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REVISIONIST MYTH MAKING AS A MEANS OF
COUNTERING PATRIARCHY IN THAT LONG SILENCE
Sita following her husband into exile, Savitri dogging
Death to reclaim her husband, Draupadi stoically sharing
her husband’s travails… No, what have I to do with these
mythical women? I can’t fool myself. (That Long Silence
11)
In a fictional career spanning two decades and a half, Shashi Deshpande has
consistently sought to come to grips with the problems of Indian womanhood in the
post independence scenario. A major issue is whether the female archetypes of old or
the myths of femininity constructed by the society to establish and maintain patriarchy
are still valid. Her novel That Long Silence raises serious issues like, should Sita and
Savitri continue to be the beacon lights for Indian women? If not, what precisely
should be the role of a woman within her family and in the world beyond?
The notion of myth has undergone a radical transformation within the last
century. From a term, which referred to the tales of antiquity, ‘myth’ has become one
of the most universally and loosely used of cultural concepts, and its place in both
literature and literary study has been extended to an enormous range of imaginative
activity.
The myth-history combine marks the ruling motive of the contemporary Indian
novel in English. The preservation of tradition while breaking away from it is the
principle involved in combining myth in the recent Indian fiction in English. Modern
writers found that ancient myths could sustain and enrich their creative sensibility and
at the same time they were free to interpret and make use of the myths in their own
way.
The recent texts of Indian fiction in English attempted by conscious writers like
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R. K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Shashi Deshpande reflect the
theoretical proposition of the preservation of tradition in practical terms. They device
suitable narrative strategies to accomplish the task. The use of myth strengthens the
fictionality of the fiction.
The re-writing of myth in literature brings tradition and
innovation into the same fold making them mutually complementary.
The twin
objectives of literature namely delight and instruction go hand in hand in these new
texts, which cover both aesthetic considerations and social concerns. In the texts of
modern Indian writers like Shashi Deshpande, myth reaches ironic levels and is
presented in ironic reversals, in so far, as they choose to subvert it. Myth works into a
text as a symbolic mode of expression where the move is towards the selective
recreation of reality. This requires a redefinition of the mythical roles such as Draupadi
or Sita with a deviance on unconventional lines as Deshpande does in her works. This
sort of subversion of myth in literature is intended to evolve an oppositional political
ideology as against the existing one, they evolve a new political paradigm, or in short
myth offers itself to subversion to highlight the contemporary socio-cultural history in
Indian fiction.
When a writer explores a myth in such a way as to converge the textual
meanings with the meanings acceptable to the culture, the use of myth is just ordinary
and not revisionist.
The use of myth becomes revisionist when the myth is
appropriated for altered ends so that the textual meanings are at variance with the
meanings accepted by the community. In her book Stealing the Language Alicia
Ostriker defines revisionist myth making as the process of using an ancient figure or
tale by appropriating it for altered ends, the vessel filled with new wine, thus initially
satisfying the thirst of the individual poet but ultimately making cultural change
possible. Deshpande’s use of the myths of femininity in That Long Silence is
revisionary in this sense. The revisionist myth making satisfies the immediate need of
the writer as it ultimately seeks to change cultural perceptions. In this sense the historic
figures are as mythic as the figures of folktales legends, and scriptures. Local myths
and personal myths are also revised and reinterpreted by Deshpande in her novels.
Deshpande uses this technique as a means for female self-projection and selfexploration. It is an ingenious device to literally assimilate the materials dangerous to
the history and culture of the female gender. This deconstruction of myths by female
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knowledge of the female experience, by Deshpande, is a method of redefining the
myths which have long been the source of collective male fantasy. Through the revised
myths Deshpande represents the retrieved images of what women have collectively and
historically suffered and also try to challenge and rectify female stereotypes embodied
in such myths. Deshpande thus historicizes and desentimentalises the myths in her
works and thus demolishes the fairytale conventions of femininity and feminine virtues.
This paper is an attempt to explore and analyse the revisionary and subversive use of
the myths of femininity by Deshpande in her novel That Long Silence. One of the most
enjoyable features of Deshpande’s writing is the unselfconscious use of literary
allusion, myth and folklore, which seamlessly meshed her work with earlier literature.
In That Long Silence, Maitreyee and Yagnavalkya, the wife with enquiring probing
mind and her legendary – philosopher husband, are evoked as naturally as Sonia and
Raskolnikov and Fanny Price and Aunt Bertram.
