chapter ― 3 survival tactic of woman in githa hariharan's the
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CHAPTER ― 3
Survival Tactic of woman in Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night
and When Dreams Travel
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The term survival denotes to live beyond the life of, to outlive or a living beyond the life
of another. Survival skills are techniques a person may use in a dangerous situation to save him
or others. Generally speaking, these techniques are meant to provide the basic requirement for
human life. The feminist movement in India had to think in terms of its own agendas and
strategies. In the Indian context, several feminists have realized that the subject of woman’s
emancipation in India should not be reduced to the contradictions between man and woman. In
order to liberate herself, the woman needs to empower herself to confront different institutional
structures and cultural practices that subject herself to patriarchal domination and control. The
problems and predicaments peculiar to the Indian woman found artistic expression in the Indian
literature in English since the 1970s.The image of woman in fiction has undergone a change
during the last four decades.
Women writers have moved away from traditional portrayals of enduring, self-sacrificing
woman toward conflicted female characters searching for identity or survival, no longer
characterized and defined simply in terms of their victim status. In contrast to earlier novels,
female characters from the 1980s onwards assert themselves and defy marriage. The novels
emerging in the twenty-first century furnish examples of a whole range of attitudes towards the
imposition of tradition. They also re-interpret mythology by subverting the canonic versions and
using new symbols. In conclusion, the work of Indian women writers is significant in making
society aware of woman’s demands, and in providing a medium for self-expression and, thus, re-
writing the history of India. However, patriarchy still demands mute acceptance from a woman.
She is still considered to be somebody’s daughter, wife or mother minus her own identity. In
such situation, it becomes very difficult for a woman to survive. But the women characters of
Githa Hariharan are living and surviving by adopting some strategies.
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The theme got autobiographical undertones as the life story of Githa Hariharan herself
has been an eternal quest for identity. Finding no hope, she opted writing and it is this writing
which ultimately has given her name and fame. Adrienne rich described women’s writings as re-
vision. Re-vision, as defined by Adrienne Rich, is an act of looking back, of entering into an old
text from a new critical tradition. She observed “this is for us [women] more a chapter in a
critical history; it is an act of survival” (Rich 18). As part of this re-making and revisionist myth-
making programme, old stories are told in different ways from gyno-centric perspectives.
Therefore, the definition for revisionist myth-making can be framed as when “the figure or tale
[is] appropriated for altered ends, [it is like] old vessel filled with new wine, initially satisfying
the thirst of the individual poet but ultimately making cultural change possible” (Ostriker 317).
Revisionist myth making has been one of the strategies for liberation employed in the cause of
women’s freedom. Subversion is mainly preferred technique in feminist re-writing of the old
texts. This chapter analyses how the Indian English fiction writer, Githa Hariharan uses the genre
of fiction as a medium to transmit the culture to learners exhibiting the Indian myths in a detailed
manner and proves myth making a survival strategy. She has represented the glory of India
through her fiction. The women writers concentrated on the portrayal of different facets of
woman. They talk about the woman’s problems in love, marriage and sexual bias.
The present chapter of the study reflecting on the two novels of Githa Hariharan i.e. The
Thousand Faces of Night and When Dreams Travel, shows that how woman survive even in the
odd situations of her life and examines the survival tactic of women characters. Githa Hariharan
also articulated these themes with the help of Indian myths taken from Ramayana and
Mahabharata and relates them to the women characters of her first novel, The Thousand Faces
of Night. Through her this novel, she has won an outstanding place in Indian Writing in English.
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Githa Hariharan selected the less important prominent figures form the Indian epics and
Puranas. She talks about Gandhari, Amba and Ganga who are less known to the contemporary
learners instead of talking about Sita and Savitri. She talks about Indian myths which are
forgotten by many of us. Thus, through her narrative she turns her work into the act of restoration
— restoration of lost Indian tradition. She shows how women in Indian myths lived and could
make their place in society.
From the closed study of both the novels The Thousand Faces of Night and When Dreams
Travel of Githa Hariharan, it is found that struggle for survival or individual identity is the main
theme. The story of marital discord and the woman’s survival outside marriage is turned into a
remarkable rendering of the collective struggle of woman for self-liberation through the author’s
narrative technique of framing texts within the text and her intertextual weaving of Mahabharata
and folk stories with lives of real women. In the Indian traditional family system, these myths
have a unique importance as they are orally and verbally transmitted from one generation to
another generation in order to “establish the sanctions for the rules by which people conduct their
lives” (Abrams 170). Githa Hariharan, being brought up in a traditional Hindu family might have
been acquainted with all these myths and she perfectly blended the myth and reality in the
modern Indian life.
In order to make her only daughter, Devi, settle down, Sita decides to call her back from
America. After arriving in India, she realizes that her motto is going to arrange her marriage
through swayamvara. Marriage is considered as a traditional role of woman in Indian society.
