Along with a range of socio-cultural political and economic concerns the focus on 'self' has
been an inevitable assertion of writers during the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Individualistic in tone the contemporary women novelists are trying to portray realistically
the predicament of modern women torn between the forces of tradition and modernity their sense
of frustration and alienation the emotional and psychological turmoil and complexities of
man-women relationships and subtleties of feminine consciousness against the persistent
patriarchal social set-up. Cognizant of the evils originating from patriarchy a positive sense
of feminine identity has been recognized by them and the result is the emergence of a new woman
in Indian society and its concept in the Indian English novel which has assumed a strident
posture in the contemporary writings by women. The shift from submission to assertion
acquiescence to resistance and obedience to rebellion however has not been abrupt and
effortless. Women are still in the process of negotiation with different limiting factors and
thresholds of patriarchy to claim their due space and affirm their identity. The present study
is an attempt to critically investigate the negotiations with cultural norms by the women
characters in the selected novels by the contemporary novelists namely Manju Kapur and Anita
Nair. Almost all the women characters major and minor from the selected novels have been
considered and positioned as per their ideological leanings and convictions under two thematic
chapters namely Women in the Clutches of Traditional Norms and Tradition to Modernity. The
major issues around which the novels move - education marriage gendered space and
mother-daughter relationships - are taken up to put them within the contemporary social
conditions in which women characters live. The present book is divided into five chapters to
make a critical and analytical study of the select novels of these contemporary Indian women
writers in English. The present work is focused on five selected novels: Manju Kapur's
Difficult Daughters Home and Custody and Anita Nair's Ladies Coupé and Mistress.
