International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research

E-ISSN: 2582-2160   •   Impact Factor: 9.24

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Volume 8 Issue 2
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Reproductive Labour and the Feminist Politics of Survival: Beyond Motherhood as Symbol in Indian Fiction

Author(s) Dr. Devashish Kumar
Country India
Abstract In this article, the concept of motherhood in Indian English fiction is re-theorised through the lens of reproductive labour and feminist political economy. The concept of motherhood in literature has been widely interpreted as symbolic endurance and emotional crisis. This article suggests that unpaid domestic and reproductive labour performed by women maintains colonial modernity, nationalist development, and families without recognition and remuneration. This article draws upon Marxist feminist theories of social reproduction and feminist political economy at the global level and explores Nectar in a Sieve, Clear Light of Day, That Long Silence, and Dalit women writers’ narratives to illustrate how gendered subsistence labour maintains economic systems and renders women structurally disposable. These narratives reveal care extraction as a foundational process through which agrarian, middle-class, and caste-based social hierarchies reproduce themselves. Women’s labour serves families, maintains property, and regulates economic and social crises and respectability without recognition and remuneration in the formal economy. These narratives do not romanticise motherhood as symbolic endurance and emotional crisis. They reveal survival as a gendered responsibility imposed through moral and emotional discipline. The article contends that the feminist literary discussion in India should go beyond symbolic motherhood to the politics of reproductive work. By highlighting the survival economy supported by the unpaid work of women, the present study positions the fiction of India in the global discussion of social reproduction, precariousness, and feminist resistance.
Keywords Reproductive labour, Social reproduction, Care extraction, Feminist political economy, Gendered subsistence, Indian English fiction.
Field Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In Volume 8, Issue 2, March-April 2026
Published On 2026-03-21
DOI https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i02.70987
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