Relational Feminism in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors

The paper attempts to analyse how Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terror(1980) exhibits the cruelty of undue gender discrimination of a mother inflicted on her girl-child. A woman in a family equally contributes as a man. But she is always left unrecognized.She has to face a more stringent criticism in the family as well as in the society.Like most Indian writers Shashi Deshpande has documented female dilemmas, anxieties and sufferings.She deals with the inner world of Indian women in almost all her writings.In The Dark Holds No Terror she remarkably brings out the love, the estrangement, the alienation and the discord between a mother and a daughter.