Reading Women in The Better Man

 

Reading Women in The Better Man

 

Nivedita Hembrom,

Ph.D. Research Scholar,

Department of English,

Sido Kanhu Murmu University,

Dumka, Jharkhand, India

 

Abstract: The Better Man (1999) is about Mukundan, a retired government servant who goes back to his village to face old memories he has spent years avoiding. The novel treats this as his story, but the women around him, his cousin Meenakshi, his lover Anjana, his neighbour Valsala, and his mother Paru Kutty, are living their own struggles the whole time, mostly unnoticed by the plot. This paper looks past Mukundan and reads these four women through two ideas: Simone de Beauvoir's idea that woman is treated as man's "Other," and Virginia Woolf's argument that a woman needs money and a room of her own before she can be anything more than what her circumstances allow. Meenakshi tries politics, then marriage, and both fail her, before she eventually builds a full independent life through her own work. Anjana feels worthless when she is single, briefly feels valued again when a man proposes, and only starts to become her own person once she gets a job and later chooses a relationship for herself. Valsala wakes up to her own desire after years of a dead marriage, but this awakening leads to murder, not freedom. Paru Kutty has the least room to move of all four women, and even her death ends up serving her husband's story rather than her own. Taken together, these four women suggest that the real difficulty in this novel is not Mukundan's, but theirs.

Keywords: Anita Nair, The Better Man, women, Beauvoir, Woolf

 

Introduction

The Better Man (1999) was Anita Nair's first novel. It follows Mukundan, a man in his late fifties, as he retires and returns to his home village of Kaikurussi after decades away. On the surface, this is a book about Mukundan facing his father's cruelty and his own failures as a son. Most readings of the novel treat it this way too. But if you look closely, the women in Mukundan's life are given real space in the story even though the plot keeps pushing them to the side: his cousin Meenakshi, Anjana, the woman he plans to marry, his neighbour Valsala, whose story turns violent, and his mother Paru Kutty, who spends her whole life in a marriage where nobody asks what she wants.

This paper is interested in exactly those women, not as background to Mukundan's story but as the real subject worth looking at. I chose Meenakshi, Anjana, Valsala, and Paru Kutty because together they cover a wide range of what a woman's life could look like at that time, everything from open rebellion to quiet endurance. Each of them ends up somewhere different: one finds a full independence by the end, one is still working her way toward it, one is punished for reaching too far, and one never gets free at all. Damayanti, a fifth woman in the novel, is set aside here, since her story runs closely parallel to Anjana's and does not add a distinct pattern to the four already under discussion. Existing scholarship on the novel has tended to look at these women one at a time rather than together.

Kumar traces Anjana's arc from a woman defined by the failure of an unmarried life, through a difficult first marriage, to the teaching job her father arranges for her, arguing that this job, and later her relationship with Mukundan, allow her to grow into someone who makes her own choices, including the choice to seek a divorce. Sharma and Chauhan take a wider view, reading Valsala and Anjana together as two routes to freedom within a broader argument about female liberation across two of Nair's novels, Valsala's through desire and defiance, Anjana's through economic independence and personal choice. Both readings are valuable, but neither brings all four women in this novel into a single frame, and neither tests the pattern against Meenakshi or Paru Kutty. This paper takes up that gap, reading Meenakshi, Anjana, Valsala, and Paru Kutty together through Beauvoir and Woolf, to see what pattern emerges once all four are considered side by side rather than one at a time.

This paper leans on two books: Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Beauvoir's basic argument is that society treats man as the normal, default human being, and woman only gets defined in relation to him, as his "Other," rather than as a person in her own right (Beauvoir 26). She also makes the well-known claim that "one is not born, but rather becomes, woman" (Beauvoir 330), meaning that femininity is something society builds into a girl over time, not something she is simply born with. Beauvoir also talks about immanence and transcendence: immanence is a life that just repeats itself, mostly through unpaid domestic work, while transcendence means actually moving forward through your own choices and actions.

Woolf's argument fills in the practical side of this. She says a woman needs money and a room of her own, meaning some income, privacy, and time that is not constantly being interrupted, before she can become anything more than what her situation forces on her (Woolf 4). Applying this to Nair's four women raises one simple question for each of them: does she have any money, space, or voice that is really hers, or is her whole life shaped by the men around her?

