A Matter of Time
Page 27
“My feminism has come to me very gradually,” she told Holmström, “and for me it isn’t a matter of theory ... For me feminism is translating what is used up in endurance into something positive: a real strength.”22 Although her writing preceded her awareness, she has no doubt at all that once awareness came to her, it was “like drinking Asterix’s magic potion. You feel full of power. No more feeling that my gender made my work inferior.”23 And yet, the problem of women’s writing being marginalized remains. Next to the isolation of writing in English in general, what Deshpande has come up against, time and again, is the marginalization she feels in her career as a woman writer.
The dilemma of being a woman writer in India—or should one say, a politically aware woman writer—is not unique to Deshpande. Few today would say that they have not felt marginalized to some extent by the mainstream—generally also male-stream—literary establishment. Notwithstanding the marginalization, Shashi Deshpande has demonstrated a remarkable integrity of purpose. Her presentation of the urban middle-class woman’s reality is perceptive and insightful; and her exploration of it across time and space, through two or more generations, in small towns and big cities, allows her to see it in all its complexity. In this sense, she is indeed a women’s writer, with all the expansiveness that this appellation affords, suffused with understanding and delicate observation.
“I believe in good and evil,” she says of the moral vision that informs her writing, “and literature seeks always to find a balance between them. We struggle all our lives to attain moral heights but we also fail and fall from them. This is at the core of the human condition.” By refusing to be deflected from her chosen subject matter with charges of “domesticity” she has rejected the “marginal” spaces reserved for women, declaring instead, “Where I stand is always the center to me; it’s the others who are in the margins.”24 So, too, with the women in her novels.
Ritu Menon
New Delhi, India
November 1998
Notes
1.Shashi Deshpande, “The Dilemma of the Woman Writer,” in The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, edited by R. S. Pathak (Delhi: Creative Books, 1998), 229.
2.Deshpande, interview with Lakshmi Holmström, Wasafiri (Publication of the Association for New Teaching of Caribbean, African, Asian and Associated Literature, U.K.) 17 (Spring 1993): 26.
3.Deshpande, interview with Ritu Menon, Bangalore, India, June 1998. Except where otherwise noted, all subsequent quotations from Deshpande come from this interview.
4.Deshpande, “Of Concerns, of Anxieties,” Indian Literature (September-October 1996): 104.
5.Ibid.
6.Ibid., 105.
7.Ibid.
8.Malashri Lal, The Law of the Threshold: Women Writers in Indian English (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1995), 4.
9.Deshpande, “Of Concerns, of Anxieties,” 106.
10.Ibid., 108.
11.Lal, The Law of the Threshold, 14–24.
12.Ibid.
13.Deshpande, interview with Holmström, 25.
14.Ibid., 23.
15.Deshpande, “Writing from the Margin,” The Book Review 22, no. 3 (March 1998): 9.
16.Deshpande, “Writing from the Margin,” 9.
17.Deshpande, interview with Holmström, 25.
18.Deshpande, “Denying the Otherness,” interview with Geetha Gangadharan, in The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande, 252.
19.Deshpande, interview with Holmström, 25.
20.Deshpande, “Of Concerns, of Anxieties,” 108; and interview with Holmström, 25.
21.Deshpande, “The Dilemma of the Woman Writer,” 230.
22.Deshpande, interview with Holmström, 26.
23.Deshpande, “Of Concerns, of Anxieties,” 108.
24.Deshpande, “Writing from the Margin,” 10.
BOOKS BY SHASHI DESHPANDE
Collections of Short Stories
The Legacy. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1978.
It Was the Nightingale. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1986.
The Miracle. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1986.
It Was Dark. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1986.
The Intrusion and Other Stories. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1994.
Novels
The Dark Holds No Terrors. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1980; Delhi: Penguin India, 1990.
If I Die Today. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1982.
Come Up and Be Dead. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1982.
Roots and Shadows. Hyderabad: Orient Longman Ltd., 1983.
That Long Silence. London: Virago Press, 1988; New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1989.
The Binding Vine. London: Virago Press, 1993; New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1994.
Children’s Books
A Summer Adventure. Bombay: India Book House, 1978.
The Hidden Treasure. Bombay: India Book House, 1980.
The Only Witness. Bombay: India Book House, 1980.
The Naryanpur Incident. Bombay: India Book House, 1982; New Delhi: Puffin Books, Penguin Books India, 1995.