1

Chapter I

Introduction

Literature is a crystal clear stream that reflects the whole canopy of life.

Literature is commonly classified as having two major forms, fiction and non-fiction.

The two major techniques are poetry and prose. Important historical periods in

English Literature includes old English, middle English and renaissance or the

Elizabethan era of the sixteenth century, the seventeenth century, restoration period,

the eighteenth century, the age of enlightenment, and romanticism of the early

nineteenth century and the twentieth century modernism and post modernism.

Literature can be classified according to historical periods, genres, and

political influences. In general a genre consists of artistic works that fall within a

certain central theme. An example of genre includes romance, mystery, crime, fantasy

erotica and adventure, among others. Similar to Thomas Hardys Wessex, Narayan

created the fictitious town of Malgudi where he set his novels. Some critics criticize

Narayan for the parochial detached and closed world that he created in the face of the

changing conditions in India at the times in which the stories are set others.

Literature references to the practice and profession of writing. It comes from

human interest in telling a story in arranging words in artistic forms, in describing in

words some aspects of human experiences. Literature has always been a handy tool in

exploring the gender relations and sexual differences. Literature enriches our lives

because it increases our capacities to understand and to communicate. It helps us to

find meaning in our world and to express it and share it with others. It makes us to

understand particular age, custom, and the mindset of the people. Literature portrays

characters realistically.
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The beginning of Indian Literature in English is traced back to the end of the

eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. When English

education is more or less firmly established in the three major center of British power

in India.

Indian Literature is the expression of the creative genres of Indian people

earlier it was mentioned Indo-Anglican Literature. Indian writing is greatly influences

by writing in England. Indo Anglican Literature is both and Indian Literature and a

variation of English Literature. Indian English Literature has a relatively recent

history. It is only one and a half centuries old. The first book is written by an Indian in

English by Sake Dean Mahomet, titled Travels of Dean Mahomet; Mahomets travel

narrative is published in 1793 in England.

The first Indian English novel is Bankim Chandra Chatterjees Raj Mohans

Wife (1864). It paved the way for Anand math (1884). Indias first political novel

which gave the Indians their national anthem Vandematharam. This was followed

Mano Basus Jalijangal in the form of English translation as the forest goddess by

Barindra Nath Bose.

The novels published from 1860s up to nineteenth century were written by

writers belonging to the presidencies of Bengal and Madras. Most of these novel were

on social and few on historical issues, especially that of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding

and Scott. The twelfth century is game with novelist of more substantial outputs

Michael Madhu Sudan and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee had opened new avenues

Literature and Romesh Chandra too turned to creative writing. Indian English

Literature novel has four phases of its development.

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The works of the pioneers are imitative of British models. This early phase

may be called the phase of imitation. The second phase is of Indigenization, it began

with the works of Toru Dutt is the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The third

phase is of increasing Indigenization. During this period Indian in English acquired a

national consciousness and even become popular the west. The fourth phase is of

experimentation and individual talent. This phase is remarkable for the growing

confidence and originality in the writing of Indian English writers.

Novelist turned their attention away from the past to concentrate on

contemporary issues. In their novels prevailing social and political problems that

Indians found were given prominence. Indian English Literature has a relatively

recent history; it is only one and a half centuries old.

The term 'Novel' is derived from the Italian word 'novella' which means a little

new thing. Novella is a short story in Prose and Novel. Novel is the modern meaning

of the word the broader name fiction may properly be applied. Since, we shall see all

novels are fiction but all fiction is by no means novels. The whole development of the

novel indeed is embraced within little more than a century and a half from the middle

of the eighteenth century of the present time. The novel came to express most

inclusively among the literary forms this more vivid realization of mean and turn. The

novel in its treatment of personality began to teach the stone thrown into the water

makes circles to the uttermost bounds of the lake.

Raja Rao (1908-2006), Indian philosopher and writer authored Kanthapura

and The Serpent and the Rope, which is Indian in terms of its story telling qualities.

Women in Raja Raos novels suffer from domestic injustice and tyrannical tradition,

but the writer suggests no way to come out of their dilemma. His women characters,
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who are a little ambitious end up playing the devoted role of a wife like Savitri in The

Serpent and the Rope.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) wrote in Bengali and English and is

responsible for the translation of his own work into English. Dan Gopal Mukerji is the

first Indian author to win a literary award in the United States. The first generation of

Indian writers in English was Raja Rao, R.K.Narayan, Rabindranath Tagore, Mulkraj

Anand etc. They talked about freedom struggle, domestic violence, marginalization

and self-identity.

R.K.Narayan is a writer who contributed over many decades and who

continued to write till his death recently. Narayans portrayal of women characters

ranges from the meek and submissive wife of margay in The Financial Expert and

Savitri in The Dark Room to the vibrant and radical women characters like Daisy and

Rosie in the painter of signs and the guide respectively.

Bhabani Bhattacharyas portrayal of women is too optimistic and realistic. His

women are tender, charming and virtuous and play a significant role in effecting

social change. But in spite of being tender and virtuous they are victimized. Kajoli in

So Many Hungers undergoes immense suffering and misery, but her spirit remains

invisible.

Recent writers in India such as Arundhati Roy and David Davidar show a

direction towards conceptuality and rootedness in their works. Arundhati Roy is a

trained architect. In 1997, she is the booker prize winner for The God of Small Things,

calls herself a home grown writer. Her award winning book is set in the immensely

physical landscape of Kerala. Davidar sets his the house of Blue Mangoes in Southern

Tamilnadu. In both the books, geography and politics are integral to the narrative. In
 5

his novel Lament of Mohini (2000), Shreekumar Varma touches upon the unique

matriarchal system and the sammandham system of marriage as he writer about the

Namboodiris and the aristocrats of Kerala.

In India, too women writers have come forward to voice their feminist

approach to life, the patriarchal family set-up. They believe that the concept of gender

is not merely a biological phenomenon but it has social construction. A woman is

commonly constructed as a submissive, surrendered and suppressed reaction of the

society.

Women writers on the other hand were mere honest in the portrayal of women

in their novels. Their main contribution is that they view the distinctive female

sensibility with some other feelings like marginalization, self identify, etc. It is a well

known fact that women are natural story tellers. Women writers are not far behind

their western counterparts, in carving a niche for their story telling abilities. They are

renowned for their originality, versatility. The focus of most of the women writers in

India has been on the predicament of woman in the changing, socio-economic

scenario of the male dominated society. Each and every one of the woman writers

explores and struggle for identity. This is the underlying theme in the tales of all

Indian woman writers. They were very realistic and appeared as the horizon of Indian

English novels kamala Markandaya, Nayanthara Saghal, Anita Desai are the women

who portrayed some of the above said themes in their novels. The above mentioned

women novelist were the contemporaries of Shashi Deshpande.

