• SHRUTI JAIN

  Author

Silence anticipates the storm and Jaya’s ‘long silence’ in Shashi
Deshpande’s That Long Silence (1989) makes the approaching storm all the more audible.
Shashi Deshpande in Creative Theory: Writers on Writing says: “[…] and then I wrote That
Long Silence almost entirely a woman’s novel nevertheless, a book about the silencing of onehalf
of humanity” (210). The novel traces the growth of Jaya, an educated Indian wife as an
individual. The novel opens with Jaya pondering over her life; life that has confined her to the
prescribed roles of wife and mother and made great demands on her to live up to the model of
pativrata, ideal womanhood. Jaya does everything her husband wishes. She initially has no
choice but to be nice to him, however much she has a mind of her own. But when Mohan reveals
his involvement in a financial malpractice and takes her to the old Daddar flat in order to hide
from the enquiring authorities, Jaya begins to question the prison of the home she had been put
into since her marriage. She tries to erase a woman’s long silence: “To achieve anything, to
become anything, you’ve got to be hard and ruthless” (1). Throughout her life she has helped
her husband in building his identity but now she engages in searching who she really is and what
is her individual identity.

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