Shashi Deshpande’s Rootsand Shadows: Novel of Women’s Inner Struggle

Shashi Deshpande is a foremost woman novelist in the Indian Literary Horizon with ten novels, four books for children, over eighty short stories and a screen play to her credit. She has won the prestigious Sahitya Academy Award for her fifth novel, That Long Silence in 1989. She has been awarded Padmashri in 2009. As one of the epoch-making writer of the contemporary Indian writing in English, Shashi Deshpande is the confident voice, who explores individual and universal feminine psyche she has gained repute as a grave writer with marvelous potential. Almost all her protagonists are women who are sophisticated and exposed to western ideas. Contemporary women stand on the verge of social change in an enviable position. They are extremely aware of the prejudice heaped on them unlike their counterparts a generation ago. In fact, Shashi Deshpande does not consider women as inferior beings and so that they must remain inactive and dutiful. This awakening of the female’s consciousness as represented by Shashi Deshpande in her novels justifies the extent of articulation of a woman’s point of view, which needs to be evaluated from a new viewpoint