Volume VI Issue I January-March 2026

Name of Author : Asish Martin Tom

Title of the paper : Remembering Against Normality Cultural Memory, Madness, And Resistance in Sandhya Marys Maria, Just Maria

Abstract: Sandhya Marys Maria, Just Maria explores in depth what it means to remember. Employing the model proposed by scholars such as Jan Assmann communicative, cultural memory, Aleida Assmann storage memory, Foucault disciplinary power, counter memory, Halbwachs collective memory, M. Hirsch and S. Smith Feminist Memory, this essay argues that Maria Just Maria does not merely bring memories to the fore it challenges the systems that determine whose memories count and whose memories are pathologized. This paper unfolds across four interconnected readings. The first examines domestic spaces, the ancestral home, Kottarathil Veedu, and Marias parents house as rival material archives that shape identity through competing logics of belonging. The second traces Marias construction of a counter archive her nocturnal conversations, her refusal of official family histories, and the significance of writing that is discarded rather than preserved. The third situates her psychiatric institutionalization within a Foucauldian frame, reading her madness not as an illness but as a measure of how powerfully normality polices its own boundaries. The final section argues that the selfhood Maria rebuilds from fragments, alternative bonds, and refused narratives constitutes a form of identity that exceeds institutional categories altogether. The article argues that Maria, Just Maria, remembers ways that go against what society calls normal, is itself a form of cultural and political resistance.

Keywords : cultural memory, counter memory, counter archive, madness, normality, disciplinary power, storage memory, communicative memory, feminist memory studies

DOI :

Page No. : 94-99