Female Subjectivity and Patriarchal Resistance in the
Novels of Shashi Deshpande
Dr.
Bisheshwar Ray
Ph.
D In English (JPU, Chapra)
Managing
Director, Rebel: A School of Personality Development, Chapra
Abstract
This paper examines the dynamics of female subjectivity and
resistance to patriarchal structures in the novels of Shashi Deshpande, one of
India's most distinguished women writers in English. Drawing on feminist
literary theory, postcolonial criticism, and psychoanalytic frameworks, this
study analyses how Deshpande's protagonists negotiate identity, silence,
language, and selfhood within the circumscribed spaces of the Indian
patriarchal family. The paper focuses primarily on That Long Silence (1988), The
Dark Holds No Terrors (1980), A Matter of Time (1996), and Small Remedies
(2000), tracing Deshpande's evolving portraiture of women who move from
internalised oppression toward tentative acts of self-articulation. The paper
argues that Deshpande's fiction occupies a complex feminist terrain — neither
straightforwardly celebratory nor despairing — in which female subjectivity is
constructed through the dialectic of submission and resistance, voice and
silence, tradition and modernity.
Keywords: Female subjectivity, patriarchy, Indian feminism, women's writing,
silence, identity.
1. Introduction
The literary landscape of postcolonial India has been significantly
reshaped by the emergence of women writers who have turned the novel into an
instrument of feminist inquiry. Among these, Shashi Deshpande holds a unique
and formidable place. Writing in English while remaining deeply embedded in the
cultural and social textures of middle-class Indian life, Deshpande occupies a
liminal position that allows her to interrogate from within the very
patriarchal structures she inhabits. Her fiction is marked by an insistence on
the interior life of women — on subjectivity, consciousness, and the painful
process of self-discovery in a world that consistently denies women the
authority of their own experience.
Born in 1938 in Dharwad, Karnataka, Deshpande was raised in an
intellectually stimulating household shaped by Kannada literary culture. Her
father, the playwright Sriranga, instilled in her a love of literature, but it
was her own negotiation of womanhood in urban, middle-class India that formed
the crucible of her fiction. Her novels are characterised by a deceptively
quiet realism — the drama is not political or public but intensely domestic and
psychological. Yet this domestic sphere, Deshpande insists, is never merely
personal: it is the site where ideology, gender, and power are most
relentlessly enacted.
This paper argues that Deshpande's novels constitute a sustained
feminist project — one that maps the construction of female subjectivity under
patriarchy and traces the fractured, incomplete, yet meaningful forms of
resistance her characters mount. The key tension in her fiction is not between
tradition and modernity per se, but between silence and speech, between the
female self that has been culturally produced and the self that struggles
toward authentic expression.
2. Theoretical Framework: Feminist Subjectivity and
the Patriarchal Order
Before turning to Deshpande's texts, it is necessary to briefly
outline the theoretical coordinates that inform this analysis. The concept of
female subjectivity — the woman's sense of herself as a thinking, desiring,
feeling, and acting subject — has been central to feminist literary criticism
since Simone de Beauvoir's foundational observation in The Second Sex (1949)
that woman is constructed as the Other to man's Self. Beauvoir's insight
established the ideological nature of femininity: that what appears natural is
in fact the product of patriarchal social arrangements.
Subsequently, theorists such as Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and
Luce Irigaray explored the relationship between femininity and language.
Cixous's notion of écriture féminine — a distinctly female mode of writing
rooted in the body and resistant to phallogocentric logic — is particularly
resonant for a reading of Deshpande, whose protagonists frequently locate their
crisis precisely in their relation to language. If patriarchy silences women,
feminist writing may be understood as a reclamation of the word.
In the Indian context, feminist scholars such as Kumari Jayawardena,
Susie Tharu, and Meenakshi Mukherjee have complicated the application of
Western feminist frameworks to Indian women's experience. They emphasise the
intersection of gender with caste, class, religion, and colonial history.
Deshpande herself has expressed ambivalence about the label 'feminist,' yet her
fiction consistently dramatises what Tharu and Lalita describe as 'the
production and reproduction of gender' within specifically Indian institutional
arrangements — the joint family, the arranged marriage, the expectation of
wifely self-effacement. This paper reads Deshpande's fiction through a feminist
lens while remaining attentive to its Indian specificity.
