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The Bank Accountant's wife is an orthodox and homely woman like Raman's aunt. She reacts to Raman's proposed marriage with Daisy in the way his aunt does. Her objection is that he is marrying a woman who is out of their caste. She tells Raman that he has spurned a proposal in the last days to marry a girl who will have rought him a good dowry. Her conventional views about marriage are put forth by her to Raman unhesitatingly. She says:
"You are a good boy," she said and added, "You will go to heaven for this, I am sure. You are a gem, don't I know, but evil company warps - that is why it is important that one should marry at the proper time and age. Nothing can then go wrong."
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| Bank Accountant's Wife |
Continuing her peroration on the ethics of marriage and making a sly dig at Raman's fascination for Daisy, she remarks that his old aunt is responsible for the misery she has brought on her head because she should not have let him roam about freely like a well-fed colt, rather he should have tied him in a wed-lock with some girl much earlier. In this way, the catastrophic situation created by Daisy-Raman association will have been averted. The Accountant's wife's reactions to Raman's getting married out of caste and religion are thoroughly on the traditional line of thought. She believes in observing the customs and rituals which are sanctioned since generations by the middle-class society in India. A deviation from them is like committing a sacrilegious act.
Both Raman's old aunt and the Bank Accountant's middle aged wife share many common traits of character. They represent the underlying imperturbable and self-complacent elan of Malgudian tradition-abiding society. They remain immune to, and immutable self-confined against the onslaughts of modern thoughts and ways of life imported in the ambience of Malgudi by outsiders who land in this place, have a stay here for a certain period and then depart after causing short-lived rumblings and concussions in the normal, placid, calm and smooth run of life of the place.
Daisy and Raman's old aunt, in this novel, represent Narayan's recurrent theme of juxtaposition of modernity and tradition. Daisy's outlook is belligerently and intransigently modern. She is individualistic to the core. She has avowedly liberated herself from all the shackles imposed by formal traditional institution's of the Hindu society such as parenthood (family) and marriage. Both of these institutions symbolise the social unit of a family life which constitutes the bed-rock of the superstructure of social fabric in the Indian society. She has made a bonfire of all these social trappings, personal conveniences and taboos of food, sex and mode of living for the sake of a relentless crusade for the attainment of greater, national goal of Family Planning. The old aunt's way of life, sphere of activity and her greatest pleasure in fulfilling the daily chores of a homely life represent a thoroughly different world which looks as much strange to Daisy as Daisy's world of modernity and unconventionality look startling to the old aunt. There exists an unbridgeable generation-gap between the two. They stand poles apart from each other.
No other woman delineated in Narayan's novel is comparable with Daisy's fervent passion for maintaining a separate, totally liberated and independent individuality. She is a class in herself, a finished product of Woman's Lib. movement. Her sexual indulgence with Raman is nothing more than a casual happening in her life which she washes off her mind with astonishing normalcy and ease. The pre-marital relationship causes no moral dilemma for her which is just contrary to the outlook of a puritanic and tradition-minded Indian woman. The traits of her personality lying in her total disregard of social institutions and her extreme individualism lend to her a larger than life stature.
Savitri's short-lived but significant rebellion manifested in The Dark Room against the age-old, well-entrenched, mediaeval oppressive regime of the unchallenged social supremacy of man over woman sows the tiny seed of Women's Lib. movement in its nascent and embryonic state which reaches the point of its culmination in Daisy's no- holds-barred emancipated individualism. The Painter of Signs presents a changed scenario of reversal of roles of female and male protagonists. Confronted with Daisy's dash, drive, unyielding commitments and domineering assertiveness, Raman looks dwarfed into a timid, submissive, vacillating, evasive, diffident, lack-lustre and cringing male protagonist. His so-called rationalism and self-proclaimed high-sounding but hollow ideal of establishing the 'Age of Reason' in the world end ludicrously in his being continually haunted by lecherous and sensual thoughts about female protagonist, Daisy. The arrogant, autocratic, tyrannical and wilful Ramani of The Dark Room remains now no more than a relic of his extinct species of male protagonists.