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A comparative study of The Kept Woman by Kamlia Das

and The bull and the she-devil by Zaib-un-Nissa

Hamidullah

Introduction
In spite of modernization and globalization, restrictions and limitations for women still prevail.

Gender discrimination consistently plagues our social fabric down through the ages. The

condition of women in our society is arguable. Though physically weaker when compared to

men, women prove that they are mentally stronger than men. They have established the fact that

they could effectively remove their constraints themselves and efficiently perform many things -

right from managing a family to ruling a country. Women work hand-in-hand with men to bring

financial stability to the family. All these glories and achievements show only the brighter side of

the lives of women. The other side is so gloomy and dull as women are viewed as subordinates

to men. Marginalization of women persists as a perennial problem. Gender bias is deeply

entrenched in our society. Stressing the kind of platform that literature provides for writers to

bring even issues like gender disparity and victimization of women to the attention of the reading

fraternity, Anita Myles, in her book, Feminism and the Post-Modern Indian Women Novelist in

English, says, “Literature has always been a handy tool in exploring the gender relations and sexual

differences”, (2).

Introduction of the authors

”I feel a woman is most attractive when she surrenders to her man. She is incomplete without a
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man,” averred Kamala Das shortly before her death in May, 2009. One of the most controversial

and celebrated Indian authors, she combined in her writings rare honesty and sensitivity,

provocation and poignancy. The Kept Woman and Other Stories explores the man-woman

relationship in all its dimensions. Deprived, depraved, mysterious, mystical and exalted, each

character, culled from experience and observation, is an incisive study of love, lust and longing.

The corpus of her work throws light on the unexpressed sufferings of women who are

vulnerable just because of the fact that they are born women and are part of a society which is

patriarchal to the core. Vasanthi Sankaranarayanan in her article, “The Malayalam Short Story –

Evolution, Influences, Original Perspectives” writes: Kamala Das is very different from other

short story writers in that her style, content and approach to writing are very individualistic and

modern and in some ways not indigenous to Kerala. She reaches out to a sphere of hitherto

unexplored ideas and experiences and relates them in a style which is candid and poetic. Her

style is not monotonous; she changes her style to suit the theme, ambience and emotional tone of

the story. (25)

The Bull and the She Devil is part of a collection of short stories entitled The Young Wife that

brought Hamidullah critical acclaim when it appeared in 1958. Prior to this, one of Hamidullah’s

poems, written for The Mirror of London, won a prize. In 1949, she started writing a column

called “Through a Woman’s Eye” which made her the first woman columnist for Dawn,

Pakistan’s largest circulated daily newspaper. Hamidullah, who grew up in Calcutta in the 1920s

and whose mother was English, started writing very early on in her life. Her visits to her father’s

village in (what was then called) Bengal and later to small towns in the Punjab where her

husband was posted brought her into contact with rural life. This is the setting for The Bull and

the She Devil that was considered “a rare and courageous story for a woman to write in the
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puritanical Pakistan of that time” (Shamsie 41).

Comparsison between The Kept Woman by Kamlia Das and The

bull and the she-devil by Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah

Subaltern

Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah’s short story The Bull and the She Devil also portrays the power of

the gendered subaltern. At the centre of the story are a farmer called Ghulam Qadir, and his new

wife, Shirin, with whom he has a tortured relationship. Given that the story is entirely narrated

by its protagonist, Ghulam Qadir, we never hear Shirin directly, the ‘voice’ of the subaltern.

Thus, we are not in a position to understand Shirin because we see her only through Ghulam

Qadir’s eyes; through his gaze she is not assigned or given any position from which she can

speak or represent herself. Shirin is ‘spoken for’ by her husband and this is why I choose to read

her as a subaltern figure. At one point he finds himself pleadingly asking her, “[a]re you happy

with me?” (Hamidullah 46), Shirin starts to reply but only manages to say “I” when they are

interrupted by the bull again. We could, on one hand, assume that she has so little of a voice that

when she is given the opportunity to speak she is cut off and this is significant in terms of her

‘subaltern’ position.
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