That Long Silence

by Shashi Deshpande

Jaya's life comes apart at the seams when her husband is asked to leave his job while allegations of business malpractice against him are investigated.

Her familiar existence disrupted, her husband's reputation in question and their future as a family in jeopardy, Jaya, a failed writer, is haunted by memories of the past. Differences with her husband, frustrations in their seventeen-year-old marriage, disappointment in her two teenage children, the claustrophia of her childhood all begin to surface. In her small suburban Bombay flat, Jaya grapples with these and other truths about herself among them her failure at writing and her fear of anger.

Shashi Deshpande gives us an exceptionally accomplished portrayal of a woman trying to erase a 'long silence' begun in childhood and rooted in herself and in the constraints of her life

Genres: Fiction, India, Indian Literature, Literature, Feminism, Classics, Novels

193 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Novelist and short story writer, Shashi Deshpande began her career with short stories and has by now authored nine short story collections, twelve novels and four books for children. Three of her novels have received awards, including the Sahitya Akademi award for `That Long Silence'. Some of her other novels are `The Dark Holds No Terrors', `A Matter of Time', `Small Remedies', `Moving On', `In The Country of Deceit' and `Ships that Pass'. Her latest novel is `Shadow Play'.Many of her short stories and novels have been translated into a number of Indian as well as European languages. She has translated two plays by her father, Adya Rangacharya, (Shriranga), as well as his memoirs, from Kannada into English, and a novel by Gauri Deshpande from Marathi into English.
Apart from fiction, she has written a number of articles on various subjects - literature, language, Indian writing in English, feminism and women's writing - which have now been put together in a collection `Writing from the Margin.' She has been invited to participate in various literary conferences and festivals, as well as to lecture in Universities, both in India and abroad.

She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2008.

List of books by Shashi Deshpande

Dark Holds No Terrors (1982)
That Long Silence (1989)
A Matter of Time
Moving On
Small Remedies
Shadow Play (2013)
The Narayanpur Incident
If I Die Today
In the Country of Deceit
The Binding Vine
Ships That Pass (2012)
The Intrusion And Other Stories
3 Novels : A Summer Adventure, The Hidden Treasure, The Only Witness
Come Up & Be Dead
Collected Stories (Volume - 1)
Collected Stories (Volume - 2)
Writing from the Margin: And Other Essays

Reviews

[Pradnya]

I wish I could give it more stars.

After a long time I came across such a book - dense narrative, several characters (at least 25), void of a storyline, and yet riveting. From the very beginning it stamps its singularity vividly, perpetuating till the end.

I came across the book accidentally. In the reader's club I glanced at the cover with a modern art of a lady against the backdrop of dark old building mounted with a clock. The cover is an art in itself, depicting the strong lady, unwilling to give in to the traditions, already left them behind. The story abides by this theme. Rather there's no story. It's about a housewife's reflections, who lives in posh suburbs of Mumbai. Her husband has been caught in graft in his job. This changes everything in the otherwise normal life of the couple. They shift temporarily to the dingy flat in Dadar. The protagonist, Jaya, ponders how she has reached here, her days before marriage, her fond memories of childhood and her demised father who always believed in her, the complex weaves of relations between her grandmothers, mother, brothers and herself. She also thinks of her friends - either lost or stuck with her, their kids, especially daughters. Her neighbors, cousin and maid and her daughter, their irresponsible and chauvinist husbands, why, even her own husband who is obsessed with self-validation so that he won't come across as his abusive father, who never cared for his mother or the kids. In spite of this he is casted in the same pattern of showiness of the society, the society which throttled women. So what if it's a drunkard husband, or a high class engineer who is upset with his wife for writing a frank article about a man's failure to reach to his woman except through her body.
Jaya's husband doesn't really force her to give up on her honest writing, or for anything. But when he's upset with her, she searches his face and acts in a way expected to him, to be better at her profession - being his wife.

She meets only one person, Mr Kamat, who encourages the writer in her, like her father did. Mr Kamat is the only person who treats her as a person and not as woman. His character is feminist in a true way. He learns and excels in cooking, arguing that women make men dependant on themselves by feeding and pampering them, that cooking is a survival skill. He despises Jaya's current mask of writer and insists she should write being true to herself. Jaya, unable to understand him, gets scared and leaves him in his dying state. The irony - running from something good due to her ignorance - repeats when she leaves her early friend in hostel based on the rumors she heard about her.

Through all these reflections, Jaya finds something of her own, something she always possessed but wasn't aware of.

Like an expert hairdresser, braids the hair with one strand of hair, in continuation and then picking random strands in the flow, weaving a beautiful braid, yes, that's how author picks her characters, pirouetting across Jaya.

The thing I loved most about the book is the writing style, pondering in past, linking one thing with another reference as they come in handy due to the similarities. Or contrasts. In her reflection of herself, she throws light on people around her, the cogs of society, helpless, playing their own parts due to the established structure. She doesn't ridicule it, she just throws focus on them, leaving readers to decide for themselves, and that convincing enough to think alike her.

It reminded me of Mrs Dalloway due to the plotless structure. But unlike Mrs Dalloway, it has very dense narrative and a hundred tales of life. The vocab of author is extensive. With her every character a new shade of human nature comes in limelight, painted in just few conversations. It seems to be the strongest point of writing style. At times it feels like we are reading her personal diary, she rotates in the deep grooves like she has forgotten about the book she's writing. That makes a personal connection with her. Her way of looking at the thoughts hidden in plane sight is unparallel. She looks at the daily routine and the way women often give in her convictions for the sake of family, without anyone forcing them. It's a marvelous tale of relations and marriage, disintegrating and yet nailed in a strong bond, their vulnerability and yet the strength, just like her own.

I would have added some more paragraphs but they are quite lengthy, spanning a page sometimes hence below is just a glimpse of this phenomenal writing.

'I know you better than you know yourself,' I had once told Mohan. And I had meant it; wasn't he my profession, my career, my means of livelihood? Not to know him was to admit that I had failed at my job. But why then the idea of his anxiety not occur to me this time? Was I slipping, losing the clue to him? Or was it that, not caring, I was not as finely tuned to his moods as I had been?

And then as we grew into young women, we realized it was not love , but marriage that was the destiny waiting for us. And so, with each young man, there was the excitement of thinking - will this man be my husband? The future stretched ahead, full not of possibilities but of cozy, comfortable certainties. It has been our parents who had taken charge of these vague desires of ours and translated them into hard facts. It was like the game we had played as children on our buttons - tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor. Only for us it had been - doctor, engineer, government official, college lecturer, if the young man was of the right sort, that is.

[daisy(temporarily inactive)]

This book revolves around a “married woman” with two teenage children, and as she speaks of the women around her, I found myself relating them to the women around me.

Jaya is married and moves to Mumbai. She is deeply unhappy with her life as a housewife, shaped largely by the influence of her father, who always wanted her to be more than just a wife. When her father dies, that dream dies with him, and she is left only with the role assigned to her by marriage.

Jaya is also a failed writer, not because her stories lack depth, but because no one wants to listen to them. They carry truths that the world is unwilling to accept. At its core, this book is about how women are silenced by so-called society.

The most unsettling realization in the book is that there was never really a relationship between Jaya and her husband. It was an arranged marriage, and she existed merely as a wife, someone who worked endlessly to keep everyone else comfortable.

“The relation of man to woman is the most natural of one person to another.’
Natural? There’s only treachery, only deceit, only betrayal.”

