Urban Middle-Class Women and Feminist Consciousness: Shashi Deshpande vs Arundhati Roy

Abstract

The emergence of feminist consciousness in Indian English literature has been significantly shaped by the representation of urban middle-class women, whose lives embody the tensions between tradition, modernity, and socio-political transformation. This paper undertakes a comparative study of Shashi Deshpande and Arundhati Roy, two influential voices whose works interrogate the structures of patriarchy and foreground women’s struggles for autonomy. Shashi Deshpande, through novels such as That Long Silence and The Dark Holds No Terrors, employs a realist mode to depict the psychological interiority of women negotiating silence, guilt, and selfhood within the confines of domesticity. Her protagonists often represent the “everyday woman” of urban India, caught between familial duty and personal aspiration, thereby articulating feminist consciousness as a gradual awakening within the private sphere. In contrast, Arundhati Roy, particularly in The God of Small Things, situates female subjectivity within broader socio-political and ecological frameworks, linking women’s oppression to caste hierarchies, state violence, and global capitalism. Roy’s experimental narrative style and radical politics expand the scope of feminist discourse beyond domestic spaces, presenting feminist consciousness as inseparable from questions of justice, resistance, and collective survival.

By juxtaposing Deshpande’s psychological realism with Roy’s political radicalism, the paper highlights both convergences and divergences in their feminist visions. While both writers foreground the agency of urban middle-class women, Deshpande emphasizes the subtle negotiations of identity within patriarchal households, whereas Roy situates women’s struggles within larger structures of power and inequality. This comparative analysis demonstrates how Indian English literature reflects the multiplicity of feminist consciousness—ranging from the intimate and personal to the structural and political—thereby enriching global feminist thought. Ultimately, the study argues that Deshpande and Roy, through their distinct literary strategies, contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how urban middle-class women in India articulate resistance, negotiate identity, and redefine the contours of feminist discourse in a rapidly changing society.