However Devi is not interested to marry, she accepts the proposal of her mother because she
does not want to hurt the feelings of her mother. The mother “weaves a cocoon a secure womb”
(13). With this point Devi recollects her grandmother’s story of Damayanthi that was taken from
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Mahabharata. Nala, the king of Nishad was handsome, brave and virtuous. Damayanthi’s father
decided to hold her swayamvara. Damayanthi was brave and determined to adopt Nala. So she
threw the garland around his neck and espoused him amidst all the intrigues made even by the
gods. Devi’s grandmother concludes this story with the moral, “A woman gets her heart’s desire
by great cunning” (20). The story of Nala - Damayanthi fascinated her. By this story Devi
established the concept of swayamvara.
Devi’s efforts to play the role of traditional wife are thwarted by Mahesh’s reserved
attitude to love and marriage. But her education has left her unfitted to take life as it comes. She
does not challenge the system openly, but cannot accept it either. To meet the demands of her
unfulfilled self, she turned to Gopal. Her elopement with Gopal shows signs of revolt.
Ultimately, Devi accepts it her responsibility, decides to ‘fight’ and starts life all over again. She
does not align herself to any community to gain her strength to be whole but the myths of various
legendary Indian women like Amba, Gandhari, Damayanti and others help her to understand the
significance of fight and the implication of standing on her own.
Devi’s grandmother’s stories which were drawn from the Ramayana and Mahabharata
focused on the woman’s pride, destiny and self - sacrifice. Her stories seek to establish a link
with lived experiences; myths for her were possible resolutions of a perplexing reality. She
narrates the story of Gandhari who plays a significant part in the Mahabharata. Gandhari was
married to a very rich prince, whose Palace was “twice as big twice as magnificent as her parents
Palace” (28). Whereas on meeting her husband for first time, she was taken aback for “The
White eyes the pupils glazed and useless” (29). In anger Gandhari vowed to never see world; so
she bound her eyes with the help of her veil. Summing up the story Devi’s grandmother says,
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“She embraced her destiny-a blind husband with a self sacrifice worthy of her royal blood” (29).
Through this story Devi learnt life through her grandmother’s choice of Gandhari and acclaims:
The lesson brought me five steps close to adulthood. I saw for the first time that
my parents too were afflicted by a kind of blindness. In their blinkered world they
would always be one, one leading the other, one hand always in the grasp of
another (29).
It is the way Devi interpreted the story and realized the blindness of her parents.
Gandhari’s story is once again reflected in the life of Sita, Devi’s mother. As Gandhari blindfolds
her eyes after finding her husband Dhritrashtra blind, in the same way Sita breaks the string of
her veena and also burns all her photographs to avoid obsolete memories. Devi’s mother Sita has
to put aside the music, the need of her soul to perform traditional duties of wife, daughter-in-law
and mother. By stifling her own wishes she transforms herself into an ideal daughter-in-law. She
broke her veena to satisfy her in-laws. But her sacrifice was never the sacrifice of weak. She
considers Devi as the symbol of veena. For years thereafter, she remains unhappy; this is
confirmed by her extreme silence and the rigidity with which she conducts herself in her real life.
Towards the end of the novel, she acknowledges her selfhood and the needs of her ‘self’. Her
return to music and the welcome Devi gets are strong indications of her release of her ‘self’ from
the clutches of the past. She also exhibits courage and determination to take hold of her own life
after her widowhood. In a subtle way, Sita shows the power of asserting her individuality
breaking the myth of male superiority. She learns to keep her freedom and individuality alive
within the relationship. When her husband died alone in the room, she lifted his head and pulled
out the papers containing an unfinished essay on African folklore on his table. She burnt them
before him and poured the relics of body into one jar and came back “to setup this house by the
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sea in Madras” (45). She exhibits the courage and determination to take hold of her life after her
widowhood. It is towards the end of the novel she is shown to be a woman with a will of her own
resuming her love for veena.
In the course of revisionist myth making, Devi has learnt survival. From her
grandmother’s stories Devi listened to and learned the strategies of woman survival. She rewrites
these stories in her own life. Her strategy for survival is different. Devi learns from Amba’s story
“A woman fights her battle alone” and applies this strategy for herself. Survival is the highest
ideal in her struggle ridden life. The grandmother narrated the story of Amba who transformed
her fate that overtook her into one of triumph by avenging her offender Bheeshma. This time
grandmother dwells upon Mahabharata for a story of Amba. Prince Bheesma goes to a
swayamvara of three beautiful princesses: Amba, Ambika and Ambalika. Amba, the eldest
princess chose king Salwa and garlanded him. But suddenly Bheeshma kidnapped all the three
princesses and took them to his step-mother. When they came to know that Amba had already
married, they let her go to Salwa.but king Salwa refused to accept her and insulted her by saying:
Do you think I feast on Left over’s? I am a king. I do not touch what another man
won in battle. Go to Bheeshma. He won you when his arrow struck my heart on
your luckless garland. He is your husband. What have you to do with me? (37)
Insulted Amba returns to Bheeshma, who also refused to accept her. As a result of this
Amba changed her attitude towards life and vowed to avenge him. She went to the forest and
undertook penance, meditate for Lord Shiva. Pleaded with her penance, Lord Shiva gave her a
garland and promised her, “who so ever wears this garland will surely kill Bheeshma” (39). This
story built a brave attitude in Devi. She fed on the stories of mythical figures and becomes a
dreamer. Her artistic and creative yearnings are unleashed and nurtured. “She day-dreamed more
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and more about female avengers” (40). These lessons permanently imprint themselves in her
mind. Nourished by her grandmother’s stories, Devi imagined herself to be a great warrior of
enormous physical strength and agility, trained by a mentor to fight against men and who warns
Devi that she must be prepared to endure unimaginable pain. In her fantasy, she becomes a
woman warrior, a heroine. She confesses, “I lived a secret life of my own; I became a woman
warrior, a heroine, I was Devi. I rode a tiger and cut of the evil magical demons heads” (41) for
the emancipation of the world.
