VIOLENCE, FEMALE RESISTANCE, AND FEMINIST CONSCIOUSNESS IN GANESHANANTHAN’S BROTHERLESS NIGHT (2023)  

Abstract

This article examines the representation of violence, the forms of female resistance to coercion, and the broader feminist consciousness articulated in V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night (2023), a novel set against the twenty-six-year Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009). Drawing on Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) as its guiding theoretical framework and using a qualitative method of close textual reading, the study argues that the novel positions its Tamil women not as passive casualties of ethnic and militarised conflict but as agents who resist patriarchal and state coercion through protest, caregiving, education, and documentation. The analysis is organised around three concerns: how violence is represented in its physical, structural, gendered, and psychological registers; how the major female characters—Sashikala Kulenthiren, her mother (Amma), and Professor Anjali Premachandran—refuse coercion; and how the text cultivates a feminist consciousness grounded in solidarity, intersectional alliance, and the critique of both patriarchy and nationalist militancy. The findings reveal that Ganeshananthan reframes the war narrative from a feminist standpoint, exposing how the Sri Lankan state, the Indian Peace Keeping Force, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam each reproduced male-centred power, and how women converted private grief into public resistance. The study contributes to feminist literary criticism of South Asian conflict writing by demonstrating that resistance and feminist awareness, rather than mere endurance, structure the moral vision of the novel.