Chapter-I

Introduction

Anita Desai (1937) is now one of the most recognized major

figures in Indo-Anglian fiction. She is one of those who have

tried to understand closely the predicament of women.

During the last three decades her novels and short stories

have won her detractors and defenders and a growing

number of readers in India and abroad. The aim of my work

is to examine the emergence of feminine sensibility as a

concept of reality in the fictional world of Anita Desai.

Although where are several Indian women writer’s writing in

English, I have chosen Anita Desai for my research work

because, unlike other writer’s, she has laid emphasis not

only women character’s but on men also. I have chosen the

Psycho Analytical Method for my thesis because it is

interesting to study how complex a human mind is and how

differently different characters react to the same situation.

She now ranks with celebrated writers e.g. R.K.

Narayana, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and Kamala

Markandaya and, has like them, made a significant

contribution to Indo-Anglian fiction. She is one of the most

distinguished women novelists writing in English language

[ 2 ]

and comparable on the world-scene, with women writers,

like Irish Murdoch, Doris Lessing Margaret Laurence and

Elora Nwapa. In appreciation of Fire on the Mountain (1977),

Paul Scott (who has an established reputation for his

own Anglo-Indian Fiction) hails it amongst the most

distinguished novels he read that year. In the Times Literary

Supplement an enthusiastic perceptive review of her book,

Games a Twilight (1978) declares, ". . . she writes

extraordinary delicate, lucid English which puts many

English authors to Shame." She has been awarded the

prestigious Sahitya Academy Award for her novel, Fire on the

Mountain and Author's Build Award for Where Shall We Go

This Summer?

Women writers have made considerable contribution

to the development of English fiction. In the case of Indian

English fiction, however, it is after the Second World War

that women writers have enriched the genre, making it

compatible in the context of the world literature. Indian

women novelists in English, notably Kamala Markandaya,

Nayantara Sehgal, Anita Desai have offered convincing

creations of a world in which characters live and indicate

that the novels written by women novelists have reached

maturity. They forge a style of their own, and reveal a power

of artistic selection by which their novels achieve a

[ 3 ]

harmonious effect. These writers particularly share the

experience of women in general and transmute these

experiences into the form of fiction. The awareness of

individuality, the sense of compatibility and incompatibility

with their tradition-bound surrounding, the resentment of

male-dominated ideas of morality and behaviour, problems

at home and at places of work or in the society all come

up in the form of a discussion for these women writers. As,

Prof. Malashri Lal rightly said:

Indian women writers have consistently refused to be named in the category of feminist writers.1

These writers question the universal presumption of the

western discourses on the basis that the West is unaware of

the Indian traditions and problems of joint family, dowry,

illiteracy, purdah, sati and childlessness. They aspire to pin

point these problems and convey them to critics so that

ordinary Indian women can carry out a movement and try to

find out a solution. In the realm of contemporary Indian

English fiction, A.N. Dwivedi has rightly argued:

Anita Desai is the first among Indian English novelists to have forcefully

expressed the existential problems of womankind; she is the first to have laid bare the inner recesses of human psyche; she is the first to introduce the

[ 4 ]

deep psychological probing of her characters.2

Anita Desai moves inward in her subtle psychological

probing and grapples with the abnormal or the hyper-

sensitive to lend a dimension of psychological depth and a

poetic parable of consciousness to the Indian novel in

English. Her work projects the difficulties faced by her

characters in shedding their fears and insecurities, which

result in disruption of their family ties. According to Wier,

Ann Lowry:

Anita Desai is the vanguard of a new generation of Indian writers who are

experimenting with themes of inner consciousness. She gives her reader a valuable insight into the feminine consciousness through her memorable protagonists.3

Anita Desai herself describes her creative writings as

"purely subjective"4 thus avoiding those problems, which a

more objective writer has to deal with since she depends on

observation rather than on the private vision, which she

tries to encapsulate in her works to see what the

subconscious does to an impressionable person. She is not a

social realist in the conventional sense of the term. She is

more interested in portraying the response of a sensitive

mind in the enveloping world. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar calls

[ 5 ]

her novels:

The intolerable grapple with thoughts, feelings and emotions.5

The purpose of her entire writing is to discover for her and

then describe and convey the truth of life. Her writing is an

effort to discover, underline and convey the truth and the

significance by plunging below the surface and plumbing the

depths, then illuminating those depths till they seem a more

lucid, brilliant and explicable reflections of the visible world.

