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The announcement of the new economic policy in 1991 pushed India into hitherto unchartered domains of liberalisation, globalisation and privatisation. Many literary writings by Indian women published in the 1990s and 2000s reflect the rupture of Nehruvian model of development as India entered and settled itself in the brave new world of globalisation. Reading Alka Saraogi’s Kali-katha: Via Bypass (1998), this article attempts to explore how women writers in the post-1991 era negotiated the category of nation and its concomitant identity politics when it was impinged on by the looming spectre of liberalisation and globalisation. When we place women’s writing at the interstices of gender, caste and class inequalities alongside the syndicated structures of nation and globalisation, we find how deeply it engages with the fundamental asymmetry of power relations in society. Kali-katha: Via Bypass attempts to trace the kind of changes that have been taking place since the onset of the 1990s, proposing a rethinking of the very terms in which the woman’s question has been framed in the post-independence years. Thereby, this text calls for revising the way we have been constructing our knowledge of the nation, especially its gendered contexts. Such an epistemological revision, however, would not preclude looking at the past, suggests the text.

The present article focuses on the plight of deserted women and widows in post-independence India, drawing its arguments from Indira Goswami’s novels Neel Kanthi Braja ( Shadow of Dark God 1986) and A Saga of South Kamrup (1993). It exposes the collusion between masculinity, patriarchy and national identity. While doing so, it not only interrogates the traditional concerns associated with wifehood and widowhood but also foregrounds the need to reclaim women’s bodies from becoming site and symbol for patriarchal and institutional control, especially as evident in the drafting of the Hindu Code Bill. It also seeks to privilege alternative modes of identifying relationships and concerns of women’s sexuality that may rest on mediation of lived experience and individual subjectivities so pertinent to ‘constructing new modes of politics and identity in post-independence India’ ( Sreenivas 2009 : 128).

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