God created men and women equally, but the women's rights were limited to small.

Analysis of the works, author‘s experience and their works and real life. characters. The feminist
movement advocates equal rights and equal opportunities for women. Feminism was portrayed
by many writers of English Literature. This work examines the feminist perspective of Shashi
Deshpande's That Long Silence (1988).

The novel deals with gender discrimination, freedom and

struggles, social structure, portrayed gender roles that impose social norms, gender
discriminations, self-identity and inequality prevalent in society. Keywords: self-Identity,
feminine, Searching for new space, independent, obligatory, Relationship

Introduction

The paper is an attempt to examine the feminist perspective in That Long Silence of Shashi
Deshpande. The male superiority signifies the patriarchal culture in the family relationship
between Jaya and her husband Mohan. The result of marriage yield into frustration, discard and
disharmony as there was absence of love with only sex. Jaya was compelled to keep silence and
surrender and adopt a socio-psychic nature. The traditional institution of the Indian family is
dwindling as the familial relationship does not have gender equality. Male member of the family
is entitled to all sorts of comforts and excuses whereas female member has to sacrifice her life
keeping silence, suppressing emotions and desires. The mechanical and artificial love is
significant where gender discrimination exists in family environment. Jaya could break her
silence after the support of Kamat but decides to keep silence and surrender. Violence is not the
solution to the problems, to bring a change one has to wait and to be optimistic.

Feminist movement advocates the equal rights and equal opportunities for women. The true
spirit of feminism is into look at women and men as human beings. There should not be a gender
bias or discrimination in familial and social life. Establishing gender justice and gender equity is
the key aspects of feminist movement. In India, women writers have come forward to voice their
feminist approach to life and the patriarchal family set up. They believe that the very concept of
gender is not merely biological phenomenon but it has a social construction .Shashi Deshpande
is a renowned novelist of Indian
in English. She has the credit o
well known novels namely; The Dark Holds No Terrors; Roots and Shadows; and That Long
Silence. Her first novel The Dark Holds No Terrors was translated into German and Russian
languages. That Long Silence (1988) was her fifth novel which was recognized with ‘Sahitya
Akademi Award’ in 1990. Her work primarily deals with the problems of women in the present
social context. Deshpande’s quest for identity and freedom has become dominant themes in
literature. She unfolds the problems of women in the patriarchal society in a very positive way.
According to her, women has every right to live her life, to develop her qualities, to make her
decisions, to be independent and to take charge of her destiny .That Long Silence is one of the
unique works of Shashi Deshpande which signifies the pathetic condition of Indian women. It is
a reflection of sufferings of an Indian woman in the dogmatic social milieu i.e., family. It also
reflects how women suffer deeply and end up life silently bearing molestations of male. The
sacrifice made by women counterparts is hardly noticed by the male dominated society. The
writer wants such women who suffer to break their silence in the wake of feminist movement.
The novel illustrates the image of women in the middle-class family and the way she is
sandwiched between tradition and modernity.
The title of the novel depicts the intention of the novelist in order to reveal the female psyche
during the quest of Jaya, the protagonist, for self. She is the protagonist of That Long Silence
who is an intelligent woman with graduation in English, a writer and a columnist had a bright
career. Unfortunately, none of these attributes would provide her a respectable position in the
eyes of her husband Mohan, who had socialization in a typical traditional environment. He
perceived his wife on par with Seeta, Savitri and Draupadi. His mother and sister Vimala were
very much submissive to father. The decisions relating to familial and financial matters were
taken by the male members of the family. So he wanted his wife to be submissive like them as a
homemaker.In a male-dominated society, a woman has no space to be independent. She is
dependent on men either on father, husband or son. They are hardly given freedom and
independence. Slavery to man makes them suffer from dual roles of child bearing and domestic
chores. She has no freedom regarding the selection of her life partner and marriage. Marriage
becomes their destiny as Jaya thinks ;As we grew into young women, we realized it was notlove,
but marriage that was the destiny waiting for us.and so, with young man, there was the
excitement ofthinking will this man be my husband? ….It had beenour parents who had taken
vague desires of ours and
translated them into hard facts. It was like the game wehad played as children on our buttons
tinker, tailsoldier, sailor That Long Silence: Jaya’s parents and Vanita Mami go on hammering
onto her that ‘husband is like a sheltering tree’. Women should dependent on the male member
of the family in order to be safe and protected. In other words, a woman is undermined ignoring
the fact that she is equal to men in all the spheres of life. Her abilities and strengths are
undermined. However, she is inferior to men in patriarchal society. This is rightly pointed out by
Deshpande as;

….A sheltering tree. Without the tree you’re dangerously

unprotected and vulnerable. This… followed logically;
and so you have keep the tree alive and flourishing even if you have to water it with deceit and
lies (That Long Silence:
The author clearly depicts the image of marriage institution and familial relations in India.
Husband and wife hardly speak openly about their sexual life. It is treated as sinful and immoral.
Jaya had dreamt about her marital life that she would love her husband first and then sex. A
mechanical relationship and artificial love were the consequence of her marriage. It was a total
failure. She had lost interest and tired of with the acts of sex. Unfortunately, with Mohan she
had only sex but not love either before or after marriage. In other words, she hardly enjoyed
marital relationship with her husband. She had no freedom to express or share her desires with
Mohan. Her feelings of love and sex are suppressed as she says; In any case, whatever my
feelings had been then, I hadnever spoken of them to him. In fact, we had neverspoken of sex at
all. It had been as if the experience waserased each time after it happened, it never existed
inwords. The only words between us had been his question,

‘Did I hurt you?’ and my answer, ‘No’ That Long Silence: Jaya was introduced to her neighbor
Kamat who motivate her to think and act independently by appreciating and admiring. He
inspires and cheers her to get serious, to be real and true to herself. This made her regain her
self-confidence which had been lost. He further makes her to speak frankly about sex. What she
could not speak with Mohan, was able to speak to Kamat. It makes her realize her ‘self’. In this
way, Kamat enables her to break ‘long silence’. Jaya now resolves to assert her individuality by
breaking ‘that long silence’, putting down on paper that in her entire seventeen years of silence
she had suppressed her desires. This man… it had been a revelation to me that two
people a man and woman could talk this way. With this
man I had not been a woman. I had been just myself—Jaya. There had been ease in our
relationship, I hadnever known in any other. There had been nothing Icould not say to him. The
companionship of Kamat made Jaya get her identity. However, she was not strong enough to
challenge the traditional value system of the society. Though she had lost faith in her husband,
she wanted to adjust with her present setup. She was of the opinion that no change comes
suddenly, it takes a long time. Human happiness consists inharmonizing the opposites of life.
The husband-wife relationship needs to be built on the values of democracy and socialism. In
other words, rebelliousness is not the solution to the problems of life.
At the end of a novel Jaya’s husband loses his confidence, his position as an engineer. In the
urban and global society, her husband becomes the victim of corruption. During the 17 years of
their marriage Mohan never asks her opinion on any matter but when an inquiry has been set up
against him, he holds Jaya’s hand and asks her to support the family through her career as a
writer. But Jaya remains silent without knowing what to say. This is a kind of protest against her
long silence, which makes her strong at the end of the novel.

Feminist movement has a great deal in this regard. The feminist

of Indian literature probe into the pathetic situation of women in the male-dominated society in
general and in the institution of family in particular. In order to establish social harmony, the
harmony in the family needs to be established. There has to be an end to the discriminations on
women based on the gender. No gender is superior in this world. Gender equity, justice and
equality have a bearing on attaining gender development in order to have peace, harmony and
love in the family relationships.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Shashi Deshpande is one of the eminent novelists of contemporary

Indian literature in English. Deshpande was born in 1936, in Dharwad. She is the younger
daughter of the Sanskrit scholar, novelist, actor and dramatist.

Education:
The University of Bombay, B.A. (honors) in economics 1956, diploma in journalism 1970, M.A.
in English 1970; University of Mysore,Karnataka, B.L. 1959.

Awards:
Raugammal prize, 1984; Nanjangud Tirumalamba award, for The Dark Holds No Terrors, 1989;
Sahitya Academy award, 1990.

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 emotional deprivation. The woman deprived of
love, understanding, and companionship is the center of her work. She shows how traditional
Indian society is biased against women, but she recognizes that it is very often women who
oppress their sisters, though their values are the result of centuries of indoctrination.
Desphande experienced childhood in a family that had a place with the upper working class, thus
does her own family. She was given the regular instruction at a British community school,
proceeded onward to Bombay University and
examined financial matters and political theory, required a subsequent degree, in law, in
Bangalore, had her first occupation with a legal advisor, at that point a
law correspondent. At long last she was by then hitched, with two children, she added a degree in
news-casting (1969-1970), and finished off that with a Master of Art.

Deshpande creates figures that take her readers through the social strata of urban society, but her
interest comes to center more and more 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 backdrop to her stories, action 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
has said, a loud shriek 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.

WRITING STYLE

Shashi Deshpande has used a combination of first person and third

person narrative with flashback tools to bestow reliability and believability to the novels. She has
expressed her views and her narrative techniques in a chronological way
Selected Perennial Themes

Deshpande‘s novels deal with certain perennial themes such as quest for self identity, man-
woman relationship, and experience of educated and rural family women and the image of
woman. Her narrative structure is embodied in several strands, using memory, experience and so
on. Her stories are about women‘s struggle in their day-to-day life.Jaya in That Long Silence
Jaya, in “That Long Silence”, undertakes an unavailing search for herself‘. 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.”(That long silence)These words show her use
of metaphors and similes in her fictions and each character plays significant role in different
aspects. Jaya, who is the protagonist of this novel, offers us a glimpse into the lives of apparently
content housewives who are nevertheless suppressed under the weight of male dominance. Her
major concern as a woman writer is about women‘s struggle to find and preserve their identity as
wife, mother and apart from that as human being in contemporary Indian society. Deshpande has
expressed all these views in simple and colloquial way

Simple and Realistic Way

Deshpande is accomplished with a remarkable literary mind. She has

exclusively matured exposures in life and readings. She has experienced her thought by
expressing her views on writing in a simple and realistic way as follows: “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.”

Style and Development of Character

Development of character is a prominent one among the elements in literary style. Shashi
Deshpande, a leading women writer in English, has tried to bring out a naturalistic picture of the
middle-class educated women who are financially independent and represent a large part of the
contemporary Indian society. Her novels deal with the problems of the adjustments and conflicts
in the mind of female protagonists, who belong to the traditional rules. The characters in her
novels are free from their fear and guilt. In addition, they feel free from the restrictions imposed
on them by their
society, culture and nature.Deshpande‘s first full-length novel Roots and Shadows‖ highlights the
agony and suffocation experienced by the protagonist Hindu, a middle-class young girl brought
up in an Orthodox Brahmin family, in a male-dominated society. Saru in The Dark Holds No
Terrors has childhood scars. Denied of parental love and a victim of her husband‘s frustration,
Saru undergoes a rigorous journey into her and liberates herself from guilt, shame and frustration
to get full control over her life. Jaya in That Long Silence represents the modern young women
educated and they are unable to break free from the strange hold of tradition.
Shashi Deshpande‘s heroines decline rituals that are traces of the past. All her women characters
revolve around the same concept of search for their self identity. They, in order to achieve their
freedom, seek marriage as an
alternative to the bondage created by the parental family.Deshpande brings out the struggle of
these women to give shape and content to their individual survival in a sexist society which ends
in compromise. All the
characters, finally, accept that there is selfhood in being a wife, a sister, a
mother and a career woman. Consequently, one can be true to oneself.

Stereotypes

Deshpande‘s characters are stereotypes. They aim to induce the readers into leading a peaceful
life for themselves in a sophisticated manner. They motivate the younger generation to have a
self-identity for their own in the society in which they are living. Deshpande‘s main motive is to
make women realize their position and responsibilities as a wife, a daughter, a sister and a
mother.

Use of Tone

Tone is another important element in the literary style in which the author‘s attitude and the
mood of the story are known. Shashi Deshpande‘s main perspective is to achieve the self-
discovery of women of different generations (traditions). The author seems wistful throughout
her novels. The women characters in her novels are longing for the self-identity in the male-
dominated society showing their quest for space and selfhood. Deshpande‘s novels are not only
wishful but also it gives hope for the women who are suppressed by the male domination in their
family. Though they are lovable towards their family and family members, situation leads them
to a mournful atmosphere.

Narrative Technique and Style

Every author uses different methods of story-telling, but the narrative technique used by an
author is of great importance. Shashi Deshpande has used a combination of first person and third
person narrative with flashback tools to bestow reliability and believability to the novels. She has
expressed her views and her narrative techniques in a chronological way. She has explained
every incident in a coherent way and it consists of logical ordering of things happened.

Style of Paragraphs and Chapters

Structure of chapters and paragraphs are considered to be an uncomplicated thing. The

paragraphs are conventionally framed; hence it would be easy for the readers to get her concept
comprehensively. She has divided her novels into simple units which helps the reader not to feel
weary by reading a long or lengthy unit. Deshpande pays much attention to her own way of
narrative process. Her thoughts reach the mind of the reader because of her simple and realistic
way of expression. Her style of narration, role and her thoughts are mentioned explicitly in all
her novels. Thus, the meta-fictional techniques serve as the base for the elements of literary style
which makes her work effective.

