From Submission to Celebration: Women's Identity in Indian English Fiction

The struggle of woman in terms of equality of status, dignity and identity with their counterparts is immemorial. This struggle has been a crisscross journey over the past few millennia. Down the ages, a woman may has stumbled, staggered, faltered or even got wounded on her way but nothing has ever deterred her from struggling through her way towards her purpose. The purpose is to get acknowledgement, respect, reverence, acceptance and recognition of her identity from the society. Art and literature are undoubtedly, a reflection of life and reality. Interestingly, when we talk about literature by woman it is more so about women - their pain, emotions, feelings, sentiments, expectations, longings, passions, desires, needs, requests, wishes, beliefs, points of view and lot many related concerns and issues. The present paper explores, analyses and critically examines the journey undertaken by the Indian English women novelists to reflect, assert and ultimately, celebrate their feminine identity through the art of novel-writing. Apart from undertaking a feminist critique on Kamala Markandaya’s Nector in a Sieve (1954), Anita Desai’s Cry, the Peacock (1963), Bharti Mukherjee’s Wife (1975), Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence (1988), Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) and Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand (2018) the paper also offers a comparative and contrastive analysis of the protagonists of these path-breaking novels. Above all, the paper draws attention to the strong interconnection between the world of words and the progressive evolution of women from submission to celebration across the history.