Parvatiamma, mother-in-law of Devi was a loving and gentle lady. She remained
subjected to the loneliness of the big house after her children had been sent away to the boarding
school. The urge to apply the messages conveyed in the Bhajans sung by her, grew stronger
within her day by day. She was an ambitious woman; she had like a “man in self-absorbed search
for God” (64), stripped herself of the life selected to her as a householder and left her house in
search of salvation.
It is significant to note that the grandmother chooses to recount the stories of woman who
are not stereotypical females, submissive, self - sacrificing and subdued. Her women are self-
directed heroines, who have shown their courage in countering the hegemonic discourse –
Gandhari blindfold herself as a mark of protest, Mansa has the power to retrieve her husband
from the snake skin, Amba avenges herself on her offenders, and Damayanti has the courage to
choose her husband openly. re-living the stories in retrospection, she understands the
implications for her situation and becomes self-directed. The grandmother has seen life’s
vagaries. She known the price a woman has to pay for deviating from the given line. That is why
she does unduly criticize the myths, but then she does not uphold the system. Her answers to
Devi’s questions have many meanings and when the time comes, Devi chooses the answer that
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best suits her purpose. Re-living the stories in retrospect, she understands the implications for her
situation and become self-directed. In The Thousand Faces of Night, Hariharan uses Baba and
Devi’s grandmother as mouthpieces to initiate Devi into the tradition of an ideal archetypal
woman. But Hariharan makes a deft distinction between Baba’s stories and Grandmother’s
stories and conveyed her message perfectly. While Baba’s stories are for Devi as a wife,
grandmother’s fascinating stories have a deeper import.
Survival is the highest ideal to every woman in her struggle ridden life. These three
women ― Sita, Devi, and Mayamma find a way to come to terms with their life. Mayamma has
learnt how to wait, when to bend her back and when to wipe her rebellious eyes dry. She blesses
Devi when leaves the house, saying “seek the river, miles away, where the dim forest gives way
to a clear transparent flood of light” (126). Her choice is to be fixed in her women’s role, but
through Devi she can too see a different life. Both Devi and Sita realize “whatever is
depenendent on others is misery; whatever rests on oneself is happiness” (68). They realize
You are your own refuge;
There is no other refuge,
This refuge is hard to achieve. (The Dhammapada 8)
All such stories of mythological women become Devi’s cultural and psychological
survival kit. In fact, grandmother’s stories were a prelude to her womanhood, an imitation into its
subterranean possibilities (51). They mark a female practice of passage into female creativity.
Therefore, the underlining theme in Githa Hariharan’s novels is human relationship, especially
the one that exists between husband and wife and also between mother and daughter. In all these
relationships the woman occupies the central stage and significantly the narration shifts through
her feminist consciousness. Her novels reflect the lives of suffocated woman in search of refuge
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from suffering. Searching for a solution to their personal problems, the female characters in the
novel shifts from their personal pains to the suffering of the other woman around.
Female Bonding:-
Another strength giving aspect through which woman counters patriarchy and tries to
create a world of her own is female bonding. An important expansion of nurturing and care
giving is the woman-woman dyad, also called female bonding, which helps in female identity
formation. It plays a significant role in identity formation as well as in sustaining women in the
patriarchal set up. In a society where the male and the female worlds are strictly
compartmentalized, women find their space in the ‘inner courtyard’, where the feminine
environment is supreme. In this chapter of my study, it is proposed to focus on female bonding as
a helpful tool in female identity formation.
The concept of female friendship, especially the mother-daughter relationship, is the
central concern of the recent feminists’ psychological studies. These relationships aid the
development of the female personality. The girls, being of the same gender as the mother, do not
completely separate from their mothers. The mothers also tend to experience their daughters as
more like and continuous with themselves. Thus, the formation of identity blends with
attachment felt for their mothers. Hence, the mother-daughter and woman-woman bonding
becomes a growth-fostering medium with empathy as an important nutrient. The concept of
female friendship, particularly mother-daughter relationship, came into prominence with the
Black American female literary tradition. Writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and many
others realized the significance of female bonding as an alternative to the historical reality of
their situation. Usually, the Black men went away from their families to seek employment in the
North. The Afro-American mother had to depend on her children for emotional support
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especially daughters, as mothers found it easier to relate with the female child. This historical
necessity gained further significance in feminist movement, which gave a call to create
‘sisterhood’ and saw mother-daughter bonding as an extension of woman-woman dyad.
