INDIAN FEMALE IDENTITIES, BETWEEN HINDU PATRIARCHY AND WESTERN MISSIONARY MODELS IN ANITA DESAI’S FASTING, FEASTING AND CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY
INDIAN FEMALE IDENTITIES, BETWEEN HINDU PATRIARCHY AND WESTERN MISSIONARY MODELS IN ANITA DESAI’S FASTING, FEASTING AND CLEAR LIGHT OF DAY

Summary/Abstract: The paper compares and contrasts several of Anita Desai’s female characters who experience the transcendent urge to restructure their familiar cultural models along Western parameters. Whether engaged in migration or experiencing a static existence in India, Uma (Fasting, Feasting), Bim and Tara (Clear Light of Day) are exposed to cultural difference and this process influences their strategies of identity negotiation. The most important instrument of their cultural change is represented by the world of the mission schools that involves different challenges for each character. The present analysis focuses on the manners in which the Indian women under scrutiny attempt to refashion their cultural norms in accordance with the Western values disseminated by the missionary schools in India. The discussion employs theories of hybridity and culturally specific gender conventions in order to account for the characters’ need to modify their inherited gender roles. The present argument advances a novel approach to cultural hybridity, which goes beyond the idea of an identity label customarily applied to migrant identities. Starting from the assumptions that all cultures are inherently hybrid and that the notion of hybridity covers a dynamic process, the discussion demonstrates that the transformations experienced by these characters illustrate the emergence of different patterns of female hybrid identities within the same cultural sphere. Thus, the argument sets out to demonstrate that Anita Desai’s Indian women, whether migrant or non-migrant, experience different speeds of cultural transformation, depending on their different positioning towards Hindu and Christian prescriptions. Their metamorphoses illustrate that cultural hybridity is not a necessarily a consequence of migration, but an ongoing cultural process that constantly reshapes cultural patterns.

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