In Custody- Narrative style, Theme and Techniques

Interpretations on Indian Fictions- 1 (In Custody)

Themes, setting and narrative techniques

 

Even though linguistic and religious varieties in India endow the country with a rich cultural mosaic, the cultural scene is still fraught with clashes. Indeed, competing cultures within India continue to strive for supremacy. Published almost three decades ago, Anita Desai’s novel, In Custody (1984), raises ongoing cultural anxieties besieging Indian consciousness at the present time. Desai’s narrative charts the changing social and cultural values as India moves towards a global ethos. It starts from the story of a Hindu teacher, infatuated by the decaying Urdu language and literature, to portray a marginalized minority superseded by an increasingly engulfing Hindu culture. The narrative dramatizes the highly politicized issue of languages in India and explores its social and artistic ramifications.

The kind of cultural memory Desai is constructing in her text, and how this depiction can be read in relation to the actual machinations of Indian politics with regard to the language question. As a successful author, writing for an international publishing market, she is invested with a certain power to imaginatively represent an “authentic” India. While she is not a writer who bombards us with an epic style narration, purporting to offer “the great Indian novel,” her exploration of individual identities and self formations work in a subtle and problematic way, creating instead miniatures, and guiding the reader’s responses through a combination of omniscience, internal focalization, indirect speech and symbolic tropes. In Custody, a short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1984, can be retrospectively read as a literary narration of the communalization and disintegration of Urdu in post-Partition India. The year in which it was published was coincidentally the same year that saw the death of an Urdu literary legend, the master lyricist Faiz. Ahmad Faiz, who stirred the hearts of millions with his haunting melodies and sustained hope for many with his romantic vision of a return to a beloved home land.

 Anita Desai weaves all these historical threads in her 1984 novel, In Custody. The text narrates the ongoing struggle between two competing languages in India, Hindi and Urdu. This struggle is artistically relocated into its historical and political contexts. Anita Desai describes her narrative as an attempt “to portray the world of poets.” She interpolates her childhood memories in Delhi to resurrect the enchantment of this dying language. “Living in Delhi I was always surrounded by the sound of Urdu poetry, which is mostly recited”, claims the writer. “But although there is such a reverence for Urdu poetry, the fact that most Muslims left India to go to Pakistan meant that most schools and universities of Urdu were closed. So that it’s a language I don’t think is going to survive in India” (Costa). In this statement, Desai refers indirectly to the linguistic aftermath of the 1947 Partition resulting into a mass exodus of Muslim Urdu speakers to Pakistan.

 The mocking tone of the narrative places both Nur and Deven within a corrected perspective — Nur is no God, nor is Deven a fool or a court jester — but for a few moments in the drama of their meeting, everybody else is forced to occupy the wings of the stage while the "superior being" and the nervous admirer and devotee meet.

 Desai’s perception of Urdu as an artifact of Old India and its communal heritage are key features of her story. One of the narrative devices she uses is that of cultural memory and this, in connection with the theme of Urdu, is inevitably tied to the memory of separation and Partition. Here it is important to make the distinction that whereas Faiz is still looking for national liberation in Shubh-e-Azadi. Desai is analyzing Urdu as the cultural object of a lived experience in post-Partition India. Later in his career, Faiz was commissioned by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government in post-Partition Pakistan to conduct an “official” search for Pakistani culture and nationalism. Desai’s fiction, on the other hand, demystifies the idea of a national collectivity and looks toward the arts and the way of life of individuals as distinctive cultural representations. Her constructions of cultural memory are marked by nostalgia for the past, and a kind of closeness to the Romantic tradition with its ‘idealizing of the folk,’ of vital subcultures buried deep within its own society.

         Desai’s narration of Urdu’s tragedy is mediated through the eyes of an urban dweller in New Delhi struck by the lyrical romance of Old Delhi Urdu poetry, a remnant of a pre modern cultural tradition that rememorizes the old city. In an interview with Magma Costa, Anita Desai responded to the suggestion that In Custody is a representation of the decay of Urdu literature as follows:

 

“I was trying to portray the world of Urdu poets. Living in Delhi I was always surrounded by the sound of Urdu poetry, which is mostly recited. Nobody reads it, but one goes to recitations. It was very much the voice of North India. But although there is such a reverence for Urdu poetry, the fact that most Muslims left India to go to Pakistan meant that most schools and universities of Urdu were closed. So that it’s a language I don’t think is going to survive in India…. There are many Muslims and they do write in Urdu; but it has a kind of very artificial existence. People are not going to study Urdu in school and college anymore, so who are going to be their readers? Where is the audience?” (Costa 2001)

