Vol. 4, Issue 1, Part A (2022)

This paper examines how gender, caste (and caste-adjacent social stratification), and power intersect and operate in selected novels of Anita Desai. Working through close readings of Cry, The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain, Clear Light of Day, In Custody, and Fasting, Feasting, the study argues that Desai's fiction registers the everyday enactments of power in domestic spaces, cultural institutions, and the marketplace of language. The analysis foregrounds Desai’s persistent attention to female interiority and its containment within kinship and caste-inflected hierarchies; it also considers how class and ritual status function as often-implicit proxies for caste in her predominantly urban and small-town settings. Using feminist and intersectional frameworks, the paper demonstrates that Desai’s narrative strategies-psychological focalization, fragmented temporality, and an understated pastoral/diasporic contrast-render visible the entanglement of personal trauma and structural subordination. The study concludes that while Desai is primarily a novelist of consciousness and family, the social texture of her fiction exposes how gendered power is enforced, negotiated, and sometimes subverted through ritual, language, and economic dependency.