Women, from ancient times to date, have faced countless challenges. Despite being oppressed and mistreated by the opposite sex, they have shown remarkable resilience. Since childhood, they have been treated unequally by their counterparts and male members of the family. Their suppression is often due to being considered liabilities by their parents. Even after marriage, they are sometimes viewed as weak and dependent. However, some women have emerged from this crowd, breaking free from this suppression and taking the initiative to prove their power and ability, inspiring others.

Literature, as a mirror to life, has always reflected the struggles and triumphs of humanity. This is evident through the works of many great authors and novelists. Feminism, as a medium for women to voice their concerns, has found a powerful platform in literature. These women, through their works, have succeeded in sharing their experiences and shedding light on the issues they face. Thus, literature has played a crucial role in bringing feminism to the forefront and allowing it to flourish in India.

Among the pioneering women in literature, Anita Desai stands out with her profound exploration of feminism and marriage in her works. Her contribution to Indian English-language fiction spans almost four decades, marked by significant achievements such as winning the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain and being shortlisted for the Man Booker prize thrice. The central theme of Desai’s fiction, Familial Relationships and their Evolution over Time, resonates deeply with the daily lives of women and their enduring issues.

Concept of Marriage

A famous Indian proverb says, “Raising girls is like watering someone else’s lawn”. Just like an initiation into a caste makes a man a man and provides him with an acceptable and meaningful identity in society, Marriage is the act that does so for a woman, hence making marriage a crucial need for a woman rather than a choice to make. The ancient tradition of making the women bear the responsibility of child care, looking after other family members solely, and the delicacy of a woman’s body and lack of physical strength is what makes her a subordinate to her husband and other males of the family, in most

countries of the world. Family is the institutional and basic structure through which the whole concept of sex inequality is brought up and enforced. It won’t be wrong to say that a family is where this inequality stems from. A woman’s fate does not have any meaning; it is considered that the true fate of a woman’s life is tied to her family, whose fate, in turn, is tied to society.

A woman, after marriage, is said to have fourfold characteristics and personalities as a life partner: she is arranging, the significant other half of her husband, to be put metaphorically; sahadharmini, an associate in the fulfilment of human and divine goals: sahakarmini, a part to all her husband’s actions and sahayogini, a veritable co-operator in all his ventures. A couple of husbands and wives are called Ganpati, joint owners of the household, and they share and are equal partners regarding their biological, psychological, and individual dharma.

However, in recent times, thanks to modernisation and urbanisation, the status of women and female economic participation has gained considerable attention from social scientists. When the lady of a house works, gets employed in a professional occupation and earns finances, it empowers her with resources and higher levels of prestige, which creates a shift in the power balance of the household.

 Marriage in India: Issues and Challenges

If one observes Indian society meticulously, one can see right through the fact that “Everything here seems to begin and end with a marriage.” Some of you might disagree, but in India, Marriage is the most critical social and, most of all, religious occasion of a person’s life and their family as well. Even though the spiritual virtue of Indian society is Celibacy, it is considered as acting contrary to culture and religion and going against the social norms and religious beliefs if a person attempts to become a celibate ascetic without having experienced a marital and parental life ever before. Marriage holds such great social importance and emotional value in India that the decision and choice to marry are rarely left in the hands of individuals to marry themselves. This whole idea is a contradiction, but that’s how things have always worked in Indian society.

The most popular belief regarding marriage in India is that this union named ‘Marriage’ is not of the individuals but of the lineages. Marriage “arrangements” and “negotiations” are not the concerns of the individuals but of the castes and clans. The trendy “Love marriages” these days, in which the individuals marry independently, not giving importance to the agreement and consultation of the family, are regarded as Anti-traditional and even dangerous. In Indian arrangements, each marriage is a public statement of a family’s and a lineage’s social and ritual status and, hence, must be arranged so that the strict rules of endogamy and exogamy are not violated or disobeyed in any way. In short, every marriage is a pact to define formal relations between two lineages in the public’s eyes.

The act of marriage isn’t only to choose your life partner and significant other but also to choose your relatives and brethren. The aspect of marriage that makes it such a great deal has less to do with the social meaning and more with the religious value of it. To look at it objectively, it’s rather complicated to even look at the two separately as they have been bound together ever since. It is not simply – as the people in the West view sacraments – “an outward, visible sign of inward, invisible grace”. It does something. It changes things. It is the only way to change a person in the way that leads to that person’s salvation. No other thing does the wonders that marriage can.

