet managed to associate many educationists and scholars both from home and abroad with
Santiniketan. Among them were Sylvain Levi, Moritz Winternitz, Vincent Lesny, Sten Konow, Carlo
Formici, Giuseppe Tucci, Dr. Harry Timbers, etc. The poet also became an intimate friend of the world
famous philosopher Romain Rolland. The educational paragons of Santiniketan are a manifestation of
Rabindranath's humanitarian panorama on life. He has elaborated the philosophy that lay behind the
constitution of this institution in his essay, 'The Centre of Indian Culture'. Wherever he went in India, he
informed people about the institution that he had built and asked for the help of everyone he met. Some
distinguished faculty members of Santiniketan like Mohitlal Sen, Satishchandra Roy, Ajitkumar
Chakravarty, Jagodanand Roy, Haricharan Bandyopadhyay, Bhupendranath Sanyal, Manoranjan
Bandyopadhyay, Kunjabihari Ghosh, Bidhushekhar Shastri, and Kshitimoha helped the poet in
developing it throughout their lives.
As an educator he wrote a series of speeches that he delivered in America and later compiled
in Nationalism (1917). In addition, he lectured in America on topics such as the goals of education, selfidentity, and on the larger world. These were published in the book titled Personality (1917). After his
American trip, Rabindranath now recast his ideas about the school in Santiniketan in the light of his
recent experience. With the years, Rabindranath had won the world and the world in turn had won him.
He sought his home everywhere in the world and would bring the world to his home. And so the little
school for children at Santiniketan became a world university, Visva-Bharati, a centre for Indian Culture,
a seminary for Eastern Studies and a meeting-place of the East and West. The poet selected for its motto
an ancient Sanskrit verse, “Yatra visvam bhavatieka nidam”, which means, "Where the whole world
meets in a single nest." Rabindranath transformed Visva-Bharati into a centre for higher studies. He
aimed to establish a complete system of education that combines Indian philosophy with the best of
international education. Here he made provisions for the study of music and painting while arranging for
more traditional forms of study and research. In 1921 the poet established the Visva-Bharati Board to run
the institute according to specific guidelines. He finally handed over its management to the government
so that Visva-Bharati became a state-run institution. Rabindranath also established at this time a fullfledged organisation for agricultural and rural development called Sriniketan in the village of Shurul, two
miles away from Santiniketan. Schemes for developing animal husbandry, weaving, agriculture, and
cottage industries were undertaken by this organisation. In addition, projects to improve the lot of the
villagers such as a village library, hospital, cooperative bank, tube-well irrigation, and an industrial estate
were adopted. For Rabindranath one goal of Visva-Bharati was to adopt a broad outlook and the other
was to promote universalism. As Rabindranath began conceiving of Visva-Bharati as a national centre for
the arts, he encouraged artists such as Nandalal Bose to take up residence at Santiniketan and to devote
them full-time to promote a national form of art. According to him without music and the fine arts, a
30
nation lacks its highest means of national self-expression and the people remain inarticulate. Tagore was
one of the first to support and bring together different forms of Indian dance. He helped revive folk
dances and introduced dance forms from other parts of India, such as Manipuri, Kathak and Kathakali.
He also supported modern dance and was one of the first to recognize the talents of Uday Sankar, who
was invited to perform at Santiniketan.
Visva-Bharati, the meeting-ground of cultures, as Rabindranath visualized it, should be a
learning centre where infringing interests are minimized , where individuals work together in a common
pursuit of truth and realize 'that artists in all parts of the world have created forms of beauty, scientists
discovered secrets of the universe, philosophers solved the problems of existence, saints made the truth of
the spiritual world organic in their own lives, not merely for some particular race to which they belonged,
but for all mankind.' (Tagore 1922:171-2) . To encourage interdependence, Rabindranath invited artists
and scholars from other parts of India and the world to live together at Santiniketan on a daily basis to
share their cultures with Visva-Bharati. The Constitution denominated Visva-Bharati as an Indian,
Eastern and Global cultural centre whose goals were:
1. To analyze the mind of Man when it realizes the different aspects of truth from diverse points of
view.
2. To bring into more intimate relation with one another through patient study and research, the
different cultures of the East on the basis of their underlying unity.
3. To approach the West from the standpoint of such a unity of the life and thought of Asia.
4. To strengthen the fundamental conditions of world peace through the free communication of
ideas between the two hemispheres.
5. To provide at Santiniketan a centre of culture where research into the study of the religion,
literature, history, science and art of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian, Islamic, Sikh, Christian
and other civilizations may be pursued along with the culture of the West, with that simplicity of
externals which is necessary for true spiritual realisation, in amity, good-fellowship and cooperation between the thinkers and scholars of both Eastern and Western countries, free from all
antagonisms of race, nationality, creed or caste and in the name of the One Supreme Being who
is Shantam, Shivam, Advaitam.
"Visva-Bharati", he declared, "represents India where she has her wealth of mind which is for all. VisvaBharati acknowledges India's obligation to offer to others the hospitality of her best culture and India's
right to accept from others their best." In 1940 a year before he died, he put a letter in Gandhi's hand,
"Visva-Bharati is like a vessel which is carrying the cargo of my life's best treasure, and I hope it may
claim special care from my countrymen for its preservation." Rabindranath Tagore's role in the
innovation of educational ideas has been eclipsed by his fame as a poet. He was a pioneer in the field of
education. For the last forty years of his life he was content to be a schoolmaster in humble rural
surroundings, even when he had achieved fame such as no Indian had known before. He was one of the
first, in India, to think out for himself and put in practice principles of education which have now become
commonplace of educational theory. Mahatma Gandhi adopted the scheme of teaching through crafts
many years after Rabindranath had worked it out at Santiniketan. In fact Gandhiji imported his first
teachers for his basic School from Santiniketan. Rabindranath’s work at Santiniketan and Sriniketan was
sufficient to rank him as one of the India's greatest nation-builders.
31
It should be noted that Rabindranath in his own person was a living icon of the type of mutuality
and creative exchange that he advocated. His vision of culture was not a static one, but one that
advocated new cultural fusions, and he fought for a world where multiple voices were encouraged to
interact with one another and to reconcile differences within an overriding commitment to peace and
mutual interconnectedness. His generous personality and his striving to break down barriers of all sorts
gives us a model for the way multiculturalism can exist within a single human personality, and the type
of individual which the educational process should be aspiring towards. Tagore's educational efforts were
ground-breaking in many areas. He was one of the first in India to argue for a humane educational
system that was in touch with the environment and aimed at overall development of the personality. As
one of the earliest educators he thinks in terms of the global village. Rabindranath Tagore’s educational
model has a unique sensitivity and aptness for education within multi-racial, multi-lingual and multicultural situations, amidst conditions of acknowledged economic discrepancy and political imbalance.
Rabindranath did not write a central educational treatise, yet his various writings and educational
experiments at Santiniketan clearly depict his ideas. In general, he envisioned an education that was
deeply rooted in one’s immediate surroundings but connected to the cultures of the wider world,
predicated upon pleasurable learning and individualized to the personality of the child. He felt that a
curriculum should revolve organically around nature with classes held in the open air under the trees to
provide for a spontaneous appreciation of the fluidity of the plant and animal kingdoms, and seasonal
changes. Children sat on hand-woven mats beneath the trees, which they were allowed to climb and run
beneath between classes. Nature walks and excursions were a part of the curriculum and students were
encouraged to follow the life cycles of insects, birds and plants. Class schedules were made flexible to
allow for shifts in the weather or special attention to natural phenomena, and seasonal festivals were
created for the children by Tagore. In an essay entitled “A Poet’s School,” he emphasizes the importance
of an empathetic sense of interconnectedness with the surrounding world.
We have come to this world to accept it, not merely to know it. We may become powerful by
knowledge, but we attain fullness by sympathy. The highest education is that which does not merely
give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence. But we find that this education of
sympathy is not only systematically ignored in schools, but it is severely repressed. From our very
childhood, habits are formed and knowledge is imparted in such a manner that our life is weaned away
from nature and our mind and the world are set in opposition from the beginning of our days. Thus the
greatest of educations for which we came prepared is neglected, and we are made to lose our world to
find a bagful of information instead. We rob the child of his earth to teach him geography, of language to
teach him grammar. His hunger is for the Epic, but he is supplied with chronicles of facts and dates.
Child-nature protests against such calamity with all its power of suffering, subdued at last into silence by
punishment. In Tagore's philosophy of education, the aesthetic development of the senses was as crucial
as the intellectual and music, literature, art, dance and drama were given great prominence in the daily
life of the school. This was particularly so after the first decade of the school. Drawing on his home life
at Jorasanko, Rabindranath tried to create an atmosphere in which the arts would become instinctive.
One of the first areas to be emphasized was music. Rabindranath writes that in his adolescence, a
'cascade of musical emotion' gushed forth day after day at Jorasanko. 'We felt we would try to test
everything,' he writes, 'and no achievement seemed impossible...We wrote, we sang, we acted, we poured
ourselves out on every side.' In keeping with his theory of subconscious learning, Rabindranath never
32
talked or wrote down to the students, but rather involved them with whatever he was writing or
composing. The students were allowed access to the room where he read his new writings to teachers and
critics, and they were encouraged to read out their own writings in special literary evenings. In teaching
also he believed in presenting difficult levels of literature, which the students might not fully grasp, but
which would stimulate them. The writing and publishing of periodicals had always been an important
aspect of Jorasanko life, and students at Santiniketan were encouraged to create their own publications
and put out several illustrated magazines. The children were encouraged to follow their ideas in painting
and drawing and to draw inspiration from the many visiting artists and writers.
Most of Rabindranath's dramas were written at Santiniketan and the students took part in both the
performing and production sides. He writes how well the students were able to enter into the spirit of the
dramas and perform their roles, which required subtle understanding and sympathy without special
training. In terms of curriculum, he advocated a different emphasis in teaching. Rather than studying
national cultures for the wars won and cultural dominance imposed, he advocated a teaching system that
analysed history and culture for the progress that had been made in breaking down social and religious
barriers. Such an approach emphasized the innovations that had been made in integrating individuals of
diverse backgrounds into a larger framework, and in devising the economic policies which emphasized
social justice and narrowed the gap between rich and poor. Art would be studied for its role in furthering
the aesthetic imagination and expressing universal themes. One characteristic that sets Rabindranath's
educational theory apart is his approach to education as a poet. At Santiniketan, he stated, his goal was to
create a poem 'in a medium other than words.' It was this poetic vision that enabled him to fashion a
scheme of education which was all inclusive, and to devise a unique program for education in nature and
creative self-expression in a learning climate congenial to global cultural exchange.
Conclusion:
Rabindranath Tagore, by his attempts and accomplishments, is component of a planetary network
of innovating educators, such as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Montessori and Dewey--and in the
contemporary context, Malcolm Knowles--who have endeavored to create non-authoritarian learning
systems appropriate to their respective surroundings. Expressing his goals for international education, he
wrote a poem which is as follows:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken
up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into
the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward
by thee into ever-widening
thought and action–
into that heaven of freedom,
my Father,
Let my country awake
33
References:
A Centenary volume Genealogy , Sahitya Academy, New Delhi
Dutta, Krishna & Andrew Robinson (1995) Rabindranath Tagore : The Myriad-Minded Man, London:
Bloomsbury. Hook, Sidney – Education for modern man (1946)
Kripalani, Krishna, Rabindranath Tagore (1980) Calcutta: Visva-Bharati. Selected letters of Rabindranath
Tagore (1997) edited by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson.
Tagore Rabindranath. (1922), Creative Unity. London: Macmillan & Co.
Tagore, R.N. – ‘Svadhin Siksa
Tagore, Rabindranath (1917), Personality. London: Macmillan & Co.
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Tagore, Rabindranath (1961), The Religion of Man. Boston: Beacon Press.
Tagore, Rabindranath (1961), Towards Universal Man. New York: Asia Publishing House.
Tagore, Rabindranath (1966) A Tagore Reader. Edited by Amiya Chakravarty. Boston: Beacon Press.
Tagore, Rabindranath (1980) Our Universe. Translated by Indu Dutt. Bombay: Jaico Publishing House
Tagore, Rabindranath (1985) Rabindranath Tagore:Selected Poems. Translated by William Radice.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.
Tagore, Rabindranath. (1917), My Reminiscences, New York: The Macmillan Company.
34
FOOD MEMORY, IDENTITY AND DIASPORA: AN EXPLORATION OF CHITRA
BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI’S ‘THE MISTRESS OF SPICES’
Mr. Soumyajyoti Banerjee
&
Amrita Basu, Ph.D.
Department of Applied Sciences
Haldia Institute of Technology, Haldia
West Bengal,
India
Introduction:
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a contemporary Indo-American poet and fiction writer whose
writing tackles the intricate and multi-faceted identity issues faced by immigrants, with an emphasis on
those experienced by women. In 1976, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni left Kolkata (then Calcutta), India as a
young adult and moved to the United States. Her experience of immigrating “caused Divakaruni to reevaluate her homeland’s culture, and specifically its treatment of women” (Sofky 1997). A characteristic
feature of Divakaruni’s novels like The Mistress of Spices (1997 ), Sister of My Heart (2000), Vine of
Desire (2002) and Queen of Dreams (2004 ), is that she combines the elements of Indian American
experience and magical realism, drawing parallels between the realistic and the cosmic. Her stories
mainly deal with the search for identity – both individual and communal and a sense of emotional
completion achieved by fusing the two. In order to express experiences as well as internal struggles, in
her novels, women are always in the forefront of action, women become the sites where the presence of
one culture in the thought and world of the other are negotiated. Another characteristic feature of
Divakaruni’s novels is that she often weaves a divine order and mysticism into the gritty reality of the
lives of her women characters. As a result, women protagonists in her fiction often enter a state of
liminality, a space between ruptured pasts and unpredictable futures, residing in an ever changing present
and giving rise to discourses which enable new narratives to be formulated” (Brah 1996). A case in point
is the female protagonist in ‘The Mistress of Spices’ who has been Nayantara, the pirate queen, Sarpakanya, the old-one’s apprentice and now Tilottama in a journey which leaves her at the end as Maya. We
never know what was or is the original nature of her spirit. She is ever sailing into uncharted and amazing
areas of experiences where the transformations require more than time and distance, even desire.
Divakaruni, through choosing names for the protagonist marks Indian popular thought’s indifference to
modern history’s concern with exact birth dates, death dates and name dates, to fit neatly a chronological
pattern of thinking which ties self-identity to segments of time like years, months and days of the
Gregorian calendar. Women like Tilo, making diasporic journeys in Divakaruni’s novels, often identify
fault-lines and fissures in their search for self-definition . Thus her novels are an adventurous foray into
the complex minds of women.
The present paper attempts a reading of the politics of multiculturalism in Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni’s novel The Mistress of Spices. As stated, the protagonist of the novel, Tiolottama (popularly
called Tilo), owns a spice shop in California. She supplies ingredients for various Indian recipes,
simultaneously possessing an uncanny ability to penetrate deep into the personal life of each of her
35
customers and prescribing different spices as remedies for their different problems. Tilottama prescribes
range of spices to evoke desired emotional reactions from people and it may be looked at from the
standpoint of evocation and practice of “Indianness”. Though she has a very supernatural history, she
owns a spice shop in California, much like Indian emigrants. She suggests spices as remedies for various
problems, in the process playing a typical Indian agony-aunt for the expatriate community and much of
an alternative-medicine professional who can read the problems of others bodies and others minds, and
knows the value of Indian spices. In the process, suggesting remedial spices also becomes a soul
searching inner journey for Tilottama as the novel ventures into the magical and wonderful world of the
woman in whose hands ‘the spices come to life’. Espin has commented that although the contradictions
involved in immigrant experiences (specifically for women) can lead to emotional or other problems,
most immigrant women “manage to survive and emerge from the emotional struggle” (Espín 10). How
this is achieved in the novel makes interesting study. When one analyses the opening lines of the
concerned novel ‘The Mistress of Spices’: “I am a Mistress of Spices. I can work the others too. Mineral,
metal, earth and sand and stone…But the spices are my love” (p3). The opening lines are very poignant.
Tilo is “a” mistress of spices. So, it is assumed that there may be other mistresses. Second, she uses the
word “spices” that is the plural form, so she considers the spices as a unified category and at the same
time she belongs to each and every member of the spice family. The juxtaposition of mistress and love is
equally important here as she says that she loves the spices but she is their mistress. Later she goes on to
reveal: “If you stand in the center of this room and turn slowly around, you will be looking at every
Indian spice that ever was—even the lost ones—gathered here upon the shelves of my store” (p3). The
word store is another important word because it is a metaphor of commodity-exchange. It is not a place
associated with love, but it is certainly more in line with the association with mistress. In a society that
generally sees adult women as sexual rivals, especially wives and mistresses, and in one that is inclined
to see a mistress’s function as disruptive rather than constructive, these lines appears rather odd. Here
mistress may be said to be modeled on the ancient concept of the courtesan. Courtesans were artistically
gifted women, who in the past were pictured as consorting with kings and other members of the royal
dynasty and enjoyed a fabulously rich life style, being the custodians of culture and fashion. They also
enjoyed a lot of respect in society. Courtesans were under the patronage of the King or the nobility and
would provide favours only to them. It is interesting to see that before giving out her name Tilo opens her
lines with her status as mistress of spices. She defines her identity, though finds it difficult to stress her
individuality. It reflects her unequal power relations and partial social exclusion in the novel. The concept
of a stable identity is derived from rootedness in a locality, owning land, having a neighbourhood. She
has forged a complex relationship with the self by owning a store, and becoming a mistress of spices. She
is at once rooted and rootless in a deterritorialized community; the “shop” which is not a consistent
geographic space.
Food Memory, Multiculturalism and The Mistress of Spices
The next phase of the novel unfolds different people in front of us. Tilo through her magical
artistic vision sees what they want or lack in their life and sets out to correct it through customized
dosage of spices in each individual’s life without the subject realizing it. Most problems seem to emerge
from the family. Indians suffer from a dependency complex (Kakar 1983, 89) with sometimes the
familial bond being so strong that even the loosening of the family bond, not to mention an actual break,
may be a source of psychic stress and heightened inner conflict (Kakar 1983, 91) as is evident in the
36
characters in the novel. Surprisingly, this makes the narrative even more “Indian” though located in a
foreign land. Thus for Ahuja’s wife Tilo feels:
“Child-longing, deepest desire, deeper than for wealth or lover or even
death. It weighs down the air of the store, purple like before a storm. It
gives off the smell of thunder. Scorches…A handful of turmeric wrapped in
old newspaper with the words of healing whispered into it, slipped into your
grocery sack when you are not looking. The string tied into a triple flower
knot, and inside, satin-soft turmeric the same color as the bruise seeping
onto your cheek from under the dark edge of your glasses”(p16).
Tilo’s heart also cries out for Ratna, another migrant lady who suffers regular, routinised
torture at her husband’s place. She feels:
“Fenugreek, I asked your help when Ratna came to me burning from the
poison in her womb, legacy of her husband’s roving. And when
Ramaswamy turned from his wife of twenty years to a newer pleasure” (p
47).
At a personal level, Tilo’s selection of spices as a tool to create emotions in people reflects gender
oriented underpinnings in her choosing to work within the domestic aesthetic praxis. At a socio-political
level, the spice-shop emerges as a diasporic space where identities are repeatedly destabilized by the
mutability of the diasporic’s situation in the land of domicile (hostland) and the corresponding readjustment of his relations with the place he/she calls home by habit (homeland). The call for repeated renegotiation of identity makes the shop and by extension, diaspora a volatile space. The store transforms a
part of terrestrial space into a place of historical life for people (Bhabha 1994, 143) to quote Bhabha in
another context. Supriya Chaudhuri and Rimi B. Chatterjee in their work The Writer’s Feast: Food and
The Cultures Of Representation (2011) state that: “The physical realities of migration and resettlement
produce two types of psychic accommodation. One, which may be labelled as nostalgia, where the land
left behind is equated with the food that can never be recovered. In the other—which may be labelled as
cosmopolitanism—a dazzling array of global cuisines greets the gourmet traveller in the great cities of
the world.” (xiv)
For traumatised people displaced by history, who have lost much of the material inheritance of a
prosperous, cultured and happy past, remembering food is a form of preserving their roots. In the process,
feasting and plenitude became part of a cumulative narrative of a golden past, a story which compensates
to a small extent for the loss of ancestral roots, property, and social and economic security (Chakravarty
2011, 126). Bunny Crumpacker opines: Food memories, most of them forgotten or blurred, are a mystical
heritage, long since digested and gone, but still lingering in our souls. Personal food, ethnic food, family
food, the food of the culture in which we grew up, the food our mothers gave us—this is the eating that
determines who we are, what we love, what disgusts us, and makes us feel better (Bunny Crumpacker,
The Sex Life of Food 2006, xii). Thus Tilo, through spices sets upon an endeavour to play an agony
aunt for the people in the community and often leans on a tradition of collective memories to help people
in the present. Bhikhu Parekh posits that tendencies to equate multiculturalism with racial minorities and
seeing it as promoting a thinly veiled racism is not what multiculturalism is about. It is a far more
encompassing concept. He argues that multiculturalism is in fact "not about minorities" but "is about the
proper terms of relationship between different cultural communities", which means that the standards by
37
which the communities resolve their differences, e.g., "the principles of justice" must not come from only
one of the cultures but must come "through an open and equal dialogue between them." (Parekh 2002,
13). This is exactly what is achieved through the use of spices in the novel which is our area of
exploration. The sketches of everyday lives of the women in the novel—from the social and political
relationships they forge to the food they eat and the clothes they wear underline the syncretic and
dynamic nature of Indian culture and the subtle complexities that arouse with an American encounter.
Complex problems, combination of spices
While Ahuja’s wife and Ratna face problems from their respective husbands, Geeta has to
confront the ire of her own family members for choosing a life of American Independence where a girl
can choose her own marriage partner and stay with him before marriage. Slowly, the problems start
getting more and more complex, and Tilo has to take recourse to combination of spices to heal others
rather than her earlier relying on individual spices for individual cases. Thus, when she comes face to
face with Jagjit’s case; Jagjit, a young Sikh boy continuously threatened by white racist boys, Tilo feels:
“And here is cinnamon, hollow dark bone that I tuck unseen in your turban just before you go. Cinnamon
friend-maker, cinnamon dalchini warm-brown as skin, to find you someone who will take you by the
hand, who will run with you and laugh with you and say See this is America, it’s not so bad…And for the
others with the pebble-hard eyes, cinnamon destroyer of enemies to give you strength, strength which
grows in your legs and arms and mostly mouth till one day you shout no loud enough to make them,
shocked, stop”(p39). Thus cinnamon is considered the spice which will increase tolerance and
assertiveness, it will help a boy like Jagjit to learn to say no. However, the chapter cinnamon has an
elaborate reference to Lanka or the red chilli which hints at the nature of events to come. Thus, in this
same chapter dedicated to cinnamon, Tilo weaves a paean to Lanka. The solution to the racist problem
through the use of spices reveals to be binary in nature, one developing tolerance (through cinnamon) and
another, fighting back (through the red chilli). In which direction the narrative will move is indicated by
the choice of spices: “Let me tell you about chilies…The dry chili, lanka, is the most potent of spices. In
its blister-red skin, the most beautiful. Its other name is danger... I lanka was born of Agni, god of fire. I
dripped from his fingertips to bring taste to this Wand earth…Chili, spice of red Thursday, which is the
day of reckoning. Day which invites us to pick up the sack of our existence and shake it inside out. Day
of suicide, day of murder. Lanka, lanka. Sometimes I roll your name over my tongue. Taste the enticing
sting of it. So many times the Old One has warned us against your powers. “Daughters, use it only as the
last remedy. It is easy to start a flame. But to put it out?”That is why I hold on, lanka, whose name the
ten-headed Ravana took for his enchanted kingdom. City of a million jewels turned at the last to ash.
Though more than once I have been tempted…In the inner room of the store, on the topmost shelf, sits a
sealed jar filled with red fingers of light. One day I will open it and the chilies will flicker to the ground.
And blaze.Lanka, fire-child, cleanser of evil. For when there is no other way” (p 37).
While elaborating the level of competency needed to handle each spice, Tilo remarks that the
chili grows in the very center of the magical spice island, in the core of a sleeping volcano. Until the third
level of apprenticeship is reached, no one is allowed to approach with working the chilli. Tilo also
remarks that the presence of lanka is like an ever looming threat as any day it may provoke one to take it
out of the jar and use it. Lanka becomes symbolic of the dormant, inner violence present in all of us. It
can come out anyday. To ward off the looming tension, Tilo moves into the history of the spice lanka.
38
To borrow from Rogobete, tracing and interpreting a food’s story is also about mapping a cultural
geography; a food is both a product of particular times and places, and part of the process of
globalisation. Like “any good biography or travelogue,” a food’s story reveals a “much bigger story.”
(Rogobete 2007). Tilo talks of the rich ancient heritage of chilli, its illustrious past. At the same time she
also tries to explain the contemporary use of the spice and how it may be used in the future to help the
community. Tilo thus also acts as an art historian seeking to accommodate novelty while retaining some
continuity with the aesthetic as understood in the past (Dickie 1964). It is understood traditions often
have to be reclaimed and revitalized as part of modernity to establish their continuity. At the same time,
the legitimacy of modernity depends on how it conforms to tradition (Ramakrishnan 2011, 6). Tilo’s
mention of the grand history of chilli and its ever important presence in today’s scenario also supports the
argument. The paean to Lanka especially reflects that historically, there has been no complete rupture
between the medieval and the modern in Indian thinking. Collective hopes, aspirations, fears and belief
that have been handed down from the past continue to rule the thinking of communities from India in a
way that has almost disappeared from the West. Even mundane objects like spices are exotic and remote
in their history yet very capable to leap out any moment from their place in history and break in upon the
consciousness of the present generation, overlapping history with current societal concerns.
Soon after the paean to the red chilli in Jagjit’s case for whom Tilo has already prescribed the
tolerance enhancing cinnamon, comes up Haroun’s case. Haroun is a Kashmiri Muslim who has migrated
to Oakland, California and is working as a cab driver there. Haroun gets into argument with the local
whites of the region and therefore, he is mercilessly beaten up. This is the location in the narrative where
to quote Homi Bhaba, “the very place of identification, caught in the tension of demand and desire, is a
space of splitting” (44). Tilo initially prescribes cinnamon for Jagjit, then moves on to prescribe Kalo Jire
for Haroun and all other Indian brothers in trouble, but everything moves towards failure. As Mendoza
and Shankar (2003) point out, “assimilation remains an option; even a recommendation” as many
contemporary immigrant and ethnic American texts present a suspicious, if not oppositional, attitude
towards Americanization. They often challenge the myth of the American Dream, exposing the racism
that immigrants face and the challenges that even the hardest working face in their quest to “make it.”
Such challenges may not always be resolved through tolerance. Tilo casts a spell for the benefit of all
Indians in America: I will split once again tonight kalo jire seeds for all who have suffered from America.
For all of them and especially Haroun, who is a hurting inside me, whose name each time I say it pulls
my chest in two. I will lock the door and stay up all night to do it, through dimness the knife rising and
falling steady and silver as holy breath. So that when he comes tomorrow evening (for tomorrow is
Tuesday) I can hand him the packet and say, “Allah ho Akbar, may you be safe, in this life and always…I
will whisper into air purifying prayers for the maimed, for each lost limb, each crushed tongue. Each
silenced heart. (p 173)
But Tilo soon realizes that kalo jire is not so potent a spice to stall violence when America rushes
by. “Kalo jire wasted once again, what apology can I offer you? I can say only what you know already. It
is too late for you to work your power. One spice alone is left that can help Haroun now”. (p 231)
Incidentally Tilo associates kalo jire with Ketu (itself considered a shadowy planet) in the system of
navagrahas (since spices are also associated with grahas in the novel). Rahu and Ketu are actually not
considered as planets proper but as the nodes of the moon and hence important. It is interesting to see that
the spice associated with Haroun which is kalo jire is the spice of the planet ketu. In the system of Indian
39
astrology, there are two shadowy planets, A traditional healer should have a sound knowledge of
astrological discourses; the workings of the grahas or the planets in our lives. Foucault described
discourse as an entity of sequences of signs in that they are enouncements. This includes, language, talk,
visual representations, and cultural beliefs and norms (Ussher 2011, 232).The term discourse refers to a
set of shared cultural beliefs and practices, which are utilized in everyday life in order to construct
meaning and interpretation about the world. It is also argued that discourses are constitutive of
subjectivity, and that the meanings of objects and events are inseparable from the way in which they are
constituted within particular discourses (Ussher 2011, 238). Tilo, as the mistress of spices somehow
manages to choose a marginal spice ruled by a marginal planet for the Kashmiri Muslim immigrant
Haroun. There are two things important here, first, ketu though a navagraha, is a marginal planet as it is
the last one in the schema of planets, the schema being Surya, Chandra, Mangal, Budh, Brihaspati,
Shukra, Shani, Rahu and Ketu. Second, ketu is often associated with violence, fears, unknown enemies
etc; all of which find reflection in Haroun’s case. With help for Haroun repeatedly failing, Tilo starts
suffering from a lack of self-confidence. This spreads to the lack of her self confidence in her own looks
and body. The socio-poltical gets intertwined with the personal here at this juncture of the novel. In steps
a devastatingly handsome American man and Tilo soon experiences the throes of loosing out her heart to
him. One cannot say that Tilo is not aware of her precarious situation. She even mentions at a point of
time: “A Mistress must carve her own wanting out of her chest, must fill the hollow left behind with the
needs of those she serves” (p69).
I scrub my one American outfit in the sink with a bar of chemical-smelling Sunlight soap. Night
passes, each minute dripping like wash water from the hung-up clothes. Neem dust dries and pulls at my
skin. My scalp itches. Spikes of ritha hair poke at my face…Yet when I have bathed and dried myself, I
feel on my face the same crumpled skin, around my shoulders the same locks, coarse and gray as the
shon jute women weave into sacking…For you, for him, where do you separate the desires…My spells
were not given for myself to use”(p 189). It is interesting to see that while she still relies on Indian herbs
and spices to accentuate her beauty, the outfit she chooses is American. This is where Tilo arrives at a
critical juncture where she has to choose between her identity as the mistress of spices or she has to set
out into a foray into an unknown world. But her very identity of a mistress also hints at the idea that one
cannot abdicate power one has not held. She is not a wife, she is a mistress of spices, however creative a
power the spices may confer on her. “O spices…Can I not love you and him both. Why must I choose”.
(p 190), she asks in a moment of desperation. She is not afraid to enter conflagration and consuming in
Shampati’s fire (p 261), a sure punishment for aberrant mistresses because she has already entered this
conflagaration in love. Dick Hebdige, in addressing the subculture of punks in the United Kingdom
posits that a dominant culture incorporates any alien culture through two forms: the commodity form and
the ideology form (90-99). If, for the purpose of this paper, we extend Hebdige’s definition of
incorporation through commodity and ideology and apply it to the immigrant condition within the space
of California in the novel, we find, as Hebdige argues, the first form - commodity - turns difference into
something to be embraced and purchased, that is Indian spices and herbs are affordable commodities and
may be easily purchased, including its people are affordable and no matter how they treat Indians, they
are going to escape from the clutches of the law. This creates tensions in some who extend it to a
perverted idea that everything Indian is affordable because an Indian marker of culture like valuable
herbs and spices is reduced to the category of material goods. The second form discussed by Hebdige is
40
ideology, that is presenting people belonging to the alien culture in such a way that they don’t appear as
“the other” but rather as a part of the dominant culture. The combined role of home and host cultures in
conditioning the diaspora’s sense of belonging to a definitive and stable space cannot be overstated. The
diasporic’s identity in this space is thus generated by the collective imagination of a community that has
evolved from the migrant’s contact with the new host-land cultures and the distancing from a familiar
homeland culture and its established systems of knowledge production. This ironically finds expression
in a very twisted way in the novel where routinised violence emerges as an established system of action
against migrants and they in turn resort to violence as the only solution to violence. Slowly the cases
Tilottama faces, also become tougher day by day, for example, Jagjit getting involved in a drug racket or
like Haroun, even Mohan being mercilessly beaten up in a violent racist attack. Kalo jire the spice she
selects for helping Haroun has already been wasted multiple times. Tilo remarks:
“Doubts and more doubts crowd the cage of my chest, clawing and crying
for release. But I think of Haroun’s face, and behind him Mohan with his
blinded eye, and behind him all the others, a line of injustice that stretches
beyond the edge of eternity…
The seal is easier to break than ever I had
thought. I reach in, feel the papery rub of the pods against my skin, the
impatient rattle of the seeds…O lanka who has been waiting so long for a
moment like this, I pour you onto a square of white silk, all except one
which I leave in the bottom of the jar. For myself, for soon I will need you
too. I tie the cloth ends into a blindman’s knot that cannot be untied, that
will have to be cut open. I hold the bundle in my hand and sit facing the
east, where storms arise. I begin the transforming chant.”
Descriptions of irritation triggered by such external incidents could also be interpreted as masking deeper
feelings of hurt and frustration. Once again in her life Tilo has to reject the mantle of the caring,
sacrificing woman, the fantasy of idealized femininity, which is internalised from childhood and cast a
spell with the spice of violence, with a constant looming threat of loosing her own identity. Chitra
Banerjee Divakaruni, through Tilo, puts into print women creator’s deepest fears: the fear of being
trapped and imprisoned in her store which confines her life, at the same time a fear of male sexuality,
male power and male duplicity, and not least a fear of losing her own identity. This echoes Haroun’s
deepest fears, of being trapped an imprisoned in a no-solution situation, at the same time a fear of what
may come if one does not rise to the occasion and take action against the racist attacks. C. James Trotman
(2002) argues that multiculturalism is valuable because it "uses several disciplines to highlight neglected
aspects of our social history, particularly the histories of women and minorities and promotes respect for
the dignity of the lives and voices of the forgotten (113). By closing gaps, by raising consciousness
about the past, multiculturalism tries to restore a sense of wholeness in a postmodern era that fragments
human life and thought" (Trotman 2002). The spice Lanka helps Tilo to close the gap between the past
and the present so that she can move boldly into the future without anything holding her back. Lanka
achieves the same for Haroun too who is resolved to start life anew. Thus, Lanka emerges as a final
salvation for Haroun. Emboldened, Tilo tries it out for herself too, the fire of Lanka to combat
Shampati’s fire. Lanka emerges as a spice to break away, fight back and rebel rather than assimilate.
While Haroun gathers courage to face the situation with resilience, Tilo sees a vision of the First Mother
41
in the mysterious spice island, the one who had warned her about Shampati’s fire in case she dares to use
the spices for her own benefit. The exchange of words is important:
“Tilo you should not have broken open the red jar—”
“Mother it was time.”
“—should not have released its power into this city that has too much anger
in it already.”
“But Mother, the anger of the chili is pure, impersonal. Its destruction is
cleansing, like the dance of Shiva. Did you not tell us this yourself?”
She only says, “There are better ways to help those who come to you.”
“There was no other way,” I say in exasperation. “Believe me. This land,
these people, what they have become, what they have done to—. Ah,
rocked in the safe cradle of your island, how can you understand?” (p 235)
It is interesting to see that the imagery of being burnt Shampati’s fire is almost like the Hindu pratha of
burning oneself at one’s husband’s funeral pyre. It also hints at purity through fire, because Tilo does not
burn away into ashes after this ordeal. Rather, imbibed with new courage and newer priorities in life Tilo
starts off into another new journey with her dream man, this time with another cosmic name for herself—
Maya.
Conclusion
The novel The Mistress of Spices, examines with clinical precision, the process by which people
get alienated from the host-nation. It probes the sources of violence that have been internalized by the
host-nation. Deeper subliminal layers of ideological perspectives present in the novel point to the the
manner in which Divakaruni presents alternative ideas of self, community and nation for a woman and a
man, intertwining socio-political with personal destiny. The knowledge of spices, the food-memories
offer Tilo the impetus necessary to move beyond the quotidian existence bound by the limitations of
contemporary or modern knowledge. The magic of spices offer a system of protection and in the process
become a vital form of self preservation of the community in the face of western influence. When seen
against the essentialising socio-political discourse of the nation, the personal and random aspects of
everyday life also acquire the halo of the heroic and the homogenous. Thus, both destinies influence, and
in turn are influenced by each other. Issues of power and desire, contest and consent, aggression and
accommodation revolve around the multicultural praxis in the novel. Full of people negotiating the
immigrant experience, in The Mistress of Spices Divakaruni skillfully “builds an enchanted story upon
the fault line in American identity that lies between the self and the community” (Merlin 207). Diverse
people problems are solved through the use of diverse spices. According to Bhattacharya, “immigrants to
do not simply accept the ‘melting pot’ roles expected of assimilated Americans” – instead they
continually redefine their sense of identity (66) and such identities are continually constituted within the
crucible of the materiality of everyday life; in the everyday stories we tell ourselves individually and
collectively”(Brah 1996, 8). Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel offers a crucial site to explore how
characters maneuver their lives and identity struggles. As has been famously remarked “as migrants cross
borders, they also cross emotional and behavioral boundaries…. One’s life and roles change…with them,
identities change as well” (Espín 1991, 241). “Although such experiences are stressful, they also provide
opportunities for creating a ‘new’ identity” (Ramakrishnan 2011) and this new identity is achieved
through the help of spices in The Mistress of Spices.
42
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Chakravarty, Suchandra. 2011. Lost Land, Remembered Flavours. In Supriya Chaudhuri and Rimi B.
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125-135.
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New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.
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New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.
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2012
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75.
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44
DECULTURE AND DEHUMANIZATION: RECIPES OF APOCALYPTIC DISINTEGRATION
IN NATHANAEL WEST’S MISS LONELYHEARTS
Dr Payal Khurana
ITM University, Gurgaon
Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West’s second novel, published in 1933, looks like a five-finger
surrealistic exercise. Lonelyhearts simply gives the pen-portrait of the modern-day existence which has
proved to be totally futile in all its attempts to gain credibility and an inspirational essence, and
consequently becomes “… a novel about the tragic failure of modern man to nurture and to assert his
unique selfhood.”1 It employs a surfeit of physical and sexual violence, men and women emotionally
happy and spiritually sterile. Miss Lonelyhearts is narrating the story of a young unnamed bachelor, who
works with a New York newspaper as an advice columnist to despairing readers. The name given to the
hero is Miss Lonelyhearts, as being in charge of an agony column, the hero gives counsel to readers in
distress, with loneliness afflicting their hearts and minds. While giving advice to grief-stricken, helpless
and desperate people, who write to him under assumed names as Desperate, Harold S., Catholic Mother,
Broken-Hearted, Broad-Shoulders, Sick-of-it-all, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband etc., all these
names becoming an index of the inner turbulence agonizing the writers who shoot off letters for the
agony column of the hero’s newspaper. These people are psychologically sick, products and denizens of
a diseased society and their “… letters are clichés of suffering, despair, fragmentation, alienation,
dehumanization, victimization, sterility and violence – qualities indicative of modern life.”2 While
mirroring the reality of modern life, these letters also appear to parody it. Miss Lonelyhearts had taken up
this job as a joke, hoping it would lead to a gossip column but soon he realizes that the joke has turned
upon him and the individuals corresponding with him are seen to be in real suffering, while the hero
himself becomes the victim of the joke.
The letters were so real and frustrating that they remind Lonelyhearts of his creative failure.
