Shashi Deshpande is very renowned writer and an ever-shining star in the sky of novel writing in Indian English. she has successfully held her position as a feminist writer by articulating the anguish, agony and conflict of the modern educated Indian women, sandwiched between tradition and modernity, struggle for self- expression and individuality. She concerns with the inner world of the Indian women in her novels. She highlights her heroines in a very realistic manner. Basically, she focusses on the plights of women and their failure in the fast-changing socio-economic context of India. The story rotates around the women’s desires, efforts and failures in the traditional Indian society. She is a typical Indian feminist writer. She describes women’s world in an authentic manner. Feminism in the Indian context is he by product of the Western liberalism in general and feminist thought in particular. The indigenous contributing factors have been the legacy of equality of sexes inherited from the freedom struggle, constitutional rights of women, spread of education and the consequent new awareness among women. Indian women caught in the flux of tradition and modernity saddled with the burden of the past but both to cast off her aspirations constitutes the crux of aspirations constitutes the crux of feminism in Indian literature. In literary terms it describes in search for identity and a quest for the definition of the self. In critical view, it boils down to scrutinizing empathetically the plight of women characters at the receiving end of human interaction. Shashi Deshpande portrays in her novel’s social worlds many complex relationships. Many men and women live together with feelings of doubt, anxiety and often feelings of avoid of values and irrespective with each other. In the extended families Shashi Deshpande presents, two or three generations live together. Deshpande presents social reality as it is experienced by women. She highlights the world of women and her clashes between tradition and
Keywords: inner conflict, unconscious, doubt, anxiety, patriarchy, identity crisis, self-introspection, despair, alienation etc.
