Abstract
40 DCL
CLAI 2012
Maya
Devi J mayamahimaa@yahoo.co.in
Ambivalent Affiliations: Traditions of Dissent in Amitav Ghosh
with special reference to The Shadow
Lines and The Glass Palace
Abstract
Dissent, from the recognized lines
of thinking and their representation, is hardly a new phenomenon. Each period
of time has a set of cultural codes, values, customs, beliefs, ideologies etc.
endorsed by the ideological state apparatus which itself is a product of the
power structure formed out of the circulating power relations. The recognized
forms of knowledge systems / epistemologies and their associates on account of
their state of being recognized, hints at other deviant, dissident modes of
thoughts and actions which the dominant mode tries to contain by all possible
strategies including appropriation and adoption. The dissenting voices are put
to silence, traces are erased and often totally obliterated; but their presence
cannot be fully erased as the deviant thinking and dissident voices invariably
resist erasure, and like the engravings on a palimpsest that allows only
partial erasure, the tradition of dissent can be discerned from the binaries
present, in particular, in a literary text. A literary narrative consciously
created to depart from accepted trends, genres
( sometimes even the thematic concerns), often end up fluctuating
between the dominant and the deviant exemplifying the ambivalent affiliations
of the author with regard to the aspects mentioned above. The dominant voice
and the deviant voices of dissent are studied in the light of insights gathered
from Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines
and The Glass Palace.
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