Pushpa Dixit

As the title suggests, my main focus is on Shashi Deshpande’s first novel “Roots and Shadow” only. After reading her all other novels, it must be stated here that ‘difference’ is not a theme. Even though the peripheral role of woman is represented, the figure of woman is overwhelmingly – and not marginally – presented in her novels. Read differently, the protagonists and the other female characters in her novel could problematize the center-margin binary and suggest that postcolonial arguments (on the basis of major postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha) could be used as reading tools even when nation, narration, history, hybridity are not serious issues in the world of the novels. Such a juxtaposition of the theory and the text leads to a fascinating reading of the novels of Deshpande using a non-traditional approach. A typical double faceted female protagonist of Deshpande is an ambivalent role, split between tradition and modernity.