Chapter – VII
SUMMATION
This thesis entitled, Nayantara Sahgal’s Novels as Period Novels, aims at
exploring the periodical happenings of the nation, India through Sahgal’s selected five
novels. Nayantara Sahgal’s experience of human relationships and pre-Independence and
post-Independence politics have shaped and influenced her ideology. Even her very
private experiences expressed in her novels have a social context and so they give the
readers an insight into the cultural conditioning of the characters. Her novels thus capture
the depths of both the individual mind and the social mind. There is an impressive
portrayal of strong, resilient women “raving for more life to live” (Mistaken Identity
152) in all her novels after realizing that there is merit in being free from mental
constraints. We find in them a definite desire for societal change and a vital need for
private space.
A deep survey of Sahgal’s novels leaves not only an iota of doubt that the novelist
has adopted an unorthodox approach with a touch of deep understanding to the
microscopic analysis of human nature’s puzzle. This introspective probing of human
mind, its complexities and the inexorable quest of the self, make the novels timeless.
They throw light on what is unique and universal simultaneously.
Sahgal’s inborn genius and talent are inspired by the milieu she was born in, not
that merely a birth in such an illustrious family as that of Nehru makes one a good
political writer. Being a member of such a milieu should not serve as an excuse for her
success. She is the master of uncanny insight into the inner most recesses of the human
mind, particularly feminine mind besides the understanding and faith in the progress of a
nation in spite of all the obstacles. Her adoption of different form and technique develops
her plot structure and adds to her art as a novelist. Linguistic competence, stylistic
devices, and gradual development of characters are quite enough to pay off the
amorphous structure of her novels. K.R. Srinivas Iyengar asserts: “Mrs. Sahgal’s feelings
for politics and her command over English are rather more impressive than her art as a
novelist” (474).
A vision of womanhood, the value of freedom of an individual and that of a
nation, the futility of violence are reflected in her novels. Through her novels she insists
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the truth that challenges of time demand a reorientation of values and unless a nation
accepts this truth, it has very little chance to survive. The people have a negative notion
about politics. This is because of ‘missing social connectivity.’ Sahgal attempts to
portray and interpret the realities of the contemporary political setting. This creates a
periodical setting and hence her novels are considered as periodical novels. She analyzes
various political events with her intelligent perspective and portrays the major characters
of her novels as the imitation of the martyrs. Thus, her novels stand as a reflection of the
post-independence generation.
Her works range from factual and emotional
autobiography to fictionalized autobiography.
In her address to the colloquium at
Radcliffe Institute she had this to say about the close link of her life and writings:
I grew up during the national movement.
My parents went to jail
repeatedly during our fight for freedom. My father died as a result of his
last imprisonment released too late to be cured of the serious illness he
contacted in jail. My uncle became our first Prime Minister. I was born
and brought up within the atmosphere and hopes and ideals of the
Congress Party. Its leaders were familiar to me. Our home was their
meeting place and many decisions momentous to India were taken in it. I
became a novelist and a political journalist, and all my writings, fiction
and non-fiction, has been about contemporary India. (5)
Nayantara Sahgal also identifies politics with power. According to her, a political
novel deals with power and its operation at varied levels. She observes: “I think of
politics not as leading the country, but politics as the use of power and also the abuse of
power, as it happens at so many Levels” (21).
Nayantara Sahgal is also acclaimed as a partition novelist. In all the novels of
Nayantara Sahgal the Indo-Pakistan partition plays a role as a handiwork of petty minded
politicians that caused a lot of sufferings, loss of lives and loss of material resources of
people.
A realistic description given about the misfortunes people suffered during
partition in the novels, This Time of Morning, Storm in Chandigarh, The Day in
Shadow and Rich Like Us gives them a veritable aspect of partition fiction.
The
reminiscences in these novels of the havoc caused by partition, “the exodus of the
completely disinherited trudging toward unimaginable future with only what they carried
and won” (DS 24), she has witnessed, illustrate Nayantara Sahgal’s humanistic concern.
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Therefore, Nayantara Sahgal’s novels could be compared with any novel of the partition
novelists especially Khushwant Singh and K.A. Abbas.
