Women, Social Stigma and Resistance in Sudha Murty’s Mahashweta and House of Cards

Abstract

This paper examines how Sudha Murty represents women’s experience of social stigma and their resistance to it in two novels, Mahashweta (2007) and House of Cards (2013). Drawing on feminist literary criticism, the sociology of stigma and intersectional thought, it argues that the protagonists, Anupama and Mridula, are constrained by different but related forms of patriarchal control. Anupama is marked by a visible skin condition and is discarded by a marriage market that prizes bodily “purity”; Mridula is bound by a marriage whose respectability rests on her husband’s wealth and status, which she gradually discovers to be morally compromised. In both novels, the community’s judgement works through the family, and women are expected to absorb the cost. Both women respond not through open rebellion but through self-respect, economic independence and moral refusal. A comparative reading shows that Murty favours resilient, ethically grounded agency over spectacular rupture, while remaining attentive to the material conditions that make such agency possible. The paper concludes that the novels present empowerment as a relational and ethical process, and that their simplicity of form carries a sustained critique of conformity.