Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Modern Approaches in Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Tentative Title of the Paper- Writing as Resistance: A Venture in the Poetic World of Kabita Sinha and Mallika Sengupta
Dr. Trayee Sinha
ABSTRACT:
Women’s writing and the politics of representation have invited critical debates and discussions across the globe. Women’s marginality is a worldwide issue. Writers, critics, activists, academicians, scholars and researchers have expressed their concern over this issue for decades and have already produced large body of literature. Feminisms’ search for identity has been diversely shown through visual and literary representations. The present paper attempts to focus on writing as a mode of resistance through the analysis of the poetry of Kabita Sinha (1931-1999) and Mallika Sengupta (1960-2011). Both Sinha and Sengupta belong to the same culture, from the Bengali intelligentsia. Both of them hail from the Indian subcontinent. Sinha never wished to be identified as a feminist but her writings truly bear feminist consciousness. She has not only written volumes of poetry, she is also a novelist, short story writer and most of her works represent women’s subordination. For Mallika Sengupta, according to the poet, critic Sanjukta Dasgupta, “feminism is not just an academic issue but a conviction and challenge.” Kabita and Mallika’s literary activism converge at a point- to expose the politics of identity of women who are reduced as marginalized social beings. Both of them look at the intersections of society- Kabita, without consciously adopting a gender perspective and Mallika, an enthusiastic votary of feminist philosophy. The proposed paper will argue on the basis of various feminist scholarship that, in spite of Kabita’s unconscious attempts, she could be listed among one of the fabulous feminists in terms of her literary creations. The paper would also like to focus on Mallika’s poems and make a comparative study between the works of the two poets to justify how writing can act as resistance.
keywords: Feminism, Identity, Literary Activism, Poem, Scholarship