Kamala Markandayas works are a realistic delineation of the double pulls

that the Indian women is subjected between her desire to assert herself as an

individual and her duty in the capacity of a daughter, wife and mother. She also points
 6

out how the socio-economic condition affect the women much kamala Markandayas

novel Nectar in a Sieve has passing reference to the burning problem of dowry. The

women character of kamala Markandayas novels though not conscious, though not

fully aware, yet are concerned with the fundamental question to the lot of women. An

analysis of her novels reveals that is feminist in her novels by giving and objective

account of womens emotions against the background of the Indian womens

emerging awareness of her identity in the male dominated society.

Her Nectar in a Sieve is a tale of village life as comprehended through a

female sensibility. Tale of Rukmani is the tale of any village women in India of the

fifties. Her Two Virgins express her concern with womens situation in modern India.

It is a story of two sisters, Lalitha and Saroja who grew from childhood to woman

hood. Markandaya another novel. A Handful of Rice the two women Nalini and

Jayamma are present. It is Jayamma whose portrayal is of relevance to this study

because she possesses some of the traits of new woman. Thus the novels of kamala

Markandaya are metaphorical elongations of the basic fact of awakening feminine

consciousness.

Anitha Desai one of the prominent Indian women English novelists is born on

June 24, 1937 in Delhi to a German mother and a Bengali father. She married Ashwin

Desai a businessman. They have four children. She was short listed for the booker

prize and three times and received a Sahitya academy award in 1978 for her novel

Fire on the Mountain and the British Gandhian prize for The Village by the Sea. Her

daughter Kiran Desai won the man booker prize in 2006 for her second novel The

Inheritance of Loss. She is very distinguished Indian novelist. She has been

recognized as such has written large about women characters through her fiction

throughout her novels and short stories. Desai focuses on the personal struggles of
 7

anglicized middle class women in contemporary India. Her novels move around

women character although she is preoccupied with the theme of incompatible marital

couplets.

Most of Desais works engage the complexities of modern Indian culture far

from feminine perspective while highlights the female Indian predicament to maintain

a self identity as an individual. Cry the Peacock is a novel mainly concerned with the

theme of disharmony between husband and wife relationship. It deals with the

psychological consciousness of the female protagonists and is aptly illustrated amidst

detail images, monologues and flashbacks. The female character Maya, in the novel

envelopes the reader as she unfolds the growth, development and climax of her

neurosis. Maya is a young girl obsessed by a childhood prediction of disaster. The

story unfolds that Mayas father without thinking much married her off to his own

lawyer friend Gautam who is middle aged man. The marriage is never fruitful and

slowly Maya turns into a psychopath whose emotional needs were seen to be collided.

The climax of the story lays when Mayas attachment with her father further develops

into an Electra complex which again acts as the catalyst in the deflowering of her

marital relationship with her husband. Extremely frustrated Maya then looks back to

the class of her childhood spent with her father. The reminiscence of these long lost

days serves as the defense mechanism to set her free from her inner frustration and

conflict.

Nayantara Sahgal yet another prominent Indian women writer dealt with

issues concerning women that later became major issue in the feminist movement

launched in the sixties. She exposes the prejudice women face in a male dominated

society. The Day in Shadow is about the prejudice faced by the divorce heroine Simrit.

Sahgal being a divorce herself reveals in a realistic and vivid manner how Simrit tries
 8

to square her equation with her growing children and her ex-husband. she not only

undergoes the humiliation of being a divorce but also faces the cruel consent terms

of the divorce. Her fiction deals with Indias elite responding to the crises engendered

by political change.

She is awarded the Sahitya academy award for English in 1986, for her novel

Rich Like Us (1985). Her novel Rich Like Us is about Sonali the daughter of Marathi

and Kashmir. Sonali the centre character differs from the stereotypes of Indian

womanhood found in fiction. She is very brilliant IAS officer. She goes to oxford to

escape the Indian world of arranged marriage. Sahgal has a limited world of feminist

ideas. She does a close and sensitive study of her elite women characters her

protagonists refuse to remain fettered to their subordinate roles and defy traditional

norms and values in search of emancipation.

The second generation of Indian English women novelists have favorably

responded to the changed psychological realities of Indian life specially after

independence to this group belong writers like Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai,

Shashi Deshpande, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Nergis Dalal, Shobha De and Bharathi

Mukherjee all being well equipped both emotionally and intellectually to treat the

situation appropriately.

Shashi Deshpande is born in 1938 in Dharwad, a prominent place known for

its education and culture in North Karnataka. She is the second daughter of famous

Kannada dramatist and writer Adya Rangacharya (Sriranga). At the age of fifteen she

went to Mumbai, graduated in Economics, then moved to Bangalore, where she

gained a degree in Law. She secured her M.A in English from the University of

Mysore. When, she is living in Mumbai she did a course on Journalism at the
 9

Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and worked for a couple of months as a Journalist for the

magazine Onlooker.

Deshpande is the author of nine novels and number of short stories, the best

novels which are The Dark Holds No Terrors, That Long Silence, Small Remedies

which won the Sahitya Akademi award. She started writing childrens stories for her

two young sons. Her novels are Roots and Shadows, The Dark Holds No Terrors

(1980), If I Die Today (1982), Come Up and Be Dead (1983), That Long Silence

(1989), The Binding Vine (2002), A Matter of Time (2000), Moving On (2004), and In

the Country of Deceit (2008) are the works of fiction that she has contributed to the

domain of Indian English Literature. She published her first collection of short stories

in 1978.

Apart from a number of short Stories and nine novels Shashi Deshpande has

written four books for children: A Summer Adventure, The Hidden Treasure, The Only

Witnessand The Narayanpur Incident. A volume entitled writing from the margin and

other Essays contains several of her perceptive essays. She has also written the screen

play for the Hindi features film Drishti. She is honoured with Padmashri award in

2009 by the Government of India.

The novels of Shashi Despande sensitively portray the miserable plight of the

contemporary middle class, urban Indian women. In all her novels she focuses in

detail on the working of the psyche of her women characters, who plunge into periods

of psychin disturbance due to traumatic experience in life. Nevertheless the suffering

leads to a stage of self introspection and later self discovery which evinces a fresh

perception of life Shantha on the general lot of women thus. She is a creature who as a

child is sold to the strangers for a bridal price, or when she grows up serves as a
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supplier of dowry for her husbands family or who as window in a final act of

obliteration immolates herself on her dead husbands funeral pure to be acclaimed as

Sita-Savitri as an immortal.

Shashi Deshpandes analysis of the post modern dilemma of women she

concentrates on career women and their problems. They face outside the threshold of

their homes in a basically male-dominated social setup. Deshpande has portrayed

women of different ages and has reflected their psyche. Likewise the woman as a

young girl tries to shed off the shackles of parental control as a daughter leading to

her marriage where, she finds that her role as wife or as mother Erlave her in another

framework. Then she ventures out of the house to pursue a career perhaps become

economically independent, here again she is subjected to gender discrimination. These

circumstances momentarily lead to trauma detachment and disorientation. But soon

her defense strategies begin to function and she manages to overcome the crisis with

strong will power.

