Celebration and disillusionment in contemporary India: Narrating the Muslim wedding and its aftermath in Shama Futehally’s Tara Lane and Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days

Many well-known Indian women writing in English have achieved commercial success and critical appreciation during the past few decades, including Nayantara Sahgal, Shashi Deshpande, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, and her daughter Kiran Desai. However, so few prominent Indian women authors have been from among the Muslim minority that it is perhaps premature to speak of a “tradition” of anglophone literature by Muslim women in India. Among the best-known writers in this category – Zeenuth Futehally, Attia Hosain, Shama Futehally (no relation), and Samina Ali – perhaps the most striking common narrative feature is the centrality of the wedding in the life of the young female protagonist. While the fiction of earlier writers such as Zeenuth Futehally (1904-92) and Attia Hosain (1913-98) sympathetically explored the life experiences of women (particularly weddings and their aftermaths), more recent fictional works by Muslim women in India tend to narrate the same life events from distinctly feminist perspectives. Although the author Shama Futehally apparently dislikes the word “feminist”, having said in an interview about Tara Lane, “I wouldn’t call it feminist at all” (Kuortti, 2003: 85), much feminist criticism is implicit in both the interview and the novel itself, as we shall see. In particular, the narrative repeatedly draws attention to the protagonist’s disempowerment within the marital relationship because of her gender-based exclusion from any involvement in economic activity or any control of economic resources.

In an earlier article (Jackson, 2011), I discussed the unequal power relationship between a husband and wife in another novel by Shama Futehally, Reaching Bombay Central (2002), focusing there too on the complicating factor of the couple’s minority status as Muslims in India. Here I argue that Tara Lane, like Reaching Bombay Central, powerfully conveys implicit feminist criticism in spite of the author’s repudiation of the word “feminism”, and I draw parallels and contrasts with a more explicitly feminist novel by another Indian Muslim woman writing in English: Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days (2004). While Tara Lane focuses on the power dynamics between the husband and wife as revealed in their verbal interactions, Madras on Rainy Days points to the institution of arranged marriage as a patriarchal tool for the control of women’s sexuality. Thus both texts implicitly support the radical feminist view that women’s oppression is located primarily within the family.

It is difficult to overemphasize the cultural importance of marriage in India, where from an early age the vast majority of girls are “groomed for marriage through a range of prescriptive injunctions and normative practices, and are socialized into accepting marriage and motherhood as their principal, if not their only, lifelong career” (Hasan and Menon, 2004: 98). Ninety-five per cent of all Indian women are married by the age of 25 years, so that “the one more or less constant feature in the lives of Indian women, regardless of class, caste, community, and region, is marriage” (Hasan and Menon, 2004: 96). Not surprisingly, domestic life has featured prominently in the fictional writing of Indian women from all communities, including that of “political” writers like Nayantara Sahgal and self-consciously feminist writers like Shashi Deshpande. A particularly prominent theme among anglophone Indian novels written by Muslim women has been that of the wedding narrative and its aftermath, which is notable, for example, in Zeenuth Futehally’s Zohra (1951) and Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961).

The Qur’an speaks eloquently of the emotional and ethical dimensions of marriage, defining it as a relationship based on tranquility, mercy, and affection (30:21). Husbands and wives are described as being like “garments” for one another (2:187), having been created for one another (4:1, 7:189). On a practical level, “husbands and wives have rights and obligations, differentiated by gender, although husbands are given a privileged role of both authority and responsibility (2:228, 4:34, 128)” (Ali, 2008: 612). In response to negative western stereotypes of Muslim gender ideologies, some Muslim feminists including Fatima Mernissi (1991) and Riffat Hassan (1991) have argued that the Qur’an itself does not discriminate against women. They argue, for example, that legal rulings which have resulted in unequal rights between husband and wife are loosely based on a Qur’anic verse that does not command women to be obedient to their husbands but states that righteous women are obedient – that is, to God (4:34) (Calderini, 2008: 633). However, the argument that women are – or should be – in all respects equal to men is a minority view among Muslim scholars; by far the most commonly held view is that “in Islam women and men are considered equal but different” (Calderini, 2008: 626).

Theological debates aside, it is widely agreed that “economic, geographic, and social factors do more to shape the circumstances of Muslim women’s lives than religion” (Ali, 2008: 611). All over the world, Muslim women’s life circumstances tend to closely parallel those of non-Muslims with similar backgrounds; for example, “a poor Indian Muslim villager has more in common with her rural Hindu counterpart than with a career woman in Mumbai who happens to be her co-religionist” (Ali, 2008: 611). In India, where Muslims are in a minority, recent studies (Hasan and Menon, 2004; Tabassum, 2003) have confirmed that Muslim women’s experiences are influenced far more by social, cultural, and economic factors than by religious ideologies and practices. In fact, “Hindu-Muslim differences in marriage, autonomy, mobility, and domestic violence are so insignificant that they point to the similarity of cultural practices and pervasiveness of patriarchal controls across communities”, though there are regional variations and of course “not all women experience restrictions to the same debilitating extent” (Hasan and Menon, 2004: 239).

