From Silence to Speech: An Assessment of Indian English Fiction by Women

Asha Choubey, PhD
Reader in English
Head, Department of Humanities
MJP Rohilkhand University, IndiaE-mail: asha.choubey@yahoo.com

We have to know where women are, why women have to write the novel, the story of their own domesticity, the story of their own seclusion within the home and the possibilities and impossibilities provided by that.(1)

Women write to celebrate their womanhood; they sing women’s dream and speak their bodies. For as long as women did not write they were not heard. Women’s writing then, is like a raising consciousness. Their writing impacts their very existence in the socio-cultural milieu as it expedites their shift from a marginal position to a central one. Literature is impacted by reality, but its corollary, that reality is molded by literature, is also true. The Indian literary scene, dominated by men as active forces, always had a gap—it told the story of half of humanity through the voice of the other half. In a country where even the political power in the hands of rural and urban uneducated women is used by their men, it becomes very significant to explore the changes brought about in the literary scene by women writers. The shift from women as seen and projected by men, to women as lived and experienced by women was most welcome. This essay proposes to take stock of the ways in which the fiction scene is impacted by the Indian women writers of English.

I

In its nascent stage, Indian English Fiction (2) had men writers who focused on a man’s world where the presence of women was only incidental. Women appear in this fiction only as a necessary tool to be used by men. There were few writers like R.K. Narayan or M.R. Anand who bothered to take up some secondary women characters, but the depiction was not authentic because: (a) men in did not have access to the insides of a house which was the only space women moved in; (b) only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches and these shoes were certainly not worn by men; and, (c) howsoever sensitive these writers may have been they still did not consider women’s lives as exciting enough to become apt material for fiction. There were writers who chose women protagonists, but their portrayal of them was too romanticized to compare with the real women. The suffering wife, the weeping widow, or the sacrificing mother were the only images found in fiction. In these novels the sita (3), pativrata (4) image of women found acceptance, and submissiveness was still considered a virtue. There was no room for a woman who was not virtuous. Women either upheld conservative ideals or they were labeled immoral. Traditional moral aesthetics dominated these narratives.

Women’s entry into the writing arena made way for the shattering of the sita and pativrata image. Suddenly there was a shift in the traditional virtue syndrome. Instead of extolling the so called virtues of the sacrificing, submissive woman with tears in her eyes but not a word of complaint on her lips, these writers started presenting the fighter spirit of women in their novels. The suffering wife now gave way to the demanding one. Female perspective made it easier to articulate many an emotion not acknowledged in the body of literature hitherto.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Mad Woman in the Attic analyze the development of women’s writing as their emergence from the shadow created/interpreted by men. It’s a coming of age experience for the writer as woman. They write: “A woman writer is engaged at another level with assaulting and revising, deconstructing and reconstructing those images of women inherited from male literature, especially the paradigmatic polarities of angels and monsters.” (5) Gilbert and Gubar declared that while the older generation women’s writing was per force palimpsest, the contemporary writers need not struggle to hide their agendas.

A close look at the women novelists of Indian English Fiction (IEF) may draw one’s attention towards certain interesting facts. Almost all women novelists write from their personal experience; almost all of them end up in one or the other form of feminism. Some of them give us their autobiography in fiction, and virtually all of them identify with their female characters. It is not surprising, then, that their female characters tend to overshadow all other characters. How could the writer remain indifferent to what the woman experienced? Even T.S. Eliot would not blame her for presenting a record of her own experiences through her novels.

The beginning in IEF saw a spurt of writings where women characters, on the one hand, are more conservative than their men in terms of their strict observance of religion and caste norms; and on the other hand, they are more modern than their men inasmuch as they are more inspired and motivated by the supreme religion known as humanity. The flexibility and adaptability of these women to their surroundings derives from this belief. These Indian English writers had their inspiration in regional writers like Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, Shivani, Mahashweta Devi, Manjul Bhagat. It is important to trace the evolution of fictional women and their creators just as it is important to see the factors responsible for the “irruption of the feminine.”(6) The credit for writing the first English novel in India goes to Krupabai Satthianadhan whose Kamala: The Story of a Hindu Child-Wife was published in 1894. The protagonist, though apparently an apostle of sacrifice and docility, grows into an independent woman strong enough to stand her grounds as also to protect other women from being crushed by the parochial norms. Published in the wake of the famous Rukhmabai case(7) the novel took up the reformist agenda of its time. It was certainly a good beginning for the Indian English novel with feminist agenda. Satthianadhan also published Saguna which gave a realistic account of the life of a Christian woman. Both the novels together established women’s solidarity cutting across the lines of religion. In 1895, Sevantibai M. Nikambe published an autobiographical novel Ratanbai : A Sketch of a Bombay High Caste Hindu Young Wife. These publications are contemporaneous with the Age of Consent Act of 1891(8). The novel narrates the struggle of a Hindu girl, married at nine, to study, and it is a plea for female education that Nikambe makes in this novel. The Hindu zenana had come alive in Kamala and in 1944 Iqbalunnisa Hussain gave a peep into the life of a Muslim woman in a traditional Muslim household. Her novel Purdah and Polygamy: Life in an Indian Muslim Household (1944) is a feminist narration with deep autobiographical tones.

