Chapter III

Women and Isolation

“In herself she has the slightest importance.”

“…‘the modern woman’. This woman, she imagined, would be the equal of men; she
would think and work and act like a man, and instead of bemoaning her inferiority to
men, she would declare herself their equal.”

63
 Gender stratified study of isolation, constraining it to women only, is yet not possible,
which exposes the situation that male female binary is still not dissolved, despite the
proclamation of the arrival of ‘New women’. Gandhiji’s statement to Mridula Sarabhai,
one of the earliest feminist in India, “I have brought the Indian women out of the kitchen,
it is up to you (the women activists) to see that they don’t go back”, Bipan Chandra et.
al., 2008, p. 641,

“resolved many doctrinal debates about the desirability of women’s role in

the public sphere. If women could march in procession, defy the laws, go
to jail (my reference to Mukti Devi of ‘All the Lives We Never Lived’) —
all unescorted by male family members — then they could also aspire to
take up jobs, have the right to vote, and may be (my emphasis) even inherit
parental property.”

‘Maybe’. People still opposed and hesitated to accept women as equal to men. They still
retained the image of women as ‘the recipient of justice’, not ‘an ardent supporter’ and ‘a
comrade’ (Ibid.).

There were two committees: one under the chairmanship of B. N. Rao, the other chaired
by the law minister, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. Though the ‘first draft of the constitution’ ‘had
already gone in the matter and submitted a draft code in 1944’ — much later than the
setting of Roy’s An Atlas of Impossible Longing (the reference line is ‘In about 1907,
when Amulya moved from Calcutta to Songarh…’) — however, probably speaking, it
was not until Dr. Ambedkar’s bill,

“…which raised the age of consent and marriage, upheld monogamy, gave
women the rights to divorce, maintenance and inheritance, and treated
dowry as stridhan, or women’s property.” (Chandra et al., p. 642)

It explains the reason why, in 1930s or 40s, the rickshaw puller contradicts
Mukunda saying,

“No, he did not, you understand, not a bit! Poor Pagla Dadu even had to be
cremated by his old servant’s son, nobody from his family…But what can

64
 you say, he only had that one daughter , and she’s dead, poor girl. Even if
she were alive, what good would it have done? Could she have lit his
pyre? What’s a man to do without a son?” (Roy, An Atlas, p. 290)

She may have ‘come out of the kitchen’ in order to fulfill Gandhiji’s dream, and
Ambedkar may have succeeded to hand over her her ‘stridhan’, however, her ‘stridhan’
does not emancipate her from social patriarchal entanglements. She now has to struggle
for her emancipation from the male-centered nation-wide independence. A post-
independent woman seems to say,

“What good will the great nation’s freedom do for me? Tell me that! Will
it make me free? Will I be able to choose how to live? Could I go off and
be alone in a village as Walter has been doing? Could I spend a night out
under the stars away from the town as your father did the other day...Don’t
talk to me about freedom.” (Roy, All the Lives…, 90)

“Do you know what I would do if I were free at this minute? I would leave
this house. I would go away and never come back.”(Roy, Ibid. p. 91)

In this chapter, though the causes of isolation and its consequences are female
centered, the male shadow cannot escape. Joshi’s novels focus on male characters; while
the plight of women is much stronger in Roy’s novels. On the one hand, we see
traditional stereotyped women characters as Ratan’s mother (The Apprentice), Kanabala
(An Atlas of Impossible Longing) and others; on the other, stand in sharp contrast Tuula
(The Strange Case of Billy Biswas), Leela Sabnis (The Last Labyrinth), Gayatri (All the
Lives We Never Lived), Nomi (Sleeping on Jupiter), Maya (The Folded Earth), and
similar others. Merely To be born in the twenty-first-century or the centuries-to-come is
not enough to be a self-reliant woman. Despite the textual constraints which allow only
the study of the twentieth century woman, Joshi and Roy represent much more advanced
women having the potential that our contemporary women lack. Joshi’s and Roy’s
women characters, even traditional, emerge as having self-formed precepts to break with
the precedent. They are different from a sobbing female figure often represented in most
of the literature. Nothing least hesitates them in confrontation with the cantankerous

65
‘father figure’. They are capable of resistance. What this ‘new macho woman’ wants to
introduce is as,

“There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex
category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other
social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement
forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory
social realities of patriarccolonization, and capitalism.” (Leitch et al.,
p.2050)

Yet, what makes them subject to male dominance is their inevitable dependence due to
‘life force’ as June (The Foreigner) feels, socio-economic conditions as Kanabala (An
Atlas of Impossible Longing) faces, and above all, as paralyzing as constant male gaze
makes her where she is.

Thus, the binary oppositions have never been innocent from the beginning of the social
contract. A woman has, from her girlhood, ‘the consciousness of exclusion’, which is
rooted in her ‘social reality’ (‘lived experience’).What makes the difference between a
traditional woman and modern woman is the latter’s resistance or giving voice to this
consciousness rather than silently suffering which is coded in deifying her as devi
(goddess). Her space , thus seeming wider than men’s, in the sense that she has to
perform the role of ‘Bharat Mata’ and ‘Sati Savitri’, turns into a short of confinement.
Her private and public spheres merge objectifying her for ‘constant male gaze’.
Deification of her ‘decenters’ and ‘dislocates’ her. In order to free himself of the familial
responsibilities, man has imposed on her though seeming mutual yet a forced contract on
her ‘womb’. Her lived experience is painful ironical narrative, for ‘production’ is
culturally, traditionally, and religiously coded. It makes her subject to oppression and
turns her out of the production itself. The female body is, thus, “a text of culture”. A
woman is,

“…a powerful symbolic form, a surface on which the central rules,

hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed

66
 and thus reinforced through the concrete language of the body…it is
also…a direct locus of social control.” (Leitch, p. 2096)

The two prominent examples of the ironical social contract are fasting and gautra
(surname system) in India. Whether she is a ‘new macho woman’ or traditional, isolation
has been, objective or subjective or perceived or voluntary, an inevitable experience of a
woman’s life. It is her social reality. A sense or state of isolation is, as though, for her, a
waited phase.

Gazing. Though ‘exchange of looks’ is ‘concerned to develop way of exploring the

interaction’ , creating intimacy between each other, the looker and the looked, and thus ‘a
cumulative process’, it often causes, if two individuals are of the opposite sex, an
uncomfortable feeling. They become ‘more conscious’ of each other than in the company
of the same sex. The reason behind un-comfortableness caused by such a seeming
innocent looking, is well observed by Jeremy Hawthorn who writes,

“Looking is far from being a neutral process of information gathering: our

looking activities are saturated with the residues of our social and cultural
existence – for example, those relating to class, sexuality, economics.
(Waugh, p. 508)

In the light of the above extract, it can be studied in detail how male gaze makes a
female body its object of pleasure. Woman is, for men, only a means of sexual
satisfaction. The gaze is so deep that it pierces her clothed body and makes her naked in
her own eyes. The powerful active male gaze objectifies woman. It is patriarchal
psychological and ‘differential’ as Joshi’s ‘young girls’ (The Foreigner, p. 20) and Roy’s
‘tribal girls’ (An Atlas…, p. 5)are screened with male eyes. Babu’s ‘desire in his eyes’ ‘at
passing young girls’ in America is more explicable by Roy’s insight into the male gaze as
she puts the words in a tribal man’s mouth,

“Something about these tribal girls, eh, Amulya Babu? Makes long –
married men think unholy thoughts! And do you know, they’ll sleep with
any number of men they like!” (Roy, An Atlas, pp.5-6)

67
Woman is thus reduced to her body only. She is, for man, not more than a biological
figure, which is not only a ground of male organ arousal but ‘a source of imagery’ also.
This male gaze encounters with ‘female biology’ remain intact to man’s mind. And this is
why Billy is able to ‘remember’ Bilasia’s ‘voluptuousness to her full figure’ (The Strange
Case, p. 85) But these devouring eyes on a female figure are not to be qualified by Babu
or Billy only, they are as Billy says, “Yet everything that I know believe matters to man.”
(The Strange Case, p. 85) So what matters to man is ‘a waist so slender’, ‘swaying hips’
and breasts, that is all his ‘life yearns with desire’ (An Atlas, p. 6) The tribal people’s
obscene conversation makes, therefore, the refined and cultured Brahmin Amulya
‘annoyed and reluctant’. He is

“…barely able to summon up a strained smile to the yodeled laughs that

accompanied the ensuing discussion about why a woman’s two holes
smelled different despite being geographically proximate.”(Roy, An Atlas,
p. 8)

