Human Relationships in Shobhaa De’s Novels

By Jabeen R. Siddiqui & Vitthal V.Parab

Shobhaa De a passionate, poignant and confident writer by means of her art disseminates the idea of disgusting back for the fundamental mental rights of females. She achieved success with latest burning issues faced by her characters in relationships.The book explores deeply Shobhaa De’s fiction and raises the mask of crimeful relations prevailing in high society of contemporary India. She exposes the obscure secrets of the urban elite people and the changed picture of dilemmas to a few knows about it. Through the means of literature she wanted to bring the awareness among the people and to stop the absurd circumstances ongoing in metros. Although the modern life has been exhibited in the novels, at the end she focuses on the Indian ethos. As a feminist cum humanist she intimates the women to be self reliant, independent through education and economic independence. Characters in new avatars are presented. This book discovers the secret behind linking of unmarried females to married males and the entrapping of young females by ineffectual males. This epitome confers benefit to the youngsters to know about the side effects of premarital relationships. It also exhorts the decaying of marital relationships and rise in remarriage. Denying from motherhood is also viewed. The reasons behind falling into extramarital affairs are outspoken. New attitudes towards sex are adverted. It discusses the reason of preferring homosexually by bestowing the knowledge of mental health and problems in the lives of upper class people. Voilence against women is also stated.This book is a solution for each and every unsettled, unsatisfactory relationship prevailing in contemporary society and also to the students, researchers and readers to get right direction for their motives. This contemplation exhibits that people live longer if they are in satisfying relationships. It is an honest and sincere attempt by the authors to convey Shobhaa De’s significant thoughts to the readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Notion Press
• Release date: Jan 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9789384878184

Book preview

V.Parab

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Shobhaa De is the most prominent socialite, openly straight forward columnist, intellectual, moderate poignant, sharp, shrewd and extremely conservative novelist in Indian English Literature. She is a grandiloquent advocate of the feminist thoughts and a budding genius in the domain of Modern English Literature. At the present age of Sixty-six she is beautiful, ostentatious and the most darling lady of India.

She portrays the true picture of modern metropolitan life. Her novels deal with men and women of urban elite class their obsessions, disappointments and insecurities. Human relationships in De’s novels were important to see the fun, feelings, stress and struggle in their lives. She is esteemed for writing proper trashy romance lit and pseudo-erotica. Her art is easily apprehensible and is upright to show the bare disclosure of urban elite society, but she executed through the medium of art and exquisiteness, feeling and form. Her Art may not like by the readers but it has been fruitful to her to expose the absurd situation of the metropolitan elites. It spreads the message of revolting back for the rights of the woman which has a strong voice of objection and an outburst of suppression and discrimination of women in patriarchal society. She exhibits her characters in numerous types of relationships.

In Shobhaa De’s novels one finds round and flat characters. She takes care of the readers and develops the effective characters unequally by giving some major roles and some minor roles. Flat characters are represented in outline or their role is subdued. A round character is provided with full role and is complex in nature. They all infer different type of dispositions to which the readers knows best. Round characters stand like a pillar and fully support the story and are never bothered by the supporting characters. They look natural and real, on the other hand the flat characters are utilitarian. She brings the liveability in the novels by providing the great effect to the action of the characters while describing the joy and sorrow. She also describes the sex scenes, love scenes, their psyche and relationships with great gusto. Not only this she handles the thoughts of the characters and brings the liveability in the scenes.

The characters chosen are amazingly beautiful, ruthlessly ambitious, filthily rich youngsters who love and hate each other in a said relationship.

Her female characters are rich, beautiful, surefooted and assertive who combines the flapper’s physical freedom, sexuality and stamina with feminist self-assertiveness and traditional domestic feminity. Males are painted in gloomy colours as they are passive, involuntary, unresponsive and rigid. Shobhaa De though a student of psychology possess feminist cum humanistic approach towards life. She stands behalf of the acquisition of Indian English Literature.

The backdrop highlights the evolution of Indian English Literature. A transition of English Literature culminates through many forms such as Indo-Anglian, Indo-English, Indian writing in English and recently Indian English literature which manifests modern thoughts, modern life, despite the utterances of fallacious reasoning, patriotic duty and political prejudices it remains good enough and proves itself. It facilitates to focus the readers mental responsiveness and awareness.