She does not believe that literature ought to be confined

within reality. As Purvi N. Upadhyay has rightly said:

Anita Desai has contributed a lot in making Indian English Fiction popular the world over by shifting the domain of her fiction from outer to inner reality and by carrying of the flow of the mental experience of its characters.6

The fictional world of Anita Desai is located in the

corridors of the human consciousness. She is almost

obsessively concerned with the dark uncannily oppressive

inner world of her intensely introvert characters. Her

characters, especially the females, have been portrayed on

the verge of psychological breakdown. With a view to capture

the prismatic quality of life in her fiction, she uses the

stream of consciousness technique, flashbacks and interior

[ 6 ]

monologues. These techniques are appropriately used in

capturing authentically a psychological realm, an intensified

impression, and a quickened multiplied consciousness. The

centre of her fictional construction becomes some dominant

consciousness artistically realized. For this she has often

been called the Virginia Woolf among the Indian fiction

writers. The pattern of stream of consciousness divides time

into clock time, giving a new approach to working on

memories. A large extent the process of memories

determines the narrative of her novels. She plunges deep

into the psyche of her characters and exploits the underlying

truth. She discovers underlines and conveys the true

significance of things.

Desai is a subjective writer and believes that total

objectivity is impossible. Her dependence on the instinct is

so great that when she gets down writing her novel, she has

no plot in mind. Her novels gradually and instinctively take

their own shape.

Though very reticent about her personal world, Anita

Desai has extensively elaborated her views on creativity. She

claims not to have any set theories of the novels. She feels

that a writer does not create a novel by observing a given set

of theories', he follows flashes of vision and a kind of trained

[ 7 ]

instinct that leads him, not any theories. She feels that

writing is not an act of deliberation, vision or choice but a

matter of instinct, silence, compulsion and waiting. As an

artist she handles the raw material of life and conveys it

through a pattern and a design. She is much interested in

life with its hopes, frustrations, negations, rejections and

chaotic flow of events as she is concerned with the art of

giving shape, purpose and wholeness to life. Mrs. Desai

elaborates her protagonists in an interview with Yasodhara

Dalmia:

I am interested in characters who are

not average but have retreated, or been driven into some extremity of despair and so turned against, or made a stand against the general current, it makes no demands it costs no effort. But those who cannot follow it, whose heart cries

out 'the great No' who fight the current and struggle against it, know what the demands are and what it costs to meet them.7

Anita Desai's characters reveal her vision of life.

They share her perception and they set out in quest of

meaning. She is often seen as an experimenter who deals

with many existentialistic problems and predicaments.

Primarily interested in exploring the psychic depth of her

female characters, Anita Desai may be said to be doing

something unique among the contemporary Indian English

[ 8 ]

fiction writers.

Her novels, apart from focusing on the intricacies

and complexities of human relationships, inevitably move

around the theme of alienation and isolation. According to

Usha Bande, her characters can be classified into two

distinctive groups:

Those who fail to adjust the harsh realities of life and those who compromise.8

The premise, which provides the momentum to her creative

activity, is the basic human condition. In a novel, as in life

there are those who always remain outsiders because they

cannot accommodate themselves in the world of realities.

The complexity of form and theme of Anita Desai's

novels, conforming to the broad parameters of Anglo-

American tradition of psychological novel, has attracted

critical attention. These psychological novels retain the

fundamentals of Indian sensibility and socio-cultural ethos.

She focused her attention on the status of women in India in

the male-oriented and male-defined social and moral codes.

