Post-Structuralism: An Indian Preview - Igcollege.org

Proceedings of National Seminar on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature , Jan. 27-28, 2012, Nanded 

Post-Structuralism: An Indian Preview 

--Prof. Nishikant Mirajkar 

Dept. of English, Delhi University, Delhi. 

It has been a long practice among Indian 

litterateurs to borrow literary theories from the 

West as and when these become known to them, 

or, should I say, to welcome these with open 

arms without considering their viabilities in the 

Indian context or without trying to understand 

these with an Indian perspective, and then either 

engaging their creative talents to copy the 

models blindly or try to fit in the existing Indian 

creations to the canons of these theories while 

reviewing them. I remember an occasion when 

Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak once delivered a 

tedious lecture on Derrida in Delhi University 

and when the questions were invited after the 

lecture, Professor Premsing of the Department of 

Linguistics rose and said, “Madam, What 

difference would it take in our understanding of 

Indian literature if we scrap today’s lecture 

totally from our memory?” Taken aback, Gayatri 

fumbled for words before answering that 

question. 

Here in this paper, an attempt will be 

made to understand the post-structuralism by 

juxtaposing its features with the Indian scenario 

and then trying to judge its feasibility in 

understanding and evaluating Indian literature. 

We have to begin our quest from 

reviewing Roland Barthes (1915-1980). He was 

basically a structuralist, actually, the forerunner 

of the new generation that emerged in the sixties 

in Paris. His major contribution was in the field 

of semiotics of literature. Later, he emerged as 

the pioneer of post-structuralism, mainly with 

his article From work to Text. His 

revolutionary claim that the text is not an object, 

but it is a process, was the beginning of a new 

thinking. He highlighted the difference between 

the text as a book and the text as a literary 

experience by pronouncing that the objects of 

write-ups are available in the library, but the 

texts are sites where the playful creation of 

meaning goes on taking place continuously. This 

creation and recreation of meaning is different 

from receiving or accepting the write-up. It is a 

playful recreation of different meanings and 

patterns; similar to the enjoyment of sexual 

pleasure, claimed Roland Barthes. 

In order to understand the natural 

process of different perceptions of meaning 

claimed by Rolland Barthes, let us turn to a 

mischievously humorous story ignoring its 

superficiality in the current serious discourse. 

Once there was a teenager boy heavily addicted 

to tobacco-chewing. His father, disgusted with 

the repulsive addiction of the boy, decided to 

take him to a holy place hoping to motivate a 

positive change in his attitude. He took the boy 

to a temple of Vitthala and was delighted to find 

his son gazing intently at the idol. His joy, 

however, was short-lived when the son uttered, 

“Father, look, the God is demonstrating how the 

tobacco plant could grow only waist-high, by 

placing both his palms upon his waist!” They 

then went into a Ganesha-temple and looking at 

the idol of Ganesha with his right palm in a 

boon-giving posture and the left palm in a 

meditation posture with the thumb pressing the 

index finger, the boy exclaimed,”Father, the God 

is signaling that the leaf of the tobacco plant is a 

palm-size, but you should take just a pinch of 

it!” On seeing the idol of Hanuman with his 

puffed cheeks and raised arm in a striking 

position, the boy said, “Look, father, the God is 

relishing his tobacco-juice and warning us not to 

disturb him, else he would hit!” Leave aside the 

humor in this superficial story and deliberate 

over its message which indicates that there can 

be different and sometimes quite unexpected 

interpretations of the text akin to the personality, 

aptitude and interest of the interpreter. No 

branch of iconography would have predicted the 

interpretations imagined by the addicted boy of 

the story. It is a common experience that the 

rape scenes and fighting scenes in popular Hindi 

cinema invoke different responses from different 

types of the audience. While it induces disgust 

and fear in some viewers, every exposure of the 

rape-victim’s skin and advances of the rapist is 

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met with vulgar whistles and shrieks if 

excitement from the front-block viewers. 

Moving back from this transgression to 

the serious literary business, let us take into 

account the nature of the texts in ancient Indian 

literature. Ancient Indian texts like the 

Ramayana and the Mahabharata and even 

some of the later epics were never restricted to 

their written form. Interpolations and variations 

were not frowned at as the transmission of the 

texts was in the oral form. Thus they are aptly 

called as the mobile texts. A further extension of 

their mobility is underlined by the fact that their 

movement (I do not say the translation 

deliberately) into other Indian languages from 

Sanskrit is marked by genuine alterations and 

deviations in response to the literary traditions of 

those languages and influence of their 

surroundings. The Ramayana by Valmiki in 

Sanskrit, by Kamban in Tamil, by Tulsidas in 

Avadhi and by Eknath in Marathi are different 

varied forms of one text which is formed in the 

public psyche as The Ramayana. A common 

man would not believe you if you tell him that 

the famous Lakshmanresha, a circle drawn by 

Lakshman around their hut to protect Seeta from 

any possible danger warning her not to cross it 

under any circumstances, is not a part of the 

Sanskrit Valmiki Ramayana, or the extremely 

popular confronting dialogue between 

Lakshman and Parashuram is an invention of 

Ramleela troupes and not part of any written 

text, or the portrayal of Ram as an incarnation of 

the Almighty presented by Tulsidas is totally 

different from his portrayal as an ideal human 

being presented by Valmiki. This is exactly 

what is meant by “playful recreation of different 

meanings” as expressed by Roland Barthes. So 

the concept of mobile text in ancient Indian 

literature is quite helpful in understanding the 

concept of text as sites where the playful 

creation of meaning. 

Even when we come to the texts in 

modern times we find some useful illustrations 

to facilitate the understanding of the concept. 

Those familiar with Marathi poetry know how 

different critics have presented different 

interpretations of poems like Oudumbar by 

Balkavi, Chafa by Bee and Navavadhu Priya 

Mi Bavarate by Tambe. After initial debate 

over which interpretation is the correct one, 

finally it was agreed that all of them are 

simultaneously acceptable leaving place for 

further different interpretations, if any. 

Barthes developed this idea further in 

his book The Pleasure of the Text (1973/1975) 

and finally pronounced in Death of the Author 

(1977) that a perception of the text cannot be 

tied to the author, or a real person or his or her 

intention. This point can well be understood by 

taking into consideration appreciation of the 

sculptures of the copulating couples at 

Khajuraho. There have been different theories 

about the intension of the sculptors in sculpting 

such erotic figures in the vicinity of temples, but 

none of these match with the perception of the 

viewers while appreciating the artistic beauty of 

these sculptures. Coming back to the literary 

scenario, take the case of the historical novel 

Swami by Ranjit Desai. Rightly without taking 

into consideration his intentions, critics have 

interpreted and criticized the presentation of 

history, the characterization of the protagonist 

and the end of the novel glorifying the 

eradicated custom of Sati. Death of the God was 

proclaimed by Nietzsche. Now Roland Barthes 

proclaimed the death of the author. He pioneered 

the post-structural viewpoint that there is no 

possibility of the personality of the author being 

reflected in the text and also there is no need to 

investigate the intension of the author in order to 

decipher the meaning of the text. For, text is not 

at all a material object created by a person called 

the author. Text is created from the process of 

writing and the reader has the right to decipher 

the text. (Does this argument remind us of the 

reception theory in Comparative Literature? The 

readers’ response to literary creation is held 

there with equal importance and seriousness.) 

