Subjugated Women in Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers: A Postcolonial Feminist Reading

Abstract

Shauna Singh Baldwin in What the Body Remembers (1999) closely studies the Indian social structure and examines the marginal position of women within it. She surpasses the patriarchal framework as the only system that marginalizes women and addresses issues related to caste, class, and religious boundaries that further aggravate the female position. Although her protagonist is of Sikh descent, the novelist conceptualizes the heterogeneous experiences of Indian women, and in support of this notion, she crafts her female characters from various social levels. Through adopting a postcolonial feminist perspective, the present work explores the intricate mechanisms by which various social constructs subjugate women differently. Despite being oppressed in one way or another by social ranking, some of her female characters still maintain caste and religious systems to exclude and subjugate women from the less privileged social strata.