In the literary criticism, scholars and critics have explored the woman-woman dyad and
mother-daughter bonding in fiction. The notion of female friendship is also not new to India,
where it was accepted socially due to the rigid male-female compartmentalization. Women often
had the ‘inner room’ to themselves, which used to be their exclusive domain. This has also been
portrayed in Mrinal Pande’s Daughter’s Daughter. The child narrator’s mother, aunts,
grandmother and other females of the household spend their spare time in their ‘embroidery
room’. A lot of ‘feminine gossip’ was exchanged here and women developed bonds of affection.
The concept of female bonding cannot be fully applied to the Indian sociocultural matrix
as seen by Western scholars. As Vrinda Nabar points out, there is a significant difference between
the Western and Indian female bonding, though the basic nature of female bonding is similar
around the world. She contends:
The concept of female bonding, which Western feminists emphasized, has
operated in societies like ours for a very long time, but its special nature is
conditioned by the differences between the individualistic version of the West and
our own perception of community-membership may mean an intolerable loss of
individual identity in the Western world’s view, which the Indian may perceive as
spiritually fulfilling. (Nabar 37)
She feels that in India, the dependence of one generation of woman upon the earlier one
is far from salutary because woman passes on to the younger generation the laws of Stridharma,
which are backed up by patriarchy and become an instrument of oppression. Devi, in The
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Thousand Faces of Night, is given the cues of attaining the ideal womanhood by her
grandmother through the mythological stories of Gandhari, Mansa, Amba and others, which later
her mother ‘fed and stoked’ to prepare her for marriage (16).
This concept of female friendship, especially the mother-daughter relationship, is the
central concern of recent feminist psychological studies. Hence, the formation of identity blends
with attachment felt for their mothers. Lynn Z. Bloom observes:
The most significant dimension of maternal heritage that offer some answers to
these questions are: the nurturing and conveyance of a sense of self; the
transmission of human values through mothers who serve directly or indirectly, as
positive or negative role models; and the fostering of a group identity — national,
racial or cultural. (Bloom 291)
Thus, the mother-daughter and woman-woman bonding becomes a growth-fostering
medium with empathy as an important nutrient. Heinz Kohut, a psychoanalyst describes empathy
as “a fundamental mode of human relatedness, the recognition of the self in the other; it is the
accepting, confirming and understanding human echo” (Kohut 704-5). Therefore, the general
understanding of empathy is that it is a capacity to intuit the feelings of others, involving two
persons’ ability to show their thoughts and feelings in a way that it adds changes and continues
their relationship, making it healthier. Another psychoanalyst Judith Jordan, in her essay
‘Empathy and Mother-Daughter Relationship’, speculates:
Empathy is the central to an understanding of that aspect of self which involves
we-ness, transcendence of the separate, disconnected self. It is, in fact, the process
through which one’s experienced sense of basic connection and similarity to other
humans is established. (Jordan 68)
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The making and keeping of connections becomes elegantly complex and often affects the
dynamics of female bonding. About female friendship Simone de Beauvoir in her famous book,
The second Sex observes:
Woman’s fellow feeling rarely rises to genuine friendship, however. Woman feels
their solidarity more spontaneously than men; but within this solidarity, the
transcendence of each does not go out towards the others, for they all face
together towards the masculine world, whose value they wish to monopolize each
for herself. (Beauvoir 558)
This desire to gain ‘monopoly’ through men explains the basic reason why woman craves
to be blessed with sons and conditions her daughters according to the male model. The story of
The Thousand Faces of Night shows how woman opposes patriarchal hegemony by developing
female bonding. Female friendship between Devi and Mayamma is prominent and strength-
giving. Devi is concerned for Mayamma when she is sick, but Mahesh’s unconcerned remark is:
“So leave her alone . . . if you fuss over her today, she’ll do it more and more often” (53). In
Mayamma’s suffering Devi feels one with her when she ruminates about her life in retrospect
whereas Mahesh does not ‘take it all too seriously’ (82). Similarly, Devi’s loneliness and her
problem with Mahesh do not escape Mayamma’s notice. Devi empathizes with Mayamma’s life-
stories. The two women, so apart in age and social standing, build a strong interactive bond
between themselves. Mayamma shines as a mother figure that shows a deep understanding of
Devi’s emotional life. Also, when Devi’s grandmother recounts to her the stories of Gandhari,
Damayanti and other mythological women, her attitude, and the manipulation of events have
secret messages. Women tend to be empathetically and sympathetically related towards other
women.
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In the patriarchal community, woman forms her own community to stand against the
patriarchal forces. It is clear that woman exhibits empathic ties, a kind of cooperative devotion
with the other woman and helps her through her crisis in life. This kind of helpful relationship
and sympathy can be attributed to their fellow-feeling, undergoing similar experiences as
members of the same community. In The Thousand Faces of Night, Parvatiamma shelters
Mayamma, who is thankful to her for her charity, “I came to her with only a torn sari over my
weeping flesh. She gave me this home. She gave us all a home” (63). Similarly Devi’s widowed
grandmother ‘collected in her old age more and more wounded refugees in her house, stray
objects of charity’ (39). Devi’s cousin, Uma, molested by her father-in-law and ill-treated by her
husband, seeks shelter with her. The grandmother empathizes with the domestic problems of
Gauri, the maidservant, as if they were her own. Distant relatives, having been “orphaned or
deserted by philandering husbands, found in her house a warm refuge. They came and went and
my grandmother never let them go empty-handed . . . with advice culled from the epics” (26-27).
