The inherent discursivity, entailing the composite category of ‘The third world women’ hinges on many contentious contours of female subjectivity, its genealogical and teleological subservience and submission to patriarchy, and the subsequent re-assertion of their identities and different female roles within the given rubric of patriarchal capitalist social order of the former colonies through strategic subversion, vis-à-vis negotiation of certain patriarchal ideals.The select novels, i.e. Anuradha Marwah Roy’s The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta (1993) and Advaita Kala’s Almost Single (2007); from the discursive category of Indian genre fiction narrate two intersecting stories of two middle class Indian women, who have migrated to Delhi in pursuit of empowerment and to transcend the circumscribed trajectories of parochialism and stereotypical tropes of patriarchal order. Drawing inferences from these two texts, the present paper would like to look into the ethical question of women’s empowerment in India, so as to ‘problematize’ the much appropriated subversion of gender roles, through a ‘palimpsestic’ assertion of female subjectivity , as evidenced in the seemingly divergent experiences of the two protagonists, within the unstable contexts of a postcolonial nation. Having engaged with the contested notion ‘female consciousness’, the paper further seeks to examine the veracity of such changes in the lived experiences of the women within the ever-shifting paradigms of ‘post-national’ and ‘post-globalization’ Indian milieu, while being placed against the multifaceted impediments, faced by them to bridge the two extremes; personal and professional affairs. Last but not least, the paper would also seek to shed some light on the equivocality, bordering the genealogical and generic classification(s) of the ‘genre fiction’, often under the charade of ‘literary aesthetics’ and critical/wide reception of these literary narratives.

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Aakriti Mandhwani

Papers

Indian Genre Fiction : Pasts and Future Histories