Echoes of Women’s Silence in That Long Silence

Abstract

Shashi Deshapande is one of the living dynamic women writers in Indian English Literature. She is known for authentic portrayal of the typical Indian women’s world with great sensitivity and has pictured the contemporary middle-class women with rare competence. Having started her career as a journalist, her creative endeavours include seven short story collections, ten novels and two short crime novels, four books for children. Her work has received awards, including the Sahitya Akademi award and the Nanjangud Thirumalamba award.

In her Sahitya Akademi award winning novel That Long Silence, she has successfully voiced the innermost thoughts and perceptions which are consciously hidden intricately in their psyche by women. In fact Deshpande in this novel has creviced the walls of literary tradition that has since years estimated women’s writing very low, and has successfully produced the multiple echoes of ‘Women’s Silence’ to shape them into a rubric of   ‘dream writing’ by women. This paper is an analysis of the difficulties that the women writers undergo to express the stereotypically prohibited, but true reflections of their selves.