She portrays their quest of self-assertion and self-

actualization in the face of rigid norms of behaviour in a

conformist and status-quo society. Though Anita Desai

[ 9 ]

traverses a broad territory of themes, yet she mainly:

. . . focuses on the trials and tribulations, fears and

apprehensions, joys and hopes, dilemmas, predicaments, perplexities and paradoxes, in the physical and psychological lives of her characters in general and the protagonists in particular, to mirror the multi-dimensional reality in all its contours.9

She is interested in characters that are not average but are

driven into despair and as a result turned against the

general environment and trend.

She believes that a writer must have certain traits of

the head and heart, which are essential for writing a novel.

Besides having a creative genius, a novelist must be

sensitive and have a power of keen observation so that he

can give actual description and pick up the tiny details. In

an interview with Jasbir Jain she says:

I think a writer simply has to be an observant person. If he is not going to write a novel any way, which entails so much acute description and also an eye for details. I find certain people tend to

take in abstract ideas; others might take in some other aspect of the society they live in. A writer generally tends to pick up the tiny details that other might not notice.10

[ 10 ]

Anita Desai lays special stress on the existential

problems of womankind in general and Indian women in

particular. Although she does not belong to any feminist

movement yet there is a touch of persuasive feminism in her

writings. She marks a revolutionary departure without

involving herself in any controversy and is contended to have

women protagonists in her novels. She visualizes life for a

woman as a series of obligations and commitments. Her

themes and characters depict the existential reality and

evoke the sensibility of her females. She is constantly

concerned with the problems of communication between

men and women and has a talent of probing the psyche of

her women characters.

She depicts the inner world of sensibility and the

chaos inside the mind of characters with a special stress on

female psyche. The psychological turmoil creates psychic

imbalances, which in turn, handicap them in establishing

harmonious and gratifying inter-personal relationships. B.

Ramchandra Rao feels that in her novels, environment only

adds to presenting:

Each individual as an unsolved mystery. . . .11

The protagonists possess a defiant individuality and

fight against the common place conformity and stick to their

own vision of life. Those who manage to say the 'Great No'

[ 11 ]

and become independent are saved from total disaster, while

those who say 'no' but do not find positive ways to unburden

their 'self' are entangled in their own introspection, failing

thus to revivify their strength.

Following the flashes of individual vision, Anita's

fertile imagination makes her take up such themes as clash

of characters, maladjustments due to family environment,

class-conflicts, alienation and loss of identity, the narrow-

mindedness of Indian society, violence and death; and

complex human relationships. Despite a variety of themes in

her novels, the problems of relationships remain essentially

central, and all the themes and issues finally get subsumed

in this problem. The most recurrent themes are the

problems of communication between husband and wife,

between the individual and the social world. Alienation in

filial relation is a newly emerging idea of our modern society

for parents and children are equally alienated from each

other. In fact their meetings have just become Sunday

rituals. While discussing their relationship Jasbir Jain has

rightly said:

She prefers to delude deeper and deeper in a character, a situation, or a scene rather than going around about it.12

Anita Desai is an expert at depicting female psyche

[ 12 ]

and holds an enviable position as a psychological novelist

dealing with the psychic problems of women, particularly

Indian ones. They have been depicted as dumb driven cattle

or witless creatures without any will of their own. She had

no existence save that of shadowy, suffering, pathetic

creature. Our male-dominated society has idealized her

pride in suffering with her Sati-Savitri images. Anita Desai

has emerged with a new awareness dealing the subject with

her fine feminine sensibility. The myth of Indian women as

tolerant and sacrificing is not for her, for the isolation and

insecurity that, a woman suffers is just inhuman. Her female

characters are educated, well to do and hypersensitive

women who are burdened by the contemporary chaotic

milieu. Anita Desai reflects the inner struggle of such

women, their desire to break the shackles and come out of

the shell of their cocoon existence and assert themselves as

human beings. In this struggle they often get alienated from

the mainstream of life. Her pre-occupation with the

individual, highlighting the psychological motivation,

frustration, sense of failure and her keen awareness of the

futility of existence radiates from each of her novels.

Anita Desai refers to “enduring human conditions”

as discussed by Heinemann in her novels. Existential

themes of freedom, decision, guilt, alienation, anxiety,

[ 13 ]

boredom, death and destruction are all dealt by her. On the

surface level we see her women characters leading a

comfortable life, living luxuriously in the essentials of life but

internally they are wounded and strife-ridden personalities.

