FROM PERIPHERY TO CENTRE: EXPLORING GENDERED NARRATIVES IN SELECT FICTIONS OF SUCHITRA BHATTACHARYA

Abstract
The issue of women empowerment breaking the boundaries of patriarchy is the locus of the narrative based on the female experience. The representation of the female perspective in a narrative constructs an alternative discursive narrative, different from that of the male narrative. And once, when the perspective is changed, the whole narrative got changed. Suchitra Bhattacharya’s lady detective fiction based on detective Mitin aka Pragyaparamita Mukherjee introduces detective literature from female experience, quite unlike the conventional detective genre, exploring gendered experience in terms of intelligence and its relation with the discourse of power. These fictions encode female experience within the web of the narrative, opening the door of a new prospect towards detective literature. The lady detective literature, as it was developed, was resistance against the male narrative of the detective literature and the subverted female presentation of it. It brings forward the women agency that was previously denied by patriarchy and reconstitutes the ways of interpreting a text incorporating women in the center. The narrative establishes and celebrates the thinking capability of women negated in the male narrative. Henceforth, the argument is how and to what extent the female narrative achieves its hold over discursive power, and succeeds in bringing up a whole new thread by subverting the discursive narrative of the androgenous stratum.

Key Words:Gender, lady detective, narrative, discourse of power, women.

https://doi.org/10.37948/ensemble-2020-0202-a002