#101, Research Paper: ‘Shashi Deshpande As A Short Story Writer’ by Y. Priscilla

ELTWeekly Vol. 3 Issue#100 | October 10 | ISSN 0975-3036

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Y. Priscilla works as an Assisstant Professor of English wit hSri Venkateswara Institute of Technology (SVIT), Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh.

The short story is a piece of fiction dealing with a single incident, material or spiritual, that can be read at one sitting; it is original; it must sparkle, excite, or impress; and it must have a unity of effect or impression. It must move in an even line from its exposition to its close. – Edgar Allen Poe.

It is interesting to unveil the images of woman in Indian literature because when put together, the picture in its totality makes for fascinating reading. Woman in India are still caught between feudal values and the fast approaching new life. Shuttling between the burden of home and workplace, child bearing, mothering, struggling with conventions, women have first to survive. The question of equality arises afterwards. In such transitional times characterized by flux, it is essential to identify the new areas of trouble and to check the imbalances.

The ‘new’ woman in Indian short story is emerging slowly, but she has to fight her way through self-effacing dependence, aggressive self-assertion and iconoclastic rage. The sexually free, wayward female is not the new woman if she imitates the male by turning the traditional values upside down. Her arrogant vindictiveness will be enormously inflated were she to follow man in his realm of aggression. What the new woman requires to achieve is the extraordinary power of her real self, as shown in some of the stories of Ajit Cour, Amrita Pritam, Priya Tendulkar, Manu Bhandari and Shashi Deshpande.

Shashi Deshpande’s stories show frankness and boldness not found so far in Indo-English short fiction. Her women tend to be the architects of their own fate. Hers are the authentic, poignant tales of the middle class educated women and their exploitation in a conventional male-dominated society.

Though no writer in India can get away from the idea of social commitment or social responsibility, committed writing has always seemed to have dubious literary values and Shashi Deshpande stands first among such type of writers in India.

Shashi Deshpande’s first book was The Legacy, a collection of short stories, and since then she has published dozens of stories. The authentic recreation of India, The outstanding feature of her stories, is a distinct feature of her novels also. There is nothing sensational or exotic about her India—no Maharajahs or snake charmers. She does not write about the grinding poverty of the Indian masses; she describes another kind of deprivation—emotional. The woman deprived of love, understanding, and companionship is the center of her work. She shows how traditional Indian society is biased against woman, but she recognizes that it is very often women who oppress their sisters, though their values are the result of centuries of indoctrination.

An early short story, A Liberated Woman, is about a young woman who falls in love with a man of a different caste, and marries him in spite of parental opposition. She is intelligent and hardworking, and becomes a successful doctor, but her marriage breaks up because of her success. In typical Deshpande style, all of the characters are believable; the best defined perhaps is Mai, the always dignified but detached matriarch. The final short story authored by Mai, Blackout was an interesting tangent that deserved further scrutiny.

Shashi Deshpande, born in Dharwad, a small town in the state of Karnataka in Southern India, is a Sahitya Akademi award-winning novelist who writes in English. The daughter of Shriranga, the renowned Sanskrit scholar and dramatist, she moved to Mumbai at the age of fifteen and later graduated in Economics, before moving to Bangalore where she earned a law degree. Marriage and family took up most of her time in the years that followed, though she managed a diploma in Journalism and a short stint working in a magazine. It was only in 1970 that her writing career took off, initially with short stories, now collected in several volumes. Today she is a recognized Indian voice, author of four children’s books and six novels, besides several perceptive essays, now available in a volume entitled Writing from the Margin & other essays (2003). In her view, this work is the key to understanding the beliefs and the influences that shape her writing.

Deshpande’s short stories have, like those of Jane Austen’s, a narrow range. They are more or less a fictionalization of personal experiences. Most of the novels present a typical, middle-class housewife’s life. Deshpande’s main concern is the urge to find oneself, to create space for oneself to grow on one’s own. One striking thing about her novels and short stories is the recurrence of certain themes in them. But the predicament of women – especially those who are educated and belong to the middle-class – has been most prominently dealt with. Many of her characters are persons who are frustrated either sexually or professionally. It is these relationships which are responsible for human bonds and bondages, and as Bandbhatta says in his Harsacarita, are stronger than iron chains (api lohebhyah khalu kathinatarah snehamayah bandhanapasah). According to Deshpande, everyone has to live within relationships and there is no other way. “It’s needed,” she reiterated to Vanamala Viswanatha:

It’s necessary for women to live within relationships. But if the rules are rigidly laid that as a wife or mother you do this and no further, then one becomes unhappy. This is what I have tried to convey in my writing. What I don’t agree with is the idealization of motherhood – the false and sentimental notes that accompany it.⁵

There is in Deshpande’s novels revulsion to normal physical functions such as menstruation, pregnancy and procreation. Women, she feels, must not be reduced to the level of breeding machine:

I have a very strong feeling that until very recently women in our society have been looked upon just as ‘breeding animals’. They had no other role in life. I have a strong objection to treating any human being in that manner.

