Not all Indian women have been weak, submissive, downtrodden, deprived and uneducated in modern, medieval as well as ancient history. In fact, India has been the origin of autonomous unmarried female artists, priestesses, warrior queens, women wrestlers, women bodyguards of royalty, women soldiers... and women guards posted at forts, palaces and harems with the authority to check even fellow officers when necessary! Mind you, all the examples I've listed up to this sentence existed in India's ancient past! If this has sparked your interest, I now inform you that as the history known to me is long, complex and rich in examples, all I have learned will be elaborated to the best of my ability within a series of blog posts about the topic of obscured women of India. Hence, the words "Part I" in the title of this post you are reading now!
I think that clearly, the majority of the world's population (including many people of Indian ethnicity) has not seen an authentic representation of the wide spectrum of India's women in history and the present. As a person who is very lucky to have been exposed to such a representation since my early childhood, through the work by my mother (social historian, Dr Kusum Pant Joshi) and father (film historian/critic and documentary filmmaker, Lalit Mohan Joshi), knowing and/or learning about generations of other Indian women in my own family, watching films as well as my own independent reading and research, I think it's a shame that the reality of this topic has not been widely disseminated by mainstream media, a number of academicians and even some politicians and activists. I don't deny the problems as well as the massive improvements in the overall state of women in India and the world. However, it's apparent that the obscurity of the actual variance of India's spectrum of past and present women is due not only to an innocent ignorance within some who work in mainstream media, academic research, politics and activism, but also to a deep-seated prejudice concerning India's women and deliberate actions by others in these fields to obscure the women who defy this prejudice. This is the unfortunate legacy of invasions of India and has played a factor in the disempowerment of some Indian women who live in oppressive families. Here, the oppressors and the oppressed have no sight of their heritage.
Now on a short tangent, in case anyone misunderstands me here, I don't romanticise India or any other place or people. I'm aware that crimes and acts of discrimination against women have been committed in ancient Indian history before India fell under foreign rule, just as there are worldwide crimes and discrimination against women co-occurring today with progressive attitudes and mobility for women across the world. Nonetheless, I don't think one should deny or underrate the positive aspects of India's history by looking only at its negative aspects and overemphasising them. Sayings about each individual having their own realities/perspectives and life's ups and downs in the present also apply to history. As we can safely say that each individual is complex and can't be narrowed down to a label, we can't label any part of history with certainty, especially since we don't know each and every single detail of any history.
Now to come back to focus, I think it's important for those of the oppressive Indian families to review their past in order to apply the positive elements of Indian women's history to changing their own mindsets and behaviour. I believe this would be much more effective than their being confined to notions of women's emancipation being a new, "threatening" Western phenomenon of modern history and, hence, reacting with resentment and obstinacy towards criticism of their current oppressiveness, from Western feminists and others outside India.
After much thought, I've decided that a good area to start with is postcolonial literature about the position of Indian women in the family. Here, I would like to share an essay I wrote about this subject as I was studying English Literature in 2012. Those who are familiar with the writings of Shashi Deshpande and Anita Desai might also be interested in my analysis. My apologies for not being able to include my footnotes. Correct me if I'm wrong - to me, there doesn't seem to be a way of including footnotes in blog posts on this website!
Future posts I'm planning to write for this particular blog series on Obscured Women of India will be about powerful Indian women characters in some noteworthy films of India over the years and real-life powerful Indian women from the twentieth and nineteenth centuries, medieval and ancient times. I think it may be logical to go in reverse chronological order.
I'll keep doing my best to keep my knowledge updated. Please feel free to share any thoughts, questions and/or constructive feedback! Discussions and debates are most welcome, as long as everyone will be respectful.
(Please note: all comments will be moderated, so any attempts to be abusive will be in vain!)
Chandra Talpade Mohanty criticises Western feminists as homogenising all "Third World" women as being oppressed by their societies, submissive, naïve, backward, uneducated and unaware of their rights as being equal to those of men. She disapproves of Western feminists suggesting that women can only emancipate themselves by adopting their Western ideal of revolting, completely breaking away from all their older socio-cultural gender roles, and playing a dominant role in their household. Mohanty illustrates that "Third World" women have developed their own alternative feminisms that liberate them by asserting their rights against any oppressive patriarchy and (simultaneously) sustaining their original cultural identity through accommodating some of their socio-cultural values. Using Mohanty's argument as a theoretical framework, I will analyse postcolonial literature about the position of Indian women in the family. I will argue that literary works of Indian women authors living in India clearly illustrate that, in line with Mohanty's argument, there have been and still are Indian women in the family who are privileged and have a reasonably good status. I will argue that they are revealed by such literature to have their own unique strength and, therefore, as having no need to embrace Western feminism in order to be liberated. Some of these women could perhaps benefit more by developing their own Indian feminism that accommodates their socio-cultural values in order to achieve a more "balanced" and satisfying lifestyle and relationship with their husbands and families. I will present documentation of the historically held rights of Indian women and the writings of Shashi Deshpande as opposed to the writings of Anita Desai.
