“Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being...”(Albert Einstein) However, it increasingly difficult travel down both these paths, as, society’s expectations are quite different to personal desires. Many times it creates feelings of dissonance in the individual, as he or she is forced to make a decision between two facets of human existence. It is this personal conflict which is the theme of Mira Nair’s film, Monsoon Wedding. It explores the life of a middle-class Indian family, preparing for the wedding of their daughter Aditi. Into the wedding, Nair introduces to the family, some of the harsh realities of life. She incorporates the imagery, songs, and the framing of shots which are unique to the text type, as well as the defiant acts against socio-cultural obligations shown by the characters of Aditi and Alice, to emphasise the underlying conflict between social obligations and personal aspirations. The character of Aditi is portrayed in a setting of wealth and status, but the social expectations which adjoin this status, are at odds with her own hopes and desires. Aditi is born into an upper middle-class Indian family and is therefore, entitled to all the pleasures of life. A wide-angle shot of the canopy which is to hold her wedding, reveals the grand scale of the event. But in this setting of prosperity the audience witness her riotous intentions. A long distance shot of jeep is framed with a Banyan tree encompassing most of the background. The jeep is the sanctum for the illicit love between Aditi and Vikram, a married man. In the Indian milieu, this is against the moral traditions and statutes which have been upheld for centuries. The reader is shocked because this act is committed on the eve of ... ... middle of paper ... ...tions, is through the actions of discourse against the economic class divide imposed by Indian society. Nair reveals to the reader that personal aspirations are suppressed by the social obligations of society and that, the only option for one who wishes to live out their desires is to operate in secretive defiance. This is especially seen through the shot of the Jeep and the Banyan tree. The contrasting character of Aditi and Alice highlight the fact that this clash occurs in all classes in Indian society. It is through these same characters that the reader is able to understand that the acts of having an affair and as wearing something which belongs to another, are not acts which are committed with devilish intent, but rather, they are ways of dealing with the dissonance caused by the clash in the two worlds, of person and society. Works Cited Albert Einstein
The author and her friends, Judewin and Thowin, alone with other children got excited about an adventure in to a new land. Their excitement was short because of their painful experiences from the white’s ignorance of the Indian culture. When a white women saw her arrived the school, she tossed her up in the air several times. It was insulting for her because of against the Indian culture. Her stay at the school was other painful experience.
In America, long gone are the days of gender based marital roles where the man financially provides for the family, and where the woman is uneducated, maintains the household, and regards her husband as superior. In today’s western society, education is for all individuals, marital roles are defined by both spouses, and needs are equally important regardless of gender. In contrast, there are cultures still existing who value the old marital traditions. The protagonist, simply referred to as “the husband”, in Divakaruni’s The Disappearance, is a fully developed character who values these old traditions still active in his homeland of India; ill equipped to cope with western culture and unable to respect his wife’s needs, this static character is a victim of his actions.
The narrator’s family considers socializing as a principal habit in Indian society. They have only one neighbor behind the fence, they are surrounded by a government office and a high
In attempting to define the history and modern identity of postcolonial nations, Partha Chatterjee calls to attention the many paradoxes inherent in the cultural fabric of India. It is a country, he notes, with a modern culture based on native tradition that has been influenced by its colonial period. This modern culture contains conflicts and contradictions that create the ambiguity in India’s national identity. U. R. Anantha Murthy’s understands Indian culture as a mosaic pattern of tradition and modernity. He writes of a heterodox reality where the intellectual self is in conflict with the emotional, the rational individual experiences the sad nostalgia of the exile from his traditional roots and in fluctuating between belief and non-belief he works out his dilemmas. This paper attempts a reading of the transgression of “Love Laws” in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as not only the representation of this heterodox modernity in the personal domain as a reflection of the larger national conflict but also a postcolonial writer’s dilemmas in search for an identity and their troubles in expressing it.
Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, places Jane Austen’s emphasis of equality in marriage within an intercultural context, where the difference in culture is the source of social tension. As West meets East, American tycoon William Darcy sparks cultural conflict with his presumption of Indian girls’ “simple” and traditional characteristics and of their ready subordination to American men. Parallel to Elizabeth’s assertion of her father and Darcy’s equal class standing, Lalita’s fierce rebuttal of Darcy’s assumption highlights his ignorance of the Indian culture, especially his inability to understa...
“Despite so many reforms, the idea of untouchability is still very much a part of Indian life." (doc A) There are hundreds of millions of people trapped under the poverty line in India, who can’t escape. They are kept in a cycle of poverty with no end. However, instead of getting the help that they need, they are being pushed further down into poverty, leading to generations of families trapped. The cycle of poverty in India is being pushed along by discrimination of the poor. The poor are discriminated against by being denied health care, pushed out of school, and targeted by officials, which leads to more poverty.
