A Psychological Study of the Heroines in the Select Novels of

Shashi Deshpande

Thesis submitted to Bharathiar University in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the award of the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in English

by
G.Aruna

Under the guidance of

Dr. S.K. Pushpalatha Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English

POST GRADUATE AND RESEARCH DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

GOVERNMENT ARTS COLLEGE (AUTONOMOUS)
COIMBATORE- 641 018
INDIA

MARCH 2015
Certificate
 Certificate

This is to certify that the thesis, entitled "A Psychological Study of the Heroines

in the Select Novels of Shashi Deshpande" submitted to Bharathiar University, in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in

English, is a record of original research work done by G. Aruna during the period

2012- 2015 in the Post Graduate and Research Department of English at Government Arts

College (Autonomous), Coimbatore-641 018, under my supervision and guidance and the

thesis has not formed the basis for the award of any Degree/Diploma/Associateship/

Fellowship or other similar title of any candidate of any University.

Countersigned Signature of the Guide

Head of the Department Principal

Declaration
 Declaration

I G.Aruna, do hereby declare that the thesis, entitled "A Psychological Study of

the Heroines in the Select Novels of Shashi Deshpande" submitted to Bharathiar University,

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the Degree of Doctor of

Philosophy in English, is a record of original and independent research work

done by me during the period 2012 – 2015 under the supervision and guidance of

Dr. S.K. Pushpalatha M.A., M.Phil., M.Ed., Ph.D., Associate Professor, Post Graduate

and Research Department of English at Government Arts College (Autonomous),

Coimbatore -641018 and it has not formed the basis for the award of any Degree /

Diploma / Associateship / Fellowship or other similar title of any candidate of any

University.

Signature of the Candidate

Acknowledgement
 Acknowledgement

I owe a great deal of respect and gratitude to my supervisor Dr. S. K. Pushpalatha

Ph.D., Associate Professor, Post Graduate and Research Department of English,

Government Arts College (Autonomous), Coimbatore for her valuable guidance, untiring

encouragement and friendly rapport throughout the period of study.

I express my profound indebtedness to Dr. R. Kumaresan Ph.D., Principal,

Government Arts College (Autonomous), Coimbatore, for permitting me to pursue this

research work.

I wish to offer my special thanks to Dr. S. Nalini Ph.D., Associate Professor and

Head of the Post Graduate and Research Department of English, Government Arts

College (Autonomous), Coimbatore, for her kind co-operation in the completion of this

task.

I express my special thanks to Smt. Dhanalakshmi Jayachandran, Secretary,

Dr. S. Subramanian Ph.D., Principal, and Mrs. R. Premalatha, Vice-Principal,

Sri Jeyandra Saraswathy Maha Vidhyalaya College of Arts Science, Coimbatore for their

continuous support and encouragement.

I thank God Almighty for His blessings in this endeavour.

Contents
 Contents

Chapter Page
Title
No. No.

Abstract

I Introduction 1

II Emancipation of Women 39

III Restoration of the Sanctity of Women 90

IV Awakening of Women 136

V Summing Up 173

Works Cited
Abstract
 Abstract

Chapter I traces the evolution of English language and literature. This chapter analyses

the emergence of Indian women writers in the recent decades and their abundant literary

output. The theme of psychological suffering and traumatic experiences of Indian women

is exploited by feminist novelists like Iqbalunnisa Hussain, Anita Desai, Rama Mehta,

Shashi Deshpande and Arundhathi Roy. These novelists are primarily concerned with the

psychological crisis of India women who are subjected to physical and mental torture in a

male dominated society.

Chapter II examines the Emancipation of Women in The Dark Holds No Terrors

(1980) and Roots and Shadows (1983). Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Hold No Terrors

which is her favorite novel, seeks to discuss the male ego, which refuses to accept a

secondary position in marriage. Dark Hold No Terrors analyses woman’s fight to survive

in a world that offers no easy outs. The novel narrates the harrowing experience of the

protagonist, Saru. It also deals with the psychological and traumatic experience of a

career woman. In this novel, the novelist discusses the blatant gender discrimination

shown by parents towards their daughters and their desire to have a male child.

In the next novel Roots and Shadows, Shashi Deshpande has portrayed the new

women who are educated and who live in close association with society, brushing aside

all narrow social convictions. This novel explores the inner struggle of the protagonist, Indu.

She tries to learn the truth about her, deserting all the shadows that she had thought to be

her real self. Indu presents a set of modern women, who are educated and very much in

contact with the society, dealing with the society, dealing with the critical problems of love,
marriage, sex, settlement and individuality. Shashi Dehpande seems to suggest through

‘Roots and Shadows’ that a change in the upbringing of girl-child is required.

Chapter III brings out the restoration of the sanctity of women as seen in That Long

Silence (1989) and A Matter of Time (1996). Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence,

deals with the story of an Indian woman who maintains silence throughout her life in face

of hardships that threatened to break it. The protagonist Jaya stands for the woman, who

bears all sorts of inhuman cruei behavior of her husband and never speaks a word against

him. Mohan, her husband, is a traditionalist whose roots are firmly laid in hoary Indian

customs and convictions. The difference in their outlook and attitude is so glaring that they

fail to understand each other.

The novel A Matter of Time concentrates on the relationship, which the women

characters have with their men. Shashi Deshpande liberates herself from the narrow

confines of women and their problems and enters into the metaphysical world of

philosophy. The novel is essentially the story of three women from three generations

from the same family and how they cope up with the tragedy that overwhelms them. The

novel particularly deals with the theme of the quest for a female identity. It is only

through a process of self-examination and self-searching, through courage and resilience

that one can change one’s situation from despair to hope.

Chapter IV analyses the awakening of women in The Binding Vine (1933) and Small

Remedies (2000). The Binding Vine deals with the protagonist’s rebellious and

courageous efforts to break the silence and seek justice for the less fortunate. It also deals

with the human relationship and the personal tragedy of Urmila. As Urmila wades through

the labyrinth of relationships, she witnesses the experiences and analysis the confusion
and guilt. She also suffers from an entire emotional tornado surfacing in her turbulent

journey. Her one year old daughter died and she is unable to forget her because her

memories haunt her. In order to overcome her grief she gets involved with a young rape

victim Kalpana and her own long dead, mother-in-law Mira’s poetry.

The Small Remedies focuses on the intensive study of career women and the choices

they make. Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies (2000) is a saga of emancipation. It is a

novel about myriad feelings- love, courage, honesty, truth, death, and the pain associated

with death. It tells the story of Madhu Saptarishi whose search for self is linked with the

search for identity of two other women-Savitri bai Indorekar and Leela. It is through their

struggle for identity that Madhu comes to know her own self. The novel presents

Madhu’s struggle with her shattered family life. Her long and lonely journey of life, is the

theme of the novel.

Chapter V, the concluding chapter, attempts to explain the positive attitudes of life-its

understanding, love, forgiveness and acceptance of life. Her six novels are a self-analysis and

a self-probe into the existential problems of women. Shashi Deshpande’s introspection and

psychological probe make their distinct in revealing the subconscious and unconscious

psyche of her characters. The heroines are bold and balanced to face the challenges of life

confidently. The continuous analysis of their own self enables them to face ,understand

and solve their problems.

Shashi Deshpande’s heroines break the mental barriers, which they initially built

around themselves. They learn more about their mothers and gradually overcome their

feelings of alienation and hatred towards them. Their stay at ancestral homes gives them

the chance to recollect the past and re-evaluate their decisions and actions. Their parental
home does not provide them any permanent relief from their suffering. The escape from all

the demanding roles give them a sense of relief and an opportunity to reflect on their life.

Shashi Deshpande presents human feelings, which were forgotten from the pages

of human history. She makes them come alive as characters that seem real. Her style is

lucid and the language is always kept simple and commonplace. Her attitude to her

characters seems to be compassionate and sympathetic. All the women protagonists of

Shashi Deshpande, succeed in constructing a self through their individual and

professional achievements. They also try to come out redefining their relationships.

Finally, they become fully developed individuals who succeed in their domestic as well

as professional lives.
Introduction
 Chapter 1

Introduction

Indian writing in English, like other new literatures of the world in English, was

the outcome of national unrest. Indian novel in English is gaining ground and has

acquired a special significance in the global context. Indian writers in English have made a

remarkable contribution to fiction. Fiction has become the medium of presenting Indian

culture and thoughts to the world. Indian writing in English has now gained international

repute and standards by the galaxy of Indian writers. Fiction became a powerful form of

literary expression and has acquired a prestigious position in the Indo-English literature.

English language came to India at a time when Indians were prepared to try anything

that helped them explore new realms of thought and adopt new ways of expression. The new

vistas which English education opened to the Indians made them restless. There was a

wave of enthusiasm all around. The Renaissance that followed had a profound impact on

the Indians. The study of English language and literature, to a considerable extent,

revolutionized the thought process of the educated Indians and subsequently changed not only

their outlook on life but also their basic approach to life. Two significant developments took

place in the awake of the Indian Renaissance. First, the emergence of a middle class and

secondly the introduction of new literary forms like the Novel, the Short Story and the

One-act Play to the Indians.

Literature is an embodiment of man’s feelings, thoughts and experiences shaped

into an aesthetic form. It is an expression of society using language as its medium. All over

the world, at all times most of the writers were concerned with the problems of men.
 2

One of the greatest values of literature is its capacity to acquaint man with the forces

which motivate him to locate his place in the society and ultimately in the universe.

Human feelings, ideas, passions, experiences, joys, sorrows, aspirations and struggles

form the core of all arts and more particularly of literary art. Literature is one of the

infinite expressions of any society or culture, and its varied aspects of life are mirrored in

the works of the writers. India, which is marching ahead in divergent fields, has also seen

the flowering of literary genius.

The Indian writers in English have acquired great significance in recent years.

In the post-independence era, a number of Indian writers have successfully used English

as a medium of expression and have made a great contribution. Indo-Anglican fiction is

totally Indian in theme and treatment, its message being essentially Indian. English is being

used with greater dexterity and has undoubtedly become a powerful instrument for the

delineation and probing of psychological problems and status of mind. Many writers of

fiction have broken fresh grounds and have some compelling close critical examination.

The novel is considered to be the most socially oriented because it depicts human society

in its varied aspects of struggle, chaos and anarchy. Diana T. Lawrenson and

Alan Swingewood in The Sociology of Literature observe:

Thus the novel as the major literary genre of industrial society, can seen

as a faithful attempt to recreate the social world of man’s relation with his

family, with politics, with the state: it delineates too his roles within the

family and other institutions, the conflicts and tensions between groups

and social classes. (97)

 3

Novels are the art of values and feelings. They reflect the changes occurring in

society and the kind in which individuals become accustomed to the social system.

Martin Price comments:

The purpose of the novel is to reveal life under a certain aspect, to shape it so

as to make sense of a roughly formidable kind-the formulation is its theme.

To do this the writer creates a model, a small scale structure whose

proportions or relationships have some analogy with the realities we

know. (131)

Thus, the novelist penetrated into the life of the people to reproduce it in a novelist

structure, thereby exposing the inner as well as the outer layers. The novel, as a medium

of story-telling and art form, is essentially of the west and represents a tradition that is

totally different from Indian tradition of story-telling. To quote V.S. Naipaul:

The novel is of the west. It is the part of that western concern with the

condition of men, a response to the here and now (…). In India thoughtful

men have preferred to turn their backs on the here and now and to satisfy

what Dr. Radhakrishnan calls “the basic human hunger for the unseen.”

It is not a good qualification for the writing or reading of the novel (…).

It is the part of the mimicry of the west, the Indian self-violation. (221)

The appearance of the novel as a literary form in 19th century India was a social

phenomenon and was associated with social, political and economic conditions. Social

reforms such as abolition of Sati, and prohibition of throwing a child into sea at the

mouth of Ganga in fulfillment of religious vows and infanticide were accepted readily by

the Indian society, despite of these protests from orthodox sections, the moral support
 4

they received from influential Indian personalities like Raja Ram Mohan Roy. India

was also cured by the superstitious ideas and there was a radical transformation in her

religious ideas as well. English education was responsible for the afore-mentioned

transformations. English education became the only passport to higher appointments.

Western education opened the floodgates of western ideas. Raja Ram Mohan Roy with

his liberal and creative use of English expressions ushered in a new era of English

literature.

Some of the writers have taken the craft of fiction seriously and have shown

a good grasp of Indian literary conventions and great concern for the transmission of

genuine Indian thought and feelings. The Indian epics and Upanishads have exerted

considerable influence on the Indian writers of English. Indian women writers have given

a new dimension to the Indian literature. Indian English fiction has developed over a

period of time, and writing in English did not start in a day. It took many years and

several distinguished personalities to bring the present status and distinction to Indian

English Literature. Before the rise of novels, several women writers composed Songs,

Short Stories and Small Plays. It is still believed that women are the upholders of the rich

Indian tradition of fables, storytelling and more.

Fiction writers of thirties wrote about the ordeal of the freedom struggle, East-west

relationship, the communal problems and the plight of the untouchables, the landless

poor, the downtrodden, the economically exploited and the oppressed. Makarand R.

Paranjape says:

The early novelists used their works to promote social reform. They espoused

several liberal causes, campaigning for the education of women, the

 5

upliftment of depressed classes, widow-remarriage and against

child-marriage, dowry, superstition, Sati and untouchability to list a

few examples. (214)

Novels written before thirties were connected to religious aestheticism. Then the

focus shifted to contemporary socio-political concern. Spiritual and social awareness was

slowly giving place to political consciousness. The intellectuals, philosophers, historians

and literary artists have traditionally played significant roles in all national revolutions of

the world. They reached the mind through their writings. Novelists were most responsive

to the call of equality, freedom and human rights. The literary artists have natural quality

and ability to look beyond their time. A number of novels written during the period portrayed

the British rule and the plight of the people who were determined to get rid of it. Politics

became synonymous with nationalism. Creative writers like Romesh Chander Dutt, Bankim

Chandra, Sri Aurobindo, K.S.Venkataramani, Bharathi Sarabhai, Mulk Raj Anand and

Raja Rao were the champions of the nationalist cause and spokesmen of the natural

culture. K.S.Ramamurthi observes:

Political urgency, reformistic motivation, journalistic impulse and creative

imagination seem to have criss-crossed in the speeches and writings of

the leaders like Surendhranath Banerjee, Gopalakrishna Gokhale,

V.S. Srinivasa Sastry, Sarojini Naidu and Jawaharlal Nehru and created

patterns of writings which carry with them an unmistakable literary

quality. (52)

Naturally, the Indian English novelists were bound to give creative expression

of the new political and social aspirations of the people. The novels that dealt with the
 6

freedom struggle, gave true pictures of the exploitation, the arrogance of the foreign rulers

and the portrayal of an awakened people struggling for their rebirth. The growth of the

historical novel coincided with the ideas of the struggle for Indian freedom after the First

World War. The historical novel popularized by Walter Scott, enjoyed much popularity

in the nineteenth century.

In the mid-nineteenth century, more women started to write in the English language.

With the passage of time, English literature has witnessed changes in the writing patterns.

Indian women novelists have incorporated the recurring female experiences in their writings

and it affected the cultural and language patterns of Indian literature. They have brought a

stylized pattern in the whole context of Indian writing. The first novel in India made its

appearance in Bengali and then in a number of other Indian languages and in English.

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1864) established novel as a major literary form in India.

He was the first Indian to write a novel in English. Raj Mohan’s Wife was his first and last

novel in English.

With the advent of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the stage had been set for the

emergence of novel as a form of literary expression in India. Srinivasa Iyengar states, “It was

in Bengal that the ‘literary expression’ first manifested itself” (315). Referring to other

novelists like Sarobji and S.B.Banerjee, M.E. Derret observes, “Others who imitated

English forms and expressions admirably could not convey through them the Indian modes

of thought and feeling, so that their works lacked the necessary depth and sincerity and

were imitations” (89). Bankim Chandra Chatterjee filled the foreign mould with Indian

context and legitimately earned the name of “The Father of The Novel” in India. His novel

played a vital role in quickening the literary renaissance all over the country. Krishna Kripalani
 7

has summed up Bankim’s contribution thus, “It was Bankim Chandra who established the

novel as a major literary form in India. He had his limitations. He was romantic, effusive

and…he indulged a little too free in literary flashes and bombast and was no peer of his

great contemporaries Zola and Dickens and much of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky” (31).

The freedom struggle resulted in the revolutionary brand of writing that voiced

sentiments against the British Empire. Several political leaders from different parts of the

country emerged as literary figures such as Bala Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpath Rai,

Kasturi Ranga Iyengar and T. Prakasham. The English language became a sharp and

strong instrument in the hands of Gandhiji, who edited and wrote for papers like ‘Young

India’ and ‘Harijan’. He also wrote his autobiography, ‘My Experiments with Truth’,

which was known for its literary flair. Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) stands out as another

prominent leader who excelled in writing prose. He was particularly remembered for his

Glimpses of World History and Discovery of India. Gandhiji, Nehru and Rajaji proved

through their writings that effective thoughts, even though they changed the destiny of a

nation could be expressed in a simple style. Their prose writings have been landmarks to

reveal the strength of Indian English writing. Tagore, Aurobindo and a host of others

wrote for humanity in general.

K.S.Venkataramani’s Kandan the Patriot (1932) and Murugan the Tiller (1927) are

novels full of politics. Strong echoes of these novels were written by Mulk Raj Anand

and Raja Rao. Anand’s novel occupied the forestage and the Indian novel replaced poetry

as an expression of Indian life and culture. After Anand and Raja Rao, the most significant

talent of R.K.Narayan emerged. After Narayan came Govind Desai, Kushwant Singh and

Manohar Malgonkar. The afore-mentioned social reforms had brought about

 8

emancipation of Indian women and the emergence of women writing in English. Indian

women had to be content with playing only a subordinate role in the social life of the

country. The advent of English education had cast its impact on the status of women in

Indian society. The battle for emancipation which was initiated by western education was

taken over by a few educated women who turned writers in their attempt to lay bare their

own bitter experiences to the world. It is only after the Second World War that women

novelists of quality have begun to emerge.

Rabindranath Tagore has also written novels and it dealt with the minds of the

individuals. His novels mostly were psychological. Again, V.S. Naipaul of Indian origin

has brought glory to the country by winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002. Since

1981, the Indian novelists have achieved great success with Salman Rushdie receiving

the “Booker Prize” for his work, Midnight’s Children. This Booker Prize was founded in

1969 in order to rescue the literary novel from feared extinction. R.K.Narayan’s Swami

and Friends (1935) struck a totally different note catching bemusedly the slow pace of

life in Malgudi, a fictional microcosm of India. The Bachelor of Arts is an early novel,

which explored the darker areas of human experience. The Financial Expert incorporated

the order-disorder rhythm perceived ironically even though a note of tragedy lingers.

R.K.Narayan’s comic vision projects in The Guide the attainment of self-knowledge

through diverse misadventures.

Mulk Raj Anand, one of the triumvirates of the established Indian writers, draws

characters from the everyday experiences and presents them as they are. The individual’s

search for identity is the central preoccupation of Mulk Raj Anand in most of his novels.

He believed that man can emerge from the breakdown, the disruption and the decay.
 9

Raja Rao is one of the most talented and innovative Indian-English novelists. He was

specialized in handling the abstract themes and tense situations. He has given full scope

to his characters to establish their identities as social beings and as typical members of

Indian society by involving them in actions, situations and experiences, which are valid

in the Indian context.

Bhabani Bhattacharya, presents a very idealistic portrait of female characters in

his novels. His admiration for Indian women is very high and he keeps them on equal

footing with his male characters. They are not mere fiddles to their male counterparts, but

they are fully independent, self-sufficient, have free spirit and are aware of their rights

and responsibilities. Krishna Kripalani has observed this situation thus:

It was both moral and intellectual and at once inhibitive and liberating.

In so far as it sharpened the writer’s loyalties by narrowing them and

encouraged Puritanism and a horror of sex it was inhibitive and unhealthy

and resulted without meaning to, in an irritating sanctimoniousness.

Gandhi stripped urban life elegance of their pretensions and emphasised

that religion without compassion and cultures without conscience were

worthless. He transfigured the image of India and turned national idealism

from its futile adulation of the past to face the reality of India as she was

poor, starving and helpless but with an untapped potential of unlimited

possibilities. (79)

Literature written at the time of the freedom movement projects a new image of

the Indian woman. The most significant development in the history of Indo-Anglian

literature of the post-Independence period was the emergence of a powerful group of

 10

women writers. From time to time Indian women novelists in English had discussed the

problems of women. They developed a style and technique of their own. Each writer was

different from another in individual perception, experience and response to the world

around them. All these are displayed by the wide variety of characters portrayed by them

in their novels. Spiritual, mental and psychological alienation has become a powerful

theme for many writers. The vast canvas of the theme helped many Indo-Anglian novelists to

explore the many aspects of the inner life. It soon became a recurring theme, especially

with young writers. Indra Kulshreshtha observes, “After centuries of social stagnation,

the Indian woman was now encouraged to come back to the main stream of social life

and resume her rightful place” (95). The growth of Indian women novelists writing in

English added a new dimension to Indian English novel. It was only after independence

of India that they began enriching Indian English fiction. Usha Bande says:

Liberation, discrimination and injustice are no doubt, some of the

significant issues tackled by women writers but it would be unfair to judge

their writings as regressive or stagnant. A woman may not have written

about actual action in battle, but she has not been blind to its horrors in

writing about her times. She has very often dipped her pen in tears or

blood and recorded her own impressions and experiences. (19)

All women writers are not feminist writers. They wrote about women issues

because, being women, they understood the problems of women which they projected in

their works. Amarnath Prasad says, “Indian women novelists in English and in other

vernaculars try their best to deal with, apart from many other things, the pathetic plight of

forsaken women, who are fated to suffer from birth to death”(2). In Indian society the
 11

ideal woman is personified by Sita who was portrayed in The Ramayana as the quintessence

of wifely devotion. This image of woman has loomed large in the Indian psyche and

women consciously or unconsciously had moulded themselves to conform to this image.

Raja Rao gave a holistic picture of woman in The Serpent and the Rope (1960):

Woman is the earth, air, ether, sound; woman is the microcosm of the

mind…. The knowing is Knowledge; woman is fire movement, clear and

rapid as the mountain stream….To Mitra, she is varuna, to Indra, she is

Agni, to Rama, she is Sita; to Krishna, She is Radha. Woman is the

meaning of the word, the breath, touch, act….woman is the kingdom,

solitude, time, woman is growth, woman is death….woman rules, for it is

she, the universe. (357)

As centuries went by, no voice was raised against the indignities heaped on women

in the male- dominated society. They were kept as illiterates and were treated as no more

than a child-bearing machine and an unpaid servant at home. The plight of the widows

was terrible, child marriages, which were in vogue, increased the number of widows.

The harmful custom of dowry increased, the miseries of young women too increased

every day.

In the ancient history of India, women have been deified, glorified and regarded

as myths. Even today, a duality is there in the protection of the image of women in literature.

While portraying deified archetypal images, there are also debased and degraded ones.

Mary Ann Fergusson observes, “… the images of women throughout history is that social

stereotypes have been reinforced by archetypes. Another way of putting this would be to

say that in every age woman has been seen primarily as mother, wife, mistress, sex
 12

object-their roles in relationship to men”(4-5). The last fifty years of Indian writings,

particularly novels, not only produced a rich harvest, but also an immensed variety and

complexity.

The psychological stand of the new generation writers are the source of the thematic

and conceptual variations that the Indian fiction writers have explored since the 1970s in

feminism, political and social concerns. Indian novel, since its origin more than a hundred

years ago, has dealt with the position of women’s problems. Most of the Indian women

living in an orthodox and conservative family felt inhibited to raise their voice against

aggressive dominance of the male persons of the society. Their ambitions, desires, sense and

sensibility are faithfully expressed in the novels of the women novelists of the twentieth

century. Their novels show such women, in spite of being highly educated, undergo

psychological suffering due to inferiority complex and deep sense of inhibitions. They

depict the image of the new women waiting for emancipation and liberation in a fast

changing world.

In the past, the work of the Indian women authors have been undervalued because

of some patriarchal assumptions. Indian societies gave priorities to the worth of male

experiences. Male authors used to deal with heavy themes. It was assumed that their work

would get more priority and acceptance in the society. Today is the generation of those

women writers who have money and are mostly western educated. Their novels are the

latest burning issues related with women and the society since long. Their books are

completely enjoyed by the masses. Women novelists use bold topics and commercials in

their novels. They paint the whole world of women with stunning frankness. The majority

of these novels trace the psychological suffering of the frustrated housewife.

 13

In India, the western feminist theories and explorations of female psyche have

been insisted and plagiarized. In western countries women give more importance to

individualism and they believe in rejecting the family and home and hating men in general.

But Indian women are more ‘rational’ in that sense. Feminism in India has changed over

time in relation to historical and cultural realities. Indian women struggled for identity

through different hierarchies. Writing about the recent fiction, K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar

says, “The future of insane fiction has given ample evidence of vitality, variety, humanity

and artistic integrity” (15).

Indian women writers shine luminously like their male counterparts by their

significant contribution to the enrichment of Indian English novels. The women novelists

who have risen to fame and won global recognition in literature are Comelia Sorabji,

Kamala Markandaya, R.P. Jhabvala, Attia Hossian, Nayantara Sahgal, Santha Rama Rao,

Kamala Das and Shoba De. These novelists seem to have derived inspiration and influences

from British novelists in respect of art and device in writing novels. They resemble to a

great extent Jane Austen, George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia

Woolf in the art of characterization and portrayal of the psychic mind of women.

Like these British women novelists, Indian women writers mute the male novelists both

qualitatively and numerically in exploration of inner mind of women to express their own

identity. The theme of psychological suffering and traumatic experiences of Indian

women was exploited by feminist novelists like Iqbalunnisa Hussain, Anita Desai, Rama

Mehta, Shashi Deshpande and Arundhathi Roy.

These novelists are mainly concerned in their novels with the psychological crisis

in the lives of Indian women who are subjected to physical and psychological torture in a
 14

male dominated society. They have exploited their skill in projecting convincingly the

agonized minds of women characters. Their novels invariably bear authenticity to their

feminist approach, outlook and perspective. Their keen observation of life of Indian women

and their interest in the study of their inner mind are examined by their vivid and panoramic

portrayal of their plight. They dived deep into the inner mind of the repressed women by

virtue of their feminine sensibility and psychological insight and brought to light their

inner issues, which are the outcome of their psychological and emotional imbalances.

Psychological content appears in a wide range of literary forms, from poetry to short

stories, plays and novels. Psychological novels deals with the individual’s inner experiences,

thoughts, feelings, emotions and introspections. The psychological novel is a work of

fiction in which the characters, thoughts, motivations and feelings are of greater interest

than the external action. Psychological novels give importance to values on characters,

their emotional reactions and go deeper into their minds than novels of other genres.

Events may not be presented in a chronological order, but as they occur in the characters’

minds, memories or fantasies.

Psychology is the science, which tries to understand the mental processes and

also it tries to find out what the mind is and how it works. Freud and Jung are the two great

exponents of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic study. They have made a significant

contribution to the interpretation of human motivation. According to Freud, the three

abstractions, Id, Ego and Super-ego are shorthand expressions for highly dynamic and

interrelated process in the life history and the present behavior of the individual. The modern

English novel is extremely psychological in character and deals with conscious regions of

the human. Psychology and literature are interrelated to each other. Most of the
 15

psychological novels in literature have a theme of virtue, emotional feelings and human

destiny. Psychological novels give a statement of what happens in it it goes on to explain

the way of the actions which had happened in it. It helps to analyse the change of behaviour

in the characters and deals with both the character and its action. The social, economic

and political factors play a very important role in the change of behaviour. Stream of

consciousness and close impressions of human mind are the main concepts in the

psychological novels.

The evolution of every human being – man or woman–starts right from the time a

single cell divides and multiplies, building up trillions of cells around itself to create an

organism endowed with consciousness. Like a man, woman begins her journey of life at

birth and passes through different stages till her span is over. In this journey, she develops

different characteristics, undergoes physical and psychological changes, acquires maturity

and with the advancement of time contributes her share in the progress of society. Unlike

man, most of the time she remains passive in many spheres, activities and decisions and

does not get the credit she deserves. History has recorded the names and achievements of

a large number of men but of only a small number of women.

The situation of women in India today is improved by making constant efforts to

change the female psyche, which has evolved over a period of centuries to become the

single greatest barrier in the path of women’s development. The psychological process of

women changed over time in their perceptions, patterns of thinking, motives, emotions,

conflicts and their strategies of coping with conflicts. This was important since adult

behaviour and personality characteristics are influenced by events that occur during the

early years of life. The birth of a female child evokes many responses from the family
 16

ranging from an overall sense of indifferent acceptance to a sense of contentment and a

feeling of being blessed. It is in this context that a girl develops an emotive map of the

family. The parents’ indifferent acceptance of her makes the female child realize that her

status is secondary and she experiences no space for herself. She learns to accept herself

as unwanted, or as a transient object to be cared for, but never to belong. In this process,

she starts doubting her value as a person. Lucky are those few women who have overcome

these psychological barriers and evolved successful strategies for coping up with hostile

circumstances and force in the personal, familial and social environments.

Women novelists have mostly written about women characters. Some writers

think that it is because women can understand female sensibilities better, they feel more

confident writing about women. Indeed, it requires a Tagore to be able to write about

both male as well as female sensibilities with equal perception. Women writers have

generally written about the problems of women against the background of changing

social, economic, cultural and political patterns.

Efforts are made today to study and analyze the psychology of women at different

stages of life in working and non–working environment. It scientifically studies the strategies

evolved by the successful few who have been able to break the age old myths about women’s

helplessness, incompetence, lack of drive and motivation to reach pinnacles of glory. A great

effort is required to provide women with necessary psychological security, nurturing, support,

guidance and counselling to enable them to understand themselves in more realistic and

progressive terms. The ways and means to break the barriers that stand in the way of

women’s progress is that women alone can break the barriers they have created for

themselves over a period of centuries.

 17

Even today, woman is regarded as a sex object. Though she is highly educated,

economically independent, she is still considered to be inferior to man. A housewife’s

work is not valued though she is an equal partner. Cooking, house-keeping are supposed

to be her basic works and of primary importance. The society wants that the woman must

think about her career after completion of her primary duties. Though she earns equally

with man, her income is always secondary and considered as extra money. The income of

man is basic or primary income. If a woman tries to escape from the overload of the

responsibilities she is called ‘selfish’. If she complains about her inferior situation, she

becomes a black mark on the ideal womanhood. Even today, society is not ready to give

an equal status to women.

The psychological content takes different forms in literature. It is found in the

structure of the text, the time, the place, the action or even in rhythm in the case of poetry.

Written thousand years ago in Japan, The Tale of Cenji was considered to be the world’s first

psychological novel. In Europe, Boccaccio was the first exponent of literary psychology.

Early psychological content in literary works are found in the texts of Plato and Aristotle.

The beginning of psychological literature as a genre can be traced back to Samuel Richardson’s

Pamella. Psychological novel fully developed in the twentieth century. Sigmund Freud is

well known for his theories regarding the unconscious mind and the mechanism of

repression. He stated that the mind can be divided into two parts. The conscious mind

which includes everything people are aware of and the unconscious mind which includes

people’s feelings, thoughts and memories that influence their behaviour.

The first Indian woman novelist who made a pioneering effort in writing novels

of profound psychological significance was Toru Dutt. Although she was pre-eminently
 18

renowned as a poet for the analysis of a substantial number of poetical works. She was

recognized as a novelist for her fictional work like Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arves

written in French and Bianca or The Young Spanish Maiden written in English. These two

novels are self – projection of her own agony and anguish of life. Toru’s typical attitude,

feelings and sentiments, which are characteristically Indian in all respects, manifest in the

character of her heroines.

Kamala Markandaya portrays a clear picture of women, especially the South

Indian women who lived in villages where life has not changed over a long period of

time. Nayantara Sahgal describes the problems and sufferings of women who feels

entrapped, oppressed and doomed to the care of husband and home. Her fiction focuses

attention on Indian woman’s search for sexual freedom and self – realization. Most of

her women are aware of this injustice done to them in marriage. As they go out of their

homes, they go in quest for their freedom. Anita Desai, like James Joyce and Virginia

Woolf, is widely recognized as the pioneer of psychological novelist in modern Indian

English Literature. Her writing attempts to discover truth and to convey it aesthetically.

She tries to go into the depth of the human mind to project a vision of the psychic world

and the trauma faced by womanhood.

Kamala Das projects in her poetry and novels her own inner mind without inhibition

and hesitation. She revolted against the male dominated Indian society and revealed her

feeling in a confessional mood. The other feminist novelist who won the Booker Prize for

literary achievement is Arundhati Roy. She has used the psychoanalytic theory of Freud,

to unveil the agonized minds of her women characters. Another woman novelist of the

pre– independence India was Comelia Sarobji, a feminist and a social reformer. As an
 19

advocate by profession, she championed the causes of Indian women and exposed in her

stories the deep mental agony of the married and unmarried women. Shevanthi Bai Nikambe,

a champion of feminism, advocated the liberty and emancipation of women in order to

extricate them from obsequious servitude and inhuman torture to which they were

subjected to by their husbands, mother-in-law and others.

Iqbalunnisa Hussain, as a feminist writer, has brought to light the tragic life of

Indian women in her fiction. She shows Indian women endure physical and psychological

suffering simply by virtue of their womanliness. Another novelist who travels along the

same path of study of psychic mind is Rama Mehta. She focused on the conflict between

tradition and modernity. Gita Hariharan has become a literary luminary with her first novel

The Thousand Faces of Night which has added a feather in her cap – The Commonwealth

Prize. Her motifs deal with death, pain and loss of self. She debates and analyzes complex

social psychological problems of the day.

Manju Kapur has successfully depicted the inner subtlety of a woman’s mind.

She displays a mature understanding of the female psyche and manages to blend the

personal with the external. Shoba De, an essential modern novelist and journalist, has

focused the marginalization of women in Indian society. As a female writer, she has a

genuine understanding of the psyche of woman. Her female protagonists struggled hard

in their lives to break patriarchal order and protect against male dominance. At last they

come out in flying colours in their quest for self – identity. She specifically explores the

world of urban women. Ruth Prawer Jhabavala was concerned with the psychological

state of mind of Indian women who undergo inexpressible sufferings in their marital life.
 20

The novels of these authors reflect the present age women who have realized

that they are not helpless and dependent. Today, woman has also become a direct money

earner and she is not simply confined to household works. The women of modern era

think of different lines and that is what is depicted in the novels of the Indian women

authors. With the spread of education and the influence of western thought, the women of

India today are evolving from their traditional image of ‘wife and mother’ to more

independent human beings, capable of spiritual depth, moral vision and intellectual

flights. This change in the thought process is well marked in the novels of the Indian

writers in English, especially those of the women writers of the post-independence era.

The women in these novels no longer occupy secondary positions but occupy the central

stage. They are the protagonists. They are presented as doctors, lawyers, artists and even

as scientists. The Indian women novelists, with their dominant role in the field of fiction,

have dealt with high seriousness the changing ethos of womanhood.

The main cause for the dissatisfaction of the women in today’s society is the superior

attitude of the men throughout. The women have suffered in silence and the Indian English

novelists frankly highlighted this concept. Sarah Grimke observes:

Man has subjugated women to his will, used her as a means to promote his

selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasure, to be instrumental

in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that

rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could do to debase and

enslave her mind. (10)

The protagonists of these novelists suffer from the changing reality on one side

and are affected by the society on the other. They experience and undergo bitter traumas
 21

and psychic problems. While many women writers of the modern times are concerned

with the political, socio-economic, scientific and cultural fields, Shashi Deshpande pictures

the psychological problems affecting middle – class Indian women and their changing

attitudes and abilities in confronting these problems.

Shashi Deshpande portrays the new Indian woman and her dilemma. She concerns

herself with the plight of the modern Indian woman trying to understand herself and to

preserve her identity as daughter, wife, mother and above all as a human being. Shashi

Deshpande is one of the few Indian English writers, who has portrayed the girl child

with deliberation. Shashi Deshpande unveils the subtle process of oppression and gender

differentiation at work in the family and in the male oriented society. Shashi Deshpande’s

protagonists occupy a pivotal position in her fiction. Her characters are not wooden ones.

They are modern ones. They are written in a psychoanalytical way. They have strength

of their own, and in spite of challengers and hostilities remain uncrushed. They are sensitive,

self-conscious, brilliant and creative. They revolt against the traditional parental family and

run away from the suffocated atmosphere of the narrow minded society.

As a living writer in India, Shashi Deshpande reflects a realistic picture of the

contemporary middle class family life. She focuses on women’s issues. Shashi Deshpande

began her writing career with short stories and then moved on to writing novels. Shashi

Deshpande was born in 1938 and brought up in Dharwad in Karnataka. She is the second

daughter of the renowned Kannada dramatist and Sanskrit scholar Sriranga. At the age of

fifteen, she went to Bombay, where she was graduated in Economics. Then she moved to

Bangalore where she gained a Degree in Law. After getting married, she settled in

Banglore with her husband and two children. During her stay in Mumbai, she decided to
 22

pursue a course in journalism. She got herself enrolled in the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan.

She took up a job as a journalist in the magazine “Onlooker”. She worked there for a

couple of months. While working in the magazine one of the sub – editors suggested to

her to write a short story.