Chapter 1
ANALYSIS OF NOVEL

A woman can never be angry; she can only be neurotic, hysterical, frustrated.I have often
watched in fascination the leaps and bounds of her mind as, starting from the banks of
uncomfortable facts, she reaches the safety of easier-to live-with invention.Before marriage Jaya
has optimistic views on life as her father always encourages her by saying 'I named you Jaya' he
said, 'Jaya means victory' . But after the death of her father, 'Ai' her mother does not support her.
This makes Jaya feebler and more vulnerable. Her mother always prefers her son and she even
gifts their ancestral property . the Dadar flat to her son rather than her daughter Jaya. Things can
never be as they were. It‘s astonishing how we comment on change, as if change is something
remarkable. On the contrary, not to change is unnatural, against nature. That long silence And
after marriage, Jaya lives in the family life thinking about her family and her husband Mohan. At
their wedding, Mohan renamed his wife Jaya as Suhasini as he wanted her to be 'Soft, smiling,
placid, motherly woman' (16). Her period of marriage life comprises of confrontation between
two phrases of her personality where the later had to be triumphant to appease her husband's ego
and to save her marriage. And 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.It‘s not
just that life is cruel, but that in every process of our birth we submit to life‘s cruelty Deshpande
beautifully described Jaya's married life as, A pair of bullock yoked together. It is more
comfortable for them to move in the same direction. To go in different directions would be
painful and what animals would voluntarily choose pain? The narrator believes that with money
and a room she could have been a writer as living conditions always affect one's creativity. Jaya
also wishes to keep on writing. She breaks her silence of seventeen years in her writings, with
which she expressed the thrust of craving identity for herself. She writes the responsibilities and
social bondage in her view has been a failed writer and the universal voice is not heard in her
works.For her writing pieces, she is unanswerable to Mohan, which means that she does not have
freedom and liberty both in her personal and her professional life. The creative and artistic zeal
free her from her dubbed domestic roles.
When she realizes this, she makes her mind to be silent no more, she has the right to reveal her
genuine feelings and emotions. So, she resolves to break her silence by putting down on paper
that entire she has suppressed in her seventeen-year silence. Finally, she expounds:The panic has
gone. I am Mohan's wife I had thought, and cut off the bits of me that had refused to be Mohan's
wife. Now I know that kind of fragmentation is not possible. The child hands in pocket, has been
with me through the years.Shashi Deshpande effectively expounds the aim of individual
happiness in marriage. From the beginning Jaya developed fear of speech for fear of reticulate
from males Appa, her father, who always prevents her from doing any task of her taste. Her
father and brother criticized whenever she got opportunities to rebuke. Due to all these she jumps
into silence which becomes easier to her. Later she maintains the silence with Mohan also and
the reason behind this was liberty and freedom shown in threads. The inability to find words
loads Jaya to embark upon a long silent journey. Finally she holds silence, the utter silence But
the words remain unsaid. I know his mood was best met with silence‖.It was so much easier for
women in those days to accept, not to struggle, because they believed, they know, there was
nothing else for them. Deshpande depicts the complexities of Indian women of the modern age.
Marriage plays a pivotal role in the life of Indian women and it changes their entire life. The
husbands rejoice in their life carrying no sign of being married. Jaya meditates why women
plunge into the marital life and keeps burning silently. The reason that she finds to her is, We're
all frightened of the dark, frightened of being alone‖ (102). For women in the Indian society, it is
both a personal weakness as well as a social fate.And Then,as we grow into young women, we
realizes it was not love, but marriage that was the destiny waiting for us‖That Long Silence is one
of the unique works of Shashi Deshpande which signifies the pathetic condition of Indian
woman. It is a reflection of sufferings of an Indian woman in the dogmatic social milieu i.e.,
family. It also reflects how woman suffers deeply and end up life silently baring molestations of
male. The sacrifice made by women counterpart is hardly noticed by the male dominated society.
The writer wants such women who suffer to break their silence in the wake of feminist
movement. The novel illustrates the image of women in the middle-class family and the way she
is sandwiched between the tradition and modernity.A Wife should always be few feet behind her
husband‖. If he is an MA you should be a BA. If he is earning five hundred rupees you should
never earn more than four hundred and ninety nine rupees. That‘s the only rule to follow if you
want a happy marriage…no partnership can ever be equal. It will always be unequal, but take
care it is unequal in favour of the husband‖.The title of the novel depicts the intention of the
novelist in order to reveal the female psyche during the quest of Jaya, the protagonist, for self.
She is the protagonist of That Long Silence who is an intelligent woman with graduation in
English, a writer and a columnist had a bright career. Unfortunately, none of these attributes
would provide her a respectable position in the eyes of her husband Mohan, who had
socialization in a typical traditional environment. He perceived his wife on par with Seeta,
Savitri and Draupadi. His mother and sister Vimala were very much submissive to father. The
decisions relating toamilial and financial matters were taken by the male members of the family.
So he wanted his wife to be submissive like them as a homemaker.Marriage is a very stranger
thing. It‘s a very public institution, it meant to tell the world the two people are going to live
together, to declare that their children will be legal, that these children can inherit their property.
It meant for social living, to ensure that some rules are observed; so that men and women don‘t
cross the lines drown from them. At the same time, marriage is an intensely private affair; no
outsider will know the state of someone else‘s marriage. It‘s a closed room, a locked room…In a
male-dominated society, a woman has no space to be independent. She is dependent on men
either on father, husband or son. They are hardly given freedom and independence. Slavery to
man makes them suffer from dual roles of child bearing and domestic chores. She has no
freedom regarding the selection of her life partner and marriage. Marriage becomes their destiny
as Jaya thinks;….As we grew into young women, we realized it was notLove, but marriage that
was the destiny waiting for us .And so, with young man, there was the excitement of Thinking
will this man be my husband? ….It had been Our parents who had taken vague desires of ours
andTranslated them into hard facts. It was like the game weHad played as children on our
buttons tinker, tailor,Soldier, sailor….
(That Long Silence: 19) Jaya‘s parents and Vanita Mami go on hammering onto her that husband
is like a sheltering tree‘. Women should be dependent on the male member of the family in order
to be safe and protected. In other words, a woman is undermined ignoring the fact that she is
equal to men in all the spheres of life. Her abilities and strengths are undermined. However, she
is inferior to men in patriarchal society. This is rightly pointed out by Deshpande as;The author
clearly depicts the image of marriage institution and familial relations in India. Husband and
wife hardly speak openly about their sexual life. It is treated as sinful and immoral. Jaya had
dreamt about her marital life that she would love her husband first and then sex. A mechanical
relationship and artificial love were the consequence of her marriage. It was a total failure. She
had lost interest and tired of with the acts of sex. Unfortunately, with Mohan she had only sex
but not love either before or after marriage. In other words, she hardly enjoyed marital
relationship with her husband. She had no freedom to express or share her desires with Mohan.
Her feelings of love and sex are suppressed as she says;

In any case, whatever my feelings had been then, I had never spoken of them to him. In fact, we
had never spoken of sex at all. It had been as if the experience waserased each time after it
happened, it never existed in words. The only words between us had been his question,‘Did I
hurt you?’ and my answer, ‘No’ (That Long Silence: 95)Jaya was introduced to her neighbor
Kamal who motivate her to think and act independently about her writing by appreciating and
admiring. He inspires and cheers her to get serious, to be real and true to herself. This made her
regain her self-confidence which had been lost. He further makes her to speak frankly about sex.
What she could not speak with Mohan, was able to speak to Kamat. It makes her realize her
self‘. In this way, Kamat enables her to break long silence‘. Jaya now resolves to assert her
individuality by breaking that long silence‘, putting down on paper that in her entire seventeen
years of silence she had suppressed her desires.…. people a man and woman could talk this way.
With this man I had not been a woman. I had been just myselfJaya. There had been ease in our
relationship, I had never known in any other. There had been nothing could not say to him.(That
Long Silence: 153)The companionship of Kamal made Jaya get her identity. However, she was
not strong enough to challenge the traditional value system of the society. Though she had lost
faith in her husband, she wanted to adjust with her present setup. She was of the opinion that no
change comes suddenly, it takes a long time. Human happiness consists in harmonizing the
opposites of life. The husband-wife relationship needs to be built on the values of democracy and
socialism. In other words, rebelliousness is not the solution to the problems of life.At the end of a
novel Jaya‘s husband loses his confidence, his position as an engineer. In the urban and global
society, her husband becomes the victim of corruption. During the 17 years of their marriage
Mohan never asks her opinion on any matter but when an inquiry has been set up against him, he
holds Jaya‘s hand and asks her to support the family through her career as a writer. But Jaya
remains silent without knowing what to say. This is a kind of protest against her long silence,
which makes her strong at the end of the novel.Feminist movement has a great deal in this
regard. The feminist writings of Indian literature probe into the pathetic situation of women in
the maledominated society in general and in the institution of family in particular. In order to
establish social harmony, the harmony in the family needs to be established. There has to be an
end to the discriminations on women based on the gender. No gender is superior in this world.
Gender equity, justice and equality have a bearing on attaining gender development in order to
have peace, harmony and love in the family relationships. 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. 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: 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.
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. 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. 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. Shashi Deshpande has discussed two
different images in the novel, which put a big question-mark on the relationship of a husband and
wife.That Long Silence (1988) is a story of Jaya who is a house wife and a writer. She thinks that
the society is not for women but it is for men only. She is an intellectual writer and finds no
place for herself in society. Instead of expressing her views and ideas in the society as a writer,
she keeps silence. She broods over her past, present, and future. She is not happy in her married
life. She is educated and influenced by Western ideas. She has a dream from her childhood days
to change the situation of women. However, she is failed to achieve her goal because of the
familial and social restrictions on women. She is completely failed to uplift and improve the
status of women. Jaya does not react immediately against her injustice, however, she revolts
silently. According to her, silence of woman is helplessness but men take it as contentment.
Mohan, her husband, is an engineer. He is a dominating husband and not a lover. Mohan stops
Jaya‟s career as a writer. He blames her for bringing the realities of their family life into the
public trough her writing. He is suspected in the act of malpractice and to avoid disrespect, the
family has to shift from Churchgate into old house in poor locality in Dadar. In the present
situation, Jaya is the representative of the typical Indian
woman. She wants to be an ideal wife. She would like to compare herself with the mythical
women – “Sita following her husband into exile, Savitri dogging Death to reclaim her husband,
Draupadi stoically sharing her husband‟s travails.” (That Long Silence, 11) In the same way,
Jaya follows her husband to Dadar flat.”That Long Silence” is a story of a woman who wants to
revolt against social conventions however; she seeks compromise and does not revolt. Her mind
is full of anger against society but she does not express her anger and she prefers to be silent. She
is incapable to expose the truth. Because she knows that her expression of anger will not be
accepted by the society. She knows that there are pains in hostility and anguish in rebellion. So
Jaya says, “Two bullocks yoked together …it is more comfortable for them to move in the same
direction. To go in different directions would be painful and what animal would voluntarily
choose pain?”(That Long Silence, 12) And it had been a habit of her to suppress her wishes from
her childhood days. Before the marriage, Jaya had to listen and follow her father suppressing her
desires. Jaya has to play traditional role of a woman. She keeps on changing herself according to
her husband‟s likes and dislikes. While playing the role of a wife and mother she has to sacrifice
her existence. She feels that she has no status. Jaya loses her identity. Vanitamami says,
“Remember Jaya, a husband is like a sheltering tree, without the tree youare unprotected.” (That
Long Silence, 32) Jaya as a wife forgets herself, her identity, and her existence under the
dominance of husband. Jaya does not like this traditional approach. Her husband has to face
enquiry of corruption. She becomes angry when her husband says, “I did it for you for you and
the children.” (That Long Silence, 10) This irritates her. Jaya says, “… there is no comfort in her
married life. That silence seemed heavy with uneasiness.”(That Long Silence, 12) Women
change their mind and the ways of life according to the likes and expectations of men. Mohan
thinks for woman as to be angry is to be unwomanly. Jaya changes her mind according to the
expectations of her husband. After the marriage, she gets new identity for fulfilling other‟s
expectations. Her name is changed from Jaya, a winner to Suhasini, soft, smiling, placid,
motherly woman. She says, “…no woman can be angry. Have you ever heard of an angry young
woman? … A woman can never be angry.” (That Long Silence, 147) According to M. K. Naik,
“That Long Silence shows how the silence imposed on women is partly of their own making,
though society and tradition have a hand …. The heroine Jaya …is incapable of breaking away
from the supportive yet stifling extended family.” Thus, Shashi Deshpande‟s novels deal with
Indian middle class educated women their confusions, convulsions, disillusionments and
compromises with existing familial and social conventions. Her protagonists are sensitive,
intelligent and career-oriented. She portrays women characters in her novels and shows how
women are trapped in the crisis of the transitional society. The transitional phase – from
conventional to the unconventional –creates tensions in which Indian educated middle class
women are trapped. Even though, the Indian women are educated, employed and economically
independent, they do not enjoy complete freedom. Family and social conventions restrict their
freedom completely. They struggle against the prevailing social conventions but their struggle
cannot bestow upon freedom and equality. In spite of having all the dominant qualities like men,
they remain secondary and unwillingly submit themselves to their conventional roles. Deshpande
shows how her protagonists have to undergo through all the tortures and struggles in patriarchal
society. However, these struggling protagonists do not succeed getting freedom. The only
weapon they can use is ‘silence and surrender’Though Jaya was a highly educated girl, the
female members of her family enthrust upon her their own experiences of life as she has no own
knowledge of real life yet. They taught her how to live happily after marriage by not opposing
her husband, to obey his all orders and to rank him as her god just as they did. Though she was a
modern and convent educated girl equipped with the skill of writing, she followed their
instructions due to her traditional upbringing. Divorce is considered a taboo in contemporary
middle class Indian society. As an impact of the teaching she received from her mother and other
female members of the family, she became voiceless after marriage. She never opposed or
confronted her husband in order to save her marriage.This long silence of Jaya is an expression
of the silence of the modern Indian housewife. In Indian Patriarchal society, there is no self-
identity for a woman. The laws of the Manu are the roots of the traditional orthodox manner in
which men in Indian society are conditioned to look at and treat women. In Manu’s Code,
chapter 9 underlines social and moral codes for both men and women. But men are directed
towards governing social and moral behaviour while the woman is only somebody's daughter,
sister, wife or mother. The men are clearly given the upper hand as described in verse 3. Women
are fated to be dependent on the father in childhood, husband in youth and sons in old age and
are forbidden from being self-reliant at any stage. Verse 5 warns men against being even a little
careless toward women as women are fickle-minded andincapable of taking care of themselves
(Burke 62).It is easy for an uneducated woman to accept this dominance and leads her life
silently without arguing like Jeeja, Jaya's help maid whose husband is a drunkard who frequently
beats her. She does not protest even when her husband remarries because she thinks that she has
failed to give him a child, so he has every right to remarry. Mohan's sister Vimala developed
ovarian tumour and bleeds herself to death in silence. All these women are victims of ingrained
patriarchal values. But the situation for highly educated women is very tough. She has her own
point of view on a particular situation. It is not easy for her to follow someone silently without
even telling her own attitude.Jaya received higher education, in spite of gender discrimination.
She was convent-educated, English speaking lady with a literary taste. After her father’s death
the responsibility of her marriage is transferred to his brother's shoulders.Only later had I come
upon them with a painful awareness. Dada had wanted me off his hands; he had wanted to be
free of his responsibility for an unmarried younger sister, so that he could go ahead with his own
plans. After Appa’s death, the Kakas had never left Dada forget his role as the man of the house.
And so Dada had cleverly maneuvered me… (93)When Jaya tries to figure out why she had
married Mohan, she sees the truth that it was because 'he had decided to marry' her, she 'had only
to acquiesce'. Jaya's traditional upbringing makes her submissive after marriage. She never
argued or opposed her husband in order to save her marriage. As she has observed the lives of
widowed and deserted women, she was afraid to live a deserted life. Vanita Mami counsels her
just before her marriage: "Remember Jaya, a husband is like a sheltering tree. Keep the tree alive
and flourishing, even if you have to water it with deceit and lies" (32). She further says: "If your
husband has a mistress or two, ignore it. Take up a hobby instead, cats,may be, or your sister's
children" (32). She does not believe in these patriarchal notions but still follows the same path
out of helplessness. At the time of her marriage, her husband changed her name from Jaya to
Suhasini. She didn't protest just to keep him happy. Even she cut her hair as per her husband's
choice, dressed according to her husband's choice.Soon after marriage, a quarrel between the two
leads Mohan to silence. She feels guilty as Mohan is the "Sheltering tree", "God for her" as she
was taught by the ladies of her family before marriage and to keep her husband happy. She wraps
herself in a cover of silence. For seventeen years of her marriage she successfully manages to
suppress her feelings as she thought it’s important for a happy and successful married life. She
even gives up her career as a writer to make her husband happy. In the context of marriage,
Bertrand Russell says:

The essence of a good marriage is respect for each other's personality combined with that deep
intimacy, physical, mental and spiritual which makes a serious love between man and woman the
most fructifying of all human experiences. Such love, like everything that is great and precious,
demands its own morality, and frequently entails a sacrifice to the less to the greater; but the
sacrifice must be voluntary, for where it is not , it will destroy the very basis of the love for the
shake for which it is made Jaya’s married life was stable and happy but a disaster came when her
husband was blamed for his involvement in a financial malpractice and enquiry against him
wasset up.
Their children Rahul and Rati were away on a long tour with their family friends at that time, so
he expects Jaya to go into hiding with him but she denies complying with. Mohan leaves home
without saying anything to her. Now she has plenty of time to analyse her marital relationship
with her husband. She realizes that Mohan has lost interest in her. She is afraid lest something
should happen to Mohan. She cannot imagine a life without Mohan or his support

Shashi Deshpande's novel "That Long Silence" delves into the complexities of Indian
womanhood and the societal constructs that shape and confine it. Set against the backdrop of a
traditional Indian household, the novel navigates through the protagonist's journey of self-
discovery and empowerment amidst the stifling silence that pervades her existence.At its core,
"That Long Silence" is a poignant exploration of the intricacies of marital relationships and the
disillusionment that often accompanies them. The protagonist, Jaya, finds herself trapped in a
marriage devoid of passion and mutual respect, where her identity is subsumed by the
expectations and demands of her husband and in-laws. Through Jaya's introspective narration,
Deshpande skillfully exposes the subtle nuances of gender dynamics within Indian households,
where women are expected to sacrifice their dreams and desires at the altar of familial duty.One
of the central themes of the novel is the quest for identity in the face of societal constraints.
Jaya's journey towards self-realization is fraught with obstacles, as she grapples with the
conflicting demands of tradition and modernity. Her internal struggle mirrors the broader societal
shifts taking place in India, where women are increasingly asserting their agency and challenging
traditional gender roles. Deshpande deftly captures the tension between tradition and progress,
offering a nuanced portrayal of the complexities inherent in navigating a rapidly changing
society.Moreover, "That Long Silence" serves as a critique of the patriarchal structures that
perpetuate gender inequality and silence women's voices. Jaya's narrative exposes the insidious
ways in which patriarchal norms dictate every aspect of women's lives, from their education and
career choices to their personal autonomy. Deshpande's incisive commentary forces readers to
confront uncomfortable truths about the entrenched misogyny that continues to pervade Indian
society, despite ostensibly progressive strides towards gender equality.In addition to its thematic
depth, "That Long Silence" is distinguished by Deshpande's masterful use of language and
narrative technique. Her prose is evocative and lyrical, imbuing even the most mundane
moments with profound emotional resonance. Through vivid imagery and vividly drawn
characters, Deshpande invites readers into the inner sanctum of Jaya's world, where the weight of
unspoken words hangs heavy in the"That Long Silence" stands as a powerful testament to the
enduring resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity. Deshpande's exploration of
female subjectivity and agency resonates with readers of all backgrounds, offering a poignant
reminder of the importance of speaking out against oppression and reclaiming one's voice. As
India continues its journey towards gender equality, novels like "That Long Silence" serve as
invaluable touchstones for understanding the complexities of womanhood in a rapidly changing
world.

