Female writers in India like Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Anita Nair amongst others have opened up an outlet for expressing their cry for social equality and to raise their voice against the oppression of women.
Historically, women in India had an equal status with men in society. Through the medieval ages women faced discrimination in a society that accepted their role as only a homemaker and a machine for reproduction. The expression for the Indian woman was limited to care for her family. These orthodox and rigid boundaries had tied up the Indian woman for centuries.
The modern Indian woman has moved away from this stereotype and is exploring the realms of undiscovered horizons. She is excelling at the workplace and hold away at home too. With the doors opening for education to women, literacy rates amongst women shot up and so did the confidence amongst women to explore their frontiers.
To be able to write is to be able to express. A writer is able to convey emotions and thoughts like no spoken word could ever do. Through their pen, women activists have run campaigns to raise their voice against the position that society has offered to them in spite of the fact we are now in the 21st century. The contemporary Indian woman writes about her denial to accept the patriarchal oppression she has been subjected to for many millennia now. She writes from a feminist viewpoint that questions society on why cases like the Roop Kunwar case and recently the Nirbhaya case happen in this society.
Female writers in India have written on a number of subjects and themes, but, the common thread running through all their work was a fight for equality, for recognition and for asserting her position as a human being too.
From the feminist works of Ismat Chughtai who incidentally was imprisoned for writing her short story ‘Lihaaf’, to the assertion of female sexuality by Kamala Das, writing has given a platform for the Indian woman to express herself. This in itself is a form of empowerment.
Empowerment is about being heard and making a difference to peoples’ acceptance of this voice. Female writers in India have taken up the task of creating social awareness about the condition of women in a strong way, and through the characters that they have created in their works.
Image credit: La Fessée on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Nidhi.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Nidhi Manuja is a creative freelance writer who started her career as human resource professional but later moved on to writing, which has given her a chance to be creative and follow the path of her father’s success as well who is an author.[/author_info] [/author]