Desire,sanity and the middlebrow aesthetic: The case of Triveni’s Sharapanjara

Abstract

Two landmark novels appeared in the same year (1965) in Kannada literature — U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara and Triveni’s last novel, Sharapanjara. While the former got enshrined into the Indian modernist canon (the Navya movement), Triveni’s work has stayed mostly in the realms of popular literature for women. This article seeks to make a case to read Sharapanjara in light of recent scholarship on popular modernism and on the middlebrow novel, especially the feminine middlebrow. Depicting the chilling unspooling of a woman’s mental health, recovery and relapse, within the constraints and duplicities of domestic space, this novel makes several bold thematic and stylistic forays. The article analyses Sharapanjara as a text whose double vision about desire and insanity, both in its treatment of the subject as well as its nuanced narrative structure, elicits new articulations of extreme alienation and discrimination at the very cusp where the domestic and the public collapse into each other.

In 1965, two landmark novels were published in Kannada, a major language of southern India spoken by over 43 million people. ¹ These two novels were U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara (A Rite for a Dead Man), which has become a celebrated modernist text in Indian literature (Miller, 2015), and Triveni’s last novel Sharapanjara (The Cage of Arrows), published posthumously two years after her death following childbirth at the age of 35. Both novels are illustrative of an important literary configuration around modernism and women’s writing in the literary canon of mid-twentieth century India. The attempt here is not to compare a male writer (U. R. Ananthamurthy) with a female writer (although the gendered hierarchies of literary culture are a subsidiary factor in the analysis that follows). Instead, my focus is on the relation of gender to desire and mental health in one novel, Sharapanjara. Depicting the chilling unspooling of a woman’s psyche, recovery, and relapse, within the constraints and duplicities of domestic space and (pre)marital sex, Sharapanjara is distinct for several bold thematic and stylistic forays. In fascinating contrast to this charged domestic perspective is the spiritual, existential, and sexual crisis of the male protagonist of Samskara who has to traverse and break down the strictures and hypocrisies of his high-caste community through the uncovering of his own suppressed desires of the flesh. Despite superficial differences, both novels emerged at the forefront in thematizing a new array of provocative concerns of the 1960s in India — individual agency vis-à-vis the evisceration of tradition, and sexual transgressions vis-à-vis extreme levels of psychological and/or spiritual distress.

In the years following publication, through the award-winning film version in 1970 and the English translation by celebrated poet and scholar A. K. Ramanujan in 1975, Samskara went on to become the face of Navya, a movement that bore all the hallmarks of literary modernism. In 1977, the noted Kannada critic L. S. Sheshagiri Rao described the Navya author as “writing in the context of the disenchantment with Freedom” and in a society that was indifferent to such experimental writing: “He [sic: the Navya writer] sought to explore his own nature, and a work of literature embodied this exploration” (Rao, 1977: 79). While Samskara came to represent this self-conscious literary gambit, and U. R. Ananthamurthy became a celebrated figure who went on to win one of India’s most celebrated awards, the Jnanpith, for outstanding contribution to literature in 1994, the case of Triveni’s Sharapanjara becomes representative of how certain novels came to be regarded almost entirely within the framework of women’s writing, as “popular” and gendered, but not as participants in the literary conversations and aesthetic innovations of the time. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita in their canonical anthology Women Writing in India discuss this trend that becomes apparent across various languages in India, “As mainstream Indian tradition was authoritatively enshrined, many other traditions, including feminist ones, were delegitimated” (1993: 93). This delegitimation, especially in the case of women writing in Kannada through the 1960s and 1970s, was complicated by their cinematic adaptations. Samskara was directed by Pattabhirama Reddy Tikkavarapu (1970) and was considered a pioneer in the parallel cinema movement, while Sharapanjara was adapted to cinema by Puttanna Kanagal (1971), a prolific director who made several commercially successful films. ² While Kanagal’s movies gave more visibility and cultural mobility to Triveni’s novels, they also, predictably, preempted critical readings, re-affirming the dominant opinion that novels/films like Sharapanjara were non-literary. However, the more productive mode of reading Sharapanjara is to see the novel as being influential in both literary and cinematic genres (Raghavendra, 2011). By being part of an influential cinematic movement and by taking on complex social themes in innovative idioms, writers like Triveni had to work hard, and against much prejudice, to create pockets of aesthetic resistance. It may be salutary to remember that women novelists of the 1960s, such as Triveni, shared this difficulty of articulating cultural resistance with another literary grouping from the margins — the Dalit literary movement (called Bandaya) that was to come of age in the 1970s (Deva, 1996; Tharu and Satyanarayana, 2013).

