Scarlet Words: Menstruation Myths, Cultural Narratives, and Modern Literature

Abstract

Menstruation remains shrouded in silence and stigma across South Asia, where patriarchal and caste ideologies frame the bleeding body as polluting, while public-health discourse reduces it to a hygiene deficit. Although critical menstruation studies have consolidated as an interdisciplinary field, menstruation as a literary trope in South Asian women's writing has received little sustained close-reading attention, and indigenous sacred epistemologies are seldom placed in critical dialogue with feminist literary theory. This qualitative study closely reads Kamala Das, Ismat Chughtai, Bama, Meena Kandasamy, H. Lavanya, and Rupi Kaur through gynocriticism, corporeal feminism, postcolonial feminism, and eco-spiritual feminism, alongside the Kamakhya Temple's menstruating goddess and Sinu Joseph's Rtu Vidya. It finds not a single feminist menstrual poetics but a differentiated menstrual literary cartography, in which caste, genre, language, and platform generate distinct grammars of the bleeding body, and sacred traditions function as contested rather than redemptive resources.