Let me cite an interesting episode from 

my childhood here. When I was studying in my 

S.S.C. class, we had the poem Datapasun 

Datakade by Vinda Karandikar in our textbook 

of Marathi. P.G.Sahasrabuddhe, a very reputed 

Marathi critic, used to write a ‘guide’ for the 

S.S.C. Marathi text, without any feeling of guilt 

or shame as his ‘guide’ was meant not for below 

average students to mug up the answers of 

probable questions, but for scholars to mould 

their talents effectively. Before discussing the 

poem, Sahasrabuddhe gave a note saying, “We 

give below the meaning of the poem as we 

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decipher it. We had sent this interpretation to the 

poet for his perusal, but in his reply he ridiculed 

us saying that this was not his intention at all 

while writing the poem and the poem is beyond 

our comprehension. However, despite this 

ridicule from the poet, we firmly believe that the 

meaning of the poem is as we are giving below.” 

Such bold rejection of the intention of the poet 

and firm insistence of the right of the reader to 

decipher the meaning of the poem came in 1957, 

well before Roland Barthes’ proclamation in 

1977! 

Barthes explained that the process of the 

construction of the meaning takes place in the 

reader, or in the readership. The author has 

nothing to do with it. He has done his job. He 

has written a text and presented what he wanted 

to present. Now he has to move away and allow 

the reader to negotiate with the write-up, 

decipher his meaning and create his text. He has 

to die so that the reader could be born. The death 

of the author is the birth of the reader and 

consequently the birth of the process of creating 

a text. As many texts of the same write-op are 

possible as many are the readers. This is the 

reason why there are different readings of a text 

leading to different types of analysis and 

different evaluations of the same text. For 

example, the feminist reading of 

V.S.Khandekar’s novels or even Vijay 

Tendulkar’s plays can bring out quite different 

evaluation of them than the traditional one and 

the cultural criticism of translations of 

Shakespeare’s plays in Marathi can bring out 

totally different picture that what we used to 

project. 

The notion of the ambiguity of the 

author and the non-rigid nature of the text is 

known to Indian literature since the ancient time. 

Who was Vyasa, the author of the 

Mahabharata? Modern research claims that 

Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata might 

not be a single person, but a tradition of 

disciples of the same clan. Even the text was not 

the same in the beginning as it appears today. 

Initially it was a small composition entitled 

Jaya, then it expanded to become the Bharata 

and finally it took the shape of the 

Mahabharata. As regards different readings of 

a single text, Shreemadbhagawadgeeta is a 

glaring example. Different commentators have 

interpreted its text differently. Shankaracharya 

found Sanyasa as its core-message, 

Dnyaneshwar emphasized on Bhakti and Tilak 

interpreted the same text as giving the message 

of karmayoga. 

Having said all this and having 

understood the notions in the light of Indian 

literature, it would not be impertinent to raise a 

question, which should be lingering in our mind 

by now. Things like insignificance of the author 

while deciphering the meaning of the text and 

the right of the reader to decipher the meaning 

are all right, but what about enriching the 

sensitivities of the reader by taking into 

consideration the personality of the author? It 

may add new dimensions and extra layers of 

perception to his understanding. Take the 

example of Savarkar’s poem Sagara, Prana 

Talamalala. Savarkar composed this poem on 

the beach of Brighton when the clouds of the 

possibility of him being arrested in England 

were hovering over his mind and his heart was 

paining with the fear of losing the sight of his 

motherland forever. If a reader approaches this 

poem with full knowledge of Savarkar’s 

personality, his unprecedented sacrifice for the 

nation and the condition of his mind when he 

composed the poem, his deciphering the 

meaning is bound to be enriched. Ganesh 

Choudhari was an over-sensitive schizophrenic 

man in Jalgao. He killed his wife and children in 

a fit of rage brutally with an ace. Later, in the 

prison, as part of his mental treatment he was 

advised to express his feelings in words. He 

wrote poems and the poems were o such a 

caliber that the collection of those poems bagged 

the literary award of the Government of 

Maharashtra. The anguish of his repenting 

broken heart is intensely expressed in those 

poems. Now, if a reader deciphers the meaning 

of these poems with the knowledge of the poet’s 

personality, his deciphering is bound to be 

enriched. 

Exactly the same tune is found in the 

arguments of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), 

another flag-bearer of.post-structuralism. He 

contradicted Barthes’ concept of total 

elimination of author and argued that, if writing 

is considered as a cultural and historical process, 

then authorship is an essential and inevitable 

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factor of this process and it cannot be totally 

eliminated. 

Foucault’s another contribution in poststructuralism 

is in the area of relation between 

history and literature. In his book The 

Archeology of Knowledge (1972), Foucault 

claims that history can never be presented in a 

static form; for, it consists of various pasts, 

various chronologies and cause-effect relations 

and hierarchies. The entire fiery debate over the 

historicity of Vijay Tendulkar’s play 

Ghashiram Kotwal becomes insignificant in 

this light. Foucault discusses four stages of the 

history of European literature that corresponded 

with four ideologies. According to him, the stage 

of renaissance corresponded with the ideology 

of resemblance, the classical stage corresponded 

with the ideology of discrimination, the modern 

stage corresponded with chronology and the 

structuralist/post-modern stage with order of 

things. (We can see that Comparative Literature 

is an assemblage of all these four 

ideologies.)Foucault raises the question why 

can’t we presume that there are certain thoughts 

or passions or ideologies behind discourses and 

answers it that it is because this means imposing 

present presumptions upon the past, watching 

the past through the glasses of our ideologies. 

Again, turning to the scenario of the homeground, 

we find that this was exactly what 

happened in the case of criticism of Saint 

Literature in Marathi. G.B.Sardar saw a 

methodical social protest in the entire saint 

literature and acclaimed it for its social 

achievement (Santawanmayachi Samajik 

Falashruti), whereas Dalit critics like 

Gangadhar Pantawane condemned the saint 

literature, as according to him, it lacked the will 

and courage to challenge and change the social 

system which wasthe root-cause of the plight of 

the masses. Both these divergent judgments 

were the result of the fallacy mentioned by 

Foucault. Instead of weighing the past with our 

present ideologies, Foucault suggests, we should 

investigate archeologically the scenario of the 

concerned time and discover the happenings 

which can be astonishing for today’s point of 

view and try to present the system or ideology 

behind them. 

In his most famous book of 1971 

entitled Madness and Civilization (A history 

of Insanity in the Age of Reason) Foucault has 

deliberated over different imbalances in the 

society. He says that these imbalances are 

basically imbalances of power and these 

imbalances create knowledge. Foucault takes 

parallels from the patterns of prison, factory, 

hospitals and educational institutions and 

concludes that power domination creates docile 

bodies. In rather surprising conclusion Foucault 

claims that, in pre-modern times, the control of 

power over individual was not total; on the 

contrary, the freedom of an individual has 

drastically shrinked in the modern Western 

culture that vows to nurture individualism. 

Foucault brings in the example of public 

execution in pre-modern times and says that, in 

such social power-exhibition of the 

establishment, there could have been always a 

chance to the victim to express his hatred 

towards the system and the spectators could also 

participate in that. Consequently, this might 

have resulted in failure of the intention of 

creating a threatening impression upon the 

spectators. This, he claims, led to the idea of 

prison. The prisons are built, he explains, on the 

concept of Panopticon, that is, creating a feeling 

that you are constantly watched and observed. A 

central pillar is erected around which there are 

barracks of the prisoners for the purpose. The 

prisoners are thus constantly under the 

impression that they are being watched and thus 

begin self-discipline. The same principle is used 

in the construction of mental asylums and 

educational institutions. Comparing the two 

situations, Foucault infers that it was not 

possible in any pre-modern societies to control 

the individual’s body through his mind, as is 

done by bourgeois power-groups in modern 

times. 

