Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her seminal essay Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988), teaches us how women, especially women on the margins, are twice silenced: first by imperial, national, or external structures, and then by the patriarchal forces within their own societies. She calls this double marginalisation, a concept that has shaped postcolonial feminist thought across South Asia.
But perhaps it is time to speak of a third layer — to recognise the thrice subjugated woman of war.
First, she faces the national crisis, the immediate violence of war: bombs, borders, soldiers at her door, the terror of losing family, home, body, or all three. Then, she must fight the internal crisis, the weight of patriarchy within her social world, where even in war, decisions are made over her, not with her. Finally, she carries the burden of her social status as a woman in her own land, where she must pay the price of being a woman twice over, knowing she is unsafe not only from the men who cross borders but also from the men within her own home, her own community, her own country.
Who weeps for the women left to stitch together the broken? Who sings for the woman who lays aside her own dreams to tend to the fallen, or the returning soldier who comes home broken, or worse, brings his brokenness home?
As Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag so sharply observes, men have long sought pain. They run towards it, glorify it, wrap it in the language of honour and conquest. Their external pain, their bleeding, is often sanctified through war, medals, or heroes' welcomes. But women? Women's pain is hidden, domestic, taken for granted. Either they are casualties, their deaths counted in civilian tolls, or they are left behind, abandoned to rebuild lives they were never asked about in the first place.
Either dead or left behind. Either killed or called to care.
So I ask you, future peacemaker: Who truly wins in war? And who, always, is left to clean up the wreckage, tend to the wounded, carry the grief, and sacrifice her own dreams so that a nation, a people, or a man can rise again?
If South Asia is to have a future worth building, it must centre these women — their stories, their labour, their grief, and their stubborn, relentless resilience. Without them, there is no peace. There is no future. There is only the same old cycle of pain, dressed up in new flags, new slogans, and old, tired myths of glory.
Sincerely,
A Fellow South Asian
Illustration by Ajitesh Vishwanath
About the Author: Uttara Das
A writer and ELT trainer with a master’s in English from the Central University of Gujarat and a CELTA certification, her work moves between literature, history, and cultural critique, often tracing the sharp edges of satire, gender, and post independence India. In an attempt to collect half-forgotten stories, she turns fragments of memory and history into words worth remembering.
Read Unquiet Neighbourhood: What is the Future of South Asia
