THE INTERSECTION OF FEMINISM, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURAL TRANSLATION IN SHASHI DESHPANDE'S FICTION

Overview & Synopsis

This study investigates how Shashi Deshpande, one of India’s foremost women novelists writing in English, negotiates feminist consciousness, language, and cultural translation in her fiction. It contends that Deshpande’s narratives perform cultural translation by transforming the silenced inner lives of Indian women into articulate feminist discourse. Through close readings of The Dark Holds No Terrors, That Long Silence, and The Binding Vine, this study explores how Desai’s linguistic and narrative techniques render women’s struggles, pain, and self-realization within patriarchal frameworks. Drawing upon feminist theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, Sherry Simon, and Susan Bassnett, this paper proposes that Deshpande’s fiction serves as a metaphorical site of translation across languages, cultures, and genders thereby constructing an indigenous feminist poetics of translation.