Marriage Life in Anita Desai’s Novels

The novels written by Desai, such as Cry the Peacock and Where Shall We Go This Summer? Voices in the City, Bye-Bye Blackbird and her other novels also highlight the theme of marital disharmony, making the collective theme of her works, Marital Discord. Her stories often underline a touch of feminist concern and portray the failed marriage relationship, which usually leads to the alienation and loneliness of the characters.

R. K.Gupta writes, “Mrs Desai sincerely broods over the fate and future of modern woman more particularly in male-chauvinistic society and her annihilation at the alter of marriage.”(Pg.153)

In the novel Cry, the Peacock's storyline mainly revolves around disharmony in the relationship between husband and wife. Desai searches for the potential reasons for marital discord and analyses how this affects the whole family and household. While tension and strain in a relationship sometimes appear on account of varied levels of sensitivities, it is often due to an individual's inability to observe and react accordingly to the behaviour patterns of their partner. In this novel, Maya and Gautam are two characters with vast temperament differences, which becomes the main cause of incompatibility between them, leading to a strained relationship. On the one hand, Maya is dreamy, sensitive, and emotional, while Gautam is realistic, insensitive, and rational. Maya is quite high-strung and poetic, while Gautam, her complete opposite, is a detached, philosophical and remote person. Maya harbours tenderness, softness and warmth in her personality, while Gautam has complex and cold traits. The invisible thread of bond and the promise of Marriage between the two is anything but strong enough to bind them together for life. It is so fragile and tenuous that it seems it could break any second now. The nightmare becomes a reality when the growing tension between them reaches its climax, and Maya kills Gautam and then commits suicide herself, breaking the thread of marriage into thin shreds.

In Voices in the City, Desai’s primary concern is meaningful human relationships and how a person suffers and changes drastically in their absence. She talks about the psychic compulsion and the psychological effects that may affect an individual in making long-term relationships and relationships with a great deal of meaning or getting involved in them. She is also concerned with what could happen, how a person’s life, behaviour and attitude can change dramatically, and what sorts of situations one would have to go through if one could not make such relationships. In this novel, one of the main characters, Nirode, is obsessed with the relationship between his mother and Major Chadha as it seems to him and thinks of her mother as a she-cannibal. His mother and father didn’t get along well and always had some difficulty, causing dissonance in their relationship. His mother’s affair in Kalimpong was a result of that strain and the cracks in their relationship. The husband-wife relationship was challenging, and Nirode and her mother’s relationship was love-hate, not the normal one between a son and mother. When we searched for suggestions for a mother’s fixation, we came across psychologists who say that hatred is often a defence mechanism of the psyche that obligates one from committing incest.

If Maya’s tragedy in Cry, the Peacock rose from her obsession with a father figure, Nirode’s tragedy lies in his love-hate relationship with her mother.

The novel also shows Monisha and Jiban's incompatibility in their marriage. Monisha’s husband is a prisoner of conventional culture. He believes that apart from childbearing, the most crucial roles of a woman’s life are those of cooking, chopping vegetables, serving food, cleaning, doing the laundry, keeping the house in tip-top state and looking after the children, brushing their hair, all under the stern and rather harsh control of her mother-in-law. In such a household, Monisha can’t help but feel a lack of personal space and privacy. Her husband is always busy with his middle-rank government job affairs, not taking any time out of his schedule for her wife and family, not willing to share her feelings and hence causing dissonance in his and her wife’s relationship, which eventually becomes the main reason behind alienation in their relationship and this is what this novels aim to highlight. This feeling of alienation, frustration and anger is then shifted to the mother-children relationship due to the strained relationship of the married couple. Monisha leads an equally fragmented and starved life. Moreover, she is alienated not only from her husband but from her mother as well. Her mental health and life can be easily comprehended from her long searching and self-confronting in her diary. Her relationship with her husband consists of loneliness, bitterness, lack of communication, and not even a minute of joy and company. As a result, her husband also reckons his wife is a good-for-nothing. He doesn’t even bother to ask his wife if any money gets misplaced or safely stored somewhere else in his pockets.

