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Abstract
Prior to the rise of the novel, many Indian women composed poetry and short stories in Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada. Women were the chief upholders of a rich oral tradition of story-telling, through myths, legends, songs and fables. Once literacy began to filter through society, those stories were transformed into poetry and drama. The novel was not at first a common form, perhaps because the majority of women had less access to education than men.But in the last two decades there has been an astonishing flowering of Indian women writings, the literature of this period being published both in India and elsewhere. The authors are mostly educated middle-class women, who express in their writing their discontent with the plight of upper-caste and class traditional Hindu women trapped in repressive institutions such as child-marriage, dowry, prohibitions on women's education, arranged marriages, suttee and enforced widowhood.The issues of Identity and selfhood have become a very dominant theme in literature since the rise and development of feminism, which studies various problems of women and creates awareness among them. Feminism is a criticism of the prevailing social conditions, which have excluded women from the dominant male culture, social, sexual, political and intellectual pursuits. As women have experienced displacement and dislocations in personal lives, they are better suited for adaptability in an alien culture. The present paper is an attempt to have comparative analysis of three women writersfrom three different languages and examines the suffering embedded in the lives of Indian women and their experience portrayed in the novels of Bharati Mukherjee, Asha Bage and Usha Priyamvada.