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The Forked Tongue of Lyric in Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day

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SOURCE: Mohan, Rajeswari. “The Forked Tongue of Lyric in Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day.Journal of Commonwealth Literature 32, no. 1 (1997): 47-66.

[In the following essay, Mohan explores the effects of English literary studies on the subjectivities of the postcolonial urban Indian middle class in Desai's works, suggesting that the unspoken gendered and imperialist premises of colonial culture limit the potential and aesthetic growth of the colonized.]

Over the last few years, ambivalence has emerged as the paradigmatic stance of postcolonial theory. While this might be attributed to the ascendancy of poststructuralist theory in academic discourses, from a materialist point of view one might argue that this ambivalence is symptomatic of the problem that decolonization is more than the physical displacement of the colonizer, itself not a tidy and punctual process. Colonization forces a fundamental rearticulation of culture and reconfiguration of social priorities. As a result, liberation struggles, after winning political independence, get re-directed at decolonizing the mind, in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's memorable phrase, resisting the blandishments of the emergent neo-colonial world order, and working towards a revitalization of national cultures. So it is that Ngugi has suggested recently that “the complexity of postcolonial politics and culture … cannot be properly understood outside the framework of the neo-colonial economic and political structures, which in effect means, colonial structures under another name.”1 Working from the belief that a critical awareness of the political implications of colonial culture is essential to a fuller realization of the dream of postcolonial freedom, this essay explores the mixed effects that the cultural apparatus of colonialism, specifically the study of English literature, has on gendered subjectivities of the urban middle class in postcolonial India. It begins by noting the ways English literature provides women with compelling discourses, narratives and tropes by which to make sense of their circumstances. Alongside these world views, the essay suggests, literary texts slip in their unsaid or understated gender and imperialist premises which set limits on what their readers can envision as possible, as just, right and beautiful. The same process may be seen with some variations in other realms of culture such as music. Also the hegemony of colonial culture either enshrouds alternatives, including indigenous traditions, in a pall of disrepute, or so alienates subjects from their own cultures that they appreciate them only as mediated and sanctioned by colonial cultures.

Writing about the dilemmas of women caught between colonial and patriarchal structures, novelists such as Anita Desai, Jamaica Kincaid, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Buchi Emecheta have acknowledged the mixed blessings of colonial education.2 Female protagonists in their novels often turn to English education to secure economic independence and cultural capital, thereby gaining some leverage in the traditional patriarchal systems within which they live.3 Education is narrativized as the process that brings women out of their homes and into the public sphere as economically able subjects who gradually gain critical consciousness of the forces ruling their lives as women in postcolonial societies. Though this process cannot by any means be exclusively attributed to the workings of schooling and literature, the significance ascribed to them is the focus of this essay. In these narratives, while education empowers women it also locates them at the nexus of contradictory gender ideologies, because it often valorizes an individualism that puts pressure on indigenous constructions of femininity that emphasize nurturing, self-denial and filial piety. Further contradictions are engendered by its advocacy of Western ideals of femininity based on the nineteenth-century middle-class figure of the “angel in the house” and subsequently that of the housewife-consumer.

In the general story of women's emancipation, the birth of the nation is of special narrative significance, metonymically suggesting an epistemological break and an originary moment. But the contradictions that bedevil attempts to narrativize this birth suggest that this moment foregrounds the ambiguities of all beginnings, always already inscribed as continuations of a past that is agonistically set aside to inaugurate a radically new future.4 Cross-hatched with assessments such as the one by Ngugi above, this textual ambiguity can lead to a historicizing and politicizing recognition not only of the pervasiveness and intransigence of colonial structures, but also of their informing presence in patterns of desire and doubt in narratives of postcoloniality. Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day tracks the orbit of this ambiguity. The novel interweaves the tales of three women as they contend with adulthood and its responsibilities with oblique accounts of the traumatic events of India's independence and partition. Through its engagement with personal memory and the collective memory recorded in history, the novel encourages a parallel, even allegorical, reading of the story of the nation and the status of its women. Bim, the novel's protagonist, is a woman forced to assume the mantle of responsibility for the family even though that would traditionally have been the prerogative of her brother Raja. At one point she declares, “There is never anybody except me,” and this becomes a poignant central plaint of the narrative.5 In a society where tradition guarantees several patriarchal buffers and protectors for women, protection being but the other side of control, Bim's situation swells out to imply a strong social critique. Hers is a story that makes visible not only the enmeshing family structures of patriarchal opportunism and exploitation, but also the forces ensuring her consent to what she recognizes as oppressive practices and disabling beliefs.

While the struggle for national liberation historically marks a moment when patriarchal constraints on women underwent redefinition, the narrative movement of Clear Light of Day posits an altogether different scenario. As women all over India were flocking in unprecedented numbers to join the independence movement and in the process forcing a shift in the social imaginary regarding gender, Bim remains firmly immured in the home.6 Even though she is very much an educated modern woman who has fiercely independent ambitions for her future, the opportunity to expand her horizons is closed to her, and the narrative stages this loss as a private family drama that inexorably narrows down her prospects. Her brother Raja, however, is given the option of participating in the struggle, but he is incapacitated by tuberculosis from doing so. In the way it sets up this withdrawal of the family from the torrent of historical events, the narrative embeds its points about gender in the field of upper-middle-class culture.

As the nation undergoes its fiery birth marked by partition riots, the figures of authority in the Das household inexorably pass away under bizarre circumstances. Bim is left behind in the family home, alone and unprepared, to manage the small family business, carve out a professional life for herself, and take care of her brother, Baba, who is afflicted with Down's Syndrome. The increasingly absurd circumstances by which the house in Old Delhi is gradually emptied out systematically clear the ground for the narrative's central exploration of Bim's and Tara's consciousness. The narrative thus sets up a parallel movement between British withdrawal from India and the progressive emptying out of the Das home, such that the very excess and absurdity of the family's tragedy seems to make a distinct point about the erosion of cultural frames of reference in the colonial world, an erosion that arguably threatens to unmoor the newly independent society.

