Two Virgins by Kamala Das: complete story
Two Virgins , Kamala Markandaya's eighth novel was
published in 1974. It also refers to the East-West encounter in the
form of a contrast between the traditional simple village life and the
artificial modem city life. There is no direct confrontation between an
Englishman and an Indian as in the others novels yet, there are some
references to the English culture. The East-West enchantment and
disenchantment remains one of the favourite themes for the novelist.
Lalitha who develops a great enchantment for the westernization,
encounters with Mr. Gupta who practices the western values in his
life. For him there is nothing like the human values or human
dignity, and so he easily tries to pass himself on Lalitha who is blind
in the brightness of the Modem World which is the gift of the
Western civilization. However, the end of the novel is also pragmatic
one where Lalitha looted everything from herself, again escaped in
search of the pleasure of the modem life which suggests the
individual's enchantment for the west. Even though the humiliating
treatment given by them the unceasable flaw of the immigrants is still
found in our period. Lalitha's elopement here is symbolic one. Her
journey is, in fact, our irrational haunting in life for pleasure. Here,
Markandaya suggests that if we fail to stick to our traditional values,
there will be certain possibility for the invader's success on us. She
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wants to highlight the fact of life that every human being has got his
roots in his native place and the very moment he leaves his native,
place, he has to encounter a lot of unforeseen emotionally shaking
predicaments. The vibrations of politics are prominent in Some Inner
Fury, The Golden Honeycomb and Two Virgins. On the whole, the
novelist presents her themes in an artistic manner which has assured
her a permanent place in the living Indian English Literature.
Markandaya is undoubtedly one of the major novelists on the
commonwealth scene.
In Two Virgins, we find the story about two growing sisters in a
closely knit impoverished family in a small village. We learn a great
deal about what the fabric of life means to the Indian woman through
adolescence into adulthood. The author portrays the questing
outward of the two sisters; their lives are shaped by the influences of
their childhood environment. They move beyond the home and the
village. They do not want to be roofed in by the familiar
environment, by the familiar emotions. They strive out towards the
city, the larger life beyond the unknown, and they want to feel free.
In imposing upon them their growing awareness of their own
sensibilities, the author shows us how they, though sisters under the
same parental roof, develop differently. Saroja and Lalitha, the two
sisters are constantly made to choose between the Eastern and the
Western way of perceiving the world around. The contrasts between
tradition and modernity, between India during and after British rule,
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between the older and younger members of the family/between the
sons and the daughters are all there around the two, in their school,
at home, and in their upbringing in general.
Their own ripening sexuality of which they are both keenly
aware leads them in differing directions. Lalitha, the elder opts for
manipulation through sex while Saroja having a foretaste of sexual
knowledge and its power observes everything wisely decides to wait
and bide her time.
Lalitha, the more beautiful one, plays on the
vulnerability of her doting father, and gets away with what she
wants. Yet the author shows us that physical beauty and feminine
desirability are the cardinal points in Lalitha's existence. The goals
touted as part and parcel of traditional Indian womanhood, need not
lead to personal fulfillment. Lalitha strikes out beyond the pale of
conventional society and is brought low. Betrayed by her own
beauty, she goes to the city in/pursuit of a film career, lured by the
'Western punk', Mr. Gupta. She sells herself to this film magnate in
order to become an actress, in the process, she has to abort her
illegitimate child.
\
Through Saroja's innocence and outward questing for
adventure in life, the author gives expression to one of the modem
problems - the plight of sensitive human beings caught in a harsh
dehumanizing society. Saroja here symbolizes the conflict between
reason and feeling, between tradition and modernity. Her freely
discriminating responses are ever in contrast with the restricting
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egotism of the people around her.
