Home as sanctuary: Stories of secrets and sadness in Fire on the Mountain and The Blue Bedspread

This article explores the idea of home as a space of sanctuary and retreat from the problems of domestic life through the novels of Anita Desai and Raj Kamal Jha. I examine how these novels destabilise discourses of gender, home and family. Both novels demonstrate the relationship between narrative and power by showing how the protagonists overcome their relative powerlessness through narratives which enable them to reconstruct a sense of self that challenges nationalist ideologies. I show through a reading of the novels the problems of privileging the self over the family and communal identities and suggest how the consequences might be imagined and narrated in relation to the spaces of the home, the city and the nation.