Using a third-person omniscient point of view, this four-part novel follows the four siblings of the Das family of Old Delhi.

The eldest son is Raja; now living in Hyderabad and married to a Muslim woman, Benazir, he has become the heir to her wealthy father, the former neighbor (and landlord) of the Das’s, Hyder Ali Sahib.

The eldest daughter is Bim (also called Bimla and Bim-masi by her nieces), a college professor of history who has never married, but who once was courted by Dr. Biswas, a Bengali who attended Raja (for tuberculosis) and Mira-masi (for alcoholism-induced delirium tremens) during the summer of independence and the partition of Pakistan, 1947.

The third child is Tara, who escaped into marriage to Bakul, a diplomat, that same summer, and who is now the mother of two daughters of traditional marriageable age.

The baby of the family is Baba, born late in his mother’s life when she suffered from severe diabetes, and who is probably autistic or mildly mentally handicapped, and who is now Bim’s dependent in the house where they all were born.

The father of these siblings was the part owner of an insurance company; their mother loved playing bridge at the Roshanara Club. Both parents, however, were distant and cold with their children, employing instead an impoverished cousin (Mira) to watch over them.

Other neighbors include the Misras, a middle-class family of loutish brothers and two spinster sisters, Jaya and Sarla, who support the family with dancing lessons for girls.

In the opening chapter, Tara and Bakul arrive to visit before going on to the wedding of Raja’s daughter. The main characters are introduced through conversations the sisters carry on after many years apart; these conversations establish the underlying tensions between and among the siblings that came to a climax in the fateful summer of 1947.

Chapter two returns the narrative to that summer; it was a traumatic year for India and a disastrous one as well for the Das family. The parents die (the mother first); Raja contracts tuberculosis; Mira-masi dissolves into alcoholism as the burdens on her increase; and Tara retreats to the neighbors’ house and meets Bakul, then marries him and they immediately depart to diplomatic postings abroad.

Dr. Biswas’s courtship of Bim is a disaster because of his nervous subjugation to a domineering mother (he is her only child and she is a widow). Bim is too strong for these kinds of relationships. In fact, she is the only stable family member that terrible summer, and she winds up making choices that sacrifice her chances of establishing a family of her own.

Chapter three takes readers still further back to the period when Baba was born too late in his mother’s life to be fully formed and functioning when he is born. Baba’s history is depressing, as his limitations become more and more apparent. The girls are being suffocated by the dullness of school—Bim’s intelligence exceeds the demands of the curriculum provided to girls, and Tara is indifferent to education.

The most difficult and damaging transformation is the estrangement between Bim and Raja that develops as he matures into a self-absorbed young man, writing poetry and seeing himself as a future hero. In college, he refuses to support the Hindu extremists advocating violence toward Muslim Indians such as Hyder Ali Sahib, and he makes the mistake of openly expressing his support for the partition of India and Pakistan. His attachment to the Hyder Ali family steadily increases, especially as his mother fades into death, followed quickly by his father. He sees his wealthy, poetry-loving Muslim landlord as a role model in the absence of a strong father figure.

Eventually, everyone escapes but Bim and Baba: Mira-masi into death; Raja to Hyderabad and eventually, through marriage, into the Hyder Ali family; Tara into marriage and international travel with Bakul. Bim enrolls in graduate studies and excels in her work, eventually receiving an appointment as a faculty member at a nearby college. But she is trapped in the family home among the memories and disappointments that fill the old house, and Baba will never be able to survive without her. She both envies and resents Raja and Tara even as she tries to believe her life to be satisfactory.

Chapter four returns to the present of the story. Bim must learn to forgive Raja and Tara and accept some responsibility for the choices she made. Tara’s presence has stirred up the past, and the sisters have read over Raja’s old poems and the letter that finally estranged Bim from him. Bim has reached the end of her patience for the burdens placed on her; after expressing some rage against Baba, suggesting that she may have to send him to live with Raja, she is able to check her frustration and anger, realizing that she must contribute something to heal the rift in the family. Her simple brother is not able to hold a grudge for her outburst, and she determines to forgive Raja. She refuses to attend the wedding, but she asks Tara to invite Raja and his family to visit her and Baba at the old home they grew up in.

On one level, the story of the Das family works as a metaphor for India itself in the early days of independence. The rift in the family parallels the rift between India and Pakistan. But the story is also a carefully rendered example of psychological realism, with a special care to represent the limited options that Indian women have to choose from. The characters’ disrupted lives mirror the political disruptions of the nation, but they are also fully rounded individuals with feelings grounded in past experiences that the writer brings to life.

Bibliography

Chatterji, Partha. “The Nationalist Resolution of the Woman Question.” In Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. Edited by Kumari Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Hashmi, Alamgir. “A Reading of Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day,” International Fiction Review 10 (1983): 56–58.

Jain, Jasbir. “Airing the Family Ghosts: Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day,” World Literature Written in English 24 (1984): 416–422.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: Alamgir Hashmi, Anita Desai, Anita Desai criticism, Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day, Baba Das, Bim Das, Clear Light of Day, Das family, family estrangement, feminist Indian literature, Hyder Ali Sahib, Indian domestic fiction, Indian English novels, Indian historical fiction, Indian independence, Indian nationalism and gender, Indian partition novel, Indian women in fiction, Indo-Muslim relations in literature, Jasbir Jain, literary analysis, Mira-masi, Old Delhi fiction, Partha Chatterji, Partition of India 1947, postcolonial literature, psychological realism, Raja Das, Recasting Women, representation of autism in fiction, sibling relationships, South Asian literature, Tara Das, twentieth-century Indian fiction