CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT CONTENTS

CHAPTERS
INTRODUCTION KAMALA MARKANADAYA AS AUTHOR TWO VIRGINS INDIAN FEMINISM SEXUAL HARASSMENT CONCLUSION

APPENDIX
BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Kamala Markandaya (1924 - May 16, 2004) was a pseudonym used by Kamala Purnaiya Taylor, an Indian novelist and journalist. A native of Mysore, India, Markandaya was a graduate of Madras University, and afterwards published several short stories in Indian newspapers. After India declared its independence, Markandaya moved to Britain, though she still labeled herself an Indian expatriate long afterwards. Known for writing about culture clash between Indian urban and rural societies, Markandaya's first published novel, Nectar in a Sieve, was a bestseller and named a notable book of 1955 by the American Library Association. Other novels include Some Inner Fury (1955), A Silence of Desire (1960), Possession (1963), A Handful of Rice (1966), The Nowhere Man (1972), Two Virgins (1973), The Golden Honeycomb (1977), and Pleasure City (1982/1983). Kamala Markandaya belonged to that pioneering group of Indian women writers who made their mark not just through their subject matter, but also through their

fluid, polished literary style. "Nectar in a Sieve" was her first published work, and its depiction of rural India and the suffering of farmers made it popular in the West. This was followed by other fiction that dramatized the Quit India movement in 1942, the clash between East and West and the tragedy that resulted from it, or the problems facing ordinary middle-class Indiansmaking a living, finding inner peace, coping with modern technology and its effects on the poor. Markandaya died in London on May 16, 2004. Kamala Markandaya had great hopes for India. Her most famous novel, Nectar in a Sieve, told the story of woman who faced incredible hardships yet never ceased to dream of a better life. Nectar, which takes its title from a poem by Samuel Coleridge, is typical of Markandayas forward-thinking perspective. It became an instant classic and a staple of college literature coursework. Drawing comparisons to Thomas Hardys novels, Nectar in a Sieve is anchored by a strong female character. The protagonists optimism serves dual purposes. It allows Markandaya the writer to imagine a better future both for the characters and the country, yet it also renders the realities and

disappointments all the more real in light of such blind faith. Essential Facts : 1. The name Kamala Markandaya is actually a pseudonym. The authors real name is Kamala Purnaiya Taylor. 2. Markandaya came from a very upper-class family. They were members of the Brahmins, the highest order of the Indian caste system. 3. Markandaya studied history while at the University of Madras and later worked in journalism. Both disciplines had a major impact on the cultural examinations that characterized her work. 4. Much of the criticism devoted to Markandayas work has been focused on its postcolonial overtones and the ways in which India has evolved since its independence from British rule. 5. Despite her interest in writing about Indian identity and culture, Markandaya herself was an expatriate, living in England for most of her life. She died there in 2004.

KAMALA MARKANDAYA
Kamala Markandaya is one of the best of contemporary Indian novelists. Her novels are remarkable for their range of experience. Nectar in a Sieve is set in a village and examines the hard agricultural life of the Indian peasant; Some Inner Fury, which includes a highly educated woman and her English lover who are torn apart by the Quit India campaign of the time, has to do with the quarrel between Western and Indian influences, as they are focussed in a marriage; A Silence of Desire deals with the middle class, and A Handful of Rice with the city poor; Possession moves from the West End of London to a South Indian village, and is centred on the conflict of Eastern spirituality with Western materialism; The Coffer Dams is a highly contemporary examination of the activities of a British engineering firm which is invited to build a dam in India. Markandaya has not the same intimacy and familiarity with all these areas of life, and she has indeed been criticised by Indian critics for a certain lack of inwardness with the life of the Indian poor. Her particular strength lies in the delicate analysis of the relationships of persons, particularly when these have a

more developed consciousness of their problems, and particularly when they are attempting to grope towards some more independent existence. She has, too, the genuine novelist's gift for fixing the exact individuality of the character, even if she is less successful at establishing it in a reasonably convincing social context. She has been most successful and at her best, an impressive best, in dealing with the problems of the educated middle class, and she has a gift in particular for delineating the self-imposed laceration of the dissatisfied. Perhaps Markandaya's most achieved and characteristic work is A Silence of Desire. It is a delicate, precise study of husband and wife, although the wife has less actuality than the husband, Dandekar, a nervy, conscientious, petty government clerk. He is rocked off his age-old balance by his wife's strange absences, excuses, and lies. It turns out that she has a growth and is attending a Faith Healer. The husband is by no means a Westernised person, but he is to some degree secular and modern, and the situation enables the author to reflect on the tensions, the strength and the inadequacies and aspirations of middle-class Indian life. The book is gentle in tone but sharp in perception, and the mixture of moods, the friction of faith and

