Paradigms of the New Woman in Gita Mehta’s Raj

Abstract

Gita Mehta, in her works, has dealt with the contradiction of the old and the new as a noteworthy factor of the Indian culture. Scholars believe that the factors of tradition and Modernity do not negate but complement each other and work in unison for the progression of a personality or society. The binary of tradition and modernity is noticeable in the personality of the woman in the novel Raj. The present paper is an attempt to explore the psyche of Jaya, the woman protagonist of the novel, to understand the interplay of these two factors and to study how a traditional woman grows out of shackles, by rejecting the outrageous traditions and embracing positive norms of modernity.