The Binding Vine by Shashi Deshpande | Characters, Summary, Analysi

The Binding Vine by Shashi Deshpande | Characters, Summary, Analysis

Hello and welcome to the Discourse. The Binding Vine is a novel by Shashi Deshpande that was published in 1992. Shashi Deshpande's ‘The Binding Vine’ is very similar to her earlier novels, as it sketches her middle-class female protagonist's predicament in a male-dominated world, where she has minimal scope to give voice to her concerns. The Binding Vine is often regarded as an example of a ‘Stream of Consciousness’ Novel. ‘Stream of Consciousness’ was a phrase used by William James to characterize the unbroken flow of thoughts. Stream of consciousness is a narrative style to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind" of a narrator. The stream-of-consciousness novel differs from the psychological novels because it is more concerned with the incoherent and inexplicable parts of the mind. The Binding Vine deals with the multi-facetedness of its central character Urmi who plays the role of anchor, it is she who is used by the novelist very cleverly to expose the sufferings of women from different sections of our society. Thus, the novel is narrated from the point of view of Urmi in first person narrative style. This novel is a multi-dimensional narrative about family bonds, human relationships, women's right to their bodies, and the need to speak out to set right the wrong.

Characters of The Binding Vine:

Urmi is the central character of the novel. She is a married woman who recently lost her one-year-old daughter Anusha in an accident. Kartik is her toddler son. Urmi is an intelligent, educated middle-class wife, who is employed as a lecturer in a college. She is married to Kishor who is a merchant navy officer. Though Urmi loves Kishor and prefers him, Urmi has an egoistic clash of feelings with Kishor. Urmi is a financially independent woman who seeks emotional love from her husband but Kishor because of his job often remains away and when Urmi tries to reveal her emotional insecurity, he asserts himself sexually rather than understanding that her desire is not physical, what she needs is something else. Vanaa is Urmi’s childhood friend and her sister-in-law, she is the sister of Kishor. Vanaa is married to Harish who is a doctor. Vanaa too is a medical social activist. Unlike Urmi, she never dares to question her husband’s supremacy. Mandira is the daughter of Vanaa and Harish. Though Vanaa is equally contributing financially to her family, Harish is careless not only about his household duties but he is also unsympathetic towards his wife. Amrut is Urmi’s younger brother and Inni is their mother. While Amrut spent his childhood with his parents, Urmi was sent to her grandparents to live with them and for this, she has a grudge against her mother. Akka is the stepmother of Kishor and Urmi’s stepmother-in-law. Kishor’s mother Mira died when Kishor was just one day old. His father married Akka to take care of his son. Mira was a well-educated girl and a poet. She got married to an abusive sadistic man who was very possessive and obsessive towards her. Though he believed he loved his wife, it was no less than torture for Mira who was afraid of her husband. Shakutai or Shakuntala is a woman whom Urmi meets in the hospital. She is an aged woman whose young daughter Kalpana was brutally raped and seriously injured as she is admitted to the hospital. Shakutai is a peon in a girl’s school. Kalpana and Sandhya are Shakutai’s daughters and Prakash is her son. Shakutai’s husband was an alcoholic indolent man who deserted her long ago. Shakutai’s younger sister is Sulochana or Sulu who is married to Prabhakar. Sulu is very supportive of Shakutai but has her own marriage troubles as she failed to conceive a child. She fears her husband may leave her for another woman. On the other hand, Prabhakar is obsessively attracted to Kalpana, the young voluptuous daughter of Shakutai. Dr. Bhaskar Jain is the doctor attending Kalpana, the rape victim.

