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ISSN: 0974-892X

VOL. VI
ISSUE I

January, 2012

 

 

Manoj Kumar

Acid Violence against Women: A Study of Namita Gokhale’s The Book of Shadows

 
Namita Gokhale, a writer and publisher, is one of the founders and co-directors of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Her first novel, Paro: Dreams of Passion made her famous instantly. Namita Gokhale has written five novels and two works of nonfiction in English. The Book of Shadows is a work of fiction of her.The Book of Shadows is very well praised by the publisher as, “Part ghost story, part erotic romance, The Book of Shadows is an ambitious book that investigates the nature of reality, love and faith. It is a work of startling originality by one of India’s most daring and talented writers.”(Penguin) The Hindu admires the techniques of Namita Gokhale, “Namita Gokhale excels in extolling the erotic and the exotic. Her fiction is wide ranging and experimental…. Her characters are haunting.”(Penguin) The tale of the novel revolves around the matter of acid attack. The conditions of woman become worse after these types of attacks. Acid Survivors Foundation also throws some light on such type of cases:


Acid attacks on women in the Indian sub-continent have seen a sharp increase in recent years, with four women blinded or having their faces disfigured every week, according to a study conducted by the Dhaka-based Acid Survivors Foundation (ASF) . . . . Girls and women thus afflicted are unlikely ever to marry and may have difficulty finding employment. Some have become activists in the Acid Survivors Foundation which assists in treatment and rehabilitation of ‘burnt’ girls and women, campaigns to prevent future attacks, and to bring about changes in attitudes towards women.(Acid Survivors Foundation)


In South Asia, disputes over land, inheritances, dowries, and declined marriage proposals often arouse jealousy, which lead to acid violence and woman becomes the first victim of it. Acid attacks are intensely inhuman crimes, because the perpetrators plan to disfigure the victims rather than kill them. Acid is also easily obtainable and cheap, which is thrown at women. These attacks make them disfigured, often blinded, and severely traumatized. The lives of many women, deprived of free choice and independence in this way, have been destroyed. The data which is available on acid attacks in India is very little.There are some studies which reported an increasing trend in cases relating to acid attack. According to a study 174 cases of acid attack were reported in India in 2000. This was a per capita incidence of about 1/15 of that of Bangladesh, which has the highest incidence rate as well as the highest number of acid attack cases in the world.


The protagonist of Gokale’s novelis Rachita Tiwari. Rachita had sought refuge in a remote house in the Himalayan foothills. Namita Gokhale has also lived in that house, she mention it in Author’s Note.  “I too have lived in the house I have written about. This is a novel which has its core in truth. It has been written, or it has written itself, under circumstances which would appear strange to most people. It has been a vehicle to resolve my personal pain, but there is more to it than that.”(I)


In the beginning of the novel we find that Rachita’s fiancé has committed suicide. Her fiancé commits suicide by hanging himself in the centre of a room. The whole scene of the room was very pathetic. The tongue of Anand was hanging lifeless from the corner of his mouth and his eyes was staring at something. It was difficult even for Rachita to link him with Anand.  “Who was this swaying on a rope before me? This was not my lover, the stroker of my brow. It was an unbearable excess of all that was possible and bearable. There was defeat here, and a loss of dignity. This travesty of not-life was not how death was to be faced: of this I was sure.”(5) It becomes clear from the suicide note of Anand that there was something unusual between them because of which Anand committed suicide. Though the writer doesn’t present his full suicide note but the part given justifies that he was not happy with this relationship. “‘Goodbye, cruel world! I bid thee farewell! You have tried me sorely, you have abused my trust! My tryst with time is over! Tell the faithless one, the Delilah, that her betrayal will cost her dear.”(5)


After the death of Anand, his sister threw a beaker full of acid on Rachita’s face. Rachita wanted to wash her face but water was not there and she had to bear unbearable pain. Anand’s sister was teaching Chemistry at the same college where she wanted to continue the study of English literature. The news of this scandal was everywhere. As a result of the incident, she was in news, “The press took a morbid interest in all that had happened in the course of that summer madness. Pictures of my face as it had been stared back at me from everywhere. Reality pressed upon me with the weight of the unshed August clouds, it confronted me in the eyes of strangers.”(6)


