Beyond Boundaries: Feminist Thirdspace in Tomb of Sand and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

This article employs a comparative feminist-postcolonial spatial close reading of Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand and Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to examine how South Asian women's fiction reimagines space, memory, and the gendered body as sites of resistance against social and ideological divisions. Employing Edward Soja's concept of Thirdspace, this article argues that both novels challenge hegemonic territoriality and expose the absurdity of man-made boundaries. The novels construct fluid and transformative spaces that destabilise dominant patriarchal ideological structures. The gendered body and memory enable the protagonists to dismantle social and national dichotomies and divisions. By bringing these novels into dialogue, the article contributes to feminist postcolonial debates on space and memory. Space is constructed in the novels as retrospective, i.e., recovering a cosmopolitan space-time matrix, or prospective, which builds a future on hope and inclusive community. Both function as alternative realms in which marginalised subjects resist hegemonic structures and reconfigure possibilities of coexistence and human connection.