Amrita Pritam Essay

Imtiaz Dharkar calls herself a Scottish Muslim Calvinist (British). She was a Muslim but married a Hindu man, an action that is unacceptable in Islamic society ("Imtiaz Dharker." Contemporary Authors Online). Although not much is known about her family to the media, we know that her family and background plays a role in her poems. She moved to Europe for her work but then soon moved to India where she lives with her husband ("Imtiaz Dharkar" Contemporary Authors Online).

She is certainly as a noted critic puts it ‘one of the most important writers writing in India today. Much more can be said of Mahashweta Devi. She stands with few equals among today’s Asian writers in the dedication and directness with which she has turned writing in to a form

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel, The Palace of Illusions is the epitome of feminism. It retells the story of Mahabharata from the view point of Draupadi, the daughter of King Drupad. The delicate threads of her life have beautifully been interwoven to bring forth a grasping story. Chitra Banerjee has herself written “I would uncover the story that lay invisible between the lines of the men’s exploits. Better still I would have her one of her tell it herself, with all her joys and doubts, her struggles and her triumphs, her heartbreaks, her achievements, the unique female way in which she sees her world and her place in it.”(XV).

When first hearing about Rupi Kaur through Tumblr, I instantly fell in love with her stylistic writing and ability to clearly convey images through her poems. In each of Kaur’s poems, she is able to use her own experiences in love, abuse, gender, and heartbreak to write a fluid and heart wrenching poem. Though I cannot relate to all of her poems, she is still able to capture me as a reader into feeling compassion and sympathy towards the poems and her experiences. Poems that she wrote in her book Milk and Honey especially stood out to me. Throughout the book “you are snakeskin” and “i know it’s hard” spoke to me through her language and images created. Furthermore, “did you think i was a city” and “when my mother was pregnant” were also intriguing poems. Throughout these four poems, an overall theme of love and femininity were observed. The poems and themes can be observed through multiple critical theories and lenses, but the reader response and feminist lense were the main two that were reflected in the poems.

‘Critically discuss the Basic Skills Component Domains within the Children and Young People’s IAPT Project and the challenges in applying them in your service.’

Compared to my other texts, which seem a lot more aggressive and controversial than this poem, Naheed’s poem is quite ‘tame’ for feminist poetry. However, at the time, after the partition of Pakistan and India, in an extremely militaristic male orientated society, Naheet was well known for her feminist critiques, and they were considered to be very contemporary and contentious. Even now, her discussion of breaking away from the male model of what a woman should be is extremely relevant; “For the wall which has been razed / don’t now insist on raising it again.” Naheed’s argument for a woman’s right to agency and equal opportunities throughout all of her writing has classed her as a feminist poet, though at the time she did not call herself a feminist in 1990’s Pakistan. Her use of plural first person narrative form connects this more classical poem with my other texts, just like women are connected through this sense of

Ambai’s short stories are embedded with the plurality of narrative voices, the use of interior monologues and postmodern techniques of multiple perspectives which are normally used in the novel rather than in the short story. Her feminist stance is visible in the ways in which she investigates how gender is constructed in society and explores communication between human beings.

Ismat Chughtai, the Urdu writer of fierce feminist sentiments, has never got the accolades that have been bestowed upon her contemporaries- especially male contemporaries. She is remembered as a controversial writer who did not hide anything in her narratives; and hence irked her contemporary society in all possible manners. I am of the opinion that it is high time to re-evaluate the works of Ismat Chughtai by foregrounding her unflinching anti-hegemonic sentiments. Chughtai was a Feminist who challenged the status-quos and prudery of the Indian culture shaped up during the Victorian era. Her collection of short stories raised such a storm all across the country that she even had to face the court of law. The primary charge labelled against

Kamala Markandaya published “Nectar in a Sieve” in 1954 in attempts to enlighten the world about how hard it was to live a rural Indian life in that time period. She tells this story through Rukmani, a woman who was given away in marriage at the age of twelve to a poor tenant farmer that she had never met. Rukmani is very obedient to her husband as she helps him work in the unyielding fields and is a wonderful, caring mother to her seven children. The struggles that Markandaya highlights in her book are not only problems known to a peasant villager, but they are also specific to women. Women’s roles in India during the twentieth century is very different from women’s roles in the United States at that time, and because Rukmani was a woman, she played a silent but necessary part in her culture.

