Chapter III: Nation Building

I. Introduction The third chapter is about 'Nation building', which refers to the consolidation phase of nationalism with the congruence of nation and state. It has been argued in Chapter I that 'nation' is forever configured, the identity codes bearing its name never stabilised. If 'nation formation' is a movement/moment of figuration, then 'nation building' refers to the processes of reconfiguration. Both phases involve construction, revision, contestation and negotiation over the discursive field of 'nation'. This phase is marked by the generation of consent toward the hegemonic construction of nation, regulation of the 'national', and institutionalisation of mechanisms of exclusion and control. The hegemonic nationalism so as to sustain and entrench its domination negotiates, undermines, short circuits and appropriates the space of the state. In the context of India, the hegemonic orthodoxy has effectively established its own mechanism of power that, while influencing the state functions, also reserves the initiative to control identitarian practices. The hegemonic discourses of the upper classes/castes structure nationalism, which prescribe and proscribe identities, monopolising the definition of subjectivity, modernity and cultural self-representation. The argument here is that in India, the point of permeation of power is not always and decidedly the state but the hegemonic socio-cultural power of orthodoxy. Rudolph and Rudolph, describing Indian politics, identify this and characterise it as the tussle between 'demand polity' (societal pressure) and 'command polity' (state control)'. This indicates that the congruence of nation and state is incomplete. The socio-cultural power often is in alliance with the state and sometimes in defiance of the state. There are many accounts of how in modem societies state is the major arbiter of power. State is seen to be the juncture of the dispersal of power under modernity. Nation-state, it is argued, typically is the point of concentration of totalised power.

189 In India the situation is conspicuously different. The struggles against power are aimed in many people's movements at an entity other than the state: a socio-cultural power in the form of orthodoxy. If we look at the post- independence period in India, most of the long time struggles have been against the orthodoxy or the various forms of its operation. Such struggles would include feminist and anti-caste movements. In many cases state is seen as an ally of the strugglers, as an institution that may intervene on behalf of them. This suggests that state in India is not yet, not wholly, in a position of subject constituting. That power, it seems, still belongs to the socio-cultural community, the orthodoxy, with its past and present theories of knowledge, of being and doing, of socialising and of identity. In other words, practices of socialising and modes of individualising are powers that orthodox socio- cultural power carries out.^ Often, the struggles aimed at the state target the collusion between the state and the cultural power. In this connection Romila Thapar's proposition is puzzling, when she says: Perhaps the state has to be reminded of its function as a mechanism for improving conditions, from which function it has been withdrawing. This might best be achieved by a more articulate and effective intervention of civil society to control the possible excesses of the state, to prevent a stranglehold by particular interests and ensure that the activity of the state effectively narrows the disparities."*

Making the civil society the agency for negotiating with the state for narrowing the disparities involves a contradiction, considering the 'civil society' itself is structured in the Indian society in communitarian axis. In fact it is the stranglehold of the community-based civil society over the state and its control over the functioning of the state that need to be altered. Hence, state is not the central agent of hegemonisation. It exists in an ambivalent condition: as a rational institution, state, in India, acts as the power commanding the allegiance of the subjects; but it is compromised as its powers are assumed and disbursed by the cultural power of orthodoxy, undermined by the diverse demand groups.^ In the context of identity politics it is the cultural

190 power that comes to configure and negotiate the construction of 'nation'. Thus, beyond the political domain, state is less a source of the hegemonisation than a means through which contestations are acted out. Theorising the notion of political society as distinct from civil society, Partha Chatterjee has observed: Civil society, restricted to a small section of culturally equipped citizens, represents in countries like India the high ground of modernity. So does the constitutional model of the state. But in actual practice, governmental agencies must descend from that high ground to the terrain of political society in order to renew their legitimacy.. ."^

Partha Chatterjee's term 'civil society' comes close to the term cultural orthodoxy employed here. That this 'civil society' is not structured as a representative of the larger body of society, termed by him 'political society', is the significant point. In this section the attempt is to examine the ways in which the processes of nation-building in relation to the notion of nation are set to work. The processes of nation-building would differ from the earlier movement of nation- formation, discussed in the previous chapter, in so far as the focus now is more on consolidation of the hegemony established and the contestation is in relation to upstaging or seriously revising the established hegemonic notion of nation. The role of the state and that of the various socialities - civil, political, ethnic, etc. - would need to be examined in order to bring out how the concept of nation is in the process of continuous configuration and contestation. The discourses of the state, of the various socialities, are to be viewed in order to analyse the prescriptive form of national identity, the marking of national interest and the activities of the people vis-a-vis the space of the state functions. One has to examine the centrality that state comes to assume in the affairs of the people, deciding their attitudes towards self and sociality, development and change, values of public good and the parameters of the 'public' itself in the Indian Republic. At the same time, the constraint under which state articulates its subject constituting power also has to be examined. The structure of power that regulates the identity politics needs to be studied to

191 understand how state itself comes to be channelised, by passed, subverted, and undermined in the 'staging of nation'. In studying novels in relation to 'nation building' one has to look at what kind of social concerns - evils, problems, progress, etc. - are thematised; what interests are projected as constituting or having a bearing on the nation; what values and practices are subjected to erasure; and what kind of rearranging of nostalgia is undertaken. Novels need to be examined both to understand the nation concept and to unravel the 'outside' of such a 'nation' implied within them. In this examination, one has to attend to the privileged constructions of identity in relation to gender, caste, religion, class, sexuality, region and other such identity interests. State is often seen as the major arbitrator of public good and public interest. But the space of the state itself - in terms of its function, responsibility, policies, players, representation of the state and so on - is an issue of contestation. Akhil Gupta develops a well argued case for understanding state as produced performatively by people in contingent situations: At the local level, it becomes difficult to experience the state as an ontically coherent entity: what one confronts instead is much more discrete and fragmentary... it is precisely through the practices of such local institutions that a translocal institution such as the state comes to be imagined.

One may also notice that in India a number of things are done, not within the modalities framed by the state, but through network stimulation. These networks could be based on kinship, community, caste, religion, profession, region and other civil-social bonds. Thus, in the public arena, especially when it comes to state-citizen relationship, we notice the operation of a discourse of 'connection'. That this is not merely a case of corruption in the bureaucracy is suggested by the fact that connections are also crucially employed in negotiating with private bodies such as educational institutions, civil forums, private sector employers, etc.

192 It may be noticed that the hegemonic construction of nation pre­ occupies the state and its discourses which comes to be expressed in the pohcies and programmes of the state. These normally are aimed at entrenching the interests of the hegemonic identity groups. At the same time, attempts to revise the 'nation', to redefine it, are still underway and contenting nationalisms continue to try to make inroads into the hegemonic space. Disenchantment is not a strange motif in a work of the post- independence era, especially in the 60's and 70's. This is a period in India when in most Indian language literatures 'modernist' works made their presence felt. Risking generalisation, one may venture to say that along with such tropes as alienation, angst, etc. the literature of this period in most Indian literary traditions gave vent to disillusionment and a strong anti-romantic feeling. In Indian English literature too this is the period when, in poetry as well as fiction, a general sense of dissatisfaction and refusal to follow idealism were commonly seen. Fredric Jameson's formulation that in the third world novels, narrating a story becomes narrating the nation itself has been hotly debated^. On the face of it this generalisation does appear reductive as it seems to consider the individual as a microcosm of the collective, the local as the seed of the national. This formulation seems to depend on an element of essentialism. But the imperative for a study that undertakes to examine the notion of nation in Indian English novels is however contained in a view akin to the allegorical view suggested by Jameson. It would be convenient but inadequate to restrict such a study to those novels that self-consciously relate to nation, nation-state and nationalism. But if one raises the question, what is the nature of the collectivity that a novel develops in its narrative, then, one has to move beyond the avowedly nationalist fiction. To do this, one needs to approach even a novel that is focused on the local, on the individual with a view to entering into its implicit or explicit construction of collectivity - political or cultural. Doing so becomes necessary for the study of the intricate and complex link between nation and narration, especially when one is dealing with novels that narrate

193 the stories of individuals caught in their class-determined roles as the subjects of nation-state. Routines, daily lives, mundane everyday practices are the tropes one finds in 'social' novels. But these practices found in the narratives are not removed from the social universe even when they are carried out in utter ignorance of or indifference to them. This is not to suggest that there is to be found a one-to-one correspondence between the narrative universe and the social universe. However, the narrative universe is hardly autonomous, not even its various elements: words, sentences, metaphors, sentiments, values, desires, events, experiences, modes of statements, etc., as these are all caught up in social relations. Speaking of the use of language in the novel, Bakhtin argues that 'no living word relates to its object in a singular way' and says: The word directed towards its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgements and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group.^

The insight available here is that narratives are enfolded in the social and that no story remains in a shell of autonomous existence. The embeddedness of values, judgements and a host of interrelationships in the narrative leads us to view the complex elaboration of sociality itself in the novels. Therefore, it is viable to study a novel about the trial and tribulations of an individual as offering room for a discussion of the social universe within which the individual lives are embedded. Even when their focus is on the local, particular lives, novels are nevertheless part of a network of production, distribution and consumption in social and cultural spaces. In pursuing a study of the construction and contestation of nation in novels which do not explicitly narrativise or allegorise the affairs of the nation-state, this embeddedness will be explored in this chapter. The experiences that are fictionally presented in them create a socially pertinent universe of values, desires, challenges, and sentiments. An engagement with these would provide a means of discussing the macro issues without claiming the macro to be universal.

194 It is therefore possible to concern oneself with the macro issue of nation in a novel that is situated in a micro locale. In tracing the everyday practices of the middle class family and noting the way it is located in a wider web of social, cultural and political relations, one may be able to examine the underlying valorisations of, as also attend to contestations of, certain notions of nation. To do so is not to claim that such a novel speaks in the universalistic register of nationalism. In this chapter three novels are studied with the purpose of examining the processes of identity politics in relation to the phase of nation-building. These novels, Arun Joshi's The Apprentice, Rama Mehta's Inside the Haveli, and Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence, suit the present purpose as they deal with a time phase when the ideas of consolidating the nationhood and marching towards the Utopian 'developed' status of the country are very much a concern in India. Published between 1975 and 1988, these novels deal with roughly the same period of 1960s and 1970s.

II. The Apprentice-. Nation's Honour and the Responsible Citizen Arun Joshi has authored five novels and a collection of short stories. His first novel, The Foreigner, was published in 1968. His other novels are The Strange Case of Billy Biswas (1971), The Apprentice (1974), The Last Labyrinth (1981) and The City and the River (1990). His collection of short stories, The Survivor, was published in 1975. Joshi is a writer who has dealt in all his novels with the human predicament in modem conditions. As T. Vijay Kumar points out, "His novels have been about individuals' convoluted quests for meaning in life, beyond material success, and a search for identity beyond their societal roles."^° His narratives are weaved around themes like alienation, identity, crisis in faith, quest, corruption of the soul and disillusionment. The tradition established in Indian English fiction by Joshi's predecessors such as Mulk Raj Anand, Bhabhani Bhattacharya, and Kamala Markandaya was one of intense engagement with the immediate problems of the society. Contrary to the preoccupation with the social experience, Arun Joshi and his

195 contemporaries begin to explore individuals' life and psyche. Makarand Paranjape characterises Arun Joshi's fiction thus: "Arun Joshi's novels reflect elitist concern - the hungers of the flesh and soul of the wealthy, privileged, but desperately unfulfilled protagonists, blundering through spiritual and sensual labyrinths to quench their various thirsts."'' This censure apart, Arun Joshi is one of the major voices of the modernist period of Indian English novel. In his novels which are often structured in the quest mode, Joshi explores the individual psyche that is burdened with angst, to arrive at some kind of redemption. O.P. Mathur and G. Rai have argued: Arun Joshi is concerned with the predicament of modem man and his attempt to understand the labyrinth of life. Joshi's angst-ridden protagonists are relentlessly in search of a way to face with dignity a life which is ugly, inescapably painful and always unsatisfying. Ultimately, however, they are able to arrive at some form of personal affirmation.'^

The choice and treatment of the material in Arun Joshi may thus be said to reflect the modernist idiom. Consequently, his novelistic style too is modernist and he uses non-linear narration, monologue, fragmentation of story units, mixing of memory and descriptions, orality, and psychological exploration. M.K. Naik has said: Arun Joshi's recurrent theme is alienation in its different aspects, and his heroes are intensely self-centred persons prone to self-pity and escapism. In spite of their weaknesses they are, however, genuine seekers who strive to grope towards a purpose in life and self-fulfilment... The most acute kind of alienation is that from self and the victim in The Apprentice is Rathor, a minor Government official... Joshi is a novelist seriously interested in existential dilemmas and equally acutely aware of both the problems of post- Independence Indian society and the implications of the East- West encounter. He is a skilled narrator and can even make an entire novel a long monologue (as in The Apprentice) without losing his hold over the reader's attention.

