SILENCE

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SILENCE : THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY Waheed Uzzafar Khan It is a miracle of great poetry that it speaks in words but explains itself in silence. Actually silence in poetic frame assumes a profound status in which words dilute in meaning and acquire an infinite span of interpretation. They unfold multiple layers of implications refurbishing aesthetic pleasure and culminating into metaphysical insight. Science believes that all sounds and voices are in a still float in the sublunary sphere and can be revived one day by some sophisticated electronic device. Similarly an idea or thought flings and floats in human mind in utter silence before it takes shape into words, reverberating awhile before sinking again in silence. The process of creativity is not loud in cosmic brain or in human brain but soundless and still. Both the cosmic brain and human brain exist in close corollary and operate almost in similar fashion in silence. The cosmic brain governs the entire phenomenal world by transmitting the silent signals to each phenomenon. We see leaves, flowers, copses, buds, fruits, their shapes and sizes outside on the branches and boughs of trees and plants but not inside where they are concealed in silence. When they comes up and bloom to see the world is best known to Time only. Time conspires with creativity in a mysterious fashion in utter silence. All creations of the entire phenomena of nature slumber in silence awaiting to rise at the behest of the Commander's call. In the context of its operational mode the cosmic brain seems to be inferior to human brain which does not operate under any deterministic force but enjoys free will to accept or reject, to choose or discard using his own sense of judgement whereas cosmic brain functions under certain rigid laws of Divine Ordinance. It is this liberty of independent decision which has an edge over other paradigms. The planetary system too, in a sense, has got its rhythm, symmetry, kinetic symphony and a kind of intrinsic harmony, which can only be realized and enjoyed in silence. What is poetry? Not only symphony, symmetry or rhythmic notes, it is beyond that. It is a thought, a philosophy, and a light that enlightens and enriches the human soul with wisdom and delight in utter silence. The real poetry rises from the innermost regions of human soul in a state of bursting

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energy and the breathing consciousness connects itself in moments of illumination with the silent zones of creative faculty. The sublime sustenance of poetic fervour enriches its beatitude in silence. Poetry is basically meant for human beings and not for other creatures, plants and planets. It is not mere song or melody as we find in musical compositions or orchestra, it is a melody of meaning, meaning that travels in silence. Words, reach as far as to the human ear, which are the motley of meaning where their journey ends with the end of the sound. When the sound dies away, the meaning starts speaking in the language of silence to human psyche. This experience can easily be ratified by the poetic confession of the renowned romantic poet Wordsworth who felicitously claimed to have established a sort of communion with the object of Nature in the language of silence; To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that often lie too deep for tears.

In reality he is speaking of an ideal language – a language not found anywhere, nor likely to be found. Truth is inexpressible, In the main It lies far hidden from the reach of words.

The poetic truth with all its connotations and denotations travels along the invisible waves on the aerial currents into the deeper recess of silence. It evokes the perceptive pleasure with its essence of meaning into the soundless faculty of understanding. The language of the Muses which is the prime source of sustenance to the poetic creativity is initially formless, wordless, speechless and soundless. Beyond words there exists a language immortal, universal and exciting to all mortals in all times. Beauty, thought and truth are abstract too fragile to be fully concretized in words, they can only be felt and realized. Silence is the language of hearts and minds – a language of vision and imagination – a language of gods and spirits – a language of angels and heavenly Grace. The sages and saints hold communication in a state of trance with their Creator in the language of silence. They say it is a mystic experience when a human spirit speaks to the Divine spirit in the mysterious language of silence. An esoteric link, not known to words or to the world, is established between the spirits. Rumi, the famous mystic Persian poet, glorifies the silence to the highest degree of spiritual communication by saying that “The silence is the language of God. All else is poor translation.” The silence of God is more eloquent than any speech or any song or sound ever produced or heard in the phenomenal

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world. Silence, in a word, may be regarded as the essence of existence a secret bond between Creator and creation. Shelley, the famous romantic poet, sings a hymn in the praise of poets assuming that “the poets do not belong to this terrafirma because they are the children of a sunnier star/ spirits from beyond the moon. They feed on the aerial kisses of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses, and the shapes more real than living man/ Nurslings of Immortality and these Nurslings sprout silently in colour and light, in life and motion and weave a spell of radiance in and around a poet who is hidden in the light of his thought.” No real poet would ever deny the fact that such poetic experiences exist somewhere beyond the reach of words where emotions, thoughts, and perceptions are fused into a single whole. These abstract formless phenomena seek to find their outlet through some measures of transmission till they assume the shape of words. Since words happen in time they are not suitable carrier to transmit the wholeness of an experience. The total essence of existence is preserved in time which in itself is an unfathomable span of silence. Besides, language is deemed to be lacking in transmitting the full magnitude of feeling, thought, or emotion hence it insinuates through images, metaphors and other poetic devices along with the underlying stirrings of realization. It, infact, is silence that opens the floodgate of undisturbed delight in which the entire state of being is intuitively submerged. It faithfully transmits totals as totals. The sound of words evaporates in time and the gist of the meaning reaches home soothing our sensibility in silence. Wordsworth has intuitively observed the initial role of the Muse by saying that, “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.” Breath, spirit, and knowledge are abstract phenomena they exist with all their mystery and magnitude in silence. Look at a bud when it opens its mouth speaks to the wisdom of a philosophic mind in utter silence about the ephemeral stay of beauty. Similarly a blooming flower spreads its delicate petals and fragrance around, actually speaks to the world through its colour and perfume explaining the meaning of mortality in soundless words. The perceptive faculty of a genuine poet draws inspiration by holding a mysterious communion with the phenomenal beauty and enriches his wisdom by the silent message which is not to be captured otherwise. Wordsworth frankly and freely confesses the blessings of “sensations sweet, felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing into (my) purer

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mind with tranquil restoration.” It is this mysterious bio-chemistry that elevates the sagging spirit of the poet and cultivates confidence to create a significant corollary to assimilate to be relished in silence. It is the power of poetic sublimity that helps him to “hear the still sad music of humanity.” 'Hearing' still sad music of humanity widens the scope of experience and transcends a thinking mind to the ultimate verge of thought and imagination where definite perceptions are melted into the mood they generate. It is a revelation or vision of the aftermath of the suffering that acknowledges the presence of the suffering and yet knows the depths touched by suffering are silent depths enriched by harmony capable to bring mankind together in the experience of pain-- a grief buried deep in the stillness beyond words. It is the relationship of 'silence' with 'sad' which gives it meaning beyond itself. The word 'still' reaching towards 'sad' suggests mute stoicism, and the coming of the poise after suffering is pushed into memory as Emily Dickinson puts it, “After great pain a formal feeling comes.” 'Music' adds to these meanings a sense of integration and of sublimity through the coming of the sad harmonies. It turns the stillness into a rhythmic stillness which is different from the stillness of death. 'Humanity' evokes a sense of sharing and the stillness shared is the stillness of unspoken understanding in Wordsworth's poetry. He, like his Lucy, knew the silence and the calm of Mute insensate things. The silence of integration, towards which great poetry strives, is that silence in which multiplicity is given coherence. It is not a silence that banishes the warmth and vibrations of life in time. The poet's vision and observation are completely and harmoniously synthesized into a unified totality through inclusions and not through exclusions. John Keats enunciates that “The simple imaginative mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent working coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness.” In one of his famous comedies, As you Like It, Shakespeare has created a forest of Arden in which he has initiated an academy of perceptive knowledge imparted through a medium of a language which yet craves for words and voices, because the teachers therein are the trees, the brooks and the stones. He finds “tongues in trees, books in running brooks and sermons in stones.” They all speak to man in a mute language. Trees tell us the philosophy of growth and decay, cycle of seasons and the mysterious relationship with the existential evolution. Similarly brooks assume the stature and status of books which enfold the entire gamut of philosophy,

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literature, science and the cosmic order that holds good on all levels of universal stability and perpetuity. The sermons sung by stones sublimate human soul by spiritual enlightenment exploring the underlying connectivity of all creations with the creator, emphasizing the rigidity of the Cosmic Laws. They all teach us through a meta-linguistic medium. A learner may assimilate the truth of all knowledge by his spiritually rich sense of sight and hearing elevating his vision and widening his wisdom. Articulation and oration often boggle the arguments whereas the language of silence absorbs the essence, the truth. In poetic sense symbols are not words but modes of multiple meaning inhabited in silence. A poet composes his poem in response to an urge within, capturing 'airy nothing' and molding it into musical shapes by the alchemy of his creative imagination. It is a process of capturing silence in silence to be preserved in silence. We are reminded of Shakespeare's transcendental insight, poetic power and creative genius when he shares the secret of his flight with the world: The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.

Silence and essence exist in timelessness whereas words exist in time. Actually dialectic of poetry rests on the tussle between words and silence. The silence dialectic of poetry assimilates the essence of the dialectic of metaphysics which connotes this essence to a timelessness, a blank eternity from which all experience in time is shed. The poet's essence is made of experience involving the whole man with the exception that the experience is lifted out of the medium of time into the medium of timeless. Greatness is achieved when it emerges out of an involved contemplation of existence. In an Intuitive flash through an experience of self identification, all of a sudden, knowledge comes and that realization of knowledge is a pleasant experience of total synthesis where existence and essence are locked into one whole in a moment of intense silence. The words-silence dialectic of poetry finds a parallel dialectic of rhythm which is the soul and breath of poetry. Rhythm that converges movement on stillness dissolves words in

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their flow and freezes them in silence. As a dialectic of rhythm poetry has no apparent nexus with the silence till it reaches the zone of silence as the song of High Land lass impregnates itself into the silent chamber of Wordsworth's memory and makes him spell-bound just like an unborn child who sleeps in silence in the womb of his mother. The melody of the song stays alive in the mind of the poet long after it was heard no more. Wordsworth is gifted with a peculiar treasure house in his memory chamber to preserve his emotions at will and recollect them in tranquility. Here silence reiterates the melody in silence to furbish the experience with the same emotional intensity. On the contrary Coleridge laments his inability to revive the symphony and the song of the damsel with a dulcimer, singing Mount Abora or he would build the pleasure dome in air. The experience of the pleasure drawn from the unintelligible song of the countryside sang by the country maids is the same for both the poets. But Coleridge fails to recollect those emotions of delight which help Wordsworth to build a pleasure dome inside his mind. It suggests the power of capturing the original emotions of bliss from the chamber of silence (memory) in order to rejoice with the same intensity. Eventually both the poets were hypnotized by the magic of the melody. None of them knew the language of the songs. Coleridge believes that “Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.” Several great poets have ardently highlighted the significance of silence to be the most effective language of poetry. Coleridge says that “It is the surging influence of the unexpressed on the expressed.” Shelley believes that “Most wretched souls / Are cradled into poetry by wrong / They learn in suffering what they teach in song.” Keats is of the opinion that “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter.” T.S. Eliot comes up with an unambiguous definition by saying that “Great poetry communicates not through its words but through a silence indicated by them - a silence frozen in between and around words.”

THE POETRY OF MAHENDRA BHATNAGAR AND RAMESH CHANDRA DWIVEDI: A COMPARATIVE STUDY Suresh Chandra Dwivedi Dr. Mahendra Bhatnagar and Shri Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi are very senior and famous poets who are influencing the poets, readers and general th public today. Both were very active in the 20 century as poets, teachers and social workers and it is quite fascinating that they are still active in the st second decade of the 21 century. Let us start modernism first. When both of these poets were active as the Modern poets like Yeats, Auden, Eliot and Spender, influenced the minds of poets and of readers. Poetry for Dr. Mahendra Bhatnagar and Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi serves as a therapeutic value and it is born in their books as a liberating force. Both of the poets write to experience freedom and liberation in their own lives. They embrace poetry as a liberating force. After centuries of slavery, the poets find a perfectly democratic space in poetry. Both of these poets write in free verse like Eliot, Auden, and Agyeya and demonstrate their poetic talents in a period of time which may be called modern. This is the period of Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Spenser, Ezra Pound, Premchand, Agyeya and Rambilas Sharma. Both Mahendra Bhatnagar and Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi have written many books in Hindi and English where they leave no stone unturned to demolish the walls of caste, creed, colour, religions and languages. Both often cross the boundaries and write to break the walls of inequalities created by birth and other circumstances. Both these poets are most important poetic voices of Post-Modern era. Mahendra Bhatnagar's books of poems are Forty Poems of Mahendra Bhatnagar, After the Forty Poems, Exuberance and Other Poems, Death-Perception: Life-Perception, Passion and Compassion, Poems: For A Better World, Lyric-Lute, A Handful of Light, New Enlightened World, Dawn to Dusk. In all these books, which were originally written in Hindi and later translated into English, we find a certain kind of poetic delight and profound philosophical insight. Besides these translated books his 18 poetry collections are compiled in 3 volumes of Mahendra Bhatnagar Ki Kavita-Gangaa.

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Mahendra Bhatnagar's SAMAGRA collected works have been published in seven volumes in Hindi. Bhatnagar's as many as 16 collections of poems are also available. Bhatnagar has written articles on Premchand. Both poets use rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia in abundance. The influence of Marx, Gandhi, Lenin, Eliot, Spender and Ezekiel can be found on both these poets. I like both these senior poets and writers who have inherited Indian cultural heritage like anything. Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi has travelled in more than 50 countries so far and has propagated the literature, culture and civilization of India wherever he has gone. He is a well-known 'yaayaavar'. He has become a saint and is known as Swami Shraddhanand and lives in Wazirabad-Delhi as a Chief Priest. He embraced sainthood and took to sannyas in the Mahakumbh of Ujjain in 2004. Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi is a saint of literary interests and he has served in Indian Army, Air India and several news agencies of the East and the West. Frost's following lines are applicable to Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi's poetic personality: The woods are lovely dark and deep But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep And miles to go before I sleep

To rest is to rust to Swami ji. He is a soldier of Peace. And he will never fade away, retire or become out of date. His internationally known poem 'Captain Blake' deserves to be quoted in full: I write poetry and I wrote prose It gives me pleasure bellicose Of cruel world of corruption and sin, I'm not the one for sadistic pleasure A blade of grass and a sapling small Are ready to greet when I walk or stroll O! River Nile, O! Ganges great My heart is close to Hudson River My hands are shaking for a friendly shake Drop your guns O! Captain Blake With the stroke of a pen this offer I make Come with your troops and join in prayer We shall make the earth a better place

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Where all will live with honor and grace Cruelty will be the rarest thing to trace In the temple of humanity happiness will usher Anywhere you live and whatever you do You are my brother O! Timbukto Look at this tree where rests cuckoo Dissolved in meditation with Mother Nature I'm not authorized to kill and destroy The peace of my neighbor or a child with a toy This is most cowardice act of a coy I'm bravest of braves, I'm a soldier A piece of poetry is not a thing To relish or rejoice or something It's to contemplate my dear Singh Be a harbinger of a prosperous future.

It is the best poem which I have enjoyed in the last 20 years. It combines the best elements of modernism and post-modernism. Here the poet gives a public declaration to end wars, enmity, and hatred from our society. Both Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi and Mahendra Bhatnagar write to make our world better. This poetic aim of theirs is most welcome. The sun does not snatch the work of the rain or the rain does not take the work from earth, and the earth performs its own duty. All the rivers must flow and all poets must sing for peace, harmony, sweetness and light. Man cannot be and should not be an enemy of man. The poem is inspiring and teaches us to live and let others live peacefully. The poet is a 'manishi', 'Paribhu' and 'swayambhu. The poet writes like a prophet. The purpose of the contemporary poets is to reject universalism made on behalf of canonical western literature and to expose the limitations of civilization, culture and governance. In Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi and Mahendra Bhatnagar I have found a tendency to extend empathy and sympathy across boundaries of cultural and ethnic differences. They are pro-changers and celebrate hybridism and cultural polyvalence. They develop a new perspective which is wider and larger than other poets and other intellectuals. Both the poets write about

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plurality and consider otherness as a source of energy and potential change. Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi has written and published 12 books so far and his books of poems The Shafts of Sunlight and Written Words consider the questions of slavery of the poor people of Pharsatar (Poet's village) and nearby villages of Ballia District in detail and traced the ill influences of subjugation of the British. The Influence of Mangal Pande, Chittoo Pandey, Tarkeshwar Pandey, his Parents, Thakur Jagannath Singh and Gandhi's Hind Swaraj is there on the mind of Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi. His 12 books have already changed the course of history, politics and sociology. His books of poems are impressive and full of enthusiasm and zeal which are unprecedented. His books are highly impressive, valuable and influential from the point of ecocriticism and Post-colonial theory. The books by Dwivedi and Bhatnagar should be studied in the light of eco-critical theory, eco-critical history and concurrent writing. You must read them together as you read Ezra Pound and Eliot together, Nirala-Mahadevi together, Auden-Spenser together. They have applied variety of the modes, genres and given beautiful representations of nature and human nature and shown links with the physical environment. Their books explore eco-humanism and show deep connections with radical green theories such as deep-ecology. Dwivedi's books of poems especially Written Words and The Shafts of Sunlight and Mahendra Bhatnagar's recent books of poems like Exuberance and Other Poems and Life: As It Is must be read as classic examples of Romantic Ecology. Both Dwivedi and Bhatnagar find Marxvad, Leninvad, Gandhivad, Nehruvad and Chhayavad, Pragativad as inadequate and they often cross the boundaries. The best poems of Dwivedi and Bhatnagar are those where they forget Marxism and other universalism. Dr. Mahendra Bhatnagar started as a Marxist poet and critic but his books are loudly exposing the limitation of meta-narratives. They act locally but think globally. One is a saint of Wazirabad while another is a prophet of Gwalior. Both are concerned with aims of serving the earth and humanity. Swami Ji is known for cardinal human values, ethical values, epiphany and eco-humanism. I have found the seeds of Wordsworth's romantic ecology and environmental tradition in Dwivedi's books like Por Por Kavita Bibhor, Bharat Mata Gramvasini, Dhudhta Hun Shabda Shabda Me Suryodays The Shafts of Sunlight and Written Words. Ramesh Chandra

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Dwivedi is an internationally renowned poet, patriot, saint, religious thinker, a social activist and followers of Baba Ramdev, Anna Hazare, Baba Pashupatinath and Naga Baba of Vrindavan. Our beloved poet Bhatnagar is a nationally, internationally renowned poet, critic, editor, thinker, humanist, philosopher and follows Marxism, Humanism and other leftist ideologies. I like these two poets as they are two sides of the same coin. They are two sides of the civilization and culture. Their literary works are full of significance because of their growing popularity. Bhatnagar and Dwivedi write on post modern themes, tendencies and attitudes within their literary works and explore such implications. They are different from writer of high modernism like Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens etc. J. A. Cuddon describes post modernism in these words “an eclectic approach [by a liking for] parody and pastiche”. When I was reading books like The Shafts of Sunlight, Written Words, Epiphanies and other Poems and Life: As It Is I see enough use of magic realism, modernism, and Post modernism. Their poetry faithfully analyses and interprets elements of modernism and post modernism: Every volcano Are one day Has to cool down Has to disappear Forever

And the following lines of his poems “cyclical occurrences” deserve our attention. But All undeserved Went on happening Before us And we could only see All before us Successively All battered sheltered Demolished

The post-modern poets celebrate fragmentation and reject narrative. Almost all the poem of Life: As It Is and Written Words have been written under post modern conditions and both our beloved poets return to their

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roots. Both the communist and the former Sadgrihastha and soldier celebrate the distinction, disintegration. The high and the low, the popular and the vulgar, the good and the bad, the gaudy and the simple all qualities and tendencies are presented as mixture, playfulness, and celebration of fragmentation in abundance. The influence of Habermas, Lyotard and Baudrillard and other Post Modern thinkers like Brooker, Andrew Benjamin, Steven Connor, Thomas Docherty, Madan Sarup, Patricia Waugh. Their words can be seen in the works of both Bhatnagar and Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi. There is a need to apply tools of comparative criticism, eco-criticism, post colonial criticism and post modern theory to these poets. We cannot defend their philosophical tones playfulness celebration of dying families, governments, societies, languages and cardinal human values unless we try to use the light gained from works in postmodernism. Habermas, Lyotard and Buadrillard when the literary Gods are many you need new flowers and not stale flowers to decorate their heads and garland them. There is a need to get rid of old and uncompleted project of modernism and enlightenment. To conclude the poets and readers of Mahendra Bhatnagar are scattered over the whole globe. His poems are available in Hindi, English and French. Dr. Bhatnagar's poetry has been liked by Dr. Patricia, Dr. Suresh Chandra Dwivedi, Dr. Suresh Nath, Dr. Subha Dwivedi, Dr. D. C. Chambial, Dr. K. R. Bhushan, Dr. Anita Myles, Dr. Pradeep K. Talan, Mrs. Purnia Ray, Dr. Kalpana Rajput, Shri Kedarnath Sharma; eminent literary critic Vidya Niwas Mishra praised the “vigorous rhythm” of his poetry. Their poetry demonstrates combination of heterogeneous trends. They write about nature and human nature. They are more akin to Whitman, Larkin and Heaney. They are changing the course of history and have emerged as the powerful poetic voices of 20th and 21st centuries. They question and examine history and meta-narratives and test both the eastern and western traditions. Barthes, Bakhtin, Derrida, Foucault and Kristeva seem to influence their poetic minds. Everything comes under their sceptical scrutiny and they employ a language which is akin to vernacular language. They share the qualities of robust optimism, playfulness, openness and celebration of the fragmentation. Their poetic landscape is wide spread and is concerned with the problems of human existence and it is full of ingredients of post modernism.

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WORKS CITED 1

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Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural rd Theory, 3 Edition, Delhi: Viva Books, 2012. Peter Brooker, Modernism/Post Modernism, Longman, 1992. Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post- Structuralism and PostModernism, Longman, 1993. Krishna Shrinivas, World Poetry 1991, “Best Poems by 233 Eminent Poets in 71 countries”, Chennai, 1999. Mahendra Bhatnagar, After The Forty Poems. -------------------------Exuberance and Other Poems. -------------------------Death-Perception: Life-Perception. -------------------------Poems: For A Better World. -------------------------Passion and Compassion. -------------------------Lyric-Lute. -------------------------A Handful of Light. -------------------------New Enlightened World. -------------------------Dawn to Dusk. -------------------------Poems: For Human Dignity. -------------------------Life: As It Is. -------------------------O, Moon, My Sweet-Heart! -------------------------Sparrow and other Poems. Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi: The Shafts of Sunlight. -------------------------Written Words [Forward by Suresh Chandra Dwivedi & Afterword by Prof. Rajkumar of Delhi University] -------------------------Bharat Mata Gramvasini. -------------------------Por Por Kavita Vibhor. -------------------------Culture and Imperialism 1993. -------------------------The Wretched of the Earth.

KABIR'S SOCIAL VISION: A STUDY OF HIS ONE HUNDRED POEMS (TRANSLATED BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE) Ravindra Kumar Kabir Das is one of the three most prominent figures of Hindu Bhakti Movement; the other two are Surdas and Tulsidas. He is widely known for his couplets and songs that connect life and spirituality in a simple yet powerful manner. He has inspired a number of scholars and poets like Rabindranath Tagore. As a religious preacher and a poet, he is surely different from all other poets of his age who wrote before and after him. Foremost among all the mystic poets who occupy the galaxy of Sufi poetry, Kabir was the only poet who was praised by the same people whom he condemned. A fine star of the galaxy of the fifteenth century India, he moved both the educated and uneducated people with the same intensity with his poetic vision. He wrote simple and profound verse and has become the most quoted of all the Indian poets today. During his lifetime Kabir wrote around sixty-one books of which only forty-three have been published. The authenticity of some of these books is doubtful. Only three of these-Kabir Granthavali (edited by Dr. Shyam Sunder Das), Sant Kabir (edited by Dr. Ram Kumar Verma), and the Bijak are supposed to contain the original poems of the poet. The very aim of the present paper is to find the relevance of Kabir's social vision at the present time. The study is mainly focused on the hundred poems of Kabir translated by Rabindranath Tagore. In order to understand Kabir as a poet and man, one should take note of the historical milieu which served as a background to his songs. Evidences show that he was brought up during the 15th century India, a period of political disintegration. The period witnessed a rapid change and fall of ruling dynasties in Delhi. In 1399, the Tughlaq dynasty was replaced by the Taimur dynasty followed by the Sayyid dynasty and finally the Lodis. The Lodis were Afghans and their rise to power was an end to the Turks who had ruled India for more than two centuries. This resulted in the form of commotion and conflict in India. Kabir was born and brought up in this political atmosphere. Kashi and Jaunpur were the two main centers of knowledge reflecting Sufism and Bhaktism at this time. Although Kabir was not a systematic thinker and philosopher, but he expressed something

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which touched the hearts of people directly. He spoke to the people in a direct and spontaneous tone which became capable enough to awake the people from their long sleep of ignorance. What he said during the 15th century is very much relevant even today. Kabir never adopted the life of a professional ascetic, or retired from the world in order to devote himself to bodily mortifications and the exclusive pursuit of a contemplative life. He never tried to conceal his married life which saints usually attempt to conceal; it was from out of the heart of the common life that he sang his rapturous lyrics of the divine love. Kabir believed in an attributeless, monotheistic God and he addressed Him by various names like Ram, Rahim, Hari and Govind Shahib. His chief focus was on the unity of God with the created world. For this he did not believe in any artificial or hypocritical way, but his focus was on simplicity. He firmly believed that the union with God could be achieved by the individual through mysticism and by following some disciplines in life. Equality of the humankind was the central theme running through most of the songs of Kabir. He strictly condemned the inequality of human beings on the basis of caste, creed, religion color, race and tribe. During the time of Kabir, the Turks and Brahmins were proud of their racial superiority. Attacking on the Turks he says: Only the one I recognize Those who call him two will go to hell For they not know the reality. All the human beings are sustained by the same air and water, And are illuminated by the same light; All have been formed out by the same dust and Their creator is the same. (Kabir, Pada, 55)

About Kabir it is said that he never touched the ink and paper with his hands, and never put pen in his fingers. Actually he was very fond of moving from one place to another. During his trips he met a number of scholars and preachers and this made him an experienced poet and philosopher. He used poetry as a weapon to ridicule the trivial customs and traditions prevailing in his society. Poetry to him was a means to express his social, religious, political and philosophical ideas and not an end in itself.

