Susan Visvanathan’s new work, Phosphorus and Stone is composed in the lucid but subversive style that characterises her feminist writings. In this novella she examines a fishing hamlet from the startling perspectives of the bourgeois enclaves set both in a village called Valli, Kerala, and in the suburbs of Chennai and Bangalore.
This is the story of a young woman and her refusal to be betrayed by death, obsession or love. It engages with the activist concern for the fisherpeople as well as the problematic of middle-class loyalties and the antagonisms of sect and gender. The most complex narrative, in this slim volume, is the apocryphal reading, from a feminist perspective, of Jesus’s resurrection.