A description of the horrible killing of innocent people is found in gory details in
K. A. Abbas’s novels, Blood and Stones (1947), Inquilab (1955), The Walls of Glass
(1977) and his autobiography I am not an Island. Critics of Indo-Anglian literature feel
that partition – a major event in Indian history has not been dealt with as a major theme.
Even Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao who set the great tradition in Indian
English literature felt delicate to touch on this ethnic topic. Khushwant Singh made a
daring attempt on this unfortunate turn in the history of India. Abbas, Khushwant Singh
and Nayantara Sahgal were eye witnesses to the sufferings of innocent civilians who had
nothing to do with politics or communalism. Khushwant Singh has established himself as
a partition novelist from his first novel A Train to Pakistan. So Nayantara Sahgal’s
novels could be compared with partition novels.
Nayantara Sahgal’s novels could be analyzed from the perspective of political
allegory. A complete study of Nayantara Sahgal’s novels gives a fleeting impression of
reading allegorical poem or allegorical novel. There are two sets of characters as in
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, one standing for virtue
and the other for vice. The theme is a conflict between these two forces. In Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress the pilgrim Christian during his journey to the Promised Land meets
different kinds of characters, all exclusively personifying either virtues or vices.
Here in Nayantara Sahgal’s novels India is the pilgrim and the theme is India’s
journey towards freedom and progress. The characters are politicians, bureaucrats, some
business magnates and their wives divided into tow groups. Some of them are patriotic
politicians and bureaucrats interested in the welfare of the nation and some of them are
power hungry selfish politicians and corrupt bureaucrats. All these characters reflect the
image of the people who lived in the period of Nayantara Sahgal. Kailas, Harpal Singh,
Saradar Patel and Jeyaprakash are patriotic in spirit, put nation’s progress in the forefront
and raise their voice against the exploitation of the nation’s wealth by the selfish
politicians, whereas Kalyan, Gyan Singh, Sumer Singh and Devikin are power hungry
and have no principle in life except their prosperity. The first group of men achieves
victory in politics through hard work and service to people, with a humanistic concern.
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The second group of men is political upstart. Extensive use of similes and imagery
highlight the contrast in their characters as in an allegorical work.
In Spenser’s The Faerie Queene one can come across a similar division of
characters standing for virtues and vices in life with King Arthur as the central figure.
Nayantara Sahgal’s men are political figures grouped as Gandhians and anti-Gandhians.
Some of the bureaucrats like Rakesh, Vishal Dubey, Raj and Yusuf resemble King
Arthur’s chivalrous knights who redeem victimized women and marry them. To these
bureaucrats and politicians like Kailas, Harpal Singh and Sardar Patel Gandhiji is the
ideal man like King Arthur to his knights. Their “total dedication to the spirit of man in
the Gandhian tradition stands out in sharp contrasts” (Rao 143) to men like Kalyan and
Gyan Singh with an insatiable ambition to amass wealth and to acquire political power
through corrupt means.
Some of these politicians and bureaucrats were familiar to
Nayantara Sahgal with whom she kept up a close acquaintance.
The presence of contemporary politicians and bureaucrats, some of them in their
original names and some in fictitious names, make of her novels a veritable account of an
allegorical caricature. A.V. Krishna Rao also supports this view in his statement that her
characters “are not real, for they really have no lives; they are symbols representing
Gandhian ideals or pragmatic politics of power” (150). Through these characters she
expresses the political realities in their true colours “without any of their repulsiveness
being lost” (Mathur 71).
One unifying theme that runs through all her novels is freedom: the freedom of the
nation at the macro level and freedom of women from the shackles of convention in
domestic life at the micro level. In novel after novel she deals with women’s growing
awareness of the implication of freedom against the backdrop of the nation’s struggle for
freedom.
By freedom she does not mean mere political freedom or economic
independence, but “a habit of mind or a way of life” (Storm in Chandigarh 227) or as C.
Vijayashree aptly sums it up “the joy of being one’s own self” (22). In Sahgal’s own
words “freedom means creativity, adventure, experimentation and even risk” (“A Search
for Answers” 85). Every major character of her novels “strives towards the realization of
freedom as a basic human value” (Rao 146).
