Novels By Nayantara Sahgal

Role of Society in the Novels of Nayantara Sahgal

The importance of men and their superiority has been a part of Indian social mores for generations. Women had always been the less important individuals. When a woman lives in a male dominated society obviously she undergoes many hardships. It is a wretched condition of women in our society when she has no husband in her life she is not worthy of respect. Society finds faults with anyone who does not adhere to its laws, in other words, they are the transgressors of society. In a male dominated society and under male chauvinism a woman's role is hence viewed through a magnifying glass, and she is always watched by others, especially if she does not follow the rules established by the males.

As male chauvinism refuses to recognize woman as competitor in domains of society. In this situation, a woman is not born but made by the society— "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. No biological, psychological or economic fate determine the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine."3

Thus patriarchal practices which reduce women's status to inferior social beings are further perpetuated by myths and traditions which unfortunately have been embedded in the fabric of society. Patriarchal society promoted tow images : woman as the sexual property of man, and woman as chaste mothers of their children.

Even though man is a civilized being now, there is still the savageness of primitive man in him. With savage selfishness he treats woman as "an object that provides physical enjoyment, social companionship and domestic comfort." This inequality between man and woman in our society is rightly observed by Sarah Grimke— "Man has subjugated woman to his will, used her as means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasure, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could do to debase and enslave her mind...."8

Thus denied the freedom to act and choose on their own, women remained solely inside the field of vision, mere illusion to be dreamt and cherished. A woman is a woman, and a woman she must remain but not a 'man's shadow-self', 'an appendage', 'an auxiliary' and the 'unwanted and neglected other'. A woman is held to represent the 'otherness' of man, his negative.

Simone de Beauvoir finds man-woman nexus quite unsymmetrical and uncomplementary for— "man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined criteria, without reciprocity."9

A woman is never regarded as an autonomous being since she has always been assigned a subordinate and relative position in our society. It is an appalling condition of women that they cannot live without men in our social set-up. As they are considered physically weak and to venture in the society they need protection from males. This is the root cause of females' apathy in our society.

"Man can think of himself without woman. She can not think of herself without man. And she is simply what man decrees.... she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex...... absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental the inessential as opposed to the essential."10

We find references to his aspect of social life, where husbands dominate their wives, and make them the worst sufferer in the novels. The Day in Shadow, Storn in Chandigarh, Rich Likes Us by Nayantara Sahgal.

The fundamental humanistic values which bind a man and woman into the bond of togetherness the fidelity and companionship are away from social world today. Men take pride in having relationship before and after marriage but this thing they do not expect from their women. We find this thing in the relation between Saroj and Inder in the novel Storm in Chandigarh.

Saroj is also like Rashmi, unhappy and unable to find a reciprocal involvement in her marriage. Inder, her husband is not only from a different cultural background but is a different kind of person altogether. He is obsessed by this narrow possessive attitude towards Saroj. He treats very brutally like a sex object not as a companion in marriage.

While others use power or money or religion, Inder uses chastity as a weapon against Saroj. It is part of his capacity to torment others and also torment himself. When Saroj tells about her affairs before her marriage, Inder considers it to be a serious moral lapse which has sullied their whole relationship. He feels that her act has no place.

Saroj, however is not guilty and dishonest. When she marries Inder it is already behind her – a relationship which has not involved her deeply enough. It is different that society which lives by a double standard brands her as guilty. For herself she is fully involved but Inder does not under stand her and tries to destroy her sense of innocence. He persists in taking up the past and withdraws into his own self, leaving her outside, isolated and unhappy.

Inder often ill-treats Saroj chiefly for her having lost her virginity before marriage. Inder, a sadist, neither forgets this incident nor lets Saroj forget it.

Saroj who has been brought up in the liberal atmosphere of freedom expects equality within marriage. She is greatly surprised by her husband's violent reactions to a pre-marital affair she had in her college days. Inder is obsessed and could not forgive this act of Saroj and constantly exploits her sense of innocence. Again in this passage we see male's cruelty over female for defying the code of chastity before marriage that is man made for his convenience.

It shows the cruel face of patriarchal social set-up where dual standards work out prominently. Inder often tortures his wife Saroj for having premarital affair, but ironical thing in this matter is that Inder himself has lost his virginity long before his marriage, the narrator reports : "There had been no such nightmare to contend with until his marriage. He (Inder) had been precocious and successful in sex, robustly collecting experience where he found it. Saroj had plundered that robustness, made a tortured image of the body's surrender, and nailed him to the inquisitor's chair."26

Since he had a lot of erotic experience before his marriage, there is no ethical justification behind his expecting his wife to have one. Saroj undergoes even a beating for this fault of hers, but Inder never punishes himself for this faults of identical nature.