Shashi Deshpande began writing and she published the first collection of short

stories, The Legacy and other stories in 1970. It was a textbook in Columbia University

for a course in modern literature. The primary focus of attention in her short stories is

woman, her frustration, pain and anguish. Her stories circle around middle – class woman

in India who are unable to challenge social convention and seek a compromise as a way

out of dilemma. Shashi Deshpande says that her father shaped her life and influenced

her mind. She says about her father, “He was dominant, never domineering. On the

contrary, if I should criticize him, I would say he was somewhat detached from us…,

may be if he had directed us at an early age, I could’ve done better” (232). Shashi

Deshpande’s father never allowed his children to mention their casts even though they

come from a Brahmin family. Her father is free from these gender identities :

He never allowed us to state that we were Brahmins. There were no elders

in the family who could’ve introduced us to the rituals and rites of a

Brahmin upbringing. so we had a very free and uncluttered childhood, a

good up bringing….we started reading and thinking very early ….Another

thing about my father was that he never made us feel conscious that we

were daughters. He never barred us from doing anything we wanted. (232)

Shashi Deshpande has written four children’s books and twelve novels. Her novel

The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980) won the Nanjagud Thirumalamba Award. In 1984 she
 23

was given the Thirumathi Rangammal Prize for her novel Roots and Shadows (1983)

which is her first novel but published after her novel The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980).

The novel That Long Silence (1998) won the Shahitya Akademi Award which is India’s

highest literary honour. The Binding Vine (1993), A Matter of Time (1996) Small Remedies

(2000) and two crime novels If I Die Today (1982) and Come and be Dead (1983), and

her latest Moving on (2004), In the Country of Deceit (2008), Ship that Pass (2012,)

Shadow Play ( 2013), are the other novels. The novelist portrays in – depth the meaning

of being a woman in modern India. Over the years, Shashi Deshpande has published about

a 100 stories in literary journals, magazines and newspapers, in between writing her

immensely popular novels which are now read all over the world, and taught in

universities wherever Indian writing has an audience. Shashi Deshpande wrote screen

play for the Hindi film “Drishti”. Her short stories were collected in five volumes.

She identifies herself as a wife, mother and a human being. She values ‘human

relationship’ and her writings mostly revolve around middle – class Indian families.

Her novels start with characters and end with characters. Like Jane Austen, her novels

have a narrow range in dealing with theme and characters. She mentions Somerset

Maugham, Jane Austen, Doris Lessing, Simone de Beauvior and Tolstoy as the personalities

who influenced her. Shashi Deshpande is essentially a self-taught writer. She never

thought of becoming a writer. She told the interviewer that after their return from

England her husband persuaded her to write about the trip:

My husband was a commonwealth scholar and we went to England.

We were there for a year. I thought it would be a pity if I forget all our

experiences there, so I started writing them down and gave them to my

 24

father. He gave them to ‘Deccan Herald’ which published them promptly.

So it began very accidently. (14)

The short stories and novels of Shashi Deshpande portray women’s struggle for

life and survival in contemporary India. She outlines the critical human predicament and

emotional affinities, of women. Her novels reveal woman’s quest for self, enlightenment,

exploration into the female psyche and an awareness of the mysteries of life in which

women are placed. G.S.Amur aptly remarks:

The operative sensibility in Deshpande’s stories is distinctly female and

modern…she is at her best when she works out her themes in terms of

intimate human relationships, generally within the family. She uses the

story as a medium of moral and psychological analysis and her focus is

almost invariably on the inner life. (112)

In the context of the contemporary Indian writing in English, Shashi Deshpande is

the confident voice which explores individual and universal female psyche. Her fictional

work is a long journey through the psyche of the educated middle – class Indian woman.

Most of her protagonists are women who are educated and exposed to western ideas.

She excels in painting a realistic picture of an educated woman who, although financially

independent is still facing the problems of adjustment between the old and the new,

between tradition and modernity, between idealism and pragmatism. She portrays the

protagonist’s turmoils, convulsions, frustrations and that long silence which has been

there for many centuries. Shashi Deshpande gives her personal view:

When I look back at this point of time, to the beginning of my own

writing, I can see that it came out of both anger and confusion. Something,
 25

I felt, was not right with the world, with my world. It was hard to get a

clear sense of what was wrong; there was only this confusion and anger.

It was only much later that I was able to connect my anger to the sense of

denigration I was made to feel about being a female, about the roles that

my gender Identity seemed to have locked me into, roles which I often

chafed against. Worst of all was the idea that this gender identity and the

roles that came with it, seemed to deny my intellectual self, a self that was

as important to me as my emotional self. It was out of this turmoil and

disturbance that my writing was born. (22-24)

Shashi Deshpande presents the sufferings of sensitive women characters, who

find it very difficult to adjust themselves to the present urbanized set up. She has been

labelled as a great feminist writer of international acclaim for having presented the plight

of sensitive women characters trapped between tradition and modernity. Shashi Deshpande

feels embarrassed to be called a woman writer and she is not very enthusiastic about the

label ‘feminist’. She considers herself as a feminist in personal life but not a feminist

writer. When interviewed by Prasanna Sree, she asserts that she is a feminist and further

elaborates on this:

I am a feminist; I am a very staunch feminist in my personal life… My

idea of feminism is like what I told you. A woman is also an individual

like a man with lot of capabilities and potentials. She has every right to

develop all that. She should not be oppressed just because she is a female.

Like a man she also has her own qualities she has every right to live her

life, to develop her qualities, to take her decisions, to be independent and

 26

to take charge of her own destiny. So all these things to me are part of

myself being a feminist. I don’t mean by that this false idea of liberation

that you don’t need a family. You don’t need parents. We are all part of

the society and we need some ties…. I am not a feminist writer. If you call

me a feminist writer, you are wronging me, because I see people as human

beings. In my novels you will not see bad men and good women. All of us

have both qualities in ourselves, some good and some bad and you know it

is all there is my novels and in my characters. (154-155)

Shashi Deshpande makes no attempt to find solutions to their various problems,

for her view is that the solution of the problem lies not in constantly finding fault with the

husband’s behavior but in having a positive attitude. Vanamala Viswanatha points out

that the author has presented in her work, “A typical middle class house – wife’s life.

The urge to find one self, to create space for oneself to grow on one’s own seems to be

the major pre – occupation, personally I think that’s every woman’s problems. Well, that’s

where you have touched a chord, I think” (48).

Shashi Deshpande’s heroines are sensitive, intelligent and career-oriented. She is

one with Anita Desai and Nayantara Sahgal in not merely describing the pathetic life styles

of Indian women but in trying to understand and suggest measure for their problems. She

captured and captivated her readers by presenting the subtle psychological complexities

of the individual mind. Her characters are real and alive. Though in one of her interviews

she has remarked that she does not possess any specific mission as a writer and has

resisted the tag of a woman writer, her themes and concepts are based on the lives and

problems of women. According to Shashi Deshpande, the writer writes not to achieve
 27

something but she is on the quest that allows her to an unknown way. In “Writing and

Activism” Shashi Deshpande explains the role of a writer. She says:

“How do we Live?” This is the question, which, above and beyond all

questions, has plagued the human mind….A writer is different from all

others in that at the moment of writing, she steps out of the room, so to

say, stands at a distance, a little away from her own humanity and sees the

world from this vantage point of view. This gives a unique perspective, the

larger picture, which is closer to the truth, than anything else…. It also lets

us see, clearly our strengths and weakness, our flaws and follies, our dreams

and nightmares. This is what the writer has to offer a reader. This, perhaps, is

truly the writer’s role. (6)

Shashi Deshpande deals with the inner world of the Indian women in her novels.

In her novels The Dark Holds No Terrors, Roots and Shadows, That Long Silence,

A Matter of Time, The Binding Vine, and Small Remedies women are supportive to men

in dealing with the contrary world.

Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Hold No Terrors (1980) which is her favourite

novel, seeks to discuss the enlightenment and the harrowing experience of the protagonist

Saru. It also deals with the psychological and traumatic experience of a career woman.

Shashi Deshpande discusses the gender discrimination shown by parents towards their

daughters and their desire to have a male child, and it portrays the sexual sadism of a

frustrated husband’s victimization of his wife. Shashi Deshpande also makes the readers

aware of society’s reaction to the superior status of the wife in a marriage, which leads

the husband to develop an inferiority complex.

 28

Shashi Deshpande’s first novel Roots and Shadows (1983), presents the image of

a woman. This novel explores the inner struggle of the protagonist Indu. She tries to learn

the truth about her, deserting all the shadows that she had thought to be her real self.

The novel projects the enlightenment of an educated women who are unable to enfranchise

the world in which they are reared. Shashi Dehpande seems to suggest through Roots and

Shadows that a change in the upbringing of girl-child is required. Since her childhood, the

psyche of a girl child is conditioned in a particular fashion to inculcate in her all types of

feminine qualities.

Shashi Deshpande’s third novel, That Long Silence (1989) won the Sahitya Akademi

Award in 1990. She received “Padma Shri” Award for the same novel in the year 2009.

It deals with the story of an Indian woman who maintains silence throughout her life in the

face of hardships that threatened to break it. The novel shows how the male dominated society

tortures the Indian women. The protagonist Jaya stands for the woman who tolerates all

sorts of inhuman behaviour, cruelty of her husband and never speaks a word against him.

Like Kamala Markandaya and Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande has presented a slice of

Indian life with its up and downs, tears and turmoils and restoration of self through crisis.

In her novel A Matter of Time (1996) Shashi Deshpande frees herself from the

narrow confines of women and their problems and enters into the metaphysical world of

philosophy. The novel is essentially the story of three women from three generations from

the same family and how they manage with the tragedy that overwhelms them. The novel

particularly deals with the theme of the Awakening of the oneself for a female identity.

It is only through a process of self – examination and self – searching, through courage
 29

and resilience that one can change one’s situation from despair to hope. The story is revealed

through the inner consciousness of one central character, Madhu Saptarishi.

Binding Vine (1993) touches a chord in every woman as she responds to it with

recognition of her own doubts, complexes, fears, desires and suffering being mirrored in

the narration of Urmila, the protagonist. It pictures the restoration of self through crisis

and the personal tragedy of Urmila. Three stories are merged in the plot of Binding Vine.

As Urmila walks through the labyrinth of relationships, she witnesses, experiences and

analyses the confusion and guilt, the pain and anger, the joy and suffering and an entire

emotional whirpool surfacing. Her one year old daughter dies and she is unable to forget

her because her memories haunt her. So, she gets involved with a young rape victim

Kalpana and her own long dead mother-in-law Mira’s poetry.

Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies (2000) is the most confident assertion of

her strength as a novelist. It is a novel about several feelings – love, courage, honesty,

truth, death and the pain associated with death. It tells the story of Madhu Saptarishi

whose awakening self is linked with the search for identity of two other women–Savitri Bai

Indorekar and Leela. It is through their struggle for identity that Madhu comes to know

her own self. She has led the normal life and undergoes a great mental trauma due to the

opposition of a society that practices a double standard. Even as a child, she is a victim of

gross gender discrimination. The novel presents Madhu’s struggle with her feeble family

life. She is a lonely, sensitive and capable woman faced with the terrible shock caused by

the death of her only son Adit, and sets out on a long and lonely journey of life.

Come Up and Be Dead (1983) is a psychological thriller novel by Shashi Deshpande.

This novel marks her literary skill. School and Headmistress play an important role in
 30

this novel. The story relates with the suicide of a girl in the school. Headmistress Devayani

could not find the reason why it has happened. Devi is the storyteller of this novel.

Following the two deaths, the reason for the death is revealed. In a unique manner, Shashi

Deshpande made it a good example for crime novel. The novel mainly deals with human

philosophy with the help of crime and suspense. Even though the story carries suspense

the characters seem to be quite and simple.

Shashi Deshpande’s detective novel If I Die Today (1982), is full of crime and

suspense. The young college lecturer, the narrator of the story, is married to a doctor.

They live inside the medical college campus. A cancer patient Guru plays an important

role in this novel. After his arrival the family starts to collapsing. Mriga, an important

character, plays another vital role. Her father leaves her alone because of his westernized

and modernized habit of living. Her growth in the novel narrows down her to the central

character of the novel. The story mainly concentrates on the patriarchal society in a

delicate way.

The novel Moving On (2004) reveals the secret passions of men and women like

love, plot, hate and debate. This novel also deals with the Indian women and their inner

world. Manjari a chief character starts the story by discovering some truths in her father’s

diary. In that she finds a lot of old memories, responses, love and hate. It makes her feel

something new in the world. She comes to know lots of new things from the diary. This

helps to expose the new ways of storytelling. Thus, Shashi Deshpande has proved her

own innovative methods of storytelling in this novel.

Like Jane Austen, all her novels are obviously considered with human relationships.

In the Country of Deceit (2008), is about love between an adult man and an adult woman.
 31

Devayani, the protagonist of the novel, falls deeply and passionately in love with Ashok

Chinnapa. It is very difficult to judge if adult love is good or bad. Human beings always

care for love – even in death a dying man wants to hold some one’s hands. It is very

difficult to distinguish love according to the level of mental maturity. A sixty –year – old

man or a woman can fall in love and behave like a child. People realize the true meaning

of love only when they fall in love.

Shis that Pass (2012) tells the story of Tara and Shaan, mere strangers to each

other even after fourteen years of married life. Tara’s sister Radhika engaged almost on a

whim, to someone she barely knows. Radhika tries to understand how a once ideal marriage

has come undone and struggle with her own feelings for an older man. Tara dies in

mysterious circumstances and Shaan is arrested for murder. In the aftermath, Radhika

realizes that while life may seldom turn out as expected, the only hope lies in finding the

courage to take one’s changes.

Shadow Play (2003) is a story about ordinary people going about their lives, in a

city in Karnataka. They go to work, come home, eat, sleep, and deal with each other.

There are births, deaths, silences, irrational acts, talk, and more than their share of

tragedy, with which they seem to cope rather well. The story deals with three generations

of the family, and how even when one generation has passed on, they continue to throw

shadows on the lives of those still living. Shadow Play was shortlisted for The Hindu

Literary Prize in 2014.

The protagonists of Shahi Deshpande’s novels are modern, educated and independent

women, roughly between the age of thirty and thirty-five. Their search for freedom and

self – identity within marriage is a recurring theme. She brings the issues of sex and
 32

exploitation of women and portrays a woman’s inner conflicts and her struggles to achieve

her identity. Her heroines try to change their lives and fight their own battles of life.

As Rani Dharkar comments, “they begin in ignorance and grow into self-knowledge

through suffering” (56). In an interview with Prasanna Sree, she remarks:

It is not my idea of replacing one model with another. I am just de- constructing

these myths ….All of us are trying to adapt ourselves to the society as it is,

and in that process we are discovering ourselves, new ways of living and

new ways of functioning. I don’t really subscribe to this theory that one is

destroying the role models totally. These role models were imposed on us

by men. It was they who wrote the stories. They who told us about these

Pativratas, “they told us what we should be”. So we want to find out for

ourselves, now what we are and how we are going to function in our

relationships in our different ties with the whole world. It is a too simplistic

idea that women writers are destroying the role models and what are the

role models? This is a liberated woman and this is not a liberated woman.

I think literature has to be approached differently. Literature is as complex

as life itself. (157-158)

Women are now treated in equal terms by law as far as inheritance of property

and opportunities of job are concerned. But on the social level, these women who have

been struggling since ages to assert themselves, are still being challenged by their male

counterparts and forced to remain silent. Shashi Deshpande says:

I am a feminist in the sense that, I think, we need to have a world, which

we should recognize as a place for all of us human being. There is no

 33

superior and inferior, we are two halves of one species. I fully agree with

Simon de Beauvoir that “the fact that we are human, is much more important

than our being man and women.” I think that’s my idea of feminism

….women have been quite oppressed. We, middle class people with

education are quite lucky. But a large section of Indian women are

suffering even today….It is this absmal difference that I want to do away

with, as a feminist. (254)

Shashi Deshpande novels based on surrender and sufferings of women do not

necessarily end with their rejection of family and marriage. The tension created by the

husband-wife relationship due the lack of understanding and mutual respect affects the

family relationship. Family is the main theme in the fictional world of Shashi Deshpande.

In an interview with Vanamala Viswanatha, she says:

Undoubtedly my novels are all about family relationships. But I…. go

beyond that because, the relationships which exist within the family are, to

an extent, parallel to the relationships which exist between human beings

outside…. When I am writing about the family, it is not just about the

family, it definitely does not limit my canvas. On the contrary, that is

where everything begins. (13)

Shashi Deshpande takes us inside the consciousness of her women characters to

present their plight, fears, dilemmas, contradictions and ambitions. Her bold and balanced

heroines often face the challenges of life confidently. Mostly, they return to their husbands

with Enlightenment, Awakening of oneself and Restoration of their self through crisis.

She examines the realities behind the silence of women.

 34

While Anita Desai’s heroines succumb to their weakness and find solution in homicide

or suicide, Nayantara Sahgal shows her woman defy traditional roles in search of

emancipation. They fail to find a positive solution without defying traditional norms.

Only Shashi Deshpande through her works, shows women willing to take their share of

the blame of their sufferings and bravely face the situation. J.P.Tripathi opines, “Anita

Desai or Shoba De who present disintegrated individualistic pictures of Indian social

ethos show the crumbling of familial bonds under modern egotistical selfish social

scenario. Shashi Deshpande’s pictures are still integrational and cohensive even under

pressures of modernity” (150). In Indian fiction, women characters suffer in both

conventional or unconventional way. Bala Kothandaraman remarks:

The unconventional are seen to suffer for their violation of accepted norms

of society, or for questioning them – death is the way out for them, unless

their experience teaches them to subdue their individuality and rebelliousness

and realize the wisdom of the traditional ways. The conventional women

suffer too, but their suffering is sanctified by the norms of Indian culture and

particularly by that of a patriarchal culture. (57)

Shashi Deshpande’s concerns are with the people and their inner fears and doubts

rather than with the externals of life and living. Her characters are always engaged in

questioning and evaluating the meaning of ideals, attitudes, actions and reactions of

people in personal interactions and relationships. Shashi Deshpande presents human

feelings, which were forgotten from the pages of human history. She makes them come alive

as characters that seem real though belonging to an own neighbourhood. Her powerful
 35

protagonists come out of the bedrooms, kitchens and attics to articulate and reconstitute

their lives through their ‘feminist awareness’ and introspection.

In her six novels, homecomings, mothers, traditions and families, appear to be

made clearly into a single corpus that it is quite often very difficult to disentangle one

from the other. This is ingeniously one of the major distinctive traits in the fiction of

Shashi Deshpande. The theme of homecoming becomes a symbolic instrument and a

crucial process for Shashi Deshpande’s protagonists to regain inner balance, to declare

their independence and to stake out their own identity. She portrays her women as seeking

anchorage in marriage. Her protagonists rebel and marry the men of their choice, but

ultimately submit to traditions of their husbands. As Carl Gustav Jung opines, “Middle

life is the moment of greatest unfolding, when a man still gives himself to his work with

his whole strength and whole will. But in this very moment, evening is born and the

second half of life begins” (45). Shashi Deshpande’s women compromise with their lot in

life, though not before asserting their individuality. In an interview to Chandra Holm,

Shashi Deshpande remarks:

…you bring them to question everything. And it is through this

questioning, through this thinking that you move on, pick up your life

once again. But you are never the same after this. This is true of all human

beings, not just women….In this thinking process, humans do discover

their own potential. So do the women I have written about. (9)

Her writing reflects an ongoing process of problematizing life’s conflicts and

compromises, resolutions and irresolution, ironies and affirmations, triumphs and tragedies,

and so on. G.s.Balarama Gupta found her women, “Creatures of conventional morality:
 36

they are the ones who are unfairly abused, misused and ill-used. But they believe in

conformity and compromise for the sake of retention of domestic harmony rather than

revolt which might result in the disruption of familial concord” (39).

The novels of Shashi Deshpande keep ‘Woman’ at the centre and the story roll

around the experiences of the protagonists who are women. The demands that society

makes an individual self in two different cultures of the West and the East and the struggle

of the protagonists to achieve the self– realization, is portrayed in Shashi Deshpande’s

six novels.

The six novels The Dark Holds No Terrors, Roots and Shadows, That Long Silence,

A Matter of Time, Binding Vine and Small Remedies which are the main contributions of

Shashi Deshpande are the select novels for this research. As most of the novels of Shashi

Deshpande concentrated on the women who play the vital role, this research has concentrated

on a psychological study of the heroines. Being a part of man’s life, a woman plays a

different role from birth till her death. With a gift for sharp psychological insight into the

subtleties of human mind and society and aided by a richly evocative, unassuming and

unpretentious style, Shashi Deshpande is perhaps ideally suited to tread the labyrinthine

tracts of human psyche and creditable respect in fiction. Her six novels are a lesson to the

psyche of people who lose their capacity for rational thought on being subjected to

traumatic experience.

The following brief analysis of Shashi Deshpande’s novels presents a clear idea

about the problems of women and the solutions taken by them for these problems. It also

presents Sashi Deshpande as one of the foremost Indian women novelists. Though there is

no overt feminism in her work, she tries to achieve a texture of individuality and in it, one
 37

can trace the pattern of women’s roles in the changing matrix of Indian society. In the

context of the contemporary Indian writing in English, Shashi Deshpande is the confident

voice who explores individual and universal female psyche. Her fictional work is a long

journey through the psyche of the educated middle-class Indian woman. In her novels

The Dark Holds No Terrors, Roots and Shadows, That Long Silence, A Matter of time,

The Binding Vine and Small Remedies women are supportive to men dealing with the

hostile world.

Though much link has been spilled on the most reputed and widely read modern

Indian novelist Shashi Deshpande, this research work aims at liberating the suppressed

Indian women from all sorts of suppressions. Voluminous critical works and research

papers have been carried out on Shashi Deshpande and her works. Various aspects in her

novels like traditional, cultural, social, moral, feminine feministic, modern, etc. have

meticulously been worked on by numerous writers as below:

"A Bond or a Burden" in The Binding Vine by S.Indra

"Woman’s Inner Life" in A Matter of Time by N.B. Misal

"The Theme of Marriage and Selfhood" in Roots and Shadows by Ujwala Patil

"Breaking Silence" in That Long Silence by Sarala Palkar

The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande by M.D. Soundkar. Ph.D. thesis.

Shashi Deshpande has hardly been touched on from the psychological point of

view. Thus, in this aspect, this thesis proves a novel effort, as it aims at a psychological

analysis of the select novels of Shashi Deshpande such as The Dark Holds No Terrors,
 38

Roots and Shadows, That Long Silence, A Matter of Time, The Binding Vine, and Small

remedies.

This psychological study is carried out with a view to:

1. Eradicate fear of all storts from the mind of Indian women,

2. Induce self confidence and self awareness,

3. Liberate from all social taboos,

4. Break the shackles of tradition, and

5. Empower women with new found self awareness and glorify womanhood.
Emancipation of Women
 39

Chapter II

Emancipation of Women

In Indian family, the woman’s sphere of life and activity are bound by the protective

and prohibitive walls raised by the moralists from the middle ages down to the beginning

of the present society. Later, the prohibitive walls turned into the walls of prison and her

position in the family as well in the society has become an almost inferior one. A woman

is expected to have no sense of identity. Though the condition of women is free and

autonomous, they find themselves living in a world of compulsion. The relationship

between man and woman exists similar to that of a master and a slave, but woman is to

be observed as an essential object to man. After marriage, women sacrifice a considerable

part of their personal development. Karen Horney’s comments on feminine psychology

and observes that a wife, “will despair because of her abundant love while at the same

time she will feel most intensely and see most clearly the lack of love in her partner” (108).

In The Dark Holds No Terrors Shashi Deshpande succeeds in the portrayal of the

heroine Saru’s mental state. Sarita was normally referred to as ‘Saru’ throughout the novel.

She was a neglected and ignored child of her mother. Her mother Kamala was a typical

Indian woman, who took much pride and more care and lot of love on her male child

Dhruva rather than Saru. Though Saru was the first child to her parents, she was considered

secondary because of her brother Dhruva.The novel is remarkable for its exploration of the

inner landscape.

The Dark Holds No Terrors gives a realistic portrayal of Saru’s inner self.

The novel is an experience in reflection of the past, the crisis, its cause and the quest for

identity. Shashi Deshpande explains herself in an interview by Holmstrom Lakshmi:

 40

The present is in the third person and the past is in the first. I was doing it

throughout in the first. But that’s often a perspective I use in short stories.

I wanted to be more objective. So then I tried it in the third. But it wouldn’t

work at all. Yet I really need to distance myself from the narrative in the

present, otherwise it was going to be far too intense. And then I read an

American novel by Lisa Alther where she uses this method. And the

minute I came across her novel I thought let- me admit it freely-oh god,

this is how I am going to do my novel. (13)

Shashi Deshpande brings out the psychological problem of a career woman.

The protagonist Saru was a successful lady doctor. She tried to escape the role of being a

wife, when she returned to her parents’ house fifteen years after she left home with a vow

never to return. Her stay in her father’s house gave Saru a chance to review her relationship

with her husband, her children, her parents and her dead brother Dhruva. Saru returned

unable to bear the sexual sadism of her husband. But she did not know the kind of

reception she would get at her parental house. After her love marriage with Manu, Saru

had lost contact with her parents. She therefore got a cold reception at her father’s house.

Saru was least expected there, for she had not even written a letter announcing her arrival.

She had made up her mind just two days before and had come, as if, unannounced. She entered

the house, and immediately, the past overtook her. She fights back, “The memory was as

violent as an assault and angrily she rejected it” (15).

Though Saru had met her father after a long time, both of them feel as strangers to

each other and could not think of a common topic of discussion. Her father avoided

looking at her and sits gingerly on the edge of his chair. When she was served tea by her
 41

father which is, “…too sweet and strong” for her, she feels her father was, “an unwilling

host entertaining an unwelcome guest”(18). At times, Saru goes to the extent of regretting

her visit, “Why had it seemed so important to come here, and, at once? She thought of

Abhi’s tears….Of Renu’s face and question”(17). For an enlightenment Saru had come

back to her father to sort out her problems, to analyze her life, to review and re-examine

her crisis. She did not feel at home at her parent’s place where once she was born and

brought up. She felt like a ‘stranger’ as Sudama standing at the gates of the place of

Krishna and Rukmani. She was conscious that she is no ‘Sudama’ in rages, with bare feet

and filled with humility. But she got only a cold reception. Soon she settled into a

peaceful state, despite the many inconveniences of the private old fashioned house and

all her past.

Saru’s mother had been an orthodox old- fashioned woman and she had as a general

practice brought her children up with some amount of strict discipline. The mother was

more strict with daughters because daughters were trained to submit and adjust in a new

household. For sons it was different. Household chores were meant only for daughters.

The sons will have to earn. Saru was too young to understand the mother’s logic. Her mother

was very attached to her son. She loved Dhruva because he was a male child and therefore

one who will propagate the family lineage. The male child is considered more important

than a girl, because he is qualified to give “agni” to his dead parents.When Dhruva was

alive, her mother’s discrimination between the two had been very apparent to Saru. Her

mother reminded her that she should not go out in the sun, as it would worsen her already

dark complexion. Saru recalled her conversation with her mother.

 42

Don’t go out in the sun. You’ll get even darker.

Who cares?

We have to care if you don’t. We have to get you married.

I don’t want to get married.

Will you live with us all your life?

Why not?

You can’t.

And Dhruva?

He’s different. He’s a boy. (45)

Saru was ignored in favour of her brother Dhruva. The celebration of birthday

parties differed among the two. Dhruva’s birthday party was often given a prominent

importance comparing to Saru’s. Her fifteenth birthday gave the bitter contradiction

between her mother and herself. Mother usually liked to rule alone over her feminine

universe. Saru narrates the incident:

I rarely brought my friends home, rarely went out with them after school.

Whenever I did so, there was always a scene. I felt full of a sullen hatred I

could not find words to express adequately. I kept silent and that enraged

her even more. ‘Can’t you talk? Am I so much below your notice? You

can talk to your friends for hours, but you can’t speak a sentence to your

mother. What am I? An enemy?’ ‘Is it such a crime to go for a walk?’ I

burst out.‘Walk? Didn’t you think you could have helped me at home?
 43

There are the vegetables to be cut, the buttermilk to be churned.When

you’re working, I never ask for a bit of help. I slog the whole day all by

myself. But to go for a walk….’A huge anger filled me making me almost

blind. What about me? It was my birthday. Did she remember that other

girls had gifts and smiles and festive meals. While I? (170)

Saru was assigned duties that belong to the periphery of women. Saru was forced

to obey the orders of her mother. She survived on mere responsibility. Her mother’s words

only reflected her second affection. Her mother always adored Dhruva, and posed in an

environment of hatred and loneliness, which created a rebellion within her. Saru’s mind

was filled with feelings of hatred towards her mother as Adesh Pal observes, “For Saru

the very word “mother” stands for old traditions and rituals, for her mother sets up a bad

model, which destroys her growth as a woman, as a being” (74-75). Though the death of

her brother was purely an accident, Saru was blamed for the whole incident. Her mother

kept on blaming her, saying that she was the only cause and also the murderer of Dhruva.

Saru and Dhruva were never enemies. They shared their own secrets, which were never

revealed to their mother. Saru loved and cared for her brother and the memories haunted

Saru often.

The death of Dhruva turned a great blow in the life of Saru. The sad end of her

brother branded Saru as a disobedient and adamant child. She was blamed solely for the

death of her brother Dhruva. Her mother who already showed gender discrimination

started hating Saru, used harsh words and insulted her, “I hated her. I wanted to hurt her,

wound her, make her suffer” (142). By the death of Dhruva, Saru lost her peace of mind.

She whole – heartedly felt sorry for her disobedience. Her guilty conscience began to
 44

worry her from her childhood days. When she was not provided a comfortable home, her

search for self and individuality begins. The quest for self was an important search that

each human being felt at a certain stage in life. M.D.Soundkar says, “Identity is a subjective

sense and an observable quality of ‘personal sameness’ and continuity. It can only be realized

by a process of examination into the past incidents and the personal experiences. These

experiences are different almost in every way: emotional, physical and social” (160).

The gender discrimination of her mother and her treatment of Saru is the cause for

the death of Dhruva. In her adolescent age, Saru is very much haunted by her “feminism”.

She is ashamed of her girlhood. The haunting words of her mother and her untouchability

during her periods is a hateful one to Saru. As she grows up, bitterness and hatred drive

her to leave home and seek success in medical college. There she falls in love with a

college mate Manu, a post graduate student. Hostel life is a rebirth to Saru, where she

does not have to stay outside during her mensuration. It is the first time in her life Saru

feels proud of her female identity and learns to dress and walk gracefully. Mary Wollstonecraft

rightly observes:

I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and happiness consists, I

wish to persuade women to en-deavour to acquire strength, both mind and

body…(and) to show that elegance is inferior to virtue that the first object

of loadable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being regardless

of the distinction of sex. (19)

Saru’s love for Manu, was a love at first sight. He was not only a good student

but also the Secretary of the Literary Association, an active member of the dramatic society

and a promising writer. Saru had admired Manu in her college days. He was a student
 45

leader and a young poet like Shelley who was to take the literary world by storm. Their

love was romantic. Saru surrender herself completely to Manu. Saru met Manu when he

was directing a play for the college day. On seeing Saru and Smitha, her friend, Manu

gets irritated. Saru said, “He was the only person I saw. His effortless control over the

others, his anger at their mistakes, his smiles that came and went in a flash…” (53). Manu

adored her beauty, whereas her mother had always said that she was not pretty. He talked of

Keats and Shelley and she marvelled at his knowledge and for saying romantic things to her.

Saru’s father supported her decision to marry Manu, but her mother said, “I know

all these ‘love marriages’. It’s love for a few days, then quarrels all the time. Don’t come

crying to us then. To you? God, that’s the one thing I’ll never do. Never !” (69). She was

determined never to return to her mother. Her mother, being an old, traditional, orthodox

woman, did not want her daughter to get married to a low caste person:

What caste is he?

I don’t know.

A Brahmin?

Of course not.

Then, cruelly…his father keeps a cycle shop.

Oh, so they are low –caste people, are they? (96)

Saru disobeyed her mother and she wanted to show her mother that she was not a

spare or secondary thing but an individual. Her wish is not accepted by her mother. She first

enquired about the man and his caste whom Saru had decided to marry. When Saru’s
 46

mother came to know that Manokar was a low-caste man, she cursed her daughter. Saru

revolted against her parents and ran away to get married to a person of her own choice.

In Shashi Deshpande’s novels, mothers play a very important part in protagonists’

journey. Their hatred towards their daughters, which destroys not only their childhood

but their adult life as well, is felt throughout her novels. According to Usha Pathania,

“The stifling mother-child relationship in the novel is an off-shoot of dissonance in the

husband-wife relationship” (115). Saru always feels insecure in her parent’s home, her

marriage to Manu is a means of that love and security which she had always lacked in

life. He is the ideal romantic hero who has come to rescue her from insecure, loveless

existence. Saru feels flattered by Manu’s love:

that he, a man set apart from the others, above the others…how callow

they seemed now, the boys in my class…should love me seemed even

more incredible. The fisherman’s daughter couldn’t have been more

surprised when the king asked her to marry him, than I was by Manu’s

love for me. But the fisherman’s daughter was wiser. She sent the King to

her father and it was the father who bargained with him.While I…I gave

myself up unconditionally, unreservedly to him. To love him and to be

loved. (66)

Saru finds it hard to believe that she could find so much happiness in life, which

could mean so much to any human being. Such things happened only to girls in movies

and books, not to girls like her. Manu cared for her feelings as no one has ever done.

One night she wakes up sobbing, after having dreamt of Dhruva. She finds Manu hovering

over her, and asks, “What is it, Saru? What is it?” (146). She does not tell him the truth
 47

and says, “I dreamt that you had rejected me”(146). The lie immensely pleases Manu who

holds Saru to her heart. She too gives herself up to being comforted and loved. Marrying

Manu is an act of challenge and signifies a permanent break in her relationship with her

mother. Manu fears that separating Saru from her parents will be painful for her. Saru, on the

other hand, feels quite detached from them already and explains it in a scientific manner:

Have you seen a baby being born? Do you know, Manu, how easy it is to

cut the umbilical cord and separate the baby from the mother? Ligate, cut

and its done. There’s scarcely any bleeding either. It’s as if nature knows

the child must be detached from the parent. No, Manu, for me there will

be no trauma, no bleeding. (39)

When Saru accepted Manu, she metaphorically cuts the umbilical cord. After Saru

married Manu, the mother successfully erased every trace of her in the household. As an

educated young woman, she did not accept anything without reason. Her mother almost

forced her to stay within the four walls of the house. She did not give her permission to take

admission to the medical college, but Saru did not even listen to her, “I’m not talking to

you. I’m not asking you for anything. I know what your answer will be. No, forever a

“no” to anything I want. You don’t want me to have anything, you don’t want me to do

anything. You don’t even want me to live” (142). Here, a kind of hatred towards her

mother is shown, as it is the mother who puts all the restrictions on her daughter without

considering the fact that the times have changed and the next generation is passing

through a traditional period where the daughter is sandwiched between tradition and

modernity. Now, education invokes in her a consciousness, which was not present in the

older generation.
 48

In many cases, Maira Mies says:

the non-conforming conduct of the women is not the consequence of an

external necessity but of changed consciousness. They are not satisfied

with the rhetoric of equality between man and woman but want to see that

the right to an individual life and the right to development of their

individual capabilities are realized in their own lives. (12)

Manu’s salary was not enough to fulfill their family expenses. So Saru gave up all

her normal way of life like the parties, the movies and the casual trips. Finally, she realized

that without money life becomes empty. She wished to have a house of her own to fulfill her

dreams. This made Saru to improve her career. After becoming a successful doctor, she cast a

shadow on their married life and disrupted the harmony. She became the object of admiring

attention of her neighbours who came to her regularly for advice and help. She felt,

“…exhilarated with the dignity and importance that my status as a doctor seems to have given

me” (42). She wanted to have her own consulting room in the same place where other eminent

doctors were located. She told Manu that her boss whom they called Boozie had offered her a

loan and she could have her own consulting room. She had expected Manu to say something,

but he kept silent. As her social status has gone up Manu’s behaviour began to change. The

warmth between them cooled off. Saru was assailed by feelings of guilt.

Saru took a long time to know Boozie’s interest in her. He helped her with enough

money to set up practice in a decent locality. He helped Saru in higher education and also

in better quality of life. Saru said, “I told myself my relationship with this man couldn’t,

wouldn’t hurt Manu. It was just a teacher-student relationship. If he put his hand on my

shoulder, slapped me on my back, held my hand or hugged me… that was just his mannerism
 49

and meant nothing. It had nothing to do with me and Manu” (91). Saru thought herself as

a raw material which Boozie wants to shape and polish in a perfect way. He taught Saru

how to dress in a pleasing way, to speak good English and to have good food. He gave

her work in a research scheme and year later she became his Registrar. Within two years

she passed M.D. Four years later she became a Assistant Honorary at a Suburban hospital.

She received money from Boozie to have a consulting room of her own. Manu did not

question Boozie, who helped Saru for her career.

Saru’s other extra marital relationship was with her classmate Padmakar Rao in

the medical college. He was the most popular student in the college. Later, they become

good friends. Saru and Padmakar meet each other frequently. Padmakar was not happy in

his married life. While he was doing graduation, he was pressurized into marriage by his

parents. Saru adviced Rao that as his wife is a good wife and mother, he should be satisfied

with her. Saru was scared of Padmakar’s undue interest in her and wanted to refuse even a

cup of coffee that he offered. Padmakar forced Saru to have a deep relationship with him.

