NIGHT OF THE SCORPION

                                                                                                                         Nissim Ezekiel

           

            Night of the Scorpion is a poem written by Nissim Ezekiel who is one of the leading Indian poets. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award. The poem depicts two levels of understanding. One describes mother’s selfless love for her children. On the second level, the poem presents a charming picture of the innocent world of illiterate and superstitious villagers of India.

            The poem opens with the poet’s reminiscence of a childhood experience. One night, when there was a steady rain, a scorpion had crept into the poet’s house. It crawled behind a bag of rice. It stung his mother and went again into the rain. All the neighboring farmers came like swarms of bees. They uttered the names of God to minimize the movement of the Scorpion. They believed that the poison would move in the mother's veins with the movements of scorpion. They began to search for it with candles and lanterns. They could not find the scorpion.

            The poor farmers said that the sins of her earlier birth would be washed away with this suffering  and it would reduce the misfortunes of her next birth. They also felt that the sin gained in this birth would be diminished by this pain. They said that poison would also purify her physical and spiritual ambition. His mother was lying on the ground wriggling her body out of pain.

            The poet’s father was a septic rationalist. He had been trying all kinds of  powders, herbs and mixtures. He even poured a little paraffin upon the bitten toe and put a match. However, after twenty hours the pain subsided. The poet’s mother thanked God, that the Scorpion spared her children and had chosen to sting her.

            The poem, thus, brings out the mother's pure love for her children and also describes the superstitions and ignorant practices followed by the villagers.

Character of Dr. Primrose

Dr.Charles Primrose is the protagonist of Goldsmith’s novel The Vicar of Wakefield. He is the narrator of the story. He is virtuous, intelligent moral and religious. He is a loving husband of Deborah and a caring father of six children. He considers that all the members of his family are “equally generous, credulous, simple and inoffensive.”

Dr.Primrose has fortune of his own. He donates his small clergyman’s salary to orphans and widows. He never cares for money. His unconcern for money is revealed in the fact that he has entrusted all his money and property with an unscrupulous merchant who finally deceives him. When he loses his money and is compelled to live with a meagre salary of fifteen pounds a year, he readily accommodates himself to the new environment. He often advises his daughters to avoid the traps of worldly pleasures and comforts.

Dr.Primrose is a committed vicar. As he keeps no assistants, he personally knows everyone in the parish. One of his favourite topics to discuss is that of matrimony.  He has written and published many pamphlets arguing that a husband or wife should never remarry if his or her partner dies.  He believes that a person should remain chaste in his or her beloved’s memory. When the vicar fails to pay his annual rent to Squire Thornhill and is put in prison, he regularly delivers sermons to the fellow prisoners. He tells them that the suffering on this world is only a preparation for the joy in the next world.  

The priest is a man of principle. He doesn’t want to compromise his ideology for anything. He argues vehemently with Mr. Wilmot against remarriage fully knowing that he is a polygamist. Even one of his relative warns him that the argument will affect his son’s marriage. But Dr.Primrose angrily cries that he will not “relinquish the cause of truth”.  Similarly, when he is in prison, he boldly attacks the criminal laws that they punish only the weak and not the corrupt. He criticises that these laws are inefficient to reform the sinners. He remains unshaken even during times of calamities.

Though Dr.Primrose usually has a sweet, benevolent temper, he does not possess much worldly wisdom. He is often deceived by the appearances and behavior of those around him.  He often misjudges his family’s supposed friends and neighbours. He has a poor opinion about Mr.Burchell. He discourages Mr. Burchell’s love for Sophia thinking that he is morally weak.  Later, it is only Mr. Burchell, (the disguised Sir William Thornhill) who rescues Dr.Primrose from all his sufferings and sorrows. However, despite all his faults, he is affectionate, faithful, loving, patient, and essentially good-natured.

            Dr. Charles Primrose, the vicar, can be compared to  Job in the Bible, who suffers and suffers but never loses faith, and whose continued devotion is ultimately rewarded by God.

SMALL SCALE REFLECTIONS ON A GREAT HOUSE

                                    A.K.Ramanujan

            A.K.Ramanujan is a well known Indian poet writing in English.  He has a rare capacity to bring to life even the smallest details of his subject.  This is obviously revealed in his poem Small Scale Reflections on a Great House. The poem is nostalgic in tone about a great house in which the poet spent his childhood

            The poet begins the poem humorously by stating that things that entered his grand parents’ house never went out.  Lame cows that entered the house were provided with shelter and gifted with a name.  Library books once borrowed from libraries never found their way back.  They remained only to serve as breeding homes for insects and worms. Dishes that belonged to the neighbours for distributing sweets were never returned.  Servants once employed, never left the house. Gramophones continued to remain there. On a distressing note, the poet says that diseases like epilepsy that once entered the blood continued to haunt the generations to come. Sons-in law who came to the house were asked to stay back to check accounts or to teach arithmetic to the nieces of the family. Women who came as wives of some male members never left the house.

            The poet then goes on to say that something that went out of the house did find their way back.  Bales of cotton carried to some textile mills returned processed as packets of cloth to be worn on special occasions by the members of the family. Letters posted by the members of the family found their way back as the postmen failed to locate the precise address. Ideas that originated in the house conveyed to outsiders returned to the house as gossip. The daughters who got married returned back home as widows. Sons of the house who had run away returned as fathers as their wives had given birth to boys.

