Feminist Futurity and the Politics of Inheritance: Women Writing Against Patriarchal Continuity in Indian Fiction

The present article, through an examination of the concept of inheritance in the context of gender politics in Indian fiction, seeks to highlight the ways in which the continuity of patriarchal politics is disrupted by women writers not merely through resistance to the politics of trauma and silence but also through the ways in which they redefine the politics of inheritance. The present study, through an engagement with the works of feminist theorists such as Butler, Ahmed, and Fraser, seeks to highlight the ways in which the politics of inheritance is represented in the works of Kiran Desai, Manju Kapur, and Anita Desai, and the ways in which Dalit autobiographies also present a similar politics of inheritance. The present study seeks to highlight the ways in which the concept of counter-lineage can be used to understand the politics of inheritance in the context of the works of these feminist writers, where the politics of futurity is not merely represented in the context of utopian possibilities but through an actual renegotiation of the politics of what must not be inherited.