About Us: http://www.the-criterion.

com/about/
Archive: http://www.the-criterion.com/archive/
Contact Us: http://www.the-criterion.com/contact/
Editorial Board: http://www.the-criterion.com/editorial-board/
Submission: http://www.the-criterion.com/submission/
FAQ: http://www.the-criterion.com/fa/

ISSN 2278-9529

Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal

www.galaxyimrj.com

www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English

ISSN: 0976-8165

From Love to Libido: Irony as a Narrative Mode in Ruskin Bonds Love is a

Sad Song
Pabitra Kumar Rana
Assistant Professor
West Bengal Education Service
Dantan-II Govt. College,
Paschim Medinipur, W.B.
Abstract:
Ruskin Bonds Love is a Sad Song is a semi-autobiographical story in which the thirty
year old Anglo-Indian narrator wishfully reminisces about his own love once paternal and
subsequently libidinal for a sixteen year old Punjabi girl and undermines the gravity of his
affair by taking recourse to self-reflexive irony. The narrators obsessive love for the girl can be
deemed as the manifestation of the authors repressed Oedipal desire as Bond passed his
childhood days in the midst of psychological angst due to the separation of his parents. The
present article attempts to understand how the narrator was a split subject between the lover and
the artist and how his art becomes a defense mechanism to negotiate his Oedipal anxiety.
Keywords: Love, Desire, Irony, Oedipal, Anglo-Indian
Ruskin Bonds story Love is a Sad Song (first published in 1975) is a wishful
reminiscence of an unsuccessful love-affair by a self-critical lover-narrator whose reflection of
his affair with a girl almost half of his age opens up interesting avenues of psychoanalytic
study. The semi-autobiographical story invites the reader to have a critical look into it not
because that it depicts the universal conflict between passionate love and strictures of society,
albeit complicated here more for the lovers being an aged Anglo-Indian and the beloveds being
a school-going young Punjabi girl, but because the lover-narrators ironic stance on his own
affair. The smooth stream-ofconsciousness-like narrative not only details the incidents and
mental state of the lover during the active days of his romance, but also undermines the intensity
and feasibility of the affair by incorporating the observation of the self-critical narrator who
makes gentle fun of his love at the cost of himself. The present article attempts to understand
how the narrator of the story turns out to be split subject and how his passionate love is
attenuated by the ironic mode of his narration.
I
Nature, children and love are constant concerns in Bonds fictional world. Bond has an
acute sense of perceiving the dynamism of nature and finds the peace of his mind in the midst of
hills at Dehra Dun, at the foot of the Himalayas and feels like a fish out of water on the plains.
Love, especially between adolescents and young people, is also Bonds cup of tea. He is not so
much interested in marriage or in marital love as he is in romance among unmarried lovers.
Amita Aggarwal in her book Fictional World of Ruskin Bond detects the probable reason for
this:

Vol. 6, Issue. V

087

October 2015

www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English

ISSN: 0976-8165

Bond has not created a single couple enjoying happy conjugal life in his short
stories. Perhaps, the trauma of his parents separation does not allow him to
conceive of a pair of lovers living in blissful matrimony.
( Aggarwal 30 )
As any writers creation is deeply informed by his/her personal life, so is with Bond whose case
was fairly complicated for his being an Anglo-Indian and deciding to stay in India after the
Independence. Born to a British father and an Anglo-Indian mother in 1934 in Himachal
Pradesh, Bond passed his childhood in unhappiness in the midst of the discord between his father
and mother, their separation, the remarriage of his mother when he was four, the demise of his
father when he was ten, and his dislike of the very idea of colonialism. Unlike the other sahibs
who retreated to clubs and small ghetto like Chandrapore in Fosters A Passage to India , Bond
attempted to de-ghettoize himself by living in Missouri and declasses himself among his
friends in Dehra Dun. Instead of leaving the country like most other members of his community,
ge developed a keen interest in Indian landscape and Indian life. Remembering his fathers
words that he belongs to England, in his youth Bond went there in 1951 with the aspiration to
become a famous writer but soon returned because it was not easy to leave a place that has soulconnection with a person. This was a period of crisis as were the childhood days of insecurity
and anxiety. He was divided against himself between his communal affiliation and his sense
of familial attachment with a place he had grown up. Debashis Bandyopadhyay has captured this
dilemma in Bond adroitly in his book Locating the Anglo-Indian Self in Ruskin Bond:
At twenty, the authorial self engages in a debate between his communal
commitments and private desires. Whether or not they are mutually exclusive or
subsumable ideas like the symbolic and the imaginary constituents of the
authorial self is a matter on which he is undecided. The brand of self-reflexive
irony that engenders the narration can be called, to borrow Franco Morettis
words, spell of indecision.
(Bandyopadhyay 21)
Though the observation is made in relation to another story in the broad context of sense of exile
in an Anglo-Indian author, it is very much pertinent to Love is a Sad Song (henceforth Love) as
the story not only reveals the narrators self-reflexive irony, but also betrays his defense
mechanism to cope with his sense of loss through nature, nostalgia and writing.
Love starts with the thirty year old narrator ruminating, in the midst of nature (against
grey rock and beneath the sky of pristine blueness) in a cool November afternoon, his romance in
May of previous year with the sixteen year old Sushila, who came to the hills, with her twelve
year old brother Sunil and twenty three year old uncle Dinesh who was an acquaintance of the
narrator. The narrator charts, in conjunction with his minute sensuous description of nature, how
he fell madly in love with child Sushila after conversation on love at night following a picnic in
which they came close in the midst of oak, rhododendron, maple and a sylvan stream. The
narrators calm narration not only dilutes the heat of his passion, but exposes his vulnerability in
shifting the nature of his love:

