Brick in the wall

From feudal havelis to modern-day apartments, houses in Indian fiction writing by women are not mere backdrops but take on the character of shifting ideologies, argues author Geetanjali Singh Chanda

Houses loom like characters — sometimes protective and sometimes sinister in novels by Indian women. Far from being mere backdrops, where the plot unfolds, their location in particular places, whether hill-stations, ancestral villages, or urban settings, is deliberate, specific, and meaningful.

For the young women protagonists particularly, the home is a training ground where they are taught the rules and rituals of family life. The home’s floor plans reinforce codes of behaviour that are almost subliminally internalised. These structures become the regulating grid within, or against, which women negotiate their lives and relationships.

 

These novels explore how homes can morph into claustrophobic prisons. But they also suggest alternate nurturing spaces de-linked from the rigid confines and rules of gender and hierarchy.

Over time, Indian homes have broadly moved from havelis to bungalows and apartments. The novels set within these contexts reflect the ideologies of that kind of home. “Haveli” novels like Attia Hossain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column and Rama Mehta’s Inside the Haveli, for example, highlight the feudal, joint-family ethos. The word haveli derives from the Arabic word “haowla”, meaning partition.

The physically segregated spaces of the havelis — male-female, public-private and family-non-family — are manifested in the strict hierarchies and gender rules against which the young protagonists Laila and Geeta struggle.

Geeta (Inside the Haveli), in fact, has to unlearn her cosmopolitan, urban Bombay existence to embrace the ways of her enclosed, marital haveli. The house in Sunlight on a Broken Column is a microcosm of India on the brink of change. Here, we witness the end of feudalism and British rule and the partition of India. In both novels, the threat to tradition is posed by insiders who have been exposed to odernity.

One of the central architectural features of the haveli is the inner courtyard where women gather to ensure the smooth running of the household. In my book, Indian Women in the House of Fiction, I describe this as a “womenspace”, a segregated space that can have the lasting benefit of creating the potential for female friendships. In fact, this yearning of women towards other women for everyday nurturing and friendship is evident in many novels.

The shift from havelis to Western-style bungalows also marks a move away from the joint to the nuclear family. However, in Shashi Deshpande’s A Matter of Time and Shama Futehally’s Tara Lane, the natal and new marital bungalow homes are linked with what seems like an umbilical chord.

Both the newly-married protagonists Sumi and Tara move into separate homes with their husbands, but these are physically and figuratively situated in the shadow of the parental homes. Furthermore, although housing styles changed, some of the patterns like female friendships and joint family existence of the old homes were carried over to the new homes.

Meena Alexander’s Nampally Road, Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni’s Sister of My Heart, Shashi Deshpande’s Binding Vine, among many others, reiterate the centrality of female friendships that can go beyond family and friends to an instinctive empathy towards all women.

Novels like Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us is a family saga where a young English girl, Rose, even establishes a bond with her co-wife that transcends language, culture and wifely rivalry.

In Deshpande’s novels particularly, houses are almost central characters with histories of their own. The first chapter in A Matter of Time is entitled “House” and it begins by introducing the reader to the house Vishwas. Not only is the house named — which is not unusual — but the entire first section is devoted to giving us the essentially male lineage of the house, its exact location, its directional coordinates, what does and does not grow around it and the text notes, anthropomorphically, that, “Inside, the house seems to echo the schizophrenic character of its exterior.

” The author then carefully maps the inside so we know this personified house both inside and out. As readers we are privy to this essential information, but Sumi’s self realisation can only occur when she recognises the emotional tenor of the house that has so shaped the relationship between her parents and, therefore, also her own and her siblings’ interactions in their new homes. 

In fact, this return to the old home is a kind of returnto a personal, historical archive and the message is that it is essential for characters to acknowledge their past before they can move forward. Laila (Sunlight on a Broken Column), for instance, has to come back to Ashiana before she can come to terms with herself and any kind of new beginning she might envisage.

Diaspora homes raise a different set of issues because they signal new beginnings and often in new places that afford no going back; but, they also evoke, sometimes nostalgically, the homes and countries left behind.

In the London-based A Wicked Old Woman, Ravinder Randhawa suggests that for second-generation Indians, being twice removed from the original home and home-country loosens the framework of life.

First-generation immigrant homes are quite different from the homes created by second-generation Indians. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Ashima lovingly creates a home with what Vijay Mishra aptly calls a “Hindu toolbox” of Indian artifacts that make the home a familiar Indian space.

The Namesake even opens poignantly with a pregnant Ashima hungrily recreating and literally consuming India in her concoction of “jhaal moori” made with Rice Crispies cereal. For her son, the American-born Gogol, as for many others, the very Indianness of the home is often a burden, hampering their assimilation and marking them as different.

A character in A Wicked Old Woman asserts, “Respect. Obedience. Hard Work. The three penances for being born Indian you know!” The same sense of duty and conformity oppresses both Laila and Rani (A Wicked Old Woman), but whereas in the former it is merely seen as rebellion, in the latter it is read as a cultural betrayal.

The glimmerings of an original experimentation are in the creation of home spaces that are not necessarily linked to domesticity. In Divakaruni’s Mistress of Spices and Amulya Malladi’s Song of the Cuckoo Bird a shop and an ashram respectively are the locations for working out new ways of relating to the world.

Women and domesticity are often automatically coupled as the house is where women both live and work. However,

Indian novels in English argue that the home can also be seen as a mechanism for controlling women. Although the home is popularly seen as a woman’s domain, the Victorian view of the home being the lord’s castle is probably more accurate and tradition, patriarchy, and gender divisions ensure women’s subordinate positions within.

Homes offer women shelter but their place in the home is never guaranteed. The price of breaking the rules of the home is eviction and homelessness. This constant fear buys womanly submission, but the rules of the house are deeply ingrained and often internalised by the women.

They are the guardians of the hearth but they also become jailers for other women who dare to challenge the rules. Though the novels may not provide a model for ideal woman-friendly homes, they explore more egalitarian and compassionate ways for women and men to live together.