A CONTEMPORIZED MYTH AND REALITY IN CONFLICT: SUNDERLAL’S PSYCHIC IMBALANCE IN LAJWANTI BY RAJINDER SINGH BEDI

Abstract

Man has always been trying to make sense of the world around him in the light of the narratives around him. Be they the stories given in the religious manuscripts, the myths of gods and goddesses, legends of the heroes, or everyday common moral stories, they are always regarded as a store of human wisdom, setting ideals to be aspired by man. The myth of Ramayana is such an epic narrative which provides the Hindus with perfect definitions of an ideal man i.e., Rama or an ideal woman i.e., Sita. During the partition of India (1947), the scene of Sita’s abduction was repeated thousands of times with the women of the sub-continent. The men, who consequently had to play the role of Rama, failed in most of the cases to re-enact the narrative in the true sense of the myth. One finds many literary representations of men who remained confused about their roles in such situations. Sunderlal, a character in Rajinder Singh Bedi’s short story “Lajwanti”, trying to make sense of the Rama-Sita narrative in the wake of his own circumstances, seems to be totally lost in a world of incomprehension. This research affirms that this short story may be read as a contemporized and appropriated Ramayana through an examination of the mechanics of Bedi’s juxtaposition of a concrete event (Lajwanti’s abduction) with an abstract event (Seeta’s abduction by Rawana) and the psychic aftermath of this juxtaposition which consequently shatters the essentials of Ramayana, the myth. The theoretical support will be sought from the concepts including Julia Kristeva’s concept of “intertextuality”, Harold Bloom’s concept of “poetic misprision” and C.G. Jung’s idea of “archetypes and the collective unconscious” to imply, through a detailed textual analysis, that these myths seem to fail to explain the circumstances and the psychical implications of similar events and situations in contemporary times (for the writer), for instance, the post-partition times of stress depicted in Lajwanti.