chapter 1
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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
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Delhi, 2000, p. 47.
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