Resignation As Resistance: Re-Reading Silence in Select South Asian Women’s Poetry

Abstract

This article re-examines the critical tendency to interpret silence and resignation in women’s poetry as signs of passivity or ideological defeat. Through a comparative reading of Eunice de Souza, Gauri Deshpande, and Imtiaz Dharker, the study argues that what appears as emotional withdrawal or acquiescence often functions as a subtle mode of resistance within gendered structures of power. Rather than treating speech as the sole indicator of agency, the paper explores how muted irony, strategic reticence, and interiorized dissent become forms of negotiation in intimate, domestic, and religious spaces. Drawing upon feminist and postcolonial theoretical frameworks, the essay situates these poets within late twentieth-century South Asian contexts where overt rebellion is frequently constrained. De Souza’s restrained irony, Deshpande’s inward questioning, and Dharker’s engagement with faith and embodiment reveal a poetics of withheld speech that unsettles normative expectations of feminine expressivity. Silence in these works emerges not as absence but as a charged and affective presence that registers structural constraint while tactically evading it. By foregrounding alienation and resentment as affective forces, this study reconceptualizes resignation as a politically nuanced modality of survival and resistance.