TRANS - CULTURAL IDENTITIES: A REVIEW

ON SHASHI DESPANDE’S SELECT NOVELS

A THESIS
Submitted by
ADLIN FREEDA. M.R

in partial fulfilment for the award of the degree of

MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY IN
ENGLISH

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
NANJIL CATHOLIC COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCE
KALIYAKKAVILAI– 629 153

APRIL 2017
TRANS - CULTURAL IDENTITIES: A REVIEW ON
SHASHI DESPANDE’S SELECT NOVELS

A THESIS
Submitted by
ADLIN FREEDA. M.R

in partial fulfilment for the award of the degree of

MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY IN
ENGLISH

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
NANJIL CATHOLIC COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCE
KALIYAKKAVILAI– 629 153

APRIL 2017
 NANJIL CATHOLIC COLLEGE OF ARTS AND
SCIENCE

KALIYAKKAVILAI– 629153

BONAFIDE CERTIFICATE

Certified that this thesis titled “Trans-Cultural Identities: A Review

on Shashi Despande’s Select Novels” is the bonafide work of ADLIN

FREEDA M.R (Reg. No.: 61012080) who carried out the work under my

supervision. Certified further that to the best of my knowledge the work

reported herein does not from part of any other thesis or dissertation on the

basis of which a degree or award was conferred on an earlier occasion on

this or any other candidate.

Mrs.SUSHMA JENIFER., M.A., M.Phil Dr. G.R. GNANA RAJA, MA., M.Phil., PhD
Assistant Professor and Head Assistant Professors
(The Superior)
Department of English Department of English
Nanjil Catholic College of Arts &Science Nanjil Catholic College of Arts &Science

Kaliyakavilai Kaliyakavilai
 ABSTRACT

The present study “Trans - Cultural Identities: A Review on Shashi

Despande’s Select Novels” explores the post colonial feminist context in which the

marginalised women find chaos in their own destiny and quest for their identity in the

patriarchal society.

The study inculcates the review of literature brought from the feministic

perspective. It also indicates author’s background and works of the contemporary period.

It elucidates how women are suppressed by the banner of culture and tradition. The

traditional thought drag them to forget about their destiny. The society forces the woman

to lead a restricted life in silence. The characters in Shashi Despande and novels find

themselves entrapped in the roles assigned to them by society and achieve self identity

and independence within the confines of their marriage. They use silence as a weapon to

show their protests and fight against the predominant culture.

The trans- cultural identities in her fiction is one of the favourite areas of

feminism. It comforts the modern woman who are dissatisfied with the cultural and

sexual roles assigned by the patriarchal society. But at the same time she cannot reject the

cultural social background too. The woman is neither free nor independent. She is in

between the two. There is an urge for the identity and independence in them. Most of

Despande’s characters are woman who are educated and exposed to western ideas, but

are caught between tradition and modernity.

 ACNOWLEDGEMENT

To God I raise my heart in deep gratitude and love for the abundance of grace,

wisdom, knowledge and good health he had given me to complete my dissertation with

interest and enthusiasm.

I owe my sincere gratitude to our beloved Father Dr. S. Maria Rajendren, a

constructive visionary who always provoke quality enhancement and motivate the

research aspirants to reach the new horizon. My heartfelt thanks to him.

I am grateful to my guide and supervisor Dr. G.R. Gnana Raja, M.A, M.Phil, PhD

(Assistant professor of English) who guided me in my research work with far reaching

discussion, sincere evaluation, generous and incisive comments. I remember with

gratitude the long hours he spent to bring it to its present form.

It is my duty to thank our Principal Dr. E. John Jothi Prakash and Mrs.Sushma

Jenifer M.A., MPhil., Head of the Department of English, who was a great source of

inspiration to me throughout the preparation of this dissertation.

I would like to place my record of gratitude to the librarian of Nanjil Catholic

College of Arts and Science, Kaliyakkavilai and the American College, Madurai for

providing me with a number of books related to my work.

I like to express my heart full thanks to my parents, friends and lecturers who had

stood by my side at every point of my life. Their role towards completing the dissertation

has been enormous and encouraging.

Adlin Freeda. M.R

 CONTENT

CHAPTER TITLE PAGE NO

I INTRODUCTION 1

II WOMEN IN TRANQULITY

III QUEST FOR IDENTITY

IV TRADITION & MODERNITY

V CONCLUSION
 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Indian literature is usually believed to be the oldest in the world. Due to the vast

cultural diversities, there are around two dozen officially recognized languages in India. It

describes the writers of English language whose native or co-native language could be

one of the numerous languages of India. After the British rule in India there has been

writers started writing in English language.

Indian Literature is an honest enterprise to demonstrate the ever rare gems of

Indian Writing in English. Indian Writing in English has turned out to be a new form in

which Indian culture and traditional voice converses regularly. The Indian Writers such as

poets, novelists, essayists, and dramatists have been made momentous and considerable

contributions to the world literature since pre-Independence era. In the past post colonial

Indian concept literature have been witnessed a prospering and thriving achievements in

the global market. Indian Literature represents the culture of India, tradition, politics,

national living, patriotism, atmosphere and sensibility of the people. AmitChaudri says

Indian Writing in English started employing magical realism, bagginess, non-linear

narrative and hybrid language that sustain theme seen as microcosm of India and

supposedly reflecting Indian conditions. (46)

India’s substantial contribution to world literature is largely due to the profusely

creative literary works generated by Indian novelists in English. Their works

contemplated and deliberated on multifarious range of issues like nationalism, freedom

struggle, social realism and individual consciousness. The literary movement is

strengthened by the overwhelming output by novelists and distinguished itself as a

remarkable force in world fiction. The struggle for independence was a mighty and

momentous movement sweeping the entire nation and exerting tremendous impact on the

sense of national consciousness among the literary fraternity. Thus the lucid description

of the freedom struggle showcased images of the awakened Indians who sought to regain

their freedom from the grueling and torturous regime of the British. Apart from these

reflections, the writers were able to propagate their concept, which ultimately helped to

motivate and guide the people over there. Thus the Fixation on religious aestheticism was

replaced by concerns on socio-political issues. The horrors and evils of the society are

portrayed in the large scale, which provoke interest on the readers. Indian English

novelists have started to prove its mark in the global literary scenario. The most revolving

aspects of East-West conflict such as multi- culturalism, social realism, gender issues,

comic values, concern over ecology, magic realisms, diasporic cravings are identified as

the themes of post-Independent writers.

Indian Writing in English has commended tremendous admiration both in home

and aboard. It has carved out a new track to response for faith and hope, myths and

traditions, customs and rites etc. Those Indian writers provoke a new structure and colour

to English literature parallel to Australians and Americans who pursue their own literature

in their respective countries. In the beginning of twentieth century, numerous Indian

writers who have made their attempt to the world English literature. Some of the most

noted Indian born writers are R. K. Narayan, Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati

Roy, AmitavGhosh, Khushwant Singh, Anita Desai and JhumpaLahiri.

Among them ShashiDespande is one of the prominent writers of this century. She

is a well known literary figure in the field of Indian writing in English. She was born in
Dharwad of Karnatak. Her father, a renowned Kannada dramatist, great Sanskrit scholar

Shriranga who is called as the Bernard Shaw of the Kannada Theatre. Like her father, she

also deserved various awards such as ThirumathiRangammal Prize, the prestigious

SahityaAkademi Award (National Academy of Letters) for her novels That Long Silence

(1990). She also won the Padma Shri award in 2009 for her valuable contribution to the

novel That Long Silence. She continued her education in Dharwad, Bombay and

Bangalore. She had an inquisite mind to learn many things. She received degrees in

Economics and Law. Infact, she was a gold medalist. After getting married, she shifted

over to Bombay (now Mumbai). During her stay in Mumbai, she decided to pursue a

course in Journalism. Thereafter, she took up a job as a journalist in the magazine

Onlooker. She worked there for a couple of months. While working in the magazine, she

began writing short stories. Her writings made her popular and helped her to enter in the

reputed magazine. Her short stories were compiled in five volumes. They are: The

Legacy and Other Stories (1978), It Was Dark and Other Stories (1986), It Was the

Nightingale and Other Stories (1986), The Miracle and Other Stories (1986) and The

Intrusion and Other Stories (1993). Her maiden collection of short stories was published

under the title Legacy in the year 1978. Also she wrote novels which remarkable credited

the writer. Her first novel, The Dark Holds No Terrors was published in the year 1980.

Her novel That Long Silence, which brought ample of laurels and appreciation.

Deshpande’s creative talent and attainment have established her as a deserving

writer. Her protagonists are modern, educated young women, crushed under patriarchal

male-dominated and tradition-bound society. The characters portrayed are aware of

patriarchal structures, and try to establish their own identity bearing amidst of sufferings.

Infact, for her fabulous work, she received the SahitayaAkademi Award in 1990 and
NanjangudThirumalamba award in 1982-1983. Also she has been actively involved in

writing books for children.

ShashiDeshpande explores the prominent patriarchal premises and prejudices

embedded in Indian culture and lifestyle. She challenges the existing ideology of gender

which justifies and neutralizes the inequitable division between male and female. By

understanding the mindset of Indian, she seriously tried to bring froth the gender issues in

her novels with the contemporary aspect of changing society. She excels in projecting a

realistic picture of the middle class educated woman who, although financially

independent, is still facing conflict and confusion between the old and the new, between

tradition and modernity, between idealism and pragmatism. She raises her voice against

the patriarchy in which ability and emotions of women are suppressed and the self is

subdued by the age-old customs and traditions. The women are particularly caught in the

process of redefining and rediscovering their own roles, position and relationship with in

their given social world.

Deshpande explores the new image of woman who tackles the problems boldly

and intellectually are in the society. Her novels explore the women identity, where they

try to fulfill their needs as a human being, independent of their traditional role as

daughter, wife and mother. They were examined by variety of common domestic’s crisis,

which trigger off the search path. Despande’s concern and sympathy are primarly for the

woman. While disclose the woman’s struggle to safe self-respect and self-identity for

herself, the author subtly bares the multiple levels of suppression, including sexual

suppression experienced by women in the society.

In all her novels the protagonists tend to search of their own self. Deshpande

makes us to consider how male supremacy damages female egos and leads women to a
state of intellectual slavery. Educational and professional opportunities enable women to

function outside the family domain to prove their efficiency. But there is a discrepancy

between their aspiration and achievement. Indian woman is considered to a blind

emotional dependence on men and in a sense the whole purpose and meaning of woman’s

life is to win and retain a man’s love in her life. Even though the middle class Indian

women want to stand against the patriarchal set-up of family and society achieve the self-

fulfillment in their endeavours, they fear that their rebellion attitude could affect their

relationships. And they become the slaves of their own emotions as they do not want to

have any emotional as well as economical independence at the cost of their relationships

in the family.

Indian women desire to have intellectual and spiritual companionship with their

male counterpart which would culminate in their total surrender of minds and bodies for

each other. But very few are lucky enough to get such type of egalitarian relation with

men. So they lead life restrain their dreams, desires, visions, goals and ideals in mind.

Woman realizes that the only way to relate her male counterpart is by offering body and

mind to him unconditionally. She becomes puppet in hands of her husband. She

understands the situation that otherwise there will be discord in her marriage, a secure and

safe institution for woman as per social norms. Being aware of this humiliating and self

denying experience of woman in the family, Deshpande’s, novels dealt the readers a wild

range of indigenous Indian issues, punctuated by a strong feministic outlook.

During the recent decades , a galaxy of Indian women novelists have started

writing about India women, their conflicts and predicaments against the background of

contemporary India. In the 21st century, women’s writing was considered as a powerful

medium of modernism and feminist statements.

 ShashiDespande in her novels reveals the women in the society who are deprived

of love, understanding and championship. In the patriarchal society setup the structures

were established by the dominant group. Women have to depend the power patriarchal

model for their economical and social survival. They become the passive object

unquestioning the power role. ShashiDeshpande exposes the feminist view in her novels.

She incubates the advance political, economic, personal, and social rights that make the

woman recognised in this society. It also includes equal opportunities for women in

education and employment. The present study focuses on how women is struggling as a

wife, mother and also as a humanbeing in the patriarchal and capitalistic society.

Her novels shows the concern over a woman's struggle, in the context of

contemporary Indian society, their efforts to find and preserve their identity as a wife,

mother, and as a human being. She also focuses on modern women are inclined towards

the social issues, and trying hard to improve their social status at large. Increased

awareness and education has inspired women to come out of the four walls of the home.

The woman characters portrayed in her novels are actively supported and participated in

the nationalist movement and secured eminent positions in offices and public life in free

India. She satirizes face the modern working environment where the women lot of

problems even though they were educated.

In the male chauvinistic society, the tradition does not support woman to go for

preferred job. ShashiDespande in her novel “That Long Silence”, the protagonist Jaya

also experiences the same problem. She has been controlled by her husband and even she

was not allowed to express her thought or expression through writings. In the Traditional

picture Indian women exist because of the family and for the family. Just like their man

counterpart, women are also fond of attending social functions and value her social life

quite a lot. Previously, men-folk used to dissuade women from leaving their households
for attending social functions. Now the modern expansion of education, especially that of

women, and with that the changing social attitudes of educated women have changed the

traditional order.

The status of women in modern India is again a dilemma of finding the women

identity. The modern Indian women have honed their skills and jumped into a battlefield

of life fighting against social restrictions, emotional ties, religious boundaries and cultural

clutches. She can now be seen working on par with men in every sector. When compared

with socially accepted women, modern times woman is achieved partially and still

prolony with the same social clutches. According to A. Cripps “Educate a man and you

can educate an individual; educate a women and you educate a family” (87).

In India Marriage is the oldest institution of human society, but in

literature, the writers are questioning it. Marriage leads to heartbreak woman and stay

alone are may comfortable for woman. But ShashiDeshpande is one of the writers who do

not reject marriage. In her novels, marriage without the foundation of love and only as

means of social security for a single woman is not acceptable. Matrimony is often

regarded as a weapon in the hands of patriarchy. In Deshpande’s novels, a wife thinks

that a world without husband is impossible.

In India every one follows the tradition. The peoples are judged on the basis of

tradition. Women are compelled to follow the traditional manners especially in their

dressings. In her novels the characters compel to follow the traditional rules. The

character of Kalpana is focused to wear traditional dress code. In the modern world

women are also influenced by education, jobs, friends, family and money are increasingly

changing the image of women. In modern world women try to avoid the traditional rules
and regulations. In India woman won’t get any property from her parent’s. In the

patriarchal India Women position is to be good daughters, good wives and good mother.

