SHASHI DESHPANDE: A VOICE OF PROTEST AGAINST INDIAN PATRIARCHY
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Abstract
Shashi Deshpande, the Sahitya Academy Award-winning Indian woman novelist in English started her literary career as a short story writer with the publication of her first short story in 1970. Her first novel, The Dark Holds No Terrors, appeared in 1980 while her latest novel, Strangers to Ourselves, came out in 2015. She has eleven novels and four children’s books to her credit. She has been awarded Padma Shri in 2009 for her significant contribution in the field of Indian English Fiction. Her novels are simple stories dealing with the lives of the ordinary people, women in particular, with their heads and hearts. Her women protagonists are as real, life-like and convincing as human beings can be. They are the human beings who breathe and live around each one of us. They belong to the world of flesh and blood. The main thread of her novels is woven around the life of her women with their struggle for self-realization, self-assertion and emancipation in the world of males, and also with their struggle to find and preserve their identity as a daughter, a wife, a mother, and most importantly as a human being. Since Indian society, as we know, belongs to the man since time immemorial, the woman has been facing injustice, suppression, oppression, subjugation and exploitation in one way or the other. She is a victim of social ills and evils prevalent in a contemporary Indian context. In spite of being educated, she has been looked down upon with contempt; she has been reduced to the status of a plaything; she has been treated as a lifeless object used to fulfil men’s sexual desire and also as a child-bearing machine; she has been treated as a commodity to be used, controlled and disposed of by the male members of society. Deshpande, who is fighting for the cause of women, gives an outlet to her resentment at the woman’s plight and predicament. The present article intends to assess Deshpande as a woman novelist who raises her voice of protest against injustice done to the woman in the name of gender-discrimination and marriage.
References
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