Interpreting Women’s Histories: Memory, Identity and Agency in Anuradha Roy’s Selected Novels

Abstract

This paper offers a comprehensive reading of Anuradha Roy’s fiction through the lens of feminist memory studies to trace how memory undergoes an act of counter-history or reclamation of women’s silenced lives. It examines three novels—An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008), Sleeping on Jupiter (2015), and All the Lives We Never Lived (2018), emphasising that memory is not a recollection of static experiences, but rather it is an affective practice that is always situated in spaces, objects, and emotions. In Atlas of Impossible Longing, the decaying home is a mnemonic archive of multigenerational entrapment and displacement in a quiet resistance; in Sleeping on Jupiter, the temple town of Jarmuli exemplifies how sacred spaces house gendered trauma; and in All the Lives We Never Lived, there are mnemographs in the forms of letters, artworks, and gardens, that are communications of affect across time and geography. Drawing on theorists such as Pierre Nora, Marianne Hirsch, Aleida Assmann, and Ann Cvetkovich, this study maps Roy’s fiction from spatial archives to aesthetic archives, presenting the notion of feminist historiography foregrounding exile, longing, and identity. The continuities of personal memory invite counter-histories that might invite erasures offered by patriarchal violence and nation-branding, allowing Roy to present alternative cultural archives with women and their agency, preserved as traces of affect, making memory itself a practice of resistance.