Beyond
the Binary: Gender, Resistance, and Liminality in the Fiction of Dr. Indira
Goswami
Dr. Mayuri Pathak,
Independent Researcher,
Bengaluru, India.
Abstract: This research undertakes a critical
examination of gender binarism in the fiction of Dr. Indira Goswami (Mamoni
Raisom Goswami), foregrounding her literary interrogation of heteronormative
structures embedded within Indian sociocultural and religious institutions.
Through close readings of The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker, The
Blue-Necked God, and Pages Stained with Blood, the study
elucidates how Goswami's narrative strategies resist essentialist constructions
of gender and instead render it as a fluid, performative, and historically
contingent category. Drawing on feminist theoretical frameworks, particularly
the works of Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, and Rosi Braidotti, the analysis
situates Goswami’s protagonists—Giribala, Saudamini, and the unnamed
narrator—as figures inhabiting liminal gendered subjectivities. These
characters subvert patriarchal norms through embodied desire, affective
resistance, and narrative agency, destabilizing normative dichotomies of
masculine/feminine, sacred/profane, and visibility/erasure. Goswami’s fiction,
though not overtly theoretical, performs a profound critique of gender as a
disciplinary regime, offering instead a literary praxis that reconfigures
femininity as a contested, relational, and ethically resonant site of identity.
In doing so, her oeuvre anticipates contemporary gender discourse and
underscores the inadequacy of binary logics in capturing the multiplicity of
lived experience.
Keywords: Gender
Binarism, Indira Goswami, Feminism, Widowhood, Assamese Literature
Introduction
Known by her pen name Mamoni Raisom Goswami, Dr. Indira Goswami was one of the most well-known authors in contemporary India. An exceptionally sensitive and insightful writer, Goswami wrote from a position of profound empathy for those who are silenced by institutions, whether they be cultural, religious, or political. As a writer, scholar, and activist, she frequently questioned established societal institutions, such as gender, caste, and religious dogma. Goswami's characters defiantly refuse to fit in with a society that has rigidly defined gender norms and frequently punishes or shuns those who don't fit the mould. Delving deep into the psychological and emotional lives of women, Goswami’s writings frequently provide insights into individuals that defy gender norms. Goswami considers the ramifications of this artificial split and challenges the strict male-female binary in her writing. Her criticism of gender binarism demonstrates a persistent interest in identity, oppression, and resistance throughout the numerous levels of her writing.
Instead of explicitly theorising on
gender, Goswami bases her stories on social realism and draws from personal
experience in the majority of her works. However, the strict male-female binary
that rules traditional Indian culture is radicalised in her narratives.
Goswami's characters frequently challenge, violate, or dismantle the limits of
gendered roles, whether it is via the life of an identity-deprived widow, a
female narrator who rejects traditional domesticity, or a woman asserting her
right to desires. She illustrates how constrictive binary categories may
dehumanise and constrain women via her complex depictions of female
subjectivity, especially those marginalised by caste, widowhood, or political
upheaval. Goswami's work challenges these norms and encourages readers to
reconsider gender as flexible, embodied, and morally nuanced.
With an emphasis on a few of her
works, including The Blue-Necked God,
Pages Stained with Blood, and The
Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker, this chapter analyses how Goswami handles
gender binarism in her fiction by closely examining her characters and
narrative decisions.
Understanding Gender
Binarism
Before diving into Goswami’s select
works, it is necessary to grasp the idea of gender binarism. In simple terms,
the categorisation of gender into two separate and opposing forms—male and
female—is known as gender binarism. This binary thinking ignores the wide range
of gender identities and expressions that exist outside of this dichotomy and
presumes that gender is strictly related to biological sex. According to Emily
Kendall, “Many critics of the gender binary
system argue that gender essentialism is rooted in cisnormativity, a term that
refers to the assumption that everyone is cisgender, and so it discriminates
against individuals who identify as transgender or gender nonconforming.” (gender binary) Rooted in patriarchal practices, the
binary system places societal obligations on individuals, where men are viewed
as authoritative, logical, and forceful, while women are supposed to be
submissive, kind, and homely. People that don't fit into these roles are
frequently marginalized or ignored.