The grandmother in Daughter’s Daughter is very parallel to the grandmother in The Thousand
Faces of Night. Acquainted with the adversities of being a widow, she shield Hiruli with her
brood of five, giving her two rooms to live in her house, free of cost. Hiruli calls herself
grandmother’s ‘devoted Hanuman’ and tries to reimburse the gentleness by being her constant
companion.
Being fully acquainted with the adversities that come in the path of their individuality,
women often feel sorry for their race. Like Mayamma, the other female characters in the novel
under discussion, too, show deep concern over their troubles and at the same time extends help to
raise them above their suffering. Mayamma does not stop Devi when she elopes with Gopal. She
remembers how she was always on the threshold of tears and ‘cried like a trembling little bird’
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against her shoulder (118). She wishes her to go away from that state of suffering. It is
Mayamma’s empathy for Devi that forbids her from telling Mahesh the truth. She pleaded
deafness, ignorance and old-age when he enquires about the missing Devi. Her empathy for Devi
radiates into her concern for womanhood in general.
In Githa Hariharan’s novel The Thousand Faces of Night, the mother-daughter
relationship is explored from yet another dimension. Sita poses to be a strict disciplinarian and
Devi craves motherly touch. The only memory impinged on her mind of her tender touch is of
when she once fell sick and her mother caressed her while Devi had pretended to ‘feign deep
asleep’ (85). On close reading, we discover that Sita has covert love and sympathy for her
daughter. She wants Devi to be perfect in every way. Sita considers Devi as her Veena.
Together with her disappointment, Devi realized that all through her life, she was running
away from her trials ― America, the house of Jarcand Road, Mahesh and Gopal. She had been
living as a weak willed woman and she had allowed others to treat her as a puppet and they
pulled her string. Devi realizes that she has made very few choices in her life. Devi knew that
this time was right to make choices in her life to write off the male scripts. She has to find her
authentic self now. She knew if she did not act now, she would be forever condemned “to drift
between worlds . . . a floating island detached from the solidity of mainland” (138). She wants to
come back to her mother from whom earlier she tried to escape through her flight of the
imagination and through her identification with the male world.
Suitcase in hand, Devi opened the gate and looked wonderingly at the garden,
wild and over-grown, but lush in spite of its sand-choked roots. Then she
quickened her footsteps as she heard the faint sounds of a veena, hesitate and
child like, inviting her into the house. (139)
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Although Devi returns to offer her love, Sita is also reborn through her daughter’s
adventures in life. She retrieves her lost self by returning to her music and to her veena. Sita has
been the ideal wife, daughter-in-law and mother. When her ideal becomes ineffective and void,
she is ready for self-examination. “She sat before the relic from her past, the broken veena,
freshly dusted, and waited for Devi to come back to her” (109). The inviting call of veena to
Devi suggests a restoration of new positive relationship with mother, herself and the renewal of
itself. Both Devi and Sita have liberated themselves from the pressures of feminine role-play to
attain a free creative individuality. Now for both of them it is self, the genderless principal which
is neither male nor female that is in quest of selfhood. Devi admires her strong and self-willed
mother. Sita and Devi share one thing in common. Both are strong willed. But as a critic asserts,
in one case, ‘this becomes a strength to live by, in the other, it becomes a venom to poison the
life force’ (Khan 139). Devi empathizes with her mother for her strong resistance to patriarchy
when she broke her veena to satisfy her in-laws. But her sacrifice was never the sacrifice of the
weak. It had the force of a rebellion. However, in the bargain, what she lost was her own
comfort, privacy and needs.
The same mother-daughter bonding is seen through the eyes of child-narrator in
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Mrinal Pande’s Daughter’s Daughter. In
Daughter’s Daughter, Tinu and Dinu intuitively understand their mother’s tension. They hear her
crying secretly after some dispute with their father and conclude that there is a rift between their
parents. Even as a child, Tinu shows great understanding of her mother’s sufferings. Mother’s
fears, her sufferings, her moans and sobs sweeps a wave of fright over Tinu and Dinu.
The fictional universe of mothers and daughters, which this chapter sought to read from
diverse angles, has brought forth various facts. Interestingly, the novelist Githa Hariharan under
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study, too, exhibits deviously her affection to her mother in dictating the novel. Githa Hariharan
dictates her novels to her parents. Similarly, Manju Kapoor and Arundhati Roy dictate their
novels to their mothers, respectively. “The daughter sees in her mother the authority which
impose limits to her will”, therefore she often sees a rival in her (Freud 173).
In The Thousand Faces of Night, three types of suffering women characters recur with
subtle changes. To the first type belongs the housemaid Mayamma –the traditional woman who
believes that her place is with her husband and family. Whatever be her troubles, she does not
speak. In this sense, she respects the traditional religious ethos and confirms to the Manu code
that the woman should be under control of the father in the maidenhood the husband in the youth
and sons during her old age. Despite being the victims of control over other woman in the family
because of their status as mothers or mothers-in-law. Mayamma cannot offer resistance because
traditionally, it is supposed that a bride is not to have a voice of her own. In a traditional society,
those women can be happy who blindly and unthinkingly accept the roles it assigns them.