The later writings clearly have the impress of the nineteenth-century reform movement. It was in 1917 that a demand for women’s suffrage was raised by Women. All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) with members such as Sarojini Naidu, Amrit Kaur, Annie Besant and the likes was a major influence in furthering the women’s cause. Though by the fifties AIWC had receded, the liberal nationalist ideologies continued to exert influence on women writers’ pen. The appearance of fiction by women was few and far between before Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve (1954) and Ruth Pravar Jhabvala’s To Whom She Will (1955). Kamala Markandaya is the first woman novelist to present a varied repertoire of fictional women. Ira in Nectar in a Sieve emerges as the direct successor of the Victorian New Woman. Eschewed by her husband for being infertile, she mothers her brother starving herself to feed him, during the famine. Her mother Rukmini does not deviate from the model of Indian wife, devoting herself completely to Nathan, her husband who shows occasional infidelity. Some inner Fury, Possession and The Nowhere Man deal with the problems facing women arising out of east-west encounter. Markandaya’s women, howsoever aware of their rights, do not prefer to exercise the same. Venu Chitale in In Transit wrote the story of three generations of a Brahmin joint family and recorded the transition of India from colonial times to the independence. The theme of marital dissonance finds place in Ruth Pravar Jhabvala’s fiction as well. Whatever conflicts arise in a marriage is mostly due to women’s growing awareness of their self and the resultant sense of alienation from the male culture. Veena Paintal portrays upper middle class women who still bear with the marital atrocities in the hope of becoming sita but once they realize that is not possible unless the man be a Ram; they either commit suicide or they walk out of their marriages. Roshini commits suicide when she finds herself unable to be happy with her husband Ashok in the eponymous novel; Charisma in An Autumn Leaf divorces Amit who is involved with a widow Natasha. Thus Paintal’s characters challenge the double standards of the parochial society.

IEF is, then, marked by a gradual shift in narrative paradigms but what really cast a lasting impression on women’s writing post 1975 is the publication of “ Towards Equality: Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India” in 1974. This was certainly an eye-opener for those who till then, had dwelled in the false paradise of equality. This report bred a number of forums and groups dedicated solely to women’s causes. Nineteen seventy-nine saw the birth of the feminist journal Manushi. Rama Mehta’s Inside the Haveli brought to light the life of a Rajasthani zenana in 1977. Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column recalls the pre-partition Lucknow; Laila’s ambition to study is nipped in the bud by her grandfather; Zahara is forced into marriage while Nandi the servant girl is more free as compared to the upper class girls. This again is a statement on woman’s duty to protect the honor and virtue of their family, while men can get away with anything.

IEF by women writers may very well be said to revolve around the twin questions ‘What is a woman?’ and ‘What does a woman want? If the answer Cixous gives were to be the true indicator of women’s desire, ‘women want to write their bodies,’ the shift in women’s writing may be seen in their proclivity towards feminine aesthetics as against moral aesthetics. Women writers of IEF are still struggling between the dilemmas of choosing reality or moving further towards an ideal situation. Vijaylakshmi Sheshadri uses the term feminine aesthetics while discussing this essential dilemma facing the women writer in India:

Feminine aesthetics finds its expression in the female authors’ conflict between their loyalty to the dominant tradition and their compelling need to break through the conventional barriers to establish a new tradition. In this context a novel expression manifests itself in the manner in which novels are constructed and the female figures are conceived. There is no text in which this pressure does not rise to the textual surface to greater or lesser degree, and there is no writer who does not yield to it to a certain extent(9).