Her female figure is coded with ‘erotic impact’. The ‘erotic spectacle’ turns her into a
sexual object. For men, her biological figure signifies male desire. The ‘presence’ of her
body parts is of ‘indispensable elements’ in men’s songs. (See p. 8)

‘Pleasure at Being-looked-at-ness’. Every woman, whether employed or housewife,

needs to sustain life ‘emotional regulation’ (ER), especially from her partner, the only
one, whose caring gestures are enough to help her withstand any adverse effects.
Emotional regulation depends on the transmission of emotions between family members
i.e. the process lays in expressiveness. Love is to be expressed as the quality of
attachment between two individuals relies on the quality of expression. There is always a
pleasure in partner’s adoringly looking at. For this caring gesture June (The Foreigner),
Ratan’s wife, Meena (Billy’s wife), Kanan, all have yearning. For example, when Sindi
asks June, “Did I tell you, you have the most lovable laugh in town?” Instead of expected
blush, she gives a detached reply in the negative. June never find solace from Sindi who
remains detached till her death, exactly like Meena with whom Billy ‘is always annoyed’,
‘quarrelling’, ‘unhappy’, ‘restless’. (Joshi, The Strange Case…, p. 56) Whenever she asks

68
him what bothers him, what makes him restless, he puts her off saying ‘’it has nothing to
do with” her. She happens to say to Romi (the narrator),

“He…he doesn’t want me anymore. He hasn’t touched me for six months.

Not once.” (Joshi, The Strange, p. 57)

But Kanan’s dependence on Amulya is not only because of her emotional and physical
needs, in the lack of which June and Meena are vulnerable to isolation, nor is her
isolation, like theirs, subjective only but because of her incompetence, like Ratan’s wife,
to take a financial stand for herself and also because of her too traditional mindset that
does not let him cross her husband’s threshold. Even though she loses her mental balance
and feels ‘locked within ‘a bell jar’ in Amulya’s house, she remains a true Bhartiya nari
(an Indian compliant woman), for whom the Bollywood song from the movie ‘Nasseeb
Apna Apna’ (1986) sung by Anuradha Paudwal seems to be composed as “bhala hai
bura hai jaisa bhi hai / mera pati mera devata hai” (google trans. “good is bad as he is /
my husband is my god”). Her “strict adherence to conventional moral standards” is
reminiscent of Brontё’s Bertha. The above lyrics can also be played as background music
for Geeta’s (Som Bhaskar’s wife) life but she is too modern to shed tears for her
emotionally isolated husband. Both fall victim to ‘the orchestra of discontent’, the
limitless desire of possession. Amulya begins to stay at his factory till late in the evening
because of his ‘frequent distress’ due to ‘too much competition now from imitators’.;
while Som’s obsession to ‘corner companies’ and to possess Anuradha isolate him from
his family. Consequently,

“The stress enters the family through one member and is passed in a
predictable sequence to others.” (JSTOR online)

The consequence of such ‘substantial stress’, which results ‘in cognitive, emotional,
behavioural and psychological changes’ varies person to person. Some have the capacity
to cope; while others bring disaster to themselves as well as to the dependents as,

“In turn, these changes would lead to minor or major illness (my
emphasis). There are even known examples in which very critical events
have resulted in death (my emphasis).” (Hortulanus, p. 64)

69
However,

“…it was not the occurrence of an event per se, but the way the situation
was perceived by an individual in terms of stress, which counted.”
(Hortulanus, p. 64)

The first quoted extract gives a detailed account of Kanan’s insanity, Amulya’s death,
and Bhaskar’s disease; while the second one puts a contrast to the characters mentioned
above by Geeta Bhaskar’s life, who is capable to normalize that , the opposite of which
Bhaskar ‘had expected resentment, protest, even withdrawal’. (Joshi, The last Labyrinth,
p. 154)

‘Gender Segregation’. In addition to such hurdles as women’s immovability,

dependence, incompetence, there are “imperceptible existing spatial arrangements
between men and women” (Spain online) in the world where ‘space is gendered and
highly politicized in all societies’. A Patricia Mc Fadden writes in ‘short article’,

“The spaces we refer to public are assumed to be male…Additionally,

across human time, those spaces that were feminished were also
considered the least important, they were and still are places were women
functioned through the benevolence of males, but which they never owned
and still do not have entitlement to if they live in close intimate
relationships with adult males. Notions of ‘the family’ and ‘the household’
remain fundamentally masculine in terms of all the key institutions of our
societies.” (Online)

Woman is pushed out of the sphere: public as well as private. Kanabala, Manjula and
Mukunda’s wife (An Atlas…), Gayatri (All the Lives…), Ratan’s wife (the Apprentice)
are all excluded from their husband’s public sphere. Kanabala, Manjula, Shanti (Nirmal’s
wife), and Gayatri are the women who struggle to survive in the dominant environment
of their husbands’ joint families. Kanabala projects her identity onto Amulya’s response
to her words. She mirrors herself in his words. She is too conscientious of her husband’s
words. Unlike Gayatri, she suppresses her inner voice of rebel against her husband;
however, his words leave ‘negative effect’ on her. It is not so much her geographical

70
isolation from her native place, Calcutta that instills in her mind a sense of loneliness but
her husband’s attitude as

“She had felt something twisting, writhing and changing inside her with
his ‘leave me alone!’” (Roy, An Atlas…, p. 7)

The ‘stillness’ of Amulya’s house and his ‘inattentiveness’ startle “her into an unexpected
garrulity” (Ibid., p. 17) Amulya’s preoccupation with his work and moreover, ‘his
yearning for isolation’ create a split in his relationship with his wife. He remains an
‘outsider’ for her. Thus, Amulya’s voluntary isolation is imposed isolation for Kanan.
She yearns for re-living her days with her acquaintances in Calcutta, the city that gives
her a sense of attachment, a sense of self. Songarh dislocates her; however, she thinks
confinement to a window fit for herself rather than Gayatri’s defiance. As she is aware of
her husband’s reluctance to send her to Calcutta, she embraces the repellent. But does the
embrace not have a gesture of defiance? She puts an end to her requests to Amulya. In the
act of throwing ‘the keys to her unused Calcutta room’ (p. 17), which she has kept
underground for a long time anticipating her return, she does appear to be braving her
soul and devaluing male superiority in not caring her husband’s objection to her decision,
however, her ‘clutching’, pausing, drawing a ‘deep breath’ before parting from the keys
reveals a woman’s helplessness and resignation.

Husband’s Preoccupation with ‘Work’: A Cause of Isolation. Man establishes his

superiority over woman supposing he is engaged in a consequential work. The monstrous
contract between man and woman throws her out of ‘labour market’, thus, making her
man’s possession. Man believes that he has his birthrights over the workplace, over the
production. Since the domestic workplace is not one of ‘pure exchange’, it does not
equate her to man as Manjula says,

“They’re all the same, men, think they have important work and we’re just
stupid idlers.” (An Atlas…, p.147)

There are certain ‘implications of denying’ woman ‘entry into’ the wage earning works
and as “the labour process externalizes itself and the worker as commodities” (Spivak, p.
497), the production in her ‘womb’ reemphasizes her subordination, and hence her

71
oppression. For man, household chores are not, as strictly speaking, pure exchange, for
they do not certainly include labour. Therefore, her household chores are not work. He
does not share ‘daily hassels’ and ‘uplifts’ to his wife. Kanan undergoes a form of
isolation i.e. perceived social isolation, the cause of which lies in her imposed isolation
due to Amulya being too preoccupied with his work, consequently her immovability. She
craves, staying at home all alone, for the company during the day. She gets bored. So she
asks him,

“Couldn’t you come home a little earlier in the evenings?” Because, as she
further says, “It feels so empty, Nirmal at college, Kamal at work with you
all day: not that sons are company for mothers…How I wish I had a
daughter.” (Roy, An Atlas…, p. 18)

Similarly, Mukunda’s wife says when she sees his ‘mind in turmoil’ because he has to
shoulder responsibilities at his workplace,

“If this what landing responsibility does to you, just stay an assistant all
your life, that would be better for all of us.” (Roy, An Atlas; p. 217)

Though Ratan’s wife experiences what Amulya’s wife and Mukunda’s wife feel at home
piercing the pin drop silence, she remains a silent sufferer.