The Apprentice is a novel of the sixties as far as its story-time goes. The novel weaves historical details integrally into the narrative. This positioning of the novel firmly in the sixties explains the tenor of the novel in one sense. This

196 is so because, 1960s, in the post-independent Indian history, is an age of disillusionment. This is the period when in most Indian languages the modernist literary movement took roots. Literature of the period deviated from the idealism of the preceding periods and began to focus on the stark reality. The novels specially began portraying the disillusionment and sense of estrangement felt by the individual. Arun Joshi's The Apprentice captures the mood of personal crisis that is nevertheless linked with the state of affairs of the country. This link between the personal and the social engenders alienation. K.R. Shirwadkar explains it thus: "...in Arun Joshi, [ahenation] is due to inability of man to establish contact with the reality around. The discord between man and the reality arises on account of the imperfection or the insensitivity of the reality."^'* The events narrated in this novel do not all happen during the sixties, but they are being narrated at that juncture. The time of narration and the time of the narrated events are different. The distance between the two is important because the novel presents itself as a confessional narrative of the first person narrator, who is the protagonist. Although the confessional tone is absent initially and the narrative becomes confessional only gradually, the speaker, from the outset, offers his present evaluation of the past events he is narrating. As a result, the narrative operates on two time-scales - the present and the past - and the first person narrator's approach to both is evaluative. The story of The Apprentice relates to the past time-scale, i.e., the events from the past life of the narrator become in substance the main focus of the narrative. As far as the present time-scale is concerned, apart from the descriptions of the local details of the situation when/ where the narration is taking place, there is very little that becomes part of the story. The novel has a situation of story telling, but the story being told is the life-story of the teller. Nevertheless, there is a self-consciousness about this telling of the story. The teller and the listener of the story are clearly identified and firmly located. Though the listener is detailed with reference to his age, background, occupation, attitudes, future plans, etc., his name is not given. In

197 fact, the novel mentions only two names: one is Himmat Singh the Sheikh, a master manipulator, and the other is the narrator himself - Ratan Rathor. Pier Paolo Piciucco has observed that "The gloomy, Kafkaesque atmosphere of the novel tends to ignore the identity of every character so that the reader knows them through their social role or kind of relationship to Ratan."'^ What makes Ratan Rathor seek out a listener to whom he can narrate his life-story is the sense of guilt he carries within. The guilt relates to his corrupt actions that have caused the death of many soldiers in the battlefield during the Indo-China war of 1962 and also have led to the suicide of his closest friend, the Brigadier. He gets an opportunity to own up to his crime and save the Brigadier who is about to be court-martialled, but Ratan Rathor backs out. Then, after the Brigadier's death, he sets on a hunt for the one who has led him into the crime and later has exposed him. During the hunt, he realises that, contrary to his suspicion, it is not the manipulative Sheikh who is behind the expose, but Ratan Rathor's boss, the Secretary and the Minister. But this search for the ones who have wronged him also makes him realise that such a search is of no use; that the problem is with himself He realises that he has erred and hence his life is exposed to be futile. Now, if he wished to make amends, he has to change his approach to life and begin in earnest to seek how to make it useful. As Gopal Reddy says. Out of an acute sense of alienation and a quest to understand the meaning of life, Ratan undergoes the sternest apprenticeship in the world. Symbolically he starts at the lowest - dusting the shoes of the congregation outside the temple every morning on his way to the office.

His attempt to reconstruct his life now makes him a humble man who can find peace only in service to humanity and that is the beginning of his second 'apprenticeship'. It is on one such Sunday that he comes across his listener, a young boy of the same age as his daughter. He begins to meet him regularly and slowly makes him the receiver of his confession. The confession is occasioned by his sense of wasting his life. The sense of waste of life is related to his own sense

198 of loss of honour due to his corrupt ways. As a result, he feels that all that he presently is requires a reconstruction. Thus, the reconstruction of his life-story as a confessional narrative is an attempt at the reconstruction of his life in the future. Arun Joshi links the condition of the protagonist to the choice of the narrative technique. Thus, the novel is written in a confessional mode, but this mode is also necessitated by the nature and purpose of the protagonist. Madhusudan Prasad thus finds the technique well suited to the material: The Apprentice... is essentially a confessional novel, and self-realisation as well as resultant contrition is its main motif It is written in the form of a monologue which is eminently suited to the confessional mode of narration as well as the theme dealt with.'^

In the story of his life that Ratan Rathor narrates, two worldviews are presented, that of his father and mother. This neat ordering of worldviews invests idealism with the father and pragmatism with the mother. On the basis of the portrayal of the two characters, these two worldviews are differentially valued. References to the father portrays him not only as courageous, bold, selfless but also active, youthful, dynamic, whereas descriptions of the mother present her as sick, struggling, 'sitting in the dusk'.'^ (19) The father gives up his law practice and all his prosperity for the sake of his ideals while the mother sternly cautions Ratan Rathor that only money matters in the world. Father's idealism is attached to patriotism and the nationalist movement in Ratan Rathor's narrative. His father has a change of heart after listening one day to Gandhiji (8) and gives up his practice as a lawyer and gives away his wealth, immersing himself in the struggle for independence of the nation, a cause for which he does not hesitate to sacrifice his life. This provides one of the paradigms in relation to which Ratan Rathor views his life. This paradigm places greater importance to the well being of the nation and the ideals that inform a life dedicated to this cause. Thus, for example, Ratan's father looks down upon 'career' as "bourgeoisie fifth." (36) Ratan has had a pull towards a life dedicated to such ideals. He even contemplates joining the 'Movement' but overcome by the fear of failure he

199 withdraws. But it is made clear, in Ratan's nostalgic recounting of the event, that the thought was exhilarating and one that uplifted him: "Those first seven miles beside the river had been like a pilgrimage. For forty minutes I had felt an upliftment that I was never to feel again... 1 believed I was ready to sacrifice all without promise of reward or of success." (21) Both as experience and as a memory of that experience, this event is viewed as 'elevating'. In short, the paradigm of idealism associated with his father brings into the structure of the novel the domain of nationalism. Serving the nation as a freedom fighter is automatically seen by the young experiencing Ratan as well as the adult remembering Ratan as of intrinsic value. Therefore, R.K. Dhawan has said, Ratan Rathor unfolds the story of his life - his hopes and aspirations, his dreams and fantasies, his agonies and anxieties. The account given by him is not a mere tale of the life of an individual but also the story of a nation's 'passage' through a period of trial and tribulation. The destiny of the individual is thus inexplicably linked up with the destiny of the nation in which he lives.'^

Idealism is seen basically as contained in serving the nation and is associated with nationalism for Ratan Rathor. The paradigm of idealism and nationalism offers him the possibility of organising his life in the service of nation and finding fulfilment in life. When it came to the choice of a career too, he would have wanted to be a doctor as it was a profession that was 'respected' and where one could be of 'use'. (18) This train of thought suggests that for the young Ratan, there was a strong desire to make his life meaningful by becoming a respected man, the way his father had been. Intimations of greatness, fame and good name structure the desire to lead a life following his father, within the paradigm of idealism. Ratan is also pulled towards a less adventurous approach to his life wherein he is able to find a secure job. This paradigm is structured by pragmatic considerations. Not how things should be, but how things are. His mother exhorts him never to forget that money succeeds where all else fails:

200 Don't fool yourself, son, she said. Man without money was a man without worth. Many things were great in life, but the greatest of them all was money. It was not that she believed it to be so, she said, but that was the way the world was made... If I had everything and had no money I would be little better than a beggar's shoe. It was not patriotism but money, she said, that brought respect and bought security. Money made friends. Money succeeded where all else failed. There were many laws, she said, but money was law unto itself If I underrated the power of money, she said, I would be sorry some day. (19)

The mother represents a pragmatic worldview as opposed to the idealism that his father represents. But, mother's point of view is not about being corrupt. She stands for the individual to take care of himself/herself She considers that money is to be made for the individual to survive. It is important that her enunciation of these ideas are located at a time when without any economic or family support she has to bring up the child after the death of Ratan's father. Thus in Ratan's narrative, two principles are framed as binary opposites and his growing up story presents a clash between the two. While Ratan follows his mother's advice in taking his own care, he later on completely muddles up her advice by becoming greedy and corrupt. C.N. Srinath points out: The Apprentice is the tale of conscience torn man with a curious mixture of idealism and docility, a vague sense of values, a helpless self-deceptive effort to flout them for the sake of a career - in short, with a deep awareness of the conflict between life and living.

What is significant, however, is the maimer in which these binary opposites are linked not only to the individual's choice of a worldview, but to the question of one's place in relation to the nation. The paradigm of idealism requires the individual to structure his life so as to serve the nation through self-sacrifices. The paradigm of pragmatism requires the individual to take care of his future by securing a decent livelihood. The opposition between the two paradigms, in Ratan's narrative, emerges not because of opposing values but because of opposing needs of the individual. In the father's paradigm, the individual becomes a patriotic national by partaking in a struggle for the

201 'nation'. In the mother's paradigm, the individual becomes a subject of the nation-state in attempting to fmd his/her bearing within it. Thus despite the binary opposition set up between an idealistic and a pragmatic worldview, in relation to nationalism, an individual is inescapably implicated in the metanarrative of the nation-state. At one level the novel is the life story of Ratan Rathor - his growing up, settling down to a government job and a middle class life, his descent into a corrupt lifestyle and finally his present attempts at expiating the wrongs he had committed. At this level the story is particular to the individual, his trials and tribulations. But we are not allowed to limit our reading of the novel as the story of an individual. In the course of narrating his story, Ratan Rathor, invokes the general many times in many ways. For example, the novel opens with a rally addressed by a minister. Ratan's listener is soon identified as a National Cadet. Throughout the novel references are made to the war with China and the fervour of patriotism during the war time. Before long, we have to acknowledge that the novel's focus on the individual notwithstanding, it is also about the nation. Thakur Guruprasad argues, "The broader topic of this novel is the rotten soul of a whole generation in a nation, the generation of post-independence India emerging between 1947 and the Chinese war of 1962."^' The rendering of the personal story within the larger framework of the national is available mainly through symbolism, though frequent descriptions of the social environs are very much a part of the narrative. Ratan Rathor, for example, says at one point: "I remember nights of summer - brief but cool - when I lay awake for hours gazing at the star filled sky thinking of 'India'. What was India? Where was she headed? How long must the struggle go on? How long?" (18) The significance of this passage partly lies in the fact that we see in it the protagonist thinking not only about himself but also about the nation. However, and more importantly, the suggestion is about the status of the narrative itself which aims to incorporate the nation's story within the narrow one of the protagonist. This can also be seen in his insistent references to the

202 nation: "I have this unfortunate weakness for pontification - a common weakness in our nation to judge by things." (22) and again "Not much remains in a nation whose youth has lost its soul." (51); further, "What oppressed me? A sense of failure, I suppose, more than anything else. Not so much a personal failure... but a more general failure, the failure of a continent, a race." (63); "After the restlessness came apathy. And this apathy, this indifference, grew. Upon me. Inside me. Like a boil. Like leprosy. Just, 1 suppose, as it grew upon the country, from day to day, week to week." (63) Locating the personal narrative within the larger narrative of the nation, Ratan Rathor is at once claiming a generality to his life-story as well as implicating the general as having causal relation to his story. Thus the novel moves in two directions: one in which the particular story of Ratan Rathor becomes an allegory for the story of the nation; another in which nation is implicitly held responsible for the life of the protagonist. These two possibilities are suggested through two distinct strategies. First, in Ratan Rathor's recounting of his life-story there is a severe irony directed at the self It is an irony that mounts a scathing attack on the corrupt ways and selfish tendencies of his former self The structure of the novel as a confessional narrative reinforces this irony. Even as he narrates the events of his life, along with details of what he felt, thought and did in the course of those events, the first person narrator is openly critical of those actions retrospectively. The irony targeted towards the self of the past - the experiencing self as against the narrating self - not only brings a distance but also imposes responsibility on the experiencing self and holds him guilty of amoral life: I started to rant again, in order, more or less, to camouflage my fear. It used to be my tested principle that in such situations one ought to be the first to start the offensive, if one were to gain the upper hand... on and on I raved full tilt as though I stood on a stage competing for a declamation contest." (105)

203 The tone of retelling makes, as in the above passage, the irony intense. The hypocrisy and the amorality of the attitudes of the experiencing self are subjected to criticism by the very choice of words and tone in their recounting. This feature in the novel is a constant one that we find from the beginning till end. This criticism of course is coupled with another strategy wherein the experiencing self s attitude is made general and he is seen as metonymically standing for the whole of the nation. These twin strategies release at once the allegorical structure of the story - Ratan Rathor as only a symptom; and the causal relation to the nation - Ratan Rathor as a victim of the spirit of time in the nation. In developing an internal critique of the self in the very narration of that self, the novel comes to present Ratan's life as one of progressive decay. But even as the narrator tells his past experiences, we begin to see that the decay is not limited to the individual, but is systemic. The individual is only a symptom of the evil. Ratan Rathor also continuously refers to the corruption not only in himself but also in the larger society - his nation. The manner in which a variety of the individual's experiences are twinned with the nation's history, we begin to read the individual's story as an allegory for the story of the nation. The second strategy is the broad generalisations about the nation that Ratan Rathor offers in passing judgements on a number of occasions on the state of affairs in his nation, both in the past and now at the narration-time. Ratan Rathor also suggests that his own story is not merely a sign of his culpability, but it is also a sign of the way in which an individual is led to dishonest means of life. This is so because Ratan Rathor's acts of corruption are made possible by the system which leads him in that direction - if not Ratan some one else would do the same. He only becomes a cog in the machine. It is the whole system which produces the corruption. The system does so because the society has no deterrent for such amorality. This logic leads Ratan Rathor to claim that he is as much a victim as he is guilty. His

204 confession of a guilt ridden life thus is also a conviction of the society. K.D. Verma's argument is pertinent in this context: No doubt poverty is fertile soil for breeding crime, but it is the rich and the bourgeoisie of the pre-independence and the post-independence periods who will do anything to gratify their indulgent lust for money. Joshi's astute analysis of the crumbling values of the bourgeoisie and the complete absence of ethical concerns on the part of aristocracy reveals the nature of the moral and psychological conflict that people like Rathan Rathor face, especially in preserving their own ideahsm.^^

The strategy of first person narration introduces the element of confession as well as an internal criticism, and the confession is the internal criticism. It is a confession of a life that veers away from the innocence of childhood and idealism of youth to the crass materialism and corruption of adulthood. The narrative places the corrupt protagonist between two internally valued phases in Ratan's life, the idealistic adolescent and the repentant narrator. Retrospection from a point of repentance gives the major part of the story a severe ironic treatment. The present of the narrator obviously colours the narration of the past. As Srinath puts it, The contrast between the earlier Ratan, the apprentice who has hitched his wagon to the star of success, and Ratan the apprentice who has passed through the dark night of soul, is brought out in anger, remorse and intense suffering that one can feel in the tone of the narration.^^

