First Study

The first chapter discusses the path-breaking contemporary novel Hangwoman (2016) written by K. R. Meera, and translated by cultural historian J. Devika. The novel focalizes the ethical dilemmas of capital punishment through the perspective of a young woman, Chetna. Chetna inherits the gruesome profession—however, the new factor is the presence of a sensationalist television media, which reduces what should have been a moment of crime and pathos to a lurid search for commercial visibility. The chapter allows the book to foreground the questions of injustice and ethics as they interact with the gendered perspective of a subaltern young woman. The notion of subjectivity finds an opening and horizon within these difficult questions of private shame and a determination to make one’s way in a hard and unforgiving world.

Fourth Study

The fourth chapter stays within this older tradition. Saratchandra Chatterjee’s Srikanta is to many the canonical Indian novel—it too is a bildung, following the protagonist from a wayward rural childhood into adulthood via many quests for livelihood and love. The protagonist Srikanta is far removed from a typical bourgeois clerical life. His life is often made via several fascinating female protagonists who educate him into the joys of non-conformity and courage. The chapter also includes a discussion of Rabindranath Tagore’s Garden—though less appreciated, the Garden is a fine meditation on illness and love. Unlike the infinitely mobile characters in Srikanta (male and female), here the ill female protagonist watches the world unfold in front of her (including her husband’s interest in another woman) even as she lies pinned to a bed.

Second Study

The second chapter takes off from the first in using the affect of humiliation. Humiliation has already been discussed widely in scholarship with relation to caste—see for example Humiliation: Claims and Context (OUP, 2011). This chapter discusses one of the most influential Dalit memoirs—Urmila Pawar’s Aaydan: The Weave of My Life, A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs (2008). Pawar’s powerful work recounts her life from a rural childhood, through education, marriage, and social prominence in the Dalit movement. The book thus demonstrates the evolving subjectivity of the protagonist as she outgrows intense negative affect (such as caste humiliation) to emerge as a full-fledged and respected writer and activist.

Fifth Study

The fifth and last chapter gathers together the threads of the previous chapters’ meditations on subjectivity—a subjectivity that may first be triggered by a sense of injustice, subjectivity that is often sharpened by powerful negative affects such as humiliation, or developed over the course of a lifetime as it navigates difficult life experiences. The oeuvre of Krishna Sobti is an apt summation of the themes of the previous chapters. Sobti’s characters too negotiate subjectivity vis a vis difficult family relationships (especially mothers and daughters), the legitimate wife vis-à-vis extramarital establishments and children, or again, the self vis-à-vis the darkness of depression. Few people round off the theme of subjectivity, affect, and meaningful moral action in an anguished and confusing world than Sobti’s protagonists, so it is fitting that the book ends with her.

Third Study

The third chapter takes up this tradition of the developmental novel (the bildung), and seeks to understand it in its canonical form in India. In this context, it looks at two of the most influential such novels in India, both published in the 1940s—Agyeya’s Shekhar and Ismat Chughtai’s The Crooked Line. The former, though essentially a story from childhood to the twenties of the protagonist also plays with the form of the novel—there is experimentation with non-linear storytelling, with fragmentation and ellipsis. Such techniques convey the darkness of the protagonist—the novel begins with the intimation that he is to be hanged (hanging also evokes the first chapter). Chughtai’s work is also a bildung, though in a playful mode that nevertheless invokes the difficulties of establishing a working-woman protagonist from a conservative milieu.