Department of English & Modem European Languages, Lucknow University, Lucknow.
“Most of my writing comes out of my own intense and long suppressed feelings about what it is to be a woman in our society, it comes out of my experience of the difficulty of playing roles enjoined on me by society, it comes out of the knowledge that I am something more and something different from the sum total of these roles. My writing comes out of my consciousness of the conflict between my idea of myself as a human being and the idea that society has of me as a woman. All this makes my writing very clearly women's writing… for quite a while, I believed-a belief that came from all around me-that men's lives are more important, more significant and therefore, that serious writing is done by men and is about men, that women's writing, like their lives, somehow lacks weight and substance. That there was something embarrassing about such writing and one had to feel apologetic about it. For long, I had to fight against the feeling that my writing is second-class writing for the sole reason that it is about women. My writing has been categorized as ‘writing about women’ or ‘feminist’ writing. In this process, much in it has been missed. I have been denied the place and dignity of a writer who is dealing with issues that are human issues, of interest to all humanity.”1