This article, therefore, revisits Triveni’s work in light of recent scholarship on the middlebrow and on “popular modernism” — a concept I borrow from Joel S. Kahn (2001). Popular modernism for Kahn is about this conflict between self-appointed modernists on the one hand and excluded groups (women in this case) who challenge their exclusion as well as the original claims of mainstream modernism (2001: 24). Similarly, Alison Light draws attention to “another history of modernism, one bound up tightly with the history of femininity” (2001: 24), in order to reevaluate private subjective spaces in women’s writing vis-à-vis their public manifestations in the normative modernist canon. With the work of writers like Triveni, one could argue for a sort of “middle modernism”. Middle modernism is not about the grand and extreme formalist inventiveness of Gertrude Stein or Virginia Woolf, but more about a self-articulated claim to modernity that pushes past the limits of social realism. We must recognize that social realism itself was new in India and arrived only in the 1920s and 1930s (Gajarawala, 2013). Thus, by 1965, modernism was supplanting the social realist novel that itself was only a few decades old in Kannada in the 1960s. This type of modernism retains some of the narrative smoothness of realism (it does not seek to fully explode the novel as James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake does). Instead, it constantly challenges novelistic realism’s limits, especially using the repertoire of psychological affect (such as melancholia, rage, fatigue, and collapse) with regard to the question of woman’s desire and suffering. The history of terms like realism, social realism, and modernism can only be used approximately in the context of Indian literature and, moreover, one must remember that these terms have differential valences in the history of different regional languages (Bhasha literature). If we are to accept the definition of Navya by one of contemporary Kannada’s most influential novelists and critics Vivek Shanbhag, that it was a literary style that “emphasized the importance of authenticity of experience and craftsmanship” (2010: 2), then this means it is time to rethink the canon. Many of the women writers of the 1950s to the 1970s, especially the pioneering Triveni, deserve to be given their due place in Indian and world literary history.

Paperback economy and the stories women tell

Triveni was the pen name of Anasuya Shankar, whose writing career spanned the decade from 1953 to 1963. During this time she published 21 novels and three short story collections. Triveni’s writing career closely paralleled the inception, rise, and popularity of the pocketbook in Kannada. As P. Radhika (2007) argues, these affordable compact books, called kai hothige or kise hothige (pocket books) as well as entane pusktaka (eight anna books), were responsible for encouraging a large reading public. The pocketbooks especially encouraged educated women to read, and led to Triveni becoming one of the most commercially successful writers of her time (Radhika, 2007: 51). She was followed by several other prolific writers such Vani, M. K. Indira, and Anupama Niranjana, who were widely read in the 1950s and 1960s.

Nicola Humble’s work on the category of the middlebrow, especially the feminine middlebrow, encourages us to re-examine all the “ossified literary snobbery” (2013: 97) associated with that label in order to appreciate the sophistication that women writers aimed for in the tone and content of their writing. Humble points out that the middlebrow novel that dealt mostly with conventionally “feminine” subjects such as the home, romance, marriage, motherhood, and the family, remaking the everyday into something strange, slightly off-centre (2013: 110). This off-centredness is often coded or written in ellipsis. The accessibility of the text, its constant gesturing towards a surface play of dialogue and action, tends to obscure the coding, and the pleasure of reading the text lies in the reader being able to work both with and against its accessibility. Humble call this “a sort of double vision” that middlebrow novelists demand from their reader: “they demand to be taken seriously at precisely the same time as they wryly mock themselves and the world they depict” (2013: 104). Without this double vision, and measured against a mostly fixed and exalted literary canon, a novel like Sharapanjara is not easy to critically evaluate.