In Chapter 1 of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Solidarity, Mohanty criticises the tendencies in scholarship and writing by educated "Western" feminists (whether they are based in Western discourse or representing "Third World" women for reflecting on their own culture) for portraying Third World women as oppressed, underprivileged and voiceless. According to Mohanty, the "average Third World woman" is defined as being "domestic" (i.e., backward), not progressive, and "illiterate" (i.e., ignorant) since the "Third World" is perceived as "developing" (unlike the "First World") and, therefore, as "not evolved to the extent the West has". Western feminists have tended to assume that Third World women most strongly wish to be "released" from male patriarchy, like women in the West. In terms of their position in the family, all Third World women, including Indian women, are viewed to be a monolithic, oppressed group, regardless of their cultural and historical contexts. By homogenising the experiences of different groups of women in Third World countries, including Indian women in India, this mode of feminist analysis overlooks "all marginal and resistant modes and experiences", where Third World women are not oppressed. In the case of how Indian women living in India are viewed by Western feminist scholarship and writing, this tendency is evidently the legacy of colonialism (i.e., a postcolonial view). This is because, during colonial rule, Indian women became objects of "political contestation" during the Raj. Western patriarchs competed with Eastern patriarchs by selectively reading classical texts to arrive at diametrically opposite views on Indian women, in order to help justify their rule and Westernisation of India. Evangelicals exaggerated the abject condition of some Indian women to justify converting them to Christianity. Colonial evangelical commentaries based on a bird's eye view of some misogynist Indian customs fuelled the Victorian British people's idea of Western superiority. For example, even though John Stuart Mill had never visited India, he described its women as "generally degraded" and concluded that "Nothing can exceed the contempt which Hindus entertain for their women". Such initial images of India left an indelible mark upon Europeans, in that they perceived Indian women to be underprivileged and ill-treated in the family.
I think that clearly, the majority of the world's population (including many people of Indian ethnicity) has not seen an authentic representation of the wide spectrum of India's women in history and the present. As a person who is very lucky to have been exposed to such a representation since my early childhood, through the work by my mother (social historian, Dr Kusum Pant Joshi) and father (film historian/critic and documentary filmmaker, Lalit Mohan Joshi), knowing and/or learning about generations of other Indian women in my own family, watching films as well as my own independent reading and research, I think it's a shame that the reality of this topic has not been widely disseminated by mainstream media, a number of academicians and even some politicians and activists. I don't deny the problems as well as the massive improvements in the overall state of women in India and the world. However, it's apparent that the obscurity of the actual variance of India's spectrum of past and present women is due not only to an innocent ignorance within some who work in mainstream media, academic research, politics and activism, but also to a deep-seated prejudice concerning India's women and deliberate actions by others in these fields to obscure the women who defy this prejudice. This is the unfortunate legacy of invasions of India and has played a factor in the disempowerment of some Indian women who live in oppressive families. Here, the oppressors and the oppressed have no sight of their heritage.
Now on a short tangent, in case anyone misunderstands me here, I don't romanticise India or any other place or people. I'm aware that crimes and acts of discrimination against women have been committed in ancient Indian history before India fell under foreign rule, just as there are worldwide crimes and discrimination against women co-occurring today with progressive attitudes and mobility for women across the world. Nonetheless, I don't think one should deny or underrate the positive aspects of India's history by looking only at its negative aspects and overemphasising them. Sayings about each individual having their own realities/perspectives and life's ups and downs in the present also apply to history. As we can safely say that each individual is complex and can't be narrowed down to a label, we can't label any part of history with certainty, especially since we don't know each and every single detail of any history.
Now to come back to focus, I think it's important for those of the oppressive Indian families to review their past in order to apply the positive elements of Indian women's history to changing their own mindsets and behaviour. I believe this would be much more effective than their being confined to notions of women's emancipation being a new, "threatening" Western phenomenon of modern history and, hence, reacting with resentment and obstinacy towards criticism of their current oppressiveness, from Western feminists and others outside India.
After much thought, I've decided that a good area to start with is postcolonial literature about the position of Indian women in the family. Here, I would like to share an essay I wrote about this subject as I was studying English Literature in 2012. Those who are familiar with the writings of Shashi Deshpande and Anita Desai might also be interested in my analysis. My apologies for not being able to include my footnotes. Correct me if I'm wrong - to me, there doesn't seem to be a way of including footnotes in blog posts on this website!
Future posts I'm planning to write for this particular blog series on Obscured Women of India will be about powerful Indian women characters in some noteworthy films of India over the years and real-life powerful Indian women from the twentieth and nineteenth centuries, medieval and ancient times. I think it may be logical to go in reverse chronological order.
I'll keep doing my best to keep my knowledge updated. Please feel free to share any thoughts, questions and/or constructive feedback! Discussions and debates are most welcome, as long as everyone will be respectful.
