THE INTRUSION

-SHASHI DESHPANDE
INDEX
◦ ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
◦ ABOUT THE AUTHOR- SHASHI DESHPANDE
◦ SUMMARY
◦ ANALYSIS OF THE STORY
◦ CONCLUSION
◦ BIBLIOGRAPHY
◦ TEAM MEMBERS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to take this opportunity to express special gratitude to my Indian English Literature
teacher Mrs. MINAXI BRAHMBA as well as our principal who gave me the wonderful opportunity to do
this history project on the topic “THE INTRUSION’’. The opportunity to participate in this project has
helped me improve my research skills and I am really grateful to them.
I would also like to thank my family and friends for constantly encouraging me during this project,
which I could not have completed without their support and Continuous encouragement.
SHASHI DESHPANDE
◦ Shashi Deshpande is one of the few writers who writes equally in both forms, the novel and the short story. She
has five short story collections, nine novels and four children’s novels on her credit. She began her writing with
short stories. So short stories play very important role in her writing career. Her stories were published in Eves
Weekly, Femina, The Illustrated Weekly of India and the Mirror. Her short stories are collected in volumes. Shashi
Deshpande comes from the middle class family and so is well aware of the Indian women’s predicament of this
class. She writes about the Maharashtrian middle class women. Her writing deals with the problems of women in
the society. Primary focus of her works is the world of women, the struggle of women in the context of modem
Indian society.
◦ The novels of Shashi Deshpande depict the woman’s search for self, a vivid picture of female psyche, place of
female in the society. She puts forth the problems which a woman faces in day to day life. Her experiences and
observations are reflected in her novels. The novels Dark Holds No Terror, Roots and Shadows, That Long Silence,
The Binding Vine, Small Remedies and Mooving On depict the domestic life of an individual. If I Die Today, Come Up
and Be Dead are her two detective novels.
SUMMARY
The story “The Intrusion” begins with the woman protagonist, (here the woman is unnamed) describing about their
honeymoon place as the newly-married couple moved through fishing village. She is aware of the physical
surroundings as much as she is aware of her inner chaos and the unreasonable twinge of irritation against her
husband. They walked out of the seaboard and were back in village, hiking up a steep rocky path and finally reached
the top with the square stalk building. The unease that the narrator is experiences continues to grow when they are
finally boarded indoors. In the room the man attending on them opened the window to let the wind in. The narrator
aware of the man smirking and revealing an awareness of what they had come here for and the gaze that the man
was giving made her feel uneasy and embarrassed. The man left the room, having left alone to themselves, she felt a
painful silence as if they were stranger left to themselves. His stress on the words complete privacy in describing
their honeymoon place made her fell extreme disgust at the thoughts of it. Her feeling of disgust and dislike is
expressed in the lines which she states:
There was something furtive about the place, something deadpan about the servant’s face, which made me feel that
the men who came here did so with ‘other women’, who would laugh and chat with the men, not go through what I was
enduring now. Fear. Tremors. The way I averted my face from the beds. The narrator here talks about the societal
rules and institutions in which a woman is trapped and demonstrating the fact that female sexuality across classes is
under male control.

The sexual urges on the parts of her husband sickness the narrator-protagonist and makes her want to avoid him,
but to no gain. She was now looking back at her memories before she got married. She thinks about the exchanging
words between the two families and not asking the girl about her wishes and desire. she was
being binding in a relationship in which there is no returning point. The memories of pre-marital bliss fade away and
she is once again reminded of the uneasy and awkwardness of being in the room with complete stranger which is her
husband. They spent hardly a moment trying to know each other. The writer projects the image of a women who is
vulnerable with her fear and annoyed being with a man who has his own vulgarity, insensitivity, selfishness and
sexual urges.
They had not been given time to know and understand each other wishes. The inner feelings of the woman protagonist
are revealed here when she sees the sea from the balcony expressing ger wish, except that there will be a
difference in what she wishes for and what she gets. Imagining these things, she utters:
He would swim, I thought, and call out to me in a lazy and friendly way and I would respond with a wave and a
smile. But all this was in future, possibly, if at all. And at present we were not friends, not acquaintance even,
but only a husband and wife.

It was night and he asked her to change into her night-dress. She changes feeling glad that her night-dress
was simple. However, escaping his sexual overtures seemed difficult now.
