Marriage, Divorce and Motherhood: Simrit as a New Woman in Nayantara Sahgal’s The Day in Shadow

Abstract

The concept of ‘new woman’ incorporates a ‘self-awareness’ or ‘feminist consciousness’ and an attitudinal transformation of woman to overcome oppression in her search for personal fulfillment and self-actualization. The term ‘new woman’ here in the context of Indian society refers to the educated self-dependent socioeconomically empowered daring woman who claims her individual rights, freedom, and dignity. In the process of self-actualization and self-fulfillment these new women articulate their “female” (Showalter, 1977:13) voice against the injustice and exploitation generally imposed on them in the traditional patriarchal social construction. Nayantara Sahgal, a post-independence Indian English novelist deals with such ‘new women’ characters who nurture unconventional sentiments and attitudes in most of her novels. The present paper aims at exploring the changing sensibility of contemporary urban Indian new woman through Simrit as reflected in Nayantara Sahgal’s The Day in Shadow (1971).