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Chapter 5

Resolution of the Fight with Oneself

“You are your own refuge.

There is no other refuge.

This refuge is hard to achieve.” The Dhammapada

The epilogue of Shashi Deshpande’s novel The Dark Holds No Terrors

authentically reflects the biological dread and psychological difference that women

experience, which makes them, their own refuge. Saru the protagonist in The Dark

Holds No Terrors is a well educated, economically independent woman in search for

her identity. The novel opens with Saru returning to her parental house after a gap of

fifteen years, with a vow never to return. Nevertheless, she returns to seek refuge. Her

stay in her parents’ house gives her a chance to review her relationship with her

husband, her mother, her children and her dead brother, Dhruva.

Saru is an unwanted child and her brother’s death makes her all the more

unwanted. She is at perpetual war with her mother who can never forgive her for

being alive when her brother is dead. Growing up in this environment of hatred and

hostility, she nurtures seeds of rebellion within her. She has many psychological knots

woven into her personality, and is ingrained with a fear of rejection. Coopersmith

Stanley states that-

Being an unwanted has a disastrous effect on one’s self esteem. People

with low self- esteem feel isolated unloved incapable of expressing or

defending themselves and too weak to confront or overcome their

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deficiencies. They are afraid of angering others and shrink from

exposing themselves to attention. (87).

In his theory of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud lays stress on biological

factors being primary reason for neurosis in woman’s life. But many psychoanalysts

after Freud have studied the dynamics of neurosis from different perspectives and

have conceded to the view that it is the most natural result of the friction between the

individual and the society. Karen Horney (1885-1952), a German American

psychoanalyst and founder of American Institute of Psychoanalysis, too emphasizes

the role of socio-cultural conditions, traditional expectation of society in blocking the

development of a woman’s whole self and giving way to her neurosis. She studies the

sense of alienation, loss and isolation in women due to social and environmental

factors and propounded her theory of neurosis. Horney discusses neurosis as a

disturbance. Saru’s behavoiour is determined by a large number of tensions resulting

from the incidents hat occurred in the early life. Saru joins a medical college and later

on marries Manu out of rebellion because her mother opposes the idea. The more

vehemently her parents oppose the idea, the more determined she becomes. But as

time passes, her involvement in her profession, lack of communication, difference in

professional status, distances her from her husband too. Saru’s character can be truly

understood only in the light of psychological precepts. First, she carries within her the

effects of gender discrimination, which springs out as a reaction to the psychological

setup of society at large and her parents in particular. Saru also has the deep-rooted

complex of being an unwanted child and added to this is the physical trauma of sexual

harassment that she tragically suffers, and which leaves an indelible impact on her

psyche.

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The true substance of the novel lies in the mental processes that Saru goes

through during her apparently eventless existence at her father’s place. She journeys

into and introspects all the dark corners of her soul. We see her true self while she is

traversing through memories and dreams and unconsciously lays bare her mind. She

endeavors to gain her self respect and tries to overcome her psychological fears. “The

dark holds no terrors. The terrors are inside us all the time. We carry them within us

and like traitors they spring out; when we least expect them, to scratch and maul.”

(85)

Saru’s most important and recurrent childhood memory is that of her brother

Dhruva’s drowning in a pond. She is persistently haunted by the thought that she is

responsible for his death because she played a mute spectator to the incident. Even

when she is accused by her mother of murdering her brother she does not deny the

charge. As Premila Paul observes, “When the mother accuses her of murder, she

speaks out Saru’s intentions and not the deed. Dhruva’s demise had always been her

subconscious desire and there is a very thin demarcation between her wish and its

fulfillment.” (67) This incident is clearly indicative of sibling jealousy which no doubt

arises out of mother’s blatant favoritism.

Saru’s mother’s obvious preference for her brother creates a sense of

alienation within her and precipitates a sense of rootlessness and insecurity. The

situation becomes even worse when after Dhruva’s death her mother insensitively

blames Saru for his death. This sense of rejection by her mother at every given chance

fills the mind of adolescent Saru with a feeling of hatred towards her mother. Saru

finds release for this rejection in two ways, “One is through constant and recurrent

dreams and the other is through acts of defiance. Her dreams mostly represent her

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guilt feeling. Therefore, she often dreams of Dhruva’s death and the accusations made

by her mother.” (Reddy 53) In the words of Premila Paul:

She has always felt an inner drive to make him the mythological

Dhruva (pushed off the father’s lap by the step brother) And Dhruva in

death becomes a tantalizing ‘North Star’ controlling her happiness

from afar. The guilt had come to stay and she is destined to be in the

dock perennially. Her husband, dead brother, dead mother and even

her children are the accusers and she the accused. (67)

Her psyche now is such that while introspecting, she confronts her fear of

rejection- “The fear was there; the secret fear that behind each loving word…lay the

enemy, the snake, the monster of rejection.”(66)

Saru recollects her own attitude as a young girl towards her mother “I hated

her. I wanted to hurt her, wound her, make her suffer.”(142) She rebels against her

mother by going to Bombay to study medicine and then later by marrying a man

outside her caste. Her inherent quality is her defiance which can also be an indication

of her highly self-willed nature. As a child she can not understand her parents’

behaviour. It is later that she realizes that she did not matter to her parents because she

is a girl and has survived her brother. However, the mental confusion prevails

continuously in her mind. Her husband also has been exploiting and assaulting her.