Many women novelists reflected their portrayals very beautifully like Shobhaa De and depicted a common relation between past and present, cognitive content and contemporaneity and it is a strong sense of Indianness which has proved an individual identity in Indian writing in English.

Shobhaa De’s fiction focuses every variety of heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexual behaviours, psyche of women and her problems.

Human relationships in Shobhaa De’s novels consist of a mixture of cognitions, feelings and attitudes that clearly straighten into a flexible fashion depending on the cultural and social environment and the psychomotor objectives of the individual character.

Shobhaa De understands the psyche of women and their problems as she is a psychology student. She knows the urban elite women of contemporary metro cities their demands and needs and frames them in such situations by giving them full justification.

She is condemned by various critics like A.G.Khan, S.P.Swain and M.K.Naik calling her novels as pieces of delight and not the proper novels. On the other hand Jaydipsinh Dodiya and R. K. Dhawan also recognise her as a meaningful writer who touches the big and small facets of human life through the means of her characters. This book fill up the hiatus and focuses the relationships of urban elite people of metropolitan cities of India as mentioned by Shobhaa De in her novels and creates the image of a novelist. The following novels were selected and analyzed to study the human relationships. Socialite Evenings (1989), Starry nights (1992), Sisters (1992), Strange Obsession (1992), Sultry Days (1994), Snapshots (1995) Second Thoughts (1996) and Sethji (2012). Her novels are blinded by the glitter, sadness, hollowness, the artificiality, the pangs and inner fragmentation of falsified life.

This book is an attempt to procure a realistic picture of a particular urban elite class of people in metropolitan cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Calcutta captured by the novelist’s naïve realism from the society.

It raises the veil of crimeful relations prevailing in high society of contemporary India and also throws significant light on the predicament of women in India. Shobhaa De’s women unhesitantly and unmistakably discuss and practice sex with unusual candour. They practice sex in four-wheel-drive sex in all directions. So the relationships are based on sex, lust and greed. Beneath the turbulent waves of relationships run the placid meaningful orthodox values projected by De.

The book provides the enigmatic fissures in human relationships in changing dilemmas in an urban India. The more positive attitudes towards greed and quest of self centeredness associated with elite people in part impel their attitudes towards increased unethical behaviour in relationships. It also describes that how characters get assimilated, suffered or distracted in relationships.

Society has to pay attention towards the inhumane relationships ruining the Indian culture.

The book reflects the weaving of characters from the novels their association with one another and the changing dilemmas in an Indian urban elite society. It is not about just bored and frustrated housewives but also about harden and cynical women who are unsafe to the eternal feminine fantasy of a partner who seems to be ready for any challenge and they think the men think of their supremacy in the most adolescent term.

It states that relationships play an important role in one’s health and to discover meaning in one’s life but the picture is changed due to psychodynamic changes, occurring in the characters due to urbanization, bureaucratization and individualization as portrayed by Shobhaa De in her novels. Thus it intensifies to combat the deepest study of the novels to mitigate the problem.

Shobhaa De has given birth to Hinglish, a willful, irrelevant combination of Hindi and English which sounds the readers in a different way.

From many years, Hinglish has earned its own some distinguishing traits which are very different from Hindi and the readers have prior begun to utter it as a:

‘Language in the making.’1

Many Hindi snippets have been used by the writers in Indian English. Use of Hindi snippets are written in Roman and not in Devanagri; the legitimate writing of Hinglish has gained a feature of its own and has achieved so much to what is now being called as:

‘Hinglish.’²

Examples as: ‘Kitni sweet lag rahi ho!’, ‘Kaajal’, ‘hijda’. She uses it to make her art beautiful, and sound slipshod, not formal and something purposeless. Shobhaa De apprehends very well to establish orally. Her articulation of speech is chatty and aloof. Some of her usages are glittering for instance ‘fluff and frippery’, ‘grime

and grit’ and ‘pegs and pakoras’. Her phony language creates the real scene before the readers and mocks at their hypocrisy and duplicity of the Characters.

"Sachchi, Kya pyari figure hai. You should feel very proud of your body. I have photographed hazaar film- stars, but I have yet to see such a figure. Chalo let’s shoot some Adivasi shots. After all, most of our films are about villagers. You will have to wear such costumes when you become a star. I have arranged for one today, take a look!"³.

