Search for Identity in Despandey

SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN SHASHI DESHPANDE’S THAT LONG SILENCE, THE DARK HOLDS NO TERROR AND ROOTS AND SHADOWS


"SEARCH FOR IDENTITY IN SHASHI DESHPANDE’S THAT LONG SILENCE, THE DARK HOLDS NO TERROR AND ROOTS AND SHADOWS", 1st Edition

Dr.Kavya.B

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

It is with great elation, I take this opportunity to express my profound

sense of gratitude to my Research guide Dr. Shantha Naik N Assistant

Professor, Department of Studies in English, Maharaja’s College, University of

Mysore, Mysore, Karnataka, India for the valuable guidance, supervision and

constant encouragement given throughout the course of the present

investigation. His valuable support and timely suggestions have enabled me to

successfully complete this dissertation.

I am deeply indebted to respected Prof. K.M.Chandar, Prof. C.P. Ravi

Chandra, Prof. K.T. Sunita, Prof. Mahadeva, Prof. A.S. Dasan, Dr. Vijaya

Sheshadri & Dr. Devikarani, for their encouragement, helpful suggestions and

comments.

I am grateful to my beloved parents Sri. R. Basavanna, and Smt. G.P.

Pushpalatha for their constant support throughout my research work. I thank

my husband Dr. T.S. Jagadeesh Kumar, Associate professor, University of

Mysore for his encouragement.

I am indebted to Miss. Suman, Librarian, CIIL for her support. I thank

my college colleagues and Principal Mr. Marpallikar,Govt.Pre-University

College,Gabbur,Raichur for their co.operation.

My special thanks to my friends Mrs.Mamata Krishna, Ms.Pushpalatha,

Ms.Sujatha and my well wishers.


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CONTENTS

CHAPTER

TITLE

PAGE

No.

I

INTRODUCTION

5-32

II

ERASING – THAT LONG SILENCE

33-53

III

LIGHT OF AWARENESS – THE DARK HOLDS

NO TERROR

54-76

IV

RENOUNCE-ROOTS AND SHADOWS

77-98

V

CONCLUSION

100-106

BIBLIOGRAPHY

107-116


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CHAPTER - I

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this study is to examine self-identity in the novels That Long

Silence, The Dark Holds No Terror and Roots and Shadows written by the most

renowned writer Shashi deshpande. Human relations form the warp and woof of

Shashi Deshpande’s novels; her greatness is revealed in the treatment of human

relation capacity for a deeper probing of the human heart. Shashi Deshpande is

a diva of female assertion. The Plight of middle class women that too educated

and working women, the marital adjustments and quest for identity forms the

crux of her novels. Her protagonists are more intelligent and capable women

than men. Who desire to have their own individuality. Shashi Deshpande is

fascinated towards the complexities of human relationships. She has confessed

in an interview with Geetha Gangadharan: “We know a lot about the physical

and the organic world and the Universe in general, but we still know very little

about human relationships. It is the most mystifying thing as I am concerned. I

will continue to wonder about it, puzzle over it and write about it. And still it is

tremendously intriguing, fascinating.”1 (Indian communicator, 20 November

1994 P-11).

1 R.S. Pathak (ed), The fictions of Shashi Deshpande (Creative Books 1988) P.202.


6

The treatment of human relationships in the words of T.D. Brutons:

“Indian society has always been a group society; the administration of the west

is still foreign. Thus even individual dreams tend to have a broad social content

and one life reflects another. One sees this in the tensions between the new

urbanized class and their village kinsmen, between minority groups and those

who still seek to uphold monolithic class barriers, between the masses and those

in public office between students and teachers and most strikingly – between the

young and their middle – aged ( and often bewildered) parents and guardians.

These conflicts are re-enacted in a million forms in modern India. The novelist

can thus draw upon certain situations, essentially individual, which yet have

almost the archetypal power of parable.”2

Fiction has its own privilege among drama, prose and epic. “All over the

world the novel has become the dominant literary form. The once-popular

modern of myth, symbol and parable have been mainly absorbed by the more

esoteric styles of poetry. Whatever literary has spread the novel-realistic,

precise, this worldly has swiftly followed. ‘The Art of fiction’ as Henry James

reverently called it, is not reserved for a few initiates. The modern world

demands novels, just as it demands films and television programmes. Indeed, it

is only through the novel that literature, the unglamorous written word without

colour or illustration is able to compete with its brash competitors of the

2 T.D. Burton, Critical Essays on Indian writing in English. P.201-202.


7

screen.”3 It is remarkable that Indian English novel has gained a challenging

position. The Prose fiction in English Written by Indians is undoubtedly “the

most popular vehicle for the transmission of Indian ideas to the wider speaking

world”.4

A careful study of the Indian English fiction gives the clear picture of our

culture. Indian English Fiction not only demonstrates its culture but it’s very

soul is Indian and that makes it different. There is a remarkable growth from the

first Indian novel in English Raj Mohan’s wife by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

to the latest Jinnah: India Partition Independence by Jaswant Singh. Bankim

Chandra is the pioneer writer whose translations to English are significant to the

literary renaissance in India. Other contributors like B.R. Rajam (Vasudeva

Sastri), T. Rama Krishna (Padmini, 1909) and The Dive for Death (1911), P.A.

Madhvian (Thillai Govindan), Sardar Joginder Singh’s Nur Jahan and Nasrin

are note worthy. After 1930, the emergence of the three great novelists Mulk

Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao changed he scenario of Indian English

literature. Mulk Raj Anand’s Across the Black waters, The Coolie, Two leaves

and a Bud, The untouchable, The village and The Big Heart reveal socialistic

pattern of society. It raised a wave of social revolution in the society by voicing

the poor and oppressed.

3 T.D. Burton, “Indian in fiction – The Heritage of Indianess”, critical Essays on Indian writing in English,ed. M.K. Naik, S.K. Desai, G.S. Amar ( Dharwar : Karnataka University Press, 1972), P.199. 4 Williams. H.J. “ Indo – Anglian literature, 1800-1900 ( Orient Longman’s 1976), P.109


8

R.K. Narayan’s novels revolve round the fictious town Malgudi a small

town in south India in his first novel Swami and Friends. Raja Rao achieves

Indianess by capturing the flavour of a regional dialect. Indianess is seen in the

use of a few words here and these from the language use of imagery. Raja Rao’s

Kanthapura (1938), is perhaps the finest evocation of the Gandhian age in

Indian English Fiction. William Walsh rightly opines: “It was in 1930s that the

Indians began what has now turned out to be their very substantial contribution

to the novel in English and one peculiarly suited to their talents.”5 After the

1950s however, novelists indulged in portraying their private life. As C.Paul

verghese pointed out: “Most of them in their eagerness to find novel themes,

renounced the larger world in favour of the inner man and engaged themselves

in a search for the essence of human living.”6

Indian English literature in the recent past has attracted a widespread

interest, both in India and abroad. Women novelists have proved their worth by

enriching Indian English fiction with their memorable contribution. With the

born gift of storytelling women novelists have dwelled into the home of human

minds and hearts with the core essence of sympathy, sensitivity and

understanding. As in English literature women novelists – Jane Austen, George

Eliot, the Bronte sisters,

5 The Indian Sensibility in English in C.D. Narasimhaiah’s (ed.) Awakened Conscience ( New Delhi, Sterling, 1978), p.66. 6 Verghese C. Palu, Problems of the Idnian creative Writer in English ( Bombay : Somaiya, 1971), pp.124-25.


9

Mrs. Gaskell Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf would be in the top

list so as in Indian Women novelists Kamala Markandaya, Ruth Pawar

Jhabuala, Anita Desai, Nayantara Sahgal, Shashi Deshpande, Shobha De, Kiran

Desai, Arundhati Roy, Gita Hariharan and Manju Kapur are on the top list.

Literature which was male dominated forced to show with sparking contribution

with the most educated women who urged to voice their feelings to redefine

their space, to connect to the larger world. There was a time when Anita Desai

had said about women novelists in English: “With all the richness of material at

hand, Indian women writers have stopped short from a lack of imagination,

courage nerve or gusto – of the satirical edge the ironic tone, the inspired

criticism or the lyric response that alone might have brought their novels to life.

In these last few years of thin articulary, they have been content to record and

document – but to satirize, criticize, lament? No, not yet. They seem unable to

throw off the habits of reticence and acceptance of being uncritical and

unobtrusive. Oddly enough, they have not gone to the other extreme of feminity

or fantasy either. With their vast inherited store of myth, fable, legend and

superstition, one might have expected here and there a touch of the fantasy of

Narayan of Sudhin, but they have remained rigidly, self – consciously prosaic

perhaps here lies the crux of the matter – rigidly and self consciousness, the

natural descendents of the silence, the falsehoods and the shackles of the past.”7

7 Anita Desai : “ Women Writers”, Quest, No.65, April – June 1970, Pp.42-43


10

Happily today the scene is dramatically different. Now our women

novelists have gained international acclaim. Many significant literary awards

have been won by many novelists: The Booker for Arundhati Roy’s The God of

Small Things in 1997 followed by Krian Desai for her maiden novel Inheritance

of Loss. The Commonwealth awards for best first books for Githa Hariharan’s

Thousand Faces of Night (1993) Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters (1998), the

Common wealth Award for the Best short story for Sujata Sankranti’s The Warp

and the Weft and The Pulitzer Prize for Jhumpa Hahiri’s Interpreter of Maldies

it is noteworthy that Manjula Padmanabhan is recipient of the Onassis Award

for Drama and Rukhmini Bhaya Nair the Commonwealth Poetry Award.

The history of emergence of women writers in Indian writing in English

was a great significance during the last quarter of the 19th century. Toru Dutt

(1856 – 1878) was one prodigy. She is the pioneering poetess who made a mark

in the creative writing of 19th century by publishing A Sheaf Gleaned in French

Fields in 1876. It is very remarkable that there were women who contributed

their share in religious and political movements of India. Pandita Ramabai

(1858–1922) involved herself in the movement for women’s emancipation. She

started Women’s Organizations, campaigned for women’s education and

medical training. She authored a book on woman’s religious law to safeguard

women from blind traditions. Swarnakumari Devi (1885-1932), Rabindranath

Tagore’s sister was the founder of Theosophical Society for Women of all


11

religions. She was a co-editor of a Bengali Journal Bharati. In the 1889 Indian

National Congress meeting there were ten women participants. After 1919, it

was M.K.Gandhi, the father of the nation on the scene for freedom struggle who

inspired Sarojini Naidu, poetess, orator, freedom fighter became the president of

the Indian National Congress. Gandhi’s ideals gained respect to women and

discarded her symbol of sex doll. In 1938 Gandhi penned, “I do believe that

women is more fitted than man to make Ahimsa. For the courage of self-

sacrifice woman is in anyway superior to man”. (Gandhi Quoted 80:125)

Among the prominent post independent Indian Women novelists Kamala

Markandaya’s contribution is note worthy whose fiction revolves round the

sphere of traditional Indian society, which has been passing through a phase of

transformation. She is a talented novelist defined as a “Superb representative of

the growing number of Indian Woman Writing Serious Literature in English”.8

Markandaya deals with more on the rural backgrounds. Her first novel Nectar

In A Sieve portrays hunger and starvation in Indian Villages. Her poignant and

realistic expression of the pathetic conditions of the peasants is memorable. The

plot construction in her earlier novels – Nectar In A Sieve, Some Inner Fury, A

silence of Desire, Possession and A Handful of Rice have a social background.

Whereas in The coffer Dams, Nowhere Man, Two Virgins and The Golden

Honey Comb deals with issues like alienation, rootlessness. Her novel The

8 Stephen Ignatius Hemenway : The Novel of India ( Vol. II : The Indo Anglian Novel), Calcutta, Writers Workshop, 1975, P.52


12

Golden Honey Comb sets mirror to the talent of the novelist. It is a historical

novel which spans Indo-British relations till the attainment of independent in

1947.

Ruth Jhabvala is a versatile and humorist writer. Being Indo Anglian she

deals with the personal relation, man-woman relationship and domestic life with

a humanity amalgamation of East-West. Her first novel To whom She will

(1955) was compared by critics to the work of Jane Austen. The Nature of

Passion (1956) is about the upper class life in New Delhi, Esmond in India

(1958) is a social comedy, The Householder (1960) is a realistic novel, Get

Ready for Battle (1962) is a contrasting novel between materialistic values and

eternal values of life, A Back ward place (1965) seems to be a sequel of Esmond

in India. A New Dominiion (1972) a novel of spiritual quest and Heat and Dust

(1975) is a remarkable work of art which won her the prestigious Booker prize.

Anita Desai is one of the few renowned Indian writers in English with an

International repute. Her novels occupy a unique place in the Indian English

Literature because of her writing style, which is rich with psychological depth

and sophistication. She took the literary world by a storm with her first novel

Cry, the Peacock in 1968. It is a psychological novel exploring the traumatic

emotional world of the protagonist Maya.

Voices in the City (1965) is flavoured with depression, disillusionment

and hopelessness. This novel is compared with Camu’s The outsider. Bye Bye


13

Black Bird (1971) deals with the theme of frustration and alienation in a foreign

country. Where shall we go this summer (1975) is again with a theme of

frustration and loneliness in married life. Fire on the mountain (1977) revolves

round the inner emotional world of Nanda Kaul, on old lady. Clear light of Day

(1980) is a retrospective novel. In custody (1984) (also made into film),

Baumgartner’s Bombay, Journey to Ithaca, Fasting Feasting, Diamond Dust

and The Zig Zag Way (2004) deals with Personal struggles and problems of

contemporary life.

Nayantara Sahgal presents the dilemma of modern man very effectively

through her novels. Her first Novel A Time To Be Happy (1957) presents the

dawn of Indian Independence. In her first novel itself she has successfully

portrayed a wide variety of characters quite convincingly and realistically.

There is an autobiographical touch in almost all her novels. The novelist being

the niece of Jawaharlal Nehru uses personal knowledge of politics in her second

novel. The Time of Morning is about the fall of Kalyan Sinha an important

figure in the Government becomes the crux of this novel. Storm in Chandigarh

is with the theme of partition of Punjab into the Hindu dominated Haryana and

Sikh dominated Punjab. It is in fact the story of the novelist’s break up of her

marriage. The Day in Shadow (1985) is sensitive and political novel. A situation

in New Delhi is a novel which deals with moral values of the politicians and


14

frustrated youth becoming Naxalites. Rich LikeUs (1985) is her best novel

dealing with Post – Nehru era in India.

From her first novel, The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980) to In The

Country of Deciet (2009) Shashi Deshpande’s central issue remain unchanged.

She has been always keen on self – assertion and freedom of self. Her real

concern is exploring the human psyche. She documents Indian middle – class

women with Indian settings, Indian culture and Indian background. It is evident

that all the characters old and new generation adhere to the Indian culture. All

her protagonists rebel the traditional roles forced on Indian woman but reject to

come out of the marital Institution as Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Though

all her novels are open ended the protagonists would be a transformed New

Woman with a new attitude in the end.

Shashi Deshpande was born in 1938 in Dharwad, a prominent place

known for its education and culture in north Karnataka. Her father late Adya

Rangacharya (Sriranga) was a highly reputed and well-known Kannada

playwright. She was educated in Mumbai and Bangalore, and secured her M.A

in English from the University of Mysore. Shashi Deshpande also has to her

credit degrees in Economics and Law. When she was living in Mumbai she did a

course on Journalism at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and worked for a couple of

months as a journalist for the magazine Onlooker. She began writing rather late

in life at her father's persuasion and insistence. In 1969, she visited England


15

which inspired her to write and publish an account of her experiences on the

English soil. Since then, her short stories began to appear regularly in popular

magazines. Shashi Deshpande has written four children’s books, a number of

short stories, and ten novels, besides several perceptive essays, now available in

a volume entitled Writing from the Margin and Other Essays. She has also

written the screenplay for the Hindi feature film Drishti. She was honoured with

the Padmashri award in 2009 by the Government of India.

Shashi Deshpande's first novel The Dark Holds No Terrors was published

in 1980, followed by If I Die Today in 1982. Roots and Shadows and Come Up

and Be Dead were published in 1983. While Roots and Shadows won the

Thirumathi Rangammal Prize for the best Indian novel of 1982-83, That Long

Silence published by the Virago Feminist Press in 1988, fetched her India’s

Sahitya Akademi award for 1990. Her other novels are The Binding Vine (1993),

A Matter of Time (1996), Small Remedies (2000), Moving On (2004) and In the

Country of Deceit (2008) Her short stories have been collected and published in

four volumes: The Legacy and Other Stories (1978), It was Dark and Other

Stories (1986), It was the Nightingale and Other Stories (1986) and The Miracle

and Other Stories (1986). Shashi Deshpande sticks closely to daily-life

experiences. Her novels move in space as well as in time, and reuse mythical

heritage, through internalized beliefs. She uses the’ realistic’ approach to

domesticate English, she says, “I am converting the life which is lived in


16

different languages, a small part of it being in English as well into a Single

language”9

Women’s suppression is rooted in the very fabric of Indian society – in

traditions, in religious doctrine and practices, within the education and legal

systems, and within families. Traditionally, women bear primary responsibility

for the well being of their families. Yet they are discriminated systematically

and deprived of access to resources such as education, health care services, job,

training and etc”.10 Shashi Deshpande’s novel shows how carefully she

expresses the frustration and disappointments of women who experience in the

social and cultural oppression in the male-dominated society.

