Published Paper Details:

Shashi Deshpande is one of the leading Indian English novelists of today. Her persistence with the theme of "Woman Question" in her novels and short stories occasionally raises doubts in our minds that she has taken sides with the problems of womankind, pushing the other half into the subordinate role, but this is far from the truth. She is not an aggressive feminist-quite unlike Lord Tennyson's princess who set up an academy solely for women, having barred the male entry strictly-who wants to live in an isolated tower, having no truck with the male world. Deshpande knows it well that this kind of existence is not possible in the real world, and that man and woman are the two equally important wheels of the chariot of life. Her attitude is, therefore, balanced one, and does not create any fissure or fragmentation in man-woman relationship. And it is clearly reflected in her fictional writings. That Long Silence (1988) is precisely a novel of this nature.