She has no one to turn to. As Sarabjit Sandhu observes:

The mother is very attached to her son. Her attitude is a typical one,

after all, he is a male child and, therefore, one who will propagate the

family lineage. In another sense, also, the male child is considered

more important than a girl, because he is qualified to give ‘agni’ to his

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dead parents. The soul of the dead person would otherwise wander in

ferment. (20)

This gender sensitivity remains a significant factor in the Indian social set up.

According to the research conducted by S. Anandalakshmi, Director, Lady Irwin

College, Delhi:

The supremacy of the male is so well established that the average

Indian is surprised to even be queried about it. Whatever the ecology

of the social group, even in communities where the women are the

breadwinners, the male is considered superior. Within the family the

sense of inferiority of the female is pervasive. The sex ratio is

unfavorable for girls and forces us to conclude that the survival of the

girl is a matter of indifference in a considerable number of families.

The birth of a son gives a woman status and she invests herself in her

son’s fixture, creating a deep symbiotic bond. (31)

The female psyche is very complex. “Psychotic rupture is perhaps the worst

and the most regressive aspect of female subjectivity.” (Tandon 24) A woman’s

experiences of life as a member of a gender/biased society formulate her psyche.

Psychoanalysis has a greater impact on feminist theory and gender studies more than

any other critical theory. Feminism has always meant independence of mind and spirit

and body. Feminist effort to end patriarchal domination should be of primary concern

precisely because it insists on the eradication of exploitation and oppression in the

family context and in all other relationships.

Saru’s association with Manu, her husband begins in her college days. She is

attracted towards Manohar, during her college days. He is her senior by a few years

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and quite popular in the college. On top of all that he is a budding writer and a poet of

promise with some poems already published in magazines. Saru is introduced to

Manu by a friend. She considers herself privileged because he makes her his

companion. The initial years of her marriage are quite blissful as Manu seems to be

her saviour, who rescues her from her insecure existence in her maternal home. But

happiness for her is only an illusion. As long as Saru is a medical student and her

husband the bread winner there is peace at home, even if home constitutes a dingy one

room apartment. On this Shubha Tiwari while describing Saru’s psyche states that she

is

Helplessly entangled in the racial and social prejudices prevalent. Saru

is conscious of the fact that she is superior to her husband in her

qualifications, social status, mental caliber and in many other respects.

But in her heart of hearts she repels against it. Being an unwanted child

to her parents she has inherited a psychology which does not allow her

to displease anyone. (91)

The problems arise only when she gains recognition as a doctor. Perhaps life

would have remained smooth and without turmoil had Saru restricted herself to being

a doctor, treating the people around their shabby apartment. But Saru aims higher and

wants to specialize in order to achieve the things she dreams of. Gradually Saru’s

social and financial status grows far beyond that of her husband. She is a busy,

successful doctor in contrast with Manu who is an underpaid lecturer in a college.

Though her profession satisfies her ego it does not bring happiness at home. Saru’s

steady rise in status brings about a rift between Saru and her husband which grows

even wider with the passage of time. This ultimately results in the torture of bearing

Manu’s physical abuse in the privacy of their room and his feigned complete

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ignorance the next morning. The physical assaults which Saru suffers at the hands of

her husband totally perplex her.

Saru’s insecurity is escalated by her disastrous experiment with marriage. Her

dreams have a choking sensation; the nights are a terrible nightmare. Loneliness

becomes an integral part of her and she leads a dual life. For the world, she is a

competent doctor and in reality she is a tortured woman. She is going through quite an

abnormal pattern of life which is full of hypocrisy and duplicity. At her father’s house

Saru tries to objectively analyse her share of the blame in the disaster that her

marriage has been. It makes her think, “My brother died because I heedlessly turned

my back on him. My mother died alone because I deserted her. My husband is a

failure because I destroyed his manhood.” (217) This statement suggests a study in

guilt consciousness. As S.P Swain observes: “She marries to attain autonomy of the

self and to secure the lost love in her parental home. Manu is her saviour, the ideal

romantic hero who rescues her from insecure wooden existence in her maternal home.

Her marriage with Manu in an assertion on and affirmation of her feminine

sensibility.” (35-36).

The novelist presents the other side of the picture as well. Somewhere the

weakness inherent in her own self allows the society and the people to overpower her.

