Shashi Deshpande is a feminist novelist supporting primarily the manifesto of the feminist movement of the early sixties and the late seventies of the last century. Basudeb profiles the contemporary Indian woman novelist, in the weekly column, exclusively in Different Truths.
In the literary galaxy of the last half of the twentieth century, one of the luminous award winning woman novelists is Shashi Deshpande. She was born in 1938 in Karnataka. She received the Padma Shree Award, in 2009, and the Sahitya Akademi Award for her novel, Shadow Play. Altogether Shashi Deshpande authored nine short story collections, twelve novels and four books for children, to date. These are The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980), If I Die Today (1982), Come Up and Be Dead (1983), Roots and Shadows (1983), The Long Silence (1989), The Intrusion and Other Stories (1993), A Matter of Time (1996), Small Remedies (2000), The Binding Vine (2002), Moving On (2004), In the Country of Deceit (2008) and Shadow Play (2013).
One of the important aspects of Shashi Deshpande’s novel is that the novelist very minutely delineates some modern educated women characters, who suffer indescribably the distress and contradictions of the minds of our society. In the post-colonial India, Indian educated women suffer a lot because of the strong opposition between the age-old Indian traditions, norms, and values of life and the overwhelming impact of the exposure to the Western lifestyle and they are looking at life in their own ways. This conflict creates a kind of tension and dilemma in the minds of educated Indian women, who finally emerge as champions of their rights and empowerment.
Deshpande’s minute observation also includes a class of Indian women, who are in the abysmal depth of poverty, illiteracy, and social exploitation. These two types of women are presented side by side in her important novel. Most of these humiliated women are of rural India. Simultaneously we also find almost the photographic depiction of women belonging to the lower middle-class families in cities and semi-urban areas. Basically, Deshpande is an advocate of freedom of the women in the context of the socio-cultural milieus of Indian society. She is a feminist novelist supporting primarily the manifesto of the feminist movement of the early sixties and the late seventies of the last century. This leads readers to accept the novelist as one of the feminist writers of the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Deshpande’s That Long Silence does not belong to any imaginary world of the novelist. It depicts the middle-class educated Indian woman, found in those days of the late twenties. Our Indian society was undergoing changes about the rights of Indian women. Women started thinking of their identity in their families, as one family unity, as well as her own identity as a person. Jaya, the protagonist, after her graduation, enters into the wedlock with Mohan. She hardly ceases her duties and commitments to her husband and children. Mohan considers Jaya’s role as an inseparable part, as his wife and the children. Everything in her life is gradually transformed into a routine life. Being monotonous and frustrated in this scheduled day’s work, she is led to the search of her identity as a human being. Towards the end of the novel, we find she reconciles herself to the family happiness by oppressing her own emotions. Thus, the ultimate role she finds at last.
A careful study of the novel reveals that Jaya is a person of self-doubt and she is afraid of her own emotions. Of course, she finally regains her strength by accepting her happiness in the happiness of her own family. She finds her own identity in the identity of her family. One important aspect of this novel is that it begins with a note of doubt and conflict in the mind of Jaya but Jaya fails to put a resistance for restoring her identity as a woman and as an independent individual.
Her second important novel, The Dark Holds No Terrors, is about the female protagonist, Sarita, who becomes tired of her tensed, bitter and loveless relationship with her husband and her parents. And finally, she makes a quest for her own identity as an individual woman. In this novel, the male protagonist, Monohar, is typically an Indian husband, who thinks that he is the family head. The problem arises when he finds that his wife being charged with the slogans for the woman rights and empowerment in the late sixties and seventies onwards and enters into the professional career and getting the almost the identical economic benefits like her male counterparts, the husband’s position in the family is threatened. In this novel, Sarita is a medical practitioner and her husband is an ill-paid college teacher. Monohar shrinks and starts suffering an inferiority complex. It then becomes a clash of ego between Sarita and Monohar.
In this connection, let me refer to the bitter relationship between Thomas Hardy and his first wife. Hardy first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford always felt that her husband had eclipsed her talent. She believed that Hardy’s growing popularity had deprived her due attention of the world. As she came from a professional middle-class family, socially superior to that of Thomas Hardy, she likes people to refer to them as “Mrs. Hardy and her husband”. This comparison between Lavinia, Thomas Hardy, and Sarita, Monohar here is relevant to Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terror. Hardy is more acceptable than Lavinia and here Sarita is more powerful socially and financially than Monohar. Finally, the marriage between Lavinia and Gifford wrecked. Another important feature of this novel is that female protagonist stands against the patriarchal hegemony of the male members of the Indian society. Finally, the centre of power between Sarita and Monohar shifts to Monohar because Sarita reconciles herself to Monohar. She peacefully manages her husband get her desire fulfilled. The compromise and adjustments between Sarita and Monohar are finally made.
Her novel Come Up and Be Dead is about the menace of sexual harassment. The main characters in the novel are Sharmila, Devi, Girish, Mridula, and Mr. Verma. The suicide of Mridula has been introduced at the very beginning of the novel. That it is a murder of or suicide is a matter of doubt. The main culprit is Mr. Verma. Finally, the criminal is rounded up.
If I Die Today is a crime fiction but it is not a crime fiction in the truest sense of the term. The locale of this novel is on the outskirts 
of Bombay. The man who constructed the hospital is a visionary and a person of insight. The place is idyllic and peaceful. It is almost an emblem of everything good. The sudden appearance of one man, known as Guru, disturbs everything including the relationship among the doctors and the staff of the hospital. He creates a mystery about himself. And ultimately everything is revealed.
A careful reading of the language used by Deshpande in her novels shows that the “Sociolect” is the language of the middle-class educated men and women of the Indian society. Her language is lucid and very much befitting to the thought and ideas of the educated middle-class Indians. One of the important aspects of her English language is her spontaneity and straightforwardness. She describes the events vividly.
©Basudeb Chakraborti
Photos from the Net.
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