            The poet ends the poem by saying that one thing that left the house never returned back. i.e. life.  A member of the family who ran away from the house never came back alive. A nephew who had left the house to join army had been killed in the border and only his corpse was brought home.

            Thus A.K.Ramanujan describes the people, things and events associated with the great house.

           

CHAUCER’S PORTRAYAL OF THE SHIPMAN IN THE PROLOGUE

Chaucer’s descriptive skill in the delineation of human character is evident in the portraiture of the pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales. He portrays his characters with precision and accuracy. He often makes use of the details of physical and moral attributes of the characters to describe them.

The Shipman is one of the pilgrims to Canterbury. He hails from Dartmouth. He rides on a big strong horse. He wears a coarse gown down to the knee. Around his neck and under his arm he had a dagger hanging on a lace.  The hot summer had made his complexion all brown.

The shipman is a skilled sailor. He is good at calculating the tides, navigating the stars and bringing the ship safely to the harbour. There was no one from Hull to Carthage who knows more than the Shipman about the harbours. He knows all the harbours and every creek In Britain and in Spain. He was also bold and cautious in his undertakings. In his career, he has seen many a tempest.

Chaucer describes the Shipman as ‘a good fellow’ ironically as he has certain villainous characters. He steals Bordeaux wine from the merchants when they are in sleep on the ship. He has no regard for a scrupulous conscience. If he fights with any one, he throws his enemy into the sea and sends him to ‘afterlife’

Chaucer’s Shipman is representative of the seamen of the day. The reason for Chaucer  to include the Shipman among his pilgrims is that Chaucer wants to show the newly emerging medieval middle class as a result of the developing mercantile ships.

Masks and Disguises

MASKS AND DISGUISES

Shashi Deshpande

          Shashi Deshpande is one of the prominent voices to arrive on the scene of Indian literature in English.  She has created a place for herself in the galaxy of Indian women novelists in English.  She excels in projecting a realistic picture of Indian middle-class educated women, who though financially independent are confronting the dilemma of existence.

            Shashi Deshpande’s Masks and Disguises is taken from her famous collection of essays titled Writing from the Margin and Other Essays. This is a representative essay of Deshpande in which she enumerates the problems of women in general and the women writers in particular.  She argues that the women writers wear masks and disguises in order to hide their real self.

            Deshpande begins her essay by recollecting an incident that happened in her life in the past.  She was scolded by her parents for writing her name in a public building.  As a child, Shashi Deshpande did not know why she was rebuked but later when she came across a passage in Mahabharata she understood the reason for it. In the passage, Draupadi was advising Satyabhama to hide her thoughts and remain silent to win the love of her husband, Krishna.

            This advice of Draupadi makes Shashi Deshpande to get upset.  She argues that this is an injustice done to women folk. She says that as a writer she has to think and share those thoughts with the world.  But the age old customs and tradition advocate the women not to reveal their thoughts in public. Another problem which women writers face is that whatever they write is associated with themselves.  They are identified with the characters they create. Deshpande is of the opinion that it is easier to write women’s problems in general but harder to write of a specific woman’s sexual abuse by her husband.

Shashi Deshpande observes that the way men and women are looked at and the way their actions are judged in the world are different.  The reactions to their writings are also different. Devadas, the hero of Sharat Chandra’s novel, is considered as an admirable hero when he drinks himself to death because of failure in love. Deshpande asks if Parvati does the same thing will the world give the same status to her.  She is quite sure that Parvati would just become a debased figure.

Shashi Deshpande says that women are given less space or no space in the outer world.  They are confined within the domestic walls. The moment the women step out of their self is the moment of revelation and pure knowledge for them. This is what Jaya, the protagonist of Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence does in the novel.

The early women writers believed that telling things slant was one of the defensive mechanisms by which they could save them from sharp criticism. Today also many women writers follow different techniques to escape criticism. Some use the term ‘Anonymous’ and some others use ‘By a Lady’ .  Shashi Deshpande calls such techniques as mask and disguises.

Women writers prefer to write only poetry and fiction because they help them to make them partly invisible.  This is not possible in an autobiography.  In an autobiography neither masks nor disguises can be used.  But the autobiographies of an early era written by women writers kept the woman writers in the background foregrounding their counter parts. But the Women Liberation Movement and its struggle against the patriarchal society had shaken off the rigid social restraint imposed on women and gave much freedom to women writers as well.  The autobiographies of Sunita Deshpande and Kamala Padhye, wives of eminent men have been more open about their feelings, more analytical about their marriages and often critical about their husbands.

            The most difficult thing for the women writers to write about in public is sex.  Shashi Deshpande recollects that she felt very uncomfortable when she wrote her short story ‘The Intrusion’ which deals about a woman’s first experience with a man.  Many forget the fact that sex is as much part of women’s lives as it is of men’s.  Language  is also a problem and a disguise for women writers.  Many women prefer to write in another language as it gave them a freedom of expression and a shield to protect them from slings and arrows of their own men.

            Shashi Deshpande finally concludes the essay be saying that today a few women have managed to break the barriers and remove their masks and disguises.  They are no longer silent but are bold enough to articulate their deepest feelings, their dreams and frustrations. Shashi Deshpande is quite optimistic that soon many others would also remove their masks and show their real self.