 

The knotty issue of national language has been a topic of much scholarly deliberation history and sociological studies of the Indian nation. Several researchers have drawn our attention to the contentious fates of Hindustani, Urdu, and Hindi in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. Such linguistic differences can be read as marking an important distinction from what Benedict Anderson has theorized as an integrated ‘Imagined Community’ coming together through a common language via the rise of a homogenizing print capitalism.

         Urdu came to prominence in the middle-to-late eighteenth century at the same time as the ousting of Persian from the courts by the British and its replacement with the official language of government, English. Generally, in eastern and northern India, Bengali and Urdu remained in use in the lower levels of administration and judiciary, while in the northern state of Punjab, the British imposed English and Urdu as the languages of government.

     In Custody tells the story of the decline and decay of Urdu in modern India. Deven, the antihero of the novel, is a Hindi lecturer devoted to the classical tradition of Urdu poetry, a devotion which stems from his childhood associations with the language as a mother-tongue speaker. Born in Lucknow, educated in Delhi, he is a poor widower’s son who has found employment as a university lecturer in Lala Ram Lal College in Mirpore. While his career choice is not particularly lucrative as a language specialist, it has been directed by a practical consideration of the market economy that favors Hindi, the language of communication in North India. Urdu fuels his imagination and Hindi sustains his corporeal needs.

         Deven feels trapped in the confines of his chosen home, so when the opportunity of returning to the capital presents itself through the intervention of his childhood friend Murad, he takes an uncharacteristically risky step by agreeing to Murad’s suggestion. In taking this decision he is temporarily freed from the constrictions of his existence in the small town of Mirpore, which had come to resemble the metaphorically ‘impassable desert that lay between him and the capital with its lost treasures of friendships, entertainment, attractions and opportunities’.

         The northern plain of Mirpore situated “more than a thousand miles from the coast” had been shaped by the presence of a Muslim aristocracy, in this case a long-forgotten Nawab who had fled Delhi to escape the aftermath of the 1857 Mutiny and had subsequently built a mosque in Mirpore as a memorial of thanks to his Supreme Benefactor for preserving his life. The narrator tells us that the history of the mosque has been swept away in the dust which saturates the Mirpore atmosphere and all that remains of the “marble and pink sandstone” is a decaying filth ridden stone structure overtaken by the debris of modernity. But the narrator reiterates its ongoing use as a mosque. Continuing to map the cultural traditions of Mirpore the narrator tells us, ‘The temples were more numerous but had no history at all. There was literally not a man in Mirpore who could have told one when they were built or by whom.  Here it can be argued that Desai’s reconstruction of the geography of Mirpore is interesting and problematic because it links the Muslim presence in Mirpore to a pre-modern urban aristocracy and contrasts it with the timelessness of an indigenous Hindu tradition which is embedded in an infinite antiquity, ‘the same kind of antiquity that the shacks of the poor had, and the stalls of the traders—they were often wrecked, rebuilt and replaced, but their essential form remained the same.

Mirpore in Desai's latest novel, In Custody (1984), is not like Calcutta in Voices in the City. Mirpore is unidentifiable as a particular city on the map of India and yet, it is every Indian city. It is not imaged to build a locale-bound background or scene but is more allusive, brought in to evoke an image of contemporary India. Beneath the apparently loose lumping together of protean detail, it is really a concentrated imaging, like long shots of a camera directed full gaze upon different parts needed to put together the mosaic whole. It is, in some ways, like E. M. Forstels Chandrapore in A Passage to India, a deliberately focused evocation — only more detailed and more heavily laced with irony.