The socialization of a girl child for her future roles as wife and mother begins in
early childhood when the prevailing social mores and norms are studiedly inculcated
into her through myths, legends, folklore and rituals. Deshpande interrogates and
brings out the ideological agenda involved in all such conventions, by juxtaposing these
myths with lived experiences. In this context these feminine myths of patriarchy are
seen as a means to sustain the order. It is through the construction of such myths that
culture orders the world. Barthes is of the opinion that in a society, myth operates by
confusing nature and history and thus translates bourgeois norms, which belongs to
culture, to self-evident laws of nature.
Thus myths of femininity constructed by
patriarchy to dominate and rule over women are conceived as natural and hence
inevitable. Deshpande’s purpose in using these myths of femininity in her novels like
The Dark Hold No Terror, That Long Silence and The Binding Vine is to reveal the
patriarchal agenda of establishing a male dominated society by making female
subjectivity inferior, hidden behind the cultural constructions of such myths. Women
are made to believe these mythical constructions of womanhood as natural so as to
make them yield to their inferior status in society.
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The the concept of revisionist myth making employed by Deshpande in her
works like That Long Silence and The Binding Vine offers a significant means of
redefining women and consequently rediscovering ones culture. According to
Jasodhara Bagchi, Indian womanhood is constituted by a multi-layered accretion of
myths, which in their turn essentialize and thereby homogenize the myth of
‘Bharatiyanari’ within the hegemonic ideology of patriarchy and thus serve patriarchy
in both its local and global manifestations. As per these myths a women is the pure
vessel of virginity, chaste wife, weak and owned by her husband or the self-denying
mother, never an independent entity (Bagchi 1-4). Shashi Deshpande demythifies all
such images in her works. The familial frame within which this myth was presented
suited the caste / class agenda of the elites, for it helped to establish the upper class,
upper-caste Hindu male as the social norm against which the woman of the same class,
the men and women of the lower caste / class, the men and women of the lower
caste/class had to be measured.
The concept of femininity in India, especially, in Hinduism, presents an
important duality. The female is first of all Sakti, the energising principle of the
universe. The female is also Prakriti – the undifferentiated matter of the universe.
Though all beings have this Sakti by birth, it is believed that it can be increased or
decreased through later actions. As far as a woman is considered, it is said that, a
woman, by being a devoted and true wife, Pativrata, literally, one who fasts for her
husband increases her Sakti. Various austerities, particularly sexual abstinence, also
increase a person’s Sakti. But as far as man is concerned no such thing is said (Wadley
24).
Deshpande reverses this Pativrata myth by presenting her protagonists as
vulnerable to a certain extent. Neither Jaya in That Long Silence, nor Urmi in The
Binding Vine are presented as Pativratas.
Certain other fictions of womanhood prevalent in India are concerned with
woman’s sexuality and motherhood. Thus the ideal of womanhood is that of chastity,
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purity, gentle tenderness and a singular faithfulness, which cannot be destroyed or even
disturbed by her husband’s rejections (Wadley 28). As power and Nature controlling
her own sexuality, the female is potentially destructive and malevolent and according to
Hindu cosmology, if female controls her own sexuality, she is changeable. In India
motherhood is usually glorified. But the mental anguish and trauma that a woman
undergoes during this phase of her life are often neglected by patriarchy who constructs
the images of ideal motherhood. Deshpande is against such idealisations and subverts
the myth of motherhood in her novels. Her protagonist Jaya, through a process of
introspection, realises the patriarchal agenda behind the construction of these myths of
femininity and she comes out of the illusion that all these myths are natural and try to
assert themselves. Deshpande achieves this end by presenting these myths as well as
their ironic reversals simultaneously.
