Rope of Resistance: Subaltern Identity through Myth and History in Hangwoman by K. R. Meera

Abstract

The paper discusses how myth and ancestral history work as a power structure to contribute a major part in framing a person. It is one of the most important works among the contemporary Indian novels which was originally written in Malayalam as Aarachar (2012) and translated by J. Devika. The novel is set in Kolkata. Even though it was set in the contemporary Indian social background it traces a 2,400 years old genealogy to engage with the myth and history in a conscious, prolonged interaction to create a multilayered subaltern identity of its main character, Chetna Grddha Mullick. This paper employs the theorisation of the subaltern by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, subaltern historiography by Ranajit Guha and lieux de mémoire by Pierre Nora to argue that Meera invokes the blurring of mythological and historical time as a narrative strategy to chart a subaltern form of subalternity that is neither entirely victimised nor entirely resistant but exists in the generative, unstable zone. The article also argues that this peripheral location makes possible a feminist counter-archive which puts into question the colonial and patriarchal histories of writing, reclaiming the voices of women forgotten by official national memory.