Gendered Subalternity, Land Dispossession, and Narrative Mediation: Re-Theorising Tribal Feminism in Paraja

DOI

https://www.doi.org/10.59256/ijrtmr.20260601010

Published In

Volume 6, Issue 1 (2026)

Published Online

January-February 2026

Pages

78-81

Article Type

Original Article

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This article re-examines Paraja through feminist political ecology, Dalit feminist standpoint theory, and indigenous decolonial scholarship to argue that the novel encodes a gendered cartography of tribal dispossession. While frequently read as a realist critique of feudal exploitation, its gendered structures remain under-theorised. Drawing on intersectional feminist political ecology (Mollett & Faria, 2018; Nightingale, 2017; Sultana, 2020), Dalit feminist epistemology (Rege, 2016; Paik, 2018; Krishnan, 2022), and indigenous frameworks linking sovereignty to land (Whyte, 2018; Tuck & Yang, 2012/2018), this study demonstrates that tribal women’s labour, bodily vulnerability, and narrative marginalisation operate together to produce gendered subalternity. The article proposes a land–body– narrative triad as a critical framework for re-situating tribal women within Indian feminist literary historiography.