Chapter-V Psychological Conflict in Bye-Bye...
Transcript of Chapter-V Psychological Conflict in Bye-Bye...
Chapter-V
Psychological Conflict in Bye-Bye Blackbird, Clear Light of Day and Fire on the Mountain
The main forte of Desai's fiction is the exploration of the
main currents and undercurrents of human psyche. She is
more concerned with the portrayal of inner reality than the
outer life. According to Usha Rani:
She peels off, layer after layer, the hidden impressions and experiences of
the conscious as well as the sub-conscious self.1
Her sharp awareness of the inner reality and the massing of
details is expressed in a manner that the interior self of the
characters is revealed in all its prominent shades. Her
protagonists are not average. In this chapter I have
described such sensitive souls as, sweet Sarah in Bye-Bye
Blackbird, unfortunate Ila in Fire on the Mountain and
optimistic Bim in Clear Light of Day. All the protagonists in
Desai's novels were undergoing mental conflict of varying
intensity. Some of them are lost during the struggle, while
others come out successfully with new realization and
hope.
The different states of mind produce different
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reactions in different situations. In the world of Desai's
character there is an amalgamation of all types of human
psyche. Various factor gives rise to mental tension of
varying intensity. Most prominent among the causes of
these mental conflicts is the clash is between the inner
reality of the protagonist and the external situation of
their life.
The protagonists of Desai suffer from these mental
agonies at various levels. They often come in clash with the
outside life, with others at individual level, or with the
society at-large. The changes brought in their mental
perspective with the time and experience also produce a
psychic strain. Mostly the female protagonists are usually
more sensitive than their counterparts but sometimes as in
the case of Raman in Where Shall We Go This Summer? we
find that men can be sensitive too.
In this chapter there is a detailed analysis of the
three selected novels Bye-Bye Blackbird, Clear Light of Day
and Fire on the Mountain. These novels are replete with
instances of psychological conflict.
Bye-Bye Blackbird, published in 1971. In this novel
Desai widens her canvas to deal with a group of Indian
immigrants in London and in her sensitive manner traces
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their complex emotional relationship. It is different from the
other novels by Desai in an important aspect that is while
the other novels have an Indian setting, but Bye-Bye
Blackbird is set in an English background. But whatever
the setting, a constant theme in Desai's novels is the
problem of adjustment, both personal and social. At the
personal level, the problem is more complex. The struggle of
the characters, especially women, to maintain their identity
and to emerge as individuals in their own right leads to
maladjustment with those who are related to them. Desai's
women characters are, who are sensitive can try as best to
cope with their situation in ways that are sometimes
damaging to themselves and sometimes to others, because
they are often guided by impulse rather than reason.
Desai's heroines live in a tightly enclosed world and
inevitably their repression breaks out is violence in Cry, the
Peacock, Maya murders her husband and becomes insane,
Monisha in Voices in the City commits suicide and Raka in
Fire on the Mountain sets the forests ablaze.
Bye-Bye Blackbird though written in digression
from the track, on which the earlier novels of Mrs. Desai
move successfully on the theme of existential isolation and
lack of adjustment encountered by Indian immigrants in
England. This novel deals with the treatment of the psychic
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tumult of her self-afflicted characters. The treatment of the
characters is quite different from her earlier novels. In this
novel Mrs. Desai presents the topical problem of
adjustment faced by black immigrants in England. She
analyses this critical problem by portraying the three major
characters, Adit, Sarah and Dev and exploring the effect of
racial malice and hatred on their sensibility. These three
characters face the dilemma of finding their identity
because their background is rooted in the different classes
of society divided by birth, and from a definite sense of
social placement they find themselves in an alien
atmosphere where it is not easy for an individual to adjust.
Anita Desai herself confesses in an article:
Their (immigrants) Schizophrenia amused me while I was with them and continued to tease me when I returned to India. I wrote it in an effort to understand the split psychology, the double loyalties of the immigrants.2
Anita Desai is not quite satisfied with this novel, as it
presents the plight of Indian immigrants in an alien land
too realistically. As Atma Ram has remarked:
Bye-Bye Blackbird is the closest of all my books to actuality and practically, everything in it is drawn directly from my experience of living with Indian immigrants in London.3
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In this novel, Mrs. Desai highlights the commendable
success, the confusions and conflicts of another set of
isolated characters. Dev feels isolated in London from both
Indians and Englishmen because the former have become
used to the condescending attitudes and motives which he
cannot follow, and the latter consider him an outsider. At
the beginning Adit is happy but later on he feels isolated
and his attitude towards an England undergoes a major
change. Dr. G.D. Barke has rightly said:
Adit though lives and admires England, loves everything that is English appreciates her history and poetry, feels the thrill about Nelson's battles,
waterloo, about Churchillall, and yet all this break like a soap bubble at the first touch of reality. He must have not loves England less but then he loved
India more.4
His initial Anglophobia is ultimately supplanted totally by
his new experienced Anglophobia. He considers himself to
be a stranger a misfit in England. He moves about London
in a kind of morbid search for belonging. Sarah Adit's wife,
though not deeply involved in the main motif of the novel,
she is also an existentialist character suffering from the
feeling of isolation and loss of identity. She also feels upset
because by marrying an Indian she feels alienated in her
own country.
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The novel opens with the arrival of Dev in England.
He is a young student, with some intellectual pretensions,
from Bengal, desirous of taking admission in the
prestigious London school of Economics. He finds himself
totally a misfit in England because he is an unable to
reconcile with the English norms and conventions and
finds it difficult to adjust in an alien land. The novelist
powerfully and effectively narrates the various experiences
that Dev undergoes and the culture shocks that he receives
in a foreign country. He remains one of those, " . . . eternal
immigrants who can never accept their new home and
continue to walk the streets like strangers in enemy
territory, frozen, listless, but dutifully trying to be busy, an
unobtrusive and, however superficially to belong . . ."5 as he
has read a long about it in books. The self-consciousness
that leads him to a self-crisis around which the whole novel
revolves, the crisis is not peculiarly Dev's own. It seems to
have a much larger dimension; it seems to overpower all
those who are placed in similar situations. If it engulfs Dev,
it also engulfs Adit, and his English wife, Sarah. Dev
cannot get accustomed to the quietness and an emptiness
of London city. He experiences a lack of sympathy and
geniality among Britishers who cannot recognize even their
neighbours and live like strangers to one another. The
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social atmosphere of India is quite different where people
are joined with bonds of mutual cooperation and genuine
relationships, but in London the things are quite different.
The silence and emptiness of the houses and streets in
London make him uneasy.
He yearns for green Indian parks and other
beautiful places where people are seen sitting in harmony
with each other. The discovery of artificiality in manners,
lack of ethics and morality in Britishers preys upon his
mind constantly. Though now and then, he enjoys the
idyllic countryside but on the whole he does not feel as
home with this new local and resides there like an
unwanted, isolated and insulted creature. The humiliating
treatment accorded to immigrants in England, hunts him.
While travelling in a bus, he feels humiliated while buying
his ticket for seats a glint of scorn in the conductor's eye,
the abrupt way in which he hands him his ticket and then
keeps him waiting for his change. Even the old lady sitting
next to him clutches her handbag and leans away from him
as if she finds him repulsive.
The novel revolves around the crisis of identity that
the characters have to face. The external landscape
becomes the internal climate of these characters enmeshed
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in an existential despair. But Dev's response to the city of
London has nothing of the emotional involvement that
Nirode or Monisha face. He feels offended by the silence
and emptiness of the town and reacts in an unemotional
and confused manner. There is a gap between his real self
and imagined self that increases his existential agony in an
alien country. A proper perspective of the novel emerges
when Dev's dilemmas are seen emanating from his
instinctive responses to the London scene. His isolation and
spiritual anguish is reflected through his hellish experience
in the London tube.
The inner conflict, in Dev's mind between
acceptance and rejection, renders him emotionally and
intellectually tortured person. London makes him aware of
his otherness, that he does not belong to the world that he
takes to be the source of his conscious existences. His
suffering emanates from this conflict between experience
and mental perception. Similarly, Adit becomes aware of his
otherness after his visit to his in-laws and leaves England
as a patriotic Indian. Dev suffers because he keeps on
oscillating between his choices. For him, England is the
golden world, the price which is too high from him to pay.
Anita Desai alludes to this symbolically, when Dev wants to
find out the price of a gold icon from Russia and is told that
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he does not even deserve to be told the price.
Living in uncertainty, denied and rejected, Dev
develops a schizophrenic attitude towards England.
However, in the final section of the novel we observe that
Dev loses his self control and in slowly drawn into London
life. The English countryside stirs his inner self, lets him
open his soul and fills it with that healing touch which
nature along can give and Dev as he responds to the scenic
beauty of English countryside rediscovers the magic that he
had lost in London.
Thus, Dev who feels depressed in the early stages
of his stay in London because of the insults hurled at the
black by the callous and arrogant Britishers, gradually
finds the life of an alien enthrallingly rich and highly
enterprising. Adit's situation is just the opposite of Dev's. In
the beginning he is Anglophilliac, marries an English girl
Sarah and settles in England with no desire to return to
India. He is often ridiculed by Dev, as a "spineless
imperialist lover," but unlike Dev he is happy there because
he understands the reconciliation between the two different
cultures the Eastern and the Western the meeting of
discordant natures and backgrounds. A vein of sarcasm
and irony underlines the analytical thoughts of Adit, but he
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manages to solve his dilemma of the Indian mind's
fascination for the western culture.
