From Silence to Speech: A Study of Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence

In That Long Silence, Deshpande portrays the life of Jaya, an educated, married writer. As a writer, she should be able to use her thinking and analytical skills to show the problems and contradictions in society in her writing. However, this does not happen for several reasons. She has to surrender to family and societal pressures. Not being able to say or write what she feels like saying or writing, she is forced to write what patriarchal society wants to read or hear. Even though she is educated, she remains silent against the injustices that have befallen her. Not only Jaya but also the other women characters portrayed in the novel— Jaya’s mother, grandmother, cousin Kusum, her widowed neighbor Mukta, and the women in general— have also maintained silence for centuries. Deshpande goes on to show how the social environment, as well as family preaching and practices, play a significant role in this. When Jaya gets time to reflect on the happenings of her life, she finds herself in a dilemma about what to do and what not to do. This paper aims at analyzing the factors, taking into consideration the comments and observations by other critics and theorists as well, responsible for Jaya's crisis in particular and the misery of women in general, as well as showing how, through introspection, Jaya, the representative of modern women, comes out of her victimization and crisis and breaks her long silence