Shobha De's Socialite Evenings: A Yearning for Sophisticated and Fulfilled Life

The enduring theme of Socialite Evenings is a search for identity who finds fulfillment and self in a creative occupation. The female character's hatred towards a middle class pedantic life and inadequate facilities that run throughout their life, forces them to yearn for a sophisticated life. The unfed hunger to lead a happy and prosperous life makes the characters to compromise everything, as they get all the financial security and the luxuries they cannot do without. Women characters find that the freedom to do what they like gives them absolute joy. Wealth and its accompanying social status is therefore constantly sought, displayed and reinforced by the heroines. This paper is an attempt to show how Shobha De has portrayed the women characters who first yearn for a sophisticated life but later are contented with the life they have in the first novel, Socialite Evenings.