The two nations – Australia and India – together present before us a very interesting package. They are a lot similar, yet very different from each other. Australia seems to be a solitary but domineering island nation down in the southern hemisphere, and India situated too right at the end of the huge Asian continent overshadows other countries to some extent. These countries are different and similar in many ways, and these are reflected in one way or the other in the literature produced by both the nations. ‘Postcolonial literature’ is the term usually used for literature produced by a country like ours that has been colonised at one time or the other by a foreign country. This severing of a nation from its very past is depicted in all the major works of writers belonging to such nations. A parallel of male domination can be brought out very clearly with the political domination of the master nations over the east. The Federation year novel of Grenville ‘Joan Makes History’ is also an attempt to rewrite history from the subject nation's and feminine point of view trying to rejoin the broken bond. History till now had always been a man's domain. This very motif of unheeded female voice runs strongly in Shashi Deshpande's ‘That Long Silence’. Both Grenville and Deshpande touch similar issues. Issues related to the silences of a woman, her being normal if she confirms to the norms dictated by the society and how she learns to internalise her being merely to be a ‘Suhasini’, but in the end utterly fails as the ‘Jaya’ in them finally resurfaces.
Postcolonial, Eurocentric, Colonisation, Feminine and Masculine, Patriarchal, The other Hybrid, Fiction, History