In accepting it as it is. There are scenes 

of public execution in Shudraka’s Sanskrit play 

Mrchhakatikam as well as Vijay Ttendulkar’s 

Marathi play Ghashiram Kotwal, but none of 

these contain the elements or atmosphere 

suggested by Foucault. The public does 

sympathize with the victims of the execution in 

both these cases, but the show of hatred towards 

the system which Foucault has suggested, is 

totally missing. Even in history chronicles, the 

brutal public execution of Annaji Datto under 

the feet of an elephant ordered by Sambhaji and 

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later, the brutal public execution of Sambhaji 

ordered by Aurangjeb have been described 

without any mention of the expression of hatred 

towards the system either by Annaji Datto or 

Sambhaji. Similar difficulty arises in the case of 

Foucault’s description of prisons. Sanskrit 

Bhagawatapuranam and several narrative epics 

in Indian languages based on it, like Shreedhar’s 

Harivijay in Marathi, describe imprisonment of 

Vasudev and Devaki in Mathura for decades and 

many bakhars describe political imprisonments 

in mountain forts or Shivaji’s house-arrest in 

Agra. However, nowhere the panopticon central 

tower is mentioned. Rather the prisoners are 

described to have been kept in dark cells 

(preferably underground) behind seven heavily 

guarded doors one after the other. The prisoners 

did not have a constant feeling of being watched 

all the time and there was no question of selfdiscipline 

under that mental tension. Vasudev 

and Devaki gave birth to eight children in the 

cell though Kansa kept on killing them 

immediately after birth. Political prisoners in 

mountain forts engaged themselves in planning 

conspiracies. There was no self-disciplining 

under the tension of being watched 

continuously. Educational institutions in ancient 

India were Gurukuls away from the public 

hassles, in a free atmosphere in Nature. Contrary 

to Foucault’s description of mental asylum, 

mentally imbalanced behavior of spiritually 

possessed people like Govindaprabhu was the 

subject of reverence and devotion in medieval 

India. Hence it is apparent that Foucault’s 

observations are not based on Universal facts. 

Mind-control system in India and eastern 

countries was not through panopticon, but 

through religious construct. Instead of the 

panopticon, there is the concept of the 

omnipresence of God, which created the feeling 

of being watched by the supernatural power all 

the time. This led to self-discipline not through 

tension under fear, but as a moral duty. Concepts 

of Swarga or and Narka or Kayamat created 

self-discipline with fear, but without tension. 

Belief in the cycle of birth>death>re-birth 

monitored behavior of people here. 

However, Foucault did present 

shattering challenges to the established ideas of 

evaluating criteria of literature. He made us 

aware that the discourse of literature is one of 

the discourses originating in the society. He 

uncovered the fact that there is politics in giving 

absolute autonomy to literary discourse. Edward 

Said’s entire book Orientalism is based on this 

awareness. 

Later, Jacques Derrida put focus on 

deconstruction, using the same data. He 

highlighted the possibility of various 

interpretations due to different modes and 

designs of deconstruction. Sometimes these 

possibilities may be contradictory to each other. 

Let me give you a personal example here, 

assuring that it is not as superficial as that of the 

tobacco-addicted boy referred to earlier. Do you 

remember the fine Marathi film Umbaratha? 

Smita Patil, in that film, has excellently depicted 

the mental suffocation and tension of a housewife, 

who determines to step out of her domestic 

constraints in order to ascertain her identity. 

After watching the film, my orthodox elder 

sister had remarked, “Look, how the film has 

powerfully depicted that it is not proper for a 

woman to cross the threshold of her house in 

pursuit of her identity!” Now, this is exactly in 

contrast to the message of the film as most of us 

conceive it. However, this was her mode of 

deconstruction and it has its value in its own 

right. Different readings of a text like the 

feminist reading, the Marxist reading, the 

Sociological readings etc. are, in fact, 

deconstructions of the text in different modes. 

So are the different uses of myths from the 

author’s point of view. 

What the post-stucturalists from Roland 

Barthes to Derrida have explicitly expressed is 

the plurality of literature and literary 

interpretations. This has to be understood, 

debated and testified in the Indian preview, 

instead of following their discourse blindly and 

obediently. 

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FINDING ECHOES IN LITERARY WORK 

--Dr Shailaja B. Wadikar 

School of Lang., Lit. &Cul. Studies 

S. R. T. Marathwada University, 

Nanded 

The dissatisfaction of the younger 

generation of poets and critics with biohistorical 

and subjective literary criticism and 

the growth of Formalism brought about two 

important developments on both the sides of 

the Atlantic. I. A. Richard’s Principles of 

Literary Criticism,Science and Poetry, and 

Practical Criticism; William Empson’s Seven 

Types of Ambiguity, the critical essays of 

T.S. Eliot, and the essays of F. R. Leavis in 

his journal Scrutiny ... established Practical 

Criticism as a theory and method of literary 

criticism from the 1930s to the 1970s. 1 

John Crowe Ransom’s book titled The 

New Criticism published in 1941, gave 

currency to the term ‘New Criticism’ in 

America and Europe. So, Practical Criticism is 

a British term that emphasizes the analysis and 

interpretation of literature without the 

reference to any context or author, which is 

later on termed as New Criticism in America. 

Like practical criticism, new criticism also 

stresses the decontextualized objective reading 

of the text. In the new critic’s view, literary 

criticism has nothing to do with social context 

or literary background of the work or the 

effects of the work on its readers. It is 

concerned with the work itself. The work has 

become the text now. So, the text is allimportant 

for the critic. New criticism, 

therefore, relies on the close study of the text 

as implicit in I.A. Richards’s, Ezra Pound’s, 

and T. S. Eliot’s ‘Objective Criticism’. 

Cleanth Brooks and R. P. Warren collaborated 

in producing such textbooks of practical 

criticism as: Understanding Poetry (1938), 

Understanding Fiction (1943), and 

Understanding Drama (1945). The other 

critics, writing in this mode, are Allen Tate, R. 

P. Blackmur, William K. Wimsatt, F.R. 

Leavis, Rene Wellek and Austen Warren. The 

tenets of the new criticism, in brief, are as 

follows: 

• A poem is an object of study in 

itself. 

• It is independent, autonomous, and 

self-sufficient. 

• The art of poetry is not 

teleological,i.e. has no practical purpose/ use. 

• In the new criticism, there is no 

reference to the biography of the author or his 

social conditions or his ideology. It is because 

of its critical focus on the literary work in 

isolation far from the circumstances under 

which it is written and the effects it produces 

on its readers, the new criticism may be seen 

as a type of formalism. 

• What is of prime importance to the 

new critic is his explication or close reading of 

the text. 

• The most important feature of the 

new criticism is that it is basically verbal. It 

views literary language as a special kind of 

language, as it is different from the scientific 

language and the everyday language. The 

emphasis is on the overall “structure” of the 

poem and its “organic unity”. The two can 

never be separated: the verbal structure i.e. the 

form and the meaning i.e. the content of the 

poem. A poem is, therefore, something 

unparaphrasable, although it looks 

paraphrasable. So, Cleanth Brooks calls this 

semantic phenomenon “the heresy of 

paraphrase.” 

• The new criticism does not seem to 

distinguish between literary genres. 

• In the view of a new critic, there 

exist ‘tension’, ‘irony’ and ‘paradox’ in a 

poem. A poem represents “reconciliation of 

diverse impulses or juxtaposition of 

heterogeneous and opposite forces.” The work 

has a form which consists essentially in its 

structure or pattern of meanings. It is 

characterised by completeness, integrity, and 

unity. The best examples of the theory and 

practice of new criticism are found in Cleanth 

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Brooks’s The Well Wrought Urn (1947), W. 

