Social Critique in Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting - Bigsight

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In Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting, the trappings of a traditional. Indian family on its women are made clear. Uma falls short of the traditional definition of a woman  ...
6 Social Critique in Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting Chung Chin-Yi

In Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting, the trappings of a traditional Indian family on its women are made clear. Uma falls short of the traditional definition of a woman in an Indian family as one who is marriageable and domestic. She is clumsy and plain, does not excel in her studies, and becomes the victim of two annulled marriages, unlike her sister Aruna who manages to achieve success as a woman through marriage to a man who is highly eligible, rich and good looking. The plight of an Indian woman is thus made clear through Uma’s story—by convention, Uma falls short of how the traditional family defines a woman, because she is plain, unattractive, and not good in household chores. She then becomes marginalized in her family because she has fallen short of the standards the traditional Indian family has set for its women. The suffocating nature of tradition that would measure women solely by their ability to marry is made clear early in the novel when Uma’s mother withdraws Uma from her studies as she thinks that there is no need for women to be literate, not having schooled herself, along with her belief that women’s place in society is solely at home and domestic. Uma is taken from school because she fails her tests repeatedly, and thus, having failed as a woman by society’s standards by not being attractive enough to be married, she then fails again to escape the vicious cycle of

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confinement to the household by not being able to excel in her studies. In contrast, her brother Arun, by virtue of his gender and status as a male, is sent to the United States to study and given an opportunity to be socially mobile by escaping the constraints of village traditions. It is clear Uma’s failure to meet society’s expectations of a woman are solely due to her unattractive appearance and her inability to do household chores as she is quite clumsy with feeding Arun as a baby and cooking. By contrast, her sister, who is quite the opposite in terms of appearance and domesticity, gets a multitude of proposals and quickly settles down into her success as an Indian woman, having a child and living a highly urbane and modern life as her rich husband procures a chic flat in an upper class section of town overlooking the beach. Uma fails simply because she does not possess the appearance of her sister, or her ability to excel in the domestic sphere. Society’s double standards on women are made even clearer when Uma is offered a job by Dr Dutt and is swiftly turned down by her mother, who again, does not see the place of a woman as existing outside the household. Having ruined the chances for Uma to be socially mobile from young by withdrawing her from her education, her overbearing mother further destroys the possibility of Uma having any future outside her home by denying her the possibility of employment offered by someone who is able to see beyond Uma’s lack of qualifications. Uma then fails twice as a woman, first by her inability to secure a marriage and second by her inability to secure an education and to escape the rut of being trapped with her overbearing and traditional parents who would not give a second thought to sending Arun her brother overseas so that he will have bright prospects and a future but confine her to doing chores which she does not excel in. The burden of tradition is made clear—women are clearly of a lower status in Indian society, measured solely by their ability to marry, not secure an education or a job or to be financially independent.

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To further compound her sense of ostracism from her family and society, Uma has physical fits which embarrass her family. Her cousin Mira Masi takes this to be a mark that the Lord has on her, but Uma’s painful convulsions are hardly ecstatic spiritual intensities or heights but a painful handicap which serve to alienate her further from her parents who deem the fits an embarrassment to the family which further impede her ability to get married. Uma is then alienated many times over, from her parents, from society, from school, from employability. Uma is an invisible woman because she is unattractive, clumsy and lacks an education. Having failed to realize herself as a woman by being unfeminine and unattractive, Uma fails to realize identity through another source – religion. In the convent she is kept from visiting the chapel, and while Mira Masi brings her on her pilgrimages, she fails to find any religious solace in Mira Masi’s extreme fits of devotion and is alienated once again from religion, finding the chanting and the rituals strange, alien and unappealing. While Mira tries to enthuse her with her extreme shows of dedication, Uma is unmoved, finding Mira extreme and incomprehensible. Anamika, Uma’s cousin likewise fails in her destiny as a woman though she succeeds in getting married. She has a miscarriage and can no longer bear children and is considered flawed as a woman and damaged goods. In the gradual dissolution of the marriage that ensues, Anamika resolves to end her misery as a failed woman by taking her life. At a point in the novel, Uma makes an impulsive leap out of the boat to the shore, but falls into the sea instead and nearly drowns. The hopelessness of her plight as a woman inspires her to morbid thoughts on life, and indeed, Uma is a tragic figure. In her own right, Anamika had been a resounding success. She had excelled so much in her studies that she won a scholarship to Oxford. But it was deemed unnecessary for women to leave for abroad to study and improve their circumstances. She was shuffled quickly into marriage as that was deemed the more

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appropriate course of action for her, and upon marriage she was ill-treated, abused like a house hold slave, denied any form of freedom, mistreated by her mother-in-law, and generally denied any resemblance of human dignity until she saw suicide as the only escape. To these women thus, marriage becomes a prison— a prison to domestic slavery and measurement only in terms of one’s ability to bear children—when that failed to come to fruition she gradually withered away as a woman till her suicide. While on her own terms, academically, Anamika had been a success, she fails in marriage because of her subordinate position in society as a woman. There was no belief in spontaneous love rather than arranged marriages. Uma finds brief excitement in the company of Ramu, where they go out and have drinks and fun at the pub, but is severely chastised and called a hussy when she returns. Marriage in those days was a business proposal, where the suitor had to be wealthy and respectable enough to merit the sacrifice of a dowry. Following this, Uma loses not merely one but two dowries as her prospective husbands do not find her enticing enough to keep as a wife. Aruna’s victory over Uma comes as a natural consequence of her being able to meet society’s expectations of a woman far more than her. The stereotype of a woman—physically attractive, domestic, vain, knowing how to dress up and appeal to men— all apply to Aruna rather than Uma. Aruna is seen teaching Uma how to apply makeup and the latest fashions in Bombay while Uma is indifferent to such things. The essential requirements for being a woman—physically appealing to your partner by dressing up, looking attractive, thriving in the domestic sphere—all these are characteristics which enable Aruna to pass the test of womanhood while Uma fails miserably. The illusion that universities abroad hold brighter prospects for its students is shattered in the second half of the book. Arun lives with an American family, which is steeped in consumerism and excess. Melanie, the daughter of the family, cannot stop

