The Affective Home: Stuckedness and Cultural Trauma in Namitha Gokhale’s The Blind Matriarch

Affect theory and spatial critique are important paradigms in literary studies whose intersections with pandemic narratives have not been adequately addressed. This paper places an affective reading of quarantine spaces in critical dialogue with trauma and spatial studies. Drawing upon Sarah Ahmed’s concept of sticky effects, it seeks to examine Namitha Gokhale’s The Blind Matriarch, one of the earliest Indian literary responses to the pandemic, as the portrayal of an affective site where the ambient cultural trauma circulates and permeates domestic spaces and bodies that inhabit them during the global health crisis. It argues that changes in quotidian performance in the domestic sphere because of the unprecedented crisis reveal the entanglement of fear, care, and resilience in everyday spaces. The novel thus demonstrates how the stuckedness of the pandemic can reconfigure relationships among bodies, spaces, and their past.