Abstract

The project titled The portrayal of postmodern feminism in

literature:An Analytical study of K. R Meera's The unseeing Idol of
Light explores the theme of postmodern feminism in literature.

The research is divided into three chapters. The first chapter examines the
representation of postmodern feminism in various novels, contextualizing it’s
literary treatment and comparing it to K. R Meera’s approach. The second
chapter analyses the character of Deepti, adressing the social,
psychological, and narrative consequences of her character. The third
chapter investigates the thematic and formal representation of postmodern
feminism, discussing how K. R Meera’s narrative techniques reinforce the
novel’s themes.

The first chapter provides an overview of postmodern feminism in

literature, exploring its use as a motif from postmodern novels-where it
symbolized patriarchal oppression or importance of Feminism- to modern
portrayals centred on lived experiences. Notable works include Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid ‘s Tale which is an dystopian novel explores themes
of reproductive freedom, power dynamics, and the social construction of
women’s roles in a totalitarian society;Again Margaret Atwood’s The Edible
woman

Which is often considered a “protofeminist”social satire, it uses black humor

to critique the societal expectations that “consume”women’s identities in
patriarchal consumer culture; and John Fowles The French Lieutenant's

Woman which is an historical novel employs metafiction and multiple

endings, featuring a female protagonist who subverts Victorian social norms
and male control, exploring female identity and authorship in a patriarchal
world. The chapter then transitions into an analysis of The Unseeing Idol of
Light, examining how K. R Meera ‘s depiction of postmodern feminism aligns
with or diverges from these traditions.

The second chapter focuses on Deepti, who was the dear wife of
prakash, was lost in a train journey and it causes the loss of eyesight of
prakash and he later tries to find an another partner named Rajani, who has
resemblance to Deepti but fails to give back love as his mind is filled with the
memory of Deepti.
Through Textual analysis, the chapter explores love and loss, blindness and
sight, obsession and suffering-and the poignant interconnections between
them.

The last chapter explores how K. R Meera’s literary strategies

duplicate the experience of postmodern feminism. It also reflects on how
postmodern feminism is both a literal and metaphorical component of the
novel, representing marginalization and female oppression.

In conclusion, K. R Meera’s portrayal of Deepti aligns closely with the

principles of postmodern feminism theory by revealing how when some
women like the Deepti leave, they also take with them the sight of those
men who had loved them. This is an perfect example of postmodern
feminism. It shows the change happening in the modern society and more
interest towards females in a male dominated world.

Introduction

K. R. Meera (born 19 February 1970) is an Indian author and journalist, who

writes in Malayalam. She was born in Sasthamkotta, Kollam district in Kerala.
She worked as a journalist in Malayala Manorama but later resigned to
concentrate more on writing. She started writing fiction in 2001 and her first
short story collection Ormayude Njarambu was published in 2002. Since then
she has published five collections of short stories, two novellas, five novels
and two children’s books. She won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in
2009 for her short-story, Ave Maria.[1] Her novel Aarachaar (2012) received
several awards including the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award (2013),
Odakkuzhal Award (2013), Vayalar Award (2014) and Kendra Sahitya
Akademi Award (2015). It was also shortlisted for the 2016 DSC Prize for
South Asian Literature.

The Unseeing Idol of Light is a psychological novel by Indian

author K.R. Meera, originally published in Malayalam as Netronmeelanam.
The narrative is a haunting exploration of love, loss, obsession, and the
literal and metaphorical dimensions of blindness and sight in a patriarchal
society.

K.R Meera’s latest addition, The Unseeing Idol Of Light is all in all
about disappearance .Jayaprakash is the protagonist of the novel. One
midnight Deepti, his wife disappeared into thin air on a train journey to
[Link] since her disappearance his life has been a constant turmoil.
He wishes to transpose life but contemplating her and finding to draw
conclusion within her became the be-all and end-all purpose of his survival.
He imagines how life would have been if things were going as pretty as
earlier.

Concurrently he encounters Rajani, an orphan who craves for him. He finds

a way to console himself at times through her and being oblivious to her he
finds a way to recall Deepti. Moreover, Rajani can be the counterpart of
Chetana Gridha Mallik, protagonist of Aarachar( Hangwoman); K.R Meera’s
magnum opus till date.

