The Portrayal of Women characters in K.

R Meera's
Meera Sadhu and Malakhayude Marukukal
Feminist movement mainly focuses on the problems faced by women.
Feminist theory is one of the major contemporary sociological theories which
analyse the status of women and men in society with the purpose of using that
knowledge to better women’s lives. Feminists theorists have also started to
question the difference between men and women, including how race,
class,ethnicity and age intersect with gender. Feminist theory is more concerned
with giving a voice to women and high-lighting the various ways women have
contributed to society. Feminism is the idea that women should have social,
intellectual, sexual and economic rights equal to those of men. It involves various
movements, theories and philosophies, which concerns with issues of gender
difference that advocate equality for women, campaign for women’s right.

The first wave refers mainly to the women’s suffrage movement in the 19th and
early 20th centuries in the United Kingdom and in the United States, focusing on
women gaining the right to vote. Originally, the first wave focused on the
promotion of equality and property rights for women and the opposition to
chattel marriage and ownership of married women and their children by their
husbands. As Margaret Waters claims in her book called Feminism: A Very Short
Introduction,

“For a married woman, her home becomes a prison-house. The house itself, as
well as everything in it, belongs to the husband, and of all fixtures the most abject
is his breeding machine, the wife. Married women are in fact slaves, their
situation no better than that of Negroes in the West Indies.”

Women at that time were treated no better like servants with hardly any rights
and possession. Marion Reid in her essay A Plea for Women, which has been
described as the most thorough and effective statement by a woman since
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, argues

“if women’s rights are not the same as those

of man, what are they?” in one sense, she admits, “woman was made for man,
yet in another and higher she was also made for herself.”

Many female writers and feminists argued that what they needed was recognition
of what women need to fulfil their potential and their own natures and not only
equality. K. R Meera is one among the writers who strongly advocates for the
liberation of women., she wrote several stories based on the issues faced by
women. Her works Malakhayude Marukukal and Meera Sadhu dissect the inner
regions of the human psyche, revealing the unconscious threads of human mind
and analysing interior motives and existential traits. Based on mythological and
archetypal images, these stories explore the hidden impulses in the unconscious
depths where all the dualities of the surface — love and violence, life and death
— fuse inextricably, striving to exist together.

The story Malakhayude Marukukal centres on Angela, a singlemother with

incredible and unbelievable grit, power, and will, living unapologetically outside
conventional morality. The story is interesting for the play of extreme
vulnerability and pragmatism of Angela’s character, who amazes us with
unconventional ideologies and thought processes. Constantly debunking the
stereotypes, she exhibits strength and cleverness and doesn’t fear to speak her
mind and her capability as a vehement individual is evident throughout the story.

“Angela was killed in front of her children. Her husband was the killer. He thrust
the knife deep into her fair-skinned, well-rounded belly again and again. She
writhed like a snake, her hair stood on end (sic). Her blood hissed and spattered
everywhere. Her sweat streamed. Her eyes bulged.”

Angela marries for love. But she chooses badly. Her husband Alexander hands her
out to his friends when they fall on hard times. The vicissitudes of life help her
develop a handy philosophy.

“This body is a huge liability. Very hard to lug without a job! And hard to find a job
with it! I have had enough of men staring at me. So, wherever I go, I look for the
top man there …”
Angela makes a straight-out proposition to her employer, the “top man” in
whichever job she takes, and all the top men accept. If her experiences teach her
anything, it is that “The only lasting love is between a mother and her children.“
And yet, Angela is full of joi de vivre. She is the ideal mother; her girls always
come first. She gives them fun-filled times, birthday parties with eat-outs and
cakes. She intrigues her men with her repartee and her charms.

In a restaurant, celebrating her daughter’s birthday, she is accosted by a man.

“You are Alexander’s wife aren’t you?” he asks. She replies,“I am the wife of many
such.

