Question

Show liow Narayan depicts women in the story and their role in a man’s life.

Answer 1

When Muni the Indian peasant and the red-faced American meet and converse in “A Horse and Two Goats,” the differences between them are immediately apparent, and these differences inform the main idea of the story, the clash of cultures. One of the few things the two men have in common is kept in the background of the story, but resurfaces frequently—each has a devoted wife on the sidelines, making it possible for them to keep going.

To begin to understand Narayan’s sense of women, it would be useful to look briefly at how Indian and Hindu culture has perceived and shaped women’s lives. It is believed that the ancient Tamil societies may have been matriarchal, that is, ruled and guided by woman. The great Indian epics, composed approximately two thousand years ago, contain stories of several important female characters.

In practical terms, however, the life of a woman in India as recently as one hundred or two hundred years ago was almost unimaginable today, even in comparison to the restrictions placed upon American women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hindu law and tradition dictated that women were under the protection of their fathers, and then of their husbands. In fact, although Muni has never kept track of his age, “He was told on their day of wedding that he was ten years old and she was eight. During the wedding ceremony they had had to recite their respective ages and names.” This is the tradition under which Muni had grown up. Women were honored on the one hand, and subordinate on the other—no more simple or straightforward than gender roles in any society.

Muni and his wife were married in a traditional ceremony at a young age and have lived together nearly all their lives. His expectations for their roles in relation to each other, based on tradition, have not been met. He remembers that “he had thrashed her only a few times in their career.” The tone here is casual, without regret; thrashing is what husbands do when wives get out of line. But the balance of power did not hold, at least not in Muni’s eyes: “later she had the upper hand.” In the opening, the narrator shows the town and a typical day. “His wife lit the domestic fire at dawn, boiled water in a mud pot, threw into it a handful of millet flour, added salt, and gave him his first nourishment of the day. When he started out, she would put in his hand a packed lunch, once again the same millet cooked into a little ball, which he could swallow with a raw onion at midday.” It is a spartan meal, the most nutrition for the least money, but there is no mention of her preparing anything for herself. Is the narrator simply not interested in her diet, or does she skip the morning meal to leave more for Muni? “She was old, but he was older and needed all the attention she could give him in order to be kept alive.”

The American’s wife is even more on the periphery of the main action than Muni’s wife; in fact the action could go along just as smoothy without her even being mentioned. But Narayan has a reason for introducing her. The American’s wife’s name is Ruth, the name of an Old Testament figure who stands in Judeo-Christian tradition as a model for wifely loyalty. The Biblical Ruth is loyal to her dead husband’s family; the Ruth in “A

Horse and Two Goats” is loyal to her husband and stands by to prop him up when he is about to do something off-balance. She seems to be a good sport, to support her husband’s whims: “Next day she called the travel agent first thing and told him to fix it, and so here 1 am.”

Having a loyal, grounded wife gives each of the husbands the freedom to move out into the world. Muni goes to the highway each day so he can “watch the highway and see the lorries and buses pass through to the hills, and it gave him a sense of belonging to a larger world.” Ruth has come to India with her husband, but he tells Muni that she is “staying back at Srinagar, and I am the one doing the rounds and joining her later.”

Muni remembers that in his youth he was often chosen for the women’s roles in the plays the community performed. Sometimes he was the Goddess Lakshmi, a nurturer and a model for devoted wives. It is her obedience to Vishnu that gives her power. Muni also played the part of Sita, another incarnation of Lakshmi and the wife of Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, an exemplary wife, who remains loyal to Rama in spite of many trials.

A possible reason for Muni’s memories of these plays may lie in town gossip. To the delight of the men in town, the postman’s wife has run off to the city with another man. The postman “does not speak to anyone at all nowadays. Who would if a wife did what she did? In this speech, Muni comes as close as he ever will to stating the truth about wives: it may be annoying when they stay, but it is devastating when they leave. As Muni drives his goats out to the statue in the beginning of the story, he reflects on his age. “At seventy, one only waited to be summoned by God. When he was dead what would his wife do?” In fact, his wife would be lonely, but she is the one in the family with survival skills. The real question is what would Muni do without his wife if she were summoned by God? Where would a man be without a loyal wife?