Reading disgust: a critical gerontological examination of a Hindi-language short story

Senescence in fiction has been rarely studied in the cultural gerontological tradition in India. While later life associated with intergenerational authority, or enhanced religiosity or as a cultural process of worldly renunciation, have been themes in the phenomenological corpus of gerontology in India, studying the aging feminine body has remained outside the intellectual sensibilities of this field. In this paper, we analyze the short story, Boodhi Kaki (old aunt) by noted Hindi and Urdu writer, Munshi Premchand (1880–1936) to explore the cultural construction of the abject, an ambiguous liminal stage that is distinct from notions of “Third” or “Fourth” age in life-course studies. As such, by focusing on food and (a devouring) appetite of the older female protagonist, we complicate the entanglements of desire and disgust in aging studies. Ultimately, we explore the transgressive potential of the abject as a self-reclaiming device that upends cultural understandings of age(ing) and gender.