Post Midnight’s Children Indian novel in English has attained a respectable position throughout the world. Post God of Small Things the number of women novelists from India have increased. However, the literary scene occupied by their male counterparts is quite different. Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Upmanyu Chatterjee to name a prominent few focus on the issues that lie ‘externally’. The women novelists have restricted themselves mostly to the ‘interior’ of the body or house they live in and their relationships with the people living around. Their narrations are about family. Shalini Shah (2008:04) reasons out and says, ‘This asymmetry in the emotional response of men and women occurs in a patriarchal set-up where children are primarily raised by women’. Women are in search of their own identities. Women are passive victims of patriarchy. In The Thousand Faces of Night (TFN from now onwards) Githa Hariharan depicts the thousand faces of women in India from Past to present ranging from Sita, Gandhari, Ambika, Amba (TFN: 249) to Devi in TFN. These faces depict the multiple roles the women have to play in the society. They try to perform and balance all the roles but are not satisfied with roles they are playing. They are still searching for self-identity. Tales and legends play a crucial role in introducing a child to his society. (Kakkar, 2007: 37). There are myth makers or readers (Pati and Baba) and a myth consumer/ receiver (Devi) Influenced by the way the myth readers decipher the myth, the myth consumers spends her life interpreting the myth around her. All through her childhood Devi grew up listening to her grandmother’s stories. Her grandmother’s stories had a purpose to telling Devi- a woman- the ways to behave in a tradi...
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Reflective of her post-colonial and post-feminist context, Rachel Perkins utilises her filmic medium in ‘One Night The Moon’ (2001) in order to create distinctive voices for the purposes such as the space between men and women, black and white and the different ways of knowing and seeing. Echoing Perkins interest in interrogating the spaces between men and women, Indira Gandhi, the first and only women prime minister of India, uses her 1966 ‘True Liberation of Women’ speech platform to give voice to an emerging feminist movement, as well as to raise awareness of the discrimination, including stereotyping, suffered by many women in order to promote the resilience and skills of Indian women. Hence, it is through distinctive voices that both Perkins and Gandhi uniquely position their audiences to reflect upon the factors
Ihara Saikaku’s Life of a Sensuous Woman written in the 17th century and Mary Woolstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman written in the 18th century are powerful literary works that advocated feminism during the time when women were oppressed members of our societies. These two works have a century old age difference and the authors of both works have made a distinctive attempt to shed a light towards the issues that nobody considered significant during that time. Despite these differences between the two texts, they both skillfully manage to present revolutionary ways women can liberate themselves from oppression laden upon them by the society since the beginning of humanity.
As Indians living in white culture, many problems and conflicts arise. Most Indians tend to suffer microaggressions, racism and most of all, danger to their culture. Their culture gets torn from them, and slowly, as if it was dream, many Indians become absorbed into white society, all the while trying to retain their Indian lifestyle. In Indian Father’s Plea by Robert Lake and Superman and Me by Sherman Alexie, the idea that a dominant culture can pose many threats to a minority culture is shown by Wind-Wolf and Alexie.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2000. 333-358.
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In the novel A Passage to India, written by Forster, he is bias towards the women in the novel. The society when Forster wrote the novel in the 1920’s had different views on women than it has today a...
However, partly due to their biological sexual difference and the socio-cultural surroundings to which they belong, the consequences of these above mentioned social evils are much more on women, especially subaltern women. Giving voice to such oppressed subalterns, the gendered subaltern (women of the deprived sections) and Indian women in general, Gayatri Chakvarty Spivak says: “For if, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.” During her analysis of Sati she concludes her essay “can the subaltern” with her declaration that “the subaltern cannot speak” (Ashcroft, Griffths, and Tiffins 218-219).
In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, women possess power within the sphere of their home and family, otherwise known as the domestic sphere (the private realm of domestic life, child-rearing, house-keeping, and religious education). Throughout the course of their lives, the possession of power changes as women’s role shift from childhood and adolescence to being a wife and mother. This possession of power manifests as their ability to control their decisions in life and the lives of those around them once they enter this domestic sphere. The process of change that turns Naseem Ghani into the Reverend Mother and Mumtaz into Amina demonstrate how women gain or lose power in the Indian society that Rushdie depicts. Before her marriage to Aadam Aziz, Naseem Ghani was a young woman who is owned by her father and has little or no power in her childhood home due to being viewed as object to be traded as a wife in exchange for a dowry. Naseem is seen one part at a time through a hole in a sheet held by three female bodyguards. This objectification of Naseem by Aadam Aziz reveals that she is viewed by the sum of her parts instead of as a complete person. Aziz’s perception of Naseem is “a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts" which he glues together with his "imagination" (Rushdie 22). By introducing her under the patriarchal male gaze, Rushdie reveals how little power she has as an unwed woman in her father’s household.
In this paper feminist aspect of post colonization will be studied in “Season of Migration to the North” novel by Tayeb Salih. Postcolonial feminism can be defined as seeks to compute for the way that racism and the long-lasting economic, cultural, and political influences of colonialism affect non-white, non-Western women in the postcolonial world, according to Oxford dictionary. As it mentioned earlier about the application of Feminism theory in literature, the provided definition of postcolonial feminism also is not applicable in literature analysis. Therefore, Oxford defines another applic...
Nicholas B. Dirks. (2011). Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton University Press
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.
Crane, Ralph J. Inventing India: A History of India in English Language Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1992.