Coloniality of Power and Gendered Suffering in Seto Dharti – A Texual Analysis

Abstract

Background: Gendered suffering in South Asian literature has historically been denoted primarily by culturalist or Western feminist markers, which overlook the ways in which colonial institutions of power hunger and shape female selfhood, embodiment, and agency in local contexts.  Eventually Neupane’s Nepali novel Seto Dharti presents such a platform for addressing these bottomless histories of power in the life of a child widow named Tara who is marginalized in her life.

Method:  The research uses a qualitative textual analysis of the Seto Dharti, based on the  decolonial theoretical approach of Anibal Quijano (coloniality of power) and Maria Lugones (coloniality of gender).  Narrative excerpts were read three times and the themes were assigned initial coding, which was reduced and clarified into final codes, namely ritual purity, social exile, corporeal discipline and affective resistance.

Findings:  Epistemic hierarchical categories, ritual purity and bodily regulation function as regimes of control that naturalize the subjugation of subaltern women in the text. Tara‘s childhood widowhood points to the convergence of caste, religion and patriarchy as systems of co-constitution in coloniality.  Fragments of affective Resistance and agency are identified, which complicate totalising subject condensation narratives of victimhood in Table 1.

Conclusion: By placing Seto Dharti in South Asian sociohistorical contexts, this work is a contribution to decolonial feminist thought about how indigenous practices serve to re/produce coloniality but also challenge and decolonize it, and therefore what alternative subjects and subject positions can have space to be imagined in opposition to hegemonic/subjuging definitions of power.

Novelty:  The present is the pioneer study applying Quijano‘s coloniality of power and Lugones’ coloniality of gender simultaneously to a Nepali literary text,  as it ventures beyond the colonialist (Go 2009) culturalist as well as Western (Chatterjee 2010; Kothari 2010) feminists frameworks to locate the “features of” Nepali women‘s pain in decolonial feminists debates.