Their so-called easy and comfortable living fails to give them

peace, love and satisfaction which they cherish the most and

have to live without them throughout their lives.

Anita Desai focuses her attention more on character

rather than the plot and delineates them by sinking deep

into their psyche and showing their agony, anger,

dissatisfaction and frustration. Women are depicted as

caught between their desire to assert their individuality on

one hand and their liability to live according to the

traditional norms on the other. Education and new fangled

notions about equal rights give birth to the modern

predicament of women in society. Coming down from the

ivory tower of fantasy and imagination, they come face to

face with the absurd realities of life and as a result they feel

frustrated and heart broken. When her characters come out

of their cocooned existence and face the harsh realities of the

life outside, they feel frustrated and the cruel and callous

urban surroundings, in addition to the lack of sympathy and

understanding on the part of their near and dear ones only

serve to enhance their isolation. Loneliness renders them

[ 14 ]

helpless, torn and indecisive personalities, who research for

love and are unable to get it. As R.K. Gupta has commented:

Desai's female characters are generally neurotic, highly sensitive but alienated in a world of dream and fantasy. Separated from their surroundings as an outcome of their failure or unwillingness to adjust with the reality.13

She deals with the problem of meaninglessness in

life and lack of communication not from the philosophical or

sociological but entirely from the psychological point of view.

As a psychological novelist she tries to delve deep into the

emotional built up and crevices of her characters. She

employs all techniques of a psychological novel like

flashbacks, stream of consciousness, diary-entries, self-

analysis and ruminations. She herself confesses about her

novels:

My novels are not reflections of an Indian society, politics or characters. They are part of my private effort to seize upon the raw material of life-its shapelessness, its meaningless . . . despair and to mould it.14

She stands foremost in the line of modern Indian

novelists who have tried to portray the tragedy of human

soul trapped in the adverse circumstances of life. In fact we

[ 15 ]

can even say that she employs characters and situations

just to bring into limelight the absurd realities of human

existence.

Although Anita Desai cannot be directly related to

any feminist movement to secure the complete equality of

women with men in the enjoyment of all human rights,

moral, religious, social, political, educational, legal and

economic, yet she is well aware of the fact that, for Indian

women, hearth and heart are two extremes and now they

have to strive against their circumstances to break apart

from the cordon of customs and redefine themselves. Indian

women, since the annals of history have been treated merely

as objects to please men rather than to have an identity of

their own. The idea of male superiority in India has received

religious sanctions. The Rig Veda labeled women as the

eternal temptress's driving males to the pleasures of

materialistic world. The religious support given to the evils of

'sati', 'purdah', 'devadasini', and 'polygamy' took the

enslavement of women a step further. As Simone de

Beauvoir has observed:

As soon as a girl child is born, she is given the vocation of motherhood because society really wants her for washing dishes which are not really a vocation. In order to get her washes the

[ 16 ]

dishes. She is given the vocation of maternity.15

Many social movements have tried to change this

position of women by pin-pointing their resultant

helplessness, frustration, anger and rancour and there has

been a change for the better albeit a slow one.

Anita Desai does not portray women as being strong

and self-sacrificing but as helpless and frustrated, she

highlights their frustrations, sense of failure and keen

awareness of the futility of existence. Her women characters

are haunted by the deadly nightmares of imaginary

apprehensions conjured up by their flawed nature and, in

the process, they disintegrate themselves gradually. The

fictional world of Anita Desai is located in the vicinity of

female consciousness. She is obsessively and entirely

concerned with the depression and oppression of these

intensely introverts female characters that are unable to give

vent to their emotions. She may be called the spokesperson

of our culture as she authentically conveys its problems,

uncertainties, complexities and paradoxes and, as evident in

her novels, an expert in depicting the reaction of women

towards a given situation, for example, apathy of parents, ill

treatment by in-laws, and indifference of the husband. Post-

[ 17 ]

feminists do not agree to the universality of women, their

situations and to the solutions of their problems.

