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IJELLH Volume V, Issue X, October 2017 389

SHYLA L.,
RESEARCH SCHOLAR,
BHARATHIAR UNIVERSITY, COIMBATORE
ktmeenaswamy@gmail.com

DR. GURUDUTT T.N.,

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR,
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH,
VISVESWARAPURA EVENING COLLEGE, BANGALORE

ANITA DESAI AND HER NOVELS AS A JOURNEY INTO THE WORLDS OF MAN
AND WOMAN

ABSTRACT:

Anita Desai is one of the best known contemporary women writers of Indian fiction in
English. A concerned social visionary, Anita Desai is a keen observer of the society and the
position of the women in the contemporary society draws her special attention. Her novels are the
exploration of the family problems, which perhaps is the chief concern behind the estrangement
of the women from the family. The world of Desai’s fiction is largely a domestic one. If her
reputation is established by her early portraits of domestic disharmony, her later novels
demonstrate that she writes equally well about the world of men, about Indians abroad and about
the western in India. Desai’s novels also evolve a typical setting or ‘world’ of their own of the
characters. Most of the Desai’s novels also contain a deep rooted, philosophical concern about the
meaning of life.

Key Words: Catastrophe, Displacement, Domestic disharmony, Gender issues,

Patriarchal, Stereotype

INTRODUCTION:

Anita Desai is one of the best known contemporary women writers of Indian fiction in
English. Born to a Bengali father and a German mother, she is an excellent example of the
bicultural heritage of post colonial India. Desai grew up in Delhi, receiving her education first at
Queen Mary’s school and later at Miranda House, one of Delhi University‘s prestigious colleges.
She began to write in English at the age of seven and published her first story at the age of nine.
She brought out her first novel, Cry, The Peacock in 1963. This work immediately established her
as a major voice in Indian literature in English. Since then Desai has steadily published novels,
short stories and children’s literature. Well versed in German, Bengali, Hindi and English, Anita
Desai has always preferred to write in the English language.
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A concerned social visionary, Anita Desai is a keen observer of the society and the position
of the women in the contemporary society draws her special attention. The novels of Anita Desai
are noted for the profound probing into the inner life and feeling of the women, bounded by the
shackles of the middle class. The novels are the exploration of the family problems, which perhaps
is the chief concern behind the estrangement of the women from the family.

As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times; she has received a
Sahitya Academy award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Academy,
India’s Academy of letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea. In the
later novels, the key themes, which Desai is concerned with is the Western stereotyped views about
India. The life of the middle class family is the chief aspect of most of her novels. Often the
author’s characters in the novels are the anglicized Indians, who jaded of their everyday life and
lack of warmth in the marital relationships ultimately covert to escape from the folds of family
institution.

The world of Desai’s novels reveals certain recurring patterns in plots setting and
characterization. The plots of her novels fuse two opposing properties-one toward the gothic
mystery and the other toward the philosophical novel. Most of the Desai’s novels also contain a
deep-rooted, philosophical concern about the meaning of life.

Desai’s novels also evolve a typical setting or “world” of their own. Most are set in the
city, which come to represent the undesirable and unimaginative reality; most also have a romantic
counterpoint to the city in a hill station or an island that seems to represent the remote, romantic
ideal but is revealed to be an unreal or unsatisfying delusion. At the hearts of the novels are usually
big, old houses with several verandas, green shutters, gardens, servants and pets. The garden is
extremely important in Desai’s world because her characters show an unusual sensitivity to it.
Trees, creepers, tendrils, flowers, fruits, seasons pets-the concerns of the so called woman’s world-
are more vividly perceived in Desai’s novels than anywhere else in Indian English fiction. The
city, the hill station, the big house with a garden, a decent family, an obsession with the past-these
make up the typical world of a Desai novel.

Her early novel Where Shall I Go This Summer focuses in various ways on the disharmony
and alienation women frequently experience in marriage. And although novels like Voices In The
City and Bye-Bye Black Bird in particular give the impression of being about the lives of their male
characters, the focus inevitably the patriarchal world places on them (as daughter, wives or
mothers). The saga of escapism, the tune feel melody of the long lost song of childhood is the
central theme of the novel-Where Shall I Go This Summer.

Bye-Bye Blackbird, which moves out of India to look at wider post colonial issues of
displacement, is the most accomplished of Desai’s early novels. The novels focus on the lives of
Dev and Ajit, two Indians in Britain and the social discrimination with which they have to contend,
it is ultimately more about the alienation. Ajit’s wife Sarah, suffers in her own country following
IJELLH Volume V, Issue X, October 2017 391

her marriage to an Indian and her changed position in relation to the (British) nation state. It is the
psychiatry of the immigrants who suffered mixed feelings of love and hate towards the country of
their adoption, it moves out of India to look at wider post colonial issues of displacement is the
most accomplished of Desai’s early novels.

