Anita Desai's voices in the city: reconstructing Indian female identity

Abstract

Theoretical approaches to literary study over the past few decades have taught us to comprehend and respect heterogeneity and difference as against the humanis/universalist tendency to reduce difference to a single identity. Anita Desai's second novel, Voices in the City (1965), had long been regarded as an artistic failure for its "out-of-place" female characters in the overall design established by the male protagonist. But thanks to recent revisionist approaches to non-traditional texts, Desai's novel has not only found pride of place in the English curricula of most Indian universities but had reappraisals in the West as well. Opposing earlier Eurocentric/androcentric readings of Voices, this paper attempts to re-read the novel as a significant discourse on the female identity in postcolonial India. By depicting women who "go in the opposite direction", Desai subverts the "quintessential" feminine ideal rooted in Hindu mythology and manifest in the cultural nationalism and socioeconomic sectors of both pre- and post-independence India. Interestingly, Hindu mythology also has a considerable body of cultural imagery militating against traditional male orthodoxies, which she appropriates to create a new site for contemporary Indian women. With the exception of the first part, devoted to Nirode's "masculine" world, the remaining three parts of the novel foreground the struggle of three women for self-definition. The topicality of the book remains unabated as Indian women are still grappling with fundamentalism that now operates in newer guises.