Memory, Trauma And Identity Reconstruction In Anita Nair's Lessons In Forgetting: A Feminist Trauma And Disability Studies Perspective

Abstract

This paper examines Anita Nair's Lessons In Forgetting (2010) through the combined lenses of feminist trauma theory and feminist disability studies, arguing that memory, trauma, and embodied disability function together as the mechanisms through which the novel's protagonists reconstruct fractured identities. Drawing on Cathy Caruth's model of trauma as a delayed and repeated psychic wound and Judith Herman's stages of trauma recovery, the paper first traces how Meera and Jak's parallel losses unsettle linear selfhood and produce narratives organised around silence, repetition, and deferred disclosure. It then extends the analysis, largely absent from existing criticism of the novel, to the character of Smriti, whose comatose, non-verbal body following a sexual assault becomes a site where gendered violence and disability intersect. Using Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's feminist disability framework, the paper reads Smriti's condition not as a passive backdrop to her father's grief but as an active locus of meaning that exposes the limits of a purely psychological trauma paradigm and demands attention to embodiment, dependency, and caregiving as feminist concerns in their own right. The paper concludes that Nair's novel stages identity reconstruction as a collective, relational process rather than an individual triumph, and that reading disability alongside trauma and gender yields a fuller, more ethically responsive account of the text.