(Please note: all comments will be moderated, so any attempts to be abusive will be in vain!)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Postcolonial literature: the position of Indian women in the family
Chandra Talpade Mohanty criticises Western feminists as homogenising all "Third World" women as being oppressed by their societies, submissive, naïve, backward, uneducated and unaware of their rights as being equal to those of men. She disapproves of Western feminists suggesting that women can only emancipate themselves by adopting their Western ideal of revolting, completely breaking away from all their older socio-cultural gender roles, and playing a dominant role in their household. Mohanty illustrates that "Third World" women have developed their own alternative feminisms that liberate them by asserting their rights against any oppressive patriarchy and (simultaneously) sustaining their original cultural identity through accommodating some of their socio-cultural values. Using Mohanty's argument as a theoretical framework, I will analyse postcolonial literature about the position of Indian women in the family. I will argue that literary works of Indian women authors living in India clearly illustrate that, in line with Mohanty's argument, there have been and still are Indian women in the family who are privileged and have a reasonably good status. I will argue that they are revealed by such literature to have their own unique strength and, therefore, as having no need to embrace Western feminism in order to be liberated. Some of these women could perhaps benefit more by developing their own Indian feminism that accommodates their socio-cultural values in order to achieve a more "balanced" and satisfying lifestyle and relationship with their husbands and families. I will present documentation of the historically held rights of Indian women and the writings of Shashi Deshpande as opposed to the writings of Anita Desai.
In Chapter 1 of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Solidarity, Mohanty criticises the tendencies in scholarship and writing by educated "Western" feminists (whether they are based in Western discourse or representing "Third World" women for reflecting on their own culture) for portraying Third World women as oppressed, underprivileged and voiceless. According to Mohanty, the "average Third World woman" is defined as being "domestic" (i.e., backward), not progressive, and "illiterate" (i.e., ignorant) since the "Third World" is perceived as "developing" (unlike the "First World") and, therefore, as "not evolved to the extent the West has". Western feminists have tended to assume that Third World women most strongly wish to be "released" from male patriarchy, like women in the West. In terms of their position in the family, all Third World women, including Indian women, are viewed to be a monolithic, oppressed group, regardless of their cultural and historical contexts. By homogenising the experiences of different groups of women in Third World countries, including Indian women in India, this mode of feminist analysis overlooks "all marginal and resistant modes and experiences", where Third World women are not oppressed. In the case of how Indian women living in India are viewed by Western feminist scholarship and writing, this tendency is evidently the legacy of colonialism (i.e., a postcolonial view). This is because, during colonial rule, Indian women became objects of "political contestation" during the Raj. Western patriarchs competed with Eastern patriarchs by selectively reading classical texts to arrive at diametrically opposite views on Indian women, in order to help justify their rule and Westernisation of India. Evangelicals exaggerated the abject condition of some Indian women to justify converting them to Christianity. Colonial evangelical commentaries based on a bird's eye view of some misogynist Indian customs fuelled the Victorian British people's idea of Western superiority. For example, even though John Stuart Mill had never visited India, he described its women as "generally degraded" and concluded that "Nothing can exceed the contempt which Hindus entertain for their women". Such initial images of India left an indelible mark upon Europeans, in that they perceived Indian women to be underprivileged and ill-treated in the family.
Mohanty points out that there are some women from Third World countries who have been influenced to hold the same biases as some Western feminists. This includes Third World women who have lived away from their countries of origin. I would argue that this point applies to Indian women writers who have lived in the West for a considerably long time and who have not visited India to see or be "updated" on the current state of its women. Even if these women writers were brought up in India or had a long-term stay in India in previous decades (before moving to the West), the themes of their works would clearly be outdated as a result of not experiencing firsthand (and, therefore, not being regularly informed of) the shifts in the status of Indian women. Therefore, I argue that the literary works of these particular indian women writers, including Anita Desai, are not reliable or truly representative portrayals of Indian women living in India. Anita Desai was born and brought up in India, but moved to the West after the 1980s. Since then, she spends most of the year away from India. She admits that as a result of this, she feels like she is "drifting" further away from India and cannot write about it with the same "familiarity" as when she was in India. Therefore, I argue that her novels on Indian women living in India are outdated accounts and are biased by Western feminism. Moreover, the female protagonists in her novels are not "average" characters whom every Indian woman residing in India can identify with. As Desai herself admits:
I am interested in characters who are not average but have retreated or been driven into some kind of despair.