To illustrate this point, one may turn to the images of disintegration with which the novel begins. The garden in Bim's house has fallen to rack and ruin. The remembered splendours of the rose walk are overtaken by dust and neglect as if to underscore the disintegration of a house once the figures of authority that bring order and regularity to its rhythms are gone. Things are not much different at the neighbours,’ the Misras. Old man Misra rails at his sons who completely abdicate their patriarchal responsibilities and live off their sisters' labours. He remembers his promises to take care of his sisters on Rakhibandan day “even if it was only a custom, an annual festival” (p. 33). His equivocation about the seriousness of his patriarchal responsibilities as mere formalities bound by custom and ritual foreshadows what is to come, for a page later, he boasts that he was no different from his sons in his own youth. It becomes clear that any promise of security the patriarchal order might offer to women is on shaky grounds from the start. Like Bim's father who, when alive, was nothing more than the “master of entrances and exits,” old man Misra too rests on the illusion of patriarchal responsibility whose benefit is that it allows him and his sons to take advantage of the women in the family without compunction. In the actions of these men, the narrative offers an axis against which we can plot Bim's anger at Raja's betrayal. Even before Raja is fully realized as a character, the narrative sets him up to be, despite his delicately cultivated sensibilities, no different from the Misras. In so doing, it seems to suggest that it is not so much that independence from the British set in motion a train of events that leave women like Bim and the Misra sisters in the lurch, but that the end of colonialism makes visible the gradual hollowing out of traditional ideologies of femininity.

As his Nandy's analysis is particularly pertinent in this context According to Nandy, colonial culture includes codes shared by both rulers and ruled: “The main function of these codes is to alter the original cultural priorities on both sides and bring to the centre of the colonial culture subcultures previously recessive or subordinate in the two confronting cultures. Concurrently, the codes remove from the centre of each of the cultures subcultures previously salient in them.”7 While the codes and conventions affecting women's lives are not Nandy's particular concerns, gender ideologies are obviously an important area undergoing reconfiguration under colonialism. Under the pressure of territorial displacement, class formation and religious identification during the independence movement, these ideologies assume complicated and indeed hardened forms that, despite their apparently liberatory potential, more often than not circumscribe options available to women. Education and culture often served as the ideological apparatus by which this change was consolidated. Clear Light of Day stages the workings of this apparatus as a polyphony of languages, literary and musical traditions, and genres that figures the contradictions at the centre of emerging ideals of nation and femininity.

This staging occurs in the midst of the novel's exploration of how finding one's voice depends on and extends clarity of vision. Voice is presented in the novel as an inescapably intertextual device that foregrounds the composition of subjectivity for, to the extent that it is distinctive, it is a web of citations, the source-texts of these citations marking characters off from one another. The fact that these texts are drawn from an array of cultural backgrounds, colonial and indigenous, is significant. As voice, that which is considered distinctive and most one's own, is shown in its impassioned and introspective moments to rely crucially on texts drawn from literary traditions that are set up in contestation with one another, the processes of subject formation in postcolonial contexts become discernible. The focus on voice and subjectivity is structurally maintained through the lyrical mode of the novel, which is sustained by the adoption of shifting points of view whereby the narration is focalized variably through different characters, through a thematic emphasis on characters' feelings that are subjective to the point of being solipsistic, and through a proliferation of citations from literary and popular cultural lyrics.

The constant eruption of music into characters' thoughts foregrounds the association of lyric with song. Baba, the silent one, asserts his presence by loudly and obsessively playing 78 R.P.M. records of the forties—hits of Bing Crosby, Marlene Dietrich and Nelson Eddy—on a hand-cranked gramophone. Brought to India by the American GIs and British Tommies stationed there during World War II, this music is coded as the monstrous and comic intrusion of Western popular culture into the already heteroglossic culture of postcolonial India. This coding is heightened by the association of this music with Benazir, Hyder Ali's daughter, whom Raja eventually marries. Unlike her father who is a patron and collector of high art, Benazir is an avid consumer of glossy magazines, synthetic fabric and Western music. The music thus signals by synecdoche the overshadowing of political responsibility by the emergence of middle-class consumerism in modern India and the concomitant displacement of British by American cultural products. As well, the music is a constant reminder of Raja's “betrayal” of Bim for Benazir, with its melodramatic titles—“White Christmas,” “Smoke Gets in your Eyes,” “Don't Fence Me In” and “Donkey Serenade”—serving as ironic commentaries on Bim's preoccupation with the past.

Adding to the effect of voice gone awry are the maudlin songs about nightingales and roses Mira-masi and Mulk sing when they are drunk. If Western popular music is presented as comic in its alienating effects, classical music comes in for a more complex critique. Much to Bim's and Raja's amusement, Dr Biswas, the only person to take an interest in Bim's welfare, confesses to an enduring attachment to the music of Mozart, Strauss and Bach. His description starkly reveals what is at work in this appreciation:

When I first heard Mozart … it was as if my whole past vanished, just rolled away from me—the country of my birth, my ancestors, my family, everything—and I arrived in a new world. It was a new world, a shining new world. I felt that when I heard Mozart for the first time—not when I stepped off the boat at Hamburg, or saw strange white faces and heard the strange language. … After that there was nothing in my life—only Mozart.

(p. 83)

For Biswas, Mozart signifies the moment when he is interpellated, to use Louis Althusser's term, in a manner that amounts to his renunciation of his cultural past and his rebirth as a Westernized professional. After this self-revelatory declaration, Biswas invites Bim to a concert of Brahms and Schubert. Raja and Bim ridicule Biswas perhaps because they are sensitive to the incongruity of attending a concert of eighteenth-century Western music at a time when their family is falling apart and the nation is erupting around them in riots. Yet they do not recognize that their own retreat into English and Urdu poetry is neither more nor less ridiculous than Biswas's musical tastes. Perhaps the peculiar valence of German culture in a post-World War II context in which Indian nationalism was curiously interwoven with Allied euphoria has something to do with this blindness. Perhaps, too, musical sensibility was less controlled by colonial hegemony than literary taste so that its mystificatory effects are more visible than those of literature.