The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980) explodes the myth of man's

superiority by portraying a career woman whose marriage is on the rocks. Sarita

or Saru is a "two-in-one-woman" who is a "terrified trapped animal" in the

hands of her husband Manohar. The novel dramatizes the reaction against the

traditional concept that everything in a girl's life is shaped towards the sole end

of pleasing a male. Saru in the novel is endowed with an ability to launch a self-

search as well as offer a critique of the society in general without either

sentimentalizing or over-dramatising the picture.

9 Writing from the margin and other Essays : Purdha in the Subcontinental Novel in English. Deshpande Shashi P.32-38. 2005 Viking New Delhi. 10 Soundary, M.H and Sudhir M.A. 2003, Status of Women Gender Disprity in Tamil Nadu. Social Welfare 49 (12) 4-27.


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If I die Today (1982) and Come up and Be Dead (1983) are different from

the other novels of Shashi Deshpande. The former was originally published as a

short story and later developed into a novel, the latter was meant for a serial

publication. Both can be read as detective novels, even then it deals with

women issues such as education, economic independence and motherhood. The

theme of the novel is like an allegory of the story of Adam and Eve. The

protagonist-narrator Manju is an honest, straightforward, broad minded, kind

hearted and intelligent lady who is a lecturer in a college by profession. Manju’s

married life is caught in the well of silences and barriers. She fails to bring any

harmony in her married life even after the birth of the second child and she

thinks “A marriage you start off expecting so many things. And bit-by-bit like

dead leaves, the expectations fall off. But there two people who have shut

themselves off in two separate glass jar who can see each other but can’t

communicate? Is this marriage?” (Shashi Deshpande P.24).

Come Up and Be Dead is a story of revenge. Miss Kshama Rao is the

new head mistress of the high school. She has been appointed as a result of the

good impression she made on the chairman of the body of Governors whom she

encountered by chance in a train. The novel’s central theme is murder which

probes the vengefulness in Varma. Varma becomes a misogynist and treats the

whole female sex as his enemy. Note Girish’s words to Devyani, “Strange isn’t

it, that a man who has so much money should make himself vulnerable by going


18

in for a thing like this? When I went to him I knew at once that he enjoyed this

trade in girls." (252)

Roots and Shadows encapsulates the artistic vision of feminity as

expressed by Shashi Deshpande. It explores the quest for an authentic selfhood.

Indu, the protagonist, symbolizes the New woman, and through her Deshpande

portrays the inner struggle of an artist to express herself and to discover her real

self through her potential for creative writing. Addressing the question of

marginalization of women, among other things, the novel shows the emergence

of a bold, challenging woman who defies male authority and expresses her

vision of the struggle for harmony.

That Long Silence, deals with a crisis in a middle class family, which

triggers off a process of retrospection and introspection. Jaya, an urban, middle

class woman exposed to liberal western ideas seeks to free herself from

chauvinistic ideas such as the husband as a "sheltering tree." Moreover, into the

texture of a novel supposedly about Jaya and Mohan, several tragedies of

subordination are woven as though to form a tapestry. And at the end of the

novel, Jaya asks herself in honest self-doubt and self-evaluation the question:

"But why am I making myself the heroine of this story?"

Urmi in The Binding Vine, in a moment of crisis, makes an inward

journey which enables her to analyze the roles of women around herself. Urmi's

comments, in the context of the narrative, on the girl child and society, rape in

marriage, marriage in general in the Indian society, woman and family and


19

career, relationship between mother and daughter, constitute the core of the

novel and reveal the complex texture of a tradition-bound society which

requires the redemptive power of love to free itself from violence, deprivation,

and destitution.

Shashi Deshpande’s novel A Matter of Time interestingly traces the

transformation of the ideology from the stage of the internalization of

patriarchal values through awareness of the value of female bonding and self

identity to assertion of women’s rights. This is the only novel which has the

distinction of having a male protagonist Gopal. The novel also endeavours to

trace the plight of the woman who shoulders the responsibility of the whole

family when her husband leaves the house all on a sudden without uttering a

word. Her Sumi’s parents Kalyani and Sripathi spend a long period of nearly

thirty five years without speaking to each other. Four generations of women

project four variants of the ideology within the same family charting the course

of social history and ideological change.

Small Remedies potrarys social transitions occurring in Indian society.

Savitribai and Leela represent modern women with vaulting ambition and

courage and do what they want violating the frame of society. Madhu is

summoned to write the biography of Savitribai Indorker, a classical singer. It is

through her narration, Madhu goes into her flashback and recalls the memory of

her beloved people and gains immense strength to lead her future life.


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In her novel Moving on, Shashi Deshpande has drawn the most private

world of humans, the most intimate and secret world of man and woman. It

stresses how the past of man sets test on the present and future. Manjari, realizes

the urge of knowing her parents and goes through her fathers dairy. She learns

about her parents' frustrations and suffocation in their marriage and thinks about

her marriage which created gap and ultimately lead to the doom of their happy

family. Through her Baba’s dairy she learns the essence of life and realizes that

life carries its own truth within it, and in order to change one’s circumstances,

they have to be accepted.

In her latest novel In the Country of Deceit Shashi Deshpande begins her

novel with the demolition of the house. Devayani and her sister Savitha are

looking at the empty space where once was the house of their childhood. Their

parents are dead - their father as a broken, bitter man, and their mother after a

long and difficult illness. The new house - “a complete reversal of the old

house” - is large, spacious, filled with light. While Savitha returns with her

doctor husband and children to Delhi, Devayani moves into the new house,

happy to remain in their hometown Rajnur. She establishes friendship with

Rani, a onetime film actor who, with her husband and children, has moved back

to India from the US. While Rani’s mind is quietly preoccupied with memories

of her film career, Devayani spends her time teaching English and caring for her

garden. She was leading a calm life until she meets Ashok Chinnappa, the new


21

district superintendent of police who is older and married, with a 10-year-old

daughter. Then there is twist in the story as they suddenly embrace on a

passionate affair. He is in a highly visible post in this small town where

everyone knows everyone else; she is unmarried and lives alone. Yet there is a

desperate madness in their relationship and meeting in a car or in her house.

Devayani feels that there is something sordid about meeting like this; but she

cannot end it. “There are no boundaries for love,” she says silently. She frees

Ashok from the bondage as he is transferred from Rajnur and thinks, “Why did

I do it? Why did I enter the country of deceit? What took me into it? I hesitate to

use the word love, but what other word is there? And yet, like the word

“atonement, the word love is too simple for the complicated emotion and

responses the made me to do what I had done. Ultimately, I did it because he

was Ashok, because we met. That’s all.”

Recently to her credit Shashi Deshpande has translated Gauri

deshpande’s work Deliverance- a novella originally written in Marathi as

Nirgaathi into English. “The first thing that leaves a reader overwhelmed when

he/she starts skimming through Deliverance is the sheer woman- power that

oozes through the effortlessly powerful writing that coursed through Gauri’s

pen, especially in an era more than two decades down the line!”11

Feminism had its origin in the west. The term ‘feminism’ is derived from

the Latin word ‘femina’ meaning women, originally meant ‘having the qualities 11 Reshma Kulkarni, Literary Review, The Hindu, March 6, 2011


22

of females’. Its genesis can be marked during the last decade of the 18th century,

when the struggle for women’s Rights began. The core of feminism is the belief

that women are subordinated to men in western culture. Feminism seeks to

liberate women from the subordination and to reconstruct society in such a way

that patriarchy is eliminated and a culture is created that is fully inclusive of

women’s desires and purposes. There are many different kinds of feminist

theory but they all have these goals in common. Where they differ is in the

particular visions of what such a reconstructed society would look like and in

the strategies they employ to achieve it. “Feminism has only working

definitions” says Donna hawxhurst and sue Morrow, “since it is a dynamic,

constantly changing ideology with many aspects including the personal, the

political and the philosophical. It can never be simply a belief system. Without

action, feminism is merely empty rhetoric which cancels itself out”.12 Barbara

Berg defines it as “a broad movement embracing numerous phases of women’s

emancipation. It is the freedom from sex-determined role, freedom from

society’s oppressive restrictions, freedom to express her thought fully and to

convert them freely into action”13

The most Significant work, concerning-the quest for recognition of

women’s socio-cultural roles and struggles for women’s Social cultural and

political rights was Mary Wollstone Craft’s- “A vindication of the Rights of

12 Tuttle, Liss (1987). “ Feminism : A Movement to End Oppressions”, in Anna Coote and Ters Gill (Ed.), Women’s Rights : A Practical guide P. 65-66. 13 Hooks, Bell (1974). “ Feminism : A Movement to End Oppressions”, in AnnaCoote and Ters Gill (Ed.), Women’s Rights: A Practical guide, P.65-66


23

women”(1792). Wollstone Craft engendered a political activism that has

remained at the core of western feminism. She says “In tracing the causes that

have degraded woman, I have confined my observations to such as universally

act upon the morals and manners of the whole sex and to me it appears clear,

that they all spring from want of understanding. Whether this arises from a

physical or accidental weakness of faculties, time alone can determine; for I

shall not any lay any great stress upon the example of a few women who from

having received a masculine education have acquired courage and resolution. I

only contend that the men who have been placed in similar situation have

acquired a similar character.” Fredrick among later works, with such quests

include Margaret Fuller’s woman in the 19th century (1845) John Stuart mill’s

“The subjection of women “(1869) Frederic Engel’s “The origin of the Family

“(1884) and Olive Scheiners” Women and labour”. (1911).The struggle was

cameo on the suffragette movement at the outset of the 20th century. In 1929,

Virginia Woolf’s book “A Room of one’s own “Came to light and was

recognized as the most important feminists’ document. The late 1960’s

witnessed intensification of the feminist struggle in Europe and America. The

movement acquired political dimensions and turned aggressive and polemical

nature. Western theories are a part of our intellectual capital for, Raja Ram

Mohan Roy, Phule, Ambedkar or Pundit Ramabai. During the colonial period

the negotiation led to a trend of essential sing ‘Indian culture’ and a

construction of an image of recasted Indian womanhood as an epitome of that


24

culture. (Flavia 1994) “In the 1990s it was Elaine showalter, who claimed that

feminist criticism has finished with her ‘Gyno –Criticism’ and needed to focus

on gender and sexual difference in text by men as much as by women.

‘Speaking of Gender’ (1989) focused on signification of the feminine in the

works of Irigaray, Jardine and others. Thus from 1970’s onwards the growing

interest in feminist criticism has taken speedy strides like political feminism

which began with the women’s Liberation Movement in ‘70s’, critical feminism

today is shaped by a much richer understanding of difference. …With such

conceptions feminism comes a long way from power politics to an

understanding of cultural diversification.”14 Indian Women are credited with

having resisted patriarchal oppression for more than 2,000 years (Tharu and

Lalita, 1993.)

The first major work in this direction was Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics

in 1970 which according to feminist social scientist is “one of the first major

attempts to provide a though theoretical examination of the oppression of

women using the concept of patriarchy”. The other major work is Adrienne

Rich’s Of Women Born in 1976. This book suggests that women voices can

only be authorised by hearing private and sometimes painful experiences. She

painfully describes. I soon began to sense a fundamental perpetual difficulty

among male scholars (and some female once) for which “sexism” is too facile a

term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be named “patrivincialism” 14 Sengupta, Jayita, Refractions of Desire : Feminist Perspective in the Novels of Toni Morrison, Michele Roberts and Anita Desai, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors (P) Ltd., 2006, P.52)


25

or “patriochalism”: the assumption that women are a sub-group, that “man’s

world” is the “real” world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture

and culture to partriarchy, that the “great” or “liberalising” period of history

have been the same for women as for men, that generalisations about “man”,

“humankind”, “children”, “black”, “parents”, “the working class” hold true for

women, mother, daughters, sisters, wet nurses, infant girls, and can include

them with no more than a glancing reference here and there, usually to some

specialised function like breast-feeding.15

If Rich’s Of Women Born helped women in deconstructing

partriochialism, Nacy Hartsock’s Money, Sex and Power (1985) draws on

Marxist’s analysis of ideology to argue that it is the restriction of woman the

private sphere which accounts to her dominance by the man. This exclusion of

women for the public sphere affects the organisation of knowledge, specially in

academic disciplines. Therefore, Hartsock argues on Marxist line that only an

epistemology rooted in production instead of an exchange can ground a way of

knowing that distinguishes reality from false appearances. That is to say,

Hartsock argues that theories of power which employ the market model of

exchange can only assume a experience of the domination because these

theories reflect the experiences of the dominations, i.e., the experiences of men.

She then concludes that only women’s experiences provide a standpoint which

15 Adrienne Rich, of Women Born : Motherhood as Experience and Institution, New York, Norton, 1976, p.16


26

can uncover the real relation of male domination.16 According to Chandra

Mohanty’s definition of Third world Women are “imagined community of

women with divergent histories and social locations woven together by the

political threats of opposition to forms of domination (Sexist, racist and

imperialist structures that are not only pervasive but also systematic).”17

In the Western male-dominated colonial, neo-colonial and post-colonial

discourse, we discover three distorted images of southern women. The first

image is that of Zenana, whereby veiled Third world Women are looked upon

as mikndless member of a harem, preoccupied with petty domestic raivalries

rather than with artistic and political affairs of their times.18 The Second image

of the Third world Women is that of sex objects.This image is exemplified in

Malek Alleula’s exposure of the Colonial Harem (1986) and Rana Kabbani’s

Europe’s Myths of the Orient (1986). Here, the women of South are portrayed

as eroticised, unclothed and therefore needed to be ‘civilised’ through their

contact with the colonisers. How ironical it seems that in the first image women

of south are criticised for being fully clothed and in the second, for being half-

naked. However, both images define Third world Women as inferior and

16 Money, Sex and Power : Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism, Boston, North Eastern University Press, 1935, p.242 17 Chandra Mohanty, “ Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism” in Mohanty et., al (eds), Third World Women and Politics of Feminism, blumington, Indiana University Press, 1991, P.4 18 C. Enloc, Bananas, Beaches and Bases : Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Barkeley, University of California Press, 1989, P.53


27

subjugated- the object of sexual desire. Spivak says that in both images, the

Third world Women are “not allowed to speak” and “deeply in shadow”.19

In the third image, the women of the Third World are portrayed as

Victims. The feminists, who create such images, claim that they base their

analyses on the shared and gendered oppression of Women. In doing so, they

homogenise the experiences and conditions of the western women and apply it

to women across the world. As a result, the varied interests of Women of South

are not only misrepresented but produce reductive understandings of the Third

World Women’s multiple realities.20 The above mentioned three images of

women depict Third World Women are traditional and non-liberated and need

to be civilised and developed like western women. Nussbaum rightly remarks

what is essential is the positive changes in the lives of women. According to her

Essentialism and particular perception were not opposed: they were

complimentary aspects of a single process of deliberation. Had the women not

been seen as a human beings who shared with other women a common

humanity, the local women could not have told their story they did, nor could

development workers have brought their own experiences of feminism into

participatory dialogue as if they had some relevance for the local women. The

very structure of the dialogue presupposed the recognition of common

humanity, and it was only with this basis securely established that they could 19 G.C. Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essay in Cultural Politics, New York Routledge, 1988, p.287. 20 A.M. Goetz, “ Feminism and the Limits of the Claim to Know: Contradictions in the Feminist Approach to Women in Development: in R. Grant and K. Newland (eds.,) Gender and International Relations, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991, p.143


28

fruitfully explore the concrete circumstances in which they were trying, in the

one case, to live and in the other case, to promote flourishing lives.”21

Feminism in literature is essentially manifestation of women in society.

Feminism always meant representation of freedom of women’s mind spirit and

body. One of the primary concerns of feminism is to declare that a woman is a

being. She is not an appendage a subordinate of man. Rather she is an

autonomous being capable of trial and error, finding her own way to salvation.

With the rise of feminism in India in the seventies, literacy feminist critics

confront to the feminine sensibility, an urge to create a literature of thin own. A

literature written by women about women and for women. The writings of

women all considered as feminists and many writers deny the tag and even a

writer is referred to as a ‘Woman writer’ while male is not referred as ‘male

writer’. Shashi Deshpande on feminism in India and Reservation Bill says: “I

think it will never happen because men will never give women anything. It will

happen because of women themselves.” Further she says: “I think consumerism

is good in one way. You see a T.V and you see all those things and you say I

want to have that and how do you get that if you don’t work and your husband

alone is earning? you know, my servant who has been working with me for

many years, whatever she wants she buys with her own money. She does not

wait for her husband to buy it. So, consumerism is going to be good in one way.