         In Mirpore, there are no alien rulers to exploit and plunder native resources. Yet it is as decadent, neglected, and dying a town as Chandrapore. The passive resignation of Chandrapore's ‘inhabitants of mud’ becomes here the cynicism and disillusionment of the citizens (note that they are referred to as ‘citizens’ and not as ‘inhabitants’) of Mirpore, the commercial city of ‘dust.’ ‘Dust’ with its connotations of unproductivity, sterility, and death is more real to them than soil, associated with vitality, creativity, growth. Throughout the novel, the nouns and adjectives that occur with almost uninterrupted regularity in the characterization of Mirpore are ‘debris,’ ‘desolation,’ ‘empty,’ ‘barren,’ ‘stagnant,’ ‘stale,’ ‘blight,’ ‘dustbin.’ Mirpore is a town properly spoiled and neglected by its own citizens, who seem to have no sense of history. There is no respect for monuments, no special signs or space or protection for them. The small mosque of marble and pink sandstone, built by a nawab to commemorate his safe escape to this ‘obscure and thankfully forgotten town" after the mutiny of 1857 and also to raise a memorial to the grace of God who had made his escape possible, is now. Of course, the traditional use of the mosque continues and five times a day the priest gives a call to worshippers who come and pray. But no one remembers the mosque as neither a historical landmark nor attempts to reconstruct or restore it. In other ways too, the town is the very essence of sterility. In the passage below, heavy irony is employed to suggest aridity and stagnation and the underlying despair and futility that mark the town.

        But in Mirpore in free India, the same communal divisions as under the British persist: the area around the mosque is considered the 'Muslim' area, and the rest 'Hindu'. Although no boundaries mark one area from another there are differences between them, not easily discernible but known to all so that ‘pigs were generally kept out of the vicinity of the mosque and cows never slaughtered near a temple. Even so, if once a year Moharram and Holi happened to coincide, communal disturbances would break out and tensions remain high for a time. ‘Then the dust of Mirpore rose and swirled and buried everything in sight again; the citizens of Mirpore returned to their daily struggle to breathe’ (21-22). Also to be found in Desai's Mirpore is the same fear of Muslims being swamped by the dominant group, the same seeking of identity in the past days of glory and grand style of Nawabs, and the same use of the Urdu language — the language of the court, in the days of royalty, that had to be saved from being swallowed by that ‘vegetable monster, Hindi.’ Mirpore in independent India has also had its share of ‘development’ — schools, colleges, the railway station, the bus depot. Close to Delhi, the busy centre of business and commerce, it seems to be in a state of ‘perpetual motion.’ However, the bustle is strangely unproductive. The incantatory irony-laden negations of worth, growth, and creativity — ‘no construction . . . except the daily one of repairing,’ ‘no growth except in numbers’, ‘no making permanent what had remained . . . so stubbornly temporary" — build up Mirpore as a town with no reason for existence. However, the novel is also about human beings who entertain hopes and aspirations like human beings everywhere in the world. These are people who live in that ‘prison,’ ‘trap,’ or ‘dustbin’ (as it is variously called by the characters in the book), Mirpore, and those outside it, in Delhi, where some of the action in the book is also developed.

             While Hindu is considered a minor subject and not allowed any funds in Deven’s university, Urdu is barely tolerated. “It was perhaps unusual to find a private college as Lala Ram Lal’s offering a language such as Urdu that was nearly extinct”, comments the narrator. The story behind its presence further stresses the Indian dominating linguistic policy based on eradicating a whole cultural heritage. Going back to the genesis of the college, the narrator explains that its owners had to accept a large donation from the descendants of a Muslim Nawab who fled Delhi after the 1857 mutiny. The Hindu owners, determined not to write the Muslim family name upon the college’s signboard, have conceded to create a department of Urdu instead.

         The Urdu department, however, “small and precarious” (108), has no real status. Once again, Desai uses her characters’ physical appearance to symbolize the deteriorating state of Urdu. While the ageing Nur stands for the decay of Urdu, the greying hair of Abid Siddiqui, the head of the Urdu department, announces a similar fate. Indeed, ‘in keeping with the size and stature of that department,’ Abid Siddiqui ‘was prematurely topped with a plume of white hair as if to signify the doomed nature of his discipline’. Creating a parallel between the two characters reinforces the improbable survival of Urdu.

 The parallel is extended to the spaces they inhabit. Nur’s house situated in the tortuous dusty streets of Delhi bazaars finds an echo in Siddiqui’s dilapidated palace reminiscent of the Mughal courts where Urdu once flourished. While Nur’s farcical gatherings cling to a dying language and art, Siddiqui ends up selling his palace, a gesture that announces the metaphorical death of Urdu Culture and memory. Deven remains the only character who strives to protect a language which is not his own. His attempts at preserving an endangered language, however, veer towards a farce. All his efforts turn out fruitless. He utterly fails to have a proper interview with the Urdu poet; He does not manage to record his poetry, either. In his role of a custodian, Deven adopts a typically misogynistic attitude: he excludes female creativity as a way to preserve the purity of Urdu.