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He was not only a religious preacher but a social reformer too. Whatever he thought and expressed through his songs was originally logical. He had the much required sense of self-respect of a poet. Words go that he denied to salute Sikander Lodi in his court and said clearly that he knew only one king and that was lord Rama. Kabir's poetry is written in a very simple manner and that's why it can be understood with a very simple approach. It requires no intellectual argumentation and critical operation, but a thirstful drinking and assimilated appreciation and enjoyment. It is a call, an invitation, a welcome to those who are seekers not for the sake of aesthetical but of ethical values. Kabir was mainly concerned for the society and its welfare. He strictly ruled out the useless deeds that misguided the common innocent people of the society. Though he was born in a Hindu family and brought up in a Muslim family, but as a poet he belonged to none of these religions. That's why he is very harsh both on the Hindus as well as the Muslims for their mischief and artificial ways of worship. He declared very emphatically that only one's own self could free from the circle of life and death and not the artificial ceremonies of prayer in temple and mosque. Attacking on Hindus he says: Tell your beads, paint your forehead with the mark of your God, and wear matted locks long and showy: but a deadly weapon is in your heart, and how shall you have God? (One Hundred Poems of Kabir, LXVII)

His simple thinking is that if God can be found by worshipping the stone, he would worship the mountain. In the same way, he attacks on the Muslims and says: The mullah cries aloud to Him: and why? Is your lord deaf? The subtle anklets that Ring on the feet of an insect when it moves Are heard by Him. (One Hundred Poems of Kabir, LXVII)

He was of the view that Hindus died worshipping deities and Muslims died going to Haj. He further raises some questions ironically on the approaches of both Hindus and Muslims. He asks:

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If God be within the mosque, then to whom does this world belong? If Ram be within the image which you find Upon your pilgrimage, then who is there To know what happens without? Hari is in the east: Allah is in the west. Look Within your heart, for there you will find Both Karim and Ram. (One Hundred Poems of Kabir, LXIX)

Kabir's approach to know God is simple and that's why he preached simple life and suggested the people to focus on purification, forgiveness and service of the suffering humanity: O Sadhu! Purify your body in the simple way. As the seed is within the banyan tree, and within The seed are the flowers, the fruits and the shade. (One Hundred Poems of Kabir, XLVI)

He stated that God could be achieved neither by ringing the temple bell nor by worshipping the images of God with flowers and nor by applying austerities in life. He feels that: The man who is kind and who practices righteousness Who remains passive amidst the Affairs of the world, who considers all Creatures on earth as his own self He attains the immortal Being, the true is ever with him. (One Hundred Poem of Kabir, LXV)

Actually Kabir did not believe in the concept of dualism and denied to accept the existence of Self and God in separation. Perhaps he got the very idea of God from Upanishadic non-dualism and the Islamic monism. He feels that everything in the universe is born of Brahma and will ultimately merge into Brahma. God, according to him, is knowledge, truth and light

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which can be achieved through love and devotion only. He strongly feels that God is not within the scriptures and can't be achieved by making an intense reading of the religious books of the world. It can be known and achieved by the one who reads the two letters of love i.e. Lord Rama. Further he lampoons the ways through which people try to know God: The Kazi is searching the words of the Koran, and instructing others: but if His heart be not steeped in that love, What does it avail, though he be a teacher of man? The yogi dyes his garments with red: but if He knows naught of that color of love, what Does it avail though his garments be tinted. (One Hundred Poems of Kabir, LIV)

Kabir is a mystical poet also which is reflected through his several songs. At several places he considers God as his husband and feels himself to be His wife: Dear friend, I am eager to meet my beloved! My youth has flowered, and the pain of Separation from Him troubles my breast. (One Hundred Poems of Kabir, LI)

In Kabir's songs, we notice his free and frank dislike of all institutional religion and external observance. Thus, from the point of view of orthodox Hindu or Muslim sanctity, Kabir was simply heretic. The simple union with the divine Almighty which he recurrently proclaimed through his songs was independent both of ritual and of bodily austerities. The God whom he knew was neither in Kabba nor in Kailash. Those who pined to seek Him need not go far. He is more accessible to a washerwoman and a carpenter than to a self-righteous and self-proclaimed holy man. The temple and mosque, holy water and scriptures, the Koran and the Purana are mere substitutes for reality: There is nothing but water at the holy bathing places; and I know that they are

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useless, For I have bathed in them. The images are all lifeless, they cannot speak; I know for I have cried aloud to them. The Purana and the Koran are mere words; Lifting up the curtain I have seen. (One Hundred Poems of Kabir, XLII)

Apart from his religious pursuit Kabir's emphasis was on the society. He believed in the equality of all human beings as he felt that all human beings were made of the same drop of semen, and had the same bones and tissues. Hence, there should be no discrimination between human beings on the basis of caste, colour, class, religion and race. Attacking on the Turks he asks if they (Turks) were superior, why were they not born circumcised? His main attack is on the Brahmins who discriminated people on the basis of caste. He asks: “If you claim to be Brahmin by birth, born of brahmani, why were you not born in different fashion?” (Kabir, Pada) He further asks, “Do you have milk in your veins while we have blood in ours? If not, how are you a Brahmin and we Shudras”? (Kabir, Pada) Kabir particularly attacked on the feudal class of his time who were land lords belonging to the nobility. He ridiculed them for nurturing false pride and arrogance for taking birth in the high class. These people were proud of their fine-bred horses, their elephants and their lofty palaces. Kabir feels that these were the very people who were responsible for the miseries of the poor class. They made the society a living hell by oppressing the people in all the possible ways. Kabir did not spare the commercial class either. He felt that the people from this class were misusing their money by lending it to the poor at high rate of interest. When the people were not able to pay the money back, they usurped their land and houses. He compared this class with the blood-suckers who sucked the blood of the common people. Apart from inequality, intolerance, arrogance and attachment to worldly objects, Kabir considered lust to be a major reason for the problems of human beings. People in his society were crazy for money, power, name, fame and sex which were the root causes for their sorrow. The essence of Kabir's songs is that he was deeply dissatisfied with the society of his time which was filled with a number of evils. But the question

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is- did Kabir try to do something seminal to remove these evils from the society? Did he seriously try to change the society? Actually Kabir was not a social revolutionary; his chief concern was to establish a society based on equalitarianism, a society without any kind of discrimination which separates one man from another. In fact, we notice some limitations in Kabir as a social reformer. He never talks about the equality of women and seems to favour the practice of Sati in laudatory terms. He also spoke of Purdah as a normal practice. Nowhere does he seem to condemn child marriage and polygamy. Also he does not advocate widow re-marriage. This shows Kabir's limitations as a reformer. But we should not forget that Kabir was writing in a very different age which was mainly ruled by the foreign invaders. Hence, his ideas in relation to the condition of women, Sati pratha, child marriage and Purdah pratha should be understood in the light of the time and period in which he was writing. So far as his language is concerned, it is very simple and lucid. Since he never touched pen he speaks to us in a direct and uninhibited tone which is capable enough to arouse us from our slumber-like existence. His style is frank and refreshing. The instructions given by him are simple yet deep, obvious yet multi-layered, challenging yet caring, powerful yet empowering, irrelevant yet highly devotional. Indeed, he lived what he preached or he preached what he lived. Like a true artist he revealed the highest truth regardless of the circumstances. In a very simple manner he affirms the intrinsic divinity in each of us and opens up intimate and direct way of communication with each one of us. The language of most of his songs is a mixture of different tongues-Bhojpuri, Avadhi, Punjabi and Marwadi. Hajari Prasad Dwivedi, the prominent Hindi author spoke highly of the language of Kabir and said that Kabir had extraordinary command on language. To conclude one can say that Kabir was a sadhak who sang unparalleled songs in the praise of the Almighty and who gave voice to the voiceless people of his age. His ideas are as relevant today as they were six hundred years before. At the present mundane world his ideas seem to be more authentic and applicable. Like a great artist he belongs to all the societies of all the ages. He can well be defined as an apostle of religious tolerance and of Hindu-Muslim reconciliation. He is sober and didactic in his ideas and his voice is that of an ecstatic, generous saint. He is a great religious reformer. The spontaneous expression of his vision reflected through his

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songs has made him an immortal poet of all the ages. Surely, he is, as he says, the child of Allah and Ram.  WORKS CITED One Hundred Poems of Kabir. Tr. by Rabindranath Tagore. Delhi: McMillan India Limited, 19.

HINDU EQUILIBRIUM IN THE EARLY FICTION OF R. K. NARAYAN Jitendra Singh The precise link between fiction and life has been a matter of extensive study among critics and writers since the days of Plato. However, all the critics, more or less, agree with Aristotle that, whatever its apparent factual content or verisimilitude may be, fiction is to be regarded as a structured imitation of life, and it must not be confused with the literal transcription of life. The world of fiction is always a recreated world, a world of the probable rather than the actual. It is governed by its own rules, and becomes believable for it has been transmuted by art to appear consistent and coherent. Depending on his outlook the writer may select any material as he deems fit. He may choose certain aspects of life and ignore some other experiences. In his treatment he may be naturalistic, realistic, symbolic or allegorical. His tone may be comic, satiric or ironic rather than serious. He has absolute freedom in the choice of subject matter and the fictional mode. Of course, his success depends on how well the artist has succeeded in organizing the material to represent his point of view and not on how faithfully he has mirrored or copied life. To quote Henry James: The only obligation to which in advance, we (as readers)may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting…we must grant the artist his subject, his ideas, his personae; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. (Henry James, 1948: 8-14)

The above guideline prescribed by Henry James is to be followed while appreciating a work of fiction. Unfortunately, R.K. Narayan's choice of thematic structure as well as the traditional Hindu Weltanschauung as evident right from his first work, Swami and Friends, displays a repressive and regressive attitude. The social and political implications of this attitude are an important consideration. Since dissent and progress are absent in Malgudi novels, Narayan cannot be considered a successful novelist. One has to find fault with Narayan's limited option on the choice of events, characters and narrative strategy. These novels are simplistic, entertaining

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and leisurely. They do not offer any message, nor do they go into the depth of life. Besides, the limited themes and facts of life depicted in the novels demonstrate the artist's regressive conception of life and the universe. After all, every artist, whether he is Narayan or some one else, has his own conception of the world and his fiction represents a selected and organized expression of his lived experience. Literary works, as Eagleton understands, are the forms of: Perceptions, particular ways of seeing the world; and as such they have a relation to that dominant way of seeing the world which is the social mentality or the ideology of an age. (Terry Eagleton, 1976: 6)

This is very true in the case of Narayan. Beneath the simplicity of themes, his conception of the universe, conscious or unconscious, is discernible. It, in fact, determines the basic pattern behind the orgization of events in Malgudi novels. He has a Hindu response to the universe based on the Tamasic and Sattvik gunas of Hindu philosophy. Srinivas echoes it in Mr. Sampath: His mind perceived a balance of power in human relationships. He marvelled at the invisible forces of the universe which maintained this subtle balance in all matters: it was so perfect that it seemed to be unnecessary for anybody to do any thing. For a moment it seemed to him a futile and presumptuous occupation to analyze, criticize and attempt to set things right anywhere (Narayan, 1986: 63) (Emphasis added)

It is a defeatist view of humanity which involves things neither particularly wrong nor right, but just balancing themselves. What Srinivas points out is the Hindu archetypal existence of the world which neither begins nor ends but simply repeats itself in cycles. The basic pattern of life is immutable. Whatever changes occur are very temporary and just illusions. They do not affect the universe. It has an in-built mechanism which always maintains the equilibrium. At a particular moment harmony may be upset, but the next moment it is restored by some means or the other. This is the fundamental law of creation and Narayan has a strong faith in it. Narayan simply believes that divine intervention will set the equilibrium going.

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This is his passive world-view which is the basis upon which the model structure of Malgudi fiction has been devised. All the novels of Narayan are based upon this particular structure. It is regular and recurs in each of them with-out any change. Therefore, the structural pattern in these novels is the archetypal graph moving from order to disorder, and then back to order. They begin with order that is disrupted soon. But it is revived again at the end. It is the central characters who account for the disruption of stability and it is they who too finally restore it. All of them undertake the journey through a series of binary opposites like happiness and sorrow, geniality and cruelty, innocence and experience, the rural and the urban, the low and the high. They terminate at the end with the same motto and conviction with which they have started their pursuit. This is how these heroes of Malgudi follow an archetypal passiveness in their behaviour and activities. These protagonists represent the Indian middle class. They are average human beings with no exceptional merit. They have a limited ability or desire to get things done or undone. Without corresponding ability, they go ahead with high ambition and overconfidence. The result is, they are tempted to move out of the track at the cost of social harmony. But the pity is none of them is able to mterialize his exception. They only disrupt the normalcy at Malgudi. But this disruption is only for a short period. These characters, who otherwise are not contented with the existing pattern of life at Malgudi and search for better possibilities, ultimately reach a worse state. Therefore, they are disillusioned and have no alternative except returning back to their initial status to be rehabilitated socially. Narayan's first novel, Swami and Friends, was published in 1935. It is significant in the sense that it offers the archetypal regressive of structure which is repeated in the rest of the Malgudi novels. Swami and Friends begins with a note of stability. There is no commotion, nor any social tension. The freedom movement is just at the background, and it hardly affects the harmony of Malgudi. Interestingly enough, Swami, the hero of this novel, is in his boyhood, and the essence of the novel is in “the intense serio-comic human relationships of family life and school children”. (Williams: 1973: 60) Swami and the other children operate in a society which is still under the British rule. There is the colonial background with the English teachers talking against Hindu gods, and the freedom movement occasionally disturbing the peace of Malgudi. But thematically these issues are

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secondary. What is primary is the social harmony issuing out of the Hindu equilibrium of life and Swami's response to it. He has a normal life which consists of having adventures with friends, avoiding homework, playing cricket and coping as best as he can with the teachers and other adults he encounters. He has the privilege of being at home with his grand-mother with whom he is linked not merely by affection but by common alliance against Swami's parents. Swami has the pleasure to boss over her. He scorns at her incomprehension of cricket and such other matters which in his impression are childish and easy to understand. He has, no doubt, some fear of his father. But it is after all the sensible and loving authority of parenthood unlike the authority of the school he represents. For him the headmaster represents the image of a monster. His most pleasant day is when the examination is over and he is at large. But with the arrival of the new baby Swami finds his position threatened. The impulsive boy feels discriminated against. The rebellion occurs in him gradually, and he runs away from school and home in search of better environment. He realizes the predicament of moving away from Malgudi: ….He walked like one half-stunned. The strangeness of the hour so silent indeed that even the drop of a leaf resounded through the place oppressed him with a sense of inhumanity. (Narayan 1992: 160)

He falls on the road unconscious. A forest official comes to his rescue. He treats Swami with love and tenderness, and makes arrangement to send the boy back to Malgudi. With the return of Swami, harmony is restored at Malgudi. Stability disrupted is again revived. This is how the narrative comes to an end. The child in Swami and Friends grows mature. But so far structure is concerned the novelist does not make any experiment. Swami and Friends remains the archetypal model of silent suffering and meek surrender to bourgeoisie values that will be followed in the subsequent novels. This defeatist structure which is the manifestation of Narayan's worldview has been consistent for the last six decades. There have been considerable changes in the social, moral, and cultural values in the country. But they have little impact over the life-style practised at Malgudi. The people of Malgudi are, no doubt, exposed to urbanization and modernity and they have accepted it. But the irony is, they are not affected

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to the extent of challenging their original identities. Hence, one need not be surprised when Chandran, the hero of the second novel, The Bachelor of Arts (1937), appears to be a continuation of Swami. The Mission school of Swami and Friends is now the Albert Mission College from where the hero of The Bachelor of Arts graduates. Chandran's ambition, snobbery and vanity are skillfully exposed. But the real development begins with the protagonist passing the degree examination. The second chapter witnesses a sudden change in his normal life as he falls in love with Malathi at first sight. It is love obsessive by nature which leads to a turning point in his life. Of course about whether Malthi is as attached by Chandran as Chandran is by her, the narrative is silent. But the crisis arises when the horoscopes don't match and Malathi's parents decide to settle her marriage with a cousin. He tries his best to prevent the marriage by sending a message to the girl to wait for two years so as to outwit the stars. But to his disappointment this cannot be delivered to the person concerned. His health breaks down. When he recovers he goes off to Madras. At this point he is led to believe that his whole life has been ruined and there is no point in returning home. He realizes that he cannot go on “living, probably for sixty years more with people and friends and parents, with Malathi married and gone” (Narayan 1987: 103). He becomes a sanyasi by shaving his head and using clothes dyed in ochre. His renunciation has no significance because it is not based on a spiritual awakening. It is just suicide he would have committed but for its social stigma. Perhaps he lacked the barest physical courage that was necessary for it. He was a Sanyasi because it pleased him to mortify his flesh. His renunciation is a revenge on society, circumstances, and perhaps, too, on destiny. (108) But gradually he realizes that he is disgracing himself and hoodwinking the simple villagers who are giving charity on the face value of a counterfeit. He repents. Therefore, he gets back home. His marriage is fixed with Susila. After the marriage he is at rest and draws a new inspiration out of the new love that drives out the old: Susila, Susila, Susila. Her name, music, figure, face and everything about her was divine. Susila, Susila-Malathi not a spot beside, it was a tonguetwister; he wonders why people love that name.(162)

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Chandran has “a life freed fro distracting illusions and hysterics” (123). With the marriage things are set right. Once the intricate formalities of traditional marriage are over and family life is initiated, the complicacies are resolved. In a Hindu system arranged marriage is a social institution. It involves intricate formalities which are to be honoured. If they are violated, complicacies would arise. The harmony of married life is disrupted in The Dark Room (1938) because Ramani, after fifteen years of marriage, gets involved with Santa Bai. Savitri is quite devoted to her husband, Ramani. She is confined to her children, the household servants and the assertive and exigent husband. With the arrival of Santa Bai the crisis begins. Ramani is infatuated and is passionately involved with the new lady who is much ahead of her time in her approach to morality. Gradually he becomes selfish, aggressive and callous to Savitri. She bears with it for a time considering it as something ordained. Gradually she is so depressed that she fails to find out any difference between a prostitute and a married lady: What is the difference between a prostitute and a married woman? The prostitute changes her men but a married woman doesn't, that's all, but both earn their food and shelter in the same manner. (Narayan 1960: 80)

In a state of frustration she goes away from her residence and jumps into a river. She would have died but for the rescue by Mari, a lock-repairer and umbrella-mender. Impelled by the needs of her children and as suggested by Ponni, she returns to her own family, thoroughly deflated and humiliated. She is rather prepared to accept the status-quo, to accept life with Ramani and Santa Bai. In fact Narayan does present this novel as a study of Hindu values regarding the proper relationship between the couple, or between two sensitive human beings in a tradition-bound society. His primary concern is how the state of normalcy is restored at the end. May be he is going too far in this novel suggesting that it is better to compromise with a situation, however disgraceful it may be, instead of raising a rebellion against it, Seven years after the publication of in The Dark Room, Krishna, the english teacher, takes off in The English Teacher (1945) from where Chandran has left. If Swami and Chandran signify the first phase of life-the student-

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celibate, Krishna represents the second-stage-the house-holder. As the novel opens, he, his wife-Susila, and their daughter, Leela, build up a harmonious household. The love of the couple deepens in the midst of household chores, prudent house-keeping, religious ceremony, visits to a cafe or a cinema, gardening or shopping etc. Unfortunately, this note of harmony is upset. The state of grace and maturity is brought to a brutal conclusion as Susila suffers from typhoid. There is the elaborate description of the disease, the wrong diagnosis, the collapse of the patient. Of course, the picture is here moving because it is where the narration is based on the artist's personal experience. With the death of Susila the joy and stability of the family is totally disrupted and Krishna almost misses the meaning of life as he narrates: “I nothing and nothing else…Nothing else will worry or interest me in life hereafter” (Narayan 1984: 114-115). The hero, the bereaved husband, disconsolate in his grief, tries to communicate with his dead wife through a psychic medium involving occult. As the occultists put it, the gulf between this life and after-life is bridged, there are intimations of immorality. The boundaries of life and death are dissolved, as the dead and living are united, not through argument or philosophy, but by sharing an experience. Susila undergoes a metamorphosis, turns into a spirit and undertakes the task of guiding her husband to a higher harmony of souls life and death. Critics are often not satisfied with the second half of this novel. They think that an experienced novelist like Narayan should not have allowed his hero to escape from his predicament by such an eccentric activity. But Walsh justifies it by arguing that this is something that Indian sensibility apprehends and secondly, “an intelligent, sensitive and sceptical man like Krishna should have recourse to spiritualism testified by the strength of his hunger for the presence of his dead wife” (Walsh: 57) Stucturally too, the second half may be justified because without it the novel would have failed to maintain the archetypal design. Because of such activities Krishna revives his stability. For a time he is able to console his aggrieved soul and then reconciles to his fate. As he returns back from his ancestral village, he is able to compromise with the laws of meeting and parting. He is able to understand how the cycle of life is a continuous

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movement. Children, brother, sisters and parents exist for a specific period. Not only they move away from us but also we too move away from them. Separation is always there with life since a baby is detached from mother's womb. Any attempt to prevent this law of separation would result in suffering. “A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life.” (218) in fact, life has taught him a little, but on the other hand, death teaches him more. To sum up, Narayan's first four novels justify the supremacy of bourgeoisie values based on a regressive Hindu tradition. The small mutinies of Swami, Chandran and Savitri are ruthlessly crushed by the so called Hindu equilibrium that Narayan approves as the ultimate stabilizing force of Indian society. It is nothing but meek submission before the established order. The pre-ordained Sattvik values reign Supreme in Narayan's Malgudi. WORKS CITED Harrex, S.C. “R.K. Narayan: Malgudi Maestro”. The Fire and the Offering: The English Language Novel of India, Vol-II, Calcutta. Writers Workshop, 1978. Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism. London: Methuen, 1976. James, Henry. The Art of Fiction and Other Essays. London: Oxford University Press, 1948. Murti, K.V.S. “Monkey and Hanuman: R. K. Naryan's Novels”. Studies in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English. Ed. Dwivedi, A. N. Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1987. Narayan, R. K. The Dark Room, Bombay: Pearl Publications, 1960. ______The English Teacher. Mysore: Indian Thought Publications, 1984. ______My Days: A Memoir. Mysore: Indian Thought Publications, 1986. ______Swami and Friends. Mysore: Indian Thought Publications, 1992. Krishnaswamy, Shanta. The Woman in Indian Fiction in English (1950-80). New Delhi: Ashish Publishing House, 1984. Williams, H.M. “R.K. Narayan. The Sage of Malgudi” Studies in Modern Fiction in English. Vol. I, Calcutta; Writers Workshop, 1973. Walsh, William. R. K. Narayan. New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1983.

THE CONFLICT OF PSYCHE: TRADITION VS MODERNITY IN URBAN MIDDLE CLASS  Pramod Kumar Pradeep K. Talan “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”  ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

The man – woman relationship in the society has been analyzed innumerable times. The trends however have not changed much in the last century. Susie Tharu and K Lalita's landmark collection of Women Writings in India (1991) has shown that there was a prolic exchange of ideas about gender construction and gender norms well before the late 1800s when Tarabai Shinde is supposed to have penned 'A Comparison of Men and Women'. However, modernity has not been able to eradicate the bias; the shadows still linger over our social system. Going down the lanes of Indian social system, it was found that Indian writers of eminence have been involved with this issue through regional ction and also through literary pursuits in English. The beginning of the twentieth century was a witness to the sociocultural and political consciousness. The “Bhadralok Samaj” which popularized the Western education also realized that it was heralding a change in the cultural consciousness of the youth. The colonial modernity was spreading like wild re among the high-class families of the Bengali samaj. It may be mentioned here that according to Nirad C. Chaudhury the Bengali Samaj in the late nineteenth century was not one but two: village samaj and the urban society of Kolkata. Tagore wrote eight novels, some among them are Noukadubi, Chokher Bali, Ghare Baire, Char Adhyay and Jogajog. The novels of Tagore exhibit a trend. Irrevocably his protagonists are either from aristocratic families or from well to do middle class families. The empowerment and emancipation of women in the contemporary age was important. Therefore, in all his novels women are the central protagonists. Edward Thompson comments on Tagore's outlook on women in Indian society:

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He would have her remain woman-a centre for love and inspiration without which the world is poverty stricken. But he has never ceased to attack the injustice and cruelty which regard women as inferior or untted for education and arts (Kh. Khunjo Singh).

In ancient Vedic literature, women were elevated to the status of goddesses. They were turned into myths and legends. The primordial myth gave women her identity, the social stereotype which has been reinforced by archetypes for ages. In continuation of this the Bengali society's faith in the goddesses Durga, known as Shakti and Kali has unparallel devotion. In contemporary patriarchal society he etched out the women as the sole power. It is extremely evident in the novels of Tagore that the women are cast as the Hindu goddesses. Tagore saw the Indian women in the form of a nurturer. As a mother, sister, wife the women characters have played a pivotal role in his novels. His treatment of widows and widowhood also strikes a chord of sympathy in the hearts of his readers. He has highlighted the pathos of women of his age. However, woman as the mother and Motherhood is rarely discussed and analyzed by the characters in most of his novels. The women in the 'andarmahal' were well versed with Gita, Upanishads and various other customs and folklores where in “Ma” or “mother” is a common appellation used in referring to Goddesses who are embodiments of Shakti or feminine energy. To go back to the years when these novels were written, a sense of responsibility motivated the novelist to imbibe the goddess like quality for the women to help them to stand rm in their convictions and not go astray with the rise and spread of modernity in the name of Western education. Perhaps, Tagore felt this was the only way he could maintain the sanctity of the institutions of marriage and family and resist the wave of cultural changes. The central protagonist was always a Bhadramahila - a construction about which Malavika Karlekar writes, “Enlightened yet domesticated, by nature loving and devoted to the family's well-being, her emancipation was to be viewed within the context of a family situation.” Jogajog (Relationships) is a lesser known novel of Tagore. In this novel, the decline of Bengali aristocracy and rise of entrepreneurial

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Bengali class has emerged. The protagonist is Kumudini. She has been brought up in a sheltered home. She is not only taught all the customs and rituals of the womenfolk but also how to play chess, the art of photography along with Sanskrit grammar, literature and music. She is well acquainted with Kalidas and Shiva-Parvati ideal resulting in an image of a man who personies the qualities of the Hindu Gods that she prays to. She has been represented as Dakshayani (Goddess of marital felicity and longevity from the Hindu mythology). Kumudini, though accepts defeat ultimately, is certainly one of the most deant women of the time. Feminism, as we understand is a cultural-intellectual movement aimed at establishing and defending oppression of woman and equal rights for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights and gender inequality. Women across the world have been writing about their experiences in male-dominated society. The women are incensed with superior attitude of men causing dissent. Feminism does not adhere to equality alone but the compassion, respect and understanding from male counterparts is wanting. In the same vein it is important to look at another classic Subarnalata by Ashapoorna Debi. Subarnalata is the second of the triology written by the acclaimed novelist. Ashapoorna Debi's rst of the triology is Pratham Pratishruti whose heroine is Satyavati. She had left her three children with their father and moved out of her husband's home. She stays with her father at Varanasi. Subarnalata is married at the age of nine to Prabodh, twice her age. The novel brings forth many issues such as rebellion, self expression, and search for an identity by Subarnalata thereby raising issues of manwoman relationship in Indian context. Bengali Bhadralok was also divided. Education for men was important but these men inside homes contributed little in elimination of women victimization. Subarnalata leads all family members to lead a better life gradually. She travels, reads and broadens her outlook of the world beyond the four walls of her home. She is also credited to raise her awareness about the ongoing freedom struggle lead by Gandhiji. Her readings inform her about other womenfolk like Sarojini Naidu, Kasturba etc. and their contribution to national struggle. Subarnalata goes to a swadeshi fair and brings clothes for the family and herself. Her actions can be viewed at two levels – one her yearning to see India as a free nation and the other is her effort to emancipate women by setting certain examples.

