Prominent Indian Feminist Novelist, 20th Century a comparison, Shashi Deshpande & Anita Dasai

Abstract

Shashi Deshpande is one of the major voices in modern Indian English fiction, and occupies a prominent position as a novelist, especially feminist novelist though she rejects this image. She emerged in the Indian fictional scenario in the late 70's. Inspite of her recent, in the horizon of Indian English fiction, her contribution is significant and praiseworthy in Indian English literature. Her literary career started as a short story writer. She excels in projecting a realistic picture of the middle-class woman who finds herself standing at the cross-roads of tradition and modernity and is caught in the dilemma of choosing either of the two. Shashi Deshpande was born in Dharwar, a small town in north Karnataka, in 1938. She is the daughter of the renowned Kannada writer and Sanskrit scholar Adya Rangachar, better known as Sriranga, a cerebral man who wrote plays of ideas. From her father nevertheless, she must have acquired an intellectual bent of mind and a keen love for reading and scholarship which won her various academic degrees. At the age of fifteen she went to Bombay, graduated in Economics, obtained a degree in law, post-graduate degree in English literature and a diploma in journalism, at present she lives in Bangalore with her pathologist husband and two sons. Deshpande was influenced by Somerest Maugham, Jane Austin, Bronte sisters, Margaret Drabble, Dorris Lessing and Erica Jang. Simone de Beauvoir and Gernaine Greer. As she says "when I read them, they stimulated me "works obviously on live