The reasons why Europeans were seeking colonies so fervently in Africa are numerous, but none suggest cruelty, greed or evil-heartedness for them.
Capitalism had reached a stage where control of capital was coming to be concentrated more and more in a few hands, which left too little purchasing power in the home market for the commodities that could be produced. Hence it created a situation of under-consumption. There was therefore the need to export to underdeveloped regions which might contain valuable raw materials.
The abundance of these raw materials in the underdeveloped regions might have caught the eye of these Europeans. And seeing that Africans obviously were not putting these vital raw materials into use as they would, naturally, they sought to put in mechanisms to dominate these resources. So with an upper hand in offensive weaponry, and no international laws to guard against an attempt to subjugate Africans, settled and dominated all facets of the African.
Another explanation borders on the prestige and honour it brought European governments, and the possibility to win voters when territories were won. Once again, it must not be forgotten that there were no international laws to make settling and domination illegal, nor were there global laws spelling out the rules of trade engagements.
Then there is the much hated reason, which is that the Europeans saw most of the practices in Africa and some parts of Asia as uncivilized, hence they took it upon themselves to embark upon a mission to civilize the world. This proclamation by the Europeans, partly racial and partly moral, may not be the best of remedies to what they saw as some of the morally inappropriate practices of some people in the world, but a slight justification comes for this mission to civilize when we consider human sacrifices made in the nineteenth century by some chiefs i as a traditional wont.
If thought determines action for persons, then by extrapolation the dominant ideologies in any period of time determine the phenomena of the world. The Europeans burnt women with strange behaviors at the stake in the era of witch-hunting. A phenomenon which occurred due to the idea of superstition.
This practice which was born out of the belief in the supernatural does not exist anymore in these countries. The people who carried out acts like this and those of similar nature have gained the maturity in knowledge.
Pre-colonial Africa facilitated the European conquest. These internal dissension and conflicts said to have been brought about by artificial barriers of the colonizers, thereby alienating hitherto unified and organized African people existed even in pre-colonial Africa.
History attests that the states in pre-colonial Africa were plagued by internal dissonance because there were no widely accepted methods of transferring political power. African rulers supplied the major part of the 7.6 million slaves exported to the European colonies, as well as the unknown numbers sent by Muslim traders across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean
There is a significant link between some of the reasons of Africa's lateness to attaining socio-economic growth in the measure expected by virtue of her vast reserve of natural resources, and her colonial domination and slavery past.
Desai shocks us near the end of her novel when she presents Nur's young wife's point of view in a letter to Deven, in which the woman claims that Nur married her because of her "gifts and abilities," not because of sexual entrapment as had been assumed throughout the novel. She challenges him to read her enclosed Urdu poems.
Deven's timidity prevents her defiant letter from gaining her acceptance in the world of Urdu poetry. Frightened of having to "enter that world on a mission of mercy or rescue," he tears up her poems. But her angry statements make the reader reevaluate what they previously had only seen through the eyes of a male character. By making women's frustration understandable, Desai subverts her book's primarily unsympathetic portrayals of women which turn out to have been Deven's -- not the author's -- perceptions.
But in fact, Desai does more than simply subvert a male society's attitude towards women, since she portrays a flawed Sita-like image in her main male character, not her female ones, who are too disillusioned and angry to want to fulfill self-sacrificing ideals. First of all, Deven suffers bitterly throughout In Custody because he has too weak a character and personality to refuse the burdens others place upon him. Second, whereas Nur's wife gains respect as a character by asserting her rights and abilities, Deven never manages such fiery rebellion. In contrast, he becomes noble at the end of the book by taking upon himself tremendous responsibilities: "He had accepted the gift of Nur's poetry and that meant he was custodian of Nur's very soul and spirit. It was a great distinction. He could not deny or abandon that under any pressure." Only as Deven decides to accept and endure whatever disasters befall him does he reach a kind of graceful inner strength: "Soon the sun would be up and blazing. The day would begin, with its calamities. They would flash out of the sky and cut him down like swords. He would run to meet them"
Kamala Das is a Kerala poet famous for her honesty. Her book 'My Story' created some controversy for its frank discussion of her search for love inside and outside marriage. She writes critically of the traditional conservative society in which she lives.
Born in 1934, she had an early inclination towards the literary life, inspired by her uncle Nalapat Narayan Menon, a prominent writer. Her mother, Nalapat Balamani Amma, was also a well-known Malayalam poet. She was educated at home and married at 15 to K. Madhava Das, who was many years older. She bore her first child at 16, but her husband was often in a fatherly role to the children as well as Das herself. He encouraged her to associate with people of her own age, and also encouraged her writing. He was invariably proud of her accomplishments, even when they were controversial.
