The Feminine and the Familial: A Foray into the Fictional World of Shashi Deshpande

The Feminine and the Familial

A Foray into the Fictional World of Shashi Deshpande

M. Kanika Priya

The Feminine and the Familial

A Foray into the Fictional World of Shashi Deshpande

M. Kanika Priya

MA (English), MA (Linguistics), MPhil, PhD (Pursuing)

Sarem, Puducherry-605013

Email: priyamkanika1990@gmail.com, Mob: 9442890314

First Published: July 2019

Published and Distributed by

Smashwords, Inc.

15951 Los Gatos Blvd., Ste 16

Los Gatos, CA 95032

United States of America

www.smashwords.com

Copyright 2019 M. Kanika Priya

Thank you for downloading this book. This book remains the copyrighted property of M. Kanika Priya, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes without prior permission from her. If you enjoyed this book, encourage your friends to purchase their own copy from their favourite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

Editing and Proofreading

Manu Mangattu

Email: manumangattu@gmail.com, Mob: +91-9496322323

Cover Design

Bijeeshkumar Shaji

To

My parents

Dr. P. Suthigare Mary (MA, B.Ed, MPhil, PhD) and

F. Maria Kulandai Raj (Indian Army)

Uncle S. John

My Little Champ B. Sam Paul Jayaraj

About the Author

Hailing from Sarem, Puducherry, Ms M. Kanika Priya is a double Majors holder, with MA in both English Literature and Linguistics. She completed her M.Phil degree from Kanchi Mamunivar Centre for Post Graduate Studies, Puducherry in 2015. Her work on Shashi Deshpande won her a first class and a Gold Medal. The present book is a reworking of her MPhil dissertation. An academician and a researcher par excellence, Kanika Priya has published in about 25 reputed international journals. Her research aptitude and taste for literary endeavours are well-documented – she has 43 national and 44 international research papers to her credit. Further, she has been a vibrant presence in Workshops and FDPs, furthering and fine-tuning her knowledge and expertise. The prestigious Kavithilagam Award she won from Solai Pathipakam at Chennai on 13 September 2015 stands testimony to her creative and poetic endowments. Her poems have featured no less than five times in Kovai Vasantha Vasal yearly magazine proving her unrivalled passion and enthusiasm for the endless gifts of the poetic muse. Apart from her creative and critical pursuits, she has excelled as a teacher as well, conducting Tamil classes at PILC and Alliance Francais for foreigners from different countries. She has also served with distinction as a tutor for Government officials from different states. Currently, she is pursuing her doctoral research on Kiran Desai’s fiction.

Address: No 1, 4th Cross, Muthu Ranga Chetty Nagar, Sarem, Puducherry-605013

Email: priyamkanika1990@gmail.com, Mobile: +91- 9442890314

Contents

Chapter I: Introduction

Chapter II: The Familial Fabric

Chapter III: Family Matters – The Indian Scenario

Chapter IV: Social Constructs – Foiled Freedom

Chapter V: Conclusion

Works Cited

Chapter I

Introduction

A family is the smallest unit of society where all members share their joys, sorrows and anxieties of life. Familial relations are important as they help us interact with the wider social world. The exploration of relationship among men, women and children often serve as the central focus in the works of literature. Many writers, women writers in particulars—place great significance on the dynamics of human relationships for relations often present complex, and provocative models of interaction.

Women, have been seen to play sincerely their role of upholding the tradition of the family ever since the dawn of civilization; there has been continuous struggle to emancipate women from male-oppression. Consequently more and more women writers are articulating their anxieties and concern focusing on women’s issues and creating a body of ‘literature of their own’. One of the major concerns of the contemporary literature all over the world has been to highlight the plight of women, their increasing problems, their physical, financial and emotional exploitations and their mental anguish in their families as well as in the male-dominated society in every sphere of life.

Women’s suppression is rooted in the very fabric of the traditional Indian society – in religious doctrine and practices, in the education and legal system and in the families. The male-domination in a woman’s life and the consequent suppression of the woman to a secondary position are the natural phenomena in a patriarchal society. These factors of male chauvinism and female oppression seem to have prompted the Indian women writers to focus on the dual image of women in order to break the shackles of their traditional position and to search for their identity as individuals, rather than to objects of sacrifice at every step for the sake of their husbands and children. Traditionally, Indian woman has been known to bear primary responsibility for the well-being of her family. Yet, she is discriminated systematically and is deprived of access to resources such as education, health-care services, and jobs and so on. Shashi Deshpande’s writing is based on the delineation of such a woman’s inner world.

The present study proposes to analyze Shashi Deshpande’s A Matter of Time and Shadow Play, to explore the realistic familial issues that run across four generations, the human relationships focusing, man, woman and child, Indian family tradition and security, and social mindset and loss of freedom.

The Indian family structure is believed to be the unit that teaches the value and worth of a virtuous living to all members of the family. The joint family is an ancient Indian institution, ideally consisting of three or four generations of people’s all of them living under one roof, working, worshipping and co-operating together in communally beneficial social and economic activities. In fact, people learn the essentials of Indian cultural life within the bonding of a family. Despite the continuous impact of urbanization, secularization and westernization, the conventional joint householder of the typical Indian family structure, both in ideal and in practice, remains the chief social force in the lives of most Indians. Loyalty to family is deeply imbibed in every member of a family.

The Indian English novel too is firmly rooted in the social and cultural ethos of India. Besides being an experience in literary creativity, it is also a documentation of the Indian life in all its socio-cultural aspects. In almost all societies, a woman is culturally assigned to the norms of behavior — within the family and outside it — in which the standards of conducts and decorum set the boundaries for her as external signs of what it means to be seemingly proper and respectable within the differentiated hierarchy called gender. Any form of deviation from the prescribed norms or any display of transgression or any violation of the ideal image of womanhood makes her an unruly woman to be detested by most societies. In fact, the portrayal of women’s characteristics in a male writer’s works is normally weak and passive, as pointed out in The Second Sex: He is the subject, he is the Absolute — she is the other (Beauvoir 1989: 19). For Beauvoir, the weakness and passivity of the women characters in the works of male authors are not due to the factors of the woman’s biology but due to the social system that has long been dominated by the power and authority of men. The position of women has always been degraded by the traditions of a society where they are expected to merge their aspirations and desires with those of the members of their families.

In the twentieth century many women writers like Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai, Nayantara Sahgal, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and Bharati Mukherjee successfully highlighted the women-related issues in their works and have established themselves firmly on the literary ground. Shashi Deshpande is one among such prominent feminist writers of the contemporary Indian writing in English. These women writers, influenced by western feminist writers, raise a voice against women’s oppression and focus on the construction of gender in their writings. One of the fundamental and far-reaching social changes brought about after India’s Independence has been the emancipation of women from their tradition-ridden ethos, which has resulted in the participation of women in male-dominated professions. The socio-economic emancipation of women in India in turn has brought in a sea change in the status and outlook of women.

The literary scenario of the twenty-first century seems to be luxuriant indeed by producing yet another breed of Indian woman fictionists in English. Some of the notable writers of this period are Jaishree Misra, Kiran Desai, Kishwar Desai and Shoba De. These writers have rare reviews and suggest that the next Indian literary generation will be as strong as the current one. The subject matters of their novels continue to include traditional Indian obsessions such as food, landscape, caste, sexuality and generation-gap while expanding its domain to address issues of globalization, the breakdown of family, culture, and the role of women. The novels emerging in the twenty-first century set an example of a whole range of family structure and project familial issues.

Anita Desai is a powerful and persuasive voice among the Indian