Title:- Representation of ‘the Other’ in Texts: Familiar is Unfamiliar to Us
Author: Tanmoy Kundu,
Part-Time Teacher at khatra Adibasi Mahavidyalaya,Bankura,west bengal
Mob:9434243908
Jaques Lacan and Levinas were instrumental in coining contemporary usage of
the ‘Other’. Lacan associated the ‘Other’ with the symbolic order and language where as for
Levinas The ‘Other’ is superior to the self and connected it with the traditional God. The ‘Other’
was given much emphasis in Post-structuralist era. Then it became the focus of Post-Colonial
and Feminist study. The ‘Other’ is an individual who is taken as belonging to a group who are,
though constructed by society, fundamentally different in some way as they do not possess
that standard norms as the gentle group do possess. They are treated as inferior to gentle folk.
But under the term ‘Other’ may come Woman, Infant, Male worker, Gay or Lesbian, and
actually those who are suppressed or oppressed by the society and they are called as subaltern
(popularized by Antonio Gramsci) by Gayatri chakraborty spivak. This tendency of suppression
or oppression of the ’Other’ has been continuing from an early period of Colonialism and on
even at the present age. My Paper will deal with the condition of the ‘Other’ as represented in
various text of so many writers which include. Shakespeare, William Blake, R.Tagore, Shashi
Deshpande, Sumathi Sudhakar, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy and many others.
Simon de Beauvoir has proclaimed “one is not born a woman, one becomes
one ‘.The male writers have tremendously reduced woman as inferior and weak. The male
domination in woman’ life is a natural phenomenon in a patriarchal society and the consequent
relegation of woman to a secondary position seemed to have prompted Indian woman writer
to take up the cause of women as their western counterparts. They stressed their need for
women to break free from the shackles of their traditional position. Feminism throws a
challenge on the age long tradition of gender differentiation. It attempts to explore and
enunciates a new found social order to identify pertinent resolves to the real life problems in
the light of traditionally gendered role-playing. Woman has always been projected as secondary
and inferior human being. This bias against woman can be seen right away from the first day of
creation. It is said that God is male and it is said that God after creating man made woman from
the rib of man. As Adam, the first man on the earth remarks about Eve – “This now, bone of my
bones and flesh of my flesh, she shall be called woman, because she has taken out of man”. It
implies woman is secondary to man. Beauvoir calls the ‘other’ the minority the least favored
one and often a woman when compared to a man for a man represent both positive and the
neutral whereas woman represents only the negative. They are automatically identified as the
‘Other’ without knowing.
Unlike the western feminist movements, India’s movement was imitated by men
and later joined by women. The effort of this men included abolishing sati, which was a widow’s
death by burning on his husband’s funeral pyres, banning the marriage of upper caste Hindu
widows, the custom of child marriage, promting women’s education obtaining legal rights for
women to own property and regulating the law to acknowledge women’s status by granting
their basic rights in matter such as adopting, religious law and expectation of personal laws,
enumerated by specific religion often conflict with the Indian Constitution, eliminating rights
and power women legally should have.
Virginia woolf while defining women’s place in the prevalent patriarchal set up, voices
the sentiments of millions of her sisters. She bemoans the inevitable position of women in
these words:
“A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Insignificantly she is of the highest
importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She provides poetry from cover to cover:
she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in
fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the
most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real
life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of the husband”.
The description of women goes on with the same words as it used to be in woolf’s time. In
reality a woman is nothing but a ‘womb’- her role is always determined by the male dominated
society as secondary. Her role is felt only when it is the need to cook, food, to rear the child, to
take care of the in-laws and so on and so forth. When it becomes the question to talk about a
woman’ own story, everything gets blurred because there is no story of a woman’s life.
Every civilization and every culture determined certain characteristics
for a woman to fit into that particular set up. The process still goes on. The following sloka will
define an ideal woman of Indian civilization:
Karyesu Mantri, karaneshu Daasi
Rupecha Lakshmi, Kshamayaa dharitri
Bhojyeshu Mata, Shayentu Rambha
Shat karma Yukta, Kula Dharma Patni.
It signifies that woman should serve her husband as minister while counseling, by her looks she
should be as goddess Lakshmi, like the earth in forbearance, as a mother like feeding and in
bed, she must be like the celestial beauty. If a woman obeys all these she is regarded only as
the ‘Weaker sex’, the ’Other’, a child producing machine and so on and so forth. She never gets
equality of man. She was an inanimate object, who followed five paces behind their men…they
had to be gentle, patient, gracious, Bengali women were hidden behind the barred windows of
half dark rooms, spending centuries in washing clothes, and murmuring alone verses from ‘ The
Bhagavad Gita and The Ramayana’.
