Gender and communal politics in Shama Futehally’s Reaching Bombay Central

Abstract

Most of the best-known women writers of anglophone Indian fiction have been Hindu, and in the context of the intensification of communal politics in India, it is important to also consider the voices of their Muslim counterparts. Shama Futehally’s novel Reaching Bombay Central (2002) engages with both gender and communal politics from a Muslim perspective, and this article examines the ways in which the narrative implicitly challenges a number of popular perceptions about the disadvantaged position of Muslim women in India. The novel dramatizes the environment of inter-communal tension but conspicuously downplays the role of religious ideology and legal disadvantage, both of which have been prominent in public debates about Muslim women in India. In its dramatization of the power dynamics within a middle-class Muslim marriage, the narrative suggests that women’s disempowerment is located above all in the domestic sphere and in interpersonal relationships, and that their subordinate status is not specific to particular religious communities.

A number of postcolonial scholars have noted the enduring preoccupation of the anglophone novel in India with “questions of nation and history, events necessarily played out in the public sphere even as they inflected domestic spaces and personal relations” (Gopal, 2009: 139). Indeed, Aijaz Ahmad (1991: 118) claims that modern literature in indigenous languages such as Urdu is far less concerned with the “nation” as a category and much more with “our class structures, our familial ideologies, our management of our bodies and sexualities, our idealisms, our silences”. While pointing out that anglophone fiction has always engaged with the impact of “transformations of the public sphere” on private lives, Priyamvada Gopal (2009: 139) nevertheless draws a distinction between the (implicitly mainstream) anglophone Indian novel and what she calls “familial” or “domestic” fiction which is set in the home and concerned mainly with personal relations and emotional lives. Noting that this is a genre in which “women writers are salient” and in which “the anglophone is eclipsed in volume and, often, in quality, by writing in other Indian languages”, Gopal identifies Shashi Deshpande and Anita Desai as exceptional in the sense that they are prominent anglophone writers of the “family story”.

My own view is that the boundaries between domestic fiction and fiction that addresses (supposedly) larger concerns are often more blurred than this. The fiction of R.K. Narayan, one of the major founding fathers of anglophone Indian literature, focused more on personal relationships than on public issues as such. His fictional town of Malgudi can be seen as an extended domestic space in which interpersonal dramas are played out while grander narratives about the nation are rarely considered. Moreover, it is not necessary to invoke the old feminist slogan that “the personal is political” in order to remember that power relationships within the so-called domestic sphere are part of a larger national – and indeed, global – framework. Nor are Deshpande’s and Desai’s “familial” texts unaware of the interconnections between power, gender, social class, communal affiliation, and other categories of identity which constitute the nation as a whole. For example, Deshpande’s novels Roots and Shadows (1983) and Small Remedies (2000) address caste and communal politics within ostensibly domestic settings, and all of her fiction is self-consciously concerned with gender politics in India – a “reality” that she insists is “never trivial” (Deshpande, 2003: 163).

Another contemporary anglophone Indian author who writes what might be described as “socially aware domestic fiction” is Shama Futehally. Not as well-known in the West as the likes of Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, and Arundhati Roy, Futehally is one of a handful of prominent Muslim women writers of contemporary anglophone Indian fiction, along with Anjum Hasan and Samina Ali. These Indian Muslim women writers, unlike their predecessors from a previous generation (most notably Attia Hosain and Zeenuth Futehally [no relation]) were born in India after independence and partition, so that they have always been minority members of a secular but predominantly Hindu Indian nation.

