Search for authentic existence in selected novels of Anita Desai

Abstract

In the Indian English literature of the 20th century, few writers are original, versatile, innovative and controversial like Anita Desai. She is a novelist, a critic, an essayist, a writer of short stories, a travel writer and a psycho-analyst. She chooses novels as the best medium to express her wisdom and creative genius. She has tried her best to voice the mute, untold and psychosomatic miseries of the women, particularly of the married women who are seen caught in the net of existential problems and predicaments. newlineAnita Desai dives deep into the emotional world of several unfathomed shades of human personalities and feminine sensibilities. The present research focuses on the psychic states of the protagonist s despair and desolation. The purpose of this research is to examine the cause and nature of alienation and to show that alienation from the real self leads to quest for identity which culminates in either self-realization or self-annihilation. In Desai s fiction, the irrational manifests itself in human relationships. She studies the life of the invisible and the unsaid panting for vision and articulation. She has portrayed in her novels the socio-psychic roots of familial ties and shackles of traditional values. newline