Mental Health, and Trauma in Cry, the Peacock and Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing

Writers have always tried to create stories to help understand human emotional phenomena, mental health remaining one of the most evocative and troubling themes throughout literature. From Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, which narrates the stifling treatment of women’s mental illness to contemporary ones like Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar, trauma narratives have evolved to capture the deep, raw, and intimate struggles of the mind. Women writers especially have depicted the most personal experiences about these realities and created women who, due to societal and cultural pressures and personal herstories, undergo immense psychological struggles. Anita Desai and Shashi Deshpande have, for example, explored the quiet, internal suffering of their protagonists, revealing the profound trauma of loneliness as well as the enduring strength of those coping with it. Literature does more than merely depict these struggles, seeks answers for the systems that suppress them, and articulate suffering that is so often overlooked. This study focuses on the ways fiction portrays mental distress as a means to critique society’s understanding, responding not just, as many assume, in personal terms, but also showing that trauma is always situated within history, culture and the compelling articulation of silence.