Reimagining Women's Agency : Feminist Perspectives in Contemporary Indian English Literature

Reimagining Women's Agency : Feminist Perspectives in Contemporary Indian English Literature Dr. Seema Surin* This paper investigates how contemporary Indian English literature reimagines women's agency by moving beyond victimhood narratives toward complex, self-authored subjectivities. Founding on Indian and postcolonial feminist theory, the study argues that Indian English women writers negotiate agency along three interlocking axes: the domestic and familial, the corporeal and sexual, and the socio-political, each inflected by the intersecting structures of caste, class, religion, and region that set Indian feminism apart from its Western counterparts. Through close reference to the fiction of Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Manju Kapur, Bharati Mukherjee, and Meena Kandasamy, alongside the poetry of Kamala Das and Eunice de Souza, the paper traces a trajectory from quiet, interior resistance in the 1980s to overt, embodied defiance in twenty-first-century fiction. It further considers the diasporic extension of this agency and the persistent tension between individual selfhood and collective solidarity within Indian feminist writing. The paper concludes that contemporary Indian English literature does not offer a single model of empowerment but rather a plural, contested, and historically situated vocabulary of women's agency. *Assistant Professor, Department of English, S. S. Memorial College, Ranchi University, Ranchi, Email: [email protected]