Religious scriptures, familial
structures, rituals, and legal systems frequently institutionalise these
binaries in South Asian civilisations, including India. Women's roles—such as
mother, wife, or daughter—are strictly enforced, determining their value based
on their interactions with males. It is important to note that gender binarism
overlaps with power, society, and control and is not only a question of
personal identification. Widows, LGBT people, and women who don't fit into the
binary are among those who frequently experience social exile, abuse, or
invisibility.
However, these binaries can be
effectively reinforced or resisted by literary storytelling. Literature has the
power to either support or challenge established gender norms by providing
voice to those who oppose them through language, structure, and character. The
latter is a good fit for Dr. Indira Goswami's novels. Instead of idealising
women or showing them as helpless victims, her stories show women who challenge
gender norms by questioning, struggling, feeling deeply, and claiming their
humanity.
Similar to what academics like Judith
Butler have theorised in scholarly contexts, Dr. Goswami creates a literary
environment where gender becomes fluid and performative by refusing to define
her characters under typical gender moulds. (Butler 33) Gender is a
multifaceted experience rather than a binary truth in Goswami's universe. Her
characters' actions speak louder than words, even though they don't always have
the ability to express their concerns in contemporary feminist or LGBTQ terms.
According to Goswami's narratives, gender is therefore a negotiation between
the individual and society that is frequently characterised by suffering,
bravery, and contradiction rather than destiny. Goswami uses fiction to perform
theory without resorting to it, therefore bringing the political, spiritual,
and emotional implications of gender binarism to light.
Defying the Binary: The
Case of Giribala in The Moth-Eaten Howdah
of the Tusker
The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker, one of Goswami's best-known works, depicts upper-caste
widows in an Assamese Vaishnavite Satra.
Goswami, herself, translated the text from the Assamese Dontal Hatir Une Khowa Howdah. The protagonists of the narrative
are Giribala and her fellow widows, who are ensnared in a life of enforced
purity and strict asceticism. Goswami gently criticises the patriarchal
religious system that maintains the gender binary throughout this novel.
Despite being physiologically female, the widows are supposed to represent a
genderless life—devoid of ornamentation, desire, and self-identity. They are
denied the dignity of complete spiritual agency and are not regarded as true
women. Their existence becomes ethereal, existing in a state of ambiguity.
However, Giribala refuses to stay
unseen by challenging the unfair limitations imposed on her. She pursues
pleasure and dares to fall in love. The conventional assumptions of widowhood—a
gendered identity designed to uphold the binary—are challenged by her desire
for autonomy and connection. A system that wants Giribala to disappear into
submission is challenged by her disobedience, which turns into a silent
revolution. Goswami demonstrates in Giribala how gender norms are socially
constructed rather than innate. She contends that being a woman is a
combination of experience, expression, and selfhood rather than just biology.
Goswami's narrative portrays Giribala’s resistance as difficult, alone, and
socially dangerous rather than romanticising it. The sometimes dichotomous
representation of women as either victims or revolutionaries is complicated by
this complex portrayal. Giribala is both; she may imagine a new existence, but
she is also fashioned by the brutality of the social order.
The way that Goswami handles widowhood
also challenges the caste-based moral standards that uphold gender binary
thinking. In the novel, widowhood is portrayed as a social position as well as
a personal loss—a descent from conventional womanhood into a liminal state that
is neither associated with the feminine nor the male. The widow's absence—of
her spouse, her sexuality, and her identity—makes her a non-person. In addition
to reclaiming her gender, Goswami disrupts the fundamental binary that
underpins this social order by re-inscribing desire and agency into the widow'
Giribala’s character. In the end, there is no spectacular emancipation at the
end of Giribala's story. Goswami leaves her at a threshold, making her
character perceptive, inquisitive, and incredibly human. Through the
sympathetic narrative that focuses on the legitimacy of desire, agency, and
difference, Goswami provides a potent critique of the gender binary by giving
voice to a character such as Giribala.