She does not want to be hedged in
by the time worn values and way of living dinned into her by her
elders. She wants to move .beyond them and seek newer fresher
pastures and establish a sense of her own integrity, of her own
independence as a whole human being. The discovering wondering
intelligence, male or female, is a vital and attractive part of fictional
design. In the process, Saroja's relationship with her family and
friends turn out to be awkward and painful enough. But the
dynamism of projected wonder-growing up, meeting each new day's
demands on her own terms getting visual
evidence and experience
through a sibling's travails the slow but inevitable awakening of new
sensibilities and the inexorable growth and demands of a developing
sexuality, all these propel her on her way. A new kind of perception,
a new order of adjustments is necessary at the end of the story when
her childhood ends. In the meantime, the author portrays skillfully
t the young girl's impressions, the details about the simultaneous
awakening of intelligence and coquettishness, confidences,
confessions of being led as tray, of falling in love, the disclosure and
analysis of delicate and shy refinements in feeling - in short, all the
unknown and subtle aspects of feminity at the depths of a young
woman, which husbands and lovers, fathers and brothers generally
ignore or are unaware of. What we have is a full participation in the
growing consciousness of Saroja.
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The setting of Two Virgins is a South Indian village. There is a
family there consisting of Appa(father),Ama(mother), a widowed
sister of Appa named Aunt Alamelu, the two daughters, Lalitha and
Saroja and perhaps two sons who remain shadowy figures
throughout the novel and who are referred to as boys employed in
town. The central consciousness through which die story is unfolded
is the younger of the two sisters, Saroja. She is also the embodiment
of self-knowledge in a particular kind of social organization. This
self-knowledge, Saroja gradually comes to have in the course of the
novel.
Kamala Markandaya makes the two sisters different, so that the
two sisters have their individual self-knowledge by the end of the
novel. "Lalitha and Saroja are in some respects alike and yet, in
certain other respects different. Significantly, the two sisters go to two
different schools—Lalitha to an expensive and "superior" school
run
by an Anglo-Indian named Miss Mendoza, while Saroja goes to the
traditional school in the same village. The father's liberalism, whose
seed was sown in him the days of the national struggle during the
pre-Independence period, makes him more inclined towards Lalitha.
Aunt Alamelu stands on the
opposite pole and represents Hindu
traditionalism with all its attendant superstitions and narrownesses
but without the pitfalls to which "Modernism" in the social
organization existing in the village—where for example, a woman; if
she becomes pregnant before marriage, is ruined and branded for life
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- is exposed. The "modernism" that Lalitha imbibes at Miss
Mendoza's school is only cheap sophistication which has a tinsel
quality about it in the shabby social life in a village. Combined with
this is her physical attractiveness over which is spread the tepid gloss
of raw sexiness. Naturally, for such a vulgar village girl the life's
ambition is to become a film heroine. So when Mr. Gupta's film
production unit comes to Lalitha's village, she thinks that her
ambition will now be fulfilled.
The irony, however, is that Mr.
Gupta
has come to the village to make a documentary film on village life
and not a glamour film with a lot of sex. Lalitha is, therefore,
disappointed to feature as a village girl and dance an Indian dance in
it, and not an English dance which Miss
Mendoza's school has taught
her. However, she hopes that Mr. Gupta will soon launch her into the
vulgar, glamorous world of Indian films."1
After completing the shots, Mr. Gupta goes away with his unit,
making some vague promise to Lalitha that he will assign her a role
in a feature film.
To Mr. Gupta, Lalitha is no more than an ordinary
village girl from a peasant family, when Lalitha does not hear from
Mr. Gupta for quite sometime, she one day leaves her home and her
village and goes to him to the city. She brings disgrace to the family.
In the city she stays as Mr. Gupta's mistress and willingly allows
herself to be sexually exploited by him. In fact, as Mr. Gupta tells
Lalitha's father later, she had literally "flung herself at him"2
and
makes it clear that she was a 'wanton'. (व्यभाचारिणी, कामुक
स्त्री, आमोद प्रमोद करने वाली लड़की, चंचल, ढीठ, )
When Mr. Gupta, a typical film world personality, had had his fill of
Lalitha's sexual charm and
has got her with child he sends her back to her village with not so
much as a fine sari to her back. Lalitha is quite happy at having had
enjoyed the glitter and luxuries of city life as Mr. Gupta's mistress.
