Subaltern Women and Marginal Voices in the Fiction of Shashi Deshpande

Abstract

Shashi Deshpande occupies a distinctive place in Indian English literature for her nuanced depiction of women’s psychological realities within patriarchal Indian society. Her novels foreground the experiences of middle-class women who remain marginalized in spite of education and social suppleness. This paper examines the representation of subaltern women and marginal voices in Deshpande’s novels through the theoretical framework of postcolonial feminism and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of the subaltern. Focusing on That Long Silence, The Dark Holds No Terrors, Roots and Shadows, The Binding Vine, Small Remedies, and A Matter of Time, the study explores themes of silence, psychological colonization, conjugal conflict, physical violence, identity crisis, and female self-articulation. Deshpande’s protagonists inhabit subaltern positions within domestic and cultural structures that deny them support and voice. Through self-analysis, memory, and psychological realism, Deshpande transforms silence into a subtle mode of confrontation and self-realization. The paper argues that her fiction recovers relegated female subjectivities and challenges patriarchal systems that reduce women to secondary beings in postcolonial Indian society.