In olden days women were live in joint family, they unable to take independent

decision in their own life. In her novel the character of Jaya also in same situation. Even

though she was educated she can’t able to take her own decision. She asks permission to

her husband as well as her mother-in-law. The women live with her husband's and his

family. She adjusts in every situation. In her novels the character of Jaya and Mira was

adjust in their husband family. Women sacrifice her own need, education and hard worker

and always contribute to new family wealth being. Many Indians believe that not only

young girls should get married early but as well be less educated than the males in the

family. The daughter has to live by father and family arrangement. Even in India joint

family system is breaking. Women in India had been desire in their mind that they shall

be establishing a home of their own in which they had desired that there shall be one

husband, they themselves, their children and no one more. 

Though women were educated the marriage choice has been selected by their

parents. Many young girls of the middle and upper classes are educated with a marriage

rather than career. Again, many girls enter into careers apparently not because they want

them, but because there is nothing else to be done until their parents find them husbands.

In her novels the few protagonist never able to choose their future partner, parents select

according to their wish.

In art, literature and philosophy are essentially attempts to found the world anew

on a human liberty, individual creator and woman are so moulded and indoctrinated by

tradition. They are assuming the status of beings with liberty. Maternity is feminine

function impossible to perform in liberty.In old days woman did not have right to vote.
When they get right to vote they thought that they got liberated but still women suffers

within herself. Woman has employed but until she cannot be liberated.In her novels she

says that employment does not gurantee or liberty. If she wants independence she faces

all obstacles in society. Woman respects the man and also she was inferior to man.

In India male dominated societyis a well equipped in the family. Woman only

loved by her body not for her intelligence. She cannot find her own decision, she always

depend on men. After marriage the woman sacrifices everything for her family but even

though male dominate towards them. They suffer a lot after her marriage with the

dominance of male, family and society. The materialization of these problems still

depends largely upon the attitudinal changes in society.

Shashi Despande says male can able to do what he wants but at the same time

women cannot. If they broken such rules or refused she may be get severe beating and

frightened her to death. The society cannot allow to treat them as a same level.

The independent woman is torn between her professional interest and the problem

of her sexual life. The woman does not dare to aim too high. She enters upon her

profession with superficial preparation but soon she sets limit to her ambitions. A woman

is afraid to go further she will break her back. She has to sacrifice herself to maintain a

balance between her professional interest and the problem of her sexual life. While she

sacrifices herself she becomes tensed. Woman is limited in their strength and they soon

become ill. The character of Mira get married, her husband rape within in her marriage

life. Her ambition is to become an intellectual woman but he was physically weak. When

she gave a birth to her child unfortunately she died.

 In her novel she says about two types of value systems, one that questions and

other that accepts. In her novel characters like Jaya, Sulu and Kalpana are fall into

acceptance mode and she excels in the platonic method of looking for answers. He

explores in her novels womens pain, agony, helplessness, exploitation and the problem of

being a woman. She shows the inner world of Indian women and the conflict of tradition

and modernity.

The woman can only able to understand the another women feelings. In Binding

Vine the character of Mira and Urmila are strong. Urmi understand the suffering of pain

and pain of her dead mother-in-law and expose her pathethic life through publication of

her writing.

Shashi Deshpande's protagonist finds herself enmeshed by desires and despairs,

fears and hopes, loves and hates withdrawal and alienation, suppression and oppression,

and marital discord and male chauvinism through in social conventions. Shashi

Despandedelieneately describes the challenging women, who come out from the social

structures to establish their identities face numerous problems in social and family lives.

The present study focuses on three novels namely That Long Silence, Small

Remedies and The Binding Vine. In the first novel That Long Silence, Shashi Despande

tried to portray the marginalized condition and the miserable plight of women in a

traditional society. Through the character of Jaya, who is also the protagonist of the

novel, the novelist has tried to delineate the women’s attempts to erase the silence and to

give voice to their inner conflicts and traumas, which the women are destined to live since

ages. The novels explore tensions between family members and the alienation of middle-

class women. It mainly focused the depression and frustration of the woman.
 In her novels she presents the condition of the woman in the traditional and

patriarchal society. Most of her novels portray the situations of the woman in the male

centered society. ShashiDespande’s novels focus the woman’s sufferings in the

contemporary society and the inner aspring of the woman. It also portrays the identity of a

woman in a controversial society.

In this novel she indicates that the plight of woman is miserable in a patriarchal

society, whether they belong to the upper sections of society or they are from the lower

state of society. The characters like Jaya, Mukta, Jeeja, Manda, Ai, Ajjietc used to lead a

life of subjugation. They are conditioned by the society to be in the strict boundaries of

mother, daughter, wife etc. They are tempted to play these roles in their life. Their life

has no significance if they are not able to perform these roles of wife or mother perfectly.

She delineates Jaya’s silence and her writing is related. In the biography she has to

submit to a newspaper she pares herself down to the barebones of: “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

three alive” (TLS 45).

The breaking of silence or life of passivity not only on the domestic level, but the

novel talks about breaking the silence of traditionalism by women writers also. Jaya in

That Long Silence attempts to break not only her own silence but that of women,

especially women writers, down the ages. A desire for identity and self-expression spurs

the creative writer but Jaya finds it being smothered by her husband’s reactions.

In the novel That Long Silence Jaya, who is leading the roles of wife and mother

perfectly. After the seventeen years of her marriage, she has to face a catastrophe. Her

husband is caught in the malpractice of funds at his office and their marital life comes to
halt. They have to shift to the Dadar flat gifted to her by her uncle. She spend some days

at that flat, she introspects her married life with Mohan, while the children are away with

some relative. Women are leading the same routine life. For seventeen years, Jaya has

been leading a life of routine performing the roles of wife and mother, caring and

handling her household works. She never shown her feelings towards other:

A woman can never be angry; she can only be neurotic, hysterical,

frustrated. There is no room for anger in my life, no room for despair,

either. There’s only order and routine-today I have to change the sheets:

tomorrow, scrub the bathrooms: the day after, clean the fridge…. (TLS

147-148)

Like Jaya and other female characters in That Long Silence are fall in sufferings

and struggling individuals. Jaya the female protagonist, the desire to become a mother

haunts her, and this craze alone forces her to enter into wedlock. This motherhood craze

proves to be a burdensome weakness for women. The women lead a life in her household

roof as a mother or wife. The life of the woman turns out to be one of struggle and

suffering as a mother.

Kusum the cousin of Jaya is not a mother, but the motherhood complex is deep

seated in her. That is why she thinks that she is mother, though she is not. Marriage plays

a vital role in the life of women. It drags the woman to a life of suffering. It forces her to

dependent state and this is the root of all her struggles and suffering. In every case the

women were depending a men even she is educated. Jaya is trained, educated and cultural

by her elders to keep her marriage intact, not with standing the defects and faults in

Mohan and not with standing the adverse circumstances. Therefore, she suffers along

with Mohan when he commits the offence of corrupt practices and consequentely hides
from his children and avoids law. Jaya was sufferings and struggles only because she is

blind to the faults of Mohan. She meets her brother Ravi, who tells her of this knowledge

of the corrupt practices of Mohan, which has forced him out of his office. She gets

delayed in returning home. This infuriates Mohan she suffers silently bearing the burnt of

his anger. This is a classic instance of male chauvinism. The character of Jaya expressed

that she want to be quiet even if she know the reality of the men. She convinces herself

for her husband’s fault. It makes her to suffer silently in her heart.

The woman suffers because she submissively acquires all to the husband, which

includes that of her body. She yields to sexuality perforce. She knows that he needs her

body alone and that he cares not for her feelings and thoughts. ShashiDespande

establishes the truth that it is the women that suffer because of the roles devised for them

by the male chauvinists.

The double standards practiced by the male dominated society the women to

denials, deprivations, degradations, and above all dehumanization. Without proper

education and a position of pelf and power and solid earnings the women perforce suffers

from lack of economic independence and the opportunities to live on her. The roles of the

daughter, sister, wife, mother and widow force the women to experience a life of

constraints and restraints. Her life becomes a constricted because she is to conform to

certain customs, traditions, and follow the rituals. She suffers from the impositions of

taboos.

The second novel Small Remedies, in this novelDespande describes the period of

about a year in the life of Madhu. It is a woman-centered novel. It is a novel about myriad

feelings-love, courage, honesty, truth, trust, death, the pain associated with death, about

music, about the power exerted by time and by words. The theme of self-discovery, it also
deals with oppression and subjugation of women in a conventional Indian social order. In

this novel all the female characters are subjected to gender discrimination but

SavitribaiIndorekar is the only one who dared to choose an independent and challenging

life. Bai married into an affluent Brahmin family elopes with a Muslim table player in

order to be known as a great classical singer.

In this novel all the characters are tradition, modern, educated and empowered

women through society labels them subaltern. Madhu and Savitribai walking out of

wedlock are post modern women. Leela on the other hand is a strong leflist woman and

outrightly admits her hatred towards Gandhiji’s principles of Ahimsa and Sathyagraha.

However both Madhu and Leela admire and uphold the familial values of Indian tradition

and culture. Savitribai through closely tied to Indian culture through traditional music

does not seem to be respecting the famililial values.

She shows how the protagonist searches for identity and the liberation. Madhu’s

search for identity is linked with quest for liberation and selfhood of Leela and Savitribai.

Madhu feels alienated after her father’s death and goes through a phase of feminine

insecurity and identity crisis. She says “my own life had ceased to exist and I could only

watch, from a distance, others living out their lives” (SR 44). Madhu senses a self and

decides to start a new life with Som. Leela, too decides to come out of a cocooned after

her husband’s death and moves on. Savitribai’s search for identity as a singer forces her

to give up all that she has. Memory plays a dominant role in the journey of these women

towards their selfhood and self-assertion. “memory, capricious and unreliable though it is,

ultimately carries its own truth with in it” (SR 324).

In this novel she portrays the exploration of womanhood, motherhood and

widowhood. Savitribai and Madhu are portrayed as biological mothers but Leela’s
maternal instincts overrules. Munni rejects her relationship with Savitribai for known

reasons while Aditya distances himself from Madhu for personal benefits. Both of them

are unable to get along with their mothers. Madhu finds Bai’s indifference to Munni

unacceptable as she herself is a grieving mother. Adiya’s death gives her a hard blow

whereas Bai is unaffected by Munni’s loss. Madhu narrates:” when I look into the

mirrors, I see only what I want to see: a mother, a loving mother… PutaMoha. Yes, I am

obessed with my son” (SR 188).

In the Small Remedies,Leela is a widower and a deglamourized figure.

Widowhood is a major issue of women. She keeps staying in her husband’s house even

after his death and educated her brother-in-laws. Her cross-caste remarriage to Joe

retaining her identity shows her determination in self-hood. The psychological effects of

widowhood are very much visible in Madhu as she ruminates over their past memories

and desires for a better life with Som. The novel portrays the wishes and sufferings of a

woman as a widower. The unique traditions and culture shows that the women must

suffer or want to end her life after the death of her husband. Modernism shows the

remedies for this social problem as remarriage. It will give a new life for a woman.

The third novel, “The Binding Vine” occupies a special place in all the works of

ShashiDespande in the sense that it presents especially the world of women. In The

Binding Vine the theme of sufferings begins with the painful experience of Urmi, who has

recently lost her daughter Anu, who died in an accident. The loss of her one year daughter

makes Urmi extremely sensitive to woman’s intense relationship with their children.

Giving birth to a child make the women happier more than nothing else in the world. The

loss of her child makes her to suffer internally. It is the emotional suffering which makes

her to feel. Proper care from her family can make her to feel protect and to find solution
for the problem. This growing awareness makes her relate to other woman who may not

be close to her in time or relationship. But it is their female experience of child bearing,

nurturing of the child, and the precarious kind of life women live in a patriarchal society

that draws her to them. She realises the strong emotional bonds that relate a mother with

her child. The experiences of Shankuntala, a poor woman, whose teenaged daughter has

been a victim of rape, of Mira, her dead mother-in-law, are instances of women whose

urge for freedom, creativity and full human development was destroyed through forced

physical relationship by men. The man-woman relationship, marriage as an institution are

explored through these instances and the novelist probes into many forms of female

subjugation, suppressions and even destruction through male and social indifference to

the well-being of its women.

The loss and despair of Urmi finds Shakuntai caught between her loyalities for her

younger sister Sulu, who commits suicide, and her daughter Kalpana who is almost a

dead person. Urmi involvement with Shakuntai, Mira and the decision to bring out in

public these incidents irritates her mother-in-law Ajji, and Vanaa, her sister-in-law. They

are worried about public exposure and embarrassment that would follow thereafter.

Shankuntai, having lost Kalpana and Sulu, now looks a upset woman. Yet she becomes

all the more concerned about the second daughter, Sandhya, afraid that she might lose her

too. She blames herself for the sufferings of Kalpana. But as a mother she finds within

herself the strength to go on living.

Urmi’s relations with Inni, her mother also acquire a new level of understanding

when Urmi learns the ways in which her mother was powerless against her father’s will.

Inni tells Urmi that the decision to send Urmi to Ranidurg to live with her grandparents

was taken by Urmi’s father, as a form of punishment to Inni for her supposed neglect of
the child. Urmi had always resented this distancing from her own home, and blamed her

mother for casting her away. Inni’s helplessness and inner sufferings makes Urmi realize

the wide spread subjection of woman to the men; women do not have freedom or right to

live as they wish to: their lives are bond by male will, desire and physical strength,

depriving women the opportunities of growth into full human beings. Women’s bonding

and mutual support seems to Urmi to gain a great social value when she realizes the

disadvantages in which women like Mira, Kalpana and Shakuntai live. Unable to speak

for themselves and fight for their rights, they suffer all forms subjugation, deprivation and

even physical abuse.

Shashi Deshpande has created domain to write about women. Her creativity is

reflected in her wide range of woman’s experience which she has made her province to

confer status and dignity on woman. Her women suffer because of inequality and denial

of freedom leading to disillusionment at every stage of life. They feel that fulfilment of

life is possible and could be achieved only through freedom of self and self-reliance and

conscious of their potentialities to debasement and self-debasement

The introductory chapter provides necessary information about the writer and the

Indian literature. It also deals about ShashiDespande as a novelist and it highlights the

woman in the novel.

The second chapter ‘Woman in Tranquility’ focuses the suffering of women. The

society forces the woman to lead a restricted life. So she suffers a lot in silent. Nobody is

there to console or support her. Women’s life start and end with tranquility.