Arranged marriage is still the norm among both Hindus and Muslims in India, though in both communities the theory has always been that forced marriage is unacceptable, and nowadays “distinctions between love marriages and arranged marriages are more ambiguous than clear-cut. For example, parents may legitimize mutual attraction between a young woman and man of the same class by arranging the marriage” (Puri, 1999: 139). However, it is my contention that if distinctions between love marriages and arranged marriages can be ambiguous, so too can distinctions between arranged marriages and forced marriages. A number of contemporary Indian novels, including Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting (1999) and Shashi Deshpande’s Roots and Shadows (1983), dramatize situations in which marriages are arranged for young women by their elders in such a way that they effectively have no choice. While most young people in India are theoretically free to decline particular prospective spouses, there is considerable cultural pressure, especially for women, to marry early. As the novels suggest, the element of “choice” is, at best, extremely limited for a very young, inexperienced woman from a sheltered background whose decisions are always made for her by others.

Although research, such as the extensive study by Hasan and Menon (2004), has shown that most women in India from all backgrounds have severely limited control over all aspects of their own lives, including when and whom they marry, Muslim women are popularly perceived to have even less self-determination than others, and there are a number of reasons for this. First, although India is a secular state, personal law (pertaining to such matters as marriage, inheritance, and divorce) for the Muslim minority is governed by particular forms of sharī-a, so that Muslim women do not enjoy the same legal rights as Indian women from other communities. For example, monogamy is the rule for everyone in India except Muslim men who are allowed to have up to four wives each and, although forced marriage is unlawful, the state authorities tend to be reluctant to intervene, particularly in sensitive cases involving minority communities. In a global context, because forced marriages are still contracted in a number of predominantly Muslim countries, there is a popular misconception that this practice is condoned by sharī-a. However, “all contemporary Muslim scholars would insist that consent is one of the required elements for a marriage to be deemed valid according to Islamic law” (Calderini, 2008: 634). But again, consent can be a slippery concept, not least because not all young women are informed that their silence constitutes consent to the arranged marriage (Al-Hibri and El Habti, 2006: 168).

The Muslim protagonists’ reactions to their prospective arranged marriages in Shama Futehally’s Tara Lane (1993) and Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days (2004) present a striking contrast. Tara in Tara Lane has met her prospective bridegroom only once, and because she was unaware of having been scrutinized as a potential bride, she had noticed the young man’s good looks and good manners as a detached observer. The next day, when her mother tells her that “Halima Khala has asked us if we will consider their son” (Futehally, 1993: 63), ¹ Tara is initially confused, thinking that they are asking whether her family will consider their son for a job. She is greatly flattered by her mother’s light comment that “perhaps he found you pretty” (64), and thereafter she catches only snatches of what her mother is saying: “‘…of forcing you at all’, continued my mother” (65). Meanwhile Tara is recalling with pleasure the appearance and manners of “this stranger” who had suddenly become all-important:

“…and that would be a help to your father”, finished my mother. “But that of course is not important.”

After watching me for a few minutes more she said anxiously, “If you want to meet him again, that is all right too. Take your time. We don’t mind.”

But I was afraid that I was going to need absurdly little time. (65)

Nevertheless, she asks for “a little time” in order not to seem too eager. We notice the fortunate coincidence between the bride’s wishes and those of her parents because it is gently made clear to her that although she is free to reject this suitor, it would be “a help” if she would accept him. Here we have a situation of gentle but palpable pressure being applied to a young woman who, knowing that she is expected to marry and that her whole life will be shaped by her marriage, is simply happy to be marrying an attractive stranger.

