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Etymologically, the word feminism is derived from the two Latin words ‘Femina’ which means 'woman,' and the suffix-ism, which denotes a ‘principle or doctrine.’ Feminism is the ideology of women’s liberation from the men's domination. Feminism comprises variety of equalitarian social, cultural and political movements, theories and ethics is anxious with gender social disparity and equal rights for women. It constitutes the laws for women that make them equal to men. Feminism is the belief in and advocacy of the economic, political and social equality of the sexes expressed especially through organized activity in the interest of women’s rights and interests. Anita Desai is conscious about women’s life and their troubles. During an interview with The Hindu, Elfriede Jelinek, the Nobel Prize winner for literature in the year, 2004. When a journalist asked question about feminism her reply on being addressed as a feminist writer, she comments: “Being a cerebral woman, one can only be a feminist. Obviously, feminism is a conception with which one annihilates all awkward and displeasing accomplishment of women. It is easy to be part of a public judgment and then to make joke about these women. The male thinking exists and has a power to side line all woman whom they do not want to see leading.” Anita Desai’s novel, Cry, the Peacock depicts the story of its heroine Maya, who suffers a tragic end due to temperamental incompatibility in married life. She has by and large written about women characters and is preoccupied with the theme of incompatible marital couples. Her women characters suffer in one way or other at the hands of men or in the society. She exploits the situation of women’s suffering in her novels to present problems that confront women in a male-dominated society. Maya in Cry, the Peacock is an artistic excellence by Anita Desai as a feminine-self. Maya’s position is different from all the women characters in the novel. She is the most fascinating and psychologically, frustrating among all Desai’s female characters. Maya is herself a class of opposite gender in a society victimized by the males. Her behavior and response may not always draw one’s kindness and can be dismissed as the worthless thoughts to enjoying the pleasures of luxury mind. She is suffering from the luxurious demands of the social changes put forth by the novelist can’t be denied. The trend of living off from the parents house, the mother living of from the children and the increase busy life, are some fragment of changing nature. The lonely condition of affairs is unacceptable to Maya. Hence, Maya relieved her tension psychologically by understanding the peacock stamps its feet and stroke its beak on the rock, and then how it seizes the snake to break its body to relieve its pain. It impacts her awareness badly, and she desires for an immediate outlet of her emotions. Thus, she kills Gautama and commits suicide. She desires to kill her husband is a flashback of revenge coming out from her frustrations and unhappy married life. Her experiences made her push to appoint that she was acting as insane. Anita Desai’s Cry, the Peacock is a debut work in which she defines her experiences in the form of characters. Maya the chief female protagonist in Cry, the Peacock is a spoiled pampered and obsessed almost from the very beginning of the novel with the beautiful prophecy of an Albino Astrologer. According to the prophecy of disaster, she or her husband would die during the fourth year of their marriage. Maya’s matrimony to Gautama with the lack of emotional attachment is differing to her joy of childhood. The old memories cast its shadows over her present life. She is not able to make good relationship not even a healthy communication with her husband. Maya’s life is an amalgam of her experiences and present livelihood, whether it is her marital life or her physical relationship. Maya seeks communion of peacock that makes intense mating calls. From one side of Maya’s tragic end and on the other side Desai’s tries to special attention the great potency of the women to be understood by her male partner. This novel is basically concerned with conflict between husband and wife relationship. There is a breakdown in communication and Maya gets isolated and aloof. Maya kills Gautama and then commits suicide. She finds herself imprisoned within the four walls of the house and remains cloistered because there is no one to share her sorrow. Anita Desai’s female characters are tolerant as well as submissive but are not readily available to accept the criticism in case of male-female relationship. Gautama and Maya sacrifice their self-identity and commodity, and also they suffer from deeply aloneness because they could not to restore their relationship with the demands of