The minority location of these female writers is significant, not least because, as historians and political scientists have shown, the process of defining community identity in India is inevitably gendered, with “women and the family becoming emblematic of ‘authentic’ cultural traditions constituting these identities” (Mukhopadhyay, 1994: 108). Social commentators have further observed that the gendered politics of community location have become more acute and complex in the past two decades, following “the intensification of communal politics in India and the consolidation of fundamentalist factions across religions” (Hasan and Menon, 2004: 3). The situation of Muslim women in India is particularly contentious, not least because they have not been granted the same legal rights as Indian women from other religious communities. Specifically, they are disadvantaged in the area of personal law (regarding such matters as marriage, divorce, and inheritance) on the grounds that Muslim personal laws are considered part of the religion of Islam. For instance, polygamy has been banned for everyone except Muslims, although a majority of Muslim women favour its removal. In 1985 a test case was taken up by the Supreme Court relating to Shah Bano, a Muslim divorcée who sought maintenance from her husband under a secular interpretation of the law of marriage and divorce. Her case received widespread support from the press, but the government bowed to the weight of counter-opinion originating in orthodox Muslim circles against this “interference” in their “community rights”. It enacted the Muslim Personal Law Bill under which Muslims in India would continue to be governed by Sharia law, thus reasserting Muslim women’s position of legal inequality (Hasan, 1994; Narain, 2008).

Much recent feminist scholarship (Nainar, 2000; Narain, 2008; Tabassum, 2003) on Muslim women in India has focused on the question of Muslim personal law and its curtailment of Muslim women’s legal rights. While conceding that eradicating the gender bias of personal laws is “undoubtedly important”, Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon (2004: 2) nevertheless argue that this is not sufficient for improving the status and the lives of the majority of Muslim women in India. In their book Unequal Citizens, they suggest that in general, socioeconomic factors are more important than religious ideology in Muslim women’s disempowerment. Their recent Muslim Women’s Survey (2004: 42) confirms statistical data which indicate that Muslims, who comprise approximately 13% of the population of India, are “generally poor and disadvantaged” compared to other groups. This, they suggest (2004: 74), more than Islamic practice, accounts for Muslim women’s disadvantage in educational opportunities which is “an important aspect of gender inequality… and also a powerful instrument of perpetuating it”. They point out that the tendency of lower-income households to prioritize the education of sons over that of daughters is common to all communities in India. Girls perform a large share of family labour in these financially constrained households, so that the benefits of educating them are often perceived by their families to be negligible compared with the investment made.

Obviously not all Muslim families in India are economically disadvantaged, but it is notable that there are proportionately fewer Muslim women than Hindu women writing in English. The significance of this is that although English is now being taught in most schools throughout India, it has until very recently been almost exclusively the language of the elite. So while there are many fine female writers of Urdu fiction (including Zakia Mashhadi, Ismat Chughtai, and Qurratulain Hyder), ¹ an Indian Muslim woman writing in English would almost certainly be from among a tiny privileged minority whose families are wealthy enough – and liberal enough – to provide an elite Western education for their daughter(s). Some postcolonial critics have seen this as a limitation. For instance, Jaspal Kaur Singh (2008: 25) has argued that:

Although the elite Western-educated women gained substantially in terms of modernization and emancipation through Western education in the material realm it is important to note that the models of liberation conceptualized by them are limited due to their consciousness and status, which are produced within a given class ideology and within various transnational locales.

She gives the example of Samina Ali’s novel Madras on Rainy Days (2004), in which “the narrator is always aware of her Western and Westernized reader, explicating every cultural practice, especially regarding sexuality”, and in which “empowerment of the diasporic Indian woman comes from leaving the home spaces and Indian cultural practices” (Singh, 2008: 192, 193).

Shama Futehally, like Samina Ali, is a Western-educated Muslim Indian woman whose fiction explores, among other things, gendered power relationships in India. However, her texts show no such consciousness of a Western readership, nor indeed do they engage with the idea of the West at all. Moreover, it is difficult to see why the perspective of an elite woman would necessarily be more “limited” than that of a woman of any other social background. Imagination is not inversely related to social class, and in her collection of short stories, Frontiers (2006), Futehally sympathetically explores the experiences and perspectives of characters from a range of social backgrounds.

Futehally’s relatively unusual situation as an elite Muslim woman writer of anglophone Indian fiction places her at the nexus of (at least) three intersecting positions: those of class privilege, gender disadvantage, and minority status. Thus she is able to explore through her protagonist Ayesha Jamal in Reaching Bombay Central (2002) ² the implications of this particular combination of positions. This article sets out to demonstrate the narrative’s illustration of the ways in which gender disadvantage can outweigh both class privilege and communal affiliation as determinants of individual power in contemporary India. Thus domestic “private” relationships are politicized by being juxtaposed with other structures of power – a tactic also employed in the novels of Nayantara Sahgal, including The Day in Shadow (1971) and Rich Like Us (1985).

