LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 25:9 September 2025
ISSN 1930-2940

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         Nathan Mulder Bunce, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
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         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
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Beyond Stereotypes: A Linguistic?Stylistic Study of Indian Womanhood in Anita Nair's Fiction

Dr. Ravindra Goswami

Abstract

This paper investigates how Anita Nair's fiction redefines Indian womanhood through language. Using a linguistic?stylistic framework that integrates Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Appraisal Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), and discourse?pragmatic tools, the study offers a close reading of Ladies Coup? (2001), Mistress (2005), Lessons in Forgetting (2010), and Eating Wasps (2018). Across these novels, Nair's narratorial strategies?shifts in focalization, transitivity patterns, multilingual resources, and intertextual revoicing of myth?construct subjectivities that resist stereotypical scripts of docility, sacrifice, and silence. Findings indicate consistent foregrounding of women's material and mental processes; systematic deployment of positive self-appraisal; pragmatics of resistance through refusal, counter-questions, and irony; and recuperation of culturally resonant metaphors to reframe gendered norms. The paper contributes a linguistically grounded account of feminist narration in contemporary Indian English writing.

Keywords:Anita Nair; Indian womanhood; Systemic Functional Linguistics; Appraisal; Critical Discourse Analysis; stylistics; feminist narratology; discourse and gender; multilingualism

Introduction

Stereotypical representations of Indian women often align with scripts of docility, sacrifice, and silence (Mohanty, 2003). Anita Nair's oeuvre challenges these, offering protagonists who negotiate desire, labour, kinship, and public life with agency. While previous literary criticism has explored Nair's feminist themes (Spivak, 1988; Butler, 1990), fewer studies show how linguistic choices realise these themes at the level of lexicogrammar, discourse structure, and narrative voice. This paper addresses that gap by providing a linguistic analysis of selected novels to demonstrate how womanhood is reimagined through language.

Research questions: (1) How do transitivity patterns distribute agency among women and men (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004)? (2) How does evaluative language (Martin & White, 2005) construct selfhood and resistance? (3) What discourse?pragmatic strategies negotiate power in dialogue (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Tannen, 1990)? (4) How do intertextuality and metaphor recast cultural frames of gender (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980)? We argue that Nair?s writing systematically repositions women as knowers, doers, and evaluators within social worlds aligned against them.

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Beyond Stereotypes: A Linguistic?Stylistic Study of Indian Womanhood in Anita Nair's Fiction
Dr. Ravindra Goswami
Seth G. B. Podar College, Nawalgarh (Raj)
goswami.raaj23@gmail.com
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