Analysis Of Shashi Deshpande's Roots And Shadows

Shashi Deshpande is a leading woman novelist in Indian writing in English. She has written seven novels and four collections of short stories. In her novels she gives us a realistic portrait of middle-class educated Indian women who are self-confident, self-reliant and financially self-dependent. Such women are the protagonists of her novels, they get trapped between tradition and modernity, they undergo great mental trauma, they face the problems of adjustments and conflicts and then they go in self- quest or a quest for their identity. When they start their journey for self-quest, they face sundry outer and inner conflicts, but they do not bother for the restrictions imposed by society, culture and nature and they get rid of their own fear and guilt.Roots and Shadows is the first novel of Shashi Deshpande and this novel depicts the tribulations and suffocation experienced by Indu, the female protagonist in a male-dominated and tradition-bound society. Indu faces confrontation or …show more content…
She was taught how to behave and how to conduct herself in society. Even a simple thing, like sending a cup of tea for her to the room, was supposed to be a breach of etiquette. As she tells, “sending up a cup of tea for a woman. Whoever heard of it?” Women, like children, were supposed to know their place. She writes, “As a child, they had told me I must be obedient and unquestioning. As a girl, they had told me I must be weak 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 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.” For a woman intelligence was always a burden. They liked their women not to think, not to make their own identity. And when old uncles had wanted Saroja to learn music, Akka opposed tooth and