The second type of suffering woman is converse of the traditional type. Here, the woman
is bolder, and rebellious. She cannot conform to the Sita’s version of womanhood. Such kind of
woman is Devi, the protagonist who rejects the traditional roles of woman and rebel against
patriarchal society. She left her husband Mahesh and her lover musician, Gopal and decides to
live an independent life with her widow mother Sita.
The third type of women characterizes the woman in between. Most of the Shashi
Deshpande’s heroines belong to this category. This woman is neither traditional nor modern in
her ideas and practice. She faces troubles and suffers a lot in her life and also pay a price to get
adjusts in the patriarchal society. But in the end of the novel, she realizes herself and survives
independently. Devi’s mother Sita belongs to this category of woman in the novel The Thousand
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Faces of Night. These three women ― Sita, Devi and Mayamma manage to survive by making
their female choices in life. Not succumbing to despair or sorrow, not committing suicide like
Anita Desai’s characters, they prove the strength of their womanhood by their very act of
survival.
Hence, The Thousand Faces of Night is not only about the confrontation of tradition and
modernity, the conflict between the ‘old’ stories and ‘new’ ones that need to be articulated; it is
also about the search for identity that Devi embarks upon with a corresponding change in her
mother’s attitude that hints at an affirmative relationship being established between mother and
daughter, where storytelling emerges to be a significant trope.
The second novel When Dreams Travel, under study, is a novel about storytelling and
storytellers, typically powerful ones, especially female, Githa Hariharan takes the myth of
Shahrzad and begins after it ended, with her sister Dunyazad returning to Shahrzad’s palace to
help her husband to construct her tomb. Dunyazad and a scheming maidservant Dilshad with a
peculiarly hairy mole meet and share stories, including a hair covered woman Satyasama who
was eventually disliked by her community . . . revolving around the possibility that Shahrzad
escaped and they can too, from the entrapments of the old One Thousand and One Nights story
and the present concerns of their lives.
In the novel When Dreams Travel, Hariharan’s Shahrzad is a magnificent fighter, who
knows, she holds the destiny of many other women in her tongue. Her daring has a measure of
pleasure, of love for risk taking that goes beyond the self-sacrificial spirit of the martyr. Shahrzad
cares for the city, for the common people’s lives, the ones she is trying to save from the
tyrannical sultan. In this retelling of One Thousand and One Nights by the Indian novelist Githa
Hariharan, the main protagonist is Scheherazade ― here renamed Shahrzad ― who each night
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staves off execution through the power of her stories. Her fantastical tales are told as part of a
power game with her husband, the Sultan Shahryar, a battle in which she is joined by her sister
Dunyazad, Hariharan’s novel subverts the escapism of her sources by reminding us of the
political context whilst also presenting us with a range of stories that are dark, poetic and witty.
Twisting the fine fabric of myth and legend, knotting into it her own concerns about women’s
dreams, desires, their gift of golden speech, their courage, is the story of two sisters, Shahrzad
and Dunyazad. Past and present, reality and fantasy, are blurred with richly evocative prose and a
large dose of “magic realism”.
The silent and absented women in the original story of The Thousand and One Nights
come to the surface here. Shahrzad’s sister Dunyazad, their mother, the mother of Shahryar, the
slave girls and maids in the palace and Shahrzad herself who were silenced after one thousand
and one nights, speak in Githa Hariharan’s When Dreams Travel and tell their story. As a critic
observes:
Hariharan’s way of inventing and incorporating these women ― so long invisible
or inaudible or both ― itself involves a challenge and rejection of the andocentric
imagination and an underscoring of the ‘other’ presence. (Mittapalli 187)
In support of this case, many examples from the text can be cited. In her characteristic
satiric-ironic element the author points out :
As for the mother (or mothers) (of the sultans) the storyteller is completely silent
on the point. Surely, Shahryar and Shahzaman must have required the services of
the mother before they mounted their steeds. (8)
“The original stories, supposedly told by her do not carry feminine features” (Mittapalli
187). These stories often smack of obscene or rude male sexism, which is understandable as
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“they were actually told written by male orators in an orthodox cultural context which
necessarily confined the woman indoor” (Mittapalli 187). Hariharan projects Shahrzad’s act in an
altogether different light. She sees her creativity, as her only happiness and power. The
powerless, she observes, “have a dream or two, dreams that break walls, dreams that go through
walls as if they were powerless” (25). The author aptly brings out woman’s power that she finds
lying concealed between the lines of the source text, that “He (the Sultan) has been brought to
senses by a woman . . . with her stories” (21). At the same time Hariharan also successfully notes
that Shahrzad’s creative power of story telling goes unacknowledged. For example, when
Shahrzad (supposedly) dies, Shahryar praises her only for her chastity, that is to say, patriarchal
value imposed exclusively on woman and not for her creative talent. The voiceless woman’s
voice is going to carve a place, and enjoy the glorious place in the history of creative writing
permanently as Dilshad says to Dunyazad: “You and I have a script of our own ― a story or two
waiting to be told, our text of gold to be written, every page remembering us to posterity” (107).
