Workshop 9: Gender, Ethnicity and Nationalism: European Perspectives

 

Title: “May You Be the Mother of a Thousand Sons”...The Ambiguous Bond Between Mothers and Daughters in Contemporary Indian Fiction

 

Author: Joana Passos

             Utrecht University   

 

            This paper deals with a set of texts written by Indian women. My interest in these Indian  voices  is framed by two important ideas, which I believe are common-ground among feminist researchers:

 

            As Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson[1] pointed out, “contemporary feminist political practice (...) is increasingly a matter of alliances rather than one of unity around universally shared interest or identity” (1993: 429). The mentioned “alliances” refer to the co-ordination of feminists who are active in different locations, facing a completely diverse set of problems.  Part of the European perspectives on basic feminist issues, like gender politics, ethnicity or nationalism, also implies being attunded to geo-political differences and  specific cultural contexts surrounding the struggles of  groups of women in other cultural frames beyond the western one.

 

            The second point which led me to this research on Indian women writers is connected to the status of literature itself as a means to represent and give voice to women in a postcolonial context. Writing about Indian women provides precious insights on local struggles and grants visibility to subtle sources of tension. The committed feminist writer has a very important role to play here, creating sensitivity to women’s problems and denouncing the weight of rich traditions whose negative aspects have been deemed acceptable because they have been endured.  A writer’s intellectual work is a form of  raising awareness, identifying problems, and suggesting forms of  resistance and negotiation.

 

            In the case of India, the relationship between women, nation and community is particularly straining. Nationalist movements, usually controlled by high caste members, have tended to revive tradition in rigid, purist ways so as to assert a complex constellation of national/communal cultures. This conservative, repressive mentality has been supported by a pervasive presence of religion which has been interpreted in such a way as to  encourage a fatalist and  subservient attitude on women.  Ania Loomba[2] wisely points out that postcolonial gendered identities are shifting, but “religion plays a key role in defining these shifts” (1998: 226). I think literature, adequately promoted and discussed,  can play an equally important role.

 

            The greeting which I use as the title of this paper is actually quoted from Difficult Daughters (Manju Kapur, 1998) but I have read this sentence very often, in other texts, ever since my interest in Indian literature started to take a more definite shape. It represents a wish, and a sort of fraternal blessing. To wish a woman a thousand sons shows how important fertility is, and how much the best achievements envisaged for women are deeply linked to the feminine role as wife and mother. At the same time, this greeting is one more, among  many everyday gestures,  which marks the inferiority of women, their “valuelessness” when compared to males, and consequently, the undesirability of  daughters in comparison to sons.

            Taking into account the importance of thinking feminism across cultural differences, I will be using several instances of Indian literature as invaluable tools to highlight  crucial issues for feminist agendas in an Indian context, such as the prejudice which makes daughters grow up feeling they are second best, a burden,  for their own families.  I will look at moments when, as a mother,  women are led to prefer sons, and, I will also consider  daughters’ growing awareness of  these  feelings in their mothers. In any case, it is not that particular mother and her private sensitivity which is at stake. It is rather a sexist social order which is here exposed and denounced as a means to claim a new solidarity across generations of women beyond the adequate performance of the expected feminine roles.

            Note that I do not intend to propose a thorough study of the selected texts in the frame of this paper. I will discuss some themes and outline the representation of mothers and daughters in relation to the social landscape framing them.

           

            1- I will begin with Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of  Small Things (1997) to  take advantage of the fact that this is a widely read text. The plot develops around a  Syrian Christian family cell in Kerala, where three generations live together.   Mammachi, the grandmother, loves her son (Chacko) obsessively while she is indifferent to her daughter (Ammu). This difference in terms of emotional investment will be extended to the grandchildren and logically, the only one who counts for the household is the son’s daughter. In wider social terms, apart from private preferences, this distinction is represented in the text as standard behaviour. Furthermore, sexism is sanctioned by law regarding inheritance rights since  the son is expected to inherit the whole of the family fortune.

