Subverting Patriarchal Scripts: A Gendered and Queer Reading of Sudha Murty’s Gently Falls the Bakula

Abstract

Sudha Murty’s Gently Falls the Bakula (2008) has generally been received as domestic fiction concerned with marital estrangement. This article contends that the novel performs a sustained critique of the patriarchal and heteronormative structures that govern middle-class Indian conjugality in the late twentieth century. Employing a qualitative, interpretive close reading informed by gender theory, particularly Judith Butler’s account of gender performativity, and by queer theory’s critique of compulsory heterosexuality, the study examines the trajectory of Shrimati, a gifted student of history who relinquishes her scholarly ambitions to sustain her husband Shrikant’s corporate ascent. The analysis identifies three interlocking patterns: the extraction of Shrimati’s domestic and intellectual labour in the service of male achievement; the repeated performance of an idealised femininity (sacrifice, forbearance, silence) that the text exposes as enforced rather than innate; and the disruptive force of her final departure, which unsettles the assumption that marriage constitutes the horizon of a woman’s identity. The bakula flower, the novel’s governing metaphor, is read as an emblem of a rupture that is quiet rather than spectacular. The article argues that Murty locates resistance not in confrontation but in self-recognition and withdrawal, and that this mode of resistance renders the text available to a queer reading even in the absence of non-normative desire. In doing so, the study extends the critical conversation on Murty beyond thematic surveys of marital conflict and proposes a framework applicable to other Indian English narratives of female self-emancipation.