Then, over seven days and seven nights, Dunyazad and Dilshad play a grown up version
of a dangerous but exiting game, The Martyr’s Walk. If you were talking or writing about your
life, what would you say? Dunyazad, Dilshad and Satyasama take turn playing the woman who
saves herself and others through her fiction. Dunyazad’s tales develop the novel’s frame
characters, but only as confined to life in the palace and its surroundings, whereas Dilshad’s
stories venture out into the city and its crowded markets, the countryside, and the forest. Both
sets of tales, though, gradually take the reader to a more recognizably Indian culture context.
Dunyazad and Dilshad travel, re-inventing their lives and bodies and in this process, mirroring
and distorting the reality created by Shahrzad, so that the past and future are reconstructed by
strong determination of wishes, dreams and memories of these dreams. The slave girl Dilshad,
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who is lost, as the story she tells of herself goes, in the forest, exclaims in response to this
situation, “Is there no way out of this old story?” (231) As soon as she says these words, she sees
the way out of the forest. It is her search for adventure and the desire “unmapped territory” that
have led her here (226). In the forest she has met, successively, two men-the first deceives her
into marrying him with the promise that he will help her find her way, and the second, a strange,
graceful, deer-man, is in turn, and seduced by her. Her story of herself has unwittingly followed
two contrasting but related formulas - in her words: “the king seizes a virgin girl; the courtesan
seduces a virgin boy” (231).
In the first section of the novel, we realize that Shahrzad is no longer an
archetypal victim fighting for her survival but a bold woman stimulated by the danger implicit in
the situation. She shifts from the position of a victim to that of puppeteer, the master-narrator
who carefully plays and controls this scene. Against the passive listeners, king Shahryar and
Shahzaman, she is one who is “gifted with movement . . . talking for her life” (Hariharan 5). She
revels in the danger and becomes a prototype of the feminine heroine. We are told:
She throws back her neck, holds her goblet high and drinks deeply, eyes
shut. What she does not swallow she holds for a moment or two, rolling
the liquid in her mouth as if she tastes it for last time. Then she wets
her lips with her tongue and begins again. (6)
Hariharan’s narrative “off stage”, starts by questioning the meaning of “travelling” and
“dreaming”, two words in the title When Dreams Travel. Shahryar wants to know where
Shahrzad got the inspiration for all her amazing tales. This is her answer:
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I don’t have a sword, so it seems I cannot rule, I cannot travel, I don’t
care to weep. But I can dream. (…) My dreams? . . . Only those whose
necks are naked and at risk can understand them. (20)
Shahrzad refrains from giving the sultan a straight forward answer because as she says
bluntly, only those at risk should be entitled to understand the dreams that make up for the
absence of a sword (a clear symbol, associated with power as violence). Then ‘to dream’ in this
novel, is a form of wisdom passed on between women. Although not allowed to travel physically,
women always took to travel through imagination and in fact, a manual for survival. Shahrzad’s
story itself shows that dreams and imagination can make women survive.
Hariharan is quite clear about Shahrzad’s love for risk. In the first tale told by Dunyazad,
the reader is brought inside the harem, to meet Shahrzad, swollen by pregnancy, trying to prepare
her performance of that evening. Meanwhile her body starts the process of giving birth to the
baby inside her. Shahrzad is scared and impatient. Dunyazad, in solidarity, concern for the city
women but Shahrzad will not allow that. Dunyazad then propose to kill the sultan. Since she has
given birth to the male heir, they have what they need to keep order in the palace and the city.
They can dispose of Shahryar. Shahrzad will not accept this alternative either. Shahrzad’s love
for danger makes of her a perfect figuration for liberated patterns of feminine identity because
she represents, together with her self-assertive wit and saviour behaviour. It is like locking a
good jinni in a household bottle.
Another shift of perspective in the novel When Dreams Travel, in relation to the original
(1812) version of the tales, is the change in the main character, for Hariharan chose to build her
plot around the forgotten sister of Shahrzad, younger Dunyazad. In the novel, Dunyazad is made
to look back years later to the one thousand and one nights. “She sees that it was always
69
Shahrzad who was its central magnetic figure” (105). As Stephanie Jones points out, the novel
belongs to a genealogy of contemporary rewordings of the Nights that “embolden” Dunyazad,
Shahrzad’s sister. In this text she is given body, voice and agency, thus being released from her
role of “audience, prompter, chorus, and heckler” (Jones: 130), forever at the foot of the sultan’s
bed, urging Shahrzad, “sister, if you are not sleepy tell us one of your lovely little tales to while
away the night” (39). The eminent critic Rama Kundu rightly observes, “Here is the narrator, and
not the narrated, who comes to focus” (Mittapalli 181). The plot starts when Dunyazad is
informed of Shahrzad’s death. This sad event is the beginning of the new journeys, and new
nights, with Dunyazad’s departure from her home city to find out what happened to her sister.
