Feminism Tested in Ameen Merchant’s ‘The Silent Raga’
Project outline submitted to the Mahatma Gandhi University in partial recognition of the requirements for the award of the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in English Language and
Literature.

Sruthi Murali
Reg No: 130021007268

Supervising Teacher
Ms. Mary Sapna Peter Miranda
Assistant Professor
Department of English
St. Albert’s College
Ernakulam

March 2016

Introduction
The Silent Raga is an eminently readable book by a first time author. This is Ameen Merchant's first published novel and he has certainly presented a rich repertoire of emotions strung to a melodious tune. He uses fine strokes and bright colors, commonly associated with miniature painting, in his portrayal of life within the constricted confines of a small community. The Silent Raga, inspired by a Tamil novel, is an exquisite blend of tradition and transition, exile and reconciliation, silence and eloquence, society and self, crisis and consciousness, where various stages of a raga’s performance in recital breathe life into the mellifluous flourish of evocative prose.
Ameen Merchant was born in Bombay in 1964 and raised in Madras. The Silent Raga (Douglas & McIntyre, 2007/HarperCollins India, 2008) is his first novel. In prose that moves from the sensuous to the sublime, and that recalls the rhythms and progression of the raga, Merchant the storyteller weaves a moving tapestry about the ties that bind us and the sacrifices we must make on the way to realizing our destinies. This novel was shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Canada and the Caribbean). He now lives in Vancouver, Canada, where he is working on his next novel.
The inspiration to pick this novel came from the very name. As a raga, the story unfolds slowly, picks up pace and ends leaving behind a mind that’s peace-filled. It’s not the words but the composure of silence that remains even after the story is done-with.
The Silent Raga by Ameen Merchant is a story of family, tradition, loss, and reconciliation. It is a moving and ambitious debut novel from Ameen Merchant. Set in Madras, India, it tells the story of two sisters, Janaki and Mallika, from a middle-class Brahmin family. After the death of their mother in a bus accident, the two sisters must negotiate their changing relationship with their father and their mother's sister, who is threatening to take their mother's place. Janaki is a musical prodigy, sublimely gifted on the Veena, but as she grows toward her eighteenth birthday, she becomes fearful of being entrapped in a marriage arranged for her by her father and her aunt. Eschewing the traditions of her family and her caste, she runs off with a Muslim Bollywood star, whom she marries. Years later Mallika, now a programs counselor with the United States Information Services, receives a letter from Janaki, who is returning to Madras. It is a story about the traditions that bind us and the sacrifices we must make along the road to our own individual destinies. There can be no doubt that Ameen Merchant, a transplanted Indian now living in Vancouver, has a writer’s eye for color and action, a writer’s ear for language and music, and a writer’s obsessive interest in the patterns of human behavior. In The Silent Raga, his first novel, Merchant tries to, if not make sense of these patterns, at least describe them lucidly and cannily.
This project is a study of feminism in the novel The Silent Raga. Janaki is a girl with a heart of gold and guts of steel. A girl so hopelessly trapped in circumstances, and yet who finds the way out, makes the novel an incredibly optimistic tale and serves as an inspiration for those of us, who under circumstances also tend to get bogged down and lose our will to fight. Janaki is quite lucky, one might say. Yet she doesn’t complain or disregard anything. The protagonist Janaki is suppressed in many ways. Prime importance is given to Janaki’s character, personality, the way she overcome the difficult situations into which she falls and how she has changes over the past ten years.

Chapter 1: An introduction of the novel The Silent Raga
This chapter consists of a brief summary of The Silent Raga, the important events that occur and the character sketches of the main characters in the novel. Peculiarities of the novel is highlighted. It is an exquisite blend of tradition and transition, exile and reconciliation, silence and eloquence society and self, crisis and consciousness, where various stages of a raga’s performance in recital breathe life into the mellifluous flourish of evocative prose.
All families are dysfunctional, and all families are dysfunctional in their own way. The Silent Raga explores this “difference” in the context of small-town, middle-class India. So, it would be safe to say that the book is about a family gone awry. But it is also about more than that: it also looks closely at the everyday trade-off between tradition and modernity, the role of religion and mythology in Indian women’s lives, the small moments of remembering and forgetting and the big moments of caring and forgiving.
