Feminism and Indian Women: Shashi Deshpande’s Perspectives

Dr. Shamenaz, Associate Professor (English), Dept. of Applied Sciences & Humanities,

Allahabad Institute of Engineering & Technology, Allahabad.

Shashi Deshpande is a writer who is considered as a representative of women of her country. In

her writings she has tried to depict the condition and problems of the women of her society. Till

date she has written ten novels. Her novels can be easily termed as feminist novels because almost

all are based on the problems existing in the lives of the women and how they respond to different

situations. Her protagonists are always female and she depicts contemporary problems and

dilemmas. She explores the inner conflict existing in a woman and how she adjusts to the

surroundings, which are not according to her wishes. She deals with how the women in today’s

middle class Indian society try to make a fusion of the traditional and the modern. It is within the

existing social framework that Deshpande depicts the reality of women lives.

She shows that patriarchal norms and values confine women, taking away their autonomy

and freedom. They have to shape their lives according to the requirements of the patriarchal

constructs. She believes that women should get equal rights with men. Men and women should

co-operate in all the fields of life. To her feminism should not be anti-men. She says in her book,

Writing From the Margin and Other Essays:

Is to be a feminist, to want to be like men? I don’t think so.

On the contrary, to me it has meant an acceptance of my

womanhood as a positive thing, not as a lack. An understanding

that I am different, not inferior. And how can feminism be

anti-men, when it is really working for a better, a more

meaningful and companionable relationship between men

tyrant and the oppressed. (83-84)

In this sense she has successfully captured in her writing, the intricate emotions and the

dilemmas and conflicts of the modern Indian woman.

Shashi Deshpande occupies a place of honour among writers of Indian English fiction. She is

the author of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s and so she is able to reflect a realistic picture of the feelings

and attitudes of contemporary middle class Indian women, in terms of various situations which

are clearly depicted in her novels.

Her novel, That Long Silence, which was published in 1988, has been one of her most

discussed works. In it, Jaya the protagonist thinks:

Self–revelation is a cruel process. The real picture, the real you never

emerge. Looking for it is as bewildering as trying to know how you really

look. Ten different mirrors show you ten different faces. (1)

The book describes the ruthless self-analysis of her life by the protagonist and the intellectual

self-grappling with her emotional self, a terrible painful honesty in the way a woman is able to

see her own relationships with others. She thinks:

To achieve anything, to become anything, you’ve got to be hard and

ruthless. Yes, even if you want to be a saint, if you want to love the

whole world, you've got to stop loving individual human beings first.

And if they love you, and they bleed when you show them you don't

love them, not specially, well so much the worse for them! There's just

no other way of being a saint. Or a painter, a writer. (1)

She even says that:

and perhaps, others too see in your face only what they want to see. Yet the

fascination of seeing yourself in the mirror, of knowing how you look to

others never palls. (1)

Her first novel, Roots and Shadows (1980) shows the conflict between tradition and modernity.

This novel tries to answer some of the questions relating to an individual's life, whether one can

live an isolated life forgetting all family and social responsibilities and obligations. It is a tale

about a house and a family. Indu, the protagonist of the novel represents the modern, educated

and liberated woman of contemporary Indian middle class society. On the other hand Akka, who

is the grand old matriarch of the house, belongs to an older generation. She is a rich childless

widow, who is autocratic and traditional and maintains absolute control over her brother's

children. Sarabjit Sandhu remarks:

Shashi Deshpande has very artistically juxtaposed two sets of women in the

Indian set-up. One set is represented by Akka, Narmada, Sumitra Kaki,

Atya, Sunanda Atya : and the other set is represented by Indu. (15)

She further comments on the mentality of the older generation of women and their main motive

in life– “To the old generation, a women's life is nothing, but to get married and to bear

children.”(28) In the long list of these women characters, Akka deserves special attention. Every

member in the family fears as well as respects her. It is Indu who questions and challenges the

authority of Akka and walks out from the house to seek fulfillment in her own way. She marries

Jayant against the wishes of the family. But Indu is finally called back by Akka when she falls

critically ill and realizes that her end is near. She chooses Indu as her heiress and wills her entire

property, including the house, to her. Indu returns to her ancestral home and has a brief meeting
with Akka who soon passes away. After her death, she is left with the responsibilities of the

family including the marriage of her cousin, Padmini. She manages to fulfill most of them. In the

end she even decides to sell the house, despite the opposition of her uncle who is emotionally

attached to the place. What is significant here is the fact that Akka, who is a staunch

traditionalist, leaves the responsibility of the family on a young woman rather than on the senior

men in the family.

