Female Characters In Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces Of The Night

Abstract: Seeing women here, there and everywhere in all professional fields is a common sight these days. They turn against the inequality in relationship and unfair distribution of responsibilities imposed heavily upon them. But to achieve this hard task, Indian women have to cast aside the narrow traditional mental framework which pushes them back to their secondary status in society as well as in family. The age old conflict between woman’s own desires and ancient social practices find expression through the voices of various women novelists writing in English today. All the female characters in the novel of Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night find themselves on the verge of internal dilemma due to the various reasons and the …show more content…
The plight and predicament of woman have been presented in the novel by the novelist after a minute observation of the inner psyche of self-sacrificing Mayamma, assertive Sita and rebellious Devi. By and large, all of them are found themselves trapped in the web designed for the woman by centuries of social conditioning. The novelist sensitively portrays the condition of Indian woman caught between tradition and modernity. Devi, the protagonist around whom all the characters whether male or female move and leave an indelible mark on her life, passes through a situation of contradiction arises between the two worlds. When the novel begins, Devi is shown as a young girl with a modern outlook. She lives in America and loves an American boy, Dan. But at the same time, she worships her mother in the temple of her heart. She is well aware of this unforgettable reality that her traditional mother and her open minded boy friend would never come to terms with each other. “ Dan was different . His charm lay in the vast distance they have travelled towards each other, and in Devi’s awareness that this distance was not, would not be, completely bridged. This awareness havered over them like a memory, protective because it remained undiminished” …show more content…
All the American participants took a negative view of her situation. To them the term connoted a denial of autonomy and freedom, an unhappy compulsion to accommodate into her plans and aspirations something that she would have been more comfortable without. In contrast, the overwhelming majority of the Indian women seemed to consider compromise positively to view it as the most acceptable of conflicting obligations, of pressures satisfactorily