Vol. 6, Issue. V

088

October 2015

www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English

ISSN: 0976-8165

A year ago my feelings about you were almost paternal! Or so I thought But
you are no longer a child and I am a little older too. For when, the night after the
picnic, you took my hand and held it against your soft warm cheek, it was the first
time that a girl had responded to me so readily, so tenderly. Perhaps it was just
innocence but that one action of yours, that acceptance of me, devastated my
heart.
(Love 24)
This is the feeling of a grown-up child whose psyche is moulded by Oedipal anxiety and lack of
womens company in his adolescence, with the result of what Dinesh rightly diagnoses as
delayed adolescence. The intensity of the lovers psychic flow is punctuated by the prosaic
reality of the ironic narrator:
Gently, fervently, I kissed your eyes and forehead, your long smooth throat: and I
whispered, Sushila, I love you, I love you I love you, in the same way that
millions and millions of love-smitten young men have whispered since time
immemorialAnd what else did I say? That I would look after you and work for
you and make you happy; and that too had been said before, and I was in no way
different from anyone. I was a man and a boy again.
( Love 25 )
The narrator enumerates every little move of his physical intimacy with Sushila and for the
purpose of his narration appropriates Sushilas thoughts which, in reality, remain unfathomable
to him for ever. The narrator imagines that she thinks of him in some private moments away in
Delhi, but could not understand her mind when she was with him:
You never replied directly to a question. I suppose that was a feminine quality;
coyness, perhaps.
Do you love me, Sushila?
No answer.
Not now. When you are little older. In a year or two.
Did you nod in the darkness or did I imagine it?
( Love 26 )
These are the moments of uncertainties and doubts which sufficiently capture the split
personality of the lover-narrator. The narrator is bemused at the sincerity of his desire and his
consciousness of the drabness of his language. This psychological gap, coupled with his
jealously against her imagined lover, generates a self-pity that verges on self-mockery:
Im very impatient, I know that, but Ill wait for as long as you make metwo or
three or a hundred years. Yes, Sushila, a hundred years!
Ah, what a pretty speech I made! Romeo could have used some of it; Majnu too.
( Love 27)
The narrators ironic attitude intensifies as he continues to narrate his attempts to convince the
members of Sushilas home of his intention to marry her. The narrator ventures into intimating
his intention to her mother, and having done that in the midst of a crowded bus in Delhi, reverts
into his ironic self-derogation:

Vol. 6, Issue. V

089

October 2015

www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English

ISSN: 0976-8165

You are her mother and so I want you to be the first to know. (Liar I was! She
about the fifth to know.)

Dont tell anyone else just now, I said.

