Feminism in Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence

 

Praveen Rai¹ and Dr. Sujata²

 

¹Research Scholar, Manav Rachna International University, Sonepat  Haryana

 

The term ‘feminism’ has its origin from the Latin word ‘femina’ meaning ‘woman’ and thereby refers to the advocacy of woman’s rights, status and power at par with men on the grounds of ‘equality of sexes’. The term became popular from the early twentieth century struggles for securing women’s suffrage in the Western countries and the later well organized socio-political movement for woman’s emancipation from patriarchal oppression. The political scope of feminism has been broadened by the impact of Marxist ideology that made feminist challenge sexism along with capitalism, for both encouraged the patriarchal setup.

 

Feminism, besides being a political crusade, attempts to study and solve the various gender-based problems. It questions the pre-conceived assumptions about the roles that men and women should have in life. In literary text, feminism brings to scrutiny the portrayals of gender roles, which tend to impose social norms, customs, conventions, laws and expectations on the grounds of gender discrimination. It throws a challenge on the age-long tradition of gender differentiation and attempts to explore and find a new social order.

 

The literary world of the Indian English fiction has spread red carpet for woman writers. Consequently, more and more woman writers are articulating anxieties and concerns focusing on woman’s issues and creating a body of ‘literature of their own’. Feminist issues transcend all limits of nationality, race creed etc. Woman writers have been echoing the feeling of marginality and expressing their revolt against the purely masculine world. One of the major concerns of the contemporary literature all over the world has been to highlight the plight of woman, their increasing problems, their physical, financial and emotional exploitation and their mental anguish in the male dominated society in every sphere of life.

 

In almost all the countries, in the academic field, in woman forum, the main focus is to bring into light the oppression faced by women in various forms. The enforcement of the feminist movement, the establishment of various woman study centers and formation of various welfare organizations are the indications of the fact that the voice of women is being heard. In order to reach the stage of being listened to, the woman writers had to struggle much and through their writing, they have been projecting their points, pleading and fighting for a change in the attitude of society towards woman. Paravati Bhatnagar aptly remarks:

 

Values need to be redefined, so also human relationships, especially within the family. Such is the dilemma of the middle class. An adherence to the traditional values has become difficult. New values have yet to be evolved.

              

It requires tremendous courage (and thoughtlessness?) to break away from the tradition. (Bhatnagar, 50-57). Many female writers such as George Eliot, Sylvia Path, Margaret Alwood, Dorris Lessing, Anita  Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Dalip Kaur Jiwana, Bharati Mukherjee, Shobha De and a few male writers like Thomas Hardy, Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan, in their many writings, have analyzed the female psyche, the inner turmoil of the woman, the culture and context-specific problem of woman. Shashi Deshpande is one of the noted Indian feminist writers who have shown their serious concern in the depiction of women in literature and have expressed restlessness with traditional positioning of women.

 

1.      Shashi Deshpande, a prominent novelist in the contemporary Indian literature in English, depicts realistically and casually the innermost feelings of the woman self and craving for solutions to establish a stable identity in the society. Deshpande concentrates more on the sufferings of women from cultural restrictions, male child preference, child marriage, forced marital sex, rape and sex-role stereotyping as in her novels, she projects the day-to-day struggle of women in reconciling their dual role as wife and mother. Moreover, there is a lingering struggle and conflict arising out of the man-woman relationship in all her oeuvre. But in her essay, “Why I am a Feminist”, she declares: “Women are neither inferior nor subordinate human beings, but one half of the human race” (Deshpande, 83). This concept of feminism is shared with Prasanna Sree during her interview:

 

2.      A woman is also an individual like a man, with lots of capabilities and potentials. She has every right to develop all that. She should not be oppressed just because she is female. Like a man, she also has her own qualities. She has every right to live her life to develop her qualities, to take her decision to be independent and to take charge of her own destiny. (Sree, 155)

 