reason, the quarrel of old and young, are beautifully pointed. There are conventional, perfunctory patches in the novel, but Markandaya shows a very high skill in unravelling sympathetically but unflinchingly the structure of the protagonist's motives and the bumbling and stumbling progress of his anxieties. Towards the end of A Silence of Desire there occurs a suggestion in an encounter between Sarojini and Dandekar, the husband and wife, of a theme which clearly much engages Markandaya. The wife reverences the tulasi tree as embodying the divine spirit, whereas the husband understands its purely symbolic function. "You with your Western notions, your superior talk of ignorance and superstition you don't know what lies beyond reason and you prefer not to find out. To you the tulasi is a plant that grows in earth like the rest an ordinary common plant." She is preoccupied with the opposition between a cerebral, Westernand, she seems to be suggesting, a narrowly Benthamitehabit of mind and the more inclusive, the more ancient and ritualistic Indian sensibility. This is a theme which works its way in and out of Possession, in which the artist Valmiki is discovered and taken over by Lady Caroline Bell, a relationship which appears to offer itself as a tiny image of India's being taken over by

Britain. Neither Valmiki nor Lady Caroline is irresistibly convincing. There is a certain put-up, slightly expected, air about them. The novel's merit lies in the clarity and point of the prose, in an unusual metaphorical capacity and in a gift for the nice discrimination of human motives. Markandaya's failure as yet is to establish a context as impressively real and as sympathetically grasped as her central characters. She is very much more conscious in A Handful of Rice of the context, in this case an urban one, which nevertheless still suffers from a lack of solidity. Ravi, on the other hand, the central character, an educated peasant, is seen with the coolest and most accurate eye and realised with a very considerable creative skill. Nor does this novel offer any easy solution or any obvious superiority of one side of a spiritual dilemma over the other. The novel ends flatly and hopelessly but rightly in a way which suggests the achievement by the author of a bleaker and more necessary kind of wisdom.

TWO VIRGINS
In this book "Two Virgins" Kamala Markandaya takes us into the lives of two sisters who gradually bloom and are on the threshhold of physical maturity set in the background of post Independence India. Kamala navigates very deftly into the lives of Saroja and Lalitha and makes her characters breathe so realistic. It is a story of awakening, exploring a time when a child, through events beyond her control, loses her childhood naivete, descriptively termed as her "bubble". An adult book with a timeless story that explores childhood, womanhood, poverty, abortion, prostitution and humanity in a chaotic world.

Two Virgins is about the depiction of life in an Indian village- and a young girl's "seduction" by the city. However, it can be witnessed that the older sister is quite unbelievable and not at all sympathetic.

About the Book : 'She tossed and turned, her body an alien creature full of strange, strong impulses beyond her control. Saroja lives in a village with her parents, aunt and beautiful elder sister Lalitha. Sarojas life is uncomplicated, and simple things give her joy like the birth of a calf or a taste of one of Chingleputs sweets. Lalitha, on the other hand, believes she is too good for the village. Ambitious and spoilt, she has dreams of being a movie star that are fulfilled when a film-maker casts her in his documentary on village life. Overnight Lalitha becomes the talk of the town; her latent sexuality manifests itself and she uses her elevated status to her advantage. Basking in Lalithas reflected glory Saroja tries to imitate her womanly wiles, which results in confused ideas about sexuality and ambition. But when the family is faced with a scandal, Saroja emerges with a practical outlook on life.

Sarojas life in the sense uncomplicated means that at that point of life she was not having any sort of worldly tensions. She was overjoyed by the visualization of simple things like birth of calf, by

taste of sweets..etc which depicts here that at that point of time her mind set is similar to that of a small child who feels free to enjoy each passing moment of his life.

On the other context, Sarojas elder sister Lalitha is more concerned and conscious with her beauty, which she greatly admires as one of her inseparable qualities. She becomes ambitious and dares to dream, of becoming a great movie star. She achieves her aim and becomes famous due to her latent sexuality. Saroja tries to imitate her to become like that but in her way she gets confused and takes the wrong path,on which she later repents when the family is faced with the scandal but this happening provides her a practical outlook on life.

