Compare And Contrast Anita Desai And Kamala Markandaya

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.

So is the case of Sarah, the heroine of the novel who stands between the poles of India and England. Sarah is one of the best women characters of all Anita Desai’s novel. She is weak but possesses steady voice. Sarah, Adit’s wife, represents for reconciliatory approach between East and West. She becomes a victim of psychic and social alienation. Sarah oscillates between her

Anita Desai is an Indian novelist and short story writer. She is known for her sensitive portrayal of the inner feelings of her female characters. Many of her novels explore tensions between family members and the alienation of middle-class women. In her later novels, she wrote on varied themes such as German anti-Semitism, the demise of traditions, and Western stereotypical views of India.

Feminine longings can be considered as a recurrent theme in the writings of Rokheya Sakhawat Hossain and Kamala Das. The critical analysis of both these writers may remain incomplete without mentioning the feminine longings within their text. Rokheya Sakhawat Hossain and Kamala Das were two distinguished authors. They were representing two generations almost a century apart. Rokheya Sakhawat Hossain was born in 1880 where as Kamala Das was born in 1934.Rokheya belongs to the northern part of India, precisely colonized Bengal. Kamala Das hails from the South, precisely from the Southern Malabar in Kerala. The place Calcutta has much significance in the writing

Anita Desai has added a new dimension to the achievement of Indian women writers in English fiction through novels like Cry The Peacock, Voices In The City, Where Shall We Go This Summer, Fasting Feasting, Fire On The Mountain and many more.

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.

Although in many ways this text can be seen as a radical feminist text, but Devi dismisses the idea as she is not a feminist. She feels that it is a mere coincidence that some professions are gendered and doesn’t regard women as a separate entity but treats their oppression as linked to a wider oppressive structure controlled by caste. She thinks that to ignore the latter in the shadow of the former, is a “denial of history”. But Usha Ganguli in her introductory text ‘Metamorphosis of Rudali’ presents a different view and says that in many ways this could be read as an ‘enabling’ feminist text-with the empowerement of Sanichri, the bonding between the two characters, the importance given to household chores, the common experiences of discrimination of women along class lines and the rare sensitivity expressed by the author towards women in general. Through this novella, Devi discusses and rethinks questions of class, caste and gender and how such structures affect women by giving a powerful voice to the gendered subaltern and thus rescuing them from the dark recesses of third world

But it is not Devi’s description alone that finds experience in it; the novelist has entrenched so many other stories which are related to real life, to mythical page (told by her grand-mother, pati), to the life of musicians and about the females’ ideal role (told by her father-in-law) as well. The variety of stories does not create any harm to the meaning of the story and the aim of the novelist because the skilfully interwoven plots give each other considerable meaning. The revolving point of the story is Devi’s life with all the mythical stories. All these are inseparable part of the novel as all these stories and the real stories (connected with these mythical narrations) present a glimpse of what will go on in the life of Devi and put in the picture the truth of females’ fate in the patriarchal society. The novel causes the readers’ encounter with the truth that how so ever the female get educational capacities, how so ever the society may become modernised; but the females will be exploited in all the ages and their condition will remain as still as it was years ago during the mythical

Maya showering care for on her dog, reaches the height of concentration to bring a finish to her husband’s life at her own hands, she initiates the survival of Anita Desai’s responsive heroines in insensitive and cold world, subjugated by men, who seek for worth and agreement in life and either eradicate themselves or concession with their fortune.

Kamala Markandaya has occupied a prominent place among Indian English writers as one of the leading woman writers in English. All her ten novels deal with the themes of East-West encounter, rootlessness, human relationships, poverty, hunger and exploitation. The character of Rukumani in Nectar in A Sieve is stronger than other characters in her novels. Her life is full of hopes and frustrations, pleasures and pains, rise and fall. An awakened-woman is completely different from the woman who thinks of seeking equality with man, asserting her own personality and emphasizing on her own rights as a woman. She is gifted with depth and rationale thinking.

All her novels have themes chiefly exploring the human psyche to its deepest depths. Anita Desai’s exploration of female domains historically, the family and the home, as well as her focus on female

Women in Indian society belong to the category of the unprivileged, the suppressed, the downtrodden and the marginalised. She has been suffering for long being socially, politically as well as financially marginalised. In simple terms a woman in Indian society is deprived of opportunities and freedom to go with her own preferences and choices and thus marginalised at every front. Woman suffers some or other sort of marginalisation whether she is educated or illiterate, dependant or independent, traditional or modern, rural or urban. Despite of our advance in the 21st century, women in our society is still subjugated and placed at a secondary position to men. She has to follow the path of men whether her father, her husband or her son forgetting her personal identity. Women’s struggle for identity and emancipation has long been treated as one of the major thematic concerns in Indian English writings. Indian English writers of fiction have written variously highlighting the women issues. Shashi Deshpande, an Indian feminist fiction writer has dealt the issue of women being a marginalised figure in a phallocentric world.

Anita Desai’s novels are concerned with the portrayal of the most troubled part of her protagonists’ life. The world seems to be ‘out of joint’, and in their helplessness,

Arundhati Roy Presents a slice of life in a small Indian town where male hegemony as well as Androcentric power relation are prevailing on the other hand, she depicts different types of male and female identity challenging myths. This novel depicts the feministic elements, caste and class gender, political and childhood exploitation. It does not deal with one particular theme. It encompasses all the social issues. The dominance of patriarchal voice and treatment of Dalits and women are mainly focused in this novel. The God of Small Things portrays the struggle of women in the male dominant conservative society. In this novel women of three generations are discussed. The first generations is about Mammachi and second is about Ammu and finally Rahel. The three women are struggled throughout their life and they were not able to survive in a peaceful manner. Mammachi was often beaten up her husband Pappachi. Ammu and Rahel were divorced in their life before they begin their family life and both of them returned to Ayemenem. Both of them became the victims of the so called male chauvinistic society.

Anita Desai, a noteworthy woman novelist, is a modern Indo-English writer, widely acclaimed not only in India but also in the world of fiction writing. She emerged after independence, deliberating on the highly debatable contemporary issues. Anita Desai is a keen observer of the society and the position of the women in the contemporary society draws her special attention. The novels of Anita Desai are noted for the profound probing into the inner life and feelings of the women, bounded by the shackles of the middle class. They are the explorations of the family problems, which perhaps is the chief cause behind the estrangement of the women from their family. Literature for her is not a means of escaping reality but an exploration and an inquiry. She prefers the private to the public world and avoids the traditional grooves of external reality and physical world. In fact, her real concern is the thorough investigation of human psyche, inner climate, and she unravels the mystery of the inner life of her characters. Her main engagement is to study human existence and human predicament, her exploration being a quest for self. Anita’s main focus, in this way, is to depict the psychic states of her protagonists at some crucial juncture of their lives.