Trauma and Cultural Memory Studies in the Select Works of Manjula Padmanabhan
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31305/rrijm.2026.v11.n06.010Keywords:
trauma theory, cultural memory, Post memory, Manjula Padmanabhan, Indian English drama, speculative fiction, postcolonial witnessing, biopolitics, counter-memoryAbstract
This article examines the politics and poetics of trauma and cultural memory in five works by the Indian playwright and novelist Manjula Padmanabhan: the plays Harvest (1997), Lights Out (1986/2000), and Hidden Fires (2003), and the speculative novels Escape (2008) and The Island of Lost Girls (2015). Drawing on the trauma-theoretical apparatus developed by Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, on Marianne Hirsch's concept of post memory, on Jan and Aleida Assmann's distinction between communicative and cultural memory, on Pierre Nora's lieux de mémoire, and on the postcolonial recalibrations of these frameworks by Michael Rothberg and Stef Craps, the article argues that Padmanabhan's oeuvre constitutes a sustained literary intervention into three intersecting registers of South Asian traumatic experience: the structural violence of neoliberal globalisation upon the racialised and gendered Third-World body; the domestic and urban violence inflicted upon women in late twentieth-century Indian cities; and the communal, sex-selective, and biopolitical violence that has marked the post-Independence subcontinent. Through close reading and theoretical analysis, the article demonstrates that Padmanabhan stages trauma not only as an event but as a temporal and representational impasse, and that her texts function as counter-memorial archives that resist the consolations of official commemoration. The article contributes to the broader project of pluralising trauma theory beyond its Euro-American canonical scene, and proposes that Padmanabhan's writing be read as a sustained, multimodal experiment in what may be termed speculative postmemory.
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