Perhaps, Kananbala says something true that her daughter would be the filler of the
void of emptiness, what her sons can never be as she imagines, “How I wish I had a
daughter.” Daughters indeed prove to be the true companions to their mothers. Mother-
daughter relationship is inseparable on emotional level. It establishes a mutual bond, a
tight-knit relationship, which even a daughter-in-law cannot provide as Kanan says “It is
not the same” (Ibid., p. 18) when Amulya suggests to her spending time with Manjula,
(her daughter-in-law) consoling that daughters are, in the most cultures, have to leave
their parental home for her in-laws’ and cannot be lifetime companions to their mothers.
It is the very mother-daughter attachment that is explicable for the support Maya receives
from her mother even after the former’s elopement with a Christian boy Michael and
despite mother’s being ‘too intimidated by him’ (Maya’s father), as Maya recalls the
temple where her mother ‘would meet’ her,

72
 “…unknown to my father…Each time, she brought me a piece of
jewellery from her box and thrust it into my hands, without a word.” (Roy,
The Folded Earth; p. 65)

And, while her father remains concerned about his social prestige because of his
daughter’s elopement with a person of ‘different religion’ which is ‘abhorrent’ for him
and, therefore, makes “a great show of formally disowning’ Maya; Her isolation hastens
death of her mother who remains ‘tearful and imploring’, and ‘uncomprehending to the
end about’ her ‘stubborn refusal’. (The Folded Earth, pp. 11 & 20) Sheila (The Foreigner)
who is, after her mother’s death, brought up by her materialistic father, remains silent
most of the time before him. And even after her brother Babu’s death, she is not able to
muster up courage withstanding her father’s words. All Som Bhaskar (The Last
Labyrinth), Ratan Rathor (The Apprentice), Amulya, Mukunda and Nek Chand (All the
Lives…) are convinced of the futility of inconsequential conversation with their wives.
They are self-conceited of being engrossed with consequential ‘work’ believing their
earning runs the house in all sense and their salary is the only thing that their family
wants and needs. They prioritize their work – work that furnishes them with sovereignty,
masculinity, activity, compared to their wives’ household chores that signify femminity,
passivity. They avoid everyday conversation with their wives. By contrast, Gayatri is a
‘new’ woman who does not submit, like Ratan’s wife or Kanan, to her husband Nek’s
whims. In her letters to Lipi, she seems to accentuate the word ‘work’ several times in
order to subvert the active-passive binary by devaluing male work.

Inattentiveness and Indifference: Low Degree of Intimacy. If a person pauses for a

while to think how strong his emotional ties with his life partner have been since his
marriage, he may seek out the solution to her ‘frustration’. Conversation gap between
husband and wife is, though there are multiple factors such as shyness, in-laws’ presence,
age factors, etc., the experience of the bygone days. When television and internet have
brought bliss of openness, the relationship cannot suffer from such a blockage in our
contemporary twenty first century. The following situations give insights into a woman’s
subjective isolation, particularly in the company of her life partner. How much Ratan,
Amulya, Som, and Nek Chand know their respective wife, is measured from the fact that

73
they ‘have knowledge’ about them rather than they ‘know’ them. As in ‘a Marxist
psychologist, philosopher, socialist Eric Fromm’s words,

“Having knowledge is taking and keeping possession of available

knowledge (information): knowing is functional and serves only as a
means in the process of productive thinking.” (Fromm, p. 33)

Thus, they are familiar with, not with their wife in particular, but with a woman in
general. They remain ‘islands’ put together by Indian marriage system. In operating on
their life, they overlook their wife’s emotions. But overlooking, unresponsiveness in its
proper sense, anticipates consequential negative effects on the concerned person’s psyche
also. Both partners turn ‘outsiders’ to each other. As one night Ratan is completely
silenced by the, now conspicuous to him, flow of thoughts about the separateness, un-
mindfulness, impracticality between him and his wife, as he wonders,

“So I was not able to tell her anything. I should have expected that. What
had I shared with her in the twenty years of our married life that could be
called intimate?” (Joshi, the Apprentice; p. 114)

Perhaps, ‘sex’ and procreation of daughter and son. And after that ‘boredom’, the adverse
affect that his wife has to suffer and he remains unaware, as unmindful as Amulya is of
kanan’s mental deterioration due to his ‘yearning for isolation’. Taking in consideration
Kanan’s mental condition, Amulya can be blamed for his impracticality. When her fits
transform into illness and become frequent, he too one day finds himself lost in self -
debate exactly like Ratan Rathor,

“He tried puzzling out what had happened to her, blamed himself, forgave
himself, blamed it on her age, her difficult time of her life, thought he
should have spent more time with her, thought he should have taken her
such a long distance from her family in Calcutta.” (Roy, An Atlas; pp.45-
6)

Both, in their cogitation, reach almost near the trouble, yet come back to the routine of
their way of living. Justify themselves, defend themselves. But Geeta (Som’s wife) is cast

74
in a different mould. Although Partner’s infidelity breaks the ties between wife and
husband and may lead to divorce, Geeta does the contrary to Bhaskar’s ‘disbelief’. She
neither resents nor protests on hearing about his romance with Anuradha. Perhaps, she
has learnt to compromise with her life or has learnt to circumvent her ‘resentment’. As
Bhaskar says,

“But Geeta, to my disbelief, responded with sudden powerful thrusts, as

the vision of me locked into Anuradha was somehow more erotic to her
than I by my plain self.” (Joshi, The Last; p. 154)

Incompatibility of beliefs and values. Gayatri’s marriage with Nek Chand is

incompatible because of “their contrary sense of wrongdoing and right-thinking, their
clashing views of necessities and indulgence, freedom and captivity”. There has been
altercation for the beginning. Gayatri’s individualistic nature remains conflicting with her
husband’s socialization, her longing for freedom against Nek’s conventional mind-set
and as on the one hand, traditional demand of her roles as a wife, mother to Myshkin and,
in a wider sense, mother of the nation; while on the other, as Roy tells Parvati in an
interview, she herself is,

“…a woman for whom family and motherhood is not the end and start of
everything — Gayatri has an inner core that is hers alone, it is a flame that
lights her up and has nothing to do with her family, not even her child…”
(Someshwar Online)

But, Nek’s of the views that is her “fundamental problem” which does not have to clash
with “national freedoms”. (Roy, All the Live; p. 91)

Consequences of Emotional Isolation. Amulya’s unresponsiveness to Kanan’s

feelings cuts her off from her family; confines to one room and drives insane. Her health
deteriorates. The terrible silence his house is unendurable for Kanan who has spent her
childhood in the crowded house in the crowded city, in the house where someone or the
other from the neighbourhood is always present to gossip. Neither he nor his sons take
her to her relatives’ house in Calcutta, for which she keeps complaining as,

75
 “Why didn’t you ever ask me before we moved to this town?” Kananbala
continued, almost in a whisper. “Why didn’t you ever ask me about
building this house? I’d have liked being closer to my relatives. Did you
never think of that?” (Roy, An Atlas; p. 19)

She has a large network of personal contacts in Calcutta; while, in Songarh she faces
linguistic barriers, for the neighbourhood there mainly consists of the British. Neither he
nor his sons take her to her relatives’ house and remote as she is from them, a sense of
isolation compels her to think of attempting suicide as,

“They did not let her meet outsiders; the roof was out of bounds too. They
were afraid she would jump, as she had once threatened to.” (Roy, An
Atlas…, p. 52)

When her threats do not have an impact on Amulya, she creates her own world through
the window of the roof, though her communication to this self-created world is
‘unintractive’ i.e. one way process. She finds pleasure in silent looking at the Barnum’s.
She spends sleepless nights at the window, which turns into a panacea to her ‘loneliness’.
She wants to enter the forbidden world through the window, which is, for her, an exit to
Mrs. Barnum’s world. Her continually ‘sitting at the window sill and watching’ (p. 51)
familiarizes her with Larissa Barnum, in whom she begins to mirror, confirm, generalizes
her femininity, her passivity. There is an incident when she identifies her womanhood
when Larissa is hit by Mr. Barnum (her husband) ‘across the face’,

“Kananbala touched her own cheek as if she had been hurt.” (Roy, p. 52)

And, Mr. Barnum turns into ‘the real man’ (p. 52). The proper noun changes into the
common noun as all men are the same in inflicting pain on woman.