The Silent Raga captures the social intricacies of Tamil Brahmin life in an Agraharam (traditional living quarters for the Brahmin community serving the local temple) in small-town Tamil Nadu. It conveys the conservatism, the thrift, the social mores imposed on young girls of marriageable age as well as the paradoxes that are not spoken about. At 18, musical prodigy Janaki Venkatakrishnan escapes her father’s plans for an arranged marriage, fleeing her village for the bright lights of Bombay. She leaves behind a gaggle of gossip-mongering old women, but also her younger sister Mallika, who is forced to take care of their increasingly unhinged father. But ten years later, when Janaki announces her return and demands a meeting with Mallika, the buried past is once again excavated. In a span of seven days, memories and misgivings, innocence and wisdom, everyday truths and family secrets are laid bare as the two sisters prepare to face each other, and their childhood experiences, once and for all. Ameen Merchant’s poignant and ambitious debut novel, at once intensely imagined and sensitively nuanced, shines an unsparing light on the complex subject of family obligations and sibling relationships. India-born and Vancouver-based Ameen Merchant’s debut novel, The Silent Raga, inspired by a Tamil novel, is an exquisite blend of tradition and transition, exile and reconciliation, silence and eloquence, society and self, crisis and consciousness, where various stages of a raga’s performance in recital breathe life into the mellifluous flourish of evocative prose. Unlike the mythical Janaki, the protagonist Janaki does not stifle her inner voice. The iconoclastic Janaki, be it in her self-struggle or her marriage to a Muslim actor or in abandoning her typical Brahmin self of Tamil Sripuram upbringing or registering her biting sarcasm, forges her own fate, bringing her “silent raga” to life. She has the answer to the question posed by the omniscient narrator: “Where do MIDDLE-CLASS, Tamil Brahmin girls go when they turn eighteen?” She refuses to subside into silence by submission to the male chauvinist’s deference to moribund caste-ridden customs. The feminism in the novel seems to be a conscious reaction against the true-blue male-chauvinistic protagonists of writers. Janaki defines the role of a liberated woman described in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as she renews creative power in her husband and makes her house, which is permeated by her creative force.
Merchant’s poetic self is evident in his glittering array of metaphors, tactile, aural, and kinesthetic images. His unerring instinct for sound words bears out the poet-musician in him. Steeped in verbal music, Merchant’s fidelity to colloquial dictions and phrases of bourgeois Tamil-speaking Brahmins asserts the linguistic identity of the South Indian culture.
The book is loaded with the lives of orthodox families of Tamil Brahmin community layered with details to the extent of prints on a saree, smell of the kitchen, incense of the flowers and everything that’s normally unfelt and unheard. The lady of the story – Janaki’s unhurried posture and self-control despite the unhealthy environment around her is the pick of the story. Journey of a Brahmin girl from a teenager to a lady of a Muslim actor is narrated through words – each of it selected with care and appropriate tone. Janaki’s divine passion for music, Zubeida’s (first wife of the Muslim actor) determination to live life in spite of her disability, Gayathri Chitti’s characterization, Mallikka’s (Janaki’s younger sister) unrealistic hope of her sister always being there with her to take care, a father bound by social obligations – a no good moral-support for the family are the attention-grabbers.
The first half of the novel tells this somewhat lurid and improbable story from Janaki’s point of view; the second half tells it from Mallika’s, the sister left behind to pick up the pieces. It is the 1980s in Sripuram, Tamil Nadu. When Janaki, talented in playing the Veena, walks away from her overbearing father and maternal aunt, she leaves behind not only a hard-earned, spotless Brahmanical reputation but also her beloved younger sister, Mallika.
Ten years later, Janaki, now Janaki Asgar lives in Mumbai. She receives an unsigned but hardly anonymous letter from her maternal aunt informing her of her father's failing mental faculties and Mallika's financial struggles. Janaki writes to Mallika requesting to meet her in Chennai.Both letters stir strong emotions for the sisters as each sister braces herself to meet the other. It is through their eyes and alternating narratives, that we piece together the story of their childhood.
We meet the mother, dead but still a silent observer in the form of a garlanded portrait. We meet the bank manager father, Venkatakrishnan, a man who is melodramatic even in his silences. He lives life on his terms, but ensures his daughters are brought up traditionally. Then there are Janaki's friends, Kamala and Revathi, who are as different socially as they are in temperament, but unanimous in their love for music and unconditional affection for Janaki.
