ARRANGED MARRIAGE: AS AN EPITOME OF SOCIAL ISSUES

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, an Indian-American literary figure, has been constantly presenting innumerable themes such as immigration, Indian experience, contemporary America, alienation, women issues and their empowerment, history, myth, and the joys and challenges of living in a multicultural world through her short-stories collections, poetry and novels. Her writings reveal an exclusive blend of the two essentially distinct cultures and in this way she entertains her readers globally. In her award winning short-stories collection entitled Arranged Marriage, Divakaruni narrates eleven convincing stories which are though distinct in background, pattern and detail from each other but tied up in a single string of marriage. The present study tries to erect the conventional image of the women projected in some of the stories of this collection and this kind of depiction can be said to have its origins from the Indian traditional atmosphere which had been the habitat of the author and influenced her mental faculty to a great extent.