3. Silence as Inscription: That Long Silence (1988)
That Long Silence, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990, is
perhaps Deshpande's most celebrated novel and the most concentrated examination
of female subjectivity and patriarchal constraint in her oeuvre. The
protagonist, Jaya, is a middle-class Marathi woman who has suppressed her
identity as a writer in order to fulfill her role as wife and mother. When her
husband Mohan is implicated in a financial scandal and the couple retreats to
their old Bombay flat, Jaya is forced to confront the silence she has inhabited
for eighteen years of marriage.
The novel's central metaphor — silence — is rendered with
extraordinary psychological precision. Jaya's silence is not merely an absence
of speech but a positive achievement, the product of conscious and unconscious
strategies of accommodation. She has learned to efface herself, to speak in a
voice that pleases her husband, to write stories that never threaten the
domestic order. The silence is patriarchy internalised — what Deshpande
presents not as simple victimhood but as a complex form of agency in which the
woman collaborates in her own subordination in order to survive.
Crucially, Deshpande shows that this silence has a history. Jaya
reflects on the mythological and literary precedents for female
self-suppression: the figures of Gandhari, who bandaged her eyes to share her
blind husband's limitation, and Savitri, who followed her husband into death.
These mythological referents are not invoked uncritically; rather, Jaya reads
them as scripts of feminine self-abnegation that have been handed down across
generations. The novel thus situates individual female psychology within a long
cultural history of patriarchal ideology.
Jaya's resistance is not heroic in any conventional sense. She does
not leave her husband, does not publish her writing, does not achieve a
dramatic liberation. What she does achieve is the beginning of consciousness —
an understanding of how her silence was constructed and a tenuous claim on her
own subjectivity. The ending of the novel is deliberately ambiguous: Jaya
prepares to meet Mohan when he returns, but with a changed inner self.
Deshpande suggests that the transformation of female consciousness — even
without outward social change — constitutes a form of resistance.
4. The Body as Battleground: The Dark Holds No Terrors
(1980)
If That Long Silence is concerned with the politics of voice, The
Dark Holds No Terrors turns to the body as the site of patriarchal violence and
female resistance. The protagonist, Sarita (Saru), is a successful doctor who
returns to her father's home after her husband Manohar begins sexually
brutalising her — a form of violence that she recognises as rooted in his
inability to accept her professional success and social authority.
Deshpande's treatment of marital rape in this novel — published in
1980, long before Indian law recognised it as a criminal offence — was
groundbreaking. The nighttime attacks Saru endures are represented as an
assertion of patriarchal dominance: Manohar punishes her for transgressing
gender norms by excelling professionally and earning more than him. The body
becomes the terrain on which masculine insecurity expresses itself. Deshpande's
unflinching account of this violence refuses both sensationalism and romanticisation;
it is presented as the logical consequence of a social order in which women's
achievement is experienced by men as emasculation.
Equally important is Deshpande's exploration of mother-daughter
relations. Saru's mother had always preferred her son, treating Saru's ambition
with suspicion. The maternal wound — the sense that even women in patriarchal
structures become enforcers of gender norms — adds psychological depth to
Deshpande's feminist analysis. Her female characters are not simply victims of
male domination; they are also shaped by internalised patriarchal values
transmitted through female kinship networks. This insight anticipates later
feminist work on the role of women in sustaining patriarchal ideology.
Saru's act of return — to her father's house, to her childhood, to
the memory of her drowned brother — is both literal and psychological. Through
the process of remembering and narrating her past, she attempts to reconstruct
a coherent female self that was fragmented by familial rejection and marital
violence. The novel suggests that psychological survival requires the recovery
of memory and the courage to look unflinchingly at one's history — a form of
resistance through self-knowledge.
5. Identity, Abandonment, and Female Genealogies: A
Matter of Time (1996)
A Matter of Time represents a deepening of Deshpande's feminist
project in its multi-generational structure, tracing the lives of three
generations of women — Kalyani, her daughter Sumi, and Sumi's daughters — as
they negotiate the crisis precipitated by Sumi's husband Gopal, who suddenly
abandons his wife and family without explanation. The novel is remarkable for
the way it frames female experience as embedded within a web of female
genealogy and historical continuity.