their psyche and with those of the world around them. They view the world as a hostile place and often take a negative stance, which generates psychic states of fear, guilt, confess, anger, bitterness, anxiety, depression and helplessness. A consideration of the situation of women in the male-dominated world is also found in this novel. The female characters are portrayed incapable of reaching out to the wider world. Desai depicts females’ desire of liberty from social and traditional bondage in the patriarchal society in her novels. She denies a narrow feminist approach. The feminine-self in the novel of Anita Desai defines the author's intellect and insight of humanity. They are focusing of communication between the writer’s awareness and the world from which they are alienated. Her women, therefore, have to face conflicts, make effort to break away from them, to assert their individuality and think whether their decision to do so is the right one, how to find a solution of their identity crisis and emerge triumph from the trauma. These are some questions Desai seems to explore through her women characters. Alienation is one of the big challenges to face especially the postmodern man. The novel begins with the portrayal of relationship in between Maya and Gautama as husband wife, their alienation, and discord. The subject of alienation is the result of the hypersensitive nature of Desai’s female characters. In Anita Desai’s novel the stress is transferred from the external and the internal world. The character Maya is obsessed with the fear of death as a consequence of an astrological prediction that one of the spouses will die in the fourth year of their marriage. She cannot affirm any effective communication with her husband, Gautama, who is detached, rational and twice of her age. Her husband does not understand her feelings why she is feeling isolated and alienated. He does not understand her neither questions nor behavior. As she psychologically disturbs, she kills him in a fit of insane fury. In the novel the protagonist Maya receives hostility and in differences rather than delicacy and affection from her husband Gautama. In this novel Desai presents the quietness, solitude, sadness and dark world of overshadows in Maya’s life. Gautama, a friend of her father, he is very much older than Maya is a prosperous, middle-aged lawyer. He is a reasonable, cultural, and practical; he is too much engrossed in his own affairs to meet the desires, of his young and beautiful wife. He cannot admire his wife for her great qualities but makes a disparaging remark about her that she has a third rate poetess’ mind. Provoked by this she confesses thus: “Because when you are away from me, I want you. I insist being with you, being allowed to touch and to know you. You can’t bear it. Can you? No. You are afraid. You might perish.” The matrimony of Gautama and Maya is more or less a marriage of amenity as we can say that it is a marriage of traditional bond. Maya’s matrimony with Gautama has been settled by her father’s friendship with him. But Maya is not aware about unpleasant actualities of life. But surprisingly she is married to a non-Brahmin lawyer whose family doesn’t know the happiness of life, Instead of the individual’s exigency and feelings; they converse about only big things and national events. The discipline of fellowship is sadly missing in the relationship between husband and wife. Maya pines for Gautama’s contact, but he cannot spare long hours for his wife. One can understand that there is lack of emotional bond in between husband and wife. This is the marriage which provided them only physical closeness, the relation of two bodies. Both the husband and wife don’t have mental satisfaction at all. Shanta Acharya a prominent literary critic says, “Gautama and Maya turn out being two sides of the same coin; in each case the excluding of the self makes it incapable to adapt the other.” Desai as a feminist writer introduces the theme of women’s freedom in her novels. Her young women characters yearn for freedom. But quite unfortunately none of her characters could free themselves from the bondage. Maya thinks, “I had not escaped. The years had picked up, and now the final, the decided one held me in its sweating grasp from which release seemed not possible.” Desai’s females’ characters all times seen excessively, lonesome and helpless and that they are laid low by the patriarchal domination. Ogunyemi says, “A feminist novel is not just one that deals with women and women’s issues, but it should also posses some aspects of a feminist ideology.” Desai’s early novels best illustrate that they are feminist novels. Cry the Peacock is a maid’s novel, and it presents a mismatched marriage life of the protagonist Maya. She is married to Gautama an honorable lawyer, who is older than her twice. Gautama