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Ashapurna Devi's writings Now, let us discuss another popular women writer, Ashapurna Devi. She has focus on the revival of a reformed traditional womanhood that would accommodate women's need for self-expression. Like Desai and Bhandari, she considers education of women to be of utmost importance. She does so because she sees women, and not just men, as agents of female oppression. Therefore, she is more critical of women than she is of men, who she feels are able to dominate women because dependent and insecure older women like mothers and mothers-in-law help them to do so. In her Trilogy, 'Pratham Pratishruti', Subarna Lata and Bakul Katha.
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| Ashapurna Devi |
Ashapurna Devi traces the progression of the feminist movement from colonial to post-colonial periods in India. She finds that the contemporary, educated and economically independent women, like Bakul in Bakul Katha, the last part of her trilogy, have become more self-centred than, the women of earlier generations, like Satyavati and Subarna Lata in Pratham Pratishruti and Subarna Lata respectively. More importantly and ironically, Ashapurna Devi finds that their freedom has not brought them closer to other women. Ashapurna Devi advocates a re-vision of traditional community where the relations between men and women and between older and younger women are not based on the subservience of one to the other, but where women enjoy the same rights and privileges as men in an affirmation of human values. To get peace at home Ashapurna Devi wants women to break the walls of psychological imprisonment located inside them. The community, for Ashapurna Devi, should become the foundation that would free women by providing them the solid ground to stand firmly. She shows how the individual or smaller self finds liberation from pain and isolation.