The narrator at the point of narration occupies a different world of morality than in the past. He does not however have answers to all questions that his experiences may raise, but he firmly believes that a lack of moral conviction is the cause behind the life he has lived the way he did. In his early life, Ratan Rathor moves away from the paradigm of his father's idealism to the paradigm of his mother's pragmatism by renouncing his desire to join the 'Movement' (for the freedom of the nation) and instead hunts and obtains a clerical job in the bureaucratic machinery of the colonial state. At this stage, he is a lowly official, not yet confirmed in job but is keen

205 to do well. He is conscientious too and refuses a large bribe. Later, after being confirmed in job with the arrival of independence, he begins his slow descent into corruption. Ratan Rathor's career introduces us to another dimension of the novel. With respect to his career, the protagonist narrates the manner in which he started on it, how he settled in it and became a confirmed employee, how he slowly grew complacent in his job and came to accept bribe and how he fought off being exposed by not confessing to his crimes. This narrative is at one level the story of gradual decay. But it also unravels the workings of the bureaucratic machinery of the state - initially of the colonial state and then the nation-state. Ratan Rathor joins the war department as a clerk during the British rule and is confirmed in the job at the dawn of independence. Interestingly, in his narrative of his life in office, there is no significant change in the bureaucracy after independence as compared to the British times. In fact, there is continuity: There was the public and there were THEY... Earlier, when I thought of THEY I had thought of the Englishmen. Could it be that the Englishmen had been merely replaced? And many times over? Could it be that nothing else but this had happened? ... We thought we were free. What we had in fact was a new slavery. (60-1)

The insensitivity of the bureaucracy to the cause of the country, of the nation or the state or the people or any section of the people, is forcefully brought out in the main sequence of the story wherein profiteers neglect the total impact of their actions on the lives of the soldiers during the China War and supply faulty materials for the sake of making profits. Ratan Rathor happens to be just one small part and his higher ups are also involved in this graft. Further the war effort itself is revealed to be charade and that politicians did not just care: What if there was, I said and we lost it. Nobody lost a war these days, the M.D. said. There were always compromises. To be candid, he whispered, who cared for the wilderness that we were quarrelling over... Ultimately, he said, we would settle on a formula. An Honourable Formula. In the

206 meantime the thing was to put up a good show - for the rest ofthe world. (82)

In Ratan Rathor's narrative nation comes to be in the grips ofthe state and the various apparatuses of the state including the private movers. State as a machinery is a compromised lot, despite exceptions. In his portrayal of the ruling class, there is very little that is outside the thirst for money and power. The novel brings out how people come to be at the mercy of the state - the Brigadier exemplifies it. The state machinery is corrupt and leads to tragic actions in the story. But what comes to be presented as true is the power that state has over the fates of people and how they are subject to the state and the ruling class in general. If this class was at the forefront during the freedom struggle, in post- independence era, it still is leading the multitudes ofthe ordinary people. The lot of the ordinary people as portrayed in The Apprentice is a clear indication of how they come to be manipulated by the power hungry ruling class. The ordinary people become just a mass which quite unquestioningly follows the diktats ofthe leadership braving lathi charge or bullet or hunger. The status of the novel as a confessional monologue calls for our attention. The confession serves two purposes: within the scheme ofthe story, it suggests that Ratan is mending his earlier error of not confessing when the police commissioner offers to save the Brigadier if Ratan confessed. Secondly, confession in the novel sets up a sociality - between Ratan and the listener. That the listener happens to be young, innocent and idealistic is a sign of the novel's way of signalling to the future. Ratan's confessional is also a monologue - a sort of dramatic monologue in prose^'' - and takes the shape of oral narration, as Pier Paolo Piciucco says: The decision to start the narration abruptly, in media res, as if the exigencies of the reader were the least cared for, vehemently draws the reader's attention to the unfolding of the plot. The beginning of each new chapter recording Ratan's voice halfway through his dialogue and insisting on a language deeply structured on orality, appears to be a major concern of the writer... The writer reproduces the dynamics

207 of the discourse imitating the itinerary a thought follows through the remote recesses of the mind; the narration is not subject to any rule of logic, but rather to an irrational cause- effect route skipping from the sudden impulse of an emotion to the past memory of painful events which apparently have nothing in common.^^

In setting up a dialogue with a young boy, Ratan begins the expiation of his past crimes. But beyond this cathartic and confessional function, the technique of speaking to an actualised listener hints at the forming of sociality. Secondly, the narrative, as it comes to the reader as a book, is not a personal document produced in the privacy of the narrator. Thus, the framing of the narrative in orality undercuts alienation and insists on a public acknowledgment of responsibility. The confession along with Ratan Rathor's humbling act of dusting the shoes is the beginning of his life as a new 'apprentice'. A brief recapitulation of the analysis made so far is due here. The Apprentice links the particular story of Ratan Rathor with the story of the country. This is done in a variety of ways: the novel is crowded with references to the historical and contemporary incidents in the country, there are symbols (Hindu) evoked to refer to the collective culture, there are generalisations that Ratan makes about the behavioural patterns of the Indians, there are direct statements about the state of affairs in the country, and there are rallies and parades displaying nationalist fervour. In short, the novel invites us to view the simultaneity of the micrological (individual) and macrological (national) narratives through both the causal connection and symbolic parallels between the two. Ratan is very conscious of how his sense of loss of honour, wasted life, moral degeneration are structures of feeling that are not limited to him alone but are collective. Describing the Republic Day parade after the 1962 war with China, Ratan says: There was a body of men that had sworn to lay down their lives at any time, any place, without a tear in their eyes. But the test had come and they had failed. Yes, they had failed. For all the starch and the bagpipes there was no doubt that they had failed. They had fled leaving their armour and their honour behind. (126)

208 There is also in Ratan's narrative, a deliberation about how he and the country can become better. For example, "The crookedness of the world; the crookedness of oneself How to get rid of it? Revolution or God?... Whose God? .. .And Whose Revolution?... I do not know what do to, where to begin." (142) This indicates the simultaneous structuring of the story of the individual and the country. In this configuration of the relationship between the individual and the nation-state, there is a suggestion of the responsibility of both in achieving progress. The novel invokes two binary structures: one, between idealism and pragmatism and, the other, between individual and the state. These also become the twin frameworks to work out the theme of responsibility. It is Ratan's irresponsible greed that causes the loss of life, property and the honour of the nation. Further, it is his irresponsibility that leads to the charges of dereliction of duty against his friend, the Brigadier, and his death ultimately. Once Ratan pursues this issue of responsibility - of who is responsible for making him do what he did, and for the leak that led to framing of charges against the Brigadier, - he comes to realise that it leads from one to another individual, till the very representatives of the state are involved. Thus, we notice that the theme of responsibility with respect to what is wrong has been picked up at the level of the individual and traced up to the state. It has to be noted that in this novel the state has a 'face', it is not disembodied, it is not dispersed among structures beyond the individuals. The novel sees the state as being made up of individuals, whose integrity is what finally determines the quality of the 'nation' being built. In terms of idealism and pragmatism too, the novel seems to suggest that a balance between the two are necessary. Sheer idealism fails to take realistic stances toward the evil, and can become self destructive; unrestrained pragmatism can easily slide to moral depravity. Thus, the figuration of the individual as a responsible citizen indicates an attitude toward the construction of nation. This attitude imposes on the individual a responsibility towards the well-being of the nation. The choices.

209 actions, aspirations and values of the individual are to be structured with the nation's 'good' in mind. On the other hand, the state has to function morally. A notion of good, of being useful to others, is necessary in individuals; similarly the creation of a system that ensures honourable lives to its subjects is the responsibility of the state. This can be achieved, the novel seems to suggest, by striking a balance between idealism and pragmatism worked out in the lives of the individuals as well as in the functioning of the state. Thus, the novel is a search for the right balance between the role of individuals and the state in preserving the dignity of the nation and between idealism and pragmatism to ensure a purposeful life to individuals with assured material support. The individuals, in the novel's construction of nation, have to turn into full subjects of the nation-state. The novel does invoke the glories of the past in setting up a contrast with the present. The identity of the collectivity in The Apprentice is mainly formed in political terms. This reveals the novel's adherence to the rhetoric of the state in framing the nation-state's subjects. The rarefaction of the social and cultural marks in the configuration of collective identity, and the silence over the impact of the hegemonic nationalism on social harmony reveal how this novel reduces the sphere of politics to the acts and activities of the rulers and ignores the politics of the ruled. One of the tendencies of the hegemonic nationalism is to deploy the state to perpetuate its construction by instituting an affective structure inviting the subjects to defend the status quo lest the nationhood fail. Ratan's rhetoric of the failure of the nation, loss of honour, wasted lives, the need to learn from the past follies and so on are signs of the effectiveness of this affective structure. The search for the right balance that Ratan undertakes in his narrative is thus implicated in the rhetoric of the honour, dignity, and progress of the 'nation', the fear of its failure intensifying that search. In the meantime, the 'nation' in whose name the story of Ratan is structured, remains unchallenged on class, gender, caste or any other cultural grounds. The rhetoric of equalised 'national' identity comes to dominate all the attention with none of the other kinds of struggles having any import. In fact, everything else would be framed in the moralistic

210 vocabulary of greed, corruption and degeneration. The result is that the spiritual economy of The Apprentice obscures the political economy as well as cultural conflicts by locating the interest of the individual in that of nationhood by mobilising a homogenised morality of nationalistic 'good'.

III. Inside the Haveli: Emplotment of Aristocratic Nation Inside the Haveli is Rama Mehta's only novel though she has published academic books and children's fiction. She has received considerable acclaim for the lone work as reflected in what K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar says about the novel: Inside the Haveli is a sensitive piece of realistic fiction, even an authentic sociological study, and it is written with a naturalness and poise that are disarming and effective at once. The evocation of scene, character and especially of atmosphere is almost uncanny... The balance between repose and movement is well sustained, there is romance but no cheap sex, there is tension but no violence, and there is a feeling for the values and verities.^^

Published at a time when in India the desire for modernity was strong even as pride in tradition was fierce, it is a novel that sets up a face off between tradition and modernity and it is seen as offering the best of both the 'worlds'. As the above quote from Iyengar suggests, its popularity seems to be due to not so much for resolving the conflict between tradition and modernity, but for favouring tradition and maintaining a conservative outlook, both in ideological framing of the narrative as well as the style in which it is rendered. That the novel's ideological framing of modernity can at once gather up pedagogic import is suggested in the praise showered on it by Viney Kirpal: Rama Mehta's intentions in writing this novel are to help the western educated Indian reader regain his belief in his own traditions... The resolution of the novel is that Geeta gradually grows away from the westernised perception acquired from her education and learns to appreciate the dignity, solemnity, meaning and worth of indigenous traditions. ^^

211 While in Shashi Deshpande's novel, That Long Silence, discussed later in this chapter, the ^contestation of nation proceeds on the basis denial of agency and selfhood to women with the ideological framing that is resolutely modem, in Rama Mehta's novel the contestation is based on nostalgia, with the traditional forms of collectivity preferred over what has replaced them, the 'nation-state'. The novel develops the thematic of 'nation' as a traditionally sanctioned community as opposed to the flattened horizontality of the citizenry in a nation-state chiefly through a class and gender marked valorisation of tradition. Inside the Haveli demarcates its narrative paradigm by instituting a division between the magical time of traditional community and the flat horizontal time of nation-state. The former derives its enchanting character in its difference from the flat memory-less domain of the latter, the one constituting the other. The magical time of the narrative universe of the novel is contained partly in nostalgia and partly in continuity. The flat time of the nation-state is contained in taming the alien gaze of its central character, Geeta. The novel opens with a highly resonant description of Udaipur's 'Old City' in its distinction from the new township: "Udaipur was once the capital of the state of Mewar; now it is only a town like many other towns in Rajasthan." (3) The contrast invoked in the words 'once' and 'new' introduces the nostalgic and rues the levelling of Udaipur with 'many other towns' in the time of the nation-state. The insertion of Udaipur into the flat horizontal plane of notion-state undermines the magical uniqueness of Udaipur. This perception is conveyed in the distance between 'the state of Mewar' and 'Rajasthan' in the description. The 'magical' is, of course, not a quality of Udaipur in itself, but one that is obtained through its temporal and spatial distanciation and differentiation from the flat horizontality of the nation-state. The novel characterises this 'magicality' as being generated in the now through a memory of the past: "But the change in its status hasn't diminished its beauty, nor the air of mystery that hangs over what is now known as 'Old

212 City'." (3) There is a suggestion that the diminution in the status is occasioned by the integration of the state of Mewar into the Indian nation-state, into becoming one among the many towns of Rajasthan. This is what can be called the flattening into horizontality: Udaipur, no more the hallowed capital of Mewar, but just another town. The likeness to towns is seen here as an effect of flattening and as a diminution in status. Thus, the coming of the nation-state (the state of Mewar has been dissolved into the Indian nation-state at the time of Indian independence, and the beginning of the novel is twenty-five years from that time) has brought about a reduction in the status of Udaipur, which is regretted by the citizens of Udaipur. The change in the status nevertheless is only a limited 'loss' because, the novel goes on to assert, its 'beauty' is undiminished. The result of this contradiction is the production of magicality: 'the air of mystery' that 'hangs over' the city. The severance is neither complete, nor is the flattening all- penetrating because this mystery, this nostalgic production of the magicality that sustains the past through remembered practices sets up the 'old city' as distinct, as not-yet-opened up. Therefore, "the wall still divides Udaipur into two halves. The new township is beyond the old wall and the city within it." (3) The topographical division also marks a deeper distance as the 'old city' and the new township are enveloped in the novel's narrative prose in distinct zones of time: the magical time of the old city and the flat time of the township. This is precisely what conjures up the 'mystery' for the 'old city': a mystery that is not fathomed by the people of the town. In two paragraphs of contrasting visions of each other, the novel points to the distance in terms which focus on the continuity with the past for the old city and an absence of collective memory for the new township. (5) In the first of these paragraphs, the view of the township by the people of the old city is presented: They have seen the rows of neat houses on either side of the broad tarmac road. The air is clean and in it there is no cow dung smoke but there is no soul in the new township. Its people have not memories of what Udaipur was like, they are newcomers, they don't have common ancestors. They don't belong to the soil of Mewar. (5)

