Feministic Analysis of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s selected stories in English Lessons and Other Stories

The present paper aims at exploration of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s specific technique implemented to present women predicament in selected stories from feministic point of view. The feministic point of view has developed out of a movement for equal rights and chances for women society. The present search is based on analytical and interpretative methods. Shauna Singh Baldwin is a writer of short fiction, poetry, novels and essays. Her ‘English Lessons and Other Stories’ explores the predicament of earlier neglected women of Sikh community by putting them in the context of globalization, immigration to West and consumerism at Indian modern society. “Montreal 1962” presents a Sikh wife’s attachment, love, determination, struggles and readiness to do anything for survival in Canada where her husband is threatened to remove his turban and cut his hair short to get the job. “Simran” presents the story of sacrifice of individual desire by a young Sikh girl because of her mother’s fundamentalist attitude. The title of story “English Lessons” presents injustice to an Indian woman who has married to an American, who compels her to become a prostitute and a source of his earnings in the States. The fourth selected story “Jassie” tells us about the timely need of religious tolerance in the file of an Indian immigrant old woman. Being a feminist writer, though Baldwin has never claimed directly to be, she has very skillfully presented the issues of feminism through her own technique of presentation. She has used technique of presenting absence or opposite to highlight it indirectly. Thus, true to her technique, though not explicitly declared, Baldwin is one of the feminist writers who skillfully deals with feminine concerns.

Dislocation, Displacement and Immigrant experience in the Short Stories of Shauna Singh Baldwin

The Indian Diaspora is a wonderful place to write from, and I am lucky to be a part of it-Kiran Desai Indian Women writers like Kiran Desai, BhartiMukherjeee, Chitra Banerjee, Jumpa Lahiri all are dealing with the issues of Diasporic Consciousness, dislocation, displacement and immigrant experiences in their writings. Shauna Singh Baldwin, a Canadian-American writer of Indian origin is one of the most significant writers of Indian diaspora writing experiences of Sikh community during partition of Indian and its aftermath. In molding the personality of Shauna Singh Baldwin, the concept of nation, home and belongingness to the place of origin finds an important role. She has adopted and assimilated the elements of both home and host cultures and that is clearly revealed through her writings. As she says: “I wrote because I needed to make sense of my world by describing it. Eventually the stories weren't about me and my experience, but about situations, problems, feelings, metaphors and images that just refuse to go away.”