Deshpande writes a variety of Indian English that is rooted in the ambience

of regional cultures those of the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka. Her search for

the location of a self outside the contested territories of conservation discourses

slowly subverts the binaries and transcends to a dimension where the woman is

matured and free to understand herself and her shadows.

Deshpande has been labeled a feminist because of her concern with women

characters and the situations in which they find themselves. She believes that she

simply writes about what she sees around her and that her ideas follow naturally. Her

work has helped to break the silence on some womens issues which were not

discussed in the past and to raise peoples awareness.

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Roots and Shadows her first novel depicts the agony and suffocation

experiences by the protagonist Indu in a male dominated and tradition bound society.

The Dark Holds No Terrors her second novel is all about male ego where in the male

refuses to play a second fiddle role in marriage. That Long Silence her third novel is

about self doubts and dears which Jaya undergoes till she affirms herself. The Binding

Vine her fourth novel deals with the personal tragedy of the protagonist Urmi to focus

attention on victim like Kalpana and Mira victims of mans lust and womans

helplessness.

Her protagonists Sarita in The Dark Holds No Terrors, Indu in Roots and

Shadows and Jaya in That Long Silence from inner conflict, confusion and

indecisions, fail to express themselves. Jaya does not like the role assigned to a

woman in the old system. She is fed up with the daily work of a housewife. But Jaya

is not as bold as Sarita in The Dark Holds No Terrors who defies her mother to

become a doctor, defies her caste to marry outside and violates social norms to liaison

with Boozie to advances her career.

Deshpande connects to the women in her stories in tune with her own life she

says there are three things in her life that shaped her as a woman. Her father is a

writer the fact that she is educated in English and she is a woman. It allows her to

understand the womans mind and the societys reaction to the Second sex in the

perspective of changing politics, cultures and economics.

Her writing is clearly a part of Indian Literature and emerges from her

rootedness in middle class Indian Society. She uses simple language to describe

simple life especially of the Indian women. She wrote of simple day to day Indian

middle class life. Saptgiri and Dedar in That Long Silence, Bangalore in A Matter of
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Time, ancestral village in The Dark Holds No Terrors and A Matter of Time these are

just not geographical locations. Rather they are places from where her women

characters come they are ordinary people, Teachers, Lawyers, Doctors, Clerks.

Incidentally, she writes all that she had experienced personally.

Her female characters she presents portrayal of womans guest for identity in

the patriarchal world. Shashi Deshpandes heroines are courageous enough to revolt

against the attempts of men to marginalize them as is revealed in her novels through

her female characters like Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors, Jaya in That Long

Silence, Indu in Roots and Shadows and Urmi in The Binding Vine.

Shashi Deshpande holds great worth as an Indian English women novelist. She

is the only Indian author to have made bold attempts at giving a voice to the

disappointment and frustrations of women despite her vehement denial of being a

feminist.

Roots and shadows is a Saga of an old Maharashtrian Brahmin family caught

in the shackles of old tradition the novel deals with the triumph and tragedy of a house

and family. It is a feminist novel in the sense that it deals with Indus struggle to

liberate herself from rotten tradition, her attempt not only at self-assertion but also at

self-realization, not as a woman but also an Individual.

That Long Silence the third novel is about Jaya who despite having played the

role of a wife and mother to prediction finds herself lonely and estranged. The gender

subjects in the novel are traced through their class and gender matrix.

The Binding Vine her fourth novel deals with the personal tragedy of the

protagonist Urmi to focus attention on victims like Kalpana and Mira. Urmila dreams
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societys attention to the plight of the rape victim and is determined to get Miras

poem published. The Binding Vine is a refreshing change from the earlier novels of

Deshpande.

Small Remedies her latest novel is about Savitribai Indorekar the aging

Doyenne of Hindustani music who avoids marriage and a home to pursue her genius.

A deep analysis of her novels leaves no doubt about her genuine concern for women

caught between tradition and modernity. Her protagonist search for their identity

within marriage. Despandes novels contain much that is feminist.

Her first novel The Dark Holds No Terrors portrays the protagonist Sarita in

relationship to her parents, to her younger brother, to her husband and her children. Its

about the traumatic experience, great humiliation and neglect as a child after marriage

as a wife. It is the pathetic story of Saru and her struggle. Deshpande shows that Saru

gets an inferior treatment at the hands of her mother and her husband on account of

her gender. She is discriminated against in comparison to her brother.

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Chapter II

Quest for Identity in Shashi Deshpandes The Dark Holds No Terrors

Quest for identity is the main theme of the novel. In all her novels are

concerned with a womans search for her identity, an exploration into the female

psyche. It portrays the psychological problems that a career oriented woman

encounters in her life. The crisis of identity is because of the darkness that persists in

ones mind. One must come out of this terror and face the problems boldly with

courage.

Through her novels, Shashi Deshpande has performed her role as a protagonist

of the oppressed woman. She feels that a woman not only in India but also in other

countries, is not treated part with man in any sphere of human activity. Deshpande is

grimly aware of plight and the predicament of Indian woman. A careful study of her

novels evinces that her women protagonists have been drawn from the middle class

society. Most of them are sensitive intelligent educated and carrier oriented. Their

pain and torture have been highlighted through the roles of the women protagonist,

Indu, Saru, Urmila and Sumi who find themselves trapped in the roles assigned to

them by the society. They have been portrayed as struggling against social taboos and

attempt to assert their individuality.

In her novel, The Dark Holds No Terrors, Shashi Deshpande post-mortems the

fractured psyche of the protagonist, Sarita. The novel reveals the quest of an

ambitious, anxious and highly self-willed girl. The novel tells the story of a marriage

on the rocks. Sarita is married to Manohar who is an English teacher in a small

college. She is a successful doctor. She treats the patients in the daytime but, at night,

lives as a terrified and trapped animal at the hands of her husband. In the end, she
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learns that her life is her own which she will have to shape on her own. Terror is not

enforced from outside rather it comes from within. It portrays the psychological

problems that a career oriented woman encounters in her life. The crisis of identity is

because of the darkness that persists in ones mind. One must come out of this terror

and face the problems boldly with courage.

Man and woman are complementary to each other and one is never a whole

without the other. Both are considered as two wheels, balancing each other. Neither of

them can claim any kind of superiority over the other. Woman is neither biologically

nor intellectually inferior to man but, in human civilization, she is valued inferior to

man. She has been given the secondary status in the society. Though woman possess

the power of endurance, affinity, love and foresight, which contributes to the

happiness of others, yet man has always looked down upon her as a weaker sex, as his

property and as an object of pleasure. She is not recognized as a human being and has

no identity of her own. Even she is known by the name of her husband, son or father.

The quest for identity has become a dominant theme in literature since the rise

and development of feminism, which studies various problems, related to women and

creates awareness among them. It is an anti-masculinist movement of the women, by

the women and for the women. It is a protest, started by women of the west, for equal

social, political, legal, moral and cultural rights for women.

