Theme Of Voices In The City By Anita Desai

'Mrs. Sen’ is the sixth story of this collection in which Lahiri has portrayed proficiently and successfully the problems of immigrants such as displacement, restlessness, discrimination and marginalization in the migrated country, even after having found a place to settle in. This story exhibits the troubles faced by an Indian wife in a foreign culture. Mrs.Sen is one of two main characters in this story. She is a friendless woman who hopelessly misses her native place Calcutta, her home. Her husband took a job as a professor in a New England town. Life is very different for her there. She refuses to learn to drive because it’s not her interest, but the rejection also limits her experiences in her new country. She becomes a babysitter for

Women in India were unaware of their miserable condition. It is in the post independence period the women’s quest for identity of her own commenced. The 20th century saw the shift from outer to inner sensibilities and no one can better understand a man or woman better a feminine writer. In modern English fiction a number of women novelists have arrived on the literary scene, they have set out making new forays in to the world of women. Nayantara Sahgal being a feminist writer has emphasized in her novels on freedom and a new definition of the New Women. Sahgal’s heroines are well aware of the injustice done to them in their marriage and they come out of this traditional bond.

The dominant idiom of Indian writing today is firmly entrenched in pain, anxiety of displacement, nostalgia, yearning to belong to roots, and so on. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss are two such novels that explore the tragedy of man on several levels using different perspectives. Both the novels are about averted culture-clash tragedies, homogeneity vs. heterogeneity, and about Indian sensibilities.

First, this novel showcases acts of caring for family and friends, during a rough time for all the Indians bringing them closer into one community. The protagonist Sabine displays acts of caring among her friends and family. For instance, near the end of the novel, Sabine helps her mother’s friend, Lalita, despite having a sour relationship with her. Sabine saves Lalita from being arrested by lying to a military officer, thus making Sabine a more confident and brave person. Sabine faces her fear of the military and gains the power she

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 especially 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 possessing deep insight into the female psyche. Focusing on the marital relation she seeks to expose the tradition

Mrs. Asrani, one of the important character in the book, says, "If we can't all live in harmony in this building, what hope is there for the nation?" Her mood changes often between embracing the unique individuals who share her living quarters and shunning them for insecure and picayune reasons. The author manages to give everybody good and bad days and thus offer this three-floored microcosm of urban India an emotional resonance that many readers will happily relate to ---especially those who lives in urban areas. The ailing drunk Vishnu becomes more and more decrepit, he wanders from floor to floor revisiting moments of his life through delirious remembrances of loves and horrors. Though the neighbours are not always interested in sharing his memories with him, he moves from landing to landing as if descending into a private hell, taking their abuse or kindness in whatever amount they wish to hand it

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.

Readers also develop an emotional attachment to a character, such as the main character in Chitra Divakaruni’s “Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter”. From the direct perspective of the character, the reader looks through the eyes of an elderly widow from India who struggles to find balance between her

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

Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters in her anthology ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ do face moments of unhappiness, however her characters are not always isolated in darkness. Many of Lahiri’s characters suffocate on their migrant experiences, struggling to let go of their home culture; India. Despite this, Lahiri suggests that the light can indeed be found in migrants’ lives if they maintain their connections with their birth place and accept their new fates, evident by incorporating and exploring happy moments for her characters who do so. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story Mrs. Sen’s, character Mrs Sen is Lahiri’s study of the classic case of a migrant who fails to adapt to their new life and fit into new culture; experiencing the inability to let go of the old culture.

The book also illustrates the mafia that terrorizes the poor and the corpse business which sells the bones and blood of dead people ruthlessly. Lastly, Lapierre explains the working of Indian marriage: Pal breaks his back to produce a dowry and make wedding arrangements for his daughter and dies of sheer exhaustion in the middle of the ceremony. The people of Anand Nagar were faced with many hardships. Although, despite facing hunger, deplorable living conditions, illness, bone breaking work (or no work at all) and death, the people still hold on to the belief that life is precious and worth living, so much so that they named their slum "City of

Thus, to give voice to the suffocated psyche and suppressed desire of woman and lay bare ambitions and frustrations and soothe the aches and pains has been primary focus in Deshpande’s writing. Her works show that compromise is what characterizes the life of the common run of the middle-class women in India. Unable to defy social conventions or traditional morality,

Unfaltering, much like the ‘Noise’ that it is about, this poem transitions from one subtopic to another; bringing forth a host of issues faced by a country which holds the second largest population in the world. Kalki Koechlin, the poet, not only a writer, but also an actor, feminist and philanthropist, strikes a chord in the hearts and minds of viewers as she voices the reality we all see, and yet are somehow blind to. She begins her poem by describing, with uncanny accuracy, the daily noises we hear in the streets of Bombay- The mosque, the temple and the church, each not wanting “to be left out of the divine cacophony.”

Through close analysis of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, one is able to see the various ways women are represented in literature, showing that both social and cultural views of its context, as well as the author’s own view are equally important in crafting an ingenious storyline. In this novel, Ali focuses on several Bengali women as they embark on a journey of self discovery. Ali portrays them as suppressed by their patriarchal culture, by their religion, as well as being resilient fighters against injustice. At times, Ali conforms to Bengali cultural views, however, at others, they are

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