Larissa is nevertheless a modern woman who defies tradition and does not suffer
from the sense of guilt in committing adultery. But the concealment of her love affair by
her from her husband accentuates the similarity, particularly in terms of being ‘culturally
possessed’. She is Kanan’s other self, her ‘true self’, marked by cultural codes. Mrs.
Barnum’s appearance therefore imbues her with a sense of defiance against the

76
authoritative voice of her husband. For example, she leaves her husband’s house without
his consent. The short extract below illustrates her long suppressed desire,

“Kananbala looked up at Mrs. Barnum’s smiling, confident face bobbing

considerably above hers. What strangeness! Her clothes, the colour of her
skin, the ways she walked, shoulders thrown back. She noticed Mrs.
Barnum’s earlobes were long and pierced with green stones, that her front
teeth were, stained yellowish, that she smelled of rose sand smoke.
Kananbala had looked at Mrs. Barnum so many nights and evenings
separated by road, window grill and distance that to have her so close
seemed a revelation. Impelled by some irrational force (emphasis added),
Kananbalafelt she would not stay in her room any longer. She felt as if she
would do anything at all, anything to get out of the house.” (Roy, An
Atlas…, p. 77)

Even though her ‘anything’ may be at the expense of her obedience to her husband.
Larissa’s appearance ‘so close’ to her articulates her suppressed voice, her ‘other half’. In
the above passage she (Larissa) appears to be her ‘irrational force’, irrational as it defies
resignation, as it is bold enough to contravene the traditional rules laid down for women;
and as it is dissonant with her structured compliant self. However, she cannot be attuned
with Larissa’s appearance for long. She may have, in Larissa’s company, a state of
floating, i.e. being in a state of voluntary isolation, in solitude, the moments of which are
actually in the compliance with her true self, but the voice of her compliant self (false
self) authorizes her. She is bound to act accordingly as — though remote from the fear of
her husband, what her mind is preoccupied with is,

“She had not left the house for what seemed like forever, let alone with
strangers (emphasis added). It was impossible.” (Roy, p. 76)

‘Stranger’? ‘impossible’? Is Larissa still stranger? If yes, in whose sense, in Kanan’s, or

Amulya’s? And what is impossible? As later Amulya is also heard saying ‘she was
making a fool of herself with a stranger’ (p. 79). But the situational irony of Amulya’s
words is this that he himself does not have the sense that he has, for his ‘yearning for

77
isolation’, turned into a stranger for her. For her, her life after marriage, especially in
Songarh, her family, and her husband, these are all strangers. Larissa is the only person,
she has familiarized herself with. What makes Amulya stranger to Kanan is his
authoritative voice that is innate.

Patriarchal Structure and Women: Isolation. The societies in India is patriarchal, like
most countries save Yemen. They have long denied women the ‘opportunity for growth’,
her emancipation, repression through ‘unnatural indoctrination’, by which man has made
her subordinate, inferior to himself. The seeds of repression are in the religion epics and
the social structure which is male dominated for, “religious tradition and social
institutions have a deep bearing on the role and status of women” (Nirola online).

The nature of Patriarchy has, however, because of the arrival of ‘new’ men-women
awareness of such principles as individualism, rationalism, and above all, globalization,
changed by the twentieth century liberating women from the direct male control. But it
does not, as widely thought, alleviate the situation; instead, it worsens matters for women
for, the twenty-first-century patriarchal mind-set is ‘more complex’ as instead of direct
physical control it is implicit, subtle. It now dominates women’s sphere through social
and cultural codes. It permeates her environment. Silvia Walby, a sociologist, identifies
‘six sources of patriarchal control’: paid work versus household chores, culture, sexuality,
violence, the state. The application of these sources to the novels of Joshi and Roy
delineates the condition of women in the male commanded social structure. Female
sexuality has “experienced an axial period in a striking transformation of human
consciousness”; it has been “culturally repressed” by privileging over it the discourse of
morality. However, the transformation of human cultures explains the fact that now
‘culturally repressed female sexuality was once ‘primary’ ‘in both the East and West’ as,

“…the female sexual archetypes and values gradually weakened over

millennia, until they were finally supplanted by patriarchal societies and
religions. In the East, Confucius and Lao Tzu, the Upanishadic sages,
Mahavira, the Buddha in India continued to speak of the importance of
women as sexual teachers and their active role in ritual sexual union.”
(Francoeur et al. online)

78
Even till the nineteenth century, female sexuality had a free play in the aristocratic
societies. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, it was absolutely repressed and
subverted. Mr. Khemka and his daughter Sheila (The Foreigner), and Som Bhaskar of
‘The Last Labyrinth’ shed light on this sexual subversion. While the twentieth century
Mr. Khemka is liberal enough to discuss his playfulness with ‘girls’ in his youth as he
tells Dr. Sindi,

“Don’t tell me I haven’t gone through as much as any of you youngsters.

When we were young we fell in love with girls next door but we didn’t
make an ass of ourselves.” (Joshi, The Foreigner; p. 118)

And while promiscuous Bhaskar is, in the twentieth century, as respectful and acceptable
as Nek Chand (All the lives…), why should Sheila, daughter of Mr. Khemka, a next
generation hence more modern, blush and ‘hide’ her embarrassment at such open
conversation, as Sindi mentions,

“So you think one of these Marwari girls is really superior merely because
of a silly membrane between her legs?” (Joshi, The Foreigner; p. 52)

And why does Gayatri have to tolerate silently Dinu’s mother’s rumour about her escape
with Walter Spies and Beryl de Zoete, her escape which in the words of Dinu’s mother
turns into elopement. These are disgracing rumors; Meera always has to be very
conscientious of what people would think while she is with Nirmal. It is explained under
widowhood as below.

Widowhood Widowhood, for women in particular, inlays fetters, writes its harsh
dictations on the body of the widow, draws a Lakshman rekha , impinges strict diet; a
method of, if not through fire, self-immolation. Meera and Lipi have to, despite
themselves, maintain saintliness and stay abstemious till death. They have to be
conscientious of their movements as Meera of “An Atlas…” says,

“What she would say at home about the time she had been gone…And
what would they say when they saw all of them return together? What was
it about darkness, Meera thought, that altered things? Always those

79
 injunctions from parents, from husband, from relatives, come before
dark.” (Roy, p. 137)

Even her very presence becomes disgusting to the in-laws. She is regarded as stigmatic to
the family. For Meera and Lipi, the courtyard does change supplanting their husband’s,
but it is their vain hopes that they think of remarrying as Nek Chand’s following words
are reminiscent of her past life, of ‘one more suffering’. She needs to remind herself of
social obligations as,

“Things have no meaning. You and I know that it’s our inner being that is
everlasting” (All the Lives…, p.191) and she has to wear “only handspun
saris. Didn’t the two of us vow to live our lives with simplicity, purity —
Lippi? All this…” he gestured at the necklace and the sari. “All this is not
for us.” (Roy, p. 186)

Widowhood lays strictures on women. Meera’s and Lipi’s second marriage is not without
conditions. To the exigency of behavioural codes of society, she has to subdue her
feelings. No second chance of happiness. Remarrying cannot give back, to their disbelief,
the position of a newly married woman; their position in the house is of “a glorified
maid” “who was aspiring to the master, a widow who had begun to dream up an
impossible future.” (An Atlas…, p. 166) They can never regain the position of a mistress
to the house. The relationship between them is not of a husband and wife but of a lenient
master and an obedient slave, a slave who has been shown mercy. Contrary to Meera’s
and Lipi’s beliefs, Nirmal and Nek have kept Meera and Lipi respectively in their houses
to maintain and look after Bakul and Myshkin respectively, not to superintend, and
particulary in order to free themselves from the household duties. As Nirmal’s elder
brother Kamal’s and Lisa’s view reveal their (Nirmal and Nek) inner workings of the
mind,

“…having provided Bakul with a mother who was not a mother and a
brother who was not a brother, Nirmal had thought his duty done and
made good his escape.” (Roy, An Atlas…, p. 105)

80
And as Lisa, Nek’s neighbor, tells Dr. Razario (Myshkin’s Dada) about Nek’s seeming
‘compassion’ in bringing Lipi to the house,

“Compassion’s good for kittens, Batty R, it doesn’t make for happy

marriages…Lipi was the youngest son’s widow, Bad luck, they thought
her — a woman whose husband dies young. She has that little girl — if it
had been a son, the family might have treated her better. She tended to
Nek, brought him his food and so on. He saw her all day around the house,
staring. It occurred to him that this was what the Buddha had intended all
along.” (Roy, All the Lives…, p. 180)

The only consolation for Lipi is that Liza does this fault finding in Lipi’s absence, while
Meera has to confront maltreatment as Kananbala’s words, “who is it you’re fucking
these days, Meera?”, are intolerable and so hastens Meera’s withdrawal. The only cry
from within, she hears is

“Couldn’t, couldn’t, continue living in Songarh. She must leave.