….The whole chronology of their life centres around childbirth….

The stress laid upon the feminine functions, at the cost of all your potentials as an individual, enraged me….

May be too much of thinking has made me express a sort of dislike for the purely physical aspects of feminine life, making it seem as if I am totally against all feminine functions, which is not the truth at all.⁶

Even if Deshpande seems to belittle the significance of woman’s physical functions, her writings redress the balance by highlighting the fact that a woman is not merely a conglomerate of such functions. She has to be judged at par with her male counterpart on the basis of her potential.

Deshpande is all for spontaneity in creative writing and believes that good literature and propaganda do not go together. Being a woman herself, she sympathizes with women, and “If others see something feminist in my writings,” she told an interviewer.

I must say that it is not consciously done. It is because the world for women is like that and I am mirroring the world. ⁷

Deshpande does admit the influence of the Western feminist writers, but only “to a small extent”. She candidly told M.D.Riti:

One never knows what influences one as a writer. I have read a lot of feminist novelists, and understand what they are trying to say easily. However, I began reading feminist writing only recently, while my writing has reflected feminist idea from the strat.⁸

It is this light that Deshpande’s concerns for Indian women must be considered. Arbitrary appellations and dragging her work into the fold of militant feminism of the Western variety would be unjust.

Deshpande has portrayed the new Indian woman and her dilemmas, her efforts to understand herself and to preserve her identity as wife, mother and, above all, as a human being in the tradition-bound, male-dominated Indian society. The Indian woman’s plight is a part of general human predicament, though her experience is significantly more intense. As such a sensible woman writer would like to be read as a human being and not as a surrogate for others.

Deshpande’s novels contain so much that can be regarded as the staple material of feminist thought: women’s sexuality, the gender roles, self-discovery and so on. But she can be called a ‘feminist’, if at all, only in a certain specific sense. The interview given to Lakshmi Holmstrom throws significant light on her stance:

I now have no doubts at all in saying that I am a feminist in my own life, I mean. But not consciously, as a novelist, I must also say that my feminism has come to me very slowly, very gradually, and mainly out of my own thinking and experience and feelings. I started writing first, and only then discovered my feminism. And it was much later that I actually read books about it.⁹

To Deshpande’s mind, no amount of theorizing will solve women’s problems – especially in the Indian context. Elucidating her viewpoint she further remarked:

But to me feminism isn’t a matter of theory; it is difficult to apply Kate Millet or Simone de Beauvoir or whoever to the reality of our daily lives in India. And then there are such terrible misconceptions about feminism by people here. They often think it is about burning bras and walking out on your husband, children, etc. I always try to make the point now about what feminism is not, and to say that we have to discover what it is in our own lives, our experiences. And I actually feel that a lot of women in India are feminists without realizing it.¹⁰

The strong point about Deshpande’s novels is her delineation of the woman’s inner world. She herself admitted to Geetha Gangadharan in an interview:

We know a lot about the physical and the organic world and the universe in general, but we still know very little about human relationships. It is the most mystifying thing as far as I am concerned. I will continue to wonder about it, puzzle over it and write about it. And still find it tremendously intriguing, fascinating.¹¹

Deshpande’s protagonists are women struggling to find their own voice and are continuously in search to define them. But they become fluid, with no shape, no form of their own.¹²

Jaya, in That Long Silence, undertakes a futile search for her ‘self’: The real picture, the real ‘you’ never emerges. Looking for it is as bewildering as trying to know how you really look.  Ten different mirrors show you ten different faces. ¹³

That Deshpande has been genuinely interested in issues pertaining to the lot of women in India is irrefutable. The time has come when woman’s body must be heard and Woman must uncensor herself, recover her goods, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal. She must throw off her guilt….¹⁴ anything like this is yet to happen in Deshpande’s fiction, not withstanding anatomical descriptions and detailed specifications in her short stories, but the absence of total reticence in this respect in her novels is a proof of the novelist’s comprehensive understanding of the grass root reality and woman’s plight in India. While remaining well within the bounds of the Indian middle-class respectability, the novelist has raised some significant questions to the position of women in society and gender issues.

