View of A STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY INDIAN WOMEN IN THE NOVELS OF ANITA NAIR

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Vol. 06, Special Issue 08, (ELL-2021) November 2021 IMPACT FACTOR: 7.98 (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL)

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A STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY INDIAN WOMEN IN THE NOVELS OF ANITA NAIR

Waseem Akram

Research Scholar, Bhagwant University Rajasthan Ajmer.

Abstract:- The paper will focus on the Study of Contemporary Indian Women in the Novels of Anita Nair in Indian Society. Women are an important part of society and a society will not prosper without their active participation, but we have limited their freedom and have confined their roles to house and kitchen. Anita Nair in her novels has discussed all these issues, be it marriage, divorce, male dominance and there is hardly any issue that is not discussed in her novels that is related to women. She herself being an Indian women has personally seen so many problems and discriminations against indian women and has raised her voice in her novels.

Keywords: marriage, divorce, male dominance, contemporary.

In Anita Nair‟s Ladies Coupe, there is one female character whose name is Margaret Shanthi, who is a chemistry teacher and she is married to Ebenezer Paulraj. He believes in male dominated society and attempts to curtails her freedom in one way or the other and finally she won her freedom from his clutches, she is modern women who values her life and freedom. When she became tired of her submissiveness at her home, she takes her life in her own hands and takes important decisions in her life which changed her course of life forever. Her husband loves her from the core of his heart but is not ready to listen her whims and fancies, dreams and aims, her individual likes and dislikes. Margaret was a very young girl having little experience in work and always says „yes‟ to her husband‟s orders.

When her husband totally controls her, she starts to hate him and some feelings came to her that she is now a free woman.

I mouthed the words: i hate him. I hate my husband. I hate Ebenezar Paulraj. I hate him. Hate him. I waited for a clap of Thunder, a hurling meteor, a whirlwind, a dust storm… for some super Phenomenon that is usually meant to accompany such momentous and perhaps Sacrilegious revelations. (Ladies Coupe 98)

She represents all new woman who are committed to attain their freedom in male dominated society. She focused in her health and takes good diet to make herself healthy and it gives her an edge over her husband. She now controls her husband who feels terrified by her strength and in her unique way changed her parents outlook and attitude of her husband. This all process is handled by Anita Nair in an artistic manner. The profound despair of Margaret, her mental and physical sufferings, and all the pains she takes to make herself strong and proactive and these all things are dealt by Anita Nair in a fine manner.

Akhila is another woman character in Ladies Coupe, who is a forty five year old single woman working as income tax officer. She is born in a conservative family where rules to be followed and men give supreme decisions and this ruins her life. But what is more sad in her life is that her mother too believes in male supremacy and always taught her sometimes through words or sometimes through actions about being good woman. Her blunt and pierce words which haunt Akhila are as:

There is no such thing as equal marriage it is best to accept that the wife is inferior to the husband. That way there can be no disharmony. It is when one wants to prove ones equality that there is warring and sparring all the time. It is so much easier to accept one‟s station in life and live accordingly. A woman is not meant to

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ACCENT JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING Peer Reviewed and Refereed Journal, ISSN NO. 2456-1037

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take on the man‟s role. Or the Gods would have made her so. So what is all this about two equals in a marriage. (Ladies Coupe 14)

But this very mother of Akhila on becoming a widow expected her daughter to play the man of the house. So from playing the role of the daughter Akhila progressed to being the provider and continued playing different roles all through her life. Sometimes a sister, sometimes an aunt but she never got to be herself. She never was Akhila until one fine day when she realized that she has got nothing from life not even memories to look back to. To change the course of her life Akhila decides to do something she had never done before. She buys a one way ticket to Kanyakumari to escape from the norms that stopped her from being Akhilandeshwari. On her way to Kanyakumari, Akhila meets five different women, her fellow passengers. Each with a story of her own but all of them had one thing in common and that was their search for the real denotation of life.

