Feminist Precarity and Everyday Survival: Women’s Lives Under Slow Violence in Indian Feminist Narratives

In this paper, Indian feminist literature would be understood using the concept of precarity/slow violence, where the subjugation of Indian women is understood not so much due to catastrophic situations that erupt but because of processes that occur on an everyday level, becoming one with normalcy. Indian women’s literature, while depicting situations that unfold due to “violence, nativity, fatalism, and ripeness,” includes aspects where “violence can derive from situations described using other social categories, for example, exhaustion, social control, ethical dilemmas, etc.” Indian women’s literature, while depicting situations that erupt due to “violence, nativity, fatalism, and ripeness,” also includes situations where “violence can derive from situations described using other social categories, for example, exhaustion, social control, ethical dilemmas, etc.” Following various social sciences’ understanding regarding “ferocity, nativity, fatalism, ripeness, visibility, normality, etc.,” and using various strands from feminist realists, feminist narrative ethics, etc., while understanding precarity/slow violence’s role in shaping Indian women’s understanding/expression, it has also been observed that under “fatalism, ripeness, normality, etc.,” Indian women’s literature also includes situations where “violence can derive from situations described using other social categories, for example, exhaustion, social control, ethical dilemmas, etc.” Hence, theorizing survival as a feminist discourse, the article builds upon the existing ideas of feminist literary studies in the context of events of trauma and empowerment, focusing on the ethical-political value of lived experiences of survival in the context of slow violence, the ultimate truth of the paper being that feminist resistance in literature is not one of triumphant events but of surviving, existing, and being, even within a context of structural precariousness.