Women in Raja Rao's Kanthapura

This short story can be analyzed also from the point of view of the feminist criticism because the story as well as its symbols point out to a certain state of the way in which women are perceived by the society, not necessarily only in the Indian society but as well in the American one. Feminism means, "paying attention to women. It means paying attention when women appear as characters and noticing when they do not. It means making some invisible mechanisms visible and pointing out, when necessary that while the emperor has no clothes, the empress has no body. It means paying attention to women as writers and as readers or audience members. It means taking

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.

Just as the British ignored women’s perspective, so did the Indian men from both secular and religious backgrounds. Geraldine Forbes (1996) argues that the female approach is often missing in history and thus, she attempts to privilege women’s own accounts, whether it be through their oral histories, folktales, memoirs, journals, documents, etc. I believe the same could have been done in regards to the sati, primary documents such as the Ramayana reveal that there was female opposition to the sati (in the case of Sita). The introduction of the “woman question” was a significant step in South Asian history in terms of initiating the movement for women’s rights, however, it lacked the necessary voice from Indian women

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.

Kim gives a vivid picture of the complexities in India under British rule. It shows the life of the bazaar mystics, of the natives, of the British military. There is a great deal of action and movement, for Kipling's vast canvas painted in full detail. The dialogue in the novel makes use of Indian phrases translated by the author, they give the flavor of native speech in India. They are also touches of the native behavior and shrewdness.

Our society has created an identity for women since ancient days. Women are considered as an weaker sex and inferior to men. Though she plays a important role in her life, she is not found as an individual human being with all emotions and sufferings. She is supposed to live a life of dedication, surrendering and devotion. In Indian fiction, the women are modelled with the above qualities. Those qualities of women created a large impact on the Indian psyche and the expectation of society, and consciously or unconsciously

Through the prescribed framework of magic realism, the novel allows its multitude of characters, belonging to diverse cultural backgrounds, to appraise and originate their own versions of Indian history, thus subverting British colonial versions of history. Magic realism becomes obligatory to communicate the postcoloniality of India, and within its framework, the novel explores and presents a postcolonial history of its own. The cultural and social hybridity, along with the historical hybridity present within the novel allows the text to exemplify the major themes of the novel and postcoloniality itself: the formation and telling of history, self, and narratives. The novel effectively and noticeably depicts the problems of postcoloniality and

Using the elements of fiction and truth a mass amount can be gained from understanding how women fit in with the government/patriarchy. From novels comparably, A Passage to India and A Handmaid’s Tale, these two reflect different times: a realistic time of Indian Imperialism and a Utopian fantasy that could indubitably become the future of tomorrow. How do they correspond with the role of women? Both either represent or differ from the true, unseen representation of women amongst the power of the elite, against the suppressors of the minority, and the

These ethnographies have been also called “inadequate science” (Visweswaran 21); this is in relation to Malinowski’s belief that anthropology is a structured and scientific method. It is ironic then that men are “heralded as exemplars of this new genre” (Visweswaran 22) when women began reflexivity before them. Visweswaran goes on to analyze these formerly unknown and ignored female texts; she looks at these ethnographies to make her own ethnography. These ethnographies, for Visweswaran, are ethnographies in the text themselves; they reveal the female author’s “complex negotiation of positionality within a single gender domain” (Visweswaran 27).

The political and social events of the sixties and the seventies along with growing opportunities of education and employment for women encourage women belonging to the urban middle class to engage in literary activities. The thematic concerns of these women writers have been cantering around women related issues. The social setting for most of these writings is the urban middle class and the protagonist is, more often than not, a woman. Indian Culture treats women with utmost reverence. Women are identified with Adi Shakti or the primordial energy. Woman’s avatar as mother treated as highest manifestation of human relationship; It is the mother who gets precedence over all other principles of life including father and god in importance. She

Born in 1906, R.K. Narayan was brought up in a country struggling to gain independence. ‘The M.C.C.’, an excerpt taken from the larger novel Swami and Friends by Narayan, was published in 1935, a time when Anti-British sentiments were at their height, engaging Indians from every corner of the country. In fact, Narayan himself was quoted as saying, “growing up in the first half of the twentieth century in India one couldn’t but be swept away by the rising tide of the nationalist movement,” (p. 202, Alam). The 1930’s were a time where “all that a writer could write about became inescapably political,” (p. 179, Alam). The first part of a trilogy, the semi-autobiographical Swami and Friends was Narayan’s first published work. The excerpt

The objective readership of my novel will comprise youth with a flair for novelty and curiosity, to know more about this maligned society and relationship between the old and the young. This novel will go a long way among those people, who wants to understand the havoc caused by the partition of India in 1947. The characters of the book will depict their relationship and the plight they suffered from the hands of their own. In a way the contents are the ugly truth of the society, impact of the commercial world and the perverted nature of the characters.

Apart from the political criticism, a humanistic reading of the text reveals the social bias around the social politics, i.e. caste system. It bares the sad plight of the lower caste, even in the political system supported by the proletarian values. What Roy implies is that the Marxist party in Kerala worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them. Velutha is a member of the party. Yet he does not get help from the party leader Comrade Pilliai. Pilliai’s double standard distances him

She makes an important point when trying to go beyond the female (otherness), by paying careful attention to differences among women themselves, and by putting emphasize on the multiple realties that women faces, and by that trying to uncover universalist interpretations (Parpart and Marchand 1995:6). She reveals the inadequacy of binary categories by showing us how power is defined in binary terms, between the people who have (men) and the people who do not (women). This is a consequence of seeing women as a homogenous group, and contributes to the reinforcement of the binary division between men and women (Mohanty 1991:64). By assuming that women are a already constituted group with the same experiences and interests, gender is looked upon as something that can be applied cross cultures (Mohanty 1991:54), and it also produces an assumption about the “average third world woman” as poor and uneducated, in contrast to the educated, modern Western women (Mohanty 1991:56). Implicit in the binary analytic lies the assumption that the third world woman only can be liberated through western rationality. Mohanty is making an important point when emphasising the need to challenge these objectifications (Udayagiri 1995:163).

E.M. Forster’s classic novel “A Passage to India” tells the story of a young doctor, Dr. Aziz, and his interactions with the British citizens who are residing in India during the time of the British Raj. Throughout the novel, the reader gets many different viewpoints on the people and the culture of India during this point in history. The reader sees through the eyes of the Indian people primarily through the character of Dr. Aziz, and the perceptions of the British through the characters of Mr. Fielding, Adela Quested, and Mrs. Moore. Through the different characters, and their differing viewpoints, the reader can see that Forster was creating a work that expressed a criticism that he held of the behavior of the British towards their Indian subjects.