West’s hero offers ‘Christ’ as the solution to every problem irrespective of its nature. He becomes ‘sick’
in the eyes of the world and tries to cure his sickness with alcohol, sex and indulgence in violence, yet the
“Christ-complex” gets worse. Shrike the editor of the newspaper, for which Lonely hearts works, makes
life further difficult for him. As a secular Satan, a con-man, Shrike mocks at the “Christ-complex” of the
hero, thus aggravating his problems. Lonelyhearts has an on-going affair with Mary, Shrike’s wife, but
the relationship proves effete, devoid of any solace. The very opening chapter of the book, containing a
number of letters addressed to Miss Lonelyhearts, apprises us of some of the violence, oppression and
corruption rampant in a diseased society. The incidents that follow are in a way an extension of this
violence and corruption. The writers of letters in no way deserve the suffering they are undergoing.
Cumulatively, the agony-column letters represent the demonic aspect of a dehumanized society:
“… now I would like to have boyfriends like the other girls and go out on
Saturday nites, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose –
although I am a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me
pretty clothes. I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in
45
the middle of my face that scares people, even myself, so I can’t blame the
boys for not wanting to take me out.”3
This letter from noseless “Desperate” epitomizes a brutal society in which only physical beauty and
glamour reign supreme and other qualifications get rejected. It also brings forth the fact that human
beings are not compassionate to each other. Indifference, neglect and callousness dominate and determine
human relationships of all types and hues. People suffering from physical and mental deformities are
looked down upon and are not able to receive the love, sympathy and compassion of their fellow- beings.
This results in frustration among them which stems out in the form of abnormal and bizarre behaviour
and suppression takes the form of violence. The letters received by Lonelyhearts makes an interesting
spectrum. One letter highlights that it is not only the physically deformed who suffer sexual alienation
but also those having a pretty nose have to bear the same fate, as is narrated by Harold S. in the letter:
“… my little sister Gracie … is thirteen and … is deaf and dumb … she
plays on the roof of our house … last week a man came on the roof and did
something dirty to her … I am afraid that Gracie is going to have a baby …
If I tell mother she will beat Gracie up awful because I am the only one who
loves her and last time when she tore her dress they loked her in the closet
for two days and if the boys on the block hear about it they will say dirty
things like they did on Peewee Conors sisters the time she got caught in the
lots.”(CWNW, 1957, p. 68)
A perverted human attitude does not spare even the handicapped, and the brutal reality is that lust and
violence have overtaken love. A little before the publication of Miss Lonelyhearts, West wrote that, “in
America violence is idiomatic … In America violence is daily.”4 Such a compendium of a violent society
confirms the harsh fact that emotional and spiritual values have gone dead and become totally extinct and
meaningless. This holds good not only for America but the situation is the same throughout the globe. In
a similar vein, “Sick-of-it-all” is tortured by her husband. She writes to Miss Lonelyhearts:
“I have 7 children in 22 years and ever since the last 2, I have been so sick.
I was operated on twice and my husband promised no more children on the
doctor’s advice as he said I might die but when I got back from the hospital
he broke his promise and now I am going to have a baby and I don’t think I
can stand it my kidneys hurt so much. I am so sick and scared because I
can’t have an abortion on account of being a catholic and my husband so
religious. I cry all the time it hurts so much …” (CWNW, 1957, p.66-67)
“Sick-of-it-all” is being tortured by her husband whose blind faith on Catholicism has made him the
destructive agent of a concept, which makes the fanatical husband a veritable monster, using his conjugal
rights simply to kill a helpless and innocent wife. Religion, instead of providing any comfort to the
unfortunate lady, hastens her destruction and she is caught in the vortex of never ending psychological
cum physical violence. These letters highlight the suffering, anguish and torment which human beings
have to undergo in a society which has lost its moorings in a quagmire of moral, spiritual and religious
decadence. Even Miss Lonelyhearts who is a product of this society only, fails to provide any consolation
to his readers as after reading a letter from “Sick-of-it-all”, “Miss Lonelyhearts threw the letter into an
open drawer and lit a cigarette”(CWNW,1957,p.67) and after the third letter: “He stopped reading. Christ
was the answer, but if he did not want to get sick, he had to stay away from the Christ
46
business”(CWNW,1957,p.68) .All this shows the moral deprivation and deep perversions of modern life
which is the basic cause of dissatisfaction among people and leads to violence in society. In fact, faced
with such a state of affairs, “It kindles in him only a reaction of boredom and disinterestedness.”5 The
situation is really ironic for West’s protagonists as being himself a product of the same sociological
environment he can do little for his psychologically suffering clients who are the victims of
psychological and physical struggle and their agony ultimately engulfs Lonelyhearts as well and spells
his doom.
Among the letters, is one from Fay Doyle, married to a cripple, another letter is from “Broad
Shoulders”, a deserted wife who wants a home for herself and her children. Each letter becomes a symbol
of human force of evil that crushes man in a torrent of mental anguish. For these sufferers, the only
reality is their flame of agony and torment. But reality cannot be endured without dreams and in utter
desperation, the anguished victims write to Miss Lonelyhearts. In their continuous struggle to escape
from violence and torment, the anonymous writer of the agony column becomes their only hope of
salvation, their savior. West’s vision of human life is ironic here. He sees men’s ideals and ideas as mere
pipe-dreams. Man, in an ironic society, lives by his illusions and dreams as these sustain him, “… and in
this world of decay and violence, the only way that man is able to exist is through dreams.”6 But what
exactly has gone wrong with these dreams is that the “Commercialization and stereotyping of man’s
dreams have led to a weakening of their power, an adolescent puerility in their content. This is the worst
betrayal of modern man.”7 The whole idea of circulation gimmick shows how lightly human emotions
are trifled with. Miss Lonelyhearts continually tries to see the suffering around him as joke, but in
accordance with his role as the unsuccessful hero, he fails. However sick, painful, evil and miserable
modern life might be, it is no more than a joke and a subject of laughter. The inhumanity of a demonic
and dehumanized world fosters total unconcern and an appalling lack of affection and sympathy for the
sick, needy, agonized and helpless humans who desperately need the healing touch. The anarchic and
painful affairs reflected in the letters are indicative of suffering, frustration and despair. Miss
Lonelyhearts also anatomizes the pervasive theme of loneliness and personal alienation of modern man.
It is primarily concerned with the individual’s moral and psychological struggle in a world in which all
values are suspect and all attempts to achieve identity, are subject to frustration. Even the title as an
inversion, may be said to represent alienated modern man, virtually traumatized by his pathetic condition.
The multiple levels of meaning which the title yields, suggests that West’s intentions are more than just
presenting the depravity of modern life. The name ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ is a misnomer. First of all, Miss
Lonelyhearts is a man and not a woman. He is a “Miss,” suggesting remedies even to married people.
Again, he is Miss Lonely “hearts” and not Lonely ‘heart’. It is a paradox that the plural “hearts” should
be lonely. Yet it suits him well, for he is as lonely a heart as any of his correspondents, the readers who
address letter to his agony-column. The name would appeal to the vulnerability of other lonely people
and thereby, give him an entry into their lives and secrets, the hero can easily disguise his loneliness in
some activity. In fact, all the characters in the novel are grotesque and abhorrent personages, denizens of
a hell that man creates on earth. Miss Lonelyhearts himself is a true representative of the jadedness of
modern life. The spurious solutions he offers to his suffering correspondents are matched by the complete
inauthenticity of his own responses to religion, love and sex. He has begun to doubt all values, and
therefore, the value of suffering itself, “…letters, all of them alike stamped from the dough of suffering
with a heart-shaped cookie knife.”(CWNW, 1957,p.66) Lonelyhearts is virtually a traitor, who takes to
47
the profession of an agony-column advisor as a joke, but soon finds, as already pointed out, that the joke
has since recoiled upon him, as he too is a product of a futile and Kafkaesque world, in which everything
has gone degenerate and degraded. Culture is dressed in deculture, terrifyingly pessimistic, with no ray of
hope and, “…in this world of decay and violence, the only way that man is able to exist is, through
dreams,”8 Human society is shown as morally sterile and culturally stagnant and Miss Lonelyhearts is
physically alive but spiritually dead and he lives in a world which “has no values …”9 Even Lonelyhearts
thinks that “only violence can make him supple or only friction would make him supple or only friction
would make him warm or violence mobile.”(CWNW, 1957, p.90) He is virtually a con-man, who instills
false hopes and promises in the minds of suffering people and thus, only aggravates the situation. His
editor, William Shrike, makes it virtually impossible for him to offer any serious advice or religious
solace or to display any feeling of tenderness, towards the sufferers.
Miss Lonelyhearts incorporates a secular wasteland of pain, torture and torment, a world “in
which evil and human suffering stalk in their naked horror. No sensitive viewer of this land can observe
the anguish and retain his sanity. The death mask is their alternative to facing horrors of life.”10 Through
the portrayal of the character of Miss Lonelyhearts, West is highlighting his apocalyptic stance which
dominates the action in the novel and displays the author’s disgust with a human society where “…
rituals are impotent and whose world remains stubbornly dead.”11 He writes to his grief-stricken clients:
“Life is worthwhile, for it is full of dreams and peace, gentleness and
ecstasy and faith that burns like a clear white flame on a grim dark altar.”
(CWNW, 1957, p. 66)
These words are meaningless and offer no comfort to the sufferers, the clients of the heroes’ agony
column. The central protagonist’s words only mock at the effete and futile existence led by spiritually
sterile and morally debased humans. In West’s world, no salvation is possible as confused and lost
human beings become misfits in an undirected and absurd universe. Man is thus, unable to impose order
on his existence. Miss Lonelyhearts obsession with order is vividly described:
“Miss Lonelyhearts found himself developing an almost insane
sensitiveness to order. Everything had to form a pattern: the shoes under the
bed, the ties in the holder, the pencils on the table. When he looked out of a
window, he composed the skyline by balancing one building against an
other. If a bird flew across this arrangement, he closed his eyes angrily until
it was gone. For a little while, he seemed to hold his own but one day he
found himself with his back to the wall. On that day all the inanimate things
over which he had tried to obtain control took the field against him. When
he touched something, it spilled or rolled to the floor. The collar buttons
disappeared under the bed, the point of the pencil broke, the handle of the
razor fell off, the window shade refused to stay down. He fought back, but
with too much violence, and was decisively defeated by the spring of the
alarm clock.” (CWNW,1957, p.78)
However hard and desperately Miss Lonelyhearts may try to escape from disorder and chaos, the more it
envelopes him. The hero becomes an example of a disorderly orderly, frantically attempting to construct
form, harmony, and meaning out of chaos and confusion. The hero develops an obsession with imposing
48
order on inanimate objects because he finds the outside world disorderly. His problem is that he cannot
separate himself from his readers. He wants to provide assistance to them in removing their miseries, but
can’t make any difference in their lives. What is projected is a:
“ … world that desire totally rejects: the world of the nightmare and the
scapegoat, of bondage and pain and confusion…the world also of perverted
or wasted work, ruins and catacombs, instruments of torture and
monuments of folly.”12
Even nature is hostile towards man, giving him no chance to impose order upon a disorderly existence.
For creating havoc and disorder, none else but man becomes the main culprit. In fact, homosapiens have
created a world which is full of “total inhumanity, hovering between dream and nightmare, and ever on
the edge of apocalypse.”13 Human beings appear like moronish entities in this directionless society,
where sex, violence, lust, and materialism rule high and moral and ethical values are completely rooted
out.
West, therefore, suggests that Lonelyhearts world represents the modern day world, a world:
“… in which evil and human suffering stalk in their naked horror. No
sensitive viewer of this land can observe the anguish and retain his sanity.
The death mask is their alternative to facing horrors of life.”14
Getting ultimately fed up with his “Christ business”, Lonelyhearts now wants to get rid of it. He
tries various escapes, all demonic and perverted. First he goes after Betty, his fiancée and then
concentrates on Mrs. Shrike, the wife of his newspaper editor and finally has a sexual intercourse with
Mrs. Doyle, his agony-column client who is the wife of cripple, Peter Doyle. The whole business of sex
is made to look nauseating, contrived and mechanical when Lonelyhearts is described as feasting his eyes
upon the gigantic female anatomy of Mrs. Doyle: “the action of her massive hams, they were like two
enormous grind-stones.”(CWNW, 1957, p.100) The comparison of her hams with grindstones shows the
disintegration of human form into the inorganic form, a common feature of demonic imagery. Lonely
hearts pursues an American dream of innocence and heroism and selflessness. The dream turns into
nightmare as the sociological environment is base and perverted with money, power, sex and violence,
dominating everything else. West wrote at a time when America was undergoing cataclysmic socioeconomic changes as a result of the Great Depression. Believing in the dream of abundance and
prosperity had become increasingly difficult. Consequently, the dreams sold by modern dream merchants
offered no adequate solution toward overcoming suffering in an evil world. This is the main reason of
dissatisfaction among people which led to suffering and ultimately violence and destruction. Violence is
increasingly becoming the only way of expressing frustration and giving vent to anger by the common
middle class people, who feel deprived at every stage of their lives.
Shrike, Miss Lonelyhearts chief tormentor, is actually a secular Satan, who lambasts
Lonelyhearts “Christ business” and puts it to ridicule:
Soul of Miss L, glorify me.
Body of Miss L, nourish me.
Blood of Miss L, intoxicate me.
Tears of Miss L, wash me.
Oh good Miss L, excuse my plea,
And Hide me in your heart,
49
And defend me from my enemies,
Help me, Miss L, help me, help me….A Men (CWNW, 1957, p.66)
Shrike also makes vulgar jokes about Christianity: “I am a great saint. I can walk on my own
water.”(CWNW, 1957, p.72) This shows the evil person’s spiritual sterility, as the chief spokesman of a
spiritually barren world in which the people “have dissipated their radical energy in an orgy of stonebreaking.”(CWNW, 1957, p.100) Josephine Herbst denounces world of Miss Lonelyhearts as “the entire
jumble of modern society bankrupt not only in cash but more tragically in emotion, is depicted…like a
life-sized engraving narrowed down to the head of a pin.”15 Shrike’s lack of emotions determines his
actions throughout the novel. Named after the butcher-bird that impales its prey on a thorn or a twig,
while tearing it apart with its sharp hooked beak, Shrike lives by impaling the dreams of others and
ripping them apart. He makes a joke of everything and everyone mocking and ridiculing at the miseries
of people. He becomes an antichrist figure, crucifying those who strive for faith and love.He laughs at
Miss Lonelyhearts and time and again pesters him by asking him to forget Christ:
“Forget the crucifixion, remember the renaissance…..I give you
renaissance. What a period! What pageantry; Drunken Popes…Beautiful
courtesans…illegitimate children… (CWNW, 1957, p.72-28)
Here, Shrike can be compared to the “Bad Angel” in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of
Doctor Faustus, who forces Faustus to sign an agreement with the devil and in turn offers him all
epicurean pleasures, including women. Shrike, thus becomes the ideal representative of a morally corrupt
and degraded society. When Miss Lonelyhearts expresses annoyance over Shrike’s mentioning women,
he mockingly says: “Oh. So you don’t care for women, eh? Jesus Christ the King of Kings, the Miss
Lonelyhearts of Miss Lonelyhearts….”( CWNW,1957,p.72- 29) This statement has been has been
interpreted as a statement, “ not comparing Miss Lonelyhearts to Christ but very differently, Christ to
Miss Lonelyhearts.”16. It suggests a “simple but devastating equation: Christ is to Miss Lonelyhearts as
Miss Lonelyhearts to his correspondents and just as Miss Lonelyhearts is powerless to help the
“Desperate” and “ Sick-of-it-alls” of the world, so Christ is powerless to help him.”17 These critical
interpretations again confirm the central premise of the novelists’ sociological credo: compassion, love,
sacrifice and selflessness become totally redundant and obsolete in a society where materialistic and
sexual lust, vengeance, opportunism and violence dominate and guide every human act and thoughts.
Betty, West’s fiancée, also comes forward to cure Lonelyhearts of his “sickness.” She is the only person
in this fictional apostatic world who stands for, “order, simplicity and childish innocence.”18 She feels
that these are only “city troubles” which have made him sick, and takes him to the countryside.
Whenever Lonelyhearts mentions the letters or Christ to her, she changes the subject by narrating long
stories about life in a farm. Both of them spend some time in close proximity with nature and when they
drive back, the hero feels:
“Her world was not the world and could never include the readers of his
column. Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience
arbitrarily. Moreover, his confusion was significant while her order was not.
(CWNW, 1957, p.79)
The lesson is obvious – Human agony, suffering and violence are too real and unforgettable for West’s
protagonist, and any amount of artifice or embellishment is not going to make any difference, as far as
50
Lonelyhearts involvement with his role of an agony column counsellor is concerned. Consequently, he is
disturbed by her serenity and shouts at her:
“What a kind bitch you are! As soon as anyone acts viciously you say he’s
sick. Wife-torturers, rapers of small children, according to you they‘re all
sick. No morality, only medicine. Well, I’m not sick. I don’t need any of
your damned aspirin. I’ve got a Christ complex. Humanity…I’m a
humanity lover. (CWNW, 1957, p.81)
The above passage reflects spiritual sterility highlighting the fact that the inhabitants of this effete society
are breathing dead men, leading a chaotic and disordered existence like empty husks. Lonelyhearts, like
his fellowmen, is virtually a living corpse leading an infertile existence in a societal wasteland.
After his fiancée Betty, he concentrates on Mary Shrike, the wife of his newspaper editor. Shrike
is having strained relations with his wife, who never obliges him sexually. He tells Miss Lonelyhearts:
“She’s selfish. She’s a damned selfish bitch. She was a virgin when I
married her and has been fighting ever since to remain one. Sleeping with
her is like sleeping with a knife in one’s groin.” (CWNW, 1957, p. 92)
Shrike’s commentary on his wife reflects the total fracture of marital harmony and the virtual dissolution
of the institution of marriage. Even the husband-wife relationship has degenerated into farce, becoming a
mere eye-wash. Mary Shrike’s relationship with Lonelyhearts also reflects the non-belief in the sanctity
of marriage. Even Shrike doesn’t object to his wife going out openly with Lonelyhearts and encourages
her to see other men, as she points out:
“Do you know why he let’s me go out with other men? To save money. He
knows that I let them neck me and when I get home all hot and bothered, he
climbs into my bed and begs for it. The cheap bastard!” (CWNW, 1957,
p.93)
The above passage is a reflection of modern society, where carnality and the appetites of the flesh have
consigned courtly and connubial love to the scrap-heap. In Mary’s unhappy marriage with Shrike, we
have the predicament of modern man who has fallen a victim to the emasculating and debasing forces of
moral and spiritual decadence. Mary’s wavering loyalty towards her husband is mainly responsible for
Shrike’s cynical and sadistic nature. He becomes an anti-Christ figure, crucifying those who strive for
faith and love. He laughs at Miss Lonelyhearts and tells him:
Miss Lonelyhearts, my friend, I advise you to give your reader’s stones.
When they ask for bread, don’t give them crackers as does the Church and
don’t, like the State, tell them to eat cake. Explain that man cannot live by
bread alone and give them stones. Teach them to pray each morning: Give
us this day our daily stone!” (CWNW, 1957, p.70-71)
Here shrike, the secular Satan, is depicted as mocker of religion. His cynicism is basically a defense
against the despair of ever being able to do any thing about suffering. This devilish man’s nature is also
suggested by his very name that suggests a bird impaling its prey upon a cross road of thorns. In his lack
of love, shrike has become the anti-Christ, crucifying all those who strive for the Christ dream.
Miss Lonelyhearts escape which spells doom for him is his sexual intercourse with Mrs Fay
Doyle, his agony column client and the wife of the cripple, Peter Doyle. Mrs. Doyle is a lady with “legs
like Indian clubs, breasts like balloons and a brow like pigeon…”(CWNW,1957,p.100) These ludicrous
51
comparisons smack of total denigration and dismemberment of the female form. The hero takes refuge in
sex by concentrating upon the gigantic body of Mrs. Doyle She discloses to Miss Lonelyhearts:
“My husband isn’t much. He’s cripple…much older than me…all dried up.
He hasn’t been a husband to me for years. You know, Lucy, my kid, isn’t
his.”(CWNW, 1957, p.101)
It is a reflection of man’s personal and cultural degeneration, totally devoid of ethical values. An
apocalyptic world morally sterile and culturally stagnant displaying the fact that “its basic components
are decay and violence.”19 Even Mrs. Doyle can’t help Miss Lonelyhearts to get rid of his sickness. This
time he gets physically sick and imagines himself in a pawnshop where he gets a vision of human life:
“He found himself in the window of a pawnshop full of fur coats, diamond
rings, watches, shotguns, fishing tracks, mandolins…A tortured high light
twisted on the blade of a gift knife, a battered horn grunted with
pain.”(CWNW, 1957, 104)
All these things constitute the paraphernalia of suffering, besides pointing towards demonic aspects of
the surroundings and suggesting how totally tortured human life is. Lonelyhearts further thinks that:
Man has atropism for order, keys in one pocket, change in another.
Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for
disorder, entropy. Man against Nature…the battle of the centuries. Keys
yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order
has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is
worthwhile.” (CWNW, 1957, p.78)
Disorder, anarchy, and a nauseating, unnerving vision of human life resounds in these lines. Man
strives to live in this topsy-turvy world by creating order in his life but human beings themselves appear
misfits in this undirected universe. Even Nature is hostile towards man, giving him no chance to impose
order in this universe with his dreams, philosophies, art and science. Man, has tried it, but “history and
time have proved his efforts futile. Only evil, the manifestation of the world’s disorder in human
existence has always flourished.”20 The world of Miss Lonelyhearts is not only a demonic human world,
but a world overflowing with all kinds of base and perverted desires and relationships. Shrike invents
another way of tormenting Lonelyhearts. During a party to which the hero has been invited, he (Shrike)
reads out a letter from Peter Doyle, in which the latter rebukes Miss Lonelyhearts for having tried to rape
his wife, Fay Doyle and threatens to kill him:
“What kind of a dirty skunk are you?...I found my wife crying on the floor
and the house full of neighbours. She said that you tried to rape her, you
dirty skunk and they wanted to get the police, but I said that I’d do the job
myself….” (CWNW, 1957,p.135)
Shrike further reads:
“So that’s what all your fine speeches come to, you bastard, you ought to
have your brains blown out.”(CWNW, 1957, p.135)
When the cripple goes to meet Lonelyhearts at his place, he runs forward to take Doyle into his arms, but
his attempts to establish communication with the cripple fail miserably. Peter Doyle fails to perceive his
noble intentions and tries to escape his embrace and feels terrified by seeing Betty coming up the stairs.
Getting panic-stricken, Doyle tries to toss away the gun hidden inside the package:
52
“He pulled his hand out. The gun inside the package exploded and Miss
Lonelyhearts fell dragging the cripple with him. They both rolled part of the
way down the stairs.”(CWNW, 1957, p.140)
Miss Lonelyhearts is killed on the spot. Here he can be likened to Jesus Christ. Christ was also
killed by one of those for whom he had suffered and Miss Lonelyhearts murder can be compared to the
crucifixion of Christ: “Miss Lonelyhearts is shot dead by Doyle, destroyed like Christ, by the panic and
ignorance of those, whom he would save.”21 But his martyrdom fails to kindle any hope of salvation.
West with his apocalyptic stance has tried to reveal the fact that in a demonic human world, there is no
place for Christ-like saintly figures. Only “a victory for morbidness”22 forms the compelling reality.
In the death of his hero, West clearly hints that although dreams were once powerful and “men have
fought their misery with them, but they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers.”
(CWNW, 1957, p.114) Any attempt at the enactment of dreams in a puerile society which reeks with
corruption and violence of every conceivable manner can only be fought with disastrous consequences,
as becomes the case with Lonelyhearts. West firmly believed that the modern human society moved
without a direction and in the rebellion against his own society, he has depicted a universality of human
life “that is why Miss Lonelyhearts is still a live book today.”23 West stuck to his apocalyptic vision; his
work certainly has value in that it records his contemporary human society and its ways, but that is not
the only virtue. What he describes, what he warns about is valid at the same time as it is provocative and
questioning. The pathos of the protagonistic condition manifests in the fact that Lonelyhearts knows that
he is sick, but finds that he can do nothing about it. Thus, the problem of man taken in entirety is
represented in terms of a cosmic dialectic, recognizing that to be human and sane, one must find a
rational organizing principle. The scenario presented is a world in which human life is reduced to the
bare, naturalistic animal plane: birth, copulation, death. Therefore, it is a true representation of the
sterility and futility of modern life, parodying the aimlessness and hopelessness of human existence. The
compact and terse form and the episodic structure of the novel brings out the reductive nature of modern
society, where “commercialization and stereotyping of man’s dreams have led to a weakening of their
power as adolescent puerility in their content. This is the worst betrayal of modern man.”24 Thus, Miss
Lonelyhearts incorporates a secular wasteland of pain, torture, torment, violence, apostasy and
tribulations inherent strongly in modern times. It is really the devil’s carnival.
References:
Zlotnick, Joan. (1971) “The Medium is the Message or is it?: A study of Nathanael West’s comic strip novel.”
Journal of Popular Culture, V (I, Summer), 239.
Rahim, F.Abdul. (1992) “Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts: A Parody of modern
life.” IJAS, 22(2), 108.
West, Nathanael. (1957) The Complete Works of Nathanael West. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, 142.
All further references to the text have been incorporated as CWNW.
53
Jay, Martin. (1958) Some Notes on Violence. (ed) Nathanael West .New York: Farrar , Strauss & Cudahy, 50-51
Rahim, F.Abdul. (1992), 108
Hyman, Stanley Edgar (1962) Nathanael West. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 19
Light, James F. (1961) Nathanael West: An Interpretative Study. Evanston III: North Western Univ. Press, 76.
Light, James F. (1956) “Miss Lonelyhearts: The Imagery of Nightmare.” American Quarterly, VIII (4, Winter), 317
Volpe, Edmund L (1968) “The Wasteland of Nathanael West.” Contemporary Literature (II, Spring), 93
Volpe, Edmund L (1968), 93.
Madden, David. (1973) Nathanael West: The Cheaters and the Cheated. Deland, Fla: Everest / Edwards, 309.
Frye, Northrop (1971) The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 147.
Bradbury, Malcolm (1983) The Modern American Novel. Oxford/New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 121
Volpe, Edmund L. (1968), 93
Martin, Jay (1958), 69
Frye, Northrop (1971), 149.
Frank, Mike. (1973) “The Passion of Miss Lonelyhearts: According to Nathanael West.” Studies in Short Fiction, X
(1, Winter), 71.
Frank, Mike. (1973), 68.
Light, James F. (1961), 76.
Harold P, Simonson. (1970) The Closed Frontier: Studies in American Literary Tragedy. New York: Holt &
Winston, 111.
Commerchero, Victor (1964) Nathanael West: The Ironic Prophet. New York: Syracuse Univ. Press, 76
54
Martin, Jay (1958), 69.
Frank, Mike. (1973), 71
Frank, Mike (1973), 68
Frye, Northrop. (1971), 149.
Volpe, Edmund L. (1968), 90.
Frye, Northrop. (1971), 149.
Galloway, David D. (1964) “A Picaresque Apprenticeship: Nathanael West’s The Dream life of BalsoSnell and A
Cool Million.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, (V, Summer), 118.
Highet, Gilbert. (1962) The Anatomy of Satire. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 236.
55
TREATMENT OF MARGIN IN ROHINTON MISTRY’S WORKS
Dr. Richa Bijalwan
Assistant Professor
THDC Institute of Hydropower Engineering and
Technology,B.Puram,Tehri,249001(Uttarakhand)India
Writing from the margin RohintonMistry, has been able to search a space for him from where he
mounted the challenge of the dominant culture through his writings. Living in a multicultural society and
being recognised by an ethnic identity, he in his texts negotiates the issues and discourses related to his
ethnicity. Showing ethnic discrimination, either explicit or covered, he describes socio-cultural history of
his community and more importantly the present marginalized and dwindling existence of his Parsi
community. Being in diaspora, he creates the narratives which challenge the static and cultural orders of
his native land. From his position of the margin, he portrays the cultural identities of his community in
India. In his works he invariably goes back to India where his community lies in the margin. But this
going back to his past or portraying his community can neither only be characterised by nostalgia nor
bitterness but more his having attitude that the marginalization of his community or country can well be
noticed by the international community of readers. In fact, invoking the past, he adopts a strategy to cope
with his present and make it beneficial by resisting assimilation into the mainstream Anglo-Saxon
culture. Asserting and maintaining a distinct but marginalized cultural identity of his double displaced
self, he presents a possibility and a reason of the better future of his portrayed characters.
The portrayal of marginalization starts with his first work Tales from FirozshaBaag a collection
of eleven stories in which the customs, traditions and economic settings and details of the Parsi
community have been described. The stories differ from one another but have been interwoven in the
same ambiance of society. The marginalized conditions of the different characters appear with the
changed situations, yet the mood remains the same. The marginalization depicted in the works of
RohintonMistry emerges as possibility for him as the immigrants’ dilemma or loss what he faces is
recovered by the fame and accolades he earns for his works. Tales from FirozshaBaag conveys this
implication in the story ‘Swimming Lessons’ where the ‘Swimming Lessons’ being learnt by the main
protagonist Kersi provides him the opportunity to see the life through the symbol of water which has
been linked with the marginality of Kersi who, having been unable to master the sea on the chowpatty
beach in Bombay, finds himself also incapable in learning swimming in the pool of Canada. This failure
of swimming is more significant as it shows the marginalized condition of an immigrant who, in
expectation of acquiring greater and better future prospects of life, migrate to alien lands, realises his/her
position trapped in the loss of culture, identity and human relations.
The failure of Kersi, a Parsi character and the narrator of the story too, moreover displays the
marginalized situation of most of the Parsis who find hard enough to assimilate either in India or Western
diasporas. In search of unique identity and superior status they prefer to move to foreign land but remain
swinging between the two diasporic identities:
56
Those Parsis who have gone into a western diaspora also face problems. In
the land of the white races, they hold no unique position and are lumped
together with the other brown races – the Asians. This is an identity the
Parsis were trying to avoid in India and it creates confusions and delays
assimilation into the new western context (Bharucha 43).
The swimming pool and the eponymous ‘Swimming Lessons’ offer Kersi another chance to
overcome his failure in swimming, yet his failure in that also is the symbol of marginalization of him and
his community:
Water imagery in my life is recurring. Chaupatty beach, now the highschool swimming pool. The universal symbol of life and regeneration did
nothing but frustrate me (TFFB 243).
This marginalization may be poignant and painstaking for the Parsi community but as a diasporic
writer for Mistry it is the source of possibility and greater future of him as his portrayal and presentation
of his community and country is viewed by international community of global readers and sympathised
with appreciation by these readers, which ultimately generates awards and accolades for him. The
evalution of the father of Kersi elucidates this purpose of writing in such a way as he explains, “if he
continues to write about such things he will become popular because I am sure they are interested in
reading about life through the eyes of an immigrant, it provides a different view point; the only danger is
if he changes and becomes so much like them that he will write like one of them and loss the important
difference” (248). Father’s view shows that the margin is the real possibility and power for the immigrant
writers as they have adequate space to portray their native land and cultural heritage in its typical but
quite different perspective and if they don’t portray their native lands’ cultural existence in its margin
form, they will not be liked by the global class of readers who are themselves affluent and need not to see
or watch the affluence and prosperity of others. For them the importance of the diasporic writers is due to
their portrayal of the margin in their writings and if it is not there in their works, they won’t be
appreciated or applauded by the readers.
Revolving around the sufferings and troublesome situations, the other stories of Tales from
FirozshaBaag contain the recurring conditions of the margin. Though the characters don’t seem to be in
the margin of economy at times, yet they are in the margin of some other kind of social, cultural or
psychological situations. Whether the characters living in FirozshaBaag, a Parsi enclave or they are
immigrants like Kersi and Sarosh, all are in the margin. Therefore the portrayal of the margin is the
recurring and dominant theme in the treatment and narratives of the stories of Tales from FirozshaBaag
and this element of the margin is lauded by the readers of Msitry’s works. Consequently the margin
becomes power and possibility for Mistry. The treatment of the margin is also carried on by Mistry in his
first novel Such a Long Journey where the Parsi community and its fear of being minority come out
through the treatment of the incidents. Like Tales from FirozshaBaag, Mistry has also put Parsi ambiance
in Such a Long Journey. Portraying the marginalized condition of his community, Mistry has tried to
exhibit consciousness of his community towards India and its political and social features in postcolonial
era. Symbolising through the title of the text Such a Long Journey, he portrays the declining and
degrading condition of the Parsis who migrated from Iran to the West coast of India to seek refuge from
being crushed by the Islamic expedition in the eight century. For the Parsis the journey has been very
57
compromising and full of complexities. Mistry shows that they could not mingle with the local natives
nor they made themselves out of Indian identity.
After such a long journey the community is in dwiindling and declining condition and the
question for the Parsi community spontaneously arises which is pondered by Gustad whether, “Would
this long journey be worth it? Was any journey worth the trouble?” (SLJ 259) Mistry has responded this
question with the narratives of his community’s woes through the mouths of his characters. The fate of an
individual is bound up with the fate of his community; it is shown by Mistry in Such a Long Journey
where Gustad Noble is encircled by troubles of his family and friends:
It was becoming too much to bear, Roshan’s sickness, Dilnavaz blaming
him for potassium permanganate, Jimmy’s treachery, Dinshawji’s stupidity,
Laurie’s complaint, Sohrab’s betrayal, nothing but worry and sorrow and
disappointment piling up around him, walking him in threatening crush him
(177).
Gustad’s sufferings are general human problems but the novel, as a cluster of narratives
centralises more the Parsi Community as a protagonist. The Parsi community is marginalized due to its
remaining isolated and at distance from the mainstream and dominant race. So the novels of Mistry also
portray the marginalized existence of the Parsis. In Such a Long Journey “the inhabitants of khodadad
building are representatives of a cross section of middle – class Parsis expressing all the angularities of
dwindling community” (Dodiya 70). The ethnic existence of the Parsis is more marginalized and
suppressed as the religious bigotry and communal specificity have restricted Parsis in their own world.
Mistry expresses ethnic anxieties, insecurities, identity crisis and social crisis like decline of population,
late marriages, low birth rate, high incidents of divorce, alienation. Bounded with his ethnicity, his
writings are influenced by deep concerns of his community and their marginalization. Ethnicity plays an
important role in his writings and brings the reiteration of his ethnic existence in his works:
Ethnicity becomes an important concern as one shifts one’s location and
becomes a member of a minority community in an alien environment. A
shift in location and a change in location status make owe conscious of their
ethnic identity (Paranjape 3).
At the end of the novel Gustad appears to be tearing off the black paper covering the ventilators
of his flat that had for years because of Indo-Pak war and which had for years “restricted the ingress of
all forms of light earthly and celestial” (SLJ 11). And from that place “a moth, a symbol of past, flies out,
a sign of new beginning, and a new birth that emerges from death” (Mani 176). This possibility of a new
birth from the past is the possibility in the margin comes out. The possibility in the margin again appears
in another work of RohintonMistryA Fine Balance which raises the voice of the marginalized sections of
the Indian society and deals with “the predatory politics of corruption, tyranny, exploitation, violence and
bloodshed” (Selvam 80). Throwing light on the injustice, the cruelties, the traumas and the disparity that
take place in the rural India, this novel brings out a very dark and marginalized condition of the subaltern
and people living in the margin. In spite of a dark and gloomy portrayal of the story and situations in it,
Mistry has also shown possibility in this text. Ishvar, one of the protagonists and a marginalized character
shows the perfect example of possibility when he explains his nephew that “this is the way the world
works. Some people are in the middle, some are on the border. Patience is needed for dreams to grow and
give fruit” (AFB 82). The echo of the marginalized voices comes out as the incidents of exploitations of
58
the socially, economically and politically marginalized occur in the novel. With the illustrations of
ruthless exploitation, tormentations, atrocities done on the poor and Dalits, Mistry has shown that India
has got independence from colonialism but for the poor and the downtrodden the things have not changed
yet. However, he shows the possibility of better prospects as he mentions the point: “There is always
hope-hope enough to balance our despair” (553). This optimism has also been beneficial for Mistry
himself who, having been in an alien ambiance, has described India and his own community with keen
observation and perception and by showing its margin, has been capable to earn prizes and accolades for
himself.
Being in the margin he has twined out possibility for himself and has proved that the margin has
the potential and power of possibility and benefit, too, if it is used properly. MakarandParanjape also
agrees with this view of presenting the margin by RohintonMistry as a possibility for future and says
RohintonMistry’s two novels Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance “are elegiac, not nostalgic in
tone. They do not celebrate the homeland but mourn its relentless and innumerable atrocities and
tragedies” (167). It clearly shows that tragedies and relentless atrocities are the best ways to captivate
global readers and these innumerable atrocities are the true representations of the margin which is being
used by these diasporic writers and also making them well known literary figures as they receive a
number of prestigious awards. MakarandParanjape further says:
Mistry’s winning the Governor General’s medal and other honours in
Canadian society for his work on India suggests not just the rewards of
writing novels which are critical of homelands, but do not threaten the host
country. It also indicates Mistry’s effort to say farewell to India and to
accelerate his development as a Canadian citizen (169).
The discourse of Parsi marginalization and ethnocentricity which has been discussed in the
previous three works of Mistry is also taken ahead in the novel Family Matters where the anxieties of
dwindling Parsi community and its youngsters’ negligence towards their parents and elders and their
approach towards marriage are deliberated by Mistry. The illustrations of marginalized condition of the
Parsis have been conveyed through the discourse of their falling number. The youngsters are constrained
by their jobs and individual preferences to have the company of the elder people of the family:
Take the falling birth rate. Our Parsi boys and girls don’t want to get
married unless they have their own flat. Which is next to impossible in
Bombay, right? They don’t want to sleep under the same roof as their
mummy and daddy. Meanwhile, the other communities are doing it in the
same room, never mind the same roof, separated by a plywood partition or a
torn curtain. Our little lords and ladies want soundproofing and privacy (FM
413).
The fear of the falling rate of birth is so haunting with the Parsis that Mistry says that if they
don’t restrict their dwindling condition, consequently someday the Parsis will be “extinct like dinosaurs”
(412) and the experts in demographics will only “have to study our bones, that’s all” (Ibid). The self
pride of the Parsis is also revealed by Mistry in this text where he connects his community with the grand
construction and formation of Bombay city and now as the Parsis are declining, they think that the spirit
and grandeur of the city is also perishing:
59
To think that we Parsis were the ones who built this beautiful city and made
it prosper. And in a few more years, there won’t be any of us left alive to
tell the tale… Well, we are dying out, and Bombay is dying as well… when
the spirit departs, it isn’t long before the body decays and disintegrates
(416).
The margin has been the prevailing theme in all the works of RohintonMistry. Whether it is the
marginalized condition of the Parsis or the suppressed state of destitude and downtrodden class of Indian
society, his texts contain the minuscule, precise and expounded descriptions of the margin. Writings and
narratives show the personal touch of the author as well as the psychological treatment of his own
community. Delineating some cataclysmic changes that occur in a society, Mistry has depicted his
characters being trapped in the margin. Whether they are Kersi and Sarosh from Tales from
FirozshaBaag, marginalized by the immigrant’s psyche, Gustad Noble in Such a Long Journey
surrounded by the painstaking and poignant situations or she is Dina Dalal, a Parsi widow with two
DalitsIshvar and Omprakash in A Fine Balance drowned in the world of sorrow and sufferings or
Nariman, an old-aged and displaced Parsi man, of Family Matters all these characters are in the margin
and on account of their being in the margin the stories and themes of the texts are instilled with the
margin. Writing from the margin, RohintonMistry has woven a world of dark and pathetic side of India.