Indeed, the central female protagonists in her novels are highly oppressed and dominated by men and their patriarchal families. A most notable example is the character of Monisha in Voices in the City, a novel about family and the impact of the city of Calcutta (which is now Kolkata) on the protagonists. It is true that Desai wrote Voices in the City before she first moved away from India. However, I point out that in spite of this, the dominant home culture in Desai's household was the European one of her German mother (since her family spoke German at home). Although Desai says in an interview that she never identified herself as a German, she admits that she thinks about India "as an outsider", because of the influence of her mother, who did not completely assimilate within India and its culture, since "there was a European core in her which protested against certain Indian things, which always maintained its independence and separateness". Monisha is intelligent and well-read, but nobody in her family appreciates or cares about her, including her husband. She does not get privacy:
Moreover, Deshpande asserts that Indian women in the family do not need to rebel in the same way as Western feminism endorses. She related that the more current concern for women is balancing their career and self-development with their family responsibilities. As pointed out by Prasad and Chandra:
In spite of these constraints, Deshpande shows that Indian women of Saroja's generation were still privileged in the sense that many child and adult wives were educated by their husbands. After marrying Saroja when she was thirteen years old, Old Uncle educated Saroja as he felt that it was his duty to do so. Such a practice was encouraged by the Indian Women's Movement (part of the Social Reform Movement of the 1800s) in India and thus became commonplace during the nineteenth century. As outlined by Gandhi and Shah, the first mahila mandals organised by the Arya Samaj and the Brahmo Samaj (the Hindu revivalist and reformist organisations) provided women with a space for socialising and education. Women met other women outside their families, learned how to read and write and even how to view stars through a telescope. The fact that these actions were male-initiated and made by Indians for Indians, clearly counters the view of Western feminism that all women have always been oppressed by their families and men. In fact, these initiatives were "the first public propagation of the belief [of Indians] that it is not the destiny or fate of women to be oppressed, illiterate and ignorant". Moreover, "the Social Reform Movement set in motion forces which encouraged the emergence of a number of women doctors, social workers, teachers and scholars, the first cadres of the women's movement who gradually took over from men the cause and the organisation". By the early 1900s, numerous women's organisations grew, "mainly in urban centres, but remarkably all over India". Among these were a Brahmin women's home built by Subbalaxmi Amal in Madras, the Mahila Seva Samaj in Mysore, the Bhagni Samaj in Pune, and the Chamanbai Maternity and Child Welfare Board in Baroda. Some liberal histories claim that reformers are indebted to Western secular and Christian thought for their ideas. However, they claim this without acknowledging the reformers' early education in humanist Indian scriptures. For example, Tamil reformers Vedanayakam Pillai and Madhaviah frequently quoted the Jaina sage Tiruvallavar (ca. 100 CE) on gender equity.
Overall, Deshpande's novels effectively reflect the strong position of Indian women in the family, as opposed to Western feminist accounts and works by Desai and other Indian women writers influenced by the bias in Western feminism. However, Shashi Deshpande's novels mainly represent urban middle-class women of the culture of India's region of Karnataka. Since India is a multilingual country that is multicultural and economically diverse with a wide variety of urban as well as rural contexts in which gender hierarchies are understood and challenged, one cannot even have a holistic view of the position and status of each and every single Indian woman in the family. As aforementioned, there are pockets of aboriginal and Dravidian societies that are different from the more mainstream patriarchal societies in India as they are traditionally matrilineal and have sexual norms favourable to women. For example, the Todas of Tamil Nadu have been documented by W. H. Rivers as having exotic matrilineal and "promiscuous" practices favourable for women in the early 1900s. Also, as noted by Singh, Wlodarski, Mahapatra, Karafin, Karlin and Thomas, women in Kerala have enjoyed great freedom and power over their household and families through matrilineal kinship that was established in their societies by the fourteenth century. Moreover, as pointed out by Purkayastha, Subramaniam, Desai and Bose, "What is written in the English language represents a minuscule portion of the ongoing debates on the subject" of gender. The writing in regional languages, which receives less global attention, is equally important, because many regional languages have very vibrant debates, controversies, and other writings on gender, and their roots can be traced through centuries. I would argue that scholars of postcolonial Indian women's literature should not only look at postcolonial women's writing in English, but also at literature in all the native languages by other female Indian authors dwelling in all geographic areas and of all socioeconomic statuses.
In conclusion, postcolonial literary works by Indian women writers who have lived in india, continuously witnessed the ongoing changes in the status of Indian women within the family in India, and whose depictions of these women have not been influenced by the biases of Western feminism (like Roots and Shadows and That Long Silence by Shashi Deshpande) are not only more reliable than the depictions of women from the West, but also more reliable than the comparatively outdated novels by Indian women writers, like Anita Desai, who have been influenced by Western feminism, immigrated to reside in the West, and who have not been regularly exposed to the shifts in the current state of women in present India. Desai accords with the Western view of Indian women, by depicting female protagonists (like Monisha in Voices in the City) as oppressed and underprivileged by the family. Conversely, Deshpande challenges the Western view of Indian women in the family. She effectively represents how many Indian women have inner strength and are enabled by their culture's respect for women to be influential, privileged and to pursue their own Indian feminism, even when under constraints placed (often for their safety rather than oppressing them) by the family. Nonetheless, since her novels are based in urban cities and mainly depict middle-class Kannada women, Shashi Deshpande cannot holistically represent the position of all Indian women within the family, due to the diversity of familial systems (and the position of Indian women within these systems) being much wider than depicted in her novels. This, in turn, is due to the varying socioeconomic statuses and subcultures that determine how women are treated within the family. In order to have a more holistic representation of Indian women and indian feminisms in India, scholars should gather, translate and analyse postcolonial literature written in all the native languages of India by Indian women writers that represent women from all socioeconomic strata and other geographical parts of India with differing subcultural rights and rules for women.
Primary Sources
Desai, Anita. Voices in the City (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1963).
Deshpande, Shashi. Roots and Shadows (Bombay: Orient Longman, Ltd., 1983).
Deshpande, Shashi. That Long Silence (Bombay: Orient Longman, Ltd., 1989).
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses." Chap 1 in Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, by Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 17-42.
Secondary Sources
Agrawal, Sadhana. "Manatee's Plight in Voices in the City". In Feminism in Indian Writing in English. Edited by Amar N. Prasad and S. K. Paul (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2006), 153-163.