Adit settles down in England because he fails to
find a decent job in India in spite of having a degree from a
British University. With a little difficulty he finds a job as a
travel agent and is generally content with life. Like his
fellow immigrants, he quietly tolerates racial insults and
humiliations to which he is continually subjected. Fed on
English Literature in school and exposed directly to English
life and manners for years, he now feels a sense of cultural
affinity. This closeness, however, does not obliterate the
sense of his cultural identity. He secretly longs for Indian
food, music and friends. This longing suddenly grows
intense during one of his visits to Sarah's parents. Adit,
from then onwards, feels stifled and starved in the alien
land. He makes up his mind to leave for India to lead a real
life clear of all pretences.
We are informed with the help of a few flashbacks
how the marriage between Sarah and Adit is materialized.
To Sarah, Adit seemed a complete contract to her. She had
been brought up in a strict and drab atmosphere which
was in sharp contrast to Adit whose life seemed colourful
drab in contrast:
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I should thick ninety out of every hundred people here live exactly alike. Every evening they watch the same
programmes on the telly, every Friday night they go to the local pub for a drink, every Sunday have roast beef for lunch, every Whitsun and bank holiday stream down to the see . . . like lemmings . . . .6
Adit is impressed by Sarah's shyness and reticence. He
feels that she is like a reserved, quiet, Bengali girl, in fact,
prettier than the rest. Beyond these affectionate words, the
novel hardly presents any scene of love or intimacy to
indicate that their initial fascination for each other lasts
long. They soon settle down to a dull, drab routine of
cooking, washing dishes and keeping the house. Adit
sometimes behaves in an intemperate way as is disclosed in
his conversation with his friend Dev. As, Alvin Toffler has
pointed out:
These English wives are quite manageable really, you know. Not as fierce as they look . . . very quiet and hard working as long as you treat them right and roar at them regularly once or
twice a week.7
The novel deals, at great length, with the numerous
adjustments which a married couple is compelled to make
or fails to do so. Adit cannot stand British broth and stews
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and, therefore, he makes Sarah to cook Indian food
immediately after marriage. Since she is not able to cook
Indian food to the entire satisfaction of her husband most
of the time, Adit is found in the kitchen which irritates his
mother. Sarah and Adit have difficulty in adjusting to each
other's concept of cleanliness also. Sarah takes no
precaution to protect the food from the cat sniffing at it and
Adit's appetite is killed when he thinks of eating the
unclean food. Adit's Bengali music has no impact on Sarah.
She cannot join him and his Indian friends in their
conversation, jokes and laughter, and thus remains a
foreigner in their world. She does not find it easy to wear a
sari and Indian jewellery. The rituals and beliefs of one
mean nothing to the other, which upsets both of them at
the lack of regard shown by the other, for what each holds
dear. A major part of the book is devoted to husband - wife
isolation. After marriage Sarah's reticence turns into
aloofness, she loses her zeal to participate in living and
becomes apathetic. She feels that her life is an empty and
ineffectual one and therefore is left with stark loneliness.
Her bewilderment and frustration is the consequence of
'cultural shock'. Her immersion in a strange culture causes
a breakdown in communication, a misreading of reality and
inability to cope. Sarah feels depressed because she cannot
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fully involve her, self in her husband's culture nor can she
adapt herself to his society. As Meenakshi Mukerjee has
aptly said:
Sarah is the most typical of
Mrs. Desai's characters, complex, hypersensitive and intelligent.8
The novelist displays commendable skill in delving deep
into her psyche and highlighting her social and
psychological isolation. Sarah, like Maya and Monisha, is
an introvert, but there is hardly any other kinship between
them. She does not suffer from inner vacuity like them
though she is temporarily isolated. Mrs. Desai's depiction of
Sarah's personality, full of dualities and uncertainties,
presents a vivid image of the struggles of an alienated self.
Fear, insecurity and the resultant withdrawal are the three
major motifs in the novel. The novel incorporates the
impact of an East-West marriage on the psyche of Sarah.
As the likings and tastes of husband-wife are different, a
disharmony prevails in Sarah's family life and it seems to
threaten her marriage. One gets the impression that Sarah
and Adit have adjusted to each other despite their
differences. His romantic love for England is matched with
the romanticism of her imagination about India. They
maintain their cultural identities yet experience a close
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affinity with each other's culture. But Sarah has a dread of
being labelled an Indian and there in lies the crux of her
difficulty. Her sense of shame and nervousness is so
obvious that some readers tend to agree with her colleague.
Julia, who bluntly says that if being an Indian was so
adherent to her, she should not have married, Sarah's
irrational fear is not an out come of her social Adit in the
first place alienation only. We can analyze her motives in
the light of her anxiety behind her psychological upheaval.
Dr. G.D. Barke has concluded that:
Sarah was to say good-bye to her,
English self, Dev must be saying good bye to his Indian self or it can be prayer for rest and light for him and a good bye to his bloomy self.9
As, we know Sarah had been brought up in an
atmosphere of regimentation and she has learnt, to project
herself as an ideal, obedient, loving daughter who had
accedes to all their demands. As long as she was able to
identify with her image that there was no conflict but her
marriage, her only act of non-confined made her vaguely
uneasy. Existentialists are of the view those same springs
out of our awareness of us on contemplation. The
recognition of her failure to measure up to her expectations
produced, in Sarah, a feeling of guilty or self-reproach. This
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self reproach does not interfere with her married life but is
damaging for her mental health.
Although, we are not told about her parent's
reaction to the marriage, we learn about their resentment
by fathers' displeasure and mother's unconcealed
bitterness toward Indians. Sarah's father changes into a
reticent old man from an exuberant physician and the
process of his alienation is triggered off not so much by the
country life, as by the jolt to his perfectionist standards.
Sarah is an intelligent enough to understand this change
she also comprehends her mothers hostility. As Dushyant
B. Manawat has said:
Adit told Sarah not to be romantic about Indian life and warned her that life in India was not a luxury. She would have to face noisiness, and unpunctuality in India is place of tidiness and punctuality in England.10
In order to save herself, Sarah takes recourse to
withdrawal over the years. In her own social circle in the
school, she finds it easier to let others talk of themselves
rather than discuss her life. This is the way she adopts to
mitigate her sufferings caused to her by conflicts. When
this privacy is eroded and orden and are made on her, she
recoils as in the case of phillippa Grodge. She buys a
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chocolate for the girl, but the moment she is questioned
about Indian postage stamps, she withholds her gifts,
consciously.
In fact she wishes to guard her secret not so much
from other as from herself that she is making an effort to
know India and become Indian. To have anyone try upon
them, break in upon the shadowed intimacy of her
relationship with them, was violent, shaking terrible. The
strategy of withdrawal is characterized by emotional
distance. Sarah feels isolated and suffers from anguish
loneliness. She does not even i.e. cognize her owns self and
knows her identity in precise terms.
Who was she, Mrs. Sen, who had been married in a
red and gold Banarasi brocade sari one burning, bronzed
day in September or Mrs. Sen the Head Secretary, who sent
out the bills and took in the cheques kept order in the
school and was known for her efficiency? Both these
creatures were frauds, each had a large shadowed element
of charade about them. When she briskly dealt with letters
and bills in her room under the stairs, she felt like an
imposter. She was playing a part when she tapped her
fingers to the sitar music on Adit's records or ground spices
for a curry which she did not care to eat. She had so little
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command over these two charades and she played each
day, one in the morning at school and one in the evening at
home, that she could not even tell with how much sincerity
she played one role or the other. They were roles and when
she was not playing them she was nobody. Her face was
only a mask, her body only a costume. Where was the real
Sarah? Staring out of the window at the chimney pots and
the clouds she wondered if Sarah had any existence at all,
and then she wondered with great sadness, if she would
ever be allowed to step off the stage, leave the theater and
enter the real world, whether English or Indian, she did not
care, she wanted only its sincerity, its truth.
Sarah realizes that both these images are false
reduces the intensity of her isolation. Her awareness of the
quality of her situation leads her to self-questioning, which
enables one to take the first step towards action. It makes
one conscious of one's inner life and outward behavior and
one does not remain a passive victim of circumstances.
Peter Jones talks of two terms "Actio", and "Passio" to
denote these emotional states: Actio, he says "is essential
not only for self-respect but ultimately for sanity".11 Sarah
feels trapped between these two selves and being aware of
her two roles like Sita, wishes to get out of them. The
freedom essential for self-identity is not fully recognized
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because she is only acting her roles and is a non-entity
when she is not dramatizing her parts. She cannot even
separate her two selves as they are intermingled. Sarah
wishes that if only she was allowed to keep her one role
apart from the other, she would not feel so, cut and slashed
into living in bleeding pieces.
The discovery that she has been deceiving people
and even that herself she has been parading, like an
imposter, to make claims to a life in a positive step towards
establishing a contact with the self. Sarah's spontaneity,
which was blocked by the impasse created by these two
roles she was acting out, is released. She wishes to discard
the masks and be a true and sincere self; she does not
mind which identity she adopts - British or Indian so long
as it is genuine. At the end of the novel we find that Adit
suddenly decides to leave England and Sarah is downed
again in the ocean of uncertainties, she is haunted by
suspicion and doubt whether Adit would be able to give her
emotional support. Like Maya and Sita, Sarah also needs
somebody's support to emerge out of the rut into which her
life pattern has fallen. The struggle caused inside her by
the contradictory feelings of assurance and faith and the
sharpness of fear torments her and creates considerable
tension in her mind. Disintegrating forces keep disturbing
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her. These thoughts however, are not neurotic for
ultimately. Sarah realizes that she will have to establish her
cultural identity in order to adopt a new culture and
undergo an utterly novel experience. There is a hope that
she would be able to have a altogether new and different
personality in India. That is why she accepts Adit's decision
with the characteristic acquiescence of an Indian wife for
she felt that even the smallest contradiction might make
Adit beat his chest and complain of being misunderstood,
start shouting and hurling accusations against her or shut
himself up in a room and weep.
