TREATMENT OF WOMEN IN MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN

TREATMENT OF WOMEN IN MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN

V.GuruDevRajan M.A.,M.Phil.

Associate Professor Dept. of English

ArumugamPillaiSeethaiAmmal College

Tiruppattur

Rushdie’s women in spite of the limitations of their liberation gender and religious taboos, show a positive tendency towards emancipation.  Aadam Aziz’s mother carries on with the gem business after her husband suffers a stroke and sees to it that her son Aadam Aziz completes his studies in medicine at Germany and return to Kashmir as a full-fledged doctor.  Saleem Sinai’s mother goes to the race ground and earns money by betting on the horses to win the suit against the freezing of her husband Ahmed’s assets owing to anti-Muslim feelings generated in India after the partition.  Pia, the wife of Saleem’s uncle Hanif takes to acting much to the chagrin of Reverend Mother (Naseem) and tries to help her husband.  Some of the women seek pleasure out of the conjugal basket.  Saleem’s mother Amina has secret affairs with Nadir Khan.  Pia has affairs with HomiCatrack who jilts her and falls for Lila Sabarmati ending in the death of both.  Women of affluent society fall for Major Shiva during parties and let him sire illegitimate kids by cuckolding their husbands.  Alice Perira, sister of Mary Perira also has affairs.  Thought these are secret liaisons, Saleem Sinai is able to track all these through his telepathic powers.

We have women like Reverend Mother (Naseem) and Mary Pereira are capable of nursing people to good health and temperament by their culinary art.  Naseem takes upon herself to cook nourishingly for her pregnant daughter Amina.  Mary takes every care of Saleem during his formative years in feeding him with her own hands.  Her pickle savours to the taste of Saleem and reunites him with her in the end with Saleem and his son Ahmed.  She will attend on baby Ahmed at Methwold as she did once, Saleem.  As a contrast to this we have Saleem’s aunt Alia who pours out her vengeance on her sister Amina and her family at Agra with her malicious cooking causing bad dreams on pregnant Amina about the nature of her son-to-be.

Then we have women who symbolize fraternal loyalty, magic and libidinousness.  Parvati is one of them.  She also symbolizes love and procreation.  She is not able to get her love consummated through Saleem.  So she uses her magic power and seduces Shiva and conceives Aadam.  She marries Saleem.  Then we have the dhobanDurga who symbolizes goddess Durga of Hindu pantheon.  She nourishes the child Aadam back to health from the milk of her enormous breasts and crushes Picture Singh between them holding him in her love-thrall.  We have Padma symbolizing the dung-goddess.  She accepts Saleem for what he is and awaiting her marriage with him.  It is hoped that she will be able to save Saleem from falling apart by her gentle ministrations.

Hindu goddesses are traditionally conceived to be strong figures, even indomitable ones.  By comparing his female characters to these goddesses, Rushdie attributes them with a force of character.  He perceives India as a matriarchy, an ideological presumption whereby maternal power, energy and love is the means to social cohesion.  The reign of the goddess is a gynocentric period, an important concept in feminist myth and anthropology.  It involves the sharing of certain kinds of women-centered beliefs and women centred organizations.  Gynocentric activities involve a set of women’s strengths, which could be explored and cultivated; for example, the strength of women’s eroticism as evidenced in Parvati-the-witch and Durga.

The Devi (or goddess) in India is presented as fulfilling many different roles: at a rudimentary level, she is shown as a maternal village divinity, then as the wife of Shiva and in a relatively auxiliary mode as the wife of other great gods.  These feminine figures cannot be truly understood without the attachment of the notion of Shakti. 

The Vedic word, Shakti “energy” designates the energy personified in the spouse of Indra, god of war and thunder who is the chief god in the Vedic pantheon.  The idea of Shakti has been amalgamated with mythological images of female deities: it is conceived as a force field, a principle which enables a sensibilisation to the world for the supreme god, who is inactive without it.  In a broader sense, shakti is the “vitalelan”, the animating factor as illustrated in the fiercely anti-colonial Bengali novel, GhareBhaire (The Home and The World, 1915) by Rabindranath Tagore, where the tribune Sandip asks the self-emancipating woman Bimala to become the shakti of the nation.

By far the most remarkable of the shaktis is Shiva’s spouse, who is known under a variety of forms and names.  The most common place representations are Durga the “inaccisible, “Uma “the favourable,” Gauri “the fair one, “Kali “the dark-complexioned” (or less likely perceived as symbolizing feminine Time), Candi the “violent,”, Parvati “the mountain girl” (an allusion to one of her incarnations), Kumari the “virgin,” more generally Devi Mahadevi, is the goddess par excellence.  The more redoubtable aspect of shakti is found in ancient literary texts : goddess of war, destroyer of men, satisfied by bloody animal sacrifices, inebriated by human flesh and wine, dragging horse and human cadavers, gathered from the battlefield to her altars.  (See Devimahatmya, where a detailed description is given of how the demons Madhu and Kaitabhaendeavour to destroy Brahman: Devi emerges from Brahman’s body and engages in a 5000 year combat which ends in the destruction of the demons.)

In Midnight’s Children a character named Durga dominates and crushes the burly Sikh, Picture Singh, with her :preternatural breasts (which) unleash(ed) a torrent of milk” (448) and according to grapevine tattle, she is said to possess two wombs.  Saleem acquaints us with this dhoban/washerwoman without really wanting to get too close to her:  “It was with the greatest reluctance that I admit her into these pages” (445).  We have not forgotten that Durga means “the unapproachable”. Saleem fears her because she symbolizes the hope that he has completely lost because of the consequences of the state of Emergency.  Durga incarnates the future, “of new things”: “her name, even before I met her, had the smell of new things; she represented novelty” (448).  She is blessed with superabundant fertility and is even capable of foretelling the imminent death of Saleem, “I mention Durga… because it was she who… first foretold my death” (449).  According to Picture Singh, she is also responsible for the healing of Aadam Sinai, stricken with a particularly virulent case of tuberculosis.  In a certain respect this imperious woman is reflected in the equally audacious, courageous character Tavleen, the beautiful Canadian Sikh terrorist of flight 420.  In The Satanic Verses, Tavleen proves to be more resistant than her masculine accomplices in the hijacking operation in which the two heroes of the novel, Saladin Chamchawala and GibreelFarishta are embroiled.  Rushdie describes her body as being armed with powerful explosives, as if these explosives were potentially destructive female corporeal appendages : Tavleen “exposes herself” to the petrified plane passengers : “She lifted the loose black djellabah…so that they could see the arsenal of her body, the grenades like extra breasts nestling in her cleavage (81)… those fatal breasts… (87).  The author’s masculine gaze appears to condemn female sexuality; Tavleen is attractive but she is also deadly.  In Midnight’s Children, The Moors Last Sigh and The Satanic Verses, Rushdie is torn between feelings of dread and desire for these female figures.  Durga and Tavleen inspire fear because they effortlessly eclipse the men who surround them.

Bibliography

Primary Source

            Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, Penguin Publications, New Delhi, 2000 Print.

Secondary Soruce

            Clark, Roger. Stranger Gods: Salman Rushdie’s Other Worlds. McGill – Queen’s                                       University Press, 2001 – Print.

            Cundy, Catherine. Salman Rushdie.  New York : Manchester University Press, 1997.                                Print.

            Rushdie, Salman and Elisabeth West.Book of Indian Writing, 1947 – 1997. London                                   Vintage, 1997, Print.