Submission of the wife is ensured with the help of socialization that begins in

early childhood and extends well into adolescence and adulthood. Girl children are

trained to think, speak, dress and behave in such a way as to give preference to the

males around them and stereotypes of mythical figures like Sita, Savitri, Draupadi and

Gandhari are given to them to emulate. But, when they grow and get educated, their
 16

new sense of identity and equality clash with the internalized sense of submission and

docility and consequently, when they get married later, their marriages threaten to fall

between patriarchy and imperialism subject constitution and object formation. The

figure of woman disappears, not into a positive nothingness, but into a violent

shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the third world woman caught between

tradition and modernization. It is this tension between tradition and modernity that

Deshpande deals with in her novels.

Deshpandes novels show this socialization and stultifying effects of culturally

determined ideas of marriage and wifehood on Indian women. Indu, Saru and Jaya all

desperately try to fit themselves to the prescribed image before they learn to question

the image itself. Our society visualizes women as mothers, daughters, sisters and

wives who care for other never as individuals. The woman accepts this because the

models given her to emulate are mythological women like Sita, Draupadi and

Gandhari who never framed a question regarding their individuality. The protagonist

of The Dark Holds No Terrors can be taken as the role model for the new woman

because it was she who defied and over threw the male patriarchal system represented

by her mother and her husband. The novel does not confine itself to the feminist

problems but Deshpande probes the universally relevant problems which come in

between man-woman relationships. The novel tells the story of a marriage on the

rocks. Sarita is married to Manohar who is an English teacher in a small college. She

is a successful doctor. She treats the patients in the daytime but, at night, lives as a

terrified and trapped animal at the hands of her husband.

When the novel opens we find that Saru, the central character of the novel

comes back to her parental home. When she enters home, flashback begins. The true

substance of the novel lies in the mental processes that Saru goes through during
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apparently eventless existence at her fathers place. She thinks she analyses all the

dark corners of her soul. She introspect judges life and relationships. We find her true

self while she is unweaving her mind through memories and dreams. The novel to a

certain extent resembles Canadian novel entitled surfacing by Margaret Atwood. The

unnamed female protagonist has been hart and deceived by her previous her she got

her pregnancy terminated after the suggestion of her love and later on these previous

wounds, the dark memory started surfacing on her conscious mind and she became

rebellious. The novel The Dark Holds No Terrors exhibits not only the callous mother,

Saru has in her life intolerant nagging mother, nonchalant father , sadist husband,

womanizing professor and lecherous sex hunting colleagues.

Society treats the male offspring as an ultimate panacea to all problems but the

girl child is an unwanted burden as she cannot fulfill the parental needs or ungratified

ambitious the given social calculus. The plenitude, warmth and importance given to a

male child are denied to the girl and this makes her either depressed or rebellious.

Saru is victimized and persecuted by her own mother and husband. Her mother could

never forgive her daughter for being alive after her brother had drowned and Saru

could never forget the traumatizing effect of her mothers hysterical outburst.

The novel is about Saru an educated, economically independent, middleclass

wife who is made conscious of her gender as a child and whose loveless relationship

with her parents and strained relations with her husband lead to her agonizing search

for herself. The novel opens with Sarus return to her parents house fifteen years after

she left home with a vow never to return. Her relations with her husband become

unbearably strained and she returns for some solace. Here she gets a chance to think

over her relationship with her husband, her children, her parents and her dead brother

Dhruva.
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Sarus relationship with her brother has been given special presentation. she is

ignored in favor of her brother Dhruva no parental love is showered on her and she is

not giving any importance. Her brothers birthdays are celebrated with much fanfare

and performance of religious rites; where as her birthdays are not even acknowledged.

She even feels that her birth is a horrible experience for her mother as she later recalls

her mother telling her that it had rained heavily the day she is born and it is terrible for

her mother. It seemed to Saru that it is her birth that is terrible for her and not the

rains. She recalls the joyous excitement in the house on the occasion of his naming

ceremony. The idea, that she is a liability to her parents in deeply implanted in her

mind as a child.

Her mothers adoration of her son at her daughters cost is the rallying point

for the novelist to bring her feminist ideas together. The preference for boys over girls

can be openly witnessed in most Indian homes and is inextricably linked to the Indian

psyche sons bring in dowry could be one reason, but the Indian society steeped in

tradition and superstition considers the birth of a son as auspicious as he carries on the

family lineage. The first though that rose is Sarus mind at hearing about her mothers

death is who lit the pyre? She had no son to do that for her Dhruva had been seven

when he died (DHNT 21). As Sarbjit Sandhu aptly remarks:

The mother is very attached to her son. Her attitude is a typical one

After all, he is 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 parents would otherwise wander in ferment.

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Her mother constantly reminds her that she should not go out in the sun as it

would worsen her already dark complexion Saru recalls her conversation with her

mother. Saru's mother favours to her brother, Dhruva. At him, Saru is insecure and

lonely. Saru's mother believes that a girl is a liability and a boy an asset. Saru

remembers how her mother had installed in her a negative self image: I was an ugly

girl. At least, my mother told me so. I can remember her eyeing me dispassionately

saying. 'You will never be good looking. You are dark for that.(DHNT 63)

This sort of blatant discrimination between Saru and her brother leads to a

sense of insecurity and hatred towards her parents, especially mother, and her

resultant rebellious nature. Mothers condescending behavior and fathers indifference

deters the balance beauty of Sarus life. She develops inferiority complex in herself

which makes her too vulnerable and insecure in her relationships with others. She

always feels insecure in her fathers house. She wants to be accepted, loved &

cherished by someone because she always had been spurned and rebuffed by her

mother. She finds love in her relationship with Manohar who was an English teacher

in a small college. In spite of her parents disapproval, She revolts against the parents

and runs away from home to get married to a person of her choice. She marries

Manohar. Sarita is brought up in a traditional atmosphere but the education, that she

receives, makes her a changed person with a rebellious attitude. She was quite

satisfied with her choice. She feels herself lucky for getting Manohar as her husband.

The life was going smooth but it takes a turn when her neighbors become aware of her

professional identity. The respect she gets, as a doctor, disturbs the traditional

equilibrium of the superior husband and inferior wife. Her superior economic

position, of a reputed lady doctor in the society, is not accepted by Manohar. He gets
 20

jealous of her popularity. He cant tolerate that his wife enjoys better social prestige

and it gradually destroys their marriage. She thinks:

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 youngman and I his bride. Now I was the lady doctor and he

was my husband (TDHNT 42).

V.S.Sunitareddy observer: In this connection, Sarus mothers attitude is

typical of most Indian mothers and a common enough phenomenon in the Indian

context. The novel has an echo of The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. Here the

female protagonist Maggie Gulliver is looked down upon by her mother while her

brother Tom is the darling child of his mother.

The turning point in her life is the accidental death of her brother by drowning.

