Women’s Struggle for Individuality in Kamala Markanday’s Some Inner Fury
Women’s Struggle for
Individuality in Kamala Markanday’sSome Inner Fury
V. Balamurugan Dr.
D. Shanmugam
Ph.D Research Scholar Associate
Professor
Department of English DDE,
English Wing
Annamalai University Annamalai
University
Markandaya’s novels show the
stifling of young women’s dreams, the silent oppression of a devoted Hindu
wife, as well as the disturbing prospect of sexual violence against women. She
tends to portray women from upper caste Hindu families who exceed the patriarchal
and paternalistic boundaries for their behavior. As a result of their attempts
at agency, these women face varying degrees of retaliation that ultimately cost
them their livelihoods, their lovers, or even their lives.
Markandaya’s narratives provide a feminist,
post-colonial historiography that documents and dramatizes the struggles of
women to find independence from restrictive familial expectations, to find
equality with men, or to find a fulfilling role either at home or in the public
domain. Taken as a whole, these narratives show the evolution of Markandaya’s
ideas about how women, especially Indian women, could achieve independence from
the forces that continued to restrict their lives. Her narratives show the
continued cultural oppression of women, despite the nominal progress of legal
reforms. Importantly, through her expression of dissent,
Markandaya makes the connections between the status
of women and the heritage of colonialism. Over the course of her career,
Markandaya develops a subversive, feminist stance that not only challenges the
boundaries of women’s behavior but also sees cultural reform and women’s
empowerment in their risky abandonment ofthe patriarchally defined behavior for
daughters, wives, and mothers.
Markandaya’sSome InnerFury in
which he discussed about two young women’s struggle to free themselvesfrom
restrictive familial and cultural pressures. Culminating in the 1942 Quit India
movement,this novel shows the oppression women faced during specific points in
India’s history,both colonial and post-colonial. In Some Inner Fury, the
female characters struggle againsttraditional notions of womanhood as the
nation seems on the cusp of revolution. In Some Inner Fury she
illustrates that money alone is not sufficient toensure happiness in the life
of the women concerned. Here Premala, Mira and Roshan are well brought up and
enjoy all sorts of material comforts.But self fulfillment is far away to them
as they are victims ofcircumstances that are beyond their control.
In Some Inner Fury, Mira is aware that
character is destiny. Shereflects on the evening when their family was together
for the last time.
She discovers that “there had been signals of their foreboding
sadness”.(80) But they “saw no shadow, heard no whisper to warn us it was thelast
time.”(80) But she also knows that they could have done nothing about it. “We
should still have gone our way, moving in orbits weourselves created and could
not help creating because we were what we were”.(83-84)
Premala is the archetypal image of doomed Indian
womanhood.She loses her life in the riot. She is the typical Hindu woman whobelieves
in abiding by one’s Dharma, as the way to salvation andhappiness. She conforms
closely to the mythical ideal of suffering.Indian womanhood leads the way for
the salvation of the Indian male.Mira and Premala are more representative than
individualistic in theirfunction.Premala stands for the traditional concept of
the Indian women.In the bondage of marriage, she and her husband Kit are
mismatched.
As a result cultural disparities bring them apart.
Despite this difference,it is Premala who tries to bridge the gap, but it ends
in vain. Mira says,“Though she tried desperately, she plainly found it
difficult to adapt herself to him.” (37) As a climax to all these, she brings
home an orphan girl. With his entire claim to modernity, Kit is worried about
what peoplewould say but she does not mind. To Premala the goodness of the
heartis the only thing that matters. The little orphan fulfils her need
fornurturance and caring that she desperately yearns.Premala becomes a martyr
without causes. She sacrifices herself ather attempt to be an ideal wife and
later when she rushes to protect theschool which she has helped to build, and
which to her perhapssymbolizes the reason for living, she is burned to death.
For people like Premala who scatter love around,
death meansnothing because one remains beautiful in death. Premala as her
namesuggests, is an embodiment of love- prem, and she, like a reformer
mustlavish on her husband, on Govind. On the adopted child as also on theentire
village but which, in her pervading violence and hatred, cannotsurvive and must
inevitably die.Roshan is the most striking and unusual woman character in
thenovel. Everyone likes her. However modern, she never irritates the
peoplearound her-young or old. As GayatriSpivak writes:
“The figure of the woman. . . as
daughter/sister and wife/mother, syntaxes patriarchal continuity even as she is
herselfdrained of proper identity . . . the continuity of community or history
. . . is produced . . . on therepeated emptying of her meaning as instrument”
(31).
