Gita Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night: A Replica of Indian Heritage

Abstract

English is taught as a second language in India. The learners may have difficulty in acquiring the basic skills of the language, since they may not have sufficient exposure to the language. In a multilingual country like India where twenty-two languages are approved by our constitution as the national languages, English is used as a tool in unifying the feelings of our people. So, our learners need to acquire language skills in English. Language skills may be imparted to the learners when it is coupled with a material that is familiar. When the glory of our culture is dealt with in fiction, the learners may understand the sentence structure, word order, and vocabulary. For fulfilling this purpose, fiction is the finest vehicle to transmit the culture. In India, people are aware of their culture, though they live in a busy world. This paper analyses how Githa Hariharan, the Indo-Anglican fiction writer uses the genre of fiction as a medium to transmit the culture to learners by exhibiting the Indian myths in a detailed manner to correlate the contemporary life of our people. In the story, Indian myths are intermingled with the lives of Indian women. Githa Hariharan has represented the glory of India through her fiction. In simple words, her fiction; A Thousand Faces of Night is the commemoration of Indian Mythology.