scholarly journals A Study of Cultural conflict and trauma of the protagonist in Amitav Ghose’s The Glass Palace

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (11) ◽  
pp. 140-152
Author(s):  
Dr.K. Jaya ◽  

Amitav Ghosh is one of the most popular novelists of the period, with an amazing intelligence of place, history and politics. Ghosh has joined the ranks of notable novelists such as Monohar Malgonkar, Shashi Tharoor, Khushwant Singh, Salman Rushdie, Chaman Nahal, and others. In Ghosh’s novels, one may detect a feeling of historical realism. Ghosh’s writings are characterised by a strong desire for strong identifications and race relations. Amitav Ghosh recognises that society must be reformed from problems such as caste system, gender discrimination, ill-treatment of women, child marriages, poverty, exploitation, and demonic tradition, among others. Ghosh’s humanistic approach provides voice to the forgotten and lowly women characters in his works. He wants to free the entire world from the squabbles of caste, race, gender, religion, untouchability, and geographical dislocation that obstruct human development. It is also demonstrated how the sacrifices of marginalised and female characters have gone unnoticed in the pages of history. This paper examines the Cultural conflict and trauma of the protagonist in AmitavGhose’s The Glass Palace.

Author(s):  
Ekawati Marhaenny Dukut ◽  
Nuki Dhamayanti

The world of literature can be a medium of expressing the writer's expressions and ideas. Universal topics such as, love, death, and war often become subject mailers in the world of literature. In the novel, of The Color Purple. Alice Walker describes the oppression experienced by Afro American women in the female characters of Celie, Nellie, Shug Avery, Sofia, and Mary Agnes who faced sexual discrimina!ions in a patriarchal society. Womanhood, education, and lesbianism are factors that help the Afro American women to free themselves from traditional values. The Color Purple puts into words the process of its main character, Celie, who tries to reject and escape from the male domination of her world. The other Afro American women characters that help Celie to find her selfidentity represent the manifestation of the rejection of the traditional values. This article. which uses the socio-historical alld feminism approach. is intended to analyse the Afro-American women's rejection of traditional values by focusing on the major character of' Walker's The Color Purple. Celie. as she develops from being a victim of traditional values to the rejoiceful discovery of her selfidentity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. e45888
Author(s):  
Cielo Griselda Festino

This article brings a reading of the short-story collection Monção [Monsoon] ( 2003) by the Goan writer Vimala Devi (1932-). The collection can be read as a short-story cycle, a group of stories related by locality, Goa, character, Goans, from all walks of life, and theme, in particular women´s milieu, among other literary categories. In her book, written from her self-imposed exile in Portugal, Devi recreates Goa, former Portuguese colony, in the 1950s, before its annexation to India. A member of the Catholic gentry, Devi portrays the four hundred years of conflictive intimacy between Catholics and Hindus. Our main argument is that Devi´s empathy for her culture becomes even more explicit in Monção when her voice becomes one with that of all her women characters. Though they might be at odds, due to differences of caste, class and religion, Devi makes a point of showing that they are all part of the same cultural identity constantly remade through their own acts of refusal and recognition. This discussion will be framed in terms of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s theory of autobiography (2001) as well as the studies on Goan women by the Goan critics Propércia Correia Afonso (1928-1931), Maria Aurora Couto (2005) and Fátima da Silva Gracias (2007).


Author(s):  
María Elena Martos Hueso

Abstract:Since the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the recent history of Indian Literature in English has been characterised by a growing interest in rewriting the history of India from an angle diametrically opposed to that of official historiography. Taking as a starting point Foucault’s concept of Nietzschean genealogy, which emphasises the value of microhistory and interrogates the function of narrative linearity in historiographic practices, this paper analyses two analogous Indian English novels based on the independence and subsequent partition of the Indian subcontinent: The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh and Difficult Daughters by Manju Kapur. It mainly focuses on the deconstruction of the nationalist myth, where women and motherhood lay at the centre of the gestation and birth of the new nation.Keywords: Amitav Ghosh, Manju Kapur, The Shadow Lines, Diffi cult Daughters, history, genealogy, women, Indian Literature in English.Resumen:Desde la publicación de Midnight’s Children de Salman Rushdie, la historia reciente de la novela india en lengua inglesa se ha visto marcada por un interés creciente en reescribir la historia de la India desde un ángulo diametralmente opuesto al de la historiografía oficial. Partiendo del concepto de la genealogía nietzscheana de Foucault, que enfatiza el valor de la microhistoria y cuestiona la linealidad narrativa de la práctica historiográfica, este estudio analiza dos obras de inquietante paralelismo basadas en la independencia y posterior división del subcontinente indio: The Shadow Lines de Amitav Ghosh y Difficult Daughters de Manju Kapur. Se centra principalmente en la deconstrucción de los mitos nacionalistas, donde la mujer y la maternidad se convierten en foco de toda una alegoría en torno a la gestación y nacimiento de la nueva nación.Palabras clave: Amitav Ghosh, Manju Kapur, The Shadow Lines, Difficult Daughters, historia, genealogía, mujeres, literatura india en lengua inglesa.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 08
Author(s):  
Sultana Jahan

