Most of the family members, especially in rural areas, develop negative opinion when a girl child is born in their family. They reckon with the fact that a day will come when the girl will leave her parents and will go to her in-laws forever. They consider her as a burden on them, that's why, from the very beginning, they teach their girls to understand their social status in comparison with that of boys. She is persuaded to conform, relentlessly to the preferred male code of behaviour. Theoritically the female chastity is honoured greatly but the reality is totally different. In real life women are humiliated, depersonalised and dominated. Usually at the time of the girl's marriage, the guardians don't comply with her and settle her marriage with a total stranger. After marriage a woman's fate is confined within the house. In lower classes of the society, the guardians arrange their daughter's marriage in early age. They train their daughters, from the very beginning, to become a 'pliant' , 'placid' and 'well-mannered' housewife who will fulfil her dreams by following the decrees of her husband. The woman has to devote herself to homelife and her spirit gets lost in the endless chores of the domestic duties. They list up all her activities in one single breath but doesn't quite evade the emptiness in her life. The marginality of the women is the handiwork of the indigenous power structure thriving on patriarchy, caste system and class-based privileges. Women in India have sometimes been exalted as a doll or kept down and oppressed. Mulk Raj Anand has successfully depicted the marginality of women in his first novel Untouchable , which was published in 1935 and was described as a minor classic. He not only introduces us to the world of outcasts but also underlines the subalternity of women as they suffer under the class structure which is prevalent in the society. In Indian society, a person’s caste is a decisive factor of his position in power structure. Similar issue has been raised by Arundhati Roy in her debut novel The God of Small Things, which bagged her the prestigious Booker Prize for literature. In this paper an attempt has been made to analyse Mulk Raj Anand’s and Arundhati Roy’s exploration of the marginality of women characters in their novels.
Research Scholar, Department of English, Magadh University, Bodh-Gaya