Women and Desire in The Blue-Necked God
Dr. Indira Goswami’s The Blue-Necked God (Nilkanthi Braja)
provides a compelling reflection on the life of widows banished to Vrindavan, a
city that serves as both a physical haven and a spiritual prison. In certain
orthodox Hindu communities, widows are frequently deprived of their social
responsibilities and isolated in holy towns under the pretence of spiritual
salvation. The protagonist, Saudamini, is a young widow who is transferred to
Vrindavan after her husband passes away. Goswami reveals the harsh irony of a
practice where rather than serving as spaces for healing, these settings—the
holy cities, end up serving as places of abandonment and systematic gendered
violence.
The narrative of Saudamini is a
dramatic divergence from the romanticised image of the spiritually resigned
widow. Her presence in Vrindavan is characterised by emotional turmoil and
sensuous awareness rather than quiet acquiescence. Goswami presents widowhood
in a unique way, showing it as a condition of increased emotional complexity,
sensitivity, and longing rather than as renunciation. The fact that Saudamini
acknowledges her own emotional and physical urges is a type of rebellion
against the patriarchal system that portrays widows as asexual and spiritually
burdened. The Brahmanical-patriarchal structure of Indian culture is firmly
rooted in the societal taboo against widow remarriage and, consequently,
widows' sexual liberty. Within such a context, Saudamini's attraction to a
young priest Kaushik challenges not only moral principles but also the
fundamental binary reasoning that supports them: that female desire is either
hazardous or nonexistent, and that womanhood is dependent on chastity or
married subservience. Based on Judith Butler's idea of gender as performative,
Saudamini defies the performative expectations placed on her by refusing to
adopt the role of the desexualised widow. (33) Her gendered identity does not
fit the austere script that has been assigned to it. Instead, she reveals the
brutality that results from making people repress fundamental parts of their
humanity in order to conform to rigidly binary gender norms through her
internal turmoil and emotional excesses.
As much as her widowhood influences
Saudamini's sense of isolation and desire, so does the hypocrisy of a society
that takes advantage of women in the name of holiness. Her physical hunger and
spiritual need are inextricably linked, supporting the notion that female
subjectivity is not easily separated between the holy and the profane. In one
of the most moving scenes in the book, Saudamini is standing in front of a
picture of Lord Krishna, who is adored by everyone but is not really within her
reach. Her need for human connection is mirrored in this picture of longing for
an unsatisfying god, finally exposing the fallacy of spiritual prescriptions
that reject embodied experience.
The Blue-Necked God's critique resonates with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's analysis of the
"subaltern woman," whose voice is frequently silenced by patriarchal
and colonial ideologies. This silence is best illustrated by Saudamini's
circumstances, as she lives in several levels of dispossession as a widow and a
woman who is denied narrative agency. By providing Saudamini with an
interiority that is profoundly human, tormented, and resilient, Dr. Goswami,
however, challenges this silence. Saudamini's character serves as an example of
how gender binarism affects people's psychological and emotional well-being in
addition to their outwardly observable behavioural rules. Her impulses, which attest
to her survival—her insistence on being viewed as a whole person rather than a
societal category—do not identify her as morally flawed.
Goswami opposes the division of female
as holy or fallen, and creates room for complexity by portraying a widow who
refuses to delete her impulses. The
Blue-Necked God exposes the inconsistencies and harshness of the binary
gender system through Saudamini, therefore challenging its validity. According
to Goswami's fiction, femininity is not the same as submission, and desire is
not the antithesis of devotion. Instead, the potential for reinventing gender
is most evident in the ambiguity and resistance of characters such as
Saudamini.
