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Unit 9: Rupa Bajwa: Sari Shop—Concept of Feminism

special language that women speak when they shop and is good at his job at the Sevak Sari House. Notes
He is inspired to make a few changes to his dull existence after a glimpse into the life of the rich.
But the consequences are quite the opposite! Ms. Bajwa has a crafted an honest narrative of a town
in modern India, replete with the heartbreak of humdrum existence.
Feminist enterprise has been so far a long struggle to universalize female behaviour, their common
tales of woe and sufferings under realms of patriarchy and male oppression. Be it a question of
rewriting of male texts or parametering of social structure, the set pattern of feminist view point
has been struggle against androcentric ethics and female sensitivity in bonding, analysing and
understanding each other universally. Nowhere have women been set against women, only men
have been peeled, chopped and even roasted in certain instances.
In Indian context, the fashion in writing and criticism, pertains to this noveau feminism in vocal,
visual and literary form. Rupa Bajwa, the young girl from Amritsar and brave I must say, has dare
set in a different view point with her text, The Sari Shop. The title itself is a potent symbol of
Indian womanhood and all traditional and modern idiosyncrasies associated with it. This is Rupa
Bajwa’s debut work, and she bangs in a time when Jhumpa Lahiri, Shani Motoo, Anita Nair and
other young brigade is all over the scene. But she has a different identity of a small town like
Amritsar, an image like Sari to unfurl, and a separate story than immigrant culture tale, and a
separate woman to portray- an Indian woman, a wounded woman, a raped woman, a woman
who dares against women, woman who assumes the status of an actual heroine/ role model when
she pulls down glitters from fabrics of rich and suave feminist minds by poking fun at their
miserableness of being hollow inside. Bajwa has presented in all its nakedness the common psychic
inheritance of Indians’ regarding women and the psychic makeup of women in general.
The continuous assessment all over the world has been of women as important as men but no
evaluation of women’ position in society with other women. The enigma of plural societies like
India, which face more social, political and cultural cleavages, is complex and uneasy to differentiate.
The feminisation of media especially T.V. has brought a new cult of upper upper or upper middle
class bourgeois woman, obliterating our mind of the crude statistics of women facing unto
untouchability, oppression, below poverty line (bpl status), unemployment graphs, illiteracy or
ignorance factors, rising suicides, molestation, violence, rape etc etc
The embellished make believe world has bypassed our awareness of internal and external social
system in terms of caste, creed, race, colour, ethnicity, religion and now with emerging social
class. Though class in Indian context is not a new signifier, but Is the Indian writer in English
especially woman writer aware of interclass struggle, class division, class oppression, class-
consciousness and class solidarity among women themselves? The uniformity of biological status
among women can’t ignore rational, social, political and economic differences, where she is a
different class from the other. So, there are ‘fault lines’ emerging among perceived feminist notions
and theories, the fancied ‘equality manifesto’ not with men but with women in general seems
itself ‘unequal’ in theory and reality. The Sari Shop is a work where representations of different
Indian woman is given due analyses on the basis of numerous hybrid and heterogeneous class
groups. The rationalisation of status and class adds to discrimination between and women and
women and is discussed in terms of dominant and subordinate category. Frank Parkin has observed
in the book ‘Sociology of Gender’:
“For the great majority of women the allocation of social and economical rewards is determined
primarily by the position of their families and, in particular, that of the male head. Although
women today share certain status attributes in common, simply by virtue of their sex, their claims
over resources are not primarily determined by their own occupation but, more commonly, by
that of their fathers or husbands. And if the wives and daughters of unskilled labourers have
something in common with the wives and daughters of wealthy landowners, there can be no
doubt that the differences in their overall situation are far more striking and significant. Only if

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