Emotional Regimes and Silent Resistance in Selected Indian Caste Novels by Meena Kandasamy

Reading Meena Kandasamy for the first time feels less like encountering literature and more like being caught doing something you weren’t supposed to. There is an accusatory quality to her prose not directed at the reader exactly, but at the comfortable assumptions readers carry into
books about suffering that isn’t theirs. This study takes seriously the claim that Kandasamy’s fiction is doing theoretical work, not just emotional work, and tries not always tidily to trace how that theory
unfolds across When I Hit You (2017) and The Prey (2014). The central argument leans on William Reddy’s concept of emotional regimes and James C. Scott’s notion of the hidden transcript, with some necessary detours through Dalit feminist scholarship. Silence, this study insists, is
the wrong word for what Kandasamy’s protagonists practice. It is closer to strategy a disciplined withholding of the self from a world that would consume it without ever quite understanding it. The proposed used inaims to examine emotional regimes and modes of silent resistance in
select works of Meena Kandasamy . The study focuses on Kandasamy’s
representation of explicit emotional articulation as a feminist. Employing
a qualitative textual analysis supported by theories of emotional regimes
and resistance, the research attempts to identify convergences and divergences in the narrative strategies. The study intends to contribute to
Indian English literary studies by offering an emotion - centered
framework for understanding resistance in contemporary regional and
diasporic writings.