An Exploration of Female Agency and Gender Resistance in the Selected Novels of Geetanjali Shree

Abstract

Geetanjali Shree's fiction continues to revolve around women who live in the confines of the north Indian home, but her novels are infrequent jaunts toward female freedom as a departure from North Indian homes. In two of her novels, Mai: Silently Mother and Tomb of Sand, this paper explores ways in which agency and gender resistance are articulated in the text, and also questions the nature of the form as a means to bringing to light kinds of resistance that are generally ignored in the telling of narratives about liberation. The study examines characterization, the voice of the story, silence, the female body, mobility and the mother–daughter bond, a qualitative interpretive framework informed by existing feminist scholarship about Shree and based on close reading. Drawing on the obvious parallels between the two texts, the analysis enters into each one to consider its tension between withheld endurance (the performance of agency) and the slow maturation of a reading, of a narrating child's, daughter's, widow's, queens' and borders' (the beginning of recorded histories) growing speed. Both texts are resistant, but they come at a cost, and with a contradiction. The paper also includes a comparison reading which juxtaposes the strategies of silence and movement as discourses of female self-determination in the fiction of Shree.