She meets another women in train whose lives were equally destroyed by the cruel society. Although they have different stories but all are connected with one thing that is they all are victims of cruel society. When they all share each others problems it becomes very painful to listen their lives under patriarchal society. The oldest of the women is Janaki with a story that many women of her age will identify with. Janaki is someone who learnt to love the man she married. She is someone who always had a man to protect her. Someone who was first protected by her father then by her brother then by her husband and after him it would be her son. Janaki believed that to be a good mother and a good wife are the only two duties of a woman and she made her home her Kingdom. It was too late to amend her life when she realized that even a strong and independent woman can make a good wife and a good mother.

In the novel, Mistress, the story revolves round the Kathakali dancer Koman, his niece Radha, and a travel writer, Christopher Stewart who comes to India to write about Koman. The locale of the novel is the banks of the river Nila in Kerala. Koman, a famous Kathakali artist, and her niece Radha receives Chris at the railway station. From their first meeting, both Radha and her uncle are deeply impressed by this young man. Radha is a true representation of the modern Indian woman. In spite of her origin as a daughter of a middle class traditional family, while studying and in the years following her education, Radha became well aware of her possibilities. Living in a large city away from home, having a job and later even a lover, she likes to think of herself as of an independent young woman who can freely decide about her life.

Ironically, it is precisely her independent way of life that makes her go back to her family. By being married to Shyam, she is forced to become the traditional woman. Shyam‟s relationship to her is somewhat ambivalent. On one hand he is proud of her being a modern woman who knows what she wants to achieve in her life, on the other hand, he hinders her from achieving it. Radha impresses him and is willing to follow many of her decisions. Thus, Radha finds herself in between her longing for independence, which is acknowledged to a certain degree and the traditional role that she is to play. Although she, at the beginning of her marriage, decides "never to flout the rules of custom again," (54), she still feels trampled by the expectation that Shyam has. In his eyes she is to play a modern wife whose utmost wish is to please her husband. While her first violation of the social rules was motivated by the urge to pursue her love and conduct herself according to her wishes rather than social convention brought her to the decision to follow the social conventions, the actual following of the conventions brings back the longing in her to follow her wishes regardless the rules.

This dilemma is inevitably the theme of the novel—and Saadiya's pursuit of freedom can be seen as a variation on the theme. The closer to the ideal of a housewife Radha gets, the more she feels the need to escape. The more boundaries she crosses, however, the more she

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tends to get back to her role of a wife. The longing for adventure as well as the guilt she feels while pursuing it is the main driving power that makes her sway between her duty to Shyam and her attraction to Chris.

Radha feels that for her husband, she is merely “a much cherished possession” and what he really wants is a mistress” (54), His expectations "Does she ever consider that such silly acts have repercussions? Besides, what will my friends and their wives say if they find out? We have a place in society. Radha has always treated rather carelessly" (70) in contrast to Radha's feelings "Don't I have a right to an opinion? I am your wife. Your wife, do you hear me? But you treat me as if I am a kept woman. A bloody mistress to fulfil your sexual needs and with no rights" (72).

In the face of several confrontations with Shyam and the anguish of being, denied freedom, she longs for the intimate company of Chris. Her affair with Chris is such an attempt to engage herself fully in a relationship with a man who appreciates her needs and lets her breath. This is a second major violation of the rules that is supposed to help her realise herself in a relationship where she would be, just like the women she reads about or whom she sees in the television, able to realize herself. The violation does not, however, prove to be an efficient one, in that sense that she does not find the space for self realization she is looking for. Nonetheless, it helps her redefine her self-image and point out what she is, and even more so what she is not looking for in her life. But the narrative resolves the dilemma in an entirely novel way, with Radha realizing the flaws of and in a sense, also the similarity between— Chris and Shyam.

WORKS CITED

1. Nair, Anita: The Better Man. New Delhi: Penguin books India, 1999.

2. Nair, Anita: Ladies Coupe. New Delhi: Penguin books India, 2001.

3. Suganya, S “Enslavement to autonomy in Anita Nair‟s Ladies Coupe”. The Criterion. Volume Issue 2, 2012.

Print.

4. Sinha, Sunitha. Post-Colonial women writers‟ new perspectives. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors (P) Ltd: 2008.