Marriage In Shashi Deshpande

Identities are often challenged by others and there is a struggle with maintaining one’s true self. In Santha Rama Rau’s “By Any Other Name” and Anzie Yezierska’s “My Last Hollywood Script,” adversities are faced during their battle for their genuine self. Yezierska struggles with maintaining her identity as a writer whereas the Rama Rau sisters struggles with maintaining their identities as Indians. “By Any Other Name” and “My Last Hollywood Script” both deal with the hardships of maintaining an identity, but eventually each set of characters have an epiphany.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel, The Palace of Illusions is the epitome of feminism. It retells the story of Mahabharata from the view point of Draupadi, the daughter of King Drupad. The delicate threads of her life have beautifully been interwoven to bring forth a grasping story. Chitra Banerjee has herself written “I would uncover the story that lay invisible between the lines of the men’s exploits. Better still I would have her one of her tell it herself, with all her joys and doubts, her struggles and her triumphs, her heartbreaks, her achievements, the unique female way in which she sees her world and her place in it.”(XV).

Women in India were unaware of their miserable condition. It is in the post independence period the women’s quest for identity of her own commenced. The 20th century saw the shift from outer to inner sensibilities and no one can better understand a man or woman better a feminine writer. In modern English fiction a number of women novelists have arrived on the literary scene, they have set out making new forays in to the world of women. Nayantara Sahgal being a feminist writer has emphasized in her novels on freedom and a new definition of the New Women. Sahgal’s heroines are well aware of the injustice done to them in their marriage and they come out of this traditional bond.

Anita Desai’s female characters are ‘highly sensitive and neurotic’. But they are failure and unwilling to adjust with the real world because they live in alienated society and separated from their surroundings. They find indifference in their ideas from others and try to understand their way of life.

Throughout time, there has been a battle present in which females try to rise above the power of men and the hold they have on women. Whether the battle be for the equal treatment of both sexes or simply establishing a level of respect and understanding from the opposite sex, the meaning stands the same in which there is an ever-present power struggle that is continuously ongoing between the sexes. No matter the intentional meaning of the work, women suppression by men are seen when one looks beyond the simple statements given and examines the female characters in great detail to better understand the struggle she endures daily due to men. One author in particular that allows an interesting viewpoint into the mind of a blossoming woman is Susan Minot. Minot demonstrates in her story “Lust” how the female narrator is influenced and altered by her male sexual partners. Through each sexual encounter, the reader is able to see the changes these encounters have on the young woman emotionally and other affects a man has on her as she grows up in a male dominated world. This can all be determined by observing closely the figurative language used in the story, the fluctuations in emotions seen in the female character, and the thoughts the woman has about men throughout the story.

This paper attempts to examine the fictional projections of Indian girls, to see how they emerge in ideological terms. Their journeys from self-alienation to self-adjustment, their childhood struggles against the hypocrisies and monstrosities of the grown-up world, eventually demolishing the unjust male constructed citadels of power that hinder their progress- are the highlighted issues. The point of comparison between the two novels focused on here is the journey of Rahel in The God of Small Things and Sai in The Inheritance from a lonely childhood to a tragic adulthood passing through a struggle with the complex forces of patriarchal society. Both the novels portray the imaginativeness, inventiveness, independence, rebelliousness, wide-eyed wonder and innocence associated with these young girls.

Shashi Deshpande is one of the famous contemporary Indian novelists in English. She writes about the conflict between tradition and modernity in relation to women in middle class society. Shashi 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. The Indian woman has for years 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 has emerged as a writer possessing deep insight into the female psyche. Focusing on the marital relation she seeks to expose the tradition

Deshpande's concern and sympathy are primarily for the woman in whatever circumstances she might be placed or whatever role in the society she might be playing. While revealing the woman's struggle to secure self-respect and self-identity for herself through her protagonists, the author subtly unravels the multiple levels of oppression, including sexual oppression experienced by women in our society thus creating a new social awareness. This stance of Deshpande makes her a potential feminist writer creating a woman's world with loving, care and a soothing touch depicting the nuances of her consciousness while advocating her liberation from the meticulously concocted web of imposed socio-cultural orders that have existed over centuries. From