Chapter 2
Quest for Identity in Shashi
Deshpande‟s That Long Silence

In That Long Silence, Shashi Deshpande has portrayed the irony of a woman
writer who also happens to be a young housewife. Being writer she is supposed to present her
views and ideas before the society but still, she remains silent probing into her past,struggling
with her present and trying to establish a rapport with her future. She is an intellectual who finds
herself out of place in the society meant only for men.The novel opens with Jaya and her
husband Mohan shifting from their well-settled, comfortable house to other old house in Dadar,
Bombay, where they had stayed immediately after getting married when their financial condition
was not so good. They shift into an old apartment in order to escape the ugly scene as Mohan has
been caught in some business malpractice and an inquiry is in progress. Here, in a small old flat,
Jaya gets out of touch with her daily schedule and becomes an introvert. She sits deep in
contemplation, thinking of her childhood and tries to analyze herself. Not satisfied with her
married life, Jaya recalls her past days, her upbringing, the environment in which she was
brought up and the preachings that were thrust upon her when she was growing up, e.g. she was
taught that a husband is like a sheltering tree.Though Jaya has been educated and influenced by
the modern thought of the west and other advanced countries, and is herself a writer, she still
wants to compare herself with the image of Sita, Draupadi, and other ideal mythological
characters. She had always tried her best to keep a balance between husband and wife: “ours has
been a delicately balanced relationship, so much so that we have even snipped off bits of
ourselves to keep the scales on an even keel” (Deshpande 7).
On the occasion of the Raveti‟s birthday, Jaya as well as her daughter, Rati, feel that Mohan
loves his niece Raveti more than his own daughter. But she does not say anything to Mohan as
he only dismisses it as her “writer‟s magination” and nothing more. She always wishes to
proceed as per her husband‟s wish.Generally, a woman‟s identity is defined by others, in terms
of her relationship with men, as a daughter, as a wife, as a mother, etc. The question “what a
woman does” is never asked, but “who she belongs to” is always considered important. She does
not have an identity of her own. Her name keeps on changing according to the wishes of others.
In That Long Silence, the writer has presented this phenomenon through the character of Jaya,
who is known by two names: Jaya and Suhasini Jaya, which means victory, is the name given by
her father when she was born, and Suhasini, the name given after her marriage which means a
“soft, smiling, placid, motherly woman” (Deshpande16). Both the names symbolize the traits of
her personality. The former symbolizes revolt and later submission. The dreams of her
childhood, to change the ascribed situation of women resulting in achieving her goals, are
shattered by the environment, the surroundings, and above all by the society which imposes all
sorts of restrictions on a woman. She is absolutely helpless and is unable to do anything to
improve her situation. Ultimately, she tries to adapt herself to the main current. She longs to be
called an ideal wife. She revolts in silence. She comments on a situation when her husband
talksabout awoman being treated very cruelly by their husbands and he calls it “strength”: “He
saw strength in the woman sitting silently in front of the fire, but I saw despair. I saw despair so
great that it would not voice itself. I saw a struggle so bitter that silence was the only weapon.
Silence and Surrender” (Deshpande36).Coming to the physical relationship between husband
and wife, it is again the case of dominating husband and a suffering wife. Even if the husband
hurts the wife, she remains silent. Jaya, too, has been cast in the same mould. She cannot say
“yes” when her husband asks her whether he has hurt her. She has to tolerate everything: “The
emotion that governed my behavior to him, there was still the habit of being a wife, of sustaining
and supporting him” (Deshpande98). All this certainly does not show a natural and harmonious
relationship between the two when one is unable to express his or her real feelings to others.
Their physical relationship always ends up with Mohan‟s question whether he has hurt her. It
obviously shows a forced relationship and not a natural one. Jaya does not immediately react to
the situation but the reader is informed through the flashback technique used by the author.
Lying alone in a small house, her mind travels through the past and the present and thus covers
the whole span of her life. At times the author uses the technique of stream-of consciousness to
project the minds of the characters and thus making the story authentic and realistic.In the Indian
context once a girl gets married to a man, whether it be a lovemarriage or an arranged one, the
husband takes complete control over her whether he follows theright path or the wrong one, she
has to blindly follow in his footsteps. When Mohan is caught in an act of malpractice and is
supposed to be unavailable for certain period, he assumes Jaya would accompany him. Though
she is unwillingto follow the examples of Sita and Savitri, paradoxically, she is compelled by the
situations and circumstances to follow the principle that “both are yoked together, so better to go
to the same direction as to go to different direction will be painful” (Deshpande10).Jaya‟s
husband, Mohan, always interprets things in relation to the effect it may
have on society. He unobtrusively likes to conform to the social norms even if they are wrong.
The success of Jaya‟s novel depicting the relationship between man and woman is weighed in
relation to what society would think in future. So, he wants to make Jaya also think like him and
induces her not to deliberate on such themes that would endanger their marriage.Jaya, a
representative of the typical Indian woman in the present context, wants to mould herself as he
wills. But all these malechauvinistic ideas are not her own but have been thrust upon her by the
society in general and her father in particular. He father made her think that she was different
from others and hence, she could not cope with her hostel mates and kept herself aloof from
other girls.In her childhood, she had been brought up in a loving and affectionate manner without
any responsibility. But after her marriage, she changes automatically, her anger withers away:
“She was a child who used to get angry very soon. But after her marriage, she tolerated her
anger. She realized that to Mohan anger made a woman „unwomanly” (Deshpande83). When
Kammat asks her why she has not expressed the anger of women in her writings, her reply is:
“Because no woman can be angry. Have you ever heard of an angry young
woman”(Deshpande147). When she leaves her home after getting married, her father advises her
to be always good to Mohan and she, at all times, tries her best to follow his advice. It also
throws light on her being closer to her father than to her mother. Even when her mother scolds
her or questions her going out andreturning home late, she complains about her mother to her
father.Social conformity has always been more obligatory for a woman than for a man.
Generally, a woman‟s identity tends to be defined by others. Due to her sensitive nature, Jaya is
very particular about moulding her tastes in order to suit those of the rest even if her superior
intellect is not satisfied. In the very beginning of the novel, we see that she tries to reason out
with her father as to why she should not listen to the songs broadcast on the radio, but ultimately
she keeps silent, suppressing her desire. Here, Deshpande has presented the theme
of lack of communication. Jaya is basically a modern woman rooted in tradition, whereas her
husband, Mohan, is a traditionalist rooted in customs. The difference between their outlooks is so
great that they fail, time and again, to understand each other. To Mohan, a woman sitting before
the fire, waiting for her husband to come home and eat hot food is the real “strength” of a
woman, but Jaya interprets it as nothing more than despair. The difference in their attitude is the
main cause of their failure to understand each other.In her stream of thoughts, Jaya too looks at
her marital relations where there is left the little possibility of conversation between them. This
unhappiness is reflected not only in her conjugal life but also in social life. Her books, her stories
lack anger and emotion. Her writings are rejected by the publishers. And when, finally, Mohan
angrily walks out of the house, she feels that she has failed in her duty as a wife. She recalls the
tradition of act and retribution and compares herself with Kusum, Mohan‟s mother “An act and
retribution- they followed each other naturally and inevitably” (Deshpande128). When Mohan
leaves the house without informing her, she feels that she is being neglected by her husband in
the same manner as she had done with Mohan‟s mother. Silence creates agap between Jaya and
Mohan. Mohan keeps on asking questions, but she does not find a word to answer them, “I
racked my brains trying to think of an answer” (Deshpande31).But her silence on such issues,
like her own writings, puts on into doubt. As Veena Seshadri writes, “one ends up by wondering
whether Jaya has imposed the long silence on herself not out of a sense of duty or to emulate the
ideal Hindu woman of the ages gone by, but in order to camouflage the streaks of ugliness within
her” (95). Her negative approach coupled with her habit of discerning and analyzing every
situation causes havoc in her personal life. She doesn't like to submit to the male-chauvinistic
ideals, for her prudence does not allow her to submit beforeignorance. Thus, there ensues a
struggle between ignorance and prudence.
Further, her covert superiority complex makes her think not only of herself but also of other
women who come in her contact which causes a type of irritability in her marital conduct. Thus,
all the troubles emerge from their unequal cognitive status. In order to have a well balanced
conjugal life, it is imperative that husband and wife be at par with each other. They should
supplement and not supplant each other. Further, they should know each other well physically as
well as emotionally. It is this harsh reality that Deshpande tries to project through the female
protagonist who, at the end, chooses to break her long silence of the past.The intuition of this
talented contemporary Indian writer seems to break the long silence that has surrounded women,
their experience and their world.That Long Silence, then, traces Jaya‟s passage through a
plethora of self-doubts, fears,
guilt, smothered anger and silence towards articulation and affirmation. Jaya, in fact, rejects the
patriarchal notion of a unitary self or identity when she observes:But what was that „myself?
Trying to find oneself-what a cliche that hasbecome. As if such a thing is possible. As if there is
such a thing as oneself, intact and whole, waiting to be discovered. On the contrary, there are so
many, each self, attached like a Siamese twin to a self of another person, neither able to exist
without the other.(Deshpande69)Even a casual reading of the novel makes one conscious that
ShashiDeshpande is not only writing about her female protagonist, Jaya, who is trying to ease a
long silence and grapple with the problems of self-revelation and self assessment but through
her, also about other women, those unhappy victims who never broke their silence. The author,
in the first place, points out how our culture has often kept silent on the subject of women. For
instance, at one point in the novel, Jaya discovers that she does not figure in the family tree.
WhenJaya asks her uncle why her name is not included in the family tree, she is given to
understand that she now belongs to her husband‟s family and not to her father‟s. But this is only
half the truth. Neither her mother, her Kakis, i.e. her uncle‟s wives, nor even her grandmother,
ajji, the indomitable woman, “who single-handedly kept the family together” (Deshpande143)
finds a place in the family tree. Jaya, to her dismay, finds that her name andexistence, along with
those of other women in the family are completely blotted out of the family history. The novel,
as it were, is Jaya‟s protest against the kind of treatment that is given to women in our culture
and her attempt to give another version of history from woman‟s point of view.The feminist
upsurge of Jaya‟s ego becomes evident when we consider the husband wife relationships of the
old Hindu women and modern women. Jaya‟s mother never raised a voice against her father.
Mohan thinks Jaya is not sufficiently trained to play the role of a good wife and that a woman in
anger is “ugly and unwomanly” (Deshpande83).ShashiDeshpande through Jaya-Mohan
relationship has shed some light on modern love, sex, marital relationship, and has hinted at the
domestic warfare of married couples. The novelist focuses on some modernist elements in the
novel. The first is the pre-marital love of Jaya and Mohan before they are under the yoke of
marriage. Mohan was enamoured of Jaya‟s modernity and her modern education. With a new
feminist frankness Jaya talks of the interdependence of love and sex: “First thee‟s love, then
there‟s sex-that was how I had always imagined it to be. But after living with Mohan I had
realized that it could so easily be the other way round” (Deshpande95) .Woman‟s realization
between of her aloneness in the “act of sex” (Deshpande97) and the possibility of love without
abodily union as in the case of the relationship between Jaya and Kamat) are discussed clearly
and add an unorthodox frankness to an esoteric experience.Tolerance and suffering, “Silence and
Surrender” are seen as marks of goodness, but
tyrannical mother-in-laws are considered as “Ghouls” (Deshpande45). The Greek thought that “a
woman is her womb” (Deshpande107) fills Jaya with remorse and guilt after the abortion. At the
face of it, Jaya‟s predicament seems existential in so far as she often finds life absurd and
meaningless. However, the feminist rebellion and defiance, epitomized in Jaya‟s conduct, are
based on the balance of the rejection of bad and the acceptance of good in the time honoured
values and traditions.Jaya‟s feminist awareness has a note of deterministic pessimism: “I felt a
thickening in my throat as if I was to burst into tears. It‟s not that life is cruel, but that in the
process of our birthwe submit to life‟scruelty” (Deshpande102).This cosmic awareness leads her
to momentary gloom and to her adoption of aggressive tactics as a psychological defense, and
this partly explains her mysterious giggle at Mohan and desertion of the dying Kamat. A
modernist trait of Jaya‟s temper is her agnostic treatment of religion as asymbol of tyranny and
violence: “So many chariots of Jagannath promising us Moksha. But there was no Moksha
anymore” (Deshpande113). Nevertheless, the novelist gives an optimistic message through these
words of Jaya: “…we have to go on trying.” One has to believe in one‟s self; As K.R.S. Iyengar
concludes:Jaya will begin life anew, for life provides many choices. She feels a compulsive
sense of embracing life‟s obligations as life “has always to be made possible” (114).This is the
wisdom Jaya has learnt in the tribulations of her life. Perhaps, almost always she will have an
opportunity in life to act
according to her will. (760)At the very outset the problem of identity crisis comes to the fore in
That Long Silence. The dilemma faced by the protagonist is highly intriguing when she says the
words come to her freely but “Self revelation is a cruel process”(1). For her “the real ‘you’ never
emerges”.It is customary in Jaya to change the name of the bride when she gets married, which
means a change of identity. One is identified by their name and changing that name means
changing the identity. When a magazine asked for the bio-data of Jaya the protagonist, she could
give only a few lines as her profile when she omitted what she thought as irrelevant
facts.“Finally when I had sifted out what I had thought were irrelevant facts, only these had
remained: I was born. My father died when I was fifteen. I got married to Mohan. I have two
children and I did not let a third live.”(2)Even when she faces the dilemma of being a
homemaker devoted to her husband and being a writer, she asserts herself by saying that she was
the one who took decision to stop with the two children.The indifference shown by her husband
to her was a recurring process he never bothers to show interest in anything, which is of no
concern to him. Though they are married for seventeen years with two children they ought to
have been understanding couple for the outsiders. But in reality they were different persons. “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)Her frustration
at being neglected is reflected when she says, “Reconciled to failure?” But she quickly says,
“That seams cruel, but it is true.”(9).Mohan, the husband of Jaya has least concern for the family.
But he poses himself or believes that he is the one ideal husband. He wants to give his children
what he did not get as a child. He is clear about himself. “he was a dutiful son, he is a dutiful
father, husband, brother”(9). Jaya gets frustrated when he says, “It was for you and the children
that I did this. I wanted you to have a good life. I wanted the children to have all those things I
never had.”(9).Jaya is rather honest and she could not persist the hypocrisy shown by her
husband. For anything that happens, which is good the credit is taken by him but if some harm
happens Jaya is blamed for that. Jaya gets angry.It is not only her own silence that Deshpande is
highlighting but the silence of each and every character in the novel from different Strata of
society. Veena Sheshadri further supports this point: “The novel is not only about Jaya’s efforts
to obliterate the silence that is suffocating her. It is also about the despair and resignation of
women like Mohan’s mother, Jaya’s servant; Jaya has mentally disturbed cousin Kusum. It also
deals with Mohan’s silence, which is the silence of a man who speaks but can find no one to
listen to him” (7)Mohan’s character is perhaps deliberately weakened in order to glorify the
image of woman as a prudent wife, compromising and adaptable to the situation. Jaya describes
the character of her husband thus: “His old air of authority and confidence. Then the old self
vanished, leaving behind a sad, bewildered man.” (8) She further company him with Graham
Greene’s Scobie, a sad. obsessed man reconciled to the future. Besides all these issues presented
by Deshpande there is also a distance depicted in the parent-child relationship. Children are not
even aware of where their parents are. They have been sent for picnic and now Jaya, being
sensitive to people’s queries regarding the children, wants to get back home soon.Thus, in the
novel, Deshpande has presented not a woman who revolts openly in the beginning and later on
reconciles to the situation, but a kind of woman who wants to revolt, ultimately does not. Her
inner turmoil are so bitter that she is unable to speak them out and remains silent in order not to
be frustrated and disappointed after the disapproval of her actions by the society. She is unable to
unfold the truth. Her image becomes like that of a bird who has wings and knows that it can fly,
but, somehow, does not. In the same way, Jaya is aware of her abilities and she knows that she
can expose them openly, but somehow, she does not. She always remains silent, which indicates
that the traditional roles of women still have primacy over all the newly acquired professional
roles.

Shashi Deshpande has attained a reputation as a serious writer with fabulous potential. Her place
is among the significant women writers who are concerned with the real problems of women.
Her projection of women is also commendable. For the courageous and sensitive treatment of
large and significant themes, her works are regarded as outstanding contributions to Indian
literature in English.

Deshpande’s stories are authentic, emotional tales of the middle class educated women and of
their exploitation in a conventional, male chauvinistic society. Rather than treating them as
merely women’s issues, she measures these tribulations of the whole of humanity. Because this
tradition is what the next generation has to follow. Thus this handicapped custom will degenerate
the next generations. In her stories and novels Deshpande asks, how a healthy minded generation
can live in a society where women get little respect.The traditional patriarchal system has to be
changed. Our society demands submissive, docile, fearful,Dependent and suffering in silence
from women. But if they overcome these boundaries and liberated from these restrictions, they
learn to live in an equal footing with men and develop qualities associated with manliness such
as aggressiveness, ambition, independence and courage. Our country and its old stock of values
do not allow such liberation and women with bold attitude have to face difficulties to survive in
the present society.Deshpande focuses on the problems of middle class women and portrays the
traditional and tabooed Indian society that provides little scope for the independent growth of a
woman. In her novels, she discusses the Herculean obstacles in the path of women during their
quest for identity. She peeps into the inner world of women and portrays them in a most genuine
manner by applying the stream of consciousness method and a narrative technique, which goes
back and forth.The heroine of the novel, Jaya, can be called a mouth piece of Shashi Deshpande
herself. The way of thinking and opinions of Jaya is indisputably that of Deshpande. Her fifth
novel, That Long Silence teaches the reader that the real empowerment comes from our inner
will and the capacity to reach beyond restricted and guarded forts. She successfully makes her
readers realize that all path-breaking discoveries are the outcome of faith, which helps, man kind
like a ladder to reach the zenith. The journey to wider horizons requires an innovative effort.
What she has said in That Long Silence is true of all times in the history of mankind:To achieve
something, to become anything, you’ve got to be hard and ruthless. Yes, even if you want to be a
saint, if you want to love the whole world, you’ve got to stop loving individual human beings
first. And if they love you, and they bleed when you show them you don’t love them, not
specially, well, so much the worse for them! There’s just no other way of being a saint. Or a
painter. A writer. (That Long Silence,1)Male characters do not have any prominent role in
Deshpande’s novels. The reader can easily find out resemblance in Deshpande’s heroes and
sometimes they even look monotonous. She presents these characters only as dominating male
characters and seems to produce them only to trouble the women in her fiction. As Sara Grimke
puts it:Man has subjugated woman to his will used her as a means of selfish gratification, to
minister to his sexual pleasure, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he
desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill.Jaya’s husband, Mohan was that sort of
a man and he married her for his social betterment. Jaya had lost her father at the age of fifteen
and her brother considered her a burden and this lead her to marry Mohan. Before her marriage,
Jaya had been taught the importance of the husband in the life of a woman. Vanitamami tells her
that a husband is a sheltering tree. Ramukaka reminds her of the thing that the happiness of her
husband and home depends entirely on her. When Jaya is leaving her home after her marriage,
Dada has advised her to “be good to Mohan”. Jaya’s brother brought Mohan with money and
gave him to Jaya and she tried to be good to him. This was the beginning of Jaya’s lifeless kind
of married life.The entire novel brings out the stale married life in a middle class home and
Deshpande tells the story from the point of view of a wife. The women in Mohan’s family were
so definite about their roles and duties. But Jaya has no clear cut idea about her role in that
family. Her life before marriage and after marriage shared little similarity. Her father gave her
the name ‘Jaya’ for ‘victory’. But her in-laws gave her a new name ‘Suhasini’ pointed to a docile
but efficient housewife.Concerned only about the tastes and interests of Mohan, Jaya has lost her
authenticity as a human being. She has shaped herself to the wishes of Mohan. Mohan kept her
away from her likings. She was forced by Mohan to given up the job she wanted to take, the
baby she wanted to adopt and the anti-price campaign she had wanted to take part in. Jaya’s
journey through the rough road of her nuptial life, she learns at last :“no questions, no retorts:
only silence”. In accepting everything mutely, she thinks she resembles Sita or Draupadi. In her
view,The truth is that it was Mohan, who had a clear idea of what he wanted; the kind of life he
wanted to lead, the kind of home he would live in, and I went along with him (25)
Deshpande’s Woman- centered novels and short stories give us a psychological insight into the
working of a woman’s mind. Ever since Jaya got married, she has done nothing but wait.Waiting
for Mohan to come home, waiting for children to be born, for them to start school, waiting for
them to come home, waiting for the milk, the servant, the lunch carrier man… (30)This
mechanical process of waiting fills her life with existential nothingness. Related to the theme of
nothingness is the existential theme of death. Her monotonous, boring and isolated days made
her to realize this,And above and beyond this, there had been for me that other waiting… waiting
fearfully for disaster, for a catastrophe. I always had the feeling- that if I’ve escaped it today, it’s
still there round the corner waiting for me; the locked door, the empty house, the messenger of
doom bringing news of death. (30)Deshpande’s heroines do no give too much importance to
sexual encounters unless; it serves an urgent physical need. She feels that ‘love’ is an
overworked word, over burdened by the weight one put on it, just another word for human
contact. Jaya’s loveless sexual life with Mohan was mechanical and gives her no satisfaction.
Jaya’s relationship with Kamath was the result of her search for a human being who can
understand, console and support her. Jaya’s judgment about this relation proves it.The entire
novel brings out the stale married life in a middle class home. The married life of Jaya seems to
have lost its freshness. As a typical Deshpandean heroine, Jaya does not decide to walk away
from marriage or think about a divorce. Instead she has decided to tackle her marital problems in
her own way, and make her husband realize that she has to be treated on an equal footing,
without destroying the status of her family life.As she has nothing to do in the Dadar flat, Jaya
gets plenty of time for introspection. In the process of analyzing herself, she discovers her true
identity. She realizes that her self had been a divided self- one for the world and another for
herself. But in a middle class society it is a must for a woman to fulfill the roles of wifehood and
motherhood before their own identity. Deshpande’s women break out of their conventional lives
and attitudes and seek an identity of their own.Shashi Deshpande’s novels contain the seed of a
definite quest for a true and authentic self. By making her heroines undergo stages of self
introspection and self reflection Deshpande makes them evolve themselves into more liberated
individuals that what their gender or culture have sanctioned.The self quest of these women is
triggered off by some crisis in their lives. These women strive heroically and overcome their
cultural conditioning and the barriers created by society in matters of tradition and manners.
They finally emerge as free, autonomous individuals, no longer content to be led but desirous of
taking a lead. Rather than falling into Western Feminist slot, these strengthened Indian women,
work out their own individual paths towards liberation and in the process discover new facets to
themselves which had been latent in them. In this discovery of selves and consequent self-
fulfillment, these women pave the way for a better understanding of themselves as well as others.
In charting the course of such unconventional women, Mrs. Deshpande seems to make an
obvious plea that traditional society must re- mold itself in order to accept these emerging new
women.Shashi Deshpande’s achievement lies in the depiction of her central character, the
introspective and inward probing Jaya. She is representative of girls brought up in middle-class
families in post-Independent India, a time when most parents strove hard to provide their
children with English education and exposure to Western modes of living and thinking; parents
inculcated in their girls a certain duality, sometimes quite unconsciously: On the one hand an
impulsive desire to be temporarily, he has no work to do. In her stream of thoughts, Jaya, too,
looks at her marital relations where there is no conversation left between them. This unhappiness
is reflected not only in her conjugal life, but also in social life. Her books, her stories lack anger
and emotion. The publishers reject her writings. In addition, when, finally, Mohan angrily walks
out of the house, she feels that she has failed in her duty as a wife. She recalls the tradition of act
and retribution and compares herself with Kusum: “An act and retribution they followed each
other naturally and inevitably.” (128) When Mohan leaves the house without informing her; she
feels that her husband is neglecting her in the same manner as she had done with Kusum.There
grows a silence between the husband and the wife. It creates a gap between them. Mohan keeps
on asking questions, but she does not find a word to answer them: “I racked my brains trying to
think of an answer.” (31) But her silence on such issues, like her own writings, puts one into
doubt. As Veena Sheshadri writes: “One ends up by wondering whether Jaya has imposed the
long silence on herself not out of a sense of duty or to emulate the Ideal Hindu woman of the
ages gone by, hut in enter to camouflage the streaks of ugliness within her.”‘Her negative
approach coupled with her habit of discerning and analyzing every situation causes havoc in her
personal life. She does not like to submit to the male-chauvinistic ideas, for her prudence does
not allow her to submit before ignorance. Thus, there ensues a struggle between ignorance and
prudence.Further, her covert superiority complex makes her think not only of herself but also of
others which causes a type of irritability in her marital conduct. Thus, all the troubles emerge
from their unequal cognitive status.In order to have a well-balanced sexual life, it is important
that husband and wife be at same wavelength. They should supplement and not supplant each
other. Further, they should know each other well physically as well as emotionally. It is this
harsh reality that Deshpande tries to project through the female protagonist who, at the end,
chooses to break her long silence of the past.

