By critically focusing on two stories, i.e., Mahasweta Devi's "Draupadi" and Ambai's "Black Horse Square", and reading them with and against each other, this paper tries to showcase how these writers offer two distinct, yet overlapping perspectives on the causes and consequences of the sociocultural violence against women. Both of them diagnose this violence as a function of the conflict between representation and self-presentation of woman. Through these stories, these authors destabilize the patriarchal representational-praxis in order to etch out a blueprint for agential and representational empowerment.

Both Mahasweta Devi and Ambai employ similar narrative language to capture the immoral and violent infringement of their protagonist's body and space. It is through the brutally graphic description of the `act of rape' that both the stories seem to converge and reinforce each other's activist praxis. The narratives, at this juncture, become virtual echoes of each other, at least in the delineation of the physical aspect of gender violence.

For both the stories, their activism targets the construction of `femaleness' and its attendant violence within the patriarchal order. The embedded nature of violence becomes manifest the moment a woman transgresses the ever present `female/feminine' boundary inbuilt into patriarchal normativity. This transgression triggers masculist provocation that visits female self/body in many forms. The brutalization of female bodies symbolizes the silencing strategies of the powerful, a ploy that unfolds in "Draupadi"as principal-subaltern binary, and in "Black Horse Square" as economic disparities within class-caste nexus. Though the ideological frames within which this victimization takes place may differ, the consequences remain identical, i.e., in both the cases the woman's body becomes a site for exploitation, assault and degradation.

Patriarchal Violence, Sociocultural violence, Ubiquitous social condition, Representational empowerment, Patriarchal order, Patriarchal violence, Masculist provocation, Sociopolitical interaction, Sociocultural organizations, Literary narratives, Female empowerment, Cultural notions, Artificial schism, Mutual bonding.