But she avoided him after a few incidents and she wanted to put an end to their

relationship. She said:

And I? Now, I knew it was not just the consequences I feared and hated,

but the thing itself. What had I imagined? Love? Romance? Both, I knew

too well, were illusions, and not relevant to my life anyway. And the code

word of our age is neither love nor romance, but sex. Fulfillment and happiness

came, not through love alone, but sex. And for me sex was now a dirty

word. (133)
 50

Saru felt totally upset at having an affair with Padmakar Rao, which failed to

satisfy her desires. Kamini Dinesh comments Saru’s affair with the two men:

In ‘The Dark Holds No Terrors’ also there are other men, but the

relationship gives no solace. On the other hand, the homosexual Boozie

and the frustrated Padma bring to Saru the disillusion in grealization that

there can be no happiness or fulfilment in these relationships. There

cannot be an escape route from the tension of married life. The woman

seeking a crutch has finally to fall back on herself. (168)

Saru succeeded and emerged as a successful, well-known and reputed doctor.

At the same time, her marriage began to crumble under the burden of success in her

profession. She was happy until she began to establish herself as a doctor. Now the

situation undergoes a change. Saru remembered the incident of the explosion in the

factory that happened to be the turning point in her life. The incident of fire in the factory

turned Saru’s life completely and gave a new direction to her life. It provided her an

opportunity to prove herself as a successful doctor. After helping wounded people, she

returned home. While walking through the “refuse-lined avenue”, people smiling at her at

the first time indicates that, the distance maintained earlier has vanished all of a sudden.

Women calling her, “lady doctor, lady doctor” (41) automatically gives her recognition

and makes her aware of her own “self”.

The frequent visits of people with their miscellaneous complaints make her a

centre of attention. Generally, her social status goes high, “…nods, smiles, murmured

greetings and namastes” (42) by people make Saru feel honoured. Her growing social

status goes beyond Manu’s endurance. A sense of being ignored hurts him a lot. He tries
 51

to escape from the fact of life. As a result, a love between them gets affected, and Saru

finds herself, “…shrinking from his love making” (42). Saru is not supposed to enjoy

mental, physical, economic or intellectual independence. In spite of her recognition as

“a lady doctor” and Manu as “her husband”, she appears to be a trained Indian woman,

who withdraws from her struggle for independent identity. She cannot feel herself free

from the fear of hurting the ego of her husband.

Manu, cannot tolerate people greeting her and ignoring him. He cannot express it

openly but says out of irritation, “ ‘I’ am sick of this place. Let’s get out of here soon” (42).

He does not love her the way he used to earlier. Manu is uncomfortable with Saru’s

steady rise in status, as he feels ignored when people greet and pay attention to Saru.

Besides, she is unable to share time enough for Manu and children. The life that they

begin together eventually becomes a power race of two egoistic people in which

Saru overtakes him effortlessly. When her succes begins to highlight his failure, he

degenerates. All the men she relates to are weak will-powered men like Padmakar Rao

and her father, for whom she has no great respect. She starts hating the man-woman

relationship which is based on attraction and need not love:

The ego of the male, she thought wryly, unwilling to believe that he had

lost the art of pleasing, assuming that marriage, possession, gave him a

lifelong right to affection, love and respect. Love… how she scorned the

word now. There was no such thing between man and woman. There was

only a need which both fought against, futilely, the very futility turning

into the thing they called ‘love’. It’s only a word, she thought. Take away

the word, the idea, and the concept will wither away. (72)
 52

This is an awkward situation in which Saru is placed. At a personal level, she

feels a gradual disappearance of love and attachment, which she had once developed.

It was now replaced by a psychological conflict, which was uncalled for but inevitable,

at the given situation in which both of them have been placed. Most of the solemn duties

towards her husband and children are unattended. The children did not get proper love

and care from their mother as she came home late. The husband sits waiting, “I came

home late that night….When I came home I found him sitting with a brooding expression

on his face that made my heart give painful, quivering little jumps” (78). In an interview

by S.Prasanna Sree, Shashi Deshpande answers:

I never realized the sameness. When I wrote, it was just how the novel

started for me. You know, for Saru, it is very simple that there is this, that

these women are all carrying the burdens of the past. You know, Jaya is

carrying the burden of not only of her childhood past… but mainly of her

marriage…. There comes a time when stop and take stock …there is a critical

moment in one’s life when you come to a particular crisis in your life, you

try to stand there and look back, but most of the time you just go on with

your life. Only when you confront your past, you can go to the fiture. And

for all these women, those moments come at a time, and for all of them the

only gateway is their parental home. (149)

Saru’s character can be truly understood only in the light of psychological precepts.

She carries within her the sad effects of gender discrimination. Saru’s feminism springs

out as a reaction to this discriminatory psychological set up of society at large and her

parents in particular. She also has the deep rooted mentality of an unwanted child.
 53

Saru sufferd the bruises of a terrible physical trauma on her psyche. Psychologists

have dealt with the mental make up of the unwanted children. A child who is not loved

and cared by his/her parents is likely to develop a deep rooted sense of fear, insecurity

and rejection. They are highly reactionary. Children have primarily the fear of supernatural

agents (ghost and witches) being alone in the dark or in a strange place or being lost.

Being unwanted has a disastrous effect on one’s self-esteem. People with low self-esteem

feel isolated, lack of love, incapable of expressing or defending themselves and too weak

to confront or overcome their deficiencies. They are afraid of others anger and shrink

from exposing themselves to attention.

The study of the mind of a physically assaulted woman is definitely being deeply

probed now- a- days. Such a woman is broken mentally. She is a pessimist to the core.

She hates touch. She abhors men, each one of them. She is haunted by the traumatic

experience. She is perplexed and lost, sometimes secretive. She is definitely suspicious

and revengeful. In the light of these views, Saru’s character gets fully revealed. Saru is

shaped by her childhood experience. Social prejudices have damaged Saru’s personality

to a big extent. Her mother chides her not to go out in the sun, as her complexion will

suffer whereas her brother is allowed to do whatever he wants because, “He’s different.

He’s a boy”(45). Girl is subordinated to the fact that she must someday please and serve,

obey and sacrifice for her man. Saru’s personality is continually being eroded by the fact

that she is mere a girl. She narrates bitterly:

A wife must always be a few feet behind her husband. If he’s an MA, you

should be a BA. If he’s 5’ 4” tall, you shouldn’t be more than 5’ 3” tall.

If he’s earning five hundred rupees, you should never earn more than four
 54

hundred and ninety-nine rupees. That’s the only rule to follow if you want

a happy marriage. Don’t ever try to reverse the doctor-nurse, executive-

secretary, principal-teacher role. It can be traumatic, disastrous…. You

can nag, complain, henpeck, whine, moan, but you can never be strong.

That’s a wrong which will never be forgiven. (137)

It is an open assertion made through an interview given for a special issue of a

periodical on career women. The interviewer jokingly mentions bread and butter, which

sets the ball of destruction of their relationship rolling and acquires momentum.There is a

monstrous maniac, a sadist, shaping inside her husband, Manu. The monster comes out

when a female journalist asks him, as how it feels when the wife is the breadwinner of the

family. That night, he ruins her physically as well as psychologically. He turns out to be

a brutal sadist. Manu is not only a sadist, he is a man with two completely different

personalities as well. In the morning, he is the normal, chatty husband. He seems to have

completely forgotten his humanism that he has been showing during nights. It terrifies

and humiliates Saru so much that she cannot even speak about him. S.P.Swain comments

on Manu’s actions, “His masculinity asserts itself through nocturnal sexual assaults upon

Saru. Thus the benevolent, cheerful husband by day turns a lecherous, libidinous rapist at

night. Saru becomes a mute sufferer, wallowing in self-pity and choked in silence” (36).

Living with Manu, Saru has to undergo horrors of rape. Manu asserts his manhood at

night when he turns into a rapist of his wife.

Saru is pained that neither she could talk about it to him, nor discuss with anyone.

The dual behavior of her husband shocks and surprises her.When Manu sexually assaults
 55

her, she remains quiet. She wants to talk to him, and comfort him but no conversation

takes place in the increasing silence between them:

I should have spoken about it the very first day. But I didn’t. And each

time it happens and I don’t speak, I put another brick on the wall of

silence between us. Maybe one day I will be walled alive within it and die

a slow, painful death. Perhaps the process has already begun and what I

am is a creature only half alive. And it seems I can do nothing to save

myself. (96)

The suffering increases so much that it becomes unbearable. Saru had many times

tried to say it aloud, only to repeat it to herself time and again. She wants to escape from

this marriage but there is no one to solve the problem. The communication is not possible

between them but she finds it difficult to start talking of her problem. In married life, it is

the sex that stands for communication of love and passion between Manu and Saru. There

is no communication between them other than sex. She tries to express all these things

with her husband but he fails in hitting at the right words and expressions.

Saru considers Manu at fault for smashing the eternal dream of a woman to find

happiness and though she wants to be free from her terrifying loveless trap, she feels

guilty of breaking their marriage. This guilt she feels always in her life. It was first the

drowning of her younger brother Dhruva, then it was betrayal of her mother and now it is

killing her married life. Saru is conscious of the fact that she is superior to her husband in

her qualifications, social status, mental caliber and in many other aspects. But in her heart

she rebels against it. Being an unwanted child to her parents, she has inherited a psychology

which did not allow her to displease anyone. So she resigned from her job that there
 56

would be a better rapport between her and her husband. But her husband, the so called

supervisor of the welfare of his wife and the family, prevented her from doing due to

economic compulsions.

Being an unwanted child was the root, the origin of Saru’s tragic tale. The need of

parental love was important for the well-being of an individual’s mental health. Right

from the beginning of her life, she did not belong to any place or person. She is “…like a

homeless refugee….which is my room? I have none” (32). She is lost. Saru is rejected by

her mother and by her father in such a manner that the sense of being permanently rejected

kills her hope, curiosity and sense of expectancy. After getting married, her happiness is

shortlived and troubled by her fear of rejection. She cannot drink the cup of joy because

her mind is convinced that she can never be loved. That is the psychology of an unwanted

child as well as Saru’s. Saru as a child, cannot understand her parent’s behavior. Being a

doctor, she enjoys the advantageous position in the society and family. But her children and

husband are not able to understand her because her professional identity presents a new face

of a woman, a mother and a wife. Saru is back from work late at night and asks Manu:

‘Renu? Abhi? Are they in bed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have they eaten?’

‘ Yes.’

‘And you?’

‘No’. (79)
 57

Actually, in Indian families, a wife waits for her husband from work at night

but in the case of Saru it is reverse. It reflects on how a place in the division of labour

marginalizes or silences the voices in the asymmetrical relation between Saru and Manu.

As a lady doctor she holds an articulate position and occupies bigger space in public world.

Manu remains at home, takes care of household affairs and hence occupies a relatively

smaller public space. The asymmetrical relationship and its repression are well expressed

by Saru:

a+b they told us in mathematics is equal to b+a. But here a+b was not,

definitely not equal to b+a. It became a monstrously unbalanced equation,

lopsided, unequal, impossible. But is that the only reason, or would it have

happened in any case, what happened to us later, he being what he is and

I being what I am? I have a feeling I will never know the answer to that

one. (42)

Though Saru is an educated woman, she is unable to make a decision on her own.

She acts like a dual person. As a professionalist, she attempts to prove that she is a person

with a lot of individuality. She suffers as a daughter and then as a wife. It humiliates Saru

to a great extent. Manu on the other hand assaults her physically. Saru becomes tired of

her long, gloomy dual role. Though she faces so many struggles and agonies, she proves

her individuality by choosing her study of subject and she even firmly holds her freedom

in marrying Manu against her parents’ wishes.

Saru hears the news of her mother’s death and decides to go to her native village

and to her father. The true substance of the novel lies in the mental processes that Saru

goes through during her apparently eventless existence at her father’s place. The life that
 58

she lives at her father’s place is essentially a spiritual life. She analyses all the dark corners

of her soul. She attempts hard to gain what she had lost, her self-respect. She tries hard to

overcome her psychological fears. The dark holds no terrors. The terrors are inside her all

the time. She carries it within her and like traitors she spring out, when she least expect it, to

scratch and maul. At her parents’ home, she felt isolated. Her father’s response showed, as

though she was an unwelcomed guest. Though she came back a totally changed woman,

everything looked strange to her, “Inside here, though, there were no changes. The same

seven pairs of large stone slabs leading to the front door on which she played hopscotch

as a child. The yard was bare as always…” (15).

She wanders in her house as a lonely individual. For an enlightenment Saru’s returned

to her house it helped her to gain a reunification of the split self in her. At daytime, she did

all the domestic work, which she had enjoyed. As she did all the work, she resembles her

mother. Saru’s return is to escape from her husband’s sadism. She did not feel at home at

her parent’s place where she was born and brought up. When she came back to her father’s

house, she acknowledged the truth of what her mother had said, which in a way signifies

her defeat.

At her father’s place, she had occasion to look at these happenings in her life in a

detached way and sort them out one by one. Madhav, a young college student had come

to stay with her parents while her mother had been alive. Saru was surprised at the warm

and affectionate relationship that existed between the boy and her father. She realized that

her father was not a negative character. He had adjusted himself to his wife’s absence as

he had to her presence.

 59

Saru realized with a shock how she had failed her parents. She was the only child

left after her brother’s death, and it was her duty to take care of her aging parents. But she

acted like a peevish child sticking on to childish prejudices. Her mother had been old

fashioned, uneducated brought up under very peculiar circumstances. Her ill temper was

quite understandable. Saru was educated, enlightened and also a doctor. Better understanding

was expected from her. Saru also realized that she had been wrong in accusing her

parents of discriminating between their two children. The fact was that just as the elder

child has the right of commanding authority over the younger one, the authority Saru

exercised over Dhruva the other had the privilege.

Saru also realized that she was looking and behaving exactly like her mother had

done. Her smooth hands had become rough and black like her mother. Her lifestyle had

changed, but basically she was the same as her mother had been. It seems that all the

education she had received had brought no change in her. Saru started admiring her

identity. She realized the role that women ought to play at her home. The life at her

parental home turns to be very soothing and comforting. She thought that men going to

work, children going to school and women staying at home find a kind of harmony in it.

Now Saru tried to identify herself with her mother.

Saru’s desire was to confide and seek advice from her father. She could not reveal

anything about her personal life. It was largely due to her guilty consciousness. In her

father’s house, Saru remembered the little need of her children. Abijit, her son, refuses to

go to bed until she covers him with his blanket every night. Renu, her daughter, did not

feel like going to school unless Saru saw her off every morning. But if she was busy with

her career, Saru neglected her duty of a mother and a wife. As she comes late from his
 60

work, the children never gets proper love and affection. Saru’s attitude towards children

was invariably conditioned by her past and even love for importance. But such a thought

did not send Saru rushing to her home .

Shashi Deshpande contrasts Saru’s life with the lives of her two school friends

Smitha and Nalu, and shows that a wife, a mother and a spinster had their own share of

joys and sorrows and it is almost difficult to conclude as to who is happier or the more

fulfilled. Saru happens to meet her friends, Smitha and Nalu. Nalu is a spinster who

teaches in a college and Smitha is a housewife. Nalu modifies herself as a woman of

dignity and confidence, but Smitha submits herself fully to her husband. Smitha is called

as Anju after her marriage. Saru compares herself to Nalu. She says:

Remembering the Nalu of old with her endearing enthusiasm, she wondered

at the bitterness. It’s easy to generalize, she thought, and say she is bitter

because she never married, never bore a child. But that would be as stupid

as calling me fulfilled because I got married and I have borne two

children. I could talk to Nalu about my problems and may be she would

understand better than most of people would. But to her, I would be a

woman, my problems a part women’s problems. But this is mine, Saru’s,

and has as much to do with what I am, apart from my being a woman. It’s

not only I, it’s Manu and I, and how we react against each other. (121)

Saru taught that it was difficult to judge the value of happiness and fulfillment among

her childhood friends. Saru felt that if it had been an arranged marriage, she would have got

support from her parents. But she suffered both, suffering as well as guilty consciousness.

These feelings reminded her of the fate of one of her friends:

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If mine had been an arranged marriage, if I had left it to them to arrange

my life, would he have left me like this? She thought of the girl, the sister

of a friend, who had come home on account of a disastrous marriage.

She remembered the care and sympathy with which the girl had been

surrounded, as if she was an invalid, a convalescent. And the girl’s face

with its look of passive suffering. There had been only that there, nothing

else, neither despair nor shame. For the failure had not been hers, but her

parents’ ; and so the guilt had been theirs too, leaving only the suffering

for the girl. (218)

Saru’s marriage was not an arranged marriage and she could not blame her parents

for anything. She herself was responsible for both her suffering as well as her guilt.

She cannot say all that she wants to, “But I thought…maybe you would help me.’ But

there can never be any forgiveness. Never any atonement. My brother died because I

heedlessly turned my back on him. My mother died alone because I deserted her.

My husband is a failure because I destroyed his manhood”(217).

Saru’s father blamed her indirectly by holding her responsible for Dhruva’s death.

He remained Saru of her part in the death of her brother, Dhruva, “Don’t turn your back

on things again. Turn round and look at them. Meet him” (216). Her father adviced Saru

to face boldly the reality, “I told you once Saru…your mother is dead. So is your brother.

Can’t you let the dead go?’…‘I told you…they’re dead. They can do nothing. Why do

you torture yourself with others? Are you not sufficient for yourself? It’s your life, isn’t

it?” (217). Her brief stay at her parent’s house, away from her husband and children,

brings out certain realities, as a woman is never welcomed at her parent’s house once she
 62

is married off. In case of a married woman, her “alone return” to her parent’s house is

considered as an impending calamity. Saru’s father withdrawing support at the last

moment proved to be a motivating factor for her. Her determination made her overcome

the initial stage of hovering between anger and remorse, and moves towards the stage of

understanding of life and her role as an individuality. Simon de Beauvior throws light on

the way woman struggles, “Today the combat takes a different shape; instead of wishing

to put man in a prison, woman endeavours to escape from one; she no longer seeks to

drag him into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of

transcendence” (12).

During her stay with her father, she received a letter written by Abhi, referring to

Manu’s arrival. The bitter emotions increased further. She went to the inner room and

started packing her things into her suitcase. She had come away with minimum clothes.

Saru’s father asked her whether she was frightened of Manu, but she replied, “Scared of

him? O god, yes. But not the way you think. It’s not what he’s done to me, but what I’ve

done to him” (216). Saru felt overwhelmed by the burden of so many failures as a

daughter, as a sister, as a mother and also as a wife.

Saru reacted to every situation and became sensitive to every sound, all the time

conscious of Manu reaching and knocking at the door. She asked her father not to open

the door when Manu comes, perhaps believing that after being tired of knocking, Manu

would depart. At the same time, she waited for someone to come and support her. Saru

ignored her father’s advice. When she heard the whistle of the train by which Manu is

going to arrive, she knew she cannot run away from reality. She wanted to escape from

the situation. Ragini Ramachandra opines, “Escape has always been her mode of
 63

resolving the tangled knots, exchanging old horrors for new ones” (120). Saru was not

ready to face her husband and decided to leave her father also and go away somewhere.

But her father stoped her and tried to make her see the truth:

‘Saru’, and there was angry despair in his voice, ‘don’t do it

again.’…‘What have I done’? ‘Don’t turn your back on things again.

Turn round and look at them. Meet him. ‘Her mind fastened on the word

‘again’ once more to the exclusion of everything else. ‘Again? When did I

do it?’ ‘When your brother died’. (216)

Like Duruyodhan Saru was left all alone. Instead, she would face life, meet its

challenges and see to it that her relationships did not fail once again. Saru introspects

philosophically and reaches the conclusion that escape is a ridiculous idea. There is no

escape. It is an individual’s own life. One will have to shape as well as face the events of

one’s life. There is no refugee other than one’s own self. She realizes that she cannot

attain happiness through anyone else, be it a husband, a father or a child. She can attain

peace of mind by her own efforts. No one gives peace. It has to be created within. Thus, free

from fears and pain, the final picture of Saru is appealing indeed when she confidently

waits for what used to be greatest terror of her life and her husband. Prema Nanda Kumar

writes, “Sarita cannot forget her children or the sick needing of her expert attention; and

so she decides to face her home again” (821).

Saru opened the door and was relieved to find Vimala’s son Ravi and not Manu.

He asked Saru to attend his sister who was having fits. Then Saru heaved a deep breath

and tried to control her trembling legs. Now the fear of darkness and loneliness comes to

her and it reminds her of her brother and mother:

 64

Now she had both, the suffering as well as the guilt. She was concerned.

There was no place to go, no room to breathe. There was nothing and nobody

left. Even Baba had gone away, leaving her alone. It had happened at last,

what she had always dreaded. She was alone, alone in the dark like Dhruva.

And her mother who had died alone in the middle of the night. (219)

Saru who enjoyed a peaceful life starts shivering on the idea of Manu’s visit.

At first, she is not ready to face him who tortured her during the night and behaved as a

gentleman during the daytime. She longs for an answer to her mental and physical

suffering. When she is left alone to make her decision on her own, the words of Madhav

have an effective change in the mind of Saru. It helps her to seek her identity. Saru begins

to analyse her life. The words of Madhav, “I can’t spoil my life because of that boy. It’s

my life, after all” (208) helps Saru to face the world with confidence. These words create

a sparkle in her. At first Saru feels these words to be meaningless, but later on she realizes

that if a young boy like Madhav is able to think of her future life, why cannot she think of

her life. As a successful doctor want to think of herself and her life. Saru decides to face

the situation and enlighten herself. Then she turns out to be a confident individual with

courage. Saru understands the reality of life and says, “All right, so I’m alone. But so’s

everyone else. Human beings …they’re going to fail you. But because there’s just us,

because there’s no one else, we have to go on trying. If we can’t believe in ourselves,

we’re sunk” (220).

The novel portrays a realistic picture of modern Indian society. Though adopted

modern styles, psychology remains tradition –oriented, resulting in strains and conflicts

of different types. The problem with Saru was that though she had acquired high level
 65

education and had adopted outward modes and styles of living, her psychology had

remained tradition bound. She forced Manu to become a college teacher rather than

remain a journalist, because, traditionally, college teaching was considered more

respectable than journalism. This change from journalistic profession to college teaching

killed all spirit in Manu and gave rise to other problems. Saru analyzes further:

There is something in the male…that is whittled down and ultimately

destroyed by female domination. It is not so with a female. She can be

dominated, she can submit, and yet hold something of herself in reserve.

As if there is something in her that prevents erosion and self-destruction.

(If not, she would have been destroyed too easily. But then, have I not

been destroyed?). Does the sword of domination become lethal only when

a woman holds it over a man? (85-86)

Shashi Deshpande is certainly aware of the woman’s predicament in a male-

dominated society, especially when the woman is not economically independent.

This entire process of self-analysis made Saru realize that it is her sense of superiority

over Manu that had destroyed their relationship. This is the message Shashi Deshpande

conveys in all her novels – that relationships within the family need to be built on human

values of understanding and trust rather than on the prescribed rules of discipline.

Shashi Deshpande is trying to explode the myth that the educated Indian women

are liberated. Their education should have given them all the freedom to be free from

evils. But, they have failed to utilize their education. Saru feels that she has done injustice

to her mother, husband, children and everybody else. Her self-realization relieves her
 66

from all her miseries. Saru’s search for self comes to an end, when she realizes that she is

her own enemy and learns truth and the philosophy of life. She accepts:

They came to her then, all those selves she had rejected so resolutely at

first, and so passionately embraced later. The guilty sister, the undutiful

daughter, the unloving wife…persons spiked with guilts. Yes, she was all

of them, she could not deny that now. She had to accept these selves to

become whole again. But if she was all of them, they were not all of her.

She was all these and so much more. (220)

Saru understands the importance of self-confidence, which serves as a source of life.

When Saru realizes life, she starts blooming into an individual. She decides individually to

start a new life with her husband and children. So she is more afraid of darkness and

thereafter the dark holds no terrors. Shashi Deshpande gives The Dark Holds No Terrors

an open ending in that Saru is now ready to speak to Manu. Having won over her fear,

she is prepared to meet him, and she goes back to him. At last Saru realizes that she has

to shape her life:

My life is my own… somehow she felt as if she had found it now, the

connecting link. It means you are not just a strutting, grimacing puppet,

standing futilely on the stage for a brief while between areas of darkness.

If I have been a puppet it is because I made myself one. I have been

clinging to the tenuous shadow of a marriage whose substance has long

since disintegrated because I have been afraid of proving my mother

right. (220)
 67

Throughout the novel, Shashi Deshpande probes the inner recess of Saru’s psyche

in order to discover the root of her silent suffering and peaceful resistance. She does not

know what to do. She thinks that it was easier for women in the past to accept, not to

struggle, to go on, because they had no choice. There is nothing else for them, and that is

their fate. Whereas Saru cannot go on, her way of thinking is shaped by age she lives in.

She is an educated modern woman who has turned away from her traditional background

and accepted marriage into a different, lower caste even if it means living in poverty.

She is a woman who has established herself as a successful doctor and earns not only bread

but also butter for the family. Saru’s realization fills her with a sense of fulfillment.

She says:

It’s my life. It’s my life. Four words forming a sentence. Go on saying

them and they become meaningless, a jumble of sounds, a collection of

letters. And yet, they would not leave her alone. She went back to bed, the

words going on and on in her mind. It was maddening. She tried to turn

her thought to other things, to go back to that childhood fantasy of hers…

the friend who would never fail her. But it was no use. That friend had

deserted her too. There were only these words instead….We are alone.

We have to be alone….We come into this world alone and go out of it

alone. The period in between is short. And all those ties we cherish as

eternal and long-lasting are more ephemeral than a dewdrop. (208)

The society presented in The Dark Holds No Terrors is certainly one going

through transitions where least economically independent women could have choices

in life. In an article, Shashi Deshpande states: “ A woman who writes of women’s

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experiences often brings in some aspects of those experiences that have angered her,

roused her strong feelings. I don’t see why this has to be labeled feminist fiction” (5).

Saru’s feeling of homelessness is an affirmation of her sense of isolation. Saru

leaves “home” twice in the novel to seek release – once to establish her independence

from mother’s suppression and the second time to establish her indispensability to her

husband and children. Shashi Deshpande is an uniquely Indian and her use of Marathi

words very evidently present the customs and traditions of the people belonging to

Maharashtra and Karnataka. For example, words such as Kaka, Kaki, Atya, Dada and so

on, are essentially Marathi words and might be little difficult to reach for the readers who

do not know the language. Shashi Deshpande’s fiction is an example of the ways in

which a girlchild’s particular position, social reality, identity and psychological growth

determine her personality. She has presented the suffering of Indian women from

different angles.

Roots and Shadows presents the image of woman. This novel explores the inner

struggle of the protagonist Indu. Like Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors, Indu tries to

learn the truth about herself, deserting all the shadows that she had thought to be her real

self. Roots and Shadows and The Dark Holds No Terrors have women who have established

themselves as autonomous beings, free from the restrictions imposed by society, culture

and nature and also free from their own fears and guilt. In these two novels Shashi

Deshpande presents the young women struggling to enlighten both their professional and

private lives.

Roots and Shadows is a multi–layered novel which tells the story of intricate

relationships within a traditional joint family. It covers the specific issue of the protagonists
 69

quest for self – identity and position of women in traditional Indian society. The story moves

back and forth in time. It is a saga of three generations of a joint family ruled over by the

domineering Akka. Indu comes back to her ancestral place, had accepted so many years ago

to get married to a person of her own choice. She comes back to attend the funeral ceremony

of Akka, the old rich family tyrant. During the three weeks at the ancestral home following

Akka’s death, she finds herself once again amidst family bickering. Indu realizes that a

love marriage is not really different from an arranged marriage in the matter of freedom

of choice that it offers a woman. She understands that all the freedom and contentment

that she thought she had gained by leaving the family and by making a love marriage was

merely an illusion.

Indu of Roots and Shadows is a motherless child. She lost her mother at her birth,

and her father Govind brought her home and left her in the care of Atya, who was a

surrogate mother to her and he went after his craze for photography. He rarely came to

see his daughter and thus she grew up without a father and a mother. Indu is shocked to

see the rigidness in her father’s attitude which made him unconcerned about is fatherly

duties. About her mother, Indu remembers, “…no one had ever spoken of her, or even

mentioned her name. For me it had been a total blank. A blankness that had left its mark

on me” (48).

Discrimination is not that rampant in Roots and Shadows, yet Indu feels that her

father deserted her because she is a girl. She says he did not even come to see her a year

and she believes it was because she is a girl and not a boy. The birth of a boy is considered a

luck and when Sunanda Atya had a boy as her first child, they all agreed saying, “Lucky
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girl, they had called her then. Specially when her first child had been a boy” (122).

Indu remembers how she was trained, even from her childhood, to behave like a girl:

As a child, they had told me I must be obedient and unquestioning. As a

girl, they had told me I must be meek and submissive. Why? I had asked.

Because you are a female. You must accept everything, even defeat, with

grace because you are a girl, they had said. It is the only way, they said,

for a female to live and survive. And I …I had watched them and found it

to be true. There had to be, if not the substance, at least the shadow of

submission. But still, I had laughed at them, and sworn I would never

pretend to be what I was not. (144-145)

Thus, a girl child is taught from her childhood that she is underprivileged in being

a girl and that being born as a female is a handicap. Like Saru in Dark Holds No Terrors,

Indu resents her womanhood as she was made conscious of her feminity by the elder

women of her family. Throughout the novel, Akka is the mother figure. Indu revolts

against Akka, her world, her values and marries Jayant against the wishes of Akka.

Akka bursts out at her marriage, “Such marriages never work. Different castes, different

languages…it’s all right for a while. Then they realise…” (69). Indu comes back to her

parental home after a long period of eleven years when Akka is in her deathbed, and on

Akka’s death, becomes the sole inheritor of her property.

Indu goes back to her parent’s home to find out the roots, but she finds the

shadows instead. It becomes a time of reckoning for her. She thinks about her own life,

her career, her love, the traditional concept of marriage and her own marriage based on

love. Indu finds so many hurdles coming in her way. She finds dominant Akka and her
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family to be a great hindrance to achieving her goal of attaining independence and

completeness. When she studies in college, Akka does not allow her to meet and cultivate

friendship with her friends. Later on, Indu leaves the house and enters into marriage, to

be independent and complete, but ironically, she realizes the futility of her decisions:

Jayant and I….I wish I could say we have achieved complete happiness.

But I cannot fantasise. I think of the cries that had filled me earlier…I

want to be loved, I want to be happy. The cries are now stilled. Not because I

am satisfied, or yet hopeless, but because such demands now seem to me

to be an exercise in futility. Neither love nor happiness come to us for the

asking. But they can sneak up on us when we least expect them. (23)

Indu speaks about her own incompleteness thus, “This is my real sorrow. That I

can never be complete in myself. Until I had met Jayant I had not known it…that there was,

somewhere outside me, a part of me without which I remained incomplete. Then I met Jayant.

And lost the ability to be alone” (38). However, women like Indu are alienated from their

self. Their experience is primarily defined usually through interpersonal and domestic filial

relationship mainly serving the needs of others. In the eyes of all those conventional women

who had their own standards for judging people, the only success and achievement for a

woman is to get married to bear children, to have sons and grand children. Indu’s

husband shatters her hope for peace and integration. He is in no way a refugee for her.

Instead, she finds herself totally surrendered before Jayant’s by being his wife. Indu’s

role as a wife restricts her self –development to the extent that she was not permitted to

go for creative writing. Jayant denies her freedom.

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Indu struggles to release herself from the circumscriptions of the traditional and

tradition bound institution of marriage. Shashi Deshpande portrays through the struggles

and sufferings of Indu the miserable plight of educated middle-class women under male

domination. Like Indu, women search for an autonomous self and realize that it is hard to

achieve. Indu ultimately travels the road of self- realization and reaches her destination which

was the point of comprehension of the mystery of the human life. Indu breaks away from her

family out of resentment and marries for love in order to achieve her freedom.

Akka dominated the family and became an emblem of authority. She was a childless

widow. She treated almost everyone under her guidance. She approved whatever occurs

in the house. Until her death, she maintained her power and authority over everyone.

It was a very large family encompassing three generations. Indu received summons from

Akka but she was hesitant to go. Jayant also disapproved of the idea but she decided to

leave for her ancestral house. When Indu returned home, Akka was angry that Indu had

come home alone without her husband:

‘I had something important to tell both of you.’ ‘You will have to put up

with me.’‘And I wanted to see him, what kind of a husband you’ve got.’

At that I had to laugh. ‘Oh Akka, still intent on approving him, are you?

Three years after our marriage? And what if you don’t approve of him?

Do I give him up?’ Her eyes showed hurt. ‘You think that what you do is

no concern of ours, do you Indu? You think your life is none of my

business? You haven’t grown up, child.’ (28)

These are the last words that Akka speaks to Indu. The words set Indu thinking

about the nature of relationship with Akka. Indu also wonders why she had been selected
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by Akka to hold the responsibility of the family after her, probably Jayant’s remark helps

her to understand the reason:

‘You! And tears! You know, Indu, when I first saw you, I thought you a

frail, little creature. Now I know you better. You’re indomitable.’ The word

fell into me with a heavy thud. ‘Indomitable? But Jayant, that’s what we

called Akka!’

‘Perhaps you are like her’, he began lightly, but seeing my face, he went

on more seriously, ‘Aren’t you? Isn’t that why she chose you…only a

great-niece, really…from among all the family?’ I was aghast at the idea.

‘Like her? But then…will I have my victims, too? Maybe I have one

already. (16-17)

But soon she realizes her mistake and wishes that she had listened to Jayant’s advice

and not gone there. She has been entrusted with the great responsibility of being Akka’s

heiress, leaving all the money and jewels to her. She is angered by this, for she wanted to

remain detached from the family. Indu does not know what to do about the house-whether

she should sell it or keep it. Staying in Akka’s house, Indu provides an opportunity to

reconsider her relationship with her husband and to find out what is wrong in it. Like Saru in

The Dark Holds No Terrors, Indu recollects her relationship with her husband.

Akka, came home as a childless widow and treated almost everyone with her rule

of thumb. Indu was much in the same mould of Akka. That she became the inheritor of

Akka’s property established her identity as Akka’s child. But Indu, in the beginning,

refused to accept her as a role model. She rejected Akka’s orthodox rituals and moulds a
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life of her own, hoping that by escape from Akka she will gain independence and freedom to

live as she pleases:

But I heard that twice she tried to run away…a girl of thirteen. Her

mother-in-law I heard, whipped her for that and locked her up for three

days. Starved her as well. And then, sent her back to her husband’s room.

The child, they said, cried and clung to her mother-in-law saying, “Lock

me up again, lock me up.” But there was no escape from a husband then.

I remember her telling me before my own marriage was consummated.

“Now your punishment begins, Narmada. You have to pay for all those

saris and jewels”. (70-71)

Indu was deserted after her mother’s death. She was brought up with affection by

her uncles and aunts. They taught all the traditions and culture and to respect, to obey the

elders. Akka choose Indu as heir to all her property and this lead to much consternation

among all her relatives. After that, they all turned hypocritical and their wants are unending

and their love and affection failed with jealousy, hatred and envy. Everyone in the family

wants Indu to do something with Akka’s money. Due to the financial position, Anant will

not able to get his daughter Mini married, and he accepts to get marry his daughter to a

distant relative to Akka. She promises to give money for Mini’s marriage. Simone De

Beauvoir opines, “Marriage is the destiny traditionally offered to women by society” (45).

In Indu’s ancestral home, the partition between male and female world is very

sharp. Women are not allowed to join any important family discussions. Even in the

heyday, they did not allow Akka to join the discussion. But after Akka’s discussion to

choose Indu as heir, she is thrust with the responsibility of how to distribute Akka’s
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money to others and to maintain the house. The family members accept Indu after the

opposition for a discussion, because in a joint family women are not permitted to join in

any discussion. To them she has no right to inherit the money or property because she is a

married woman. To her relatives, Indu is a childless woman, and it does not matter

whether she is educated or how successful she is in her profession.

Kaka had been finding it difficult to maintain the house. Akka while she was alive

used to help but others refused to help because they did not live in the house. Kaka wanted

Indu to help him out. For Narmada Atya, a poor childless widow, who had come to live

with her brother in her father’s house, the house was her only security. All she wanted

was to die in the house where she had been born and where her father and mother had

died. For Sunanda Atya too, the house was a security against life with an irresponsible

husband. Others wanted to sell the house and get their shares. Kaka wanted to sell the

house and pay for Mini’s marriage. Indu strongly argues with Kaka. Kaka tells Indu,

“Affection in a family…it should be a living presence. As it was once.’ The old…they

dream of the past, as revolutionaries do of the future. Perfection for them, was, as it will

be for the revolutionary. It never is” (51).

Indu’s desire was to marry Mini to a better man and not the man chosen by Akka

and others in the family. She wanted to continue her writing and to help the old. Particularly,

she wanted to educate women. To do all these, she was having wealth, strength and

intelligence. After Akka’s death, Indu’s position has changed. Her family members did

not like Indu entering Akka’s place. She even decided to fulfill all the needs she had

towards herself. She avoided the letter from Jayant, who advised her to leave the house
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because the family members did not bother about her for the past ten years. Jayant

wanted Indu to return home, so that they can make plans with Akka’s money.