The importance of woman has been recognized in literature on various grounds. For centuries,
the human experience has been synonymous with the masculine experience. Gyno-criticism has
opened up new vistas of study and research. The feminist philosophy projects the problem of
“self” The quest of women's identity is a typical motif of feminist literature and a central task of
feminist literary criticism. Accordingly, Sashi Deshpande’s novels reflecting their high critical
mind of women's identity seem to reveal the essential and typical theme of feminist literature.
Sashi Deshpande’s novels show how the "feminine mystique" deceives women, and that the
persona, a wise mother and good wife, is no more women's desirable identity. And it is presented
through a heroine who suffers from the inner dissociation and attempts to wander outside the
house. . In some respects, Simone de Beauvoir's trenchant observation, "He is the Subject, he is
the Absolute — she is the Other," sums up why the self is such an important issue for feminism.
To be the Other is to be the non-subject, the non-person, the non-agent — in short, the mere
body. Deeming women emotional and unprincipled, these thinkers advocated confining women
to the domestic sphere where their vices could be neutralized, even transformed into virtues, in
the role of submissive wife and nurturant mother.

The portraiture of women the entire world over have been all-too-myriad in their complexion, as
they have been all-too-rich in their composition and ail-too variegated in their character. Picked
up from the different times and diverse climes, even a random sample of these images soon
reveals the wide spectrum of richness of their code, content and treatment, their colours and
contours. There is, however, no denying the fact that the one-time idealized and idolized images
of women have undergone some unprecedented metamorphosis all the world over, especially in
the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.

According to Indian tradition, a woman must defer to her husband in every possible respect. She
must make the marital home pleasant for him. She must cook the meals, wash the dishes, and
take care of the children. She must never enquire about money and she must acquiesce to her
husband's every demand. But what happens when the old customs lose their power and the
woman no longer believes her life should be determined in this narrow fashion? This prospect is
the underlying theme of Sashi Deshpande’s novel, That Long Silence, in which her lead
protagonist, Jaya, undergoes profound changes against the backdrop of an India that is also
evolving. There is a shift in values and women have started acknowledging themselves the co-
equals of man. Though the high hopes of Feminism have been washed away in the present social
milieu, the relationship between man and woman becomes one of structured interdependence.
Still the woman has to work for her liberation without resigning herself to her destiny. Gender -
equality remains a myth.

A major preoccupation in recent Indian women's writing has been a delineation of inner life and
subtle interpersonal relationships. In a culture where individualism and protest have often
remained alien ideas, and marital bliss and the woman's role at home is a central focus; it is
interesting to see the emergence of not just an essential Indian sensibility but an expression of
cultural displacement. Sashi Deshpande has joined the growing number of women writers from
India on whom the image of the suffering but stoic woman eventually breaking traditional
boundaries has had a significant impact. The finite dimension of the relationship between man
and woman has been prescribed by man and not by woman. Man who is ruled by the mastery-
motive has imposed her limits on her. She accepts it because of biosocial reasons. Very often,
this acceptance is not congruent with the reality that lies underneath. Modern women prefer to
exercise—her choice and break away from her traumatic experiences. Women are now portrayed
as more assertive, more liberated in their view, and more articulate in their expression than the
woman of the past. Instead of downgrading the elements of suffering at the hands of her lover or
husband or man, she has started asserting her substantive identity in action, not in words.
Whether it is Devi of Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night, or Sita of Shashi
Deshpande's The Dark Holds No Terrors, or Lucy of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, the women have
established a coherent class structure—one of assertion of identity and defiance of male
supremacy, and protest at being subordinated by man.

The male ego has given the woman an inferior status through the ages. Man has relegated her to
a second-class citizen. A group of Indian women novelists in their, hybridity of thought and
multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-religious social dimensions have conceptualized the
women problem in general and middle-class and upper-class women in particular. While the
gynocritics think that too many women in too many countries speak the same language of
silence, some Indian women novelists like Githa Hariharan, Shashi Deshpande, Arundhati Roy,
and Anita Desai have tried with sincerity and honesty to deal with the physical, psychological
and emotional stress syndrome of women.

Deshpande began her literary career in 1977 as a short story writer. She is a born storyteller who
proved her sustained creativity with the novel form. She is one of the widely read post–
independence Indian English writers who write consciously of the issues that concern the
educated middle class woman in Indian society. She attempts to closely analyze man-woman
relationship within the perimeters of family and the contemporary social set-up. She primarily
focuses on the captivating problems and the suffocating environs of her heroines, who struggle
hard in this malicious and callous male-dominated world to discover their true identity.
Deshpande has thrashed women’s problems and situations in a fast-changing social scenario. We
cannot brand her either as typical Western liberated or an orthodox Indian one. She does not let
herself be overwhelmed by the Western feminism or its militant concept of liberation. In quest
for wholeness of identity, she does not advocate separation from the partner but a diplomatic
assertion of one’s identity within marriage.
In spite of the advances in technology and science, society still marginalizes woman, based on
gender distinction. In our society, there is a distorted notion that if somebody writes anything
about women, that would be a feminist work and it is against masculine supremacy. It is also
noted that many of the feminist writers worked out on the exaggerated or fabricated troubles of
women and at the end of the story the protagonist quarrels with the male characters and publicly
challenges the male domination. Shashi Deshpande differs from other feminist writers on this
angle. She does not write as a feminist but she has a woman’s perceptive on her works. She deals
with the genuine problems of contemporary Indian woman. With her works she could convey the
depths of female psyche. Her protagonists are modern, educated young women, crushed under
the weight of a male dominated and tradition bound society. Her attempt to give an honest
portrayal of their sufferings, disappointments and frustrations makes her novels ‘feminist texts’.
She does not make her women characters stronger than they actually are in their real life. We can
see the elements of ‘Deshpandean heroines in every woman of today’s Indian society. They hold
the authenticity of flesh and blood. Deshpande has handpicked these characters from real life and
readers can equate these characters with themselves or somebody they know. I think this might
be the reason behind her popularity.By describing women characters with a feminist awareness,
she reveals her own attitude to the concept of liberation. Her writings therefore lend themselves
to a feminist interpretation, which is not necessarily based on Western type feminisms. Her
female protagonists redefine the Sati- Savitri image. She tries to re-evaluate the present Indian
value system and recommends the importance of equality in man-woman relationship. On this
aspect, she has portrayed the ‘bossy’ nature of men and pointed out that women are turned to be
mere secretaries after their marriage.

A typical Indian husband considers his wife as a machine, which speed up or smoothen his day
to day work. For them marriage is a means for their social and personal betterment. After
accepting dowry, they use their wives as unpaid servants; Indian husbands gain more from the
‘marriage sale’. Mohan in That Long Silence is that kind of husband because he married the
protagonist for his social betterment. Though Deshpande is aware of this fact, she never suggests
the female chauvinism as a solution to all the problems of Indian women. This is why her voice
is different among the feminist writers in India.

Deshpande generally has the heroine as the narrator, and employs a kind of stream of
consciousness technique. All the novels of Deshpande hold the power to deliver the problems of
middle class women in a genuine sense. Her novels conceive the elements of personal
experiences. Her psychological insight into her characters put her on par with the masters of the
genre. Her women have a peculiar authenticity, as they seem to be direct offshoots of their
peculiar backgrounds. They don’t speak much but we have ample opportunity to read the
workings of even their inner beings. Deshpande has a rare vitality of language to make her
portraits striking as well as convincing.Jaydipsinh Dodiya remarks on the style of Deshpande:
Shashi Deshpande writes in a clear, lucid prose. Her articulation of thoughts is done in such a
way that the reader feels a bond with her. We feel as if she has stolen our feelings and thoughts
and written about them. Her finely honed sensibility reflects the wonderful interplay of
relationships and also many facets of isolation. The ambience is the everyday world with its
hustle and bustle

The novelist does not indulge in verbal acrobatics. She does not believe in beating round the
bush. Technique is very important for her. She hits the nail directly on the head. This clarity of
perception is visible when she categorically gives definitions of love and marriage (72,73)

The recent decades have witnessed the emergence of an unprecedented awareness of woman’s
situation, which has brought about shift in our appraisal of human condition. Gyno-criticism has
opened up new vistas of study and research. The veritable explosion of ‘linguistic sexism’ during
the past decade has been hailed as containing ‘an ocean of interest’.10 The politicization of the
sexism-in-language issue has insured its future prominence for a systematic study of the complex
interaction of language, sex and gender. It is believed that ways of speaking and writing are
intimately tied to ways of thinking and patterns of self-and-other evaluation. Scott observes:
“The mere fact that there are two sexes give rise inevitably to two ways of perceiving human
life: the ‘us’ of one view and the ‘them’ of the other.” The importance of woman has been
recognized in literature on various grounds. But she has rarely been defined as a subject in her
own right. For centuries, the human experience has been synonymous with the masculine
experience. The importance of woman deserves to be seen in the context of what Michel Calls
‘rupture’ of ‘discontinuity’ in history. Alex comfort has asserted the value of the ideology of the
whole human being looking at the whole universe.12 Woman is wronged in a society dominated
by male-oriented institutions and world-view, although she is the complementing principle to
what Carl Jung claims to be the psychic activity, which transcends the limits of consciousness.
When in determining the status and role of woman in the society “the ideal man posits opposite
himself as the essential other: he feminizes it because the woman is the palpable figure of the
other”. The discrimination and woman’s anomalous position have left indelible marks in the
sphere of languages also. Linguists like Stanley have posited a theory of ‘negative semantic
space for women. When woman move outside their traditional roles of mother and wife, they
say, they enter the semantic space already occupied by the male.

Right from the beginning of their life, women are forced to feel dwarfed and acquire a highly
circumscribed world-view. To quote Bolinger, “women are taught their place along with other
lesser breeds, by the implicit lies that language tells about them.”(15) This unfortunate state of
affairs has been responsible for many problems and confusions which women have been
condemned to face.

It may be mentioned at the outset that while dealing with her female character, especially their
relations with men, their drives and responses and their sexual repressions, Sashi Deshpande has
made significant efforts to step out of the main current of narrative devices and linguistic
techniques as developed by the masculine approach. She has tried to look at things essentially
from the women’s point of view. Although writing for her, is not an act of deliberation, reason
and choice and is primarily a matter of instinct, Sashi Deshpande is fully aware of the
possibilities of her medium and seems to be making at times strenuous efforts to explore its
possibilities. Her earnest attempts to break new grounds have made her linguistically self
conscious. She keeps on trying to annex, like a resourceful poet, new verbal domains had
integrate varying modes of perception and writing. Whether she succeeds or not in her efforts,
one thing that is certain is that she is almost invariably eager to exploit various linguistic
resources at her disposal.

