Gender, Identity, and Resistance in Contemporary Indian English Fiction

Abstract

Contemporary Indian English fiction has increasingly transformed gender from a stable social category into a contested narrative space in which identity, embodiment, caste, sexuality, class, community, and personal agency interact. This study investigates how literary resistance is constructed through narrative voice, linguistic choice, character agency, spatial mobility, silence, memory, and acts of refusal within contemporary Indian English fiction. A major research gap lies in the limited integration of intersectional literary criticism with computational approaches capable of identifying recurring textual patterns associated with gendered resistance across a multi-text corpus. To address this gap, the study proposes a computational-humanities framework combining close reading with natural language processing, contextual embeddings, emotion analysis, agency detection, and interpretable machine-learning techniques. Rather than treating resistance merely as an explicit political act, the framework conceptualizes it as a multidimensional narrative phenomenon ranging from verbal confrontation and bodily autonomy to withdrawal, solidarity, mobility, memory, and linguistic disruption.