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consuming sweets and is spoilt rotten by her parents. She ominously tells Arun to return to India at one point, highlighting racisms that are common during the time and among the Americans. So the sacrifice that Arun’s family has made for him has come to naught as Arun is seen leaving the dysfunctional family he lives with by lying he had found a dorm, while there is a possibility that he has not and is simply returning home to India where all is more familiar and hospitable to him. In another of Desai’s stories, Winsterscape, the burden of tradition is once more made clear. The sole purpose of having families was to bear children and extend the families, and Asha is devastated when she has a miscarriage, not unlike Anamika. When her sister Anu has a child, she more or less kidnaps the child and keeps the child as her own—children were the first priority in any marriage, and having had none and thus failed as a woman, Asha is driven to desperation to kidnap her sister’s child. Hence a common thread can be seen running throughout the stories we have been examining—a stereotype of a woman as a child-bearer and domestic keeper, and the inability to escape these formulas for success as a woman which drive Anamika to suicide and Asha to child kidnapping. Uma herself is a supreme victim of these standards that her society exacts upon her because she fumbles about at domestic chores and is plain and unattractive. Every attempt for women to be socially mobile is ruthlessly thwarted by their families as Anamika is stopped from going to Oxford on her scholarship while Uma is withdrawn from her education. Women are not allowed to be financially independent and thus are reduced to objects of possession as brides, who must then serve the husband’s household they belong to until they are driven to exhaustion as slaves like Anamika and then subsequently suicide. Aruna escapes this fate by fitting into society’s expectations of a woman more comfortably, she is physically attractive, vain, knows how to dress up and please a man, is fertile, and knows how to handle domestic chores such as cooking and raising a daughter. Women are thus child-bearing

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slaves to the families they are married into, with the exception of Aruna who knows the art of pleasing men and marrying the right kind of husband who can afford domestic help. The trap in tradition in India during the time was thus reducing women to objects in a domestic sphere. Yet the novel also problematises what would be its opposite—pursuing opportunities in a land abroad through Arun’s section of the novel in which America is not depicted as a land of promise but a land of excessive consumption, racism and family dysfunction as well as being inhospitable to Asians from faraway lands. Hence while men are certainly given more opportunity, it is not clear that these opportunities are in themselves as valuable as the sacrifices that are made in order for them to occur. It then seems that problems arise for both men and women in India, women are stifled by society’s expectations of them as domestic housekeepers and child bearers and men are stereotypically called upon to be rich and successful so that can provide for the families and send a handsome dowry for the brides. The real trap then is the institution of marriage, which holds both parties responsible to procreating and raising children into the further pattern of subjugating women to be married off as brides and men to procure successful jobs in order to provide for their families. The novel is then not merely typically feminist in its decry of the rights of women in India but also decries the institution of marriage as a source of entrapment in India. The institution itself is laden with stereotypes and expectations—that women must be fertile and a source of child-bearing, which Anamika and Uma fail at and thus feel they have failed as women, Anamika thus kills herself, while Uma comes close to wishing a morbid end upon herself because she has failed to live up to society’s expectations of a woman. Tradition is then tyrannical and cruel, claiming its victims in Anamika and Uma and only allowing superficial characters such as Aruna to flourish simply by the fact that she is physically attractive and comfortable in a domestic

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sphere. Aruna is shallow compared to Anamika and Uma. She is no excellent scholar like Anamika nor does she have the empathy and sensitivity of Uma. She succeeds simply by being physically beautiful and able to bear children. The second half of the novel is the expression of another form of alienation—racism in a white country. Arun feels displaced in the excesses of American society with all its consumption and emphasis on enjoying life to the hilt. It breeds spoilt children like Melanie who is self-centred and racist. She tells Arun to leave her home to go back to India. Just as Uma is an outsider as a woman in her own native country, Arun becomes an outsider in America where he studies, presented not as a golden land of opportunity but a highly dystopian and dysfunctional society which thrives on consumption and satiation of the senses and impulses or desires. The novel then examines forms of gender, class, and racial inequalities and discrimination, while women suffer on account of their gender, Indian men in foreign lands suffer on account of their race. There is also class commentary in Aruna being able to rise above her upbringing by marrying into a rich family while Uma is trapped in the household and unable to transcend her situation simply because she does not fit society’s expectations and definitions for what it is to be a woman at that time. While tradition in India is stifling for women, it stifles for men as Arun is sent abroad in hopes of him returning with a degree to secure a good job and marry well in order to provide for a family and send his children into the same cycle of traditions and expectations. Fasting, Feasting is then a rich commentary on the paradoxes, entrapments and double standards that haunt Indian society during its time.

Work Cited Desai, Anita. Fasting, Feasting, Vintage, London, 2000.