Summary of The Binding Vine:

The story begins as Urmi goes to a hospital for a checkup. She lost her one-year-old child Anusha in an accident and since then she has been inconsolable. Nothing can cheer her or divert her attention from her daughter. She is flippant, angry, irritated, and even hysterical. In such a state she hit her head with a wall and had an injury. Vanaa, her sister-in-law and a childhood friend is with her. Urmi’s husband Kishor is a merchant navy officer and remains on the sea for half a year or more. Thus, Urmi lives with her mother Inni in Bombay. While ruffling her nerves, Vanaa tries to divert Urmi’s mind from her recent troubles and reminds her how strong she used to be during her childhood when she fell off a bicycle while learning in Ranidurg. Urmi gets irritated by this. She understands that Vanaa wants her to be strong and forget the pain of losing Anu, her daughter. However, Urmi doesn’t wish to be strong. "This pain is all that's left to me of Anu. Without it, there will be nothing left to me of her; I will lose her entirely.” she feels. Her childhood memories remind her of how she was forced to stay with her grandparents while her younger brother remained with her parents. Urmi is a strong woman who doesn’t like submissive women. Vannaa too appears to be submissive to her and never says a word against her careless husband Harish who often belittles her. Harish has examined Urmi and found that she is asthmatic. He offers to inform Kishor about it but Urmi insists that she will recover soon and they need not disturb Kishor who is on his touring job.

One day, Urmi’s mother-in-law Akka gives her a trunk containing Mira’s diaries, papers, and old photographs. She informs her that Kishor is Mira's son while she is the stepmother. Kishor was just one day old when his mother Mira died. To take care of the newly born baby, his father remarried Akka, but Akka couldn’t become his wife ever, her only role remained to be a caretaker of Kishor and his sister Vanaa. Urmi feels sorry for Akka. As she begins reading the diaries and papers of Mira, she realizes that Mira used to be a great poet. She was not happy in her marriage because her husband’s love was a “trap”, it did not give her individual freedom but suffocated her by over-riding passion. Kishor’s father was obsessive towards Mira and he had a sadistic streak of which Mira was afraid. However, Mira had no recluse but to continue marital rape every now and then. Mira's diary is a glaring revolution of her extreme dislike of the sexual act with her husband, a physical repulsion for the man she married. Taken collectively, her poems and diary entries pointed out molestation in marriage. Urmi is aghast by knowing all this. She also begins thinking about Kishor and how he too thinks of her as a sexual object. As she reads further, she learns that Mira once met a poet named Venu and showed him some of her poems. Venu discouraged and ridiculed her and said, “Why do you need to write poetry? It is enough for a young woman like you to give birth to children. That is your poetry; leave the other poetry to us men."

Urmi feels too bad while reading all this and decides to try getting Mira’s poems posthumously published. However, Vanaa is not happy about this, rather she opposes Urmi’s effort. She feels that this stride of Urmi in publishing the poems of Vanaa’s dead mother will destroy and demolish the honor of her family.

Urmi joins duty after her leave expires and gets busy in her daily routine. One day, she learns of a rape case when she goes to the hospital to meet Vanaa who is a medical social worker. The rape victim is Kalpana. Kalpana is a young vivacious girl from a lower class background. She is Shakutai's daughter. Shakutai has one more daughter Sandhya and a son. Her husband does not stay with them so it is Shakutai who is the breadwinner. She has a sister, Sulochana (Sulu). Sulu is childless and is afraid that her husband, Prabhakar, may marry another woman and shunt her out of his house. Her husband is enamored of Kalpana and is keen to marry her. Both Shakutai and Sulu approve of this proposal. Sulu likes it because if Kalpana comes as the co-wife, Sulu will not be driven out. After all, Sulu is Kalpana's aunt (Masee). Shakutai likes the idea because she thinks Prabhakar is a good man and since he loves Kalpana, he will keep her happy. Kalpana, however, has her own aspirations. She likes a young man whom she wants to marry and rejects Prabhakar's offer.

Now she is lying in the hospital, unable to speak or express, almost dead. Nobody knows what happened to her. When Dr. Bhaskar examines her, he announces that she was brutally raped. The police officer examining the case doesn’t agree with the doctor as he wishes to register the case as a road accident. He says, “She’s going to die anyway, so what difference does it make whether, on paper, she dies the victim of an accident or a rape?” the Police officer is unwilling to register it as a rape case because such cases become complicated and harrowing for them; Dr. Bhaskar admits based on the medical examination that the girl was raped but his point is simple— the girl will not recover from her coma and so it does not matter whether it is reported as a rape or an accident.

