Predicament of a Woman in Manju Kapur’s Home

Abstract

Manju Kapur is an Indian novelist. She was born on 25th October 1948. She is an archetypal representative of the postcolonial women novelists. She was a professor of English Literature at her alma mater at Miranda House College, Delhi. But she is retired from there. She joined the growing number of Indian women novelists, who have contributed to the progression of Indian fiction i.e. Shashi Deshpande, Arundhati Roy, Kamla Das, Geetha Hariharan, Anita Nair, Shobha De. Her novels reflect the position of women in the patriarchal society and the problems of women for their longing struggle in establishing their identity as an autonomous being. Her works not only gives voice to the society’s effort to improve its women population but it is for every woman’s self–consciousness in order to improve the society. She has written five novels, Difficult Daughters (1998), A Married Woman (2002), Home (2006), The Immigrant (2008), and Custody (2011). Kapur’s most memorable female characters are Virmati, Astha, Nisha, Nina, Shagun and so many others. All of them strive to assert themselves. These characters give us a rare glimpse of modernized Indian women who are in their aggression may enter into a scandalous relationship with her married neighbor, the professor or develop lesbian relationship as Virmati does in Difficult Daughters and Astha in A Married Woman. But Nisha in Home is different from her predecessors.