P. Radhika studies the critical response of Triveni’s output in the 1950s and finds that the novels were seen as good and progressive, both in subject and form (2014: 85–110). However, this would change very soon. Radhika writes, “In early 1960s the Navya school formulated for the first time a literary canon based on notions of good realism and bad realism within which the women’s novels were seen as sentimental and excessively emotional” (2014: 86). She points out that the reputation of the women writers could never fully recover from that aesthetic judgment. The preoccupation of these popular novels with the domestic, which was considered trivial, meant that the novels themselves have come to be seen as trivial artistic outputs. A key moment in Kannada literary criticism was when influential Navya critic Kirtinath Kurtakoti in his celebrated Yugadharma Haagu Sahitya Darshana (The Aeon’s Moral Code and Literary Philosophy), published in 1962, dismissed Triveni’s novels for their “lack of truth, immature dreams and lack of aim” and added that “the strong influence of cinema has masked life’s realities” (qtd. in Radhika, 2007: 89).

Scholarship even up to the end of the twentieth century persisted with this downgrading of Triveni’s literature. For example, even as a critic lauds Triveni’s contribution, he nevertheless adds a familiar qualification about sentimentality: “She is the first Kannada writer to recognize the specificity of women’s psychologies, but one gets the feeling that she sentimentalizes women’s problems” (Deva, 1996: 174). The category of the feminine middlebrow in Kannada, with its intrinsic insinuations of poor literary quality, not only got consolidated as a minority voice within the literary (mainly male) canon, but the feminine middlebrow became the counterpoint against which the canon got defined.

This gendered literary sidelining was happening not just in Kannada but in other Indian languages as well. Writing about her mother, the famed Hindi writer Shivani, author Ira Pande draws attention to how the popularity of women writers became a weapon of dismissal, and their extraordinarily complex literary output “was passed off as romantic fluff or domestic sagas that housewives ordered by mail as part of a gharelu (domestic) library scheme” (Pande, 2017: n.p.). If the middlebrow woman writer faced dismissal on the one hand, on the other they had to contend with their artistic output being considered “literary embellishments to their femininity” (Devika, 2013: 24). A close study of Triveni’s work reveals her efforts to negotiate these stereotypes by recognizing her affective accents in the novel’s plot — for instance, its central preoccupation with psychological distress — as a conscious resistance to the moralizing patriarchal view. This article therefore approaches Sharapanjara as a text whose double vision about madness and sanity, both in its treatment of the subject and its nuanced narrative structure, elicits new articulations of extreme alienation and discrimination at the very cusp of where the domestic and the public collapse into each other.

The shifting axes of trauma and madness

Sharapanjara makes an explicit claim (in the novel’s tagline) to be a “psychological novel” and is focalized via the protagonist Kaveri who is in a seemingly harmonious and companionate marriage with Satish. Soon after the birth of her second child, Kaveri suffers a mental breakdown that hints at the surfacing of a past trauma of rape. After two years at “the mental hospital” (as it is referred to throughout the novel), Kaveri is now returning home with the hope of reclaiming her previously happy life, tragically unaware that nobody will allow her to forget her time in the asylum or her “ownership” of “madness”.

The novel opens in media res with a car journey from the mental facility in Bangalore to her family home in Mysore. This single journey triggers the narrative arc, with Kaveri in the back seat and her husband Satish at the wheel. This car drive stretches over several chapters and is fragmented into shorter narratives and recollections, some from earlier events of that day, and others from the early years of their marriage. Kaveri’s arabesque thoughts make repeated tangential references to nurses, hospital wards, prison, prisoners, bars, and locks — enough to indicate to us that the husband has come to take his wife home after she has spent two years in the hospital.

Looking at herself in the car’s mirror, Kaveri takes pride in her beauty. The narrative voice tells the reader that “even though her divine beauty was dimmed by mental illness, there was no doubt that she was a beauty” (2011: 7). ³ This segues into Kaveri’s voice thinking about her own lips:

Her lips the colour of light rose . . .

