EMBODIED TRAUMA, POST MEMORY, AND SUBALTERN SILENCE Caste, Gender, and the Politics of Representation in Urmila Pawar's The Sixth Finger and Mahasweta Devi's Breast Stories

This dissertation examines the representation of embodied trauma in Urmila Pawar’s The Sixth Finger and Other Stories (2017) and Mahasweta Devi’s Breast Stories (1997), arguing that caste-based and gendered violence in these texts functions not as episodic catastrophe but as a deeply embedded structural condition. While much of contemporary trauma theory—particularly as articulated in Euro-American contexts—understands trauma as an extraordinary rupture within the continuity of lived experience, Dalit and tribal literatures emerging from the Indian social context challenge this conceptual framework. Instead of sudden catastrophic events, these narratives depict trauma as repetitive, normalized, and socially institutionalized. This dissertation therefore proposes a theoretical shift from event-based models of trauma to a structural understanding of violence that foregrounds the body as the primary site where caste hierarchy, gendered exploitation, and state power are inscribed and contested.