Anxiety, Alterity and Alienation of Pan-diasporic Kerala Women in Arranged
Marriages: An Analysis of Janu in Jaishree Misra’s Ancient Promises
Sonu
Sujit David and K. G. Bhuvana Maheshwari
Sonu Sujit David is a Ph.D scholar of the Department of English, JAIN
(Deemed-to-be-University), Bangalore; K. G. Bhuvana Maheshwari is the External
Guide, Department of English, JAIN (Deemed-to-be-University), Bangalore.
Abstract
The article examines the novel Ancient
Promises by Jaishree Misra, in the framework of postcolonial studies,
diaspora studies, psychoanalytic, conflict and re-Orientalism theories
and through three major forms of
displacement:
a)
Cultural displacement from urban New Delhi to native semi-urban
Valapadu, Kerala.
b)
Dilemma within the protagonist of aligning herself with her place of
origin.
c)
Ideological position (democratic) of urban Delhi versus Marxist ideology
of native Kerala and the class conflicts therein.
The paper dwells on the anxiety the
protagonist Janu undergoes by giving up Arjun, her first great love and giving
into an arranged marriage. The gradual coldness of her husband’s family and his
indifference to her and their daughter’s needs led to feelings of alterity. The
paper therefore also examines how a pan-diasporic writer experiences alienationce
thrown into her native culture; her feelings of rootlessness and meaningless
existence leads her to experience otherness in her marital home and thus leads
to alienation. The birth of a mentally challenged daughter further intensifies
the resultant trauma she experiences. The cultural displacement from her
adopted homeland Delhi brought about a loss of her own identity and the
difference in her upbringing both perplexed and traumatized the protagonist
Janu after marriage.
Keywords: Anxiety, Alterity, Alienation, pan-diasporic,
Re-Orientalism, Trauma.
Diaspora
does not refer to simply the geographical dispersal but also to the vexed
questions of identity, memory and home which such displacement produces. (The Empire Writes Back 217-218)
The Indian Diaspora (which began with the
voyage of indentured labourers from India to the Fiji and Trinidad and Tobago
islands to work in the sugar plantations) produced Indian diasporic writings
from writers like V. S. Naipaul (who is no longer clubbed with Indian diasporic
writers because of his affiliation to England) whose concept of home and
homeland has taken a very different meaning from the search of his roots to the
route he adopts to identify himself. From Naipaul to Rushdie, each writer is
connected to their origin differently and has found different routes to find
homeland. Diasporic literature is thus grappling with the idea of home and
homelessness.
The term “diaspora” comes from the Greek
translation of the Bible, meaning “to scatter about, disperse,” from dia- “about,
across”, and, speirein “to scatter” (originally in Deuteronomy xxviii.25). Safran points out that the term has its
Western beginnings in the Jewish diaspora communities, extending to groups
“such as the Armenian, Chinese, Greek, Indian, Kurdish, Palestinian, Parsi, and
Sikh, whose experiences of expatriation, institution building, cultural
continuity, and refusal to relinquish their collective identities have
demarcated them from mere immigrants” (36). The term has come to mean a group
of people that were expelled or migrated from their historic homeland out into
different parts of the world. Further, it implies that they established new
political communities in those places, making contact with the people of the
receiving lands for various purposes, but generally remaining closely together
as communities of religion, culture and/or welfare (Rios
and Adiv 2).
As a nation, India is
made up of several states with its unique languages, cultures and customs. As is
the case with any migration and assimilation, one sees a mass exodus from
smaller cities to bigger metropolitan urban cities like New Delhi, Mumbai,
Bangalore and Hyderabad, etc. by people from different parts of India in their
quest for a better life. This set of people who have assimilated into the
culture and customs of places within India but foreign to their own language,
customs and culture is what is termed as pan-diasporic by the researcher. The
term “pan-diasporic” needs clarity at this point. Just as “diaspora” is the
overarching term for all Indians living outside India, the term “pan-diasporic”
is the overarching term for all diaspora that is scattered within India in
different states. The pan-diasporic is interpreted here as referring to a
broader and universal experience of diasporic identity cutting across Indian
states and its cultural boundaries. Like the diaspora scattered abroad, the
pan-diasporic community also experiences alterity and alienation. In fact, the
diaspora scattered abroad is looked at with leniency or less severity by the
homeland because of being in a foreign land whereas the experiences of the
pan-diasporic community is negated or scoffed at as this community is within
the geographical parameters of the nation-state India. This dispersion for a
better life has resulted in the destruction of the real identity of the
migrants and a confused identity for the subsequent generations of the pan-diasporic
community. Jaishree Misra, the author of Ancient Promises1 is
one such pan-diasporic writer about whom Kalra et. al. say, “It could be argued that those writing in
English in India have a diasporic consciousness forged either through internal
migration to the metropolis or by being multilingual” (46).
