Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality

15. Redefining the Postcolonial Female Self: Women in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day

--------------Redefining the Postcolonial Female Self Women in Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day Pushpa Naidu Parekh The politics of theoretical and literary representation by international women of color in the last decade or two and its intervention in the diversifying context of feminist discourse invites and, in many cases, challenges theorists and practitioners to address the specific nature, method, and polities of these representational practices. In this context, to borrow Bapsi Sidhwa's terms, "third world, our world" women's voices interpellate postcolonial theories of cultures with diverse strategies that explore the praxis of cultural contact , difference, domination, and change.1 Known an? emerging Indian women writers have recently begun to be studied in the West within the rubric of International, Women's, or Postcolonial Studies. In the United States they are often viewed as representations of the marginal, and many write from the consciousness of displaCing the center, whether of patriarchy, colonialism, or imperialism. Indian women writers-in the category of Asian women, Third World women, or women-of-color writers-have often been given this ambiguous space in the periphery of the dominant Euro-American curriculum. The recent surge of Postcolonial Studies in American institutions verges on the dangerous brink of emphaSizing and therefore privileging an artificial and ahistorical repositioning of ex-colonized women writers for the purpose of proving or debating, from intellectual and institutional grounds, certain theoretical assumptions regarding women's roles in cultural dynamiCS. Although the recognition ofPostcolonial Studies in academia implies a refreshingly challenging force that pushes beyond the overt and covert manifestations of hegemonic practices, its revolutionary ramifications are still in the process of being constituted. Within one broad category, the discourses ofnation or nationhood 27 1 The Postcolonial Female Self and decolonization have foregrounded various contentious forms ofresistances and "decolonizations," depending on the specific politics of the subject position that is being confronted or contested. For postcolonial female subjects, the "politics" has often been layered and sedimented by the converging forces of oppression that Patricia Hill Collins refers to, in the context of black feminist thought, as the "interlocking systems of oppression" and the "matrix of domination ."2 Race, gender, class, caste, religion, sexual orientation, and age differences , as well as the politics of coloniality and postcoloniality, complicate the identification of women's issues. Writing from a certain location implies, for a postcolonial female writer, some combination of these positions in the overriding matter of social and cultural space as well as the contours of colonial and postcolonial histories. Within the current debates over the ongoing processes ofarticulating decolonizations and feminisms, Anita Desai's observations, in an interview conducted by Feroza Jussawalla, reflect a criticism of the role of American institutions within the larger contradictions of capitalistic technocratic societies that engage in selective, self-serving forms of "multiculturism": The reason that Baumgartner has had any success over here is not because of its Indian material but because of its Jewish material . It's aroused a great deal of curiosity and interest among Jewish readers. It won a Jewish prize in fact, the Hadassah prize, and people are interested in the element of the war, the Nazis and then the Holocaust. India is really superfluous as far as American readers are concerned.... I don't think for Americans India has ever figured very largely in their imagination, except for a very limited area which is South Asian studies in a few of the universities.3 Desai's name began to be recognized in the United States academy only after the publication of Baumgartner's Bombay (1988), although she has been writing since the 1960s. Her previous works--Cry, the Peacock; Where Shall We Go This Summer ; Bye, Bye, Blackbird; Voices in the City-won her the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 and the Guardian Award (United Kingdom) in 1983. Clear Light of Day and Fire on the Mountain, both written in the 1980s, deal with women's psyches and relationships, yet the fact that U.S. publishers and academicians ignored them is evidence ofhow and why Third World writers are or are not allowed into the larger arena of Western-centered academic machinery where current critical theory feeds on and is fed by the limited number of their texts that are published or even translated. Without diminishing the significance of Holocaust 272 Pushpa Naidu Parekh experiences, Desai clearly sees that her novels on Indian contexts and even Indian women are...