Title: Kamala Markandaya's-Nectar in
a Sieve Sasi Deshpande's-The Binding Vine :A study of female characters
Table of Contents
This
Thesis examines the treatment of female characters in Kamala Markandaya's-Nectar in a
Sieve and Shashi Deshpande's-The Binding Vine and attempts to
identify how Indian feminism differs from other feminisms which reflect
different cultural concerns. There are different types of feminisms (liberal
feminism, Marxist feminism, French feminism, etc.), and the very meaning of the
term ‘feminism’ is continually being contested. The Oxford English Dictionary
defines it as ‘advocacy of the rights of women based on the theory of equality
of the sexes’. Some feminists, however, underline divergence rather than
impartiality, and some wish to challenge masculine values themselves rather
than grant women equal rights within a male-oriented culture. My own understanding
of feminism is based not so much on what it is as on what it does: it seeks to
analyze and redress the power imbalance between the sexes. It takes on
different forms in different contexts, based as it is on various critical
analyses of male privilege and women’s subordination within different
societies. Using this broad, functional understanding of feminism, my purpose
here is to identify the particular feminist concerns of Indian women novelists
writing in English and to examine the ways in which they are handled in their
fiction.
Kamala
Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai and Shashi Deshpande are the
best-known and most prolific Indian novelists writing in English who have been
self-consciously engaged with women’s issues.
Moreover,
their work – collectively and individually – spans several decades, enabling a
study of its development over time. I have chosen four novels by Markandaya and
five each by Sahgal, Desai and Deshpande which best express their feminist
concerns. These are Nectar in a Sieve(1954), A Handful of Rice(1966), Two
Virgins(1973) and The Golden PROOF.
Feminism and Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing
The
feminist concerns expressed in these novels can be broadly classified into four
thematic areas: women, cultural identity and social class; marriage and
sexuality; motherhood and other work; women’s role in maintaining and/or
resisting patriarchy. The thesis also analyses the formal aspects of their
writing in order to examine how these thematic concerns are expressed and to
investigate possible connections between their feminist consciousness and
writing techniques.
At
this point it would perhaps be helpful to clarify the epistemological status of
the novels, which function on a number of levels in my argument. While they are
mainly seen as fictional expression, they also point to social and historical
realities – for example, in their depiction of sati during the twentieth
century (RLU1985), curtailment of the education of daughters (FF1999), child
marriages (FOM1977) and the emphasis on status and image in contemporary Indian
bourgeois society
(CLD1980).
At times the novels can also function on a metaphorical level – as exemplified
by my discussion of Two Virgins(1973) in which I suggest that the character
Saroja can be seen in some ways as emblematic of Indian feminism during the
1970s. The issue of literary realism arises when the fictionality of the texts
and their function as social critique are related, and in this context I
address realism as an artistic and critical issue in the thesis.
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