Inder's deep rooted notions about women render him incapable of genuine partnership with Saroj, such as she ardently desires. Gauri expresses in her talk with Vishal. "Inder belongs to the he-man school,"27 and born and brought up in an atmosphere where male dominance is the most formidable for cults, there is no question of any freedom or self-expression for Saroj.

Inder is man who, not really traditional but he derives his idea of male superiority from religious sources.

Inder treats Saroj merely as a wife – a possession, not a person. There is no question of friendship between them. Inder loves Saroj, no doubt, but the loves her as if she were his slave, his possession or commodity. They have lived, loved, even produced and raised children, but there has been no real happiness between them. To such a callous, irescible and inhuman husband, she wants the emotion to overflow into everyday life but Inder is not able to correspond.

Saroj is by nature pitiable and docile. She seeks to please him and to save her marriage. She clings to the moments of response and communication. She is willing to accept her role as a traditional wife and does not seek anything outside marriage. Actually Saroj leaves him only towards the end of the novel where as Inder had left her each time he quarrelled with her. It is with a sense of dismay that she had viewed their future together.

Thus Inder-Saroj relationship exposes the cruel face of patriarchy where a woman lives in an appalling condition and faces sufferings because of strong social conventions, she cannot escape herself from society therefore, she accepts these things as the part of her destiny.

The male superiority over female in marriage that works in Inder we find in Ram also, in the novel Rich Like Us. With tradition behind him the namesake epic hero Ram marries Mona, then falls in love with Rose and finally falls for Marcella. His marriage with and love for women are for him a part of the heritage he has inherited and considers polygamy a prerogative. There are no qualms of conscience in him and with Lord Krishna and Rama for authority he lives with two wives. He tells Rose that Lord Krishna had three hundred wives and King Dasaratha, Rama's father, had three wives. He claims rather audaciously that Hindus are more adventurous than Mohammedans who can only have four wives at a time. Claiming that Hindu marriage is a sacrament, not a contract, he rules out giving up his first wife, Mona.

He has no guilt in his heart having his first wife on the one hand and marries second time with Rose. And after his second marriage he carries an affair with Marcella. When Rose asks an explanation on this matter he explains to Rose that he feels intellectual love for Marcella and feels pride by stating that before her. But his attitude turns violent towards Rose when she goes out with Freddie (with whom she wan engaged before she met Ram) to get some relief from the suffocating experience which she got after marrying Ram. He doesn't approve her meetings with Freddie and becomes annoyed at her. He scolds her very brutally.

Rose, the English woman marrying Ram, is the Sita figure in the novel. There is an inexplicable fatalism about her – her yielding to Ram's persuasions and her decision to sail to India against warnings by her parents. Ironically in spite of all her experience of the male species, and even with the knowledge that Ram had been married, she fatalistically walks into his life. There was something romantic about her attitude to Ram.

Surviving the shocks of the first weeks of adjustment, she learns to live in humiliation and neglect. She realizes that – "Without a child of her own she would never be the mistress of the house not even her half of it."35

The cold war between Rose and Mona abetted by women visitors disgusts Rose until they are reconciled after Mona's attempt to commit suicide. But this was not the end of her troubles. These is the Marcella affair which leads to her separation from Ram for five years. In all her vicissitudes it is Sonali who remains a friend and who fights for her right to property. And Finally she is murdered. But people are made to believe that she invited the death on herself.

The story of Rose is the story of several Indian widows. In the name of Sati many women are murdered. How voluntary are voluntary deaths? One can see the parallel between the accounts of Sati found in Sonali's father's trunk and the Sati of Rose. In both cases the deaths are not voluntary but forced. But like a phoenix rose dies so that her son, rather fosterson, may live. He had forged her signature to withdraw, money from the bank and has now become a Cabinet Minister. Betrayed by her lover – husband Ram, by her fosterson Devikins, betrayed by law, she lives and dies pathetically much like the beggar whom she has always cared for. She fails to fight for her legitimate rights and how could she give hands for the beggar.

The novel The Day in Shadow also exposes the cruel face of society. It also exposes the chauvinism intrinsic in the modern male who believes himself to be liberal – minded, educated but considers wife as a commodity as a possession not a person.

The novel deals with the struggle of a young, beautiful and daring Indian woman trapped under the burden of a brutal divorce settlement and the agony and unhappiness she experiences in the hands of cruel and unjust male dominated society of India. Simrit, the heroine of the novel gets suffocating environment with her husband Som. Therefore, she seeks divorce from Som to be free but after getting divorce she realises that it's too appalling and cruel situation to move as a divorcee in society.

