Images of Women in Indian Society as Portrayed in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terror

Abstract

Indian fiction in English has been enriched by several highly talented women novelists like from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Toru Dutt, Rajalakshmi Debi, Krupa Baiv Sathyanathan, Swarnakumari Debi Ghoshal, Cornelia Sorabji have taken writing in all seriousness. In contemporary Indian English writing we can see women writers like Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Anitha Nair, Shoba De, Shashi Deshpande etc writing about, and for women.

The novels of Shashi Deshpande have portrayed the evolution of this new Indian woman, especially during the last decades of twentieth century. In the milieu of contemporary Indian writer Shashi Deshpande has her own independent views on woman, her position, predicament, her trials and tribulations. Her major concern has been woman’s struggle to find and preserve the images as wife, mother, and most important of all, as human being. This paper focused on images of woman in Shashi Deshpande’s well known novel The Dark Holds No Terror.