Had there been better communication and clarity of vision between the husband and

wife, things would have been better. Throughout the novel the guilt consciousness

seems to act like a fatal flaw driving her to a mental state where she is holding herself

responsible for everything. Saru does reach the depths of self-actualisation, a stage

where she is “not beaten down by other people’s rejection…. By low self regard, by

anxiety, or by conflict.” The theory goes that “If the self develops in an open, flexible,

expansive manner the individual will continue on the road of self-actualisation.” (Neil

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445) One cannot escape from the reality and one’s own life. There is no refuge, other

than one’s own self. She understands that she cannot be happy unless she attains

peace of mind through her own efforts. It needs to be created within. The Dark Holds

No Terrors has an open ending. At her father’s house Saru is initially in an undecided

state and does not answer to her husband’s letters. However towards the end of the

novel on receiving a telegram she prepares herself for a confrontation with Manu. As

R. Mala remarks:

The novelist’s credo is to take refuge in the self which means that self

is not metaphysical but psychological. In other words Deshpande

means that the heroines will in future assert themselves; they will no

longer allow their ‘self’ to get deceased. By this assertion of the self,

Deshpande certainly takes her heroines to the pole of feminism though

she may not have aimed at propounding such an ism. (56-57)

Thus the final picture of Saru that emerges is indeed appealing she confidently

awakens to face what used to be the greatest terror of her life, her husband. She is

ready to face him and her life ahead stoically. She is determined to take control over

her life.

Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors is finally liberated from the fear of the

darkness in her life. Kamini Dinesh’s observation aptly sums up Saru’s development

as an individual in her own right, “To be true to herself, the woman has to excoriate

the film of superimposed attitudes and roles. Her emancipation is not in repudiating

the claims of her family, but in drawing upon the untapped inner reserves of strength.”

(200) At the end of the novel Saru stands poised to receive her husband secure

because of her new found confidence in herself. She successfully rids herself of her

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complexes and guilts and comprehends the meaning of human life where she realizes

that she is not the only one caught in loneliness: “Alright so I’m alone. But because

there is just us, because there is no one else, we have to go on trying. If we can’t

believe in ourselves, we’re sunk.”(220)

In The Dark Holds No Terrors Saru’s seeking of her refuge is more of a

psychological process, where she is trying to overcome and reconcile to her secondary

status in her family. Shashi Deshpande focuses on Saru’s relationship within the

family. Her alienation at her parental house, her parents preference for the male child,

all this leads to the psychological knots in her personality. This becomes more

complicated after her marriage to Manu. As she says,

And at last it had been Manu. Her abnegation to his tastes had seemed

wholly natural at first. Now for the first time, she found herself,

waveringly, hesitantly, making her way back to her real self. I, as I

would like myself to be. But hunting for that real self had become

rather like a dog scrabbling for a long buried bone. Piles of earth flew

up, but where the hell was the bone? Or, had there never been a bone at

all? (124)

Whereas Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee places her heroine Tilo in The Mistress

of Spices on a much wider platform with more varied experiences. Her reconciliation

is also no doubt more psychological but her experience is more global and the reasons

are not merely the family. Her reasons of mental dilemma are one she is a woman,

secondly a dark-skinned, which is in common with Deshpande’s protagonist, thirdly

she is a diasporic. The diasporic in case of Tilo will take many connotations which are

discussed further.

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In the Mistress of Spices, the process of self perception forms the basis of

identity formation for the central character Tilotamma (Tilo). The very foundation of

this novel deals with the act of perceiving oneself, and the inherent conflict between

pure self perception and self perception as it is influenced by others. Born with

supernatural abilities to predict and solve the problems of people in a small village in

India, Tilo can elicit specific powers inherent in spices and use them to cure the

maladies of those around her. In Tilo’s pre-teen years, pirates storm into her home,

murder her entire family and abduct her to their ship as prisoner. Eventually, Tilo

overthrows the pirate captain to become the pirate “queen, leading (her) pirates to

fame and glory, so that the bards sang their fearless exploits”. (20) But Tilo abandons

the exalted position when mystical sea serpents tell her about the existence of an

island upon which she, and other women like her, can develop their supernatural

talents to use them for a greater good. This isolated island is a haven for these women,

who call themselves the “Mistresses of Spices” and are under the care of the First

Mother, the eldest and the wisest teacher of all the women. The women are trained in

the art of listening and controlling the spices, and are then sent forth into the greater

world to aid humanity.

After Tilo learns all that she can, she is sent to Oakland, California, to a tiny

Indian spice shop where she must begin her duties of healing the masses. Thus, she is

thrust into the chaos of American life and the newness of culture to which she must

adapt. She is in “fundamentally a discontinuous state of being”. (173) ‘Exile’ carries a

multiplicity of nuances and connotations in the case of different individuals, in which

a person is forced to live away from his own country, either for political reasons or for

some sort of punishment. Such an exile is cut off from his roots and his past, and

nurtures an urgent need to reconstitute his broken life. According to Edward W. Said,

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exile is “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place,

between the self and its true home; its essential sadness can never be surmounted.”

(181) Whereas nationalism is spoken of in terms of groups of people living together,

exile is a solitude experienced outside the group and therefore, the deprivations and

the achievements of an exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something

left behind.