But the family is terribly humiliated and disgraced. Lalitha's father
takes her to the city with a view to confronting Mr. Gupta with his
misdeed. But Gupta is an adept at such games. He agrees to meet the
expenses of the abortion and the abortion is duly carried out. Gupta
can do nothing more than give them just enough money to meet the
travel expenses for going back home, while
they are preparing to
come back, Lalitha disappears from the room in which they have
been staying, leaving behind a note in which she has written that
they should not search for her and she is capable of looking after
herself. The father frantically searches for her for several days but it
prove as futile as the attempt to find a needle in a big haystack.
While the father is haggling with Mr. Gupta for money for their
return journey, Devraj, Gupta's assistant flirts with Saroja and wants
to exploit her sexually as Gupta did exploit Lalitha. Saroja is hungry
for sexual pleasure as Lalitha has been. Both the sisters have derived
this sexiness from their mother but she has, however, greater control
over herself and repulses Devraj; particularly because she is afraid
that she will come to grief like her sister. Saroja longs to be back to
her village home and feels happy when she comes home with her
parents.
The last scene in the novel ends with a visit by Saroja to
Chingleput's sweetmeat shop. Chingleput who began his life as an
orphan in this village is now a young man and has become the village
sweetmeat seller. He has prepared special sweets for Saroja, who eats
them with relish. Although Saroja tastes the sweets, her "tongue was
tinctured with the bitterness of aloes" and she starts sobbing.
Chingleput clasped her and at this moment, the author says, "Ms
organ was hard, was nuzzling her body"(p.252). He tells her not to be
afraid and that since he was a man he cannot help it. Saroja was not
afraid, because "she knew too much, she had gone through too much
to be afraid of anything", (p.250)
Lalitha, very early in life is aware of her beauty and its hold
over people around her. Her beauty earns her a lot of perquisites at
home, denied to her ordinary-looking plain, little sister, Saroja. She
knows instinctively when to bat her long lustrous eyelashes and how
to weave her father and mother and at times even crusty cynical aunt
Alamelu around her little finger.
Feminine desirability and sexual
parlance dominate her mode of behaviour every single moment of
her life. Her beauty and her manipulation of it earn her a host of
admirers and thereby she gains in status as Saroja puts it:
Lalitha had status. She had no husband yet, but everyone
could see when she did, she would have more than her
fair proportion. There was no lack of emissaries. The
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young men's mothers sent them and the women came
and spoke to Amma and pinched Lalitha's cheek and
Lalitha was demure, pressed her delicate feet together
and cast down her eyes to show off her lashes which were
long and lustrous. Saroja knew it was for show because
Lalitha told her.
Lalitha goes to the exclusive school run by Mrs. Mendoza and
learns to dance around the maypole and to talk mincingly about
culture, religion and society. The Christian environment at school
adds strength to the individualistic strain in her. Aunt Alamelu has
cause enough to accuse her and her parents about the way she has
been brought up
Maypoles, dancing around them and such practices, it is a
fitting pastime for our young Hindu maidens? And
simpering with young men and flaunting themselves in
films and such like, is there any propriety in it; no, it is
shame - shame, totally contrary to the code of bur youth
for a thousand years .... It is ended at our peril, Brother,
she said, it is not for us, puny denizens of this immoral
age, to question the wisdom of our ancient mentors ....
You have given your children rights, Brother, she said,
and they have come home to roots, (pp.176-177)
So in the name of modernity Indian women are adopting western
education and culture blindly . In her balanced examination of human
nature, the author does not ascribe Lalitha's going astray solely to
these newer influences. Her heredity and her family environment
also contribute to her fall from grace. Amma, the mother of the two
girls is herself a complex character, not lily white and pure as Sita or
Savitri. She is soft, fully feminine and free with her looks and
passionate by nature. She is conscious of her faminity and bold with
her eyes at men. Amma, for all her passion and fire is firmly
anchored to the ground through her marriage.