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Due to the domination of Ashapurna Debi's grandmother who was a staunch supporter of old customs and conservative ideals, the female children of the house were not allowed to go to school. Private tutors were employed only for the boys. It is said that baby Ashapurna used to listen to the readings of her brothers sitting opposite to them and that was how she learnt the alphabets. Ashapurna's mother came from a very enlightened family who was a great book lover. It was her “intensive thirst” for reading classics and story books which was transmitted to Ashapurna and her sisters in their early age. After reading Subarnalata, it can be deduced that to a very large extent this story was the outcome of her own life experience. Her own thirst for emancipation was depicted through Subarnalata. The letter that Subarnalata receives from her dead mother, Satyavati has been crafted as a foremost document of gender equality. She has focused on revival of a reformed traditional woman who would accommodate a need for self expression in her life. Women have always been portrayed as submissive and deferential. However, a sense of individuality has been inculcated in Indian women due to education and growth in women's institutions. In Bakul Katha, the last of Ashapurna Debi's triology, Bakul has been portrayed as educated and economically independent woman who is more self centered. She feels that post colonial women have freedom to express themselves. And have moved away from social responsibilities in pursuit of personal ha[ppiness. According to her, the relation between men and women and also between women of all ages should not be based on subservience of one another but where women enjoy the same rights and privileges as men in conrmation of human values. In the name of modernity, India hasn't much achieved equality in gender. Our patriarchal system hasn't really helped much in evolving out of old mores and superstitions. There have been changes in the society but these are miniscule. A common trend runs through feminist groups that male undermines woman's psyche by projecting her with patriarchal notions. It becomes important to understand that the subjugation of women is not only a material reality, which is inuenced by economic conditions, but also a psychological phenomenon – how man and woman recognize one another. However, after reading Ashapurna Debi's works, it can be inferred that she strongly advocates that a woman should break the walls of psychological imprisonment located within her rather than by going

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outside the patriarchal homes. In maintaining ties with community which represents her larger self she can nd her individuality and do away with her isolation. After Ashapurna Debi, with a leap in Indian literature of late twentieth century, the writers like Anita Desai and Shobha De explored another side of the coin of women's psyche. Desai's female characters have been a rebel. They live on their terms. They rebel regardless of consequences, to nd their potential away from patriarchal community. The protagonists realize that they cannot be complete or their search for personal happiness and fulllment is not attained by running away from the community but by living within the community and fullling her obligations. In her novel, Clear Light of Day, the two sisters Bimla, unmarried but fullling obligations towards her family, and Tara who is married achieves fulllment in the sanctity of her marriage. Bimla's emancipation is due to her awakening and expanding her role rather than following a traditional way of life. Therefore she feels liberated, and not being dependent on men gives her a sense of achievement and acceptance instead of rejection and abandonment. Thus, women in Desai's novels when connected with others are liberated and experience freedom thereby asserting themselves due to economic independence and intellectual satisfaction rather than clinging to others or living in their narrow world. They achieve harmony in the existence of self within the community comprising men and women. With changes in the women's world creeping along with globalization, the emerging class working women has acquired the long rebuffed respect, esteem and freedom but they too are facing problems due to arising dual responsibilities of home and workplace. Shobha De has envisioned a completely different women protagonist. Her urban women are in love with themselves. They understand the importance of power and economic independence. They handle the male psyche through power – to control and direct. She opines: “Yes, we know money is power. The person who controls the purse strings plays grand puppeteer. If the wife is wealthier, she's the one who makes the husband beg for pocket money” (De xviii). Marriage as a social institution is also De's object of power. It is more a convenient contract than a traditional system. In one of her novels, Socialite Evenings, the protagonist Karuna turns

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out to be rebel, going after materialistic things which were denied to her in her puritanical world. After she gets married to a man of her choice, she accepts the fact that she had married a wrong man. This acknowledgement is rather rare in our society. In her realization: “she has married the wrong man for the wrong reasons at the wrong time”(65) she feels as if she was a commodity to be used by a man – her husband and she therefore gets a divorce after an affair with her husband's friend Krish. She nds Krish to be disgusting, shallow, exploitative and very selsh. She aborts her baby to nd a meaning to her life. She surges ahead with minor jobs at hand to keep a roof above her head since her parents disown her saying: “ …you have made the mistake, now you pay the price” (219) She progresses doing odd jobs and scripting lms and ad-lms to bag an award for the best copywriter of the year. Her responsibility towards her parents and her invalid sister provide her with a reason to nd life meaningful and carves an identity for herself without her dependence on any man. Her mother feels that “a woman cannot live alone. It is not safe”(275). To contradict her she asks a valid question “Why does security rest with a man?”(276). She was earning just as much as a man can earn with a roof above her head with no responsibilities. She says “I am at peace with myself. I am not answerable to anyone…”(276). She represents the city bred young women of India Today. They are not ready to be underdogs. The women today have travelled a long and dark road where they nd their voice and an identity in a society which had marginalized them. A fear also lurks lest this new found identity and voice be suppressed. Their intellectual satisfaction leads them on to carve a niche for themselves in the power hungry world. The heartless approach of men towards women propels them to break free from traditional norms to exercise their freedom and will. The phallocentric patterns are no longer welcome in her world. Today's women are fearless and have learnt to live alone, travel alone, and rear children alone when failures in marriage and life partnerships occur. Women have begun to make choices to remain single, have or not have a child and have integrated multiple roles for the benet of the family. There has been a shift in ideas where women as a daughter, as a wife, mother or an entrepreneur has brought some semblance of equilibrium and relevance to her life, thereby sharing her space willingly with dignity.

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REFERENCES Singh, Kunjo Kh. Humanism and Nationalism in Tagore's Novels. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers.

Karlekar, Malvika. Voices from within: early personal narratives of Bengali women. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Debi, Ashapurna. Subarnalata. Chennai: Macmillan. Desai, Anita. Clear Light of Day. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers. De, Shobha. Socialite Evenings. New Delhi: Penguin Books India.

GRAHAM GREENE'S THE HEART OF THE MATTER: A THEMATIC STUDY Ranu Dubey Greene returns to his favorite debate structure involving the metaphysical voices of sacred and profane love in The Heart of the Matter (1948). The protagonist, Major Scobie, is a police ofcer in a West African colony. Scobie's world-a British colony in West Africa-is as crowded with squalid imagery as Mexico and Brighton. Greene's realistic picture of the West African colony is undoubtedly based on the details of the physical and moral climate which he must have observed during his stay in Sierra Leone when the War was in full swing. The town where Scobie lives is an ugly place where, for a few minutes, the laterite roads turn a delicate ower-like pink and create an illusion of beauty. The heat is oppressive. The slightest contact between two bodies starts to sweat. One has to keep a blotting paper under the wrist to catch the sweat when writing. In the hot moist air, the smallest scratch turns dangerous if neglected for an hour. Tropical diseases like malaria and backwaters fever abound. The climate of the land breeds its ugly fauna-rats, cockroaches, ies, mosquitoes and pye-dogs. It is, however, the vultures; the scavengers of a rotting and decaying region that symbolize the corruption which has overtaken the land and will soon overtake Scobie. Once again there are the sights and smells of a world that is evil. The rusty handcuffs, the broken rosary, the atabrine yellow face, a joint under meat cover, the ugly flapping birds, the swollen pye-dogs—all coalesce into an overwhelming picture of ugliness and decay. The moral climate of this place is of undisguised corruption. The natives, Syrians and Europeans are all alike corrupt and unreliable. The schoolboys lead a sailor triumphantly towards the brothel. The natives resort to lies, evasions and bribery in order to out-maneuver the rules and regulations which it is Scobie's duty to enforce. In dealing with them, he discovers that guilt and innocence are as relative as wealth. The Syrians, who run all the stores in the country, are diamond smugglers, out of favour with the government. Yusef, with his unabashed villainy, his crooked arguments and his genuine need for love and respect, is a typical inhabitant of this world. The English, the colonizers, are aficted with a physical and moral debility. The Secretariat reminds Scobie of a hospital: For fteen years he had watched the arrival of a

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succession of patients: periodically at the end of eighteen months certain patients were sent home, yellow and nervy, and others took their place.1

In the climate of West Africa even the intonations undergo a change; they become high-pitched and insincere or flat and unguarded. Typical of these exiles are Wilson, the MIS agent who spies on Scobie, and Harris who is another version of Minty in England Made Me. Wilson, brash, awkward and immature, ready to adapt himself to the way of the world, and Harris, the pathetic, splenetic, grown-up schoolboy, are the two old Downhamians who, harassed by climate discomforts, quarrel, hunt cockroaches and read their school magazine. In them, Greene reduces human nature to a level where nothing dignied can ever come of it. The scene is a West African port in War time. It has afnities with the Brighton of Brighton Rock, parasitic, cosmopolitan and corrupt. The population are all strangers; British ofcials, detribalized natives, immigrant West Indian Negroes, Asiatics, Syrians. There are poisonous gossips at the club and voodoo bottles on the wharf, intrigues for administrative posts, intrigues to monopolize the illicit diamond trade. The hero, Scobie, is deputy-commissioner of police. One of the oldest inhabitants among the white ofcials, he has a compassionate liking for the place and the people. He is honest and unpopular and, when the story begins, he has been passed over for promotion. His wife Lousie is also unpopular, for other reasons. She is neurotic and pretentious. Their only child died at school in England. Both are Catholics. His failure to get made Commissioner is the nal humiliation. She whines and nags to escape to South Africa. Two hundred pounds are needed to send her. Husband and wife are found together in the depths of distress. The illegal export of diamonds is prevalent, both as industrial stones for the benet of the enemy and gems for private investment. Scobie's police are entirely ineffective in stopping it, although it is notorious that two Syrians, Tallit and Yusef, are competitors for the monopoly. A police-spy is sent from England to investigate. He falls in love with Lousie. Scobie, in order to fulll his promise to get Lousie out of the country, borrows money from Yusef. As a result of this association he is involved in an attempt to frame Tallit. The police-spy animated by hate and jealousy is on his heels. Meanwhile, survivors from a torpedoed ship are brought across from a French territory, among them an English bride widowed in the sinking. She

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and Scobie fall in love and she becomes his mistress. Yusef secures evidence of the intrigue and blackmails Scobie into denitely criminal participation in his trade. His association with Yusef culminates in the murder of Ali, Scobie's supposedly devoted native servant, whom he now suspects of giving information to the police-spy. Lousie returns. Unable to abandon either woman, inextricably involved in crime, hunted by his enemy, Scobie takes poison; his women become listlessly acquiescent to other suitors. The Heart of the Matter illustrates the constraints of exile interwoven with politico-economic machinations of the time (World War II), which rendered domestic life resentful for many families. In this turbulent world Green portrays the character of Henry Scobie, an exile, who struggles throughout his life to authenticate his existence. Greene's religious vision in this regard extends its scope through the continuous humanistic efforts of the protagonist to ll the gulf between him and the world. Based on Greene's West African explorations recorded in Journey without Maps and later his ofcial visit to West Africa between 1942- 43, The Heart of the Matter lends a perfect inner landscape with an image of the human condition. Greene bewails the loss of a world wherein “the sense of taste was ner, the sense of pleasure keener, the sense of terror deeper and purer”2.He is at pains to recall at which point civilization went off its track. Major Scobie, the protagonist of the novel is a part of that colonial scene which: isn't the climate of emotion, it's a climate for meanness, malice, snobbery, but anything like hate or love drives a man off his head. (The Heart of the Matter, 3)

What comes before the reader is the picture of a human condition against which will be measured the awareness of his virtues. Scobie never felt that his life was in any way important. Although he has all those qualities of a gentleman viz., no fornication, no bbing and no drinking (wine), he never felt their absence as virtue. Scobie loves failures, aws and weaknesses, perhaps as a human being he wants to endure, to be close to the human condition, to know the depravity in it. Scobie wants to stay there with the suffering lot because he feels that he would be lost elsewhere in the maddening crowd of the supercial living. He possibly thinks that the materialistic outlook tends to

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seize the humanistic approach to life. Living in such inhuman conditions, an honest and humble Scobie is emotionally frustrated too. The trauma of the loss of his daughter has made him emotionally weak. Scobie is a pathetic father gure who has insufcient communication with his ruthless wife, Lousie. Devoid of any emotion; he wears the socialy accepted mask. A dejected heart, Scobie continues: “To be a human being one has to drink the cup of suffering his contentment lies in other's happiness.” (The Heart of the Matter, 39) Although experience has taught him that human understanding is a decit affair and that one cannot arrange the happiness of the other, yet Scobie's anxiety arises from the incompatibility of his loyalties and his cognizance of: “what an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery.” (The Heart of the Matter, 123) This gives vent to his emotion of pity leading him to pervert his own criterion of conduct. Greene's comprehension of society motivates the action within a framework of personal and larger political interests. In the novel, the crisis begin when Scobie, the Deputy Commissioner of police, who is too damned honest to live is superceded by a person who is junior to him in rank. We discern a weather of corruption which does not suit Scobie because he is not sly or cunning in possessing his post. He has no selsh motives to exploit the situation. The administration here speaks of the crafty policies of colonialism: They had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous because you couldn't name its price. (The Heart of the Matter, 55)

Scobie nurses a powerful sense of guilt and responsibility even though his present state has been thrust upon him. In his efforts to alleviate his wife's frustration and to arrange for her trip to South Africa, Scobie borrows money from a Syrian trader (after failing to get money from the bank manager), who in turn blackmails him. Scobie's compelling situation grows out of the unfair policies of colonialism. He comprehends that to receive help from the Syrian was almost equivalent to help him, because it is quite undesirable and shameful for a police ofcer like Scobie to make a deal with a diamond smuggler. Here starts Scobie's self-alienation related to a corrupt environment. In Ways of Escape Greene writes:

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Scobie was a good man...he was hunted to his 3 doom by the harshness of his wife.

Greene's grasp of the situation that how a timid and kind man becomes a prey to the demands of human relationships, amounts to the cynical attitude of the colonizers spoiling the domestic soundness. Thus, follow the series of Scobie's transgressions, both professional and moral. His professional integrity further descends when he feels pity for the Portuguese Captain and destroys the letter he seizes from him. Scobie is trapped by his emotions when the Captain moans: “If you had a daughter, you'd understand; you haven't got one” (p. 50). During his bid to defend himself from authorities, Scobie enters into the territory of lies which wouldn't fetch him a passport for return. But his realization continues all along and he is aware of the fact that relations, kindness and lies have exaggerated value. Scobie's inclination to succor others and his overwhelming sense of responsibility that he is conditioned to serve, draw him to a state of despair a sickness unto death, to use Kierkegaard's phrase. It is as the narrator says: a price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. (The Heart of the Matter, 60)

Greene's concept of despair comes close to that of Dostoyevsky's who wrote: The decent people who have some conscience and 4 a sense of honor left are in worse plight.

Green's Scobie is also too decent to escape the ordeal. The phrase heart of the matter is evident in part I of Book II, when Scobie wonders: If one knew the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the plants. If one reached what they called the heart of the matter. (The Heart of the Matter, 124)

Scobie presents himself as a God's spy because his entanglements out of deep sympathy for others have produced a strong effect on his intellect about the unremitting sufferings of the world, There comes the major turning point in the book when Scobie is asked to look after the survivors of the ship wreckage-a six year old child and nineteen year old child window,

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Helen, in a rest house room. The sight of the dying child on the bed who mistakes Scobie for her own father (who has died in the ship wreckage), reminds him of his own daughter who died at school in England a few years ago. With his emotions aroused in the memory of his child, Scobie vehemently prays; “Father, give her peace. Take away my peace for ever, but give her peace. (p. 125). Scobie's genuine and ardent prayer is answered. Greene in his letter to Marcel More, a French Christian existentialist, writes: Obviously one did not have in mind that when he offered up his peace for the child it was a genuine prayer and had the result that followed. I always believe that such prayers, though obviously God would not follow them to the limit of robbing him of a peace forever, are answered up to the point as a kind of test of a man's sincerity and to see whether in fact the offer was merely based on 5 emotion.

In the miraculous way, the child dies a peaceful death in peace and Scobie's peace is taken away. What is important at this point is the paradoxical quality of faith rising out of deep core of Scobie's heart and his inability to bear the sight of her pain out of which he prays. Until now Scobie thinks he is simply capacious to help others, but with the induction of Helen on the scene, Scobie's feelings appear to be clouded by his self-pity. His attraction towards Helen, though at rst sight is because of her childish looks and her ugliness, but later, Scobie is drawn towards her more so because of his wide divergence with his wife, an anguish he had not been able to share with his wife. This time, his pity seems more of his own need than his need to others. Though Helen doesn't want his pity: Yet it was not a question of whether she wanted itshe had it. Pity smoldered like decay at his heart... the conditions of life nurtured it. (The Heart of the Matter, 178)

Scobie entangles himself into the circumstances. Helen's childish immaturity makes him worried that Bagster (a philanderer) is not the man who can take her responsibility. His belief that he is indispensable is a mark of his pride. Strangely enough, his presumptions combined with pity and responsibility reaches the intensity of a passion to the extent that he commits adultery. Realizing his shameful act, Scobie frets about his future:

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Was it the buttery that died in the act of love? But human beings were condemned to consequences. The responsibility as well as the guilt was his- he was not a Bagster: he knew what he was about. He had sworn to Preserve Lousie's happiness, and now he had accepted another and contradictory responsibility. (The Heart of the Matter, 161-62)

Scobie's apprehension mounts when he tells Helen that he is a Catholic and a Catholic cannot have two wives. She furiously reacts to his excuse for being a Catholic which, she taunts him, though binds him from marrying her but does not stop him from sleeping with her. In a further confusion and exhaustion, he writes to Helen: “I love you more than myself, more than my wife more than God” (p. 181). Scobie's conscious blasphemy puts him into a state of perplexity. At this stage, he is not merely aware of his of his sins done to Lousie or Helen but God too, making his own fall sure. A serious turn in the life of Scobie occurs when his pity gets engrossed with a sense of quivering fear as if the ground had slipped beneath his feet. Scobie thinks himself incapable of conciliating with the emotional demands made on him by Lousie and Helen. He even feels himself unt for placating his indelity with his conscience. Lousie's insistence on him for taking communion is an instance of her harshness. Ironically, she underestimates her husband's pity. She knows all about Scobie's relationship with Helen but uses the sacrament just to bring him to an open confession. Scobie thinks it futile to go to the priest for Communion. He asks himself: Could I shift my burden there, he wondered: could I tell him that I love two women: that I don't know what to do. What would be the use. I know the answers as well as he does. One should take one's own soul at whatever cost. (The Heart of the Matter, 184)

Scobie doubts the theological yardstick of the church for seeking Communion: “taking God in my mouth in what they call the state of Grace. (p. 219) He further refutes it saying: “We Catholics are damned by our knowledge. (p. 219) Scobie is all along conscious of the sin he commits in pride. His selfalienation gets even deeper, so much so that: Even self-pity was denied him because he knew so exactly the extent of his guilt. He felt as though he

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had exiled himself so deeply in the desert that his skin had taken on the colour of the sand. (The Heart of the Matter, 235)

Pity is Scobie's weakness which brings about his decline. It is ironic that the pity for which Scobie pays so heavily should debase him and act negatively upon the people whom he pities. He regrets that if his love is impelled by pity and animated by the love to God, how His love can result in his alienation from Him. A Catholic convert like Greene himself, Scobie is full of resentment with God who is not “human enough to love” and permits innocent suffering. (p. 121). This time it is God who in a way becomes the victim of Scobie's pity and responsibility: Oh God, I am the only guilty one because I've known the answers all the time. I've preferred to give you pain rather than give pain to Helen or my wife because I can't observe your suffering. (The Heart of the Matter, 258)

Scobie raves at God for his agonized state of affairs. He further adds: You'll be better off if you lose me once and for all. I know what I'm doing. I'm not pleading for mercy. I am going to damn myself, whatever that means. I've longed for peace and I'm never going to know peace again. But you'll be at peace when I am out of your reach . . . if you made me, you made this felling of responsibility that I've always carried about like a sack of bricks... ...I can't shift my responsibility to you. (The Heart of the Matter, 258-59)

Scobie's awareness becomes more acute when he feels that human love has “robbed him of love for eternity”. (p. 258). With disgust he speaks: “I can't bear to see suffering,” and “I want to stop giving pain”. (p. 251). In pain he recalls: when he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood other. (The Heart of the Matter, 253)

Scobie makes up his mind to omit himself from the earthly scene to avoid any further harm to Lousie and Helen as well as his creator. He gets morally exhausted and is reminded:

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There's one case of black water and a few cases of exhaustion -the worst disease of all. It's what most of us die in the end. (The Heart of the Matter, p. 30)

Scobie's thought of suicide arises from his terrible private vow. He feels like tired to death. In Ways of Escape Greene writes: I had meant the story of Scobie to enlarge a theme which I had touched on in The Ministry of Fear, the disastrous effects on human beings to pity as distinct from compassion... The character of Scobie was intended to show that pity can be the expression of an almost monstrous pride.6

Although pity is Scobie's weakness, yet he has strength to suffer for others and allow pain to himself. In his character delineation we glean something of a repellant in his character delineation we glean something of a repellant in him: Other men slowly build up the sense of home by accumulation Scobie built his home by a process of reduction. (The Heart of the Matter, 15)

This sort of aversion in his character deepens the existential truth as explained by Anne Salvatore, an existentialist critic. She writes: Greene's view of Scobie's plight is existential . . . he seems to show little faith in the possibilities of human good . . . Scobie's actions, despite his best 7 intentions bring disastrous effects.

Although Scobie has a deep sense of humanity, the hiatus between what he suffers for and the reality of what he gets in turn crumples his life having and insidious effect on his inner-being. Scobie is conscious of the fact that it is absurd: to expect happiness in a world so full of misery Point me out the happy man and I will point you either egotism, evil- or an absolute ignorance. (The Heart of the Matter, 123)

It is this religious imagination in its obsessions with evil and suffering that Scobie shares with his creator, Greene. NOTES & REFERENCES

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46 1

2

3 4

5 6 7

Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter, London: Penguin, 1986, p. 5. (All subsequent citations are from this edition and the page nos. have been given in parenthesis) Graham Greene: Journey without Maps (1936), London: Heinemann, 1950. pp. 244-245. Graham Greene: Ways of Escape, London: The Bodley Head, 1980, p.181. F. Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (trans.) David Magarshak, London: Penguin Books, 1976, p. 257. Philip Stratford: The Portable Greene, Penguin Books, 1977, p. 403. Graham Greene: Ways of Escape, p.188. Anne T. Salvatore: Greene and Kierkegaard: The Discourse of Belief, USA: The University of Alabama Press, 1988, pp. 121-22.

TREATMENT OF MARRIAGE DISINTEGRATION IN THE MAJOR NOVELS OF ANITA DESAI Lairenmayum Puinyabati Devi Marriage is a focal point in most of Anita Desai's novels. Husband-wife alienation and their communication gap, the complexities and difculties in building a harmonious relation, the plight and predicaments of the sensitive wives under the shadow of indifferent husbands are the main themes of her novels. Cry, the Peacock, Voices in the City, Where Shall We Go This Summer?, Fire on the Mountain unravel the bored, dull, unhappy married life of the educated, hyper-sensitive, over-emotional women like Maya, Monisha, Sita and Nanda Kaul. In Cry, the Peacock, Anita Desai unfolds the unfullled married life of Maya and Gautama. From the very beginning, there is temperamental incompatibility between the husband and the wife. As Gautama is the friend of Maya's father, he is twice her age. Because of this age difference, he cannot fulll Maya's emotional and physical longings. He is unromantic, unsentimental, unimaginative and practical while Maya is emotional, romantic and imaginative. About the incongruous matching, Maya herself comments: “Our marriage was grounded upon the friendship of the two men, and the mutual respect in which they held each other, rather than upon anything else.”1 Maya wants to be pampered with love and care by her husband Gautama. Though Gautama loves Maya tenderly, his over-busied schedule cannot make him available to her all the time. As she has father xation from her childhood, Maya thinks that no one loves her as her father does. Being a barren-woman, Maya is utterly lonely without a child to take care of. As she has nothing to do, it is obvious that she spends most of the time pining for human love and companionship. Gautama fails to give Maya what a wife needs from her husband apart from fooding and clothing. Besides this, there is nothing common in their likings, habits, thoughts etc. They cannot agree with each other even over trivial matters like the smell of lemon. They react differently when they dine together in the moonlight. However, they are living together as husband and wife there is no joy, passion and excitement of marriage. Maya says about her marriage:

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It was discouraging to reect as how much in our marriage was based upon a nobility forced upon us from outside, and, therefore, neither true nor lasting. It was broken repeatedly, and repeatedly the pieces were picked up and put together again (CP, 40).

So, Maya and Gautama lead a mechanical life without much meaning and harmony of marriage. Maya's emotional turmoil is heightened by the memory of her childhood prophecy predicted by an albino astrologer that premature death will come either to her or her husband after four years of marriage. She is always preoccupied with the thought of death and nally suffers from neurosis. In a moment of madness, she kills Gautama pushing him down from the rooftop and she also commits suicide after some days. In this way, the unhappy and unfullled married life of Maya ends. Temperamental imbalance and the resultant psychological alienation between Maya and Gautama bring disharmony in their marriage. In Fire on the Mountain the husband-wife conict and alienation are shown as a direct result of indelity. Anita Desai does not give detailed information about the married life of Nanda Kaul, the protagonist. The novel opens with Nanda Kaul's stay at Carignano after she has become a widow. But the novelist skillfully puts a big question in the mind of the readers why Nanda Kaul takes refuge in the remote house of Carignano at Kasauli. When Nanda Kaul, a widow of Vice-Chancellor, leaves city life and chooses to lead a life of privacy and solitude, Anita Desai reects the hidden pain and anguish of the protagonist. In social status, Nanda Kaul belongs to the intellectual group receiving respects and regards from people. Illa Das recounts the bygone days of Nanda Kaul's life in the university campus. In the view of others, Nanda Kaul is the proud and happy wife of Mr. Kaul, the ViceChancellor. She always puts on the image of a glamorous, fashionable and high-class lady at parties and social gathering. “No matter how simple the occasion, she was always in silk, always in pearls and emeralds”,2 Illa Das states. But in reality Nanda Kaul suffers the pang of rejection, humiliation and deception of her husband. So she has to play a double role – one of a pleasant, attractive wife of an ofcer, and another of her own true self which is desperate and frustrated one. No one knows her mental agony as she never exposes or tells her misery to anyone. She pretends as if there is no weary and anxiety in her life. Even in her olden days, she tells lie to Raka,

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her great granddaughter by making up a story of her glorious past. In her youth, Nanda Kaul did long for ardent love and tender care of her husband, his honest and sincere attention to her. But she could not get what she wanted from her husband as he carried on a life long affair with Miss David. To soothe her wounded soul she used to ctionalize a story of a happy, harmonious and fruitful married life. But Anita Desai claries: It was all a lie, all. She had lied to Raka, lied about everything … Nor had her husband loved and cherished her and kept her like a queen - he had only enough to keep her quite while he carried on a lifelong affair with Miss David, the mathematics mistress, whom he had loved, all his life loved (FM, 145).

Nanda Kaul's self-exile to Carignano after the death of her husband can be treated as the nal release from the bondage of her servile existence in the house of her husband. Nanda Kaul did not protest against her husband's affair with another woman nor did she show her anger against him. But her hatred over her husband is rooted so deep in her heart that she wants to forsake herself from everything related to her deceased husband. That is why she is alien even to her own daughters and grandchildren. Here, we can quote what P.D. Dubbe has written about Nanda Kaul's unhappy married life: Emotional deprivation is at the root of Nanda Kaul's disillusionment with human bonds. Her husband did not love her as a wife, he treated her as some decorative yet useful mechanical appliance needed for the efcient running of his household. She played the gracious hostess all the time and enjoyed the wife of a dignitary. But she 3 felt lonely and neglected.

