"Struggles of Women In Anita Desai's "Fire on The Mountain"

<p>Anita Desai is a significant and prolific woman novelist of modern Indian fiction. She<br>has certainly given a new viewpoint to Indian English novels. She deserves special<br>mention for her treatment of women in her novels, with the focus on her female<br>characters undergoing mental struggles. It has been unanimously accepted that of all<br>the contemporary Indian English novelists, Anita Desai is perhaps the most<br>perceptive and consistent explorer of the inner life. The protagonists of her novels are<br>torn between their search for authentic existence and the limitations of the human<br>situation that prevent them from such realizations. Anita Desai herself states. The<br>paper also highlights the breathlessness of survival, stereotyped social conventions,<br>dictated roles, unrewarding motherhood, tattered parent-child relationship,<br>suppression of Nanda, lla, and Raka in particular, and women in general, and how<br>they strive for some final comprehension of life. Desai's characters speak of the<br>unavoidable situation and circumstances that society and patriarchal norms impose<br>on Indian women. Their sense of spirit is free despite the shackles society has created<br>for them—Desai's novels, along with her contemporary writers like Nayantara<br>Sahgal, Kamala Markandaya, and Shashi Deshpande.</p>