Feminine Sensibility In Indian Fiction

A feminist is awakened and conscious of women's life, the problems prevailing in her life due to certain circumstances and feminist consciousness is the experience of certain specific contradictions.

The most natural direction for feminist criticism to take has been the subversion of certain ideologies i.e. Marxist, aesthetics and structuralist and thus altering their vocabularies and methods to include the variable of gender. Though feminism has now become a global phenomenon and feminists of the entire nationalist share the basic paradigms of feminism. They are eager to proclaim their difference from the western feminists and to find out a separate identity for themselves.

The emergence of women novelists in Indian English literature took place as early as the last quarter of the nineteenth century. But, it was only after independence that they could make solid contribution to Indian English fiction. The post independence era has brought a number of noted women novelists who have enriched Indian English fiction by creating feminine sensibility in their work. The women has been the focus of many literary works in this era. Writers like Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande Nayantara Sahgal, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are among them who have achieved recognition in recent times.

Through the eyes of these women writers, problems of women which were till now in the periphery have shifted to the center and one gets a glimpse of different world till now unattempted in literature.

Women, who were treated as second class citizens, find a prominent place in these novels. These novelists present a picture of the impact of education on women and her new found identity in the society. We can compare the works of Indian Women novelists like Anita, and Shashi Deshpande to those of the Canadian novelists like Margaret Atwood, Margaret Lawrence and Aritha Van Hark. All these writers write of life as seen by women and the impact of life on women.

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