The construction of the woman protagonist as a person in her own right is at once indicative of the author’s inclusion of women’s aspirations as well as preclusion of traditional norms. It speaks of her intentions to conceive an ideal character on one hand and on the other it shows the writer’s ability to break the tradition. However, the change in the fictional woman is concomitant with the change in women’s status in society: “The new opportunities for education and employment, the emergence of new socio-economic patterns and the privileges of new and equal political rights for women are slowly changing the traditional conceptions of the role and the status of women in contemporary society.”(10) Feminine aesthetics sometimes causes frequent shift between authorial perspectives and that of the character itself. While the character’s voice is used to express her apprehensions and her will to speak, the authorial voice points out her basic inability to speak up. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, when she expressed her doubts regarding the subaltern’s capacity of speech did not mean that the subaltern does not cry out in various ways, but that speaking in the sense of ‘a transaction between speaker and listener’ does not occur(11). Subaltern talk, in other words, does not achieve the dialogic level of utterance. I accept the feminine aesthetics as it is but the propensity towards a feminist aesthetics is what gives me hope. It is this that establishes the dialogue- the two way communication. It made the literary landscape extend to accommodate as the centre what was hitherto considered periphery. The sita image was in for a jolt and as women’s sense of individuality matured sita cleared the way for Draupadi (12). This paradigm shift may be seen in the novels of Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande and more recently Arundhati Roy besides many contemporary women writers of Indian English fiction.

II

With Nayantara Sahgal there was a major shift in terms of female perspective. She was soon joined by Anita Desai and together these writers gave push to a new tradition of writing. Contrasted with the novels of yore, which dealt with the question of morality and put the onus on women, this new generation of writers talked about the self-realization of women. The protagonist’s quest for selfhood and freedom transported the fictional woman onto a terrain hitherto unseen and unknown in IEF. The quest plot is a result of factors which unconsciously creep into the writing of sensitive souls. Extra literary inheritance may clearly be seen in the exploration of self. The high class, educated, sensible women became protagonists of Sahgal. It was an altogether new class of women whose lives were not infested by problems of dowry or poverty. These women lived a blessed life as far as material standards are concerned, but there was something wanting, some vacuum in their lives. These women were facing the problem of identity.

Sahgal became the first writer in India to break the long engendered norms of conduct. In her fiction personhood is the norm and she proclaims: “It takes half of life to achieve personhood but perhaps there is no greater glory.”(13) This is a new voice in a fiction where for woman what used to be more important was her usefulness to man. Sahgal’s women are educated, intelligent, aware and sensible women, who live a life of luxury, comfort and security but they refuse to barter their personhood, their freedom for a little security. They strive ‘to be’ and most of them are assertive, strong women in their own unique way. Extra literary inheritance operates through her novels as she projects one after another woman with a mind of her own. It may be mentioned here that this breed was quite rare in those times. A niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, daughter of Vijay Lakshmi Pundit, Sahgal herself had never had a first hand experience of gender discrimination, coming from a family of men who respected not only their women but also their need for space. It was only after her marriage that she came face to face with a man’s world where identity was a luxury as far as women are concerned.

Draupadi image keeps recurring in Sahgal’s novels and women do not think twice before searching for satisfaction outside of marriage when life becomes a burden inside it. Asha Choubey’s comments in this regard may be seen:

Sahgal’s women are not hostile to men, but they would certainly not settle for a subordinate position. They are not ready to compromise though they do not hesitate to adjust. Sahgal tries to make plainly clear that no relation is good or bad in itself; it has to be free from all labels. Even extra marital and pre-marital relations are not entirely immoral, if they tend to fulfill the person as individual. That which saps individuals of their individuality is immoral and that which saves them of all frustrations is wholesome and ethical (14).

Simrit in The Day in Shadow is a projection of Sahgal herself and her search for identity runs parallel to Sahgal’s search for self assertion. Devi in A Situation in New Delhi is an exception not only amongst Sahgal’s women but also majority of women around us in India. Here is a woman who has not only a imposing personality but being a minister she also has an unyielding authority. In the portrayal of Devi, Sahgal has drawn immensely from her association with women who belong to privileged class. Sonali in Rich Like Us is a fine Indian specimen of the new woman. An IAS officer, Sonali dares to defy the accepted norms and challenges her political bosses even in such crucial times as emergency. In some ways Sonali is a continuation of Devi but even stronger than her inasmuch as Devi has political powers whereas Sonali is only a beaurocrat ruled by political powers yet she dares to stand her grounds. Sahgal’s most defiant character is the rani (15) of Vijaygarh in Mistaken Identity. From being a purdah clad woman the rani emerges as a strong person who refuses to cow down to her husband’s demands and does not think twice before leaving her home finding the love of comrade Yusuf with whom she experiences the bliss of complete compatibility. While all the other women of Sahgal look for compatibility, the rani openly asserts her sexuality.

