Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature
The Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature (JTREL) (ISSN 0975-8828), established in July 2009, is an international, double-blind peer-reviewed, open-access journal committed to fostering scholarly exchange among educators and researchers in the field of English literature. The journal publishes high-quality, original contributions including research articles, critical reviews, interviews with authors, poetry and short stories. JTREL welcomes submissions from both established scholars and emerging researchers, encouraging diverse academic perspectives. The journal is published online on a quarterly basis by the English Language Teachers’ Association of India (ELTAI). The journal levies no submission, processing, or publication fees, ensuring unrestricted access for both authors and readers. Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis throughout the year, and all manuscripts must be submitted via the journal’s website. Submissions sent via email are no longer accepted.
English language Teachers’ Association of India (ELTAI)
The relationship between literature and culture is a well-established notion. Culture is manifested through literature, and literature thrives on or derives its sustenance from culture to a large extent. The history of literature, in general, stands a witness to the fact that the impulse of expressing cultural attributes wrapped in nativity has produced glorious pieces of literature. Not only that, some brilliant pieces of literature have come up as a result of a protest against the refusal to give vent to one’s cultural identity and patriotic feelings. The emergence of African literature in English is a case to this point. This research paper aims at exploring all those cultural strands in African life, the hunt of which has produced widely acclaimed literary pieces by Chinua Achebe, Alex La Guma, Gracy Ukala, and the likes. Moreover, this paper attempts to measure the degree of disillusionment with the imposed belief system on mankind and its reflection as the contents of a literary work.
Empathy as a Step to Divinity: A Study of Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello
The present article explores how wilful ignorance could lead to lack of empathy on the part of humans in relation to other humans and species. It also brings out how Coetzee has succeeded in stretching human reason and imagination further to appreciate the sanctity of life of one and all. He probes the answers to the critical question through portraying the real and imaginative interaction among animals, mortals and imaginary immortals in literature. Coetzee’s novel seems to be a crusade for the defenceless animals and humans against the victorious and tyrannical humans. The wilful ignorance of anguish of life—be they animals or humans and cynical reasoning is bereft of understanding and cripples human empathy that alone can lift humanity from its present state to angelic state.
Gender Issues: A Study of Mahesh Dattani’s Bravely Fought the Queen
Mahesh Dattani’s plays are the mirror of contemporary Indian Society. They discussed the undercurrent of social life. He is one of the forerunners in discussing the varied theme of homosexuality and marital problem in the spouses. In the present paper, an attempt has been made to discuss the gender issues highlighted in Bravely Fought the Queen. The play revolves around the three generations. It portrays the complexity of the husband-wife relationship, mother-daughter relationship, and mother-son relationship.
An Itinerary of a Subaltern in The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger, a fable of aggression is the winner of the 40th Man Booker Prize in 2008. The paper emphasizes the purpose behind the negative depiction of India in the novel. It enlists the major theme and sub themes. The main theme is the contrast between the stark reality of interior India and the brilliant image of exterior India. The paper attacks corruption in government, educational sectors and medical fields. John McLeod’s theory of post colonialism is applied to distinguish place and space while dealing with subalterns. Homi Bhabha’s theory of displacement is applied to the isolation of subalterns. The injustice meted out to Balram, the male protagonist turns him into a criminal. He becomes an entrepreneur through unjust means. The novelist chooses two developing countries, India and China to depict the fast changing world. There is some discussion on Hinduism as well. The paper ends with the narrative techniques and vision of the future.
Examining Missionary Writings: Promoting or Subverting Imperialism
Postcolonial studies have focused much of their attention on critiquing imperialism and its repercussions. In this process charges have been levelled not only against the imperialists, who are the primary agents in establishing this colossal exploitative enterprise, but also on informal agents like missionaries who were also present at the scene during that period. This study aims to analyse the persistent debate over the part played by the missionaries in the consolidation of the empire by analysing select missionary writings to prove whether these incriminate them or stand antithetical to colonialism as a digressive mechanism. For this purpose, the paper closely scrutinizes Social Christianity in the Orient: The Story of a Man, a Mission and a Movement, the autobiography of John Everett Clough an American Baptist Missionary, to investigate whether or not missionary writings extend as imperialist discourses. The surfacing of multiple conflicting impulses in these writings, problematise a simplistic categorisation of it as a pure imperialistic discourse.
