Splitting/Violating the “New Indian Woman” in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980)
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Poonkulaly Gunaseelan
Abstract
The dialectics of tradition and modernity in the South Asian context often focus on the female body. Developing this discourse, Sunder Rajan [Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari (1993). Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. London: Routledge.] discusses a new brand of woman that features in contemporary culture: the “New Indian Woman.” This figure is able to perfectly harmonize the conflict between tradition and modernity and negotiate seamlessly between the public and private spheres. Based on close readings, I will extend Sunder Rajan’s analysis of the New Indian Woman to Shashi Deshpande’s 1980 novel The Dark Holds No Terrors. Informed by ideas of embodiment, silence and performance, this paper considers how the unobtainability of the New Indian Woman myth in Deshpande’s novel results in a splitting of the self for the protagonist, Sarita. I argue that the splitting of the self occurs on two levels: while represented as a psychological breakdown experienced by Sarita, I contend that it is also reflected as a corporeal act through the violating literary depiction of rape.
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©2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Introduction – Voices of Their Own: South Asian Women’s Writing
- Voices of Resolution and Resistance in Indian Women’s Poetry
- Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period: Critique of Nation, Narration, and Patriarchy
- Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab
- “What an inauspicious moment it turned out to be when she began to write!”: The Presentation and Position of the South Asian Woman Writer in Colonial Bengal
- Voices from the Threshold in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column
- Negotiating Gender, Memory, and History in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day
- Splitting/Violating the “New Indian Woman” in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980)
- Challenging Gender and Genre: Women in Contemporary Indian Crime Fiction in English
- Book Reviews
- “I Am Because You Are:” Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt
- Counternarrative Possibilities: Virgin Land, Homeland, and Cormac McCarthy’s Westerns
- Shakespeare, Court Dramatist
- Subjectivity across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives
- Books Received
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Introduction – Voices of Their Own: South Asian Women’s Writing
- Voices of Resolution and Resistance in Indian Women’s Poetry
- Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period: Critique of Nation, Narration, and Patriarchy
- Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab
- “What an inauspicious moment it turned out to be when she began to write!”: The Presentation and Position of the South Asian Woman Writer in Colonial Bengal
- Voices from the Threshold in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column
- Negotiating Gender, Memory, and History in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day
- Splitting/Violating the “New Indian Woman” in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980)
- Challenging Gender and Genre: Women in Contemporary Indian Crime Fiction in English
- Book Reviews
- “I Am Because You Are:” Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt
- Counternarrative Possibilities: Virgin Land, Homeland, and Cormac McCarthy’s Westerns
- Shakespeare, Court Dramatist
- Subjectivity across Media: Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives
- Books Received