Although Tilo has already begun her diasporic journey, she does not feel the

loss of home, but rather experiences a finding of many. Tilo sails upon a ship to the

island of the mistresses, a reference to the kalapani, or “dark water” the term used in

order to describe the journey made by indentured laborers and immigrants from the

motherland of India to other foreign lands, creating what we today define or call as

diaspora. ‘Diaspora’ gained popularity in the postcolonial era. The term covers a wide

range of “cultural and ethnic groups which while living outside the countries of their

birth, are held together by shared cultural, social and religious commitments, and,

who suffer from the common sense of exile from the place of their origin” (Ashcroft

48) Already, Divakaruni presents Tilo as inextricably mired in the workings of the

diaspora, and the entire notion of the home becomes displaced, transformed into an

intangible condition that is not based on a singular location but rather a movement

among many places.

Coming back to ‘home’, we can say that whereas ‘home’ stands for warmth

and belonging and has its own pleasures, the ‘exile’ in its different contexts and

meanings has a paradoxical nature. Separated from her own geographical homeland

and dislocated culturally, an exile is released into freedom of intellectual

identification that enables her to penetrate the complexity of contemporary cultural

life. According to Edward Said, “Such an intellectual is ‘organic’ because he or she

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operates as a focus of transformation and change in society.” (18). There is a double

perspective for such a person as he or she can see things both in terms of what has

been left behind and what has been actually gained by him. For him the exile does not

mean the total separation from his place of origin; it is rather a condition that hones

his skills for his survival and helps in the perpetuation and upholding of the culture of

his people.

Tilo goes through a bewildering succession of personae: Nayantara, the dark

skinned, ugly baby unwanted by her parents and who refused to die; Bhagyavati, the

pirate queen and the novice; Tilo the old- young spice-mistress; Tilotamma, the

apsara of one night, with “goddess-face free of mortal blemish, distant as an Ajanta

painting” (297) and finally Maya –“not particularly young or old. Just ordinary.”

(306) When Tilo arrives on the island, she and the other girls are given new identities,

indicating that the past is being relegated to memory and the new personas are being

forged. A period of learning and empowerment, that is in direct contrast to her life

with her family in the village. This brings in the traditional set-up in India where

“female is born into a well defined community of women” and where the experience

of apprenticeship and the activities that transpire in this feminine sphere are

independent of the patriarchal values of the outside world. (Kakkar 61)

Tilo meets the first mother, a figure who foreshadows the paradoxical identity

that we soon find her grappling with. The first mother tells the girls, “daughters it is

time for me to give you your new names. For when you came to this island you left

your old names behind, and have remained nameless since.” (42). Tilo unlike the

other mistresses, selects her own new name and identity, leaving her childhood in the

village in India behind her. In Tilottama the first mother seems to see a reflection of

her own spirited self, so she often indulges her wishes. Tilo spends decades learning

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the delicate art of the spices, but the moment arrives when she must leave the island

and continue the diasporic journey she has begun. Before Tilo is sent to Oakland, the

first mother gives her a knife as a gift, the purpose of which Tilo believes is “… to cut

my moorings from the past, the future. To keep me always rocking at sea.” (29). Tilo

has entered a space between her past and future and without a precise knowledge of

the present. She is unmoored and treading the dark waters between the lands of her

past and the lands of future, a theme that will reappear throughout the text’s

representations of the relationship between time and space.

Tilo repeatedly questions the time frames of the events in her life which are

not clear as the ‘scrambled’ sequence of events gives a hazy idea of the real time

spent and elapsed. Was she on the spice island “for a year- or was it two or

three?”(19) Or “the store has been here only for a year. But already many look at it

and think it was always” (4). These in-between time referents appear very frequently:

“when night slides into day” (14); when “day cannot be told apart from night, truth

from longing” (18); or that evening hour when light of sun and moon fall mixed upon

our longings, and all is perhaps possible” (182). Thus, when Tilo ultimately decides to

step out into the world she does so at the “brahma mahurta, the holy moment of

Brahman when night reveals itself as day” (127). In doing so, Tilo is acting in

accordance with her svadharma, the individual’s deep and instinctive recognition of

doing the right deed. (McLeod 75) Regarding this Sudhir Kakkar says that

Divisibility, periodicity, and the flux of time, according to Hindu belief, is

only an apparent phenomenon, the worldly manifestation of

permanent, absolute or real time in all its empirical plurality. The

distinction between ‘real’ and human time is reminiscent of the

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distinction between reality and maya. Real time contained within

Brahman…is homogeneous, indivisible and motionless. (45)

The island is the first diasporic space that we encounter, and while it exhibits

the same ambiguity that America does, Divakaruni clearly genders the island

differently from how she later genders America. The island exudes feminity-

specifically; Divakaruni constructs it as a maternal space with the figure of the First

Mother and the presence of only females on the island.