We also meet Gayatri, the girls' widowed maternal aunt, who exerts authority over the goings-on in the household. Through Janaki's eyes, we come to realise the motives behind Gayatri's visits. Through Mallika's younger eyes, we see Janaki's gradual assertion of independence. When Janaki leaves Sripuram, we also sense Mallika's fear of having her own wings clipped. When the sisters finally meet ten years later it is not the misgivings of the past that take centre stage, but the strong bond they share despite a difficult childhood in a dysfunctional family. The Silent Raga captures the social intricacies of Tamil Brahmin life in an Agraharam (traditional living quarters for the Brahmin community serving the local temple) in small-town Tamil Nadu. It conveys the conservatism, the thrift, the social mores imposed on young girls of marriageable age as well as the paradoxes that are not spoken about.

Chapter 2: Feminism in our society
By its very nature, feminism studies what feminists perceive to be a male-dominated society where historically girls and women have been ‘kept in their place’ while men have dominated areas such as politics, education, the military etc. Women still make less than men, on average, in every career field. Violence towards women gets worse with each passing day. The greatest insult to any man is to claim he is somehow effeminate. Feminists believe society is male dominated –in other words it is a patriarchy. Feminists also believe that society is based on conflict between the sexes. They believe that women have historically been disadvantaged in society and that men historically have had more power than women.
The word feminism refers to the advocacy of women’s right seeking to remove restrictions that discriminate against women. It relates to the belief that women should have the same social, economic and political rights as men. Feminism has often focused upon what is absent rather than what is present. The word feminist refers to the person who advocates or practices feminism and it takes political position. Female is the matter of biology and feminine is a set of culturally defined characteristics. Indian feminists have also fought against cultural issues within the patriarchal society, such as inheritance laws and practice of widow immolation known as sati. Unlike the western feminist movements, India’s movement was initiated by men and then joined by women. The feminist literary criticism spent most of its energy describing how women were represented in literary works by both men and women writers.
Feminism is the belief that women are and should be treated as potential intellectual equals and social equals to men. The feminists can be either male or female human beings, although the ideology is commonly (and perhaps falsely) associated mainly with women. The basic idea of Feminism revolves around the principle that just because human bodies are designed to perform certain procreative functions, biological elements need not dictate intellectual and social functions, capabilities, and rights.
Feminism also, by its nature, embraces the belief that all people are entitled to freedom and liberty within reason including equal civil rights and that discrimination should not be made based on gender, sexual orientation, skin color, ethnicity, religion, culture, or lifestyle. Feminists and all persons interested in civil equality and intellectuality are dedicated to fighting the ignorance that says people are controlled by and limited to their biology.
A movement that supports equal opportunities for men and women and asserts that women are entitled to the same political, social, and intellectual rights as men. As a cultural and literary movement, feminism seeks to challenge historically male- centered representations of women and identify a sovereign tradition of female cultural and literary production.
It is an ideology that focuses on woman being treated as equals to men. There is no sexism in this concept- because we live in a patriarchal society, males are automatically given a superior position. Calling feminism sexist is also ignoring centuries of history where men have oppressed women. A common misconception about feminism is that one is supporting woman's equality but opposing man's. This is not true. Supporting something like gay rights doesn't mean you're against a straight person's rights, and the same goes for feminism in terms of equality between the sexes.
Feminism is a political, social, and cultural movement that aims at equal rights for women. Its beginnings and extreme controversy in a (Western) patriarchal society has created stigma and stereotypes associated with the definition. Feminism helped women get the vote, obtain equal rights for jobs, made laws to control domestic violence, help women obtain the rights to own property, to divorce, to have access to birth control and to have possession of their own bodies.
There is a fascinating myth about the creation of the woman by Brahma who, in his generosity, wished to give man a companion. Since he had exhausted all the material in the creation of man, be borrowed several components from his bountiful creation, Nature, and made woman out of them. After abortive efforts on Man’s part, Brahma rebuked him, “If you cannot live with her, neither can you live without her “. This primordial myth carries an unmistakable implication of the need for continual adjustment in man-woman relationship, indeed, that is the basis of all civilized relationships in life. Ever since the dawn of civilization, woman has been a myth and a legend, a metaphor and a symbol, a deity or a devil. But who is the real woman? What is her real entity? Has she an identity of her own? Several such questions has to be asked.