Kamala Das is bilingual, and writes easily in Malayalam (under the name Madhavikutty) and English. Her autobiographical novel, My Story, shocked mainstream Kerala with its candid accounts of her encounters with men. As an artist, her paintings included nudes.
In 1999 she converted to Islam, an action she said she had been contemplating for many years.
She is also known as a feminist writer. She says "I don't think any genius can survive caught in the machine of formal education." A Childhood in Malabar, Penguin, India. 2005
Meena Shirwadkar finds that the representation of women in Indo-Anglian literature fulfils this ideal of suffering devotion, which she calls the Pativrata tradition. She argues that "a graded change" has occurred, however, in Indo-Anglian fiction. "The early novels show [the] wife in her traditional role, mainly as a house-wife and child-bearer, and the writers are preoccupied with her suffering," she claims. Later novels, in contrast, show "the wives . . . to suffer more because of the incompatibility between her individuality and awareness of herself and the traditional views of her husband and her in-laws" [49].
From women who endure namelessly fulfilling the ideal of the devoted wife-goddess, South Asian fiction by women has progressed to a conflicted yet liberating naming of one's one experience and that of other women. Although Easterners and Westerners can debate South Asia's traditional valuation of suffering, both must value the latest developments in South Asian women's writing. These women authors incorporate their experience in both worlds in an attempt to make new, empowering image for women. As Anees Jung points out: "Where the two experiences meet lies a revelation, and a story." Recent writers' stories realize both the diversity of women and the diversity within each woman. Rather than limiting the lives of women to one ideal, they push the ideal towards the full expression of each woman's potential.
Like Fernando's Three Women, Anita Desai's In Custody criticizes traditional society, but her novel focuses on a pathetic, trapped male character whose wife despises his inability to succeed financially. A terrified, insignificant person, Deven moves from mediocrity as a college lecturer to impending professional and financial ruin as he incurs increasing monetary debts, which he finally decides to endure rather than committing suicide. His wife gives him little support -- in fact, the women in the book seem rather nasty, especially the enraged young wife of Deven's hero, the poet Nur. As the story progresses, however, Desai makes clear that just as the male characters are trapped in a world that offers no possibility for success, the female characters have even more right to feel frustrated with a sexist society that reduces them to clinging to these men who cannot provide them with what they want.
Unlike the evil Kunthi from Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve, Desai's characters seem justified when they act out of self-preservation. Furthermore, unlike Markandaya's Rukmani and Ira who appear justified for their rebellion yet suffer punishment anyway, Fernando and Desai's women successfully defy traditional mores. The Urdu poet's young wife in Desai's In Custody, who rages at her limitations and writes in her own defense, stands out as the most outrageous of these woman. In fact, she radically redefines her experience by insisting on telling her story. This character's self-justification has continued in recent years as women writers tell their own stories and that of other women. When women make the lives of real women the center of their books, they go beyond creating sympathetic female characters to making claims for an alternative reality, an alternative truth. The illicit, self-interested qualities so condemned in earlier fiction become liberating, positive, and creative forces.
The image of women in South Asian novels has undergone a change in the last three decades. Throughout this period, women writers have moved away from traditional enduring, self-sacrificing women toward conflicted female characters searching for identity. The interests of women writers have changed with South Asian society and its relationship with the West. This trend in writings by South Asian women clearly appears if onecompares the images of suffering women in Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve and Meera Mahadevan's Shulamith to recent subversions and expansions of the traditional image in works by Chitra Fernando, Anita Desai, Kamala Das, Sara Suleri, and Anees Jung. In contrast to the main women characters in Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve and Mahadevan's Shulamith, female characters in the 1980s assert themselves and defy marriage and family strictures. Chitra Fernando's collection of short stories Three Women, like Anita Desai's In Custody, portray women who want their individual worth realized and attempt to break through the suffering that traditional society offers them. The most recent books, of the last three years (1986-1988), explore an educated woman's search for identity and meaning -- in autobiographical form, as in Kamala Das' My Story or in Sara Suleri's Meatless Days, or combining autobiographical and ethnographic form, as in Anees Jung's Unveiling India: A Woman's Journey.
Traditionally, marriage for women -- except in certain matriarchal tribes in the south that remained unaffected by the Aryan invasion that began in 1500 B.C.E. -- has entailed a most submissive feminine role. Although a woman ideally had power as a mother, as a wife she submitted to her husband and his family. Only recently have South Asian women in the dominant patriarchal tradition started to question aspects of this role, or decided against marriage altogether.
In Image of Woman in the Indo-Anglian Novel, Meena Shirwadkar claims that, following the changes in Indian society, novels have started to progress from depicting women characters solely as epitomes of suffering, womanly virtue to portraying more complex, real characters.