213 This view of the township as a body without past, without memory, without soul and without roots is an index of the collective identity invoked in the novel. It is an identity that is specific to Udaipur, issuing from the memory of its glorious past ("No one in the city can forget those days when Udaipur belonged to the people" (5)). Unlike the old city, the new township is a conglomeration of people without collective memory, ancestors, common customs and a sense of belonging. Thus, the old city and the new township occupy different horizons of collectivity, the four hundred years old wall signalling the distance. Though this wall is crumbling, there are big gaps (presumably symptomatic of the ambivalent space where the old city and new township form continuity), it still 'divides' Udaipur. The view of the old city by the people in the new town is less penetrating. While the description of the new township seen by the people of the old city is detailed enough, the description is minimal when the people in the new town see the old city: "They are puzzled by the wall-enclosed havehs... There is no way they can look into the courtyards... The town people leave the old city, without having fathomed what goes on inside men's and women's apartments of the haveli." (5) The differentiated visions of each other, one penetrating while the other puzzled, sets up in the novel a preferred site of narrativisation. The old city from now on becomes the closed off horizon of the narrative universe. The narrative dismisses the new township, never to venture into it, though its presence continues to index the 'crumbling' wall and the growing gaps in it. Once the space of the narrative universe is thus demarcated and closed off, the narrative then moves to opening up the 'mystery' of the 'old city'. What is beyond the 'vision' of the people of the new township becomes the focus of the narrative gaze. The unravelling of the mystery in the fictional representation inaugurates a bridge between the walled old city and the outside world. The novel casts itself as the facilitator of that viewing which not only enables vision but also answers the puzzle through its anthropological

214 T 1 presentation of the 'calendrical everyday time' of the life in the havelis of the old city. This gesture in the novel, of simultaneously closing off and inaugurating an opening, introduces the "understanding" it attempts to bring to the portrayal of life of "an ancient and traditional way of life." In demarcating the life of the havelis of the old city as the preferred narrative space, the novel distanciates and differentiates it from the outside world (township) and the present. Within the novel, the 'old city' has its own identity derived from its centuries old customs and life patterns. Thus Geeta comes from a different time, in coming from a different place. The difference is in what is seen as the hierarchical structures maintained by the traditions in the havelis as against Geeta's upbringing in the relatively less hierarchical, flat world of Bombay. This is even indicated in the manner in which the narrative employs names. While the maid servants are all referred to in the narrative with their first name, the ladies of the haveli are refened to using their honorific each time. Thus, Sangram Singhji's wife is Bhaba Sa, Bhagwat Singhji's wife is Kanwar Sa, Bhagwat Singhji's sisters are bua Sa etc. But Geeta is mentioned by her first name throughout the novel. Her outsider status is never completely erased by the narrative code of naming. In distanciating the 'old city' from the outside world, the terms evoked are of root metaphors. The world within the wall of the old city is rooted in centuries old memories and customs - providing for the collective identity and differentiating it from the outside world. This outside world - whether the new township, or other places, like Bombay from where Geeta comes - is seen as lacking this belongingness. The magical time of the old city is thus constituted in the novel with reference to its link with the past time (its continuation in the present giving it its uniqueness). The insiders remember the old days with fondness and are zealous to continue the customs rooted in that past as much as possible. For example, Pari, a maid, recounts the past and says with a sigh: "Oh! Those days were wonderful... But my eyes have seen such splendour that I feel you have been cheated [not to have seen those days])." (25)

215 Within this magical time of the old city the life in the haveli is what constitutes the continuation of the old and that comes to be branded as tradition. The life in haveli that the novel portrays is of a feudal patriarchy. Here the master of the haveli is like godhead, a giver. The servants are given land and property; their weddings are arranged, needs are taken care of In the haveli, the men are the ultimate source of its very functioning: "...their presence was felt everywhere in the haveli. Nothing was done without consulting them. It was around their wishes that the whole routine of the home revolved." (19) Every custom and routine is geared towards serving the men. The best of the dishes are served to men, though for female guests adjustments could be made. While women are veiled so that they are not seen, the male members entertain themselves by watching performances by unveiled female dancers. When Geeta decides to send Sita to school and when she starts an informal school in the haveli, it is with the permission of Bhagwat Singhji that these are proceeded with. Once he gives his permission, Geeta's mother-in-law too, even when she disagrees with the developments, defends Geeta in her endeavours because it has the consent of the man of the house. The birth of a female child is viewed as a burden. Beyond this feudal patriarchal structure, the novel identifies the space 'inside the haveli' as being the sphere of the women. In its exclusive attention to the life of women, both ladies of the house and the maid servants, the novel narrativises women's life. Viney Kirpal syas: "I can't think of another Indian novel in English whose central character as well as minor characters are women, and which is told entirely from the woman's point of view." Men's presence is felt, but only through the activities of the women. The narrative concern in the emplotment^"* of female space is with the decisions of the women, activities of the women and the emotional life of the women. Men's activities come filtered through women's perception of or participation in them.

216 The narrative's steadfast focus on the hfe of women inside the haveh and outside it (but within the old city) brings up the issue of women's space. The upper class women keep purdah and the traditional rules of decorum apply to them strictly. They are largely disconnected from the outside world and spend a life of female sociality. Their vision, speech and actions are regulated by the well charted rules. Describing the purdah system among the upper class Hindus in Rajasthan, Indira Parikh and Pulin Garg point out: They come as brides and leave only for the funeral pyre. The husband's home is their prison, their castle, and their palace. They believe, or are made to believe, or have no other choice but believe, that this is all for their good... However, within the walls of their home, within the feudal system of a large joint family, run parallel themes of exploitation, intrigue and counter-intrigue, all revolving around the control of resources through legacy and heritage. This is the only life they know as wives.^

The symbolic values behind the system of purdah are rooted in the total subjugation of women, as a veil would indicate the impossibility of direct view. Geeta, for example, involuntarily lifts her veil to look at the relative's house pointed out by Pari. But she is quickly rebuked for this. Geeta's access to the world can no more be through direct viewing, it is regulated by the veil, suggesting the curtailment of freedom to develop one's own view of the world. In Geeta's case it is even more acute as she has not grown up with the habit of her view of the world being filtered. For long it has remained a constant source of irritation for her. The significance of the issue of purdah is discussed by Grace Daphne, who says: In Hindu India, the figure of the veiled woman is indicative of a high-class family, one in which the women are not required to help in agricultural labour. The woman is confined in, and defined through, her relationships within a strict patriarchal authority. Many Indian women writers themselves tend to uphold this traditional women's world, advocating its positive qualities of communication, security and protection. Others portray both purdah and "purdah mentality" as means of social control, reinforced through fear and a strict hierarchy. As Leigh Mintum discusses, the major function of Indian purdah is to enforce obedience to authority

217 in the form of both husband and mother-in-law. It is disguised in a discourse that "honours" wives. Women are harassed and vilified for not conforming to these restrictive norms. The system is justified as a way of protecting women from rape and seduction, although, as Mintum points out, purdah produces a paradoxical double standard since women are rendered more mysterious and therefore attractive-and more vulnerable—to men.^^

The prescribed roles have been internalised by women to the extent that it is only with the outsider's view of Geeta that the severity can be discerned. Hence, the novel has to employ an alien gaze in revealing the mysterious inside of the havelis. Regarding the violence involved in these customs, described by K. Radha as "tyranny of the foolish customs and superstitions of the haveli"^^, none of the inhabitants have any objections. Though Geeta is resentful about the inordinate restrictions placed on her, gradually she too comes to offer voluntary consent to the constricted life. Geeta's readiness to adjust to the harsh traditional roles is explained as springing from a concern for tradition by Rama Mehta in her academic work: It was clear from the responses [of the women interviewed during the research] that western attitudes and values in the domestic realm are not respected, nor is the Western concept of individualism felt to be worth emulating. Educated Indians seem to be prepared to merge traditional attitudes with modem needs, but they want to separate the modem from the westem... It shows that developing countries in the process of modemisation want to maintain their way of life and want change but on the foundations of their cultural values.

The space of women in the novel is divided with the ladies of the house forming one paradigm and the maids the other. The division is suggested in the very organisation of space within the haveli: "Their quarters are not on the same elevation as the haveli, but a few steps below. In their courtyard there is no dividing wall, the maids are free to talk to their husbands". (6) The division of space in the novel is neither accidental nor random. It follows the logic of the feudal patriarchy. The distribution of space is encoded in the strict hierarchy imposed by the patriarchal order. We are told: "The

218 haveli may have no shape from outside, but inside there is a definite plan." (6) This 'definite plan' includes a value-laden distribution of space and a strict code of right to entry. Women are barred fi^om visiting men's quarters though men, properly announced, could visit women's quarters. The strict regulation of male-female interaction, access and restriction of space within the haveU and the overbearing formality in the inter-personal communication go a long way in ensuring the effective power of the patriarchal system. The continuation of the haveli tradition is largely undisturbed over a period of time, the reason for which is indicated in the elaborate system of formality ruling the interpersonal relations. It is the presence of Geeta, the outsider, which makes them visible in the novel. For Geeta is a rank outsider, not having grown up in a haveli. Thus, her gaze, despite the purdah as it were, decodes the intricacies of the system. Thus it is Geeta who notices that "In the haveli no one really expressed their feelings. They covered their emotions in an elaborate exchange of formal gestures and words... Everyone moved cautiously; every word was weighed before it was spoken." (32-3) The many reminders to Geeta to cover her face properly by different people is a sign of bringing her gaze under the control of the purdah system. Geeta comes to be projected through her alien gaze as the focal point of the narrative. Gradually, her accommodation into the tradition of the haveli is enabled by her understanding of the organisation of restrictive presence of individuals but also her growing respect for the personalities of her father-in- law and mother-in-law. Through her respect for personalities she also begins to appreciate the system, as it were: "Geeta no longer felt trapped in the haveli... she had seen the value of kinship ties and wanted to preserve the ancestral dignity of the haveli". (178) It is also significant that Geeta displays, throughout the novel, greater respect for the men of the house than the women. She may occasionally confess to her husband, Ajay, her frustrations regarding the women, but never so about the men. The role of the status of men in changing Geeta and convincing her to adapt to the haveli traditions is revealed when sneaking into men's quarters she has a view of the men of the house:

219 Mewar seemed safe in the hands of these stem looking men, all of whom seemed so composed, so determined and so refmed. A glow of pride and affection filled Geeta. These were good people, gentle, kind and chivalrous. Looking at the men below she forgot her daily irritations; she felt proud to be the young mistress of the haveli. How could she allow little discomforts to blind her to the great traditions of the family? (40)

The process of assimilation, though not complete even in the end, is facilitated by what is projected in the novel as a negotiation. Geeta is projected as one attempting to bring changes in the rigid confines of the haveli lifestyle. Her attempts at educating the women and sending Sita, a child of the maid servant Laxmi, to school are all seen as radical by the characters in the novel. The novel's projection too views it similarly. For example, the blurb to the Penguin edition says: "faced with [Purdah] and other traditions that threaten to snuff out her independence and progressive views, Geeta fights to maintain the modem values that she has always lived by". But the novel presents continuous signs of Geeta's adaptation to the haveli traditions. That these are her willing adaptations, and not just compromises, is indicated in the growing respect she has for the customs of the haveli, which begins fairly early in the novel and continues till the end. Malashri Lai, seeing Geeta as a 'version' of Rama Mehta, has commented that the attitude to the modem represents an "act of

39 retrogression . While Geeta's negotiation with the feudal patriarchal tradition of the haveli is thus privileged, the narrative also presents another kind of negotiation in the form of the maid servant Laxmi's rejection of the haveli. Laxmi, suspected of conjugal disloyalty and subjected to public revilement by her husband, leaves the haveli. She walks out of her marriage with Gangaram, a servant in the haveli, to live a lonely and battling life in the outside world. She refuses to come back even when Kanwarani Sa, the mistress of the haveli, sends her emissaries pleading with her to retum. Even before leaving, Laxmi had always been one who resented her confined life in the haveli. This negotiation with the rigid system of the haveli, however, is invalidated in the

220 narrative. The invalidation of Laxmi's actions strengthens the road taken by Geeta - that of assimilation with minor benefits. The narrative marshals the feudal generosity of the master and the mistress of the house on Laxmi's child Sita as well as the progressive stand of Geeta as signs of the futility of Laxmi's act of defiance. It is significant however that the only forms of negotiation with tradition that the novel deems fit to include in the emplotment of the narrative are the ones that operate within the life of the 'old city'. Geeta never leaves the haveli and commits herself to re-organising it to prepare it for the changing times. Laxmi, on the other hand, leaves the haveli, but continues to live in the bazaars of the old city. Considering that the novel has set up a divide - a fundamental one for our purposes here - between the magical time of the haveli in its life in the old city and the flat time of the new township, it is significant that all avenues of engagement with the world outside the 'old city' are truncated in the novel. We never see Geeta going back to Bombay even on a visit. We do not see people from beyond the old city ever visiting the haveli, and the one chance of living outside the haveli for Geeta, if Ajay Singh had taken up the job offered to him in Delhi, is also rejected. Thus, in the novel, there is a virtual cutting off of lines of engagement with the world outside the old city. If the opening remarks in the novel about the old city are taken seriously, then the horizontal plane of relative flatness comes to be seen in the novel as the road not to be taken. In this context, the implication is that the continuation of the tradition is preferred. This preference includes the subjection of the servants and the women (of both classes) to the feudal patriarchy. Inside the Haveli enacts the problem of pre-national forms of collectivity living within the nation. The time of the story told is twenty five years since the integration of the state of Mewar into the Union of India, which makes the time of the narrative to be around 1972. In delineating the negotiation of Geeta (bom and brought up in Bombay, has studied in co­ education institute) with the rigid tradition of the haveli, the novel claims a

221 clash between tradition and modernity. While, in the novel, tradition is simply the age old customs and practices of the feudal patriarchy as seen in the havelis of the old city of Udaipur, there is no clear portrayal of what its opposite - modernity - is. Because, if we look for signs of modernity in Geeta what is found is a trivialised dimension of it - that she is college educated, that she reads 'books', that she dislikes the rigid customs of the haveli, that she aims at providing education to the women of the haveli and the like. Some of these may be aspects of modernity, but Geeta's actions, when taken in totality, are constrained in many ways.''° In terms of her engagement with the patriarchal system that metes out unequal treatment to women and the class system that perpetuates exploitation of the underclass or the presence of caste system - we notice that Geeta is never in any discomfort with the practices of the haveli. In terms of the encoding of positive valuation of the past in the present, or nostalgia that is the implicit celebration of the charming life of the old city, Geeta has little problem with it and, in fact gears herself to a perpetuation of it. In this respect, critics who have commented on the dialectics of tradition and modernity and found the novel's approach to it laudable seem to do so because they ignore the complexity of class and gender based exploitation represented by the traditions portrayed in the novel. For example, Santosh Gupta examines this dialectic and says that the novel presents 'possible meaningful interactions' between tradition and modernity: Mehta's concern with social situations is not purely of an observer and recorder. She tries to understand the complications and complexities of woman's relationship with their society in which they also fmd much that is life-giving, and emotionally fulfilling... The young heroine of this novel penetrates the fagade of rituals and customs and finds underneath it a deep reserve of warm love, care and affection. Inside the Haveli is not only portrayal of an orthodox society - it juxtaposes a modem mind and a traditional way of life, to suggest the possible meaningful interactions.