Tara’s pleasant experience of the marriage offer contrasts sharply with that of the eighteen-year-old Layla in Madras on Rainy Days, whose lack of self-determination is made much more explicit and confrontational. Layla locks herself in a bedroom, refusing to “assent to this suitor, the one they have all chosen for me to marry, then love” (Ali, 2004: 3). ² Layla’s mother (“Amme”) is furious:

“Whore!” she growls, pounding on the door. … “Tell me who is your lover. Shameless whore! Just like your father. Who are you sleeping with that you can’t marry another?” Of course there is no one, and I am exactly how she has raised me to be, innocent. But she condemns me and my femaleness, hoping to take control in the only way anyone can: through my body. (4)

This painful scene is a brief flashback in the narrative, so that we are not told how Layla was finally made to capitulate to her family’s demand that she marry Sameer. We are, however, told that in an act of defiance she subsequently lost her virginity because, as she explains, “I had to try on love, just once with the man I chose before…” (74), and although she does not finish the thought, her transgression is clearly an attempt to take control of her own body and her own sexuality before she unwillingly becomes Sameer’s possession. Having been brought up in India and the United States by divorced parents, she has both a critical attitude towards patriarchal ideologies and a painful feeling of shame because of her family situation and, above all, her own behaviour. She laments that in her community “a girl raised without a father, without a man’s name shielding her reputation, might as well be illegitimate, might as well have been a whore” (77), linking the language of illegitimacy (bastard) with that of promiscuity (whore) and suggesting that women outside of patriarchal family arrangements can easily be suspected of both. Interestingly, she adds that “a whore” was “the very thing I had become, according to those local customs, by sleeping with Nate” (77-78), implying that if she is already regarded as illegitimate and promiscuous, she “might as well” act it out.

During the run-up to her wedding, she is pregnant with Nate’s child, wondering why she had “done such things in Minneapolis” right before the wedding when she had never been tempted to do them before (14). The explanation, as she suspects, lies in her desire to take control of her sexuality, thus resisting its appropriation by patriarchal culture. In fact, she explicitly says that in losing her virginity to Nate, she deliberately gave to him what she had “always been warned” did not belong to her but to her future husband (14). So here, too, she is shown to be torn between shame and defiance, remorse and resentment. Unable to confide in anyone about her pregnancy and unable to prevent her forthcoming wedding, she nevertheless tries unsuccessfully to abort her baby.

The two novels differ not only in the attitudes of the protagonists toward their arranged marriages, but also in the nature of the wedding ceremonies themselves. A Muslim wedding is known as a “nikah” in Urdu, and nikah practices vary considerably throughout the world and, to some extent, even within India itself, because many wedding customs are a matter of culture and not of Islam (Maqsood, 2009). Although Hindu wedding rituals, too, vary from region to region, Hindu and Muslim weddings in India have a number of features in common. Both tend to incorporate a succession of pre-wedding rituals involving the exchange of gifts, including wedding rings. Mehndi is applied to the bride’s hands and feet before both Hindu and Muslim weddings. The main differences are apparent within the specifically religious aspects of the wedding ceremonies themselves – for example, the readings from the Qur’an during the nikah, and walking around the sacred fire reciting prayers and vows during the Hindu ceremony (Prinja, 2009).

Layla, the narrator of Madras on Rainy Days, who, like the author, spent half of her childhood in Hyderabad, explains that:

The Hyderabadi Muslim wedding lasts five days, each ceremony bearing its own ritual along with its own color. The first three days are the gold that promises fortune and fertility, the wedding nik’kah is the blood red of union, and the walima dinner that is given only upon a successful coupling is the green of Islam, of submission. (50)

Interestingly, red is an important colour in Hindu weddings as well, with the groom applying red vermilion to the bride’s hair parting during the ceremony. Afterwards the Hindu bride dips her feet into a mixture of vermilion before entering the groom’s house, leaving red footprints on the floor (see Hindu Wedding, n.d.). The symbolic significance of red (blood) as “proof” of the bride’s virginity is spelled out in Madras on Rainy Days, when the groom’s mother inspects the marital bedsheets the morning after the wedding (97). Here the irony and tragedy is that Layla’s bleeding is caused only by her efforts to abort her baby.

In the context of Layla’s private agony, the joy and fanfare of the wedding celebrations have struck a painful note. As she entered her new husband’s home along with great public ceremony (a brass band, a large audience all dressed up for the occasion, and so on), at the doorway, Sameer’s father, Ibrahim, held the Qu’ran over her head, blessing her steps (94). This detail is notable because in India it is customary among both Hindus and Muslims for the groom’s mother (not his father) to formally welcome the bride into their home. Customs vary, but this might also be a case of the author emphasizing the male domination of the household. Several days later, “over a thousand guests were invited to the dinner Sameer’s parents hosted to proudly announce that he had consummated the marriage” (104), though ironically he had not consummated the marriage as his parents believed.