There is also a story Jaya’s husband tells about his mother. She had already cooked and fed the children. When her husband returned late, he refused to eat what the children had eaten. So, late at night, with a newborn in her lap and four other children beside her, she cooked again. Until reading this, I believed women of that time were simply strong. But what I saw instead was silence and surrender.

If I found the story painful, I found his comment on it
even more disturbing.

‘God,’ he said, after he told me this, ’she was tough.
Women in those days were tough.
He saw strength in the woman sitting silently in front of the fire. But I saw despair—a despair so profound that it could not voice itself. A struggle so bitter that silence became the only weapon. Silence and surrender.

Some readers may feel the author exaggerates, but she does not. I have witnessed this in my own home. My mother wanted to become a lawyer. After her BA, she was married off to my father, who promised she could continue her studies and work. But after I was born, he said he earned enough and questioned why she needed to work at all. And so, my mother surrendered to silence.

At first, she spoke about it. Now, she doesn’t.
And reading this book, I finally understand why.

[Versha]

When it comes to beautiful writing, the story takes a backseat for me and that is what happened with ‘That Long Silence by Shashi Deshpande’ .
Her writing is something deep and exceptionally classy. It’s never too hard to connect to her protagonist that mainly deals with women and her emotional journey.
This book is no different. But this has neither any particular story nor any characters but for Jaya the protagonist who is stuck between her wish and her duty,(her wish of becoming a free-spirited writer with no restrictions from her society and her duty which is taking care of her husband and two children and also restricting her writing keeping the society in mind) who finally breaks her long silence and pours her heart out about what she was and what she had eventually become and what she should be in the future. She unlocks all her emotional turmoil and her guilty conscience layer by layer in her writing. Initially, understanding Jaya takes time, as the writing is just like scattered thoughts that flow in our mind which connects to some unrelated situations and persons but the puzzles solve eventually. This is a book that makes you think about who you really are (whether you like it or not).

P.S.- Thank god I don’t have any prejudice against Indian writers, which has led me to discover some remarkable authors like Shashi Deshpande and RK Narayan and many more!

https://varshasbookshelf.blogspot.com/

[Avid]

I picked up this book as a way to allay my guilty feeling for not reading enough Indian authors. Shashi Deshpande ranks high in the list of top Indian authors, so it was natural to pick up one of her books.

That Long Silence is the story of Jaya, a housewife and mother to two teenaged children and is a writer in her free time. Jaya’s life resembles any typical Indian housewife, compromising for family needs, putting family before oneself, suffering silently, until she gets a jolt when her husband is fired from his work with charges of fraud. Her life turns upside down when her husband ‘the tree which gives shelter’ is no longer the bread earner of the family and they have to live with the shame of the charges and move on with their life. Jaya tells us stories about her cousins, parents, aunts and grandparents and we see how Jaya has evolved through her life.

The main problem I had with the book is its narration. The tone is sloppy, weak and not engaging and the writer jumps from past to present to future which makes you go dizzy. For someone who is left with ‘that long silence’, the conversation should have been deeper and more philosophical, but it sounds like Jaya is nervously reciting from a paper in front of a packed audience. The writer failed to evoke any emotions in me for the main protagonist, which was what the book needed the most. The rest was a downhill journey. The convoluted sentences and bad choice of words makes this book a difficult read. Do we Indians try hard to sound like foreign authors or are we so bad with English that we can’t write well? The characters are lifeless and do not deserve the readers’ time.

I am disappointed that my first attempt at reading more local authors was such a failure. I don’t want to be deterred by this, so I am going to read other authors or other recommended books of the same author. If you have read a good book by any Indian author, do suggest some.

[Aishwarya (Mindscape in Words)]

4./5/5 STARS

This book was published in 1989, so I would like to believe that the portrayal of a wife has changed a lot over the years. But, given the fact that I could find Jaya’s life all too feasible made me sad. Despite people being vocal about gender equity, this story sounds all too familiar and probably represents the major women population who are in their 50s and 60s. If I start talking about this, it would be endless, so I am going to stick to my thoughts on the book alone.

To me, That Long Silence was multi-faceted, not only in its depiction of the role of a wife, but also in depiction of various familial bonds. Yes, the tip of the iceberg is about a woman’s silence, or rather her assumptive passive agreement to everything that has to do with a marriage; selecting a husband, the wedding, having sex, changing houses, having a career, having children, and just every decision, minor and major. It talks about how a woman’s life looks fulfilled because it consists of a husband, family, children and homes. But, when you separate all of these from the woman, who is she? If not a wife, mother, daughter, sister, or friend, then what is her identity?

The story is imbibed in the patriarchy and the assigned roles for a husband and a wife. The mere thought of a girl asking why the boys never help in the kitchen leaves the women in a roar of laughter. Just the thought of ‘allowing’ his wife to work sounds to the husband as if he has progressive thoughts. Just the thought of a wife not knowing her husband truly feels to her that she failed her job, because being a wife feels and is like a job to her. The reversal of husband waiting for his wife to come home strikes both of them as odd because they only ever knew the opposite. The act of pretending to be scared of lizards and cockroaches just so the husband would feel safe in his manhood. The fact that the husband had a missing button on his shirt was not his fault but his wife’s for not noticing and tending to his every need. Husbands gaslighting wives that the latter have all the power because the former are completely dependent on something that are basic survival skills. The way in which consent is just assumed because you are married.

The sad rage that fills the reader when wives restrain themselves on showcasing their real emotions because they would be called unwomanly. The sad rage of knowing that women are absent from family trees because you are a woman without whom there would be no family, let alone any branches.

Another layer which subtly focuses on the raw human emotions is how a person behaves dictated by the ignanimous ‘society’. The very real picture is how so many adults have a friendship based on convenience but is entirely hollow. Knowing a person’s family, job, lifestyle, routine is not friendship. It’s the knowing of the heart, mind and soul. Being connected to your family does not mean knowing how old they are or when their anniversary is. It’s about knowing their struggles and how they cope on a daily basis.

There are also so many primal unfiltered thoughts spread out across the novel too. These are the thoughts we too have, but perhaps the space we give them is 1 out of 10 wherein the rest are all happy and not unusual. How we think that our loved ones might be dead just because they’re late to come home. How we feel safe about our sanity after meeting someone who is visibly struggling with mental health. The very basic way in which you love your children but maybe don’t really like them. And also, how you are grateful to your aging parents but don’t really want them to come stay with you in their last days. The selfish act of feeling good about yourself because you gave money, equivalent to a second of your lifestyle, to a blind beggar and her baby. Such primal unfiltered thoughts that remain thoughts because no one ever dares to speak them out loud are explored in this book with utmost sensitivity yet without restraint. It was meant to be unsettling and uncomfortable and in its true right it was.

I felt that this book was brilliant. It’s structure was not perfect with a lot of random discontinuous writing throughout, but it never made me lose my train of thought and focus. At times, it made me wonder how many women really go through such similar lives. Most of the time I was reading, the book made me profoundly sad in a way that brought clarity. I will not stop recommending this book any time soon. I have rated That Long Silence by Shashi Deshpande at 4.5/5 stars!

Full Review: Mindscape in Words

[Joy]

To my tastes, this might be the perfect feminist novel. Jaya's first-person narative captures an authentic female experience in middle class India. She frets, probes, justifies, and discovers parts of her psyche as she goes about the daily tasks of being "a career wife." In beautiful prose, Deshpande explores what it means to play a role and be one's self at the same time.