The third chapter ‘Quest for Identity’ analyses how the protagonist of the novels

identify their own destiny. By their quest they identify their life goal and work hard to

achieve it. Their self-realization made them to identitfy the reality.

 The fourth chapter ‘Tradition & Modernity’ reveals how the women are

suppressed by the name of culture and tradition. The traditional thought drags them to

forget about their destiny. Modernity forces them to forget their moral values. So it gives

inner conflict for women.

The last chapter conclusion sums up the scholar’s analysis of the novels.

Deshpande characters are trapped in the trans cultural identities in which the women

characters are educated and exposed the western ideas but confused with tradition and

modernity.
 CHAPTER II

Women in Tranquility

CHAPTER II
 Women in Tranquility

The real spiritual progress of the aspirant is measured by the extent to which he

achieves inner tranquility. Tranquility is the weapon of women. It helps to avoid some

problems in our day today life. The plight of the women are still worse, aggravated by her

problem of marital adjustment. The women are leading a good life because of their

tranquility. Violence against women whether physical, mental or emotional is an issue

that crosses all borders and all classes of women. Many years Indian women are a silent

sufferer. In the novel, That Long Silence protagonists, Jaya is oppressed by particularly in

all her different roles, she plays in her life-as a daughter, as a wife, as a mother and as a

writer.

Early times women have been viewed as a creative source of human life.

Historically, they have been considered not only intellectually inferior to men but also a

major source of temptation and evil. In Greek mythology, for example, it was a woman,

Pandora, who opened the forbidden box and brought plagues and unhappiness to

mankind. Early Roman law described women as children, forever inferior to men. In

early Christian theology it also says about the St. Jerome, a 14th-century Latin father of

the Christian church, said: "Woman is the gate of the devil, the path of wickedness, the

sting of the serpent, in a word a perilous object." Women got education and rights in

recent times but women doesn’t got full freedom equal to men. Even though they are

educated they are living in home and after their marriage they take care their husband and

children. Men don’t allow them to go for job, they won’t give importance to their feelings

and emotions.

The attitude toward women in the East was favorable. In ancient India, for

example, women were not deprived of property rights or individual freedoms by

marriage. But Hinduism, which evolved in India after about 500 BC, required obedience

of women toward men. Women had to walk behind their husbands. Women could not

have own property, and widows could not remarry. In both East and West, male children

were preferred over female children.

Many retail stores would not issue independent credit cards to married women.

Divorced or single women often found it difficult to obtain credit to purchase a house or a

car. Laws concerned with welfare, crime, prostitution, and abortion also displayed a bias

against women. In the Despande’s novel the character of Shakuntai doesn’t have child, so

her husband move to another woman for children. In possible violation of a woman's right

to privacy, for example, a mother receiving government welfare payments was subject to

frequent investigations in order to verify her welfare claim. Sex discrimination in the

definition of crimes existed in some areas of the United States. Deshpande novel the

character of Mira in same condition. Her husband raped with in her marriage.A woman

who shot and killed her husband would be accused of homicide, but the shooting of a

wife by her husband could be termed a passion shooting. In such situation woman were

suffer a lot.

In the 1980, many women as well as men taught in elementary and high schools.

In higher education, however, women held only about one third of the teaching positions,

concentrated in such fields as education, social service, home economics, nursing, and

library science. A small proportion of Women College and university teachers were in the

physical sciences, engineering, agriculture, and law. The great majority of women who

work are still employed in clerical positions, factory work, retail sales, and service jobs.

Secretaries, bookkeepers, and typists account for a large portion of women clerical

workers. Women in factories often work as machine operators, assemblers, and

inspectors. Many women in service jobs work as waitresses, cooks, hospital attendants,

cleaning women, and hairdressers. Only through education women got freedom to survive

in this society.

Traditionally a middle-class girl in Western culture tended to learn from her

mother's example that cooking, cleaning, and caring for children was the behavior

expected of her when she grew up. The major reason given was that the girls' own

expectations declined because neither their families nor their teachers expected them to

prepare for a future other than that of marriage and motherhood. This trend has been

changing in recent decades. In Deshpande novels the characters are modern and educated.

Even though they are educated , they suffer silently.

In the Indian situation we find that the culture that created a Sita and a Gandhari

has denied any other existence to a woman except as a daughter/sister, a wife/daughter-in-

law, and a mother/mother-in-law. The Hindu Society has deprived of woman the

possibility of being a person capable of achieving individuation. She is a non-person and

as described in Raja Rao'sThe Serpent and the Rope, ‘Women should not be’. Man's

relationship with woman is most often the bond that exists between a master and a slave.

Woman is an object and she is necessary to man because it is in seeking to be made whole

through her that man hopes to attain self-realization., In recent times, it is a culture that

voices of oppose are heard and particularly education and formal education played a very

important role regarding the social status of women. Education is a major avenue of

upward social mobility. Education is the enter that opens the door to life which is socially

essential. The Indian social structure, its strength and stability is clearly and indisputably

vested in the family. For women, the greatest achievement is motherhood. Everything

proceeding to marriage is training; everything after motherhood is reward for fulfilling

her destined role. Tranquility of women is good for the welfarement of the family. But in

some case it leads the women to suffer in silent.

Gandhi once addressed, "God has blessed woman with the strength of faith in a

measure that is not given to man. So long as we cannot dispel the ignorance which makes

women put male off spring above female, it won't be well with us." Women’s freedom

and liberation from a male supremacy is believable but it will only succeed with the

support and cooperation from the women of the world, which is extremely improbable. In

order for women to obtain freedom and equality, we would have to break our ties with

men. It has been built into us that a man is a essential for a woman’s survival in the

chaotic world.

Beauvoir discovers in her multifaceted investigation into woman's situation,

woman is constantly defined as the Other by man who takes on the role of the Self. As

Beauvoir explains woman is the incidental, the inessential, as opposed to the essential. He

is the Subject, he is the Absolute she is the Other.  Beauvoir investigate how radically

unequal relationship emerged as well as structures, attitudes and presuppositions continue

to maintain its social power.  Modern woman "prides herself on thinking, taking action,

working, creating, on the same terms as men; instead of seeking to disparage them, she

declares herself their equal. In order to ensure woman's equality, Beauvoir advocates such

changes in social structures such as universal childcare, equal education, contraception,

and legal abortion for women-and perhaps most importantly, woman's economic freedom

and independence from man.As far as marriage is concerned, the nuclear family is

damaging to both partners, especially the woman. Marriage, like any other authentic

choice, must be chosen actively and at all times or else it is a flight from freedom into a
static institution.She demands that women be treated as equal to men and laws, customs

and education must be altered to encourage this.

In the novel That Long Silence the character of the Jaya annihilate the original

aspect of her personality to keep Mohan happy. For the happiness of her husband and

family Jaya maintain silence in her life. She devotes herself to the care and fulfilment of

her husband’s and her children’s needs. Thus, obedience and loyalty, which are

considered to be the virtues of Hindu womanhood, degenerates into silent bearing of

oppression. A woman is even expected not to be angry or revolting as stated in the novel

“A woman can never be angry; she can only be neurotic, hysterical, frustrated. There’s …

no room for despair, either. There is only order and routine” (TLS 147-148).

Women were treated cruelly by their husbands; Mohan says that her tolerance of

brutality is the power of women. But Jaya thinks differently as she says “He saw strength

in the woman sitting silently in front of the fire, but I saw despair. I saw despair so great

that it would not voice itself. I saw a struggle so bitter that silence was the only weapon.

Silence and surrender” (TLS 36).

According to Robins, women intentionally use silence as a tool. Silence is a kind

of leitmotif in the novel That Long Silence. Woman after woman keeps silent. Mohan’s

mother keeps silent because she has no other choice and Vimala is silent about her

suffering because there is no one to listen in her martial home, and by the time Mohan

and Jaya take her to a doctor for treatment, it is too late, “she sank into a coma and died a

week later, her silence intact” (TLS 39). Through this novel all the characters are suffer

silently due to different problems. Jeeja husband was drunkard and beat his wife, she is

the domestic servant, tells Jaya,

 ‘Don’t ever give my husband any of my pay’, she had warned me when

she had started working for me, giving me a hint of what her life was alike.

There had been a days when she had come to work bruised and hurt, rare

days when she had not come at all. But I had never heard her complain.

What had surprised me then, what still surprised me, was that there seemed

to be no anger behind her silence. (TLS 51)

She learns that silence is the easiest way out: “I knew his mood was best met with

silence. And I was right. By the time we sat down to dinner, he was in a more agreeable

mood” (TLS 78). Mohan too knows how silence can used as a weapon. Jaya recalls,

I had found myself raging at a silent, blank-faced man. I had ignored his

silence at first, but when it had gone on, not for hours, but for days, it had

unnerved me. It was I who had made the first conciliatory move and only

then, when he had spoken to me, had I realized what my anger had done to

him. It had shattered him. (TLS 82)

If Mohan’s mother died because of too many pregnancies, his sister Vimala dies

because she cannot have a baby. She is suffering from an ovarian tumour, but suffers

quietly. Mohan was very sad when doctor says it’s too late so she died. Her mother-in-

law says “I had heard of women’s 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’ve never had

children are like that” (TLS 39).

Silence is a precious thing in the life of Jaya. She gives up serious writing because

Mohan feels that people will find autobiographical touches in it, “How can you reveal our

lives to the world in this way?” (TLS 144). She keeps silent, instead of explaining that her
fiction is not self-revelatory, it is a transmuting of experience into something different.

(TLS 144).

Deshpande says that all her novels, the women were get married and also suffered

a lot in their marriage institution. The chains of traditional marriage are heavy. In the

absence of any other alternative, wives often seek comfort in obsession or mental slavery

leading to physical decay, disease and death. This unappreciated martyrdom becomes an

essential part of a housewife’s existence. She is expected to subordinate her own needs to

those of her family. She is supposed to bear her development and suffering silently as her

fate. Mohan’s mother and his sister, Vimala, both suffer throughout their lives. But they

never utter a single word of protest. Finally, they die in silent agony without getting any

help from their in-laws. She suffers all these accusations without any exclusion because

she was advised by her Ajji to keep silence.

Deshpande shows the influence of mother on daughter, father on son inspite of the

generation gap between them. Vimala, Mohan’s sister, follows her mother in suffering

silently as Jaya says “I can see something in common between them, something that links

the destinies of the two … the silence in which they died” (TLS 39). Mohan, like her

father, holds that a wife is a passive creature who can never be angry. When Jaya talks to

him in a daring tone, he retorts, “How could you? I never thought my wife could say such

things to me. You’re my wife … My mother never raised her voice against my father,

however badly he behaved to her” (TLS 82-83).

In fact, Mohan had seen his mother obeying his father and bearing the insults

silently. But Jaya is brought up somewhat differently by his father, she is an

unconventional manner. This discrimination in background is also a reason of lack of

understanding and clash of expectations between them. But Jaya has to adapt herself to

the expectations of Mohan.

 In India, a girl is married not only to a man, but also to his family traditions. She

has to adapt herself according to his husband’s family rituals and traditions without any

complaint. Jeeja’s husband and her son, Rajaram, represent the male domination in lower

class. The son follows the habit of father drinking and beating his wife. They

demonstrate their manhood by being violent to their wives. Still they feel that the women

want to be quiet and tolerance everything.

In her worthlessness marriage, Jaya is drawn towards Kamat, a middle-aged

intellectual. He treats Jaya as an equal and Jaya gives expression to her real self in

Kamat’s Company. But there is no physical relation between the two. In society, a

married woman cannot be have a friendship with another one. The friendship between

Jaya and Kamat suffers due to this reason. People, including her friends and neighbours

like Mukta, do not approve their relationship. One day when Jaya finds Kamat lying dead

on the floor, she silently leaves the place because of the fear of social disgrace. In such

case woman unable to say their sufferings and struggle to their husband. Instead of

sharing their thoughts they kept silent.

Jaya’s father makes decisions regarding her life. When she wants to listen to film

music sung by Rafi and Lata broadcast from Ceylon Radio, her father decides whose

music she should listen to, “ he had despised addiction to what he called ‘that disgusting

mush,’. He had tried his best to wean from the habit, to make her love Paulushkar and

Fiayaz Khan instead of Rafi and Lata” (TLS 3). As a daughter she is trained from her

childhood to suppress her will and aspirations.

When Jaya was a child, her inquisitiveness to question things were restricted by

her grandmother Ajj “I feel sorry for your husband, Jaya, whoever he is,She had said to
her once. What for, Ajji? Look at you- for everything a question, for everything a retort.

What husband can be comfortable with hat? (TLS 27).

Jaya’s grandmother remain silence when she questioned her. When Mohan faces

a crisis in his job, he orders her to move along with him to the Dadar flat and Jaya as a

submissive wife obliges and moves along with him. Though she tries to satisfy his

demands.

Jaya as a mother of two children feels that she has failed in the role of a mother

too, “I had failed at it”.(TLS 50) Jaya who is dominated by patriarchy plays different

roles as an obedient daughter, submissive wife, and sacrificing mother reacts to and copes

with such domination. Her first reaction to domination is silence, which is important

theme of the novel. Jaya realizes silence as a weapon against patriarchy. She declares, “It

was so much simpler to say nothing, so much less complicated” (TLS 99). Jaya’s silence

for the past seventeen years is a way of suppression of the tortures endured by her. But

during her stay in the Dadar flat, she analyses her life with her husband Mohan and in the

process resolves to change in the future.

Jaya makes her choice by refusing to become a victim of trends and is determined

to break her long silence which has plagued her family. But there are other women who,

like Jaya, belong to the middle class, but unlike her, suffer silently without protest taking

the suffering to be their fate Vanitamami, Kusum, Mukta, Mohan’s Mother and Mohan’s

sister, Vimala .

Though being silent for many years she realizes her own power, “it came as a

shock to her to realize suddenly, that her long suffering silence had been in vain” (TLS

139). She tries to resolve to fight and overcome domination. She reshape her life and the

power to do it transforms her life. Her statement at the end of the novel, “I’m not afraid
any more. The panic has gone,” ( TLS 191)shows the empowerment she had gained. She

reshapes her broken identity by breaking the fetters of a father’s daughter, as Mohan’s

wife and as her children’s mother, to Jaya which means victory. It ends with her resolve

to speak, to break her long silence.

Mohan’s father uses his power over Mohan’s mother by abusing her and torturing

her. He wanted his rice fresh and hot, from a vessel that was untouched. “Once when

there was no fresh chutney, the next moment he picked up his heavy brass plate and threw

it, not at her deliberately at the wall” (TLS 35). Mohan’s mother also resolves to silence

like Jaya. Jaya suppressed herself silently to cope with the social and cultural outlook.

