উত্তর-পূর্বের মানবী পাঠ : বাংলা ছোটগল্পে নীরব প্রান্তিকতার স্বরসন্ধান/ Subaltern Silences: Marginalized Voices in the Short Stories of Northeast Bengali Women Writers

Abstract

Northeast India is a deeply diverse region whose unique geography and culture have profoundly shaped its literary landscape. Writers nurtured by this environment have consistently engaged with the lived realities of the marginalized populations inhabiting its fringes, bringing their stories into urban consciousness. While women remain central to gender-based subaltern discourse, twenty-first-century Bengali short stories from the Northeast have actively constructed a new understanding of womanhood. This study examines how selected Bengali women writers—who are intimately familiar with the region's socio-economic and cultural struggles—portray the lived experiences of the marginalized. We find that working-class individuals, housewives, and other figures living on the periphery— those whom Antonio Gramsci termed ‘subalterns’ or Ranajit Guha called the ‘nimnabarga’ - occupy a central place in these literary worlds. These subjects encompass domestic workers, day laborers, sex workers, tea-garden and tribal women, female detainees in camps labeled as Bangladeshis, and various other destitute or displaced individuals navigating everyday survival. Based on selected texts, this discussion examines how these marginalized individuals either surrender to the machinations of power or become compliant despite their convictions, ultimately exploring how they are defined as the 'subaltern' within the binary relationship between the hegemonic and the oppressed.