Published Paper Details:

This dissertation examines the gendered dimensions of psychopathology in Indian fantasy and speculative fiction, with particular focus on Indra Das's The Devourers (2015) and Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome (1995). Rather than treating mental illness as individual pathology, the study argues that these texts deploy psychological disturbance as a narrative and epistemological strategy, one that exposes the interlocking violence of colonial rationality, patriarchal containment, and biomedical authority. The analysis draws on two primary theoretical frameworks: Tzvetan Todorov's structural theory of the fantastic, which locates genre in the hesitation between rational and supernatural explanation, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's feminist critique of literary madness in The Madwoman in the Attic. Read together, these frameworks reveal how Indian speculative fiction inherits and radically transforms the Victorian madwoman archetype, displacing her from attic to jungle, from clinical case to epistemic insurgent. Across both novels, madness is shown to be unevenly gendered, feminised as hysteria, silence, and bodily excess; masculinised as obsession and intellectual overreach. Yet neither is straightforwardly pathologised. Instead, the study traces how psychological instability becomes a site of resistance: Mangala's opacity subverts colonial science from within, while the shapeshifting Devourers embody a feral consciousness that dismantles humanist binaries of reason and instinct. Trauma, non-linear memory, and narrative fragmentation further complicate biomedical models of mental health, reframing fractured consciousness as a structural response to historical dispossession rather than cognitive failure. Ultimately, the dissertation contends that Indian speculative fiction does not represent madness so much as weaponise it, forging from psychological wreckage a counter-epistemology that challenges who may speak, who may know, and whose perception of reality is permitted to endure.