“I want to do something with my life”: Reading Resistance in South Asian Girlhoods Portrayed in Keeping Corner, Climbing the Stairs, and Neela: Victory Song

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Notes

¹ A husband’s death meant the end of purposeful life for widows in upper-caste marriages. Some widows were forced to commit Sati, where a grieving widow commits suicide by immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre (Bose and Jalal 58). Many others were forced to keep corner for the first year and live out the remainder of their lives as social outcasts. Keeping Corner, demonstrated in the novel, Keeping Corner, is a year-long period of isolation observed by upper-caste widows after their husbands’ death.

² Narmadshankar, or Narmad, is a Gujarati writer and reformer, considered a revolutionary for his liberal ideas. In Keeping Corner, his writings were considered a “bad” influence on a child widow like Leela for giving her radical ideas about female empowerment and gender equality in society.

³ He organized Indian soldiers abandoned by the British colonial army into the Indian National Army (INA) to fight British colonization of India, taking a different route to the Gandhian nonviolent struggle.

⁴ Subaltern Studies scholars trace the term “subaltern” to Marxist class analysis from Antonio Gramsci, who first used the word “subaltern” to mean “subordination in terms of class, caste, gender, race, language, and culture … signify[ing] the centrality of dominant/ dominated relationships in history” (Prakash 1477). Early definitions of “subaltern” are broad and include anyone who is not “elite.”

⁵ In Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak provides the example of Bhubaneshwari, a young woman freedom fighter from Colonial Bengal. When she finds herself incapable of carrying out a suicide attack mission targeting British leaders, she commits suicide at home while she is menstruating. Interpreting this act as Bhubaneshwari’s statement that her death was not the result of an illicit affair, Spivak points out that Bhubaneshwari’s “graphematic” speech remains unheard because her descendants still read shame of an illicit affair to be the cause of her suicide, even though a menstruating body rules out illicit affairs.

⁶ The custom where a grieving widow (woman) commits suicide by immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre (Bose and Jalal 58)