UNMASKING THE MASCULINE IN SELECT INDIAN ENGLISH NOVELS

Abstract

The study of identity in general and gender identity in particular has been one of the key concerns in the humanities and the social sciences over the last five decades. This is true for literary studies in the context of India where debates surrounding the construction of gendered subjectivity in and through literature are regularly raised. From a Foucauldian standpoint, such projects or theses in the process of talking or writing about gender effect gender. This thesis does not intend to create a new construct of gender or masculinity, a new definition, as it were, which may find its significance and signification in relation to its difference from other constructs. Rather, it proposes that the popular constructs of masculinity, in which it is a natural, unalterable phenomenon, when explored in the Indian Novel in English lacks any inevitability or (natural) essence. As one may be aware, the traditional conception of masculinity advances it as a collection of actions and attributes that lack any historicity because they emerge from the unchanging natural male body; the reproductive organs become, in such a scheme, the source of unique, stereotypical masculine traits. However, recent social scientific studies have called into question such entrenched notions by foregrounding the overarching role of the social sphere in the construction and perpetuation of rigid boundaries around gender identity. Yet, even such novel ways of thinking about gender, or masculinity, remain macro-structural and modernist in orientation, in that masculinity retains its description in connection with negative power, independence, coercion, violence, competitiveness, risk-taking, resourcefulness and action orientation, etc. In so doing, both popular and academic discourses fix masculinity by seeking unification, deep structures, or what Anthony Easthope would call a ‘sense of totality’, ‘an imaginary wholeness’ in men’s internal variability. The central argument of this thesis envisages to be a necessary corrective to the continued reliance on essentialism that men and masculinity are regularly marked by both in the academic critical study of men and masculinities as well the Mars and Venus type popular books on inevitable and unresolvable gender differences. Although, over a period, in an attempt to avoid charges of essentialism the academics producing scholarship in the field of men and masculinities have put forth the thesis of the plurality of masculinity even as they continue to reify and solidify ii the categories with some additional sub-divisions; there is a dearth of accounts of vulnerability and ‘undecidability’, to use Butler’s term, in men’s actions. Theoretically, the project is informed by the postmodern approach to identity which postulates the ‘self’ as hybrid, contingent, and discursive. It proposes that masculinity is characterized by plurality, indeterminacies and internal fractures. The logical extension of this is that the notion of a stable oppressive masculine subject, which is transcendent, capable of making independent, rational choice is untenable. In other words, this thesis explores the interface between post-structuralism/ postmodernism, gender (masculinities), and the Indian English novel by analyzing four literary texts and attempts to destabilize the Enlightenment notion of a unified, ahistorical masculine subject which recurs in more orthodox second-wave feminist (literary) criticism by exploring and articulating the indeterminacy, plurality, and fractured character of masculine subjectivity In what follows, I show how four Indian English novels which follow the ethos of social realism with a focus on the domestic private sphere of human relationships complicate received ways of conceptualizing masculinity. The writers and their works are: That Dark Holds No Terror (1980) by Shashi Deshpande, A Suitable Boy (1993) by Vikram Seth, Ravan and Eddie (1995) by Kiran Nagarkar, and Custody (2011) by Manju Kapur. I show how men’s consciousness is not unified; rather it is characterized by an intense sense of fracturing and hybridity which corresponds with the Bakhtinian notion of ‘unfinalizability’, indeterminacy and open-endedness of the novel. Men’s being follows closely the inherent polyphony of the novels which renders it plural and brings everyday masculinity into attention. This is important because most studies employing the influential concept of hegemonic masculinity have a tendency to highlight men’s toxic coercive power and relegate other mundane aspects of everyday masculinity to the fringes. In addition to this, the historical, shifting reality of masculinity becomes apparent when chosen fictional texts are historicized, read against the dominant national discourses of the time in which the realist novel are set. Here, desirable masculinity finds consonance with the shifting discursive reality in the two important decades of postcolonial history of India; namely the first decade of post-independent India vis-à-vis the post-liberalization decade, the 1990s. Such a closing reading of the novels destabilises the ahistorical and static configurations of masculinity in iii the popular imagination by unfolding the inherent flux, or temporal mutability in the imagination of the desirable in men and their masculinity. In another instance, masculinity and its easy association with the male body is troubled by unfolding the ways in which women characters too in the novels assume those subject positions, such as the position of autonomous, rational subject of Enlightenment modernity, that has historical, epistemological, and ontological links with men and masculinity. The fixing of a set of supposedly masculine actions and attributes in the male body is challenged by showing the fluidity of the phallus, or rendering mobile attributes such as independence and rationality thereby destabilizing any linear and necessary link between men and masculinity. Another contention that emerges in the course of demystifying the signifying and relational nature of masculinity is that in so far as the domestic realist novels succeed in implying the fluidity of masculinity, the bipolarity of realism-postmodernism also gets called into question. The Indian English realist novel, as analyzed further, otherwise characterized as politically naïve or conservative is shown to make space for a variety of masculinities that are often internally fractured; it automatically follows that it is not only the postmodern/ postcolonial subversive novel that apprehends the postmodern condition of being which is characterized by liquidity. The chosen realist novels from Indian English fiction also depict similar contingencies of subjectivity thereby contesting the old formulation that realism oversimplifies and naturalizes reality