International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research

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The Alienated, the Silenced, and the Reinvented Self: Three Figures of Female Subjectivity in the Fiction of Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, and Bharati Mukherjee

Author(s) Yashashvini Sharma
Country India
Abstract Criticism of women's representation in Indian fiction has tended to read its major novelists in isolation, to privilege thematic content over narrative form, and to treat "the Indian woman" as a relatively unitary category. This article addresses these gaps through a comparative feminist reading of three novelists usually kept apart by the institutional division between "Indian English" and "diasporic" literary study: Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, and Bharati Mukherjee. It argues that the three construct three distinct yet mutually illuminating figures of female subjectivity—the alienated self, whose predicament is interiorised as psychic crisis (Desai); the silenced self, who negotiates the oppression and the uses of silence toward a qualified voice (Deshpande); and the reinvented self, who refashions identity across borders at a cost the fiction does not always acknowledge (Mukherjee). Reading the novels through existential, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial-feminist frameworks, and attending throughout to focalisation, narrative time, and symbolic form, the article contends that these three figures are best understood not as a developmental sequence in which diasporic agency supersedes national constraint, but as coexisting strategies, each disclosing what the others repress. It further argues that all three imaginations remain bounded by an upper-caste, middle-class vantage that the analysis makes visible as a limit rather than a norm. The study contributes a comparative, form-attentive, and intersectional model for reading women's fiction across the national/diasporic divide.
Keywords Indian English fiction; feminist literary criticism; female subjectivity; Anita Desai; Shashi Deshpande; Bharati Mukherjee; postcolonial feminism; narrative form; intersectionality; diaspora
Published In Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On 2026-07-08
DOI https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.83445
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