The Representation of Women's Role in Family and Society: Feministic Reading of Mannu Bhandari's Short Stories

This paper scrutinizes Indian society's expectations and restrictions on women, tensions between tradition vs modernity, individual desire and Societal expectations and the struggles of women in patriarchal society and focuses on women's experiences and empowerment. Indian women's writing, such as present study deals with Mannu Bhandari's short stories, it highlights the ways women especially poor middle-class women has her journey of emotional experience contribute towards Indian women's writing, language, and how Bhandari beautifully portrays of her individual feminine feelings in post independent India. Her writings provide insight into literary discourses of gender equality circulating in the immediate post-independence India. Her linguistic use of sentences, tones, symbols, speeches, silence, images through her female point of view makes her a true feminist in the era of 21st century literary feminist critique, who essentially points out all the minute details of feminist poetics in her stories. Yet, in order to make positive change in society with regard to social justice oriented, more feminist researchers need to reach the broader public and close reading of texts to interpret game narratives or characters as misogynistic, patriarchal attitudes of society, binary relations.