LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Homeless in One's Own Home
An Analysis of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
and Lakshmi Kannan's Going Home

Pauline Das, Ph.D.

Rights of a Woman to Family Property

The aim of this paper is to project the suffering of women as represented in Lakshmi Kannan's Going Home and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things with special reference to the Hindu Succession Act 1956 and 2005. The women folk in these novels feel homeless in their own homes. The physical and psychological conditions of women, with no space in their own homes remind us of Virginia Woolf's 'Room of My Own.'

In the preface of the novel, Kannan vents her anger at post- independent Indian society's failure to guarantee property and inheritance rights to Indian women. She points out that while the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 assures the legal rights of a woman to family property, the actual reality of control of assets is another story. Seemingly progressive families, according to Kannan, count upon the "unconditional compliance" of women when it comes to asserting over ancestral property. As a consequence of this "tacit silent acceptance of their lot in the unequal equation between them and their male siblings" (Preface,vii), the larger number of Indian women neither feel at 'home' in their physical homes, nor within their bodies.

The Plight of Career Women

Going Home is also a direct statement on the plight of the married middle class career woman who is compelled to cross over from private sphere to the public. However, this 'outing' from the inner courtyard to a larger world is not translated into any real freedom for the self. Society feels that women allowed to work have special privileges accorded to her by the family. The unpleasant reality of it is that she has to work both at the home and in the office. A woman who is intellectual and excellent in academic performances is not even acknowledged in the community. This is the plight of women even two decades after Women's International Year. A woman who may become recognized by scholars and critics as brilliant, and who may draw so many readers compellingly into her books, is only insulted in her own family.

Women in India in the Sixties to Eights

Going Home attempts to study the condition of women in India in the sixties. The novel talks of formally and apparently socially respectable educated women who witnessed a mute, dull, numbing pain and were trying to break their long, oppressive silence. It talks of women who had changed their dress code but nevertheless could not change their status that was still governed by the random accident of their birth. Their growing up in the male dominated society developed a low esteem for them as they saw themselves inferior in the cultural and social context.

Voices in a Voiceless Environment

Indian writers in English have contributed a lot in reflecting the thoughts and aspirations of the Indian mind. Women novelists especially have recorded their voices in a voiceless environment. With the coming of Arundhati Roy in the Indian scene a great deal of attention has been paid to women's writing. Women writers' themes reflect the sad plight of their women protagonists, reflecting our society.

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