Anindita Saha
Assistant Professor, Department of English Rani Dhanya Kumari College, Jiaganj, Murshidabad, West Bengal
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21659/jsae/v1n2/v1n203
[Article History: Received: 18 Jun 2024. Revised: 27 Jul 2024. Accepted: 15 Aug 2024. Published: 27 Aug 2024]
Abstract
Anita Desai’s Voices in the City has been criticized by European critics as a portrait of a joyless, ‘monster city’ called Calcutta and by Indian critics as an artistic failure for its ‘out of place’ female characters. However, the forms of conservatism and domination have been questioned by postcolonial and feminist theories. These theories teach us to respect difference and heterogeneity as against the sexist and colonist tendency to ‘reduce the difference to a single identity. his paper attempts to re-read Voices in the City through the lens of postcolonial and feminist theory to explore that Desai’s female characters who ‘go in the opposite direction’ and ‘not average’ are modern Indian women. They struggle for self-definition by defying the cultural stereotypes rooted in ancient Hindu religious scriptures, mythology, and ancient legal codes. They are reflected in cultural nationalism and socioeconomic spheres of pre- and post-Independence India. As a modern, ‘purely subjective’ writer Desai is aware of the various cultural, social, and economic impediments faced by her women characters in their quest for identity and self-hood and records meticulously the victimization of Hindu, educated, urban, middle-class women in postcolonial India as well as their various modes of protest against patriarchy and fundamentalism thereby “creating a new feminist ideology in Indian literature written in English” and reconstructing female identity in post-colonial India (Mann, 1995, p.156). The paper also tries to find out the relationship between cultural ethos and gender discrimination in India which serves as a background to the narratives of Desai’s female characters.
Keywords: Hindu fundamentalism, cultural ethos, female identity, gender discrimination, patriarchy, victimization.