Rewriting Gendered Spaces within the Nation in:

A Clear Light of Day and No Telephone to Heaven [authors or not?]

To write is not only to speak for ones place in the world. It is also to make ones own place and narrative, to
tell the story of oneself, to create an identity (Boehmer, 94)
In her text, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation, Elleke Boehmer writes
from a transnational perspective to demonstrate both the necessity and the problem of anti-colonial nationalism.
She critiques the gender-specific structures within the postcolonial nation that emulate the Manichean binaries
of colonial ideology and impede the realization of national liberation. According to Manichean logic, colonial
power is characterized as disciplined, assertive, rational, superior, and masculine thereby constituting legitimate
and true power. In contrast, the colonized native is negated as disorderly, lawless, irrational, inferior, and
feminine, thus, defined by a lack or void. Thus, systems of power and knowledge are instituted through the
construct of a gender binary.
Ashcroft et als discussion of place illuminates the ways that gender feeds into Manichaeism and
configures national spaces and relations in the postcolonial nation. A pre-colonial sense of place is experienced
as being connected to ones own being for the ways that place is rooted in a cultural history, folklore, and
language (Ashcroft et al, 177). They explain how colonization creates a sense of dislocation and disidentity by
disrupting the precolonial meaning of place in a number of ways in order to restructure identities and social
relations. One way this is accomplished is by physically dislocating people from their place for the purpose of
enclosing it to create property or commodity. A sense of place is also conceptually dislocated by the modern and
dualistic severing of time from space creating a notion of an abstract, ahistorical, and empty space. Finally,
place is disrupted is by the imposition of colonial language. Since the vocabulary of colonial language is rooted
in the myth of an empty space bereft of time, native history and legends that are crucial in describing and
authentically experiencing place are alienated from their locales. The formation of a timespace dichotomy
posits the concept of modern time as universal and masculine while space is physically enclosed and defined as
a negation of meaning or history thereby gendered feminine. These gendered dualities set the stage upon which
social reality is enacted and national identity is constructed.
Boehmer explains that national identity is entwined with textuality through official languages, definitive
histories, and cultural traditions. Accordingly, male nationalists of the emergent nation inherit the gendered
values of colonial dominance and preserve them in consolidating their own power through national authorship.
Nationalist narrative thus remains masculinist and continues to displace and dispossess women of the nation.
Boehmer advocates that male-centered national narrative can be textually subverted as postcolonial female
authors recover personal agency by writing themselves into national narratives. Accordingly, in the novels: A
Clear Light of Day and No Telephone to Heaven, Anita Desai and Michelle Cliff (respectively) engage with the
use spatial metaphors to interrogate and rewrite gendered spaces within the nation. In doing so, they employ
concepts of place to reconcile the oppositional dualities of colonial ideology and create hybrid spaces of selfrepresentation and determination. SOMETHING ABOUT HISTORY?

Anita Desais novel A Clear Light of Day employs the principles of affiliation, a process of identification
through culture in creating a complex portrait of post-colonial India during the partition between India and
Pakistan in 1947. Desai uses the splitting of the Das family to represent the larger societal and political struggles
of the postcolonial nation-state. She focuses on the female characters, particularly Bim, to reconcile the
gendered spaces created or exacerbated by the Manichaeism of colonial ideology.
Bims character is complex in the ways that it troubles the dichotomized gender roles of the nation. Bim
is equated [parallel with the land must go here as well as the nation-women tropebharat mata but she remains
unwed and wants knowledge]hybrid: gender ambiguity? She occupies a space associated with traditional selfsacrifi
Though Bim has nurturing qualities associate her with domesticity and the national trope of the Bharat
Mata (Mother India), she deviates from solely a maternal or feminine identity by simultaneously occupying
[this could segway into discussion on feminine spaces of domesticity] moves through domestic spaces as a
nurturer in the home masculine spaces of knowledge and politics. [TS: uses these spaces to rehistorisize?
gender] For example, Bim participates in a political discussion and counters the neocolonial attitudes of native
elites. Bims brother-in-law and Indian Ambassador for America, Bakul, is questioned on how he responds to
American interrogations regarding the corruption of Indian officials to which he replies:
What I feel is my duty, my vocation, when I am abroad, is to be my countrys ambassador. All
of us are, in varying degrees, ambassadors. I refuse to talk about famine or drought or caste wars
or political disputes. I refuse I refuse to discuss such things. [] I choose to show them and
inform them only of the best, the finest [:] The Taj Mahalthe Bhagavad GitaIndian
philosophymusicartthe great, immortal values of ancient India. But why talk of local
politics, party disputes, election malpractices, Nehru, his daughter, his grandsonsuch matters
as soon will pass into oblivion? These arent important when compared with India, eternal
India. (emphasis added, 35)
Indeed, Bakuls response represents an essentialist or nativist view of India and native culture as an abstract idea
consisting of images and artifacts lifted from their contexts. In renouncing the history imbued in the sense of
place, Bakul perpetuates colonial myths of an empty space. He further exoticizes native culture for western
consumption and exploitation thereby mobilizing neocolonial relations between America and India. Bim
contextualizes Bakuls narrative responding, Yes, it does help to live abroad if you feel that way [] If you
lived here, and particularly if you served the Government here, I think you would be obliged to notice such
things: you would see their importance (emphasis added, 37). Bim points out the willful ignorance, indeed
escapist attitude, required to entertain Bakuls position. She also indicates that Bakuls perspective is rooted in
his allegiance to the American government, which establishes him as a comprador or native elite who
misidentifies with colonial power and is not representative of his native people (Ashcroft et al, 61). Bim
continues, In all the comfort and luxury of the embassy, it must be much easier, very easy to concentrate on the
Taj, or the Emperor Akbar. Over here Im afraid you would be too busy queuing up for your rations and
juggling with your budget, making ends meet (emphasis added, 37). By juxtaposing the comforts and luxuries
of working for the embassy to the everyday struggles of Indian people living in poverty, Bim alludes to the
economically exploitive, neocolonial relationship with ex-colonial powers that enables an extravagant lifestyle.
In this way, she exposes Bakuls mentality as being inherently contradictory and dehumanizing. Furthermore,
by refuting myths of native essentialism and an ahistorical space. Bim reconciles the Manichean duality colonial
ideology. Gendered spaces: of political and private spaces and moves through masculine

