Author Description

Language: English Pages: 176 Introduction This book is an attempt to suggest a methodology for Womens Studies in India, particularly as it relates to interpretations of literary texts in English. Recasting some significant works by writers from Toru Dutt to Bharati Mukherjee in the mould of masked autobiography, the book argues that womens personal lives are often disguised in fiction as narratives of a depersonalized time and place. In reality, the women were often struggling with their articulation of a problematic interface between their familiar home base and a world of tantalizing possibilities beyond the parameters of the known. While it was indecorous to speak in the direct persona of the self, their creation of the literary other was never an ordinary equation. In most instances the fragmentation felt by the Indian writing-woman was expressed through many disunited literary artifacts that she cunningly wove into an apparently innocent Story. The heroines of these stories are often conventional women who encounter the ordinary vicissitudes of domestic living but come to some extraordinary consciousness of domestic living but come to some extraordinary consciousness of their selfhood. The dramatic changes are recorded on the tranquil surface of the text which, almost irritatingly, follows a linear pattern in the narrative and uses variations of standard English in its linguistics. But when a careful reader disturbs the surface, it is my conjecture that the underlying expressions will reveal troubled sentiments bordering on the subversive. Yet, these are not allowed to breach the literary front of cogent narrative order. The choice of India womens writing in English is deliberate. A reconsideration of this group provides fascinating ground for examining what I call the Law of t