The Somatic Archive: Narrating the Body as a Vessel of Law and Resistance in Banu Mushtaq’s <i>Heart Lamp</i>

This article examines Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp: Selected Stories through the concept of the somatic archive, a living ledger of unpayable juridical debt inscribed on wives’ bodies through the convergence of Islamic marriage law, reproductive governance, and domestic discipline in Kannada Muslim spaces. Reading six stories through feminist somaesthetics, biopolitics, necropolitics, and Kristevan abjection, it argues that South Asian women’s domestic bodies become necro-biopolitical zones where intensive management and systematic abandonment converge, and where the demand that wives incorporate the abject, including the husband’s bodily decay and dissolution, functions as the definitional gesture of somatic debt. The article further traces how the somatic archive is transmitted intergenerationally from mother to daughter, and how it generates, in the same bodies it subjugates, the hidden transcripts of resistance that constitute a counter-archive of somatic autonomy.