India is regarded as a traditionally male-dominated society where individual rights are subordinated to group or social role expectations. In these roles, personality must not dominate the roles assigned in the societal framework. Consequently in such a set-up, a purely social, platonic or intellectual relationship between man and woman become nearly impossible. A woman’s individual self has very little recognition and self-effacement is her normal way of life. Indian woman too, as a part of that setup, has accepted it and lived with it for ages. Roles outside this ie: woman as an achiever, as a leader, or as a strong individual or, by and large, either non-existent or rare. There are also expectations but they represent the extra ordinary types and not the average ones. But male and female writers have seen women in these relationships. There are deified, archetypal images and there are also debased and degraded images. Literature also portrays a few insurgent minorities who protests against the existing ills. In the ancient Indian history, by and large, women has been deified, glorified and also regarded as myths. However, in reality, most of the times, the contradictory state of affairs also existed. There was and perhaps it is there even today, a duality in the projection of the image of woman in literature.
In Post-Independence India when women’s education has already commenced and life had started changing, the new woman started emerging. The spread of education inculcated a sense of individuality among women and aroused an interest in their rights. Women started becoming economically independent and there was a striving for the realization of their own aspirations. The society recognized virtues, merit and talent wherever they existed and gender distinctions were not taken into account. Women could, besides fulfilling their distinctive roles, also participate in several other walks of life. There was an attempt at resurrection of the high-condition of woman in our society after the introduction of western education reformist movements, promotion of women’s institution, the freedom movement and so on. With India acquiring an identity of her own, doors were open for women too to acquire their own identities.
Woman striving for an identity of her own is also not just an imitation of the west. This fact is obviously clear when we look at the issues before women in two societies. In the west, it is now purely a question of identity and equality; in India, it is still a question of stark survival. Women in India are still caught between feudal values and style of life and the fast approaching new life. Caught between the burden of the home and the work-place, child-bearing, mothering, struggling with conventions, women first have to survive, the question of equality is a far cry. The broadly general image of the woman in literature identifies the real status according to woman in society-as mother, wife, and daughter, in that order- in a familial setting. Outside in she is the widow, the companion etc. In the modern times she is accepted as a professional, but when she protests against injustice and exploitation, she is grudgingly termed activist and seem as a rebel or deviant.
With the coming of women’s liberation and feminism, the move is towards the insurgence of woman in the face of the effort of man to curb her freedom. To think that the impact of these movements has caused a radical change in the insights of women would be a conceptual error. Certainly there has been a shift in values and women have started acknowledging themselves the co-equals of men. Though the high hopes of feminism have been washed away in the present social milieu, the relationships between man and woman have to work for her liberation without resigning herself to her destiny. Gender-equality still remains a myth.
It is the male ego that has given the woman an inferior status through ages. Man has relegated her to a second-class citizen and when she could no longer endure the suppression, has revolted, her revolt ravaging like a tempest. And feminism is one such moment of protest. With a nostalgic fondness, the modern women ruminate over the Ardhanarishwara concept that guarantees an equal status for women with men because the eternal male principle cannot but co-exist, they have existence only in contiguity.
But a handful of good willed people alone have not been able to build the foundation for women’s emancipation. The women themselves have been coming forward and uniting in their march towards excellence, irrespective of their class, caste, creed, or religion. The image of the modern woman, her quest and struggle for and excellent identity of her own is emerging in the Indian English Literature. Such a struggle needs some support structures outside the family to enable women to survive. Thus, a peep into the Indo-Anglian literature provides name of stalwarts who have stood for the cause of women’s emancipation.

Chapter 3: How far Feminism has been tested in The Silent Raga and its peculiarities
Adopting the metaphor of Indian classical music, The Silent Raga fills the bridgeable and the inexplicable between two sisters—Janaki and Mallika. The novel, with all its postmodern hybridity, arrests the accents and inflections of the protagonist on the threshold of inflamed isolation and inimitable glorification in flashback and forward narratives. The novel with its different chapters— Varnam, Alaapana, Krithi, Ragam Thaanam Pallavi, Padham, Thillaana and Mangalam — conforms to the rhythmical cadences of Carnatic music of South India.