21 M. Nussbaum, “ Human functionary and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism”, Political Theory, 20,2,1992 : 236-37.


29

Because if people want the goods, they will need their own money. To earn the

money they want to take up a job. Once you take up a job you became an

independent person.”

Earlier Shashi Deshpande objected being called as a feminist. But later

admits herself to be a feminist but only as a person and certainly not as novelist,

she says in an interview her stance on this issue “I now have no doubts at all in

saying that I am a feminist``, in my own life, I mean. But not consciously, as a

novelist. I must also say that my feminism has come to me very slowly, very

gradually and mainly out of any own thinking and experiences and feelings. I

started writing first, and only then discovered my feminism. And it was much

later that I actually read books about it.22 further clearing her view point, she

declares: … “I am a feminist, I’m very staunch feminist in my personal life…

cruelty and oppression should not be there between the two genders, this is my

idea of feminism. I am feminist very much and I strongly react against any kind

of cruelty or oppression, decimal of opportunities to women became they are

women… the important thing is we have the right to live ourselves. But as

writer I’m not going to use my novels carry the message of feminism then it

becomes propaganda.”(Interview with Prasanna Sree XIII-XIV). She is a true

huminist her views are more close to me modern feminist. More than being

labelled as a feminist she expresses her desire to be a humanist in an interview

given to Vanamala Vishwanath: “…I want to reach a stage where I can write 22 Lakshmi Holmstorm “ Shashi Deshpande” Talks to Lakshmi Holmstrom, The fiction of Shashi Deshpande, Ed. R.S. Pathak, New Delhi: Creative, 1998, P.248


30

about human being and not about women in relation to men. I don’t believe in

having a protagonist or sexist purpose to my writing. If it presents such

perspective, it’s only a coincidence.”23

Thus Shashi Deshapande deals with human issues, problems, which are

of high concern. Her works, therefore, makes an outstanding contribution to

Indian literature in English. There was a time when Women’s writing was

treated as trivial, sentimental and sensational and was not taken seriously. But

now the conditions of the women writers are quite different. Women now enjoy

equal rights with men so far as education is concerned. Moreover with the

change in society’s attitude to women, the attitude of the critics to women

writers has also undergone a radical change and women writers’ portrayal of

their experiences, especially the experience of sex and child birth is no longer

considers it an abnormality or perversity for a woman writer to think of writing

or portraying her inner and so called strictly personal and private experiences.

The present study is divided in to five chapters. The first chapter is

Introduction which traces the status of Indian English fiction and to project

Shashi Deshpande as a leading Indian-woman novelist. The biographical details

of Shashi Deshpande and the brief analytical synopsis of all her novels are

given to prove the significance of her novels.

23 Vanamala Vishwanath Interview with “ Shashi Deshapande”, Ed R.S. Pathak; The fiction of Shashi Deshapande, 1998, P.237


31

The second chapter titled ‘Erasing That Long Silence’is about breaking

the long silence prevailed for seventeen long years by the protagonist Jaya. That

Long Silence can be called as a psychological novel portraying middle class

Indian women’s lives universally appealing.

The Third chapter titled ‘Light of Awareness in The Dark Holds No

Terror’. The novel The Dark Holds No Terror is argued in different

perspectives in order to illustrate that the theme is of varied significance. Saru

who is binded with her emotions is subjected to mental torture and slavery.

The Fourth chapter titled ‘Renounce in Roots And Shadows’. Shashi

Deshpande with every new novel Attempts much more than what she has

already explored in her earlier novels. Indu is a very bold character. She tries to

gain freedom in all the aspects of her life. She is also caught in the maze of age-

old customs and tradition. Indu is in the process of fighting and finding her way

out of this. A pause from her routine life far away from her husband, Indu is

able to resolve the riddle of failure in her life. She is able to understand herself

and learn many truths about her life.

The Fifth chapter titled ‘Conclusion’ summarizes the techniques

employed by Shashi Deshpande in articulating the ‘Self’ in her novels chosen

for study and records the conclusion. Women characters play a vital role in

Shashi Despande’s novels. They voice female identity, her freedom and

challenges, psychological complexities and optimistic view in crisis. Marriage


32

plays a crucial role in the life of a woman. That too in our country it is still the

ultimate goal of a girl’s life. As a contrast to this Shashi Deshpande through her

works condemns the institution that creates suffocation and deprives a woman

of her identity. This concluding chapter also discusses how patriarchal society

confines woman to kitchen withholding her talents by imposing rigid restraints

on her and how Shashi Deshpande tries to address women with her bold ideas

through her novels.


33

CHAPTER - II

ERASING THAT LONG SILENCE

Shashi Deshpande studies the issues and problems of contemporary

middle class woman. Her heroines are sensitive, intelligent and Career-

Oriented. A glimpse of her novel reveals how poignantly, she expresses the

frustration and disappointments of women experience social and cultural

oppression in the male-dominated society. That Long Silence is an individual’s

journey in search of one’s true self who confronts the gender oriented tradition.

It depicts the plight of a wife who suffers silently in the name of family.

Marriage is still a social necessary, where women seek security and men

respectability. As Eva Figes (1986) says: Dominance is …the keynote in an

analysis of the man-woman relationship where the male attributes are ones

associated with mental thought and positive activity, whilst the woman is

regarded as essentially passive, her role to be the respectable of male sexual

drive for the subsequent reproduction of the species.24

Shashi deshpande started her writing career all of a sudden. In her own

terms: “There was really nothing. It was very strange. May be it was there

waiting inside and suddenly at one moment, it came out. Until then, I was

looking around to see what I could do. I was very unhappy not doing anything,

24 Figes, Eva. Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society (London : Macmillan, 1986) P.125


34

just looking after the home and children. It was perhaps a kind of claustrophobic

existence. I could feel something building up in me and that caused the outburst.

Otherwise, it would have perhaps led to a breakdown.”(“Denying the otherness”

II) Her novels are autobiographical in nature depicting her own experiences of

the educated middle class Indian women’s predicament and they tend to be

gender specific. Her work concentrates on the status of the women in the

traditional bound, male-dominated middle class society of the contemporary

India. Balzac wrote in “Physiology of Marriage” pay no attention to a woman’s

murmurs, her cries, her pains nature has made her for our use and for bearing

everything, children, sorrows, blows and pains inflicted by man. Do not accuse

your self of hardness. In all the codes of so-called civilized nations man has

written laws that required woman’s destiny under this bloody epigraph “Woe to

the weak.” (Quoted by Simone de Beauvoir)

That Long Silence is “a muted and essentially sympathetic treatment of

the problems of marital relationships maintaining a credible balance between

sexes”.25 Jaya, the protagonist, is a sufferer right from her childhood day’s,

which continues even after marriage. She nurtured shame because she could not

respond and admire the classical music of Paluskar and Faiyaz Khan like her

father. Her grandmother has continuously chided her for her inquisitive nature

and further cautioned her saying that “for everything question for everything a

retort what husband can be comfortable with that?”(5). She is further cautioned

25 “The Second Sex”, Trans H.M. Parshley (London: Four Square Books Limited, 1961) P.255


35

that “a husband is like a sheltering tree” (137) and that “the happiness of your

husband and home depends entirely on you” (138).

These tips of Vanitamami for a future wife became foundation of Jaya’s

married life. This reveals how women are viewed in the society controlled by

men and the tradition. Jaya wanted to confront security, she accepted Mohan as

a sheltering tree that is why she did not bother to know if he was following

shortcut ways for earning money. Ever since her marriage she had been content

to follow the footsteps of the mythological role model of Sita, which authorities

tend to sacrifice at one instance and she tries to compare herself with

Gandhari:“If Gandhari, who bandaged her eyes to become blind like her

husband could be called an ideal wife, I was an ideal wife too. I bandaged my

eyes tightly. I don’t want to know anything. It was enough for me that we

moved to Bombay; that we could send Rahul and Rati to good schools, that I

could have the things we needed – decent clothes, a fridge, a gas connection,

travelling I class.” (144).

The family tree sketched by her paternal Uncle Ramukaka: “Look Jaya,

this is our branch. This is our grandfather – your Vasu and me. And here are the

boys – Sridhar,Jaanu,Dinakar,Ravi...” Jaya exclaims, “I am not here!” She was

answered rudely. How can you be here? You don’t belong to this family!

You’re married; you’re now part of Mohan’s family. But she was not found in

Mohan’s family tree either. “Generally, a woman’s identity is defined in terms


36

of her relationship with man as a daughter, a wife and a mother it means

virtually a woman doesn’t have an identity of her own”.26 Shashi Deshpande in

all her novels raises her strong voice of protest against the male-dominated

Indian society and against man-made rules and conventions. She confesses that

“only a woman could read my books - they are written from the inside, as it

were.”27

In orthodox Indian marriages, it is not enough for the husband to be

approved and admired; he wants immediate unquestioned obedience to his

commands. This is clearly witnessed in the case of Mohan’s mother. As

narrated by Mohan to Jaya “I can see a picture of extraordinary clarity and

vividness-the woman (Mohan’s mother) crouching in front of the dying fire

sitting blank and motionless, the huddles bundles of sleeping children (Mohan,

his brothers and sisters) on the floor, the utter silence, the loud knock at the door

… They had all had their food, except her. Though she always waited for him,

their father, however late he was (and he never gave her any indication of when

he would be back) she had asserted herself in this that she would not make the

children wait for him. She gave them their dinner, even the older ones and then

she cooked rice for him again for he would not, he made it clear to her, what he

called food as, “your children’s disgusting leaving,” He wanted his rice fresh

and hot, from a vessel that was untouched. She had just finished cooking this 26 Indira Kulkshreshtha, “ That Long Silence” Chapter 4 “Women in the novel of Shashi Deshpande”, a Study 27 Vanamala Viwhwanath interview with Shashi Deshpande, “ A woman’s world…….. All the Way!, ‘Literature Alive’ 1:3 (1987), 9.


37

second cooking and was waiting, hoping, perhaps that he would not be too late,

for it wouldn’t do to allow and as for lighting the fire again, that was

unthinkable” (P.15-16). At last, when he came in, he went straight to the

bathroom to wash. By the time he returned, she had his plate ready. Hanging his

shirt on a peg on the wall, he Sat down, drank a glass of water, poured some

water into his palm to sprinkle ritually around his plate and then he paused,

“Why is there no fresh chutney today?” he asked, not looking at her. She

mumbled something, the next second, he picked up his heavy brass plate and

threw it, not at her, but deliberately on the wall, which it hit with a dull clang.

He wore his shirt and went out of the house. This is silently watched by the

children, the mother silently picks up the plate, cleaned the floor and the wall of

all the spattered food, and wiped it, she once again cooked rice and prepared

fresh chutney, and sits clown to wait, when her children, who had awoken up by

the clanging sound of the plate, finally drift off to sleep again, “She was still

sitting there in front of the fire, silent, motionless” (36).

Mohan’s reaction after his narration is quite revealing. “God… She was

tough. Women in those days were tough” (36). But Jaya sees a ‘wounded

woman’. Mohan is so insensitivity that as a son, being witness to his father’s

harassment is not condemning his father but praising his mother as a virtuous

woman. Mohan’s sister Vimala too dies in silence rather than informing her

mother-in-law about her problem, victim of ovarian tumour. If Vimala would


38

have expressed herself it would have been in vain, that could be confirmed by

her mother-in-law’s response towards her ill health. “God knows what’s wrong

with her, she has been lying there on her bed for over a month now. Yes, take

her away if you want to. I never heard of women going to hospitals and doctors

for such a thing. As if other women don’t have heavy periods. What a fuss. But

these women who have never had any children are like that." (89). At last, she

killed herself. Silence, in a way becomes a symbol of high endurance on the part

of a person who is silent. “Her Ajji along with silence had taught her to “wait”

the waiting game”(30) For a man waiting brings in restlessness but for woman

the game of waiting starts quite early in her childhood “wait until you get

married, wait until your husband comes, wait until you go to your in law‘s

home, wait until you have kids. Yes, ever since I got married I had done nothing

but wait” (30) Women are blamed unfeminine and unnatural if they break the

rules of patriarchy so they are forced to cling to be termed feminine.

Shashi Deshpande provides perfect examples of victimized women in a

patriarchal system. Jeeja, Jaya’s maidservant supports her good for nothing

husband by all means. She does not protest him for getting her co-wife, in turn

she justifies it by saying,“ God didn’t give us any children. That was his

misfortune as well as mine. How could I blame him for marrying again? When I

couldn’t give him any children? After the death of her husband and his mistress

she willingly brings up their son, Rajaram and looks after his wife Tara. Jaya


39

does not allow even Tara to abuse or curse her husband. She says, “Stop that

don’t forget he keeps the kumkum on your forehead. What is a woman without

that? (53)”. Then there is Kusum who is an adopted girl by the childless

Vanitamami. In a letter informing Jaya of Kusum’s death, her mother writers:

“But it was a good thing in a way. She was of no use to anyone after she went

crazy, nobody needed her." After reading the letter Jaya tears it furiously.

Kusum’s madness and the way she committed suicide by jumping into the dry

well depicts her insecurity as she failed in one of her goals, a male child – the

winning of man’s heart, his long life and the propagation of his lineage through

a male child are the goals of the traditional married woman.

Mukta is Jaya’s immediate neighbour at her Dadar’s flat who tortures

herself by fasting, ‘If it wasn’t her ‘Saturday’ it was her 'Monday’ or her

'Thursday’. Jaya’s reaction towards her piety: “Mukta had more days of fasts

than days on which she could eat a normal meal. Her self-mortification and

reproach seemed to be the most positive thing about her. And yet her piety –

surely it was that which prompted those fasts – seemed meaningless, since she

had already forfeited the purpose of it, the purpose of all Hindu women’s fasts –

the avoidance of widowhood”. Even Jaya’s Vanitamami falls into this category

of performing numerous Pujas and fasts in the hope of getting a child. “But she

had gone on with her fasts, her ritual circumambulations of the Tulsi Plant of


40

the Peepal tree, even when their aim had gone beyond her reach, when her

uterus had shrivelled and her ovaries atrophied.” (67).

Jaya, Jeeja, Mukta, Vanitamami, Vimala and her mother’s story depicts

the plight of Indian women. It shows how prescribed norms of the society are

powerfully embedded in the female consciousness and her failure to surmount

orthodoxy. Even today, women strongly cling to the various forms of female

oppression, exalting and glorifying them with the proactive norms of their life.

Jaya, too tries, her level best to imbibe the tradition of silence of her

mother-in-law and sister-in-law, by enacting role of a devoted wife and dutiful

mother, but the role playing is not as natural as it should have been, the cracks

are soon visible. Once, she cannot control her anger, retorts back at Mohan,

paying back his anger in the same measure-“ Then, getting the feel of it, I had

met his anger with my own, deliberately using it as a weapon, raging, furious- I

had flung accusations, wildly at him”(1).

Jaya’s absorption into the family fold and tradition is so total that from a

fiercely independent girl, she gradually deteriorates into that a “stereotype of a

woman, nervous, incompetent always in hand of help, wanting to build an

edifice of security around her husband and children, believing it to be a burrow

into, to which she can crawl like a reptile and feel safe. (148) The very thoughts

of the collapse of her marriage, particularly those fears relating to the possibility

of Mohan’s death, keep constantly haunting her; “I had lived in constant panic


41

that he would die, I had clung at him at night, feeling with relief the warmth of

his body, stroking his chest letting my palms move with his even deep breaths.

The thought of living without him had twisted my insides. His death had

seemed to me the final catastrophe. The very idea of his dying had made me feel

so bereft that tears had flowed effortlessly down by cheeks. If he had been a

little late coming home, I had been sure he was dead. By the time he returned, I

had, in my imagination shaped my life to a desolate widowhood (96-97)

Jaya’s married life has been lived on the same life of the wise sparrow,

who built a home of wax and the foolish crow, who built her house of dung . On

a rainy might the crows’ house collapses forcing her to seek shelter at the

sparrows The sparrow is so possessive of her house and attached to the safety

and welfare of her family members, that, she keeps the crow waiting out in the

rain, for a considerable time. She allows the crow in her home only when the

crow is thoroughly drenched and then guides her to the hot pan to warm herself.

The foolish crow hops on to the hot pun and gets burnt to death. The moral of

the story of the foolish crow and that of a shrewd sparrow, she learns to “stay at

home, look after your babies, keep out the rest of the world, and you are safe”

(17)

Thus marriage means- to be at home, to take care of the children and the

husband and to be away from the rest of the world. She has “Attending to the

needs of the husband and tending and caring of the children becomes her full—


42

time occupations she recalls in unequivocal terms that,“Mohan is her

profession, career and means of livelihood”(75) “She, like Gandhari of the

Mahabharata symbolically bandages her eyes and grows blind to his weakness.

