Narrative Strategies as Feminist Resistance: A Study of Personal and Political Self in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande and Nayantara Sahgal

Abstract

This article examines how narrative strategies function as forms of feminist resistance in select novels of Shashi Deshpande and Nayantara Sahgal. Focusing on That Long Silence and The Dark Holds No Terrors by Deshpande, and Rich Like Us and Storm in Chandigarh by Sahgal, the study explores how women protagonists negotiate personal identity within oppressive domestic, social, and political structures. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial theoretical perspectives, the article argues that narrative techniques such as silence, memory, interior monologue, psychological realism, and political contextualization enable women to articulate both personal and political selfhood. The selected novels demonstrate that women’s private experiences are deeply embedded in broader power structures, thereby challenging the traditional separation between the personal and the political in Indian English fiction.