It would be fair to say that the themes of The Silent Raga do have a certain feminist over/undertone. But it is sure that there are “feminisms.” An understanding of Anglo-American feminism might not work when put to practice in other geographies; it might even prove to be counterproductive. Hence, before we apply the term “feminism” to the thematic impulses of a work, we have to consider the specifics of culture, economics and class as they relate to women in a particular society. For example, Mrs. Samanta’s understanding of her place and identity would have nothing in common with Gayatri Chitti’s. Zubeida’s philosophy might have a few connecting points with Nalini Miss’s, but even in those instances, the class and exposure divide would be immense. In other words, the feminist “consciousness” of the characters in The Silent Raga is, and can only be rooted in Sripuram, Madras and Bombay. Not Vancouver, London and New York.
The Silent Raga is about a Tamil Brahmin family living in an agraharam within a small town. Agraharams in south India were traditionally reserved residential spaces in a village exclusively for Brahmins. The novel explores a darkly dysfunctional family, in which neatly apportioned mundane chores, well executed, gives it an appearance of respectable functionality. The novel deals with hypocrisy, double standards, patriarchal domination and other such concerns, within an ordered agraharam structure. The book has invoked mixed responses. There are always those who dismiss such works as "written with a western audience in mind" indicating that somehow it is either non authentic or written to the codes of a formula known to succeed in the international market.
There are no perfect choices of action opened to Janaki. She has the choice to conform and enter into a marriage over which she has no control or choose to run away to a future, which will at least fulfill her musical ambitions and hopefully give her a better quality of life. She makes her bed and literally and metaphorically chooses to lie on it. The novel is appealing in the manner in which it presents the daily rituals of a Brahmanic household-the colors, smells, flavors and patterns are portrayed with intricate strokes like the work of an exquisite piece of embroidery. However, when the protagonist of the novel, Janaki, enters the Muslim world, the picture gets hazy and sketchy and that is surprising, since the author himself is a Muslim, who in his own words, was brought up in a Brahmin neighbourhood.
The author, when asked by an interviewer to choose two characters from this novel as his favorites, chose those of Zubeida, the first wife of the Muslim actor, and the aunt of the two girls. The choice appeared rather curious to me as Zubeida is a two dimensional character who is too good to be true- there is a fairy tale quality to the whole Bombay scene-they lived happily ever after sort of wishful ending. To give credit to the author, it must be said that his heroine starts with very little expectations from her marriage, is perfectly prepared to play the second fiddle and from the meager descriptions one can gather, she is also quietly acquiescent in her role as the sexual partner of Asgar. We hear little about her love for her husband or even for her children. One wonders whether it was the deliberate ploy of the author to describe the Brahmanical life in such minutiae while allocating only a few Spartan brush strokes to paint the life in the city of Bombay. That is how possibly he wants us to see it, through Janaki’s eyes. For Janaki, life in her agraharam was real even when mixed with extreme pain, while life in Bombay is a carefully crafted strategy to survive. As for the aunt she is a strong, slightly eccentric character, who while living within the social orbit of the agraharam, dares to flout its rules.
The relationship between the two sisters Janaki and Mallika is pivotal to the novel. The responsible older sister and mother figure abandons her vulnerable sibling to flee from the nest. This leaves the trapped younger sister not only furious but in a state of unforgiving non-comprehension. How and why, she rages silently did Janaki choose to abandon her? As the story unwinds, Mallika slowly begins to understand the moral conundrum faced by her sister.
The whole novel is structured to reflect the slow unraveling of a raga or melody in Carnatic music. Janaki, the protagonist is a child prodigy, a musical genius, who becomes a famous Veena player. It is at a musical competition that she meets her future husband and musical notes are an essential part of the structure of the novel. The joy, the thrill, the sad plaintive notes, forms the intricate raga of life in the agraharam. Janaki's friend and member of the school musical trio, Kamala, is silenced before she and her friends could articulate their raga to the world, but the silent raga too, we are told, will be heard (p.191) for silence is not acquiescence.
The sections in the novel are titled Varnam, Alaapana, Krithi, Ragam Thaanam Pallavi, Padham, Thillaana, and Mangala, and these reflect the elements of a raga. Unless one takes them to be metaphors for the nuances of the relationship between the two sisters, which finally evolve into a melodious raga, brought to an auspicious conclusion (Mangala), we do not see any direct connection between these subtitles and the plot. To Janaki the Veena is her essence; it is as she points out to the journalist interviewing her, her spinal cord, and in that sense one sees her whole life as a musical structure.
