SHACKLED TO IMPOTENT FREEDOM -the Fate of Women in Jaishree Misra’s Novels

Presented by RADHIKA MENON at a UGC sponsored seminar on the Empowerment of Women in Indian English Fiction, conducted at SN College, Kollam

The concept of women’s rights came into being when some individuals began to experience a chronic imbalance in gender relations and to realize that the unequal power-sharing between men and women is not actually an innate fact of life or an incontrovertible given but rather a viciously created situation, an evil construct. This dawning of awareness gradually led to an active opposition to the perceived injustice. At times – especially in the early stages – the resistance was spontaneous and radical. But in due course of time, the victims of discrimination were able to carefully formulate a definite methodology for the restoration of equal rights.

Such an intellectual handling of the issue led to great benefits. It helped women shed their narrow focus and take on a more broad-based, pro-life vision of things. There also came a realization that the concept of women’s rights cannot be a water-tight compartment because it is organically linked to children’s rights. The two are inextricably interlinked. So women have seen greater wisdom in evolving strategies that will work on a long-term basis – strategies that will not only help them lead more meaningful lives but assist the newer generations enjoy what is rightfully their heritage – a safe planet where there is no threat of nuclear holocaust and where natural resources are seen as a common legacy, not the property of a few private individuals or MNCs.

When we think and talk about women’s rights or any other rights, we cannot exclude certain terms and concepts that are specifically associated with them. In the field of literature we cannot but take into consideration the dichotomous archetypal stereotypes that have worked against women – the angel or Madonna versus the virago or monster – or the dichotomous stereotypes that have categorized men as constituting the centre and women merely forming the margins of an essentially patriarchal social structure. We cannot ignore the clichéd binaries that have characterized the depiction of the male and the female as the Self and the Other; as the active and the passive entities, as the reasonable and the passionate beings and so on. These perspectives and terminologies also constitute a convenient theoretical framework for critics when they set out to evaluate the worth of a writer or to examine the intensity of feminist commitment in that writer’s canon.

I proceed along the same lines in order to explore the complexity of the works of one prominent contemporary writer – Jaishree Misra – and analyze the extent to which she handles the issue of “empowering the marginalized” – the subject of the day’s seminar. Misra’s literary career took off with the hugely popular novel Ancient Promises that was published in 2000. Since then, she has written three more novels – Accidents Like Love and Marriage (2001), Afterwards (2004) and Rani (2007) and a collection of poems The Little Book of Romance - a creditable output considering the short span of eight actively creative years.

Of the four novels, I shall exclude Accidents Like Love and Marriage because its tone and texture does not match that of the other three. My reason for choosing Misra is simple – firstly, her works are woman-centric; yet her characters do not conform to the staid stereotypes we are probably used to expecting from women-writers. Secondly and more importantly, Misra, in my view, problematizes the concept of women’s empowerment. Where does a woman’s power lie? Is it only in defying oppressive, male chauvinistic mores of the society and deciding the course of her life? Or does it mean something more? Does empowerment provide a panacea for all her troubles? These are the questions which I think Jaishree Misra fields, wittingly or otherwise, in her works and in doing so she seems to have cut her own furrow. In fact, in one of her countless interviews, she is reported to have said "I've tried to break out of the mould that people try and push you into." My attempt is to find out how exactly she has tried to break out of the mould people have pushed her into.

When we look at these three novels, we realize that Misra does not present the typical plot of a weak, silent, suffering, voiceless woman who is trapped in an oppressive, male dominated atmosphere, gathers courage one fine day, breaks free of all restraints and walks bravely into a life of intellectual, emotional and financial independence. Actually, her heroines – Janaki in Ancient Promises, Maya in Afterwards and Manikarnika in Rani (who becomes Queen Lakshmibai of Jhansi) – enjoy a lot of privileges. They are not weak, silent, suffering, voiceless women. All of them are born into families that value and love the girl child, believe in educating her and accept her right to articulate her thoughts and feelings. There is not even a hint of patriarchal oppression as the father figures play a significant role in grooming the girl. The crisis comes only when the family succumbs to the time-honoured Indian practice of marrying her off at a relatively young age. But here again, the intentions are unquestionably noble; the family take all precautions to ensure that the match works out well for her – either in terms of providing companionship or greater prospects. It is in the depiction of marriage-related crises and the heroine’s overcoming of them that Jaishree Misra shows her uniqueness.

