Tracing Trauma and Resistance in Mahasweta Devi’s “Behind the Bodice” and Indira Goswami’s A Saga of South Kamrup

This chapter investigates the syndromes in the narrative of resistance, the tools resisting the dominant androcentric social system. It focuses on the characterisation of the protagonists of two stories: “Behind the Bodice” (2019), a short story written by Mahasweta Devi, and a novel by Indira Goswami, A Saga of South Kamrup (1993). These stories present two paradigms of violent resistance that female protagonists use, which are self-injury and suicide. The study argues that self-injury and suicide are emotional responses against the chronic trauma where patriarchy is the stressor causing women’s oppression and mental disorders. The protagonists’ responses as resistance to the imposed and hegemonic man’s world system in the two stories are self-evidently  the impacts of nonsuicidal self-injury disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, which certainly are not the acts of resistance. As the narrative of resistance inspires, provokes, generates, encourages and sometimes discourages resistance, this chapter broadens the scope to reinterpret acts of resistance by examining the psychological underpinnings of the female protagonists’ reactions which assert ‘no’ and ‘refusal’ to recurrence of oppression in the past while preserving one’s identity. Self-injury and suicide, thus, are not the means of resistance but murder, where patriarchy is the triggerman.