Reclaiming the Self: Feminist Consciousness in Shashi Deshpande's Novels

Abstract

This article examines the evolution of feminist consciousness across the novelistic corpus of Shashi Deshpande, situating her within the broader constellation of Indian English women's writing alongside Anita Desai, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Nayantara Sahgal, and Gauri Deshpande. Drawing on feminist literary theory from Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, and Chandra Mohanty, alongside established Deshpande scholarship, the study traces how silence, marriage, motherhood, and memory function simultaneously as instruments of patriarchal control and as sites of female agency in The Dark Holds No Terrors, Roots and Shadows, That Long Silence, The Binding Vine, A Matter of Time, and Small Remedies. The analysis foregrounds Deshpande's realist, interior-monologue-driven prose and her recurring symbolism of darkness, sound, and binding threads as narrative strategies that enact what French feminists term écriture féminine within an Indian middle-class domestic idiom. The article argues that Deshpande's protagonists do not achieve liberation through rupture but through incremental, intersectional renegotiations of selfhood within family and caste-class structures, thereby complicating universalist feminist paradigms while enriching the "woman question" in postcolonial Indian literature.