Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Arranged Marriage

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Kaushal Desai

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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Arranged Marriage: Feministic issues in her stories, “The Bats” and “Clothes”.

Introduction

The real issues can be conducted with greater effect, here as well the stories of Chitra Banerjee has lot more to say. Indian American writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award winning and best-selling author, poet, activist and teacher. She writes the critical disputes of present time. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Arranged Marriage, a masterpiece is a collection of short stories. This book received the 1996 American Book Award, the Josephine Miles Award, The Bay Area Reviewer’s Award and The Pen Oakland Award. The stories in the collection provide a representation of Indian women’s experience, their turbulent lives. The stories in the collection deal with conflicts arising due to man-woman relationship in the patriarchal society, that again in a land of their adoption, especially in case of women. So, Divakaruni’s fiction is famous as the fiction dealing with the immigrant experience. Divakaruni, like her contemporaries Gita Hariharan, Anita Nair, Meena Alexander, analyses the pressures and conflicts which women experience or face in a patriarchal frame of reference. The milieu of Divakaruni’s stories is Kolkata or USA. Divakaruni seems to employ the form of short story ‘to dramatize the ordeals of wronged womanhood’.

Arranged Marriage establishes the theme of female itinerancy that Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart will later gather as well as foregrounds related issues of racism and assimilation into new societies. Another major thread that connects many of the stories in this collection is the theme of arranged marriage and its impact on women who usually have very little say in their matrimonial destiny. The text can be taught at various scholastic levels and in courses organized around different themes. For example, Arranged Marriage may be included in classes on American literature, Asian-American literature, Indian literature, South Asian diaspora literature, women’s literature, and ethnic literature.

The Book contains eleven stories. All the stories have women as their focus and bring out the issues dealing with women, their search for identity, self-actualization, self-assertion etc. The recurrent theme of the collection is woman, her various roles and the nuances of these roles. Divakaruni interrogates the patriarchal system, traditional idea of woman and motherhood. There seems to be an attempt at demythologizing the very concept of motherhood in patriarchy. Let us see the first story and find out feministic approach with make eagle eye on it;

The first story, “The Bats” deals with a victimized, helpless life of a housewife whose condition is like the bats who have to return to her uncle’s farm where the only alternative is their death. The story also brings in the issue of the societal eye and the demeaning status of women separated from their husbands.  The story is set in Kolkata. A foreman in a printing press, comes home drunk and regularly beats his wife, but her lack of economic independence makes her suffer silently without protest. She hides the beating marks and scars from her daughter. But the daughter states ‘a couple of days later, mother had another mark on her face even bigger and reddish blue’. However, the wife has to seek refuge at her uncle’s place when the beating becomes unbearable. However, she seems to be so conditioned to being with him that she succumbs to his fake promises. Besides, the consequences of her desertion are also unbearable for her and she returns to him. Divakaruni uses the interlude of bats which surround the mango grove but even when their first batch is poisoned, the next batch does come to the same place. Divakaruni uses bats very symbolically to bring out the issue of inevitability of the marriage ties in India. The uncle says:

‘I guess they don’t realize what’s happening. They don’t realize that by flying somewhere else they will be safe or maybe they do, but there’s something that keeps pulling them back here’. (AM, 10).

Both the wife and the bats know that they are not safe and secure there but it is an inevitable place for them. Divakaruni exposes the cultural devaluation of women as the object of violence and also women’s helplessness which is a recurrent pattern of life for women like the wife in the story. The story ends on the note: ‘we came back few weeks later, this time even before our bruises had faded all the way’.

In the ‘Maid Servant Story’, the wife belongs to the rich class but her fate is no different from that of the poor wife in ‘Bats’. Divakaruni in this story shows how patriarchal power works across classes. The wife in this story comes to know about her husband’s sexual exploitation of her maid, still she does not leave her husband as she has no courage to do so and as it will harm the prospects of her daughter in the marriage market if ‘the scandal of a broken home stained her life’. She becomes a silent sufferer. So her position is nothing but that of an unpaid prostitute and her status is similar to that of the maid who has become a paid prostitute.

