Gender and Resistance: Exploring Violent and Non-Violent Forms of Women’s Agency in Contemporary Indian Fiction

Abstract

Contemporary Indian fiction increasingly represents women as active subjects who negotiate, challenge, and resist patriarchal structures rather than merely experiencing them as passive victims. This paper examines women's agency through violent and non-violent forms of resistance in selected contemporary Indian fictional works. It argues that resistance extends beyond physical confrontation and includes silence, refusal, education, economic independence, mobility, storytelling, writing, bodily autonomy, sexual self-determination, and collective solidarity. Through a qualitative and comparative reading of selected works by Shashi Deshpande, Manju Kapur, Anita Nair, Arundhati Roy, Bama, Meena Kandasamy, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Megha Majumdar, the study investigates how women negotiate gendered power within family, marriage, caste, class, sexuality, and institutional structures. Drawing upon feminist literary criticism, postcolonial feminism, theories of agency, intersectionality, and resistance, the paper conceptualises violent and non-violent resistance as interconnected rather than mutually exclusive forms of agency. It demonstrates that the meaning and consequences of women's resistance are shaped by their social and economic locations. The study concludes that contemporary Indian fiction expands the understanding of female agency by presenting resistance as a continuum of negotiation, refusal, survival, self-expression, and direct confrontation. Such representations also demonstrate that female subjectivity is produced through women's struggles to reclaim voice, body, mobility, identity, and interpretive authority.