Shikshan Sanshodhan : Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Abstract: Contemporary Indian English fiction has increasingly represented marriage not as a private romantic arrangement but as a gendered institution that organizes labour, emotion, sexuality, and social respectability. This paper argues that recent women’s Indian writing in English depicts marriage as a “hidden economy” where women perform disproportionate emotional labour—managing moods, reputations, kinship ties, and household stability—while patriarchy frames this work as love, duty, or “adjustment.” Through close readings of Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You, and selected scenes and motifs from Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar and Anuradha Roy’s All the Lives We Never Lived, the paper shows how contemporary fiction: (1) exposes coercion and entitlement inside conjugal intimacy; (2) maps emotional labour as a form of gendered governance; and (3) constructs counter-archives of women’s interior lives against the public myth of the “good wife.” The analysis is framed through Hochschild’s concept of emotional labour and feminist readings of domestic patriarchy, emphasizing how fiction makes patriarchal power visible at the micro-level of tone, apology, silence, and care. The paper concludes that Indian English fiction’s marriage plots function as diagnostic narratives of modern patriarchy, showing how institutionalized love can become a mechanism of control—and how narration itself becomes a practice of resistance.