Only this time, it is two sisters and not two brothers, who are searching for each other. The quest
of Dunyazad is to establish how and why Shahrzad died, avenging her, if this is the case. Hence,
When Dreams Travel is a story of how the sisterhood of women triumphs over the overweening
authority and specious control of the fictive brotherhood of ineffectual men. A story that is not
new, yet told with such ingenuity, such surefooted style and panache that it lights up forgotten
corners of a readers mind. Hariharan in her own words is the womanly fabricator.
In the course of the novel, the story of Shahrzad becomes a myth. As the narrator
comments, “she is now a myth that must be sought in many places, fleshed in different bodies
before her dreams let go to Dunyazad or her descendents” (25). Emphasizing the importance of
myths, in The Power of Myth Joseph Campbell states:
Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the
message of the symbols. Read other people’s myths, not those of your religion in
terms of facts ― but you read the others, you begin to get the message. Myth
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helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. Myth tells
you what the experience is. (Campbell 181)
The novel concludes with a vision of Shahrzad who is now an old woman ― which
brings past - present-future together, blending in one another and “a circle with no beginning or
end” (276). In one way, she appeals to women to be self-conscious:
I fought for myself, and yes, for you as well. And you ― what would you do
when your turn comes? When the drums role and the sword blunted with age, the
rusty axe, wake up to be freshly sharpened. (276)
Undoubtedly, When Dreams Travel is the transparent medium of self-expression.
However, as it proceeds, it has become a significant mediator within the private self of the writer
and public world of letters. Truly speaking, When Dreams Travel is a modern myth; “a symbolic
projection of women’s hopes, values, fear and aspiration” (Gulerin 159), representing and raising
perennially suppressed voices of women, that is, the ‘other’.
In this rewritten version of The Arabian Night tales, Githa Hariharan emphasizes on the
significance of the bonds of friendliness between women, presenting these bonds as the essential
grounds to create ‘unheard of” stories. The importance of these new tales is that they are the
fore-runners of alternatives moralities and the ways of living as imagined by the liberated
characters. Shahrzad turns her martyr’s position into the means to manipulate her sultan
effectively, so that he postpones her death and forget this murderous vow. Dilshad starts as a
slave in the sultan’s harem and ends up arranging the rebellion that empoisons him. Finally,
Dunyazad, after lending a helping hand to overthrow the tyrant, settles for travelling with her
new lover, breaking with a life devoted to others like her sister, son, stepson, father and silently
despised husband.
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Hariharan’s novel When Dreams Travel is one that stands closer to the principles
defended by sexual difference theories, exploring the liberating potential of imagination to create
a new non-misogynous universe of popular references, which will be stimulating for women. As
an instance of one of these references, Hariharan revisits Shahrzad as an inspirational myth for
feminism on account of her qualities of strength, daring and intelligence. In fact, as she hints in
her novel, there are very few heroines in the popular gallery of mythical feminine images who
succeed in gambling with death and win the game, saving the rest of the community through
their deeds. Usually, the role of facing enemies is a masculine one, being the heroine/bride, the
prize the hero gets. The middle-aged Dunyazad who is now a widow of Shahryar’s brother
Shahzaman arriving at the palace of Shahryar, to discover the reasons for unexpected death of
her sister Shahrzad.in her this discovery, Dunyazad is aided by the slave girl Dilshad, who has
served Shahrzad and Shahryar, witnessed Shahrzad’s death and has intimate knowledge of the
palace’s structure and secrets. In return, Dilshad receives from the new sultan what she has long
wanted to acquire ― the transcript of Shahrzad’s stories, written in gold.
The character of one tale “The Woman Under the Deadly Skin” in the second part of
Hariharan’s novel When Dreams Travel, Poison Skin is recruited by a palace-man to be used as a
spy. She drinks poison everyday, until her skin had such a concentrated dose that it kills her
lovers. One day, she decided to run away from the palace that employed her services and she met
a handsome man who had bitten by a snake and was about to die. Poison Skin hence discovered
she was not poisoning to the many passionate and rustic lovers she had. Similarly, Shahrzad’s
escape from the palace is a liberating alternative to the secluded life she has in the harem, where
she is neither allowed the simple pleasure of a normal life of her own. Through the character of
Poison Skin girl, Githa Hariharan shows the kind, helping and sympathetic nature of woman and
72
how she uses her extraordinary power for the survival of others. Therefore, When Dreams Travel
is a story of how the sisterhood of women triumphs over the overweening authority and specious
control of the fictive brotherhood of ineffectual men. A story that is not new, yet told with such
ingenuity, such surefooted style and panache that it lights up forgotten corners of a readers mind.
Hariharan in her own words is the womanly fabricator.
Through her female characters in both the novels she tries to show how woman survives
in male dominated society. She faces all the problems in her life and even survives with her inner
strength, female bonding and this makes Githa Hariharan’s ‘feminism’ typically Indian. She
evolves a feminist understanding of the woman’s problem out of a purely Indian climate. The
central experience in her fiction is authenticated by autobiographical overtones. Her feminism is
not a copy the western feminism. It is very much rooted in the Indian soil. She is quite down to
earth in her feminist approach to the woman’s problem.
73
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