In additional, Hosseini does a lot of research before he starts writing A Thousand Splendid Sun. Hosseini travelled back to Kabul after 30 years to interview Afghan women, and listens their heartbreaking life stories. Both Hosseini and Saib-e-Tabeizi believe in promoting women’s rights and putting an end to the cruelty women face in Afghanistan. Both authors believe strongly in the need to speak up and put an end to the second class status of women in Afghanistan. Hosseini’s novel acts as a kind of witness account to the hardship and agony associated with oppression and discrimination His goal is to focus on the needs of Afghan women and promote the change that is needed to transform their lives.
Murthy’s style of story telling impresses me how a book written nearly 3 decades ago is still appropriate. This book is a homage to all the wives of India. How they sacrifice their dreams for their loved ones and are the least credited for it. I would recommend this book to every female especially in India who have sacrificed their dreams and aspirations. This book starts of as a clichéd love story between two wonderful individuals who are bound to go places.
According to 'The New Yorker', Jhumpa Lahiri is one of the best twenty young writers in America today. All the nine stories in this collection are simple and touching, beautifully crafted around common themes. Most stories revolve around individuals who are divided into two cultures. Her stories except “This Blessed House” have been written from a woman’s perspective, but her novel has been written from a male point of view. Her stories are mainly on familial relationships in which she has taken the relationship like husband wife, father daughter.
Shakti tells us about a love story, between the son and the daughter of two powerful business families, which in the end are able to overcome the conflicts, due to appearances, power and money that only love seems to make disappear. The story is a telling portrait of the gossipy nouveaue- riche of Bombay society. It is about a social climber Shiela Bijlani, “the daughter of a common chemist- type shopkeeper growing up amongst potions and medicines” (1997:33), who infiltrates the Malabar high society. Chandra’s narrative explores the intricacies, hypocrisies and intrigues of a life behind the façade of glamour and glitz. But he is very astute in painting an equally stark picture of the seamier side of the glittery city with its chawls and brawls.
In western countries empowerment of women is linked with personal recognition segregated from the society irrespective of their kinship where as a woman in India is associated recognition with cooperation from members of family and society. As for the women novelists who focused on the problems regarding women are Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Shashi Deshpande, Githa Hariharan, Arundathi Roy, Manju Kapur, Shobha De etc. Shashi Deshpande is a prolific writer reflecting the role played by the middle-class educated women in the hegemonic Hindu society in majority of her novels. Her characters seem natural ,and so come as typical stereotypes of the modern generation. Her novels bud natural and effortless throwing light on the common problems faced by women in the society.
Although they acknowledge that in the last sixty years, Indian conventional establishment has changed to a large extent, yet the need of the hour is to have a setup in which everybody may flourish equally irrespective of gender, culture, and place. Through the sensitive portrayal of the female characters and their problems, Bhartee Mukherjee and Manju Kapur have given us an effective illustration and unforgettable picture of the evolution of the Indian woman’s psyche overtime, starting from the earlier pre-independence era through the freedom struggle up to the time of the post-independence. Their individuals are shown mostly as incarcerated within the bounds of age-old traditions. When they try to think independently and chalk out their life schemes for themselves, they become unbearable for the socio-cultural setup. The combat between these individuals and the surroundings leads them to create their own individuality and social
Indian women novelists have given a new dimension to the Indian literature. Indian English literature has developed over a period of time and writing in English did not start in a day. It took many years and several distinguished personalities to bring the present status and distinction to Indian English literature. Indian literature is not only about novels, it is also about poetries and short stories. Before the rise of novels, several women writers composed songs, short stories and small plays.
For the first time, some women had a choice between motherhood and professional career and shockingly some of them choose the latter. “For Kate Chopin, who regarded American culture as stifling, the French school, and particularly Maupassant, opened up the prospect of approaching ‘‘modern topics’’ with new openness.” Sandra M. Gilbert defines “New Woman” as “a woman who choose to be politically, professionally, and emotionally autonomous.” They were not interested in “women’s culture,” writing about typical female topics such as marriage and motherhood. They decided to write about something not even men could write better – about themselves. And with The Awakening we get a female author writing about female issues – Chopin offers us deeper understanding of women’s psyche. Furthermore, Linda Wagner-Martin points out that “to describe the novel as a female bildungsroman (…) is to change definitions for a readership that thought it already knew the story Chopin wanted to tell.” A late 1890s reader would probably expect younger, single Edna, however Chopin alternates those notions – Edna is already a wife and a mother at the beginning of the novel, we assume to know her identity, yet we witness Edna’s spiritual and mental search for
It is comparable to the sufi concept of Wahdat al-Wujud that compares the God and the soul to the Sun and Earth respectively- the Earth does not have any light of it’s own, rather it borrows light from the sun just as the soul borrows its divinity from God. Akka Mahadevi is considered by many to have played a significant role in female emancipation in South India, specifically Karnataka. She was outspoken and made decisions independent of social expectations in the midst of an extremely patriarchal society that afforded women little freedom and few rights. She rejected worldly pleasures and familial
The novel is an exploration of woman’s struggle and suffering in the journey of creation of individual identity. It describes Virmati’s endeavors against so-called traditional taboos, her struggle to break the shackles of orthodox, rigid social customs where women are considered inferior than men. It is the fact that though Virmati succeed in crossing patriarchal boundaries, there are certain priorities so deeply embedded within her that she struggles a lot to uproot and get free from them but fails in