Citation
Prof.
Awadh Kishor Pandey
Professor,
Dept. of English
Kamla
Rai College, Gopalganj, Bihar
akpandeydr31@gmail.com
Abstract
This article
examines the evolution of feminist consciousness across the novelistic corpus
of Shashi Deshpande, situating her within the broader constellation of Indian
English women's writing alongside Anita Desai, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Nayantara
Sahgal, and Gauri Deshpande. Drawing on feminist literary theory from Simone de
Beauvoir, Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, and Chandra
Mohanty, alongside established Deshpande scholarship, the study traces how
silence, marriage, motherhood, and memory function simultaneously as
instruments of patriarchal control and as sites of female agency in The Dark
Holds No Terrors, Roots and Shadows, That Long Silence, The
Binding Vine, A Matter of Time, and Small Remedies. The
analysis foregrounds Deshpande's realist, interior-monologue-driven prose and
her recurring symbolism of darkness, sound, and binding threads as narrative
strategies that enact what French feminists term écriture féminine
within an Indian middle-class domestic idiom. The article argues that
Deshpande's protagonists do not achieve liberation through rupture but through
incremental, intersectional renegotiations of selfhood within family and
caste-class structures, thereby complicating universalist feminist paradigms
while enriching the "woman question" in postcolonial Indian
literature.
Keywords: Feminist
consciousness, selfhood, patriarchy, silence, marriage, écriture féminine,
Indian middle-class domesticity
Introduction
Shashi Deshpande
occupies a distinctive position in the history of Indian English fiction: a
writer who moved from a Kannada-speaking, Karnataka-rooted literary milieu into
English narrative art without severing her allegiance to regional cultural
texture, and who produced, across nine novels beginning with The Dark Holds
No Terrors (1980), one of the most sustained fictional interrogations of
middle-class Indian womanhood in postcolonial letters [1] [6]. Writing in the
wake of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which she regarded as a
genuine "pathbreaker" that "changed everything for Indians
writing in English," Deshpande nonetheless resisted the idea that Indian
English fiction should be measured against a metropolitan center, declaring
"to me as a reader there are no margins" [1]. This refusal of
marginality is significant for a feminist reading of her work, since it signals
her insistence that the domestic, quotidian struggles of Indian women
constitute a legitimate and central literary subject rather than a provincial
footnote to a national or postcolonial narrative dominated by male protagonists
and historical grand narratives [1].
Deshpande's
fiction emerged alongside, and in productive tension with, that of Anita Desai,
whose Clear Light of Day she admired but whose vision of India she found
occasionally too exoticized for an English readership; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala,
whose outsider's gaze on Indian domestic life differs from Deshpande's insider
realism; Nayantara Sahgal, whose novels foreground the intersection of politics
and female self-realization within elite, politically connected families [8];
and Gauri Deshpande, one among a wider cohort of women novelists who, alongside
Kamala Markandaya, Santha Rama Rau, Bharati Mukherjee, and others, "left
their permanent imprint" on Indian English fiction even as "the life
of the ordinary Indian woman hasn't changed much" [1] [8]. Unlike Sahgal's
women, who move within the "vortex of politics" and elite historical
events [8], Deshpande's protagonists—Indu, Saru, Jaya, Urmila, Sumi, Madhu—are
drawn overwhelmingly from the educated, career-oriented, urban middle class,
and their struggles are refracted through domestic space rather than the public
sphere of nationalist or parliamentary politics [1] [6]. This essay argues that
it is precisely this sustained attention to the domestic interior—the drawing
room, the kitchen, the marital bed, the mother-daughter conversation—that makes
Deshpande's fiction a rich site for tracing the emergence, contestation, and
partial achievement of feminist consciousness in Indian women's writing.
Theoretical Framework:
Feminist Consciousness, Selfhood, and the Woman Question
Feminist
consciousness, as it operates in Deshpande's novels, cannot be separated from
the broader theoretical vocabulary developed by twentieth-century feminist
criticism. Simone de Beauvoir's foundational claim that "one is not born,
but rather becomes, a woman" underlies the entire architecture of
Deshpande's fiction, in which girls are systematically socialized into
subordinate roles through family ritual, marriage arrangement, and internalized
shame [2]. Beauvoir's critique of marriage as an institution that
"transforms into rights and duties those mutual relations which should be
founded on a spontaneous urge," rendering the two bodies
"degrading" objects of mutual possession rather than autonomous
persons, finds direct fictional embodiment in the marital relationships
Deshpande depicts, from Jaya and Mohan's compelled companionship in That
Long Silence to Mira's coerced sexuality in The Binding Vine [6].
