THE PARADOX OF MOTHERHOOD – AN INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S LIVES IN MOTHERWIT BY URMILA PAWAR

Abstract

Dalit writer and activist Urmila Pawar addresses the persistence of gender biases in Motherwit (2014), an anthology of short stories. She challenges the monolithic, hegemonic, colonial and patriarchal notion of motherhood in the anthology. Urmila Pawar’s analysis locates the agency of a woman within and beyond the biologically inscribed body, presenting the women at the intersection of asserting rights, demands for equilibrium and greater gender justice through their narrations of experience of mothering. Using Rich’s arguments on patriarchal motherhood, O’Reilly’s assertion of mothering as a feminist response to motherhood defined in terms of patriarchy and Bagchi’s assertion that ‘motherhood’ is a paradox as i oscillates between “ideological glorification of motherhood as Shakti (power) and the powerlessness faced by mothers in their everyday lived reality”, the paper explores how Pawar locates the women as mothers negotiating “the complex process of the ideological use of motherhood” as a social, ideological apparatus which confines “women to the reproductive domain of ‘home’ and denying them access to the ‘world’”. As a feminist and a Dalit writer, her narratives offer a glimpse into the experiences of women marked by the intersectional marginalities of gender, caste and class. She presents varying material realities through her stories. She shows how that contributes to the diverse social and cultural negotiations, often contradictory and quite often reminiscent of the vulnerable, contingent and strategic locations women as mothers have to inhabit.