The things changed upside down on Irene’s birthday night. Angelina bought cakes
to celebrate the special day but at that time her husband Alex came to their
home. He was released from the jail that week. “Ann and Irene came to the room
at that time. They remembered their pappa. To them, pappa was a mysterious
fear. Irene looked at her mom’s and sister’s face and bent her lips” (my
translation 92). Alex wanted to kill his family. On that special day, Angelina was
murdered by him in front of her daughters.

"He approaches her without any reply. Her nice home. Good children. Then, her
smile. His blood boiled. He seized the knife. Angela trying to say something with
her smiling lips. But he gets angry at her. Knife pierces her fleshy abdomen
without any defence". (my translation 92)

Love is the universal emotions which reflects in every creature. Meera Sadhu is a
story where love became a curse. Tulsi who keep up all her feminine values
achieve failures throughout her life. Love been her weakness which made her
lose everything. She tries to purify her husband by hurting herself.

The story revolves around the courtship and marriage of Tulsi and Madhav.
Through them, K.R. Meera perfectly captures the helpless and entrapped feelings
of women in toxic relationships.Meera’s narration of Tulsi’s life has many parallels
to the story of Mirabai, who escaped her oppressive marriage by devoting herself
to Lord Krishna.When the narration begins, Tulsi has adopted the life of a Meera
Sadhu (widow) in Vrindavan. The widows of Vrindavan are perhaps the modern
day Meera Bais, escaping oppressive conditions and societal scrutiny by
dedicating themselves to God.

Tulsi is not the quintessential victim who you immediately feel sympathetic
towards. She does end her torturous relationship with Madhav, that too in the
most unexpected manner. Her method of breaking free is not what most people
would approve of, nor does it end her love and desire for Madhav. As such, the
story does not present the protagonist as the relatable victim. Instead, her anger
and resentment takes on frightening forms thus encapsulating the reality of
abusive relationships. There is nothing black and white about them – only the
continued entrapment of an individual in a cycle of abuse of cleverly masked as
love.

Tulsi and her intense love and desire for her husband which continuously gnaws
at her insides and fills her with guilt and indignation. An IIT graduate, Tulsi is
portrayed as a smart and capable woman with the drive to make her own
decisions. Madhav, a charming and irresistible journalist comes into her life like a
breath of fresh air and sweeps her off her feet nearing the eve of her marriage.
He convinces her that her life is not one to be dedicated to a man and her
capabilities not to be wasted in the drudgeries of performing the duties of a wife.
His offer is one of companionship where she could grow and explore her
possibilities. She also reminisces about how he narrates stories of being with 27
other women previously but has never loved anyone the way he loves her. She
readily leaves her family and almost everything she had ever known in the hope
that she will be the last woman he loves. This is the premise on which their
marital relationship begins.

Tulsi’s intense attraction towards Madhav also has the element of intrigue and
the excitement of being the woman who finally makes him settle down. This
captures perfectly the way women have been conditioned to understand and
receive love in a system where promiscuity for a man is charming and attractive.
Madhav’s deception and lies are masked by his apparent charm and Tulsi
struggles to cope with the realisation that his relationships have continued after
marriage. As the narrative unfolds, the IIT graduate Tulsi gets restricted to the
role of a housemaid taking care of Madhav’s every need and nurturing their
children. The love and intimacy of the initial days disappear and Madhav becomes
distant. At this point, Tulsi is trapped in her own home, which she once thought
paradise.

“Look Tulsi, be practical! No man can ever confine himself to a single woman.
That’s the way men are built.”

“What about women?” I asked.

“That’s different. You are genetically tuned… I am bloody fed up!”

In Meera’s narration, Madhav and Tulsi are not mere individuals. They are
representatives of the men and women we see around us. Madhav embodies all
that is praised as masculine. He believes in a natural division of responsibilities
within the house for a man and a woman. While he understands and expresses
his sexuality quite freely, he reduces that of a woman’s to something for his
pleasure. At the same time he can seem progressive to an outsider.