How many days have passed since they have received kisses from Satish! He used to appreciate her shapely natural light pink lips so much. The words of love that flowed from Satish’s lips would make Kaveri’s lips into a half blossomed rose. Now deprived of Satish’s touch, Kaveri’s lips had wilted a little.

But from now onwards?

Thinking about it brought colour to Kaveri’s face. The powerful embrace of his arms, the lips beneath his thin moustache that would touch her, the memory of the tickle of his moustache stirred Kaveri. (7)

The ability to seamlessly work through different registers of perception and sensations, even though mediated by an external narrative consciousness, makes it possible for the text to resist any pathologization of the character’s condition, and forces a porosity between the inscape and the external. The erotic here is confidently located in the woman’s gaze at herself, and in her keen longing for love.

The car journey marks a critical relocation between a solitary institutionalized experience of madness and a socially sanctioned domesticity that co-opts sanity. For a woman who is in a transitory space, whose mind is bouncing between different time frames, both lived and anticipated, desire provides the cognitive anchoring for the rehabilitation she seeks. Kaveri is not shy about expressing love or sexuality. We are told very early that, “even though some say that children are more important than husband for a woman, Kaveri loved her husband infinitely more than her children” (9). The conjugal space in the novel is sharply delineated and divided equally by sexual desire and madness, both seen as alternate cause and effect — in other words, desire and madness seem to invite and precipitate each other. Satish goes from being an obsessively devoted husband before his wife’s mental breakdown to feeling nothing but repugnance for Kaveri after her recovery. Kaveri’s desires, however, do not wane with the experience of the illness, but remain equally intense. Her efforts are compared to a Kalpavriksha (a traditional and common Indian image of the Tree of Desire) growing in the Sahara desert (126), and she has to try hard to reintegrate into the family fold despite numerous rebuttals. The historian and literary scholar J. Devika in her study of the emergence of individuals as already engendered subjects in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Kerala (and the corresponding literary output in the Malayalam language) has observed how the nuclear family, although widely accepted as an ideal to be attained by the 1950s, was also the space for “new tensions and struggles” that reflected “disillusionment with the new family and modern conjugality” (2006: 300). Many of these conflicts also played out in Karnataka (Kerala’s immediate neighbour) and duly find their place in Sharapanjara.

At the end of the car journey is the domestic space where Kaveri quickly realizes the futility of her expectations of a fresh start. Satish refuses conjugal relations and has an affair with a member of his office’s staff; Kaveri’s children are afraid and keep a distance from her; her sister’s wedding is cancelled because of social taboos; and everyone from the domestic help to the neighbours treat her as a madwoman. Kaveri repeatedly pleads for two things — first, that her illness be treated like any physical illness, and second that her illness be relegated to a fixed duration in the past. But the horror of madness is so great that the illness is talked about as worse than death and, having been struck once, the label gets appended to Kaveri ad infinitum.

It is how Triveni writes Kaveri’s madness that is powerful and distinct. First, there is the intimation of an underlying trauma that cannot be traced or erased; then this trauma has to be articulated in the garb of madness; and only then are we aware of the unrelenting culpability and instability of middle-class “sanity”. Discussing the madwoman in the literary attics of nineteenth-century women’s writing, Gilbert and Gubar have argued: “In projecting their anger and dis-ease into dreadful figures, creating dark doubles for themselves and their heroines, women writers are both identifying with and revising the self-definitions patriarchal culture has imposed on them” (2002/1979: 79). The lines that social conventions might draw between unfettered madness and docile domesticity are challenged by the sympathetic narrative voice. This voice slowly reveals Kaveri’s world to us, how she is truly an outlier, deeply rooted in her desires — and traversing both madness and sanity in equal measure. The line and sentiment that “[t]here was no limit to Kaveri’s passion for life” (2011: 15) is repeated several times through the first half of the novel, as if to prepare us for the outcome of this passion — especially when it is located inside a madness that Kaveri will define and claim with defiance.