Anywhere would be better than here…anything but this nightmare.” (Roy,
An Atlas…, p. 166)

But if not Songarh, where does she determine to go? Perhaps, she thinks “she would go to
her brother and beg for shelter”, but returning is not possible for a widow. Will her
widowhood let her live peacefully wherever she thinks she will go? She says, “She would
get away to a big city where nobody knew her.”(Ibid., p. 167) To an unknown place?
There is, to her ignorance, no unknown place for a widow. She cannot escape the slanting
eyes of the times. For a woman, ‘All men’ are ‘the same’ under the sun. Meera who is
unaware of the ways of the world, newly acquired sense of drawing does not make her
self-contained. Big cities, the metropolitan cities, demand highly skilled people, and
above all, adjustment is another issue in such big places.

Marriage as Confinement for Women. It may be shocking to a city-bred emancipated

educated woman to think about a rural woman, in the nineteen twenties or thirties, like
Kana, Gayatri, or Ratan’s mother who is not even named in the text. It is not like that
these women are not conscious pf their ‘true self’; instead, to their incomprehension, the

81
socio-cultural impositions and their preliminary education which taught them strict
adherence to the moral codes are much stronger than the male authority. Thus, a sense of
isolation is inevitable for the women who are never allowed to cross out the threshold of
their in-laws’ house. A girl is taught from her childhood to be skilled in household
chores. So in childhood she is taught to learn a woman’s ‘roles and behaviours’ in the
prevailing view that

“Establishing a family is one of the most important life events for women,
work for men.” (Hortulanus, p. 27)

Thus, they are excluded from men’s space. Their remaining life is, for them, to
familiarize with such a confinement. The house becomes their entire world. The outside
world is merely left to their imagination by the fragments of men’s evening
conversations. If it ever occurs in their mind to visit the imaginary world, they have to
suppress their feelings till inattentive, indifferent husband’s consent. Both Kananbala and
Manjula are forced to pander to their husband’s whims. They are in their so-called own
house victims of imposed isolation that is the consequence of imposed strict social
obligations on them.

Violence. Marriage subordinates a woman to man. The conditions of pre-independent

Indian women were as such: she was completely dependent on her husband; her
traditionally directed place in her in-laws’ house was equivalent to the wash of her
husband’s feet as what the widespread belief in the countryside is transferred from the old
generation to the new is she is pati ke paira ki dhovan, and treated with utter contempt
because she is paira ki juti (absolutely of no value). Therefore, if she does not dance
attendance upon her husband’s dictations or goes against him she is beaten, tortured or
even ‘killed’ while her husband even after having committed this heinous crime, remains
devata (a worshipful god). What does the devata expect from her? She is supposed
always to be calm, pacifying her husband and not to utter a single word in protest, while
her bodily postures should be before him: drooped eyes, neck bent downward, as being
vulnerable for physical as well as emotional torture. Charu’s mother endures everything.
She tolerates her husband’s even keeping a mistress. However, such long endurance,
instead of rewarding her, takes a heavy toll on her life by the hands of such a drunkard

82
devata. Had it been in Bakul’s house, Kananbala would have been extremely distressed
and would have been found herself helpless to do anything. But Charu’s grandmother
(Ama) is not like Bakul’s grandmother as,

“She was not afraid of anything, and had thrown Charu’s father, her
younger son, out of her house for being drunk everyday and beating his
wife to death in a drunken fit, she would bring up her grandchild alone,
she had said, they didn’t need a man around the house if it is a man like
him.” (Roy, The Folded, pp. 18-19)

However, a man always acts in accordance with his pleasure, not at a woman’s
discretion, be she his wife or mother. Charu’s father and Nirmal after Manjula’s warnings
(older sister-in-law) do not give up drinking.

Perceived isolation in Married Life. During industrial expansion, “adjustment to the

demands of organized society” is “primarily rational and thought out”. Consequently, it
does not spare human relationships, for people are,

“…forced into calculating attitude in relations to others in order to realize

their own goals, while feelings and emotions are considered irrational.”
(Hortulanus, p.23)

Isolation does not severe the ties between husband and wife until it is internalized, in
other words, an event is not intrinsically and essentially,

“…stressful, it depends on the way an individual perceives and interprets

the event and its consequences.” (Hortulanus, p. 64)

Thus, partner’s perceived isolation in his or her married life,

“…doesn’t mean you’re physically excluding your partner from your life
but you’re excluding them from your thoughts.” (Carol Bruess, Ph. D
online)

But how does an individual in the company of her/his life partner feels a sense of
isolation? It is due to not sharing ‘daily hassles and uplifts’. Does anyone of Billy, Ratan,

83
Som, Amulya, or Nek communicate to their respective wife their ‘hopes, fear, and
dreams’? Some of them “might not be arguing or yelling or showing any obvious sign of
disharmony; quite often because” they have found it easier not to by “responding the
majority of their energy toward their kids”, professional life or some external motive
resulting in emotional detachment, and in turn, leaving both strange to each other ‘even
after twenty years’ of married life. Neither Amulya nor Ratan have time for their
respective wife to ask basic questions regarding daily menial, ‘inconsequential’ activities
in order to ‘get into their world’, in order to make an approach to the partner’s
perspective.

Lack of Competence and Dexterity: Women’s Dependence. For socio-economic

reasons, they have to embrace harassment, violence, humiliation, and exploitation.
Ratan’s wife, Billy’s mother, Lipi, Kananbala, Meera, Kripa the maid-servant, Manjula,
Shanti, and Mukunda’s wife are all either uneducated or unskilled to stand by themselves.
Financial insecurity makes them custodial to their husband and sons. Compared to
women mentioned, Tuula Lingerden (The Strange Case…), Leela Sabnis (The Last
Layrinth), and Gayatri are modern independent women. They are competent enough to
look straight in the men’s eyes. Tuula is ‘Swedish and had come to the united states for
advance training in psychiatric social work’ (p. 13); has ‘advanced the then prevalent-
Freudian explanation of Gandhi’s non-violence’ (p. 15) and ‘she doesn’t like men the
way a woman is meant to’ (p. 14). Like her, Leela Sabnis is also self-dependent, self-
contained, and ‘a scholar, an educator’s child…could read at three and hadn’t stopped,
from what I could make out. She knew Marathi, Sanskrit, French and German besides
English Hindi and Tamil… books had done the job for Leela Sabnis.” (p. 74) Gayatri the
passionate is, though her education takes a pause after her father’s death, competent
enough to make an entry in the world of wage earning. Equally advanced is Anuradha in
spite of seeing conventional. But here one needs to pause for question, what explains
their advancement: cultural difference, their education or their views? Cultural difference
does not, in fact, though one of the few essential impacts on the growth of the individual,
wholly imply so much effect on these women’s competence, for the fact that not
everyone in the Western culture is capable. What then explains the real difference
between Kananbala, Lipi like women, and Tuula, Leela, and others? Dissimilarity

84
denotes partly to their persistence to continue lighting a flame for their passion and partly
to the patriarchal system. These women are capable to keep their life impervious to the
irrational male-centered system and do not let circumstances impinge on their life. As
Gayatri withstands her husband’s opposition what Kanan cannot even daydream of. They
find a way out by either remaining single as Tuula is or divorcing as Leela Sabnis prefers
or escaping as Gayatri does rather than leading a life of compliant self. They do not stay
adhered to the conventions, to the male-dominated institutuions such as family, marriage
etc. June’s imploring insistence on being married to Sindi seems out of these women’s
ken. They seem to comprehend the necessity of Anuradha’s words that echo Mary
Wollstonecraft’s injunction for women, “It’s better not to be anybody’s wife” in order to
free themselves from the ensnares of the patriarchal structures or agree with Gayatri as in
a letter dated 11th – 12th to Lisa she says,

“You are lucky not to be married, Lis, how often I have envied your
freedom! The feeling of being trapped — trapped forever — I honestly
thought I would know nothing but misery for my entire existence. There is
a time after which the doors close & then where do you go? Nowhere.”
(Roy, All the Lives…, p. 221)

What else does married life give a woman except altercation, discordant, humiliation,
lamentation, affliction, fretting, infliction, ‘injunctions’, alienation, a sense of isolation,
contempt. Whole life, a woman keeps watching the attitude of her husband as though it
were her lot.

