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Empowering women in select novels of Jaishree Misra: A Study

R DANIEL RUBARAJ
The concept of womens rights came into being when some individuals began to experience a
chronic imbalance in gender relations and to realize that the unequal power-sharing between men
and women is not actually an innate fact of life or an incontrovertible given but rather a viciously
created situation, an evil construct. This dawning of awareness gradually led to an active
opposition to the perceived injustice. At times especially in the early stages the resistance
was spontaneous and radical. But in due course of time, the victims of discrimination were able
to carefully formulate a definite methodology for the restoration of equal rights.
Such an intellectual handling of the issue led to great benefits. It helped women shed their
narrow focus and take on a more broad-based, pro-life vision of things. There also came a
realization that the concept of womens rights cannot be a water-tight compartment because it is
organically linked to childrens rights. The two are inextricably interlinked. So women have
seen greater wisdom in evolving strategies that will work on a long-term basis strategies that
will not only help them lead more meaningful lives but assist the newer generations enjoy what
is rightfully their heritage a safe planet where there is no threat of nuclear holocaust and where
natural resources are seen as a common legacy, not the property of a few private individuals or
MNCs.
When we think and talk about womens rights or any other rights, we cannot exclude certain
terms and concepts that are specifically associated with them. In the field of literature we cannot
but take into consideration the dichotomous archetypal stereotypes that have worked against
women the angel or Madonna versus the virago or monster or the dichotomous stereotypes
that have categorized men as constituting the centre and women merely forming the margins of
an essentially patriarchal social structure. We cannot ignore the clichd binaries that have
characterized the depiction of the male and the female as the Self and the Other; as the active and
the passive entities, as the reasonable and the passionate beings and so on. These perspectives
and terminologies also constitute a convenient theoretical framework for critics when they set
out to evaluate the worth of a writer or to examine the intensity of feminist commitment in that
writers canon.
Jaishree Misra, one of the prominent contemporary Indian novelist handles the issue of
empowering the marginalized in her Novels. Misras literary career took off with the hugely
popular novel Ancient Promises that was published in 2000. Since then, she has written six
more novels Accidents like Love and Marriage(2001), Afterwards (2004) and Rani (2007)
Secrets and lies (2009) Secrets and sins (2010) A Scandalous Secret (2011) and The little book
of Romance, a collection of Romantic poems.
The reason for choosing Misra is simple firstly, her works are woman-centric; yet her
characters do not conform to the staid stereotypes, probably used to expect from women-writers.
Secondly and more importantly, Misra problematizes the concept of womens empowerment.
Where does a womans power lie? Is it only in defying oppressive, male chauvinistic mores of
the society and deciding the course of her life? Or does it mean something more? Does
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empowerment provide a panacea for all her troubles? These are the questions which Jaishree
Misra fields, wittingly or otherwise, in her works and in doing so she seems to have cut her own
furrow. The novels selected for the study are, Ancient Promises,(2000) Afterwards (2004) and
Rani (2007) Secrets and sins (2010) A Scandalous Secret (2011)
A careful study of these novels reveal that Misra does not present the typical plot of a weak,
silent, suffering, voiceless woman who is trapped in an oppressive, male dominated atmosphere,
gathers courage one fine day, breaks free of all restraints and walks bravely into a life of
intellectual, emotional and financial independence. Actually, her heroines Janaki in Ancient
Promises, Maya in Afterwards and Manikarnika in Rani (who becomes Queen Lakshmibai of
Jhansi) enjoy a lot of privileges. They are not weak, silent, suffering, voiceless women. All of
them are born into families that value and love the girl child, believe in educating her and accept
her right to articulate her thoughts and feelings. There is not even a hint of patriarchal
oppression as the father figures play a significant role in grooming the girl. The crisis comes
only when the family succumbs to the time-honoured Indian practice of marrying her off at a
relatively young age. But here again, the intentions are unquestionably noble; the family take all
precautions to ensure that the match works out well for her either in terms of providing
companionship or greater prospects. It is in the depiction of marriage-related crises and the
heroines overcoming of them that Jaishree Misra shows her uniqueness.