She might anything was possible in his highly
strung and dramatic condition. She dreaded such a
reaction and was ready to sacrifice anything at all, in order
to maintain, however, superficially, a semblance of order
and discipline in her house, in her relationship with him.
It's doubtful if Sarah will get success in self recovery in an
alien atmosphere. Meenakshi Mukherjee is of the view that:
She is displaced in her own country and
her identity crisis will never be solved even if she goes back to England.12
It is true that Sarah's social and cultural identity will be
hard to regain, but her crisis is not beyond redemption; it is
certainly reducible if she is able to maintain constructive
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thoughts and if they are not followed by any percussions of
self-annihilation, she may reconstruct and retain her
personality and become a much stronger person. If she
strives towards a clearer and deeper experiences of her
feelings, beliefs and wishes (out growing; narrow, neurotic,
egocentric) and if she manages to relate herself to others,
she will slowly but surely gain inner certainty one can
achieves by developing a sense of belonging and through
active participation in life.
At last we can say that Bye-Bye Blackbird deals
with the theme of psychological conflict with encountered
by the Indian immigrants in England on account of their
inability to adjust with the atmosphere and situations alien
to them.
The novelist analysis this existential predicament
by delineating realistically the situations of three major
characters Dev, Adit and Sarah, who fails to come under
the terms of reality and consequently feel rootless and
utterly cut off from the people around them and also from
their own selves.
The novel Fire on the Mountain (1977) reveals that
the three divisions of the book can have three facets of the
inner consciousness as reflected through Nanda Kaul, Ila
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Das and Raka. Nanda Kaul the major protagonist of the
novel is the linking tie with Ila Das as well as with Raka,
not only at the level of conscious self but also at the
meeting point of infinite time-the part spent, the living
present and the coming future.
The whole novel reverberates with the agonized cry
of Nanda Kaul and Ila Das. Nanda's life has been just like a
barren mountain, devoid of all human love and faith. All
the three characters have one thing is common. They are
lone individuals trying to guard their privacy in their own
Shells, in their own distinct manner. They are mentally very
close to one another, yet at the same time they are quite
distanced from one another in age as well as in their
attitude towards the outside reality of life.
The seclusion and alienation from society leave
different impressions on all the three souls, who are highly
sensitive and emotional. There is a vast difference between
their inner desires, dreams and the hard outside facts of
life. As, Usha Rani has remarked:
Nanda Kaul grows more and more introvert and finally, she withdraws from the outside world completely. For her the seclusion is a kind of protective shell under the weight of which she groans miserably.13
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In her solitary life, she mentally weaves around her a
fantasy world of her own, in which she pretends to live a
happy life, full of satisfaction. But that is not the real truth
of her existence.
In an article entitled Flight of Forms, Anita Desai
tells us that she formed the character of all these three
women on the basis of women she had come across in real
life. The writer had gone to Kasauli when she was eight, a
sickly child, living in solitude. Raka one of the central
character is a projection of her own childhood, sick and
lonely. The Pasteur Institute, the dry pine needles, the dry
forest fire, all are childhood memories changed into fiction.
Ila Das is the replica of a spinster lady whom Anita Desai,
as child, disliked. She too, was poor and was brutally
assaulted and murdered by a villager. The character of
Nanda Kaul is drawn on the basis of the character of
certain gray haired and melancholic lady whom Anita Desai
had seen playing on the piano, taking solitary walks and
had ultimately died a sad solitary death. According to P.D.
Dubey:
Fire on the Mountain is suggestive of the
revolt of the new generation of women against a world dominated by harsh and cruel men.14
[ 187 ]
The first part of the novel, entitled 'Nanda Kaul at
Carignano', provides the setting and introduces us to
Nanda Kaul, an old woman, who has chosen to live a life of
voluntary seclusion away from her children, grand children
and great grand children. Leading a solitary life at a house
called 'Carignano' in Kasauli, this part also depicts how
resentful Nanda is, when her great grand child Raka, comes
to stay with her. The second part of the novel deals with
Raka's arrival to Carignano and her subsequent
experiences there. Her relationship with her great
grandmother, Nanda Kaul is not a cordial one but we
cannot fail to note, in spite of the great disparity of age that
these two characters display a remarkably similar tendency
to be aloof and reserved.
'Ila Das leaves Carignano' is the title of the third
and last part of the novel. As Alka Saxena has rightly said:
Carignano the key words are desperation, desolation, agitation, nervousness, agony, alienation, solitude and above all emptiness.15
Ila Das is a childhood friend of Nanda Kaul. Nature has not
blessed her either with beauty or riches. Her struggle for
existence, her constant optimism and the way she tries to
cope with repeated setbacks in life make her not only an
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admirable but almost a heroic woman. She stands out in
sharp contract to the other women of Desai's fiction
because while they face inner conflict tension and agony,
Illa Das is ready to face the world around her.
The fact that the three parts deal with three
different women does not mean that the novel is made up of
three different and independent stories. The setting is the
same throughout the novel and the women, Nanda Kaul,
Raka, and Ila Das are all related to each other is some way
or the other. Of the three women, Nanda and Raka have
withdrawn from society into a state of self-imposed
loneliness, though for different reasons. The third, Ila Das
is friendly and wishes to eradicate certain social evils
which, however, result in her tragic end. One similarity
between this novel and the other novels by Anita Desai is
that the women are first deprived of certain emotional and
personal needs in life, and it is this deprivation, which
results in their withdrawal and alienation from family and
society. And this change brought in their mental
perspective with the time and experience and produces a
psychic strain. Desai also tries to focus attention upon the
fact that though a woman is made to spend her life taking
care of others, she too, requires love and respect in return.
[ 189 ]
The theme of Fire on the Mountain is similar to
those of the earlier novels by Desai. So once again we are
presented with a deeply sensitive woman engaged in a
painful search for identity and undergo psychic tension.
Desai's maturity as a writer is evident in the greater
sensitivity as well as restraint shown here than in Cry, the
Peacock and Where Shall We Go This Summer? In the
present novel, Nanda Kaul wants to do away with personal
and social relationships in order to live a life of her own,
without any bondage. Her life so far, has been full on the
surface but empty inside. After marriage she had to care for
others without being cared for. This lack of attention over
the years gradually built up in her an attitude of hostility
towards people which finally leads to her self-imposed
isolation. Thus her neurosis induced her to withdraw into a
state of seclusion. It would be worthwhile to examine
Nanda Kaul's conduct on the basis of Karen Horney's views
on neurosis and neurotic behavior:
Neurotics employ several strategies in
dealing with others and in solving problems that seem to be weighing heavily upon their minds.16
First they move towards people in a state of helplessness,
lack of attention or sympathy, which leads to hostility and
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their resultant withdrawal. Finally, they resort to complete
isolation and withdraw themselves from society. This
scheme serves as a structural model of neurotic character
formation which is of special value in identifying, Nanda
Kaul's pattern of behaviour and thought in Fire on the
Mountain.
At the beginning of the novel, we come to know that
Nanda Kaul's fervent desire is to be left to herself in an
isolated house in Kasauli anyone's presence would be an
unwelcome intrusion and distraction. In the initial chapters
of Fire on the Mountain we find that she has different
reasons for living in seclusion away from all her relative.
Her apparent state of contentment is quite deceptive as we
discover later. Her desire is not so much to settle into an
old age, or even death, but to escape the burden of the
past.
She has chosen to live a secluded life at Carignano
in search of peace, both outer and inner. The problems and
tensions of her past life seem to have drained her
emotionally as well as physically. The dual strain caused by
the infidelities of her husband and the running of house
full of servants, guests and children has left her completely
exhausted.
[ 191 ]
Nanda's husband was the main cause of her agony
and misery for instead, of loving and cherishing her. He
had been in love throughout his life with another lady, Miss
David. Nanda, who knew about her husband's extra-marital
relationship, suffered endless agony and heartache. J.P.
Tripathi feels that:
Here is love - impoverished heart or rather a heart burning with feminine jealousy.17
The presence of a second woman in her husband's life,
made her feel a complete stranger, an unwanted person in
the house which she felt could never be her. Indeed she felt
doubly alienated from her husband on the one hand and
from her children on the other. Whom she could neither
understand nor love, life in a house which she could never
honestly, call her own could hardly have been a
comfortable one. Yet she was not able to free herself from
the bondage of her unchanging conventional life which she
found highly demanding and extremely unbearable. She
could not give vent to her feelings and could suffer only in
silence.
This tendency to repress her sorrow is suggestive of
a deep rooted pride that prevents her from expressing her
pain. She fights shy of being made to appear weak and
[ 192 ]
small not only in the eyes of others but also in her own. No
one could ever make out her true feelings for she never let
them show on her face. This apparently stoic stand had
helped her to tide over that bleak phase of her life which
was lacking in composition and harmony. But intense
feelings cannot long remain suppressed they are bound to
erupt when the heart can bear the strain no longer. Nanda
began to feel the strain of her dual existence in which there
was a vast difference between what she actually felt and
what she was required to put on before others. It weighed
heavily upon her mind, for she could never find an
opportunity to give vent to her pain and get it out of her
system. For a long time she had suppressed her emotions
and this accumulated misery, made her long for a desire to
be her true self, to lead the type of life she had wanted and
prepared for all her life.