Copyright (c) 2019 Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature
The French Folktale Bluebeard Reinvented
The original French folk tale by Charles Perrault, about an ugly noble man who had anywhere between five to seven wives who died in quick succession and who was always looking to remarry. His castle is a place of uncountable wealth and one of the rooms also is a chamber of torture and death. This old folk tale is given an alternative ending by the British writer Angela Carter in her story “The Bloody Chamber”.
Folktales from South East Asia: A Synonym of Ethnographic Document
Folktales are studied, recited, and reinvented ethnographic documents that offer a plethora of information, which supplies moral, cultural, global, and historical perspectives about life. These parables, widespread across the pallets of the Asian sub-continent are likened to tales and morals contained in every holy book and in an interesting way comment on life and its bitter and sweet moments. The customs, traditions and beliefs expressed in folktales link people to their history and root them in their past. Expanded and shaped by the tongues of tellers over time, and passed down from one generation to the next, folktales often reflect the values and customs of the culture from which they come.. This ancient form of narrative communication for both education and entertainment, offers a window into other cultures. The most assuring way of managing diversity in such a peaceful and sustainable dynamic is learning otherness through the folktales of others. The present paper is an attempt to explore the popular folktales from Southeast Asia as testimonials of an unadulterated ethnographic documentation.
The Arabic Novel: An Overview of the History and Evolution of the Genre
When we talk about the novel in Arabic literature, we can certainly find it in classical Arabic literature along with various other forms of literature. The Arabic novel passed through different periods such as the Pre-Islamic period, the Umayyad era, the Abbasid era, and the Modern era, but in the Pre-Islamic era, it was not known as the novel because it was not an art form. But as time passed, the concept of the novel gradually came to people's minds. Many things have been written in this form of literature, for example, the (إخوان الصفاء), Kalila and Dimna by Ibn al-Muqaffa, the Maqamat of Hamzani and Hariri, the Hadith Issa ibn Hisham by Muhammad al-Mawili etc. But it wasn't an art form. Its real development began when Rifa'a Al-Tahtawi translated the French novel "The Adventures of Telemac" by the artist Fenlon. Then a lot of Arab writers went to Europe and translated European literature into Arabic literature, for example. Mustafa Lutfi Al-Manfaluti. Then in 1913 when "Zeinab"(زينب) came to Hussein Haykal, almost all critics of Arabic literature agreed that this novel was in real form. Then, after a lot of novels, came many great novelists in Arabic literature who contributed to this form of literature (the novel), for example, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Naguib Mahfouz, Najib al-Kilani, Ali Ahmed Bakathir, etc.
Orality and Historiography: A Perspective on the Changing Contours of African History
In this article, the methodological role of Orality in African historiography will be re-evaluated to ascertain how colonial conceptualisations of historical legitimacy (ontological truth) were grounded in the existence of written documentation. As such, African oral traditions have often been relegated to myth, folklore, or some other form of non-historical knowledge. By utilising the works of Jan Vansina, Paul Thompson and Walter Ong, this article tracks the development of oral tradition from a contested source to an accepted form of historical methodology. The paper claims that oral narration does not only fill gaps in archival sources, but also fundamentally challenge the textual biases that are embedded in existing historical practices. The paper also argues that through an emphasis of community memory, performative action and interpretive fluidity, orality has redefined the boundaries of African historical knowledge. The combination of oral and written forms of historical knowledge provides a more inclusive historiographical framework through which to challenge the colonial epistemologies of history and broaden the overall global discourse on history.
