Re-Visioning in Deshpande
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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 womenâs struggle for identity, man-woman relationship, womenâs body, marital rape, gender discrimination, rebellion and protest, among others.
But Deshpande, in order to authenticate her writing rejected the title âwoman writerâ and more so âa feminist writerâ. In an interview with Shoma A Chatterji in âBeginning Anewâ 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 âwoman writerâ 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 âWhy I am a feministâ (2003) she reconsiders her position. In the essay she admits, âIt took me years to say even to myself, âI am a feministâ. It was a culmination of a voyage that began within myself and went on to be the ocean of womenâs place in the worldâ (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 doesnât 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 womenâs liberation and autonomy, for instance, are deeply entrenched in the Indian womenâs 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 Deshpandeâs 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 âwomen trying to understand themselves, their history, their roles and their place in the societyâ (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 âRe-Visionâ as stated by Adrienne Rich in her seminal feminist text âWhen We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Visionâ. Rich defines Re-vision as âthe 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 survivalAnd 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.â(Rich, 18)
An act of Re-vision is Sarithaâs re-visioning her past in Deshpandeâs 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 âsadistâ husband and the world in general.
Sarithaâs visiting her fatherâs home was an act of survival for her. Though in the beginning it was to escape her husband Manoharâs animal âattacksâ 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 âfresh eyesâ in the silence and tranquillity of her fatherâs dim house. She goes back and forth in time thereby analysing her past life â 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 beganthis 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