Type-cast roles in Anita Desai’s "Where shall we go this summer"

Eating, breathing, working and sleeping are not the only activities for which God created woman. If a woman were to spend her married life in complete servitude with a notion that Nature has allotted to her a capacity to love her husband and rear children who would one day be exemplary citizens, then that life would be a barren existence. An existence that is totally devoid of creativity and experimentation is pathetic and yet it is still what Indian males expect their women to be. Anita Desai’s Where shall we go this summer illustrates this point convincingly. Anita Desai has chosen ‘Sita’ as the name for her heroine in this novel because, for the Indian consciousness, Sita stands for the typical Indian woman who is pious, beautiful and loyal to her husband and these are the qualities of Lord Rama’s wife Sita in the Ramayana. Mythology has the uncanny habit of planting deeply rooted ideas and concepts in the minds of people. It is very hard for a generation to forget this image planted in the collective unconscious realm (As Jung would describe it). One cannot forget any incident overnight and how much so for a generation to forget the heroes and heroines of mythology! Bearing children, whether the woman desires for it or not, seems to be the order of the day in Where shall we go this summer . Bearing the fifth child becomes the point of contention for Sita and it is as if each child’s birth and arrival at the homestead reinforces the fact that Sita is destined to a life of drudgery. Sita goes to the island in search of freedom and instead confronts nothing that is very different from what she experienced in the city. She flees into wilderness to find her wild side but the island disappoints her by pointing out the barrenness in her life through a very uneventful life. It is a disappointment of many sorts in the sense, Sita becomes more acutely aware of her barrenness in the island more than what she felt during her stay in the city. In other words, It is a thwarted escape, an escape into another kind of prison; an escape from a prison made of crude metal bars into a prison made of golden bars.