Like Sita, who followed her husband into exile, she follows Mohan into the

concrete jungle – Bombay” (11) Even faithfully she followed all the edicts laid

down by the women’s magazines. She says, “They had been my Bible, and I

had pored over the wisdom contained in them. Don’t let yourself go. How to

keep your husband in love with you. Keep romance alive in a marriage. The

quality of charm in a woman….” (96). Jaya says, “And when I had been praised

for anything, I’d been so ridiculously pleased, ‘I almost wag my tail, like a dog

that’s been patted by its master.”(84)

Mary Wollstonecraft argued that if women appeared stupid and passive,

this was not because of some innate lack of intelligence but because women had

not been told to cultivate their minds. “Women are told from their infancy and

taught by the examples of their mothers that little knowledge of human

weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience and a

scrupulous attention to do a puerile kind of propriety will obtain for them the

protection of man, and should they be beautiful, everything else is needless, for

at least twenty years of their lives.” Jaya even sacrifices her creative writing for

her insensitive husband. In the early years of her marriage, she was on the

threshold of acquiring some merit. One of her short stories bags the first prize


43

and is published in a magazine, which is about “a couple, a man who cannot

reach out to his wife except through her body”. Mohan thinks that the story

portrays their own personal life, and he is very apprehensive of the idea that

people may assume that he is the kind of person portrayed in the story. His

words were enough to nip her creative writing in the bud. She says, “Looking at

his stricken face, I had been concerned. I had done him wrong. And I stopped

writing after that” (144).

Even though she knew Mohan was wrong in his thinking she never dared

to reason it out. Instead she turned towards popular writing and wrote for a

Woman’s Magazine under the pseudonym of Seeta (In Indian mythology, Sita

stands for total self-surrender. Sita and Savithri were strong and individualistic

women but their energies were directed not towards self-liberation but towards

the welfare of their husbands.). While Mohan’s actions before and during the

sex are so typical that Jaya can predict them each time. He asks her the same

question—did he hurt her. Then he falls asleep turning his back to Jaya. The

communication between them ends with the conclusion of the intercourse. Even

in her sexual life Jaya is passive, submissive and yielding, while Mohan is

callous, aggressive and self centered.

It is this emptiness within which that draws Jaya towards Kamat. He is an

intellectual man “structured to loneliness”. He was unlike her husband; he was

devoid of male ego and loves to cook and do domestic chores, which are always


44

assigned to women exclusively. Kamat’s words provide her an insight into the

truth about herself and make her accept responsibility for her deeds. He warns

her against self-pity, “I am warning you – beware of this ‘women are the

victims’- theory of yours. It will drag you down into a soft, squishy bog of self-

pity. Take yourself seriously, woman. Dont sulk behind a false name.”(148).

She had a good comfort with him. “It had been a revelation to me that two

people, a man and woman, could talk this way. With this man I had not been a

woman. I had been just myself - Jaya. There had been and ease in our

relationship, I had never known in any other.” (153). Kamat encouraged her like

her father-“Spew out your anger in your writing, woman spew it out.” (147) It

becomes so difficult for Jaya that she says- "It became difficult for me to

distinguish between him and Appa for a second.…Even like an adorable lover

praises her beauty “Your name is like your face.”(152). She is not a sexual

object to him but a good friend. As she says, “I told him things I’d never been

able to speak of, not to Dad, not to Mohan (153).

When she feels particularly sad about her father Appa’s death, she

involuntarily finds herself in the comforting embrace of Kamat. It becomes

difficult for her to distinguish between him and Appa for a second. But her body

responds to his gentle look, voice and touch and momentarily her ego and id

clash with the ferocity of two fighters. She remembers that experience- “There

had been nothing but an over whelming urge to respond to him with my body,


45

the equally over whelming certainty of my mind that, I could not sole. Later,

there had been confusion”(157) His sudden death shocks her and she is

heartbroken. But she turned her back to him, as she was keen to protect her

marriage. "That night while having dinner I had thought someone I know is

dead. I saw him dead. And I had been detached from that woman who had seen

him remote from that experience." (157)

Jaya is shocked when Mohan defended himself by saying, “It was for you

and the children that I did this, I wanted you to have good life. I wanted the

children to have all those things I never had”(19). She now realized that the

seventeen long years of her married life had failed to make them one emotional,

intellectual, only their physical bodies had occasionally met, not their

souls, “We were two persons, A man, A woman” (8) Jaya, fails to identify her

identity and doesn’t enjoy her own individuality she sees herself as some one’s

daughter, wife and mother, shunning her own identity, she therefore remarks, “I

was born my father died when I was fifteen I got married to Mohan, I have two

children, and I did not let a third live” (2) This last sentence directly hints at an

abortion of her third child without her husband’s knowledge. She even lives up

to this dedicated wife’s role at the cost of losing her own identity. She

remembers her relationship with her husband- “I am Mohan’s wife I had

thought, and cut off the bits of me that had refused to be Mohan‘s wife” (161).

“Worse than anything else had been the boredom of the unchanging pattern, the

unchanging monotony” (4). Both of them are leading their life like “a pair of


46

bullocks yoked together”. The one was pretending, as most couples do, to be

happy. But in reality, in a real happily married life there is no room for

hypocrisies and pretensions. The imagery of the two bullocks yoked together

signifies two human begins are forced together without any choice of then own.

Mohan names Jaya as ‘Suhasini’ after marriage. ‘Suhasini’ becomes the

symbol of submissive housewife, to only care and look after her children,

maintain the home well in order. Shashi Deshpande condemns the scheme of

changing a woman's name as the part of a marriage. It’s not changing her name

but changing her identity enslaving her to the new house. Charlotte Perkins

Gilman says: "It's no, that, women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded,

more timid and vacillating, but whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a

small, dark Place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will

become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it. The Woman is narrowed by

the home."28

Jaya is a gifted writer. But because Mohan does not like her writing and

nurtures an idea, through Jaya’s writing public will know their personal life and

hence restricts her writing career. Jays very faithfully given up her hobby and

fits into the traditional role of an, ideal wife. She even shuts her eyes to the

corrupt practice of her husband. She compromises her creative, talented writing

skills and writes silly and non-sense things for a Magazine the ‘Seeta’ column.

For him the fiction is life, but for her life is a fiction, an illusion. This Seeta 28 http:// women’s history. About.com/od/quotes/a/c c_p_gilman.htm


47

column, in course of time becomes, a likable column for her female readers,

Mohan and to her editors, Jaya sees in this Seeta columns a patriarchal

construct, “The means through which I had shut the doors, firmly, on all those

women who invaded my being, screaming for my attention. I could not write

about, because they might resemble Mohan’s mother, aunt, my mother, or aunt.

Seeta was safer” (149)

Jaya, deliberately gives up her creative aspect which is so close to her

heart—and ignores even those subjects of woman’s suffering etc. She negates

her own self and accepts the role of a traditional housewife. Jaya, right from day

one of her marriage till now, concludes that her husband Mohan had never

accepted her as Jaya (the victorious) but as he had renamed her as ‘Suhasini’ he

yearned her to be soft spoken, obedient, always smiling, ready to serve etc. But,

when Jaya, in their fierce verbal battle, blurts out that “Suhasini was dead; yes,

that was it, she was the one Mohan was mourning… No, the fact was that I’d

finally done it—I’d killed her” (121). Jaya’s feelings of detachment from the

self, experience of a personality torn due to conflicts and a sense of

disorientation are nothing but an expression of neurotic conflict. After marriage,

a woman, in fact finds a split personality within herself. Jaya too has been living

with this kind of split personality for the last 17 years of her married life.


48

Suhasini had been her marital identity. Her real identity as ‘Jaya’ is in

crisis and she feels disoriented. On a secret visit to her posh church gate house,

where her marital identity as Suhasini is fixed, sees her own divided self clearly.

“And now nothing seemed to connect me to this place, nothing bridged the

chasm between this prowling woman and the women who had lived here. I was

conscious of a faint Chagrin at her disappearance. Wasn’t it I who had pain

fully, laboriously created her? Perhaps, for that very résumé, she could not

evade me entirely, and she appeared to me only a faint wraith of herself

standing near this table, hand poised over a vise of flowers?” (168).With

Mohan’s disappearance, she experiences a fine quivering in her abdomen,

which has always been for her prelude to a panic. There is no Kamat now to

assure her of her significance and sanity nor the distant relative, mad Kusum,

against whom to test her sanity. Thus “her sense of confusion and turmoil meet

her, with brutal force” (125). “I could feel myself gasping, drowning in the

darkness, the wild, flailing, panic – stricken movements that I was making

taking me lower and lower into the vortex…. Take your pain between your teeth

bite on it; don’s let it escape… I came floundering out of the depths, thinking ---

am I going crazy like Kusum?” (125) Jaya experiences utter mental pain and

confusion, It is only after she gets Mohan’s telegram from Delhi informing her

that everything is fine and their changed son Rahul’s return, makes her think

that she was silly in contemplating suicides earlier. She tells,“I’m not afraid any

more, the panic has gone. I’m Mohan’s wife. I had thought, and cut off the bits


49

of me that had refused to be Mohan’s wife. Now I know that kind of a

fragmentation is not possible,” (191)

Her step in breaking ‘That long silence’ is towards restoring normalcy

and happiness in the family. Elezabeth Robins Writes – “ Shashi Deshpande’s

novel, That Long Silence announcing, as it were, the intention of this talented

contemporary Indian Writer to break the long silence that has surrounded

women, their experiences and their world. For a long time, woman has existed

as a gap, as an absence in literature. Whether Western or Indian. This is not only

true of the fiction created by men, but also by women, who have mostly

confined themselves to writing love stories or dealing with the experience of

women in a superficial manner, creating the same kind of stereotypes of women

which they find so reprehensible in the writings of men. Women writers have

also often fallen a pray to that prescriptive feminist ideology of creating strong

women characters. This doctrine becomes as repressive as the one created by

male hegemony and represses the truth about the majority of thin sister and thin

lives.” 29 Simone de Beauvoir in her work The Second Sex (1984) asserts that no

biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the human

female presents in society; it is civilization that determines this creature. She

entreats women to discover their own identity, the authentic and autonomous

self and not the derived and reduced figure of a genderized being. It is to

29 Singh Sushila (ed) Feminism and Recent Fiction in English, ( Prestige Books New Delshi) P.129


50

achieve autonomy and a concrete subjectivity or that will be much more than

just being the other of the universally authenticated man.

Jaya’s self-analysis reveals her the fact that she lacked courage and the

right of making a choice. “The truth is that it was Mohan who had clear idea of

what be wanted; the kind of life he wanted to lead the kind of home he would

live in, and I went along with him. But I cannot blame Mohan, for even if he

had asked me what do you want? – I would have found it hard to give him a

reply.” When she is in this deep thinking Maitreyee comes to her mind who so

definitely rejected her philosopher husband Yajnavalkya’s offer of half his

property. 'Will this property give me immortality?' she asked him.‘No,’ he said

and she immediately rejected the property. To know what you want ……I have

been denied that "(25).

Shashi Deshpande’s protagonists undergo a Psychological journey of

self-realisation to define themselves to assert by their own identity. “The French

theorists of feminism like Julia Kristiva, Helence Cixous Luce Lirigaray and

Monique within apply Derriada’s method of deconstruction and look upon the

language as a means of subjugation, they treat the structure of language as

Phallo centric (or phallus-dominated) and hence reject all language and

literature. In their over enthusiasm, they even call for a feminine language

(parler femme). The Anglo-American exponents of feminism like Showalter,

Gilberts, Gubar and Cheri Register, also opine that woman’s consciousness is


51

much different from that of mans, and so woman writers ought to be studied by

their own standards and ought not be relegated to a secondary position. The

French and Anglo American feminists channelize their energy toward exposing

the sexist modes of male authors and patriarchal practices in society and

assigning an honourable place to the literary works of women writers.”30

Jaya feels if Mohan is a sinner, then she too has to accept herself as one.

She says,“There was a simple word I had to take into account:

retribution."(127). “An act and retribution - they followed each other naturally

and inevitably. Dasarath killed an innocent young boy Shambuka whose parents

died crying out for their son. And years later, Dasarath died too, calling out for

his son ‘Rama Rama.’ (128).

Jaya confesses her creative self, "She (Seeta) had been the means through

which I had shut the door, firmly, on all those other women who had invaded

my being, screaming for attention; women I had known I could not write about

because they might – it was just possible – resemble Mohan’s mother or aunt or

my mother or aunt." (149). Jaya is revaluating herself and now wants to choose

her own way. Jaya even acknowledges her fear regarding writing and failing.

"Middle class. Bourgeoise. Upper-caste. Distanced from real life. Scared of

writing. Scared of failing. Oh God. I had thought, I can't take anymore. Even a

worm has hole it can crawl into. I had mine - as Mohan’s wife, as Rahul’s and

30 Writing the Females, Academy Awarded Novels in English. Mithilesh.K.Pande, A.N. Dwivedi’s Shashi Deshpande’s- ‘That long silence’ (88) A feminist Reading P.14.


52

Rati’s mother…And so I had crawled back into my hole. I had felt safe there.

Comfortable. Unassailable. And so I had stopped writing. It hadn’t been

Mohan’s fault at all. And it had been just a coincidence, though it had helped,

that just then Mohan had propelled me into that other kind of writing. ‘I

encouraged you,’ he had said to me. He was right But, I went on with my chest-

beating fit of penitence; Mohan had not forced me to do that kind of writing. I’d

gone into it myself. With my eyes wide open." (148).

At last Jaya realizes that she has to make a choice of her own to assert her

individuality. Maitreyee made a choice of her own. Sri Krishna told Arjuna in

Bhagavadgita that he himself had to make his choice - yathecchasi tatha kuru –

‘Do as you desire.’ “But now I understand. With this line, after all those

millions of words of instruction, Krishna confers humanness on Arjuna. ‘I have

given you knowledge. Now you make the choice. The choice is yours. Do as

you desire’.(192) Jaya’s final choice is to erase the silence. “If I have to plug

that ‘hole in the heart’. I will have to speak, to listen; I will have to erase the

silence between us. While studying Sanskrit drama, I’d learnt with a sense of

outrage that its rigid rules did not permit women characters to speak Sanskrit.

They had to use Prakrit - a language that had sounded to my ears like a baby’s

lisp. The anger I'd felt then comes back to me when I realize what I have been

doing all these years. I have been speaking Prakrit myself." (192-193).


53

Now Jaya is out of panic. Rajeshwari says, “She chooses to operate

within the self-imposed limits of the family, resolving to change her life by

renegotiating the power-relations and improving the interpersonal relationships

within it rather than through the instrumentality of her writing. (22) Jaya has

now realized how much she has contributed to her self-destruction. “It is only

through self-analysis and self understanding, through vigilance and courage,

they can begin to change their lives. They will have to fight their own battles,

nobody is going to do it for them.”31 By erasing the silence that had prevailed in

her life for seventeen long years Jaya is asserting herself. It has been rightly

said: “Emancipation means communication; it does necessarily mean

identification.”

31 Palkar, Sarala. “ Breakin Silence: Shashi Deshpande’s That long Silence” Feminism and Recent Fixes In English, ed., Sushila Singh, New Delhi : Prestige Books, 1991 :134


54

CHAPTER – III LIGHT OF AWARENESS IN THE DARK HOLDS NO TERROR

“Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself

without man. And she is simply what man decrees . . . She appears essentially to

the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex-absolute sex, no less. She is

defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to

her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential.”32

In The Dark Holds No Terror the protagonist Saru undergoes a

psychological journey to define her ‘Self’ and ultimately with the knowledge of

self she tries to assert herself. “Deshpande has very exquisitely pin pointed the

inner struggle and sufferings of the new class Indian women through the

character of Index who has raise many basic questions regarding modern

women who are rooted and shaped by the Indian customs but influenced by the

scientific knowledge of the west. Assertion of a woman in a male dominated

society like India is a challenge for every woman. It is not only gaining freedom

from male oppression but also making one self-strong to lead life in a new

attitude. A woman has to gain her own identity than representing herself as a

loyal wife and dedicated mother.

32 Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949. London : New English Library, 1970. P.xxv


55

The opening pages of the novel The Dark Holds No Terror holds the

breath of any reader and creates curiosity for further reading. Malashri Lal

commenting on the opening scene of the novel The Dark Holds No Terror says,

“Pornography is a convenient play for selling. But then Indian ‘moral

consciousness’ prevents pornographic fiction being accorded an honorable

literary reputation. In the circumstances how does an Indian writer resolve the

problem of ensuring sales in a society. Where book buying is not a habit, and

simultaneously preserves the hope of earning a reputable name? Shashi

Deshpande devises her own answer. The first two pages of her recent novel

Dark Holds No Terror describe vividly, a sum of rape. It is printed in italics lest

the reader should miss the import of such an epigraph ……A few paragraphs

later, though the writer sets the readers conscience at rest by revealing the

‘identity’ of the rapist as the woman’s husband; and since this woman’s 'point

of view’ determines the action of the novel, the reader may look forward to

further titillating scenes, all justifiable in the name of women’s lib. Thus

prurient delights and the social theme are violently yoked together."33

Shashi Deshpande in an interview with Lakshmi Holmstrom says, “It

didn’t start for me, that novel, with the notion of rape or sexual domination. It

started with a couple, the uneasiness or tension between them. And I knew the

man was not doing well in his career as the woman was and I connected the

33 Malashri Lal, “Good Luck to Entrepreneurs, Rao of The Dark Holds No Terror Indian Book Chronicle, Vol. 6, No.9, May 16, 1981, 169.