She is devoted to her
husband in her own way and theirs is an enduring bond that makes
them close ranks in the face of the common enemy. But Lalitha has no
such relationship with Mr. Gupta. Though Hindu, he is outside the
pale of her community and is not bound by the conventions that
hedge her as a woman, as a girl in her family. In her choice of her
lover, she acts unwisely. She risks all and is brought low unlike her
sister who observes acutely, quivers with new experiences but
chooses to wait her time out wisely.
Lalitha is betrayed by her faith in her beauty, in feminine
desirability and sexual power. She is not match in the game of sexual
politics against a city-hardened, money encrusted with entrepreneurs
like Gupta. Saroja has had a foretaste of sexual knowledge through
Lalitha. Growing up amidst so much beauty and squalor, she is
untouched by the squalor, she knows the facts of life; she knows
sibling rivalry. She is aware, she is no match for Lalitha, that she can
never occupy the special Lalitha shaped niche in her father's heart.
Yet she loves her parents and her sister, and is generous enough to
feel sorry even for Gupta, her sister's seducer. She watches people
keenly and is aware of how her parents quarrel.
In the narrow compass of one short novel, we witness the
development of the Indian woman from phantasmagoric infancy to
almost discretionary adulthood. A slip of a girl Saroja may be but she
protects herself by assuming silence, stupidity and often agility. The
awareness of her own integrity is brought through the negative
depravity of promiscuous love as seen in Lalitha. She creates a
positive world from the sympathy and loyalties of ordinary human
relationships, from her awareness of the quality of lasting love and
respect. It is this awareness that helps her from being sexually
mutilated or spoiled.
She develops her own sense of integrity in spite
of and sometimes with aid of the sexually depraved environment.
She succeeds because, unlike Lalitha, there is enough felt life in her
consciousness to sustain her awareness of what is wrong, of what is
to be done or not. It is this awareness, the foretaste of knowledge that
makes her stand steadfast despite masculine allure, in the form of
Devraj or Chingleput. She is not to be corrupted, truly a virgin in a
whorehouse.
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There is the interesting episode where surrounded by a nexus
of adult infidelities, Devraj, the assistant of Mr. Gupta, attempts to
make a pass at her:
He came close. He touched her. Please, he said, Saroja
leapt up. Her flesh was molten. She knew what he was
asking. She knew where it ended. She had dragged her
bloated gravid sister out of the bog; she had seen the
bloody pulp of the baby. Take your hands off me, she
cried and Aunt Almelu, of all people loomed up and put
words she was fighting for into her mouth. What do you
take me for, she screamed, a virgin in your whorehouse?
Similarly, at the end of the novel, Chingleput, the sweet seller
who has been her guide and confidante, suddenly changes track and
clasp her with the glib explanation that he is a man and he cannot
help it. Saroja, young as she is, has enough of her mother's common
sense to reject resolutely both Devraj and Chingleput. She is the
pragmatic one in the story; she keeps her bolt hole open to fly to and
Devraj with his city allure and Chingleput with his comforting
fatherly airs cannot lure her into the sexual trap.
We are not invited to pass a judgment on the two sisters. Each
acts in her own way and what is important is not the violation of
Lalitha has erred in breaking the strict social coHp for young cirls is
regretted: not the fact of her conception. Once again it is society, that
beastly tamer, that gives no room for children outside the wedlock
and hence Lalitha has to be aborted. In Aunt Alamelu, we find the
familiar poor relation in the Indian joint family. As the interfering
relative, she not only provides humour, she stands for society,
tradition and the norm of social behavior. Saroja is discerning enough
to notice the power of social stricture. She is rooted firmly on the
earth and has warmth of heart side by side with an awareness of
reality. She knows what she wants in life.
Saroja has come of age .
Her knowledge of the world has not diminished her nurturing side.
She is, however, realistic enough not to add on her burdens as a
woman; she wisely chooses to stay within the prescribed code:
She wanted lots of lovely cuddly babies, and, as Appa
said, the way society was organized you had to be
married for that A peasant's ambition, Lalitha called it,
but Saroja did not feel herself demeaned by that, there
were lots of qualities of peasants that she greatly
admired, (pp.57-58)
It is a new kind of perception that she attains. A great deal could be
done for nurturing humanity within the existing boundaries of social
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norms and conventions. One need not always be a rebel to serve
mankind.
