Byline: Shashi. Deshpande (Shashi Deshpande is a well known name in the field of Indian literature. She was born in Dharwad in Karnataka as the daughter of the renowned Kannada dramatist as well as a great Sanskrit scholar Sriranga. She pursued her education in Economics in Bombay and graduated in Law from Bangalore. She later received an MA in English Literature. Shashi Deshpande, was awarded the Padmashri in 2009 & is well known for her novels, short stories and children's fiction stories. Her book titled Writing from the margin and other essays, was published in 2003 stop other notable works of Shashi Deshpande: Binding Vine; Matter of Time; That Long Silence; Dark Holds No Terrors). A strange paradox about literature (as also about culture, of which literature is a part) is that in the abstract it is considered to be of great importance. (Note how the words culture and literature are often spelt with a capital C and a capital L.) But in real life, literature is a low priority, (which is made clear by the fact that literature and culture are many times regarded as a woman's domain) to be given a place in our lives only in times of ease and plenty. For, the point is, of what use is literature? When we speak of fiction, there are even more decided views. have often heard people say, with a self-congratulatory air, I don't read fiction. After all, fiction is only a story; it is good as a time pass, some hours of entertainment and amusement. People would rather read, or be seen reading, books like Amartya Sen's, for example, which are enlightening, giving you both information and knowledge. So, once again the question is: Of what use is fiction? But will rephrase the question and ask instead: What does a novel do to us? And then quote an opinion which comes in the introduction to Prof. M. N. Srinivas's famous book The Remembered Village. Sol Tax, who has written the introduction, says, It is the poet or novelist who brilliantly catches the truth of a nation, a civilization or an era. how true this is when think of how Dickens' novels gave me a living picture of London, of the England of his times. How to read Mrs. Gaskell is to understand what the Industrial Revolution did to individuals, to workers and their lives. And to read Jane Austen is to get an idea of women's lives at the time. If her novels spell out the importance of marriage to women, it is because women at the time could neither inherit nor own property; without marriage they became dependent upon male relatives. Therefore, the conflict between marrying without love and remaining unmarried was not merely a romantic question for women, but one that hid a harsh economic reality. If the novelist does catch the truth, it is because he/she does not give the reader a mirror image of society. novelist creates a picture that goes behind the facade, beneath the surface. A questioning picture, exploring not only what is, but the silences, the gaps, the ambiguities and the contradictions. In the process, perhaps, unearthing hidden truths that mere facts can never get at. This is the larger picture. will move on to the smaller one, to the question of what the novel does to people, specifically to the author and the reader. Before that, one needs to why the novelist writes stories of make-believe people living in a pretend world. To escape from reality? To give readers some hours of escape? Why do you write? 0 This is a question that writers are almost always unable to answer. Answers, when attempted, range from I don't know to I can't not write to novelist Margaret Atwood's splendid statement, There is the blank page and there is your resistance to it. truth is that the novelist is impelled into writing by something deep within her, something she can't explain, because she does not understand it herself. Often, reading what she has herself written, the writer is puzzled. …
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Jan 1, 2021
Waldemar Kuligowski 
Open Access