<p>The present paper is a sincere effort to explore the image of Indian women in the early 19th century social context as depicted in Sharat Chandra’s  novel S<em>rikanta</em>. In this novel Sharat Chandra’s  portrayal  of  women  characters-  Rajlaksmii,  Annada,    Abhaya  ,  and  Kamal Lata  assert    their  individuality, self-worth  and    deliverances  boldly  in  the  then  male-controlled  and traditional society. These characters are unwavering and resolute enough to cast around an emancipated futuristic outlook. They are all precursors to the later day women characters depicted by the feminist writers. Sharat chandra is not a feminist in the traditional sense nor does he take the side of forceful assertion of women rights but he shows    a  significant  understanding  of  woman  psyche  and  to  a  great  extent, protests against  social  and  religious  double  standard  that  ultimately  results  in  gender nonconformity.  He  values humanity more than chastity  and raises his voice against traditional  morality  and religious dogmatism  in depicting  illicit  love relationship  and in disclosing  the deceptions  underlying  the established  marriage  custom. To all  female  characters, Rajlaksmi,  Annada,Kamal  Lata,  and  Abhay,  marriage  fails  to provide  congenial atmosphere  to love and value each other;  rather to them, marriage is nothing but  religious  and social yolk that come up with patriarchal applaud   but result in self-deception. This paper is an attempt to elucidate Sharat Chandra’s unconventional idea of chastity and reversed roles of women going deep into the female characters of this novel who fearlessly look down on the patriarchal impediments.</p>


Author(s):  
Amardeep Singh

The Indian novel has been a vibrant and energetic expressive space in the 21st century. While the grand postcolonial gestures characteristic of the late-20th-century Indian novel have been in evidence in new novels by established authors such as Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, and Salman Rushdie, a slate of new authors has emerged in this period as well, charting a range of new novelistic modes. Some of these authors are Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga, Githa Hariharan, Samina Ali, Karan Mahajan, and Amitava Kumar. In general, there has been a move away from ambitious literary fiction in the form of the “huge, baggy monster” that led to the publication of several monumental postcolonial novels in the 1980s and 1990s; increasingly the most dynamic and influential Indian writing uses new novelistic forms and literary styles tied to the changing landscape of India’s current contemporary social and political problems. The newer generation of authors has also eschewed the aspiration to represent the entirety of life in modern India, and instead aimed to explore much more limited regional and cultural narrative frameworks. If a novel like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) took its protagonist all over the Indian subcontinent and indexed a large number of important historical controversies in the interest of broad representation, Padma Viswnanathan’s The Toss of a Lemon (2008) limits itself to a focus on a single Tamil Brahmin family’s orientation to issues of caste and gender, and remains effectively local to Tamil Nadu. There is no central agenda or defining idiom of this emerging literary culture, but three major groupings can be identified that encapsulate the major themes and preoccupations of 21st-century Indian fiction: “New Urban Realism,” “Gender and Secular History,” and “Globalizing India, Reinscribing the Past.”


Literator ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Murray

This article offers a feminist literary analysis of selected contemporary South African texts by women writers in order to explore how they represent female characters’ engagement with conventional understandings of time and its chronological and linear progression. These engagements are represented as being particularly fraught for women characters as they find themselves constrained by various temporally located constructions of femininity even as they attempt to heed the temporally dislocated voices of gendered trauma that consistently speak through their bodies. In this article, my focus will be on Bridget Pitt’s novel, Notes from the Lost Property Department (2015), Elleke Boehmer’s The Shouting in the Dark (2015) and Mohale Mashigo’s The Yearning (2016). Despite frequent references to the importance of temporality in making sense of the experiences of the female protagonists, there has been a dearth of scholarly attention to the complexities of the intersections between gender, time and trauma in contemporary South African fiction by women. While gender violence and trauma are topics that have received extensive critical scrutiny in South African literary studies, this article demonstrates that the inclusion of temporality in the analytical framework enables a richer and more nuanced reading of the experiences of the female characters in the selected texts.


Text Matters ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 135-144
Author(s):  
Monika Rogalińska

Women characters in Muriel Spark's novels are diverse, some strong and powerful, some weak and unable to make decisions. And there are characters who develop throughout the novel and learn from their own mistakes. From being passive, they gradually start acting and making their own choices. Loitering with Intent and The Public Image present women characters who go through metamorphosis, from being dependent on others into living their own lives and freeing themselves from former influences. Such kaleidoscopic change enables them not only to be able to finally make their own decisions but also to overcome many difficult situations threatening their future life. Fleur Talbot, a heroine in Loitering with Intent, finds herself at a point in which she thinks that everything she cares for is lost. Chronically passive and naïve, she cannot imagine another way of being until she understands that she is being cheated, that her life will be ruined if she does not act. Everyone around her seems to be in conspiracy against her; only taking a firm stand and opposing her surrounding world can help. Fleur's life has become totally dependent on her ability to be strong and decisive. She knows that if she remains what she is, her career and prospects for the future will be lost, so she decides to prove her determination and her will to be finally happy. Her transformation into a powerful character saves her dignity and makes her a successful writer. Annabel, a character in The Public Image is the same type of person as Fleur, as she lacks self-confidence and has no support from anybody, even her own husband. Muriel Spark, however, presents her as another example of a heroine who develops as the action progresses, able to evoke strength in herself when her situation seems hopeless. Annabel, at first treated as a puppet in the hands of other people, who use her image for their own benefit, shows that she is capable of anything by the book's end. When her career and reputation are threatened and her privacy invaded, she decides to leave the country. This requires both effort and sacrifice, as she has to leave behind everything she has worked for all her life, but this is the necessary price for her freedom. The ability of both female characters to show so much determination reveals an inherent inner strength, and their weakness and vulnerability as just superficial. When the situation requires it, both Annabel and Fleur are ready to fight for their rights, for their freedom and self esteem, and they discover that they are indeed capable of changing their lives.


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