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Abstract

Taboo is formally defined as “a social or religious custom prohibiting or restricting a particular practice or forbidding association with a particular person, place or thing”. It is a prohibition of social actions based on the beliefs of the society. Such prohibitions are present in all societies. Taboos are often meant to protect the individuals or community, but when all the members are not given equal protection and when applied only to one individual or one subsection of the community it can serve to suppress the other person or the community. Thus, the dominant sections will be responsible for framing taboos and imposing taboos on the weaker sections of the society. There are different approaches to this concept of taboo namely social taboos, cultural taboos, religious taboos, gender taboos and sexual taboos. Manju Kapur, the celebrated novelist of Indian English Literature has fore grounded an imaginative impression of human life, human relations, social systems, political and religious institutions and the culture and customs of the time through her novels. She vigorously deals with the taboo issues like sexual assault, female sexuality, masturbation, sexual disability, divorce, abortion, adultery, extra marital relations and incestuous abuse. The focus of her novels is on the resistance of the characters within the territory of home, society and culture. The characters try to reveal the resistance to the existing taboos in the society. The paper intends to study the dynamics of resistance shown by the characters as seen in the novels Difficult Daughters and A Married Woman by Manju Kapur. The characters, Virmati, Ida, Shakuntala, Astha and Pipeelika reveal resistance in relation to their home, society and culture and they transcend themselves from the taboos of the society

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