The Quiet After the Night: Gendered Violence and Language Failure in The Dark Holds No Terrors

Abstract

Violence in its contemporary manifestations extends far beyond physical injury to encompass psychological harm, institutional coercion and discursive silencing. The paper examines violence as a socially produced and ethically ambivalent phenomenon by situating Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors within this expanded conceptual terrain. Drawing on the philosophical and sociological theories of violence, the paper argues that Sarita despite being a doctor, a profession conventionally associated with rationality, precision an healing, is unable to find a language to articulate her own trauma. It stages the tension between embodied emotional experience and institutionalised linguistic frameworks in confronting gendered violence. Culture as a structure emerges from the appropriation of nature into systems of meaning, order and hierarchy. In this process, women often become central mediating figures through whom institutional values are secured and propagated. Their bodies and labour become sites of where kinship, morality and social continuity are played out. Thusly, culture sustains itself by controlling women and regulating the terms through which they may speak. Consequently, Sarita’s trauma is not merely personal but emblematic of a broader social and professional failure of language in negotiating the complexities of power, desire and domination.