Women suffering from Identity Crisis: A Study ofManju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters and Custody

Abstract

The word ‘Identity’ is generally believed to be a ‘distinctive’ characteristic belonging to any given individual or a group. A person spends his/her whole life searching for identity or creating it as per his/her desire which is of course, opposite to the age-old established identity and this contradiction results in identity crisis. In the Post Independent era, the concept of identity and identity crisis came to be one of the major areas of interest and highly adopted subject for the writers of Indian English Fiction.
Manju Kapur one of the most famous modern Indian English women novelists has delineated women who suffer from identity crisis because their definition of ‘self’ or ‘identity’ is against the social and traditional norms. The research discusses how the author has attempted to draw out the social, emotional and psychological causes of identity crisis through her leading female characters in two of her novels named Difficult Daughters and Custody.