As most part of her life is spent away in a tasteless and ruined marriage, Nanda Kaul wants to enjoy the remaining years of her life in peace and solitude without anybody's humiliation and insult. It is just like a pilgrimage for Nanda Kaul towards the path of self-identication and selfdetermination. In Where Shall We Go This Summer? Sita, the protagonist, undergoes an unsatisfactory marriage. It is not that Sita is ill-treated by her husband Raman, an upper middle class factory owner. Having grown up in the

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remote island of Manori without getting education and much knowledge of city life, Sita is unable to adjust to her in-law's house in Bombay. So they move into a at. But Sita's married life to Raman cannot be a harmonious one. Because of temperamental incompatibility, they argue and dispute even on trivial matters everyday life. She says that she cannot live in the mad-house with mad children and a mad husband. Like Gautama in Cry, the Peacock, Raman is more practical and mature than Sita. So he nds Sita's decision to go to Manori island unreasonable and an act of madness. He does not understand what Sita means when she says that she is going to Manori Island not to give birth to her fth child but to keep it in her womb unborn. After hearing Sita's statement Raman feels bitter and shocked. He feels that Sita is an inhuman who has no sentiments. He says: Any woman – any one would think you inhuman. You have four children. You have lived comfortably, always, in my house. You've not had worries. Yet your happiest memory is not of your children or your home but of strangers, seen for a moment some lovers in a park. Not even of your 4 own children.

Sita has her own reason when she says that she is not happy to be a wife and mother because Raman does not have enough time to spend with his wife and family. Like Gautama, he also is a very busy person with his ofce work in factory and he spends his evenings and Sundays reading newspaper. He does not notice the sadness and gloom in Sita. He is surprised to hear that his wife Sita is not happy. Raman thinks that Sita has no problem and worry in running a home as he provides everything for the maintenance of children's education and household needs. But Sita expects something more than this. She longs for a tender and divine love from her husband. Like the Muslim woman and the old man in Hanging Garden get lost in their profound love for each other, Sita wants to receive uninterrupted and sincere love and care of her husband. She feels that Raman does not have time at all to treat her tenderly. When Raman says that he is coming to Manori Island just because Menaka, their daughter, writes to him to take her back home as she has to apply for admission to medical college, Sita is annoyed thinking Raman is not concerned about her. She feels that even the way Raman gets married to her is out of pity and lust not of love. But, unlike Cry, the Peacock, Where Shall We Go This Summer?

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ends with reconciliation of Sita and Raman. Anita Desai's male characters like Gautama and Raman are not depicted as cruel and inhuman husbands who torture their wives. The alienation and disharmony arise in the marital relation because of their wives' neurotic and psychic turmoil. But Mr. Kaul in Fire on the Mountain and Jiban in Voices in the City represent the traditional Indian males who believe in patriarchal values of male domination over female, the servitude of wife to her husband and the sexual liberation of the man. Mrs. Kaul and Monisha suffer because their husbands dishonour them as nonentity, insignicant and dependent creatures. Such educated and sensitive women who value their own dignity and self-respect and consider themselves not parasites incline to clash with their husbands. Monisha ends up her meaningless marriage to Jiban by self-immolation and Nanda Kaul protests against her husband's callousness and indelity by keeping a grave and stoic silence and then later on by her self-exile to Carignano.

WORKS CITED 1

2

3

4

Anita Desai, Cry, the Peacock, New Delhi: Vision Books, 1983, p.40. (All subsequent references to this edition will be referred to as CP). Anita Desai, Fire on the Mountain, New Delhi: Allied Publishers Private Limited, 1985, p.121. (All subsequent references to this edition will be referred to as FM). P.D. Dubbe, “Feminine Consciousness in Fire on the Mountain”, The Fictions of Anita Desai Volume 1, eds., Suman Bala and D.K. Pabby, New Delhi: Khosla Publishing House, 2002, p.207. Anita Desai, Where Shall We Go This Summer?, New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1991, p. 147.

CULTURAL DISLOCATION AND QUEST FOR SUBJECTIVITY: A STUDY OF TONI MORRISON'S TAR BABY Poonam Mor Mira Tomer Toni Morrison is widely regarded as one of the most signicant African- American novelists to have emerged in the 1970's. She is the rst African-American, and only the eighth woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. African-American women have a unique place in American life and literature. African-American writers like Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, Alexis Deveaux and many others fought against a hostile climate to build and sustain a sense of self-worth. Toni Morrison's novels depict that the fundamental cause of the oppression of African-Americans is the exploitative economic system of capitalism and its overseas extension, imperialism. Thus, racism and sexism, although equally oppressive, are treated as by-products of capitalism. Tar Baby deals with the relations of migrated Blacks with the dominant culture and its institutions. The novel shows Morrison's perception of the white reality as completely oppressive for the helpless migrated black people in the urban ghettoes in the middle years of the last century. It also presents the damaging impact of the dominant culture's values on the blacks. Morrison has related color with class. She is more occupied with her characters' survival and with the “complexity of how people behave under duress—the qualities they show at the end of an event when their backs are up against the wall” (Mckay 402). The ideologies of the dominating group that is America work insidiously to systematically erode the African-American's cultural heritage and beliefs. As a consequence, the African-American receive in turn only a crippled culture. As Willis puts it: “Right,” in a capitalist society, means “white;” and capitalism offers a way to whiteness (which, in economic terms, means an approximation of the bourgeois class) through the consumption of

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commodities and the style these evoke. The great illusion of commodity capitalism is that, while we may not all be white and middle class, we might (if we have a little cash) trade in its signs.   (215)

In Tar Baby, Morrison's increased consciousness is reected in her ability and commitment to explore the cause–and–effect relationship between race, class, and sex. Through Jadine Childs and William Green, Morrison develops the theme of the cultural dislocation and quest for subjectivity. The novel is the story of the struggle of a modern black woman to come to terms with her modern materialistic aspirations. In her struggle for fulllment, she ultimately loses her roots from the white as well as from the African–American world and “becomes a double orphan, a pariah gure” (Reyes 19). In this novel, Morrison delineates the conicts that give rise to tension; tension between master and servant, between men and women, between the Blacks and the whites, and between the younger and older generations of blacks. The theme of racial tension underlies the novel like bedrock. She deftly draws the parallel between sexism and racism. The relationship between colonizers and colonized is explored at various stages. Imperial Valerian represents the power of the colonizer. He is the sole authority on his estate. His wife Margaret represents dependence and vulnerability. She is a former beauty queen from Maine who can neither cook nor mother competently. Gideon and Therése, islanders who do the yard work and laundry represents the natives who refuse to be colonized. They are called “Yardman” and “Mary” by everyone on the estate except Son. Son reects the indifference of the colonizer to the identity of the native and the degree to which the colonized—Sydney, Ondine, Jadine—accept this violation of their identity. Valerian's estate, L'Arba de la Croix, is situated on Isle des Chevaliers. He has made this island into a kind of false paradise by building a designer house that is safely removed from the intrusion of native life and by deliberately “adjusting the terrain for comfortable living” (TB 53). The place has been made to seem tame and safe just the way Valerian likes it. His wealth is gained from the production of candy, the main ingredients of which–sugar and cocoa–come from the Caribbean island. Inside the house, everything seems under perfect control. However,

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after arrival of Son, it becomes apparent just how much of a failure Valerian has actually been. During the Christmas meal, the news breaks that Valerian has red Therése and Gideon, the natives who have worked on his place, for stealing apples. Ondine and Sydney erupt in bitterness and complain that they should have been consulted. Now Ondine could no longer suppress her rage at the circumstances at the Streets' household and reveals the awful family secret that Margaret had physically abused Michael when he was a child. As soon as Valerian is confronted by this secret of torture of Michael at the hands of his wife Margaret, his condence as well as his sense of power shatters. He literally begins to shake out of control. He nally realizes that his safe and controlled life has been guilty of the kind of self–centered innocence. She had given him a son, but he had to admit that he “knew nothing” about his son. It also occurs to him after all this time Michael, while he was being abused by Margaret, might have sent out signals for help. But the fact remains that he didn't pay much attention to that was really going on in his house. Behind the victimization of Michael, their son, there lies a history of Margaret's own victimization by the distorted needs of others. She had grown up as a poor girl who was rst isolated because she didn't look like a member of her clan. Later on, she was admired for her breath taking good looks rather than anything there might have been of value in her character. Aware of her attractiveness as a teenager, she felt compelled to exploit it although she had no great ambitions in life. She embodies White America's myth of entrancing beauty. She has bright red hair and strikingly white skin. Thus, when Valerian rst saw her, as he was himself an exponent of the American success myth, he wanted to have her. After marriage Margaret discovered that she is just a beautiful piece of possession for her husband and the life of a beautiful possession is cold and lonely. Her loneliness and idleness accentuated the effect of her unfullled dreams. More out of insecurity than love Margaret became pregnant and delivered Valerian's child at the age of nineteen. Their marriage is a marriage of coercion as in Jadine's words “Just a May and December marriage” (TB 67). Like Margaret, Ondine and Sidney are also victims of false American dream. With due course of time, they have internalized their suppression at the hands of Valerian. In the process of adopting the American dream, they have disavowed their African roots as well as African history completely.

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But as their service time grows, they come to hold on to the illusion that they have become much more than servants to their master. Consequently, they can safely work for him without surrendering control over their lives. They even respond to the other two servants, residents of the island, as the Streets do. They are contemptuous of anybody of their race who isn't like them. Thus, while Valerian welcomes son to his dining table, they hate him intensely. They cannot think of this “swamp nigger” as a “Negro-meaning one of them” (TB 107). They have become prized servants whose lives are dened by their “belonging” to Valerian. Jadine has lost her father and mother at a very early age. She has been adopted by her Uncle Sydney and aunt Ondine. As Sydney and Ondine work for a white family, the Streets, she is under the protection and care of Valerian and Margaret Street. As a result, she loses her touch with the world of both the Streets and Childs. Thus, through Jadine, Morrison depicts the African-American suffering from identity crisis. Having been raised by her aunt and uncle to mirror rather than question White American values, she rejects what those values reject. Jadine's reaction to the explicit indictment in Michael's questions is a sign of her rejection of her African heritage as well as a sign that no one has taught her to value that heritage and its' cultural values. Jadine's attitude towards her own culture recalls black historian Carter G. Woodson's dictum in the Preface of his famous book The Mis-Education of the Negro: The same educational process which inspires and stimulates the oppressor with the thought that he is everything and has accomplished everything worth while, depresses and crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples. The Negro thus educated is a hopeless liability of the race. (v)

Jadine is a self–loving woman. She refuses to be a mother and takes care of her old ones. She draws on the nancial resources of her uncle without any sense of gratitude for seeking education and other needs. She is a graduate with a degree in art history from the Sorbonne and a successful model. She is recognized internationally for her beauty. She lives in the fast lane and is primary interested in “making it”—a material success. She has

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internalized white values so much so that like any other white woman, she thinks of rape the moment she sees Son. Jadine is made to confront her cultural heritage, when she is challenged haphazardly in Paris by an African woman who wears her heritage with pride and dignity. Jadine sees a woman, a woman much too tall. Under her long canary yellow dress, Jadine knew there was too much hip, too much bust… so why was she and everybody else in the store transxed? The height? The skin like tar against the canary yellow dress? The woman walked down the aisle as through her many colored sandals were pressing gold tracks on the oor … her hair was wrapped in a gelée as yellow as her dress. The people in the aisles watched her without embarrassment, with full glances instead of sly ones. (TB 45)

The African woman “with the condence of transcendent beauty” (TB 46) feels disgusted at the sight of Jadine, a black woman who has forgotten her roots, once insultingly spat at her. The woman's apparent reaction to her has a devastating effect on her. Nevertheless, she is also fascinated by this woman. She reacts at rst with indifference, but she is unable to transcend the implications of the “woman's insulting gesture”, which in the end has successfully “derailed her” and “shaken her out of proportion to incident. Why she had wanted that woman to like and respect her” (TB 47). As Barbara Christian correctly notes: Morrison uses the image of the African woman in the yellow dress as a symbol for the authenticity that the jaded Jadine lacks. It is this woman's inner strength, beauty, and pride, manifested in the deant stance of her body that haunts Jadine's dreams and throws her into such a state of confusion. (244)

She attempts to be other than herself that causes Jadine's insecurity throughout the novel. She feels threatened by African woman who are unashamed of their identity and culture as well as feels themselves beautiful not simply because they are, but also because they posses pride and dignity in them. It is for this reason that the woman in yellow—beautiful, self–condent, proud—is such a disturbing and

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haunting image for Jadine. Thus, Morrison depicts Jadine's confusion about her cultural identity through her reaction to the African woman. Jadine is made aware of what Therése would later inform Son is Jadine's loss of her “ancient properties,” which Angelita Reyes denes as “those sacred and psyche—cultural bonds of the Past” (19). Jadine's refusal to submit to Son diminishes her as a woman. In her assimilation into white culture she has completely lost her connections with her roots. She had abdicated her responsibility to her own people. Jadine has a fullling relation with Son. However, they part after a few months because their relationship has no sustaining force other than sexual compatibility. Upon rst seeing Son, Jadine immediately suspects that he has “rape, theft or murder on his mind” (TB 91). Ideologically she thinks like the European, and like her aunt and uncle, she embraces the stereotypes of the African. She calls Son a raggedy nigger and thinking he is about to rape her. But Son's response elicits a revealing reaction: “Rape? Why you little white girls always think somebody's trying to rape you?” “White?” She was startled out of fury. “I'm not … you know I'm not white!” “No? Then why don't you settle down and stop acting like it”.  (TB 121)

Not only does Jadine think like a European, but also she behaves as if she is a European. When Son's presence at L'Arbe de la Croix is discovered, she questions his reason for stealing as if she too owned the house: “It depends on what you want from us”. Surprised by her irrational association with the Streets, Son replies that, “Us? You call yourself 'us'. “ Of course. I live here.” “But you. . .you're not a member of the family. I mean you don't belong to anybody here, do you?” “I belong to me. But I live here. I work for Margaret Street. She and Valerian are my . . .patrons”. (TB 118)

She belittles African art and says, “Picasso is better than an Itumba mask” (TB 74). Moreover, Jadine's enchantment with European art distances her from the indigenous art of African culture. She ridicules Michael's attempt to politicize her as to her Africanness by asserting:

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Actually we didn't talk; we quarreled. About why I was studying art history at that snotty school instead of—I don't know what. Organizing or something. He said I was abandoning my history. My people. (TB 72)

Michael underscores her awed sense of self, her rootlessness, and her loss of concern for and connection to her own people. He as Margaret depicts “wanted value in his life, not money,” and that he spends his life encouraging Indian people in Arizona to “keep their own heritage intact” (TB 199). Therefore, he is a kind of foil for Jadine. Jadine has absorbed the capitalist values of making money and acquiring status. In doing so, she becomes ignorant of the traditional African principles that have ensured the survival of African people despite their dehumanized conditions. Jadine must go through life denouncing the White people because she is trying to run away from the Blacks and decrying the blacks because they are not white. Jadine abandons them to the caprices of Valerian and doesn't bother about their future. When they most need her, she prays that they don't. And she ignores Ondine's wise words that: A girl has to be a daughter rst. She has to learn that. And if she never learns how to be a daughter, she can't never learn how to be a woman . . . a real woman: a woman good enough for a child; good enough for a man—good enough even for the respect of other women. (TB 281)

She has no obligation as a daughter. She elopes with Son and enjoys her relationship with him without caring to take stock of what happens to the couple that stood by her. Morrison shows sexual freedom as non–fullling. She has done so through Jadine's reaction to the black woman in canary dress with “too much busts” (TB 45) and three eggs held up in her hand in Paris and the crowd of women visiting her at Eloe, Florida. The rst image keeps haunting her as a reminder of falseness of her beauty by stressing on “the condence of transcendent beauty” (TB 46). The second incident of black mothers also haunts Jadine as an insult of her femininity, but it does not include nurturance. In spite of having felt insulted Jadine does not amend her perception of beauty as well as womanhood. Her cultural dislocation continues.

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Unlike Valerian and Jadine, Son (William Green) has a sincere love for living things in general, African people in particular. As a consequence, he is attuned to nature and plucks Valerian's plant to make it bloom. He suggests Ondine to place banana leaves in her shoes to soothe her sore feet. He has special love for the African masses. . The relationship between Son and Jadine is short–lived. Son's hatred for New York and all the material values it represents seems clear enough. Jadine tempts him from his world to a world of visible signs of success: education, money, herself as physical presence and as the actual picture of elegance. He tries to overcome this by taking her to Eloe, back to his origins. But she hates Son's Eden, Eloe. Jadine sees the lesson of the “night women” in only negative way. She remains convinced that they were “all out to get her, tie her, bind her. Grab the person she had worked hard to become and choke it off…” (TB 262). So, she runs away as quickly as she can but Son who loves both beauty and blackness, and in fact sees them as a totality, cannot understand her need to escape this black village. Son wants Jadine to connect with her cultural roots and choose him. But Jadine tells him conclusively: You stay in that medieval slave basket if you want to. You will stay there by yourself. Don't ask me to do it with you. I won't. There is nothing any of us can do about the past but make our own lives better, that's all I've been trying to help you do. That is the only revenge, for us to get over. Way over. But no… you don't know how to forget the past and do better. (TB 271)

Son is the son of Africa and of his ancestors; all he needs is the passage that Therése provides him. He goes to Therése thinking she will help get back Jadine but Therése knows the meaning of his return better than Son. She deceives him by letting him believe that he is going to Valerian's house, but she in fact lets him off on the part of the island inhabited by the blind horseman: “The men. The men are waiting for you”. She was pulling the oars now, moving out. “You can choose now. You can get free of her. They are waiting in the hills for you” (TB 306). Son achieves his truest nature by becoming one, not with the tales themselves. On the one hand Son has roots and values of fraternity, on the other hand Jadine is rootless and values only herself. Thus, it is evident

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from the foregoing discussion that the novel by Toni Morrison marks Son's nal step of immersion into the black folk world. He successfully achieves his cultural roots while Jadine remains culturally dislocated. In fact, through the major characters of the novel, Morrison reveals that their struggle can end only with recovering their black identity that develops their sense of survival as well as the capacity for forgiveness.

REFERENCES  Christian, Barbara. “Trajectories of Self-Denition: Placing Contemporary AfroAmerican Women's Fiction.” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Eds. Spillers, Hortense and Marjorie Pryse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 233-248. Mbalia, Doreatha D. Toni Morrison's Developing Class Consciousness. London: Susquehanna University Press 1991. McKay, Nellie. “An Interview with Toni Morrison.” Contemporary Literature 24, Winter 1983, pp. 413-29. Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. New York: Knopf, 1981. Reyes, Angelita. “Ancient Properties in the New World: The Paradox of the 'Other' in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby.” Black Scholar 17, March-April 1986, pp. 19-25. Woodson, Carter. The Mis-Education of the Negro. United States of America: The Associated Publishers, 1933. McKay, Nellie, ed. Critica1 Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1988.

HISTORY, POLITICS AND MEMORY: A POST-COLONIAL STUDY OF SALMAN RUSHDIE'S MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN Simmi Gurwara [In] our society there is so much polarity that every successive regime appoints its own historians and tries to rewrite history. In a situation like this, the only true history of our age will be written in ction. -Abdullah Hussein, Pakistani Writer

Great national events have always spurred creative writers to put their pens to paper. Great novels of the world like Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Tolstoy's War & Peace and Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago deal with different historical events and movements in their respective countries in different times and climes. Thus, a new kind of literature was born known as 'holocaust literature' in the west which dishes out the futility of wars and what wars, especially World Wars have done to humanity. In our country, a large number of novels have been written in response to the different historical events and movements such as Indian mutiny, the list of which crosses nearly fty, and there is a whole gamut of 'Raj literature' mostly penned by Britishers. It was, therefore, natural for the writers of the Indian subcontinent to articulate their experiences of partition in their works, an activity which goes on till date. Among the Indian English writers, credit goes to stalwarts like Khushwant Singh (Train to Pakistan), Chaman Nahal (Azadi), Manohar Malgonkar (A Bend in the Ganges and Distant Drum) and of course Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children) who have displayed their ingenuity and sensitivity in handling the issue of communalism and partition in their classics. An overview of these writers' works, including those of Saadat Hasan Manto, Yashpal, Nayantara Sahgal, and Bapsi Sidhwa make us re-live and realize not only the wrenching pain of partition but also connect with our colonial history and nationalist struggle against the backdrop of urban decadence, poverty, political degradation, and partition proteering.

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The genesis of Midnight's Children is to be found in a familiar joke: two months after Rushdie was born, the British ran away from India. As Rushdie revived his fainted memory: This joke was almost told to embarrass me at awkward moments, which gave me the idea to take a child and a country, and to join them comically. From that there was a short step to having the idea of a child that was born exactly at the moment of independence, and who believed himself to be connected to the country. Then there was the story of the child growing up and the country growing up, so to say, in parallel, it began with that. (Pandit, 44)

The narrator of the story, Saleem Sinai, opens the novel explaining that th he was born on 15 August, 1947, at the exact moment when India gained its hard won independence from the British colonial rule. “I was born in…on august 15th, 1947 and the time?...on the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came… at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled into the world” (Rushdie, MC 9). By virtue of this, he claims his centrality to India as well as India's national history. The novel encompasses the twin stories. The version of history that Saleem offers is a product of his perspective just as every other version of history is packaged in some or the other individual perspective. If we talk about Saleem, he assumes his version to be the most valid just as any other historian claims his or her to be. In Midnight's Children, Rushdie delineates the diversied colors of Indian state rather than depicting a unied eld. There seems to be no pivotal point around which the Indian identity can be woven. The novel doesn't have any geographical certainty to brag about. India is multifarious and can only be imagined and understood through disintegrated memories and histories. This diversity is pronounced in variegated versions of the same truth when interpreted by reporters and historians to back up their claims. Hence, news reports of Indo-Pak war in Midnight's Children have different interpretations of the same events. This open-endedness of the historical truth is the essence of the novel. Saleem is “mysteriously handcuffed to history” with his “destinies indissolubly chained” to his country. However, as he kicks off his history of

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the new nation, other histories intervene. There is ferocious competition to grab the centre. Saleem nds himself wrangling with politicians. Towards the end of the novel, there is reference to Indira Gandhi's role in the decimation of the midnight's children. With the arrival of Indira Gandhi, her “state of emergency” and the sterilization campaign that rendered the Midnight's Children infertile, Rushdie mingles the two narratives with a sole crisis. Throughout the novel, Saleem's personal life perpetually mirrors India's political turmoil and he tries to resolve the tensions that build up. The rst inevitable linking of nation with imagination was done by Benedict Anderson in his book Imagined Communities which dened the nation rst and foremost as: “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them” (124). Anderson goes on to say that the imagination of a nation is 'limited' because of its restricted boundary. But today his opinion has been diluted as even a migrant living in a foreign country successfully follows the rituals of his or her own country, which in turn points out that the idea of a nation is more often than not based on naturalized myths of racial, cultural and ethnic origin and focuses on the issues of separate identities and cultural exclusivities. In his essay “Imagined Homeland” Rushdie opines: After all, in all the thousands of years of Indian history, there never was such a creature as a united India. Nobody ever managed to rule the whole place, not the Mughals, not the British. And then, that midnight, the thing that had never existed was suddenly 'free.' But what on earth was it? On what common ground (if any) did it, does it stand? (27)

Memory also plays a prominent role in the construction of a nation's history. At the same time it stands undeniably true that memories are shifting, unreliable and changeable. To quote James Young: Whatever 'ctions' emerge from the survivors' accounts are not deviations from the 'truth' but are part of the truth in any particular version. The ctiveness in testimony does not involve disputes about facts, but the inevitable variance in perceiving and representing these facts, witness

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by witness, language by language, culture by culture. (Young)

Just after the birth of Saleem Sinai, the narrator focuses on the preindependence period of the country i.e. to the year 1915 when Aadam Aziz, Saleem's grandfather, gets back to his home Kashmir from Germany after completing his medical education. Thereafter the focus is on the life of Dr. Aziz and his connections to the Indian freedom struggle. The novel also explores the clashes and conicts of his enlightened, progressive ideas with the dogged ideologies of the conservative Muslim society and culture. Book I of MC refers to the parallels of Dr. Aziz'z life, the ups and downs of his family as well as the socio-politico-cultural context of the Indian subcontinent. It is interesting to note Rushdie's incisive remarks against the socio-political as well as the ethical issues in the pre independence India i.e. from 1915 to 1947. Book II of MC reects on the growth and development of the nation in parallel to the growth and maturity of saleem Sinai from infancy to youth. The author immaculately presents the problems and situations of the two young nations, namely India and Pakistan after the partition. The focus is on the corrupt practice in politics and nearly torn moral fabric of the two societies of India and Pakistan till they get engaged in a devastating Indo-Pak war in 1965. Book III of MC refers to the further complexity of the Indo-Pak relationship, Bangladesh war, proclamation of emergency by Indira Gandhi and the longest midnight operations during the Emergency leading to curtailment of freedom and oppressive measures of a despotic and tyrannical rule. All these problematic aspects, issues and corrupt practices in relation to the socio-political standing of the Indian subcontinent have signicant bearing on the sufferings of Saleem Sinai, who is a victim to the misrule of emergency and its repercussions. Rushdie's allusions to history in Midnight's Children cast a surrealistic atmosphere through a weaving of characters, plot and the events. In other words, he creates magic realism by combining facts and ction, fantasy and realism quite naturally. He so meticulously chooses the dates of the events around the characters that they appear to be part of contemporary history themselves, without any aberrations. History in Midnight's Children is therefore not separate from the main plot. It is not a detached fragment, but an integral part of the plot. For instance, Dr. Aziz and Naseem Bano after their marriage come to Amritsar where Jallianwala Bagh massacre occurs th by the order of the British General Dyer in 1919: “It is April 13 ; and they

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are still in Amritsar”… “This affair isn't nished… Good shooting”, Dyer tells his men, “We have done a jolly good thing” (Rushdie, MC 35). The historical events of “Quit India Movement” and “Pre-independence Partition politics” are also integrated to the plot of the novel. Behind the partition politics based on communalism, there are, of course, selsh, ulterior motives of the individuals, namely Mohammed Ali Jinnah and some other politicians. The communal tension between the Hindus and the Muslims continues even after independence and partition. In his book The Partition of Memory, Suvir Kaul regards partition as “not just an unnished business, but an ongoing business too, because partition's afterlife still guides our public policy and inhibits our progress from colonial state to postcolonial democracy.” The connection with history for the Sinai's is rather integrated in Midnight's Children. Even after they migrate to Pakistan, they are closely related to history. Jamila, Saleem's sister becomes the “Voice of Pakistan Radio”. She is called to inspire the soldiers of Pakistan by singing patriotic songs during the time of Indo-Pak war-1965. Naseem Aziz, the grandmother of Saleem, migrates to Pakistan in 1964, the year of Nehru's death which precipitates a bitter power struggle in the congress party and Indira Gandhi is prevented from assuming the leadership. The connection of history to the personal domestic life of Sinai's is predominant. In the beginning of the rst chapter of Book III, Saleem is subjected to the framework of the historical events. He considers himself among those “whom the war of 1965 could not obliterate.” It was the time when Indira Gandhi and her congress party win the Lok Sabha elections with a thumping majority in 1971 elections. The war between East Pakistan and West Pakistan resulted in millions of Bangladeshi refugees migrating to India. India intervened and a separate Bangladesh was formed. Since Saleem is always placed in the historical context of most of the events of the Indian subcontinent, he therefore, in an enraged mood questions: “…why alone of all the more-than-ve-hundred million, should I have to bear the burden of history?” (Rushdie, MC 382). Rushdie's treatment of history in Midnight's Children is not a mechanical presentation of the events. He rather enlivens history by corelating it to the individual's destiny and personal life. He, therefore, juxtaposes the individual to the nation and integrates them to create a