The protagonist Janu in Jaishree Misra’s Ancient
Promises has an in-between identity as she is a Nair girl whose roots are
from Valapadu, a semi-urban place in Kerala but is born and brought up in the
urban landscape of Delhi. So Janu is a pan-diasporic Malayali-Delhiite. Janu
experiences a sense of rootlessness/not belongingness with respect to her
native land and culture. The general feeling is this sense of rootlessness
exists only if one is detached geographically from one’s native land and has
settled in another country with its unique culture and customs. But in a
diverse country like India, where people migrate from one state to another for
various reasons, this displacement resulted in social, cultural implications
and caused one to question one’s real identity. Most of the postcolonial
interpretations of the Second-generation diaspora often mask, occlude, alienate
and disown these in-between identities. For instance, Ashcroft et. al. note
that hybrid forms are always regarded as ‘the other’ which is radically
different from ‘the self’ and a simultaneous proposition suggests that
authority is maintained over them even as there has been a deliberate attempt
to destroy or marginalize their very presence. This argument is supported by a
recent approach in culture studies that traces the unproblematic and
confounding nature of the cultural identity of the in-betweens, which, as the
cultural theoretician Stuart Hall puts it, “…is never complete, always in
process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (222).
The ability to live within two worlds is
applied to the experience of pan-diasporic people living in postcolonial
nations. But the protagonist Janu of Ancient Promises is forced to,
through the institution of marriage, relocate to her native homeland which is
alien to her. This has created a cultural displacement for this pan-diasporic
protagonist. This cultural displacement causes anxiety in Janu as she is unable
to comprehend how to come to terms with the contradiction between the two
cultures she is exposed to. The third chapter of the novel Ancient Promises
begins with explaining this paradox in the protagonist Janu’s life. She says, “That
these two places ran together in my blood, their different languages and different
customs never quite mixing, never really coming together as one. And when, as a
Malayali girl growing up in Delhi with Malayali parents but Delhi friends, and
Malayali thoughts but Delhi ways…” (18).
It becomes very difficult therefore
especially for a pan-diasporic person to explain the otherness he/she feels
when in the company of his/her relatives in his/her native land. The spattering
sense of identity with regards to the language, social rituals and customs and
yet the difference in the way of language usages, pronunciations, mannerisms,
the different connotations that a word or sentence may imply to the native
speaker and the apparent sense of loss in conversations by the pan-diasporic in-between
second-generation is lost on many postcolonial interpretations of the second
generation of pan-diasporic community. The sense of a shared language and
culture is not enough for an identity of “being ” who you are (i.e. here a second-generation
pan-diasporic Malayali-Delhiite) to the sense of what this migration has caused
to you “becoming” who you are- a person with an in-between identity, a
second-generation pan-diasporic Malayali-Delhiite bride in her originary “homeland”
Kerala.
Janu tries to establish her cultural identity
as how Stuart Hall defines the second sense of cultural identity:
Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a
matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as
to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place,
time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have
histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant
transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they
are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from
being grounded in a mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found,
and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities
are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position
ourselves within, the narratives of the past. It is only from this second
position that we can properly understand the traumatic character of ‘the
colonial experience’. (225)
The anxiety that this disconnectedness (of
becoming a Maraar bride from being a Delhi-bred Janu) brings especially when
forced into a contrasting environment to one’s upbringing creates a feeling of
anxiety leading to alterity and subsequent alienation.
When Janu, the protagonist is asked by her
mother-in-law if she would like to have tea, Janu replies “Yes, please.” She is
reprimanded by her mother-in-law: “Look you are not in Delhi anymore. Like it
or not, you now live in Kerala, so I suggest you drop all these fashionable
Pleases and Thank Yous. Here we don’t believe in unnecessary style” (80). The
author Jaishree Misra has through this novel drawn attention to a pan-diasporic
culture which the dominant native culture of Kerala has marginalized and
attempted to erase. Jaishree Misra has in this novel attempted to blur the
Malayali ideological boundary and allow multiple ways of identifying a
Malayalee rather than creating binaries between them. Both Jaishree Misra and
her protagonist Janu share pan-diasporic sensibility – they are not quite “at
home” in either of their two cultures. It is a new identity - of “becoming” which
is again fluid and open to further dynamics of their “positioning”.
Jaishree Misra’s novel Ancient Promises
dwells on the plight of the protagonist who is unable to comprehend why she is
unable to enjoy Kerala as she did when she came for her holidays. She finds
herself a misfit in the wealthy Maraar household which expects her to fit in
their orthodox ways of living, willing to doll herself as the educated wife of
Suresh when he starts business in urban Mumbai. Her education and urban
upbringing were totally frowned upon and mocked by her in-laws. To put it in
Jaishree Misra’s words:
There is so much that is so wonderful about
Kerala but I still feel a bit like Janu of Ancient
Promises when she says, “Kerala is a place for holidays, not forever.” It’s
a complex state, and still highly conservative. I find it sad that, despite the
impressive education figures and the numbers of women who work and earn their
living, it encourages an environment (especially in the upper classes) in which
the women have to “know their place” and behave in a certain way. It’s subtle
but it’s there. “Literacy without liberation,” I say in Ancient Promises. (Vinai and Hazarika 196)
Chesler further states that in 1996,
psychologists Peter Glick of Wisconsin’s Lawrence University and Susan T.