Unwillingly I turned went to him, my legs as heavy as lead. And suddenly his arms were round me, his face
close to mine, his rough chin scraping, hurting in cheeks. His embrace was too sudden, too rough and I
wanted to scream, to cry out. But somehow I knew that this was just between the two of us. I turned my face
away from him, trying to escape, so that the kiss he intended for my lips landed in the air. He let me go
abruptly. There was a foolish, angry look on his face. […] ‘What’s this? Why are you behaving like this?’
Despite her stammering to him that they hardly know each other, her husband only protested that it had nothing to
with their sexual act. The final act of violation and the moment of her sense of wounded dignity are apparent in the
following lines, towards the close of the chapter:
And then I woke up to realize that the sound of the sea was real but I was on a bed, not on beach. And it was
not the sea that was pounding my body but he, my husband, who was forcing his body on mine. I was too
frightened to speak, my voice was strangled in my throat.
PARTRIARCHY THROUGH MARRIAGE
"Until women get over the handicaps imposed by the society outside and inner conditioning the human race will not
have realized its full potential“
- SASHI DESHPANDE.
The immense of these lines are basically the evidence of the woman's position in a male- dominated society. Actually,
apart from the nationalistic perspective, one of the major feminist writers Sashi Deshpande jotted down about the
effects of male domination, treatments of women and what they face in post-colonial era. Deshpande's "The intrusion
is a literal field where traditional matrimony erases the feelings of an educated, marriageable woman, where marital
rape is conferred as a ritual and little wishes are stuffed into boundary. As for the nature of human being, one have
to propagate and beget next offspring, but what happens if it is bound to do ?
In the story, we are at first introduced with a newly married couple-where the husband wanted to involve into
experience but the wife became panicky. They came to a little village at a sea- shore for their honeymoon trip and the
grassy surroundings was uncomfortable to the wife.
Then the unexpected experiences were going to attempt. At that moment, the lexical meaning of the title Intrusion' is
aptly applied.
The relation between a husband and wife is conferred as a mode of physicality. To Deshpande herself, every woman
must involve in a relationship but she should thread the spring of male domination where marriage-the vital ritual, is
done only for physical demand & maintaining social status. The intercourse in ‘The Intrusion’ amounts to rape but it
goes unpublicized since it occurs within marriage.
But the question appears here about the reason of subjugation and objectionless mentality. We find its answer in the
conversation of the father of that newly married wife and she herself. Yes, it was a typical Indian family having three
marriageable daughters and being followed the overpower of contemporary tradition of matrimony, Though the lady
was disagreed in that marriage her father threw her a question- what will you do after that? This one question was
enhanced into a thousands of questions-which ultimately results into her agreement it is seriously noted that both in
the state of before & after marriage, the girl was subjected. Though to the society, marriage is a bondage, an
unconditional condition, to the newly married wife it is nothing but a way of subjugation with only a speech - The more
we subjugate ourselves, the more we form in the family. Besides, the wife conferred that she felt panicky not for the
physical engagement, but for the intrusion into her privacy and the man responsible for it went to sleep peacefully as
if nothing had happened.
So, we get another proof of the poisonous tendency of accepting the logic of matrimony Here many controversies
are presented but the writer expressed that the female protagonist was not like frigid and incapable of love. Before
her marriage, she went through a book on sex, where she deserved unlike the other women about the others women.
To her, a perfect relationship demands exact introduction and knowing well to each other. But to the experienced
husband, representing the patriarchal motif knowing each other is less important than sufficiency of physical
demand.
We also see in the story that when the wife eagered to go into the sea, her husband replied negatively and she then
thought that between that evening and next morning, there was a night-a night out of expectation. Besides of it, we
see the newly married wife felt uncomfortable due to the naughty sound, for what she was in little hesitation.
So, we realized that every situation was against that woman - the representative of whole woman society of
contemporary period) And truthful to say, intentionally or unintentionally this sense transforms into wantonness.
This mentality stunned the protagonist what Sarada Banu rightly says, it is the classical picture of the start of an
Indian marriage and crossly insensitive Indian male" The writer adds a sense of irony with it. It is a matter of
mocking that a woman is said to hide her chastity from other men and told to deliver to a strange man, called
‘husband’
The story The Intrusion has appeared a clear proof from the deep sense of it, it is not against the social rituals or
any religious themes but only a mode of literal protest against what we think about, and how we apply these rituals
or themes. To conclude we execute the very bold line of Sashi Deshpande-
"The fact that we are human is much more important than our being man and women.’