K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon (1954), Rene 

Wellek’s and Austin Warren’s Theory of 

Literature (1973), Rene Wellek’s A History of 

Modern Criticism in six volumes (1986). 

New Criticism: Background 

The nature and scope of new 

criticism can be understood by taking into 

consideration the brief outline of the 

development of the English critical tradition. It 

is observed that foundation of the Western 

literary criticism lies in the writings of 

classical critics like Aristotle, Horace, and 

Longinus. Aristotle’s Poetics is considered the 

greatest treatise in the field of drama, poetry, 

and criticism. Aristotle wrote it with two 

intentions: (a) for giving principles as 

guidelines for the construction of a play; (b) 

for his own understanding and appreciation of 

existing Greek plays. In that sense, Poetics is 

partly ‘theoretical’ and partly ‘applied’. 

Similarly, Horace’s Ars Poetica is also 

pragmatic in its aim. In it, there are ‘rules’ for 

the apprentice dramatists and poets which 

Horace lays down as a series of ‘do’s’ and 

‘don’ts’. Still, it is not considered theoretical 

in its orientation. 

‘On the Sublime’ by Longinus is 

actually a magnificent piece of applied or 

practical criticism which later on came to be 

regarded as the old version of the new 

criticism. Here the pieces of Greek poetry and 

drama are examined on the basis of diction, 

imagery, verse movement, and tone. The 

readers’ attention is kept centred on the 

stylistic features of the chosen passage. The 

analysis of the sublime -- be it imagery, 

metaphor, or any such rhetorical figure-- 

anticipates the modern critic’s close analysis 

of poems. The sublime, according to 

Longinus, lies in excellence and distinction of 

expression from the common one. Here, he 

seems to demand, like the stylistic critics, 

deviations from the norms of regular grammar 

and usage. Similarly, he appears to think that 

poetical devices are valued only in terms of 

their function in a work. 2 

The fundamental questions in literary 

criticism are: (a) What is the nature of a 

literary representation? (2) What is its 

function? Literary criticism enables us to 

examine thoroughly the structure/form of a 

work of art in terms of its constituent parts so 

that it will be totally an objective 

interpretation. Aristotle anticipates the same in 

his analysis of tragedy. 

Following the historical approach, we 

see that the major critics in English literary 

criticism are Sidney, Dryden, Dr. Johnson, 

Coleridge, Arnold, Eliot, and Leavis. In the 

evaluation of a work of art, the poet or the 

writer is placed in his times and attention is 

given to the state of the English language at 

the time of his/ her writing. Notable examples 

are found in Sidney’s examination of Spenser, 

Dryden’s and Arnold’s estimates of Chaucer, 

and Dr. Johnson’s criticism of Shakespeare. 

Another major trend in English 

literary criticism is bio-literary approach. 

Here, the personality of the poet is taken into 

consideration and his/her achievements are 

related to his intellectual development and 

character. Famous example of it is Dr. 

Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779-81). 

T. S. Eliot, a classicist, is obviously a 

great opponent of romanticism. In “Tradition 

and Individual Talent” he states, “…the more 

perfect the artist, the more completely separate 

in him will be the man who suffers and the 

mind which creates; the more perfectly will 

the mind digest and transmute the passions 

which are its material.” 3 Coleridge’s 

comments in his lectures on Shakespeare and 

his scrutiny of Wordsworth’s poetic theory 

and practice in Biographia Literaria (1817) 

the chapters XIX, XX, and XXII of the book 

are the best examples of applied criticism. 

While commenting on Wordsworth’s unique 

use of the English language, he reveals 

Wordworth’s mastery of the language, 

particularly in the use of different stylistic 

features. 

Too much emphasis on the 

biographical criticism in the late Victorian 

period (e. g. Matthew Arnolds critical 

estimates of the English poets from Chaucer 

onwards) led to the emergence of ‘practical 

criticism’ in the 20th century. This movement 

“opposed itself against the prevailing interest 

of the scholars and the critics of that era with 

the biographies of authors, the social context 

of literature and literary history by insisting 

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that the proper concern of literary criticism is 

not with the external circumstances or the 

effects of a work, but with a detailed 

consideration of the work itself.” 4 T. S. Eliot’s 

‘theory of impersonality’, which is considered 

to be his greatest contribution to the field of 

poetry and criticism, marks the beginning of 

the new or practical criticism. He emphasises 

the autonomy of the work of art in his famous 

essay “Tradition and Individual Talent”. In 

Eliot’s words, 

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, 

but an escape from emotion; it is not the 

expression 

of personality, but an escape from 

personality.... 5 

In another famous phrase from his 

essay on “Hamlet” (1919), he describes the 

work of art as an ‘objective correlative’ for the 

experience which may have engendered it-- an 

impersonal re-creation which is the 

autonomous object of attention. In other 

words, it is “the only way of expressing 

emotion through a set of objects, a chain of 

events, a situation as a formula.” 6 The other 

names associated with this approach are Ezra 

Pound, I. A. Richards, William Empson, and 

F.R. Leavis. 

A poem or a piece of writing, in 

Richards’s view, stands all by itself. His 

approach to literature is based on the 

experiments, he did in Cambridge. He used to 

give an unsigned poem to the undergraduate 

students and invite their uninhibited and 

unconditioned responses. Thus, the focus of 

his approach is on recording of what happened 

to a reader while reading poetry. A poem is, 

no doubt, a response of the poet to an object or 

situation. It throws light on his/her state of 

mind. However, the poem also has its 

inclusive or ironical structure, which is 

realised by analysing language, imagery, and 

rhythm. 

The extension of Richards’s work is 

noticed in William Empson, especially in his 

books-- Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and 

The Structure of Complex Words. His 

emphasis in the analysis of poetry is on its 

ambiguity. According to him, it is due to 

ambiguity that there are several reactions to 

the same piece. As the stress is on the 

ambiguous language, Empson concentrates his 

attention on the diction and imagery. In his 

analysis of a poem, Empson has tried to look 

for double or contradictory meanings. The best 

example of it is his interpretation of 

Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 83. 

However, there is a slight difference 

in Empson’s method and that of Richards. 

Richards’s approach is empirical. And for this 

experimental method, the reader’s response is 

the foundation. But Empson is not interested 

in the reader’s psychology but in the context 

in which the word occurs. Connotations, for 

him, are more important than denotations. So, 

he thinks that the reader, while he is reading a 

poem, has to pay attention to the context rather 

than to the lexical meaning. In short, both, 

Richards and Empson pay attention to the 

reader’s response in terms of meaning, but 

from different angles. For Richards, in the 

interpretation of a poem, the psychology of the 

reader is important and for Empson, the 

connotation of the diction is important. 

F.R. Leavis, through his journal 

Scrutiny (1932-53), made remarkable 

contribution to the practical/applied criticism. 

One of the columns of this journal consisted of 

his interpretation of the passages from English 

literature. This experimental analysis of 

innumerable passages brought the practical 

criticism to a great degree of refinement. 

Criticism, in Leavis’s view, should not be 

regarded as a method of neutral literary or 

rhetorical analysis. It must enable the reader to 

distinguish between a vital and a slovenly 

piece of literature. A successful poem, for 

him, is one, in which there is an integration of 

imagery, movement, and attitudes into a single 

complex whole. Through his analysis, the 

reader has to give his estimate of whether a 

writer has cast his thought in the concrete, felt 

terms or has merely left it as an abstraction. In 

his analysis of some of the passages from 

Macbeth, in his work The Living Principle, he 

brings to the reader’s notice the efficacy of the 

practical criticism not only as a method of 

literary analysis, but as a tool of judgement. 

