Analysis Of Shashi Deshpande's 'Small Remedies'

Shashi Deshpande is one of the prominent contemporary women writers in India writing in English. She excels in projecting a realistic picture of the middle class educated women who are sandwiched between tradition and modernity. She is entirely different from any of her contemporary women writers. Although critics indiscriminately dub her as a feminist, she is not a feminist in the sense that is probably applied to certain women writers. During the course of her narration while unfolding the drama of an individual is life – a women’s life, “ she almost compatibly portrays Indian middle class women with their turmoils, convulsions, frustrations endurance .”( Sabita Ramachandran: Sashi Deshpande’s Craft as a novelist”) One admirable

Either their voices are unheard or misinterpreted. The characters are also portrayed in a way that they are under some influence.Deshpande's women protagonists remain ideal. Both Savitri Bai and Leela in' Small Remedies' appear as independent and significant, each having sentiments of dissimilar nature. Breaking the tradition is of late a thinking and they are unable to present themselves. Their search for peace and harmony is out of their orthodoxy. The stories of these women, independent spirits, both who give up respectability to gain love and unhappiness in equal measure. Not only this, in' Small Remedies' Madhu, the biographer of Savitri Bai tries to make sense of her own life, writing the biography of Savitri Bai. Grieving the death of her only son Aditya,she hopes to find a way out of her own despair."This is a kind of novel which presents a problem, analyses it and posits a kind of solution so that the focus is on the psychological process of becoming a mature person. The desperate search for meaning, the effort to find a sense of one's identity and one's relationship to the world outside, culminates in the realisation that loss is never total, and it is essential to realise it because, in any event, life has to be made possible."(Nanda Kumar,'The Emerging Voice: A Comparative Study Of Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence and Small

She believes that love is a basic human emotion and there is nothing banal about it. However one cannot walk away from the consequences of the choices we make in life. In this way while taking up the theme of love in the backdrop of the feminine sensibility, the author goes on to describe the protagonist s quest in search of answers to some of the existential questions of life. Devayani falls in love with the DSP Ashok, who is already married and had a nine year old girl and soon realizes how everything in life is not that easy to be classified as right or wrong the' Ananda' which the protagonist experiences and describes nowhere makes her look like a voluptuous female. On this way the issues of women sensuality and sexuality taken up by the author implies rejection of prudery associated with them. At the same tone one cannot overlook the fact that the author has a very balanced approach. She is meticulous about the socio- cultural milieu of the society for which she writes. The love story of Devayani has no future and she was fully conscions of it from the very beginning. This however, never belittles the sorrow which feels on betrayal. She could not escape form the repercussions of the choices she made this seems to be the message of the author to this open minded novel. The reader is left with the food for thinking that traditional approach