[Rashmi]

Shashi Deshpande's portrayal of the protagonist, Jaya, is very powerful. We see glimpses of so many women around us in Jaya. With brutal honesty she lays bare the structures and workings of middle class families.

[Aditi Chikhale]

Uncovering the white-red paper from a present, I was delighted to find a book by Sashi Deshpande from my thoughtful secret Santa. I love her writing and was excited to read this book.
Jaya, our protagonist, is not unlike many Indian women. She has lived her life for others. For her husband, for her children, for her relatives. You could say she hasn’t lived at all, she has existed only as role. After several years of marriage and two children, she finds herself going over her life, pondering where was it that it went all wrong. Did she love her husband? Why had she spent most of her life behind a façade of the happy family? Mohan, her husband, finds himself in a business problem and they have to remain underground for a few days in their old flat in Dadar. Their children have gone away on a trip with their family friends. It’s just the two of them, living in a house where they first lived as a married couple. The old place or maybe the rehearsed conversations and awkward silences between the couple trigger some thoughts in Jaya and she goes back in time, thinking. And connecting dots. Making hypotheses about her life and her behaviour. There are many characters that enter the book then. Her parents, her grandmothers, uncles, aunties, brothers. She gets insight into her own being as she introspects and realizes many things. Things that have been simmering near the surface all her life but she had ignored them tactfully.
I really liked the book. There isn’t a major plot in the book, it’s just Jaya thinking over her life which hasn’t been that eventful. It’s the normal life of any woman. But these normal lives that we all are living are soaked in oppression and patriarchy. We can go on living with blindfolds and ignoring our own voices. But As Jaya realized, no matter what happens, at the end of the day when you look back at your half-lived life the only person you can point fingers at is yourself. Because you have the power the choose and make decisions. To fight and live a life that you want to live. I like Sashi Deshpande’s writing because it feels real. I can imagine Jaya and her extended family. The familiar Marathi words that she uses makes the entire setting come alive. I can’t wait for another Sashi Deshpande book.

[Ashish Kumar]

“With that I was defeated. ‘The children’… the words have been our final argument, our sacred cow, our justification for everything, even for living. Everything we did, or didn’t, was for the children. No wonder, it occurs to me now, that they grow up to be such sullen monsters, burdened with all this unselfishness of ours.”


There should be an official name for books that deal with bored housewives looking back into the depths of their past to figure out what and where things went wrong, how they ended up in this strange situation and whether they should try to find a way out or submit to the charade of happily ever after.

That Long Silence, similarly examines the psyche of Jaya, a wife and a mother of two who starts to question her existence when her husband is interrogated for business malpractices. Slowly the cracks and regrets become apparent and unavoidable and their marriage of seventeen years begins to falter. Due to the absence of any plot or concrete storyline, the novel engages in meandering thoughts, encounters, dipping in and out of various stories of various women in various circumstances.

From the very first page, I fell in love with it. The narration is extremely tenacious, it pulls you right into the story, drags you by hair and refuses to let you go. It’s like being into someone’s head, privy to their uncensored opinions and unfair judgments. It’s addictive, the way she manages weave past with the present and insinuates about the future. There were two particular moments in the book where I almost felt like crying; one involving a group of poor children and the other with her husband’s mother and that’s when I realized how special this book was.

Two reasons why I am not giving it five out of five stars; firstly, there were some typos and even though it isn’t the fault of the author, it did annoy me and considering that Penguin is the publisher, I couldn’t believe no one noticed it. Secondly, the last thirty pages felt like a drag and that could be attributed to my own lack of concentration. I shouldn’t have neglected it for a full three days and when I did pick it up, I couldn’t get back into it.

Anyway, it’s a phenomenal book, one that is timeless and I was surprised to find that this was published in 1978. Can’t wait to pick her next The Dark Holds No Terrors.

[Ajay]

Trenchant in its observations and melancholic in its mood, this gem of a book breaks down the many layers of repression that a person can cloak themselves in over the course of a lifetime.

[Ramprasad Dutta]

A typical "saas bhi kabhi bahu thi" or "valika badhu" kind of tale. I suppose Ekta Kapoor would be interested in making a ("what!"-"what!"-"what!")-sort of daily soap out of it. Feminism is good but what Deshpande has portrayed through Jaya is rather artificial. For example, she ponders over the fact that why Mohan (her hubby) is not interested in taking any dowry (subconsciously she is thinking about her dark complexion and takes it as an answer), her maid Jeeja is also a victim of male chauvinism as her husband beats her after consuming alcohol, her neighbor Mukta, Mukta's daughter Nilima everybody is suffering as it seems. BOGUS! Jaya has an online blog called "Seeta" , again Feminism! While reading it I was feeling like it is still India? I mean, it's quite unnatural that everything in a (so-called independent, lonely) woman's life seems to drag her into the murky hole of despair created by the sadistic patriarchal society. sorry, it's not my cup of tea.

[Lester]

Excellent writing, and a very moving book. Consistently depressing, though, with very little relief from the travails of the life led by Indian women. The plethora of catastrophies heaped on the narrators family are just short of unbelievable, but as a diary of the wrongs suffered silently by Indian wives, the book does justice to its subject.

[Itz Shasanka here]

And thus Jaya is reborn, the little girl with her hands in her pockets. She will compromise no more. She will start questioning too and she demands answers. No more harvesting silence inside the heart. Suhashini, the 'imposed ladyship' has been abandoned. It's the protagonist's resurrection.

[Shreya Vaid]

That Long Silence, bred in the soul of every Indian woman, whether married or not married, educated or non-educated. It is always there, silently eating into some women's heart, or coming out in some other way.

That Long Silence by Shashi Deshpande is a fictional story, yet something that many women can relate to. Nowadays, every woman born is aware of their rights and can stand for themselves, but still the silence continues. That Long Silence is a story about Jaya, an educated middle-class woman living with her husband and kids, Rahul and Rati. Jaya is an idle example of typical middle class Indian woman, who is confined between her realization and restrictions. Though her upbringing was like any other modern woman, from time to time Jaya faces strange looks from the society who are still not ready to accept individuality in a woman.

That Long Silence is a story of Jaya's life when it all starts to fall apart. Her husband is asked to leave his job because of allegations of him being involved in business malpractices. Differences with her husband along with frustrations in her 17-year-old marriage, disappointment in two teenage children, the claustrophobia of her own childhood and her writer's block, all start coming to the surface and haunt her. Now, shifted to a small suburban Bombay flat, Jaya is left alone to deal with demons of her past and her soul. Jaya's constant fight to fend off that long silence which is embedded in her since childhood is the main plot of the story.

Throughout the novel, Jaya ponders over her role clarity, she keeps on searching her identity and questioning situations where she was not able to take charge of a situation and turned submissive. From being a failed writer due to circumstances she was not able to control to changing her name to ''Suhasini'' after marriage, Jaya dissects each and every moment where she could have done something different to keep a hold on her life.

When we started reading the book, it was a bit difficult for us. The sentences are too long and some of the words, seem like, are deliberately included in the story, maybe to make it more exciting or gripping. But in turn, it confuses the reader. After 60 pages or so, you will start getting the hang of the story. The flow of the story is easy to read and understand and at the end of it, you will feel good to have read such a story. Though the language could have been made a bit easy and some of the chapters might have been removed as well. For housewives or women born during the 70's, this novel might strike a cord. But for women like us, born in new times, you might feel surprised at the oppression and confusion of a woman which we hardly come across these days. But a little part of that long silence still remains with the new age also, in the form of a mother or a sister.

