Women of the Mahabharatha: Perspective of Shashi Deshpande

Shashi Deshpande's stories are primarily woman-centered. She honestly portrays the sufferings, disappointments, and frustrations of her protagonists. The themes that operate in her stories are guilt, failure, frustration, loss, and loneliness. Deshpande lets her protagonists search and analyze their “selves,” and thus probes into the existential problems of women. In an effort to maintain peace and harmony in their families, Deshpande's protagonists lose their own selves and become victims.

Even the women in our epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are not exempt from this victimization. In the stories of The Stone Women, Deshpande goes back to the greatest epics of India. Their core stories are more than 3000 years old and tell innumerable stories. But in many of these stories, women, though very much present, have had no voice. In “The Inner Rooms,” “Hear Me, Sanjaya,” and “And what has been decided?” Deshpande has lent voices respectively to Amba, Kunti and Draupadi the very famous women characters of the Mahabharatha, and allows them, finally, to explain their predicament. For Deshpande, the story becomes a medium of moral and psychological analysis and her focus is almost invariably on the “inner” life.