Indian feminism
The concept of feminism has been controversial in India and other developing nations for a number of reasons. On the one hand, traditionalists argue that it alienates women from their culture, religion and family responsibilities; while some on the left see it as a diversion from the more important class struggle or the struggle against the Western cultural and economic imperialism. Underlying both views is the assumption that feminism is an essentially Western ideology. There are different types of feminisms (liberal feminism, Marxist feminism, French feminism, etc.), and the very meaning of the term feminism is continually being contested. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as advocacy of the rights of women based on the theory of equality of the sexes. Some feminists, however, emphasise difference rather than equality, and some wish to challenge masculine values themselves rather than grant women equal rights within a male-oriented culture. My own understanding of feminism is based not so much on what it is as on what it does: it seeks to analyse and

redress the power imbalance between the sexes. It takes on different forms in different contexts, based as it is on various critical analyses of male privilege and womens subordination within different societies. At times the novels can also function on a metaphorical level as exemplified by my discussion of Two Virgins (1973) in which I suggest that the character Saroja can be seen in some ways as emblematic of Indian feminism during the 1970s. The historical reasons for this resistance to feminism in India extend well back into the nineteenth century, when the woman question was a central issue in debates over reform in India. Enamoured of their civilising mission, influential British writers like James Mill condemned Indian religions, culture and society for their rules and customs regarding women. Indeed, a significant tool used by colonial ideology to prove the inferiority of the subject population was the question of the status of women, as reported by Christian missionaries who argued that the moral inferiority of Indians was demonstrated by their barbaric treatment of women. Thus one of the main justifications for British rule in India was the argument that Indian women required the protection and intervention of the colonial state.

There was no uniform movement for reform of gender practices, but different campaigns on specific issues were taken up at different times in different parts of India. The main issues included sati ( widow burning ), Female infanticide, child marriage, purdah (female seclusion) and restrictions on female education. Markandayas Two Virgins (1973) draws attention to the sense of sexual threat that pervades the lives of young girls in India, and this widespread problem of sexual harassment (or eve-teasing, as it is called in India).

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SEXUAL HARASSMENT
The key to what constitutes sexual harassment is that it is, unwanted, unwelcome and unasked-for behaviour of a sexual nature. Sexual harassment is a display of power which is intended to intimidate, coerce or degrade another worker. These are some examples of sexual harassment: Physical > Touching, pinching, stroking, squeezing, or brushing against someone > Leering or ogling > Making homophobic comments and sexually suggestive signals, winking > Sending unwanted e-mails, text messages, posting sexually-explicit jokes on an office intranet. > Unnecessary physical contact and touching > Physical assault Verbal > Making sexual comments or innuendos, > Telling sexual jokes, or asking about sexual fantasies > Making insults based on a persons sex or rating their sexuality

> Turning work discussions to sexual topics > Requests for sexual favours, often related to promotion Non-verbal > Displaying pictures, calendars, PC desktop wallpaper or other sexually explicit material > Sending anonymous letters > Whistling Other > Forcing women to work unsociable hours, which could make travel to work dangerous

WHAT IS SEXUAL HARASSMENT ?? Sexual harassment at work is an issue which trade unions should actively deal with, as it is usually the result of power relations in the workplace, so the most vulnerable and least protected workers are most likely to be under threat. 1. Who are the victims ? Most sexual harassment is carried out by men against women. Sexual harassment affects women regardless of age, relationship, disability, physical appearance, background or professional status. Sexual harassment

does not affect women alone, as men can also be victims. However, women are more vulnerable due to their position on the labour market. In developing countries and industrialised ones too, womens employment continues to be typified by part-time, lowpaid, atypical, sub-contracted, unregulated, unprotected, temporary or casual work. Sexual harassment takes place in all countries in the world. It seems to be increasing or perhaps it is just no longer tolerated, and therefore more likely to be reported as more women, particularly younger women, enter the workplace. However, the issue of sexual harassment is often difficult to raise and difficult to prove. Women workers, particularly those in the informal economy, export processing zones and domestic workers are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and harassment. In both developing and industrialised countries migrant workers are at risk because of the problems of getting work, social isolation, and inability to stick up for themselves because

they are often unable to express themselves properly in the countrys language to object or complain about the way they are being treated. 2. Who are the harassers? Sexual harassment can be perpetrated by colleagues, supervisors, management or clients, and it usually takes the form of suggestive remarks and requests for sexual favours and compromising invitations. The harasser may be of the same sex as the victim.

The social, human and economic costs of sexual harassment at work

Sexual harassment also has a detrimental effect on the workplace itself. As it affects workers morale it makes them less efficient. In the US, ignoring problems of sexual harassment can cost a large company up to US$ 6.7 million a year in low productivity, low morale, and employee turnover and absenteeism, not including legal costs.

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CONCLUSION
In this book "Two Virgins" Kamala Markandaya takes us into the lives of two sisters who gradually bloom and are on the threshhold of physical maturity set in the background of post Independence India. Kamala navigates very deftly into the lives of Saroja and Lalitha and makes her characters breathe so realistic. It is a story of awakening, exploring a time when a child, through events beyond her control, loses her childhood naivete, descriptively termed as her "bubble". An adult book with a timeless story that explores childhood, womanhood, poverty, abortion, prostitution and humanity in a chaotic world.

Two Virgins is about the depiction of life in an Indian village- and a young girl's "seduction" by the city. However, it can be witnessed that the older sister is quite unbelievable and not at all sympathetic.

