About Author
Contemporary Indian English literature has indexed many novelists who are writing open-handedly, thought-provoking, and iconoclastic novels. Anita Nair is one of the celebrated Indian English novelists who stands apart from novelists of the popular contemporary Indian English novels. She has authored some well know novels like Ladies Coupé, Mistress, Lessons in Forgetting, Idris: Keeper of the Light. Theses novels have attracted wide readerships across the world and popular amongst critics and thus got wide critical acclaim across the world. Ladies Coupe, published by Penguin Books in 2001, is also one of the remarkable novels from the contemporary galaxy of English novels. Like Canterbury Tales, Ladies Coupe has narrated stories of female existence in the society where women are expected to carry out a predefined set of responsibilities throughout their life. Here we have six female characters to tell the stories of their lives who come from different walks of life, each of them has complaints to their relatives. although the novelist did not claim it as a feministic novel, readers and critics have, sometimes, labeled as a feministic novel that deals with the elements of feminism and existentialism. the novel is set in a train - coach in which, as of today ladies coach, a ladies coupe is reserved only for the female in those days. In the novel, Ladies Coupe has become a battleground for Akhila, the protagonist of the novel, who sets a heroic journey to justify her ways of life by supplying her arguments to other members of the Ladies coupe. Anita Nair has attempted to charge such social norms, by suppling her ardent desire for an ideal lifestyle that suits her most, in this novel. Unlike other contemporary novels that impose unwanted feminism, heterogeneity, and far fetched ideas that seem very alien to this domain, Ladies Coupe stands far ahead and excavates the buried impulse of female life that tries to break through and become a free being. As novelist herself does not claim as a feministic novel that, to some extent, stands true while reading the novel, it comes on the way that the discrimination between males and females is not quite noticeable as the theory of feminism entails.
About Novel
Ladies Coupe, unlike a traditional feministic novel that demands the equality between the male and female identities of the society, tries to break through and goes on psychological equality and female existence as a free being, not as subordinate to her counterpart. The novel begins with a journey to Kanyakumari on Udyan express in which Akhila meets six other members of the ladies coupe, and she tries to seek their experiences and their realizations, how they perceive other family members in the family lives whether it is male or female. In the ladies coupe, Akhila with her five other members that board and deboard at the different railway stations. the other five members: Prabha Devi, Janki, Margaret Shanthi, Sheela, and Marikolanthu; each of them has a story that haunts them and suffocates them, prompting them to look for their peculiar longing for freedom, this is the very idea that novelist has dealt with.
Critical Opinion
Thus, through the novel, Nair has become a mouthpiece for the female existence that demands female emancipation. Seeking this liberty, she goes to such an extent that she tries to erase the conception of family and relatives. The novelist, moving one step ahead of her time, tries to defy the social norms and social pattern in which everybody has their own importance and value in the social ties. As a Chick Lit, it may inspire a selective section of the readership and writers as well. But on a large scale, it could not stand on the circle of serious fiction which has something to do with reality. perhaps it has no inspirational whims that could inspire women to live a dignified life. off the line, Anita Nair is very prominent for her writing among the contemporary Indian women writers.
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