This is certainly the conclusion encouraged by the evaluation of other forms of musical expression in the narrative. Bim notes the irony of the Misra sisters' giving themselves up to ecstatic song and dance about “Radha pining for Krishna” when their own lives are testaments to the betrayal of women by their husbands and brothers. Similarly, Biswas is deprecating of his mother's taste for Bengali songs composed by the nationalist poet Rabindranath Tagore, because it makes her unappreciative of his own musical tastes. Reiterating the futility and irrelevance of music, the exemplary lyrical mode, the narrative establishes affinities between the characters' difficulties in finding their voice and the paralysis of Old Delhi where every house is a “sleeping grave.”

As a personalizing metonym of the history of Old Delhi stand the relics of the Das family, especially the house with its dull, stolid colonial furnishings. The spirit of the house overwhelms Tara; its heavy burden of history pins her down. Significantly, it is a book, Jawaharlal Nehru's Letters to a Daughter, that makes tangible her sense of being overpowered by memory. Heightening her childlike sense of being a daughter of the house, Nehru's book also calls attention to the absence of links between generations and her father's failure to recognize his daughters and pass down the mantle of tradition and authority to them. If New Delhi, with its “democratic feudalism” of the Nehru dynasty, is ruled by the misappropriated legacy of one father, the house in Old Delhi is the site of a misrule born of paternal neglect. This moment anticipates Bim's complaint later in the novel about their uncaring father who never bothered to teach her about their family business. By problematizing the “responsible” father-daughter relationships of the Nehrus and the Misras, the narrative offers a response to Bim's resentment. Fathers' legacies, it suggests, are fundamentally flawed. Like the decaying relics of the Das family's lost grandeur and the hollow promises of freedom contained in Nehru's letters, the father's word leads to nothing but stale memories in an India ruled by “bribery and corruption, red-tapism and famine, caste warfare and all that” (pp. 35-6). The cost of the oppressive fullness of unrealized potential is hinted at by the stark emptiness of life outside the sagging gates of the Misras' house—in the somnolent heat of summer, everything is bare. The river is but a trickle and the nets the fisherman casts out are drawn in slack and empty. The house seems to have sucked the outside world of all promise. Significantly, the narrative plays down the connections between the paralysis of the family members and the hidden labour of servants, gardeners and clerks that is responsible for the punctual appearance of food on the family table and the monthly cheque from the business. That is, while the novel encourages an understanding of femininity as a continuum of oppression through the symbolic centrality it accords to Mira-masi, this understanding is undercut by the periodic appearance of an outer circle of unacknowledged workers who make it possible for the novel's main characters to spend time contemplating their suffering. The repeated contrasts drawn between the stasis of over-fullness inside the house and the stasis of emptiness outside, suggest a parallel or even causal connection—between the private and public, the domestic and civic, middle-class demoralization and subaltern deprivation—that remains one of the understated strands of the narrative, perhaps disclosing its own ideological blindness.

Tara's use of Nehru's letters as a reference-point to mark her re-entry into the pool of life she has left behind anticipates another similar moment in the narrative. As Bim confronts her with family tangles, Tara finds herself thinking about Sir Mortimer Wheeler's Early History of Indian and Pakistan; “how relevant such a title was to the situation of the family” (p. 28). History seems to give Tara emblematic figures, moments, events and, above all, texts by which to measure and comprehend her family life. History is no longer an account of the past, but refers to the persistence of the past—as text, discourse, and ideology—in the present. Thus the texts Tara turns to are not simply about Indian history; they are that history, exerting material influence on the lives of the characters. And the characters' tendency to render their histories intelligible through annotations throws into relief their positioning within the tangled conflicts between Hindu and Muslim, India and Pakistan, Hindi and Urdu, nationalist pride and colonial power, and men and women.

Bim shares this predilection to take stock of her life by textual references. As a child she loyally follows her older brother and idol, Raja, who in an emblematic moment declares that when he grows up he wants to be a hero, to which she assents by claiming that she wishes to be a heroine. As the children grow older, the heroic ideal assumes a distinctly literary cast. Raja assiduously follows his ambition, and the narrative relentlessly traces the bathos of his posturing, in the process making visible the complex effects of Romantic ideology on the formation of the national bourgeoisie. Enthralled by Lord Byron's fight for Greek independence and his death, Bim worshipfully identifies. Raja as a Byronic hero, an identification to which Raja is quick to accede. So well does Raja perfect this role, that his friends in college seek to enlist him to the cause of Hindu nationalism because they feel that “his idealistic enthusiasm, his graceful carriage, his incipient heroism” would lend credence to their cause (p. 57). But Raja's sympathy lies with the opposite camp, with the Muslim cause for which their neighbour Hyder Ali stands as a synecdoche. Even here, Raja's loyalty is to an aesthetic rather than a political ideal of secularism or religious tolerance, for he is awe-struck by the elegance, grace and nobility of Hyder Ali's courtly lifestyle which offers a marked contrast to his own dishevelled home. In other words, Romantic ideology in the colonial world is shown to be eminently compatible with the “Old Delhi decadence” associated with Bim's claustration. But as if to mark the political limits of this odd coalition, the narrative renders Raja's ardour impotent, since he is lain down by tuberculosis at the very time his loyalty has a chance of being tested by events. As the family and their neighbours are swept up by the political turbulence of independence and partition, Bim sees Raja with unconscious irony and insight:

His situation was Romantic in the extreme … his heavy limp body as she lifted it as spent and sapped as a bled fish, and the city of Delhi burning down about them. He hoped, like Byron, to go to the rescue of those in peril. Instead, like Byron, he lay ill, dying.

