Maternal Fictions

Writing the Mother in Indian Women's Fiction

Indrani Karmakar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032102047
• eBook ISBN: 9781000578645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book constitutes a feminist literary analysis of motherhood as presented in selected Indian women's fictions across a diverse range of geographical, linguistic, class and caste contexts.

Situated at the crossroads of motherhood studies and literary studies, this book offers a rigorous examination of the prosody and politics of motherhood in this corpus. In its five thematically focused chapters, the book scrutinises in depth such key concerns as maternal ambivalence; maternal agency and caste; mother–daughter relationships; motherhood and diaspora; and non-biological motherhood. It attempts to understand the literary ramifications of these issues in order to identify the ways in which fiction writers reconceive of the notion of motherhood and maternal identities from and against multiple perspectives. Another pressing concern is whether these Indian women writers' visions furnish readers with any different understandings of motherhood as compared to dominant Western feminist discourses.

Maternal Fictions advances feminist literary criticism in the specific area of Indian women's writing and the overarching areas of motherhood and literature by acting as a launchpad into a complex constellation of ideas concerning motherhood. The fictional universe is at once ambivalent, diverse, contingent, grounded in a specific location, and yet well placed to converse with discourses emanating from other times and places.

1 Reluctant Mothers? Maternal Subjectivity and Ambivalence

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214175-2

In her book, Motherhood and Choice (2017), feminist social scientist Amrita Nandy coins the term maternormativity by which she means ‘a body of norms that assume, expect and oblige females to be mothers’ (60). This term, she avers, also encapsulates the ‘overwhelming maternalisation of female identity that is produced and sustained by […] the language-knowledge-power nexus’ (60). Nandy submits that this particular term can communicate the pervasiveness of the dominant motherhood ideology that entails layers of social codes and ‘interlocked affiliations’ with the larger socio-political system. For such a procrustean ideology, the narratives of maternal ambivalence are inherently threatening. Ambivalence, a term that describes opposing pulls, has long been a subject of interdisciplinary theories (Adams, Cassidy, and Hogan 15). Within Motherhood Studies, there is a growing emphasis on recognising and acknowledging the ‘maternal ambivalence’ not only to resist the dominant motherhood ideology but also to bring to light the structural inequalities and concerns that often cause such intense ambivalence. Andrea O’Reilly argues, ‘Social, structural, and cultural conditions of mothering […] affect experiences of maternal ambivalence and need to be considered along with the traditional psychological view of maternal ambivalence’ (52). O’Reilly here advocates a rounded approach towards the issue, considering the contextual factors alongside a psychologically oriented perspective.

In her 2018 novel All the Lives We Never Lived (ALWNL), Anuradha Roy presents a supposedly ‘deviant’ mother, who oscillates between her maternal love and the love for her art, so much so that she ends up choosing her art over her child. What follows soon is the mother’s more profound ambivalence and guilt. Significantly, this narrative of maternal ambivalence unfolds in the context of the soaring nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s in India, in which the ideology of motherhood and womanhood was reconfigured to fuel nationalist imagination, as the figure of the mother came to be the central image in the iconography of the nation. In this chapter, I examine the literary texts that limn such ruptures and fissures in motherhood – both in terms of the often-irreconcilable conflicts between maternity and women’s other identities, and the bodily experience of pregnancy. As such, this chapter explores the representations of varied experiences of maternal ambivalence, drawing on cultural, social and psychosocial analyses to probe what this ambivalence means for the textual mothers and the ideology of motherhood. The chapter concerns an examination of two novels: Anuradha Roy’s All the Lives We Never Lived and Anita Desai’s Where Shall We Go This Summer. The first novel poises us well to understand the second text, the setting changing from colonial to postcolonial time.

Structured through memory, Roy’s novel follows the genre of historical fiction incorporating in its fictional world such real-life characters as German artist Walter Spies, Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, British dancer and critic Beryl de Zoete and others. The narrative is mostly set in the early mid-twentieth century in the fictitious Himalayan town, poetically named Muntazir (an Urdu word, meaning ‘wait’). Within the novel’s narrative landscape is an India witnessing the nationalist movement and a world approaching yet another devastating world war. The novel’s first-person narrator is a middle-aged horticulturalist, Myshkin Rozario who tries to make sense of his unusual life, bruisingly marked by his mother’s abandonment of the family when he was seven years old. Although the novel uses the narrative focalisation of the son, Myshkin, the epistolary format of the significant portion of the novel allows the narrative space for a maternal subjectivity to emerge through the mother’s own words.