 While it is in no intention to suggest that Anita Desai is articulating a communalist viewpoint, there is a particular historical and ideological freight surrounding the usage of Hinduism as timeless and Islam as latecomer which the narrative inevitably duplicates. The miniature portrait of the town grafted onto the larger narrative of Urdu replicates what, to borrow a phrase from Edward Said, might be seen as a “problematic structure of attitude and reference” regarding a whole cultural tradition.  The narrator tells us that the Mirpore communities were mutually observant of the stratified “Muslim” and “Hindu” areas. While this separation was habitual and uneventful for the most part, police had to be brought in from time to time when the ritual mourning of Muharram coincided with the festival of Holi.

         Here, the reference to the Hindi and Urdu newspapers is highly charged and can be seen to be indicative of the manipulation of ethnic differences in the regional print media. This print culture has the power to stoke the fires of dissension in a tense situation and intensify a separatist stance through divisive linguistic narratives.

         The novel begins with an unscheduled meeting between two childhood friends with contrasting personalities and backgrounds, namely Deven and Murad, his Muslim friend, as the spoilt rich boy with money in his pocket for cinema shows and cigarettes. The story symbolically unfolds at the beginning of spring in the month of March signifying the theme of birth and hope. The encounter between the two friends takes place on the grounds of Deven’s college. Murad has traveled from Delhi to Mirpore, metaphorically tearing across the plain like the changeable March wind ‘whirling dust and dry leaves around violently’.  To involve Deven in his latest project and sow the seeds of Deven’s fateful journey from Mirpore to Delhi. This initial paired characterization of the two friends underlines Murad as active and Deven as passive.

             However, Murad’s active nature is supplanted by the darkness of his actions. He comes to embody the exploitative city with its disregard for sentiment or nostalgia. In contrast, Deven’s residual passivity makes him the unfortunate vessel of many betrayals, ultimately unable to cope with the pressures of modern living. Deven is coerced by Murad to interview the renowned Delhi poet Nur Shahjahanabadi for a ‘special issue’ of his Urdu journal Awaz. Murad’s outlook on Urdu is marked by a sense of the ‘glorious’ past and an intention to recover the lost high cultural tradition that flourished in the pre-modern urban literary landscape in order to rescue it from its present relegation to the nameless margins of the city.

             Murad feels he is on higher moral ground because, unlike Deven, he has not surrendered to Hindi. His job as an Urdu editor displays his commitment and lifelong struggle in the cause of a golden tradition despite the constant worries of diminishing subscriptions, low readership, and escalating production costs. He accuses Deven of betraying his mother-tongue by selling out to the professional service of its archrival Hindi. This accusation is to haunt Deven throughout the book every time he enters the Urdu arena. Murad is facially disfigured by pockmarks, rather like his beloved Urdu which no longer has the patronage of emperors and nawabs, and while his scarred face marks him as a metaphor for Urdu, it can also be read as a symbol of an Urdu-speaker tainted by his contempt for Hindi. However his prejudicial attitude toward Hindi does not seem to extend to a communal rejection of Hindus since he confers custody of Urdu on Deven.

             Here Desai’s reference to a well-known, socially aware poet may be seen as an indirect nod in the direction of Faiz’s, the revolutionary Progressive poet who was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962. Desai’s narrative has a lyrical quality, with its use of symbolic tropes, and echoes some of the indefinable nuances of Faiz’s verse, but unlike Faiz’s, she is not sending out a call for social change. Faiz’s political agenda radically changed the classical imagery of the lover and the beloved, the literal and metaphorical desert of their separation, and the hopeful symbol of the morning breeze charging them with new meaning. The nation became the unattainable beloved and Faiz’s its devotee, the morning breeze was tinged with revolutionary powers of change, while the pain of separation between the beloved nation and its lovesick poet remained as agonized as ever. For Faiz’s, the poets were the warriors-/the riders of dawn who wrote first against colonialism and then against the oppressive postcolonial state giving hope to people where there was none. Nur’s legendary persona borrows the revolutionary traits of Faiz’s poetry.

