Despite not having any kids of her own, Tara is the primary caretaker for her younger brothers until she does not feel comfortable in her father\u2019s house anymore and at the age of 33 years, leaves for Devghat.<\/p>\n
Devghat is a place people go to devote their lives to spiritual pursuits. The concept of Sannyas is an old tradition in our culture, meaning purification of everything in Sanskrit.<\/p>\n
To quote Bhagavad Gita, \u201cHe is known as a permanent Sannyasin who does not hate, does not desire, is without dualities.\u201d Hence, this action by Tara can be seen as the fulfilment of both the need for purification and the renouncement of desires.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
But Tara\u2019s feelings portray anything but this. At the beginning of the journey, all she desires is for her brother to come calling for her, to stop her from going. And throughout the journey, she has other desires, as she continues hoping and fantasizing for an alternative to where she is going.<\/p>\n
She fantasizes about marrying a fellow traveller, becoming a wife, and taking a different life path than the one she is travelling towards.<\/p>\n
Throughout her young adulthood, we see Tara pondering about her desire for love, sex, and relationships.<\/p>\n
Human desire is said to be the fundamental motivation of all human actions and even in our own religious textbook Rig Veda, desire is said to be the first seed of minds. But despite this, personal desire is seen as something that needs to be repressed or sacrificed in our culture, specifically in the period that follows the main protagonist of our book Tara.<\/p>\n
Tara suffers through almost all of the social evils that our country\u2019s women of that time had to suffer. It might have been a melodramatic sob story about misery had it not been realistic for a woman to happen during that time.<\/p>\n
Along with Tara\u2019s story, the novel follows the lives of two other women whose story arcs seem to be there just to tell us how Tara\u2019s lives would have been in different cases.<\/p>\n
Yamuna, Tara\u2019s friend who is still married embodies the life that Tara might have lived had her husband not died and the plot of her fellow child widow, Pabitra, embodies the life that Tara might have made for herself had she not shackled herself to the expectations of the society and given into all her desires and pleasures.<\/p>\n
All three women do go through their share of trials and tribulations and end up in the same place in their old age almost if to showcase the inevitable rigidity that the society had provided to these women.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The novel always draws a parallel between the colorless<\/strong> and harsh life<\/strong> of Tara and the colorful fantasies and desires<\/strong> that she has for herself.<\/p>\nThrough our modern lens, her desires do not seem outrageous or even unreasonable at any point but it seems impossible for any of them to come true for Tara. While Pabitra may be seen at the surface level as someone who did extract herself from the shackles of patriarchy but would we have felt that way if we had followed her journey as closely as we followed Tara\u2019s?<\/p>\n
Contributed by:<\/strong> Achala Sharma<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seto Dharti, one of the most important books in modern literature, turns 10 this year. The…<\/span><\/p>\nRead more<\/a><\/div>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":761,"featured_media":30962,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,4219,3],"tags":[4643,8765,16261,16257,16258,98,16256,16259,16262,16260],"yoast_head":"\n
Colorful Desires and Colorless Culture - Seto Dharti 10 Years Later<\/title>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n