From Silence To Self–Assertion: A Comparative Study Of Female Subjectivity In Contemporary Indian Women’s Autobiographical Narratives

Abstract

This paper examines female subjectivity and quest for self-assertion in select contemporary Indian women's autobiographies. Applying a feminist framework to Sr. Jesme’s Amen: The Autobiography of a Nun and Nalini Jameela’s The Autobiography of a Sex Worker, this study seeks to analyze these women’s negotiation of institutional as well as social/cultural constraints that differentially allows them to speak their lives and their selves, thus signifying agenetic re-assertion of identity in the narratives. Adopting a comparative literary perspective, the analysis examined common topics such as silence, patriarchal victimisation and violence, abuse and exploitation, misguided passion/struggle for selfhood in both narratives; it equally points to similarities that unite as well as the significant contextual differences that distinguish both narratives. The study will show how otherness, oppression and social environment are presented in Sr Jesme’s and Nalini Jameela’s  works and proposes a reading of the authors which sees them both as agents who refuse to be silenced by structures that try to contain them and silence their voices, they are an act of resistance beholden only to themselves. By locating these autobiographies in the larger context of feminist literary studies, we hope to introduce new dimensions into debates on how women negotiate power and voice and construct identity within Indian society; ultimately, we aim to make room for more complexity both in the stories that personal narrative allows women writers to tell and in the readings that go beyond other types of polemics.