In an article entitled ‘A Secret Connivance’, Desai criticizes ‘a subtle, deep-rooted form of suppression’ in India and she attributes this connivance to the denial of education to women, and hence their complete dependence on men for their livelihoods and sense of themselves and their social place. ‘Like other countries where women are traditionally suppressed,’ she observes, ‘India deifies its women’, as mother goddesses and loyal wives devoted to their husbands as lords and masters. An Indian girl is brought up on myths and legends celebrating these archetypes, and inculcated with the belief that her mission in life is to try and live up to them, even ‘if in reality she is nothing but a common drudge, first in her father's house and then her husband's’. She cannot speak out or rebel because to do so is to question the myths and legends, ‘the cornerstone on which the Indian family and therefore Indian society are built’. This is a situation for which men are not entirely to blame, for Desai sees women as conniving in it, and she attributes this connivance to the denial of education to women and, hence, their complete dependence on men for their livelihoods and sense of themselves and their social places. In classical poetry of the oral tradition by women poets, this predicament is encoded in the recurrent theme of a woman pining for a man, often camouflaged as ‘the pining of the soul for the godhead, a spiritual longing’. Through the article's expose´ of the interpellation of the woman subject, and the hidden dynamics of gender relations, Desai shows how the material privation of women is justified in a complex of ideological expressions which constitute India's cultural inheritance. Indians themselves, according to Desai, ‘have been as guilty’ in creating and perpetuating these notions which shield both themselves and readers in the West from truths about ‘the human being within’, and a quotidian reality which is often seen as dull and unexciting. Desai concludes: