Analysis Of South Asian Literature In English: Bapsi Sidhwa, Salman Rushdie And Sara Suleri

The key plan of South Asian Literature in English is to write back in the language of the ex-colonizers from a (dis)comfort zone of a decolonized area. It makes us rethink the idea of the word `exotic` in an investigation of returning to the Postcolonial ―Exotic of the South Asia writing America and American experiences which built up a home of Orientalist discourses of the Political, cultural, and aesthetic signs and symbols that refuse to disappear. It is vital to take note of how exoticism draws in with and negotiates against notions of difference. Strategically, South Asian-descent writers have begun to ―self-exoticism ideologies of nation, identity, and culture related to South Asia in their own works to reconstruct the phenomenon of South Asia for an international attention. The colonialist ― exoticism of Eastern Others by Western writers had not only marked the aesthetic and critical projects of Eastern writers themselves but also received reputation across the global market. The phenomenon of ― exoticism may be interpreted as a strategic methodology utilised by writers of South Asian descent to examine critically both the post- colonialist ramifications of casteism, religious intolerance, and gender violence across differing cultural contexts within the South Asian region.

Through the book of Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Sara Suleri's Meatless Days. We are given insight of what was the reality through an eye of native rather than a outsider. These book highlight this through the use of walls of Lahore as, in the Lahore writings walls do not always function as structures of division, control and segregation; they can also be seen as points of transcendence or convergence as studied in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘On the City Wall’. Lahore is the social and administrative capital of Pakistan’s largest province, the Punjab. Many writings represent the city of Lahore, ranging from fiction to non-fiction. While studying the writings on Lahore one sees that most literary representations of the city contain a significant image: walls. Walls are portrayed in many ways in Lahore writings: as tangible and intangible; as negative as well as positive; as agents of division as well as frontiers of shelter and protection; as veils which conceal the reality from the onlooker; as points where opposites meet. Contemporary literary representations of walls in Lahore writings address the trope of walls in all these aspects.

As in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India deploy walls as a metaphor for the Partition of India, Rudyard Kipling’s stories ‘On the City Wall’ depict walls not as structures of division and segregation, but as fortifications and shelter from the outer world. In Indian and Pakistani culture the walls of social norms, especially for women, hold strong. Though not referring directly to Hindu mythology, many writings on Lahore address the subject of social walls. Thus the Third world literature is essentially maternalist and highlights the feminine as the redeeming principle. Third World literature does not simply use phrases like motherland," and "mother tongue"; it uses motherhood as informing the world with its fertility, care, maternity, and all the sentiments and passions that can be evoked with the word maternal. No use invoking the land if it is barren, describing the women if they are physically and emotionally infertile. Subversion of the maternal figures through expressive realism in these novels shows the social change that was actually taking place. Expressive realism gave way to magic realism when attempts were made at historicising South Asian experiences. Cracking India shows how Sidhwa negotiated issues of feminist identity suppression and transformation in a realm of contradictions through the story of Shanta. Referred primarily as Ayah in the novel, I will refer to her as Shanta, thereby giving her character agency by recognising her individual identity separate from other relationships in the novel. Shanta’s character encourages a re-reading of the Great Divide of the Indian Subcontinent in ways that resistance, globalization, and re-mapping collide into our contemporary understanding of marginalized South Asian women.

As Sidhwa’s story takes a sharp turn on the brink of independence from British rule and at the the time of Partition of India. Shanta and her world are destroyed as is her sense of self. It is as if the cost of winning independence from the British is the breaking up of the mighty country, its way of living, and its people. Sidhwa foreshadows the plight of the country and its occupants in the seemingly tranquil activities of Lahoris. Replicating the political anxieties over India’s impending partition and the fierce animosity between Hindu and Muslim leaders, Sidhwa shows Masseur and Ice candy-man’s rivalry in winning Shanta over. They try to outdo each other in entertaining and impressing Shanta. When Masseur shares his invention of an oil that can grow hair and how he is raking in money with its sale,Ice-candy-man declares that he has developed a fertility-pill. Simultaneously,Sidhwa also recounts how Nehru tried to win Lord Mountbatten over while Jinnah stood firm on his ideas of how India should be partitioned. Sidhwa uses Lenny’s innocent narrative point-of-view to show the absurdity of how each stakeholder in Indian politics was trying to get his way. Amritsar. Sidhwa in recounting the story of the Indian Subcontinent and its people fractured by the largest ethno-religious and political upheaval in recent h istory, reveals the fate of women who are similarly marginalized, demarcated, and conquered. Her novel highlights the trangressive, ambiguous, and contradictory nature of war.