At last the Deshpande's women decide to act naturally, accepting themselves in whatever situation they are. When the 'exit plan' comes to be fail for them, then the 'way in' – their digging deep into their selves - gives the fundamental sustenance and strength to confront their issues. Their determination to confront the circumstance and their reliance just on the self demonstrate to them the best approach to stand up to the crisis in their lives. Despite the fact that their issues stay unsolved, their state of mind towards the issue change with their comprehension of the "self." Once they begin stand on their own legs, the heroines choose to quit fleeing starting with one shelter then onto the next. They acknowledge all that is cracked in

Her heroines are sensitive, intelligent and career-oriented. Study of her novels reveals how poignantly, she expresses the frustration and disappointments of women who experience social and cultural oppression in the male-dominated society. Shashi Deshpande started her writing career all of a sudden. In her own terms: “There was really nothing. It was very strange. May be it was there waiting inside and suddenly at one moment, it came out. Until then, I was looking around to see what I could do. I was very unhappy not doing anything, just looking after the home and children. It was perhaps a kind of claustrophobic existence. I could feel something building up in me and that caused the outburst. Otherwise, it would have perhaps led to a breakdown.”(“Denying the otherness” II) Her novels are autobiographical in nature depicting her own experiences of the educated middle class Indian women’s predicament and they tend to be gender specific. That Long Silence is a saga of suppressed women prisoned in the room of silence. It is Jaya’s journey in search of one’s true self who confronts the gender oriented traditional

However marriage ends up with being no escape. The husbands acknowledge their wives as working women however they cannot encourage the feminist self in their wife. In many of Deshpande's novels protagonists are left with no feeling of satisfaction – both physical and mental–because their husbands were not able to understand their feelings. The protagonists who have children, sense a sort of uneasiness in their association with their relatives. They regularly ponder whether history repeats itself regarding the misconception between the parents and the children. The heartless husband and the demanding children get to be hindrances to accomplishing individuality. Therefore the feeling of being caught returns to them even after the marriage too.

People may speak out words in life that may affect themselves and other after losing someone that was significant, which can connect to Indian and Pakistani literature. All parts of a struggle coming back to a character facing the past being alone in life can create emotions overall. Readers must comprehend that people in society today can relate to Indian and Pakistani literature where one feels alone. A reader who looks at Indian and Pakistani literature can understand that people with struggles in India or Pakistan countries can go through a lot with their emotional past. For the most part, the significance of Indian and Pakistani literature is to make a reader acknowledge how going through a tough situation can cause circumstances that get emotional for a character's self and others around them. In today's society, people may associate to this literature to distinguish a relationship with people being alone through the countries India and

She does all she can to wipe a tear from the eyes of the poor, the helpless and the innocent tailors and to make a reasonable deal with they which they have been long denied: “For this job, there will be no customers to measure,” she explained, “the sewing will be straight from paper patterns. Each week you have to make two dozen, three dozen, whatever the company wants, in the same style”... “The more dresses you make, the more you earn.”3 We meet Dina Shroff and learn how she became the widow Dina Dalai, living alone in the city stitching scraps of cloth into a quilt at night and trying to keep her dignity and independence from her dominating brother Nuswaan who assumed the role of the head of the family and legal guardian to Dina after the death of her father, Dr.Shroff. A Fine Balance maps out how Dina Dalai, the protagonist of the novel, and the three characters, Ishvar, Omprakash, and Maneck, suffer from a sense of rootlessness. The author brings his readers face to face with the dilemmas of inter-relationship and broken values and 75 customs of society. He tries to re-discover the Indian identity by setting his novel in three different

Thus, to give voice to the suffocated psyche and suppressed desire of woman and lay bare ambitions and frustrations and soothe the aches and pains has been primary focus in Deshpande’s writing. Her works show that compromise is what characterizes the life of the common run of the middle-class women in India. Unable to defy social conventions or traditional morality,

Kapur has explored the agony of a woman under patriarchal pressure and state of social ostracism. In their search for individual identity, the women characters prove themselves as real women of flesh and blood who have their own emotions and sentiments and urge for new identity in the life. The novelist explores their yearning for intellectual space in the traditional society. Kapur’s novels reveal disintegration in woman’s life, her struggle for basic rights and quest for identity and survival. She portrays how women are suffering from economic and socio-cultural lacunas in the male governed society. They have been still deprived for their basic rights, their aspirations to their search of individuality and self-reliance.