ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates ‘a politics of close reading practice’ of ‘a set of knowledges’ ‘disqualified as inadequate’ due to the intersection of caste, gender and poverty. It shows that warranted critiques of ‘the invocation of praxis as code word for an ‘activist knowledge’ is transcended by the situated knowledge of intersectional subjugation articulated in the work of contemporary Indian feminist poetry. Literary texts are marked with multi-layered, interdependent sensibilities that challenge binary positions of social conditioning. Literary texts, both in terms of composition and content, are intersectional. The application of intertextuality as intersectionality exposes the power/knowledge relationship, whereby ‘subjugated knowledges’ are relegated. Many Indian women writers face intersectional marginalisation because of their gender and caste or class and their poems carry images of the intersectionality of women as the subject of their poetry and emphatically denounce all kinds of oppression and violence.
