Contribution of Women in Indo-English Novel

SHYAM M. ASNANI
Government College, Ajmer

An interesting aspect of the modern Western education in India has been the creative release of the feminine sensibility. The history of modern India bears a testimony to the fact that women in this country have not only shared the exciting and dangerous burdens of the struggle for independence, but have also articulated the national impulse and the awareness of cultural change in the realm of art and literature. In the personality of Sarojini Naidu, the temper of Indian womanhood achieved sit comprehensive synthesis; “She was not only the lark of the Indian political awakening but also the nightingale of the Indian imagination.

In the field of the English Novel, women novelists like Jane Austen and George Eliot, Bronte sisters and Mrs. Gaskell, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf have already established their own “great tradition”; and today a woman novelist in England, lacking neither a room of her own nor financial independence, can well compete with the male counterparts. In the development of the Indo-English novel, the women writers have also achieved a remarkable  imaginative self-sufficiency which merits recognition in spite of  its relatively later manifestation and limitations.

Women, it must be conceded, are natural story-tellers irespective of the fact that they don’t write or publish. And in India we have seen how the marvellous Toru Dutt wrote both a French and an English novel in her teens (she died at the age of 21 in 1877). Her two novels Bianca, or The Young Spanish Maiden and Le Journal de Mademoicelle d’Arvers are the autobiographical projections of her precocious nature. The memory of the death of her brother and later of her elder sister, Aru, seeped into her sensibility.

Among other Indian women novelists in English may be mentioned Raj Lakshmi Debi–The Hindu Wife or The Enchanted Fruit (1878), Mrs. Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Kamala, a Story of Hindu Life (1894) and Saguna–A Study of Native Christian Life (1898). A much later writer, Iqbalunnisa Hussain, in her novel Purdah and Polygamy; Life in an Indian Muslim Household (1944) has also tried with commendable success to present the currents and conflicts in a typical Muslim family. As the title suggests the purdah and polygamy are the twin evils which need to be attacked in the traditional Muslim society. The novelist has artistically projected how Kabir, the chief character in the novel, marries four wives mainly to satisfy his lust, taking advantage of the religious sanction, how the mother-in-law is a dreaded tyrant, how the poor, helpless women are socially compelled to spend all their lives behind the purdah only, and how, finally Akram, the son of Kabir, reacts violently against the hide-bound superstitions and obsolete customs.

Zeenut Futehally is another novelist who in her first novel Zohra(1951), depicts the changing panorama of Muslim social life in Hyderabad. Zohra’s proud father, the Nawab Saheb, has named her “the brightest star in all the Heavens”. She stands tornbetween the old feudal and conventional social life that was fading fast being replaced by new resurgent life and nationalism. Modern politics of Gandhian era have also been deftly interwoven into the texture of this poignant story of a sensitive girl’s life whose face even in death appears as a “face that has been filtered through sorrow and suffering”. It is a touching story of Muslim social life.

Mrs. Vimla Raina, a well-known poetess and also a successful Hindi dramatist, earned a sudden tremendous reputation with the publication of her maiden attempt in Indo-English fiction. Ambapali(1962) is the historical account of the courtesan Ambapali who grows up into a vision of loveliness and is the woman loved by all in Vaishali and Magadh. In this drop of history and religion, Vimla Raina has produced the warm-blooded, throbbling, loving and yet pure character like Ambapali who stands in her glory with a number of other characters like Ajat Shatru, the king of Magadh, the gentle prince Suryamani, and Chandrahas who tries to smother his passion beneath ochre robes. In the midst of these and Kautilya, the ancient Machiavelli, there is the Buddha, preaching his gospels and showing his path leading to the “nirvan”. The way she renounces everything and becomes the first woman to be accepted by the Buddha as his disciple, is superb.

Miss Attia Hossain’s novel Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) and her earlier collection of short stories, Phoenix Fled (1953) describe how at the time of partition, a Muslim familyescaped to Pakistan leaving behind theirold grand-mother, who later on buries under her burning house. Sunlight on a Broken Column, autobiographical in its form, describes the life of a narrator–heroine Laila from an orphan girl of fifteen to the widowed mother of a girl of that period. It is a sensitive portrayal of the privileged class and its pangs of extinction. In a period of twenty years, as Laila’s fortuneschange, India too moves from colonialism to independence, losing old feudal order, its property, privileges and poise, giving room to the exertion, strain, frustration and toil ofthe post-independence era.

The book is not so much a “case” against Purdah as a well-shaped, genuinely felt reconstruction of life in such conditions, its collisions with the modern World, and the astonishingly tough-minded women it breeds. She writes from a Muslim point of view about the intense life of the Muslim family. Her study of Laila is very firm, clear, and sympathetic, and exhibits the sort of dilemma which the overwhelming claustraphobic life of the family in India tends to bring about–the character with a bias to independence and solitariness who becomes almost a solipsist in reaction to the smothering family. In Miss Hossain’s sensitive novel there is an attractive Persian glitter, a kind of strange dignity, a mare masculine force in the character of the women than one often gets in other Indian novels. This complicated and impressive novel keeps a number of different themes smoothly in play and firmly in order. The tense bitter Laila evokes in her character and suffering a great section of life in the Indian sub-continent which has been rarely heard of from the inside–the woman smouldering, snobbing and suffocating in Purdha.

