It is said that those who rule the word rule the world & since men historically dominated the role of authors, therefore, a deep-rooted gender-bias became a part of our historical and textual tradition. The significance of the immense potential of women would have remained confined to the margins had the world not produced reformers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, J.S. Mill, Simon de Beauvoir and the likes of them, whose persistent efforts gradually shifted the emphasis from andro-texts to gyno texts. Consequently feminist consciousness emerged as the new spirit of the age. No doubt, in the beginning it was an individual trend, but it has global relevance now and, in most cases, its coming out of a genuine desire to make a difference. Indian women novelists too have concentrated on women’s problem in their work and are expressing themselves freely and boldly and on a variety of themes from a feminine eye without adopting feminist postures. What was just a beginning in writers like Anita Desai, Kamala Das and Amrita Pritam has assumed a strident posture in Shobha De and others.
Shobhaa Dé, one of India’s bestselling authors, presents the modern Indian woman at the centre of her fiction. Her various books with Penguin India – the novels (Socialite Evenings, Starry Nights, Sultry Days, Sisters, Strange Obsession, Snapshots and Second Thoughts), three books of non-fiction (Surviving Men, Speedpost and Spouse) and an autobiography (Selective Memory), all highlight her attempts to find ways by which women can survive and cope in a world that's cruel to them. She clarifies however that her brand of feminism is not about women getting up and fighting for their rights, but is more sly and subversive. The character Anjali in Socialite Evenings sums up De's philosophy when she says: "Men feel terribly threatened by self-sufficient women. They prefer girls like me--dependent dolls--You should try it--see how much more you can get out of him that way." In De's self-help book for Indian women, Surviving Men: The Smart Woman's Guide to Staying on Top, she gives similar advice & suggests that in order to "train a man to any level of competence," women should use "a) food, b) sex, c) food and sex."
The erotic content of her novels has been somewhat controversial. De makes her female characters break sexual taboos and put forth candidly what they always felt but were too afraid and inhibited to show. Conversely she realizes that this aspect of female sexuality is still hurtful to men as, it could mean women talking about being bored with their husbands sexually, mentally or spiritually. “The very fact that sex is no longer the most dreaded and despised three-letter word in India is enough reason to celebrate”, she says with unfeigned glee. She recommends a mature attitude to sex wherein it should be something special, something shared, something beautiful.
Love is a major motivating factor for women in all her novels though it takes various forms: sometimes aggressive and destructive (like in Strange Obsession which has lesbianism as its theme) and at other times submissive, innocent and child-like (personified, for example, in the character of Maya in Second Thoughts). Her fiction often focuses on an exhausted generation of neglected wives who yearn for companionship and appreciation which invariably eludes them. As Rita remarks sarcastically in Starry Night: “We demand communication, attention..! arrey baba forget it. We should be happy if our husbands don’t beat us, burn us, torture us, insult us, discard us. That is all”. Interestingly, its not just bored and frustrated housewives, but also hardened and cynical women who are vulnerable to the eternal feminine fantasy of a partner for whom she would mean the world. Most of the times however, De highlights the futility of this emotional surrender because of a man’s innate inability to reciprocate it. As Rashmi( a character in her novels Snapshots) asks: “But was any man worth a woman’s love”?
Thus the archetypal Indian male in Shobha De’s novels has been painted in the murkiest colours. She obviously believes that Indian women have changed qualitatively, are a part of the modern world, and ready for the new millennium. But the Indian male is still trapped by history and refusing to be shaken out of this torpor. This imbalance deals a major blow to the institution of marriage. Hitherto it had provided for society’s need for love, security and children, but in the fictional world of Shobha De, it is not regarded as essential. In a country where women rarely bare more than two inches of leg and hardly ever file for divorce, she writes about women who, like herself, flee marriages because they are bored. This woman is bold, daring and ambitious. In Shooting From The Hip, De writes: “The terms underlying marriage have been redefined in recent times. If a self-sufficient woman with a roof over her chooses to marry, it is because she wants to share her life with someone in the fullest sense, not because she is looking for a life-long meal ticket. Divorce too has got to be viewed in this light. A woman of independent means is not compelled to perpetuate a bad marriage because she has nowhere else to go”.
However her recently published non-fiction work ‘Spouse: The Truth About Marriage’ debunks the image that most Indians have of Shobha De being a man-hating feminist. In it, she wholeheartedly endorses marriages and says emphatically, ‘Don’t knock it till you have tried it.’ She stresses that there is no formula for a happy marriage and that nobody has all the answers. For her, marriage is memory. If the good memories outnumber the bad ones, it's fair to declare the marriage a success. She further believes that there are no permanent highs and lows in marriage and that the only permanent thing about it is our desire to be in a long-lasting and loving relationship.
Simultaneously Shobha De goes on to emphasize that eventually every man-woman relationship is a power struggle either on an overt or subliminal level. Very often we find De exploring the difficulties that women face in balancing careers and marriage in a male-dominated society, thus highlighting the economic aspect of this power-play. She stresses that there can be no talk of independence for women without economic self-sufficiency. An independent mind or free spirit is meaningless so long as the body and soul are being kept together by somebody else. Her novels emphasise the value of equivalence of power. A pertinent example is Starry Nights which is a feminist work of sorts. The starlet is used and abused throughout, but in the final pages of the book, she, her sister and her young daughter walk off into the sunset with self-respect and "an income to match”. The ending once again brings out De’s emphatic statement: “The women in my books are definitely not doormats. They’re not willing to be kicked around.”
In the final analysis one may not like everything in De’s fiction but her treatment of the contemporary urban woman’s challenges, predicament, values and life-style are surely not without significance. Through her novels and essays, she has tried to shatter patriarchal hegemony, by vociferously drawing attention to women’s exploitation, discrimination and commoditization in the Indian ethos. If Dé packs a punch in her writing, her everyday speech is just as direct. “If the contents of my books have shocked India, well, they did. I don’t want to explain, complain and certainly never apologise”, she says defiantly. Undeniably , Indian contemporary writing owes a depth of substance to this enterprising lady who has taken off from the literary launch pad and is soaring comfortably in the world of serious readers. At the end of it all, I wonder why Shobha De portrays herself as a woman with sharp fangs, obsessed with you know what, when she is actually a soft, gentle, often ethical human being and, above all, a caring mother and a doting wife. Maybe, if all writers were writing serious, straight-laced, conformist stuff, life would be dull; an occasional jester with a capacity to expose society is the most wanted person.
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