Contemporary Fiction: an Anthology of Female Writers PDF
Preview Contemporary Fiction: an Anthology of Female Writers
CONTEMPORARY FICTION: An Anthology of Female Writers Edited by Vandana Pathak Urmi la Dabir Shubha Mishra Sarup & Sons Contemporary FiCtion: an anthology of Female Writers Contemporary FiCtion: an anthology of Female Writers edited by Vandana Pathak Urmila dabir ShUbha miShra Sarup & SonS new Delhi - 110002 Published by Sarup & SonS 4740/23, Ansari Road Darya Ganj, New Delhi-110002 Tel. : 23281029, 23244664, 41010989 Fax : 011-23277098 E-mail : [email protected]. Contemporary FiCtion: an anthology of Female Writers © editors 1st Edition - 2008 ISBN 978-81-7625-835-7 Views and opinions expressed in the articles are those of the contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors. PRINTED IN INDIA Published by Prabhat Kumar Sharma for Sarup & Sons, Laser Typesetting at Chitra Computers and Printed at Mehra Offset Printers, Delhi. to all our Family members with Love and Gratitude… …Don’t write in english, they said, english is not your mother tongue. Why not leave me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins, everyone of you? Why not let me speak in any language i like? the language i speak Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses all mine, mine alone. it is half english, half indian, funny perhaps but it is honest, it is as human as i am human, don’t you see ? it voices my joys, my longings, my Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing is to crows or roaring to the lions...(Kamla Das) preface “Literature can not be the business of a woman’s life and it ought not to be”, declared robert Southey in a letter written to Charlotte Bronte. yet Women’s literary voices successfully marginalized and trivialized by the dominant male establishment, nevertheless survived. indian writing in english brings out the veracity of this statement. Last few decades have been catalytic for the growth of indian writing in english. a new galaxy of writers has been witnessed. that Women are no longer ‘others ‘in the indian english literary scenario and that indian english female fiction writers have created a space for themselves is crystal clear from the distinguished awards they have bagged in the recent times and by the way in which their names figure in any anthology on fiction. in india, many female fiction writers like Kamala Das, Kamala markandaya, nayantara Sahgal, rama mehta, ruth prawer Jhabvala, Shobha De, Shashi Deshpande, manju Kapur, neelum Saran Gaur, Bharati mukherjee, indira Goswami, arundhati roy, Jai nimkar, Gouri Deshpande, and Susan Viswanathan, arundhati roy, eunice De Souza, Jaishree misra, anita nair, Suniti namjoshi, mrunal pande, namita Gokhale, Githa Hariharan, arundhati roy, manjula padmanabhan, Jhumpa Lahiri, anjali Banerjee, Sonia Singh, Kavita Daswani, Sabrina Saleem, Santha rama rau, Basanti Karmarkar, etc. have contributed to this genre immensely. Female writers of the indian Diaspora too have carved a niche for themselves. they include writers like anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Gita mehta anjana appachana, abha Dawesar, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Bharati mukherjee, Shauna Singh Baldwin, viii ann Bhalla, Kaavya Vishwanathan, Bapsi Sidhwa, Bharti Kirchner, Sujata massey, indira Ganesan, Shani muthoo, marina Budhos, anuradha marwah-roy, rani Dharker, meera Syal, anita rau Badami, Uma parameswaran, and ameena meer, etc. Female fiction writers from other asian countries like pakistan and Bangla Desh too have expressed themselves in english. Some such well known writers are Bapsi Sidhwa, Uzma aslam Khan and Kamila Shamsie, rukshana ahmad, taslima nasreen, monica ali, etc. all women novelists are the unacknowledged sociologists of the world. the famous historian Gerda Lerner is quite sure of the “evil conspiracies of men” and feels that women have been left out of history. She stresses the need to “rectify this” by conducting a “women centered inquiry” to see “what would history be like if it were seen though the eye of the women and ordered by the values they define.” Literature by women presents an “imaginative continuum”. in women novelists, a commonality of motifs is observed. they deal with gender issues and roles, female subjectivity, exploitation and oppression, the concept of being ‘other’ in a patriarchal society, the theme of growing up from childhood to womanhood, that is, the Bildungsroman, self liberation via self quest, sexual deviance and sexual autonomy, human relationships, realism, magic realism, fantasy and surrealism, the image of the new Woman, traditional indian culture, image of ‘exotic india’, globalization, migration, expatriation, diasporic consciousness, east-West confrontation, the clash between tradition and modernity, socio-psychological aspect, independence struggle, and partition, etc. the articles in the present anthology highlight some of these significant themes. narrative Strategies and the invisible in neelum Saran Gour’s Sikandar Chowk park: re-Constructing identities and (inter-) religious Confrontation by Ludmila Volna analyses the so called ‘backstage’ of a militant’s explosion in allahabad park where 57 people died. the paper analyzes what is behind the explosion and is interested in the author’s questioning to each individual’s part in a religion-related confrontation ix displayed on the ‘scene’. ana Garcia-arroyo in her piece of writing From the Sandal trees to Facing the mirror: a Herstorical overview of Same-Sex Love in india discusses very less anthologized and in the typical indian aspect considered a taboo subject of lesbian relationships. it voices a silence and depicts the invisibility of such relationhips as an urge to create space for themselves in their quest for identity. prem Srivastava in her brilliant exposition Literature Still matters! the namesake: Woman reads Woman studies the dynamics of Jhumpa Lahiri’s the namesake and mira nair’s depiction of the same on the celluloid. the aspect of how one woman reads the other woman constitutes another touchstone of this enquiry. Leela Kanals’ in the Celebration of acculturation in monica ali’s Brick Lane celebrates acculturation leading away from stereotyped self pity at the loss of identity exposing problems of exiles in england. it applauds the ability of human kind to be transplanted from one environ to another and turn it into an adopted home. Vaishali naik explores various metaphors and aspects of space related to discourse of protest, hegemony, and hierarchies in her intellectual scrutiny a Socio-Cultural Feminist Critique of inside the Haveli within the Frame of the marginal. Supriya Sahasrabuddhe’s scholarly article on reason and rebellion in Feminism: Shashi Deshpande and Bharati mukherjee is a comparative study focusing on the women centered approach. Her analysis of women as beings, not as gender specific beings is applaudable dealing with quest for identity. p.D. nimsarkar in his in depth analysis of History and politics, in Bapsi Sidhwa’s ice Candy man sheds light on history especially the aftermath of partition caused in the lives of people in pakistan. it describes an amalgamation of the parsi community and the deep undertones of racial politics have been perceptively dealt with.
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