All her life she is haunted by the memories of her mother accusing her of intentionally

letting Dhruva dies by drowning. She to on her part has a guilty conscience as she

considers herself responsible for having remained a mute spectator to her brothers

death by drowing. She never refutes the charge leveled against her by her mother. As

G.Dominic Savio observes; Dhruvas demise had always been her subconscious

desire and there is a very thin demarcation between her wish and its fulfillment.

Shashi Deshpande thus reveals the social aspect of keen sibling jealousy born of a

mothers undue fondness for the son.

 21

Sarus Mothers discriminatory behavior makes Saru feel unloved unwanted

leading to a sense of alienation and estrangement. She is in the grips of insecurity.

After her brothers death her lot deteriorated from bad to worse. Irrespective of

geographical or chronological space, any Indian girl is a victim of gender

discrimination in the Indian society setup. Life becomes more desperate to Saru after

Dhruva's death. There is no celebration at home, her much awaited birthday passes off

in silence both at school and at home. Right from the beginning Saru is made to

understand that she is inferior to her brother. Saru feels that men enjoy more liberty

and freedom in Indian society. When a mother differentiates between her own

children for whom she has equally suffered and taken equal pains. This feeling of

insecurity makes a life of a girl more miserable. The ambiguity of Sarus relationship

with her mother is not taken into consideration by many critics who have taken up this

novel for interpretation. Most of the readings of this novel seem to be driven by the

compelling desire to make woman an autonomous being. The protagonist of one

novel is sufficient reason for generalizing about the category woman.

The woman in order to achieve her freedom seeks marriage as an alternative to

the bondage created 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.

This kind of criticism on the one hand holds such tradition bound notions as

one should be good to the mother and on the other, the western individualistic notion

of freedom. The infectivity to the question of difference the notion that the Indian

woman can be easily defined and identified is accordance with the dominant

nationalistic search for the essential Indian subject.

 22

Sarus mother could be no exception to this and she loses interest in life after

her sons death. She puts the blame for her own wretched lot squarely on Sarus

shoulders. She snatches every opportunity to reproach her and takes no interest in

education, career or future. Her feeling of being unwanted is so acute that she begins

to hate her own existence as a girl or woman. On attaining puberty she says

scornfully, If you are a woman, I dont want to be one (DHNT 62). The treatment

that is meted out to her during her monthly ordeals is inhuman. She is treated like an

untouchable, segregated from the other members of the family and made to sleep on a

straw mat with a cup and plate exclusively meant for her to be served in from a

distance .She is engulfed with a sense of shame and prays in desperation for a miracle

to put an end to it.

Thus, unloved and unwanted, she develops hatred towards the traditional

practices during her impressionable years. Her hatred towards her mother is so acute

that she becomes rebellious just to hurt her. She leaves her parental home to start her

life on her own, putting the first foot towards independence.

Saru always prefers to take the road less travelled. She doesn't like women

friend's who mould themselves into the traditional stereotypes and remain the silent,

nameless waiter at the dining table. On the contrary she has great respect for the

dignified, self reliant teacher-friend Nalu, who despises all compromises and remains

single to lead a meaningful life of convictions. She considers economic independence

as an insurance against any subordination. Afterwards she decides to join medical

science to be economically independent, in spite of the stiff resistance from her

mother. This hatred drives her to leave home for Bombay to seek medicine as a

career. In the medical college she falls in love with a college mate and marries him
 23

against her parent wishes. Her orthodox mother was dead against her daughters

marrying a man from a lower caste.

Her marital life goes through many ups and downs. Manohar, her husband, is

the master of the family before she got recognition as a doctor. Earlier she is known

as the wife of Manohar but now after the explosion in the factory people recognize

Manohar as the doctor's husband. The explosion provides her an opportunity to prove

her worth and assert herself, though unconsciously. But this shatters their family life.

Manohar thinks Saru's success as his failure.

Saru considers herself is the luckiest woman on earth, as the initial years of

her marriage are sheer bliss. Manu is her savior and the romantic hero who rescues

Saru-a damsel in distress. She marries to secure the lost love in her parental home and

her identity as an individual. Her marriage with Manu is an assertion on and

affirmation of her feminine sensibility.

Her dingy one-room apartment with the corridors smelling of urine, the rooms

with their dark sealed in odours, is a heaven on earth for her. But soon all this proves

to be a mere mirage for her. Soon she realizes that happiness is illusory. Saru

remembers how a particular incident becomes a turning point in their blissful marital

relationship. One night she returns home late in her bloodstained coat as she helped

out the victims in a fire accident in a factor nearby. The neighborhood thus comes to

know about her identity, and she gains recognition. People would come to her for

medical help and other related matters. In the beginning Saru could come to her for

medical help and other related matters. In the beginning Saru could not realize the

change that had come in Manu. Her success as a well known and reputed doctor

becomes the cause of her strained marital relations with Manu. In a retrospective
 24

mood she says much later: He had been the young man and I his bride. Now I was

the lady doctor and he was my Husband (DHNT 42).

Manu is uncomfortable with Sarus steady rise in status, as he feels ignored

when people greet and pay attention to Saru. Beside she is unable to spare time

enough for many and children. Manu and Saru want to move out to some other place

for their own reasons. While Manu feels humiliated and embarrassed, Saru is no

longer happy in that cramped and stinking apartment and wants to move into

something more decent. Earlier she was happy and contented to live on Manus salary

but in her new role as carrier woman she becomes discontented.

Manu does not love her as he used to earlier. Saru begins to hate this man

woman relationship which is based on need and attraction and not love. She scorns

the word Love now. She realizes there was no such thing between man and woman.

With change of circumstances she feels a gradual disappearance of love and

attachment towards husband and children. The most solemn duties towards them

remain unattended to. The children are denied due love and care as she gets late in the

evenings.

While her social and financial status rises gradually, there is an inverse decline

in her conjugal relationship. Her relations with Manu would have somehow moved

on smoothly had she remained contented with treating people in the neighborhood.

But her ambition to move higher in life, by her career through Boozie, who is a

handsome and efficient doctor. He is flirtatious in nature and Saru has no strong

dislike towards flirts. Their relation reaches a stage when Boozie helps her financially

to set up her own practice in a posh area. Saru, blind in ambition, is unscrupulous in

her relationship with Boozie and console herself by treating it as a mere teacher-
 25

student relation. Both had their own vested interests in sustaining such a relation.

Boozie openly flaunts his relationship with Saru to hide his homosexual nature and

Saru wanted to exploit him through her feminine wiles to achieve her much coveted

goal of becoming an established, reputed doctor. Although there is nothing physical

about Saru-Boozie relationship, but this gives rise to a misconception in Manu's mind.

But she had such an unwilling towards Manu that she does nothing to make upset

him, rather lets him believe the obvious.

The womans emancipation is not in repudiating the claims of her family, but

in drawing upon untapped inner reserves of strength. The wife, in the end is therefore

not a rebel but a redeemed wife one who has broken the long silence, one who is no

longer afraid of the dark. She is a wife reconciled as woman and an individual a

marked contrast to the older generation of woman around her with their

uncomplaining unresisting fatalistic attitude.