Inside the Haveli projects the feudal community of yesteryear as still holding positive values and seeks to defend its continuation. This means that Inside the Haveli privileges the hierarchised space of the feudal patriarchy of

222 the old city's havelis over the modem space of the nationhood. Geeta's new found commitment, towards the end of the novel, to preserving the "ancestral dignity of the haveli" signals the privileging of the nostalgic old city lifestyle over that of the new township's people who are without collective memory and local roots. Reflecting on the traditions of the haveli, Geeta notes: "Tradition was like a fortress protecting them from the outside world, giving them security and a sense of superiority." (114) The projection of the generosity of the feudal patriarchy as looking after the interests of the servants by bestowing upon them land, property, and education, aims at papering over the social divisions and pleads for its continuation in the name of security and traditional well-being. The narrative prose in its measured tones, standard linguistic hfe of various characters and linear narrative, contributes to the glorification of social division within the haveli and the old city. In the opening chapter of Inside the Haveli, the description of the city establishes a firm division between the old and the new, the past and the present, the inside and the outside. This division is seen as symbolised by a bastioned wall which despite 'big gaps' "still divides Udaipur into two halves. The new township is beyond the old wall and the city within it". (3) The division has more than topographical significance and comes to provide an axis around which the novel arranges the old and the new. This arrangement of the old and the new in relation to two different spaces - the 'old city' and the 'new township' - encodes them with different values: The air is clean and in it there is no cow dung smoke but there is no soul in the new township. Its people have no memories of what Udaipur was like, they are newcomers, they do not have common ancestors, they do not know what they did, who they worshipped, what sorrow and joy they felt. They do not belong to the soil of Mewar. (5)

This encoding of value in the two spaces firmly separated at the very beginning of the narrative establishes two things: i. that the social universe of the narrative is measiured on the basis of past time and not the present;

223 ii. that belonging to this social universe, this collectivity, would require a conformity with the past. In the novel now on, viewing, understanding, adjusting and assimilating with the past becomes an important index of value. While the narrative turns away from the new township, after a brief penetrating look at it, it focuses entirely on the mysterious survival of the past - a way of life of the bygone years - in the present. But its project of unpacking the mysteries of that life as seen in an 'illustrious' haveli is nevertheless, predicated upon a 'new comer', one who does not 'belong to the soil of Mewar', who does not have 'common ancestors'. That is Geeta, who comes to the haveli after her marriage with Ajay Singh, grandson of Sangram Singh, the master of Jeewan Niwas. Geeta is an outsider not only because she is not from Mewar, or has not been brought up in a haveli, but also because she is from outside its 'time'. She is from a time that is for the haveli not in its past from which it draws its sustenance. She is a modem, educated girl. Now as a daughter-in law in the haveli she brings in the alien's gaze that enables the narrativisation of the haveli. For, an insider would not have seen what Geeta sees in the haveli. Thus it is Geeta's outsider's view that makes the haveli umavel its mysteries in the novel. Geeta is also an insider (gradually at least) as she begins to see, understand, adjust and assimilate to the haveli way of life. As Daphne Grace has pointed out: She experiences the shift between two eras, and two geographical space-time dimensions, leaving behind the modernity of her parents' home for the traditional household of her aristocratic in-laws. While apparently typifying "silenced woman," Mehta's heroine Geeta finds fiilfilment in observing without being observed, and she finally not only accepts the power of the patriarchs~the "towering tree under which the family sheltered" but ultimately perpetuates its values in the next generation.'*^

Even as the novel at its outset makes a foundational distinction between inside-outside, old-new, belonging-not belonging, it also introduces another code of value, the status of the haveli tradition within the old city as well as outside it. Evoking the nostalgia for the past when Udaipur was ruled by Ranas

224 (twenty five years ago), the narrator mentions: "No one in the city can forget those days when Udaipur belonged to the people." (5) The 'people' here refers, by an earlier mention, to both 'rich and poor'. In contrast to this perspective, the view of the new township is set up: "In the new town the rich and poor are separated by the rose gardens; they do not know each other; they live separate lives. The only thing common between them seems the tarmac road on which the poor too have the right to walk." (5) The manner in which 'people' are differently constituted in the realms of the old and the new makes a claim for a positive evaluation of the former. The 'old city', in its nostalgia for a way of life rooted in the days before nation- state and for the days of dynastic rule of the kings, sustains its past vigorously in its present life. This is the substance of a number of ethnographic details throughout the novel. This claim on behalf of the old city about the sense of collectivity is significant also because the novel, in its detailed portrayal of the aristocratic household in a haveli, gives much attention to the lives of the 'poor' servants of the haveli. Seen against this initial contrast and claim, it is a fair conclusion to draw that the novel is defending the values of the way of life in the old city as against that of the new township. In relation to the insider-outsider framework, Geeta becomes the focal point in the narrative that deploys her alien gaze to unravel the haveli life. The narrative adopts Laxmi, similarly (if not as extensively), in relation to the framework of the rich and poor. The initial contrast drawn in this respect between the old city and the new township has introduced the thematic of a responsible collectivity of the rich and poor forming the old city's 'people', as against the separateness of the lives of the rich and poor in the new township. While the narrative shuts out any viewing of the new town and its 'people', it goes on to portray the interconnected lives of the rich and the poor in the haveli. This portrayal is to be seen as an illustration of the way of life of the old city. The trope that informs the narrative concern with this issue (of constituting the collectivity) is responsibility. In the haveli, there are many

225 servants. They have their own quarters. Some hve with their spouse and children. They constitute a substantial portion of the very activities that present the haveli life to the readers. The aristocratic masters and mistresses do not merely extract labour from the servants but also take responsibility of their hfe. This is the substance of the novel's engagement with this issue. However, Laxmi's character in the novel functions in more than one way. Even though Laxmi's character operates to provide a contrast in relation to the framework of Geeta's life in the haveli, she also comes to expose the limitations of the trope of responsibility that the narrative employs in defence of the haveli way of life. Laxmi's basic contention that being a servant is not blissful despite the goodwill and generosity of the master class is indicative of a desire for class mobility: "... Nothing could convince her that cleaning and sweeping was wonderful..." (12) While this reading of Laxmi's contention has limitations, what is more evident is that none of the servants are shown to exhibit much ambition or agentive desire to break free of the servility. Their contentment is a proof within the novel of the security and support that the feudal patriarchy of the haveli tradition provides them. But this also reveals the narrative's politics of containment. There is a denial of the social mobility to the underclass in this construction of collectivity. The changes that come are due to the munificence of the upper class; Geeta sending Sita to school is a point in case. Moving beyond an understanding of nationalism as an active political movement and considering the sometimes muted manners in which it may be in operation, one may be able to study the life practices, cultural marks, attitudes to change, etc. as indicating the nature of the collectivity being imagined by people. While this suggests the kind of nations people construct, their everyday practices are a form of nationalism - not an active mass movement but a collective activity that constitutes the nation imagined by people. In a novel, hence, the everyday practices of the characters, their valorisation or otherwise of cultural and social activities, their relation to the past and the changes, etc. map the kind of collectivity being imagined.

226 In Inside the Haveli the collectivity that is valorised is the feudal patriarchal community of the havelis of aristocratic families of Udaipur. In so doing, the narrative firmly keeps out the world that is unrelated to the 'past glory' of Udaipur as the capital of Mewar. The new township, which has sprung up since the dissolution of the Mewar state and its integration into the Indian nation-state, is kept out of the narrative. Even within the space of the 'Old City', it is the aristocratic space that is invested with the values of community life. This choice projects in the novel a privileging of the collectivity that the feudal patriarchy represents over the non-aristocratic life outside haveli, the bazaar life. In the novel the world outside the old city is kept out - there are no instances of engagement, dialogue or even communication with that world. The only two exceptions are Geeta who is from Bombay entering the haveli as the daughter-in-law and Ajay Singh contemplating taking up a job in Delhi. Both end in privileging the haveli, as Geeta comes to assimilate into the haveli rather than opening it up to the outside world and Ajay Singh decides against taking up the job. The novel's steady focus is on the haveli life within the old city. The portrayal of the haveli life takes into account two sets of characters - the aristocrats and their servants. The narrativisation of haveli life integrates the lives of these two sets of characters. That is to say, here the story of the aristocratic characters and that of their servants is not separated. The servants are not made a part of a subplot or kept as peripheral characters. There is, however, another kind of segregation in the narrative - male and female. The novel largely focuses on the life practices of women. Men are at a distance and the narrative does not probe the details of their daily lives while with women it gives attention to the repetitive cycle of daily activities of their living. The presence of men and their actions are mediated through female characters. It must hastily be added that this is true only of the men of the aristocracy. They are not only at a distance, they are at a height. Men come to be seen as the very reason for women's (and by extension of the haveli's) life. The same is not true of the male servants who are incorporated into the

227 narrative details and treated on par with the female characters. This signifies the patriarchal nature of the haveli life. It is significant that the men of the aristocracy are largely absent from the narrative space (as the narrative circles around the women's apartments in the haveli). Yet most of the activities, conversation, anxieties, and joys relate to men. The rarefaction of men's physical presence is countered by the concentration of attention on them in narrative details: desire for male child, sorrow at the birth of a female child, concern about men's health, about their food, about their financial status, about their generosity, munificence, achievements, about suitable bridegrooms, dowries to be given to them and so on. The female space is crowded with concerns for male life. This technique brings out forcefully the patriarchal nature of the haveli life. It is this practice in the haveli that comes to characterise tradition - in its customs, habits and formal gestures. The novel situates Geeta, the outsider, as the viewer of these and the one who is learning about the traditions of the haveli. It is along with Geeta that the reader learns about the internal mechanism of the haveli life. Geeta proceeds to shake off her outsider status, gradually though never completely, but decidedly in favour of assimilating into this traditional life. Despite her misgivings about some aspects of the traditional life and the slow changes in the very traditions of the haveli, Geeta is projected in the novel as a future defender of the haveli tradition. In this context, novel's attitude towards the life outside the haveli in the old city and changes taking place in the havelis of the old city are illustrative of the values privileged in it. There are occasions when, along with Geeta, the reader is also taken beyond the walls of the havelis and introduced to the world outside it though within the old city. The viewing of the bazaar when Geeta is driving in a car to a relative's place is one such instance. Here, the scene of the bazaar as seen by Geeta is couched in orientalist details. For example, "The streets were a tangle of bicycles, rickshaws, bullock carts, tongas and of course, pedestrians, each threading his way through the congestion as if everyone else were an intruder."