Bliss, Corinne Demas and Anita Desai. "Against the Current: A Conversation with Anita Desai", The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Fall, 1988), 521-537.
Bose, Madakranta. "Satī: The Event and the Ideology". Chap 2 in Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern India. Edited by Madakranta Bose (New York, Oxford: University Press, 2000).
Coomaraswamy, Ananda. "The Status of Indian Women Artists". Chap 9 in The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays. (New York: The Sunwise Turn Inc., 1918).
Gandhi, Nandita and Nandita Shah. "Rhythms of a Movement". In The issues at stake, theory and practice in the contemporary women's movement in India (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1992), 15-35.
Nayak, Abhilash. "Making of the New Woman in Shashi Deshpande's Novels", The Criterion: An International Journal in English, Vol. II, Issue III (September 2011), 1-10.
Nayak, Bhagabat. "Feminist Approach to Manju Kapur's Difficult Daughters". In Feminism in Indian Writing in English. Edited by Amar N. Prasad and S. K. Paul (New Delhi, Sarup & Sons, 2006), 208-215.
Ostberg, Elizabeth. Notes on the biography of Anita Desai,
http://www.haverford.edu/engl/engl277b/Contexts/anita_desai.htm (accessed January 2, 2012).
Pant, Kusum. The Kashmiri Pandit (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1987).
Pathak, R. S. "Beyond the He-Man Approach: The Expression of Feminine Sensibility in Anita Desai's Novels". In Feminism and Recent Fiction in English. Edited by Sushila Singh (New Delhi: Prestige, 1991).
Prasad, N. K. and Chandra, N. D. R. "Feminism in Shashi Deshpande's Roots and Shadows", Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies, Vol. 1, Number 2 (Winter: July-December 2009), 60-67.
Purkayastha, Bandana, Mangala Subramaniam, Manisha Desai, and Sunita Bose. "The Study of Gender in India: A Partial Review", Gender & Society, Vol. 17, No.4 (August 2003), 503-524.
Raman, Sita Anantha. "Introduction". In Introduction to Women in India: A Social and Cultural History (Santa Barbara California: Praeger, 2009), xi-xix.
Singh, Sarina, Rafael Wlodarski, Anirban das Mahapatra, Amy Karafin, Adam Karlin and Amelia Thomas. South India (5th Revised Edition). (Lonely Planet Publications, 2009).
Uddhavrao, Kulkarni Chandrashekhar. "Anita Desai's Response to Feminism". In Feminism in Indian Writing in English. Edited by Amar N. Prasad and S. K. Paul (New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2006), 136-152.
I am glad they give me so much work to do. I am glad to be occupied in cutting vegetables, serving food, brushing small children's hair. Only I wish I were given some tasks I could do alone, in privacy, away from the aunts and uncles, the cousins and nieces and nephews. Alone, I could work better, and should feel more--whole.
Through her portrayal of female protagonists like Monisha, Desai depicts women in Indian society as dominated by men. In all her novels, women are shown as living a life of "ceaseless passive waiting". In Voices in the City, their lives are described as:
Lives spent in waiting for nothing, waiting on men self-centred and indifferent and hungry and demanding and critical, waiting for death and drying misunderstood, always behind bars, whose terrifying black bars that shut us in, in the old house, in the old city.
Here, Desai reflects the Western bias that Indian women wish to be "released" from their families, which are oppressively patriarchal in nature.
Also, Monisha is ridiculed by other members of the family. For instance, since Monisha is childless, her sister-in-law directly and openly discusses the idea of her genitals being in a state of malfunction. Monisha regularly writes in a diary as a medium for expressing her oppressed feelings and obsessions. Ultimately, Monisha sets herself on fire since, as quoted by Agrawal, she cannot "endure" the assaulting existential forces in the family. I would argue that Monisha's experience and her ending indicates that Desai is influenced by and accords with the often inherently biased Western feminist view: Third World women are ill-treated by their families and are "weak" in that they have no "inner strength" for enduring or surviving such ill-treatment.
In contrast with Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande challenges the bias within Western feminism that women in India are oppressed by their families and seek the same "release" from male patriarchy as some middle-class Western women. Unlike Desai, she has always lived in India and her dominant household or home culture is Indian. She also claims that she is not a "feminist" in the "Western" sense. Therefore, I argue that her depictions of Indian women in her novels are more authentic. I argue that she conveys the point that not all Indian women are underprivileged and ill-treated in the family, and also depicts that even Indian women who are unjustly treated by their families are not "weak" in the sense that they cannot psychologically endure ill-treatment and are devoid of inner strength. In Roots and Shadows, for example, when Indu and her husband (Jayant) talk about Mini (Indu's relative) and how she has "no choice" but to "accept" the wishes of her family for whom she will marry, Jayant says:
Also, Monisha is ridiculed by other members of the family. For instance, since Monisha is childless, her sister-in-law directly and openly discusses the idea of her genitals being in a state of malfunction. Monisha regularly writes in a diary as a medium for expressing her oppressed feelings and obsessions. Ultimately, Monisha sets herself on fire since, as quoted by Agrawal, she cannot "endure" the assaulting existential forces in the family. I would argue that Monisha's experience and her ending indicates that Desai is influenced by and accords with the often inherently biased Western feminist view: Third World women are ill-treated by their families and are "weak" in that they have no "inner strength" for enduring or surviving such ill-treatment.