Sahgal’s fictional women thus uphold the need to be granted the right to choose; their life is governed by their choice instead of the patriarchal norms: “Though feminist in her approach Sahgal does not subscribe to militant feminism which believes in the overthrow, not of suppressive forces, but of the society itself. Sahgal’s women refuse to fit into the mould of the ‘perfect lady’; but their revolt is more cathartic than defeatist. Instead of seeking to burn the social order her women strive to carve a niche, a respectable and equal place for them within the social order.”(16)

III

Anita Desai’s appearance on the scene with the publication of Cry, the Peacock led to a shift in women’s spaces. Before this women’s inner space has never been the pivot around which the narratives revolved. Desai’s novels mark a new beginning in Indian English fiction. The conflict that forms the mosaic of her novels in not between tradition and modernity but that between: “the need to withdraw in order to preserve one’s wholeness and sanity and the need to be involved in the painful process of life. . . This oscillation between attachment and detachment reflects the need for a meaning in life.”(17) This conflict works at another level between the self that is essentially based in socio-cultural forces and the one that these women strive for—which Jasbir Jain terms as the “ideal self.”(18) Authorial devices push these women towards selfhood but counter devices pressure them back only to check their human endeavor. Confinement in futile domesticity is a major concern in Anita Desai’s fiction. Her Sita in Where Shall We Go This Summer breaks the sita image and breaking all bonds she escapes to another space namely Manori Island, but that is only for a while. She has to come back to her husband’s home when she fails to revel in the ‘magical space’ because the magic is fled. Also her need for protection and concern for children’s comfort overpowers all other considerations and she comes back, a more mature person. She realizes that she could break away from her role-playing as a wife but not as a mother. Sita’s revolt may have been intended as that of Nora, only that given the social constraints, it faces abortion. Desai’s Nanda Kaul in Fire on the Mountain does not even think of leaving for as long as the husband is alive because she had got used to his aggressive ways as also to her own submissive ones. Maya in Cry, the Peacock however breaks the good-girl syndrome; her obsession with her father and her pampered life before marriage drives her to a point where finding him an alien to her world she kills her husband Gautama and still she does not lose the sympathy of the writer/reader. Cry, the Peacock took up the pain of displacement and alienation as had never been dealt with before this. But Maya commits suicide, showing the novelist’s serious concern for the societal do’s and don’ts. The problem of maladjustment may be seen in Desai’s novels in its various dimensions. Her women have an extremely sensitive nature and face a conflict between their parental culture and that of the in-laws, as also between their original protected surroundings and the adopted urban culture. Women in Desai are not satisfied with their feminine space but they do not have the courage to do much about it. Even Maya has to kill herself as she dares to deviate from the societal norms. Sita does break the spatial norms only to adhere to it again. Outside world is still not considered a feminine domain, hence Sita returns to her original space. Nanda Kaul’s story re-enacts the spatial paradigm of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott.(19) Nanda Kaul moves to Carignano only to escape the ‘home’ that was in her case, never anything but ‘exile’. In open defiance of the space given her by traditional patriarchy she looks for some refuge in the lap of nature which itself is a feminine space; but since she has rejected the domestic space, considered the primary domain of woman, she must face doom. R.S. Pathak’s comment aptly sums up for Desai’s women:

Anita Desai has conveyed her women characters' fundamental dependence on men through her lexicon and tropes of mastery, command and domination. Her women sometimes do attempt to assert their independence and self-sufficiency, but their quest for identity is thwarted at significant junctures . . . No woman in Anita Desai's novels. . . has been fortunate enough to free herself from the shackles of femininity.(20)

IV

“It is fair to say that the silence female postcolonial writers manifest in their works is actually a sound “silence”, their pens make such a sound of “silence” resound in the world of letters. Thence, “silence” is no longer “silent” the colonial females seen in the “silence” in postcolonial texts are in fact crying revolt against the mainstream society from the periphery where they subsist.” (21)

