Scars and Stories: A Literary Exploration of Laxmi Agarwal’s Quest for Identity and Justice

Abstract

This research delves into the multifaceted struggles experienced by Laxmi Agarwal and critically examines how she transformed her suffering into strength and advocacy. A survivor who shattered the silence and pioneered a path for others to reclaim their voices. The paper reveals how in fact the art of storytelling (literature in general) has helped Laxmi to fight triumphantly against the psychological injuries of her trauma and the societal stigmas that were inflicted on her because of her trauma. The journal effectively demonstrates the aforesaid by evaluating a brief in depth narrative on her life along with four interviews that were offered by her to various newspapers. The research highlights that the problems that she faced as an acid victim affected not only her personal self but all her relations and all aspects of her life. In aim of doing this research the paper takes its methodological framework from Arthur W. Frank’s “The Wounded storyteller” (Frank, 2013), “Trauma Within the Limits of Literature” by Geoffrey Hartman (Hartman, 2000), Jill Bennett’s “Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art” (Bennett, 2005) and Naomi Wolf’s “The Beauty Myth” (Wolf, 2002). The paper brings into focus the various phases of her trauma and her struggle against it, her initial position as a passive victim of male violence when her whole being is inflicted with the wound of acid attack by a chauvinist patriarchal male whose proposal she denied, how that wound distorted her face as well as crushed her dreams, how the society shunned and stigmatized her for her wound, and what economic troubles she had to face because of her wound  and finally how she struggled with her trauma by making her wound a means of  telling her story  an act that liberated her from her physical and psychological trauma.