Prem Chand's Brave Women in 'Karma Bhoomi '

 Prem Chand is a prolific writer on  profound themes and in unearthing psychological complexity of characters . His novel , Karma Bhoomi which is written in the backdrop of nationalist movement shows the characters like Amarkant, Salim, Sukhda, Sakina , Munni , Naina, Lala Samar kant . Amarkant , an idealist youth who is  starving of love and respect grows estranged from Sukhda, his  rich and haughty wife. He falls in love with Sakina, a Muslim girl but runs away to escape public censure. He turns into an teacher, friend and leader of the marginalized in a far away village and tries to purge himself through hard life but develops a soft corner for Munni, a victim of rape by the British soldiers. Earlier Amarkant ,his close friend Salim and their mentor teacher Santhakumar stand by Munni who stabs her tormentors, faces a case , wins with popular support but abandons her husband and child and goes far way in shame and guilt and to save family honour. Amarkant leaves his father Samarkant , his profit- mongering father, his wife Sukhda and child and goes away. He courts jail in the struggle for the marginalized and Salim, the practical rich youth becomes a collector but relinquishes his post  under the influence of  Lala Samarkant who has a change of heart and turns generous  when his son, daughter in law  go to jail and his daughter Naina who was shot dead  while leading a march of the poor for sites for houses against Municipality resolutions. The struggle changes Sukhda, her mother Renuka , Sakina , her mother Pathani and Munni into fighters for emancipation of the poor. Prem Chand’s greatness lies in portraying the weaknesses of the idealist characters and strengths of the women who are initially thought of and treated as such by their families  as ‘abalas’ (weaklings’). Male characters who take pride in their struggle recognise their vulnerabilities in quest of name and leadership. The courage, deep understanding, love , kindness , death-defying leadership qualities  shown by women come out vividly in the novel. The pathetic life, fighting spirit, hopes and fears , sacrifice of the oppressed are  portrayed in a realistic manner. Urdu writer  Prem Chand,  Bengali writer Sarat Babu and Telugu writer Chalam can be considered as the writers who understood the heart of women caught in the conflict between the traditional and modern democratic values such as freedom, equality and solidarity.   

Rushdie's Imperishable Empire of Words in Victory City

 

Salman Rushdie’s Victory City continues the undaunted artist spirit of the novelist who combines history, magical realism and blending of fiction and facts in enchanting language. The 'Bisnaga' empire,  a corruption of ‘Vijayanagar’ is seen in its glory and decline and fall  through the eyes of Pampa Kampana. The miraculous beginning, the  change of dynasties of rulers, intricate palace coups , politically convenient l marriages, the marriage of the east and the west, the glorious rule of Krishna Deva Raya , the flourishing of literature, the fortification of the empire, the struggle for gender equality, the prophecy of future, the ingratitude of the king towards his chief Minister Timmarusu and Pampa Kampana, the Progenitor and loving partner and immortal beauty  who rescues and recluses herself at the end of her life. Her work Jayaparajaya  records the history of the empire, the glorious golden age recedes and a melancholic ambience prevails. It is the result of inefficient final rulers like Achyuta Raya and Aliya Ram Raya. Cities and Empires rise and fall but  the words which  offer different narratives   never die. It is a novel of a medieval empire and a warning to  modern India when exclusivism reigns and integration of cultures disintegrates and power games outdo  morality of  a culture or  civilization. in the Past the ancient civilizations such as the Greek , Roman and Egyptian disappeared through internecine warfare, savage attacks by the barbarians and  the rise of new religions. The lesson is that humanity is more significant than erecting walls and creating rigid boundaries  among nations of the world.        

Dr.S.Radha Krishnan on “The Supreme Spiritual Ideal : The Hindu view”

 

Radha  Krishnan in his article  “The Supreme Spiritual Ideal : The Hindu view” in his work  Eastern Religions &Western Thought (1939) writes as follows ;

1. India’s great men- ‘those rarer and more chastened spirits’ declare the reality of the  unseen world and their qualities such as wisdom, gentleness of soul and   humility proclaim that the destiny of man is self- knowledge and furthering the universal life of which he forms a part.