               In Desai’s narration Nur holds the key to Urdu’s revival. However, it is difficult to say whether Desai’s guiding muse in this story is Faiz since the Nur we meet—a poet at the end of his career contrary to the reader’s expectations, is very reluctant to part with the old metaphors and lifestyle of an aristocratic lineage and seems to be untouched by a Progressive outlook. He is obsessed with his pigeons, his body is saturated with an excess of rich foods and alcohol, he lives in a dusty faded house with his two wives and entertains extravagantly. His poetic muse sustains itself through the poetry of Byron and Shelley. This link between the melancholic Romantic English poets and nostalgic Urdu poetry is also developed as a motif in Desai’s characterization of Raja in Clear Light of Day.

              In the Urdu department at Lala Ram Lal College Deven finds an unexpected ally who assists him in acquiring college funds to purchase a tape recorder for his assigned project. Deven’s poverty as a Hindi lecturer is matched by the diminishing stature of this colleague who is the head of the Urdu department, Abid Siddiqui. Siddiqui is described as a small man, whose youthful face was prematurely topped with a plume of white hair as if to signify the doomed nature of his discipline. Lala Ram Lal College could afford the luxury of an Urdu section because of a very large donation from the descendants of the very nawab who had fled Delhi in the aftermath of the 1857 mutiny. Like the dying culture he represents, Siddiqui lives in a deteriorating Haveli which reemphasizes the decay of Urdu and the peripheral position of Muslims in the modern Indian environment.

In this instance Desai overtly connects the theme of language with religion and politics. Ultimately what the novel shows us is that a mother tongue speaker of Urdu, Deven is economically disempowered by his first language, which he studied as a boy in Lucknow, taught to him by his father, a teacher, a scholar, and ‘lover of Urdu poetry.’ It does not stand him in good stead when, after his father’s death, his mother decides to move to Delhi: ‘I was sent to the nearest school, a Hindi-medium school, Sir’ says Deven when he first meets Nur Shahjahanabadi. ‘I took my degree in Hindi, sir and now I am temporary lecturer in Lala Ram Lal College at Mirpore. It is my living, sir. You see I am a married man, a family man”. For Deven, in post-independence India, his love for Urdu and his job as a Hindi lecturer are at odds with each other and he finds it increasingly difficult to hold onto both.

             This portent is mediated through an omniscient narrator who foregrounds the theme of dying through the symbolic motifs of the dog, the crows, and the fly. It appears that Deven’s journey has ended before it has begun because the language he wishes to save is already dead. Another way of looking at it is through the idea of shock experienced in the alienating city, where Deven is unable to resolve the crisis which unfolds.  His heroism is of a more romantic kind and his ideas are unsustainable in a modern environment.

            It is of course inevitable that the tape recorder which is purchased by Deven, with Murad’s unreliable help, is a secondhand model, and that he does not know how to operate it so he has to rely on Chiku, a young lad technician, to help him make the recordings. The recorder itself is a symbol of modernity and functionalism; therefore it fails to record the voice of tradition or of pre-modern India. Chiku’s ineptitude with this symbol of progress is a metaphor for the continuing inequalities of language and opportunity in India. The failed recordings are symptomatic of the dysfunctionality of Urdu. ‘It was a fiasco. There was no other word for it. Disbelievingly, Deven had the first tape removed, the second tried and then the third and the fourth’.

         It seems that the book does offer an alternative vision through the poetry of Nur’s second wife, but this vision is rejected by Deven because he sees her as a snake, an impostor who has stolen her husband’s verse. Again Imtiaz Begum’s character is problematic because it wavers between the typecast intellectual yet predatory courtesan/poet who is a chosen companion of the Progressive, pre-modern Muslim poet as his second wife and the woman who sends her manuscript to Deven for critical perusal. She cannot shed her first skin as a performer and always has to take a secondary role to Nur.  

 In Custody raises the issue of the communalization of languages in India. It charts the tense relationship between two religious groups asserting themselves as two political factions. The story revolves around Deven, a Hindu teacher enamored of Urdu poetry. Asked by a friend, an editor of an Urdu magazine, to interview a famous Urdu poet, he embarks on a series of Quixotic like adventures. He fails to interview the poet, Nur, and his attempts at recording his poetry turn into a fiasco. The narrative unfolds into tragicomic episodes in which language, art and gender are highly enmeshed.

