Changing Faces of New Woman in Indian Writing

Abstract

The post-modern liberalization grants women a space for their presence and thereby provides the opportunity to develop multiple identities for them as women from different cultures are adopting different means of countering the dominant narratives. While some of the women from the western cultures seems to fascinated by a "manly” image of woman, which tries to gain space by aping everything masculine, we find a different reaction in Indian context.

Instead of eliminating their essential subjectivity, a section of Indian women evolves a new counter strategy which consists of an understanding of the patriarchal discourse of power and utilizing them in an improvised way to their own advantage. They are manipulating the techniques of operation in order to create their own space and thereby evolving an identity for themselves as the master players as here the women are paying it back but under the disguise of being stereotyped. Instead of subverting the system in some overt mode of confrontation they prefer to remain stereotyped but play their game of manipulation.

In Girish Karnad's Nag Mandala, we find a woman, Rani who is rejected and confined in a room by her husband, who likes to spend the nights outside at the chamber of a prostitute. Now Rani develops an extra-marital relationship with a snake, a cobra which can take the shape of Rani's husband by magical power. When she becomes pregnant, her husband who never touched her in his life drags her to the village court, the Panchayat to put her under trial. Here the patriarchal regulatory body comes to play its role. The Panchayat asks Rani to go under a fire ordeal, the Agnipariksha. But she insists on the snake ordeal where she puts her hand into the hole where the cobra lives and swear diplomatically that she has never touched any other male in her life except her husband and this cobra. The cobra does notbite her as she speaks the truth, and she, thus comes out victorious by manipulating one patriarchal instrument of operation i.e., the ordeal, to her own advantage