Gendered minority subalternity and colonial law in Sujata Massey's A Murder on Malabar Hill

This article examines gendered subalternity within the historically privileged Parsi community of colonial Bombay through a literary-critical reading of Sujata Massey’s A Murder on Malabar Hill (2018). It is the first novel in the Perveen Mistry series and a work of feminist historical crime fiction set in the 1920s. It reconceptualises subalternity not as a fixed class-based or economic category but as a relational, epistemic, and gendered condition produced at the intersection of minority privilege, patriarchal communal authority, and colonial legal modernity. While Parsis benefited from close alignment with British rule and enjoyed disproportionate access to education, commerce, and the legal profession, Parsi women remained subject to systematic marginalisation through gendered exclusions from legal practice, communal regulation of female respectability, and restrictions on spatial and professional mobility. The novel’s protagonist, Perveen Mistry, modelled on early women legal practitioners in colonial India, occupies a liminal position as a legally trained solicitor who is barred from courtroom advocacy solely on the basis of gender. Her semi-professional detective work exposes the contradictions embedded within minority privilege, revealing how elite women are rendered epistemically invisible within masculinist legal and institutional frameworks. Through close textual analysis, the article demonstrates how Massey’s narrative recuperates suppressed female testimonies located within domestic interiors and gender-segregated spaces, thereby contesting colonial legal epistemologies that privilege masculine forms of knowledge. By foregrounding the tension between communal privilege and gendered exclusion, the article proposes ‘gendered minority subalternity’ as a critical framework for understanding women’s structural silencing within elite minority formations, contributing to interdisciplinary debates in postcolonial studies, feminist legal criticism, and literary studies.