R J College of Arts & Science

M A ENGLISH PART III

SEM III
PAPER II
COURSE TITLE : Gendered Perspectives on Literature

The Binding Vine

by Shashi Deshpande

A presentation by Rajalakshmi Varadarajan

Roll No.37
 The Binding Vine – Shashi Deshpande
 Shashi Deshpande portrays characters from the urban middle class of modem India. Her focus is
on women and the men come alive through her female characters. The overall effect is like real
human beings interacting with us.
 Shashi Deshpande creates life-like characters. We cannot claim that she creates unforgettable,
superhuman female heroes. The Binding Vine by Shashi Deshpande is a hard hitting novel about
the concepts that surround women. Set in a patriarchal world, it is a narration of the protagonist,
Urmila and the women in her life, some of whom she happens to encounter by chance. They
come from various strata of the society and bind themselves together with the narrator.

 About the Author :
 Shashi Deshpande was born in 1936, in Dharwad, Karnataka & is an award-winning Indian
novelist. She is the second daughter of famous Kannada dramatist and writer Srirang. Deshpande
has degrees in Economics and Law. In Mumbai, she studied journalism at the Vidya Bhavan and
worked for a couple of months as a journalist for the magazine 'Onlooker'.
 She published her first collection of short stories in 1978, and her first novel, 'The Dark Holds No
Terror', in 1980. She won the Sahitya Akademi Award for the novel That Long Silence in 1990 and
the Padma Shri award in 2009. Her novel Shadow Play was shortlisted for The Hindu Literary Prize in
2014.
 Shashi Deshpande has written four children’s books, a number of short stories, and nine novels,
besides several perceptive essays, now available in a volume entitled Writing from the Margin
and Other Essays.
 The Binding Vine - Summary
 the story begins with a miserable Urmi, mourning the death of her beloved infant daughter Anu. Caught in
an unhappy marriage where her husband is away on the sea most of the times, Urmi finds it difficult to
cope with this loss. She struggles to accept the reality, both relating to her marriage with Kishore and
Anu’s death.
 Urmi herself in her childhood, was sent away to live with her grandmother Baiaji to whom she was closer
to than her own mother while her brother continued to live with their parents. She knows she shouldn’t be
keeping her son away the way her mother did to her. While overcoming her grief, Urmi crosses path with
three women; Mira, her dead mother-in-law, Kalpana, a brutal rape survivor and her impoverished mother,
Shakutai. As their story unfolds, so does their strength and courage blossoms. She conceived as a result
and died during the delivery of her son and was ultimately emancipated from her miseries. But before
that, being a gifted writer she was, penned down her beautiful poems, which years later capture Urmi’s
attention who finds an escape in them. Urmi makes it her aim to get the poems published.
 Urmi sympathizes with Shakutai and to some extent identifies, since both the women are at a loss of their
respective daughters. She suggests lodging police but Shakutai refuses because she fears that no one
would marry her daughter Sandhya. Blaming Kalpana for her situation, Shakutai curses her for being so
forward, thinking that she could be spared of the fate that awaits a woman. It is eventually found by Sulu (
Kalpana ‘s aunt) that it was her husband who had revenged Kalpana as a punishment for refusing to
marry him. Sulu, in shame commits suicide but not before exposing her criminal husband.
 Shakutai’ s decision towards the close of the book, to reveal the truth about her daughter’s rape gives her
a new sense of liberation. Urmi also decides to publish her dead mother in law Mira ‘s poems which also
from her point of view will give a sense of justification and voice to the departed one. She comes to
understand her own mother Inni’s view point and helplessness and reconciles.
 Urmi is emotionally numb in the beginning after the realization that her daughter is really gone: “what’s
broken cannot be mended” She learns, however, that pains can be mended after she learns to reach out
to those who need to find their own strengths .
 The Binding Vine - Themes

 Rape - both as a random violent act and within marriage.