Widowhood brings to her a promise of freedom for
it enables her to lead a life of sufficient privacy, to be her
true self and escape the bondage of relationships and
associations that had stifled her. Here Stephen Wall has
rightly commented:
She moves to Carignano for a life of privacy, seclusion and isolation, in a desperate search for her selfhood
[ 193 ]
and away from familiar restraints.18
In her self-sacrifice, hostility and final isolation
Nanda Kaul serves as an excellent model of a neurotic. But
at the same time it is equally significant to note that her
seclusion is important for her because it means the
restoration of selfhood and identity. Carignano, with its
scenic beauty helps her to pick up the threads of her life
and be at peace with herself. She begins to experience the
bell and calm after the storm. Now she feels that no one
can betray her or back-slab her because she has built a
wall of seclusion and security around her.
Nanda Kaul can't be accused of escapism in her
decision to live a secluded life at Carignano for she had
gone there only after fulfilling all her duties. She had stood
by her husband inspite of his infidelity, had never let him
down before his guest and had brought up her children to
be busy and responsible. Now that they no longer needed
her, she was free to enjoy her well earned seclusion in
peace. In this respect Nanda Kaul is different from the
other women characters of Anita Desai, especially Sita in
Where Shall We Go This Summer? Sita had come to the
island of Manori, away from her children and husband who
was reasonable and sensible. She had escaped from her
[ 194 ]
duties and responsibilities. On the other hand, Nanda
Kaul's arrival at Carignano does not harm anyone else it
was beneficial for herself. Nanda Kaul is the only great-
grandmother created by the novelist. She has suffered the
agony of being a neglected house her husband loved
another woman. As P.D. Dubey has remarked:
Her husband did not love her as a wife. He treated her as some decorative yet useful mechanical appliance needed for the efficient running of his
household.19
Nanda's agony is suppressed, but only in silence, as
compared to Maya and Sita who are demonstrative and
tend to be melodramatic every now and then.
Carignano helps Nanda Kaul tide over her misery.
She has only the minimum necessities and finds solace in
the soothing and paregoric company of the open sky, stars
and the Himalayan air and brooks. She wanted no one and
nothing else because the fullness of life, riches, children
husband, and guests had failed to provide her with
happiness. She had suffered in that fullness and variety,
surging clamoring about her. What pleased her there at
Carignano was its barrenness and emptiness and her
radiantly single life helped her to attain a state of elegant
[ 195 ]
perfection.
In this idyllic solitude, her great grand daughter
Raka's arrival comes to her as an unpleasant intrusion,
since it violates Nanda self imposed isolation. Besides, the
old lady seems instinctively aware of her advancing age and
knows that she will soon have to depart and this knowledge
has makes her excessively possessive about every precious
moment at this place that has become so dear to her. The
arrival of an outsider meant deprivation of what she wished
to preserve so desperately - her privacy; she could not give
vent to her feelings, with the young intruder around. She is
unwilling to accept traditional maternal responsibility once
again because she is fed up with every thing connected with
her past, and wishes to avoid every link with those
memories and these results is willful rejection of the child.
But Nanda Kaul need not have worried; Raka's desire to
preserve her own secrecy and solitude is nearly as strong
as, if not stronger than her great grandmother. As R.S.
Sharma has said:
It is almost metaphysical.20
Nanda finds this tendency in the child inexplicable. She
was expecting her to be a normal, curious and interfering
child but Raka's love for solitude rouses the material
[ 196 ]
instinct which she had been trying to suppress though not
without setting up an internal tension. For while she
consciously refused to accept her great grand child's
responsibility, she couldn't instinctively, help caring. A
conflict ensues between her assumed attitude and her real
concern. But now she experiences a situation which is
oddly parallel to the earlier one. It was the indifference of
her husband and children that had hurt her in the past;
and what hurts her now is Raka's indifference and self-
sufficiency earlier her family had needed her and used her
without caring of her but Raka on the contrary, neither
needed nor cared for her. Her suppressed desire for being
wanted erupts once again, breaks the self protective shield
of her seclusion and makes her pathetically vulnerable in
her old age. Her attempts at creating an imaginary dream
world out of her unhappy past are, for herself and Raka,
merely tranquillizers that have but a temporary potential to
have a soothing effect. In her last days, Nanda comes to
realise that she had failed to attain the happiness she had
so desperately been in search of throughout her long life.
Her death gains in poignancy as she faces that the only
certainty in her life had been the certainty of failure.
Raka's childhood had driven her into a hard core of
solitude and self-sufficiency, rarely to be found in a child of
[ 197 ]
so tender an age. She had been transformed into what she
is partly by her weak physical health and partly by a
similar set of circumstances in early childhood that seem to
afflict the heroines of Anita Desai. Like her grandmother,
Nanda Kaul in Fire on the Mountain, Sita in Where Shall We
Go This Summer? and Maya in Cry, the Peacock, Raka's
young life has also its sordid side crammed into her
memory. Her childhood memories are devoid of fun and
games, the romance of adventure, or any other happy
associations we find no mention of friends or sisters or
brothers with whom she played or shared secrets. The
tension filled life of her parents has a disastrous effect upon
her tender mind. The bed rooms of her infancy were packed
with illness, sadness, drink, medication, milk and tension.
Her withdrawal from society was an expression of her revolt
against the sort of life had led.
Her intense desire for solitude and secrecy becomes
necessary part of herself. So she learns to lead an
independent existence as the young of animals do. She
arrives at Carignano at a time when she has completely
mastered the art of existing without aid sympathy from
anyone else. Nanda Kaul's obvious rejection therefore does
not hurt her.
[ 198 ]
Raka displays involuntary bouts of sentiment and
concern in spite of her defiant utterance - 'I don't care - I
don't care - I don't care for anything'. This utterance is
mere self consolation since it is meant only for her. Her
concern about her mother, though she does not appear to
be very concerned and her pleading with Ram Lal not to hit
the mother and brief flashes into her dark closed self.
Raka's bitterness makes her feel strongly drawn towards
scenes of devastation. Hard acts not pleasant things or
sights, appeal to her. Jackals, snakes, thorny bushes and
insects fascinate her. It is not without reason that the
people at Kasauli finds her behavior absurd and think that
she is eccentric. It is possible that she has turned into what
she is because her own mother suffered from frequent
bouts of nervous breakdowns and may have passed on
some of her disease genetically to her daughter. Whatever
the reason Raka evolves as a pyre-maniac because
whatever is illegitimate, uncompromising and lawless
fascinates her. It appealed to her so much that in a mood
she sets fire to the forest on the mountain. As, P.D. Dubey
rightly says:
Raka's act of setting fire to the forest is symbolic of her revolt against the cruelty and violence rampant our society.21
[ 199 ]
This act of her however comes as a surprise to the
reader. There does not seem enough motivation for Raka to
take this sudden bold step at that particular juncture in
the novel. Moreover, it appears to be a well-planned, and
not an impulsive action of a neurotic child. However, since
the step has been taken, one could justify it as Raka's
giving vent to the fire of her inner anger and frustration by
setting the forest on fire. As Alka Saxena has rightly
commented:
It was the first forest fire Raka had seen. Shivers ran through her zigzag, leaving streams of sweat in their wake. The fire had broken out far away across the valley and they could neither 'smell the burning pine trees nor 'hear' the crackling and hissing. It was like a fire in a dream-silent swift and threatening.22
What is ironical is that neither Raka nor Nanda have been
happy by being unnatural or by behaving abnormally. The
experiences of both have been different but each loss
suffered deprivation and lacks a sense of belonging. What
makes them alike is that each one runs away from the
place and situation which caused her anguish; but the
curious thing about it is that each knows what she is
running away from, but there is no assurance that she will
[ 200 ]
find what she wants at the place she is running to. In this
novel, the difference that Desai makes between the two
characters, Nanda and Raka, is subtle and persuasive. The
lack of communication between the two is an outcome of a
wounded psyche in each case. Nanda's unhappy domestic
experience and the traumatic childhood experience of Raka
have made them both loners. Each tries to hide and conceal
what she needs most i.e. a feeling of security and
fulfillment of love. Nanda's growing concern and
attachment with Raka is suggestive of this need. While
Nanda nurses her illusion and guards her quite life
jealously, Raka is not under the illusion of having achieved
what she wanted, she has only run away from others but
not form her frustrations. In a way both Raka and Nanda
are escapists but the irony lies in the fact that while the
situation has been left behind, the old identity remains.
Nanda's seclusion from society is her sacrifice but since
Raka has nothing that she can sacrifice as she is not
mature enough to sublimate her negative emotions, she
seeks to obtain some relief from the fire within through the
objective correlative of the burning forest, undoubtly a
violent expression of her frustrations.
The question that haunts the reader at the end of
the novel as to whether there is any symbolism behind the
[ 201 ]
Fire on the Mountain has been answered by Desai herself.
Accordingly to her, everyone in the book is living, a life of
illusion and in order to get rid of them, a fire had to be lit
and only the child was pure enough to light it everything
had to be burnt away in order to reduce it to ash and reveal
the truth. It is true that each of the three characters is
living under an illusion. Nanda Kaul's illusion is that she
can do without human company. She is happy here at
Carignano and has ultimately found the peace and calm
she desired throughout her life:
In the last days of her life, self realization and honesty forced the bitter truth upon them, a fire had to be lit and only the child was pure enough to light it. Everything had to be burnt away in order to reduce it to ash and reveal the truth.23
The truth had dawned upon Nanda Kaul much before the
fire but Ila Das remains ignorant because she was brutally
murdered, much before the forest was set on fire. Both
these women are dead when Raka comes out with her
confusion. The question of the truth being revealed
therefore does not arise. There is a great discrepancy
between the author's intension and the real situation -
what she set out to do, what she has done and what she
thinks she has done. Desai herself seems to feel the same
[ 202 ]
way and it appears to be Desai's own illusion finally.
