It is this incident which is the cause of sufferings of Sumi and her daughters. She returns to her paternal house called Big House where her mother Kalyani is shocked to see her because she herself was abandoned by her husband who has not talked to her for thirty years. The two women Kalyani and Sumi who have been abandoned by their husbands for different reasons and in different ways have not rebelled but rather have kept quiet and tried to adjust to the situation.
To some extent she is able to succeed as she starts working in a school and also takes up writing as a hobby. The death of Sumi is quite surprising. In fact, Deshpande claims that she was herself surprised by her sudden death but she wanted to give this end to the novel though it was very hard.
Her eighth novel, Small Remedies, was published in the year exactly twenty years after her first novel, Roots and Shadows. In it she has highlighted the world of music. Deshpande confesses that for writing this book she listened to many cassettes, attended performances and even read many books on music and musicians. They were initially written as short stories. Though these novels are typical of Shashi Deshpande's style they are different from all her other novels.
They are both psychological thrillers, viewing crime through the gaze of average Indian women. Death, murder and nightmarish suspense form part of both the novels. By writing these she proved her versatility at handling different fictional forms.
Her ninth novel, Moving On, which was published in the year , is about the secret lives of men and women who love, hate, plot and debate with an intensity.
The story begins with a woman's discovery of her father's dairy. Manjari, the central character of the novel while sorting the papers after her father's death, discovers his diary. Though, she is not comfortable with the idea of reading it, her need to understand her father and his life, drives her to open it. The diaries are a supplement and their contents unfold surprises for Manjari that reveal the thoughts of her father Badri Narayan Dr.
Shashi Deshpande herself maintains: Memories and pictures of the past, dreams, hopes and plans for the future — these are as real to us as the present. Bapsi Sidhwa and her work Bapsi Sidhwa is one of the most prominent writers of English fiction in Pakistan.
Born in in a Parsi family of Karachi, she was brought up in Lahore. Though Parsi, as a Pakistani, she was brought up among Muslims — all these influences moulded her voice and had their effect on her writing.
She has written, Pakistan Bride first, but due to some political reasons The Crow-Eaters was published first. The Crow-Eaters is about the Parsi community, their customs, their way of looking at things, their honour and their courage.
This book was received very enthusiastically in her country and abroad. But it was not well-accepted by the Parsi community because they thought she had made fun of them and they reacted very strongly against it.
Perhaps the community is not accustomed to seeing itself in fiction or being portrayed with all their idiosyncrasies for everyone to see. I want to record their charms, their customs, their way of looking at things, their slant on life, their humour, their courage.
Her next novel, Pakistani Bride, is based on a true story which she had heard during her stay in the army camp of Karakoram, the world most rugged Mountain range. She and her husband were invited to a camp in the remote region of the Karakoram Mountains more than twenty years ago. The people living in that part of the world are locked in by the mountains and are totally insular-- ignorant about the happenings of the world.
During her stay in the remote army camp, the person who invited them told them about the incident of a young girl brought to the mountain areas across the Indus, which was then totally unadministered territory, by an old tribal to marry her to his nephew. A month after her marriage the girl had run away. She survived in the wild mountains for fourteen days but was finally caught when she was very close to being helped and rescued. A runaway wife is an intolerable insult to the tribesmen and the whole clan but especially to her husband.
So when, she came to the rope bridge that would take her across the river to the army camp, her husband who was waiting there caught her. He severed her head and threw her into the Indus River and his clan were satisfied that he had vindicated their honour.
But Sidhwa has changed the ending in the novel. In The Pakistani Bride, the girl isn't killed because Sidhwa claims that she had inhabited this girl's body for so long and felt her emotions so deeply that she felt it was a shame, considering all she had been put through, that she should be then killed off.
And so at least in the end she lives-she barely survives, but she lives. Her third novel, Ice-Candy Man is a story about the partition of India. This has been written in the first person, from a child's point of view. It is a subject as harrowing as the Holocaust.
In the center of the novel is an eight years old Parsi girl named Lenny. She has chosen a Parsi rather than a Hindu or a Muslim narrator to keep the account objective.
According to Ralph Crane: It may be that the atrocities of are best seen through the innocent, naive eyes of a child, who has no Hindu, Muslim or Sikh axe to grind. She manages to do justice to the racial, ethnic, and religious violence that accompanied the partition of India. Richly layered, realistic and magically evocative, as well as topical: a novel that brings to triumphant life an India that has less to do with fate that the will of men.
We see the horror and holocaust of the incident through the point of view of a child living in Lahore. She witnesses what happened in Lahore, which was the looting of the Hindus and Sikhs communities and the killing, largely of the Hindus and Sikhs by the Muslims.
But she also gives the picture of the atrocities committed in the East Punjab, which is now in India, against the Muslims, who were in a minority there. The Hindus and Sikhs drove them out brutally. The kidnapping of Ayah, one of the major incidents of this novel had been witnessed by her during her childhood. There were many scenes and incidents embedded in her memory which made her decide to write a story on partition. She says: So these emotions and images were in my mind, and I wanted to write a story of partition.
Nothing has been written on the partition in English fiction from my part of the world, Pakistan. Her family witnessed the tension and turmoil of that period and saw how it affected the people around them and altered them. Ayah has many admires and lovers. Among them is Ice Candy man.