The abandonment — Gopal's unexplained withdrawal from family life —
sets in motion a crisis of female subjectivity that the novel interrogates from
multiple angles. Sumi's response is, surprisingly, one of quiet liberation.
Unlike the expected performance of wifely devastation, she finds in her
abandonment a strange freedom — the space to claim her own subjectivity without
the defining presence of a husband. Deshpande here challenges the conventional
narrative of female suffering; Sumi's equanimity is not passive resignation but
a hard-won philosophical acceptance rooted in female strength.
Kalyani, the grandmother, represents an earlier generation shaped
more completely by patriarchal norms, while Sumi's daughters, particularly Aru,
embody a younger feminist consciousness that is less patient with
accommodation. This generational architecture allows Deshpande to historicise
female subjectivity — to show that it is not fixed but evolving, and that each
generation of women inherits and transforms the psychic and social resources of
the preceding one. The feminist project, Deshpande implies, is not the
achievement of any single heroic individual but a slow, collective,
multigenerational process.
The novel also explores the relationship between women and houses —
the domestic space as both prison and refuge. The old ancestral home to which
the women retreat is simultaneously a constraint and a sanctuary, a material
expression of the ambivalence that runs through all of Deshpande's
representations of domesticity. Her women are always negotiating the threshold
between the space assigned to them and the wider world they desire.
6. Memory, Creativity, and Female Autonomy: Small
Remedies (2000)
Small Remedies extends Deshpande's feminist inquiry into the domains
of art, memory, and female creative autonomy. The journalist protagonist,
Madhu, undertakes a biographical project — to write the life of Savitribai
Indorekar, a renowned classical singer who chose her art over marriage and
family. The novel thus sets up a contrast between two modes of female
existence: the life of creative autonomy represented by Savitribai and the life
of domestic compromise represented by Madhu herself.
Savitribai's story is a powerful counter-narrative within
Deshpande's fictional universe. Unlike most of Deshpande's protagonists,
Savitribai has refused the patriarchal bargain — she has not sacrificed her art
for domestic respectability. Yet Deshpande is too complex a writer to simply
celebrate this refusal. Savitribai's freedom has its own costs: social
marginalisation, the loss of conventional kinship ties, a life lived on the
margins of respectability. Deshpande suggests that in patriarchal society, female
creative autonomy is never simply liberating; it is achieved only through
significant sacrifice and social penalty.
Madhu's biographical quest is also a journey into her own suppressed
creative self. In reconstructing Savitribai's life, she confronts the
compromises she has made, the losses she has suffered — including the death of
her son — and the fragments of her own identity that have been dispersed across
the demands of wife, mother, and professional. Memory, in this novel, is both a
literary strategy and a feminist practice: the recovery of female experience
from the silences of official history.
7. Language, Voice, and the Politics of Narration
Across Deshpande's fiction, one of the most consistently
foregrounded feminist concerns is the politics of language. Her protagonists'
crises are always, in part, crises of voice: they have learned to speak in ways
that do not threaten the patriarchal order, and their struggle toward
subjectivity is simultaneously a struggle toward authentic speech. Jaya in That
Long Silence is the most explicit example: her aspiration to write — and her
recognition that her writing has been compromised by her need to please — is
the central drama of the novel.
Deshpande's narrative technique reinforces this thematic concern.
Her preferred mode is interior monologue and free indirect discourse — forms
that give direct access to female consciousness and privilege the inner life
over external action. This is a formal choice with feminist implications: by
rendering the interior experience of her women with such care and attention,
Deshpande insists on the significance of female interiority in a literary
tradition that has long privileged male public life.
Deshpande's use of the Indian English idiom is also noteworthy. She
writes in English but inflects her prose with the rhythms, idioms, and cultural
references of middle-class Maharashtrian and Brahmin life. This linguistic
hybridity mirrors the hybrid subject position of her protagonists, who are
simultaneously inside and outside the traditions that shape them. Language, for
Deshpande, is never innocent: it carries the sediment of patriarchal ideology,
and learning to use it against itself — to find, within the dominant tongue,
the resources for a female counter-discourse — is one of the central projects
of her fiction.
