https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.110
Early Regional Archives and Gendered Spaces of Illness Narrative: A Reading of Saraswathiyamma’s Iswarante Kayyil
DR. SUJATHA A. V.
Associate Professor
Postgraduate Department of English
Government College Peringome
Affiliated to Kannur University, Kerala
Email id: sujathagck20@gmail.com
Abstract: This paper analyzes the short story Iswarante Kayyil [In the Hands of God] by K. Saraswathiyamma through the framework of medical humanities, with a specific focus on the representation of postpartum depression in the text. The story was published in the year 1944 in Mathrubhumi Weekly, the leading periodical of the time in Malayalam, and later included in the collected volume of her complete works by DC Books. Placed in mid-twentieth-century India, the chronicle sheds light on the absence of medical discourses on women’s mental health in general and the lack of the same on mothers’ mental health in particular. The story, even though silent on the silencing, moralization, and gendered expectations that control the female body and female psyche, presents the domestic space as a site of mental breakdown.
The research discusses the value of literary texts as archives of medical history and seeks to recover gendered illness narratives that were never clinically recognized. The study further aims to place the importance of regional literature in expanding medical humanities beyond a Eurocentric framework and hopes to include the concepts of medical gaze and institutionalized motherhood in a patriarchal society.
Keywords: Medical Humanities, Illness Narrative, Postpartum Depression, Domestic Space, Medical Gaze, Gendered Medical Discourse
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