The Role Of Patriarchy In The Binding Vine By Shashi Deshpande

For thousands of years woman has been living and breathing silently under the umbrella of patriarchy and under its ‘gaze’. With the establishment of patriarchy, in its unwritten form, disproportion between man and woman developed through language, customs, rituals, myths and religious practices. Myths, rituals and customs contribute in the evolution and establishment of human society. It is believed that they have developed naturally, but they are actually socio-cultural constructions and help in carrying out patriarchal ideologies. Thus they are instrumental in the subjugation of women in our society.
This paper makes an attempt to study Shashi Deshpande’s novels, viz. The Dark Holds No Terrors, That Long Silence, Roots and Shadows and The Binding Vine, in the light of status of women in family and society. Women, the preserver of traditional spirit, are forced to pursue certain socio-cultural

Not just the three days when I couldn’t enter the kitchen or the puja room…I was served from a distance, for my touch was, it seemed, pollution.” (62). In The Binding Vine, we get to see similar expression from Mira when she exclaims, “My companion for three days, window in the corner room” (98). Indu is blatantly told by one of her female relatives in Roots and Shadows, “…[F]or four days now you are unclean. You can’t touch anyone or anything.”(79). Jaya calls her attainment of puberty, That Long Silence as ‘drama of my womanhood’ (64), she further recalls the experience as ‘unaccountably choky’, ‘emotional’, ‘momentous’, ‘agonising’ and ‘terrible’. We witness that the social customs associated with the initiation of puberty makes things worse for these girls as they are already traumatized by the physical change in their body. The women begin to feel themselves unclean, unwanted, devalued and diminish. They find it difficult to accept their growing femininity and the physical changes that are accompanied with