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Shashi Deshpande has clearly articulated in in her novels that women must speak for themselves because they are free individuals, but their autonomy is not derived from the liberal humanism which believes that all are equal- something that would surely be hard to sustain in a country like India riddled with gender bias. Deshpande's conviction that each individual subjectivity is ultimately responsible only to itself comes from the realization that no one can occupy another's subjectivity, a fact which becomes glaringly obvious in the face of death, which each must encounter alone. Thus, paradoxically, it is death, not creation, that endows freedom on the individual in Deshpande's fiction. Deshpande clamour for feminine space thus, is a code for the repression, self-imposed or otherwise, which cannot be breached. She forgets that the silence of women protagonists is annoyingly insidious which is often mistaken for speech. Deshpande claims that an essential self for every woman must exist since it is an ontological necessity. But this very demand for liberation from the limitations of gender roles is rather ironical because it exists only as a prerequisite for its death.