"I never went seeking anyone. All of them came in search of"

On the other hand, Tulsi is the embodiment of a typical woman stuck in an

abusive relationship, whether physical or emotional. Every protest she raises is
“lovingly” silenced by her husband with his assurances and calm words. She wants
to believe, even in the face of glaring proof otherwise, that she is the only woman
he truly loves. Her education is of no use to her now as she has herself accepted
her relegation to the four walls of her home. In the absence of financial
independence or familial support she has no more options before her. This is not
just the story of Tulsi but that of thousands of women everywhere.

Tulsi soon breaks free and takes control of her life in a rather drastic and perhaps
even strange way. She leaves Madhav and takes her kids along. Although the path
she chooses after this point may seem strange and eccentric, it offers her a sense
of liberation and autonomy. She poisons her children and while they lie dead in
the same room, spends a night with the unaware Madhav. The sight he wakes up
to is his two children dead and blue.

Having lost everything she ever cared for, she decides to strip Madhav of
everything she had ever given him. Living in Vrindavan with widows as one
amongst them, taking alms for subsistence is a kind of penance for Tulsi. The cost
of breaking free for her was her children and even then she seemed to be bound
by the shackles of her desire for the man who took everything from her.

"It seemed to me that a devastated woman’s grief-stricken sigh had the potential
to burn down a house"

She waits in Vrindavan for the day when finally Madhav arrives in search for her –
a broken man. By then she had learned to live a life of self-torture. Having
witnessed Madhav’s final downfall as a middle aged man with no more women in
his life and nothing to live for, Tulsi awaits death in the ruins of Vrindavan

Meera’s portrayal of Tulsi’s emotions, her extreme hatred and intense desire for
Madhav, is the situation of many Indian women trapped in abusive relationships.
The “genetically different” (superior men)have this ability to convince women of
their love even when hurting them in all ways possible. The general culture in
which women are raised have continuously been telling them that men may have
many intimate relationships even if they truly love only one woman. Popular
culture has created a fascination around the idea of that one virtuous woman
different from all others who can make the promiscuous man fall in love and stay
monogamous.

The concept that woman is nothing but a womb, was perhaps the basic
perception of the role of the female in society and literature, down the centuries.
In the male-centred societies of the world, men used women as beautiful puppets
to pacify their lust and to bear and rear children. Women were relevant only in
so-far they contributed to the well-being of men’s lives with all socio-political and
economic powers being vested in men, women had no choice but to submit to
the pressures of social norms. They learned early in life the need for adjustments
and submissiveness and hesitated to develop strong opinions. The male ego
expected only a second-rate self from the female, which was trained to repress its
aspirations and hesitant to express itself. Their voices went unheard in social
spheres, their experiences were overlooked and their presences were
marginalised.

k. R Meera's protagonists are not domesticated-angels in the traditional sense,

who are trapped in the nets of domesticity with total self-surrender to the
enslaving system. On the other hand, they are angels with spotted differences,
who refuse to conform to the generally accepted roles of femininity and
inferiority. They show a radical resistance against the patriarchal concept of
normality and yearn to find a space for effective self-expression and survival. They
violate the taboos of society and orthodox codes of conduct, refusing to take
pleasure in passivity and meaningless conformity. They clearly point to the
unequal nature of the relationship within patriarchy, which normatively tries to
put women in the ‘proper’ position, below men, undervaluing their existence. It
leads to women’s loss of will and reason, denoting a pause in their existence. But
these women are intensely conscious of themselves as human individuals, where
men try to objectify them as play-things, and their vision is particularised by their
female sensibilities,daringly articulating the dreams, desires, hurts and
disenchantments that they have received and experienced. Even while livingin a
society where women are forced to repress any spontaneous expression of their
sexuality, where they are culturally andpsychologically conditioned to believe that
chaste women have sublimated their lively exuberance, sexuality, freedom of
choiceand decision-making capacities,