Jayaprakash is portrayed as an epitome of [Link] is aware of the fact

that he is inextricably knotted to Deepti but he finds relief in Rajani at
times . He contradicts her making his way back to no one but Deepti at the
end of the day.
For a conventional reader who longs for that “happily ever after” sort of
endings this ain’t your cup of tea. This is a melancholic though beautiful
piece of literature that will haunt you ever after.(Ramesh,2018)

In chapter 1 “postmodern feminism in various Novels and comparing it to

K. R Meera’s work “

Introduces that the Postmodern feminism in novels explores the social

construction of gender, rejects universal female identity, and uses
fragmented narratives to challenge patriarchal "grand narratives". K.R.
Meera's The Unseeing Idol of Light aligns with these themes by portraying
the constructed nature of gender and love, but it also maintains a focus on
the tangible, often violent, realities of female oppression, giving it a unique
place in the discourse. In essence, while general postmodern feminist novels
might play with form and language to primarily deconstruct theoretical ideas
of gender, K.R. Meera uses similar techniques (ambiguity, symbolism,
questioning reality) to shine a light on the concrete, urgent issue of violence
against women in her specific cultural context. Her work is a powerful blend
of postmodern narrative techniques and an unflinching social realism.

In chapter II “The story of Deepti and her disappearance”gives the overall

plot of the novel. Through the main character Deepti , the theme of
postmodern feminism and it’s importance is portrayed.
In K.R. Meera's The Unseeing Idol of Light, Deepti is the catalyst for the
story, a mysterious, pregnant young woman whose sudden disappearance
plunges her husband, Prakash, into a decade-long search, causing his
blindness and obsession, and setting the stage for themes of love, loss,
sight, and silence, representing an idealized light and joy that vanishes,
leaving darkness and unending longing in her absence. She embodies the
"missing woman" trope, symbolizing the fragility of women in a violent world,
and her memory becomes an almost worshiped, yet absent, force in
Prakash's life, much like an "unseeing idol".

Lastly, chapter III “K.R Meera’s narrative techniques that reinforce the
theme of postmodern feminism”shows that K. R. Meera employs several
narrative techniques in The Unseeing Idol of Light that reinforce the
themes of postmodern feminism, primarily by challenging patriarchal
narratives, blurring the lines between reality and myth, and giving voice to
the internal experiences of her female characters.

Challenging the Patriarchal binaries of women:

Meera uses characterisation to deconstruct traditional, patriarchal
archetypes of women (e.g., the "acquiescent wife" versus the "evil
temptress"). The characters of Deepti (the luminous, missing wife) and
Rajani (the dark, turbulent other woman) are initially presented in this binary
through the eyes of the male protagonist, Prakash. However, Meera subverts
these simplistic labels through Rajani's complex ruminations and actions,
revealing the depth and reality of their lives beyond how men perceive them.
This challenges the patriarchal tendency to "box" women into narrow
definitions.

The Metaphor of Blindness and Sight: The pervasive motif of physical

and metaphorical blindness is a central narrative device. Prakash loses his
sight after Deepti's disappearance, but the novel suggests that all
characters, particularly men, are "blind in some way or the other" to the
truth of women's lives and the violence they face. This challenges the
traditional male perspective as the sole source of "sight" or truth, instead
validating "other modes of seeing" through feeling, touch, and intuition,
often associated with female experience.

Juxtaposition of Fable and Forensic Insight: The novel is constructed

less like a conventional modernist narrative and more like an "instructive
fable" that blends "forensic insights" and dream-like events. This postmodern
technique of mixing genres and narrative styles allows Meera to explore the
abstract, universal suffering of women in a way that goes beyond a single,
linear story. This narrative choice suggests that the story of one woman is
"not one woman but all women" who go missing or suffer within a patriarchal
society.

Exploration of Internal Female Consciousness: Meera employs a

narrative style that delves into the psychological and emotional landscapes
of her female characters, especially Rajani. The narrative voices explore their
pain, rage, and resilience, giving them agency and depth that often subverts
the male-centric plot (Prakash's search for Deepti). This focus on the
personal and psychological experiences of women is a hallmark of
postmodern feminism.

Ambiguity and Indeterminacy: The narrative embraces ambiguity

regarding Deepti's disappearance and the characters' motivations, reflecting
a postmodern sense that "nothing is certain". This challenges grand,
universal "truths" often established by male-dominated history and
highlights the fragmented nature of reality and identity for women in a
patriarchal world.

Depiction of Violence and Vulnerability: The novel employs graphic and

"edgy prose" to depict the physical and mental violence women endure,
forcing the reader to confront uncomfortable realities. This unflinching
realism, combined with the fable-like structure, highlights the pervasive
danger for women in society and serves as a powerful feminist critique.

