• Rashmi Naik

This paper critically examines the representation of women in Temsula Ao’s short stories The Last Song and The Pot Maker, and argues that Ao reconfigures conventional gender hierarchies by positioning her women characters as autonomous, skilled, and resilient agents. While Simone de Beauvoir conceptualises women as historically constructed as “the second sex,” Ao’s narratives challenge this universal paradigm by situating women at the centre of labour, decision-making, cultural transmission, and resistance. Through the figures of Libeni, Apenyo, Arenla, and Sentila, the stories explore maternal independence, artistic inheritance, occupation-based agency, oral tradition, and embodied defiance in the face of military violence and patriarchal judgement. The absence or passivity of the father figure further destabilises the normative masculine axis of authority. Drawing on feminist theorists such as Beauvoir, V. Geetha, and classical assumptions from Aristotle, this paper demonstrates how Ao’s fiction configures women not as victims but as creators, labourers, memory-keepers, and moral anchors. Ultimately, Ao articulates a feminist aesthetic unique to the North-East, where womanhood becomes a locus of power rather than inferiority.

"Re-positioning Women and Reconfiguring Power: A Feminist Reading of Temsula Ao’s Short Stories.", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.6, Issue 4, page no.201-204, april 2019, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR1904X29.pdf

"Re-positioning Women and Reconfiguring Power: A Feminist Reading of Temsula Ao’s Short Stories.", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.6, Issue 4, page no. pp201-204, april 2019, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR1904X29.pdf