Abstract

Reading Krishna Sobti’s Mitro Marjani (To Hell with You Mitro 1967) and Pankaj Bisht’s Pankh Wali Naav (The Winged Boat 2007) this presentation will explore the (re)production of heteronormative and same-sex desires across the caste, gender, and sexuality spectrum in Hindi fiction. While Mitro (To Hell with You Mitro) revels in a sensual exploration of her sexuality within and without marriage, Anupam (The Winged Boat) struggles to interrogate the heterosexual and patriarchal biases of a homophobic society around him. The narrative of The Winged Boat becomes especially significant as it tends to revisit the revolutionary decade of 1980s in India when feminist activism resulted in progressive legislations, curbing violence against women but rarely acknowledged that sexuality was integrally related to women’s expression of self. It further fell short of contesting the violence faced by gay men and lesbian women among other trans populations. A contrapuntal reading of the selected novels, therefore, reveals how non normative assertions of their protagonists disrupt the patriarchal and procreative conjugal biases betrayed by the women’s movement, communities, and the nation state. By so doing they propose a de-linking of women’s and men’s sexualities from the patriarchal and legal-activist epistemology, restituting them to what Gloria Anzaldua (1987) calls “sexual and spiritual borderlands” (3).  Unlike borders which tend to be divisive, “borderland is a vague and undetermined place” (3), that keeps alive the resistant spirit of living, desiring, seeking pleasure and creatively re-imagining the nation state. This could further activate a cognitive decolonial praxis aimed at affirming and upholding the heterogeneous relationalities and living epistemes of citizens that have been otherwise eluded by the dominant structures of the nation state.

Works Cited

• Anzaldua, Glora. 1987. Borderlands La frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt lute books, San Francisco. 

Banner image:

Drawing by artist by Harini Rajagopalan, and by kind permission of Feminism In India:
https://feminisminindia.com/2017/04/08/comic-intersectional-feminism/#google_vignette

Short Bio

Bharti Arora teaches at the Department of English, University of Delhi, India.  She earned her PhD (English) from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She was the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow (2022) at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her areas of research include Gender Studies, Women’s Fiction, Indian Literatures, Social Movements and Nation. Her articles have appeared in journals like Indian Journal of Gender Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, South Asian Review, and Society and Culture in South Asia.  She is the author of Writing Gender, Writing Nation: Women’s Fiction in Post-independence India (Routledge 2019). 

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