In Ancient Promises Janaki, a Keralite brought up in Delhi, falls in love with a north Indian boy
Arjun Mehta, when she is a wee wisp of a girl, a teenager. The parents are aghast at their
daughters unorthodox behaviour and object to the relationship. The lovers are prized apart
Arjun goes to England to pursue higher studies and Janaki is brought to Alleppey. Several
marriage proposals are discussed and finally a match with the Maraar family is fixed. Janaki is
terribly upset at the turn of events but she is not bulldozed into a marriage to Suresh. She thinks
over her situation:
The fact of Arjuns departure was just starting to sink in as something real and permanent. Hed
gone, not for a month or a year but probably for ever. Ma was right, it was crazy to expect wed
ever share a future together. Wed always occupied different worlds, now it could have been
separate universes. (62)
And when she writes a letter to Arjun to inform him of her impending wedding, her justifications
display a combination of rational thinking and filial loyalty:
Besides, she is given all assurances that she can pursue her studies. There is no compulsion
either from her husband or her rather strong-willed mother-in-law to start a family. But for all
these advantages, life does not move smoothly for her. Janaki is not whole-heartedly accepted
into the Maraar family. The reasons are difficult to pinpoint, the harassment is hardly overt or
brutal. And it is in a bid to gain acceptance that Janaki herself decides to put her studies in the
back burner and start a family:
Perhaps, just perhaps, having a child would solve my problems more easily than a BA and a job.
Thats what Id do. Id have a child! She, as their grandchild, would be loved. Especially if she
turned out to be the much-longed-for first grandson. And, as his mother, Id receive a sort of
instant double-promotion, so to speak. Be elevated to the position of Good Mother and Good
Daughter-in-Law. And spin out the rest of my days basking in a kind of reflected glory and
blissful motherhood. (113)
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But things do not go according to plan. Her child, a daughter Riya is detected with learning
disability and this defective baby gives the Maraar family a strong reason to be dismissive of the
mother-daughter duo. Interestingly, it is at this point that Janaki casts off her deferential attitude
and becomes openly rebellious.
She [Riya] was not going to provide me with a passport to their love and affection, she did not in
fact have one herself. My struggle was over. I grabbed at the realization with a weary but dizzy,
almost overwhelming sense of liberation. I was free. I neither had to struggle for their approval
any more, nor put Riya through the same hopeless loop. I wasnt sure why I had so easily given
up my own right to be loved, allowing it to fade into oblivion somewhere long ago. But a child
like Riya, left unloved, would simply wither and perish. Couldnt they see that her kind of
innocence could only understand love, not the lack of it? My own rights had not seemed worth
fighting for, but Riya needed me to be her voice and a battle on her behalf would be far more
satisfying. I was soon going to become the thorn in the Maraar side. (132-133)
So here we have a woman character who is bothered not about her own survival per se but in
garnering for her intellectually challenged daughter her due rights. Janakis empowerment lies
not in getting herself heard and respected but rather in rescuing her child from a debilitating
atmosphere.
The emergence of Janaki the responsible and protective mother may appear stereotypical but
Jaishree Misra brings in a twist in the plot. Janakis escape route lies in getting herself educated,
securing a BA and an MA degree before she can go abroad on scholarship/sponsorship where
she herself can take a course in Special Education and enroll her daughter in a Special School.
Education holds the key to true empowerment and it has to be admitted that Janaki manages to
complete her under-graduate and post-graduate studies while living in the Maraar household.
Besides, Sureshs family does not stand in her way of going West (America or England) with her
daughter. Subversion comes with Janaki accidentally meeting her old lover Arjun and accepting
his suggestion that she join him in England to pursue her goals. Her decision to seek divorce
from Suresh and fight for the custodianship of Riya predictably create a huge scandal and
through this twist in the tale, Jaishree Misra saves the novel from becoming a stereotypical anti-
male narrative.