3.      The tragic predicament of the Deshpande’s protagonists is the outcome of male domination in a patriarchal culture. Their silent suffering is socio-psychic in nature. In her quest for identity, the Deshpande protagonist moves from despair to hope, from self negation to self assertion. Her struggle throughout is to attain wholeness, completeness and an authentic selfhood. Deshpande’s protagonists are in search of authentic and distinct self. Breaking away from the familial ties and the stifling milieu of the family they are all agog to find meaning and value in their own life, their self styled roles, their autonomous existence. The quest is an attempt to assert human values, to affirm their rights as human beings. Deshpande rightly observes:

4.      Women have been quite suppressed, quite oppressed…a large section of Indian women are suffering even today. We have women going about with ghunghat on their faces. And women who have no choice even to decide about having children. We have many people who still advocate ‘Sati’, who consider dowry a necessity, who count it a loss when a girl is born and profit when a boy is born. It is this abysmal difference that I want to do away with as a feminist. (Gangadharan, 254)

 

5.      In Deshpande’s That Long Silence, the feminist struggle for liberation is looked upon within the framework of the freedom crisis. The quest for an authentic selfhood on the part of the protagonist finds an artistic expression through the heroine’s rebellion against the patriarchal core of society. Like a radical feminist, Deshpande uses the term patriarchy in the popular sense of “male domination and the power relationships by which men dominate women” (Beechey, 66). Deshpande explores Jaya’s public and private realms of experience. In this novel, we are exposed to the life of the sense as well s the agonized feelings of the narrator protagonist, Jaya, a housewife and an unsuccessful writer. Her creative urge and artistic zeal free her from her cramped domestic and societal roles. It releases her from emotional upheaval. She resolves to assert her individuality by breaking that long silence, by putting down on paper all that she had suppressed in her seventeen years’ silence.

 

6.      That Long Silence is an exploration of the nature of the cultural construction of the female identity and behavior pattern, particularly as ‘wife’ and ‘mother’. The marital relationship of Jaya and her husband, Mohan, focuses on psychological, emotional and social implication of being a wife in the patriarchal culture. The novel is concerned with a woman’s quest for self exploration into female psyche and an understanding of the mysteries of life and the protagonist place in it. Besides the self assertion of jaya, the novel also poses a host of women’s problems, their dilemmas, disappointments and frustrations. The novel’s strength also lies in the consideration of the mute, traditional bound women like Kusum, Vanitamani, Jeeja, Jaya’s grandmother, Mohan’s mother and sister Vimala who opt for positive resignation in life. Deshpande establishes a perspective that women should be recognized, heard and understood; they must not be kept as cage birds; they must triumphantly sing of their true selves and transcend all sorts of oppressions.

 

7.      Jaya is the perfect representation of the modern woman of today. Her ambivalence and consequent mental turmoil make her a perfect picture of present woman. She can be intercepted as a present time woman of indecision who wavers between family and self-assertion. An Indian woman cannot survive peacefully by denouncing her family but she cannot also flourish by quelling her desire to spread her wings and scale the sky of achievements. To strike a balance between the two crucial choices of a woman, she has to wriggle out of the pressure of the family and asserting herself, should perform both the duties – satisfying herself and enabling herself to prove her worth.

 

8.      Shashi Deshpande has discussed two different images in the novel, which put a big question-mark on the relationship of a husband and wife.

 

9.      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)

 

10.    She has compared the husband and wife to a pair of bullocks yoked together which means the two have to go together in the same direction, violation of which would result into pain. Secondly, the two bullocks in-spite of sharing the burden do not know whether one loves the other or not.  The pair of bullocks goes together under compulsion whereas, the marital relationship should be based on love and affection. It involves two lives of opposite sexes who unite love to form a family and no happy family can be formed under compulsion. Thus, such a comparison puts forth a bizarre picture of husband-wife relationship. The husband, Mohan, expects everything from his wife and never peeks into his heart to see if he was showing any feelings and compassion towards his wife.