Saru is not rebellious daughter who is searching for herself identity for her

freedom, not as an agoist who cannot understand the inferiority complex of her

husband, not as the guilty sister who is responsible for the death of her brother, not as

a daughter who is never forgiven by the mother, not as a traveler who goes to a

spiritual quest that ends in resolutions, but as a woman who possesses White, soft

and clean (DHNT 36).

But Saru's rise in social and financial status in contrast to Manu's status of an

underpaid lecturer sets in great discomfort in their conjugal relation. Saru's

contentment in her career is no match to her discontentment at home. And contrary to

the claims of most feminists, she does not achieve fulfillment in life.
 26

Certain incidents aggravate the already strained relation between the two to

the extent that in the privacy of their room at night he doesn't behave like a husband,

but a rapist. In an interview with Saru when the interviewing girl happens to ask

Manu innocently: How does it feel when your wife earns only the butter but most of

the bread as well? (DHNT 204). The three Saru, Manu, and the girl merely laughed it

off as if it were nothing. This particular incident is very humiliating to him and he

feels helpless and effeminate. To gain his masculinity he gives vent to his feelings

through his beastly sexual assault on Saru. Although he is a cheerful normal human

being and a loving husband during day, he turns into a rapist, to assert his manhood.

In yet another incident she undergoes this nightmarish experience. Prior to going on a

vacation to Ooty while shopping Manu and Saru happen to meet the former's college

mate and his wife. During the talk Manu tells his colleague that they were going to

Ooty. When his colleagues expresses his inability and bad luck in affording such a

vacation, the colleague's wife replies that he also could have afforded it had he

married a doctor.

A humiliated Manu once again victimizes Saru. She expresses her helplessness

to her father: I couldn't fight back. I couldn't shout or cut, I was so afraid the children

in the next room would hear. I could do nothing. I can never do anything. I just

endure (DHNT 204). Although she has achieved economic independence, her plight

is miserable, as she has to perform double duties. Besides practicing medicine she has

to fulfill the assigned job of a housewife. She expresses her desire to leave her

medical practice but Manu dissuades her from doing so, as their standard of living

wouldn't be possible on Manu's income.

During her youth Sarita is an aware of the growing changes in her body and its

demands.
 27

Man and woman, male and female, how exciting that game had seemed.

And that she could play that game as well had seemed! And, that she

could play that game as well had seemed even more incredibly exciting.

Youre a woman now,' they had told her when she began menstruating. But

she did not feel then that it made her any different. She was the same

Saru, with the burden of that curse added on to her like an appendage

each month (DHNT 123).

The emotions of love and the recognition of the demands of sexuality should

be always within the social institution of marriage. Hence a woman should and must

occupy. Some Social space to be identify as a wife, mother, daughter and a sister. She

has to be in the guardian of her father, husband and son. Hence, the woman in Indian

is simply been trapped in the Brahminic world view that she cannot have an

independent existence Sarita has been fed with all these norms; her mother accused

her of her brother Dhurvas death. Why didnt you die? Why are you alive and hes

dead? (DHNT 34-35). To a mother a boy is all the more important but not a girl. Her

father too takes least interest in her studies or development; he shows no love anger or

dislike towards Sarita.

The novel may be said to be a study in guilt consciousness, as Saru ruminates,

My brother died because I heedlessly turned my back on him. My mother died alone

because I deserted her. My husband is a failure because I destroyed his manhood

(DHNT 220).
 28

Although she returns to her parents' place in a detached frame of mind, she

feels strange despite the fact that nothing had changed in the house, not even the

seven pairs of large stone slabs leading to the front door on which she had played

hopscotch as a child. Her father also sounds strange as he talked like an unwilling host

to her as if she is an unwelcome guest. She is in grave need of sympathy but he does

nothing to console her. This reminds her of the fate of a sister of her friend's who had

come home after her disastrous marriage. She remembers how she received care and

sympathy from her parents. Because her marriage had been an arranged one, the

parents too were party to her misfortune. Since Saru is not an arranged one, she makes

herself solely responsible for her disastrous marriage and is guilty conscious. She is

totally confused and feels that she has done great injustice towards her brother,

mother, husband, and children.

On one occasion Saru presents a perfect recipe fire a successful marriage. On

being asked by her friend Nalu to talk on medicine as a profession for women, to a

group of college students, she says:

Have you noticed that the wife always walks a few steps behind her

husband? Thats important very important because its symbolic of the

truth. A wife must always be a few feet behind her husband. If hes an MA,

you should be a BA. If he is 5'4" tall you shouldnt be more than 53 tall. If

he is earning five hundred rupees, you should never earn more than four

hundred and ninety, if you want a happy marriage. Don't ever try to

reverse the doctor-nurse, executive-secretary, principal-teacher role. It

 29

can be traumatic, disastrous. And I assure you, it is not worth it. He'll

suffer. You'll duffer and do will the children. Women's magazines will tell

you that a marriage must be an 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 favour of your husband. If the scales tilt in

your favour, god help you, both of you (DHNT 137)

Neither God nor even her parents can help Sarita. She had married the one

time promising and charismatic young poet against her parents wish. In her many acts

of violation of societal norms, Sarita defines her parents in stating medicine and

becoming a doctor, defines them to marry Manohar and then breaks away from domes

facility as she cannot talk his sadism any more, she escapes from his nightmarish

brutality man other in on her every night when he feels that his wife has overtaken

him professionally and financially. She goes to her fathers home without love and

beyond a life of fulfilling domesticity and wants the old self again.

In the beginning Fulfillment and happiness came not through love alone but

sex. And for me sex was now a dirty word (DHNT133). It had become dirty because

of Manohars ego. All her runner sentiments, sensitivities and herself identity had

been trampled and crushed by his ago. Union with Manohar had turned to slavery of if

everything in a girls life it seemed is shaped to that simple purpose of pleasing male

endless night of pleasing male endless nights of torture make her put in crudely.

Saritas superior economic position of a reputed lady doctor in the society is not

accepted by Manohar continues in hurting her the more she becomes like a patient

having carcinomas dying inch by inch bit by bit and at last waiting for death.
 30

The pain and shame she undergoes a deep anguish kill the creativity and

imagination in transforming the person into something different. Her pain her

suffering cannot be uttered in public but she feels her body us a burden which her

husband would not feel even if he had thought that body many pains. The word pain

brings a kind of transformation and the physical pain becomes a form of

internalization of social guilt. Sarita feels that she is raped not only physically but also

psychologically. To be a woman thus is to embrace forced sickness both physically

and mentally.