Although Muslim cultural practices are portrayed as inherently oppressive to women in Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days (2004), a number of recent academic studies have suggested that discussions and debates on Muslim women in India have overemphasized the role of religion in Muslim life. Vrinda Narain (2008: 22) argues that in understanding Muslim women’s gendered subjectivity as “mediated by religion alone… the systemic nature of gender discrimination in India has been disregarded”. This is borne out by Hasan and Menon’s (2004: 238) finding that despite the “pervasive belief that Muslim women have less autonomy than Hindu women…owing to the restrictions imposed on women’s freedom by Islamic codes”, their Muslim Women’s Survey does not report “significant community variations in decision-making, mobility, and access to public spaces”. In fact what it shows is that most women in India have “very little autonomy and control over their own lives across communities and regions” and that “Hindu-Muslim differences in marriage, autonomy, mobility, and domestic violence are so insignificant that they point to the similarity of cultural practices and pervasiveness of patriarchal controls across communities”.

As if to illustrate Hasan and Menon’s (2004: 2) argument that “Islamic practice does not and cannot constitute the whole of women’s lives”, religious observances are portrayed as merely part of the conventional etiquette for a proper daughter-in-law in Futehally’s novel Reaching Bombay Central, in which Ayesha Jamal recalls “the joy, in the early years, of making her mother-in-law happy; by demurely covering her head, by keeping the fasts during Ramzan, by telling Pushpa, just a little louder than necessary, not to put too much milk into her mother-in-law’s tea” (91). Here a religious practice (“keeping the fasts during Ramzan”) is placed directly between two gendered practices: female modesty (“demurely covering the head”) and female deference to the mother-in-law (ostentatiously catering to her preferences). Thus the specifically Muslim cultural practice is both gender-neutral and overshadowed by two other cultural practices which are related to gender but not to communal affiliation, thus implicitly emphasizing the centrality of gender (rather than religious identity) in social custom throughout India.

Elite and well-educated, Ayesha is nevertheless shown to be completely submissive to her husband, thus illustrating Hasan and Menon’s (2004: 147) finding that “Low decision-making capacity is the general condition of women in India, and it is not significantly affected by either their own educational attainment or that of their husbands; by community; or by their wage-earning capability”. Perhaps surprisingly, their survey in fact reports a lower decision-making capacity for Indian women of higher socio-economic status, although this does vary with age and residence, with younger women and urban women tending to report a higher rate of joint decision-making with their husbands. This is dramatized in Reaching Bombay Central, where the younger, more self-confident Jayashree is drawn as a foil to the diffident Ayesha with whom she shares a train compartment. Jayashree, like the other passengers in the compartment, is friendly and courteous, but as the only other woman, she also responds in a sensitive and supportive manner to Ayesha’s evident distress. However, Jayasharee’s kindness appears to be based on genuine empathy rather than conventional deference to a woman substantially older than herself, as she also displays a remarkable degree of assertiveness: for example, in her interactions with the ticket collectors and other passengers. Significantly, this self-possessed young woman is single, in contrast to Ayesha who, even in her husband’s absence, is shown to be anxious about his reaction to every little thing she does. Worried that she might be overpaying a porter carrying her luggage at the train station, “she made the murmur of protest which was necessary in case she found herself describing the scene to her husband (‘I’m telling you, I fought with him…’)” (1). Because of her gender-based inhibitions and her air of vulnerability, the porter has the upper hand in this situation:

He has spotted a memsaab who is wishing that she had never left home; he has taken possession of her forthwith; he has raced to her compartment with the bedroll on his head; and now he stands before her and announces that he has won. Healthy, sweaty and victorious, he fills the doorway in his faded red shirt. (1)

Tellingly, other passengers subsequently enter the compartment haggling over money with other porters, and each of them ends up paying less than half of what Ayesha has paid. In the context of the narrative, this is more about demonstrating Ayesha’s timidity than about advocating cheap labour as such. More importantly, it points to the complex, multi-dimensional, and continually shifting relationships between gender, power, and social class.

