LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:9 September 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Breaking The Silence : Jaya in Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence

Kavita Parashar

Abstract

Love and marriage are interrelated concepts of human relations. Love has many forms and one of its forms is seen in the relations of husband and wife. This relation has been the major concern of feminists all over the world. The most stable, pious and natural form of love, and its expression in daily life changes with time and space, from a permanent fountain to occassional drops. Even in this expression, a woman has no equal share and this results in dissatisfaction, subjugation and suffocation, which is well brought to the fore by Shashi Despande in That Long Silence.

A male partner not only changes a female’s identity from a girl to a woman, but dominates her whole life to such an extent that she accepts herself as a part of his identity. She accepts everything silently, not because she is afraid of changing the society, but she fears changing herself, her relation, and her forced identity. She becomes so suppressed from within, that hardly she feels the need to change her predecided roles and assume her new identity. The roles, she imbibed with the help of her darling mother. Many times she feels herself tied with invisible chains, invisible chains but harder and stronger than visible ones.But sometime this suppression finds expression in any creative form, and becomes the source of inspiration and power to shake the hollow systems.

Introduction

The present paper is an attempt to reveal the hidden gaps of married life, which not only suppress one of the partners, but many times lead to total failure of relationships. Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence, is a manifesto of such predicament of its main protagonist, Jaya.

In Search of Identity and Meaning

Jaya, a father supported child and ambititious girl, tries to find the true meaning and identity of her life, in various roles assigned to her by familial and social codes. She starts her journey with her father’s favourite name Jaya and passes through different phases of daily life with other identifications as Suhasini and Sita. She finds her role and life fit, only and only in Jaya, “Jaya, the Winner as papa wanted to make her”. She had been brought up in a family, in which modernity of thoughts superssded traditions and drilled social taboos.Her father gave a blow to his family’s expectations, by having a love affair with her mother,thus denying the comprising and adjusting ways of society.This helps Jaya to think herself different. Like all the girls in the society, she does not want to be shadow of her mother and typical domestic girls, who visit temples and smear sandal paste, in the hope of their prince charming and to prove themselves devoted and complete housewives.Her papa has made her different, indifferent to social taboos and familial rituals, as he often said- “You are not like others,Jaya,’Appa had said to me, pulling me out of the safe circle in which the other girls had stood...You are going to be different from others,’Appa had assured me” (136).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Kavita Parashar
Research Scholar
DCRUST
Murtal
Sonepat
Haryana
India
Kavita_parashar80@rediffmail.com

H.No. 759,V.P.O. Rohat 131403
District- Sonepat
Haryana
India
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