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supernatural effect. Further his approach to history lies in interpreting history in a new way. He also integrates the political incidents, cultural ethos and social morality of the people in a complex way while interpreting history. Partition of India, post-partition problems of India and Pakistan, imposition of emergency and fall of Indira Gandhi, have been dealt with in a critical manner integrating them to the origin and life history of Saleem Sinai in a natural way. We clearly understand the interrelationship between history and politics. In his yearning to deal with the contemporary history, Rushdie also refers to contemporary political events and the long-term economic impact on the people of Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's political inclination in Midnight's Children lends a post-modern and post-colonial orientation to this novel, in which he discusses the issues of politics of freedom struggle, partition, migration, communalism, colonialism and multiculturalism. The political realities have a strong and direct bearing on the social and moral ethos of the people of pre-independence as well as post-independence milieu. Independence and partition came out of the womb of India's struggle of deliverance from the colonial rule as twins: “a complex, contradictory reality is symbolized by 15 August 1947. A hard earned, prized independence was won but a bloody, tragic partition rent asunder the fabric of the emerging free nation. Freedom came, but with it partition” (Mahajan, 392). Treatment of politics of the Indian subcontinent is a major issue in Midnight's Children. The author draws parallels between the current political events and the incidents in an individual's life. On April 7 in 1919, the Hartal of the Mahatma was turned into a violent event in Amritsar. Many people were injured and Dr. Aziz, being detained there due to detention of the trains, treated people with red mercurochrome; and on his return home his wife mistakenly took the stains in his cloth as blood and cried in pain. The politics of religion is touched upon when there is reference to the discord in thinking between the Indian Muslims and the Kashmiris. Dr. Aziz expresses his feelings on this issue: The Hummingbird was the founder, chairman, unier, and moving spirit of the Free Islam Convocation; and in 1942, marquees and rostrums were being erected on the Agra maidan, where the convocation's second annual assembly was about

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to take place. My grandfather, fty years old… told his friend the Rani of Cooch Naheen, “I started of as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim, but I'm all for Abdullah. He's ghting my ght. His eyes were still the blue of Kashmiri sky.” (Rushdie, MC 40)

The rise of the Muslim League, the Muslim dominated party and their violent political agenda are referred to in the following lines: Abdullah and Nadir were coming to the end of their night's work; the Hummingbird's hum was low-pitched and Nadir's teeth were on edge. There was a poster on the ofce wall, expressing Abdullah's favorite anti-partition sentiment, a quote from the poet Iqbal: “Where can we nd a land that is foreign to God? and now the assassins reached the campus.” (Rushdie, MC 47)

Rushdie depicts how the unscrupulous politicians generate communal hatred in the society for their selsh motives. In the process, the common men indulge in division according to their religious communities while these politicians gain political mileage out of it. The political indulgence of Kemal, a grocery merchant and S.P. Butt, a match manufacturer helped in arousing such communal sentiments. The role of money-power for safety in communal riots between Hindus and Muslims is worth-mentioning in this context: What is known about the Ravana gang. That is posed as a fanatical anti-Muslim movement, which, in those days before the partition riots, in those days when pig's heads could be left with impunity in the courtyards of Friday mosques, was nothing unusual. That it sent men out, at dead of night, to paint slogans on the walls of both old and new cities. NO PARTITION OR ELSE PERDITIONS! MUSLIMS ARE THE JEWS OF ASIA! And so forth and that it burned down Muslim owned factories, shops and go downs. But there's more, and this is not commonly known; behind this façade of racial hatred, the Ravana Gang was a brilliantly conceived commercial enterprise. Anonymous phone calls, letters written

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with words cut out of newspapers were issued to Muslim business men, who were offered the choice between paying single, once-only cash sum and having their world burnt down. (Rushdie, MC 72)

The naked side of this communal politics has been further exposed after the independence when selected afuent Muslims were targeted. Rushdie therefore questions the viability of Indian secularism in this context: These are bad times, Sinai bhai-freeze a Muslim's assets, they say, and you make him run to Pakistan, leaving all his wealth behind him. Catch the lizard's tail and he'll snap it off! This so-called secular state gets some damn clever ideas. (Rushdie, MC 135)

In the Indian subcontinent, no historical event has left a greater impact than partition. The partition of the country continues to nd an echo in the collective minds of the people of this region even after more than six decades. The scars of the holocaust run deep, its ramications can be felt in every sphere, be it social, political or economic. Partition is indeed the deepest wound of modern times in the country's physical and spiritual psyche. “The violence it unleashed was unprecedented, unexpected and barbaric,” (vii) comments Alok Bhalla. Even before independence, the reference to this irrational communal frenzy is worth-mentioning in the context of Laifafa Das, the man who was entertaining people through peepshow. Though a Hindu, his name Lifafa is a mask to escape the Muslim rage. In a Muslim Gulli when he conducts the peepshow, one girl, being delayed to enjoy the show, gets angry and says: “You are a Hindu, you have so much courage to come to this Muslim Gulli.” (Rushdie, MC 76) Suddenly he encounters a mob who drag him out by saying: “Mister Hindu, who deles our daughters? Mister idolater, who sleeps with his sister?” (Rushdie, MC 76-77) Despite his pleading to be innocent, the fanatic Muslims were almost to kill him but for the interference of Amina, who, remembering her former husband, Nadir Khan, saves his life. There is also reference to corruption during the 1950s by politicians who accumulated wealth despite the fact that the poor people were dying out of starvation:

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At one time I was a landlord in Uttar Pradesh, my belly rolling over my Pajama cord as I ordered serfs to set my surplus grains on re… at another moment I was starving to death in Orissa, where there was a food shortage as usual. I was two months old and my brother had run out of breastmilk. I occupied, briey, the mind of Congress Party worker, bribing a village school teacher to throw his weight behind the party of Gandhi and Nehru in the coming election campaign; also the thoughts of a Keralan peasant who had decided to vote communist. (Rushdie, MC 174)

The author's acerbic satire on the political corruption is quite obvious. He is anguished to note the degradation in politics and morals in the society. In this context, the encounter between Shiva and Saleem further exposes the political corruption: how the money power and hooliganism play prominent role to win elections through booth capturing and threatening. By referring to the general elections of 1957, Rushdie notes with great concern for the steep rise of regionalism, communalism, hooliganism, religion and so on in political life and its impact on our society. In this context, the strategies of different parties of Anna DMK in Tamil Nadu, Communist Party of E.M.S Namboodripd in Kerala (food for everybody), Jan Sangh (rest homes for aged sacred cows), and Congress (Hindu Succession Act to give women equal rights of inheritance) point to the narrowness in the political agenda which is a deviation from the national interest. Politics in India after independence has therefore gone awry as it stands bereft of the high ideals and morals set by the great freedom ghters who had sacriced their lives to get freedom for us. There is also language politics to divide the country on the basis of different languages. Politics is no more an ideal to sacrice for the sake of people and the nation; on the other hand, it has become a means to seek cheap popularity by resorting to narrow populist measures and arousing communal sentiments. After the death of Nehru, there was struggle for power in the congress. Though Indira was prevented from assuming power, she could however succeed to control the congress party after the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri. In Midnight's Children, Rushdie is concerned with the contemporary sub continental politics and its impact on the common man due to the whims and fancies of the political class. He has touched upon the nuances

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of partition politics, communal frenzy, Indo-Pak war, Sino-Indian border crisis, formation of Bangladesh, military coups in Pakistan, Kashmir issue, political corruption as well as tyrannical rule of emergency, and integrated all of these issues to the protagonist's birth, growth and development in parallel to the growth and development of the nation. The two parallel stories have been well-integrated by the powerful techniques of “fantasy” and “magic realism”. The main objective of the author is to present before us the socio-cultural, politico-historical and moral context of the subcontinent. In the process, Rushdie also prevails upon the multicultural situation and anti-colonial stance. Violation of these norms results in a decline in morality. Rushdie has a keen eye to probe deeper and deeper how the society, political system and the individuals are prone to infringement of these norms for the sake of their own advantages. Rushdie also attacks the high society ladies for their moral lapses in cheating their husbands as are evident in the case of Amina and lady Sabarmati. Similarly people in high positions misuse their power positions, and are inclined towards debilitating moral standards as is evident in the case of Tony Catarak, the great lm producer, and Qasim Khan, the Communist politician. The misuse of power at the highest level is quite conspicuous in the case of military Coups planned in Pakistan and the tyrannical misrule during the emergency in India. Saleem's alter-ego Shiva, who is highly successful, is morally bankrupt. He has surrendered all moral and ethical values. His association with the powers-to-be makes him even more corrupt, and his sexual misadventures with so-called high society ladies are the reections of the erosion of ethical and moral norms in our society. Thus, Midnight's Children can be read as a metaphorical novel which comments sharply on more than one aspect of our social and political life and succeeds in presenting before us a perspective which is praiseworthy.

WORKS CITED Anderson, Benedict. “Imagined Communities.” The Post Colonial Studies Reader. London & New York: Routledge, 1983. 124. Print. Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism. London: Granta, 1991. 27. Print. Pandit, M.L. “An Interview with Salman Rushdie.” New Commonwealth Writing.

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New Delhi: Prestige, 1996. 44. Print. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children. London: Vintage, 1981. Print. Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. Macmillan, 1989. Print. Young, James. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington, 1990. Print. Bhalla, Alok. Stories about the Partition of India. New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1994. vii. Print. Kaul, Suvir. The Partition Memory. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001. Print. Mahajan, Sucheta. Independence and Partition: The Erosion of Colonial Power in India. New Delhi: Sage, 2000. 392. Print.

IMPACT OF GANDHI ON MULK RAJ ANAND 

Sudhir Kumar Solanki

Gandhi's ideas of truth and non-violence impressed every Indian to a great extent. Gandhi's teachings inuenced not only the politics of India but also the novelists of the age. When Anand was under the inuence of the ideas and thoughts of Gandhi, he was also inuenced by the writings of James Joyce because he returned from London and was in touch with Bloomsbury group. The Portrait of the Artist had a great impression on Anand When in 1927 Anand visited Ireland, he enjoyed the writings of Yeats because they represented the lives of ordinary people in the villages and towns. At that time the condition of the people in India was pitiable. As a result of it Anand's novels were greatly inuenced by the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi. When Anand came in contact with Gandhi, his life got a “U” turn. He was so much inspired by the ideas and life style of Gandhi that he began to wear the homespun clothes and decided to write about the underprivileged. Gandhi believed that true socialism lay in the development of village industries. For this reason Gandhi visualized a social order based on “Charkha”- but he did visualize electricity, ship building, iron works, machine making existing side by side with this symbol of village th handicrafts. In 1924, Gandhi said in his presidential address at the 39 Congress at Belgaum; “I wish, too; you would dismiss from your minds the views attributed to me about machinery. Machinery has its place; it has come to stay. But it must not be allowed to displace the necessary human 1 labor.” . Anand persists in a criticism of Gandhi for his anti-machine utteracnes. Ralia and his friends believe that the cause of their doom is the machines, introduced in the Billimaran. They said that “the teaching of Gandhi Mahatma is against the machine. So everyone should be against machines…..”2 In the political thought Anand is evidently anti Congress. The physical description of Gandhi is also charged with irritation and hatred: There was a quixotic smile on his (Mahatma Gandhiji's) lips-something Mephistophelean in the determined little chain immediately under his

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mouth and the long toothless jaws resting on his 3 small neck!!

He was quite aware of the day to day development in the country after independence. He found the creeping in of hypocrisy, corruption and complacency of the Congress Party, “All those dhotiwallaws pronouncing half-truths! Partial prophets! Compromising! Compromising with the big Seths while they talk of socialistic pattern. They talk while people are 4 helpless….” He was shocked to discover treachery, betrayal and nepotism became the order of the day. Those who went to Jail in different movements reaped rich dividends and within a few months became very rich. As Anand makes his own observation: …had to accept the suzerainty of the bourgeois national government of Delhi, and let the Praja Mandal Leaders rule over their states, themselves retaining their money and being further reinforced in their dignities and powers by the revival of ancient Hindu titles… The neat little captions under which this change was wrought were “Democracy”, “Freedom” and “Responsible Government”, the even ready stock-in-treads of the money power state…5

Gandhi's assassination on January 30, 1948, created a great vacuum and Pt. Jawahar Lal Nehru was the only choice to lead the nation in the absence of Gandhi. He humorously records his observation thus: Some days ago, in one of the villages in Gurgaon District, a certain star was seen through another star's tail. And a deputation of women came the next morning to me to ask which particular day of the calendar was the appointed for the burying alive of the Prime Minister, who, being good and gracious, was unable to die and had thus ordained his own passing away into paradise….I did not tell them the exact date, but assured them the Prime 6 Minister was immortal.

It is a well-known fact that the personality and ideals of Gandhi inspired a lot of literature in English and regional languages of India. A big space in these writings was given to Gandhi's struggle for freedom and the various

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political movements that he led. There is a long list of novels, plays and poems which were inspired by Gandhi's personality and philosophy. To name a few these include Sarojini's Sonnet, “Lotus” (1917); R.R. Sreshtha, “A Light Unto Our Path”, taking Gandhi as the light; and Humayun Akbar even titled a whole book after him; Mahatma and other poems (1944). In 1919 ghastly massacre of Jallianwala Bagh shocked of the country and processions condemning the massacre became order of the day. Anand also took part in this Movoment and for a brief period he was jailed. Even in England, during his stay there, he used to attend the meetings at India League Ofce under the supervision of Krishna Menon. There also Gandhi was a frequent subject for discussion. After writing Untouchable he got an appointment with Mahatma Gandhi to discuss the novel as its protagonist Bakha was modelled on Uka, a sweeper about whom Gandhi had written in Young India. From Bombay he straightway went to Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmadabad. When one goes through the pages of Untouchable, there is a particular section of the novel that deals with Mahatma Gandhi. People climbed up the trees and walls to see Gandhi and the ground was agog with slogans like – Mahatma ki jai. Gandhi's speech focuses on the plight of the untouchables whom he lovingly calls 'Harijan' or sons of God. He exhorts them to remain clean and not to eat meat and drink liquor. Bakha is not impressed by his speech because Gandhi does not offer a solution to his problem of carrying night soil on his head. Though he likes Gandhi's polite words, love and sympathy for the untouchables, he fails to solve his real problem. He is convinced that so long as he carries the night soil on his head, he will remain an untouchable. This shows Anand's approval of Gandhi's initiative for the welfare of the untouchables. Gandhi's unscientic approach to the problem was rejected by him as Bakha rejected Gandhi. Gandhi's love for cleanliness, his concern with the poor and the weak and his humanism win respect and love from Anand. He looked the man and not his doctrine, “Gandhi the ascetic, would eschew sense-pleasure and sex, but Anand would like to roll in aunt Devki's buxom labs, to touch the hem of a girl's shirts, and would not be happy to mires the touch of “esh.” Though Anand differed from Gandhi on various aspects of his philosophy, his inuence on Anand is manifest in his works and many other writers.

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REFERENCES 1 2 3 4 5

6

M. K. Gandhi, Young India, November 5, 1925. Mulk Raj Anand, The Big Heart, Bombay: Kutub Popular, p. 32. Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable, Delhi: Penguin Books, 2001, p. 133. Mulk Raj Anand, The Old Woman and the Cow, Bombay, 1960, p. 240. Mulk Raj Anand, Private Life of an Indian Prince, Noida: Harper Perennial, 2008 p. 242. Mulk Raj Anand, The Road, Bombay: Kutub Popular, 1961, p. 69.

FEMINIST CONCERNS IN THE NOVELS OF SHASHI DESHPANDE       Sangeeta        Shashi Deshpande occupies a prominent place among the Indian English novelists. Her contribution to the world of ction dates back to 70s. It is a truth universally recognized that women, who are physically and mentally outtted to perform at par with men, have not only been deprived of existence as complete human beings, but also denied the opportunity to give air to their feelings, their thoughts and their agony. As Sushila Singh puts it: “Human experience for centuries has been synonymous with the masculine experience with the result that the collective image of humanity has been one-sided and incomplete. Woman has not been dened as a subject in her own right but merely has an entity that concerns man in his 1 real life or his fantasy life.” Shashi Deshpande occupies an important position among the present-day women novelists who concern themselves with the problems of women and their pursuit for identity. This paper seeks to assess the novels of Shashi Deshpande from a feminist perspective. Shashi Deshpande began her writing career as a story writer in 1970s rst and as a novelist afterwards. Her father, husband, Indian philosophers, foreign writers namely Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Maupassant, Keats, Kate, Greene, Betty Friedan etc. inuenced her thoughts and works to some extent. Besides this her own experience as a middle class educated woman helped her in understanding the trauma of Indian women. Her ctional art comprising use of English metaphor, suitable words, memory, autobiographical note etc. added charm to her ctional work. The themes of Shashi Deshpande's ctional works are mainly concerned with the conicts and the predicament of middle class Indian women. Prof. M.K. Naik remarks: “Her writing is clearly a part of Indian 2 literature and emerges from her rootedness in middle class Indian society.” Her strong conception of feminism comprises equality of gender, authenticity of women's signature, rejection of masculine dominance and emancipation of fair sex from the clutches of other social evils which reduce her position to a secondary creature. However, Deshpande does not take anti-male stand. Shashi Deshpande is the winner of the prestigious Sahitya Akademy Award for English(1990) for That Long Silence;

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Thrumathi Rangmmal Prize for her novel Roots and Shadows for the best Indian novel of 1982-83. The Dark Holds No Terrors earned Nanjangud Thirumalamba award 1991. Feminism is the hallmark of Shashi Deshpande's works. Feminism is by no means a monolithic term. If one seeks a common strand in a number of its varieties, it is the critique of the patriarchal modes of thinking which subordinate women to men in familial, religious, political, economic, social, legal and artistic domains. This patriarchal ideology teaches women to internalize these concepts in the process of their socialization. It brings to focus the concepts of gender which are man made. Undoubtedly, the world looks at women and their roles as dened by society which characterizes her as ideally warm, gentle, dependent and submissive. Most of the religions of the world assert that women should be subordinate to and dependent on men. According to the historian Linda Gordan, feminism is, “an analysis of 3 women's subordination for the purpose of guring out how to change it.” Acknowledged as the weaker sex, women have been deprived of full justice- social, economic and political. A consciousness of the inequalities present in the society resulted in the Women's Liberation Movement as late as the mid-nineteenth century. Simone de Beauvoir's book, The Second Sex, sought to break the myth of feminity and provided momentum to the movement. Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, also sparked of the movement. Friedan's book was followed by Kate Millet's Sexual Politics in 1969. She is considered to be one more signicant feminist of the twentieth century. Other feminist novelists in the West like Margart Drabble, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Marilyn French and Margaret Atwood have created an alcove for themselves in the literature formed in this century. A reading of Shashi Deshpande's novels reveals a profound understanding of the female psyche principally that of the educated, urban, middle-class woman. She feels that a woman not only in India but also in other countries is not treated at par with man in any sphere of human activity. She has been since post Aryan age, oppressed, suppressed and marginalized in the matters of sharing available opportunity for fulllment of her life. Deshpande is grimly aware of plight and the predicament of Indian woman. A careful study of her novels evinces that her women protagonists have been drawn from the middle-class society. Most of them

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are sensitive, intelligent, educated and career-oriented. Their pain and torture have been highlighted through the roles of women protagonists Indu, Saru, Jaya, Urmila and Sumi who nd themselves trapped in the roles assigned to them by the society. They have been portrayed as struggling against social taboos and attempting to assert their individuality. Her endeavor to give an honest representation of their sufferings, disenchantment and frustrations makes her novels vulnerable to treatment from the feminist angle. She, however, maintains that her novels are not proposed to be read as feminist texts. This is obvious from what she says, “A woman who writes of woman's experiences often brings in some aspects of those experiences that have angered her, roused her strong feelings. I 4 don't see why this has to be labeled feminist action.” Ibsen who heralded the idea of woman's liberation with his character, Nora, in A Doll's House, also disclaims any association with women's rights. In a feast held in his honour by the Norwegian society for Women's rights, he says: “Of course, it is incidentally desirable to solve the problem of women; but that has not been my whole object. My task has been the portrayal of human beings.”5 While it may not have been Deshpande's objective to advocate any particular theory, even a supercial reading of her novels displays a remarkable amount of sympathy for women. Most of her protagonists are educated and open to the elements of western ideas. As Ramamoorthy puts it, “Her heroines speak of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Betty Friedan and it becomes obvious that the women she 6 has created are feminists if she is not one.” Moreover, the attitudes and reactions of her protagonists to a variety of issues linked to women who are caught between tradition and modernity do provide plentiful material for dealing from a feminist perspective. Deshpande refers to the myths, epics, puranas as well as other holy books in which women, even though innocent, have been presented as the embodiments of pativrata obeying male persons and submitting to their wishes. Shashi Deshpande's rst novel, The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980), deals with an unusual character, Sarita, who dares to challenge the age-old traditions to marry a man of outside her caste. The novel analyses an intricate relationship between a successful doctor, Sarita (Saru), and her professionally aggravated and irritated husband. Just because the wife had a superior job, there is a very evident tension between them, which then leads them to part from each other. The ordeal of being the prey of her

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husband's irritation which manifests itself in the form of sexual hostility is powerfully portrayed. The novel also seeks to discuss the barefaced gender discrimination which is shown in even by parents towards their daughters. Deshpande efciently conveys the longing by parents for a male child and the catastrophic effect it can have on a sensitive young girl. Deprived of parental love and sufferer of her husband's frustrations, Saru undergoes a strenuous journey into herself and liberates herself from guiltiness, shame and embarrassment to come forward in full control over her life. Deshpande's novel Roots and Shadows effectively put the women as wife whose feminist resolution speaks out in the face of all oppressions explicit and concealed. It highlights the anguish and suffocation experienced by the central character Indu in a male dominated and tradition bound society. “This is my real sorrow, that I can never be complete in myself,”7 (p. 34) says Indu. A incessant inner conict goes on in her mind whether to revolt against the social set-up or to surrender to the tradition, whether to pay attention to her intellect or to her emotions, for intellectually, she is liberated, independent, has the comprehension of the world but emotionally she is so dependent upon the traditions that she eventually follows the latter one. The novel gains its feminist standpoint from Indu's continual searching of herself as an individual. An extra marital affair helps her to break free from the emotional burden of wedding and makes her conscious of herself and realizes that it is possible to implement autonomy within the parameters of marriage. Deshpande's third novel, That Long Silence, deals with the life of a young married couple. As a middle class Indian woman, Jaya spends her life in conformity to her husband and yielding her will to the age-long social customs. Jaya is not sure of her own individuality. Her name changes from Jaya to Suhasini when she gets married and becomes her husband's property. She becomes a very subservient woman and longs to be called a perfect wife because she does not see any other way out to live. The only weapon that she has with her is “silence and surrender.” The novel ends on a note of hope, with the protagonist Jaya's consciousness that she is no less to be held responsible for allowing her to be dictated by her husband and by the conventions of the society. She achieves a kind of catharsis by penning her story and she is capable to view the circumstances more impartially. In The Binding Vine, Deshpande makes a bold endeavor to undertake the subject of conjugal rape. Through the character of Mira, she focuses

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concentration on all those women who are doomed to mutely suffer night by night assaults by their husbands because the very thought of a woman protesting in opposition to her husband's sexual advances is unheard of in our society. Deshpande also hints at the lack of compatibility in Urmi's marriage although hers is a love marriage. Through the personality of Shakutai, Deshpande shows how at the lower level of society, nuptial vows are outed most indifferently by men like Shakutai's husband. He is a goodfor-nothing drunkard who deserts his wife and three children to defend for themselves and hankers after another woman. The novel can be best summed up in the words of Subhash K. Jha who writes in a review: “The Binding Vine is one of the few contemporary Indian novels to discuss its heroine's sexuality, her 'passion' with a measure of unrepentant concern. In this novel Deshpande travels much further down the road in exploring the working women's needs of the head, heart and further down the anatomy, 8 then her earlier novels.” Shashi Deshpande's sixth novel, A Matter of Time deals with the intricate theme of alienation. The novel revolves around an urban, middleclass family of Gopal. It begins with a predicament leading to an extreme introspection by the protagonist. The author quotes comprehensively from the Upanishads to elucidate the sense of rootlessness and anguish experienced by Gopal, who abandons his wife and three teenaged daughters for some eccentric and enigmatic reason. The novel also reveals the pain and embarrassment of Sumi, his wife, who copes with the circumstances commendably and tries to provide emotional and nancial protection for her three daughters. The novel ends on a tragic note with the unexpected deaths of Sumi and her father, Shripati, in a road accident. This, perhaps, serves to substantiate the philosophical strain which runs through the novel. In A Matter of Time, Deshpande has succeeded in depicting the aggravation of the women characters on a broader comprehensive level. In Shashi deshpande's novel, Small Remedies, she has honed her skills to excellence. Her protagonist is still the urban, middle- aged and educated woman, but her work of art has broadened to take in a cross-section of people who belong to diverse communities, professions and a level of society. It is a book with reections on the unfeasibility of ever capturing in words the truth about any life. It examines, in retrieving memory, the complexities in encapsulating the life of Savitribai Indorekar, who is committed to music. Running through the narrative of this signicant

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woman is the saga of Leela, who dees conservative norms and remarriage after her widowhood. It is through Madhu's eyes that we get to know the dark corners of Bai's life and the enlightening tale of Leela. In portraying the great effort of these women for individuality, no explicit postures of feminism are struck. A comprehensive scrutiny of all her work leaves one in no doubt about where Deshpande's sympathies recline. She can at best be called an articulator of women who are trapped at the cross-roads of alteration in a society which is undergoing the birth pangs of conversion from tradition to modernity. It is obvious from her studies that Deshpande, on no account, intends to subscribe to the views of any feminist. Her characters, though urban and educated, are resolutely rooted in India with the weight of centuries of convention and customs behind them. Whether or not she is a feminist, Shashi Deshpande has beyond doubt embossed a position for herself in expressing the thoughts and feelings of learned, urban middle-class women. Though Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai and Nayantara Sehgal have all ventured into this area of writing, none has pursued it with the consistency and rigorousness of Deshpande. She is principally engrossed in the issues, not just pertaining to women, but extended to the entire humanity. Her thought of feminism is best summed up in her words: “for me feminism is translating what is used up in enduring something positive: a real strength.” Deshpande is equally uncomfortable regarding being categorized as a woman-writer and denies being a feminist writer with an assignment. She does not illustrate the inuence in her writing of the feminists like Simone de Beauvoir or Germaine Greer, although she agrees that they helped to place her confusions, and set them in order. Thus it is obvious that Shashi Deshpande is a true humanist who never proposed to subscribe to the vision of any feminist.  REFERENCES 1

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Shushila Singh, “Preface,” Feminism and Recent Fiction in English, New Delhi: Prestige, 1991, p. 7. M.K. Naik & Shamala A Narayan, Indian English Literature 1980-2000, Delhi: Pencraft International, 2001, p. 85.

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Linda Gordon, quoted in the “Preface,” Feminism and Recent Fiction in English, p. 8. Shashi Deshpande, “The Dilemma of Woman Writer,” The Literary Criterion, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1985, p. 33. Henrik Ibsen quoted by Inga-Steva Ewebank, “Ibsen and the Language of Women,” Women Writing and Writing about Women. P. Ramamoorthy, “My Life is My Own: A Study of Shashi Deshpande's Women,” Feminism and Recent Fiction in English, ed. Shushila Singh, New Delhi: Prestige, 1991, p. 115. Shashi Deshpande, Roots and Shadows: A Novel, Madras: Sangam Books, 1983, p. 34. Subhash K. Jha, “Coming to Terms with Tragedy,” Rev. of The Binding Vine, The Economic Times, No. 30, 1994.

