Life & Background
Shashi Deshpande was born in Dharwad in 1938, the daughter of the Kannada dramatist and Sanskrit scholar Adya Rangacharya, who wrote under the name Sriranga. She took degrees in economics and law, married, and moved to Bombay and then Bangalore, coming to writing in her thirties after her children were born — a late start she has written about as characteristic of women's careers. She began with short stories for magazines and published her first novel in 1980. She won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990 for That Long Silence and the Padma Shri in 2009. In 2015 she resigned from the Sahitya Akademi's general council in protest at its silence over the killing of the scholar M.M. Kalburgi and returned her award.
That Long Silence
Jaya, a middle-class Bangalore wife and mother, moves with her husband Mohan into a shabby Bombay flat when he is implicated in a business malpractice inquiry and they must disappear for a while. Confined there with him and without her usual routines, she begins to examine a life she has never questioned. She recalls her name being changed at marriage, her writing career abandoned after Mohan was hurt by a story she published, the humorous column she writes under a pseudonym because it is safely trivial, her friendship with Kamat, and her silence during a family crisis. The novel is her account of how the silence was constructed — by upbringing, by the Sita and Savitri models held up to her, and by her own consent — and ends with her decision to speak.
Deshpande's method is deliberately undramatic: no violence, no scandal, no escape, only a woman working out what she agreed to and when. The title comes from a line she quotes from Elizabeth Robins about the long silence of women, and the novel's argument is that complicity is part of how the silence is maintained, which is what separates it from a straightforward victim narrative. Her prose is plain and her settings are resolutely middle-class and domestic, and she has consistently rejected the label of feminist writer while writing the most sustained body of Indian English fiction about women's inner lives. That refusal is itself an examination topic.
Why Deshpande Matters
Deshpande is the central Indian English novelist of middle-class women's experience, and That Long Silence is a standard text on Indian women's writing, gender, and the domestic novel. Her work offers a deliberate counterweight to the diasporic and magic-realist strands that dominated Indian fiction in English from the 1980s — she stayed in India, wrote about ordinary households, and refused the international market's appetite for the exotic, which makes her useful in questions about who Indian writing in English is written for.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Dark Holds No Terrors1980
- Roots and Shadows1983
- That Long Silence1988
- The Binding Vine1993
- A Matter of Time1996
- Small Remedies2000
- Writing from the Margin2003