In conventional societies like India's, for woman to liberate herself from the overbearing patriarchy and to find her own voice to express her thoughts, to invent her own ways to manage her 'self' is a long and grueling journey against female-subservience, self-sacrifice, and self-denial. Several stories of the well-known Urdu writer Ismat Chugtai and of renowned Indian writer in English Shashi Deshpande are concerned not only with social and psychological problems affecting middle-class Indian

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... women, but bring about the complexity of their situations and their changing attitudes to and their abilities in confronting those situations. Their stories reveal the manifestation of woman's diplomatic ways of negotiating with her life in order to gain autonomy over her body and mind, to have the freedom to decide her own identity released from all conditionings, freeing her from sex-determined roles and performances, in spite of what she has to many times face as consequences.