(p. 60)

As for Raja, the Byronic ideal is but the first in a series of disparate ideas he is unable to distinguish from one another, much less to arrange into political priorities. His imagination seethes with an assortment of texts that includes the Urdu verse of Iqbal, Zauq, Ghalib, Dagh and Hali; American paperbacks of Bromfield, Twain, Saroyan and Melville; volumes of Keats, Shelley, Blake, Donne, Swinburne, Tennyson and his beloved Byron; and the adventure-stories of Robin Hood and Beau Geste. Equally compelling to his imagination are his forays into the world of cinema where Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin compete for his admiration with Bombay films, especially those with songs by Seghal whose Urdu lyrics appeal to him powerfully. Faced by this array of cultural fare and aesthetic possibilities, Raja becomes the consummate dilettante, moving from one tradition to another, savouring each but always keeping faith with his ideal of intransitive heroism. The appeal of culture does not become anything more for Raja than an invitation to consumerism of a certain sort, and this latent position becomes fully realized in his eventual marriage to Benazir, Hyder Ali's daughter, who is coded as the upper-class consumer who surrounds herself with ribbons and lace, with glossy magazines and American records. In Raja, then, we are presented with a figure whose taste, culture and sensibility do not lead to nationalist, let alone revolutionary, consciousness as nationalist advocates of education had hoped. Instead, the circumstances of Raja's life, underwritten by middle-class and male privilege, result in a heroism without a cause.

Theorists of nationalism have long argued that one of the effects of colonial education was its inculcation of Western ideals of individual liberty and universal humanism in the native bourgeoisie. Ania Loomba has pointed out that the universal humanism put forward by the institutionalized study of literature “was useful in the task of hegemonizing native elite culture”; at the same time, native intellectuals from the nineteenth century onward drew upon the idea of universal humanism to point out the inherent unfairness of colonial domination and to “claim a place under the sun.”8 In the interaction between Raja and Bim, the narrative explores the effect on gender arrangements of the ideological work of literary study which produces colonial subjects who appreciate and adopt English cultural values and, as a consequence, serve as intermediaries between imperial rulers and their subjects. In this context, Raja's choice of Byron is significant because of the latter's revolutionary as well as expatriate stance exemplified in the following lines: “When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home / Let him combat for that of his neighbors.” Raja seems to have taken this exhortation to heart literally, albeit selectively, for even though there are freedoms to fight for at home, his sister's and brother's, for instance, he espouses his neighbour's cause. The narrative makes it very clear that this choice is not merely misguided romanticism or even an understandable desire to escape the confines of home, but really a sophisticated justification of his evasion of responsibility. Bim definitely sees it as such.

Romantic poetry, itself emerging in a crisis of culture provoked by the cataclysmic liberation movements in nineteenth-century Europe, met this crisis with what one critic has identified as “a psychological strategy … of cultural alienation and social isolation.”9 Critics of Romanticism have pointed out that this sense of crisis also stemmed in part from the gradual undermining of the universalism of Natural Law philosophy through the development of historical studies and the emergence of modern historical sense. As a result, human nature no longer could be seen as always and everywhere the same.10 Yet, this historicity is submerged and effaced by humanist critical paradigms that, in the context of colonial education, reintroduce universalism and aestheticism. In the words of one postcolonial critic, such education fosters the view that “literature pertained to the cultivation of certain emotions—sentimental effusions over the beauty of nature, anguish over mutability—and a high minded disdain for all rationality and abstract thought.”11 In Raja, the narrative exemplifies the middle-class products of this education, for it is precisely his high-minded disdain for rationality and historical urgency that allows him to pursue his goals undistracted by thoughts of social or family responsibility. Raja self-consciously cultivates the heroic ideal of the alienated artist. In the context of a bloody struggle for independence, Raja's aestheticism can be read as one of the sophisticated strategies of mystification deployed by the national bourgeoisie that protects it from political risk and bodily harm. Against Raja's duties to the family as its new paterfamilias, the Byronic heroic ideal bolsters individualism. So, when asked to take over the family business after his father's death, Raja, “gesturing with his hands which had grown long and thin and artistic after so many months of fever,” shrugs off his responsibilities claiming, “I am not a businessman” (p. 65). Prizing his individual freedom above all else, Raja can leave home in an act that is at once liberating (he is not caught in the stagnant atmosphere of Old Delhi) as well as irresponsible: His leaving forces Bim to sacrifice her longing for freedom emblematized by her childish fantasy of becoming a Gipsy or trapeze artist, and remain confined to her family home; what Raja has made of himself after all this is left mercifully unclear. Bim thinks that he is nothing more than a over-fed landlord and this, the narrative suggests, is the fate of heroism without a cause.

If Raja's cultivation of Romantic sensibility sets him apart from and above the others in the novel, he finds added support for his position in the politics of language. The English language is clearly given pride of place in the emotional and social growth of the characters, but it has a strong rival in Urdu, particularly for Raja's loyalty. The narrative is frank about the status that goes with Urdu. As the court language of the Moghuls, Urdu has persisted into the time frame of the novel as “the language of the learned and the cultivated.” Raja, however, dismisses Hindi, soon to become the national language of free India, as a language of no “great pedigree,” with its “modern, clipped, workaday forms.” The narrative underwrites Raja's value judgment every time Hindi is used in the novel. During Baba's brief forays into the outside world he is either commanded or cursed in the language. Operating as the medium of violent, bruising encounters with a world of exploitation, commercialization and brute power, Hindi betokens the public, social, and historical world the characters fear, shun, and avoid. It represents the graceless world of a postcolonial India bereft of the patrician, courtly elegance of Old Delhi Persian, the grandeur of Hyder Ali's Urdu, and the anglicized snobbery of the Das family.

