Negotiating Structural Inequalities in Post-independence India: The Case of Deserted Women and Widowhood in Indira Goswami’s Neel Kanthi Braja and A Saga of South Kamrup

Abstract

Abstract

The present article focuses on the plight of deserted women and widows in post-independence India, drawing its arguments from Indira Goswami’s novels Neel Kanthi Braja (Shadow of Dark God 1986) and A Saga of South Kamrup (1993). It exposes the collusion between masculinity, patriarchy and national identity. While doing so, it not only interrogates the traditional concerns associated with wifehood and widowhood but also foregrounds the need to reclaim women’s bodies from becoming site and symbol for patriarchal and institutional control, especially as evident in the drafting of the Hindu Code Bill. It also seeks to privilege alternative modes of identifying relationships and concerns of women’s sexuality that may rest on mediation of lived experience and individual subjectivities so pertinent to ‘constructing new modes of politics and identity in post-independence India’ (Sreenivas 2009: 128).