Ancient Promises ends in hope for both Janaki and Riya but when we come to the next novel, the
colour and the mood get dark. Afterwards is in many ways at once a weaker version of Ancient
Promises and an extension of it because it captures the story of a wife and mother Maya Warrier
after she leaves her husband and starts a new life with her daughter Anjali in London with her
neighbour-turned-friend-turned-rescuer-turned lover Rahul Tiwari. On the surface, the story of
Mayas courage, iconoclasm and heterodoxy reads like a narrative of empowerment. Maya
succeeds in putting her unhappy past behind her, secures an emotionally fulfilling life for herself
and finds a satisfying engagement as a volunteer with a Social Services agency:
She was so good at what she did, as though she had found her calling in life, helping vulnerable
women and children. Even though it was only voluntary work. She didnt have permission to
work here because we had not been able to get married without her producing a divorce
certificate. (82)
But the cheer that this freedom brings is deceptive because the novel shows how Mayas single
act of walking out on her husband has a domino effect. Misfortunes pile up on her one after
another relentless until that freedom turns ashes in the mouth. The only silver lining in the cloud
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is that Maya is not alive to see and suffer most of the tragedies. But the narrative leaves no
doubt that all the unfortunate events that followed her elopement are triggered by her crucial
deed. Her parents are quite predictably distraught, her paternal grandmother, too old and frail to
tolerate the onslaught of wagging tongues in her native village, dies of sorrow, her father too
succumbs to a sense of shame and heart-burn, her mother has to seek refuge in a temple. What is
even more tragic is that Rahul (Mayas lover) is not permitted by British laws (the country has a
stringent Childrens Act) to remain Anjalis custodian. Without a legally sanctioned divorce,
Maya could not marry Rahul and as they had never anticipated this eventuality of Mayas death,
they had never approached the British courts for officially securing parental responsibility for
Rahul. Now Anjali has the status only of an illegal immigrant and has to be returned to her
biological father, Govind Warrier in India. Thus in one stroke, the emotionally secure and
intellectually satisfying empire Maya had sought to establish collapses like the proverbial pack
of cards.
Here again, Misra is very careful in designing her plot. For one man (Govind Warrier) who
represents the hateful patriarchal values of the society and who stands in the way of Mayas self-
fulfilment, there is another (Rahul Tiwari) whose liberal mind defies that stereotype. Thus like
Ancient Promises, the womans movement towards a better plane of existence or empowerment
is not a lonely affair. She has to face strong opposition no doubt but she is assisted by a man
who pitches in, not out of any sense of sympathy or chivalry, but out of his own goodness of
heart and an appreciation of her worth. The tragedy is that despite these compensations, life
denies her complete happiness.
Rani is by far the most complex and the bleakest of Jaishree Misras novels. In this novel, Misra
tries to rescue her protagonist Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi from two stereotypical moulds she has
been cast into one, the popular, Indian image of a fearless warrior who defied all patriarchal
norms for a noble cause the freedom of her country; and the other, the lesser known British
historical profile of her as a heartless mutineer who engineered a brutal massacre of British
women and children in Jhansi fort. Both images are diametrically opposed to each other. Yet
they have one thing in common. They focus on the martial aspect of her personality. Misra
takes a different approach. She states in her Authors Note that her aim is to find the woman
behind the warrior (vii).
So the novel traces the growth of a six year old, intelligent girl Manikarnika into a responsible
Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi till her death when she is in her late 20s.
The most interesting thing about this imaginative recreation of Lakshmibais portraiture is the
unignorable presence of male mentors, guides, assistants and well wishers all through her life
and her ability to be her own person. While a child she is greatly influenced by the old Peshwa
of Varanasi, her own father Moropant, who is the Peshwas minister. The two men play a very
active role in grooming this motherless girl and give her the earliest and most crucial training in
administration and make her aware of the dangerous maze of power politics. When she is barely
fourteen, she is married off to a 40-year-old king of Jhansi, Gangadhar Rao. The purpose of the
marriage is openly to beget a male heir to the throne. So for all intents and purposes, the young
rani is recognized only for her biological usefulness. But enjoying a warm friendly relationship
with her husband, the trust of the minister of Jhansi and the respect of the British representative
Major Robert Ellis, her personality gets fully rounded. She is valued as a sovereign who will
work for the welfare and safety of her subjects.
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This does not mean that she does all that is expected of her without raising a note of dissent.
