The Cultural Impact in the Contemporary Society and Representation of Womanhood as Depicted in Gita Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night

Abstract

Gita Hariharan is the most notable woman writer in India. She adopted her own style of writing to record her own experiences of hurt and humiliations. She is also a social activist known for her concern for women she challenged the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act in the supreme court of India in 1995 and obtained a remarkable judgement in the modern era of the Indian History. She has explored the problems and challenges faced by women in the Indian society. She discussed the status of women, their life-style, and their state of living, their identity, and their social responses. And through her novels, she portrayed the women characters in all the spheres of social life and further she has disclosed how women were being treated in the male-dominated society. Her novels exhibit the actual condition of women as they are directed and guided through their rigid social system and communal set-up. Her works have been translated into many languages. In this regard, her first novel The Thousand Faces of Night deals with the problems and challenges of women who are struggling a lot to identify themselves in the male-centred Indian society. The novel narrates the story of three different women highlighting their expectation and their reality of life as they are being caught between tradition and culture. Each one of them facing a unique challenges in finding their own place and identity. Distinguished by its lyrical prose style, the novel charts the precarious course of three women’s journeys through the routes of Indian social norms.