Faculty: Nalini Natarajan - Book Review

New Orleans : University Press of the South, 2003

Nalini Natarajan's Woman and Indian Modernity: Readings of Colonial and Postcolonial Novels looks at literature as a window through which to explore the ambiguities in the paradigms of modernity that arose in twentieth century India. As she discusses five twentieth century Indian novels, the author explores the ways in which writers vacillate between criticizing the lifestyles of those that lay claim to modernity, and championing the search for new values and more democratic patterns that will hopefully transform life on the subcontinent. Natarajan uses gender as a category of analysis to reveal the hidden ambiguities in the stance of creative artists, whose novels both reflect and shape Indian values.

In her critique of U. R. Anantha Murthy's Samskara (published in Kannada in 1965 and made into a film in 1970), Natarajan argues that the effort of high caste Brahmans depicted in this novel to negotiate the integration of traditional concepts of ritual purity, upon which their high status rests, with more modern notions of the ethical basis of purity, represents a gendered modernity that excludes women. The protagonist Pranesh performs ritually polluting actions in tending to his dying wife, which projects him as a new kind of saint. However, no importance is given to the hard physical labor performed by the wife of a Brahman that is essential to the maintenance of purity upon which his livelihood depends.

Natarajan goes on to use the anthropological concepts of Louis Dumont and Freudian psychoanalysis to explore the ways in which the Brahmanical ethic of renunciation takes on a modern hue as a rational philosophy of life that intersects with western notions of individual ethical choice. On the other hand, women are seen as irrational elements, whose love of material things makes the forging of a modern ethical viewpoint more difficult. The repression of female sexuality in Brahmanical culture is depicted as precluding the possibility of wives providing a safe sanctuary for Brahman men, supposedly exposed to dangerous temptations from lower caste women.

While the female characters in Samskara are represented simplistically as ineffective helpmeets or temptresses, the main female character in Sarat Chandra Chatterjee's Swami (published in Bengali in 1918 and made into a Hindi film in 1977) is more sympathetically drawn. Natarajan compares the role of the heroine of this novel, Saudhamini, with famous daughters in the novels of Jane Austen. She attributes to Austen the foregrounding of the role of the daughter in nineteenth century middle class society in England , creating a new concept of daughterly value. In Austen, well-educated and witty daughters who question the values of the old aristocracy, as well as the new moneyed middle class, become the arbiters of cultural and social values.

In India, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, reformers put considerable emphasis on female education. Male intellectuals, better able to communicate with their daughters than their uneducated wives, were apt to give daughters more social freedom. In Swami, the father dies early, but the uncle of the heroine fulfils the paternal role of encouraging her literary interests. The mother, on the other hand, pushes Saudhamini to marry a man from a traditional family. Ultimately, the heroine is able to integrate the new ideas derived from literature with her role as a Hindu wife. Her husband is pleased that Saudhamini does not behave like the uneducated gossiping women of the household and eventually protects his wife from gossiping tongues. The husband helps anchor the wife to traditional values, but she prods him to adopt a slightly more benevolent version of patriarchy. Natarajan concludes: "Daughters seem to allow, structurally, a way for the changes of modernity to enter, then be contained to suit the contradictions in patriarchal ideology."(p. 41)

Although the wife in Swami is depicted as a junior partner, in the novel A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, published in the nineties, Natarajan perceives an open embrace of agency for woman in the process of social change. The heroine, Dina, is a Parsi , one of the groups in Bombay that prospered under British rule, but fell on hard times in postcolonial India . After losing her beloved husband to a traffic accident on the congested streets of Bombay , the heroine resists her brother's demand that she remarry to a suitor of his choice. She tries to hold on to her apartment, the symbol of her precarious autonomy in a city where space is at a premium. After her eyesight deteriorates to the point that she cannot sew, Dina becomes a middleman between untouchable tailors and garment manufacturers.

Shared suffering enables Dina to sympathize with the plight of the tailors who are engaged in a struggle for survival even more agonizing than her own. According to Natarajan, "Her own predicament mirrors those of these classless people."(p.115) Eventually she comes to see Indira Gandhi's administration as inimical to the most basic human rights of the unfortunate, while her brother continues to support the government upon which his own privileges rest. Once Dina decides to strike out for autonomy, gender discrimination undermines the advantages of her social class, for women who do not obey the rules of patriarchy are not privileged to enjoy its protections. Instead of being consigned a subordinate role in modernization like Saudhamini in Swami, in Mistry's novel Dina suffers defeat after defeat, and yet seems poised on the threshold of forging her own role in unexpected ways.

Natarajan also explores the theme of woman and dispossession in her discussion of Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things, published in 1996. Minority communities, such as Syrian Indian Christians, have been exempted from property laws that protect a daughter's rights to inheritance of family property in India . Natarajan juxtaposes the legal subjection of women against the myth of the safety of home in which women supposedly reign supreme in her analysis of this novel. In so doing, she questions feminist discourse of home as empowering and Partha Chatterjee's construct of the home/world dichotomy as a tenet of Indian nationalist discourse. The young twins from whose perspective the novel is narrated experience home as a precarious " unhomely " environment when their mother's capacity to protect them withers away. According to Natarajan, the mother's discovery that "home is no more secure than the world" leads her "out of an identification with the bourgeoisie into a subjectivity at one with the laboring classes."(p.103) It is her sexual liaison with a low caste male that triggers the tragic ending of the novel.

Natarajan analyzes Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children in the context of nationalist use of the body of woman to signify the nation. More specifically, she refers to the nationalist myth of Mother India in pre-independence days that was further elaborated by the Bombay cinema in the postcolonial era. Natarajan notes that the glorification of woman as the symbol of the nation effaces the complex realities of women's lives and hinders feminine agency. She explores the ways in Salman Rushdie parodies the use of woman as signifier, exposing the myth to comic ridicule. At the same time, Natarajan's analysis unveils the ways in which Rushdie's text falls into complicities with the ideological construct he set out to criticize, thus "writing women out of modernity."(p.12)

The author wisely chose five consummate works of art that not only mirror a broad spectrum of Indian society, but also mold modern values and attitudes. The two novels, Swami and Samskara, written in the first half of the twentieth century, have both acquired new relevance in postcolonial India through their reinterpretation by Bombay cinema. The analysis of these innately intriguing works of fiction in terms of the politics of gender and modernity provides us with a unique vantage point to understand the incongruities and ambiguities of contemporary India . Nalini Natarajan concludes that the reinterpretation of Indian culture and social norms sparked by colonial rule opens new spaces for the feminine subject, but shifting gender norms are sites of conflict and negotiation, which may or may not produce an improvement in the status of women at any given historical moment. Scholars that specialize in other geographical areas will find that the insights into the utilization of women as objects and signifiers in modernity discourse, as well as the struggle of women to recover feminine agency, is applicable to reading literary production in postcolonial societies in all parts of the globe. The book is highly recommended for those interested in gender and feminist studies, cultural history, film and contemporary culture, literary criticism and postcolonial theory.

Barbara Southard

December, 2003

Contributors:
Barbara Southard has a Ph.D. in Asian Studies form the University of Hawaii . She has taught history at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras for many years. Her published works on Indian history include numerous journal articles on nationalism and feminism and a book titled The Women's Movement and Colonial Politics in>Bengal, 1921-1936.