Analysis Of Shashi Deshpande's 'In The Country Of Deceit'

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Shashi Deshpande is one of the India’s leading contemporary novelists. She writes about issues related to women. Man-woman relationship is one of the most important areas of interest in her novels. Love in all its forms is an important theme in her novels. Deshpande is equally interested in mythology. A perceptive reader of Deshpande novels is familiar with her use of cultural narratives as allusions, reference-points and embedded-narratives. One of her concerns is to address contemporary issues with the help of myths and legends. Her novel In the Country of Deceit (2008) deals with the themes of desire, adult-love and deceit. The novel is a revisionist mythmaking of king Yayati and his maid Sharmishtha’s adulterous love-affair. This paper …show more content…

Revisionist mythmaking is a technique of rewriting a myth, often from a feminist perspective, radically subverting the old story in such a way as to render the woman’s experience which has been ignored in the original, patriarchal version. The aim of revisionist rewriting of myths is to correct the incorrect gender imagery inherent in them.

In the Country of Deceit, is a skillfully structured novel. It is the tenth novel of Deshpande. Devayani is a young married woman living in a small town Rajnur in the state of Karnataka in India. She is just recovering from the loss of her mother and starting a new life. Devayani chooses to live alone in the small town of Rajnur after her parents’ death, ignoring the gently voiced disapproval of her family and friends. Teaching English, creating a garden and making friends with Rani, a former actress who settles in the town with her husband and three children, Devayani’s life is tranquil, imbued with a hard-won independence. Then she meets Ashok Chinappa, Rajnur’s District Superintendent of Police, and they fall in love despite the fact that Ashok is much older, married, and-as both painfully acknowledge from the beginning-it is a relationship without a

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