Chapter - 15
That Long Silence

- Shashi Deshpande

Question- Write about the whole life of Shashi Deshpande with works.

Answer - 

Shashi Deshpande is one of the eminent novelists of contemporary Indian literature in English. Western readers align her with Anita Desai. Indeed, both writers work centres around women's lives in modern Indian society. However, only Deshpande lives and writers in India and she explicitly addresses Indian readers, not the international marketplace.

Deshpande was born in 1936, in Dharward. She is the younger daughter of the Sanskrit Scholar, novelist, actor and dramatist R.V. Jagirdar (1904-1984) and his wife Sharda Arya. Under the name of Adya Rangacharya, and also under the 'pseudonym of Shriranga, he published a huge literary oeuvre that includes translations of Sanskrit plays. He enjoyed great success and fame, his work has become part of the national Indian heritage.

Deshpande grew up in a family that belonged to the upper middle class and so does her own family. She was given the typical education of a British convent school, moved on to Bombay University and studied economics and political science, took a second degree, in law, in Bangalore, had her first job with a lawyer, then a law reporter. Finally, she was by then married, with two sons, she added a degree in journalism (1969-1970) and topped that with a master of Art.

In 1962, she marries Dhirendra H. Deshpande, a medical doctor. The couple settles in Bombay, where her husband takes up work as a pathologist at G.S. medical college. In 1968 they go to stay in London for a year. In 1970 they move on to Bangalore where they settle for good. Their son Raghu will live there too, until his early death in 2017. Their son Vikram lives in the US.

She had two children, no career, she "got restless with being just a housewife and mother." In England she felt isolated, with no friends, and her husband away all day. On their return to India her husband encouraged her to write about this experience. In 1972, her first short story "The Legacy" is seen and many more were to follow its. Her father advised publication, otherwise the stories would get lost.

Thus her career began that would make her a name in India and beyond. Her father had taught her Sanskrit, she also speaks Marathi and Kannada, is well versed in the huge realm of Indian mythology, which she reads "against the grain", from her own, feminist position. But she writes in English. Her English schooling, and her reading that has taken her through the better part of English literary history, will add to the subtexts of her own texts. The web to her main text, however, is woven from Indian women's lives, their day-to-day living deeply impregnated by religious, social and political traditions, and gender relations determined by male power structures. Her eleven novels, children's books, two long stories and many short stories rest on the complexities of tradition and modernity a tradition that does not go unquestioned in Deshpande's work.

Deshpande creates figures that take her readers through the social strata of urban society, but her interest comes to centre move and move on women of the middle and upper middle classes, well educated women who fight for their own space, for their place in the family and in their social and their cultural setting. This setting is the back drop of her stories, action remains private, even with rape which is, after all, private only to a certain degree, with her first published novel, "The Dark Holds on Terrors' (1986), she introduces his painful topic that had already been there, as marital rape, in one of her early stories, "The intrusion", later follows it up in 'The Binding Vine' (1992) and in 'Shadow Play' (2013).

Deshpande's novel 'That Long Silence' (1988) of which she says that it is her most autobiographical one, makes silencing, by the family and by society, its main topic, it is as she said, a loud strick of despair. The main figure, however, manages to break the silence and to speak out, achieving agency. The novel had come out in English. in Britain, but was translated into Hindi, Marathi and Kannada. Which shows, not only the impact of the linguistic diversity of the subcontinent but also the status Deshpande has by then achieved.

The themes and topics, the cultural contexts of her novels seem to reflect Deshpande's own family and its cultural setting. There is literature, Indian myths, traditional Indian music, medicine, an intimate or at least a close relationship to her father, all of this being part of the fabric of 'A matter of Time' (1999). 'Small Remedies' (2000) 'Moving on' (2004) and most directly, of 'Strangers to ourselves (2015). Deshpande's novels are family novels. Family, in their generational enfolding, in their ramifications, is the groundwork of the novels. Its intricacies by the way, are more easily understood if readers-in particular western readers take to paper and pencil and draw a family tree. The complexities of this groundwork are not just family complexities, they are also the complexities of memory, and it is this that women shape as it has shaped them that they experience and that they leave behind, through divorce or through seperation..

Women, in Deshpande's texts, are not simply victims, of circumstances, of family of society. Over the decades that Deshpande's work embraces, they have come to stand out as self assured, self empowered articulate personalities. They leave behind limits and limitations hurt themselves against and cross barriers and conventional norms. The female figure in 'in the Country of Deciet, (2008) enters into a relationship with a married man. There are men who rape women, who are despots, but also remarkable men- lovers-husbands, fathers.

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