Roots And Shadows Character Analysis

Shashi Deshpande the daughter of famous Sanskrit scholar Adya Shriranga is a promising writer in the history of Indian English Literature. She bagged many awards for her credit. She won Thirumathi Rangamalai Prize for the novel Roots and Shadows in the year 1982-83. She becomes the inner voice for convoluted, self abnegated, mute and lost women in the male dominated society. In the novel Roots and Shadows she projects her protagonist, Indu, who faces discrimination, identity crisis at different levels of her life. The bigoted Indu is much anguished with the unfair treatment of the people. She is treated as inferior when she was a child. She is being differentiated in her romantic relationship in her conjugal life and as well as in her professional life. But at the end of the novel she realizes what she lacked in her life and achieved her individuality with her brave declaration of her right to independence. She represents the modern educated woman who always stands at

She is a scintillating Indian woman novelist who delineates the identity crisis of modern educated women in the patriarchal system of family. G.S. Amur aptly remarks: “Woman’s struggle in the context of contemporary Indian society to find and preserve her identity as a wife, mother and most important of all, as humanbeing is Shashi Deshpande’s major concern as a creative writer, and this appears in all her important stories.” Though there are many educated women characters in the novels of Shashi Deshpande
The present paper is an attempt to trace out the identity crisis in the fiction of Shashi Deshpande with special reference to Roots and Shadows.
“We talk of revolution- political and economic and yet the greatest revolution in a country is one that effects improvement in the status and living conditions of its women.”- Jawaharlal