Her novel, The Dark Holds No Terror, which is an award winning novel, is a story of marital

rape and depicts the inner conflict of a woman who considers herself responsible for the

sufferings and tragedies of her life. She believes that her brother died because she needlessly

turned her back on him, her mother died alone because she deserted her and her husband is a

failure because she destroyed his manhood. This novel also deals with the question of

competition between wife and husband. The reason why Sarita suffers in her married life is

because she is a successful doctor while her husband is a teacher who earns less than her.

Another novel, The Binding Vine, has two incidents of rape- one is marital rape while the

other is the rape of a young girl by one of her relatives. The protagonist of the novel is a woman

named Urmila, who is grieving over the death of her baby. Deshpande has raised many questions

relating to the feminine world in this story. The narrator Urmila or Urmi is a clever and sharp-

tongued woman, who discovers the poems written by Mira, her mother-in-law. Mira was trapped

in a suffocating marriage. She is an important character holding the different strands of the story

together.

This novel is based on a true incident. A young nurse had been brutally raped in the

hospital in which Shashi Deshpande’s husband had worked in Bombay. The novel addresses the

issue of a woman’s right to her body, of feminism, and about the dilemmas faced by women.
 Her seventh novel ‘A Matter of Time’ is about the middle- class family of Gopal, who is a

university history teacher. It is for the first time in this novel; that Shashi Deshpande had made

an effort to highlight a male protagonist in her fiction. Y.S. Sunita Reddy aptly remarks that:

Shashi Deshpande, who has earned a niche for

herself in articulating the bitterness and desolation of her women characters

in her novels, enters for the first time into a broader area and grapples with

the complex theme of alienation in her novel, A Matter of Time. (111)

Besides Gopal, this novel deals with the story of three generations of women. The first

generation’s representative is Kalyani, the grandmother, the second generation’s is Sumitra

called Sumi: and the third is represented by Arundhati, the daughter of Sumi called Aru. The

main incident of the novel is the walking out of Gopal on Sumi. The novelist provides no clear

reason for this action, except that the character feels that he could no longer go on. It is this

incident which is the cause of sufferings of Sumi and her daughters. Though Sumi is deeply hurt

by Gopal’s action, for the sake of her daughters she behaves normally. She returns to her

paternal house called Big House where her mother Kalyani is shocked to see her because she

herself was abandoned by her husband who has not talked to her for thirty years. The two

women Kalyani and Sumi who have been abandoned by their husbands for different reasons and

in different ways have not rebelled but rather have kept quiet and tried to adjust to the situation.

But Sumi’s daughter Aru, who is of very young age reacts as a rebel against the injustice done

towards her mother.

After Gopal’s desertion, Sumi tries to build her life independently and according to her

own wishes. To some extent she is able to succeed as she starts working in a school and also

takes up writing as a hobby. But finally even as she is emerging out of the situation, she dies in
an accident. The death of Sumi is quite surprising. In fact, Deshpande claims that she was herself

surprised by her sudden death but she wanted to give this end to the novel though it was very

hard.

Her eighth novel, Small Remedies, was published in the year 2000 exactly twenty years

after her first novel, Roots and Shadows. It is “a book about writing a book”. In it she has

highlighted the world of music. Deshpande confesses that for writing this book she listened to

many cassettes, attended performances and even read many books on music and musicians.

Her two novels, If I Die Today and Come Up And Be Dead are detective novels. They were

initially written as short stories. Though these novels are typical of Shashi Deshpande's style they

are different from all her other novels. They are both psychological thrillers, viewing crime

through the gaze of average Indian women. Death, murder and nightmarish suspense form part of

both the novels. By writing these she proved her versatility at handling different fictional forms.

So in this way we can say that, Deshpande has tried to show in almost all her novels, the

different problems which the women of her society are facing.

Reference

1. Shashi Deshpande, That Long Silence (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999)

2. Sarabjit K. Sandhu, The Image of Women in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande (New Delhi:

Prestige Books, 2003) p. 15

3. Y.S. Sunita Reddy, Marriage in not for Everyone : A Matter of Time, A Feminist

Perspective on the Novels of Shashi Deshpande (New Delhi: Prestige Books, 2001)

4. Shashi Deshpande, In Literary Review (The Hindu, 5 Sept., 2004)