A CRITICAL STUDY OF HENRIK IBSEN'S A DOLL'S HOUSE Pankaj Dwivedi A Doll's House has been staged throughout the world, and still is - one and a half century later. Few plays have had a similar impact globally on social norms and conditions. Few play characters world-wide can claim an equivalent importance as role model as Nora Helmer. More than anyone, Henrik Ibsen gave theatrical art a new vitality by bringing into European bourgeois drama an ethical gravity, a psychological depth, and a social signicance which the theatre had lacked since the days of William Shakespeare. It is from this perspective we view his contribution to theatrical history. His realistic contemporary drama was a continuation of the European tradition of tragic plays. In these works he portrays people from the middle class of his day. These are people whose routines are suddenly upset as they are confronted with a deep crisis in their lives. They have been blindly following a way of life leading to the troubles and are themselves responsible for the crisis. Looking back on their lives, they are forced to confront themselves. Henrik Ibsen's works are performed on stages world-wide, read in numerous translations, studied and researched on every continent of the world. The notes, drafts and papers for Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House belong to the most copious and most interesting manuscript material from the hand of this great playwright. The rst known draft of the play is entitled “Notes on the Tragedy of the Present Age” (Rome, 19 October 1878). When published in 1879, the play revolutionised contemporary Western drama, both formally and thematically. In the twentieth century, the effect of the play spread to include Asia and the Third World, where its form became symbolic of modern Western drama and its content symbolic of values such as human rights and existential freedom. Ever since A Doll's House was rst published, it has raised debate and controversy, both because of its splendid dramatic structure and because of its broad ideological impact. Henrik Ibsen projects the woman's place in the society, one of the burning topics of the day, in his play A Doll's House. In this choice of theme, he was more inuenced by his own convictions than the growing movement for the emancipation of woman. He is regarded as

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the father of the modern drama and the prophet of new morality. He stands supreme among the moderns. He is often considered as the greatest dramatist next to Shakespeare. Ibsen blazed a new trail in the eld of modern drama that was admired by great personalities such as Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, J.M.Barrie, Gilbert Murray and H.H.Asquith. Ibsen's A Doll's House is a masterpiece of compact dramatic structure. It has a minimum of dramatic character and maintains a dramatic unity of place, time and action. In the play, he uses some technical factors which contribute to the apparent realism of his play. The detailed stage directions, employment of everyday prose and elimination of soliloquies and 'asides' are also included. His stress on the visual concreteness of his settings and characters help him greatly in making his plays look life – like. The characters are drawn from real middle–class set up. The problem posed in his play is the problem of subservient women in that period. In pre–emancipation days, when women were considered to be subservient to man and wives merely existing through their husband's will, Ibsen weaves his characters with esh and blood to make them come out with the pressing social conventions and customs which leads to the freedom of the individuals in society. He gives more importance to the delineation of his characters than his plot and he enables his viewers to get a full and perfect picture of his characters. The play A Doll's House bears a close resemblance to a typical intrigue play. Nora, the heroine is guilty of committing forgery. This act of indiscretion makes the villain, Krogstad, blackmail her. She has committed this incriminating deed in order to save the life of her husband, Torvald Helmer. But Helmer, instead of appreciating the sacrice of his wife, indicts her as a liar and criminal, unt to rear their children any longer. However, she is ultimately saved by the intervention of her old friend (of her school days), Mrs. Christine Linde, who manages to bring about a change in the heart of Krogstad. Helmer is willing to forgive Nora for her rash act. Krogstad frees Nora from exposure and shame. But, Nora does not stay with her husband. She leaves her home and children to learn the way of the world and experience the brave new world. Right from the beginning of the play, we can witness male chauvinism and the pathetic gure of Nora who is scapegoat for male chauvinism. She is being treated as a doll throughout. Torvald Helmer wishes that Nora should act according to his wish. Nora is protected, petted, dressed up,

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given pocket money but she is not allowed to be herself. Though Torvald Helmer is a lawyer by profession, he is the representative of male chauvinism who thinks that his orders has to be carried by her wife, as he is the head of the family. It is he, who holds the key to the letter box in his house. It is Torvald Helmer, who has full control over his wife in every aspect. She plays the doll with her husband just to please him. In A Doll's House, Nora Helmer spends most of her on-stage time as a doll: a vapid, passive character with little personality of her own. Her whole life is a construct of societal norms and the expectations of others. Until she comes to the realization that her life is a sham, she spends her whole life in a dream world. In this dream world, Nora does not take life seriously, an attitude that led to many of the plot's complications.Until her change, Nora is very childlike and whimsical. Her rst act on stage is her paying the delivery body. Though his service only costs 50-p., she gives him a hundred. Though an additional 50-p. is not a signicant amount of money, the casual way in which she gives it to him is indicative of her scal irresponsibility (Cummings www.cummingsstudyguides.net). She hands him the hundred and before he can thank her, she decides in the middle of the transaction that she is not patient enough to wait for change. The fact that this seemingly mundane occurrence is presented as the rst action on stage showcases the reckless attitude implied. An important aspect of a dream world is the suspension of cause and effect. Nora's lackadaisical approach is very prominent throughout the story. Another aspect of the dream world is the acquisition of material possessions; Nora is always trying to make herself happy by buying things: dresses, toys, candy etc., rather than doing anything meaningful with her life. She has never spent serious time with her husband of nearly a decade, and is always dumping her children on the nurse rather than bonding with them herself. This practice may have been common at the time the play was written, but Ibsen is clearly not ashamed of bold social criticism (Chandler 333).In her dream world, Nora takes a back seat approach to life and becomes like an object, reacting to other's expectations rather than advancing herself. As a result of her passivity, Torvald is very possessive of, frequently adding the “my” modier to all the pet names he calls her. When Torvald enters the scene, Nora's childlike behavior becomes more patent. Torvald calls her pet names “little lark”, “little squirrel”, and “Little Miss Extravagant”. Nora is being treated like a cute little girl and she

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happily accepts the epithets. Torvald nds himself having to restrain Nora with rules, much as a father would have to inhibit a child, forbidding her from pursuing candy and other temporal pleasures. (Kashdan www.epnet.com) When the play was rst performed in English (in Milwaukee), it was titled “The Child Wife” (Templeton 113).The maturity level Nora exhibits demonstrates that the relationship between Torvald and Nora is more like father and daughter than husband and wife. (Ford 14). Nora's father would force his beliefs on her and she would comply with them lest she upset him; she would bury her personal belief under Papa's. According to Nora, Torvald was guilty of the same things. In addition to his insistence on her wearing the sh girl costume is his frustration over her inability to grasp the tarantella. The costume and dance are part of Torvald's fantasy of gazing upon Nora from across the room at a party and pretending that she is something exotic. Torvald made Nora take on a foreign identity; Torvald used her as a doll. At the end of the play, the doll symbolism becomes very powerful. Nora imagines that Torvald will two dimensionally remain morally upright and, on principle, defend Nora's honor and not allow Krogstad to blackmail the Helmers. Nora imagines that Torvald would sacrice his own reputation and future to save her, but Torvald tells her that he would not make the sacrice, shattering Nora's dream world. At this point it becomes clear to Nora that “[she] had been living all these years with a strange man, and [she] had born him three children”. This realization forces Nora into the real world and she ceases to be a doll. At the end of the above statement, she adds “Oh, I cannot bear to think of it!” which echoes her childlike shutting out of unpleasant thoughts.It is not only that Torvald would not sacrice himself for her that opens Nora's eyes to reality. She did not understand that though Torvald loved her, he loved her as a thing - a status symbol (Lord 25). Nora serves as a wife and mother, but not as an equal to Torvald. Torvald planned to cope with the scandal resulting from blackmail by stripping Nora of her spousal and motherly duties, but would keep her in the house for appearance sake. If Nora, with her reputation tainted as a criminal, would poison the minds of the Helmer children, she would be useless as a mother to them (Metzger www.answers.com). The next thing Nora does is change out of her fancy dress. Torvald bought this dress for Nora to wear at a costume party because he wanted her to appear as a “Neapolitan sh girl”. As one would put clothes on a doll, Torvald dresses

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Nora. When she sheds this dress, she is shedding a trapping of her doll-like existence (Cummings www. cummings studyguides.net). Nora, having grown up as a manipulated tool of others, is under the impression that manipulation of others is a societal norm. Though she is usually passive, she can be seen to use others, even when the manipulation is of no benet to her. A prime example of this is when she tells Dr. Rank that it was Mrs. Linde who brought forbidden pastry into the house. Telling the truth in this situation would not make Dr. Rank think signicantly less of her, but she compulsively blames Mrs. Linde, which lowers her standing with Kristine. Since Nora is willing to perform extraneous manipulation, even when it harms her, we can see her addiction to it (Young 74). In the marvelous design of the action, Ibsen shows Nora painfully acquiring those attributes, in effect recapitulating the development of the race as she moves from, metaphorically; the role of a little animal, a lark, a squirrel, to a new – born human self with something of the tragic sense of life. In this play A Doll's House, the protagonist, Nora hides her true feeling so as to please her father and her husband. There is a conict between what she pretends to be and what she really is. Her spouse, Torvald Helmer, was just a father substitute. She is not happy with him. Torvald promises to treat her as she would wish him to do. She refuses to stay. He reminds her of her duty as a wife to him and as mother to her children. Ibsen has chosen a very apt title for his play. The title, A Doll's House, also highlights the principal theme of marriage and subservient role of women in society.

WORKS CITED Hudson, W. H. An Introduction to the Study of Literature. New Delhi: Ajit Printers, 1998. Print. Boel, Herman. “Norwegian.” The Language Database. 2008. Herman Boel. 7 Jul 2009 http://www.hermanboel.eu/language-database/lg_norwegian.html.Web. Chandler, Frank W. Aspects of Modern Drama. London: MacMillan Co., 1914. Print. Cummings, Michael J.. “A Doll's House - a Study Guide.” Cummings Study Guides. 2003. 7 Jul 2009 http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/DollHouse.html.Web.

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Drake, David B. “Ibsen's A Doll House.” Explicator, 53.1 (1994). Print. Ford, Karen. “Social Constraints and Painful Growth in A Doll's House” Screen Education 37, 2005. Print. Ibesn, Henrik. A Doll's House. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1961. Print. Johnston, Brian. Text and Supertext in Ibsen's Drama. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989. Print. Kashdan, Joanne G. “A Doll's House.” Masterplots. Rev. 2nd ed. Salem P, 1996. MagillOnLiterature Plus. EBSCOHost. Victoria College/University of Houston Victoria Library, Victoria, TX.05July 2009 http://www.epnet.com.Web. Lord, Henrietta F. and Henrick Ibsen. The Doll's House. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1894.Print. Metzger, Sherri. “A Doll's House (Criticism)”. Answers.com. July 5, 2009 http://www.answers.com/topic/a-doll-s-house-play-8.Web. Templeton, Joan. Ibsen's Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ,1997. Print. Young, Robin. Time's Disinherited Children. Norwich: Norvick Press, 1989. Print.

SOCIAL CENSURE IN THE NOVELS OF UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE Shuchita Chandhok Ambuj Kumar Sharma Healthcare market depicts the experiences of the advanced market economies where there is a clear demarcation of the roles of, and boundaries between, the public and private sectors in delivering services. They have a strong institutional and regulatory arrangements for both market and non-market services. Components of healthcare are facilities where health care is provided, the workforce, therapeutics which includes pharmaceuticals and medical devices, education and research and last but not the least the nance. Globalisation came to India in 1991 wherein the new Central government introduced market friendly structural changes to formally integrate the Indian economy with the global economy. Consequently, a vast network of primary, secondary and tertiary health facilities were rolled out across the country during the period. A number of programmes to control various diseases and immunizations were introduced but failed since the country's public investment in the health system had been too small (less than 1 percent of GDP) to translate the vision into a reality. Even the available funds failed to promise much owing to typical inefciencies in nancing, provisions, organizing and regulation by the public sector. Against this dismal backdrop, neo-liberal policies lead to a rapid proliferation of the private sector in the Indian health market. Commodication of Indian healthcare sector began because of a highly heterogeneous consumer base and unequal ability to pay. Decades of low spending on the health sector has resulted in massive deciencies in health infrastructure and a shortage of qualied healthcare providers. Most public healthcare facilities are poorly equipped, understaffed and badly managed, while the few relatively better ones are overcrowded. Typically public health centres are characterised by poor accessibility, staff absenteeism, shortage of medical supplies and technology, unhygienic environments, and poor quality of services. The relative failure of government healthcare systems has resulted in people turning to private

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providers, who are often unqualied and have little or no formal training. In the very rst novel of Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August, the readers are introduced to Dr. Multani. Agastya goes to meet the private practitioner for he will be able to get a fake medical certicate easily, if required. It is to be noted that Dr. Multani is a very pleasant practitioner and therefore a good businessman too. He is popular which helps him have a thriving practice in Madna though there is a civil hospital also: Multani's room looked so awesomely depressing that he found it amusing. It was like a caricature of a shabby clinic, something out of a TV serial that desired to be realistic. A hospital bed half hidden by a green hospital screen, beside the bed a large cupboard with ointment boxes and strips of pills oozing out of it like toothpaste out of a split tube. On walls one could see the calendars from pharmaceutical corporations. He wondered what it would be like, to be a doctor in a small town and come to a room like this every day, and look into people's mouth and breathe in their exhalations, so what if you earned Rs. 8000 a month for it, he thought, as Multani surely did, surely what was far more important was the quality of your life.” He stopped there, because the argument against him was the contentment on Multani's face (English, August, 223).

A middle class family tends to face life with jest. In the rural areas and smaller towns people still tend to take a simplistic view of life. Without too many aspirations and each member looked after to the best of the income generator's ability, families are more contended than the urban dwellers where materialism drives the members to not only constantly feel dissatised but also look for different ways and means to full their desires. The difference between want and needs fades and they merge into a larger need leading to monetary gains illegally. However, in rural areas people are more power conscious. This private sector enterprise of Dr. Multani will never lack patients and his fan following will continue over the years. Aya, in The Last Burden, suffers from TB. Shyamanand and Urmila are frantic and search for a hospital which would admit aya for treatment because she never takes her medicines when she is at home alone.

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Moreover, they are worried that her constant coughing will be contagious and it will communicate the disease to them also. Despite requesting the doctor at the government hospital to admit her till they can arrange for some other TB clinic does not bode well. Aya turns up at their doorstep next day valiantly ghting the betrayal of the family where she looked after the children Bur and Jamun from childhood to adulthood, stating vehemently “I am not going back to that compost pit.” (88) She laments them for getting her admitted to a hospital which was full of lth and rodents! This is the very rst instant where the reader comes across the reality of the public health system. Next time around, Urmila and Shyamanand bribe and cajole the doctor at the charitable TB hospital where the superintendent doctor assents to enrol Aya at rupees seven hundred a month. Urmila manages to entreat someone at Ministry of Health to bid an intermediary propose to a connection to nudge the doctor not to be irksome to aya. The doctor lls in the registration form. When asked about family both Urmila and Shyamanad are aghast. The doctor tells them that she can be declared a waif else the Welfare will have to be explained “how a patient with family had been registered in a hospital meant for the shelterless” (The Last Burden 92). They do not wish to be notied in case she dies. To get treatment one has to bribe the doctor. If we can reach this level in corruption, can our actions be validated? It is agonising to see that we can stoop so low to earn money. On humanitarian grounds also we do not like to be of help. Caregivers in public health system can be shallow in their Hippocratus oath. Again in the same novel, Jamun comes home announcing that there is a new hospital quite near to Dost Garden, the locality where they stay. Jamun's friend Kuki's mother conrms it and recommends it to them. Shyamanand is treated there for his cerebral thrombosis. Jamun's mother gets operated there for piles. Twice she is taken there after her attacks. Dr. Haldia is a suave man. His perfume always announces his arrival. He listens very attentively to the patient. Inpatients are treated very politely. Though he does not linger more than required, he knows what his patients would like from him and sympathizes adequately. He is a pure businessman. When Jamun's mother is admitted to Dr. Haldia's hospital, there are many instances when Jamun feels that the Doctor's when they go abroad come back with an additional acronym after their names in form of a

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qualication for the Indian masses have no idea what those acronyms represent. For example FIVN (Zur.), DBTP (Lond.), MAKG (Berne) etc. According to Bur “these abridged names could be some American or European centre of learning” (The Last Burden 62). After her heart attack Urmila needs a pacemaker. Jamun and Bur meet Kuki who has turned 'a wily trafcker in medical gear' and sells the device. He is quick to say: “the combination of Dr. Haldia and pacemaker will be extortionate.”(75) Kasturi asks him: “...a pacemaker's truly necessary. Or are we just easy money for Haldia? And for you?” (The Last Burden 75). The inpatient is not going to be treated by the doctor in whose nursing home she is admitted. A specialist would have come in to check her statistics. It will be the specialist who will operate on the patient. So, the family of the patient pays not only for being admitted but for each visit of the specialist also plus the operation would sum up a neat and tidy bill running in thousands. Kuki tells them that “Haldia will ip in the pacemaker in a day or two, as soon as they fancy that your mother is t enough-or when they urgently want some money” (The Last Burden 76) They wanted to know if they can take a second opinion but naturally would not have been possible in Haldia's hospital. It has to be his hospital and his advice. The device manufacturing industry is doing a thriving business. Even though the patient would like to trust the doctor, the patient and his family never feel as if the doctor is not doing business at their expense. The trust factor is poor. In the third novel, The Mammaries of the Welfare State, the outbreak of plague in Madna was a cause for concern and it was blown out of proportion in ministries. The health care department much to its astonishment nds Tetracycline is difcult to come by in Madna as well. Overnight, its dealers and retailers have made it as rare a commodity as statesmanship and probity in public life (115). Plague represents the corruption, rodent's represent the bureaucracy and tetracycline to combat corruption is gone astray. The author in his book The Mammaries of the Welfare State gives us a picture of the state of the Civil Hospital: Mouldy walls, cobwebs, window panes opaque with grime, a dirt-encrusted oor, bedpans strewn all anyhow like a child's playthings, the electric supply as wayward as a politician's ethics. His bed had no linen. Its mattress was stained and stank, its cotton had been dementedly gouged out in parts.

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His side-table was rusted and somehow furry with some kind of fungus. Faecal matter, mouldy bandages, cockroaches, enormous spiders and rats. Rats at every step scurrying up your leg. Heavens down which drain does the crores of rupees allocated to Public Health every year go? (137-8).

Remorse because a t person like him who is not infected with any disease can easily be infected with any communicable disease for that matter and surprise because he is left to wonder if “with a maintenance budget of eleven lakh rupees it was enormously difcult to keep the hospital toilet clean?” (The Mammaries of the Welfare State 139). This apathy makes people avoid the government hospitals like plague. The working class has a right to good medical facilities and clean toilets from the government. However, a common man seems not to understand that once a facility is made available it is the duty of the public to maintain the facilities provided. The lack of hygiene and sanitation comes from within the sensibilities which seem to have disappeared from the common man's dictionary. This is lack of commitment to ownership of public health programmes. Upamanyu Chatterjee wrote his rst novel in 1988 and is not new to the literary circle. However, the problems are the same. The private healthcare sector is growing and ourishing and the government welfare schemes are lagging behind despite numerous commitments made by the political parties and crores of rupees being pumped into the sector. The writer has directly and indirectly censured the apathy shown by the elected representatives and the growing capitalist power. The common man marginalised and a victim of this indifference is paying a heavy price with his health. The onus of good health is not only the responsibility of the government functionaries but basic amenities when provided are the collective responsibility of the common man using it. REFERENCES Chatterjee, Upamanyu. The Last Burden. New Delhi: Penguin Books. ----------------------------. The Mammaries of The Welfare State. New Delhi: Penguin Books.

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Bhandari, L. and Gupta, A. “The Evolving Role of the Government Regulations and Programmes” in Inputs for Health. A.Mahal, B.Debroy and L. Bhandari (ed.) India Health Report 2010. New Delhi: Business Standard Books, 2010. Print. Jonas, Steven, Karen Goldsteen and Raymond L. Goldsteen. Jonas' Introduction to US Healthcare System. 7/E. Srinivasan, R. 'Healthcare in India –Vision 2020: Issues and Prospects'. New Delhi: Planning Commission (2000). Web. January 6, 2015. WHO (World Health Organisation). 2013a. World Health Statistics 2013. Italy: WHO.

ASHIS NANDY'S PSYCHOLOGICAL CONCEPT OF COLONIALISM IN THE INTIMATE ENEMY Madhavi Nikam Ashis Nandy is a clinical Psychologist, Sociologist and a leading thinker and critique of Colonialism in India. He is an internationally renowned Indian Political Psychiatrist and Social theorist too. His works include a variety of topics including the Psychology of culture, public conscience, mass violence as well as dialogues of civilization. Currently, he is a Fellow and Director of the Centre for the study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. At the Edge of Psychology, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopia, The Savage Freud and other Essays in Possible and Retrievable Selves are some of the books written by him. The present article basically explores how Ashis Nandy, trained as a Political Psychiatrist and Sociologist, is intellectually exploring and analyzing his psychological Concept of Colonialism in his well-known book The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (1983).The book is divided into two parts contains two essays. In the rst essay, he depicts the Psychology of colonialism with reference to sex, age, andideology in British India while the second essay deals with thepostcolonial view of India and the west. Here, his psychological concept of Colonialism is concerned both with the colonizer and the colonized which explores the loss and recovery of self under colonialism. Nandy, thus, through these two essays tries to “justify and defend the innocence which confronted modern colonialism and its various psychological offshoots in post-Independent India” (ix). Nandy's concept of colonialism is related with the psychological aspects of conscious and unconscious mind. Just as Sigmund Freud's concept of mind, it is in a sense a state of mind associated both with the colonizers and colonized in British India.Nandy in his rst essay argues that Colonialism is a state of mind which is associated with the Colonizers and the Colonized. So, it is a psychological problem posed at personal level both to the Colonizer and the Colonized in British India. As per the analysis of Nandy: “It is an indigenous process released by external forces. Its

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sources lie deep in the mind of the rulers and the ruled. Perhaps that which begins in the mind of men must also end in the mind of men” (3). This reference reects that it is a matter of colonial consciousness. So it needs to be defeated in ultimately in the mind of men.For him, acolonial consciousness includes the unrealized wish which makes economic and political prots from the colonies.These two are important motives for creating a situation and are identied with the economic gain and political power. For Nandy: The Political economy of colonization is of course important, but the crudity andinsanity of colonialism are Principally expressed in the sphere of Psychology and to the extent the variable used to describe the states of mind under Colonialism have themselves become politicized since the entry of modern Colonialism on the w o r l d s ce n e in t h e s p h e r e o f P o l iti ca l Psychology.(2)

With the above context and the book, Bishnu Mohapatra in his article Colonialism: Remembrance of Things Present: A Short Reflection says that:”Nandy's work signals a signicant shift in which colonialism is seen not only as economic and political domination but primarily as psychological and cultural subjugation”(2). While exploring the psychological aspects of colonialism in the Colonizer and the Colonized, Nandy tries to dene the term Colonialism. He denes it as a “shared culture which may not always begin with the establishment of alien rule in a society and end with the departure of the alien rulers from the colony”. For the support of this denition, here he quotes an example of India and British Raj where the ideology of colonialism is still triumphant in many sectors of life. He quotes the British imperialism because both politics and culture dominance helps to a colonial situation which produces a theory of imperialism to justify itself. It is also because, it justies even after the departure of British Raj from India in 1947, the ideology of colonialism is not yet over in India. So, colonialism is a psychological process deeply rooted in earlier forms of social consciousness in both the colonizers and the colonized and carries a certain cultural baggage in the course of time. The earlier forms of social consciousness are related with both the

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colonizers and the colonized. It is, though, concerned with them; it alsoreects a cultural continuity and carries certain cultural beliefs. Firstly, it includes some codes which both the ruler and the ruled exchange among themselves during and after the colonial period. Such type of codes play the role of exchanging the original cultural structure on both sides and brings at the Centre the subcultures of previously suppressed one while confronting the two cultures. Secondly, the colonial culture presumes a specic style of managing the dissent one. It further perpetuates itself by inducing the colonized, through socio-economic and psychological rewards and punishments, to accept new social norms and cognitive categories in the society. This colonial social setup then reects in the form of oppression and dominance. Such type of social culture of colonialism creates its permanent roots in the minds which results in the form of psychological prots and losses. This type of psychological prots and losses, Nandy says, are dangerous and permanent for the rulers and the ruled. It imposes violence upon its victims that is the ruled/colonized people. For Nandy, thus, colonialism occurs at a moment when external, economic and cultural pressures which produce a psychological necessity to question, to reconstruct and to represent an inner image of self in this easy. It is a psychological state deeply rooted in the social consciousness of both the Colonizer and the Colonized. The colonial dominance of west has affected through sex, age and ideology in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Nandy states that, it was a homology sexual and political dominance. It was not an accidental byproduct of colonial history. It was correlated with oppression. Here, he quotes an example of oppression in American experience with slavery. It has created a disparity between the sex, age and ideology both in the western countries and the Asian continent wherever the colonizers ruled. In the western countries and the culture, it produced a cultural consensus in which political and socio-economic dominance symbolized the dominance of men and masculinity over women and femininity. With this reference, Nandy says that, Frantz Fanon was the rst one in the west who pointed out the psychological dominance of the European middle-class culture in the colonies in his Black Skin, White Masks. Even in India, the political culture of British India was a product of the dialectic between feudalism and British middle class culture. Nandy, here, talks of the macro-politics of colonialism. So, he says the identication

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with the aggressor bound the rulers and the ruled in a dyadic relationship in colonial culture.It reects in the form of change in the consciousness of the people. This is concerned with the different concepts of polarities. During the early years of British rule in India the homology between sexual and political dominance was not central to the colonial culture but when the raj won the battle. The colonialism started in India properly. Then, started the real disparity between the homology of the masculinity and the femininity in India. Nandy here gives a fascinating analysis of the masculinization aspects of Indian culture and a femininization of the hyper-masculinity of the colonizing culture. In this context, he states that: The Raj saw Indians as crypto-barbarians who needed to further civilize themselves. It saw British rule as an agent of progress and as a mission…British idea of the material races-the hyper-masculine, manifestly courageous, superbly loyal Indian castes and subcultures mirroring the British middle-class sexual stereotypes. (7)

The concepts like Purusatva which is the essence of masculinity, Naritvaas the essence of femininity and Klibatva. All these three concepts were central to colonial India. The polarities dened by masculinity and femininity were supplanted in the colonial culture of politics. With this context Nandy gives an example of Tagore's novels: “Tagore had dealt with the same process of cultural change in his novel Gora, probably modeled on the same real life gure and with a compatible political message”(08). Colonialism was not seen as an absolute evil in India says Nandy. It has created superior forms of political and economic organization which defeated Indians in power-politics. In his analysis of colonialism in India, Nandy further states that it is also a subsidiary homology between childhood and the state of being colonized. It has drawn a new parallel between primitivism and childhood because it looked like a blank slate on which the adults have rights to write their moral codes. It indicates that the colonizers were the adults and the colonized were the child. So, it is said that the colonialism is necessary for some societies in the world. The colonizers consider that they are having sole rights and working for the upliftment of the under-privileged of the world.The British ideology of colonialism in India has further formed a

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disjunction between India's past and it's present.The civilized India in the bygone age is dead for Nandy. The present India is only related to its history. It is said that Max Muller did not allow is students to visit India because the India of his mind was dead. While discussing psychological concept of colonialism in India, Nandy th has analysed the leading 19 century Indian thinkers who tried to reform the Hindu. These thinkers were Raja Ram Mohan Roy, M. M. Dutt, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Swami DayanandSaraswati, Swami Vivekanand, Sri Aurobindo and Pandit Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar. He has also analyzed the Life and works of some Anglo-Indian writers like Rudyard Kipling and George Orwell and some English men and women who adopted the Gandian way of life. His analysis of Gandhi is intellectual and brilliant. While analyzing the Gandhian ideology, he states that, the comparison between British ideology and Gandhian ideology which cut the cultural barriers between Briton and India, and Christianity and Hindusim. Gandhiji always tried to be a living symbol of the other west. He implicitly dened his ultimate goal to liberate the British from the history and psychology of British Colonialism in India. The moral and cultural superiority of the oppressed was not an empty slogan to him.Gandhiji, thus, wanted to liberate the British as much as he wanted to liberate Indians from the British Raj. Nandy's exploration of psychological contours is seen in the writing of Octave Mannoni's Prospero and Caliban, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized. Through these writer's writing we understand something about the interpersonal pattern which constituted the colonical situation, particularly in Africa. So, Colonialism as a psychological process cannot but endorse the principle of isomorphic oppressions which restates for the era of the psychological man the ancient wisdom implied in New Testament and also perhaps in Sauptik Parva of the Mahabharata. Nandy, in his second essay The Uncolonized Mind, analyses Rudyard Kipling's ambivalence towards India because he was the hero, loyal to western civilization and the Indianized Westerner who hated the west within him. He also talks about the Hindus. He talks about the conict that whether the Hindus are spiritual or hypocritical and materialists. The second essay, thus, deals with the post-colonial view of India and the West. Nandy, thus, as a clinical psychologist and sociologist, provided his

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views about the psychology of colonialism in his rst easy The Intimate Enemy. His proposition of colonialism is a matter of consciousness and needs to be defeated ultimately in the minds of men. He tried to explore two major psychological categories derived from biological differences which gave structure to the ideology of colonialism in India under British rule. It also shows how these are related with the colonial culture to the subject community, and ensured the survival of colonialism in themind of men. It represents certain cultural continuity and carries a cultural baggage. Though he states that colonialism is a psychological state but says that the liberation had to begin from the colonized and end with the colonizers. Thus Nandy's psychological concept of colonialism is deeply concerned with both the colonizer and colonized in this essay. He argues that, colonialism damaged both colonized and colonizing societies, and Indian anti-imperialism found in Gandhi's counter modernity a new language of dissent built on the lifestyle, values, and psychology of everyday life in India and on dissenting Western voices.