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Even Rich Like Us, a fictional depiction of the Emergency as a threat to people’s
freedom, stresses freedom as the fundamental requirement of human beings like the air
we breathe, through the stubborn resistance of the boy in Connaught Place to free himself
from the clutches of the police, through the armless beggar’s struggle to free himself from
vasectomy activists and through the ‘satis’ fierce struggle to free themselves from the
flames. The value she stresses consistently is freedom as the fundamental requirement for
all achievements. Her heroines strive to enable themselves by freeing themselves from
their chauvinist husbands, “the orthodox Indian conventions and moribund tradition”
(Asnani, New Dimensions 61). So research could be done on the concept and the theme
of freedom in Nayantara Sahgal’s novels.
A Situation in New Delhi explores the dilemma which India had faced in the
field of education due to political changes during the post-independent era. Sahgal
presents a clear picture of Delhi in this novel. The failure of political machinery in the
absence of a good leader and an educated woman’s unstable position in the midst of the
immoral atmosphere are presented in the novel.
The novel is Sahgal’s attempt to
deconstruct the issue of violence and non-violence in India. Violence and revolution are
the major themes in the novel. Rishad’s violence, which is invisible even to his mother,
depicts the real face of India where violence prevails invisibly. Sahgal’s interest in the
treatment of women in Indian society comes to light in the novel. She presents different
women characters, Devi, Swarnapriya, Madhu and Pinky, who represent different
attitudes. All their lives are contrasted with each other. The difference between them is
the difference between their goals, values and aspirations. For Sahgal, non-violence is a
far more comprehensive attitude than merely a political weapon. It is an active and a
powerful force. It may have been ineffectively used on occasion by a misuse of fast, but
it remains potent force if used in an organized way. The whole issue of the novel
revolves on the values involved rather on emotions.
Nayantara Sahgal’s novels offer abundant scope for contradictory views. When
one group of critics like Neen Arora, Jasbir Jain, S. K. Tikoo and A. V. Krishna Rao
discern feminist traits in her novels, another group traces anti-feminist attitudes in her
women.
Asoka Rani brands Nayantara Sahgal as a feminist writer formulating a
definition for the feminist in the following lines, “Feminist is a person, male or female
who is concerned with the status of women and who advocates or works for the removal
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of all forms of discrimination and oppression of women so that they may live in a milieu
of freedom, dignity and equality with men” (68).
Critics like Pankaj K. Singh find an antifeminist attitude in her women because
instead of living independent of male support, they fall into the trap of marriage once
again after their walk out Another attack on Nayantara Sahgal’s characterization is that
her women do not “have to struggle for survival, neither at the economic level, nor at the
emotional one which leaves woman even more disintegrated and vulnerable” (Singh
Pankaj 137).
There is also glaring contradiction in terming her women as victims of marriage.
One such criticism is about Rashmi in This Time of Morning. How is Rashmi a victim
of conjugal unhappiness? Nowhere in This Time of Morning is there a portrayal of
Dalip’s character and the conjugal relationship between Rashmi and Dalip. In the case of
Simrit also there is no valid reason for her divorce. Simrit is not a victim of physical
brutality or mental torture as Saroj is. It is only when Som enters into a business deal
with Vetter, a manufacturer of deadly weapons, she contradictions Som. There are many
points in the novel The Day in Shadow to disprove it as a feminist fiction.
Nayantara Sahgal’s ‘wives’ yearn for a meaningful or an ideal relationship in
marriage. They wait for their men to change from their sexist stance. As it is not possible
they come out of marriage and go with men who fulfill their desires. This aspect in the
behavior of her heroines raises a question: Is it womanism or feminism that we find in
her novels? Womanism “believes in the freedom and independence of women like
feminism. Unlike feminism it wants meaningful union between women and men and will
wait patiently for men to change from their sexist stance” (qtd. in Johnson 20).
According to Rotimi Johnson, the literary theoretician of womanism and feminism, neowomanism is “feminism without its militancy and overt rebelliousness, complementing
the responsibility of traditional womanism with its subservience and quiet dynamism,
resourcefulness and subtle revolutionary mechanism of modern womanism” (Johnson
35).