However, Leavis’s approach to 

literature is not that of a rhetorical critic. For 

him, literature is a powerful weapon for 

effecting a moral change in society. So, being 

84 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1


a moralist, poets have to be sincere and the 

object of practical criticism is to examine 

whether the poet has successfully attained the 

technique of sincerity. What one can observe 

in Leavis’s critical work is his “literary 

sensibility, capacity for intense concentration, 

commitment to local textual analysis, and an 

inclusive morality. It is due to his influence, 

practical criticism has come to be regarded as 

‘close analysis’. ” 7 

The new trend in criticism has been 

noticed since the 1920s in Britain and since 

the 1930s in America. The critics revolted 

against the existing philological approach, 

which is based on the historical study of 

language. There was an emphatic demand to 

study the poem as a poem or literature as 

literature. This new movement came to be 

regarded as ‘New Criticism’ which includes 

such critics as J.C. Ransom, Allen Tate, 

Cleanth Brooks, and R.P. Warren. “All these 

New Critics sought precision and structural 

tightness in the literary work; they favoured a 

style and tone that tended towards irony; they 

insisted on the presence within the work of 

everything necessary for its analysis and they 

called for an end to a concern by critics and 

teachers of English with matters outside the 

work itself-- the life of the author, the history 

of his or her times, or the social and economic 

implications of the literary work.” 8 Their wellknown 

books mentioned earlier -- 

Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding 

Fiction (1943), Understanding Drama (1945), 

and Well Wrought Urn (1947) -- comprise an 

analysis of a number of passages and works. 

The method that is adopted for analysis is a 

question-and-answer method, where students 

are stimulated to give answers on their own 

instead of relying on the information from a 

poet’s biography or the history of literature. 

They have to analyse the feelings and 

emotions of a poem through the diction, the 

imagery, the verse movement, etc. all of which 

impart meaning to a literary piece. The 

students are also asked to find out the presence 

of ambiguity, irony, tension, paradox, etc. in a 

given literary work. Well Wrought Urn 

comprises Brooks’s sustained study of wellknown 

poems from Donne’s “Canonization” 

to Yeats’s “Among School Children”. In his 

book titled Understanding Poetry, written in 

collaboration with R.P. Warren, he has given 

the techniques of the new criticism to be used 

in the class-rooms for the interpretation and 

appreciation of poetry. It is for this reason that 

he has been described as the systematizer and 

technician of the New Criticism. 9 Rene Wellek 

is quite justified, when he says: “He (Cleanth 

Brooks) has his own personal theory. He has 

taken the terminology of Richards, deprived it 

of its psychologist’s presuppositions, and 

transformed it into a remarkable, clear system. 

It allows him to analyse poems as structures of 

tensions: in practice, of paradoxes and 

ironies.” 10 

Approach and Interpretation 

According to the new critics, in the 

interpretation of literature, the focus should be 

neither on the writer nor on the reader but on 

“the words on the page”. If the focus is on the 

writer, the result is intentional fallacy and if it 

is on the reader, the result is affective fallacy. 

As the literary work is autonomous and self 

sufficient, the reader should not go outside the 

text for its interpretation. 

Interpretation of Poetry 

The steps that are followed in the 

interpretation of a poem are as follows: 

• Read the poem carefully several 

times. 

• Note carefully the poem’s title and 

its relationship to the main argument. 

• Study the diction in the light of 

denotations and connotations; try to find out 

the etymological roots of the words, wherever 

necessary. 

• Examine all allusions with reference 

to the primary text or source. 

• Analyse the images, symbols, 

tropes, etc. and examine their relationships. 

• Analyse the structural pattern of the 

lines/ stanzas. 

• Consider such elements as tone, 

theme, attitude, perspective etc. related to the 

dramatic situation. 

• Note the tensions, ambiguities, or 

paradoxes and study their interrelationships. 

• Narrate how the poem achieves its 

dominant effect. 

Living in Sin 

85 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1


The teacher can ask the students to 

analyse the poem with regard to its imagery, 

diction, syntax, and rhythm. Using this 

analysis, the students can arrive at an 

interpretation of the poem. 

She had thought the studio would keep 

itself; 

no dust upon the furniture of love. 

Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal, 

the panes relieved of grime. A plate of 

pears, 

a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat 

5 stalking 

the picturesque amusing mouse 

had risen at his urging. 

Not that at five each separate stair 

would writhe 

under the milkman’s tramp; that 

morning light 

so coldly would delineate the scraps 

10 

of last night’s cheese and three 

sepulchral bottles; 

that on the kitchen shelf among the 

saucers 

a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own-- 

- 

envoy from some village in the 

moldings... 

Meanwhile, he, with a yawn, 

15 

sounded a dozen notes upon the 

keyboard, 

declared it out of tune, shrugged at the 

mirror, 

rubbed at his beard, went out for 

cigarettes; 

while she, jeered by the minor demons, 

pulled back the sheets and made the 

bed and found 20 

a towel to dust the table-top, 

and let the coffee-pot boil over on the 

stove. 

By evening she was back in love again, 

though not so wholly but throughout 

the night 

she woke sometimes to feel the daylight 

coming 25 

like a relentless milkman up the stairs. 

--Adrienne Rich 

(Mcmahan, Elizabeth, Susan X Day, 

Robert Funk(eds.). Literature and the Writing 

Process. V edition. U. S. A.: Prentice Hall, 

1999, 614.) 

Imagery: 

The kind of imagery, a poet or a 

writer uses, depends on the age to which 

he/she belongs. The 20 th century is the age in 

which the two world wars broke out. It has 

faced uncertainties that accompany crises. 

People have faced anxieties and tensions 

which are reflected in the literature of the age. 

In this age, poetry has become more prosaic 

and so has its imagery. The present poem 

‘Living in Sin’ is no exception to it. 

Adrienne Rich is a feminist criticpoet. 

In the present poem, she depicts the 

helpless condition of women in maledominated 

society where women are simply 

taken for granted. She throws light on the 

burning fact that still in the later half of the 

20 th century, where everyone has the right to 

enjoy independence, women are used just 

either as stepping stones or as slaves to their 

male-counterparts, satisfying and fulfilling 

their needs. 

The poem creates a visual picture of 

the house of a lady. The important images in 

the poem are ‘the studio’, ‘the furniture of 

love’, ‘taps less vocal’ , ‘panes relived of 

grime’, ‘a piano’, ‘a cat’, ‘a mouse’, and the 

title itself ‘Living in Sin’. The sensuous 

imagery is reinforced by such phrases as ‘the 

studio’ and ‘furniture of love’. The studio 

seems to stand for the heart of the lady. She 

wishes that her heart and mind should be pure, 

sacred, untroubled by dirt. But all her 

expectations are futile and useless. She is 

totally helpless and has to submit herself to the 

man’s passion or lust, and, that too, against her 

wishes. The feeling of love has been reduced 

to furniture which is full of dust. Love for her 

is lifeless as her companion has forgotten that 

she also has her individual personality and 

identity. The studio is bound to gather dust. 

The lady desires that her studio should 

be calm, clean, and placid where even the taps 

should be less vocal and window-panes should 

be relieved of grime. However, the same thing 

happens with the panes as with the furniture. 

86 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1


The panes, too, are bound to collect dirt, dewdrops, 

etc. They are symbolic as they indicate 

the life of the lady where everything is quite 

vague, unclear, and uncertain. 

