Women's Roles In Indian Literature

Women right to celebrate their womanhood; they sing women’s dream and speak their bodies. For as long as women did not write they were not heard. Women’s writing then, is like raising consciousness. Their writing impacts their very existence in the socio cultural milieu as it expedites their shift from marginal position to a central one. Literature is impacted by reality, but its corollary, that reality is molded by literature, is also true. The Indian literary scene, dominated by men as active forces, always had a gap-it told the story of half humanity through the voices of the other half. In a country where even the political power in hands of rural and urban and uneducated women is used by their men, it becomes very significant to explore the changes brought about in the literary scene by women writers. The shift from women as seen and projected by men to women as lived and experienced by women was most welcome.

In its nascent stage, Indian English fiction had men writers who focused on a man 's world where the presence of woman was only incidental. Women appear in their fiction only as a necessary tool to be used by men. There were few writers like R.K. Narayan or Mulk Raj Anand who bothered to take up some secondary women characters, but the depiction was not authentic: (a) men in did not have access to the insides of a house which was the only space women moved in;(b) only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches and these shoes were certainly not worn by men;