Shashi Deshpande occupies quite a unique place in the history of IEF inasmuch as it was for the first time in her novels that the middle class urban Indian woman became the subject matter of fiction. She is one of the few indigenous writers IEF has seen who retain the Indian sensibility in their plots and characters. The quest plot operates in Deshpande’s novels at various levels. There is Sarita in The Dark Holds No Terrors who lives nightmares after nightmares when her husband chooses to vent his frustrations on her by indulging in a sadist pleasure. Even before marriage Sarita’s plight may be compared with the privileged position of her brother Dhruv. While Dhruv is the apple of all eyes, Sarita does not exist as a person in her own right; she is merely a playmate and a governess to Dhruv. So complete is the discrimination that even in his death, Sarita does not find any respite. The simple rule is that as a girl she had no right to survive the ordeal that claimed her brother. This rule applies even after marriage when she becomes more successful than her husband; she is punished because she has no right to supersede a man.

The writer uses the metaphor of silence in many of her novels to justify the circular movement of her women who move on only to come back from where they started. Deshpande’s Sarita and Desai’s Sita are one inasmuch as both find a voice of their own only to realize there are no listeners. Their initial will to move on is counteracted upon by their passivity to patriarchal construction of space for women. In embracing this space they adhere to the feminine aesthetics. Homecoming runs through the entire corpus of Deshpande’s fiction. The ambivalent stance of women writers can be seen in the construction of all protagonists of Deshpande. Sarita wonders: “Why do we travel, not in straight lines but in circles? Do we come to the same point again and again?” (22)

Deshpande’s uniqueness comes from her women’s belief in the message of Bhagvadgita : Yathechhasi tatha kuru, which gives them the right ‘to do as they wish.’ Freedom of choice is the most important freedom and it is this that makes truly emancipated beings. What many Deshpande like writers in India have aspired to do may be evaluated in the light of Raman Seldon’s clarion call: “Write yourself. Your body must be heard. Only then all the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth […]Since writing is the place where subversive thought can germinate […]Women must uncensor herself, recover her goods, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal. She must throw off her guilt.”(23) Female perspective made it easier to articulate many an emotions not acknowledged hitherto. The growth from childhood into adolescence, the first awareness of a feminine body at puberty—are situations that Deshpande depicts verily and beautifully. She also gives mother-daughter relationship a new dimension in her portrayal of the same in Kamala-Sarita (The Dark Holds No Terrors) and Inni-Urmi-Vanaa-Mandira/ Sakutai-Kalpana (The Binding Vine). In Desai’s Fasting, Feasting we had Uma who was practically disowned by her mother in terms of her exploitation of the daughter as a domestic servant; in Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors we have a mother praying for her daughter’s unhappiness and the daughter saying, “If you are a woman I don’t want to be one.” (24) Judith Kegan Gardiner’s “mother villain” comes to the mind while studying Deshapande’s mother characters.

Deshpande’s characters are ensconced in the entwining interpersonal relationships. Her latest novel Moving On however goes a step ahead where Manjari the protagonist happens to break all relationships and move ahead alone and independent refusing to take the crutches of re-marriage that Raja offers. Manjari’s moving on in another search sums up the contemporary women’s unending search for selfhood. In the words of Manjari: “The search is doomed to failure. We will continue to be incomplete, ampersands all of us. Yet, the search is what it’s all about…the search is the thing.”(25) Mother-daughter relationship which had been shorn of its glory since women started telling their own stories, now starts taking an ugly turn where the gender-identity is crushed because of the masculine pattern of separation entering into the feminine pattern of connection.

V

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things is a path breaking novel inasmuch as after Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children this is the first book that created quite a few ripples in the socio-moral as well as literary pool in India. And all this for reasons more than one, a) The God of Small Things raised certain pertinent questions and slapped them on the traditional patriarchal society to explore their answers b) Roy broke all the norms to accommodate the feminine principle, c) The God of Small Things became the mouthpiece of the subaltern in terms of its open and defiant concern for the untouchable and the marginalized in the person of Velutha and Ammu.

