Abstract: Shashi Deshpande’s fiction is distinguished by its sustained representation of women negotiating identity within patriarchal social structures. Her women characters are educated, emotionally complex, and frequently economically or professionally active, yet they continue to confront expectations associated with marriage, motherhood, domestic responsibility, sexuality, and family honour. This article examines the movement from silence to self-awareness in selected novels by Deshpande, particularly The Dark Holds No Terrors, Roots and Shadows, That Long Silence, The Binding Vine, A Matter of Time, Small Remedies, and In the Country of Deceit. The study argues that Deshpande presents female identity not as a fixed condition but as a continuing process of negotiation between individual desire and social expectation. Her protagonists rarely achieve freedom through a complete rejection of family and tradition. Instead, they question inherited values, confront memories, reconsider relationships, and attempt to establish an autonomous sense of self. The article also examines Deshpande’s use of interior monologue, memory, psychological narration, and fragmented temporal structures to represent women's suppressed experiences. Particular attention is given to the relationship between silence and resistance: silence initially signifies social conditioning and emotional repression, but introspection transforms it into a means of self- recognition. Deshpande thus complicates conventional representations of feminist resistance by presenting identity formation as an internal and relational process..