The Portrayal of Self-Realization and Liberation in Gita Hariharan’sThe Thousand Faces of Night

The Portrayal of Self-Realization and Liberation in Gita Hariharan’sThe Thousand Faces of Night

P.Boomiraja,Ph.D Scholar, PG Dept. & Research Centre in English, Alagappa Govt. Arts College, Karaikudi-3

A.Sarath Kumar, M.Phil Scholar, Dept. of English and Foreign Languages, Alagappa University, Karaikudi-3

Women’s writings of last decade were in social, political, cultural, economic and religious matters all have in for a critical re-vision. In this paper, re-vision no longer remained a simple looking back but has evolved into a revisionist remaking of the past and thereby a revisionist myth-making programme, old stories are told in different ways from gyno-centric perspectives. Feminist writers like Angela Carer, Fay Weldon, Mahashweta Devi, SunitaNamjoshi have rewritten and retold myths. They women such as Circe, Medusa, siren and they have revised and reinterpreted the older icons demolishing the cultural stereotypes popularized by patriarchal discourse.

Traditional Hindu myths and tales also have depicted women to be meek, submissive, servile, feminine and inferior to men. Epics like Mahabharata and Ramayana have set standards directly or indirectly by which our culture has been operating all along. These Hindu myths and folklores which speak about women’s role and models have a greater impact upon female psyche and women have been trained to internalize their cultural image through these myths. These myths are used as tools by patriarchal society in a subtle manner to enslave women and make them play male-scripted subordinate roles.The definition for revisionist myth-making can be framed as when,“the figure or tale (is) appropriated for altered ends, (it is like) old vessel filled with new wine, initially satisfying the this of the individual poet but ultimately making cultural change possible”(Ostriker 318) such revisionist myth making has been one of the strategies for emancipation employed in the cause of women’s liberation.

            The post- colonial woman novelist, GithaHariharan, mainly interested in the portrayal of women characters, explores in her first award winning novel The ThousandFaces of Night – the marriages, old traditional values, story and myth, passion and loneliness in the lives of Indian women. Marriage becomes an instrument of female exploitation and subjugation leading to trivialities, lack of communication, loneliness, hollowness andincapability. The novel deals with what it means to be a woman in modern India and it raises question of female space.

The novel presents stories of three women Sita, Devi, and Mayamma who engange in a lonely but difficult battle against the restrictive rules of patriarchy. All of them, each in her own way have been both a victim and survivor in their lives scarred by suffering, sacrifice, injustice and disappointment meted out by the patriarchal society. Yet in the end, they emerge undefeated and strong by using their own survival strategies. Their survival strategies lie in deconstructing the age-old Hindu myths and stories, rewriting them and subverting the male discourse. Hence, GithaHariharan’sThe Thousand Faces of Night can also be read as part of the revisionist myth-making programme one finds in women’s texts. Simone de Beauvoir writes –“It has been said that marriage diminishes man, which is often true, but almost always it the inner life of women spanning three generations- Devi, the daughter, Sita the mother and Mayamma the grandmother, each has her own life story to tell.

            The novel The Thousand Faces of Nightshows with exceptional fictional skill, the subtle ways in which women are bludgeoned to play male-scripted subordinate roles. The novel explores how middle class Hindu society prescribes gender relations and male script roles by means of myths that women are told and how women rework them in their lives and also in the lives of others. The paternalistic laws of Manu, the ancient Hindu sage run like a thread throughout the text. These laws are articulated by Devi the protagonist’s father-in-law. This male discourse is subverted by female discourse of Devi’s grandmother. If Manu speaks of female subordination, the grandmother’s discourse glorifies strong, rebellious angry women like Draupadi and Amba from Mahabharata whose just wrath wreaks havoc and destroys entire lines of male controlled dynasties. If history is male, myth is female. In fact, the male discourse of Manu is subverted by grandmother’s revisionist myth making.

            “There is no remedy to sexual politics in marriage” (Millet 147). This statement is explored by GithaHariharan in her novel The Thousand Faces of Night. The novel is yet another version of female ‘novel of marriage’ in which the woman does not live happily even after getting married. Devi, the protagonist returns to Madras with an American degree after refusing the proposal of marriage from Dan, a Black American friend because of her ambivalent attitude to American culture. She returns to India only to be sucked in by the old order of things – a demanding mother’s love, a conventional but hollow marriage and an unsuitable lover who offers a brief escape. Disillusioned with men in her life, she returns to her mother “to stay and fight, to make sense of it all… to start from the very beginning”(TFN 139).

