Defiance in the Domestic: Women's Agency against Patriarchy and Caste in Anjali Kajal's Ma Is Scared

Abstract

This article examines Anjali Kajal’s short story “Ma Is Scared” (2023) through feminist, Dalit feminist, and subaltern frameworks to consider how a vernacular Hindi text reimagines the domestic sphere as a site of caste-inflected, gendered resistance. Set within a Dalit basti family in northern India, the story follows a mother’s anxiety over her daughter’s exposure to street harassment and her unease, in turn, at the very self-defense training meant to protect her. Reading Kajal’s prose against Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality, Uma Chakravarti’s account of brahmanical patriarchy, and Sharmila Rege’s Dalit feminist standpoint, and holding these alongside Gayatri Spivak’s and Chandra Mohanty’s cautions about speaking for the subaltern, the analysis argues that Kajal stages domestic resistance as incremental and ambivalent rather than triumphant. Close attention to the story’s imagery, dialogue, and irony suggests that education and physical training function less as solutions than as occasions where fear and agency are renegotiated between generations. The article contributes to Indian literary criticism by extending intersectional feminist analysis to an underexamined vernacular text and by clarifying the limits of treating domestic resistance as a sufficient political response.