This is how patriarchy harms women and they have to live dual lives or maintain their multiple identities. For the two wives in ‘The Bats’ and the ‘Maid Servant Story’ respectively, deviation is not possible as both of them have daughters and their future is a matter of great concern for them and this condition reduces their capacity to take risk and to deviate from the traditional path. No movement is possible for then within patriarchy and since they are Indians, living in India, the mythological Laxman-rekha dominates their psyche. They will never cross the Laxman-rekha as they know the possible severe punishment. And that is how one can observe the element of feminist view in this “The Bats” story.

Now, let us look on the key view point of another story “Clothes”. While optimize any of the aspect, one should be conscious and happenings and that is what Chitra Banerjee master of it. To see that in this story, ‘Clothes’ brings out the metamorphosis of Sumita, a 20^th century young Indian wife living in America with her husband and in-laws. From a traditional wife, with the help of the indirect agency of her husband, she changes into a rebellious assertive women who rejects the traditional idea of widowhood and all that accompanies widowhood as she decides to stay in the US even after the sudden death of her husband since she perceives widows in India to be ‘doves with cut off wings’.

And she knows she ‘cannot go back’. She is determined to liberate herself by denouncing the ‘Angel’, the traditional ‘feminine image’ of herself. One can see the similarity between Sumita and Bharati Mukherjee’s protagonist, Jasmine who is obsessed with her husband’s dream regarding his wife. This seems to be a strategy which is adopted by these protagonists in order to justify their behaviour. These protagonists become their own persons and initiate a movement beyond their confined space. Of course, their husbands seem to have been the catalysts in the process of their development. Sumita’s identity is both, traditional virtuous wife and a ‘lovable daughter-in-law’ that she is, on the one hand and on the other, she breaks away from the traditions as she shares her husband’s dream of herself wearing Western clothes and becoming a teacher. Her rebellious nature is hidden beneath the surface but the shock of her husband’s death makes her come to terms with life and decide for herself.

Furthermore, Divakaruni examines the complicated issue of sexuality in the story "Clothes," in which sex is portrayed as the duty of a wife in her marriage, regardless of whether she desires to engage in it of her own volition. Sumita has been trained (as traditional Indian culture instructs young women) to view sex as a demand that husbands make upon their wives, a command that women must obey so as not to fail in the fulfillment.

In the story "Clothes," Sumita, the central character, moves from Calcutta to California, into a small apartment that she shares with her new husband and his parents. She describes the delineation between an Indian home and the American world outside and the contradictory feelings that emerge from the disconnection between the two spheres:

That's our dream (mine more than his, I suspect)- moving out of this two-room apartment where it seems to me if we all breathed in at once, there would be no air left. Where I must cover my head with the edge of my Japan nylon sari.. .and serve tea to the old women that come to visit Mother Sen, where like a good Indian wife I must never address my husband by his name. Where even in our bed we kiss guiltily, uneasily, listening for the giveaway creak of springs. Sometimes I laugh to myself, thinking how ironic it is that after all my fears about America, my life has turned out to be no different from Deepali's or Radha's [her friends in India]. But at other times I feel caught in a world where everything is frozen in place, like a scene inside a glass paperweight. It is a world so small that if I were to stretch out my arms, I would touch its cold unyielding edges. I stand inside this glass world, watching helplessly as America rushes by, wanting to scream. Then I'm ashamed. Mita, I tell myself, you're growing westernized."

Divakaruni beautifully brings out the nature of men thus, He was a good husband. No one could deny it. He let her have her way, indulged her, even. When the kitchen was remodeled, for example, and she wanted pink and gray tiles even though he preferred white. Or when she wanted to go to Yosemite Park instead of Reno, although he knew he would be dreadfully bored among all those bears hit-filled trails and dried-up waterfalls. Once in a while, of course, he had to put his foot down, like when she wanted to get a job or go back to school or buy American clothes. But he always softened his no’s with a remark like, What for, I’m here to take care of you, or, you look so much prettier in your Indian clothes, so much more feminine. He would pull her onto his lap and give her a kiss and a cuddle which usually ended with him taking her to the bedroom.

It does not end with this.

At last…

This is how the aspect of feministic reading can come out crystal clear with hard trauma. And also observable that Divakaruni demythologizes images of women like Sita and Savitri and probes the psyche of women so as to analyze ‘the problem that has no name’. Divakaruni is a feminist as she shows the women characters in a sympathetic light and exposes the malpractices of patriarchy by questioning the patriarchal institutions, bringing out ‘post identity’ and at times, no identity but ambiguity as all identities seem to be fluid and not at all fixed and at time, quite reversible.