Urdu, however, is inflected with a certain degree of nationalist, even anti-colonial resistance to English. When Raja measures Urdu against English poetry, he finds even his favourites, Tennyson and Swinburne, lacking the economy of grace he finds in the poet Iqbal. He says that “The Garden of Proserpine” is lovely to hear but is “too many words, all words, just words: Now any Urdu poet could put all that into one couplet” (p. 46). To be sure, Raja's devotion to Urdu poetry is very much caught up in his fascination for Hyder Ali, and it is perhaps this factor that turns Bim against it:

She was made shy by these verses—something in her cringed at a kind of heavy sentimentality of expression that was alien to her and also, she felt, to him … she regretted its effect on him.

(p. 82)

Bim fears the poetry's effect of fanning up ideas of heroism and loyalty which by definition, would be directed away from the family. But Bim's is also an aesthetic judgement. If Raja feels that English poetry masks its absence of meaning with an excess of words, Bim feels the same way about Urdu poems. They all seem to her to be always the same, about “death, and love, and wine, and flames” (p. 25), drawing upon the same old trite images of “the cup, the wine, the star, the lamp, ashes and roses” (p. 47). The aesthetic norms of originality and restraint implicit in Bim's judgement seem to derive from her complete indoctrination by her English education. Ania Loomba notes that the introduction of English education in India sought, among other things, “to penetrate and inform vernacular instruction … One evident result of this interpenetration is that today the critical orthodoxies prevailing in the departments of English literature and those of different Indian literatures are not entirely different” (p. 178). The nineteenth-century critical orthodoxies that inform Bim's judgement work in Raja's as well, though differently. The Iqbal that emerges through his quotes is an impassioned, sensuous, mystic, but depoliticized poet who almost warrants Bim's criticism. This is only one face of a versatile poet, every aspect of whose poetry, even his mysticism, was informed by a politically charged, nationalist and anti-colonial aesthetic. In other words, Raja and Bim's sensibilities depend upon and perpetuate a tradition whose selectivity is concealed even from themselves.

Like Raja, Bim is caught within the ideological binds of her colonial education, but without his male prerogatives and with a strongly inculcated sense of her responsibility for the family, she ends up being the one to pay the price for his freedom. Central to nationalist constructions of Indian tradition is the trope of maternity as the signal expression of femininity, evident in Gandhi's pronouncement that, “To me the female sex is not the weaker sex; it is the nobler of the two: for it is even today the embodiment of sacrifice, silent suffering, humility, faith and knowledge.”12 Gandhi himself was to capitalize on this ethic of sacrifice with great success in his attempts to forge an oppositional nationalist agency that negated the very basis of colonial culture.13 But Bim's story is that, whatever its potential for nationalist resistance, this construction is pivotal to the curtailment of women's ambitions. The contradictory ideal of femininity instilled in her by colonial education is emblematized in the figures of Florence Nightingale and Joan of Arc whom Bim worships in her “private pantheon of saints and goddesses” (p. 126). This ideal is of a piece with the older Bim of the first section of the novel, whose hostility to Raja, Bakul and even Tara is matched by the equally fierce protectiveness and indeed maternal nurturing she shows towards Baba. But in depicting her childhood, the narrative presents Bim as a model student who fiercely upholds institutional order and social hierarchy. The narrative thus casts Bim as the site of contradictory desires to be free (like the Gypsy and the trapeze artist) and to be the pillar of a society whose gender norms are all about the curtailment of feminine power (she is the headgirl who idolizes Florence Nightingale). Bim's ambivalence about authority is symptomatic of the effects of English education on women. The emphasis on women's education was, from the nineteenth century, an important strand of the reform movements which accompanied the struggle for national liberation. Nationalist reformers believed that social evils could be wiped out with education, but women's education aimed to produce good home-makers and companionable wives and thereby revitalize orthodox gender ideologies.14 As such, education was designed not so much to emancipate and empower women, as to provide updated supports for the reorganized patriarchal and class system that followed independence.15

Like Raja, Bim leans upon English literature to voice her sense of who she is and how she will face the world. Figuring prominently in the novel are swathes of quotations that Bim has memorized from the poetry of Byron, Swinburne and Tennyson. These are the poets she is trained to appreciate under Raja's tutelage, and they are associated in the time-scheme of the narrative with the summer of 1947. The texts that come in for special emphasis are significant. Of Swinburne, we are treated to lines from “The Garden of Proserpine,” which Bim reads to the invalid Raja. Their fondness for this poem, which celebrates withdrawal from a state of “too much love for living,” from a world of hope and fear, into “sleep eternal,” assumes an almost macabre irony when we turn to the fact that the world outside the walls of their house was literally exploding with life, with history and politics, with hope and fear, at the very moment the two characters seek refuge in the forgetful Lethe of literature.16 Another work that is a special favorite of Raja's is Tennyson's “The Princess,” a poem that undercuts the potential of a feminist utopia organized around learned, independent and articulate women by casting women's quest for knowledge as a destructive, indeed fatal, aberration. In its reassertion of women's place in a domestic sphere ruled by the ideals of heterosexual love, marriage and motherhood, the poem enacts a profound anxiety over the possibility of women gaining voice and mobility.17 Also, its conclusion links women's rebellion to social chaos and national disintegration. Bim's adoration of Raja when transferred to his literary tastes leaves her defenselessly open to the poem's ideological agenda. It is precisely the reassertion of traditional ideals of feminine domesticity in these works that ensnares Bim. However, she accedes to the role of caretaker thrust upon her with an ill-grace that flows from her conflicted recognition that the values she lives by dictate the containment of her desires.