It is interesting to observe how Anita Desai depicts

life in a complicated situation. She is not interested in social

and economic problems; she devotes her entire creative

energy in portraying the impact of social and family

environment on the psyche of her protagonist. As O.P.

Budholia has rightly commented:

She creates certain complicated problems in her characters and allows them with free choice to face their situation.16

She stresses the isolation and loneliness of her

characters surrounded by their self-created problems. In the

words of Harish Raizada:

Their attempt to seek their refuge in their loneliness worsens their situation still more, for their solitary musings and their mobility quicken the process of their disintegration.17

Her women grapple with social forces working

against their individual identity. They definitely are not anti-

family or anti-female. They only try to over-power their

solitary, marginal and oppressed situation for their lives are

full of turbulent passions, unfulfilled dreams and chaos.

[ 18 ]

Anita Desai can be considered as a social essayist

though not a social realist in the conventional sense of the

term, she is more interested in portraying the response of a

sensitive mind to the over shadowing world. There is a touch

of persuasive feminism in her novels and she believes that

creative literature is more interesting, more significant and

overwhelming than the real world. A novelist primarily of

thought, emotion and sensation, Anita Desai is constantly

concerned with the problem of communication between men

and women, between the individual and the social world,

between parents and children.

In ‘Introduction’ I have attempted to analyze Anita

Desai's fiction in the light of her sensitive portrayal of her

troubled characters desire to carve out a meaningful

existence for them. The way in which Desai has depicted the

story gives more psychological touch to it. Her novels probe

the psychic dimensions of their protagonists. Their moods,

observations, dilemmas and abnormalities are conveyed very

effectively in them. Thus, the novels are pioneering efforts

towards delineating the psychological problems of

characters.

Anita Desai has firmly established the psychological

novel in the annals of Indo-English fiction. Her contribution

[ 19 ]

to IndianEnglian Fiction has earned both name and fame

for her. Man-Woman dichotomy or relationship, East-West

encounter, alienation, feminine sensibility etc. are the

common themes that we find in her fiction.

The novels which I have taken in my thesis are Cry,

the Peacock (1963), Voices in the City (1965), Bye-Bye

Blackbird (1971), Where Shall We Go this Summer? (1975),

Fire on the Mountain, (1977), Clear Light Of Day (1980), In

Custody (1984), Baumgartner's Bombay (1989), Journey to

Ithaca (1996), Fasting, Feasting (1999) etc. have exposed the

evidence of the novelists' awareness of several problems

related to women, which she has tried to tackle from a

psychological point of view. Her novels present an

explanation to the long smothered wail of a lacerated psyche.

In these novels she deals with the dislocation of normal life

of temperament, Mal-adjustment in family life. Being a

woman novelist she sides more intensely with the heroines

of her novels. She is only interested in exploration of psychic

depths of her characters. They are generally neurotic, highly

sensitive but alienated in a world of dream and fantasy,

separated from their surrounding as an outcome of their

failure or unwillingness to adjust with the reality.

The second chapter delineates the 'Recurring

[ 20 ]

Themes in the novels of Anita Desai'. By dividing the chapter

into two parts i.e. depressed women and assertive women on

the periphery, I have tried to present the plight of

introspective, hypersensitive women in her novels. As

Gajendra Kumar has rightly said:

The recurring themes of Anita Desai's novels are identified-woman's struggle for self-realization and self-definition, woman's quest for her identify, her pursuit of freedom, equality and transcendence, her rebellion and protest against oppression at every level.18

This chapter deals with certain depressed female characters.

In Cry, the Peacock (1963), Anita Desai portrays the

transformation of a hypersensitive Hindu woman, Maya, of

orthodox background seeking unorthodox means of

fulfillment, into an insane individual. Maya's fascination for

life clashes with her husband's rational and pragmatic

approach to it. Both of them could never understand each

other and thus drifted apart.

The fatal distance between Gautama and Maya

arising from a temperamental incompatibility is the main

factor to the theme of psychic disintegration. Monisha in

Voices in the City could never adjust in the joint family of her

husband and always craved for silence and solitude. She

[ 21 ]

revolted in the form of setting herself afire. Uma in Fasting,

Feasting, keep living a caged life under the strict supervision

of her wings and at last tries to fly from the cage.

