View of FEMININE SENSIBILITY IN SHASHI DESHPANDE’S NOVELS

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Vol.03, Issue 09, Conference (IC-RASEM) Special Issue 01, September 2018 Available Online: www.ajeee.co.in/index.php/AJEEE

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FEMININE SENSIBILITY IN SHASHI DESHPANDE’S NOVELS Dr. Manpreet K. Sodhi

Asstt. Prof. And Head Deptt. of English University College, Miranpur, Distt. Patiala.

Indian English literature in the past has attracted people in India and abroad and has attained a distinctive position. It has occupied a major position in the world of a “new woman” in the society. The term „new woman‟ has awakened to a new dawn of asserting one‟s being - awakening into a new realization of her place and position in family and society and assert her individuality. Woman has always been confined to the small periphery and the cocoon of her home. This has been her place where she is supposed to perform her duty as a wife, mother, daughter, sister and daughter in law. She remains confined to the boundary of her home and is not even allowed to cross the threshold. Man, on the other hand, remains free of these constraints. It is ironic that only a woman bears the consequences of crossing the boundaries (as Sita is abducted in Ramayana by the demon king Ravana and is taken along to his island kingdom). The mythology thus sets the limits of a woman‟s physical and psychological boundaries within which a woman must operate.

The present paper is an attempt to study two novels of Shashi Deshpande The Dark Holds No terrors and That Long Silence.

The novels highlight the plight of women who are suppressed at different times in the different walks of life. These women protagonists refuse to submit to the patriarchal suppressions and try to shape their lives according to their needs and perceptions. Shashi Deshpande is a versatile Indian writer who has contributed to the English fiction. She occupies a prominent position among the Women writers in Indian English literature. Her novels are a portrayal of the lives of middle class Indian women and highlight various themes with sensitivity. Deshpande, being the second daughter of a Kannada dramatist and a Sanskrit scholar, was born and achieved her education in Dharwad in Karnataka.

She bagged the Gold medal along with the degrees in Economics and Law. After marriage, when she was in Bombay, she also underwent a course in journalism at the Bhartiya Vidya Bhawan and worked as a journalist in the magazine “On looker.” She started writing stories which were published in magazines like

“Femina”, “Eve‟s Weekly”, etc. She wrote her first collection of short stories in 1978 and in 1980, her first novel “The Dark Holds No Terror” was published. Her books have been published both in India and abroad and three of her novels have received awards till now including the Sahitya Akademi Award.

Deshpande minutely observes the social constraints of the women and

explicitly highlights their plight in her novels. Her fiction is rich with rare insights and finesse such as man-woman relationship, human desire, longing, gender discrimination, rebellion and the protest. Her writings thoughtfully portray the structural dynamics of the society and offer a broad spectrum of variety. Her novels are written with a special focus on women‟s autonomy and selfhood, human relationships and social activism.

Feminism challenges the age long tradition of gender discrimination and attempts to explore and suggest remedies to overcome the problems where women have always been given an inferior role to play.

The term „feminism‟ has originated from the Latin word „femina‟ which means

„woman‟ and aims to assert the human rights, status and power and become at par with men. It suggests that women should possess the social, economic and political status equivalent to men. It attempts to explore and aims to resolve the real life problems that appear in the gendered role playing. Feminism originated in the West during the last decade of the eighteenth century with the beginning of the struggle for women rights through Mary Wollstonecraft‟s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). The later works included John Stuart Mill‟s The Subjection of Women(1869) and Fredrich Engels‟ The Origin of the Family (1884). In the post war period, Simone de Beauvoir‟s The Second Sex became an important landmark in the evolution of feminist

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2 theory. Beauvoir highlighted the social, economic, political, cultural and psychological aspects of women and questioned the supremacy of patriarchal set up of the society. She opined that a woman is not born as a feminine by birth, it is the sociological and psychological conditioning of her mind that makes her a woman, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. No biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the female presents in the society, it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature...which is described as feminine.”(Second 20) Beauvoir‟s work gave a proper orientation and guidance to the feminist literary theory.

