AGENTIC FEMALE FRATERNITY OF THE RECOVERING PATRIARCHAL WOMEN IN SHOBHA RAO’S GIRLS BURN BRIGHTER

Abstract

The paper critically reads Shobha Rao’s Girls Burn Brighter (2018) as the feminist novel that clearly sets out to explore the possibilities of an agentic female fraternity in the teeth of the worst patriarchal and misogynist cultures. Contextualizing the theoretic perspectives of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Pramod K. Nayar, and Lois Tyson, with regard to their concepts of subaltern speech, agency, and recovering patriarchal women, the paper projects Rao’s characters of Poornima and Savitha as the epitomes of female subalterns on their way to gaining agency as to recover from patriarchal misogyny. The novel shows that India, being the worst place with regard to female existence, has its females still the most redeeming feature of its society as they have started to formulate the lasting bonds of sisterhood/fraternity help them get hold of resilient agency.