Though That Long Silence is not everyone's cup of tea, we still recommend the book to everyone. Especially to those who are familiar with Shashi Deshpande's talented writing.

[Swathi]

That Long Silence by Shashi Deshpande is Jaya, the protagonist's introspection  to find herself. Jaya and Mohan's routine life is bought into a halt when Mohan gets caught up in work troubles. The undisclosed problem has them moving (hiding) at their old flat in Dadar . The pretense of a happy life with their children Rahul and Rati comes crumbling down as the aftermath.

Starting off Jaya seems very bitter, selfish and a frustrating character. Her thoughts made me uncomfortable. She posed  questions on the norms for men and women. Most of all she talks about the different silences that women she knew maintained and hence the title. Going across various phases of her life, how her father's death changes her aspirations for future. Coming across the women from her family, silenced for various reasons. Mohan's mother and her eventual death following a failed abortion. Mohan's sister facing a fate similar to her mothers. Of Jaya's Mamis and Kakis ,  of Kusum pushed to the edge by her madness - her loneliness and abandonment by her husband. Society and the remarks from them play a vital role in the conditioning of women. Women here are taught to be silent. Jaya and her Ai's fractured relationship full of resentment for the former which in some ways I felt she showed to her children. Jaya's wedding to Mohan is motivated by her Ai's dislike for him. Even with a loving relationship with her elder brother Dinu, he pushes her to the wedding to wash his hands of her. Mohan, coming from an economically lower background strives to make it big.

Jaya silences most of her opinions after comprehending Mohan's reaction to one of her comments. She keeps bottling her feelings trying to portray the ideal  wife, mother and so on. With the new circumstances in their old home, old pent up emotions resurface with Jaya retrospecting her role and reason for remaining in this marriage. She remembers a friendship with her upstairs neighbour Kamat, so different from Mohan . His encouraging words, views on women in contrast to Mohan. Her silence also due to her failed writing career with many rejections for her materials making her more bitter. She keeps remembering her Appa's words Jaya means victory , thus her failures probably pinching her more.

Death, loneliness and silence of women are the recurring themes throughout. Towards the end, Jaya doesn't know what her new normal would be but remembers her father's words in his diary-' Do as you desire'. An open ending left to the readers imagination , I wonder what Jaya chose - to continue her silence or speak up. Considering the period this is set in , the characters remind you of someone you have known or seen around. It was hard for me to get into the book, to understand what shaped Jaya but I consider her character well rounded and went towards a logical character growth. Aptly titled, I would like to revisit the book few years later, at a different juncture in life to see how I resonate with this one.

Rating: 3.75/5

[Archana A]

"Looking through these diaries, I realised, was like going backwards. As I burrowed through the facts, what I found was the woman who had once lived here. Mohan's wife. Rahul and Rati's mother. Not myself."

Shashi Deshpande has a unique style of writing. I really love her usage of similes and metaphors. I had liked her book 'Small remedies' and after reading this, I felt that this isn't really comparable to that in any way.

Jaya, a failed writer is the protagonist of the story. In her seventeen years of marriage, she has lived her life for others and never to herself. She engages in fights with her husband Mohan, which is when she thinks what has exactly gone wrong in her marriage.

She had given up her writing career for Mohan, by performing the duties of a good wife, mother, sister and a daughter. Things start changing when Mohan is caught in his office for a malpractice case. This makes them move to Jaya's flat at Dadar. One fine day, Mohan shouts at her and then leaves home for several days.

I never felt anything unusual in the story to be honest. I was so bored that I wanted to end the book ASAP.

[aayushi]

Last night, I sat at the edge of my bed in the quiet of early morning and realised I could not remember the last time I had heard my own voice - not the one I use to answer emails, or order food at restaurants, but the voice that speaks only when no one is listening.

It wasn’t that I had gone mute. It was that I had disappeared into function. Sister. Colleague. Daughter. Friend. And underneath it all, a kind of hum: the silence of a woman who had not asked herself what she wanted in years.

Very similar to Jaya, the main character of the book. She was so busy trying so hard to do everything right that she forgot what “right” even meant. She’s angry. She’s numb. She’s sometimes not very likable. But she’s honest in a way that made me ache. Because I’ve had those thoughts.

The ones you don’t say out loud.

The ones about resenting your kids, your partner, your choices.

The ones about wondering if you gave up something essential in exchange for being loved.

[Anil Swarup]

Every one has a past. However, to be obsessed with it can lead to a terrible present. The chief protagonist chooses to live in her horrible past that makes for a terrible present. The author makes us believe that she does not have a choice. Hence the "heroine" (she questions this status") continues to recall the horrors of the past in terms of her relationship with her husband and those around her. One may agree or disagree with what she has to narrate but it is perhaps a true reflection of what a number of women go through in their marital life.

[MG]

I picked up That Long Silence trying to understand a kind of life women in the older generations had led — one shaped by duty, restraint, adjustment, and questions that were rarely voiced directly. Not because the women in those lives were weak or perpetually silent — they were not. They endured, they negotiated, they sometimes protested, sometimes screamed. But there was also a pattern: roles assumed early, desires left unexamined, anger redirected inward.

What struck me most about Shashi Deshpande’s novel is its restraint. The book does not rant or dramatise suffering. It does not turn patriarchy into a loud villain. Instead, it allows its protagonist, Jaya, to observe, to hesitate, and most importantly, to indict herself. The absence of melodrama makes the critique sharper. There is no comfort in easy blame.

Patriarchy in this novel operates quietly. It appears in small exclusions — like the family tree in which Jaya finds no place for herself. Married, she no longer belongs to her natal family; in her husband’s lineage, she is barely visible. It is an erasure so matter-of-fact that it almost passes unnoticed. It appears again in the metaphor of the “sheltering tree” — the husband as protection, the wife as dependent creeper who must keep the tree flourishing at any cost. Safety becomes the justification for silence. Vulnerability becomes a threat to be avoided.

And yet, what makes the novel quietly powerful is that it does not allow Jaya to rest entirely in accusation. At one point, she realises she cannot make her husband the scapegoat for her failure to write. She had stopped writing not only because of him, but because she was afraid — afraid of anger, afraid of failure, afraid of stepping outside the safe, familiar role of wife and mother. The novel resists the comfort of simple blame. It suggests, gently but unmistakably, that systems endure partly because we find psychological safety within them. Silence protects. It also perpetuates.

Reading this, I was reminded of a small incident in a family I know. During Diwali, the names of all family members are written during the puja — a ritual affirmation of belonging. For years, the daughter’s name was not written. It was tradition. No one had questioned it. Until she did. She objected. There was discomfort. There were murmurs about unnecessary fuss. And then, from the that year onwards, her name was included. Nothing revolutionary happened. The ritual did not collapse. It simply corrected itself. Change came because someone refused to remain erased.

That Long Silence seems to ask a similar question: not only what was done to women, but what we continue to do by refusing to be honest about what we want, what we fear, and what we accept for the sake of safety. Men silence women; women sometimes silence themselves and other women. Roles harden into identities. Martyrdom becomes comfortable. And yet, nothing shifts unless someone speaks — and someone listens.

The novel does not end with triumph or rebellion. It ends with something quieter, and perhaps more demanding: “Life has always to be made possible.” It is the book’s final line. And that responsibility, Deshpande seems to suggest, belongs to all of us.