Modernity vs. Conventions. Whenever a woman goes with the tide, she has to
counter the conventionalist slanting glance. She has to suffer ultraconservative reflection.
But if mind adopts a new course, to suppress desires is never without lingering agony.
That is why Gayatri is compelled to ‘transgress’ the socio-religious threshold,; that is
why Maya has to jump out of traditional threshold, even though staying ‘disinherited’ for
entire life. Cultural role cannot be neglected, however, it is also observable that capability
of the individual helps to stand on their belt instills confidence in order to make one
daring. Leela Sabnis doesn’t hesitate wearing man’s clothes as “jeans and white shirt and

85
cut her hair like a man’s” (Joshi, pp. 188-9). Her dress sense captures Bhaskar’s attention,
who is able to recall it later.

Appreciation and Recognition. “Social relationships are important to the development

and maintenance of the identity and self-respect of people.” (Hortulanus, p.15) Self-
confidence comes from ‘internalizing the appreciation’ (Ibid.) Hortulanus’ study throws
light on Meera’s and Gayatri’s attachment to Nirmal and Walter Spies respectively.;
while the latter’s (Gayatri’s ) detachment from her husband, Nek Chand. Meera and
Gayatri are amateurs not professionals. Although Meera’s acceptance “I only sketch, I’m
not a draftsman”, and Nirmal himself sees that pictures are ‘more atmospheric than
accurate’, he appreciates her sketches as “they are wonderful sketches, they really convey
the feelings of this place”. The words of appreciation are more powerful than his
subsequent critical words as, “…try to do this a little systematically.” (Roy, The Folded
Earth, p. 141) Nirmal’s words, thus, have a great impression to establish a close bond of
familiarity between Meera and he compared to Nek Chand Rozario’s words. Gayatri
remains attached to some people in her life: her father, Lisa, and two foreigners, Walter
Spies and Beryl de Zoete; for they recognize her true self. Her father, for instance, want
to take her to the Borobudur, to Angkor Wat, to the Temples of Bali, to ‘show her there
was a shared cultural universe in Asia’ (Roy, p. 27) and from Madras to Singapore, to
Malaya and Cambodia because he has recognized his daughter’s love for art. Beryl de
Zoete has also come to know that ‘Gayatri Rozario — young, beautiful, gifted, tortured,
stifled’ needs to be rescued. How ‘appreciation and recognition’ create a bond between
people and swell their network size is apparent from the fact that except selected few,
Gayatri’s rest of the letters are addressed to ‘Lis’ (Lisa) who is, just because of her sense
of understanding, the former’s life-long-friend in sharp contrast to the relationship
between her and her husband. Amidst the altercations between them, amidst “wrong
doing and right-thinking, their clashing views of necessities and indulgences, freedom
and captivity” (Roy, p. 110), it comes out that Nek’s discouraging words force her to long
for isolation as he says,

“Painting, singing, dancing, these are wonderful things. Everyone needs

hobbies. But there are hobbies and then there are serious matters. Try and

86
 read something other than novels — I’ve given you so many books
and…what about that history of India?” (Roy, All the Lives…, p. 35)

And, for the same reason, that her husband’s perspective is condescending and
disparaging, Leela Sabnis prefers isolation. She gives her agreement when her husband
sends a divorce letter as Som says,

“…books had done the job for Leela Sabnis. Her husband, she claimed
proudly, divorced her for reading too much.” (Joshi, The Last, p. 74)

Inheritance: Isolation. There is a prevalent view in a patriarchal culture, in which

ancestral property is inherited through only male succession: that is, only a son is entitled
a successor to the family; while a girl is pertaining to the other, thus, she is othered. If she
is authorized to have a share in her father’s property, she is given off during her marriage.
That makes all the difference. Her rights compared to son of the family are qualified by
the patriarchal contract that isolates her by the adoption of arranged marriage.

As the rickshaw puller (An Atlas of Impossible Longing) asks Mukunda worrying
about Bikas Babu’s property as he (Bikas Babu) does not have any male successor. He
emphasizes the necessity of a son’s presence, even if Bikas Babu’s daughter Shanti
would alive, “Could she have lit his pyre?” Since his belief refers to the rituals of the
Upanishadic period, it can be consulted with the original scriptures to defamiliarize the
prevalent view of the society. By contrast, a woman cannot only ‘light a pyre’ but also go
through, as mentioned in the Upanishads, upananyan (thread ceremony, that is, an act
leading to enlightenment near the preceptor’s eye), perform all ritualistic rites like
shraddha, ‘pind daan’ (as mentioned in the Ramayana where Sita does) and others. The
Vedas confirm woman’s equivalence in rites as on performing shraddha, “putroabhabho
vadhu kuryat” (Vabhishyapurana: Chap. 12-14) The Vedas, in fact do not privilege male
supremacy over women. As immediately after Indian actress and T.V. presenter Mandira
Vedi’s ‘performing her husband’s last rites’ (Pandey, New Delhi, 21 July, 2021), Prof.
Kaushalendra Pandey, “who teaches Sanskrit literature at the prestigious Benaras Hindu
University”, says,

87
 “…there are references in ancient texts to wives performing the last rites if
a man died without leaving a son or a daughter or a male relative such as a
brother. Even daughters, he says, had the right to do the last rites.”
(Pandey BBC.com)

But she is not the only woman, in our contemporary period, who took the initiative. There
are a number of women, for instance, during the recent pandemic, performing the last
rites in the absence of a male heir as,

“For the record, Bedi is not the only woman to cremate a loved one. When
former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee died in August 2018, his
adopted daughter Namita Kaul Bhattacharya did his last rites. In 2014,
Pankaja Munde lit the pyre of her father Gopinath Munde, a senior BJP
leader in the western state of Maharastra.” (Pandey)

Nor can the event of the village Azaan near Bharatpur in Rajasthan be forgotten, where
the martyr Virendra’s wife, Gayatri Devi, wearing her wedding dress, accompanied her
husband’s dead body to the crematorium as Hindi poet Hariom Panwar mentions in his
poem, two memorial lines of which are as follows, “Un aankhon ki do bundon se saaton
sagar hare hain/Jab menhdi wale haathon ne mangalsutra utaare hain”, a poem on the
martyrs of Pulwama, a district in Indian union territory, Jammu and Kashmir.

It’s subsequent manipulation that deprived women from Vedic rituals or from
chanting mantras, e.g. Gargi, Maitreyi, Gayatri, in the mythological period. And, as all
Hindu texts confirm, no rituals were performed or believed to be completed without
including women. In her absence, yagya was considered incomplete. In India, Goddesses
are equally worshipped. Saraswati (goddess of wisdom), Lakshmi (goddess of wealth),
Kali (goddess of creation and destruction) are known to be the incarnation of God
Himself, and hence worshipped across the territory, e.g. Saraswati puja is performed in
Amulya’s family.

Provision for Girls’ Education in India. Compare to the 1950s and 1960s, the standard
of education for girls has improved. Still, the provision of education is below the
satisfactory mark, let alone the comparison with the standard of education in the

88
developed countries. Women’s emancipation and empowerment is always intact with the
quality of education imparted to them in preliminary stage. The drawbacks of education
system for girls are, in the beginning years of post-independent India, pronounced more
in the rural area schools. Nirmal’s arrangement a private tutor for his daughter, Bakul,
and Charu’s staying away from school for days betrays the pathetic conditions of the
schools of the latter half of the twentieth century rural India in clean contradiction to the
condition of schools of the metropolitan cities like Delhi and Mumbai where Leela
Sabnis could develop her expertise; where Sheila could get post graduation and where
Gayatri could dream her dreams, or to Western countries where Tuula enrolled herself for
advance course in psychology. Despite constitutional equal rights for education, girls
suffered gender segregation. Besides, there was inefficiency of the strategies adopted for
primary schools. Thanks to the ‘Report of the CARE committee on Girls’ Education and
Common School System’, which drew attention towards the drawbacks as,

“The committee feels that incentives offered for promotion of Girls’

education needs to be revisited and the measures taken need to be of such
nature, force and magnitude that they are able to overcome the obstacles
posed by factors such as poverty, domestic/sibling responsibilities, girl
child labour, low preference for girl’s education, preference to marriage
over education of the girl child, etc.” (MHRD, 2005)

The committee also took into consideration the dire necessity of “opening single-sex
school at upper primary and secondary stage”, despite the opposition “on the ground that
it perpetuates gender inequality. However, it took the initiatives to promote the policy ‘as
short-term strategy’ to eliminate the discrimination.