228 (108) or "The village women wore red saris, printed saris and skirts, and the underfed half-naked children clung to their mothers." (109) These orientalist details are complete with the self deprecating romantic description of the happy rustics: "Geeta saw the eager faces of shoppers staring at the car... she yearned to join the happy boys and girls." (108) or "Geeta noticed how the eyes of these women sparkled with joy... Geeta envied the village women who walked proudly away from the shops with little bundles tucked under their arms and newly purchased bracelets on their wrists." (109) This view of the world outside the haveli is seen through Geeta, whereas on another occasion when the narrative moves out of the haveli and into the city when Pari and Khyali go in search of Laxmi, there are no such involved amazement in the descriptions. The details of this kind in the novel further the 'othering' of non-haveli life. Although, early in the narrative a claim is made about the people of Udaipur as constituting the inhabitants of the old city, both rich and poor, forming a collectivity through their common ancestry, common memory and common belonging, the othering operational in such descriptions reveal the actual subject of the narrative universe. The community that the narrative universe projects as the 'self in a self-other binary here becomes haveh-non- haveli rather than the initially invoked binaries of old city-new town (insider outsider). In thus portraying the haveli community as the self in the self-other binary, the narrative participates in the construction of an imagined community that is closed off for the non-haveli (non-aristocratic) occupants of the old city. Further, the narrative has only a gazing (that too the alien gaze of Geeta) relation with the non-haveli world. The non-haveli world of the old city of Udaipur never enters the narrative structure. There are no lines of communication across these planes. That the community imagined as the people is never more than the aristocracy of the havelis of Udaipur is clear if we give attention to the way 'changes' are noted in the novel. The novel attends to the changes that enter into the traditions of the haveli. It is not as if, as claimed by Dr. Shirish

229 Chindade, Inside the Haveli portrays the life of the Udaipur aristocracy as the 'triumph of the timeless''^^ Changes are taking place in the economy, customs, social relations and even the patriarchal system. Various characters reflect over it. There are some that are attributed to the initiatives of Geeta. But put in perspective against the socio-economic scenario, changes introduced by the modem sensibility of Geeta are relatively minor. Her initiatives are: sending Sita to school and starting an informal school for the women of the havelis. Against the backdrop of the dwindling financial resources, political power and social status of the aristocracy, these generally amount to tokenism. In relation to these changes the novel has an ambivalent attitude. This is reflected in the way Geeta reacts to the changed circumstances: "I don't want to leave Udaipur now. The haveli has made me a willing prisoner within its walls." (170) and again, "Geeta felt an outsider, an onlooker. She could never share their past. But Geeta, over the years, had come to appreciate their tradition though she could not regret the passing of an era." (114, emphasis added) Regarding the life to be led in the future, Ajay Singh and Geeta have no modem agenda. As pointed out by Z.N. Patil, "in spite of all the freedom, Geeta and her husband remain rooted in the traditions."'*'* From Bhagwat Singhji to Manji Bua Sa, many characters reflect over the changing times. They are anxious about the changes and are determined to make adjustments. One of the women during a conversation complains about the growing demands and assertiveness of the servants. Manji tells Geeta that with time havelis will not survive, so one must be prepared for the future. In fact even the rigidity of the patriarchal order in the haveli had relaxed over the time: "In the last years the etiquette that completely separated her fi-om her father-in-law had been relaxed. She was now allowed to sit in his presence when no outsiders were present." (179) But all the reflections over the changes taking place are aristocracy- oriented. The novel takes note of the changing status of the servants in the haveli: "they know we are dependent on them. The days when servants behaved as servants are over." (111) In contrast to the times when poor people

230 of Rajasthan left their children in the care of the aristocracy when they were unable to feed them, now, in the time of the nation-state, servants are less dependent on the aristocracy. The havelis are no more the main benefactors of the poor. In noting all these changes, only the interest of the aristocracy is reflected. Even when the changes involve the servants, what it means to the servants does not emerge as a concern in the novel. The concern is with the impact of these changes on the lifestyle of the aristocracy. This attitude toward change in the novel, very sympathetically recounted, reveals that contrary to the claim made initially about the rich and poor being one people, the novel is mainly concerned with the aristocracy. Thus, in Inside the Haveli the community that is imagined as a collectivity is the aristocracy. The interests of the aristocracy are not best served by the flat time of the nation-state and it is suggested in the division it institutes between the 'old city' with its roots in the past and the new town that is rootless. Further, in 'othering' the non-haveli world of the old city of Udaipur, the narrative reveals the restriction on the imagination of collectivity operative in it. And, in its attitudes toward changes taking place since the integration of Mewar into the Indian nation-state, the novel reveals its concern with the aristocracy of the havelis of Udaipur as against that of the totality of the inhabitants of the haveli, including the servants. Thus the aristocratic families of the havelis are constituted in the novel as the privileged community. The 'nation' in this narrative thus is primarily the aristocracy. But the presence of the teeming bazaar and the labour force in the havelis form the disturbing element in the happy construction of the aristocracy as the national community. Such privileging comes across as the defence of class interest. At the level of nation-building, what strategies of imagining the collectivity are in operation is interesting to explore. Nation-state invites an expanded and inclusive imagining of collectivity within a territorial domain. But a novel like Inside the Haveli illustrates the phenomena of closed off.

231 exclusive ways of imagining nation especially on behalf of the privileged sections of the society. This too is a form of contesting the grammar of 'nation' as a category of collective formation. The Utopian project of a single sense of collectivity for the people inhabiting the territorial plane of the nation-state is unrealised due to the diverse configurations of the nation-space.

IV. That Long Silence: Embedded Imsigmation and Otherness Shashi Deshpande, who started her writing career with short stories around 1970, published her first novel, The Dark Holds No Terrors, in 1980. She established herself as a significant novelist with her intense novels written in a style that mixed social realism with modernist rendering. M.K. Naik indicates the seriousness with which she has been received by critics when he says: "The most outstanding woman novelist of the period is Shashi Deshpande, the overarching theme in whose work is a woman's quest for fulfilment and the way she is thwarted at every stage by the forces of custom and tradition."'' Deshpande's novels forcefully interrogate the patriarchal structures that arrest women within their interiors and explore the social apparatuses through which this is done, including marriage, education, media, language and culture. Her novels usually have female protagonists, leading many critics to term her a feminist writer, a label she is not comfortable with. She has said in an interview: I don't like to call myself a feminist writer. I'm a feminist, but I don't write to propagate an ism... You've got to read women's writing differently. If you're going to say this is only a story about a kitchen, and belittle it for that, that's stupid. It's about a human being trying to place herself within relationships, people, and ideas.''^

While she is against the tendency of squeezing a work into a label, she is forthright about the focus of her writing: "My writing comes out of my consciousness of the conflict between my idea of myself as a human being and the idea that society has of me as a woman."'*^ In an oeuvre comprising seven novels, two collections of short stories, children's fiction, crime fiction and

232 miscellaneous prose writing, Shashi Deshpande has worked hard on being a writer as distinct from being an ideologue. Nonetheless, her body of work explores a wide range of issues pertinent to women in India. Ritu Menon points: Of all the women writers writing in English in India today, Deshpande has been the most consistent in her exploration of women's condition. She has dealt with practically every issue raised by the women's movement in India regarding the subordination of women: rape, child abuse, single motherhood, son - preference, denial of self- expression, deep inequality and deep - seated prejudice, violence, resourcelessness, low self esteem, and the binds (and bonds) of domesticity. In a way this exploration has corresponded to her own development as a writer and, in her own words, helped her to fmd her "true voice. "''^

Her novels are notable for their concern with the craft. Their affinities with modernist idiom are unmistakable. Saikat Majumdar observes: [...] the discourse of modernism locates itself in Deshpande's fictions in various ways - in its formal capacities of experimentally fractured narration, lyrical interior monologues and sensual evocation of local spaces, probably most notably in That Long Silence, arguably the most modernist of her novels in a formalistic sense alone, not to speak of a solemn, life-staking commitment to the act of writing itself, a concern with creativity and the role of the artist that reveals itself as modernist in its ideology.''^

That Long Silence presents the oppressive, debilitating life situation of a housewife. This family life is firmly located in its middle class environs. The silence and the silencing of the woman as a gendered subject is the focus of the narrative. But even as the family life is located in the middle class, the narrative maps the position of the middle class in the larger social network of relations. The social category of the middle class in this novel is not viewed as autonomous. It is positioned within the metanarrative of progress, economic improvement, class mobility and socio-political struggles. That the experiences

233 of womanhood across the classes vary is shown by attending to the class contradictions. The point of departure for the novel is the individual tale of domestic strife. The crisis in the conjugal relationship of Jaya and Mohan is engendered by the professional misconduct of the husband which forces them into seclusion. The reappraisal of their roles and the value of one's life that ensues brings to the fore the tension between the two but also significantly leads Jaya into an exploration of her social and psychical self The novel consistently makes this an exploration that is never hinged upon her particular experience. Jaya's reflective narrative repeatedly places herself in the larger context of patriarchy and the metanarrative of nation. The former is chiefly done by developing a polemical prose (this term here refers to the reflections that are argumentative and are not rooted in 'events') that undertakes to historically view the position of women. Here allusions to a variety of master discourses, both 'Indian' and 'Western', entrench the implicit thesis of the systemic nature of the subjugation the character, Jaya, experiences. The latter, i.e., the metanarrative of nation is invoked through narrative details wherein the particular experiences of Jaya (and her family) are seen as not 'local' in so far as they are necessarily implicated in the story of the nation-state. For example, reflecting on Mohan's early career as an engineer in a steel plant in Lohanagar, Jaya realises that she had been excessively burdened those days while for her husband it was a time of great enthusiasm. Though she herself had seen it in a positive light then, her reflective re-evaluation of that life now sees that what was a matter of dynamism for Mohan was one of victimisation for her. But this is not merely a problem between a couple - a question of division of labour in which the woman's labour is undervalued - but the event as it is recollected by the first person narrator throws light on how it is implicated in a discourse of national progress. To work in Lohanagar had meant opportunity and hope and doors opening to a new kind of life for the country, for him, for all those who worked there. Looking back through his

234 eyes, even to me those days seemed tinged with freshness, fortified by a sense of purpose^°. (58)

The middle class life of Jaya, the narrator, and Mohan, her husband, is implicated in the metanarrative of progress and development in the country as symbolised by the steel plant of Lohanagar. The symbolism of the steel plant is not merely an affective for Mohan and the other engineers working there (58). It involves Jaya too, though for her those days were full of the misery of domesticity: "Pregnancy, baby's wails and sleeplessness." (58) This affective state covers Mohan and Jaya, loosely the male beneficiary of the metanarrative of progress and its female victim. Jaya is a victim in so far as being a house wife (not necessarily out of choice because Mohan did not want her to 'work') she experiences displacement from her native town (Ambegaon), adjust to the "drab houses, dusty roads"; she also has to put up with the effects of Mohan's over work. While his job at the plant was exhausting, which he did not mind (59), at home he had to have undisturbed rest in the night. To ensure that, Jaya had to wake up from sleep every time the baby cried and take the baby and go to the kitchen to save Mohan from the disturbance. Thus, the steel plant at Lohanagar has different memories for the two of them. For Mohan, along with the other engineers working with him, it meant an opportunity to participate in the idealistic march of progress of the country. The impact of his benefit on Jaya was the additional burden; of displacement, of sleeplessness along with the imprisonment in the role of a housewife. This reading of the burdening of Jaya as a gendered subject of nation building finds validation in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, who have pointed out that, "... far from enjoying the benefits of so called development, the majority of women have been pushed to the margins of the production process."^' Nevertheless, this varying impact is smoothened in Jaya's recollection of those days: "even to me those days seemed touched with freshness... purpose" (58), because, she too is immersed in the preoccupations and desires of the middle class for mobility and material improvement: "It was enough for

235 me that we moved to Bombay, that we could send Rahul and Rati to good schools, that I could have the things we needed... Decent clothes, a fridge, a gas connection, travelling first class." (61-2) Now we have a schematic view of the way in which the daily practices of individuals are caught up in the story of 'nation building': citizens are invited to contribute their labour to the 'progress' of the nation; the labourers are overworked; they in turn push their family members (usually women) to overwork; none are made to feel that what they are doing is at the bidding of the 'nation-state'; contrarily, they are all lodged in an affective state of idealism, care giving, and material advancement. The novel emphasises the voluntaryness of the citizens and the extent to which they are bound in the affective state by the disjunction between the experience and awareness about it. It is only now in her reflective retrospection that Jaya comes to realise how much work was extracted of her; and how it was all in the name of bettering ones standard of life. The suggestion here is not that 'nation- state' has no business extracting labour from the citizens. The issue is how the metanarrative of progress is inscribed into an affective mechanism of personal improvement and, this is the point, how the individual lives are embedded in the narrative of the nation. In viewing this embeddedness, the fact that the trope of allegory is not relevant is also worth mentioning. The desire of the middle class family for social mobility is also driven by a view of the 'upper' class. For Mohan this viewing begins in his childhood when he watches during a function three women conversing in English. The three women, who were for Mohan "so different from all the women" (89) he had known, also carry with them intimations of modernity for him. The way Jaya comes to understand this experience of Mohan is as a 'revelation': "Those women had given him his first vision of a different kind of life, a life that had none of the poverty, the shabbiness and ugliness, the rigid rules and rituals he had known till then." (90) For Mohan this 'revelation' of modernity in the image of the English speaking women becomes the starting point of an ambitious life. It is this again that is behind his choice of Jaya as wife, one who is "educated and cultured." (90) As pointed out by Doreen D'Cruz:

236 Jaya's right to language is inscribed within her marriage to Mohan. It was her facihty with English which identified her as the woman of Mohan's dreams. She recalled to him his impoverished fascination at the women he had seen from a distance at a wedding to which he had been taken out of charity. Their effortless English, along with their perfume and their gossamer saris, proclaimed them as fantastic beings. They reflected access to a culture that Brahminism alone was insufficient to unlock. Mohan's arrival at that point of cultural privilege was to be mirrored by his possession of the right wife."