Having achieved a proper understanding of herself and life at large, Nayantara
Sahgal emerges as a champion of woman’s cause. In each one of her novels, she
concentrates on a woman character whose self-awareness takes place in degrees. For a
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long time, they brave mental stresses and tensions not wanting to disrupt the existing
cultural arrangement between men and women. Saroj who can be seen as the author’s
alter ego adopts the Gandhian non-violence in her personal life. She does not want to
create ugly scenes by unleashing her temper because she believes that such an explosion
is also an expression of violence, she carefully refrains from verbal violence too. The
novelist’s non-violence, like that of Gandhi, was not passive but active and it entailed
‘seeking opportunities for dialogue ... which would liberate people from the violent
system (of thinking) which prevented them from seeing the power and rightness of nonviolence (Hardiman 285). So, one can see in her women characters both non-violent
resistance and helpless acceptance, creating a conflict within.
While highlighting the “power situations” in family relationships and society,
Nayantara Sahgal takes efforts to change the customs that are dishonourable and oppress
women. Her attack on old ideas about chastity opens up a new world for women. She is
a reformer who sees chastity not as a public virtue but solely as a private one. Men and
women are urged to follow honesty and truth dictated by their own conscience. As a
humanist, she ignores the stereotyped fallacies attributed to the nature of women and
advocates a new marital morality that has its base in the total absence of pretence and
self-centerdness. She urges both men and women to discover the freedom of conscience.
Nayantara Sahgal’s women protagonists belong to a socially advantaged, affluent
class and enjoy right to education. So, they have no special aspiration for financial
independence.
Nayantara Sahgal is deeply interested in creating a harmonious
relationship between the genders by casting off all discriminations.
Her women
characters wish to be married but not mastered. While upholding women’s power and
potency, she is also convinced that an attempt to understand the other sex will certainly
produce finer human beings. In the union of man and wife there shall be no loss of
individual identity.
So, in Nayantara Sahgal’s novels there is no undervaluing or
minimizing of the male identity to maximize the female identity. If the power in both
man and woman is nurtured and monitored in the light of both the traditional and the new
values, humanity will be saved from damnation.
Nayantara Sahgal shares a common concern with many women writers about the
predicament of women. The wide range of characters – from silent sufferers to
empowered ones – shown in the background of politics makes her depiction different
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from that of the other writers. Her expression of concern is not only on the domestic level
but also on the political level. The manifold changes that have happened both in the
political and social spheres since Independence in India have been effectively brought out
in her novels. She transforms some of her personal experiences into fictional material
and derives general lessons from both. Nayantara Sahgal’s novels can be understood and
appreciated only with sufficient knowledge about her life and experiences that have gone
into the making of the novelist.
Nayantara Sahgal has intertwined the personal and the political in her novels.
That has made her novels as periodical novels which relates the incidents of the period.
Politics cannot be separated from her personal life and the time she lived in. She says:
“Politics for me was an environment in which every issue was a political issue, and
personal and political fates were inextricably bound” (Point of View 97). While focusing
on the political problems, both past and present, Nayantara Sahgal makes scathing on the
repressive misrule of the politicians whom she thinks are responsible for castrating the
country of its innate strength. The colonization influences the natives so strongly that
they begin to unashamedly colonise their own people. This kind of exploitation that is
done by the upper middle class in the same way that the colonialists once did is what
Fanon calls ‘neo-colonialism.’ Rich Like Us shows how “the national bourgeoisie steps
into the shoes of” (Fanon 124) the former colonialists.
The trust that the people once had in politicians receives a blow in the postIndependence era. It is ‘new’ politics that Nayantara Sahgal sees with the politicians
getting “fat from office.” She witnesses a nation where directness and upright dealings
have ceased to exist. It culminates in the imposition of Emergency sweeping out the
entire value system in politics. Sahgal strongly believes that the revival of Gandhian
values alone can save India from the political debris and rejuvenate it.
Nayantara Sahgal’s flow of words adds a special potency to her thoughts. She
“enjoyed the sound and meaning of words .... Words were the stuff of magic, and there
was the thrill of expression” (Point of View 25). She is not apologetic about using
English as her medium of expression: “I believe English today is an Indian language - and
part of its contribution to English in general may well be its Indian-English aspect”
(Gupta 6).
