Mythological Allusions in GithaHariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night

Mythological Allusions

 in

GithaHariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night

            Githa Hariharan’s debut novel, The Thousand Faces of Night articulates the problems of women with the help of Indian Mythology. She links the plight of her women characters with the Indian myths as Mahabaratha, Sanskrit stories etc.; to the Gods, Goddesses, legendary heroines in the epics of India. These stories were instrumental in supporting the insidious patriarchal concepts. The lives of the three women in TheThousand Faces of Night—Devi, Sita and Mayamma exposes the different dimensions of women’s oppression. The reworking, revisioning and retelling of the myths as allusions of the character’s story is the highlight of the novel.

            The story of the three women tells about the society’s patriarchal pattern. The society‘s expectations and the taboos laid by men of the world are vividly portrayed. ‘Story within a story’ is the narrative technique which Hariharan employs in the novel. To substantiate her stories, she uses mythological allusions from the great epics of India.

For any Indian women, institution of marriage ensures protection, love , compatibility and happiness. Marriage makes a woman expect a lot of happy events, compassion, empathy, mutual understanding and a protective atmosphere to live life in peace and harmony. Marital life in India, on the contrary lays a lot of restrictions and constraints which constrict them from a life of freedom .  They suffer disappointment and disillusionment in the face of reality.

The Thousand Faces of Night is the portrayal of different facets of women suffering different kinds of suffering  and  depicts the status of women in Indian society.  It articulates the problems of women with the help of Indian Mythology. It yokes together the various vicissitudes faced by women of the puranas.

Devi , a young educated girl with ‘the American experience’  struggles to cope with her husband Mahesh, who is most of the time on business tour. She feels alienated in her own home. She searches for an identity and tries to free her from the bondage of marriage and the various roles levied on her .Grandmother’s tales heard in her childhood days inspire her and she tries to replicate them with her own life.  The stories which she heard every summer  from the Grandmother is a kind of preparation to her future life. The child’s mind is prepared to accept her role of woman. The grandmother’s stories prepares the child towards her marriage where fortitude, patience , endurance and perseverance are inevitable. Grandmother’s stories are allusions to Gods, Goddesses, superhuman warriors, brave prince, beautiful and virtuous princesses, men and women destined to lead heroic lives. For each character’s problems, the grandmother indirectly narrates a story . The stories are solutions to their problems but they  “were not simple:they had to be decoded.”(27) They were no ordinary bedtime stories.

The stories were told for particular occasion to a particular character as
Gauri’s domestic problems  is yoked with a story of the “ beautiful girl who married a snake”. Uma’s disastrous marriage was linked with how even Amba, a high born prince becomes a ‘victim of disaster’.Amma’s stories are yoked together with Gandhari’s story.Gandhari with all her fury “embraces her destiny –a blind husband—with a self-sacrifice worthy of her royal blood.”(29) . In the same way, Amma is a wilful, proud woman. Grandmother gives us an anecdote about how the father-in-law scolded her for not sweeping the floor of the pooja room. When she lost herself in playing the veena, the uproar  of the father-in-law to put her veena away , Amma with a furiousness ” reached for the strings of her precious veena and pulled them out of the wooden base. They came apart with a discordant twang of protest.”(30).  The heart-rending music was never heard again .

 Gandhari might have blindfolded herself as a subservient wife just because her husband was blind or she might have blindfolded herself to rebel against the injustice urged on her to marry a blind husband Dhritrashtra . Gandhari wants to punish people who have imposed her the marital life with a blind man. It might also be interpreted that she refrains to see what her husband is not let to see because of his blindness. As a subservient wife, she completely shuns the scenes which the husband cannot see. Gandhari is the very enigma of women of protest.she is a wilful, proud woman who denies, sacrifices “ sight” as an answer to the injustice done to her. In the self same way, Sita also discards the Veena as an act of denial and sacrifice to retaliate to the father-in-law’s curt remarks , “Are you a wife, a daughter-in-law?”(30)

Hariharan’s novel is a dexterous conglomeration of numerous stories besides the story of the protagonist Devi. And the technique is “Passing-on” narration from one character to the other. The narration passes from Grandmother’s stories, the Baba’s stories and to Mayamma.

In the novel,Sita as a young daughter-in-law also equivalently protest in Gandhari’s fashion. When the grandmother cannot find a precise mythological equivalent for the experiences women had, she uses to corelate them with stories of “the beautiful girl who married a snake”.

  Indian families have a plethora of relationships to saveguard the system of marriage. But when there is a familial problem, nobody supports her. She fights her battles alone—her battles with men. “A woman fights her battles alone.”  Devi , who lives a lonely life, not able to bear the solitary life frees herself from the bond and rejoins her mother. She fights her battle alone.

Devi’s father-in-law, Baba  is a typical illustration of a male-dominated patriarchal world. His character is revealed through the stories which he elaborates to Devi. They are elucidation of the codes laid down by Manu which explicits the virtuous and chaste women who inspires their husbands along the path of Dharma by their sacrificial nature, self-abnegation and subservience.

Baba’s stories are different from Grandmother’s stories. While grandmother’s stories “were a prelude to my womanhood, an initiation into the subterranean possibilities. His define the limits.”(51) Baba’s stories were not ambiguous and its centre-point “an exacting touchstone for a woman, a wife.”(51). Baba’s stories always reflects that women should be devoted to their husbands .He explains the means of reaching Heaven by serving their husband with devotion and care. Baba sets the criteria for a good housewife and even afte he left his hynotic voice quavers, “The housewife should always be joyous, adept at domestic work, neat in her domestic  wares and restrained in expenses. Controlled in mind, word, and body, she who does not transgress her lord, attains heaven even as her lord does.”(70).

