Exposition of Marriage, Joint-family System, Infidelity, Class and Caste Relations in Roots and Shadows by Shashi Deshpande

Abstract

Shashi Deshpande is a leading woman novelist in Indian writing in English. She has written seven novels and four collections of short stories. In her novels she gives us a realistic portrait of middle class educated Indian women who are self -confident, self-reliant and financially self-dependent. Such women are the protagonists of her novels, they get trapped between tradition and modernity, they undergo great mental trauma, they face the problems of adjustments and conflicts and then they go in self- quest or a quest for their identity. When they start their journey for self-quest, they face sundry outer and inner conflicts, but they do not bother for the restrictions imposed by society, culture and nature and they get rid of their own fear and guilt. Roots and Shadows is one of the important novels of Shashi Deshpande and it was awarded the Thirumathi Rangammal Prize for the best English novel published in India during1982-83. This novel explores the inner conflicts of its female protagonist Indu who is an educated, modern young woman. She aspires to become independent and complete, she tries her best to create her own identity or to assert her own individuality, but finds so many hurdles coming in her way. She finds dominant Akka and her family to be a great hindrance to achieving her goal of attaining independence and completeness. So she leaves the house and gets married to Jayant who is her own choice. She leaves one house and enters another to be independent and complete, but ironically enough, soon she realizes the futility of her decisions. She feels that she has achieved completeness with Jayant, but she does not want this sort of completeness because she feels that she has lost her identity after marriage.