Blurring Gender Lines in
Pages Stained with Blood
Pages Stained with Blood (Tej Aru Dhulire Dhusarita Prishtha), one of Dr. Indira Goswami's most
politically significant works, offers a unique combination of societal
critique, historical pain, and personal story. The novel uses an unnamed female
narrator, who is generally regarded as a semi-autobiographical version of
Goswami herself, to describe the visceral horrors of communal violence against
the backdrop of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. She also chronicles her
inner life, emotional attachments, and creative struggles. The result is a
narrative that defies gendered expectations, with a heroine who questions the
normal norms of femininity as well as the socio-political order. A writer and
scholar, the narrator is an educated, unmarried lady who lives alone, travels
freely between cities, and has close relationships with people from different
religious and cultural backgrounds. She possesses sexual awareness,
emotional expressiveness, and intellectual confidence. Such a female avatar was
a stark contrast to the prevailing ideals of womanhood in Indian literature,
especially during the 1980s, which emphasised quiet, obedience, and
domesticity. By using language, memory, and emotion to create her identity, Dr.
Goswami's narrator embodies a self that defies patriotic or patriarchal
ideologies.
One of the novel's most notable aspects
is the narrator's emotional attachment to Santokh Singh, a Sikh rickshaw puller
who becomes both her companion and the object of her intense love. Their
relationship transcends gender norms, religion, and class. It resides in an
ambiguous area that defies simple categorisation; it is neither a romantic
connection in the traditional sense nor is it platonic. The relationship itself
disrupts the gender binary by putting a woman in a position of ethical and
emotional subjectivity that is broader than sexual or maternal in the
conventional sense. Through very affective language that emphasises emotional
labour—a facet of femininity that is frequently minimised or exploited in
patriarchal discourse—the narrator conveys her sensitivity, empathy, and loss.
She is not, however, inactive as a result of her emotional transparency.
Conversely, it strengthens her political and artistic agency. She witnesses the
erasure of Sikh lives by state-sponsored violence, visits refugee camps, meets
survivors, and strolls through blood-stained streets. By doing this, she breaks
out from being a passive observer; her narrative voice becomes a kind of
resistance that combines the political and the personal. Theoretically, the
narrator represents what Rosi Braidotti calls a “nomadic subject”—a person in
flux, whose identity is moulded by feeling, relationality, and environment
rather than by immobile categories. (6) She is an insider and an outsider, an
intellectual and an activist, a lover and a chronicler. This diversity raises
the prospect of a more inclusive and lived subjectivity by upending the fixed
coordinates of gender identification.
Dr.Goswami broadens the concept of
gender discourse in Pages Stained with
Blood by placing it within larger frameworks of marginalisation, violence,
and resistance. By opposing gender binary thinking, Goswami portrays her
narrator as a potential—a multifaceted, changing, and politically conscious
representation of womanhood—rather than an anomaly. Pages Stained with Blood enacts a type of literary resistance that
questions dominant notions of gender, nation, and history by dismantling
boundaries across genres, emotions, and identities.
Gender beyond the Binary
Although the sociocultural realities
of twentieth-century India serve as the foundation for Dr. Indira Goswami's
fictional universe, many of the issues raised by modern gender theory are
foreshadowed by her storytelling techniques and characterisations, most notably
the recognition of gender as a spectrum rather than a binary. Widows, unmarried
women, and emotionally independent narrators are among her characters who live
in gender-ambiguous environments. Despite being physiologically female, they
are frequently excluded from the category of "proper" women because
they do not conform to heteronormative institutions like marriage, parenthood,
or sexual passivity. Their refusal—or incapacity—to fulfil the cultural norms
associated with their ascribed gender is what causes their exclusion from the
social order, not only gender nonconformity in appearance.
