The Bildungsroman Trope and Indian Consciousness in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape (2008)

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With the arrival of the twenty-first century, the representation of females in the dystopian bildungsroman has been observed in the works of Indian women authors, such as Escape (2008), The Island of Lost Girls (2015), The Lesson (2015), Clone (2018), and Machinehood (2021). These novels put a greater emphasis on the subversive possibilities of identity formation as a tool to resist oppressive social norms and codes. In this regard, Manjula Padmanabhan’s novels achieve different semantics by depicting the protagonist’s unconventional method of identity formation while shaping a discussion on the contours of the female body, female sex, and gender construction in the context of Indian patriarchal society. This article primarily aims to scrutinize the bildungsroman trope in Escape (2008) by Padmanabhan. It explores the text with a magnified focus on the bildung process of the female adolescent protagonist and draws a parallel between the novelistic context and the precarious conditions of women in Indian society. Further, it also includes a phenomenological commentary on the female protagonist’s experiences of embodied subjectivity