[Ishita]

Read it for my Indian lit class.
I would've given it a 5 star, if only the main character, Jaya, was not so self consumed. The writing style was phenomenal and nothing like I've ever read before. The book was based on Feminism and what Indian wives have to go through throughout their lives, holding that long silence and not given the opportunity to speak for themselves. Jaya first portrays that it was other people's fault that she turned out to be "Gandhari"(which i totally agree with) , but then she goes on to blame everything on her too! What the hell ma'am? How is your husband leaving you, your fault? And then, later in the novel, when we come to know how Kamat dies, the writer tells us that Kamat actually called out to Jaya for help when he was lying on the floor, lonely, going through a heart attack, she leaves him there!!! And what sorry excuse she gave? That she was afraid of her marriage going into shambles if she had helped him! Kamat was afraid he would die alone and our Miss Protagonist granted his wish. Kamat was the one who sparked the will in Jaya to continue writing, to see herself beyond the roles that were given to her by the society, of an obedient wife, of a loving mother, a dutiful daughter. And what did madam gave in return to him? A lonely death.
There was no definite ending to the book. I atleast expected Jaya to divorce Mohan after he returns from Delhi, but no such thing happens. We didn't get to explore Rati's or Rahul's characters much, her kids. I felt like Rahul could've been a very bold and sound minded character.

[Harshita]

Shashi Deshpande, as in most of her works, has brought forward the hardships of women, their journey of finding themselves and establishing themselves as independent individuals both socially and psychologically.

The female protagonist, Jaya, finally comes out of her shell that other women in her family and society had helped her create unknowingly. She finally owns up her faults and mistakes and becomes independent of her husband (not that she divorces him or gets separated).

One thing that's remarkable is how the author has portrayed marriage throughout the novel as Jaya's only carrier. Some hard to swallow facts are also brought to light.

But I'll still give it 3 stars because the story did not progress at all. The backdrop was same throughout. It started with an issue and ended (probably) there only as it was left open ended.
Another thing was the narration. There were instances of abrupt and unannounced flashbacks that interfered with interpretation of course.
The characters did not develop, except Jaya who also only changed randomly towards the end.


The whole idea was good but the writing could have been better. It was a fast paced read though, not boring.

Also, these are purely personal views and are not meant to attack or hurt anyone.

Happy reading! :)

[Bookishbong Moumita]

Silence is our weapon.
We, women use silence to express our anger.
We, women, use silence to express our denial.
We, women chose silence to cry.

And none has shown this better than Shashi Despande in That Long Silence.

The Story starts with Jaya but blends with every woman's often unseen, often seen, and always overlooked struggles.

Her husband had to leave his previous job due to some legal allegations, and they had to move to suburban Bombay.

In plaves, it feels like watching episodes of family dramas. Where there's no chronology. Presents bring back pasts, and it's like a whirlpool of thoughts.

Abd there, I felt seen. Some struggles, only I've. Some battles only I fought.

This book will not be a smooth read for almost every reader. That silence would create a chorus in your head.

But you'll feel seen and understood. After all these years.

[Shyamala]

3.5

This started out promising, Jaya's dilemma and her existential crisis were initially relatable when she was trying to discover who she really was. Despite being a short read, the story started to drag later.

nonetheless, all the characters were so well written and in the frw pages they appear in, the reader gets a good flavour of their personality (except for Rahul, i didn't quite understand why he did what he did).

[Manjul Bajaj]

I'm completely stunned by the acuity of this book, at how completely honest it is, how deeply the truth of almost every other sentence resonated. Looking forward to reading her other books now.

[Shrikant Pandey]

