The Strong portrayal of feminism thoughts in Volga's work "Women Unbound".

 Volga is known for her feminist literary works. Her novels, articles, poems portray women with modern, progressive ideologies. She while keeping the quality of work maintains the reality of characters, intact. All of her novels were written while she was a full-time employee, rather than fully dedicating her time to the novels. 

Popuri Lalita Kumari, popularly known by her pen name Volga, is Telugu poet and writer well known for her feminist perspective. She writes about the politics woven around women s bodies without any fear and hesitation. Her works bastardize the canards that have controlled women s bodies, their thoughts, experience, expectations and desires.

 Her narrative technique is so explicit that it makes the readers sympathize with her characters as one does with one s acquaintances. Her stories disturb people, make them think, show them a new perspective not known earlier, persuade them to reanalyze the already known facts, show them a new path to see the male dominated society from women s point of view and give them new rules.

 But they don t contain the poetic beauty, satire, twist and euphemism which are considered as the common characteristics of stories. She has used narrative method or debatable form to give her readers an idea of the feminist movement. 

However her stories have not lacked humanity, sensitivity and feedback which are the common features of stories. As Kalpana Rentala puts it, - " Volga has explained in detail the male dominance which has indirectly exploited the women in families".

Through her stories Volga has pin pointed the multi faceted family tortures in the three faces of torture, body politics and their social outlook. Her stories bring the gender politics to discussion from the family background built on reality instead of putting them in theoretical form. Volga s works go beyond the Western 

conception of feminism and provide the strength and vision for Indian feminism portraying a zeal for a world with better human relationships shattering the myths woven around woman in the name of womanhood and motherhood. 

Through her writings she has proved that feminism is not confined to the problems of middle class or the upper class women alone but to the women of lower class and has written many stories centered around lower class women. 

She has proved through her stories that women of all ages irrespective of their caste and creed have been looked down by the patriarchal society and have been affected either directly or indirectly by it. 

Volga writes for the cause of women and has her own style of writing. Like Shashi Deshpande she too writes about tears in the lives of women. She does not portray the problems in the lives of women and leave them to the readers for scrutiny. 

She takes up the entire responsibility of identifying the causes and analyzing the reasons. She does not stop with that. She even gives out a solution for the problems. Her pen has the power to sharpen the reader s thoughts and ideas. She has given her readers, the scope to look at ordinary things with an extra-ordinary perspective.

She proudly calls herself a feminist writer and says that she writes to propagate the ideas of feminism. She says, - "I am a feminist. I proudly call myself as a soviet feminist. I am not a writer who writes for the sake of writing" . Further she says that : "women do not face problems only due to cruel husbands".

Feminism is a range of social movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that societies prioritize the male point of view, and that women are treated unjustly within those societies. 

Volga consider that feminist campaigns to be a main force behind major historical societal changes for women's rights and women had little or no access to education and were barred from most professions. In some parts of the world, such restrictions on women continue today. Gender stereotyping presents a serious obstacle to the achievement of real gender equality and feeds into gender discrimination.

The idealised stereotype of a female is one that places the needs of others particularly her children above her own career and self-interest. Moreover, behaviour that is socially acceptable amongst men often meets with social disapproval when done by women. 

According to Volga, women are more suppressed and stereotyped by male domination and social construct of femininity that matches the interests of a profoundly patriarchal system.

Keeping all this in mind, Volga created women characters that instead of asking for a place in the hearts of men or near their feet started asking for their identity as an individual. It is feminism which introduced identity politics to the middle class women.

She explains without the slightest hesitation all the experiences of a female body, which no other writer dares to. In a nutshell it can be said that she uses a surgical knife in analyzing and portraying the concerns of women. 

As a feminist writer she looks at women as human beings and not as wives, daughters, and mothers alone. Her gallery of women consists of mothers, mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law, daughters, sisters-in-law, working women, labour women, housewives, deserted women, divorcees, widows, spinsters, unmarried women and even unwed mothers. Most of them are teenage or middle class women. Through her stories Volga tries to portray the influence of society on the life of women. 

Volga's style of writing is to initiate the reader s thought and her specialty lies in establishing her principles through powerful stories. She analyses even the trivial matters in such an explicit way that the readers after reading them feel, how they have missed to observe it all these days.