The most important aspect of Gokhalian heroine is that from the beginning of the novel to end they want to live alone. After this incident, Rachita also wanted to live alone to heal her wounds. The heroines of other novels like Shakuntala, Paro, Priya Sharma and Parvati feel loneliness in their family but Rachita wanted to go away from the society and her family also because of this incident. She found herself utterly out of place and time with her miserable condition and rejects the social life with a sense of loneliness and dejection. After the incident of acid attack, she lost her identity as Rachita, and this feeling estranged her from herself. She says, “I have come to the hills to heal, to hide, to forget. To forgive, to be forgiven. My friends all resisted my decision. My sister even insisted on accompanying me here, but I knew that I needed solitude and soliloquy to come to terms with what had happened.”(6-7) She feels:  


The acid had worked on the bone cartilage, and the surgeon has been cautious in his restorations. I have not looked into a mirror for months now, and my face, that familiar index of my being, has dissolved into absurdity and abstraction. Even my fingers do not recognize the changed contours of my cheeks, of the injured flesh. The avengers of my vanity have broken me, humbled me with these small depredations of skin and bone and tissue, leaving me less than I was. (7)


This escapist tendency of Rachita set forth her sense of alienation in this world. Rachita’s parents were dead and she had only one sister. The house in which she was residing in the hillside belongs to her Mamaji who also did not have any children. She decided to live there because she wanted to forget all miserable happenings. She wanted to forget Anand’s indulgent and wanton act of self- destruction.


The face of any person always keeps the mark of identification. It is our face which gives us identity in this world. As far as women are concerned, their face is most important mark of identity which is also the symbol of their beauty. To live with a damaged face which was the example of good face is just like living without identity. She went through the set drill of forgetting and started to go on walk covering her face with a Muslin chunni. She didn’t look at her face for a long time but she changed her nail polish  every two days.


After her departure from the outer world, she was without action and motion. In the beginning she passed her night with open eyes because she “knows that if I close my eyes I will see Anand’s sister’s face, contorted by an expression which is beyond anger or hate or spite. . . .  .I keep my eyes open to shut out the image of her face from my mind: it tends to float up in my interminable hours of half-sleep.”(24) In the darkness Rachita heard the voices of Anand. The voice of Anand also describes the reason of their unwanted and unsuccessful relationship. The relationship was ended by Anand himself. ‘“That’s just what I was saying! he said. ‘That’s exactly what I was saying. The trouble with you is that you don’t bother to listen to me. The trouble with you is that you are so bloody self-obsessed. You are conceited, you are vain, you are frivolous. The trouble with you is that you are you!”(31) Like usual couples they also have quarrels but the most important aspect is that there was not any solid reason for that. “All our quarrels had been without reason, without focus. He had loved me for precisely the same reasons that he hated me. What was I to do?”(31)


One common factor in the lives of Gokhalian heroines is their encounter with supernatural powers. This novel has lots of thrill and suspense in it, the novelist is a step ahead of reader’s imagination. In this novel also we encounter with the same thing in a detailed way. Here, the images of the ghosts of the past come before Rachita even, she heard the sound of them. Being alienated and estranged from her social life, Rachita was getting mental weakness and hallucinated unusual and unreal sights in the house and becomes astonished. She says, “I am being stalked. I know I am being stalked. All the evidence is there-all the telltale signs of a . . . person? entity? stalker? . . . intent on pursuit.”(61)


After sometime, Rachita wanted to go back to the city for her job, but something was forbidding her. Now, she could not see her face in the mirror. The beauty of her face was lost by that acid attack. It was her hands which were still as beautiful as they ever were. She was suffering self estrangement because she retired from life and longs for solitude. “I find I’m scrutinizing myself all the time.”(63) It was her alienation from the society which was arousing the questions in her mind, “Why am I babbling these big words? What am I running away from? Perhaps I should just submit to this alternate world.”(6364) This loneliness becomes unbearable for her and she again thinks to go back to society.