The most important images are- ‘the 

mouse’ and ‘the cat’ and ‘their game’. The 

game symbolizes the kind of life that is going 

on in that ‘studio’ and the relationship that 

exists between the lady and the man. The cat 

stands for the male-companion and the mouse 

for the protagonist, that is, the lady. ‘A kind of 

hide and seek game’ is going on where a cat’s, 

‘stalking’ remains successful in capturing the 

prey. The lady is as helpless as the mouse and, 

therefore, remains in the clutches of her 

unwanted but unavoidable male-companion of 

‘night’. 

Thus, the first eight lines illustrate the 

relationship that exists between the lady and 

the man. In the beginning, she thinks 

positively. When the man asks her to ‘come’, 

she has the vision of ‘a plate of pears’, ‘a 

piano with a Persian shawl’. But what she 

faces in reality is the vision of writhing of 

stairs under the milkman’s tramp, early in the 

morning. In short, the things do not turn up 

according to her expectations. The cheese and 

sepulchral bottles indicate the repeated nightly 

actions of the companions. 

The next two lines, i.e. 14 and 15 give 

us the feeling that there is another woman in 

the kitchen. She has beetle-eyes and is 

watching the lady. Maybe, she is from ‘some 

black village’ and is envious of the lady. 

The man’s action of checking the 

piano- ‘whistling’ shows his boredom, 

carelessness and indifference to the lady’s 

feelings and emotions. He thinks that she is 

bound to satisfy him. With a yawn he wakes 

up, plays the piano and declares it out of tune. 

Specting his beard, he goes out for cigarettes. 

Here, the piano also seems to stand for the 

lady. The lady, for the man, is a plaything. 

And this piano, for him, is out of tune. ‘A 

fallen towel to dust the table top’ indicates the 

lady’s futile efforts to clean her studio and 

furniture of love. Meanwhile, with the return 

of the man, she comes to know of the reality 

and once again she is back in love though not 

wholly but all through the night, waiting for 

the milkman’s tramp that represents the 

monotony of our present, everyday life. 

Thus, the images used in the poem are 

not only complex but at times complicated 

also. They refer to the illicit relationship 

shared by the protagonist with the man. The 

very title of the poem is highly symbolic in 

nature. The man and the lady are living in sin 

as their relationship is based not on love but 

on mere physical attraction. The lady wishes 

to maintain secrecy in the relationship. That is 

why she wishes ‘the taps less vocal’. 

The poem can be divided into three 

parts. The first part symbolizes her optimism, 

as the lady expects ‘no dust upon the furniture 

of love’, ‘a plate of pears’ and ‘a piano with a 

Persian shawl’. The second part depicts the 

fact, that is, the man’s indifference to the 

lady’s emotional involvement in their 

relationship. The piano that he declares ‘out of 

tune’ actually throws light on their extramarital 

relationship which is out of harmony. 

The resultant effect is, naturally, of 

depression. The life, projected here, is 

essentially illogical, irrational and absurd. The 

last part of the poem indicates the no-escaperoute 

or the dead end of the lady’s journey. 

She has ‘a towel to dust the table-top’, and ‘by 

evening she was back in love again’. The lady 

has no alternative but to continue ‘living in 

sin’. 

It seems that the poem might have 

been written during the second half of the 

twentieth century, when under the impact of 

World Wars, people were less concerned 

about the moral values. In that sense, the poem 

throws light on the absurd, illogical, irrational 

life devoid of values in the aftermath of the 

World Wars. The lack seems to have 

continued till today. 

Diction: 

The epithets used have quite a grim 

connotation. For example, ‘the less vocal 

taps’, ‘furniture with dust’ a piano ‘out of 

tune’, ‘last night’s cheese’ ‘sepulchral bottles’. 

All of them have negative connotations. ‘The 

less vocal taps’ is an expression that indirectly 

brings to the notice the uselessness of female 

expectations in male-dominated society. 

‘Furniture of love’ and ‘full of dust’ connote 

that women are always taken for granted even 

87 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1


in personal matter such as love. So, the 

furniture is full of dust, suggesting that 

everything goes against her expectation. The 

phrase ‘the last night’s cheese and sepulchral 

bottles’ connotes that the lady’s life is similar 

to them, rather ragged, useless and scattered 

and her body is like an empty tomb. She is 

alive just in her shadow-like existence. 

The verbs used are dynamic, depicting 

some kind of action. For example, ‘relieved 

of’, ‘stalking’ ‘shrugged’, ‘went out’, ‘to 

dust’, ‘was in love again’. These verbs seem to 

have a negative meaning attached to them. 

They indicate the fruitless expectations of the 

lady and her cunning companion’s 

indifference to her emotions. 

The diction used is formal. There are 

no contractions, no dialectal terms, and no 

colloquial expressions. The words used are 

simple. Some of them are long, having four 

syllables, such as ‘picturesque’, ‘companion’, 

‘delineate’; some have three syllables, such as 

‘relentless’, ‘furniture’, ‘contending’; majority 

of them have two syllables, such as 

‘milkman’, ‘granted’, ‘sounded’, ‘pleaded’ 

‘moulding’, ‘throughout’, etc. And some of 

the words are monosyllabic, for example, 

‘love’, ‘dust’, keep’, etc. 

Suffixes such as—‘-less’ as in 

‘relentless’, ‘-ian’ as in ‘Persian’, ‘-ly’ as in 

‘coldly’, etc., are used. Poetic license is not 

used. The picture depicted is realistic in 

nature. 

Syntax: 

The poem consists of 26 lines. A full 

stop is used four times, after second, in the 

middle of the fourth, after the seventh, and at 

the end of the last line. In the third, fifth, 

fifteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and 

nineteenth, a comma is used in the middle. An 

apostrophe is used two times (i.e. in the words 

– milkman’s, night’s). Dash (-) is used at the 

end of the thirteenth line and a semi- colon is 

used three times, viz. after the first, the 

eleventh, and the eighteenth line. The poem is 

not divided into stanzas and looks like a 

unified whole. 

Rhythm: 

The poem is in blank verse, that is, an 

unrhymed iambic pentameter verse as each 

line consists of ten syllables (five feet) and in 

the lines, the unstressed syllable is followed 

by a stressed one. 

The General Interpretation: 

The poem ‘Living in Sin’ depicts 

the life of two persons, living together but a 

separate life. From the title, it is noticed that 

they are not husband and wife. The situation 

depicted appears to be an imposed one on the 

lady. They seem to be young, and they may 

continue to live the same type of life, but 

know well that their worlds have to be 

separate mentally rather than physically. 

The title itself is very apt. The diction 

used in the poem and the situation projected 

indirectly throw light on the kind of life in the 

twentieth century. It is the age of two world 

wars-- spreading frustration, corruption 

everywhere. Poverty, unemployment, and loss 

of the means of livelihood are the major 

problems that the people have been facing. 

Another problem is that women are always 

taken for granted in a male-dominated society. 

From the description, it appears, the 

poem depicts an upper middle class lady, 

leading a solitary life. Due to the monotonous 

life, she is frustrated and sad at heart, but life 

moves on and her ‘night’s companion’ 

remains careless about it. Such phrases as- 

‘shrugged at the mirror’, ‘went out for 

cigarettes’ indicate his carelessness. The 

phrase ‘rubbed at his beard’ points out the 

daily routine of the mates and ‘relentless 

milkman’ describes the tedious life of the 

companions. 

‘Last night’s cheese’ and ‘sepulchral 

bottles’ throw light on their nightly activities 

where she has to help herself with drink to 

submit to her male-counterpart. The line - ‘she 

was back in love again though not so wholly 

but throughout the night’ brings the realisation 

that she is taken for granted and compelled to 

submit herself to the man physically. 