In Ancient Promises Janaki, a Keralite brought up in Delhi, falls in love with a north Indian boy Arjun Mehta, when she is a wee wisp of a girl, a teenager. The parents are aghast at their daughter’s unorthodox behaviour and object to the relationship. The lovers are prized apart – Arjun goes to England to pursue higher studies and Janaki is brought to Alleppey. Several marriage proposals are discussed and finally a match with the Maraar family is fixed. Janaki is terribly upset at the turn of events but she is not bulldozed into a marriage to Suresh. She thinks over her situation:

The fact of Arjun’s departure was just starting to sink in as something real and permanent. He’d gone, not for a month or a year but probably for ever. Ma was right, it was crazy to expect we’d ever share a future together. We’d always occupied different worlds, now it could have been separate universes. (62)
And when she writes a letter to Arjun to inform him of her impending wedding, her justifications display a combination of rational thinking and filial loyalty:
. . . I’m tired of fighting off my family, they’ve proven their love for me in the eighteen years it’s taken to bring me up. And I just can’t believe they’d push me into something that would be wrong for me. I know you think of it as a stupidly blind kind of trust, but there it is. (63)

Besides, she is given all assurances that she can pursue her studies. There is no compulsion either from her husband or her rather strong-willed mother-in-law to start a family. But for all these advantages, life does not move smoothly for her. Janaki is not whole-heartedly accepted into the Maraar family. The reasons are difficult to pinpoint, the harassment is hardly overt or brutal. And it is in a bid to gain acceptance that Janaki herself decides to put her studies in the back burner and start a family:
Perhaps, just perhaps, having a child would solve my problems more easily than a BA and a job. That’s what I’d do. I’d have a child! She, as their grandchild, would be loved. Especially if she turned out to be the much-longed-for first grandson. And, as his mother, I’d receive a sort of instant double-promotion, so to speak. Be elevated to the position of Good Mother and Good Daughter-in-Law. And spin out the rest of my days basking in a kind of reflected glory and blissful motherhood. (113)

But things do not go according to plan. Her child, a daughter Riya is detected with learning disability and this defective baby gives the Maraar family a strong reason to be dismissive of the mother-daughter duo. Interestingly, it is at this point that Janaki casts off her deferential attitude and becomes openly rebellious.
She [Riya] was not going to provide me with a passport to their love and affection, she did not in fact have one herself. My struggle was over. I grabbed at the realization with a weary but dizzy, almost overwhelming sense of liberation. I was free. I neither had to struggle for their approval any more, nor put Riya through the same hopeless loop. I wasn’t sure why I had so easily given up my own right to be loved, allowing it to fade into oblivion somewhere long ago. But a child like Riya, left unloved, would simply wither and perish. Couldn’t they see that her kind of innocence could only understand love, not the lack of it? My own rights had not seemed worth fighting for, but Riya needed me to be her voice and a battle on her behalf would be far more satisfying. I was soon going to become the thorn in the Maraar side. (132-133)

So here we have a woman character who is bothered not about her own survival per se but in garnering for her intellectually challenged daughter her due rights. Janaki’s empowerment lies not in getting herself heard and respected but rather in rescuing her child from a debilitating atmosphere.
The emergence of Janaki the responsible and protective mother may appear stereotypical but Jaishree Misra brings in a twist in the plot. Janaki’s escape route lies in getting herself educated, securing a BA and an MA degree before she can go abroad on scholarship/sponsorship where she herself can take a course in Special Education and enroll her daughter in a Special School. Education holds the key to true empowerment and it has to be admitted that Janaki manages to complete her under-graduate and post-graduate studies while living in the Maraar household. Besides, Suresh’s family does not stand in her way of going West (America or England) with her daughter. Subversion comes with Janaki accidentally meeting her old lover Arjun and accepting his suggestion that she join him in England to pursue her goals. Her decision to seek divorce from Suresh and fight for the custodianship of Riya predictably create a huge scandal and through this twist in the tale, Jaishree Misra saves the novel from becoming a stereotypical anti-male narrative.

