Seema Chauhan
Research Scholar (English),
Uttar Pradesh Rajarshi
Tondan Open University, Allahabad.
The theme of man-woman relationship in
Anita Desai’s novels reveals her consummate craftsmanship. Mrs. Desai sincerely
broods over the fate and future of modern woman particularly in
male-chauvinistic society and her annihilation at the altar of marriage. The
novelist however dose not challenge the futility of marriage as an institution
but discloses the inner psyche of the characters through their relations. In
Desai’s novels most marriages are proved to be unions of incompatibility. Men
are considered to be rational whereas women are sensitive and emotional. They
have their different attitudes and interests so they look at thing in different
ways and react to same conditions differently. Mostly women have been both
culturally and emotionally dependent on me, any disruption of attachment or
affiliation are seen not as a loss of relationship but “a total loss of self,”1 which are then seen as
neurosis. The relationship between family and insanity as suggested here is
relevant to the study of Anita Desai’s characters.
Anita
Desai has explored different aspects of feminine psyche which also includes
man-woman relationships. The novel Cry
the peacock is a family play mainly concerned with the theme of marital
discord between husband, Gautama, and wife, Maya. The play is about maya’s cry
for love and relationship in her loveless wedding with Gautama; the peachock’s
cry is an implication of Maya’s anguished cry for love and life of involvement.
Anita Desai has dealt with a sterile woman, highly sensitive and emotional who is
married to Gautama, a busy, prosperous, middle-aged lawyer. The husband is too
much engrossed in his own affairs to meet the demands, partly temperamental,
partly, spiritual, of his young wife. Gautama’s sensibilities are too rough and
practical to suit Maya. Albeit Gautama is a faithful husband who loves and
cares her in his own way yet Maya is never satisfied and happy. Usha Pathania,
a noted critic, remarks: “Marital relationships are established with the
explicit purpose of providing companionship is sadly missing in the
relationship between Maya and Gautama.”2
The novel exposes an impression of marital inconguity and unhappy conjugal
life. As Kohli points out, “No other writer is so much concerned with the life
of young men and woman in Indian cities as Anita Desai is.”3
The
relationships between man and woman point out the plus point and minus point of
brides and bridegrooms. Wedding is a union of two souls and two bodies. It is
to be established very consciously and carefully. General situations in society
are such that no apt time or notion is offered to these affairs. Its outcomes
are the clashes, desperation, obsession, alienation and loneliness. “In Indian
Society, if a marriage is successful then credit is seldom given to a female
for her contribution to make it successful. If a marriage becomes unsuccessful
then the woman is sometimes held responsible for the same.”4 But this notions are not accepted by the
self-conscious and self-respecting woman in our society. P.F. Patil again
suggestes it that, “All marriages in Desai’s novels are more or less business
transaction. A marriageable daughter is handed over to the male-partner without
considering the delicacy of her mind and feelings. She has to fulfil either the
parent’s responsibilities or the relatives demands with diferent intentions.”5 Maya’s marriage with
Gautama is a fine instance of her father’s friendship.
Anita
Desai not only portrays the feminine of a common woman but also the subnormal
bordering on abnormal woman. The women who are under so much of psychic
pressure that they cannot be known for insanity but then they are explicitly
normal. The first character that comes to our mind is that of Maya who is
hypersensitive and because of her alienation she is almost a mental wreck. Ann
Lowry Weir, a remarkable critic, rightly assesses the character of Maya in
terms of man-woman relationship through Indian ethos and culture. In this way,
in his critical estimation the critic suggests:
Maya is an Indian, and her
thoughts have an Indianness about them, despite their disturbed state. She
reflects on Indian weather, Indian flora and fauna, Indian religious and
mythical figures.6
Anita Desai in Voices in the city has depicted
feminine sensibility mainly through the delineation of man-woman relationship.