Mrs. Frieda H. Das’s Into the Sun (1933) is one of the first works produced under the impact of Mahatma Gandhi. The aim of the author is to show how under the impact of the Gandhian movement, the very face of Indian social life was changing. The focal point is the traditional Indian woman. The new set of values that are set afloat by the reformative national movement, transforms an orthodox, diehard Brahmin familyinto an ideal product of the cultural synthesis of modern India. Rama Devi, the chief character of the novel, is symbolic of the emancipated Indian womanhood. A young widow, condemnedby the cruel conventions to a secluded life, she is irresistibly drawn into the vortex of non-violent freedom struggle–a struggle as much personal for her, as it is national. “Confronted by her mother, representing the decadent orthodoxy, Rama Devi, the ‘Asuryampasya’ triumphantly marches into the sun.”

In Red Hibiscus (1962), Padmini Sengupta has fictionalised the problems of the new generation of young women falling an easy prey to the enticing and dangerous guiles of the modern and so-called sophisticated society. It is a pleasing fictional song of the protagonist’s passage from the stage of romantic innocence to that of marital experience. In contrast to her compatriots, Venu Chitale takes up a bigger canvas to paint the complete picture of the renascent India during the Ghandhian era. It is this image of India in transition that Chitale attempts to describe in her novel In Transit (1950). A Maharashtrian joint family with its destiny dependent on the national movement, forms the pivot of the story. The narrative is woven from the warp and woof of the changes being noiselessly effected in the lives of Indian families of culture and prestige. Apart from the artistic subsumption of the vast horizons of national experience, the novel presents vivid vignettes of the joint Hindu family. It is generally said that the Hindu joint family is breaking rapidly under the stress of modern forces, but, in this all round and rapid metamorphosis, some may think it desirable to have preserved in a permanent form a faithful picture of the cultural traditions, mental equipment and customary observance of such families before their extinction becomes complete. Viewed from this angle, this novel, written in a flowing and fervid style, is a remarkable success.

Santha Rama Rau has a number of travel books to her credit: Home to India, East of Home, My Russian Journey and Gifts of Passage. She has also made a dramatic version of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1960). Her first novel, Remember the House (1956) is a story of Bombay upper class society with its colourful ladies, drinking parties and princes. The story, in fact, describes how Indira or Baba, as she is called still by her childhood name, marries Hari, an eligible young man, after having refused once to marry him. When her father dies, she has to get settled one way or the other. As such after meeting Nicky and Alix and dallying with romance with them, she decides to prefer Hari to the princes of romantic mirage. She can now well feel that the West cannot easi1y mix with the East, and she finds hidden innate strength in the traditional culture to absorb shocks from outside, and her progress “from adhesion to romantic tinsel to the calm appreciation of the need for security and commonsense” is presented as something natural as well as commendable.

The inherent sense of adventure of Kay, the heroine of Santha Rama Rau’s recent and best selling novel, The Adventuress, drives her, in spite of herself, to assume a different history, even sometimes a different personality with a friendly stranger. She begins her love affairs in post-war Tokyo where, for the victorious American soldier she symbolises Japan’s enigmatic glamour. She suddenly finds herself a guest and then a hostess in Philippines; a country stubbornly trying to maintain its aristocratic, cosmopolitan character. Her fortunes take her to Shanghai justbefore its fall to the communists. In this city of corruption, vice and violence, she is always a “comfort”, ironically to the people uprooted like herself whether it be grass-widowers, or rich ones in far away Manila. The story of a beautiful young woman’s search for fulfilment reaching out through trial and error, and the ravages of war, to la dolce vita, is at once a touching and frank account. The author, an Indian journalist in New York, has won a place in the literary world without losing her roots at home.

Nargis Dalal is pretty well on way to be a significant Indo-English novelist. She has been writing for many years and has contributed innumerable articles, stories, literary essays to various journals and magazines of India and abroad. Winner of a number of first prizes in short-story competitions, she writes for the B. B. C. frequently and has four books to her credit-Minari, Neuer a Dull moment, A Birthday Present and The Sisters. Minari is her first attempt at fiction-writing and is a passionate story of love and politics set in a hill-station of present day India. Despite credible characterization, an uncontrived plot and smoothly flowing narrative, the novel fails to impress. As an immature artist, Dalal in this ~book oversimplifies the things with the use of popular psychology, insists on stating the obvious and fails to explore the full potential of the interesting theme. \

The Sisters traces the fortunes of Nina and Rita, un-identical twin sisters who, from small beginnings in childhood, go on to poison each other’s lives to a ghastly climax. It surely is not a great work of art, but then the greening of the novelist is more important than the greatness of The Sisters. This is a definite step towards the novelist’s steady and assured progress to maturity. The Sisters, undoubtedly, is an interesting tale told well.

