BEYOND NATIONAL FREEDOM: COLONIALITY OF GENDER AND DECOLONIAL FEMINIST UNFREEDOM IN CHAUDHARY’S A SHIMLA AFFAIR

Abstract

This article argues that Srishti Chaudhary’s A Shimla Affair should be read not as a conventional historical romance with a nationalist backdrop, but as a decolonial feminist narrative of gendered colonial unfreedom. The novel situates three Parsi sisters in late colonial Shimla and shows that British rule, family duty, respectability, inheritance restriction, marriageability, and domestic confinement operate not as separate pressures but as coordinated mechanisms of control. Drawing on María Lugones’s account of the coloniality of gender and Françoise Vergès’s decolonial critique of liberal and nationalist emancipation, the article contends that the text makes women’s subjection legible through everyday structures of space, labour, mobility, and property rather than through spectacular violence alone. Royal Hotel Shimla emerges as the novel’s decisive social form: it is livelihood, inheritance, labour site, refuge, and carceral enclosure at once. Nalini’s language of “servility,” the sisters’ conditional relation to property, their prohibition from overt politics, and the novel’s skepticism toward nationalist closure reveal that decolonization in the text cannot be reduced to transfer of state power. Instead, freedom appears as an unfinished struggle over women’s right to move, inherit, labour on their own terms, and inhabit history as subjects rather than supports. By placing South Asian feminist historiography into sustained dialogue with decolonial feminism, the article offers a framework for reading contemporary historical fiction that reimagines anticolonial struggle from the intimate terrain of women’s constrained lives.