The third part of the novel, entitled 'Ila Das' deals
almost exclusively with Ila Das life. She is an object of
admiration as well as pity for even though she has to face
are disaster after another, it does not weaken her will out of
all the women created by Anita Desai, she is the only one
who possesses the right attitude towards life, that is, to
enjoy life as it comes and bravely, meet it face to face.
Nature had not endowed her with any of those
qualities which a woman normally desires. Her voice for one
was hardly feminine lit alone melodious. Throughout her
life Ila had felt humiliated in society because of this
drawback. She reminds us of Dorin Kilman in Virgina
Woolf's. Mrs. Dalloway for like Dorin Kalman, Ila Das's over
appearance is such that she becomes an object of ridicule.
The taunts and the awareness of her immense short
comings however, cannot break her and she never wallows
in self-pity and is always brimming with excitement. Ila
Das's may even be considered as paradigms reflecting the
problems and conditions of Indian women in general.
Malashree Lal feels that:
Through Ila Das, Anita Desai has encapsulated the history of a recognizable feminist position.24
[ 203 ]
The author exposes the tendency of partiality towards male
children as against the female ones, an unworthy son is
considered more precious than a worthy daughter in the
Indian society. Ila Das is a victim of the same gender bias.
In her family the sons were sent to foreign universities
where all they learnt was to drink them ill, to find the
nearest race course and squander their allowance on
horses that never won. The three sons inherited the family
income often their father's death whereas the daughter's
who were hardworking got nothing'. Ila Das and her sister,
though born in a rich family and accustomed to gracious
and luxurious living, are required to toil for their own
livelihood. Along with this issue, Anita Desai also shows her
awareness of the lack of proper education among women.
Ila had not been given proper education and it was Nanda's
husband who had given her the job of a home-science
teacher.
Desai has also deal with the issue of child marriage
and the existence of male domination, especially in villages
in this novel. Ila Das's tragedy indicates how deep rooted
these evils are in the country and how difficult it is to
uproot them. Her fight for the cause of women proved fatal
to her for her protest against the bartering of a seven year
[ 204 ]
old girl provoked the father of the girl to such a fury that he
raped Ila and killed her. Ironically, Ila Das, who wanted to
save other woman, could not save her own self.
It would be wrong however, to assume that Ila Das
has been created by Desai only in order to focus attention
upon the plight of Indian women. Her emotions have also
been discussed but Ila has no one to blame for it is indeed
difficult for an old woman to make both ends meet all by
herself, especially with little money in hand. Even old age
fails to pierce through her iron will power. She does not
become irritable bad tempered for she has a marvellous
capacity for not only hiding that she has something to hide.
She appears so pathetic and frail that Nanda feels
protective towards her and is almost on the verge of inviting
her to come and stay with her at Carignano.
The end of Ila Das is undoubtedly tragic, but it is
certainly a blessing in disguise, in so for as it frees her from
the suffering which she would have had to endure, she
lived and grown older and had to struggle for existence.
Malashree Lal's views that:
The novel is a fictional rendering of feminist attitude in India.25
It is not entirely correct. Both Nanda Kaul and Ila Das
[ 205 ]
represent the older generation of women who, though
conscious of their social constraints, lack assertiveness.
Nanda Kaul calmly accepts the role set by society for a
woman to play, first as a daughter, then as a wife and
mother. She can never break through the shackles of
conventions and passes the major part of her life living for
others. In her case, autonomy is desired, but never
achieved till the dusk of life and then too, without
fulfillment. There is not any mention of her desire to step
out of her home and assert her individuality in the world.
In the first place, Nanda Kaul can not be a called for
feminist. She does not protest against her husband when
she is deprived of her basic rights as his wife. Her protest is
very mild and it only comes after her husband's death, so it
can hardly be called a protest. She cannot be called a
feminist because despite her desire for autonomy, she does
not try to achieve it and lives through out like any other
tradition-on-bound woman. Again to call Raka a feminist
would be misreading the novel altogether. But Raka is a
sickly child, frustrated and bewildered, and there is no
assertion of self-hood or identity. She protests, not for the
feminist cause, but for her own. Ila Das is the only one who
can be called a feminist to some extent: She speaks up for
the cause of a woman and she lives in an illusion of
[ 206 ]
happiness, an illusion that keeps her alive; but once she
realizes the reality, she is broken up and dies soon after.
Raka lives in an illusion that she needs no human company
but her own, and can live life as animals do without any
bonds of affection and concern. But she too, is vulnerable
and runs to Nanda Kaul, whom she had so far ignored and
treated as non-existent, in the hope of gaining appreciation
from her for setting the forest on fire for she somehow feels
that what she has done might meet with Nanda's approval
and she needs comfort, for she is scared her coming home
and addressing Nanda as 'Nani' and confessing her deed to
her. Betrays her need for comfort and love; precisely the
things that Nanda has needed in her life. What makes the
story tragic is the fact that Nanda Kaul dies at a juncture
when both have had their illusions broken, both realize
how great their need for comfort and love is, and with this
realization, might have henceforth led a happy existence in
each others company; Ila Das was under the illusion that
she could transform society and purge it of its evils, but she
is the one who dies before she gets disillusioned.
There is, however, a discrepancy in the second half
of Desai's statement when she protests against child
marriage, dowry etc. and feels that a woman can be
economically independent and live without the support of a
[ 207 ]
male. But she too lacks assertiveness. It is ironical that she
should stand up for the cause of others but not for herself,
for though she tries to defend herself from the cruelties of
society. Fire on the Mountain is, therefore, not a referring of
feminist attitudes in India but the way in which three
women look at life and deal with its problem, each in her
own way.
Clear Light Of Day (1980) begins with the following
quotation from T.S. Eliot and sums up the hidden message
of the narrative:
See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured,
in another pattern.26
The clear bright light of the cosmic day pierces
through the darkness of doubt, misunderstanding,
psychological concerns and apprehensions, and finally
leads to the inner brightness of mind and soul. The central
theme of the novel unfolds a constant struggle between the
inner reality of the dominant self and the outer reality of
hard facts and failures. But in the end, the protagonist
realizes the togetherness not isolation: love, understanding,
acceptance, not bitterness and hatred; sublime faith and
[ 208 ]
eternal hope for a better morrow, not despair and
withdrawal; are the truly charitable human values. The
smoothing balm of time heals all the wounds of dejection
and failure howsoever deep the scars may be. The timely
purgation of emotions leads only to the happy cheerful faith
in the wholeness and perfection of love.
In this novel, the central conflict has been
portrayed through the major protagonist of the novel Bim
(Bimla). The outside influence of the harmony of sweet
musical notes in the beginning of the novel through
cuckoo's call, and finally that of the old guru's recital
further help in surging out the seraphic love of Bim's
affections and attachments with which she embraces all
her brothers and sister together.
The novel is a study of feminine psyche and it
illustrates the emotional reactions of the two main
characters, Bim and her younger Sister Tara. Bim is the
central character of the novel. As Ramesh Kumar Gupta
has remarked:
Clear Light of Day is chosen to evince and examine the wide space that divides the two types of women hailing from the
same family the women who do not act but surrender and so keep the tradition alive and next, the women who
[ 209 ]
choose not to surrender and be weak but break the convention to face their situation and take up a new road where
no one can dictate to them.27
Clear Light of Day, the novel by Anita Desai, has
been her most successful novel with the public. Sunil Sethi
finds in it:
The quantity of Bergman movie or a Tantric rite interpreted in terms of everyday life.28
This novel envisages a change in Desai's psychological
mood evident in her earlier novels. For the first time, the
novelist dwells upon an existentialist theme of time in
relation to eternity, hitherto unexplored in Indo-Anglian
fiction. Meenakshi Mukherjee points out that"
The change is towards a widening out of human concerns and a willingness to integrate concrete historical and specific cultural dimensions in the creation of interior landscapes.29
In an interview with Yashodhara Dalmia the novelist
remarked:
One's preoccupation can only be a
perpetual search for meaning for value, for truth. I think of the world as an iceberg . . . the one-tenth visible above the surface of the water is what we call
[ 210 ]
reality, but the nineteenths that is submerged makes up the truth, and that is what one is trying to explore.
Writing is an effort to discover and then to underline, and finally to convey the true significance of things.30
In this novel, Mrs. Desai tries to discover the true
significance of things in life. In her earlier novels she
had deal with different existentialist themes like
quest, estrangement, isolation, rootlessness, lack of
communication and helplessness etc. Her chief concern
had been existentialism that basically considers the
enduring human condition in relation to the unchanging
human destiny. She has given an admirable treatment of
time as a fourth dimension, depicting emotional turmoil in
the main protagonist. Explaining the theme of the novel,
Anita Desai states:
My novel is set in old Delhi and records the tremendous changes that a Hindu family goes through since 1947.
Basically my pre-occupation was with recording the passage of time. I was trying to write a four dimensional piece on how a family moves backwards and forwards in a period of time. My novel
is about time as a destroyer, as a preserver and about what the bondage of time does to people. I have tried to tunnel under the mundane surface of domesticity.31
[ 211 ]
Desai seems to have asked her readers to read the
novel in the perspective of time but the philosophy of time
that the novel expounds is larger than mere chronology or
history or temporality. Though localized in Delhi since
1947, the novel touches upon aspects of life that are
universal. The novelist seems to be more interested in
discovering the final patterns of meaning that come out of
the apparent meaninglessness of life in a small family than
in mere chronology.