Too much of sadness and remembrance of the attack creates abnormality in her behaviour. Now her life was completely disturbed by the past memories and by the present miserable condition of her. Sometimes, she wanted to come out from this dilemma. Even she started to think or to imagine unusually. She wanted to become an author, “I’ll write a best seller and go for the launch in a black lace mantilla and have all the men in the audience wildly in love with me.”(66) It also raised the unusual imagination, “Perhaps. Or perhaps I’ll just live here forever, and my sister will send me endless parcels of clothes and baked beans and Haldol, and I’ll burn Lohaniju when he turns one hundred and dance on his ashes. Of course, I’d kill him first. Ha Ha.”(66)


Sometimes, she herself felt that her behaviour was not normal at all. She tried everything to  comfort herself but everything was useless. “Nothing is what it seems to be. Even my arithmetic is dismayed. Mathematics is sanity, especially when it moves towards increasing levels of abstraction. It battles change and disequilibrium. And now, these anomalies, these confusions. What is happening to me?”(67)


Rachita’s sister insisted that she write a novel. First, she considered it a foolish idea, but after all that she thought. “Today I distinctly heard an inner voice speak. It whispered from the debris of clamorous emptiness that is my centre. It said to me, “Hang on. Just hang on, okay?’”(212) But this idea was not put in practice by her. Her sister informed her that a world-famous plastic surgeon of Indian descent from Austin, Texas was coming to Delhi for a six month break and he will remake her face. She remembered the line from a play of Shakespeare. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.”(216)  She didn’t consider it good or bad. She thinks:


If you lose-if one loses-one’s sense of self, there is no remedy but to proceed on a simulated model. All self-image is anyway a construct of circumstance. If you lose an arm or a leg, you cannot forget what you have lost, the phantom pain is there to remind you, but if you have lost your sense of selfhood things are quite different, for (this is the important part) you are no longer there to know it. Who will find you again? (216)


In the end, alienated from society and her circle, Rachita went to nature for consolation to her wounded soul. She says, “This house belongs to me, as I belong to this house. I have lived here alone in the hills, watching the day turn to dusk, awaiting the dawn. This house, which knew me as a child, has taken me in again. We have closed ranks together, me and the house. We have become as one spirit; it is us against the world.”(3) She continues, “All day I sit and stare at the blinding shadows of the snows. I sit here by the window and shelter in the certainty of these presences, so different from the bewildering world below. I belong to this house, as this house belongs to me.”(3) She became extremely sentimental and seemed to be totally isolated from the world. She desperately describes,


I do not know whether I will ever return to that other world, the world I have left behind. Lohaniju has gone, he has left this house to me, entrusted me with its memories. The world outside is full of change, and I do not know if these memories can endure. This hillside will remain, as will the snow mountains that watch over us, even if nothing else does.(231-232)


She anticipates her future, “the garden will bloom again, the roses by the veranda, the weeds and forget-me-nots by the gravel path. I think I know that I will remain.”(232)


In India we worship woman as a deity. It’s very pathetic that some people make her victim of their greed or jealousy. The victims of acid attack face a lifetime of discrimination from society and they become lonely. They are humiliated that people may stare or laugh at them. Because of this they hesitate to leave their homes fearing an adverse reaction from the outside world. The same case happens with the protagonist of the novel.  An utterly broken Rachita feels that all love and happiness are no more than mirage. They always elude the seeker. Disappointment, dejection, defeat are in store for man to embrace him. She maintains that any attempt at embracing cheerfulness is only abortive and futile. Victims who are not married are not likely to get married. Those victims who have got serious disabilities because of an attack, like blindness, will not find jobs and earn a living. But Rachita even after she has not got any disability decides not to go to city for a job. Discrimination from other people, or disabilities such as blindness, makes it very difficult for victims to feed for themselves and they become dependent on others for food and money. Rachita also becomes a victim of self estrangement. She experiences emptiness which has overpowered her; sometimes this world seems unreal to her. Thus the novelist shows the feelings of despair, loneliness and despondency of the victim of acid attack, Rachita.

 

Works Cited


Gokhale, Namita. The Book of Shadows. New Delhi: Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 2001. 3. Print.
The Book of Shadows by Namita Gokhale. From Penguin Books India. Online. Netscape: 17 Oct. 2007 SOURCE <http://www. penguinbooksindia.com/ Author Lounge/Author Detail.asp?aid= 1745>. Web.
The Book of Shadows by Namita Gokhale. From New Writing from South Asian. Online. Netscape: 17 Oct. 2007 SOURCE <http://www. acidsurvivorsfoundation.org>. Web.