The novel explores the depth of relationship between Shyam and Radha. In their relationship we find that Radha’s role as a wife blocks her freedom. Beauvoir believed that the institution of marriage has marred the spontaneity of feelings, between the husband and wife by transforming freely given feelings into mandatory duties and shrilly asserted rights. A woman is more than her body. She is not only a Being-in-itself but also a Being-for-itself. Radha’s alienation under the rubrics of sexuality is on account of Shyam’s cold intellectuality. The entire pulsating and throbbing world around Shyam serves to deepen her love for Chris. Radha’s contact with Shyam never went deeper than skin. She is unable to satiate her sexual urge because of Shyam’s aloofness, and this leads her into Chris arms. Nair, who is a sensitive writer, can delve deep into people’s personalities and take the reader on a wonderful journey of relationship.
Radha rejects her husband’s oppressive environment and she rebels against the false materialism and vulgarity of society. She even virtually rejects her marriage. She distrusts love as a form of male possessiveness and does not want love to be an aspect of male domination. Radha who had a pre-marital affair with a married man, had an abortion, Later her post-affair with Christopher, she grapples for the true sense of love, completely divorced from the sense of guilt. As she travels back to her uncle life she confronts many harsh truths of her own past. To the agitated self of Radha who is fed up with ugly life, she has a strong desire to find out an order. She tries to explore the past of her uncle, as well as, Christopher who are so closely connect with her mysterious past. She wants to understand the secret b...
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...Nair has also projected her own Indian sensibility and attitude through her women characters in her novels.
Most of the Indian women living in an orthodox and conservative family feel inhibited to raise their voice against aggressive dominance of the male person of the society owing to their inferiority complex and rigid code of conduct imposed on them. Their ambitions, desires, sense and sensibility are faithfully expressed in Nair’s novels. Her novels show how such women in spite of being highly educated undergo psychological suffering due to inferiority complex and dead sense of inhibitions. She not only limits her writing to upper class urban people, but also picks up characters from all stratum of society. Her theme is not only restricted to domestic problems, but it is variegated in nature. Besides, her novels represent what is authentically Indian or native.
Miranda thinks she is in love with Dev but in reality she is not because she doesn 't know him as a person at all. She soon realize this after the child tell her the meaning of Sexy. It because of her innocent and lack of knowledge of good relationship with people. She finally lets go of the romance when she knew that it would not change at all because he is a marry man. The main character seem to not be in love with Mala even though they have meet several of times before, It just like how Miranda does not know Dev in any way and is in love with him. They are arranged to be married to each other and force to live with each other. He even mention how he was not touch by her words when a letter was sent to him. The main character did not even kissed or hugged his wife. He just knew that she was the perfect wife do to the explanation given to him by his older brother.” The only thing I ws not used to was Mala.” (Lahiri 's 190). I think he was afraid to get to know someone he didn 't know about. It may be because he grew up in a different way than his wife. It was something he could not get used to. Shoba fell out of love with his wife even though he tried to get back with her. He did not know that he was not in love with her anymore. He assume that they would be together after the second day of the game they played. It was like he was getting things
Radha is emotionally detached and fairly disdainful of her husband, Shyam. Their matrimony existed only in name, without any effort on the part of Radha to keep it lively. She was unable to create a bond with him and considered that her marriage was already “fractured” as she mentioned to Chris. It is the beginning to enjoy her life and first step indirectly to voice out her travail. An affair can add excitement and a sense of purpose to life, and often this activity helps to taste up the state of achieving autonomy, from the hands of the dominati...
