Communal Violence, Trauma and Indian Women: Fictional Representations of Women in Manju Kapur's A Married Woman and Anita Rau Badami's Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines fictional representations of Indian women’s responses to trauma in the background of communal violence. It argues that fiction allows for the reimagination of women’s conditions during communal riots, and their responses to trauma as a result of those riots. While ethnographic research seeks answers from traumatized victims, a fictional text can open up spaces for debates about conditions of women and their responses to trauma in the background of communal violence. Through Manju Kapur’s <em>A Married Woman</em> and Anita Rau Badami’s <em>Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?</em>, this project examines women’s negotiations of their religious and national identities within the private and the public and their responses to trauma caused by communal violence. The Introduction draws on texts on gender and diaspora theory as well as scholarly work on the evolution and history of communalism in India. It also looks at the historical backgrounds of two events of communal violence that underpin Kapur’s and Badami’s texts, namely, the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid controversy and the resulting 1992 riots, and Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the resulting 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Chapter 1 examines Indian women’s negotiations of religious identities in <em>A Married Woman</em>. Through the characters of Astha, Pipee and Sita, I argue that Kapur draws parallels between women as Other and religious minorities as Other. Her text shows the ways in which trauma crosses religious borders of Hindu-Muslim, and opens up possibilities for envisioning ways of ethically coexisting with the Other. Chapter 2 investigates communal violence in India and Canada in <em>Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?</em> Focusing on the characters of Bibi-ji, Leela and Nimmo, I argue that communal violence subsumes class, religion and location. Her text highlights how trauma crosses national boundaries and how the three women are torn apart by their losses. In my Conclusion, I suggest for new avenues of research that might contribute to a further understanding of the dynamics of communal violence and trauma, and a future investigation into the negotiation of male religious identities in the background of communal violence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".