Woman And Family In Recent Indian Feminist Fiction In English A Select Study

Since there was hardly any book written on the concept of ‘New Woman’ compiling the works of Indian English writers, the author had long-felt desire to bring out a compact volume in this field. The present volume is like a dream come true as it prepares the solid ground for the long-cherished desire of the author. The book New Woman in Indian English Literature: From Covert to Overt is an attempt to combining the varied shapes of new emerging trend of womanhood in Indian English Literature into a single whole. The book covers twenty six well explored articles on this recent trend of writing which has been fast growing since last few decades. The contributing authors are very deep, sincere and reflective in the articulation of their original ideas and views. Authors are hopeful that the book will bring into focus many new things and ideas yet to be explored and thus will be useful to critical minds.

Shashi Deshpande, b. 1938, Indian English novelist.

Along with a range of socio-cultural, political and economic concerns, the focus on ‘self’ has been an inevitable assertion of writers during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Individualistic in tone, the contemporary women novelists are trying to portray realistically the predicament of modern women torn between the forces of tradition and modernity, their sense of frustration and alienation, the emotional and psychological turmoil and complexities of man-women relationships and subtleties of feminine consciousness against the persistent patriarchal social set-up. Cognizant of the evils originating from patriarchy, a positive sense of feminine identity has been recognized by them and the result is the emergence of a new woman in Indian society and its concept in the Indian English novel which has assumed a strident posture in the contemporary writings by women. The shift from submission to assertion, acquiescence to resistance and obedience to rebellion, however, has not been abrupt and effortless. Women are still in the process of negotiation with different limiting factors and thresholds of patriarchy to claim their due space and affirm their identity. The present study is an attempt to critically investigate the negotiations with cultural norms by the women characters in the selected novels by the contemporary novelists, namely Manju Kapur and Anita Nair. Almost all the women characters, major and minor, from the selected novels have been considered and positioned as per their ideological leanings and convictions under two thematic chapters namely “Women in the Clutches of Traditional Norms,” and “Tradition to Modernity.” The major issues around which the novels move – education, marriage, gendered space and mother-daughter relationships – are taken up to put them within the contemporary social conditions in which women characters live. The present book is divided into five chapters to make a critical and analytical study of the select novels of these contemporary Indian women writers in English. The present work is focused on five selected novels: Manju Kapur’s “Difficult Daughters”, “Home” and “Custody” and Anita Nair’s “Ladies Coupé” and “Mistress”.

Contributed articles presented at a seminar hosted by Andhra University on 20th century women authors from India.