In contrast with Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande challenges the bias within Western feminism that women in India are oppressed by their families and seek the same "release" from male patriarchy as some middle-class Western women. Unlike Desai, she has always lived in India and her dominant household or home culture is Indian. She also claims that she is not a "feminist" in the "Western" sense. Therefore, I argue that her depictions of Indian women in her novels are more authentic. I argue that she conveys the point that not all Indian women are underprivileged and ill-treated in the family, and also depicts that even Indian women who are unjustly treated by their families are not "weak" in the sense that they cannot psychologically endure ill-treatment and are devoid of inner strength. In Roots and Shadows, for example, when Indu and her husband (Jayant) talk about Mini (Indu's relative) and how she has "no choice" but to "accept" the wishes of her family for whom she will marry, Jayant says:
Don't feel sorry for her, Indu. She looks a victim, but you know what I feel? It seems to me that the weak have their weapons as well as the strong. And those women... I don't know if you can really call them weak. They have an inner strength we know very little of.
On one hand, Indu states that the Indian women in her family have had "no choice but to admit, to accept", but even though she says that Mini "had no choice either", she describes Mini to have "accepted the reality, the finality, with a grace and composure that spoke eloquently of [...] inner strength".
Indeed, many such women throughout history have shown inner strength, literacy, individuality and progressive views by writing literature and using their literal silence as a form of protest against ill-treatment in the family. As Sita Raman states, "women did rebel quietly through nonconformism and loudly through religious literature". The most famous examples are the Kannada hymns of Akkamahadevi (twelfth century), a woman saint who rejected caste and gender inequality; the padas (songs) in three languages of Rajput saint Mira (sixteenth century) who cast aside prescribed norms of feminine and royal behaviour; and the yakshagana folk songs of the Telegu widow Tarigonda Venkamba (nineteenth century), who was compelled by society to become a recluse. Other women worked from within the patriarchal order to negotiate with elite men through their writings. Betrayed in love, Chandrabati (sixteenth century) wrote Humayun Nama, a biography of her brother in Persian; and courtesan Mahlaqa Bai Chanda (eighteenth century) composed Urdu Ghazal poetry. In terms of postcolonial literature, Deshpande highlights this in That Long Silence. In That Long Silence, Deshpande shows how Indian housewives used silence to demonstrate their anger. In spite of being trained to be submissive and obedient, the female protagonist, Jaya, resents rather than accepts the treatment meted out to her by her husband and "Though she seemed to be passive, she continued [a] 'guerilla war' with her husband for many years" through using her silence as a "weapon". Jaya also sublimates her frustration through writing. She writes for a newspaper column and uses her imagination and self-assertion as weapons in order to question the meaning of marriage. She confronts life through her fiction and writes a story of a man "who could not reach out to his wife except through her body". Although her husband is deeply hurt by her story and believes it to be a literal depiction of their own married life, Jaya is too strong to get affected by such minor acts of disapproval.
Indeed, many such women throughout history have shown inner strength, literacy, individuality and progressive views by writing literature and using their literal silence as a form of protest against ill-treatment in the family. As Sita Raman states, "women did rebel quietly through nonconformism and loudly through religious literature". The most famous examples are the Kannada hymns of Akkamahadevi (twelfth century), a woman saint who rejected caste and gender inequality; the padas (songs) in three languages of Rajput saint Mira (sixteenth century) who cast aside prescribed norms of feminine and royal behaviour; and the yakshagana folk songs of the Telegu widow Tarigonda Venkamba (nineteenth century), who was compelled by society to become a recluse. Other women worked from within the patriarchal order to negotiate with elite men through their writings. Betrayed in love, Chandrabati (sixteenth century) wrote Humayun Nama, a biography of her brother in Persian; and courtesan Mahlaqa Bai Chanda (eighteenth century) composed Urdu Ghazal poetry. In terms of postcolonial literature, Deshpande highlights this in That Long Silence. In That Long Silence, Deshpande shows how Indian housewives used silence to demonstrate their anger. In spite of being trained to be submissive and obedient, the female protagonist, Jaya, resents rather than accepts the treatment meted out to her by her husband and "Though she seemed to be passive, she continued [a] 'guerilla war' with her husband for many years" through using her silence as a "weapon". Jaya also sublimates her frustration through writing. She writes for a newspaper column and uses her imagination and self-assertion as weapons in order to question the meaning of marriage. She confronts life through her fiction and writes a story of a man "who could not reach out to his wife except through her body". Although her husband is deeply hurt by her story and believes it to be a literal depiction of their own married life, Jaya is too strong to get affected by such minor acts of disapproval.
Moreover, Deshpande asserts that Indian women in the family do not need to rebel in the same way as Western feminism endorses. She related that the more current concern for women is balancing their career and self-development with their family responsibilities. As pointed out by Prasad and Chandra:
The predicament of Indu represents the larger predicament of women in contemporary Indian society where the new concept of Western education, economic independence and globalization have completely shaken the roots of old Indian culture and social values. The breaking up of the joint family -- the school of inculcating dedication, sacrifice, moral values etc... is the immediate visible impact upon the Indian culture. It has adversely affected different relationships at different levels in general and husband-wife relationships in particular. The novelist has very subtly conveyed the message of mutual understanding and co-operation between wife and husband.
Initially, Indu says that she no longer fights the fact that she needs her husband, due to her love for him, and is not ashamed of it. She says: "I know it does not make me less of human being. On the contrary, I remember Old Uncle's words... 'the whole world is made up of interdependent parts. Why not you? [...] All things are connected.'" Deshpande suggests, through Roots and Shadows, that the Indian woman does not need to be rebellious like the Western feminists nor weak and submissive. Instead, married Indian women should move forward, by seeking their freedom within the periphery of marriage through mutual understanding without neglecting the Indian socio-cultural values -- I believe that by conveying this idea, Deshpande accurately represents how Indian women have multiple identities besides being female, as well as loyalties to groups including their religion, nation and family that dissuade them from joining in a "generic sisterhood" like Western feminism. Living such a lifestyle and not resorting to "revolt" or "revenge" is the main aspect of Indian feminism. In the following quote, Indu suggests that Indian women can have freedom and privileges within the periphery of their family without breaching, and in spite of, their boundaries and family obligations:
'[...] There have to be some rules so that life can have both dignity and grace. We can always find measures of freedom within these rules.' [...] To fulfil one's obligations, to discharge one's responsibilities... can I not find freedom within this circle?
Furthermore, in line with this quote about freedom for women within the periphery of the family and unlike literary works of the same biased Western feminist nature as Anita Desai, I interpret Deshpande to demonstrate that Indian women in the family have not all been underprivileged, but are actually respected and exercise considerable authority and influence. Regarding the influence of Indian women in the family during the early 1900s, Coomaraswamy writes that "women are accorded corresponding honour, and exert a corresponding influence on society", and that "even at the present day, it would be impossible to over-emphasise the influence of Indian mothers not only upon their children and in all household affairs, but upon their grown-up sons to whom their word is law". Within certain Indian communities in particular, such as in parts of south India and in Kashmir, women have actually enjoyed extraordinary powers. This is echoed in the power and influence of Akka's character in Roots and Shadows. Although Akka is initially ill-treated by her husband and mother-in-law, she grows to become strong.
Since the day Akka had come back, a rich childless widow to her brother's house, she had maintained an absolute control over her brother's children. Kaka, even after becoming a grandfather, could be reduced to a red-faced stuttering schoolboy by Akka's venomous tongue....
On one hand, one can interpret this quote to reflect how a vicious cycle of oppression is perpetuated in Indian families, as Indian daughters-in-law who have previously been oppressed and dominated by their mothers-in-law often grow to assume similar roles and behaviour of their mothers-in-law. Indeed, Raman supports this by saying that just as Akka's mother-in-law placed restrictions on her as a child bride, Akka herself is revealed to have prohibited Saroja (her deceased junior relative and the young wife of Old Uncle) from being taught by a singing teacher. The fact that Kaka claims that Akka was wrong to do so seems to support this point and implies that Saroja was unwillingly coerced into obeying Akka. However, I interpret that Akka's actual motive for placing this restriction is not oppression, but protecting the safety of Saroja. I interpret that Saroja willingly accepts this restriction out of her loyalty to the family and her wish to "protect" her "family honour" as she "never complained" against this restriction and is revealed to have been encouraged to learn music later after she marries Old Uncle. My interpretation is supported by the following rationale. Akka clearly expresses that she does not object to singing itself, but worries that Saroja's learning music will jeopardise her safety when she says:
'What -- learn music from a strange man! Sit and sing in front of strangers! [...] Isn't it enough for you sing one or two devotional songs, or one or two aarti songs?'
I propose that through this, Deshpande (as a postcolonial writer) intentionally and effectively challenges the neo-colonial universalist view - inherent in Western feminism - that Third World women tend to be backward, passive, submissive and oppressed by their roles within the familial system. Indeed, to elaborate, I post that these events in Deshpande's novel authentically represent how women artists (singers and dancers) have always been valued in India. In previous centuries, it was considered respectable for Indian women to show their artistic talents through public singing and dance performances. However, restrictions (like that made by Akka on Saroja) were placed on women by their families out of fear for their safety during the occurrences of foreign invasions in previous centuries and, also, as a result of the British colonialists themselves who labelled forms of Indian music and dance as debauched and immoral activities. As Raman suggests, the original motive for women being restricted in this manner by their families is their protection from foreign immigrants of the same race as the invaders:
Despite the persistence of local pockets of aboriginal and Dravidian matrilineal societies, and enclaves of Buddhist, Jaina, and Hindu nuns, the many layers of mainstream patriarchal society were cemented by adopting Sanskritic values (or "Sanskritization") due to foreign invasions, immigration settlement, and internecine feudal wars. These occurred centuries before Islam and European Christianity infused their own patriarchal features into Indian society.Many of the invaders are known to have subjected women in the families of their defeated enemies to rape, slavery or slaughter. Indeed, as Raman documents, it was "During tumultuous colonial wars over hegemony in India (seventeenth to nineteenth century)" when women "retreated further into private courtyards and zenanas, constrained further by child marriage" in their families.