Mini represented the average Indian woman who, due to a lack of education and

opportunity, feels it was safer to identify with the persona and remain unaware of the self.

Mini wisely realized that there was safety in marriage, even if the groom was not the man

of her dreams. Mini accepted to marry a man without any hesitation. Indu kindly asked

her uncle to wait for a better match for Mini. But Anant rejected Indu’s suggestion, “Maybe

the boy is a little ugly, may be a little stupid…but everything else is fine. The family is

good, it’s known to us, they have money, she’ll be quite comfortable. And Akka had

promised she would pay for the wedding expenses as well as the dowry if this came

through. What else could I ask for?” (55). Indu tried to explain the difficulties of

marriage and its efforts. Mini did not want to listen to Indu’s words and explained about

her marriage:

‘Of course I’m marrying him because there’s nothing else I can do. I’m

no good at studies. I never was. I went to school because… Ihad to. And

then to college because Akka said I must go. Boys prefer graduates these

days, she said. So I went. But I failed and it was a relief to give it up.

There’s only one thing I’m really good at…looking after a house. And to

get a home, I have to get married. This is not my home, is it?’ (117)

Now Indu understands the reason for Mini’s acceptance to marriage. Indu has

been a determined girl, who always wanted to be free and independent. But a number of

questions come before her, which leave her puzzled and amazed. She has broken the

strangle hold of family and tradition to be dominated by love for her husband, which
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again, she feels, is not a true love. She has accepted Jayant not for love as she used to

think but because she wanted to show her family that she was a success. Rupalee Burke

says about the woman in India in 21st century:

Census figures are most definitely flawed-a majority of households,

especially in the rural areas do not reveal how many daughters they have.

Since the girl child will eventually go to another household after marriage,

her presence is obliterated from birth. She goes through her invisible life

with no identity barring that in relation to a male; the unwanted daughter

becomes someone’s wife and if she is ‘lucky’ the mother of male child. (12)

Indu is an educated ‘New woman’ who has the desire and the freedom to talk

about things and to question the seriousness and nature of matters related to her. She thrives

on emotional conflicts and oppositions. Her creativity and her observant nature make her

sensitive to issues like discrimination against girls, the trimming of their bodies, speech

and mind and marital rape. As a girl, she is told to be obedient, submissive and

unquestioning. She used to laugh and always thought that she would never try to show

that she was not. But marriage changes everybody.

Jayant, in spite of his seemingly western style of life, behaves no differently from

an average Indian male. To her great shock and surprise, Indu found that Jayant had not

only expected her to submit but had taken her submission for granted. Without being

aware of it, she submitted herself to him step by step in the name of love. Ujwala Patil

comments, “By refusing to accept Indu’s real self, her human self, Jayant forces in her a

state of armed neutrality to live with him and mar the felicity of their relationship” (133).

When the realization came to her, she found it was not love but an adjustment as she
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never wanted conflict in her married life. As it was a love-marriage, she did not want to

give any chance to her parents to blame her for the step taken by her. She wanted to

prove her success. Like Saru, Indu too clings to her marriage for fear of hurting her ego.

She declares her pathetic state:

The hideous ghost of my own cowardice confronted me as I thought of

this…that I had clung tenaciously to Jayant, to my marriage, not for love

alone, but because I was afraid of failure. I had to show them that my

marriage, that I, was a success. Show whom? The world. The family, of

course. And so I went on lying, even to myself, compromising, shedding

bits of myself along the way. Which meant that I, who had despised

Devdas for being a coward, was the same thing myself. (145)

According to Indu, one should listen to the one’s own conscience and be true to

oneself in speech as well as action. As Seema Sunnel quotes, “Indu’s marriage with

Jayant denies her fullness of experience. It brings her nothing but a sense of incompleteness.

It threatens to rob Indu of her self” (93). Her idea of being complete, independent and

self-contained disappears after her marriage like a dewdrop after sunrise. After a rebellious

love – marriage, she slips into the conventional way of life. She remains no more than her

Kakis and Atyas, as she always wants Jayant to be with her. She performs all the activities,

which her husband likes her to do. Y.S.Sunita Reddy quotes, “Her hard-won independence

seems only an ephemera when she honestly questions herself if she is indeed independent.

Under the guise of independence, the rebel in her had conditioned herself to become as

submissive as any other Indian wife” (121).

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Indu, being educated and economically independent realizes that she is no different

from the women like her Atyas and Kakis. Marriage had taught Indu to be a hypocrite

and she reveals her husband nothing but what he wants to see, to tell him nothing but

what he wanted to hear. She shields her emotions and desires from Jayant. Indu did this

only to show off that her marriage was successful. She was afraid of failure and so she

went on lying even to herself. The truth is that she had lost the ability to be alone after

marrying Jayant. It is Jayant who forces her to write in a way, which pleases the editor

and the public. Even after their three years of married life Indu is not able to convince her

husband to have a baby.

Indu works for a magazine but she is not satisfied with her job. She hates to work

on a woman magazine and when she starts writing, it was in the borrowed attitudes of a

man. She stops working for the woman magazine, “Women, women, women…I got

sick of it. There was nothing else. It was a kind of narcissism. And as if we had locked

ourselves in a cage and thrown away the key. I couldn’t go on. Better this than that” (77).

She wants to go for creative writing. But Jayant comes in her way. He denies her the

freedom to leave the job and do whatever she likes. He says, “We need the money, don’t

we? Don’t forget we have a long way to go.’ ‘To go where? I had not asked him. I had

quietly gone back to thinking. Hating it, hating myself. Waking up each day and

thinking…I can’t go on. Feeling trapped, seeing myself endlessly chained to the long

dusty road that lay ahead of me” (27). Sarabijit Sandu quotes, “All these bitter facts of

losing her identity into her husband’s frighten and scare her. The paradox of the situation

is that she is not happy with Jayant but at the same time, she cannot live without him.”
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Indu feels uneasy not only about her marriage but also about her writing. The greatest

and the most distressing sacrifice, among all other sacrifices, is her ambition to become a

writer on her own. She loses her interest in writing creative articles. S.P.Swain observes,

“One is a writer in quest of an artistic selfhood while the other is a philistine in pursuit of

materialistic happiness” (88). Indu fights against her own timid self as well as man’s

prospective shelf. She wants to prove that modern woman is no longer a child, a baby, a

pet under the control of a man. Her marriage as a child clashes with her new-founded

identity. G.D.Barche quotes, “And herein lies the cause of her suffering. The old habit

compels her to remain her as a child, while the realization of her new identity liberates

her from the guardian-child chain”( 142).

As a result of her unhappy conjugal life with Jayant, Indu enters into a physical

relationship with Naren, her cousin. Initially she declares, “I’m essentially monogamous.

For me, it’s one man and one man only” (80). But later Indu offered herself twice to

Naren with total abandonment. Though she did not mind love making as a sin or crime,

the next day she starts thinking of the enormity of what she had done, “Adultery…what

nuances of wrongdoing…no, it needs the other, stronger word…what nuances of sin the

word carries. I will now brood on my sin, be crushed under a weigh of guilt and misery”

(142). Indu is in a confused state of mind. Her mind is often burdened with sin, crime,

right and wrong. She asks herself, “ But had I not wronged Jayant even before this?

By pretending, by giving him a spurious coin instead of the genuine kind? I had cheated

him of my true self. That, I thought, is dishonourable, dishonest. Much more than this,

what I have done with Naren” (155).

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Indu’s dream is to attain the state of ‘detachment’ and ‘loneliness’ and be perfect

in herself. She wants to be like Naren, completely detached and non-involved. But, to her

surprise, she finds herself involved and attached in many ways. She constantly expects

others to show concern for her. She again feels ashamed of herself when she does not see

things in a practical form. She expressed her confused state of mind before Naren, “So that’s

all I am, Naren. Not a pure woman. Not a too faithful wife. But an anachronism.

A woman who loves her husband too much. Too passionately. And is ashamed of it” (82).

She was ashamed of her not being a pure woman, and she hated her womanhood.

Indu regrets her relationship with Naren and shows her detached and emotionless

involvement with him. Initially, she thinks that she can go back and lie on her bed, erasing

the episodic period and what happened between Naren and her. But later she feels, “I

don’t need to erase anything I have done, I told myself in a fit of bravado” (140). According

to her, love has no meaning and feels that there was no love in real life but it present only

in books and movies, when Naren asked her the truth about love, she said, “The sexual

instinct… that’s true. The maternal instinct…that’s true too. Self-interest, self-love…they’re

the basic truths. You remember Devdas? I saw it with some friends. They sobbed when

he died for love. But I could have puked. A grown man moaning and crying for love!

God! How disgusting!”(144).

Indu struggles hard to understand the reality of life, the actual cause which destroyed

her married life. She felt that her confidence is destroyed in the presence of Jayant. But to

Jayant her feelings are ‘nonsense’. This became the crux of the problem. This was the

reason why Indu talks about marriage like this, “It’s a trap…that’s what marriage is.

A trap? Or a cage? Maybe the comic strip version of marriage…a cage with two trapped
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animals glaring at each other…isn’t so wrong after all. And it’s not a joke, but a tragedy.

But what animal would cage itself ?” (63).

After the death of Naren Indu’s life changes. Through her old uncle she came to

know that he was a person with strong feelings, expectations and disappointment and he

preferred disappointment and suffering to negation of feelings. Indu ultimately realized

that she has been chasing shadows, leaving her roots far behind in the family and in Jayant.

Naren, with whom she developed an adulterous relationship, is nothing more than a mere

shadow to her. He had no permanent place in her memory. So she decided to go back to

Jayant, “There was only one thing I wanted now… and that was to go home. Yes, home.

The one I lived in with Jayant” (168). R.S.Pathak quotes, “It is she, she feels, who is to

blame for the marital discord in their lives. She has created a bell out of a heaven” (149).

Loneliness is a symptom of modern man’s predicament which creates an awareness

to search for the true meaning of life. For long, women have been seeking an identity and that

she could also live in the world where men also live. In trying to enlighten herself she

becomes more and more assertive of her position and her rights. Her efforts and pursuits

to free herself from the wretched state and her attempts to find a place for herself in the

male dominated society have made her lonely. The protagonists, Saru of The Dark Holds

No Terror and Indu of Roots and Shadows, are able to strike a balance between their

individuation and their obligations towards the family. Shashi Deshpande discusses a fear

and darkness within oneself. Darkness implies the fear and incapability to face the

problems objectively. When one is ready to face the problems the darkness is removed,

confidence and courageness of an individual increases.

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Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors longs to break away from the traditional

norms of the society and yearns for freedom. She is presented simultaneously as an

individual and as a woman who undergoes the trauma of alienation and discrimination.

At the end she confronts reality and realizes that the dark no longer holds any terrors to

her. She survives in the male dominated society. Indu of Roots and Shadows also seeks

freedom within the boundaries of obligations and responsibilities. She conquers her fears

and achieves harmony in life discovering her roots.

Indu learns more about Akka, her past, her concern and her suffering. Akka

returned to her parental home as a rich widow after the death of her husband. Her husband

was a wealthy man and kept mistresses. Akka as a married woman was expected to bear

children but she faced many miscarriages. Her mother-in-law made her life miserable.

Akka has to endure and submit to insults, injuries and humiliations. Her husband became

obsessed with a woman, which further worsens Akka’s life. She declared, “It’s my turn

now. I’ve listened to you long enough. She came here. Twice. She wanted to see you.

She cried and begged to be allowed to see you just for a short while. I threw her out.

You’ll never see her again” (72).

Akka’s traumatic married life had come to a close when she exercised her will in

not allowing her husband’s concubine to see him at his death bed. It is here that Indu

learns not to judge others by her standards. Akka’s house provides her with plentiful

opportunities to know herself, her secret passions and the volcanic sexual explosions that

she is capable of. It is here that Indu knows what her roots are – an independent woman

and a writer, and what the shadows are – a daughter, a mother, and a commercial writer.

She takes a firm decision regarding her job and life, “But there were other things I had to
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tell him. That I was resigning from my job. That I would at last do the kind of writing I

had always dreamt of doing. That I would not, could not enrich myself with Akka’s

money. That I would, on the other hand, pay for Mini’s wedding”(168).

She also learns to see life in a fresh light. While everyone is shocked at the idea of

demolition of Akka’s house, she sees the house itself as a bondage and trap:

As a matter of fact, I felt neither mournful, nor desolate, but in a peculiar

way, both light and free. Yes, the house had been a trap too, binding me to

a past I had to move away from. Now, I felt clean, as if I had cut away all

the unnecessary, uneven edges off myself. And free. But not detached. I

would, I knew, never hanker after detachment any more. (167-168)

Indu is able to judge Akka’s choice of her being a heiress. She looked up on Akka as

an insensitive and interfering old woman, but later she knew better. She knew that Akka

had been a great strength that made Indu to act according to her beliefs. Indu has been

chosen by Akka because she believed that Indu is having great strength like her and she

will act according to her desire. She decided to sell the house and not to enrich herself

despite Jayant’s intention, and made a trust out of it. In her personal life also, Indu

decided not to be different but to go back to Jayant, resign her job and devoted herself to

the kind of writing she has always dreamt of.

Indu believed her roots in breaking away from the family but ultimately she

discovered that these family bonds are the roots of one’s being and keep on dragging one

like shadows. Indu expected a lot from her husband Jayant. She wanted her husband to

support her in each and every act. In addition, too much expectation leads to frustration in
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the relationship. Indu felt that she was acting in front of her husband. In the assertion of

her identity, she felt she has moulded herself according to her husband. In search of herself,

she has spoiled her life. Through old uncle, she realized that life is made of attachment.

Finally, she convinces herself and gets ready to show her true self, i.e., both the strength

and weakness to Jayant. Parag Mani Sarma views, “Located, as the Indian woman is, in

the confluence of a new awakening and her long history of being culturally and politically

determined as preserve and sustainer of cultural and traditional norms, the past will find a

way to assert itself” (126).

Indu tried to move towards detachment but very often she realized that there was

a pain in failure and she shakes off the feelings of detachment. She wants everyone to show

concern for her. Indu’s love for her husband is the strongest emotional confinement. Another

imprisonment is that her guilty feelings about her relationship with Naren. Indu ultimately

realized that she has been chasing shadows leaving her roots behind in Jayant. Hence, she

decides to go back to Jayant. Indu does not feel the guilt but at the same time she felt

Jayant in Naren’s touch.

Indu is always in a confused state of mind. She was willing to wound but afraid to

strike. She firmly declares, “Now I would go back and see if that home could stand the

scorching touch of honesty”(168). And in the next breath she confesses, “Nevertheless I

knew I would not tell Jayant about Naren and me” (168). Indu resolves to start a new life

based on honesty. But the next moment she revokes the vow by her unwillingness to

share the secret with Jayant. Indu’s mind is torn between two extremes. On the one hand,

she is so attached to her parental house that the house and the voice, the sounds, the smell

and the members of the house have become a part and parcel of her life, and on the other
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hand, the house turns out to be a “caged place”, “a trap” and the family “a large

amorphous group of people with conflicting interests”(63).

The old house is a trap, Indu must come out of. The old house has already obsolete

entire life. She must sell it to Shankarappa who wanted to demolish it and have a big hotel

built on the site. It is a very painful decision to take. The sale dealings are over and

Shankarappa who bought the house announces that he is going to demolish the old house

and build a modern hotel. At the last stage, Indu becomes very emotional and is floating

with the memories of her childhood days in her ancestral house. Demolition of the house

hurts her a lot.

It was an ancestral house for generations. Every corner of the house would tell its

own story about the person who had lived in it. Indu overcame by a sense of desolation

and bereavement but she reminded herself that she must not allow any soft feeling to

come in the way of doing what she thought was the right to do. The ancestral house led a

clean life and it deserved a clean end. She had a great fascination for the champak tree in

the courtyard, which would be completely rooted out. But she overcame it by thinking

that other trees will grow, other flowers would bloom and other fragments will pervade.

One era end the other might begin. But life will continue. It is endless, limitless, formless

and full of grace.

Indu was forced to look what she has gained and lost by breaking away from the

family, from the house and from Akka. The shadows of the past live on, even when one

was no more. These thoughts came to Indu only after Akka’s death when the rituals are

performed. She knows that dead do not go anywhere:

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But they don’t really go anywhere, our dead. Here, where we were all

gathered to perform Akka’s final obsequies, I could feel her presence very

strongly among us. I could feel her enjoying, as she had always done,

having the whole family together; giving her a chance to probe, to scold,

to decide, to dominate and show her power. And there was one moment

of perception when I felt like Akka herself, seeing the family as an entity,

beautiful and living. It is one of those memories that will stay with me all

my life. (61)

In the end she achieves freedom and does what she thinks she should be doing.

She successfully supress her fears and achieves harmony in life. She says, “I must know.

To live without fear…fear of being unloved , misjudged, misunderstood, displeasing.

Without the fear of failure” (158). She refused to be influenced by Jayant who did not

want her to leave her job. He was finally able to recognize her strengths and her weakness,

which have been latent so far. Jayant asks her to return home and promises her to publish

her work as she likes. After that she understands that she will be able to achieve her lost

mirth and passion with realization that she loves and needs Jayant. This helped them to

develop a better understanding between them, thus opening the door of enlightenment.

Indu discovers that relationships are roots of one’s being and follow one like shadows.

Dr.S.Prasanna Sree observes:

Harmony and understanding of the mind that facilitates between conflicting

selves and the opposing ideals is the true basic Indian attitude. Indu is seen

exercising her potential self to a fuller use by asserting herself as an

individual, pushing aside all her fears and doubts. Moreover, she continues
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to maintain her individuality in a house full of tradition– bound men and

women….Indu represents any woman who is torn between age old

traditions and individual views. She realizes that it would be an act of

wisdom to keep the traditional family ties.Without losing her identity. (43)

Shashi Deshpande explores the inner world of women, espeically of Saru and

Indu, the protagonists of The Dark Holds No Terror and Roots and Shadows. Both Indu

and Saru are engaged in search of their distinct self, trying to retain their own individuality

and try to find meaning in marriage. In these two novels, Shashi Deshpande presents the

young women struggling to synthesize both their professional and private lives. A career

woman has to face not only the oppositions of her surroundings but also to subscribe the

idea of womanhood prescribed by the Indian society. Both have similar predicaments in

life. They adopt marriage as a means to get away from their families, and in order to

achieve their freedom they seek marriage as an alternative to escape from the bondage

created by their parental homes. Their financial and professional success leads to

disharmony and discord as the result both experience disappointment and humiliation.

Saru in The Dark Holds No Terror revolts against her mother’s oppressive dictates,

becomes a doctor and even marries a man of her choice. Indu in Roots and Shadows rebels in

a similar fashion. A motherless child, she is left to fend for herself in a traditional family

by her renegade father and Akka the strict and disapproving matriarch of the family.

She manages a good education, a job and a husband. Indu and Saru despite their early

rebelliousness, cannot quite free themselves from their early socialization and its effect

upon their psyche. Indu finds herself becoming an ideal woman and becomes like her
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traditional aunts. Saru victimization by her mother on the basis of gender causes her to

become ruthlessly ambitious to the extent of understanding her husband’s confidence and

making him impotent.

Both Roots and Shadows and The Dark Holds No Terrors begin with the heroines

returning to their parent’s home and this beginning allows Shahi Deshpande to use the

cinematic technique of flashback. Indu comes at the call of Akka and stays there till the

house is disposed off. Saru comes quite unexpectedly much to the surprise of her father.

It is once again in their parental homes that both Indu and Saru acquire real independence

and maturity and finally they discovered roots. At the end of both these novels, the

protagonists neither escape from nor surrender to the problems but with great strength

accept the challenge of their own class.

Restoration of the Sanctity of
Women
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Chapter III

Restoration of the Sanctity of Women

The position of women suffered a sea change while society changed from culture

to civilization. When men began to occupy official positions with their degrees earned

from the universities and colleges, and when there emerged a salaried people working in

factories and industries, the problem of women arose. The idea that the woman should

stay at home, a toy and a doll-like creature destined to amuse the male, is one of the

greatest fallacies of the modern age, throughout history. In all societies, woman proved

herself to be a born ruler and complete administrator and organizer. What she performed

naturally in her own household was what the ruler was supposed to perform for the

benefit of the state as a whole. The rule of the household has invested woman with more

power. The man of the modern age feels successful to have kept the woman confined to

her household duties. But he indirectly strengthens her by giving her the home rule and

authorize himself in her hands.

Woman of the present day society stand on the threshold of social change so they

are intensely aware of the injustice heaped on them. The traditional suffering of women

in silence has come to be broken with assertion, courage and determination in order to

march towards self – fulfillment and a peaceful life. From the time immemorial, Indian

women, were embeded with love and affection, hope and patience and have been showing

their worth in each and every discipline of knowledge. In the modern time, women have

shown their mettle in every field in some respects, far better than the male.
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Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence (1988) which won the Sahitya Academi

Award in 1990. The novel opens with Jaya and her husband shifting from a cosy,

comfortable house to their unfashionable, old apartment at Dadar, Bombay. They shifted

their house at the time when Mohan her husband has been caught in some business

malpractice and an enqury was in progress. As a junior engineer in Lohanagar, he makes

himself a scapegoat in the corrupt deals of the chief engineer, for the want of spacious

living quarter for his family. At this point, Agarwal his colleague adviced Mohan to hide

for some time. Mohan did not like to stay in their costly apartment at church gate for the

time being. So Jaya and Mohan move in to the Dadar flat of Jaya’s maternal uncle

Makarandmama, who has given this house to Jaya. Shashi Deshpande has painted the

irony of a woman writer who is also a young housewife. Being a writer Jaya is supposed

to present her views and ideas before the society, but she remains silent probing into her

past, struggling with her present and trying to establish a rapport with her future.

Generally, a woman’s identity is defined only in terms of her relationship with her

husband, and it means virtually a woman does not have any identity of her own.

The Dadar flat is indeed a very small place for a person like Mohan, used to a

costly lifestyle. Their son Ragul and daughter Rati have gone on a holiday trip,

accompanied by their old friends. In a small old flat, Jaya got confused and became an

introvert. She broods over the situation and fondly recalls her past. She remembers

herself adjusting to the more cosmopolitan city of Bombay after leaving her earlier

surroundings of Saptagiri. Jaya is stunned at Mohan’s malpractice, “We don’t have to go

to extremes,’ he had said to me with pedantic dryness. ‘Nair was a fool, he left himself
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too wide open. He was greedy for money. I… I’ve just accepted a few favours from

people I know. Things are not too bad, I’m not that involved” (11).

Jaya’s identity and personality are totally broken, and her very instinct of self

assertion is suppressed. One day, during a tussle, Mohan exploded with anger and

accuses Jaya of being indifferent, emotionless and unconcerned. Unable to hear Mohan’s

words, she breaks her silence. Openly, she points out to Mohan that because of him she

has given up her writing. The quarrel between them reaches a climax and for the first

time in her married life real displeasure comes out through words:

‘Cheating, cheating’ I wanted to cry out, the way we had as children when

we knew we were going to be defeated. But as if I’d been struck dumb,

I could say nothing. I sat in my place, pinned to it by his anger, a

monstrously huge spear that went through me, excruciatingly painful, yet

leaving me cruelly conscious. (121)

Jaya tries to control herself, but she cannot control her emotions and she bursts

out into a hysterical laughter. After hearing Jaya’s harsh words, Mohan leaves the Dadar

flat without a single word. Jaya is thunderstruck as she had spent her whole life in being

only an ideal wife and mother. She had negated the demands of her own self in order to

be ‘Mohan’s wife’ and ‘Rahul’s and Rati’s mother’. In this moment of crisis, she is forced to

have a look backwards and analise her married life so far. Adele King in her book review

says, “Jaya finds her normal routine so disrupted that for the first time she can look at her

life and attempt to decide who she really is” (93). Jaya recalled her married life with

regret.
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Shashi Deshpande uses a beautiful image to describe Jaya’s married life:

A pair of bullocks yoked together…a clever phrase, but can it substitute

for the reality? A man and a woman married for seventeen years. A couple

with two children. A family somewhat like the one caught and preserved

for posterity by the advertising visuals I so loved. But the reality was only

this. We were two persons. A man. A woman. (8)

The image of a pair of bullocks yoked together suggests a world of meanings.

The bullocks so yoked shared the burden between themselves but no one knows whether

they love each other or not. The ideological difference creates a wide chasm between

them and they fail to understand each other. The result is their marital life grows weak and

dark. Out of social fear, they continue to be husband and wife and not for their mutual need

for each other. Jaya’s trauma begins here. Her martial life is a string of silence. There is

no share between her and her husband because a psychological distance is kept between

them. There is no lasting companionship, but only deep silence which leads to unhappiness

in her home. Because of lack of communication, Jaya becomes a silent victim:

I remember now that he had assumed I would accompany him, had taken

for granted my acquiescence in his plans. So had I. Sita following her

husband into exile, Savitri dogging Death to reclaim her husband,

Draupadi stoically sharing her husband’s travails… No, what have I to do

with these mythical women? I can’t fool myself. The truth is simpler.

Two bullocks yoked together…it is more comfortable for them to move

in the same direction. To go in different directions would be painful; and

what animal would voluntarily choose pain? (11-12)

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Mohan has married Jaya not out of love but simply because she resembled his

dream girl. When she talked fluently in English, he proudly asserts, “You know, Jaya, the

first day I met you at your Ramukaka’s house, you were talking to your brother Dinkar,

and somehow you sounded so much like that girl, I think it was at that moment that I

decided I would marry you” (90). Jaya was forced to bear the burden of being a wife.

In this mood of frustration and depression there is total silence between Jaya and Mohan.

Naturally, Mohan loses his status, Jaya her selfhood and dignity. But to achieve harmony

in relationships a woman has to suppress her emotions and remain silent.

Jaya goes into an intense self-examination of her life in the Dadar flat where

they have shifted temporarily. In the absence of her usual domestic routine, she examines

her past and the different roles that she had played as a wife during these years as a dutiful,

loyal and a tireless mother. She had been a sufferer right from her childhood days. But her

grandmother had always chided by saying, “I feel sorry for your husband, Jaya, whoever

he is. Look at you, for everything a question, for everything a retort. What husband can

be comfortable with that?” (27). But now she has imposed silence upon herself because

she feels that silence is the only weapon to defend herself. Hence she says, “I had neither

any questions nor any retorts, for Mohan now, and yet there was no comfort”(27).

During the times of difficulties and problems Mohan blames her and holds her

responsibile for their present conditions.

After marrying Mohan, she has lived seventeen years of comfortable life, with

two teenage children. She faced an unexpected shock. The unveiling of Mohan’s misdeed

changes the life of Jaya. Mohan expects Jaya to be a mythical, legendary wife but she

refuses to be so. Hence, he abruptly leaves her alone. This helps her to re – examine her
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life and her individuality in her family. Looking through her old diaries in the Dadar flat,

she finds little connections between her old self and her present nature.

Jaya ponders over her past and present, and feels proud of her father who named her

‘Jaya’, the name signifying ‘victory’. In her childhood, she experienced some freedom.

Her father has been the person, who always encouraged her. She has her own desires

and her own wishes. He has a very high opinion about his daughter and tries his best to

inspire her with his conviction that she is not like others and that she must shine in life.

He dreams that Jaya either bags an international award or goes to Oxford. He makes her

feel that she is someone special, and someone different from the other girls who would

normally end up becoming housewives:

‘You are not like others, Jaya,’ Appa had said to me, pulling me

ruthlessly out of the safe circle in which the other girls had stood, girls

who had performed pujas and come to school with turmeric-dyed threads

round their wrists and necks, girls who, it had seemed, asked for nothing

more than the destiny of being wives and mothers. While I, Appa had said,

and I had agreed, would get the Chatfield Prize, or the Ellis Prize, go to

Oxford after my graduation … ‘you’re going to be different from the

others’ Appa had assured me. (136)

After her father’s death, her goals were shattered. M.Khan and A.Khan observe,

“The mythological archetypes such as Sita and Draupadi which formed the other self of

her psyche led to the split in her consciousness”(75). From her childhood she was trained

to be under a sheltered tree. Jaya was chided by her grandmother for asking too many

questions. Sunitha Reddy observes, “In the early formative years of the child…he or she
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exposed to traditional pattern which sharply defines the male or female pattern of

behaviour”(29). These elements of tolerance helped Jaya to attain her individuality. In her

young age, Jaya has been under the care of her father and after her father’s death she has

been under the care of her brother. Jaya, since her childhood, has designed her life

according to her family member’s desires. After the death of her father, Jaya’s relations

persuaded her elder brother to marry her off at the earliest opportunity to complete the

unfinished job of his father. After her marriage with Mohan, he became her ‘sheltering

tree’ and takes up the family responsibility.

Jaya always wants to assert her individuality in every point and action of her life.

Jaya unwillingly accepts her renaming and ideas of Mohan. Her re-naming suggests her

being treated as a shadow figure. She even unwillingly accepted her other name Suhashini.

Subash Chandra observes, “Supersede or supplant the identity of the woman, which in

sharp contrast to the continuity, nay, reinforcing of the same familial identity of the male,

an identity which is the product of patriarchal society” (149-150). Jaya needed some

individuality. As trained by her elders, she adopts her life under the shelter of Mohan.

So, Jaya is transformed into a subjugate wife. She suffers tortures and depression. She did

not shared her views on set with her husband. Even when she is not treated equally by

Mohan, she never confirms the words ‘yes’ when her husband enquired about whether he

hurts her. Indra Bhatt opines, “Jaya is basically a modern woman rooted in tradition,

whereas her husband Mohan is traditional, rooted in customs”(40).

Jaya recalls the position of her mother, aunt and the cousins of their family. Jaya

never develops a friendly relationship with her mother but her mother hardly tried to be
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friendly with her. She prefers continuing in the hostel but her grandmother asked her to

go with her mother. She says:

But Ai? How can she sit there so coolly packing up as if she doesn’t care

that Appa is dead, as if going to Ambegaon will make it better? I’m not

going to Ambegaon, I’m not, she can’t make me…I was crying loud, the

wooden pillar rough and rasping as I ran my hands up and down it; there

was a piercing point of pain as a silver of wood entered my palm. (137)

Jaya’s mother tried to live without her husband. After the death of her husband,

she goes back to her parental house at Ambegon. The mother – daughter relationship has

always occupied an important place in Shashi Deshpande’s fiction. When interviewed by

S.Prasanna Sree in this context, Shashi Deshpande remarks:

It’s a very common theme….Jaya has problems with her mother, that does

not mean she does not love her mother. I don’t see that as a major conflict.

There is this major conflict, between Saru and her mother which is the

focuses of the novel. It is also a plausible and credible thing because such

things do happen. Are we all the while telling ourselves that all mothers

and daughters always love each other and have no problems? No, not a

while. Yet get irritated with your mother and that doesn’t mean you don’t

love her, that doesn’t mean you don’t care her….please look at the

reality, I don’t write from myths. I write from real life….I don’t see

women as Sita, Savithri and Draupadi. These are all myths. Let us leave

them there. (151)

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Jaya stayed at the Dadar flat to increase her loneliness. Shashi Deshpande is of the

view that silence is a friend of the self. In silence one can analyze oneself in a better way.

So silence helped Jaya to acquire her individuality. In silence Jaya regained her ability to

face boldly and individually the problems of the life she was thrown into. It takes time for

her to assert herself among her society. Sometimes Jaya was not sure of what to do and

she was confused of her needs. She compared herself with many women to assess her

individuality. She even compared her with ancient Maitreyee, the scholarly wife – pupil

of an Indian philosopher Yajnavalkya. Maitreyee questions her husband because of her

education. But Jaya being an educated woman hesitates to break her long silence. Adele

King says about Jaya’s emotions in the novel:

‘That Long Silence’ is Shashi Deshpande’s finest novel so far because it

analyses emotions within rather unexceptional situations and because it

creates more detailed pictures of an extended family with its odd misfits,

its petty bickering over money, its jealousy over affections and of a

marriage in which there is no right or wrong.The scene in which Mohan

accuses Jaya of indifference to his plight and in which she is uncertain and

confused about her responsibility is especially powerful. (97)

Jaya felt isolated and frustrated, she did not blame her husband. Instead, she blamed

herself. She felt guilty, angry and unhappiness for all that happened in her life. It is

because, she considered herself wholly responsible for her sufferings. She began to

question the reason for her separation from Mohan. Though they are couples, they never

attempt to share their mutual feelings. It is revealed through their conversation regarding

women who are treated cruelly by husbands. Mohan considers it as strength, whereas
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Jaya considers it as surrender. Mohan never understands her expectations and desires,

even Jaya never reveals it to her husband. She says:

Love …? Yes, what else could I call it but love when I thought of how

I had longed for his physical presence, when I remembered how readily,

almost greedily, I had responded to his touch? What else could I name it

when I thought of the agony it had been to be without him, when his desires,

his approval, his love, had seemed to be the most important thing in my

life? It seems to me now that we had, both of us, rehearsed the roles of

husband and wife so well that when the time came we could play them

flawlessly, word-perfect. (95)

Jaya started realizing herself by questioning her home, job and their state of

being. Jaya knows her self through the understanding of her family and surroundings.

At the end, she realized herself by identifying the truth. Bijay Kumar Das comments,

“In a way, the protagonist Jaya is any modern woman who resents her husband’s callousness

and becomes the victim of circumstances. By implication, the character of Jaya represents

modern woman’s ambivalent attitude to married life” (131).

Shashi Deshpande depicts Jaya’s oppressed and unsatisfactory life. The reason for

her silent aberration is psychological alienation. The husband-wife are united in marriage

for love and not for leading a mechanical life terminating in mutual hatred and distrust.

Jaya resents the role assigned to a wife in India, who is called upon to stay at home, look

after the babies and keep out of the rest of the world. She could not continue her writing

as Mohan discouraged her. Jaya was deeply distressed to know that the writer in her

could not come to light because of her husband.

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Jaya says:

I had known then that it hadn’t mattered to Mohan that I had written a

good story, a story about a couple, a manwho could not reach out to his

wife except through her body. For Mohan it had mattered that people

might think the couple was us, that the man was him. To Mohan, I had

been no writer, only an exhibitionist. (144)

Putting all her feelings, emotions, desires and needs in the background Jaya

shaped her life in accordance with the likes and dislikes of Mohan. She had decided to

pattern herself like an ideal wife and mother. But in this role, the free expression of

feelings are not allowed. One day she shouted at Mohan in a fit of anger, “As my own

anger had grown, I had felt his dwindling, and finally I had found myself raging at a

silent, blank-faced man” (82). Mohan stops talking with Jaya and when silence continues

for days together, she recalls:

It was I who had made the first conciliatory move and only then, when he

had spoken to me, had I realised what my anger had done to him. It had

shattered him…. He had been utterly crushed by the things I had said.

‘How could you? I never thought my wife could say such things to me.

‘You’re my wife…’ he had kept repeating. (82)

For Mohan, who had seen the blind rage of his father in childhood and silent bearing

of his mother, the anger in a woman was ‘unwomanly’. Mohan is highly dominating and

more demanding. Jaya’s parents have trained her to find psychological and social

justification in her marriage, and that she must live to the expectations of her husband.
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She lives for him, accepts her new name after marriage. She thus yields and loses her

self – identity. But her inner self refuses to be circumscribes and get into the mould of a

conventional wife. But at the same time she has to withhold her emotions tightly to herself,

not letting her husband know that she is doing so to keep her family and marriage intact.

Her creativity is not a passion but a vent for her regular sufferings.

This novel was mainly concerned with the state of modern Indian woman, who was

constantly trying to know themself. Shashi Deshpande says that the theme of That long

silence is the inner conflict of Jaya, the protagonist and at the same time there is a quest

for identity. Jaya represented one half of humanity, who remain silent all their life.

Mohan expected Jaya to come true to that image of women, which he had witnessed in

his family during his childhood. These women knew how to bear endless suffering

without uttering a single word of protest. Those women were ‘strong’ according to

Mohan. Jaya tells about her experience:

Terrified of his disapproval, I had learnt other things too, though much

more slowly, less painfully. I had found out all the things I could and

couldn’t do, all the things that were womanly and unwomanly. It was

when I first visited his home that I had discovered how sharply defined a

woman’s role was. They had been a revelation to me, the woman in his

family, so definite about their roles, so well trained in their duties, so

skilful in the right areas, so indifferent to everything else. (83)

Mohan wants an educated, cultured and modern girl as his wife. On the other hand

he expects her to perform the traditional stereotypical roles. These dual expectations had a

devastating effect on the psyche of Jaya. She continues playing this role proficiently and
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repressing her genuine feelings. With the passage of time, she was so alienated from her

own self that she felt somebody else has taken her place. When she was browsing through

the pages of her old diaries, she felt:

As I burrowed through the facts, what I found was the woman who had

once lived here. Mohan’s wife. Rahul’s and Rati’s mother. Not myself.