Blessed with the creative ability, Mistry has utilised it in making his margin a possibility of future. His
“themes are Indian, derived from the Indian history, i.e. the Indian reality. But his interpretation of this
reality is based on the western ideological and literary influences on him and partly on his Indian
heritage, as in Mulk Raj Anand” (Selvam 80). He appears to be following the course of acquiring
accolades with the use of politics of marginalization. Descriptions of ethnic struggle and socio-cultural
truths with economic struggle show that the truth which has been portrayed in his writings match the
mentality of the diasporic writers who for their own benefits many times show the biased and
exaggerated side of a place:
Immigrant novelists have on several occasions revealed more biased and
lopsided political and socio-cultural truths than all the professional
politicians put together (Rao 227).
This biased attitude many times also comes when Mistrycriticises racism and discrimination
happening in India and by showing the dark and disturbing side of India, he tries to pull the foreign
readers for his writings. He is writing from the margin and being a Parsi as well as an immigrant to
Canada he is doubly displaced and diasporic. Therefore his diasporic sensibility practises the politics of
marginalized representation of his abandoned land and his nonbelonging to both lands as well as
belonging to both lands provide him a heterogeneous identity which is the best and the most beneficial
for the immigrant writers like him:
To the diasporic sensibility, it is easy to practice a perennial politics of
transgression in radical postponement of the politics of constituency. To put
it differently, travelling or peripatetic transg-ression in and by themselves
begin to constitute a politics of difference or post representation. Belonging
nowhere and everywhere at the same time, the diasporic subject may well
attempt to proclaim a heterogeneous “elsewhere” as its actual
epistemological home (Radhakrishnan 173).
60
This heterogeneous identity shows the possibility in the margin of an individual or group as
Mistry explains about his community in Family Matters where Jal claims “We’ve been a small
community right from the beginning. But we’ve survived and prospered” (FM 412). The Parsis have
been in displacement since the invasion of Islam over Persia in seventh century and consequently they
have learnt the assimilation in displacement. Having been in the margin, they know how to make their
margin their possibility of future and again Mistry shows this power of possibility in the margin, which
he has learnt on account of his being a Parsi and an immigrant too, in his characters who have the ‘Parsi
spirit’ and “the ability to laugh in the face of darkness” (412). Notwithstanding having been in the margin
in Canada owing to being a South-Asian immigrant, Mistry does not suppress his ethnicity in the name of
pragmatism and modernism, in fact he presents the peripheral existence of his community as the most
latent power of his possibility. He, like other immigrant writers, imbibes his translated personality and
edeavours to make it the best gain as it provides him the comprehensive understanding of survival and
resistance in both native and alien lands as Salman Rushdie states:
Having been borne across the world, we (migrants) are translated men. It is
normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling,
obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained (17).
Likewise Mistry also takes the advantage of his immigration as he portrays the picture and
illustrations of his past experiences in India and presents them in the best narratives and writings which
cultivate the series of awards and prizes for him. Having been in the margin in an alien land, for Mistry it
has proved his power which is apparent in his double displacement to the assimilation. This period of
struggle and assimilation makes his writing sterling and influential especially for the international
community of readers.
WORKS CITED:
Bharucha, Nilufer E. Writers of the Indian Diaspora: RohintonMistry.Ed. Jasbir Jain. New Delhi: Rawat
Publication, 2003.
Dodiya, Jaydipsinh. Ed. “Such a Long Journey A Critical Study”. The Fiction of RohintonMistry: Critical Studies.
New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1998.
Mani, K. RatnaShiela. “Moral Dimensions in RohintonMistry’s A Fine Balance.” Parsi Fiction. Vol. II. Eds.
NovyKapadia, JaydipsinhDodiya, R.K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 2001.
Mistry, Rohinton.Family Matters. London: Faber and Faber, 2002.
. A Fine Balance. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.
. Such a Long Journey. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
. Tales from FirozshaBaag. London: Faber and Faber, 1987.
Paranjape, Makarand. Ed. “Displaced Relations: Diasporas, Empires, Homelands”. In Diasporas: Theories,
Histories, Texts. Op. Cit.
Radhakirshnan, R. Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Rao, B. Gopal. “Distorted Angularities of Socio - Political Reality: A Study of Such a Long Journey.”
RohintonMistry’s Such a Long Journey: A Critical Study. Ed. SantwanaHaldar.Asia Book Club, 2006.
Selvam, P. Humanism in The Novels of RohintonMistry. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2009.
61
THE VULTURES: AN ANALYSIS
Gaganpreet Walia
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Baba Balraj Panjab University Constituent College
Balachaur, Nawanshahr, Punjab.
Vijay Tendulkar, one of the outstanding Indian playwrights, was born in Mumbai on 6th January
1928. He started writing at an early age, and as a writer he has excelled in many departments of literature:
essays, short stories, criticism, screenplay writing and drama. In the beginning he appeared as a
controversial writer, but his works showed him as an honest artist. His honesty and skill won him
reputation and recognition. Today, he is celebrated as a great Indian playwright. Vijay Tendulkar
transcended the cultural boundaries of Maharashtra. There is no other Marathi literary icon today not
only well known all over India but also respected among the elite. There is an establishment elite and an
equally prestigious anti-establishment elite. Tendulkar moved from one to the other, with no one
questioning his right to do so. But his heart was on the anti-establishment side. That showed in his
themes as well as the way he crafted and presented his plays. He was fastidious about the directorial
details. He wanted to achieve a certain effect and he knew that it could not be achieved without the
correct composition of lights and music, sets and costumes. He also wrote detailed notes on the script
itself, on the movements and moods of the actors. Often the directors had to merely follow the script and
those notes. His modern themes and perfectionist approach impressed the metropolitan elite. In his
famous and highly controversial play, Gidhare (The Vultures) Tendulkar explores the human
relationships within a family, which turn explosive and violent to the extent that the father, brother, sister
and the rest get into a murderous mood over a question of property. He wrote the play in 1972, when land
prices were not skyrocketing like today and family incomes were not very high. Yet the conflicts within
families were turning vicious. Joint families were splitting up but nuclear families were not fully evolved.
Property distribution, in a stagnant economy with low incomes, was turning hideous. Conventional
playwrights would not dare to take up such themes. Romanticised and moralistic images of the family
determined the predominant content of theatre. Tendulkar dared to expose the brutal reality with equally
brutal language. That shocked audiences. There were protests and demands to ban the play. A young
woman, forcibly aborting with blood oozing out on her saree, was too outrageous an image to be shown
on the stage. But the play was acclaimed by the liberal, cosmopolitan art and theatre world. It was
existentialist and bore the European sensibilities of hyper-realism. Leading actors like Alyque Padamsee
and Gerson da Cunha performed the play in English later.
It is difficult to understand how and from where Tendulkar acquired modernist and, later, postmodernist ideas. He had a very modest middle-class background, with little exposure to the European or
American world of art and literature. He started writing at a very young age. His rebellious mood perhaps
was a reflection of the times he lived in. Till Tendulkar arrived on the scene, theatre essentially meant
entertainment and sometimes idealistic or moralistic evocation. It was not supposed to shock and
certainly not devastate well-ensconced beliefs. He initially acquired notoriety before he began to get
62
attention as a serious writer who was ready to confront and fight the status quo. Tendulkar’s play
Gidhade (The Vultures) was originally written in Marathi. It was translated by Priya Adarkar in English
in 1971. It is a play of a family dispute in which the dramatist has dramatized the proverb “As you sow so
shall you reap”. Tendulkar is concerned with the middle class individual set against the backdrop of a
hostile society. The decadence and degeneration of human individuals belonging to a middle class milieu
is exposed through the interactions among the members of a family. The beating up of a father by his
own children, the two brothers’ forcible abortion of their sister’s child, the mutual hatred among the
members of the family, underline the fundamental evil inherent in human character. In the character of
Rama, he is able to create a sensitive, naturally kind and good hearted individual. She is like a helpless,
submissive, tender little bird among the vultures. The play depicts with a strange admixture of
ruthlessness and compassion, the degeneration of a family, economic and moral.
Ramakant shows the stuff he is made of by abusing and beating the poor gardener who comes to
request for his rightful money. There is no trace of civility or decency in Ramakant. Prone to indulging in
dishonest practices, he has ruined the family business. He does not feel any gratitude towards Pappa
though the old man has gifted him a well established business. He openly declares that he is waiting for
Pappa’s death. For him, his father is a “confounded nuisance” and “A bloody burden to the earth!” All
his intelligence and energy are directed towards making money using all the means available. He is fond
of gambling. Excessive drinking has made him impotent. When Pappa denounces him, he retorts, “As the
seed so the tree! Did we ever ask to be produced?” (Act I Scene II). Ramakant’s wife, Rama, has a
burning desire of becoming a mother which remains unfulfilled. She holds her husband’s excessive
drinking responsible for this. Fed up she fulfills her only desire through her illegitimate brother-in-law,
Rajaninath. This act of momentary courage leads her nowhere. Ramakant and Manik abort her and leave
her “empty of pain and empty of desires” (Act I Scene I). Rajaninath is a much neglected, much hated
and lonely being. His agony at his illegitimacy and hatred for his parents who are responsible for it
comes out often in the play. He has nothing but hatred for his father and half siblings whom he considers
as Devils. Even Rama does not escape his anger as he considers her departure with her husband just like
“The true companionship to a leper of a mangy dog” (Act I Scene I). He is an inactive character; fully
conscious of Rama’s suffering. An analysis of the play brings out a very dark picture of human vices.
Prof. N.S. Dharan opines that The Vultures is a naturalistic Drama of domestic violence and “expresses
the unmitigated violence arising from drunkenness, greed and immorality”. Ramakant, Umakant and
Manik get a clue of Pappa’s hidden bank account. They pretend to be affectionate towards Pappa and get
him dead drunk. Ramakant and Umakant feign a fight with Pappa in the middle and all three fall to the
ground. Terribly frightened, Pappa shouts- “You’re devils you pimps! You’re going to kill me! You’re
going to murder me . . . murder! I don’t want to die! Don’t want to!” (Act I Scene V). He gets a respite
only after giving up the secret bank account.
In the play Manik is having an affair with the Raja of Hondur, Ramakant and Umakant pounce
on this opportunity of making some money. Ramakant suggests Umakant “Why shouldn’t we blackmail
that Hondur chap ourselves?” (Act II Scene I). Together they hatch a conspiracy of detaining Manik in
the house and extracting money from the prince by blackmailing and threatening to make his relationship
with Manik public. Armed with a broken bottle and the tin opener, the brothers fracture their sister’s leg.
Their violent plan fizzles out as the prince dies of a heart attack before they have a chance of getting
money from him. Their anger knows no bounds and they take out their frustration on the child in Manik’s
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womb. The fatal kick is delivered by Ramakant, and one is awestruck by such savage cruelty of the
brothers. They do not care about the family prestige when they are trying to extract money from their
sister’s illicit relationship with the Raja but they worry about the blow to their family honor due to
Manik’s unwed pregnancy only when the opportunity to make money is no more present.
Manik takes her revenge by trying to abort her sister-in-law’s child. She joyously declares:
“I’ve done it . . . I’ve done it as I planned. . . I cut lemon. . . I rubbed the ash. Seven times on my loins
and stomach! It’s going to abort sister-in-law’s baby going to abort Ramya’s brat going to abort. It
won’t live. It won’t live” (Act II Scene VI)
Rama had conceived the child from her illicit relationship with Rajaninath. Umakant, angry with
Ramakant for not sharing mother’s jewels with him, discloses this fact to him. Ramakant himself decides
to perform the heinous deed contemplated by Manik. There is horrifying depiction of the evil
consequences of man’s avarice. The incidents like the cruel manhandling of the father by his own
children and the ruthless abortion of their sister’s child by the brother’s, constant plotting by own family
members against each other and calling one’s own siblings by cheap vulgar names shows the extent to
which family values have deteriorated in the modern, scientific era. Man can go all the way to satisfy his
greed, and family is yet another relation of profit. Totalitarianism, Consumerisms, greed, dominance of
materialism are some words which describe the New Age generation which in turn are the foundation of
selfishness, egoism, lust, aggressiveness, violence, cruelty, wickedness, lie, deceitful, hypocrisy,
corruption and envy. The play enacts all these devilish and satanic qualities and crudities existing among
the Pitale family. Hari Pitale deceives his own brother Sakharam in business to satisfy his insatiable
greed for money. They had jointly started a firm “Pitale Plumbers” and when the business flourished,
Hari Pitale, a Machiavellian brother, grabbed all the joint property in a clever way that Sakharam failed
even in the Court of law. In Act I Scene III, Ramakant and Umakant try to locate the centrality of
betrayal motif in a drunken state and reveal how Hari Pitale and Sakharam both were traitors with a little
difference. The following conversation makes it clear:
Umakant- Pappa cut is er-throat! Pushed him out of business! Ruined’m!
Turn’d him . . . out of house. Fifteen years ago.
Ramakant- Poor, poor Uncle! I pity him.
Umakant- Why did Pappa. . . cheat.
Ramakant- Poor, poor Uncle! I pity him!
Umakant- Why did Pappa cheat Uncle d’y’ know?
Ramakant- Simple! Uncle was going to . . . hmm! . . . Clean Pappa out. But
Pappa found out first. Poor Uncle! They are both equal bloody swindlers . .
Umakant- No Pappa’s worse.
Thus, the very foundation of the edifice of Hari Pitale is corrupt and deceitful. Obviously his
house has to collapse and it collapses terribly. All his means of grabbing property have been foul and
shameless. His limitless greed for money creates a complete moral and spiritual vacuum among his
children. Ramakant, Umakant and his daughter Manik also inherit his culture of extreme loveless
individualism. Justifying the title of the play, they all form a family of vultures. These vultures inhabit
“the interior of a house; a house that reminds you of the hollow of a tree”. It is the same interior of the
house that remains the scene of incessant and grotesque confrontations between Pappa and his three adult
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vulture-like children. The flood of hatred has engulfed everyone. Ramakant and Umakant hate each other
and they both hate their only sister Manik. And the three hate their father. They all prefer money to a
man. Throughout the play, the condition of victimization prevails upon all the inhabitants of home who
are trapped by cultural constraints and economic circumstances into an impossible coexistence. All sorts
of treacherous, corrupt and deceitful ways coupled with the frequent verbal and physical violence stem
equally from the old father and his three children. Living in the air of complete disbelief, all the family
members except Rama and Rajaninath are always ready to cheat one another to get more money and they
don’t hesitate to kill one another for the share of a property. There prevails in the whole play (rather
complete Pitale household) an acute crisis of perfect love, duty, obedience and respect between the two
brothers, brothers and sister, father and children. Deviating from cultured language, the play begins with
the words “ungrateful bastards!” and the whole play goes on to be littered with such abusive and abrupt
insulting terms as part and parcel of day to day language. Bottles of liquor, smoking and taking pills are
an essential characteristic of the Pitale family. The relationship between brother and sister is simply
disgusting. Manik, the paranoid sister, sarcastically remarks: “Think its human beings that live here?”
for her brother Ramakant is “Ramya, the swine, the hypocrite” and Umakant, “Umya- that miser, that
lickpenny! . . . Bloody ruffian!” with a sense of utter disbelief, she tells Rama, her sister-in-law: “so I
should leave it (the door) open, should I? So you can come and strangle me, all of you? It’s because I
take care that I’ve survived in this house!” very painfully Manik avers the fact to Rama: “but who wants
a sister round here?”
Ramakant and Umakant both have no respect for their father. They use expressions like “crafty
old swindler, scoundrel, rascal!” for their father. In the course of drama, Ramakant raised a flower vase
to hit him and later knocked him on his head too. Umakant is not far behind; he too comments that a
mangy dog would have made a better father. The father curses his own children which is not normal in
many families in India.
“I’ll see you dead first! I’ll see your pyres burning, you pimps! . . . if I die,
it’ll be a release! They’re all waiting for it. But I’m your own father, after
all! If I die, I’ll become a ghost. I’ll sit on your chest! I won’t let you enjoy
a rupee of it. I earned it all. Now, these wolves, these bullies!”
In the play, Tendulkar shows how each character is responsible for the breakdown of the joint family
system. In this postmodern perspective, the age-old concept is fast disintegrating. The home is turning
into several houses and houses into a number of scattered flats and the flats carry the burden of still
fragmented, alienated souls of those materialistic machines whose minds are badly occupied with an
unending fierce competitiveness and power games. Tendulkar has minutely observed this twentieth and
twenty-first century phenomenon of strong individualism.
Critical Reception and His Works:
Tendulkar’s plays, which came in succession, Ghashiram Kotwal and Sakharam Binder, were
penetrating studies in violence. Before these plays, he had been drawing the attention of theatre-goers and
critics with plays like Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe (Silence! The Court is in Session). But he began to
get national attention only in the early '70s and became an icon of the young. All of us, the equivalent of
the so-called Beatles Generation, enveloped by the ideas of protest and rebellion, by the anti-war
movement, were his followers. For this generation, defending Tendulkar meant being anti-establishment.
Marx and Che, Ho and Mao defined the ideological contours of the period. As for us, we had Tendulkar.
65
Not that he was Marxist or Maoist. But he had his sympathies with them. He has never defended
communism or the Soviet Union or Mao's Cultural Revolution. He never studied seriously the Marxist
theories or the New Left versions. But he was familiar with the ideas and that was enough for him. He
was neither an intellectual nor an ideological polemicist. He was a creative writer and saw the world
around him as a living theatre. He saw that violence ruled from Vietnam to Naxalbari, the JP movement
to Emergency. He wanted to show the nexus between violence and power. Later, he became more antiestablishmentarian, not only in theatre, but also on public issues. He became part of the movement for
democratic rights and civil liberties, participated in the Narmada agitation, and supported Dalit
movements. But by nature and creative instincts he was an artist, a playwright, and could not remain
straitjacketed. He would write something that would go against the conventional Left or he would
publicly say something that would hurt liberal sensibilities.
However, he never lost contact with the young and those experimenting with different forms. In
hospital, in his last days, he asked a young admirer of his to read out to him Terry Eagleton's piece in The
Times Literary Supplement. He was obviously tired as he turned 80 and could not bear the pain of the
chronic muscle disorder, but he never thought of retiring. He was a colossus, and no one can take his
place with that maverick style in confronting the establishment.
References:
Prasad, Amar Nath. The Plays of Vijay Tendulkar: Critical Explorations. Sarup and Sons. New Delhi:
2008.
Ratra, Amiteshwar et.al. Marriage and Family. Deep and Deep Publications Pvt. Ltd. New Delhi: 2006.
Tendulkar, Vijay. Five Plays. Oxford University Press, New Delhi: 2010
66
INDO-ANGLIAN POETRY: AN IMAGE-HOUSE
Chowdhury Omar Sharif
Lecturer, Department of English
East West University
Bangladesh
Indo-Anglian Poetry, where Indian Poets are found to write poems in English, is undoubtedly
a storehouse of imagery. Indians use the term ‘Indo-Anglian’ to denote original literary creation in the
English language. Today there are a large number of educated Indians who use the English language as a
medium of creative exploration and expression of their experience of life. Their writing has now
developed into a substantial body of literature in its own right and it is this literature, which is now
referred to as Indian English literature. The literary device Imagery is frequently found in the poems of
the Indian poets. The terms ‘image’ and ‘imagery’ have many connotations and meanings. Imagery as a
general term covers the use of language to represent objects, actions, feelings, thoughts, ideas, states of
mind and any sensory or extra-sensory experience. An ‘image’ does not necessarily mean a mental
picture. The use of imagery can be easily discovered in plenty by the readers who are careful enough. A
serious reading of the poems makes it really easy for the readers to seek out the use of imagery. Among
the famous Indo-Anglian poets Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das and Rajagopal Parthasarathy are much more
highlighted through this paper. It is clearly visible that they have successfully applied this device for the
fulfillment of their purposes. The first point to be noted by the reader of Kamala Das’ poetry is that
Kamala Das is her non de plume or pseudonym, and that her real name is Madhavi Kutty. She was born
on the 31st March 1934 at Punnayarkulam in the coastal region of Malabar in the State of Kerala. Her
diction is market by simplicity and clarity. It is the language of her emotions, and she speaks to her
readers as one human being to another. In this lies her originality and her distinction. There are no
abstractions no complexities, and no intricate, tortuous constructions. Her imagery is always functional,
never merely decorative and is drawn from the familiar and the commonplace. Often her images are
symbolic and thus they increase the expressive range of her language. The poetry of Kamala Das abound
in imagery and the imagery covers quite a wide range, even though the subject dealt with in her poetry
remains very much the same. Her favourite subjects are marriage and extra-marital sexual relationships;
but, in dealing with these subjects, she offers imagery which is varied and which is by no means
monotonous or her treatment of the themes of the failure of her marriage and the failure also of her sexual
relationships with other men. Images drawn from the human body are used most frequently. The male
body is an agent of corruption, a destroyer of female chastity and individuality. “The Freaks” was
published in poet’s first anthology Summer in Calcutta, 1965. The word ‘freaks’ means a creature that
deviates in some way or the other from the accepted norm, either in appearance or conduct. Thus, in “The
Freaks” the male anatomy furnishes her with images of horror and ugliness. It is represented as repulsive
and destructive. The mouth is like a cavern, which is dark, the cheek is sun-stained and the teeth are
gleaming and uneven. The lover’s right hand rests upon the woman’s knee, while the fingertips of the
other hand move upon her body, arousing the skin’s “lazy hungers” (12,Parthasarathy 23). The woman’s
heart is like an empty cistern or the tank in a toilet getting filled not with water but with coiling snakes of
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silence. This picture is partly concrete but partly very abstract. The Woman calls herself a freak, adding
that, in order to save her face or to preserve the appearance of a normal human being, she flaunts at times,
a grand flamboyant lust. Her rejection of the male body is total, and is symbolic of her revolt against the
male ego and the male-dominated world. “The Invitation” published in The Descendants in 1967, in the
form of a dialogue between the poetess and the sea, stresses the boredom and ennui of meaningless
sexual encounters. It opens with the powerful image of a male fist ‘clenching and unclenching’ in her
head. It conveys the intensity of the headaches she gets on Sunday evenings as a result of meaningless
sexual encounters. Some sex-imagery occurs in the poem entitled the Invitation. The bed, six feet long
and two feet wide, becomes a kind of paradise to the lovers who lie there to make love to each other. The
woman imagines herself perishing in the sea and stretching her limbs on cool sands while resting her
head on the flowers growing at the bottom of the sea. Another sexual image follows when the woman
says that, all through the summer’s afternoons, she and her lover lay on beds, with their limbs inert, and
with their thoughts blotted out or obliterated by the heat. The lyric of “The Looking Glass” is a looking
glass, a mirror, which presents a true, realistic image of the lustful relationship between every man and
every woman, and the frustrations, which inevitably follow such a relationship, at least for the woman.
The poetess is conscious of the beauty and glory of the human anatomy and is attracted by it, but its
raging lustfulness disgusts her and hence the use of images like those cited above. She is also conscious
of disease and decay to which the human flesh is heir to, and this awareness also colours her imagery. In
the following lines from “The Looking Glass”,
“Admiration. Notice the perfection
Of his limbs, his eyes reddening under
Shower, the shy walk across the bathroom floor,
Dropping towels, and the jerky way he
Urinates. All the fond details that make
Him male and your only man. Gift him all ,
Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of
Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,
The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your
Endless female hungers.”(7-16,Parthasarathy 27)
The poetess urging women to let their lovers smell the scent of their long hair and the musk of sweat
between their breasts, and urging them further to let their lovers experience the warm shock of their
menstrual blood and all their endless female hungers. The last line of this poem contains a vivid picture
of a woman’s body gleaming like polished and glossy brass but subsequently becoming drab and
destitute. “The Old Playhouse” is a wholly autobiographical poem in which Kamala Das has described
her unhappy conjugal life or the misery, which she experienced in her life with her husband. At the same
time we have here a confessional poem because Kamala Das here takes her readers into confidence by
telling them about matters which are strictly personal and private, and about which the ordinary woman,
and even a poetess, would not speak in public. This poem shows the uninhibited manner in which
Kamala Das can speak about matters pertaining to her private life and also about matters relating to the
sexual relationship between a man and a woman. Furthermore, this poem shows Kamala Das as a
feminist poet because, in demanding her release from the cruelty of her husband and asking for “a pure
and total freedom” she is indirectly advocating the right of women in general to assert themselves and
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thus to get the opportunity to develop their personalities and their potential. The very title of this poem
gives us a clue to what Kamala Das wishes to write in this poem. The phrase “The Old Playhouse” means
an old theatre-hall which is no longer in use and which lies deserted, with all the lights put out. Kamala
Das uses this phrase as a metaphor for her own mind. Her mind is no longer in use because it is no longer
serviceable and because it has lost its power to think as a result of the continued authoritarianism and
callousness of her husband. In this poem the role of the wife is caricatured and there is a consequent
dwarfing of her personality. The poem also conveys Kamala’s aversion to male domination and to the
artificialities of modern life, in which she feels suffocated. She has a natural inclination for the primitive
and the simple, and is consequently disgusted with the artificial set up of the modern world. Saccharine
and vitamins, artificial light, air-conditioner and cut flowers in the vases convey this feeling. These
images represent the mechanical, drab and hypocritical world of the modern times, and the poet is clearly
out of tune with these. She is always in search of the essential purity of human hearts and its native
vigour. In short her rebellion and discontent with the male dominated world is loudly proclaimed in this
largely confessional lyric. Her poetry is deeply rooted in the Indian soil and in Indian cultural tradition,
and despite her modernity, and her “revolt” against the role a woman is traditionally expected to play in
Indian society.
Nissim Ezekiel was born in Bombay in 1924. He comes of a Jewish family. He is one of the
foremost Indian poets writing in English, and he has attracted considerable critical attention from
scholars both in India and abroad. Not only that but also by virtue of his critical evaluation, he has
brought fame and recognition to a number of Indian-English poets. Simplicity is the cardinal virtue of
Ezekiel’s poetry, and decoration is reduced to the minimum. He is not an imagist poet in any sense. But
this does not mean that imagery is entirely absent from his poetry. He uses imagery, but he does so only
sparingly, and when used, his images are not decorative, but strictly functional. Certain images are
frequently repeated and thus they acquire symbolic overtones and enable the poet to make the abstract
concrete and easy to understand. “Night of the Scorpion” published in The Exact Name, 1965, is one of
the finest poems of Nissim Ezekiel and has been universally admired, for its admirable depiction of a
common India situation, for its vivid and forceful imagery. The imagery in the poem is not only vivid but
also varied. The scorpion has crawled into the house and hidden himself beneath a sack of rice. There is
the scorpion’s “diabolic tail in the dark room”(6,Parthasarathy 31). “The peasants came like swarms of
flies/and buzzed the name of God a hundred times”(8-9,Parthasarathy 31). Here the peasants come like
swarms of flies. The simile here is noteworthy, though it is somewhat inflated. “With candles and with
lanterns/ throwing giant scorpion shadows”(11-12,Parthasarathy 32). Here the candles and lanterns throw
huge shadows on the sun-baked walls. This particular detail--the walls that are sun-baked--is noteworthy
because the poet here shows a tendency to minute observation. Then there is the picture of the mother
groaning on a mat, with her body twisting and turning because of the pain. The picture of paraffin being
poured upon the bitten toe and its being set aflame with a burning matchstick is even more vivid. The
typical Indian setting is very much visible in this poem through the vivid imagery. “The Visitor”
published in The Exact name is a short, simple, lyric, and it demonstrates once again how Ezekiel is
conscious of the “ordinariness of most events”, and yet how he can transmute and transform them, make
poetry out of them, and bring out their essential significance. The lyric also brings out the poet’s gift of
verbal portraiture, how with a few deft touches he can bring a character to life. The most striking feature
of this poem is its concrete imagery though we also have here one or two abstract pictures. The concrete
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imagery is to be found in the baleful eyes of the crow, the crow’s wings slightly raised in sinister poise,
its tense body, and its neck craned. And here we have a concrete simile; “And neck craned like a nagging
woman’s,”(5,Parthasarathy 33). It is a very common and traditional belief of the Indian people. “The
cigarette smoke/Was more substantial than our talk”(23-24,Parthasarathy 34). Here he becomes very
sarcastic. Then there is a concrete image in the line; “The figure in the carpet blazing”(28,Parthasarathy
34). “Background, Casually” is a long poem in three sections; each section consisting of five stanzas of
five lines each. It is one of the biographical poems of Ezekiel, which shows him to be a very Indian poet
writing in English. It expresses his total commitment to India. The poet reflects n his failures and
achievements and gives expression to his love for the soil in unequivocal terms. He affirms that he is
very much an Indian and that his roots lie deep in India. He was not a Hindu, but a Jew. He had to face
many hardships at school. He was sent to a Roman Catholic school where he was ill treated by Christian
boys, for it were the Jews, his people, who had betrayed Christ. He was “A mugging Jew among the
wolves” (7,Parthasarathy 34). They were Christians, but they knew no Christian charity. In this poem the
image of the basement room which frequently recurs in his poetry. In England the poet had lived in a
basement room with three companions, as he says; “Philosophy, /Poverty and Poetry, three/Companions
shared my basement room” (23-25,Parthasarathy 35). In his poetry it is an image of a place of refuge, a
shelter from the outside world, a place where the poet can reflect and create, where, in short, he can be
himself. It is the “home” where “grace” is to be found, where the poet can embark on a voyage of selfexploration, where noble and heroic achievement is possible, where he is protected from the defilement
of the putrid city. However, Ezekiel found if difficult to regard India as his real home because here the
Hindus with contempt had always treated him and because his father had told him that all the Hindus
were alike in their behaviour, which, according to him, was offensive and obnoxious. In any case, Ezekiel
now got married, changed his job, and then realized that he had committed a folly by getting married.
The offensive attitude of the Hindus towards him continued. One of the reasons for their contempt for
him was that he was descended from ancestors who were oil-pressers by their trade, as he says; “(The
hooded bullock made his rounds)”(50, Parthasarathy 36) and that he was not therefore a member of any
respectable community or family. In the beginning he did not know that words could betray a poet and
could create misunderstandings in the minds of his readers; and, therefore, he wrote his poems just as the
words came to him. This carefree and spontaneous manner of writing poetry led to his losing his grip on
things; and he then decided not to continue with that facile manner of writing but to adopt a more worldly
style which consisted in commercializing his poetry and to exploit such themes as the inner tumults of his
fellow-human beings and the external, social upheavals, as he says; “The inner and the outer
storms”(65,Parthasarathy 36). The poem “Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S.” is a satire on the way
most Indians speak or write the English language. Nissim Ezekiel is himself, of course, a master of this
language, having an unusual command over it; and in this poem he is poking fun at the way the Indians
speak this language. This poem is thus a parody of the Indian way of speaking English though Nissim
Ezekiel certainly knows that there are many Indians who speak and write much better English than the
average Englishman. Ezekiel has no ill will against the Indians who speak wrong English; he here merely
points out the kind of errors, which they commit, his object being only to make us laugh. The poem itself
is the example of imagery where the picture of ‘Indianness’ is depicted by the poet through the mistakes
of the Indians rather it is more specifically the mistakes of the people of Gujarat in speaking English.
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Rajagopal Parthasarathy was born, as he himself tells us in the anthology of Indo-Anglian
poems edited by him, at Tirupparaiturai near Tiruchirappalli in 1934. Most the imagery in
Parthasarathy’s poetry is realistic and vivid. Most of it is presented to the reader through the use of
metaphorical language. Sometimes the imagery serves a symbolic purpose. And, almost always, the
imagery is integral to the idea being expressed; and even if the imagery seems incidental, it serves to
heighten the atmosphere. There is a lot of variety too in the imagery. These are the features imparting a
distinctive character to Parthasarathy’s imagery. Poem No. 2 in “Exile” illustrates most of these features
of Parthasarathy’s imagery. The principal idea in this poem is that a poet must know his roots, that he
must make use of his own language to write his poems, and that a foreign language, is this case English,
cannot serve his purpose, one reason being that it is the language of a nation which is contemptuous of
the coloured people and has an imperial post. All the imagery in this poem is integral to these ideas,
which the poet wishes to convey. The opening lines of this poem build up the environment and also the
setting against which the poet wishes to express himself. There are the lamps burning in the London fog;
and, in a basement flat, the poet is conversing with the musician Ravi Shankar. The cigarette ends, the
empty bottles of beer, and the snacks represent the western civilization to which Ravi Shankar had
become attached because he had spent his youth “whoring after English gods”(7-8,Parthasarathy 75). The
language is a tree, says the poet; and this tree loses colour under another sky. The imagery is thus
presented in metaphorical language. Under snow, and the branches of the tree become hoarse meaning
incapable of expressing the poet’s ideas. The city of London, says the poet, is no jewel as its lanes are full
of smoke and rubbish; and there are unwashed English children to be seen there. As for the immigrants
like the Indians and the West Indians, the English people call them “coloureds”; and they go about,
dressed in tweeds or grey flannel, in the suburban localities, which they have made their own. All this
imagery creates the local colour, and is strictly relevant to what the poet is really saying. This poem then
continues with some more imagery; and this imagery too, like the imagery described above, is realistic
and vivid; and this imagery too is integral to the idea, which the poet expresses there. Here the statues of
some of the well-known builders of the various empires are brought into view—the da Gamas, Clives,
and Dupleixs, The statue of Queen Victoria, an old hag, shaking her invincible locks on Westminster
Bridge symbolizes European imperialism, while the statue of Boadicea seated in a chariot symbolizes a
love of freedom. While the English people want freedom for themselves, they deny it to others by trying
to conquer other establishing their control over those lands. Thus it is that Parthasarathy in this isolation,
its political and imperial past, and its decadent present, through the imagery. London is a city, which is
divided from the night only by the river Thames. With the coming of dawn, the city noises return. The
milkman makes his appearance; and the events of the previous day appear in print in the newspapers.
Poem No. 8 expresses the author’s feelings on arriving in the city of Calcutta. The poet has attained the
age of thirty, but the experiences no joy because he feels that he has achieved nothing in these thirty
years of this life. Feeling disappointed and sad, he makes up his mind to do something worthwhile during
the remaining years of his life. The opening lines of the poem contain some perfectly realistic imagery. A
grey or din sky produces an oppressive effect on the poet’s eyes. He witnesses the porters, the rickshawpullers, the barbers, the hawkers, the fortune-tellers, and the idlers around him, and sees also the towering
bridge, which spans the river Hooghly. He also witnesses huge trees casting an extensive shade upon the
ground in the park nearby. This poem is not a love-poem. On the contrary, it is a thoughtful, meditative
poem expressing the author’s feeling of frustration in life. A few of the lines in this poem contain erotic
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imagery, which lends spice to it. “Your breasts”(10,Parthasarathy 76), says the poet, “sharp with desire,
hurt my fingers”(11,Parthasarathy 76). And then speaking metaphorically he says that his feelings, which
at this time cannot be described, “shiver in dark alleys of the mind,”(13,Parthasarathy 76). Although he is
feeling desolate, he cannot dispense with the woman in his company because “The heart needs
all”(15,Parthasarathy 76). In Poem No. 1 from “Trial” the poet takes hold of the hand of his beloved and
feels that the contact is like a rainbow. The glory and the pleasure of this physical contact between the
two hands has metaphorically been described as a rainbow, as the poet says; “I grasp your hand/in a
rainbow of touch. Of the dead/I speak nothing but good.”(13-15,Parthasarathy 78). Poem No. 2 in “Trial”
may also be considered in this connection. The imagery here brings before our eyes the poet’s past and
the past of his wife too. The family album contains a picture of the wife when she was yet a child, with
her unruly hair kept in place with pins and ribbons, her eyes half-shut before the mirror, and here arms
round Suneeti’s neck. Suneeti would probably be the wife’s little sister. In the distance lies the Taj. The
poet then depicts the little girl growing up and, in due course, getting married He next depicts her as she
looked on the day of his father’s death. She had rolled herself into a ball in the afternoon of the day of his
father’s death. All this imagery is thoroughly by a felicity of word and phrase. Particularly noteworthy is
the picture of the Taj “squatting on fabulous haunches”(7-8,Parthasarathy 78) and equally noteworthy
from this point of view are the lines; “hand on chin, you grew up, /all agog, on the cook’s succulent/
folklore.”(13-15,Parthasarathy 78). In Poem No. 9 from “Trial” the images of the body and physical
pleasure are here curiously juxtaposed with the images of approaching middle age and the shadow of
death and despair. The images of the eyes submerging in the skull, and the image of the flesh solidifying
in stone, are rather extraordinary in the skull, and the image of the flesh solidifying in stone, are rather
extraordinary in a poem of love. Particularly ironic is the contextual connection between this kind of
dismal visual setting and the sensuously evocative moments of experience. The touch/of your breasts is
ripe/in my arms. They obliterate my eyes/with their tight parabolas of gold. (9-12,Parthasarathy 79). This
highly sensuous yet controlled, passion overflows the tightly organized images then follows the image of
the sweet water of the beloved’s flesh being drawn, as from a well. The crystal-clear purity of sweet
water is depicted as felt poetic experience of love, and the late-December or early-January night of
Capricorn provides the right setting for this sensitive experience. The poet relegates to the background
his psychic past, like and over-worn umbrella put aside in a corner of the room. However, the sense of
overpowering middle age seems to grow upon him as he continues to confront the predicaments of the
present and the future. In Poem No. 10 from “Trial”, we have another vivid picture which is highly
fanciful and in which some marvelous metaphors have been employed. Here the poet says that the
woman had asked him some question about the constellations whereupon it occurred to him that here
very hand was a galaxy of stars, and that it was a galaxy which he could reach and even touch with his
“half-inch telescopic fingers”(6-7,Parthasarathy 80). In this case the hand of the woman having
metaphorically been described as a galaxy of stars, it is obvious that he can touch this galaxy with his
own fingers and that, if he can not only see the galaxy but also touch it. Poem No.1 in “Homecoming”
deserves notice. The opening line “My tongue in English chains,”(1,Parthasarathy 80) contains a vivid
picture of the poet’s habit of using the English language; and this picture is followed by another which
expresses the poet’s longing to use his own language namely Tamil instead of English. He is at the end of
his Dravidic tether, and he is hungering to make use only of his native language for all purposes. But then
comes a picture of the deterioration and the degeneration, which Tamil has suffered, so that the poet finds
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Tamil to be a “tired language”(7,Parthasarathy 80), which has to e “wrenched from its sleep in the
Kural.”(8,Parthasarathy 80) The use of the word “wrenched” is here noteworthy as being most
appropriate to convey the idea of the labour and the toil necessary to renovate and rejuvenate that
language. Some other expressive phrases, and the vivid pictures which they contain, are “its agglutinative
touch”(10,Parthasarathy 80) and “hooked on celluloid”(11,Parthasarathy 80). Tamil is now being used
for cheap commercial purposes including cinema advertisements. In Poem No. 3 in “Homecoming”, the
poet says; “the dust of unlettered years/clouding instant recognition.”(6-7,Parthasarathy 81). Again he
says; “her three daughters floating/like safe planets near her.”(17-18,Parthasarathy 81). These lines are
the examples of imagery in the poem about the get together of the relatives of the poet. In Poem No.8
from “Homecoming” the imagery is perfectly realistic and also integral to the idea which here is that
Tamil culture has declined to such an extent that the people of Madurai have turned the river Vaikai, once
truly a river and held in great respect, into a sewer. The poet gives us a picture of boys floating paperboats on the surface of the river Vaikai, and of the buffaloes relaxing in the water and treating the river as
a pond. Here the buffaloes could be symbolized as the customers where the river is a prostitute. Every
evening a man may be seen sitting and cleaning his arse with the water of this river. All this shows that
Vaikai, which was once a river in the true sense of the word, has now become a sewer; and here is a
metaphor conveying to us the idea that the water of this river has become very dirty and filthy, and that
the river has lost its sanctity and its cultural associations. In Poem No.12 from “Homecoming”
Parthasarathy is here; “I say to myself, “The son of a bitch/fattens himself on the flesh of dead poets.”