The social world inhabited by Ayesha Jamal and her husband Aarif is one in which men have professional positions and women are simply “wives”. In this respect, Ayesha’s situation resembles that of many of Anita Desai’s earlier protagonists, including Tara in Clear Light of Day (1980), although Tara is shown to have more inner autonomy than Ayesha, despite having an equally overbearing husband. Ayesha’s entire life depends on her husband’s career, so that when it is threatened by his involvement in a corruption scandal, her whole world is at risk of falling apart. Acutely conscious of this, she has become an expert at interpreting what the narrator describes as “the codes of her husband’s world” (51-52). For example, while listening quietly to a conversation between Aarif and their friend Shiv Prasadji, she is anxiously alert to every nuance in the mood of the conversation between the two men:

And Aarif gave that half-laughing resigned shrug of the shoulders which she knew so well, and said, “Arré… We have messed things up completely” which he only said when he was in a truly excellent mood. He was in that mood now because of Shiv Prasadji’s artistry in making you feel one with the world. (32)

Through the narrative attention to concrete detail and Ayesha’s imaginative responses to it, she is effectively portrayed as an acute observer and sensitive interpreter, not only of her husband, but of other men who have power over him:

Ayesha saw the Secretary’s face becoming preternaturally still. It was the expression of a man who is walking a path no wider than his own body, with barbed wire on one side and a thorny fence on the other. If Aarif now went to the Secretary to ask for his support against the rumours, the Secretary’s jolly face would take on exactly that still expression, and he would walk that narrow path all over again. (43)

In some ways, Ayesha’s situation in Reaching Bombay Central is similar to that of Jaya, the protagonist of Shashi Deshpande’s novel That Long Silence (1988). Both are intelligent, mature, middle-class housewives confronted with identical crises: the husband’s involvement in a corruption scandal which threatens to ruin his career and hence their lives. While this crisis causes Jaya to begin to interrogate her gendered disempowerment, Ayesha remains emotionally dependent on her husband who expects her to agree with every decision he makes, particularly when he is uncertain or uncomfortable. When she responds weakly to “his need of her sanction for what he had done” (34), he demands a firmer answer from her:

“Somebody,” he repeated, glancing at her fiercely, “has to be prepared to stick their neck out in such a case. And if no one else will, then I will”.

“Naturally,” said Ayesha, looking up now and with all the force at her command. “It’s the only thing to do”.

And on Aarif’s face the aggression, the defiance, the nervousness at last gave way to something like relief. (35)

Aarif’s pomposity and cowardice, enabled by Ayesha’s meek deference, is again brought out in the scene in which he wants her to go to Bombay to “pull strings” with her uncle who is a senior police officer:

“But one would have to go to Bombay to speak to him. You can’t explain this sort of thing on the telephone. And I’m damned,” said Aarif impressively, “if I’m going to ask permission to leave Delhi now”.

As her husband made this magnificent pronouncement, it became clear to her what she was expected to do. Because behind her husband’s magnificence lay the fact that when it came to asking anyone for anything… Aarif became like an unwilling child. (79)

Thus it is suggested that Ayesha is expected to do brave things behind the scenes for her husband while he maintains an air of authority.

To some extent, Aarif’s insecurity seems to stem from his own sense of his vulnerable position as a Muslim man in a predominantly Hindu milieu at a time of rising communal tension. Indeed, it has been observed that patriarchal oppression tends to intensify in situations of communal conflict, and it is suggested that “the growing helplessness that men experience in a hostile environment is sought to be compensated by a reassertion of power and control over women within the family” (Kannabiran and Kannabiran, 1995: 129). If this is so, it would follow that men from both Hindu and Muslim communities would react to communal tension in India by seeking to reassert power and control over the women in their families, and studies have consistently shown that this is precisely what happens (Jackson, 2010: 15-22).

