Resilience and Healing in Contemporary Narrations of Sexual Violence against Women in Indian Fiction in English

Abstract

The entrenched systems of domination and violence placed upon women are polyform and multidisciplinary. Also numerous are the ways in which women deal, denounce and heal from such experiences of being subjugated, attacked and systematically discriminated against. This chapter deals with contemporary narrations of sexual violence suffered by women in India that describe female characters who suffer, resist and subvert individual and collective violations as well as physical and spiritual abuses. The study focuses on two novels written in English, Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You (2017) and Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter (2015), with a twofold aim. Firstly, to analyse how female characters suffer systemic acts of violence inflicted by interlocking systems of social, political, religious, family and economic domination. Secondly, to assess how both novels represent the act of writing as a means to build up resilience and the possibility of healing. Writing appears then as a key agent that challenges those structures of control permeating and fostering sexual violence.