Short Note On Feminist Movement

Feminist movement in India was initiated by men, and later women joined it. The efforts of these men included abolishing sati, the custom of child marriage, abolishing the disfiguring of widows, promoting women 's education, obtaining legal rights for women to own property, and requiring the law to acknowledge women 's status by granting them basic rights in matters such as adoption.

The Indian Women 's Movement began in the early years of the twentieth century. Annie Besant and Sarojini Naidu were two of the first leaders. They argued that female roles - mother, wife, and homemaker were important. They stated that weakening social practices should be abolished and that women should be educated. Led by Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Dayananda Saraswati, and Justice Ranade, and by the spread of

Feminist movement also seeks to champion the cause of a woman, one who is trying to assert her independence and individuality by making a loud protest against the good old image of ‘an auxiliary’ or ‘an appendage’ in the society. Few of the Indian woman authors and writers like Arundhati Roy, Mamta Kalia, Kamala Das, R. P. Jhabwala, Kamala Markandaya, Eunice De Souza, Imtiaz Dharkar, Nayantara Sahgal, Shashi Deshpande, Manju Kapur, Kiran Desai, Anitha Desai, Shobha De, Ismat Chugtai and so on, have voiced their protest and anguish over the containment and marginalization of women through their works with lot of passion and intensity to uphold the need and cause of feminism in different ways. This change is reflected in the Indian literature and drama in fifties and sixties. Many of the plays depict women characters, who are rebelling and trying to deconstruct the myth of male sovereignty in the society; who are trying to occupy subject positions by coming out of the margins. from the Indian drama in English a more realistic picture of the Indian woman began to emerge. the portrayal of the Indian woman in plays of Indian dramatists of the post-Independence period reveal