Herrick Dissertation, Final Submission
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Feminine In/Auspiciousness in Indian Literature in English by Margaret Herrick A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Margaret Herrick 2015 Feminine In/Auspiciousness in Indian Literature in English Margaret Herrick Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2015 Abstract In this thesis I seek to theorize the complex and shifting meanings of ‘auspiciousness’ and especially ‘inauspiciousness’ in twentieth and twenty-first century Indian literature in English. Anthropological scholarship on the subject demonstrates that these concepts are closely associated with, as Veena Das puts it, “events involving life and future” on the one hand and “events involving death and the termination of a future” on the other (144). At the same time, through the concept of Shakti, in/auspiciousness is closely tied to the feminine and to ‘feminine’ people. This means that certain people are associated with the creation and furtherance of life while others are tied to death, disease, and catastrophe. While many scholars have discussed the crucial role played by the ‘auspicious’ wife (and by the ‘inauspicious’ widow) in the construction of Indian nationalism, previous to my own work scholars of literature had not yet carried out any sustained interrogation of auspiciousness and inauspiciousness as they operated in literary texts. ii By doing so in this project, I was able to trace how, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, certain highly influential novelists instrumentalize a widow’s destructive inauspiciousness to smash open the social world and to inaugurate a bourgeois Indian modernity. In the process, though, these authors rationalize, domesticate, and modernize auspiciousness and, to some extent, inauspiciousness. By making widow characters directly and individually responsible for negative events, these authors efface the ways in which these characters are always already inauspicious (i.e. they efface a more traditional, ontological understanding of a widow’s inauspiciousness). Inspired by a tremendously insightful article by M.S.S. Pandian on the subject of caste, I argue that these novels continue the exclusion of widows into modernity while relegating the true reasons for their exclusion to a traditional past (outside the new national culture). This has the effect of silencing these characters –denying them an accurate vocabulary with which to speak of their exclusion – and also of squashing and containing the danger attached to them as ontologically inauspicious. In order to counter this powerful containment, I argue, novelists writing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries multiply the vocabularies they use to represent these inauspicious figures. These authors reinvent mythic and/or popular motifs, blurring the ‘traditional’ with the ‘modern’. They layer stories told primarily in the realist mode with myth, folktale, the gothic, and the grotesque to question the nature of the ‘real’. And, ultimately, they reinvest their inauspicious characters with power –the power to destroy things, to break down the social order, and, therefore, sometimes, to reinvent themselves and others. iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding this project with a Doctoral Research Grant. I would also like to thank the School of Graduate Studies, the Asian Institute, and the Indo-Canadian Advisory Group for generous funding to cover the costs of my research trip to India. I would like to thank my committee members Professor Mary Nyquist and Professor Victor Li for all their good advice and helpful suggestions during the writing of this project. To Professor Li, a special thank you for shepherding me so kindly through the final difficult stage. I would also like to express my enormous gratitude to my supervisor the late Professor Chelva Kanaganayakam for so many thought-provoking and challenging conversations. His tremendous wisdom and patience helped me to continuously see the project anew and push through intellectual hurdles. Along with so many others, I am deeply saddened by his untimely passing. Without the support and friendship of my colleagues at the University of Toronto this project would not have been possible, so thank you to Jay Rajiva, Sundhya Walther, Philip Dickinson, Kathleen Ogden, Stephanie McAllister and Alexandra Rahr. Finally, a million thank yous to my wonderful husband Senwung Luk whose generosity and intelligence were invaluable to me as I worked on this project. iv Table Of Contents Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iv Table Of Contents ........................................................................................................................... v List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ vi Note on the Text ............................................................................................................................ vii Introduction Theorizing In/Auspiciousness .................................................................................... 1 Anthropological Scholarship ...................................................................................................... 2 Scholarship on Nationalist Discourses: .................................................................................... 10 Outlining my Project: ............................................................................................................... 15 Chapter One In/auspiciousness, Discipline, and Sympathy in Some Influential Early Indian Novels ........................................................................................................................... 25 Chapter Two Burning Down the House, the Book, the World in Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain ....................................................................................................................... 57 Chapter Three Inauspiciousness and a New Manifest Destiny in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine ..................................................................................................................................... 94 Chapter Four The Hijra’s Curse: In/auspicious Postmodernities in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and Anand Mahadevan’s The Strike .............................................................. 117 Adventure on the High Seas: Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies ............................................. 123 Outside the Ladies’ Carriage: Anand Mahadevan’s The Strike ............................................. 144 Chapter Five Staging In/auspiciousness: Dangerous Performances in Mahesh Dattani’s Tara and Anupama Chandrasekhar’s Free Outgoing ............................................ 160 Dattani’s Ardhanarishvara: Creativity, In/auspiciousness, and Performance in Tara ................................................................................................................................. 169 Shameful Performances in Chandrasekhar’s Free Outgoing ................................................. 188 List of Works Consulted ............................................................................................................. 198 v List of Figures Figure 1. Durga Slaying the Buffalo Demon, Raktabij, and Kali Lapping up the Demon's Blood, Page from a Markandeya Purana Series. Brooklyn Museum ............................ 103 Figure 2. The cover of one published version of Dattani's play, Tara, suggesting an allegorical understanding of the twins as Ardhanarishvara. .......................................... 170 vi Note on the Text I have used phonetic spellings for all words in South Asian languages, here, using italics where appropriate. I have used other transliterations and diacritical marks only when I am directly quoting from a source. vii 1 Introduction Theorizing In/Auspiciousness Although concepts of auspiciousness and inauspiciousness are important aspects of everyday life for many people in South Asia, the body of scholarly work on the subject is comparatively small. In anthropology there is an important cluster of articles on the subject, growing in recent years, slowly but surely. In other disciplines, however, political science, history, and literature, to name a few, the concepts surface quite regularly but are never the objects of direct and sustained interest in themselves. This strikes me as particularly unfortunate, since the axis of in/auspiciousness provides a particularly dense field in which to explore questions of individualism, subject-hood, agency, citizenship, gender and sexuality. I want to begin this introduction with a brief overview of the work on in/auspiciousness that has been done in other fields in order to get some sense of the cluster of concepts that fall under this terminology. While these definitions give us a starting point, I want to emphasize the fluidity of the concepts and the fact that they may be understood quite differently by people with different cultural backgrounds and life experiences (rural vs. urban, more or less Western educated etc.). Like so many aspects of culture, these terms are not dead categories that are accepted and understood the same way by everyone; they are dynamic fields, which people actively negotiate and manipulate,