Question

There are three major themes present in Shashi Deshpande’s novel The Binding Vine. Discuss each in details.

Answer 1

The lives of three women who are "haunted by fears, secrets, and deep grief" are bound together by strands of life and hope—a binding vine of love, concern, and connection that spreads across chasms of time, social class, and even death.

Answer 2

The three major themes that are present in ‘The Binding Vine’ by Shashi Deshpande are:

• Feminism – ‘The Binding Vine’ raises the issue of the lack of voice of women, the society’s attitude towards their suffering and the way by which women’s body is being abused. Urmi is a woman who is the voice of the new women and the suffering women. Even when people blamed Kalpana for dressing up the way she did to attract men to her, it was Urmi the only one who stood in support of Kalpana. The society told that it was Kalpana who was the one who attracted men but Prabhakar was not mentioned in any way. Feminists want to have right on her body. She doesn’t want a man to own her own body, whoever the person is.

• Love and Marriage – many families that we see in ‘The Binding Vine’ face a problem of lack of intersection of love and marriage. In Mira’s case, she was loved abundantly, by which she felt the love as a nuisance and lack of freedom, which led to the struggle of her existence. In the case of Akka, she did not get the love as a wife, from her husband. She was married to that family as a mother and not as a wife. Even their daughter, Vanna did not get her father’s love.  

• Human Relationships – according to Shashi, relationships should not be a trap. It should give the individual freedom of everyone. Human relationships should mean building bridges between the situations of each other. The factors that make the bridge strong are love and affection. when the love becomes selfishly blind, the bridge loses its power, eventually misery follows. So the love and affection must be maintained in a good manner in order to maintain the bridge.