This chapter deals with some assertive female

characters and women on the periphery of submission and

assertiveness. In Where Shall We Go This Summer? Anita

Desai tries to use the myth of the archetypal Sita in the

modern context. This Sita in her forties graying, aging, well

established, well carried, finds herself alienated from her

husband, children, in laws and society. She regards their

presence as a threat to her own existence and behaves

abnormally. The withdrawal of her wounded and bruised

soul into her own protective shell conveys her protest. Nanda

Kaul in Fire on the Mountain (1977) desires to remain in

isolation to register her revolt for a world where women

cannot hope to be happy without being unnatural. Bim in

Clear Light of Day (1980) is the real assertive lady, who

adopts the life of loneliness not out of her choice but out of

her feelings of responsibility after her parents' death and her

brother's indifferent behaviour. Though Bim needs her

brothers help, she never asks for it. The world of Anita Desai

is a world where harmony is aspired to but often not

achieved. Her characters' are unable to attain emotional and

passionate response from a world of sordid daily routine.

[ 22 ]

Therefore, they try to flourish in solitude and only come out

when their individuality is challenged.

The third chapter deals with the male-female

dichotomy in the novels of Anita Desai. The theme of male-

female dichotomy has been popular with Indo-Anglian

novelists for ex., R.K. Narayana discusses the,

incompatibility in the male-female relation-ship in The

Darkroom and The Guide: Raja Rao in The Serpent and The

Rope: Mulk Raj Anand in Gauri; Bhawani Battacharaya in

Music for Mohini. Anita Desai shows in her novels that the

main reason for their conflict is incompatibility, detachment,

childlessness and male domination.

In this chapter I have described the predicament of

modern women in the male-dominated society and her

destruction at the altar of marriage. With the help of novels

like Cry, the Peacock, Voices in the City, Where Shall We Go

This Summer?, Clear Light of Day, In Custody, Baumgartner's

Bombay, etc., it is clear that the male-female dichotomy is

both artistically moving and psychologically sound. Each of

the frustrated characters adopts their own manner of facing

the problem of the alienation, suffering and boredom and the

appropriateness of such manners can be justified and

supported by the views of the psychologists.

[ 23 ]

The fourth chapter deals with the theme of marital-

discord in Cry, the Peacock, Voices in the City, and Where

Shall we go this Summer?, Maya's cry for love and

relationship in her loveless wedding with Gautama,

Monisha's dissatisfaction with the marital relationship as a

reflection of their fear of attachment which involves human

beings in the complex rituals of give and take. Sita's psychic

plight too is similar to that of Maya and Monisha for she is

also oppressed and depressed in a loveless marriage with

Raman.

The fifth chapter namely, psychological conflict in

Bye-Bye Blackbird, Clear Light of Day and Fire on the

Mountain is the main forte of her fiction to explore the main

currents and undercurrents of human psyche. The

protagonists of the novels are under going mental conflicts of

varying intensity. Some of them are lost during the struggle

while others come out successfully with new realization and

hope. As Purvi N. Upadhyay has remarked:

Anita Desai emphasizes on interior than

on exterior characterization; on motives and circumstances, and on the invisible. She can be considered the writer of the psychological effects of actions.19

The 'Conclusion' is an enumeration of inferences

[ 24 ]

reached at after making the study of the feminine

psychological study in her novels. It sums up the outcome of

the critical psychological effects in the preceding chapters

and attempts to discuss the whole gamut of Anita Desai as a

feminist psychological novelist. I have highlighted the Anita

Desai's basic parameters of exploration that emphasize the

similarities and differences between different character's

predicaments. Her fiction exposes to us the troubled

thoughts and confused behaviour of her characters who are

ordinary individuals with an extraordinary sensitivity.

Thus, there are ups and downs in protagonist's

mental make-up. The way in which Desai has depicted the

story gives a more psychological touch to it. Her novels

probe the psychic dimensions of its protagonists. Thus, the

author, Anita Desai has firmly established that the

psychological study is one of the annals of Indo-English

fiction.