Kate Millett's
notion of "sexual politics"—the recognition that power relations
between men and women pervade even the most intimate domestic exchanges—is
echoed in Deshpande's own insistence that patriarchy operates as "male
domination and the power relationships by which men dominate women" within
her fiction [3]. Adrienne Rich's exhortations to women writers to look afresh
at inherited myth, refusing the roles scripted for them by patriarchal
tradition, resonate with Deshpande's repeated invocation and subsequent
rejection of mythological women—Sita, Gandhari, Draupadi—whom her protagonists
initially model themselves upon and later repudiate as inadequate templates for
a modern, thinking woman's life [1] [3]. Jaya's realization in That Long
Silence that she, like Gandhari, had "bandaged my eyes tightly"
and "didn't want to know anything" is a paradigmatic instance of a
Rich-inflected feminist self-scrutiny: an unblinding, a refusal of inherited
narrative [3].
bell hooks's
theorization of solidarity among women "from margin to center," and
her essay on sisterhood as "political solidarity among women,"
provides a critical vocabulary for reading the female networks Deshpande
constructs in The Binding Vine, where Urmi, Shakutai, Vanaa, Inni, and
the dead Mira are bound together not by unproblematic sisterly affection but by
painful, asymmetrical, class-inflected relations of care [5] [6]. Gayatri
Spivak's foundational question "Can the subaltern speak?" complicates
any simple celebratory reading of female solidarity, since it draws attention
to the ways in which even sympathetic intermediaries—educated, English-speaking
women like Urmi—may inadvertently speak for rather than with the
subaltern woman, whose access to authorized speech remains structurally
foreclosed [11] [12] [13]. Chandra Mohanty's critique of universalizing
feminist categories in "Under Western Eyes" further cautions against
reading Deshpande's middle-class women as representative of "Indian
women" tout court, and instead demands attention to the specific class,
caste, and regional positioning of her protagonists relative to women like
Shakutai and Kalpana in The Binding Vine, whose predicaments are shaped
by economic precarity and social vulnerability in ways categorically different
from Urmi's [10]. This intersectional caution, elaborated further through
Kimberlé Crenshaw's framework as cited in recent scholarship on Deshpande's
short fiction, is essential to any responsible account of "feminist
consciousness" in her oeuvre [10].
Deshpande herself
resisted straightforward identification as a feminist polemicist, insisting
"I'm a novelist, I write novels, not feminist tracts" and lamenting
that being categorized as a "women's writer" caused critics to
overlook the universality of her human concerns [6]. Yet in her essay "Why
I Am a Feminist" she affirmed unambiguously that "women are neither
inferior nor subordinate human beings, but one half of the human race,"
and in interview she articulated a rights-based feminist philosophy centered on
individual autonomy, decision-making capacity, and freedom from oppression
rooted purely in gender [3]. This productive tension between authorial
disavowal and textual feminist argument is itself a critical datum: it suggests
that Deshpande's feminism operates less as ideological program than as what
critics have called a sustained "quest for authentic selfhood," in
which her protagonists move, in the words of one critic, "from despair to
hope, from self negation to self assertion" [3].
Silence as Oppression and
Agency: That Long Silence and Roots and Shadows
Silence is the
master trope of Deshpande's feminist poetics, functioning simultaneously as the
instrument of women's oppression and, paradoxically, as the terrain upon which
resistance is first imagined. In That Long Silence, Jaya's seventeen
years of marital silence are figured through the image of "a pair of
bullocks yoked together," a phrase Jaya recognizes as inadequate to the
emotional reality of marriage, since bullocks "do not know whether one
loves the other or not," yet are compelled to move in the same direction
under social rather than affective compulsion [3]. Jaya's married identity as
"Suhasini"—the compliant, ever-smiling wife name assigned to her by
Mohan—stands in explicit opposition to "Jaya," the name given by her
father and associated with a sharpened, defiant "animus" [3]. The
novel dramatizes what critics term the "double personality aspect of every
modern educated middle-class married woman," in which the socially
compliant Suhasini persona is progressively cracked open by the resurgent Jaya
self, and it is precisely the act of writing—the breaking of the "long
silence" through autobiographical narration—that constitutes Jaya's, and
by extension Deshpande's, central feminist gesture [3]. This narrative strategy
exemplifies what French feminist theory calls écriture féminine: the recovery
of a repressed female voice through the physical, embodied act of inscription,
here rendered not as abstract jouissance but as the concrete labor of an
"unsuccessful writer" finally permitting herself to write her own
life rather than the domesticated fictions she had previously produced [3].