            This common place story of marital discord and the woman’s quest for identity outside marriage is turned into a remarkable rendering of the collective struggle of woman for self-liberation through the author’s narrative technique of framing texts within the text and her intertextual weaving of tales from Mahabharata and folk stories with lives of real women. From her childhood to adolescence and during her summer visits, Devi grew up listening to her grandmother’s stories. Devi’s grandmother is a feminist in her own way asserting her individuality and sheltering women who are victims of male chauvinistic society. Her stories are not ordinary bed time stories. She chose each for a particular occasion- a story in reply to each of Devi’s questions. She has an answer for her every question but her answers are to be decoded and unravelled intelligently. Grandmother’s narration is a kind of revisionist myth making in its own right. By her clever improvisation of texts and revisionist myth-making talent, the grandmother seems to impart a secret knowledge through her purposeful retelling of the tales. She did not dwell on the prominent figures of Hindu mythology like Sita, Savitri or Anasuya who are celebrated paragons of female virtue. She retrieves marginal figures like Gandhari, Amba and Ganga who are almost forgotten and rendered invisible in patriarchal versions of myth.

            All these women contain greater fury in them and they have protested against their exploitation. Gandhari’s anger is hid behind the bandage covering her eyes, Amba is a female avenger and Ganga who walks out of marriage when the terms of marriage are broken, represents female determination. For the grandmother, the link between her stories and the lives of real women whom she has come across is a vital one. She tries to make subtle connections between the profound, awe- inspiring lives of mythical heroines with the sordid stories of real women and men. For instance, once Devi was surprised to see the photograph of her mother with a veena. She had never seen her mother playing a veena. Devi’s grandmother narrates the story of Gandhari as an answer to her question.

            Gandhari of Mahabharatha on her marriage day, dressed in her bridal finery, reaches her husband’s palace, with quick impatient steps. When she approached her husband, he was standing by the window “with his noble head looking up at the sky. But when he turned around, she saw the white eyes, the pupils glazed and useless. In her pride and anger, Gandhari tore off a piece of cloth and tied it tightly over her eyes. She groped towards her unseeing husband… her lips straight and thin with fury”(TFN 29). Gandhari is usually portrayed as an icon of self-sacrifice, a pativrata. But in grandmother’s story, she becomes a symbol of pride and self-denial. Saddled with a blind husband, she desires to shard his blindness than to be his vision. Her blind folding is definitely an act of protest.

           

GithaHariharan draws a parallel between Sita’s repressed desires and Gandhari’s suppressed anger. As a young bride Sita brought a veena because she is a veena player and she nurtured youthful dreams of artistic genius and fame. But when her father-in-law objected to her playing the veena in the house, “she pulled the strings of veena out of the wooden box and she never touched the veena again”(TFN 30). Now she focused on one goal in life, i.e., to be a good wife and good mother. She meticulously planned the lives of her husband and her only daughter Devi with clinical precision. She led her husband from promotion to promotion. She sent him to Africa on a prestigious mission where he died. She sends Devi to America for higher studies. On Devi’s return, Sita leads her to the altar of marriage gently and firmly. Suppressing her artistic desires and dreams, she becomes an embodiment of self-denial. By accepting the conventional roles of a wife and mother, she becomes domineering and over possessive. Devi and her father allow themselves to be led by Sita. But they resent her for making them mere puppets in her hands. After Devi’s marriage, Sita dared not look back at her life lest she would encounter only emptiness that will reveal to her “a soiled ground of life devoted to being the ideal woman”(TFN 107). In fact, she has to pay a heavy price in her life.

            All such stories of mythological women become Devi’s cultural and psychological survival kit. In fact, grandmother’s stories were a prelude to her womanhood, an imitation into its subterranean possibilities (TFN 51). Devi fed on the stories of mythical figures becomes a dreamer. Her artistic and creative yearnings are unleashed and nurtured. They mark a female rite of passage into female creativity. In her fantasy, she becomes a woman warrior, a heroine. She is Devi, the goddess. She “rides a tiger and cuts off evil, magical demon’s heads” (TFN 41) for the redemption of the world. Soon marriage traps Devi in man-made enclosures. Grandmother’s stories are replaced by her father-in-law’s discourse on Manu’s laws for women. “His (stories) define the limit for the women… their centre point an exacting touch stone, a wife” (TFN 51).

            The characters in GithaHariharan’s novel The Thousand Faces of Night are victims of loneliness and emptiness- a search for self-discovery, their places in society. She has succeeded in giving the readers the glimpses of the interior life of the woman characters. Devi, the protagonist searches her identity through knowing herself and self. Thus, the novel exploring the world of women; can be read as women’s text, “A Novel that every Indian woman must read… and every Indian man”.

Work Cited

Beauviour, Simone de.The Second Sex (tran. And ed)H.M.Parshley. London:Picador         Classics, 1988.

Chakaldar, Arnab. “A Conversation with GithaHariharan”.New Internationalist, April             1996(www.anothersubcontinent.com/gh1html).

Millet, Kate. Sexual Politics. London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1971.

Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking” in The New Feminist Criticism (ed.) Elaine Showalter (New York:          Random House, 1985.

Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision”. College English (34.1), 1972.