Roy told one of her interviewers: “Writing The God of Small Things was a fictional way of making sense of the world I lived in.”(26) Critics like Dr. B. N. Singh have taken note of its predominantly female pattern. The narrative in The God of Small Things is not linear. Rahel and Estha’s reading the posters backwards is the breaking of patriarchal conventions. The novel itself persuades the readers that it be read backwards. Howell’s analysis of the feminist mode of writing may well be applied to Roy’s novels:

Perhaps the commonest feature of woman’s resistance to tradition is their mixing of genre codes- like those of gothic, romance, history, gossip and Christian fable……..the difference here is that those stories are all told from the women’s angle, registering a feminized of dislocation within the very tradition in which they are writing.(27)

The novel is a story of transgression in many senses. There is Velutha who dared to forget his untouchability; there is Ammu who crosses the norm of womanly virtues as also dares to forget the very fact that she is a touchable who should not allow an untouchable near her. ‘Locusts Stand I’ (Locus Standi) is forgotten and Ammu dares to feel at home in the Ayemenem House—her brother Chacko’s home. The norms of patriarchy are broken and this brings doom. Only Chacko knows the norms: “What is mine is mine. What is yours is also mine.”(28) This, in essence, is the law of patriarchy that must be obeyed. Roy’s protagonist dares to break this law but not with impunity. The History House is the lawgiver; it punishes all transgressions that take place in the Ayemenem House. In one sense Roy defines her feminine aesthetics. Ammu breaks the boundaries of how much and who – she defies all phallocentric discourse only to herald a new era when women will make their own choices, even if it entails death in isolation, in a dingy room. Roy’s use of feminine aesthetics breaks all norms of the phallocentric system, which makes women’s body unrepresentable.

Roy’s protagonists revolt against the ‘combined forces of religion, tradition and society.’ because these forces do not operate with oppression in the case of the privileged. “Paravan identity,” says M.K.Naik, “is the albatross round their untouchable necks,”(29) and I’m tempted to add the feminine identity is another albatross or to borrow from Ammu---millstone around the women’s necks. Chacko’s amorous adventures have Mammachi and Baby Kochamma as facilitators of the crime whereas when Ammu decides to satisfy the needs of her body, all hell breaks loose. Men have all the rights to indulge themselves; women must not have any desires. Love laws and need laws are clear and men rule the roost. Ammu’s doom is the failure of the feminine principle inasmuch as she is the voice of defiance of women’s sexuality.

Roy’s protagonists are women with fortitude and gumption. They represent the fluidity of tradition thereby challenging its imposition as a closed phenomenon. On one hand the narrative takes up a cross-caste love relationship and its consequences and on the other hand it also tackles such issues as the daughter’s right to inheritance in her parental property. Roy also delves into women writers’ favorite theme i.e., defining virtue and honor in the light of humanism.

VI

IEF by women exudes a positive approach towards breaking the myth of Medusa and the abyss. It is through these writings that the misconstrued myths like Medusa would dismantle. The ambivalence seen in the fictional women derives from that of the modern urban middle class woman from where most of the woman writers i.e. Manju Kapur, Geeta Mehta, Shashi Deshpande are drawn. The struggle for existence characteristic of these first generation libertines is reflected in their fictional creations. Feminine aesthetics lends a female voice to the novels and works towards women’s self-will and effacement of ‘all qualities conducive to conformity.’(30) The very fact, that IEF by women does not entertain moral aesthetics at the cost of the feminine, brings satisfaction. The question important in this context is not whether these women kept their virtues but whether they are honest to themselves and whether they work towards getting what they wanted. IEF without showing an explicit awareness of the same has internalized the l’ecriture feminine and enriched the same by indulging in extra literary inheritance in an Indian context. Elaine Showalter in 1977 posited three major phases that she claimed were common to all literary subcultures:

1. A phase of imitation
2. A phase of protest
3. A phase of self discovery, a turning inward, freed from some of the depending of opposition, a search for identity.

