Examples of cultural hegemony in Anita Desai's In Custody
Answers
Answer:
Indian Literature in English has journeyed a long way to achieve its present glory and grandeur. Beginning with the trio of Raja Rao, R.K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand; today it is assimilated in the rubric of Post Colonial Literature. At present it is enriched by a sizeable number of women writers read and acclaimed all over the world. Their works offer penetrative insight into the complex issues of life. The fictional concerns of these women writers are not limited to the world of women and their sufferings as victims of male hegemony they also express social, economic and political upheavals in Indian society. Among these women writers Anita Desai has earned a separate space for her particular attention towards psychological insight and existential concerns. Her sensitive portrayal and understanding of intrinsic human nature makes her writings conspicuous and captivating. She herself admits her preference for the internal world of the psychic space that has always been a major concern in her fictional writings: “My writing is an effort to discover, underline and convey the significance of things. I must seize upon that incomplete and seemingly meaningless mass of reality around me and try and discover its significance by plunging below the surface and plumbing the depths, then illuminating those depths till they become more lucid, brilliant and explicable reflection of the visible world.”1 Apart from concentrating on the problems of women and the way they impact their mind, Desai’s novels have an irresistible appeal for the treatment of the external world of politics impacted by momentous historical events. For example, her Clear Light of Day (1980) and In Custody (1984) fictionalize the life impacted by the tragic saga of the partition. The present paper is an attempt to analyze the dynamics of motive and mode that make In Custody an artistic achievement
Desai’s treatment of the questions related to the social role and implications of language forms the central thrust of the novel. Her motive becomes amply clear when she replies to a question related to the theme of the novel in the following words: “I was trying to portray the world of Urdu poets. Living in Delhi I was always surrounded by the sound of Urdu poetry, which is mostly recited. Nobody reads it, but one goes to recitations. It was very much the voice of North India. But although there is such a reverence for Urdu poetry, the fact that most Muslims left India to go to Pakistan meant that most schools and Universities of Urdu were closed. So that it’s a language I don’t think is going to survive in India ………There are many Muslims and they do write in Urdu; but it has a kind of very artificial existence. People are not going to study Urdu in school and college anymore, so who are going to be their readers? Where is the audience?”2 . The fictional discourse in the novel presents a critique of the essentialist nature of the understanding of language that treats it as related to particular communities. Her treatment of the problematic of language culture divide also marks a rejection of the view that considers langue as the real custodian of any language. In the process it marks a preference for Bakhtinian view of language that treats the parole or language in use as the real language. Language in such a view, instead of being related to any community in particular, is related to the people who use it irrespective of the community they belong to. Another view about language that finds fictional expression in the novel is related to the use of language - its teaching or learning – is not always a matter of communal responsibility rather it is more related to one’s vocation.
hoping it helps