Marriage is assumed to be the primary business of a woman’s life through which the patriarchal values perpetuate. The themes of Anita Desai’s compositions are chiefly love, matrimony and divorce which ultimately annihilate a woman’s life. In Indian society, still in the twenty first century marriage is seen as the only course for majority of women. A woman is defined by her relatedness to man. Married or unmarried, women are the victims of discrimination, humiliation, and violence on various levels. Woman’s emergence in society from the house and her deliverance from ignorance are favoured by only a few broadminded personalities and people influenced by the great post-colonial movement ‘feminism’ that aims at eliminating sexist oppression in the male-dominant societal set-up in order to make a possible ground for the empowerment of women by providing them control over their own lives and liberty of materializing their dreams. Seen from this perspective Desai’s Fasting, Feasting (1997) can be declared a highly feministic novel. In the present paper an endeavour has been made to trace and analyse all those double standards of codes of conduct in society regarding men and women due to which innocent women characters, such as “Uma” and “Anamika”, are subjugated and tortured at each corner of their lives, not by the outsiders, but to utter surprise, by their own family members. Desai’s novel Fasting, Feasting realistically illustrates the passive docile role of a woman in a man-woman relationship, and the malicious role of a lady in perpetuating the humiliation of another lady by a male. In it the problems of gender discrimination, pathetic conditions of women at their maternal and in-laws’ homes, bride-torturing, unmatched marriage, dowry system, wife-beating, betrayals in marital relationships, humiliation of women when they are girls of marriageable ages, denial of education and equal career opportunities to girls, all have been masterly interwoven along with the plot.
P.G.T. (English), Kendriya Vidyalaya Ordnance Factory, Nalanda, Rajgir
