Anita Desai, A Modern Indo English Writer Essay

Kiran Desai is an Indian writer. In the age of fifteen years, she left India for England with her mother. Her mother’s name is Anita Desai, who is also a recognized writer. After a year they moved to the America, where Desai has lived till date. She is a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the America. She is a part of the Indian diaspora. Kiran Desai’ first novel is Hullaballo in the Guava Orchard. In this novel, she is dexterously able to portray male psyche. She won Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss. This is her second novel. Desai is the youngest female to win the Booker prize.

Deshpande's concern and sympathy are primarily for the woman in whatever circumstances she might be placed or whatever role in the society she might be playing. While revealing the woman's struggle to secure self-respect and self-identity for herself through her protagonists, the author subtly unravels the multiple levels of oppression, including sexual oppression experienced by women in our society thus creating a new social awareness. This stance of Deshpande makes her a potential feminist writer creating a woman's world with loving, care and a soothing touch depicting the nuances of her consciousness while advocating her liberation from the meticulously concocted web of imposed socio-cultural orders that have existed over centuries. From

Anita Desai presents to reader her opinion about complexity of human relationships as a big contemporary problem and human condition. At the level of inner consciousness words are not mere meanings recorded in a dictionary but are symbolic which trigger feelings and meanings that an individual draws out of one’s subconscious storehouse. Her women characters make a reader look at them with awe with their relationship to their surroundings, their society, their men, their children, their families, their psychological make-ups and themselves. Though not admittedly a feminist, Anita Desai is well aware of the predicament of the Indian women and their relationship with men. Running inward her fiction grapples with the intangible realities of life. Man-woman relationship in the urban society is her concern and in novel after novel she delves deeper and deeper in this dilemma. D.H. Lawrence rightly points out that "The great relationship for humanity will

Anita Desai undoubtedly holds a prominent position among the Contemporary writers of Indo –Anglican fiction. She is a bold and experimental Novelist with a new sense and vibrant richness. Much attention is given to the emotional crisis of her protagonists who live in a chaotic society. She delves deep to find out the factors responsible for such a despair and attempts to suggest solutions to overcome it. From her novels, it is clear that she, possesses one of the healthiest and psychologically most balanced minds in the realm of Indo – Anglican fiction and the sanity of her tastes and attitudes, is almost exemplary, a point worth emulation for her fellow religionists in the field of writing. As a woman writer she does not profess to be a feminist and yet she voices the fears and concerns, the hopes and aspirations of her characters in her own artistic way. She is deeply fascinated in exploring the social structure through the central characters in her novels. She is a minute observer of the society existing around her, perceiving everything minutely and delicately so that the situations can be presented in a poetic style.

Anita Desai, the grand dame of Indian English literature, was born in Mussorie on 24 June 1937, of a Bengali father and a German mother. This identity of her plays a significant role in the portrayal of characters in most of her novels especially Bye, Bye Blackbird as it presents the cultural crises suffered by her main characters due to the East-West encounters. This novel is considered to be most intimately connected to her own experience as she herself has mentioned in an interview thus, “…of all my novels Bye, Bye Blackbird is the most rooted and experienced and the least literary in derivation (Dhawan 92).”

Unlike other women novelists, Anita Desai concentrates on the exploration of sensibility, that too feminine sensibility by probing deep into the inner life of a woman. Desai reigns supreme in her fictional world by focusing attention towards “the quest inward” and concentrating on the still grimmer and more harrowing presentation of Indian life. In fact all her characters are sensitive, solitary and hyper- introspective. Her fiction balances itself delicately on the fringes between things and awareness of things, between chaos and order of mind. Her primary interest lies in exploring the disturbed depths of the female psyche. . The most prominent feature of her fiction is her mode of individualizing the character. She is preoccupied primarily with the portrayal of women protagonists as living in a

Bharati Mukherjee’s female protagonists are immigrants and suffer cultural shock but they are anxious to establish their identity by undertaking their heroic journeys that is why Bharati Mukherjee received considerable critical attention from almost all the quarters of the globe in a relatively short period of just twenty five years. Even though she has been acknowledged as a voice of expatriate immigrants, sensibility, and a close observation of her novels reveals that she has written all the novels with predominantly feminist views. Mukherjee’s depiction of women and their different relationships portray the dominance of practical practices in traditional society, as well as the forms of liberation and empowerment which are available to women in their Diaspora’s situation.