I wont tell anyone, she said with a smile.
So now the secretif it could be called thatwas shared by at least five people.
(Love 41)
It is the narrators realization of the improbability of his situation that engenders his narrative
self-pity; barring one occasion rarely does he become sentimental. Even when the narrator meets
Sushilas other lover Pramod whom he has visualized as crude, selfish, irresponsible and
unattractive college student and finds him to be gentle, diffident and uncertain like himself , he
cannot help exposing his own wishful fantasy and uncertainty: I wondered if I should tell him
about my own feeling for you. The irony operating in the narrative resembles structural irony
as Narration is the most common vehicle for structural irony (Bedford 254), but differs from
it in that the narrator can hardly be identified as nave as he himself consciously brings to light
the discrepancy between his feelings and his reflection of them.
II
From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the incidents narrated in the story and the
narrators rendering of them in fiction can be deemed as an attempt, on the part of the author, to
assuage the psychological anxiety embedded at the core of his being. The pungency of psychic
mechanism manifest in Love has its genesis in Bonds real life. In his introduction to the 2015
anthology of his favorite stories chosen by the author himself, Bond writes:
Readers often ask me if a particular story is true or not, and sometimes the
answers surprises them. Love is a Sad Song is a true story, and happened very
much in the same way I have described. But of course Sushila wasnt her real
name; and the real Sushila is now a grandmother. In Delhi, you grow old. In Deoli
you are trapped in a time warp and stay young forever.
(A Gathering of Friends ix)
The narrators obsessive desire for Sushila, given the absurdity of their situation, can be seen as
the disguised manifestation of the authors repressed oedipal trauma because of the separation of
his parents. According to Freud the repressed desire for mother and its accompanying fear of
castration in child are revived during adolescence and during paranormal conditions of
adulthood. Going a step farther, the French psychoanalytic theorist and critic Jacque Lacan
postulated that the childs entry from the illusory but idyllic and delightful realm of the
Imaginary order to the Symbolic order of law and language results in a split or division at the
heart of the subject. In the words of Lois Tyson, Our entrance into the Symbolic Order thus
involves the experience of separation from others, and the biggest separation is the separation
from the intimate union we experienced with our mother during our immersion in the Imaginary
Order. For Lacan, this separation constitutes our most important experience of loss, and it is one
that will haunt us all our lives. We will seek substitutes great and small for that lost union with
our mother. We will spend our lives unconsciously pursuing it in the Symbolic Ordermaybe
Ill recapture that feeling of union if I find a perfect mate; if I acquire some money; if I convert

Vol. 6, Issue. V

090

October 2015

www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English

ISSN: 0976-8165

to a different religion ; if I become better looking; if I become more popular; of if I buy a flashier
car, a bigger house , or whatever the Symbolic Order tells me I should wantbut we will never
be able to sustain a feeling of complete fulfillment.(Critical Theory Today 28). Sushila
becomes, in the Lacanian paradigm, object petit a, an object-cause which comes to mean an
object of desire that can never be actually attained. To that extent, it can be viewed as the cause
of desire rather than a concrete object that is actually sought by the drives. In Love Sushila
remains both palpable and evanescent. Though on one or two occasions, she expressed her love
for the narrator, for him she is ultimately an enigma; he is not sure whether he has seduced her or
she has seduced him. As for Pramod so for the narrator, Sushila and her love remain a mystery.
The narrators quizzing of Pramod on the exact nature of the latters love is ironic selfinvestigation:
But do you know if she loves you? Did she say she would like to marry you?
She did not sayI do not know
There was a haunted, hurt look in his eyes and my heart went out to him. But I
love herisnt that enough?
It could be enoughprovided she doesnt love someone else.
Does she, Uncle?
To be frank, I dont know.
He brightened up at that. She likes me, he said. I know that much.
Well, I like you too, but that doesnt mean Id marry you.
He was despondent again. I see what you mean But what is love, how can I
recognize it?
That is the one question I couldnt answer. How do we recognize it?
(Love 46)
The narrator does not know whether Sushila loves anybody at all despite having intimacy with
her. The narrator tells Pramod that in their pursuit of Sushila, It is not time thats passing by, my
friend. It is you and I. In his book Jacques Lacan, Sean Homers description of Lacanian object
petit a in the context of love corresponds the narrators inexplicable desire for Sushila:
When you first fall in love you idealize the other person and feel perfect together.
This is the imaginary dimension of being in love. There is also symbolic
dimension of being a couple and of being in a relationship with another subject
who is lacking. But there is also something more; your new partner may be
beautiful, intelligent, funny, a great dancer but then so is everyone else. So what is
it that makes your new partner special? There is something elusive, something
intangible, something extra about them and you cannot grasp or articulate it but
you know it is there. That is why you love them. This is the object aobjectcause of your desire. (Homer 88)
The object of desire (i.e. other) is under the grasp of the Other from which the self seeks
confirmation for its existence. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan
declared that Mans desire is the desire of the Other and further wrote:
it is in seeing a whole chain come into play at the level of the desire of the
Other that the subjects desire is constituted.