Fisher of New Jersey’s Princeton University confirmed that hostility towards
women may coexist with positive feelings towards women who know their place and
who support traditional gender inequality (qtd. in Chesler 79). They called it “ambivalent
sexism”. According to the authors, such ambivalent sexism helps maintain
traditional and unequal gender roles and serves as a balm for the conscience of
the dominant group members “as well as a more effective and positive means of
coercing co-operation from the subordinate group, whose members receive various
perks and even affection in return for “knowing their place.”
Janu’s co-sister is treated well as she fits
into the prescribed norms of the Maraar household. Whereas Janu is excluded and
segregated as she fails to fit into their expectations of a Maraar bride. Janu
ponders on her identity thus: “Who was she? Mrs. Suresh,
pretty-and-wearing-nice-saris-and . . . nothing else was important anyway. A Maraar
daughter-in-law? Not quite, looks like one on the outside, complete with silk
sari and big red bindi and flowers in the hair, but with funny Delhi ways that
needed more ironing out – “Still she says daal for parippu!” and “Still she
doesn’t know how to sit properly while wearing a sari” and “Still preferring a
good book to sitting around a kitchen table and tearing some poor soul apart” (100).
Janu here faces an existential crisis as she
is unsure of what her identity truly is. This Janu always felt that she did not
belong in the Kerala culture and specifically in the culture of the Maraar
household. In other words, Janu experienced alterity. Lucidity of the term
Alterity/otherness is required at this point. Alterity
also is synonymous to be the “other” i.e. someone who is not like or different
from the common/same environment/culture/surroundings, etc. “Otherness” denotes
a difference based either on gender, sex, race or ethnicity mainly due to lack
of similarity and even the out of ordinary. Hence the “othered” is excluded or
marginalized. Few instances from the text Ancient Promises is
highlighted to exhibit the “otherness”/alterity that Janu experienced. Janu
tried her best to assimilate but in vain. She says, “A year had passed, very
slowly and inexorably in the Maraar household, and it was now clear to me that,
however hard I tried, I wasn’t to be one of them. But it still didn’t stop me
from trying” (109).
Janu was mocked at her lack
of knowledge in hanging out sari blouses to dry. She was asked:
Is that how you hang out
sari blouses in your house? We do it like this.And I would rush to rearrange my
wet, newly washed blouse hanging shamefully on the line next to the smartly
folded Maraar ones, done just so. Even a badly hung blouse could announce to
everyone who walked past the washing line that there was an intruder in their
midst, one that could never ever measure up to the others. There for the
fish-seller and the gardener and the next-door neighbours to look at and laugh at.
(109)
Janu expressed her desire to
go to Delhi for three weeks which was promptly turned down by her mother-in-law
stating that it was her (Janu’s) father-in-law’s birthday. “So I wasn’t
to get to Delhi for another year. My chances of seeing my parents and being
able to tell them that I wasn’t really as terribly happy as they’d hoped
were receding” (109). Chesler notes that according to John Beard
Haviland, in a study of Mexican Zincantan, “A new bride, introduced into her
husband’s household, represents a potential break of confidentiality; her
in-laws begrudge her even occasional visits to her own mother, where she can
leak out family secrets and gossip about her new household to an outsider” (qtd.
in Chesler 87).
Janu’s father-in-law’s
birthday was a torment for her. She says, “Perhaps because Amma knew I had
dared to attempt making my own plans, I seemed to be singled out for an extra
dose of meanness this time. What are you doing with that vilakku? It
goes there. Haven’t they taught you anything?” (109).
Janu feels alienated from her own husband Suresh as well. She says, “Suresh
didn’t need to discuss money or his business with me – for that he had his
father. We didn’t need to discuss the household – for that there was his
mother. Leisure time was shared with his sisters” (101). Karl Marx’s theory of alienation describes estrangement (Ger. Entfremdung) of people from aspects of
their Gattungswesen (“spedes-essence”)
as a result of living in a society of stratified social classes. The alienation
from the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class,
the condition of which estranges a person from their humanity. Saleem notes,
Alienation is the basic form of rootlessness,
which forms the subject of many psychological, sociological, literary and
philosophical studies. Alienation is a major theme of human condition in the
contemporary epoch. It is only natural that a pervasive phenomenon like alienation
should leave such an indelible impact upon contemporary literature. Alienation
emerges as a natural consequence of existential predicaments which are both in
intrinsic and extrinsic terms… Owing to its historical and socio-cultural
reasons, the Indo-English literature also, could not remain unaffected by it. Alienation
is the result of loss of identity…Man fails to perceive today the very purpose
behind life and the relevance of his existence in a hostile world. (67)
The protagonist Janu expresses her
incompatibility with the native environment that led to her sense of isolation,
randomness and meaninglessness in her existence, and further, her sense of alienation
in the Maraar household. She says:
It didn’t sound as if anyone in this family
had grown up outside Kerala, the Malayalam flying around me was fast, fluent
and elegant. My years of growing up in Delhi and having to struggle with Hindi
in school, had relegated Malayalam to a very low priority. It was getting
clearer by the minute that my holiday-Malayalam, so comical it sometimes even
made my grandparents giggle, was unlikely to endear me to this family. (81)
Janu’s incompatibility also caused
conflicting emotions within her which furthered her sense of alienation. She
struggled with conflicting ideologies of her conditioning and upbringing in
urban Delhi.