Coming to the top-ranking women novelists in India, the best and most neglected is Mrs. R. P. Jhabvala, the most gifted is Kamala Markandaya, the most courageous is Nayantara Sahgal, and the newest is Anita Desai. Mrs. Jhabvala’s seven novels and three collections of short-stories describe the furious social scuffing in the present-day India. All her novels are full of local colour and clamour, dealing with the young who are inert, romantic and none-too-wise, and the old who are cool, calculating and rigid. She describes the head on collision between the traditional and the modern, the East and the West, and the confusion that follows in the wake of these collisions.

Kamala Markandaya’s eight novels written between 1954 and 1973 are remarkable for their range of experience. Nectar in aSieve (1954) portrays rural India’s serenity, despair and tyranny; Some Inner Fury ( 1956) which includes a highly educated young woman and her English lover who are torn apart by the Quit India Movement of the time, deals with the conflict between Eastern and Western influences focussed through a marriage; A Sience of Desire (1960) reflects the tensions, the strength and the inadequacies and aspirations of middle class Indian life. Gentle in love and sharp in perception, the novel beautifully conveys the mixture of moods, the fiction of faith and reason, the clash of ideas between the old and the young; A Handful of Rice (1966) shows a hard struggle of life in a modern urban city and its demoralization through the marriage of a peasant-boy Ravi and the so-called cultured and sophisticated Nalini. Possession (1963) reiterates the theme of Eastern spirituality with Western materialism; and The Coffer Dams (1969) examines the love-hate relationships between the guest Whites and native Blacks creating piquant situation till a calamity overtakes both. But she has woefully failed to display the same intimacy and familiarity with these areas of life; as in her characteristic work–A Silence of Desire.

Nayantara Sahgal, a young, angry mini-prophet, is a writer of very sharpened sensibilities. She has brought fiction to new dimensions which underline a rich heritage co-mingled with strong Western impact. In her four novelsso far: A Time to be Happy (1958), This Time of Morning (1965), Storm in Chandigarh (1960), and The Day in Shadow (1971), she writes aboutthose areas of life which she has known intimately and of which she has direct and first hand experience. It is the upper strata, including the Upper middle class, landlords, bureaucrats, business executives, industrialists, administrators, politicians, university professors, diplomats and wealthy well-to-dos in general. A Time to be Happy discusses the problem springing from the slowly evolvingsocio-political situation in the country in the turbulent forties: the theme of adjustment to a shifting political panorama in a country struggling to be free. In This Time of Morning, the author stands for the new humanism and a new morality, according to which a woman is not to be taken a mere toy, an object oflust and momentary pleasure, but man’s equal and honoured partner. Storm in Chandigarh and The Day in Shadow repeat the theme of “lack of sympathy and understanding between man-woman relationship”. In The Day in Shadow Mrs. Sahgal has tried to figure out something that has happened to her – the shattering experience of divorce. She has also tried to show how even in a free country like ours, where women are equal citizens, a woman can be criminally exploited without creating a ripple.

Anita Desai, another young, promising writer, rose to eminence with the publication of her first novel, Cry, the Peacock (1963), which portrays a character psychologically, a story of psychical, intangible happenings, through the married life of Maya and Gautama, where a word, a look, a gesture are as important events as the deceptive half-lights and the brooding darkness. The distinctive style, intensely individual imagery with sensuous richness is curiously characteristic of Maya’s hyper-sensitive temperament. Anita’s nextnovel Voices in the City (1965) describes the corrosive effects of city life upon an Indian family.’ The focus here is on human futility. It is not a novel of action or character, but of atmosphere, the atmosphere of doom and destruction, which the characters and action help realize. The sombre atmosphere reminds one of the cosmic tragedy in Emile Bronte’s The Wathering Heights. Her third novel Bye-bye Blackbird (1971) does not describe any mental or emotional state of an individual’s mind. This time the author gives a refreshingly new treatment to a familiar, weighty and topical theme of coloured immigrants who have a difficult time in England; and to whom that country says “bye-bye” not always very politely. Against this ground, the novelist forges divers and powerful theme through vivid portrayal of Indian characters steeped in a unique love-hatred relationship with England. There are Devs among the “blackbirds” who prefer to stay on in England, though it means putting up with insults. On the other hand, there are immigrants like Adit, in whom the insulting environment creates nausea and aggravates homesickness. Although Adit and his English wife Sarah decide to return to India at the end of the book, one can see this is not suggested as a solution to their basic dilemma.

In spite of a score of weaknesses, it must be admitted that these women-writers are working, and their novels on the whole have life and substance and present a convincing picture of human existence. The total picture is one of hope. It may also be seen that women have a more important role in Indo-English literature than their sisters in any of the Indian languages. One of the major factors responsible for this is that they all have come from the higher economic, social and educated strata of Indian society–most of them educated abroad and thoroughly westernised in their outlook. There can be no two opinions that a good, sound education in English gives a woman-writer a big and thrilling start in the writing career.