“Women writing self, gender, and the postcolonial nation – a brief study of the ‘new women’ phenomenon in south Asia”

Bentur, Pavankumar (2024). “Women writing self, gender, and the postcolonial nation – a brief study of the ‘new women’ phenomenon in south Asia”. University of Birmingham. M.A.

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Abstract

The idea of the ‘women question’ and the ‘new woman’ phenomenon in middlebrow South Asian literature has drastically changed the complexities of womanhood. The Gandhian ‘new woman’ is curated to supplement the South Asian patriarchy and designed to accept the caste hierarchy. The phenomenon successfully presents itself as a postcolonial literary method to uplift women and the perception of women in Indian literature. However, it simultaneously and categorically removes subversive women based on religion, caste, and sexuality.
Progressive women writers have critically reshaped the ‘new woman’ phenomenon to include different types of womanhood by engaging with religion and understanding sexuality through religious dogma. This thesis studies select progressive Muslim woman writers and their struggle to question the modern literary and political praxis and hold these systems accountable. They rebelliously incorporate themselves into the more significant literary phenomena and political canons. However, the progressive writers, perhaps unknowingly, continue to produce literature within the Savarna framework (a hierarchy based on the caste system) of conjugality.
The Savarna women, or the bourgeoisie, continue to benefit from the status quo established by the Gandhian ‘new woman’ even after decades of literary changes. Subaltern women’s emergence and the political space that allows them to reiterate their lived-experiences jeopardise the benefits enjoyed by the bourgeoise by highlighting the intensity and nuances of South Asian postcolonial patriarchy, a unique structure explored later in this thesis. Subaltern voices, thus, are now the beacon of change in South Asian literature. This thesis explores this historical trajectory and the difficulties subaltern women face in the present to contribute to the literary lacunae.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Masters by Research > M.A.)

Award Type:

Masters by Research > M.A.

Supervisor(s):