56

two.” Pramila Paul says, “Married to a practising neuropathologist, Shashi

Deshpande presumably has intimate knowledge of the neurotic world of the

likes of Manu. But she shows remarkable restraint in the depiction of these

scenes and spares readers the clinical details.”34 In an interview with Vanamala

Vishwanatha, Deshpande narrates how the novel was conceived: “The Dark

Holds No Terror came to me when I saw a couple. The wife had a better job and

there was an obvious tension between them. He was aggressive and surely, that

set it off.”35

Saru had a very bad childhood due to her mother, who symbolizes a

submissive figure of patriarchy. She follows the rules set by the rigid

conventional society, to bring up her child. Thus saru is a victim of gender-

based discrimination. The mother, full of a closed minded conservative society,

has inculcated a moral bound to prefer a son to daughter. Saru at her very young

age is made to realize that as a girl she is inferior to her brother Dhruva in all

respect. As Chodorow (1978) argues that because adult women tend to be the

primary caretakers of infants, most children begin life with a feminine

identification. Whereas boys are compelled to break with this identification to

establish a masculine identity, girls are encouraged to maintain this primary

attachment to their mothers. Consequently, girls and later adult women, often 34 Pramila Paul, “ The Dark Holds No Terror, A Woman’s Search for Refuge,” Indian Women Novelists, ed., R.K. Dhawan ( New Delhi : Prestige, 1991), Set 1, Vol. V.64 35 Vanamala Vishwanatha. “ A Woman’s World…….All the way” in Literature Alive, Vol. I, No.3 (Madras: British Council Division, Dec. 1987).


57

experience problems developing a strong psychological sense of separation

from others. This may lead to women’s “loss of self in overwhelming

responsibility for and connection to others”.36 Her mother says: “Don’t go out in

the Sun you’ll get even darker. Who cares? We have to care if you don’t; we

have to get you married. Will you live with us all your life? Why not? You can’t

And Dhruva? He is different. He is a boy”(8). This differentiation hurts her ego,

cracks her identity and the real problems starts from here. “According to

Deshpande it is only the crisis of identity which is the root of all problems in

human life”.37

Saru lives and grows within the oppositional structures of freedom and

bondage, domination and resistance, a space within which she negotiates,

accepts, defies the norms of family and society. Saru is a neglected child

without mother’s nurturing care. She was aware of her mother’s hatred towards

her. She says, “If you are woman, I don’t want the one” (55).Thus the mother

daughter relation was in crisis. Saru is made to feel stranger at her own house.

Saru’s mother never forgave her daughter for being alive even after her brother

had drowned, and she coud nor forget the traumatizing effect of her mother’s

hysterical outburst. “You did it, you did this, you killed him… you killed him.

Why didn’t you die? Why are you alive, when he’s dead” (62).Saru as a child

was aware of the discrimination done to her. She says, There was, - “always a

36 Chodorow, No. (1978). The Reproduction of Mothering, Berkeley : University of California Press, P.59 37 Quoted in AK. Awasthi, “ The Quest for Identity in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande, “ in quest for Identity in Indian English Novels, Part I : Fiction, (ed) Pathak, R.S ( New Delhi : Bahri Publications, 1992), P.97


58

Puja on Dhruva’s birthday. A festive lunch in the afternoon and an Arti in the

evening my birthdays were almost the same - but there was no Puja”(168-

169).After her brother’s death the family slides into a perpetual mourning and

there are no celebrations.

Saru’s mother is responsible for Saru’s development of sibling rivalry

who gave preference to the male child and neglected the girl child. As a child

Saru was eager to grab her father’s attention towards her, she remembers: “It

had been Dhruva sitting on Baba’s lap and talking to him. And I had thought…I

must show Baba something, anything, to take his attention away from Dhruva

sitting on his lap. I must make him listen to me, not to Dhruva. I must make him

ignore Dhruva. But she had not succeeded. And when he is drowned, Saru is

held responsible and her mother accuses for her no fault or rather her gender

sets as her fault. Saru too, had lost her kid brother and was in need of emotional

support. Though there was no direct hand of Saru in her brother’s death, all the

balance was shouldered on her and she was not allowed to have any escape

from this sense of guilt, which makes her too vulnerable and insecure in her

relationships with others. She recalls “…She (her mother) never really cared.

Not after Dhruva’s death, I just did not exist for her; I died long before I left

home (32). Saru, fails to get any sympathy from her father, and this guilt

suffocates her, and she is made to live with the guilt that she was the murderer.


59

As Sarabjit Sandhu observes: “The mother is very much attached to her

son. Her attitude is a typical one; after all, he is a male child and therefore one

who will propagate the family lineage. In another sense, also, the male child is

considered more important than a girl, because he is qualified to give ‘agni’ to

his dead parents. The soul of the dead person would otherwise wander

restlessly.” 38 ‘Saru’s life is choked by her mother’s routine criticism and

faultfinding. She is made to feel an ugly girl – “You will never be good looking.

You are too dark for that” (12). As she grows, the natural things her feminity is

made to feel something guilty and faulty. A sense of shame is installed in her

for her physical growth “you should be careful now about now about how you

behave. Don’t come out in your petticoat like that. Not even if it’s only your

father who’s around” (13). Normally a mother according to Simone De

Beauvior : “She scolds her daughter severely if, after two days, absence, she

finds the house in disorder, but she is filled with anger and fear if she finds that

the life of the family gives on perfectly well without her. She cannot bear to

have her daughter become really her double, a substitute for herself.”39

The do’s and don’t prescribed by the domineering mother make her hate

the body and all bodily functions. When she attained her puberty she is told,

“You are a woman now”. (14) Her mother tortured Saru by making her feel a

sense of unclean for those three days of menstruating and banning her entrance

38 Sarabjit Sandhu, “ The Dark Holds No Terror” Image of women in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande (N.D: Prestige, 1991), 20-35 39 Simone de Beauvior, The Second sex, For H.M. Parshley ( London : Vintage 1997) P-229-30.


60

to kitchen and the Puja room. She is made to sleep on a straw mat covered with

a thin sheet. It gave her a feeling of being a pariah, an untouchable, served in a

special up and plate from a distance and her very touch seems to pollute. It is

only when she begins to study anatomy and physiology in her first year of

medicine does Saru felt released from her prison of fears and shames.

Susan Bordo argues that: “The body is not only a text of culture. It is

also…a practical, direct locus of social control. Banally, through table manners

and toilet habits, through seemingly trivial routines, rules and practices, culture

is “made body”… converted into automatic, habitual activity. As such it is put

‘beyond the grasp of consciousness… [Untouchable] but voluntary, deliberate

transformations.”Our conscious politics, social commitments, strivings for

change may be undermined and betrayed by the life of our bodies not the

craving, instinctual body imagined by Plato, Augustine and Freud, but what

Foucault calls the ‘docile body’ regulated by the norms of cultural life.”40

Her mother’s attitude has given rise not only to remorse but also to a

revolt. The mere presence of her mother makes her as a culprit, and in order not

to be like her she acquires a medical degree. The image of a lady doctor, seen in

her childhood becomes a source of inspiration for her, and hence aspires for the

similar detachment and superiority. Her mother wanted to get rid of her

daughter’s responsibility by getting married as soon as she completes her 40 Bordo, Susan, The Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body California: California University Press, 1993, “Reconstructing Feminist Discourse on the Body” In Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory. New York and London: Norton and Co, 2001, Pp.2362-2376


61

degree. She even tells on the face to Saru that they can’t spend money for her

education as well as for her marriage. Veena Das says: “Daughters are

comparable to something kept in trust for another (amanat). You have to care

for them, love them, and you will be held responsible for them but you are

destined to lose them. Once a daughter is properly married and goes to her own

house it is like a debt that has been paid.”41 Saru seeks her father’s support for

her admission to the medical college, and her father for the first time, is on her

side.

Saru after securing first class in her inter science finds a passport to shun

from her mother’s fist. Her father’s support signifies a victory and finally she

would be free from her mother. This Victory is mixed one with the sour taste of

hatred for her mother. “There was a pain in my chest, my throat ached

intolerably, there was a bugging in my ears, a blur in front of my eyes, I hated

her. I wanted to hurt her, wound her, make her suffer” (142). She revolts against

her parents and runs away to get married Manu. Saru marries Manohar quite

agonist her parent with, she doesn’t feel any remorse at this separation but her

childhood traumatic experience still haunts her. As she always feels in secured

in her parent's home, her marriage to Manu is reaching the zenith of that sort of

love and security, which she had always aspired for. Manu is an angel who

gifted love and happiness to her life for which she is hungry for and each act of

sex was triumphant assertion of their love and her of being loved of my being 41 Veena Das, “ Reflections on the Social Construction of Adulthood”, in Sudhir Kakkar (ed), Identify and Adulthood, Delhi: OUP 1992, P.93.


62

wanted. She had thought that her problems are nullified after marriage, but it

gets intensified by the male chauvinistic attitudinal, beliefs of the society affect

the husband wife relationship. After her marriage, Manohar and Saru travel not

only in different directions but even in opposite directions. As Prasanna Sree

Sathupati observes:"The woman in order to achieve her freedom seeks marriage

as an alternative to the bondage crated by the parental family. The simple need

to be independent eventually becomes a demand of the inflated ego and takes

shape as the love for power over others. She resents the role of a wife with the

hope that her new role will help her in winning her freedom".42

Disillusionment in her marital life makes her look for other avenues. Her

affairs with Boozie and Padmakar Rao are temporary substitutes for her

unfulfilled marital life. According to Saru Boozie is a handsome masterful man.

Everything about him right from his language, his swift progress through the

hospital wards etc…appears to Saru, in perfect coordination. When later Saru

realises that Mr. Boozie’s interest in Saru is not that of master and student but

that of a woman and a man. It looks strange to her, she responds to his

flirtatious manner, Very soon, their relationship reaches a stage, Boozie helps

her with enough money to set up practice in a decent locality. She manages to

fulfill her desire of attaining higher education and also better quality of life,

which otherwise may not be possible for a common girl like her, Saru says: “I

42 Prasanna Sree Sathupati, Conflict and Identity in Shashi Deshpande’s Novels, Indian Women Writers, Set III Vol. 4 P.17.


63

told myself my relationship with this man couldn’t, wouldn’t hurt Manu. It was

just a teacher-student relation-ship. If he put his hand on my shoulder, slapped

me on my back, held my hand or hugged me… that was just his mannerism and

meant nothing. It had nothing to do with Manu and me”(91). Manu, never

questions Saru about Boozie giving her so much money for opening a new

constructing room. Saru becomes resentful towards Manu who had closed his

eyes to Boozie displaying his affection towards her in public, at the

inauguration in her consulting room.

Her celebration of love ended a soon as she gained recognition as a

doctor. Her marriage begins to crush under the weight of success in her

profession. Till now, he had been the young man and she his bride. Now she

was the lady doctor and he was her husband. Gradually Manu is subjected to

jealousness, he cannot tolerate people greeting her and ignoring him:"the same

thing that made me inches taller, made him inches shorter". (96)

There is a subtle contrast with Manohar, for he had a happy childhood,

He is a good-looking man; he is a poet, an orator, director of plays and a cult

figure. After marrying Saru begins to enjoy superior financial and social status.

Both enjoy a harmonious relationship so far as Saru was only his wife. But after

she assumes the role of a lady doctor and that he is recognized as her husband,

the equation changes, he becomes a jealous; sexually aggressive husband. He

can’t tolerate that his wife enjoys better social prestige and it gradually destroys


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their marriage. She feels that, -“The human personality has an infinite capacity

for growth, and so the esteem with which I was surrounded made me inches

taller. But perhaps, the same thing that made me inches taller made him inches

shorter. He had been the young man and I his bride. Now I was the lady doctor

and he was my husband” (42). Though Manu don't express his inferiority

complex, he would say her, "I am sick of this place. Let is get out of here soon.”

Infact the patriarchal domination is ingrained in Indian culture in an inescapable

way, Jessica Benjamin observes: “The anchoring of this structure so deep in the

psyche is what gives domination its appearance of inevitability, makes it seem

that a relationship in which both participants are subjects – both empowered and

mutually respectful – is impossible”. Benjamin also observes the object status of

women. It is always “man expresses desire and woman is the object of it”

clearly suggests woman’s sexual subjectivity and her recognition as his “Object

of Desire”.43

Saru remembers what exactly changed the scenario of her marriage. A

girl, who comes home to interview Saru for a magazine, innocently asks Manu:

"How does it feel when your wife earns not only the butter but most of the bread

as well?" (30).At that moment, Manu, Saru and the interviewer laugh over it as

if it doesn’t matter. But late that night, Manu expresses his feelings by attacking

her like a wild animal. The next morning he behaves very normal, ignorant of

his own actions. This type of wild attack is repeated on Saru when Manu's 43 Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love : Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination. London : Virago, 1990. (85-86)


65

colleague and his wife comments on their trip to a hill-station. Manu gets

insulted and vents his frustration once more on Saru that night, making her

victim of his bestiality, brutality, as she later relates to her father. As Bell Holds

observes: [b]etween women, male supremacist values are expressed through

suspicious, defensive, competitive behavior. It is sexism that leads women to

feel threatened by one another without cause…Sexism teaches women-hating

and both consciously and unconsciously we act out this hatred in our daily

contact with one another.44

Saru is scared and finds very difficult to face her sexually aggressive

husband. Manu by his animal - like sexual attacks wants to prove his superiority

or hold on his wife. “Violence against women is an important issue in feminist

theorisation everywhere. While liberal feminists generally view it as actions of

psychologically and socially disturbed males, medical feminists consider it as

the commonest and most important basis of male control over women”. 45 Saru

is totally shattered by this in due course, she feels utterly humiliated at the

thought of being used and reduced to " a dare damp, smell hole" (24). She is

very much emotionally disturbed and hurt by this act: “And each time it

happens and I don't speak, I put another brick on the wall of silencer between

us. May be one day I will be walled alive within it and die a slow painful

death." (25). I never knew till then he had so much strength in him: I could not

44 Hooks, Bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre Boston: South End Press, 1984. 47 45 S. Brownmiller, Against Our Will : Men Women and Rape, New York, harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976


66

fight back. I could not shout or cry I was so afraid the children in the next room

would hear. I could do nothing. I can never do anything. I just endure (201). She

even admits that her success as a doctor and her flirtation with Dr. Boozie has

ruined the self-confidence of Manu.

