Silence, Land, and the Speaking Subject: Liberal Feminism and Standpoint Theory in Manoranjan Byapari’s “The Fortress”

Abstract

This paper reads Manoranjan Byapari’s short story “The Fortress” in dual theoretical contexts: the rights-based formulations of classical liberal feminism on the one hand, and the epistemological limitations of such feminism when faced with caste-patriarchal power relations on the other. The story’s protagonist, Sarama, a widowed woman living alone in the village who has inherited her late husbands land, thereby making her a victim of collective sexual violence, asks us to consider how the vocabulary of rights offered by feminist discourses like those of Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Smith, Gopal Guru, Sharmila Rege and Uma Chakravarti can be applied in a narrative where the very notion of rights is circumscribed. For Byapari, Sarama’s social location provides her with situated knowledge but not necessarily with a standpoint from which one can have an automatic emancipation through epistemic access. Thus, her final conversion of the violated body into a “fortress” is not necessarily an act of uncomplicated empowerment or even an ethical collapse, but rather a retaliatory act of agency, made possible after the exhaustion of all legal, collective, and political interventions. Byapari’s shifting tenses, fragmented temporality, interiorisation and choral representation of the village all serve to make explicit the very real limits of any feminist epistemology that privileges rights as the primary location of intervention. The paper thus seeks to examine the story through a Dalit-feminist practice of reading that closely examines how Dalits are positioned vis-à-vis knowledge production systems, even as they attempt to negotiate their epistemic locations.