Voices from the Inner World: Navigating Female Consciousness and Social Realism in Sudha Arora’s Fiction

Abstract

Sudha Arora’s fiction examines the relationship between women’s inner experiences and the social conditions that influence their lives. Domestic responsibility, marital authority, migration, motherhood, ageing, and emotional deprivation become significant through the perspectives of women who experience them. This article studies selected stories under the descriptive English titles ‘You Will Remain the Same’, ‘Annapurna Mandal’s Last Letter’, and ‘The Unravelled Sweater’. It draws on selected feminist works to distinguish socially formed expectations from individual needs and to examine the relationship between intimate experience and power. These theoretical connections are interpretive comparisons rather than claims of direct influence. The article argues that Arora’s social realism gains force through its attention to experiences concealed by outward accounts of respectable family life. Speech, testimony, memory, and everyday objects make emotional relationships visible. Female consciousness emerges as a changing awareness of circumstances rather than a universal identity. Her narratives preserve the distance between recognising inequality and acquiring the practical freedom to change it.