The concept of gender is not merely a biological phenomenon, but it is a
social construction. As Simone de Beauvoir says “one is not born, but rather becomes
a women”. In the Indian scenario a woman is commonly construed as a submissive
wife, dutiful daughter or as the doting mother. Jaya, the heroine of the Sahithya
Academy award winning novel That Long Silence, is not born a woman but rather tries
to become a woman. The social taboos associated with marriage and the Indian social
setup in general makes her a woman. She says that she even “Snipped off bits “of
herself to keep herself an ideal daughter, ideal wife, ideal mother, in short an ideal
Indian female (7). This process of becoming a woman is shown through the character
of Jaya. When she was born her father named her ‘Jaya’, which means victory. But
after the marriage she is renamed as ‘Suhasini’, which means “a soft, smiling, placid,
motherly woman.” (15-16). The former stands for a feminist figure and the latter
symbolises a desexualised, ‘angel in the house’ stereotype. She is brought up in the
loving and affectionate care of her parents. On the one hand she has been given
modern education, which instills liberalised values in her, and she evolves herself into a
writer. On the other hand her parents inclulcate in her the images of traditional ideal
Hindu women like Sita, Savitri and Droupadi. She has been taught that ‘a husband is
like a sheltering tree.’ (32). She comes to learn that in the male dominated society a
woman has no independent identity. She is the daughter, the wife and the mother of
somebody. She is defined in terms of her relationships with men. One feels that the
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modern women are caught in this dichotomy. She has now two options: One is to live
a traditional life of an ideal woman and another is to opt for the life of a modern,
independent and equal partner in society. The new role – lures her but the deep-rooted
tradition in her does not allow her to give up the old guise completely. Centuries old
indoctrination has made women too weak to lead an independent life. This feminist
dilemma is the crux of That Long Silence. In Deshpande, women’s western education
awakens in them a desire for freedom and individuality, which patriarchy tries to curb
and this leaves her alienated and discontented. The marital relationship too has its share
of oppression. In That Long Silence Jaya says ‘it was not Mohan but marriage that had
made me circumspect’ (187). Both men and women are socialized into accepting the
male superiority through the construction of various myths and fictions of womanhood.
The women also collude with the patriarchal conventions. Deshpande attempts to
deconstruct the numerous levels of patriarchal and sexist bias shown towards girls and
women in Indian Society, particularly in marriage or within the family setup by
presenting the ironic reversals of those myths of femininity.
The theme of That Long Silence is, as always with Shashi Deshpande, the
protagonist’s journey towards constructing an alternate identity. The heroine Jaya
encounters a crisis, which is the usual strategy, employed by Shashi Deshpande to
delineate the psyche of her protagonists. The novel opens with Jaya and her husband
Mohan moving back into their old Dadar flat in Bombay from their cosy and palatial
house. This journey is parallel to that of Sita following Rama to forest and to Savitri’s
journey to hell to bring back her husband. . In the small old Dadar Flat shorn off the
usual domestic routine and confronted by the ghosts of her past, Jaya becomes introvert
and goes into deep contemplation of her past. Her familiar existence disrupted, her
husband’s reputation in question and the future of the family in jeopardy, Jaya a failed
writer, is haunted by the memories of the past.
Differences with her husband,
frustrations in their seventeen years old marriage, disappointment in her two teenage
children, the claustrophobia of her childhood – all begin to surface, and the process of
introspection ends with Jaya deciding to break her long silence through writing her
autobiography.
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Minor characters weave through the story. There are two ajjis and the mother,
the uncles and the two brothers, mad Kusum, and most of all, Kamat, the only character
in the novel who is not touched by Jaya’s hatred and the only person who can see
through her hypocritical martyr – like stand and her cultivated morbidity. Jaya further
faces another trauma, another crisis that shakes her out of her complacent stupor and
leads her on to the path of self-recognition. This comes in the form of Mohan’s
desertion and her son’s disappearance.
These two events orchestrate a quest for
recognizing her subjectivity. Jaya looks afresh at the core of what it is to be a woman.
The novel traces the protagonists passage through a plethora of self-doubts, fear, guilt,
smothered anger and deliberate silence towards articulation and affirmation and
attempts to come to terms with her protean roles while trying to rediscover her identity.
Jaya’s journey is from a fragmented, self to a unified whole. The fragmented self is
associated with “women – are – the victims” theory. Deshpande demythifies this
theory and as the glimmer of self – recognition dawn on her, she realises that she
cannot make others, especially her husband the scapegoat for her failures.
She
painfully finds her way back through the disorderly chaotic sequence of events and
non-events that made up her life. The novel ends with her determination to speak, to
break her long silence. In one of her interviews with S. Prasanna Sree, Shashi
Deshpande says:
I don’t write from myths. I write from real life… I don’t see women as
Sita, Savitri and Draupadi. These are all myths. Let us leave them
there. ( Prasad 94)
Her novel That Long Silence illustrates her words. The author subjects the male
constructed concepts and symbols, the myths of wifehood, Pativrata concept, images of
ideal motherhood, the myth of women as victims to analysis through the characters like
Jaya, Kusum, Jeeja, Vanitamani and many others in That Long Silence.