Deshpande’s novels present at times a lonely and somber world. Reviewing The Intrusion and Other Stories, Muriel Wasi points out that this collection of hers reflects “unhappy realities of Indian life” and the woman’s “depressing, melancholic or claustrophobic” world. …it is time for Shashi Deshpande,” she concludes, “to open some of her windows and let the morning light fill her dark rooms.¹⁵

Deshpande seems to be eagerly “finding measures of freedom within the circle”. She does not try to run after technical innovations or stylistic deviations, but her use of language is fresh and characteristically precise. Her writing once again proves that art lies in concealing art. The highly functional language with telling economy that she uses is an important asset of her as a fiction writer in her modesty, Deshpande thinks of herself as an ordinary woman who writes sitting at home.¹⁶But she would not like to compromise with the dignity and essential freedom of a writer. Without subscribing to the myth of elitistic “inverted snoberry” clamped on to Indian writing in English, she declared to Stanley Carvalho in an interview that everyone has a right to choose a language.¹⁷

She is honestly concerned with expressing herself in English as clearly and effectively as possible. Asked whether she ‘thinks’ in English while writing her fiction, she told Carvalho:

When I write narrative, I think in English; when I write dialogue I think in Kannada or Marathi, which are my languages.¹⁸

Justifying this kind of code switching, she added: In our middle-class families, most of us converse in English but automatically switch over to our mother tongue when we speak to our elders, relatives, and so on At places, the dialogue in her novels reads like translation from Kannada, Marathi or Hindi, but her narrative is generally free from Indian coinages. I do not use Indianisms to make my writing look Indian, she said. I never try to make India look exotic either.¹⁹

Deshpande writes in English because she finds it the most convenient mode of self-expression. Moreover, she did not have a choice in the matter: I never did study Marathi or Kannada. And even more importantly I haven’t actually used these languages as working tools. ²⁰ She is nevertheless aware of the handicaps of creative writing in a language other than one’s mother tongue. Writing in English makes even Deshpande somewhat inhibited. She frankly admits: “I lose the range of nuances which are available in Marathi – for example, the richness of the phrases that make up that language. So I lose out on that, but I gain in other ways because English has its own special qualities too”. And then “one has to work a little harder when one writes in English”. While revising her manuscripts, Deshpande has to look particularly closely at the language.²¹ What is still worse is that writing in English alienates you from the main stream.²² It is for this reason that Deshpande would like to be regarded at par with writers in regional languages, without being ‘non-Indian’ in any way. Her English is deeply rooted in her background:

…I am different from other Indians who write in English, my background is very firm there, I was never educated abroad. My novels don’t have any Westerners, for example. They are just about Indian people and the complexities of our lives. Our inner lives and our outer lives and the reconciliation between them. My English is as we use it. I don’t make it easier for anyone really. If I make my changes, it’s because I think the novel needs it, not because the reader needs it.²³

Thematically and technically, Shashi Deshpande’s shorter fiction is, in many ways, identical to her larger fiction, and it would be worthwhile to trace a common thread running through both of them. More often than not, Deshpande dwells on desperation and frustration

, misunderstanding and incompatibility, sense of guilt and loss of face, loneliness and alienation of a sensitive woman pitted against an ill-mated marriage and hostile circumstances around her. As G.S. Amur remarks,

Woman’s struggle, in the context of contemporary Indian society, to find and preserve her identity as wife, mother and, most important of all, as human being is Shashi Deshpande’s major concern as a creative writer, and this appears in all her important stories.²⁴

Deshpande attempts to intimately analyze man-woman relationships within the ambit of family and society, and usually concentrates on the experiences gained in life, recalling yet another instance of Jane Austen with her narrow range and limited knowledge. Like Jane Austen, again, she is primarily concerned with the intriguing problems and the suffocating environs of her female protagonists, who struggle hard in this cruel and callous male-dominated world to discover their true identity as daughter, wife, mother and, above all, as human beings.

When Shashi Deshpande’s first volume of short stories, The Legacy and Other Stories (1978), appeared, it captured the notice of readers and reviewers alike. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar considered this work along with Raji Narasimhan’s The Marriage of Bela (1978) and Juliette Banerjea’s The Boyfriend (1978), and remarked of them that these writers wrote about the tears in things, the little upsets in life, the price one has to pay for one’s acute self-awareness, and the loneliness that becomes more pronounced as one gets older and older.²⁵ The ‘acute self-awareness’, of which Iyengar speaks, constitutes the crux of Deshpande’s creative writings. The author adheres to it with utter fidelity and integrity, and it is this that offers an existential strain to her novels and short stories. It also reveals a deep understanding of human psychology on her part. As a general practice, she evolves the threads of her plot from the restlessness and tension of a married couple. She builds it up step by step until the climax is reached and the realization occurs in the self-seeking woman that in the present social set-up the best course for her is to grin and bear and those human beings are inter-related and inter-dependent upon one another.

