LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 18:9 September 2018
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
         Dr. S. Chelliah, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

Language in India www.languageinindia.com is included in the UGC Approved List of Journals. Serial Number 49042.

HOME PAGE

Click Here for Back Issues of Language in India - From 2001

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIALS

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2016
M. S. Thirumalai

Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
11249 Oregon Circle
Bloomington, MN 55438
USA
Custom Search

Interface Between Myth and Modernity in Negotiating Issues of
Migration and Establishing Identity in Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni’s The Vine of Desire

Anamika Chakraborty, M.A.


Feminism and Myths

Feminist writers and critics have emphasized on the need of female bonding and companionship as discussed in the chapter on Sister of My Heart, that can help them to fight patriarchal institutions and discriminations based on race class or gender, but there are many instances where female writers have also tried to problematize this area of female companionship and attempted to address the issues related to the various complications and tensions arising within female friendship, because of the same above- mentioned reasons. Toni Morrison has dealt with the failure of female friendship as childhood friends grow into adulthood. Both in Sula and in Love we find childhood bonds disintegrating as patriarchal structures like class, racism and marriage intervene. The friends face the challenges of patriarchy together in their childhood but fail to do so as they mature. Louisa May Alcott who exhorted “the religion of sisterhood”, portrays instances of conflict and tension between the sisters as they struggle with life’s challenges in her novel, Little Women (1868). Shashi Deshpande has dealt with conflict and tension in one the most significant female bonds of that between the mother and daughter in novels like The Dark Holds No Terror (2003), A Matter of Time (1999) or The Binding Vine (2002) that deal with the strained relationship between the mother and the daughter. Though in Divakaruni the bonds between mother and daughter or between female friends are not as pungent as in Deshpande, she still views these relationships from different perspectives. The Vine of Desire (2002) attempts at viewing female friendship critically and not in a simplistic, linear manner, a critical juncture, a crises that reaches its climax due to “desire”, which philosophers have defined it in more than one ways and mythology too has its own interpretation. In his Introduction to the Befriendig Our Desires (1994), Philip Sheldrake delineates human desire to be “the fundamental motivation of all human action”, because of which Buddhism has given “a great deal of attention between unhealthy craving and healthy desire”, and Dimitriadis (2017) expounds Baruch Spinoza, who in the 17th century saw “natural desires as a form of bondage”. Dimitriadis explains desire as “an emotion associated with a need or want. It expresses the strong feeling of needing or wanting to have something. It is an intimate cousin of pleasure, and an opponent to fear and pain. Christopher Alan Anderson, in The Metaphysics of Sex…in a Changing World (2014) cites David Hume who opined that “desires and passions are non- cognitive, automatic bodily responses”. Hegel claimed that “self- consciousness is desire” and Freud professed that desire often works in the subconscious mind which can at times be kept repressed, though not always.

Myths, however, hold desire as the reason for human unhappiness, woe and sorrow; desire or craving impedes a person from achieving moksh or nirvana according to Buddhist teachings. In the Indian mythology Kamdev, son of Vishnu and Lakshmi is the god of desire who gives birth to sensual longings in human beings. Divakaruni has worked upon the mythological connotations of desire, interested as she always is to explore the world of myths and the meanings they carry, to show how uncontrolled desire can bring in complexities and complications even within the strongest of bonds. As desire creeps inside the body and psyche of one and spreads its tentacles, relationships stagger and bonding gets snapped, like it does in the present narrative under discussion.

This is only the beginning part of the ARTICLE. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Anamika Chakraborty, M.A.
Asst. Professor, Dept. of English
Srikrishna College
Bagula, Nadia
West Bengal
Anaamika1975@yahoo.in

Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian/South Asian scholarship.