Home, Away from Home: Violence, Womanhood and Home/Land in Jahnavi Barua’s Fiction

Abstract

This paper is a gendered analysis of structures and cultures of violence that characterize both public political and private domestic spaces in Northeast India, one of the most sustained conflict zones in South Asia. It links the violence at home with the political violence generated by the idea of ethnic homelands. While illustrating how domestic and political violences intersect, the paper questions the very idea of home as safe haven, or refuge from the outside world. It also parallelly raises reservations about the ethno-nationalist demand for territorial homelands as the solution to political conflicts between communities. The paper does this by juxtaposing the specters of fear and manifestations of violence in both the public and private domains as depicted in the fiction of Anglophone writer Jahnavi Barua. It analyzes Barua’s characters who are at the center of this violence to understand her depiction of home and homeland. It then relates text to context by drawing on media reports, policy documents, domestic violence handbooks and manuals, field reports and reports of fact-finding missions among other primary sources. The sociology of conflict literature and an attempt to illustrate the value of the witness fiction writers bear to violent conflicts underpins the analysis.