The novel gives the summary that One day Prakash put his wife on a
train from Cochin to Calicut. He never saw her again. The disappearance of the
pregnant young Deepti is at the heart of K.R. Meera’s new novel.
Prakash, his friend Shyam, and Deepti’s father spend 10 years searching in
morgues and hospitals for their dimpled and curly-haired loved one. When Shyam
and Deepti’s father find an emaciated, unresponsive woman in a hospital, they are
sure she is Deepti.

Prakash, now blind, does not believe the destitute woman is Deepti. Strangely, he
chooses this moment to stop searching for his wife and to settle down with his
lover Rajani, who wants to marry him. Shyam is furious and Deepti’s father insists on
bringing the unknown woman in the hospital home, but slowly a cloud of doubt forms in
their minds. Meanwhile, Rajani decides to break it off with Prakash and marry someone
else. She also takes into her new husband’s family a blind boy she has been sponsoring
at school and, just to add to the tension, she decides not to sleep with her husband.

Each character behaves capriciously, setting off reactions that bounce around as if on a
billiards table. K.R. Meera writes in the language of violence, obsession, and rage. The
writer is best known for her award-winning novel Hangwoman , and she lavishly
wields the noose in this novel as well. Literature in Malayalam is usually thick with
suicides, but The Unseeing Idol of Light contains a surprising, even exasperating,
level of emotional and psychological self-destruction.

The blind but presumably not unseeing Prakash seems to exploit both Shyam and Rajani.
He sports a philosopher’s beatific smile, but in his pursuit of women he exhibits more
lust than love.

The disappearance of Deepti has an explanation a reader probably should have predicted.
It is when Rajani too goes missing that we realise Meera was telling the story of not one
woman but all women. The events that happen to them are plausible enough, but the
bottomless angst of the characters themselves is overwrought and ultimately exhausting.

Meena kandasamy asserts that K. R Meera’s writing as “Engrossing and

forensic, rich in complexity and intense in its sadness”(kandasamy, 60).

Chapter I
Postmodern feminism in various novels and comparing it to K. R Meera’s work
Postmodern feminism is a branch of feminism that opposes
a universal female subject.[1][2][3] Drawing on postmodern philosophy,
postmodern feminism questions traditional ideas about gender, identity, and
power, while emphasizing the social nature of these concepts. [2]
Postmodern feminists argue that language constructs reality and that power
is embedded in social norms, shaping identities and limiting agency. They
seek to challenge traditional binary oppositions (e.g., man/woman,
culture/nature) and deconstruct hierarchies.[1]
The inclusion of postmodern theory into feminist theory is not readily
accepted by all feminists—some believe postmodern thought undermines
the attacks that feminism attempts to create, while other feminists are in
favor of the union.[4]

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) challenged the idea of a singular, objective