The novel is structured in the pattern of Satyavan-Savitri myth, but in a post
modern context. The novel has a cyclic structure, a typical feature of myths. Jaya
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begins her married life in Dadar flat. Then she goes to a much better flat at Churchgate
but later comes back to the same Dadar flat during the time of crisis, which paves the
way for reconstruction of Jaya’s identity as a woman. The difference in Deshpande’s
use of myth is the re-ordering of the meaning of these archetypes by historicising them
and interrogating them. Jaya’s journey back to Dadar flat is symbolic of Savitri’s
journey to hell to bring back her husband. Like Savitri who follows her husband to
hell, Jaya follows Mohan into hiding when he was facing a crisis. It also resembles Sita
following Rama to the forest. But the difference as far as Jaya in concerned is that, her
journey leads her to a certain kind of reassessment of herself as a woman, wife, mother
and daughter. Unlike the mythical embodiments of the ideal wife, Sita or Savitri’s
journey Jaya’s journey is from an illusion, a myth, that of the husband as a protector, a
‘sheltering tree”, to the realisation that it need not always be so. Thus Deshpande is
challenging the popular myth that marriage provides protection for women.
The ideal of womanhood fore grounded in the images of Sita or Savitri is one of
chastity, purity, gentle tenderness and a singular faithfulness which cannot be destroyed
or even disturbed by her husband’s absence, rejections, slights or thoughtlessness
(Kakar 55).
Jaya, in That Long Silence was an ideal wife, or in other words, she was
successful in her attempts to be an ideal wife and would have been through out until
and unless the crisis in her life revealed the “illusion of happiness” floating over the
“visual” of her family life (4). Jaya was the meak and submissive wife of a “proudly
matter–of–fact” husband (5). She was trying to change herself from Jaya to Suhasini,
cutting, not only her hair, but even “bits of me that had refused to be Mohan’s wife” to
satisfy Mohan’s concept of an ideal wife (191). She was following not her dreams, but
her husband’s ideas about the life he wanted to lead with her eyes bandaged like
Gandhari. She too like any other ideal wife believed that “a husband is like a sheltering
tree” and tried to keep it alive and flourishing, watering it even with deceit and lies
(31). But she was not able to keep her illusion of having a sheltering tree, a protecting
hand in her husband for too long. That myth was destined to be shattered. The
sheltering tree of her life “died of too much water, of white ants in the manure that
destroyed its roots” (32).
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The usual image attributed to women in a patriarchal society like India is that a woman
is weak and is in need of male protection. Deshpande interrogates this image also in
That Long Silence. Jaya says that she is “Scared of cockroaches, lizards, nervous about
electrical gadgets, hopeless at technical matters, lazy about accounting… almost the
stereotype of woman: nervous, incompetent, needing male help and support” (76).
But her statement is ironical for she herself concludes that she wasn’t always like that.
The change was, to a certain extent, a part of her attempt to fit herself into the role of an
ideal woman. The myth of madness attributed to women is a part of the stereotypical
image of woman as weak and nervous. Jaya in That Long Silence says: “A woman can
never be angry; she can be only be neurotic, hysterical, frustrated” (147). She is even
denied the right to be angry and the frustration that accompanies such suppression leads
to her breakdown.
When Kamat asks Jaya to present her anger in her writing, she says that it is not
possible, for no woman can be angry. Jaya realised this fact when she expressed her
anger at Mohan once. From Mohan’s response Jaya understood that according to him
“anger made a woman unwomanly” (83). His ideal before him in this matter was his
mother who never raised her voice against his father however badly he behaved, and
Jaya learnt to control her anger after that.
Interestingly Mohan’s and Jaya’s interpretations of an incident involving
Mohan’s mother, silently suffering the misbehaviour of her husband subverts the
patriarchal image of silent, strong woman with endurance. According to Mohan, his
mother “...was tough. Women in those days were tough” (36). But for Jaya that silence
was symbolic of despair:
I saw a despair so great that it would not voice itself. I saw a struggle so bitter that
silence was the only weapon.
