ABSTRACT
The dramatic presence of unique characters such as Mitro and Ratti in her fiction have drawn attention to women's experiences of body, pleasure and sexuality. While Hindi literary criticism recognises Krishna Sobti's representation of female body and desire in terms of a daring expression, in actual terms her focus is on the centrality of the body vis-á-vis the identity of her characters in a variety of ways. While the approaches may vary, it cannot be denied that at the core, it is the body that has a well-thought-out and serious focus in these novels. She depicts the female body as a site for violence and identifies the muted voices of the sexually abused. Ironically, the culture that takes pride in its dealings with the metaphysics of the body and the transcendence from it fails to assign space for the expression of the body. In Krishna Sobti's fictional writings, Mitro and Ratti represent two divergent expressions of body and sexuality.