If Mohan's move towards life in modernity begins with this desire image, for Jaya its roots lie in her father's belief that English education is more important than one's customs. Her father believed that "It is going to be more useful to them than being good Brahmins." (90) Coupled with the embeddedness of individual lives in the metanarrative of nation, the effect of modernity on the individual choices and aspirations speaks of the overdetermination of ordinary lives with that of nation-state. Thus, in the novel the family life of Jaya and Mohan is not only portrayed as a middle clAss life, but the middle class itself is located within a matrix of desire for social mobility, economic improvement, and modernity. In this sense the novel attends to the subject in the making in the matanarrative of nation building. Jaya is alive to the restrictions on her self expression. Her narrative, which forms the novel That Long Silence that we read, written in secrecy, is a breaking of the silence imposed on her because it is a violation of the gendered modes of self-expression. The limits on the woman's ability to participate in a free circulation of ideas and employ 'fiction' as a mode of self-expression are revealed in the novel. Mohan takes strong exception to Jaya's story published in a magazine where it had won a prize because he feels the story will be construed as real by their acquaintances (who read the story), and they would see him in poor light. He says: They will all know, all those people who read this and know us, they will know that these two persons are us, they will think I am this kind of a man, they will think I am this man. How can I look anyone in the face again? And you, how

237 could you write these things, how could you write such ugly things, how will you face people after this? (143-4)

Interestingly, Mohan offers a paradoxical reading of the story here. In feeling hurt, he seems to find the story realistic and hence feels denuded in the public, yet he insists that he is not the man in the story though others would mistake it to be so. This acts as a force containing Jaya's free expression and she turns to writing 'womanly' pieces in women's magazines, gaining popularity. This regulated and conformist mode of writing is appreciated by Mohan. Thus, the patriarchal order moulds the modes of self-expression of women and interferes in women's cultural self-representation. There are other concerns of the middle class that are thematised in the novel such as desire for safety. The mortal fear of the middle class is the sight of the lower classes. The fear of slipping downwards, loosing the grip on the present class position, informs the attitude of the middle class toward the lower class. Early in the novel this fear is evoked. Mohan is shaken after watching some women with their children sitting on the street demanding justice. He learns that they too were middle class (they are wives of army men who have been arrested). The present status they are reduced to, to be on the streets, scares him. He wonders what 'people like us' would do in such situations. The fearful of vision of the lower class, as with Mohan here, introduces the conflictual relation between classes and the perception of 'otherness' that comes to problematise the contestation of nation developed in the novel. Mohan's fear of 'people like us' being reduced to beggars informs his middle class desire for security. Jaya too in her life believed in it until the crisis in her married life jolts her. Her life was also conditioned by this logic: "stay at home, look after your babies, keep out the rest of the world, and you are safe." (17) Though later, with the crisis in her marital life, she concludes that this is a false belief: "I know that safety is always unattainable. You are never safe". (17) The placidity that Jaya displays till the crisis in her life pushes her to begin an interrogation of her life may be read as a sign of her enclosed consciousness. Viewing this as a limitation of the novel, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan says, "for a

238 woman in Jaya's position to take no cognisance of the world of work, politics, even physical geography is to neglect an important component of the reality of the Indian bourgeois woman's situation."" Shashi Deshpande seems to be aUve to the delayed self-assertiveness of her protagonist. In an interview she has argued: My novels always begin in a moment of crisis. Most of us go on unquestioningly until we are shaken out of the rut by something catastrophic or disastrous. Suddenly all that you have taken for granted becomes doubtful, everything falls apart. You begin then to question everything. And it is through this questioning, through this thinking that you move on, pick up your life once again. But you are never the same after this. This is true of all human beings, not just women. My protagonists being women, one of the things they question is the fact of their being females, what it has done to them. But they are also probing the human condition, the human predicament. In this thinking process, humans do discover their own potential. So do the women I have written about.^"*

As against her 'secure' middle class life. Jay a witnesses her servant Jeeja's life. Jeeja and her husband used to live in a chawl. The husband had a good job in a mill. But after a strike in the mill he lost it all and they were pushed down, now living in a slum. The husband had become a drunkard and Jeeja was working as a house maid. This viewing of Jeeja's life can proceed in three directions: Jaya can find common human suffering across classes; she can find gender soHdarity across class division; or she can maintain class division within the gender framework. It is possible to read Jaya's incorporation of the life stories of the underclass in her narrative as a sign of solidarity which cuts across class and gender. Such a reading will then be able to structure the contestation of patriarchal hegemony over 'nation' as the chief polemics of the novel. There is in the novel a very vigorous questioning of patriarchal constructions of nation and the systematic devaluation of women's selfhoods even as they are deployed in its service. This devaluation is analysed with reference to the frameworks of both culture and political economy. In the culture framework, it is the metanarrative of tradition that is punctured and in

239 the framework of political economy it is the metanarrative of progress that is targeted. Thus the novel suggests the intertwining of tradition and modernity, partners in crime, as perpetuating, instituting, and reconfiguring apparatuses for the subordination of women. A subordination that suppresses them to the extent of spending a lifetime before realising that they haven't begun their life yet, busy as they are playing the feminine role assigned by the society, as Jaya comes to realise. It is this subordination that through an affective mechanism has obtained women's consent and renders them silent. Jaya's first person narrative is a sign of the break in that silence and the break contests the very premises of the 'nation-state' with respect to the construction of nation. Yet, paradoxically, the novel, from the narrator's perspective, takes recourse to a generalised view of womanhood. This is to be seen in the polemical prose of the novel. This plane of the polemical prose apparently aims to point at the victimisation and silencing of the gendered subject in the scene of middle class life by patriarchal discourse. The polemics of the novel is contained in its insistence on challenging the silence, even patriarchy's mechanism of silencing. It is the presence of the lower class women that problematises this polemics. Any attention to them uiu-avels the tension between the polemical prose and its implicit agenda of appropriating the gendered subject within middle class brahminical identity by shutting out the cultural marks of others or by shutting out alterity all together. While the gendered subjects in this novel are traced through their class and gender matrix, there is a strange silence about the identity politics on the cultural plane. Hence, within the narrative universe of this novel, the construction of the gendered subjects in their class environs represent a collective identity whose voice is discursively silenced under the aegis of the metanarratives of progress of the nation. This is one plane on which the novel problematises an undifferentiated notion of nation as a collective identity. But this polemics itself hides its own politics of containment in its restraint from attending to the cultural politics of the gendered subjects, as with the attenuation of 'others' in the novel. The novel insistently operates at the level of class determined binary

240 of male and female social categories and this amounts to a rarefying of cultural marks of the gendered subject. This gives rise to a structural irony in the novel wherein there is, throughout the rebellious silent reflections over the oppression, a movement towards status quo with only a 'hope' for change and with very little reinvention of subjectivity. The contestatory energy of the novel notwithstanding, the construction of sociality in the novel is not based on a Utopian homogenous fraternity. The identity category of nation, as has been argued in Chapter I, is such that such a Utopian sociality cannot be sustained. Nation is a name for collectivity, yet it keeps frustrating the possibility of the universal commune. It is so because nation is, after all, an identity category. Identity is differentially produced and hence, as with all categories of identity, nation too is a restrictive category. Jaya's attitude to lower class, I wish to argue, takes the restrictive path, the third direction mentioned above. This comes to our view when we attend to the polemical prose of Jaya. The narrator sets up a binary between "I" and "they" by way of such expressions as "They never told me" that are used throughout the polemical prose. Here the T is not necessarily the delimited self of the narrator- character, Jaya. Within the polemical prose of the novel, this T is a space occupied by the victims of patriarchy. Similarly, the "they" is not a generic reference to husbands or men. It is a space occupied by the instruments of patriarchy - male or female. The polemical point is about the presence of hierarchy; of power of the "they" over "I". But significantly, this binary hides another kind of binary between T and 'they', or between us and them. Within this other framework, the T of the polemical prose itself is split and, with a similar split in the 'they', reconstitutes the 'self and 'other' divide. Herein we see the class/caste construction of T. The polemical prose constitutes the problems of the T with a flattening of class and caste difference in such a way that it appropriates the other cultural identities to merge with the T, who is a victim of patriarchy. Patriarchy is seen

241 here as the common enemy, without specific class/caste (or other) specificity. As has been noted by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan: The force of Deshpande's indictment of women's lives lies in the way she is able to universalize their condition, chiefly by drawing similarities among Jaya and a variety of other female figures, including characters from Indian history and myth; and among three generations of women in her family (Jaya, her mother, her grandmother); among different classes of women (Jaya, her maid Jeeja); among different kinds of women of the same class and generation (Jaya, her cousin Kusum, her widowed neighbour Mukta). So compellingly realistic is this rendering that no Indian woman reader can read this novel without a steady sympathetic identification and, indeed, frequent shocks of recognition.^^

The victim of patriarchy as T is seen as fragmented when we give attention to the narrator's attitude towards the maid servants. For example, Jaya's attitude towards Nayana: "I hesitated... when I came upon a shoe, the inside of it filled with an unhealthy growth of fungus. My fingers twitched with horror. Finally I pushed it with my foot outside the door, leaving it there for Nayana to carry away." (13) This shows that Jaya and Nayana occupy a social space that is divided by class position but also importantly they are valued differently. What is repulsive to Jaya is not supposed to be repulsive to Nayana. This reveals that the polemical prose of the victim makes invisible, or flattens, another 'other'; one who is kept distinct in class terms; and the cultural identities of this 'other' are subsumed into that of the T. Thus, in the polemical prose that develops a critique of patriarchy 'they' refers to the construction of the other. But the manner in which the 'I' is constituted as a sign of collectivity on gender basis and making indistinct the divisions of class and caste implies that within Jaya's polemical prose the T and 'they' are composite pronouns and still they are refracted by divisions across which the polemical prose seems to position identities. That is to say, T comes to signify a class/caste specific victim of patriarchy though in her polemical prose Jaya claims it as a general category of 'woman'. This T incorporates the underclass and lower caste women, yet it fails to incorporate within the polemical prose the structures that

242 victimise the underclass and the lower caste. In other words, Jaya's narrative appropriates the underclass and the lower caste victims of patriarchy but constitutes the patriarchy as evenly victimising all women. Nilufer Bharucha argues: Although women in India are bound by a common reductiveness, it would be simplistic to categorise them as a hegemonic sorority. Third World feminists quite rightly point out the dangers of lumping together white-middle class women with those belonging to the underprivileged nations of the world... women belonging to different ethno-religious groups experience this secondary status in different ways."^^

I am not suggesting that a novel that deals with patriarchal violence must also tell stories of other victimisation. Such a story would be impossible as the structures of domination cannot be posited as being hmited. What is significant in Jaya's narrative is that, she develops a polemical prose that constitutes an T so as to incorporate the underclass and lower caste women, and then the class/caste specific structures of patriarchal domination are elided to focus on a unitary notion of 'they', the patriarchy. The problem with this kind of equalised terrain of women is identified by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid when they say, "The lives of women exist at the interface of caste and class inequality, especially since the description and management of gender and female sexuality is involved in the maintenance and reproduction of social inequality."^^ It is thus that in the novel the framework of self and other becomes problematic. The 'other' happens to be not so much the 'they' of the polemical prose in the novel (patriarchy), but the culturally blank marginal underclass/caste. There is another proof for this observation about the otherness of underclass/caste in Jaya's narrative. We need to examine the tropes of silence and woman's language to obtain that proof The characterisation of the silence and the silencing of the women in the novel critique the patriarchal deafness to women. It is suggested that the 'long silence' is a result of the patriarchy's refusal to comprehend women's 'language' in so far as women's work, speech, acts and aspirations are not valued. But the burden of breaking the silence is

243 finally placed on the women in the novel. Silence can be broken only if women 'learn' men's language, as it were. This suggestion is the result of two tendencies in the novel: one, the anger at speaking 'Prakrit' and the desire to speak 'Sanskrit' that Jaya displays at the metaphorical level; second, the citational engagement in Jaya's polemical prose with the 'master discourses.' Towards the end of her reflective narrative Jaya remembers how in Sanskrit drama, women characters spoke not in Sanskrit but in Prakrit. With this she also comes to the realisation that her reading of her own subjectivity had been wrong. All along in the narrative, Jaya has been afflicted by the silence imposed on her. Her perception of herself as a silenced subject is now revised. She realises that what had been imposed on her is not silence but a 'different' language: "I have been speaking Prakrit myself" (193) If, then, she has all along felt herself unheard, it is not due to 'silence', not due to muted subjectivity. It is because the patriarchal space of communication, the 'normal' discourse, is at variance with her speech which is conducted in a 'different' language. In that sense, with this realisation she comes to see her reflective narrative on her subjectivity as conducted in the patriarchal discourse (or the sign system that has led her to place the 'value' of silence on her own speech is one that does not accommodate the signification of her speech). If she has been speaking in Prakrit and has been rendered silent, it implies that her language is 'unheard', made not only incomprehensible but also 'unsounded' by the male discourse. Now, if she herself viewed her life as silenced thus far ("I will have to erase the silence between us" 192), it is so because she too had not recognised the nature of her language. For the male discourse, within which her reflective narration views her life thus far, the space of 'Prakrit' signs is a black hole - they cease to exist in their very enunciation. Why does Jaya feel that she has been rendered silent? It is because Mohan hints that all that she has done in her life has not 'meant' to signify her care for him. Mohan, after so many years of conjugal life, accuses her of not caring about anything except her needs: "He accused me of not caring about the children, of isolating myself from him and his concerns, even of some

244 obscure revengeful feelings that were driving me to act this way". (120) He does not even understand how the kind of writing she is doing is a betrayal for her of what she has wanted to write. At the moment of this crisis in their married life, Jaya and Mohan are total strangers to each other, as if in all the years they have never understood each other. Jaya feels that Mohan's accusation means that she had failed in her 'career' as a wife. But Mohan is not merely complaining about Jaya. His accusation extends to all women: "It's not just you, it is all women" (120); he insists that "I know you". (122) But Jaya feels he does not know her at all. This dramatic exchange that takes place before Mohan walks out on her and leaves the house indicates the incomprehension that exists between the two. It is as if despite living together, Mohan has not understood her. What is the reason for this? Jaya comes to realise that what lies between them is not silence. If it is, it is not speechlessness; it is a loaded silence, or even loud silence. Silence, in this novel comes to suggest not the absence of communication but the failure of signs to signify. Mohan does not understand Jaya or any woman because their sign system does not carry any values for him. Women avail themselves of language, they register their voices, send forth the signs into circulation that remain undecoded. The women reside within a language the users of which do not understand their language. This raises the issue of women's language. But this novel does not value the proposition of women's language in any positive manner. For Jaya, it is a source of irritation. She not only feels the burden of resultant silence but also a denial of even maturity, because she thinks that Prakrit was "a language that had sounded to my ears like a baby's lisp." (192) This is suggestive of Jaya's own valuation of her language. She is angry that she is not speaking Sanskrit. This means that Jaya too does not positively value her 'language', and places the burden of communication on women rather than on the patriarchal deafness to women's language. The reason why she has in her narrative till this moment (till the last but one paragraph of the narrative) sees herself as silenced is because, she too fails to understand the structure of women's language, as it

245 were. She has been completely incorporated into the patriarchal discourse so that her own speech has only signified for her 'silence', an absence and not a difference. There are two frames of reference in the novel with which there is a citational relationship of intertextuality: English literatureAVestem philosophy and Sanskrit literature/philosophy. Jaya's own speech is carried out in a site of intertextuality where Daniel Defoe, Marx, Jane Austen, Dostoevsky, etc. on the one hand and the Bhagavad Gita, the Mahabharata and the Vedas on the other are cited and alluded to. The allusions to these two frameworks indicate the desire of the first person narrator to make her narrative engage in a dialogue with these 'master discourses'. This desire to cite and to be sited in relation to master discourses places Jaya's narrative not so much in an oppositional relation, but in a negotiating relation with the will to power of the male discourses. Jaya's need to locate her speech in a negotiating relation with the master discourses of Western and Sanskrit literature and philosophy indicates an eagerness to 'speak in' the dominating discourse which links up with her anger at having to speak (symbolically) Prakrit and not Sanskrit. The foregoing analysis may be summed up here to arrive at certain conclusions. In this novel the structuring of the middle class within the framework of the metanarratives of progress situates the narrative in the context of nation building. This process of nation building places the burden of 'servility' on women along with the burden of self-formation. This self- formation is disrupted in the scene of the family where a career for woman conflicts with the social order. The disruption is seen as a kind of silence. It is a historical silence - That Long Silence - stretching both in time (across generation) and space (across social groups). But the novel, even as it notices 'difference' in language as the structure of the silence, tends to insist on being incorporated into the 'normal' scene: that of speaking and being heard within the male discourse rather than continuing with what the male discourse has refused to decode - the Prakrit of women or women's language. The effect of the desire to speak Sanskrit is that the collective identity sought is one that

246 aims to reduce the difference and be open to homogenisation. In so doing it alters the self - other equation wherein, male is no more the 'other' of the victimised woman. That Long Silence puts up a rigorous contestation of the construction of normative national interest and values of work, challenges the regulation of women's cultural self-representation and questions the hegemony of patriarchal constructions of nation. Working on the material of the middle class life, the novel sets up particular stories in its interrogation of the metanarrative of nationhood. In this respect the novel displays an embedded imagina//o«.^^ In its location of the space of women, the novel prefers an axis across class/caste/region/time. The universalised space of gender deflects the conflicts in the terrain of cultural politics, especially in relation to the vision of 'nation'.

