Narrating madness constructing mental illness and normalcy in select Indian English narratives

Abstract

The thesis analyses the construction of madness in select Indian-English narratives. The study draws on concepts from Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and Narratology to inform its theoretical framework, examining how madness is constructed in narratives. Falling under the rubric of Literary Mad Studies, this research attempts to counter homogenising discourses of madness propagated by medicine, emphasising that the complex experience of being mad is rooted in history, social structures, and cultural codes, thereby creating unique experiential realities of madness. Consequently, the focus is on the Indian experience of madness, contextualised by the specificities of India. The ‘constructed-ness’ of madness following the historical event of Partition is studied in Anirudh Kala’s The Unsafe Asylum: Stories of Partition and Madness, wherein clinical madness is juxtaposed against the madness of communal violence, chaotic cross-border movements, and intergenerational trauma. In Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey: A Novel, the gendered aspect of madness is highlighted through radical feminist ideals of witchcraft perceived as a threatening madness, and the portrayal of motherhood and its associated travails, suggestive of the conformist, acceptable madness. Swadesh Deepak’s I Have Not Seen Mandu: A Fractured Soul-Memoir is surveyed to investigate how medicalised madness is creatively reconstituted to foreground the human experience. The ‘constructed-ness’ of madness is expressed and executed through language. Across the three selected texts, narrative techniques are deployed to discover the functions of language and madness, while also re-modelling such techniques to represent the experience accurately. The thesis develops from inability, reaches an intermediate zone of resistance, and finally arrives at agency. Further, it is claimed that a mad person is the ultimate intersectional subject, influenced by historical, cultural, economic, political, and psychological factors.