The Concept of New-Woman in Shashi Deshpande’s Novel That �Long Silence�

Mrs. Ritu Bajaj

Department of English

Hans Raj Mahila Maha Vidyalaya

Jalandhar

• Shashi Deshpande, a prominent and up-coming Indo-Anglian writer has delineated the undulations of the female ego or self under the pressure of critical human predicaments and emotional affinities. Her attention is focused on feminine sufferings in Indian society. The feminist literary tradition is grown out of the anxieties of woman’s life. The very basis of feminism is reformist. The fundamental reality of woman’s life situation. Its interrupted nature, perhaps is the reason for a close connection between woman and fiction writing. Mostly definitions about women’s conduct, behaviour and existence were given by men.

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• The oid conventional notions of male dominated society were so rude, unbearable, suppressive, oppressive and depressive that women’s discourse takes a shape of movement. Their consciousness seeks to analyse and understand the material conditions through which gender has been constructed within specific languages and bodies of literature. And its outcome is that the strong wave of new women in 1960s and 1970s took place for women’s liberation.

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• The concept of new woman will have justified itself only by bringing about a radical change in public attitude towards man-woman relationships. The general perspectives about woman as a shadow-figure to a male caretaker be he a father, a husband or a son, continue to persist. Man’s affinity with woman is most often the bond that exists between a master and a slave. This state calls for a concerted effort to demolish such notions and to assert the dignity and equality of woman in the family as well as in the wider social life.

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• Shashi Deshpande’s novels reveal the women’s quest for self, an exploration into the female psyche and an awareness of the mysterious of life and the protagonists’ place in it. Her first novel Roots and Shadows published after the Dark Holds No Terrors and If I Die Today, and all these novels indicate the initial quest of woman for herself. The same quest is continued in her later novel That Long Silence. The novelist explains that all her protagonists are related with their selves. Her women, like those of her predecessors, are tolerant, obedient, passive and submissive.

• But the concept of new-woman is all along markable in their feelings and conducts. The title of the novel That Long Silence suggests a belated reaction, a postponement of offensive behaviour for long till postponement cannot be made any more. The patience of silence and endurance is broken and its outcome is a new woman with egotistical affirmations and emotional explosions. As Shashi Deshpande herself states, “Innermost feelings come out in my writings. The kind of emotions we know women have but never come out.

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• In the novel That Long Silence Mrs. Deshpande depicts the anxiety and difficulty of a middle class family. Mohan to obtain name and fame as well as prestige and security, is involved in some maldeeds as a result of which he faces inquiry and loses his job. Agarwal a co-partner in the same deeds advises him to stay away from the office ntil the storm is over. Mohan, along with his wife, Jaya, decides to go and reside for a while at Jaya’s maternal uncle’s flat in Dadar. They lived there till the shifting to a big flat in Churchgate.

• Although to silent indignation, the mode of self-examination and self-criticism begin for Jaya. As she makes excuses (it was all Appa’s fault why had he made me feel I was someone special? To the realization that in releasing them from the slots I’d put them in I have released myself somehow. She is ever haunted by the memories of the past – her earlier life and her marriage with Mohan.

• The desperations and disappointments in her seventeen years old marital existence, her personal failures, all these begin to haunt and torment her. Jaya can no longer be a passive, submissive and silent partner to Mohan. The novel ends with her determination to speak, to break her long silence. This way she is representative of girls who are brought up in middle class families in post-independent India.

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• That Long Silence depicts Jaya’s self-doubts, fears, guilt, silent indignation towards articulation and assertion. Suman Ahuja, a reputed critic, observes that Jaya “Caught in an emotional eddy, endeavours to come to terms with her protean roles, while trying albelt in vain, to re-discover her true self, which is but an ephemera…an unfulfilled wife, disappointed mother and a failed writer.

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• The novelist is not only writing about her female protagonist, Jaya, who is trying to remove a long silence and struggle with the problems of self-revelation and self-estimation, but, through Jaya, also about other women, those unhappy preys who never broke their silence. For example, at one place in the novel, Jaya realizes that her name is not figured in the family tree. When Jaya asks her uncle, Ramukaka, to understand that she now belongs to her husband’s family and not to her father’s.

• But this is not quite true. Neither her mother nor her Kakis (uncle’s wife), not even her ajji (grand mother)that indomitable woman, who single handedly kept the family together find a place in the family tree. Jaya feels that her name and existence along with those of other women in the family are fully effaced from the list of family history. Jaya’s protest against such kind of order which is given to women in our culture depicts another vision from women’s point of view.

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• The novel presents a scathing aspect of our social institutions like marriage or family. For instance, during her pregnancy, when Jaya advises Mohan that he should do the cooking, Mohan is highly amused by this advice and thinks that cooking is not a man’s business. But the sight of Kamat doing the cooking made her uneasy. Kamat is Jaya’s up-stairs neighbor at Dadar. He is a widower and his only son has settled abroad. He lives alone in the house and hence he performs his all deeds without any one’s help.

• Here we find Jaya’s relationship with Kamat. Kamat has shown a lot of understanding and sympathy for Jaya. Jaya too is more free with him than she is with her husband. But such type of friendship between a married woman and another man is always looked down upon. That is why when Kamat’s dead body was lying on the floor of his flat Jaya did not stay and pay homage to her best friend for the fear of destroying her wedding. So she does her role of a wife but falls as a human being. She belies for a while the loyal Hindu ideal of devotion to husband.

