‘Sites of Memory’ as Feminist Resistance: Domestic and Religious Spaces in Anuradha Roy’s Fiction

Abstract

While history often relies on a pretence of objectivity, what is remembered as history is woven tightly with selected remembrance. In Anuradha Roy’s fiction, memory is more than remembering—it takes place as a memory-site, a site of women’s muted memories where repressed experiences have been recalled, resisted, and re-invented. This paper examines An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008) and Sleeping on Jupiter (2015), positing that domestic and religious spaces function as archives worthy of being remembered in women’s lives. In Atlas of Impossible Longing, the dilapidated house of Songarh absorbs traces of confinement, grief and implicit resistance over generations, and renders the female-occupied domestic space a site of affective memory that keeps the unbearable at bay. In Sleeping on Jupiter, the temple town of Jarmuli becomes a fractured memory site of trauma, a sacred site where violence and silence are contained. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire, Hirsch’s postmemory, and Ann Cvetkovich’s archive of feelings, the study closely reads how Roy mediates material spaces into memory sites, where absence, silence, and affect offer counter-histories to patriarchal historical accounts. By emphasising women’s everyday tussles with memory-filled spaces, Roy’s novels suggest how memory may interrupt official historiography and offer feminist resistance.