The elaborate Hyderabadi wedding rituals in Madras on Rainy Days are very different from the simple but elegant Bombay wedding ceremony in Tara Lane, where the protagonist, like the author, grew up:

I sat behind a screen of flowers in Dadi’s ancestral red and gold sari while the Nikah was performed. And in the evening little green and gold lights came on in the garden, caterers dashed to and fro around white tablecloths, and I was married. (79)

This description incorporates the same three symbolic colours identified in Madras on Rainy Days (red, gold, and green), but here the colour imagery is more muted, downplaying the red, giving just a hint of green in the little garden lights, and adding that staple of elegant western dinner parties: white table linen. This is at least partly a reflection of the different demographics of Hyderabad and Bombay. According to the 2001 census, Hyderabad is about 42% Muslim, whereas Bombay is only 18.5% Muslim (see www.censusindia.gov.in), and also larger and more cosmopolitan. Therefore it stands to reason that among the Muslim elite of both cities, Bombay wedding ceremonies will often be less explicitly religious than those in Hyderabad. Indeed, in Tara Lane, the characters appear to regard the religious rituals as mere formalities to be quickly observed before the more congenial business of socializing begins. This is perhaps best illustrated in the description of the engagement ceremony where Tara is (unaccustomedly) veiled, the women are dressed in their “stateliest” saris, the men standing together in “stiff cordiality” (68). After a brief reading from the Koran by the groom’s mother, the mood quickly turns light-hearted as the diamond engagement ring is produced, admired, and even joked about: “‘This?’ said Rizwan. ‘But this is glass. Bought in Chor Bazaar for five rupees.’ And he was spanked on the shoulder as everyone roared. Oh was there ever such wit.” (69). At the Mehndi ceremony too, religious rituals quickly give way to the admiration of material gifts and opulent entertainment as the invited guests offer their congratulations: “They were thrilled with my trousseau, they were concerned for the welfare of my mehndi, they were anxious about whether I had found a servant… And when these cares were set aside, they could turn tenderly to the biryani in its silver dishes.” (78-79). In Madras on Rainy Days, the significance of the Mehndi ceremony is explained in the narrative, apparently for the benefit of a western readership:

The longer it stayed on, the deeper the red would be, and the more auspicious my marriage. Inside the delicate leaf painted on my left palm, within the fragile lines, Sameer’s initials. That, too, was auspicious, his name seeping into blood and skin, becoming part of me. It was tradition here for the groom to search for his initials on the wedding night, a silly ritual perhaps intended to provide a natural way for the young couple to touch each other when they had never touched before. (46)

The different textual approaches to the wedding ceremonies reflect not just regional differences but also the different attitudes of the authors based on a number of factors including, perhaps, generation and diasporic experience. Ali and Futehally are both from elite Muslim backgrounds, but Futehally was born in Bombay in 1952 and, with the exception of her postgraduate studies in Britain, lived continuously in India until her death in 2004. Ali, on the other hand, is of a younger generation and a partly diasporic upbringing, having been born in Hyderabad in 1969 and having spent half of each year in India and half in the United States while growing up. These factors, as well as a liberal education at the University of Minnesota, may well be contributing influences which at least partly account for the more stridently feminist tone of her narrative.

While Futehally’s novel constitutes a subtle critique of gendered power inequalities within Indian marriages, Ali’s novel scathingly attacks the institution of arranged marriage itself. As we have seen, Madras on Rainy Days begins with the conflict between Layla and her family over her arranged (read: forced) marriage and then continues with detailed descriptions of a lavish wedding that only adds to her despair. Despite the grand scale of this wedding, the private unhappiness it brings to the bride and groom is expressed and magnified by Sameer’s inability to consummate the marriage. Blaming herself, Layla is only too grateful not to be “thrown out” by Sameer who knows that she is not a virgin, having found the letters from her lover in America. Although she resents the traditional “double standard” of sexual morality, Layla had feared the consequences of her premarital sexual experience being revealed: “If [Sameer] threw me out, it would mean that he found me unsuitable. And an unsuitable wife here, by Old City laws, was a whore, so by those same laws, her father had a right to kill her” (49). If Layla’s premarital sexual experience is taboo in such a traditional milieu, so too is Sameer’s homosexuality, which he keeps secret even from the unsuspecting Layla, though many readers will discern this fact about Sameer before it is revealed in the narrative. Hints are provided through the combination of his impotence, his secretiveness, his frequent and unexplained absences, and above all the behaviour of his close friend Naveed who frequently turns up unexpectedly whenever Layla and Sameer leave the home together.