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Nayantara Sahgal’s novels could be interpreted from the perspective of
mythology. Myth is the metaphoric and thematic structure of her novels. There are
several areas in her novels which lend to mythical interpretations. For example in This
Time of Morning, Kailas acts like Rama, the mythical hero. To compare him with
Rama, for instance, he renounces his legal profession at the command of Gandhiji and
follows his leader like Rama who renounced the Kingdom of Ayodhya at the command of
his father.
The description of the salt march and the setting in which Harimohan, his
friend, meets him at the Bharatwaj Ashrama resemble Rama’s leaving of Ayodhya and
Bharat’s meeting of Rama at the Bharatwaj Ashrama during his exile. This comparison is
enhanced by the lines, “He would not go to jail with Kailas but he would wait for his
return, guard his kingdom, save his own homage till then. He would be Bharat to Kailas’
Rama” (83). Sree Rashmi Talwar holds the view that “The story of Mira – Kailas is an
enactment of the stereotypical pattern of the Rama-Sita ideal” (Talwar 80).
In Storm in Chandigarh, also the whole narration of Inder’s obsession with his
wife’s premarital loss of chastity can be interpreted through an approach to mythology.
The author’s comment, “He had said so again and again ever since he had known her, to
wash her image clean. He wanted it clean” (9) explicitly indicates that the hero is a
stereotype of Rama.
The story of sage Jamadagni punishing his wife Renuka for the loss of her chastity
through her admiration of the image of Devendra while he was flying in his chariot across
a pond is an episode in the Mahabharata. The (Jamadhakni) sage kills his wife through
his son Parasurama. This episode resembles the story of Som punishing his wife Simrit in
The Day in Shadow for divorcing him by the crooked method of exploiting her
financially. Som too uses his son indirectly for punishing his wife. Similarly Rose in
Rich Like Us is compared with Sita in may aspects.
Mythology presents two types of characters, Devas representing virtue and Asuras
representing vice based on the existence of virtue and vice in the macro level in the
universe and in the micro level in every individual. There is this mythical / universal
pattern in the characterization in Nayantara Sahgal’s novels.
On the one hand she
exposes the villainy of power hungry politicians (Asuras are power hungry) like Kalyan
in This Time of Morning, Gyan Singh in Storm in Chandigarh, Sumer Singh in The
Day in Shadow and Jayaprakash in Rich Like Us who have “genuine concern for human
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values and human beings” (Jain Nayantara Sahgal 9). Their political interrogation
resembles ethical and spiritual conflicts between two aspects in man: ‘Deva guna’ and
‘Asura guna’ in other words between good and evil / Devas and Asuras.
P. Lal says that it is myth that “provides in sight into the mysteries of life and
death” (15). He believes that one cannot understand the meaning of life or life’s activities
without an insight into the myth of one’s nation. The ancient gods and demons in the
myths are not far away from the modern man. They still populate this earth and are
among every generation. So there cannot be a portrayal of Indian life or Indian men and
women in any Indian literature without an absorption in Indian mythology. “History and
myth are intertwined in Sahgal’s perception of national identity” (Salgado 65).
Sahgal tries to tell her own story of political bureaucratic intrigues as every
historian attempts to do. Her novels seem to be historical which comprises the social
realities of the post-independent era.
Her novels are the composition of Gandhian
ideologies in the past and the present and treatment of women in the patriarchal society.
In the present study, Nayantara Sahgal’s Novels as Period Novels, Sahgal’s
works have been critiqued and assessed from different perspectives. One finds tension
between two opposing forces in all her works. On one side there is humanism that
advocates compassion and reaching out to others but on the other is the vehement pursuit
of power that ultimately proves to be self-defeating.
Humanistic concern that runs
through Sahgal’s novels is the solution she offers to the political and social evils, and also
individual conflicts. Satyagraha as a device involves introspection and is non-violent in
its communication with the ‘self’ as well as the ‘other.’ Though politics receives a close
attention in her novels to the extent of defining her novels political, the human drama that
Nayantara Sahgal is mainly concerned with proves that she is primarily a literary artist.
Her novels are political in the sense that they make an accurate representation of what is
happening in the society and create the right awareness in the readers. Hence it can be
rightly said that her novels are exploration of her political period and therefore they can
be considered as periodical novels.