The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Kandasamy, Meena. When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife. Europa Editions, 2017.

Content Warning: This novel vividly depicts scenes of physical, verbal, and sexual abuse. Rape and violence are described in detail and derogatory terms for female anatomy are used. Summaries of these details are included in this plot summary as well as throughout this study guide as they are central to the unfolding of the plot.

When I Hit You: Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife is a novel by Meena Kandasamy set in modern day India. The protagonist in the novel is unnamed as is her husband. When the novel opens, the couple has moved to a new town in order for the husband to start a job teaching at a local college. The plan is for the wife to continue her work as a writer and to start teaching once a new semester starts. She does not speak the language.

Soon after the couple marries, the husband starts to abuse the narrator. This abuse starts by distancing her from those she loves. He convinces her to deactivate her Facebook account, and he then convinces her to give him her email password. He shows her that he has been signing all of his emails, professional and personal, with both of their names. She later learns that he has been answering some of her emails without telling her. This all makes her feel like she is losing her identity.

Her career suffers because she learns that she cannot teach at the college because the college only allows one person in a family to work there at time. Still, the husband lets her lecture in one of his courses, but students pass around a note about how unkempt her hair is, an attitude originating due to the colonization of India. Her husband gets mad when she shares this with him, blaming her. Deactivating her Facebook account hurts her career because she stays on people’s radar through social media. Eventually, however, the husband deletes all of her emails as well. Through this, she loses all of her drafts as well as all of her professional contacts. He then only allows her three hours a week on the internet, and this is all in his presence. To maintain some semblance of control, when he is gone, she writes letters to imaginary lovers and deletes them before he can ever see them.

Prior to her marriage, the narrator was the secret lover to an unmarried politician. The relationship had to be kept a secret because people only really trusted bachelor politicians. The two loved each other, but the politician was significantly older than she was. The relationship ended when he was brought to the hospital for an emergency, and she was the last to know. When she finally got there, he refused to acknowledge her. This left her heartbroken, and when she met the man who would become her husband, he made her feel safe and he wanted to marry her; this is what she wanted. In this way, she considers the marriage to be a mix between an arranged marriage and a marriage for love.

The marriage only lasts four months, but the husband becomes physically abusive as well as verbally abusive. He calls her many derogatory terms such as a whore and a cunt, and he uses her past sexual experiences against her to humiliate and shame her. He beats her with objects like her Macbook cord, hits her, kicks her, and repeatedly and brutally rapes her. He demands that she demonstrate no pleasure from sex, and he uses rape as a punishment to try to correct her behavior.

Throughout these four months, the narrator tells her parents of the abuse, and they encourage her to stick with the marriage. Finally when the husband tells the narrator that he will slit her throat with a knife, she tells her parents about this as well as details she had previously left out. They finally tell her that if he ever threatens to kill her again that she should leave and come straight to them. By this point, the narrator knows how to make her husband angry. She incites his anger but also emasculates him to the point where she knows he does not feel empowered enough to actually kill her. He grabs her by her neck and holds her off the ground and then smashes her face into the ground with his foot while he beats her, but afterwards, she is able to escape, and she returns to her parents.

She tries to find legal justice after she leaves, but this proves difficult. Her husband is asked to resign from his job, but he makes a name for himself as an activist. He gets a new girlfriend. The narrator wants love, but she is also fearful of being hurt and controlled. Eventually at her father’s behest, she leaves town to make a new life. She continues to write and it is through writing that she feels safest because no one can rape her written body; only her physical body is in danger of violence.