In this way, Goswami's fiction echoes
Judith Butler's claim that "gender is a kind of persistent
impersonation" by dismantling the notion of gender coherence and exposing
it as an ideological construct. (viii) Giribala's status as a woman is rejected
in The Moth-Eaten Howdah of the Tusker
not because she is not feminine, but rather because she is a widow and so
invisible. She turns into what anthropologist Veena Das refers to as a
"social non-being"—bodily yet denied bodily autonomy, present yet
rejected. (64) Her expression of emotional and physical desire places her in an
unclassifiable area between roles, where she is neither respected nor adored,
rather than "restoring" her to conventional womanhood. This
in-betweenness reveals the costs of upholding binary logics of gender
identification and undermines them.
In a similar vein, Saudamini in The Blue-Necked God defies easy
categorisation under any accepted feminine paradigm. Between sensuality and asceticism,
between longing and sadness, and between societal rejection and individual
activity, her character resides. Dr. Goswami's fiction is strong because it
doesn't try to ease these tensions. Saudamini is a tremendously disturbed,
emotionally resonant human being whose life defies classification; she is
neither redeemed via transformation nor punished into repentance.
Also, the narrator in Pages Stained with Blood rejects
patriotic and religious binaries in addition to gender standards. Her
subjectivity as a woman documenting political violence is very different from
traditional gendered roles that link men to public action and women to private
pain. The distinction between feminine and masculine modes of agency is blurred
by her connection with Santokh Singh, her active position as a trauma
historian, and her reluctance to embody domesticated femininity. She performs
roles that are often excluded for women in literary and historical discourse by
speaking, observing, and documenting.
Goswami encourages readers to rethink
identity as multiple, incomplete, and very human by depicting individuals that
reside on the periphery of gendered existence in a sympathetic and
psychologically nuanced manner. Her work makes the gender binary insufficient
for comprehending the entire range of lived experience, not just rejecting it.
Goswami paves the way for a more inclusive and morally conscious understanding
of gender by providing a voice to individuals that society seeks to silence or
eradicate.
Conclusion
In her novels, Dr. Indira Goswami
explores the systems of gendered oppression that are ingrained in Indian
society in a profound and incredibly personal way. Goswami exposes the horrors
of gender binarism via the lives of her female protagonists—widows, lovers, authors,
and seekers—intimately depicting suffering, desire, silence, and resistance
rather than through theoretical abstraction. By exposing the nuanced, sometimes
conflicting realities of experienced gender, her text, which is rooted in
social realism but rich in emotional and intellectual depth, questions the
assumed naturalness of the male-female binary. A different kind of resistance
to the binary system is represented by the anonymous narrator's emotional
entanglement in a city ripped apart by communal enmity, Saudamini's forbidden
desire in the holy city of Vrindavan, and Giribala's subdued revolt within the
cloistered satra. These women characters are not exceptional heroines; rather,
they are regular people whose ethical and political ramifications make their
unwillingness to fit in extraordinary. The binary logic that insists on women
being pure or profane, virtuous or fallen, visible or erased, is upset by their
voices, wants, and discontents that resist the roles that have been allocated
to them.
Despite not being overtly expressed in
feminist or queer theory terminology, Goswami's critique of gender strikes a
deep chord with its issues. She demonstrates how gender is socially produced,
historically contingent, and ideologically reinforced without using technical
terms. Her characters show that identity cannot be reduced to binary
classifications; rather, femininity is a disputed and dynamic realm that is
influenced by trauma, love, memory, and resistance rather than being a single,
set category. The lone narrator in Delhi, the widow in a satra, and the
deserted lady in Vrindavan all carry the burden of political, social, and
spiritual violence in addition to gendered expectations. Goswami's fiction is
incredibly relevant in a time when people are becoming more conscious of the
limitations of binary thinking, whether it is in terms of gender, sexuality, or
identity in general. She doesn't present tidy fixes or romanticised futures.
Rather, she presents narratives that encourage thought, discomfort, and challenge.
According to Goswami’s literary perspective, gender is a question—urgent,
unsolved, and, most importantly, human—rather than a fixed identity.
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