I don't use both ideas the same way for every woman here. For Meenakshi, I use both, first immanence and transcendence to look at her failed attempts at escape, then Woolf's idea of money and space once she finally builds something of her own. For Anjana, I mostly use Beauvoir, since her sense of self so clearly depends on whether men approve of her or not. For Valsala, I use both, since she briefly reaches for something like transcendence through desire, only for it to end in violence. For Paru Kutty, I use both too, though in her case neither idea points to any freedom she actually gets, only to how completely that freedom is missing.

Meenakshi: Two Failed Escapes and One Real One

            Meenakshi grows up with Mukundan in Kaikurussi, and the two are close as children, but that changes sharply once they hit adolescence. Mukundan gets his own room and is told to bathe separately from the women in the house. Meenakshi's restrictions go further. She is kept at home, and her mother pushes her firmly toward domestic life: "Put aside your books and fancy talk. It is time you learned to cook," her mother tells her (Nair 54). This is not just Meenakshi growing up. It is Meenakshi being shaped into a certain kind of woman by a mother who went through the same shaping herself, exactly the pattern Beauvoir describes when she says femininity is made, not born.

Her uncle, Achuthan Nair, becomes for Meenakshi everything she wants to get away from: feudal power, land, and old-fashioned male authority. Her answer is to join the Naxalite movement:

Meenakshi had become a Naxalite. Armed with books on revolutions and driven by the mythical powers of Stalin and Lenin, Meenakshi had pledged to cleanse the earth of bourgeois vermin. And her first target of attack was Achuthan Nair—Mukundan's father, her uncle. Feudal landlord. Tyrant. Master of oppression. (Nair 56)

This is a real attempt at transcendence, a genuine effort to break out of what's expected of her through action instead of just putting up with it.

            It doesn't work. She then pins her hopes on Balan, a Kathakali dancer, believing marrying him will finally set her free: "Mukundan, I’m finally going to escape this prison," she tells her cousin (Nair 57). But Balan's dance work takes him abroad and later to a teaching job in Delhi, and he never comes back: "Balan never came back" (Nair 57). All Meenakshi is left with is "fleeting memories of the days they had spent together, and a child that was the result of a few passionate nights" (Nair 58).

            Both her political rebellion and her marriage were attempts at transcendence, and both send her right back into the same kind of stuck, repetitive life she was trying to escape, one because it never actually touches the household structure holding her in place, the other because it just swaps one dependence for another.

            By the time Mukundan meets her again, five years later, Meenakshi has stopped talking about escape at all:

"How can I abandon my mother?" she said in a flat, dull voice when Mukundan met her next, five years later. "And there's the child to think of now. If I stay on at home, we'll manage. We don't have to worry about a roof over our heads and food when we are hungry." (Nair 58)

There is no more talk of prisons or escape here, just a flat, practical acceptance of what her life actually is. But this acceptance is not the end of her story. She starts small, running a crèche for the panchayat out of a room she "carved out for herself" next to the post office (Nair 58), earning just enough to stop being entirely dependent on her in-laws.

            Years later, once her son is grown, Meenakshi goes further than this. She tells Mukundan she has found a job as matron of a working women's hostel, far from Kaikurussi, and she is finally leaving:

'Haven't I given them the best years of my life?' she countered. 'There is nothing left of me to give any more.'... 'I'm tired, Mukundan,' she said quietly. 'If it wasn't this, I would have found something else. Perhaps an ashram that would have me.' (Nair 249)

This is Meenakshi finally choosing herself over a household that has used her up. Even Mukundan's reaction, treating her leaving as something almost unthinkable, "like being told that the Pulmooth mountain was going to be levelled" (Nair 249), shows how permanent everyone assumed her staying would be. Looking at her story as a whole, Meenakshi moves from being tightly restricted, through two failed attempts to break free, through a flat acceptance of her circumstances, to a real and complete independence she finally chooses for herself once money and the right opportunity make it possible.

Anjana: Worth Measured by Male Approval

            Anjana first appears as K. M. Nair's niece, already a schoolteacher stuck in a bad first marriage to a man her own uncle calls a "no good creature" (Nair 211). Before that marriage even happens, at twenty-seven and unmarried, she already believes being single makes her a failure:

On the day Anjana turned twenty-seven, she resigned herself to a state of eternal spinsterhood. She had become, she thought, with a little bitter smile, one of those old maids destined to remain at home. Unloved, unwanted, unfulfilled. (Nair 223)

Those last three words aren't just about her feeling sad. They're a pretty direct example of Beauvoir's point, a woman who has learned to judge her own worth entirely by whether men want her, rather than by anything she's actually done or built.

