Hello and welcome to the Discourse. Anita Desai is one of the leading Indian women novelists writing in English most of the themes found in her novels are the problems of alienation, immigration, marital disharmony, and so on. In Voices in the City Anita Desai portrays how people, especially the poor, are forced to lose their moral values because of money which is indispensable to lead a life. Thus society makes a lot of sudden changes. Voices in the City was published in 1965. Desai’s protagonists are basically tragic and they fail indefatigably. They are psychologically disturbed, moody, self-absorbed, and confused in their manner and disjointed expressions. They are faced with an aggressive social environment and they fall into a state of passiveness. They share their experience and perceptions about life and try to search for the real meaning of life. The characters live a lonesome life and love privacy. The story of the novel is set in the city of Calcutta, India, and represents Calcutta as a place for bohemians. The story is about three siblings, Monisha, Nirod, and Amla.
Characters of Voices in the City:
Monisha is the eldest daughter of the family. She is a delicate person blessed with an extraordinary power of visualization. However, she fails to attain chances to develop and express her artistic streaks. She gets married at an early age and suffers disharmony in the mismatched married life. She fails to become a mother and this further stresses her life. Nirode is the only son of the family. He is a highly talented young artist and a struggling writer. He seeks a sense of individuality and commitment to some higher purpose in life and fails to find it. He rejects the help of his rich mother in attaining a stable career while trying to establish himself as a successful artist on his own. Nirode is unique in his feelings and thoughts and seeks absolute freedom. Amla is the younger sister of Nirode and like her two elder siblings, she is a talented artist, a beautiful model, and a writer. She arrives in Calcutta to find a career as a commercial artist but soon she derails and begins seeking love and joy sans struggles, pain, and suffering. The three kids spent their childhood at Kalipong, a hilly area of West Bengal in a feudal family dominated by their mother. Their father was a drunkard who died of alcoholism. Their mother led a lonely life and then developed an affair with Major Chaddha one of their neighbors. All of them, especially Nirod are too sensitive about this and don’t like Mr. Chaddha being close to their mother. David is one of the friends of Nirod who came to Calcutta after running away from his home in Ireland. Mr. Dharma is an aged artist, a painter who impresses Amla and befriends her. He develops a sexual affair with Amla and she falls in his trap while searching for absolute love. Later on, she learns that he is a philanderer who doesn’t even treat his own daughter well. Jiban is Monisha’s husband. He is a government servant and he is insensitive towards Monisha. He believes that women are expected to serve their husbands, and their families, rear their husbands’ kids, and take care of home. Hari is a childhood friend of Monisha. Ila is the wife of Nirode. Rita is Nirode’s aunt, his father’s younger sister, who is a scientist.
Summary of Voices in the City:
Nirode is working as a news reporter for a newspaper in Calcutta. He doesn’t like his job much and thinking of quitting because he has reached the limit where it has become “impossible, physically impossible to work under any man.” Furthermore, he finds no creativity in his job and considers it senseless. He remembers his childhood days at Kaligong where he was so happy with his two sisters. However, after the death of their father, he couldn’t accept the growing bonhomie between his mother and their neighbor Major Chaddha. He always found a feeling of antipathy against Mr. Chaddha. He left Calcutta for higher studies. His mother is still living in Kaligong and when she learns that he has left his job, she offers help in finding a better job but he rejects her help.
He seeks complete freedom so that he may experiment with his creative ideas and thus, he decides to launch his own magazine. Though he enjoys initial success with his new magazine, he fails to attain a track of readers in the absence of proper advertisement, and thus, his magazine begins to flounder and fold back. He tries his hand at writing a play. However, all his attempts fail as his magazine folds and his play is rejected by theater groups. He begins to equate the city of Calcutta with the goddess Kali, a deity of destruction that kills creativity and self-expression. Nirode is married to Ila. Though Ila loves Nirode, she is a complex character deeply affected by her own insecurities and marital dissatisfaction. Alienated from her husband's artistic world, she finds solace in an affair with a family friend, which only exacerbates her inner turmoil. Ila's internal struggle is a reflection of the changing dynamics within Indian society, where traditional gender roles are being reevaluated and challenged.
Nirode attempts to model his existence after a painter named Dharma who seems to be at peace with his life in Calcutta, though Dharma is a mysterious figure and Nirode is ultimately not able to understand his motivations.