(18-19,Parthasarathy 83) condemning himself as a poet. Using metaphorical language, he calls himself
the son of a bitch who eats the flesh of dead poets in order to feed himself and to grow fatter. What
Parthasarathy means to say is that he has been deriving his material for the writing of poetry from the
work of English poets of the past. Parthasarathy has written the Poem No. 14 from “Homecoming” in
self-disparagement. He expresses a low opinion of his poetic work. In fact, he feels that he has lost his
identity altogether and is no longer himself. Using the metaphor “The balloon/of poetry has grown red in
the face/with repeated blowing.”(12-14,Parthasarathy 84) the poet says that his efforts to write poetry
could be compared to an inflated balloon, which has no substance in it except air. Parthasarathy has been
recognized as one of the most competent craftsmen among the Indo-Anglian poets. It is a craftsman that
Parthasarathy impresses most. The entire Rough Passage is written in a three-line, free verse stanza-from
which Parthasarathy has developed for his use and which he handles with great skill. The management of
line-length; pauses and overflow; the deft placement of short, one-line sentences; the sophistication of
syntax--all these are noteworthy. Emotion in these poems has been caught in few well-chosen images,
etched carefully. The metaphors do not pretend to profundity, and are not used collectively for some
wider statement. Though Parthasarathy complains of his tongue being in English chains, yet he domestic
imagery is to be found in such phrases as “rice-and pickle afternoons”(12,Parthasarathy 81) from Poem
No. 3 of “Homecoming”.
In postcolonial literature, Indo-Anglian poetry plays a vital role. One will not be able to
figure the postcolonial aspects out of Indo-Anglian poetry directly but there are some indirect relations
between these two. In Indo-Anglian poetry, it is really hard to get explicit reference of postcolonial
literature. In Nissim Ezekiel’s poems, imagery is found in plenty and through the use of metaphorical
language he tries to decorate his imagery fundamentally. Ezekiel, not as a Jew rather as an Indian
captures the ‘Indianness’ in his poems. He does it in such a way that the whole India seems to be visible
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to the readers through his poems. His commitment as a poet and as an Indian leads him to picturize his
country beautifully and realistically. It is this patriotism, revealed though the writing, which makes his
poems a postcolonial reading. In the poems of Kamala Das, the readers find her as a confessional poet.
This particular quality makes her distinct from others. She, through her poems, dares to speak against the
traditional attitudes of the society towards the women of India. She shows the readers the futility of
marriage and the oppressed women who are mentally chained by the conventional society. In her poems,
there is always a tendency to break the barriers set by the society. This want of freedom of the women
makes her poems a postcolonial reading. The imagery is so strong that the readers can feel the oppressed
mind of the woman of the woman in the poems. In Rajagopal Parthasarathy’s poems, a reader can
experience the rudeness of the foreign country. The imagery in his poems is so common and real that the
readers become a companion of the frustrated poet. The readers find themselves as “a Parthasarathy”.
The poet through his poems tries to revitalize the regional language, which is Tamil. It is one of the
languages of the huge India. The poet regrets as he fails to understand the futility of the English
language. But at last he seems to be determined to serve the Tamil language, as he is a man from
Tamilnadu. This sense of belonging of the poet makes his poems a postcolonial reading. All these three
poets successfully make the Indo-Anglian poetry ‘an image-house’.
Works Cited:
Cuddon, J.A. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 4th ed. London: Penguin
Books, 1999.
King, B. Modern Indian Poetry in English. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Lall, R. Indo-Anglian Poetry. 2nd ed. New Delhi: Rama Brothers, 1999.
Parthasarathy, R. Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets. New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1976.
Tilak, R. New Indian English Poets and Poetry. 8th ed. New Delhi: Rama Brothers, 1997.
74
QUEST FOR WOMEN-SELF IN THIONG’O’S MINUTES OF GLORY
Biman Mondal
Ph.D. Scholar
Sarguja University, Ambikapur
Chattisgarh
The African literature mainly deals with African problems at all the levels. African writers such
as Ngugi have talked about the theme of African women’s self esteem and elitism through their works.
As far as Ngugi is concerned, African women’s selfhood is like an underlying theme in all his writings.
But before showing out how Ngugi portrays the African women in her short stories we think it necessary
to ponder over the evolution of African literature. For years, Africa was considered to be an uncivilized
continent because of its lack of written records. Indeed, African literature was based on oral records,
which is the reason of the lack of written reports. As literary works are rooted, to a large extent, in a
precise setting, at a given time, literary critics tend to take into consideration the space, the time, the
political, cultural, social and economic background of any work of art to better interpret it. The study of
the authors’ backgrounds is necessary for a good understanding of their literary works. But it is admitted
that a good study of literary productions can help one to have a good idea of their authors' backgrounds.
This explains the historians’ propensity to analyze the writings referring to a social and political
background, located in time and space. This double link between literary productions and their
backgrounds reveals the dialectic relating the two, and this is particularly true for African literature
because Ngugi believed in Marxist dialectical values. There are three different stages in the evolution of
African literature. First of all, there is the pre-colonial stage or traditional Africa. At that time, African
literature was mainly a literature of transmission. It was the stage of oral literature which was
characterized by the records of the “griots” who would sing the glories of African noblemen such as
kings and wealthy people. Besides the traditional or pre-colonial stage of African literature, there is the
colonial one. During that period, African literature was in the form of protest. African writers tried to
retrace, in their works, the mistreatments which their black fellows were victims of. At this stage almost
all African writers protested against the evil deeds of the colonists. In this context, Ngugi wa Thiong’o
and another writer wrote Barrel of a Pen and Cahier d'un Retour au Pays Natal respectively. This
literature of protest showed that Africans were fed up with the presence of the white man who settled in
Africa only to exploit its economic and human resources. After the end of second stage of African
literature, there comes another one which is considered to be the third in position but very important
because of its literary richness and diversity in literature. This stage of post colonial literature has given
birth to a literature of condemnation. At this stage the bulk of African literary productions are about the
disastrous situation which has prevailed in Africa in the first years of independence. More than the
protest, the literary productions at this stage aimed also at awakening ignorant people that is to say
African masses. This sort of literature aimed at inviting the Africans to resist against black leaders who
were carrying on white domination and to partake in the reconstruction of Africa which was ruined by
imperialism. The theme of neo-colonial imperialism is at the centre of African post-colonial literature. It
is worth noting that in the post-colonial era, the white man was replaced by black leaders but he
75
succeeded in finding new ways of maintaining the black continent under his yoke. To some extent, the
new black leaders are nothing but pawns of the white man whose presence on the African soil was no
longer bearable. However, we can note that, before leaving Africa, the colonist had succeeded in training
and setting the native elite which Frantz Fanon analyzed as: “Sham from beginning to end... their mouth
stuffed full with high sounding phrases’’.
Still, as regards post-colonial African literature, the writings of Ngugi wa Thiong'o il1ustrate
well this fact, mostly “Minutes of Glory” deals with post-independence Kenyan society. This is why
study women-self in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's ‘Minutes of Glory’ is worthwhile. Nonetheless, we can ask the
following question: where does the interest of such a topic lie? First and foremost, the interest lies in the
topicality of the subject, not only as regards post-independence Kenyan society, but equally in connection
with most contemporary post-colonial African countries. As a matter of fact, this short story describes the
fact that it refers to Kenya in particular and deals with situations and problems those are common to
almost all post-colonial African countries. This topic also draws its interest from the fact that its choice
appears as a tribute paid to a great fighter in the interest of the common masses, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a
man who up to now has dedicated his life and worked to the struggle for the liberation of his native
Kenya to save his mother land from colonial oppression.. And beyond Kenya, Ngugi's fight is to liberate
Africa from neo-colonialism, imperialism and local corrupt powers. He is a man whose actions and
writings are dedicated to the building of a society of justice, democracy, equality, and brotherhood. He
like romantic poet Keats thinks as a writer for the social responsibility. Before giving the outline of our
analysis and discussion of the story and character, we will first introduce the man, from the biographical
and ideological point of view. In the biological point of view, we will be very short because Ngugi is
well known. Ngugi was born in a peasant family in Kamirithu, Limuru, Kenya, on 5 January 1938. In
Homecoming, he writes: “I grew up in a small village. My father with four wives had no land. They lived
as tenants-at-will on somebody else's land. Harvests were very poor. Sweetened tea with milk at any time
of day was a luxury. We had one meal a day-bite in the evening. Every day the women would go to their
scruffy little strips of samba. But they had faith and they waited”. After this point, it may be helpful to
examine Ngugi's ideological views. Ngugi rather appears as a Marxist though he does not expressly say
so in his essays Homecoming and Decolonizing the Mind. Ngugi appropriately expresses this point in
Decolonizing the Mind by quoting this phrase from Cheikh Amidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure, “On
the black continent, one began to understand that their real power resided not at all in the cannons of the
first morning but in what followed the cannons. Therefore behind the cannons was the new school. The
new school had the nature of both the cannon and the magnet. From the cannon it took the efficiency of a
fighting weapon. But better than the cannon it made the conquest permanent. The cannon force the body
and the school fascinates the soul”.
My paper deals with Ngugi wa Thiong'o's portrayal of female protagonist in his Short story
“Minutes of Glory”. Wanjiru which is her African name finds herself trapped in an urban setting and she
is a victim of her situation and low self-esteem in the society in which she lived. She shows all types of
black notion and feeling of inferiority. Actually she shows affects of colonization. The story is a poignant
and touching study of this young woman who is battling with an identity problem and is seeking
acceptance in a post-independence setting where women are exploited by men of the New Africa elite
sexually, politically and economically. She is regarded as “a wounded bird in flight: a forced landing now
and then but nevertheless wobbling from place to place”. The story affirms female self-realization rather
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than perpetual self-alienation, and that validates the persistence in attaining her desired goal. The male
protagonist is the focus of a large body of African literature in English but the general theme being the
conflict with the inroads of Westernization upon his world .Karen Smiley-Wallace sums up African
women worth noting. “Through their vast and colorful tableaux of women figures market women, wives,
mothers, daughters, political leaders, prostitutes, teachers, secretaries, etc”. Sadjiand Sembene
exemplifies the world which is tormenting with the double self, anxiety and alienation. Although the
notion of duality is expressed differently by each character, they are all linked by two factors: their
intense struggle for survival and the disintegration of their sense of ‘africanite’.The study of the African
woman in African literary criticism is also in line with the African feminist theoretical framework. A
summary of current African feminist criticism is outlined in Carole Boyce Davies’ introduction to
Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature. According to Davies "African literary criticism ... if
it is unbiased ... will have to come to grips with issues such as the treatment of women
characters.Wanjiru, the chief character in “Minutes of Glory”, is a victim both of circumstances and lowself image, and the story is a moving psychological study of this young woman, who is in search of self
approval and identity. Wanjiru's perception of herself appears to be a requisite for acceptance and
belonging in her world. Obviously, she has embarked upon a journey in search of self since she desires to
find the root cause of her alienation. Her search is constituted by the following stages: endeavoring to
come to terms with the meaning of her name, wandering from place to place, and examining self,
fantasizing, experiencing a surface relationship with a man, and, finally, triumphing. From the omniscient
perspective, the story follows her experiences through bars around Limuru and also in Ilmorog. She is a
school drop-out because her parents lacked money. As a naive young rural woman desperate for
employment, she falls prey to the deceit of an exploiter who promises to find her a job but, instead,
dumps her after a one-night stand. Consequently, she finds herself trapped in a situation completely
foreign to her experience and resorts to prostitution, a profession that is dehumanizing to womanhood.
The exposition of the story sets the tone for the story by introducing the protagonist and suggesting the
conflict under which she chafes. Her Christian name, Beatrice, which means "Blessed One”, is
contradicted by her very existence. She liked her Christian name and she was ugly and black and she
disliked herself for her black identity. Beatrice never tried to find the root cause of black self- hatred .She
simply accepted the contradiction and applied herself to Ambi with a vengeance. She had to rub out her
black shame. Her miserable condition reflects what Bantu people regard as “darkness” or misfortune and
underscores the overall mood of the story. No wonder her attempt at making it in life is futile. To her
men are strange creatures. Ngugi explains: “Her name was Wanjir but she liked better her Christian one,
Beatrice. It sounded more pure and more beautiful. Not that she was ugly, but she could not be called
beautiful either. Her body, dark and full fleshed, had the form, yes, but it was as if it waited to be filled
by the spirit. She worked in beer-halls where the sons of women came to drown their inner lives in beer
cans and froth. Nobody seemed to notice her. Except, perhaps, when a proprietor or an impatient
customer called out her name, Beatrice; then other customers would raise their heads briefly, a few
seconds, as if to behold the bearer of such a beautiful name, but not finding anybody there, they would
resume their drinking, their jokes, their laughter and play with the other serving girls” . In traditional
African culture, nomenclature is significant in that the name borne is supposed to reflect the personality
of the person, and this is not the case here. From the perspective of customers to the beer halls, who are
the people who seem to matter in terms of Wanjiru's self-concept and belonging, the name “Beatrice” is,
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instead, ironic and it practically has no referent. As the story unfolds, Wanjiru's incapability of holding
down a job for any significant length of time is noticeable and is a symptom of her instability. She is
accurately described as “a wounded bird in flight: a forced landing now and then but nevertheless
wobbling from place to place so that she would variously be found in Alaska, Paradise, The Modern,
Thome and other beer-halls all over Limuru " . Her search seems to be an interminable journey. She is
unsuccessful in the urban centers. So she tries the sprawling townships in the vicinity. At times she is
dismissed from a job by an angry boss because of her failure to “attract enough customers’’, success as a
prostitute means more income for her boss. But she hopes that by wandering from place to place she will
eventually find her roots. But she never finds herself in control of her life and of her situation and no
wonder she envies rival prostitutes, who she thinks are successes. In her endeavor to find a solution to her
misfortunes, she engages in a process of self-examination and comparison with the other young women
but she fails to perceive any significant differences between herself and the latter. Ironically, she is more
attractive than some, so she cannot fathom why they are desirable and she is not: “girls even more
decidedly ugly than she are fought over by numerous claimants at closing hours. What do they have that I
don't have”? Later, because of her concern that her appearance is a major cause of her rejection by men,
she will attempt a metamorphosis of her looks. Nyaguthii is the girl whose intimidation is most
unbearable, for Wanjiru erroneously sets Nyaguthii up as a model because she assumes that the latter has
control of her life, and Wanjiru herself doesn't. She sees in this person “the girl she would like to be,
someone who is “both totally immersed in and yet completely above the underworld of bar and violence
and sex.” Outwardly, Nyaguthii is haughty, distant, and even fights men, but she always has them in her
‘courtyard’, and they still bring her “propitiating gifts which she accepts as of right”. To Wanjiru,
Nyaguthii is the exemplification of a free woman but Nyaguthii is also a bird in flight that hungers for
change and excitement; new faces and new territories for her conquest. Because wherever she goes,
Nyaguthii's visibility is unavoidable. In a sense Nyaguthii is a kind foil for Wanjiru, and, ironically, in
her darkest hour, she will turn to Nyaguthii for help. Even though she discovers that her imagined rival
does not fit the perceived description, she learns from Nyaguthii that she, too, can relate to men with a
certain air of indifference, thus freeing herself from her mental bondage. Although Wanjiru's greatest
desire is to find a bar-kingdom where she would reign without the interference of other women, bliss for
her is also contingent upon being physically attractive so that she is enticing to men. Her attitude is
reminiscent of that of Madame Loisel, in The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant, who longed so eagerly to
charm, to be desired, to be wildly attractive and sought after Wanjiru, therefore, tries two approaches to
mask her unattractive image. First, she tries clothes, but she does not earn enough money both to buy
clothes and to pay for her lodgings. Since she, like Wariinga in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Devil on the Cross,
loathes her blackness, attributing it to her misfortunes, she attempts to mask her unattractiveness by
applying Ambi, a skin-lightening cream, “for had she not seen girls blacker than herself being
transformed overnight from ugly sins into white stars by a touch of skin-lightening creams? And men
would ogle them, would even talk with exaggerated pride of their newborn girl friends ... they always
went for a girl with an Ambi-lightened skin and head covered with a wig made in imitation of European
or East Indian hair” . This searing of her black skin could be interpreted as an attempt by Wanjiru to
obliterate her negative image, hoping that a new Wanjiru would emerge at the end of the process. But no
matter how she uses her creativity to change her exterior image and accommodate her perception of
acceptance, she is still unhappy and feels alienated. All this does nothing to camouflage her low self-
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image. It is during her experimentation with the skin-lightening cream that she feels her most profound
humiliation. The owner of Starlight Bar and Lodging in Ilmorog, after being turned down by Nyaguthii,
approaches Wanjiru and tries to seduce her, but she refuses, thus retaining “a fierce pride even at the
bottom of the heap’’, for she could not, she would not bring herself to accept that which had recently
been cast aside by Nyaguthii . As a consequence of her action, Wanjiru is fired by her boss. This
uncompromising reaction to her boss's attempted sexual harassment surprises her, and it is a
foreshadowing of her future self-assertiveness and an inner strength hitherto not seen in her personality.
As the story unfolds, Wanjiru begins to view herself from a different light, thus making some progress
toward the resolution. When she is out of a job, she looks at herself in the mirror and observes that she
has aged, “hardly a year after she has fallen from grace”. She also realizes that she is scrupulous, and
somehow has a horror of soliciting lovers or directly bartering her body for hard cash. Deep down what
the real Wanjiru “wanted was decent work and a man or several men who cared for her. Perhaps she took
that need for a man, for a home and a child with her to bed. Perhaps it was this genuine need that scared
off men who wanted other things from barmaids” .No wonder she is a failure as a woman of the street,
and, according to Cook and Okenimpke, it is “because her romantic soul yearns for a true love
relationship and makes her hate this dreary imitation, thus accentuating her lack of seductive graces” .
The author seems to unveil a major reason for Wanjiru's lack of success. She cannot substitute
fake relationships for genuine love. The implication here is that the New Africa elite is bent on exploiting
women for their own gratification and not interested in Germaine relationships between men and women
as prescribed by traditional African culture. Now at the end of hope, she begins to fantasize about home
and her roots. The reference to the protagonist's background is significant in that ‘Minutes of Glory’ is in
part a political statement against the vices of Westernization. Westernization is portrayed as a blight that
has corrupted the earthly paradise, that is, communal rural African life and all its ramifications, thus the
reference: “Her mother's village in Nyeri seemed the sweetest place on God's earth. She would invest the
life of her peasant mother and father with romantic illusions of immeasurable peace and harmony. She
longed to go back home to see them. But how could she go back with empty hands? In any case the place
was now a distant landscape in the memory. Her life was here in the bar among the crowd of lost
strangers. Fallen from grace ... She was part of the generation which would never again be one with the
soil, the crops, the wind and the moon”. It is against this background (the communal existence versus the
brutal market economy) that she reflects on the life that could have been hers, a life of security and
happiness. She is like other African women characters who often have found themselves cut off from
their past and trapped within a system of ruthless exploitation. Ngugi shows that separation from the
fabric of African traditional community life is a key factor contributing to the exploitation of African
women. Nobody can protect them once they are uprooted from home and all it represents. Nguhi,
therefore, wants us to interpret this sense of displacement as a result of the influence of foreign values
which are brought upon by Westernization. She inadvertently has relegated herself to the position of an
outsider to her parents’ community. Thus she “anticipates Wanja in Petals of Blood” and postdates Jagua
Nana, the heroine in Cyprian Ekwensi's Jagua Nana. Wanjiru's life as prostitute is anathema to the
traditional values of her people; as a result, she, Wanjiru, has condemned herself to a fruitless pursuit of
life and love. She even attempts suicide but does not go through with it .Wanjiru's plight seems to reflect
a larger sterility affecting women attempting to exist in an environment unnatural to the African way of
life. A writer like Okot Lawino despises modern women and rejects the concept of beauty held in the
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West but, instead, promotes the traditional way of life. For other African writers, however, the rural
habitat is no Shangri-la. They perceive some aspects of the traditional society as being discriminatory
against women. Westernization has only sharpened their lot. Therefore, some city women are portrayed
as being free from the bondage of traditional life and marriage practices. Unfortunately, in African fiction
most urban women are not held in high regard and they are stereotyped as ‘prostitutes and mistresses’
These prejudices are however also reflected in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's works. To return to "Minutes of
Glory", we notice that the opening of a new bar, TreetopBar, in Ilmorog offers Wanjiru temporary relief.
She is employed as a sweeper and bedmaker and feels closer to greatness since she now makes beds for
big men whom she has previously known only as names. Her feelings of elation are, however, short-lived
when Nyaguthii and the other girls flock to Treetop Bar from other bars. These girls are offered more
prestigious jobs than Wanjiru.For that reason they despise her for performing menial tasks for which she
is paid a mere pittance. To escape from her misery, she resorts to illusion and fantasy, dreaming of
lovers, sleek cars, smart clothes, fulfilled passions and lust. These fantasies merely provide a brief
respite. Then there is a glimmer of hope, but this hope is dashed by her perceived rejection by a man who
is a big transporter of vegetables and one whom she sees as a fellow victim since he is not really one of
the ‘ big shots’ whose recognition he is attempting to gain. She has yearned to talk to and confide in
someone who would understand. Instead she is insulted by this truck-driver who falls sound asleep when
she has been expecting to share verbally with him what is in her tormented heart, the very man who
“Saturday after Saturday” has poured out his soul to her and has “paid for her human services” . At this
climactic moment in the story, something is in her snaps. All the anger of the year and a half that she has
been on the road and all the bitterness against her humiliation are now directed at this man. The failure of
this person, presumably the most able to commiserate with her and understand her situation further
emphasizes cultural disintegration because the friendship develops outside the confines of traditional
cultural norms. She steals his money and then imposes herself on Nyaguthii, in desperation to talk to
somebody. From the conversation it is clear that Wanjiru and Nyaguthii have all along had
misconceptions about each other and they both have assumed that the other has control over her life.
Wanjiru learns that Nyaguthii, even though she requires the attention of “those flattering eyes to make ...
her feel... herself’, she Nyaguthii is free in terms of not being moved by men; “nothing interests’’ her.
Wanjiru realizes that she too can be herself free and whatever that implies in her situation. The
conversation between Nyaguthii and Wanjiru does indicate an element of sisterhood solidarity. When she
goes to Nairobi to shop with the stolen money, Wanjiru looks at the mirror, this time at ‘her new self’ and
becomes aware of a new sense of power. Like Ngugi's other female characters who triumph. At the end,
Wanjiru finally achieves self-realization rather than perpetual alienation; even though it does not appear
that she seeks an alternative life-style, henceforth, her relationships with men will be based on her terms.
It is as if a spell has been removed from her, and Ngugi paints her new image so vividly: “Tliere was a
glint in her eyes that made men's eyes turn to her”. Later, a man follows her but in her newly found
freedom and self-assurance she snubs him and he loses his confidence. Her return to Treetop Bar, the
very place where she has been humiliated, is significant, for she must prove a point; she must assert
herself, as a liberated being, even though for a brief moment. Ngugi's description of this moment is
poignant: “At Treetop Bar ... conversations stopped for a few seconds at her entry... lascivious eyes were
turned to her ... she accepted their drinks as of right. She felt a new power, confidence even’’ And Cook
and Okenimpke capture this ‘Minutes of Glory’ very effectively. She knows what she is doing in
80
returning to the scene of her former shame and of her theft. She knows that this is a blaze of false glory, a
paper conflagration that will burn itself out in a few minutes and leave only ashes. But in these brief
moments she has asserted herself (and to the reader) that her lot in life is determined by accidents and
external circumstances not by anything inherent within her.
Finally, this search for self is evident in Afro-American novel also such as in the writings of Toni
Morrison. Throughout the story ‘ Minutes of Glory’ by Ngugi wa Thiong'o Beatrice complained how
lousy her life was and all of the hardships she went though. She was dissatisfied with herself and was
saddened that nobody ever noticed her. Although Beatrice's life was a disappointment to herself, she
made a decision that would change everything or so she thought. When Beatrice stole the money from
her customer and ran off to Nairobi, she became happy for the first time throughout the story. Was being
happy for a couple of moments in her life worth the pain and agony, which will follow her arrest?
Beatrice worked in the beer halls outside of Nairobi as a concubine. She was always miserable, she
complained constantly about how she was not as beautiful as the others. Not only in his short story bit
also in his two famous novels she he show the corrupted society. In both novels, Devil on the Cross and
Petals of Blood, women are presented as mere toys for the wealthy men who fill elite positions. Indeed, in
their daily struggle to earn their own living, be it by looking for a job or by keeping the one they have
got, women are almost always crossing some elite’s paths. In such cases the latter have a tendency to
grasp the opportunity to submit the women to a sort of sexual blackmail. The professional abilities of
women applying for a job are then always ignored by employers in favour of their physical appearance
and their sexual appeal. Before anything, they will have to accept to sleep with their prospective
employer. We come to conclusion that the quest for self and significance by a woman in the
protagonist's situation in a climate which exploits and manipulates women for sexual gratification would
appear to be a futile endeavor. The author decries this world that the new Africa elite have adopted, a
world whose values are in contrast to life that is African and all that it implies. Wanjiru's strength lies in
her persistence and constant striving for answers to her problem, not only by engaging in an inner search
for who she is but also by actively seeking answers through externally endeavoring to change her
appearance from the reality. Through the character we get the vision of plight of African women in
society and exploiters and the exploited, dominators and dominated, bourgeoisie and proletariat. All this
contributes to the paradoxically triumphant person she becomes in the end. That she even survives her
psychological ordeal could be regarded as a miracle, clearly, the portrayal of her endurance and triumph
is Ngugi's tribute to the integrity of Gikuyu women. Parallels are shown between Ngugi's heroines, those
in his novels being given more scope to develop than those depicted in his short stories. These stories are
parables of post-colonial Africa, and Wanjiru's plight is, to me, representative of this era. Although
Wanjiru is a fallen woman destined to live in a world removed from her earthly paradise, a milieu
associated with warped Western values, she still can have a stake in her destiny. Ngugi wants the reader
to see Wanjiru's brief triumph as a gleam of hope for her culture and African women.
81
WORKS CITED:
P'Bitek, Okot. The song of Lawino. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967.
Cook, David, and Michael Okenimpke. Ngugi wa Thiong'o: An Explanation of His Writings. London: Heinemann,
1983.
Davies, Carole Boyce. "Introduction: Feminist Consciousness and African Literary Criticism."
Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature. Eds. Caroline Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves.
Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1986.
Ekwensi, Cyprian. Jagua Nana. London: Heinemann, 1965.
Maupassant, Guy de. "The Necklace." Fictions. 2nd ed. Ed. Joseph S. Trimmer and C. Wade Jenning. New York:
Harcourt, 1989.
Mutiso, G-C.M. Socio-political Thought in African Literature: Weusi? New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974.
Ngugi, James. The River Between. London: Heinemann, 1965. A Grain of Wheat. London: Heinemann, 1967.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Petals of Blood. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1978.
Nama, Charles. "Daughters of Moombi." Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature.Ed. Caroline Boyce
Davies and Anne Adams Graves. Trenton, New Jersey: African World Press, 1986.
Davies and Anne Adams Graves. Trenton, New Jersey. Africa World Press, 1986.
82
‘QUEST OF HOLISTIC REDEMTION THROUGH PRIMITIVISM’: A STUDY IN ARUN
JOSHI’S THE STRANGE CASE OF BILLY BISWAS
Sushil Sarkar
Research Scholar
Department of English and OMEL
Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan
West Bengal
A British born renowned anthropologist, Verrier Elwin, in his research on Indian tribes highly
glorified the tribal way of life with the extraordinary sensational romanticism. He also found beauty in
their primitive life style, their primitive dormitory system and even in their primitive ethnic folk culture
and customs which are undoubtedly simple but always had been a great significance in India’s ancient
cultural hegemonial perspective. Moreover, these tribes are primitive and their primitive childlike
qualities as well as ideology reflect the ambivalence in the modern civilized gaze in comparison to the
primitive other. In art and literature primitivism connotes many meanings:- “Sometimes it often meant
glorification of lost innocence of a mythical, pre-civilisational human condition; sometimes it meant a
simpler, even cruder style of perception; sometimes it meant an idealization of a childlike in humankind;
in the modern sense it meant a valorization of the sexual freedom supposed to exist in primitive
societies”(Nation in Imagination-245).The tribal folk culture or tribal society had been taken a nice place
in the various writers of the postcolonial period, such as Mahasweta Devi, Oriya novelist Gopinath
Mohanty, Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhaya and Arun Joshi of course. Arun Joshi, a
prominent postcolonial Indian English novelist with extraordinary heartrending feeling vividly depicted
the tribal world or the primitive world in his novel The strange case of Billy Biswas.As a novelist, he, in
his novel delineates the mysterious magical tribal world as well as the primordial qualities of these ethnic
people, especially Bhill tribes at Satpura hills in Madhya Pradesh. Like Gopinath Mohanty’s novel
Pajara or the Bengali novel Aranyak (Of the Forest), Arun Joshi harks back to the lapse of nature leaving
the ‘The weariness, fever and the fret’(Ode to a Nightingale-23) of the modern world. All these novelists
with a romantic bent of mind displayed the primordial qualities of the tribe which are the embodiment of
savageness and wilderness but provides everyone civility, tranquility and soberness. In his second novel
The strange Case of Billy Biswas, he attacks the spiritual barrenness of the modern materialistic
sophisticated society where simple and peaceful living is the symbol of backward society. Hence the
relevance of Joshi’s main dictum which shows that back to the past of ancient culture and simple
primitive life is the panacea of all modern diseases. And hence, Billy Biswas tries to achieve the
redemption of his soul in a different way leaving the sad music of humanity amidst the primitive
backward children in the village of Madhya Pradesh.
Arun Joshi is an outstanding novelist in Indian Writing English who created an outstanding place
for himself in the postcolonial period. In the novel The strange Case of Billy Biswas, the novelist at the
outset of the novel shows that the protagonist, Billy who is a US-returned anthropologist teaches in Delhi
University. He had a family with his wife Meena and a single child with respected job in Delhi, a modern
city as well as a capital city of India. But he left his job and the responsibility of his middle class family,
83
his wife Meena and his only child, his prestigious teaching post in Delhi University and it’s extravagant
life just to escape into the forest to search his true inner being. In this paper I will try to show why Billy
abandons this established and prestigious life in the capital city of India. Did he find a tribal magic wind
or the Aladdin’s light in the forest among the primitive or the so-called tribal people? Hence, Arun
Joshi’s novel The strange Case of Billy Biswas resembles with the American novel Henderson the Rain
King by Saul Bellow where an American businessman tired of his life and goes to Africa and starts living
with the tribal community of Africa. In the contemporary period everything has been in the decentering
condition, the mood of decadence, decaying and moreover in a degenerated position prevails everywhere.
This resulted a brooding melancholy, utter upsetness, slighten moral and ethical values. ‘The Last
Romantic poet’ W.B .Yeats also laments in his poem “The Second Coming”“The falcon cannot here the
falconer, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” (The Second
Coming). It also reminds us the poem ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ by the prominent Victorian Poet Matthew
Arnold. Like the protagonist Billy , Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘The Scholar Gipsy’, the scholar in an utter
frustration left the Oxford University and joined with the band of gypsies’ avoiding the ‘Sick hurry , it’s
divided aim’(The Scholar Gipsy-224) in search of a thing which can cure the modern mankind’s strange
disease. Hence all these protagonists of the above mentioned texts are in the continuous endeavor to bring
back this Centre which will able to make the society and it’s degenerated condition intact, regenerated ,
pure and above all with ‘Centre’.
As the novel starts we find Billy in a college tour to the tribal district in Madhya Pradesh and
afterwards the protagonist disappears and many years already had been passed. It was a general
presumption to all that the protagonist is dead. Actually Billy is not dead rather lives secretly with the
Bhill Tribes of Madhya Pradesh in a remote village and that way he gtes tribalised. Many years later the
protagonist was discovered in that tribal village by a friend of Billy, an administrator named Romi Sahai
who goes there for an administrative work there. Here is not the end of the story; Billy is now a married
man who had a Bhill wife named Bilasia. The whole Bhill community reveres Billy Biswas for his
magical powers and he becomes the king of that community. The novel The strange case of Billy Biswas
propounded critique, the quest of primitive or tribal elixir of the protagonist. The primitive life is the
alternative of modern extravagant absurd life. The existential crisis, Billy faces in the capital city of India
but in the primitive, isolated simple life he finds the mysterious, a magical world which is hidden and he
is in search of it. According to his discussion with Rumi, as the representative of the civilized world and
the primitive world where he lives now is a world remains a shadowy place, inhabited by people who are
untouched by the modern world and its problem. The calling of the primordial force is unsuppressed
inspite of Billy’s continuous effort. “Come, come, come, why do you want to go back? Come now, Take
us. Take us until you have had your fill. It is we who are the inheritors of the cosmic Night” (The Strange
Case of Billy Biswas- 88). His supposed possession of magical powers and seeing him as the
reincarnation of their ancient king. This novel also emphasizes that what is superb and Sublime can be
found only in Savage. This savageness or the primitiveness can be perceived through the character of
the protagonist of the novel who finds the wild ecstasy, the wilderness and the full freedom in the
lapse of nature and in its innocent, pure primitive tribal lifestyle. His tribal woman Bilisha not only
drinks and dances with Billy rather she chooses him as her husband. He is in the constant search of
redemption by taking shelter in the lapse of nature .So Billy may be compared to Wordsworth and Bilisha
84
may be his imaginary creation, Lucy. He finds that there is a gulf of contrast between his civilized wife
and primitive wife of Bilisha. Kumkum Sangari in her Essay “Figures of the Unconscious”, says-“The tribal, especially the women, is dark, inscrutable, a kind of repository
of unrepressed, orgiastic, magical sexuality, therapeutic powers and the
‘Unconscious’ and such as a solution for the urban malaise”
(Sangari1991:70).
This urban malaise is a curative force, a primitive elixir and this elixir or wilderness which is
enough in the primitive tribal magical paradise. In the Genesis of The Old Testament of The Bible, there
were two human being –Adam and Eve, the father mankind and the mother of mankind as well. They live
in the paradisal landscape in the lapse of nature where everything is in ordered and in innocence
condition. After the falling from the blissful seat they lost the dignity of life and a devastating doom
resulted a devastating suffering. Adam and Eve desire to get back the paradise but the disobedience
which they committed results torturous suffering through which they had to pass as it is
unescapable.Here the fact of the protagonist of the novel Billy is same. He wants to get back in the lapse
of the nature among the tribal people who are the embodiment of the pure and innocence state. Billy
Biswas tries to get back the ‘Lost Paradise’ abandoning the ‘Fallen Earth’, the life of Delhi. Here the
claustrophobic atmosphere and the life of the Delhi city is the symbol of ‘Fallen Earth’ and the tribal life
is ‘Lost Paradide’.On the basis of the Christian doctrine of original sin, every human being must partake
the guilt of our original sin as nobody can escape this sin and deserves God’s wrath because each
individual inherits the fallen humanity, has tendency to commit sin. The protagonist Billy Bisaws is not
exception as he is the creature of flesh and blood, progenitor of our father of mankind and mother of
mankind. The fault of the hero of the novel has been found in the supposition of the primordial ignorance
and in the sinful act of curiousness or disobedience in the intellectual and in the moral defect in the
character of Billy is concerned.
To conclude, many Sadhaks or Rishis in Ancient India abandoning the materialistic life went
into the deep and isolated forest, far from the madding crowd to know the self in this phenomenal world
.However, these people are hungry for their indomitable quest for ‘self’ and the search for meaning of
life. Lord Buddha, Chiatyadev and Swami Vivekananda and many others also undergone this types of
ascetic life just to know the meaning of the word ‘self’ through the ascetic way. They wanted to know the
Atman and its relationship with the Paramatma.Billy Biswas is in search of that kind of critical question
Who am I?.So he is in the search of holistic redemption and became a primitive to gain his Nirvana in
the tribal village of Madhya Pradesh. So like ancient saints or rishis, he wants to get unity with the divine
through the awakening of his senses. The Bilasia becomes Prakriti (nature) and he becomes Prurush
(male) and the whole cosmic world can be experienced through their union.So the novel The Strange
Case of Billy Biswas is the quest for redemption by a sublime way in the lapse of nature through the
primitivism.
85
REFERENCES:
Joshi, Arun. The Strange Case of Billy Biswas. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 2010.Print.
Elwin, Verrier. The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin: An Autobiography. London: Oxford
University Press, 1964.Print.
Guha, Ramachandra.Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribes, and India. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.Print.
Mohanty, Gopinath.Pajara.Trans. Bikram. K. Das. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Sangari, Kumkum. “Figures of the ‘Unconscious’. Journal of Arts and Ideas, Nos. 20-21, 1991.
Print.
Hansdak, Ivy Imogene. “The Nation and the Indian Tribes: A Diachronic View”. Nation in Imagination. Edt.C
Vijayasree, Meeenakshi Mukherjee, Harish Trivedi and T Vijay
Kumar. Hyderabad: Orient Longman Pvt. Ltd.2007. Print.
Bellow, Saul. Henderson the Rain King. New Delhi: Penguin Books India.1996.Print.
Matthew, Arnold. “The Scolar Gipsy”. Poetry Foundation.1853.
Yeats, W.B. “The Second Coming”. Poems. New York, 1920.Everyman’s Library.
86
NEW PARADIGMS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING: WEB 2.0 TOOLS
Mr. Pushpendra,
&
C. Sinora,
&
Mr. Kaushik Trivedi
Lecturers, Department of Communication Skills
Charotar University of Science & Technology
(CHARUSAT) Changa
Introduction:
The advancement of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has created new
opportunities in terms of learning, teaching and assessment. ICT has proliferated every sector and
English language teaching and learning is not an exception. The development of CALL has greatly
contributed to establish the link between development of technology and pedagogy. CALL which has
shifted to Network based language learning and teaching has created boundless opportunities for English
language teachers and learners to enhance their skills. The advent of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs
and wikis has been particularly helpful in moving internet users from the passive –reader mode to one
that allows them to create and modify web content. The growth of interest in the use of Internet for
educational purposes has made teaching and learning go beyond the boundaries of classrooms and let
people all around the world be only one-click away from each other. The knowledge is generated not
individually, but collectively. This ever-growing flow of information and interactive and more authentic
communication tools have made significant implications for education. Due to immense social changes
brought about in by Web 2.0 tools, the potential impact of the blog writing phenomenon upon teaching
and learning contexts reveals an important area for consideration for all teachers. Advancement in digital
technology and introduction of Web 2.0 tools have opened up new avenues for teaching and learning of
writing by integrating it with classroom teaching.
What is Web 2.0?
"Web 2.0" is commonly associated with web development and web design that facilitates
interactive information-sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World.
Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, socialnetworking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies. A Web 2.0 site allows its
users to interact with other users or to change website content, in contrast to non-interactive websites
where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them. (wikipedia.org)
Need for Using Web 2.0 Tools:
In modern era people are using web 2.0 for various purposes like information sharing, slide
sharing, posting web logs, audio-video sharing, creating communities and forums etc., then why not to
use web 2.0 tools to enhance teaching-learning environment with the help of features of Web 2.0.