Saru is assaulted and undergoes horrors of rape by her husband. She can

feel the hurting hands, the savage teeth, the monstrous assault of a horribly

familiar body. Saru is in a fix who is shocked to see her husband cheerful the

next morning and asks her if she had slept well. Saru wonders if all this is a

sham, a force, a ghastly pretence, or is it just a dream, a terrible nightmare that

left behind this terrible after – tasted of fear. But she cannot deny the reality of

bruises on her body. “Men often use violence against their wives when they lack

in other means of control such as economic or educational superiority over

women”.46 Saru hates the word love and refuses to believe that such a thing can

ever exist between man and woman, love, It’s only a word, she thought. Take

away the word, the idea and the concept will wither away” (72). Lack of love

and attachment in Saru – Manu, she admits that, “theirs was not a case of love

dying, nor even of conflicts. Instead it was as if a kind of diseases had attached

their marriage. A disease like syphilis or leprosy, something that could not be

admitted to others. This very concealment made it even more gruesomely

disgusting, so that she was dirty and so was he and so was their marriage.”(70)

His actions humiliates Saru and she thinks-“And each time it happens and I 46 J.O. Brien, ‘Violence in Divorced Families’ in theorizing Patriarchy, ed. S. Walby, Oxford, Baril Black well, 1990, p.136


67

don’t speak I put another brick on the wall of silence betweens. May be one day

I will be walled alive within it and die a slow, painful death. Perhaps the process

has already begun and what I am is a creature only half alive. And it seems I can

do nothing to save myself” (96)

Tired of both the duties, inside and outside, she wants to leave the job

but Manu knew the truth that it is by her income they are leading a comfortable

life. But he can't digest that truth and sexually abuses harass her at night. Not

only the dark evokes terror to Saru but even the day when Manu pretends as

though nothing has ever happened. The nightmarish experience as the

protagonist notices: “The hands became a body. Thrusting it upon me. The

familiarity of the sensation suddenly broke the shell of silent terror that had

enclosed me. I emerged into the familiar world of rejection. My rejection that

had becomes so dearly routing. Her own sufferings brings forth how her small

brother Dhruva was once scared of darkness and had sneaked into her head, She

how, as an adult realizes that she has to fight out the darkness herself, nobody

can help her out, in order to live without fear she will have to look into the face

of reality and grapple with it alone.” She realises that: “The terrors are within

us, and like traitors they spring out, when we last expect them, to scratch and

maul.”(85)

One has to kill or overcome the unknown ghosts that haunt us. Saru

accepts her loneliness and tries to overcome it by- In the beginning love and sex


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was fulfilment of life, but now “sex a dirty world” (133). It had become dirty

because of Manohar’s ego. To her sex becomes “sting of scorpion to be borne

by women” 47All her inner sentiments, sensitivities and her self-identity had

been trampled and crushed by his ego. Union with Manohar had turned to

slavery as if: “Everything in a girl's life, it seemed, was shaped to that simple

purpose of pleasing a male”. Endless nights of torture make her put in crudely:

“my husband is a sadist” (199)

Unable to bear the torture any more, with the news of her mother's death

Saru dodged to her parents home - a place she had vowed never to come back

to. Saru as a child was victim of gender discrimination, after marriage she is

victim of the dogmas of marriage superiority of male in a marriage. Saru is

guilty for her own failure in life she expects her father's sympathy but it is no

avail. Saru suffers doubly, suffering alone with her guilt consciousness. Under

such pressure she feels if she had an arranged marriage her father would have

not turned his back as he did it to her. Saru's bitter realization of her marriage is

that a woman must necessarily remain a step behind her husband. When asked

by her friend Nalu to talk on ‘Medicine as a profession for women’ to some

college students, Saru makes up her imaginary speech for a successful marriage,

which depicts her silent painful experience: "A wife must always be a few feet

behind her husband. “…If he is an M.A., you should be a B.A., If he is 5'4",

you should not be more than 5'3" in height. If he is earning five hundred rupees,

47 Lakshmi, C.S, The Face behind the mask women in Tamil literature, New Delhi : Vikas, 1984, p-6


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you should never earn more than four hundred and ninety, if your want a happy

marriage. Don't ever try to reverse the doctor - nurse, executive - secretary,

principal - teacher role. It can be traumatic, disastrous. And I assure you, it is

not worth it. He will suffer. You will suffer and so will the children. Women's

magazines will tell you that a marriage must be on equal partnership. That's

nonsense, rubbish. No partnership can ever be equal. It will always be unequal,

but take care that it’s unequal in favor of your husband. If the scales tilt in your

favor, god helps you, both of you (137)."A Wife should always be a feet behind

her husband, John Ruskin is of the view: “A man ought to be known any

language or science he learns, thoroughly; while a woman ought to know the

same language or science only so for as may enable her to sympathize in her

husband’s pleasure and in those of his best friends.” 48

Shashi Deshpande through Saru's words is mocking at the rules of

successful marriage, where a wife is raped by her husband. There is another

instance where Saru and Manu visit the latter's friend's house. They are invited

to tea. Manu's friend’s talks to them while his wife like a waitress serves them

silently. She is totally ignored by her husband and so her presence is not

recognised, even by the guests. While going home, Saru smiles at her, but

without response from her. Her face was unchanged, expressionless as if she

had fallen in with her husband's desires and successfully effaced the person that

48 Sesame and the Lilies, quoted in Kate Milet, Sexual Politics (1969; rpt. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971), 74.


70

was her. At the door I looked back for a moment, she stood under a light, a

strong, unshaded bulb hanging low in the center of the room. I looked down at

her feet and saw that there was no shadow. For some reason, the words came to

my mind if I cast no shadow, I do not exist. (159).

The hellish life of a widow is seen by Saru who lived in the next street

with a bare forehead and drab Sari. She was frightened to see her empty eyes

which are the ghastliest signs of her widowhood. She shudders at the woman’s

plight; “to put all of yourself into another and then be left alone” (135). Shashi

Deshpande points out the superstitions followed by older generation: “… the

members of the older generation still suffer from superstitions… some of them

eat food from the unwashed plates which their husbands have used. If you utter

the name of Rama, the soul of the dead will go to heaven quickly. The wife

dying before her husband is to be considered good fortune. If a widow doesn’t

shave her head, she is a second class citizen.” As a child Saru has seen her

grandmother who was deserted by her husband a few years after marriage. She

was a young woman then with two little daughters, one of whom was Saru’s

mother. Her grandmother’s father had taken the deserted woman and her

daughters to his house and got the girls married. The grandmother had never

complained and accepted it as her fate: “It was written on my forehead.” The

submission of women to the male dominated society is clearly shown through

these characters. Even Vidya, one of Manu’s groups of aspiring writers,


71

journalists and stage enthusiasts is reduced to a submissive wife after marriage.

She had given up acting because Ashwin and his family do not like the idea of

her going on the stage. But they don’t mind her “Associating with the theatre

occasionally, but no acting, directing or anything like that”. (156).

Saru’s friend Smita is an example for a typical middle class dedicated

housewife struggling for her space and always surrendering. Smita has

surrendered so much that she has given up her name also. She has readily

accepted the name Geetanjali, chosen by her husband when she got married.

Smita had been a slim rather frail looking girl with large vulnerable eyes. Now

she seemed around all over with fat and hideously invulnerable. Her fat looked

not only ugly to Saru but obscene, remembering the quality of delicacy there

had been about her (117). Nalu rightly says: “He”! There is always time to do

all the things “he” wants to do, but never any time for doing the things you want

to do, but never any time for doing the things you want to do. You just tag on to

him and drift a small boat towel by a large ship… Smita takes credit of 100 Rs

from Saru and says Saru that she is lucky not to have to ask anyone for money.

Smita has to manage to save a bit from what her husband gives her for the

household expenses. She is totally dependent on her husband and feels happy

that her husband had written that he can’t exist without her any longer. Saru

sees just sexual hunger on the husband’s part and a passionate response on

Smita’s part.


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Saru’s friend Nalu is a spinster, dedicated to her job, Smita, wholly wife,

mother and house keeper. Betty Freidan in her book The Feminine Mystique

writes “The first women in business and the professions were thought to be

freaks, insecure in their new freedom some perhaps feared to be soft or gentle,

love, have children, lest they lose their prized independence, lest they trapped

again as their mothers were.”49 Saru observes Nalu that there was a whole world

of bitterness within her, ready to spring to the surface at any moment. “She is

bitter because she never married, never bore a child. But that would be a stupid

as calling me fulfilled because and got married and I have borne two children.

(121).While the married women reported to be dissatisfied with their marriage,

the unmarried ones are reported to have there own sufferings and anxieties.

Betty Freidan observes: “Strangely number of psychiatrists stated that, in their

experience unmarried women patients were happier than the married ones.” 50

Saru is not able to break her silence and show the truth to her husband.

She is struggling to assert her individuality Saru is able to analyze her life after

she returns to her parental home. She expects a lost of sympathy from her father

after having become a hapless victim of her senseless choice of a love marriage,

she moans, “It’s my fault again. If mine had been an arranged marriage, if I had

left it to them to arrange my life, would he have left me like this? (218). She is

aware of the importance and woman’s strength in arranged marriage. She very

49 Betty friedan, The feminine Mystique, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 19 71, P.89 50 Ibid:p.23


73

minutely remembers her friend’s sister who, as a result of a disastrous marriage,

was surrounded with care and sympathy, as if she was “an invalid, a

convalescent”. (218) Saru pours her heart out with all details about Manu’s

brutality and expresses her helplessness she says – “I couldn’t fight back, I

couldn’t shout or cry…I could do nothing. I can never do any thing. I just

endure”(201).

She whole-heartedly expects moral support from her father, and very

frantically requests him “But you have got to help me, you have got to. You did

it once. And because you did I went to Bombay, met him an married him”(204).

Her father, a simple man fails to understand the words like-sadism, Love,

cruelty. Actually, her visit to her father’s house is a kind of escape from the

sadist husband and loveless marriage. It is again a kind of solace from her hectic

routine to Her live with her father and Madhav is a relief, for no demands are

made to her. The whole day in her parent’s house is spent to analyze her own

desires and comforts. She recapitulates the kind of life. She had lived as a child.

To Saru the idea of men going to work, children going to school, and women

staying at home to work, clean, scrub and sweep appealed as she finds a

supreme harmony in these tasks done by whom who stay at home-this is a kind

of contentment in her new routine life, makes her feel that she has a totally new

life, and now as she calls herself as a totally changed person and nothing old

Saru is left. At her father’s place, slowly she looses, the awareness of her

feminity, she stops thinking about herself as a women.


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Saru after examining her life, able to realize that she had been her own

enemy. She says.” If I have been a puppet it is because I made myself one. I

have been clinging to the tenuous shadow of a marriage whose substance has

long since disintegrated because I have been afraid of proving my mother right."

(220).The aspect in doctor in her is more often seen than that of the wife, and

the mother in her. Her neighborhood woman now visits her for their physical

health. Mostly there simple woman keep more of their ailments everything as a

secret. Sarita thinks that - “Their very womanhood a source of deep shame to

their- she calls them stupid, silly, martyrs—I idiotic heroines. Going on with

their task and destroying themselves in the bargain, for nothing, but a

meaningless modesty” (107). Joan Gallos opines: (D)evelopment for men has

meant increased autonomy and separation from others as a means of

strengthening identity, empowering the self, starting a satisfactory life course...

For Women, attachments and relationships play a central role in both identity

formation and concepts of developmental maturity... colouring how women see

themselves, their lives, their careers, and their ongoing responsibility to those

around them”.51

Saru used to get solace from her disturbed mind only when she was

involved in her profession, otherwise there was only emptiness in her, once she

found herself cutting a piece of paper, telling herself…. these are bits of her

mind falling on the ground. Saru has no peace of mind, only fear and she has 51 Gallos, J.V. (1989). “ Exploring Women’s Development: Implications for career theory, Practice and Research”, in M. Arthur et (eds), Handbook of career theory, Cambridge, Mass : Cambridge University Press


75

blocked herself in that fear in such a way that she can’t find herself now. But

each day she has an intensified thought… I can’t go on (23). Finally She

realised: “All right, so I’m alone. But so everyone else. Human beings-They’re

going to fail you. But because there’s just us because there’s none else we have

to go on trying. If we can’t believe in ourselves, we’re sunk” (220).It is worth to

quote The Dhammapada which says: “You are your own refuge; there is no

other refuge, this refuge is hard to achieve. Loss, loneliness and grief are quite

common in the life of all these characters. Soumya Bhattacharya says, the

novelist portrays,” grief and the vacuum that grief leaves in its slip-stream, but

offers us glimpses of the core of strength and reserves of stoicism all of us need

to deal with pain and sorrow and isolation.”52

Madhav's determination " My life is my own"... and Baba's words, Are

you not sufficient for yourself ? strikes her mind saru is forced to think about

herself. Some days of gap with Manu and her job. She gained a chance to

review her past and come to a conclusion to her problems. Saru who was

escaping from her problems, who feared to encounter them is now ready to face

them. She first asked her father 'Promise me,' She said, 'Promise me you won't

open the door to him. Don't open the door when he comes. Later when she

receives a call for her services she asks her Baba to make Manu wait for her.

This shows she is very clear in her mind. She is ready to face Manu fearlessly

and to lead her life hopefully, confidently. Though Saru rebels against the

52 Soumya Bhattacharya a “ Death shall Have no Dominion”, the Hindustan Times, 14 May 2000.


76

traditions ultimately tries to compromise with the reality, but without submitting

herself. Saru all her life had led a life of maya filled with darkness now what

she is feeling is real life filled with light. As Virginia Woolf says in her novel,

“there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in

the dark.” Saru’s assertion is through the “act on their own judgment and

initiative” which leads to their individual growth.”

Now, the time has come for Sarita to face her husband fearlessly. The

fear of darkness or ignorance or the unknown fear that haunted her so long gets

evaporated and decides to face her life. The novelist makes it very clear that a

woman’s life is her won and she should start thinking that she is an individual

certainly not a dependent but being capable of withstanding all trails in life

alone. R. Mala rightly remarks: “The novelist’s credo is to take refuge in the

self which means that the self is not metaphysical but psychological. In other

words Deshpande means that the heroines will in future assert themselves; they

will no longer allow their ‘she’ to get deceased. By this assertion of the self,

Deshpande with certainty takes her heroines to the pole of feminism though she

may not have aimed at propounding such an “ism”


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CHAPTER - IV

RESOLUTION IN ROOTS AND SHADOWS

Marriage plays a crucial role in the life of a woman. That too in our

country it is still the ultimate goal of a girl’s life. As a contrast to this Shashi

Deshpande through her works condemns the institution that creates suffocation

and deprives a woman of her identity. In Roots and Shadows Deshpande is

trying to define Indian marriage: “Millions of girls have asked this question

millions of times in this country? Surely it was time they stopped asking it.

What choice do I have? Surely it is this, this fact that I can choose, that

differentiates me from the animals. But years of blindfolding can obscure your

vision so that you no more see the choices. Years of shacking can hamper your

movement so that you can no more move out of your cage of no-choices.”

(125).

Roots and Shadows has won Thirumathi Rangammal Prize for being the

best Indian novel in English of 1982-83.Both Saru and Indu ventured to

marriage with a hope to get escape from their caged existence, in a quest of

'freedom' but in turn they get trapped in another cage. A pause from her routine

life far away from her husband, Indu is able to resolve the riddle of failure in

her life. She is able to understand herself and learn many truths about her life.

She says, "Have I become a fluid with no shape, no form of my own”? (54).

Indu, a middle class young girl, brought up in an orthodox Brahmin family


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headed by Akka [the mother image in the novel]. The novel begins with the

heroine’s return to her ancestral house. The parental home initiates her into an

understanding of the meaning of human life. It is here that she discovers what

her roots are -- as an independent woman and a writer, and what her shadows

are -a daughter and commercial writer.

She rebels against Akka, her conventional world, and her rigid values

and marries Jayant. To attain freedom, she seeks marriage as an alternative to

the bondage inevitable in the parental family. She thinks by fitting herself in a

new role of a wife to attain her freedom. Her longing to achieve a complete

personhood is explicitly seen in these lines, “This is my real sorrow that I can

never be complete in myself. Until I had met Jayant, I had not know it […] I

met Jayant and lost the ability to be alone” (34).

Akka, a surrogate mother, dominated Indu as a child and young lady.

Being a motherless child Indu grabbed the love and affection from other

members of the family especially from her old uncle Kaka and Atya. Akka,

matriarchal figure represents orthodox, blind superstitions in our society. She

was so obsessed with that, she denied to go to the hospital even when she was

on her deathbed. The only reason to safeguard her caste: “God knows what

caste the nurses are or the doctors. I could not drink a drop of water there.” (24).

Nobody in the family could rule out the words of Akka. Indu remembers how


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“Kaka even after becoming a grandfather, could be reduced to a red-faced,

stuttering school boy by Akka’s venomous tongue” (24).

Akka enforced rigid restriction on girls and reprimanded Indu severely

for daring to talk to a boy in the lone corner of a library. As a child they had told

Indu that she should be meek and submissive. When Indu questioned she was

told, “Because you are a female. You must accept everything, even defeat, with

grace, because you are a girl. It is the only way for a female to live and

survive.” (158). Sex is biological whereas gender is culturally determined.

Stollers’ definition on Gender identity: “Gender identity starts with the

knowledge and awareness, whether conscious or unconscious, that one belongs

to one sex and not the other, though as one develops, gender identity becomes

much more complicated, so that, for example, one may sense himself as not

only a male but a masculine man or an effeminate man or even as a man who

fantasies being a woman.”53

When Naren’s mother Saroja wanted to learn music, Akka curbed her

saying: “What learn music from a strange man! Sit and sing in front of

strangers! like THOSE women? Are we that kind of family? Isn’t enough for

you to sing one or two devotional songs, one or two Aarti songs? What more

does a girl from a decent family need to know?” (55). The welcome of

womanhood as she attained puberty was done in a crude manner. Kaki told,

53 Stoller, Robert J. (1968), Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity (London : Hogarth Press)


80

“You’re a woman now, “You can have babies yourself.” And Indu, who had the

entire child’s ignorance about her body, had for the first time, felt an immense

hatred for it. The introduction to the beautiful world of being a woman made

feel her unclean. For four days now you are unclean. You can’t touch anyone or

anything. (79). Indu develops aversion to the natural biological function of

woman and longs to escape from the burden and responsibilities of womanhood.

Simone De Beauvior observes: “For an adolescent girl, her first menstruation

reveals this meaning and her feeling of shame appears. If they were already

present and they are strengthened and exaggerated from this time on."54

Since her childhood, it has been drilled in her mind by the women

members of the family that she as a female has to Indu resents -“As a child, they

had told me I must be obedient and unquestioning. As a Girl, they had told me I

must be meek 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 had said. It is the only way, they said, for a female to live and

survive”(158).

