Collected Stories

Shashi Deshpande

Description

Not many readers of Shashi Deshpande may be aware that her first experiments in writing fiction started with the short story. Over the years, she has published about a hundred stories in literary journals, magazines and newspapers, in between writing her immensely popular novels which are now read all over the world, and taught in universities wherever Indian writing has an audience. In this collection we find Shashi Deshpande at her best, writing with subtlety and a rare sensitivity about men and women trapped in relationships and situations often not of their making. The wife of a successful politician who must look to a longlost past in order to keep up the pretence of contentment; a little girl who cannot comprehend why the very fact of her being born is a curse; a young man whose fantasy of love drives him to murder; a newlywed couple with dramatically differing views on what it means to get to know each other every one of the characters here is delineated with lucidity and compassion. Written over the past three decades, the stories in this volume provide an insight into often forgotten aspects of human feelings and relationships, weaving a magical web of emotions that is testimony to the unusual depth and range of Shashi Deshpande's writing.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 24 février 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351184317
• Langue: English

Extrait

Shashi Deshpande

COLLECTED STORIES
Volume I
Contents
About the Author
By the Same Author
Foreword
Preface
The Legacy
The First Lady
Anatomy of a Murder
Can You Hear Silence?
A Liberated Woman
Why a Robin?
An Antidote to Boredom
It Was the Nightingale
The Stone Women
Mirrors
The Inner Rooms
A Wall Is Safer
The Duel
The Awakening
Independence Day
The Day Bapu Died
The Shadow
The Homecoming
The Boy
Waste Lands
My Beloved Charioteer
The Valley in Shadow
The Intrusion
The Eternal Theme
Copyright Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
About the Author
Shashi Deshpande was born in Dharwad, daughter of the renowned dramatist and Sanskrit scholar Shriranga. At the age of fifteen she went to Mumbai, graduated in economics, then moved to Bangalore, where she gained a degree in law. The early years of her marriage were largely given over to the care of her two young sons, but she took a course in journalism and for a time worked on a magazine. Her writing career began in earnest only in 1970, initially with short stories, of which several volumes have been published. She is the author of four children s books and six previous novels, the best known of which are The Dark Holds No Terrors and That Long Silence, which won the Sahitya Akademi award. Shashi Deshpande lives in Bangalore with her pathologist husband.

