Remembrances of Wounds: Narratives of Violence in Kusum Ansal’s Tapasi

Abstract

Women Writing in Hindi in the nationalist phase shared the nationalist agenda of
emancipation of the nation and reformation of Indian society. One of the foremost reforming
agenda in this phase was seeking ban on practice of widow immolation (satipratha) to
improve the condition of widows. In the first three decades in the post-Independent India
Hindi women writing voiced those gender issues which primarily concerned the middle-class
women. With liberalism of 1990s, Hindi women writing has more diverse interests; it
articulates more of those concerns which driven by the globalized economy.
Kusum Ansal’s novel, Tapasi (2008) is based on the writer’s ethnographic study of lives of
widows in Vrindavan hence the story has an air of authenticity and immediacy in its narration.
it is a narrative of interpersonal and structural violence that is faced by a poor orphan girl,
Tapasi who later becomes a widow. Her position as an orphan and as a widow makes her so
vulnerable that she is subjected to all kinds of abuses – physical, emotional and mental – but
she never gathers courage to resist. The final stroke of violence is the violation and mutilation
of her body in the form of organ theft. As she is left to die, memories of violence to her dignity
and body, all flash before her eyes making her story a story of thousands of Indian widows
who suffer violence and betrayal in parental /conjugal homes and even in so-called widow
shelter homes. The present paper would analyze the novel, Tapasi in the feminist framework of
vulnerability of a single widowed woman in Indian patriarchal society who suffers extreme
form of violence – violation of her body and dignity as a human being.