 

11.    Through Jaya’s character, Shashi Deshpande has tried to portray the picture of a contemporary educated independent minded Indian woman who undergoes a mental ordeal as she cannot reconcile to her husband ignorance of her ambition and also cannot forsake him simply because a husband in our society is like a sheltering tree without which life of an Indian woman becomes tedious.

 

12.    Jaya, like a practical woman, wards off any comparison with mythical woman. She believes that these women have nothing in common with the demands of an educated, independent, progressive and ambitious woman of today. She regretfully accepts the fact that she herself had accepted everything about Mohan by blinding herself to the consequences like Gandhari and was also ashamed of her ignorance and inaction.

13.    If Gandhari who bandaged her eyes to become blind like her husband could be called an ideal wife, I was an ideal wife too. I had bandaged my eyes tightly. I didn’t want to know anything.  (61)

 

14.    Jaya rejects the mythical women who are the symbols of women supplication and edification. Though women have been edified in the past, they have also been tortured on equal grounds, for example, Sita has been edified though she led a miserable life and had to give an evidence of her sanctity. Consequently, Shashi Deshpande’s protagonists stridently fight to come out from being framed as such and live a full life on the earth and on equal footing with men.

 

15.    Shashi Deshpande has very adroitly dealt with the double personality aspect of every modern educated middle class married woman. Jaya undergoes a psychological tousle when the compliant Suhasini, her new name after marriage, is confronted with defiant Jaya whose animus had been sharpened by her father when young. Her period of married life comprises of confrontation between the two phases of her personality where the latter had to be triumphed in order to appease her husband’s ego and save her marriage. But as comes off an inevitable outcome, Jaya is forced to choose between the two and put an end to a continuos struggle between the two phases of her personality which has totally left her thwarted and uprooted. In the end, she comes out to be a decided and determined woman who now knows how to strike a balance between her family and her identity in the family.

 

16.    Through the protagonist’s conscious-raising voice, struggling to assert her feminity, Shashi Deshpande gets to the root of existence and gives vent to a kind of female subjectivity which refuses to reconcile and identify herself with a patriarchal and male-dominated society. Through her female protagonists, she seems to convey the message that marital polarizations curtail human potential and individual happiness.

 

17.    In the end, it is suffice to state that courage and not escapism is what woman of today requires. She should have the courage to uphold what is right for her and adhere to it with firm determination and tenacity. A headlong plunge into the social milieu with pertinacity can alone bring harmony and fulfillment in her life.

 

18.    To sum up, Deshpande evolves a feminist understanding of the woman’s problems out of a purely Indian climate. The term ‘feminism’ is applied to Shashi Deshpande in the broadest sense here to refer to the writer’s intense awareness of her identity as a woman, her interest in women’s problems. And not in the sense that she makes as advocacy for women’s rights in her fiction. In-fact, she does not hold the torch of women’s liberation beyond making the woman realize her ‘self’. For though she is aware of the seriousness of the Indian woman’s dilemma and the generation old struggles behind it, she also believes that a positive change in women’s social status cannot materialize without bringing about a change in women’s mindset first\. So the novelist holds that it is the heroines’ retreat in their self rather than in any external crutches which injects a hope for the woman’s redemption from her predicament. The woman’s increasing involvement rather than detachment in her predicament as expressed in her novels reveals the positive, humanistic side of Deshpande’s feminism.

 

REFERENCES:

1.       Deshpande, Shashi. That Long Silence. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1989.

2.       Deshpande, Shashi. “Why I am A Feminist”. Writing from the Margin and Other Essays. New Delhi: Creative, 2003.

3.       Bhatnagar, Paravati. “Search for Identity: A Study of Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors”, 2001. 

4.       Sree, Prasanna. Woman in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande: A Study. New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2003. pp. 55.

5.       Gangadharan, Geetha. “Denying the Otherness” (Interview). The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande. New Delhi: Creative, 1998. pp. 252-256.

6.       Beechey, Veronica. “On Patriarchy”, Feminist Review, 1979.