“Pleasure may come from illusion but happiness can come only of reality.” –Anonymous. Although finding pleasure by means of illusion may be effective temporarily, a relationship is incapable of flourishing without the assistance of reality. In the book Interpreter of Maladies, there are constant battles of characters escaping illusion involving Indian culture, told through short stories. Indifferent relationships will cause a couple to stray from reality and separate themselves from reaching mere happiness. In the stories, “A Temporary Matter” and “Interpreter of Maladies,” the use of alliteration and symbolism emphasize the failing relationships of Shukumar and Shoba and the two marriages of Mrs. Das and Mr. Kapasi with the common theme of
Though varied in cultural they share a deep interest in evolving female culture and liberation of women. Our thesis mainly focused on her one of the novel “The hero’s walk” which mainly deals with Diasporic sensibility like “The hero’s walk”, “Tamarind Mem” And “Can You Hear the Night Bird Cell?” Written by her also deals with the same theme of Diasporic sensibility “Tamarind Mem” (1997) grew out of her university thesis. Her novels deal with the complexities of Indian family life and with the split that emerges when Indian move to the west. Her first novel “Tamarind Mem” deal with pungent sugary home sickness of her Indian sensibility portraying her memories of her past days, depicting the descriptions of Indian domestic life. Her second novel “The Hero’s Walk” could be the best illustration to her alien feeling which was clod in a fine garb of refinement. And also she has portrayed the clash between the cultural of East and west. She attempts to explore the nuances of Diasporic consciousness by the quait portrayal of woman characters. Badami’s third novel “Can You Hear the Night Bird Call?” Explores the golden Temple slaughter and the Air India Bombing was set against the back drop of Punjab division “Can You Hear the Night Bird Call?” Could be branded as a historical novel, as the plot conveniently moves between India and Canada in 1947. It tries to explore the
But when the inner reality surfaces, the protagonist become disillusioned and soon distances himself from such ostentatious lifestyle. The story talks about immigrant Indians, their nostalgia, their lifestyle, and the fixation that Indians have with the Western world. It brings to light the secret that individuals live with simply to continue their married life intact. Moreover, it also reveals the sort of adjustment that a couple maintains in America where husband and wife divide their responsibilities and appear as rivals to each other. The lifestyles of Mr. and Mrs. Das hinge on the foundations of co-operation and not on cordiality. Life for such couples becomes a continuous “bickering, the indifference, the protracted silences” (53). Mr. Kapasi, the interpreter’s description brings to light the various aspects of how American life had blunted the Indian way of the couple. It is, of course, a matter of pity for children who become the victim of such void that their parents
Indian Literature in English took a long struggling period to be evolved and develop. Under the British colonial rule we hardly see any rare glimpse of women writing. In 1951, a professor in one of the Scottish university told one of literary Indian academics, that there are five or six women writers who usually made the most significant contribution in Indian women writing with the same qualities of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, the Bronte’s as well as with Gaskell. But women in here were just mere story tells even they were not allowed to publish. The destroyer of this ‘traditional pedagogic stereotypical structure’ was Toru Dutt an elite woman who wrote both French and English novel.
Right from the ancient epics and legends to modern fiction, the most characteristic and powerful form of literary expression in modern time, literary endeavour has been to portray this relationship along with its concomitants. Twentieth century novelists treat this subject in a different manner from those of earlier writers. They portray the relationship between man and woman as it is, whereas earlier writers concentrated on as it should be. Now-a-days this theme is developing more important due to rapid industrialization and growing awareness among women of their rights to individuality, empowerment, employment and marriage by choice etc. The contemporary Indian novelists in English like Anita Desai, Sashi Deshpande, Sashi Tharoor, Salman Rusdie, Shobha De, Manju Kapoor, Amitav Ghosh etc. deal with this theme minutely in Indian social milieu.
Indian women poets like their counterparts in the world literature show their concern for the freedom of woman on a par with the freedom of man in the social, political and spiritual contexts. In their poetry, sometimes, it appears that they are a little too bold as poets. The boldness of women poets is natural when they look at inequality they have to suffer at the hands of men. Therefore, they constantly search for their identity as independent women.
