Predicaments of Sarita in ‘The Dark Holds No Terrors’ by Shashi Deshpande

Abstract

Shashi Deshpande holds great worth as an Indian English woman novelist. She has made bold attempts at giving a voice to the distresses and frustrations of a woman. Through her novels, she has portrayed her protagonists as actually aware of their oppressed and chained existence in a male-dominated society. The realistic description of a woman as a wife, mother, and daughter and their search for identity and sexuality indicates their predicaments. The objective of this paper is to study and analyze predicaments of Sarita (Saru), in the traditional Indian set up formed by gender discrimination, loveless relationship with the parents, and her strained relations with her husband leading to a painful search for herself.