Bhagwati Charan Varma’s women characters are among the most fascinating aspects of his fiction. He does not portray women merely as idealised figures, victims, wives or objects of male desire. His women possess desires, contradictions, ambitions and moral agency.Through them, Varma repeatedly questions the boundaries between love and desire, morality and social convention, freedom and responsibility.Chitralekha is perhaps his most iconic creation. She refuses to accept the conventional definitions of virtue and sin imposed upon women. Sensuous, intelligent and fiercely independent, she challenges the assumption that a woman’s morality can be judged simply by her sexual choices. Through Chitralekha, Varma turns the “fallen woman” into a philosophical question.Rekha, from the novel ‘Rekha’, represents another important dimension of Varma’s understanding of womanhood. Her character is more inward and psychologically complex. Through her emotional conflicts and relationships, Varma examines the tension between a woman’s personal desires and the expectations imposed upon her by society.Rekha is neither simply rebellious nor conventionally submissive; her complexity lies precisely in the contradictions within her. Falling for a man double her age was outrageous when this novel was written in 1960s, but Varma stands strongly behind the woman protagonist and readers don’t see any vilification of the character.In ‘Teen Varsh’, women become central to Varma’s exploration of love, betrayal and emotional uncertainty, while Prabha represents a typical modern and ambitious girl, Saroj is submissive yet strong.She comforts Ramesh’s vulnerability when he feels cheated by Prabha.Shyamala in ‘Woh Phir Nahin Aayi’ adds yet another dimension to his portrayal of feminine psychology. His women can be passionate, vulnerable, calculating, affectionate, confused and occasionally self-destructive. They are allowed to be flawed human beings.This is perhaps Varma’s greatest strength as a novelist. He does not confine his women to the familiar literary categories of ‘devi’ and ‘abla’.They possess agency, make choices and live with their consequences. At the same time, his portrayals inevitably carry the imprint of the social attitudes of his era.Taken together, Chitralekha, Rekha, Saroj, Shyamala and his other women reveal Varma’s enduring preoccupation with the individual’s struggle against society. His women do not merely exist within his stories; they often become the very means through which he questions the moral assumptions of the world around them.It’s a lesson for many contemporary writers, how Bhagwati Charan Varma gives positivity to his women characters and keeps them much ahead of time without losing respect for them(Writer is a behavioural scientist and grandson of Hindi litterateur Bhagwati Charan Varma)