Nearly every chapter of the first two-thirds of the novel is punctuated by the question of Satish’s absent desire, and the repulsion that has taken the place of desire. This absence of desire is queried repeatedly by the narrative voice, by Kaveri, and even by Satish himself. How could all the love, trust, and desire be completely doused, Satish wonders (104). He realizes that he is unable to have sex with Kaveri even out of pity — at times, the suggestion of intimacy “makes his body burn” (113) and at other times his body turns to “stone” (141). This is perceived as unfairness and cruelty by Kaveri, but the narrative extends its sympathies also to Satish in the repeated dwelling on his difficulties with intimacy.

While Satish is haunted by the knowledge that something whole (his passion for Kaveri) has been fragmented beyond retrieval, the parallel unresolved narrative strand is about Kaveri whose private subjectivity can only be accessed and sustained through fragments. At the heart of her madness is the question about a trauma that cannot be shared or spoken aloud: it is either a bracketed memory, or one that has an indefinable relationship with insanity. Triveni writes these two narrative threads — the husband’s lost desire and the wife’s hidden sexual past — with precise and complex techniques, such as split voices, multiple time frames and spatial positions, dramatic irony, and subtle alternation between affective excess and cognitive silence.

Shoshana Felman in Writing and Madness draws our attention to “madness” as being “an excess of remembrance” (2003: 81). ⁴ It is indeed such cascading and layered recollections that become Triveni’s mainstay in keeping our sympathies closely aligned with Kaveri’s mental illness. The illness first makes its presence felt in her household after childbirth, so the doctors attribute it to postpartum strain and anaemia, diagnosing it as “hysteria”. Kaveri demands that her husband take her to the banks of a river on a full-moon night — the local river is also called Kaveri, which an eco-feminist reading might suggest a longing for a return to physical wholeness and integrity. At the riverside, Kaveri collapses into hysterical crying and searches in the sand for something she claims has been “lost” there, something “that money cannot buy” (2011: 61). The reader surmises sexual assault, but neither the narrative voice nor the husband’s thoughts affirm this. Kaveri is told by the doctors to forget her past, and she does voice her determination to do so. However the memory resurfaces twice after her return from the hospital and before her final relapse — both times in the space of the bedroom and both times in response to Satish’s abstinence. Satish promises her intimacy in the future and mentions contraception, as he does not want any more children. At that, a memory is described rising from Kaveri’s innards “like a bee” and she suddenly asks in fear, “what if something happens?” (115). But the male voice that speaks next is neither in that temporal space of the bedroom, nor belongs to the husband. It is a voice that grabs Kaveri forcefully in an embrace. Nothing shifts in the narrative register of the novel to indicate the shifted time frame, and there are no seams between past madness and present precarity. As the dream–memory continues to play out in Kaveri’s mind, Satish taps her back and says, “I need your help for my mind to be stable again” (115). The irony of his claim of instability while her mind is sliding is an example of how deftly the narrative structure works through these twin tropes of unanswered questions about sexual desire and sexual trauma, and where the daily humiliation of rejection is as frightening as unbridled madness.

The novel mines these crosscurrents of emotions skillfully and a literarily virtuosic moment occurs three months after Kaveri’s return from the hospital. On this particular narrative occasion, the trauma emerges fluently, and is more eerily sustained. After her sexual desire for Satish is not reciprocated or consummated despite her repeated attempts, Kaveri demands an explanation from him. The narrative voice sympathetically sidles up to Satish, tells us that it was impossible for him to see Kaveri as before, for “as far as his wife was concerned, he had turned into stone” (141). Satish, the apparently sane one, again claims an unstable mind, and Kaveri then bursts into manic laughter, one that will not stop, even though her husband asks her not to disturb their sleeping child Arvind. Just then, a man’s laughter makes its presence felt, a voice speaks and a hand touches Kaveri’s cheeks without disturbing the tone of the narrative present:

“Ssh . . . Arvind will wake up,” Satish warned his wife. Kaveri did not stop her laughter.

A man’s laugher echoed in Kaveri’s heart. Even though he was laughing, regret played on Kaveri’s face as though she had lost everything.

“My dearest, give me a beautiful smile, fulfil me,” he asked as he held Kaveri’s cheeks with his left hand.

“You should not have done that.”

“You should not have been so beautiful.”

“Keep your eyes on the road. Look how the car is swerving.”

“When you are with me, I am unable to do anything. Look at my hands on the wheel, look how they are trembling.”