WORKS CITED Nandy, Ashis, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of self under Colonialism, New Delhi: Oxford University press, 2010. Mohapatra, N. Bishn, Colonialism: Remembrance of Things Present: A Short Reflection,

RABINDRANATH TAGORE: A MYSTIC POET Kamta Prasad Saroj Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is the most eminent Bengali renaissance poet, philosopher, essayist, critic, composer and educator who dreamt of a harmony of universal humanity among the people of different origin through freedom of mind and spiritual sovereignty. He became the rst-ever Asian writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize in 1913 for translated version of his cycle of song-poems, Gitanjali. His literary works transcend race, gender, religion, politics and geographic territory. From Love to Nature, from social questions to religion and mysticism were revealed in most themes of his work. He wondered with his sensitivity the meaning of life and the universe. Tagore had reected on the inner essence of Reality in many poems. For him, it was of the highest importance that people being able to live, and reason, in freedom. Nothing, perhaps expresses his values as clearly as a poem in Gitanjali: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of the truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into everwidening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.(51)

The element of mysticism is distinctly present in the religious writings of Tagore. He was considerably inuenced by the thoughts and ways of life of different mystics like Kabir, Guru Nanak, Ravidas, the 'Bauls' and the Su saints. It was as a young man that Tagore had “his rst deeply felt spiritual experience which burst upon him as a vision so vivid and authentic that its impression lasted all his life” (Kripalani, 49).

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On that very day of his extraordinary experience he wrote his famous poem 'Nirjharer Swapnabhanga' ('The Fountain Awakes'). “When I was eighteen, a sudden spring breeze of religious experience for the rst time came to my life and passed away leaving in my memory a direct message of spiritual reality. The waterfall, whose spirit lay dormant in its ice bound isolation was touched by the sun, and bursting into a cataract of freedom, it found its nality in an unending sacrice in a continual union with the sea” (The Religion of Man, 94). Describing this experience, Tagore wrote, “one day while I stood watching at early dawn the sun sending out its rays behind the trees, I suddenly felt as if some ancient mist, had in a moment lifted from my sight and the morning light on the face of the world revealed an inner radiance of joy. That which was memorable in this experience was its human message, the sudden expansion of consciousness in the super-personal world of man” (The Religion of Man, 58).This kind of mystic experience has been described insight into the depths of truth. It is an illumination, a spiritual revelation full of signicance and meaning. The mystic experience can only be felt or realized within. It dees expression, it is ineffable and incommunicable. Mysticism may be considered in two distinct stages. Firstly and negatively, it is a sense of darkness impenetrable to the light of intellect, of a profound mystery – of something enigmatic and inscrutable –surrounding our life. Though negative in its relation to the intellect, it has a more or less positive signicance, too; for the sense of mysterious implies the existence of something outside the domain of the sense and reason, however vaguely that existence may be felt. The experience of the darkness of mysterious is different in kind from the blindness of ignorance. Secondly and positively, mysticism is the experience of a light illuminating the secret depths of being; a revelation within the spirit of man, of a higher order of reality than the phenomenal and a higher value of life than the animal. In other words mysticism is the intuitive experience of a spiritual reality and the discovery of a spiritual value. Mysticism in its metaphysical aspect implies the spiritual awareness of the ultimate reality and the realization of ultimate values. In Tagore's poetry we nd the most characteristic expression of the poetic moods of a mystic. Through heredity and upbringing as well as by virtue of his individual genius, he came to occupy a place with the rare class of poets who are also

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sages. Vedic mysticism prepared the way for the rise of the other forms of mysticism that sprang up in India. Whatsoever may be the grand form of Vedanta but as far as the term Vendantic mysticism is considered, it denotes only the tradition of Acharya Shankar and his predecessors. Vedantic mysticism is the symbolic interpretation of the relation of Supreme Being (Braham) and soul (atman). Before we discuss vedantic mysticism, rst of all we should focus on Vedanta only. Before Badrayana the names of some Acharyas have been mentioned in Brahmsutra.These are Badari, Karshnajini, Atreya, Auddulomi, Ashmrathya, Kashvritritsna, Jaimaini & Kashyap etc”(Singh, 508). The seed of monism is found in the concept of these Acharyas but is not in the well-ordered form. Before Shankar those Acharyas who propounded the monistic theory in the properly arranged form are Bodhayana, Grihdevkapardi, Bhartihari & Brahmdutt, Gaudpad and Govindpad. Govindpad was the disciple of Gaudpad and Acharya Shankar was the disciple of Govindpad. Though controversial, the birth of Acharya Shankar is considered in year of 788 A.D. and his death in the year 820 A.D. In the modern researches, some of the scholars consider the time of Acharya Shankar 2500 years ago. Adi Shankaracharya Vedic Shodh Sansthan in Varanasi which has done researches on Acharya Shankar's personality & his works published a conference book.The collection of the writings of many scholars, entitled Shankarvatarana in 2003 A.D. also adheres this concept. The roots of Vedanta are found in Vedic texts, Nasdiya Sukta, Purushua Sukta, Vishvedeva sukta etc. of Rigveda are glaring examples in which the concept Monism is found. Belief in many gods is called polytheism. Vedas are often wrongly found to be polytheistic. But there is a peculiarity in Vedic thought that moves this doubtfulness. Each of many gods when praised is extolled by the hymn as the Supreme God, Creator of the universe and the Lord of all gods. “Maxmuller thinks therefore, that polytheism is not an appropriate name for such a belief and he coins a new word henotheism, to signify this” (quoted in Singh, 511). Thus we can assume that different gods are only manifestations of one underlying reality. The one reality is called by the …… in different ways: Agni, Yama, Matrisva (Ekam sad vipra bahudha vadanti ……). “It was possible therefore to look upon each deity as the Supreme” (Chaterjee & Dutta, 352). According to many writers there is a development noticeable in Vedic

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thought and they believe that the idea of God gradually developed from polytheism through henotheism ultimately to monotheism, i.e. belief in one god. This hypothesis may be true. But henotheism is not a mere transitional phenomenon; even in its more developed form. Indian monotheism retains the belief that though God is one. He has various manifestations on the many gods, anyone of which may be worshipped as a form of Supreme Deity. Even today we have in Hinduism the divergent cults Shainvaism, Vaishnavism etc. Almost everyone is based on a philosophy of one Supreme God - perhaps even one all inclusive reality. “Indian monotheism in its living forms, from the Vedic age till now, has believed in the unity of the gods in God than denial of gods for God. Hence Indian monotheism has a peculiarity which distinguishes it from the Christian or the Islam. “This is a persistent feature of orthodox Indian faith throughout, not a mere passing phase of the Vedic times” (Chaterjee & Dutta, 352-353). The Omnipresence & Omnipotence of God has been described in XI chapter of Bhagvadgita. Anekramvaktramnayamanekadbhutdarshanam Anekdivyabharanamdivyabharanam divyanekodyutayudham

Bhagvadgita 10/11 Divyamalmalyambardharam divyagandhanulepnam Sarvascharyamayam devamanantam visvtomukham

Bhagvadgita 11/11 Divi suryasahashrasya bhavedyugpaduthita Yadi bhah sadrishi sa syadbhasastasya mahatmaanah

Bhagvadgita 12/11 It means at that time Arjun saw an unlimited number of face, eye & astonishing sights. This form was decorated with divine ornaments, raising divine weapons. It was wearing divine garlands and robes and scented with divine fragrance. Everything was astonishing, gleaming, innite and omnipresent. If thousands of Sun is risen jointly then their light also can't

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compare itself with that universal form. Greatly inspired by the 'Bauls', Tagore has described them in The Religion of Man as “a popular sect of Bengal, who have no images, temples, scriptures, or ceremonials, who declare in their songs the divinity of man, and express for him an intense feeling of love”(12). It is this ideal of the 'Bauls' that helped Tagore to formulate his ideal of Humanism. Through all his songs and poems Tagore sings of an Innite Being who seeks his selfrealization through the human personality. But the uniqueness of Tagore lies in the reconciliation of sensuous and super sensuous experiences through a synthesis of mystic and humanistic outlook as expressed through the relation of love. Unlike other mystics whose experiences and aims are wholly transcendental and spiritual, Tagore's spiritual realization of divine love does not transcend this world but is very much rooted to the human world. The source of his humanist outlook is neither emotion nor intellect but rather the fusion of these two. Thus in Tagore we nd the humanitarian view of mysticism. Despite his strong Vedantic foundation and emotional afliation with medieval mystics, Tagore is uniquely saturated with love for life and nature. He strongly felt that the Creator as his cosmic beloved delights to see Creation through his eyes to witness eternal harmony. Gurudev, as Tagore was called, is profoundly grounded in the reality of life and never in the negation of life. “No, I will never shut the doors of my senses. The delights of sight and hearing and touch will bear thy delight.” He felt the embrace of freedom in thousand bonds of delight and hence did not want deliverance through renunciation of joyful engagements with life. An intense experience of pantheism is the outcome of his cosmic romance. “The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.” He feels his limbs are made glorious by touch of this world. Mysticism has been variously dened and described. One of the simplest would be “a consciousness of the beyond, of an unseen over and above seen” (Sharma 1). The only thing which is to remember is that the beyond is also within, the beyond in our midst. There are powers within and behind of which we are not normally aware.The passion for self exceeding in our genes infests us with an incurable restlessness. Unless we touch the intangible, see the invisible, hear the inaudible, a sense of something missing haunts our lives. Mysticism with its sense of wholeness and larger

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relationship, the larger reality of man is the only remedy. In Indian Literature mysticism is found in Vedic literature especially in Upanishads: Om purnmadah Purnamidam purnatpurnpurnamuduchyate Purnasaya Purnamadaya purnamedvavshishayate         (Isha – Shatipaath) Atmanah rathinam viddhi sharirah rathamevatu Buddhim tu sarithim viddhi manah pragrahmev ch   (Kath. 1/3/3) Dva suparna sayuja sakhaya Samanam vriksham parikhsvajate Tayoranyah pippalam pippalam svadvattya Nshnnyo abhichakashiti (Mundaka.3/1/1)

The eternal blissful Supreme Being is Absolute from every viewpoint; this world is also Absolute because that Absolute entity is due to that Absolute entity. From Absolute, Absolute is reduced then also Absolute remains. Consider jeevatma as a chariot rider and body as a chariot, consider intelligence as a chariot driver and mind as bridle. Simultaneous inhabitants and mutual friendly two birds (God and soul)exist taking the shelter of same tree with taste of the results of deeds whether weal or woe and another only observes without eating it. The great philosopher Shankar has also made the, use of symbolic interpretation in his writings such as Vivek chudamani and Aparokshanubhuti to express his renderings: Prabthsutragrathitam shariram. Prayaatu Va tishthatu goriv srak . Na tatpunah pashyati tattvetta. Nandatamani brhmani leenvrttih. (Vivek.4/17)

As a cow does not pay attention when garland falls from her neck

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similarly a metaphysicist does not care about the body which is destiny bound remains and subdued into Supreme Being. The name of weaver saint Kabir (1398- 1518 A.D.) is the most signicant among the medieval mystic poets. Although great critic of Hindi literature Acharya Pt. Ram Chandra Shukla has not considered Kabir as a poet but another great critic of Hindi literature Acharya Pt. Hazari Prasad Dwivedi considers Kabir as a great poet. Acharya Shukla has included only the three poets in his famous critical rendering namely, Jayasi, Sur & Tulsi. Although Jayasi was also a mystic poet of Su origin but he adopted the epic style in his literary work known as Padmavat. Due to this reason Acharya Shukla could not neglect him. As far as the writings of Kabir are concerned, which is divided into three parts: Sakhi, Sabad and Ramaini? Sakhi has been written in doha verse and on the other hand Sabad and Ramaini have been written into small pieces of poetry known as Pada. The study of Kabir is very important from the view point of the study of Tagore because the inuence of Kabir on Tagore is quite evident because the problems the country faced during the time of Kabir were Hindu and Muslim split, caste prejudices among Hindus and to some extent among Muslims, religious bitterness on the question of mode of worship, idol worship etc. Tagore, as a writer was alive to all these problems as keenly as to the question of political freedom of the country. He realized the fact that he had to don the mantle of a bard to spread Universal values through his wrtings. It was therefore natural that he was irresistible drawn towards Kabir. Actually the evaluation of Kabir by Acharya Shukla, Dr. Shyam Sunder Das and Dr. Ram Kumar Verma is not justied. Almost all the poets of the Nirgun stream of the Bhakti Movement of the Hindi Poetry were mystics. Nirgun Stream itself was divided into two branches gnanshrayi & Premashrayi. The rst was enlightenment oriented and other was love oriented. Kabir and Malik Mohammad Jayasi were the representative poets of each branch. Not only in India but concept of mysticism is also found in western literature also. Famous German poet Goethe, English poets such as William Blake and William Wordsworth were the mystic poets. This world-afrming pantheism is not oblivious of innitude where there is neither day nor night, form nor colour, and not even a single word. This realisation of the dualism of the non-dual Being made him sing, “Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well.”This loving unication of the

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transcendental non-dual with the mystic dual is the hallmark of his poetic experience. “I dive down into the ocean of forms hoping to gain the perfect pearl of the formless.” This diving pilgrimage, although poetic, is a painful process. But the poet enjoys the same as it puries him and brings him closer to the cosmic beloved and facilitates surrender. That is why he prays, “Give me the strength to raise my mind high above daily tries. And give me the strength to surrender my strength to thy will with love.”His occasional deviation from the divine path due to worldly distractions gives birth to pangs, “That I want thee, only thee — let my heart repeat without end.” He knows from the heart of hearts that all worldly desires are empty to the core. Hence to maintain the eternal communion with the Innite, he has to rise above the gravitational pull of nitude.

WORKS CITED Chatterjee, Satishchandra & Dutta, Dhirendranath. Indian Philosophy. Kolkata: University of Calcutta, 1984. Print. Collection of Nine Upanishads. Gorakhpur: Gita Press, 2012. Print. Krishna Kripalani, Tagore: A Life. London: Oxford University Publication, 1961. Print. Shankaracharya.Vivek Chudaman. Gorakhpur: Gita Press, 2012. Print. Singh, Dr. B.N. Indian Philosophy. Varanasi: Students Friends Company, 1993. Print. Bhagvadgita (ed). Swami Prabhupad. Mumbai: Bhakti Vadant Trust, 1983. Print. Sharma, T. R. Essays on Rabindranath Tagore. Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan, 1987. Print. Tagore, Rabindranath. The Religion of Man. London: Allen & Unwin, 1931.Print. ---------------------------. Creative Unity. Calcutta: Vishwa Bharati, 1962.Print.

FROM CONVENTIONS TO INDIVIDUALITY IN SHASHI DESHPANDE'S ROOTS AND SHADOWS: A STUDY 

Shrutimita Mehta

Shashi Deshpande has made an endeavor to portray the helplessness, loneliness and the basic anxieties of women in all her works. Her women are alienated from their own selves due to the tremendous suppressive forces of the male chauvinistic society. In fact they are forced to remain conned to their own space without doing anything to improve their lot. This silence of theirs is mistaken by men as their contentment. Deshpande makes her women characters break this silence and speak for themselves. Her women are modern, educated and sensible enough to understand their social and familial responsibilities as well as have an awareness of their own existence. She presents in her novels modern women who do not want to remain hidden behind the shadows of their fathers, brothers or their husbands. They want to have an identity of their own. They have become aware of their potential and have thus adorned the mantle of self- emancipation. As a writer Deshpande dwells on the concerns of women that help them ght against the suffocating environment around them. G.S. Amur observes that a woman's struggle in the Indian society “to nd and preserve her identity as a wife, mother and most important of all, as human being is Shashi Deshpande's major concern as a creative writer, and this appears in all her important stories.”1 Roots and Shadows is the rst novel written by her. Adjudged as the best Indian novel of 1982-83, it received the Thirumal Rangamal Prize In this work Shashi Deshpande portrays the life of a woman who makes an attempt to act against the dominance that women are subject to at the domestic level. She portrays the break-up of a middle- class orthodox Brahmin joint family which had been held together by the money and authority of an old aunt (Akka), a childless widow. The novel begins with the protagonist Indu's return to her ancestral house on the call of Akka, who is on her death- bed. When she dies, she leaves all her money to Indu. Indu, a rebel, left home as a teenager to study in a big city, and is now a journalist. She has married Jayant, the man of her choice, a man belonging to a

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different caste, contrary to the wishes of her orthodox family.To attain freedom from the bondage of her parental family, she seeks marriage as an alternative. She thinks that by tting herself in a new role of a wife she will be able to attain that freedom. Once married, she realizes that the so- called freedom she has achieved is not real; she has only been able to exchange the orthodoxy of the villagehome for the conventions of the "smart young set" of the city. She now belongs to a world which is as bad if not worse. It is a 'success-oriented' society where one has to sacrice one's principles in order to survive well. She has come back after more than twelve years of absence and as she attempts to take charge of her legacy, she comes to realize the strength and the resilience of the village women she had previously dismissed as weak. Indu, the modern Indian woman is caught up in the conict between her family and her profession. She also feels she is torn up between the demands of her own aspirations and the pressures of the society. She tries to run from one thing to another, only to nd the futility of everything. She is unable to nd out where true happiness lies, and is also unable to nd out what she really wants in life. Finally it is the situation into which she is thrown that helps her understand what life is actually all about and helps her take a positive look at it. She tries to achieve the ideals of detachment and freedom.“She tries to listen to the voice of her conscience and revolts. But unfortunately in all her efforts, she fails miserably either due to the impact of the culture and tradition, or fear of stigma, or timidity or all these combined together.”2 Indu's professional life is equally frustrating. As a journalist she has to keep on compromising by writing deceitful stories to keep up the reader's interest. “Fleeing the familial trap of tradition and religiosity she had landed herself into another: the almost pathological middle-class compulsions to be upwardly mobile in a materialistic society, to be moneyed, and a continuous obeisance to the emerging middle-class mantra 3 of success” opines Parag Moni. She is on the threshold of a changing social order and also attached to her past in a manner which is beyond her control. Many of Deshpande's women and almost all the protagonists are “caught in such interstitial, conict-ridden spaces between indigenous traditions and a liberal bourgeois modernity, simultaneously appreciating and critiquing both. Indu is probably the most forceful, articulate and the most rebellious of the protagonists, and she is also the youngest and the most professionally

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successful of them.” states Saiket Majumdar. Though Indu had escaped from the drudgery of her typically orthodox family by marrying Jayant, she had not been able to nd the freedom she had been running after, even with him, in his house. She had felt as if she had moved from one trap to another. It is while talking to Naren, old uncle's grandson about the life she led that the 'sense of futility, of utter vacuity' that she had experienced often, came back to her. She tells him that the life which she led with him was full of sham. She knows that the life that she is leading is not that for which she had run from her home. She is disgusted and unhappy with her lot. Even Naren feels that the life she is leading has 'degenerated' her. Anita Singh rightly observes: “marriage, the promised end in a traditional society, in feminist ction becomes only another enclosure that restricts the movement towards a perception of herself as an independent human being and not buffeted by the circumstances or the social prescriptions.”5 All her life, Indu has never felt complete in herself. Even at her house where she has come back after so many years, she has the feeling “if only Jayant were here”. She has become dependant on others to such an extent that it is difcult for her to manage life alone. She painfully acknowledges to herself her sorrow: “This is my real sorrow. That I can never be complete in myself. Until I met Jayant, I had known it…that there was, somewhere outside me, a part of me without which I remained incomplete. Then I met Jayant. And lost the ability to be alone.” (31)6 Indu marries Jayant and leaves her house in order to be independent and complete but realizes the futility of her decisions soon enough. Her marriage has brought to the fore certain aspects of her personality that were hidden. She notes that marriage has taught her many lessons. 'Indu also faces a crisis in her marital relationship and has to traverse the arduous and 7 thorny road of self-exploration before she is at peace with herself.' observe Mukta Atrey and Vinay Kirpal. She becomes the passive and submissive wife and looses the capability of leading her life on her own terms. Although Indu is a liberated woman, in her married life, she too is unassertive like any other wife in an arranged marriage. Indu has become a passive, submissive wife who has given up to the expectations of a dominating husband. Atrey and Kirpal state: “It is obvious that she has internalized the patriarchal notion that a man is superior to a woman and 8 that she is dened in his terms.” Indu asks herself in one of her internal

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monologues 'Am I not on my way to become an ideal woman? A woman who sheds her 'I', who loses her identity in her husband's?'(49) In her marriage with Jayant, Indu has compromised on several issues because she thought it was necessary to adjust if you were in love: “She has modeled her lifestyle and her values to suit him, though he has never directly asked her to do so. She has even compromised her writing, substituting honesty with sycophantic dishonesty, just because Jayant had 9 thought that was the order of the day.” “The story of Deshpande's protagonists always begins at a critical point where despite total freedom and sometimes total surrender to the expectations of their husbands they are discontented and unhappy. Therefore they wish to redene themselves”10 observe Mukta Atrey and Vinay Kirpal. Inspite of being educated and aware Indu is incapable of visualizing her independent identity. She has internalized the rules laid down by the society in such a manner that she has become a typical submissive Indian woman. In order to be happy she has to forcefully make an attempt to free herself from these self-imposed fetters. She comes to a realization of her own identity at her ancestral home. It is at here that she discovers what her roots are - as an independent woman, an individual and a writer, and what her shadows are - a daughter, a wife and a commercial writer. She understands that there is no point indulging in self pity. She confronts the reality that there was a need to express and assert herself and is thus successful in identifying her position in the society as an individual, as Indu. As far as her personal happiness was concerned, she had realized she would be able to achieve it only if she went back to her own house-the house where she and Jayant lived. She knew now that there was no point running after shadows of the past. She had to move forward and hold on strongly to her roots. Her roots, those are there in her future with Jayant. She knew now that she had to begin life afresh, treat marriage as a bond and not as a trap. She knew now that it was she who had made her love for Jayant a 'restricting bond.' The only thing that she wanted now was her home “Yes, home. The one I lived in with Jayant. That was my only home.” (187) “Shashi Deshpande's heroines in spite of their conict with traditions wish to live within the framework of family relationships. Intelligent and well aware they realize the importance of marriage but they are also aware of 11 their own individuality. Thus they strive to create a balance.” She had also

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decided that she would give up commercial writing and would now write only for her satisfaction. S.P. Swain observes: “Through the character of Indu, Deshpande has registered her awareness of the arrest to feminine development brought about by an economic system given to sheer materialistic happiness and inhabited by philistines like Jayant, and a patriarchal family structure which produce in women dependency, insecurity, lack of autonomy, and an incomplete sense of their identity. Indu lives to see life with the possibilities of growth; she has discovered the meaning of life in her journey to 12 individuation.” Elaine Showalter points to the three phases in the growth of feminist tradition. They are 'Limitation, protest and self-discovery.' Deshpande, through Indu's character highlights these three phases of feminism. She succeeds in portraying vividly the inner turmoil of a modern educated woman who has been forced to survive as per the norms set by a conservative Hindu family: “Indu's travails are an assertion of the self beyond the restrictive structures of familial and social norms. Yet it cannot be a clean cut from the past. Located as the Indian woman is, at the conuence of a new awakening and her long history of being culturally and politically determined as a preserver and sustainer of cultural and traditional norms, the past will nd a way to assert itself. It is in one's ability to accommodate the lived past with the living realities that could perhaps facilitate a reconstitution of the feminine self in India.”13 Deshpande has highlighted perfectly the anguish of a female who hates to t in the set- up that has existed in the society since centuries. Her revolt and the aftermath resulting in a confused and broken personality suggest how difcult it is for a woman to try to set herself apart from the set conventions. However, she is not affected because of the stilting pressures of the orthodox society and emerges victorious and fully aware of her own individuality.