Janaki’s Muslim husband Asgar is not dealt with as much as his name probes in. The reader never gets a clear sense of Janaki’s emotional relationship with Asgar - the man for whom she embraced all cultural taboos. It is a worthy goal that the author has achieved – of narrating the often unspoken yet common suffering of Indian women.
The protagonist's present status: Janaki Asgar, the Brahmin Hindu second wife of a Muslim film star. She is famous now in her own right with a successful classical music academy whose students are on the verge of international renown. It took her ten years to reinvent herself. There are, naturally, the psychic scars of abruptly severed ties and the whiff of scandal; geographically she is in Bombay or today's Mumbai.
There, is a small town in Southern India, not far from Madras or present-day Chennai. In the past, Janaki is a middle-class Brahmin girl with few prospects and no hope. An early adulthood is thrust on her when, plucked out of school upon her mother's untimely demise, she is dispatched to the kitchen to become the family cook and cleaning woman, plus replacement mother to the younger sister upon whom she dotes. As it is with millions of such girls in India, she must live a life of servitude, first in her father's home, then in her husband's, without murmur or question. But Janaki is different. With a survivor's canny instincts, she realizes early on that tradition can ensnare only if subscribed to. And she plays the Veena - a stringed instrument akin to the sitar-divinely. A gypsy woman, to whom she gives alms, prophesies that the instrument will be her salvation.
This prediction and a shocking incident galvanize her into putting an escape plan into action, or so one thinks. It is best that no further details of the plot are revealed to guarantee untarnished pleasures of reading and discovery.

A woman recognizes early that the world is ordered and run by the patriarchy. She then uses the unique weapons in her personal arsenal to negotiate her way to some semblance of fulfillment. There is an interesting lack of a sisterhood, for one woman will gladly offer up another for an increment in personal power, and alliances, if any, are constantly shifting. One cannot ask why the women do not rebel, or leave, or tell the oppressors to go to hell. Feminism, as it is known in the West, cannot be transplanted to South Asia and expected to flourish. The women themselves would not subscribe to it. What one can hope for are the quiet epiphanies that come to the Janakis of the world. Janaki uses her wits, and one knows at the outset that she has forged her own destiny. Perhaps change was imminent, for Mallika, the younger sister, gets to follow her desires for education and an empowering fulfilling job. But how did it happen? The author offers judiciously measured morsels of information and expertly draws out the tension in his tale, until it progresses to a satisfying, emotional crescendo.
Two skeins of narrative unspool simultaneously, like melody and harmony. One narrative recounts the past, which relies on a capricious and unreliable memory for detail, while the other relates the present. Within the first few pages, one is hooked as the question, "How did they get here from there?" forms in the reader's mind.
Women’s plight, dilemma and obligations in a typical Indian, rather south Indian setting though dresses the main theme of the novel, the composure and patience that are highlights of an Indian woman are the highlights of the novel too.
There is a musicality that permeates Ameen Merchant's exquisite debut novel. Right from the name, The Silent Raga, (the Tamil Mounaragam is more eloquent, but would be meaningless to Western readers), to the way its chapters are structured after the various stages of a raga's performance in recital, and the mellifluous prose they contain, and in the way certain sentences or words are repeated as a refrain, there is an inherent musicianship about the enterprise. Ameen Merchant has said he does not play any instrument, nor was he schooled in the Indian classical music tradition, but through a happy, albeit inexplicable osmosis, he strikes the right chord throughout his tale of a musical prodigy and her sister and the complicated familial past they must put to rest.
It is fascinating that Ameen Merchant populates his book predominantly with women. Men--the perpetrators, the oppressors, the aggressors, and yes, sometimes, saviors--remain shadowy figures. Apart from three sympathetic characters, one feels pity and a cold contempt for them and returns to the women, who are uniformly compelling.

Conclusion
Silence has a language so potent that it can make the present resound with a past shared, despised and loved. A raga is a scale (the closest technical western classical term), and as such, it can also be song or music. The Silent Raga in the book is a prophecy that keeps repeating itself – in the same words – at different junctures. But that is on a literal level. The title, The Silent Raga, is that of a love song – sung and unsung. Merchant brings it out rather well in the book that talks of rigid traditions in the face of changing times and the breaking of that system by a middle class Tamil girl who can’t be a conformist. She wants a life different from what was carved out for women in the small town of Sripuram.