Akka was one of the victims of child marriage who underwent inhuman

treatment under the shackles of marriage. Indu’s view towards Akka changes

after hearing Akka’s story from Narmada Atya: She was just 12 when she was

married and he was well past 30. He was tall, bulky man with large, coarse

54 Beauvoir de Simone. The Second Sex, Picador classic edition, London: Pen Books Ltd., Carry Books 1988 p.335


81

features. And she she… was small, dainty, really pretty with her round face, fair

skin, straight nose and curly hair. Six months after her marriage, she 'grew up'

and went to her husband's home. She was not able to share her plight with any

one as she had lost her mother when she was a child and her father remained

aloof. Twice she tried to run away as a girl of 13. Her mother-in law, whipped

her for that and locked her up for three days, starved her as well. And then, sent

her back to her husband's room. The child, then said, cried and clinged to her

mother-in-law saying, "Lock me up again, lock me up". But there was no escape

from the husband then." (77).

Her husband sexually harassed Akka as a child. “The law as in section

375 and 376 of Indian Penal Code, which deals with rape, does not give a

woman the freedom to accuse her husband of rape (until and unless she is

sixteen). The society says that a husband has all the freedom to enjoy his

conjugal rights as and when he wants. In a lot of marriages, it turns out to be a

torture for the woman, but she cannot talk about her intimate details to even her

loved ones. So where does the woman go?”55 But Akka was able to take

revenge on him when he was bed ridden for two years as a result of a stroke.

Though Akka looked after him well as a dutiful wife she didn’t allow his

mistress to meet him. Akka’s domineering character and the plight of child

marriage could be witnessed here. In this case Shashi Deshpande not only

throws light on the sufferings of victims of child marriage but also the liberty of 55 http://Women’s history.about.cm/od/quotes/a/c_p_gilman.htm


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a man who can have another woman if he is not satisfied with his wife. This

reveals as Neena Arora remarks: "Man considers it as normal behavior to satisfy

his desires at both the emotional and the physical levels outside marriage, while

it is ruthlessly condemned as adultery in case a woman indulges in it even

though accidentally the slightest hint of any deviation on her part which may

not even involve sex, man turns violent and hostile towards his wife and starts

prosecuting her. This condemnation is dictated by man’s interest in preserving

his property rather than by any moral consideration.”56

Indu marries Jayant, a man of different caste but of her own choice and

leaves her parental home. Jayant gives her a feeling of solidity and certainty.

She dreams that her marriage with Jayant would enable her to realize the need

“to belong, wanted, needed and loved, as she desired the freedom to express her

true self to the world. Akka’s warning is not heeded by Indu because Akka had

no good opinion of inter caste marriages,-“Such marriages never work.

Different castes, different languages…it’s all right for a while. Then they

realize” (68).

Indu leaves her ancestral house and enters into independent and

completely free zone, but very soon, she realizes the fruits of her decision. Both

she and Jayant wanted to achieve complete happiness, but her marriage with

Jayant suppresses her feminity and her human demands. She is physically and

56 Neena Arora, A Feminist Studies in Comparison – Nayantara Sahgal and Doris Lessing New Delhi : Prestige, 1991,61.


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spiritually dissatisfied with her husband, who takes her for granted and expects

her “to submit’. According to Simone De Beauvoir: “A husband regards none of

his wife’s good qualities as particularly meritorious; they are implied by the

institution of marriage itself. He fails to realize that his wife is no character

from some pious and conventional treatise, but a real individual of flesh and

blood, he takes her for granted her fidelity to strict regimen she assumes not

taking into account that he has temptations to vanquish that she may yield to

them, that in any case her patience, her charity, her propriety, are difficult

conquests, he is still more profoundly ignorant of her dreams, her fancies, her

nostalgic yearnings of the emotional climate in which she spends her days.”57

Her love marriage degenerates into a mere psychological affair and feels

that she has abused her body’s sanctity, denial of full experience, satisfaction or

happiness. The paradox of the situation is that Indu is not completely happy

with Jayant, but at the same time, she cannot live without him---she speaks

about her incompleteness—“This is my real sorrow. That I can never be

complete in myself. Until I had met Jayant. I had not known it…that there was,

somewhere outside me a Part of me without which I remained incomplete. Then

I met Jayant … and lost the ability to be alone” (31).She wonders how she in all

the way is trying to please her husband, feeling of having lost her independent

identity. Her other aunts and for that matter, other woman had surrendered

themselves to the concept of the ideal women, without any independent identity 57 Simone De Beauviour, The Second Sex, trans. H.H. Parsheley ( Harmondsworth; Penguin), 492.


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performing all the time self-effacing notions and rituals. But in course of her

own introspection of herself, she realizes that she is not very different from her

conventional female counterparts, for she was unconsciously and consciously

trying to mould and change and shape herself according to Jayant’s desires and

needs. Jayant, on the other hand, in spite of his seemingly western style of life,

behaves like an average Indian male. She feeds that an average Indian male. She

feels that her marriage was something shameful in total commitment, “It shocks

him to find passion in a woman. It puts him off. When I’m like that, he turns

away from me; I’ve learnt my lesson now. And so I pretend. I’m passive. And

unresponsive” (83).

She understands, that her over whelming love for Jayant is quite

disturbing and her total surrender to him is frightening. She is shocked to see,

that, she is turning into an “ideal” Indian wife, obeying her husband’s wishes

and fancies. At a crucial time, she even thinks of leaving her husband, hoping to

become whole self again, but she hangs on to her marriage though beneath her

skin, she knows that, her unwillingness to acknowledge her love, and her

marriage as a failure. Indu seeks fulfillment in education and career, works as a

journalist for a woman’s magazing, but gives it up for she was disgusted about

women and their problems, and works for the others magazine. “Women,

women, women… I got sick of it.

These were nothing else. It was a kind of narcission. And as if we had

locked ourselves in a cage and thrown away the key. I couldn’t go on” (78). The


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greatest sacrifice is her ambition of being a writer, on her own. She loses her

interest in writing creative article when she is forced to suppress facts and

present a glossy picture to the readers. She is angry, when her husband asks her

to compromise and commands her not to resign her job. He says; “That’s life!

What can one person do against the whole system! No point making a spectacle

of yourself with futile gestures. We need the money, don’t we? Don’t forget, we

have a long way to go” (17).

Indu had dreamt of a happy married life, being independent, free from the

clutches of her traditional Akka. But unfortunately her calculations go wrong

after marriage with Jayant, she lost her individuality. Charlotte Perkins Gilman

says: "It's no, that, women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more

timid and vacillating, but whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small,

dark Place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become

inevitably narrowed and weakened by it. The Woman is narrowed by the

home."58 She says, “This is my real sorrow. That I can never be complete in

myself. Until I had met Jayant. I had not known it ...that there was, somewhere

outside me a part of me without which I remained incomplete. Then I met

Jayant….and lost the ability to be alone” (31). Indu had thought she had found

the other part of her whole self but she was rather haunted by an ‘unusual

feeling of total disorientation’. She remains untouched and there is a sense of

not belonging. “For some reason I was an outsider. The waves of comradeship

58 htt;//Women’s history.about.com/od/quotes/a/c-p-gilman.htm


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ripped all around me, but left me untouched”(30). She suffers loneliness and it

is suggested through the images of “dust and barrenness” (10) and “dark room”

(21). Then we are out. It is dusty, a totally barren place. The glare and the heat

are both fierce. I am alone now and move among people I don’t know… I had

rejected the family, tried to draw a magic circle around Jayant and myself. I had

pulled in my boundaries...’ I am alone’(10). Indu acts up to the expectations of

her husband: “Always what he wants, what he would like, what would please

him. And I can’t blame him. It is not he who has pressurized me into this. It is

the way I want it to be ..."(54).

Indian women always have to adhere to Manu’s ideals of happiness, her

world revolves round her husband above all in the ideals of the traditional

cultures, the ‘good’ woman is a Pativrata, subordinating her life to the

husband’s welfare and needs in a way demanded of no other woman in any

other part of the world. The Pativrata conduct is not a mere matter of sexual

fidelity, an issue of great importance in all partriarchal societies.59 Indu being

educated, economically independent realizes that she is no different from the

women like her Atyas and Kakis. In their eyes Indu was just a childless woman.

For a woman, to get married to bear children, to have sons and then grand

children is looked upon as a successful woman. Though Indu hated the

traditions followed in her house, she hated the modernity of the city after living

with Jayanth. She says, we belong to the smart young set. Do you know what 59 Sudhir Kakkar, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, New Delhi : Penguin, 1989, P.66


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that means? Fresh flower in the house everyday. Even though doesn't like her

way of living Indu has to adjust. We are rational, unprejudiced, broad-minded.

We discuss intelligently, even solemnly the problems of unemployment,

poverty, corruption and family planning we scorn the corrupt. We despise the

ignorant, we hate the wicked and owe hearts bleed, for the blacks, for the

Harijan but frankly we don't care damn not one god damn about anything but

our own precious selves, our own precious walled in lives. (28). This shows a

clear picture of aristocrat class of the society where they have only one face but

can wear different faces for their own benefits. Indu in her self – discovery

thinks: “Am I on my way to becoming an ideal wife. A woman who sheds her I

who loses her identity in her husband's”? (118).

In contrast to Indu, is her cousin Mini,her passive acceptance is seen in

words: “What choice do I have, Indu…of course I’m marrying him because

there’s nothing else you can do” (125). In traditional Indian society, marriage

means only fear, agony and frustration on the girl’s side. Indu learns from Mini

that only compromise is the key word of marriage, and she has to learn to be

content with it-“Any man, Indu? Yes, any man. Any man who says yes’… You

don’t know what it has been like. Watching Kaka, Hemant and even Madhav---

kaka running around after eligible men: if the horoscopes matched, there was

true meeting to be Arranged, And all those people coming and Asking all kinds

of questions… and they would say, “she’s not modern enough”….She’s too


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fashionable for us! Or too short, or too tall, or too dark, or something…. And I,

feeling as If I had committed a great crime by being born a girl….I am tired

Indu, I don’t care what kind of a man he is, Once we are married, and be

becomes my husband, none of his flaws will matter (126). As though she is

punished for her crime of being a woman she has to accept him with his flaws

and habits. But man won't stop discovering flaws in her as he could dominate

her thoroughly. As Simone de Beauvoir observes: “Marriage is obscene in

principles insofar as it transforms into rights and duties those mutual relations

which should be founded on a spontaneous urge; it gives an instrumental and

therefore degrading character to the two bodies in dooming them to know each

other in their general aspects as bodies, not as persons”60

Indu feels it’s "The Indian way. The husband. A definite article.

Permanent. Not only for now, but for ever. To be accepted.” Even Indu had

stepped in this shoe without her notice. Indu is very much moved by the

situation of Mini and says. “Behind the facade of romanticism, sentiment and

tradition, what was marriage after all but two people brought together after

cold-blooded bargaining to meet, mate and reproduce so that the generations

might continue?" (3). “Men, by virtue of their penis, can aspire to position of

power and control within the symbolic order. Women on the other hand, have

no position in the symbolic order, except in relation to men, as mothers, and

60 Simone De Beauviour, The Second Sex, trans. H.H. Parsheley ( Harmonds worth; Penguin), 463.


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even the process of mothering is given patriarchal meanings, reduced, in Freud,

to an effect of penis envy”.61

Indu's family represents a typical joint family where the houses like an

old banyan tree are sheltering many lives. Indu is confused if should she sell the

house, the house where she had been brought motherless baby of fifteen days

and spend around eighteen years of her life or pay for the marriage of delicate

looking Mini? or should she benefit herself as per Jayanth's desire or should she

buy the house and make Kaka and Atya happy? When she was in these thoughts

suddenly she found solution for her problem. She realized that she had

surrendered to Jayanth as she wanted to avoid conflict in order to show the

family that she had a successful marriage. When this truth flashes in her mind,

she acquires better understanding about herself and everything. Now she knew

that Akka was a pillar of strength who acted according to her beliefs. Now she

felt that the old house is a trap and she must come out of it.

She decided to sell the house to Shankarappa, who wanted to demolish it

and have a big hotel built on the site. It was not an easy decision to take. She

says. "Had not the house lived a clean life? Did it not deserve a clean end? What

if the champaka tree in the courtyard which had always fascinated her ever

since. She had been a child, will be so completely destroyed that not even stump

will remain to sprout again? She reassured herself. If not this stump, there is

61 Chris Weedon, Post-Structural Theory and Feminsit Practice. P.54


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another. If not this tree, there will be others. Other trees will grow, other flowers

would bloom, other fragrances will pervade us. One era ends so that the other

might begin. But life will continue, endless, limitless, formless and full of grace.

By not getting influencedby anybody, Kaka or Atya or Jayant by monitoring her

own will Indu achieves freedom. Indu, who got physically attracted to her

cousin Naren and surrendered herself twice, seems to achieve freedom in sex.

She says: “Nevertheless I knew I would not tell Jayant about Nareen and me.

For that was not important. That had nothing to do with two of us and our life

together.” (187).

Indu, is quite impressed by Naren’s idea of detachment, and experiences

a sense of freedom, and very openly talks about herself and her failures. The

newly acquired sense of freedom, she got from Naren’s friendship, makes her

aware of her natural impulses. Initial she rejects his love thinking that, it is

monogamous, but later quite willingly offers herself twice. At that time, she

doesn’t mind love---making as a sin or crime, but the next day, she is quite

worried and studies each and every action in terms of situation that pushed her

way towards Naren. Her mind is often burdened with sin, crime, right and

wrong. Indu says: “A part from wronging Jayant? Wronging Jayant? I winced at

the thought. But had I not wronged Jayant even before this? By pretending, by

giving him a spurious coin instead of the genuine kind? I had cheated him of my


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true self. That, I thought, is dishonorable, dishonest, much more than this, what

I have done with Naren (171).

Indu is confused if should she sell the house, the house where she had

been brought motherless baby of fifteen days and spend around eighteen years

of her life or pay for the marriage of delicate looking Mini? or should she

benefit herself as per Jayanth's desire or should she buy the house and make

Kaka and Atya happy? When she was in these thoughts suddenly she found

solution for her problem. She realized that she had surrendered to Jayanth as she

wanted to avoid conflict in order to show the family that she had a successful

marriage. When this truth flashes in her mind, she acquires better understanding

about herself and everything. Now she knew that Akka was a pillar of strength

who acted according to her beliefs. Now she felt that the old house is a trap and

she must come out of it. She decided to sell the house to Shankarappa, who

wanted to demolish it and have a big hotel built on the site. It was not an easy

decision to take. She says. "Had not the house lived a clean life? Did it not

deserve a clean end? What if the champaka tree in the courtyard which had

always fascinated her ever since. She had been a child, will be so completely

destroyed that not even stump will remain to sprout again? She reassured

herself. If not this stump, there is another. If not this tree, there will be others.

Other trees will grow, other flowers would bloom, other fragrances will pervade

us. One era ends so that the other might begin. But life will continue, endless,

limitless, formless and full of grace. By not getting influencedby anybody, Kaka


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or Atya or Jayant by monitoring her own will Indu achieves freedom. Indu, who

got physically attracted to her cousin Naren and surrendered herself twice,

seems to achieve freedom in sex. She says: “Nevertheless I knew I would not

tell Jayant about Nareen and me. For that was not important. That had nothing

to do with two of us and our life together.” (187).

Indu wants to hide her relation with Naren and declares that she would go

back to Jayant and lead an honest life. Indu feels she had not wronged her

husband by sleeping twice with Naren but by pretending, by giving him a

spurious coin instead of the genuine kind (171). She resolves not to tell Jayanth

anything about it. P. Ramamoorthy says: “This sheds a brilliant light on Indu’s

awareness of her autonomy and her realization that she is a being and not a

dependent on Jayant. The novel gains its feminist stance in Indu’s exploration

into herself but it also moves beyond the boundaries of feminism into a

perception of the very predicament of the human existence.”62Now she has the

boldness to tell Jayant that she was resigning her job. She would tell him. “That

I would at least do the kind of writing I had always dreamt of doing. That I

would not enrich myself with Akka’s money. That I would, on the other hand

pay for Mini’s wedding. At the end Indu like Jaya hopes, Jayant would

understand her. Now she has conquered her fear and is ready to assert herself.