Silence and surrender. I’m a woman and I can
understand her better; he’s a man and he can’t. (36-37)
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The myth of ‘Pativrata’ is an important concept related to the myth of ideal
wifehood. A woman, by being a devoted and true wife, Pativrata, literally, one who
fasts for her husband, increases her worth and value. Shashi Deshpande reverts this
myth by presenting her protagonists as vulnerable to certain extent.
Jaya is not
presented as a Pativrata. Though, she tries to accommodate herself into being an ideal
wife, she knows that the relation between Jaya and Mohan is like that of a pair of
bullocks yoked together” and she followed him only because “to go in different
directions would be painful; and what animal would voluntarily choose pain?” (12)
Jaya has been too docile, too unquestioning, concerned with the ends rather than
the means. A woman’s whole life – her childhood and adulthood both – are totally
geared towards a male centre in which the central male, above father and above son is
the husband. Unending fasts are observed by the Hindu woman, a continuous self mortification disguised as piety motivated by the sole desire of avoiding widowhood.
In a marriage, it is not human goodness, which is privileged, not is it the functional
aspect of a relationship, but the physical presence of the man and his right of
ownership.
“The one who finds the coin first, rules the other at home.” commented one of
Mohan’s relatives during their post wedding game (6). Jaya describes Mohan at this
game: “my fingers scarcely moving, while his had scrabbled frantically through the
grains, groping for the coin”(7). But it was Jaya who found the coin first, though as she
says it “means nothing” (7). In Indian society it was always the husband who ruled the
house and dominated over others.
But this myth of a dominating husband gets toppled
when later in the novel Jaya more or less unknowingly asserts her role, her place in the
family when she opens the door ignoring Mohan’s extended hand for the keys.Later on
she tries to explain this incident.
She says that it was not because of Mohan’s
reconciliation to failure that he submitted to Jaya’s refusal to give him the keys – Jaya,
refusing to cope with the image of ideal wife tries to be honest with herself and realise
that, “It was not he who has relinquished his authority, it was I who no longer
conceded any authority to him”(9) and this act, says Jaya, “was part of the same subtle
resistance I had offered, the guerrilla warfare I had waged for many years”(9)
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Deshpande has created a montage of marriage in That Long Silence through
which she subverts the romantic ideal of marriage.
There was Nayana who had
drunkards as husband, brother and father and yet craves for a male child. Mukta’s
husband is dead, still she fasts. Her self mortifications seemed meaningless, since she
had already forfeited the purpose of it, “the purpose of all Hindu women’s fasts – the
avoidance of widowhood”, Mohan’s silent mother is another of such character, who
suffers the humiliation her husband subjects her to, an act which is interpreted as
strength by Mohan, but as an expression of despair by Jaya, which finally breaks down
in an unforgettable scene of comic cruelty. The realist Jeeja accepts life without anger
challenging the myth of women as victims and feels that a woman is nothing without
her kumkum on her forehead. Mohan’s sister Vimala performs Mangala – Gauri Puja
hoping to get children so that she can fulfil her role as a wife (67). All these women
come and go, composing a picture of marriage, its angles, its varieties, Point – counter
– point to the main narrative of Jaya, whose marriage is failing, so that finally the
readers feels as suffocated by marriage as does the protagonist. Jaya deliberately made
herself to believe that the ideal women are those who never strive to break the bonds of
male control, and the salvation and happiness of women revolve around their virtue as
chastity as daughters, wives and widows as per the laws of Manu. She tried to be
another Sita, Savitri, or Darupadi by keeping aside her wishes and dreams and hopes
and aspirations.
But she was disillusioned and frustrated. The pseudonym ‘Sita’
selected by Jaya for writing light, humorous pieces in the newspaper is symbolic of her
attempts to mould herself like Sita, the mythical image of an ideal wife with “no
questions, no retorts; only silence”. By trying to mould herself after these characters
she was fooling herself. She even presents her attempts ironically when she says:
If Gandhari who bandaged her eyes to become blind like her husband,
could be called an ideal wife, I was an ideal wife too. I bandaged my
eyes tightly. I did not want to know anything. (61-62)
Unlike the mythical character Maitreyee who was so sure of what she needed in
her life and could therefore reject her philosopher husband’s offer of half his property
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Jaya says, “for even if he had asked me – What do you want? – I would have found it
hard to give him a reply”. ---To know what you want--- I have been denied that” (25).
Deshpande implies that a life built on externals tends to be hollow at the core.
Maitreyee may aspire for nothing short of immortality”, but Jaya is content just to live
“and to know that at the end of the day my family and I are under a roof, safe” (181).
