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Abstract
Shashi Deshpande stands apart among the Indian English novelists, for she writes about women with a certain specific concern in her own manner. Indian woman is the centre of her fictional world. Her major concern is to depict the anguish and conflict of the modern educated Indian woman caught between patriarchy and tradition on one hand, and self expression, individuality and independence for women on the other. Her fiction explores the search of the women to fulfil herself as a human being, independent of her traditional role as a daughter, wife and mother. The women characters of Shashi Deshpande are totally different in the sense that they explode the myth of man’s superiority and the myth of woman being the paragon of all virtues. In her endeavour to reveal woman’s struggle to secure self-respect and self-identity for herself, the author subtly bares the multiple levels of oppression, including sexual oppression experienced by women in our society. This paper tries to study the women characters depicted in the novels of Shashi Deshpande.