She left with no identity of her own. She says, “Just emptiness and silence"(TLS144).

Woman have a strength as well as weak. But in this novel the character seems to

be opposite.Working class women like Jeeja, Tara and Nayana are physically beaten.

Though Jeeja’s husband beats her and abuses her, she never complains about her plight

and remains silent; her silence is in contrast most restful. “Enduring was part of it and so

she endured all that she had to … there seemed to be no anger behind her silence...” (TLS

51).Jeeja’s silence indicates both a defiance of oppression and a stoic, calm acceptance of

life.

Jeeja’s son behaves in the same way as his father. Her daughter-in-law Tara, who

belongs to the younger generation does not resort to silence, but becomes aggressive.

“Tara had none of Jeeja’s reticence or stoicism. She cursed and reviled her husband and

sobbing loudly, moaned her fate. So many drunkards die, she cried, but this one won’t”

(TLS53). When Tara curses her husband, Jeeja silences her and reduces her to a passive

and submissive picture of suffering.

 The plight of the different women shows that violence is used as a “main

mechanism by which unequal power relations are maintained in body politics”

(Humm293). Though the women characters suffer due to violence they don’t break their

ties with their husbands. They feel secure in the society with their marital status, In That

Long Silence Married women were suffered silently. The novel portrays the middle class

women’s predicament in a dominant society with particular focus on the married women

who suffer in silence because of violation.

In the novel The Binding Vine, Mira also one such women who bears the

oppression and sexual assaults of her husband silently. The other woman character in the

novel, Kalpana, the second heroine of the novel, undergoes the rape, but due to poverty,

her mother wishes to hide the mistake. Unlike these women, Urmi journey is not an

excursion into her own past, but the buried life and thoughts of her mother-in-law, Mira

and Kalpana , a poor domestic servant’s daughter, where these women are crumbling

under the weight of their sorrow. In some incidents which sets the tone of this novel The

Binding Vine, it express the tremendous familial and cultural pressures which succeed in

making women both silent and invisible.

Mira's journals and poetry reveal the pain of a vibrant young woman trapped in an

unhappy arranged marriage, and of a gifted writer whose work, because she is a woman,

must remain shrouded in secrecy and silence. Then there is Kalpana, the survivor of a

brutal rape and a young woman who has also been silenced. As she hovers between life

and death in a hospital ward, Kalpana is watched over by her impoverished mother,

Shakutai, with whom Urmi forms an unlikely bond of mutual comfort. The lives of three

women who are haunted by fears, secrets, and deep grief are bound together by strands of

life and hope a binding vine of love, concern, and connection that spreads across chasms

of time, social class, and even death.

 On seeingShakutai crying, Urmila decides to fight for Kalpana’s justice. Kalpana

chooses to remain silent inspite of being aware of her uncle’s advances. It is the day prior

to the death of her sister Sulu that Shakutai learns the truth. Salu breaks her silence about

her husband’s obsession for Kalpana. She immolates herself the following day to a tone

for her husband’s misdeeds. Shukatai who had been blaming her daughter so long is left

to cope with the bitter truth that it is her own blindness and ignorance that have destroyed

her daughter’s life and not Kalpana’s “willfulness and stubbornness” (BV172). The

reason why Sulu remained insecure, frightened and unloved throughout her life was

because she was barren. Through Shakutai has had her own share of problems like her

sister Sulu.

Like Sulu and Shakutai, Vanna, Urmila’s sister-in-law,also suffers in silence. In

order to provide a condusive atmosphere for her growing children, Vanna never voices

her feelings. She continues to be mute till the end. Considering the fates of Mira,

Kalpana, Shakutai and Salu, Urmila regains confidence. Realizing the importance of

survival and need to cope, Urmila marches forward nourishing the idea that life is worth-

living in spite of all the betrayals and cruelty.

Urmi urges Shakutai to get the case registered as a rape so that the culprit is

arrested and suitably punished, but she fails to convince Shakutai whose immediate

concern is that the rape should remain a secret. Shakutai seems to be more worried about

the scandal that would certainly ruin the family’s name and impair the marriage prospects

of not only Kalpana but also her second daughter Sandhya. The mother’s reaction is,

undoubtly, a reflection of the society governed by patriarchal norms. Shakutai wants her

daughter to suffer in silence, it can cause curiously and lead to a scandal making the

matters worse for her.

 The novel does not tell whether Kishore and Urmi would down their defences

with regard to each other. But the end of the novel shows us Urmi laying down her

armour before her mother. Inni breaks Urmi’s silence about the wrong that she had

suffered at the hands of her husband, Urmi’s papa. Urmi’s father had sent Urmi away to

his own mother at Raindurg as a punishment to Inni for her motherly duties. He had not

changed his mind inspite of his wife’s entreaties and tears. Urmi, who now knows from

her own experience how painful it is for a mother to be deprived of her own child. It can

believe her mother when the latter pleads to her: “I didn’t want you to be sent away to

Raindurg, believe me Urmi. I didn’t want that, Iwanted you with us, I never got used to

the idea of of your being inRaindurg. Iwanted you with me…” (BV 200).

When Sulu comes to know that it is her husband who has committed rape on

Kalpana, breaks her long silence about her huband’s infatuation for Kalpana to her sister

Shakutai and commits suicide. In Despandes’s, women who do not break their silence to

contribute their own oppression and sex.

Urmi has freedom at home but feels for others’ suffering- Mira’s, Kalpana’s and

Vanaa’s and suffers silently for the passionate demands of her physique. Mira has neither

freedom at home nor anybody to share her poetic feelings nor freedom to protect her body

from the outrageous, passionate attacks of her husband. Therefore, she suffers from the

sense of solitariness: “It seems appalling to me when I think of the choice of my own life,

of its freedom. Cloistered in a home, living with a man she could not love, surrounded by

people she had nothing in common with- how did she go on?” (BV127).

The death of Anu brings a sense of guilt in her life. She also feels that enjoying

personal happiness without Anu will be a betrayal for her. When her mother Inni makes a
suggestion to put a picture of Anu on the wall, she bursts out. In this she maintain silence

herself.

To put my Anu on the wall, to place my child among the dead, no more a

part of my life, never more part of my world- how dare Inni, how dare she

think such a thing. A white-hot rage explodes in me, blinding me, so that

Inni’s face is blur. Then it comes into focus and I can see her- Karthik

standing by her, holding on to her Sari, the two faces alike in their

expression of fear. I stop speaking. There is a terrible silence. (BV 68)

In the novel Small Remedies, the protagonist Madhu accepted Chandu’s offer to

write biography, she certainly did not bargain for the silence Savitribai exercises with

respect to Munni. It says “if Munni did not exist. Never existed” (SR 64). In the fourth

United Nations Conference on women held in Beijing, Ms. Hillary Clinton opined: “For

too long the history of women has been a history of silence. However it is now no longer

acceptable for the world to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights” (123).

Madhu expects her husband to be a friend, to understand and share the truth of her

life. But, as Chandru says: “…men and women can never be friends. Men can be

brothers, fathers, lovers, husbands but never friends” (SR 254). Som, an intelligent man

is guided by society and questions Madhu’s chastity. She questions her:

‘Tell me the truth’. Som says, over and over again. He dismisses the truth

of our life together, of our love, our friendship, our life as parents of a

beloved son. What he wants is something separate and distinct from the

things… To him the part is the whole. (SR 255)

And then the lovers became strangers glaring silence at each other:
 Som and I locked in a silent, fearful struggle that exhausts us. We are like

two travelers embarked on a terrible journey rocketing at a dangerous

speed, on the verge of going out of control, yet unable to stop, unable to

help ourselves. (SR258)

Madhu is filled with helpless anger and turns on him in violent but she also senses

an enormous sad under his suspicion and anger. Madhu no longer replies to him.

However she understands that her silence, “makes things worse, it’s a bigger barrier

between us than my words had been” (SR256). When Som alienates himself from his

wife, Madhu thinks of going away but she wonders where she could go and how she

could leave her son Adit. Thus Som and Madhu are locked in “silent fearful sruggle that

exhausts us. We are like two travelersembraked on a terrible journey rocketed at a

dangerous speed, on the verge of going out of control, yet unable to stop, unable to help

ourselves” (SR 258).

Madhu who enclosed in fog of bereavement caused by the death of her son Adit,

remember quoting of T.S. Eliots Words:

In the life of one man, never the same time returns, words which had

silenced everyone assembled, words which had shown then how

ominously empty life can be. Thinking of this incident now, Madhu feels

that you can neither undo nor repeat what has happened that the past is

irrevocable, that time moves on rentlessly and you have to go along with

it. (45)

Madhu alienated physically and emotionally from her son as well as her husband

and she says : “It’s so silent that I can hear the two clocks ticking, two separate sounds ,

the time in the two never merging. For me, it is like two different racks on which I am
stretched , each moment, each ticking second, one more since Adit left, one more without

his return”(300).

Lakshmi Holmstorm rightly says that “silence is like a collage of memories” (247)

and this is also quite true that withdrawl from life and being silent cannot erase the

memories of the past. Madhu herself admits: “we need to mourn him together, we need to

face the fact of his death and our continuing life together. Only in this is healing

possible”(323).

According to Nicole Shepherd “I think that many men are afraid of the

feminine qualities within themselves, such as intuition, empathy and caring. They see

them as weaknesses, since they want to belong to their male stereotype. So they shut

down these important qualities and make a virtue of doing so, and keep women out of

the picture of their daily lives. Of course, this has to change if human society is to

advance and incorporate emotional and spiritual intelligence” (57). Women tried to

come away from the inferior but in some cases the society won’t allow them to come

up. If they breakup the rules they get beat from society so most of the women keep

silence in their life, because they thought silent is the best way to lead life.

Tranquility is the strength of women to face the problems. But in some cases it

will give sufferings for them. Women will keep all the worries in their mind .So men

think it as a weakness and start to torture her. It will give both physical and mental

sufferings for her. The only way to overcome these problems is that the men want to

change their mentality. They want to give proper consideration for women and for

their emotion.
 CHAPTER III

Quest for Identity

 CHAPTER III

Quest for Identity

In the mythology, the concept of quest serves as a device to find out the ideal

identity of society, culture or individuals. A quest serves as a plot device in mythology

and fiction. It is a difficult journey towards a goal, often symbolic or allegorical. Tales of

quest figure outstandingly in the folklore of every nation and racial culture. According to

George R.R. Martin, “Self-identity is never forget what you are, for surely the world will

not. Make it your power then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it

will never be used to hurt you” (39). Identity crisis or search for identity has received a

thrust in the post-colonial literature. The quest for identity, which involves self-definition,

which is often central theme of contemporary women’s fiction. This process is both

environmental and emotional that breaks upon the path towards female individuation and

an understanding of the individual self.

From the ancient time women is considered as the goddess in the Indian society.

Though it is also true they are not treated as goddess. They are being mistreated and used

them to fulfil the wishes of men. In view of them goddess is not enough to give them full

women empowerment in the society; it needs optimistic continuous effort and

participation of both men and women to really bring women empowerment.

Post modernity has two fundamental aspects: informational mode of development,

cultural, social and economic change. The spread of popular culture, on one hand,

alienates the people from the traditions of society, and on the other hand, links them to the

forces of industrialization, urbanization and the development of media and information in

society.
 Simone Beauvoir dissects the gender-based oppression into women’s liberation

from male supremacy. Mackinnon’s idea of liberation, in her book “Feminism

Unmodified,” differentiates from Beauvoir’s vision in “The Second Sex,” in that it focuses

on the political sphere rather than the social sphere, there is still an element of unity

between the two written pieces.

In order to ensure woman's equality, Beauvoir advocates such changes in social

structures such as childcare, equal education, contraception, and legal abortion for

women-and perhaps most importantly, woman's economic freedom and independence

from man. A marriage in the nuclear family is damaging both partners, especially the

woman. Marriage, must be chosen actively and it is a flight from freedom into a static

institution. She demands that women be treated as equal to men, laws, customs and

education must be altered to encourage.

Women play a great role in everyone’s life without woman men cannot imagine

the success of life. Women play a significant roles in our society from their birth till the

end of life. They are the highly responsible for the successful continuation of the life.

Earlier they were considered as only wives and mother who have to cook food, clean

home and take care of the whole family members alone. But, now the condition has been

improved a little bit, they have started taking part in the many activities other than family

and kids. She never demands anything in return of her roles instead she performs her roles

politely without any argue. Government gives a lot of awareness programmes and rules &

regulations in the society but even though her life is more problematical than a man.

Deshpande’snovels shows the theme of quest for self and a new identity. These

novels the protagonists’ genuine search for love and identity as well as their need for

creative expression and freedom to assert their femininity in and outside marriage. Her
approach to the women’s question and her treatment of the condition of woman character

is strongly feminist. R. Mala holds: “Her feminism is not western oriented because it is

born out of typically Indian solutions. For her fiction represents the predicament of the

Indian women placed between family and profession; between culture and nature”

(Mala56).

Deshpande does not believe in destructing of modernism and feminism. Through

her character she declares that salvation is hidden in tradition. Unlike western literary

feminism, her female protagonist does not indulge in radical steps to assert their

individuality. Rather, they recreate their individual space with grace and family

betterment. Her attitude to feminism is personal, analytical and investigative. She is

deeply concerned with the quest; with the search to define a meaningful identity in an

aggressive, social and domestic climate. This theme has a special significance in these

novels as she wishes to depict women’s internal struggle to untie the enormous

complexities of her identity and gender definitions. It is considerable that it is not

exclusively a search for identity crises that engages women writers in general, but rather

an investigation and expression of the process leading to a purposeful awakening of the

female protagonist. This is obviously seen in Despande’s novel That Long Silence, The

Binding Vine and Small Remedies.

The female protagonist, Jaya in the novel That Long Silence, who is an educated

middle class woman, conforms to the system and constraints of the society. She is not

capable to find out whether she lives for herself or for her family. She is taken for granted

by everyone in the family. That is why she wants to find out her identity. Jaya herself

doesn’t know how she leads her life without identity. She finds herself attentive and lost

in the web of doubts and confusions. When worlds, she recalls the pitiable insanity of
Kusum. She loses her own world. The life with Kusum is like a madness of Hamlet of

Shakespeare.

