Gendered Spaces and Remembered Lives: Reconstructing Female Identity in Namita Gokhale’s The Blind Matriarch

Abstract

Namita Gokhale’s The Blind Matriarch (2021) explores gender, memory, domesticity, ageing, blindness, and identity within the context of the Indian joint family and the COVID-19 lockdown. The novel centres on Matangi-Ma, an elderly blind woman living on the top floor of a Delhi household. Although physically dependent upon others, she possesses a strong sense of memory, emotional perception, and familial authority. This article examines how Gokhale represents the domestic space as both a site of confinement and a space of belonging and self-expression. Drawing upon feminist perspectives on gender and space, particularly Judith Butler and Henri Lefebvre, the study analyses how the women characters negotiate familial expectations and reconstruct their identities. Matangi-Ma’s memories challenge conventional representations of women as merely wives, mothers, and grandmothers, while her blindness complicates the relationship between physical sight and knowledge. The article argues that memory becomes a means of recovering female subjectivity, while the domestic space becomes a site where gender, power, dependence, and agency intersect.