Paper Title
A Study of the Image of Man in Mahasweta Devi’s Rudali and Shobha De’s Socialite Evenings

Abstract
The Western feminists greatly influenced the women of the East and contributed a lot to the emergence of New Woman in India. The democratic liberal ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft and J.S. Mill had already brought the concept of woman empowerment. In the Post-colonial era, Indian women for the first time realized that activism is an agent of social change. Authors like Mahasweta Devi, Sara Joseph, and Arundhati Roy, Arun Joshi, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Bharti Mukherjee, Kamala Dass, Kiran Desai, Shobha Dee, Manju Kapur and Rupa Bajwa are committed to serve the society as they wrote fiction to extend their hands to the poor and the marginalized people. They believed that art is a major weapon to fight with the forces of patriarchy, injustice, and male domination. But the soaring wrath against the dominant patriarchal structures and male supremacy resulted in prejudiced and one-sided (at times even deliberately malicious) depiction of man in the works of these writers. The present paper makes a comparison of handling of the image of man by Mahasweta Devi (a Bengali writer) and Shobha De (an Indo-English woman novelist). The comparison is based on the close textual analysis of Devi’s celebrated work Rudali and De’s Socialite Evenings. Keywords - Western Feminism, Image, Patriarchy, Women Empowerment