Two Virgins by Kamala Das: complete story

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,