Lindsay’s astute observations may be cited here whereby Friedrich Engels
(1820-1895), Marx’s collaborator, applied these assumptions to the family and,
by extension, to gender roles. Lindsay notes, “He suggested that the
master-slave or exploiter-exploited relationships occurring in broader society
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are translated into the household…
Engels argued that a woman’s domestic labour is ‘no longer counted beside the
acquisition of the necessities of life by the man; the latter was everything,
the former an unimportant extra.’ The household is an autocracy, and the
supremacy of the husband is unquestioned. “‘The emancipation of woman will only
be possible when women can take part in production a large social scale, and
domestic work no longer claims but an insignificant amount of her time’ (Engels,
1942:41-43)” (qtd. in Lindsay 7-8). Lindsay further states:
The conflict perspective is evident in research demonstrating that
household responsibilities effect the occupational location, work experience,
and number of hours worked per week. Undesirable work will be performed
disproportionately by those lacking resources to demand sharing the burden or
purchasing substitutes. Because household labour is unpaid and associated with
lack of power, the homemaker (wife) takes on virtually all domestic chores (Lindsey,
1996a; Riley and Kiger, 1999). The more powerful spouse performs the least
amount of household work. (Qtd. in Lindsay 8)
In the Maraar household, the men handled the
business and the womenfolk were supposed to handle the household work. So it
was evident that the power dynamics was in favour of the men. Even gendered
spaces were observed in the Maraar household. The women sipped coffee in the
kitchen and the men were elsewhere. “The men were congregating elsewhere, in
some distant and privileged verandah or living room, to which large trays of
tea were being regularly dispatched” (81).
The Maraar clan seemed enormous and the
meal-time routine seemed to be men first in the dining-room, children alongside
at the kitchen table, then the women, the drivers and servants and finally, only
after the old Ammumma had fed everybody else, would she eat. Janu thought of
her own grandmother and couldn’t think of her being relegated to Ammumma’s
position. This was in so much contrast to her upbringing in democratic Delhi
where a more egalitarian approach was adopted in carrying out household
responsibilities and work. The beliefs and values she was nurtured with has
been shattered when she is married into an environment that emulates the
Marxist philosophy and take on life. The class conflict in Marxism is translated
in the household scenario where the men assume the bourgeoisie position and the
women are relegated to the proletariat level. In a similar vein,
the pre-dominant Communist Party in Kerala which dones a Marxist ideological
façade caters to the patriarchal norms of the society. G. Arunima in Pennezhuthu
says:
Kerala has always occupied a
paradoxical position within Indian politics. On the one hand, with record of
having had the first democratically elected Communist government in the world,
it has represented for many a progressive hope within an otherwise sectarian
democracy… an equally visible set of “indicators” that is often ignored is the
extent of violence against women… the virtual absence of women in politics, and
the left parties' refusal to address these as “political” issues. That left
wing politics in large parts of the world has not been sensitive to issues of
gender… has been addressed politically and academically by feminists for many
decades now. However, in the case of Kerala, this is linked to a larger phenomenon
from the early 20th century where the growth of nationalist (and later
Communist) political activity was coterminus with the emergence of a discourse of
masculinity. This discourse, especially in the early decades of the 20th
century, was linked to a critique of matriliny, the dominant pattern of kinship
in Kerala. The masculine idiom was ‘progressivist’ in many respects - it was to
move out of the “barbaric” past of matriliny into patrilineal modernity; it was
the language of “social reform” of this period that actually enabled the anti
matriliny legislations - but more importantly constituted the political
training ground for the latter day “communists”; finally, for many among them
it was the recovery of a “masculine” identity, apparently shackled till now by
the matrilineal (read “women-centred”) culture. (Arunima n.p.)2
Again, Meyerowitz states:
Joan Scott offered a different approach for rethinking
and rewriting history. Influenced by Derrida’s deconstructionism and Foucault's
formulation of dispersed power, she asked historians to analyze the language of
gender, to observe how perceived sex differences had appeared historically as a
natural and fundamental opposition. These perceived differences, she wrote, had
often subordinated and constrained women, yes, but they had also provided a “primary
way of signifying” other hierarchical relationships. This was the heart of her
contribution: she invited us to look at how “the so-called natural relationship
between male and female” structured, naturalized, and legitimated relationships
of power, say, between ruler and ruled or between empire and colony. The history
of gender could, it seems, inhabit more of the historical turf than could the
history of women. (Qtd. in Meyerowitz 1347)
The researcher has used Meyerowitz’s article
“History of Gender” to highlight how the relationship between male and female
structured, naturalized and legitimated relationships of power and hence the
need to perceive a viewpoint wherein doing gender precedes the biological
defining of gender. Ammumma, by virtue of being the financially weak link in
the household, ends up as the cook for the entire Maraar household even though
she is the mother of the matriarch of the Maraar household. In contrast, Janu
is unable to comprehend anywhere in her mindscape the very thought of her
grandmother being relegated to such a position. Even her own father who is a
respectable Air Commodore in Delhi becomes an object of ridicule at the hands
of the youngest daughter of the Maraar household as it is perceived as the de
facto privilege of the groom’s family.
