Clear Light of Day

The perspective shifts to Raja, the oldest son in the family. In the first section of the novel, Raja was an absent presence, exerting influence on the story even though he was not physically present. It was clear that Bim admired Raja even as she was angry at him for having chosen a life of middle-class complacency instead of the heroic life of a poet he had once envisioned for himself. Now, in Chapter 2, we see Raja’s life and his choices through his own eyes, as he becomes infatuated with a romantic vision of precolonial life in the Mughal Empire, as he struggles to make sense of the shifting political sands under his feet, and as he recovers from a near-fatal case of tuberculosis while Bim cares for him.

Poetry continues to play a large role in the lives of Bim and Raja, and their diverging poetic inclinations illustrate the connections between Family and Nation. As part of the British Empire, they have been educated and inculcated with British language and culture. Their earliest literary heroes were British Romantic poets like Tennyson and Byron. As Raja studies the Urdu language and begins reading Urdu poetry from the time of the Muslim Mughal Empire, Bim feels left behind, and the rift that opens between them symbolizes larger rifts within a nation seeking to define itself independently of colonial influence. Raja’s interest in this literature is inherently political—he is resisting English colonization by turning his attention to a precolonial literature and culture. At the same time, he is romanticizing a past that no longer exists and was never authentically his, and his father warns him that many Muslim Indians will not welcome his presence in their classrooms. Literary allusions throughout the novel reinforce the theme of Family and Nation and draw attention to the complex problem of responding to colonialism from within the colonizer’s language and literary tradition. Not only do the young Bim and Raja look up to Tennyson and Byron, but Bim compares her aunt’s eventual death to that of Ophelia, a character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. These allusions illustrate the degree to which her imagination has been shaped by English models. Lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Four Quartets are included in the text, and many critics have argued that the novel’s structure follows that of Four Quartets. These allusions are especially apt, as Eliot wrote in response to the loss of traditional sources of meaning and order in European culture following World War I. Like other modernists of his era, he was in some ways an apocalyptic writer, describing the dissolution of one world and the uncertain birth of a new one. The project of Clear Light of Day is a similar one: Its characters cling to a world that’s being swept away, unsure how to carry the burden of the past into a radically different future.

In narrating Bim’s romantic past through her aborted relationship with the kind yet “emotionally weak” Dr. Biswas, Chapter 2 further explores Struggles of Women in Modern India. Bim personifies the “New Indian Woman,” a middle-class and college-educated woman who seeks to determine her own destiny in a patriarchal and conservative society. Yet Dr. Biswas has a different take on why Bim refuses to marry him; he believes it is because Bim has “sacrificed” herself to care for her family (101), just as Aunt Mira has sacrificed herself in the care of others. Bim does at times resent the burden of caring for her house and family, and she wonders whether, in pursuing the career that allowed her to take on that burden, she has simply traded one form of female subjugation for another.