Marital Rape, Digital Erasure, and Resistance in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

Abstract

This paper examines Meena Kandasamy’s autofictional novel When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017) as a feminist critique of marital rape and coercive control within contemporary Indian marriage. Existing scholarship on the novel has read it through liberal feminism (Sangeetha et al., 2022), social constructionism and performativity (Priyadharsini et al., 2026), the psychology of abuse (Rashed & Rasheed, 2024), and trauma and rape-narrative theory (Montheil, 2025), but none has drawn on the domestic-violence literature’s concept of technology-facilitated coercive control (TFCC) to account for the novel’s sustained attention to the erasure of the protagonist’s digital and intellectual identity. This paper addresses that gap, arguing that the husband’s deletion of the narrator’s email correspondence, social media presence, and record of authorship functions as a literary anticipation of what domestic-violence scholars now call digital coercive control: control exercised over a woman’s public and professional record, not only over her body. Reading the novel alongside Evan Stark’s coercive control framework and subsequent TFCC scholarship (Dragiewicz et al., 2018; Woodlock et al., 2020), alongside feminist theorists including Beauvoir, Butler, Millett, Brownmiller, and hooks, the paper traces how social conditioning and victim-blaming sustain this violence, how marital rape functions as an assertion of ownership, and how writing becomes the narrator’s principal instrument of resistance. The paper concludes that Kandasamy’s novel offers literary and gender studies a case through which to extend TFCC scholarship — developed almost entirely from Western empirical contexts — into South Asian literary representation.