 Sakuntai's daughter Kalpana is raped by her own uncle and lay unconscious in hospital for
months. It's heart-rending to to see the reaction of her own mother who tries to keep it a secret
and blames her own daughter for her ways. She is worried if she is labelled as 'raped' who will
marry her and what would happen of her sister. On the other hand, the rapist is free and without
any guilt. Even the police officer thinks that exposing it won't do any good to anyone. Shashi
Deshpande also brings to the fore that rape is not only physical torture, it is mental agony also
and it can happen in marriage also.
 Her mother-in-law Mira's poems reveal that how she became a victim of it and how much she
dislikes her husband for being so callous. She could not say anything to anyone, so she wrote
them in her diary, but being a woman she could only have them hidden them in a diary that
existed even after she died. Yet it is the women who get the blame for being a catalyst for her
own horrific plight. Is it really the victim’s disgrace and not the criminal’s?
 woman emancipation : It is when Urmila struggles with her own griefs then she finds that she can
come over her own sorrow by connecting with others who confront even greater sorrows. It is
then, that she realizes the incongruities of women's predicament in this patriarch world and that
in resolving them lies her own solutions. She comes out as a force of change that brings a
change in the mind set of Kalpana's mother, society and the administration who look beyond
the taboos and establish entity of a girl, even though she jis a rape victim, even though she lay
mute in hospital bed.Read more on Brainly.in - https://brainly.in/question/1108622#readmore
The Binding Vine – Themes
 Marriage and its significance in an Indian woman’s life :
 The central characters of this novel are women, some weak, some strong, all bound
by a vine called Urmi, reaping it with love, concern, comfort and courage to each
other. Each one of them has their own challenges and are trying best to deal with
them. The author uses the themes of death, marriage, rape, loneliness and loss to
highlight the plight of these women.
 All the women have/had challenging marriages, Mira was exploited by her husband,
Inni and Vanaa supposedly were too submissive to their respective partners, sisters
Shakutai and Sulu were abandoned, one literally, the other emotionally and Urmi had
second thoughts about her relationship with Kishore. They are lonely despite having
(had) a life partner each. Is it so important for a woman to get married?
 Death as a theme : the story is set against the backdrop of death of Urmi’s baby Anu,
a grieving Urmi s life takes a turn when she discovers her dead mother in law’s anguish
through her poems nd diary references. Further, Kalpana the rape survivor is hanging
between life and death. Whereas Kalpana’s perpretaror’s wife Sulu not able to
withstand the shock of her husband having been the criminal commits suicide.
 The novel explores the theme of death as a unifying force between all these women
because of death and the grief wrought upon them but brings them emotionally
closer and supportive of each other.
 The Binding Vine – Feminist Literary Criticism
 Let us take a look at the definition of feminist literary criticism :
 “Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the
politics of feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of
literature. This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe the ways in which literature
portrays the narrative of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and
psychological forces embedded within literature.”
 In the Binding Vine, the protagonist and the women who come in connection with her are all
facing economic social issues such as the poor old woman Shakutai, who has to come to terms
with her daughter’s rape and survival but also the author portrays the economic hardships of
Shakutai’ life, bringing up 3 children all on her own. The social issue of whether to report the
case & thus endure social humiliation is also a decision she has to take.
 Urmi initially has a lot of psychological pressure on her due to the lack of mother’s love due to
her father’s domination and decision to send her away to her grandmother’s place
permanently. This was taken without the mother’s consent. Though it breaks Inni’s heart she is
submissive and puts up quietly with her husband’s highhandedness.
 Urmi’s lack of her partner’s presence makes her feel empty and often questions the validity of
her marriage which offers more loneliness than togetherness.
 Rejection of a man resulting in rape, the forced sex / rape in a marriage as regards Mira and her
suppression of her inner voice.
 Shashi Deshpande on Feminism
 Shashi Deshpande maintains that she has never consciously projected any feminist ideas. Her
novels and short stories which contain feminist thought—women's sexuality, the construction
of gender roles as a wife and mother, self-discoveries lead the reviewers to ask the question
as to what extent she would consider herself a feminist. Her reply is: I now have no doubts at
all in saying that I am a feminist. In my life, I mean. But not consciously as a novelist. I must
also say that my feminism has come to me very slowly, very gradually and mainly out of my
own thinking and experiences and feelings. I started writing first and only then discovered my
feminism. And it was much later that I actually read books about it.
 Shashi Deshpande, however, feels that her brand of feminism is not the militant feminism
adopted by the western writers. The problem of her protagonist rise mostly from situations in
the Indian context and differ from those of their western counterpart.
 Deshpande's protagonists are no doubt, victim of unequal power structure in marriage, but in
all her novels, she shows how one can rise above such injustice and lead a meaningful
existence. In the end, her protagonists almost always strive to make their marriages work.
 Shashi Deshpande further explains her own conception of feminism in one of her interviews
with Malini Nair, she says: The women in my book are people who come to realize what it is to
be a woman in the process of their own lives and the situations they face not through books
and theories. I think feminism is an entirely personalized perception. It is when you start
questioning preconceived notions about your roles. I don't think there is anything 'inherent' in
a woman apart from the fact that she can conceive. All other things are equally important
for them as they are for the men.