I remember presenting Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence to my mother. She was still teaching English Literature in college at that time and managing life in an extended family. She said she lapped up the narrative not for its literary subtleties or niceties but for the empathy it created for the woman in the narrative. Only empathy? I asked her? That too, she said. What else? Identification with the character? I remember asking the question of other ‘female’ elders who read the book after that. It was identification primarily that made the novel appealing to them. Jaya, Indu, Sumi, the list goes on .... strong, intelligent, educated, urban women who speak out, question, introspect, present in a literary microcosm the condition of women in India at large. Her prose is clear, simple, stark, setting forth a narrative of familial issues and crises arising from them. The long silence that has enveloped women across cultures forms the crux of her plots, the silence eloquent with unheard and unuttered doubts and worries, self questioning and suppressed grievances. 

Questioning of not just values and mores but of the self; in Roots and Shadows, Indu is seen as constantly evolving—in her ideas, sense of identity, sense of her relationships, and in her very essence, finally coming to terms with the reality of her existence as a woman, a wife, a lover (in many ways her only self extenuating and self asserting brief existence). She accepts her Old uncle’s words in their entirety as she decides to return ‘home’ to Jayant, her husband, whose passivity in the face of her passion she finds irksome and defeating for her individuality—‘The whole world is made up of interdependent parts. Why not you?’ It is to her credit that she can remember Old Uncle’s words and understand their significance in her own life, accept them, and come to terms with her confusions and identity crises. A weaker woman would not have traversed the gamut of emotions and mental turmoil as Indu does or scoured her mind and relationships to understand their true worth. A less independent woman would not have given herself to a man who is her alter ego without compunction and then decided to return to her husband and home to see if that ‘home could stand the scorching touch of honesty.’  

Deshpande’s novels show an evolving identity rather than stagnant and self defeating crises that sap one’s strength. Not for her pen the exotic India, but the India that lives in its homes and gardens, in the kitchens of its dilapidated villas meant to last generations but crumbling under the onslaught of time and changing family and financial equations. She not only shows the mere parochialism of a male-dominated universe but also the inherent meanness of women towards women, and the breakdown of the family structure under the oppression of misunderstood and misused traditions.

But, it is always the woman who is empowered in that she alone can solve her problems in the best possible way without depending on her man to grant her status or position within the family and in society; is the woman responsible for denying herself her rightful place in the family and society, does she show an all too willing acceptance of fate and position rather than fight for what is right? She questions and confronts not the rigidity or parochialism per se but the inane kowtowing to it and its willing acceptance in a blasé manner by women.

At the time Deshpande was writing her novels, feminism in the west had entered its second and third waves with contentious issues going beyond home and hearth and entering the public domain. In India, we already had strong women leaders and a prime minister, but abuse of women was still very much a domestic matter to be confined and whispered about within the four walls of domesticity, and this refers primarily to physical abuse; mental or emotional abuse was not even considered, taken for granted as it was to be the woman’s lot. Deshpande’s books have to be seen in the light of this social and public condition which suppressed the female voice; here was a writer speaking out about it, not necessarily against it. There is a degree of chest beating to her writing but that is balanced by terse sections of pragmatism and self questioning, a process that is in itself self empowering, for a woman has to first question not just the society that is seen to persecute but her own conscious and subconscious desires and decisions that give shape to her life. It helps Jaya return to the writing life and identity that she had surrendered to be her husband’s wife; it empowers Sarita to return to her home and patients who need her; it enables Indu to come to terms with herself and with Akka, one of Deshpande’s strongest female characters though underutilized. In this relationship we see the complexities of the Indian family, a strong woman, rich and dominating, hated by other women much more than by the men, yet everybody subservient to her, waiting to see the names that will appear in her will. Indu too comes to respect her in the end, thought the writer uses a predictable formula and strategy to make Indu bend—I mean the maudlin and predictable story of Akka’s life.

At 71, Shashi Deshpande veered from her chosen models to weave a love story, In the Country of Deceit with Devyani, a character whose life and narrative flows into this novel from Come Up and Be Dead (1985). The style seems to slacken in this experiment with a love story, the tone a little unsure, but again we have an independent woman, willing to fight her own battles, and another endearing and enduring aspect in Deshpande’s works, the family house. Women come back to old houses, paternal homes that become characters in their own right, symbolise the passing of an era, the breakdown of a tradition of large families, the evolution of family life from one mode of living to another, more nuclear, less giving, more hardened to one another’s emotional requirements. We find in these houses the end of a condition of life and thinking in which the family served as a blanket of security and warmth, keeping its members safe in a cocoon, however frayed the cocoon’s outer layers may be.

Shashi Deshpande’s prose captures ways of life and ethos, questions them and seeks answers that work. The depression and gloom inherent to this process of exploration and discovery may be disconcerting, but the positive and pragmatic decisions her women arrive at show the way to alternative ways of thinking to women who identify with her characters.

                      
                      Sucharita Dutta-Asane