Sidhwa’s transnational concerns depict the horrors of division along gender, ethnic, religious, and ethical lines. Prior to the Great Divide and the creation of borders everyone lived in harmony, respecting each other’s religion and culture. Sidhwa indicts the Indian people for the atrocities committed during Partition. It wasn’t the British who betrayed Indian people, but their own national and religious dogma. Trapped on the borders of society, the marginalized population, and specifically women like Shanta, suffer immeasurably for belonging to the wrong religion, gender, nation,and social class. In my analysis of the novel Cracking India, Sidhwa’s transnational feminist and geocritical concerns highlight the dynamics of space,place, and the importance of historicizing the Partition anew. Her work speaks for the silenced stories and produces a new historical narrative of India’s Great Divide. Where as Meatless Days, written in geographical and temporal dislocation, is embedded with social and political connotations. It records the memories of Sara Suleri and her protest against female subjugation and suppression through false, misconstrued and wrong interpretation of Islamic laws in the Pakistani society. Suleri, with most of her formative years in Pakistan, has interwoven the turbulent phase of her country with the reminiscences of tragic events in her family and tried to theorize the problematic issues of gender, religion and Pakistan as a Postcolonial nation. The memoir further seeks to explore a patriarchal society where religion is used to circumscribe and exploit women. Suleri, Pakistan is a place that never promised an easy breathing space for women and reduced them to a subdued community in the society. On the very first page of Meatless Days, Suleri claims My reference is to a place where the concept of a woman was not really part of an available vocabulary. In Pakistan, a woman‘s biological roles define her identity which is either dependant on, or subservient to, her male counterparts. The use of the pronoun ‘we’ in this quote refers to all the determining and defining factions of a society, both social and political, which fails to determine a respectable position for women in Pakistan. Meatless Days gives a voice to Suleri‘s dissatisfaction with the social structure of her country for denying its women any space or significance. She has reversed this situation in her memoir by giving a lot more space to female characters compared to the male ones. Four chapters out of a total of nine are named after women and the other five tell many tales and anecdotes from the lives of the women close to her. Each female character in Meatless Days reflects upon the national scenario through her own lens but none of them seem satisfied with the scheme of things in the social and political arena of Pakistan.

The frustration of these characters is evident throughout the memoir, but the prospects of finding any means of catharsis are absent. They feel suppressed and suffocated. Sara‘s mother always seemed lost, absorbed and always succumbing to her husband by saying ‘what an excellent thing’ in response to every query. Her grandmother found solace in food which became a way for her to communicate with her son and family. Suleri‘s sister, Ifat, was always biting her lips, expressing her inability to harmonize with the male dominant society of Pakistan. All the female characters in the memoir are dominated by the male members of the household. Mr. Suleri, Sara‘s father, manhandled everybody at his home and particularly subjugated the women because of his domineering and authoritative personality. Suleri questions the influence of religion and religious discourse in defining almost everything in the social and political milieu of Pakistan. She tries to highlight how it marginalized the women in the country. This misuse of Islam had a catachrestic influence on the identity of the women. The version of Islam imposed upon the Pakistani society by General Zia further strengthened the concept that women‘s role in the social structure of the country was ineffective. By categorizing them through the master word women, they are ironically deprived of their individual identity and existence.

In Meatless Days, the true recognition of the female characters is in their social and biological roles and not in their free and independent self. The master word women has no literal referent. It only casts an abusive effect on the lives and experiences of those whom it claims to define. While in the book Midnight children by Salman Rushdie, we see the narrator Saleem Sinai say“women have always been the ones to change my life” (220). This statement is particularly significant given the connection that the text posits between Saleem and the newly independent state of India. From the moment of his birth, Rushdie’s protagonist tells us in no uncertain terms that he and his country are one and the same: “I had been handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country”. In this context, it is difficult not to read his subsequent remarks as a commentary on the role of women with respect to the nation.