She is a good wife with adore and fondness for children, respect and sense of duty

for husband and her in-laws. She gives up her life for her family. Nobody in her family

understands her feelings and emotions. Because Jaya doesn’t expose her intention to

anyone. Being husband and wife, she shares friendly relations with Mohan, yet, she is

unable to communicate herself with him in terms of feelings. Her silence is represents

most of the women of the world who are unable to express themselves as individual.

Sometimes she loses her temper because of the subjugated activity of Mohan. But she

doesn’t show it back to him. It shows how the women are dominated by men in our

society.

Nobody is there to encourage her. Because they were grown up in the same

circumstance which gives less priority for a women. So they ignore her, as they remain

engaged in themselves. In this situation the character finds very difficult to fulfill her

desined life and lacks her courage. Moreover, she loses her identity when her name is

changed from Sushasini to Jaya after marriage. ShashiDespandepointsout the woman,

who has no equal rights keep the name given by her parent. When a magazine asked for

the bio-data of Jaya after marriage. She accepts her spouse as a superior one and act

accordingly his own wishes. Even change their names given by the Suhashini. In this

case, woman asks her identity in the family life. She could give only a few lines as her

profile.

“Finally when I had sifted out what I had thought were irrelevant facts,

only these had remained: 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”.

(TLS 2)

She feels a kind of stagnation when she recalls that her life, seemed so busy and

nothing, but a valueless detection. She is compelled to leave her home after marriage. She

wants to give up her life for her husband’s family. She missed her identity after her

marriage.

ShashiDespande uses first person narrative to open the voiceless story of Jaya.

Jaya, in the very beginning confesses that she is going to disclose her real self. In order to

do so, she alienates herself from her real self that is incidental under the silent attitude of

Jaya. She moves back and forth in time to recollect her subservient and inactive self. Jaya

was born in modern family. Her father had named her Jaya, which means victory. He

wants her daughter to be bold and courageous, but she remained how her needs and

feelings were hidden by her own liberal father. Jaya loved film music, but, her father

wanted her to enjoy the classical music of Paluskar and Faiyaz Khan. “What poor taste

you have, Jaya, I can remember him saying to me once” (TLS 3). To him, film music was

poor and cheap, Jaya as a child did not revolt but kept calm. It was the first blow to her

identity. She experienced and dissappointed a loss of self and began to keep her feelings

and emotions controlled to her. Jaya was unable to express her feeling towards anyone.

So she started to hide everything in her mind.

She feels that after her marriage she will lead a good life. So she expects a lot

from her husband and it also utter into failure. After marriage, Jaya encountered the

similar prospect from her husband, Mohan. She sacrificed her taste for the sake of male

family member. She failed to enjoy her married life.

 A man and a woman married for seventeen years. A couple with two

children. A family somewhat like the one caught and preserved for

posterity by the advertising visuals I so loved. But the reality was only

this. We were two persons. A man. A woman. (TLS 8)

Jaya fails to find her own place at her parental home and seeks marriage with a

hope to find it at her husband’s home. But there too she fails in providing Jaya’s own

place. Jaya confessed, “Worse than anything else had been the boredom of the

unchanging pattern, the unending monotony” (TLS 4). She needs a change in life. The

strong feelings started speeding up to find a voice. She found a correspondence between

her marriage and “a pair of bullocks yoked together….” (TLS 7). It is because she

believed herself as a bullock and moves in the same direction and same speed to avoid

pain and grief. If she allows her fate to win it make her life in trouble. She bears the

problems of her life in passive. She doesn’t allow her dilemma to overcome the life race.

She also compares herself to Gandhari, who blind folded herself to share the blindness of

her husband. She realized that she had totally transformed and lost herself during the

process of pleasing Mohan. She changed her name, personality and profession according

to Mohan’s will.

The expectation of male over female in the dominated society is nothing but the

passive submission. In this novel, Mohan expects her to change him oppose all his

masculine power on her. But when Mohan left Jaya, she was broken and helpless.

Because she didn’t have the experience of self-motivation and self-decision. She moved

out into unknown streets. She felt the situation insufferable, but it is this crisis that

awakened her to her own identity. She decides to search for her identity and sets on in

quest for her identity. Jaya in her quest reached at a situation of compromise. She agreed

to change herself and hoped for a change in Mohan who had written a message that
announce his arrival. The settlement on the part of woman, as well as man makes Shashi

Despande a liberal writer who does not commit a writing that chooses ultimate freedom

for women and assigns domestic household tasks to men.

The central character Jaya is a modern predicament and the flood of realization

that ensures out of it is a silent stream of thoughts and feelings. She knows pretty well

that in order to get by in a relationship one has to learn a lot of tricks and “Silence is one

of them ... you never find a woman criticizing her husband, even playfully, in case it

might damage the relationship” (TLS 8).

Jaya defeats and surrenders to Mohan without revolting. “She never says yes

when her husband asks her whether he has hurt her. She endures everything, tolerates all

kinds of masculine oppression silently ...in the emotion that governed my behavior to

him, there was still the habit of being wife, of sustaining and supporting him” (TLS 48).

ShashiDespande in her novel That Long Silence exhibits the dominating husband

and anguish wife. The wife does not directly respond to the situation but the reader is

insinuated through the flashback technique used by the author particularly at critical

junctures in the psychic life of wife Jaya: “Lying lonely in her room, her mind shuttles

between the past and the present and thus covers the whole period of her life. Mute and

desperate calls to restructure the groove of society” (TLS 5).

Jaya has a tendency for being transmuted into an inspired expression. In her inner

creativity end fulfilment but this creative appearance is introverted due to lack of solitude,

of physical space to reproduce. Jaya renamed her name after marriage as a Suhasini, it is

not a loss of identity as Jaya and Suhasini are the two faces of the same coin and these

two collateral names of the Despande protagonist are symbolical in their socio-familial

significance.
 Jaya, her premarital name means victory and Suhasini, the post marital name

given by her husband which means “a soft smiling, placid motherly woman. A woman

who lovingly nurtured her family.A woman who coped” (TLS15). Jaya is a woman who

adjusts and accommodates like a socially accepted woman, “forced into the background

by the claims of culture” (TLS 16). She is not the structurally patterned woman of the

traditional Indian society where woman was the follower and man the leader, where

woman was the sufferer and man the ordainer. She does not want to be like a epic story

“Sita following her husband into exile” or a Savitri dogging death to reclaim her

husband” or a “Draupadi stoically sharing her husbands’ travails” (TLS 11). She believes

that there is pain in aggression, and rebellion in anguish and misery. Hence, she adopts a

subaltern and subservient attitude:

Now, what I have to do with these mythical women? I can’t fool myself.

The truth is simpler. Two bullocks yoked together … it is more

comfortable for them to move in the same direction. To go in different

directions would be painful; and what animal would voluntarily choose

pain?. (TLS11-12)

In this way Jaya attempts to expose her actions through the animal imagery of

“two bullocks yoked together” (TLS 7). But she is never safe when yoked. So she

flounders to break out of the yoke: “Stay at home. Look after your babies, keep out the

rest of the world, you are safe. That poor idiotic woman Suhasini believed in this. I know

better, now I know that safety is always unattainable. You are never safe” (TLS 17).

Her past flashback disappointments her mind fading out the realization of her

present plight in the situation. The memories of the past enlighten the present and the

ordinary images, the sparrow story and the myths (like the Ramayana) lend a universal
touch to her tragic corner. The nursery rhymes and the petty scenes though unrelated to

the sequence of the narrative, have a thematic importance. They portray the abandoned

and the lonely Jaya’s flow of thought and her temporary mood captured through the

broken and fragmentary stream of consciousness: “A husband is like a sheltering tree…

Take your pain between your teeth, bite on it, and don’t let it escape … (TLS 32)”. Jaya’s

self-questioning attitude comes as a split in the plot. She broods over the metaphor of the

sheltering tree:

A Sheltering tree. Without the tree, you are dangerously unprotected …

equally logically and vulnerable, this followed logically. And so you have

to keep the tree alive and flourishing, even if you have to water it with

deceit and lies. This too followed, equally logically. (TLS 32)

Struggling with the horror of her freedom and her honesty, Jaya dreadfully needs

to protect herself from disputing and reducing in the disintegration world around her. Her

frantic laugh at the silliness of marriage echoes the insane woman’s laughter. It

symbolizes her cousin Kusum’s insanity through which she tries to define herself

negatively. Hence, the self-questionings “Who am I?”She thinks, “Am I going crazy like

Kusum” (125).

Memories play a unique part since the novelist’s aim is to text the flow of human

perception in different directions unaware of its taxing effects on the readers whose

sensibilities have been nurtured on the scientific and modern ideal of reality. An

individual’s exposes of thoughts and emotions rather than well thought responses of her

life. Despande presents the vast and concealed impressions of human life through

digressions. Her protagonists are not her representatives instead they emerge as living

persons who, are similar in some ways, possess personal traits and characteristics that set
them apart from the other characters in her books. The character in the novel That Long

Silence, whose name is “small, sharp and clear, like her face…” (TLS 26).However,

passive, and has silenced and muffled her own voice consciously. She has the potential to

re-define herself.

Towards the end of the novel Jaya consciously acknowledges her writings as a

kind of fiction and quotes Defoe’s description of fiction as a kind of lying, which makes

‘a great hole in the heart’(TLS 191). Hence she decides to plug that hole as said earlier by

speaking and listening and erasing of the silence that symbolizes the statement of her

feminine voice, a voice with hope and promise, a voice that articulates her thoughts. The

novel does not depict Jaya’s life as a totally bleak and hopeless struggle. It suggests hope

and change for the better: “We don’t change overnight. It’s possible that we may not

change even over long periods of time. But we can always hope. Without that life would

be impossible” (TLS 193).

ShashiDespande as a women writer raises her voice to women concerns denying

herfeminity and write like a male narrative voice. ShashiDespande presents the modern

Indian women who search for these identities in this male dominated society. Her own

struggle as a writer to focus on women’s issues, problems and experience is equally

suggestive of the struggle to feminist expression that prevails in India in the middle of the

twentieth century. She tries to distance herself from women’s lives and point of view

through the use of a male narrative voice. She deliberated over this practice, in one of her

discussions: “why did I have the male ‘I’? to attain perphaps a distance as well as a

universal stand. She says, “I too had felt that there was something trivial about women’s

concerns, something very limited about their interests and experiences” (TLS 31).
 Through her marriage she wishes to her, a separate identity, her self-knowledge

and makes to realise her “awesome power over him” (TLS 82). In India women lives

inside the four falls of their house. Even though they are educated, woman has no

liberation as like men. Women should be a good wife, mother, and daughter but she won’t

get a desirable identity.

In the novel The Binding Vine,Urmi is totally opposite to Jaya. She is violent,

economically independent, takes her own decisions and her feminism prompts harshness

in her equations with others. She is a lecturer in a Bombay College; she lives with her

mother, Inni and her six-year-old son, Kartik. Her love is very match with Kishore, a

former neighbour now working with the Merchant Navy and away from home for long

years. Although she lives with her mother, her representation suggests the strong-willed

single woman. She is a strong and more strident. In that respect, she is like any other of

Despande’s protagonists. Despande reveals the representation of women whose,

accepting one’s vulnerability are not weakness but liberation, and that violence is not

hostility but the desired ideal.

The Binding Vine occupies a special place among other works of

ShashiDeshpande. It represents the sense of women world. A man makes the presence by

their power they exercise over the women, especially over their wives and daughters.

Urmi’s unhappiness with her mother was deep- rooted in her separation from the early to

latter age. Right from her childhood day she had been sent to her paternal grandmother,

she had no close relationship with her mother. But Urmi was neither in a position nor in a

mood to find out the cause of her displacement or her mother’s predicament. Inni, had a

early marriage, so she was unable to take care of her child properly, while trying to justify

herself, she explains to her inner conflict to her daughter. She says that her father was an
authoritarian husband; he was the decision maker of the family. Urmi’s mother had to

tolerate the blistered and fault.

Urmi has many strengths. At the age of fifteen her independent violent is seen,

when her grandfather attempts suicide, she stays alone with that corpse all over the night.

While Kishore goes to bring some other members of the family. Unlike Mohan in That

Long Silence, Kishore in The Binding Vine is a very supportive and understanding

partner. So, the crisis in her life is not caused by a domestic battle but by the sudden death

of her one-year old baby girl, Anu.

The death of Anu is one event that reveals her at her most vulnerable. It is an

incident causes her intense grief. She repeatedly asks, Why me? (TBV15) her distress

sometimes manifests itself in psychomatic attacks of asthma so that she is left for breath.

In other times she explains that it is focused into hurting herself masochistically to

experience pain. The fundamental theme of the five dreams she describes in her narrative

is helplessness and despair, emotions that are a typical of the strong Urmila:

I am running along the sea. There’s someone else with me… I can hear the

footsteps, I can hear the heavy breathing, but I cannot see whoever it is …

I have to keep running ….Now it is becoming difficult; the sand, soft and

squishy under my feet, keeps dragging me down… I can’t go on…I can’t

go… (TBV 16)

Urmila is a strong woman but more aggressive than assertive. Her growth as a

character in the book is marked by her gradual realization. Urmila’s growth is

characterized by her evolution towards self-assertion from the opposite end that is

aggressiveness. Urmila’s strength is also very admirable. She stands up for her values and
convictions as a few Indian women. In the centre of family responsibility, She also

supports Kaplana, the rape victim, and Shakuntai, her mother, as household worker.

Deshpandes’s protagonists always begins at the critical point where in spite of

total freedom and sometimes total surrender to the expectations of their husbands (as in

case of Jaya), they are dissatisfied and unhappy. Therefore, they wish to re-define

themselves. A woman must give expression to her inner space and self; at the same time,

she need not reject the social institution of marriage and family (and the duties that

accompany it) or her fundamental human values. Urmila in The Binding Vine is the

simple looking young woman who wears glasses, and blouses that don’t match her saris.

There are astonishing resemblances among the protagonists – they are basically defiant

and committed to fight oppression. They represent together the, new collective voice of

dynamic young women who are not going to lead constrained lives.

Deshpande presents the conflicts of her protagonists without presenting simple

solutions. She took the different choices speak for themselves, the choice to conform or to

break free. Sometimes she seems to be barely deep sentiments of De Beauvoir, who she

admits, has influenced her, and according to whom it is women who have to define,

measure, and domain. Deshpande believes that women have deeply internalized the

dominant society being better artistic than most other Indian women, her protagonists

cannot visualize an independent identity for themselves and so they become submissive.

Urmi at last understand her mother after the death of Mira’s mother.

