PROJECTION OF WOMEN IN NAIPAUL’S INDIAN TRAVELOGUES

Abstract

This paper seeks to represent the Indian women in V.S. Naipaul’s Indian travelogues – An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization, and India: A Million Mutinies Now. Naipaul’s three books on India are not only a discourse of a diasporic individual who returns to his ancestral land to re-establish the severed ties with the homeland, but it is also a cultural, social, political, and economic representation of India towards the end of the nineteenth century. While portraying the lives of Indians in these three books, Naipaul has also portrayed how Indian women cope with the changing society. Through years of discrimination and subjugation holding them back, Indian women gradually stand up against the patriarchal society, and Naipaul’s on his three books on India record how these women cope with the changing societal norms.