The primary question that comes up while we look at a certain text is the way in which the author has exercised the choice in terms of narrative modes, and the ways in which the imaginative world is communicated to the reader. In case of writers who are women, these questions demand a more rigorous reading of the text in terms of the dominant ideological frame against which the test is displayed. Speaking about the complex relationship between women’s writing and the social matrix, Tharu and Lalitha point out that, in the post independence era Indian women engaged with “the profound rearticulation of the political world and of imaginative life that took place in the 1940s and 1950s with the birth of the Indian nation” 1. The term “rearticulation” implies the presence of a system of articulation, a matrix of meta-narratives not concerned only with women as objects of gaze but also with women as agents of articulating their subjectivity, with women as writers. In problematising the position of the narrator one may hope to detect the negotiations, debates, protests and above all, the choices available to and exercised by a female writer.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy tells the story of the communist state of Kerala and the forbidden love between two castes, which changes the lives of everyone. In the novel an ‘Untouchable’, Velutha is a carpenter and works at Paradise Pickles and Preserves for much less than he deserves because of his status as an Untouchable in the caste system. Velutha falls into a forbidden love with a divorced woman, Ammu who is associated with an upper caste Syrian Christian Ipe family. Marriage was the only way that Ammu could have escaped this life, but she lost the chance when marrying the wrong man, as he was an alcoholic and this resulted in them getting a divorce. Ammu breaks the laws that state ‘who should be loved, and how and how much’, as their affair threatens the ‘caste system’ in India, which is a hierarchal structure and social practice in India in which your position in society is determined and can’t be changed. Arhundati Roy portrays the theme of forbidden love within the caste systems and shows how they are t...
Indian Writing in English has a special status in English Literature owing to its treatment of women characters. Short stories help the writers to project select characters in an impressive way to the readers. In Indian context the status of woman in a society and her treatment is very different from those of her European or American counterparts. Women are depicted both as a good and evil in literature by various writers. However, in no literature is a women stereotyped as was done in Indian literature. Away from the mythical stereotyping of women, Ruskin Bond portrayed his women in a different way. The female characters of his short stories range from a small child to a grandmother. These characters are as powerful as men and have left a strong impression on the readers. I have chosen following eight short stories for the critical analysis of Ruskin Bond’s Women in this paper.
Thus, through the lens of sringaaram or love, we see how Radha’s absence of desire for her older husband Shyam has left vacant an emotional space within which her desire for the American travel writer and cello player Chris is born. Through Radha’s eyes, we see Shyam as a materialistic businessman who understands neither art nor aesthetics, who constantly embarrasses Radha by exhibiting
Shashi Deshpande is one of the prominent contemporary women writers in India writing in English. She excels in projecting a realistic picture of the middle class educated women who are sandwiched between tradition and modernity. She is entirely different from any of her contemporary women writers. Although critics indiscriminately dub her as a feminist, she is not a feminist in the sense that is probably applied to certain women writers. During the course of her narration while unfolding the drama of an individual is life – a women’s life, “ she almost compatibly portrays Indian middle class women with their turmoils, convulsions, frustrations endurance .”( Sabita Ramachandran: Sashi Deshpande’s Craft as a novelist”)
Garg in ‘Hari Bindi’ discusses the story of a common woman and made it extraordinary by the active force she was experiencing in herself to live her life. The husband of the protagonist symbolises the power and control of patriarchy that had restricted her life in such a way
Yes, the Indian women in this era are born at a time when there is much consciousness about her rights, liberty to convey her ideas, freedom to enjoy finance and the chance to stand for a cause. Still the silence continues, the protagonist Jaya is an educated middle class woman who lives with her husband Mohan and their children Rahul and Rati. She is stereotype Indian middle class woman in the present century who is confined between her realizations and the restrictions. Her father brought up as an “individual”, who has the rights in the society as well as in the family irrespective of gender, but a society in which we live hesitates to accept the woman as an individual. Jaya, a father supported child,confident and ambitious girl, tries to find the true meaning and identity, in various roles assigned to her by familial and social codes. She starts her journey with her father’s favorite name Jaya and passes through different phases of daily life with other identifications as Suhasini and Seeta. She finds her role and life fit, only in Jaya, “Jaya, the winner as papa wanted to make her”. Her papa has made her different, indifferent to social taboos and familial rituals, as he often said