Websites like youtube, blogger, slideshare, scribd, blogline, twitter, ning, orkut, wordpress etc. are the
87
best examples of web 2.0 which are widely being used worldwide. Teacher and learner both can go
beyond the text book and beyond the classroom for creating an autonomous teaching-learning
environment. Web 2.0 technologies encompass a variety of web sites and applications that allow anyone
to create and share online information or material they have created. A key element of this technology is
that it allows people to create, share, collaborate and communicate (Thomson, 2008:1).
Introduction and Usages of Various Web 2.0 Tools for SLA:
1. Forums
“On web most common forms of asynchronous communications are e-mails and web forums (sometimes
also called threaded discussion forums or bulletin boards”. This kind of on-line discussions can be useful
in collaborative work. People from the same forum can be acquainted with ideas, suggestions in the form
of messages which are displayed. One can change settings in which prior to a message becoming public it
asks the moderator. One such forum is ‘Ning’ which was used during web 2.0 tool course. Through Ning
the cohort of 41 participants could hold conversation, post comments on each other’s ideas (as told by
instructor Krauss), the Ning forum brought us all together on a common platform where we could hear
and speak to each other through texting.
2. Blog
Similarly, “blog (portmanteau of the term web log) is a discussion or informational site published on the
World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries (posts) typically displayed in reverse chronological
order (the most recent post appears first)”. Blogging is a useful tool not only for professional
development but also for teaching. There are blogs with specific purposes, such as- tutor blogs- used by
teachers for course work etc. and students are restricted from it, class blogs- shared space between
teacher and students to engage in joint discussions, learning blogs- require more time and effort . Every
student has a space. There are more discussion forums such as E-pal.
3. E-Bookmarks
Since 1996 numerous online bookmarks management services emerged such as- Delicious (2003), which
propagated the term ‘social book marking and tagging’. Some popular social bookmarking websites areTwitter, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Pinterest, Buzzfeed, Diigo etc.. Social book marking helps likeminded individuals to come together for searching on-line resources and organizing and categorizing the
selected database. This process continues to have an impact on the continuous expansion of
folksonomies.
4. Folksonomy is a portmanteau term from folk and taxonomy. The word was conceived by Thomas
Vander Wal. “A Folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of
collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. This is also known as
collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing and social tagging”.
Michael Krauss introduced social book marking with Diigo toolbar, where, “not only can you collect
your bookmarks there, but you can highlight web pages, make notes on them, and create groups in which
your colleagues or your students can jointly create collections of book marks”. Through Diigo toolbar
one can highlight contents of any web page with a colour of his choice, automatically save, insert sticky
notes, add them/share with a group or social network site like Facebook.
5. Wiki: Another useful tool for group work is wiki- it should not be confused with Wikipedia. This tool
helps to create web pages and permits others from a select group to edit or make changes on the page.
88
This tool can be innovatively used by introducing a group activity that would result into 100%
participation.
6. Voki and Voice Threads: In order to break the monotony of a class, Voki is more suitable for
teaching primary level students. From the whole range of figures one can choose any avatar, give voice,
either your own or participant’s or any celebrity voice which too is available on-line. Krauss had
introduced this activity and we’d to guess whose voice it is conjecturing on the accents and regional
influence. “Voice thread is a service that lets you create collaborative presentations by collecting
comments- both text and voice. It is a great venue for presentation that allows docs, videos, audio, photos
… flexible and shareable”.
7. Podcast:
A podcast is a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and
downloaded through web syndication. (Wikipedia)
Thus, using Audio-Video-Podcast various study materials can be uploaded on web pages or else on blogs
along with some relevant audio-visual taken from the deep sea of internet. We prior used to give reading
comprehension, writing exercise and speaking exercise only in the premises of the classroom but now it
can be made available for the learners using blogging. Even in case of listening exercise, what we used to
do was to bring cassette/CD player in the classroom! Now, in the age of DIGI music, i-pods have moved
this kind of appliances. So better we use ‘podcast’ for listening exercises. This is the new age demand
and we must be using all these features to make teaching-learning more effective and to shape and color
it in the form desired by 21st century learner.
Paradigm shift in Pedagogical Scenario:
The term web 2.0 was first coined by Tim O’ Reilly. “A simple definition of web 2.0 is the read/write
web. Originally, the internet was a place to locate information- mainly a ‘read only web’. As the internet
slowly changed, websites were developed that let people write, collaborate and share information, such as
Wikipedia and Facebook”. The latest teaching tool is web 3.0 which can be used via any media,
anywhere and in any device. “ICTs are changing and developing so rapidly, mastery of new technologies
whether by a student, a teacher, or an institution – necessitates a capacity for constant innovation and
adaptation”. It has become a global phenomenon that the universities are making extensive use of web
2.0 although not consistently. “Some lecturers are allowing students’ access to podcasts and videos of
their lectures. Others are encouraging students to collaborate through wikis and using RSS feeds to
organize their own work. Many are now giving feedback on essays through Skype and using social
networking sites both for their own research and to encourage student debate”. Students can have a
debate and exchange views through social sites like Google plus. The students can approach a teacher or
get feedback through free internet telephone communication system Skype.
Language Learning via Web Technology
Language and technology are like two wheels of a bicycle. In order to learn language one has to take aid
of technology and in order to access technology one has to depend on language. On a random survey
among my students and colleagues I discovered that e-mail and SMS are the most popular mediums of
communication. “Both English and Information Technology are tools to allow individuals to participate
fully in society”. In order to apply web technology in language learning one should be able to use the
search engine efficiently. There are excellent resources on the web which can be inserted in the regular
classes in order to revitalize them, such as for vocabulary and pronunciation the two essential skills:
(i)
(ii)
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online dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com)
learn
pronunciation
online
via
videos
and
interactive
games
(http://www.youtube.com/watch).
(iii)
vocabulary games (http://www.vocabulary.co.il).
(iv)
create puzzles and worksheets (http://www.billybear4kids.com).
There are abundant of free online resources which can be utilized. Another popular tool is ‘audio-graphic
conferencing. One can simultaneously do voice chats along with working on the web whiteboard. A,
“web whiteboard, basically allows users to communicate and share ideas in graphical forms over the web
in real time”. Brainstorming is a technique which can be applied to introduce any type of topic to warm
up the academic environment of the classroom. During this session the teacher can use a mind map so
that novel ideas do not slip away. A mind map begins with a topic drawn in the centre and the ideas
related to it are added to branches and sub-branches. Similarly, “Spiderscribe is an online mind mapping
and brainstorming tool. It lets you organize your ideas by connecting notes, titles, calendar, events etc. in
free-form maps”.
Varied Web 2.0 Tools and Skill Development:
Web 2.0 is a two way web avatar in which web is not only readable but also writable. It has become easy
to create, contribute, publish, share and change information, that anybody can become an author or
creator. Therefore it is affecting the language teachers approach towards teaching LSRW skills along
with other crucial skills too. Many important Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs, Wikis, forums, google docs,
have emerged for interacting through the medium of writing and producing many written documents
collaboratively, as, they offer online writing resource. Forums and weblogs provide the platform for self
expression, self evaluation, open discussion, analytical skills, organizational skills, argumentative skills
and critical thinking skills. Blogs and forums are the promising tools when focus of working is on
extensive discussion process where comments, suggestions related to language and content are given so
that the author who initiates the discussion process can bring in the desired changes in his/her draft of the
document through enhanced critical thinking and argumentative skills in addition to perfection in form
and content in the respective language. While in wikis and google documents the focus is on the accuracy
of the form so as to improve the expression in the language used. For joint production of a document
Wikis and google docs are appropriate where the focus of collaborative writing is on the final product
through drafting, editing and re-editing. Usa Noytim’s (2010:1127) study suggests that Weblog gives an
opportunity and freedom for self-expression in English, writing for both a local and global audience,
fostering creative, analytical and critical thinking skills, creating social interaction and good relationships
between writer and reader, and supporting the learning community. Claudia Trajtemberg and Androula
Yiakoumetti (2011:437) demonstrated that blogs promote EFL interaction, self-expression, selfevaluation, and a sense of language progress.
Web 2.0 Tools and Collaborative Learning:
A Web 2.0 sites allow users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as
creators of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where people are
limited to the passive viewing of content. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs,
wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies (Wikipedia).
Web 2.0 is concerned with mapping the new terrain and calling into question its range and influence.
Web 2.0 technologies have been advanced as technologies that fundamentally grapple with contemporary
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pedagogy and question the transformation of learning. For educational institutes, Web 2.0 technologies
have dramatically shaped both the way instructors teach and the way students learn. Web 2.0 not only
expresses the dynamics of changes in the World Wide Web through social networking sites, for example,
but also serves as a platform for open source productivity and online learning through the new dynamics
of collaboration. The core educational Web 2.0 application is the Course Management System (CMS).
These systems play important role in supporting both collaboration and learning content both inside and
outside of the classroom. Whether a learning activity consists of text, links, graphics, sound or video, or
whether the task is that of creating, storing, retrieving, viewing, or listening to digital content, databasedriven course management systems based on Web 2.0 technology are the best prospects for deploying
collaborative learning activities. The open source CMS can be modified to make better use of Web 2.0
infrastructure either by constructing customized modules or blocks, or by integrating existing Web 2.0
technologies into a CMS. It can help a teacher in preparing a mobile blog module, a shared whiteboard
module, a presentation module and a slideshow module.
SLA Theories supporting usages of Web 2.0 Tools:
The use of Web 2.0 tools are supported by major SLA theoretical paradigms such as Krashen’s (1985)
input hypothesis, Long’s (1983, 1996) interaction hypothesis and models of corrective/facilitative
feedback (Gass, 1997; Long, Inagaki, & Ortega, 1998). Krashen (1985) proposed the concept of
comprehensible input, which refers to the idea that is a little beyond one’s current target language level
(i+1) is the necessary and sufficient condition for target or second language (L2) development, and that
learners should be exposed to an “i+1” level of input only. Long’s (1983, 1996) interaction hypothesis
emphasizes the importance of input. According to Long, negotiation of meaning through interaction
facilitates L2 acquisition because it connects input and output through selective attention. Thus,
negotiation is important to give learners opportunities to get input and to practice output. In terms of
feedback, there are two types of feedback, positive and negative. They both play critical, though
different, roles in L2 acquisition. Positive feedback confirms learners’ language production as correct or
acceptable so that the learner can strengthen his or her L2. Negative feedback informs a learner that
certain forms are not acceptable so that the learner can reconstruct his or her interlanguage. Given this,
Web 2.0 tools are good ways of facilitating L2 acquisition in terms of input, interaction and feedback.
Extraordinary Features of Web 2.0 Tools supplementing SLA:
Portability and easy access to Web 2.0 tools such as blogs or wikis through mobile devices enable
learners to be exposed to L2 anytime and anywhere. The input could be from native speakers, which
enhances the L2 learner’s authentic use of the target language. It could also be from other L2 learners,
which provides more opportunities to negotiate meaning. Moreover, by nature, Web 2.0 tools promote
social networking or social relationships on the net. Finally, through social interaction, learners may give
and receive feedback, which is also meaningful for learners.
Learner autonomy is also an important component of L2 learning (Benson, 2001). Autonomy means
“the ability to take charge of one’s own learning (Holec, 1979).” Inherent in this is the need of the learner
to determine the learning objectives, define the content and progression of learning, and select methods
and techniques to be used (Benson, 2001). As a result, autonomous learners are “flexible, persistent and
responsible, venturesome and creative, independent and self-sufficient, and curious, open and motivated
(Candy, 1991, pp. 459-66).” Benson (2001) suggested six ways of fostering autonomy, and one of these
emphasizes a technology-based approach. By teaching learners how to use technology independently,
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learners may have more chances to become autonomous users than traditional classroom learners. They
can find study materials by searching the web and independently determine how to study the content.
Thus, Web 2.0 technology can definitely enhance learners’ autonomy if learners are properly taught and
well practiced.
Learning Made Flexible: Websites and blogs are being used as tools for distance learning now a days
but actually use of webs and blogs have caused the removal of the term ‘distance’ from the curricula and
in true sense it has been ‘flexible learning’ rather than ‘distance learning’. Distance learning is student
oriented and exactly what the term implies- any type of study that takes place when the instructor and the
students(s) are separated by physical distance, with printed materials and various technologies used for
communication and program delivery. (Pradeep M.) Thus using web-tools, blogs and podcasts facilitates
both teacher and learner to remove the factor of distance and it expands the classroom beyond the
boundaries.
Conclusion:
Using web technologies like blogs, podcast and other web 2.0 tools provides knowledgefacilitator a wide exposure and to learner a wide range of choice of his/her interest in teaching-learning
respectively. It affiliates teacher and learner both with a new age feel and ultimately it results into a better
scope of betterment in teaching-learning as it makes the entire teaching-learning process more flexible
and effective. Learners can open up new horizons in studies with learning from web-tools in a livelier
environment and at the same time teachers can facilitate learners with some new techno-features in
teaching. Easy access is a major characteristic of use of web-tools in teaching-learning. The advantages
of online learning can be summarized as accessible and flexible as it offers the possibility to experience
English without the need of travel and to learn language when they want, where they want. The internet
offers the possibility of instant feedback to learners as a response with a repeatability in which the learner
can encounter the language in a repetitive fashion until mastery is achieved. It can be considered as
multi-model learning tool. It stimulates sensory and cognitive perception by fertilizing language
acquisition successfully. It specifically allows the language learner a choice and variety in learning. It can
offer services for less. To conclude, Modern Technologies have undoubtedly changed the way the
teachers teach, and learn to teach. The interactivity, the potential for collaborative research and shared
data, the new ways of receiving, organizing and manipulating information offered by Web 2.0 are very
vital components which might transform the way teacher develop. In the broader context of technology
that came before, and what we have seen since, Web 2.0 could be considered the latest fad in the cycle of
hyperbole, or something truly unique and new – a transformation. The new paradigm of learning focused
on knowledge creation and active participation, mashed up with social technologies like web 2.0 has
potential for huge shift in ELL and ELT practices. It gives a hint towards the formation of global
classroom.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Agnihotri R. K., Khanna A. L., English Language teaching in India, Sage Publications, New Delhi, 1995
Aharony, N. “The influence of LIS students’ personality characteristics on their perceptions towards Web 2.0 use.”
Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, Vol.41:No.4 (Dec 2009): 227-242
Aslam Mohammad, (1995) Needs Analysis of Indian Learners of English, English Language Teaching in India,
Sage Publications, New Delhi.
Cheung, C. T. Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. An Online Computer Language Learning
Environment with Automated Assessment
Coghlan, Michael. ICT Consultant (TAFE), Australia m-learning in the Wireless World: Where is the M in
Interactivity, Collaboration and Feedback?
Dixit Pushpa, (2009) Use of Technology in English Language Learning, Technology in ELT, Vol.1, Isuue.1,
Jan.2009, pp16-19.
Fiedler, S. (2004). Introducing disruptive technologies for learning: Personal webpublishing and weblogs. Paper
presented at the Ed-Media 2004, Lugano, Switzerland.
Hardisty, D., & Windeatt, S. (1989) CALL. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harrington, C. F., Gordon, S. A., & Schibik, T. J. (2004). Course management system utilization and implications
for practice: A national survey of department chairpersons. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration,
7(4).
Nagaraj Geetha, English Language Teaching: Approaches-Methods-Techniques, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 2004
Pradeep M., (2009) „Promotion of Distance Education through Internet Learning Technology: Major
Impediments, university News, Vol.47, No.10, Mar.9-15, 2009, p.1.
Stern H. H., Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching, Oxford University Press, 2009. Thomas Michael.
Handbook of Research on Language Acquisition Technologies: Web 2.0 Transformation of Learning.
Thomson,
Helen.
Wikis,
Blogs
and
Web
2.0
technology,
http://www.unimelb.edu.au/copyright/information/guides/wikisblogsweb2blue.pdf
Webliography:
www.wikipedia.com,
www.podcast.com,
www.eslpod.com,
http://www.iallt.org/iallt_journal
V.1-21/05/08
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WORDSWORTH: AN ECO-HINDU POET
Raj Kumar Mishra
Lecturer of English
Varanasi-221003
As a literary field of study, it seeks to relate humans to non-human environment. Moreover it
evaluates prevalent ideologies towards nature spread over literary and cultural texts. Ecocritics are so
enthusiastic that they blur the line between human and non-human world. Like Wordsworth they see
nature as living personality. Ecocritics flamboyantly disapprove of the notion that non-human world is
subordinate to human. Ecocritics view all literature in terms of place, setting or environment.
Ecocriticism as a critical perspective looks at the relationship between human and extra-human world.
Ecocritics not only worry about wild life and wilderness but also human health, food and shelter. Almost
all human activities today are engaged in the blind exploitation of nature. Consequently he/she is
enjoying the deadly dance of destruction without any complaint. Industrial pollution is the main threat
along with destructive ways of consuming natural resources, such as excessive fishing and the ‘clear cut
logging of forests’. (Kerridge 533). Ecocritics argue for sympathy towards both pet and non-pet animals.
This brief analysis of ‘ecocriticism’ flourished lately in the West and looks quite novel to Western and
American thinkers; but the way it argues is not new to Indian philosophers and thinkers. To the Western
and American thinkers, man occupies highest place in the web of life. For them, nature and natural
resources are to be made subservient to human needs. Such kind of defective view of nature is ratified by
Greek humanism, Judeo-Christian, and Christian culture and tradition, especially the Bible. These cults
hold men superior to other living beings, and non-living things for their rational faculty. Here let me say
that Hindus have greater exposure to eco-philosophies than that of Christian, and Judeo-Christian people.
Hence turn to Hinduism.
Indian culture and tradition has been ever eco-oriented since Vedic period. Eco-oriented ancient
practices still can be seen at least in rural belts of India. Indian culture is not opposed to growth and
development. Development should take place but without disturbing the eco-system. Indian philosophers
distinguish themselves by their spiritual philosophy from material philosophy of the West. Spirituality of
the East never taught schemes of exploitation and appropriation. In the ancient Hindu traditions, man was
looked upon as part of nature, linked inextricably with elements around him. The Hindu tradition is the
oldest living religious tradition in the world. It believes in the all-inclusive world-view. It sees divine
presence in all living and non-living objects. Hinduism is a theory and practice in compliance with
principles of Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, Smritis, and many more sacred Hindu texts. Since Hindus feel
the Supreme Being’s presence in everything around them, they feel obliged to honour all living creatures
and organic things on the earth. They know how to live in harmony with His creation including earth,
fire, rivers, forests, pet and non-pet animals and birds, trees, plants, sun, air etc. No other religion lays as
much emphasis on the superiority of nature as does Hinduism. In fact Hinduism is an argument for
reverence towards all things in the cosmos.
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Hinduism looks at the world of nature which is utterly different to that of Western religions. It is
based on the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, Gita, Vedant etc. According to Hindu thought, there is no gap
between the Divine and the world of nature. Physical world is just the manifestation of Him. All things
and beings are just manifestations. Hindu sacred texts stress on the fact that human beings cannot
separate themselves from nature. Hindus adore divine forces hidden in nature. Hinduism believes in the
attainment of liberation to soul. It accepts the world of nature or real world as described by science but
rejects altogether materialism. It approves reason but rejects rationalism as the final view of life.
Simultaneously it rejects theology in the form of blind faith. Hinduism accommodates science
philosophy, and theology. Hinduism does not agree to Western notion that God needs human aids in His
progress project. Every social work done extra-self-interest is worth to the adoration of God. Hinduism is
every inch synthetic, coherent, and universal. It is coherent because it succeeded each and every scientific
enquiry. It is synthetic because it gives place to all schools and systems of thought by virtue of
moderation and toleration discrediting sectarianism. It is universal because it holds that every man is son
of God and he can feel His presence by himself. Without doubt, every creature is another manifestation
of God. Millions of people around the world, especially in the West, are practicing some aspects of the
Hindu system, such as Yoga, Meditation, Vegetarianism and Ahimsa or non-violence. Many of these
aspects are currently being researched and used in the fields of Health & Medicine, Management, Selfdevelopment, Environmental issues, Human and animal rights and Socio-Political issues (Ahimsa).
Man is an intermediate player in the drama of material and abstract reality. He is made of as per
Hindu belief, five elements- space, air, fire, water, and earth – form the fabric of interconnected web of
life. Hinduism teaches that the five great elements (Panchbhutani) that constitute the environment are all
derived from prakriti, the primal energy. Hinduism relates nose to earth, tongue to water, eyes to fire,
skin to air, and ears to space. As such Hinduism establishes the inseparable bond between our senses and
the elements with the natural world. For Hinduism, living beings are the by-products of the environment.
They are not outside us, not alien or hostile to us. Harmony among five constitutive elements keeps man
alive and working. Any kind of tussle, if there happens, causes ailments and even sometimes death
strokes. The point to drive home is that we cannot live without ensuring viable environment. We should
live with and by environment like a sympathetic and sensitive friend. All creatures (plants, animals, birds
included) of the world above and below the earth are members of a bigger family called environment.
During Vedic days, the term pollution perhaps, was not in existence. Instead of it the term poison was
used frequently. Yajur Veda writes: “Do not disturb the sky and do not poison (pollute) the atmosphere.”
(Yajur Veda 5:43). “The oceans are treasure of wealth protect them” (Yajur Veda 38:22). “Do not poison
(pollute) water and do not harm or cut the trees” (Yajur Veda 6:33). Western technological and
economic upmanship and superiority led to the destruction of indigenous societies along with large-scale
looting of natural environment. Thousands of years ago, Hindu sages realized that ecological harmony
was necessary for the survival of mankind.
The Prithvi Sukta of Atharva Veda, invokes and addresses the earth as mother. The Vedic seer
declares : 'Mata Bhumih Putroham Prithivyah: Earth is my mother, I am her son.' Mother Earth is
celebrated for all her natural graces and particularly for her gifts of herbs and vegetation. Her blessings
are sought for prosperity in all endeavours and fulfilment of all righteous aspirations. “We invoke all
supporting Earth on which trees, lords of forests, stand ever firm.”( Atharva Veda 12:1:27 ). The
Atharvana Veda identifies three things essential for all lives on earth to exist. These are air, water, and
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plants (Atharva Veda 18:17). “Plants and herbs destroy poisons (pollutants)” (Atharva Veda 8:7:10).
“Purity of atmosphere checks poisoning (pollution)” (Atharva Veda 8:2:25). In the Rig Veda entire
world is taken as family - vasudev kutumbakam. Here all religious cults are free to flourish. In fact, earth
is the mother of all mothers and sky the biggest protector, the father of all fathers. If earth is nourisher,
sky will be protector. An unknown author in the morning- prayer says: ‘O earth forgive me for the touch
of my feet’. In the Rig Veda, the seer on one instance calls upon the deity of water: ‘The waters in sky,
rivers, wells whose source lie in the ocean may all these sacred waters protect me’ (Rig Veda 7:49:2).
This sacred text explicitly declares: “Do not cut trees because they remove pollution.” (Rig Veda
6:48:17).
India has been ever incredible India. Hindu scriptures are replete with ecological instances. Here
each and every work begins and ends with at least remembering the concerned deity. The Varaha Purana
writes, "One who plants one peepal, one neem, ten flowering plants or creepers, two pomegranates, two
oranges, and five mangoes does not go to hell." "Five sorts of kindness are the daily sacrifice of the trees.
To families they give fuel; to passersby they give shade and a resting place; to birds they give shelter;
with their leaves, roots, and bark they give medicines." (Varaha Purana 162.41-42). Here in India Tulsi
(Basil like plant) as goddess mother is worshipped in Kartik (November) month. The whole month girls
and women worship and in the end they arrange Tulsi marriage and celebrate with traditional love and
faith. The Tulsi plant is an important mythological plant with a Puranic background. “The inhabitants of
a house which has sacred basil are fortunate” (Padam Purana 59.7). “The yama (messenger of death) does
not enter a house where sacred basil is worshipped every day” (Skanda Purana 21.66). In terms of
science, Tulsi and Peepal exhale of life-giving gas oxygen in utmost degree. According to myths and
legends goddess Mahalaksmi, wife of Visnu, had once taken the form of Tulsi. Here every temples and
sacred places have Tulsi. The Coconut tree, in Hindu mythology, is called "Kalpa vriksha (wish-fulfilling
tree). Lotus, a symbol of beauty, purity and divinity is also seen as the sitting platform of many Hindu
deities. The Skanda Purana interprets the significance of Bael tree and it is said that it originated out of
Goddess Parvati`s perspiration, which fell to the ground while she performed penance. Hindu mythology
also says that various incarnations of Parvati reside in each part of the Bael tree. In the Skanda Purana, on
one occasion, Parvati wife to Shiv adopts a sapling of Ashoka as her baby and gets all sanskaras (rites)
performed by learned sages.
The Padma Purana warns: "A person who is engaged in killing creatures, polluting wells, and
ponds and tanks, and destroying gardens, certainly goes to hell." (Padma Purana, Bhoomikhanda 96.7-8).
The Matsya Purana tells that to plant one tree and extend personal carings to it is equal to ten sons.
According to this Purana, one who plants even one tree on the earth is warmly welcomed in the Heaven
and obtains liberation to soul (Moksha). This is one of the greatest eco-philosophies (Matsya Purana
59.159). Reincarnation of soul is central in Hinduism. Hindus believe that in the cycle of life and birth
one may come back as an animal or a bird and so on and so forth. This is the solid basis for adopting the
path of non-violence against creatures. The Visnu Purana states that one who does not harm and kill nonspeaking creatures or animals, pleases God (Visnu Purana 3:8:15). In the Ramayana, Balkand, Valmiki
was grief-striken at the sight of Kraunch bird killed by some hunter. He curses him that he would lose his
peace of mind for good. "One should not throw urine, stool or mucus into the water, nor anything mixed
with these unholy substances, nor blood or poison, nor any other [impurity]." (Manu Smriti 4.56).
Yajnavalkya Smriti condemns those to Ghora Naraka (hell-fire) who kill domesticated and protected
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animals and creatures. Just now, it is ample to say rather declare that Hindu view of cosmos is all the
way hale and hearty. It upholds the intricate relationship of man with nature. All living beings and nonliving are inter-dependent. Both survive and sustain only by enjoying mutual cooperation. God is
everywhere, nature is too everywhere.
II
Wordsworth, who was not well exposed to Hindu culture of nature-worship, dedicated his entire
life to nature not for individual benefits rather for humanity. He has been very sensitive to nature since
his early days of life. He realized divine presence in every aspect of nature. He made poetry as a medium
for the sublimation of individual soul and human society. He often pained to see people blind to others.
People prefer to do bloody deeds instead of humane. This is a kind of defeat to humanity. Several of his
poems carry the environment theme. He deplores materialism and consumerism’s taking hold on
mankind. He found countrymen engaged in industries doing several in-human works. Notwithstanding it
seems unjustifiable to claim that during Wordsworth’s time nature was not so much assaulted by human
hands for material growth. Great souls anticipate much earlier dangers to come about. Wordsworth also
knew and felt environmental dangers beforehand. This is the reason he took resort in ‘lake district’. He
never favored city life. He refers to his change of abode in his big autobiographical sketch The Prelude
(1850) Book I from Bristol and London. He recallsA backward glance upon the curling cloud
Of city smoke, by distance ruralised;
Keen as a Truant or a Fugitive,
But as a Pilgrim resolute, I took,
Even with the chance equipment of that hour,
The road that pointed toward the chosen Vale. (Lines: 88-93)
In his lone drama The Borderers (1842), Wordsworth narrates about the reign of Henry III and the
engagement with borders of England and Scotland. Wordsworth finds his countrymen ‘out of joint’. They
are enticed to in-human acts. In this thin play, Marmaduke, one of the borderers while talking to another
fellow Lacy shades light on the then condition. He declares:
We look
But at the surfaces of things; we hear
Of towns in flames, fields ravaged, young and old
Driven out in troops to want and nakedness;
Then grasp our swords and rush upon a cure
That flatters us, because it asks not thought:
The deeper malady is better hid;
The world is poisoned at the heart. (emphasis added). (Act II)
Wordsworth expresses his sadness in his sonnet “The World Is Too Much With Us” over people’s
estranged relationship with nature. According to him man is one of the happiest beings, provided he is
closest to nature; man and nature are closely linked. Unfortunately his countrymen are engrossed in
material pursuits. They have nothing to do with teachings of nature. They are blind to her beauty and deaf
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to her music and message of peace. People are mindful to only material growth. They see little in nature.
He opines:
…we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The poet laments the loss of people’s ability to imagine themselves as part of nature and God’s creation.
People are insensitive towards God and nature. They are like ‘sleeping flowers’ to them. The broad sea,
howling winds, pleasant meadows etc. could not attract them. His countrymen are completely ‘out of
tune’ while the poet feels less forlorn in the company of nature. Thus the poet laments that we are lost in
the affairs of the world. We think 'getting and spending' is the ultimate end of life. We no longer consider
ourselves to be 'part' of nature and connected to the trees, grass and the animals around. We do not realize
the fact that our oneness with nature make truly happy. And moreover, we do not feel that material
pleasures do not yield happiness for good while the pleasures of nature are immune to this error. In this
Wordsworth boldly approves the fact that man cannot survive and imagine happiness having cut off
nature and God. Hence he must live with and by nature and God. Environment is forte of this poem.
Lately Ecology as a branch of biology emerged which deals with the reciprocal relationships
between living organisms and their environment. Ecology studies interdependent nature of the whole
world. Like ‘structuralism’ it regards environment as a whole of numberless elements which cannot be
evaluated in isolation from other concerning elements. Jonathan Bate finds in Wordsworth’s longest
work The Excursion the insight that ‘Everything is linked to natural environment’ (Bate 66) which is the
basis of modern ecology. Similarly in “Lines Written In Early Spring” the poet argues for harmony
between man and nature. The poet feels sorry for men who have crippled the scope of their own
happiness by ignoring nature. He wants to drive home the idea that the modern man suffers at his own
hand by keeping nature aside. Wordsworth believes that the holy plan of nature is to bring men into the
communion of nature (God). But unfortunately, his countrymen do not find anything worth noticed in
nature. Although nature is keen to impart peace and joy to men by linking their soul to her fair work; but
the poet grieves to see people torn by the strife of material pursuits. Consequently man has become
enemy of his own kind making nature’s holy plan redundant:
To her fair work did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What Man has made of Man.
Wordsworth in “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” (1800) or “Education of Nature” (Palgrave)
seeks to convey the idea that nature is not mere vegetation instead it is invested with divine potential of
teaching for entire humanity. Nature is omnipresent. About the identity of Lucy in the poem nothing is
certain. But Lucy is foster child to nature like Kalidas’s Shakuntala. The latter is also protected, nurtured
and educated by nature. Nature admitted Lucy into her kindergarten as she grew three years old playing
and enjoying ‘sun and shower’. Nature herself took the charge of teaching her the principles of regulation
and revolution and as such enable her to feel the presence of God in everything around her. Wordsworth
narrates:
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
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A Lady of my own.
"Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.
And moreover, Lucy will learn humility through bendings of floating clouds and willow tree; and in
suffering days she will learn the lesson of patience. The beauty of stars at midnight ‘in many a secret
place’ and sweet sound of flowing rivers downwards will be radiated through her face. In this way nature
is determined to give shape of cheerfulness altogether to her internally and externally. He writes:
“And vital feelings of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height,
Her virgin bosom swell;
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
While she and I together live
Here in this happy dell."
But unfortunately nature lost Lucy right away. She felt broken. Lucy became mere a part of memory. In
the concluding stanza death of Lucy almost abruptly baffles us a little. In my view, death of Lucy is
symbolic. It refers to the loss of faith in divinity. Wordsworth sees nature and God hand in hand. Lucy
who is ready to receive divine shape and beauty dies. With her death, spirituality which was in his prime
days began to lose her ground in human world. For this loss Wordsworth mourns. He finds nature among
people’s thinking mere wilderness. But to Wordsworth nature is God, teacher, philosopher, and
supervisor. “Three Years She Grew” is an elegy; so is deemed among scholars. But is different kind of
elegy. It is not mourning Lucy’s death (material). Lucy symbolizes spirituality. Loss of faith in
spirituality is the object of Wordsworth’s lamentation.
“The Tables Turned” is another poem of my discussion. In this highly pragmatic poem, the
poet again denounces worldliness of people and people’s inability to learn from nature. He believes that
people are too much dependent on science and art. We are unable to enjoy natural graces which leave
permanent imprints in our life. Wordsworth wants people to learn from nature and follow her as disciple.
He does not justify too much indulgence in bookish knowledge. He even calls upon the people to leave
all books aside and turn to nature for knowledge of permanent value. Books stand for material
knowledge. They cannot sublimate our souls. He writes:
Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?
Wordsworth firmly declares that all knowledge came from science are lesser than one stroke of nature.
No doubt knowledge obtained from nature remains ever pleasure-giving; whereas knowledge through
books requires too much labour and always holds possibilities for getting bent. Wordsworth is not
merely eulogizing nature rather it is practical:
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One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
By implication, we can deduce that Wordsworth in this poem wants people to live with and by nature.
Those who go by science only meddle with and spoil the shapes having spiritual luster. Any knowledge
obtained from science must be verified by the touchstone of knowledge acquired through nature.
According to the poet science must not have upper edge over nature: Sweet is the lore which Nature
brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things We murder to dissect.
Wordsworth in his another great poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”
asserts his firm belief in the spirit of nature or God. He alludes to his spiritual relationship with nature in
the second stanza. Having been away for five years from nature, he felt life ‘mid the din/ Of towns and
cities’, yet as ever he realized ‘In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, /Felt in the blood, and felt along
the heart;’. Wordsworth feels that ‘these beauteous forms’ have restorative effect on my mind. He doesn’t
use God or Christianity for nature but nature seems playing divine roles. It has such a mesmerizing
influence that organic activities get suspended before nature:
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid sleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Further he contests, if his cult be proved erroneous then why one looks for seclusion in the state of
‘fretful stir’ ‘and the fever of the world’. The poet argues that he looks on nature for its comforting
ointments because he often hears ‘The still, sad music of humanity’. This is not only Wordsworth’s belief
rather it is common and pragmatic view of entire mankind that nature comforts all broken-heart people. It
has been since immemorial time most favorite resort for those who want solace and sympathy. The poet
that’s why claims that ‘nature never betrays’ those who love her. For all these reasons he prefers to live
life being ‘worshipper of nature’. He realizes divine presence everywhere:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something for more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting sins,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky and the mind of Man
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts
And rolls through all things.
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He treats nature as ‘an anchor, the nurse, the guide, and the guardian of his heart, and soul, and of all
moral being’. Wordsworth in this way wants us believe that nature is much more than vegetation.
Without it all living being’s survival is unimaginable. Everything in the cosmos is inter-related.
Works Cited:
Kerridge, Richard. “Environmentalism and ecocriticism.” Literary Theory and Criticism. ed. by Patricia
Waugh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. pp. 530-543. Print.
Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology. London : Routledge, 1991. Print.
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CULTUAL AMALGAMATION IN DIASPORIC STUDIES: A STUDY IN SELECTED SHORT
STORIES
B.Sreekanth Reddy,
Lecturer in English,
Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies,
R.K.Valley, Kadapa dist, Andhra Pradesh
The study of the history of Indians migrating to other parts of the world has been the subject of
study for a considerable period of time. The cultural identity has two significant aspects for the Indians.
One of them is religious element and the other one is related with their daily routine work. The famous
scholar Stuart Hall in “Cultural Identity and Representation” remarks that “we all write and speak from a
particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‘in
context’ positioned” (222). Hall’s statement is a reminder that immigrants experience and their lives are
shaped by the social location. Their history, their culture, their geographical location, as well as other
elements go into the formation of their cultural identities. The present article is a study on the issues that
are gaining relevance in the modern world – namely caste, religion and culture. An attempt is made to
present how the immigrants maintain, sustain and develop their cultural identities. T.S.Eliot, in his
analysis of culture, categorically admits that culture is deep and infinite, pure and imperishable as
religion. He states that religion and culture besides meaning different things from each other, should
mean for the individual and for the group something towards which they strive, not merely something
they possess, (Eliot:Notes:31). It implies that culture is a comprehensive term that includes all those
independent as well as interdependent elements that contributes to a composite ideology which
determines the ways of human existence. It also implies that human identity is closely associated with the
cultural identity of specific society, age, country, tradition, nationality, caste, religious practices and
geographical surrounding.
The migrants suffer a serious trauma in their newly accepted identity as immigrants in the alien
nation. For them it is not only a challenge of geographical displacement but also a challenge for
transformation of cultural ideologies as well the diasporic writers investigate the bi-cultural pulls which
create a type of double consciousness and present these aspects through their characters in the novels and
short stories. These characters caught in the struggle between two cultures make continuous efforts to
maintain a balance and reconstruct their identity. But in spite of their efforts for assimilation and
acculturation, they still posses a speck of fractured identity because they can’t forgo their autonomy of
‘self’ and national cultural identity. Homi Bhabha, in his most popular essay The Location of Culture
postulates how cultural alienation generates the psyche of ‘marginality’ and the felling of ‘not belonging’
which reduces them to a state of ‘non-recognizable entity’. He states:
Cultural differences must be understood as the free play of polarities and
pluralities in the homogenous empty time of the nation community ……The
analytical of cultural differences intervenes to transform the scenario of
articulation……The aim of cultural differences is to rearticulate the sum of
knowledge from the perspectives of the signifying position of the minority
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that resists totalisation….producing other spaces of subaltern signification.
(Bhabha: 162).
Culture on the whole makes two kinds of impact on it adherents. On the one hand, it promotes certain
activities and experiences with some values, but on the other it imposes certain constraints. These
constraints can be direct or indirect. Many societies around the world have obtained multicultural
perspectives during the recent decade. The reason for this is the migration of the people from one country
to another. Most often it is evident that people from developing countries migrate to developed countries.
There they tend to assimilate the new culture and try to establish their own cultural identity. Cultural
identity is formed through an interaction of tradition, history, spiritual and societal values. Tradition is a
link between the past and the present and involves an active interaction of approval and disapproval of
beliefs and customs. This article deals with the reflection of culture in the various diasporic writings and
the ways in which the writers deal with the concept in terms of both Indian and regional identities. Indian
immigrants in the western countries particularly in the United States form a new identity while
maintaining the notion of traditional culture. Indians are a diverse group of different cultures but are held
together by the dreams of national identity and rich cultural heritage. There are certain problems and
cultural conflicts that Indians face during the process of acculturation. These issues are a result of
Western value system, which are very different from that of their homeland. The situation demands
continuous adjustments, resulting in stress, frustration and hopelessness. Most Indian families try to
maintain their traditional pattern but due to strong oppressive forces, they learn to adjust.
These adjustments can be noticed in the writings of the diasporic writers. So an attempt is made
to bring to light some of the short stories in which the characters confront with cultural issues and how
they react to overcome those challenges. Most of Bharathi Mukherjee’s writings deal with the projection
of cultural confrontation between the East and the West. This concept is clearly portrayed in the
collection of short stories in Darkness. In these short stories the immigrants are found struggling with the
cultural codes of the New and Old communities. The story “Lady from Lucknow” presents the changing
status of a woman when she is culturally transplanted. Nafeesa is a Muslim woman from Lucknow who
marries Iqbal and immigrates to a foreign land. Though hers was an arranged marriage at the age of
seventeen, she had always yearned for passionate pleasures defying all established taboos. It indirectly
contrasts the puritanical upbringing of Islamic women with her own craving for sexual and romantic
desires. She develops an extra marital affair with Dr.James Beamish, a Pakistani and later she realizes her
mistake at the end. The story begins with an incident in Nafeesa’s neighbourhood in Lucknow back in
India. Husseina who stays next door to Nafeesa falls in love with a Hindu. They stay in a Muslim
locality, which is very sensitive to the conventional affairs. Later Husseina’s father gets to know of his
daughters love, he beats her to death. Her father intercepted a love note from the boy, and beat her with
his leather sandals. She died soon after …… and I pictured the dead girl’s heart – rubbery squeezable
organ with …… a fruit swelling, then bursting and coating the floor with thick, slippery blood.