Poetry is thus the woof to the wrap of history and memory in the narrative. The pattern of this weave is revealed well before the novel begins in the epigraph from Emily Dickinson: “memory is a strange bell—Jubilee and knell—.” For Bim, poetry serves as a mnemonic device, the incantation of old favorites bringing back to mind the momentous events of the summer of 1947 when the fate of the nation and that of the family were cast by events sweeping up both. More importantly, poetry revives old feelings and registers the extent to which Bim has allowed herself to be confined by the events of long ago and by her growing burden of bitterness. Her habit of relying on poetry to express intense feelings and powerful insight does not seem to help much, as can be seen in the references to the sisters seething with “unspoken speech” (p. 10) and the house being bloated and swollen with “things left unsaid and undone” (p. 13). Indeed, the narrative suggests that the habit of taking colonial literature as a blueprint for life depends on and encourages a state of intellectual passivity. Tara and Bim are avid readers as children but, we are told, “they hadn't the vitality that Raja had, to participate in what they read—they were passive receivers, bulging with all they read, sinking with its weight like waterlogged rafts” (p. 120). The image of death by water implied by this comment firmly imbricates Bim and Tara in a web of associations that explains their lives through the articulated effects of gender, class and colonialism.

Central to this chain of associations is the accidental drowning of a “bride-like” cow in a well at the bottom of the garden. Ever afterwards, we are told, the horror of that death lingers “like a mad relation, a family scandal or a hereditary illness waiting to re-emerge” (pp. 107-8). This simile becomes literalized in the horrific circumstances of their aunt Mira-masi's gradual death from drinking. In keeping with her penchant for seeking literary analogues to her experiences, Bim envisions her as having drowned:

Bim dreamt night after night of her bloated white body floating naked on the surface of the well. Even when drinking her morning tea, she had only to look into the tea-cup to see her aunt's drowned face in it, her fine-spun silver hair spread out like Ophelia's, floating in the tea.

(p. 99)

That Bim should choose the image of the drowning Ophelia, a figure of iconic significance to the Pre-Raphaelites, is in keeping with her literary tastes. But the image subtly erodes her defences against the insight that Mira-masi's death is nothing less than a hideous drowning. At the same time, it protects her from the full force of the recognition that her aunt's death, especially the eruption of her dementia, stages a return of repressed family secrets. Michael Taussig points out that “things such as the signs and symptoms of disease … are not ‘things-in-themselves,’ are not only biological and physical, but are also signs of social relations disguised as natural things, concealing their roots in human reciprocity.”18 That is, Mira-masi does not passively succumb, Ophelia-like, to the combined weight of her betrayal and disappointment. Instead she plays out in her symptoms her anxiety, confusion, and above all, anger at her situation. In so doing, she becomes the riveting point where the obscene violence of the postcolonial conjunction of indigenous and colonial patriarchy stands exposed.

Mira-masi's downward spiralling begins with the gradual loosening of the ties that bind the Das children to her. As first Raja gravitates towards Hyder Ali and then Tara leaves to marry Bakul, she takes to drink “as if to hide from the intolerable prospect” of losing her only reason to live. But Mira's feeling is less of anxiety than of anger. This point is forcefully made in her hallucinations of herself as a drudge, a weary worker bee, that satisfies the unremitting demands of the larvae that “swelled on the nourishment she brought them” (p. 89). In contrast to the enraged recognition of exploitation in this passage are others where Mira adopts the ideal of maternal sacrifice:

Soon they grew tall, soon they grew strong. … If they choked her, if they sucked her dry of substance, she would give in without any sacrifice of will—it seemed in keeping with nature to do so. … she was the soil, she was the earth.

(p. 111)

But the circumstances surrounding her death and the lingering shadow of her presence long after her death suggest anything but her capitulation “without any sacrifice of will.” She may have entered the Das family “like a discarded household appliance they might find of use” (p. 105), but her death throws into relief the silken filaments of duty, responsibility, helplessness, fear and guilt that bind all the female characters in the novel.

The narrative achieves this effect by establishing a series of metonymic relations between characters with Mira-masi at the emblematic center. As Bim takes stock of her life towards the end of the novel, she, like her aunt before her, resorts to naturalistic tropes that conflate parasitism and nurturing. She thinks of her family with anger as swooping down on her like mosquitoes to torment her and sip her blood (p. 153). So it comes as no surprise that by the end of the novel, like Mira-masi, Bim remarks, “I always did feel that—that I shall end up in that well myself one day” (p. 157). But Bim is not alone. With the comment that the “secret, hopeless suffering of their mother was somehow at the root of this subdued greyness, this silent desperation that pervaded the house” (p. 130), the narrative provides even Mira-masi with other antecedents in the family.

Curiously enough, the narrative deprives Bim of any recognition of the consistently gendered pattern of this anger and rebellion. Indeed, the poetic allusion to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land that accompanies every reference to the persistence of Mira's-masi's presence poses this coherent pattern of feminine resistance as a baffling enigma. In response to the question, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?,” we only have the poem's bewildered “Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded / I do not know whether a man or a woman” (pp. 41, 100). In relation to Mira-masi's life, Bim invokes another modernist poem as well. If Romantic lyric puts forth an ideal of passionate and ardently imaginative subjectivity whose effects we have already traced in Raja, Bim's choice of modernist articulations of the crisis of that subjectivity is singularly appropriate. D. H. Lawrence's “Ship of Death,” helps Bim deal with her aunt's death through a fatalistic acceptance of oblivion and helplessness. Whatever might be the emotional, indeed subversive, charge of the poem as an expression of Lawrence's modernist revolt against a world ruled increasingly by technology, instrumental reason and man's will to power, the poem only serves to overdetermine and rationalize Bim's already disempowered and alienated condition. So, murmuring lines of the poem, “upon the sea of death where still we sail / darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port,” as her aunt slowly slips into death, Bim too wishes “that she could herself lower herself into that dark tunnel and slip along behind the passage made for her by the older, the dying woman” (p. 98). The ambiguity of Bim's longing, in its conflation of birth and death, is in keeping with the tenor of Lawrence's poem. But Bim reads the poem in conjunction with another text, the Tibetan Thodol Bardol, to arrive at a mystical, ritualistic interpretation of the lingering trace of her aunt's agony: “I felt Mira-masi was lingering on, in the garden, not able to leave because she hadn't been seen through all the stages [of death] with relevant prayers and ceremonies” (p. 42). The combined effect of these interpretive moves on Bim is the obscuring of a reading the narrative itself encourages. The uncanny lingering presence of life-in-death makes visible, to those who will see, the death-in-life that is the fate that the peculiar circumstances of national culture impose on women. Homi Bhabha has argued that the trope of such unhallowed haunting signals the manner in which “the intimate recesses of the domestic space become sites for history's most intricate invasions. In that displacement the border between home and the world becomes confused; and uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting.”19 The disorienting effects of Mira-masi's haunting is heightened by the split between the sympathy with which Bim's tortured self-knowledge is portrayed and the narrative's unflinching focus on the inescapable flaws of that knowledge.