Subjectivity, a debated term that intersects with the notions of identity yet remains distinct from it, ‘harbours a dual sense of an individual speaking or acting, while also being subject to external forces’ (Baraitser 724). Within motherhood studies,

when maternal is described as a subjectivity, an attempt then is being made to signal the simultaneity of a psychic, embodied, and affective lived experience that arises out of a specifically structured relationship with a child, and a variety of heavily regulated norms and discourses that surround motherhood. (Baraitser 724)

It is my contention that the maternal subjectivities depicted in the novel evince an ambivalence that complicates the master discourse of motherhood. Furthermore, the novel locates such divided maternal consciousness within the broader context of nationalism and its reformulation of women’s identity, particularly maternal identity.

Indeed, both the novels selected for this chapter are instructive for revealing the connections between women, Hinduism (especially in Desai’s novel), the nationalist construction of womanhood and this construct’s supposed prerequisite, motherhood. The idealisation of motherhood and the concept of womanhood based on it can be traced to the writings of (late nineteenth-century) nationalist writers such as Swami Vivekananda and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who ‘linked [the] traditional image of sacred motherhood to the modern concept of the motherland, hoping thereby to give a new sanctity to the concept of nation in an essentially apolitical society’ (Nandy 311).

The Indian nationalist movement has had a complicated and problematic relationship with the ‘woman question’. Nationalist discourse, which was formed to oppose the colonialist power, constructed an image of woman which moved to the centre of anti-colonial political strategy, but ultimately remained restrictive for women’s emancipation (Chatterjee 622–32). At the heart of anti-colonial rhetoric, there existed a dichotomy of the ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ represented by India’s own identity and colonial power. In other words, in the anti-colonial narrative, the Indian nation’s identity was conceived in terms of its long tradition of spirituality, which, the narrative claimed, was superior to the materialistic colonial power; this identity based on religious and spiritual traditions was to be preserved by all means. Within this ideological framework, woman was positioned as the symbol of the country’s true self – the inner domain which should be preserved and saved from outer influences (624). Partha Chatterjee analyses the nationalist construct of women and how it creates a gendered division of space:

Applying the inner/outer distinction to the matter of concrete day-to-day living separates the social space into ghar and bahir, the home and the world. The world is the external, the domain of the material; the home represents one’s inner spiritual self, one’s true identity. The world is a treacherous terrain of the pursuit of material interests […]. It is also typically the domain of the male. The home in its essence must remain unaffected by the profane activities of the material world – and woman is its representation. (624)

Thus, the polarised ideas of the spiritual and material corresponded with the notions surrounding home and the world, the spaces assigned to females and males, respectively.¹ In the preservation of the spiritual self of India, where ‘woman’ became the symbol of the nation, anti-colonial discourse imbued the traditional or mythological images of woman and the mother goddess with qualities of self-sacrifice and benevolence (Bagchi Interrogating 51–73). Rabindranath Tagore’s 1916 novel Ghare Baire (translated as The Home and the World) was groundbreaking for explicitly addressing the issue of these spheres as the domains of two contending forces. In this novel, Tagore uses the character Bimala and her journey from the private to the public sphere as ‘pulse points of an increasingly violent Hindu nationalism that engenders itself in the image of the Mother Goddess as Shakti (strength)’ (Ray 91).

Interestingly, nationalist discourse’s centrifugal and centripetal forces simultaneously pulled women in different directions that proved to be both constraining and enabling for them. The nationalist movement sought not to physically confine women in the domestic area but encouraged their political mobilisation in the anti-colonial struggle; however, this apparent agency was to be operated within a normative patriarchal framework (Katrak 397). In such a patriarchal setting, women’s sexuality was not supposed to transgress the traditional institutional boundaries of marriage and motherhood, for this would threaten the division of the private and public locations assigned to women and men. The construct of the ‘Indian woman’ – a figure endowed with ‘cultural refinement’ but construed as nonthreatening and compliant – ‘has generalised itself among the new middle class, admittedly a widening class and large enough in absolute numbers to be self-producing, but is irrelevant to the large mass of subordinate class’ (Chatterjee 632).