Conequently, it led with other developed strategies, to increase the graph of girls’
admission to the school, for example. The findings of a survey conducted between 2002
and 2013 showing “10% more boys completed secondary school education when
compared to girls” have the swelling of the diagram by ‘a significant increase’ in the
statistics of an another survey showing “10% more girls were enrolled in secondary
school in India by 2019 when compared to 2011”. (Online)

89
 Thus, Charu’s inattentiveness to school implied in the causes, found by the United
Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), of poverty, local cultural practices, and lack of
sanitation in schools i.e. lack of ‘facilities for children who menstruate’. (Online) In the
light of these above mentioned report, survey findings and UNICEF’s findings, Charu’s
inattentiveness can be studied as being inherent in guardian’s lowpreference, preference
for marriage over her education, poverty, and taking her age of puberty (She is 12 years
old) poor toilet facilities. Besides, the fact cannot be overlooked that her school does not
have qualified teachers, hence leaving what is taught in the class all Greek to her. For her
lack of interest in the study, she cannot be completely held responsible, for it, to a greater
extent, depends on the teacher’s content delivery. Mukund’s Words about his school
describe the conditions of the schools in India of the twentieth century. How can one
expect study environment in such a school where students are, irrespective of their age,
told to sit together, classes merged, and teacher who is not least interested in teaching;
instead, what he is interested is maintaining decorum of the class. As on Mrs. Barnum’s
asking “Why can’t you read this book?” Mukunda lets her know,

“His school was a shed, he had said, and his classroom a blackboard
shared by boys from four years old to fifteen. There was just one teacher
who caned them when he felt inclined to, and then went off to drink tea at
the shop round the corner.” (Roy, An Atlas, p. 98)

One can pause to think what the girls’ school environment would be if boys were sent to
such schools. Most of the schools were run by the missionaries: those boys and girls who
belonged to poor families, the families that could not afford education from ‘big city’ had
been bound to suffer such school environment. There are on the one hand Roy’s women
characters who suffer such depravity; while on the other hand, Joshi’s characters as
Sheila, Leela Sabnis and Geeta who get the best of opportunities in their childhood to
achieve proficiency: Sheila who breaks all India record, Leela who is, “a professor,
descendant of a long line of professor, M.A. and Ph. D. from Michigan, something else
from London…trained in philosophy, emancipator of women, married and divorced,
believer in free love, harbinger of a new order of things, reformer of the body…” (Joshi,
pp. 72-3) The differences other than this are on the ground of cultural issues. While India

90
was tangled with the necessary education for girls at primary level, the contemporary
period did give birth to the far advanced girls like Tuula and June who are not only
educated, but also emancipated girls. They are employed and thus self-reliant. Education
really empowers. It can be ascertained from the fact that even Billy who himself is
pursuing Doctorate asks her favour in order to get a job.

India of the 1960s or till the advent of 1990s was not so liberal as India of 2020, nor
were there so many plans by the government for the empowerment of women. Roy
chooses her women characters from the rural India, India in the making; while Joshi’s are
from the metropolitan cities, the standard of which is much more in the imitation of the
Western model than India itself. Charu and Bakul are the girls of the rural patriarchal
India, where girls are still left to her lot. Charu represents the majority of Indian village
girls who have to depend on others even to understand their own private letters. Though
the condition of Bakul’s family environment is little better than that of Charu’s whose
grandmother is unconcerned about her saying, ‘a girl learns what she needs to know’ (p.
190, for Bakul’s father Nirmal is a teacher of history in a college, hence understand the
value of education. However, Nirmal is also conservative. He gives Bakul the necessary
education and does not send her (Bakul) for higher studies, but he keeps insisting
Mukunda for further studies. In Parenting, he has nothing similar to Mr. Khemka who
sends Sheila for completing her Masters, nor is he like Agnisen or Maya’s father.

Male parent’s influence on the girl child’s character development is ascertained by

the fact that ‘a daughter’s self-esteem and body image’ is much affected by ‘a strong-
father-daughter bond’. However, more than their individuality, it affects their academic
performance, and they are easily led to go astray. A study exposes,

“It is statistically proven that the girls who do not have caring fathers in
their lives, are three times as likely to fall victims of teenage pregnancy,
and substance abuse.” (Sagg foundation online)

If not pregnancy or abuse, at least Charu’s early attraction towards marriage and love
affair are the consequence of lack of parental attendance. She is diverted from education.
As girls have to enter patriarchal system of society, their regular positive interaction with

91
their father/male guardian is essential. Male parent’s influence can be measured on the
girls’ ‘social traits and behaviours’ as,

“Researchers in a recent study (2018) discovered that young girls with

good relationships with their fathers reported less loneliness and were less
likely to become anxious or clinically depressed. This positive influence
also extended to them being less likely to develop body
dysmorphia…Fathers that are present and loving end up giving their
daughter a strong sense of self.” (Sagg foundation.org)

But Charu is not so fortunate. Her father, a drunkard and idler, cannot be expected to
have a positive influence on her life, let alone her education. Her father’s non-
involvement has serious repercussions on her illiteracy. But if male parent has positive
effects on a girl child’s perspective, why does Maya feels isolated in her father’s
presence? Her father is too anxious about her life, about her future dealings with the
unemotional business-minded world. But in the anxiety for Maya her father becomes
possessive, obsessive, and too anxious to give her freedom of choice. In imparting
education at school and training at home, he acts as a modern man, but after all he is a
man whose patriarchal mind-set cannot let him give her his untroubled attention of a
father, unlike Mr. Khemka who is concerned about Babu’s future because of the latter’s
lack of interest in his study, not certainly because of his promiscuous behavior. Because
of possessiveness of Maya’s father, the father-daughter relationship turns into master-
slave bond. In the lack of freedom of conscience she feels suffocated in such a family
environment of dominance, and hence her isolation.

Boredom. Covid-19 has unmasked the evils of boredom entrenched and pervaded in
women’s world. Though it may be argued that men and women equally suffer a sense of
boredom, irrespective of their being employed or unemployed, yet, as boredom is
presumed to be ‘counterpart of aloneness’, women are, especially living in rural areas or
are home confined, more prone to a sense of boredom compared to men preoccupied with
‘work’. Pandemic has exposed to us its impact on human psyche and has caused diseases
pertaining to it such as BPD (borderline personality disorder). In a wider context,

92
boredom is a “negative aspect of social existence (emphasis added) that drains one’s
energy and spiritual vitality” and,

“…construing the problem as one of the boredom or irritation puts the

blame on something outside or external to the avoidant person. One can be
bored and critical or dismissing of others without admitting personal
needs, insufficiencies, or dependence on them.” (Coplan & Bowker, p. 39)

And, on the critical attitude and sense of helplessness of the individual as,

“dismal theorists have distinguished between self-critical (or autonomous)

and dependent (sociotropic) depression. Blatt et al. (1995) found that the
dependent factor was made of two dimensions: one characterized by
interpersonally based depressions involving the loss of a real relationship
and another called anaclitic neediness that is characterized by anxiety
related to feelings of helplessness, fear of separation and rejection, and
emptiness.” (Coplan & Bowker, p. 433)

Boredom has, if not ‘tackled’, its grave effects on the individual. Though appearing mild
in its early stage, boredom can cause anxiety, isolation due to ‘fear of separation and
rejection’, due to utter helplessness in re-establishing the bond of attachment. However,
the recent study in 2021 shows that a person’s “attitude remains the same”.

What does Mrs. Chauhan (w/o Mr. Avanish Chauhan who is an administrator of
Ranikhet) conceals from Maya when she says, “I have a dull married woman’s life”? (the
Folded Earth, p. 223) Seemingly, she is complaining about her husband being
‘preoccupied’, yet by her feelings of boredom, her object of complaint is, in fact,
boredom out of Maya’s too preoccupied life, otherwise why ‘a mischievous smile’?
Through Maya’s life, however, she, unbeknownst to herself, reveals her own dependence,
incompetence, and helplessness. For example, when Maya could discover ‘nothing’ to
say about herself, she bursts out speaking again. But what she speaks is important for
exposing the inner workings, her repression. Why does she change the subject of
discussion? Instead of listening to Maya, she starts speaking out about her husband, starts
counting her husband’s qualities thus,

93
 “He had much to do; the entire administration of the cantonment. Had I
noticed how much betterthe power supply and water supply had become?
That was all because of Mr. Chauhan’s untiring efforts to make our town
the Switzerland of India. He was getting roads re-laid and parapets
painted…” (Roy, The Folded Earth, p. 223)

And, etc., etc., etc., But Kananbala’s sense of emptiness is ingrained in her ‘fear of
separationand rejection’, in ‘loss’ of her personal network, in helplessness, in her
‘anxiety’ as she becomes possessive of her husband whom she is worried of losing as,

“She had often asked him before: were there women at the parties he went
to? The host’s wife? Her friends or relatives? Why could she, Kananbala,
never be taken?” (Roy, An Atlas…, p. 10)

(For more detail on why she fears losing contacts; why she cannot live isolated, see
Chapter 5 titled “Environment and Isolation’ under entry Kananbala.)

