PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION (2020) 57(9): 1425-1429 ISSN: 00333077 1425 www.psychologyandeducation.net BYE BYE BLACKBIRD: A Reflection of the Struggle for Female Autonomy against a rigid system of patriarchy Dr Saptorshi Das 1 , Prof Sayantika Bose Chakraborty 2 , Prof Mohar Banerjee Biswas 3 1,3 KIIT Deemed to be University, Bhubaneswar 2 Techno India University, Kolkata, ABSTRACT I am a married woman. I am also a working woman. I love what I do. And I am actually paid to do what I love. Yet, everyday I return home from work with a heavy heart. No. My workplace poses no threats. Although many working women across the world would disagree with me; but fortunately, I am not one of them. My greatest threat is my returning home to my in-laws and tolerating their snide comments on my being out all day. The men in the house can do it. That is not a problem. But my going and staying out to work is a matter of domestic debate. I usually don‟t retaliate. But I cannot help brooding over, from time to time, how unfair life still is towards women. When you really think about it, the fact that women all over the world are still fighting for equal rights defies all logic. Humans have mastered flight, walked on the moon and created the internet but women still can‟t be trusted to make autonomous decisions about their own bodies, be guaranteed free dom from violence or harassment or get paid the same amount as men for doing the same damn work. From time to time, many women have voiced their disgruntlement over the gender inequality. Anita Desai is one such powerful and persuasive voice among the writers, endeavouring in all her works to reflect the how the female autonomy strives to prove its existence in a strictly patriarchal cultural pattern. This paper seeks to refer to one of her novels, Bye, Bye Black Bird (1971) to highlight the way man-woman relationships are bedevilled by cultural encounters. The novel deals with alienation of an English lady, Sarah, married to Adit, an immigrant from India, who spends her days wallowed in the guilt of committing a mistake of marrying an Indian in her own society. In spite of being a woman from the so-called advanced west, she is quiet, meek and submissive; while Adit, behaves most of the time, like a typical Indian male, conservative, rigid and patriarchal. Through Sarah, Desai draws our attention to the annihilation of self that marriage involves for a female, through a recurring theme of insecurity, fragmentation, homelessness and the quest for identity among different communities across the world Keywords Woman, Identity, Freedom, Diaspora, Home Article Received: 10 August 2020, Revised: 25 October 2020, Accepted: 18 November 2020 Introduction The internal and external conflicts between people are perhaps most vividly expressed through the powerful medium of literature. Diasporic literature expresses the insecurity, fragmentation, homelessness and the quest for identity among different communities across the world. It may be noted that hybridity, that springs from the intermingling of various classes, ethnicities and religions, forms the core of this genre of literature. In the process of assimilating the two worlds, the migrants become transnationals who coexist in two or different nations together and this finally leads to a deeper understanding of varied cultures and ethnicities. Anita Desai, has often written about characters who do not flow with the current or who are stranded while the others flow along. She has always been interested in people who live in a kind of exile, often the exile is not political but in a sense it is exile from the rest of the society. Probably because she is a daughter of a Bengali father and a German mother, she could relate to the state of exile in a unique way. Her origin and upbringing rendered her an insight that helped her to understand the nuances involved in the sense of exile. In many of her interviews she has recounted how her mother could never bring herself to visit Germany even after the war was over, as it was a devastating experience for her to lose her country and kinsmen. She has also reiterated the fact that her father was also in a state of exile as his native place in East Bengal became a part of East Pakistan after the partition in 1947, and the family lost all their property and possession. Later in Bangladesh and then in North India her father felt completely out of place and Anita Desai absorbed in this state of homelessness while she grew up. Despite the fact that she was born in a country, she constantly felt as though she were an outsider there. No wonder her works explore the themes of identity crisis, homelessness, trauma and the predicament of the immigrants so intricately. She truly brings out her plight when she says, „This has brought two separate stands into my life. My roots are divided because of the Indian soil on which I grew and European culture which I inherited from my mother.‟ (Desai, 24). Estrangement and alienation characterise the works of fiction of the twentieth century as modern man confronts the turmoil of not only the external strife like war, persecution and famine but also the inner conflicts that manifest in various forms such as isolation, generation gap, loss of credibility and a constant feeling that life itself is meaningless. The complete dissolution of old certainties has shoved the modern man into disintegration, identity crisis, complete uncertainty, disillusionment and an unsettled demeanour. The existential dilemma so profoundly expressed in the works of Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka, Beckett, Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison in modern Western fiction also percolated into the filigree of Indian diasporic authors and the manifestations of the emerging dilemma have been reflected in their writings as well. Anita Desai vividly portrays exiled and uprooted characters in her novels and delves deep into the turmoil of their psychic states. Anita Desai‟s third novel Bye-Bye Blackbird, published in 1971, explores the theme of exile and dilemma of the