In Meera Mehadevan’s Shulamith, a recent Sakti novel, the dominant Hindu culture is shown to have an effect on Indian Jewish women. Shulamith, the main character in the book, has a “sense of dual fidelity” between her love for her husband and her way of life. When her husband goes to Israel, she stays in India and dies when he comes back. She chooses her own life and stays in India when her husband goes to Israel. Second, Shulamith’s sister-in-law, Mezuzah, who is allowed to date and stay single, soon comes to regret breaking Indian-Jewish rules. In Western cultures, romance and freedom are important. The young woman falls in love with a non-Jewish man and gets pregnant. Her mother won’t let her marry a non-Jewish man or have a child out of wedlock, so she has shame, a painful abortion, and a bad marriage. “The ideas, tastes, and manners that these girls have adopted from the West seem appealing to these young women until a crisis or experience in their lives forces them back to their own culture.” Meena Shirwadkar, “Image of Woman in the Indo-Anglian Novel,” New Delhi: Sterling, 1979, 49. Mezuzah, or Maizie as most people call her, becomes an image of a woman who has been through a lot. Her values and personality change as she goes from being a submissive, abused, barren wife living in poverty to being a hard-working, self-sacrificing nurse.
Shulamith is very conflicted because Mahadevan makes the young women Maizie and Naomi victims of a patriarchal tradition, but she makes Shulamith, who enforces social tradition and religious orthodoxy, a character to be admired. Mahadevan seems to be sympathetic to both sides of the conflict, but the positive image of the woman who is hurting stays the same. Mahadevan likes strong women who have to deal with hardship and young women who learn how to deal with it. In not being able to solve the conflict she shows, she goes back to the Sita-Savitri image.
Source: http://www.postcolonialweb.org/india/literature/sml5.html