When Shakutai hears this, she panics. Kalpana’s mother is hysterical as she pleads with the doctors not to report the matter as a rape case. She is afraid of the social stigma. She says that if the people came to know that Kalpana was raped, nobody will marry her, nor will her younger sister get a man to marry. Urmi’s heart goes out to the wailing mother and sensing that the woman is alone, she offers to escort her home in a taxi. This is how Urmi comes to know more about Shakutai, a peon in a girls’ school. She lives in a chawl along with her children—Kalpana, Sandhya, and Prakash (son); her husband has deserted her for another woman and Shakutai has no male support except Prabhakar, her younger sister’s husband. Urmi learns more about Kalpana. Kalpana was a

good-looking child, and Sulu (Shakutai’s sister and Kalpana’s mausi) was attached to her. When Kalpana was growing up, Sulu offered to take her to her house and look after her and educate her. The offer was good from Shakutai’s angle also. She wanted her children to get an education and settle down well in life. But after a while, Kalpana had come back and refused to go to Sulu Mausi. Shakutai cursed the obstinate girl, without ever looking into the cause of her refusal. Now Shakutai accuses Kalpana of her condition. They tell Urmi to keep away from this mess. Shakutai blames her for crossing the limits of a woman's life and attracting attention through her modern ways of dressing up. Shakutai also felt that Kalpana was punished because she broke all these rules. Urmi refuses to agree with her views but Shakutai silences her on the plea that Urmi, belonged to the higher middle class, and, therefore, could not understand the constraints of people like Shakutai.

Urmi begins taking interest in Kalpana’s case while her mother and Vanaa try to discourage her. However, Doctor Bhaskar supports her. One day Shakutai comes to Urmi’s house and as Urmi gets busy making tea, Shakutai tells her the story of her marriage, her journey from the village to Bombay, and her life with her husband. He was a good-for-nothing fellow and never gave Shakutai a home. They shared a room with his cousin where she gave birth to her children, cooked, worked at a shop, and in fact did everything to run the household. She was overworked and it was only when Sulu came to stay that she got some help. However, Shakutai’s husband got involved with another woman and left her. Urmi continues to investigate Kalpana’s case while Inni, and Vanaa all offer only lip-sympathy. They tell Urmi to keep away from this mess. However, Urmi continues her efforts and comes to know that Kalpana returned from Sulu’s home only because Prabhakar tried to molest her while she was still a child. When Kalpana rejected Prabhakar’s offer of a second marriage which was illegal on its own, Kalpana rejected it. Prabhakar was enraged at this rejection. He waited for an opportunity, raped her, and leaving her mutilated body in a dark street, ran away. Urmi gives the facts about the rape case to Malcolm, a journalist and it is published. As the case becomes public, the government offers more attention. The reluctant police officer registers a rape case and offers protection to Kalpana in the hospital. The hospital authorities too begin observing Kalpana keenly. However, Sulu fails to bear all this. When she comes to know that Prabhakar raped Kalpana, whom she cared for like her own daughter, she commits suicide. Shakutai fails to understand how to react. Urmi feels deeply for Shakutai; she can empathize with her but cannot do anything further. She finds that she couldn’t talk about all this to anyone.

While Urmi is going through these problems, she talks freely to Dr. Bhaskar, seeing in him a good listener. Somehow, Dr. Bhaskar imagines that Urmi is unhappy in her marriage and he indirectly proposes to her. Urmi is shocked at his boldness. Though she likes his companionship, she has no reason to deceive Kishore. Kishore is remote and reticent by nature but he is a loving husband and a doting father. Urmi realizes that she loves Kishore, despite her disillusionment with him and his long absences. Urmi liked Dr. Bhaskar’s warm companionship, but she loved Kishore.

During this tumultuous period, Inni tells her that it was not Inni but Papa who sent Urmi to Ranidurg to live with her grandparents. When Urmi was a child, Inni had gone out leaving her in the care of Divakar, a trusted servant. Urmi's father had come home early that day and seeing that the girl was left with a male servant, had got angry. After that, he decided to send Urmi to his mother. He made his decision without even consulting his wife- Inni, Urmi's mother. Urmi learned that though her mother was sophisticated, she was submissive and couldn’t oppose her daunting dominating father. Urmi realizes that just like other women, her mother too is a victim, not a culprit.

So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of Indian English literature. Please s