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.

Kandasamy’s poems portray such a dreadful picture of varied agonies experienced by Dalits that her poems seem as an encyclopaedia of painfulinventories. Untouchable turns into touchable for upper caste when it fits their selfish deeds andlusty demands. As in the poem entitled “Narration” the lady narrates

Anita Desai is recognized as the first Indian author writing in English who delineates feminist themes seriously, focusing on the conditions of women in India. The conflict of her characters is noted to be as one, between reason and instinct, the will and reality, involvement and detachment. She is deep rootedin her native culture that is evident from herthemes, style, landscape, images and of course, in her successful experimentation with English novel. Her novels raise many issues of universal relevance and its beauty lies in the fact that it can be interpreted from various angles.

Shashi Deshpande is one of the famous contemporary Indian novelists in English. She writes about the conflict between tradition and modernity in relation to women in middle class society. Shashi Deshpande’s novel deals with the theme of the quest for a female identity. The complexities of man-woman relationship specially in the context of marriage, the trauma of a disturbed adolescence. The Indian woman has for years been a silent sufferer. While she has played different roles-as a wife, mother, sister and daughter, she has never been able to claim her own individuality. Shashi Deshpande has emerged as a writer

Woman in Shashi Deshpande's novels is initially an unconventional one. She willy-nilly submits herself to the tradition, perhaps realizing the wisdom of the traditional ways at this stirring moment of the transitional phase of society. Ultimately, she is an appendage to man or family. Though economically independent, she is emotionally dependent on her husband.

I feel that the book is distinctive and special in a way, as it alternates between the view of Hari and Lila is in the village of Thul. From these two point of view we can get the idea of similarities and differences between city and village life. The situation in the village was very bad as we can see the father drunk and a critically ill mother the character of the family struggling to make end meet. It brings the struggle of man for evading the psychic pressure of life in the hope of survival. The writer denounces the flaws of society by painting scenes of everyday life and also how society works and how it can put pressure on people sometime to the point of destroying individual. Anita Desai’s critical sense of observation and her essential thinking with common men become important in her expert characterization, vivid description of a vigorous plot which is highly authentic. When we examine the concept of free or new women in this novel, we take it for granted that Anita Desai understanding of feminine sensibility is well display in all her novel. Her protagonist, most of whom are women, battle desperately with, their traditional

That Long Silence is a saga of a suppressed woman who is prisoned in the room of silence because they are unable to prove themselves as individuals. She tried to present an exceptional character of a woman who is desperately wishing to erase a long silence begun in childhood and rooted in her throughout her life. It is Jaya’s journey in search of one’s true self who confronts the gender oriented traditional speculation. Jaya being educated was leading a life without any purpose. She is an object of deep sympathy. A woman with graduation in English, a creative writer and a columnist doesn’t get the right place for her such attributes. Her husband brought up in a typical traditional environment perceived his wife as Sita and Savitri. All her family members are leading their lives as per their wish but she neither express herself nor achieve anything. So taking the shelter on silence she allowed her family to possess her body and soul. Others are silent towards her, no one take care of her expectations and happiness. This novel reflects how silence strengthens men and weakens women.

The traditions, culture and society in India have given precedence to men over women in multitude of issues concerning family, administration, decision-making and several other matters of high magnitude. This gender bias has gradually taken a shape as male chauvinism, which resulted in the oppression of women and subjected them to insufferable physical, psychological, moral and ethical castigation. Women, albeit contribute equally with men in societal and domestic affairs, are not allowed to enjoy equal status with men in traditional India. Indian society has always manifested them as obedient daughters, dedicated mothers, devoted wives and loving siblings. The funniest thing in Indian culture is a mother, being a woman, alienates her daughter and manifests antagonism to her, if she makes attempts to question gender-bias in her family or in society. The novel is an impeccable manifestation of post colonial period where a woman is fighting for her constitutional rights for education and power. The female protagonist Saritha in the novel acquires good education and becomes a doctor despite her mother’s antipathy to girl education. She sustains her mother’s antagonism to her who perpetually maltreats her with her offhand attitude to her very existence in the family as she wrongly concludes her as the murderess of her dear brother, Dhruva. Further, she is estranged from her family as she marries a person of her choice. Her husband, Manohar is a school teacher. Saritha, being a