Thematic Spectrum in Anita Desai’s Major Novels

Anita Desai is one of the literary luminaries of the contemporary fiction writing in Indian English. As a novelist of notable merit, Anita Desai has enriched the thematic convention of the Indian English novel. Her novels present an explanation to the long smothered wail of a lacerated psyche. Most of her works engage the complexities of modern Indian culture from a feminine perspective while highlighting the female Indian predicament of maintaining self-identity as an individual woman. She delves deep into the psyche of her female characters where she finds them struggling to strike a balance between self and society. She leads her characters to a sense of loneliness and alienation in many cases, but in some other cases there is a strong desire to overpower this as well. In most of her works, she stressed on the lives of the Indian middle-class women as most of her female characters highlighted on their strained relationships. She presents the plight of introspective, hypersensitive women in her novels. This research article is an attempt to explore and examine thematic variety in Anita Desai’ novels.Her each work is an accelerating exploration of the psychic self and emphasizes on the alienation of man from an absurd world, his estrangement from normal society, and his recognition of the world as negative and meaningless. She presents the man as sensitive, individual, fragmented and spiritually destroyed by the particular social conditions of life