Implied in the story are the contrasts between the city and the
village/ between traditional and modernity, between idealism and
common sense. Lalitha symbolizes the fondness of the village girl for
city life. She is trapped by Gupta partly because of his masculine
allure and partly because of his city varnish.
She emphasizes physical
beauty and feminine desirability; she flirts, and is vain, shallow and
selfish. She abandons conventional morality and follows her own star
in the city. Her future is left vague. Perhaps deluded by visions of
making a success as a film star she is only to sink into the morass of
prostitution into which unwillingly, village girls usually fall perhaps
in the clash between opposing systems of values, Lalitha could have
attained tragic dimensions. But Kamala Markandaya does not focus
on her - it is Saroja who is the centerpiece and secondly the author is
not concerned with the morality or the rightness of the issue.
In Two Virgins, the East-West encounter has been portrayed in
the form of difference in the traditional values of the Indian village
and the artificiality of modern city life. Lalitha is portrayed as a girl
with modem outlook. She is lured by the glamourous life of the city.
She decided to quit her village once again to enjoy the pleasures of
modem life. Before leaving, she leaves a letter for her parents. The
letter reveals her desire to lead an independent life, hi fact, there is a
sort of conflict between urban culture and rural culture in the novel
Two Virgins.
Markandaya's Two Virgins has generally been rated as the
weakest of all her novels. According to Margaret P. Joseph, "This
novel occupies the lowest position in the order of merit. In fact it can
hardly be called literature, falling short, as it does , of the level
attained by the other books . There is little attempt at plot
construction and the story is merely a tedious description of village
life with stereo-typed contrasts between pre and post-independent
India, village and city, traditional Eastern and modem
Western ways,
the whole amounting to nothing more than a documentary about
rural living, such as the film director in the novel actually makes."3
Joseph concludes her study of the novel with the remark: "On the
whole Two Virgins is a very disappointing book."4
According to Madhusudan Prasad, "Two Virgins has the theme
of adolescence and growing up of love and conflict between parents
and children, of contrast between village and city."19 The novel is
neatly divided into six parte.
In part I, Markandaya depicts the
village backdrop with Appa and Amma, their two daughters, Lalitha
and Saroja, and Chingleput, the sweetseller to whom Saroja talks
confidentially. In part n, Miss Mendoza, Lalitha's schoolmistress,
introduces her to Gupta/ the film-director, who selects her tQ cast her
in a documentary film he is making on the village. In part III, Lalitha
goes to the city for the premier of the film and feels allured by the
glamorous film world. She develops hatred for home and one day
she quietly goes to the city even without the permission of her
parents. In part IV, Lalitha returns home seduced, and soon her
parents discover that she is pregnant by Gupta. In part V, Lalitha's
parents take her to the city and meet Gupta. They accuse him of
having seduced their daughter.
Gupta says, "Lalitha is a woman with
the natural desires of a woman." And he also confesses "I am not
made of stone." In part VI, Lalitha undergoes abortion successfully.
But as she recuperates, she, leaving her parents and her sister, gees
off "to face the world on her own." Before disappearing, she
leaves a
note tucked in her bedding. It says: "She could not face going back to
the village: it stifled her, her talents, her ambition. She intended to
stay in the city where she belonged. She could look after herself. They
weren't to search for her, which in any case would be a waste of time
because they would never find her."
(p.236) However Lalitha's
parents search frantically for her in the city. But as their financial
resources begin to come to an end and as Saroja insists on getting
back to the village, they return home reconciled to their lot. Thus in
this novel, the emphasis is laid, as G. P. Sharma says, "...on the
change in the rural life brought about by the modem money-based
civilization in the country after independence. The changes are
marked through the perceiving eyes of Saroja, the village girl, as she
sees them in her village and of her sister,