Amrita Bhalla teaches English at the Jesus and Mary College, Delhi University. Her book on Shashi Deshpande for the series Writers and Their Work is to be published soon. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation on Sarojini Naidu.
By the Same Author
The Binding Vine
The Dark Holds No Terrors
The Intrusion and Other Stories
A Matter of Time
Small Remedies
That Long Silence
The Narayanpur Incident
Foreword
Shashi Deshpande, in a writing career of thirty-one years, which includes nine novels, four books for children, innumerable short stories and more recently, translations of her illustrious father Shriranga s works into English, has consistently rejected attempts to label and define her works. She has stated an aversion to descriptions and the plethora of titles which inevitably attach themselves to writers and their writing today-essentialist and reductive definitions so integral to academic theories and bookshop shelves. Her works are not , she says, not Indian, not Indo-English, not woman, not feminist, not third world . The list goes on- not Asian writer, Indo-English, Indian writer in English, third world writer, postcolonial writer and so on ( Of Concerns, Of Anxieties , Indian Literature: Women s Writing in English, New Voices, 1996).
Be that as it may, Deshpande makes gender central to her writings. Her works deal not only with ordinary women in ordinary, urban situations but stem from a firm belief that our lives are to a great extent governed by gender. Women, she feels, have not participated in the process of word-making; the stories, myths and legends in our Puranas, epics and kathas have been written by men. Moreover, women have been conditioned to a great extent by myth: To be as pure as Sita, as loyal as Draupadi, as beautiful as Laxmi, as bountiful a provider as Annapoorna, as dogged in devotion as Savitri, as strong as Durga-these are ultimately the role models we cannot entirely dismiss ( The Indian Woman-Myths, Stereotypes and the Reality , 1977, private papers). Deshpande feels that women never start with a picture of themselves on a clean slate, their self-image honed by the hegemonic influences of myths, movies and current-day soap operas. She sees herself as a writer whose writing comes out of, she says,
my own intense and long suppressed feelings about what it is to be a woman in our society, it comes out of the experience of the difficulty of playing the different roles enjoined on me by society, it comes out of the knowledge that I am something more and something different from the sum total of these roles. My writing comes out of a consciousness of the conflict between my idea of myself as a human being and the idea that society has of me as a woman ( Of Concerns, Of Anxieties ).
Deshpande, however, expresses her unhappiness at the consistent ghettoization of women writers , at their marginalization or categorization usually tinged with a note of apology.
I call myself just novelist and short story writer . Truth is, I am a story-teller. I m deeply interested in human beings, in the human condition. Through the stories I tell I am probing into this condition. I am asking those questions most of us ask ourselves some time or the other-about life, about death, about our relationships with one another, with society and our moral values ( Where Do We Belong: Regional, National, or International , 2002, unpublished paper).
Deshpande s stories in this collection give a perspective on women in their complex and real relationships. They are about mothers and daughters, grandmothers and wives, women working outside the home, negotiating a balance between tradition and modernity, women analysing or just expressing their insecurities and fears and desires. As Deshpande says about the protagonist of The Dark Holds No Terrors, What we want to reach at finally is the telling, the breaking of silence (in an interview with Romita Choudhury, World Literature Written in English, 1995).
Some of the stories in this collection depict poignantly the mother-daughter relationship seen from the perspective of a mother trying to reach across a barrier to her daughter. Why a Robin , It Was Dark and My Beloved Charioteer are first- person narratives of a woman s real concern at her inability to be an ideal mother, the epitome of succour and comfort, and her difficulty in communication. Deshpande examines the problematic of the mother-daughter relationship, warts and all , in several of the stories, and while commenting that this relationship is rarely dealt with in traditional stories and legends, she feels that her portrayal of the uncompromising relationship, at times, makes some readers uneasy . She asks, Isn t it because we have this stereotypical image of what a loving mother is like that we find any variation to be lacking in motherly feelings? It seems to me we need to get rid of these images to be able to release ourselves from guilt . . . We had to wait for women to write to bring out the truth of this relationship ( The Indian Woman-Myths, Stereotypes and the Reality ).
Corresponding to the mothers narratives are the daughters portrayal of their mothers in A Liberated Woman and The Awakening , and their attempts to contend with the ghosts of the past and the complexity of their present. Memory and the counter-pointing of the past and the present are devices effectively used by Deshpande both in her novels and short stories. Memories are not records: they refuse to stay enclosed within covers. They choose their time and spring out at you, she says in Independence Day , a story ironically celebrating Bharat Mata s victory, even as the horrors of Partition decimate the country. Deshpande the storyteller uses almost similar narrative techniques in her short stories and novels despite the fact, as Lakshmi Holmstr m says in her introduction to The Inner Courtyard; Stories By Indian Women (1990), that the short story imposes certain restrictions, intensity, concentration, suggestiveness, surprise.
Deshpande incorporates all these elements in a first-person narration by one of the stone women , in The Inner Rooms . Iravati Karve s Yuganta inspired Deshpande to retell Amba s story from the Mahabharata, or rather to let Amba tell her own story, to express her anger, her disgust and despair at becoming a pawn in the hands of Bhishma. The Stone Women , in fact, is almost emblematic of this collection of short stories, for Deshpande goes beyond and behind the facade-the beautiful sculptures created by men which she saw in the Channakeshava temple in Belur-and the myth of the ideal woman, to explore the inner self of women. Yes, women writers are now exploring the myths and stereotypes, a phenomenon which has been partly influenced by the growing strength of feminist thinking. This has made it possible for us to ask a great many questions, questions which had never been asked before ( The Indian Woman-Myths, Stereotypes and the Reality ). Deshpande states categorically, What we are now doing is retelling our own tales (Ibid). These are not stories of victims, but of thinking women able to analyse their situation, as in The Intrusion or The First Lady , while other stories such as The Homecoming and Can You Hear Silence? celebrate the triumph of resilience of the girl child.
Deshpande feels that now women writers are saying the kind of things nobody has said until now. They are showing you the world which the men have not known (In Conversation: Sue Dickman with Indian Women Writers , the Book Review, 1995). This was not always so. Though women have traditionally been storytellers, according to Holmstr m, the short story written by women writers is a phenomenon of the twentieth century. In fact, when Deshpande started writing, she felt this sense of isolation, of writing in a vacuum, since she did not feel a sense of literary kinship with writers or a literary tradition. She speaks of a physical isolation as well. She had no room of her own and wrote, when her husband left for the hospital, either at the dining or kitchen table, in between meals or when her boys were in school. She started writing short stories which were published by Femina and Eve s Weekly and remembers receiving the princely sum of Rs 75 with which she bought the boys a scooter to play with.
Born in 1938, Deshpande grew up in a house which had a harmonious mixture of languages. Her father taught Sanskrit in a college and wrote in Kannada, but opted to send his daughters to study in an English-medium convent school. Deshpande recalls a childhood reci