Fasting, Feasting: From a Feminist Perspective

Western feminism is encapsulated in literature and corresponds in written form, which is contradictory to the East, especially in countries like India. Because of its oral tradition and greater illiteracy, the effect of this discourse was limited to the urban community. But the recent scenario is different as rural people are much better informed with the advent of the electronic media. Indian women writers in English have been raring to try their hands at writing over the past few decades and perpetually making efforts to accomplish their mission successfully. They no longer fall behind their male counterparts no matter what the genre is. Their artistic creations are axiomatic and have bagged a prominent place in the spectrum of world literature. Women novelists are now globally recognized for their contribution to the amplification of Indian Writings in English, especially in the genre of fiction which causes the acclivity of feminist literature. The most prominent among them are Shobha Dey, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandeya, Ruth Prawar Jhabvala, Shakuntala Shrinagesh, Bharathi Mukherjee, and Kiran Desai, who defy the deep-seated patriarchy. Among these writers, Anita Desai denies a narrow feminist approach and portrays females' desire for liberty from social and traditional bondages in patriarchy. The present paper explores the despicable status of women in the Indian patriarchy and expounds on the depiction of the psychological plight of her female characters and gender oppression in her novel Fasting, Feasting. As a prominent Indian writer, Desai proposes her outlook and stance on the issues of femininity and elucidates that Indian feminism contradicts the Western one.

Othello: A Postcolonial Play

In pursuance of Literary Theory and Criticism, texts are drastically heterogeneous. They do not contain any general meaning, but each time a text is read from a different perspective, it reproduces new meanings and contributes to the propagation of new ideas and theories. A deconstructive reading can reveal the irreconcilable possibilities generated by the text, and the reader finds it strenuous to determine any permanent meanings. In this paper, Shakespeare's Othello is read from a different perspective in adherence to postcolonial theory. The Othello bears several references to postcolonial qualities – the Eurocentric ideology of Elizabethan people, who incline to think and express their thoughts in terms of binary oppositions, the notion of postcolonial othering, the position of marginalized, a clash between the Orient and the Occident, the hybridity of culture, identity crisis, and European racial consciousness, etc. Thus, the present paper focuses mainly on Shakespeare's work Othello with a postcolonial approach in the light of Edward Said's Orientalism.