Unfinished histories: Gendered violence and national identity in women's writings (Joyotirmoyee Devi, Mahasweta Devi, India, Jahanara Imam, Taslima Nasreen, Bangladesh)

The dissertation studies literary writings by women---Jyotirmoyee Devi and Mahasweta Devi from India and Jahanara Imam and Taslima Nasreen from Bangladesh---and through these texts examines four instances of catastrophic political violence in South Asia. These are the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, 1947; the Naxalite Movement 1967--72; the liberation struggle in Bangladesh, 1971; and the violence following the razing of the Babri Masjid, 1992. The dissertation examines how in every incident of political violence, the human body has been subjected to culturally specific but emphatically modern gender pathologies. By investigating literary representations of these political developments it seeks to isolate gender as a recurrent, if suppressed, subtext at issue in different ways in these very different political struggles and interrogates the recruitment of violent and oppressive gender ideals to dominant macrosociological identities of nationality and religious community. The dissertation examines how political violence is shot through with an irreducible dimension of gendered violence, so that acts of political violence reveal key aspects of gender relations, and that gender pathology is at the core of political struggles. The analysis cuts against the emphasis of many investigations of inequality and oppressive social relations dominated by caste-focused or class and interest focused preoccupations by seeing these as so many forms of reproducing a vulnerability and terror at the heart of gender relations per se in South Asia. Also, the dissertation endeavors to bring out the longue duree continuities and disjunctures between the colonial and postcolonial periods. Addressing the issue of the experience of violence through the writings in South Asian languages by novelists, poets, journalists, and activists, it analyzes questions of representation, and relatedly, the attempts by women to inhabit, if not to come to terms with, the scarred histories of their various presents.