Though he loves her, his love is unrequited because Ayah is deeply involved with Masseur, who dies during the riots. Although Ice-Candy-Man loves Ayah even then he helps a gang of men to abduct her. And later forces her into prostitution. From the beginning he had lusted for her, and at this point, affected by the bestiality around him, he takes advantage of the situation. But he soon realizes that he has done her a great wrong and his conscience troubles him and he genuinely falls in love with her.
She is set free but is emotionally dead. Her eyes are dead, her reactions are dead and she is no longer able to relate to Lenny with love. So in this way Sidhwa has depicted the sufferings of women during the communal violence occurring at the time of Indian independence.
Her characters are depicted in hilarious and accurate detail and are very active and alive. Her novels contain a rich undercurrent of legends and folklore. Sidhwa can be termed a feminist and a realist. One sees in her women characters the strength of passion, the tenderness of love, and the courage of convictions. As a Parsi from Lahore she cannot be categorized as just a Pakistani novelist, she is much more versatile, a candid, forthright, balanced women novelist in the contemporary world of writers.
She was born in August in the city of Mymensingh of Bangladesh, a country which was once a part of India, before Partition, but which is now socially and economically very backward. Living in such a place she had to face many problems during her childhood and even later on.
She is a witness of the miserable condition of the women living in her society and her anger is clearly reflected in her writings. She wishes women to get equal rights and equal position with men. She has written many books based on female exploitation and the religious fundamentalism in her country. For such writings she has been given the death-sentence by many fundamental groups and institutions and she has even been exiled from her own country.
Her voice is a voice of humanism and she does not differentiate between caste, creed and colour. She has also raised her voice against the injustice and atrocities done towards minorities in her country. She is an outspoken person who represents the oppressed and exploited women of her country.
Her writing career started in , when she started writing poetry just at the age of fifteen years. She has written more than twenty books of poetry, essays, novels and short stories in Bangla, many of which have been translated into several Indian as well as European Languages. Her most famous and controversial novel Lajja, established her international reputation as a fiery feminist. She has received several prestigious awards and honours from both India and abroad.
She was also awarded an honorary doctorate from Ghant University, Belgium in and from American University of Paris in Lajja is about the communal violence which overtook Bangladesh after the Babri Mosque demolition in India. She depicts clearly how when any incident occurs in India, it has its effect in Pakistan as well as in Bangladesh. The protagonist of the novel is a young man named Suranjan.
He and his family are witness to the communal violence and the atrocities committed against the minorities in their country. Moreover, they have full faith in their Muslim brother who has always sheltered them in adverse situations. It is after the kidnapping of his sister Nilanjana that Suranjan and his father decide to leave the country. The writer believes that there should be no difference and discrimination on the basis of religion and there should be equal rights for every citizen irrespective of caste, creed and religion.
She portrays how women suffer if there is any communal violence. Tasleema Nasreen herself is a witness to all the cruelties committed against the women in her country. Her novel, Phera Home Coming narrates the story of eighteen years old Kalyani who lives in Mymensingh and is a student of Anandamohan College. Set during the Liberation War of Bangladesh when there was a lot of chaos and violence, she is compelled to leave Mymensingh to escape from being raped by the Muslims.
Her father sends her to Kolkata to one of their relatives but she is never happy there and has to do all the household work. Moreover her first cousin tries to molest her but she is able to defend herself. After completing her graduation from Lady Brabourne College of Kolkata, she marries Anirban who is in love with her.
She has a happy married life but she never feels really at home, and always pines for own country. Finally she gets the opportunity after thirty years to go back to her country. But when she gets there, she is shocked to see the changes which have taken place there. Her journey back to Bangladesh reveals to her that her homeland had existed merely in her imagination and that she must share the fate of millions of others who have left one country for another, and do not belong to either.
This novel also shows how women are generally the major victims in wars of all kinds of violence and atrocities. Kalyani has to leave her country in fear of being raped but here she has to face the threat of being abused by her cousin.
Her non- fiction book, Nirbachita Kalam Selected Column has won her wide acclaim. In this book she speaks in favour of the rights of women in every field. She condemns the objectification of women whether in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan or any other country. She shows how most social and familial relationships are marred by the male lust for power and domination.
In this society, a woman is considered to be a weak and fragile creature, with no power of her own, fully dependent on men.
She says: In this society, every woman needs another person in order to exist. Some creepers twine round a tree, some weak plants need the support of bamboos.
Our society regards women as creepers who cannot live without support and shelter. In fact, they can live. They can flourish like a banyan tree. However there is no fertile soil to favour their growth. The soil is dry, stony and therefore the trees grow up stunted. Even then…religion is against her. Incessantly, she accepts an inhuman way of life in hostile surroundings, as a rule and as her destiny.
In reality a women is alone. She lives with herself. Some of us understand this loneliness, others do not. They should fight for the cause of their freedom and should not remain under the age-old bonds imposed on them. They should liberate themselves from all the confining customs and traditions which are made by men to keep them in chains.
And they should fight against all the injustice and atrocities done against them. A close study of these three novelists, Shashi Deshpande, Bapsi Sidhwa and Tasleema Nasreen clearly shows that they are unique in their ways. Though they speak in different voices, their motives are the same. Their writing styles may be different from each other but their attitudes are similar. They believe that women are human beings like men and not inferior creatures.
The customs and the traditions existing in patriarchal society should be changed. She leaved Bangladesh in and now stay in New Delhi. She is globally famous for her articles, writings and eassys with feminist views and criticism of Islam and other religion. She was born in 25 August in Mymensing, Bangladesh. She is former Physician. She is struggling to build support for secular humanism, freedom of thought, equality for women.
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