Post-Modern Feminist Ideology in Nayantara Sahgul Select Novels-A Critical Study

Abstract

Literature is the mirror of life as a statement which reflects of the society and the characters are the images of writers. The novels of Kiran Desai and Anita Desai deals with the men and women, specifically women struggling against oppression and injustice heaped upon them in the name of tradition and culture. This paper has been discussing about Nayantara Saghul novels here it portrays the inalienable right of the characters in her novels. As a writer with feminist concerns, Nayantara Sahgal is a progeny of the tradition where in power it is defined as goddess ‘Saki’ a female symbols. Her fictional world is busy by political leaders, business tycoons, foreign advisors, upper class people, journalists and highly qualified persons like ambassadors and ministers. A political theme is often combined to the theme of man-woman relationship their marital problems, their temperamental incompatility and the problems arising out of their submissiveness and finally the place of a woman in Indian society when she opts to dissolve a seventeen years old marriage. A divorced women is stigmatized forever and she is curiously watched by others as if divorce where “a disease that left pock marks”. Nayantara’s main concern is with self expression within marriage. She describes marriage as a “life-long damage” if the other partner is not sensitive enough to communicate. Marriage is the unwritten law of most societies and very few do not subscribe to in the post modern world. Sahgal presents couples from three generations and details their antithetical relationships in postmodern feminism.