• Her romantic appearance is the feminist mark of the new-woman. But after all she concludes that a husband is a sheltering tree and she plays again the role of an orthodox Hindu wife. There can be no life without her husband, Mohan. His telegram confirms that he is coming. But life with Mohan now must be put on a new footing. If mohan returns I thought if only Rahul and Rati came back, we can begin living afresh.

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• The concept of Jaya’s ego becomes evident when we consider the husband-wife relationships of the traditional Hindu Women and the new-women. Jaya’s mother never raised a voice against her father. Mohan thinks Jaya is not sufficiently trained to play the role of a good wife. Her mother did not prepare her for the duties of a woman’s life. So a woman in anger is ugly and unwomanly. The novelist through Jaya-Mohan affinity has shed some light on modern love, sex, marital affinities and has hinted at the domestic warfare of married couples.

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• Jaya is symptomatic of the emerging new-woman. She has already developed a maxim that the daughter must fight the mother if she wants to graduate in the world. In keeping with this view she marries Mohan, because she finds that her mother is opposed to this match. Her maid-servant Jeeja plays an important part in her understanding of life’s equation with mundane reality. The novelist presents some elements of new woman in the novel The Long Silence. The pre-matrimonial love of Jaya and Mohan is a good paradigm of new woman.

• Mohan was enamoured of Jaya’s modernity and her modern education. With a new feminist frankness Jaya presents interdependence of love and sex, “First there’s love then ther’s sex…that was how I had always imagined it to be. But after living with Mohan I had realized that it could so easily be the other way round. Woman’s realization between of her solitude in the “act of sex” and the possibility of love without bodily union (as in the case of the affinity between Jaya and Kamat) are delineated clearly and add an unorthodox frankness to an abstruse awareness.

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• Jaya as a wife and a mother, has done no justice to her own talents. Years back Jaya begins as a writer by producing a story which has won the first prize and is published in a magazine. But her husband Mohan assumes that the story is about their personal life. So mohan under the pressure of his suspension and social complications arising from it and nervous irritations caused by humiliation and the need of hiding facts from family and friends accuses Jaya of changed behaviour in the days of adversity. The undesirable accusation puts her into anger and insanity and she giggles violently and angrily on Mohan’s accusations I had to control myself, I had to cork in this laughter.

• But it was too late. I could not held it any longer. Laugher burst out of me, spilled over and Mohan started at me in horror as I rocked helplessly. This incident affects her career as a writer and it has left a deep impression on her psyche. Besides it she has continued to write under an assumed name (as women writers have often done under patriarchy) but her stories have been rejected. Kamat comes to her help and reproves her. I am warning you-beware of this women are the victims theory of yours. It will drag you down into a soft, squishy bag of self-pity. Take yourself seriously, woman. Don’t skulk behind a false name. And work –work if you want others to take you seriously. Here Kamat appeared as a hard critic.

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• He points out that the basic truth of her failure is her fear. In her failure Jaya is weak woman, in her failure she is a new woman, who is weaker than the traditional woman of Indian ethos. Here Shashi Deshpande presents a new concept of feminist element in this novel. Jaya taking no such hard criticism, has resumed her career as a wife, as a mother. In the meantime Mohan has advised that she should write light, humorous pieces in the newspapers what they called middles. Jaya has been started her weekly column Seeta which has won the approval of the readers, the editors and above all of her husband.

• And for Jaya, as she observes, she had been the means through which I had shut the door, firmly on all those other women who had invaded my being, screaming for attention, women I had known I could not write about, because they might – it was just possible resemble Mohan’s mother or aunt or my mother or aunt. Jaya is not free to act at will, she is a slave of her emotional affiliations and under limited conditions only she can follow the theory of Yathechchhasi tatha Kuru – do sas you desire as Lord Krishna giving the message of Karma or Arjuna on the battlefield. I have given you the knowledge.

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• Now you make the choice. This way Jaya’s self as a writer that is being crushed and this leads her to a rebellion. She herself delineates how she gave up writing for the joy of wifehood and motherhood. Even a worm has a hole it can crawl into I had mine – as Mohan’s wife, as Rahul’s and Rati’s moterh and so I had stopped writing. The situation in the narrative of That Long Silence arrives when Jaya, its protagonist is almost on the breaking point. The novelist has tried to clarify that under patriarchy women have also recoiled from telling the truth about their sex and self.

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• There has been a revolutionary and egocentric note in Jaya’s character right from her early stage. Her father loved the classical music of Polushkar and Fatyaz and recommended it to Jaya, but Jaya was fond of the lilting music of Rafi and Lata. Jaya’s reaction to her own father speaks of her temperamental nature. The feminist rebellion and defiance, epitomized in Jaya’s conduct are based on the balance of desertion of bad and acceptance of good in the time – honoured values and traditions.

• Jaya, like most of her new-woman, wants, only mundane joys, security and family harmony. The novelist presents an optimistic view through these words of Jaya, “we have to go on trying. One has to believe in one’s life _ Jaya will begin life a new, for life provides many choices. This is the sapience Jaya has learnt in the turmoil’s of her life. She has an opportunity in her life to act according to her choice.

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• Thus, as the title of the novel indicates, Jaya for her seventeen years past life, has tried to play the role of a traditional woman, the embodiment of tolerance, suffering and courage. However, she becomes the modern egotistical self-assertive rebellious woman – all these being marks of new-woman. The desertion of the conventional passive and submissive role and adoption of the new role present a woman’s perspective on the world and it focuses on women’s issues.

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