(Mukherjee, “A Lady from Lucknow” 23). Through this incident we notice the cultural conflicts in the
same country, but between people of different religious identities. There are certain problems and
concerns that Indians might face during the process of acculturation. These issues crop up due to the
Western value system, which is significantly different from that of their homeland. Indian immigrants
experience strong reaction while shifting to an unfamiliar foreign culture and on missing their families
and extended families. These actions demands continuous adjustments, resulting in stress, frustration and
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hopelessness. Most Indian families try to maintain their traditional pattern, but due to forces in American
society they encounter severe stress and frustration.
The cultural difference is brought back when Nafeesa has an extra – marital affair with James.
When Kates Beamish, James wife, discovers Nafeesa and James in bed, she doesn’t react to it furiously.
Her silence tortures Nafeesa. Suddenly Nafeesa sees herself caught in a different patriarchal paradigm,
that of the white man’s colored mistress in a new version of the colonial era. Her realization of her own
exploitation as a sexual object is ironic because she has only exchanged the polygamous code of Islamic
tradition for white male patriarchy in America. This gives us the picture of an Indian woman who is
exposed to a new culture. Her guilt pricks her mind and points at her culture. The immigrants say that the
American society had an impact on their views on marital relationships. They find themselves halfway
between the traditional Indian views and the ‘progressive’ American values. They sometimes try to move
towards the opposite end, trying to assimilate the western ways of living. By the aid of this short story,
the conflict in the social and cultural codes of the East and the West, the Old and the New shows the
hopeless binary nature of all human desires. Here the protagonist tries to break the taboos of her
traditional culture and finally end up in a messy situation. Anuradha M. Mitra’s “Romantic Stereotypes”
in Contours of the Heart is the story of a husband and wife using a new process to maintain their
traditions and culture. This is a story in the form of letters, Rahul, an immigrant in the United States
writes back to his wife who is about to migrate to America. Sunila is depicted as one waiting to be
accepted into American life; whereas Rahul is seen as the one has adjusted to American life. He writes
about the difficulties of being a non white in the white American society. He says that he is unrelated to
the fast-paced world.
The use of images like ‘Khichri’ is used in terms of emotions of the immigrants. This exemplifies
that being an immigrant is like being a mixture of all customs, adapting to the new ones and remaining
tied to the past. In the same way, Rahul adjusts according to the changes in society, adopting the western
culture and at the same time maintaining his own. He says:
I am like ‘Khichri’ incarnate, being indeterminately molded into whatever
pot will contain my shape. My individuality lies awash in the saffron
flavored soft, textures …….. My national, racial and ethnic identities work
overtime to conceal rather reveal. (Mitra, “Romantic Stereotypes”424).
The other image is that of wine. He guides his wife in the letter about her behavior during the flight. He
suggests her to accept the wine served during the flight and give less heed to people watching her having
the wine. It explains that Rahul guides her to accept the new culture and traditions of the alien land
though they seem different. He asks her to pay less attention to her cultural past for it will only confuse
them in the world of new cultures. In other words, he is suggesting that one should adjust and try to adopt
the new culture though it is difficult, and not grumble about it and spoil the new taste it provides. Rahul
is shown as a person who adjusts to the alien land and its culture. Sunila is exposed differently through
her letters to her aunt. Her dissatisfaction of the land of opportunities is well depicted all through the
letters. She frequently questions her aunt about the varied identities in America. She is disappointed and
faces identity crises:
Is it because our sense of self is established in opposition to rather than in
partnership with the rest of white or black or yellow American? Is it this
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that makes us crumble and grow weak inside so that we become strangely
inarticulate in expressing who we are? (ibid,427).
While Rahul strives for his position, Sunila opposes the negation of herself. Generally, men are not
deeply bound by traditions and Customs, whereas women are deeply bound. They stick to certain
sentiments about their culture. Thus the author successfully portrays the differences in men and women
adapting to Western culture. The image of ‘Khichri’ signifies a mixture of cultures. The ingredients
mixed to give taste to the ‘Khichri’ are the people from different regions who come together to stay
united and take the best of both lands. Thus the diasporic writers’ analyses that the immigrants would like
to preserve their caste, religion and culture. They view these as integral parts of their ethnic and cultural
identities. Cultural identity is a powerful issue for Indians and it is well reflected in the short stories and
novels of diasporic Indian writers. The characters show a strong sense of ethnic identification with their
root cultures.
Works Cited:
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Eliot, T.S.Notes Towards The Definition of Culture. London: Faber, 1948.
Jasbir Jain. “Introduction” Writers of Indian Diaspora (ed), Rawat Publications, New Delhi, 2003
Mukherjee, Bharathi. Darkness. Penguin: New Delhi: 1990
Mitra, Anuradha M. “ Romantic Stereotypes” Maira and Srikanth (421-429)
Sireesha Telugu, Diasporic Indian Women Writers. Prestige Publications New Delhi: 2009
Rutherford J., ed. Identity: Commuity, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence, 1990
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EMERGENCE OF MIDDLE CLASS PROTAGONISTS IN THE PLAYS OF ARTHUR
MILLER
Dr. Pawan Kumar Sharma
Assistant Professor,
Vishwa Bharti P.G. College, Sikar,
Rajasthan
Arthur Miller, a leading and celebrated playwright of America, was born on October 17,
1915. Arthur Miller had spent an ordinary life. Miller was not a king; he was from a middle class
family who had faced financial problem in life. The first twelve years of Miller’s life were
monotonous. He states that he was unaware of the events that were happening around him, and spent
his time in playing, engaging in sports, and in general idleness. He entered in high school about the
time when the stock market collapsed and the Depression began. Miller has highlighted in his plays
that courage, truth, responsibility and faith must be the central values in a man. He was well aware
with the life of middle class Americans which has been reflected in his dramatic works. The major
dramatic works of Arthur Miller include-- The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), All My Sons
(1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge (1955), A
Memory of Two Mondays (1955) and After the Fall (1964).
In fact, Arthur Miller can be rightly regarded as a steadfast critic of contemporary American
society since he has skillfully demonstrated a considerable social attentiveness in his plays. In this
regard, we can compare Miller with Ibsen who had the talent to compose a play upon realistic
bedrock. Miller’s reputation and distinction as a dramatist is known chiefly due to the fact that he
copes with the most leading and mystifying problems of his era. Miller has been basically regarded
an artist because he has dealt with these issues in such a way as to differentiate his compositions
quite clearly from the common sociological problem play. He has experienced these social evils and
issues as living issues; his most successful characters are not merely aspects of the way of life but
individuals who are divine and values in themselves
Miller has identified his strong interests in the importance of middle class protagonists as
tragic heroes in modern times. Arthur Miller has introduced working class characters in his all the
major plays. He was against making kings and princes as the heroes of his plays, not for any
ideological reasons. In fact, his existential views of life and literature were responsible for his
following middle class protagonists as hero of the plays. In Death of a Salesman, Willy loman, a
middle class tragic hero, is a compound of Loman who has an invincible will. He is committed to the
ideal of success which is, perhaps, unapproachable. But his will is not to be deterred by any
handicaps. His will acts on itself and on the will of others and thus succeeds in imposing a form that
he rides on the crest of popularity. It is a formless form which, in the existential term, is nihilistic,
though not ending in pessimism. It is a subjective view of the world. Willy is determined to live and
die for success. When he commits suicide in the end, it is to the same end in view that if he could not
succeed, he will at least have a consolation that Biff, his elder son, would succeed. We know that Biff
and even Happy are made of the same stuff of dreams as their father was made of. They will also live
dreaming of some great business enterprise.
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The middle class heroes in Miller’s plays in fact are irredeemable dreamers of some ideal.
That is why they do not recognize their human boundaries. It is specially so when they are touched
with drunkenness to fulfill his dreams. In this respect, Miller’s working class characters become an
embodiment of the whole man, with their commonness wanting to be great. This philosophy is akin
to life. It holds the Greek view that a man may be from middle class but his ambitions know no limits
of sky as far as his flight is concerned. Thus, Miller’s heroes are not to be understood as a common
man with common desires. When we go through the personal life of Miller, we find that he had been
very much sympathetic for middle class persons since he had himself led a life full of adversity.
Miller makes the case for why heroes in modem tragedies should be different from those in
traditional tragedies. Arthur Miller’s concept of tragedy is essentially modern, so it is different from
the classical view. He protests and opines that a middle class fellow can be an apt subject for tragedy
commenting that if those working class characters are put in the similar emotional situation of
Orestes and Oedipus, the same result will appear. And if the tragic action gets totally on exclusive
property, the play will not become the object of whole mankind.
Miller has introduced middle class or ordinary protagonists in all most all his major plays
such as Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, and The Crucible. Willy Loman, the metaphor for
American society, although “unwanted and blue” but he leaves no stone unturned to secure his
rightful position in the society. John proctor and Joe Keller are also middle class protagonists just
like Willy Loman. In the play, All My Sons, Miller has portrayed to the audience the character, Joe
Keller, killer of twenty one American pilots, as an old fashioned ordinary American, with peasant
like common sense who commits a serious and blunder mistake by supplying faulty air-plane
cylinders to the American air-force and as a result twenty one pilots were killed. On coming to know
his mischievous father’s indefensible fault, Chris Keller’s fury on Joe brings fear and pathos to the
audience:
“Chris: (With burning fury) what the hell do you mean you
did it for me? Don’t you have a country? Don’t you live in the
world? What the hell are you? You’re not even an animal, no
animal kills his own, what are you? What must I do to you?”
(All My Sons)
Joe Keller is representative of American capitalist society who kills himself in expiation at
the end of the play realizing that those American pilots who died were equally all his sons as Larry
and Chris Keller. Willy Loman is a sensitive salesman and wicked father. His series of “ups and
down” is equal to Aristotle’s view of proper tragic figure, a king with flaws. We notice that his faulty
personality, the financial struggles, and his incapability are significant flaws that contribute to his
failure and tragic end. Willy is frequently fired by the buyers and other people in the play. He
borrows money from Charley to make end meet. When his boss, Howard fires him, Willy furiously
declares:
“You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away;
a man isn’t a piece of fruit!” (Death of a Salesman)
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Willy Loman is not a noble person rather he is a middle class fellow, a low man. However,
he can be truly considered a tragic hero because in our modern times great men are the common men.
Thus Willy Loman can be distinguished as a tragic hero according to Aristotle’s definition. Willy
also has the same problem as all of the other Greek tragic heroes. His hamartia is inborn. No matter
what he does he is obliged to fall because his flaw is part of his character. Willy's hamartia is selfdelusion. He frequently deceives himself and keeps the truth away from himself. He does not realize
this truth until Biff catches him with another woman. It is at that point that Willy has his peripeteia
and anagrorisis scenes. Willy comes to know that he is not as well liked. With this realization, Willy
suffers. He begins fusing memories of the past with the present because it was in the past that he had
not realized what a fake he was. He is blind to the truth of the situation. Like King Lear, Willy is
recognized as a man that slowly loses his identity in a modern world. This is a modern sort of idea
that really touches the hearts of many readers of the play. The optimism that Willy fronts as truth
really hides the malignancy underneath. No body is perfect and great in this world. Willy fights
against his fate and in the end kills himself so that his sons may not have the same fate he had. In
Willy’s view, suicide was only the hope that could elevate the situation of his house and raise his
family members from obscurity. In the end this is seen when Linda says, "We're free… We're
free…We're free…" (Death of a Salesman)
In the play, The Crucible, John Proctor, a farmer, is ready to forfeit his life for his good name
and dignity when he is forced to either confess to a crime he has not committed or to hanged or to be
hanged, he chooses the latter in order to maintain his dignity as he says with a cry“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another
in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because
I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hung! How
may I live without my name? I have given you my soul;
leave me my name! (The Crucible)
John Proctor’s journey to his defining moment is quite different. Although we cannot consider
Proctor as the Aristotelian model of a tragic figure, he does not fall from the heights—he begins a
fallen man, racked by guilt at his unfaithfulness —who, through the crucible of experience,
recognizes his reputation. Proctor stands for Miller’s definition of the tragic hero. For Miller, tragic
heroes are not just victims that are defined by what happens around them. They are defined by what
they choose to do with the power of responsibility. Every human being must answer for the choice
one makes. It is the exploration of those choices that Miller finds the purpose of tragedy most
compelling. What makes a hero tragic for Miller is not their stature, but their struggle for personal
dignity and perfectibility of man, that Miller so effectively explores. Arthur Miller declares himself
to imbue his characters with experiences of struggles, griefs, losses, along with small acts of heroism.
His protagonists, Willy Loman (low man), carries the weight of being representative American man,
a figure who toils and pusses onward, unrecognized by the world, in presenting such a figure, Miller
hoped to raise the fears and empathy of his audience.
Miller announces his focus on middle class Americans struggling for but failing to seize a
communal sense of success. Miller’s works as a whole give evidence to his concentrated
consideration on the instabilities and flaws of ordinary Americans. The crisis of identity is felt
everywhere in this world. This concept is equally fit for the protagonists of Miller also. We notice
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that Willy Loman, John Proctor and Joe Keller also die to sustain their good name and rightful
position in the society as Miller states that “society is inside of man and man is inside society”. Thus
the tragedy of Miller’s tragic heroes can be aptly considered like the tragedy of Greek heroes because
Willy Loman, John Proctor, Joe Keller, King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth etc make a quest for their image
and dignity in the society of which they become victims. Concluding, it can be put on writing on the
basis of above observation that Arthur Miller’s plays deal with middle class tragic heroes as Miller
takes a innovative step forward by placing his protagonists at the heart of tragedy. For Miller, the
tragic flaw in the hero is not essentially a weakness. It is man’s opposition to stay passive to what he
thinks to be a challenge to his dignity. In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman is the tragic hero. Miller
makes a case for the Common man protagonist, the low man, as the tragic hero. He is a man who
struggles against a “stable cosmos” to secure what he conceives his right, to defend his dignity.
Thus, all the protagonists, in the plays of Miller such as Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and All
My Sons are from middle class but at the same time those ordinary men take on that tragic stature to
the extent of their willingness to throw all they have into the contest- the battlefield to secure their
rightful place in the world.
References:
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversation in Two Acts and a Requiem, Penguin
Books, New York, 2000.
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible, The Penguin Group, New York, 2003.
Miller, Arthur. All My Sons, Reynal, 1947, reprinted, Chelsea House, 1987.
Miller, Arthur. Tragedy and the Common Man, New York Times, February, 1949.
Jackson, Esther M. Death of a Salesman: Tragic Myth in Modern Theatre.
Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy (Stanford, Calif: Press, 1966).
Atkinson, Brook. New Voices in the American Theatre (New York, Modern Library), 1955.
Otten, Terry. The Temptation of Innocence in the Dramas of Arthur Miller, Columbia: Uni. of Missouri P.
2002.
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THE CHHAMAK CHALLO AND THE GLASS BOTTLE
Viswas Viswam KC
Research Student
Department of English
University of Calicut, Kerala, India
The extensive use of the term Bollywood to refer to popular Hindi cinema highlights its growth
as a transnational product. This not only points to the colonial origins of Hindi cinema but also to its
postcolonial existence, thereby making it an intriguing area of research in cultural studies. The plethora
of scholarly works on popular Hindi cinema by the likes of Ashis Nandy, Ravi Vasudevan, Ashish
Rajadhyaksha, Madhava Prasad, Sumita Chakravarthy, Rosie Thomas and Ranjani Mazumdar justifies its
use as a tool for exploring the socio-cultural and gender negotiations happening at both the national and
the international level. Two icons which have been scrutinized ubiquitously by film scholars for
deciphering the prevalent discourses influencing the vicissitudes of the Indian spectator have been the
Bollywood hero and the heroine. By focusing on certain changes that has happened in the contemporary
version of the Bollywood heroine, this article examines the discursive structures constructed by the
patriarchal system to control and contain the female body in a postcolonial Indian society. The narrative
devices in various contemporary films of the first decade of the twenty first century and Dev.D (2009) in
particular are analyzed to achieve the same. The postmodern adaptation of Sarat Chandra
Chattopadhyay’s novel Devdas (1917) by Anurag Kashyap is unique as it has numerous cultural markers
which portray the negotiations carried out by the cosmopolitan Indian youth in a postcolonial setting. The
twenty first century embodiment of the castrated tragic hero has nothing to fall back on as radical
changes in gender perfomativity of the ‘new age’ Indian woman, has dented the thousand year old
traditional patriarchal belief system. I am aware of the ambiguities associated with the use of the term
‘new age’ but I use it to contextualize the Indian women who belong to the educated upper class youth
living in the metro cities. Through a reinvention of the roles of Paro and Chandramukhi, Dev.D presents
the emergence of the new age Indian woman. Dev.D serves as an illustrative example of how the
patriarchal power systems circumvent this lack in the male by ‘cubiclising’ the female body through the
state sponsored surveillance mechanism. I use the term ‘glass bottle’ as a metaphor to refer to the visibly
invisible post-Foucauldian self participatory surveillance system. Before tracing the developments which
created the new age heroine I am giving a brief overview of the plot of Dev.D.
Having been refashioned to suit the needs of each era, the status of Devdas as the archetypal
tragic hero in Indian cinema is irrefutable. Although Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas was released in
2002 the director’s attempt to locate it in the lineage of PC Barua’s (1936) and Bimal Roy’s (1955)
versions situated the plot and the characters in a distant past. It is here that Kashyap’s version is
significant. The transition from the colonial text of Devdas to the postcolonial Dev.D happen as Dev
(Abhay Deol), Paro (Mahie Gill) and Chanda (Kalki Koechlin) traverse rural Punjab and the metro city of
New Delhi. The basic plot of Dev.D is similar to that of the novel except for some spatiotemporal
alterations. Instead of West Bengal, the plot of Dev.D happens in Punjab and New Delhi. Kashyap
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divided the film into three segments each named after the major characters Paro, Chanda and Dev. Dev
is the son of a rich Punjabi Businessman. He and Paro are childhood sweethearts. Narcissistic tendencies
in Dev are seen right from his younger days, when he is seen hurting Paro over frivolous things. He is
incapable of acknowledging her love and care. Dev’s father sensing how spoilt his son is sends him to
London for higher studies. Distance does not stop Dev and Paro’s love from blossoming. Dev arrives in
Chandigarh to meet Paro. Suspicion soon sprouts when Dev hears rumours about Paro. Although Dev
realizes that the rumours were false on the day of Paro’s marriage his insecure ego does not let him stop
Paro from marrying Bhuvan. She begins a happy married life with Bhuvan but Dev is unable to get over
Paro and stalks her. Once the Paro segment is over, Chanda’s life story begins. Chanda aka Leni is
introduced as a Delhi school girl who gets embroiled in an MMS sex scandal with her much older
boyfriend. This is a reference to a similar scandal that took place in 2004. The chaos, unleashed after the
scandal hit the air, destroys her family. Unable to withstand the humiliation her father commits suicide.
Her mother sends her away to her father’s village where she is constantly nagged by her family members.
Refusing to live a life of shame and maltreatment she returns to Delhi. Her desperation and her exotic
looks (Leni’s mother is portrayed as a foreigner) soon gets her into a whorehouse run by Chunni. Leni is
given the best room in the house reserved for the highest paying customers. Her appeal to the customers
is based on the native Indian’s admiration for the gori (“white skinned”). She completes her studies while
working for Chunni. Appropriately Leni adopts the name Chanda (from Chandramukhi) for her
profession, inspired by Bhansali’s Devdas. One night a half-conscious customer is brought to her, which
turns out to be Dev.
The Dev.D segment begins after Dev is brought to Chanda. Tormented by Paro’s thoughts he has
taken to drugs and alcohol. Dev’s elusiveness and aggression attracts Chanda. He too finds some solace
in her but is unable to get Paro out of his mind. He contacts Paro and she visits his room. She takes care
of him but spurns his advances at physical intimacy. Rejected by Paro he returns to Chanda. Their
relationship strengthens when he finds out about her past. Dev soon realizes the brutal reality of her
profession and leaves Chanda. Having lost both Paro and Chanda he drinks more. His drunken bouts
soon land him in trouble when he runs over a few people in a road accident. This is a reference to the
BMW hit-and-run case of 1999.Shaken up by this incident he regains his senses and returns to find
Chanda. With her help he starts out to sort things right. The movie ends with them riding off in a bike.
The first decade of this millennium saw a ‘bolder’ and ‘hotter’ version of the Bollywood heroine. Being
equally hip and trendy to compete with the heroes, the heroine essentially transformed into a self declared
‘chhamak challo’ (a girl who is flashy in appearance; can also be used in a derogatory sense) demanding
an increased screen space in contemporary Hindi cinema. The likes of Preity Zinta, Priyanka Chopra,
Aishwarya Rai, Katrina Kaif, Kalki Koechlin, Kareena Kapoor etc. represent the new age Hindi heroine.
Claims of Bollywood being abused at the hands of the male dominated cinema and the call to stop
portraying women as mere ‘entertainment’ have mellowed down with the arrival of these chhamak
challos who live life their way. The sea-change that has happened in the way the fair sex in India has
evolved in to the über (“super/above”) woman to dominate the consumer world is reflective of the film
world. Although the presence of a strong male gaze continues to dominate, the female gaze has
demanded much screen space with the advent of the chhamak challos. These women, who are assertive
of their sexuality, play the part of the flaneuse with ease. The massive body building phenomenon of the
Bollywood heroes which started off with Salman Khan, acknowledges the presence of this female
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spectator. Heroes had to refashion themselves to accommodate this part of female sexuality, a fact even
naughty guy Shahrukh realized when he toned up to do the item number ‘Dard-e-Disco’ in Om Shanti
Om (2007). The objectification of the male body has had parallel readings in Queer theory but
nevertheless the existence of this powerful female gaze cannot be denied. There is nothing much
secretive about her when it comes to having fun. This freedom enjoyed by her has made the difference in
the way the onscreen chhamak challos are accepted by the audience.
The transformation of the Hindi film heroine is reflective of the alteration that has happened in
her male counterpart. The birth of the new millennium was characterised by the arrival of a series of
coming of age movies. One of the earliest representative examples of this genre was Dil Chahta Hai
(2001). It was the story of three friends, Akash (Amir Khan), Sameer (Saif Ali Khan) and Siddharth
(Akshay Khanna). These three protagonists belonged to that section of the cosmopolitan upper middle
class youth who were in their college years or had just finished college and were in the process of
building a career. This also explains the film’s appeal to the fan base consisting of the young working
class population employed by the Multi National Companies in India. The financial success of Dil
Chahta Hai highlighted a change that had happened in the Indian audience. This change could be traced
back to the entry of Shahrukh Khan in the nineties whose portrayal of the Non Resident Indian (NRI)
characters in movies like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995) and Pardes (1997) toned down the image
of the Hindi film hero from that of the six feet tall ‘Angry Young Man’ to that of the charming, boy next
door image. Hindi cinema has always shifted gears with that of the changing cultural tides of the country.
This is evident in the dominance of various character types in their respective decades, the gentle loving
roles played by Dilip Kumar (Aag) and the chaplinesque hero of Raj Kapoor (Awara) in the fifties, the
charismatic Krishna type heroic portrayals of Shammi Kapoor (Junglee) in the sixties and the ‘Angry
Young Man’ of Amitab Bachchan (Sholay) in the turbulent seventies (The National-Heroic Image 204205). Although it is hard to point out any specific character type which dominated the eighties, the
presence of monstrous villains in the plots ensured that the hero had to display his physical dominance on
screen. The coming of age movies or the ‘buddy’ movies of the early decade of the twenty first century
reflected the cultural changes that were happening in a postcolonial Indian society. These heroes may be
called the ‘dude heroes’, a term potent enough to carry a wide range of western cultural connotations.
The lives of the Indian youth tuned towards a consumerist lifestyle dominated by capitalist icons in a
postcolonial Indian society challenged the notion of ‘Indianness’ in their identities. The ‘liminality’
associated with their identities was reminiscent of the crisis faced by the ‘mimic men’ during the British
rule famously flagged off with the introduction of Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education (Bhabha 87).
Cut off from familial ties and in essence devoid of any commitments to one’s nation, these guys (not
‘men’) over the course of the movie pass through a process of self discovery and maturation aided by
their female counterparts. These movies thus represented a transition happening in the Indian youth who
were willing to accommodate the western values and lifestyles but had trouble in letting go of the
patriarchal norms to which they were accustomed. These youth were all for free love but still cherished
marriage as an effective system to retain power. The consistent negotiations happening between the EuroAmerican cultural discourse attained via a western education process and the numerous indigenous
discourses which consistently impinge on them could potentially generate an identity crisis for the hybrid
mimic men of the twenty first century. The buddy or dude movies hence focused on the heroes fighting
their inner demons rather than super villains. These heroes celebrated their aimlessness, were antinational
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and indifferent to familial responsibilities. For instance in Rang De Basanti (2006), Daljit "DJ" (Aamir
Khan), Karan Singhania (Siddharth Narayan), Aslam Khan (Kunal Kapoor) and Sukhi Ram (Sharman
Joshi) lead a carefree life vandalizing public property and indifferent to the happenings outside their
milieu. It is only after the arrival of the foreigner Sue (Alice Patten) that they come to discover their roots
and mature as adults. While in the seventies, Amitab’s character might go on a revenge streak destroying
villains for the atrocities done on his family, Karan Singhania kills his own father in Rang De Basanti.
Family history and the influence of the parents are relegated to the background in this genre. The success
of such movie genres is also suggestive of the loss of the epic nature of the narrative structure of popular
Hindi cinema. The influence of the family was replaced by the prospective family, their love interest
which increased the screen space for the heroines. These women although belonging to a similar cultural
background are portrayed as being much more stable and capable of molding these wayward heroes in to
adulthood. In Dil Chahta Hai, the maturation of the Akash, Sameer and Sid happen during their
interaction with Shalini (Preity Zinta), Pooja (Sonali Kulkarni) and Tara (Dimple Kapadia). A similar
process was also observed in Delhi Belly (2011) and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011). It is into this
lineage that Anurag Kashyap places Devdas, the embodiment of the Indian male’s escapist and
chauvinistic tendencies in Dev.D. While in the buddy films mentioned above, the friends complemented
and completed each other, in Dev.D the chief protagonist is singled out. He has to sort out his anxieties
all by himself. By locating the castrated hero in a postcolonial Indian society, Kashyap highlights the
struggle of the contemporary Indian youth to compete with his female counterparts.
As the romantic lover, the subdued housewife, as femme fatales, as personifications of the
Bharatmata, back to being the romantic lover and now the chhamak challo, the on-screen representations
of the Bollywood heroine have always been redolent of the development of India in the international
scenario. The sheer number of non-Hindi speaking, rather ‘hybrid heroines’ in Bollywood is a concrete
indicator of the impact of the international and the desi viewership of Indian films. The eroticization of
these female bodies which is already hybrid in their origins is evocative of Homi Bhabha’s notions of
postcolonial hybridity. The inability to speak Hindi and their simultaneous command over the English
language seems to add a different aura to their public appeal. Katrina Kaif’s success as a heroine is a case
to be studied. She made her entry into Bollywood through the film Boom (2003), a controversial skin
show flick. After a dormant period she was seen in a series of blockbuster movies like Namaste London
(2007) and Singh is King (2008) which were set abroad or had her play herself-- the foreign born and
brought up Indian girl. Although this in effect did away with her inability to speak Hindi fluently, at a
social level, it also pointed to the admiration the natives have towards the foreign locale. The geography
of space was thus negotiated by bringing the international literally into the Indian cinematic space. Her
success in the industry brought in other foreign actresses and they too had their share of success. The
image of the modern liberated woman was repeatedly imprinted on the minds of the audience through
these English speaking heroines whose looks affirmed that they were different. Being hybrid came to be
viewed as being modern. The paradigm shift in the heroes of Bollywood was seen reflected on the
heroines. They became bolder, outgoing and sexually liberal. It was a natural outcome as the castrated
hero was in no position to ‘tame’ the heroine and lock her up in the prison house of tradition to which he
himself had no key to. The physical limits on the heroine were being consistently transgressed, as the
über woman began frequenting pubs and night clubs. Such spaces where beyond limits for the ‘morally
respectable heroine’ of the previous decades. Very rarely would one see the Indian heroine in such shots.
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She would be seen sitting with her husband at a party looking at the spectacle as a distant observer. Her
mobility was curtailed to setup the morally fallen vamp as her foil. The heroine’s staticity was thereby
juxtaposed with the mobility and freedom of the vamp. Consequently the image of the ‘liberated woman’
popularized by the likes of Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi in the seventies and eighties started becoming
a commonplace phenomenon and more socially acceptable. The über woman and their onscreen
representations, the chhamak challos, are frequent visitors in pubs and discotheques. She parties, drinks
and eats whatever she wants. Such roles reflected the boldness of the über woman and highlighted
changes in gender performance roles in the Indian society. The definition of ‘Indian Love’ was being rewritten as the women were taking charge. Thus if Rahul (Shahrukh) bowed to Tina (Rani Mukerji) in
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), as a matter of accepting her as his wife, in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara
(2011), we have Laila (Katrina Kaif) chasing Arjun (Hrithik) in a bike and kissing him to profess her
love. The message written on the wall was clear, the Indian heroine had moved along. She was no longer
the candy, cute and subdued lady for the alpha man but the über woman who challenged the omega man
in every aspect. This was the kind of ‘power’ that came along by locating the heroine in a foreign locale,
away from the traditional Indian settings. By tradition, I am adhering to the Hindutva religious codes
which construct the image of the ideal Indian woman who more often than not lead a mass worship of
some deity. This was a heroine who thought that the new age man must loosen up and let her enjoy a
beedi as Katrina does in Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (2011) (Srivastava 97). The juxtaposition of the image
of the traditional beedi with that of the hybrid subject is thus an instance of the postmodern subversion of
the moral codes of the Indian society and of the role traditionally ascribed to the Indian woman. In Tees
Mar Khan (2010), Katrina did an item number ‘Sheila Ki Jawani’. The lyrics of the song are interesting
and reflective. Through the song what Sheila says is that she feels so complete and happy with herself,
and hence does not want anybody (in effect a man) to love-- a declaration of freedom and independence.
In the nineties such a woman will be tagged as one with suspect morals. But in the era of the castrated
hero, the chhamak challo is his perfect counterpart. What is ironic is that this new icon of womanhood is
in fact a merchandise of the male dominated capitalist society. By branding and tagging the newly
emergent female power as a product for consumption these power systems have compensated their own
‘lack’. Such controlling mechanisms have only grown stronger and more efficient by finding better
means to curb this newly found power of the Indian woman.
The inability of the Indian heroine to transcend the mold of objectified pieces of mass
consumership has an interesting history to it. Glancing through the evolution of the spectacle of the ‘item
numbers’ will help us in understanding the twenty-first century heroine – the chhamak challo.
Vyjayanthimala’s performances in songs like “Man dole mera tan dole” from Nagin (1954), “Ab Aage
Teri Marzi” from Devdas (1955) and “Hothon pe aisi baat” from Jewel Thief (1967) arguably was some
of the earliest instances of ‘item numbers’. Starting off as flashy dance performances the item numbers
were less sensual in the initial years. Though the trend of erotic dance numbers was started by Cuckoo in
films like Shabistan (1951) and Aan (1952), it was Helen who paved the way for the more sexually
explicit musical entertainment through a career spanning more than two decades (Mohanty). With the
entry of Helen, the wicked, naughty, immodest woman character of the ‘vamp’ was consistently pitted
against the heroine. Helen’s anglicized looks and luring actions in songs like “Piya Tu Ab To Aaja”
from Caravan (1971), “Mehbooba Mehbooba” from Sholay (1975) and “Yeh Mera Dil” from Don (1978)
made the figure of the cabaret dancing vamp an important cinematic element in that era. The ‘hybrid’ has
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always bedazzled our consciousness. The entry of Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi in to the scene with
their trendy looks established the image of the ‘liberated women’ in Hindi cinema. By the eighties the
vamp image began to vanish with the heroine performing the bolder numbers herself. The social
acceptance of the heroine performing the sexually explicit dance sequences was a key moment in
Bollywood cinema history, which merged the vamp with the heroine (Shresthova 26). Madhuri Dixit’s
“Ek Do Teen” number in Tezaab (1988) and the controversial "Choli ke peeche kya hai" in Khalnayak
(1993) set the trend of the bold, skimpily clad heroine doing erotic dances (Ganti 134). The decade of the
nineties witnessed several of such performances but it was when Shilpa Shetty danced to the song "Main
Aai Hoon UP Bihar Lootne" in Shool (1999) that the term ‘item number’ began to be used more widely
for such performances.
Bollywood’s inertia in acknowledging the ‘female star’ is related to the allocated space for the
female body which is intriguingly post-Foucauldian in its functioning. Ranjani Mazumdar in Desiring
Women analyzes the manner in which ‘the women’s body is mediated via architectural landscaping’ (79).
The Bollywood phenomenon of the ‘westernized vamp’ makes an interesting case study as it marks the
first instance of tagging a particular female body (located in specific geographical locations like bars,
night clubs etc) as the eroticised object to be ‘gazed’ at. The cabaret dancing vamp as the femme fatale
satisfied the voyeuristic fantasies of the spectator and served as the foil for the heroine. Throughout the
evolution of the Bollywood heroine the female body has been subject to ‘cubiclisation’ by consistently
tagging gender specific roles to the female protagonist. Tags like ‘Mother India’, ‘Savitri’, ‘Sheelavati’,
‘Bazari aurat’, the ‘vamp’ and now the chhamak challo serve to contain and control the female behavior.
While watching a movie in the theatre the gaze of the spectator is guided by the camera onto ingeniously
positioned bodies. Although the male body is also subject to the gaze of the audience, the
‘objectification’ of the female body is predominant in the cinematic world as supported by the studies of
Mulvey, Guilliano Bruno, Friedberg et al. In the twenty-first century, cell phone cameras and digital
interfaces give mobility to this gaze as each individual is able to carry the means to view and record the
representations of one’s self and others’ bodies. Digital technology provides a ‘window shopping’
experience by taking Mulvey’s ‘spectator’ out of the theatre and into the streets as a flaneur whose gaze
is mobilized. Mazumdar cites Anne Friedberg’s Window Shopping (1993) in which she discusses how
the female body functions in the urban space (Mazumdar 80).
Deepa Deosthalee in her article “The 'Sluts' of Hindi Cinema and the Price Women Pay on
Screen” examines the various representations of Hindi film heroines over the years. She argues that in
movies which proclaim to be female centered or with a feminist bend, the safeguarding of the female
body as the sanctum sanctorum is more often than not considered of utmost priority. The role of the hero
is to sacrifice himself to protect a woman’s virtue which underscores his duty to save and protect the
honour of women and in effect that of the nation. The female body hence is always the site of struggle for
the male to establish his authority and valor. Deosthalee cites that when Radha (Nargis) shoots and kills
her son in Mother India (1957), she is essentially protecting her country by sacrificing her son, who has
defiled a woman’s body. The same determination was earlier observed when she had defended the
advances of the moneylender Sukhilala. Bollywood’s tendency to portray woman power by centering the
stories of these female characters on a rape or an attempted rape shows the inability of the modern Indian
society to let go of the objectification of the female body. Although movies like Ankur (1974), Bandit
Queen (1994) and Fire (1996) can claim to have powerful woman characters, it is their sexuality that is
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being discussed and narrated. Each era witnessed a re-invented form of the female lead which reflected
the social situation of that period. When India was reorganizing itself after the British rule, the Mother
India image was in vogue and when discotheques and cabarets became popular in the sixties and
seventies, the vamp reigned supreme. The female counterpart has always shifted gears with the hero, but
has never failed to acknowledge the social constraints imposed on her over the years. Consequently the
different personas adorned by the Bollywood heroine like ‘Sita’, ‘Mother India’, ‘Anarkali’ and the
‘vamp’ have been in sync with the development of India as a nation.
Sumita Chakravarty in “‘Can the Subaltern Weep?’ Mourning as Metaphor in Rudaali (The
Crier),” discusses the portrayal of women in Indian films by citing Rudaali (1993), which tells how the
society chastises a woman who is unable to perform the ‘womanly’ function of crying (1999).
Chakravarty thus questions the normative ways in which Indian women are assigned well defined roles to
perform, transgressing which raises pointed questions. Chanda in Dev.D goes through similar stages of
disciplining when she is taken to her paternal grandmother after the scandal hit the air. She is seen
reading Moravia’s Contempt when her grandmother and her uncle warn her that things over there go as
they wish i.e. the traditional way where women never look at a man eye to eye. This sequence paves way
for yet another momentous scene of the two chhamak challos meeting in a train. Leni who runs away
from home refusing to be ‘cubiclised’ by her family sees Paro, who in turn is on her way to send her nude
picture as an exhibit to Dev. Both women submit their bodies as exhibits for the male gaze. Later on we
find Leni, who had rejected the social constraints imposed by her family ending up in a cubicle given by
Chunni.
Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2002 take on Devdas was faithful to the novel with regard to the
narration of events and character development. The change in the portrayal of women in Bhansali’s and
Kashyap’s versions is evident in the unfolding of events leading up to Paro’s breakup with Dev and
eventually her marriage to Bhuvan. The scene in which Paro rolls up a bed and carries it to a field on a
cycle in order to consummate her love with Dev is very potent. A jealous egoistic Dev shuns her away
and she returns home only to find that her marriage is getting fixed to Bhuvan. Paro objects strongly and
after a heated conversation with her father storms out of the house, goes to a water pump and vents out
her anger by pumping water. Even though educated, very rarely did women born and brought up in rural
areas (even in cities for that matter) get to voice out their feelings or opinions. In Bhansali’s version, Paro
is always depicted as the pleading, submissive lover of Devdas. She tries to talk her way into or out of
situations but never is her physicality or sexuality shown onscreen. Kashyap’s Paro is the new age
dominant über woman. She is expressive of her desires and opinions and is open with her physical needs.
Though Dev.D is set in the twenty-first century, Chandigarh still retains its agricultural practices and
beautiful fields. Thus the ‘traditional Indianness’ of Chandigarh serves as the perfect setting for the
chhamak challo and the dude. They have to constantly negotiate cultural territories and beliefs which
have been present since time immemorial. Paro is rebelling against a very tight knit system of patriarchal
power as is evident from her conversations. She is seen to converse mostly with men be it her father,
Dev, his father or the servants of the household. Women very rarely speak and even if they do it is only
to support the argument of the men. So when Paro, the über woman uses the water pump, what we are
seeing is an act of transgression. The voicelessness of the Indian women is communicated through the
water pump-- an age old symbol of rural Indian womanhood. The water pump has been absorbing the
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anger of the Indian women who are muted out by the authoritative patriarchal order. The über woman is a
rebel and refuses to be submissive.
We live in a society where various power systems continuously interact and influence the way
one lives. Every system contains within it controlling mechanisms which keep the freedom enjoyed by
the individuals in check. The new edition of the heroine belongs to a digital epoch and is presented as
much more sophisticated and liberal in her choices. She seems to challenge the male hero in every aspect.
