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Memory, Change, and Identity
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Clear Light of Day, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Das siblings grow up in a deeply patriarchal culture in which men are allowed to pursue careers of their choice while women are expected to marry as teenagers and then dedicate their whole lives to caring for their husbands, in-laws, and children. Of course, the Das family’s wealth and liberal values spare Tara and Bim from the worst of what Indian women face—unlike Aunt Mira, whose late husband’s family essentially treats her as an indentured servant until Tara and Bim’s mother calls her to Delhi. But still, the sisters end up limited and confined by the expectation that Indian women should be obedient caregivers above all else. Tara and Bim first realize this when they try on Raja’s trousers while he’s away—they instantly feel comfortable and powerful, which represents the advantages that men and boys enjoy in all aspects of public life.
While Tara genuinely loves being a mother later in life, her husband Bakul belittles and ignores her. Bim, in contrast, refuses to marry in an attempt to preserve her independence, but she still gets thrown into a caregiving role against her will when both Aunt Mira and Raja fall sick—because Bim is the eldest able woman in the family, she has no choice but to step up. Despite her excellent performance at school and her grand dreams, her life ends up looking much like Aunt Mira’s, and she has to pause her studies. Eventually, she returns to them and becomes a teacher at a women’s college (which is still a delimited, gender-segregated space). All the while, she continues taking care of Baba, which also prevents her from leaving Delhi to pursue other opportunities. Her care obligations are clearly the root cause of her resentment toward Raja: as children, they promised each other that they would stick together and become a hero and a heroine. But whereas society allowed him to pursue his dream, she was not allowed to pursue hers. While Bimla’s teaching career shows that Indian women are by no means powerless, her overall trajectory still shows that patriarchal societies like India’s limit women’s ability to achieve their goals by disproportionately placing care obligations on them. Desai suggests that Indian women cannot escape this predicament through individual determination alone and so should work to change broader norms about the gendered division of labor instead.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Gender and Indian Culture ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Gender and Indian Culture appears in each part of Clear Light of Day. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Gender and Indian Culture Quotes in Clear Light of Day
Below you will find the important quotes in Clear Light of Day related to the theme of Gender and Indian Culture.
Part 2
Quotes
She needed protection. She wanted help. She reached out for the hand that would help her, protect her …
… Here it was. Here, in this tall, slim coolness just by her hand, at the tips of her fingers. If she got her fingers around it, its slender pale glassiness, and then drew it closer, close to her mouth, she could close her lips about it and suck, suck little, little sips, with little, little juicy sounds, and it would be so sweet, so sweet again, just as when they were little babies, little babies for her to feed, herself a little baby sucking, sucking at the little trickle of juice that came hurrying in, sliding in …
And she sucked and laughed and sucked and cried.
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“Now I understand why you do not wish to marry. You have dedicated your life to others—to your sick brother and your aged aunt and your little brother who will be dependent on you all his life. You have sacrificed your own life for them.”
“I have to go. Now I can go. I have to begin my life some time, don’t I? You don’t want me to spend all my life down in this hole, do you? You don’t think I can go on living just to keep my brother and sister company, do you?”
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“Bim, I’ll come back,” he said. “I’m leaving all my books and papers with you. Look after them till I come back.”
“Why should you come back?” Bim asked stonily.
“Bim, don’t be so hard. You know I must come back—to look after you and Baba. I can’t leave you alone.”
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Part 3
Quotes
The girls […] looked through the green tin trunk once again for some remnant of her wedding, of her improbable married life. And there was one: a stripe of crimson and gold edging an untouched Benares silk sari. Since it was white, she had been allowed to retain it, and now it was yellowed like old ivory. The strip of crimson and gold made it impossible for her to wear: taboo. It was wrapped carefully in tissue and laid away like some precious relic. […] It contained Aunt Mira’s past, and the might-have-been future, as floating and elusive as the musk itself. But she would not touch it. When they became insistent, she said, laughing, “All right, when I die, you may dress me in it for the funeral pyre.”
“I shall earn my own living—and look after Mira-masi and Baba and—and be independent. There’ll be so many things to do—when we are grown up—when all this is over—” and she swept an arm out over the garden party, dismissing it. “When we are grown up at last—then—then—” but she couldn’t finish for emotion, and her eyes shone in the dusk.
