Writing the Body, Resisting the System: Gendered Vulnerability in Arundhati Roy and Meena Kandasamy

Abstract

This paper examines how Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) and Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess (2014) deploy the female body as a contested site where systemic violence is inscribed and resisted. Through close reading textual analysis grounded in postcolonial feminism, Dalit feminism, and corporeal feminism, this study shows that both authors write the body not merely as a passive surface of oppression but as an active locus of resistance against intersecting structures of caste, class, gender, and colonial modernity. Roy’s narrative foregrounds the transgressive body of Ammu, whose intercaste desire violates the “Love Laws” that regulate bodily contact across caste boundaries, while Kandasamy’s polyphonic text inscribes the collective trauma of Dalit agricultural labourers whose bodies become sites of state-sanctioned violence during the 1968 Kilvenmani massacre. Both texts reveal how gendered vulnerability operates through what this paper terms “corporeal subjugation”—the systematic targeting of female bodies to enforce social hierarchies. Yet simultaneously, both authors demonstrate how these same bodies become instruments of defiance, articulating forms of resistance that challenge dominant narratives of victimhood. By comparatively analysing specific textual moments where bodily experience intersects with structural violence, this paper argues that Roy and Kandasamy contribute to a distinctly South Asian feminist literary tradition that refuses the separation of body from politics, instead insisting on embodiment as the primary terrain where power is both exercised and contested.