REFERENCES 1

2

Amur, G.S. “Preface” to Shashi Deshpande's The Legacy and Other Stories, Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1978, p. 10. Sandhu, Sarabjit. 'The Image of Woman in Roots and Shadows, (ed.) R. K

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3

4

5

6

7

8 9 10 11

12

13

Dhawan: Prestige Books, 1995, p. 103. Sharma, Parag Moni. 'Self as Contestation in Roots and Shadows,' Writing Difference: The Novels of Shashi Deshpande, (ed.) Chanchala K. Naik; Pencraft, 2005, p. 121. Majumdar, Saiket. 'Aesthetics of Subjectivity', Ethics of Otherness: The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, Postcolonial Text, Vol 1, No 2 Rutgers University, http://www.postcolonial.org/, 2005. Singh, Anita. Shashi Deshpande - A Critical Spectrum, (ed.) T.M.J. Indra Mohan; Atlantic, 2004, p. 83. Deshpande, Shashi. Roots and Shadows; New Delhi, Orient Longman (Disha Books), 1983 (All subsequent parenthetical textual references are from this edition.) Atrey, Mukta and Kirpal, Vinay. 'Women as Wives' Shashi Deshpande: A Feminist Study of her Fiction; B.R Publishing Corporation, 1998, p. 25. Ibid., p. 26 Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 37. Sinha, Urvashi and Jandial, Gur Pyari. 'Marriage and Sexuality in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande', Shashi Deshpande - A Critical Spectrum, (ed.) T.M.J. Indra Mohan; Atlantic, 2004, p. 172. Swain, S.P. 'Root and Shadows: A feminist Study', The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, (ed.) R.S Pathak; Creative Books, 1998, p. 87. Sharma, Parag Moni. 'Self as Contestation in 'Roots and Shadows', Writing Difference: The Novels of Shashi Deshpande, (ed.) Chanchala K. Naik; Pencraft, 2005, p. 126.

RACIAL CONCERNS IN SHAKESPEARE'S THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Sandeep Kumar Dubey The Merchant of Venice is play that has a great number of issues that are either directly or indirectly related to postcolonial theory. This play is steeped in a spirit that invites postcolonial response. An important postcolonial issue in The Merchant is the issue of race. From the beginning to the end of the play, we see that Shylock, the Jew, is treated very badly by almost every Christian character. The character of Shylock is very signicant due to racial grounds. Victor L. Cahn points out, “The title character of this work is not the gure of greatest interest. Indeed, during most productions, Antonio fades from audience concern, and Shylock dominates the action the way he has dominated centuries of criticism” (599). The Christians of Venice think of him as an inferior human being. They treat him as a racial “other”. Antonio, the title gure of the play is an occidental who has Eurocentric attitude. In the course of the play, we see that Shylock has been treated by Antonio as a 'racial degenerate', due to his racial “otherness.” He has been treated as an inferior human being. Antonio behaves towards Shylock like a Eurocentric colonizer would have behaved. It becomes clear that the relationship between Antonio and Shylock can be compared with the relationship between an oppressor and oppressed. Shylock hates Antonio because the latter hates him because of his Jewish race. Stopford A. Brooke comments, “He is not only Shylock, he is a Jew. He hates Antonio, for he is a Christian. The sorrows of his race, the injustice done to his people for ages are in his heart, and he adds them to his personal hatred” (140). Antonio seems to be a racist. He seems to believe that the Jew Shylock is a stereotyped Oriental gure who does not deserve respect and equality; rather he is to be despised due to his racial degeneracy. Commenting on race as an issue, John McLeod highlights, “Racism is the ideology that upholds the discrimination against certain people on the grounds of perceived racial difference and claims these constructions of racial identity are true or natural” (110-11). Antonio seems to be guided by Eurocentric ideology that advocates the superiority of Western race.

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The Christian characters of this play seem to believe that Jewish race is not trust worthy. They believe in Oriental stereotyping of a Jew. John McLeod elaborates, “Oriental stereotypes xed typical weaknesses as (amongst other) cowardliness, laziness, unrest, worthiness, ckleness, laxity, violence and lust. Oriental peoples were often considered as possessing a tenuous moral sense and the readiness to indulge themselves in the more dubious aspects of human behaviour” (46). Shylock is never loved by the Christians of Venice. Being a Jew, he is always humiliated. He is hated. He is discarded. Sometimes when Christians need his money they atter him, but he understands that clearly. What he wants, is love, unconditional love. He wants their trust, he wants their respect but he never gets these things. He is acutely hurt by the racial discrimination that is prevalent in the Venetian society. He unlocks his heart and asserts: ….. I am Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions” Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge, If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (III.i. 42-57)

This speech of Shylock seems to be his noble appeal for racial equality. About this speech of the Jew, Stopford A. Brooke opines, “Shylock appeals to humanity itself against the vast injustice meted out to his race”(140).He further writes , “This is his challenge to humanity, and erce as it is, it stirs out pity and our sense of Justice”( 141). Hazlitt remarks, “He becomes a half-favourite with the philosophical part of the audience, who are disposed to think that Jewish revenge is at least as good as Christian injuries”( 175) Here we see that Shylock speaks as the representative of his people, voicing

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the wrongs, the insult, the humiliation visited upon them. It seems that Shakespeare has given him a touch of tenderness. He seems to be a sufferer. His anger and frustration can be seen as his response to Venice and its ill treatment of him. Shylock suffers because he is a Jew in a Christian country. He is a stranger by temperament and race. Elmer Edgar Stoll comments, “A miser, a money-lender, a Jew,— all three had from time immemorial been objects of popular detestation and ridicule whether in life or on the stage” (269.) Analysing the character of Shylock, John Dover Wilson comments that Shylock is, “the inevitable product of centuries of racial presecution”(114). M. M. Mahood mentions, “Shakespeare's play can be seen as the culmination of a series of extant plays about grasping Jews which are all in one way or another critical towards the assumed moral superiority of Christians”(21). Thus, Shylock wants to take revenge upon Antonio. He had suffered in the past due to Antonio and now it is Antonio's turn to suffer. In a way we can say that he wants to retaliate for the wrongs done to him and his people. During the trial scene, we see that Shylock charges the Christians of Venice of being racist. He says to the Duke: . . . You have among you many a purchased slave, Which, like your assess and your dogs and mules, You use in abject and in slavish parts Because you bought them. Shall I say to you, 'Let them be free! Marry them to your heirs! Why sweat they under burdens? Let their beds Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates Be seasoned with such viands'? You will answer, 'The slaves are ours'. So do I answer you., The pound of esh which I demand of him Is dearly bought; 'tis mine, and I will have it. . . . (IV.i. 90-100)

Here it becomes clear that Shylock hates the Venetian Christians as they have colonial mindset. They purchase slaves (blacks) from African countries and employ them to their services. They exploit them for their pleasure. They purchase them as these slaves are no human beings, rather they are commodities. The Venetian Christians believe in their racial superiority over these slaves and so they think that they have the right to

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behave in whatever way they like with these slaves. About Shylock's anticolonial attitude, M.M. Mahood opines, “Ostensibly the argument is 'you own men, why should I not own a man's esh?' but we recognize and can scarcely fail to appreciate the Jew's real targets; the racial exclusiveness which denied human rights to non-Christian captives, and the greed which exploited their labour” (37).Thus we see that Shylock seems to give back to the Venetian Christians what they deserve. In the entire course of the play, we see that Antonio seems to be an antiSemite. He hates Shylock because the latter is a Jew. Ruth Nevo writes: “Shakespeare may not have been an anti-Semite, but Antonio certainly is undisputedly, and by self-confession”(128). About the play, Marion Wynne-Davies writes, “The Merchant of Venice is a play about the way in which a visible exterior may conceal a different and more valuable interior, about the way in which prejudice produces the marginalization and persecution of certain racial and religious groups, and about the way in which harmony and redemption might be engineered”(369). Apart from Antonio, other Christian characters in the play, too, treat Shylock as an inferior human being. They all seem to believe in colonial ideology. Bassanio, like Antonio, nourishes hatred towards the Jew. He too, does not trust Shylock as the latter belongs to Jewish race and the Hebrew religion. Regarding the proposed bond by Shylock, Bassanio expresses alarm and says to Antonio: “I like not fair terms and a villain's mind”. (I. iii. 172) He further addresses Shylock as an, “unfeeling man” (IV, i. 63) and a, “cruel devil” (IV. i. 213). We see that Solanio too, treats Shylock in the same manner. He addresses Shylock as, “The Villain Jew” (II.viii.4), and, “the dog Jew” (II. viii. 14). It seems that the phase “dog Jew” suggests the antagonism the Venetians bear against Shylock. Later in the play, we see him comparing Shylock with the Devil. While talking to Salarino, he says: Let me say 'amen' betimes, lest the devil cross my prayer, For here he comes in the likeness of a Jew. (III.i. 17-18)

Later on, Solanio says about Shylock: It is the most impenetrable cur That ever kept with men. (III.iii. 18-19)

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Gratiano addresses Shylock as, “harsh Jew” (IV.i.123), and as an, “in execrable dog” (IV.i. 128). He thinks that Shylock is a man of, “currish spirit” (IV.i.133). Lancelot too, expresses contemptuous feelings towards the Jew, who is his master. He hates Shylock. It seems that the Christians of Venice believe that only Christians can be saved in heaven, not the Jews. They seem to believe that Christianity is a must for salvation. Thus, we see how Lancelot degrades the Jewishness of Shylock and Jessica. This shows his racial and religious prejudice. In the play, we see that Lorenzo too, seems to be racist. He is a Christian and he hates Shylock due to the latter's religion. Expressing his dislike for the Jew Shylock, he says to Gratianio: . . . If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven, It will be for his gentle daughter's sake; And never dare misfortune cross her foot, Unless she do it under this excuse That she is issue to a faithless Jew . . .    (II.iv. 33-37)

Lorenzo hates Shylock the Jew, but he loves Jessica, the Jewess. It seems that he does not have any problem with Jessica, on religious grounds, as she has already in the play expressed her desire to convert to Christianity. In Act II, scene iii, she says:   . . . O Lorenzo, If thou keep promise, I shall end this strife, Become a Christian and thy loving wife.    (II.iii. 18-20)

It seems that the Christians of Venice believe that the people who belong to the Hebrew religion are sure to be damned. They seem to think that Shylock's and Jessica's only opportunity for salvation lies in their conversion to Christianity. In the play, we see that, like other Christian characters, Portia too, seems to be racially biased against the Jew, Shylock. Moreover, she shows her racial prejudice towards the Prince of Morocco, who is 'black'. She clearly seems to be a Eurocentric person. In Act I, scene ii, when a serving man informs Portia about the arrival of a forerunner from the Prince of Morocco, a suitor to Portia, Portia says:

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. . . If he have the condition of a saint, and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me than wive me.    (I.ii. 106-8)

We see her again in Act II, scene viii, making fun of the Prince of Morocco's blackness. When he exits, after failing in the casket test, Portia says: A gentle riddance! Draw the curtains, go. Let all of his complexion choose me so.    (I.viii. 78-79)

It is clear that Portia is of a colonial bent of mind. John McLeod points out, “In colonial discourses, blackness has been frequently evoked as the ultimate sign of the colonizer's 'racial' degeneracy” (369). He further comments, “Skin colour has often been the primary sign of racial difference and a frequent target of racialising discourses, often taken as evidence of some form of 'natural' difference between, say, white and Black Africans”(110). Thus, we see that Portia believes that the Prince of Morocco, who is 'black' is inferior to her, as she is 'white'. Moreover, in the trial scene, we see her racial prejudice. Here she seems to be favouring Antonio, who is a Christian. She humiliates the Jew, Shylock. At the beginning of the trial scene Portia conveys the impression of being very impartial. This prompts Shylock to remark: A Daniel come to judgment; yea a Daniel! O wise young judge, how I do honour thee! (IV.i. 219-20)

This makes it evident that Shylock seems to be condent that Portia (Balthazar) is not racially biased. He can now expect impartial judgment in the trial. He hopes that he will not be deprived of justice because of his being a Jew. Ruth Nevo comments: “His cry of joy when he thinks that Portia endorses his bond: 'A Daniel comes to judgment' is, it will be noticed, not the Daniel of the lion's den, but the Daniel— defender and justier - of the wronged and libeled Susanna”(110).But as the trial progresses, we see that Portia plays with the emotions of Shylock. Initially, she seems to be favouring the Jew, but later on, we see that she pretends to be favouring him just because she wants him to suffer. About this attitude of Portia, Victor L. Cahn thinks, “She wants to see Shylock suffer” (614). Bertrand Evans writes ,”She delayed merely to play cat-and-mouse with Shylock, tormenting him by repeatedly expressing opinions that seem in his favour, whetting his expectations only to make his defeat more crushing, when she

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might have pronounced her inevitable verdict at the outset”(64). It seems that Portia willingly torments Shylock because the latter is a Jew. She is humiliating the Jew because of his racial and religious 'otherness'. Commenting on Portia's attitude, Philip Brockbank remarks, “Her exquisitely hypocritical performance has been called, 'a consummate piece of Jew-baiting'” (17-18).Thus, we see that like other Christian characters in the play, Portia too, seems to be racially and religiously biased against Shylock. Thus, it may be noticed that Shakespeare has portrayed the character of Shylock, the Jew, in a sympathetic manner. In the portrayal of the Jew, Shakespeare is not racially biased. He seems to be truly, a postcolonial writer who supports the human beings, who have been oppressed, suppressed and marginalised by colonial authority and colonial ideology, as well.

WORKS CITED Brockbank, Philip “Jesus, Shakespeare and Karl Marx - Timon of Athens and The Merchant of Venice: Parables for the City”, On Shakespeare. U.K.: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1989. Print. Brooke, Stopford A. “The Merchant of Venice”, On Ten Plays of Shakespeare. London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1905. Print. Cahn, Victor L. “The Merchant of Venice”, Shakespeare The Play Wright. Westport: Praeger,1996. Print. Davies, Marion Wynne. “Rubbing at Whitewash: Intolerance in The Merchant of Venice”, A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Vol. III., eds. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard.U.S.A.: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Print. Evans, Bertrand. “All Shall Be Well: The Way Found”, Shakespeare's Comedies. London: Oxford University Press, 1960. Print. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. Print Mahood, M.M.(ed). “Introduction”, The Merchant of Venice. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1997.Print. Nevo, Ruth. “Jessica's Monkey; Or, The Goodwins”, Comic Transformations In Shakespeare. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1980. Print. Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Ed. Mahood, M.M. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.

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Stoll, Elmer Edgar.”Shylock”, Shakespeare Studies. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1960. Print. Wilson, John Dover. “The Merchant of Venice in 1937”, Shakespeare's Happy Comedies. London: Faber & Faber, 1962. Print.

CREATIVE WRITING God and Rain God, God Give me a rod To poke into sky And Get some rain, Today is holiday Let me enjoy my way. Sun is a re ball I hate he stands tall My holiday is insane, Clouds refrain from rain, It is itching. My eyes are sting Need a little soothing Let there be some rain God, God Give me rain. My Father cannot Be wrong, It is Weatherman's mistake My life is a stake I am defeated and drain God, God Give me some rain.

Wasteland in Wazirabad Down the suburb The wasteland lies It is Wazirabad

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A blessing in disguise. Weeds sprout, fade And recur Songs of eternity is Always in air. Wild owers Decorate the land, It is fallow and hard, It is His stand. Trees rustle and Shades intrigue Often I mend My attitude. A tree is a Silent saint Fully composed Never irritant. Life is a wasteland, Cultivate hereafter A massage serene I get from Creator.

Fire is On Seated on Armchair He holds a stick. Old fashioned Swiss watch Swings on His gentle wrist. Watch and his Nostrils tick together. Childhood gone Youth discouraged; Sun dictates The day.

CREATIVE WRITING AND CRITICISM

Dear Clouds...

Stars twinkle, Heart is the Fountain of harmony, Peace echos Old man smiles. The circle Is incomplete. Some more Is due Nature watches All the time. He taps His stick On ground, A pile of rewood Is around. There is a chill In the air. He fastens, Watch band, And plays With stick. He loves sitting, By the re The re is on.

Dear Clouds Quite and still Are clouds at dawn They are gentle Soft and fawn, A new sun is a fresh apricot. Noon clouds Are busy bee,

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126

Have no time For coffee or tea. They parade and march past. Evening clouds Vivacious and frill, It is a routine Not a thrill. They're pictures of ne art. Sky studded With stars, A frequent Deepawali On Mars It is a merriment at last. Every night is A merrier night Every dawn is A gift of light In between leaps up my heart. Ramesh Chand Dwivedi

Life-opera I know you can't hear the whispers That scream all round Pointing my shiftNot gradual, not surreal. It so happened when I got softly struck By invisible hands, Caressing and coaxing My wooden structure To life-opera. I need my Beethoven To wrap my imsy frame Into his ever broadening breast

Long Wait...

And nurse my nascent being on every classical note.

Long Wait When I was armed With my armory All set All staged You ditched me. I waited long I was eager Wanted all noises shut All silences deeper But it didn't occur Morning till night Months and years After years Withered and vanished away You never showed up Though I could hear your Anklet, clank in a rhythm From a far off distance, That often broke into tiny pieces of glass Reecting my ever rousing passion And the impossibility of our union.

Man's World Man's world is so unmanlyvacuous and sinister at the same time, gobbling up the sparsely scripted mobility registered by the shrunken half. Spreading of the din, that doubles up and echoes, Deafening those who breathlessly await jingling of bells At their altar, is weakening the closely distant dreams, waving tirelessly. The cacophony drowns tales of victory, Periodically grim and gory, Of minions in a monstrous world that

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128

Draws inerasable lines. In their frozen resolve, descendants of Eve Stand rmly on a wobbly ground, holding their increasing weight, To stand the pelting That goes night and day long. 

Simmi Gurwara

Marriage of Chunnoo's Bua Come September, Good news in the air, Ankita bua's beau is here, Sagai in late November Marriage in early December. All relatives were happy, In Delhi and else where. On the day of Sagai, I saw a tall smart guy, With lovely smiling face. A CA by profession Giving an inedible impression, With his Lakshman like brother And dazzling Kaushlya like mother. Pandit ji chanted holy mantra Amid din and music of orchestra, Bua's killing smile undid me, Smilingly reciprocated by her beau. They exchanged their rings. So happy, I was, as on my wings. I could see in their eyes, A unique pair, proverbial and wise. All my ma, pa, ba, da and tau Stood up, showered owers, and clapped thrice. GIP was hired for wedding place, Beautifully decked and bejeweled, Like a garland of diamonds

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Around the neck of a newly wed bride, We looked all around with pride. Littred with tents and stalls, Lighted with varied coloured bulbs. In the midst of the ground, Was a glittering canopy, An altar for nupital rites, A sacricial re, a holy place, For promises and eternal commitments. A terrible cold night, But unmindful of it, The moon, the milky way and stars, Peeped through the clouds, This beautiful tempting sight. Chacha Abhishek tied the welding knot The place with light and aroma fraught Cheerfully the couple was hailed. We showered owers and clapped So ended the religious ceremony, For vidai arrangements were made Bua sat in car beside her mate, “Chhor Babul ka Ghar, Chali Piya Ke Ghar”. Shilpi Nath

Lone Soul Disturbs Your soul disturbs me,  I want to be disturbed, Come, disturb me,  I want to be disturbed. Oh! your hair locks disturb me, Your glazings disturb me, Your soul disturbs me, Your eyes disturb me. Give me blessing of love,  I want to be loved,

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Sincere, true, not fake,  I think you are not fake.









For God's Sake,  Give my Love, I want your love,  I want your love.



Your Jhumkas' Shine Your Jhumkas shine, Enough to steal my heart, Ur heart now mine, As not any day thine.     I am happy,   For stealing your heart,   Now I see you sad,   I have grasped your heart. Never would you get back, Your own heart, Its now in safe locker, Of my own heart.     

    

   

My everything your,  I would be your, One day sure,  One day sure. Ramesh Kumar Tripathi

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Dr. Suresh Chandra Dwivedi, Professor of English, Dept. of English and Modern European Languages, University of Allahabad, is internationally known poet, thinker, translator and critic. Author of several books on American and Indian English literature, he has won several awards and a D.Litt. Degree for his distinguished achievement in literature. A prolic writer, Sri Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi writes in Hindi, English and Bhojpuri. A journalist, religious and social thinker, he has authored several books on contemporary themes. He has worked in Indian Army, UNI, Air India, USA. He has the vast experience of living and working in about fty countries including USA, Greece and Hongkong. His poetry has been admired by well-known critics and scholars. Prof. Waheed Uzzafar Khan is formerly Professor & Head, Department of English, Almora Constituent PG College, Kumaon University, Uttarakhand. Dr. Ambuj Kumar Sharma is Professor of English, Dept. of English, Gurukula Kangri Vishwavidyalaya, Haridwar, Uttarakhand. Dr. Pramod Kumar is Professor of English, Dept. of Applied Sciences & Humanities in Accurate Institute of Management & Technology, Greater Noida. Dr. Simmi Gurwara is Professor & Head, Department of Professional Development (Humanities & Management) in Radha Govind Group of Institutions, Meerut. She has penned academic books, research papers, articles, short stories and poems that have been published in reputed national and international journals, magazines and newspapers. Creative writing has been her forte. She is a columnist with National Dailies 'Aaj Samaj' and 'Hastakshep.' Dr. Gurwara has extensive media related experience to her credit. She is the script writer and commentator of 4 documentary lms commissioned by Films Division (Govt. of India). She is the concept writer of a Hindi feature lm “Coffee House” that was screened at prestigious Cannes Films Festival in France in May 2009 and also at the Film Festivals held at Mumbai, Chennai, Goa, Dubai and Iceland. She has worked as translator and dialogue writer of bilingual documentary and crossover lms. Dr. Pradeep K. Talan is Professor of English, Dept. of Applied Sciences & Humanities in AIMT, Greater Noida. His work on A Study of Walt Whitman's Romanticism has been admired in India and abroad. He has contributed several articles to well known Indian literary journals. Dr. Ravindra Kumar is Associate Professor of English, C.C.S. University Campus, Meerut. He has contributed several articles to prestigious journals and is a teacher of repute. Dr. Mira Tomer is Associate Professor, Dept. of Languages & Haryanvi Culture, CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar.

132

CREATIVE WRITING AND CRITICISM

10. Dr. Madhavi Nikam is Associate Professor, Department of PG Studies in English, R K Talreja College, (University of Mumbai) Ulhasnagar. 11. Dr. Poonam Mor is Assistant Professor, Dept. of Languages & Haryanvi Culture, CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar. 12. Dr. Shrutimita Mehta is an Assistant Professor of English, Centre for Language Learning in ITM, University, Gurgaon. 13. Dr. Sandeep Kumar Dubey is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Mangala Devi Smarak Degree College, Naini, Allahabad. 14. Dr. Sangeeta is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Dayanand College, Hisar, Haryana. 15. Dr. Jitendra Singh is a Lecturer in English, D.R.S.M. Degree College, Budaun, UP. 16. Dr. Ranu Dubey is a Lecturer in English, Arya Mahila College, Shahjahanpur. 17. Dr. Sudhir Kumar Solanki is a lecturer in English, Jain Inter College Sikandrabad. 18. Dr. Lairenmayum Puinyabati Devi is a lecturer in English, Pioneer Academy Imphal. 19. Dr. Ramesh Kumar Tripathi is Assistant Teacher in Hindi English High School, G. N. B. Road, Tinsukia, Assam. 20. Kamta Prasad Saroj is a Lecturer in English, G.I.C., Allahabad. 21. Shuchita Chandhok is a research scholar in Gurukula Kangri Vishwavidyalaya, Haridwar, Uttarakhand. 22. Shilpi Nath is a research scholar in C.C.S. University, Meerut. 23. Pankaj Dwivedi is a research scholar in University of Allahabad.

ISSN 0975 - 2390

CREATIVE WRITING AND CRITICISM (An International Biannual Journal of English Studies) Volume XII

Number 2

APRIL 2015

EDITOR

SURESH NATH

CREATIVE WRITING AND CRITICISM Declaration under section 5 of the Press and Registration of Books Act, 1867. 1. Place of Publication 2. Periodicity of Publication 3. Printer's name Nationality Address

4. Pulisher's Name Nationality Address

5. Editor's Name Nationality Address

6. Owner's Name

Sikandrabad (Bulandshahr) Biannual Suresh Nath Indian Saraswati Bhawan, Bara Darwaza Kayasthwara, Sikandrabad, Bulandshahr Pin Code 203 205 Suresh Nath Indian Saraswati Bhawan, Bara Darwaza Kayasthwara, Sikandrabad, Bulandshahr Pin Code 203 205 Suresh Nath Indian Saraswati Bhawan, Bara Darwaza Kayasthwara, Sikandrabad, Bulandshahr Pin Code 203 205 Suresh Nath Saraswati Bhawan, Bara Darwaza Kayasthwara, Sikandrabad, Bulandshahr Pin Code 203 205

I, Suresh Nath, hereby declare that the particulars given above are true to the best of my knowledge and belief. SURESH NATH

Printed & Published by: Dr. Suresh Nath at Mangalam Graphics, Sikandrabad (U. P.) India.

GOVT. OF INDIA-U.P. ENG/2003/11473

CONTENTS S.No. Author

Article

Page

1

Waheed Uzzafar  Khan

SILENCE: THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY

1

2

Suresh Chandra  Dwivedi 

THE POETRY OF MAHENDRA BHATNAGAR AND RAMESH CHANDRA DWIVEDI: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

7

3

4

Ravindra Kumar

Jitendra Singh 

KABIR'S SOCIAL VISION: A STUDY OF HIS ONE  HUNDRED POEMS (TRANSLATED BY  RABINDRANATH TAGORE)

  14

HINDU EQUILIBRIUM IN THE EARLY FICTION OF R.K. NARAYAN

22



5 

Pramod Kumar Pradeep K. Talan

THE CONFLICT OF PSYCHE: TRADITION VS MODERNITY IN URBAN MIDDLE CLASS

30

6

Ranu Dubey 

GRAHAM GREENE'S THE HEART OF THE MATTER: A  THEMATIC STUDY

37

Lairenmanyum Puinyabati Devi

TREATMENT OF MARRIAGE DISINTIGRATION IN THE MAJOR NOVELS OF ANITA DESAI

47

Poonam Mor  Mira Tomer

CULTURAL DISLOCATION AND QUEST FOR SUBJECTIVITY: A STUDY OF TONI MORRISON'S TAR BABY

52

7 8

9

Simmi Gurwara



 

HISTORY, POLITICS AND MEMORY: A POST- COLONIAL STUDY OF SALMAN RUSHDIE'S MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN

61

10

Sudhir Kumar  Solanki

IMPACT OF GANDHI ON MULK RAJ ANAND

72

11

Sangeeta

FEMINIST CONCERNS IN THE NOVELS OF SHASHI DESHPANDE

76

A CRITICAL STUDY OF HENRIK IBSEN'S A DOLL'S HOUSE

83

12 13

14

Pankaj Dwivedi

Shuchita Chandhok  SOCIAL CENSURE IN THE NOVELS OF Ambuj Kumar  UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE Sharma Madhavi Nikam

ASHIS NANDY'S PSYCHOLOGICAL CONCEPT OF  COLONIALISM IN THE INTIMATE ENEMY

89  95

15

Kamta Prasad Saroj

RABINDRANATH TAGORE: A MYSTIC POET

101

16

Shrutimita Mehta 





FROM CONVENTIONS TO INDIVIDUALITY IN  SHASHI DESHPANDE'S ROOTS AND SHADOWS: A STUDY

109

17

Sandeep Kumar  Dubey 

RACIAL CONCERNS IN SHAKESPEARE'S THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

115



CREATIVE WRITING 1

Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi





2

God and Rain Wasteland in Wazirabad Fire is On Dear Clouds

123 123 124 125

Simmi Gurwara

Life-opera Long Wait Man's World

126 127 127

3

Shilpi Nath

Marriage of Chunnoo's Bua

128

4 

Ramesh Kumar Tripathi

Lone Soul Disturbs Your Jhumkas' Shine

129 130

CONTRIBUTORS

131

The views and opinions expressed by the authors in their respective articles. reviews etc., in this issue are their own and the editor is not responsible for them. All disputes concerning the Journal shall be settled in the Court at Sikandrabad Distt. Bulandshahr (U. P.) 203 205.