A woman?s take on women writing about other women is bound to evoke interest. But the task of ?analyzing generations of Indian women negotiating their personal spaces across a typology of homes through fiction? was never going to be easy. However the very idea and attempt at mapping ?how women have appropriated and interacted with space in havelis, bunglows and apartments? is remarkable. Geetanjali Singh Chanda?s Indian Women in the house of Fiction is a valuable addition to the genre of nonfiction writings on women. Chanda does a fine job of exploring the complexities and nuances of women?s life in a haveli by handpicking suitable case studies from the ?Indo-English literature?. Her emphasis on the ?courtyard? as a location that at once serves as a space of confinement and freedom for women seems justified by the explanation that women could feel free but only in that restricted square of open space.
Chanda narrates with conviction how the arrival of ?bunglow? architecture marked a phase of critical transition for men in India, signifying their aspiration for and adaptation of English lifestyle while role of women even in that ?liberal? space remained untransformed. Women living in bunglows but rooted in Indian tradition were perceived in the national psyche as compensating for a change that the social fabric was undergoing as a result of cultural invasion by the British.
It is while probing women?s interaction with space in apartments that the author?s voice lacks definitive authority. It could be attributed partially to the lag between literature and contemporary times or it could be that unlike havelis and bunglows which have a definite underlying class connotation of higher echelons of social strata, apartments are confused spaces which could either inhabit one end of the spectrum, the lower middle class or the extreme other end. If the author hadn?t confined her scope (akin to Indian women) to the clearly demarcated boundary of ?Indo-English fiction revolving around Indian women penned by women writers?, and chosen to liberate herself from the self erected prison, she could have included Rohinton Mistry?s narratives to interrogate ?womenspace? in apartments. Similarly Chanda could have enriched the discourse by sprinkling examples from regional writings.
One sorely misses Ismat Chugtai amongst others in the book. Also ?kitchen? and ?bathroom?, two intimate indispensable spaces for women within the domestic layout, have remained grossly unaddressed. Although the author repeatedly refers to images of parallel lives of maids and mistress, she has refrained from devoting a separate section for women?s interaction with space (or the lack of it) in makeshift houses or chawls. This could be reflective of the absence of such themes in Indo-English literature with its elitist tones and it could be indicative of the reality that certain voices even while having numerical majority remain marginalised and unheard in their original milieu.