Paper IV The Contribution of Women to the Indian English

 The Contribution of Women to the Indian English

            The Indian English novel is globally recognized today. It has come of age in terms of quality, quantity, and variety. The credit also goes to women novelists whose contribution counts a lot in novel writing and publishing. They try varied themes, locales, techniques, or styles; raise issues of caste, class, gender, and identity; and derive the stuff for their books from home, society, politics, deep psychology, or self-story. Some women writers went abroad and got settled there. They include Attia Hosain who migrated to Britain in 1947; Kamala Markandaya married an Englishman; Bharti Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee and Kiran Desai now reside in America.

            There are many Indian women writers both novelists and poets, based in the USA and Britain. Some like Jhabvala and Anita Desai are late immigrants while others, like Jhumpa Lahiri, belong to the second generation of Indians abroad. Most expatriate writers have a weak grasp of actual conditions in contemporary India and tend to recreate them through the lens of nostalgia. Their best works deal with the Indian immigrants, the section of society they know firsthand. Sunithi Nam Joshi, Chitra Banerjee, Divakarvas and Bharathi Mukherjee are the oldest, and naturally, the most prolific. Writers like Jumpha Lahari, Manju Kapoor, Kiran Desai, and Arundhati Roy too have written novels of Magic Realism, Social Realism, and Regional fiction, and benefited from the increasing attention that this fiction has received National and International awards. 

            Anitha Desai is the best-known of the contemporary women writers. Of all the contemporary novelists, she is indisputably the most popular and powerful novelist. She has made a commendable contribution to Indian English fiction. She is a novelist of the urban milieu and is a fine mixture of Indian European and American sensibilities. She is essentially a psychological novelist. She claims that her novels are not a reflection of Indian society or character.

            Shashi Deshpande who is labeled as a feminist novelist succeeded in depicting the plight of a successful educated woman and the problems of being a woman. She has written eight novels, six collections of short stories, and four children‟s books. Her popular novel The Dark Holds No Terror (1980) portrayed the life of a woman who marries a doctor and becomes the victim of brutalization.

            Manju Kapoor is also one of the significant writers whose work establishes the nexus between tradition and modernity. The dominating works of Kapoor can be critically seen in her significant novel Difficult Daughters (1998), which is her first novel.

            Gita Mehta is also another woman writer who proclaimed the problems of contemporary immigrant women with sublime standards. She wrote Snakes and Ladders Glimpses of Modern India in 1997. It has become the most widely read book, particularly by those unfamiliar with India. In an interview, she said that her intention was “to make modern India accessible to westerns and to a whole generation who have no idea what happened before they were born” 

            Arundhati Roy is the only novelist, who is an activist and is constantly writing about social problems. Her monograph, The Greater Common Good (1999) reveals the truth about the Narmada Project. The book also shows her talent as an essayist and social reformer.

In the contemporary Indian Literary scenario, Indian women writers in English reflect the truth of Indian reality.