The protagonist Janu, rightly so, is totally
confused and at loss to respond to everyday situations thrown at her even as
she tries her best to adjust to the marital house’s demands. Chesler states,
British
psychologist Anne Campbell notes that girls do not like any girl who “positively
assesses herself or explicitly compares herself with others. Girls find this
offensive. Painfully—and almost constantly—girls scrutinize each other’s
behaviour for displays that might be interpreted as showing that one girl is
trying to differentiate herself from others in the group. To girls, as research
confirms, “belonging” is the most important thing—and in order to belong, each
girl must “conform to group expectations while not exceeding them.” Of course,
boys also need to belong to a group, but, “having achieved this they then
strive for public recognition of status within it.” Status-seeking girls tend
to be rejected or excluded by other girls. As we shall see, girls view members
who are in any way better or worse than other group members as less desirable
friends. Finally, Campbell points out that naturalistic studies show that “cliques
are girls’ preferred mode of association.” She theorizes that such a preference
is “probably the result of a desire to avoid status competition,” which might
result in being excluded. (Qtd. in Chesler 54-55)
Janu,
the protagonist tries her level best to fit into the Maraar household. She says
that in spite of her mother’s advice that one could fit in a new surrounding at
a younger age, she is unable to do so. She says,
I
was also beginning to get a sense of having a lot of reassuring to do. That
hadn’t occurred to me before, that this new family of mine might have developed
a pre-conceived notion of me! Somehow I had to let these strangers know that I
was kind-hearted and affectionate. That children and animals usually liked me.
And that, despite Delhi, I was really not too stylish and had come into their
lives very eager to love them (85).
Sam
Watson in his interview with McMahon3 in light of forced form of
displacement of the Aboriginals says: “[y]ou can take aboriginal people out of
the land but you can’t take the land out of aboriginal people. So regardless of
where we live and what we do, we always have that relation to our spiritual
side. (in Dean 8)” (Qtd. in McMahon 49-50). In a similar vein, it can also be
argued that you can take the second and subsequent generation of the pan-diasporic
community out of their homeland (albeit adapted by their parents) but you
cannot take the adapted homeland out of the pan-diasporic community. So
regardless of where they live and what they do, they will always have that
relation to their adapted homeland where they grew up. So, just as sense of
place is internalized by part of any indigenous community, so is it
internalised by the pan-diasporic community. The pan-diasporic community has
assimilated itself into the new homeland through the process of inculturation
and acculturation, syncretism and cross-culturalism. Hence they are embedded in
the culture of their new homeland and now find their originary “homeland”
distant and unrelatable. Hence a mixed-up identity or an in-between feeling
arises like developing fault lines in the process of identification.
Each
state in India has its own distinct set of languages, cultures and customs and
forges their own unique identity as a state and in relation to the nation
India. Yet when people of each of these states migrate to the large “melting
pot of cultures” i.e. in urban metropolitan cities like New Delhi, Mumbai,
Bangalore, Hyderabad, etc., they forge an affinity between different cultural
groups. This happens right from their childhood when they are exposed to
multiple cultures in school. Janu the protagonist meets her teenage crush Arjun
in this very setting. Both Arjun and Janu have developed affinity to the urban
culture of New Delhi. This new identity may not quite be coherent to the
traditional notion of identity in their native homeland. Though the first
generation pan-diasporic community may conform to their adapted homeland’s
paradigm, they would still retain their own unique identity of their native
homeland too. But this sense of distinct cultural identity and shared
understanding of the first- generation pan-diaspora regardless of where their
new homeland, is not necessarily shared by the second and subsequent
generations of the pan diaspora. It becomes a bit too far-fetched to assume
that the subsequent generations would follow suit. The first generation pan
diaspora deals with areas of intersection with their new homeland but the
subsequent generations become comfortable in their adapted homeland’s culture
and customs and are left in a state of flux, always negotiating how to handle
this dual culture – that they live in and that which their parents impose of
their native homeland.