Unfortunately, neither the portrayal nor the function of women in Rushdie’s landmark book is quite as simple as Saleem would have us believe. With the post colonialism, women specially the educated, are caught between tradition and modernism, womanhood and motherhood, cultural laws and universal laws and gender issues, in a way trying to understand the socio-cultural problem of their society specially their own plight. Midnight’s Children is a postmodern metafictional autobiography of the protagonist, Saleem Sinai with a glimpse of chutnification and hybridity in which postcolonial women are portrayed outdoing and outpacing men from managing power to homemaking. The empowering female symbol still remains an icon to this day, reminding us of the incredible female efforts towards making of a nation. Salman Rushdie’s women in Midnight’s Children resort to unethical acts like indulging in infidelity. On the other hand, they want to be dominated as an object as a subordinate person. Pleasure is experienced by both men and women from within despite their social and psychological constraints. Rushdie’s men are indifferent to women’s individuality, sensitivity and feelings. Being in uncommitted relationships, they seek for pleasure outside and develop illicit relations. Men regard their women as commodities and mould them in the concept of traditional servility and make them stand meekly and suffer emotionally. Rigorous taboos of our society forbid women to have sexual liaisons by breaking the rigid laws of matrimony in India. However, Amina is an unfaithful wife as Lila Sabarmati. Parvati–– the witch traps Saleem to marry her, an infidel who gets her son from Saleem’s arch rival Shiva. Vanita and Parvati deliver bastard children.

Ahmed Sinai, when defeated by ill-luck and financial disaster looks towards his woman who leads the family to sound financial status, fights legal battles for him and overtakes responsibilities of her man in several instances to rebuild lost fortunes. Entangled in the turmoil of home, family and professional spheres the woman tries to establish her selfhood in the world of alienation. Despite this, they are exhibited as interdependent where individual identity is invariably affected by male counterparts. Strict traditions discriminate women who are regarded as men’s property, producers of children and are placed in second position on the social pyramid. The discussion surrounding women in Midnight’s Children is a testament to the complexity of his gender politics. The fabric of the novel is dependent upon this “othering” of women ‘champion of women. ’The narrator neither acknowledges the worth of women in his making nor completely denies their significance and contribution in the making of the nation. He rather averts punishing himself to the front to gain heightened momentum and women struggling with cultural shackles to carve out an identity of their own. Through these books we see that historically, men have been able to exercise power over women because they have been the originators, interpreters and perpetuators of knowledge; Word is power and whosoever possesses the power of naming has the ability to construct and constitute the world around him to his advantage, not only for himself but for others too.

Women have suffered because they have not been a part of the knowledge-making and disseminating processes. The first step, thus, in challenging male supremacy is to (re)possess this power of naming. By telling tales, women writers like Sidhwa accomplish this. Sidhwa redresses the imbalance of power by giving voice, through her novels, to those whose stories have never formed part of national histories and discourses: stories that have been silenced in the name of modesty, chastity, honour and shame. Sidhwa’s voice, then, can be considered a feminist subversive voice because it puts names to the anonymous faces of those who oppress and identifies those whose lives are lost in the name of religion, culture or tradition. Despite the occasional stylistic weaknesses, the early novels provided an important insight in the lives of Indian women around the time of India’s independence. Against a backdrop of rapid social changes the recurring theme was further developed by writers addressing a number of topical issues concerning women and their role in the society. They questioned the existing social norms and they pushed back the boundaries of the traditional role of women by giving their protagonists a sense of personal identity and a voice of their own.

The central element of defining the women’s role was skilfully interwoven with other relevant themes of the Indian reality, such as family relations, religious tensions, history, culture, politics and social discrimination, which gave credibility to women’s writing and created literary space for women’s voices. The writers empowered women, granted them identity, mobility and the freedom of expression which they had been denied before. For this reason, the late twentieth century women’s literature made a significant contribution to the change of attitudes towards the position of women in the Indian society and literature, and as such it holds an important place in the development of women’s writing. The issue of the status of Indian women remains controversial even at the turn of the twenty-first century and it continues to serve as a recurrent motif of the most recent women’s fiction, however, it is employed alongside a wide range of globally related themes introduced by writers in order to account for the phenomena of the modern society.