Like Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya(Suraiya), Shashi Deshpande, Nayantara Sahgal, Ruth Prawar Jhabwalla and Githa Hariharan Mukherjee exposes many facets of feminism, encompassing agitation for equal opportunity, sexual autonomy and right to self determination. We find the same in the novel Desirable Daughters where the heroine Tara ventures to widen her horizons in matters of marriage, love and sex; redefines her roles as wife and mother.
Social identities are far from getting fixed in some essentialized past, and are subject to the continuous play of history and culture. And these concepts provide positionality for an intellectual to create his/her own site to construct through representation indigenous identities. In this regard Bill Ashcroft …show more content…
All places are holy. You can talk to God from the bathroom and he will listen to you” (Desirable Daughters p.302). Her down-to-earth attitude contrasts with Motilal’s attempts at other-worldliness. Though Tara’s eldest sister, Padma, bore anger against their authoritarian father throughout her life, Tara moves beyond that. It is evident near the end when Tara visited India and stopped in Rishikesh, together with her 15 year old son in order to be with her parents for a …show more content…
She has lived an exemplary life in India but how much ever she tries to blend in with the cosmopolitan population of San Francisco she is constantly aware of being different. She finds it impossible to convey to American friends —citizens of comparatively classless, mobile society — how circumscribed and static Indian identity is : “[It] is as fixed as any specimen in a lepidopterist’s glass case, confidently labelled by father’s religion (Hindu), caste (Brahmin), sub-caste (Kulin), mother-tongue (Bengali), place of birth (Calcutta)...” and on and on in an ever decreasing circle. Although Tara had left Calcutta decades ago, she is always on the alert decoding names, manners and accents whenever she encounters strangers of Indian
Social identities are far from getting fixed in some essentialized past, and are subject to the continuous play of history and culture. And these concepts provide positionality for an intellectual to create his/her own site to construct through representation indigenous identities. In this regard Bill Ashcroft …show more content…
All places are holy. You can talk to God from the bathroom and he will listen to you” (Desirable Daughters p.302). Her down-to-earth attitude contrasts with Motilal’s attempts at other-worldliness. Though Tara’s eldest sister, Padma, bore anger against their authoritarian father throughout her life, Tara moves beyond that. It is evident near the end when Tara visited India and stopped in Rishikesh, together with her 15 year old son in order to be with her parents for a …show more content…
She has lived an exemplary life in India but how much ever she tries to blend in with the cosmopolitan population of San Francisco she is constantly aware of being different. She finds it impossible to convey to American friends —citizens of comparatively classless, mobile society — how circumscribed and static Indian identity is : “[It] is as fixed as any specimen in a lepidopterist’s glass case, confidently labelled by father’s religion (Hindu), caste (Brahmin), sub-caste (Kulin), mother-tongue (Bengali), place of birth (Calcutta)...” and on and on in an ever decreasing circle. Although Tara had left Calcutta decades ago, she is always on the alert decoding names, manners and accents whenever she encounters strangers of Indian