Pan-diasporic
literature explores borders and boundaries and particularly the novel Ancient
Promises deals with the crossing of borders by the protagonist Janu between her
adapted homeland New Delhi and native homeland Kerala. Malayalees, since the
splurge of oil companies in the Gulf and the consistent demand for Malayalee
nurses and doctors in various states of India and abroad have migrated all over
the globe. This community is known for their resilience and ability to co-exist
in both adapted and native land. Their fluidity and ability to slide between
the two lands is commendable. But they are faced with resistance from the
subsequent generations who insist on creating a new and distinct identity
rather than trying to recreate/import their native culture. They are confronted
with this very dire need to preserve their native culture (thrust upon by their
parents) while imbibing their adaptive homeland’s culture. This rupture and
dislocation which is a significant feature of postcolonial studies has been
identified by Jaishree Misra through her protagonist Janu’s fault lines.
The protagonist Janu is placed into a
marriage much against her desire. She is married off as a form of punishment
for the audacity she showed by falling in love with a boy who is from New Delhi
and not approved by her parents or community. Her parents tried to make up for
this loss of dignity (as they viewed it) by forcing her into an arranged
marriage much against her will. She was denied the desire to continue her studies
in Delhi where she grew up as her parents feared that she would cause them
further shame. In her unpublished article, “The Concept of Humiliation”, Evelyn
Gerda Lindner4 defines humiliation thus:
Humiliation means the enforced
lowering of a person or group, a process of subjugation that damages or strips
away their pride, honour or dignity. To be humiliated is to be placed, against
your will and often in a deeply hurtful way (although in some cases with your
consent) in a situation that is much worse, or much ‘lower,’ than what you feel
you should expect. Humiliation entails demeaning treatment that transgresses
established expectations. It may involve acts of force, including violent
force. At its heart is the idea of pinning down, putting down or holding
against the ground. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of humiliation
as a process is that the victim is forced into passivity, acted upon, and made
helpless. (4)
In fact, Janu is the one who is humiliated first by her parents and then
by the members of her
husband’s household. Right from her
mother-in-law to her little sister-in-law, none of them
spared her from their regular jibes. A few such instances from the novel
are listed below:
...I replied, ‘Yes, please.’ ‘Look you
are not in Delhi anymore. Like it or not, you now live in Kerala, so I suggest
you drop all these fashionable Pleases and Thank Yous. Here we don’t believe in
unnecessary style.’ (80)
‘Do you know, I refer to your father
as “Air Commode”. Only air comes out on the lavatory. It always makes everyone
laugh.’ She giggled loudly and looked slyly at me to gauge my reaction. (88-89)
‘Oh look, Sathi, have you ever seen
such tiny ear-rings? They’re like your jumikis, only ten times smaller.’ (91)
It didn’t take long for me to start
hating myself for the many different things that gave the Maraars reason to
slap their knees and laugh until tears ran down their cheeks. For my mother
having omitted to teach me how to cook; for not being able to speak Malayalam
elegantly; for forgetting constantly not to mind my Ps and Qs; for having been
brought up in Delhi; for having had an aunt who, in the nineteen twenties, had
an affair that everyone in Kerala (except me) had heard about. There was so
much to be ashamed of. (97)
As
noted earlier, female human beings have the power to include or exclude others
– mainly female others – from their group. When men exclude a woman, it may
indeed have dire consequences both economically and socially. However, being excluded
by boys and men is not as emotionally devastating to a girl or woman as being
excluded by others of her own gender. In 2000, Australian educators and
psychologists Lawrence and Owens, Rosalyn Shute and Phillip S. Lee studied how
15year olds set into motion indirect aggression. They found that girls
persistently “spread rumours, break confidences and criticize other’s clothing,
appearance and personality. Sometimes they say nasty things….. engage in
exclusionary behaviour, ostracize one female for short or long periods of time”
(qtd. in Chesler 70). The reason for their behaviour stated were that the
victim was annoying, indiscreet or aggravating or found starting conflict and
so bringing it on themselves. The effects of such exclusions can have far reaching
consequences that may last a lifetime. Some of the effects seen are the
victim’s confusion at first then the victim getting into a state of denial that
this cannot be happening to her and that she would not let it get to her.
Ultimately, she feels immense pain and goes through hurt, fear, high state of
anxiety, low self-esteem, lowered self-confidence and finally depression. Here
we see Janu going through all these stages which finally results in a
traumatized Janu. Chesler says, “...when a group of women betray or collude in
the betrayal of an individual group member, there is really no higher authority
to stop them, no legal or religious council who can rule on the matter in a
binding way. This is a no man’s land, where anything goes” (202).
The
Maraar household is totally controlled by the matriarch, Janu’s mother-in-law. Whatever
she desires is what happens. The men merely follow her wishes and the women who
are outsiders (here the daughters-in-law (even amongst them between the
traditional and non-traditional)) and insiders (daughters who are given
preferential treatment) are totally at her mercy and whims. Hence it is
psychologically traumatic for Janu to be held at the mercy of this matriarch
figure of the Maraar household. Janu struggles to adapt to the norms of her
marital home.
Pan-diasporic
people migrated from their traditional land into places within the country but
into different cultural identity. They learn to negotiate language use, customs
and socio-political norms which are essential for their survival in the new
land. This then leads to the adaptation/formation of a new social organization.