Although the poem is pessimistic in 

tone, the hope gleams through intermittently. 

Everything goes against her expectations. Still 

she desires, there should be no dust upon her 

‘furniture of love’. That is why she goes on 

dusting the table top with a towel. 

The diction used reinforces the 

meaninglessness, the uselessness of her 

stereotyped existence. The piano is out of use. 

88 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1


So, it is covered with a Persian shawl; ‘a plate 

of pears’ is put just for decoration. ‘A cat 

stalking the picturesque amusing mouse’ 

shows the imposed state that she has to face 

during the night hours, though rather 

unwillingly. Nightly affair becomes boredom 

as both of them get involved just physically, 

but not emotionally. Ultimately, both of them 

remain unsatisfied with their loveless state. 

Reading the poem one is reminded of what 

Adela Quested, in E. M. Forster’s novel A 

Passage to India thinks: Physical union 

without love is rape. 

The long lines of the poem are 

suggestive of the monotony, the relentless 

repetition of the same routine, everyday 

boredom. The poem, thus, reflects the 

frustration of the lady, who is “taken for 

granted”, along with the boredom of the postmodern 

life which is mechanical, monotonous, 

unfeeling, and devoid of any moral and 

spiritual force. 

It is observed that in formalist 

approach to literature, the emphasis is laid on 

the analysis of form or structure. In new or 

practical criticism, meaning is also considered 

of prime importance along with the form. A 

poem, for Empson, is ambiguous; for Allen 

Tate, the real strength of a poem lies in its 

‘tension’. Cleanth Brooks’s Understanding 

Poetry in collaboration with R. P. Warren is a 

milestone since it comprises the techniques of 

new criticism to be used in the classroom. 

Thus, in the new critical approach, the 

technique of interpretation of literature, 

formed on the basis of diction, imagery, 

paradox, irony, verse movement, etc. has got a 

sound foundation as it becomes concrete due 

to its experiments with the students. The 

abstract form of criticism in the formalist 

approach is rendered into a physical one in 

new criticism. 

2. Seturaman, V.S., C.T. Indra, T. 

Sriraman. (eds.) Introduction. Practical 

Criticism. Mumbai: Macmillan, 1990, 8. 

3. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and Individual 

Talent”. S. Ramaswami and V. S. Sethuraman 

(eds). The English Critical Tradition: An 

Anthology of English Literary Criticism. Vol.2. 

New Delhi: Macmillan, 2007,172. 

4. Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary 

Terms. VI edition. Bangalore: Prism, 1993, 246. 

5. Eliot, T. S.op. cit.,175. 

6. Eliot, T. S. “Hamlet”. Selected Essays 

by T. S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 

1980,145. 

7. Seturaman, op. cit., 18. 

8. Guerin, Wilfred, L., Earle Labor, Lee 

Morgan, J.C. Reesman, J.R. Willingham. A. 

Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 

V edition. New Delhi: Oxford, 2007, 101. 

9. Das, B.K. “Basic Tenets of New 

Criticism”. Twentieth Century Literary 

Criticism. V edition. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2005, 

29-30. 

10. Wellek, Rene. “Literary Criticism”. 

Leonard, S. Klein (ed). Encyclopaedia of World 

Literature in the 20 th Century. Vol. III. New 

York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983, 

122. 

References: 

1. Krishnaswami, N., John Varghese, 

Sunita Mishra. “Anglo American Practical/ New 

Criticism”. Contemporary Literary Theory: A 

Student's Companion. Mumbai: Macmillan, 

2001, 113. 

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Re-Inventing the Metaphor: Women in the Narratives of Partition 

--Mithun Chakrovarty 

SDM College, Ujjire, (KA) 

I 

The departure of the British from India 

in August 1947 was accompanied by a bloody 

Partition in which it is estimated that one million 

people perished and over ten million displaced. 

The elation of freedom, on the one hand, and a 

deep sense of anguish over the Partition riots, on 

the other, left the consciousness of writers 

deeply troubled and created an ambiguous 

tension that provided ample opportunity to 

transmute the raw experience into literary art. An 

exhaustive body of Partition literature has been 

generated in the six decades following the 

historical event. 

Women were arguably the worst victims 

of the Partition of India in 1947 and endured 

displacement, violence, abduction, prostitution, 

mutilation, and rape. However, on reading 

histories of the division of India, one finds that 

the life-stories of women are often elided, and 

that there is an unwillingness to address the 

atrocities of 1947. 1 This reticence results partly 

from the desires of the Indian and Pakistani 

governments to portray the events as freak 

occurrences with no place in their modern 

nations. Literature can play an important role in 

interrupting state-managed histories and reading 

Partition narratives written by women writers 

unsettles official versions of Partition. They 

examine how the narratives act as a counterpoint 

to ‘national’ accounts of 1947 through their 

depiction of the gendered nature of much of the 

violence. 

The process of recognising and 

addressing the cultivated silence in 

historiography started in the year 1993 with the 

publication of articles by Urvashi Butalia, Ritu 

Menon and Kamla Bhasin as project to recover 

women’s voices. This process of exceptional 

research culminated in the publication of path 

breaking documentary narratives like Veena 

Das’s Critical Events (1994); Urvashi Butalia’s 

The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the 

Partition of India (1998) and Ritu Menon and 

Kamla Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries: 

Women in India’s Partition. These feminist 

studies on Partition attempted to collect and 

make sense of the testimonies of people who 

lived through these events drawing upon oral 

histories and official records. The entire process 

laid the groundwork for more extended 

discussions on the nature of sectarian violence, 

constructions of community and state identities 

at the time of Partition. 2 

This paper focuses on the period 1980- 

2000, the last two decades of the twentieth 

century, and attempts to understand the 

particular circumstances in which there was a 

spectacular effusion of Partition fiction by 

women writers during this period. The fictional 

output of women writers up to this point is rather 

meagre, despite the fact that women suffered the 

trauma of Partition in an intense way. This 

includes the first novel by a woman writer, The 

Heart Divided by Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, which 

appeared in 1957 (though it was written much 

earlier), 3 and Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a 

Broken Column (1961). It is with the 1980s that 

we see substantial additions to the tradition of 

Partition fiction by women writers. The texts 

published during this period include Anita 

Desai’s Clear Light of Day (1980), Mehr Nigar 

Masroor’s Shadows of Time (1987), Bapsi 

Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man (1988), Jyotiromoyee 

Devi’s original Bangla novel of the 1960s 

translated into English as The River Churning 

(1995), Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body 

Remembers (1999), and Meena Arora Nayak’s 

About Daddy (2000). 

I have chosen fictional narratives in 

English and in translation (Bengali), both being 

considered for the purposes of this study as 

fiction written in English. The specific focus of 

the paper will be on Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy- 

Man (1989) and Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The River 

Churning (1995), the former delineating the 

experience of Partition on the western borders of 

India and the latter as a response that 

fictionalises the experience of Partition along the 

eastern borders of the country. At the same time, 

the study derives some of its tools and insights 

from the oral testimonial project for the recovery 

of women’s voices seen in the documentary 

narratives mentioned above. These texts are 

framed within the tradition of Partition fiction, 

with Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided 

(1957) and Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken 

Column (1961), providing the fictional 

90 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1


precedents, while Anita Desai’s Clear Light of 

Day (1980) and Meena Arora Nayak’s About 

Daddy (2000) provide useful points of 

comparison as successor texts. This kind of 

analysis would help locate the chosen texts 

within their times and help in drawing out a 

female tradition of fictional writing on the 

Partition. 

