© 2024 IJRAR April 2024, Volume 11, Issue 2 www.ijrar.

org (E-ISSN 2348-1269, P- ISSN 2349-5138)

Narratives of Female Aging in Indian Children’s

Literature
Sudiksha Singh
MA
Department of English
Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India

Abstract: An attempt to understand how does young-adult literature portray the females in their active
phases i.e pre-menopause, how much they accept or reject filiation their parents ‘culture) and affiliation (the
culture of neighbouring nations (the kind of feminism), what are the narratives met with such female characters
who have survived the dominance of those in power and provided with nothing but marginal position. The
paper aims to dig beneath the contemporary apparent treatment met with female characters who have
descended the peak time of their life i.e. teenage, adult, marriage and motherhood (post-menopausal phase of
life) and stay at the periphery of the family and societal space and that the centre is occupied by those section
of females who can voice out opinions, demand rights and protests against those who sideline them through
careful study of Munshi Premchand’s The Old Aunt.
The paper explores the common defence strategies that includes denial (the refusal to accept the
upsetting reality), displacement (the directing of anger toward people or things that feel unthreatening) and
sublimation (and distracting of one’s thoughts by engaging in physical or entertainment activity) and analyze
the fissures and nuances present in the contemporary feminist studies that talk about power and equality to be
shared between male and female and fails to actually acknowledge the violence and trauma inflicted to the
females and which goes unnoticed as they find no seat but marginalized positions and find no recognition or
place.
Keywords: young-adult literature, literary gerontology, post-menopause, marginality, reifungsroman
The emergence of consumerism, often equated with modernity, was gradually giving birth to a more
individualistic society. Social values were fast changing. Emotions like empathy, fellow feelings and
benevolence which were formerly characteristics of the community life were fast becoming things of the past.
Self-centrism and unhealthy competition became part and parcel of the highly individualistic ‘modern’ outlook
that requires power to fulfil the budding necessities of contemporary cultural spaces. The contemporary culture
of Indian feminism with hybridized realities is symbolic of changing façade of present social structures and
spaces.
“No one should be alone in old age he [Santiago] thought, But it is unavoidable.” (The Old Man and
the Sea, 1952)
Aging people in Young-Adult literature have persistently been presented as inactive and bland,
roaming around in a doubtful limbo relegated to looking on from the periphery at exciting life dramas
experienced exclusively by characters who are young and have the privilege of exploring their life
comparatively more than the characters who are old.
In Indian literature for instance, The Old Aunt (Boodhi Kaki), a short story by Munshi Premchand
characterises the old aunt as a marginalised figure:

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It was the pre-wedding ceremony of Buddhiram’s eldest son, Mukhram, and the celebration was
organized for that reason. Women were singing inside the house while Rupa was busy preparing a feast. There
were large vessels on the stoves, in which delicious food was getting cooked for the guests; a tantalizing aroma
spread in the house. The old aunt was sitting dejectedly in her room and the aroma reaching her nostrils made
her restless. She was troubled by all kinds of gloomy thoughts: “It isn’t likely they will serve me food; it is so
late, yet no one has come with the food; it seems everyone has finished their meals and nothing is left for me.”
These gloomy thoughts made the aunt miserable, and she wanted to wail. But she held back her tears for fear
of desecrating such a pious event. (The Old Aunt)
The aged play insignificant roles and the roles and activities they do engage in do not require mental
agility (Barnum, 1977). They are presented as ‘limited, incapable and sometimes to be pitied’ (Ansello, 1977).
Even the prestigious Caldecott and Newberry Award winning books have not portrayed older characters
dealing with everyday problems of life; also lack of vividness in descriptions of older people and their lives
is a common transaction (Robin, 1977). Old age may be conceived of as ‘Other’ in youth-obsessed Western
culture, ‘a foreign country with an unknown language’ in May Sarton’s suggestive phrase (As We Are Now,
1973). Literary representations of older people, here, more importantly of aging female beyond 50 years of
age, both shape and have the potential to counter our ideas about age and ageing. It may also help us to
recognize the subjectivity of those who are already ‘older’ (since age is often understood relationally) and to
understand the ways in which age and ageing are culturally constructed. On the one hand, the decreased social
and physical mobility of older persons might naturally lead one to assume that they have little to offer
regarding exciting tales of adventures or community machinations, excepting, of course, those heard from
other sources. Their days of adventure supposedly having come and gone, replaced by what society often
assumed were slow, quiet, pensive days in empty houses, elderly persons likely had little else to offer an
audience besides reminiscences on bygone days. On the other hand, an old narrator is a convenient framing
device, allowing an author to easily preserve the relatability of a first-person narrator while still providing the
semiomniscience of hindsight that often otherwise only comes with a third-person narrator. As Looser and
Chase have argued, old age is, in fact, perhaps the ideal state for a narrator, as it provides the emotional
distance, wisdom, and perspicacity that much moralistic nineteenth-century fiction desired (19; 114).
Consequently, even older narrators seemed to bolster the notion that the later stages of life are less eventful
and interesting — narration in old age was often merely an apparatus by which an author could present a
compelling love-plot or adventure narrative of younger days as in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Real Durwan (Lahiri,
1993):
It was with this voice that she enumerated, twice a day as she swept the stairwell, the details of her
plight and losses suffered since her deportation to Calcutta after Partition. At that time, she maintained, the
turmoil had separated her from her husband, four daughters, a two-storybrick, house, a rosewood almari and
a number of coffer boxes whose skeleton keys she still wore, along with her life savings, tied to the the of her
sari…. And so, by the times he reached the second-floor landing, she had already drawn to the whole building
attention the menu of her third daughter’s wedding night. We married her to a school principal. The rice was
cooked in rosewater. The mayor was invited. Everybody washed their fingers in pewter bowls…. Mustard
prawns were steamed in banana leaves. Not a delicacy was spared. Not that this was an extravagance for us.
At our house, we ate goat twice a week. We had a pond on our property, full of fish. A man came to pick our
dates and guavas. Another clipped hibiscus…. Whether there was any truth to Boori Ma’s litanies no one
could be sure. For one thing, every day, the perimeters of her former estate seemed to double, as did the
contents of her almari and coffer boxes. No one doubted she was a refugee; the accent in her Bengali made
that clear. Still, the residents of this particular flat-building could not reconcile Boori Ma’s claims to prior
wealth alongside the more likely account of how she had crossed the East Bengal border, with the thousands
of others, on the back of a truck, between sacks of hemp. (Lahiri, 1993)
In her book, The Coming of Age (Beauvoir, 1972), an inaugural work on study of scandalous treatment
of aging spanning across thousand years and a variety of different nations and cultures to provide a clear and
alarming picture of “Society’s secret shame”—the separation and distance from our communities that the old
must suffer and endure. The questions raised in the book are: what do the words elderly, old, and aged really
mean? How are they used by society, and how in turn do they define the generation that we are taught to
respect and love but instead castigate and avoid? Most importantly, how is our treatment of this generation a
reflection of our society’s values and priorities?