Bim continues to dismantle the colonial narrative of Bakuls dialogue by restoring a sense of history in
reconciling binaries of time and space disrupted by colonial interference. One way she does this is by her role as
a history teacher. Bims history lessons take place in the Das house in Old Delhi. This setting is important
because the splitting of Delhi into new and old counterparts is a result of British colonialism. Accordingly, Old
Delhi is described as a dull, uninviting provincial museum where nothing changes and the neighborhood a
great cemetery, every house a tomb (21, 5). In contrast New Delhi is the colonial and national capital. It is
where things happen and contains the lively and energetic qualities that Old Delhi lacks (5). Bim registers this
colonial relation to Old Delhis decay as she explains snapping her fingers, the British built New Delhi and
moved everything out. Here we are left rocking on the backwaters, getting duller and greyer (5). Thus, the two
cities represent the Manichean duality that associates the colonial capital as new, progressive, and lively and has
caused Old Delhi to become static, unchanging, and lifeless.
Bim transforms the static space of the Das house and Old Delhi into a dynamic and inviting classroom
that fills the house with the laughter and vibrancy of a brightly colored bunch of young girls (18). The
imagery of these girls paired with descriptions of parrots in guava trees revitalizes the home, and by extension
Old Delhi. Seeing her students get distracted by an ice cream vendor during the lecture, Bim refers to her
students as babies a description that juxtaposes with the deathly qualities that describe the home and
neighborhood and injects a sense of hope and future. Accordingly, Bims lectures also are a mixing of the past,
present, and future spaces. Set in the old Das house in the present time, they not only contain the history of the
nation and the house but simultaneously contain the future of India, the students. In this way, Bim not skews
political and domestic spaces, but also reconciles compartmentalized and indeed dichotomized by colonial
power.
Bim continues to skew the binaries of time and space by reclaiming the legends of the land and paying
homage to the sacred Jumna River. Bims sister Tara tells her that she wonders how they played in the river as
kids referring to it as drab, dust and mud and adds that its hardly a riverits nothing, just nothing (24).
Bim corrects Tara revealing the layers of history and meaning that the river holds saying that it is, On whose
banks Krishna played his flute and Radha danced? [] Its where my ashes will be thrown after Im dead and
burnt [] it is where Mira-masis ashes were thrown [] its where we played as children (24). This relating
of Hindu gods and texts, the self, and ancestors to the river establishes place as a site of cultural and personal
identity formation. This view of being tied to the land or in some sense being owned by the land undermines
the colonial logic of commodification that views land as property (Ashcroft, 179-180). Furthermore, it restores a
sense of place in a space rendered empty.
This historical and cultural significance of place is epitomized at the end of the novel when Bim looks
upon her home from the outside. She recognizes the history of their house as a palimpsest giving them soil in
which to send down their roots, food to make them grow and spread, reach out to new experiences and new
lives, but always drawing from the same soil, the same secret darkness. That soil contained all time, past and
future, in it (182). This moment is important as Bim reconciles her familys displacement and alienation and
articulates a complex post-colonial positionality of her home and familial relationships. By extension she also
reconciles the national diaspora of which the Das family is an emblem. This striking metaphor transforms the
Das house from a tomb or cemetery into a tree that simultaneously branches out to bear future life whose roots
mesh into the soil containing their past. Thus, Bim restores the sense of time and history to the colonial creation
of an empty, alienated space exemplified by the house, the Das family Diaspora, and the nation for which it is a
microcosm.

Overall Desai appropriates traditional tropes of the Bharat Mata to broaden the female identity as she
textually asserts female selfhood in a national framework. Thus, she transform male-centered national narrative
and revises Manichean binaries of gender and place. By revising the female identity Desai also revises the
national identity as one that does not exist as Manichean compartments but rather as a complex reality that is
constantly negotiated and rooted in history and place.