What can be better conclusion than the previous?
 ANALYSIS OF THE STORY
Shashi Deshpande is one of the eminent novelists of contemporary Indian literature in English. Deshpande creates
characters that take her readers through the social strata of urban society; but her interest comes to center more and
more on women of the middle and upper middle classes. She talks about well-educated women who fight for their own
space, for their place in the family and in their social and cultural setting. This setting is the backdrop to almost all her
stories. Women, in Deshpande's works, are not simply victims of circumstances, of family, of society, they suffer from a
self consciousness till the end of their lives. Hence, over the decades that Deshpande's work embraces, they have come to
stand out as self-assured, self-empowered, articulate personalities.
She introduces a painful topic that had already been there, as ‘marital rape’, in one of her early stories, “The Intrusion",
the meaning of which clearly tells one’s forceful entry into another’s private world denying the latter’s self-respect. "The
Intrusion", a title story deals with a newly married woman, whose sense of worth is dishonored by the appalling treatment
by her husband, whom she thinks as an intruder. Deshpande emphasizes the self-effacing role of female protagonists in
the short stories under study in a scathing manner.
In the story, there is the newly married protagonist whose self-respect and sense of self are violated by her crass
and insensitive husband. The wife who finds herself conscious of her being but her husband's forceful pressure to
indulge sex with her at the very first night after marriage, considering it his legal right makes everything futile. She
has to surrender herself to the vindictive will of her husband. The female protagonist considers this relationship as
'marital rape' where the society and its norms win over one's self consciousness. The psychological being of a
woman doesn't have any value to the male chauvinistic nature. Throughout the story, the female protagonist's sense
of suffering makes no room in the traditional sociological approach and she has no way left but to surrender.
Although marriage is a legal institution by which a man can have sex with woman freely, but the writer is of the view
that one should develop a friendly relation before indulging to sex. He should not remain a stranger to her. An air of
trust and dependence must chill both of their hearts so that he should not appear as intruder, as the title of the story
implies. Forceful implementation of rights does never reflect manliness, rather earnest efforts to honour others’
sentiments and self consciousness defying the self ego brings real laurels for a man.
The story speaks not only about the male's intrusion over female's body and mind, but it intrudes over woman's own
identity from the psychological perspective. Thus, Shashi Deshpande has presented in her novel modern Indian
women’s search for this definition about the self, society, and the relationship that are central to women.
Deshpande’s novel deals with the theme of the quest for a female identity.
The complexities of man-woman relationship especially in the context of marriage, the trauma of a disturbed
adolescence is evident in the story. The Indian woman has always been a silent sufferer. While she has played
different roles-as a wife, mother, sister and daughter, she has never been able to claim her own individuality. Shashi
Deshpande’s novels deal with the women belonging to Indian middle class. She deals with the inner world of the Indian
women in her novels. She portrays her female characters in a realistic manner. Deshpande’s feminism is certainly
not pessimistic or unenthusiastic. She analyses the universal significance of the woman’s problem, thereby
transcending the feminist perspective and her story "The Intrusion" speaks volumes about it.
CONCLUSION
Deshpande illustrates the battle of women for self-identity via these stories, highlighting the tension, helplessness,
restlessness, and shame that these women experience. There is a certain tension in the relationships between men
and women as well as between mothers and daughters since many of Deshpande's ladies attempt—and some of them
are successful—to break free from the constraints of tradition. Women in Deshpande's work struggle with emotional
and practical issues related to self-identity.
In summary, Shashi Deshpande presents the reality of middle-class Maharashtrian living. She notes that women are
outcasts in a world ruled by men. She believes that much as women should value their uniqueness, they should also
be regarded as fellow human beings. In order for her to survive in such a corrupt environment, she needs to make an
effort to understand herself.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
◦ http://ir.unishivaji.ac.in:8080/jspui/bitstream/123456789/1950/11/11_Conclusion.pdf
◦ https://www.englishveda.com/2020/07/the-intrusion-summary-by-shashi.html
◦ https://www.academia.edu/40439924/INTRUSION_OF_PATRIARCHY_via_MARRIAGE_IN_DESHPA
NDES_THE_INTRUSION#:~:text=Deshpande's%20'The%20Intrusion'%20is%20a,wishes%20are%20stu
ffed%20into%20boundary%20.
◦ www.google.com
TEAM MEMBERS
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