Telling their own stories: a reading of the stone women and other stories Tiwari Manjari Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, BES SGM College, (University of Mumbai), 12 Lane, Khetwadi, Girgaon, Mumbai, 400004, E-mail: manjaritiwari@gmail.com Online published on 3 July, 2021. Abstract This paper attempts to analyse some stories from Shashi Deshpande's Stone Women and Other Stories. Almost all the stories with the sole exception of The Last Enemy explore the psyche of celebrated female figures from The Mahabharata and The Ramayana. Out of the nine stories complied in the said volume, six stories have characters from The Mahabharata while The Day of the Golden Dear is about Sita, the female protagonist of The Ramayana. Deshpande was inspired to write about these characters by her reading of Irawati Karve's Yuganta: The End of an epoch (1967, 1969) which studies the humanity of The Mahabharata's great figures with all their virtues and their equally numerous faults for Deshpande too, the epic becomes a record of complex humanity and a mirror to all the faces which we ourselves wear. Deshpande has worked out a creative re-interpretation of the myths surrounding female characters such as Kunti, Draupadi, Amba, Sachi Devi. She has successfully dealt with the complexities and nuances of these female characters in the stories in The Stone Women and Other Stories. She looks at these women as real human beings, thus taking them out of their mythical frame. For purposes of the present paper, three stories Mirrors, Hear Me Sanjay And What Has Been Decided have been singled out for critical analysis and exploration. Top |