            A good explanation for the prejudice against daughters is voiced by a servant, Kochu Maria, who, very pragmatically links affection to inheritance rights. Speaking of  Sophie, the daughter of the male child of the house, the servant says:  

 

“When she grows up, she will be our Kochamma, and she’ll raise our salaries, and give us nylon saris for  Onam.”  (p.185)

 

                Obviously, it is better to spoil those children that will be in charge one day...

                As for the other children, the twins who have moved in with their divorced mother, Kochu Maria voices the common-sensical view that their rightful place is with their father/husband:

 

“Tell your mother to take you to your father’s house. (...) There you can break as many beds as you like. These aren’t your beds. This isn’t your house.” (p.83)

 

            The current prejudice underlying this view is that the children of a daughter, divorced or married,  are not responsibility of her own family. Once a woman is married she is “given away”, together with  any inheritance rights she might consider. Any sense of injustice regarding the needs of  a daughter’s children  is swept away within a circular logic that implies they will be provided for, by the husband’s family. Then, in the social context  represented in this novel, there is a clear policy of exclusion concerning  daughters. In the horizon of  the extended  family cell, the sons and their progeny are the sole active members of  the next genration. It is not by coincidence that lineage is defined by the male part of the family.

            On account of this sense of non-place for daughters, it does not seem important to spend a lot of money on the education of girls since they are temporary guests at their parents’ place. In Roy’s novel,  this dimension of the mechanisms of exclusion for women  is mentioned. While the son, Chacko, was sent to Oxford, the daughter was simply left at home, in such a degree of  neglect that even the traditional responsibility of arranging a husband was ignored:

 

“Pappachi insisted that a college education was an unnecessary expense for a girl. (...) Since her father did not have enough money to raise a suitable dowry, no proposals came Ammu’s way. Two years went by. Her eighteenth birthday  came and went. Unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon by her parents. Ammu grew desperate. All day she dreamed of escaping from the clutches of her ill-tempered father and bitter, long-suffering mother.” (p. 38)

 

            After Ammu’s death, alone and away from a family that denies her any help, the older generation of the family will repeat the same mistakes with the twins. The grandson,  Estha, is sent to his father, restoring the proper order of things. As for the grandaughter, Rahel, she is allowed to stay and grow up with the same amount of indifference and neglect as her mother. 

           

“After Ammu died (...) Rahel drifted. From school to school. She spent her holidays in Ayemenem, largely ignored by Chacko and Mammachi. (...) In matters related to the raising of Rahel, Chacko and Mammachi tried, but couldn’t. They provided the care (food, clothes, fees), but withdrew the concern.”        (p.15)

           

            How did Ammu and Rahel, daughter and grandaughter, face this society whose codes clearly denied them attention and encouragement? Ammu rebelled, with her sharp tongue and illicit love affairs. She grew up to dislike her family and keep an independent mind. As a mother, she  tried to be equally close to her son and daughter and encourage their love for each other. After her death she left  them a model of transgressive resistance before obsolete views and ideas.

            Rahel’s spirit was broken because of the events during her childhood.  She grew into an emotionally disfunctional woman, whose sense of emptiness prevents her from connecting to people,  projects, or life. By the end of the novel, her return to the family house to be reunited with her brother leaves open the possibility of a new beginning.

            In both cases, society does not provide satisfactory alternatives to women who fall out of the usual pattern of  acommodation to wifehood and integration in the husband’s family.

 

            At this stage, after concluding that Arundhati Roy represents the patterns of family distribution of affection, education opportunities and property as extremely unfair for daughters, it is relevant to look at other texts to see how much of this particular view of  family behaviour and social prejudice is confirmed by other women writers.

 

2- Both Githa Hariharan and Manju Kapur wrote a novel about the confusion and pain  of daughters before the despotic and distant behaviour of their mothers. Despotic because daughters are expected to obbey without questioning their elders, distant because no room is allwed  for dialogue, explanations or flexibility.