But what was that ‘myself’? ‘Trying to find oneself’-whata cliche that has

become. As if such a thing is possible. As if there is such a thing as

oneself, intact and whole, waiting to be discovered.On the contrary, there

are so many, each self attached like a Siamese twin to a self of another

person, neither able to exist without the other. (69)

Jaya becomes unsure of herself. She merges herself in Mohan and feels that her

existence without Mohan is impossible. Sometimes she was captured by a strong fear of

Mohan’s death. If he was late, she started to think about her life as a widow. She becomes so

dependent on him that independent existence without Mohan seems an impossibility to

her. But now, when Mohan has deserted her, she is not sure whether he will come back or

nor, she probes into her subconscious to find reasons for her undue dependence. The answer,

which she finds, is, “I had rationalised: we’re all frightened of the dark, frightened of

being alone. And so we cling to one another, saying…I love you, I want you, I need you” (97).

Sarala Palkar opines, “By the journey into the past, Jaya gets the guidance for the future”

(164). She further re-examines her personal life and recollects that sensual memories were

coldest for her. In spite of being with Mohan, she had felt alone many a time.

Woman is always bound by restrictions imposed by the society. Jaya was submissive

and passive, in fact, it was deep rooted in her childhood. When Jaya was engaged,
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Vanitamani advised her that, “the happiness of your husband and home depends entirely

on you” (138). She gets ready to change herself according to his choice. She cuts her hair

and wears dark glasses. In the words of Vimala Rama Rao, “Jaya is one of the rare

narrative voices in Indian English fiction that possesses and displays a literary sensibility.

Commensurate with her fictional role as a writer telling her own story, her college

education and reading habits are in evidence in her speaking voice. This indeed

is an achievement”(93).

Jaya was a talented person who has the ability to create stories. At first, she

succeeded in her award and recognition. But her frankness and reality of emotions in the

story are not welcomed by her husband. Jaya had written a story about a couple, where

the man could not reach his wife except through her body. She got a prize for this story

but Mohan’s question, “How could you have done it’(143) puts an end to her happiness.

Mohan was worried that people will think he is that man. His objection is:

‘They will all know now, all those people who read this and know us, they

will know that these two persons are us, they will think I am this kind of a

man, they will think I am this man. How can I look anyone in the face

again? And you, how could you write these things, how could you write

such ugly things, how will you face people after this?’ (143-144)

Jaya could not explain it to him that it was not self-revelation at all. Instead of

explaining her position, she had felt ashamed, “It had sounded too pretentious, as if I had

been taking something that was after all only a hobby too seriously. And so I had been

silent” (144). Jaya is a gifted writer whose realistic story of man – woman relationship

wins a prize. According to Mohan, Jaya had disclosed their personal relationship to the
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world. Jaya was shocked at this, but she knew that Mohan was unable to distinguish

between art and life as he has no artistic sense in him. Jaya who could not write about any

woman, afraid that she may resemble Mohan’s mother or aunt, gets the courage to write

about herself and Mohan, without using any fictitious names, in a straightforward,

autobiographical way. She decides to write what she wants to write and not to look up at

Mohan’s face for an answer she wants. Sumitra Kukreti rightly remarks, “The realization

that she can have her own-yathaecchasi tatha kuru-gives a new confidence to Jaya.

This is her emancipation”(197).

Jaya was scared by Mohan’s feelings and decided to stop writing in order to keep

him happy and content, crushing her own wish to express herself through writing. After

she had stopped serious, true and expressive writing, following Mohan’s suggestion,

started writing on light subjects about middle-class women. Jaya’s creativity provided her

an outlet for her frustration. She is even willing to become ‘Suhashini’ the smiling placid

motherly women instead of being ‘Jaya’ the name given to her by her father. Jaya is

willing to follow the mythical image of the pativrata tradition of Sita, Sati, Savitri image of the

silently suffering sacrificial wife, mother and daughter. To Mohan, her profession as a writer is

just a status symbol for him to flaunt. According to him, a wife is an embodiment of the

submissive woman, he has witnessed in his childhood days. Jaya had sacrificed her

lifelong ambition of becoming a great writer. Despite all the progressive ideas, Jaya was a

role model of married Indian womens’ mind.

Jaya gave up her hobby and joins the traditional role of an ideal wife. She compromised

her creative writing and wrote under the pseudo name ‘Seeta’. She wrote stories like ‘Seeta’,

which pleased Mohan. Her “Seeta” stories are not what she wanted to write but what
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Mohan wants her to write. Seeta column became very famous among the female readers.

Jaya is not happy, she knew that her stories have nothing to do with reality of life.

But she felt safer, “Women I had known I could not write about, because they might-it

was just possible-resemble Mohan’s mother, or aunt, or my mother or aunt. Seeta was

safer. I didn’t have to come out of the safe hole I’d crawled into to write about Seeta.

I could stay there, warm and snug” (149). Jaya comes out of creative aspect which is

close to her heart and also rejects the subject of woman’s suffering. She accepted the role

of a traditional housewife.

In Jaya’s life, her talent was crushed and uncared by her husband. When he

leaves her alone the privacy helped her to find her role and part in the family and in her

life. Jaya being an educated woman was able to find a solution for her problems. Jaya has

a friend and a companion Kamat, a widower and neighbour in the Dardar flat, he encourages

Jaya to realize her individuality. Kamat exists in the novel as a shadowy figure. He is an

advertiser and lives alone above the apartment of the Kulkarnies at Dadar, Bombay.

Unlike the other men, he has no reservations against doing “unmanly” things like cooking.

He is symphetic and objective and conducts himself with ease and grace in the company

of women. He encouraged Jaya to write striking stories which deal with real emotions.

He remoulds Jaya to face the world with her individuality. He warns Jaya about her

identity and he insists to be on the apt side. Kamat advised her not to write under false

name, but to Jaya “Seeta” appears to be safer because Mohan is happy with it.

Jaya’s long inner agitation disappeared, when she is in the company of Kamat.

He becomes the whole companion to Jaya. She felt very comfortable with Kamat. She threw

away her mask as a daughter, wife and mother in his presence. The encouragement and
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preaching of Kamat she understands herself. She wants to acquire individuality, in order

to lead her life in a better way and in accordance with the society. Kamat was the only

person with whom Jaya shared her feelings, emotions and thoughts without any hesitation.

Kamat is not good looking as Mohan. He is “…middle-aged, bulky, had metamorphosed

into someone entirely different…. a man whose life was structured to loneliness” (157).

But Jaya goes towards him due to his intelligence, so that she can share her ideas with

him. To continue with her stories, she told Kamat that she wanted to write under a pseudo

name and use his address for her mail so that Mohan may not know about those stories.

Kamat tells Jaya, “The relation of man to woman is the most natural of one

person to another”(158). Kamat encouraged her like an elder brother, “Spew out your

anger in your writing, woman, spew it out” (147) and he can pay beautiful compliments

like a lover, “Your name is like your face” (152). Jaya felt that she and Mohan did not

actually make up a family, a home. She realizes, “We live together but there had been

only emptiness between us” (185). It is this emptiness within Jaya that drew her towards

Kamat, her neighbour. Kamat’s casual nature of physical contact has amazed her.

He became close to her in a friendly way:

But this man…it had been a revelation to me that two people, a man and a

woman, could talk this way. With this man I had not been a woman. I had

been just myself - Jaya. There had been an ease in our relationship I had

never known in any other. There had been nothing I could not say to him.

And he too…. (153)

Appa meant a great deal for Jaya and his death was premature and sudden. It occurred

at a crucial time in her life when she was writing her school final examinations. His death
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rendered Jaya’s family homeless and left her bereft of an emotional support. But at the

same time, although she took seriously ill, the comforting hand of her elder brother

saved her from further psychic crisis. The present loss of her second home, which she has

so carefully nurtured, apart from being of traumatic proportions, comes as a repetition of

it. After experiencing the trauma, Jaya seems to become at once excessively concerned

about the moral side of what she has done so far, and what she should have done but did

not. Freud observes in this regard:

Ill-luck- that is, external frustration greatly enhances the power of the

conscience in the super-ego. As long as things go well with a man, his

conscience is lenient and lets the ego do all sorts of things; but when

misfortune befalls him, he searches his soul, acknowledges his sinfulness,

heightens and demands of his conscience, imposes abstinences on himself

and punishes himself with penances. (16)

Now the truth dawns upon Jaya that she had shaped herself absolutely according

to Mohan’s desires and that was the reason of blankness, emptiness and silence in her

life. She has been writing all these memories and experiences, “So many bits and pieces-a

crazy conglomeration of shapes, sizes and colours put together” (188). Thus she ultimately

realized that in order to attain self – hood a woman must transcend silence, her self – negation

and alienation. She decided finally to come out of the cocoon and firmly resolved to

break the icy silence, which had plagued her family so long. Suman Ahuja observes,

“Jaya caught in an emotional eddy, endeavours to come to terms with her protean roles,

while trying, albeit in vain, to rediscover her true self, which is but an ephemera…an

unfulfilled wife, a disappointed mother and a failed writer” (32).

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Jaya understands that the crack in her family was because of her anger that was

the result transmitted into silence. This was the result of variation between what her

father taught her that she was someone above the rest and special and what the other

women in the house taught her that she is how different from the other women. Jaya

finally comes to an understanding that the reason for her depressing conditions is not the

society alone. In a way she too is responsible for her situation. She is horrified at the

silence of Kusum and Vimala, her mother-in law and compares the condition of these

women, who could not break their silence and situation. Jaya discerns the unlimited

despair in the heart wounded and hurt but continued to serve the man but humiliates her.

Shashi Deshpande pictures Jaya’s plight in the well-known childhood bedtime

story of the wise sparrow which built a house of wax and the foolish crow which built

hers of dung. On a rainy night, the crow’s house collapsed forcing her to seek shelter at

the sparrow’s. The sparrow was so possessive of and attached to her home that she kept

the crow waiting, out in the rain, for a considerable time. She allowed the crow to be only

when she was thoroughly drenched and then guided her to the hot pan to warm herself.

The foolish crow hoped onto it and got burnt to the death. Jaya’s married life has been

lived almost on the same lines as the sparrow’s. Jaya emerged as a victorious new woman

who has discovered the means to overcome oppression and ultimately utilized her powers

and abilities not only for personal fulfillment and self-actualization but also help to create

awareness among other women to break their silence to impose the discipline and to

understand the purpose of a woman’s life within the family. Jaya, as a person, comes to

understand that everyone is alone in life.

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Shashi Deshpande unmask both Jaya and Mohan when they face crisis in their

lives. They had ran into stormy weather and their secured sheltered life washed away like

a water – colour in a rainy storm. The catastrophe they faced affected them differently

and they react differently. Mohan felt that Jaya, who cared much for him, no longer cares

for him because of this crisis in his life. His life was centred around his office work and

his family. Now that he has no office work, he became unsettled. Waiting to hear from

his colleague, he becomes restless and ghost like. He expected his wife Jaya to not only

share his anxiety, happiness and doubts but to positively speak out and help him to face

the crisis. He said that whatever he has done, he had done for his wife and children, not

merely to realize his ambition of good high society life.

Jaya, on the other hand, reacts differently. Her whole life revolved around the

wants of her husband. Her homecoming made her take stock of her life, to review her

life and examine her inner self and her relationship with Mohan. So far she was like the

leg of a compass, all her life arranged on the circumstance of Mohan’s life and his activities.

But now she no longer wanted to be silent revolving around Mohan. As she gave up the

newspaper column “Seeta” she also wanted to give up her traditional role-model as wife.

At last Jaya was reminded of the Sanskrit words in her Appa’s diary, “Yathecchasi

tatha Kuru” meaning “Do as you desire”(192). On the battlefield of Kurukshetra, Lord

Shri Krishna taught to Arjuna the different ways of life. At last, Shri Krishna told Arjuna

that he himself would have to make his own choice. Jaya did not understand it earlier. But

later she understands the meaning of the words. Now Jaya has to make a choice of her own.

Jaya believes that one cannot remain unchanging throughout one’s life. One must change

and hope for the men also to change.

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Jaya’s confusion started when she received the message that her son Ragul had

left the company of those persons with whom he and Rati had gone out for a picnic.

Her body became wet and she felt that the room was hot. Suddenly she goes near the

window and bangs it hard with her fist, hurting herself:

My palm was hurting. I could see tiny red spots flecking the palm as the

blood surfaced. I looked into my palm as if I might find some answers

there, but there were none. All that I could see instead, even with my eyes

closed, was a stark, night marish picture of an eerie caravan of skeletal

vehicles, a caravan we had seen on the highway one early morning, each

vehicle driven by a silent, masked, hooded figure,each driver looking

straight ahead, each totally unaware, it seemed, of the vehicle ahead of

him or the one behind, each vehicle moving in a chilly isolation. Where

had that glossy coloured picture of a happy family vanished? (171-172)

Jaya’s trauma reached the climax when Mohan left home silently and stealthily

without a word to his wife. She was afraid that Mohan has left for good and he would not

return to her. In her traumatic state she wandered in the streets of Mumbai, because she

could not bear the crushing burden of her marriage and the responsibility of her two

children to be carried on her shoulders all alone. She decided that she could not continue

to be in that state. She wanted to resume her domesticity by making a compromise.

Jaya wants to bring an end to her role as the victim of silence. At the very same

time, the adverse situation changes for Jaya, because Mohan sends a telegram informing

her that the corruption case on him is settled amicably without loss of his job. With the

“All Well” news from Mohan, she finds herself slipping into the grooves of her marital
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life. A change comes over her. She feels, she is no more a victim of silence. Jaya’s image

is no more relevant for her as she tells us:

What have I achieved by this writing? The thought occurs to me again as

I look at the neat pile of papers. Well, I’ve achieved this. I’m not afraid

anymore. The panic has gone. I’m Mohan’s wife, I had thought, and cut

off the bits of me that had refused to be Mohan’s wife. Now I know that

kind of a fragmentation is not possible. The child, hands in pockets, has

been with me through the years. She is with me still. (191)

Jaya took up the role of wife again with a difference, and not like a dumb woman.

She has decided not to look for clues in Mohan’s face and then to give, “him the answer

he wants” (193) but to speak out what she thinks is right. Her deep rational reflections

have given her an important insight about life. She believes, “Life has always to be made

possible” (193). Enrich Fromm suggests , “There is only one possible, productive solution

for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all

men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world,

not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual” (27).

Jaya decided to compromise and breaks the cocoon of silence. Her trauma is

over. She realized that Mohan has locked his heart to her and has not shared his problems

with her because she too is not receptive. Lack of mutual understanding has created a

whole of silence between them. Jaya was not ready to shred her wife-role and mother-

role. She realized that life for her was to be lived fully in relationship with others. Jaya’s

psychological war was between the role she has been playing to please Mohan and the
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self she wished to be. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan criticizes Shashi Deshpande by saying that

the author is trying to universalize the problems of women through the character of Jaya:

The force of Shashi Deshpande’s indictment of women’s lives lies in the

way she is able to universalize their condition, chiefly by drawing similarities

among Jaya and a variety of other female figures, including characters

from Indian history and myth; and among three generations of women in

her family (Jaya, her mother, hergrandmother); among different classes of

women (Jaya, her maid Jeeja); among different kinds of women of the

same class and generation ( Jaya, her cousin Kusum, her widowed

neighbour Mukta). So compellingly realistic is this rendering that no

Indian woman reader can read this novel without a steady sympathetic

identification, and indeed, frequent shocks of recognition. (78)

After a long struggle, Jaya realized herself and decided to do as she wishes.

Jaya feels that she can have her identity only if she has Mohan with her. She is clear that

all faults are her own and she has the responsibility to amend it. So Jaya, who feels guilt

redeems herself by freeing herself from the cage of surrender. Hans-George Gadamer

philosophizes, “Understanding is not to be thought of so much as an action of one’s

subjectivity, but as the placing of oneself within a process of tradition, in which past and

present (self and other) are constantly fused” (258). At the end of the story, Jaya is fresh

and she regains hope. The telegram from Mohan, indicating his return brings back the

blooming of her life. Jaya decided to reconcile her life with her husband Mohan. She

asserts her individuality and changed to a new life with hope and affirmitity. At the end

of the novel, Shashi Deshpande left a hint for a new beginning. Jaya waited for the return
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of her husband and children. Through Saru, Shashi Deshpande explains that, “emancipation

and success for women in the patriarchal Indian society can cause subversion of roles in

the family and destroy happiness” (120).

Shashi Deshpande has presented a slice of Indian life with its up and downs and

tears and turmoils . She has highlighted the tremors and traumas of Jaya’s psychological

alienation. Whatever may be her problems, all the women returned to their fold assertively.

Life has its limitations and she has to accept her roles as wife and mother. When this

realization dawns on her, she readily accepts the plight of her life. Jaya understands that

life is a two way process. It has to be lived fully in relationship with others. She felt that

she can have her identity only if she has Mohan with her. She too did not want to reject

her wife – role and mother – role. The novel raises many questions by providing the

reader with an insight into the problems of different roles that a woman in society, despite

the romanticizing of womanhood, has to play.

In A Matter of Time Shashi Deshpande comes closer to her avowed mission of

foregrounding not the men verses women issue, but the predicament of human existence.

In the earlier novels, women characters are not only at the centre, but they also throw the

male characters into the ground. They are intelligent, courageous and strong, while

the male characters are mediocre and shadowy. In The Dark Holds No Terrors, Saru

overshadows her average husband who tortures her under the cover of darkness, trying in

egotistic to prove his manliness to her. Again, Indu in Roots and Shadows is more

perceptive and forceful than her materialistic husband. Indu’s aunt Akka, who rules the

family with an iron hand, is more interesting and strong than her puppet-like brothers.
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In That Long Silene, Jaya argues for self-fulfilment and her commitment to the

call of her conscience and her firm aim to break that long silence lift her to great heights.

Her husband and her other male characters are important only for analyzing and

understanding her soul-searching and frustrations. Shashi Deshpande’s A Matter of Time

was not only ‘her story’ but ‘his story’ too. It was about women and men, bonds of

human relationships, crisis, alienation, renunciation and Fate or Time. It was the high

watermark of contemporary fiction by women writers. Discussing the histrocial origin of

the form of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin observes, “The novel, from the very beginning

developed as a genre that had at its core a new way of conceptualizing time” (70). And

Gerard Genette holds that, “the core of the novel is its potential to manipulate time” (37).

In A Matterof Time as the title indicates, Shashi Deshpande tries to weave a philosophy

around the concept of time. T.S. Eliot, the greatest man of letters of the twentieth century,

says in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that tradition:

…involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call

nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond

his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception not

only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence….This historical sense,

which is a sense of the timeless as well as the temporal and of the timeless

and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is

at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place

in time, of his own contemporaneity. (44)

Thus, along with the conventional idea of time, there came into vogue in the

modern age the philosophical concept of Time, ‘a time in the mind’ which was also
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called psychological time. Shashi Deshpande opens with a crisis which shattered the

harmony of Sumitra’s family. Her husband Gopal deserted her and her three daughters.

Their relationship has not been rocked either by violence or by infidelity, and yet he

abruptly declared that he cannot bear his married life. He announced the unfortunate

decision of leaving the family when Sumi is absorbed in watching a scene in the Raj Kapoor

movie ‘Mera Nam Joker’, in which the clown was prancing and dancing in the ring, singing

the philosophical song. It strikes the ketynote of the novel, Eliot goes on to say in Four

Quarters, “To be conscious is not to be in time.But only in time can the moment in the

rose-garden, the moment in the arbour where the rain beat, the moment in the draughty

church at smokefall be remembered; involved with past and future.Only through time

time is conquered” (72).

Family must always support the members and provide security. They in fact

disturb the family, environment of love and understanding. The parents, instead of

allowing their children to grow, fail in their filial duties towards their children. Shashi

Deshpande projects this in her novel. Woman, mostly the wife, was at crossroads. Crisis

afflicted the families of the near and dear. The persons who bear the brunt of it are the

wives, children, mothers and women in general. Sumi, the heroine of A Matter of Time,

was a perfect example of an educated woman.

Shashi Deshpande has skillfully intertwined the lives of three generations and the

promising fourth generation in the context of families which are moulded by the traditional

values that are attached to family bonds. Sumi learns to pick up the threads of life though

deserted by her husband for no fault of hers. However, Sumi did not think of divorce.

Sumi and Gopal enjoyed adorable relationship during the early years of their marriage.
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Their joys, intimate love, physical as well as mental, leads one to understand the bliss

especially in their early years of their marriage.

Sumi did not want any one’s pity. When Gopal walks out on her for no reasons

which he himself cannot understand, Sumi returned with her three daughters Aru, Charu

and Seema to shelter in the ‘Big House’ where her parents Kalyani and Shripati lived in a

strangely oppressive silence. They have not spoken to each other for thirty-five years.

There is a distinct parallel between Shripati’s desertion of Kalyani and Gopal’s desertion

of Sumi. Gopal’s desertion is not just a tragedy. For Sumi and her daughters, it is also a

shame and a disgrace. Sumi was silent where as Aru, her eighteen-year-old eldest of all,

tries for reasons for this tragedy. She becomes aware of her neighbour’s eyes following

her family. Aru resents the situation that their family appears to be “so pathetic and

vulnerable”. She was upset over the break up of the family. She even wants her mother to

file a case against Gopal. Aru the eldest daughter, most confused with father’s desertion

and mother’s indifference seeks to find an answer for the riddle of mother against father.

Though deserted, Sumi did not contemplate a divorce as she considered this

to be no one use to her. Divorce isolate a woman legally but the memories attached to the

marriage cannot be erased easily. The social stigmas associated with divorce in the Indian

society haunted her and she has to continue to struggle and suffer at various levels,

economical, emotional and psychological. A woman may get relief from the painful life

of a wrong marriage through divorce, but it will not always re-establish her socially,

psychologically or financially. It can turn out to be the beginning of another phase of

troubles as the divorce has to further bear the onslaughts of a harsh society which does
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not allow her to be free and happy. Sumi has the full support and sympathy of her

parents, sisters, cousins and others. This has helped her to a great extent to withstand the

shock, pain, humiliation, crisis and the trauma of desertion.

Man, from ancient time, has always abandoned women and family to achieve his

higher goals. Women have been left to fend for themselves, they have suffered for this

irresponsible act of man but none has questioned him or punished him for the self-centred

deed. In this novel, Kalyani and Sumi are treated in a similar fashion by their respective

husbands Shripati and Gopal. Shripati Sumi’s father had never declared his reasons for

abandoning. Gopal also could not pinpoint the reasons of his desertion. Both the male

members of the society, with their thoughtless behaviour, had disturbed the life of their

family. But encapsuled in their own problems, they never thought of the painful trail

they were leaving behind. The novel registers the reaction and future moves of these

affected women.

The transition of women from total silence to strong articulation was the revolutionary

revision introduced by Shashi Deshpande in the fictional universe of her novel. Kalyani,

Sumi’s mother in the imperialistic atmosphere of her family, could not dream of the

words ‘I want’. Sumi could and did assert her wish regarding her life – partner but as a

wife and mother her right was ignored. The third generation woman Aru, cannot be

denied.

To Gopal, the house is a bondage and trap, and so he moves out of it to a kind of

Vanaprasatha or renunciation. Though Sumi was rooted firmly in the family she learnt

the bitter truth that individuals are like two parallel rivers that do not converge but only

diverge and move separately in different streams. She accepts unemotionally what Gopal
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once said to her, “Sa-hriday in the sense of oneness is an impossible concept”(24).

Then, abruptly he had pulled her close to himself and said, “Listen, can you hear? It’s two

hearts beating. They can never beat in such unison that there’s only one sound. Hear that

?” (24). Following the seemingly unreasonable desertion of the family by her husband,

Sumi examines and re-examines the crisis of their married life and comes to the sad

conclusion, “ Two hearts, two sounds. Gopal is right. Sa-hriday-there is no such thing,

there can be one thing” (24).

There is a social stigma that they now have to bear. Sumi undergoes her own kind

of suffering, “It takes time to get used to sharing your life with another person, now I

have to get used to bring alone” (23). There is a ruthlessness with which she makes the

girls discard things when they vacate their house and decide to live permanently in the

Big House. She looks hollow-eyed and drawn after their last night in their own house but

Aru finds her mother looking so bright and normal in the morning after her bath, that she

cannot but think, “Perhaps things will work out, maybe we will be able to go on, even if

we can’t go back” (30). Aru boldly comments on her mother’s reaction:

‘You don’t care?’ Aru’s reaction to her mother’s words is violent and

sharp. That’s wonderful. You don’t care about his having gone, you don’t

care where he is, you don’t care what people think-but I care, yes, I do, I

care about papa having left us, I care about not having our own house. I don’t

want to live like this, as if we’re sitting on a railway platform, I want my

home back, I want my father back…. (21)

Sumi knew why Gopal left her. She always knew that Gopal, who always had a

fear of commitment and family ties, had the potential to walk out on her and the children.
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So, with all the trauma of being a deserted wife, Sumi was more interested in getting on

with her life and finding a meaningful existence. She does not wallow in self-pity. She is

willing to let Gopal go his own way just as she must find her own path. Now back in the

Big House, she feels “Paradise” and is keen to get a job. She cannot help but observe that

being a daughter is a disadvantage, “Sumi saw it then, the adoration of the male child. It

must have been this way in the stable in Bethlehem, in Nanda’s house on the banks of the

Yamuna in Gokul. The male child belongs” (71). Sumi realizes that Gopal and she must

now move on alone and she agree herself to their separation:

We can never be together again. All these days I have been thinking of

him as if he has been suspended in space, in nothingness, since he left us.

But he has gone onliving, his life has moved on, it will go on without me.

So has mine. Our lives have diverged, they now move separately, two

different streams. (85)

The fear of being unable to fulfill his duties as a husband and a father, coupled with

an intense loneliness, and a feeling of isolation from his wife and daughter, compelled him to

choose what could easily be termed a coward’s way out. Unlike the other deserted wives,

Sumi did not decompose at the humiliation and suffering inflicted on her. As she recovered

from the shock, she musters up courage, picks up the threads of life and tries to read just

her lifestyle to suit the situation. She moved to her parental house with her children and

helped them to lead their lives without mentioning about her husband’s desertion.

Sumi’s three daughters often talked of Kalyani’s marriage to Shripati and about

their grandmother Manorama. In the meantime, Aru is also told how Kalyani lost her

retarded son and was never forgiven for it. It is a desertion in every sense expected that
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they live in the same house. Shripati had punished his wife for her carelessness towards

the male child, by abandoning her and then later, not communicating with her for the last

thirty -five years. Kalyani at some point of time had begged him to forgive her. He had

refused with the intension of crushing her completely. She had survived the attack and

retaliated with silent determination by playing a leading role in Gopal – Sumi’s marriage.

The girls argued about the boy who was lost, and what striked Aru the most was the

injustice of it. But they knew nothing of the history of the relationship between Kalyani

and Shripati:

They know nothing of the reason for the marriage, of Shripati’s reluctance,

of Manorama’s appeal to Shripati’s sense of gratitude, of the cruelty that

made Kalyani accept a feared uncle as a husband. They have no idea of

the hopelessness that lay within the relationship, that doomed it from the

start. (143)

Females compelled to serve as the colony or the slave of the males have been

exploited and oppressed, physically, materially and emotionally. The under current of the

power struggle between the man and the woman emerged as one of the most debatable

issues. The struggle was not limited to simple rights and duties but has extended to the

issues related to work, economic position, individual liberty, marriage, reproduction,

child-care and the right to question.

Shashi Deshpande clearly identifies the problem, and often in the novel, proclaims

woman as the victor. Kalyani’s initial feeling of guilt results in her segregation with her

daughters. The psychology of the guilt infused into a woman brings about the feeling of

inferiority. Sumi was never colonized either by her father or her husband. She had
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challenged the colonizer by marrying the man of her choice and later unscathed by the

husband’s treatment, neither beg him to return to the family life nor dumbly accepts the

‘crushed’ position. Immediately she begins to build for herself and her daughters, and

finally emerges as a woman of substance.

Kalyani’s is a pitiable story, seems to have endless capacity to bear pain. Even Sumi

realized, “Kalyani’s past, which she has contained within herself, careful never to let it

spill out, has nevertheless entered into us, into Premi and me, it has stained our bones”

(75). It is Kalyani who carried within her a sense of history – the Big House was more

than just a house to her despite the fact she has had a traumatic past. Manorama , Kalyani’s

mother had always wanted a son. For Marorama, Kalyani became an invisible symbol of

her failure to have a son. Not only this, Marorama had wanted her daughter to be beautiful

and accomplished, to make a wonderful marriage, so that she could show all those who

looked down upon her as the daughter of a poor man. Manorama came from a much

poorer background than her husband, and after her marriage she had broken off all ties

with her own family, except the youngest brother who had been left memories at the age

of one, “Perhaps this boy, born after her marriage, was the one child she never carried about,

and therefore brought her fewer reminders of a past she wanted to forget” (121).

Coming from a humbler background than her husband, Manorama never got over

her fear that her husband might marry again. Moreover, she could never give him a son.

Kalyani was intelligent and good in studies. Because of her mother’s insecurities she

was not allowed to complete her studies. She was taken out of school and married to

Manorama’s own brother Shripati, “Perhaps, after this, Manorama felt secure. The property

would remain in the family now” (129). It is only when Kalyani gave birth to a son that
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her mother’s contempt for her was assuaged. But the child turned out to be retarded and

Kalyani lost him at the railway station on her way to a visit to her parents’ house. Shripati

looked for the lost boy throughout the city like a mad man for the whole day and Kalyani

returned home, as a deserted wife. Shripati returned after two months but never spoke

to Kalyani thereafter. Kalyani is a fatalist. She believes in destiny and sees miracles

everywhere. The family members smile at her stories, “ The family smiles at her

predictability, they humour her, none of them believe in her miracles. They don’t seem

to realize that the real miracle is Kalyani herself, Kalyani who has survived in tact, in

spite of what Shripati did to her, Kalyani who has survived Manorama’s myriad acts of

cruelty” (151).

Manorama emerges as a cruel woman, and ironically, it is she who is a victim and

not Kalyani. In a world dominated by men and in which marriage and sons are only things

that matter, Manorama was unable to see the good in Kalyani, nor she was able to enjoy

with her granddaughters, Sumi and Premi. Manorama had attempted to kill her metaphorically,

and Kalyani probably has killed a retarded son to gave life to her daughters. Their crimes

are the same but not the punishment. Her role in Gopal-Sumi’s marriage may be condemned

by patriarchy but from the human point of view, Kalyani’s deed is applaudable. She emerged

as a worthy mother. It is this that Kalyani realized in the end, when she tells Aru:

For so many years I thought I had nothing, I was so unfortunatethat I

could get no pleasure even from my own children. My mother didn’t care

for my children, either. Daughters again, she said. And when you were

born a daughter, I wondered how she could have been so blind. Now when

I look at you, my three grand daughters, especially at you, I think I’m

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luckier than my mother. She’s the unlucky one who didn’t know how to

enjoy her children and grandchildren. (226)

Sumi, the third mother in question, is very different from Manorama and Kalyani.

Though she has inherited the qualities of her mother and grandmother, she kept a space

for herself. Her decision to take up a job is unwelcomed by Aru who selfishly objects to

the idea. Indian mythology depicts woman more as an absence than presence. Woman’s

sacrifice, surrender and effacement are proved because the heroic failures of the

females ensure the victory of the males. Shashi Deshpande’s re-vision of the myth of

Sairandhri/Draupadi of The Mahabharata uncovers new truths and possibilities related

to female psychology. But Sumi’s interpretation of Sairandhri’s psychology is an

eye-opener:

‘Don’t you think this was something she had often wanted, to be by

herself, to sleep alone, to be free, for a while, of her five husbands?

Why not? Sumi is right, it’s very possible. (But only a woman could have

thought of this.) To have the pleasure, the liberty of being alone, her own

mistress, not to have to share her bed every night with a husband-yes, she

must have longed for it. (85-86)

Shashi Deshpande, through a reorientation of the myth, suggests that a married

woman may desire to enjoy an independent existence occasionally. She believed that

flexible norms and behavoiur patterns, adjustable responses to changing issues related to

women are some of the measures to reduce man-woman confrontation in the present

world. For Kalyani and women like her, marriage is the most important aspect of

woman’s life. Kalyani’s character is a faithful representation of self-sacrificing Indian

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woman of the older generation. History rarely gives space to woman and yet it is women

who keep history alive by carrying on the burden of the past and samskaras.

Sumi’s mother Kalyani pathetically pleads to her son-in-law Gopal to return home.

Gopal never blames Sumi but does not offer any convincing reasons for his action. When she

goes to meet Gopal she takes the entire responsibility herself for Sumi’s carelessness and

pleads with Gopal not to let what had happened to her happen to her daughter. She says

without allowing him to speak, “ I know she didn’t bother too much about her home, ‘

But, Gopala’ and now she hesitates,‘ how could she have known what being a good wife

means when she never saw her mother being one? I taught her nothing, it’s all my fault,

Gopala, forgive me and don’t punish her for it” (47).

Sumi, at times, enters a world of creative writing. Her first attempt, a play entitled

‘The Gardener’s Son’ is a success. This gave her the courage to deal with more daring

themes like female sexuality. She decides to write a story with Surpanaka the demon

sister of King Ravana at the centre. On Aru’s eighteenth birthday, Sumi tells the family

of the job that she has got and moving away to Devgiri. Aru was shattered, but Sumi

consoled her by saying that their family life would have been over anyway, “Be happy

for me, Aru. This is the first thing in my life I think that I’ve got for myself….I’ve been

so lazy all my life. And now suddenly I want to do many things” (230). The concept of

the new woman is clearly expressed through the transformation of Sumi. It is clear that

today women are no longer subservient to male ego and no longer dependent on them.

The new woman feels that economic independence and domestic space are pre – requisites

for women and they are never prepared to compromise.

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For a while, Aru and Kalyani do not get along very well, but very soon Aru realized

that there is something strange in the relationship between her grandparents, “Why doesn’t

Baba ever come down? Why doesn’t he have his meals here with the rest of us? Why doesn’t

he ever speak to Kalyani? She is his wife. Isn’t she? And why is she so frightened of

him?... “Poor Amma”, Sumi says, But why?” (39) Sumi tries to persuade Aru to ignore

the queer relationship between her grandparents just as she tries to make her forget what

Gopal has done, “Do you want to punish him, Aru? I don’t. I’m not interested. I just want

to get on with my life’… ‘Let him go, Aru, just let him go. This is not good for you” (61).

Aru discards the concept of marriage and decides to become a self – aware, confident and

autonomous social worker-cum-lawyer.

Jaya in That Long Silence seek refuge at her Dadar flat, Sumi, also accompanied

by her father and her daughters, comes to her parental house. Jaya submits herself to

introspection and rumination to regain confidence, Sumi straightaway decides to face the

facts boldly. Almost after twenty-three years of her marriage with Gopal, a history lecturer in

a college, one evening, for reasons even he cannot articulate, in a very casual way walks

out and unburdens his responsibilities as husband and father of three grown up children.

Even before Sumi realizes the enormity of the situation and burden thrust on her,

everything ends leaving Sumi in a shocked silence. Describing the whole scene of

Gopal’s casual desertion, Keerthi Ramachandra says:

One evening, while Sumi is watching a film on T.V. about circus,“without

the dirt, the smells, the fear and despair of the real thing, but sanitized,

bacteria free” Gopal tells her he want to talk to her. And Without any

preamble says what he has to. He waits for Sumi’s reaction, but within
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moments both realize that there’s nothing more to be said and he leaves as

quietly as he had entered. (171)

Indu in Roots and Shadows and Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors, leave their

husbands. Sumi does not do so, but her husband Gopal leaves her. Like Indu-Jayant,

Saru-Manu, Jaya-Mohan, Sumi and Gopal also enjoyed a harmonious relationship during

the early years of their marriage. Their joyous intimate love, physical as well as mental,

leads one to understand their conjugal bliss, especially in their early years of their

marriage.

Kalyani, had a vague suspicion that Gopal had done this for the sake of money.

She further explains to Gopal her own misery and agony surmounted in her heart all

through. She pathetically implores him, “What have you done to my daughter, Gopala,

don’t do this, don’t let it happen to my daughter, what happened to me” (46). Gopal goes

on scrutinizing his own apprehensions:

Emptiness, I realized then, is always waiting for us. The nightmare we

most dread, of waking up among total strangers, is one we can never

escape. And so it’s a lie, it means nothing, it’s just deceiving ourselves

when we say we are not alone. It is the desperation of a drowning person

that makes us cling to other humans. All human ties are only a masquerade.

Some day, some time, the pretence fails us and we have to face the truth. (52)

Gopal finds no reason why he should think that children are the sole concern of

parents. But when he thinks about his own parents whom he lost in an accident, he shows

a kind, ambivalent attitude. The life of parents, he now feels, is inextricably entwined
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with the life of their children. Sumi also shows an ambivalent attitude in her philosophical

reflections.Though she accepts Gopal’s unreasonable and quaint behavior, at another

occasion she says that she would like an answer from him. She plans to ask him question,

“How then can you, in this age, a part of society, turn your back on everything in your

life?” (27).

Sumi knows that Gopal believes that, “Marriage is not for everyone. The demand

it makes-a lifetime of commitment – is not possible for all of us” (69). She also remembers

that when they had decided to get married, Gopal proposed that if either of the two wanted to

be free, he or she would be left to go. There should not be handcuffs to tie them together.

Reminding Gopal about this, Sumi tells him, “And I agreed. I was only eighteen then and

you were twenty-six…. But it meant nothing to me then. How can you think of separating,

of wanting to be apart, when you are eighteen and in love? If I thought about it at all, I

thought we would always be together” (221). She is, however, not unconscious of the

developments taking place in him. She tells him:

Then you began to move away from me. I knew exactly when it happened.

