Silence & Beyond: Shashi Deshpande's Fiction explores at length various feminist themes and concerns in the Indian context and investigates their relevance to the fiction of Shashi Deshpande. It embodies a comprehensive study of thirteen novels of Shashi Deshpande that address and transmit the basic anxiety, loneliness and helplessness of women. She has also scathingly attacked the myths which men hold about women. The study brings to the fore various Indian social patterns which have been responsible for the secondary position of Indian women. Shashi Deshpande caringly articulates the misery and distress of the traditional Indian woman whose lot is mainly to suffer in silence while coming to terms with domestic conflict, law and order situation, crime, violence and exploitation in many forms. Often drawing from parallel themes from Indian epics and the puranas, she presents women in various roles as wives, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, girls and beloveds. She has shown her awareness of the tensions between appearance and reality. She portrays the lives of women as they have been living and as they are led to imagine themselves. Rejecting the masculine dialect and the masculine perception of virtue, she has laid bare before us the subversive role of tradition in perpetuating the secondary role of women and emphasizes the need for women to emerge as liberated and emancipated beings.