In case of Shakespeare we can see that in the play ‘Hamlet’ womanhood
has been seen as the name of betrayal or moral weakness and it is very much clear from the
speech of Hamlet that ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’. Again Arundhati Roy also speaks for
women. She successfully demonstrated the injustice inflicted upon women through the means
of patriarchism, caste taboos and love-laws. She regards that inequality and subordination of
women is an instrument of the social structure. Her novels like The God of Small Things unfold
the subjective politics which has ordered the subjection of women in a man-owned world. This
novel exposes the violence imposed on women and how Ammu got victimized by the
patriarchal society. She thought that after marriage she would be able to make herself free
from parental tyranny and therefore she agreed to marry. Here Simon de Beauvoir remarks
that’ there is a unanimous agreement that getting a husband or in some cases a protector is for
her the most important of undertakings. But suffering had been pulling Ammu down for long.
She became domesticated depriving of privacy and freedom. Even after marriage the fate of
drudgery followed her. At last finding no solution to avoid her drunken husband Ammu
returned to father’s home where ‘she had no position at all’ and falls in love with Velutha in
search of happiness but in vain .Therefore we can see very clearly from the story that Ammu is
treated as not merely as wife but as other who can be used for any purpose.
Among them Sahitya Academy award winning novelist, Shashi Deshpande is
one of the most important and versatile Indian English woman writers since the 1980’s. Her
novels and short stories explore the psyche of educational middle class Indian woman. With
rare sensitivity and depth, she portrays the dilemma of the Indian woman trapped between her
own aspiration as an individual and the forces of patriarchy which confines her. Shashi
Deshpande bares the subtle processes of oppression and gender differentiation operating
within the institution of family and the male centered Indian society at large. Deshpande’s
feminism does not uproot the woman from her background but it only tries to expose the
different ideological element that shapes her. These include social and psychological factors
such as woman’s subordinate position in the family and her restricted sexuality. She seeks to
expose the ideology by which a woman is trained to play her subservient role in society. Her
novels eclectically employ the post modern technique of constructing patriarchal culture and
customs and reveal these to be man- made constructs.
In Dark Holds No Terror’she portrays the protagonist’s fight to survive in a
world that offers no easy outs. The story is mainly on the waking up of acquisitive knowledge
that there is more to life than dependence on husbands or parents imposed by society, culture
and free from her own fears and guilt, Saru decides to assert herself and fight her own battle.
She realizes that her life is her own which she will have to shape. Saru has come to realize that
her profession as a doctor in her own and she will only decide what to do with it. She will not be
a puppet. Her marriage is shadow. Like Shaw, Ibsen, Tolstoy, her women characters have the
independent feeling.
In Roots and Shadows Deshpande explores the inner self of Indu, who symbolizes
the new women, who are educated and married to Jayant but her feminine instinct for
articulation in suppressed. In this novel the predicament of Indu represents the larger
predicament of woman 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.
A Matter of Time explores into the many facets of feminine experience in life
which gives her a new height as a writer. The novel arises many questions by providing the
reader with an insight into the problems of different roles of womanhood, has to play. Again it
successfully reveals the secrets and strength of women as well as the complication of family
culture. Sumi, the woman protagonist of this novel, has accepted the tragic decision taken by
Gopal without questioning and opposing him. Without any prior indication, Gopal, the
respected professor, devoted husband, and caring father announces to his wife that he is
leaving the house for good without any reason.
Shashi Deshpande is quite down to earth in her feminist approach to the woman’s
problem. For though she is aware of the seriousness of the Indian woman’s dilemma behind it,
she also believes that a positive change in woman’s social status can not materialize without
bringing about a change in woman’s mindset first.
Again in Rabindranath Tagore’s short story Shasti (Punishment) the female
protagonist was attributed by her husband with the crime of murder done by his brother. Here
we wil find that woman has no respect as she can be treated in every manner and can be given
any charge the man like. Again in Dena Powna we can see that Nirupama was married to a
aged and death -stricken bridegroom and after whose death she taken to the burning ghat in
order to be burned with her husband on pyre. Mulk Raj Anand places his women in the novel,
in a socio-cultural milieu of a stiflingly conventional Hindu society, where she is doomed to a
life of degradation and dehumanization, and life of mental subjugation and conditioned
responses. Woman are unredeemed, dumb creatures caught in the Darwinian world of the
survival of the fittest, unable to pull their beyond the biological factors.
If we talk about gay/lesbian we can say that they were regarded as alienated class
or the ‘Other’. For example in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy Arjie’s gay relationship with the
Sihala boy, Shehad, was not accepted by the family as well as society because homosexual
relationships automatically signal the end of a ‘traditional’ family. Homosexuals have long been
seen as the’other’.
To conclude we can say that still women are considered as ‘Other’ in the term of Louis
Irrigray, Julia Kristeva. They are not given any respect, social justice and educational
opportunities as mass media bring to us how women are victimized in our civilized world.
Children are oppressed in the society, also pitiless to bar dancer, gay, lesbian. They are not
given any focus. All these people are familiar to us but they are not given any respect or
sympathy, justice. They are treated as unfamiliar to us as if they are inhabitant of Other society
of other planate. All these are considered as ‘Other’ and as Literature is a kind of reflection of a
society, all these categories are described by any writer in their texts. This subaltern categories,
the Unrepresented are represented by the literary person in their written texts, unconsciously
or consciously.
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