Regardless of the underlying factors which promote patriarchal attitudes, Futehally’s novel portrays the practice of gender oppression in a particular social milieu: that of a middle-class Muslim family in contemporary India. This practice is dramatized through an intricate narration of the interactions between husband and wife. If the narrative voice is consistently contemptuous of Aarif, it is also at times ironic about Ayesha’s deference to him, particularly when she prioritizes his needs and feelings over those of their children. For instance, she fails to console their son who is frightened by Aarif’s unreasonable temper on the grounds that “it would be seen as forming a front against Aarif. Which meant that it could not be done” (101). At other times the narrator’s sarcasm is aimed at women’s complicity in a social system which disempowers them and encourages petty neuroses. For example, Ayesha feels anxiously responsible for tidiness everywhere, even in a shared train compartment in which everyone’s cups of tea have left brown liquid circles on the plastic table top:

Those circles produced in her a faint familiar feeling of guilt. She should find some tissue and wipe up those circles. If somebody – anybody – saw the table top, they would think her slovenly… Fifteen years of housekeeping had left her with the perpetual fear which is the inheritance of the housewife. Will somebody find crumbs on the table, will somebody else see a dead cockroach in the kitchen? (86)

While Ayesha is clearly aware, on some level, that this way of thinking is a conditioned response, she does not reflect on its implications to the same extent as, say, Jaya in Deshpande’s That Long Silence who, in perusing her earlier journals which she wryly dubs the “Diaries of a Sane Housewife”, is suddenly “scared” by the thought of a “life spent on such trivialities” (1988: 70).

Ayesha, unlike Jaya, remains in a position of child-like dependency on her husband throughout the narrative – occasionally resentful but always compliant. This is perhaps best illustrated in the exchange between Aarif and Ayesha following a conversation with Shiv Prasad Nath which has left Aarif so defensive and ill-tempered that he takes out his rage on his hapless wife when she timidly asks him about it:

“My God,” said Aarif savagely, “will you never learn?” And as Ayesha burst into tears his face acquired the hunted look of a blameless man before a crying wife. “Can’t you see,” he continued furiously, “why he came here? First, he wanted to remind me that I can’t prove his involvement. Second…”.

But Ayesha was no longer listening… She had worried about him day and night, she had adjusted every word and expression and gesture to give him exactly what he wanted… and now she had to hear that she would never learn. (100, my emphasis)

Ayesha never considers challenging her husband, but she does occasionally, for brief moments, consider leaving him:

“That wretched PS,” thundered Aarif, “whoever he is, can’t call his soul his own”.

Exactly like your wife, she thought between sniffs. And now she could do one of two things. She could walk out on this man as she should have done long ago, or she could say something in a neutral tone so that things became normal again. Most probably she would walk out. (101)

Instead, however, she immediately says something in a neutral tone, and when superficial harmony is finally restored, the narrator comments sardonically that “For the umpteenth time she had the experience cherished by all devoted wives – the knowledge that her husband had already forgotten all about her feelings” (102).

In contrast to the novel’s vivid dramatization of the relationship between gender and power in a contemporary Indian marriage, its handling of communal politics is conspicuous but understated. Indeed, there is a sense in which the text’s approach to this issue seems to echo the discomfort displayed by its characters in relation to the sensitive topic of communal affiliation. This is established near the beginning of the narrative when Ayesha introduces herself to her fellow passengers in the train carriage. Her Muslim name generates mild embarrassment, followed by awkward attempts to cover it up, all of which is presented as typical of her experience:

As always, there was a flicker of a pause while this was digested. And as always, it was no more than a flicker. “I also have,” he said almost immediately, “many Muslim friends”. The young man shook his head in vigorous agreement. (5)

Another way of attempting to smooth over the anxiety generated by communal tensions is exemplified by Shiv Prasadji’s ostentatious “universalizing” of the insecurity felt by Muslims because of their minority status in India:

What a world this is. That poor boy feels that all his troubles are because he is a Muslim. Sometimes I feel the whole world is against me because I am a Brahmin. And my PA thinks he is not being promoted because he is SC. (32)