Shobhaa De is a Symbolist who tries to discover the hidden meaning and significances of her characters which are hidden underneath the surface. Her psychological knowledge is also more important to her to know the interior life of her contemporary characters of the bourgeois world. She focuses on the human consciousness and exposes the dark secrets of urban elite people in their complexities with their true colors.

She has given importance to the family in her personal life but has shattered the image of respectability of marriage in her novels. Her novels are very responsive to their time and place. She is attracted with the use and misuse of power in today’s India. Her books were first to reflect a contemporary India rather than be focused on the clichés surrounding India. She in a presumable manner reflects her own feminist and sexiest thoughts. She protests the malist culture and strongly opposes the subjugation and marginalization of women. She mentions that women also had to give importance towards their physicality at any age; they must not give up themselves and must not complain about the society and their marginalization. She is the forerunner of the emerging Indian women with her liberated womanhood. She writes frankly about sex and openly discusses the sexual matters in her fiction which hurts the critics and the orthodox people. She thinks that the main cause is sexuality from which most of the problems of women arise. This book lays impact on the arrival of the new women who is ready to confront in all spheres of life.

It is adequate to say that Shobhaa De is writing in the environment of Indian English literature which is not absolute fiction, but on the contrary it is an interpretation and collection of Anthropology, History, Sociology, Psychology and a multitude of other areas. So far the real literary artist unfolds life more precisely and with more clear historical facts and statistical details, because he/she shares with the conformity to rule the human heart with the realities of man in society.

When we see the history we find that a group of persons with native or co-native languages associated to write in English and their literary work invoked as Indian English Literature. English is taken up as a language of education ad gesture and an important source of verbal connection of the Indians.

Indian English literature is one and half century old. During the British rule also English was the language of supremacy, position and advantage in India. English was used to compose and to hold up possession of administrative officers, clerks and civil servants in vast and expansive sub-continent. It originated in the summer of 1608 when Emperor Jahangir invited with attraction to Captain William Hawkins, Commander of British Naval Campaign in the Moghul Court. It was Indian’s first tryst with the Britisher in English.

English became irresistible necessity for the natives to impart with their British rulers. They conveyed their messages and entreaties in English and lodge their ailments with the police in English. English became a matter of endurance of the urban class rather than an issue of self esteem. As soon as the modern population emerged, it started to extend its wings. Most of the early advocates of English literature in India were Britishers. The persons like George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling and Jim Corbett boosted English language and afterwards it was carried on by many British authors. Their tone of philosophy was soon characterized by facts and non-fictional works.

English language was too used by many young patriots as a device to strive against the rightful power of British. Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Swami Vivekananda wrote prose; Henry Derozio, Tagore and Sri Aurobindo Ghosh were as poets and prose writers. They wrote literary genres of their choice to make a political change. They spiritualized and fraternized their genres with their yearnings to strengthen the deaden people, to be more communicative in their better feelings and to make them active in their functions. As though Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan has exactly commented in his book The Hindu view of life as:

"Our accounts of God are like stories, but all the same legendry.

Not one of them is full and final. We are like little children on the

sea shore trying to fill our shells with water from the sea. While we can’t exhaust the waters of the deep sea by means of our shells,

every drop that we attempt to gather into our tiny shells is a part

of the authentic water."4

- Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan.

As Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu were contributing to the English literature initially- in that period many boarding schools educated upper class English authors were engendered in the society. They wrote realistic fictions and it was read by all over the world. There was a compensatory pause for three decennaries when India was going through the phase of ambitiousness and reconstruction. Many works produced by the Indian writers set the stage on fire and failed in catalyzing and detonation.

Due to the emergence of freedom struggle a radical social change in writing voiced abreast the British Empire. At that time many political leaders like Lala Lajpat Rai, Gangadhar Tilak wrote from different parts of the country. English language became a weapon in the hands of Gandhiji and he edited and presented his autobiography as My experiments with truth to show his literary stylish elegance. Nehruji was an eminent leader who outranked in writing prose.

