Beloved Daughters and Liberated Mothers: Duty and Rebellion in Three Indian Novels

Abstract

This study investigates how three Indian women novelists—Toru Dutt, Krupabai Satthianadhan, and Kamala Markandaya contributed to the discourse on women’s rights and position in society in the nineteenth century and into the mid-twentieth century. From the mid-nineteenth century on, “woman” became the site of resistance against the British by Indian nationalists. Based on “traditional” ideas of women’s place in the household, as keepers of tradition and values, and as insulated from foreign influence outside the home, nationalists promoted a mythic ideal of womanhood as being synonymous with nation, of “Bharat Mata,” of women as virtuous mothers, in order to resist the British charge that Indians were depraved and inferior. The British on their end, in their “civilizing” mission, sought to legislate women’s reform, to end such practices as child marriage and sati as a moral justification for their rule. Indian women were spoken of and spoken for. My initial investigation into Indian women’s literature in nineteenth century India proved that women were not always silent observers and recipients of male dominated discourse. Although history has largely forgotten the writers I study in this thesis, they did contribute to the debate concerning women’s rights in the nineteenth and in Markandaya’s case, mid-twentieth century India. Although separated by varying demands such as regional affiliation, religion, and identification with the colonizer, each struggled with the notion of independence for women. Additionally, all three writers wrote in English which gave them an audience in the English reading Indian elite as well as in the British public. This afforded them the opportunity to be in the midst of the debate and not marginalized because of their sex and choice of language. English offered a certain status.

The most compelling questions I sought to answer in this thesis were, how do these Indian female writers resolve the conflict between individual desires and a society which seeks to oppress women for varying reasons? How are nationalist ideals of womanhood coopted and extended by these women writers? How can women express a will to self while remaining within a social structure that holds antithetical beliefs towards self-hood, especially if that self is female?

My conclusions were that the heroines in these novels do not seek to break away from their ties to their social group, be it their families or their community. Rather, they find fulfillment or resolution, through the socially acceptable female role of motherhood which is complicit with the nationalist idea of mothers as leaders and nurturers of the Indian nation. Motherhood is recast by these writers as a role in which women can receive physical and emotional sustenance. It becomes a space for women to define their own relationships without first having to define themselves in relation to a man and therefore offers the opportunity for self-definition.