Copyright (c) 2026 Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature
Analysis of the Criminal Justice System in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
The American justice system in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird focuses on the 1930’s legal system which did not always give the morally right verdict. This American novel discusses the serious issues in American society, including injustice, racial segregation, racial discrimination, crime and violence. It was first published in 1960. In the story, the court issues a decision guided by prejudice and does not follow the ordinance that justice is to be served equally regardless of race or social circumstances. The novel is analyzed based on the historical approach to understand Harper Lee’s background and how it influenced her writing.
The Interweaving of Ecofeminism and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison, the first black woman who was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, in her novel The Bluest Eye, delineates how class, race and gender prejudices victimize the protagonist, an eleven-year-old black girl, Pecola Breedlove. The doomed protagonist internalizes the destructive obsession with the white standards of beauty and nurtures a fatal fascination for a pair of blue eyes, characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race. The novel is a poignant portrayal of the cruelty the black heroine witnesses and experiences in society and her own home, along with the devastating effects of the Western notion of beauty. Through an ecofeminist lens, the present paper analyses the injustice unleashed against women and Nature, and their subservient role in this biosphere. It also studies the traumatic experiences undergone by the heroine, highlighting the emotional, psychological, physical, and sexual abuse that the child protagonist experienced in her short life span and how these experiences led her to insanity. The novel demonstrates how trauma transcends personal suffering, affecting entire communities and generations. It critiques a society that dehumanizes black women and makes an urgent call to dismantle the systemic inequalities that continue to victimize marginalized individuals and Nature alike.
Women-Nature Similitude: An Ecofeminist Study of Indira Goswami's Select Works
Ecofeminism is the amalgamation of environmentalism and feminism. It explores the deeper connections between the oppression of women and nature, highlighting their entwined struggles. This paper argues that Indira Goswami’s novels The Blue-Necked God and The Man from Chinnamasta articulate a culturally rooted ecofeminist vision that critiques the intertwined oppression of women and nature through religious, socio-cultural, and political lenses. The paper focuses on how the Western concepts of duality have been internalised within the Indian socio-religious structure to justify domination, and how patriarchal ideology rationalises its authority over women and nature. Drawing on the Sankhya philosophy’s concept of prakrti, the paper aims to emphasise the interconnectedness of all life forms and Goswami’s subtle resistance to patriarchal authority The paper argues that Goswami’s works not only depict the shared suffering of women and nature but also proposes and analyses how embracing prakriti, a spiritually resonant and culturally embedded philosophy can be an alternative universal basis for gender liberation and the liberation of the environment.
Woman as a Major Character in Kamala Markandaya’s Selected Novels
This paper attempts to examine and explore the study of Woman as a Major Character in Kamala Markandaya’s Novels: Nectar in a Sieve, Some Inner Fury, Possession and Two Virgins. Markandaya’s novels are marked for their use of women characters as her spokespersons. She published eleven impressive novels and in all the novels the woman characters are glorified. The key protagonists in most of her novels are female characters who are in constant search for meaning and value of life. In some of her novels she presents an existential struggle of a woman who denies to flow along the current and refuses to submit her individual self. Markandaya was master in the depiction of female characters in her novels.
Examining the Dialectics of Belonging within Subaltern Counterpublics in Bijoya Sawian’s Shadow Men
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.
Copyright (c) 2024 Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature
Beyond Borders: The Journey of Themes of Indira Goswami’s Writings from Vernacular to Transnational
This paper presents international concerns expressed by Sahitya Academy winner, writer, poet and academician, Indira Goswami, in Assamese. Goswami has written extensively about concerns that relate to typical locales of her home state Assam, while lucidly correlating the themes to the lives of humanity around the world. The paper will explore the exposition of theories such as Womanism, Bilateral Peace talks, international recognitions and the retelling of classics like Ramayana while exploring the trajectory of Goswami’s work. Indira Goswami has engaged multiple genres in her journey of this exploration, thereby establishing a role and responsibility of vernacular writings, in the literature of India. As for the role of translation of vernacular to English in India, this immense possibility has made writings of various calibres of vernacular writing accessible for reading, review and research. This paper will thereby present the significance of writings in the vernacular in the canon of Indian Writing.