Her heroines are sensitive, intelligent and career-oriented. Study of her novels reveals how poignantly, she expresses the frustration and disappointments of women who experience social and cultural oppression in the male-dominated society. Shashi Deshpande started her writing career all of a sudden. In her own terms: “There was really nothing. It was very strange. May be it was there waiting inside and suddenly at one moment, it came out. Until then, I was looking around to see what I could do. I was very unhappy not doing anything, just looking after the home and children. It was perhaps a kind of claustrophobic existence. I could feel something building up in me and that caused the outburst. Otherwise, it would have perhaps led to a breakdown.”(“Denying the otherness” II) Her novels are autobiographical in nature depicting her own experiences of the educated middle class Indian women’s predicament and they tend to be gender specific. That Long Silence is a saga of suppressed women prisoned in the room of silence. It is Jaya’s journey in search of one’s true self who confronts the gender oriented traditional

The articles “Voicing the Feminine Within: A Journey through the Life Narrative of A. Revathi”, Writing a Life Between Gender Lines: Conversations with A.Revathi about her autobiography The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story”, Gender Geometry: A Study of A. Revathi’s autobiography The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story and the interview Voice of Visibility by NithinMayanth are the only works directly based on Revathi’s autobiography The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story, the primary text of this research.

The reason I chose this song for the title, because at this scene of the movie, Pai is at a very emotionally unstable conflict with Koro, especially because he had just previously made Pai cry in front of an audience because he did not show up to Pai’s speech. Although this movie-long conflict may take place, Pai all throughout the movie is trying to please her grandpa, again shown at this particular scene when she jumps in to retrieve this whale tooth for Koro. This song now ties into this part of the movie because though Pai at this spot is having a particularly tough time in life, she does not let it “kill her”, but rather to channel that emotion into a higher level of determination, making Pai stronger. You might say that only because Koro is so rough on Pai, so she can the best leader and person she can, trying harder and harder each time Koro knocks Pai down. And, even though Koro is trying to stop Pai from becoming leader, he is accidentally creating a great leader in Pai so that he may finally rest after the 2 generations of leadership.

War raged from 1918 to 1947 and over 18 million were displaced however no one was left unaffected (Press Information Bureau, Military Evacuation Organisation.). Neighbors of the Indian ethnicity worried for their loved ones at home, families separated not knowing where or when they’d ever see each other again, and others trying to recover after being severely injured in an attack. The Partition, or splitting of India forced people out of their homes to try and relieve religious tension between the warring states, India and Pakistan. Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian author, writes about the struggles of the people before, during, and after the Partition in her books Interpreter of the Maladies and The Namesake. In the Interpreter of the Maladies, Lahiri introduces the readers to Mr. Pirzada, an Indian man who endures much turbulence after being awarded a grant to study in New England while a civil war is occurring in his home country, and Boori Ma, an elderly woman who struggles to find stability after being reluctantly migrated to Calcutta because of the Partition. In Lahiri’s The Namesake, Ashoke Ganguli was traveling to see his family when the Pakistani Army had placed a terror attack and turn his and his family life upside down. The Partition of India impacted anyone and everyone of India and largely effected the lives of these characters in many ways.

The younger generation was introduced to Amrita’s work through the novel Pinjar only which was made into a film sometime back. Her attitude towards worn out social norms and traditions of the society was so candid that she earned the outrage of many established institution but never fluctuate from the path she chose. She rose to be the voice of the entire Indian womanhood and provoked the seeds of rebellion in the minds of her readers against the values that were wrong and biased, according to her. And that is why she was given a tag "Always Amrita, Always Pritam" (Tribune: 2005)

Kapur has explored the agony of a woman under patriarchal pressure and state of social ostracism. In their search for individual identity, the women characters prove themselves as real women of flesh and blood who have their own emotions and sentiments and urge for new identity in the life. The novelist explores their yearning for intellectual space in the traditional society. Kapur’s novels reveal disintegration in woman’s life, her struggle for basic rights and quest for identity and survival. She portrays how women are suffering from economic and socio-cultural lacunas in the male governed society. They have been still deprived for their basic rights, their aspirations to their search of individuality and self-reliance.