Crucially, That
Long Silence refuses to romanticize silence as pure agency; it also
documents the "mute, traditional bound women" — Kusum, Vanitamani,
Jeeja, Jaya's grandmother, Mohan's mother and sister Vimala — who "opt for
positive resignation in life," suggesting that silence for many women
remains simply oppression without recuperation, a point that qualifies any
triumphalist feminist reading of the novel [3]. Deshpande's insistence that
"women should be recognized, heard and understood; they must not be kept
as cage birds" operates, then, as an aspirational rather than descriptive
claim about the condition of most of the women depicted in the text [3].
Roots and Shadows extends this
exploration of silence into the register of inheritance and intergenerational
patriarchy. Scholarship on the novel identifies its central concern with the
transmission of patriarchal authority through family structures, particularly
the domineering matriarch Akka, whose control over the family's assets and
destinies replicates, rather than subverts, patriarchal logics of power even
though she is herself a woman [2]. The protagonist Indu's negotiation with
inherited wealth, familial expectation, and her own aspirations toward
autonomous selfhood exemplifies Deshpande's recurring narrative structure: a
woman returning to her natal home, confronting the "roots" of her
socialization, and emerging with a reconfigured, if incomplete, sense of self
[2]. Comparative analysis across Roots and Shadows, That Long Silence,
and The Dark Holds No Terrors demonstrates that Deshpande's female
characters "challenge traditional gender roles, negotiate societal
expectations, and seek personal liberation" through remarkably consistent
narrative mechanisms: retrospective first-person narration, extended interior
monologue, and a climactic moment of partial self-recognition rather than
definitive rupture from family [2].
Marriage,
Disillusionment, and Self-Determination: The Dark Holds No Terrors
If That Long
Silence interrogates silence as the medium of marital oppression, The
Dark Holds No Terrors—described by Deshpande as her "most loved
work"—interrogates marriage itself as a contested, indeed violent,
institution [1]. The protagonist Saru, a successful doctor married to Manohar,
an underpaid lecturer, becomes the object of her husband's nocturnal sexual
aggression, itself a psychological displacement of his professional
emasculation and resentment of her superior income and status [6]. Scholarship
situates this dynamic as an early and unusually candid fictional treatment of
marital rape in Indian English literature, one that anticipates the more
explicit treatment of the same theme in The Binding Vine [6]. Saru's
night-time assaults occur in stark contrast to Manohar's daytime persona of a
considerate, even loving husband, dramatizing what one critical study calls the
"splitting" of the "New Indian Woman" between public
professional achievement and private domestic subjugation [10].
Deshpande frames
Saru's predicament within the mythic templates offered to Indian women—goddess,
mother, chaste wife, temptress—templates she explicitly critiques through the
voice of her characters, arguing that "all the women in the legends have been
made by men to satisfy their different needs," leaving little space for
"a real thinking, feeling woman" [1]. Saru's journey away from her
marital home to her natal family, and her subsequent, painful reckoning with
her mother's rejection of her (rooted in son-preference and gendered blame for
her brother's death), demonstrates that the "dark" of the title
operates on multiple registers: marital violence, filial guilt, and the
psychological darkness of internalized patriarchal judgment [1] [10]. That
"the dark holds no terrors" by the novel's end signals not the
disappearance of patriarchal threat but Saru's acquisition of the interior
resources—self-knowledge, professional identity, refusal of victimhood—that
allow her to face that threat without complete self-annihilation, an ending
consistent with Deshpande's characteristic refusal of both total tragedy and
total liberation [1] [2].
Motherhood, Trauma, and
Female Solidarity: The Binding Vine
The Binding Vine (1992) develops
Deshpande's feminist consciousness along two braided axes: the trauma of
maternal loss and the possibility, always qualified, of female solidarity
across class lines. The novel opens with Urmila's grief over the death of her
infant daughter Anu, a grief she refuses to relinquish because "to let go
of that pain... would be a betrayal" of her daughter's memory [6] [7].
This maternal mourning becomes, paradoxically, the affective aperture through
which Urmi becomes attentive to other women's suffering: she is drawn into the
life of her long-dead mother-in-law Mira, a "thwarted writer" whose
Kannada poems, discovered and translated by Urmi, reveal decades of silent
suffering under marital rape, and into the life of Kalpana, a young woman lying
comatose after a brutal rape by her own uncle [6] [7].
The novel's
juxtaposition of rape "committed within and outside marriage" is
critically significant: Mira's poetic testimony—"But tell me, friend, did
Laxmi too / twist brocade tassels round her fingers / and tremble, fearing the
coming / of the dark-clouded, engulfing night"—renders visible a suffering
that had no other outlet, since the "violation of one's body, even if
sanctified by marriage, can be as humiliating and traumatic an experience as
rape"
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