The hurting hands, the savage teeth, the monstrous assault of a horribly

familiar body. And above me a face I could not recognize. Total non

comprehension, complete bewilderment, paralysed me for a while. Then I

began to struggle. But my body, hurt and painful, could do nothing against the

fearful strength which over whelmed me. (DHNT 112)

The brutal possession of the body is reduced in the multiplication of various

forms of pain, pain of loss, pain of physical suffering and pain of mental traumas. It is

not only the cruelty of her husband that fills her with grief but her brother death and

her dejected life pain and suffering of her mother and herself. The circles of pain that

surround a woman may not possibly redeem her. But pain ultimately becomes a

means of self discovery that enables Sarita to take the decisive step of leaving her

house children and her husband. In order to become free individual land to have an

identity and with a purpose in life she quits her house on hearing through a friend

about her mothers death a month ago Saru wants to visit her fathers house from

where she had left as a young woman she returns back after a gap of fifteen years. She

returns a well established doctor and a mother of two children more out of an urge to

escape from the hell of life. She is passing through she is confessed helpless dull
 31

almost thoughtless as a recluse. She comes to her parental house to see her sense of

belonging to the world but the some eludes her Sarita is waiting outside her old house,

like the old friend of Lord Krishna Sudama in rugs waiting outside the palace gets of

Lord krishna and his queen Rukmani. But Sarita, unlike Sudama has a suit case full of

clots full of humility. She gets a cold reception at her father house at times. Thus back

in her old home and with the gradually realized comforting presence of Madhu and

her father around her whose first significant nurturing act of Sarita is to ensure a

hastily made cradle for her to sleep in the old puja room. She expects a loss of

sympathy from her father after having become a helpless victim of her senseless

choice of a love marriage. She moans It is my fault again. If mine had been an

arranged marriage if I had left it to them to arrange my life would we have left me like

this? (DHNT 128)

Once, when Saritas family is in Ooty, She is suddenly rocked by another

traumatic scene of her early childhood when she is only four or five years old. Her

mother had caught her firmly to comb her hair and young. Sarita facing the window

was happy seeing the pony dancing on the green ground near their house.The pony

was jumping running with all the awkward energy of over enthusiasm, clumsy and

awkward though it seemed to be its movement and the gently sloping green ground

harmonized into a beautiful whole that somehow enchanted me(DHNT 113).

Sarita as a young girl is enchanted by this right because the pony is free

dancing and jumping though her mother turns here away from this sight cruelly and

hurtfully she cannot prevent her daughter from seeing an understand. Sarita had never

been allowed to be free and spontaneous. But the only positive aspect her is that

strength of memory to recalls these crucial losses her in her younger days. This helps

her to restore thought a psychoanalytical process of regression had already started in

 32

her father house she years for security and emotional attachments, she wants her

father to support her against Manu brutality. She memorizes these thoughts words and

sentence to tell her father buy when the real moment comes she blurts out and very

crudely says My husband is a sadist. (DHNT 199)

Her father a simple man fails to understand the words like sadism love cruelty

etc. Sarita takes every possible steps to explain her problems and says that she wants

to talk to him not as a daughter, but as a woman to man. Her father expects that they

should talk like matured persons. Because, he says that this kind of relation Woman

and Man of intimacy or sharing of feelings or communicating with each other had

never taken place between him and his wife. He says Silence had become a habit

focus (DHNT 199). As he starts enduring Saru about the events, very slowly his

unnatural composure and indifference disappear. Saru pours her heart out with all

details about the events very slowly his unnatural composure and indifference

disappear. Saru Pours her heart out with all details about Manus brutality and

expresses her helplessness. She wholeheartedly expects moral support from her father

and very frantically requests him.

Saritas father without any response leaves her and goes away she feels quitter

isolated and becomes sad, she wants to tell her father that Baba, Im unhappy help

me baba Im in trouble tell me what to do (DHNT 44). Her feelings never get

articulated at times she regrets for having come to her parents house for she

remembers her children her parents and her patients. Actually her visit to her fathers

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 Madhu is a relief

for no demands is made to her. The whole day in her own desires and comforts she

recapitulated the kind of life.

 33

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 felinity she stops thinking about herself as a women. The aspect in doctor

she 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 them stupid silly martyrs she thought, idiotic

heroines. Going on with their tasks, and destroying themselves in the bargain, for

nothing but a meaningless modesty (DHNT 107).

Shashi Deshpande contrasts Saru's life with the lives of her two school

friends- Sunita and Nalu. Sunita leaves no effort to pose as a happily married woman.

All the while she talks about her intimacy with her husband as if she are a non-entity

without him, which only invokes pity in the eyes of the reader and hatred of her two

friends. Nalu also questions her as to why she let her husband change her name from

Sunita to Anju. Nalu is contemptuous of Sunita's constant references to her husband

and hates her for her submissive attitude of sattisfying every whim of his.

On the other hand is Nalu, a spinster who is a teacher and lives with her

brother and his family. Saru contrasts Sunita with the Nalu of her college days who

was full of enthusiasm. But now bitterness has crept into her, and Saru does not blame

her bitterness on her spinsterhood. Saru feels that it would be wrong to say that Nalu

is bitter because she never married, never bore a child. But that would be as stupid as

calling me fulfilled because I got married and I have borne two children
 34

(DHNT124). Shashi Deshpande contrasts the lives of Saru, Sunita and Nalu anf shows

that a wife, a mother and a spinster had their own share of joys and sorrows, and it is

almost difficult to conclude as to who is the more happier or the more fulfilled. While

the married women are reported to be dissatisfied with their marriage, the unmarried

ones are reported to have their own sufferings and anxieties.

A mature Saru now shuns extremes and takes a practical view of the

circumstances. She is neither the typical Western liberated woman not an orthodox

Indian one. Shashi Deshpande does not let herself get overwhelmed by the Western

feminism or its militant concept of emancipation. In quest for the wholeness of

identity, she does not advocate separation from the spouse but a tactful assertion of

one's identity within marriage.

 35

Chapter 3

Conclusion

Through her novels, Shashi Deshpande tries to depict feminine sensibility. In

general life women like male counters want to liberation in all its approaches and

recognition. They struggle for eqality for women rights historically and politically.

Shashi Deshpande has presented in her novels modern Indian women's search for

these definition about the self and society and the relationship that are the central to

women. Shashi Deshpande's novel deals with the theme of quest for a female identity.

The complexity of man-woman relationship in the context of marriage, the trauma of

a disturbed adolescence. The Indian women has for years been a silent sufferer. While

she has played different roles as a wife, mother, sister and daughter. She has never

been able to claim her own individually. Shashi Deshpande's novels deal with the

women belonging to Indian middle class. She deals with the inner world of the Indian

women in her novels. She portrays her heroines in a realistic manner.

To the maximum extent Sarita's problems are her own creations. She is a self

made person and her ego, and innate love for power create a number of problems.

Right from her early days we find her opposing traditional codes and marry outside

her community. She even defines social conventions by using Boozie to advance her

career, economic independence became a goal and every move of her life is towards

the realization of that goal. Sarita becomes a reputed and family doctor, she becomes

proud of her social status and her husband becomes insecure. She wants to outshine

other, not through dedicated service but through economic criteria. Manohar's place in

her life becomes diminished. Sarita's love for power is the undercurrent of her life.