In contrast to the secret shame and frustration of Layla and Sameer in Madras on Rainy Days, Tara’s pleasure in the consummation of her marriage in Tara Lane is delicately but effectively described (80). However, a note of self-mocking is already discernible in Tara’s narrative voice as she describes the first day of her married life:

I returned with the tea eager to please by being sensible and practical for the rest of my life. I made the tea and laid out clothes and hunted out socks as though nothing else mattered on earth. “Do you have a meeting?” said this housewife-without-a-flaw. “Should I take out a suit?” (82)

Tara’s initially enthusiastic willingness to be servile is partly an expression of her genuine – and understandable – happiness as the bride of a “good match” in a patriarchal society. It is also, arguably, a reaction to the reality of her disempowerment through marriage. Having been a successful student, she is nevertheless given no role and no stake in the family business which is run entirely by men: her father, uncles, brother, and now her new husband. As if to underline this exclusion of women from owning the means of production, her father says to her jokingly at the end of a shopping trip: “Have you spent all your husband’s money?” (149). The reality behind this bantering question is no joke: it is her husband’s money (rather than hers), even though it is her family (rather than his) that owns the business.

The implicit feminist critique of the novel is extended in an interview with the author who explains why Tara, having always loved literature, no longer reads after she gets married:

Everything goes into the task of being a good wife, which gets harder and harder as she finds out more about him. And she is more disillusioned with him and has to control her own emotions also, school her emotions all the time. […] Somehow she no longer has the mental space because the demands that are placed on her emotionally are too great. […] And she is not free enough to read and pursue literature. (Kuortti, 2003: 86-87)

Tara’s endeavour to “school” her emotions is shown in the text to result from bitter experience with her husband Rizwan. For instance, Tara’s servant Katreen is distressed because Rizwan has been hard on her husband and others at the factory – cutting salaries and punishing strike leaders – so Tara timidly brings it up with him: “Today I heard that…well, it’s just silly talk of course…but some of these people seem to say you’re too strict…” (85). Rizwan reacts with cold anger, so Tara immediately backs down, resolving that “never would I forget my place again” (86). And even though all she did was timidly report to him what she had heard, she grovels with apology:

“I’m so sorry,” I begged. “Please. Don’t be angry, please. I’m telling you, I defended…”

Later in the narrative, Tara has learned to be even more deferential toward male authority, reflecting that “I was no longer the sort of wife who would ask questions which were not wanted” (92). Despite her disavowal of the term “feminist”, Futehally concedes that:

Of course there is a very clear acknowledgement of the fact that in Indian marriages women have very little space. […] In the beginning Tara asks Rizwan about the strike. By the time it comes to the actual bribery of the municipal official […] she’s learnt that she must not ask. She waits until it suits him to tell her. (Kuortti, 2003: 85)

So, despite Tara’s awareness that her husband is engaged in bribery, she is given to understand that as a woman this activity is literally none of her business:

All evening I trod the delicate line between being obtrusive and being too obviously docile. And finally, when my fault had been forgotten, when it was silently clear that all the cares of the world rested on men’s shoulders and we had no business to ask or look askance or criticize; when I had made it perfectly plain that I had no opinion at all – only then did I learn that […] the admirable [official] – had stated his price. (150)

Thus, although Tara is outwardly deferential toward her husband, the narrative voice contains an unmistakable note of sarcasm, revealing her growing resentment, not only of her corrupt husband, but also of the patriarchal set-up that completely disempowers her. To add insult to injury, Tara, because of her gender, is shown to be excluded from knowledge and power, strongly discouraged from asking questions, and then criticized for her lack of knowledge:

“Don’t be utterly ridiculous,” said my husband. “Have you learned nothing about the world at all?”

“No, we haven’t.” I spoke with due meekness. (150)

Her answering using the first person plural, suggesting that she speaks for all women, may be her mild way of protesting against the reality that women are often prevented from learning about the world.

As we have seen, the feminist criticism in Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days has a different emphasis, being focused primarily on patriarchal society’s fraught relationship with the female body. Layla views arranged marriage as institutionalized trafficking in women’s bodies, and she deeply resents the physical controls and restrictions imposed upon her because of her gender. She is also aware of women’s collusion in misogynistic beliefs and practices:

Since I was a child, my mother had tried to teach me correct behavior and I followed her wishes when she was watching – covering my hair, hiding my legs, draping a scarf over kurtas to conceal the curve of my breasts, muffling my laughter, whispering, averting my eyes. I always knew I had to do these things because man, as Islam said, was the weaker sex, so it was my responsibility to keep him from becoming aroused. (24)

The ideological belief in the inherent shamefulness of the female body, together with the idea that it should be hidden in order to protect men from temptation, is of course not unique to Islam. In her book Women, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India, Jyoti Puri has noted that Indian women of all backgrounds appear to see the (apparently widespread) problem of sexual harassment as their responsibility; their accounts emphasize their own abilities to restrain the sexual aggression of men through “defensive strategies and avoidance mechanisms” (1999: 96). This, of course, translates into self-imposed restrictions on women’s freedom and mobility in public spaces.

