WOMEN AS CHARACTERS IN 20TH CENTURY INDIAN WRITING

 

WOMAN AS CHARACTER AND WRITER IN 20TH CENTURY INDIAN WRITING:

                 The twentieth century is a century of radical change for women. With twentieth-century analysis of Freud, Marx, Jamson and Homi Bhaba, writers get access to woman’s experiences. Previously taboo language and situations, "anger and sexuality are accepted... as sources of female creative power."(Elizabeth lee, Brown University) The mass-migration from the colonized nation to the metropolis of colonial realm has compelled writers to invent a third space ‘which represent both the general condition of the language and specific implication of utterance in a performative and institutionalized strategy of which it can not ‘in itself’ be conscious'. Hence the writers of the 'Third Space' denounce the fix identities of the language of ‘self’ and implication of ‘other’ to detect a tangial relationship between the two. They are neither inside nor outside the history of western domination. This is what Homi Bhaba calls as in-between hybrid position of practice and negotiation . Hence, it is worth mentionable that cultural authority does not resides in a series of fixed and determined diverse objects but in the process how these object come to be known and so come into being. The process of coming to be known is what brings into being and discriminates between comments on culture. “pieces together our experience, experience that bridge two worlds, the one left behind and the one newly adopted”. Through this back and forth movement the diasporas not only produce national allegories but highlights hitherto ignored cultural and national resources.

                 Most of the Indian woman writers delineate the psychological sufferings of frustrated homemaker in their effort to create a third space. In Shashi Deshpande's novels three types of women recur: The first being the mother figure, a traditional woman, the second type is self reliant and rebellious, the third one is in between the two, neither traditional nor radical. Apart from her Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Manju Kapur and others have shown their concern for women in their writings. On the other hand, Jhumpa Lahiri displays women of diasporic community facing cultural dilemma. In 'THE TEMPORARY MATTER' Jhumpa Lahiri has delineated how the protagonists abandon their fix identities to exchange theirs. By referring back to their countries of origin and invoking frames they enter the third space where cultural difference is never static but ambivalent and always open for further interpretation. A traditional Indian woman Shoba, in the same short story, is displayed as strong modern women having known to balance her work both in her office and in her house. As a housewife she maintains neatness everywhere. “It never went to waste. When friends dropped by Shoba prepare meals from things that has frozen and bottled. Her labeled mason jars are lined up in the shelves of the kitchen”. Each of her recepies is dated neatly. Her capacity to think ahead is the quality that empress Sukumar most. She wants a secure future and secure present too with Sukumar: may be for this reason she insisted on Sukumar’s visit to the academic conference in Baltimore when situation has undergone tremendous change after the birth of their dead son. “On Saturdays instead of wondering through the maze of stalls she throws herself into the work as an editor, searching for the typographical errors in text books and marks them in a code with an assortment of colored pencils.'' The story continues with Shoba and her husband Sukumar displaying conflict of culture and identity within cultural hibridity, one of the most important aspects of the twentieth-century modernism. The temporary matter of power cut stand here as the emblem of the distance that was enlarging between Shoba and Sukumar.

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