LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 16:1 January 2016
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.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Feminist Perspective in Nayantara Sahgal’s Novels: The Day In Shadow and A Time To Be Happy

R. Muthu Selvi


Abstract

Nayantara Sahgal is one of the great Indian novelists in English. She began writing when she was very young and became a professional writer in the post-Independence year. Her novels deal with men and women, especially women struggling against oppression and injustice heaped upon them in the name of tradition and culture. Nayantara portrays the inalienable right of freedom for women in many of the characters in her novels, such as Simrit in The Day in shadow, Saroj in Storm in Chandigarh and Rashmi in This Time of Morning. A time to be Happy (1958) and Storm in Chandigarh (1969) are classed as her political novels; This Time of morning (1965) Storm in Chandigarh (1969) and The Day in Shadow (1971) are autobiographical as far as they build on her own emotional experiences and conflicts. The later three novels published between 1985 and 1988 are markedly different from her earlier work as they move away from immediate political events to the early decades of the twentieth century. As a writer with feminist concerns, Nayantara Sahgal is a progeny of the tradition wherein power itself is deified as goddess ‘sakti’, a female symbol. Her fictional world is occupied by political leaders, business tycoons, foreign advisors, upper class people, journalists and highly qualified persons like ambassadors and ministers. A political theme is often combined to the theme of man-woman relationship, their marital problems, their temperamental incompatibility, the problems arising out of their submissiveness and finally the place of a woman in society. The Day in Shadow gives a sensitive account of the sufferings of a woman in Indian society when she opts to dissolve a seventeen year old marriage. A divorced woman is stigmatized forever and she is curiously watched by others as if divorce where “a disease that left pock marks”. In Time to be Happy, Nayantara’s main concern is with self expression within marriage. She describes marriage as a “life-long damage” if the other partner is not sensitive enough to communicate. Marriage is the unwritten law of most societies and very few do not subscribe to it. Sahgal presents couples from three generations and details their antithetical relationships. Thus Nayantara Sahgal depicts the predicament of her women characters in both the novels. This paper titled Feministic Perspective in the two novels of Nayantara Sahgal, A Time to be happy and The Day in shadow. It deals with ‘Simrit’s Predicament in The Day in Shadow’. The third chapter deals with ‘Antithetical relationship in A Time to Be Happy’.

Keywords: Feministic perspective, Indian English fiction, Women in society, Nayantara Sahgal.

Rooted in Indian Civilization

Indian English literature is the expression of a sensibility firmly rooted in the traditional, going back to the very dawn of civilization and yet throbbing in its live links with the very modern and the contemporaneous. While the Indian English literature is intrinsically part of the continuum that constitutes the Indian mind-set, both thematically and stylistically the expression of this sensibility is in perfect consonance with the modern as well as the post modern framework. The Indian writer depicts Indian life and culture and reflects faithfully the life and spirit of the Indian ethos. He grapples with the problems and tensions generated by the rather unique way in which an individual’s life and character are determined by home, family and society in the Indian social milieu. It can be peculiarly Indian in respect of its form and narrative techniques employed and the manner in which the author adapts the English language to the native sensibility. It can be characteristically Indian in its moral and spiritual content to a very large extent. Women are an integral part of human civilization .No society or country can ever progress without an active participation of women in its overall development.

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

R. Muthu Selvi
Assistant Professor of English
Ayya Nadar Janaki Ammal College
Sivakasi 626123
Tamilnadu
India
sekarselvittl@gmail.com
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