Jaya’s life was a continuous struggle to transform herself from Jaya to Suhasini, like
the sparrow, who believed that it was best to “Stay at home, look after babies, keep out
the rest of the world, and you are safe” (17). But by the end of her long soul searching,
Jaya realises that “Safety is always unattainable”. (17)
In one of her interviews, answering the criticism that the women writers resent
traditional models of Sita and Savitri but fail to suggest any replacement, Deshpande
says:
It is not my idea of replacing one model with another. I am just deconstructing these myths. Now you take the myth of Sita, as a perfect
woman. When I see Sita, I ask myself, when your husband ditches you,
abandons you when you are pregnant, how do you feel? I am going to
be angry and upset…
You know this is what I mean by saying
deconstruction. ...... All these myths were created by men, and not by
women. So we are in the process of discovery now and we are not just
going to move aside some models and bring in new models. We are in
the process of discovering ourselves. ( Prasad 100)
In That Long Silence Deshpande questions some of the fictions of womanhood
relating to her sexuality through the portrayal of the married life of Jaya and Mohan.
As per Indian beliefs, a woman is Prakriti, Nature, the uncultured and undifferentiated
matter and hence dangerous.
Therefore men, the Pursua, the cosmic person, the
cultured and differentiated spirit, must control it. Symbolically, a woman is ‘a part’ of
her husband his half body dominated by him; that is culture controlling Nature. All
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such conventions and beliefs constructed to control and regulate female sexuality
totally ignored the needs of a woman. (Wadley 26)
In That Long Silence, Deshpande shows how the husband Mohan satisfies his
own desires and after that ignores his wife Jaya with her body still war. Jaya’s sexual
life gives her no satisfaction. She is not able to endure a silent, wordless lovemaking.
Sex with Mohan has become very mechanical. She says “I could stay apart from him
without a twinge, I could sleep with him too, without desire” (97). For her it was like
drinking water without feeling thirsty and it becomes extraneous. She also realises that
is the act of sex that really affirms her loneliness. Mohan’s indifference after sex often
fills her with a sense of loneliness and of illusion thus revealing the pointlessness of the
belief that woman is man’s half body. One can notice here the dissolution of a feminine
sensibility under the stress of marriage that finally destroys woman’s being. She says
that they never had any communication on sex between them, the experience was
erased each time for in a married life devoid of mutual love and understanding “sex is
only a temporary answer” (Deshpande, The Binding Vine, 139). The only thing that
they spoke of sex was his questions whether he hurt her and her answer “No”. Her
realisation after marriage that there can be sex even without love itself reveals her
tragedy. Though she was not willing, she had to respond to his demands for she is wife
and he the husband.
Deshpande interrogates the ‘Pativrata’ concept in That Long Silence, but at the
same time she does not make her protagonist take a completely subversive stand. They
challenge the statusquo but find a resolution within the social institution.
Jaya
dissatisfied with her married life, is drawn towards Kamat, her bachelor – neighbour.
Sex is supposed to be a pleasurable activity. But in a situation where women is merely
an object of man’s gratification, is forcibly violated, or is disallowed self-expression
during lovemaking with a male chauvinist like Mohan the chances of her being
sexually abused, she is attracted towards Kamat, who functions as a foil to Mohan.
Kamat’s treatment of Jaya sets him apart, as for most men a woman is only a sex
object. Deshpande here shatters one of the everyday myths associated with women that
a woman is primarily a sexual object tempting man to digress. Through the character
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of Kamat she challenges another myth that all men are oppressors. Jaya is pleasantly
surprised and intrigued by the way in which Kamat treats her, not as a ‘woman’, but as
an equal: with this man, I had not been a woman. I had been just myself – Jaya. (152)
Though Kamat treats her as an asexual being, Jaya, with all the conventions
and restrictions inculcated into her being as part of socialization as a woman, feels
uneasy with his lack of inhibitions. Due to the mythical socialization of Jaya as an
ideal wife, even the comforting touch of Kamat suddenly changed for her into a sexual
awareness of the other.