These statements are, of course, disingenuous because the mild “reverse snobbery” against Brahmins that one sometimes encounters in India is nothing like the hostile – at times violent – clashes between Hindus and Muslims that have periodically bedevilled India since Partition, escalating throughout the 1990s and into the first decade of the twenty-first century. In Reaching Bombay Central the denials and displays of anxious political correctness by the non-Muslim elite are set off against the defensive and conflicting attitudes of a Muslim man in the Hindu-dominated upper echelons of Indian society. Aarif’s suspicions about the ubiquity of anti-Muslim prejudice in India appear to coexist with his desire to believe that people like himself have risen above the sordid world of communal antagonism. For instance, on a day when “two newspapers triumphed over the fact that the wrongdoer’s name, in this case, was Hamid, and the officer’s name was Jamal”, Aarif said that “maybe the only way out…would be to change my name”. (64). However, the next day he storms out of his (Muslim) lawyer’s office, enraged at the question, “Would this have happened if your name had been Rajesh Shrivastava?” (64).

The third-person narrative does not give us access to the thoughts and feelings of Aarif; instead, his behaviour is seen and interpreted through the subjective perspective of Ayesha. There is, moreover, a tension in the narrative voice between sympathetic engagement with Ayesha’s experience and implicit criticism of her exclusive focus on the needs and desires of her selfish husband. One of many illustrations of her constant anxiety about Aarif’s feelings is her reaction to his shouting unreasonably at their child. Instead of intervening, or indeed showing any consideration for the child’s feelings, she reflects that “the person most deeply wounded by what Aarif had shouted was Aarif himself” (35).

Repeatedly, the narrative draws sympathetic but critical attention to the fact that despite Ayesha’s (class-based) elite status, her (gender-based) dependent position ensures that her entire life consists of obsessively serving the needs of other people, including her sensitive and rather helpless servant Pushpa. Notably, her lack of assertiveness with Pushpa appears to be based not so much on class guilt as on a general timidity which she displays toward everyone, but especially her husband. On the day of her departure,

She had only been able to start packing in the morning, what with the household stores to be collected and the plumbers to see to. Three sets of school uniforms to be ironed. Pushpa to be convinced no one would shout at her while Memsaab was away. And just as she was leaving for the station, Chhota and Pipi had a fight. (69)

Again, because of Aarif’s temper, Ayesha feels that she has to tiptoe around him: “If he learnt that the children had chosen that particular moment to quarrel, an explosion would occur which would make it impossible for her to leave, and the packing and the plumbers and the ironing would all come to naught”. (70). Ironically, it is the train journey which provides Ayesha with a brief respite from both her emotionally fraught domestic life and her desperate mission to save Aarif’s career. After dark in the railway carriage, she has a temporary feeling of being

sheltered from her home on the one hand and her chore on the other hand; she was free of everything. Just at the moment there was no need to worry that the children would be noisy or that Aarif would be irritable or that Pushpa would be offended. (112)

The narrative alternates between past and present, between Ayesha’s experience in the railway carriage and her memories of the crisis at home that precipitated her journey. There are direct verbal links between the narrative strands of past and present. For instance, a narrative strand from the present ends with:

“Who is it,” said Chhatrasingh graciously, “who makes the officers behave as they do? Only politicians no one else”. (45)

This is immediately followed by the beginning of a narrative strand from the past:

“Who is it,” said Aarif, “who is making the Secretary do this? The Minister. No one else”. (46)

Occasionally these verbal links carry ideological significance in the context of identity politics in India. For example, the politician Chhatrasingh Yadav is not given an air-conditioned berth in the train, as he has been promised by a personal assistant, so eventually he goes off in a huff after an altercation with the ticket collector. That chapter ends with: “‘He must be feeling,’ said Jayashree, ‘that it is all because he is a Yadav’”(31), and the following chapter opens with: “‘He must be feeling,’ Shiv Prasad Nath had said, ‘that it is all because he is a Muslim.’” (32). The issue of being a Muslim in India has, of course, much more significant implications than the non-issue of being “a Yadav”, so that his ironic juxtaposition in Ayesha’s consciousness suggests perhaps her sense of the hypocrisy and denial surrounding communal prejudice in India.

