Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri’s Swallowing the Sun: Stories Spun Indigenous Tongue

Abstract

Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri’s debut novel Swallowing the Sun (2023) is an entwining of historical fiction, memoir, and feminist resistance. In the homage to ancestors, the story has been strung together from personal letters, oral history, and fictional invention. Surviving an indigenous language and affirming female empowerment resound in the story of life in pre-and post-independence India. Nonetheless, this is a story of women’s agency, survival, transformation, and resistance to colonial and patriarchal power.
Swallowing the Sun has garnered much acclaim in journalistic reviews, but there is a marked absence of rigorous engagement with either the narrative style, multilingual poetics, or the endeavour to decolonise the reader’s imagination. This gap is significant, particularly in the realm of contemporary postcolonial feminist literature, where the use of multilingualism, cultural memory, and myth as narrative strategies is understudied.
This paper seeks to redress this gap through a lens of postcolonial theory and feminist literary criticism examining Puri’s use of linguistic hybridity, cultural memory, and myth as modes of resistance. Using qualitative content analysis and close textual reading, it demonstrates how Puri’s idiom—at once personal, political, domestic, and historical—positions the novel within a corpus of decolonial works that celebrate local voices in redefining Indian modernity and womanhood.
The study previews key findings from research that demonstrates how Puri’s multilingual narrative destabilises colonial hierarchies of language, and how Puri’s female characters – Malati, Kamala, and Surekha – embody everyday resistance to patriarchal and caste-class power. Through these characters, this study argues that the novel complicates universalised notions of womanhood by foregrounding the intersections of gender, class, and caste in the construction of women’s lived experiences.