Celebration and disillusionment in contemporary India: narrating the muslim wedding and its aftermath in Shama Futehally’s Tara Lane and Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days  

Oleh:

Jackson, Elizabeth

Jenis: Article from Article
Dalam koleksi: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 48 no. 2 (Jun. 2013), page 253-267.
Topik: Feminism; Indian literature; Muslim women; Samina Ali; Shama Futehally; weddings
Fulltext: Celebration and disillusionment in contemporary India.pdf (585.41KB)

Isi artikel

This article examines representations of Muslim weddings and their aftermaths in two contemporary anglophone novels by Indian Muslim women: Shama Futehally’s Tara Lane (1993) and Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days (2004). These two first-person narratives contrast strikingly with each other, thus illustrating the wide diversity of cultural practices even within the same (privileged) class of Indian Muslims. Tara Lane is set in Bombay and Madras on Rainy Days in Hyderabad, with the added element of diasporic influences on the protagonist’s attitudes and perspectives in the latter novel. Each text centres on an arranged marriage, with sharply different attitudes displayed by the protagonists. Tara, in Futehally’s Tara Lane, enters her arranged marriage enthusiastically, considering herself fortunate to be marrying such a desirable young man who seems perfect for her. By contrast, Layla in Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days embarks on her arranged marriage unwillingly, having initially resisted it. Both novels contain strong feminist criticism, with Madras on Rainy Days focusing on patriarchal control of women’s bodies and Tara Lane focusing on women’s exclusion from power within the family and within the economy. Both texts point to the potentially restrictive nature of arranged marriage, but also challenge popular stereotypes of Muslim women in India, suggesting that women are oppressed not by Islam, but by cultural attitudes and practices which are not essentially religious in nature.

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