2.  The goal of man is ever increasing self-consciousness towards developing  spiritual personality in “which body and mind, instinct and intellect become the willing servants of spirit and not its tyrannical masters.” (35) he wants to attain inner  harmony and strives after an integrated life.

3. The tendency to overlook the spiritual side and exalt the intellectual is due to the Greek influence . our intellectual consciousness gives rise to the feeling of separatist individuality.

4.”Nations and civilizations are not eternal. Man has to live for the eternal values of spirit, truth, and goodness.” (44)

5. The way to growth from individualism and economic interpretation of history and materialist perspective “lies through increasing impersonality, through the unifying of the self with greater than the self.” (45)

5. When region succeeds in making us spiritual , we develop love for humanity and see unity in diverse forms of   life.

6. For saints , religion is not an escape from reality and “The Hindu ideal affirms that man can attain

his immortal destiny here and now.” (50) Gandhi did write in his article, “The Doctrine of the Sword” that nonviolence is for the strong and her  imperishable soul can defy the empire.

7. Indians did not take to cult of the nation till late . “Harmony of social order is an essential aim of the spiritual man.” (53)

8.To turn our thoughts, will , emotions and our whole being into divine status is” the ultimate purpose and meaning of human living.” (53)

9. When the entire  human race attains divine status which is  the supreme ideal,  it can release our creative energies  and unite us with the world fellowship mentally, morally and spiritually.     

 

 

Review of Malati Chandur’s AALOCHINCHU(Think) :

 

  Lalita is a middle class girl who marries Narayana Murty who helps her in distress . his help during her father’s heart attack develops closeness between them ending in marriage. Initially both work hard to sustain and grow financially. Then  Murty enters into a business  partnership with Madhava Rao. In the course of time Murty changes his ideas to please Rao. This surprises Lalita. Murty joins Rao in the latter’s tours and   escapades  to maintain good relations. After begetting three children Lalita and Murty’s marital life runs into difficulties. She  comes to know about Murty’s relationship with  Sujata . Her Initial  rage and anguish grows alienation between them. Lalita goes to an Ashram and her interaction with Swamiji makes her aware of  her unreasonable anger . Murty is reluctant to leave her whereas Lalita after discovering the family situation of Sujata that forced her to be intimate with Murty helps her in child delivery. But the baby dies. Lalita repents and takes case of Sujata till she recuperates. She argues with her children who see her as foolish and makes them understand their bias towards their father who is no less culpable in the plight of Sujata. She encourages Sujata to think independently and the latter goes got higher studies in a foreign country. Lalita turns to charity works through her foundation and helps in improving school. She comes out of her earlier  self-pity and confusion and goes forward like an independent  woman and her husband Murty who recognises his folly extends his moral support supports in her endeavours.

The novelist portrays the evolution of Lalita’ character  through her struggle, suffering, striving for understanding and reconciliation with situation and charting a new path undaunted by  marital crisis. She finds her inner strength and  purpose of  her life.                     

                   

Memory and Identity Crisis in Anita Desai’s In Custody

 

                    

 

    Memory is what makes people as people. It connects the past with the present and assures   continuation of  the present. It is the cherishing of the valuable and a battle against anonymity and temporariness, the sign of life and love,  challenge to death and the tyranny of power.  Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel laureate writes “if there is any substitute for love, it’s memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy”(150).

     Anita Desai is a novelist who has explored the themes of loneliness, East-West conflict, the ennui of the middle class women and the nostalgia for the  past  in her novels such as Fire on the Mountain, Fasting-feasting, Where shall we go this Summer? and In Custody. Her fiction deeply  probes the social and psychological world and human condition. The readers can identify  themselves with her characters, their conflicts, their failures and successes and appreciate  wisdom  gained  by them through the reconciliation between the ideal and reality.  This article  dwells  on how  a person’s memory shapes and  reshapes one’s  perception or experience  of oneself , one’s family and place and identity    swirling in the whirlpool of cultural change in Anita Desai’s novel, In Custody.  Narinder K.Sharma notes that  the novel  “offers a subtle transcendence of existence which is symbolic of a convergence of all contradictory pulls which split the protagonist apart throughout the narrative..” (8)

    Amina Yaqin refers to Desai’s  elegiac farewell to a lost tradition. Her symbolism is tinged with the tropes of a communally charged present, unable to breakout of the fragmentary Hindu-Hindi and Muslim-Urdu divide despite her staging the debates within the “secular” Indian-English novel (139).