Ayesha’s state of mind is vividly conveyed through the detailed descriptions of her responses to the passing landscape towards the end of her long train journey to Bombay. During the fitful night in her uncomfortable berth, her dreams interpret the world outside the window as sinister, blending her fears, and inner turmoil with the external stimuli she experiences in her half-asleep state:

Outside, the darkness galloped behind the window-bars. Now electric pylons began to gather with it, one after the other; as similar, as unmoved, as men in uniform… Now each of the pylons had a face, and it was the face of a railway inspector… The railway inspector peered closely at his list and started to say that Aarif’s head would be cut off, and she jumped out of her nightmare and landed, with a terrible thud, on her own grainy-leathered berth. (132-133)

In the morning light, with mounting apprehension as the train rushes relentlessly toward Bombay, she feels completely out of harmony with the peaceful and picturesque passing landscape:

This scene was not for her. It was only a reprieve. As for her, she would have to wait till the squalid suburbs of Bombay began to appear, with their overflowing railway platforms, children defecating on the tracks, dreary rows of blackened buildings with laundry hanging down the sides, speaking of lives consisting of clothes to be washed and then of utensils to be washed. That was the only scene to which she had a right. And then? Even the laundry-covered buildings would come to an end. She would have to step out onto Bombay Central and then what in the world would she do? (136-137)

Although she does not consciously claim affiliation with the slum dwellers, the alert reader will not miss the irony of having seen that Ayesha’s life, too, consists of laundry and ironing and washing up. So although she is materially better off than the slum dwellers and she does have someone to help her in a limited way, her basic responsibilities are the same as theirs. We have also seen that although she is not subjected to domestic violence, her husband’s domineering manner and selfish disregard for her feelings could be regarded as emotional bullying. This is not in any way to equate her suffering with that of women who are brutalized by poverty and abuse, but rather to suggest – as this novel so effectively does – that class privilege can be severely compromised by gender disadvantage.

In the end, when a morning newspaper announces an unexpected election result which means that the fraud investigation will not proceed after all, Ayesha’s relief is expressed through her joyful response to the same scenery which she had earlier anticipated in a fearful state of mind: “Next to the tracks, slum children played in little pools of water, and looked up at the train with dark shining eyes. The buildings on both sides of them were covered with the beautiful mossy dark of the monsoon; laundry hung down in vivid unabashed colours”. (151). Even the train is perceived to be giving “a long scream of joy” as it enters the metropolis (150). This third-person narration through the intensely subjective perspective of the protagonist is reminiscent of Anita Desai’s method, particularly in Fire on the Mountain (1977), in which the characters’ states of mind are delineated by their responses to nature and the surrounding landscape. The narrative emphasis is as much on memory, perception, and emotion as on actual events.

The way in which the protagonist perceives her experiences reveals not only her immediate state of mind, but also her subjective interpretation of her overall situation. We have seen, for instance, that although Ayesha responds to extreme provocation from her husband with tears or with quiet resentment, her usual strategy is to accommodate him as much as possible and, crucially, she never questions her gender-based subordination within the family. Her feelings about communal politics, by contrast, appear to be so raw that they come to the surface whenever she has to even mention her name. In the election queue, for instance, we are suddenly confronted with the statement that “hatred had got hold of her”, which was “more like defensiveness” before she had even reached the trestle table, and then:

There was no help for it. She had to tell them her name… and it came out nervously, though she hated, she despised herself, for that nervousness. And as she pronounced the word “Jamal”, one of the young men glanced at the others. That was all. Only a glance, not even a rude one; in a minute the young man was at his work again, reading through the list, looking up her number, even writing it down for her in a twirling hand. But the glance had been there, and for a minute she felt that she was going to stop right there and scream at him, and all the accumulated fear of the last months, and all the cowering, and all the fear of being cornered, would tear out of her straight as an arrow and shoot at this young man’s well-fed chest. (120-121)

Thus it is suggested that while Ayesha passively accepts overt emotional bullying from her husband, she is ready to interpret the most innocuous glance from a stranger – who may be reacting only to her nervousness – as malicious. Blind to the gender oppression that pervades her domestic life and hyper-sensitive to the communal prejudice which she imagines to be everywhere, it is strongly suggested that Ayesha is displacing her feelings of helplessness and anger from her family situation to the more impersonal public realm.

