This article examines a set of Kannada romances written by women during the 1950s–1960s that became hugely popular during that time. It investigates the formation of subjectivity in these novels vis-à-vis subjectivity constituted in the state’s developmental-modern language soon after Indian independence. The state’s developmental-modern language encapsulates an understanding of the Indian state as an agent of modernisation because of its articulation of certain notions of progress and development, like ‘rights’ and ‘citizen’, that coincide with the values of the Enlightenment. I argue that on the one hand the novels align with the state in their articulation of ‘subjectivity’ in terms of ‘citizen’, ‘individual’ and ‘rights’. On the other hand, ‘subjectivity’ in terms of the ‘non-rational’ destabilises the former. The non-rational is revealed in a narrative technique that shows the women protagonists’ psychological conflicts as persistent, recurring and irresolvable, infusing the narrative with ‘hysterical excess’.
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