The patriarchal system has however also evolved to control this hybrid version of the Indian woman. It is
hard to deny the fact that by portraying the bolder version of the Hindi heroine as a part of the
consumerist culture, the patriarchal society has only re-invented the process of objectification of the
female body. The systematic exploitation of the exhibitionist tendencies of the human body via the
ubiquitous digital interfaces and recording mechanisms is an area worth enquiring into. Digital interfaces
like camera phones, webcams and similar devices which have become an integral part of everyday life
facilitate the male gaze to keep the female body under control. As technology develops man’s desire to
capture the fleeting moments of life keep on increasing. From exchanging messages and images between
friends and relatives this medium has acquired greater significance in one’s social life. Various studies in
such developments have pointed to their characteristic feature of being an efficient mode of participatory
surveillance-- a modern day panopticon. The panopticon was Foucault’s metaphor for the disciplinary
system. Originally designed by Jeremy Bentham in the nineteenth century, this ideal prison was designed
in such a way that a single guardian in a central tower could monitor and record the movements of all the
prisoners in a series of prison cells encircling the tower. By the effect of backlighting, the guard can
observe all the cages, as if they were small theatres in which each actor is perfectly individualized and
constantly visible (Foucault 200).The prisoner cannot see the guard and can never know if he is being
watched. This, Foucault cites, was the unique feature of the panopticon. The inability of the individual to
know if he is being observed induces a permanent sense of being under control achieved via the constant
gaze. What then happens is the uninterrupted flow of power over the individual which forces him to
restrain his actions. The inmates are caught in a power situation which they have unconsciously created
in their minds (Foucault 201). Jean Baudrillard comments in his work Simulacra and Simulation that our
society is saturated with symbols and signs which reduces human experience to a simulation of reality.
Hegemonisation of cultural values happens through the transmission and acceptance of these images.
Capitalistic systems which control such ‘modes of surveillance’ transmit the data which justifies and
sustains their power. The individuals are made to remain complicit in their own confinement being
continuously fed processed information which blurs the distinction between reality and a simulation of
reality. This is how the subject is programmed into subjugation in a postcolonial state of affairs.
William Michael Dickey in his Beyond the Gaze: Post-Foucauldian Surveillance in Fictive
Works discusses this phenomenon as to how the panopticon has evolved into a post-Foucauldian
mechanism of self-participatory mode of surveillance. Foucault’s theories of surveillance are of prime
importance in studying how the system manipulates the individuals while guaranteeing social freedom.
Everything gets recorded and ‘privacy’ is replaced by ‘piracy’. The Big Brother’s eye does not miss
anything as his loyal subjects keep ‘him’ updated. The success of such image sharing networks and
people’s desire to see and be seen has given rise to television shows which demonstrate how the modern
day panopticon works. In recent years the popularity of reality television has increased by leaps and
bounds, be it shows like the Big Brother or even MMS scandals. The current status of the new age
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Bollywood heroine (and in effect the new age Indian woman) can be read in parallel while analyzing how
the post-Foucauldian mechanism functions in the postcolonial Indian society. Popular Hindi cinema
provides numerous instances of how a twenty-first century Indian subject interacts with such disciplinary
power systems. The contemporary hero and the heroine inhabit a space where such political and sociocultural negotiations can be investigated in a postcolonial scenario.
In the twenty-first century, Foucault’s static model of the panopticon has been refashioned to
observe the ‘prisoner’ by letting them free. The individual willingly records and transmits his/her
movements for scrutiny in this post-Foucauldian system. By manipulating the exhibitionistic tendencies,
the individual is programmed to record one’s body and display it for others to watch. The urge to exhibit
one’s body is related to Lacan’s interpretation of the human mind. For Lacan, the individual needs the
response and recognition of others to create one’s own identity. One’s subjectivity is thus constituted
through the interaction with others. We become ourselves via the ‘gaze’ of oneself and the ‘other’.
Starting from infanthood one’s ego is constructed through the approval of the gaze and hence is relevant
in the modern mechanism of surveillance. This human desire is exploited by the patriarchal system to
circumvent the problem of the castrated male and police the movements of the female body. Social
networking and self-participatory surveillance have become a vital part of the contemporary society and
hence is reflected in the movies as well. Paro’s life is always under the scanner of Dev’s lens. She
willingly participates in exhibiting her femininity as clearly suggested by her online name chhamak
challo. Paro however escapes from Dev’s surveillance only to be replaced by Chanda, whose life story
begins as we see from the point of view of a video camera used by her boyfriend. She is initiated into the
life of prostitution as a result of this. Her life picks up after the incident as she decides to make a living
from this job. She completes her education and gets a life. This life however is clearly manipulated by
her boss Chunni who makes her act out fetishistic roles for her customers, which are then video recorded.
The exhibitionist tendencies of the audience no longer had to be realized solely through identification
with the characters on screen. Mobile screening platforms provided more opportunities for voyeuristic
and exhibitionistic urges of the individual to function complementarily.
By juxtaposing various sequences set in rural India with that of the rapidly changing urban life,
Kashyap highlights the manner in which the exertion of the power of the male over the female body has
evolved. The introductory scene showing Dev and Paro as kids is an enactment of the age old scenario of
the wife serving food to the abusive demanding husband. Dev is looking at the turbulent sea as Paro is
seen running. She is almost out of breath by the time she reaches him and hands over the parattas. The
director puts in one of the primary motifs in the movie, food and drinking which foretells the arrival of
the consumerist world that is going to evolve as the movie progresses. The scene ends with Dev biting
Paro’s hand when she refuses to bring water for him. The male disciplines the female. Dev, the
troublemaker, is soon sent to London which his father believes will straighten him up. Paro grows up as
the traditional Punjabi girl. Their online chats using the names ‘The Dude’ and ‘Chhamak Challo’
respectively depicts that their love blossomed in spite of the physical distance. Her online persona of the
Chhamak Challo becomes a reality when she consents to Dev’s request of sending her nude image to
him. Paro enrolls herself into the invisible system of surveillance controlled by the patriarchal
‘panopticon’ represented by Dev. Dev immediately informs Paro that he is returning to India. With due
regard to their love, Dev’s decision to return taken after his lady love had given ‘solid proof’ of her
loyalty points to the physical nature of their love. Dev’s arrival is concurrent with his brother’s marriage.
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We see him capturing the happily dancing Paro through his camera. Throughout the movie this motif of
male desire to observe the female body is consistently strewn like bread crumbs in the Hansel and Grettel
story.
Chandramukhi, in the previous versions of Devdas never had a history. She is introduced as a
good hearted prostitute who tries to win over Dev’s love. In Dev.D, history and context go together as
Kashyap creates the characters from the news events of the past decade. The transformation of Leni to
Chanda happens via a MMS scandal. A similar scandal had happened a few years ago in the Delhi Public
School. Hunted by the public, Leni’s family goes into hiding. Her father succumbs to the pressure and
commits suicide. Deserted by her kith and kin she leaves home and ends up meeting Chunni, the pimp.
Leni is given the best room in the whorehouse and is asked to pick her trade name. Appropriately the
name Chanda is picked by her while watching Bansali’s Devdas. Leni becomes the whorehouse’s chief
attraction enacting various scenes from porn movies as per the customer’s fancies. She is also seen to
pursue her studies while working for Chunni. Enclosed in the beautifully lit room with an in-house bar,
Chanda lives out her life in the cubicle she has willingly enrolled herself into. This hyperreal glass bottle
is where her body is subjected by the eyes of the camera. The glass bottle is a metaphor for the state
sponsored surveillance mechanism which controls the postcolonial subject. The state provides platforms
like social networking sites which invite individuals to upload photos and videos of one’s self and their
friends. Uploading of one’s photos for others to view satisfies the exhibitionist urge as well as the
voyeuristic tendencies of the individual. Controversial images immediately get tagged and the
information is passed on along the network. The speed at which such scandalous uploads gets viewed,
makes the subject self-police the content uploaded. Thus the social networking sites both nurture and
control both types of deviant behavior. By giving digital space to display one’s representations in the
virtual world the state eroticizes the human body and controls the individual. The subject is thereby
integrated into the information flow.
The representation of the real in the virtual also allows for alterations. The individual is able to
create the near to perfect image of oneself, the way he/she wants to see it. The cyber space functions like
a glass bottle which can distort the images located inside it by manipulating the light falling on it. The
individual’s innate urge to see its body in perfection produces a psychic response in the individual that
gives rise to the mental representation of the ‘I’. The image uploaded is in most cases the one which the
individual identifies with. They happen to be the happiest moments of one’s self or of dear ones. The
subject identifies with the image which is a recreation of the perception of selfhood. The vulnerability
and weakness of the subject is made invisible in the digital space. This image represents the ideal ‘I’
towards which the individual has been striving to reach. The exhibitionist tendency of the individual is a
result of this urge to get the acceptance of one’s body from one’s ego as well as from the gaze of others.
The gaze of the ‘other’ confirms one’s existence in the social order. This platform for the individual to
exhibit his/her body is provided by the social networking sites. Once the body is initiated into the world
of the social network, it is continuously monitored by ‘the gaze’. This gaze includes the gaze of the other
and the self-policing gaze which the ‘patriarchal’ order has induced in the self. The simulacral world of
the social network is at once transparent as well as visible. Barring the ease and reach of such modes of
data transfer, the social network provides the ‘privacy’ the individual wants from others to hide the real
self and project the virtual image which has been specially created for the gaze. The transparency of the
individual’s body to the gaze of the monitoring authority is rarely challenged once the body is given the
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space inside the glass bottle. The ubiquitous presence of virtual screens has instilled in the individuals
the ‘need’ to find a space in the hyperreal world. This is what happens to the subject when the digital
camera he or she is carrying is focused on a body. This reticent state is exactly what the postcolonial and
patriarchal systems infuse within each of their subjects enclosed in their cubicles. The eroticization of
Chanda’s body is an instance of this post-Foucauldian means of surveillance in the digital world.
Chanda’s life changes when her sexual life goes viral online, thanks to her boyfriend. This exhibitionist
urge to record one’s sexuality and display it is drawn out from the individual by the state. The way this
scandal got shared illustrates the transparent manner in which the state’s control is mediated via
surveillance. Chanda tells Dev that the MMS was never shown on the television nor was her photo
published anywhere. The ‘whole world’ downloaded the video and then pointed their finger at her. This
is the gaze of the state which controls such deviant behavior. The state thus functions as the embodiment
of the male lust and chauvinistic impulses. CHANDA. Agar Poori duniya ne mujhe dek liya tho mein kya
karoon? (If the whole world saw me, what can I do?). Sabko kaise patha chala ki wo mein hi thi? (How
did they know that it was me?) Na tho MMS TV pe dikhaya tha, na meri photo kaheen publish huyi (The
MMS was neither shown on TV nor was my photo published anywhere). Kyonki sabne download karke
dekha tha. Sabne maze liye. (Because all of them downloaded the video and watched it. Everybody had
fun watching it). Then they turned around and called me the slut. (Dev.D)
Works Cited:
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Michigan: U of Michigan P. 1994. Print.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culturse. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.
Chakravarthy, Sumita S. “Can the Subaltern Weep?’ Mourning as Metaphor in Rudaali”. Redirecting the
Gaze: Gender, Theory, and Cinema in the Third World. Ed. Diana Maury Robin, Ira Jaff. New York: State U of
New York Press, 1999. 283-306. Print.
---.“The National-Heroic Image: Masculinity and Masquerade.” National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 19471987. Ed. Chakravarthy. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1996. 199-234. Print.
Delhi Belly. Dir. Abhinay Deo. Perf. Imran Khan. Aamir Khan Productions and UTV Motion Pictures. 2011. Film.
Deosthalee, Deepa. “The 'Sluts' of Hindi Cinema and the Price Women Pay on Screen.” Film Impressions. Film
Impressions. 24 Jun 2011. Web. 20 Mar. 2012.
Devdas. Dir. Bimal Roy. Perf. Dilip Kumar. Bimal Roy Productions, Mohan Films. 1955. Film.
Devdas. Dir. P.C. Barua. Perf. K. L. Saigal. New Theatres. 1936. Film.
Devdas. Dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Perf. Shahrukh Khan. Mega Bollywood. 2002. Film.
Dev D. Dir. Anurag Kashyap. Moserbaer, 2009. DVD.
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Dickey, William Michael. Beyond the Gaze: Post-Foucauldian Surveillance in Fictive Works. Diss. Indiana U of
Pennsylvania, 2011. Web. 1 Aug. 2011.
Dil Chahta Hai. Dir. Farhan Aktar. Perf. Amir Khan. Excel Entertainment. 2001. Film
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Dir. Aditya Chopra. Yash Raj Films.1995. Film.
“Flaneur.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 8 July 2012.
“Flaneuse.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 8 July 2012.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977.
Print.
Ganti, Tejaswini. Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Dir. Karan Johar. Dharma Productions and Yash Raj Films. 1998. Film.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.”
Écrits: a Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1977. 1-7. Print.
Lakshya. Dir. Farhan Akhtar. Excel Entertainment. 2004. Film.
Lyon, David. Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond. Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2006. Print.
Macaulay, Thomas B. “Minute on Indian Education, 2 February 1835.” Macaulay: Poetry and Prose. Ed. G.M.
Young. Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1957. 721-724, 729. Print.
Mazumdar, Ranjani. “Desiring Women.” Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Ed. Mazumdar. Minneapolis: U
of Minnesota P, 2007. 79-109. Print.
Mere Brother Ki Dulhan. Dir.Ali Abbas Zafar. Yash Raj Films. 2011. Film.
Mohanty, Pragyan. “Bollywood Item Numbers: from Monica to Munni.” Pixelonomics. Pixelonomics, 01
Oct. 2010. Web. 10 May 2012.
Mother India. Dir. Mehboob Khan. Perf. Nargis,Sunil Dutt. Mehboob Productions. 1957. Film.
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Mulvey, Laura."Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." The Film Studies Reader. Eds. Joanne Hollows,
Mark Jancovich and Peter Hutchings. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 238-248. Print.
Om Shanti Om. Dir. Farah Khan. Red Chillies Entertainment. 2007. Film.
Pardes. Dir.Subhash Ghai. Perf. Shahrukh Khan. Mukta Arts.1997. Film.
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Prasad, Madhava M. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.
Raheja, Dinesh. “Vyjayanthimala: Bollywood’s Dancing Queen”. rediff.com. 06 May 2006. Web.10 May 2012.
Rang De Basanti. Dir. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra.Perf. Aamir Khan. UTV Motion Pictures. 2006. Film.
Shresthova, Sangita . "Strictly Bollywood? Story Camera Movement in Hindi Film Dance." Diss. Massachusetts
Inst. Of Technology, 2003. Web. 10 May 2012.
Srivastava, K.K. “An Anatomy of the Modern Woman Consumer”. 4Ps 1 Dec 2011: 97-98. Print.
Tees Mar Khan. Dir. Farah Khan. Hari Om Productions. Three's Company and UTV Motion Pictures. 2010. Film.
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Dir. Zoya Akhtar. Excel Entertainment and Eros International. 2011. Film.
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CHANDU MENON’S INDULEKHA: THE HARBINGER OF A PARADIGM SHIFT
Dr. Asha Susan Jacob
Associate Professor
Dept. of English
St. Thomas College
Kozhencherry
Kerala.689641
The much clichéd term feminism has lost its sharp edge as it has become an umbrella term for
women’s liberation, empowerment of women, protest against patriarchy and a lot of related ideas in the
common parlance. The historical trajectory of the term refuses to be curtailed within the post-modern
scenario as it is as old as history itself or atleast as old as the first domestic clamour against the male
endeavor to ascertain his superiority on the merit of his brawn. The acknowledged feminist movement
starting in the 1960s is only a modern diagnosis of an old problem dealing with the question of parity
regarding half the population. The man-engineered imbalance in the sexual scale that resulted in the
cunning and systematic displacement of woman from the centre has subtly established the disparity
between the “home” and the “world.” History,“definitely his story,” has favoured man and every human
development, voluntarily or otherwise, sidelined woman confining her to the hearth which had by then
lost its significance. But no marginalization or repression goes unmarked by protest for long. The
remonstration against subjugation of woman, as in the case of the slaves, accrued to a major movement
within the course of time, and the nature and speed of it varies spatially and temporally. The revolution or
rebellion which must have begun in silence at home, and hence unrecorded, has now snowballed to be a
major school of thought itself. The extent and quality of social asymmetry between the sexes is highly
variable from culture to culture. Similar to the other categorizing social principles like class, race and
caste, gender also made its appearance at some point in the past when man needed a looking glass to
project his supremacy. Hence all manly qualities are considered constructive and women are thrust with
man-made virtues, conditioning her to an mediocre position. Everywhere gender categories are
hierarchically arranged with the masculine always over the feminine, except perhaps in the dictionary.
Engendering is a socially maneuvered programme whereby a human child is forced to ascribe to roles
based on his/her sex. It is a process of individuation.
Feminism demands equality: social political and economic parity, and not verbal declaration of
equality which does not guarantee autonomy. Freedom should be understood, accepted and experienced.
Without this the discrepancy between the animal and the human worlds would be negligible. Ignoring
women from historical documents is not only a curtailment on her right of equality but it also leads to the
distortion of and failure in understanding the society. Because of the androcentric nature of history,
women are often unrecorded or one collates only man made pictures. But her status forms the measuring
scale of any culture for she is the progenitor of all cultures. While history excludes her, literature allows
her in. When one turns to literature for insights into the societal roles of women we confront three areas:
women created by men, by patriarchally conditioned women, and by the newly conscious woman
sentient of herself as an entity and not an object.
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The locale and matrix of every literature is human life, though the social and personal selves
depicted vary qualitatively from generation to generation, from culture to culture. “Ecriture feminine,”
initiated in the 1970s in France reached India too without much delay but the grains of the same can be
excavated in texts produced over almost a century before. Long before Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second
Sex, Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Swami Vivekananda of the East had pronounced the need for a
reformation. Feminist writing of India is also not free from its regional and cultural nuances. As the
concept of Indian womanhood is as complex as the country itself an awareness of the plurality of Indian
culture is inevitable for an apprehension of its female folk. Feminist criticism, an ideological protest
against patriarchy, is also an attempt to appraise the literature of the past, particularly the portrayal of
women by the other sex. A re-reading of the earlier texts would definitely benefit any study on the
changing phase of Indian womanhood. Standing within the framework of patriarchy. O. Chandu Menon
depicts the evils of the feudal society Kerala in a masterly stroke in Indulekha. The novel “has for its
theme the salutary change that took place in Kerala in the wake of the spread of English education”
(Menon 333). An understanding of the novel is practically impossible without a perception of the social
milieu of the 19th century Malayalam naadu (Kerala came into existence only in 1956) with its varied
hierarchies and practices. While Manuian dictates governed the lives of the females and considered her
vassals of men in every other part of India, the shores of Kerala remained untouched by him till very late.
Marumakkathayam/ matriliny of the Malayalam speaking region placed her women much above the
others. “The Nairs lived in matrilineal joint families known as taravads, which consisted of a woman,
her children, her daughters, and grand daughters and their children, her brothers, descendants through
their sisters, and her relations through her dead female ancestors”(Panikkar 181-182). The members of
the family were beneficiaries of all family property, whether inherited or acquired by individual
members. Long before feminism or universal suffrage, Nair women were benefited by matriliny. In the
18th century while a Western husband had absolute authority over the person and property of his wife, the
Nair husbands had no right over their wives or children. They enjoyed much freedom than many other
women of even the 19th century. Matriliny offered women a unique importance though it fell short of
total equality with men. By the end of the 19th century a considerable number of Malayali girls had
started regarding education as the door to a new earth and heaven thanks to matriliny and the
missionaries.
Yet the much-projected matriliny was contentious too. Unlike popular misbelief it was not
synonymous with matriarchy which confers absolute power to the female. In matriliny women were
essential in tracing family lineage and they inherited property, but everything was not in favour of
women. It did not inevitably confer on them economic liberation and social freedom. Though the
property belonged to women, all the dealings were carried out by the patriarch, the karanavar (the eldest
male member) of the taravad. Joint family, polyandry and polygamy were the byproducts of
marumakkathayam/matriliny. Nair women, despite their freedom to accept or reject husbands, were like
flowers to the upper caste wanton Nambudiri (Malayali Brahmin) bees. The rules of social system were
codified to ensure the superiority of the upper caste male and to perpetuate his privileges. Their religious
and material positions could acquiesce service from lower castes as obligatory. “The influence of the
Nambudiri value system and of their material position is best reflected in the marriage system and the law
of inheritance”(Panikkar 180). The Nambudiri patrilineal system allowed only the eldest son to have
proper veli (marriage within the community).The younger sons could enjoy all the carnal pleasures
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without being burdened by the responsibilities as husbands and fathers through liaisons known as
sambandham with Nair women. These loose or at best semi-permanent marriages denied to the issues
any share in their father’s property. The ideological, religious, social and economic hegemony of the
Nambudiries propounded sambandham. If a Nambudiri had an eye on a Nair woman, he was able to get
her even if she was already married. The hypergamous marriages of the Nair women advantageous to the
Nambudiries were challenged by the confluence of a series of socio-cultural movements that augmented
changes in the public and private spheres. The spread of education effected a marked change in the Nair
sensibility. It became a potent instrument to break down bastions of power structure. Moulded by
modern education, the progressive minded dared critiquing the existing shameful pattern of man-woman
relationship, which according to them equated to prostitution.
Indulekha, the first perfect novel in Malayalam, vividly portrays Malayalam naadu in a flux. It
can be read as a chronicle of social reforms and as the harbinger of feminism. Menon’s experience under
the European judge Sharp and William Logan contributed to his progressive mentality. His tenure as
Commission to study about the Malabar Marriage Act of 1890 also has aided in the creation of his
novels. Both Indulekha and Sarada are seminal not only for perfecting the imported genre of novel, but
also for addressing contemporary social issues in a novel way. He condemns the social system of his days
with its concomitant issues like matriliny, bandhavam/sambandham etc. While depicting the evils of
feudal Kerala in an dexterous manner, the novel “has for its main theme the salutary change that took
place in Kerala life in the wake of English education” (Menon 333). Contrary to the popular fictional
pattern of the times, Menon’s novels are women-centred. The eponymous heroine of Indulekha is
depicted as the epitome of all virtues and beauty. In fact, even the more educated and much travelled
Madhavan is eclipsed by the glamour of Indulekha. Yet, that Menon is not completely free of the
patriarchal ideologies becomes explicit in his description about Madhavan and Indulekha. While
introducing Madhavan, Menon opines, “when a man’s merits and demerits are described, it is enough to
say about his intelligence, ability, education, manliness and other qualities like humility: the description
of his physical figure is quite unnecessary” (26). The same author considers a woman beautiful only if
“all her organs in their first and again in a detailed analysis are marvellous. They should have a
harmonious grace. They should not only tempt your mind when at sight, but even in their absence you
should crave for them”(29). And Menon classes Indulekha among such paragons of beauty. At the same
time he does not forget to endorse that her beauty is intensified by her virtues and magnified by English
education. She is described as the most coveted girl in the whole area.
Madhavi/Indulekha was favoured by other factors as well. In the Nair taravaad only those who
were directly related to the karanavar or those favoured by him were fortunate enough to gather
education. Her coveted position as the pet of her grandfather, the karanavar, and her progressive
minded uncle advantaged her to become as well accomplished as any other European lady of the time at
the age of sixteen. At the sudden demise of her uncle, when she returns to the taravaad, she proves to be
more fortunate than any other women and shows more maturity than a mere 16 year old girl. While
Macaulay hoped that English education would estrange Indian students from their roots or ethos, Menon
insists that “her English education has not made her (Indulekha) forget her status as a Malayali Nair
woman” (31).Education has moulded her into an individual rather than a gregarious being who is
cotrolled by unhealthy and derogatory practices posed for the complacence of the patriarchal domination
of caste and gender. In fact her vindication of the rights of Malayali woman has no parallel. Madhavan’s
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denigration of the Nair women highlights educated Nair’s discontent with the existing system. His
disapproval of Malayali woman’s freedom to select and reject men as prostitution provokes Indulekha to
defend her class. The vigour with which she argues for her sisters proves not only her analytic mind but
also her unswerving nature. Her words echo Vivekananda who regarded “liberty as the first condition of
growth” (Vivekananda 76). Indulekha reasons that when a woman is denied freedom and treated as an
animal, it will result in prostitution. Nair woman’s freedom has given her a unique place in India and
abroad, yet it is not freedom but the misuse of it that brings problems. While in the West an educated
woman is appreciated and acknowledged by men, in our part of the world such men will be regarded as
her “rahasyakkar” or secret lovers (48). Her defence of Nair woman is a brilliant discourse on feminism.
At the same time she is not reluctant to challenge men like Madhavan to stop those acts which bring
shame to the community.
Throughout the novel, Menon maintains the pre-eminence of his heroine over every one else
including Madhavan in her beauty, intelligence and will power. While Madhavan pines for her love and
is quite doubtful whether a richer, more suitable person would marry her, concealing her deep love
within, she chastises him to control his mind using patience and courage. When she declares her love we
realize that her mind does not indulge in anything unattainable. Her determination and dauntless courage
stand undiminished even when she hears about the Karanavar’s oath that she would not be given to
Madhavan for he has gleaned the ire of the patriarch. When even the men of the taravadu kneel before
him, Indulekha boldly declares: “In certain things I go by my own will. The oath is one such thing” (56).
Before such a resolution even Panchu Menon is finally forced to take back his oath and do penance. The
strength and sorrow of Indulekha during their separation tells on her love. During Madhavan’s
disappearance Indulekha is apprehensive about only three things--that he believes the gossip about her
marriage to Soori, that he does not trust the firmness of her mind, that he would commit suicide because
of his deep love. By making Madhavan incapable of reading and understanding the text (Indulekha’s
mind) Menon places her above even the male.
The contrast between Soori Namboodirippad and Indulekha highlights not only the folly of the
upperclass, privileged sans education, but also the simplicity, elegance and virtue of Indulekha. It
manifests the confrontation between newly acquired individuation ushered in by late nineteenth century
reformist movements and the established orders. In fact he is a foil not to Madhavan, but to Indulekha
herself. He is what she is not. While Kannazhi Moorkillathamana Soori Namboodirippad, the rich,
graceless, shapeless, senseless man proves to be guided by the words of others, Indulekha stands
uncorrupted by senseless company. There is a contrast between Soori and Indulekha in their taste and
perspective. While he tries to make an impression through external glitter, the mettle of Indulekha is
revealed through her elegance. Unlike Soori who becomes a walking goldmine glittering from top to
bottom, Indulekha is described, despite her wealth of ornaments, as a “girl not much interested in
ornaments” (31). She is a precious jewel herself. Menon knows that giving her to Soori will be like
placing a pearl before a pig. We are confused who is more frail, the man or the woman? When Menon
belittles Soori to an undisciplined mind that falls for any woman ranging from Indulekha’s mother
Lakshmikutty Amma to Ammu, her maid, neither the riches of Soori nor the oath of her grandfather can
budge Indulekha’s mind from Madhavan. Wanton Soori, though not the representative of his class, shows
the level to which the existing pattern could deteriorate men. The encounter between Indulekha and Soori
only helps to magnify the disparity between the two. While history tells that Nair women once did not
126
have the freedom to cover their breasts before upperclass men, Indulekha has the audacity to address
herself as “I.” The conversation between Cherussery Nambudirippad and Indulekha is highly illuminative
of her wisdom and character. It also demonstrates her ability to converse with both sexes with propriety
and intelligence.
The second meeting with Indulekha instills in Soori the intense desire to get her though he
himself is now doubtful about the outcome. She shows her pity towards him by playing on the piano
knowing him as a harmless enemy. Yet when he continues with his flirting she is not reluctant to
categorically tell him that she is not meant for him. Born as Nair woman, her caste and gender has to
succumb before Soori, but her individuation aids her to gracefully reject him. Her notion of self alters her
attitude. The villainy with which he tries to save his name by marrying Kalyanikkutty in secret, and the
false news spread about the bandhavam testifies the fact that he does not deserve her in any way. Chandu
Menon employs male characters as well to discuss the changing attitude towards women. The discussion
between Cherussery and Soori about agraham(desire) and bhramam (fancy) is used to show that among
the educated, noble men sthree (woman) has ceased to mean merely her body. Cherussery recognizes in
woman a mind that can take decisions. While Soori considers a female only as an object to quench his
carnal desire, Cherussery opines that physical relationship should be an outcome of the intensity of their
love for each other. Menon uses other members of the family like Govinda Menon to support Indulekha.
When her guardian Kochu Krishna Menon assures his father that her education will equip Indulekha to
do whatever is best for her, it is the novelist’s propaganda for the need of female education and freedom
in the choice of the right spouse. When this choice and freedom are judiciously used it is for the progress
of the person as well as the society. The fact that Menon could foresee the future of women points to his
significance.
Menon has been heavily criticised for advocating English education. C.P.Achutha Menon
comments: “A woman like Indulekha does not exist in Malayalam, and there in no possibility of seeing
such a woman in the next hundred years.” The text proves that the author was not unaware of such
impending criticism. Panchu Menon himself stands as a representative of the narrow-minded patriarch
when he opines that Indulekha would have been better but for her English education. Further, there is
only one fully developed female character in the novel. The others like Kunjikutty Amma, the
Karanavar’s wife, Lakshmikkutty Amma, Indulekha’s mother, and Parvathy Amma, Madhavan’s mother
always remain in the periphery. They don’t rise to the level of women with mind and mettle. Only
Indulekha is adorned with the mantle of modernity which, according to some, looks so artificial that she
looks like a Victorian woman in onnara, speaking Malayalam. Though the other females of the taravaad
are not bestowed with a voice of their own, they definitely serve a purpose. They are the traditionally
conditioned women who do not realize anything wrong with the system. Hence they consider Indulekha
fortunate enough to be united with Soori for the sambandham between a Nair woman and a Nambudiri
was considered desirable and prestigious. Lakshmikkutty Amma-Kesava Menon relationship throws
ample light on the inconstancy of such “marriages.” Like William Blake we also wonder whether the
same creator has made both the lamb and the tiger. The same Chandu Menon who lavished on Indulekha
beauty, wisdom, boldness and virtue has also created the beautiful, voiceless Kalyanikkutty of the same
taravaad who becomes a scapegoat to the lust of Soori. Kalyanikkutty is what Indulekha would have
become had she not been blessed with courage which she gleans through education to refuse the belittling
bandhavam. The fate of the less fortunate Kalyanikutty is sealed towards the end of the 14th chapter.
127
Everything is arranged in secret for the bandhavam of the thirteen year old, graceful Kalyanikutty to the
fifty year old Soori: “All women pushed Kalyanikutty, like a live pig or some other animal to be encaged,
to padinjattethil and closed the door. The bandhavam was over” (156). The question why Indulekha does
not bother to reform the lives of other females or to stop the bandhavam of her cousin remains
unanswered. Indulekha who basks in the glory of education is blind or insensitive to the fate of others.
She does not or is not willing to conscientize the other marginalized women of even her own savarna
class. Englished Indulekha cannot be considered representative of Malayali women. Kalyanikutty
represents the majority: the meek, voiceless girls who are forever conditioned by tradition and thereby
patriarchy.
Chandu Menon’s works can be classed among the pioneering works in women’s rights
movement and can be regarded as the harbingers of feminist ideas to Malayalam which see education as
the stepping stone to better economic, political and social status. Indulekha substantiates the words of
Vivekananda: “Educate your women first and leave them to themselves, then they will tell you what
reforms are necessary for them” (Vivekananda 76).
Works Cited:
Menon, A. Sreedhara. A Survey of Kerala History . Kottayam: DC, 2007.
Menon, O. Chandu.
Indulekha. 1889. Kottayam: DC, 2003.
Panikkar, K.N. Culture, Ideology, Hegemony: Intellectuals and Social Consciousness
India. New Delhi: Tulika, 1998.
in
Colonial
Vivekananda, Swami. My India: the India Eternal. Kolkata: R. K. Mission Institute of Culture, 1998.
128
QUEST FOR IDENTITY IN THE MIDST OF HOLOCAUST: SYLVIA PLATH’S “DADDY’’
“LADY LAZARUS”
Dr.P.K.Debata
Lect. in English
K.P, KIIT University
Bhubaneswar, Odisha
Sylvia Plath, the American poet whose poetry straddles across the boundaries of the nation as the best
form of metaphor. The poems like “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” have been replete with the references of
holocaust. She herself represents as the Jewish victim of the holocaust. She struggles a lot against the
male oppression and tyranny in order to find her self-identity. The appropriate use of holocaust has been
witnessed in Plath’s "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," which has been metaphorically embodied her fight
against the male dominated society. Through these poems she finds herself as a victimised Jewish woman
punished by the Nazis who have smashed the complete freedom of self-expression as well as the identity
as an individual. In another poem like Ariel, published posthumously in 1965 in which the poet not only
displays her wounds, but dramatic monologues in which the speaker moves from a state of psychological
bondage to freedom; from spiritual death to life. Indeed, the transcendence of her physical state to a state
of utopia seems remote. Plath's use of metaphor has been under scrutiny amongst critics since the
publication of "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus", as Plath displaces an individual persona and identifies
herself with the persecuted Jews by the Nazis during the World War II in the two works. Plath, in both
the poems considers herself, not as a solitary entity but as a collective population—the persecuted Jews
of World War II, often called a "collective metaphor," Linda Hutcheon sheds light on this technique of
"[Plath's poetry]... seen as a feminist reworking (or parody) of the modes of male modernism in which
she inherited" (54). It has been observed that Plath sets herself apart from referring herself as a lone
individual to a collective population or "collective" embodiment to form a metaphor for her suffering at
the hands of the two primary oppressive male figures in her life, her late father, and her husband, Ted
Hughes. The idea of the two poems investigated in this essay supported by the audacious, over
exaggerated, accusations of feeling as persecuted Jewish people terrorized by the Nazis, but many have
argued that this comparison is overstepping the boundary between what is appropriate and justified for
acceptability. "Whatever her father did to her, it could not have been what the Germans did to the Jews,"
Leon Wieseltier, an American literary critic and editor for The New Republic (Nelson 26). The aforesaid
statement is a paradigm of quintessential criticism that Plath has faced after "Daddy," in particular, which
began to circulate amongst ardent poetry readers and critics. Although Plath has often been questioned
for surpassing what is considered to be "tasteful" literature in both the poems. She shows a successful
representation of "a crisis in language and identity" by many literary experts since the time of their
publications (Rose 228). In spite of countless criticism, Plath felt it was absolutely necessary, however
arguably, to rage metaphorical war on the oppression she felt free to establish her self- identity. She has
vividly objectified in "Daddy" her husband as the male authority in her life with his "Meinkampf look"
after her marriage to him, which sets her bound within a submissive marital life. This state of affairs in
her reaction ultimately serves as a reflection between Plath's childhoods interactions with her father, and
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contributes to the motif of male supremacy and tyrannical treatment toward her. However, Plath feels the
pressures of this weight of male domination that drives her to madness at the conclusion of both poems.
The common theme of both "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" is the dissolving of what is considered
usually considered private feelings to shed light on inner conflicts. The two poems discloses an ugly
private life and makes Plath's hidden sadness of her internal struggle of self-identity and individual
mentality to public light. To achieve this, Plath is frequently using metaphor in both works. In "Lady
Lazarus," Plath puts herself in front of a "peanut-crunching crowd, [shoving] in to see" the spectacle she
is making in "[unwrapping] me hand and foot" (Plath 7). In "Daddy," Plath openly abuses her father;
"There's a stake in your fat, black heart…the villagers never liked you" revealing a community setting
rather than a private confrontation regarding the relationship between herself and her father (Plath 51).
The villagers then go about "dancing and stamping" upon him, as a collective response to a community
problem showing public disapproval, evidence of Plath's displacement (Plath 51). In Lisa Nabershuber's
book, Confessing Cultures, Plath "radically redefines herself in terms of historically grounded, collective
worlds…Plath displaces the solitary, private individual… [and identifies] herself with the concentration
camp Jew" also in effect comparing herself to a community, just as she identifies her father and husband,
who play the tormenting Nazis as a part of a historical political organization (66). This shifted viewpoint
from interpersonal to a historic perspective might seem to be reminiscent of a parody; but in fact, Plath
herself reveals these intentions by admitting her thoughts in an interview on personal writing: "one
should be able to control and manipulate experiences like madness, being tortured….and one should be
able to manipulate these experiences to the [ignorant] mind. I think that personal experience shouldn't be
a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking narcissistic experience. I believe it should be generally relevant"
(Hardy 65).
Plath's “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” are the clear indication of personal reflections. The struggle
for self-identity is taking personal experience and relating to relevant situation. The purpose of applying a
collective meaning is the persecuted Jewish people. In response to the above quote from the interview,
describing her justification for her poetry's application to a historic event in history. Plath desires to be
free from a typical narcissistic inward experience for her emotional strife to be something easy to
understand to the ignorant or sane mind. She looks at the situation where she is entangled through a
historical lens to make her pain more tangible for others. This can be taken as an overconfident claim of
equalizing her suffering to the likes of those six million dead Jews. Therefore, through these two poems,
Plath feels appropriate the Jew's pain in the hands of the Nazis is an effective comparison for the general
public to understand her own internal conflict, believing that a universal event of sorrow that can be
comprehended by all. This gives justification for her collective metaphor in defining her identity against
the male oppression.
Further in "Daddy," Plath indentifies the concept of male domination through her father as a
representation of her submission to his power. Plath ascertains that she has lived in a tight-fitting "black
shoe…for thirty years," where there was little space for freedom, as "this domestic realm stands out in the
open, but unnoticed hidden—or as the poem suggests, underfoot" of her father's irrepressible presence
over her (Plath 49, Narbeshuber, "Poetics" 189). For the rest of the poem, Plath proceeds to dismantle
this closed off-world to reveal "a new worldly theatre" from "beautiful Nauset," to "Tyrol," and
"Vienna," these various locations offer a sudden to contrast the little shoe she had previously lived in.
(Narbeshuber, Confessing 66). Here, we find the tone of the poem is dark and accusing, as Plath
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describes the boundaries of her world to be utterly unyielding. The restrictions she faces within her
environment are all preceded by "black"; "so black no sky could squeak through… [and] the voices just
can't worm through" (Plath 50). Although she breaks apart from the limited, domestic environment, Plath
is still under the authority of the "Aryan eye," a representation of her husband after grown older from the
childhood rule of her father, a figure who keeps her confined through the transition of childhood to
adulthood (Plath 50). In the line "Not God but a swastika," Plath acknowledges that in her world, not
faith in religion can determine fate but rather a symbol of authority of the oppressor's power can
ultimately define her future (Plath 50). In this case of secularism, culture is raised over spirituality in the
lines "Herr God, Herr Lucifer in "Lady Lazarus," similarly making the Germans more powerful than the
God and Devil in heaven and hell as a determination of Plath's fate. Not only does the pain she feel from
the oppression she faces pierce her emotionally and spiritually, but physically, altering the language she
uses to message her thoughts.
