3 Review(s)

Shashi Deshpande is one of India’s most distinguished authors, and the winner of the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award, and Padma Sri Award. In Indian English fiction, she has a distinctive position as a writer of women-centric novels, with a special drive to unveil the gender imbalance in society. She ventures to explore the life of Indian women with socio-cultural and psycho-ethical paradigms of human existence. Exploring the theme of woman’s subjugation in our male-dominated society, her novels reveal a woman’s capacity to assert her own rights and individuality, and become aware of her potential as a human being, like Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors. Trapped between tradition and modernity, her sensitive heroines are fully conscious of being victims of gross gender discrimination prevalent in a conservative society. Some of her protagonists, like Jaya in That Long Silence, trace their passage in the maze of doubts, fears and uncertainties.