At the same time writer like R.K.Narayan, the writer Mulk Raj Anand and the famous writer Raja Rao started to produce literary work in their early thirties. They were formulating on Indian positions and handling the social matters like superstitious notion, social status, impoverishment, ignorance and social wickedness that were diminishing the life and sustaining properties of Indian society in the English novels and short stories. As India achieved freedom many freedom fighters, leaders and writers started to write efficacious poems. Rabindranath Tagore cited in ‘Gitanjali’.

"Where the mind is without fear

And the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been

Broken up into fragments by

Narrow domestic walls’

Where words come out from

The depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches

Its arm toward perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason

Has not lost its way into the dreary

Desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is lead forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action –

Into that heaven of freedom, my father,

Let my Country awake."⁵

- Rabindranath Tagore.

We know that in 1947 India became free from foreign rule and English language was viewed from 1965. From then English and Hindi are the official languages. English language in India is used to consider mass nouns as count nouns and often use of isn’t it? Tag and more grammatical usages like compound form and prepositions came into writings. India came forth as a major literary nation in 1980’s and 1990’s. Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight Children’ caused an extreme vehemence in a circle and won the Booker Prize. ‘The Golden Gate’ also made him to enter the arena of international writers and raised an unreasonable mark on the world-wide literary scene. Some of the writers like ‘Eunice de Souza’, ‘Keki Daruwala’, ‘Adil Jassawala’, ‘Kamala Das’ used Indian phrases with English words and proved to manifest a mixture of the Indian and Western cultures.

Today’s Indian English literature is the manifestation of modern thoughts, modern life, despite the utterance of fallacious reasoning, patriotic duty and political prejudices it remains good enough and proves itself. It facilitates to focus the reader’s mental responsiveness and awareness. From the time of Tagore many intelligent critics emerged with their literary traditions of their own country not considering about their past and not accepting the charm of the modish style. Modern Indian literatures possess the republic of letters in which there are well trained critics who are judicious and fearless and they are writing with happy results.

It is noteworthy that in the modern history of Indian English literature many men and women novelists emerged and they created a remarkable visual sensation all around the world with their great master pieces of arts. In around the late 19th century the feminist movement started with the beginning of first wave of feminism. Thomas Stearns Eliot has exactly said that:

"The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by

finding an ‘objective correlative’, in other words, a set of objects,

a situation, and a chain of events which shall be the formula of

that particular emotion."6

The feminists reflected their portrayals very beautifully and depicted a common relation between past and present, cognitive content and contemporaneity and it is this strong sense of Indianness which has proved an individual identity in Indian writing in English. Thus:

Indian Writing in English is no longer a bogie attached to the British Engine, but it is running smoothly on its own track with the help of its own engine. 7

- Amar Nath Prasad.

Across India in all over the universities, the Indian writing in English has been prescribed as a separate branch of curriculum. Many writers like Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, Shobhaa De and Salman Rushdie have astounded globally by their perfect writing skills. The first wave of feminism in the 19th to early 20th Century followed the suffrage movement. The second wave of feminism considered the inequality of laws and also the official inequalities. The third wave of feminism arose from the detected failures of the second wave.

Homosexuality was also portrayed by Virginia Woolf with a positive degree. Many female writers strived to change the representation of female sexual behaviours and it was also accepted for men to have more than one sexual partner. This was also called as the third wave of feminism. The feminist literatures and the third world women’s problems were shaped by post- modernism. Contrary to the expectations the modern literature which is rising is charged as being obvious, not genuine, superficially limited and formerly also inferior in quality to summon a universal challenge. One can remember the famous words of Salman Rushdie:

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.8

- Salman Rushdie

Arundhati Roy, Gita Mehta, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Allen.j.Solly and Salman Rushdie had pronounced, directed and wrote in abundance. Some of the writers like Rohinton Mistry, Naipaul, Chitra Banerjee, Divakaruni, Jhumpa Lahiri and Shobhaa De also belong to Indian Diaspora.

The Indian English literature has endowed different intellectual women novelists who submitted Indian editions of books within the border of excellence and modesties. An American writer Gertrude Stein writes in her poem that:

"Write without thinking of the result

In terms of a result,

But think of the writing

Which is to say that creation

Must take place

between pen and paper,

Not before in a thought

Or afterwards in a recasting,

It will come if it is there

And if you will let it come."9

- Gertrude Stein.

