Gendered Realities, Human Spaces: the Writing of Shashi Deshpande works through a close reading of her fiction, her non-fiction and interviews in order to interrogate the strengths and limits of ‘feminist’ positions. It goes on to free Deshpande’s work from a reading confined only to the woman question and opens it out to aesthetic evaluations and sociocultural histories. Jain takes up the position that Deshpande’s work makes a significant contribution to the novel of ‘becoming’, and she has moved beyond the ‘given’ of gender, of stereotypical role models, even beyond androgyny to assert the right of woman as woman to a human space in the larger world. Even as images of domesticity and marital unhappiness are explored, the task of deconstructing and dismantling these confining spaces goes on. She uses the cultural heritage, so often described as ‘Indianness’, to subvert patriarchal hegemony and counter the male imagination of sociocultural realities with a woman’s view of the same. This juxtaposition is neither a division, nor a merger. It collapses the boundaries between the ‘home’ and the ‘world’, between the ‘frontyard’ and the ‘backyard’ and compels the reader to look afresh at the world that emerges, out of the shadows, the silences and the terrors. Jain’s assessment, like Deshpande’s work, is context-sensitive and seeks to locate her in the multiple contexts of the present and the multiple traditions of the past.
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