K.R. Meera’s protagonists do not falter to go through an honest and fearless

exploration of their female psyche and sexuality. They have unapologetically
expressed the candid, uninhibited utterances of love and sex and itsintimate
details and processes, with a frank admission of emotional disintegration,
frustrations and disillusionments within the confines of marital relationships.
These female-protagonists rebel against the conventions and restraints of society
and express explicitly the conflict of morality and female sexuality, unlocking a
space to speak of their desires, to stand up for themselves and voice out their
angst instead of fading into the four walls of marital and household duties. They
are also bold to talk about their traumas and failures in a male-dominated world,
and show how they try to maintain their sense of space and identity amidst the
contrast between their desires and the spasm, where the clam of fulfilment
evades forever the physical and emotional planes.These women are trying to
define themselves against the fraught, emotionally sterile landscape of a harsh
callous patriarchal world, playing out various roles of unwilling and unhappy
mistresses, wives and mothers, forced to hide their existential anguish beneath
the mask of fake ecstasy they are supposed to wear on. They daringly unmask the
emotional vacuity and hollowness of sexual love that linger in the masculine
world and hauntingly make us aware of the dehumanisation in an exploitative
world which is conspicuous by the sheer absence of love and by its excessive
preoccupation with vacant lustfulness. They crave for a genuine satiation in love,
but get deeply hurt when it is denied. Mere sexual union, devoid of love sickens
them, badly bruising their female sensibilities. The longing to discover one's self in
passionate love is openly admitted and discussed. In yearning for love outside the
bidding of marriage, these women are never justifying adultery and infidelity, but
they are revealing a search for an ideal relationship that gives love, satisfaction
and security to overcome the sense of inadequacy that had been imposed upon
them by the normative society. They confess an inevitable quest for love that they
undertake, an intense longing to find fulfilment,their inner mind frankly and
clearly willed to race towards love in all its personifications. It becomes symbolic
of their audacious search for meaningful experiences, for sights as well as insights
that grant them authenticity of existence.

Conclusion

K. R. Meera presents before us the plight of women with sparks for individuation,
fluttering like trapped souls in their attempts to actualise their existence, longing
for recognition as full-fledged human beings who can take charge of their mind,
bodies,dreams, decisions and lives. Through the extreme fineness of
characterisation, the author vehemently expresses the crises of the female psyche
within the hypocritical paraphernalia of a conservative society. The social and
psychological realities that they confront are recognizable, authentic and
inclusive. The female protagonists show an unflinching courage to break the
feminine- mystique of subordination and docility, seeking new ways to affirm
their existence against the organised strictures of the hegemony. Boldly stripping
off the deceptive aura of the socially-moulded femininity, they explore more
flexible ways that ensure a better and meaningful existence. Subverting the
clogged physical/sexual/social assumptions of the patriarchal world, they boldly
choose their terms and conditions of life in a free-floating manner, discovering
the pluralities of life and shattering the burden of victimization through their free-
willed quests. The spots that distinguish their appearance and existence, but, do
not become a blemish in their journey; they become markers of their subversive
defiance, resistance and freedom of will and expression. Thus, they become
‘messengers’ of alternate life-designs, who deconstruct the gendered
constructions and expectations of patriarchy, swimming against the currents,
recovering their sense of self, discovering new definitions for empowerment, self-
preservation and survival.

REFERENCE

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[2] Beauvoir, De Simone. Second Sex. London: Pan Books Limited, 1988

[3] Holy Bible. Red Letter ed. Uhrichsville, Ohio:Barbour, 2006. Print.

[4] J. Devika, trans. And Slowly Forgetting That Tree.N.p.: Oxford University

[5] Klarer, Mario. An Introduction to Literary Studies.London: Routledge, 2006

[6] Kurien, Sobhana. Breaking the Silence, An Anthology of Women’s Literature.

New Delhi: Ane Books Private Limited, 2013

[7] Meera, K. R. Meerayude Novellakal. Kottayam: DC, 2016. Print.

[8] Nair, Ministhy S. The Poison of Love. Wordplus.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 march
2017.

[9] Walters, Margaret. Feminism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2005.