Daughters in Arms Female Bonding in Select Novels of Manju Kapur Shashi Deshpande Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Anita Nair

Abstract

ABSTRACT newlineIn the genre of Indian English literature written by women feminine friendships has evolved as an emergent arena of possibilities and promises. The novels written over the past twenty years are literary records of women who choose to be friends with women do not cloister themselves in convents or do not live in homosexual relations. They, more often than not, are married and are mothers. They are seen to live in families and are noted to perform all the duties assigned to them by their socio cultural moorings. Yet they are rebels and they resist .Their resistance may not be read as resistance since they do not affiliate to the utter rejection of the processes of their becoming. Their method of resistance is through abrogation and subversion and the women, as postcolonial subjects of the patriarchal regime regularly violate the norms of behavior that the dominating powers demand of them. As the constant marginalization ensures that they remain in certain enclosed spaces of existence and behavior, the women tend to form bonds to convert these spaces of exile into spaces of liberation. The bonds that they form are interstitial (Bhabha) and are bereft of the divisive politics of the state such as class, caste or race. newlineThe feminine friendships depicted in the Indian English novels of the last two decades, that has seen Indian women emerge in their hitherto unforeseen independent avatars, reassert the struggle of women to affirm their identities in the contemporary postcolonial world albeit through bonds.. The bonds they forge may be homosexual or homosocial (Sedgwick) but are collectively the sites of interrogating the oppressive discursive institutions that utilize legal, social, religious, economic and sexual power to hegemonically control the second sex . The invisible force of camaraderie at the base of these bonds ensues from the performance of these women in the various roles that they play in everyday lives. The bonds rely on pluralities of existence and experience newlineii newlineand evolve out of the