Tilo is transported to America by means of “Shampati’s Fire,” a joint bonfire

into which she steps and disappears. The symbolism of the fire is obvious in its

action: the destruction of present physical form, and a reduction to ashes that are then

scattered to the far corners of the globe. Divakaruni is again foreshadowing the

process of Tilo’s identity formation, using the fire as a metaphor for the recreation of

the self and presenting identity as erratic rather than permanent. “It is as if the old

realities, like the old self, must be melted down and recast. Thus when she chooses to

rebel and to assume her new identity and the risks that it entails, she is overcome by

the feeling that “all the molecules of the universe [are] dissolving and gathering into

new shapes” (190). Consequently, the sacred mountain of Hindu myths here appear as

the volcano on the Spice Island and Shampati resembles a hybrid of the Phoenix and

the Plumed Serpent. (McLeod 78)

Tilo’s journey to America is a form of rebirth; it is a literal creation of the

self. She emerges from the fire on a bed of ash, in a small spice store in Oakland that

she will make her own. The presence of this ash serves as an ambiguous omen, for

Tilo enters into her new life upon the remnants of her old, with life and death

inextricably linked together just as they are for the phoenix. Even though Tilo now

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lives in California she cannot let go of her time on the island with the First Mother and

the other mistresses. The past streams into her thoughts causing ripples in her present

life. As her relationship with her lover Raven progresses, Tilo finds the past

inescapable, for the thoughts of the First Mother constantly plague her present

consciousness. Tilo’s journey is in itself a redefinition of the self and is an extension

of the conflict that the Indian women face in establishing their identity as an

individual. Tilo also is weighed down by the insider/outsider dichotomy which is part

and parcel of Indian woman’s life.

The conflicts that she must resolve between her real, youthful, inner

self, which reaches out to the world and life outside, and her outer,

aged powerful self, which keeps her within strictly imposed limits, are

the reworking of the very same conflicts that all exiles experience –

between past and future, and the here and the there. (McLeod 70)

One can notice that there is a sense of simultaneous universes, or different

spheres that co-exist at the same time and in the same place. As Tilo ponders one day,

“First Mother, are you at this very moment singing the song of welcome, the song to

help my soul through the layers, bone and steel and forbidding word, which separates

the two worlds.” (32) The phrase “at this very moment” suggests a synchrony

between the island and America, rather than a divide between them that would

relegate the island to the past and America to the present. Her past is part of her

current sphere, making it impossible for her to live simply “in the present” because

the present does not exist by itself. The new sense of time is also expressed in the very

structure of the text itself, for Divakaruni jumps from one temporal location to another

with almost every chapter. As Tilo reflects “sometimes I wonder if there is such a

thing as reality, an objective and untouched nature of being. Or if all that we

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encounter has already been changed by what we had imagined it to be. If we had

dreamed it into being” (16)

Tilo does not have a home in the traditional and permanent sense, and

America is simply one point in between her geographical migrations. Tilo has left the

island but knows that she will someday return to it, to that place that is still “in

between” worlds, yet remains the only location in which she feels the comfort of

belongingness. Tilo’s emotions are an extreme version of the diasporic experience of

space where home does not exist except in the space of idealizing memory. There is

an element of nostalgia and the quest for roots. Tilo is in fact torn between her filial

loyalties for the island and her new affiliations in the new dwellings. Myth and

fantasy play a significant role in such memorization of imaginary homelands.

Memory, “Like those birds that lay their eggs only in other species’ nests,” as Michel;

de Certeau suggests in his The Practice of Everyday Life, “produces in a place that

does not belong to it. It receives its form and its implantation from external

circumstances, even if it furnishes the content (the missing detail). Its mobilization is

inseparable from an alteration.” (Certeau 86) The migrants mobilization of his/her

memory becomes an effort toward, in the words of Rushdie, ‘literary land

reclamation’. (Rushdie 195)

The images of power and confinement, the dislocation between the ‘I’ and the

‘Not-I’, fantasy and reality are the reasons for Tilo’s dilemma. Tilo’s gift is her ability

to read into the lives of all those who enter her store, seeing all the problems they

endure as they assimilate, feeling their daily sufferings and understanding their most

private thoughts and wishes. Ironically, she has the deepest vision for the innermost

selves of all others, yet she is still incapable of actually perceiving herself. In fact,

Tilo is expressly forbidden to look in a mirror while she lives in Oakland and fulfill

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her duties as a mistress of spices, “once a mistress has taken on her magic Mistress-

body, she is never to look on her reflection again.” This strict prohibition of mirrors is

a metaphor for Tilo’s inability to perceive herself through her own eyes; instead, she

formulates her identity upon the visions of others, based upon the differing

perceptions of herself as seen by friends, patrons and lovers. Thus Tilo’s self-image is

never clearly defined, and she is invested with a sense of self which is porous: she

feels she is invaded by the problems and anguish of her customers; she says, at night,

“when I lie down, from every direction the city will pulse its pain and fear and

impatient love into me.” (60) But significantly, after stepping “over the threshold of

prohibited America” (132) one of the first things that she buys is a mirror that she

keeps veiled until she is ready to confront her new image.