            Hariharan’s novel, The Thousand Faces of Night (1992) is the story of a young woman’s return to India after her college education in America, in order to marry a suitable groom chosen by her widowed mother. In order to please her mother, and unsure of  any other options of  life outside of  her elders guidance, this America returned bride accepts the role which is expected of her and tries to adapt. However, her marriage does not work and things get worse when she discovers she is barren.

            The novel is set as a “coming of age” of the young bride as she grows  aware of  the difficulties of women’s lives in India.  An important role in this awakening is played by story telling, one of the most fabulous ways to pass wisdom from generation to generation. Stories become a source of inspiration for this young woman who combines her own experience with memories of her grandmother’s tales, passages from the sacred books read allowd by her father-in-law and the gossip of her old maid. All of the story tellers, each in their own way, have words that encourage accommodation, but the older women also have stories of rebellion, and eventually these become the most inspiring for the depressed protagonist. She runs away with a lover, and eventually leaves him to return to her mother. The novel ends with the encounter between the two women. A change in the behaviour of the mother suggests that, in spite of having lived all her life “by the book”, respecting traditions and social expectations, this mother is   ready to re-think  her options and establish a new degree of companionship with her daughter.

            Difficult Daughters (1998) by Manju Kapur is, by opposition, a text which does not solve, within the plot, the silences between  different generations of women. However, the novel is structured as a biography of a dead mother and the degree of understanding with which  it is written is an undirect way of settling disagreements and quarrels. In fact, at the end of the text, the narrator declares the writing of the novel a sort of exorcism, a last word on disquieting matters. Not surprisingly, one of the main topics of this biography is the troubled relation between the narrator’s mother and her own, many years before.

            According to the novel, the reasons that make  some daughters “difficult” for their families  are the rejection of an arranged marriage (which turns an entire and united household against a scared teenager), the incomprehensible ambition to study (which is completely dismissed as irrelevant for women) and the unfortunate display of  an independent will. This means that within the logic of  the represented culture,  the good daughter is “good” because she does everything she is told to and she does not have any ambitions. The tone of the text could have been ironic if it were not for the suffering and sadness that exude from every page.

           

3- The other two texts I have selected  for this paper extend the issues discussed above and consolidate my argument that these are not isolated experiences but real social issues discussed through literature.

            Sarat Kumari Chaudrani wrote a short story, “Beloved or Unbeloved”, in 1891[3], a hundred years before the three novels discussed above, but the themes she chose to address are the same: the different status of sons and daughters, the affective rejection of daughters, the anxiety to just “marry them off”. I think it is important  to note the   continuity  of these themes in women writers so distant in time. A sort of literary tradition  constructed around  (delicately written) protest  seems to have been going on. Each text brings strength to the rejection of these social patterns and suggests directions for a sensitive agenda.

            The short story “Beloved or Unbeloved” is built around a static scene. A mother wakes up in the morning, looks at her sleeping daughter, and  listens to other women talking outside her window. Although she loves the child deeply and longs for a society without  discrimination where all children are held equally dear, the mentality  of these other women and the strong agreement between all of them  makes this mother feel she has been shown the “harshness of truth”, regardless of her private, happy  motherhood.

            This narrative formulation of the argument is very clever. There are pedagogic strategies[4] embedded in daily routines, in the speeches we hear around us constantly, in the reactions of  other people which shape one’s mentality. The next stage, is to act according to the commonly held view (performative strategies), and a case of successful assimilation is completed. The  protagonist of the story is a case of resistance to the pressure to think and act in a certain way, and significantly, that is the reason why her daughter knows she is “beloved”.

            First, a sample of  the comments from the women outside who represent collective/communal views on the issue of  gender discrimination:

 

“Has your brother’s wife had a son this time, then?”

“Ah, no, don’t ask me about it - you think we’d be that lucky? My  sister-in-law will never have a son in this lifetime of  hers! It’s a daughter, as usual.

(...) when my brother heard it was a girl,  (...) he did not get up from bed, nor did he speak to her (the midwife). His wife wouldn’t pick the baby up, she took it in her arms only after a lot of coaxing (...)