Even while loving and respecting her husband, she is clear-sighted enough to suspect that his
numerous physical illnesses may in fact be a manifestation of his lack of interest in
administrative matters and the result of his greater interest in arts. Again, it is she who seeing
her husbands lack of interest in conjugal responsibilities takes the initiative, draws him into an
intimate relationship and finally has a child. When the baby dies, she is distraught but after some
time has enough sense to think of adopting a child and thus safeguarding the future of the
kingdom. She does not agree with Gangadhar Raos soft attitude towards the aggressive and
cruelly exploitative British. But even when she hold the reins of the government later on, she
does not go against her husbands wishes not out of wifely devotion alone, but also out of a
commonsensical and rational realization that Jhansi is not rich enough to trigger a rebellion
against the British, defeat them in a war, oust them out of Jhansi and declare complete
independence without compromising the safety of her subjects. Thus throughout the novel, the
focus is on Jhansi rani who is extremely solicitous about the welfare of the people under her
care. Even when Jhansi is annexed by the British, even when all the neighbouring princely states
begin to husband their resources to fight the British, she remains unmoved. Her justification:
Whatever was happening in other parts of the country, she was determined to see that none of it
would touch the peace of Jhansi. The safety of her family and her people mattered more than
anything else and she would let nothing jeopardize it. Not even the possibility being gradually
unveiled that in distant mutinies may lie the chance of Jhansis rule to be returned to her, the
achingly tempting prospect that its crown may yet grace her sons head. (299)
Her decision to give refuge to a group of British women and children in the Jhansi fort also
comes out of this selfsame humanitarian softness in her. These British citizens are killed brutally
by a group of freedom fighters but Lakshmibai is blamed for engineering the massacre. She tries
to clear her image with the British. But once it dawns on her that her words fall on deaf ears, she
decides to take up arms. The rest is history. She dies a martyrs death. She dies a free woman
but she loses everything she holds precious the sovereignty of Jhansi, the lives of her father and
her young son and the peaceful lives of her loving subjects.
Jaishree Misras efforts at portraying the woman in Lakshmibai are indeed successful and
through the figure of this redoubtable queen, Misra presents her image of the empowered
woman. Lakshmibai is almost like Janaki of Ancient Promises and Maya of Afterwards in that
she has a will of her own and craves for a space of her own. She is influenced by powerful men
in her life but that does not cloud her thinking. Power to her, as to Janaki and Maya, is a tool
that helps improve life for others than for herself and gives her freedom to live life on her own
terms. Misras concept of the empowered woman is that of a being who does not see man as her
enemy even while being trapped in a patriarchal set-up. She finds a way to overcome her
problems and arrive at a solution. In the process, she is not averse to seeking and using the
assistance of trusted men within her inner circle.
."Secrets and Sins" is one of the most satisfying books that I have ever read, as it probed deep
into the psyche of a woman, who is entangled in the web of adultery. The strength of a woman
too came through, who is capable of sifting through the stone and the diamond and recognize it
for it is. Riva is the quintessential evolved woman, who sees beyond physical attraction and
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bonds with her heart, with the person she is deeply in love with; Ben. It is a love story that
transcends cultures and constricted traditions
She projects the manifold dimensions of adoption in her recent rendition, A Scandalous Secret.
Swiftly moving through the West and the East the novelist presents the arduous quest for roots,
an emotionally entangled programme as it is the quest of an adopted daughter for her biological
mother. The manipulation of the emotional realm of the three women of British, Indian and
mixed heritage renders the novel a psycho-cultural implication. Alternating between the locales
of London and Delhi, between Sonya and Neha, the novelist deftly unveils the ramifications of
one single stupid act in the life of Neha Chaturvedi that turned her Oxford dream to a nightmare
Misras women work hard for their freedom and earn it. This shows their strength of character,
their courage and integrity. But fate it appears is not favourably disposed to them. The freedom
they win is never absolute because it does not have the power to guarantee them choicest wish
which is the safety of the lives they wish to protect. Hence the impotence of their freedom.
The doctoral dissertation, Empowering the Marginalized: A Study of woman in select novels of
Jaishree Misra attempts to study how women are empowered mainly through education.