Firstly, the novel presents an eccentric and inconsistent figure of a conjugal
life through Nirode’s parents. The marital conflict changes Nirodes’ parents
into psychic demon. The father diverts into a drunkard, adulterate and
dishonourable being quite different from an easy-going, sports loving and fond
father. The mother is converted from a sweet, sensitive, consummate beauty into
a coldly, practical and occupied woaman having no human heat and delicacy even
for her own children. Amla’s remarks about her own parents’ incongruous
conjugal relationship are obvious.
Monisha
and Jiban signify the most usual and painful instance of conjugal conflict.
This paradigm presents an acute complication and heart-crushing agony.
Monisha’s winding journey towards her horrible ending paints her physical and
psychical diversion in black, mourning colous. From a simple, silent sensitive,
beautiful mildly self-centred girl, she transforms into a sterile, insame,
diary-writing woman.
Monisha
lives in her husband’s house, shares his bed, serves his family, alleged of
stealing juban’s money and it is Jiban who mildly covers her burnt body and
begs forgiveness from her relatives. Her death in the end parted the bondages
that sequestered her soul and body in the life.
Indian
male-chauvinistic families expect woman to adjust. The opposite tendency of the
family members, hostile social conventions and backgrounds make these marital
disharmonies as they exist in Indian male-dominated society.
N.R.Gopal
aptly points out that, “The life of a woman like in the given circumstances is
never happy and the result is that she burns herself to death. Her impending
death by suicide has been poetically described by Anita Desai even before her
actual death which comes later in the novel”.7
Where shall we Go This Summer? Is an
extension of Cry, The Peacock – the
theme, the atmosphere, the characters, though matured, producing the similar
effects to a large extent. It presents another intense commentary on the
incoherence of man-woman relationship that renders Sita and Raman, the wife and
husband, spiritually homeless. Sita’s psychic plight too is similar to Maya and
Monisha. She is also oppressed and depressed with loveless wedlock with Raman.
In
this novel Sita quakes at the views of giving birth to a fifth child. She
becomes so upset that she decides to go back to the Island of Manori-that piece
of land in which memory and desire, romance and reality, the beautiful and the
sinister are inextricably mixed together.Against all the sane advice she goes
to the magic island in advance stage of preganancy. She dwells in the world of
frenzy, feeling that going to the Island and thereby to the world of childhood,
she could prevent the biological process of delivery.
Sita felt to make a compromise
to live with her husband and travel alone mentally and emotionally. But after
witnessing that tender scene in the garden one evening of a young woman being
tenderly caressed by a man, see suddenly became acutely conscious of what she
was missing in her life. Later on it became improbable for her to make any
compromise. Hence she escaped to the land of magic where she had spent a
pleasant with her father. But she found that time had made it spoil there
also-on the place and its people. She feels suffocated by the “Vegetarian
complacence,” “insularity” and unimaginative way of life of her husband and his
people.
This intense realization bring
her back to painful reality, forcing her to retrace her steps back toward the
safety and slavish security of her house in Bombay, to wait resignedly for the
birth of her child. Sita takes more wise step then Maya and controls herself
and she acts before a peril can take place.
The man-woman relationship
between Raman and Sita is based on the class values, of principles, of
confidence even, or between normal, double social standards and the
iconoclastic attitude of inflexible honesty. It is an encounter between the
adjustment with disappointment, as Raman puts it and the ability to say the
great No if and when needed, as trusted by Sita. This is not solely a case of
an emancipated woman revolting against the slavish bonds of marriage. It is
much more than that, it is a question of basic truth that is better and naked
and can neither be hidden, nor be halved to suit individual.
