Bisesa and Rehana, are the female characters in Beyond the Pale and Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies, by Rudyard Kipling and Salman Sushdie, respectively. They are both from India, and also considered to be colonised women in these stories – that is, women from a colonised nation like India.
Both texts reflect the marginality and inferiority of women in Indian society. Bisesa is literally immured within her uncle’s house by her uncle, so that she cannot keep seeing Trejago, her English lover. Bisesa wishes to get away from the chauvinistic unfair life she has been imposed. Because she is a widow, the possibility in her “community” of having an affair is something unthinkable, not to mention an affair with an Englishman. Even though she is only fifteen, she can’t start a new life with another man, and must respect her dead husband until her final days. In medieval India, a widow woman was considered a curse and had really bad life conditions, being subjected to many restrictions – like remarrying – and being looked down by society if they started a new life with someone, which led many of them to commit suicide at their husband’s funeral – an Indian custom known as Sati.
The Tuesday women in Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies only feel safe and protected when they are accompanied by their fathers or brothers, with the exception of Rehana, who is self-confident and independent enough to go to the British Consulate on her own. Rehana would rather live the life she knows than to escape to an arranged marriage to an older man she has never seen. These women needed the figure of a man next to them in order to be accepted by society, and not any man, but an Indian man.
There is an opposition in the two stories: the contrast between East and West, men and women, English and Indian words. This distinction is reflected in the way both female characters perceive the West, that is Britain. While Bisesa wishes to get away from her system – the Indian background in which she lives in – Rehana chooses her Indian roots over the possibility of a new beginning in Britain; given the uncertainty of that new life in the West, she rather stays in her own country, where she is independent and leads a humble life. Like Gurnah says: “The story draws attention to the plight of Third World women in the East, complete with the horrors of child marriage and/or abandonment by partners who have left for the supposedly more desirable West, but Rehana’s gentle refusal requires us to pause at the question of gender and ask if a movement West will set her free? Rehana now roams barefaced, big-eyed and independent might well find herself veiled and in service of an ageing master in Bradford, in a stridently Muslim immigrant enclave” (2007:142). This hybridity is reflected in the title of Rushdie’s “East, West” (in which Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies is included). Rushdie himself explained that “the most important part of the title was the comma – or at least that I live in the comma”. Having spent his life in India first and then in Britain, he feels like he isn’t Indian nor British, but finds himself between both worlds. Goodnetilleke thinks that “the comma indicates (…) an understanding of separate but connected worlds” (1998:131).
Bisesa and Rehana are similar in that they are different from the rest of women around them: Bisesa wants a lover, in spite of being a willow, and finally makes an Englishman her lover, while Rehana walks into the British Consulate alone and finally decides her own fate. Both rebel themselves against the Indian powers, but only the story of Bisessa has a happy ending.
They are different from each other in that Bisesa is literally trapped in her society, while Rehana is free in many ways. Bisesa can’t have a lover nor have her own place without having to share a house with a male member of her family, so her destiny is to remain a widow and live under the protection of a man. Rehana, on the other hand, can decide whether to go to Britain or to stay in India, to keep on with her arranged marriage or not, and is even free to show her face in public – she is barefaced.
The fact that Bisesa wears a burkah also says a lot about Indian society. Purdah is a practice consisting on Indian women hiding their body shape by wearing a long veil or burqa. Purdah also had to do with a woman’s withdrawal from life outside her home. This applies to the text in that Bisesa is always at her uncle’s place – which has also been her place since her husband died, given that widow women needed a man next to them, a family member in this case – and it is him who almost buries her alive inside the house at the end of the story. We never see Bisesa and her uncle sharing a room or interacting with each other, and this may be due to the physical segregation of the sexes taken by the Purdah, establishing the existence of different rooms for men and women – even among family members – in a house. Rehana, on the other hand, breaking the rules imposed by her society, is barefaced, while some Tuesday women were veiled, again, a symbol representing the submission and inferiority of women in India.
Arranged marriages are very common in the Muslim world. The individuals subjected to an arranged marriage had to have some things in common, like religion and culture. Rehana is Indian, and so is her fiancé Mustafa Dar, considered by Rehana’s father a “solid type”, which suggests he is also wealthy. Her father wanted an Indian man next to her in England, but she would rather stay in India on her own. Bisesa was also probably on an arranged marriage with her husband, and the fact that she is already a widow at fifteen – which is really young – suggests that she was even younger when she got married, being child marriage another practice typical from India.
Bisesa and Trejago’s punishments are seen as fair by the Indian society. Since he has had an affair with an Indian widow woman, he deserves to be castrated, and so Bisesa’s uncle stabs him in the groin. Bisesa’s hands are cut off at the wrists for having an affair with an Englishman, a punishment which is typical in Indian society to thieves, being both of them examples of cruel practices which still exist nowadays.
Indian women are always the victims in these stories, considered inferior and also a threat to Englishmen. Bisesa’s body represents the boundary beyond which Englishmen may not transgress, since miscegenation is the greatest danger to the British prestige. They are the “other”, what makes the British different from the Indians, but only in terms of gender. British and Indian men could become friends, while it was absolutely forbidden for British men and Indian women to have any kind of contact. It was Indian women who gave a bad reputation to Englishmen – who, at the same time, sacrificed their position of superiority – by having an affair with them, and that’s why men like Trejago keep it secret.
While Bisesa is against Indian customs, Rihana feels really proud of her country and with her life in India. She’s also independent in that even though her parents died, she doesn’t seem to live with any other siblings, since she mentions that if she leaves for England, she will only miss the three kids she looks after at her work as a maid. The fact that she says “they would have been sad to see me leave” to refer that they would be the only people who would miss her, suggests that she has no one else. Also, she works as a maid in “a great house”, so she has the strength and courage to support herself financially in spite of being alone, without the need of having a male figure next to her to keep on living.
Like Gurnah explains, Good Advice is rarer than Rubies “is one of few works to openly broach the question of gender” (2007:142). Rushdie does not usually include females as the main character in his stories, but in this case he does so to denounce the marginality of women in India. Kipling usually writes about interracial love between Indian women and British men also to let the readers know about the ways in which Indian society works. Both texts offer different visions of two different women who, even though they are unique in their breaking of the rules established, one can decide her own destiny and is happy with her current situation and the other can/is not.
Works Cited
Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. Salman Rushdie. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998. p.131
Gurnah, Abdulrazak, ed. The Cambridge Companion To Salman Rushdie. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007. p.142
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