Monisha’s ill-matched marriage, her loneliness, frustration, anxiety, sterility and stress of living in a joint family with such an insensitive husband, on top of it, pushes her to her limit, and she breaks down. Even at her breaking point, the element of love remains missing from her life and in the end, she gives everything up and puts a bitter end to all her sufferings and pitiful state by committing suicide.

In Where Shall We Go This Summer? Anita Desai chooses the subject matter to be marital discord and strained relationships and highlights the related details. She depicts how one’s inability to talk about one’s fears, anguish, circumstances, and feelings results in the sudden breakage in the communication of a husband and wife relationship. Factors such as differences in attitudes, individual complexes and fears add up and distance the couple even more daily, resulting in marital disharmony. Raman and Sita have opposite temperaments and attitudes towards life. Raman and Sita also face the same problem: marital discord between husband and wife. While Sita is the epitome of emotion and feminine sensibility, Raman, on the other hand, is a man who believes in keeping an active view of life and is practical. Sita is a middle-aged woman who is nervous, sensitive and timid; she doesn’t want to get up and face her problems and often has an emotional and explosive response to her adult responsibilities. It would not be an exaggeration to say that she wishes to escape reality. On the contrary, Raman represents the prose of life. He is sane and national and accepts the norms and values of society; in short, he is a Realist. He cannot understand Sita's mechanism, so she has violent and passionate reactions towards every single incident of their life.

Whenever Sita reacts that way and bursts out during any incident, Raman always gets left with puzzlement, confusion, weariness, exhaustion, and fear. At last, he refuses to accept this abnormal and problematic behaviour of her wife. He cannot get the gist of her boredom and her frustration with her life. The theme of alienation and lack of communication in married life is discussed in this novel by Anita Desai. She gets feelings and a sense of alienation from her husband and even her children. Since childhood, no one has paid any attention to her or sought to help her calm down, and her personality and behaviour remained ignored in some corners. She is the product and outcome of a broken family. She wishes to get attention and love from her family members. Still, her father is always busy with his chelas and patients, and even after marriage, his husband remains as busy as ever. He never fulfils any of her expectations, never tending to her wife’s wants and needs. The consequence is that the tension and stress in their relationship grow day by day, causing marital discord in their relationship.

Therefore, Where Shall We Go This Summer? It may be seen as a parable whose theme revolves around the inability of human beings to interlink and relate the inner with the outer, an individual with the society. It is a story of illusions melting away in the cold light of the everyday, which is commonplace for such phenomena. It gives out the message that while a life of complete inwardness and isolation from society and its norms is not the solution to the hardships and problems that one faces in life, a life of complete conformity, constantly adjusting according to culture, and total draining out of an individual’s personality, creativity of character and imagination of the individual is also not the correct way out of this room of highs and lows, troughs and crusts, mountains and valleys. It highlights that one of the ecstasies of human life is in harmonising, balancing and maintaining the opposites beautifully and creatively and in a sense, that’s what also makes us human beings, taking everything together as we keep going, not abandoning any aspect of life, no matter how contradicting, no matter how problematic, we keep everything together like a bunch of flowers in a vase, looking beautiful forever and together.

Desai’s other novel, Fire on the Mountain, again deals with the lack of communication and understanding in marital life, leading to discord. The story is of Nanda Kaul, the Vice-Chancellor’s wife, who chooses a house on the top of a mountain in Carignano in the village of Kasauli as her shelter and her escapade from the disturbances and interferences of her family as her life with her husband, the Vice Chancellor, was full of ordeals and responsibilities of her position as her wife, receiving no love whatsoever, feeling no attachment in their relationship. She is disappointed with her life with her disillusioning husband, who is not only selfish but also infidel, who treats her like a helpful tool only, giving her no respect, care or love that his wife deserves. She always played the gracious hostess and the ideal housewife for her husband, who “wanted her always in silk, at the head of the long rosewood table in the dining room, entertaining his guests”. Gopal N.R. says, “She is so busy raising the family and discharging the duties of mother, housewife and hostess that in the evening of her life, she is happy in her seclusion even though it is partly voluntary and partly circumstantial.” Mrs. Desai dives deeper into the problematic life of Nanda Kaul, who, even after being the Vice-Chancellor's wife and being offered the luxuries of life due to her husband’s position, is unsatisfied with everything. “Outwardly, Kauls were an ideal couple to the university community, but from inside, it was all empty, the whole social role and socialising was a mere sham.” Her life with her husband was “lacking in composition and harmony”.