Anita Desai’s next novel Bye-By Blackbird appears to be an
authentic study of man-woman relationships abused by cultural clashes. R.S.Sharma has rightly
said that, in the novel “the tension between the local and immigrant blackbird
involves issues of alienation and accommodation that the immigrant has to
confront in an alien and yet familiar world.”8
Sarah’s identity crisis is to
be seen in a later authorial reference in the second chapter of novel. If a
girl marries in a similar custom and culture it is very easy for her to adjust
to her new home and family members. But inter-caste, and inter-culture wedding
causes settlement problems which are not easy to overcome. For Sarah’s
situation the problem becomes more intricate for she has married a man whose
caste was once ruled over by her own class in spite of ‘progress’ and
modernity-old prejudices die-hard.
In the novel Sarah’s problem
is human. She wants to remain as a real person either in England or in India.
She attempts to remain a sincere wife and hence her marriage life is not
undone. Sarah’s husband had been playing riddle albeit not as consciously as
she. But he also realizes falseness of his existence in England and Sarah too
knows it well. As a wife Sarah does well. Of all wives of Anita Desai Sarah is
the best in comprehending and helps her husband. We have all our praise for
this alien wife who comprehends her husband, his family and country which she
would concede, once in India.
Thus, we see in the context of
man-woman relationship that Sarah’s parents avow her and her husband. But the
remarkable thing about Sarah is that she is a dedicated wife and even though
she endures suffering and psychic torture, she does not hesitate to leave her
native country and go for a good tour to India.
Anita Desai’s fire on the mountain creates the
problems of man-woman relationship as a basic component part of uninteresting
family life. She initiates with Nanda Kaul who finally discharges all her
unloving husband and his world. The novel depicts the agonized cry of Nanda
Kaul, an old woman who has had too much of the world with her and so longs for
a clam, retired life. Nanda Kaul rejoices at least at the outset of her
alienated, loveless and affectionless life. Nanda Kaul’s wedding is quite based
on physical passion and circumstantial convenience for the male. Nanda Kaul
becomes a mother of many unwanted, uncared children. She always arranges the
dinner table as a house-wife. Externally everything appears to be smooth, but
internally Nanda Kaul burns with a fire of frustration.
On the contrary, Mr. Kaul
keeps his beloved Miss Davidson, a teaching staff. He invites her to his
separate bedroom. But Nanda shows the frozen smile on her face. She looks his
family and his house with commanding confidence. The situations which she
faces, upset her and she feels to remain a widow. She is always waiting with a
singular, burning, soul-destroying hatred for her husband to cease living,
Nanda Kaul lives like a ‘recluse’.
The reality about Nanda Kaul’s
husband is that he had never loved or cherished her. He had carried on a
lifelong affair with Miss David whom he had not married only because she was a
Christian but whom he had loved all his life. She appeared face to face with
reality when she was informed of her friend Ila Das’s rape and brutal murder.
Thus, the fire on the mountain had destroyed everything for her.
Clear Light of Day is a
significant novel in the sense that it does not delineate the traditional theme
of Desai’s fictional world rather we get a fresh addition in the treatment of
man-woman relationships at the hand of the novelist. In this novel Desai does
not write about the tension and coherence between husband and wife but about
that between brother and sister. Bim, the chief character of the novel, is free
from physical torture of an incompatible wedding: she chooses to take no part
in marriage so that she could dedicate herself to look after her mentally
retarded brother baba, her old Mira Masi and her younger brother Raja. Bim and
Raja are very close to each other. Other character Tara and Bakul’s wedded life
is similar to the wedded life of Maya and Gautama; but it presents a lesser
point of insanity and perturbation. The novel delineates a pathetic picture of
a widow Mira Masi who is customarily destroyed by her relatives and society.
In this novel, we see the
growth of Anita Desai’s attitude to the theme of man-woman relationships. Time
has played the significant role in their relationships. Not only Anita Desai
herself said it in the novel but at the end of the novel there is a quotation
from T.S.Eliot’s “Four uarter”
i.e. “Time the destroyer is time the preserver”. D.H.Lawrence points out that
“The great relationship for humanity will always be the relation between man
and woman. The relation between man and man, woman and woman, parent and child,
will always be subsidiary.”9
R.K.Srivastava, has rightly said that “the man_woman relationship becomes more
important due to rapid industrialization, growing awareness among woman of
their rights and individualities, and the westernization of attitudes and lives
of the people.”10
In Custody, a
typical novel of Anita Desai, delineates different sorts of man-woman
relationships. The novel does not deal with either a sensitive and highly
strong woman protagonist or any intense introspection bordering on neurosis.