Kaveri saw, and true, his hands on the wheel were trembling.

“What excuse did you give at home to come here?”

“Why do you need to know?” Kaveri said, twisting her lips, as he pulled her towards him, even as he continued to drive, and whispered in her ears.

“Veni, Vedi, Vici [in Roman script in original]”

“Meaning?”

“I came, I saw, I conquered [in Roman script in original] is what it means. I came, saw, conquered, is what Caesar said, but here . . .”

“Let it be, you are sharp with words. But you blundered too.”

In reply, he laughed loudly.

Kaveri was still laughing.

Satish scolded again, “Kaveri, you will wake Arvind. Keep quiet.”

Kaveri suddenly stopped laughing and sobbed her heart out. Satish was distressed to see his wife’s condition. He caressed Kaveri’s head sympathetically.

“Kaveri, please be quiet . . . Give me some more time, I am confident that things will get better with time.” (142–143)

The affective and plot shifts are swift. The conversation between Kaveri and the voice that plays out in the immediacy of the man’s sexual conquest over her (in the narrative past) ends with the man’s laughter that then melds into Kaveri’s laughter (in the narrative present), which in turn is interrupted by the husbands’ voice (also in the narrative present), only to change her laughter into deep sobbing. The shifts between past and present, ebullience and grief, riverside and bedside, are written with precision.

This skilled imploding of subjective time and real time closely aligns Triveni with modernism’s obsessive fascination with the “time of the mind”, its elasticity and nebulous frontiers. In his study of modernist fiction, R. W. Stevenson demonstrates how memory becomes an essential structuring device in the creation of a “time in the mind” (2014: 96), through the randomness of recollection, away from mechanical succession and the oppressive control of the clock. Caught beneath the growing weight of unaddressed trauma, Kaveri can navigate her experience of time only through voice, a voice that can move between past, present, and future with a felicity and grit that society denies her in her daily choices.

While this falls outside the purview of the present article, it is relevant nonetheless to raise the question of the popular discourses of madness during Triveni’s time and in the publication history of the book, for this reveals the prejudices that Triveni was trying to counter. Vimala Rao observes that the English translation of Sharapanjara in 1975 by Meera Narvekar carried the title The Madwoman, a “shocking misrepresentation of the tragic story of Kaveri” (2003: 140). Rao concludes that perhaps “Narvekar worked under the pressures of marketability and hence gave it the lurid title” which was supported by the cover image of a “virtual Gorgon’s head in violent colours” (2003: 141). Within or without the text, the tag of “madwoman” seems to be fated to become a grotesque parody. This tag, once attached to a character, must then be her primary mode of social identification for the remainder of the narrative.

Repetitions, absences, and sexual desire

Triveni’s use of repetition in Sharapanjara, sometimes of phrases, mostly of sentiments, the swift intercutting between a character’s line of thought and its instant mirroring/distortion in the perception of others, the swift and relentless acceleration of the narrative pace, create very expansive critical spaces that have barely been explored in literary criticism. For instance, the novel’s narrative voice loops as much around Kaveri’s “madness” as it does around the question of what could possibly have happened to Satish’s sexual desire for his wife. The resolution is offered in one memory that is slowly unpacked for readers — a visit Satish had made to Kaveri’s hospital when she had been put in a locked room to be protected from attacks by other patients (2011: 144–145). Satish had then looked through the bars as if looking at an animal in the zoo, with the smell coming from the room similar to that of an animal’s enclosure. He had seen Kaveri dressed in burlap, lying on the floor in a corner of the room, talking to herself. He had not understood her words, but the readers recognize it — “I came, I saw, I conquered” — the same words spoken by the perpetrator of Kaveri’s rape (144). Triveni writes, “Even though Kaveri was now cured, behind the wife who stood in front of him, he saw the shadow of a mad Kaveri” (145). This image of an encaged Kaveri surfaces in the narrative each time Satish has to contend with his absence of sexual desire for his wife. And in the repetitive narrative structure, these two strands — the primitive shadow of insanity in the woman and the death of desire in the man — move into close alignment with each other, as internal spaces of madness and external reactions to that madness are wont to do.

