“A Daughter needs her Mother the most in Times of Trouble”: Shashi Deshpande’s Delineation of the Strange and Strong Mother-Daughter Bond in ‘My Beloved Charioteer’

Name of Author : Dr. P Kulalmolial

Abstract: To love and to be loved are the deepest desires of human beings. We, the human beings experience a vast expanse of emotions and these emotions are expressed in the human relationship like man-woman relationship (father and son), woman-woman relationship (mother and daughter), brother-brother, sister-sister, friend-friend, and grandparents-grandchildren. Of all the human relationships, the relationship or bond that exists between mother and child and especially between mother and daughter is the strangest as well as the strongest. There used to be conflicts between mothers and daughters and all the mothers are looked upon as terrible creatures by the daughters as the mothers always inflict and insist rules and regulations regarding the attitudes of the daughters. It is a common phenomenon that sons like mothers and daughters like fathers. Normally, when a child is asked a common question ‘who do you like most, father or mother?’, the girl child will answer ‘father’ and the boy child will answer ‘mother’. It is also true in the case of Aarti in Shashi Deshpande’s short story ‘My Beloved Charioteer’. Aarti has a great admiration for her father that her mother is just a member who takes care of her and her father. Shashi Deshpande portrays how the same daughter, who has adored her father and ignored her mother, gets comfort, solace and happiness from the mother when she faces troubles in her married life.

Keywords : Shashi Deshpande’s, My Beloved Charioteer, Delineation

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