Contents: Foreword. Preface. 1. Ellipses of history and feminist interventions: representation of the partition of India in Attia Hosains Sunlight on a broken column/Dipendu Das. 2. The discourse of the hysteric: a reading of the female question in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Palace of Illusions/Partha Sarathi Gupta. 3. The quest for identity in Anita Desais fire on the mountain and V.S. Naipauls a house for Mr. Biswas/Bidhan Chandra Pal. 4. Rukmini to Simran: changing facets of women in the post Independent India/Prasanta Chakraborty. 5. Search for human values in Anita Desai: analysis of clear light of day/Dilip Sarkar. 6. Feminist quest for identity: a study of Nayantara Sahgals storm in Chandigarh a day in shadow and rich like us/Ivy Chaudhury. 7. Memory and the ethnic self: a study of Bharati Mukherjees Jasmine and desirable daughters/Shukla Saha. 8. Theme of diaspora and disintegration in Anita Desais bye bye blackbird/Rama Chowdhury. 9. Plucking Truths from the inheritance of loss a critical analysis and exploration of Kiran Desais narrative design/Surajit Sen. 10. Arundhatis The God of small Things and Dangles poisoned bread a comparison in Dalit perspective/Somali Saha. 11. Krupabai Sathianadhans Saguna: the first autobiographical novel in English by an Indian woman/Adwitiya Gope. 12. Psycho analytical treatment of women: an appraisal of Anita Nairs ladies coupe and Sonia Faleiros The Girl/Somen Nandi. 13. Issues of pedagogy/Munmun Das Biswas. 14. Lonliness and withdrawal in Anita Desais fire on the mountain/Kalyani Bhattacharya. 15. The dynamics of feminism in Shashi Deshpandes novels/Aparna Das. 16. Presentation of women by Arundhati Roy: A study of her novel The God of Small Things/Pratap Deb Ratan Sarkar. 17. Women in Kamala Markandayas novels/Rajesh Debnath. 18. Psychoanalytic study of Anita Desais cry the peacock/Tanmoy Hrishi Das. 19. Portrayal of protagonist in Shashi Deshpandes novel moving on/Baburam Swami. Index.
The present volume is a collection of papers selected from those presented at the UGC sponsored two day National Seminar held at Ramthakur College, Agartala on Indian women Novelists in English.
The nineteen essays included in this anthology cover a wide spectrum of Indian women writers writing in English comprising of Krupabai Sathianadhan Kamala Markandaya Anita Desai, Nayantara Sahgal Shashi Deshpande Bharati Mukherjee Kiran Desai Arundhati Roy Jhumpa Lahiri and Anita Nair etc. Though the archetypal roles of women as mothers wives daughters and the other woman continue to hasnt the imagination of there writers yet they attempt to view the strength and weakness of the female sex as problems arising out of cultural racial sexual economic ideological political and gender specific confrontations.
This compendium will prove of utmost use to students researchers and teachers of English and comparative literature. (jacket)