Roy’s textual mother Gayatri belongs to this generation that experienced the searing nationalism and its resultant re-configuration of womanhood and motherhood. Gayatri’s husband Nek Chand is a patriot who extols Gandhian values and is actively involved in nationalist movement led by Gandhi. This association with Gandhi is important in the narrative to contextualise the maternal concern of the text. As such, while discussing nationalist discourse surrounding womanhood, the Gandhian view must be explored, as Gandhi powerfully invoked the supposedly female strength of nonviolent resistance and evolved political strategies to mobilise women for the nationalist agenda (Katrak 397). The idea of womanhood, ‘[N]aritva (womamhood), so repeatedly stressed by Gandhi […] included some traditional meanings of womanhood in India, such as the belief in a closer [...] conjunction between power, activism and femininity’ (Nandy Intimate 53; emphasis in original). In Gandhi’s view, passive resistance is a gendered concept as passivity is apparently connected to women, owing to their alleged passive and patient endurance of oppression (Jayawardena 97). Gandhi’s political strategy of passive resistance and non-violence came from women who were taken to symbolise nurturance and endurance. This was especially true of the image of the benevolent mother, which provided him with a model, as Ketu H Katrak argues: ‘Gandhi’s uses of female sexuality were channelled through his evocation of women’s obedience and nurturance as mother’ (Katrak 397). He harnessed the myths of Sita and Savitri creatively for their chastity, purity, patience and suffering.² Gandhi urged women to take part actively in the nationalist movement. However, as Katrak argues, Gandhi’s over-reliance on the Hindu mythological female figures to articulate specific modes of femininity was confined to traditional or legitimate marriage and motherhood (396). Although Gandhi advocated women coming out of the domestic front in order to serve the nation, he did not address the unequal power relations between males and females inside the domestic space.

These constructions of womanhood and motherhood find echoes in the text through the character of Nek Chand. For him, his wife’s passion for art is merely a hobby, which he thinks, women should cultivate, given their confined condition within the domestic realm. The patronising overtones in his seemingly progressive and liberal views are sufficiently audible. However, the novel does not present him as a villainous tyrant figure, but rather a man of his time, with lofty aspirations for the country and the country ‘men’. During a heated argument between the couple, Nek Chand chastises Gayatri’s association with Walter Spies and other artists, dubbing her artistic activities as selfishness while the nation requires the utmost attention and devotion. Gayatri lashes out, ‘what good will the nation’s freedom do for me? Tell me that! Will it make me free?’ (67). This piercing question powerfully captures the ‘woman question’ in the nationalist movement which accorded women both an idealised and secondary position. Moreover, this question is constitutive of the maternal problem suggested in the novel, for motherhood poses a dilemma for the protagonist. Her maternal duties and artistic freedom become mutually exclusive, the conflict manifesting itself in the form of ambivalence and guilt.

The overwhelming weight of motherhood and Gayatri’s intense and often bewildered response to this is registered early in the novel. This is demonstrated through the incident in which little Myshkin overhears a heated confrontation between his parents, in which his mother angrily responds to his father’s insistence on her maternal duties over and above everything: ‘Myshkin Myshkin … as though nothing else matters. As though every part of the world stopped after Myshkin came into it’ (74). Yet, after Gayatri leaves home, almost all her letters to her friend, Liz, end with her longing for Myshkin, often expressed in physical terms: ‘I have not heard from him for so very long. I long to hold him and smell his baby smell—milk, soap, powder—even though that went ages ago’ (234). This evokes the physical connection between the mother and the child, the mother’s yearning for the earlier time hinting towards a maternal temporality undistorted by the institution of motherhood.

Such a yearning, as we see, transforms into a pang of searing guilt as is evident in the following quotation:

What must he be doing at this exact time of day? I should write to him, but I can’t bear to. Not yet. Once I am calmer. He must not know ... will I ever be calmer? I lay with my back to WS & B, wept till my heart broke. Two nights running I had a horrible dream, such a fearful dream. It kept coming back to me even when I woke, of a fetus that was like Myshkin as a baby. Bloodied and dead, swollen eyes shut. Oh Lis. I couldn’t remember anything else about the dream, but I woke feeling terribly sick.... What’s more evil than a woman who does not love her child? (176–77)

Steeped in guilt, Gayatri’s words reflect her perturbed mind, manifesting itself in a violent and visceral sense. The image of the bloody fetus denotes a sense of violent severance – the act of feticide. It is as if by leaving her child behind, the mother has committed the crime of filicide, a sheer ‘evil’ act.

