there are three major themes present in shashi Deshpande's novel the binding vine. Discuss each in detail
Answers
The Binding Vine written by Sashi Deshpande is the narration of Urmi, who was grieving over the death of her baby daughter and surrounded by the loving care of her mother, Inni and her childhood friend and sister-in-law, Vanna. Through her grief, Urmi is drawn into the lives of three very different women. As the stories of these women unfold, so does a tale of quiet courage and strength. The first woman Urmi is drawn to her long-dead mother-in-law, Mira who exists only in the notebooks she has left behind, discovered by chance in a dusty storage trunk.
Mira's journals and poetry reveal the pain of a vibrant young woman trapped in an unhappy arranged marriage, and of a gifted writer whose work, because she is a woman, must remain shrouded in secrecy and silence. Then there is Kalpana, the survivor of a brutal rape and a young woman who has also been silenced. As she hovers between life and death in a hospital ward, Kalpana is watched over by her impoverished mother, Shakutai, with whom Urmi forms an unlikely bond of mutual comfort. The lives of three women who are "haunted by fears, secrets, and deep grief" are bound together by strands of life and hope—a binding vine of love, concern, and connection that spreads across chasms of time, social class, and even death.
Memories from the past stray to Urmi’s mind and a journey to the past helps Urmi uncover mysteries about herself, but not her past alone: “The past is always clearer because it is more comprehended”. One theme that was stressed in her book is rape - both as a random violent act and within marriage.
The disgrace is not the girl's, the disgrace is the criminal's. That is not how it is. It's really the dilemma which Urmi, the narrator, faces because, if she makes it public, it's possible the family is going to be affected, and if she does not, you know it's like saying the woman is the one who is in disgrace, who has done wrong. When Bhaskar, a doctor in the hospital, raises the question of why it’s so important for women to marry, his question is raised right after Shakutai pleads with Bhaskar not to release the report of rape because it would ruin Kalpana’s chance of marriage. In his eyes, she is focusing on false significance.
She should be more concerned with the fact that her daughter is lying in a hospital bed unconscious. Reputation becomes everything for a woman. The issue that has mattered the most is the conflict between the idea women have of themselves and the idea that society imposes on them of what being a woman is. And there's a struggle to conform to this image, the guilt when you can't do that. Though, the characters are women, they represent the human being lurking inside. And that human being is often a lonely one though not one who is alone. It is a loneliness deep rooted in their souls.
It is a result of being honest with oneself. A question Urmi often asks herself is why does she feel the need to forget her dead daughter? Women are tied to their children, and the binding vine, as written by Mira, signifies the umbilical cord to which mother and child are physically connected. Urmi is emotionally numb in the beginning after the realization that her daughter is really gone: “what’s broken cannot be mended” She learns, however, that pains can be mended after she learns to reach out to those who need to find their own strengths. Shakutai’ s decision towards the close of the book, to reveal the truth about her daughter’s rape gives her a new sense of liberation. The Binding Vine beautifully brings about the feelings, which are left unspoken in the Indian women, and shows the pursuit of love in their journey of life. It’s a triumphant story of victory and defeat, when women find their voices.
In the lives of Mira, Urmi's mother-in-law, Vanna, her friend and sister-in-law, Urmi herself, Sulu and Sakuntai, Shashi Deshpande brings across to her readers that marriage is a torture for all of them. While Mira, under her husband's dominance suffers endlessly, Sulu's husband rapes her own niece and agonzses her to the limit that she commits suicide. Sakuntai, all her married life faced neglect, torture and crises which left her alone to struggle with her children while her husband married another woman. Similarly, marriage turned Urmi from a confident girl to a fearing woman who feared whether her husband would come back from the sea or he would be drowned in the sea like his friends, she fears whether her husband likes to come back to her. He is not there to console her when her daughter dies and she doesn't know how to cope with the loss.
Sakuntai's daughter Kalpana is raped by her own uncle and lay unconscious in hospital for months. It's heart-rending to to see the reaction of her own mother who tries to keep it a secret and blames her own daughter for her ways. She is worried if she is labelled as 'raped' who will marry her and what would happen of her sister. On the other hand, the rapist is free and without any guilt. Even the police officer thinks that exposing it won't do any good to anyone. Shashi Deshpande also brings to the fore that rape is not only physical torture, it is mental agony also and it can happen in marriage also. Her mother-in-law Mira's poems reveal that how she became a victim of it and how much she dislikes her husband for being so callous. She could not say anything to anyone, so she wrote them in her diary, but being a woman she could only have them hidden them in a diary that existed even after she died.
It is when Urmila struggles with her own griefs then she finds that she can come over her own sorrow by connecting with others who confront even greater sorrows. It is then, that she realizes the incongruities of women's predicament in this patriarch world and that in resolving them lies her own solutions. She comes out as a force of change that brings a change in the mind set of Kalpana's mother, society and the administration who look beyond the taboos and establish entity of a girl, even though she jis a rape victim, even though she lay mute in hospital bed.