Confused,Jaya rushes back home. The narrator uses this
incident to focus on the fragile line that divides a friendship from sexual attraction. In a
patrirchally biased society like that of India the friendship between a married woman
and another man is always looked down upon. The myth is that no such friendship can
occur for long and it will always turn to a sexual relationship. It is this myth that makes
Jaya rush back home without paying homage to Kamat when he dies. She was afraid of
the possibility of a scandal that could destroy her marriage. She thus fulfils her role as
a wife but fails as a human being. But the irony lies in the fact that Jaya is aware of her
failure as a human being and is tormented from inside.
Another myth of femininity prevailing in Indian society, which Deshpande
subverts in her writing, is that of motherhood. In India motherhood is always glorified.
It is the mother who gives, who must be obeyed, who loves, and who sometimes
rejects. It is motherliness, says sudhir Kakar in his “Feminine Identity in India”, which
establishes the adult identity of a woman. The society always looks down upon a
woman, if she is not capable of becoming a mother, “subjectively, in the world of
feminine psychological experience, pregnancy is a deliverance from the insecurity,
doubt and shame of infertility: ‘Better be mud than a barren woman’, goes one
proverb” (Ghadially 76). But Deshpande is against such idealisations of motherhood
and it is expressed in her novels. She says:
It is necessary for women to live within relationships. But if the rules
are rigidly laid that as a wife or mother, you do this no further, then one
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becomes unhappy. This is what I have tried to convey in my writing.
What I don’t agree with is the idealisation of motherhood. (119)
Her rejection of the idealisation of motherhood is evident in That Long Silence
when she makes her protagonist, Jaya, abort her third child, even without the
knowledge or permission of her husband. Jaya, when asked to give her bio data by
some publisher says in a very matter of fact manner that “I was born. My father died
when I was fifteen. I got married to Mohan. I have two children and I did not let a
third live” (2). She regrets her action later, but it is not because the ‘mother’ in her
feels guilty but because she feels that the child whom she got rid off
“Would have
been a girl – with all the qualities I missed in Rahul and Rati” and hence would have
made it possible for her to fulfil the image of an ideal mother by showering her care
and affection on that child (131). But the fact remains that ideal motherhood is a
distant possibility to be idealised from far.
In the novel Jaya is portrayed as a failed mother. For her daughter Rati, her
mother is “impossible” and according to Rahul, her son, Jaya doesn’t understand
anything (131). She responds to these charges by saying that the children are selfish.
At the same time, she realises that the relationship that existed between her mother and
herself was the same and it would be the same in the case of her daughter also. Ideal
motherhood remains a myth. It is patriarchal expectations of such an ideal that brings
conflicts in the mother – child relationship.
The mother in Deshpande’s fiction
resembles the ‘mother villain’, the woman whom the daughter fears she will come to
resemble and Jaya’s description of her mother in That Long Silence seems very much
to bear out this.
Like the protagonists of her other novels, Jaya has a stormy
relationship with Ai who like most traditional women showers her affection upon her
sons while neglecting her daughter. Resenting her mother’s discriminatory treatment,
Jaya, once complains, “She [Ai] behaves as if she owns me” (75). Jaya accuses Ai not
only of domination, but also of neglecting to prepare Jaya for the duties and chores of a
woman’s life. She sees her mother as unable to live up to the ideal role of the “perfect
mother” and says that the daughter must tight the mother if she wants to graduate into
16
the world”. After all, every son must fight his father to prove himself, every daughter,
her mother” (9).
The theme of motherhood is further brought in the novel through characters like
Vanitamani, Nayana, Muktha, Jeeja, and others. Vanitamani represents the typical
Indian woman for whom to beget children fulfils the purpose of their lives. She has
cancer: “Vanitamani’s uterus having failed in its life – bearing purpose, was finally
carrying death” (106). Still she holds on to her uterus hoping to get a child so that she
can establish her womanly identity. Then there is Nayana, whom Jaya has never seen
as anything but pregnant, hoping each time to have a male child, though she knows
very well the cruelty and torture meted out to her by the male member of her own
family.
Though Deshpande rejects the glorification of motherhood, she does
acknowledge its importance in a woman’s life for Jaya says, “Was it the Greeks who
had said that a woman is her womb? I had laughed when I had read that. But can any
woman deny the link?”
The death of Kusum is another example of patriarchy’s victimisation of
uneducated woman who turn mad. Jaya used to convince herself of her normalcy by
looking at Kusum. Madness is the only option for the uneducated unassertive woman
like Kusum. But later Jaya also suffered silently when her husband and son deserted
her and was on the brink of nervous breakdown. Thus Deshpande subverts the myth
that women should not be angry and the myth of madness associated with women by
revealing the fact that the madness of Kusum or Mohan’s mother or Jaya was a
manifestation of their suppressed anger.
