Women's Voices in the Novels of Namita Gokhale and Githa Hariharan

Abstract

This study undertakes a comparative postcolonial feminist analysis of four Indian English novels, namely Namita Gokhale's Things to Leave Behind and The Blind Matriarch, and Githa Hariharan's Almost Home: Cities and Other Places and I Have Become the Tide. Drawing on the postcolonial feminist thought of Spivak, Mohanty, Leela Gandhi, Sangari and Tharu, the paper interrogates how each text constructs women's voices, articulates feminist resistance and negotiates the colonial-postcolonial inheritance shaping gendered subjectivity in twenty-first-century India. Adopting a qualitative comparative textual approach, the study reads voice, silence, memory and everyday resistance as intersecting sites through which patriarchal and postcolonial power relations are simultaneously named and contested. The analysis is organised around five intersecting thematic threads: women's voices as narrative agency, feminist resistance in everyday and intergenerational forms, colonial and postcolonial influences on women's identities, the intersection of gender with caste, class, religion and culture, and memory and intergenerational female narration. The findings argue that while Gokhale foregrounds memory, matrilineal voice and household inheritance as principal modes of women's resistance, Hariharan centres urban displacement, caste-religious intersectionality and the ethical claims of marginalised others. Collectively, the four novels stage an archive of contemporary Indian women's experience in which speaking and silence, inheritance and invention are co-constitutive practices of feminist resistance.