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

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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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