Her husband Som also cruel face of male domination in our society. He tries to be modern in each and every manner and blindly imitates the western style of life. He speaks their language, learns their mannerisms and adopts their fashions. Simrit recalls : "He had German phrases on the tip of his tongue and Vetter's mannerisms. He did most of his personal shopping in Eurpoe. In a royal blue jacket, a French silk tie and hand stitched Roman leather shoes he even looked foreigner."36

Som is a materialistic person. He gives more importance to money and power than human feelings. For men like Som, money is the most important thing in life and this love for money becomes the root cause of his separation from his wife. Simrit feels : "Money had been part of the texture of her relationship with Som, an emotional, forceful ingredient of it, intimately tied to his self-esteem. Money was, after all a form of pride, even of violence."38

Therefore, Som wants Simrit to act as a traditional wife and to his ideal of subdued womanhood. It is tradition in Som that urges him to believe that woman has to live under the control of man. Simrit finds it a suffocating experience. She has no voice in the ordinary decisions of everyday life, not even in the choice of curtains or chair covers : Simrit's life with Som lacks continuity and warmth. She feels isolated. It is act with a beginning and an end with nothing in-between or even afterwards. Sex is a part of life not a separate relationship which can be isolated from the rest of life. Sex is no more just sex than food is just food.

Som's recapitulation of his cruelty to his wife proves that cruelty to a woman is an eternal manifestation in man's life and woman is still in the modern world a symbol of Victorian womanhood – an embodiment of service, slavery and sacrifice.

Though the law has changed, attitudes hadn't and she feels uprooted in a husband-centered world. It is difficult to begin a new for the past lives on in the present, in the memories of the shared years and the lives of the children. But when divorce comes it is not definitely easy for her..

Smirit finds her life disrupted and herself in the midst of a peculiar financial problem. The heavy payments are an attempt to enslave her in every way. The divorce is a new beginning of confrontation with the age old traditional faith. She feels her position to that of an overloaded donkey whose burden attracts no notice and draws forth no pity. Her divorce does not imply that marriage has failed as a social institution of that it has outlived its utility. Marriage is neither a system of slavery nor an escape route. But is exposes the extremity of cruel faces in our society that work against women.

We see this inhuman practice against Madhu in the novel A Situation in New Delhi. The society that Nayantara creates in A Situation in New Delhi is one which fails to protect women even on the University campus in the capital city of the country as here Madhu a student of Delhi University is raped in the Registrar's office. The boys who rape Madhu obviously regard Madhu only as an object of lust to be used at their disposal and have no regard for her feelings, will and self-respect. Madhu becomes the symbol in the novel of women in India who have suffered under the oppression of the patriarchy Indeed, the explanations for the attack on Usman that Rishad offers his mothers', significant for the way, it demonstrates the collusion of the patriarchy.

It is highly ironical situation that a society which produces such men and cannot punish them does not deserve to have women in it.

In this matter the role of Madhu's parents is also very inhuman.. They "don't want more publicity for what is already an intolerable disgrace."42 and see a hastily arranged marriage as the only solution to their problems. Despite her appeal, Devi can do nothing to prevent.

Sahgal's sensitive awareness of social evils is seen in her journalistic writings. The writer is not merely reacting to social situations, but is sharply conscious of the constant deviation from social customs to suit private ends.

The writer's endeavour in her fiction has been a conscious attempt to deal with the 'brutalities perpetuated' by the privileged class. In the early novels, the prototype male chauvinist husband's arrogant indifference towards his wife has been given prime importance, be it Inder in Storm in Chandigarh or Somnath in The Day in Shadow. Other areas of social indifferences towards the cause of women appear in Situation in New Delhi, where Madhu's (a rape victim's) plight is helplessly watched and commented upon by Devi, the central woman character in the novel.

Thus, we find that which society Sahgal has created in her novels is based on the fact that society and the law are both made and controlled by man. Therefore, should any woman want help and assistance, these will not be forthcoming from society. She must open her eyes to this reality.

References :
1. Simone de Deauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley New York; Vintage, 1952, p.301.
2. Arundhati Banerjee, 'Introduction', Five Plays, Vijay Tendulkar, Bomybay; OUP, 1992, p.xvii.
3. Sarah Grimke, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes 1 Off.
4. Simone de Beauvoir, Selden, 1988, p.534.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid, p.136.
7. Ibid, p.162.
8. Ibid, p.76.
9. Nayantara Sahgal, The Day in Shadow Delhi : Vikas, 1971, p.9.
10. Ibid, p.60.
11. Ibid, p.23.c

Contributing Writer:  Dr. Ram Sharma, Lecturer in English, Janta Vedic College MEERUT, U.P. dr.ram_sharma@yahoo.co.in