An Analytical Study of Shashi Deshpande's The Dark Holds No Terrors

Abstract— Shashi Deshpande, one of the eminent writers in the field of Indio-Anglo literature, occupies a prominent place in the galaxy of Indian women writers in English. She was born in 1938, in Dharwad, a small town in Karnataka, to a Kannad father and Maharashtrian mother and is their second child. Her father Adya Rangachar, better known as Sriranga, was a noted Kannada dramatist as well as a distinguished Sanskrit scholar. In an interview with Sue Dickman, Deshpande stated that her birth in a well educated family indirectly helped her to be what she is now, “I started writing very late in life, and I never spoke to my father about my writing, nor did he ever speak to me about it. We never communicated about writing at all. But nevertheless, it did matter. It does matter, to some extent, particularly in a country like India, where I think women wouldn’t have been very educated in those days—I’m not talking of now—unless you had parents who were different and wanted their daughters to be educated. Normally it’s so difficult for a girl, if her family is against her, to go ahead and do anything, in our day at least.” She pursued her early education at a protestant mission school in Dharwad and was an excellent student. Since her childhood Shashi Deshpnade was fond of classical English novels and had a particular liking for the works of Jane Austen and was very much influenced by her. The first book that she read as a child was Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”. In an interview with Chandra Holm she tells, “I was a great reader, an absolutely voracious reader. I started reading at the age of eight. My first book was Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I was told, “You are too young for this book. Don’t pretend to understand it.” But I enjoyed reading that book, even though I may not have understood it.”