            When a marriage proposal does come along, the change in Anjana shows up almost entirely in her body: "She smiled. She laughed. Her shoulders straightened. Her breasts stood proud and erect. Her hips swung. Her eyes danced. Anjana let herself be a desirable woman once again" (Nair 224). Her sense of self is so tied to being physically wanted that her identity seems to switch on only once a man has approved of her, instead of existing on its own.

            The marriage itself doesn't live up to this. Three months in, her husband is still basically a stranger to her: "A man she cooked and kept house for. A man who used her body when the impulse took him. There was little conversation between them and hardly any companionship" (Nair 228). She has been reduced to cooking and sex, which is more or less exactly what Beauvoir means by woman as the Other. When she tries to actually talk to her husband about something that matters to her, he shuts her down: "You won't understand what I'm talking about" (Nair 228), denying her the kind of real companionship Woolf treats as essential.

            Things start to shift when Anjana's father gets her a teaching job, giving her, for the first time, some identity outside her marriage. It's not full independence, but it's a start. That start becomes something more in her relationship with Mukundan, which, unlike her first marriage, is something she actually chooses rather than has arranged for her. When Mukundan hesitates, worried about her age and her marriage, Anjana is the one who is certain:

I have never ever felt like a married woman in all these years. I feel married when I am with you... I don't care about how old you are or what the world thinks. If you will have me, that is all the happiness I need. (Nair 244)

Unlike her first marriage, arranged for her without much say of her own, this is Anjana actively choosing a man and saying so out loud: "As soon as her divorce papers came through, he intended to marry her" (Nair 247). Moving from a forced, unhappy marriage to a relationship she picked herself is the clearest sign in her story of her moving away from needing men to define her.

Valsala: Wanting Something, and What It Costs

            Valsala has been married to Prabhakaran Master for over twenty years by the time her story takes centre stage, her days filled entirely with housework while her husband stays wrapped up in his own routines, barely noticing her. Things change when Sridharan enters her life and stirs up a kind of desire she thought was gone for good:

All night, for the first time in many years, Valsala tossed and turned in her bed, breathing in the scent of the pala flowers. Strange sensations coursed through her... every pore in her body opened, greedily seeking to fill their depths with this unique fragrance. (Nair 129)

            The next morning she gets dressed up on purpose, pulling out a necklace she hasn't worn in years, and calls out under a flowering tree, "Come to me, Gandharva... Can't you smell the fragrance of want in me?" (Nair 129). This is a woman moving from being defined purely as a housewife to actually recognising her own desire. It's also worth noticing that none of this happens anywhere she can really call her own. Her house gives her no privacy at all, and this moment under the tree is just a brief escape from a domestic role that otherwise leaves her no space to be anyone else.

            But what comes next isn't freedom, it's escalation. Her affair with Sridharan grows into something more dangerous, with her husband becoming the one obstacle standing between them and the life they want, and his property becomes as much a reason for what follows as their feelings do. Instead of just leaving, Valsala and Sridharan kill him in his sleep: "Sridharan, twenty-nine, along with Valsala, wife of Prabhakaran Master, had brutally killed the schoolteacher in his bed... The body was then dismembered and buried in individual pits" (Nair 143).

            Valsala is arrested along with Sridharan. The woman who briefly found her own desire under the pala tree ends the novel in police custody, her story closed off not by any choice of her own but by the law. The novel doesn't present any of this as liberation, and neither do I. Valsala's story shows what can happen when a woman's desire wakes up with nowhere legitimate to go, it curdles into violence instead of freedom. Her dependence on the marriage for property and security, and the fact that she can't picture leaving any other way, explain why she feels so stuck, but the novel makes clear this particular way out only leads to punishment, not to any real selfhood.

Paru Kutty: A Life With Almost No Room to Move

            Paru Kutty, Mukundan's mother, probably has less freedom than any other woman in the novel. Her troubles start even before Mukundan is born, when her husband Achuthan Nair leaves for Burma while she's pregnant, and continue when he comes back years later and blames her for their son turning out afraid of him: "What have you done to him to turn him into a pathetic creature like this?" (Nair 69).Right from the start, her husband is the one making all the decisions, and she is just left to deal with the consequences.

