Summary Of That Long Silence By Shashi Despande

Introduction

Women writers of Indian English fiction have significantly contributed to enrich contemporary IndianEnglish fiction. Eminent Feminist critics and writers like Kate Miller, Simone de Beauvoir, Toril Moi, Taslima Nasrin, Anita Desai, Virginia Woolf, Elaine Showalter and Shashi Despande etc. have made a remarkable contribution to the literature of feminism. Shashi Despande is also one of the remarkable figures in Indian English Literature, who used a realistic approach to unravel various issues related to socio-economic condition of women in India. Shashi Despande was conferred with Sahitya Akademi Award for That Long Silence in 1990 and Padam Shri Award in the year of 2009.

Feminism has become in literary creation, a recognized

Her depiction of women world is authentic, realistic and credible. Most of the writers treated women as non-entities and created unreal sentimental romances and finally succumbed to the temptation of feminist ideology. Here, Elaine Showalter in Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness says that, "the feminist approach is to be more effective, it must be more structured to compete with the anti-feminist approach”(qtd. in Sharma

It is this erasing of the silence that symbolizes the assertion of her feminine voice, a voice with hope and promise, a voice that articulates her thoughts. The novel does not depict Jaya’s life as a totally dismal and hopeless struggle. It suggests hope and change for the better. It is often debated whether or not That Long Silence is a feminist novel. ShashiDeshpande is against the labeling of her novels as feminist. She says:

Any woman who writes fiction shows the world as it looks to her protagonist; if the protagonist is a woman, she shows the world as it looks to a woman—to apply the tag of feminist is one way, I have realized, of dismissing the serious concerns of the novel by labeling them, by calling the work propagandist. (qtd. in Sharma 45-46)

The protagonist has raised her voice against the straitjacketed role models of wife and mother, and rebels against the suppression of the age- old patriarchal setup. Thus the novel is a feminist critique as TorilMoi says, “It seeks to expose, not perpetuate patriarchal practices” (qtd. in Sharma 46). Although she may not be a formal feminist but she certainly is a potential feminist