The psychological solitude of Nanda was amplified by the landscape and quiet environment of the mountain – rocky, barren and still, just like her life with her husband. Her wish to cut herself from the world and spend her life alone can be seen in her lack of enthusiasm in receiving her granddaughter. “Discharge me”, she groaned. “I have discharged all my duties. Discharge!”. The top of the mountain Carignano gave her the obscurity and escape she wanted in life. Mrinalini Solunki rightly observed:

“Her option for total isolation is not related to the spirituality of Indian thought. She does not opt for this isolation willingly, but circumstances have left no other way out for her. Her long involvement with the people and the world's affairs gave her neither satisfaction nor a sense of belongingness. Therefore, to survive, she withdraws for an existence away from the world of messages and visitors.”

The novel speaks of the falsity to which Nanda is forced to. Her marital life with her husband is anything but peaceful and warm. At first, it was not even about lack of love, respect, care and sincerity from her husband but the horrible act of betrayal that he did; the main cause leading her to her secluded life in the quiet was that betrayal by her husband. The children were not even any less than aliens to her. The graces, the fame and the glories were nothing but just a façade, driving the present of their lives. “Her relationship with her husband did not involve her inner “self”.” The novel describes her happy life with her husband and children, but the last page exposes it as white lies.

Apart from this couple, the novel tells the story of another married couple, Raka’s mother and her highly alcoholic and short-tempered father. However, the plight of Nanda Kaul remains the main focus of the novel, as she is deceived and betrayed by her husband. “Lack of understanding of the partner’s expectations and temperaments is chiefly responsible for the marital discord of Mrs Kaul.” Hence, Anita Desai protests against unhappy married life and strained relationships in the phoney world through her female characters.

Custody He focuses on marital discord and relationship problems in any married couple. Deven and Sarla lead another unhappy married life. They are quite the opposite regarding temperaments and attitudes. It can be seen clearly that while Deven is a Hindi lecturer at a college, Sarla has zero interest in language and literature. She is ignorant and so oblivious that she doubts her husband about having an affair with some other girl whenever he frequents Delhi for his work. Sarla is the picture of an abandoned wife.

Sudhakar T. Sali writes, “Anita Desai has given a new dimension to the Indian novels in English by shifting the emphasis from outer to inner reality.”  

Primary Sources

1. Anita Desai Cry, the Peacock, Delhi, Orient Paperbacks, 1980
2. Anita Desai Voices in the City, Delhi, Orient Paperbacks, 1965
3. Anita Desai Bye-Bye Blackbird, Delhi,  Hind Pocket Books, 1971
4. Anita Desai, Where Shall We Go This Summer? Delhi, Vikas Publishing House,1975
5. Anita Desai Fire on the Mountain, Delhi, Penguin Random House, 1977 
6. Anita Desai In Custody, London William- Heinemann Ltd. 1984  

Secondary Sources

Books and Critical Material On Anita Desai:

1. Ranjita Pati: Representation of Women in Anita Desai’s Novels, Sayan Communication Pvt. Ltd. 2015.Print
2. R.K. Gupta: The Novels of Anita Desai: A Feminist Perspective, Atlantic Publishers, 2002,2013.Print.
3. Sudhakar T. Sali: Anita Desai’s Female Protagonists Adhyayan Publishers and Distributors, 2006.Print
4. Usha Bande: The Novels of Anita Desai: A Study in Character and Conflicts. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1998.Print

Online Sources

1. Chanda, P. (2013). Emancipation of Female Characters from the Shackles of Social Restrains:(With particular reference to Anita Desai's 'Cry The Peacock'). http://soeagra.com/ijert/ijertdecember2013/9f.pdf
2. Indian Women Novelists In English. https://www.englitmail.com/2019/09/indian-women-novelists-in-english.html
3. M Uchida, C. A. (2014). A Critical Analysis of Anita Desai's Where Shall We Go This Summer.https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Analysis-Anita-Desais Summer/dp/3659571903