In the western context, too, Jackson and Scott have argued that “men’s desires are seen as uncontrollable urges that women paradoxically are expected both to satisfy and to restrain” (1996: 17-18). Indeed, many western feminists have emphasized the centrality of sexuality in maintaining women’s subordination. The controlled female body as the basis of patriarchy has been analysed not only in the context of marriage, but also in relation to a range of issues from sexual aggression (violence, coercion, harassment), to the historical emphasis on female “chastity” and “purity”, to the contemporary commercialization of women’s bodies (in the media, in entertainment, in advertising). My own view is that in some societies, the renewed emphasis on female “modesty” is partly a reaction to the ubiquity of hypersexualized images of women in many western countries. Some “hijab activists” have argued, for example, that in the west “women are forced to conform to sexualized media images and male-dominated expectations” so that “it is ‘the Western woman’ who is the oppressed and unwitting victim of patriarchy and whose imprisonment can be read from her clothes (or lack of them)” (Tarlo, 2010: 117). Indeed, the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir encourages Muslim women to “assert their otherness from ‘the West’ by shunning Western fashions and adopting exclusively ‘Muslim garments’” (Tarlo, 2010: 104). However, Muslim scholars agree that “there is no one ‘decreed’ Islamic dress. All Muslims may follow their countries’ dress customs, so long as the dress is modest.” (Al-Hibri and El Habti, 2006: 155). “Modesty” is, of course, a culturally determined concept that is open to interpretation, but many Muslims (and non-Muslims) associate bared female flesh with sexual promiscuity.

This is illustrated, for example, in Madras on Rainy Days, in which the alim, hearing that the family divide their time between India and the United States, advises Layla’s mother that “Umrika is not the best place to raise a daughter” (25). The subsequent dialogue, revealing that the defensive Amme agrees with him, is worth quoting at some length:

“Children go there and get lost,” he said. […] “They don’t know better and do as their Umrikan friends. Drink alcohol. Go to dirty bars and dance with the opposite sex. I have heard that some of our girls are even wearing miniskirts and bikinis. […] No shame left at all. This is all a sign the day of judgment is coming.”

“Our daughter is not like that,” Amme said. […] “Her father is very strict with her. No phone calls from American friends, boys or girls. No going out of the house unless it is to attend classes. She’s been very…isolated.”…

“Is this true, Beta?” he asked me.

“Very true,” I said, for it was, and I had always resented my parents for it. Isolation to prevent assimilation. If I happened to stay out late one night or got a phone call from a boy, Dad would beat me to remind me of who I was. (26-27)

Several conclusions emerge from this exchange, in addition to the obvious point that Amme and the alim both see a dissipated lifestyle as the norm for young people in America, implicitly contrasting it with the virtuous lifestyle which they see as the norm, particularly for young women, in India. It is also evident that because of the fear of western moral corruption, some parents in the diaspora impose stricter controls on their daughters than they would in their homeland. This might also be a factor in Amme and Dad’s haste to arrange an early marriage for Layla. The idea that moral virtue is located primarily in female chastity is, of course, not unique to Islam or to India; indeed, the alim’s rhetoric is strikingly similar to that of many Christian fundamentalist preachers in the American heartland where Layla’s family reside when they are not in India.

Layla herself, with her divided upbringing and her feeling of being in between cultures, reflects on her own uncomfortable position in the love–hate relationship between India and the United States:

I had faced this all my life, the way each country held a moral stance over the other. It was as though each nation had its own uniform and I wore the shirt of one, the trousers of the other, and both sides were shooting at me. Oh, the way each culture condemned and complained. India was backward and primitive, exotic. America was morally bankrupt, a cultural colonizer. But I knew this chiding was really a flirtation. For below these criticisms, the truth was that each place held allure for the other, a fascination and curiosity, an attraction and longing. … I had never witnessed such confused and beguiled lovers. (26-27)

If these reflections sound more like the views of the author than those of a frightened, pregnant eighteen-year-old bride, so too does Layla’s awareness of women’s bodies as a battleground in the clash of cultures. Talking about the American influences in Hyderabad, her new husband Sameer says: “Take a look around you, baby, your America has reached even here, the darkest part of India. Tandoori pizza, lamb hamburgers, listen to the Hindi film music. It’s all disco and synthesizers. … Nothing goes uncorrupted, not even you” (121-122). Conscious that he is bitterly referring to her premarital sexual experience, Layla reflects that “It was not possible anymore for him to make even a broad statement about cultural invasion without thinking specifically about my body” (122). Ironically, this conversation takes place with Sameer wearing “western” clothing (tan corduroys and a blue button-down shirt), while Layla wears a chador (120). As Uma Narayan and others have pointed out, what counts as westernization seems to vary considerably with time and place and community, and men seem to be permitted a greater degree of cultural latitude in making changes than women and are less frequently accused of “westernization” (1997: 27-28).