Fire on the Mountain brings a definite sense of politics to her hitherto essentially family
focused dramas. It is another female centered narrative that portrays the lives of three women, the
elderly Nanda Kaul, her great-grand daughter Raka and Nanda Kaul’s lifelong friend Ila Das-who
one by one retreat to Casignano, a small villa in the Himalayan hill station of Karauli, to escape
the brutal patriarchal worlds is which they have each lived. Set against the pristine backdrop of
pristine Shimla hills, the novel, Fire on the Mountain portray the picture of the Indian life and
stages of old ages. The intricacies of relationship, the palpation of kinship are prominent in the
novel. Criticisms of Fire on the Mountain has tended to focus on Desai’s detached study of her
three female characters-particularly her presentation of Nanda Kaul-without paying sufficient
attention to her attack on patriarchal oppression which, Desai forcefully suggests in the novel, not
only limits the opportunities given to women in India, but mentally and physically damages them.

In the novel Clear Light of Day, although the fire of partition riots burn in the background,
Desai’s interest is again firmly focused on the difficulties facing a woman who attempts to assert
her identity within the family framework, on the relationships basis, the central female character
has with the various members of her family. It is about the fragmentation of a family played out
against the backdrop of a fracturing nation. The political implications of Indian Independence are
reflected in the characters’ inner turmoil. The contradictions between Desai and necessity are
examined as the shaping forces in the character’s lives. This novel is set primarily in old Delhi,
the story describes the tensions in a post-partition Indian family, starting with the characters as
adults and moving back into their lives throughout the course of the novel, while the primary theme
is the importance of family. Other predominant themes include the importance of forgiveness, the
power of childhood and the status of women, particularly their role as mothers and caretakers, in
modern day India.

In Custody is in many respects a delightful and sad comedy. The novel plots the
disillusionment of Devan, a young Hindi lecturer at a college in the small town of Mirpore and the
various calamities that befall him after he is persuaded to go to Delhi to interview his hero. India’s
great living Urdu poet, Nur-only to find himself being dragged deeper and deeper into Nur’s
unsavory world. For all its comedy, there is certain despair in this novel, which presents the decline
of Muslim Urdu culture in the North India in the years following Independence and Partition. The
illustrious novel In Custody is crafted with the upheavals and intricacies of relationships. A novel
is a tale of shattered emotion and the scattered dream of the individual in Custody.

Cry, the Peacock has a psychosomatic growth of female character that cannot cope up with
the patriarchal world of the husband and feels dejected, forlorn and demoralized which ultimately
gains catastrophe, when the wife kills her husband out of this frustration. Cry, the Peacock by
IJELLH Volume V, Issue X, October 2017 392

Anita Desai is an excellent novel about the marital disharmony. The married life of Maya and
Gautam is mutually opposed. It is a story about an Indian woman named Maya who believes that
her life will end in disaster due to a prophecy from childhood.

Voices In The City is the intense description of the middle class intellectuals in the backdrop
of contemporary Calcutta. The protagonists of this novel are detached, self-centered and remain
aloof from others.

A Village by The Sea is the description of the agonized subsistence of a family in the village
close to the sea. It is based on the poverty, hardships and sorrow faced by a small rural community
in India. Lila and Hari are the eldest children in the family and are also the main characters. The
story depicts the lifestyle of poor Indian families living nearby sea, their only hope the fishing
and those palm trees.

In Fasting and Feasting there is return to focus on the family and in particular the lot of
women trapped in traditional family structures in a rapidly changing post colonial world. It is an
almost plot less novel that looks at the lives of two daughters and the son of a traditional Indian
family in the modern world.

CONCLUSION:

Anita Desai is undoubtedly one of the major Indian English writers of her generations. If
her reputation is established by her early portraits of domestic disharmony in traditional Indian
families and the sufferings of women in a largely patriarchal world, her later novels demonstrate
that she writes equally well about the world of men, about Indians abroad and about westerners in
India. Above all she demonstrates again and again how gender issues are central to politics and
the nation as well and in the family.
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REFERENCE

http://en.m.wikipedia.org>wiki.Anita

http://literature.britishcouncil.org>writer

www.indobase.com>indians-abroad/anita-desai-htms

http://www.literary-articles.com/2013/12/an-evaluation-of-anita-desai-as-novelist.html

Anita_Desaihttp://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/22060/11/summary.pdf