Anita Desai as a novelist

         Introduction

Anita Desai is one of the best known contemporary women writers of Indian fiction in English. Born to a Bengali father and a German mother, she is an excellent example of the bicultural heritage of postcolonial India. Desai grew up in Delhi, receiving her education first at Queen Mary's school and later at Miranda House, one of the Delhi University's prestigious colleges. She began to write in English at the age of seven and published her first story at the age of nine. She brought out her first novel, Cry the Peacock in 1963. This work immediately established her as a major voice in Indian literature in English. Since then Desai has steadily published novels, short stories and children's literature. Well versed in German, Bengali, Hindi and English, Anita Desai has always preferred to write in the English language.

A concerned social visionary, Anita Desai is a keen observer of the society and the position of the women in the contemporary society draws her special attention. The novels of Anita Desai are noted for the profound probing into the inner life and feeling of the women, bounded by the shackles of the middle class. The novels are the exploration of the family problems, which perhaps is the chief concern behind the estrangement of the women from the family.

As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times; she has received a Sahitya Academy Award for her novel 'Fire on the Mountain' from the Sahitya Academy, India's Academy of letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for 'The Village by the Sea'. In the later novels, the key themes, which Desai is concerned with is the Western stereotyped views about India. The life of the middle class family is the chief aspect of most of her novels. Often the author's characters in the novels are the anglicised Indians, who jaded of their everyday life and lack of warmth in the marital relationships ultimately convert to escape from the foldsof family institution.

The world of Desai's novels reveals certain recurring patterns in plots, setting and characterization. The plots of her novels fuse two opposing properties -one towards the gothic mystery and the other towards the philosophical novel. Most of the Desai's novels also contain a deep rooted, philosophical concern about the meaning of life.
The uniqueness of Anita Desai's is in giving voices to the psychological, emotional as well as physical needs of women which are hardly considered in an Indian society. She portrays her characters as individuals "facing single-handed, the ferocious assaults of existence." As a result of disillusionment and a result of isolation from this world there is a tendency towards revolt in female characters. The purpose of her novel is to study the matrimonial crisis. "The hazards and complexities of man- woman relationships, the founding of individuality and establishing of individualism of her characters", in Cry the Peacock.
As a novelist she doesn't represent the futility of marriage but explore the psych of the female characters through marriage. She portrays the inherent disparity in male and female characters. Females are emotional whereas man rational. Women have shown to be emotionally as well as culturally dependent on their mates; any loss in relationship becomes a total loss of self. Anita Desai has explored man woman relationship in "Cry the Peacock". Anita Desai has mastered the technique of the untold mute psychosomatic miseries of women particularly of married women.
'Cry the Peacock' is her first novel. She has explored the theme of marital relationships and dissonance in it. This novel shows the real cause of disruptor in marriage of Maya and Gautam. The novel is about Maya's cry for love and relationship in her loveless wedding with Gautama. The peacock's cry is symbolic of Maya's cry for love and understanding. The marital discord results from the temperamental disparity between Gautama and Maya. Even Maya's childlessness exaggerate agony of loneliness which she feels in spite of being married. She becomes highly sensitive as a result of it. Maya wants to enjoy life to the utmost. She loves life in all its forms. She enjoys beautiful sights and sounds. She is an epicurean to the core. In contrast, she is married to Gautama, a friend of her father very senior to her age and a prosperous middle aged lawyer. He is a kindly, cultured, rational, practical and busy with with his own affair of business. He looks upon her love for good things as nothing more than sentimentalism and once make a disparaging remark about her that she has a mind of third rate poetess. Maya longs for companionship which to her despair she never finds in her marriage. The novel echoes in the cry of Maya the desire of a married woman to be loved with passion which few tend to get.
There is an identification of Maya with the peacocks that represent for her cries of love which simultaneously invite their death. Like her, they are the creators of exotic wild and will not rest till they have danced to their death. For her, they represent the revolutionary instinct of struggle for survival. She describes how they dance and the remarkable impact produced on her mind: "peacocks searching for mates, peacock tearing themselves to bleeding shreds in the act of love, peacocks screaming with -agony at the death of love. The night sky turned to a flurry of peacocks' tails, each star a staring eye."
Maya's preoccupation with death had been actually planted long ago in her childhood by the Albino astrologers prophecy fortelling of the death of either of the couple after the marriage. She being intensely in love with life turns hysteric over the creeping fear of death. "Am I gone insane. Father, Brother, Husband. Who is my serious? I am in need one. I am dying, God, let me sleep, forget, rest. But no I'll never sleep again. There is no rest anymore. Only death and waiting."

        Conclusion

Anita Desai is undoubtedly one of the major Indian English writers of her generations. If her reputation is established by her early portraits of domestic disharmony in traditional Indian families and the sufferings of women in a largely patriarchal world, her later novels demonstrate that she writes equally well about the world of men, about Indians abroad and about westerners in India. Above all she demonstrates again and again how gender issues are central to politics and the nation as well and in the family.