 The novel displays a critical stance toward modernity, but this criticism is marked by ambivalence in its idea of Urdu, encapsulated as a tradition to be remembered rather than continued. Desai’s overall novelistic portrayal of Urdu marks an elegiac farewell to a lost tradition. Her symbolism is tinged with the tropes of a communally charged present, unable to break out of the fragmentary Hindu-Hindi and Muslim-Urdu divide despite her staging the debates within the “secular” Indian-English novel. Despite his many journeys, Urdu’s custodian Deven is unable to bridge the metaphorical desert which separates the small regional town of Mirpore and the national capital Delhi because, in the words of one of Nur’s cronies, ‘Urdu is supposed to have died, in 1947’ The city of Delhi has absorbed another memory.

In Custody presents male and female characters equally suffering from a Tradition ridden society. The unhappy marriage of Deven and Sarla is due to a traditionally arranged betrothal. ‘of course she had not been his choice” comments the ironic narrator, “but that of his mother and aunt.” Consequently, “although each understood the secret truth about the other, it did not bring about any closeness of spirit, any comradeship, because they also sensed that two victims ought to avoid each other, not yoke together their disappointment. (emphasis added, 68). The result is a shabby marriage in which both husband and wife suffer silently.

             In tune with the predominantly “homosexual”, male oriented world of Urdu poetry (Costa), Desai focuses on masculine characters. The limited omniscient point of view narrates events from Deven’s perspective. He is the only character whose thoughts and feelings are revealed by a highly ironic narrator. Locating women on the margin of the text is the writer’s strategy of providing an accurate image of reality. “I did not want any of them [women] to take part in this male world,” explains Desai, “because in real life they did not, or to a very limited extent did”. Female characters, however, seem to escape the author’s custody for they force themselves on the narrative either through their complete silence or their unpleasant cacophony characterizing respectively Deven’s wife, Sarla, and Nur’s wife, Imtiaz Bigum.

While focusing on the characters of Desai, Deven’s wife, Sarla, embodies the traditional condition of the silenced and crushed Indian woman. Her dreams of happiness take the shape of a magazine advertisement:

 

“She dreamt the magazine dream of marriage: herself, stepping out of a car with a plastic shopping bag full of groceries and filling them into the gleaming refrigerator, a three legged table and excitedly ringing up her friends to see a picture show with her and her husband who was beaming at her from behind a flowered curtain.” In Custody (67)

 

As she is utterly disappointed by the mediocre salary of her husband, Sarla resorts to a rather contemptuous silence, her sole means to articulate her disillusion. Deven, however, translates his financial impotence into a dominant, at times violent, attitude. “He was really protesting against her disappointment,” explains the narrator, “he was out to wreck it, take his revenge upon her for harboring it” (68). Deven’s inability to satisfy the material as well as the emotional aspirations of his wife is channeled through a chauvinistic stand of domination and denigration.

 Desai’s male protagonist adopts a misogynistic discourse marginalizing women because of their intellectual ‘inferiority.’ Deven, “who had been more a poet than a professor when he married Sarla” (66), cherishes dreams of artistic glory. Sarla, who “seems too prosaic” “for the wife of a poet” (67), does not correspond to his self aggrandized image. The weak and awkward Deven blames his wife for his artistic failure. And yet, despite his inability to achieve anything, he feels more powerful for “at least Deven had his poetry, she had nothing” (68). His sense of victory is based on denying her access to the realm of poetry, an exclusively male world closed to female intrusion. Sarla has neither linguistic tools, nor intellectual capacity to impede on Deven’s poetic territory. He is the custodian of Urdu poetry and he preserves it from all dangers, including female infiltration. Deven, however, can only impose his misogynistic stand at home, for the second major female character in the narrative, Imtiaz Bigum, definitely escapes his authority.

Contrary to the silent Sarla, Nur’s wife, Imtiaz, is given a shrieking voice. Indeed, the reader’s first encounter with Imtiaz is an acoustic one: “then a woman began to scream, rapidly and hysterically… The woman’s voice rose sharply” (56). Anita Desai, who first planned to create a female free text, acknowledges her inability to ignore women’s voices: “I thought I would try to write without any female character, but it proved impossible. I could hear them always screaming in the background, banging on the doors, being very hysterical” (Costa). Her negative depiction of Imtiaz, however, may mislead some readers into the belief that she merely recreates the stereotype of the hysterical female. The virago like Imtiaz provides “an apparition of fury and vengeance (57), a hissing like snake with “scarlet lips speckled with spit” (58).

