Feminism In Shashi Deshpande Feminism

Usually we find the heroine as a narrator in Shashi Deshpande’s works. She employs a kind of stream of consciousness technique. The narrative goes back and forth in time. Since there is nothing doctrinaire about her fiction, it won’t be proper to put her in the list of feminists. She simply portrays the meaning of being a woman in modern India. The authentic recreation of India is the outstanding feature of her stories as well as novels. There is nothing sensational or exotic about her India. She doesn’t write about the grinding poverty of Indian masses. She describes emotional deprivation. The woman, who is deprived of love, understanding and compassion, is the center of her work. Shashi Deshpande discloses traditional Indian Society’s bias …show more content…
She basically reflects on the problems and concerns of the middle-class Indian women. Her writings remain sensitive to the common everyday events and experiences. They give artistic expression to something that is simple and uninteresting. Her feminism is peculiarly Indian because it is born out of the predicament of Indian women placed between contradictory identities: tradition and modernity, family and profession, culture and nature. Her feminism is humanistic and optimistic in its outlook.
The theme in Shashi Deshpande’s novels is relationship between father and daughter, husband and wife as well as between mother and daughter. In all these relationships the woman occupies the central stage. Her novels reflect the lives of suffocated women in search of solution from suffering. While looking for a solution to their personal problems, the women in her novels shift from their personal pains to the sufferings of the other …show more content…
They are neither traditional nor radical in their ideas and practice. Most of Deshpande’s protagonists belong to this category. They might walk out of their home in protest against their suffering, but gradually realizes that leaving the houses will not solve their problems. Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors thinks over her pains even after she escapes her marital home. Indu in Roots and Shadows leaves her husband to seek refuge in her ancestral home, but she is unable to accept her fate as any ordinary woman might do. These women suffer more because they are aware of the escape routes of two other types of women but hesitate to choose those options. They are at the crossroads. At the end of the novels, they realize themselves and learn to live up to challenge. Indu and Jaya decide to confront their husbands and talk the matter out in order to arrive at a