Anita Desai's In Custody: A Critical Appraisal by Tandon Neeru

Author:Tandon, Neeru [Tandon, Neeru]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-02-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Critical Appreciation of the Novel In Custody

Art could be responded to, understood, absorbed, identified with, but mystery it would still remain.

—Jasbir Jain

In Custody really marks a turning point in Desai’s career as it shows a significant broadening of the horizon of her views and ideas. It is known for dealing with male consciousness, which has not yielded the tense psychological drama of vitality and vibrancy, one of the distinctive features of Desai’s earlier novels. The novel takes up different issues like language, controversy, plight of vanishing urdu poetry, lecturer’s life and above all male psychology. Earlier her male characters subserved her design of being mere anchors to the plumb-lines into the feminine.

The novel reveals the story of the unsuspecting and worldly Deven Sharma, who is moved by an idea of creating the work of his life, but is unluckily frustrated by his own helplessness. The strained relationship between Deven and his wife Sarla is suggestively presented. Apparently, Deven’s protest against her disappointment seems to be the outcome of his hurt male ego. He is over-aggressive in his behaviour at home, though outside it he is seek and humble. Deven feels so deserted by his fate that he censures himself for his insufficiency to make any excellence in life.

To Deven Nur is a significant poet not because he makes things immediate but because he removes them to a position where they become bearable. “That was what Nur’s verse did—placed frightening and enexplicable experiences live time and death at a point where they could be seen and studied, in safety” (p. 54).

Decades ago, when a fledgling Salman Rushdie was starting out as a writer, one of the hands that guided and encouraged him was of Anita Desai’s. Now the superstar writer pays his debt to her in a “Foreword” to Anita Desai’s novel In Custody :

When I think of Anita Desai I see her most clearly as a figure standing, as an equal, beside Jane Austen, that other great Indian novelist, creator of brave, brilliant women trapped by conservative social mores into becoming mere husband hunters, women who would be very recognizable to denizens of, for example, the Delhi of clear Light of Day. And because while she is wholly Indian she is also half-European I think of her in the company of other insider—outsiders such as the white Caribbean novelist Jean Rhys, or the half-sikh, half-Hungarian Paniter Amrita Sher-Gil. Nor should Anita Desai be placed in exclusively female company. As In Custody makes plain, she has cared as much about, and been shaped as deeply by the great (male) Urdu poets as by any woman’s poems.

In Custody was, therefore, a novel of transformation for its author, a doubly remarkable piece of work, because in this magnificent book Desai chose to write not of solitude but of friendship, of the perils and responsibilities of joining oneself to others rather than holding oneself apart. And at the same time she wrote, for the first time, a very public fiction, shedding the reserve

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