A Search for Identity: A Female Centric Study of the Novels of Nayantara Sehgal

Abstract

Navantara Sehgal seeks to present in each of her novels, a consistent point of her moves from satire and irony to a positive constructive vision. Sehgal appears to be trading in new and perhaps intense areas of experience confronting with fresh insights and lyrical contents of human life. The novels of Sehgal give creative release to feminine sensibility and articulate the birth pangs of a new socio-political order like Virginia Woolf and Anita Desai. Nayantara Sehgal is also a prose rhapsodist of sentiments, Feelings and emotions passing through human stream of consciousness. In her novels the protagonist is in a pursuit of self knowledge. The transition in the women's consciousness in India has continued. The Indian woman is weir on her way to move from the feminine or feminist face to the face of displacement and self discovery. In Nayantara Sehgal's work the new women comes out in more prominent way to escape the deadlock perpetuated by the unilateral dictates of a perniciously effective patriarchal form of society. This, centrifugal revolt takes definite shape in her novels. Though divorce has been depicted as an alternative way of life but it is not the escape but the way to curb the drudgery perpetrated through discriminatory laws promulgated by the male dominated society. She is an iconoclast in her own right as she succeeds in demolishing the hitherto held myths and images of the Indian women; the "Patiparmeshwar image": i.e. the husband is god. Novels bring out Nayantara Sehgal as a writer with feminist concerns seeking independent existence of women. She sees women as victims of conventional Indian society engaged in their quest for identity.