Echoes from the Margins: Women’s Voices and Feminist Resistance in Kavery Nambisan’s A Town Like Ours

Abstract

Kavery Nambisan’s A Town Like Ours (2014) offers a powerful feminist vision grounded in the moral, emotional, and social realities of Indian womanhood. The novel departs from conventional representations of female liberation by centering its narrative on the marginalized voice of Rajakumari, a woman stigmatized for her past as a sex worker, who becomes both the storyteller and moral conscience of the community. Through her perspective and through the lives of women such as Kripa and Saroja, Nambisan constructs a layered critique of patriarchy, class inequality, and modernization. The novel reframes feminist resistance not as political defiance but as ethical resilience and compassion. Simultaneously, the narrative links the oppression of women with ecological degradation, marking the text as a subtle work of ecofeminism. This paper examines how Nambisan’s feminist aesthetic combines voice, morality, and care to challenge dominant hierarchies, positioning A Town Like Ours as an essential contribution to Indian feminist fiction.