The plight of the Indian women is aptly captured by Kamla Bhasian in the following poem: “A girl is the young plant that / gets neither light nor water. / She is the flower that would / have blossomed but cannot. / Half fed and half heartedly educated / She gets only half wage for her labour. / The country got its freedom / but she continues to be bonded.”
The existing disparities in the demographic, economic, and social indicators between males and females are a testimony to the consequences of gender inequality faced by the Indian women of the region. Being influenced by western feminist writers, the post independence Indian women writers have engaged themselves in devising verbal strategy for rejecting ‘male cold’ literary conventions historically accepted as ‘standards’. Shashi Deshpande is one of the prominent contemporary women writers in India writing in English. She has created ripples in the society of male domination by taking women as women seriously in her novels.
Shashi Deshpande’s Literary Career
Shashi Deshpande was born in 1938 in Dharwad in Karnataka as the daughter of the renowned Kannada dramatist as well as a great Sanskrit scholar Sriranga. She is a leading woman novelist in the Indian Literary Horizon with eight novels, four books for children, over eighty short stories and a screen play to her credit. She has won the prestigious Sahitya Academy Award for her fifth novel, That Long Silence in 1989, and was awarded Padma Shri in 2009.
Shashi Deshpande uses first person narrative to register women’s protest against the male dominated society in the novel That Long Silence. She uses double narratives in The Dark Holds No Terrors to give a realistic portrayal of Saru’s inner self. Roots and Shadows, her first novel, depicts the agony and suffocation experienced by the protagonist Indu in a male-dominated and tradition-bound society. The Dark Holds No Terrors, her second novel, is all about male ego wherein the male refuses to play a second fiddle role in marriage.
Narrative Technique in That Long Silence
Perhaps Deshpande’s best work is That Long Silence. The narrator Jaya, an upper-middle-class housewife with two teenage children, is forced to take stock of her life when her husband is suspected of fraud. They move into a small flat in a poorer locality of Bombay, giving up their luxurious house. The novel reveals the hollowness of modern Indian life, where success is seen as a convenient arranged marriage to an upwardly mobile husband with the children studying in “good” schools.
Deshpande avoids the simple technique of straight forward narration in the novel. She employs the flash back method instead to draw her readers’ attention. That Long Silence is a first person narrative; the story is unfolded by Jaya, ironically symbolizing victory, while in the actual life situation, she is supposed to lead a traditional, passive life like “Sita following her husband into exile, Savithri, dogging death to reclaim her husband, Draupadi stoically sharing her husband’s travails.”
There are three distinct phases of feminism. The early means imitation of role models, which Jaya has already crossed. The first phase of imitation is followed by anger and protest, the major thrust of the novel. The last phase of feminism, that of articulation and assertion, is only hinted in this novel as one of the future possibilities for Jaya.
The Dark Holds No Terrors
In The Dark Holds No Terrors, Deshpande shifts the narrative from the first person to the third person narrative in every alternative chapter. The double narrative helps to lend great authenticity to the portrayal of Sarita’s inner self. The novel is about Saru, the protagonist, an educated, economically independent, middle-class wife who is made conscious of her gender as a child and whose loveless relationship with her parents and strained relations with her husband lead to her agonizing search for herself.
Saru is ignored in favour of her brother, Dhruva. No parental love is showered on her. Blatant discrimination between Saru and brother leads to a sense of insecurity and hatred towards her parents, especially her mother. Saru’s rise in social and financial status in contrast to Manu’s status of an underpaid lecturer sets in great discomfort in their conjugal relation.
Saru presents a perfect recipe for a successful marriage: “A wife must always be a few feet behind her husband. If he is an MA, you should be a BA; if he is 5’4” tall, you shouldn’t be more than 5’3” tall.”
In the quest for the wholeness of identity, she does not advocate separation from the spouse but a tactful assertion of one’s identity within marriage.
Conclusion
A close study of Shashi Deshpande’s novels reveals her deep insight into the plight of Indian women who feel smothered and fettered in a tradition-bound, male dominated society. She delineates her women characters in the light of their hopes, fears, aspirations and frustrations. Deshpande is not against the institution of marriage, as her woman protagonists strive to make their marriages work in their endeavour to lead a meaningful existence. She prescribes a balance between tradition and modernity as a working philosophy for the contemporary woman.
Works Cited
- Deshpande, Shashi. The Dark Holds No Terrors. Noida: Penguin Books India Ltd., 1980.
- Deshpande, Shashi. That Long Silence. Noida: Penguin Books India Ltd., 1989.
- Sharma, Siddharth. Shashi Deshpande’s Novels: A Feminist Study. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2005.
- Prasad, Amar Nath and S. Joseph Peter. Indian Writing In English: Critical Ruminations. New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2005.
- Sanga, Jaina C. South Asian Literature — An Encyclopedia. Chennai: Greenwood Press, 2006.