Writing from the Margin: An Analysis of Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence

Shashi Deshpande is one of the more sensitive and versatile Indian woman writers in English. Popularly termed as a domestic novelist her novels and short stories explore the psyche of the middle-class educated Indian women, focusing primarily on her dilemma at being caught between modernity which implies freedom, individuality and self-expression and the patriarchal and traditional values that continue to permeate contemporary Indian society. Deshpande has created authentic female characters with recognizable credentials. She has successfully delineated their problems and plights, yearnings and aspirations, failures andfoibles, dreams and disillusionment. The female ‘quest for identity’ has been a pet theme for Deshpande’s novels. Their identity is minimized in family and their separated identity is attached with their husbands and sons relatively. There are certain social taboos prevailing in the society that completely doom the identity of women. Shashi Deshpande through her novel ‘That Long silence’ show how women are marginalized by the patriarchal society and how women allow themselves to be victimized for making a sweet relationship in the family. This paper attempts to analyze how women search for their identities and struggle for their existence in a patriarchal framework.