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“The least debatable of all the phenomena of our day, the surest in its progress, the easiest to foresee
far ahead and perhaps the most pregnant with consequences is the ageing of the population”, says Sauvy
(1948). With the gradual evolution the literature of contemporary times is at loggerheads with the inspiration
to emulate works wherein aging women come alive and readers become involved with them; when these
characters grow up instead of “down” (Reifungsroman), readers not only cheer but also the marginalized
stature of ageing females get a subsequent attention. The emerging sub-genre traces a different sort of maturing
whereby ‘Reifung’ pertains both to ripening and maturing in an emotional and philosophical way. Barbara
Frey Waxman in a groundbreaking paper From Bildungsroman to Reifungsroman: Aging in Doris Lessings’
Fiction (1985) which opens way for the respective sub-genre in her contemporary novels and warns wherein
that we misconstrue the true nature of old age for a woman; far from being a “dark” period of a woman’s life,
and prophesied that old age may offer the opportunity for “sun drenched” spiritual growth and increasing self-
appreciation – a kind of New Jerusalem – and provocatively attributes it to the freedom that comes from the
shedding of one’s sexuality. The bridge between middle age and old age, the years of age from 50-60 is one
that can liberate a woman from an inhibiting fear of death and enable her to develop true self-respect to become
more receptive to relationships with others.
The changing roles of women in the postmodern world have developed a gap between pre- and post-
menopause women. The condition of post-menopause women is still vulnerable. The vulnerability is reflected
in certain pieces of literature – sometimes as it is and some other times in a subversive way. Even Indian
feminism, like its Western counterpart, has left the condition of post-menopause women unstudied. The studies
in Gerontology assume the old age to start from sixty years, the post-menopause women of age between fifty
to sixty years thus remain unacknowledged. The least debatable of all the phenomena of our day, the surest in
its progress, the easiest to foresee far ahead and perhaps the most pregnant with consequences is the ageing of
the population ‘, says Sauvy (1948).
A basic assumption of narrative gerontology is that the narrative side of human life is as complicated
and as critical to fathom as, for instance, the biological side, about which gerontology has acquired an
impressive range of knowledge. An appreciation for the narrative dimensions is equally essential, however, if
we want to seek a balanced and more optimistic perspective on what aging is about. And it is essential for
honoring the dignity, humanity, and uniqueness of the lives of older persons.

References

Anonymous. (n.d.). The Old Aunt. Retrieved April 20, 2024, from https://www.youthaffairz.in/premchand-
boodhikaki1.html
Ansello, E. F. (1977). Age and Agism in Children's First Literature. Education Gerontology.

Barnum, P. W. (1977). Discrimination Against the Aged in Young Children's Literature. The Elementary
School Journal, 301-6.
Beauvoir, S. (1972). The Coming of Age. New York: Putnam.

Hemingway, E. (1952). The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Lahiri, J. (1993). A Real Darwan and Other Stories. Boston University Press.

Robin, E. P. (1977). Old Age in Elementary School Education. Education Gerontology.

Sarton, M. (1973). As We Are Now. New York: Norton.

Sauvy, A. (1948). Social and Economic Consequences of the Ageing of Western European Populations.
Population Studies, 115-24.

Waxman, B. F. (1985). From Bildungsroman to Reifungroman: Aging in Doris Lessing's Fiction. Soundings:
An Interdisciplinary Journal, 318-34.

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