Antonia Navarro-Tejero, Gender and Caste in the Anglophone-Indian Novels of Arundhati Roy and Githa Hariharan: Feminist Issues in Cross-Cultural Perspectives, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005.


This book analyzes the intersections of gender, caste and the (re)telling of history in the narratives by two contemporary South-Asian women writers in English of Malayalam descent, Arundhati Roy and Githa Hariharan. We have chosen two novels: The Thousand Faces of Night (1992) ≤winner of the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book˜ by Githa Hariharan; and The God of Small Things ≤winner of the Booker Prize in 1997≤ by Arundhati Roy. Githa Hariharan represents the reality for a considerable section of Indian womanhood inserted in a brahminical, high class environment, and Arundhati Roy depicts the fatal consequences of the inter-caste sexual relations in a supposedly caste-less Christian and at the same time communist community. Moreover, in this critical study we have included numerous references to many other narratives by South-Asian women authors. In the analysis of the selected narratives, we have used a wide-range of feminist, postcolonial and subaltern theories as a framework, which have helped to expose the patriarchal and casteist implications in the world depicted by the novelists, and to avoid a simplistic, reductionist explication of the texts.

The overall purpose of this study is to unravel, expose and analyze how these authors create new possibilities, using two main strategies: first, re-defining female subjectivity in the critical juncture of cas! te and gender, and second, by reinterpreting history. Telling stories, that is, creating history, is in itself a way of producing new entities, new identities. Consequently, from this angle, plotting family and lineage is very relevant. Roy‚s and Hariharan‚s stories call for a re-vision and transformation in the three main power structures ≤State, Religion and Family˜ subverting, thus, the canon and claiming the subalterns‚ space in History.

We support the idea that not only do these authors transcend from the private to the public, but also from the local to the universal in varying degrees. While the global project of colonization has created the universal other, culturally specific power hierarchies too have created the other within different contexts: the subalterns in general. The consolidation of discriminatory pre-colonial hierarchies under the regime of colonization and globalization is one reality we live with today, while the deepening of violence against them in contemporary times is another. Organized violence by the dominant castes against the Dalits in India, systematic silencing of women by fundamentalist organizations, and child abuse, are disturbing evidence of the growing of intolerance in highly aggressive, competitive, masculinized societies.

The present interdisciplinary study has been organized in two major parts. Part One is a descriptive survey of the theories that provide us with a clear picture of the general situation of gender and caste studies. Part Two is divided into three main ! chapters. The first one analyses the process of the female subjectivity and the authors‚ use of the Bildungsroman. The second one offers a fictional depiction of the various repressive forces working on women in contemporary Indian society: the repression and marginalization of women effected through traditional religious institutions, the imposed code of female sexuality in (extra) marital relationships, and the double morality of the ruling state. Finally, the last chapter develops the questioning of the validity and imposition of those constrains. These female protagonists go from a painful sense of alienation and a self divided between the old acquiescence and the new urge towards individuation to revolt against, and reject patriarchal impositions. These women‚s resolutions conform to a re-definition of the lives of women, fulfilling the implicit political aim of these authors, as they are not merely concerned in documenting reality, but! they have used their novels as a medium for the exploration of the new reality and a subtle projection of values, by posing questions, by suggesting re-assessment, and re-definition.

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