Projection of Women in the Short Stories of Kamala Das and Mulk Raj Anand with Refenece to Patriarchal System

Patriarchy, as a system, works smoothly through the social institutions such as marriage, motherhood and family. It prevents women from realizing their productive and creative possibilities by keeping women entirely busy in the web of the institutions mentioned above. The basic view is that our society is patriarchal that is, its male-centered and is controlled, organized and conducted in such a way as to subordinate women to men in all cultural domains such as familial, religious, political, economic, social, legal and artistic. My attempt is to view this with reference to the short stories, 1. Parboti's story,2. The Cattle Market by Kamala Das, 3 Lajawanti by Mulk Raj Anand. This paper focuses on the role played by Patriarchal system. Patriarchy works as a system which pressurizes woman and exerts force on them in order to move her away from her own self. Marriage, motherhood and family campaign for patriarchal system. At certain point of time woman struggles to rediscover her lost self. It also attempts to see how the women characters are projected by the writers in the works selected for the paper and how they are victimized by patriarchal system; how they struggle to overcome the challenges posed by the well organized system in order to create awareness among themselves regarding their state and to rediscover their lost selves. To see that many things are infused with masculine assumptions, interests and ways of reasoning and to vision those as thoroughly gender-biased.