Abstract
Kapur’s preoccupation with the female revolt against deep-rooted family values and the institution of marriage is followed through to her novels. It is an interesting case study of lesbian narrative strategies in Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman, female gender and sexual identity is inextricable from national identity. The novel exposes the domestic relationship. Astha’s lesbian relationship with Pipee is, instead, a derivative expression of Astha’s feminist awakening within a patriarchal structure. The novel preserves heteronormativity in the end. Astha in her restlessness turns into a lesbian and becomes irresponsible with everything including her children and her husband, and Peepalika a lesbian widow. She constantly struggles for recognition and a social cause. Astha married life offers her sumptuous smoothening through conjugal bliss but slowly she feels the pangs of alienation and dissatisfaction. She is brought up in a traditional homely environment of a typical middle class family. Her husband is busy with the business and Astha feels loneliness at home. She joins the profession of teaching. Hemant has little time to share Astha’s feelings and her daily routine matters. Astha develops affair with a woman Pipeelika which offers her much comfort. She is trapped in an inescapable situation.
Keywords: lesbian, patriarchal, dispassionate, married, seduction
A Married Woman (2002) is the story of Astha an educated, upper middle class, working, Delhi woman. Astha longs for a purpose in her life, other than being a wife and mother against a vividly realized backdrop of Indian politics. In quest of her identity, she forges many relationships with different persons.
Soon after marriage, Astha gets disillusioned about human nature. She tried to make her husband understand that she was an individual, she must get her due respect, and she could never tolerate being a doormat. The conflict grows in Astha. She suffers from recurring migraines and then a growing distance from her husband. Astha has to fulfill the demands of growing children, pressure at home, and silent disapproval of in-laws and the attitude of her an unresponsive husband who does not understands her perspectives. Astha finds an escape in her writings and her sketching. Then she started writing poetry but the husband did not appreciate the poems.
In this struggle for individuality, Kapur portrays Astha as an individual who engages in constant negotiations of her religious identity and personal desires between the private and public spheres. Since Astha’s contact with a Muslim activist, Aijaz, she desires to reconstruct her religious identity. Aijaz’s tragic death is an outcome of this violence: in its wake, Astha is recruited as a sympathizer and artist in the anticommunalism activist group that is formed to commemorate Aijaz. It is on one of the trips to Ayodhya with this group that she meets Pipeelika Trivedi-Khan, Aijaz’s widow who is a sociologist and works for a Delhi NGO.
Astha wants to break her dependence on others and proceed on the path of full human status that poses a threat to Hemant and his male superiority. She finds herself trapped between the pressure of modern developing society and shackles of ancient biases. She sets out on her quest for a more meaningful life in her lesbian relationship. She canonizes and comments on her feminine sensibility, by raising the social issues related to women.
Lesbians are often seen as anomalies that do not fit into the heterosexual family paradigm. Kapur traces the actual process by which woman is ‘womanized’ by locating and foregrounding the overt and covert means of women’s bondage and conscription by ideologies, stereotypes and limited choices. Kapur presents the reality of married life in a traditional society where a woman has to efface her personality and surrender one’s very existence.
In the end, Astha reaches nowhere. Ultimately, she has to come back to her family and readjust herself in ancient traditions. Kapur shows that in Indian patriarchal society where tradition is so strong a woman fails to get out of such bondage and carve a separate identity of her own. Thus, the two women Astha and Pipeelika ultimately compromise and find their own ways, knowing that they cannot have a future together.
Quest for identity is largely a social phenomenon in India, a phenomenon influenced by various changing forces of reality, freedom movement, education, social reforms, increasing contacts with the west, urban growth etc. A new era of emancipation for the Indian women, an era of increased opportunities and a more dynamic participation in the social and intellectual life of the country ushered in by the great social reorientations, which came at the turn of the century. Feminism emerged as a worldwide movement to secure women’s rights on the one hand and love, respect, sympathy and understanding from males on the other. It focused on women’s struggle for recognition and survival and made them realize that the time has come when they should stop suffering silently in helplessness.
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