Anita Desai : Sense of the Fabulous in Her Novels/Amrit Anand. New Delhi, Harman Pub., 2002, xvi, 158 p., $20. ISBN 81-86622-52-7.
Contents: Preface. 1. Fabulation and the romance tradition. 2. The unconscious source of the fabulous in Anita Desai’s novels. 3. Manifestations of the fabulous in Anita Desai’s novels. 4. Fabulation: the cause of misery of human existence. 5. Fabulation as the ground of creative sensibility in Anita Desai’s novels. 6. Fabulation and reality. Conclusion. A selected bibliography. Index.
"Indian women writers have daringly dominated the literary scene from Sarojini Naidu and Toru Dutt to Arundhati Roy. Their creative powers have not been confined to any one of the Indian languages only. Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai et al have carved permanent places for themselves in the literary world. The Indian women writers in both Indian languages and English have successfully and effectively expressed the trials and the tribulations, and pains and the pleasures, the anger and the anguish, the ambitions and the disillusionments of the Indian woman in a poignant way through the pages of their writing. In both the quality of writing and the choice of subject matter, the Indian female is in no way inferior to her male counterpart. The splendid achievements of Amrita Pritam, Mahasweta Devi and others is testimony to their prowess. While the male writer is often inhibited while expressing the agony or ecstasy of the female, the woman in the writer pours out her heart fluently. It is time the creative voice of the Indian woman writer was heard clearly and an objective assessment was made to appreciate the problems of native women. The attempt made in this thin volume is to present the qualitative merits of some Indian women writers by compiling the perspectives of critics of different hues." (jacket)