Tradition, transition and modernity are the stages through which the woman in Indo-Anglian novel is passing. The image of traditional woman, the Sita Savitri type, was at once, easy and popular. . . . In India, with its strong bent for tradition, woman was expected mainly to live for others than for herself because "others" controlled and moulded the social structure. Even woman in life and literature herself voluntarily surrendered to the ideal of self-sacrifice. . . . Modern woman, in life, has been trying to throw off the burden of inhibitions she has carried for ages. Yet, a woman on way [sic] to liberation, trying to be free from inhibitions, is rarely seen in Indo-Anglian literature. [Image of Woman in the Indo-Anglian Novel (New Delhi: Sterling. 1979), 153-154.]
Shirwadkar's study, published in 1979, criticizes a literary tradition still overshadowed by the traditional, suffering ideal of womanhood. This ideal has persisted in culture permeated by religious images of virtuous goddesses devoted to their husbands. The Hindu goddesses Sita and Savitri still exist as powerful cultural ideals of women in South Asia. Both images tell women to devote themselves to their husbands to extremes of endurance, loyalty, and self-sacrifice. As Susan S. Wadley explains,
[The god] Rama's wife Sita exemplifies the behaviour of the proper Hindu wife, devotedly following her husband into forest exile for twelve years, and eventually, after being kidnapped for a time by the evil Ravanawhom Rama finally destroys, proving her wifely virtue by placing herself on a lighted pyre. . . . Throughout North India, the women yearly worship Savitri, a goddess whose renown emanates from her extreme devotion to her husband, through which she saves him from the god of death. The story of Savitri isheld up as a prime example of the lengths to which a wife should go in aiding her husband. The good wife saves her husband from death, follows him anywhere, proves her virtue, remains under his control and gives him her power. ["Women and the Hindu Tradition,"in Women in India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1986), 122-123]
Avui lo meu mano fa anys, 43!!!!!!!!!!! I ho celebrarà en família, amb partit de futbol del Guillem inclòs! PER MOLTS ANYS, NIN! T'ESTIMO!!!!!!!!!
Com me sento molt orgullosa d'ell, vull recordar un dels moments en que m'ha caigut més la bava en sentir-lo parlar, així que us poso una part del video que se va grabar amb motiu de la manifestació en contra del trasvassament de l'Ebre fa un parell d'anys i on ell va ser convidat per llegir el manifest.
Born as Anita Mazumdar to a German mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar in Mussoorie, India. She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English outside the house. She first learned to read and write in English at school and as a result it became her "literary language". Despite German being her first language she did not visit Germany until later in life as an adult.
She was a student at Queen Mary's HigherSecondary School in Delhi and received her B.A. in English literature in 1957 from the University of Delhi Miranda House. The following year she married Ashvin Desai, a businessman. They raised four children. Daughter Kiran was born in Chandigarh and spent her childhood years in Bombay, on Alatamont Road. She recalls that as children they were taken to Thal (near Alibaug) for weekends, and this is where Anita Desai set her novel Village by the Sea .
She published her first novel in 1963, Cry The Peacock. She considers Clear Light Of Day (1980) her most autobiographical work as it is set during her coming of age and also in the same neighbourhood in which she grew up. In 1984 she published In Custody - about an Urdu poet in his declining days - which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1993 she became a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology [5]). Her latest novel published in 2004, The Zigzag Way, is set in 20th-century Mexico.
Her novels include Fire on the Mountain (1977), which won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984) and Fasting, Feasting (1999), each of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In Custody was made into a film by Merchant Ivory productions. Her children's book The Village by the Sea (1982), won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters, GirtonCollege, Cambridge and Clare Hall, Cambridge. Her most recent novel is The Zig Zag Way (2004), set in 20th century Mexico.
Anita Desai confesses that while she 'feels about India as an Indian,' she thinks about it 'as an outsider'. Desai probably derived this point of view from her German mother, whom she aptly describes as carrying 'anEuropean core in her which protested against certain Indian things, which always maintained its independence and its separateness.' Her oeuvre has explored the lives of outsiders within Indian society and, more recently, also within the West. Her fiction has covered themes such as women’s oppression and quest for a fulfilling identity, family relationship and contrasts, the crumbling of traditions, and anti-Semitism. The Eurocentric and social biases that are sometimes detected in her fiction, therefore, may be more productively read as the result of the author’s focus on uprooted and marginalized identities. Tellingly, the literary example which Desai set off to emulate was that of another migrant to India of German origins: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Though some critics detect a Western disdain for Indian social customs in her fiction, ultimately Desai’s literary world is not sharply divided along Western and Eastern lines. On the contrary, ever since her novel Baumgartner’s Bombay (1987), East and West have been treated as mirror images of each other.
This practice which was born out of the belief in the supernatural does not exist anymore in these countries. The people who carried out acts like this and those of similar nature have gained the maturity in knowledge. 