The novel revolves around two brothers, Raja and
Baba, and two sisters Bim and Tara, who grow up in old
Delhi. They are threatened and made xenophobic by their
inability, to cognize the deep connection with one another
hidden under the apparent divergences and differences. In
their quest for individual destiny they come to the loss of a
wider-based, socially integrated deep - rootedness. The look
back at their past in anger, guilt and crave for a recovery of
a sense of wholeness and closeness that they seem to have
lost.
The study begins with the return of Tara, the
younger sister, with her husband, Bakul, a foreign
executive, to attend the marriage of Raja's daughter in
Hyderabad. First, they visit their old Delhi house where
[ 212 ]
only Baba, the younger brother and Bim, the elder sister
are living. Tara is engulfed by the disturbing memories of
her childhood and the atmosphere of surrealistic states
that the old house produces, "Years of westernized and
antiseptic living in different capital cities have not exercised
these ghosts from a vividly remembered past from Tara's
mind."27 she goes back into the darkest depth of the past
together with her sister Bim. Together they wade across the
sea of anger, guilt, fear and remorse.
Tara is a highly sensitive and extremely imaginative
woman whose flights of fancy are kept somewhat in check
by Bakul, her assertive husband and by the presence of her
two almost grown up daughters. But Tara is not at piece
with herself. She comes to the old decaying house, trying to
exercise the ghosts of her childhood and adolescence. The
past bears down on her with the intensity of a half-
remembered dream and she tries to go down memory's lane
to connect the past with the present, to inter-relate the
changes, distortions and revelations that the two realities
bring.
The house is decaying slowly and so are its
inhabitants. In all these years that Tara has been away
from her old house and has a family of her own, Bim, the
[ 213 ]
brilliant but eccentric sister has became a school teacher,
and Baba, an elf-like but imbecile younger brother have
never left the house. The house is like a tomb in the great
cemetery of Delhi which does not change or rejuvenate
itself. Images of decay and destruction assault Tara's
consciousness constantly as she watches her sister and her
retarded brother. Her sister is graying, bitter, grappling
with dull students her brother is smooth, silent, white,
locked in his lunatic world constantly listening to the
records of the forties.
Reminiscences continue to invade Tara's mind. She
recalls the old well where a cow had drowned and remained
unsalvaged, the picnic in the Lodhi Garden where Bim was
attached by the bees while she herself escaped. She also
remembers her father injecting insulin into her mother's
arm making her feel that he is murdering her. Her
nightmarish vision of the insane aunt tearing her clothes in
alcoholic frenzy comes back to her mind. She revives the
memory of Raja, her elder brother so full of promise, yet
languishing in bed sick with tuberculosis. The decadent
pomp of Hyder Ali Benazir and the collusion of Raja and
Bim against her as well as her insufferable sense of
isolation at home and at school constantly invade her mind.
[ 214 ]
When Tara becomes mature, she chooses to be a
wife and mother and gets marries and goes abroad with her
husband. She is the only one among her brothers and
sisters, who escapes the pall of decay and death that the
old house thrusts on all. Bim, exposed to the world of
knowledge, imbibes the heroic idealism of Joan of Arc.
Whereas Tara discovers a world of tenderness and love in
her adolescent infatuation with her teacher and she prefers
to hide under Aunt Mira's quilt or behind shrubs in the
garden rather than doing anything constructive.
Tara was not happy during her schooldays. Apart
from an unhappy childhood, her schooldays were also dull
and dreary, blighting all the prospects of comfort and
security that she so earnestly longed for. She became a
complete pessimist think that these grey wretched days
would stretch on forever blighting her life with their
creeping mildew. Tara's life was full of anxiety and
helplessness and she became timid and shy developed a
fear psychosis which made her a weak individual. She was
conscious of the fact that she had abandoned Bim, not
because of spite or retaliation but because of fear. While
Bim stood firmly against marriage, Tara provided a contrast
to Bim's fierce independence, hedged in as she is, by her
fear and insecurity.
[ 215 ]
For many years Tara passed through tremendous
mental torture and guilt for having abandoned Bim and her
mentally retarded brother. When she wanted to ask her
forgiveness for her running away from the bees that
swarmed around them in Lodhi Garden, leaving Bim to
their mercy, it is symbolic of her asking for forgiveness for
the greater abandonment of Bim forever. She feels guilty of
breaking out, seeking fulfillment elsewhere while Bim
stagnates and Raja too abdicates responsibility running
away to Hyderabad with Benazir.
The two sisters are poles apart so far as their ways
and aims of life are concerned. This difference in them is
the outcome of their tendency to live either by reason or
emotion and imagination and is reflected the types of books
they liked reading Tara enjoyed listening to the fairy tales
narrated by Aunt Mira and being an incurable romantic,
she believed firmly in the possibility of coming upon a
treasure or at least a pearl in the shells she picked up in
their garden. She was happy to reading romantic novels
specially Gone with Wind and was happy to be dominated
by her husband Bakul who had preferred her to Bim
because of her gentle and soft nature. Although Bakul
admired Bim's sharp mind and strong domineering
personality he chose Tara to be his wife who would be more
[ 216 ]
gentle and easily manageable. Tara had read romances and
in reading them she had been dragged helplessly into the
underworld of semi-consciousness of the romances while
Bim felt irritated and tossed them aside dissatisfaction.
Bim's sharp mind did not give in an easily to
romance and romantic feelings instead she developed a
liking for reading history and chronology. Her interest in
history grows and she begins reading. Gibbon's Decline and
Fall in search of knowledge. As she realizes the mediocrity
of her brother's compositions she cringes at a kind of heavy
sentimentality of expression that was alien to her. She
becomes conscious of her inability to give in to excessive
emotions. Raja also realizes this development in her and
admires her intellectual interest for he is not at all unaware
of his inability to accomplish something.
In order to have a psychological perspective of the
novel and particularly of the protagonist Bim, it would be
fruitful to look at the formative influences that affect Bim's
psyche. Raja, Bim, Tara and Baba all have a home, a family
but their parents are so engrossed in their Rashanara club
and cards that there is a wide communication-gap between
the children and the parents and they turn to Mira Masi for
love. Raja and Bim do not appear to be in need of a mother,
[ 217 ]
too busy as they are in their hectic outdoor activities. But
her presence is there, and they could turned to her
whenever need be. She acts as a saviour for Tara who
clings to her for protection against the elder brothers and
sisters much of the emotional crisis is warded off just
because Mira Masi, a good mother is there. Baba, the
retarded child, gets emotional security and Tara, the
weakest of the three, changes from the protective love of her
aunt to that of Bakul and is happy with her life. the
atmosphere of home affects Raja and he turns into an
escapist, a self centered dreamy romantic, shrugs off all
responsibilities like the parents, and settles down to an
ordinary life. It is Bim, an avid a reader of Eliot, Byron,
Swin burn shifts between past memories and present
realities, vacillates between her self alienating forces and
her strength of spirit and mind. How she emerges out of
these is the question.
Bim's awareness and mental alertness are revealed
in her decision not to enter in to a marriage with a person
like Dr. Biswas. A well-off officer like him, particularly for a
young girl in Bim's situation could be a romantic
experience. She could have responded positively to the
doctor's courting, but she decides to decline it. At first, she
is swayed yet she at once realizes that he is not a man
[ 218 ]
made for her. Mr. Biswas understands why Bim is not
willing to marry him. She has dedicated her life to others;
to her sick brother and her aged aunt who will be
dependent on her for the rest of her life. Bim feels hurt at
being so grossly misjudged by Dr. Biswas; she reacts
vehemently, presses her hands together, as if to break
something, but soon drowns her rage and frustration with
laughter. Her struggle to close all doors on the past and run
away from conflict commences with this breaking up of self
image.
Living in the house where she was born, teaching
in the college where she was taught, Bim, unlike all others,
is not a highly strung and neurotic creature tormented by
the uncertainties of the past and present. Memories of the
past haunt her and as she goes about picking the pieces of
the past and connecting them with the present, the house
seems drenched in a deceptive calm. Yet underneath the
polite murmurings, unspoken demands and exchanged
glances; underneath this dull routine and domestic
placidity, the imponderables remain. Hints of incest,
unguarded recriminations and private traumas do not
provide answers to Bim's tormented vision and thus she
remains isolated from her brothers and sisters. Her
separation from her brothers and sisters gives her a sense
[ 219 ]
of incompleteness, of being unfulfilled and slowly
disintegrating. She loses her sense of coordination within
herself and with others and feels isolated and unwanted.
She even rejects Tara's and Raja's gestures of love and
affection, for she feels that she is somewhat different from
others.
But there is other side of the picture too. Bim, in
her childhood, had been Raja's companion in his robust
boyish activities. She was ambitious enough to see herself
in the image of a heroine. In their childhood game of
questions, the inevitable answer to what she would be
when she grew up was always that she would become a
heroine. The traces of these qualities are still present in
her. She displays her sincere urge to be independent, to do
something. The sincerity of her determination has the seed
of self actualizing tendencies; but her aggressiveness
changes, imperceptibly, into a glorified image. Bim's
glorified self image thus is that of heroic figure who can
achieve something in life. Earnest endeavour to be really
great like others indicates growth but trouble arises when
instead of the real self the idealized self-image is upheld.
Here, it is important to have a glimpse of their home by
atmosphere, the mounting dissatisfaction in their family,
the growing adolescents Tara and Bim becoming infected
[ 220 ]
with some of Raja's restlessness.
Raja married with Benazir, the daughter of his long
cherished hero, Hyder Ali Sahib, and went away to settle
down in Hyderabad. Here Usha Rani has remarked:
He changed his role from a brother to a landlord and had the guts to write to Bim that, she could keep on paying the same sent as before.32
The tone and meaning of the letter deeply stabbed her soul.