Tilo first confronts conflicting perceptions of herself through her experiences

with race and class, both of which are inextricably linked together in South Asian

formations of identity. She notices the damaging effects of racism on the lower-class

patrons of her store, the emergence of an Indian elite upper-middle class community,

and the general displacement of South Asians. Diasporas as Homi Bhabha suggests

are, “Gatherings of exiles and émigrés and refugees; gathering on the edge of

‘foreign’ cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gathering in the ghettos or cafes of city

centres; gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny

fluency of another’s language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance,

degrees, discourses, disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of

other worlds lived retroactively; gathering the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the

present.” (139)

Tilo first encounters the brutality of racism when one of her working class

patrons, Mohan, is brutally assaulted by two young white men one evening. As the

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men viciously beat Mohan, they scream, “Sonofabitch Indian, shoulda stayed in your

own goddam country.” The young men classify Mohan (who has lived in America for

over a decade) in the same category as all immigrants in the United States, just

another minority amongst others. Salman Rushdie in his essay on Gunter Grass he

writes that a migrant suffers a ‘triple disruption’ comprising the loss of roots, the

linguistic and also the social dislocation. Migrants experience deep changes which

teach them “that reality is an artefact, that it doesn’t exist until it is made, and that,

like any other artefact it can be made well or badly, and that it can also, of course, be

unmade” (Imaginary Homelands 279)

Another young South Asian patron of Tilo’s is assaulted at school, taunted by

white classmates who scream, “Talk English sonofabitch. Speak up nigger wetback

asshole.” Tilo’s patron sobs and tries to understand why the jeering must occur,

wondering what it means to be called “nigger,” when he is not black rather South

Asian living in America. Regardless of the manner in which the South Asians

perceive themselves, they are still subject to prejudices of racism, and when Tilo

observes such discrimination, it influences her perception of her race in relation to

greater American society. She now identifies with the experiences of the other

minority groups in the United States, groups that are constantly fighting for

recognition and respect from the majority. The very important subject of discussion

here is the tight rope the migrants and exiles walk, especially the postcolonial

migrants and exiles have to perform between maintaining difference and the

seductions of assimilation and how the imbrication of these conflictual pulls in the

migrant’s psyche gets inscribed in diasporic fiction in the form of ‘cultural politics’.

(Hall 36)

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Yet when Tilo observes a different class of South Asians, she sees the other

side of South Asian racial identity. As opposed to the lower class patrons described

earlier, the “rich Indians” are protected from racism and disassociate themselves from

the black community, identifying almost completely with the white-upper class. Tilo

soon realizes that the South Asian in America is considered neither white nor black in

the American society, but rather a race in-between, depending on one’s particular

class. In relation to south Asians- it is no longer skin colour only, but rather class,

which possesses an immense influence over the creation of identity, resulting in

distinctly different characterizations of the South Asian self. Tilo’s racial identity can

be characterized as entailing a self that is seen as nonwhite but not black, lower class

but in certain instances upper-class an immigrant minority and an assimilated elite

community.

The formation of the Asian within as a “model minority” is a classificatory

wonder of the dominant social strategy: it detaches Asians from their association with

other racial “minorities” by hailing them as white appointed “model,” while it

distinguishes them from the unmarked “true” nationals by calling Asians their

“minor.” The model minority discourse thus redraws the contract of Asian American

citizenship by aggressively managing (and here I borrow from Gramsci’s brilliant

analysis of hegemony) “to win active consent of those over whom it rules”. Consent

to the model minority discursive abjection has become a legitimate form of Asian

American allegiance. Strangled between the authentic white subject and the

oppositional black subject, the Asian American is at once defined and “derealized”;

his claim to a distinctive self and national embodiment will have to be fought out not

only between the East and the West, Asia and America, but also between black and

white, labor and capital. (Qtd. in David Leiwei Li 10) Tilo observes what it means to

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be a South Asian living in America in terms of race relations, and she herself

experiences what it is like to be an American. When Tilo wears her first American

outfit and walks out into the street on which her store is located, the notion of duality

is clearly evident. She possesses a consciousness that she believes is that of an

American but at the same time it is a foreign and “other” consciousness for her.

I pull on my no-nonsense pants and polyester top, button my

nondescript brown coat all the way to my calves. I lace my sturdy

brown shoes, heft my brown umbrella in readiness. This new- clothed

self, I and not-I, is woven of strands of brownness with only her young

eyes and her bleached jute-hair for surprise. She tries a hesitant smile

which resettles her wrinkles…Outside at the bus stop crowded with

other strands of brown and white and black she will get into line, will

marvel that no one ever raises their eyes, suspicious at her moving

through the air of America… She will finger in pleased wonder the

collar of her coat, which is better even than a cloak of disappearing.

And when the bus comes, she will surge at with the others, her

blending so successful that you standing across the street will no

longer know who is who. (43)

Tilo’s use of the phrase, “I and not I” is the first suggestion of the shift in

consciousness. This sense of “betweeness” is also inherent in Tilo’s perception of her

sexuality. Tilo observes some of her female patrons fulfilling the “traditional”

submissive role of the South Asian housewives, with patriarchal dominance and

instances of domestic abuse. Yet she also observes the young, sexualized and

flirtatious patrons, who come to her store, “all fizzy laughter and flutter lashes. In

miniskirts their legs are long and tan, cocoa butter smooth. Their lips are dark and

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pouting.” (50). These are the two extremes of sexuality of South Asian women that

Tilo encounters, and she herself begins to fall into these contrasting (and

stereotypical) roles in perceiving her own sexuality.