J. Eng. Lit. Cult. becomes merely “Street” as (does) Lingayat Street, Mudliyar Street and half a dozen others in Toturpuram” (5) in a gesture of egalitarianism whose effects are literally, as well as symbolically, disorientating. The sense of displacement is compounded by changes that have occurred on the street itself over the last few decades- “instead of the tender smell of fresh jasmine.... in scented sticks and virtue, instead of the chanting of sacred hymns the street had become thud with the haggling of cloth merchants and vegetable vendors, (and) the strident strains of the latest film music from video parlours” (5-6). The incursion of these loud and nestling registers of cultural change into the sanctuary of Sripathi‟s study mirrors more significant assaults on his sense of traditions including most worryingly, the refusal of his children to lead the lives he has imagined for him: his daughter Maya has broken off her engagement to an Indian man to marry a Canadian with whom she now lives in Vancouver, and his son Arun has rejected a tradition job in favour of a career as an environmental activist. Sripathi responds to the affronts by ceasing to communicate, literally, in the case of Maya, with whom he has stopped corresponding, and figuratively, with Arun and the rest of his family, through a retreat into an increasingly self enclosed world. The narrative traces the gradual expansion of his consciousness, a process initiated by Maya‟s death in a car
The result of Gandhi’s nonviolent political action movements was that an exploitative class structure cannot be broken without violence somewhere along the way. Property rights, defended by state violence, have never yielded to the peaceful pressure of the exploited class. Therefore, no exploiting class has ever left the stage of history without being pushed.
What I aim to investigate: Throughout the novel, Arvind Adiga uses a plethora of metaphors to describe the happenings of Balram Hawai, and his activities. In addition to this, the author repeatedly uses ironic, and sarcastic phrases to condemn the upper class Indian society, or “the light”. This brings several key themes in the novel, which include:
Their marriage is a failure; the string that had tied their hearts was broken with the death of their child. Sobha and Sukumar begin the game of confessing secrets to one another in the dark. We proceed from harmless personal details to the harmful ones when Sobha says that she has decided on a separation and has already made arrangements for it. The climax is reached when in a spirit of revenge Sukumar describes their dead child to Sobha whom she had never seen, a secret which he had previously decided never to tell her. The story ends with the couple weeping together. The story reflects the alienation and loneliness that the emigrants face in a foreign land. The marriage bond, which is still considered sacrosanct in India, is gradually slithering down under the pressure of new needs under a different background. Nevertheless, one needs another’s touch in an emotional crisis. That is why Sobha and Sukumar, failing to find any foothold of security,
Redefining the concept of Third World Feminism, Nair emphasizes on the importance of the female voice. We encounter the bride, Aditi, for the first time, on the sets of Delhi.com as the camera zooms in to focus on an intimate kiss that she has with Vikram. A savvy woman of the city, she does not get sentimental about the possibility of Vikram divorcing his wife for she has read too many magazines to know that it might never happen. She enters into an arranged marriage with Hemant not out of any kind of parental pressure or hopelessness but out of the choice to settle down. She makes rational decisions but not at the cost of curbing her desire. Even as the family engages in the preparations for the wedding, she is found to be repeatedly making phone-calls to her ex-boyfriend. This stands in contrast to the western portrait of third world women, usually idealized as the subjugated subject. Even before the wedding, she sneaks out of the house at midnight to meet him. Through the scene of lovemaking, she emerges as a woman who has power over her body, one who can make her own sexual choices and can also, literally, drive away from the man who leaves her vulnerable among the police to face the consequences. As women who exercise their agency, the film portrays characters who take the risk of transgressing the normative order. Pimmi may transgress by smoking, though behind closed doors while Ayesha will make no mystery of her desire for Rahul. Sexual
The first of many glimpses of Jyoti’s varying identities occurs during her marriage to Prakash. The first time Prakash talks to Jyoti, he says, “She is a woman of fine sympathies…” (74). He sees her as a delicate, obedient woman who follows her family’s wishes and societies restriction on women. Jyoti describes Prakash as “A modern man…For Prakash, love was letting go. Independenc...
This essay focuses on the theme of forbidden love, The God of Small Things written by Arundhati Roy. This novel explores love and how love can’t be ignored when confronted with social boundaries. The novel examines how conventional society seeks to destroy true love as this novel is constantly connected to loss, death and sadness. This essay will explore the theme of forbidden love, by discussing and analysing Ammu and Velutha's love that is forbidden because of the ‘Love Laws’ in relation to the caste system which results in Velutha’s death. It is evident that forbidden love negatively impacts and influences other characters, such as Estha and Rahel, which results in Estha and Rahel’s incestuous encounter.
I have a dream… you have a dream… our nation has a dream… our world has a dream. We all have a dream.
In a world where labels determine much of a person’s identity, gender and culture have a strong influence on a person’s life. Uma tries to please her parents’ Hindu expectations of her, and fitting into American society. In the short story “Devadasi”, by Rishi Reddi, gender and culture based societal standards impact the protagonist Uma and how she sees her surroundings. These standards shape both Uma’s relationships with those around her and how she sees her place in the world. Today, too many people let every piece of their lives be dictated by gender and culture based expectations.