INDIAN WOMAN AT THE CROSS ROADS: A STUDY OF SHASHI DESHPANDE'S HEROINES

The female protagonists in their writings evince sufficient vigour and courage to question the oppressive role of society, religion and culture, but yet they refrain from taking the paths suggested by the western feminists. They rather seek to find their own paths. The present paper reflecting on the three major novels of Shashi Deshpande, attempts to prove the point that Indian feminism as reflected in the Indian fiction is a unique phenomenon that has to be valued on its own scale and should not be weighed against the scales of the western feminist literature. For this purpose I have attempted a critique of the female protagonists in three of Shashi Deshpande's novels, namely The Dark Holds No Terrors, Roots and Shadows and That Long Silence. In all these novels, Shashi Deshpande objectifies new female subjective experiences with a gynocentric vision. She basically reflects on the problems and concerns of the middle class Indian women. Her writings, rooted in the culture in which she lives, remain sensitive to the common everyday events and experiences, and they give artistic expression to something that is simple and mundane. Her feminism is peculiarly Indian in the sense that it is born out of the predicament of Indian women placed between contradictory identities: tradition and modernity, family and profession, culture and nature. Her art is intensely personal, not political. Her feminism rooted in the native environment tends to be humanistic and optimistic in its outlook.