Examining the Dialectics of Belonging within Subaltern Counterpublics in Bijoya Sawian’s Shadow Men

Abstract

Amidst the pressing need to reconstruct the traditional socio-political structure, the native population’s persistent fears of losing their indigenous cultural heritage and manifestations of xenophobic politics become more evident in unprecedented ways. The conceptual gap, in this situation, between the prevailing state power and “excluded” subjects typically gives rise to “subaltern counterpublics” with countercultural values. In subaltern counterpublics, the dominance of congruent ideologies recreates the separation between the controlled and dominating classes inside the same public sphere, even when the participants are members of the marginalised group in the discursive formation process. Within subaltern communities, class consciousness, hegemony, and subalternity are pervasive at the micro-level, characterized by multipolarity, fragmentation, and divergence. This opposition extends even to totalitarian tendencies, including within the “subaltern itself” (Malik 37). This paper aims to examine the dialectics of belonging within subaltern counterpublics in the context of Meghalaya’s insider-outsider discourse by highlighting this crucial location of intra-subaltern conflicts. For this purpose, Bijoya Sawian’s novel Shadow Men is used to examine how the insider-outsider binary can be used as an ideology by the elites to further their own interests within the subaltern group. It also attempts to explore how the elites’ anti-egalitarian ethos inside subaltern counterpublics manipulates subaltern politics itself while, on the other hand, the inclusive approach of the “non-conformist” subaltern postcolonial subjects occasionally appears to dispute and reassess the very basic ideas of subaltern counterpublics.