Her mother is a caretaker as well as decision maker of her family with modest

arise. She was an unassertive woman and always said, “Nothing is in my hands” (TBV

126). Mira’s mother was not happy in her married life likewise Mira also lead an unhappy

married life. As a traditional mother, she had her own world of dreams about her
daughter but Mira’s marriage and her pregnant was very sad moment in her life.

Generally one shares one’s sorrow with near and dear ones, particularly mother. Here

Mira had no doubts or feeling of sorry that she didn’t share her feelings with her mother

since she had felt alienated from her, the intensity of her unhappiness was known to her

mother, “she knew I was not happy, I know she knew it, but her afraid to ask me, afraid I

would admit it” (TBV 126).

Women support and need to provide a mutual understanding as daughter, mother

and wives. Urmi’s realisation comes close to Deshpande’s increasing awareness on

women writers and thinkers to write about women from woman’s point of view. T.Asoka

Rani comments “ShashiDeshpande desires that women need to offer resistance and

emerge as strong willed individuals to face life resistance and emerge as strong willed

individuals to face life, to share responsibilities and not to escape from it” (17).

The woman’s self-respect grows as she manages her duties as a wife and mother.

Women’s lives within the society takes them towards a new understanding of the

significance of family. The roles do not remain closed and inhibiting. But through them

women gain fulfilment and self-awareness. Creating self-awareness can avoid these

problems and provide freedom for growth.

ShashiDeshpande, novelThe Small Remedies, projects the quest for self-

realization of Indian woman in a hostile patriarchal society. She makes an important tool

in the quest for self and projects Savitribai and Munni as failures due to their rejection of

a certain part of their lives. Madhu and Leela accept the facts of their life, to achieve the

success in their quest. In this novel the writer focuses the life and experience of

Savitribai, Munni and Leela. Among them, Madhu alone finds her identity by

understanding her life.

 A grief of sequence causing incidents are recalled from memory in the novel to

shows the unconscious plane of Madhu’s character. It shows the inner sufferings of

Madhu. The past also intrudes into the present causing confusion in Madhu’s married life.

The thoughts of the protagonist Madhu keenly narrated. Her feelings are easily pictured

in the novel. Deshpande explores the innermost recess of the human mind.

SumitraKukreti remarks, “Her introspective and psychological probe makes her second to

none in revealing the unconscious and conscious psyche of her characters”. (192)

In the tradition bound male dominated Indian Society, the Indian women has

struggled to understand herself and preserved her identity as wife, mother and above all a

human being. When Adit does not return for three days after leaving home, Som have

identity himself. It recalled through the thoughts of the protagonist : “They say your

identity is stamped on every cell of your body, your signature is all over it. Did they see

Adit’s name when they collected the limbs and gave them my son’s name?” (SR

302).Madhu is now alienated, both physically and emotionally from her son as well as her

husdand. Violence against women whether physical, mental or emotional is an issue that

crosses all borders and all classes of women. Women in India have been able to claim her

own individuality.

The words which always associate with what consider to be the concept of an

ideal women are self-denial,sacrifice, patience, devotion and silent suffering. A woman

was expected to subordinate every shriek and every desire to someone else apparent, a

husband or a child. But Despande’s protagonists are desirous to revolt against the

stereotyped roles assigned to them by society. Initially victims of self-denial they are at

conflict with their inner selves because they deny their real feelings. As psychologists tell

us the denial does not mean that the feelings cease to exist, they will still influence his

behaviour in various ways even though they are not conscious. Despande’s heroines
move from self-abnegation to self-realization. Her protagonist compel them to struggle

for their self-emancipation.

Madhu reconciles herself to the death of her son Adit. It shows great melancholy

in Madhu’s life. She enters her son’s room and it is there that the madness ends for her

and she admits to herself: “I know Adit is dead, I know he will never return” (SR 305).

Then she breaks down and gives way to tears. However she is alone in her grief because:

“If Som hears me sobbing, he doesn’t come to me, he leaves me alone, like I left him to

himself when I heard him sobbing the first night after Adit’s death. I face the grief of our

son’s death alone as he did” (305). Madhu also thinks she might have she might have

born the death of her son better if she had been with him and seen him die. Adit memories

are causing too much in Madhu’s life.

Through Small Remedies, Despande has candidly clamoured for women to realize

that nothing is as great as preserving our identity, our individual rights and our personal

freedom. Men and women are merely the agents and the power to reproduce and shape a

better generation is decidedly woman’s forte. The character Madhu faints herself when

she hears about her son’s death. She has lost a valid identity in the society. Madhu bears

the guilt of Aditya’s death, as he had left home suddenly, unable to bear her estrangement

with Som. However, her estrangement with her husband had begun, much earlier than this

tragedy. One night Madhu had revealed to him a secret, which was buried in the

innermost recesses of her mind. When she was a girl of fifteen she had once slept with a

man who had later committed suicide. She did not want to hide it from Som consciously,

but “had misplaced it in the chaos” (SR 269) of her life after her father’s death. Som is

not able to tolerate the willing participation of his wife in this act. Madhu recalls, “But it’s

the single act of sex that Som holds on to, it’s this fact that he can’t let go of, as if it’s

been welded into his palm. Purity, chasity…these are the things Som is thinking of, these
are the truths that matter” (262). For Madhu, the act alone is irrelevant. In that moment

she outgrown and wants to adapt herself to the challenges life has posited before her.

Madhu analyses her own anger at the unknown forces, which had victimized her

son. In order to escape the memories of the death of Adit, Madhu deserts Som and comes

to Bhavanipur to revive her career as a journalist. Madhu’s realisation dawns her life to be

lived, no matter what happens, even when things look abysmal. That truth comes to

Madhu not abruptly but slowly as she witnesses the lives around her. One such instance is

an upanayanam ceremony she witnesses in the Bhavani temple, a ceremony that is

marked with muted pain and grief. The death of the father had not meant that the

upanayanam could not take place. Life had to go on. Madhu thinks,

So many of us are walking this earth with our pain, our sorrow concaealed

within ourselves, so many of us hiding our suffering, going about as if all

is well, so many of us surviving our loss, our grief. It’s a miracle. (SR

315)

It tells the story of Madhu, Saptarishi whose search for self is linked with the

search for identity of two other women SavitriBaiIndorekar and Leela. It is through their

struggle for identity that Madhu comes to know her own self.

Madhu was a motherless child brought up by her father and a servant, Babu. But

the love and affection she received from them gave her a secure childhood. Her father’s

death shatters the adolescent girl. Her grief with the knowledge of another woman in her

father’s life alienates Madhu. In her grief Madhu is guided by an uncontrollable

inclination that makes her body respond to the comforting embrace of a friend of her

father. His effort to console her leads to a sexual encounter between the two. But
immediately after the incident Madhu goes to Bombay to see her dying father, and the

sorrow that engulfs her after his death blanks the incident from her memory.

Madhu discovers too late that she ought never to have blured out to Som what had

happened and meaningless in the present context. To her it was not something she had,

deliberately hidden from him. “I was not telling Som, I was sharing something with him,

a thing I’d just discovered myself” (SR 260). Madhu realized the enormity of her act

when she sees Som’s confused face.

Madhu whole life changes when she finds herself in a new town and a new

people. Her stay in aunt Leela’s house proves to be a strange experience. In the beginning

she is unable to relate to Leela’s husband, Joe as her uncle and his hostile children, Paula

and Tony as her half cousins. Madhu passes through a phase of complete loss of identity

in her new surroundings amongst strangers. As she lates says “It was not only the

knowledge that I was merely passing through, that I would be going to the hostel in a

month; it was the unreality of the situation I…. (SR 44).

Perhaps, Deshpande in her novel tries to explode the educated Indian woman who

is popularly assumed, and liberated. Their education should have given them the freedom

and the courage to do what they believe in. It should have given them the determination

to assert themselves as individuals, to set limits with their partners. However, they fail to

utilize their education or benefit it because of a concealed, patriarchal mind-set embedded

in their childhood via socialization. Thus, Deshpande gives the impression to convey the

idea of emanicipation and to come out from the patriarchal oppression to emerge as

individuals.

Both Madhu and Savitribai in the novel ‘Small Remedies’ gets the freedom to live

their life in their own terms. But strangely, this breaking out of stereotypical moulds, this
assertion of identity and individually does not come without a price. In the novel, women

voice out the gender steretotype in society, and redefine gender stereotype and live their

own life.

Women writers in Indian Writing in English have become more conscious of the

concept of a liberated woman. Deshpande’s literary works of art explore the inner psyche

of middle class educated women. Shashi’s concern in her novels is quest for self-

discovery. Her protagonists strive to find out themselves through the fullness of

experience in their lives because they are trapped between tradition and modernity. They

are haunted by the memories of their past and feel a kind of worthlessness. However, at

the end they realize their selves. Her women protagonists are middle class, educated, who

have become victims of conjugal life and its responsibilities. Though, they appear to be

outwardly, but they seem to lack direction and feel a sense of futility. Her women

protagonists are in constant search of their selves.

Deshpande's novels fit into such a scenario and help women to realize their

potential in a positive manner. In her novel Small Remedies she powerfully narrates the

theme of quest for self-realization as experienced by women in an orthodox male

dominated and tradition-bound society. The theme is delineated in terms of the conflicts

and imbalances between traditional expectations and the new demands on the part of

modern women. In the process of resolving the conflicts, the women in the novel undergo

psychological suffering. Deshpande effectively portrays the struggles and sufferings of

women for recognizing their real self.

The women in her novels face sufferings in their marriage. The sufferings are

generally inevitable when a woman refuses to conform to her so called established role as
wife, mother and other stereotyped roles. The cultural changes in India are contrasted

through the lives of individuals, communities and the nation.

Madhu a woman, who had the courage to walk out on her marriage and family,

she is so frightened to reveal the existence of her child. She wonders how she gave that

child the name Indorekar the name she adopted as a singer not comprising either her

maiden name or her married one, MeenakshiIndorekar. A comparison between them

gives an impression that Madhu is endowed with the quality of selfassertion that

Savitribai too had been endowed with. Besides, Savitribai is free from the sense of

hypocrisy of not being guilty of a daughter born of unconventional relationship. Madhu

thus learns about herself through the life of Savirti.

The novel explains quest for self-realisation of Indian women, who live in a

hostile patriarchal society. Despande portrays the failures of women too. The failures are

due to their denial of a certain part of their lives. The novelist does this in comparative

terms. The abilities of Madhu and Leela accept the facts of their life and achieves them a

success in their quest. Through these two characters, one understands the novel is one’s

quest for self-realisation.

 Chapter-IV

Tradition and Modernity

 Chapter-IV

Tradition and Modernity

Indian Society continues to live in two worlds, the traditional and the

modern. According to JaroslavPelikan, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead,

traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is

traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name” (132). According to Jose Andres,

“The modernity of yesterday is the tradition of today, and the modernity of today will be

tradition tomorrow” (97). Modernization is a theoretical tool which social is used to

analyse the process as well as the quality of social change. All societies have tradition,

but what we describe as ‘traditional societies’ refers to a particular historical part of social

and cultural development.

The term ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ are expressions of values which help us in

observing the process of social and cultural alteration in societies as they pass from the

primitive to pre-industrial to industrial and post-industrial phases of social

development.ShashiDeshpande focuses on the reality where tradition plays very

important role in individual’s development and in the development of society. It decides

the path and speed of the progress of society. Tradition and modernity is a nonstop

process of change. Sometimes regular transformation and sometimes hurried changes take

place. It is a usual process that old replaces the new.

These novels deal with the inner world of Indian women. She portrays the

heroines in a realistic manner. ShashiDespande keenly observes the conflict between

tradition and modernity in relation to women in the middle class society. In her novels,
women in the traditional society are mainly piercing of desires, efforts and failures. Also

it focuses the anguish of middle class women in her novels. They live together with

different age group, classes and gendered roles. It makes them to forget about self-

examination. They have their own inner struggle whether to follow the values or to keep

away from it. Women has problem either to give tone to women are to follow the

traditional rules of society. Family is the power and fault of women. It makes them forget

about their providence.

Modern Indian society cannot absolutely break itself from the old traditions. The

existing tradition offers numerous instances of the spirit of free and critical inquiry of the

highest intellectual order, willpower to pursue truth regardless of where it leads a positive

and secular approach to life and a tradition of abstract thought necessary for the growth of

modern knowledge.

Tradition and Modernity both prevail equal in India. Indian culture is a

intermingle of tradition values and the modern spirit. Trapped between tradition and

modernity, ShashiDespande’s protagonists search for their individuality within their

married life. She states that “she does not believe in a simple opposition of bad bad men

and good good women. I don’t believe the world is like, that at all”. (Holmstrom22)

Shashi in her writings wishes to modernize the culture but she does not search for

stimulation completely from a culture which is not a part of her own tradition. She can

reasonably get it from her past and launch permanence with it. Deshpande does not look

upon all traditions as bad and harmful. To her, traditions have the values of agreement

and co-existence that symbolize the Indian way of life. In her statement, modernity is an

independent individual identity. She seeks solution to the problem by changing mind set

of the men folk towards the women. The human race of men now is in a development of
women thinking. It cannot be changed without changing man’s way of thinking.

Siddhartha Sharma comments on the novels of Shashi Deshpande as

She has constructed motifs of patriarchy and oppression by employing the

method of negation and affirmation. Her protagonists are victims of Indian

patriarchy and her initial submission resists the oppressive situation,

thereby reflecting the author’s view that a woman must assert herself

within marriage to preserve her individuality.(111)

ShashiDeshpande holds in great worth as an Indian English woman novelist of the

21st Century. She prevails the picture of ancestral relationships and the burning problem

of women’s identity in Indian society. She is very much aware of the significant and

secondary position of the Indian women who have been wedged under the customs and

traditions of the ancient Indian Society. The illiteracy of the women and their weak and

subservient nature and their love and fondness towards their husbands and children have

thrown them into sub-graded status, as they lack strong willingness and courage to fight

against the age old traditions and taboos. Prasanna Sree comments on Indian women thus:

The Indian woman – She is the one who is torn between tradition and

modernity, she is one who is in search of self-identity, she is the one who

tries to give shape and content to individual existence in a sexist society.

(12-19)

Traditions, that teaches women to behave like ideal legendary women. The

character such as Sita, Sakuntala, and Savitri, tempt them to be called ideal, and prohibit

them to come out of the traditional circle. Almost all of novels Deshpande narrates the

story of Indian women who have been facing mental disturbance and confusion for ages.
 Shashi’s women at the beginning of the plot remain passive, obedient and

complying with all the requests of their husbands. But progressively glide away from

their spouses due to natural quarrels and conflicts. Deshpande seems to believe the

sentiments of Simon de Beauvoir whom she admits herself inclined and according to

whom it is women, who have to define, deliberate and discover their special province.