truth or "transcendental signifier," arguing instead that meaning is
constructed through an endless chain of signifiers that refer only to each
other. He introduced the concept of différance to illustrate how language
operates through contrasts and perpetual deferral of meaning. His work
underscores the idea that language does not represent reality but actively
constructs it.[1] Michel Foucault (1926-1984) viewed power as a diffuse and
pervasive force that shapes individual subjectivity. In his framework, power
is not merely repressive but productive, operating through institutions,
norms, and internalized self-surveillance. He suggested that recognizing
these power dynamics can enable individuals to challenge and reconstitute
their subjectivities.[1] French feminism, as it is known today, is not a self-
defined school of thought originating in France, but rather an Anglo-
American construct. It describes a certain body of theory associated with
French-speaking thinkers—particularly Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia
Kristeva.[5] Their work is deeply rooted
in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, focusing on pre-
Oedipal experiences, maternal representation, and the unconscious.[5]
The term was coined by Alice Jardine to identify an emerging trend in French
intellectual circles in the 1980s, where the failure of Enlightenment ideals
was being re-theorized.[6] For feminism, this meant revisiting the
sameness/difference debate through new lenses. [5] Toril Moi's
book Sexual/Textual Politics (1986) further shaped French feminism by
including only Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva. [7][5] Moi also made official a
distinction between Anglo-American and French feminism: while Anglo-
American feminists wanted to find a "woman-centered perspective", French
feminists believed there was no identity for women but that "the feminine
can be identified where difference and otherness are found." [5]
Elaine Marks, an academic in the field of Women's Studies, noted another
difference between French and American feminists: French feminists,
specifically radical feminists, criticized and attacked the systems that benefit
men, along with widespread misogyny as a whole, more intensely than their
American counterparts.[8]
 Donna Haraway's 1985 essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" is a reflection on the
politics of feminism in postmodernity, first published in Socialist
Review under the title "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and
Socialist Feminism in the 1980s."[9] Haraway uses the cyborg, a hybrid of
nature and culture, as a metaphor to criticize binary thinking and totalizing
identities.[10]
The Manifesto was a response to the rising conservatism of the 1980s. [citation
needed]
Haraway argues that women were no longer on the outside along a
hierarchy of privileged binaries but rather deeply imbued, exploited by and
complicit within networked hegemony, and had to form their politics as such.
[11]
In 2006, Haraway discussed her thoughts on gender and post-gender,
saying "people are made to live several non-isomorphic categories
simultaneously, all of which torque them."[12]
Postmodern feminism's major departure from other branches of feminism is
perhaps the argument that sex, or at least gender, is
itself constructed through language, a view notably propounded in Judith
Butler's 1990 book, Gender Trouble. They draw on and critique the work
of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, as well as on
Irigaray's argument that what we conventionally regard as "feminine" is only
a reflection of what is constructed as masculine. [13][3]
Butler criticises the distinction drawn by previous feminisms between
(biological) sex and (socially constructed) gender. They ask why we assume
that material things (such as the body) are not subject to processes of social
construction themselves. Butler argues that this does not allow for a
sufficient criticism of essentialism: though recognizing that gender is a social
construct, feminists assume it is always constructed in the same way.
Butler's argument implies that women's subordination has no single cause or
single solution; postmodern feminism is thus criticized for offering no clear
path to action. Butler rejects the term "postmodernism" as too vague to be
meaningful.[14]
Paula Moya argues that Butler derives this rejection to postmodernism from
misreadings of Cherríe Moraga's work. "She reads Moraga's statement that
'the danger lies in ranking the oppressions' to mean that we have no way of
adjudicating among different kinds of oppressions—that any attempt to
casually relate or hierarchize the varieties of oppressions people suffer
constitutes an imperializing, colonizing, or totalizing gesture that renders the
effort invalid…thus, although Butler at first appears to have understood the
critiques of women who have been historically precluded from occupying the
position of the 'subject' of feminism, it becomes clear that their voices have
been merely instrumental to her" (Moya, 790). Moya contends that because
Butler feels that the varieties of oppressions cannot be summarily ranked,
that they cannot be ranked at all; and takes a short-cut by throwing out the
idea of not only postmodernism, but women in general. [15]
Legal scholar Mary Joe Frug, a founding member of a group of legal scholars
known as the Fem-Crits, itself a part of the critical legal studies movement,
[16]
suggested that one "principle" of postmodernism is that human
experience is located "inescapably within language". Power is exercised not
only through direct coercion, but also through the way in which language
shapes and restricts our reality. She also stated that because language is
always open to re-interpretation, it can also be used to resist this shaping
and restriction, and so is a potentially fruitful site of political struggle.
Frug's second postmodern principle is that sex is not something natural, nor
is it something completely determinate and definable. Rather, sex is part of a
system of meaning, produced by language. Frug argues that "cultural
mechanisms ... encode the female body with meanings", and that these
cultural mechanisms then go on to explain these meanings "by an appeal to
the 'natural' differences between the sexes, differences that the rules
themselves help to produce".[17]
There have been many critiques of postmodern feminism since it
originated in the 1990s. Most of the criticism has been from modernists and
feminists supporting modernist thought. However, the very term
"postmodernism" has been criticised by some theorists who
have themselves been labelled as postmodern feminists.[14]
Modernist critics have put a focus on the themes
of relativism and nihilism as defined by postmodernism. They believe that
through abandoning the values of Enlightenment thought postmodern
feminism "precludes the possibility of liberating political action." [18] This
concern can be seen in critics such as Meaghan Morris, who have argued
that postmodern feminism runs the risk of undercutting the basis of a politics
of action based upon gender difference, through its very anti-essentialism.
[19]
Alison Assiter published the book Enlightened Women (1995) to critique
postmodernists and postmodern feminists alike, saying that there should be
a return to Enlightenment values and modernist feminism. [20] Gloria
Steinem has also criticized feminist theory, and especially postmodernist
feminist theory, as being overly academic, where discourse that is full of
jargon and inaccessible is helpful to no one. [21]
As with criticism of postmodernism in general [citation needed], postmodern feminism
also faces criticism with its heavy focus on sexism in language.