Masculine Sovereignty and Family Relationship in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day

Abstract

Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day depicts gruesome picture of partition violence perpetrated upon women during the partition of India in 1947. Since females become the extreme sufferer during the apocalyptic events of partition, the study is analyzed from the perspective of feminism. By dramatizing, the politics of partition and the consequential violence inflicted upon women, the novelist has fore grounded the pathetic condition of women at the time of war. However, in Clear Light of Day, Desai highlights women’s emancipation, but without showing the resolution of the difficulties of their protagonists. The central consciousness, Bimla in Clear light of Day whose self is wounded and called just only Bim; suffered by the callous behavior of her parents and her brother, very often compares her relations and their memory to mosquitoes. Thus, comparison is the real reflection of Indian society where male values marginalize female existence. In short, Desai exposes the male domination in a patriarchal society.