THE STRUGGLE TO FIND A VOICE: WOMEN'S STRUGGLE TO FIND THEIR IDENTITY IN THE NOVELS OF SHASHI DESHPANDE

Abstract [English]

Shashi Deshpande is one of the most popular female writers in India. Her novels deal with women belonging to the Indian middle class. Her novels deal with the inner world of Indian women. Shashi Deshpande's novels present a social world of relationships. In her novels, we find women searching for themselves and the relationships that are essential to them. She received the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award for her novel That Long Silence in 1990 and received the Padma Award. Shri in 2009. Feminism is indeed a serious attempt to analyze, understand and clarify how and why femininity or female sensibility is different from masculinity or male experience. Feminism puts into perspective the points of difference that characterize the "female identity" or "femalpsyche" or "femininity" of women. It can be studied by considering the psychosomatic, social and cultural construction of femininity in relation to masculinity. » Male writers have mostly seen women as inferior and weak. The texts written by men reveal a certain form of misogyny and a certain discrimination between the sexes. Men are considered the “superior sex” or the “stronger sex” while women are considered the “inferior sex” or the “weaker sex”. Men are seen as logical, rational and objective, while women are seen as emotional, unstable, intuitive, subjective and lacking in confidence. But the modern woman has raised her voice against the atrocities and injustices that the system has done to her. And it was her statement with an explicit tone that also created the difference in textuality. It was mainly after the women's liberation movement of the late 1960s that contemporary feminist ideology evolved and women's voices were listened to with special attention.