During all these troubles, his elder sister Monisha, who is also living in Calcutta offers solace to him. Nirode always found Monisha cheerful and caring towards him. However, Monisha too has her own struggles. She is a delicate girl with a creative mind and ability to visualize. She could have been a fine artist but her widow mother decided to marry her too early. After her marriage, her husband Jiban, who is a government servant was posted in Calcutta. Thus, Monisha and her husband along with her mother-in-law and sister-in-law shifted to Calcutta. Monisha has been married to Jiban for the last three years. She comes to Calcutta as her husband has been given a transfer to his ancestral city. Monisha has been brought up in the hilly region of Kalimpong. She is a new woman with a heightened level of awareness and a strong sense of individuality. She is blessed with an extraordinary power of visualization. When she comes to live with her in-laws, she goes through the experience of having a ‘surreptitious push from Jiban’ to touch the ‘feet after feet’ of various people. She has to spend time in ‘the tiered balconies’, in the room with ‘the bars of windows’, a ‘black’ bed, and a ‘black’ wardrobe. The entire description makes it clear that the environment creates a cold response and threat in her and makes her feel like a prisoner. Monisha finds herself a misfit in this new house as she is a well-educated, peace-loving, self-absorbed woman with a philosophic bent of mind. She fervently wishes for her solitude and privacy. Monisha finds a cramped atmosphere at her husband’s place. Added to this is the indignity of being unable to bear a child because her fallopian tubes are blocked. She feels really embarrassed when her sisters-in-law discuss her ‘ovaries and theirs. This is the encroachment on someone’s private life and Monisha disapproves of this very attitude. Here Monisha feels like being objectified in the atmosphere of indifference. Through her acts and thoughts, Monisha seems to challenge the popular belief of the confinement of a woman in four walls of a house enjoying motherhood. She seeks individual freedom and ways to express herself. However, she finds none. She begins to feel as if marriage is a tomb for her. She remembers Rita, her aunt who is a scientist. Rita abandoned her family to pursue her career. However, Monisha doesn’t have a career, nor her brother or younger sister are yet stable enough to support her. She has no option.
Amla is the younger sister of Nirode who too came to Calcutta to establish herself as a successful commercial artist. She is young, naive, and very hopeful at the beginning. However, as she faces the stark realities and competition in the market, she begins to crumble. She meets Monisha and Nirode and finds that both have changed with time. Amla becomes anxious about the unpleasant change that has come over Monisha and Nirode after they arrive in Calcutta. She begins to suffer from a sense of loneliness.
She also encounters Dharma, and he has a greater effect on her. Dharma, considering Amla the ideal model for his paintings, draws her into his circle of literate, cosmopolitan friends. Amla begins to feel this is a chance for success and is excited about it. She begins seeking absolute love and protection with Dharma. She meets her elder sister and discusses her issues with her. Monisha tells her younger sister Amla that there must be someone in someone’s life who reciprocates and responds. And this response, this reciprocation should be silent, discreet, pure, untouched, untouchable. But she makes it clear that this reciprocation makes some demands, obligations, extortions, untruths, and bullying. Amla fails to understand that Monisha is talking about her own struggles. She decides to compromise in her relationship with Dharma. However, she soon learns Dharma is a philanderer who treats his daughter poorly. She soon gets tired of the coterie of cynical artists and begins maintaining a distance.
Monisha begins to completely lose herself when her sister-in-law deliberately takes control of her bedroom. The situation becomes alarmingly perplexing for Monisha when one of her sisters-in-law comes to her room and asks her to show saris in her wardrobe, and when she throws open the wardrobe, the lady gets amused and shocked to find “Kafka, Hopkins, and Dostoyevsky” etc. instead of saris there. Monisha does not relate to the shocking behavior of her sister-in-law. She finds herself a complete misfit.
One day, Monisha learns that Nirode is seriously ill and has been admitted to the hospital. Tough Nirode’s mother could have paid the bills easily, he didn’t wish to take her help. Monisha takes her husband’s money from the cupboard without his permission to pay the hospital bill for Nirode.
While she is ridiculed and castigated for not being able to become a mother, she suffers heartbreak when she is accused of theft in her own house. She finds that even her husband doesn’t support her and remains insensitive towards her. She continues to play the role of a dutiful and devoted wife. However, internally, she is in deep turmoil due to the ugliness of her surroundings. She is unable to bear a child, one of her primary duties as a wife, which she interprets as an unwillingness to bring another life into a world that seems to her ugly and meaningless. While she doesn’t express her melancholic and depressive thoughts to anyone, she registers them in her diary.
Monisha locks herself in the bathroom and immolates herself to death.
When Nirode and Amla come to know about the incident, they are shocked and in disbelief. Monisha used to be the source of solace, strength, and inspiration for them. However, when they get her diary to read, they learn how difficult her own situation was.
Monisha’s death gives a new perspective to Amla who begins to take more interest in her dull job in the advertising sector and tries to adjust to the boring life of Calcutta. She begins taking an interest in making illustrations for a translation of the Panchatantra. This piece of ancient Indian political philosophy appeals to her because she finds its message meaningful and its way of being conveyed – through fables about animals – to be interesting and creative.
Meanwhile, Nirode is still struggling against his existentialist crisis. He feels that Monisha is a martyr who has met a splendid death. Her death gives him a glimpse of the secret of life and death. He feels elevated to an unimaginably high vantage point where he can see the “whole fantastic design of life and death, of incarnation, followed by reincarnation, of unconsciousness, turning into consciousness of sleep followed by waking.” However, he is troubled by the prospect of meeting and facing his mother again who is expected to visit Calcutta to meet the family of Monisha, her dead daughter. He tells Amla that he has been sentenced to death. “I am prepared and waiting for it. I have heard her approach death, Kali… while she watches I grow more and more vividly alive by the minute, and also closer and closer to my death.” A visit from his mother finally resolves his conflict when Nirode has a dream of his mother as Kali and recalls that the goddess with destructive powers also has the power to preserve what is important.
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of Indian English literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards!
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