Suffocation In Shashi Deshpande's The Roots And Darkness

The status of Indian Literature in English is judged more so by its novels than by anything else. Most Post- modern Indian women novelists indulge in exploring the feminine consciousness of the women characters, their evolution towards an awakened conscience and how eventually this leads to enrichment of their inner self in a male dominated society. Shashi Deshpande has been a very serious Indian English woman novelist who has depicted different aspects of women’s life- especially the middle class women’s life in her novels. Her novel shows expresses the frustration and disappointments of women who experience them in the social and cultural oppression in the male-dominated society and are struggling to liberate themselves and seek their self-identity and independence. She is also the one and only contemporary writer who have given graphic details about the girl-child and her psychology.

In her novel The Roots and Shadows, Shashi Deshpande highlights the agony and suffocation experienced by the protagonist Indu in a male dominated and tradition bound society and makes the reader aware of society’s reaction to the superior status of woman and the blatant gender discrimination shown to her. Indu, faces gender discrimination. Akka, the mother surrogate of Indu and a

She feels that it is she, who is to be blamed for the marital discord in their lives. She realizes that marriage had stunted and hampered her individuality because she had regarded it as a ‘trap’ and not a bond. Now she realizes She had refused to be influenced by Jayant when he tried to make her change her job. He had been bewildered in the beginning as if she had cheated him. But finally he came to recognize her strength as well as her weakness which she had hidden from him so far. There was a better understanding between them and an ease in their relationships that was not there before. Indu learns that there is beauty and security in life through