A similar dynamic is played out in Bim's reactions to Baba. After Mira-masi's death the sole reason for Bim's remaining in the family home is her responsibility for Baba. At one point in the narrative, she vents her frustration on Baba by resentfully asking him to go away and live with Raja in Hyderabad. But as soon as she makes this demand, guilt and remorse set in, once again mediated by literary references. It is as if her visceral reaction, rooted in her recognition of the conditions of her existence and the ways of her family is over-ridden by the ideological imperatives of a literary discourse that, in advancing ethical as well as aesthetic norms about the way things ought to be, also fills her with guilt for having transgressed those norms:

It was Baba's silence and reserve and otherworldliness that she had wanted to break open and ransack and rob, like the hunter, who, moved by the white bird's grace as it hovers in the air above him, raises his crossbow and shoots to claim it for his own—his treasure, his loot—and brings it hurtling down to his feet—no white spirit or symbol of grace but only a dead albatross, a cold package of death.

(pp. 164-5)

Bim's admission of guilt is contradicted by the narrative's representation of the Das family. The first three sections of the novel trace the ways Tara and Raja have retreated further and further away from the old house and have arranged their lives so that it becomes impossible for them to share Bim's responsibilities. Raja's patronizing grandeur, Tara's insecurity and guilt and Bakul's bureaucratic bluster have also been identified as psychological defences that protect their life-styles. The narrative thus establishes the groundwork that allows Bim's request to Baba, if not its manner, to seem altogether justified.

The overdetermined effect of Bim's literary sensibility and her affinities with the tragic history of feminine suffering in the narrative is that of wearing down her resistance and undermining her confidence in her understanding of her life. So it not altogether surprising that as she clears out the detritus of the past from her room, it is not of new beginnings she is thinking, but of death. Once again she marks this turning point in her feelings by a textual citation from “a book that would draw the tattered shreds of her mind together and plait them into a composed and concentrated whole” (p. 167). This time her training as a historian takes her to a biography of the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb, and “as if by instinct” she opens the book to an account of the emperor's death. In this elegiac mood, Bim recants her anger towards her family and accepts her position with a messianic fatalism:

Bim could see as well as by the clear light of day that she felt only love and yearning for them all, and if there were hurts, these gashes and wounds in her side that bled, then it was only because her love was imperfect and did not encompass them thoroughly enough, and because it had flaws and inadequacies and did not extend to all equally.

(p. 165)

Bim's misplaced acceptance of guilt, smoothed over by the allusion to Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” is now contradictorily secured by this conjunction of sacrifice and sacrificer in the figure of the flawed messiah. Having played out the various nuances of connection between voice and vision, the novel reverses itself at this point, offering vision only at the obliteration of voice and will.

As Bim represses her previously angry resistance to her family's dependence on her, and accepts her place with a Christ-like abnegation of self, a series of revisions occur in the dense semiotic network the novel has painstakingly established. These revisions lead to a closure where anger is transfigured through the agency of lyric. While this change in narrative direction starts with Bim's resignation to her lot, it emerges full blown in the context of a concert that her neighbours the Misras organize to celebrate the birthday of Mulk's guru. Through the novel, this celebration is periodically discussed by the Misra sisters who worry about the expense it entails—they, after all, are the ones who are going to have to find the money and time to organize it. Coinciding with Raja's daughter's wedding, the concert is described in ways that highlight the theme of feminine sacrifice the novel has built up through its pages. However, the description subtly recodes and transvalues sacrifice by advancing an interpretation of lyric subjectivity different from the ones previously advanced. We have seen how Raja's and Bim's privileging of nineteenth-century English lyric forms installs a norm of inviolate, individualistic subjectivity that allows Raja to pursue his dream of heroism selfishly and breeds resentment in Bim. We have also seen that Bim's aesthetic sensibility blinds her to the subversive potential and empowering aspects of Iqbal's Urdu lyrics. In her new-found state of resignation, however, Bim can hear cadences that eluded her in the past. So, when Mulk begins to sing, it is not maudlin phrases leading nowhere that she hears, but a voice of pride and triumph that succeeds where others could not. In contrast to “The Ship of Death” Mira-masi could not launch, “He had launched their boat, now they were all in motion. Now they rose upon a crest, now they moved forward upon a wave of sound” (p. 179). In one stroke, music breaks the stasis and the solipsism that encased Bim up till this point. At the same time, however, the lyric mode converges and resonates with her frame of mind and validates her sacrifice where previously it released oppositional desires. Instead of the impassioned heroic ideal she and Raja found in their beloved poetry in their youth, Bim now hears an elegiac acceptance of the flow of life. In the voice of Mulk's guru, she hears “the bitterness of his experiences, the sadness and passion and frustration” (p. 182).

