Re-Visioning in Deshpande

Education and post-colonialism brought with it the liberal thought which gradually gave rise to the new awakened, educated, career woman who tried to have an individualism and identity in the still Patriarchal society, giving rise to a power struggle earlier not known. This struggle of the new empowered woman against the male dominated phallocentric society is best depicted by contemporary women novelists especially Sahitya Academy Award winner, Shashi Deshpande, a noteworthy writer, who comments strongly on the status of contemporary women, the central themes in her fiction being women’s struggle for identity, man-woman relationship, women’s body, marital rape, gender discrimination, rebellion and protest, among others.

But Deshpande, in order to authenticate her writing rejected the title “woman writer” and more so “a feminist writer”. In an interview with Shoma A Chatterji in “Beginning Anew” Asia Africa Intelligence Wire, Deshpande states-

Why does the fact of my protagonist being woman have to give me the title of being a woman writer? So many men have male protagonists. Are they labelled male writers? A writer is a writer first and foremost. Gender is one of the many things that go into the writing...

Secondly and most importantly, the term “woman writer” is, we must admit, a pejorative connotation. It brings in nuances of being limited, secondary, concerned with rather insignificant themes. This is what I deny when I reject the label.(1)

However later on in her essay “Why I am a feminist” (2003) she reconsiders her position. In the essay she admits, “It took me years to say even to myself, ‘I am a feminist’. It was a culmination of a voyage that began within myself and went on to be the ocean of women’s place in the world” (83)

And as Chanchala A Naik in the Introduction to Writing Difference:The Novels Of Shashi Deshpande rightly says -

It may however be noted that the trajectory of feminist concerns that Shashi Deshpande travels doesn’t necessarily correspond to that of the feminist women writers in the west. In her case these concerns are essentially relational whereas for most feminist writers in the west they are individualistic. Her perceptions of women’s liberation and autonomy, for instance, are deeply entrenched in the Indian women’s situatedness within the socio-cultural and economic spaces and paradigms of the country while the western women feminist writers often stay independent of them.(14-15)

Shashi Deshpande’s individualism and uniqueness lies in her deep involvement with the society she lives in, and especially with the women. As she herself acknowledged, her novels are about “women trying to understand themselves, their history, their roles and their place in the society” (Neil and Laer, 252). This is the reason why Deshpande attaches so much importance to the past of her woman characters and why they have a strong inclination towards the past which inturn is connected to their present. For them the introspection into their past leads to their understanding and awakening thereby becoming an act of survival.

This takes us to the concept of “Re-Vision” as stated by Adrienne Rich in her seminal feminist text “When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision”. Rich defines Re-vision as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction which is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival...And this drive to self knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self destructiveness of male-dominated society.”(Rich, 18)

An act of Re-vision is Saritha’s re-visioning her past in Deshpande’s novel The Dark Holds No Terror which liberated the protagonist from her psychic conflicts and also freed her from the guilt, thereby making her confident to confront her “sadist” husband and the world in general.

Saritha’s visiting her father’s home was an act of survival for her. Though in the beginning it was to escape her husband Manohar’s animal ‘attacks’ at night that she came to her ancestral home, but this infact led to her final understanding and thereby to her liberation from her internalised fears.

All throughout her life she accused herself of being guilty of killing her brother, Dhruva by heedlessly turning her back on him; of letting her mother die alone because Saritha deserted her and also for the failure of her husband because she destroyed his manhood, though she was the victim of marital rape.

But she realises the truth and begins looking at her life with “fresh eyes” in the silence and tranquillity of her father’s dim house. She goes back and forth in time thereby analysing her past life – her relationship with her mother, her brother, Dhruva, her husband, Manohar and her children. Recalling her marital relationship she says,

But now I know that it was there it began...this terrible thing that has destroyed our marriage. I know this too...that the human personality has an infinite capacity for growth. And so the esteem with which I was surrounded made me