The Vocabulary of Silence
Reflections on Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence
Shrikant Pandey
From the start of this year, I have been prioritising quality Indian literature over world literature. As a matter of fact, except for Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, all the books I have read this year belong to the Indian literary landscape. When selecting my next read, I find it expedient and safe to check the list of Sahitya Akademi Award winners.
This is how I discovered That Long Silence by Shashi Deshpande and promptly ordered its Penguin paperback edition. First published in the UK in 1988 and in India the following year, this short novel of 193 pages won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990. I had started it in the first week of September and it took me about two weeks to complete. Overall, I found it remarkably insightful in examining the quiet, unexpressed undercurrents of domestic life, the breakdown of honest communication, traditional expectations, and the personal compromises individuals make. I have no hesitation in declaring that it proved to be a profound choice.
This is Shashi Deshpande’s fifth novel; her other notable works include A Matter of Time (1996) and Shadow Play (2014). Most of her novels deal with the delicacy of relationships that give life its meaning. A Padma Shri awardee (2009) and the author of eleven novels alongside several short story collections, Deshpande (born 1938) is frequently described as a feminist writer, mainly because she gives centre stage to her female protagonists. I would simply say that Shashi Deshpande is a good writer.
In essence, That Long Silence is the story of an urban, middle-class woman named Jaya Kulkarni. The narrative spans her memories from the years around India’s Independence, with the central crisis taking place in the 1970s. Born in a small place called Saptagiri, she spent her childhood there and her adolescent years in Ambegaon near Pune. As a young girl, Jaya is clever, curious, and bright, qualities encouraged by her father but frowned upon by her mother, grandmother, and other women in the family who want her to act conventionally. Eventually, Jaya learns to play the traditional female role and marries Mohan, an engineer.
Jaya and Mohan disagree on many things, and their marriage lacks genuine intimacy or happiness. There is no room in the relationship for Jaya to express her point of view, as Mohan expects her to go along with everything he says. Though she wishes for emotional and physical closeness, Mohan—while happy to have an English-educated, intelligent, and
presentable wife. He never cares to connect with her deeply. Jaya, too, finds herself unable to voice her feelings and thoughts. This is the beginning of "that long silence" for her. As she graduates into motherhood and her scope of responsibility expands, the range of her silence expands along with it.
Jaya becomes a dutiful, sacrificing wife, a caring mother, and a compassionate relative—in short, a duty-bound, subservient woman who neglects her own inclinations. Yet, unlike most women around her, she retains a sharp sense of individuality. She writes in her free time, though she has failed to become a commercially successful author. Jaya is acutely aware that people generally dislike it when she expresses her true self, so she learns to hide it. During her youth, only her father encouraged her; later, it was her neighbour Mr. Kamath, a lonely, compassionate man with artistic inclinations. When Mohan is suspended from his job for financial impropriety, the couple retreats to a small flat in Mumbai, prompting Jaya to think deeply while enduring claustrophobic and neurotic experiences. She hits a breaking point: her teenage son Rahul has run away while on vacation with family friends, and Mohan leaves the house for a few days after an altercation. These events shake her to the core. Terrified that the status quo will shatter, her mind goes into overdrive, replaying the past and dreading the future. It all happens internally. She obsesses over what happened, what didn’t happen, what could, should, or might happen. In a matter of days, she reviews her entire life, parsing her relationships with every family member and examining how she hides behind the veil of a wife and writer. By the end, she realizes that remaining silent and suppressing her inclinations was ultimately her own choice, not something entirely imposed by others. The book ends with Mohan sending a telegram saying he will return soon and that his job is secure. Jaya prepares to accept him back, vowing never again to let a long silence separate them emotionally.
There is not much plot to the story; in fact, it is only a mild exaggeration to say it isn't a story in the traditional sense. Instead, it is a series of intense monologues happening inside the protagonist's mind. Her story reflects not only her own dilemmas but the silent difficulties of women across different generations and socio-economic backgrounds.
Through the behaviour of these women, cutting across three generations, a very uncomfortable thought gripped me, one I am unable to shake off. The anger, desolation, and grudge against patriarchal systems exist in isolation; each woman experiences it alone, even though they all face the same weight. Ironically, the very women who consider themselves victims of an unjust patriarchal system unceasingly become its tools. They transition from victims to active participants and perpetrators. A woman who wants equal opportunity and absolute dignity for herself will readily castigate another for a transgression defined by the very system she fights if doing so secures her own social acceptance.
I found a few elements in the narrative disturbingly desolate, yet highly instructive and ironic:
The Mother's Spite: Immediately after the death of Jaya’s father, her mother sells their home in Saptagiri and moves the family to her parents' place in Ambegaon. The children lose both their father and their home. This wasn’t done for convenience or financial survival; it was done out of spite for her late husband and his family. His death presented a delayed opportunity to give full expression to long-stifled emotions. The long silence turned into something spiteful and treacherous. Furthermore, her loud, public wailings at his death were performative rather than deeply felt. She remained silent when she should have put her foot down in life; once freed by his death, she became dominant and controlling. Ironically, she cried and wailed simply because society expected her to perform, even while taking swift action to obliterate his memory by abandoning their home.
Mohan's Hurt: Mohan gets deeply hurt—not angry but seriously hurt—when Jaya wins a prize for one of her stories. The man who constantly proclaims that all his hard work and labour are solely for Jaya and their children cannot stomach her independent success. Her craft means nothing to him; he is overwhelmed by the fear that the story exposes their own conjugal life and will make him a talking point among their peers. Convincing himself that Jaya wrote it out of malice, his reaction forces her to stop writing evocative literature. Instead, she becomes a columnist, writing harmless, useless pieces under the pen name "Seeta." It made me wonder whether anger, unlike hurt, can sometimes serve a purpose. Anger may provoke action; hurt often does nothing but settle into a swelling, silent grudge.
The Abandonment of Mr. Kamath: Jaya’s failure to visit Mr. Kamath in his final moments, and her decision to spend only a few minutes in his flat after his death, is perhaps the most poignant and disturbing passage in the novel. Her overriding concern is to avoid a single blemish on her status as a devoted wife. The fact that Kamath was the only one who encouraged her writing, helped her get published, and connected with her intellectually and emotionally meant nothing in the end. Compassion, empathy, and genuine affection were completely subservient to her projected image. To disown such a vital human connection in the face of death for something as fleeting as "what will my husband think?" is desolate beyond words.
Instinctive puritanism: There is something else about Jaya's relationship with Kamath that disturbed me. Why must every relationship between a man and a woman be given a name or fitted into an accepted social category? Their relationship was asexual, intellectual and mutually fulfilling, yet Jaya could never be entirely comfortable with it. The guilt ran so deep that even death could not free her from it. Must emotional/intellectual intimacy between a man and a woman necessarily be either conjugal, sexual, familial, or illicit? Is there no legitimate space in between?
The passage that affected me most follows this incident: Jaya returns home agitated, unable to eat or bathe, but gradually loses herself in household chores. Within hours, she manages to conquer her guilt. In the evening, she takes a long hot bath, dines with her family, and wraps up the day by initiating physical intimacy with her husband to completely erase the lingering unease. It is the ultimate escape from guilt. Yet, the memory returns to haunt her in a state of feverish delirium after Mohan leaves. She could not have saved Kamath, but walking away from a dead body reveals the disturbing depths to which human sensitivity can fall. What makes it terrifying is that Jaya is not an unfeeling woman; she is conscientious and sensitive. Her later conversation with her widowed neighbour Mukta—who stoically sits by Jaya's bed during her 104-degree fever—highlights this stark contrast, making Mukta the most genuinely compassionate character in the story.
The novel describes the social milieu of the 1970s, and while the societal status of women has shifted since then, marital incompatibility and the lack of emotional congeniality remain ageless issues. A silence kept for fear of being misunderstood or used to guard oneself against the treachery of one's own mind achieves precious little. It merely ensures an edited version of one's desires to maintain an uneasy peace. The cost is incredibly high: it destroys the chance of achieving genuine compatibility, a relationship where two people converse easily, completely free from the fear of judgment or psychological manipulation.
Admittedly, I found the writing style a bit confusing at times. Deshpande jumps at the speed of thought, shifting rapidly between places and time periods, which can disorient the reader. Then again, a wandering mind is a very real thing, so one cannot be overly critical of this technique.
The Times Literary Supplement found the novel's strength in its “compassion, its tolerance and understanding of human relationships”. I came away with a somewhat different feeling. There are certainly flashes of empathy, but what stayed with me was its desolation and angst: the sense of a silence that does not merely remain, but quietly, continuously gnaws.
These are the passages I carried away from the book.
Excerpt-1 (Page 116)
Each relationship evolves its own vocabulary. Ours had been that of the workaday world. The vocabulary of love, which I had thought would come to us naturally and inevitably, had passed us by; so too had the vocabulary of anger. No, it was I who had left that alone after the day when my first disastrous foray into verbalising emotions had almost ripped our
marriage apart. Since then, we'd never gone beyond those first basic mudras. Now suddenly, unfairly, he'd overtaken me. His fingers flickered, creating images, not of beauty, but of darkness and deceit.
Excerpt-2 (Page 132)
'The relation of man to woman is the most natural of one person to another.'
Karl Marx - yes, Karl Marx it was who'd said that. Natural? When we are forever hurting, forever wronging each other? Natural? When we're forever resenting our need of each other? How wrong you were about this, Mr. Marx, prophetically right though you may have been about so much else.
Excerpt-3 (Page 143 & 144)
'I gave up my writing because of you,' I said to Mohan, and he seemed astonished. Why didn't I speak then, why didn't I explain, why didn't I remind him of the day he had come back from work carrying a magazine he had thrust at me, saying, 'Your story is here.'
'My story?' Feverishly I had turned over the pages and stared at my name, entranced. Then I had turned to Mohan. 'Oh God, Mohan, I've won a prize, it's the story I sent for the contest, it's got a prize...'
Mohan's face had finally silenced my babble. 'Jaya,' he had said dully, 'how could you, how could you have done it?'
How could I have done what?
'They will all know now, all those people who read this and know us, they will know that these two persons are us, they will think I am this kind of a man, they will think I am this man. How can I look anyone in the face again? And you, how could you write these things, how could you write such ugly things, how will you face people after this?'
I had realised it then, even in the state I had been in, that he had not been angry, but hurt; he had looked as if I had wounded him.
'How can you reveal us, how can you reveal our lives to the world in this way?'
I had known then that it hadn't mattered to Mohan that I had written a good story, a story about a couple, a man who could not reach out to his wife except through her body. For Mohan it had mattered that people might think the couple was us, that the man was him. To Mohan, I had been no writer, only an exhibitionist.
Excerpt-4 (Page 153)
I could not escape the truth any longer. He was dead.
'Why don't you stay dead and leave me alone?'
'Leave you alone? Why, it's you who won't leave me alone, it's you who won't let me go!'
It's only with the dead that we can have a perfect relationship. There are no knots, no awkward tangles here. We can mould the dead to our desires, to suit our purposes. But this man - he resisted all my attempts to manipulate him, to manipulate our relationship. I could see him grinning at my discomfiture as I failed. And yet I knew I had to puzzle it out, to put the bits and pieces together and see what form it took, my relationship with this man.
It refused to take any shape at all; it just slipped about, frighteningly fluid. Perhaps the fact that for a long time, why, till the very end, I didn't know how to address him was significant. 'Everyone calls me just Kamat,' he had said to me, but I had never been able to address him that way. He, however, had called me Jaya right from the very first day. I had envied him the ease with which he had used my name, plunging into an intimacy that would have scared me off if he hadn't made it seem so natural, so asexual.
'Come and join me,' he had said that first day, when I had gone to him with his letter that had been wrongly delivered to us.
Excerpt-5 (Page 192 & 193)
Mohan will be back. 'All well' his telegram says. Does he mean by this that we will go back to being 'as we were'? Does it mean that, now that Mohan has sorted out his problem, and no longer fears prosecution, joblessness and disgrace, we can go back to our original positions? Does it mean that he will come back and give me a carefully edited version of what has happened - as he has done so often till now - and then ask me, 'What do you say, Jaya?'?
Until today, this has been a rhetorical question. I have looked at his face for clues and then given him the answer I know he wants. I have only to do this now and authority will seep into Mohan once more.
But it is no longer possible for me. If I have to plug that 'hole in the heart', I will have to speak, to listen, I will have to erase the silence between us. While studying Sanskrit drama, I'd learnt with a sense of outrage that its rigid rules did not permit women characters to speak Sanskrit. They had to use Prakrit - a language that had sounded to my ears like a baby's lisp. The anger I'd felt then comes back to me when I realise what I've been doing all these years. I have been speaking Prakrit myself.
But why am I making myself the heroine of this story? Why do I presume that the understanding is mine alone? Isn't it possible that Mohan too means something more by 'all well' than going back to where we were? People don't change, Mukta said. It is true. We don't change overnight. It's possible that we may not change even over long periods of time. But we can always hope. Without that, life would be impossible. And if there is anything I know now it is this: life has always to be made possible.

[Sreya Mukherjee]

Initially I was hesitant to pick this book up. I feared its melancholy, it's gloominess and it's despair, for all books concerning the plight of women either make me outrageous or plunge me into an abyss of despair. Anyway, I picked it up because I am supposed to study this for my semester.
It will suffice to say that the novel neither made me outrageous nor plunged me into an abyss of despair. As soon as I started reading it I felt a connection with Jaya. It felt like I was having an one to one conversation with Jaya.
I usually don't like novels which don't have a storyline, so to say but this novel is an exception. Actually, the thing that I liked the most about this novel is its lack of a definite story line. The plot keeps on meandering through a patchwork called life. The diaphanous structure of the novel renders it closer to life.
Though we are merely tiny specks of dust in this enormous universe but the complexity and enigma that is inherent in human life is strange. And this novel presents life in all its strangeness, without any veneer of beatification.
This is my first Shashi Deshpande and all I can say about her writing style is that it soothes me. Her writing style of connecting seemingly unrelated objects and presenting life as a continuous trickle without any fixed demarcation is something that I can connect most to. Our life isn't neatly divided into seperate chapters of past, present and future rather everything is blurred and any attempt to categorize life is a futile endeavour.
Nobody is perfect, we all maintain this facade of perfection which at times threatens to fall apart. And the novel presents it's protagonist Jaya in all her vulnerability, imperfections and humaneness. While reading this novel, I am somehow reminded of D.H Lawrence and his proclamation that human relations is of foremost importance, foreshadowing even human existence itself. Reading this novel made me stop and reconsider what Lawrence had said. He was correct, for how can we define ourselves if not for our relationships.
The way this novel subtly hints at the all-pervasive gender discrimination does not make one belligerent. Rather we find ourselves wrapped in a blanket of melancholy. It doesn't make a front line attack on the pervasive patriachy but it does shows how we all are battered by this malicious club wielding Patriarchy. Each one of us is affected by it. Be it the slum dwelling women who have to deal with drunkard husbands, upper class Jaya who suffers silently because she fails at her career- her wifehood, the 'mad' Kusums who are forced to forfeit 'their' lives or young, ambitious girls like Nilima who have suicidal thoughts due to the matriarch of their homes who work as an agent of patriarchy.
The loneliness of a man dying alone, the frustrations of not being able to play perfectly the roles which society assigns to us, everything is portrayed perfectly in this novel. Even the novel ends on an optimistic note and with a reassurance of life. But somehow the novel leaves me with a sense of foreboding bordering on frustration. I think this is so because the novel captures our imperfect life so perfectly. For life will never give you a 'happily ever after' contentment. This is what life is and this is what it is meant to be. It is futile to sugarcoat life and the novel dissects life for all it's readers to observe and sigh.

[Pushpita Majumdar]

"Women can never be angry; she can only be neurotic, hysterical or frustrated."


The story of Jaya is not unlike the story of our mothers, sisters, grandmothers; she's the typical Indian housewife whose life revolves around her husband and children. Her life is confined to the roles she has been put in - A daughter, a wife, a daughter-in-law and a mother.


Following a disaster that befalls her 'perfect' family, over the span of a few weeks, Jaya ponders over her life's incidents, going back in time and reliving memories as if it were happening in the present. Jaya tries to find out what went wrong and why. She comes to the realization that her marriage is nothing but a sham; a facade to save her from the beguiling remarks of the society.


"Love? No, I knew nothing of it. I knew only my need of Mohan. And his need of me."


The events that she reminisces introduces new characters that had once or still plays an important part in her life. Some people bring out the good feelings and memories but some bring out ugly and bad truths. Jaya is seen to be going through an emotional turmoil and it seems as if she's facing a mental breakdown.


The title of the book is significant of the chosen silence on Jaya's part. Before her marriage, she is shown to be an assertive woman, expressing her views and opinions clearly but years of subtle subjugation on the part of her husband, her family; even her mother has slowly transformed her into a woman who chooses to stay silent in order to maintain her marriage and other familial relationships.


"It was so much simpler to say nothing. So much less complicated."


Towards the end Jaya realizes that all this time, she has been pointing fingers at others for her unhappiness. She realizes that she has not lived for herself but for others; she realizes that she needs to begin again, trying to make the most of her remaining life. The book ends with an uncertainty but also with a hopeful thought. Jaya is unsure if she can mend things with her husband and with her family but she knows that all she can do is hope for better things.


"We don't change overnight. It's possible that we may not change even over long periods of time. But we can always hope. Without that, life would be impossible. And if there is anything I know now it is this: life has always to be made possible."


This book will make you uncomfortable and heavy with so many emotions. It is full of existentialism and asks the right questions and creates beautiful situational ironies.


Each character, whether they are directly linked to Jaya or not, plays such an important role in building up the plot. I wish I could do justice to the book and the author with my review and I wish I could give this book more stars than what Goodreads allows me to.

[Sukanya Gogoi]

Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award, ‘That Long Silence’ is a fictional account of the conditions of women in 20th century India, reflecting the lives of women from different social classes. What remains common to all of them is patriarchal oppression. Be it the protagonist Jaya, who is an ‘educated’, middle class writer, or the various women Jaya talks about , her mother, her aunts, her maids, all of them are victims of a long silence, shut by conditioning, unjust dictates, assigned gender roles and most importantly the belief that things were meant to be just like the way it was. .
.
Ironically women of 21st century India are still enslaved by ideas of bondage, dependence and blind compliance. Pre-marital lifestyle dictated by blood relations and post marital by in-laws. The idea of a modern independent woman fighting for her individuality is still not acceptable to the traditionalists. This makes Deshpande’s book relatable to women readers in present times too.
Jaya’s experiences as a woman is the main plot of the story. Jaya’s narrative also connected to the experiences of the minor characters in the story which makes it a bit complex. It is not a very simple, easy flowing read, but one needs to understand the emotions behind every line. .
.
The author focused on the minute aspects of daily life which otherwise appears very ordinary but it reflects the complex patterns of thoughts that have influenced women since forever. The mother-daughter conversations, the dependence on the male members of the household, the references to practices like fasting for one’s husband, expecting women to know the art of handling a kitchen, working hard to fight ageing in order to please their husbands and not get abandoned in the long run are a few things which didn’t fade into darkness in the 70s. We are still carrying forward these ideas directly or indirectly. The least we can do is stop being agents of patriarchy.

