Shashi Deshpande’s Novels: as the Finest Examples of Modern Indian Feminism

Shashi Deshpande occupies a significant place among the contemporary women novelists, who concern themselves with the problems of women and their request for identity. She is a champion of weak, lonely, defeated, and the forsaken. The unhappy women in Indian society, Deshpande has presented a variety of women characters to show how they have to suffer for being women. She has presented characters of women of all groups and classes adolescents married, aged, neglected, persecuted, of course the prosperous and well-attended ones have been left out, perhaps because the champion ‘the week, the lonely, the defeated, the forsaken, the unhappy’ had no concern whatsoever with prosperousness. Deshpande has presented a vivid picture of women. Women today are determined to realize their full potential capacity and are ready to fight with anything that comes on their way. Today, the position of women in society has changed radically because of ‘Feminist Movement’. Feminism means different things to different people.Feminism, as a concept has vastly different meaning in India. In the Western context, feminism is a social, political, economic battle for rights of woman. In the east, however, feminism is only in the germ. There is only a nascent awareness that the woman, as an individual, is not sub-servants to the needs and desires of man, and alteration of social rules, with regard to the status of woman is necessary. Far from being a battle, or even a movement it is only a developing awareness.Indian feminine ideology is entirely different from Western feminism. In social life it is influenced by religious codes and the directives of the scriptures. This paper attempts to study of Deshapande’s major characters and traits of feminism in them.