Quest for Self-Identity in the Modern Indian Writings

Abstract

There has always been a space in modern Indian literature for the negotiation of questions of belonging and personhood on uneven social spaces. This paper compares two works by writers from the most marginalised sections of Indian society, These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone by Temsula Ao (2006) and Joothan: A Dalit's Life by Omprakash Valmiki (1997) to examine the literary techniques employed by these two writers to assert individual selfhood in the face of collective identity. The study, based on Stuart Hall's theory of cultural identity as becoming and Gayatri Spivak's concept of subaltern subjectivity, posits the idea of "double subaltern selfhood" in which both the Naga tribal subject and the Dalit subject are not only marginalised by the effects of colonial governance, but also, importantly, by the post-independence Indian nation-state itself. The paper suggests that both narratives act as a defiant mode of writing, writing as the last place of the self-determination of the nation's recalcitrant subject. The study also confirms that by comparing fiction with autobiography across genres, marginalised selfhood is shown to share a structure, as well as different methodologies for the reconstruction of the self.