is an argued husband who considers of Maya and loves her in his own way. But, Maya is not pleased and happy and this moves her to a notion of marital incoherence and incomplete married life. The Peacock’s cry is an inference of agonized cry for love and life. The novel is mainly focused with the theme of marital conflict between husband, Gautama, and wife, Maya. The whole novel revolves around Maya’s sob for affection and lifetime of association. The husband is simply too much engaged in his own way to meet the necessities, partially change, partly spiritual, of his beautiful wife. Gautama’s responsibilities are too rough, and it is not practical to suit Maya. He is a loyal husband who loves and take cares his wife in his own way. But Maya is never satisfied. Usha Pathania famous critics observe: “Marriage is a bond established for companionship and physical pleasure in between a male and a female. But in between Maya and Gautama it is unfortunately missing.” Maya’s marital life is exposed within the novel. Maya is deeply sprinkled within insensibility, two-facedness and disdain exposed through other marriages around her. Maya is a rebellious woman who fails to recognize herself in her husband Gautama’s world and find herself estranged from the affection she got from her father. There are other personalities in Maya’s character which go beyond the idea of Femininity. She is in search of recent overlook for a woman’s world. Maya thinks of her married life with Gautama as fatal struggle in which one is predestined to kill the other. Refusal by her husband, Maya is breaks into tears between her love of life and her dread of death. She says, “God, now I am caught within the net of the inescapable, and where lay the possibility of mercy, of release. This net is no hallucination, no. I am gone insane? Father! Husband, who is my savior? I am in need of one. I am dying, and I am in love with living, I am in love, and I am dying, God, let me sleep, forget me, But no I will never sleep again.”

A great deal of work has been done so far on various novelists in English. The crux of this work is mainly the style of writing and its objectives. A lot of work has been focused on the portrayal of oriental literature. The researcher thought it is appropriate to focus on the feminism of Desai’s select novel instead of confining only to the portrayal of woman’s image that the researcher came across in the research focusing on post-colonial- literature. Anita Desai’s novel has evoked an enthusiastic response from critics inside and outside India. She is  special because she turns her characters inward, her fiction grapples  intangible. The actuality of human life, decline into the core depths of the human psyche to understand its obscure realities, the inner conflicts inside the mind of human being. In the last couple of years the novels written in Indian English literature has really enjoyed a good repute. The abundant growth of the novel proved that there is much more intellectual life in India. The criticism thus starts with some critical opinions on Anita Desai. 1. According to Srivastava, Jaya: “Being a sensitive woman novelist and gifted with good observations, sensitiveness, penetrating analysis and a skill to paint with word, Anita Desai created a rich gallery of characters, of both male and female.” 2. According to Iyenger, Kodaganallur Ramaswami Sirnivasa: “The explosions in Mrs. Desai's novels occur only within narrow domestic walls. Always, it is the intolerable grapple with ideas, feelings and emotions.” 3. Weir, Ann Lowry. : ‘The Illusions of Maya: Feminine Consciousness in Anita Desai’s Cry, the Peacock’, Journal of South Asian Literature-The writer discusses the illusions and feminine consciousness of Maya, the protagonist in the novel Cry the Peacock. The writer has chosen the character of Maya for analysis. 4. Panday, G. S. : ‘The Relationship between Female and Nonhuman Entities in Anita Desai’s Cry, the Peacock’, (2020) In this article the research scholar discusses how women are suppressed and exploited by patriarchy and nature has been exploited and disbursed by human kinds in different pretentions.

1. Desai, Anita. Cry, the Peacock. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks 2006. Print. 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Desai. 3. https://letterpile.com› Books› Classic Literature. 4. Singh R.A. Three Novels of Anita Desai A Critical Spectrum. New Delhi: Book Enclave 2009. 5. “An interview with Anita Desai” by Yashodhara Dalmia, The Times of India 1979. 6. Tandon, Neeru. Feminie Psyche. Atlantic Publishers, New Delhi. 2008. 7. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/women-in-india. 8. Panday, G. S. : ‘The Relationship between Female and Nonhuman Entities in Anita Desai’s Cry, the Peacock’, Journal of Population and Development, June 2020