The novelist presents a male protagonists, Deven Sharma, “ a diffident and
awkward hero” coming through the trials of life with a positive vision and self
sufficiency. The novel is about an unheroic, unimpressive and unassertive
lecturer of Hindi in a degree college near Delhi. He is married to an insipid
wife Sarla who is miles away from her husband’s literary pursuits. Once again
the novelist presents an ill-matched marriage which is the favourite theme of
Anita Desai. In this novel, there are two aspects of Deven’s role as a husband
and a lecturer and he is a failure in both of them.
In the novel we find Nur Shaeb
who rejects his uncultured ugly wife, the more glamorous temptress, Imtiaj
Begum. Here female’s physical beauty is magnified at the cost of his first
wife’s feelings.
Thus, we see that the two
wives Sarla and Imtiaz Begum do not revolt against their obsession and the
hegemony of thir husbands. It is only because they are uneducated and having no
source of income they are totally dependent on their husbands. They feel about
their torment and deserted attitude of their husbands but having no means of
their livelifhood they remain their submissively.
Baumgarter’s Bombay is
a significant novel based on different plan and Mrs. Desai has explored
different aspects of feminine psyche which also include man-woman
relationships. The present novel is quite different from her preceding novels.
It is about a rootless man without family in India. The family is only present,
albeit not in realistic level but at the psychic level in the memory of the
hero, Baumgartner.
In this novel the novelist
does not delineate the insanity and tension between husband and wife. The whole
incidents move round the single protagonist. He has no wife and hence no
family. His unhappy childhood and lonely youth have made him and introvert.
Both Baumgartner and Lotte suffer terribly from loneliness and homelessness.
But their attitudes towards life in India are different. Baumgarter tries his
best to be accepted by India whereas Lotte does not feel any such need. She
lives in India throughout her life as an outsider and never tries to avow India
or be avowed by her. She always pines for the company of her native countrymen.
Thus the novel presents different sort of man-woman relationship.
References:
1-
Jean Baker Miller, Towards A New Psychology of woman, Allen lane, Penguin Books, 1978,
p.87
2-
Usha pathania, Human Bonds and Bondages: The fiction of Anita Desai and Kamala Markandaya
(Delhi : Kanishaka Publishing House, 1992) p.14
3-
Suresh Kohli, Indian Women Novelists in English, Times Weekly, 8 November, 1970,
p.3
4-
P.F.Patil, The Theme of Marital Disharmony in the Novels of Anita Desai; Indian
Women Novelists, Set 1: Vol. 2, ed. By R.K.Dhawan, Published by Prestige
Books, 1991, p.128
5-
Ibid, p. 128
6-
Ann Lowry Weir, The Illusion of Maya : Feminine consciousness in Anita Desai’s Cry the
Peacock : Perspective on Anita Desai, R.K.Srivastava (Ghaziabad : Vimal
Prakashan, 1984) p.154
7-
N.R.Gopal, A Critical Study of the Novels of Anita Desai. New Delhi Atlantic
publishers and distributors, New Delhi, 1995, p.25
8-
R.S.Sharma, Accommondation and the Locale in Anita Desai’s Bye-Bye, Blackbird, The
Literary Criterion
9-
D.H.Lawrence, Morality and the novel in David Lodge, ed. 20th Century
Literature Criticism (London : Longman Group Ltd., 1972) p.130.
10-
Ramesh Kr. Srivastava. Perspectives on Anita Desai. Ghaziabad Vimal Prakashan, 1984,
p.XXVI
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