The work of ShashiDeshpande is a verbal representation of the past and the

present, East and West, tradition and modernity. She rarely writes in seclusion because

she endeavors to create new spaces far away well conservative conventions. While

representing traditions she has tried to break the barriers of tradition which make

women’s lives unhappy. Deshpande presents the tradition and modernity in the

framework of female issues of domestic nature where they are subjected to struggle,

torture and harassment.

The present investigation deals with three of her novels to find the tradition and

modernity by her woman characters. “In our civilization of enduring patriarchal

traditions, marital infidelity is still more serious for the woman” (Beauvior 610).

In the novel That Long Silence, Mohan is a traditionalist who wants his wife Jaya

to conform to his prospect. He desires his wife to be modern and educated, but also

expects her to have traditional qualities like obedience and elasticity. As a husband,

Mohan never tries to understand his wife, her emotions and her psychological needs. On

the other hand, Jaya annihilates the creative facet of her personality to keep Mohan

happy. She devotes herself to the care and achievement of her husband’s and her

children’s needs. Thus, obedience and loyalty, which are well thought-out to be the

qualities of Hindu womanhood, degenerates into silent attitude of oppression. A woman is

even expected not to be angry or repulsive as stated in the novel: “A woman can never be
angry; she can only be neurotic, hysterical, frustrated. There’s … no room for despair,

either. There is only order and routine” (TLS147-148).

Jaya cannot find cheerfulness and liberty in her married life even she is educated.

She was forever caught in the struggle between the traditional and the modern style of

judgment and the existing traditional system. Jaya the heroine in That Long Silence gets

troubles in marriage with her husband‘Mohan. Jaya, seems to be a writer who has got a

award for her story. But by that story, Mohan felt hurt to face public degradation for

enlightening their personal life. Mohan reflected the disapproval face to Jaya and she then

stop writing. She says, “And looking at his stricken face, I had been convinced. I had

done him wrong. And I had stopped writing after that” (TLS144). In fact Jaya never tried

to make Mohan understand the difference between a fantastic story and the actuality.

Jaya feels autonomous throughout the novel; but she lacks the courage to revolt

against her husband. When her husband caught in the trouble due to the accusation of

corruption, he wants Jaya’s companionship in defeat which she refuses. After a self-

analysis, and probing of her own opinion and approach, Jaya realizes her mistakes.

Finally she understands that to declare her distinctiveness saying, “But it is no longer

possible for me. If I have to plug ‘hole in the heart’ I will have to speak, to listen, I will

have to erase the silence between us” (TLS192). Thus Jaya comes forward and shape out

a new identity for herself. Her traditional role as a wife, in her variants between tradition

and modernity and her disasters destroyed her married life with Mohan and her silent

agony in the long seventeen years of married life.

Jaya is a modern predicament and the shower of consciousness that ensures out of

it is a silent flow of thoughts and feelings. She knows beautiful that in order to get by in a

relationship one has to learn a lot of tricks and “silence is one of them… You never find a
woman criticizing her husband, even playfully, in case it might damage the relationship”.

(Cunningham, The Indian Post: 6)

Deshpande reflects a sensible image of the contemporary middle class woman

caught in the catastrophe of a transitional society where the transfer is taking place from

traditional to modern. The Binding Vine is a superb illustration of the tradition and

modernity. Urmi, the female protagonist is a confidentand strong woman who marries

Kishore, a merchant navy officer. She herself works as a lecturer in a college and able to

handle both her professional and household duties very well even in absence of her

husband. However, the death of her one-year-old daughter Anu breaks her heart totally.

She needs the support of her husband at this critical moment of life. On every occasion

she expects her need for emotional breakups. But Kishore responses back her sexually.

He does not understand the strength of her feelings and there arises a crack between them.

Due to the traditional thinking Kishore is unable to differentiate emotional fulfillment and

sex.

Deshpande analyses female psyche at points out the discomfort of her traditional

role, where her expectation to be an incarnation of sacrifice and suffering, a testimonial

of endurance and loyalty and a selfless bestower of adore and love. Urmi while mournful

over the failure of her daughter, gets involved and finds relief from her intolerable pain in

the dilemma of two persons, Mira and Kalpana. One already dead and another going

through a death-in-life subsistence.Urmi says: ‘I’ve suddenly realized – what has

happened to Kalpana happened to Mira too” (63). What binds Mira, Urmi’s mother-in-

law and Kalpana, a poor household servant’s daughter is that both have been the victim of

rape. What Mira suffers is usually not recognized as rape by our society and tradition, but

the genuine right of husband. Considering woman as feeble and dependent, the Indian
tradition had empowered the male members to take control over woman’s life. Mira is

one such woman who becomes the sufferer of such traditions.

A growing poet and an eager student, Mira loses her right to education because a

man decides to marry her. With a compulsive love, the man plots to get married to her,

leaving her with no choice. Mira’s reluctance to marry and her interest in studies have no

consequence for the man, who nourishes the dream to acquire her. Traditionally, marriage

is the only ambition of a girl’s life. Fearful that, they may not get a better match, Mira’s

parents decide to marry her to a man much older to her in age, instead of letting her

discover her poetic talents or her studies. Her fear of marriage and the right it grants to

man over a woman’s body is uttered in her verse:

But tell me, friend, did Laxmi too

twist brocade tassels round her fingers

and tremble, fearing the coming

of the dark-clouded, engulfing night? (BV 66)

Emotionally undeveloped and perceptive at heart, Mira could not recognize her

husband’s love and fascination that was limited only to sex. She fails to accept him as her

master and adoration him. His obligation on her, which he thinks an expression of love,

shatters the sensitive Mira, who creates a wall around herself and reconciles from

establishing an emotional relationship with him. Her powerlessness to manage and his

forced love-making make her to be concerned of a hate for him. She realizes that the

patriarchal Hindu society and its traditions do not recognize a woman’s feelings. Thus,

submitting to the traditional role of a wife she writes,

I give him the facts, nothing more, never my feelings. He knows what I’m

doing and he gets angry with me. I don’t mind his anger, it makes him
 leave me to myself, it is bliss when he does that. But he comes back, he is

remorseful repentant, he holds me close, he begins to babble. As so it

begins. ‘Please,’ he says, ‘Please, ‘I love you.’ And over and over again

until he has done, ‘I love you.’ Love! How I hate the word. I have learnt to

say ‘no’ at last, but it makes no difference, no difference at all. (BV 67)

The affirmation of her identity in “I am Mira” (BV 101) is her strong qualities and

recent outlook. With the loss of such selfhood women have to endure yet another kind of

brutalization.

Nirmala, they call, I stand statue-still.

Do you build the new without razing the old?

A tablet of rice, a pencil of gold

Can they make me Nirmala? I am Mira. (BV101)

Mira’s diary reveals how Venu, a poet, cleverly snubs her for attempting to write

poetry. Here Mira is represented as a woman of past generation who does not have the

bravery to revolt against the male domination due to her traditional nurture. She tried to

understand her own ‘self’ through her writing. She is a talented poet but she does not

allow to develop her poetic talent because of her gender. When Mira gives Venu some of

her poems to read, he says, “Why do you need to write poetry? It is enough for a young

woman like you to give birth to children. That is your poetry. Leave the other poetry to us

men” (BV127). It is insightful of the handicaps that women writers frequently face in a

male-dominated society

According to traditional belief, liberation for a woman is only her accomplishment

of motherhood. She does not have hope of anything beyond her wifely and motherly

roles. In the novel Urmi motherhood caused by the sudden death of her baby daughter
Anu; Urmirealationship with as a surrogate daughter through the reading of her poems

and Urmi close understanding of the mother-daughter bond between Kalpana and

Shakutai. The mother of Mira, who is traditionally adopted and accepted her role as

mother and had her own world of thoughts about her daughter and, hence, she remains

satisfied with seeing Mira married and pregnant. Mira stands against her mother’s

assertion on the straight role of daughter-in-law is understood that she neither wants to

become a sufferer of the trap in which women are being caught in their lives, nor does she

want to be forced by her mother into same trap which her mother, willingly or

unwillingly, had been caught. Her mother has a secret hope that her daughter’s destiny

would be better than her own in predictable role.

Urmi is grieving the loss of her eighteen-month-old daughter Anu, a grief and

emptiness that cannot be filled till she experiences a connectedness with her mother and

suffer silently. Nancy Chodorow writes:

The experience of mothering for a woman involves a double

indentification. A woman identities with her own mother and, through

identification with her child, she experiences herself as a cared for child…

given that she was a female child, and that identification with her mother

and mothering are so bound up with her being a woman, we might expect

that a woman’s identification with a girl child might be stronger.(47)

Mira’s unfortunate death in child-birth ends her protected existence with a man

she could not love and people she had nothing in common with. But the innumerable

experiences of her life discovered in her poems. Urmi who identifies Mira’s story with

that of Kalpana, a lower middle class rape victim.Kalpana, a young and gorgeous girl

becomes the prey of her uncle, Prabhakar. Urmi meets Kalpana and her mother Shakutai

in a hospital and becomes aware of the censorship and ill-treatment of women in the
lower strata of society. In spite of her hopeless marriage, Shakutai life turn scatter when

husband leaves her at a young age. It reveals the duality of society which expects a

woman to keep her marriage even if the husband is good for nothing whereas allows a

man to walk out for no rhyme or reason.

The divergence between tradition and modernity is evident in the relationship of

Shakutai and Kalpana. Shakutai is a typical, protective and affectionate mother, who had

nurtured fear in her heart since her daughters grew up physically; she hates her daughter

being dressed up in a stylish manner or her using makeup. She feels that it would

unreasonably attract male attention, “If you paint and flaunt yourself, do you think they’ll

leave you alone?”(BV146). But Kalpana’s ideas of life are different from those of her

mother. She was on the entrance of her youth and had her own income. She loved to dress

well and move around freely, feeling submissive to none.

According to Shakutai, Kalpana is self willedperson refuses to be guided by her

dictates. And when she struggles between life and death, she holds her mother

responsible for what has happened to her. Shakutai, being a depressed and frustrated

woman, fails to understand her daughter’s sense of freedom, who had dreamt of living an

autonomous life of her own, different from the domineering and overpowering life of her

mother and aunt. She even resented becoming their shadow and never wanted any of her

mother’s dreams. She had her own, Mira too:

To make myself in your image

Was never the goal I sought. (BV124)

Urmila’s contribution with Shakutai, her sister and daughter brings to light the

way in which the rubber trample of the traditional culture is working in her sexual

disparities between men and women of the lower class. Kalpana had been brutally raped

and in the process she was physically and mentally injured. On seeing her daughter
Shakutai is shocked but due to the fear of social stigma she cries, “don’t tell anyone, I’ll

never be able to hold up my head again, who’ll marry the girl, we’re decent people” (BV

58). But Urmila tries to explain to Shakutai that Kalpana is not at blunder. Though Urmila

is a modern educated woman, she does not reveal any fundamental attitude towards her

own marriage. When Dr.Bhaskar declares that he is in love with Urmi and proposes to her

indirectly, she is surprised and refuses to abandon her good quality because he believes in

the sacredness of marriage.

Deshpande likes to preserve a balance between tradition and modernity. To her,

traditions are the values of agreement and co-existence that symbolize the Indian way of

life and modernity is the affirmation of independent individual identity. A sudden jump to

modernity may be harmful to the Indian women because of the culture and society which

basically differ from that of the western people. Keeping in view, the long standing

traditions of Indian society, seek solution for the problem of changing mind-set of males

towards the females. Though the protagonists in her novel achieve selfhood, they don’t

contradict the family or society. Deshpande shows hatred neither to tradition nor to

modernity rather she believes in the understanding of the old and new, of the tradition and

modernity.

Deshpande, as a writer of realism, likes to create the new environment and

broaden the range where the wife and husband live together happily and adequately. She

also likes to maintain a balance between old values of life and modern fashions coupled

with individual and economic freedom. Sudden shift to modernity, according to

Deshpande, may be harmful to the Indian women because of the deep-rooted culture and

nation which basically differs from that of the Western people.

 Deshpande’s novel Small Remedies presents dual values of traditional society, one

for men and other for women. The novelist presents a miserable picture of the patriarchal

model through her characters Som who marriages Madhu and later separated. Madhu, an

educated and modern woman suffers a lot at the hands of her husband who always tries to

overpower her. In the seventeen years after their marriage Madhu discloses to her

husband a secret that she had interaction with a man who was a close friend of her father

when she was fifteen and after that the man commited suicide. Som, her husband who

spends a wonderful married life with her wife, at the same second changed person with

his representative male psychology holds on this single act of sex, the willing

membership of his wife in this act forgetting the reality that he himself has had a full-

fledged relation with a married woman before marriage. Here ShashiDeshpande shows

the clear picture of traditional society where the mind of a man is set that he has freedom

to fulfill his desire by having many love affairs before marriage and a woman has to bond

to maintain her virginity before marriage. Men expect that the women should follow

Chasity. But the whole society is least bother about men. Women will surrender their

entire life for the society and for their own family. In traditional society pre-marital sex

could lead to fall down the marriage life.

In the novel Small Remedies, Som is totally distressed and considered as faithless

character. Madhu recalls,

This is what I’m speaking to Som, this is what I’m sharing with him. But

it’s the single act of sex that Som holds on to, it’s this fact that he can’t let

go of, as if it’s been welded into his palm. Purity, chastity, an intact hymen

these are the things Som is thinking of, these are the truths that matter.

(SR262)
 ShashiDeshpande appears to believe that by not argumentative and presenting

conflict, the women have to blame themselves for their own discrimination. She,

therefore, suggests that they themselves have to break the chains that have surrounded

them. They have to revolution against the social set-up and free themselves from the

socially maintained conventional images.

Madhu, as a writer by profession, to get rid her conjugal tension and for her

emotional confusion decide to write the biography of SavitribaiIndorekar on the

persistence of Chandu. Writing gives her scope to get away from the tension in her

marriage and to make out herself. She holds the enclosure and admits,

I can take over bai’s life and make what I can trap her into an image I

create, seal her into an identity I make for her. The power of the writer is

the power of the creator. Yes, I can do much. I can make Bai the rebel who

rejected the conventions of her times. The feminist who lived her life on

her terms.The great artist who struggled and sacrificed everything in the

cause of her art.The woman who gave up everything - a comfortable home,

a husband and a family - for love. (SR166)

SavitraBai comes from a prosperous and orthodox Brahmin family. She loves

music and dancing. The traditional society doesnot accept girl’s talents. The society

considers the art of music and dances are morally wrong to women. It is after her

marriage. She learns, her father-in-law’s love for music. His support gives her self-

confidence and desire of him let her learn music. Breaking away the chains of tradition, a

female coach was arranged for Bai, very soon a Muslim tabla player came to join the

group.