Social conformity has always been obligatory for a woman than for a man. Generally, a woman’s
identity tends to be defined by others. Due to her sensitive nature, Jaya is very particular about
moulding her tastes in order to suit those of the rest even if her superior intellect is not satisfied.
In the very beginning of the novel, we see that she tries to reason out with her father as to why
she should not listen to the songs broadcast on the radio, but ultimately she keeps silent, sup-
pressing her desire. Here, Deshpande has presented the theme of lack of communication. As she
herself declares: “The themes of lack of communication may be over-familiar in western fiction,
but in extrovert India it is not much analyzed.”

In the novel under study, Shashi Deshpande presents the meanings of silence. As she herself puts
it: “You learn a lot of tricks to get by in a relationship. Silence is one of them. . . . You never find
a woman criticizing her husband, even playfully, in case it might damage the relationship.”4

The novel is not an autobiography, except for certain parts dealing with the frustrations of an
unsuccessful writer. Shashi Deshpande has presented an Indian woman as she is in India of the
eighties and not as she should be. Veena Sheshadri says in her review;

Why has the author chosen a “heroine” who only succeeds in evoking waves of irritation in the
reader? Perhaps it is because a competent writer like her is never satisfied unless she is tackling
new challenges. Also, she believes in presenting life as it is and not as it should be; and there
must be thousands of self-centered women like Jaya, perennially griping about their fate, but
unwilling to do anything that could result in their being tossed out of their comfortable ruts and
into the big, bad world of reality, to fend for themselves.5

To make the story authentic and appealing, Deshpande has used the device of first-person
narrative to ensure its credibility by making the protagonist read her inner mind and thus
representing the psyche of the modern middle-class learned woman.

Jaya is a modern woman rooted in tradition, whereas her husband, Mohan, is a traditionalist
rooted in customs. The difference between their outlooks is so great that they fail, repeatedly, to
understand each other. To Mohan, woman sitting before the fire, waiting for her husband to
come home and eat hot food is the real “strength” of a woman, but Jaya interprets it as nothing
more than despair. The difference in their attitude is the main cause of their failure to understand
each other.

Due to differences in attitude, their marital life grows shaky and gloomy. It becomes more of a
compromise than love, based on social fear rather than on mutual need of each other. The cause
may be rooted in their choice of a partner. For example, from the very beginning, Mohan wanted
a wife who was well educated and cultured and never a loving one. He made up his mind to get
married to Jaya when he saw her speaking fluently, sounding so much like a girl whom he had
seen speaking English fluently. He tells Jaya:

You know, Jaya, the first day I met you at your Kamukaku’s house, you were talking to your
brother, Dinkar, and somehow you sounded so much like that girl. I think it was at that moment
that I decided I would marry you. (90)

In her stream of thoughts, Jaya, too, looks at her marital relations where there is no conversation
left between them. This unhappiness is reflected not only in her conjugal life, but also in social
life. Her books, her stories lack anger and emotion. The publishers reject her writings. In
addition, when, finally, Mohan angrily walks out of the house, she feels that she has failed in her
duty as a wife. She recalls the tradition of act and retribution and compares herself with Kusum:
“An act and retribution—they followed each other naturally and inevitably.” (128) When Mohan
leaves the house without informing her; she feels that her husband is neglecting her in the same
manner as she had done with Kusum.

There grows a silence between the husband and the wife. It creates a gap between them. Mohan
keeps on asking questions, but she does not find a word to answer them: “I racked my brains
trying to think of an answer.” (31) But her silence on such issues, like her own writings, puts one
into doubt. As Veena Sheshadri writes: “One ends up by wondering whether Jaya has imposed
the long silence on herself not out of a sense of duty or to emulate the Ideal Hindu woman of the
ages gone by, hut in enter to camouflage the streaks of ugliness within her.”‘

Her negative approach coupled with her habit of discerning and analyzing every situation causes
havoc in her personal life. She does not like to submit to the male-chauvinistic ideas, for her
prudence does not allow her to submit before ignorance. Thus, there ensues a struggle between
ignorance and prudence.

Further, her covert superiority complex makes her think not only of herself but also of others
which causes a type of irritability in her marital conduct. Thus, all the troubles emerge from their
unequal cognitive status.

In order to have a well-balanced sexual life, it is important that husband and wife be at same
wavelength. They should supplement and not supplant each other. Further, they should know
each other well physically as well as emotionally. It is this harsh reality that Deshpande tries to
project through the female protagonist who, at the end, chooses to break her long silence of the
past.

Chapter 111
 IS THE PROBLEM A MIRAGE?

Does the protagonist in the novel really face the crisis of identity? From an Indian point of view
the question is totally irrelevant. A woman, especially a homemaker finds her security and
identity in the company of her husband. Jaya realizes this when she avoids Kamath’s sexual
overtures in spite of her body wanting it. The marriage with Mohan might have ended for all
practical purposes. However, Jaya cannot but reject the body’s response to Kamat’s desire for
her. She felt the power and attraction of her body’s response: it was simple, direct, and
irresistible. However, she resisted it and rejected it. She knew that she could not accept it. She
refuses to flirt with the doctor in the hospital (an old acquaintance who expected her to) even
though she asks for his help for Rajaram.

Mohan had left home without a word after Jaya uncontrollably laughed at him. His absence
unnerves Jaya and she thinks, she would fall apart. She begins to vegetate. Hopelessness and
despair thicken with the disappearance of Rahul who had gone with Rupa and Ashok (their
family friends) on a holiday trip. Then the situation changes. Rahul comes back. Mohan sends a
telegram informing her that all is, well which means that the corruption case involving him has
been settled without any harm to him. But on this occasion Jaya recalls with anguish the time
when she has got out of the house to walk aimlessly, unconsciously in the streets and alleys of
Bombay, because she could not go on with the crushing burden of marriage put on her. But what
had been her fate then? “Finally, totally exhausted, I’d gone back home.” (191) Her protest had
ended in futility. Her hysterical laughter had also been a gesture of protest, besides being a shield
from Mohan’s anger. Earlier, it had been the exhaustion and the feeling of insecurity that had re-
tethered her to the millstone of^mar-riage. Now it is despair and hopelessness which are breaking
her down. With the “All Well” news from Mohan, and the arrival of Rahul, she finds herself
slipping into the grooves of her marital life again. But a change has been wrought in her
situation. By penning her story, she has achieved articulation of her predicament, her constraints,
her anguish and has thereby broken her silence. Secondly, the process of reflection during the
course of articulation has given her an important insight: she realizes that fragmentation of the
self is not possible. Earlier she had cut off the bits of her that had refused to be Mohan’s wife;
she had denied certain parts of her self. But now she decides to live “whole,” retaining all that
did not fit in the straitjacket of “wifehood.” She had decided not to look for clues in Mohan’s
face and then give “him the answer I know he wants.” This decision fills her with vigour and
buoyancy and the novel ends on the affirmative note of hope as against frustration and despair
with which it had begun. The narrator concludes: “life has always to be made possible.” (193)No
act is to be done according to (her) own will by a young girl, a young woman, or even by an old
woman, though in (their own) houses. (Manu Dharma)

This tenet of Manu summarizes the plight of Indian woman but the 5truth is the woman yore
found fulfillment in being subordinate or submissive to the male member of the family – be it
father , husband or son.. Thus was sealed the fate of woman by the ancient Indian sage, Manu.
He went on to declare: “In her childhood (a girl) should be under the will of her father; in (her)
youth, of (her) husband; her husband being dead, of her sons; a woman should never enjoy her
own will.” The plight of Jaya is no different. That Manu’s edicts have formed an essential part of
the Indian male psyche from the beginning of the Indian civilization needs no corroboration.

Phenomenal progress has been registered in economic, political, technological and industrial
fields, but the social structure of the contemporary Indian remains tattooed with certain taboos
when it comes to the woman-question. Acutely conscious of this constricting social milieu, the
narrator-writer unfolds her story. The point of view is the first-person narrative, relating the
experiences from the inside, and thus, giving them immediacy, urgency and impact. However,
for an experience to achieve authenticity and consequently value, it has to be distanced. Shashi
Deshpande claims to distance herself from her “own self to make it an objective account.
Ostensibly, she relates it as the story of a particular couple, but the power relations in the
partriarchal structure, the gender differentiation with all its ramifications, and the typical travails
of a woman struggling to define herself, take on the dimension of the condition and place of the
Indian woman in society. Some of the abortive attempts of the protagonist towards androgyny
pinpoint the factors responsible for thwarting the achievement of this state, resulting in
tremendous psychic pressures endangering her sanity. The blank rectangles, preceding each part
of the book carry the suggestive connotation of “absence”or “silence” against which the
protagonist writer, Jaya, is struggling.

The novel begins with gender differentiation, valorizing “ the male categories. As a child, Jaya,
the narrator, nurtured shame because she could not, in spite of her father’s exhortations and
admonitions, respond to and admire the classical music. She enjoyed, though furtively, Rafi and
Lata, whose songs were played by Radio Ceylon. The shame continued in her adult life, after her
marriage, because she secretly enjoyed the snug, maternal and affection-laden “ads” preceding
the movies, which her husband, Mohan, dismissed as worthless. Non-cerebral, sentimental and
moving get categorized as “mushy” and are associated with the femaleness of the woman.They
are branded as inferior to the high- brow classical music of Paluskar and Faiyaz Khan—ihe
cerebral aspects of the arts repressing the maleness of the man, the superior being. But why is the
emotionalism of the woman to be rated down? Why is it innately worthless? Or is it really so?
The given paradigm of the society, both real and fictional, docs not admit of such probings. It has
been so. Hence, it shall be so. Another potent example of the gender differentiation is provided
by die family tree that is sketched by Ramukaka (Jaya’s paternal uncle): “Look Jaya, this is our
branch. This is our grandfather your great grandfather—and here’s father, and then us Laxman,
Vasu and me. And here are the boys Shridhar, Jaanu, Diiikar, Ravi...” Jaya exclaims, ‘7’/w not
here!” Ramukaka looks up at her with irritation and impatience at her stupidity: “How can you
be here? You don’t belong to this family! You’re married, you’re now part of Mohan’s family.
You have no place here.” (142-43) But she would not find herself even in Mohan’s family tree, if
someone sketched it, for women do not form part of Ramukaka’s family history. Gender
differentiation becomes instrumental for the different roles that are to be played by boys and
girls. Jaya had gone to stay with her paternal uncle. She noticed that it was the duty of her
cousins to clear up the place of the utensils and the leftovers after everybody had eaten. Sujata
and Veena, Jaya’s cousins quarrelled over this duty and suggested Jaya do it. But the suggestion
was vetoed at which they angrily asked, “Then why can’t the boys do it? Jaanu, or Shridhar?
Why does it have to be me and Veena?” (81) But it aroused only a derisive laughter. Jaya’s
mother (Ai) gifted the flat in Dadar (left to her by Makrandmarna, her brother) to her son even
though he was not very much interested in it. Ai could not think of giving it to her daughter,
though it hurt Jaya and made her resentful.

A common Indian practice is to give a new name to the girl on the day of her wedding. This
social practice seeks to supercede or supplant the identity of the woman. This is in sharp contrast
to the continuity, nay, reinforcing of the same, familiar identity of the male—an identity which is
the product of the patriarchal ethos. Mohan gave the protagonist, Jaya, the name Suhasini on the
wedding day. But Jaya does not take on the name, Suhasini. She remains Jaya, the name given to
her by her father who often repeated “Jaya for victory.” Her not adopting the name Suhasini
becomes the manifestation of resistance to the sterotyping that is inflicted on every woman in the
Indian society. However, the rejection of the name Suhasini remains only a token victory. She is
Jaya and yet she knows she is Suhasini as well—Suhasini “who was distinct from Jaya, a soft,
smiling, placid, motherly woman. A woman who lovingly nurtured her family. A woman who
coped.” (15-16)

The novel highlights the patriarchal power structure in several man-woman relationships. A
forceful example of die power of patriarchy is provided by the episode Mohan relates to Jaya
who in turn puts it down in her narrative:

I can see a picture of extraordinary clarity and vividness—the woman [Mohan’s mother]
crouching in front of the dying fire, sitting blank and motionless, the huddled bundles of sleeping
children [Mohan, his brothers and sisters] on the floor, the utter silence, the loud knock at the
door . . .

They had all had their food, except her. Though she always waited for him, their father, however
late he was (and he never gave her any indication of when he would be back), she had asserted
herself in this, that she would not make the children wait for him. She gave them their dinner,
even the older ones, and then she cooked rice for him again, for he would not, he made it clear to
her, eat what he called “your children’s disgusting leavings.” He wanted his rice fresh and hot,
from a vessel that was untouched. She had just finished this second cooking and was waiting,
hoping perhaps that he would not be too late, for it wouldn’t do to let the food get cold, and as
for lighting the fire again, that was unthinkable.

He came in and went straight to the bathroom to wash.

By the time he returned, she had his plate ready. Hanging his shirt on a peg on the wall, he sat
down, drank a glass of water, poured some into his palm to sprinkle ritually around his plate . . .
and then he paused. “Why is there no fresh chutney today?” he asked, not “looking at her.

She mumbled something. The next moment he picked up his heavy brass plate and threw it, not
at her, but deliberately at the wall, which it hit with a dull clang. He stood up, and jerking his
shirt off the peg walked out of the house.

As soon as he had gone, the two older children, the boy and the girl, sat up.
“Go back to sleep,” the mother said to them. “It’s nothing.”Silently, watched by the children, she
picked up theplate, cleaned the floor and the wall of all the spattered food, and wiped it. Twice
the girl pleaded, “Avva, let me do it.”