Her relation with her mother and husband analyzed as a rival in the game of power, as
 36

an authority which had posed a threat to her individuality and self will. Similarly, she

sees in her husband is the element of domination. Through she can be dominated yet

hold something of her reserve. Shashi Deshpande deals with the universally relevant

problems, which encounters in man- woman relationships. Sarita realize that everyone

in life encounters problems and gives sufferings at one stage or another.

Saru's self assertion and confrontation with reality but, not escape from it.

Saru gathers strength not to surrender, escape from the problems or to accept at

defeat. She rather accepts the challenge as to prove herself a good daughter, a good

wife, a good mother, a good doctor and a good human being from her own female

viewpoint. She is trying to provide an alternative. Sarita's, who is not prepared to face

her husband at one stage, decides to leave her father and go away somewhere.

She is her own refuge, she never blames others. She has to face her husband

fearlessly. The fear of darkness is faded from her mind. Deshpande makes it clear that

a woman should not be dependent on others. She should make herself determined,

capable enough of standing trials in life alone. The modern woman in this

multifaceted world is more than a mother, sister and a daughter. She is an individual,

capable of playing any role with a strong will power. Saru undergoes the arduous

journey into her and learn to free herself of guilt, shame and humiliation.

The centuries of unjust treatment, gender discrimination and humiliation

inflicted upon women have given birth to collective consciousness of the India

women. The women in Shashi Deshpande's novels portray the struggle against the

patriarchal normal of the society. One half of the community can't be neglected in this

modern world. The chief concern of Shashi Deshpande's novels is the sensitive
 37

portrayal of women's quest for identity their own solution to the problems created by

the world.

Saru's journey to her parental home can also be seen as a feminist journey in

search of identity, selfhood and individualism. She had, as an adolescent, fought a

feminist battle against her mother to break free. She remembers that in that battle her

father had stood by her. After getting a first division in her intermediate, she had made

up her mind to join the medical college. But she knew that her mother would never

agree with her. She said that they could not afford to waste so much money on her

because they have to get her married also. Between marriage and education she

chooses the later. Her first victory against her mother takes her further away from the

matriarch. When she falls in love with Manohar, a flamboyant Literature student, she

takes it as an opportunity to prove herself against her mother. She enjoys shocking her

orthodox mother by choosing to marry a man from a lower caste.

When she settles with Manu and starts her medical practice, she thinks that

she is a liberated woman. She has rejected her mother's notions of marriage as the

destination and destiny of a woman. She has proved her independence. Later when

she sets up her own practice and becomes rich and famous as a lady doctor, she

should have been at peace with herself. But it is not to be. When her loving husband

turns a monster in the night because he is unable to accept her success, dhe realizes

the vulnerability of being a woman. Though she is emancipated, she is still not really

free or liberated. She had thought that she would find her identity away from the

confines of home. But now lost in the quagmire of surrender, submission and

savagery, she sees her own feminine self fragmented and splintered around her. Once

sitting in her consulting room, she cuts a piece of paper into bits to the horror of the
 38

nurse, and says to herself that they are the bits of her mind falling on the ground. The

hollowness of her existence or non-existence makes her almost crazy. Apparently,

despite being emancipated, when locked in an unequal relationship with a man, the

female passivity, vulnerability and the legacy of patriarchy continue to a woman.

Breaking free from these needs immense courage, resilience and willingness

for a brutal self-criticism. When Saru arrives at her father's home, she is in this second

final stage of her feminist struggle for freedom and individuation. Sitting quietly, she

goes through the entire gamut of her tumultuous experiences spanning the different

stages of her life from early childhood, adolescence and youth to maturity. She thinks

of herself as a guilty sister, an undutiful daughter and unloving wife.

The novel ends with the certainty that how Saru will no longer be a victim of

Manu's frustration. She derives pride in her professional success and decides not to

feel guilt for someone else's failure. Saru realize that the essence of any marriage is

understanding and mutual respect and not subjugation of one by the other. With this

knowledge she readies herself to confront Manu.

The novelist brings out powerfully the psychological problem of a career

woman and discusses it artistically without crossing the barrier of art. The novel also

transcends feminist constraints and raises issues, which the human beings in general

encounter in their lives.

Saru presents the process of forming a gender identity. In her exit she makes a

distinction between her roles and self. Her gender identity is complete with the final

going back to the inner space. The male-female polarity is kept up and a merger is not

encouraged. Saru is study in conflict. The novelist does not depict her as a woman

surrendering herself before the adverse circumstances. Whenever, her individual self
 39

was hurt, she rebelled, she exerted her individuality by getting married with a person

whom her parents did not like. She has shown her husband that she has an

independent self. When she comes back to her parent's home to escape herself from

the monstrous brutalities of her husband, she decides to face the situation. First she

instructs her Baba to open the door if Manu comes and then she herself thinks to open

it.

Shashi Deshpande's protagonists are women endowed with positive thinking.

In the process of self-exploration and self-realization one's own potentiality which

further enhances their own worthiness as an individual and subsequently utilizing that

for the betterment of her own self any the family.

So at last to retrieve her own splintered self, Saru turns to the darkness within

herself. She must exorcise the monsters and terrors lurking in the dark. At the end of

the novel she rushes out to attend to one of her patients. She has come out of a

cathartic experience. She has forgiven her mother, her father and her brother. The very

fact that she agrees to meet Manu shows that she is no longer afraid of him. And more

importantly she is able to turn to her profession, in her own interest, not to prove

herself successful and rich but to realize her true and uninhabited free self. After

agonizing trials of errors through progression and regression she moves to self

discovery and strength. Look at the ripeness and maturity reached through her

feminist self exploration.

This novel beautifully records the trauma of sensitive young women who do

not accept anything without reason. Apart from these presenting the clash between

tradition and modernity. This novel records the resentment and frustration of Saru

who has finally learnt to face for reconciliation.

 40

Work cited

Adhikari, Madhumalati. "Creating a Brave New World: Shashi Deshpande's A

Matter of Time." Contemporary Indian Women Writers in English. Ed. Surya

Nath Pandey. New Delhi: Atlantic, 1999. 132 141.

Basu, Srimati. "Haklenewali: Indian Women's Negotiations of Discourses of

Inheritance." Dowry and Inheritance. Ed. Srirnati Basu. New Delhi: Kali, 2005.

151-170.

Berger, Louis. From Instinct to Identity. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1974.

Chatterjee, Shoma A. The Indian Woman in Perspective. New Delhi: Ajanta,l993.

Nabar, Vrinda. Caste as woman. New Delhi: Penguin, 1995

Parikh, Indira J. Indian Women: An Inner Dialogue. New Delhi: Sage, 1989

Talwar, Sree Rashmi. Woman's Space: The Mosaic World of Marearet Drabble and

Navantara Sahgal. New Delhi: Creative Books, 1997