Mira
says appreciatively: “It was this sameruthless simplicity, as I was to
discover, that she always looked at things,so that veils fell and veils lifted,
and somehow when you are with her,she lent you her vision, and you saw things
as they were.”(64) Roshan’sattitude is constructive. She tells Govind firmly: “There
is no power inviolence. . . .destruction . . . . I am really not interested in
destruction.”(86) She is an amazing human being and a wonderful woman. What
isnoteworthy of her character is the transferring of her nurturance to
thenational construction.Characters like Roshan, Usha, Mohini, Mira, Ira, and
Lalitha,Saroja and so on, who are modern and progressive in their
approachtowards womanhood, elucidate KamalaMarkandaya’s feminism best.Young
women like Roshan and Usha are confident their own decision,power and stand
firm on their feet. Mira, who runs after her romanticdesires, ultimately defies
the parental authority as she herself admits, “Ido not remember having crossed
her (mother) before” (61). She breaks allbounds of convention and even takes up
a journalistic career.
Later, sheis engulfed in the fervid flames of
patriotism and she very courageouslysacrifices Richard for her people. At this
time, she is a complete woman,traditional and emancipated enough to proclaim
her values and prioritiesin life fearlessly.The dream of Mira to get married to
Richards, whom she lovesgenuinely, is devastated by her own nationalistic
feeling of oneness withthe people who fight for the freedom of their
motherland. The opposingforce of reality in the case of Mira is not external
but internal. She is atliberty to choose the course of her life and she may
have chosen to gowith Richards and marry him. But she has preferred to be with
her ownpeople in their time of crisis, sacrificing her deep love for
Richardstheindividual to withstand the conflicting social forces andseek some
meaning, some independence out of life. Roshan is successful in this, Mira is
ambivalent andPremala fails completely. (180)
In such a turbulent time as the Quit India movement
of 1942,the ideals that these two young women hold are unsustainable.
Markandaya’s female charactersstruggle for individuality and personal choice,
while those around them seek a collective,national identity in order to
overcome colonialism.The expectations for women’s behavior that Markandaya
portrays in Some Inner Fury arethe product of decades of effort by colonialists
and nationalists. Moreover, the women’smovement could not escape the influence
and demands of the nationalist movement, for as M. S.S. Pandian asserts, “The
very domain of sovereignty that nationalism carves out in the face ofcolonial
domination is simultaneously a domain of enforcing domination over the
subalterngroups such as lower castes, women and marginal linguistic regions, by
the national elite”(1736).
As the nationalist movement grew in strength, so did
its dominating power. Mira’sdesire to live independently from her family and
Premala’s need to find relief from the lonelinessof her marriage lead these
women to occupy roles that do not satisfy the nationalist ideal of thenew woman
or bhadramahila, a nineteenth century model that was still being
followed in the1920s and beyond. The new Indian woman would be the opposite of
the “‘common’ womanwho was coarse, vulgar, loud, quarrelsome, devoid of
superior moral sense, sexuallypromiscuous, and subjected to brutal physical
oppression by males,” says Chatterjee (“TheNationalist Resolution” 244). Since
Mira’s and Premala’s actions take them away fromnationalists’ ideal
image of an upper caste Indian woman, their self-invention is short-lived.They
are pulled into the violence of the Quit India movement, as Markandaya
demonstrates thatduring this time of national turbulence, women’s agency was
forcibly postponed. Any attempt topursue individual independence rather than
subordinating oneself to the cause of nationalindependence was dangerous and even
life-threatening.
References
Markandaya, Kamala. Some Inner Fury.
New York: The John Day Company, 1956. Print.
Chatterjee,
Partha. “The Nationalist Resolution of
the Women’s Question.” Recasting Women:
Essays inIndian Colonial History. Ed. KumkumSangari and Sudesh Vaid. New Brunswick:Rutgers UP, 1990. Print.
Sharma,
Lakshmi Kumari. The Position of Woman in Kamala Markandaya’s Novels. NewDelhi: Prestige, 2001. Print.
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