While Reaching Bombay Central is Futehally’s only work of fiction that engages with communal politics, her interest in gender and social class is also evident in her first novel Tara Lane (1993) and her collection of short stories Frontiers (2006), which was published posthumously. These three volumes, together with a collection of children’s stories she co-wrote with Githa Hariharan, comprise the whole of her published fictional output, because during her relatively short life (1952-2004) she was also a college lecturer and translator of Hindi and Urdu poetry after years of bringing up her children full-time. Her literary interest in gender and domesticity is evident in her choice of a postgraduate dissertation topic at the University of Leeds: “The Idea of the Family in George Eliot”, and as we have seen, this interest in the family as an ideological construct is also developed in Futehally’s own fictional writing.

While her novels and short stories are not polemical, they do sympathetically engage with the consciousness of Indian women from a range of social backgrounds, and although she shies away from the term “feminist”, much feminist criticism is implicit in her fictional narratives of female powerlessness. It is also implicit in her comments during an interview (Kuortti, 2003) on her first novel Tara Lane:

In Indian marriages women have very little space. Beyond the point in the beginning where she asks questions but afterwards she dare not ask… She waits until it suits him to tell her. She doesn’t ask anything. (85)

Everything goes into the task of being a good wife, which gets harder and harder as she finds out more about him. And she is more disillusioned with him and has to control her own emotions also, school her emotions all the time. (86-87)

Exhaustion… is a very real factor in the lives of Indian women. Just managing so much all the time. (87)

In some ways, then, she seems to share her friend Shashi Deshpande’s radical feminist view that women’s oppression is located within the family. Some critics have argued that this exclusive focus on familial and domestic concerns limits the feminist critique of these writers and supports the patriarchal view of the domestic sphere as the natural domain of women. Reacting sharply to the charge that her canvas is limited because she focuses on these aspects, Deshpande has declared that nothing could be more universal than the family unit and no relationships more fundamental than those between members of a family. Person to person and “person to society” relationships, as she calls them, are all prefigured in the domestic arena “where everything begins” (Gangadharan, 1998: 252). This is true for men as well as women, and in Futehally’s review of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (1999), she affirms the importance of individual subjective experience that “contemporary art, in its anxiety to be correct, sometimes forgets”:

The great writers of the Partition do not feel the need to distribute suffering even-handedly between the communities. They deal with any one group and then leave it to you to deduce whether it can have been any different for the other. Unfortunately, the division, the suspicion, the mutual distrust in today’s world have made it necessary for people of goodwill to put subjective experience on hold and instead give nervous expression only to “correctness”. Essential as correctness is, it is no substitute for the healthy natural reactions in a society that has division.

In keeping with her desire to present individual subjective experience as the basis of larger social realities, Futehally’s fiction avoids making any easy generalizations about connections between gender, power, social class, and communal affiliation in India. Her short stories in the Frontiers collection present disempowered women from rich, poor, Muslim, Hindu, and Parsee backgrounds, and yet she is also careful not to present all women as disempowered. Communal affiliation is de-emphasized except in Reaching Bombay Central, which, as her friend Shashi Deshpande says in a memorial tribute, “came out of her troubled feelings about the increasing intolerance and communalism” in India (2005). However, as we have seen, her critique of gender inequalities is stronger and more sustained, and she does not connect it, even indirectly, with communal politics. Thus her fiction implicitly challenges a number of popular perceptions about gender politics in India, including the assumption that Muslim women are necessarily more vulnerable to patriarchal oppression than others, as well as the idea that elite women are necessarily less so. Moreover, in its focus on individual subjective experience within the context of family relationships and wider communal tensions, the narrative points to the inextricable interconnectedness of domestic and “public” issues. In its examination of the complex network of class, gender, and religion in which her characters move, Futehally’s novel consistently emphasizes the centrality of gender in determining access to power, privilege, and self-esteem in contemporary India.