Defying Shadows: Exploring Women’s Resistance in Sharankumar Limbale’s Hindu: A Novel

Abstract

World literature often embraces literary works that narrate diverse human experiences that transgress the boundaries of nations throughout the globe and enhance cross-cultural understanding. It challenges the dominance of Eurocentric canons and provides space for marginalised literature that largely focuses on identity, power, marginalisation, dignity, resistance, and social justice. Sharankumar Limbale’s novel Hindu: A Novel comes under the umbrella of Dalit Literature. Dalit Literature emerged as significant genre of world literature which highlights issues like caste and gender atrocities, marginalisation and resistance which are parallels to recent global concerns. This paper documents the systematic humiliation and discrimination of women and their struggle to establish dignity, liberty, equality, fraternity, and justice, which underlies human rights globally. Similar to Indian culture, Indian women do not constitute a monolithic category; the lived reality of women in India is dictated by complex religious doctrines and their intersectional framework, where identity markers such as caste, class, and gender play important roles. Brahmanical Hinduism’s Brahmanical patriarchy, endogamy, and misogyny make women vulnerable; they face different types of injustices in patriarchal society based on gender, caste, outcaste location, class, religion, and rural-urban divides, which create multiple layers of discrimination against them. However, women find their own ways to resist inequities in society based on their daily experiences and the social context. The paper attempts to find out the complex interplay of intersectional injustices faced by women characters in Sharankumar Limbale's Hindu: A Novel (2010) by textual and discourse analysis methods. This study analyses the female characters through the critical lens of Intersectionality and Dalit Feminism, interrogating how the different lived experiences of female characters shape their unique struggles and modes of resistance against injustices. Hindu: A Novel, depicts the injustices towards women in Achalpur due to the obscurantist Brahmanical approach towards women and how women stand to fight against the orthodox beliefs of the Brahmanical Hinduism (Vedic religion) and its new incarnation in society. This study argues that Limbale’s narrative of women’s struggles and their resistance for social, political, and cultural dignity places the novel firmly within the realm of world literature.