The narrative thus gradually moves Bim away from a position of feminine resistance to one of existential acceptance where she locates herself in a circle of pain that is not so clearly gendered as before. But this circle is less discriminating only insofar as lyric agency, voice, is completely surrendered to men. In a fitting rendition of Iqbal's ghazal, Raja's favourite, the guru sings, “Your world is the world of fish and fowl. My world is the cry at dawn” (p. 182). At this point, however, the ubiquitous poetry of T. S. Eliot steps in. Listening to the old singer, Bim is reminded of the line from the Four Quartets, “Time the destroyer is time the preserver,” itself a paraphrase of one of Krishna's lessons in the Bhagavad Gita. The irony of Bim's invocation of a central tenet of Hinduism only as it is mediated by the modernist anxiety of an English poet is heightened by the novel's earlier criticism of the “eternal India” associated with certain constructions of the Gita. This text, which is often characterized as a Hindu “Gospel of Action,” is invoked here to rationalize a mystical abjection whose implication in the bureaucratic hypocrisies of the everyday political life of the country has already been exposed in Bakul. Bim is thus positioned analogously to the nation, both being subject to opportunistic manipulations of texts and traditions.

Spurred by this allusion, the narrative moves towards a reconsideration of the entire complex of imagery in which Bim and Mira-masi are enmeshed:

With her inner eye she saw how her own house and its particular history … [was] not binding them within some dead and airless cell but giving them the soil in which to send down their roots, and food to make them grow and spread, reach out to new experiences and new lives, but always drawing from the same soil, the same secret darkness. That soil contained all time, past and future in it. It was dark with time, rich with time.

(p. 182)

In its acknowledgement of the hope of new lives and its reaffirmation of the family's roots in the house and its history, the narrative makes a move towards reconciliation and closure. But the ghost of Mira-masi and the obstinate memory of her troubled recognition that “she was the soil, she was the earth” (p. 111), snags this move. Bim's self-division is marked by the imagery accompanying her reconciliation. She and her family are rooted in and nurtured by the dark secret soil of their history; but the thematics of encryptment so powerfully explored in the preceding pages also reminds us that the source of this rich fecundity is nothing less than the female labour and sacrifice embodied in Mira-masi and Bim herself. Thus, as deeply felt as the need for closure, resolution and reconciliation might be, the narrative spins out of control with each attempt Bim makes to install herself as the still centre of the family.

Gayatri Spivak's provocative exploration of the question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” has impressed upon us the discursive mechanisms and institutional pressures working to close out subaltern self-representation. In the wake of her argument, readings of novels such as Clear Light of Day make it abundantly clear that agency in postcolonial contexts is often predicated upon the ability to say the “impossible no” to structures one inhabits intimately.20 This promise of agency, however, is fraught with the fear of psychic death. Thus, despite its poignant attempt at reconciliation, what the novel leaves us with is a sense of the crippling paucity of choices available to middle-class women, such that even glimmerings of possibility of a different life are quenched by the relentless demands made on them and the circumscriptions on their lives. The most insidious of these limits, the novel suggests, are the tantalizing effects of lyric sensibility which stirs up desires for freedom and self-fulfilment even as it sets up checks to those desires.

Notes

  1. Ngugi wa Thiong'o. “Postcolonial Politics and Culture,” Southern Review, 24 (1991), 11.

  2. On the importance of English education as a source of moral and intellectual suasion in matters of colonial governance, see Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

  3. Of the several examples that come to mind, I cite the eponymous heroines of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John and Lucy, and Ada in Buchi Emecheta's Second Class Citizen. The contradictory construction of femininity is powerfully represented in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions.

  4. For an influential articulation of this position, see Homi Bhabha, “Dissemi-Nation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha, London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 291-322.

  5. Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day, New York: Penguin, 1980, p. 61. Subsequent references to this edition are given in the text of the essay.

  6. For a recent engaging account of this process, see Radha Kumar, The History of Doing, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1993. See also Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, London: Zed, 1986. On the contradictory alignment of women with modernity and tradition, see Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi, Daughters of Independence, London: Zed, 1986.

  7. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of the Self under Colonialism, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 2.

  8. Ania Loomba, “Overworlding the ‘Third World,’” Oxford Literary Review, 13, 1-2 (1991), 178.

  9. Morse Peckham, “On Romanticism: Introduction,” Studies in Romanticism, 9 (1970), 218.

  10. Jerome J. McGann. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 67.

  11. Arun Mukherjee, Towards an Aesthetic of Opposition: Essays on Literature, Criticism, and Cultural Imperialism, Ontario: Williams-Wallace, 1988, p. 4.

  12. Quoted in Jana Matson Everett, Women and Social Change in India, New Delhi: Heritage, 1979, p. 76.

  13. Nandy, op. cit., p. 54.

  14. Vina Mazumdar makes this point succinctly: “Education would not turn the women away from their familial roles, but improve their efficiency as wives and mothers and strengthen the hold of traditional values on society, since women are better carriers of these values,” “The Social Reform Movement in India from Ranade to Nehru,” in Indian Women from Purdah to Modernity, ed. B. R. Nanda, New Delhi: Vikas, 1976, pp. 49-56.

  15. See also Jayawardena, op. cit., pp. 73-108.

  16. Equally relevant is the poem's celebration of a myth that is widely regarded as marking “the male usurpation of the female agricultural mysteries in the primitive times,” Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Vol. I, New York: Penguin, 1960, p. 93. In view of the references to Tennyson's “The Princess,” this strand of meaning gains in importance.

  17. On this point, see Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land 1: The War of the Words, New Haven: Yale UP, 1988, pp. 3-16. Kate Millett's assessment of Tennyson is particularly relevant to Raja's containment of Bim's ambition: “Masculine security appears to depend on Tennyson's ability to turn the rebel's head from learning to love.” See Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, New York: Ballantine, 1987, p. 108.

  18. Michael Taussig, The Nervous System, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 83.

  19. Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text, 31/32 (1992), 141.

  20. Gayatri Spivak, “Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value,” Literary Theory Today, eds. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990, p. 225; “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988, pp. 271-313.

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