All these major phases of the feminine tradition- imitation/ protest and self-discovery can be seen in the major novelists discussed herein. While Nayantara Sahgal’s protagonists become the proponent of the third phase, Anita Desai’s major characters are in the phase of self-analysis and perception which leads to a kind of ennui. Shashi Deshpande’s novels oscillate between the imitation and protest stage, and reaching finally to the self discovery. It is in Arundhati Roy that the final phase of self discovery reaches its culmination. Whatever their standpoint, all women writers have clearly striven to place women at the centre of their narratives. Anees Jung rightly comments:

In this complex pantheon of diversities the Indian woman remains the point of unity, unveiling through each single experience a collective consciousness prized by a society that is locked in mortal combat with the power and weakness of age and time. She remains the still centre, like the centre in a potter’s wheel, circling to create new forms, unfolding the continuity of a racial life, which in turn has encircled and helped her acquire a quality of concentration.(31)

The fictional women created by these writers have emerged as strong individuals deeply rooted in their culture, thus completely erasing the picture of a weak, docile shadow of men. These women have shattered the myth of subalternity that haunted the postcolonial women’s psyche for a long time. Conjugal understanding is no longer taken for subservience and family ties have come to be respected for the love that they denote and not for any need or dependence. The chrysalis is broken and women are seen fast emerging towards self-actualization in literature as they are in life. Womanhood has come a long way since 1920 when it won the battle for suffrage. From a cattle like existence women have come to hold an almost-central position in the society though the society is still to a large extent patriarchal. From being the other, woman has come to hold herself at par with the absolute in literature as well. Indian woman rubs shoulders with her professedly more progressing Western counterpart as well as with the male of the species. The scale has now tilted in favor of women and they have truly become equals. The ‘subaltern’ has come to hold a platform wherefrom she can speak and she does speak out her mind. Woman has traversed the land of silence and has arrived at the land of speech.

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Selden, Raman. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989.

Sheshadri, Vijaylakshmi. The New Woman in Indian- English Women Writers Since The 1970’s. Delhi: B. R. Publishing Corporation, 1995.

Yiming, Ren. “Three Metaphorical Uses of “Silence.” Three Female Postcolonial Writers’ Works.<n.edu.hk/eng/.../eoyang/icla/Three types of Silence - Ren Yiming.doc>

1. Mitchell, p. 289.
2. Henceforth referred to as IEF
3. Sita is the wife of Rama, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu and is esteemed an exemplar of womanly and wifely virtues. According to the Hindu belief, Sita was an avatara of Lakshmi, Vishnu’s consort, who chose to reincarnate herself on earth as Sita and endure an arduous life, to provide humankind an example of good virtues. She is one of the principal characters in the Ramayana, a Hindu epic named after her husband Rama.
4. The ideal of pativrata has been highly extolled in India down the ages. Mothers teach their daughters the ideals of pativrata. Subservience to the husband is the central quality of a pativrata. A woman who tries to live up to the role of a pativrata has to perform innumerable tasks for the husband. A woman’s salvation is routed through seva or the performance of daily domestic chores, especially those undertaken to please the husband.
5. Gilbert and Gubar, p. 6.
6. Boumelha, p. 142.
7. Rukhmabai was married even before puberty to Dadaji who was eleven years older to her. On reaching puberty Rukhmabai refused to go to her husband because of his ill health and poor education, hence the marriage remained unconsummated. There was a big hullabaloo between two factions formed around the controversy; one supporting the girl and the other supporting the man in the name of traditions.
8. This legislation amended the Indian Penal Code to raise the age at which an individual was considered capable of consenting to sexual intercourse from 10 to 12 yrs.
9. Sheshadri, p. 126.
10. Kapur, p. 28.
11. Landry and Gerald, p. 52.
12. In the epic Mahabharata, Draupadi is the daughter of King Drupada, and becomes the wife of the five Pandavas and then known as Princess Krishna. Unlike women in her times she challenged the patriarchy and became the very epitome of feminism and femininity.
13. Sahgal, p. 30.
14. Choubey, Fictional Milie, pp. 45-46.
    
15. Sahgal has used the lower case for Rani through the novel.
16. Choubey, “The Lady of Carignano,” p. 23.
17. Jain, pp. 29-30.
18. Jain, p. 31.
19. For a comparative study see: Asha Choubey, “The Lady of Carignano: A Mythopoeic Study of Fire on the Mountain, " in Studies in Indian English Literature, ed. Ravinandan Sinha & Sujit Bose ( Jaipur: Book Enclave, 2003). p. 23.
20. Pathak, p. 193.
21. Yiming.
22. Deshpande, Moving On, p. 158.
23. Selden, pp. 150-151.
24. Deshpande, The Dark Holds No Terror, p. 51.
25. Deshpande, Moving On, p. 343.
26. Interview with Arundhati Roy.
27. Howells, pp. 5-6.
28. Roy, p.75.
29. Naik, p. 226.
    
    Sheshadri, p. 127.
30. Jung, p .26.
    

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