             Once again, Desai opts for a faithful rendition of women’s reality. She first locates them on the margin of the text, and then she recreates their actual condition. It is worth noting that the author keeps consistent with her techniques of narration. Since the events are narrated from the perspective of a male misogynistic character, it is more credible to see an unpleasant, hysterical and especially a threatening female presence.

         Imtiaz’s strident sounds speak for the repressed voice of not only common women, but mainly women artists. Sarla’s silent contempt destabilizes Deven’s manliness, but he finds shelter in his masculine territory of Urdu poetry. Imtiaz’s screams. however, decenters him both as a male and a custodian of art. Imtiaz avers her poetic talent; She claims an Urdu of her own. The episode in which Imtiaz recites poetry in front of an appreciative audience provides the first instance of the convoluted relationship between language, art and gender in the narrative. Expecting to listen to Nur reciting his poetry, Deven is shocked “to find seated, in the centre of the divan, not Nur’s aged and benign figure in white but a powdered and painted creature in black and silver, coquetting beneath a shining veil” (80). By placing herself in the center, Imtiaz subverts gender spaces and roles.

The feminine veiled coquettish figure is usurping not only an exclusively male space, but also revolutionizing the subject matter of poetry: “she said the bars that hold her were cruel and unjust, that her wings had been hurt by beating against them and only god could come and release her …” (84). Imtiaz’s song speaks about women’s freedom and liberation, a threat to men’s domination.

The narrative, which starts as Deven’s venture to preserve Urdu poetry from extinction, takes a different turn. It announces now a gender struggle over the custody of art. While preventing her husband from reciting poetry, Imtiaz positions herself as the new voice of Urdu verse. Nur’s weakness in front of his young and powerful wife is ironically juxtaposed to Deven’s power with his muted spouse. While the latter, a failed poet, sticks firmly to “his poetry”, the former, a great poet, relinquishes terrain to his invading wife poetess. He secretly confesses to an outraged Nur: “she wanted my house, my audience, and my friends” (89). The seemingly engulfing Imtiaz elbows a place in this male dominated world; Her apparent violence is but a strategy of survival. Contrary to Sarla, she uses her voice, both speech and poetry, to defend her newly acquired territory. This is how, for instance, she interprets Nur’s withdrawal from her party in which she recites her poetry:

 

“You couldn’t face an audience that was not willing to listen to you. You couldn’t accept the evidence of my success. You couldn’t bear the sight of someone else regaling a large audience with poetry”.(92).

 

Imtiaz sounds decided to find a space for her poetic creativity. Contrary to the unreliable angle of narration, she provides the reader with her own success story.

             The issue of gender and artistic production in In Custody echoes Virginia Woolf’s often quoted statement: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4). Explaining her character’s poetic ambitions, Desai states: “I wanted to show how much easier it is for a man to live his life; how much harder it is for a woman’s words to be taken seriously, or even to have the time, the space and the privacy” (Costa). Perhaps Imtiaz does not really need the intervention of her creator to explain what she herself says in a very clear way. The long and eloquent letter she sends to Deven in which she asks him to read her poems functions as a feminist manifesto for women’s right of artistic production.

                 Anita Desai’s In Custody engages the complexities of modern Indian culture. It recreates in a subtle way a new postcolonial order that does not really differ from the old colonial strategies of domination and control. Indeed, Macaulay’s 1835 notorious “Minute on Education”, in which he disparaged Indian languages and proposed English as a carrier of science and art, finds an echo in post-partition Indian linguistic politics giving supremacy to Hindi. The strong move towards communalizing and politicizing languages in India results in associating Urdu with Muslims and Hindi with Hindus, creating thus a double clash: linguistic as well as religious. Desai’s novel narrates a neocolonial violence now with Hindi seizing the space deserted by colonial authority. While Urdu culture is displaced, women’s artistic production is silenced and ostracized. These cultural anxieties, however, are rendered in a comedic fashion. Desai diagnoses the cultural maladies of India without endangering an already tense situation. Her choice of a Hindu character as a custodian of Urdu language and art is a message against linguistic chauvinism as well as an invitation to cultural revision.

© 2020 Rojo's Literary Hub