Ancient Promises ends in hope for both Janaki and Riya but when we come to the next novel, the colour and the mood get dark. Afterwards is in many ways at once a weaker version of Ancient Promises and an extension of it because it captures the story of a wife and mother Maya Warrier after she leaves her husband and starts a new life with her daughter Anjali in London with her neighbour-turned-friend-turned-rescuer-turned lover Rahul Tiwari. On the surface, the story of Maya’s courage, iconoclasm and heterodoxy reads like a narrative of empowerment. Maya succeeds in putting her unhappy past behind her, secures an emotionally fulfilling life for herself and finds a satisfying engagement as a volunteer with a Social Services agency:
She was so good at what she did, as though she had found her calling in life, helping vulnerable women and children. Even though it was only voluntary work. She didn’t have permission to work here because we had not been able to get married without her producing a divorce certificate. (82)

But the cheer that this freedom brings is deceptive because the novel shows how Maya’s single act of walking out on her husband has a domino effect. Misfortunes pile up on her one after another relentless until that freedom turns ashes in the mouth. The only silver lining in the cloud is that Maya is not alive to see and suffer most of the tragedies. But the narrative leaves no doubt that all the unfortunate events that followed her elopement are triggered by her crucial deed. Her parents are quite predictably distraught, her paternal grandmother, too old and frail to tolerate the onslaught of wagging tongues in her native village, dies of sorrow, her father too succumbs to a sense of shame and heart-burn, her mother has to seek refuge in a temple. What is even more tragic is that Rahul (Maya’s lover) is not permitted by British laws (the country has a stringent Children’s Act) to remain Anjali’s custodian. Without a legally sanctioned divorce, Maya could not marry Rahul and as they had never anticipated this eventuality of Maya’s death, they had never approached the British courts for officially securing parental responsibility for Rahul. Now Anjali has the status only of an illegal immigrant and has to be returned to her biological father, Govind Warrier in India. Thus in one stroke, the emotionally secure and intellectually satisfying empire Maya had sought to establish collapses like the proverbial pack of cards.

Here again, Misra is very careful in designing her plot. For one man (Govind Warrier) who represents the hateful patriarchal values of the society and who stands in the way of Maya’s self-fulfilment, there is another (Rahul Tiwari) whose liberal mind defies that stereotype. Thus like Ancient Promises, the woman’s movement towards a better plane of existence or empowerment is not a lonely affair. She has to face strong opposition no doubt but she is assisted by a man who pitches in, not out of any sense of sympathy or chivalry, but out of his own goodness of heart and an appreciation of her worth. The tragedy is that despite these compensations, life denies her complete happiness.

Rani is by far the most complex and the bleakest of Jaishree Misra’s novels. In this novel, Misra tries to rescue her protagonist Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi from two stereotypical moulds she has been cast into – one, the popular, Indian image of a fearless warrior who defied all patriarchal norms for a noble cause – the freedom of her country; and the other, the lesser known British historical profile of her as a heartless mutineer who engineered a brutal massacre of British women and children in Jhansi fort. Both images are diametrically opposed to each other. Yet they have one thing in common. They focus on the martial aspect of her personality. Misra takes a different approach. She states in her Author’s Note that her aim is to “find the woman behind the warrior” (vii).