And I knew I could not stop you, I could do nothing. When you left, I knew I

would not question you, I would just let you go. None of them, not even

our daughters, specially our daughters, could understand me. Sometimes I

think if they had left me alone, if I had been by myself, with nothing

expected of me, I could have coped with it better. (221)

Sumi does not seek any explanation from Gopal though it is she who bears all the

disgrace and humiliation. She knows well that there is no external reason and “…the

reason lies inside him, the reason ishim” (24). Neither on the day of desertion, nor at any
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time later, she seeks an answer. However, she desires to ask him only one question, just

days after his desertion, which however remains unasked. Gopal is grateful to Sumi for

not asking any questions and thus saving him much embarrassments. Sumi does not even

wish to talk about Gopal’s act of desertion with anyone.

Gopal’s childhood, as he himself revealed, has not been normal. Painfully, he

realized the fact that his father had taken his brother’s widow for marriage and he was

born of that union. Gopal’s heart seems to be unsetting on this concept though his adolescent

mind tried to think of several possible reasons for this marriage. He struggles within

himself and undergoes a severe inner conflict. Gopal’s father was his mother’s partner.

Their gruesome death left him in great confusion and void.

Gopal’s desertion has brought out Sumi’s real hidden strength. Right from her

marriage, Sumi has been a content wife and mother and has willingly subordinated

herself to her husband and daughters. Though disappointed and frustrated, Sumi seeks to

cope with disgrace and humiliation of desertion in an admirable way. She surrounds

herself with a death– like silence which can convey her pain more effectively than words.

When all the family members curse, cry and agonize over Gopal’s desertion, the only

person to meet Gopal without bitterness is his wife Sumi, who recognizes the essential

loneliness of all human beings and so sets him free. She deliberately plays cool and

maintains her matter-of-fact attitude. Her patience, tolerance, sense of equanimity and

stoicism make her an ‘enigma’. Shashi Deshpande observes:

Sumi’s acceptance is not passive. She blocks out the unpleasantness. She

has a good opinion of herself; she is more concerned with getting onwith

life. She does not want pity; she would do anything for pride. Shedistances
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even her husband. The point is, they are both unusual people. People are

puzzled by the abandoned wife not feeling bad. (131)

Sumi dislikes to unlock her heart and lay bare her emotions to Gopal. Her pride

prevents her to show her grief to him. She never requests him to come back to her.

She controls her feelings and looks composed and equanimous to the outside world.

She thinks that it is important for women like her to retain her feelings as she observes,

“…the picture she presents to the world is one of grace and courage, to be admired rather

than pitied. Unchanged, except for a feeling-which only those who know her well are

aware of-of something missing in her” (172).

Sumi and Gopal go time and again on inward journeys, searching their souls to find a

rationale for their suffering. Sumi and Gopal go through the texts of The Mahabharata,

The Upanishads and The Bhagavad Gita as well as Camus, Kierkegaard and Shakespeare

and try to grapple with the existential riddles, which keep gnawing at them. Each character in

route finds philosophy of his or her own. If Kalyani’s motto is ‘fate’ Gopal thinks that

“Destiny is just us” (26). Gopal wants to free himself from the life of the body. He admits

that he has drowned himself into Sumi’s ‘womanness’. But at the same time, he feels

that the life of the body has to end. This duality which covers in him on many occasions

is rather intriguing. Echoing the voice of Shashi Deshpande’s women of earlier novels,

Gopal goes on to say, “Marriage is not for everyone. The demand it makes- a lifetime of

commitment-is not possible for all of us” (69).

In her parent’s house, Sumi feels she is lost and has no place there. She controls

and prevents her from demonstrating her grief . Revealing an independent and individualistic

spirit just as Shashi Deshpande’s heroines Indu, Saru, and Jaya have done, Sumi refused
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to accept any kind of economic assistance either from her parents or from her relatives.

Working as a teacher, though on a temporary basis, she wants to stand on her own legs

and assert her identity. As Sumi picks up her heart and prepares for the future, she thinks,

“…retracing my steps, picking up thinks, thinking- is this it? But she has turned resolutely

away from even her immediate past, she is preparing herself for the future, for the job

which she is soon to start on” (122).

Sumi looks for a permanent job, and with great determination learns to ride a

two-wheeler, at her age. As soon as she learns to balance her drive, she throws up her

arms in triumph of her success. She even decides to move out of her parent’s house to

live independently with her daughters and madly searches for a house. Though her parents do

not consider them a burden, Sumi in unwilling to stay there. Later, she is persuaded to

give up the idea considering the impracticalities associated with moving out of the big

house, which is spacious enough to accommodate her family, into an expensive and

congested apartment.

Sumi’s mother Kalyani, who has been herself a deserted wife for some time,

feels that history is once again repeated. Aru, who is overtly committed to the cause of

feminism, goes to a lady lawyer named Sunanda to fight against the justice meted out to

her mother by her father. Sumi is upset by the, “thought that Aru has begun to see her

mother as a victim, that, in fact, she has begun to see a victim in every woman, a betrayer

in every man” (144). Then, Aru reacts strongly when Premi narrates the story of an AIDS

patient who, though fully aware of his condition, marries so that he might have someone

to look after him later. Aru was disappointed at this and protests against this new dimension

of betrayal and cruelty of man towards woman. The tradition and customs which submit
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women to a subservient position are sanctified by society in such a way that they are ingrained

not only into the male mind but also into the female mind, so much that women accept

this as a natural and necessary state of affairs. This was the reason why Manorama kept

Kalyani under strict control and never treated her affectionately. She persecuted her

throughout her life for not having been born a boy.

Sumi accepted her lot stoically, but at times she felt intensely about the irony and

the unfairness of the situation in which she finds herself. Gopal was able to walk out of

the family so easily, while she, being a mother and a woman, was left to console and

organize the family. While Buddha could easily walk from t his palace and renounce his

worldly ties, Meera had to go through untold mental and physical suffering and tortures

to attain her Lord Krishna. Aru says these are indeed the sins of patriarchy.

Till Sumi picks up the threads of her life and shows her will power and independence,

she appears to be a spineless woman and an indifferent moron, too dull to grasp the

situation. Sumi wonders the way, even today, the fate of woman being measured only

through their marital status. A woman in the society gets respect only if she has her

husband, irrespective of the number of wives or mistresses he has, their incompatibility,

his cruel treatment , or his stony silence with his wife. It is enough if they live together

under the same roof because, “What is a woman without her husband?” (167). Sumi

thought of her parents, Kalyani and Sripathi, who lived like strangers under the same roof

and had not spoken for years, “But her kumkum is in tact and she can move in the

company of women with the pride of a wife” (167). Sumi cannot comprehend the

meaning of such an existence, which is no existence in the true sense. She ponders:
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It is enough to have a husband, and never mind the fact that he has not

looked at your face for years, never mind the fact that he has not spoken to

you for decades. Does this wifehood make up for everything, for the

deprivation of a man’s love, for the feel of his body against yours, the

warmth of his breath on your face, the touch of his lips on yours, his hands

on your breasts?. (167)

Sumi stands for responsibility, motherly love, care and concern. Every moment,

she was seen worried about her grown up daughters. She who refused to be treated as an

inferior woman in the society boosts her daughters’ spirit waned by the adversity. She is

perfectly aware of her responsibility as a mother-cum-single parent to her daughters.

When Aru and she met with an accident, she becomes very frantic and cries for help despite

the profuse bleeding from her own injuries. After taking her to hospital, she neither leaves

her nor takes rest. She was worried about her daughter, who was dejected with her

father’s desertion. She desires that her daughter’s life should be easy and comfortable.

She fervently hopes, “I want her to enjoy the good things in life, I want her to taste life,

I want her to relish it and not spit it out because she finds it bitter” (220).

At the age of forty, Sumi started her life afresh. She got an appointment in a school

and wanted to go there with Seema, her daughter. She meets Gopal to inform this, recalls

and shares a memory and departs on a note of laughter. Memory, which becomes a major

structuring device in the novel, thus, leads to the creation of a psychological time or ‘a

time in the mind’. In the context of the crisis in her life-the desertion by Gopal, Sumi

travels back in time to the night when she had left her parents’ house in a fir of defiance
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and had gone to Gopal who was then living in the outhouse as their tenant. Sumi

remembers that Gopal had behaved strangely even on that day.

Sumi defies the outdated social opinion and orthodox treatment of a woman subjected

to desertion by her husband. She had the courage to rose above the consequential problems

and difficulties, humiliations and frustrations. She has the generosity to gracefully free

her husband from marital bonds without venting ill feelings. Sumi, thus comes a long

way from Indu, Jaya, and Saru for whom marriage is misty the be-all and end-all of their

existence. They dread loneliness and disintegration resulting from broken marriage and

hence opt for a compromise without of course losing their individualities. But Sumi is

confident of her capabilities to make choices and assumes control over her life. The courage,

the dignity, the responsibility and independent spirit displayed by her proves that she has

reached a stage of self-sufficiency and self-fulfillment. She proved that women like her

are capable of ushering in a positive change in the social structure.

The fact that Sumi dies just as she is about to begin a new life, is a little hard for the

reader to agree. Sumi is seen gradually emancipating herself as a new and independent

woman. Gopal’s desertion makes her experience the trauma of a deserted wife and the

anguish of an isolated partner. Generally, on being deserted, a woman seems to be

emotionally shattered. But Sumi is not emotionally broken. On the other hand, like any

responsible mother, Sumi helps her children to get on with their lives as before. Sumi’s

decision to learn to ride the scooter is her first step towards a more independent existence.

One day is not exactly like another, each moment is different and human life is

always on the brink uncertainly. This happens with Sumi too at the end. Sumi and her

father start from their big house to the bank nearby. Unfortunately, they meet with an
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accident. Sumi riding the scooter dies leaving the grief – stricken teenager children,

Gouda and Kalyani. Even as she is preparing for a full life, it is an irony of fate that her

life is cut off in the prime. It is a pity that Sumi dies when she is taking up a job to

support herself and her daughters. She had lived, she would have certainly become an

economically independent woman with modern and matured outlook towards life, and at

the same time, a loving and responsible mother. But Sumi has established her identity and

found a meaningful existence before she dies.

Sumi’s journey comes to a tragic end with the fatal accident. Ironically, the scooter,

which had liberated her, becomes the instrument of her death. Gopal stands on the

burning ground and witnesses the ritual. Shashi Deshpande describes the awe-inspiring

experience of Gopal as follows:

Gopal, denied that glimpse of duality which Sumi was granted the moment

before her death, the duality that ends all fragmentation and knits the

world together, despairingly gives up his struggle to understand. And

now, when he ceases to think, suddenly there comes to him a moment as

when the body is fighting fever, all sensation heightened, sharpened to a

fine point of acuity. He has a feeling of stepping out of his body, out of his

plane of existence, of seeing time, past, present and future, existing

simultaneously within him. It is like seeing a pageant, a pageant that both

frightens and dazzles him, a pageant, the meaning of which eludes him. (238)

Gopal, Sumi, Kalyani and even the minor and peripheral characters, who keep

popping in and out of the past and present situations, come up with philosophical

observations and wise words. Premi and Sumi’s cousins have their own secrets and
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through their own travails have arrived at their philosophy of life. The maid Nagi, though

uneducated, finds a prompt commonsense explanation to every twist and turn of life.

Speaking of the modern concept of time, Virginia Woolf affirms in Orlando: A biograph,

“But time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with

amazing punctuality, has so such simple effect upon mind of man. The mind of man,

moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time”(61).

It is only a matter of time, within which the main characters – Gopal, Sumi, Aru

and Kalyani – manage to make some kind of sense of the Jigsaw puzzle of life. Death

may signal the curtain call for many like Sumi and Shripati. But there is Kalyani, a miracle

herself, not yet destroyed by time, she has survived the onslaughts of destiny and is still

there as a source of strength and support to Sumi’s orphaned daughters.

Shashi Deshpande’s sincere attempt to break the silence of women has been widely

acclaimed in home and abroad. In a society as traditionally male dominated as the Indian

society is, women have to try harder to find their identities. But the modern Indian women, as

portrayed in Shashi Deshpande’s novels, are definitely working towards that goal.Shashi

Deshpande concentrates on four major issues that are necessary for the liberation of women:

education, financial independence, control over her sexuality and the moral choice. She does

not believe in the necessity of a brave new world parallel to the present one. She insists space

for women in the society. Women will record her protest and create characters in real life like

Kalyani, Sumi and Aru to challenge the stereotyped images of women. Women novelists like

Shashi Deshpande are determined to prove that man’s success or failure is closely linked with

woman’s degeneration and regeneration. It is only a matter of time when the logic of woman’s

liberation has to be enforced to avoid total social disruption.

Awakening of Women
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Chapter IV

Awakening of Women

In the modern society, the place of woman has been rapidly changing. She has her

own realms to wander. Formerly, education was not given to women. Husband, children and

home-duties were her whole world. She was known only through her relationship with man

and had no independent identity. With the spread of education and of the wind of women’s

liberation movement, she became aware of her rights, self- respect, economic independence

and individual identity. Though the woman is aware of her identity, her position in

society is still secondary. The Indian woman is a victim of patriarchal society. In the male

– dominated society, the position of woman is always secondary. Because of basic

biological difference, a woman is supposed to be inferior to man. Nurturing, love and

caretaking are considered inferior works of woman, and, power, success and competition

are superior works of man. The masculine activities are always considered superior than

feminine activities.

The Binding Vine, like Shashi Deshpnde’s earlier novels, portrays a middle – class

female protagonist’s vision of life in a male-dominated society. It also exhibits the

protagonist’s search for love, meaning and happiness in life. Shashi Deshpande is concerned

with the man – woman relationship with a feminine sensibility. For ages, the human

experience has been synonymous only with the experience of man. Shashi Deshpande’s

novel offers a view of the long-smothered wail of a lacerated psyche of a female. They

tell the harrowing tale of blunted human relationships.

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Urmila, the protagonist of the novel The Binding Vine often referred to as Urmi, a

lecturer in a college is like most of Shashi Deshpande’s woman protagonists. She was a

middle – class professional woman living in Bombay. She was brought up in a conventional

joint family with its male and female roles clearly defined. The novel started with the

death of her infant daughter Anu and consequently has become highly sensitive to the

suffering and despair of others.

Urmi has an identity which was different from her husband and this identity

gives her reliance and great self-confidence. She did not want to live under the control of

her husband. In the eyes of her friend Vanaa and brother Amrut, Urmi has always been a

woman of formidable courage who could manage the old crumbling mansion in which

she grew up and her old grandfather at the age of thirteen. Used to that image, they are

shocked and helpless to see her going into pieces over the death of her daughter, Anu.

Instead of fighting her pain and sorrow, she holds on to it as she believes that to let go of

that pain, to let it become a thing of past would be a betrayal and would make her lose

Anu completely. Like a masochist, she clings to her pain and allows her memories of

Anu, every small incident to flood her with longing and a great sense of loss. Turning

away from the solicitous care of her mother and Vanaa, preferring to deal with her grief

all by herself, Urmi turns to Mira’s poems and diaries. It is this sensitivity which leads

her to be friendl with the helpless Shakutai, whose daughter Kalpana lies in a comatose

state in hospital after being brutally raped.

Urmi was trying to cope with the death of her daughter and the efforts of her

friend and sister-in-law Vanna, her brother Amrut and her mother helps her back to

normalcy. Shashi Deshpande’s novels usually started at a point of crisis which initiates
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the protagonists to analyze their past life. Urmila, a lecturer in Bombay College lived

with her mother and her six-year-old son Kartik. Hers is a love marriage with Kishore, a

former neighbour now working with Merchant Navy and away from home for long spells.

Kishore was a supportive and understandable person. The crisis in her life is due to the

sudden death of their one-year-old baby girl Anu and not because of the domestic wrangle.

After her daughter’s death, Urmi is driven into hurting herself masochically. Commenting on

Urmila’s relationship with her husband J.S. Tripathi says, “Urmila, the sailor’s wife and

college teacher, is more self-reliant and has an identity different from that of her husband; she

is self-respecting and does not want to live on Kishore’s money. She is, however, a sensitive

vine and needs Kishore as an oak to entwine herself around”(152).

Urmi’s one year old daughter dies and she is unable to forget her because her

memories haunt Urmi. She fights with the memories and also realizes that forgetting is

betrayal, “I must reject these memories, I have to conquer them. This is one battle I have

to win if I am to go on living. And yet my victory will carry with it the taint of betrayal.

To forget is to betray”(21). Although she has another son Kartik, she finds it difficult to

forget her daughter and suffers intensely. She experiences a state of emptiness and

complete blankness at the loss of her baby. Her psychic problems are further aggravated

by her physical ailment asthma. It is clear from the novel that human beings are bound by

the vine of emotional attachments as parents and children, relatives and strangers. This

emotional bondage is a part of moral life. Urmila was thus haunted by the memory of her

dead daughter both in reality and in dream. The emotional vine that binds her to her

daughter, as days went by, became stronger and stronger. She experienced a state of

frustrated motherhood.
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Urmi also realized her responsibility to her living son Kartik who needs her love

and watches him anxiously. It is not that she takes every death of her kith and kin in this

way. When her father died she could bear the shock easily. She says that, “Papa is only a

memory, a gentle memory” (27). But Anu is different. When Inni wants to have a framed

photograph of Anu on the wall, she reacts bitterly, “I don’t need a picture to remember

her, I can remember every bit of her, every moment of her life. How can you imagine I

need a picture…?” (68). When her friend Lalita asks how many kids she has, she replies,

“Only one. A son”(106). And soon Urmi realizes that she has done injustice to Anu:

Only one, a son…the words keep hammering in my mind. How could I,

Oh God, how could I? That was betrayal, treachery, how could I deny my

Anu? I can feel the grittiness of the sand under my palm as I push my hand

deeper into the sand, pour more sand on it, smoothing the sandy ridges

flat, patting it into shape, angry little pats that hurt and are somehow

satisfying. Only one son…how could I? (106)

Urmi bangs her head against the wall. The experience of frustrated motherhood

keeps on torturing and tormenting her. Urmi is also frustrated in her married life. She has

married a man of her own choice. She wants to be a good wife in order to find happiness

in her home, husband and children. But the position of her husband’s job do not allow

him to be with her. He is an officer in the Indian army, occasionally he comes home and

spends his time with his family. But Urmila wants a permanent stay of Kishore with her.

Her husband alleviates her anxiety by having sex with her. Urmi submits herself to him.

This is the quality that she shares with her mother-in-law Mira.
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Haunted by the memories of her daughter’s death, she realized that life is a

battle and she has to go on. Obsessed with the memories of her daughter, she came across

a photograph of her mother-in-law Mira which was introduced as, “Kishore’s mother,

Kartik’s grandmother” (42). Urmi, the protagonist was highly fascinated by Mira’s

writing. Somewhere in the grief of losing her child, reading Mira’s poems, suffering with

Shakutai, Urmi was forced to reject her own relationship with her husband Kishore.

Urmi and Kishore spent most of their lives away from each other. There was a distance

between them, both physical and mental, wich Urmi fails to bridge. In time, Urmi gets

more and more involved in Kalpana’s story.

Mira’s poems are written in Kannada but diaries are in English. It was left to her

daughter-in-law to publish them though she may have to face strong opposition from

family and society. Urmila’s mind got diverted and she forgot her own suffering. The effort

of Urmi to publish Mira’s poems aims at discovering the strangled voice articulating

woman’s silent discourse, deciphering the coded language and liberating the imagination

of woman from interior to exterior. It is taken to mean that Shashi Deshpande converts a

muted woman into a “talking woman” and provides the cause, will, strength and means to

articulate the silence of women. Commenting on Urmila’s attitude after the loss of her

daughter, S.Indira writes:

Instead of fighting her pain and sorrow she holds on to it as She believes

that to let go of that pain, to let it become a thing of the past would be a

betrayal and would make her lose Anu completely. Like a masochist, she

clings to her pain and allows her memories of Anu, every small incident to

flood her with longing and a great sense of loss. (25)

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Urmi tries to analyse Mira’s poetry to know the kind of battle Mira has faced

in her life. After reading the poems, Urmila was moved by the tenderness of feeling

expressed in them. Urmi was full of tears for Mira’s troublesome life. Mira’s poem

haunted her a lot and she decided to resurrect her life by publishing them. This was the

only way for Urmila to pay homage to her dead mother – in – law. Mira is introduced not

as Urmi’s mother-in-law but as Kishore’s mother or Kartik’s grandmother.

‘Take this Urmi, its Mira’s’. She gave it to me with the same formality with

which she had given me the little bits of Mira’s jewellery. Only then she

hadn’t said ‘Mira’. ‘They’re Kishore’s mother’s’, she had said, ‘I kept them

for his wife’. But this time she said,‘Take this, it’s Mira’s.’ She did not

mention Kishore at all, as if she was now directly liking me with Mira. (48)

Urmi notices the difference in handing over of Mira’s property to her, when

Akka hands over little bits of Mira’s Jewellery. It shows that a woman loses her identity

after her marriage. She is seen either as a wife or mother which in a way erases her real

self and imposes another alien self on her. Curious to know more about Mira, Urmi asks

Akka about her. Akka was forced to marry a widower and the father of a child. Akka tells

her that her brother saw Mira at a wedding and fell in love with her. Since then she had,

“single minded pursuit of an object: marrying Mira”(47). He was suggested as a good

match for Mira, and in this way the marriage was arranged. She died while giving birth to

Kishore. Most of the female protagonists of Shashi Deshpande reject their mother as a

role model. Mira in one of her poems had stated, “To make myself in your image was

never the goal I sought” (124).

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The rejection of the mother in a way is necessary for the assertion and development

of a daughter’s personality. But when it is the daughter’s turn to become a mother, she

realized in her turn that she cannot escape the Binding Vine of love and the fears and

vulnerability that came in the wake of love. Urmila has rejected her mother’s dreams for

herself, and cannot help succumbing to the same weakness as mothers:

I wanted so much for Anu; now, it’s all gone, there’s nothing left of all my

hopes for her. We dream so much more for our daughters than we do for

our sons, we want to give them the world we dreamt of for ourselves. ‘I

wanted Kalpana to have all that I didn’t,’ Shakutai told me. But Kalpana

wanted none of her mother’s dreams. She had her own. (124)

After reading the poems, Urmi realized the suffering of Mira, “…the woman who

wrote those poems in the solitude of an unhappy marriage, who died giving birth to her

son at twenty-two” (48). In the eyes of Urmi, Mira’s diary, “…is not a daily account of

her routine life, but a communion with herself” (51). For the time being she forgets her

own suffering and tried to probe into Mira’s poetry to visualize the kind of troubled life

she had lived. Mira does not share her loneliness with others. The poems and the diary

entries symbolize molestation in marriage, “But tell me, friend, did Laxmi too twist

brocade tassels round her fingers and tremble, fearing the coming of the dark-clouded,

engulfing night?” (66).

Urmi wants to share this suffering with Vanna, her friend from childhood and

now her sister-in-law but she cannot, because, “I cannot speak of Mira, of Mira’s writing,

to her. That is another pocket of silence between us. One can never see one’s parent as a

sexual being; he or she is merely a cardboard figure labelled ‘parent’ ” (83). Urmi remembers
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the poem behind which lies the man, “ Don’t tread paths barred to you Obey, never utter

a ‘no’; Submit and your life will be A paradise, she said and blessed me”(83).

When Mira came to her in-law’s house, she was christened Nirmala-the first

estrangement from her identity, her own self. Urmi feels the burden of the dead of her

mother-in-law. She had taken several things of the dead-Bai ajji’s silver pins, her saris and

Mira’s bangles-but none of these meant much to her. Mira stated in her poetry, “…like a

message being tapped on the wall by the prisoner in the next cell” (115). Urmi imagine

the moments when and where Mira could have written poems. She did not possess a

room of her own. Urmi says, “I can see her stealthily, soundlessly getting out of bed,

sitting down on the floor by the window perhaps, forgetting everything while she write”

(127). Cora Kaplan says, “To be a woman and a poet presents many women poets with

such a profound split between their social, sexual identity (their human identity) and there

artistic practice that the split becomes the insistent subject, sometimes overt, often hidden

or displaced, of much woman’s poetry” (70).

Mira uses her pen as a weapon to save herself from abuse, anonymity and mutilation

in the prison house of her husband. It is ironical that Urmi reads Mira’s poems as a hunter

to find out the real self of Mira. Every time, while reading the poems, she is filled with

the excitement of a hunter. But soon this relationship changes, “It is Mira who is now

taking me by the hand and leading me” (135). The title of the novel The Binding Vine

was borrowed from one of the poems of Mira which was about the womb-piercing joy of

her pregnancy. Shashi Deshpande condemns the idea of changing a woman’s name as the

part of a marriage. It is not changing her identity, enslaving her to the new house.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman says:

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It’s not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid

and vacillating, but whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small,

dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will

become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it. The woman is narrowed

by the home. (93)

Mira’s diary also mentioned her meeting with the rising poet Venu who later became

a grand old man of Indian literature. When Mira gave some of her poems to read, he said,

“Why do you need to write poetry? It is enough for a young woman like you to give birth

to children. That is your poetry. Leave the other poetry to us men” (127). This is also a

kind of brutality because, “Even to force your will on another is to be brutal” (133). This

reflects the suffering of a creative woman. Mira writes her poems secretly because she

can never expect any recognition for her poems. She gives voice to her inner self in her

poems. She also finds little encouragement for her writing.

Thus, Mira symbolized the miserable Indian women who suffer silently. Mira disliked

the sexual act with her husband. She writes in her diary, “How I hate the word. If this is

love it is a terrible thing. I have learnt to say ‘no’ at last, but it makes no difference, no

difference at all. What is it he wants from me? I look at myself in the mirror and wonder,

what is there in me? Why does it have to be me? Why can’t he leave me alone” (67).

Mira’s marriage was only “…the dark-clouded, engulfing night?’ ” (66). She awaits with

dread. She begins to hate the word “Love” as it is uttered by her husband all the time. She

does not allow him to drag her whole self out of her. She keeps her feelings, her rage and

despair at being singled out for his physical obsession of her, to herself. Completely
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lonely, she lives in that alien household which treats her as mad, with hopelessness

hovering about her:

They called me mad

they, who cocooned themselves

in bristly blankets

and thought themselves warm

when I spoke of my soul

that boiled and seethe. (99-100)

Mira shrinked further when a new name, Nirmala, and a new identity as a wife is

thrust on her, but at the same time, she refused to give up her name and identity and

proclaims, “I am Mira” (101). Appalled even as a child at her mother’s total indifference

to her own life, surrendering her ‘self’ totally to her husband and children, Mira decided

that she would never gave away her life dismissing it as nothing. Through the poems

Urmila could see how Mira felt burdened with her faminity. The silver toe-rings and

anklets made her stumble and fall. Though she never wanted to make herself an image of

her mother, she knew that she too was trapped with no escape.Through Mira’s poetry,

Urmila realized that each relationship, always imperfect, survives on hope:

Tiny fish swimming in the ocean of my womb

my body thrills to you;

churning the ocean, shaking distant shores

you will emerge one day.

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Lightning flashed through the front door

and I who was stone quivered.

Bridging the two worlds, you awaken in me

a desire of life.

Desire, says the Buddha, is the cause of grief;

but how escape this cord

this binding vine of love? Fear lies coiled within

this womb-piercing joy. (136-137)

Pain, joy and fear are inextricably intertwined. The pain of childbirth results in the

joy of seeing one’s own child and no one, not even Mira with all her intense loathing of

the sexual acts with her husband and discord with him and his family, could turn away

from the anticipatory joy of giving birth to her child, her creation, just like her favourite

poem. At the same time, she is aware that this new-found love for her unborn child would

make her vulnerable, and hence the fear that she would remain trapped forever. Perhaps it

is because, she was frightened of bearing the constant burden of fear for her daughter as

well if the child turned out to be a girl, she has an unconscious desire that it should be a

boy, “I feel the quickening in my womb, he moves- why do I call the child he?” (149).

The poems of Mira haunt Urmi so much that she decides to resurrect her by publishing

them. But when Vanna comes to know about this plan, she was enraged. She feels that

Urmi is a traitor who will destroy the honour of the family by publishing the poems. “ It’s

not fair, it’s not fair at all. And we can’t go on pushing it-what happened to them-under
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the carpet forever because we’re afraid of disgrace” (174). In fact, male-oriented

societies nourish women in such a way that they start looking at the world and

interpreting it from male point of view. Urmi is a modern woman, and Vanna is traditional,

even though educated, and is a social worker by profession. She was submissive and

obedient to her husband. Vanna’s repetition of words “Harish says” irritated Urmila.

She believed that women should have the boldness to express themselves and expose

the evils of society.

Urmi became irritated with Vanna, who was unable to assert herself before her

husband. Vanna secretly longs to have a son. After the birth of her second child, which

happened to be a daughter again, she told Harish about her desire to have a son. But Harish

has no intention for an another child and explains population figures. He wonders at her

wish, which makes her silent. Urmi advises Vanna and argued with her when she tries to

speak on behalf of her husband:

‘Why can’t Harish help?’

‘He comes home so tired…’

‘You know, Vanna, what you’re going to become, coping

with everything the way you are?’

‘What?’

‘A Superwoman’ (81)

Urmi’s relation with Inni, her mother, also acquires a new level of understanding

when Urmi learns the ways in which her mother was powerless against her father’s will.

Inni tells Urmi that the decision to send Urmi to Ranidurg to live with her grandparents
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was taken by Urmi’s father, as a form of punishment to Inni for her supposed neglect of

the child. Urmi had always resented this distancing from her own home, and had blamed

her mother for casting her way. Inni’s helplessness and inner suffering make Urmi realize

the widespread subjection of women to men. Women do not have freedom or right to live

as they wish to. Their lives are bound by male will, desire and physical strength, depriving

women the opportunities of growth into full human beings. Urmi’s views on women’s

role as parents gradually change, as she herself goes through the experience. Urmi begins

to feel that motherhood can change a woman irreversibly and create its own deep binds

that can make other relations seem secondary. Urmi begins to value women’s experience

as mother and the responsibility of women towards each other.

Urmi shared the worries not only with her mother-in-law but also Kalpana-a girl

who becomes a prey to her own relative who molests her. The novel Binding Vine

unfolds as a psychological analysis of the many complex female characters and their

acceptance of life on its own terms. Urmi goes to meet her friend Vanna, at a local

hospital where she finds Shakutai’s daughter Kalpana who had been violently attacked

and raped. Normally, Urmi’s meeting with Shakutai would not have happened as

Shakutai belongs to a different strata of society. It is the same sensitivity, which also

makes her dive into the poems of Mira. Vanna who is a medical social worker, tells her

that Kalpana has been assaulted by someone. She has also sustained severe head injury

and is on the verge of death. Her mother requested the doctor not to inform the police,

“No, no, no. Tell him, tai, it’s not true, don’t tell anyone, I’ll never be able to hold up my

head again, who’ll marry the girl, We’re decent people” (58).
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Kalpana was brought to the hospital in an unconscious state. The casualty man

puts it down as an accident case and when Dr. Bhaskar Jain comes up with the stunning

finding that she was raped before being knocked down by a car, the police officer argues,

“Why make it a case of rape” (88). Kalpana’s mother Shakutai has her own reasons to

insist that it be registered only as an accident case. She was convinced that the police will

not bother about finding out who did it, they will only harass her. And she was frightened

of people coming to know of it. Shakutai who works in the Principal’s office in a girls’

school said she would never be able to hold up her head again if it was known that her

daughter was raped. She feared that public knowledge of Kalpana’s tragedy would

disgrace her family, so that no one would want to marry her younger daughter .

Kalpana’s mother wants to protect the family honour by remaining silent about

her daughter’s miserable life. But Urmila wants to be reported to the police. Thus, Shashi

Deshpande breaks through Urmila, the silence on this issue of rape which was rarely

discussed. There are dozens of hardships and many forms of injustices faced by women,

but rape is the most disastrous one that destroys a woman’s life. It is the terrible outcome

of being a woman, because, rape is accepted as a risk which women are fated to face.

They are made to realize that it was the result of their distressing aspect of being a

woman and that being a woman itself is wrong.

Shakutai requests Urmi, “…to tell him not to make that report” (62). Urmi was

surprised to see her, whose husband has already deserted her for some other younger

women, worried about the marriage of Kalpana, which was, in the words of doctor,

“Neither dead nor alive” (86). But she soon realizes that women like Kalpana’s mother

find security in marriage. At least they are, “safe from other men” (88). Dr.Bhaskar
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wonders why women like Shakutai hanker after marriage of their children and live in

fear of their daughters remaining unmarried even after being deserted by their husbands

for other women, when they get nothing out of marriage except children.

Although Urmi was not related to Shakutai, she volunteers to ensure justice to

Kalpana because she is somehow bound to her by the bond of sympathy and understanding.

Afraid of the consequences of public that her daughter was raped, Shakutai expressed her

fear about the attitudes of the society. Kalpana’s mother feared about the society than the

desire to find the culprit and punish him. The truth had to be hidden, to protect the victim

and her family, especially the younger sister of Kalpana who was of a marriageable age.

The police also took no interest in Kalpana’s case because rape cases are troublesome.

So, her case was not recorded. Urmi’s regular visits to Shakutai to enquire about her

daughter and through their conversation, the story of Kalpana is revealed.

Shakutai’s husband left her in her father’s home soon after their marriage, to

search for livelihood in Bombay. When he does not return for six months, she joins him

in Bombay, unable to stay any longer in her father’s house. Then she realized that he was

lazy and does not stick to any job. They lived in a relation’s house where she was put

through much humiliation. After the birth of her three children, Shakutai takes a decision

to work and support her family. Her husband deserts her for another woman. Shakutai

does not hesitate to describe her husband as a useless fellow. She tells to Urmi about her

tragic life, “What can you expect, they say, of a girl whose mother has left her husband?

Imagine! He left me for another woman, left me with these children to bring up” (147).

Shakutai was a typical protective mother who lived in fear ever since her daughters

grew up. Kalpana stayed with Sulu, Shakutai’s sister who was childless and Sulu treated
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Kalpana as her own daughter. Being at the threshold of her youth and having her own

income, Kalpana loved to dress well and move around freely. Shakutai did not like her

daughter being dressed up or using lipstick, thinking that it would unnecessarily attract

male attention. Shakutai was wandering between praising her daughter’s beauty and blaming

her code of conduct. At the same time she is angry with Kalpana’s stubbornness and

independence which she thinks, have landed her into the present trouble. Worn out by

conflicting emotions, Shakutai begins to wonder whether she was punished for not

wishing to give birth to Kalpana as she could not afford a child then. Shakutai’s self –retort

reminds Urmi of her father’s confessing his guilt when he was down with cancer. Urmi,

however, was unable to watch Kalpana being blamed. She was outraged that the rapist

will be allowed to get away, if the case is not registered as a rape. But the police officer

urges:

Why make it a case of rape, he asked. She’s going to die anyway. So what

difference does it make whether, on paper, she dies the victim of an

accident or a rape? We don’t like rape cases, the man said. They’re messy

and troublesome, never straightforward. But forget that and think of the

girl and her family. Do you think it’ll do them any good to have it known

the girl was raped? She’s unmarried, people are bound to talk, her name

would be smeared. (88)

This feeling is so deeply ingrained in society that even the mother of the victim

does not want a case to be registered, does not want to ensure justice for her daughter.

Dr.Jain asks Urmila, “Tell me, is getting married so important to a woman?” (87).

Urmila points out to Dr. Bhaskar that marriage is a necessity for women.
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In spite of all the turmoil that a marriage may cause with a drunken husband and

constant poverty, Kalpana’s mother thinks of getting her daughters married. Marriage is

probably important even to such women, because, “…it takes much greater courage to

dispense with a man’s protection” (88). One always hopes one’s children will get more

out of life than one has. And marriage gives a woman male protection and social security.

In the Indian social set up, marriage remains the be-all and end-all of nearly every girl.

Marriage brings her and her family happiness and honour. Shashi Deshpande certainly shows

a more positive attitude towards marriage in this novel. To Urmi, happiness in her marriage

was magical. It is this marital bond which made it possible for Urmila to reject Bhaskar’s

overtures- a decision which could not be taken so firmly by Shashi Deshpande’s earlier

protagonists Jaya and Indu.

Shakutai had even thought of marrying Kalpana to Sulu’s husband Prabhakar who

was “mad” after her. Kalpana outrightly rejected the offer and ridiculed Sulu. When she

decided to marry a boy of her own liking, she was raped by Prabhakar. It is significant to

note that Sulu was compelled by her husband to make such a proposal. When Sulu knows

that her husband has molested Kalpana, she finishes her cooking, gives breakfast to her

husband and then commits suicide, because she wants to avoid telling a lie to save her

husband from the police. Her suicide symbolized the anguish of the weakened soul of the

typical traditional Indian woman. Mulk Raj Anand says about the plight of Indian women,

“No woman in our land is beyond the threat of rape, because of the suppressed energies

of the male, through the taboos of patriarchy, which deny sex before marriage and make

male young-young into want on animals who assault any possible victim, when possessed

by lust”(91).
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A remarkable development that has taken up as a public subject, a subject of

fiction, is the rape of minors. There has been a staggering rise in the incidence of the rape

of minors. What it worse is that most of these take place within the family and are not

reported by the victims for obvious reasons. Minors are less likely to fight back and

often do not even realize that they are being victimized. Their rapist is a relative or an

acquaintance. What is ominous is that rapes are now being committed by fathers on their

helpless daughters who are, in most cases, minors. Uncles comes next.