The purpose of this thesis is not to build theories as

to the nature of Desai's fiction, but to focus on different

aspects of each work. Since the approach to this study is

feminist, the dominant emphasis will be on the inner

landscape of women, their actions, thoughts, feelings,

instinct and kinship to probe their real life and ascertain

[ 25 ]

their intrinsic nature. The whole thesis is classified on the

basis of various manifestations of human nature, human

psyche, and above all human condition in the novels of Anita

Desai.

*****

[ 26 ]

REFERENCES

1. Lal Malashri, “Literary Feminism In India: In Search of

Theory”, The Tribune News Service, June 16, 2001,

p. 16.

2. Budholia, O.P., “Forward to Anita Desai: Vision and

Technique in her Novel”, ed. A.N. Dwivedi, Studies In

Contemporary Indian Fiction in English, Kitab Mahal,

Allahabad, 1987, p. 45.

3. Wier, Ann Lowry, "The Illusions of Maya: Feminine

Consciousness in Anita Desai's Cry the Peacock",

Journal of South Asian Literature, XVI, No. 2, 1981,

p. 14.

4. Desai, Anita, "The Indian Writers Problems" The

Literary Criterion, 12, Summer, 1975, Rpt in

Exploration of Modern Indo-English Fiction. ed. R.K.

Dhawan, Bahri, New Delhi, 1982, p. 225.

5. Iyengar, K.R. Srinivasa, Indian Writings In English, pub.

Bombay, Asian Publishing House, 1962, p. 464.

6. Upadhay, Purvi N., "Cry, the Peacock: A Psychological

Study", Critical Essays On Anita Desai's Fiction, ed.

Jaydipsingh Dodiya Pub. IVY, Publishing House Delhi,

2000, p. 47.

7. Dalmia, Yashodhara, "An Interview with Anita Desai",

The Times of India, April 29, 1979, p. 13.

8. Bande, Usha, The Novels of Anita Desai: A Short Study

in Character and Conflic', pub. Prestige Books, New

Delhi, 1988, p. 15.

9. Bala, Suman, and Pabby, D.K., "The Fiction Of Anita

Desai", Explorations in Modern Indo-English Fiction, ed.

R.K. Dhawan, Bahri Publications, New Delhi, 1982,

p. 102.

[ 27 ]

10. Jain, Jasbir, Interview by Jasbir Jain, Rajasthan

University Studies in English, Vol. XII, 1979, p. 68.

11. Rao, B. Ramchandra, The Novels of Mrs. Anita Desai,

Kalyani Publishers, New Delhi, 1977, p. 61.

12. Jain, Jasbir, Interview by Jasbir Jain, Rajasthan

University Studies in English, Vol. XII, 1979, p. 70.

13. Gupta, R.K., "Art of Characterization" The Novels of

Anita Desai: A Feminist Perspective, ed. R.K. Gupta,

pub. Atlantic Publishers, Delhi 2000, p. 184.

14. Vinson, James, Contemporary Novels, pub. London St.

James Press, 1976, p. 356.

15. Beaviour, Simon De, The Second Sex, pub. Penguin

Hammondesworth, 1982, p. 32

16. Budholia, O.P. Studies in Contemporary Indian Fiction

in English, Kitab Mahal, Allahabad, 1987, p. 126.

17. Raizada, Harish, The Lotus and The Rose: Indian Fiction

in English (1850-1947), Faculty of Arts, A.M.U.,

Aligarh, 1978, p. 129.

18. Kumar Gajendra, "Voices in the City: A Tour de Horizon

of Existential Philosophy", Critical Theory and the

Novels of Anita Desai, ed. Jaydipsingh Dodiya, pub.

IVY, Publishing House, New Delhi, 2000, p. 6.

19. Upadhyay, Purvi N., "Cry, the Peacock: A Psychological

Study", Critical Essays on Anita Desai's fiction, ed.

Jaydipsingh Dodiya, pub. IVY, Publishing House, New

Delhi, 2000, p. 47.

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