Narrative Voice and Domestic Violence in Manju Kapur's Home and Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You

Abstract

Domestic violence in Indian English women's fiction has received critical attention as a recurring thematic concern. However, existing scholarship remains largely author-centric and thematically descriptive rather than formally attentive to how narrative structure shapes the representation of abuse, agency, and resistance. This article argues that analyzing Manju Kapur's Home (2006) and Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You (2017) comparatively reveals a significant generational and narrative shift in how domestic violence is mediated in contemporary Indian English women's writing. While Kapur's third-person heterodiegetic narration embeds female characters within patriarchal family structures, constraining their articulation of violence, Kandasamy's first-person, confessional narrative voice performs a radical reclamation of narrative authority through metafictional intervention and literary self-fashioning. Drawing on feminist narratology, trauma theory, and postcolonial literary analysis, this study demonstrates that narrative voice is not merely a stylistic choice but a fundamentally political dimension of how abused women stake claims to agency, interpretation, and truth-telling. The formal differences between these novels reflect broader transformations in how domestic violence is narrativized, conceptualized, and resisted across two decades of Indian English women's fiction, suggesting that contemporary writing increasingly stages intimate trauma as a narrative—and thus interpretable, contestable, and transformable—phenomenon rather than as inevitable private suffering.