On the surface level though it appears her boredom, it is het conscientiousness,

something like Lawrentian anxiety, something like a sense of rootlessness. She is unable
to explain her emptiness, because she fears her husband’s detachment, his irascible
behavior. Amulya is everything for her. She wants to actualize her roots in the person
who made her rootless. But this is a women’s lot in India: her voice should be in
consonance with her husband’s consent. The social codes devour her. Like her, Ratan’s
wife also remains silent. After a ‘brief episode’ of enthusiasm of newly married life and
with expectations of offspring, in their life,

“Then followed boredom. And boredom it is, I suspect, that has ruled us
for the past ten years, although my wife doesn’t know it. Nor did I, for that
matter, until I took this bribe?” (Joshi, The Apprentice, p. 115)

But after the acceptance of bribe, he does come to ‘know’. His (Ratan’s) sense of
boredom is implicit; it lies in his being diverted from the path of honesty, loyalty,
sacrifice laid down by his patriotic father. He can express, in this way, his sense of
boredom and can accept his wife’s strangeness to him, which is ingrained in his ambition.

94
How can he nevertheless say that his wife ‘does not know’ she was feeling bored? As
conversation in Excess is also a way of hiding boredom. Moreover, whatever the reader
comes to know about his wife is through Ratan’s words only. He is the first-person
narrator of the text. The reader remains silent throughout the course of Ratan’s narrative
as in a monologue. Reader is led to believe all through the male unreliable narrator’s
single voice.

Different from the characters mentioned above, there is another woman character
whose sense of ennui seems to be adhered to her state of widowhood, seems to be
‘inscribed on her body’ by the caste she is born, Wherever she goes, whatever she does, it
inevitably seems to follow her like a shadow. It appears as if her lot, as if destined for
her. Boredom, for her, results from the ‘discrepancy between expectations and chances’.
Meera accepts Nirmal’s offer of drawing forthwith, for she need some meaningful
preoccupation that can engage her for thorough life so that she can escape widow’s sense
of ennui of home confinement as,

“…a boredom that defines the entire content of life in a negative way,
because it is that which has to be avoided at any price.” (Svendsen, p. 27)

Therefore, “Meera daydreamt about escape.” (Roy, The Folded, p. 97)

Thus, marriage in India does not give a woman right to share her husband’s public
space, nor the domestic sphere, though seeming hers. He is always complaining about
household chores, her cooking and mismanagement of the house. His complaints have
distancing effects on his wife. And gradually, due to lack of compliments from her other
half, she becomes estranged. She suffers a sense of alienation from her own work in the
lack ‘appreciation and recognition’ that are necessary to ‘develop self-respect and self-
confidence’; instead, she is constantly reminded of her ‘position of a glorified maid’ in
the house. For a few moments of peaceful personal conversation with him, she has to
wait till her husband’s good frame of mind. Her life seems to be destined for an eternal
wait for his happy moods, or perhaps never, “maybe that’s a woman’s fate!”

A woman as a Representative of Tradition and Model of Compliance. The auxiliary

Mrs. Chauhan uses in the sentence below is noteworthy,

95
 “I cannot eat before him”, she said, “Unless he is out of town.” (Roy, The
Folded, p. 225)

The sentence with ‘cannot’ instead of do not is tradition-laden. She has to, despite
herself, practice abstinence, obedience, purity, all-day-fast in the belief she is praying for
her husband’s longevity and well-being. To lose covertures, for Indian women, is to be
disgraced for whole life, especially if she belongs to an upper caste as she is ‘Chauhan’
(Kshatriya). A woman projects her identity on to her husband. He is her protection, her
bread-earner, meaning for her life, even though he is evil minded like Charu’s father. He
is her devata before whom she has to vow.

‘Three women’ characters of ‘Sleeping on Jupiter’, namely Gouri, Vidya and Latika,
are also the major characters in the novel. They plan to undertake a journey together from
“the drudgery of daily living” (p. 26). All three women are aged, almost in their
seventies. Their eyes have seen enough: parental dominance, spousal dominance, son’s
dominance, servants’ eavesdropping, unwanted surveillance from in-laws, emotional
isolation, avoidance, etc. Vidya has spent ‘forty years in the bureaucracy’ (p. 22), but has
never felt in her life that sense of ‘self-importance’ which she feels in the compartment of
the train. Their journey is planned to the Vishnu temple in Jarmuli. The main purpose of
the journey is to avoid dull life, the everydayness, a sense of ennui. And for Latika, it
(journey) means only en escape instead of having a religious purpose. They feel under
restrictions at home. Though their old age, particularly Gouri’s senility, does not allow
them such a long journey, yet nothing other than such a journey away from
entanglements can captivate their heart promptings for embracing freedom because,

“In their homes own homes, surrounded by family or servants, they would
never gossip this way, but here they didn’t have to worry about being
overheard.” (Roy, Sleeping, p. 26)

But freedom is something that has to be protected from any short of compulsion,
imposition, or external restriction. It is most enjoyed in privacy, in the state of self-
isolation, or at least, in case a company is necessary, in taking off some private moments.
But to contrary to Latika’s expectancy about her secular journey, it turns into a religious

96
and boredom for two reasons: Gouri’s senility and her obsessions for the temple, and
Vidya’s illness. She faces boredom as,

“Latika was appalled. She stuffed her hairbrush into her bag, seething. She
had felt dubious about this outing from the start; she should have trusted
her instincts and stayed at home. If they hadn’t travelled together before,
the three of them, there must be good reasons: they would probably feel
fed up in half a day together.” (Roy, Sleeping, p. 27)

She is a secular minded woman who feels trapped in Gouri’s religious obsessions. When
the imagined outing does not turn into her desired liberation, she begins to keep her
feelings under suppression instead of opposing, arguing or isolating herself from the
company, for the simple reason that she does not want to dishearten them. Then, she tries
to evade her negative thoughts about Gouri and Vidya. But instantly, what captures her
attention turns into being reminiscent of her ‘holidays’ with her husband. She begins to
compare, within her heart, the present journey with those of past. Although those
moments of past spent with her husband were not after her own heart, they were better
than the imposed, unenthusiastic journey as she regretful complaints to herself,

“Across the aisle she saw a couple sitting pressed against each other,
staring at something only they could see. If only. In an earlier time, when
her husband was alive, there was always someone to go on holidays with.
So what if he had never sat like that with her, not even as a young man.”
(Roy, p. 27)

Does boredom turn into estrangement? Does it have negative impact on their
friendship? The ‘three women’ do behave friendly toward each other as they are
conscious of mutual care. The incidents that confirm their emotional attachment are:
Vidya’s writing address on the cards as precautionary measure for Gouri’s forgetfulness;
Latika’s preparing ‘iced water’ for Vidya when the latter’s “head was spinning, her
temples ached, her neck hurt” (p. 125); and Latika’s precognition “if she (Gouri, my
addition) could not remember which city was in, could she ever be left alone?” (p. 127)

97
The attitude of these women does not change for each other because, as zahrae Afellat
and Juma Abdalla conclude their research on ‘the Impact of Boredom’ thus,

“The mediation analysis results highlighted that psychological distress

mediated neither the association between boredom and attitude nor
between boredom and behavior. As we have seen previously, the link
between psychological distress and attitude and association with
behaviours was insignificant because attitude remained the same. (Afellat
& Abdalla, Oct 2021, Online)

However, their mutual ‘care’ is in contradiction with the masked ‘resentment’ in their
hearts. They do not book a single hotel room for all three; instead, a separate room for
each. Furthermore, Latika regrets his words of disclosing about her family. The following
are two extracts, the first of which shows Latika feeling aggrieved of holidays being
spoiled, while the second about her regrets on exposing her personal family matter as,

“She (Latika, my addition) clucked partly to mask her resentment. They

had only two more days in Jarmuli. Could they afford a whole morning
commiserating with Vidya? Latika longed to spend the day on the beach,
feeling the waves lapping her ankles. It was many years since she had
been to the sea…” (Roy, p. 125)

And,

“Latika turned on her side, wishing she had not complained in the train
about her daughter’s need for Pasta and wet wipes. Why she said all that
to Gouri and Vidya, what need had she to talk so much?” (Roy, pp. 73-4)

Emotional intimacy does not involve any kind of confidentiality. They are therefore
emotionally isolated from each other, despite their seeming mutual care.

98