Muthuswamy Dikshitar’s story, Purandara Dasa, Syaama Sastri, Thygaraja’s second wife story are Baba’s illustrative stories. Baba gives out philosophical note from Manu, “All men are enjoined to cherish women, and look after them as their most precious wards. Fathers, brothers, husbands and brother-in-law should honor brides, if they desire welfare. Where women are honoured, there the gods delight; where they are not honoured, there all acts become fruitless.”

Baba says that women had always been instruments of the saint’s initiation to ‘bhakthi’. He recites the story of Jeyadeva who sang Gita Govinda ,  to say how great man can see the spiritual greatness of his wife.

Baba alludes the story of Purandara Dasa, who became miserly as his fortune grew. One day when a Brahmin asked for money to conduct upanayanam, he kept putting him off. So the Brahmin went to Sarasvati Bai, who without thought gave her nose-ring. But when Purandara Das came to know this, he sent a messenger to bring her ring. Not knowing what to do, when she was about to drink the poisonous potion, she saw the exact replica of nose-ring. After this incident ,Purandara was humbled and he lead a austere life.

Baba’s another story of Narayana Tirtha, talks about how a virtuous wife devoted to her husband dies before him, a sumangali, her forehead unwidowed and whole with vermillion, her arms and neck still ornamented with bangles and gold chains.  He narrates how Syama Sastri’s wife died five days before he did and how Thyagaraja’s second wife died after performing the sumangali  prarthana .

Baba summed up his illustrative stories: “By public confession, repentance, penance, repetition of holy mantras, and by gifts, the sinner is released from sin. That which is hard to get over, hard to get, hard to reach, hard to do, all that can be accomplished by penance: it is difficult to overcome penance.”(67)

Githa Hariharan’s Devi,  inspite of the continuous exposure to the mythical stories told by her grandmother from childhood, and then after marriage the stories she hears from the father-in-law and the real stories of Sita, Uma, Gauri and Mayamma does not help her to be a submissive wife to Mahesh. Like how her mother-in-law revolted by leaving the family in search of God, Devi’s elopement  with Gopal, is also a revolt against her husband Mahesh, who merely wants her to keep waiting for his arrival as a submissive wife. His long tours, her father-in-law’s departure to NewYork deprive her companionship.Her longing to bear children to break the monotony , the loneliness and the meaninglessness of life is not fulfilled. Finally, in a fit to give vent to her lone life, to put an end to the “yawning emptiness”(68),she chooses to elope with Gopal . She hopes to find solace with the company of Gopal but in vain. So, the hankering for love ends  and she goes alone in search of her identity.

             Her life long search for an identity ends when she reaches her mother.  Her search for identity, her quest for identity, gets fulfilled only when she reaches her home. All the grandmother’s stories which were told to condition her mind towards the womanhood she would attain had not helped her to live a life of subjection to her husband. She even dismisses the very thought of conception and leaves Mahesh. Her acquaintance with Dan and the whole course of stay in America fails to give her an identity in an alien country. Her fear to accept Dan’s marriage proposal is part of the “American Dream”. Her fear to reject the proposal for arranged marriage after she comes to India, refuses her an identity . Her acceptance to marry of Mahesh and later to be his wife(the way he wanted her to be) does not satisfy her . She tries to bear children and would have satisfied herself as a mother, but refuses .

            When she probes into the lives of women in the myth of her grandmother, she recalls all of them: Gandhari anger to blindfold herself in protest against people who caused injustice,Sita who vows not to touch the most coveted Veena in protest against her father-in-law’s accusation, Amba who gloriously triumphed against Bheeshma who wronged her, Devi’s grandmother who accepts her destiny as a widow ,Parvati who revolts by leaving her family to God... Devi’s protest is self-assertion. Devi’s marriage with Mahesh is absolutely meaningless, with his constant tours and his” purposeful love-making”. Mahesh finds fault with her upbringing and he says, “this is what comes out of educating a woman”. (74). His remarks of the other women who are not well educated but happy, active, enthusiatic and confident for example he citesMrs.Thara. She revolts against Mahesh by refusing his craving desire for a child. Her revenge against Mahesh is fulfilled when she elopes with Gopal making him a cuckold.

                       Githa Hariharan is a feminist writer. Her protagonist tries to free herself from the so called notions, taboos of the society, expectations of the scriptures. She tries to break the bond a woman has with the society and she never wants to oblige to the expectations of the patriarchal world. She wants to free herself and takes the rebels of the myth as examples to find her identity. In reality too, she takes examples of women who had revolted and rebelled against the social pattern of the chauvinistic society. The characters in the novel are enigmatic to Devi and she judges herself against them.

References

Hariharan,Githa. The Thousand Faces of Night.  Penguin Books. Penguin Books India .NewDelhi.India, 1992.

Ray, Mohit K. & Rama Kundu. Ed. Studies in Women Writers in English. Vol.III  Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, New Delhi.2005.

Sarada, T. “ Marriage : A Boon or Bane? A Study of Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night”. Women’s Writing in India: New Perspectives. Sarup and Sons.New Delhi.2002.

Trika, Pradeep. Indian Women Novelists.Vol.6 Prestige Books, New Delhi.1995.

Singh,R.A. Critical Studies on Indian Fiction in English. Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, New Delhi.2005.