In spite of these constraints, Deshpande shows that Indian women of Saroja's generation were still privileged in the sense that many child and adult wives were educated by their husbands. After marrying Saroja when she was thirteen years old, Old Uncle educated Saroja as he felt that it was his duty to do so. Such a practice was encouraged by the Indian Women's Movement (part of the Social Reform Movement of the 1800s) in India and thus became commonplace during the nineteenth century. As outlined by Gandhi and Shah, the first mahila mandals organised by the Arya Samaj and the Brahmo Samaj (the Hindu revivalist and reformist organisations) provided women with a space for socialising and education. Women met other women outside their families, learned how to read and write and even how to view stars through a telescope. The fact that these actions were male-initiated and made by Indians for Indians, clearly counters the view of Western feminism that all women have always been oppressed by their families and men. In fact, these initiatives were "the first public propagation of the belief [of Indians] that it is not the destiny or fate of women to be oppressed, illiterate and ignorant". Moreover, "the Social Reform Movement set in motion forces which encouraged the emergence of a number of women doctors, social workers, teachers and scholars, the first cadres of the women's movement who gradually took over from men the cause and the organisation". By the early 1900s, numerous women's organisations grew, "mainly in urban centres, but remarkably all over India". Among these were a Brahmin women's home built by Subbalaxmi Amal in Madras, the Mahila Seva Samaj in Mysore, the Bhagni Samaj in Pune, and the Chamanbai Maternity and Child Welfare Board in Baroda. Some liberal histories claim that reformers are indebted to Western secular and Christian thought for their ideas. However, they claim this without acknowledging the reformers' early education in humanist Indian scriptures. For example, Tamil reformers Vedanayakam Pillai and Madhaviah frequently quoted the Jaina sage Tiruvallavar (ca. 100 CE) on gender equity.
Overall, Deshpande's novels effectively reflect the strong position of Indian women in the family, as opposed to Western feminist accounts and works by Desai and other Indian women writers influenced by the bias in Western feminism. However, Shashi Deshpande's novels mainly represent urban middle-class women of the culture of India's region of Karnataka. Since India is a multilingual country that is multicultural and economically diverse with a wide variety of urban as well as rural contexts in which gender hierarchies are understood and challenged, one cannot even have a holistic view of the position and status of each and every single Indian woman in the family. As aforementioned, there are pockets of aboriginal and Dravidian societies that are different from the more mainstream patriarchal societies in India as they are traditionally matrilineal and have sexual norms favourable to women. For example, the Todas of Tamil Nadu have been documented by W. H. Rivers as having exotic matrilineal and "promiscuous" practices favourable for women in the early 1900s. Also, as noted by Singh, Wlodarski, Mahapatra, Karafin, Karlin and Thomas, women in Kerala have enjoyed great freedom and power over their household and families through matrilineal kinship that was established in their societies by the fourteenth century. Moreover, as pointed out by Purkayastha, Subramaniam, Desai and Bose, "What is written in the English language represents a minuscule portion of the ongoing debates on the subject" of gender. The writing in regional languages, which receives less global attention, is equally important, because many regional languages have very vibrant debates, controversies, and other writings on gender, and their roots can be traced through centuries. I would argue that scholars of postcolonial Indian women's literature should not only look at postcolonial women's writing in English, but also at literature in all the native languages by other female Indian authors dwelling in all geographic areas and of all socioeconomic statuses.
In conclusion, postcolonial literary works by Indian women writers who have lived in india, continuously witnessed the ongoing changes in the status of Indian women within the family in India, and whose depictions of these women have not been influenced by the biases of Western feminism (like Roots and Shadows and That Long Silence by Shashi Deshpande) are not only more reliable than the depictions of women from the West, but also more reliable than the comparatively outdated novels by Indian women writers, like Anita Desai, who have been influenced by Western feminism, immigrated to reside in the West, and who have not been regularly exposed to the shifts in the current state of women in present India. Desai accords with the Western view of Indian women, by depicting female protagonists (like Monisha in Voices in the City) as oppressed and underprivileged by the family. Conversely, Deshpande challenges the Western view of Indian women in the family. She effectively represents how many Indian women have inner strength and are enabled by their culture's respect for women to be influential, privileged and to pursue their own Indian feminism, even when under constraints placed (often for their safety rather than oppressing them) by the family. Nonetheless, since her novels are based in urban cities and mainly depict middle-class Kannada women, Shashi Deshpande cannot holistically represent the position of all Indian women within the family, due to the diversity of familial systems (and the position of Indian women within these systems) being much wider than depicted in her novels. This, in turn, is due to the varying socioeconomic statuses and subcultures that determine how women are treated within the family. In order to have a more holistic representation of Indian women and indian feminisms in India, scholars should gather, translate and analyse postcolonial literature written in all the native languages of India by Indian women writers that represent women from all socioeconomic strata and other geographical parts of India with differing subcultural rights and rules for women.
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