LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 10 : 12 December 2010
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         K. Karunakaran, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.

HOME PAGE


AN APPEAL FOR SUPPORT

  • We seek your support to meet the expenses relating to the formatting of articles and books, maintaining and running the journal through hosting, correrspondences, etc.Please write to the Editor in his e-mail address languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com to find out how you can support this journal. Thank you. Thirumalai, Editor.


BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!


REFERENCE MATERIAL

BACK ISSUES


  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Contributors from South Asia may e-mail their articles to
    B. Mallikarjun,
    Central Institute of Indian Languages,
    Manasagangotri,
    Mysore 570006, India
    mallikarjun@ciil.stpmy.soft.net.
  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.
  • Your articles and booklength reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.
  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2010
M. S. Thirumalai


 
Web www.languageinindia.com

Homeless in One's Own Home
An Analysis of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things
and Lakshmi Kannan's Going Home

Pauline Das, Ph.D.


Rights of a Woman to Family Property

The aim of this paper is to project the suffering of women as represented in Lakshmi Kannan's Going Home and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things with special reference to the Hindu Succession Act 1956 and 2005. The women folk in these novels feel homeless in their own homes. The physical and psychological conditions of women, with no space in their own homes remind us of Virginia Woolf's 'Room of My Own.'

In the preface of the novel, Kannan vents her anger at post- independent Indian society's failure to guarantee property and inheritance rights to Indian women. She points out that while the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 assures the legal rights of a woman to family property, the actual reality of control of assets is another story. Seemingly progressive families, according to Kannan, count upon the "unconditional compliance" of women when it comes to asserting over ancestral property. As a consequence of this "tacit silent acceptance of their lot in the unequal equation between them and their male siblings" (Preface,vii), the larger number of Indian women neither feel at 'home' in their physical homes, nor within their bodies.

The Plight of Career Women

Going Home is also a direct statement on the plight of the married middle class career woman who is compelled to cross over from private sphere to the public. However, this 'outing' from the inner courtyard to a larger world is not translated into any real freedom for the self. Society feels that women allowed to work have special privileges accorded to her by the family. The unpleasant reality of it is that she has to work both at the home and in the office. A woman who is intellectual and excellent in academic performances is not even acknowledged in the community. This is the plight of women even two decades after Women's International Year. A woman who may become recognized by scholars and critics as brilliant, and who may draw so many readers compellingly into her books, is only insulted in her own family.

Women in India in the Sixties to Eights

Going Home attempts to study the condition of women in India in the sixties. The novel talks of formally and apparently socially respectable educated women who witnessed a mute, dull, numbing pain and were trying to break their long, oppressive silence. It talks of women who had changed their dress code but nevertheless could not change their status that was still governed by the random accident of their birth. Their growing up in the male dominated society developed a low esteem for them as they saw themselves inferior in the cultural and social context.

Voices in a Voiceless Environment

Indian writers in English have contributed a lot in reflecting the thoughts and aspirations of the Indian mind. Women novelists especially have recorded their voices in a voiceless environment. With the coming of Arundhati Roy in the Indian scene a great deal of attention has been paid to women's writing. Women writers' themes reflect the sad plight of their women protagonists, reflecting our society.


This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.


Colloquial versus Standard in Singaporean Language Policies | Listening, an Art? | Bilingual Persons with Mild Dementia - Spectrum of Cognitive Linguistic Functions | How does Washback Work on the EFL Syllabus and Curriculum? - A Case Study at the HSC Level in Bangladesh | Impact of Participative Management on Employee Job Satisfaction and Performance in Pakistan | Homeless in One's Own Home - An Analysis of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Lakshmi Kannan's Going Home | Formative Influences on Sir Salman Rushdie | Role of Science Education Projects for the Qualitative Improvement of Science Teachers at the Secondary Level in Pakistan | Perception of Phoneme Contrast in Children with Hearing Impairment in Telugu | Motivation: Extrinsic and Intrinsic | Speech and Language Characteristics of Monozygotic Twins - A Case Study | Language Shift among the Tribal Languages of India - A Case Study in Bihar | Interrogative Structures and Their Responses as Speech Initiators and Fluency Booster for Second Language Learners | English as a Second Language - Learning Strategies and Teachability | Identifying an Unknown Language Bahai in and around Kanpur Area | Character Analysis of Andrews in Graham Greene's The Man Within | Shangshak Tangkhul and Pushing Tangkhul Numerals - A Comparative Presentation | A Review of A Course in Academic Writing by Professor Renu Gupta | Web-Based Training in Gaining Proficiency in English Language |A PRINT VERSION OF ALL THE PAPERS OF DECEMBER, 2010 ISSUE IN BOOK FORMAT. | HOME PAGE | CONTACT EDITOR languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com


Pauline Das, Ph.D.
Department of English
Karunya University
Coimbatore 641 114
Tamilnadu, India
paulinemdas@gmail.com

 
Web www.languageinindia.com
  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknolwedged the work or works of others you either cited or used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian scholarship.