He too never looked back. Bim found it very hard to
reconcile with this harsh reality. The thought of the
insulting letter haunted her mind constantly and she failed
to understand the real intention of Raja.
Raja achieves his goal by second-hand means by
betraying Bim; Bim stuck as she is with her abnormal
brother, Baba is entangled, feels lost and also inferior to
Raja and Tara who attained what they aspired for Bim is
not jealous but the futility of her desires torments her. Her
main tendency is to grasp power and glory. Triumph for her
means to be at par with Raja to wear his clothes to puff his
cigarettes secretly, to fly kits with him are some of her
passions in the field of physical activities. In the intellectual
arena their paths diverge as they grow up. Boy's books like
Robin Hood etc. that set Raja's imagination ablaze, have no
[ 221 ]
fascination for her, nor can she enjoy the light romances
dragging her into the underworld of semi-consciousness,
like Tara. Bim cultivates a higher taste in her reading. She
reads Bibbor's Decline and Fall and this enkindles in Raja a
sense of applause, admiration and awe for her intellectual
depth. But apparently he ridicules her for her lack of
imagination which hurts and puzzles Bim and this
naturally creates a gap between them. Bim resents
marriage of Raja with the neighbour's daughter, Benzir,
and moving to Hyderabad away from her. She too wishes to
be independent like him and is left, behind, lonely in the
house engulfed with bitterness with Raja and Tara, who she
thinks, have broken apart from their childhood closeness
and become very different. She feels rejected, deserted and
needs a renewed sense of self-justification. Reacting
violently when Raja leaves, she tends to exaggerate Raja's
action and feels that he is too rich, too fat, too successful to
be an interesting anymore. Bim succeeds in presenting an
exaggerated view of her suffering and realizes that:
somewhere deep down this frustration lies the under-
current of fear of being left alone.
Over the years her memory had tricked her into
thinking that Raja was a hero, but she now realizes that a
spokesman of Mughal decadence in the crumbling old
[ 222 ]
Delhi. She discovers that he was just mouthing Byron and
Swinburne and Iqbal in a fever of vain romanticism without
any belief in them; he was a mere imitation, not an original
poet. Being merely repetitive, too weak to confront reality,
he had run away, abdicating all responsibility. Part of the
debris accumulated form the past is now cleared up by Bim
as her new awareness, her self-knowledge, crumbles and
discards the false romantic image she had built up of Raja.
Raja would not matter to her any more. His poems were
really derivative because on each of them she could clearly
see the influence of the poets he loved and copied. There
was no image, no metaphor, no turn of phrase that was
original. Each was a meticulous imitation of what he had
read, memorized and recited. He had made no effort to
break the iron rings of clinches, he had seemed content to
link them, ring to ring, he had not, it seemed, really set out
to startle by originality, to burst upon the literary world as
a new star, fresh and vivid. One could see in them only a
wish to emulate and to step where his heroes had stepped
before him. This destruction of the heroic image of Raja
makes Bim aware that she is not a heroine either. The
fictitious image of self, she had guarded so well, dissolves is
the process and the emergence of a new self provides an
opportunity and a scale to re-evaluate and re-judge her.
[ 223 ]
Her new awareness does not mean that she is out
of the wood yet. Her personality achieves continuity in time
as she develops an ability to integrate the past and the
future. The past is irrevocable and memories cannot be
wiped out. Individual personality is made up of memories,
habits and reactions. The past is to be digested, so that it
assimilates with the personality and does not remain alien
to it. Against the metaphors of decay the crumbling old
house, the decaying old city, the conflicts of the post-
independence era she has to work her way out through the
tapestry of jealousy, guilt, loneliness and betrayal. It is to
her credit that she tries, repeatedly to clear herself of the
debris from the past to organize herself into some sort of
order, life and happiness. Her ordinary working life, her
routine of teaching at college is of great help in maintaining
her sanity, her spirit and her profession helps her to be a
whole, sane being against all odd. She used to long for the
college to re-open so that by following a time-table, she
would be able to end the storm of emotion in which she had
been dragged back and forth all summer as in a vast, warm
ocean, and return to what she did best, most efficiently,
with least expense of spirit.
Bim's psychic movement from self isolation to self
awareness is the journey of self temporarily befogged by
[ 224 ]
compulsive drives. Some critics are of the view that Bim's
transformation from sickness to health is not convincing.
Growth is a continuous process, and the real self of man is
not completely obliterated. It is always present and strives
to come up at the slightest opportunity. Bim's character, all
through the novel, shows some positive qualities but her
circumstances and her inability to see what she really
wants from life, impede her growth and diffuse her
energies. Slowly as the narrative unfolds, we observe her
renovated vision. She attains internal freedom; and is
liberated from her twisted vision and confused values. By
forging unity into the diverse fragments of her world into a
unified whole Bim achieves wholeness and when she is able
to establish a viable contact with her surroundings and her
siblings.
Bim's realization of her relations with her self is
related to her experience of music in the last part of the
novel. In the music programme organised by Mishra's we
find her realization widening into a broader awareness of
time, culture and society. Bim and Baba attend the
programme, after Tara, Bakul and their daughter have left
for attending the wedding of Raja's daughter at Hyderabad.
Bim has conveyed through, Tara her desire to make peace
with Raja and invited him to the house in Delhi. In the
[ 225 ]
evening at the Mishra's house she finds a carefully planned
and executed programme. The individual's skill in singing
becomes and occasion of social relationship. The
programme is also a group activity - Mulk, his Guru, the
accompanist together create an atmosphere of harmony. A
relaxed, congenial and friendly atmosphere prevails, with
all the persons sharing and belonging to a cultured society.
Traditions of music, musical programmes are observed, and
congenial individual-society relations are seen here. The
aspirations of the individual, the singer's search for his own
right combination of notes and melody, more in harmony
with the old traditional form which moulds and renews
itself from an age to age. The evening audience and singers
all together form a congenial whole, like a design on a
tapestry, forming that composed absorbed group before
them. While listening to the song of Mulk's Guru, whose
voice was sharp and cracked by the bitterness of his
experience, the sadness, passion and frustration, Bim is
reminded of T.S. Eliot's Four Quarters in which time is the
destroyer as well as the preserver and looks through her
own inner life, her own house and its particular history
and, analyzing herself, establishes identification of the
inner and the outer worlds. Her despair and loneliness are
thus given a spiritual dimension in the novel.
[ 226 ]
Thus, in Bim Mrs. Desai studies the intelligent
woman's psyche, the woman who is aware of her
potentialities and sense of direction. She is aware of the
incompatible sex roles inflicted upon women by the
male dominated society, of threats to feminine identity.
Burdened with heavy responsibilities, she is pinned down
to narrow worlds of immobility and insecurity. In a society
where no room is made for woman's sensibility or
individuality, where every attempt at asserting her feminity
and individuality leads her to being called neurotic, where
her male counterpart invariably fails in his traditional
masculine role, the woman is made to feel like a frail bark
upon the waters of life. Yet, there is hope in women like
Bim, who have the courage to withstand the onslaughts of
time and society, who lead their lives on their own terms,
who ask for the deeper morality of intelligent beings, who
struggle for the loyalties of sensitive human sensitiveness.
As Ramesh Gupta has said:
Bim is fairly representative of a
new woman of contemporary Indian urban woman-single, independent, self assured. At a superficial level, such women may be seen as westernized.33
Bim's younger brother Baba, whose problems are
slightly different, is a lively and an innocent figure. Lack of
[ 227 ]
ability to conceptualize and communicate forces place, a
vacuum of silence upon him and he fills it with the sounds
of gramophone records of the 1940s, refusing to change the
familiar instrument and records by the latest music system
brought for him as a gift by Raja. Forced to live on the
periphery of the lives of others, he creates her society in the
sounds that he can control and regulate. His withdrawal
from the world, his silence, and his undemanding existence
give him an aura of other worldliness. Both Bim and Tara
think of his lack of worldly concern and it becomes a test of
their sensitivity and perceptivity when they insist on his
going to the office and trying to learn to work, he at first
ignores them by his reticence. But as the pressure of their
will increases, he leaves the house in a state of acute
tension and fear, and the sight of a man cruelly beating his
horse sends him rushing back. In his room the
gramophone has been put off, and Baba feels threatened by
the overwhelming silence. When Tara comes to his room it
rings with her voice, then with her silence and in the
shaded darkness, silence has the quality of a looming
dragon. Even Tara senses the oppressive silence in the
room and wonders, whether it was to keep his silence at
boy that Baba played his records endlessly. Change and
growth frighten Baba where ability to understand other and
[ 228 ]
comprehend abstract concept is severely limited. For him,
time is at a standstill, and any indications of change
disturb him. His routine life is governed by the circular
motion of the gramophone records and as he changes the
needle of the gramophone, he feels defeated and infinitely
depressed. This fondness for music is limited to the music
of 1940's for he has no liking for contemporary music and
is also unable to respond to the musical notes of the
various birds calling out in their garden. Not only do these
other sounds arouse his interest, he finds comfort and
consolation only in the mechanical music.
Mira Masi has been portrayed as the traditional
picture of an unwanted widow who leads a life of drudgery
till her death for her husband's family or for relatives. Since
Mr. & Mrs. Das have no time to look after their children,
she is brought to Das family where she plays the genuine
role of a mother and identifies herself with the family
interest. She feels protective towards her children and her
charming, self denying, affectionate personality represents
the traditional Indian woman working and suffering for
others.
