Depiction of Women in Literature: A Reading of Indian Literary Texts under Gender Theory

Abstract

Within this complex spectrum of ‘culture’ Indian Literature has represented accurate sufferings of numerous characters. Identity and our skirmish in finding its appropriate nature, has often pressurized the psychic nature of humans, particularly women. To be precise the struggling of marginalized identities is more toilsome in comparison to the ‘centered’ identities. In this phallocentric Indian society, the ‘white-cis-phallus’ is the centre and the remaining becomes the ‘other’. Marginalization can be considered as a chain of events taking place in a society to create certain restrictions for few and power for the rest. Gender, class and caste are further divided into layers, creating a stratified structure where power dynamics moulds and produces identities, not for recognition but for marginalization, oppression. Within this marginalized ‘remaining’ the identity of women and their effort to break the imposed roles of Woman/Wife/Mother is somewhere trapped between the supposed links between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ which then is to be inherently related and ‘culturally’ bound. Therefore my paper would focus on politicized children’s literature- Brave Rajputs by Anant Pai, and presentation of Tilo in Chitra Banerjee Devakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, gender-power dynamics in Mahasweta Devi’s Breast Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Lowland, and Khaleid Hosseni’s A Thousand Splendid Suns.