If Madras on Rainy Days suggests that men are given more scope for “westernization” than women, it also points to the greater freedom they enjoy in every aspect of married life, including the freedom to divorce their wives or – in the case of Muslim men – take on additional wives. As Kecia Ali has pointed out, the Qu’ran “does not create the institution of plural marriage but regulates already existing pre-Islamic marriage practices” (2008: 621). That polygamy (more properly polygyny) is permissible was taken for granted by Muslim thinkers until the modern era. Nowadays those who justify polygamy often do so on the grounds that it “represents a better solution to the problem of men’s naturally greater sexual appetites and demand for variety than extramarital affairs or serial divorce which have wreaked such havoc upon Western societies” (Ali, 2008: 620). However, divorce is not forbidden in the Qu’ran; on the contrary, it states very clearly that in a marriage the couple must live together amicably or part in kindness (2:229). One problem, from the point of view of Muslim (and non-Muslim) feminists, is that in many Islamic societies, divorce is mainly a male prerogative. For instance, although India is a secular state, personal law for its Muslim minority is governed by interpretations of sharī-a which make divorce much easier for men than for women. In particular, whereas a Muslim man in India can unilaterally divorce his wife without assigning a reason, a Muslim woman can obtain a divorce only with her husband’s consent and only under specific circumstances. Regardless of who initiated the divorce, alimony is normally only a temporary measure, bringing financial hardship to many women who have always been dependent on their husbands (Narain, 2008: 6).

Madras on Rainy Days pointedly suggests that even if women had equal rights under the law, patriarchal customs and attitudes would still make divorce easier for men. This is recognized even by Layla’s traditional mother-in-law who remarks: “Divorce is always more difficult for women. No matter the circumstance, they are the ones who are blamed” (193). Consequently, Layla’s mother has insisted on maintaining the fiction in Hyderabad that she and her husband are still married and that his second wife is her co-wife because “two women jostling for one man’s attention, for his one pleasure…was the life Amme would have preferred” (44). In thinking about her father’s behaviour and fearing the potential consequences of her own premarital transgression, Layla reflects bitterly on the traditional “double standard” of sexual morality which, again, is not unique to Islam:

I thought how unfair it was that I had acted no differently from him, yet I would be the one punished. Arranged in marriage to one person, choosing another to love. What he did, by Old City laws, was natural for a man, even expected. Islam itself sanctioned four wives, just as it had sanctioned divorce. So easy for a man to release himself: talak, talak, talak, the one word pronounced thrice to undo an entire existence. (77)

Layla also expresses the (author’s) view that in many situations, perhaps the most fundamental obstacle to women’s freedom to release themselves from unsatisfactory marriages, or even to survive on their own, is their constructed dependency:

When Sameer threw me out, I would not dare return here. And, yet, if I took that airline ticket Dad had given me and returned to the US, where would I go? No money of my own, no college degree, and, most of all, no experience – no life ever lived – outside of my mother’s home. (51)

However, as we have seen, Sameer does not throw Layla out. Instead he guards the secret of her premarital transgression, and he genuinely tries to love her. If the feminist criticism in this novel is overt and powerful, the implicit criticism of the ways in which patriarchal society oppresses homosexual men is more muted. Many readers will be struck by Layla’s naiveté before finding out about Sameer’s homosexuality, as well as her subsequent lack of empathy for his predicament. Filled with shame, Sameer is torn between wanting to love Layla, wanting to stay in India with his secret boyfriend Naveed, whom he has loved for years, and wanting to escape to the United States where he will perhaps no longer have to hide his homosexuality. On the other hand, Layla’s exclusive focus on herself is not unusual in an eighteen-year-old, and her despair over her own situation is understandable, particularly because she has fallen in love with Sameer, who can still go out for clandestine meetings with his lover while she herself is incarcerated in the marital home. “As a woman, I had but one option”, she reflects, “to spend my life with my husband, untouched, uncomplaining. These were Old City ethics. Die for not being a virgin, die for marrying the wrong kind of man” (257). Informed of Sameer’s homosexuality, a sympathetic friend offers bitter but realistic advice to Layla:

People will blame you, Layla-bebe. They will even say you made him into the man he is, that you weren’t enough to satisfy him so he was forced the other way. Whatever you do now, you must be careful to look compassionate. You’re a woman. And no matter what Islam says about such men, it’s still your reputation that will get harmed. (247)

Thus we are left in no doubt about the author’s view that if this patriarchal society oppresses homosexual men, it oppresses women even more. This may be for the simple reason that whereas men can hide their homosexuality, women cannot hide their gender. Indeed, there are still such strong prejudices against homosexuality in India that the vast majority of gay men are “married and living with their wives, reflecting the cultural situation in South Asian countries, which obliges all men and women to marry members of the opposite sex” (Thappa et al., 2008: 60). In Islam, the disapproval of homosexuality is both culturally and religiously sanctioned, and Asifa Siraj has argued that “by not discussing homosexuality… the Muslim community implicitly believes that it does not exist or that it is merely ‘a symptom of westernization’” (2006: 214). Given this belief that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice rather than an inborn orientation, a woman in Layla’s position can be blamed for failing to “cure” her husband of his homosexual behaviour.

Although Madras on Rainy Days is an unashamedly feminist novel written by a Muslim woman, it does not support the popular myth that Islam is a particularly misogynistic religion. On the contrary, it shows women to be oppressed by patriarchal customs and not by Islam itself. Indeed, the repeated references to “Old City laws” and “Old City ethics” emphasize the multicultural nature of oppressive tradition in an area of Hyderabad populated mostly by Muslims but also by Hindus. Moreover, the devout Muslim characters in the novel are shown to be much kinder and more compassionate than the secular ones. For example, Layla’s religious father-in-law, Ibrahim, is portrayed as gentle and loving, in contrast to her own harsh (secular) authoritarian father. In Sameer’s home, where prayers are said five times per day and the Qur’an is recited together every Friday morning, Layla feels loved and valued and accepted for the first time in her life.

Although Islam is not specifically criticized, it is difficult to ignore the novel’s portrayal of India as a place where women are relentlessly oppressed. As Jaspal Kaur Singh argues in her discussion of Madras on Rainy Days, “empowerment for the diasporic Indian woman comes from leaving the home spaces and Indian cultural practices” (2008: 193). It is a fair assessment, especially given the novel’s ending where Layla finally runs away from her marital home, leaving the means for Sameer to escape to the United States too, if he so chooses. However, some traditional cultural practices are embraced in the narrative – in particular the wearing of the chador, which makes many women, including Layla by the end, feel protected and empowered. As she finally escapes, she articulates her awareness of “my body hidden and safe under the chador, belonging only to me” (322).

In some ways the narratives of Tara Lane and Madras on Rainy Days move in opposite trajectories. For instance, the bride in Tara Lane is initially pleased with her arranged marriage and delighted with her bridegroom, but becomes progressively disillusioned, not only with Rizwan himself, but also with her lack of power within the marriage and within her circumscribed world. As the author herself explains, “the whole thing is written from the point of view of an aware woman who is none the less outside the world of action. She sees everything, in the factory, and everywhere, but she has no say” (Kuortti, 2003: 85). The narrative of Madras on Rainy Days, by contrast, begins with the protagonist desperately opposed to her arranged marriage but subsequently falling in love with her kind, attractive husband who, tragically, wants to love her too but cannot. Despite Layla’s love for Sameer and his family, she has to leave him in order to avoid a life of frustration and misery for both of them. Tara, on the other hand, has no option but to stay in her unhappy marriage, having never experienced or imagined any life for herself outside of the patriarchal family.

Several conclusions emerge from this comparison between Tara Lane and Madras on Rainy Days. Both novels challenge popular stereotypes of Muslim women in India, which, as Hasan and Menon have argued, have overemphasized the role of religion in Muslim life: “In this perspective, Muslims were typically seen as a monolithic entity in terms of an Islam that is all-pervasive and primarily prescriptive, ignoring data on the heterogeneity of Muslim communities, their culture, and their social organization” (2004: 2). Because the protagonists of both novels are elite Muslim women, the different social customs in the narratives reveal striking cultural differences between Hyderabad and Bombay, indicating the importance of regional variation in the lives of Muslim women from the same social class. Both novels contain strong feminist criticism, with Madras on Rainy Days focusing on patriarchal control of women’s bodies and Tara Lane focusing on women’s exclusion from power within the family and within the economy. Although the lack of choice is made more explicit from the outset in Madras on Rainy Days, the often coercive nature of arranged marriage is suggested in both novels. Finally, it is notable that both texts suggest that women are oppressed not by Islam, but by cultural attitudes and practices which are not essentially religious in nature.