Silent Kitchens, Loud Revolts: Domesticity and Feminist Awakening in the Select Bengali Short Stories Translated into English

Abstract

In South Asian women's writing, domesticity emerges as a
deeply ambivalent space. It is considered as a place of
confinement as well as a ground for the awakening of selfhood.
Though the domestic sphere has been idealised as protective and
sacred throughout history, it can also nurture consciousness,
anger, and transformation. The present paper examines four such
powerful short stories, namely “The Stream Within” by Sabitri
Roy, “The Subalterns” by Ashapurna Devi, “The Confrontation”
by Sulekha Sanyal, and Selina Hossain's “Motijan's Daughters.”
In all these stories, the domestic space transforms into a site of
revolt. These stories are originally written in Bengali but are
available to Anglophone readers through translation. Although
these stories are set in varied social and economic contexts, they
converge in dramatising how ordinary household spaces such as
kitchens, courtyards, and rooms can become charged sites. The
paper draws upon the ideas of feminist thinkers such as Virginia
Woolf, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde to demonstrate how
domestic labour and its erasures fuel interior rebellions in a
Bhasha Literature.