Mrs. Das, the mother of the family suffers from
diabetes and does not enjoy good health. Her physical
[ 229 ]
ailments make her husband devote most of his time to
entertain her at a game of cards and in the club. She is
conscious of her duties towards her husband but, husband
and wife are so absorbed in each other that they find little
time for the children and the family. They live for each
other and die almost together. The only bright aspect of
their character is their deep concern for their imbecile son,
Baba for whom Mr. Das leaves some money after his death.
Bakul, the humorous character, is an excellent
specimen of Mrs. Desai's character portrayal. He leads a
formalized ritualistically perfect routine of a life and makes
his wife yield to his will and system. The daughters of Tara
and Bakul are charming young girls who introduce some
liveliness even in the dull and dreary routine of Baba's life.
Hyder Ali whose house is frequented by poets and
Muslim advocates, is another character with mentioning in
the novel. He arouses Raja's respect and emulation and
Raja is drawn towards Benazir, Hyder's pampered only
child who is presented in the novel only as a phantom and
so is her son Riaz. Other minor characters and servants
impart liveliness to the novel. Portraits of Mishra, sister,
brothers and the old father add to the diversity and
richness of human portraits in the book. Dr. Biswas and
[ 230 ]
his mother are excellent creations.
The central psychic conflict is portrayed through
the major protagonist of the novel, Bim, who has to
undergo so many tensions, tortures and mental agonies.
But she finally emerges not only as a triumphant
personality but also becomes personification of the time
eternal. She is symbolic of the time past, the time present
and the time future, all meeting at one point.
The novel, a sweet bitter story of a family reunion
moves from the past to the present and from present to the
past. The canvas is vast and the novelist's presents a larger
number of characters than she has done ever before. Her
delineation of characters is marked with detachment and
insight. Several points of view of different characters have
been successfully portrayed by the universal observer
technique which Mrs. Desai adopts in this novel, as it
dynamically suits her purpose. Accounts of past events
with their present reactions are excellently depicted.
Clear Light of Day is by far the most affirmative of
Anita Desai's novels. There is anger and bitterness but
there is also an attempt to reconcile and accommodate.
Unlike other female protagonists of Anita Desai, Bim is
symbolic of forces that have sustained the foundation of all
[ 231 ]
family life. She is symbolic of the sustaining mother who
denies herself so that her children can lead better lives.
When her mother fails to fulfill her duties, Bim steps into
her shoes and takes over the role of the mother. Bim not
only sustains the family but also the house and this is
suggestive of an acceptance of traditional values. But the
greatness of Bim lies in the fact that she is symbolic of the
new woman in her desire to dress like a man smoking and
opting out of matrimony to pursue a career of her own, with
the ability to accept what life has to offer her gracefully.
It appears reasonable to conclude from Bim's
personal and professional interest in history that she finds
in it a much needed feeling of stability, of continuity,
concomitant with change. Her interest in poetry likewise
reflects her inner experience of life's transitoriness and
uncertainty and these intellectual and imaginative interests
are her means of contemplating and dwelling in a more
satisfying world.
Of all her works, Clear Light of Day is undoubtedly
Desai's most genuinely feminine work in the sense that it
presents exclusively a woman's point of view and her ways
of tackling the problems of life and struggling for freedom.
The novels written by the other two women writers chosen
[ 232 ]
in this study do not present this intellectual or spiritual
crisis of a woman. Bim's line of thinking may not be
acceptable to the modern mind nevertheless she does have
a mind of her own. This is a positive virtue, which many
other women lack.
The fact is that among all the women protagonists
in Desai's novels, Bim stands apart with her unique and
extraordinary capacity to brave and cope with the suffering,
the failures and the pains. In a way she is the combination
of Maya, Sita, Nanda and Sarah, yet she is much more than
all of them together.
Her inner courage and strength, her real self,
surpasses them all and she emerges triumphant with a
divine love and affection. Inspite of all dejections and
disappointments, Bim embraces her brothers and sister in
all their totality. She is also unique the way she cheerfully
accepts the truth of life in all its shades and there in lies
the real beauty of her existence. Bim's realization of the
meaning of life through love is also expressive of the time's
healthy effect on one's psychic health.
*****
[ 233 ]
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. Rani, Usha. Psychological Conflict in the Fiction of
Anita Desai, Abhishek Public-ation Chandigarh,
2006, p. 15.
2. Desai, Anita. "The Book I Enjoyed Writing Most",
Contemporary Indian Literature, XIII, No. 4, Oct.-Dec.
1973, p. 24.
3. Ram Atma."Anita Desai: The Novelist who writes For
Herself", An Interviewed by Atma Ram. The Journal of
Indian Writing in English. Vol. 5 No. 2, July 1977,
p. 31.
4. Barke, G.D. "A Study of Alienation in Bye-Bye
Blackbird and The Strange Case of Billy Biswas"
Critical Essays on Anita Desai's Fiction. Ed.
Jaydipsingh Dodiya Pub. IVY. Publishing House, New
Delhi, 2000, p. 93.
5. Desai, Anita. Bye-Bye Blackbird, pub. Orient
Paperbacks, Delhi, 1985, p. 32.
6. Ibid., p. 72.
7. Toffler, Alwin. Future Shock, London, The Bodlehead.
1970, p. 13.
8. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. "The Theme of Displacement
In Anita Desai And Kamla Markandaya", World
Literature Written In English, 17, No. 1, April 1978,
pp. 225-33.
9. Barke, G.D. "A Study of Alienation in Bye-Bye
Blackbird And The Strange Case of Billy Biswas",
[ 234 ]
Critical Essays on Anita Desai's Fiction, ed.
Jaydipsingh Dodiya Pub. IVY, Publishing House,
Delhi, 2000, p. 97.
10. Manawat, B. Dushyant. "Ethnic Love - Hate Relation-
ship in Bye-Bye Blackbird". Critical Essays on Anita
Desai's Fiction, ed. Jaydipsingh Dodiya, pub. IVY,
Publishing House, New Delhi, 2000, p. 93.
11. Desai, Anita. Flight of Form, India International
Centre Quarterly, Vol. 10. No. 4, D., 1982.
12. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. "The Theme of Displacement
in Anita Desai And Kamla Markandaya" World
Literature Written in English, No. 1, April 1978,
p. 240.
13. Rani, Usha. Psychological Conflict in the Fiction of
Anita Desai, Abhishek Publication, Chandigarh,
2006, p. 129.
14. Dubbe, P.D. "Feminine Consciousness in Anita
Desai's Fire on the Mountain". Critical Essays on Anita
Desai's Fiction, ed. Jaydipsingh Dodiya Pub. IVY,
Publishing House, New Delhi, 2000, p. 121.
15. Szxena, Alka. "The Impending Tragedy in Fire on the
Mountain". Critical Essays on Anita Desai's Fiction, ed.
Jaydipsingh Dodiya Publ. IVY, Publishing House,
New Delhi, 2000, p. 124.
16. Horney, Karan. The Neurotic Personality of Our Time,
New York: Norton. 1937.
17. Tripathi, J.P. The Mind and Art of Anita Desai,
Bareilly, Prakash Book Depot, 1986, p. 83.
[ 235 ]
18. Wall Stephen. A Neurotic Response To A Failed
Marriage: George Meredith's Modern Love. Mosaic
XVII/1, Winter 1984, p. 51.
19. Dubey, P.D. "Feminine Consciousness in Anita
Desai's Fire on the Mountain", Critical Essays on Anita
Desai's Fiction. ed. Jaydipsingh Dodiya, Pub IVY,
Publishing House, Delhi, 2000, p. 116.
20. Sharma, R.S. Anita Desai Indian Writer Series, Vol.
18, New Delhi, Arnold, Heinemann, 1971.
21. Dubey, P.D. "Feminine Consciousness in Anita
Desai's Fire on the Mountain", Critical Essays on Anita
Desai's Fiction ed. Jaydipsingh Dodiya. Pub. IVY,
Publishing House, Delhi, 2000, p. 121.
22. Saxena, Alka. "The Impending Tragedy in Fire on the
Mountain", Critical Essays on Anita Desai's Fiction ed.
Jaydipsingh Dodiya. Pub. IVY, Publishing House,
Delhi, 2000, p. 127.
23. Desai, Anita. Fire on the Mountain, William
Heinemann, London 1977: Allied Publishers, New
Delhi, 1977.
24. Lal, Malashri. "Anita Desai: Fire on the Mountain",
Major Indian Novels and Evaluations, ed. N.S.
Pradhan, New Delhi, Arnold Heinemann, 1985.
25. Ibid., p. 252.
26. Rani, Usha. Psychological Conflict in the Novels of
Anita Desai, Abhishek Publication, Chandigarh,
2006, p. 203.
27. Gupta, Ramesh Kumar. "The Concept of 'New
[ 236 ]
Woman' in Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day." Critical
Essays On Anita Desai's Fiction ed. Jaydipsingh
Dodiya. Pub. IVY, Publishing House, New Delhi,
2000, p. 153.
28. Sethi, Sunil. "Pieces of the Past: Review of Clear Light
of Day", India Today, S.No. 23, Dec. 1-15, 1980.
29. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. "A Review of Clear Light of
Day", The Hindustan Times, 8th Dec., 1980.
30. Dalmia, Yashodhara. "An Interview with Anita Desai",
The Times of India, 29th April, 1979.
31. Desai, Anita. "The Book I Enjoyed Writing Most",
Contemporary Indian Literature, XIII, 4, 1973.
32. Rani, Usha. Psychological Conflict in the novels of
Anita Desai, Abhishek Publication Chandigarh 2006,
p. 207.
33. Gupta, Ramesh Kumar "The Concept of New Woman
In Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day", Critical Essay on
the Anita Desai's Fiction ed. Jaydipsingh Dodiya Pub.
IVY, Publishing House, New Delhi, 2000, p. 153
*****