Abstract
This article examines the analogies and contrasts in the women writers’ perception of Indian woman identity, notably as a process of construction and deconstruction through transgression, displacement and hybridity — an ideal to be negotiated in the space between at least two different cultures either at home or in a different geographical setting. The novels of Roy’s The God of Small Things, Mukherjee’s Jasmine, and Syal’s Anita and Me, based respectively in India, the U.S.A. and England, give a new vision of Indian women, pleasing to Western mind and feelings and yet reflecting their Indianness. Diaspora helps Indian woman to come to terms with her self, a process which could not be effected within the Indian socio-cultural setting.
Transgression and Woman Identity
In The God of Small Things, Jasmine and Anita and Me, transgression allows each heroine to assume beyond the adequate performance of the Indian expected feminine roles. While in Roy’s novel the Indian woman who dares to cross the boundaries of caste faces the most hideous form of ostracisation, in Mukherjee’s Jasmine her transcendence of cultural boundaries in the U.S.A. enables her construction into a free-thinking and acting woman. In Syal’s Anita and Me, the heroine’s transgression seems sweeter, as she is younger and born in England, with a diasporic Indian family setting that is far more liberal and Westernized.
Hybridity and Cultural Exchange
In each novel, the concept of hybridity is revealed as a blending of two cultures in the interest of individual progressive thinking and social justice. Conservative Hindu spreading that sets up monolithic cultures has disturbing implications for Indian women who have a stake in challenging patriarchal and traditional Indian behaviour and thinking. Each woman protagonist leads a life in complete conflict with traditional values.
The Anglo-Indian Woman
No Indian woman writer refers to the Anglo-Indian woman in the novels concerned. The Anglo-Indian woman has an in-between space in the post-colonial debate which allows for much diversity and flexibility in identity. Anglo-Indian women resist complete identification with both the Indian and the British and claim their own space and subjectivity.
Displacement and Diaspora
While Arundhati Roy deals with the mental aspect of displacement, Mukherjee and Syal focus on its physical and geographical aspect. The heroines of each novel are rooted in the new post-independent India; their aspirations and attitudes translate the confusion and search for self-identity. With one foot in India and the other in the West, the women characters share the common preoccupation of the globalisation of the Indians as they aspire for Western-type freedom.
Post-Colonial Women’s Writing
Post-colonial Indian women novelists, as is the case with Roy, Mukherjee and Syal, emerged as a process that gathered space as political independence was acquired and cultural decolonisation intensified. The construction and deconstruction of hybrid diasporic women identity related to gender and caste are among the social concerns shaping the work of these women writers.
Works Cited
- Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990.
- Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
- Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. New York: Grove Press, 1989.
- Rosaldo, R. Culture and Truth: the Remaking of Social Analysis. London: Routledge, 1993.
- Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New Delhi: IndiaInk, 1997.
- Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Vintage, 1978.
- Syal, Meera. Anita and Me. London: Flamingo, 1996.
- Visweswaran, Gauri. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.