Both feminism and

postcolonialism challenge the various forms of oppression, marginalisation and gender difference. Both try to emphasise on the politics of oppression, marginalisation and the subaltern subjectivity. Gatyatri Chakraborty Spivak, Trinh T. Min-ha and Chandra Talpade Mohanty are amongst the popular postcolonial theorists.

In her writings, Deshpande has tried to present a realistic picture of the plight of the middle class educated women who represent the major part of the society. Her women are sensitive towards the social and cultural changes going on in the male dominated society. It is their struggle to achieve freedom and identity that is showcased in her novels.

The novels deal with the problems and adjustments that women have to face at different phases of their lives. They also highlight the conflicts that the female protagonists have to undergo throughout their lives to achieve a respectable status in the society. Deshpande‟s novels highlight the women being split and stuck in a conflict between their family and professional roles, between individual aspiration and social demands. They stand on the threshold of tradition where they look for change within the cultural confines. They do not reinterpret them but seek respect and dignity in marriage.

They do not conform to be treated as objects or as fragile individuals who are only treated as dolls or playthings. They challenge the male psyche of victimisation and seek to create a balance between the two sexes. Deshpande‟s women protagonists generally come “...from

inherited patterns of thought and action in favour of new modes, arrived at independently after much consideration of the various aspects of the problem, keeping also in view the kind of society she lives in” (Postmodern 148).

Deshpande‟s novel The Dark Holds No Terrors boldly confronts reality through the protagonist, Sarita, and realises that the dark no longer holds any terror for her. Sarita, who is popularly known as Saru, is a simple, modest, sensitive and homely middle class woman who is conscious of her limitations. She always wishes to break the rigid social norms which she is caught in. She yearns to breathe afresh in a new environment where she does not have to be dictated by the will of others. Deshpande narrates the story of the novel in a flash back technique where Saru‟s marriage is a disaster. Sarita is a successful doctor during the daytime and a trapped animal at the hands of her husband, Manohar, an English teacher, during the night.

In the novel The Dark Holds No Terrors, Saru comes to her father‟s home to find comfort and solace after her nightly nightmarish experience with her husband. She had once determined and proclaimed that she would never come back to her father‟s place. But now she comes back to her father‟s place unable to bear the sexual exploitation of her husband. Her stay in the father‟s house gives her a chance to review and retrospect her relation with her father, husband and her dead mother. She now develops a better understanding of herself and others. The novel is a portrayal of Saru‟s remembrance of her past, a brief confession to her father about her trauma and her courage to confront reality.

The novel exhibits the trauma of a girl child who is deprived of parental love and care, she lives a pale and loveless life.

She suffers the bullying of her mother and the curtailment of her activities as the mother showers all her love and care on Saru‟s brother. Her mother literally hates Saru and loves her brother. Saru is also blamed and rebuked by her mother for the death of her brother as he gets drowned, “You killed him. Why didn‟t you die? Why are you alive when he‟s dead?”(173) The girl child Saru grows up as a victim of her mother sexist and gender. She goes against her moher‟s wishes and chooses Medicine as her

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3 career. Education makes her sensitive towards the biased treatment of a son and a daughter born of the same parents. The male child is always given the privileges and the female child is being ignored.

When Saru expresses her will to stay with her mother all her life, her mother says,

“you can‟t ”(40). But her brother Dhruva can stay, “He is different. He is a boy”(40).

This treatment of gender agonises Saru and she says, “If you‟re a woman, I don‟t want to be one”(55). Thus, Saru resents the role of a daughter and looks forward to the role of a wife hoping that it will provide some relief from the oppression of the mother and provide her some freedom, “I had come away from my parents in a fever of excitement after the last battle. The die was cast, the decisions taken, my boats burnt”(31-32).

But the decision proves to be disastrous. The second home also becomes her prison and she gets disappointed with her husband. Her husband bullies her and tortures her physically, mentally and sexually. It is against her parents‟ wishes that Saru marries a boy from a lower caste in order to get away from her mother and home and achieve self autonomy. Manu is her saviour, the ideal romantic hero who takes her away from the insecure, wooden existence in the maternal home. Her marriage with Manu is an assertion and affirmation of her feminine sensibility, “I was hungry for love. Each act of sex was a triumphant assertion of our love. Of my being loved. Of my being wanted”(35). But after she becomes an established doctor, her situation changes, “he had been the young man and I his bride. Now I was the lady doctor and he was my husband (37).

