‘Fire on the Mountain is the story of women’. Discuss/ Is it possible to consider Fire on the Mountain as a feminist novel? Give reasons for your answer.

‘Fire on the Mountain is the story of women’. Discuss/ Is it possible to consider Fire on the Mountain as a feminist novel? Give reasons for your answer.

Fire On The Mountain (1977), Anita Desai's fifth novel, is a woman centred

narrative, portraying three women characters - Nanda Kaul, the widow of a university

Vice-Chancellor, her great-granddaughter Raka and her life-long friend Ilia Das. So far its

criticism has tended to focus on Anita Desai's detailed study of these three female

characters and particularly on her presentation of Nanda Kaul, the protagonist of the novel, although Ralph J. Crane, on the other hand, has focused on 'the patriarchal oppression' and considered it as 'the antagonist of the novel' (Ralph J. Crane in A. L McLeod (ed.) 1996:94) Again, adopting a psychoanalytic feminist approach, Bettina L. Knapp has focused on the novelist's characterization and drawing upon Hindu mythology provided an interesting insight into Desai's naming of her characters and the novel's symbolism and imagery (Parker & Starkey (eds.) 1995 : 177-193). However, in a Foucauldian feminist perspective, the novel may be considered as a plurivocal feminist discourse, emerging out of the struggles of the three women characters against different forms of patriarchal oppression. In power relations they first experience oppression and then create resistance to it. In other words, they recreate the history of their oppressive life from their own standpoint and thereby assert their own subjecthood. While asserting their subjecthood, they take different positions of resistance to the oppressive forms of patriarchal power.

Like Cry, The Peacock and Where Shall We Go This Summer?, this novel has

triptyche structure, focusing on each of the three female characters in turn. Initially Nanda

Kaul is shown to be at Carignano with which Raka and Ilia Das come to be associated with

the progress of the narrative. Carignano is a house in Kasauli on the Himalayan range. It

was initially built by a British colonel with a concern for his wife's ill-health. Eventually, it

came to be used by the neurotic maiden British ladies. After independence it became a

haunted house as the British ladies were hurriedly shipped back to England in order to save them from rapes by the natives. The deserted house was up for sale and Nanda Kaul boughtit to give herself shelter from the oppressive demands of patriarchal family. Nanda has withdrawn into Carignano where she finds everything she wanted in her life. Residing in this quiet house, she fancies she could merge with pine trees and be mistaken for one :

To be a tree, no more and no less, was all she was prepared to undertake (4)..................................

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