India’s ethical development has not obviously kept pace with her technological

advancement and cannot any longer marginalize or shy away from this crime. A father,

an uncle, a neighbour, a teacher-the violator is invariably protected by the halo of trust

bestowed upon him. It is also a fact that in attacks from within family, the attacker

invariably occupied a position of power over the gullible victim. Not Even when the

victim can comprehend that what is happening is wrong, she is too scared to talk to

anyone about it. Not just out of shame but also out of fear. Fear of rebuff and reprimand.

When the newspapers carried the story of Kalpana’s rape, even Vandana, the

medical social worker, was angry and unhappy. If a girl’s honour was lost, people will

always point a finger at her. People claim that there can be no rape because it cannot

happen unless the woman is willing. There are others who hold that rape happens because

women go about exposing themselves. Rape is often treated as female fiction or

fabrication suggesting the complicity of the woman. That is why Shakutai does not want

Kalpana to fault herself, to use lipstick or go out with her head in the air, caring for

nobody. She wants Kalpana to cover herself decently, to know fear and keep to her place.

Otherwise they would be disgraced.

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In society’s attitudes towards rape, the dividing line between the criminal and the

victim, the attacker and the prey becomes blurred and almost non-existent. Instead of

pointing a finger at the violence perpetrated by the rapist, most people, including Kalpana’s

mother, find it easier to blame the girl, “ …and if you paint and fault yourself, do you

think they’ll leave you alone” (146). A little later, she laments, “She’s shamed us, we can

never wipe off this bolt…. It’s all her fault, Urmila, all her fault” (147). The only conclusion

that Kalpana’s mother is able to arrive at is, “…Women must know fear” (148). It is only

Urmi who rages at the indignity heaped on the injured woman and the impunity with

which such men are able to get away, “She was hurt, she was injured, wronged by a man;

she didn’t do anything wrong. Why can’t you see that? Are you blind? It’s not her fault,

no, not her fault at all” (147).

The mother, however, is not able to see the logic behind Urmi’s argument and

begins to hope for her daughter’s death, “But sometimes I think the only thing that can

help Kalpana now is death” (178).When Kalpana is to be shifted to a suburban hospital

merely because her bed is required, Urmi decided to go to the press and make an issue of

it so that Kalpana may get justice. This is Shashi Deshpande’s first protagonist who

decided to fight another woman’s battle. The publicity that the media gave to the case,

the question asked and left unanswered turn Kalpana and her family into celebrities.

At last Rapist is discovered to be Sulu’s husband.

Mira symbolized the plight of countless women who face the same situation but

are unable to voice their suffering. Mira lives in alien house whose inmates treat her as a

mad woman. Though Urmi is accused of being a “traitor” to Mira and Kalpana, she is

resolute to break the silence of women which come in different forms-sometimes in the
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name of social taboos, sometimes in the name of the family honour. Urmi justifies her

stand because she sees these mishaps from the female point of view. Women’s bonding

and mutual support seems to Urmi to gain a great social value when she realises the

disadvantages in which women like Mira, Kalpana and Shakutai live. Unable to speak for

themselves and fight for their rights, they suffer all forms of subjugation, deprivation and

even physical abuse.

Kalpana’s story gave an insight into Mira’s poems and diaries. Kalpana’s rape is

the clue that helped Urmi understand Mira’s relationship with an obsessive husband.

A marriage in which the girl’s feeling or choice was not taken into consideration could be

equally disastrous was made clear through Mira’s life. The stories of Mira and Shakutai

gave a chance to analyze Urmi’s marriage with Kishore, who was absent most of the

time. Kishore existed only outside the pages of the novel, but was present in Urmi’s

consciousness. Urmi married Kishore, a man whom she had once loved. Earlier in their

marriage, Kishore had appeared unemotional and withdrawn from Urmi. After the death

of their baby Anu, Kishore had became uncommunicative. Dr. Bhaskar took advantage of

the absence of Kishore, and motivated Urmi to analyze her marriage to Kishore, his

absence and his loveless passion. The death of Anu acted as a catalyst, and Urmi was

compelled to re – define her relationship with Kishore. Shanti Sivaraman observes,

“Urmila is different,…she wants to assert herself and not crawl before man” (136).

Marriage, which was a spiritual bond in the older times, had a legal bond. Since

the beginning of married life, Urmi found that the bond between her and Kishore was

only love, which she believed was an anchor that attached people in the strange world to

each other. From the first day of their wedding, she realized the distance. Each time when
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she tried to reveal her emotional insecurity whenever Kishore goes away from her, he

never understood the depth of her feeling. Since their marriage is a love marriage, there

was a time when her life was full of ecstacy and she was fearless and confident as her

love gave her immense strength. She realises that she has married a man “…who flits into

my life a few months in a year and flits out again, leaving nothing of himself” (164).

Instead of being confident now, she engulfed by fear of losing her husband.

Urmi was already leading an economically and socially secure life even without

her husband. It created confusion in her whether to take up the path of submission or

rejection because both would end in discontentment. She realized that her friendship with

Bhaskar was not the solution to her problem. The conflict of her mind and heart became

obvious. Urmi wrapped herself in the shell of ego, Kishore lacked understanding and this

led to the weakening of love. Urmi finally realized that she loved Kishore deeply.

Considering the facts of Mira, Kalpana, Shakutai and Sulu, Urmila regains her

courage. Accepting the freedom and advantages of her life as a gift, she decided to be

content with her life, hoping that Kishore will remove his armour one day and she would

reach him. Anu is gone but she still has Kartik. With the new understanding of life and

relationships, Urmi realizes that with all betrayals and cruelty, life is worth living as

there are flashes of love, concern, understanding and reconciliation that brighten it.

The bonds thus help us to continue with life, the greatest gift to mankind. Urmi observes,

“The most important need is to love. From the moment of our births, we struggle to find

something with which we can anchor ourselves to this strange world we find ourselves in.

Only when we love do we find anchor. But love makes you vulnerable. Mira realised

this; and she was afraid” (137).

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Urmila understands that the mother is only responsible for taking care of the

children and it has remained the same without any new signs of change. From the days of

Inni to the days of her granddaughter Mandira, confining women to the roles of mothers

and wives has not changed at all. Shashi Deshpande’s protagonists articulate against the

role models of daughter, sister, wife and mother, and refuse to be the objects of cultural

social oppressions of age long patriarchal society. But all their revolt is only in silence.

They suffer silently because they do not want to make the relationship with their family

and society. At last they break their silence. Nityanandam Says:

‘The Binding Vine’ is a refreshing change from the first three novels of

Shashi Deshpande. Protest comes easily to her protagonists here and there

is less agony in attempting to change societal roles and attitudes. The hope

for Indian women lies in the happy fact that though there are Miras and

Kalpanas and Shakutais, we also have our Urmila. (123)

Women as daughters, mothers and wives need to provide mutual support and

understanding. Urmi realization comes close to Shashi Deshpande’s own increasing

awareness of the duty of women writers and thinkers to write about women. Vishwanatha

says , “ woman’s point of view” (114). T.Asoka Rani comments, “Shashi Deshpande

desires that women need to offer resistance and emerge as strong-willed individuals to

face life, to share responsibilities and not to escape from it” (151).

At present, middle class women are not only educated, but are equal winners to

their husband’s income to maintain a standard of living and to provide for their children.

Madhu Saptarishi is the protagonist of the novel Small Remedies. She belongs to a

traditional Kannadiga – Maharashtrian Brahmin family.

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She is an urban, middle aged and educated woman. She is writing the biography of a

famous classical singer Savitribai Indorekar or the Gwalior Gharana. The novel is

structured as a biography, which is about Savitribai Indorekar, a singer of Hindustani

music, who denies marriage and home with a view to pursuing her genius.

Small Remedies uses the stories of two women – Leela, the trade union activist

and Savitribai Indorekar, the ageing Diva of Gwalior Gharana – as the background.

Shashi Deshpande explored her favourite theme of a woman set on a journey of self –

discovery, a journey which will bring past and present within a single pair of brackets,

which will heal the wounds even if it does not provide all the answers. At the centre of

this sprawling narrative is Madhu, who in telling the story of Savitribai, Leela and

Munni, hopes to find a way out of her despair due to the loss of her son Aditya.

Madhu was the critical figure, a lonely, sensitive, honourable wife and mother.

Faced with the terrible shock caused by the death of her only son Aditya, and she sets out

on a long and lonely journey of life. The novel presents Madhu’s strength with her

shattered family life. Som, Madhu’s husband helped her to recover from the shock and

motivated her to take up the task of writing. Then she started writing a biography of

Savitribai, a reputed singer who had once lived for sometime as her neighbour. It is a

novel in which past and present are intermingled, in which the word ‘chronology’ has no

meaning. Madhu – reflecting Shashi Deshpande’s own thoughts – feelings that writing

Savitribai’s history would be easy if ‘Time’ is the only connecting factor. But she says,

“I can’t do this. No one can. We don’t live our lives this way, we don’t see our lives this

way. We see our lives through memory and memories are fractured, fragmented, almost

always cutting across time” (165). Thus the novel is not a story told along a straight line,
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but it cuts across the timeline. Madhu’s own memories as well as those evoked by the

association of the people around her act like the only points to hold on to. These

memories are so fresh that the border between the past and present is easily obliterated.

The novel opens with the sentence, “This is Som’s story” (1). Madhu’s son fills

her life with radiance that she feels like a devotee telling her God:

Does this happen to everyone? Does every child bring such radiance into

a parent’s life? How is it I never noticed it until it happened to me? Have I

been blind? Or, am I specially privileged, enjoying something rare,

something unique? Looking at the baby in his cradle, I am dazed by my

own happiness. When he smiles at me, when he holds out his arms to me,

or so I imagine, I feel burdened by my joy, my whole body heavy and

sluggish with it, gorged, like my breasts are with milk. I haven’t put on

much weight-they all remark on it, they seem to think it unnatural that I

haven’t gone flabby and fleshy-but when I walk, I am conscious of the

weight of my body, I feel the imprint of my feet on the ground. What can

you give me, my Lord, I, who have everything? (89)

When Madhu was adolescent girl, she was shattered by her father’s death.

Her grief, coupled with the knowledge of another woman in her father’s life, alienated

Madhu. In her grief, Madhu was guided by an uncontrollable impulse that maked her

body respond to the comforting embrace of a friend of her father. His effort to console

her leads to sexual encounter between the two. But immediately after the incident Madhu

goes to Bombay to see her dying father, and the sorrow that engulfs her after his death

blanks the incident from her memory. The death of her only parent cuts her way from her
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roots and Madhu finds herself lonely. Having no knowledge of any relative, Madhu

was troubled when she knew that her father left her in the care of an aunt. Her whole life

changed when she finds herself in a new town and a house full of new people. She stayed

in aunt Leela’s house which proved to be a strange experience.

In the beginning, Madhu is unable to relate to Leela’s husband, Joe as her uncle

and his hostile children Paula and Tony as her half – cousins. Madhu passes through a

phase of complete loss of identity in her new surroundings amongst strangers. Although

Joe and Leela soon make her comfortable, Madhu decided to shift to a hostel. After finishing

her graduation, wanting to be financially independent, she decided to take up a job. Joe’s

friend Hamid’s offered him to work for his magazine “City Views” comes an opportunity

for Madhu. To her the job in which she edited or rewrote most of the articles and the small

room the Hamid rented her becomes the symbols of her independent identity. The sense of

fulfillment that Madhu gets from her new job and her home, small though, makes her over

look her colleague Dalvi’s hatred and his attempt to harass her. The appreciation and self –

fulfillment that she receives gives her pride and a sense of self – satisfication. Madhu, after

long years of alienation, becomes aware of her needs and aspires to fulfil them.

Tony’s frequent visit to Madhu’s room along with his friends brings her close to

Chandru and som. Gradually, the three make her room their weekend haunt. Her friendship

with Som blossoms into love, and with her marriage to Som, Madhu becomes part of a

real family for the first time. But it was her son Aditya’s birth that finally makes Madhu

identify herself and find roots in this world. Motherhood gave her a new sense of worth.

Aditya became the centre of her universe and she gave up her job to become a devoted

mother. Her new identity brought in new fears and new dreams. She overcame with the
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fear of Aditya’s welfare. A book called Small Remedies full of tips for childcare becomes

The Bible for the motherless and inexperienced Madhu. For years Madhu lives with one

ambition, the welfare of her son. However, the peace and happiness that Madhu had been

enjoying are interrupted by her revelation of a past incident.

A painting at an exhibition brings back to Madhu’s mind that one incident from

her past sexual encounter with her father’s friend. The knowledge that he committed

suicide suddenly fills her with guilt and a state of shock. She tells Som about this incident of

her life which she had consciously or unconsciously blanked out. But Som holds on to the

single fact of her lost chastity. Som is haunted by her past and becomes suspicious

towards her. Their days and night are spent in fights, which exhibit nothing but hateful

insinuations for each other. Madhu was unable to understand this, “But it’s the single act

of sex that Som holds on to. It is this fact that he can’t let go of, as if it’s been welded

into his palm. Purity, chastity, an intact hymen-these are the things Som is thinking of,

these are the truths that matter” (262).

Troubled by his parent’s behaviour Aditya came across one such fight during which he

finds his father banging his mother’s head against the wall. Later, Madhu cannot recall exactly

who had shouted at Aditya to go away. But one of them had, and Aditya in a state of shock

walked out never to return. His death in a bomb blast engulfs them in grief and emptiness.

Madhu’s world is shattered. Aditya, the centre of her life, whose needs and welfare which had

occupied her life for seventeen years is untraceable. She waits for him to return and in a state of

shock she walks through the streets of Bombay looking for him. She sits by the telephone

waiting for his call. Completely out of touch with reality, Madhu’s days are spent in uncertainty

and nothing makes her accept Aditya’s death.

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When Som tries to tell her about the riots in the city, the various bomb blasts,

Madhu does not care, as she remains preoccupied with her search of Aditya. She wanders

through the streets of Bombay. She feels rewarded when she imagines that she has caught

a glimpse of him. Only when confronted by Som at the end of one such day, Madhu accept

the truth that Aditya was dead and he would never come back. But with reality comes

alienation of having lost her role of a mother that had been her occupation for seventeen

years.

Madhu herself is a victim of sorts which the reader is aware only towards the

end of the novel. She had been brought up as a child by two men, her father and Babu,

male servant, but she had no complaints. Madhu herself, turned out to be a doting mother

and ever perceptive of her son’s every need. Therefore it was all the more tragic when

Aditya, her son died in bomb blast. Madhu estrangement with her husband Som, began

earlier than this tragedy, when Madhu, waking up after a nightmare on night, revealed to

him a secret which she had locked up in the innermost recesses of her mind. She had slept

with a man when she was only fifteen, a man who later committed suicide. Som is unable

to accept this of his wife. As one who had been a good husband by any standards and

shared a wonderful relationship with his wife, he is now unable to come to terms with

this news. He is totally devastated. It does not matter that Som himself had a full-fledged

relationship with another woman before his marriage. It is a typical situation where a man

may have any number of affairs but expects his wife to be a virgin. Indian society has

been so conditioned as to categorize women as immoral on the slightest deviation on their

part from the the normal course of behaviour.

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Madhu discovers too late that she ought never to have blurted out to Som

what happened so long ago and was infact so meaningless in the present context. This

discovery of Madhu’s past freezes Som’s feelings towards his wife. He refused to

recognize her as the woman who has shared her life with him. He alienates himself from

his wife and keeps to himself. A change begins to set in their relationship. Hence, when

Madhu accepts the job of writing the life of Savitribai, Som is glad that she is going away for

a while and he is to be left alone to sort out his own confused state. Like Madhu, who is

suffocated by grief, Som also feels the need to be himself, to recover his balance, to cope

with the conflicting emotions that refuse to calm down. At the moment he cannot face his

wife and longs to be alone. He too needs space and room to think about himself.

Tony, Rekha, Chandru and Som all tried to bring her out of Madhu’s cocoon

but nothing in life interests Madhu anymore. Madhu’s attention is diverted from her grief

when Chandru coerces her into taking the job of writing the biography of Savitribai.

In Bhavanipur where Savitribai, the singing legend of Gwalior Gharana lives. Madhu

takes residence in the house of a young and loving couple Lata and Hari. She accepts the

change as she tells herself that she is here to forget the horror of Aditya’s death. Like

Madhu, Urmi in Binding Vine tries to analyse Mira’s poetry to know the kind of battle

Mira has faced in her life. Haunted by the memories of her one year old daughter’s death,

Urmi’s mind gets diverted and she forgets her own suffering.

In Small Remedies Lata and Hari fail in their efforts to make Madhu a part of their

life, as she remains a loaf. During the daytime, Madhu engages herself in her work and

remains an indifferent observer in the life of people around her. Madhu’s grief makes her

night most difficult to bear. Even Tony’s visit does not help Madhu shed her grief. It is
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only gradually that she becomes more than a silent observer of Lata and Hari. Lata’s

affection and sincere efforts pay off, but it is Hari who reveals to Madhu his connection

with her mother and begins to call her ‘Kaka’. Thus, for the first time Hari brings Madhu

back in the real world by initiating her to new relationships. Madhu comes out of her

reminiscence of Aditya as Hari quizzes her on the life of her aunt Leela. Inspite of her

desire to remain isolated and detached, Madhu slowly gets involved in the lives of the

people around her. Madhu’s final break down and her talking about Aditya’s death

proves to be cathartic for her. For the first time since Aditya’s death, she opens up and

tells Hari of her mindless waiting for her son. Carefully avoiding the memories of her

fights with Som, she confides in Hari, telling him about her hope of seeing Aditya again

which kept her alive. Madhu speaks of the sorrow of not being there at his final moment.

Like Shashi Deshpande other novels, the house in Small Remedies reflects its

inmates, “In spite of being a slapdash kind of household, there’s no chaos in it; only the

disorder that comes from constant flux, the movement of life” (21). The description of the

very first night and morning which Madhu spends in this new house in Bhavanipur is so

rich with details that it comes across like a miniature painting. One feels more like a

spectator than like a reader. It is a book where no image, no description is superfluous,

like the path Madhu chooses out of three available ways to approach Savitribai’s house.

It is Lata, the effervescent Lata, who is the mistress of this house, who is constantly on

the move, and who by moving seems to imbibe new bouts of energy. “There is the main

approach” Madhu says:

…along the road and through the non-existent front gate, the route Lata

had taken on the first day. There’s another, the shortest route, which
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involves entering from the back of the house and going past a disused

well and the dilapidated remains of a row of rooms, which were once the

servants’ quarters. The tiles have fallen off the roof, leaving the rooms

open to the skies, but the doors are still secured by locks. There’s a third

way, the one I now regularly take, stepping over the sagging barbed wire

and going through the mango grove to the right of the house. Here, the

undergrowth has been cleaned by whoever it was had gathered the mango

crop at the end of summer. The grass is growing back, but even as it

grows, it carries the impress of my feet, and I can see the faint outline of

the pathI followed the previous day. (71-72)

Madhu records the life of Savitribai, a young woman who had lived a sheltered

life as a daughter-in-law in a Brahmin family. A woman with such a background, eloping

with a Muslim tabla player and living in a strange town among strangers, was indeed a

matter of daring spirit and courage. Madhu was quite confused at times about Savitribai’s

courage. Madhu was aware of Savitribai’s past and her daughter, Munni. She was unable

to digest her indifference to her daughter, Munni. Writing of the life of the ageing Savitribai

help’s her to answer the one question that has preoccupied her since Adit’s death,

…. how does one live with the knowledge of a child’s death? It is our

children whoreconcile us to the passage of time, to our aging, to our

irrelevance, our mortality. Without them the world makes no sense,

without them we have no place in it. How then does one live without

them? Can Bai give me the clue to this? Has she found the secret? (155)
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In writing about Bai, she would be dealing with the relationship between Savitribai

and her daughter Munni, her childhood friend. Madhu attempts to bring out the woman

or the mother behind the successful artist in Bai. It is really an attempt to understand her

own self. In this story the characters of Madhu and Bai has revealed the way in which

novels has to be written. Madhu always listen to the words of Bai but interpret them in

her own way, often stressing the pauses and silences in Bai’s narrative, bringing into this

operation her own knowledge of human nature in general and her knowledge of Bai in

particular.

When Madhu accepted Chandru’s offer to write this biography, she certainly did

not bargain for the silence Savitribai exercises with respect to Munni. It was as if Munni

did not exist. It was as if those years when Munni and Madhu were neighbours in

Neemgaon where Madhu’s father was a doctor did not happen. All those years ago in

Neelamgaon, Madhu could not comprehend why Munni so disliked her father, the tablaji,

Ghulam with whom Savitribai was living. Now in Bhavanipur she was taken back at the

business like reception she got from Savitribai at their first encounter, at the manner in

which she has wiped out her years in Neegaon. Then it is too late to say, “I’m Munni’s

friend Madhu. Remember me?” (29). Madhu realised that Savitribai has mapped out the

story that she wanted her to write. But Madhu knew that there are three books here:

Firstly, there’s Bai’s book, the book Bai wants to be written, in which she

is the heroine, the spotlight shining on her and her alone. No dark corners

anywhere in this book, all the shadows kept out of sight, backstage. Then

there’s Maya and Yogi’s book. A controversial one. Trendy. Politically

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correct, with a feminist slant. A book that will sell. And there’s my book,

the one I’m still looking for. It’s evading me, not giving me a hold

anywhere. But today, for the first time, I think I got a glimpse of it. (125)

Madhu is searching for the real Bai in the jungle of words she has collected,

“Which is the real Bai?, No? Then which is the real Bai? The pampered child? The young

girl who discovered what her life was going to be? The young woman who abandoned

her child and eloped with her lover? The great musician, the successful Savitribai

Indorekar? ” (283). To answer to this important question, Madhu has to travel a long

way. After many years, Madhu met Munni in a bus and recognized her. Munni refused to

be called Munni. Munni did not like to recognize Madhu, her childhood friend. She said

that her name was Shailja Joshi. She did not like to recollect her childhood days. Munni’s

mother wanted to hide the fact that Munni was born through Savitri’s association with a

Muslim, Tabla master, Ghulab Saab, who lived in Savitri’s house as a member of the house.

Madhu knowledged Bai’s life, came from being her neighbour many years back.

Bai’s life made Madhu compare her with her aunty Leela, born in a traditional Brahmin

family. She was married to a man of average income but her marriage proved to be a

boon for her, as her husband Vasant encouraged her to study and fulfill her dreams. Vasant’s

sudden death closes all doors of happiness for Leela but once again, she refused to go

back to her father’s house and takes up a teaching job. While working Leela meets Joe.

In spite of their love for each other, they wait for fifteen years. His feelings for her that

stood the test of time made him realize that love is an adult emotion. Their decision to

finally marry inspite their age and their respective families shows the depth of their love.

Thus, Leela becomes a rebel.

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Inspite of their diverse backgrounds and interest, Joe and Leela find happiness in

each other. Madhu recalled with wonder the strangeness of Joe, the widower with two

children, falling madly in love with this woman. Yet they shared a perfect life together,

Joe’s time is devoted to his T.B. patients and Leela to the freedom struggle and social

work. The difference in their lifestyle, career and religion did not come as an obstruction in

their marriage. While Leela learned to ignore Paula’s hostility and accept Tony’s love

with open arms, Joe whole – heartedly welcomes Madu, Leela’s niece, in his family and

even become a father figure for her. Together, Joe and Leela created a magical relationship

based on perfect understanding and respect for each other’s needs and feelings. Madhu’s

contact with them left an impression on her as she speaks of it as a wonderful relationship

based on love, which transformed not only her life, but also Madhu’s and Tony’s too.

Therefore, Joe’s death leaves an emptiness in Leela and Madhu.

Leela re-entered her life. Through Hari Madhu discovered that Leela, her mother’s

elder sister, was also the elder sister of Hari’s grandmother. When Madhu’s father died, it

was Leela and Joe who had provided her a home. It was they who had pulled her out of

the emptiness that life had become. Till Hari mentions Leela’s social activities, Madhu

had not thought much about those aspects of her beloved aunt. Leela the trade unionist,

the activist, the rebel was too remote a person for Madhu who could only think of the

love she got from Leela, of true love that shown in the lives of Leela and Joe. Trying to

establish the identities of the real Leela and Savitribai amidst all the facts she has

collected, Madhu sees parallels between the lives of these two women. She thinks:

I’ve begun thinking that in writing about Bai, I’m writing about Leela as

well. And my mother and all those women who reached beyond their
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grasp. Bai moving out of her class in search of her destiny as a singer,

Leela breaking out of the conventions of widowhood, reaching out from

her small room to the world, looking for justice for the weak, my mother

running in her bare feet, using her body as an instrument for speed, to

break out of the shackles, finally triumphantly breasting the tape-yes,

they’re in it together. But they paid the price for their attempts to break

out. (283-284)

Madhu has now accepted the simple truth that it is not necessary to know all the

answers to the questions that life throws up. With this understanding, the realization

dawns up on Madhu that life has simply to be lived, no matter what happens, even when

things look so very abysmal. That truth comes home to Madhu not abruptly but slowly as

she witnesses the lives around her. One such instance is an upanayanam ceremony she

witnesses with muted pain and grief. Madhu thinks, “So many of us walking this earth

with our pain, our sorrow concealed within ourselves, so many of us hiding our suffering,

going about as if all is well, so many of us surviving our loss, our grief. It’s a miracle,

nothing less than a miracle” (315).

Madhu’s wounds start healing when she meets a young family celebration the

‘upanayanam ceremony’ of a boy in the Bhavani temple. This realization of the inevitability

of death and every man’s destiny against which we cannot fight makes her accept

Aditya’s death. Hasina’s prayers on the stage of Bhavani temple where she recited that

she saw a dream, remains her of her dreams and Som’s dreams woven around Aditya.

But it also gave her the strength to accept it with dignity and once again recovering her

own sense of self. She became aware of her needs. She realized that she needs to share
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her loss with Som. Now it was not only her sense of despair she was willing to share but

also her joy and pleasure of having Aditya for seventeen years. Aditya’s memory gave

her hope to live and face life. Madhu in the end has attained self realization and hopes to

accomplish her dream recreate Aditya in her memory and unburden her soul. Thus the

novel ends on the note of awakening of self.

In the last part of the novel, when Madhu arrives in Bhavanipur and prepared to

begin a new life, playing the role of a writer, she begins the process of recovery from her

grief. In the home of Hari and Lata, she was given a room to call her very own, where she

can be alone, free and understandable. She was now capable of new thoughts and new

ideas as the writer of Savitribai’s biography. As the day pass, the inner turmoil, agony

and humiliation at her husband’s rejection are all rearranged in the inner landscape of her

mind and Madhu moved towards reconciliation to her grief and to her husband also.

Madhu’s tangled emotions and feelings are arranged within her, until her perspective of

life became clear. When Madhu separates temporarily from Som, it is to seek a female

space where she can be comfortable with herself. She wants to be self-accepted and

self-actualized.

Small Remedies clearly bears the stamp of Shashi Deshpande’s writing. In the

manner typical to her writing, the story is revealed through the inner consciousness of the

central character Madhu and the life around is focused through the eyes of this character

and understood through the mind of this one character. Not just in this aspect but also in

her special way of looking at details, love for imagery, in her deliberately slow manner of

unveiling the plot that is full of sudden twists and turns, in her ability to look into the depths
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of human heart and gave expression to the feelings buried in there, and in the very honesty

with which her central character confronts her own life, in the importance given to dreams to

unravel events, this is a Shashi Deshpande’s book.

Shashi Deshpande presents a social world of many complex relationships. Many

men and women live together and journey across life in their different age groups, classes

and gendered roles. Doubt, anxiety and often a feeling of void of values push characters

in her novels to intense self – examination. The women are particularly caught in the

process of redefining and rediscovering their own roles, position and relationship within

their given social world. Shashi Deshpande has continued to write with a definite faith

seasoned with the desire to write. In an interview to M.D.Rati, she says:

I did not write anything except school compositions and letters until I was

thirty years old. Then, my husband, sons and I spent a year in England and

after we returned, my husband persuaded me to write about our trip, so that

we would not forget the details. I wrote three articles about it…. That was

the beginning…. Then, all the stories started pouring out, as if they had

been dammed in for a long time. I had never experienced that spontaneous

flow again. It has always been consciousness writing after that. (238)

The Indian society depicts woman as a symbol of sacrifice through the image of

Devi, like Sita, Savitri and Gandhari. The girlchild in Indian family is treated partially.

The first preference is always given to a boychild. From her childhood a woman is taught

to suppress her wills and desires. She has been taught to become a good daughter, wife,

mother and daughter-in-law. She has no identity of her own. In the Indian society the

honour of the family depends upon the womens’ behaviour. The women has to sacrifice
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themselves for the family. Goodness of woman is in self-abnegation and self-sacrifice.

The good virtues expected from a woman are Tolerance, nurturing, adjustment and

self-sacrifice. Men are not bound to fulfil these expectations. An Indian working woman

has to undergo many roles at a time. Promilla Kapur states that only the husband is

responsible for the tensions, “They like wives to take up jobs, but dislike them to change

as far as their attitude towards their roles and status at home is concerned and dislike their

traditional responsibilities being neglected. Their attitude towards their wives being

employed is found to be ambivalent”(366).

Summing Up
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Chapter V

Summing Up

Psychologists stress the importance of childhood experience and environment in the

evolution of personality. Dominating, over-protective, intimidating, partial or indifferent elders

endanger a child’s free emotional growth and also curtail the child’s sense of self –esteem and

self – confidence. The psychologist R. D. Laing contents that the family is responsible for the

sanity of its members. He says, “It is not simply an individual’s bad luck in the genetic card

game that leads to his madness, but the tricks of the other players that drive him crazy” (36).

Shashi Deshpande is the only contemporary writer who has given a clear picture about the

girl child and her psychology. Most of her women characters try to transcend their identity

crisis by analyzing their childhood and the process of their upbringing.

The innocent world of children often permanently damaged by the apathy and

insensitivity of the adults. The wounded young psyche cannot mature into a wholesome

character and they suffer as the possessor of a battered childhood, incapable of facing the

vagaries of life. Shashi Deshpande draws the pictures of women who had traumatic

experiences in their childhood. They struggle as wives and mothers because they bear the

legacy of a battered childhood. Dr. M.Mani Meitei says:

Childhood experience is of vital importance in the study of mind’s

behaviour, for that lies embedded in the individual consciousness as latent

content that appears and reappears as drives and urges in the individual’s

unguarded moments. If the person is fully or partially under control of this

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aberrant mental process he is subject to neurosis or hysteria according to

the degree of the force of drama that is inside the mind. (76-77)

Shashi Deshpande strongly believed in the influence of childhood on adult life.

She looked into the childhood of her characters and shows how childhood experiences go

a long way in determining or influencing their adult lives. She believed that childhood

experiences are everlasting and that they have a crucial role to play in the formation of a

healthy personality. Saru, Indu, Jaya, Urmila and Madhu are all, in one way or other, victims

of childhood grooming and are critical commentaries on how the girl child is marginalized

and ultimately fails in life because of her childhood grooming and indoctrination. Their

childhood experiences are with over – indulgent, cruel or indifferent parents damage the

free use of their energies and self – reliance and put them on the path of neurotic

conditions in later life. They grow with vague fears and apprehension which later on

create a feeling of isolation and helpless in a world that is essentially hostile. In all the

novels of Shashi Deshpande there was no mother who could serve as a model for the

daughter. Saru’s mother in the The Dark Holds No Terrors however, dies just before

Saru’s narrative begins. In That Long Silence, the mother is a less important theme.

Shashi Deshpande fixes the cause of marital disharmony in deprived childhood. Mukta

Atrey says:

If Shashi Deshpande does not present an actual girl protagonist, she

compensates it by a detailed examination of the girlhood of her protagonists

who define their adult self through an analysis of their girlhood and the

various factors that have influenced it. She exposes the subtle processes of

oppression and gender discrimination within the male oriented family and
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society. The socialization of the girlchild includes many social factors like

myths and legends, rituals and ceremonies and also psychological factors

like the structure of the family and the girl’s place in it, her sexuality and

menstruation, childbirth and even abortion. (14)

Shashi Deshpande’s novels present the real picture of Indian society and woman’s

positions in it with no freedom or a separate status. Her novel highlights the psychology

of the middle – class Indian women. Shashi Deshpande, dealt with the aspect of fear in a

persons’ psyche, makes the characters to face it and come out of it. Therefore, the philosophy

that emerges from such a treatment was that fear does not exist in all. Her uniqueness was

that her protagonists are not rebels but they learnt in course of their encounters with the

harsh realities of life. The characters generate in themselves are the power to cope with

male domination. Shashi Deshpande expressed an ambivalent attitude of contemporary

educated independent – minded Indian women who can neither pacify themselves to a

new situation when their husbands ignored them and crushed their identity in life.

Shashi Deshpande’s main aim is to analyze the image of women in the modern world.

She always writes for women, presents their problems and lets the world know the

problems faced by women today. She has not attempted to present her women characters

stronger than they are in real life. She has done her best to expose their passivity, anxiety

and confusion. Her protagonists play the successful role of mother, wife and beloved by

keeping their entity dignified.

The chief concern in Shashi Deshpande’s novel is the self – assessment of the

protagonists themselves. Her novel is concerned with the female psyche and an

understanding of the mysteries of life and women place in it. She refused the notion of a
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woman as an object to be used and abused. Indian women take pride in suffering and live

with the idea of subjugation, and women accept the rules assigned to them by patriarchy

that rules all through their blood. In a male dominated society, woman was supposed to

be an ideal wife, a mother and an excellent homemaker with multifarious roles in the

family. But she was not equal to men. At every stage in her life, a woman is dependent

for her status and survival upon men like her father, her husband and her son. The status

and position of women degraded and deteriorated with the passage of time.

Traditionally, in all societies, particularly in the Indian society, marriage and

family are considered to be society’s most sacred institution and they are the source of

comfort, and nurture the members living within it, marriage tends to begin with violence.

Within marriage, the position of the wife is more vulnerable and she is dependent on her

husband. Indian women have to follow the Manus of Indian tradition. Indian woman has

to follow the footsteps of her husband, though he was brutal and an unemotional character.

When they step into the family life, they must be concerned about their family members

more than anything. As a traditional Indian woman, she performed all the duties to her

husband and to her children, though she cannot freely express feelings, emotion and

rights. Her individuality has been crushed under the male dominated society. In the

Indian context, the women are taught the values of culture and the roles of men, as they

accomplish things in the real world. The Hindu moral code known as ‘The law of Manu’

denies woman an existence apart from that of her husband and her family. M. Khan and

A. Khan says, “Their inner self rebels to break away from tradition: while on the other,

the cultural archetypes thrust upon their psyche bind them on the tradition” (72).
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Shashi Deshpande’s concerns are with the people and their inner anxieties and

doubts rather than with the externals of life and living. Her characters are always engaged

in questioning and evaluating the meaning of ideals, attitudes, actions and reactions of

people in personal interactions and relationships. In Indian context, once a girl was

married, whether it may be a love marriage, or arranged one, her husband has full control

over her. Whether his wish was right or wrong, the wife has to follow him blindly.

Women are never free according to old traditions. In Indian society, women are

dependent and they are appendage to men. Women start losing their individuality and

liberty amidst old traditions and patriarchal conditions particularly after their marriage.

Most of the action goes through the minds of the heroines. Shashi Deshpande

employs introspection to make them more transparent. She also uses memory and dream

as effective devices, to probe the psyche of her various protagonists who carry the past

experiences into their present life. Dreams and nightmares are used by the writer to

express fear of desertion, feelings of guilt, sexual assault and to reinforce the despair of

the suffering protagonists. From the traditional roles as a daughter, sister, wife and

mother Shashi Deshpande’s protagonists struggled to emerge as individuals in their own

right, deserting their homes which stand for patriarchy and gender discrimination.

They wanted to prove them successful before their mothers and often make themselves

emotionally and sexually famished.

Shashi Deshpande’s main aim in depicting extra-marital sex was not to show that

women seek gratification outside marriage. But she insist that sex without emotional

involvement was of little regard. Women seek emotional involvement in any relationship

and when emotions are attached to their husbands, their intimacy with other men is just
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an accident. However, Shashi Deshpande analysed woman’s point of view of uneasiness

of a woman in the traditional role, which expected her to be an embodiment of sacrifice

and suffering, a monument of patience and devotion and a selfless bestowed of love and

affection. The desire of women to revolt against the stereotyped roles assigned to them is

well explained by Shashi Deshpande. Ujwala Hiremath, “makes them undertake a self

exploratory journey which finally culminates in compromise and conformity”(116).

Shashi Deshpande presented human feelings, which were forgotten from the

pages of human history. She makes them come alive as characters that seem real and as

though belonging to an own neighbourhood. Her style is lucid and the language is always

kept simple and commonplace. Her attitude to her characters seems to be compassionate

and sympathetic. Shashi Deshpande depicts woman and her psychology in myriad roles-

daughter, wife, mother and individual in her own right, which reveals Shashi Deshpande’s

instinctive ability to articulate the feelings of the contemporary, urban, educated upper-

middle-class woman who was caught in the transitional period between tradition and

modernity. The focus of her novels has been on the psychology of Indian women, especially

the middle class women. Her novels are a self-analysis and a self - into the existential

problems of women. Shashi Deshpande’s introspection and psychological probe made

her distinct in revealing the sub-conscious and unconscious psyche of her characters. She

portrayed the traditional and tabooed Indian society that provided little scope for the

independent growth of a woman. Her female protagonists are sensitive, self conscious,

brilliant and creative.

