Shashi Deshpande and the Global South Gender Entanglements offers a transformative approach to literary gender studies and feminist literary criticism by moving beyond rigid gender binaries to examine the complex, humanistic dynamics of man-woman relationality in Shashi Deshpande’s fiction. Grounded in the socio-cultural realities of the Global South, the book investigates how male characters, rather than serving merely as antagonists, act as complex, catalytic enablers in women’s quests for identity. By integrating multipolar facets of masculinity studies with relational feminist theories, it delves into critical, understudied issues such as marital rape, masculinist anxiety, conjugal alienation, and relational autonomy. Through comparative lenses, including a pairing of Deshpande’s modern urban Indian settings with Jane Austen’s Regency-era world, the book exposes the limitations of universalist Western frameworks. It provides a fresh, interdisciplinary model for understanding how gendered identities, agency, and relational paradigms are continuously negotiated within changing Global South situations. An indispensable contribution to contemporary feminist literary criticism and comparative literature, the book redefines critical conversations around Shashi Deshpande's works while offering a robust methodological framework applicable across Global South literary contexts.