She gets too busy in her profession and stands isolated from familial ties and obligations. Manu gets jealous of her popularity and success as people greet her and ignore him. She begins to loathe man-woman relationship which has no love in it,

Love...how she scorned the word now. There was no such thing between man and woman. There was only a need which both fought against, futilely...turning into the thing they called love. It‟s only a word she thought. Take away the word, the idea and the concept will wither away. (65)

Saru feminine sensibility crumbles and love disappears from her life. She

fails both as a mother and as a wife, “I came home late that night...when I came home, I found him sitting with a brooding expression on his face that made my heart give painful, quivering little jumps.”(71)

Manu‟s male ego is hurt by her superiority as a result of which his benevolence and cheerfulness is transformed into callous, lecherous and libidinal rapist at night. Saru becomes a mute sufferer who undergoes physical and mental suffering and feels choked in the darkness of the night. She finds herself split between her obligation to her profession as a doctor and her duties to her family as a housewife. She even thinks to quit her practice to which Manu avers, “On my salary? Come on Saru, don‟t be silly. You know how much I earn.”(73)

After her mother‟s death, Saru leaves for her parent‟s home but is treated as an unwelcome stranger and an unwanted guest. As she sat in her parent‟s home and was having tea, she felt like an alien, “As she drinks tea...too sweet and strong...he [her father] sat gingerly on the edge of his chair like an unwilling host entertaining an unwelcome guest. And that, I suppose, is what I really am.” Throughout the novel, Deshpande probes the inner reccesses of Saru‟s psyche in order to discover the root of her silent suffering and passive resistance.

She doesn‟t want to go back to Manu rather she seeks refuge in her parent‟s home. But the clash between Saru and her mother represents the clash between the old and the new, the traditional and the modern. Her mother is a hindrance in her path of self realization.

Saru‟s arduous jouney in The Dark Holds No Terrors probes into the mystery of human existence. She realises that parental home is not a refuge for her as none of her parents can provide her shelter. She is her own refuge. She contemplates over the human predicament, “All right, so I‟m alone. But so‟s everyone else. Human beings ...they are going to fail you. But because there is just us, because there‟s no one else, we have to go on trying. If we can‟t believe in ourselves, we‟re sunk.”(202)

Saru‟s journey is a jouney from alienation to self-realization, from negation to assertion, from diffidence to confidence. The new emancipated women

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4 of Saru‟s generation are non-conformists who do not submit themselves to the rhetoric of equality between man and woman. They want to liberate themselves from the shackles of tradition and assert their rights for the manifestation of their individual capabilities and the realization of their feminine selves.

Deshpande‟s novel That Long Silence, which won her the Sahitya Akademi Award for 1990, tells the story of an Indian housewife who maintained her silence throughout her life in spite of facing the hardships in her life. In the opening page of the novel, the protagonist clearly states that it would be difficult to get the real picture of the novel unless the reader operates with the similar wavelength of an author. Writing is, like childbirth, both painful and risky.

Readers are like mirrors, who reflect different types of images of the author and her created characters according to their perception and understanding.

The theme of the novel That Long Silence is simple. Jaya, the protagonist of the novel, recalls her married life with Mohan in a nostalgic fervour. She recalls her relationship with her husband as he goes away from her to clear himself of the charge of business malpractice. She bears him two children and recalls her relationship with him. She tries to write about herself and her family, her isolation and her inner conflicts. Deshpande uses a beautiful image to describe Jaya‟s married life,

A pair of bullocks yoked together...a clever phrase, but can it substitute for reality? A man and a woman married for seventeen years. A couple with two children . A family somewhat like the one caught and preserved for posterity by the advertising visuals I so loved. But the reality was only this. We were two persons. A man. A woman.(8)