The novel The Dark Holds No Terrors projects the dilemma of a woman who

resents the onslaught on her individuality and identity. The protagonist Saru, returns after
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fifteen years to her father’s house, a place she had once sworn never to return to unable

to bear the sexual sadism of her husband. The stay in her father’s house gives Saru a

chance to review her relationship with her husband. Though she remains unchanged till

the end, she has a better understanding of herself and others. This gave her the courage

to confront reality. She defies traditional codes at the slightest threat to her importance,

and that was what she missed and craved for in her mother’s house. Even in her childhood

Saru had realized that economy alone could be an insurance against subordination.

She grew up as a victim of her mother’s sexist gender based bias. Even as a child, she

remembered her mother’s preference for Dhruva her brother and the importance attached

to his birthdays.

Shashi Deshpande revealed the predicament of a real career woman Saru, a doctor

by profession. She has to revolt against her mother who strongly supported Indian tradition.

Her mother’s preference to her younger brother makes it impossible for Saru to understand

her younger brother. When he is drowned to death accidently, Saru was hurt by her mother’s

words, “Why didn’t you die? Why are you alive, when he’s dead?”(191). Saru has to bear

the guilty conscience throughout her life. So she hated her mother. As a sign of rebellion,

she takes up medicine as her career. She also falls in love and gets married to a man of

her own choice, but her mother objects. She does not go back to her parental home till her

mother’s death. She wants to escape from the mother, an embodiment of authority and

domination. But after marriage, she again finds the same domination of her husband

Manohar. He was less successful in career than her and hence suffers from inferiority

complex. He started behaving sadistically towards her at night. Though he acted quite

normal during daytime, she hesitated to discuss things with him.

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Saru preferred to suffer the humiliation silently. Thus, in Saru’s character,

Shashi Deshpande presents the dilemma of a successful career woman who suffers the

pull of modernity as against the traditional attitude of an ideal wife who has to cope with

her marital discomforts to the best of her ability. Saru was a so called ‘liberated’ woman

only in name but she was a silent humiliated wife inwardly. She cannot break away from

the constraints of her marriage when she thinks of the sufferings of her children. Saru takes

refugee in her parental home where her mother was no more to question her. She realized

the fact that in India there was a limit for a married woman with a career can hope to be

liberated. Even educated men are against it. Her visit to her father’s house was a kind of

escape from her sadist husband. She developed self-confidence and courage in her

father’s house. She stopped thinking about herself as a woman and sees herself as a

doctor.

Shashi Deshpande’s heroine never thought of divorce at all. Saru did not decide to

walk away from the marriage. Instead, she has decided to solve her marital problems and

make her husband realize that she has to be treated equal. She feels isolated from her husband

and her children and became the victim of mental agonies because of her psychological

contrast between the past and the present. She thought of her past childhood, free from all

the tension and compared her childhood and her present.

Saru reacts against the traditional concept of society that the single purpose of a

woman is to please the elders, and especially the male ones. Through her character,

Shashi Deshpande wants to project the post modern dilemma of a woman who strongly

resents the onslaught on her individuality and identity. In the end of the novel she discovers

the roots and she wants to be a strong woman in all the three angles, biological,
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psychological and social. She identifies herself with the roles fulfilled. She decided to cut

off the traditional bonds of marriage and home and walks into the wide world. It is her

comprehensive realization of "self" in which the consideration of family, society and

personal relationship assume a pigmy position.

Saru is in the process of identifying herself as an individual. She realized, “She dreamt

she was walking along a road, going on and on, knowing with a sinking feeling that

something, somebody awful and frightening, was waiting for her at the end of it. But it

was important to go on just the same, not to stop, even though there was doom waiting

for her” (210). Saru understands that one has to be sufficient within oneself because there

was no refugee elsewhere and she needed to apply to herself what she has cautioned Dhruva

once. There was no need to escape from darkness or curse the darkness, “That the terrors

are inside us all the time. We carry them within us, and like traitors they spring out, when

we least expect them, to scratch and maul” (85). Shashi Deshpande’s women do not opt

out of impact relationships, but try and redress the power and gender imbalances through

self knowledge. Kamani Dinesh analyses:

Women’s emancipation is not in repudiating the claims of her family, but in

drawing upon untapped inner reserves of strength. The wife, in the end, is

therefore not a rebel but a redeemed wife-one who has broken the long

silence, one who is no longer afraid of the dark. She is a wife re-conceptualized

as a woman and an individual-a marked contrast to the older generation of

women around her with their uncomplaining, unresisting, fantalistic

attitude. Hers is the dilemma of the new woman that could be resolved
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when the claims of selfhood are reconciled with the claims made upon her

by the family and society. (204-205)

In Roots and Shadows Shashi Deshpande explored the inner self of Indu, who

symbolized the New Woman, was educated and who lived in close association with

society, brushing aside all its narrow conventions. She has the freedom to talk about

anything she liked and was free to think of her own caged self besides politics and

corruption. Through the character of Indu, Shashi Deshpande has portrayed the inner

struggle of an artist to express herself, to discover her roots through her inner and

instinctive potential for creative writing. The women in Roots and Shadows and

The Dark Holds No Terrors present themselves as the women who want to go in self – quest,

and are free from the restrictions imposed by the society, culture and nature and are also

free from their own psychological fear and guilt.

Shashi Deshpande has very artistically juxtaposed two sets of women in the

Indian society. In Roots and Shadows one set is represented by Akka, Narmada, Atya,

Sumitra Kaki, Kamala Kaki, Sunanda Atya and Padmini. For them, a woman’s life is

nothing but, “…to get married, to bear children, to have sons, and then grand- children”

(109). Against this age old set up of woman’s life is placed the new one represented by

Indu, an educated modern young woman. Shashi Deshpande suggested that Indu has

learnt to see not only her life full of possibilities for growth and grace, but the very

meeting of life itself. Both Indu and Saru returns to the past by visiting the family during

the time they are separated from her husband. In psychological journey Saru and Indu

re-evaluated their relationship with their families, especially with the mother and

mother-surrogate. On achieving individuation, they returned to their profession with

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greater dedication. Shashi Deshpande upholds marriage as the backbone of society.

S.P. Swain says, “Saru’s journey is a journey from self-alienation to self-identification,

from negation to assertion, from diffidence to confidence. She learns to trust her feminine

self” (39).

Shashi Deshpande’s novel Roots and Shadows dealt with Indu’s attempt to

assert herself as an individual. She is caught up in a conflict between their family and

professional roles, between individual aspiration and social demands. Indu, the journalist,

was torn between self- expression and social stigmas, material and psychological. The entire

novel was a well-knit closed world of a joint family. Indu, a middle class young girl was

brought up in an orthodox Brahmin headed by Akka. The novel begins with the heroine’s

return to her ancestral house. Ujwala Patil says in this context, “Returns home, equipped

with that quality of courage, necessary to face the challenge of identity crises for her marriage

had, always posed-returns to suffer, to question and to find roots” (136).

Indu discovered what her roots are as an independent woman and a writer, and

what her shadows are as a daughter, a mother and a commercial writer. She rebelled

against Akka, her conventional world, and her rigid values and marries Jayant. Against

the wishes of her father and her family members, she marries Jayant, a person of her own

choice. Indu is a determined girl and longs for freedom and independence and leaves the

house of Akka, the old rich family tyrant, to enter into another home where she would be

independent and complete. She soon realizes the futility of her decision and that can

never change roots with another.

Indu learns from Mini that nothing could endure expect compromise and that she

has to learn to be content with her lot. To attain freedom, Mini seeks marriage as an
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alternative to the bondage inevitable in the parental family. She thinks of fitting herself in

a new role of a wife to attain her freedom. Indu leaves her ancestral house and enters an

independent and completely free zone, but very soon she realizes the fruits of her decision.

Both she and Jayant wanted to achieve complete happiness, but her marriage with Jayant

suppressed her feminity and her human demands. She was physically and spiritually

dissatisfied with her husband, who took her for granted and expects her to “submit”.

Her love marriage degenerates into a mere psychological affair. The paradox is that Indu

was not completely happy with Jayant. She was independent, intelligent, logical and

rational, but after her marriage, she becomes one of those archetype submissive women,

whose identity is only an extension of her husband’s. Marriage had taught her things like

deception and pretentions. She was shocked to see that, she is turning into an “ideal”

Indian wife, obeying her husband’s wishes and fancies. Indu experienced herself as a

woman given to physical narcissism in her self – reflexive concern with the body often

“looking in the mirror”. John Berger says:

A women must continually watch herself. She is almost continually

accompanied by her own image of herself…. She has to survey everything

she is and everything she does… Her own sense of being appreciated as

herself by another…Men act and women appear. Men look at women.

Women watch themselves being looked at…The surveys of woman in herself

is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object…and most

particularly an object of vision, a sight. (46-47)

The common theme that binds Indu with the other women is the search of unfulfilled

desires and their less than happy marriages. Indu’s journey to individuation begins with
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dissatisfaction with her role of the submissive wife. Indu’s husband Jayant believed

that passion makes a woman unwomanly and expects Indu to be submissive even in the

sexual act. Her disappointment in having done such an intimate relationship causes a rift

with Jayant. Akka’s death, at this point, ends her artificial alienation from her roots and

she leaves for home. At the ancestral home, a bastion of old world values, Indu searches

for herself.

After ten years of marriage, Indu received summons from Akka but hesitated to

go. Jayant also disapproved of the idea but she decided to leave for her ancestral house.

Soon she realized her mistake and wishes that she had listened to Jayant’s advice and not

gone there. She has been entrusted with a great responsibility of being Akka’s heiress,

leaving all the money and jewels to her. She was angered by this for she has wanted to

remain detached from the family. Staying in this house provided her an opportunity to

reconsider her relationship with her husband and to find out what is wrong in it. She has

never revealed her whole self even before her husband and has revealed only those parts

which her husband wants to see. As a result she has not only wronged herself but also

Jayant. She realized that there is nothing shameful in her need for Jayant. Her love for

Jayant enables her loses herself in Jayant, thus creating harmony in their lives.

Indu tried hard to find reasons for the unhappiness in her married life. Whereas

Jayant never tries to understand what she really wants or feels, there is no communication

between them. Indu lacks satisfaction not only in marriage but also as a writer.

In The Dark Holds No Terrors Saru’s problems are her own creations. The whole

problem was due to a lack of perfect understanding between the husband and wife.

She fails to realize that everyone in life wants to face problems and undergoes sufferings.
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Saru’s stay in her father’s house gives her a chance to review her relationship with her

father, husband and her dead mother. Her father listens to Saru’s problems and advices

her to forget all her past. He also wants her to face the present life with determination.

He further adviced her that she should learn to fight against the adversities as they come

in life.

Commenting on Indu’s decision to start writing according on her own wishes and

not to use Akka’s money to enrich herself, Usha Tambe says, “the important point is that

she is making independent decision” (124). This is the long and short of her bitter struggle

through conflicting trends between the age-old tradition and the emerging new ideas. She

asserts her position as a human being equal to that of a man and does not want to submit

herself to anyone’s dictations. S.P.Swain appropriately sums up Indu’s growth:

The meek docile and humble Indu of the early days finally emerges as a

bold, challenging, conscious and rebellious women. She resigns her job,

thus defying male authority, hierarchy and the irony of a woman’s masked

existence. Her self-discovery is the frightening vision of the feminine self’s

struggle for harmony and sanity. She is able to discover her roots as an

independent woman, a daughter, a mother and a commercial writer. (95)

In the end Indu achieved freedom and does what she thinks she should be doing.

She successfully conquers her fears and achieves harmony in life. She refused to be

influenced by Jayant who did not want her to leave her job. He was finally able to

recognize her strengths and her weaknesses, which have been latent so far. This helped

them to develop a better understanding between them, thus opening the door of happiness.
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Indu discovered that relationships are the roots of one’s being and follow one like

shadows. At the end of the novel Indu realized that Akka was not a sadist as thought

earlier. Indu has confronted her real self and she knows her roots.

Shashi Deshpande’s protagonists are born in traditional families and struggle

between a traditional upbringing and a longing for freedom and self-expression. As a

result, most of them rebel against traditional norms and enlighten themselves in search of

identity. Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors flouts her mother’s patriarchal impositions

and becomes a doctor and marries Manohar on her own choice partly out of love and

partly to spite her mother. Indu in Roots and Shadows also follows her own path quite

against the wishes of Akka, the matriarch. She gets good education in spite of a renegade

father and the absence of a mother. Later she manages to secure a job and finds a husband

herself.

Jaya, of That Long Silence, also had a restricted childhood. Her father never

encouraged her to mature her own tastes. Instead of developing her confidence, her

father instilled in her a sense of superiority by naming her Jaya, which meant victory.

It is this sense of superiority that lies at the root of her marital problems. In her childhood,

she had been brought up in a loving and affectionate manner without any responsibility.

But after her marriage, she changed automatically. When she left her home after getting

married, her father adviced her to be always good to Mohan and she, at all times, tries her

best to follow his advice. It also throws light on her being closer to her father than to her

mother. Even when her mother scolded her or questions her going out and returning home

late, she complains against her mother to her father.

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Jaya led a life of disappointment and desperation during her seventeen years of

old marital existence. Her personal failures begin to haunt and torment her, as a result of

which Jaya can no longer remain passive, submissive and a silent partner to Mohan.

As Jaya is a housewife and a failed writer she is always at the silent level. Veena Sheshadri

remarks in her review, “…there must be thousands of self – centred women like Jaya,

perennially gripping about their fate, but unwillingly to do anything that could result in

their comfortable ruts and into the big, bad world of reality, to fend for themselves” (94).

Jaya’s dream of being left alone by her companion was not just an indication of a future

incident of Mohan’s leaving the Dardar flat without telling her anything. It was her

psychological alienation from others, and particularly Mohan, that was suggested through

her dreams. Shashi Deshpande succeeds in understanding the minds of her protagonist by

mixing past with present using the flashback technique. Silence becomes a part of their lives,

a distinguishing mark. According to Seema Suneel, “Very few women in India are

encouraged to leave behind them anything other than silence” (7).

Jaya is the typical Indian housewife following her husband without any question,

as his shadow. Jaya, a name given by her father since her birth, changes to Suhashini

after her marriage. Mohan has given her that name. Marriage brings a change in Jaya’s

life. Her entire vocation is tending to womanly duties as a mother and as a wife. Jaya

believes in the age-old notion, “Stay at home, look after your babies, keep out of the rest

of the world, and you’re safe” (17). Jaya, as Suhashini, believed in this and moulds her

life accordingly. She realized her secondary position in marriage. She wished to write on

many important issues but Mohan expressed his displeasure and she immediately complies to

his wishes. Husband was always thought of as “a big sheltering tree” and a woman was
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safe if she has a sheltering tree over her. She also realized that living to the expectations

of others will lead to the loss of identity. Jaya became unsure of herself. She merged

herself in Mohan and feels that her existence without Mohan is impossible. When Mohan

has deserted her, and she was not sure whether he will come back or not, she probed into

her subconscious to find reasons for her undue dependence. Jaya re-examines her personal

life and recollects that sensual memoires are coldest for her. Not only Jaya, but also

Sumi in A Matter of Time travelled in to the past and remembered her experience and

being deserted by her husband.

For Jaya, anger is ‘unwomanly’ and cannot find expression. Her reply expressed

her deep-rooted pain, hurt and agony. It revealed how boring, meaningless and blank her

life has became to her. She was living an artificial life following the dictates of others

and relegating her own wishes to the background. She cannot do what she wanted to do.

At the end, Jaya disliked herself for having remained silent. Jaya was able to view her

future more positively only after delving into her past experiences and rethinking her past

ideas and attitudes. It is not only her own silence that Shashi Deshpande is highlighting

but the silence of each and every character in the novel from different strata of society.

The reason for Jaya’s silent aberration and Sumi in A Matter of Time is psychological

alienation. Jaya was incessantly tormented by inner conflicts, given to copious weeping,

constantly analyzing her oppressed lot in a male-dominated society. She was affected

very much by the idea of being a non-entity.

The novel ends with her determination to break her silence and speak. She turns

over a new leaf and becomes a modern egoistical self-assertive rebellious woman to exist

in the society with dignity and comfort. Jaya learns as she undergoes the mental torture
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and suffering at the hands of her husband. Shashi Deshpande’s characters find freedom

not in the western sense but in conformity with the society they live in without drifting

away from one’s culture. Jaya’s decision was not meek surrender to circumstances, but a

sensible compromise.

Shashi Deshpande, through a reorientation of the myth, suggests that a married

woman may desire to enjoy an independent existence occasionally. She believed that

flexible norms and behavior patterns, adjustable responses to changing issues related to

women are some of the measures to reduce man-woman confrontation in the present

world. That Long Silence ends with a positive attitude towards life. S.P.Swain rightly

remarks:

Towards the end of the novel, Jaya consciously acknowledges her writing

as a kind of fiction and quotes Defoe’s description of fiction as a kind of

lying which may make a great hole in the heart. Hence she decides to plug

that hole as said earlier by speaking and listening and erasing the silence

between her and Mohan. It is this erasing of the silence that symbolizes

the assertion of her feminine voice, a voice with hope and promise, and a

voice that articulates her thoughts. The novel doesn’t depict Jaya’s life as

a totally dismal and hopeless struggle. It suggests “hope” and “change” for

the better. (97)

Myths legends and folklores are deeply engrained in the Indian psyche-especially

those which are found in the epics and the puranas. Shashi Deshpande used mythical

allusions and parallels it in her fiction. She repeats in her view:

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…myths are both necessary and relevant to human lives; they come out of

some human need….we are looking for a fresh knowledge of ourselves in

them, trying to discover what is relevant to our lives today. We don’t

reject the ideals, but we know we can’t approximate to these pictures of

ideal womanhood. And we will not bear any guilt that we can’t do so. More

important than knowing what we are not is to know what we are, what is

possible for us. (186)

A Matter of Time deals with Gopal’s mid- life crisis leading to his desire for

renouncing his family life. Without any warning, he tells his wife Sumi, that he is leaving

the house forever. Sumi was shocked and stood awe-struck with her three teenage daughters

Aru, Charu and Seema. All the four were unaware and caught. Sumi was silent whereas

Aru, her eighteen year old eldest of all, tries to find the reasons for this calamity. Aru is

upset over the breakup of her family. There is a problem here, it is impressive for women

belonging to this house to question it, to fight it. At the core, resistance phenomenon is

important primarily because it questions and seeks a solution. It is symbolic and never

takes place in a vacuum. In the novel, one finds an honest picture of the sudden

disintegration of Gopal’s happy family. The anguish and frustrations of women give a

true-to-life saga of the difficulties faced by Sumi. The strong support of her immediate

family-her parents, sisters and cousins comforts her against the sufferings of life.

Gopal walks out on his wife Sumi and three daughters. Gopal’s absence from the

family scene creates unique tension for the various characters. Each one of them tries to

find out Gopal’s reason. Then there is a conjugal relationship between Kalyani and

Shripati. Sumi remembers that Gopal had behaved strangely even on that day:
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Sumi remembers, now, the night she had gone to his room, knowing that

only this way could she break out of her father’s authority. But Gopal, to

her consternation, had closed himself against her. ‘Go back Sumi’ he had

said, almost coldly. Only her stubbornness and the thought that she could

not possibly return to the room she shared with Premi, had kept her there,

alone in the room, that whole long night, while Gopal sat out in the tiny,

open veranda, until morning, when he had come in and put his arms about

her, as if folding her into himself, into his life. (24)

As Sumi returns to the Big House with her daughters, a flood of memories like a

disturbed bee-hive comes swarming in. A Matter of Time tells how the mature woman

carries the burden of childhood memories. The novel presents four generations of

women. Kalyani is a living monument of her mother Manorama’s failure to have a son

and forces her own younger brother Shripati to marry her daughter. After her loss of his

retarded son, he retreated to the upper room of the house and did not speak with anybody,

even his children. Commenting on Shashi Deshpande’s novel, N.B.Misal observes:

she writes about the situation of women and their failures in the fast

changing socio-economic milieu of India. In the novel A Matter of Time,

the inner life of women emotionally isolated from her family is reflected.

The lack of communication between Kalyani and her husband Shripati

impinges on the issues of patriarchy that influence successive generations. (6)

History was marked by woman’s effacement but the marginality was changed into

centrality by Shashi Deshpande. Kalyani’s and Premi’s futile attempts to convince Gopal

that he should revoke his decision, Aru’s desperate pursuit of Lawyer Surekha to help her
 193

to bring her erring father to book for the wrong he has done to her mother, and the

ultimate end of Sumi and her father in a fatal accident – all these incidents span a little

less than one year. The double death in the family of Sumi and Shripati coincided with

the death of the national leader Rajiv Gandhi. As the country is rocked by the national

disaster, the members of Sumi’s family, who are distraught by their own personal

tragedy, sit around the T.V. set in stony silence. The reference to this historical, tragic

event roughly encompasses the linear movement of the dramatic events of the story in a

contemporary time frame:

Life has come to a standstill, people driven into their homes by the terrible

shock of another assassination. There is none of the violence that followed

the mother’s death, only this stunned silence, this wholly voluntary cessation

of normal life. Gopal finds them huddled together in front of the T.V.

Shocked and grieved as they are, there is for the time being, some respite

from their own personal sorrow. They can lose themselves for a while in a

larger calamity. But the relief does not last. They cannot ignore the

gruesome pictures of violence the T.V. brings them, they cannot avoid a

despair at being part of such a world. (241)

Shashi Deshpande’s protagonists are in search of an authentic and distinct life.

The Binding Vine gives an insight into the psychological suffering of the women

characters. The novel has its beginning in a personal loss. Urmila, known as Urmi a

lecturer and the protagonist of the novel, is grieving over the death of her one year old

baby daughter, Anu. Urmi’s loss is of a different kind than the protagonists of Shashi

Deshpande’s earlier novels. They had lost a mother or a mother surrogate from whom
 194

they had already been separated. But Urmi’s case is different in that she has lost her

daughter, the one who is always with her and she appears to have a better control over

her life and her personal relationships than these earlier protagonists. As she was deeply

affected by Anu’s loss, Urmi isolates herself mentally from those closest to her. These

include her husband, her mother, mother-in-law and sister-in-law. She has been staying

with her mother Inni at her parental home, as her husband Kishore works for the

Merchant Navy, and is therefore more of a visitor than a regular member of the

household. Kishore too is one of those “absent” husbands that the readers come across

again and again in Shashi Deshpande’s fiction.

Since the beginning of their married life, Urmi finds that the bond between her

and her husband is not that of love. Whenever she tries to reveal her emotional insecurity,

he asserts himself sexually. Kishore, the archetypal Indian husband, never understands

the depth of her feeling. As she cannot bear with her husband’s departure, Urmi tries to

tell him two times, “Each time you leave me, the parting is like death” (138) but Kishore

finds a solution in the physical relationship. This incompatibility to understand each other

of course ends in alienation. Marriage that suppresses Urmi’s human demands, a marriage

that denies her fullness of experience leads her to get solace in Dr.Bhaskar Jain’s friendship.

When Vanaa, Urmi’s friend as well her sister-in-law, advised her to be more careful

about the relationship with Dr.Bhaskar, Urmi thinks:

But how can Vanaa, secure in the fortress of her marriage to Harish,

understand what it is like- marriage with a man who fits into my life a few

months in a year and flits out again, leaving nothing of himself behind?
 195

Often, after he has gone, I find in myself a frantic grappling for his image,

as if in going he has taken that away as well. (164)

At times, Urmi suffered a long separation from her husband. This separation

sometimes gave her an opportunity to think of another relationship and there are even

moments when she overcame a longing for physical gratification during her husband’s

long absence from her and home. Though she finds it hard to control, she consoled

herself as follows, “I could put my desires into a deep freeze and take them out, intact

and whole, when he returned” (164-165). Thus, unlike the earlier protagonists of

Shashi Deshpande’s novels, Urmi appears to have a better control over her feelings and

her personal relationships. Indira Nityanandhan observes, “It is love which makes women

vulnerable” (1995:287). The novel vividly depicts the initial trauma and the intense

anguish that Urmi goes through and the various stages through which she passes before,

she comes to terms with the death of her daughter.

Urmila understands the meaning of Mira’s writings that had a personal significance

to her, but the answer is only given partially from Mira’s story. The remaining answer is

strangely related to the story of Shakutai’s daughter Kalpana. Shakutai and Kalpana

hailed from the lower order of society and represented working-class women. But their

relationship as mother and daughter was no different from middle-class families. Urmi

once visited Vanna, who was working in a hospital, Urmi had a chance to meet Shakutai

whose insistent cry in the hospital contained the fear of her daughter’s report as a ‘rape

victim’, which might spoil her daughter’s reputation. Rape thus becomes a manifestation

not of male sexual desire but of male power. Many writers have chosen to deal with this

relatively new subject in the society openly related to women. And within the sole
 196

exception of Shoba De, who is only concerned with the vivid details of how it was done,

they are concerned with what the assualt does to the shocked or frightened girl and what

will happen hereafter. In concentrating on how she and her family will now cope with the

social stigma and humiliation, Shashi Deshpande had questioned the attitudes towards the

raped of her own people, social workers, police and the society at large. It is clear that the

social value of marriage is the foundation of this attitude to the raped.

Kalpana’s rape is the clue that helped Urmi to understood Mira’s relationship with

an obsessive husband. A marriage in which the girl’s feeling or choice was not taken into

consideration could be equally disastrous, was made clear through Mira’s life. The stories of

Mira and Shakutai gave a chance to analyze Urimi’s marriage with Kishore.

No other character in Shashi Deshpande’s earlier novels is so rebellious as Urmila.

In all her novels, protagonists may be independent to some extent but are firmly bound by the

shackles of tradition. The psychological transformation that Urmi achieves is through the

psychoanalytic approaches to gender rather than sociological ones. Urmi achieves more

through a realization of the multiple and contrary identities which a woman possesses.

Through the life of Mira, Urmi transforms herself from abnormal to normal stage by

analyzing the happenings centred on the other women characters of the novel. She gets a sort

of relief, and as an individual, her search for happiness begins. By analyzing the life story of

Mira and Urmi, one can find critique of the patriarchal ideology which ignores women’s

aspirations for individuality beyond the confines of home and family, and also these pathetic

women’s longing for true love which binds different human relations, keeps them in tact and

carries forward the life of human being. The novel of course signals towards the urgency

required to change the established indoctrinations for the betterment of women also.
 197

All her protagonists like Indu, Saru, Jaya, Urmi and Sumi are determined and

committed to oppose the oppression and represent the new collective voice of the

dynamic young women who are not ready to lead an encircled life and has learned to

defend themselves.

In A Small Remedies Shashi Deshpande’s continuous analysis of their own self enables

them to understand and solve their problems. All her women protagonists, Saru in The Dark

Holds No Terrors, Indu in Roots and Shadows, Sumi in A Matter of Time, Jaya in That Long

Silence and Madhu in Small remedies, free themselves from the stultifying traditional

constraints to cherish a spontaneous surge towards life. G.S.Amur aptly remarks, “Woman’s

struggle in the context of contemporary Indian society to find and preserve her identity as

wife, mother and most important of all as human being is Shashi Deshpande’s major concern

as a creative writer. Her women characters have strength of their own and in spite of

hostilities and challenges remain uncrushed” (77).

Small Remedies is a novel about the ‘making’ of a writer, singer and a social

worker. Madhu, Savitri Bai Indorekar, Leela and Hasina learn to know themselves and in

the company of female folks, they achieve their social as well as spiritual identities.

These women attain ‘sense of self’ through their occupations and skills and continue to

defy the servility of men. Madhu’s desire to write an honest and true biography of Bai helps

her in overcoming her sense of loss after the death of her son Aditya and her husband’s

distrust for yielding to a stranger in a moment of strong impulse. Arduous mental upheaval

reveals her weakness and her strength. Madhu leaves her home to come to terms with her

identity and desire.

 198

Small Remedies explores Shashi Deshpande’s favourite theme of a woman set on

a journey of self-discovery. Life around was focused through the eyes of this character

and understood through the mind of this one character. Shashi Deshpande is perhaps the

only Indian woman novelist who has made a bold attempt to give voice to the frustrations

and disappointment of women in a patriarchal world. It is a novel which provokes our

thought and moves us deeply and quietly. It also tells us the story of Leela, who gives us

her respectability in order to gain love and unhappiness in equal measure. She was a

remarkable woman who was, “…ahead not only of her generation, but the next one as

well” (94). She was a fiercely independent woman and was strongly committed to the

communist ideology. At the centre of this sprawling narrative is Madhu, who, in telling

the stories of Savitribai, Leela and Munni, hopes to find a way out of her own despair due

to the loss of her son Adit.

Shashi Deshpande, while writing of Savitribai and Leela, has also created

characters like Munni who wanted to seek the approval of society. She has presented in

her works modern Indian women’s search for these definitions about the self and society,

and the relationships that are central to women. Her own struggle as a writer to focus on

women’s issues, problems and experience is equally symptomatic of the resistance to

feminist expression that prevailed India in the middle of the twentieth century. She tried

to distance herself from women’s lives and point of view through the use of a male

narrative voice.

Shashi Deshpande delineates Madhu’s struggle with her sheltered family life.

She is a lonely daughter of a sensitive and capable woman, a very vulnerable wife and

mother. Her marital life is vitiated owing to her husband’s suspicion about her pre-marital
 199

illicit relation. Madhu struggles hard to restore the normalcy of her mind, particularly

after the accidental death of her only son Adit that gave her terrible shock. In order to

recover from the emotional psychological shock, she diverts her attention to writing a

biography of Singer Savitribai Indorekar.

Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies is a self-conscious novel which has internalized

a sophisticated awareness of current literary theory. It presents many contemporary issues

which a woman writer has to face in her life as well as work. She has realized that though

the really important aspects of life defy verbalization, there seems to be a genuine

relationship between the process of fictionalization through words and attempts to organize

personal experiences through memory. This novel is as much about novel writing as it is

about the characters who inhabit the fictional world. This is the kind of novel which

presents a problem, analyzes it and posits a kind of solution so that the focus is on the

psychological process of becoming a mature person. The desperate search for meaning,

the effort to find a sense of one’s identity and one’s relationship to the world outside,

culminates in the realization that loss is never total, and it is essential to realize it

because, in any event, life has to be made possible.

In spite of Shashi Deshpande’s apparently random handling of events and incidents,

Small Remedies manifests a very clear structural organization. The problem Madhu faces

is stated in the ‘Prologue’ itself. After the death of Adit, she recalled this line from Eliot’s

Murder in the Cathedral, ‘In the life of one man, never the same time returns’. She adds,

“The line tells me the totality of loss, the irrevocability of it” (5). Then she tries to write

the biography of Savitribai, and her main concern is to discover how Bai has managed to

live without her child. Finally the solution appears in the last lines of the novel, “Memory,
 200

capricious and unreliable though it is, ultimately carries its own truth within it. As long as

there is memory, there’s always the possibility of retrieval, as long as there is memory,

loss is never total” (324). The novels delineate the eternal predicament of human existence

through the various encounters of her life. She believes that, “…we are responsible for our

actions, that there are no excuses we can shelter behind” (122). Madhu recalls the words

of Joe, the words which helped her once to accept her father’s death. The same words

enable her now to accept her son’s death, “It hasn’t gone anywhere, your life with your

father is still there, it’ll never go away” (324). Shashi Deshpande deals with a woman’s

psyche and the way she was made to feel an inferior being, an unwanted child, a burden

on the family. Madhu was not much different from her counterparts Indu, Saru, Jaya,

Urmi and Sumi in age, education and family background, as depicted in Shashi

Deshpande’s other novels.

Shashi Deshpande stresses the fact that man and woman are the two wheels of the

same chariot. Her protagonists fail to answer the outside world. They fall down into the

interior resources of their selves which provide the necessary sustenance and strength to

face their problems. Her novel end with the hope of some positive action in the future.

Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors waits for her husband to come to take her back and

start their life afresh. Indu in Roots and Shadows plans to go back to her husband and tell

him everything about herself, and in That Long Silence interprets Mohan’s letter in

positive terms and hopes for the better. In an interview Meenakshi Mukherjee rightly

remarks:

Shashi Deshpande’s philosophy of life as a novelist is that though each

individual has to solve his problems of his own, it does not mean that he
 201

was to reject all relationships in life. Her protagonists need to be on their

own to come to terms with life. To achieve something….you have got to

be hard and ruthless…. There is no other way of being a saint, or a painter,

a writer. (5)

Shashi Deshpande has successfully made forays into the woman psyche to come

out with the inner view of the characters with all their terrors, turbulence and subterranean

shifts. Shashi Deshpande lets her protagonist experience the confusing and disturbing

silence within, get a glimpse of their inner being and empower themselves to confront

power politics, comprehend the situation and resolve the crisis. Shashi Deshpande’s

introspection and psychological probe make her second to none in revealing the

subconscious and unconscious psyche of her women characters. Iyengar has rightly

remarked, “Raji, Shashi and Juliette, all three write about the tears in things, the little

upset in life, the price one has to pay for one’s actue self-awareness, and the loneliness

that becomes more pronounced as one gets older and older” (760). Her uniqueness is that

her protagonists are not rebels but they learn in the heat of their struggle to generate in

themselves the power to cope with the male orientation.

Shashi Deshpande’s heroines Saru, Indu, Jaya, Mahdu, Sumi and Urmi break the

mental barriers, which they had initially built around themselves. They learn more about

their mothers and gradually overcome their feelings of alienation and hatred towards

them. Their stay at ancestral homes gives them the chance to recollect the past and re-

evaluate their decisions and actions. Their parental home does not provide them any

permanent relief from their suffering. It helps them to confront their real ‘I’ and

understand themselves better. The escape from all the demanding roles gives her a sense
 202

of relief and an opportunity to reflect on her life. Chandra Holm interviewed Shashi

Deshpande for Indian Review of Books. Holm says her heroines change a lot when they

get married and lose their identity and self-confidence. But at last they change completely

as human beings and they acquire inner strength. Shashi Deshpande commented:

Actually we have reserves we are often unaware of. But for women ,the

situation is made more complex by the fact that they have been told they

are weak, they are made to believe in their weakness and often they learn

to hide their own strength, because a woman’s strength seems to weaken a

man. (5)

Shashi Deshpande’s female characters have both a tendency to blame others and

need to feel guilty for actions which are beyond their control. They often worry about

matters of responsibility for the life or death of someone. Saru in The Dark Holds No

Terrors can hardly forget that as a child she was to blame for her younger brother’s death.

In remembering and reliving this incident, she casts herself as a seductress leading him to

his death in a swamp. Similarly in That Long Silence the heroine blames herself for

leaving the body of her friend, Kamat without reporting his death, because of fear of what

neighbours might say.

Shashi Deshpande characters grapple with their struggle which drags them

through innocence and experience, ignorance and knowledge, girlhood and adulthood,

repression and submission, and rebellion, joy and sorrow that lends her novels an

elemental sweep, simple as the surface text be. To Shashi Deshpande life as a girl is an

integral part of an adult life. She recognises the childhood influences and tendencies,

and in time of crisis her characters turn back to the past to search for reasons within the
 203

family. Her fiction is an example of the ways in which a girl child’s particular position,

social reality and psychological growth determine her personality. She argues that it

would be psychologically unrealistic to imagine that awareness within the woman

emerges suddenly, that she becomes a ‘person’ with the onset of adolescence. The role of

early life experiences, the role of education, closeness to parents and sibling relationship

are some very crucial elements that go a long way in creating a woman’s personality.

All the women protagonists of Shashi Deshpande, Indu, Saru, Jaya, Madhu and

Urmila succeed in constructing a self through their individual professional achievements.

They also try to come out redefining their relationships. Finally, they become fully

developed individuals who succeed in their domestic life as well as their professional life.

Her male characters confirm to the standard of feminist description of a middle - class

husband, who is insensitive, egoistic and sometimes over-ambitious. Her mission of writing

is an effort to discover, underline and convey the significance of women. Her protagonists wish

to revolt against the stereotyped roles assigned to them by the society. Initially, victims of

self-denial, they are at conflict with their inner selves because they deny their real

feelings. Through her writings, Shashi Deshpande aims to focus on the importance of

family values. She says, “Human relationship is what a writer is involved–person to

person and persons to society - these are two primary concerns of a creative writer and, to

me, the former is of immense importance. My preoccupation is with interpersonal

relationships and human emotions” (2).

The plight of women the world over, more specifically in India, continues to be a

pathetic one. In the western countries, stringent laws have been enacted and enforced to

safeguard the rights of women. In a country like India, with its cultural diversity, a
 204

continuous assessment of the plight of women is a must. Hence, writers like

Shashi Deshpande must be encouraged and appreciated for their contribution to the

social scenario.

Further studies on Shashi Deshpande can be carried out pertaining to the realm of

Stylistics, Narrative techniques, Existentialist content and Assertion of self. The writer

has specific perspectives which are conveyed through simple but effective language.

She also follows a technique that does total justice to the content to be conveyed.

The existentialist content deserves a fully fledged analysis. The assertion of self,

though appears to be an oft-analyzed one, necessitates constant probing. In short, Shashi

Deshpande is unique.
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