    In Anita Desai’s In custody we find Deven,  a Hindi   lecturer’s attempt to rescue himself  and  a Urdu poet Nur from obscurity.  Deven  aspiring for a life of significance and  fame has been  asked by his friend Murad to interview the aged poet Nur  for his magazine.             

 

 The novelist also describes the  lack of historical interest of the townspeople.  “The temples were more numerous but had no history at all. There was not a literally not a man in Mirpore who could have told when they were built or by whom’ (13). None knew about the age of the banyan trees or its legends or their history.  “The fact was that no one knew the difference” (14). Was it due to the historical indifference of the townspeople or their economic deprivation?  

  There were ‘Hindu area’ and ‘Muslim area’ whose division was  unwritten and people observed restraint usually. Once a year when Muharrum and The Holi festival came on the same day, there used to be bloody  clashes, the police bandobust, the mutual threats and editorials on secularism in newspapers. After  a few days,  the cautious  and peaceful co-existence among the communities was restored.

     .

 Memory of Language and Language of  memory:                   

    When Deven refers  to the  Urdu poetry, the poet Nur questions that there  could be  no Urdu poetry when there was  no Urdu language left  and the defeat of the Mughals by the British and the latter by the Hindiwallahs turned Urdu into a corpse waiting to be buried.  Amina Yaqin writes that Desai’s fiction

demystifies the idea of a national collectivity and looks towards the arts and the way of life of individuals as distinctive cultural representations. Her constructions of cultural memory are marked by the nostalgia for the past, and a kind of closeness to the Romantic tradition with its “idealizing of “folk”, of vital subcultures buried deep within its own society”(122).

   When the poet  shows  coldness  towards him,  Deven’s recital of Nur’s poems  acts as a thaw. His robust memory carries him on and he could almost  feel the smoothness of his  father’s reed pens which he played with while he listened, and smell the somewhat musty, but human and comforting odour of his father’s black cotton coat. A tender  almost feminine lilt enters his voice with those memories and the poet listens to him engrossed. When the poet Nur  is lying   on the ground vomiting and being chided by his wife, Deven  goes  there.  Nur’s wife  taunts  him for being his fan and   asks him to clean up the room, Deven picks up the papers and  after throwing them in gutter runs away from that place.

   When Deven again  meets his hero the poet Nur, he finds him in  wretched condition breathing fire over the degraded status of Urdu vis-à-vis Hindi. Surrounded by the  common people and scolded by his wife , Nur presents a pathetic picture.  Two moments have  remained intact in Deven’s  selective memory. One has been   the moment when he was listening to the voices inside the house standing above the well of the courtyard and another is  his fleeing from of the house after dropping the papers in the gutter. At times he recollects  the completely different scene of “how he had marched in and thrust away the vengeful figure of a white and silver witch , how he had raised Nur in his arms and seen to his ills and rescued him from them…” (63) but this  fantasy of rescuing poet in distress  fades away and the stark truth of  the abandonment of poet by him remains.

     He receives a letter   from Nur about his dying pigeons and  for his help in meeting  expenditure to send him on pilgrimage to Mecca. In another letter received by Deven, Nur’s  second wife recounts her sufferings, humiliations , how her talent has  got Nur’s appreciation, her intellectual companionship to Nur  , the  unwillingness of males such as Deven to recognize and praise her superiority and she even challenges Deven to read her poetry to judge for himself. Deven hasn’t  had time, courage and inner resources  to accept her challenge and throws away her poetry.