The societal problems concerned with this novel are : sexual harassment that is the so called eve teasing. Hi darling," says the leering man brushing past me, his outstretched hand inches from my chest. Before I can respond, he disappears into the crowds. Walking through a crowded market, I ignore catcalls and avoid eye contact. When I stop for a roadside snack, the vendor begins humming a lewd Hindi film song. This is "eve-teasing," as it is called in India. It is a deceptively inoffensive name for the offensive sexual harassment that most Indian women have to brave daily. Most harassers back down when confronted, but there's always the exception. This past February, a 52year-old woman in the northern Indian town of Lucknow was shot dead for protesting against the harassment of her daughter-in-law. Every so often there are reports of harassers throwing acid at their victims. At the very least, I worry about the harasser stalking me or returning with a group of his friends.

Braver Women But there are braver women out there. For the past three years, Indian women (and a few men) in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi and Chennai have been tackling sexual harassment head on. They are part of Blank Noise, a still tiny but gradually growing nationwide movement. They do this in several ways: through "interventions" in which they stand on the street in groups (as harassers often do), by posting photos of harassers on the Internet, and through performance art. Blank Noise believes--as do similar U.S. groups Hollaback NYC and Hollaback Boston--that photographing molesters and talking about harassment helps women take control. Says artist and founder Jasmeen Pathija, "I remember feeling horrified when people said, 'Yes, it happens, but it's no big deal.' It was something women took as a given." On the group's blog, women talk about being harassed, some when they were as young as 9. They also mention the brazen responses from harassers when they were confronted. "I think you are beautiful. I have two eyes. I will stare at you." "What law can stop a man from talking to a woman?" Or the unhelpful responses from

police and bystanders: "Stop walking on the road then" or "Men will be men." The Indian Penal Code bans words, gestures or actions intended to "insult the modesty" of a woman, as well as assault or using criminal force with the intent to "outrage her modesty." Offenders can be imprisoned for up to a year. Modesty Is Still a Weapon But the antiquated phrasing of the law is significant. Modesty is still a weapon used to bludgeon victims of sexual harassment and rape. In April 2005, a 17-yearold college girl was raped on Marine Drive--a popular Mumbai promenade--by a policeman. The Shiv Sena, a powerful local political party that controls large sections of Mumbai, condemned the rape, but also added that women should not wear revealing clothes and mingle with men. This attitude allows harassers to escape blame. The victim's clothes, her companions, her occupation and her habits are all used to put her on trial. In February this year, Farah Khanum, a student of the prestigious Aligarh Muslim University, was warned against wearing Western clothes and told to wear a

dupatta, a long scarf used to cover the head and shoulders. When she continued to wear Western clothes, she was accosted by two men. The student union warned her of "dire consequences" if she continued her campaign against sexual harassment and the university accused her of being a troublemaker. Considering this widespread tacit approval of harassment, very few women actually fight back. Hemangini Gupta, a journalist and participant in Blank Noise, is one of them. On an overnight train journey in June 2005, she was molested by a man who repeatedly touched her breasts and legs when she was asleep. Police Complaint Drags On She filed a police complaint, despite the ticket collector and police pleading with her not to "ruin the man's life." She says she got no support from the other passengers and the police refused to believe her at first. After Gupta filed "paperwork in triplicate" the investigation has dragged on for a year and a half; the outcome remains uncertain. Why do Indian men harass women? Everyone has a theory, but I suspect that the root of the problem is that women's lives are changing. Women are increasingly venturing out of the home, taking jobs,

wearing Western clothes, going to college. Many Indian men feel threatened by this, and sexual harassment is the easiest way to put a woman in her place, or as Gupta puts it, "to assert their traditionally unquestioned male rights." "Women have to be asexual beings," agrees Pathija from Blank Noise, "because if they are sexual then they're asking for it." Or maybe, just maybe, Indian men harass women because they can.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY :
MARKANDAYA, KAMALA ----------------1. TWO VIRGINS. 2. NECTAR IN A SIEVE. 3. A HANDFULL OF RICE. 4. THE GOLDEN HONEYCOMB. 5. PLEASURE CITY. (ONLY SUMMARY OF OTHER BOOKS) MYNENI, S.R.---------------SOCIOLOGY OF LAW SHAH,M.P -------------------EVILS IN SOCIETY.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I express my deep gratitude to Prof.S.C.Roy for giving me the opportunity to prepare project on Feminist movement in Kamala Markandayas Two Virgins . I was tremendously benefitted by the valuable suggestions,help and support of Roy sir. I take this opportunity to convey my sincere thanks to all those who helped me in some or the other way in preparing this project. Last but not the least I am sincerely thankful to my parents and almighty god constituting my backbone of courage,support and passion by whose blessings obstacales of my path turn into roses.

Kamala markandaya (1924----2004)