So the novel traces the growth of a six year old, intelligent girl Manikarnika into a responsible Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi till her death when she is in her late 20s.
The most interesting thing about this imaginative recreation of Lakshmibai’s portraiture is the unignorable presence of male mentors, guides, assistants and well wishers all through her life and her ability to be her own person. While a child she is greatly influenced by the old Peshwa of Varanasi, her own father Moropant, who is the Peshwa’s minister. The two men play a very active role in grooming this motherless girl and give her the earliest and most crucial training in administration and make her aware of the dangerous maze of power politics. When she is barely fourteen, she is married off to a 40-year-old king of Jhansi, Gangadhar Rao. The purpose of the marriage is openly to beget a male heir to the throne. So for all intents and purposes, the young rani is recognized only for her biological usefulness. But enjoying a warm friendly relationship with her husband, the trust of the minister of Jhansi and the respect of the British representative Major Robert Ellis, her personality gets fully rounded. She is valued as a sovereign who will work for the welfare and safety of her subjects.

This does not mean that she does all that is expected of her without raising a note of dissent. Even while loving and respecting her husband, she is clear-sighted enough to suspect that his numerous physical illnesses may in fact be a manifestation of his lack of interest in administrative matters and the result of his greater interest in arts. Again, it is she who seeing her husband’s lack of interest in conjugal responsibilities takes the initiative, draws him into an intimate relationship and finally has a child. When the baby dies, she is distraught but after some time has enough sense to think of adopting a child and thus safeguarding the future of the kingdom. She does not agree with Gangadhar Rao’s soft attitude towards the aggressive and cruelly exploitative British. But even when she hold the reins of the government later on, she does not go against her husband’s wishes – not out of wifely devotion alone, but also out of a commonsensical and rational realization that Jhansi is not rich enough to trigger a rebellion against the British, defeat them in a war, oust them out of Jhansi and declare complete independence – without compromising the safety of her subjects. Thus throughout the novel, the focus is on Jhansi rani who is extremely solicitous about the welfare of the people under her care. Even when Jhansi is annexed by the British, even when all the neighbouring princely states begin to husband their resources to fight the British, she remains unmoved. Her justification:

Whatever was happening in other parts of the country, she was determined to see that none of it would touch the peace of Jhansi. The safety of her family and her people mattered more than anything else and she would let nothing jeopardize it. Not even the possibility being gradually unveiled that in distant mutinies may lie the chance of Jhansi’s rule to be returned to her, the achingly tempting prospect that its crown may yet grace her son’s head. (299)

Her decision to give refuge to a group of British women and children in the Jhansi fort also comes out of this selfsame humanitarian softness in her. These British citizens are killed brutally by a group of freedom fighters but Lakshmibai is blamed for engineering the massacre. She tries to clear her image with the British. But once it dawns on her that her words fall on deaf ears, she decides to take up arms. The rest is history. She dies a martyr’s death. She dies a free woman but she loses everything she holds precious – the sovereignty of Jhansi, the lives of her father and her young son and the peaceful lives of her loving subjects.

Jaishree Misra’s efforts at portraying the woman in Lakshmibai are indeed successful and through the figure of this redoubtable queen, Misra presents her image of the empowered woman. Lakshmibai is almost like Janaki of Ancient Promises and Maya of Afterwards in that she has a will of her own and craves for a space of her own. She is influenced by powerful men in her life but that does not cloud her thinking. Power to her, as to Janaki and Maya, is a tool that helps improve life for others than for herself and gives her freedom to live life on her own terms. Misra’s concept of the empowered woman is that of a being who does not see man as her enemy even while being trapped in a patriarchal set-up. She finds a way to overcome her problems and arrive at a solution. In the process, she is not averse to seeking and using the assistance of trusted men within her inner circle.

Let me conclude by alluding to the central paradox in Jaishree Misra’s woman protagonists – the paradox lies in the mismatch between their character and their fate. Misra’s women work hard for their freedom and earn it. This shows their strength of character, their courage and integrity. But fate it appears is not favourably disposed to them. The freedom they win is never absolute because it does not have the power to guarantee them choicest wish which is the safety of the lives they wish to protect. Hence the impotence of their freedom.

RADHIKA MENON

Presented at a UGC sponsored seminar on the Empowerment of Women in Indian English Fiction, conducted at SN College, Kollam