Triveni’s writing underlines Kaveri’s resilience and assertiveness, whether in the domestic episodes or Kaveri’s solitary reflections. Kaveri is unafraid to speak her mind or ask for fair treatment. Her naturally impulsive and outspoken nature, which had been attractive to her husband in the past, is gradually overladen with hues of madness. She protests, “You will not forget that I was mad once, you will not let me forget either. Every moment, every step, your every word, look, action pricks me and says — ‘you are mad’” (134). Madness is both experience and perception, and there can be no forgetting. Kaveri says she finds pity intolerable, akin to poison (48). Wherever she goes, exclamations of “Ayyo paapa” (poor thing), or “Hucchi” (madwoman) follow her like a discordant note. The gossip never stops. The collective gaze on her past mad self is so alienating that the world of sanity cannot possibly be available to her. Kaveri pleads, as does the sympathetic narrative voice:

Then, doesn’t illness come to all people? Don’t some people suffer terrible diseases, decaying bodies feasted on by flies?

Now even though I am cured, why do people look at me like this? Either they have extreme pity, because I am mad. Or extreme rejection, also because I am mad. Just like the scars of smallpox stay on the body till death, will I have to die with this label stuck to me? Won’t people give me the opportunity to live like others?

No matter where Kaveri turned, arrows pierced her heart and made deep wounds. Arrow of pitiful looks, arrow of disgust, arrow of whispering gossips, arrow of rejection, arrow of laughter — Kaveri was imprisoned by them.

Is there no release for her from this cage of arrows [the title of the book is Cage of Arrows]? (2011: 110)

That death is a better option than madness is unambiguously communicated to Kaveri, either directly or by implication. As Shoshana Felman points out, “madness designates as its opposite not sanity but stupidity” (2003: 82). Satish wishes her dead and Kaveri overhears him calling her a living corpse (117). Kaveri returns to her room to stand in front of a mirror, and wonders if there is any resemblance between her and a corpse (119) — this is even as the narrative voice extols her deep imagination and sensitivity. Not long after, Kaveri questions whether she is the living corpse or whether it is Satish instead who is effectively a corpse (125). We become aware that what is a desperate embrace of life for her is to him something to flee. Writing in the context of Triveni’s short story “Third Eye” which deals with a similar breaking down of a marriage, editor and translator Lakshmi Subramanyam writes about Triveni’s skill in repeatedly mining the image-archive of a metaphor (the third eye in the eponymous story, and in this novel one could suggest the image of the corpse) for “the subtext, the hidden, which can never be fully or satisfactorily explained” (2000: Introduction). This terrain of ambiguity and the macabre grows exponentially as Sharapanjara progresses.

When Kaveri pleads with Satish to put himself in her shoes, he claims he would have committed suicide if he were in her place. Kaveri indeed then attempts suicide, but is thwarted. This is not a fatalist move, nor does it signal resignation, as she tells her anxious mother, “Amma, is it possible for anyone to die twice? Your daughter Kaveri died two years ago. This Kaveri is merely a shadow. I have already died. How can I possibly die again?” (2011: 168). The social verdict on Kaveri’s mental illness in the past and since was of death — social ostracism remained a greater threat for Kaveri than biological life or death. The novel’s focus on the conjugal space is contrasted with its repeated teasing out of the question of desire that ruptures that social commitment. However, the extra-marital affair is a possibility only for the husband and is hypothetical for the wife. Kaveri does indeed pose the query to her husband (after one more night of her overtures being rejected): “What if I were to stray?” (185). Satish sarcastically urges her to do it in a tone that implies the impossibility of it. This goads Kaveri into a rage that results in a physical altercation — she throws things at him and he strikes her twice, thinking to himself that he is witnessing not the shades of madness but its complete manifestation. Kaveri declares, “I hate you. You are depriving me the right to live fully. I am ruined by my marriage to you” (186). Satish’s only response is to push her to the wall. By this time, the reader is only too aware that the protagonist has reached the proverbial unyielding wall in every aspect — she is perceived as having no marital or social future. The only escape would have to be by her own reframing and rearticulation of a trapped subjectivity. In her study of Ismat Chughtai’s Crooked Line, Priyamvada Gopal examines the mental meltdown of the female protagonist as a “melting down of all that is solid — romance narratives, family, dreams of marriage, a secure sense of cultural identity” and this experience proves to be “simultaneously regenerative and alienating” (2005: 93). For Kaveri in Sharapanjara, the regeneration is entirely subsumed within the language of alienation and can only be possible by a retreat into seeming insanity.

