ShodhPatra: International Journal of Science and Humanities

The Fragile Body as Battlefield: Women, Violence, and Power in The Counting House

This paper examines The Counting House as a literary interrogation of how women’s bodies become volatile and contested sites within the entangled structures of indenture, colonial capitalism, and patriarchal authority. The novel is read as a text that positions the body simultaneously as a receptacle of violence and coercion and as a fragile yet vital archive of memory and resistance. Drawing upon the theoretical frameworks of postcolonial feminism, biopolitics, and trauma studies, the analysis foregrounds how economic rationality, masculine humiliation, communal surveillance, and reproductive labor shape conditions of embodied vulnerability. At the same time, the narrative is shown to carve out precarious fissures where agency and subversion may emerge, however fraught or fragile. The paper traces the intersections of direct physical brutality with more insidious symbolic and structural violations, attending to the ways somatic memory and the gendered politics of shame and honor regulate individual and collective life. It argues that the novel not only dramatizes the multiple forms of violence inscribed upon the body but also insists on recognizing corporeality as a living historical text, one that preserves counter-histories of trauma, endurance, and survival. By situating embodiment within both the disciplinary logic of the colonial “counting house” and the disruptive potential of resistant subjectivities, the study illuminates the ambivalent role of the body as at once terrain of domination and medium of historical testimony. Ultimately, the novel compels a rethinking of how literature renders visible the intimate entanglements of power, violence, and human resilience.