Sorrow hangs over the whole house” (p. 263, 264)

 

            In the development of this dialogue among low caste women, the text presents an economic reason for  the rejection of daughters. A dowry is expensive, and daughters have to get married.   While a boy is seen as a source of income for the family, a girl is a burden. One of the younger women taking part in the dialogue tries to argue in favour of girls and she refers the importance of the domestic work they perform, which could be counted as a sort of  “income”. On the other hand, she adds, one can minimize the burden of dowry expenses if one considers the “cheap” way girls are brought up:

 

            “(....) The girls of the Sen household are  given the leftovers to eat from plates the boys have already used. The boys wear shoes and shirts and spotless garments and the girls go around in cheap grimy wraps.  (p.268)

 

            This difference of opinion between older and younger women is very important. The text implies that  traditional ways of life are changing and women are starting to think in a different way. Nonetheless, it should be noted that in all of the selected  texts,  change or deviance are deeply regretted by the older generation. We have more than a hint of a serious generation gap going on.

            As a complement to the discussion of daughters among a group of mothers, I picked Mrinal Pande’s short story “Girls”[5] (1983) about young girls’ growing awareness of a certain degree of rejection from their mothers. The reaction to this sharp truth is either rebellion or  depression, or both, as Arundhati Roy clearly stated in her own novel discussed above. In “Girls”, the narrator is a young girl,  unaware of the pressure her mother is suffering to bear a son. Initially, she accepts her mother’s impatient behaviour as a matter of character: “To Ma, everything in life is a problem. As far as she is concerned, whether we are at home or at school, ill or just playing around, we are a problem” (p. 57). As the narrative develops, the reader realises that the “we” are    three daughters, and that pregnant Ma ardently wishes for a son so that her duty towards her  husband’s family is over.

            The mother, always ill-tempered,  calls the daughters a “huge nuissance” and “the cause of all her problems”. The rest of the short story is a subtle listing of small behaviours  and comments that make the girls aware of  the fact that they do not count.  While the older daughter is already accepting her lot, the protagonist tries to fight for affection, and establish her place in the family. In exchange for slaps and sermons the girl desperatly tries to get attention from her elders. And she also wants answers and explanations: 

Why do women have to “endure”?

If  I can become anything, can I  become a boy?

When you people do not love girls, why do you pretend to worship them?”(p.63).

These, and many other important questions will surely remain unanswered as long as a sexist world view is kept.

 

Conclusion:

 

            I have discussed five texts from  five different women  writers and all of them coincide in their representation of  some aspects of  Indian culture and family life  which create the conditions  for difficult relationships between mothers and daughters:  a rigid interpretation of tradition, established sexist prejudice, a tight family budget in a society that still accepts dowry and  the belief that a woman belongs primarily to her husband’s family.

            The discussion of these texts was equally important to demonstrate the power of literature to create awareness and sensitivity of women’s problems across cultural contexts that divide us.

 

Bibliography:

 

            Hariharan, Githa, The Thousand Faces of Night, Pwenguin Books India, 1992

 

            (ed.) Holmstrom, Lakshami, The Inner Courtyard, Stories by Indian Women, Virago Press, London, 1990, Rupa & Co., Calcutta, Allahabad, Bombay, New Delhi, 1990.

 

            Kapur, Manju, Difficult Daughters, Faber and Faber, London, 1998.

 

            Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things, Flamingo, London, 1997.

 

            (eds.) Tharu, Susie; Lalita, K., Women Writing in India, Pandora Press, London, 1991, vol. I.

 

 

 

Secondary bibliography:

 

            Fraser, Nancy; Nicholson, Linda, “Social Criticism Without Philosophy: an Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism”, in Postmodernism, a Reader,    (ed.) Docherty, Thomas, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993.

           

            Frye, Marilyn, “The Necessity of  Differences: Constructing a Positive Category of Women”, SIGNS,  vol. 21, number 4, Summer 1996, pp. 991, 1009.

 

            Loomba, Ania, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Routledge, New York and London, 1998.

 

            (ed.) Mongia, Padimini, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory, a Reader, Arnold, New York, 1996.