Negotiating the Home: A Study of Six Novels by Contemporary Indian Women Writers

I was always fascinated by the study of socio-cultural aspects affecting women and their role in homes. Women use different models of negotiation to maintain and modify the web of relationships inside and outside the home. Home is thus a complex phenomenon that is based on social, relational, psychological and cultural experiences of individuals alone and collectively and sophisticated strategies of negotiation are deployed to define and redefine its space.

The book has attempted a comprehensive examination in locating and analysing the concept of the home and the process of negotiation adopted by the protagonists in the selected six novels by contemporary Indian women writers selected for this study: Anita Desai’s Journey to Ithaca, Rama Mehta’s Inside the Haveli, Namita Gokhale’s Shakuntala: The Play of Memory, Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night, Manju Kapur’s Home and Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us. The importance of home is visible in all the selected novels. All the protagonists are included in the home for physical, social and psychological security and safety. As a social institution, the home has assimilated the traditions, sentiments and modes of behaviour in society through the ages. It therefore, plays the part of an important medium to convey these to its individual members. Thus, home has developed into a primary social institution of the highest importance to the protagonists.

It has emerged in the book that it is strongly, but wrongly, believed by many members of the parental home as well as the marital home that women, especially daughters-in-law have no need for personal space. Geeta, Nisha, Sera, Devi, Shakuntala, and Sophie are very conscious of this need and they create their own space, permanent and unconditional, according to their choice, where they engage all the people round them in the process of negotiation inside the home and outside it and do not seek to futilely bring change by themselves alone. They construct homes which give them individual freedom together with a network of support and care of family and friends and of guides and mentors. All the protagonists of the selected novels are able to rebuild the home with emotional and rational linkages. In their respective homes they sow the seeds of a new heritage, new values and a new egalitarian philosophy of living.

The sole purpose to fabricate this book was to find new ways of asserting female selfhood, showing increasing courage in breaking age old restriction regarding a woman’s life and to move women from victim femininity to power femininity.