This adaptation to new culture/customs has been a key difficulty for the pan
diaspora. The subsequent generation of the pan diaspora has imbibed the
culture, customs and socio-political norms of the new homeland of their parents
as well as spattering customs, language and norms of their native homeland.
Hence a re-adaptation of their native homeland’s way of doing things becomes a
significant issue in pan diasporic literature which most of the initial group
of pan diaspora (migrants) fail to comprehend. This is the reason why Janu’s
parents fail to understand her inability to fit into the Maraar household’s way
of life. Janu’s assimilation in the urban culture is so complete that she fails
to align herself to her ancestral land’s culture and customs albeit aware of
the basic rituals and norms. It is because of Janu’s preferred affiliation to
the city she grew up in that she couldn’t adjust to the topsy-turvy world (to
her mind) of the Maraar household. Her sustained efforts to adapt to the
marital kinship status in order to gain acceptance and harmony were all in
vain. This was because though she lived in Valapadu with the Maraars, she had never
left New Delhi in her mind.
Maurice Stevens says:
Rather than thinking of trauma as an
identifiable and discrete event that must have occurred at some specific point
in time and place, it can be more usefully understood as a cultural object
whose meanings far exceed the boundaries of any particular shock or disruption;
rather than being restricted by the common sense ideas we possess that allow us
to think of trauma as authentic evidence of something “having happened there,”
a snapshot whose silver plate and photon are analogues to the psyche and
impressions fixed in embodied symptoms, the real force of trauma flowers in
disparate and unexpected places. And, like most cultural objects, trauma, too,
circulates among various social contexts that give it different meanings and
co-produce its multiple social effects. (3)
The protagonist Janu is uprooted from her
secure environment in New Delhi to a semi-urban Valapadu, where she struggles
with the inadequacy of language, culture, customs and rituals. She is mocked at
daily on a consistent basis by the members of her marital household. She grew
up as an only child in a nuclear family where both her parents worked and is
now thrust into a large joint family that is so different from hers. She tries
her best but in vain to seek the approval of her marital household. She is
rejected at every turn. She tries to seek solace in the nightly embraces of her
otherwise indifferent husband Suresh only to realize that he would not stand by
her. She realizes this when he defends every accusation Janu hurls at him for
not speaking up for her or protecting her. This situation is further
deteriorated with the birth of her mentally challenged daughter Riya. The
entire family alienates her because she refuses to give up on her daughter who
needs her. She tries to get her the best treatment possible as she realizes
that Riya can never be treated in small town Valapadu.
In her attempt to seek treatment for her
abroad, she faces hostility from none other than her husband who was not
willing to send her abroad with their daughter. Things get complicated with the
reappearance of Arjun, her first love from New Delhi. He promises her marriage
and also taking care of Riya. But when Suresh hears of it, he refuses to divorce Janu and uses Riya
as a final straw to lure her back. The trauma of separation from Riya and
Suresh’s attempt to prove her mentally ill – all these were incidents that
deeply traumatized Janu. The cultural and social expectations added to the
trauma quotient for Janu. K. Tal (1995) explores the notion of Trauma and how
traumatic cultural events are reported in written texts. Key features of trauma
literature are equally applicable in post- colonial literature. The protagonist
Janu is a survivor of extreme cultural upheaval. Tal asserts that the key goal
of trauma literature is change and that the act of writing as a means of “bearing
witness” is an aggressive one, representing a “refusal to bow to outside
pressure to revise or to repress experience, a decision to embrace conflict
rather than conformity. (7) Jaishree Misra through her semi-autobiographical
novel’s protagonist Janu refuses to conform or promote accepted views of Maraar
household and instead bears witness to those whose voices are silenced in that
house, viz. the elder co-sister. Jaishree Misra has made literature a forefront
tool to express her desire to embrace all her conflicts and made the writing of
the novel Ancient Promises a cathartic process for her.
Re-Orientalism theory is exhibited here in
the novel’s analysis as it depicts the way the pan-diasporic writer writes
about her own community’s flaws and raise concerns/questions that address
gender issues and the resultant trauma that creates an imbalanced growth of
their society. In India, historically, the mother-in-laws have always wielded
greater power over their daughter- in- law whom they have psychologically and
physically abused. The most common weapon used by the mother-in-law is the
weapon of silence. Janu’s mother-in-law rarely spoke with her and used this
tool of silence very effectively on her. Chesler notes,
Most women have a repertoire of techniques,
with which to weaken, disorient, humiliate or banish other female group
members. A woman won’t often physically knock another woman down. Instead, she
might use silence as a way of unnerving or gas lighting her opponent. The gas
lighter will refuse to look at the targeted woman when she speaks, will not
engage her in dialogue, will not hear what she says. The gas lighter might
subtly but continually move to a more favoured woman in the group as a way of
rendering the targeted woman ultimately invisible even to herself. The key to
the gas lighter’s power is the group’s unwillingness to name what she is doing
or to stop her. (210)
In traditional Kerala homes across different
religious practices, it was common practice
to condition a girl to fit into a patriarchal
society by being subordinate to the male members in the house and community –
to accept themselves as secondary citizens.
