Individualism In Anita Desai's Novel

Introduction

Anita Desai is one of the prominent voices in the modern Indian English Fiction. She introduced a new era of Psychological realism in this genre with her debut novel Cry, the Peacock in 1963. Anita Desai’s novels work out the mystery of the inner life of her characters. She repudiates all social concerns and affirms that she is interested in individuals and not in social issues. R.S Sharma refers to her “anti Fiction”. (Sharma 166)

Anita Desai’s works are different from those of other Indian women writers in English: Nayantara Sehgal, Kamala Markandaya and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who mainly concern themselves with politics, East-West encounter and social theme. Desai is concerned with the psychic

(Narasimhan 23) The most common theme in her novels is the complexity of human relationships. Another theme most frequently occurring in her novels is that of withdrawal, alienation, loneliness, lack of communication.

Madhusudan Prasad observes: “Desai is always preoccupied by an eternal quest for meaning and value, freedom and truth that can sustain us in this chaotic and seemingly meaningless world.” (Prasad 2) Since Desai believes that “literature should deal with most enduring matters, less temporary and less temporal than politics,” (Desai, “Reply to the questionnaire” 4) she is opposed to the use of contemporary material. A novelist should not write immediately about an incident but should allow it forth to settle down in order to develop a detached perspective.

Anita Desai’s world, like Jane Austen’s is a restricted one. She restricts herself to writing about people and situations that she knows or can understand by thorough examination. Therefore, she is known as a pioneer in writing psychological novels or a writer of “inner