IDENTITY CRISIS IN SHASHI DESPANDE'S THAT LONG SILENCE AND BINDING WINE

Shashi Deshpande is indeed considered as one of the most renowned of the contemporary Indian women novelists. She has well defined ethnic identities and a quest for eternal self, for something deeper in religion. She is a writer with specific urge to explore and define the areas of experiences of women, which have not been previously explored. Her stories are about a woman: her travails and privations, tensions and irritations, pains and anguishes. Her stories suggest that compromise is what characterizes the life of the common run of the middle-class women in India. Unable to defy social conventions or traditional morality, the middle-class women themselves are enmeshed by desires and despairs, fears and hopes, loves and hates, withdrawal and alienation, suppression and oppression, marital discord and male chauvinism. The present paper is an attemps to study the Quest of Identity in the novels of Shashi Despande’s Novels in special reference to That Long Silence and Binding Wine