The
Thousand Faces of Night is a scathing criticism of the way
the women are compelled to perform the subordinated roles as decreed by the
patriarchy. Through the help of various myths all of which descended from
patriarchal tradition the male world try to subjugate the women and instil into
them a false consciousness. Devi, the protagonist of the novel, sees through
the falsity of mythical stories and the so-called grand-narratives of
patriarchy. Like Maxine Hong Kingston’s The
Woman Warrior, the various accounts of trials and survivals given by the
women characters in the novel ranging from the earlier narration by the
grandmother to the misery of Mayamma open up a discursive space for women to
initiate a feminine discourse.
From the
beginning of the novel we see how Devi is denied the choice of her own and is
subjected to go through the demands of man-made order. Devi ends her desire for
Dan, a person with whom she forged bonds of friendship while studying in
America as it does fit in with her tradition. She comes back to India to find
herself hedged in with the traditional roles assigned for the women. Her mother
arranges a swayamvara for her that
shows how marriage is the posited as the raison d'être in a traditional Indian
family. We are reminded of Judith Butler’s notion
of gender construction of the female in terms of performative acts which
inscribe neutral body with social constructions.
According to traditional view, Gandhari is an exemplum
of a sacrificing wife who, seeing the plight of her husband, blindfolded
herself. However, for Devi’s grandmother Gandhari’s act is not an act of
sacrifice but an act of protest. Gandhari married her husband without having
seen him and after marriage found him to be blind. She tied up her eyes out of
intense anger. Equally interesting is the myth of Amba, ‘the princess who shed
her womanhood through her dreams of revenge and become a man’ (35). The
grandmother tells about the myth of Amba in connection with the misery of Uma
who could not channelize her ill treatment into an act of protest. This filled
Devi with great courage as she says:
Close to death, she made me a gift of the
ultimate fantasy: a woman avenger who could earn manhood through her penance. (40)
That
motherhood is not simply about giving birth to and feeding the child but also
about performing rigorous practices continually is shown by the story of Ganga.
While walking alone near the Ganga, king Shantanu came across a beautiful
damsel and fell in love with her. She reciprocated his proposal with the
condition that he would not stop her from doing whatever she wanted. The king
agreed only to find her throwing her new born babies into the waters of the
Ganga year after year. When Shantanu, unable to tolerate this, urged Ganga to
stop when she was about to throw her eighth child into the water, she said,
‘Then take him and be father and mother to him. I shall not free him from life
(88).’She did all this to protect her sons from a curse. Through this myth the
grandmother teaches Devi that ‘to be a mother at all, you have to earn the
title, just as you have to renew your wifely vows every day (89).’
Parvatiamma, the mother of Mahesh, stands as an ardent
feminist who does not buckle under the onslaughts of patriarchy but rejects
them to uphold a space of enunciation. Devi learns about her from the
maid-servant Mayamma. Parvati, as Mayamma tells Devi, relinquished her
motherhood and embraced spirituality as means of way-out. According to the
traditional myth Parvati is the helpmate of Shiva and she helped Shiva attain
the status of yogi by taking charge
of the household activities. ‘But’, observes Sarita Prabhakar, ‘in the novel
Parvati turns the story upside down as she gives up the life of a householder
(57).’
That the novel
is not only about the narration of variegated patriarchal myths but also about
survivals from those myths through resilience is shown clearly towards the end
of the novel. We find the women in The
Thousand Faces of Night tearing apart the network of myths to eke out a
space for themselves. Mayamma no longer faces the threat of a drunken husband
or a tyrannical mother-in-law. Devi escapes her husband’s indifference and her
own nonchalance into her mother’s world of music. Sita also asserts herself by
renewing her contact with the world of music that offers her a creative
individuality. The music of the veena
signals the end of chaos in the mind and a beginning of a life where women will
have a room of their own.
Spivak in her
essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ talks about the ventriloquisation of women’s
voices by the British colonizers and the Indian leaders. According to Spivak,
this act of ventriloquisation suppresses the real voices of women which lie
hidden. Hariharan in her novel The Thousand Faces of Night tries to
retrieve the lost voices of women by showing how they stand opposite to the
traditional modes of representation and the novel becomes a gynocentric version
of the Mahabharata. Through reworking of old myths, reshaping personal dilemmas
and offering new vistas for women Hariharan joins the bandwagon of modern Indian
women novelists in English. Thus Jon Mee aptly remarks:
In many respects it also
marks a coming-of-age of a certain kind of women’s fiction in English in India,
one that is written undisguisedly in ‘a woman’s voice’, a condition - of-woman
novel. (228)
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