Twisted:
A Creative & Critical Exploration of ‘Witch’ Protagonists
in Contemporary South Asian Fiction

Abstract

This thesis comprises a novel and a critical examination of representations of ‘witch’ protagonists in contemporary South Asian fiction published within the last eighty years. While reams have been written about witches in contemporary Western literature and popular culture, relatively little attention has been paid to South Asian literary witches. My research fills this gap by examining both literary and ‘pulp’ fiction from South Asia in order to identify existing patterns in the way witch bodies and behaviours have been represented. Additionally, my research challenges these narrative patterns through a new novel featuring ‘witch’ protagonists that subverts stereotypical expectations about satisfactory outcomes.
Part I of my thesis includes an introduction that outlines my motivations for undertaking this research, and the social context that informs the treatment of witches in South Asian fiction. Following this, my novel Twisted highlights the experience of women accused of witchcraft, centring their trauma and their survival strategies. Experimenting with a dual, first-person voice, it seeks out what Govind Kelkar and Dev Nathan have called the ‘subaltern’ in the witchcraft equation. Towards this end, I have sought inspiration from two major sources. The first is a series of real-life braid-chopping incidents reported from India in 2017; the second is ‘Rapunzel’. Utilising the tropes of a well-known Western fairy tale and setting it against the backdrop of ongoing witch-hunts in India, my novel places a long-haired girl at the intersection of patriarchal violence and class/caste anxieties, alongside the possibility of harnessing powers that ‘normal’ women may cede.
Part II of my thesis includes a brief critical introduction to the witch as a South Asian monster, followed by three chapters outlining various aspects of witch-hood in my chosen literary texts. These include Uzma Aslam Khan’s 2009 novel The Story of Noble Rot, Mahasweta Devi’s play, Bayen (1997) and her short story ‘Daini’ (1998), Bhisham Sahni’s short story ‘The Witch’ (2009), and Shakeela Akhtar’s short story, ‘Dain’ written in the 1950s. Seeking out diverse representations that would help me build a fuller literary portrait of the South Asian witch, I have also included two sets of untranslated pulp fiction, Raj Bharti’s Hindi novels Chudail and Shavra (undated) and M.A. Rahat’s two-volume Urdu novel, Daayan (dated 2015, but likely written earlier). The scope of my research is broadly limited to fiction originally written in English, and Hindi, Urdu, and Bangla texts where the plot revolves around a woman identified as a ‘witch’.
In my analysis, hair emerges as a visible indicator of feminine behavioural norms and, therefore, of feminine danger. I further examine appetite, defiance of social hierarchies, and resistance to the ideology of motherhood as significant markers of cultural danger. In the final chapter, I discuss my creative-critical methods, and the tools I have used to write a novel that goes further than existing representations in foregrounding the patriarchal motivations that drive witch-hunts, in shifting perspective to women who survive witchcraft accusations, and in emphasising the enabling power of female solidarity.