Divakaruni’s Arranged Marriage

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Recommended: Indian feminism in literature

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Arranged Marriage (1995), a collection of eleven short stories presents portraits of Indian and India-reared American women who are forced to live a peripheral existence owing to the pressures of cultural norms, parental, familial expectations, traditions and customs aimed at conforming them to perpetuate patriarchal interests. Peripheral existence here indicates the lack of voice, authority and sense of equality for woman in a socio-cultural set up rooted in patriarchy leading to their helplessness, powerlessness, marginalization, subordination and subservience. The alien land of America might hold promise of individual freedom, financial independence, professional betterment, space to reinvent self and assert individual identity but baggage of the past is not easy to give up, holding them back, shaping their consciousnesses, influencing their actions and decisions. The lives of these women is a saga of peripheral existence caught between pulls, pressures of the old past, hopes and aspirations of the new, the present and the future. Sometimes they are seen making bold and courageous choices to carve new identities and at other times seen succumbing to the seemingly overwhelming odds. The present paper attempts to explore and understand the exciting trajectory of the lives of these women. Development and Analysis: The Bats shows a docile Indian wife who finally one day dares to leave the house of her wife-basher husband because of more than severe beating. She is sheltered by her old uncle living in the countryside who keeps her with loving care. But the wife could not stay with him for long and decides to go back to her husband because as she says she “…couldn’t stand it, the s... ... middle of paper ... ... Concepts. Routledge. Indian Reprint 2009. Uma Parameswaran. “Home is where your feet are, and may your heart be there too!”,Writers of the Indian Diaspora. Ed. Jasbir Jain. Jaipur: Rawat Publication.1998. Jain, Jasbir and Veena Singh (Ed.) Women’s Writing: Dialogue with Patriarchy. New Delhi: Creative Books. 2005. Nayar, Pramod K. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory. New Delhi: Dorling Kindersley(India)Pvt.Ltd., 2010. Sinha, Sunita. Post-Colonial Women Writers: New Perspectives. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributers (P) Ltd. 2008. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Feminism and Critical Theory”, Modern Criticism and Theory, Ed. David Lodge. 2nd ed. New Delhi: Pearson Education, Inc. and Dorling Kindersley Publishing Inc. 2007. www.chitradivakaruni.com www.sawnet.org

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