Voice of Protest against Discrimination in R. K. Narayan's Fictional Women Characters

Abstract

This research paper seeks to study R.K.Naryan as a writer voicing the discrimination and
emancipation of women in the Indian orthodox Hindu society where men hold a superior
position and women are confined to the home and hearth with all sorts and of taboos and
tradition clamped on them. The study shows that Indian women exist among conditions often
bordering on despair. Yet as the anxious manager of home and culture, she is on a ceaseless
quest for a credible meaning to life along with her male counterpart. But we cannot consider
Narayan a feminist in terms of western feminism because his attitude is shaped with a strong
Indian sensibility that stands to resist the possibility of any foreign cultural aggression in the
movement that he launches to being about a change in the status of Indian women. It's true
that Narayan favours the western notion of liberated women, but he also considers and
depicts in his novels, the perils of following western wave of movement for liberation and
freedom of women in India. He shapes this movement of women's freedom in India's own
traditional and religious perspectives by blending both tradition and modernity in the
contemporary context.