Vol. 6, Issue. V

091

October 2015

www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English

ISSN: 0976-8165

( Lacan 235)
Thus Sushila is constituted first by her household members, especially her grandmother, then
by her husband and ultimately by society. She chooses security over love. In Time Stops at
Shamli, (1989 ) often considered as the sequel to Love, Sushila is married to the elderly Mr.
Dayal, the distracted manager of an obscure hotel at Shamli; a perfect arranged mismatch as the
man has no idea or ability of how to come up to Sushilaa romantic yearning. Meeting Sushila
after the gap of six years and finding her yoked to an unromantic man in a place cut away from
the outside world, the narrators passion for his lost object is roused again, and he proposes her
to flee with him which she flatly refuses. But the object a remains ever evasive being absorbed in
the Symbolic:
So your marriage is a success?
Of course it is as a marriage. I am not happy and I do not love him, but neither
am I so unhappy that I should hate himBut you take me away and we will only
have regrets.
You dont love me, I said foolishly.
That sad word love, she said, and became pensive and silent.
(Time Stops at Shamli 78)
The love between the narrator and Sushila never consummated. Perhaps, because of this failure,
the narrator could not make Sushilas husband an attractive man. Debashis Bandyopahyay offers
insight into the authors psyche operating in the two stories:
The narrator was thirty when he fell in love with Sushila, sixteen, in Love is a
Sad Song. His parental love for the girl had turned into conjugal desire, revealing
the authors Oedipal angst, as it was unconsciously informed by the traumatic
experience of his parents separation, due in part to the wide difference in their
ages. The authors libidinal anxieties seek alleviation in attributing his desires to
that stage of his psychic development which Sushilas unclerefers to as
delayed adolescence. In Shamli the author willfully obviates the age factor to
invest in both the narrator and Sushila the timeless qualities of nature made
jealously absent in Mr. Dayal that the author knows constituted the object of his
fathers desire. That Sushila should marry Mr. Dayal who is almost as old as he
narrator, compounds the intricacies of the latters Oedipal envyHis repressed
instincts do not only find a substitutive object for the mother in Sushila, but also
takes care to make egotistical amendment to the nature of the woman by
portraying her in broad relief against the lonely decadence of Miss deeds.
(Bandyopahyay 81-2)

The narrator realizes that Sushila is unattainable and displaces his desire into various other
activities such as assuming ironic stance, describing nature, fondly recollecting his old days and
even narrating his affair by fictionalizing it.
III
The narrative of Love is addressed by the first person narrator, in the Prufrockian manner,
to the second person you(Sushila) is if she will appreciate his feelings. The entire narrative can

Vol. 6, Issue. V

092

October 2015

www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English

ISSN: 0976-8165

be viewed as a defense mechanism to come to terms with profound anxiety in his private life.
The story depicts the transference of his feelings for girl from love to libido which is mediated
by his self-reflexive irony generated from his sense of the impossibility of regaining the lost
object of desire both in real life(his mother) and in fiction (Sushila). When Sushila returned
from the hills, the narrator tried to fill up her absence by shifting his attention to metonymic
objects of love a handkerchief, a bangle or a length of ribbon. His dream in which Sushila
almost imperceptibly beheaded a young man he and Sunil murdered a young man resembling
Sushilas lover is, no doubt, informed by his deep sense of anxiety of loosing object of desire.
The narrator is also divided in his dependence of nature in the hills and the necessity to stay on
the plains for the sake of his love. The narrators recurrent return to nature to its flora and fauna
and the landscape while recounting the tale, itself acts like balm to his overtly ironic but
covertly painful narration. The narrator ultimately strikes a reconciliation between his lover self
and his artistic self by making light fun of his anxiety and savouring the lost romance by proxy
by deciding never to stop loving the days he loved her.

Works Cited:
Aggarwal, Amita. The Fictional World of Ruskin Bond. New Delhi: Sarup and Son. 2005.Google
Book Search. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.
Bandyopadhyay, Debashis. Locating the Anglo-Indian Self in Ruskin Bond. New Delhi:
Anthem Press. 2012. Print.
Bond, Ruskin. Love is a Sad Song. A Gathering of Friends. New Delhi: Alpha Book Company.
2015. 21-52. Print.
---. Time Stops at Shamli. A Gathering of Friends. New Delhi: Alpha Book Company. 2015.
53-88. Print.
Homer, Sean. Jacques Lacan. London and New York: Routledge. 2005. Print.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.
Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton & Company.1981. Print.
Murfin, Ross and Supriya M. Ray. The Bedford Glossary of Literary and Critical Terms. Boston:
Bedford/St. Martins. 2009.Print.
Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today. New York and London: Routledge. 2006.Print.

Vol. 6, Issue. V

093

October 2015