Tilo’s female patrons view her as a traditional “older” South Asian woman,

unattractive in her age, sexless in terms of her desires and submissive to the will of

others. Tilo begins to see herself as she believes others do: “a bent woman with skin

the colour of old sand, behind a glass counter that hold …sweets of her childhoods.”

She is rather matronly, repressing any sexual desire; she is silent in her opinions and

offers advice only when asked. In her behaviour at the store, Tilo typifies the

traditional submissive Indian woman and she is perceived to be so by her various

patrons.

Yet Tilo’s sense of passion and her ability to seduce are clearly evident in her

relationship with Raven. Even in their initial encounters, Raven appeals to Tilo’s

sexual instinct, creating emotions in Tilo that she has never experienced before. There

is a stark contrast between her older asexual woman image from the spice store and a

highly knowledgeable and sensual lover she proves herself to be. Divakaruni is subtly

suggesting the possibility of simultaneous selves, as if Tilo had another younger and

more sexualized identity that existed along with the asexual identity of the older

woman.

The complexities of race in South Asian identity emerge in the formations of

sexual identities, and racism and prejudice take the form of Orientalist fantasies and

all that they imply. Tilo’s American lover Raven sees her as a paradigmatic

representation of Eastern beauty, an “authentic… Real Indian,” and since Tilo is

estranged from her own self-perceptions, she eventually comes to view herself as

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Raven’s orientalist fantasy and representative of all that is seen as Indian in American

culture. These cultural categories such as Indian and American which may at first

appear concrete, are subject to the biases and stereotypes of perception and self

perception, thereby changing the very meaning of what it means to even call oneself

by those markers of nationality.

To the migrant, the social processes of difference and assimilation present

themselves as an approach-avoidance conflict with both positive and negative

valences. Maintaining the difference from the metropolis is a way of preserving one’s

nativist-ethnic identity, and yet such identitarian politics recoils upon the migrant as

an unfortunate othering device that reproduces the superiority of the centre –

something the postcolonial migrant would like to deconstruct and undermine. Besides

this, the assertion of such a ‘pure’ ethnic identity, authenticated only in difference,

conflates with narrow hegemonizing nationalism, the dangers of which Frantz Fanon

warns us against in his The Wretched of the Earth. On the other hand the prospect of

assimilation, although enticing because of the benefits it offers the migrant in terms of

greater economic and social mobility; entails effacement of all signifiers of cultural

identity. However, the narrativization of this conflict opens up the space for

interrogating the new concepts of race, ethnicity, nationalism, religious and social

filiations of the diaspora and most importantly, the politics of representation.

At first Tilo is suspicious of her sexualized perspective of herself or rather,

Raven’s perspective of her which she adopts. But soon she cannot help but view

herself from this standpoint, as Raven’s mysterious Indian beauty. When Tilo

perceives herself as Raven’s idealized Indian fantasy, she becomes subject to a

specific form of racism that gained much attention during the twentieth century.

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In context of orientalism, western power, especially the power to enter

or examine countries at will, enables the production of a range of

knowledges about other cultures. Such knowledge in turn enables

(legitimates, underwrites) the deployment of western power in those

other countries. Moreover, such is the power of orientalist or

colonialist knowledge that even those discourses or modes of

representations which are not formally or ideologically aligned with it

may be pulled in an orientalist direction, or may simply be

appropriated by orientalism and utilized as if they were just another

facet of its world view. (Colonial Discourse and Post- Colonial Theory

p.8)

Evidence of Raven’s tendency toward an orientalist perspective is evident in

the conversation that ensues when a group of beautiful young Indian women, whom

Tilo terms “bougainvilla girls” enter the spice store one day.

He smiles, squeezes my hand. “Hey. You can do things these girls

couldn’t in a hundred years.”

The pinpricks begin to fade.

“You’re authentic in a way they’ll never be,” he adds.

Authentic. A curious word to use. “What do you mean, authentic?” I

ask

“You know, real. Real Indian.”

I know he means it as a compliment. Still, it bothers me Raven, despite

their fizzy laughter, their lipstick and lace, the bougainvilla Girls are in

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their way as Indian as I. And who is to say which of us is more real.

(271-272)

Raven believes that Tilo possesses an intangible “essence” that makes her an

“authentic” Indian as compared to other young Indian women in the store. Tilo

questions Raven’s conferring of authenticity, for even using the term authentic

suggests that there is a certain “fundamental nature” that is a prerequisite for true

Indian identity. In thinking about Raven, Tilo says, “you have loved me for the

colour of my skin, the accent of my speaking, the quaintness of my customs which

promised you the magic you no longer found in the women of your own land. In your

yearning you have made me into that which I am not.”(170). Just as her lower-class

patrons suffer the taunts and jeers of racist slurs, Tilo suffers the feeling of

objectification and exoticization that comes from Raven’s Orientalism.