The family was angry but Bai’s purpose to achieve her goal, gave her enough

bravery to face the anger of her family members and the society. Once again, she revolts
against the tradition, in search of her identity and to finish her dreams elopes to Bombay

with her tabla player, Ghulam Saab. Bai was very sure in her single pursuit of ambition,

peripheral all the other things. Here novelist presents a clear picture of traditional society

that for a man to pamper in his love of music and even to have a singer as a mistress was

not an offence. But for a daughter in law to be learning music is going to be a disgraceful

task. This is the mind-set of the society who categorizes women as wicked on the slightest

divergence of her path while men remain free from any kind of hatred and mockery if he

does something unusual. “A woman who’d left her husband’s home what morals would

she has, any way! Bai was obviously damned by everyone” (SR 223).

She faces number of hardships and humiliation and even gives birth to a daughter

out of marriage vows. And again in order to be the pupil of Pundit KashinathBuwa, she

faces difficulties, progressively all her effort starts to accept the fruits, ultimately making

her into a professional singer and then became the great artist in classical singing world of

music. James Gerein points out that, “Leela and Savitri present prototypical Indian

feminists, generation ahead of their time and successful in their chosen careers. Both of

them sacrifice more than they should have done in and achieved what they want” (James

Gerein, 804). Even towards the end of her life, Bai struggles to find her identity by

ignoring a great part of her life. But to Madhu, the real Bai remains strange even to her

own self. Hasina’s words are a indication of her going back to her faith. She says, “It

began after her first stroke. Suddenly, overnight, she became an orthodox Brahmin”

(SR74).

Evaluating other characters, Leela, Madhu’s aunt, who faces a number of

difficulties from the existing society. She was a confident and a rebel woman in her own

ways and well aware of her needs. Right from her childhood days. Her favours towards

studies reveals that she does not show any interest in the household responsibilities. Her
grandmother’s punishments turned out to be a blessing, for her husband he encourages

her to study and she passes her matric assessment. But the fate decides her husband be

suffered from T.B, and died at an early age. Her husband’s death strengthened her to be

independent and answer her challengers in life. It gave her a definite direction and

purpose, as she has to support her young brother-in-law and her suffering mother-in-law.

She feels them as her responsibility, and hence refuses to return to her parent’s

house. Her assessment of staying in her husband’s house cuts her relations with her own

family, it is only her strength of mind and power wakes her successfully, she takes up a

teaching career and supports her-in-laws. The novelist gives a new element or ambition,

which leads to revolt against tradition. She stresses that confirmation means not reduction

ones duties and responsibilities rather, it is fulfilling these courage.

The character Leela, a strong celebrity, who is aware of her needs and the goals,

she had been aspiring for. She fight against all odds and boundaries to achieve the

freedom. She was a social worker and nursed T.B patients. She even takes part into the

1942 Quit India movement during the freedom struggle and is jailed a number of times.

Madhu expresses surprise when she questions the courageous nature of her aunt. She

writes, “Is it true that, while underground, she was responsible deeds? And that, while she

had narrow escapes, she was never caught, but came out only after an amnesty was

declared” (SR 96).

After independence she remonstrated against the price hikes. All her life Leela

fulfils the requirements of her true self irrespective of the borders of traditions. The

author informs about the traditional concept of Indian family. The relational term used for

family members and their duties towards other members of the family and prearranged.
This is one of the very strong examples where individual reality and social reality go in

opposite direction:

This is Baba. He is the father. He goes out to work. This is Aai. She is the

mother.She looks after the home and children. This is Dada, the oldest brother.He

helps first father. This is Akka, the oldest sister. And so on.Each one is paying

outhis or her allotted role of perfection.Thedignified father, and nurturing mother,

the serious and the responsible oldest brother. The eldest sister…(133)

In the novel Small Remedies, ShashiDeshpande describes the conflict between

tradition on the one side and modernity on the other side. She develops the quest for self-

realization of Indian women in an opposed patriarchal society.

It reveals her deep insight into the dilemma of Indian women, who feel suffocated

and vulnerable, in a tradition-bound, male-dominated society. Shashi has great sensitivity

for the benefit of women. She has presented the silent and obedient women maltreated by

social conditioning, trained to fit to the mythological ideal women role models. The silent

problems of women from their unknown regions of minds are clearly portrayed in her

novels. Her deep insight into woman psyche and perfect understanding of Indian society

brought her global gratitude and created a place for herself in the literary world by writing

various fictional works.

She describes her women characters in the light of their wishes, horror, ambitions

and disappointments. They are aware of their strengths and limitations, but find

themselves frustrated by the conflict between modern and patriarchal mind-set.

Deshpande brings to light their inferior position and consequent humiliation in a male-

dominated society
 ShashiDesbpande rightly points out the conflicts between tradition and modernity,

through her novels. Her young female protagonists Jaya, Sarita, Sumi rebel against the

traditional way of life and patriarchal values and perceive the structuring of men and

women in gendered roles, restricting their human potentiality and fullness. They struggle

to surpass the restrictive roles so they rebel, reject and seek freedom from the traditional

norms and ways of life. ShashiDeshpande's portrayal of the women of different

generations presents the world of women divided into the traditional and modern. Most of

her themes in her novels are the relationship between human, her novels chiefly focuses

on the human relationships.

The protagonists of ShashiDeshapnde are modern educated and career women

who are rebellion. The novels depict the clear picture of the new woman in the Indian

context and the relationship of that modern woman with other traditional women, and also

with other men as father, husband and friend. Thus the human relationships find an

important role in the novels.

The new woman redefines her relationship with other women in the family as a

mother and daughter, as a friend and direct in the society. She attempts to emphasize the

position of woman in family and career providence against male-designed conventions.

Though the Indian organization has declared the equal rights for women that are not

applied in reality. Most of the Indian women are modern but they are conservative in their

thinking and position to the foundation. The traditional believes rules are based on the

biological values of men and women.

Deshpande focuses on the issues regarding women struggles, rights and victories.

Her new women dare to question and challenge the age-old traditions. Her individual aim

is to complement the man-woman relationship as equal partners. Her heroines are often

bolder, self-reliant and rebellious. At that end they realize that ‘walking out’ does not
solve their problems. Deshpande has specially concentrated on the theme of lack of

identity experienced by women in tradition oriented society. She emotionally expresses

the aggravation and disappointments of Indian women in the male-dominated society.

The age old tradition of subordinating women to men is fore stranded as a stigma

in the society. Performing a balancing act between tradition and modernity with varying

results, ShashiDeshpande’s fiction portrays educated middle class women organization

out the complexities of leaving traditional archetypes behind them and attempting to live

their life according to the new norms of liberation. In the words of Veena Noble Dass “

The Indian woman caught in the instability of tradition and modernity bearing the burden

of the past and the aspirations of the future is the crux of feminism in India” (Dass 11).

Traditions and beliefs can put its impact on relationships between parents and

children, brother and sister, husband and wife. Here ShashiDeshpande wonderfully

explores the journey of the protagonist from rejection of traditions and modernity to her

acceptance of both at the balanced level. And all their transformations affect the concept

of family. But it shows how the concept of family exist in the battle between tradition and

modernity.

Traditions are predictable part of human history which is given to the next

generations but at the same time by observing the past, we can find that by the time each

tradition changes its face sometimes gradually or sometimes rapid change occurs. The

whole development of the novel shows four stage as revolt against tradition, frustrations,

submission and ultimately an attempt to reconsolidate.

The present study on ShashiDeshpande’s selected novels the protagonist’s

highlights love-hate relationships symbolize the conflict between tradition and modernity.
Looking at the man-woman relationship neutrally, the novelist does not censure

exclusively men for the suppression of women.

Traditional and modernization are good for human being to follow some ethics

and moral values. Traditional values allow the human to live with morality. But in some

cases it makes the women to struggle physically and mentally. Also it forces the women

to live with certain restriction.

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION
 Chapter V

Conclusion

A close study of ShashiDeshpande’s novels reveals her deep insight into the plight

of Indian women, who feel smothered and fettered, in a tradition-bound, male-dominated

society. She highlights inferior position and the subsequent degradation in a male

dominated society. Deshpande’s women characters are the victims of prevalent gross

gender discrimination, first as daughters and later as wives. They are conscious of the

social inequality and injustice towards them and struggle against the oppressive.The

unequal nature of the social norms and rules limits their capability and existence as

feminine roles.

In the novel That Long Silence, Jaya bears troubles in marriage from her husband

towards any deviation from her role of a subservient wife. When threatened with charges

of corruption, he expects her to go into hiding with him; when she refuses to obey, he is

greatly enraged and walks out of the house. Jaya is miserable as she followed her

Vanitamami’s advice that a husband is like a sheltering tree, which kept alive without it,

the family becomes unsheltered and vulnerable. She does but finds herself and the

children the more unsheltered and insecure.

ShashiDeshpande raises the issue of marital rape in her novel Binding Wine.

Women like Mira, Urmi’s mother-in-law, have to bear the sexual assault by their husband

silently. Despande portrays other women in this novel Shakutai and her sisterSulu also the

victim of this brutality.Shakutai’s husband is a drunkard and a waste fellow, who leaves

his wife and children and marries another woman. Kalpana, daughter of Shakutai is

brutally raped by a sadist Prabhakar, Sulu’s husband. The central character of this novel

Urmi takes up cudgels on Kalpana’s behalf and the culprit is caught. Urmi’s husband is in
navy and during his long absence she craves for some physical gratification. Her

friendship with Dr.Bhaskar provides her ample opportunity, but she never oversteps the

boundaries chalked out in marriage. This remains unacknowledged by her

husband.Despande points outthe existence of women in this society where women

intertwined with the family bondage and suppress their sexuality and desires.

The other novel Small Remedies, is narrated by the SavitribaiIndoreker, She leads

the most unconventional of lives, but undergoes great mental trauma because of the

double standards practiced in society. Right from her childhood she had sensed the gross

gender discrimination in the society that had one set of laws for men and another for

women. Madhu, too, is a victim of double standards of society. She gets alienated by her

husband Som after she discloses to him about her single act of physical intercourse before

marriage, though Som has himself had a full-fledged physical relation with another

married woman before marriage.

In all these novels the characters are not only educated, creative and liberated but

also mature and compassionate enough to reach out to others who are at the bottom of the

socio-economic ladder. In The Binding VineShakutai finds her own voice through Urmi’s

sympathy and guidance. Jaya in That Long Silencehelps the crazy Kusum against

everyone’s wishes, later helps Jeeja when her son met with an accident. In Small

Remedies,Madhu’s son is killed in a communal riot. Most of ShashiDeshpande’s

characters go on unquestioningly until they are shaken out of the run by something

catastrophic or disastrous.

ShashiDeshpande, an eminent novelist has emerged as a writer of possessing deep

insight into the female psyche, focusing on the marital relation. She seeks to expose the

tradition by which a woman is trained to play her subservient role in the family. Her
novels reveal the man-made patriarchal tradition and uneasiness of the modern Indian

woman being a part of them. ShashiDeshpande uses the present social reality as it is

experienced by women. Her young heroines rebel against the traditional way of life and

patriarchal values. She also examines the causes that debilitate the development of a

wholesome personality like sex, sadism and authoritarianism in the present day India. She

discusses female inabilities, their problems and their failure to achieve things in life.

In her novel, That Long Silence traces a woman who is confused by doubts and

fears towards her affirmation. The novelist does not blame entirely the men for the

subjugation of women butthe man-woman relationship in general. She sees how both men

and women find it difficult to grow the images and roles assigned to them by the society.

Woman is a hapless member both in the family and the society. Women suffer while

trying to achieve individuation and autonomy either from the state or the family. She

clearly satirizes and exposes the clichés and sterotypes of gender roles that we frequently

come across in society.

Deshpande’s women are the role models of the new society whose thirst for

modernity, elevation and upgradation is appreciated. Her modern characters are assertive

in nature who tries for their individuality and quest for self identity in the male

centeredsociety. Most of her characterssearch for their individuality within their married

life. Deshpande does not regard all traditions as bad and harmful. To her, traditions have

the values of harmony and co-existence that symbolize the Indian way of life. Modernity

in her is the assertion of independent identity. Traditions of Indian society, she seeks the

solution to the problem by changing mind set of the men folk towards the women. The

world of men now is in a process of women thinking. It cannot be changed without

changing man’s way of thinking. The unbalanced relationship of man to woman is the

formost cause of problems existing in society

 Deshpande inthe select novel shows the search of self by the woman characters. She is able to

integrate herself with the family and society. She enables as a traditional roles of daughter, sister, wife and

mother, she emerges as an individual in her own right. In this process, men play crucial roles. Major role

as husband or significantly supportive roles as lover, friend and even father, they acts as catalysts

propelling her to a comprehension of her life forcing her into a gradual process of introspection and self-

realization. Women have to put up a great fight to assert their identity. They realize that their quest will be

as hard as work at the factory.

Deshpande’s novels That Long silence, In the Binding Vine, Small Remedies

Portray the sufferings of women. Every woman has a destiny but do not spend too much

for achieving it. The society plays a vital role in the life of women. It gives certain

restriction for them. So they struggle silently and lead an unsatisfied life. In

ShashiDeshpande’s novels, the conflict which is at the origin of the being for others isnot

stretched to the extreme, for her, women still find room for sustaining man-woman

relationship, as Jaya says at the end of the novel, “that life has always to be made

possible”(TLS 193).Deshpande shows man -woman relationship in the traditional Indian

patriarchal context. She suggests the women to avoid confined man -woman relationship

and lead the emancipated life of their own.

Deshpande not only presents a feminist insight into patriarchal values but also

advocates a balance between tradition and modernity and making adjustments as a

working philosophy for the present day woman. Deshpandeinsists her woman to realize

herself that the woman must be true to her own self. A woman must venture out of the

familial framework in order to realize her potential as an individual and give expression

to her inner space and self not by rejecting her marriage or family in the process.

Deshpande’s novels promote the women to come out from their suppressed roles.

Deshpande has been successful in creating strong women protagonists who despite so
many conflicts in their lives, refuse to get crushed under the weight of their personal

tragedies and confront life with great audacity and strength.

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