Copyright (c) 2023 Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature
The term 'Feminism' is derived from the Latin word 'Femina' meaning 'woman'. It refers to the advocacy women’s rights, status and power on par with men on the grounds of equality of sex. The term has garnered popularity in early twentieth century when there ensued a struggle to secure women’s suffrage and later for women's emancipation from patriarchal oppression. Contrary to popular opinion, its impact, however was not restricted to only urban population but soon extended even to rural areas. Many Indian women poets and writers have applied the term significantly in their writings and attained global recognition. Prominent among them are Kamala Das, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Kamala Markandaya, and Bharathi Mukherjee. The paper attempts to shed light on the evolution of Feminism. It dwells on some of the writings of Kamala Das, her autobiography My Story, “The Old Playhouse and Other Poems”, “A Doll for the Child Prostitute”, “An Introduction'”, and “A Widow's Lament”.
Illegitimacy as a ‘Disability’ in King Lear
Ben Jonson’s remark that Shakespeare is “not of an age, but for all time” reveals the universality and timelessness of the bard. Chronologically Shakespeare has been rediscovered through the culture of each age, the seventeenth century saw his plays as a glimpse of ‘real life characters and situations’; the eighteenth century treated him as a lover of nature, the nineteenth century read him psychologically and traced the infinity of human characters. The first half of twentieth century gave importance to his form, use of rhetoric’s, imagery and had a close reading of his plays. The second part of the twentieth century read him in feminist, New Historicist, Marxist and Post-Structuralist perspectives. These readings gave a paradigm shift in interpreting his characters. This paper reads Shakespeare in a New Historicist dimension and traces the modern concept of ‘disability’ which was prevalent in Elizabethan era. The modern concept of ‘Disability Studies’ is applied to Shakespeare’s King Lear to trace how Edmund was marginalized due to his illegitimacy.
Crusade Against the Wrong: Abolitionist Rhetoric in Anti-Slavery Speeches
The abolitionist movement sought abolition of slavery in America. The movement made use of various means and strategies to circulate its anti-slavery views and enforce an immediate abolition of the inhuman system. Ranging from famous abolitionists and former slaves like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to great political leaders like Abraham Lincoln, these people have brought their views to the large audience through their highly eloquent speeches. The abolitionists made frequent use of their oratory skills through their speeches. The present paper is an attempt towards an analysis of various facets of some of the famous speeches by well known abolitionists like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and William Lloyd Garrison. The paper will examine speeches like “Ain’t I a Woman”, “No Compromise with the Evil of Slavery” “What to the Slave is Fourth of July” and others. The anti-slavery rhetoric used by these orators to further the abolitionist cause will also be analyzed in the paper.
Vijay Tendulkar’s Play Kamala: A Symbol of Slavery
Kamala is a naturalistic play by Vijay Tendulkar. It focuses on the changed role of women in society. It was inspired by a real-life incident-the Indian Express exposure by Ashwin Sarin, who actually bought a girl from a rural flesh market and presented her at a press conference. But using this incident as a launching pad, Tendulkar raises certain cardinal questions regarding the value system of a modern success-oriented generation who is ready to sacrifice human values in the name of humanity itself. The playwright exposes the innate self-deception of this standpoint. The paper analyses the background of the play and its contents to assert that Kamala is not merely a play to read or watch but a living person through whom the reader shall experience the slavery system.
Generations of Despair: Theocracy, Masculinity and Patriarchy as Reflected in Kirwant
Patriarchy, when held as one of the highest forms of virtues or universalised truth of society subjugates women, children, and particularly men. ‘Kirwant’ compels an observation of quintessential Indian men, their children, and women within one such system. Originally published in Marathi, it voices exploitation of the kirwants, brahmin-subcaste. Their suffering remains a cyclical phenomenon under a theocratic structure. The burden of legacy in the masculine-patriarchal framework remains as much of an issue as the broadly elaborated caste context. This probe into the masculine values of Kirwant’s theocratic society is undertaken through the text’s close analysis. The textual data signifies the imposition of patriarchal norms as the cause of despair for many generations. Additionally, it seeks to explain how the lead male characters were at stake in the hands of patriarchy regardless of being male themselves. The paper explores Indian society’s socio-cultural aspects of the lives of kirwants as reflected in Gajvee’s drama.