[Munmun Samanta]

Introduction:
"To achieve anything, to become anything, you've got to be hard and ruthless."
Shashi Despande, (born in 1938, Karnataka) is an eminent contemporary Indian author. She won Sahitya Akademi Award for her novel That Long Silence. All of her writings are women-centric. And the themes of cultural clashes and subtle but powerful flow of modernized patriarchy intertwined in her plots. Apart from That Long Silence, her other works are:
The Dark Holds No Terror (1980)
If I Die Today (1982)
Roots and Shadows (1983). This book won the prize for the best Indian novel.
Come Up and Be Dead (1983)
The Long Silence (1988) - This book crowned her with the Sahitya Academy Award in 1990, and Padma Shri in 2009. The novel was translated into Hindi, Marathi, Kanada
The Binding Wine (1992)
A Matter of Time (1996)
Check from google.
That Long Silence:
Sometimes silence becomes the most violent one. And it is true in respect of Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence (1988). Though the silence was broken at the end by Jaya, the main protagonist, we can feel its overwhelming presence all over the novel.
Through the protagonist, the author depicts the silence of all women of centuries. The long built silence was finally dissolved by Jaya who wished to explode her dormant self. Throughout her life, Jaya acted as Gandhari, never dared to know about her husband’s job, money, work or anything else. She just like a mute mule carried the burden of household and everyone’s comfort.



.

Story Line:
“A pair of bullocks yoked together...”
That Long Silence is the story of Jaya and Mohan.
Mohon, a complete contradiction of Jaya in his never fanciful matter-of-fact attitude towards the world married Jaya and in between, they grow the wall of frozen silence.
Jaya was too much sensitive and curious. Her attention always hovered in her surroundings, people's or places. Every trivial pain and pleasure tickled her heart and she felt them scrutinizingly, not devoid of any emotions. Her intelligence and comprehensiveness often tagged her as unconventional and not perfect. But after her marriage, she had to bear all her suppressed emotions within her or in the pages of her writer-self as her husband was a different man of perspective. He wanted Jaya only as an unquestioning wife subservient to household jobs. Mohon was a man of total indifference and 'devoid of curiosity. He did not care for others and just ignore his surroundings.
“…it shows his superiority, the fact that he is above the kind of petty curiosity that devours me? But maybe, the thought came to me now, he has been unable to hear anything, his ears filled with the triumphant sound of his own March onwards"- his promotion, his affluence, his success.”
But Mohon’s glory screeched a sudden halt as he was suspended from his job on the accusation of forgery and they are forced to move from their spacious luxuries to a small dingy room.
In this situation, he desperately sought Jaya's support. But the long silent wall like a breach stood between them.
Jaya realised that her withdrawal from Mohon had created such a long gap. She vowed to break that long silence
"I tried painfully to retrace my way back through the disorderly, chaotic sequence of events and non-events that made up my life. It was like looking through the eyehole of the magic peepshow..."
There was nothing between them, no love, no trust or respect except a strong silent muteness...or the tug-of-war of shifting authority.
Jaya realised at the very end, "I will have to speak, to listen, I will have to erase the silence between us."
She felt all through her life she just muttered 'Prakrit' instead of 'Sanskrit' and there remained nothing more to do except cherishing the hope.
"But we can always hope. Without that, life would be impossible. And if there is anything I know now it is this: life has always to be made possible."
Characters:

Jaya's bio-data
"I was born. My father died when I was fifteen. I got married to Mohon. I have two children and I didn't let the third life."
'For me, they were the fairy tales in which people ' live happily ever after.'
Jaya: The protagonist from whose point of view the novel is told. She is very sensitive and thoughtful.
Mohan: Jaya’s husband, who resembles a Graham Greene character,-" a sad obsessed man reconciled to failure."
Kusum: Jaya’s sister
Ravi: Jaya’s brother
Rahul: Jaya and Mohon’s son
Rati: Jaya and Mohon’s daughter
Agarwal: Mohon’s friend who entangled Mohon in forgery.
Mr. Kamat: This man helped Jaya to think and express her feelings.
Feministic Approach:
Shashi Despande reminds me of Bengali novel writer Suchitra Vattyacharya. I think personally their writing style matches a lot and the technique of character portrayal. The women characters are the epitome of sacrifice, suppression, and also self-assertiveness. Mohon wanted to see Jaya in the perfect role of a wife…whose all attention and vocation will be to please her husband and to accept whatever he said. Her only job was to take care of her kids and do household chores. She must not have any choice or voice except that is imposed by her husband.
Women characters of Despande are not merely the victim of social bigotry, but their struggle for existence makes them more assured and empowered. Their consistent clash with the conventional norms pushes them to cross the barrier of social role-playing.
Despande is always against the taboo or stigma of feminism. She does not approve of the term feminist being associated with her texts. She writes from the point of view of women, their suffering, their deprivation, their invisibility in the patriarchal hierarchy. Though it seemed that she writes against the males, in reality, she is a detached observer and her novels are the truthful representation of society.
Best Quote:
"You can never be the heroine of your own story. Self-revelation is a cruel process. The real picture, the real 'you' never emerges. Looking for it is as bewildering as trying to know how you look. Ten different mirrors show you ten different faces."

"...for us, there was just living - one foot in front of another, one foot in front of another, until death came to us in a natural form".

Alvina’s Verdict:
I worship Shashi Despande in its true sense for her portrayal of women characters and contexts. Her characters touch the core of my conscience. In a gender discriminated society Jaya is always torn between the social norms and her ideals. Under the pressure of her husband’s demands her voice gets strangulated, her identity gets lost. I feel associated with the feminine psyche of Jaya. I think the greatest acclamation of the novel lies in its treating of universal theme- the voice and voicelessness associated with social ranking.



From- blogalvina.com

[Ajit]

To be frank, I did not know much about Shashi Deshpande. But am I glad I picked up her book in the bookshop! I was hooked by the quote at the beginning of the book: "If I were a man and cared to know the world I lived in, I almost think it would make me a shade uneasy - the weight of that long silence of one-half the world". Who says you can't judge a book by a quote!!
'That Long Silence' is the story of Jaya and her relationships with all the important people in her life. There is no linear narrative here and Jaya's story jumps across various episodes that have occurred at different points of time in her life. Deshpande wonderfully uses flashbacks as well stream of consciousness technique to jump to these distant episodes. Even though the milieu is firmly the Indian middle class, none of the relationship is what you would expect. Almost like in the films of Ingmar Bergman (example: 'Cries and Whispers') the veneer of close relationships is peeled off to reveal anger, frustrations, disappointments. Many of the relationships - mother-daughter, brother-sister, husband-wife - are revealed to contain a hollow core. Don't approach this book looking for saccharine coated, comfortable relationships or happy endings. Be prepared to be lacerated by the depiction of the characters. Shashi Deshpande boldly opens the lid over middle-class family situations and presents a picture that may not be pretty but is riveting nonetheless.
In the final analysis, 'That Long Silence' depicts beautifully the freeing of Jaya - from the bondage of dependence, of subservience, of the burden of imposed duties. It shows her overcoming adversity to be able to look life in the face and live on her own terms.