When you are trying to find a way out of the silence, you need words. I have
this feeling when reading Indian women writers that they are as Rushdie puts it,
reshaping English so that women could talk about what is never said. Thus
Kuortti interviews Shashi Deshpande, trying to ascertain why women write and why
they write in English. Writing in English cannot be neutral. As a colony, the
language was inescapably associated with class, race and power; after
independence it has grown in power and status, yet the problematic of English as
the language of the hegemonic West remains. Even so, a new canon