Home As Refuge and Prison: The Plight of Women Amid the Covid-19 Lockdown in Namita Gokhale's the Blind Matriarch

The COVID-19 pandemic completely upended how we view the domestic space. While public health campaigns pushed the home as a safe haven from the virus, for millions of women, it turned into an overwhelming pressure cooker of unpaid labor, domestic stress, and zero personal space. Namita Gokhale’s 2021 novel, The Blind Matriarch, captures this exact shift through the lens of a multi-generational Indian household struggling to survive the lockdown. This paper examines how Gokhale uses the domestic sphere not as a static backdrop, but as a deeply conflicted space that offers physical security while simultaneously trapping its female occupants. Focusing on Matangi-Ma, Shanta, and Ritika, the study highlights how the pandemic reinforced traditional expectations around caregiving, femininity, and family duty. Matangi-Ma’s character exposes the immense mental and physical toll of invisible emotional labor. Shanta’s story illustrates the mental trap of living under deep-seated patriarchal judgments without any outside distractions. Meanwhile, Ritika’s trajectory shows what happens when the lines between professional careers and household chores completely blur. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates that Gokhale rejects any idealist view of the home, revealing how a global health crisis exposed and amplified gender inequalities already baked into private life.