Breaking the Silence: That Long Silence

Breaking the Silence: That Long Silence

S.Amala,

Ph.D., (Full Time) Research Scholar,

PG Dept. and Research Centre in English,

Alagappa Govt. Arts College,

Karaikudi.

            “If I were a man and cared to know the world I lived in, I almost think it would make me a shade uneasy-the weight of that long silence of one-half of the world.” This statement by Elizabeth Robins form the epigraph to Shashi Deshpande’s novel, That Long Silence, announcing, as it were, the intention of this talented contemporary Indian writer to break the long silence that has surrounded women, their experience and their world. For a long time, woman has existed as a gap, as an absence in literature, whether Western or Indian. This is not only true of the fiction created by men, but also by women, who have mostly confined themselves to writing love stories or dealing with the experience of women in a superficial manner, creating the same kind of  stereotypes of women which they find so reprehensible in the writings of men. Women writers have also often fallen a prey to that prescriptive feminist ideology of creating strong women characters. This doctrine becomes as repressive as the one created by male hegemony and represses the truth about the majority of their sisters and their lives.

            Against this backdrop, Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence promises to be a refreshing departure from most of the fiction written by women. Of course, one cannot claim that she is doing anything extraordinary. We readily recognize the middle class ethos and people that we come across in the novel. The novelist’s contribution lies in the heightened sensitivity and the fresh insights that she brings to bear on the well-known types and situations. The action of the novel is triggered off by a crisis in a middle-class family. Mohan, the narrator’s husband, in his pursuit of prestige and security, had indulged in certain malpractices, as a result of which he now faces an inquiry and may perhaps lose his job. Mohan is advised by Agarwal, his partner in the crime, to stay away from the office and his Churchgate flat till the storm blows over. Luckily for Mohan, the children are away on a tour with their family friends, and it all ends well, they need not even know about this disgrace. Mohan, therefore, decides that he and his wife Jaya would go and stay at the flat in Dadar. This flat had belonged to Jaya’s maternal uncle. Jaya and Mohan had stayed there before shifting to a bigger flat in Church gate. Jaya acquiesces to her husband’s decision and accompanies him, albeit in silent resentment, to their present exile at the Dadar flat. It is here, in the intolerable period of waiting and rising hysteria, that the process of self-examination and self-criticism begins for Jaya. She is flooded by the memories of the past-her earlier life, her marriage with Mohan, the  frustrations and disappointments in her seventeen-year-old married existence, her personal failures, all these begin to haunt and torment her. By her journey into the past, Jaya gets the guidance for her future. By the end of the novel, the crisis-a mere storm in the teacup-has been averted and everything outwardly appears to be as it had been. Except for what has happened to Jaya. Jaya can no longer be a passive, silent partner to Mohan. The novel ends with her resolve to speak, to break her long silence.

            That Long Silence, then, traces Jaya’s passage through a plethora of self-doubts, fears, guilt, smothered anger and silence towards articulation and affirmation. Suman Ahuja, while reviewing the novel in The Times of India, observes that Jaya “caught in an emotional eddy, endeavors to come to terms with her protean roles, while trying, albeit in vain, to re-discover her true self, which is but an ephemera … an unfulfilled wife, a disappointed mother and a failed writer”. Jaya, in fact, rejects the patriarchal notion of a unitary self or identity when she observes, “But what was that ‘myself? Trying to find oneself’ – what a cliché that has become. As if such a thing is possible. As if there is such a thing as oneself, intact and whole,  waiting to be discovered. On the contrary, there are so many, each self, attached like a Siamese twin to a self of another person, neither able to exist without the other.” (69) That is why the novel offers interesting comes of so many other people, men and women, as they have become a part of Jaya’s personality and her unconscious. Even her mother and her two grandmothers-though Jaya may not like to think of it-have imparted something of their own selves to Jaya.

            Even a casual reading of the novel makes one conscious that Shashi Deshpande is not only writing about her female protagonist, Jaya, who is trying to erase a long silence and grapple with the problems of self-revelation and self-assessment, but , through Jaya, also about other women, those unhappy victims who never broke their silence. The author, in the first place, points out how our culture has often kept silent on the subject of women. For instance, at one point in the novel, Jaya discovers that she does not figure in the family tree that her uncle, Ramukaka, had prepared with great pains and of which he was so proud. When Jaya asks her uncle why her name is not included in the family tree, she is given to understand that she now belongs to her husband’s family and not to her father’s. But this is only half of the truth. Neither her mother nor her kakis, i.e her uncle’s wives, not even her grandmother, ajji, that indomitable woman, “who single handedly kept the family together” (143) find a place in the family tree. Jaya, to her dismay, finds that her name and existence, along with those of other women in the family, are completely blotted out of the family history. The novel, as it were, is Jaya’s protest against the kind of treatment that is given to women in our culture and her attempt to give another version of history from women’s point of view.

            That long Silence is also a scathing critique of our social institutions like marriage or family, the way they stifle the growth and free expression of the individual. These institutions put the individuals into the slots like wife, husband, brother, sister, daughter, son, etc. and obstruct the free communication between human beings. This is what happens in Jaya’s relationship with Kamat. Kamat was Jaya’s upstairs neighbour at Dadar. He was a widower and his only son had settled abroad. He was a lonely man and had shown a lot of understanding and sympathy for Jaya. In fact, Jaya was more free and uninhibited with him than she was with her husband. But in our society, this kind of friendship between a married woman and another man is always looked upon with suspicion and disapproval. That is why, perhaps, when Jaya had found Kamat lying dead on the floor of his flat on one of her visits to him, she had panicked and left the place in silence. This incident underlines how marriage often drives people into impossible and awkward situations. Jaya cannot even stay and pay homage to her best friend in his death for the fear of ruining her marriage. She perhaps does her role of wife to a perfections, but fails as a human being.

