Mapping the Gendered Contexts of the ‘Glocal’ Nation: A Critical Rereading of Alka Saraogi’s Kali-katha: Via Bypass

The announcement of the new economic policy in 1991 pushed India into hitherto unchartered domains of liberalisation, globalisation and privatisation. Many literary writings by Indian women published in the 1990s and 2000s reflect the rupture of Nehruvian model of development as India entered and settled itself in the brave new world of globalisation. Reading Alka Saraogi’s Kali-katha: Via Bypass (1998), this article attempts to explore how women writers in the post-1991 era negotiated the category of nation and its concomitant identity politics when it was impinged on by the looming spectre of liberalisation and globalisation. When we place women’s writing at the interstices of gender, caste and class inequalities alongside the syndicated structures of nation and globalisation, we find how deeply it engages with the fundamental asymmetry of power relations in society. Kali-katha: Via Bypass attempts to trace the kind of changes that have been taking place since the onset of the 1990s, proposing a rethinking of the very terms in which the woman’s question has been framed in the post-independence years. Thereby, this text calls for revising the way we have been constructing our knowledge of the nation, especially its gendered contexts. Such an epistemological revision, however, would not preclude looking at the past, suggests the text.