In an interview with the Guardian, novelist Anita Desai says that male characters tell more adventurous stories (via Kitabkhana):
As a young woman, Desai says she felt her own life was not big or broad enough to feed her writing. “My whole life was about family and neighbours: it was very difficult for a woman to experience anything else. I was bored, and I needed to find more range, which is why I started to write about men in books like Baumgartner’s Bombay [in which a German Jew flees the war in India] and In Custody [a college lecturer goes in search of a famous poet]. Men led lives of adventure, chance and risk. It just wasn’t possible to write that from an Indian female perspective.“
Desai, who grew up in Delhi, had a German mother and a Bengali father. Her new book, The Zigzag Way, is a tale about the Cornish miners who settled in Mexico before mysteriously fading away. Desai also wrote the novel In Custody, about a slowly degenerating Urdu poet. The book was adapted into a luscious movie, Muhafiz, starring Shabana Azmi (one of the greatest pleasures in film is watching the lovely Ms. Azmi, bedecked and bejeweled, sitar in hand, croon a ghazal full of smoke and longing). Desai’s daughter Kiran recently debuted as a novelist with Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard.
Saw the movie a few years back. I think Om Puri played the journalist. A very poignant film. Great performances by Kapoor, Puri and Azmi.
She might be right..I was also feeling the same last few years and specially after seeing my writing group collegues. Most indian woman writers I read like chitra divakaruni, jhumpa lahiri , Arundhati roy etc., wrote novels on women oriented feminine emotional subjects. Even some western writers like maya angelou, Simone De Beauvoir, nadime Gordimer too wrote on women oriented subjects though their women were agressive ,fighting against social evils with a lot more feminine characters in their novels. Aynrand is an exception.
In my writing group too its the same story though all my writing group collegues are americans except me. All the men are writing international thrillers and all the women are writing romantic novels except me. I thought this was strange sometime back and blogged on it and read some scientific articles on differences in thinking patterns of men and women. BTW I saw this Ismail merchant movie with sashi kapoor , the story is still very feminine though it revolves around a aging male poet..there are a lot of women characters like shabana azmi in the movie and its all about human emotions and has a feminine shade to the story . And I did not like the movie, was not impressed by the story, she is not my kind of writer nor are chitra and jhumpa lahiri. She is right, it has a got a lot to do with exposure and experiences and also the way woman think ( a lot of science articles show distinct differences in thinking patterns and working of a male vs female brains). Women tend to be more emotional, more maternal, more relationship oriented and less adventerous than men though modern women are changing roles in today’s world.