Negotiating Gendered Spaces: Social Discrimination in Birinchi Kumar Barua’s Jivanar Batat

Abstract

     Gendered space is one of the most controversial issues at present. It encompasses social inequality, particularly within patriarchal societies where social institutions, customs, and cultural practices often assign unequal roles, rights, and opportunities to men and women. Literature provides an important space for examining these structures. Birinchi Kumar Barua’s Jivanar Batat, an important Assamese novel of the twentieth century, offers a significant representation of Assamese society during a period of transition between tradition and modernity. Through characters such as Tagar, Aideo, Suprabha, Bhuga Dutta, Bapuram Bora, Dharani, Kamalakanta, Sunad, and Kadu, the novel exposes several manifestations of gender inequality, including unequal educational opportunities, patriarchal control over marriage, denial of women’s consent, caste-based discrimination, sexual harassment, gendered division of labour, and economic marginalisation.

     This article examines these representations through a feminist critical framework, drawing particularly upon the concepts of patriarchy, gender as a social construction, and the intersection of gender with class and caste. The study argues that Jivanar Batat does not merely portray women as victims of social oppression; it also reveals their endurance, moral agency, and capacity to negotiate restrictive social structures. The paper therefore contends that Barua’s novel can be read as an important literary critique of gendered social structures in Assamese society.