To better understand the contradictory pulls of the protagonist’s maternal consciousness and what this implies, I reach for another excerpt from Gayatri’s letter in which she confides in her friend about her conflicting feelings about motherhood:

No, I was not cut out to be a mother— strange that there are so many opposing pulls and tugs in us—it is not as though I don’t miss Myshkin achingly, fiercely. I do. But it is not a constant missing. I am glad to have time to work. There I’ve said it! I can confess it to nobody but you. At times when he was tiny and ailing, I forgot his medicines & his meal was late because I was daydreaming or doing who knew what. Then I’d spend a week eaten up with guilt, spoiling him till he was thoroughly confused. (211)

A mother’s quiet confession, these lines stand in sharp contrast to the dominant discourse of motherhood that demands complete surrender and dedication. For the first time, the protagonist explicitly speaks out the contradictions besetting her maternal identity. What follows the diction of opposing forces in the first two lines is the language of guilt, a pervasive emotion overpowering her mind and body. Writing about maternal subjectivity, Lisa Baraitser points out that the ‘paradox’ about motherhood is that it is conceived in terms of care and relationality – one’s relationship and responsibilities to a dependent child whose needs can be demanding, unconditional and even ‘ruthless’. In the novel, the demand of motherhood is a hindrance to Gayatri’s artistic aspirations, a conflict that is deeply entrenched in the socio-cultural setting. The situatedness of maternal ambivalence is therefore crucial here, for ‘affects, intentions, and behaviour are socially and culturally responsive’ (Adams, Cassidy, and Hogan 22).

In this respect, the novel underlines this situatedness of maternal ambivalence in subtle ways. We see Gayatri trying to save and raise money to bring Myshkin to Bali where she is based. Spies humorously names this effort ‘The Bring Home Myshkin Fund’. Home here is particularly resonant in this supposedly unserious naming of the mother’s endeavour. Put in the particular social and national context, the boundaries between the home and the world has already been crossed by Gayatri, in both physical and emotional sense. She has left her home, rejecting the most defining aspect the home – her motherhood. However, the effort to bring the child ‘home’ – to his mother – is suggestive of a parallel narrative of home and the maternal, an impossible longing at that particular moment of history. This impossibility is underscored in the following lines of Gayatri’s letter to Liz, in which she speaks of her restlessness: ‘every now and then I think I must stand up and say my thank-yous and go back home. But where is home? My home is where Myshkin is and you are. Does that mean I will never be at home again?’ (193). Home is here imbued with an array of contradictory meanings. The nationalist construct of home remains intact there in its very materiality; yet, it is problematised by the mother’s question of the true meaning of home. Such a blurring and collapsing of boundaries stems from the consciousness of an ambivalent and reluctantly rebellious mother who remains perennially guilt-ridden.

That the narrative perspective is of the son in a way adds a layer of nuance to its depiction of motherhood, especially in the light of its larger background of nationalism. At the core of the nationalist imagination is the idea of the mother imprisoned by foreign power from which the sons would make her free. Ironically, the textual mother negotiates the sense of being imprisoned in an intensely personal way, one that oscillates between her maternal identity and artistic freedom. Over the course of the novel, the son gradually moves to an understanding of his mother’s conflicts and passion, not quite fully, but nonetheless with a clearer vision of empathy. This attempted and partial reconciliation is in tune with the ambivalence woven in this maternal fiction.

Anita Desai’s Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975)

While Roy’s novel is set in the tumultuous time of the peak of the Indian nationalist movement, Desai’s is in post-independent India. As such, the narrative takes place in the monsoon season of 1967 (with a retrospective section going back t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction: Of Motherhood, Metaphor and Materiality
• 1 Reluctant Mothers?: Maternal Subjectivity and Ambivalence
• 2 Cast(e)ing Motherhood: Caste, Marginality and Maternal Agency
• 3 Mothering Daughters: The Vicissitudes of Mother–Daughter Relationships
• 4 Motherhood and Diaspora: Remembering and Remaking Home
• 5 Maternal Non-mothers: Motherhood beyond Biology
• 6 Coda: Moving the Maternal: Towards Solidarity
• Index