Viewing the daddy, we find that Plath is very much in the grips of her father, identifying for
symbolic figure of male dominance. She expresses, "I could never talk to you/The tongue stuck in a barb
wire snare", stanzas 24 through 26 state in the poem "Daddy," a resentful relationship without
understanding in reality. The "Ich, Ich, Ich, Ich," in the following line uses repetition in order to show
stuttering as well as give a voice to the anger within Plath's tone (Plath 49). "Ich," meaning 'I,' in German
is continued in the next stanza, "I could hardly speak". Plath is resistant against authority, and speaks
only with great difficulty in a language that she finds so "obscene" (Plath 50). In a parallel manner, she
addresses the male oppression within her life as "Herr Doktor, Herr Enemy….Herr God, Herr Lucifer" In
"Lady Lazarus," a representation of secularism acknowledged above to attribute this power with more
importance than God. (Plath 8-9)
Plath begins to lose her identity; by using German language, not her native tongue, "I think I
may be a Jew" and at the end of the next stanza "I may be a bit of a Jew" (Plath 50). This repetition of
words or stuttering is found throughout the poem to show Plath's bitterness towards the oppression thrust
upon her, seen in the stanzas "You do not do, you do not do" in beginning of poem, and "wars, wars,
wars" (Plath 49). Ironically when speaking of her husband "the man… with a Meinkampf look," Plath
writes "I do, I do," usually a happy and joyous proclamation of a union of love on the event of a wedding
day (Plath 51). But for Plath, it is the exact opposite. Instead, she has found herself imprisoned in her
marriage instead of loved, and silenced. The repressive, mechanical powers that rule over her is
illustrated when "an engine, an engine" is shown "chuffing" off to concentration camps of "Dachau,
Auschwitz, Hiroshima " to meet her demise (Plath 50). However, she fears and is hateful toward this
power over her. She proclaims that "every woman adores a Fascist" which shows an underlying desire to
be loved by her father (Plath 50). "The German language [represents] Plath's collection of discourses
(hospital, mental institution), [and] acts like a repressive, mechanical power, bearing down on the
collective body," but because this metaphor is enlarged to a collective comparison, Plath also implies to
be accepted socially by the entire community for her idiosyncrasies and the unjust rule pitted against her.
(Narbeshuber, Confessing 67).
Death has become a motif in both "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy” that represents liberation.
Paradoxically, life is characterized as full of preventative and restrictive measures against freedom, and
death, usually found to be dark and constrictive, but shown as the escape. In "Daddy," Plath writes: "I
was ten when they buried you/At twenty I tried to die" (Plath 51). When her father was buried, a part of
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Plath died as well and attempts suicide to try to "get back, back to [him]" (Plath 51). In this case, Plath's
yearnings to be free through death can be blamed on her father's demise at childhood. From this, the
reader can conclude that his memory haunts her still, and that she feels the need to die to be free from the
clutches he still has on her even while not living. This can also be seen in "Lady Lazarus," Plath writes
that "I done it again/One year in every ten/I manage it" continuing motif of self-destruction found in
"Daddy" of dying a little (Plath 6). With her father's death though, Plath admits that "the first time (at the
age of ten)/It was an accident… [but] the second time I meant to last it out and not come back at all"
(Plath 7).
"Dying is an art, like everything else/I do it exceptionally well" she admits (Plath 7). As in
"Daddy," "Lady Lazarus" she has displayed herself in an intense dramatic fashion in front of a crowd for
a public response, "the peanut crunching crowd" similar to the "villagers" stamping on her father, making
a spectacle of herself for a performance, a theatrical art form; this parallels the statement in which she
believes that dying is an act of art (Plath 7, 51). As in "Daddy," she transcends her body. First she
identifies with persecuted Jews, the marginalized and hidden, and secondly, her body has been stolen
from her and divided into diverse saleable objects, reminiscent of the "cleansing" of Jews, a violent
treatment the persecuted were subjected to when entering a concentration camp (Narbeshuber,
Confessing 69). In effect, parts of her body are up for exploitation in front of the public. Ironically, in
"Daddy," the collective response is the "Polish village" in which Plath metaphorically resides in to have
her father destroyed by her fellow, imaginary villagers. In "Lady Lazarus," the roles are reversed, as
Plath herself is being thrust into the crowd of male dominion itself, represented in a crowd for a taunting
"strip-tease". Plath mirrors the speaker with imagery of German exploitation of the Jewish people: "There
is a charge/For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge/for the hearing of my heart—/it really goes" is
also a charge for a bit of blood, a lock of hair or her clothes for value by the crowd which is rebellion
against male oppression (Plath 8). By the end of the poem, she faces a death much like those subjected to
the gas chambers: "Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—/A cake of soap, a wedding ring, a gold filling"
(Plath 8). This haunting tone of showing her ghostly remains, makes her "theatrical" spectacle more
dynamic in front of the Nazis as "her theatrics somehow resurrect a powerful self-possession"
(Narbeshuber, Confessing 69).
At the conclusion of both poems, Plath finds relief for her death by avenging both her husband,
father, and in "Lady Lazarus" the male population as a whole, too. After her suicide she "melts into
shriek/I turn and burn… [turning into] ash, ash" (Plath 8). Plath warns her enemies to "beware, beware"
(Plath 9). The origin of the poems' title foreshadows the ending of "Lady Lazarus" in its biblical
reference. Jesus had resurrected Lazarus in the New Testament, Gospel of John, in which he restores
Lazarus to life after being proclaimed dead for four days. Like Lazarus, Plath rises "out of the ash" but
also "[eats] men like air," it is implying that like smoke, she grasps at anything she touches to reveal her
new found power (Plath 9).
Thus, Sylvia Plath has been symbolized as rebirth and revenge. She puts outright her ferocity
towards the male oppression that she has been faced with in her previous life. She wins over the
dominion in "Daddy" as well with the stomping villagers, as she proclaimed: "Daddy, daddy, you
bastard, I'm through" in the last line of the last stanza (Plath 51). His memory is killed "with a stake in
[his] fat black heart" and can rest and "lie back now" with her reassurance and personal victory (Plath
51). "Lady Lazarus" defines a particularly brutal and dehumanizing relationship between the individual
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and her society through use of a collective metaphor of holocaust. The quest for self identity has become
a verbal manifesto. But it is unfortunate that every attempt has succumbed to her final suicide.
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REFERENCES
Hardy, Barbara, and Pollitt Katha. Ariel Ascending: Writings About Sylvia Plath. 1st ed. New York: Harper & Row,
Publishers, 1985. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of 20th Century Art Forms (New York, Routledge, 1985)
Print.
Narbeshuber, Lisa. Confessing Cultures, Politics And The Self In The Poetry Of Sylvia Plath. Victoria, Canada: ELS
Editions, 2009. Print.
Narbeshuber, Lisa. "The Poetics of Torture: The Spectacle of Sylvia Plath's Poetry." Canadian Review of American
Studies 34.2 (2004). Web.
Nelson, Deborah. "Plath, history, and politics." The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath. Cambridge University
Press, 2006. Cambridge Collections Online. Cambridge University Press. Web.
Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Print.
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OBESITY AND WOMEN: A STUDY OF MARGARET ATWOOD’S LADY ORACLE
Dr.Leena Pundir
Assistant Professor
GRD Girls Degree college, Dehradun.
Motive is a specific internal condition directing an organism’s behaviour towards a goal. It is
important to realize that a motive does not have to have a physiological explanation.1 According to noted
psychologist Stanley Schacter of Columbia University2, obese humans eat too often and too much for
reason other than hunger, for example, because of anger or fear. The obese thus have motives for eating.
S..People eat to live, but women have a special problem: they must eat, but only in limited quantities.
The basic conflict in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle is between an obese young girl Joan and her
aggressive, unhappy and emotionally insecure mother Fran who attempts to renegotiate her position in
this world through Joan’s body; for to bear a pretty daughter is to reinforce one’s own sense of feminity.
Joan is an only child, the unwanted product of an unhappy war time marriage, into which both her
parents have been trapped by an accidental pregnancy. Joan’s relationship with her mother is both
complex and charged with ambivalence. Joan’s identity confusion starts with her name. Her mother had
named her after the ‘thin’ actress Joan Crawford, while she as a child is overweight and eats
continuously. Her mother wants her daughter to be slim but Joan’s beluga whale-like appearance upsets
all her “pretensions to status and elegance.” 3
Fran tries very hard to transform Joan’s body with pills, diet sheets and help
from a psychiatrist. As Joan says: “Our relationship was professionalized
early. She was to be the manager, the creator, the agent; I was to be the
product...” (LO, p. 76)
Her mother’s concerns about her daughter’s appearance and behaviour, her efforts to “make me
over in her image, thin and beautiful” (LO, p. 101) – the appropriate daughter in a patriarchal society
which values a feminine (thin) appearance and compliant behavior – create a resistance in Joan which
manifests itself in the intense orality of overeating.4 Having heard her mother once refers to her as “an
accident” (LO, p. 89), Joan is very conscious of being an unwanted child: “I…. ate from panic…What
had I done? Had I trapped my father….ruined my mother’s life?” (LO, p. 89) She ate “steadily, doggedly,
stubbornly…” (LO, p. 79) The war between Joan and Fran was on in earnest and the undisputed territory
was Joan’s body.
By nagging Joan incessantly about her obese appearance, Fran makes her daughter rebellious to
the point of wanting to retain her bloated look. As a teenager Joan naively views her obesity as a
“victory” (LO, p. 84) over her mother and resolves not to give her mother the “pleasure” of seeing her
reduce. Thus Joan swells “visibly, relentlessly before her very eyes…..like dough.” (LO, p. 79) Thus the
mother-daughter war continues, power changes hands and Joan who was her mother’s victim during
childhood, turns oppressor. She clomps silently but very visibly through rooms in which her mother is
sitting so that she could “see and recognize what little effect her nagging and pleas were having.” (LO, p.
81) She eats to defy her and dresses grotesquely to exhibit her mounds of fat. And as Joan’s body
expands defying the limits of cultural packaging and control, her mother, instead of seeing her daughter
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as a separate entity comes to see it as a reproach to her, “….a huge edgeless cloud of ichoate matter
which refused to be shaped into anything for which she could get a prize.” (LO, p. 76)
The political ramification of the conflicts between Joan and her mother center on the latter’s
attempts to shape Joan into her notion of female identity and her failure to remodel her family and home
according to her images. The war between herself and Joan depresses and bewilders her as she cannot
understand what she has done to deserve “a sulky fat slob of a daughter and a husband who wouldn’t talk
to her?” (LO, pp. 214-215) What Joan’s mother fails to see is that she is a victim of the soul damaging
stereotypes created by patriarchy. Instead of living in accordance with her own inner-self, she has let her
society tell her how to live her life. The alienation between mother and daughter emerges powerfully
from the bad dreams Joan has in childhood. In one of them she would be walking across a bridge while
her mother would be standing on the other side of it talking to a man. Halfway across, the bridge would
start to collapse and Joan says she would feel herself begin to topple slowly into a ravine: “I called out to
my mother, who could still have saved me, she could have run across quickly and reached out her hand,
she could have pulled me back with her to firm ground. But she didn’t do this, she went on with her
conversation she didn’t notice that anything unusual was happening.” (LO, p. 65) This dream indicates
that Joan regards her mother as a detached observer of her traumas.
In another bad dream Joan says that while she would be sitting in a corner of her mother’s
bedroom watching her put on her make-up, she would suddenly realize that “instead of three reflections
she had three actual heads, which rose from her toweled shoulders on three separate necks” (LO, pp. 6667). This, she says, did not frighten her as it seemed a confirmation of something she already knew, but
outside the door was a man who was about to come in. Joan feared that “[i]f he saw, if he found out the
truth about my mother something terrible would happen, not only to my mother but to me.” (LO, p. 67)
She hopes to prevent him from entering but in vain. This dream changed as she grew older. She wanted
the man to enter and find out her mother’s secret for she alone knew that her mother was “a monster”
(LO, p. 67). This feeling grows so strong over the years that Joan starts viewing her mother, not as a
human being, but as a witch whom she, like all fairy tale heroines, needs to outwit and escape from.
Joan’s alienation from her mother causes her to look for surrogate mothers, and she finds one in Aunt
Lou who gives her all the warmth affection and attention which she craves as a child and as a teenager.
Under her guidance Joan learns to be comfortable with her body: “That’s just the way I am ….if other
people can’t handle it; that’s their problem…..” (LO, p. 102)
However, after Aunt Lou’s death when Joan perforce dwindles in size to claim the two thousand
dollars her aunt has left her (on condition that she loose a hundred pounds), her mother grows distraught
and frenzied. She accuses Joan of going to extremes, tells her that she will starve to death and tries to
thwart her by baking goodies and leaving them around in the kitchen to tempt her. She even goes to the
extent of stabbing her in the arm with a paring knife. This bizarre incident can only be explained in terms
of her mother’s fear that by losing weight, collecting her legacy and leaving home, Joan would cease to
be under her control: “Making me thin was her last available project. There was nothing left for her to
do…she had counted on me to last her forever….” (LO, p. 147) And this is precisely what Joan does. She
uses the money left by Aunt Lou to escape the escalating conflict with her mother and heads for a new
life in London. Joan is the most vibrant and independent of Atwood’s first three narrators. She evinces
tremendous resistance to her mother and disengages herself with a boldness and quietness rarely found in
a school girl.
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Obesity in women is the topic of Judy Kopinda’s Fat Is a Feminist Issue, which asserts that
“being fat represents an attempt to break free of society’s sex stereotypes. For many women, being fat
says ‘screw you’ to all who want me to be the perfect mom, sweetheart, maid and whore.”5 From
enrollment at the age of seven in dancing classes to a year in Brownies, Joan discovers the socially
accepted cruelty inflicted on girls who do not fit into the “sugar-and-spice” image: “I knew this even
when I was ten. If Desdemona was fat who would care whether or not if Othello strangled her? Why is it
that the girls Nazis torture on the covers of magazines are always good looking?” (LO, p. 56) Margaret
Atwood is here attacking Romantic fiction which is one of patriarchy’s primary tools for indoctrinating
women into the religion of beauty and promising them the happy ending of inclusion into society if only
they learn to be beautiful, slim, and tender, with probably an estate. Joan too is a “sucker for ads,
especially the ones that promised happiness” (LO, p. 31) and longs for “happy endings, I needed the
feelings of release when everything turned out right and I could scatter joy all over like rice….”(LO, pp.
387-388). Atwood shows in Lady Oracle how the socialization process of patriarchy shapes and
institutionalizes sex roles and suggests that the characteristics of maleness and femaleness are not
biologically determined; rather they are based on cultural definitions of a male, chauvinistic and sexist
society.
REFERENCES:
1
Lester A. Lefton, “Psychology”, (Boston: Allyn and Bacon Inc, 1979),p.123.
2
S. Schachter, “Some extraordinary facts about obese humans and rats”, American Psychologist, 1971, Vol.
26,pp.129-144.
3
Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle, (Toronto: Random House, 1999) p. 217. All further references to this work (LO)
appear in the text.
4
5
John Haslett Cuff, “Too Fat to make the grade?”,The Globe and Mail, July 16, 1983, Fanfare, p.2.
Lenore J. Weitzman, “Sex-Role Socialization,” Women: A Feminist Perspective, Ed. Jo Freeman, (California:
Mayfield Publishing Company, 1975), pp.106-107.
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INNOVATION AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN INDIA
Prin. Dr. Seema Malankar
Model College, Kalyan (E)
University of Mumbai.
INTRODUCTION:
You must be the change you wish to see in the world
-Mahatma Gandhi
Innovation is an important key to accelerate economic growth and development of any particular
nation of the World. There are many examples where innovation led to market growth, increase in export
and overall transformation of the economies. According to the Growth Theory, developed by the Nobel
Prize-winning economist Robert Solow, technological progress and innovation is the greatest engine of
economic growth. The industrial policies of the world’s developed nations give importance to the
strategic role of innovations in generating new business ideas which will translate into greater economic
growth. There are many countries aspiring to become a developed nation, it is imperative therefore, to
transit to the innovation-driven economy. Economic condition of business organizations and the society
as a whole today depends on their capability to produce and services that are better, cheaper and faster
than their competitors. Innovation helps bring in this much needed change and improvements at all levels
of business and economy. This helps improve the economic position of all the stake holders involved.
Innovation today, is essential for the long-term growth of organizations. Innovation is also the key to
success in all social developments. Creative ideas and innovations challenge existing norms and foster
positive growth. They help improve the overall quality of life. Innovative ideas can cross over the hurdles
of social apathy, conservative mind sets and orthodox attitudes to usher in positive changes in society. An
innovation changes existing rules, norms, thinking and structures to create a novel transformation.
Innovations thus, help achieve sustained change in a given environment. Innovation has thus become the
key to the sustainable development of the society.
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN INDIA: PERSPECTIVES
In 1972, the then Prime Minister of India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi emphasized, at the UN Conference
on Human Environment at Stockholm, that the removal of poverty is an integral part of the goal of an
environmental strategy for the world. The concepts of interrelatedness, of a shared planet, of global
citizenship, and of ‘spaceship earth’ cannot be restricted to environmental issues alone. They apply
equally to the shared and inter-linked responsibilities of environmental protection and human
development. History has led to vast inequalities, leaving almost three-fourths of the world’s people
living in less-developed countries and one-fifth below the poverty line. The long-term impact of past
industrialization, exploitation and environmental damage cannot be wished away. It is only right that
development in this new century be even more conscious of its long-term impact. The problems are
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complex and the choices difficult. Our common future can only be achieved with a better understanding
of our common concerns and shared responsibilities.
PERSPECTIVES AND APPROACHES TOWARDS ACHIEVING A SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT:
Poverty Eradication and Sustainable Livelihoods Poverty and a degraded environment are closely
inter-related, especially where people depend for their livelihoods primarily on the natural resource base
of their immediate environment. Restoring natural systems and improving natural resource management
practices at the grassroots level are central to a strategy to eliminate poverty. The survival needs of the
poor force them to continue to degrade an already degraded environment. Removal of poverty is
therefore a prerequisite for the protection of the environment. Poverty magnifies the problem of hunger
and malnutrition. The problem is further compounded by the inequitable access of the poor to the food
that is available. It is therefore necessary to strengthen the public distribution system to overcome this
inequity. Diversion of common and marginal lands to ‘economically useful purposes’ deprives the poor
of a resource base which has traditionally met many of their sustenance needs. Market forces also lead to
the elimination of crops that have traditionally been integral to the diet of the poor, thereby threatening
food security and nutritional status. While conventional economic development leads to the elimination
of several traditional occupations, the process of sustainable development, guided by the need to protect
and conserve the environment, leads to the creation of new jobs and of opportunities for the reorientation
of traditional skills to new occupations.
PROTECTING AND MANAGING THE NATURAL RESOURCE BASE OF ECONOMIC AND
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
The integration of agriculture with land and water management, and with ecosystem conservation
is essential for both environmental sustainability and agricultural production. An environmental
perspective must guide the evaluation of all development projects, recognizing the role of natural
resources in local livelihoods. This recognition must be informed by a comprehensive understanding of
the perceptions and opinions of local people about their stakes in the resource base. To ensure the
sustainability of the natural resource base, the recognition of all stakeholders in it and their roles in its
protection and management is essential. There is need to establish well-defined and enforceable rights
(including customary rights) and security of tenure, and to ensure equal access to land, water and other
natural and biological resources. It should be ensured that this applies, in particular, to indigenous
communities, women and other disadvantaged groups living in poverty.
Water governance arrangements should protect ecosystems and preserve or restore the ecological
integrity of all natural water bodies and their catchments. This will maintain the wide range of ecological
services that healthy ecosystems provide and the livelihoods that depend upon them. Biomass is, and will
continue for a long time to be, a major source of fuel and energy, especially for the rural poor.
Recognizing this fact, appropriate mechanisms must be evolved to make such consumption of biomass
sustainable, through both resource management and the promotion of efficient and minimally polluting
technologies, and technologies which will progressively reduce the pressures on biomass, which cause
environmental degradation. The traditional approaches to natural resource management such as sacred
groves and ponds, water harvesting and management systems, etc., should be revived by creating
institutional mechanisms which recapture the ecological wisdom and the spirit of community
management inherent in those systems.
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SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: LEARNINGS AND PERSPECTIVES FROM INDIA
Sustainable Development in a Globalizing World Globalization as it is taking place today is
increasing the divide between the rich and the poor. It has to be steered so that it serves not only
commercial interests but also the social needs of development. Global business thrives on, and therefore
encourages and imposes, high levels of homogeneity in consumer preferences. On the other hand, for
development to be locally appropriate and sustainable, it must be guided by local considerations which
lie in cultural diversity and traditions. Therefore recognition at the policy level, of the significance of
diversity, and the need to preserve it, is an important precondition for sustainable development.
In an increasingly globalizing economy, developing countries, for want of the appropriate skills,
are often at a disadvantage in negotiating and operating multilateral trade agreements. Regional
cooperation for capacity building is therefore necessary to ensure their effective participation in all stages
of multilateral trade. Globalization is driven by a vast, globally spread, human resource engine involving
millions of livelihoods. Their security is sometimes threatened by local events causing global distortions
(e.g. the impact of the WTC attack on jobs in India or, in a wider context, sanctions against countries not
conforming to ‘international’ prescriptions in human rights or environment related maters). Mechanisms
to safeguard trade and livelihoods, especially in developing countries, must be evolved and negotiated to
make globalization an effective vehicle of sustainable development. War and armed conflict are a major
threat to sustainable development. It is imperative to evolve effective mechanisms for mediation in such
situations and to resolve contentious issues without compromising the larger developmental goals of the
conflicting parties.
HEALTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Human health in its broadest sense of physical, mental and spiritual well- being is to a great
extent dependent on the access of the citizen to a healthy environment. For a healthy, productive and
fulfilling life every individual should have the physical and economic access to a balanced diet, safe
drinking water, clean air, sanitation, environmental hygiene, primary health care and education. Access to
safe drinking water and a healthy environment should be a fundamental right of every citizen. Citizens of
developing countries continue to be vulnerable to a double burden of diseases. Traditional diseases such
as malaria and cholera, caused by unsafe drinking water and lack of environmental hygiene, have not yet
been controlled. In addition, people are now falling prey to modern diseases such as cancer and AIDS,
and stress-related disorders. Many of the widespread ailments among the poor in developing countries are
occupation-related, and are contracted in the course of work done to fulfil the consumption demands of
the affluent, both within the country and outside.
MEANS OF IMPLEMENTATION FINANCE
Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) is declining. The commitments made by industrialized
countries at the Earth Summit in Rio a decade ago remain largely unmet. This is a cause for concern
which has been voiced by several developing countries. Industrialized countries must honor their ODA
commitments. The new instruments and mechanisms, e.g., the Clean Development Mechanism, that are
trying to replace ODA need to be examined closely for their implications for the developing countries. In
view of the declining trend in ODA, developing countries must explore how they can finance their
sustainable development efforts, such as by introducing a system of ecological taxation. Private
140
investment cannot replace development aid as it will not reach sectors relevant for the poor. Such
investments and other mechanisms can at best be additional to, not replacements for, development
assistance. Conditions attached to financial assistance need to be rigorously scrutinized, and the
assistance accepted only if the conditionality is acceptable. Financial support for sustainable development
programmes must not be negatively influenced by political considerations external to the objectives of
the assistance.
TRADE
Trade regimes, specifically WTO, are sometimes in conflict with sustainable development
priorities. Imperatives of trade, and the concerns related to environment, equity and social justice
however need to be dealt with independently. Environmental and social clauses which are implicitly or
explicitly part of international agreements must not be used selectively to erect trade barriers against
developing countries. Developing countries will suffer a major trade disadvantage if the efforts to put in
place globally acceptable Process and Production Methods (PPMs) are successful. Instead, existing
disparities between the trade regimes and multilateral environmental agreements, such as those between
Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) regime and the Convention on Biological Diversity
(CBD), should be thoroughly addressed. Mechanisms to resolve such conflicts between multilateral
agreements should be set up.
TECHNOLOGY
Developing countries need not follow the conventional path to development with regard to
technologies but must use to their advantage the cutting- edge technology options now available to
‘leapfrog’, and put the tools of modern technology to use. Mechanisms must be put in place to make
available to developing countries the latest technologies at reasonable cost. Technology transfer must be
informed by an understanding of its implications in the social, economic and environmental contexts of
the receiving societies. Technologies must be usable by and beneficial to local people. Where possible,
existing local technologies must be upgraded and adapted to make them more efficient and useful. Such
local adaptations should also lead to the upgradation of local technical skills. Local innovations and
capacity building for developing and managing locally relevant and appropriate technologies must be
encouraged and supported. Integrating highly-sophisticated modern technology with traditional practices
sometimes produces the most culturally-suited and acceptable solutions, which also makes them more
viable. This trend should be encouraged.
SCIENCE AND EDUCATION
The paramount importance of education in effecting social change is recognized. Mainstream
education must now be re- aligned to promote awareness, attitudes, concerns and skills that will lead to
sustainable development. Basic education which promotes functional literacy, livelihood skills,
understanding of the immediate environment and values of responsible citizenship is a precondition for
sustainable development. Such education must be available to every child as a fundamental right,
without discrimination on the basis of economic class, geographical location or cultural identity.
Adequate resources and support for education for sustainable development are essential. An
understanding must be promoted among key decision makers of the potential of education to promote
sustainability, reduce poverty, train people for sustainable livelihoods and catalyze necessary public
support for sustainable development initiatives. The empowerment of women and girls must be supported
by actions to improve their access to basic and higher education, training and capacity building. The
141
emphasis should be on gender mainstreaming. Greater capacity needs to be built in science and
technology through improved collaboration among research institutions, the private sector, NGOs and
government. Collaborations and partnerships between and among scientists, government and all
stakeholders, on scientific research and development and its widespread application need to be improved.
POPULATION
As per 2011 Census report Indian population has crossed 1.2 Billion. With India’s population
crossing a billion in the year 2000, the National Population Policy announced in that year has special
significance. Its change in focus from merely setting target population figures to achieving population
control through greater attention to socio-economic issues such as child health and survival, illiteracy,
empowerment of women, and increased participation by men in planned parenthood, gives it greater
breadth and depth, thereby holding forth better promise of achieving its long-term objective of a stable
population by mid-century.
The official realization, that population is not merely about numbers but about the health and
quality of life of people in general and women in particular, must be reinforced and sustained by an
informed debate to bring key population issues into ever sharpening perspective at various levels of
policy making from the national and state legislatures to local government institutions. There is need for
a better and more widespread understanding that the number of children desired by any couple depends
on a large and complexly interrelated number of socio-economic and cultural factors, and that any policy
action seeking to control population must seriously take all these variables into account.
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AT LOCAL, NATIONAL &INTERNATIONAL LEVELS
THROUGH GOOD GOVERNANCE
Local and national levels:
Effective management of resources requires participation by all stakeholders. At the local level,
strengthening democratic institutions generally leads to better and more sustained management of natural
resources. To enhance effectiveness of people’s participation in local governance, committees
comprising both elected and executive members of local bodies and representatives of community
groups, must be formed. Appropriate capacity building would enable them to undertake local
development activities according to community priorities, monitor project implementation and manage
community assets. Where the conditions for such community empowerment have already been created,
as in India through the 73rd and 74th amendments of its Constitution, effective implementation of the
provisions should be ensured. All members of society are the stakeholders of sustainable development.
Women make up half of this group. Affirmative action to ensure representation and power to women in
local governance, and appropriate capacity building, are necessary to make them effective and equal
partners in the development process.
Social groups which have been traditionally discriminated against must be represented in local
governance and empowered to ensure that they become effective and mainstream partners in
development. Children are a valuable asset of every society. It is the responsibility not only of the
parents but of the community that children realize their potential fully, growing up in a healthy, enriching
and fulfilling environment. Ensuring the provision of such an environment is a major challenge of
governance at the local level. The occupational, cultural and economic heterogeneity of population is on
the whole a major asset in making development sustainable; but there are times of crisis when the same
heterogeneity can become the basis of conflict and social insecurity. It is imperative to evolve
142
participatory mechanisms of governance involving citizen groups and local authorities which will
provide effective means of conflict resolution.
Sustainable development is achieved through optimizing gains from several variables, rather than
maximizing those from a single one. This requires government departments, by convention sectorally
organized, to work together, or in some cases as a single multi-disciplinary authority. For this joint
planning, transparency and coordination in implementation are required. The richness of skills available
in society must be harnessed through partnerships involving institutions in civil society, such as NGOs,
CBOs, corporate (including private) bodies, academic and research institutions, trade unions, etc., which
must be made an integral part of planning and implementation for sustainable development.
International
There is both a need and a scope for regional and global cooperation in sustainable development.
Some of the areas of common concern are marine issues, transboundary environmental impacts,
management of bioresources, technology sharing and sharing of sustainable development experiences.
Efforts must be made, especially by developing countries, to work towards synergizing experiences and
raising shared regional concerns as a strong united front in international forums. Mechanisms must be put
in place to facilitate such international exchange of domestic and global experiences in sustainable
development. There must be mechanisms for monitoring the compliance of countries to their obligations
under various environmental agreements. Currently there is a multiplicity of institutions with fragmented
responsibilities. A better governance regime is required to ensure cooperation and compliance.
CONCLUSION:
Thus the present paper has focused on the innovation and the sustainable development in India. It
has been discussed that how innovation plays an important role in real economic growth and
development of the country, it does not matter the underdeveloped or developing nation. There has been
suggested various strategies to come up and fight against various problems. Resources is not a problem at
all for the developing nations but the problem is utilization, through the innovative practices it is possible
to bring strategic changes in any particular economy and India is not an exception for that.
REFERENCES:
Baumol, W., Litan, R. and Schramm, C. (2007) Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth
and Prosperity, New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Bhanumurthy, N.R. and Sinha, S. (2004) ―Industrial Recovery: Can It Be Sustained, Economic and Political
Weekly 39.5: 405-407
Jenkins, R. (2007) Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Wagner, C. S. (2008) The New Invisible College: Science for Development, Washington, D.C.: Brookings
Institution Press
ANNUAL REPORTS:
Planning Commission, Government of India.
The Reserve Bank of India.
The Finance Commissions of India.
143
144
THE ROLE OF ICT IN EDUCATION
PROF. GAIKAR VILAS B
(MA, M.PHIL, B.ED, PH.D. (THESIS SUBMITTED)
UGC-NET, GDC&A, MA (POL.SC.), MBA-I)
Asst. Professor, Dept. of Economics, Smt.CHM. College, Ulhasnagar-3
University of Mumbai, India.
INTRODUCTION:
Information and communication technologies in education deal with the use of information and
communication technologies (ICTs) within educational technology. “Globalization and technological
changes have created a new global economy powered by technology, fueled by information and driven
by knowledge.” The emergence of this new global economy has serious implications for the nature and
purpose of educational institutions. As the access to information continues to grow rapidly, schools
cannot be contented with the limited knowledge to be transmitted in a fixed period of time. They have to
become compatible to the ever expanding knowledge and also be equipped with the technology to deal
with this knowledge. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) which include radio and
television, as well as newer digital technologies such as computers and the Internet have been proven as
potentially powerful tools for educational change and reform. When used appropriately, different ICTs
can help expand access to education, strengthen the relevance of education to the increasingly digital
workplace, and raise educational quality by helping make teaching and learning into an active process
connected to real life ICT in education means implementing of its equipment in teaching and learning
process as a media. The purpose of ICT in education is to generally make students familiar with its use
and how it works
DEFINITIONS:
ICT stand for information and communication technologies and is defined, as a “Diverse set of
technological tools and resources used to communicate, and to create, disseminate, store, and manage
information” “ICT implies the technology which consists of electronic devices and associated human
interactive materials that enable the user to employ them for a wide range of teaching - learning processes
in addition to personal use”
ICT in education can be broadly categorized in the following ways as:
1)
ICT as a subject (i.e., computer studies)
2)
ICT as a tool to support traditional subjects (i.e., computer-based learning, presentation, research)
3)
ICT as an administrative tool (i.e., education management information systems/EMIS)
4)
ICT as a medium of knowledge exchange
In India, ICT is being emerging field of researches in education. In the field of Open and
Distance Education it is being widely utilized. It is being offered as undergraduate and graduate level
courses in Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT) which
offers a unique four year undergraduate Program leading to the degree of Bachelor of Technology
(Information and Communication Technology). The Program aims to prepare students to either pursue a
145
professional career immediately after graduation or to continue with postgraduate studies either in India
or abroad.
CHART: 1 AN EFFECTIVE USE OF ICTs TO ECCESS, ADOPT AND CREATE KNOWLEDGE
In the above chart it has been given how ICTs is effective tool in the modern times.
USES OF ICT IN EDUCATION
ICT is being utilized in every part of life. Due to the increasing importance of the computer,
students-the future citizens cannot afford to keep themselves aloof from this potential medium. In
education, use of ICT has become imperative to improve the efficiency and effectiveness at all levels and
in both formal and non formal settings. Education even at school stage has to provide computer
instruction. Profound technical knowledge and positive attitude towards this technology are the essential
prerequisites for the successful citizens of the coming decades.
It can be used for the following purposes:
1)
To broadcast material, online facility or CD-ROM can be used as sources of information in
different subjects;
2)
To facilitate communication for pupils with special needs;
3)
To use electronic toys to develop spatial awareness and psychomotor control;
4)
To use the online resource like, email, Chat, discussion forum to support collaborative writing
and sharing of information.
5)
To facilitate video-conferencing or other form of Tele conferencing to involve wide range of
students from distant Geographic areas.
6)
For Blended learning by combining conventional classroom learning with E-leaning learning
systems
7)
To process administrative and assessment data.
8)
To exchange and share ideas among teachers for the professional growth.
9)
To carry out internet-based research to enhance, educational process
ADVANTAGES OF THE USE OF ICT IN EDUCATION:
ICT encompasses all those gadgets that deal with the processing of information for better and
effective communication. In education, communication process takes place between teachers, students,
management and administrative personnel which requires plenty of data to be stored for retrieval as and
when required, to be disseminated or transmitted in the desired format. The hardware and software like
OHP, Television, Radio, Computers and related software are used in the educational process. However
ICT today is mostly focused on the use of Computer technology for processing the data. In this context,
advantages of ICT in education can be listed down as follows:
1)
Quick access to information: Information can be accessed in seconds by connecting to the
internet and surfing through Web pages.
2)
Easy availability of updated data: Sitting at home or at any comfortable place the desired
information can be accessed easily. This helps the students to learn the updated content. Teachers
too can keep themselves abreast of the latest teaching learning strategies and related
technologies.
3)
146
Connecting Geographically dispersed regions:With the advancement of ICT, education does not
remain restricted within four walls of the educational institutions. Students from different parts of
the world can learn together by using online, offline resources.
This would result in the enriching learning experience. Such collaborative learning can result in
developing.
1)
Divergent thinking ability in students
2)
Global perspectives
3)
Respect for varied nature of human life and acculturation.
4)
Facilitation of learning
ICT has contributed in shifting the focus on learning than teaching. ICT helps students to explore
knowledge to learn the content through self study. Teacher can help the students by ensuring the right
direction towards effective learning. Situational learning, Programmed learning, many Online learning
courses are some of the example of self learning strategies that are being utilized with the help of ICT.
1)
Catering to the Individual differences: ICT can contribute in catering to individual needs of the
students as per their capabilities and interest. Crowded class rooms have always been a challenge
for the teacher to consider the needs of every student in the class.
2)
Wider range of communication media: With the advent of ICT, different means of
communication are being introduced in the teaching learning process. Offline learning, on line
learning, blended learning is some of the resources that can be used in educational institutions.
Collaborative learning, individualized learning strategies can enhance the quality of group as
well as individual learning with the real society. This can ensure the applicability of knowledge.
LIMITATIONS ON THE USE OF ICT IN EDUCATION IN INDIA
In the recent times, more than a decade into the 21st century, we live in world where there is
unparalleled surge in the usage of ICT. However, despite all the technological advancements, we have
not been able to end the prevalence of social and economic inequality, and poverty continues to be
widespread. Now education is having the primary focus from the government and the private sector. This
is because education is being seen a crucial tool for promoting economic and social development. With
its ability to transcend space and time, and provide education on an anywhere, anytime basis, solutions
from ICT are proving to be the great enabling factor in enhancing the scope of education. A variety of
constraints restricts India’s efforts to deploy technology for education. Policy exists, as government
commits. However, such policy and commitment is often lost on the road to implementation.
Educational projects, set up by conventional governments as part of a broad educational agenda, tend to
reflect the conventionalism of existing institutions with their hierarchical and bureaucratic systems of
administration when the need is for creative and innovative management. An access and availability of
technology also becomes patchy since a piecemeal rather than a co-ordinated effort by different
implementing agencies is followed. Lack of stable electric power, non-existent or unreliable
telecommunication lines and a mismatch between funding allocation and actual needs all add to the
problems. Sustainability is also a major obstacle, with many initiatives failing because donors have not
anticipated the cost of maintenance and upgrading of technology and services. Central models of
management and development those are linguistically and culturally relevant to local communities are
next to impossible when projects are being implemented nationally or from state capitals in ways that fail
to take local needs into consideration. The result is a constant tussle between local requirements and the
147
need to develop local materials with the economies of scale that are possible through more centralised
models.
A very large number of local and regional initiatives have failed to increase the knowledge base
regarding what works and what doesn’t. There is not enough documentation and sharing of knowledge of
interventions of ICT in education. Replication and up-scaling of efforts becomes difficult in the absence
of such information. Institutional collaboration is also noticeable by its paucity. Thus, it is possible to
have efforts in the same region working independently and unwilling to collaborate or pool efforts for
greater effectiveness.
THE METHODOLOGY TO OVERCOME THE DIFFICULTIES IN ADOPTING ICT IN
EDUCATION
The limitations can’t be addressed at a time; First, it is impossible in a country like India to
address these challenges through centralized planning and decision making. Second, central control
makes for a cumbersome and slow process of hardware and software acquisition and production and
response to problems and issues. Third, a decentralized educational system with multiple players cannot
expect to continue to operate with a central monopoly over the control and operation of the delivery of
education. Fourth, there is increasing evidence of local efforts succeeding, where nationwide efforts have
failed, for the simple reason that local efforts have addressed local needs, local culture and local
language. Initiatives such as Gyan Doot and the Jhabua Development Communication Project are just
two examples of local efforts succeeding. Finally, many local efforts cannot be up-scaled, for the simple
reason they address local problems and succeed because they are local.
CONCLUSION:
Thus, in the present research paper it has been discussed the introductory part of ICT and its use
in education sector. It has been also discussed about the advantages of ICT in education. Various
limitations and methods to overcome the problems in ICT are also given in the present paper. There is a
great potential to learn from India’s experiments with the application of ICTs in education. There are few
countries that can match India as for determining what works and what doesn’t. The country has all the
situations and conditions of developing countries. As a first step, there is a critical need to document
Indian efforts for the benefit of its own decision-makers, institutions, NGOs and civil society. It is
necessary to know what works and what does not, and what the implications are for policymaking,
planning and implementation. A second step would be to inform the capacity-building and training
provided to staff in Indian institutions. Specifically, it needs to be understood that any new technology
comes not merely with hardware and software, but with a learning and teaching style and grammar of its
own, and that management practices need to be adapted in order to use the technologies effectively.
REFERENCES:
Ghosh, P.P. (2005) Modern Educational Technologies, Aavishkar Publishers, Distributers, Jaipur, Rajasthan.
Johnson, D. (1996). Evaluating the Impact of Technology: The Less Simple Answer, the Educational Technology
Journal, Vol. 5, No. 5, January
Laurence, J C. (2006) Impact of Digital Technology on Education, Rajat Publication, New Delhi.
Marilyn Leask, (2001) Issues in Teaching Using ICT, Published by Routledge
Sagar K. (2005) Digital Technology in Education, Author press publication, New Delhi.
148
POEM
The Restless Soul
-Ambri Shukla
The Restless Soul
From those gloomy nights,
to those bewildered days.
with every twilight
And with sun’ rays
I was mesmerized,
and continues to be.
He knows,
or he might pretend
Not to be.
Still with that
existing frozen hour.
Expecting not to further sour.
The restless soul
Wanders, wanders, Wanders.
149

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