In a society like ours, every woman is at the risk of becoming a victim of domestic violence. Claimed by a few to have originated as a term in the early 1970s, ‘Domestic Violence’ implies physical and emotional brutality within intimate relations, especially conjugal. Also, the term is linked with many other connotations like wife beating, spouse abuse, marital violence, marital rape, physical abuse, etc. What is more traumatic is the fact that the violence takes place at ‘home’ which is basically her sphere, a place of her security and rule. Therefore, for the purpose of this paper, domestic violence is the brutality manifested either in the form of marital rape or physical abuse that occurs between couples who are living together and sharing the bond of marriage. In the Indian society, which is basically a patriarchal construct, marriage becomes an important agency through which every aspect of our existence gets regulated. This paper attempts to study women characters in selected short stories from Indian Women’s Short Fiction in English, who suffered violence within marriage but went on bearing it in their attempt to maintain familial harmony.

The institution of marriage is the most glorified and sacrosanct pattern of existence socially, religiously and sexually; hence, it is treated as an ideal form for a civilized social organization and for the propagation of the species. But it is also, significantly, the patriarchal weapon that finalizes the complete subversion and social obliteration of woman. Although constructed as the apotheosis of fulfilment for both man and woman, it acquires centrality in woman’s life only and contains both her space and her identity. The phallocentric hold on the institution determines her code of behavior and the boundaries of her space, exclusion and invisibility become strategic devices for patriarchy to foreground the image of ideal femininity. Patriarchy permits no alternatives to marriage and holds in pity and contempt those who attempt to thwart it.