www.ijellh.com 105 Echoes of Women’s Silence in That Long Silence Ms. Pooja Halyal Assistant Professor, Department of Studies in English, Rani Channamma University, Belagavi, Karnataka India Abstract Shashi Deshapande is one of the living dynamic women writers in Indian English Literature. She is known for authentic portrayal of the typical Indian women’s world with great sensitivity and has pictured the contemporary middle-class women with rare competence. Having started her career as a journalist, her creative endeavours include seven short story collections, ten novels and two short crime novels, four books for children. Her work has received awards, including the Sahitya Akademi award and the Nanjangud Thirumalamba award. In her Sahitya Akademi award winning novel That Long Silence, she has successfully voiced the innermost thoughts and perceptions which are consciously hidden intricately in their psyche by women. In fact Deshpande in this novel has creviced the walls of literary tradition that has since years estimated women’s writing very low, and has successfully produced the multiple echoes of ‘Women’s Silence’ to shape them into a rubric of ‘dream writing’ by women. This paper is an analysis of the difficulties that the women writers undergo to express the stereotypically prohibited, but true reflections of their selves. Introduction It is Helene Cixous’ adulatory persuasion of women in “The Laugh of Medusa” ‘to write and to write with their bodies, their selves’, that seems to be responded so well in That Long Silence by Deshpande. For it is Cixous who writes of women “She must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and