Thus Indu doesn’t like to be the shadow of her husband and is asserting herself

62 P. Ramamoorthy, “ My life is my own: A study of Shashi Deshpande’s Women”, Feminism and Recent fiction in English ed. Shushila Singh ( New Delhi: Prestige, 1991), 124


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by taking her own decision. Thus as Bhatnagar says: “In the end comes the

realization that freedom lies in having the courage to do what one believes is the

right thing to do and the determination and to adhere to it. That alone can bring

harmony in life.”63

Indu wants to return to her home to Jayant. In the end comes the

realization that freedom lies in having the courage to do what one believes is the

right thing to do and the determination and the tenacity to adhere to it. That

alone can bring harmony in life. “She returns home, equipped with that quality

of courage, necessary to face the challenge of identity crisis for her marriage

had, always posed returns to suffer, to question and to find roots”.64 Indu

experiences only disillusionment in sex and suffers a silent sexual humiliation

with Jayant. Her extra—Marital relationship with her cousin Naren, brings no

guilt to her, and decides not to tell Jayant about it. “That had nothing to do with

the two of us and our life together”(205). The very truth that she is aware of her

body, autonomy and that she doesn’t depend on Jayant gives her the courage to

exist as a person. Indu realizes her position in her ancestral home; the

responsibilities, fears and frustrations do not touch her. She is now an assertive

woman with emerging new self. Through Naren’s idea of detachment, she

rebuilds her lost vision. She now realizes, that she had only lacked the quality of

63 Quoted by Y.S. Sharadha in The Problem of Marriage and Affirmation of self in Roots and Shadows. Women in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande by suman Bala, Khosla Publishing House, New Delhi, 2001. 64 Patil, Ujwala, “ The Theme of Marriage and selfhood in Roots and Shadow”, Indian Women Novelists, ed., R. Dhawan, Set I Vol. 5, New Delhi, Prestige Books, 1991, P.136.


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courage. Gradually, she feels that there was nothing shameful in her feelings for

Jayant. She wants to project her true self to Jayant instead of the pretentious one

she had been showing all these days. Indu reflects –“Here, in this house, in this

family, was a role waiting for me. A role that I would, perhaps, act out more

successfully than the one I had tried until now. For had I not, so very often, felt

myself just a mouthing, grimacing puppet, dully saying the lines I had to,

feeling, actually, nothing? Had I not felt myself flat, one dimensional, just a

blurred figure merging into the background? Whereas here, I would stand out,

sharp and clear… (143) Like Jaya and Saru, Indu also realizes that the house

she had fled from to avoid being faceless contains the roots which sustain her

violation to attain self-identity, while her marriage which she had believed

would take her to self realization had transformed her into a shadow.

Indu realizes that, Akka knew her indomitable courage and strength

while fulfilling her responsibilities. Akka’s decision of making Indu guardian to

her property leads much controversial discussion among her relatives. Their

wants are never ending, their love is hypocritical, and their affection is filled

with jealousy, hatred and envy. Indu observes- “There are strong and the weak.

And the strong have to dominate the weak. It’s inevitable. And Akka thought I

was one of the strong ones. That’s why she put the burden on me. And now, it is

an obligation. I have to carry the burden. And to do that, I have to be hard. If

I’m soft, I’ll just cave in” (159). Right from her early days. She has been a rebel

against the traditional role of a woman. It is the fear of suppression by the


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patriarchal society that makes her fight, turn aggressive and assert herself.

Unless and until the roots, the source of her fears are not uprooted, Indu cannot

achieve fulfillment, she therefore destroys the roots, eliminate her fears,

confront her problems with courage and what she feels is right. Thus Indu

extends support to vital, an orphan living with the family. Indu seems to be

grown up with better understanding of the situation than that existed earlier in

the family.

Akka decides and made Indu her successor, because, she knows that

among all her relatives, Indu is strong to bear the burden of the responsibility

that goes with the wealth. Indu decides to take up Akka’s burden and live up to

her expectations. With the simple will made to her, she decides to fulfill all the

obligations she has towards the family and towards herself. She even neglects

the letter from Jayant, advising her to leave out the members of the family who

did not ever bother about her for the last ten years. He further asks her to return

home so that they both can make plans for the future with Akka’s money. But

Indu decides to finance Mini’s wedding instead of buying the old house. It

really pains her to remember about her stay in the house for 18 years, would be

demolished without a trace of their life spent in it. “One era ends so that the

other might begin. But life will continue endless, limitless, formless and full of

grace”65

65 Bhatnagar.P, Indian womanhood-fight for freedom in Roots and Shadows Ed by R.K. Dhawan, Indian Women Novelists, set I, Vol. 5-1991-P.127.


96

She wants to go back to Jayant, for she loves and needs him, and wants to

restart her life built on the foundation of honesty and decides to be her true self

in relations with Jayant. Now onwards she is not going to suppress her feelings

only to please Jayant. She really achieves freedom and decides to do what she

thinks she should be doing. She also decides not to share her affair with dead

Naren as she think that has nothing to do with Jayant. She “Returns home,

equipped with that quality of courage, necessary to face the challenge of

identity crisis for her marriage had, always posed—returns to suffer, to question

and to find roots”66

Commenting on Indu’s decision to start writing according on her own

wishes and not to use Akka’s money to enrich herself. The important point

which has to be noted is that she is making independent decision. “Deshpande

has very exquisitely pin pointed the inner struggle and sufferings of the new

class of Indian women through the character of Indu who has raise many basic

questions regarding modern women who are rooted and shaped by the Indian

customs but influenced by the scientific knowledge of the west” (Sandhu; 45)

Indu’s acceptance of western values and her search for liberty with a

precondition of unfettered growth and maturity of personality, despite the

insidious conflict between tradition and modernity, ultimately results in her

emergence as a human being evolving basically as a woman of determination

not yielding to the dictates of the patriarchal society, S.P.Swain. Appropriately 66 Patil, Ujwala, “ The Theme of marriage & selfhood in Roots and shadow”, Indian women novelists, Ed R.K. Dhwawan, set I Vol 5. New Delhi Prestige Books, 1991, P.136


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sums up Indu’s growth thus, “The meek, docile and humble Indu of the early

days finally emerges as a bold, challenging, conscious and rebellious women.

She resigns her job, thus defying male authority, hierarchy and the irony of a

woman’s masked existence. Her self—discovery is the frightening vision of the

feminine self’s struggle for harmony and sanity. She is able to discover her

roots as an independent woman, a daughter, a mother and a commercial writer.67

The traditional concept of love and marriage as sacrament and sex as a

taboo is fast losing its importance Promilla Kapur, the renowned sociologist in

her study on” love, Marriage and sex,” says that; now women aspire for” natural

companionship, respect, material comforts, satisfaction of emotional and

physical needs, in marriage”68. Calvin says: “Self-actualization is the creative

trend of human nature. It is the organic principle by which the organism

becomes more fully developed and more complete. The ignorant person who

desires knowledge feels an inner emptiness; he or she has a sense of their own

incompleteness. By reading and studying their desire for knowledge is fulfilled

and the emptiness disappears. A new person has been created, thereby, one in

whom learning has taken the place of ignorance. Their desire has become an

actuality. Any need is a deficit. It is like a hole that demands to be filled in. This

67 Swain. S.P. “ Roots and Shadows”, A Feminist study, “the Fiction of Shashi Deshpande”, Ed. R.S. Pathale. New Delhi: Creative 1998-P.95 68 Kapur Promilla, “ Love Marriage and Sex,” Delhi, Vikas Publishing House 1973.


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replenishment or fulfillment of a need is what is meant by self-actualization or

self realization.” 69

Nature has played a trick on women by giving them “ the eternal female

dream of finding happiness through a man” (Calvin S) And Shashi Deshpande

questions the concept of marriage whether arranged marriage in the case of Jaya

or love marriage of Saru and Indu are not a success. Promilla Kapur, a

renowned socialist in her study on “Love, Marriage and Sex,” says that “now

women aspire for natural companionship, respect, material comforts,

satisfaction of emotional and physical needs in marriage”70

69 Calvin S. Hall and Gardner Lindzey, Personality, P. 249-250 70 Kapour Promilla, Love, Marriage and Sex, Delhi, Vikas Publishing House, 1973.


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CHAPTER - V

Male violence against women is normalised and legitimised in sexual

practices through the assumption that when it comes to sex, men are by nature

aggressive and dominant, whereas women by nature passive and submissive.

Rape is an extreme expression of the patriarchal power associated to dominate

women. It is used as a weapon by men to terrorise women and keep them under

their control. The Third World feminists have used a definition of feminism to

mean “an awareness of women’s oppression and exploitation within the family,

at work and in society and conscious action by women and men to change this

situation”.71

The detailed analysis of three selected works of Shashi Deshpande That

Long Silence, The Dark Holds No Terror and Roots And shadows has given an

understanding of an Indian women’s ‘Self ’. Autonomy of selfhood of a woman

in the patriarchal society is problematic. Patriarchal values are so grounded

internalized that one cannot lead a life outside the boundary drawn by

patriarchy. Individual autonomy in its extreme sense implies that it is free from

all bonds, relations and even of self reflection. It is moving beyond identifying

oneself merely as somebody’s daughter, wife, mother, or sister but rather to

have their own identity. The concept of gender as distinct from the biological

71 Jayawardena, Kumari (1982). Feminism and National in the third world. Institute of Social Studies. The Hauge, Netherlands.


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fact of sex includes a complex of sociological, cultural and psychological

associations with it. According to Sandra Harding: “Gender difference is the

most ancient, most universal, and most powerful origin of many morally valued

conceptualizations of everything else in the world around us... As far back in

the history as we can see, we have organized our social and natural worlds in

terms of gender meanings within which historically specific social, class, and

cultural institutions and meanings have been constructed. Once we begin to

theorise gender-to define gender as an analytical category within which humans

think about and organise their social activity rather than as a natural

consequences of sex differences, or even merely as a social variable assigned to

individual people in different ways from culture to culture- we can begin to

appreciate the extent to which gender meanings have suffured our belief

systems (land) institutions”72

Awareness in woman of her independent identity is a major feature of

feminism. Betty Friedan says, “The Feminine Mystique permits, even

encourages, women to ignore the question of their identity. The Mystique says

they can answer question “who am I?” by saying “Tom’s wife... Mary’s

mother”.73 So a woman should posses her independent identity. Jaya finds her

‘self’ in erasing the silence which had ruled for seventeen long years. She takes

her own choice to be writer. Sarita finds her ‘self’ in her selfless dedication to

her patients. Indu finds her ‘self’ in solving the Akka’s money and choosing to 72 Friedan Betty, Feminine Mystique, New York : Dell Publishing 1984, P.71 73 Shouri Daniels : The Salt Doll. ( Vikas New Delhi 1978) in Literary Criterion, P.12


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write of her choice. As Shouri Daniel told, “a modern Indian woman describes

the ‘female incarnate’: she as no shape or form: she is everything or nothing.

She is fluid, pour her into any mould and the takes it ... Ideals and principles lie

outside her nature.74 Indu in Roots And Shadows sees that the women in the

family have no identity of their own even they don’t remember their own names

as they are recognized just as mami, kaku, mavshi, vahini and so on. Gender

consciousness has resulted in creation of awareness about gender based

discrimination, exploitation and oppression of women and causes of their low

status in the society giving rise to action-oriented movements and organisations.

The 20th century woman is crushed between tradition and modernity. In

19th century modernity signified what was new in modern life experiences and

creation of their cultural representations. According to Davis Frisbay (1986:13),

in 20th century, it focuses on the social totality and its structural and institutional

composition. Specific aspects of modernity have disappeared behind this

totalising conception. Modernity is reshaping world according to liberal

principles.

Jaya in That Long Silence and Saru in The Dark Holds No Terror have

romantic idea of love whereas Indu in Roots and Shadows is very practically

thinking lady. Shashi Deshpande never likes to romanticize her protagonists;

rather she portrays them as intellectual ladies. Because of the element of reason

and thinking her novels acquire depth and profoundness. Through her characters

74 Harding, Sandra (1986). The Science Question in Feminism, Ithaca New York: Cornell University Press.


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she brings feminist sensibility. The women’s world is wonderfully depicted by

her. Women all over the world suffer similar psychic disturbances in the male

dominated world. The Heroines of Shashi Deshpande whether Indu, Saru, or

Jaya are all intelligent and understanding women. They are not self- sacrificing

mothers and totally chaste wives but are portrayed as human beings as they are

in their real life. She created a “New woman” who is capable of self-analysis,

“The New Woman was an emphatically modern figure” whose representation

did not always offer a “a particularly attractive model for late twentieth century

feminism” because of her embeddedness in heterosexuality and imperialist

discourse.75 Ibsen’s Nora who in A Doll’s House says to her husband that she

“was simply transferred from papa’s hands to yours. You have arranged

everything according to your own taste and so I got the same tastes as you or

else I pretended to “(66). Nora wants to assert herself and walks out of the

family but all the protagonists of Shashi Deshpande fight against tradition

within the frame work of marital institution.

Saru is reminded of her visit to a house where a woman leads a non-

identical life: “Her face was unchanged expressionless, as if she had fallen in

with her husband’s desires and successfully effaced the person that was her. At

the door, I looked back for a moment. She stood under a light, a strong,

unshaded bulb hanging low in the centre off the room. I looked down at her

feet and saw that there was no shadow. For some reason, the words come to my 75 Ledger, Sally. The New Woman : Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siccle. Manchester, UK : Manchester University Press 1997, P.6


103

mind... If I cast no shadow, I do not exist.” (159) Saru’s journey in The Dark

Holds No Terror is an initiation into the mystery of human existence. She

realises that parental home is no refuge. She is her own refuge. “All right, So

I’m alone. But so’s everyone else. Human beings... they are going to fail you.

But because there is just us because there is one else, we have to go on trying.

If we can’t believe in ourselves, we’re sunk (200). Thus Saru’s journey from

self –alienation to self-identification from negation to assertion, from diffidence

to confidence. She learns to trust her feminine self: “And oh yes, Baba, if Manu

comes, tell him to wait. I’ll be back as soon as I can” (202). This is the assertion

of her individuality, her willingness to confront reality and not to run away from

it. She finds her emancipation through her profession. Saru reaches to the stage

of self actualisation. The liberated woman ultimately resolves: “My life is my

own... somehow she felt she had found it now, the connecting link. It means

you are not a strutting, grimacing puppet, standing futilely on the stage for brief

while between areas of darkness” (220). The heroine’s of Shashi Deshpande

wants to liberate themselves from the shackles of tradition and exercise their

rights for the manifestation of their individual capabilities and realisation of

their feminine selves through identity –assertion and self affirmation.

Jaya is totally a silent and mute sufferer. She cries “I can’t hope, I can’t

manage, I can’t go on”. She is suffocated in the traditional norms set up by the

patriarchal society. Gayathri Chakravorthy Spivak writes in her article can the

Subaltern Speak?”: “Between Patriarchy and imperialism subject-constitution


104

and object formation the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine

nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the

‘Third-World Woman’ caught between tradition and modernisation.”76 Jaya

says about her marriage: “A pair of bullocks yoked together”. A man and

woman married for seventeen long years, with two children. It’s clear

physically together mentally apart. As Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex

(1949) remarks that the relation between man and woman is never quite

symmetrical and invariably not a complimentary one: “In actuality the relation

of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents

both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to

designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the

negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.77

Mohan and Manu carry psychological warfare against their wives due to

the fear born out of deep sense of insecurity. The division between female and

male is socially created, and is deeply woven into the organisation of

institutions and of everyday life. It is not just a division, but an asymmetry,

with men having more power and status. The fact of being male and female

carries connotations of different power and status, although other situational and

relational factors may mitigate these connotations. Thus, gender does not have

76 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘ Can the Subaltern Speak? Colonical Discourse and Post Colonial Theory. Harves wheats half, 1994 77 Selden, Red. The Theory of Criticism: From Plato to the Presents, A reader ( London: Longman, 1988) p.534.


105

a uniform impact across situations. It is because of this that gender alone as a

stratification variable provides as incomplete an understanding as using only

class, male, ethnicity or caste.78

Jaya, Saru or Indu wants to shake off the fear, wants to live without fear...

fear of being unloved, misjudged, misunderstood... According to Usha Bande,

The definition of ‘New Woman’: “... the ‘New Woman’ is one who, shown of

her ‘feminine mystique’, is aware of herself as an individual, she is free from

her traditional, social and moral constrictions and is able to live with a

heightened sense of dignity, and individuality. The ‘New Woman’, then, is the

product of a new economic order in which woman casts aside her ‘invisibility’,

comes out of the metaphorical purdha and avails of the opportunities provided

by education, enfranchisement and employment. She, with her male

counterpart, struggles for achievements in the professionals and economic

spheres and deconstructs the image of a submissive, repressed and self –

effacing being. Kelkar opines: “One way to combat domestic violence in India

would be to make women economically independent”.79

Home is an important symbol in Shashi Deshpande’s fiction. At first her

protagonists come out of the house rebelling the traditional, superstitious and

reactionary values. But when they return home disappointed by the person she

had believed in, the home is seen in new light showing them the way to self-

78 Kalpagam, U. (1986) “ Gender in Economics”: The Indian Experience,” Economic and Political weekly, Vol. XXI, No.43, October 25. 79 Govind Kelkar, Violence Against Women in India, Bangkok, Asian Institute of Technology, 1992, p.8


106

identification. Her characters struggle to record protest eventually in their lives.

In their journey from a kind of slavery Shashi Deshpande takes them towards

self-awareness at various levels and finally to an assertion for autonomy and

freedom. The picture that emerges is of a self – reliant, emancipated and happy

individual, a person, sexually uninhibited intelligent, confident and assertive”.80

80 Bande, Usha and Atma Ram. Woman in India short stories – Feminist Perspective. ( Jaipur and New Delhi: 2003) p 14.


107

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