Pragmatic Optimism and Self-Recognition in Shashi Deshpande’s Select Novels

Abstract

Though Shashi Deshpande’s fiction is structured around oppression, psychic conflict, and patriarchal dominance, its resolution is tempered not by despair but by the measured, occasional surge of self-knowledge, sustained resilience, and circumspect, yet determined articulation of self. Against a backdrop of muted disenfranchisement, each emergent instance of self-recognition invokes a tempered covenant of hope. This durable motif, carried from novel to novel, invites sustained scrutiny, and the current examination delineates the techniques by which her cosmology enacts hope and pragmatically rehearses optimism in The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980), Roots and Shadows (1983), and That Long Silence (1988). The respective trajectories of Sarita (Saru), Jaya, and Indu witness the consecutive movement from fragmented alienation to verbal assertion, psychic renewal, and pyrrhic but reclaimed self-recognition. Interrogating these movements through the coupled optics of feminist and existential thought, the analysis adjudges hope as neither utopian the appearance of hope as neither utopian the literary eidolon nor rhetorical flourish. By embracing complexity, it is pragmatically conceived and pragmatically rehearsed—the riverine strength that permits the silent to interrupt mutism, that permits the detained to negotiate territories of contingent freedom, and that permits the muted to recombine the fragments of life’s language. The paper submits her minimalist realism steadfastly alloyed to contingent, speculative hope as the calibrating centre of her oeuvre, one that chronicles psychic dispensation by delineating the variegated edges—the sensuous ecstasies, muted lacunae, reticulated half-tones, and beleaguered tranquillities—through which the elusive, literary ambition of hope passes.