            Things get worse when Achuthan Nair takes a much younger mistress, Ammini, and eventually stops hiding it. For once, Paru Kutty confronts him directly:

I'm willing to live with the shame of your taking a mistress. But I'm not going to let you flaunt how little I mean to you. I am your wife and I insist you treat me with the respect due to me. (Nair 74)

This is Beauvoir's idea of woman as Other playing out in a single scene. Paru Kutty has spent her whole life defined only through her husband, and this demand for respect is really a demand to be seen as something more than just his wife. This moment matters for another reason too, it's one of the few times we actually hear her voice at all. She even briefly takes control of the house itself: "For as long as I'm alive, I will decide who lives in this house and who doesn't" (Nair 74), though this doesn't really last or change anything in practice.

            When Achuthan Nair can't give Ammini the house he promised her and builds her one across the road instead, Paru Kutty's resistance shrinks down to small, private acts: she refuses to share the family's grain after the harvest, which the novel calls the most public fight she is capable of, even while admitting she "was no general" and "didn't have a strategy, a battle plan. And she suffered for it" (Nair 76). She also reaches out, after twelve years of silence, to a cousin she'd been forbidden from seeing, filling the house briefly with noise she clearly enjoys, mostly because it annoys her husband. None of it actually changes her situation. Achuthan Nair keeps visiting just to tell her about his life with Ammini, and she's left crying alone once he goes (Nair 78).

            She eventually dies falling down the stairs, in circumstances the novel never really explains, and even her death ends up serving her husband's story rather than her own: Ammini refuses to live in the house because she believes Paru Kutty haunts it, meaning, as the novel puts it, "what Paru Kutty couldn't accomplish in life she did in death" (Nair 78). Out of all four women, Paru Kutty's story shows most clearly what it looks like when a life stays stuck with no real way out. Her one moment of open confrontation, and her small private rebellions, point toward some sense of self without ever actually giving her one.

Looking at All Four Together

            When you put these four women side by side, Meenakshi, Anjana, Valsala, and Paru Kutty, they don't add up to one single story about what it means to be a woman around Mukundan and men like him. Meenakshi tries and fails twice, through politics and then marriage, before finally choosing a full, complete independence for herself. Anjana starts out almost entirely dependent on whether men want her, and only begins to become her own person once she has a job and later chooses her own relationship, though the novel leaves her story unfinished. Valsala goes the furthest and pays the highest price, her awakened desire ending in violence and arrest rather than any freedom the novel is willing to allow. Paru Kutty has it worst of all, a life defined by silence, with only small, private acts of resistance that change nothing, ending in a death that isn't even really about her.

            What connects these four women isn't a shared ending, since their endings couldn't be more different, but a shared starting point: each of them has to be defined first through some man, a cousin, a husband, a father, before anyone even asks what she wants for herself. Where money and some space of her own become available, as they eventually do for Meenakshi and, to a lesser extent, for Anjana, something like real independence becomes possible. Where those things stay missing, as they do for Paru Kutty her whole life, or where desire wakes up with nowhere legitimate to go, as with Valsala, what's left is either permanent confinement or a bid for freedom that ends in disaster. Read this way, these four women suggest that the real subject of this novel might not be only Mukundan working through his past, but the much harder and more open question of what selfhood could even look like for the women who made him who he is, and who he shaped in turn.

Conclusion

            The Better Man presents itself as a story about one man coming to terms with his childhood. But the four women who move through Mukundan's life, Meenakshi, Anjana, Valsala, and Paru Kutty, are carrying their own equally important stories the whole time. Read through Beauvoir's idea of woman as Other and Woolf's argument about money and a room of one's own, these four stories show that female selfhood in this novel isn't simply given or simply denied. It depends on whether a woman gets any real independence, whether her desire has anywhere legitimate to go, and whether the men in her life ever let her be more than an extension of themselves. Where earlier writing on this novel has mostly looked at these women one at a time, this paper suggests that they make more sense read together, as one connected pattern rather than four separate character studies, and that their stories deserve to be treated as central to what this novel is actually about, not as background to Mukundan's.

 

Works Cited

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Books, 2011.

Kumar, Anil. "Expectations of Women in the Novel The Better Man by Anita Nair." International Journal of Humanities and Education Research, vol. 6, no. 1, 2024, pp. 100-103.

Nair, Anita. The Better Man. Penguin Books India, 1999.

Sharma, Divyani, and Swati Chauhan. "Female Liberation in Anita Nair's The Ladies Coupe and The Better Man." South India Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 22, no. 4, 2024, pp. 231-238.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Hogarth Press, 1929.