what is the moral of the story the squirrel by ambai
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Ambai’s early stories conformed to traditional precepts but the second phase of her writing that began with Sriragugal Muriyum (‘Wings get Broken’), propelled her towards serious self-expression and a questioning of the centuries of oppression to which women have been submitting without so much as a murmur. Chaya, the neglected wife in ‘Wings get Broken,’ questions the sanctity of marriage even though ultimately she resigns herself to her fate. It is small wonder that all established magazines rejected the story. Ambai’s voice registered displeasure and agitated the calm surface of conventionality and conservatism. She realized that self-expression for women writers had no place in the male-dominated literary scene. She remarked that her story about the protesting wife could have been published ‘if the girl Chaya had committed suicide or had been killed as a punishment for her “sinful” thoughts. Traditionally she has no right to live the moment she questions, even to herself the sanctity of marriage.’ Ambai, however, was not one to be cowed down by convention or be dictated to by market forces. For her writing was a vehicle for expressing herself and in the story she highlighted the way men have circumscribed the world of women and determined their parameters for them. She has delineated a wide variety of women characters in her stories. Ranging from Chandra who enjoys the protective cover of her household, which nevertheless works as a control in ‘Gifts’; to Jiji who takes pride in slaving for her family and is overjoyed by the authority that a bunch of keys brings her way ‘A Kitchen in the Corner of the House.’ Then there is Rosa, who, though a victim of custodial torture and rape refuses to be used as a pawn by people who want to cash in on the publicity in ‘Black Horse Square.’ In ‘Wrestling,’ Shenbagam quietly asserts her position as she slips into her rightful place on the stage, singing with her husband, Shanmugam. The place that she claims for herself had been denied her till now due to her husband’s fear of being overshadowed by his wife. The facets are many and all make a disconcerting statement about the position of women in society. As Venkat Swaminathan observes, ‘Shorn of the specificity of time, place and milieu, the undercurrent is a cry against oppression which is timeless and universal,’ (From Many Indias, Many Literatures). Ambai pointed out in her works, the innumerable clever and subtle ways in which society sought to suppress and repress women in all areas of life. She protested against ingeniously cultivated beliefs, against deep entrenchment of traditional ideas about womanhood that prevented women from seeing themselves as persons, separate from their family, parents, husbands, and children. She boldly sought to foreground the feminist concerns through her writings and succeeded in forcing people to take notice despite the stories being unconventional not just in their choice of subject and theme but also in their treatment of the same, in Ambai’s experimentation with form.
Ambai moved from writing simple realistic stories to highly complex ones where she made use of multiple perspectives, various levels of narration, and plurality of voices and skillfully wove in symbolic and archetypal sequences which at times placed an ironic interpretation on the main narrative. At times her stories were just a series of reflections, interior monologue which effected the protagonist’s ‘realization of the tragic contrast between the freedom of the inner world and the constraints of the outer world’ (Chaya in ‘Wings Get Broken’). At other times she experimented with form using the structure of a fable (‘Yellow Fish’) or a collage of surrealist images as in ‘Some Deaths.’ Then there were stories like ‘My Mother her Crime’ which had an inter-mingling of dream and reality. Lakshmi Holmstrom has observed that in Ambai’s work ‘there is a kind of exhilaration in this playing with forms at the height of her work, in what looks like post-modernistic techniques of multiple perspectives - many voices, fragmented and interspersed narratives – techniques which are normally used in the post modern novel.’ Ambai’s method is post modern but on the other side of it is her rootedness in Tamil literature and culture which is evident in her easy and often inverted use of allusions such as Ahalia in ‘Squirrel’ or Vamanan in the story with the same title.