8. The Limits of Resistance: Deshpande's Ambivalent
Feminism
A crucial aspect of Deshpande's feminist vision is its refusal of
easy resolution. Her protagonists do not achieve the triumphant liberation of
Western feminist romance; they do not leave their husbands, found new
communities, or transform the social order. The resistance they mount is
tentative, incomplete, and often ambiguous. This has led some critics to accuse
Deshpande of conservatism — of ultimately accepting the terms of the
patriarchal order she critiques.
This reading, however, misses the specificity of Deshpande's
feminist politics. Writing within the middle-class Indian context, she is
acutely aware of the material and cultural constraints that make heroic
feminist gestures untenable for most women. Her protagonists' limited
resistances — the decision to keep a secret, to continue writing, to look
honestly at one's own complicity — are not signs of defeat but of a pragmatic
feminist realism. Deshpande suggests that the transformation of patriarchy is not
achieved through singular acts of rupture but through the slow, cumulative work
of consciousness and self-knowledge.
Furthermore, Deshpande's willingness to show the ways in which her
female characters collaborate in their own oppression — by internalising
patriarchal values, by enforcing gender norms on other women, by making
accommodations that perpetuate the system — represents a more sophisticated
feminist analysis than one that simply positions women as victims. Her fiction
acknowledges the complexity of female agency within constraint, refusing both
romanticisation and despair.
Conclusion
Shashi Deshpande's fiction represents one of the most sustained and
searching explorations of female subjectivity in the Indian novel in English.
Across a body of work spanning four decades, she has mapped the psychological
terrain of women living within patriarchal structures with a precision and
compassion that has few equivalents in contemporary Indian literature. Her
novels insist that the domestic is political, that silence is a form of power
as well as submission, and that the slow, difficult work of female
self-knowledge constitutes a genuine form of resistance.
The protagonists of Deshpande's fiction — Jaya, Saru, Sumi, Madhu —
are not heroines in the conventional sense. They are ordinary women struggling
toward an honest reckoning with the forces that have shaped them. Their
resistance is internal, halting, and incomplete. Yet Deshpande asks us to take
this resistance seriously — to recognise in the small remedies of consciousness
and self-understanding the seeds of a more profound social transformation.
In a literary culture that has sometimes privileged dramatic gesture
over psychological depth, Deshpande's quiet, searching novels perform an
indispensable feminist function: they make visible the invisible, give voice to
the silenced, and insist on the full humanity of women whose lives have been
defined by their subordination to others. Her work remains essential reading
for anyone seeking to understand the complex negotiations of gender, identity,
and resistance in modern India.
Works Cited
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second
Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. Jonathan Cape, 1953.
Cixous, Hélène. "The Laugh of
the Medusa." Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875-893.
Deshpande, Shashi. The Dark
Holds No Terrors. Vikas Publishing House, 1980.
---. That Long Silence.
Penguin Books India, 1988.
---. A Matter of Time.
Penguin Books India, 1996.
---. Small Remedies. Penguin
Books India, 2000.
Dugaje, Manohar.
Subverting the Patriarchy: A Feministic Reading of Chetan Bhagat’s Novels. International Journal of English Research, Volume
2; Issue 4, Pg. 36-38. July. 2016. https://www.englishjournals.com/search?keyword=dugaje
Jayawardena, Kumari. Feminism
and Nationalism in the Third World. Zed Books, 1986.
Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Twice
Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English.
Heinemann, 1971.
Rege, Josna E. "Mothering
India: Nationalism, Feminism, and Gender in Deshpande's Fiction." Journal
of South Asian Literature, vol. 29, no. 2, 1994, pp. 23-38.
Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita, eds. Women
Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present. Feminist Press, 1991.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which
Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cornell University Press, 1985.
Krishnaswamy, Revathi.
"Mythologies of Migration: Narratives of the Indian Diaspora." ARIEL:
A Review of International English Literature, vol. 26, no. 1, 1995, pp.
125-146.
Sood, Nisha. "Silence and the
Female Subject in Shashi Deshpande's Novels." Indian Literature,
vol. 41, no. 3, 1998, pp. 145-162.