It amazes that the novel is written by a man, and by one who was not only a non-Brahmin, but not even a Hindu. The story revolves around two sisters, their mother, (who dies in the very early pages of the book) and an aunt. It is a woman's story, told from the perspective mainly of a teenager and later in the book of her younger sister. It is astounding to see how the author could penetrate into the inner workings of the minds of these two girls, particularly of the older daughter Janaki. She runs away from her small town home and to add insult to injury, it is with a married Muslim Bollywood actor that she elopes. She is the subject of passionate gossip. When the local press comes to interview her father, he wants to act the role of the typically aggrieved parent and bursts out "she could have killed us instead", but even in the midst of the melodrama he senses its hollowness. He knows he is a sham. (p.12).
Ameen Merchant’s “The Silent Raga” will obsess anyone for a few days, one wouldn’t want to complete the reading and close the chapter once for all. There was something to look forward to when the book was half-way through; thoroughly gripping and mesmerizing.
Two great qualities of this novel: one, the vitality of the characters, smart and passionate, and ensnared in a plot that is full of the play of fate and reality, feeling as familiar as one's own life, however removed that life may be from theirs. Two, the sheer physical allure of the places and scenes. The description is never overdone, but this seems to be a book which can't resist the sensuality of India itself. All of the nicely developed imagery, unspoken tensions, and finely expressed sense of powerlessness and frustration are undercut by the fact that the conclusion comes about too quickly and the emotional resolution is too simple. The author has taken us on this long voyage to get to this moment, this is to some extent the overt point of the novel, the driving force behind the tale, and it fails because it feels more like adolescent wish fulfillment than well-crafted prose. The vocabulary is authentic, the detailing is intricate and the protagonists are so well nuanced, that this evocative debut novel reads like a translation from the Tamil language.Merchant is not shy about using the sisters as mouthpieces. Janaki remarks, for example, that in her childhood home she “learned about the replaceability of women” and that she is now “no longer a prisoner of pattern”. For the reader to summon real understanding, however, such views must spring to life through characterization and dialogue. This is where the novel falls desperately short.
In the end, the ‘liberation’ won by these sisters through powerful men proves unconvincing. Merchant seems to conspire with the forces which would entrap them, by ignoring their inner lives in favor of long descriptions of Indian life. He devotes more than a page to detailing a dish Janaki prepares while telling us nothing of her first meeting with Asgar. He dedicates several pages to a sari-buying expedition while leaving us in the dark about how Mallika feels about her American. Such gratuitous descriptions belong in a travelogue, and one suspects that that is their function. Amid this pandering, the silent raga of such women’s lives remains, sadly, unheard.
The Silent Raga occasionally rises to that level of pain and poetry, most notably when it tells the story of Janaki’s best friend Kamala, who is left devastated at the altar when the last of her family’s dowry cheques fails to clear and the groom’s entourage beats a hasty and brutal retreat. Kamala’s is the silent and tragic raga, or musical pattern, that Janaki feels impelled to play. If the raga is a mysterious craft to most English-speaking readers, The Silent Raga's emotional depths begin to suggest something of it as it moves along and we are touched and seduced by turns. It is like being drawn into the ecstasy of musical rhythms; no scholarly knowledge or ability is needed, other than knowing how to listen.
Ameen Merchant has retained many of the Tamil words and locutions of everyday speech, often because they cannot be readily translated. This does not reduce the pleasure of the non-Indian reader, for the meanings are readily apparent from the gist of the sentences. His spot-on descriptions of the rhythms of small-town life and each task that comprises the quotidian routine transcend the humdrum and take them into the realm of the poetic. The remembrance of long-forgotten sights, colors, customs, tastes (yes, there are many tantalizing South Indian dishes mentioned), and textures is among the many pleasures of the book.
As first novels go, this is a well done novel, but it is clearly identifiable as a first novel. For starters, there are many "feminisms", each one specific to culture/context/and geography. If there is any activism in the novel, it pertains to the availability of choices, and the consequences/ responsibilities that come with choosing. Janaki is a strategist with feminist insight. She tries to make the best of the limited choices available to her.
Today, the suppressed female voice is articulated. To a certain extent, the dignity of woman is affirmed, she has a greater share of social responsibility and a greater readiness to author her own authority.

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“The Silent Raga:A man’s rare insight into a woman’s plight?”.www.ndtv.com.April- 12,2008.<www.ndtv.com/video/player/just-books/the-silent-raga-a-man-s-rare-insight-into-a-woman-s-plight 126814>.

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