The Privileged Man and the Subjugated Woman-A Study of Appropriation in Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel

Abstract

The patriarchal attitude of Indian society has always made women a puppet in a man's hands. Man is the foremost governing factor who appropriates, exploits, and subjugates women and assigns them a secondary position in the household. Society influences the literature; therefore, the man as the oppressor and the woman as a sufferer became a prevalent theme of the contemporary writer's pen. This paper critically analyses how the men appropriate women in one way or the other in Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel. The novel is a mythological retelling of the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, set in the era of the Indian Independence Movement and modern politics. The concept of appropriation of women by Collette Guillaumin has been applied as a theoretical framework. After thoroughly reading the selected text, relevant sentences and passages have been cited as textual evidence. The research findings indicate that the text understudy affirms women's appropriation.