Feminism In Kamala Markandaya's A Silence Of Desire

The term Liberation of Women (Feminism) was first used by the French dramatist Alexander Dumas, the younger, in 1872 in a pamphlet ‘L’ ‘Hommefemme’ to designate the then emerging movement of women’s rights. An anti-masculinist movement of the women for the assertion of their individual rights, feminism is also called Aphraism after AphraBehn, a seventeenth century feminist and political activist.

The history of Feminism is the history of the Feminism movement as well as its origins. The Feminist movement emerged in around the late 19th century. According to Maggie Humm and Rebecca Walker, the history of feminism can be divided into three waves. The first feminist wave was in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the second was in the 1960s and 1970s, and the third extends from the 1990s to the present. Feminist theory emerged from these feminist movements. It is manifest in a variety of disciplines such as feminist geography, feminist history and feminist literary criticism. Feminist Literature in English is certainly not a recent innovation. It has been there ever since perspectives on life were recorded in the medium of literature, thought is certainly has come to its own of late of recent origin again is the feminist perception of literature.

'Quit India' has been followed by partition and independence, and ten years have elapsed since then. The scene is an obscure town, a white-washed house in the suburbs, and a village beyond the river reached by a ferry. Dandekar, a government servant, tortures himself and nearly goes to pieces because his wife, Sarojini, ailing from a tumour, seeks faith-cure from the 'Swamy', sometimes at the white-washed house and sometimes in his village retreat. What sort of man is he, the Swamy? - a saint or merely a charlatan? Is faith-healing possible? Sarojini tells her