ELTWeekly Vol. 3 Issue#100 | October 10 | ISSN 0975-3036

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Y. Priscilla works as an Assisstant Professor of English wit hSri Venkateswara Institute of Technology (SVIT), Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh.

The short story is a piece of fiction dealing with a single incident, material or spiritual, that can be read at one sitting; it is original; it must sparkle, excite, or impress; and it must have a unity of effect or impression. It must move in an even line from its exposition to its close. – Edgar Allen Poe.

It is interesting to unveil the images of woman in Indian literature because when put together, the picture in its totality makes for fascinating reading. Woman in India are still caught between feudal values and the fast approaching new life. Shuttling between the burden of home and workplace, child bearing, mothering, struggling with conventions, women have first to survive. The question of equality arises afterwards. In such transitional times characterized by flux, it is essential to identify the new areas of trouble and to check the imbalances.

The ‘new’ woman in Indian short story is emerging slowly, but she has to fight her way through self-effacing dependence, aggressive self-assertion and iconoclastic rage. The sexually free, wayward female is not the new woman if she imitates the male by turning the traditional values upside down. Her arrogant vindictiveness will be enormously inflated were she to follow man in his realm of aggression. What the new woman requires to achieve is the extraordinary power of her real self, as shown in some of the stories of Ajit Cour, Amrita Pritam, Priya Tendulkar, Manu Bhandari and Shashi Deshpande. (more…)