The third volume of Deshpande’s stories, It Was the Nightingale (1986), portrays man-woman relationship on a different footing altogether. The separation of wife, Jaya, from her husband for two years is borne with love and optimism. In A Man and a Woman, a woman comes into physical contact with a boy of seventeen after her husband has been long dead. The boy is actually the younger brother of her dead husband, Jayanta. She is thirty years old, and yet she is full of beaming beauty and youth. Nature seems to have created her for “the joy of life, a body made for a man’s hands.” For quite some time, she has been overwhelmed but the questions of morality, conventionality and social taboos, but now becomes very restless and uneasy. Her family rebukes her for buying “a red and blue sari” even after becoming a widow. But for her loving son, Ramesh, she would have killed herself. She is beset with existential problems. She a mere B.A. and will not be able to secure a suitable job. Then, where should she go? Where to? Where shall I go, Manu? My parents are dead. My brothers…no, I can’t live with them. And I have become incapable of living by myself.( A Man and a Woman)pg205

The fourth volume of Deshpande’s short stories opens with The Miracle. It is more concerned with the miracle of worshipping a monkey called Raja (who does not die even after getting a dose of poison by a research-prone doctor) than with the question of self-searching. But we discover a fairly good deal of self-searching in I Want., where a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Alka is subjected to “the insolent stares, and the impertinent questions” by the groom’s party. The young woman feels much uneasiness, consternation, and hopelessness. She ruminates: The woman in me was outraged and protested. I crushed her. She had no place there. None at all (I want, pg. 142). She is terribly stirred within and remarks: Sometimes I feel we are all doomed to be strangers to one another, forever sealed in separate glass jars we call ‘self’ (The Miracle, p.36). What keeps Alka apart from the common women is a strong sense of ‘self’ that she wants to preserve at all costs. In a mood of self-preservation, she observes: I had a shape and form I had to preserve. A self I had to treasure (The Miracle, p.37).

Shashi Deshpande is thus one of the most important novelists writing in English. Gifted with a rare literary bent of mind, she has matured with experiences in life and readings. For her fictional concerns and art, she has made a niche for herself among Indian English novelists. The transparency of her language and her spontaneity make her novels highly readable. Her real contribution lies in the portrayal of plights and problems, trials and tribulations of the middle-class Indian women –those who are educated and have chosen a career for themselves. Deshpande knows this segment of the Indian society very well. Once she remarked:

I realize that I write what I write because I have to, because it is within me. It’s one point of view, a world from within the woman, and that I think is my contribution to Indian writing.²⁶

Deshpande is not unconcerned about Indian reality in respect of the lot of women, but she is not a strident and militant kind of feminist who sees the male as the sole cause of woman’s problems. Her concern, in fact, is nothing less than human predicament. As a chronicler of human relationships, she is superb. The interplay between tradition and modernity and tensions generated by it has been faithfully presented. Deshpande does not inflict ready-made solutions, for, she believes, in literary writing One does not pose a problem and present a solution. It’s not maths, but the vision of humanity and the value-based fabric of life that she projects are of great significance. Her best work, she says, is yet to come, and hopefully it will realize one day all the potential of the novelist.

REFERENCES:

1. H.E.Bates, The Modern Short Story (London, 1941).  Pg. 73-74
2. K.S.Venkata Ramani, Jatadharan, Madras, 1937.  pg 530
3. C.V.Venugopal, The Indian Short Story in English, Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1976, pg.30.
4. V.Y.Kantak, ‘The Language of Indian Fiction in English’, Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English, (Ed. Prof. M.K.Naik, et.al., Darwad, 1968).
5. Literature Alive, pg. 13.
6. Indian Communicator, 20 November 1994.
7. “Interview”, The Sunday Observer, 11 February 1990.Eve’s Weekly, 18-24 June 1988, pg. 27.
8. Wasafiri, 17, 1993, pg. 25-26.
9. “Interview”, Ibid., pg. 26. Lakshmi Holmstorm
10. Indian Communicator, 20 November 1994, pg.2
11. Wasafiri, 17, pg. 22.
12. Roots and Shadows, New Delhi: Disha Books, 1983, pg. 15
13. Delhi: Penguin, 1989, pg.1, That long Silence.
14. Raman Seldon, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, pg. 150-51
15. The Hindustan Times, 26 March 1994
16. Literature Alive, 1/3, pg.11
17. The Sunday Observer, 11 February 1990).
18. Ibid.
19. Eve’s Weekly, 18-24 June 1988,pg. 28
20. Wasafiri, 17, pg. 26.
21. Ibid., pg. 26
22. Eve’s Weekly, 19-24 June 1988, pg. 28
23. Wasafiri, 17, pg. 26.
24. Literature Alive, pg. 13
25. K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar, “Postscript”, Indian Writing in English, New Delhi: Sterling, 1984, pg.761.
26. Ibid.pg. 761.