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@article{207387,
        author = {Dharitry Borbora and Dr Sanjib Kumar Sarma},
        title = {Voice, Body, and Constrained Agency: Gendered Subalternity and Everyday Resistance in Homen Borgohain’s Subala},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {13},
        number = {3},
        pages = {564-572},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=207387},
        abstract = {Homen Borgohain’s Subala occupies an important place in modern Assamese fiction because it joins social realism with an intense exploration of a woman’s inner life. Centered on a poor woman who is drawn into prostitution and later trapped by the false promises of marriage, the novel is often read as a tragic narrative of patriarchy, sexual exploitation, and social victimhood. This paper argues that such a reading, though necessary, remains incomplete unless it also recognizes the forms of constrained agency through which Subala speaks, refuses, moves, remembers, and judges the world that degrades her. Through a qualitative close reading of the novel, supported by feminist, subaltern, objectification, and every day-resistance theory, the paper examines how Borgohain represents poverty, bodily commodification, first-person confession, suicide, marriage, and return. The analysis shows that Subala’s resistance is not heroic or emancipatory in a simple sense. Her choices are often narrow, costly, and reabsorbed by the same structures she contests. Yet her self-narration, her refusal to accept the names imposed on her, her rejection of Kanti’s violence, and her final withdrawal from an abusive marriage disturb the social order that attempts to reduce her to a body without voice. The paper concludes that Subala is best understood as a novel of gendered subalternity in which resistance survives not as full liberation, but as an ethical claim to personhood under conditions designed to deny it.},
        keywords = {Homen Borgohain; Subala; Assamese novel; gender; subalternity; prostitution; resistance},
        month = {August},
        }