    Deven makes a lot of efforts to get Nur’s poetry recorded in his voice. He has  had to placate the various demands of Nur’s first wife to have recording done in relative peace but  fails, thanks to uncongenial setting which included poet’s followers and an incompetent assistant  Chiku. Later Murad who originally asked him to interact with Nur  pays nothing   for his article and even asks for sole rights over the cassette to enable Deven pay his bills for room rented for recording.  Deven feels that he has exchanged  his mundane life for perturbed predicament. He  hasn’t been able to publish his poems or monograph, avoid  disappointment of his wife and son,  get recognition from his  colleagues or students , evade  the inheritance of ineffectuality,  his sense of  vacuum, the half-hearted help of Siddiqi . He has been forced to seek the help of his students to make recording suitable  and  to face their demand for more marks in  the annual exam. When Jayadev , his colleague says that they should have taken up some science subject  or microbiology or computer technology for the better prospects,  Deven leaves him referring to their hopeless past and unpromising future. Here the novelist Anita Desai can be appreciated in envisaging the decline of humanities and languages in the present days of commercialization.

    In Desai’s  In  Custody, When Deven returns  home from Delhi , he finds his wife Sarla in sulking mood. Both of  have been  aware of   mutual defeat of their aspirations and their being victims leading to   alienation and Sarla  remains  gloomy without  any means of consolation of poetry unlike Deven. The latter  asks  the  boy Manu  about  his text and while going through  illustrations,  he wonders at an  image out of various memories

Pictures of a thin , vividly painted face taut and dragged out of proportion with disgust and rage; of a twisted  figure bent in pain on the floor-and upon these pictures a third one, older and more faded and yet fraught  with pain, a picture of his father ,emaciated with illness, shriveled upon a pallet on the floor, holding a tattered copy of poems in his hands and reading from them with an expression of ineffable joy…. (73)

  When Deven has  listened to the song on parrot rendered by his son, he remembers how his father might have taught him, his suffering from asthma and disappointments in life and his father  being apologetic to his wife and sees similarity between his position and his father’s leading to  sympathy for the  first time for the dead father.

Dawn of wisdom

    Deven’s  undertaking of custody of Nur’s poetry means the reclamation of genius from  being mere history and  a challenge to  the market forces which give priority to only ‘useful’ disciplines and degrade other subjects. Deven’s memory of his school days that has endeared him to Nur in the first place when of  His attempts to face  the mundane  world shows that he has left his provincial mind in favour of a larger cause of a dying  language, poetry and truth. He hasn’t attained certainty of triumph but nor has he been  content to remain as  the defeated. He has also been able to enlist the support of the worldly wise Siddiqi, the lone Urdu teacher who appears like a guardian angel to save naïve Deven and vanishing  Urdu. A critic  Chaudhuri compares Deven with Sisyphus and writes  “driven by the urge of identity, Deven gets himself entrapped only to the realization that isolation leads to complete freedom, driving oneself to creation, a heroic attempt of survival  in face of  all losses”(136).

  Though Deven appears as a victim of his own psychological inadequacies  inherited as well as   the real causes of his predicament are the commercial  educational system, college administration, the undermining of humanities, the gap between the urban Delhi and the rural town Mirpur , the technological changes undermining the status  of a typical language  lecturer  in a small town

 

 

 

Works Cited 

Brodsky, Joseph. Less Than One: Selected Essays. New York, Penguins,1986. 

Chaudhury, Anwesha Roy. “Anita Desai ‘In Custody’ in maze of Existentialism.”

        International Journal of English and Literature, Vol. 4(9), pp  . 435-439.Web.

        19 Nov.2013.

Desai, Anita. In Custody. New Delhi: Random House India,2007. Print.

Sharma, Narinder K "Duality of Illusion and Reality in Desai's In Custody."  Comparative

           Literature and Culture 14.2 (2012). Web.19 Nov.2013.http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1962.

Sharma, B.S. “Remnants of Urdu Poetic Culture and Politics of Language in Anita Desai’s In       

          Custody.”Rev. Journal of English literature 3.8: 181-197. Web. 19 Nov.2013. 

           http://www.academicjournals.org/IJEL.

Yaqin, Amina. “The Communalization and  Disintegration of Urdu in Anita Desai’s In  

         Custody.” The Annual of Urdu Studies.19: 120-141.Web.19 Nov.2013.

Other works Consulted

Vijayalaksmi, M.“Ecofeminism in the Novels of Anita Desai.” Contemporary Discourse 4.2

            (2013) :51-54.Print.

Mohan Rao, H.S. “Anita Desai’s Bomgartner’s Bombay: A Depiction of  Desolated Diasporic

            Life.” Contemporary Discourse 4.2  (2013) :55-58.Print.