In the last pages of the novel, as Kaveri’s mental health teeters again, the novel ends with another car journey. While the opening scene had the car travelling from Bangalore to Mysore, two large cities separated by about 145 kilometres, the car journey at the end is in the opposite direction, from Mysore to Bangalore. The journey now is from the social sanity that Kaveri rejects for the world of madness. If one were to read it entirely along the lines of plot, this would seem conformist: a punitive consequence for an assertive woman. However, the narrative resists such a conclusion because Kaveri has already claimed madness as an alcove — it is the cruelty of unthinking social norms that is the real distortion. For Gilbert and Gubar, such literary moments open up a female point of view where “the monster woman is simply a woman who seeks the power of self-articulation” (2002/1979: 79). Kaveri has reached her conclusion even while she is still functional in the domestic space, and yet she demands to be sent back to the hospital: “Those who are inside the hospital are the sane ones. Those who are outside the hospital are the mad ones” (2011: 135). For Sharapanjara, whose title (The Cage of Arrows) overturns any assumptions a reader might have about the shape and nature of physical, social, and psychological confinements — the “inside” of the hospital and the “outside” of the social sphere are indeed reversible and intrinsically ambiguous. The critique of norms sustained by the circularity of the narrative structure becomes clear. The car journey that Kaveri took at the beginning of the novel, towards her future, was not towards sanity but towards a rejection of that sanity as monstrous and exploitative. Kaveri asks, “How can people who have not had the bitter experience of madness understand the sensitivity of people who have to carry the quality of madness in them? How would they understand that God has given such people four eyes, four ears and two minds?” (2011: 201). The quality of madness, even behind the bars that she once looked at as prison, is now infused with the quality of freedom.

Thus, an exercise in close reading the language and structure of affect in the novel reveals the resilience of Sharapanjara’s narrative sinews. This close reading is also to emphasize the larger intent of the article to interrogate the relegation of writers like Triveni (and novels like Sharapanjara) to the margins of the Kannada literary canon, mostly as popular reading for women. This categorization can be affirmatively reclaimed through scholarship on middlebrow aesthetics, as well as studies of popular or middle modernism (typologies that are often continuous, if not synchronous). Even as one is cautious not to collapse Anglo-American modernist movements with the Navya movement in Kannada, the aesthetic affinities and influences between these movements have productive points of overlap, for instance in their attunement to form and psychic inscapes. Further, this article did not seek to assess the modalities and components of Navya literature in its entirety, but rather chose to begin with Samskara (as a metonymic text of Navya) to highlight that novel’s blind spots around gender privilege. Earlier scholars, such as Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, have trenchantly remarked on these insufficiencies: “the space of modernity that is constructed as the Brahman male’s (new) sphere of action excludes women: in Samskara it is precisely women and their labour that must be elided or rendered as instrumental for the development of the male subject” (2001: 11). In line with this critique, this article has sought to demonstrate that a text like Sharapanjara, in contrast strives for a more complex appreciation for the intricacies of gender. In Triveni’s novel, women are not merely constructed as temptation but in complex relation to family — and that includes taboos around mental health, trauma, and female sexuality. Sharapanjara partakes in many of the formalistic dexterities and preoccupations of Navya even as it continues to be a counterpoint to the blind spots of some dominant Navya texts; and it has been a central effort of this article to bring these seemingly contradictory dynamics to the fore. Although neither Sharapanjara nor Triveni can be fully representative of an entire generation of women writers (publishing in the 1960s and 1970s), one wishes in conclusion to assert the need, as well as demonstrate the possibility, of applying contemporary scholarship (on modernism, middlebrow, gender studies, and so on) to reassess and expand their literary and historical resonances.