This is exhibited in various interactions
socially and in state hierarchies. A woman who is highly educated is also
expected to be docile and meek in her mannerisms and not expected to raise her
voice or protest. They therefore learnt the art of indirect aggression very
quickly. Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes introduce their chapter on
re-Orientalism thus:
According to Edward Said’s Foucauldian take
on imperial discourses, the cultural construct of Orientalism was the European
imperialistic strategy of composing a positive image of the western Self while
casting the ‘East’ as its negative alter ego, alluring and exotic, dangerous
and mysterious, always the Other. As such, ‘the Orient has helped to define
Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience’ (Said
1-2), emerging as an intricate part of western culture itself and as a way to
face internal contradictions… Orientalism… has developed in a rather curious
trajectory over the last few decades. One direction of particular interest has
been identified and designated as ‘re-Orientalism’ (Lau 2009), where ‘Orientals’
are seen to be perpetrating Orientalisms no less than ‘non-Orientals’ and,
moreover, perpetrating certain and selected types of Orientalism. Where Said’s
Orientalism is grounded in how the West constructs the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’,
re-Orientalism is based on how cultural producers with eastern affiliations
come to terms with an orientalized East… (1)
Hence it is quite evident that the writer
from the West is clueless and lacks first- hand experience of the indigenous
writer whose life experiences is better translated into their native experiences. The Oriental writer is
better equipped to express the local palpitations that their women face in the
light of their cultural context and expectations. Jaishree Misra is a writer
who has lived through the experiences of anxiety, alterity and alienation in
her married life and hence is able to give a first- hand account from her experiences
in her semi-autobiographical novel Ancient Promises. A western writer is unable
to bring that intensity and depth into his/her writing as an indigenous or a
pan-diasporic writer can about their own life situations. Hence, Re-Orientalism
theory’s importance is critical to the understanding and interpretation of
indigenous culture especially in the age of living in a global village.
Jaishree Misra’s Janu becomes a voice for the
young pan-diasporic community with her bicultural identity and urban lifestyle
which counteracts the widely accepted stereotypes about what a ‘real’ Malayalee
daughter-in-law is or should be. As Lau and Mendes note:
Re-Orientalism theory is crucial to the
critique of postcolonial cultural production today, in particular given the
increasing complexity of global cultural exchange. Re-Orientalism provides a
fertile conceptual territory for exploring the pressures and contradictions of
post-colonial production and of the ways that producers (be they creative
authors or academics) and texts critically engage with those dynamics. (3)
All postcolonial texts emphasize on the great
importance to understand the significance of indigenous writings rather than
diasporic writings in order to grasp the realities of the Eastern/Oriental world.
In light of this, it is important to also realize that pan-diasporic
writer/reader’s experience of the alienation/divide from one’s homeland and its
culture is also of paramount importance in understanding the sense of loss of
identity, the not belongingness and alterity that the pan-diaspora community
experiences.
As a pan-diasporic reader, the researcher
herself realizes the difference in the treatment of a diasporic person/writer’s
experience. The way a pan-diasporic writer writes about her homeland is quite
different from the way a native turned diasporic writer writes about her homeland
experiences. Such a person is the first-generation diaspora whereas writers
like Jaishree Misra are second generation pan-diaspora. Even the second and
subsequent generation diasporic writers outside India have a totally different
perspective of their native homeland. Hence, theoreticizing the narratives of
the diasporic community as a general common genre can be quite misleading. It
is in this sense that Re-Orientalism theory acts as a powerful tool to depict
the exact dilemmas that the pan-diaspora faces. We can safely derive that Jaishree
Misra has through Ancient Promises drawn attention to a pan-diasporic
culture which the dominant native culture of Kerala has marginalized and
attempted to erase when confronted with it. Misra has attempted to blur the
Malayalee ideological boundary and allow multiple ways of identifying a
Malayalee rather than creating binaries between them. Misra’s work forged in
the crucible of migration is influenced by the history and politics of Kerala
and India. As a pan-diasporic researcher, all attempts to apply postcolonial studies,
diasporic studies and psychoanalytical studies have been made to gain academic
standing and to obliterate colonialist silencing practices. In conclusion, it
never suffices to reiterate that the pan-diasporic writers of the turn of the twenty
first century through their fictional narratives throw a plethora of concerns
that unless addressed, will severely hamper the true potential and growth of
the subsequent generation of pan-diasporic community in India.
Endnotes
1 From Ancient Promises, by Jaishree
Misra, 2000, Haryana, Penguin Books. Copyright (2000) Jaishree Mishra and
Penguin Books. Reprinted with permission.
2 This quote is part of G.
Arunima’s presentation at a workshop which is listed in the Works Cited.
3 Quote modified with permission
from Dr. Kimberely McMahon-Coleman.
4 From “The Concept of Humiliation: Its
Universal Core and Independent Periphery ”. 2011. Oslo. Copyright (2011).
Evelin Gerda Lindner. Unpublished manuscript. Reprinted with permission.
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