The bullocks symbolise the shared burden between the pair but no one knows about the fact that they are bound in love or not. They are yoked together and they perform their duty mechanically as a husband-wife relationship. Jaya is against the traditional role assigned to women to stay confined at home, look after family and keep out of the rest of the world. She would not take a risk to annoy Mohan lest that should break her marriage. She says ironically,

Perhaps, if Mohan had been angry, if he had shouted and raged at me, if he had forbidden me to write, perhaps I would have fought him and gone on. But he had only shown me his hurt. And I had not been able to counter that. I had relinquished them instead, all those stories that had been taking shape in me because I had been scared – scared of hurting Mohan, scared of jeopardising the only career I had.(144)

She represents a routine life that she leads everyday. She showcases a loveless married life which caused the husband and the wife to drift away from each other which results in total failure. Jaya concludes, “Nothing. Nothing between us.

But after his death, nothing between me and Mohan either. We lived together but there had been only emptiness between us.”(185)

Mohan had crushed both the woman and the writer in Jaya as he neither loved nor encouraged her. Jaya had every reason to be cold towards him as he has been the reason for her misery.

Jaya recalls the mechanical marriage and their relationship with each other,

Sensual memories are the coldest. They stir up nothing in you. As I thought of those days, of my feelings, and then looked at the man lying beside me, nothing stirred in me. Those emotions and responses seemed to belong to two other people, not to the two of us lying here together. (95)

The disgust and disappointment of living with a man who does not love the woman the way she expected him to do, is a burning problem that educated women have to face in contemporary society. The thought of desertion by the husband unnerves Jaya. Through the character of Jaya,Deshpande expresses the ambivalent attitude of contemporary educated independent-minded Indian women who can neither reconcile themselves to a new situation when their husbands ignore them and crush their ambition in life nor cast off their husbands simply because the husband is like a sheltering tree they cannot afford to live without.

That Long Silence depicts the plight of an educated Indian woman of present times. Deshpande, through the protagonist Jaya, tries to depict a modern woman‟s refusal to comply with the wishes of the husband. She represents a woman of the contemporary society who

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5 has the confidence to revolt against her husband. The novel is typical as it portrays its own situation. The image of the woman undergoes a sea change when the contemporary woman decides to cast off her traditional role of living under the shade of her husband. Jaya gives us a new image of the Indian woman who now tries to stand on her own legs and seeks to break the age-old silence by refusing to dance to the tune of her husband. With Jaya‟s assertion of life that „Long Silence‟

is threatened to be broken.

Deshpande, as a feminist writer, concentrates on the tortures and sufferings of middle class Indian women who are educated, sensitive and are conscious of their legal, social and conjugal rights. Deshpande highlights the household conflict between wife and husband operating at the emotional, intellectual and sexual levels. The novelist being fully aware of the patriarchal set-up of Indian society does not plead for any kind of confrontation or militancy between men and women, between husband and wife. The concept of new woman is a mere attitudinal transformation where the woman is in search for the means to overcome oppression, develop her powers

and abilities for personal fulfilment and self-actualisation.

In conclusion, it is observed that the exigencies of life presented themselves in the form of traumatic events to Jaya, presents the predicament of human state.

The novel authentically states that, though at the outset that the patriarchal set up is responsible for women‟s condition in the Indian society. The novel is a patchwork of collective memories presented by myths and rituals, with a wide range of characters, situations, similar view-points, contrasting outlooks, all emotions, debated on life and art. The novel moves from the nervous climax to the very reality of realities, it is an exploration of selfhood as a mere form of expression. In every sense, the novel is of immense relevance to us in the present day socio-cultural contact.

Works cited:

1. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex.

Trans. H.M. Parshley. London: Penguin, 1972. Print.

2. Deshpande, Shashi. That Long Silence.

New Delhi: Penguin, 1990. Print.

3. The Dark Holds No Terrors. New Delhi:

Penguin, 1990. Print.

4. Kirpal, Vinay. The Post Modern Indian English Novel: Interrogating the 1980‟s and 1990‟s.

5. Bombay: Allied, 1996. P 148. Print.