Their writings reflected their thoughts. In the starting period very few female writers like Sarojini Naidu and Toru Dutt gave importance to English poetry. There was not a single novel written by Indian women.

The literary art chiefly written by women and culpably involved with women is called as a feminist literature. Indian women novelists have disposed a new magnitude to the Indian literature.

Simone de Beauvoir the great novelist explains the situation of women as:

"The situation of woman is that she ---- a free and autonomous

being like all human creatures - nevertheless finds herself living a world where men compel her to assume the status of the other."10

- Simone de Beauvoir.

It was of utmost importance to bring a social change and to raise the situation of women, for that matter a splendid assemblage of writers have been witnessed. Many English novels were introduced by the new age feminist writers. They thought that feminism is an end to all the bad experiences faced by a woman in muteness. From a last few decades Indian English literature is emerging and developing by itself. Female writers of India are framing a position of themselves. Writers from Pakistan and Bangladesh are also writing in English. They are all undeclared or unrecognized sociologist of the world. ‘Nilofar Cagatay’ in women’s conference mentioned absolutely that:

"Feminism constitutes the political expression of the concerns

and interests of women form different regions, classes, nationalities and ethnic backgrounds……..There is and must be a of feminism responsive to the different needs and concerns of different women and defined by them for themselves."11

- Nilofar Cagatay.

Feminism presents to a different quality of cognitive content, the transcript, movements and agencies for activities. It is an imaginative process which works for the betterment of women. The common ideas and themes are found in women novelist writings. They are concerned with gender issues and the actions performed by the female characters, subjectivity, utilization and subjugation, the notion of being other in a patriarchal society. It represents the growing up of a female from childhood to womanhood, liberating her from self quest, sexual aberrancy, sexual power, relationships, realities, philosophy and artistic movements. She represents a new woman in the Indian culture, globalization, migration, diaspora consciousness, and east-west dissension, the conflict between tradition and modernity and socio-mental status.

In India many female novelists like Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal, Ruth Prawer Jahabvala, Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, Eunice De Souza, Kiran Desai, Kamala Das, Shobhaa De, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy, Mahashweta Devi and others reflected their literary works.

Feminist in India are with down to earth attitudes and they possess accumulated knowledge and harmony of opinions. These foremost ladies strike the average Indian read out with their distinctive Indian self satisfaction concerning gender cognitive content. People started thinking about women writers in a Mills and Boon discourse, but women writers they established that they are serious and exercise discipline and are outward than that. The women authors have seized with complex issues such as sensual pleasures, confinements and groups. They have adjusted them with the awareness of balance never regardless of our Indian traditions, yet noticing that there is more in the predictable future. They possess down to earth attitudes and exercise discipline. Women writers in India can no longer be assort as the scooped property of India. Their functioning and their literary art are concerned not only in India but throughout the world. The earlier writer like Kamala Markandaya portrayed the plight of poor rural women, Shashi Deshpande, Manju Kapur and Nayantara Sahgal wrote especially about the middle class educated and employed women of India. Namita Gokhale and Shobhaa De presented the rich elite women in their writings. Ruth Prawer Jahabvala’s novels are of social and economical problems of the present century. The best recognized changeable and good writer Nargis Dalal portrays her novels with the thoughts of feminism and write short stories. Anita Desai’s work unveils the struggle for female power against the background of the patriarchal culture style in India. The principal of humanism is advocated by a diasporic writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Anjana Appachana though resides in United States her main interest is to make a study of Indian women and their minds.

Shobhaa De’s literary achievement as a writer of eighteen books fiction and non-fiction introduces the reader to the inner lives of the elite women of urban India. Many women novelists are a part and parcel of Indian English literature from the nineteenth century and De is among one of them. She observes the society keenly and sketches her characters and starts to write.

Shobhaa De in a right line delineated as an accurate sensible and practical writer describing the world of charm in the Indian upper middle class environment without any prohibition. She is courageous in a tolerable degree to write brighter about the exact human conditions the way girl think, fantasize and talk with each other when they are persistent about the tabooed subjects, and considers blatantly the problems, feelings and ambitions of the career woman highlighting the gender consciousness, self definition, manifestation and fate. Her writings have always aggravated hostile reactions because of her awareness in profound portrayal of life and her power to set forth the dark secrets but she prohibits herself by expressing that is important for