Shashi Deshpande is one of the eminent novelists of contemporary Indian literature in English who lives and writes in India, and she explicitly addresses Indian readers, not the international marketplace. Deshpande was born in 1936, in Dharwad. She is the younger daughter of the Sanskrit scholar, novelist, actor, and dramatist R. V. Jagirdar (1904-1984) and his wife Sharda Arya.