Translation Denies Expression of Figurative Language
Literature in the native language of any country is a rich repository of cultural and linguistic artefacts. Very often, this literature remains unexplored due to the inaccessibility of these authors to a larger audience. It has necessitated the birth of a translator. Translation is the process of communicating the meaning of a source text into a target language. André Alphons Lefevere, a translation theorist postulates that translation is a re-writing of a story. He implies that any text which is translated tends to deploy unconsciously a certain pattern. The pattern could be the use of literary and figurative language or ethnographic ideas. A translated work is unable to explore the metonymic, syntactic or morphological elements of a story. This research paper will argue that translated works deny expression to figurative language. It will do so, by carrying out a comparative and qualitative descriptive analysis of the original work of Marathi Dalit writer Babytai Kamble’s autobiography ‘Jina Amucha’ with that of her translated work ‘The Prisons We Broke’ by Maya Pandit.
Human Dignity and Racism in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story and The Death of Bessie Smith
Edward Albee, an American dramatist, is ranked with Eugene O’Neill and other great dramatists of American literature. He has written several plays and adapted writings from other great writers. Apart from dramas he has also written some poems and tried other genres of literature during his earlier years. All of his plays question human existence and he tries to answer this question in his plays implicitly. This paper Human Dignity and Racism in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story and The Death of Bessie Smith examines the human obligations of Albee. According to Albee, life is meant to be lived. But we are all put in a cage called tradition and society. Albee’s profound interest is in the question of human dignity. Every man is to be respected irrespective of his allegiance. The zoo is a simile for the tightly imprisoned framework of society in which there is no freedom of human response. What is wrong with the racism is want of interest in human dimensions. Thus, the major area analysed here is the need for human concern for the racial problems which prevail everywhere in the globe and to maintain human dignity properly.
A Study of Thematic Perspective in the Novel Pinjar: The Skeleton
Feminist discourse comprises the study of complications of gender discrimination, social insecurity, and religion that arose due to the patriarchal domination of women. The feminist movement allows to en route for achieving gender equality and empowers women to live freer and safer from sexual exploitation. This paper dwells deeply into the projection of women who come across the trauma of exploitation, molestation, migration, social insecurity, marginalization and subaltern during the prevalence of colonialists. In the novel, Pinjar: The Skeleton of Amrita Pritam portrays how women are entangled at the hands of patriarchy, with no self -identity, easy to be manhandled, and no right to put up their say. She is victimized not only before the partition but also during the partition. She is least bothered by enjoying her status in society.
Reconstructing the Self Through Narrative: Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices
Time and Space are the two building blocks that create the layers of any narrative work. Andre Lefebvre while talking about the ‘Historical Notions of Space’ deals with the idea of ‘Lived Space’ and the ‘Third Space’ in reconstructing the self in imagination that has been kept alive and accessible by the narrative art. Space, along with time, is inherently embedded in the narrative structure of a text and both cannot be dissociated from each other. Space has the power to prefigure the balance between the different layers that create the narrative of any literary work. This paper will explore the idea of Time and Space that compose the narrative in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices. This paper will also deal with the idea of time as the shifting construct and space as a locale in the structure that has been redefined through narrative in The Mistress of Spices by Divakaruni.
Cultural Strands of Africa in the Works of Selected African Novelists
The relationship between literature and culture is a well-established notion. Culture is manifested through literature, and literature thrives on or derives its sustenance from culture to a large extent. The history of literature, in general, stands a witness to the fact that the impulse of expressing cultural attributes wrapped in nativity has produced glorious pieces of literature. Not only that, some brilliant pieces of literature have come up as a result of a protest against the refusal to give vent to one’s cultural identity and patriotic feelings. The emergence of African literature in English is a case to this point. This research paper aims at exploring all those cultural strands in African life, the hunt of which has produced widely acclaimed literary pieces by Chinua Achebe, Alex La Guma, Gracy Ukala, and the likes. Moreover, this paper attempts to measure the degree of disillusionment with the imposed belief system on mankind and its reflection in the contents of a literary work.
