Deadline for Abstract Submission: May 15, 2025

Final Chapter Submission: December 30, 2025

Editors: Aswathi Velayathikode Anand (Visiting Assistant Professor, IIM Indore, India) & Swathi Krishna S. (Assistant Professor, IIT Bhubaneswar, India)

Contact Emails: aswathiv@iimidr.ac.in, swathi@iitbbs.ac.in

Stories of Strength and Survival: Resilient Women in Indian Fiction(Edited Collection) (With a strong publishing interest from Bloomsbury Publishing, USA)

Stories of Strength and Survival: Resilient Women in Indian Fiction aspires to bring together critical explorations of powerful and diverse portrayals of women in Indian fiction. The book focuses on resilient female fictional characters as they navigate personal and societal challenges, rise above oppressive systems, and redefine their identities against the backdrop of a complex, often patriarchal world. Rather than following a historical timeline, this book intends to engage with the varied experiences of female characters across different cultures, classes, and communities within India, examining how resilience manifests in their unique narratives. With the growing recognition of Indian authors and Indian directorial ventures on the global stage, there is an increasing interest in the stories that emerge from this region. The psychological capacity of resilience is central to this project as it dwells on the human ability to navigate pain and trauma, while demonstrating the tenacity to outlive it. Renowned psychologists, Margaret Wright and Ann Masten in the essay “Pathways to Resilience in Context” describe resilience as: “The capacity of a dynamic system to adapt successfully to disturbances that threaten system function, viability or development” (25). Similarly, Kim Anderson states that “[t]he psychological dimensions of resiliency include cognitive, behavioral and emotional strategies used to survive adverse experiences and to persevere in life” (Enhancing Resilience 20). She further asserts that the ability of a survivor to “live well in the present” is conceivable only if he/she can recover from the past “lost strengths” and continues to build on them (72). This psychological framework informs the exploration of Indian women’s narratives, where resilience emerges as a response to systemic patriarchal oppression and violence. In patriarchal India women face innumerable physical and sexual vulnerabilities both in the domestic and the public sphere, including homes, workplaces, parks, schools, universities, and public transportation, among others. The violence against women ranges from verbal abuse and eve-teasing to sexual harassment, battery, acid attacks, and rape. Despite the personal/systemic challenges, women’s narratives in fact and fiction often illuminate profound instances of fortitude and resilience. This book then is an attempt to bring forth a comprehensive and critical analysis of narratives that feature resilient women characters who fight the challenging circumstances and emotional traumas to regain a semblance of ‘normalcy’.

Notably, the 2022 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data records 4,45,256 cases of crimes against Indian women (Verma). According to the data, the significant proportion of crimes against women under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) involves ‘Cruelty by Husband or His Relatives’ (31.4%), ‘Kidnapping and Abduction of Women’ (19.2%), ‘Assault on Women with Intent to Outrage her Modesty’ (18.7%), and ‘Rape’ (7.1%) (Verma). Notorious and globally condemned cases such as the 2012 Delhi rape and murder (popularly termed Nirbhaya) and the 2024 rape and murder case of a trainee doctor in Kolkata have triggered national outrage and initiated judicial amendments. In addition to physical violence, Indian women also grapple with myriads of challenges such as poverty, emotional abuse, low living standards, the burden of care work, and gendered expectations, among others on a day-to-day basis. Given the disadvantaged position of women in Indian public and private spaces, the present project intends to focus on creative mediums such as literature, films, graphic narratives, and web series, among others that represent intrepid female characters who outlive traumatic physical and psychological experiences. Many tenacious Indian women have demonstrated their ability to navigate trauma and rebuild their lives as a testament to the triumph of the human spirit. The survivor of a brutal acid attack at the age of fifteen, Laxmi Agarwal showcased her resilience in the face of physical and societal scars by setting up an NGO named Chhanv Foundation to assist and rehabilitate other acid-attack survivors. Further, in recent times, a Malayalam film actress named Bhavana Menon’s legal battle against her assaulter pushed the authorities to form a commission to investigate the misogyny and sexual violence in the Malayalam film industry, thereby initiating a step for justice and equity for female actors. Such narratives of strength, courage, and survival have personal and collective significance.

Despite the abundance of sociological and psychological studies on resilience, the literary and cinematic representations of Indian women’s resilience remain underexplored. The present book, therefore, is an attempt to address this gap in scholarship by bringing together essays on female resilience represented and celebrated through various cultural mediums in India such as literature, films, graphic narratives, web series, and popular culture, among others. By including both psychological theories and cultural studies, the project aspires to provide a multidisciplinary approach to understand strategies of resilience among Indian women. Through narrative analysis, this edited volume intends to highlight the unyielding strength of Indian women who transform pain into empowerment, ensuring their voices are neither silenced nor forgotten. Works such as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions,Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupé, Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke, A. Revathi’s Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story, and Shashi Deshpande’s Roots and Shadows demonstrate how women navigate marginalization and reclaim their voices. Similarly, films such as Fire (1996), Matrubhoomi (2003), Queen (2014), Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016), Pariyerum Perumal (2018), Thappad (2020), and The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) portray women redefining and reclaiming their identity in a globalized, modern world. Thus, this project hopes to address the demand for feminist literary and postcolonial studies that centres on the experiences of Indian women and their resilience in various cultural and social contexts. This project invites innovative approaches and interdisciplinary perspectives that contribute to the important conversation on resilience and women in Indian narratives.

The following are some suggested areas of interest, though contributions are not limited to these themes.

1. Tradition, custom, societal norms, and women’s resilience
2. Resilient women in Indian mythology
3. Marginalization, oppression, and resilience
4. Female solidarity amidst adversity
5. Male violence, trauma, and resilience
6. Caste, class, gender, and survival strategies
7. Redefining resilience: modernity, globalization, and technology
8. Ecological resilience and women’s narratives
9. Women’s agency and resistance
10. Identity and adaptive resilience

Bloomsbury Publishing, USA has expressed a strong interest in publishing this edited collection. Please submit an abstract of 500 words and a short bio note by May 15, 2025 to Aswathi Anand (aswathiv@iimidr.ac.in) and Swathi Krishna S. (swathi@iitbbs.ac.in). The final articles will be 4000-6000 words in the latest MLA Handbook format and will be due by December 30, 2025.