Imaging the Folkloric Devi in Anti-Colonial Indian Fiction: A Case Study of Three Litterateurs

Authors

  • Dr Prasanta Chakraborty Associate Professor, Department of English, Women’s College, Agartala, Tripura, India.

Keywords:

Indian folk tradition, Folk culture, Women characters, Bisham Sahni

Abstract

There is a trend among the imperialist to use culture in order to legitimise their imperialistic design. The natives of the environs initially feel like pariahs in their own native land. Nationalism provides the chief motivating force for projecting ‘cultural difference’ and ‘identity’, against colonial authority. The colonised writers and other literary campaigners find folk culture a useful source to depend on for their resistance against the imperialistic culture. People accept women to be an embodiment of this nature and they worship nature in the form of a woman as a saviour to protect them from any danger. Raja Rao made it clear in the Foreword of his novel Kanthapura while referring to Sthalapurana and about the goddess Kenchamma in the novel as the saviour-deity and as the source of inspiration of the village. Manik Bondyopadhaya never made any announcement but he too gave an impression of destroyer and preserver to his women characters- features that are embodied in goddess Durga. My reading of Bisham Sahni gives me a similar impression.

References

Andrew Milner & Jeff Browitt. Contemporary Cultural Theory. New Delhi. Rawat Publications

Boehmer, Elleke (1995). Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. New Delhi. OUP.

Harish Narang. (1995). Politics as Fiction. New Delhi. Creative Books. 12-22.

Mala Pandurang (1997). Post –Colonial African fiction. Delhi. Pencraft International. 1-10.

Padmini Mongia ed. (1997). Contemporary Post-colonial Theory- A Reader. Delhi. OUP.

Sahni, Bhisham. "Pali." Manoa, vol. 19 no. 1, 2007, p. 56-73. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/man.2007.0052.

Sheobhushan Sukla, Anu Shukla ed (2004). Postcolonialism and fiction in English. New Delhi. Sarup & Sons.1-49.

Sorojmohan Mitra ed. (1976). Manik Granthabali. Kolkata. Granthalaya private ltd. (Manik Bondyopadhaya is a renowned post-colonial litterateur with some commitments in Bengali literature. At least seven movies are made out of his novels and short stories)

Stewart Frank, Sukrita Paul Kumar ed. (2007). Crossing Over. Manoa: University of Hawaii Press. 56-73.

Raja Rao (1974). Kanthapura. New Delhi: OUP. First published in 1938. References are to the 1974 edition and are cited in the text

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Published

01.07.2010

How to Cite

Prasanta Chakraborty. (2010). Imaging the Folkloric Devi in Anti-Colonial Indian Fiction: A Case Study of Three Litterateurs. Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature, 2(1), 14–20. Retrieved from https://journals.eltai.in/index.php/jtrel/article/view/JTREL020104

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 1 (2010): July

Section

Research Articles

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