The minor characters in the novel like the maid servants Jeeja, Nayana, or Tara
makes us rethink the idea of women as victims while the educated Jaya sees these
women as the victims of male oppression, they appear to have accepted the mundane
reality of life rather indifferently. They do not consider themselves as victims but go
17
on living as usual earning their livelihood by doing hard work. Jeeja had to suffer a log
from her drunkard husband who married a second time and the responsibility of
looking after his children came on her. Despite of all her sufferings and humiliations
Jeeja believes that a woman is nothing without her kumkum. For them the Kumkum on
their forehead works as a protective symbol from the preying male eyes. Thus the
matter-of-fact acceptance of wifehood is a strategy for the survival of these women in a
society, which sees women as sexual objects if unprotected.
Late childhood marks the beginning of an Indian girls deliberate training in how
to be a good woman, and hence the conscious inculcation of culturally designated
feminine roles. She learns that the virtues of womanhood, which will take her through
life, are submission and docility as well as skill and grace in the various household
tasks. In the ‘Vratas’, the periodical days of fasting and prayer which women kept all
over India, her wishes for herself are almost always in relation to others, she asks the
boons of being a good daughter, good wife, good daughter-in-law, good mother and so
forth (Kakar 51). Thus in addition to the ‘Virtues’ of self effacement and self sacrifice,
the feminine role in India also crystallizes a woman’s connection to others, her
embedded mess in a multitude of familiar relationships.
In That Long Silence Deshpande presents her characters performing such Vratas
and Pujas but simultaneously shows the ironic reversals of these practices by showing
the fertility of such practices.
There is Vimala, Mohan’s sister, performing the
Mangala Gouri Puja, performed by the married Hindu women for the first years of their
marriage for a successful married life. Unfortunately she has no children ever after
performing the fifth puja. Vanita mami performs the Tulsi-Puja regularly. It is related
to the myth of Tulsi, who by her selfless devotion to Krishna became an indispensable
part of his worship and is a part of the cultural heritage of Hindu women. This is
performed to free a wife from the fear of widowhood and in That Long Silence
Vanitamani is saved from being a widow for she dies before her husband’s death, a
“fortunate” death with Kumkum on her forehead, but paradoxically suffering as a wife
silently until then. Then there is Mukta going on with her fasts to avoid widowhood
even after becoming a widow.
18
The novel That Long Silence, which is full of minute details of every day life,
the hopes and dreams and the insignificant happenings, ends on a positive note. The
crisis in Jaya’s life has forced a whole lot of rethinking. And there is hope for a new
beginning. Jaya has reconstructed her identity and along with that her capacity to
dream. She has decided to get rid of the silence, which women have lived with for
ages. She has decided to stop speaking Prakrit and to live as per the dictum “Ya
thecchasi tathu karu” (192)
Deshpande does not use myth and legends in her novels as embellishment or for
local colour or ethnic appliqué work myths, legends and folklore are deeply engrained
in the Indian Psyche, they are a part of our collective unconscious and through the
subverted use of these myths, Deshpande tries to reconstruct, deconstruct and reorder
the female identity in her works. This revisionary use of myths also adds an element of
intertexuality to these novels through the transposition of the implications of
womanhood involved in these myths into that of contemporary reality of womanhood,
refreshing and revising the connotations of both. The novels That Long Silence and
The Binding Vine are thus projects that reveal the gap between he myths of femininity
and modern educated and emancipated women through a revised mythical framework.
Through these novels Deshpande has demonstrated how a dominant tradition may be
redefined to make audible those excluded voices of women. novels present
contemporary Indian women through a revised mythical framework. Myths in these
novels are shorn of their ahistorical status and historicized and thus reconstructed.
Deshpande has thus succeeded in evolving new oppositional and alternative
perspectives of the myths of ideal womanhood keeping in tune with the changing sociopolitical scenario of post-independence India.
Since the socio-political milieu is
continuously changing and posing challenges to the major assumptions of patriarchy,
there is a need to evolve important oppositional discourses from the women’s point of
view. Deshpande’s attempt in her novels That Long Silence and The Binding Vine, as
well as in many other novels is to construct such an oppositional discourse by
subjecting the age old and man-made myths of woman hood to scrutiny
19
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