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International Journal of Innovations & Research Analysis (IJIRA) [ Vol. 6 | No. 2(II) | April - June, 2026 ]

Voices from the Margins: Women’s Struggles in Githa Hariharan’s the Thousand Faces of Night

Meenakshi & Dr. Richa Bhardwaj

Githa Hariharan’s the Thousand Faces of Night(1998) is a seminal feminist novel that foregrounds the silenced experiences of Indian women trapped within patriarchal structures of family, marriage, and tradition. This research paper examines how the novel articulates women’s struggles from the margins by portraying female lives shaped by silence, suppression, and cultural expectation. Drawing upon feminist literary criticism, postcolonial feminism, and mythological revisionism, the study explores how Hariharan dismantles dominant narratives of womanhood by re-imagining myth, memory, and domestic space through women’s perspectives. The novel gives voice to marginalized figures such as Devi, Sita, and Mayamma, whose lives reflect intergenerational oppression as well as subtle resistance. This paper argues that The Thousand Faces of Night exposes patriarchy not as an abstract ideology but as a lived reality embedded in everyday domestic practices. By reclaiming women’s voices and rewriting mythological paradigms, Hariharan presents women’s suffering as historically constructed and therefore open to transformation. The study contributes to feminist discourse by highlighting how marginal voices challenge cultural silence and redefine female identity in contemporary Indian English fiction.

  1. Nityanandan, Indira. “A Search for Identity: Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night.Indian Women Novelists, edited by R. K. Dhawan, Set III, vol. 4, prestige Books, 1995, pp. 99­­­-108.
  2. Hariharan, Githa. The Thousand Faces of Night. Penguin Books, 1992.
  3. Indira, S. "Walking the Tight Rope: A Reading of Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of
  4. Night." Fiction of Nineties, Prestige Books, 1994, pp. 67-70.

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