Unveiling Multiplicity: Postmodern Readings of Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night

Abstract

 The postmodern era saw a significant rise in the prominence and influence of women novelists in Indian English fiction. The second phase of women authors, belonging to the period of post-independence achieved a specific maturity in outlining socio-psychological issues of women showing a steady advancement from modernism to postmodernism. The novel of this period exhibited the entire of the Indian ethos that was resonating with the components of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. The emergence of Indian women fiction writers in English altogether grabbed the eye of the world during the postmodern period. These writers use their words against male macho common in the artistic world uncovering the facts of interior and exterior world. The modernists in the majority of their works have endeavoured to show a fragmented perspective of human life in gloomy way, while the postmodernists as opposed to regretting the fragmentation of life have endeavoured to commend it in their works. Githa Hariharan is a novelist who has taken an interest in gender related issues in Indian culture in an engaged manner and reaped benefits out of her industrious ordeal. By combining Indian mythology and modern elements of Indian culture, Githa Hariharan has succeeded in producing a postmodern novel The Thousand Faces of Night. This content presents us with three ladies whose different but similar stories cut crosswise over ages and cross boundaries of rank and class for a situation of great female bonding. This Paper will give a glimpse on the Postmodernistic perspectives in the chosen novel.