In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

 4HE 4HINKING 3UBJECT 6IRGINITY AND 3WARAJ  It is a useful exercise to close-read Nayantara Sahgal’s four early novels, A Time to Be Happy (1958), This Time of Morning (1965), Storm in Chandigarh (1969), and The Day in Shadow (1971), if mainly to understand the predicament of the marginalized characters in these works. These characters, who are female, and their male sympathizer characters respond often enough in Gandhian ways to the meanings mobilized by society. What at first in the numerous plots appears as acquiescence of the marginalized characters to patriarchaldictatesshiftseversosubtlybutcruciallysothattheclose-reading reveals the interpellation of the subject and sometimes the rejection of such conditioning, and the final evolution of the agent of non-cooperation and resistance. What is unique about these novels is that the most marginalized and therefore the most evolved character is that of the virgin wife, the wife whose sexuality is consistently denied by a dominating ideology that insists on family-based nation building. Gandhian ideology as a nationalist ideology functions through the interpellation of the virgin wife, yet a Gandhian lived life also insists on an assertive wife, one far from pliant (Gandhi, Role of Women 50–51). This overdetermination of ideologies makes way for the figuration of the virgin wife as a character not only marginalized but also personalized, or one in wilful pursuit of the good life. This evolution of the subject of ideological interpellation into the wilful agent is achieved through self-rule, or swaraj. To close-read the novels is also to recognize the unusual place of literature: between ideology and knowledge, as both Althusser and Macherey categorize it. Martha Craven Nussbaum, whose pet topic is virtue ethics in literary theory, also insists on the extraordinary role of literature. According to her, literature can contribute to a theory of the good. Nussbaum is significantly influenced by the Greek tragedies and Greek philosophers, as well as by the Indian Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen’s capability theory, according to which what is worthwhile is not gross national product (GNP) but human 4HE !GENT IN THE -ARGIN  “freedoms,”1 where participation, human well-being, and freedom are what count. Nussbaum’s suggestion that literature can make positive change2 and that one of the best desirable changes is in the matter of human freedom is valuable for an analysis of Sahgal’s novels, particularly on the narrative significance of the Gandhian concept of swaraj, or self-rule, for female characters who to all appearances are silenced and rendered immobile in the represented society. Nussbaum takes the concept of the “good life” from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and defines “good” not as “goodness of character” or virtue, but as “the human good”—eudaimonia (Fragility xii). Awareness of “the good,” in the Althusserian scheme of things, can improve “real conditions of existence” when the subject grows conscious of the gap between life and lived life. The materiality of ideology, as Althusser stresses, facilitates this consciousness and the production of a thinking subject. Further, as Nussbaum points out, once more resorting to Aristotle, relationships of love and friendship are crucial to the good life—experiences often denied for Sahgal’s female characters. Yet, Nussbaum moves away from Aristotle and towards the Stoics, for in Aristotle, she says, is “the absence ... of any sense of universal human dignity, a fortiori of the idea that the worth and dignity of the human beings is equal.” On the other hand, “for the Stoics ... the bare possession of the capacity for moral choice gives us all a boundless and an equal dignity. Male and female, slave and free, Greek and foreigner, rich and poor, high class and low—all are of equal worth, and this worth imposes stringent duties of respect on all of us” (xx). Although Nussbaum never mentions Emmanuel Levinas, her preference for what she refers to as the “Stoic” philosophy is only too graphically presented by Levinas as the “ethical” nature of “the face.” According to Levinas, this is the face of the “Other,” who cannot be reduced to me; who challenges me, albeit meekly, to recognize the “Other” as not self, but superior: “The being that expresses itself imposes itself, but does so precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity—its hunger—without being able to be deaf to that appeal. Thus in expression the being that imposes itself does not limit but promotes my freedom by arousing my goodness” (200). While the philosophy of Levinas can explain the good life in terms...

Share