This post is based on a recent article published in the Asian Studies Review. The article can be read here and is currently available open access to all readers.
The number of single people in India is on the rise over the past years, a development attributed to increasing educational opportunities and falling adolescent marriage rates as well as more women choosing to be single. This is a crucial and potentially paradigmatic shift in Indian society, where marriage remains an inevitable part of one’s life and integral to a woman’s social respectability. Single women in particular appear to trigger cultural anxieties, being seen as symptomatic of a shift away from traditional and family-centric ideals that define social coherence and national identity. Scholarship has pointed out that attitudes towards single people – single women in particular – are marked by cultural stereotypes, gendered prejudices, and concerns about middle-class values.
This article in Asian Studies Review was born out of interest in the cultural discourse around singleness in India. It looks at two short stories from Indian English fiction, namely Jayant Kaikini’s ‘City without Mirrors’ (1999, translated in 2017) and Anita Desai’s ‘The Rooftop Dwellers’ (2000), which depict an India at the turn of liberalisation. Locating these narratives in the larger contexts of middle-class urban experiences and gendered perceptions of those ‘unattached’ to a partner, the article is interested in critically juxtaposing representations of the single woman’s and man’s different experiences in the urban scene.
The city becomes important here not just as the setting for these narratives but also as a space that is interlinked with notions of modernity and progress, drawing to it an aspirational crowd who come seeking jobs. Desai’s ‘The Rooftop Dwellers’, from the collection Diamond Dust (2000), depicts the struggles of Moyna who is a young woman working in Delhi as she tries to secure a suitable place to stay in the city. Kaikini’s ‘City without Mirrors’ included in No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories (2017) follows a single middle-aged office worker in Mumbai named Satyajit whose uneventful life is disrupted by a marriage proposal he receives for the 39-year-old Shalini from her father.
The first section of the article looks at the gendered challenges thrown up in navigating the city in the selected texts. The city is perceived as holding the potential for greater freedom and self-expression for the woman who might benefit from its anonymity and its amenities. For Moyna, the city is an ‘escape’ from the watchful eyes of her family. When she moves into a rooftop home, she initially thinks that she can find freedom in her own space on the terrace. Yet, palpable gendered power relations structure the space of the rooftop, which places the single woman at a disadvantage where she has to constantly remain vigilant in order to keep herself safe.
While Satyajit in Kaikini’s narrative is intimately acquainted with the city’s many streets, is free to loiter in its lines, and does not worry about being surveilled or robbed in his home on the roof, these concerns haunt Moyna’s life in the city as a woman. The subversive space that the terrace could be in her imagination turns into a site of surveillance monitored by her landlords. They are concerned about her being ‘too unattached’, her singleness and youth being a disruption to the harmony and unity of the bourgeois community and by extension the moralities of middle-class life. The construction of the single woman as a dangerous entity is represented through instances of discontent and distancing sprinkled throughout the narrative. It also portrays the complex process of adjustment the woman undertakes as a major factor to her sustained existence in the city and integral to the process of claiming citizenship through accessing urban public spaces.
Cultural perceptions of single women and the meanings that get attached to them are the focus of the second section of the article. In India, many women are circumstantially single for reasons including being too educated, not being conventionally beautiful, or having a ‘tarnished public sexual reputation’ as scholar Sarah Lamb has argued. While Moyna in Desai’s story is young and thus is seen as disruptive or dangerous due to her singleness, Shalini Sen in Kaikini’s story is in her late-thirties, making her positionality different from Moyna’s. She is conspicuously absent in the narrative, the reader encountering her solely through her father’s descriptions of her as an ideal bride and Satyajit’s imaginings about her.
The notion that the older single woman does not have the privilege of choice or agency to decide for herself is underlined here, marriage being the only legitimate path forward that will give her any social standing. While Satyajit does not think about himself as lonely or deprived, his elaborate imaginings of Shalini paint her as a lonely woman who is ashamed of her unmarried-ness and is reclusive because of it. Loneliness becomes ascribed as a debilitating force to the single woman and in turn dictate how she is perceived in heteronormative social imaginations. Satyajit, although also older and unmarried, does not face the same issues as he possesses the power to choose and is also the default urban citizen whose aloneness does not render him helpless in the city. However, the narrative contests this image of the helpless woman through Shalini’s chosen absence at the end of the story when she does not turn up to meet Satyajit, not succumbing to the societal pressures she faces. Her physical absence within the narrative then becomes a point of agency.
The article thus argues that a sense of ‘aloneness’ haunts the narratives as a slippery slope, where it is imbued with connotations of loneliness for older single women and indecency and threat for younger women, making both states undesirable for the maintenance of the status quo. These constructions ironically also further marginalise the woman by marking her as ‘unsafe’ for the wellbeing of the community. Single women exist in the Indian city through complex processes of adjustments and risks, negotiating citizenship, access, and community daily. They exist in an interstitial space between the traditional and the modern, also signalling the formation of new social identities inflected by the contestations and possibilities that critiques of gendered singleness entails.
The narratives also leave room for hope amidst their ambivalences as they show women asserting their own voices, embodying the dilemmas that single women who are unattached by choice or circumstance reckon with in contemporary times. By juxtaposing the contradictory experiences of gendered singleness in the city and the connotations of male and female singlehood, the article critiques overarching patriarchal frameworks that construct single women as peripheral entities and highlights the notes of subversive agency that nevertheless appear in social scripts and cultural representations.
This post is based on a recent article published in the Asian Studies Review. The article can be read here and is currently available open access to all readers.
Image: Photo by Shreesha bhat on Unsplash
