Reading Shashi Deshpande in The Postcolonial Context

Abstract

The postcolonial has been described as an act of rereading and an approach that offers us different perspectives on issues related to colonialism. As a critical concept, it recovers resistance of various kinds and attempts to explain the presence of the silenced voice in any dominant discourse and makes it possible to tease out various readings of a textual narrative. Postcolonial criticism draws attention to issues of cultural difference in literary texts and focuses on issues of gender, class and caste. It illustrates that the strategies of marginalization are used even in other power structures and the dominant even in the postcolonial context make the strategic use of stereotypes in order to control and subjugate the other in terms of gender, class and caste. In this context, it is possible to read in the novels of Shashi Deshpande “strategies of representation as empowerment” (Sebastian 125), in which she makes attempts to rewrite the traditional stereotypes of the Indian woman. This paper shows of how, the novels of Shashi Deshpande can be read in the postcolonial context, by considering her as a postcolonial writer. This part of the paper is an endeavor to indicate all these