“No,” the woman replied. “You go back to sleep.” When it was all done, she came back with the
scrubbed plate and said to the boy, “Are you awake? Will you go and get me some chillies from
next door?” (35-36)

Mohan’s reaction to the episode, “God . . . She was tough. Women in those days were tough,”
(36) is found strange by Jaya, but is actually not so strange, because it is in conformity with the
psyche formed by the patriarchal power structure. Women were tough. They could survive the
blows of the patriarch. They went on competently with the work. But Jaya discerns the deep-
rooted despair in the episode, despair so deep that it could not get articulated. It is a struggle so
bitter that “silence and surrender” become the only weapons. Jaya is conscious of the power of
the patriarch in the power relations. And it is against this that she occasionally chafes and feels at
the end of her tether. There is no dearth of instances which reinforce the inferior status of
women. Jija, Jaya’s maid-servant, is the living epitome of the oppressed Indian woman. In spite
of the brutal beatings from her good-for-nothing husband »hr hu no anger, no complaint* and no
equivocation in her mind as to her approach to life. She has to earn; she has to cater to her
husband’s needs which include drinking liquor, and she has to live on. She does all these
ungrudgingly, reticently, competently: the ideal woman portrayed in Manu’s Ordinances. She
would wipe her vermillion the day her husband died, and be fidel to him even after his death.
This is what she actually does when her husband dies. Not only that, she willingly brings up the
children of the “other woman,” whom her husband had married (she had also died) because Jija
could not give him a child. The story gets repeated after3 Jija’s husband’s deatli—only the actors
change. The other woman’s son, Rajaram, steps into his father’s shoes. He beats his wife, Tara,
extorts money from her and drinks liquor. Jija would not let Tara even revile or curse Rajaram:
“Stop that! Don’t forget, he keeps the kumkum on your forehead. What is a woman without
that?” (53) Manu could not have hoped for a more steadfast follower! Yet another instance of the
sceptre used by the patriarch is the beating administered by a man to his wife in the building in
Dadar where Mohan and Jaya have come to live. There is a sound of a blow, followed by soft
moans of the woman. The man hisses, “Open your mouth, you bitch. Tell me where you went.
Speak.” There is no answer and, therefore, more blows are inflicted. But the woman continues to
cling to her silence, abandoning it only to cry softly “mother, mother, mother.” And the same
silence is observed by Vimls . Mohan’s sister, after she gets married. She does not tell her in-
laws about her malady and bleeds herself] to death. When she is taken to the doctor by Mohan
and Jaya, the doctor asks them in disbelief: “You mean to say . . . She didn’t tell anyone about
her illness? When she was suffering so much?” (39) Vimla knew, even if she had told her in-
laws about her illness, it would have been of no avail. Her mother-in-law’s response to her
illness confirms this: “God knows what’s wrong with her. She’s been lying there on her bed for
over a month now. Yes, take her away if you want to. I never heard of women going to hospitals
and doctors for such a thing. As if other women don’t have heavy periods! What a fuss! But
these women who’ve never had children are like that.” (39) This is a typically conditioned
response in a patriarchal system.
Jaya has her first and the only outburst with Mohan soon after her marriage. But then she was
fresh from her “Jaya for victory” past. She was also new to the accepted mores of married life.
Nonetheless, she has to make the first reconcili-atory move after days of Mohan’s silence. And
then she goes silent, keeping her grouses to herself, withdrawn under the shell of silence. Mohan,
steeped in the norms he had learnt in his own family, says to Jaya:”My mother never raised her
voice against my father, however badly he behaved to her.” (83) Should this be potent enough
reason or argument for Jaya to follow suit? But Jaya does follow suit. She feels hurt and angry at
the accusations Mohan flings at her during a later quarrel, but she is struck dumb: “I was full of a
sense of angry confusion. What was he charging me with? And, Oh God, why couldn’t I.speak?
Why couldn’t I say something? I felt foolishly inadequate, having nothing to offer him in
exchange for all the charges he was pouring on to me. ... I could say nothing. I sat in my place,
pinned to it by his anger, a monstrously huge spear that went through me, excruciatingly painful,
yet leaving me cruelly conscious.” (120-21) When silence fails as a protective cover, hysteria
becomes the only shield: ‘*/ must not laugh, I must not laugh,” (122) she keeps telling herself,
considering the gravity of the situation (Mohan is involved in a case of bribery and fears
prosecution, loss of job and disgrace) and fierceness of Mohan’s anger, but she docs laugh and
lands herself in a more hopeless situation.

A woman is besieged with all sons of advice, when she gets married. “Be good to Mohan, Jaya,”
(138) Dada had advised Jaya, when she was leaving Ambegaon. Vanitaraami had used an
enveloping simile to drive home trie sanctity of a husband: “A husband is like a sheltering tree.”
(137) Ramukaka had said, “Remember, Jaya, the happiness of your husband and home depends
entirely on you.” (138) But Jaya had not been told a word about what to do when a marriage was
over. It had been over for Kusum, Vanitamami’s sister’s daughter. But Kusum had opted for
madness. She had escaped into it and later into death. Jaya chooses not to. But then she has to
pay the price for it. She experiences a terrible loneliness. And it is only when her marriage is
over, she understands what Kamat had meant when he said to her, “Pursuit of happiness,” is “a
meaningless, unending exercise, like a puppy chasing its tail.”

The status of women has undergone a giant hike in the recent decades. Education, exposure to
the fast growing world, urbanization, increasing number of career women, awareness of own
strength and status in society are some of the reasons for it. The change in the status of women
has revolutionized the system of family and literature too. This theme of self realization has
become a major theme to literary artists, theorists, and sociologists. Though we have overcome
many evil practices like child marriage and Sati, the image of Sita and Savitri is still there in the
mind of Indian community, this in essence is the theme of Shashi Deshpande’s works. The
conflict between the light of education and exposure and the darkness of the old tradition and the
values is the essence of her novels.

That Long Silence tells the story of Jaya and the novel expands through various stages of her
physical, mental and emotional developments. As every other Indian girl, she had been born and
trained according to the conventional practices of the Indian society. Her girlhood was a well
protected one and her father was very fond of her. He gave her much freedom with an insight
that she was not an ordinary girl. Because of this influence, she failed to find friends in her
schools and colleges. After the death of her father, Jaya was always terribly alone. But she could
never complain of her loneliness.

In That Long Silence she makes an aesthetic plea to free the female psyche from the clutch of
conventional male domineering. In short, almost all the literary ventures of Shashi Deshpande
revolve round the pathetic and heart rending condition of women in a male dominated society.
For this, she never suggests female domination as a solution to it. She points out the importance
of self realization among Indian women. She believes that all the path breaking discoveries are
the outcome of our faith, which helps mankind like a ladder to reach the zenith. Fro the very
beginning of the novel, That Long Silence, she stresses this

To achieve something, to become anything, you’ve got to be hard and ruthless. Yes, even if you
want to be a saint, if you want to love the whole world, you’ve got to stop loving individual
human beings first. And if they love you, and they bleed when you show them you don’t love
them, not specially, well, so much the worse for them! There’s just no other way of being a saint.
Or a painter. A writer. (That Long Silence,1)

The theme of cultural conflict or reconciliation assumes a pivotal place in the recent fiction by
Indian writers. It is more than a manifestation of the Indian writer’s constant awareness of the
changing traditions. Further, the process of realizing himself creatively in English exposes him to
western culture. The protagonist’s awareness of these two civilizations exhilarates her search for
her own identity. They are all in search of their true image, tossing between the traditional
values, they have absorbed from childhood and the new values, their education and their
association with the west has bestowed open them.

Most of the women writers employ a mode of social realism. History rarely gives space to
women and get it is woman who keeps history alive by carrying on the burden of the past and
samskaras. The institution of marriage, eulogized by male, has been viewed by women writers as
something debilitating, restricting and emotionally fragmenting for the female protagonist.
Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence has a slight resemblance to Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s
House. Both Ibsen and Deshpande could draw the attention of readers on these works and both
wrote their works with a sense of social commitment. So these works have a social relevance
also. Both the works unveil the trueS condition of women on those particular periods. The
heroines Jaya and Nora represent the caged life in a male dominated society. A Doll’s House and
That Long Silence develop through the disillusionments of the heroines and their identity crisis
which lead them to find out their individuality as a human being. Feminism, the meaning of
marriage, theme of isolation, the quest for identity, self-realization etc. are the major themes
shared in these works. Both reflect the nature of themes with their titles also.

Indian mythology depicts woman more as an absence than presence. Woman’s sacrifice,
surrender and affacement are approved because the heroic failures of the females ensure the
victory of the males. Deshpande very interestingly manipulates the Indian myths to create a
space for women to challenge the traditions of subservience and circumscription. Her re-vision
of the myth Draupadi of Mahabharata uncovers new truths and possibilities related to female
psychology. Conventionally, it is believed that a married woman without her husband is unhappy
and incomplete. Deshpande through re-orientation of the myth suggests that a married woman
may desire to enjoy an independent existence occasionally.

Women’s double marginalization through patriarchy and imperialistic ideologies is a dominant

point of reflection and discussions in all fictional works of women writers. In a middle class
family, man tries to convince his family that he is the spine of the family which keeps standing it
erect. That Long Silence handles this kind of marginalization and the minimizing role of women
in their family. Jaya’s husband Mohan was this sort of a person and he cleverly veils his guilt by
his repeated self appraisal that he was a dutiful son, he is a dutiful father, husband, brother. But
Mohan’s statement breaks Jaya by her description of her nuptial life

A pair of bullocks yoked together… that was how I saw the two of us the day we came here. It
was an eerie sensation I had while climbing up the stairs with him, as if there was for that one
infinitesimal moment a pause in my being, and I, detached from myself, saw this… a pair of
bullocks yoked together. (7)

Deshpande’s primary focus of attention is the world of women -- the struggle of women in the
context of modern Indian society. Unable to fully defy traditional, patriarchal norms of society,
these women characters attempt to realize and preserve their identity not only as a woman but
also as a human being.

Though her novels are set in a limited milieu of Indian society, the heightened sensibility of her
protagonists helps them in their attempts to carve out a niche, however small, for themselves.
That Long Silence is the story of Jaya’s solitary crusade against the deafening silence that has
entrapped the likes of her for generations.

In our tradition there is an old practice of stamping a woman writer, a feminist if she writes about
women or their problems. But a male writer is free from this stamping and he has full freedom to
write anything even it is vulgar about women. Thus our women writers are restricted by certain
discrimination even in the play of creativity. This is the result of our tradition of male
domination. Deshpande also had to face this problem and in certain moments, she bursts out of
calling her a feminist. She wonders why male writers are never accused of writing male
propaganda. She prefers to be called a writer with humanistic concerns than a feminist writer. .

Jaya is forced by events beyond her control to seek refuge at her first home, after marriage.
Husband, Mohan, has been accused of misappropriation of office funds and, on the advice of
some friends, is in hiding for some time. Jaya was not supported to Mohan’s business
malpractices in the company. Away from her children and alone with her husband, Jaya
understands dearly many aspects of her life and relationships that she had avoided or failed to
realize earlier. Her decision to write as she wishes to is rendered possible only after this home
coming.
Well I’ve achieved this. I’m not afraid any more. The panic has gone. I’m Mohan’s wife, I had
thought, and cut off the bits of me that had refused to be Mohan’s wife. Now I know that kind of
a fragmentation is not possible (191)

Deshpande employs withdrawal as a tool for both introspection and self realization for Jaya. She
withdraws not into a world of fantasy but into a world away from the suffocating circumstances
of their life. Unable to adjust to the social demands on her, she attempts a temporary
psychological as well as sociological withdrawal. In the former, she probes into her inner psyche
and attempts to understand her personality, her hidden strengths and her potential. In the latter-
sociological withdrawal- she acquires freedom and ensures a place for herself in both family and
society. Then she is able to view her future more positively only after delving into her past,
reliving past experiences and rethinking past ideas and attitudes.

Jaya needs a period of physical and mental withdrawal before she is able to come to terms with
her expectations of life. When Mohan walks out of the Dadar flat, she is in a state of turmoil.
Alone at home, with only Mukta and Nanda to nurse her back to normalcy out of her delirium
and fever, Jaya is physically alienated from her family- temporarily. During the next two days
she writes, pouring out all that she had attempted to suppress for years together. This writing,
during the period of withdrawal, helps her realize that she alone is responsible for both her
achievements and failures. She begins to see the truth of the dictum, “do as you desire” only after
this period of withdrawal.

The novel ends with a remarkable outlook of Jaya that:

We don’t change overnight. It’s possible that we may not change even over long periods of time.
But we can always hope. Without that, life would be impossible. And if there is anything I know
now it is this: life has always to be made possible. (193)

This concept has a world-wide acceptance. Jaya’s expectation for a new life, a better way of
living with a better understanding with Mohan is clear in these lines. The most important thing is
that it is the ultimate self realization of Jaya. Here Jaya discovers her real problems and finds
remedy for that.

