Between the Lines: Taboos in South Asian Literature

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she talks about taboos in South Asian Writing.

There is a particular kind of stillness that lives inside South Asian homes, a silence that hums behind closed doors, between sentences left unfinished, around subjects that are never meant to be spoken. Every writer here knows it intimately: the tremor that runs through the hand before writing what should not be written.

In this part of the world, shame has lineage. It is inherited, embroidered into bedtime stories, wrapped carefully inside proverbs and prayers. The word taboo doesn’t quite capture its texture. Here, it is more like a scent of incense masking the memory of smoke, of secrets steeped in centuries of caution.