As Tilo moves through the maze of American culture, she desires even more

to see herself, to view her life through her own eyes rather than the perspectives of

others. Tilo’s moment of “self perception” occurs after she questions the prohibition

of mirrors for Mistresses. “Here is the question I never thought to ask on the island:

First Mother, why is it not allowed, what can be wrong with seeing yourself?” before

she looks at her reflection, Tilo decides to drink a special potion, a concoction whose

power stems from the spice Makaradwaj, and is considered the “conqueror of time.”

This potion will transform Tilo’s body from that of the “old woman disguise” she has

been wearing since she arrived in America, to a body of youthful beauty. Over the

course of three days, Tilo’s beauty increases as the layers of age peel away. Tilo gazes

into the mirror, but does not see some great truth about identity revealed to her.

Instead she sees “…a face that gives away nothing, a goddess face free of mortal

blemish… Only the eyes are human, frail.” Tilo’s physical transformation represents

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the illusion of the notion of a singular “true identity” for in the process of trying to

reveal a “real self” Tilo finds that she has lost all that was human about her. Tilo

realizes that in place of a unified identity, she possesses an identity of multiplicity and

ambiguity; she is comprised of many different and contradictory perceptions of self,

or else she is a blank.

Nina Manasan Greenberg in her essay “Defining Differences: Feminism, Race

Theory, and Identity Politics in the Academy” states that according to Riley, “we

must take the charge that feminism depends upon, and yet suspects, identity and

identification.” (p 10) Cornel West develops the notion of self identification when he

discusses race with Jorge Klor de Alva and Earl Shorris. West asserts that people

“identify themselves in certain ways in order to be associated with people who ascribe

value to them and for purposes of recognition to feel as if one actually belongs to a

group”. (10) So for West, self-identification is often a pragmatic gesture; it is (as

Riley says) meaningful only in context, as it defines groups as it defines individuals.”

At this pivotal point in the text, Tilo realizes that self perception is a matter of

acknowledging the multiple processes and factors that influence the formation of

identity, of embracing each of the contradictory characteristics and consciousnesses as

legitimate identities. She describes this process of understanding in rather surreal

terms: “I move as through deep water, I who who have waited all my life- for this

brief moment blossoming like fire works in a midnight sky. My whole body trembles,

the desire and fear…” but Tilo’s happiness is soon diminished, for she has a dream in

which the First Mother tells her that she only has three more days in America, and on

the third day she will have to enter once again into Shampati’s Fire and return to the

island.

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Yet when the moment arrives for the fire to consume her, Tilo is surprised to

find that the flames do not envelop her as they did once long ago. Rather, she is

transformed back into the body of the old woman, wrinkled with age and bereft of her

youthful beauty. The transformation back into the body of the old woman further

reinforces the notion that identity is not a question of cohesion, for when Tilo returns

to the body with which she experienced the different perceptions of race and

sexuality, the idea of her fragmented self is more acceptable to her in place of a

unified identity. She comes to terms with her situation and is able to resolve her

dilemma.

The novel closes with Raven renaming Tilo. He considers. “Anita,”…then

says, “How about Maya?” Maya which can mean many things- illusion, spell,

enchantment, and the power that will keep her going in this imperfect world. Tilo

chooses a name that can mean many things, a name that embodies the multiplicity of

her identities, the many consciousnesses that lie within her. In naming her Maya,

Divakaruni wants to show that she is made of: multiple consciousnesses that allow her

to exist as not as South-Asian or American only but rather than anything in between.

Tilo’s recreated self will always be marked by her cultural inheritance, just as

Raven’s will carry the stigmata of the legacy of which he has been deprived. (He was

brought up by American-Indian mother who totally cut herself and her family off

from her origins) The intertextuality of herself complements and completes the

palimpsest of his. (Mc Leod 78)

Through Tilo’s character in The Mistress of Spices, Divakaruni clarifies that

the journey of self perception is full of internal conflicts. The dilemma faced by the

individual in the process of locating one’s ‘self’ in the journey through life,

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particularly in the case of persons like Tilo who are diasporics, the difficulties are

even more pronounced. But through her encounters with the multiple perceptions of

herself through the eyes of other people, Tilo finally resolves the conflict of her mind

and establishes her own identity which assimilates her tradition and the American way

of life. The protagonists of both Shashi Deshpande and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

take a retrospective view of their lives, indulge in introspection, probe into their inner

psyche and attempt to understand their personality, their hidden strengths and

potential. After self analysis, the protagonists learn to assume responsibility towards

their own selves and decide to live life on their own terms. It has been made possible

through the self-knowledge which they attain during the process of self-analysis. In

Horneyian terms “Self-knowledge, then, is not an aim in itself, but a means of

liberating the forces of spontaneous growth” (Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth

15) Horney’s theory is unique as its aim is, “not to render life devoid of risks and

conflicts, but to enable an individual eventually to solve his problems himself” (New

Ways 305) and it helps him “to regain his spontaneity, to find his measurement of

value to himself, in short, to give him the courage to himself” (New Ways 305).

Shashi Deshpande and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni too make their female characters

aware of their inner strengths to counter the day to-day problems of life. The

resolution of her inner conflict comes from within and illustrates the statement in the

epilogue.

168

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