Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy

I didn’t ease into When I Hit You — it felt more like stumbling into a scene already in motion. The kind where the camera is trembling, the soundtrack has gone silent, and you realise you’ve entered a story that isn’t waiting for you to settle in. Friends had mentioned how intense it was, but nothing prepares you for the way this book grips your collar and says, “Stay. Watch.” A few pages in, I knew I wasn’t reading for leisure; I was witnessing a life being peeled open.

Meena Kandasamy, poet, activist, and one of the fiercest voices in contemporary Indian literary fiction, is not a writer you meet halfway. She leads. You follow. Her previous works — especially her poetry — already hinted at her ability to blend fire with lyricism. But here, in When I Hit You: Or, The Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, she does something rare: she turns pain into art without romanticizing either. The book is at once a howl and a hymn, raw yet crafted, deeply political yet painfully intimate.

The story comes to us through an unnamed narrator — a detail that is not coy, but intentional. This namelessness is a mirror, a terrible universality. You see her. And then, suddenly, you see women you know. Your mother, a friend, the woman who laughed too loudly once and was never the same again, even yourself in moments you don’t speak of. She marries a man she thinks she understands, a man who appears intellectual, revolutionary, aligned with her ideals. But masks slip slowly, and Meena lets that slow unravelling play out with devastating precision.

There are no cheap thrills here, no dramatic thunderclaps. The violence comes quietly at first — a snatched password, a condescending comment, a guilt trip disguised as love. And then it grows claws. Physical violence, sexual violence, psychological captivity. The book never turns away, even when you want to. But here is the strange thing: even in the bleakest chapters, the writing is breathtaking. There were passages that felt like standing inside a storm with a poet who insists on showing you each raindrop’s shape.

Kandasamy’s prose is agile — sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, always alert. She weaves politics into personal spaces, slips philosophy between kitchen walls, and lets language itself become a character. She talks about the limits of vocabulary, the failure of speech, the way silence becomes both shield and prison. More than once, I paused, not because the book was difficult, but because a sentence had knocked the wind out of me.

The narrator’s inner world is the heart of the book. Not just her suffering, but her intellect, her defiance, her stubborn need to write even when it is forbidden. Those tiny acts of rebellion — a secret file, a hidden line, an imaginary lover she invents just to reclaim the word lover — became some of the most powerful moments for me. Her writing becomes oxygen. Her imagination becomes armour. It reminded me how creativity, at its purest, is an act of resistance.

Structurally, the book is tight, almost claustrophobic — fitting for a narrative about entrapment. Yet within that tight space, Kandasamy builds entire continents of thought. Reflections on marriage, patriarchy, communism, capitalism, parenthood, language, womanhood — all flowing together with a poet’s sense of rhythm. If anything, the only challenge is that the density of brilliance sometimes makes you read slower, not because it's dull, but because your mind keeps wanting to underline things.

Reading it, I found myself remembering women I’ve known who lived inside decorously painted cages. Women who normalized violence because tradition told them suffering was a virtue. And I kept wondering — how many stories like this sit unspoken at dinner tables across the country? How many still believe silence is safety?

When I Hit You broke something open in me. Not dramatically, not with noise. But like a quiet door finally clicking unlocked.

This isn’t an easy book. But it is an essential one. A courageous, unsettling, gorgeously written exploration of what happens when love turns into control, when marriage becomes captivity, and when a woman decides that her voice — bruised, cracked, trembling — still deserves to be heard.

If you’re ready for a book that will stay with you long after the last line, pick this up. Let it challenge you. Let it discomfort you. Let it remind you of the power of telling the truth.

And maybe — just maybe — let it remind you to listen more carefully to the women around you.

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