The fictional world of women writers today has a wider range than the limited social one
presented by their predecessors. Today, the women characters do not merely confirm to male
expectations or conflicts with the male world. Jaya attempts to break not only her own silence
but that of women, especially women writer, down the ages.Form the traditional roles of
daughter, sister, wife and mother, Deshpande’s protagonists emerge as individuals in their own
right. They achieve this not by being brazen feminists or iconoclasts but by a gradual process of
introspection and self realization. Jaya is not a rebel or conformist or trail- blazer or a self
effacer. Faced with difficulties of life Deshpande’s heroines seek a path that allows them
individual freedom and growth even within the constructing environs of a traditional upper-
middle class family. In their reaction to role conflict in a patriarchal society, they show the
strength to achieve their goals of self realization. From a state of passive acceptance they move
to one of active assertion. Without surrendering to societal pressures, and without breaking away
from accepted, traditional, social institutions, Deshpande’s protagonists succeed in being
individuals.Deshpande suggests the theme of self realization as a remedy to the suffering of that
long silence of women in the middle class educated society than a female domination. This is in
result of awareness that the ‘iconoclast’ characters like Seeta, Savitri, Leelavati etc. can nothing
to do with the society. They remained helpless and could not save themselves from their
dilemma. By presenting understanding, bold and courageous female characters Deshpande asks
the relevance of such Sati-Leelavati characters in the social order. The heroines of Deshpande
have the quality of ‘humanness’ and the sense to analyze things, which these ‘ideal women’ lack.
Deshpande believes that the heroines of her woks are able to be role model for the women in
India and only they can re-mould the society in a more perfected and practical way.Shashi
Deshpande stressed the idea of self realization in all her novels and demands a position for
women in the society, without the support of their masculine part. But she could not escape
herself from the label of ‘the daughter of a renowned dramatist Shriranga’. But this is not the
problem of Deshpande only, almost all the women writers used to write the name of their father
or husband after their name. This shows a kind of insecurity lay on the deeper portions of
feminine mind. As their works indicate, this has to be changed; they have to have a self
realization of their own.
 CHAPTER 4

CONCLUSION:

The paper explores the place of a woman in today‘s society through the novel. The paper
also studies the psyche of males. Man still thinks that woman is a piece of furniture kept in the
house. They still want them to follow their steps without raising any question. The Male psyche
needs a major transformation. They must respect the females‘ desires and choices. Dr.Sapna
Tiwari writes that it is also the females also who are responsible for their sufferings. They must
raise their voice and fight back for their rights and place in society. Dr Sapna Tiwari says that
through the character Jaya, the writer expresses that a woman can rebel and fight if anything is
going wrong. She has all the rights to protest. A woman can only change a woman's life. She has
to take her steps and decisions to mark her identity. The role of a traditional woman must
change. Feminism is the theory which asserts that women have the equal rights and role to play
in social and political scenarios. A country can make all round progress only if the woman has
the equal rights and opportunity to progress.The portrayal of Jaya as an awakened woman, thus,
soon fades into that of a middle-class romantic heroine whose courage fails at the first encounter
with reality. All her revolutionary ideas sag by the time the challenge presents itself. Her
realization that her own children are distanced from her besides her husband‘s accusation of
having let him down is sufficient to shake her dreams of glory for her. Jaya, thus, signifies the
weakness of the servile mind of the service classes. If the conclusion Jaya arrives at is taken as
the authorial sanction, then Indian womanhood has no hopes of salvaging her image even with
westernized education. Thus, Deshpande offers appalling spectra of the modem woman heaving
a sigh of relief after realizing, There was nothing he needed, so there was nothing for me to do,
nothing I had to do. Another important aspect of the narrative of That Long Silence is that Jaya
is heroic in her ideas and perceptions only so long as she stays on the subjective grounds of
Church gate. All her heroism sags when she shifts to the upper-floor flat at Dadar. Now, she
reflects upon the ground-realities from some height. She is not involved in them because life has
come to a stand still for her. The upper-floor existence signifies the objective state as against the
subjective mode at the Church gate. No hopes are offered: if Mohan is reinstated, life will start
flowing again for Jaya; if not, then she shows no sign of recovery from the shock of realization.
There is no vision offered: Jaya can be happy only as a devoted but complacent wife.Twentieth
century marks the emergence of many women writers on the Indian literary scene. The stories
presented are also presented through this has been written from the women's point of view and
though the long silence is broken and women express their anguish, the picture is still grim.
Although the women wish to take a bold step, because of certain values instilled in them right
from childhood, they feel a sense of guilt if they break the established 235 norms. For instance,
Malini in Starry Nights who, in preference to her husband, children and family, gives up her
career as a ghazal singer. Maya in Second Thoughts, compiles with the traditional
norms.Naturally very limited freedom is granted to such women. Sooner or later they learn to
adjust, as there is no other alternative, if they need to live a respectful life. Maya, too, accepts to
remain enveloped in the loneliness and sadness of her life. On second thoughts, she learns to
survive the sultriness of not only Mumbai, but also of her marriage. This clearly shows that the
reality hidden behind the glamorous and glittering life of the modern women is extremely bitter
because after the temporary glamor vanishes, they have to learn to live with the stark realities of
life. Deshpande‘s novel That Long Silence captures the leitmotifs running through all her short
stories. Jaya‘s life falls apart when her husband is suspended from work after allegations of
malpractice against him. Her ordinary existence is disrupted; the future of the family is in
jeopardy. Jaya is an unsuccessful writer, haunted by memories. Differences with her husband,
frustrations in their seventeen-year marriage, disappointment in her two teenage children and the
claustrophobia of her childhood all begin to surface. She says: surely there comes a moment in
every human life when he or she says, like the Sibyl I wish to die. In her small, suburban
Bombay flat, Jaya grapples with these and other truths, among them her failure at writing and her
fear of anger. Deshpande portrays a woman trying to erase a long silence‘ begun in childhood: I
had learnt it at last, no questions, no retorts, only silence.‘For Deshpande, female autonomy and
selfhood relate to sexuality and identity; she explores the body as a site of subjugation and social
control. In 'The Intrusion‘, couples are on their honeymoon at a seaside village. The groom
makes advances towards his bride who is lost in reflections of her past life and their arranged
marriage . Our women writers have succeeded in writing about the real problems of Indian
women and their lives inside the four walls of their house. The life of Indian women is different
when compared to the women of other nations. Our country is famous for educated and
successful people but there is an old stock of traditional norms, which pulls back the social
betterment of the Indian female community such as the identity of women being incomplete, if
lacking the name of their husbands or fathers along with their names. And it is also believed that
a woman has no independent existence even if she is educated or employed. Our women writers
have graphically depicted this narrow-mindedness in many novels and other literary forms.Like
Virginia Woolf or Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande is a prose rhapsodist of feelings, sentiments
and emotions passing through human consciousness. Anita Desai and Shashi Deshpande
specialize in depicting undulations of the female ego or self under the pressure of cn:ical human
situations and emotional relationships. Their attention is also focused on feminine suffering in
the complex culture stresses and strains in Indian society having strong past moorings. Shashi
Deshpande explores human relationship in modern Indian society particularly in husband-wife
relationship, Shashi Deshpande’s women, like those of her predecessor, are tolerant, obedient
and submissive. But a feminist awakening and upsurge is notable in their feelings and conduct.
The theme of the novel That Long Silence implies a belated rebellion, a postponement of
aggressive behavior for long till postponement cannot be made any more. The dam of silence and
tolerance is broken and the result is a flood of egotistical assertions and emotional explosion.The
wisdom that Jaya derives in this situation is to follow her will and act accordingly. If we focus
our attention on the propriety or justifiability of her will or ego. the result may be mixed. Her
conduct is not the model of righteousness or even right; she may be wrong or very wrong, but
she is human and her reaction has a feminine modernist quality, making her a modern or new
woman without abjuring the totality of the obligations of the typically traditional woman in
India. As the title of the novel indicates, Jaya for very long in her past life tried to play the role of
traditional woman, the embodiment of tolerance, suffering and courage. However, her courage
deserts her and she becomes the modern egotistical self-assertive rebellious woman, all these
being marks of modern feminist awakening. However, the desertion of the traditional submissive
role and adoption of the new role do not leave the psyche of Jaya unstinted and intact. She is in
great emotional turmoil. It is this emotional turmoil and suffering that the novelist depicts with
rare skill.When the human ego sinks into the flood of sufferings and its. power of toleration
reaches the brink of negation, freedom to act becomes an existential necessity. Otherwise
freedom to act at will may lead to perfect libertinism and disorder in social and human
relationships. She is torn between love and hate, liking and disliking her own husband and life
situations. Such a creature is the least entitled for the right of free action. She must follow rules
and customs and should continue as an obedient and submissive wife as part of the Hindu
Culture and righteous path for a married woman. Bui this would be another extreme of tyranny
and mechanical subservience to a husband as if he were a god to his wife. The novelist Shashi
Deshpande has chosen a humanistic bye-line, a psychological solution to Jaya’s problem. She is
allowed indulgence in her own egotistical feelings. The smoldering fire of suppressed feelings,
the maintenance of self-control the pursuit of the mechanical role of mother and son, the need to
cater to the physical and emotional needs of husband and children must remain suspended for a
while, or be forgotten and her real feminine soul, her pent up sufferings and feelings must find an
outlet. The lid of self-control must be opened and left open for a while to allow the smoldering
feelings an outlet.The element of tiredness and disgust the bearing of many types of burdens
while playing the role of ideal Hindu wife, the discard of her selfhood and identity as a writer
and subordinating everything to the wifely role accumulate and tell upon her nerves and weaken
her emotional equipoise, effort fully maintained all along. But Mohan, under the pressure of his
suspension and social complications -arising from it and nervous irritations caused by
humiliation and the need of hiding facts from family and friends, accuses Jaya of changed
behavior in the days of adversity. The undesirable and untimely accusation puts her into an
aggressive and almost sadistic posture, almost unnatural and insane. A mood of aggressiveness
and revenge, anger and irritation, overpower her. Jaya, like every wife, had fed Mohan and her.
The smoldering firewood of bitterness, waiting. accumulated hurts and injuries, disgust with the
role of a wife and mother primarily a feminine role and undesirable feelings of every type
tolerated so far but intolerable from now onwards, go up in flames: Jaya’s disgusted laughter is a
cathartic act Jaya’s laughter is a purgative act for her but a stimulant to the misery of Mohan, her
husband, whose miseries are increased manifold and who in humiliation deserts the house and
runs away in disgust from society because of the accusation of accepting bribe.her failure Java is
a weak woman, m her failure she is a modern woman who is weaker than the traditional woman
of Hindu society. This is the new feminist element in the novel, as well as in Shashi Deshpande;
The depiction of such intense feelings of female ego gives a sharp focus to the psychological
insights of Shashi Deshpande. All incidents are presented psychologically. Like the female
protagonists in Jane Austen’s novels, Jaya is in pursuit of self-knowledge : “Self-revelation is a
cruel process. 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” (p. 1).
So we have Jaya trying to know herself, the narrator heroine painting her own picture of
life.Deshpande focuses on male-female rivalry as felt by Jaya. The egocentric vein in her
temperament does not strive for the total fusion of identity with Mohan; she keeps intact a little
bit of her own identity, her own individuality. As a married lady she has become dependent on
Mohan and this she considers derogatory; she feels she is reduced to “the stereotype of a woman;
nervous, incompetent needing male help and support” (p. 77). In married life she wishes to
maintain her separate identity. Her desire for self-knowledge makes her realize her “awesome
power over him” (p. 82). Dada reveals humorously another strain of her character as a child and
calls her a “pampered, bad-tempered only daughter” (p. 92)Shashi Deshpande has made the
revelation of Jaya’s real nature the very core of the novel. Java is in conscious pursuit of self-
knowledge. Thus, various discordant notes meet and unite her complex nature. She is a model of
patience, endurance-, devotion, integrity, rebellion, defiance and disobedience at the same tune.
She is all along pursuing the idea of a separate female identity. She finds it difficult to put
together the different discordant acts of her personality. Thus, the young bride Suhasini is at
loggerheads with the mature and seasoned Jaya who is both restrictive and destructive. The
tradition-bound docile woman in Jaya is irreconcilable with the modernist individuality seeking
Jaya. The loyal, loving Jaya the devoted wife of Mohan is irreconcilable with the epicurean
Jaya relishing a momentary embrace with Kamat. So, the novelist is able to impart a complex
identity to Jaya, focusing at the same time on the egoistic and the altruistic aspects of
womanhood

Shashi Deshpande is undoubtedly a writer who looked into women's problems. She charts
women’s emotions starting from the pangs of a growing up girl to the void created because of the
non-fulfilment of a woman’s yearnings. Jaya comes to the conclusion that marriage is subjective
and abusive to women. She is forced to follow her husband's wills and wishes. That she has no
right to have her own independence. Shashi Deshpande succeeds in this novel to turn Jaya's
misery into a revolutionary thinking in order to find out for her own identity. It symbolizes Jaya's
attempt to reveal and inform herself. By the end of the novel, the protagonist within the family's
power matrix undergoes a radical change: her fears and insecurities have been replaced by self-
esteem that is an important ingredient of happiness in human life. Now she wishes to exercise
her choice; her confidence drives her to break the silence while her skills make her talk about her
writing. Thus, narrative records Jaya's movement from the feminine phase as she dissolved the
patriarchal system, while still being a part of it.

Jaya the main character of the novel is taught by her paternal family to be a submissive wife
to her husband after her marriage. She is trained in a way to accept the
patriarchy of her husband and live in a male-dominated family. So we find Jaya submissive to
her husband and not confronting him in any way. We can see the helplessness of a girl and wife
in a male-dominated home and society.We find that Jaya is not happy in such a husband-and-
wife relationship. Her husband Mohan is not bothered about her feelings and emotions. For him,
Jaya as a wife is his status symbol in society. At home, she needs to fulfill her role as a wife
satisfying her husband sexually and taking care of children and all other duties as a wife. We find
the helplessness of a wife in marriage and physical relationship.Jaya in her isolation and
loneliness finds Mr. Kamat her neighbor. Mr.Kamat is quite supportive and encouraging toward
Jaya. He tells her to be honest in her writing and supports her. Jaya finds solace and comfort in
Mr. Kamat draws closer to him.But she quickly realizes that society will not accept the
friendship between a married woman and a widower. So she controls her feelings and leaves Mr,
Kamat alone when he is dying. We can find the helplessness of a married woman while dealing
with other men. Jaya, a woman, faces a dilemma in her personal life as a married woman. The
realistic condition of a woman living in our Indiansociety is presented by Shashi Despande.
Many women in our society today are facing different dilemmas in their personal and
professional life.