Women against Women: A Study of Purabi Basu’s “Radha Will Not Cook today” and “Saleha’s Desire”

Abstract

The report examines a realist study on woman-woman relationship and explores that womanhood is more than sisterhood. In the Third World context, woman-woman relationship is based on irrational jealousy and sentiment. The true picture of Third World Bangladeshi women is that they are the embodiments of male psyche. Here women are dominated by both males and females. In reality, women are women’s great spy as mother against daughter, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law, sister-in-law against sister-in-law as appeared in the two charming short stories “Radha Will Not Cook Today” and “Saleha’s Desire” by Purabi Basu (1949-), Bangla Academy award-winning feminist writer. Her rebel heroines Radha and Saleha challenged patriarchy by creating their self-reconstructed images; exercising free will and denying stereotypical set-roles. In the first story, Radha is an uneducated subaltern woman who denounces patriarchy by keeping herself aloof from one day’s cooking. Saleha, in the second story, she is another poor subaltern who challenges patriarchy by cutting her lover’s penis. In Bangladeshi patriarchal culture, a woman should be voiceless; mild in nature; and chief-co-ordinator in the house. If they go against these, they are questioned and criticized by other women belonging to the same patriarchal culture. Here Basu’s two protagonists’ new identities are re-colonized by the internalized notions of the elder female family members. Radha is entrapped by her mother-in-law and Saleha by her own mother. This paper investigates that in Bangladeshi culture, women lack women’s support and they are the mouthpieces of male chauvinism due to their internalized notions of age-bound patriarchal hegemony.