V. Conclusion The novels studied in this chapter present different kinds of engagement with the construction of 'nation'. Arun Joshi's The Apprentice endorses the hegemonic construction by way of locating the problem of 'national honour' in the domain of responsibility. Rama Mehta's Inside the Haveli contests the construction of nation as an equalised citizenry and defends the aristocratic community. Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence contests the hegemonic patriarchal construction of nation. Thus, all these novels engage with the issue of configuration of the identity of the collectivity called nation, yet negotiate it differently. In Arun Joshi's novel, 'nation' is viewed as an already formed identity, the vicissitudes in the life of which is the focus of exploration. In "mis exploration, the condition of the nation-state is seen as degenerate, for which the state and the citizens are held equally responsible. Ratan's search is for the right balance in exercising responsibility. In this respect, individuals (the subjects of the nation) and the state (the conglomeration of individuals) are incorporated into a rhetoric of moral obligation. The novel's complete concurrence with the hegemonic nationalism removes identity politics from the

247 terrain of nation building and relocates it in a moral domain. This leads to a silence over the underclass who come to be represented in the novel but are assigned no role except that of meek subjects in the processes of nation building. In Rama Mehta's novel the perspective is different. The novel raises the issue of forms of collective identity prior to nation imaginary. It invests greater value in the traditional communities even as it vividly portrays such a community being composed of feudal patiiarchy. Nation as a form of collectivity itself is contested here and the aristocracy of Udaipur havelis, symbolic of the feudal form of collectivity, valorised. In so doing, the novel suppresses issues of exploitation and marginalisation of the underclass and women. Nation building is a framework that enters this novel in a limited maimer, and it is subjected to a valuation wherein the accent is more on the tradition than change. In this novel negotiating with the changes imposed by the processes of nation building means circumventing them and finding ways of enfrenching the power of tiadition. Shashi Deshpande's novel interrogates the patriarchal construction of collective identity. It explores the normative constructions of progress, value and culture. It presents itself as a resistant discourse in questioning the silencing of women by patriarchal social order and records the complicity of the rhetoric of nation building with the hegemonic patriarchal discourses. However, in constructing a universalised victim of the patriarchy the novel elides the question of cultural identities and how subjugation may differ on class and caste terms even for the victims of patriarchy. All these three novels bring into their narrative space marginalised groups. The narratives are alert to the class and gender frameworks in the experience of marginalisation. Their exploration of the processes of nation building, in their own different ways, moves away form the problematics posed by the underclass represented within their narratives. The theme of responsibility in The Apprentice, the valorisation of aristocracy in Inside the Have I i and the universalising of the subject of patriarchy in That Long Silence

248 are the modes by which the experiences of the underclass, and the marginalised are evaded. This evasion in these novels, in specific manner in each of them, amounts to the endorsement of hegemonic nationalism, or aspects of it. As these novels directly and indirectly relate to the state and its functions, we also come to notice that the state's complicity with the hegemonic nationalism too goes unquestioned. In fact, state comes to be seen primarily as the repository of the power to shape the lives of individuals in the social domain. Here again, the role of hegemonic nationalism in structuring the state and appropriating it are unexamined by these novels. This chapter concludes that in these novels the focus on nation-state's regulatory regime underplays the role of socio-cultural power beyond the state in perpetuating its hegemony. The novels studied reveal a politics of masking the hegemony of the brahminical patriarchy because even as we detect in them contestations of totalised national identity with reference to class, gender and traditional community, the reconfigurations implicitly projected in them are attached to the hegemonic identity groups.

249 Notes

' See Lloyd and Susaime Rudolph, In Pursuit ofLakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

^ See Ashis Nandy, The Romance of the State and the Fate of Dissent in the Tropics. (Part I, Chapter 1) New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002.

^ See Dipankar Gupta, Culture, Space and the Nation-State. (Chapter 6), New Delhi: Sage, 2000.

'' Romila Thapar, "Will a Millermium be Coming Our Way?", in Romila Thapar (ed.) India: Another Millennium?. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2001. p. xxii.

^ Partha Chatterjee discusses the complexities of state-subject relations in relation to civil society, political society and the state in his "Introduction", in Partha Chatterjee (ed.), Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.

* Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. p. 41.

' Akhil Gupta, "Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imagined State", in Zoya Hasan (ed.), Politics and the State in India. New Delhi: Sage, 2000. p. 341.

* See Fredric Jameson, "Third world Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" in Social Text. no. 15 (1986). pp. 65-88.

' Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, tr. Caryl Emerson, Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. p. 276.

'° T. Vijay Kivnar, "Allegory and the Negation of History: Arun Joshi's The City and the River", in Viney Kirpal (ed.), The Postmodern Indian English Novel. Bombay: Allied Publishers Limited, 1996. p. 146.

" Makarand Paranjape, "Inside and Outside the Whale: Politics and the New Indian English Novel", in Viney Kirpal (ed.). The New Indian Novel in English: A Study of the 1980s. Bombay: Allied Publishers Limited, 1990. p. 215. '^ O.P.Mathur and G. Rai, "Arun Joshi and the Labyrinth of Life", in R.K. Dhawan (ed.). The Novels of ArunJoshi. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1992. p. 83. '^ M.K. Naik, A History of Indian English Literature. Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1982. pp. 229-31.

'" K.R. Shirwadkar, The Indian Novel in English and Social Change. Bombay: Shalaka Prakashan, 1991. p. 99.

'^ Pier Paolo Piciucco, "Fictional Technique and Rhetorical Devices in Arun Joshi's The Apprentice", in The Literary Criterion, vol. XXXIV, no. 2 (1999). p. 32.

'* V. Gopal Reddy, "The Apprentice: An Existential Study", in R.K. Dhawan (ed.), The Novels of Arun Joshi. p. 222.

'^ Madhusudan Prasad, "Arun Joshi", in Madhusudan Prasad (ed.), Indian English Novelists: An Anthology of Critical Essays. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1982. p. 58.

'* Arun Joshi, The Apprentice. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1993. All references to the novel are to this edition. Emphasis is always added.

250 " R.K. Dhawan, "Destiny of a Nation: Arun Joshi's The Apprentice", in Sudhakar Pande and R. Raj Rao (eds.), Image of India in the Indian Novel in English 1960 - 1985. Bombay: Orient Longman, 1993. p. 52.

^° C.N. Srinath, "The Fiction of Aran Joshi", in The Literary Criterion, vol. XII, no. 2-3 (1976). pp. 127.

^' Thakur Gumprasad, "The Lost Lonely Questers of Arun Joshi's Fiction" in R.K. Dhawan (ed.), The Novels of Arun Joshi. f. 101.

^^ K.D. Verma, "Alienation, Identity, and Structure in Arun Joshi's The Apprentice", iw Ariel, vol. 22, no. 1(1991), p. 72.

^^ Srinath, "The Fiction of Arun Joshi", p. 130.

^'' V.V.N. Rajendra Prasad, Five Indian Novelists. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1990. p. 118.

^^ Piciucco, "Fictional Technique and Rhetorical Devices in Arun Joshi's The Apprentice", pp. 39, 42.

^^ Rama Mehta's academic books include The Western Educated Indian Woman (1970), The Divorced Hindu Woman (1975), and India: Now and Through Time (co-author) (1971); her works of fiction for children are Ramu and Life ofKeshav.

^' K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, rev. edn.. New Delhi: Sterhng Publishers Private Limited, 1985. p. 753.

^ See R.K. Asthana, "Tradition and Modernity in Inside the Haveli", in R.K. Dhawan, (ed), Indian Women Novelists, vol. IV, New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1991. pp. 193-201.

^' Viney Kirpal, "How Traditional can a Modem Indian be: Analysis of Inside the Haveli" in R.K. Dhawan, (ed), Indian Women Novelists, vol. IV, New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1991. p. 176.

^° Rama Mehta, Inside the Haveli. (1977), New Delhi: Penguin, 1996. All references to the novel are to this edition. Emphasis is always added unless mentioned otherwise.

^' This Bakhtinian term well illustrates the life narrated in the novel: "Time has no advancing historical movements; it moves rather narrow circles: the circle of the day, of the week, of the month, of a person's entire life. Day in, day out the same round of activities are repeated, the same topics of conversation, the same words and so forth." Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 248.

^^ Anita Desai in the blurb of the Penguin India edition of the novel.

" Viney Kirpal, "How Traditional can a Modem Indian be: Analysis of Inside the Haveli", p. 176.

^'' 'Emplotment' is used here to refer to the structuring of the plot in the narrative by employing strategies of selection and omission to develop a particular perspective.

^^ Indira Parikh and Pulin Garg, Indian Women: An Inner Dialogue. New Delhi: Sage, 1989. p. 90.

^^ Daphne Grace, "Women's space 'Inside the Haveli': incarceration or insurrection?" in Journal of International Women's Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, (2003). p. 63.

^^ K. Radha, "Geeta and the Problem of Adjustment in Inside the Haveli" in R.K. Dhawan, (ed), Indian Women Novelists, vol. IV, New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1991. p. 207.

'^ Rama Mehta, The Western Educated Hindu Woman. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1970. p. 207.

^' Malashri Lai, The Law of the Threshold. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1995. p. 83.

251 ''° Malashri Lai in The Law of the Threshold discusses the limitations of the portrayal of Geeta's scheme for the illiterate women of the havelis and relates them to the class and gender conditioned perception of the haveli life.

'" Santosh Gupta, "Entrapment and Freedom in Inside the Haveli" in R.K. Dhawan (ed.), Indian Women Novelists, vol. IV, New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1991. p. 220.

''^ Grace, "Women's space 'Inside the Haveli': incarceration or insurrection?" p. 63.

""^ See Shirish Chindhade, "The Triumph of Timeless India: Rama Mehta's Inside the Haveli", in Sudhakar Pande, R. Raj Rao (eds.), Image of India in the Indian Novel in English I960 ~ 1985. Bombay: Orient Longman, 1993, pp. 84-91.

'''' Z.N. Patil, "Indian Kinship Organization and Taboo Customs as Reflected in Inside the Haveli" in R.K. Dhawan (ed.), Indian Women Novelists, vol. IV, New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1991. p. 237.

"^ M.K. Naik, Twentieth Century Indian English Fiction. Delhi: Pencraft International, 2004. p. 211.

"* Aditi De, "Breaking That Long Silence", The Hindu, 28 August 2003.

•" Shashi Deshpande, "Of Concerns, Of Anxieties", in Indian Literature, vol. XXXIX, no.5 (1996). p. 107.

"** Ritu Menon, "No Longer Silent", published as an 'Afterword' in Shashi Deshpande, A Matter of Time. New York: The City University of New York, 1998. p. 3.

"' Saikat Majumdar, "Aesthetics of Subjectivity, Ethics of 'Otherness': The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande", Postcolonial Text, vol. 1, no. 2 (2005).http://joumals.sfu.ca/pocol/index.php/pct/article/view/284/93

^° Shashi Deshpande, That Long Silence. London: Virago New Fiction, 1988. All references to the novel are to this edition. Emphasis is always added.

'' Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (ed.), "Introduction" in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. New Delhi: Kah for Women, 1989. p. 2.

" Doreen D'Cruz, "Feminism in the Postcolonial Context; Shashi Deshpande's Fiction", in SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, no. 36. http://wwsshe.murdoch.edu,au/cntinuum/litserv/SPAN/34/D'Cruz.html

" Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, "The Feminist Plot and the Nationalist Allegory: Home and World in Two Indian Women's Novels in English" inModem Fiction Studies, vol. 39, no. 1 (1993). p. 80.

'" Chandra Holm, "A Writer of Substance", in Indian Review of Books. May 2000. p. 5.

'^ Rajan, "The Feminist Plot and the Nationalist Allegory: Home and World in Two Indian Women's Novels in English", p. 78.

'* Nilufer Bharucha, "Inhabiting Enclosures and Creating Spaces: The Worlds of Women in Indian Literature in English" in Ariel, vol. 29, no. 1 (1998), p. 95.

'^ Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (ed.), "Introduction" in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989. p. 5.

^* I use the term 'embedded imagination' here, without the connotations of Romantic notions of creativity, to suggest a strategy which, through details of everyday practices, routine, mundane, particular stories engages with the issues of collective identity, which under modernity happens to be 'nation'; images of nation are embedded in the ordinariness of lives in a novel like That Long Silence.

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