            Shashi Deshpande employs the first-person narrative and makes her central character Jaya tell her own story. Jaya warns the reader at the very outset that she is not the heroine of her story, nor is she talking about her isolated self.

One may say that her preoccupations are man-woman relationship, marriage and family life. But the novel avoids the facile solution of putting the blame on man only. Both men and women are products of their culture and victims of the institution of marriage. It is as difficult for women to outgrow the images and roles allotted to them by their society as it is for men. For example, during her first pregnancy, when Jaya suggests to Mohan that he should do the cooking, Mohan is highly amused by the suggestion, because he thinks cooking is not a man’s job. Later on, we discover that Jaya also shares her husband’s viewpoint when she confesses to Kamat that the sight of him doing the cooking made her uneasy as she thought it was unmanly. Like Mohan, she too puts her children into the slots and feels disappointed when they refuse to remain there and contribute their share in creating the myth of a happy and harmonious family. It is only at the end, after her ordeal, that Jaya realizes her mistake and releases herself as well as her children from the slots into which she had put them.

            In her anxiety to fulfill her roles of a wife and a mother, Jaya had not done proper justice to her own talents. Years back Jaya had made a good beginning as a writer by producing a story which had won the first prize and was published in a magazine. But Mohan’s response to the story was most disheartening. He assumed that the story was about their personal life. He was apprehensive and hurt at the thought that the people of his acquaintance would think he was the kind of person as was the man portrayed in the story. No doubt, this incident had left a deep impression on Jaya’s psyche and affected her career as a writer. She, therefore, can easily make her husband a scapegoat for her failure, but in her self-critical mood at the Dadar flat she refuses to have this easy way out. She reminds herself that even after her confrontation with Mohan she had continued to write-write under an assumed name (as women writers have often done under patriarchy)-but her stories had been rejected. Something had been missing from them, something had been censored out of them. According to Kamat, it was Jaya’s anger, her strong passions. Jaya had tried to remind him-what actually she had learned from her husband in her first memorable argument with him-that a woman cannot be angry, that anger makes a woman unwomanly. She had also given the familiar excuse that women give, when they fail at anything, that they have no time for serious work because of their household duties. Kamat had reproved of this tendency in her. “I’m warming you-beware of this ‘women are the victims’ theory of yours. It’ll drag you down into a soft, squishy bog of self-pity. Take yourself seriously, woman. Don’t skulk behind a false name. And work-work if you want others to take you seriously.” (148) Kamat was a  hard critic and he would leave no escape route for Jaya. The real reason for her failure, he pointed out, was her fear. She was afraid of writing, of failing.

            Jaya was in no mood to take such hard criticism. She had crawled back into her hold. She had resumed her career as a wife, as a mother. In the meantime, Mohan had suggested that she should write light, humorous pieces in the newspapers, what they called “middles”. Jaya had then started her weekly column “Seeta” which had won the approval of the readers, the editor, and above all of her husband. “And for me” “Jaya observes, “she had been the means through which I had shut the door, firmly, on all those other women who had invaded my being, screaming for attention, women I had known I could not write about, because they might – it was just possible-resemble Mohan’s Mother or aunt, or my mother or aunt” (149) Thus the novelist makes it clear that not only patriarchy has kept silent on the subject of women, but under patriarchy, women have also recoiled from telling the truth about their sex.

            When Jaya finally comes out of her emotional upheaval, she has sorted out a few problems with herself. For the two nights that she has to herself, she puts down on paper all that she had suppressed in her seventeen year’s silence. What she has written in evidently the novel that we are reading. The novel is mostly concerned with women like Kusum, Mohan’s mother and many other victims like them-Victims of patriarchy and also of their own silence. That Long Silence puts into nutshell the history and evolution of women through four generations that Jaya has known and promise a better future for women.

            What has Jaya ultimately achieved by her writing, by her getting all the ghosts that bothered her out of her systems on to the paper? In Jaya’s own words, “I’am not afraid any more. The panic has gone. I’m Mohan’s wife, I had thought, and cut off the bits of me that had refused to be Mohan’s wife. Now I know that kind of a fragmentation is not possible. The child, hands in pockets, has been with me through the years. She is with me still.” (191) Bald statements like these plainly show that That Long Silence is a feminist critique written in the form of a novel. As Toril Moi remarks, “The principal objective of feminist criticism has always been political. It seeks to expose, not to perpetuate, patriarchal practices.” And this is what Shashi Deshpande also does through her text. At the same time, That Long Silence is also a self –critique. The important insight that Shashi Deshpande imparts to us through Jaya is that women should accept their own responsibility for what they are, see how much they have contributed to their own responsibility for what they are, see how much they have contributed to their own victimization, instead of putting the blame on everybody except themselves. It is only through self-analysis and self-understanding, through vigilance and courage, they can begin to change their lives. They will have to fight their own battles, nobody is going to do it for them.

References

        Deshpande Shashi, That Long Silence.India: Penguin, 1989.Print.

        Ahuja  Suman, “Review in The Times of India” (8 October 1989), P.2

        Moi Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist  Literary Theory. London:             Methuen,1985. Print.