None to Accompany Me: Tracing the Role of Isolation in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee has once described himself as a writer, working in the medium of a novel. Coetzee’s reputation as a serious and responsible writer is now largely uncontested, and there is enough room to evaluate his significance as a writer of extraordinary fiction in different ways. His Booker Prize creation Disgrace (1999) is a brilliant example of his literary supremacy. The present paper discusses isolation as a theme, with a focus on the characters of David Lurie and Lucy Lurie as well as explores the novel taking into consideration the position of its writer in the literary world. The discussion’s theoretical framework is based on the theory of existential isolation by Irwin D. Yalom and the theory of self-alienation propounded by Karen Horney. This paper is a tight scrutiny of the economic, political, social, and cultural conditions prevalent in South Africa, that contribute to individual and social isolation, making brokenness and helplessness the everyday state of being in the post-apartheid period.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Technique as a Novelist
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has achieved an international reputation as an Indian novelist. Though she is a European, her marriage to an Indian architect and stay in India have given her deep insight into India’s social, political, religious, economic, moral, and cultural life. Her knowledge of the Indian social and cultural ethos can be marked by the variety of themes that she has undertaken in her novels. Her artistic excellence, as a novelist lies in the method of handling her material. Due to her ‘dual nationality’, she is equipped with two types of consciousness i.e., native consciousness and the consciousness acquired from Western civilization. Her eight novels which appeared in quick succession deal with the themes like love and marriage in the bourgeois society, East-West encounter, pseudo-modernism in Indian society, the post-independence Indian ethos, affectation, and hypocrisy in the Indian middle class society. She handles her themes with dazzling assurance and presents a penetrating and compassionate picture of human relationships ironically and realistically. Though Ruth Jhabvala has made a significant contribution to Indian English fiction, she has not received proper attention from the critics of literature. The present paper is a vivid analysis of her literary craftsmanship.
This paper deals with the way, the protest poet— Langston Hughes had reflected on the problems of race in his poems. To unravel the secrets buried in the depth of his complex poetry, the readers have to carry the appropriate tools to know the social, political, and racial dimensions. There is a strong notion that the Black literature should be analyzed in social, political, and cultural contexts. The interpretation of the chosen poems of Langston Hughes is done against the Sociological background that the Black sensitivity is preconditioned to the interpretation of Black poetry. As a protest poet, Hughes had responded to the racialisation of society and the culture and politics of nineteenth-century United States and recorded his feelings in his poetry. The study examines the poems of Langston Hughes as protest poetry. Regardless of its call for revolution and counter-violence against oppression, the protest poetry of Hughes is distinguished by a quest for a better world where people can learn from the painful experiences of the past.
The World of 'Marginalised' in Mahasweta Devi's Play Mother of 1084
Mahasweta Devi, the recipient of Padma Vibhushan, Magsaysay, Padmasree, covetous Gnanpith award (1996), and Yashwant Rao Chavan National Award for 2010 is a modern playwright and social activist. In this paper, a modest attempt has been made to explore the concerns of the marginalized section of the society as depicted by Mahasweta Devi in the play Mother of 1084. The play also focuses on the exploitation of the tribal folk, the landless workers by the landlords and money lenders of West Bengal.
Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children: A Bildungsroman Novel
The objective of this paper is to bring out the bildungsroman aspect of the novel by establishing the relationship between the life of Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of the novel, and the fate of India during his lifetime. The novel is strewn with instances highlighting bildungsroman, not only restricting itself to Saleem Sinai but also proceeding to dominate the lives of Aadam Aziz, Saleem Sinai’s grandfather, and Aadam Sinai, Saleem Sinai’s son. Their lives are intertwined with the history of India – both pre-and post-independent periods. This paper also tries to bring out the effectiveness of the bildungsroman by pointing out the events in the history of India.