Literature has always been a means of reinforcing cultural and social values. Juxtaposing the multifaceted Indian women and their lives of three generations, Githa Hariharan has portrayed the changing scenario in the Indian society. Her concern is to bring out the irrationalities and injustices of domestic and social life. Women were ready to accept their archetypal female role in the past. Modern women have started to rebel against the age-old social conventions. The Thousand Faces of Night deals with the sanction of space for woman in the Indian society and her struggle to emerge as an individual expressing her existential anguish. The novel presents the effects of patriarchy on women of different social classes and ages and particularly the varied responses to the restrictive institution of marriage. Women were confined to their homes, they were oppressed and opportunities for self-fulfillment were bleak. Even in the modern changed ambience their position is still debatable as they stand on the threshold of social change.

Githa Hariharan was born in Coimbatore, India, and she grew up in Bombay and Manila. She was educated in these two cities and later in US; presently she lives in New Delhi. She completed Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Psychology, Bombay University, 1974, Master of Arts in Communications, Fairfield University, Connecticut, 1977. She worked as a staff writer in WNET Channel 13 in New York from 1979 to 1984; later she worked as an editor in Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi offices of Orient Longman. Her first novel, The Thousand Faces of Night (1993) won the 1993 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book. Her work also includes a collection of short stories, The Art of Dying (1993); the novels The Ghosts of Vasu Master (1994), When Dreams Travel (1999), In Times of Siege (2003), and Fugitive Histories (2009); and a children’s book, The Winning Team (2004). She has edited A Southern Harvest, a volume of stories in English translation from four major South Indian languages. Along with co-editor Shama Futehally, she has brought out a collection of stories of children, Sorry, Best Friend!

Literature has always been a means of reinforcing cultural and social values and the women writers around 1970s brought in a big change by transforming their own experiences as women as well as their feminity into literary creations. Githa Hariharan belongs to this class of ‘new woman’, replacing the suffering and suppressive models. As Seshadri observes: “The woman is self-willed and assertive, searching to discover her true self.

English Studies Journal, Indian English Short Fiction, Bhasha Literatures, Autonomous Forms, Indian Short Story, Indian Language, Montage Patterns, Women Writers, Social Milieu, Postmodernist Movements, Global Communities, Joint Family System, Indian Women Writers.