There is a generational shift that is 

clearly evident over the decades among women 

writers of Partition fiction. Texts that appeared 

from the decades of 1947 to 1980 form the ones 

of first generation writers and those that 

appeared after the decade of 1980 till the recent 

present are categorised as texts of second 

generation writers in this paper. This kind of a 

division is made for the purpose of convenience 

in understanding the texts and the writers more 

comprehensively. This enables to understand the 

response of women writers to Partition in two 

different time frames, the zeitroman sensed by 

individual writer in different milieu. Some texts 

were the immediate response of writers and 

some others were written after thoughtful 

endeavour. 

II 

The first generation writers like Mumtaz 

Shah Nawaz (1912-1948) and Attia Hosain’s 

(1913-1998) novels besides focusing largely on 

the description of the feudalistic character of 

their contemporary times, do not move further 

than just portraying the struggle of their 

protagonists in emancipating themselves from 

the clutches of feudal and patriarchal ethos. 4 

They narrate largely about the nation building 

process of the 1930 and 40s, the rapid 

deterioration in Hindu-Muslim relationships, 

triangle of the Congress, the League and the 

British. Both Shah Nawaz and Hosain do not 

deal with the Partition as a central theme in their 

novels. 5 However, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz and 

Hosain laid foundation steps to see Partition 

from women’s perspective through their woman 

protagonist narrators, Zohra and Laila 

respectively. Depicting the ways in which the 

lives of women in a feudal Muslim family were 

circumscribed, confined to the zenana and 

purdah, their protagonists are caught between the 

desire to break free of traditional norms and their 

sense of duty, as daughters, to uphold family’s 

honor and respect. The narrator-heroines of the 

novels are only passive observers of the political 

drama with little agency to be active. 6 

7 

Jyotirmoyee Devi’s The River 

Churning 8 is set in and around Calcutta dealing 

with the Hindu patriarchy, a critique from the 

Indian inside. It deals with the story of Sutara 

Dutta, a young Hindu girl who is orphaned by 

Partition violence and is protected by a Muslim 

family of the neighbourhood during the time of 

the pre-partition riots in a village called 

Bamunpara in Bengal. Though Sutara is 

returned to her extended family in Calcutta, her 

relatives shun her. This girl has not been 

molested, but all the same she stands 

condemned and abandoned as a social outcaste, 

is left to her own resources and placed outside 

all relationships. Undeterred by all the odds, she 

studies in a missionary school and becomes 

empowered. Even then the prospect of her 

marriage demands her to prove her past like 

Sita. The novel ends with a proposal from the 

foreign returned Promode who is ready to debate 

with his mother about marrying Sutara. 

The brief introduction as well as the sub - titles 

of three sections in the novel claims a kinship 

with the epic narratives and myths. The 

references to Sita, Draupadi and to other women 

in the epics, who were abandoned, rejected or 

exiled, comment on the continuity of brutality as 

well as on the falsity of vesting purity in a 

woman’s body and her moving beyond the 

confines of a defined space. Devi speaks 

vehemently about the side-lining of Stree Parva 

in Mahabharata focussing on women’s absent 

histories. She draws a parallel between the gaps 

in the Mahabharata regarding women’s history 

and the gaps in accounts of women separated 

from their male relatives during Partition. 

Interestingly, Devi names the final section of her 

novel as Stree Parva. 9 

The conviction that no girl is ‘one of us’ as far as 

men are concerned is angrily expressed by 

Sakina’s mother, a Muslim woman sheltering a 

Hindu girl in the communal riots of Partition. 

She says to her sons: 

You want to partition the country, go ahead, go 

ahead; you want to fight over it-do it by all 

means. But why don’t you leave the women 

alone? 10 

Jill Didur, a Canadian scholar on Partition 

wonders about the surprising gap in the 

narrative. Didur observes that Sutara's 

experiences during the riots are not represented 

in the novel which is so flourishingly evident in 

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the testimonies of abducted women collected by 

scholars like Butalia, Das, Menon and Bhasin. 11 

In other words, the protagonist in the novel is 

not placed at the actual riot of Partition. No one 

is interested in knowing what happened to her 

during the riot. Suspicion lingers in everyone’s 

mind to avoid her. The novel ends with a hope 

of Sutara’s marriage, in spite of all odds. 

III 

In his introduction to the revised 1988 

translation of Bisham Sahni’s novel of the Indian 

Partition, Tamas, Govind Nihalani writes: 

A traumatic historical event usually finds the 

artistic/literary response twice. Once, during the 

event or immediately following it, and again 

after a lapse of time, when the event has found 

its corner in the collective memory of the 

generation that witnessed it. The initial response 

tends to be emotionally intense and personal in 

character, even melodramatic. On the other 

hand, when the event is reflected upon with 

emotional detachment and objectivity, a clearer 

pattern of the various forces that shaped it is 

likely to emerge. 12 

Etched in the same line of argument, Sukeshi 

Kamra quotes Aijaz Ahmad who notes that the 

first novels on the Partition “tended to be raw 

narratives of the suffering itself, in a somewhat 

naturalistic manner, so as to preserve the 

memory of the brute facts of the attendant ethical 

collapse”, whereas later novels “tended to be 

more reflective, seeking to negotiate some larger 

civilizational, social or political questions”. 13 

With the decade of 1980s, there is a spectacular 

addition to the tradition of Partition fiction by 

14 

women writers. The 1980s began on a 

promising note for Indian fiction in English in 

terms of what Meenakshi Mukherjee has called 

15 

the “upsurge of the eighties,” with the 

publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 

1981. This was also the decade when the 

Subaltern Studies Project took off (1982), and 

the anti-Sikh riots (1984) provided a gruesome 

flashback to the days of the Partition. The 

increasing communalisation of Indian society 

also kept the memories of Partition alive, 

culminating in the demolition of the Babri 

Masjid in 1992. 16 The celebration of fifty years 

of Indian independence in 1997 provided an 

ironic counterpoint to the Partition 17 and also a 

tremendous fillip to Partition fiction by women 

writers. 

Just as much of the history of modern-day India 

has been a male-gendered enterprise, so has most 

of the writing, whether political, academic, or 

representational, displayed a masculinist bias by 

failing to address women's agency. The 1980s 

and 1990s are heir to the major political 

developments of the 1970s, including the 

imposition of political emergency in India in 

1975, which was also the U. N. International 

Year of Women that extended into the U. N. 

International Decade for Women up to 1985. In 

the same year, 1975, the publication of the 

Report of the Commission on Women, Towards 

Equality, revealed the prevalence of deep sociocultural 

prejudices against women in India. 

As a second generation novel, Anita Desai’s 

Clear Light of Day came in 1980 exploring the 

role of memory in keeping old wounds alive. Set 

in Old Delhi in the 1970s, the novel tells the 

story of a middle-class Hindu Das family, 

paralleling their past estrangements to the 

Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. In Clear 

Light of Day, the theme of Partition works only 

at the backdrop of the story where the main issue 

becomes the emancipation of women from 

patriarchal hold. 18 Desai’s story like Hosain’s 

novel is a personal document where Partition is 

only a distant nightmare. The fires are beyond 

the city walls, “so far outside the city” and Bim’s 

sheltered life tells her “that it was really rather 

improbable and she told herself she only 

imagined it”. 19 Distance from the Partition 

experience is seen apparently in Clear Light of 

Day. 

Bapsi Sidhwa’s 20 Ice-Candy-Man (1988) 21 is 

set in Lahore dealing more with the Muslim 

ambience of Partition in Pakistan. The story of 

Ice-Candy-Man centres on Lenny, a polio 

stricken Parsi child through whose eyes the story 

unfolds. Lenny is protected and taken care of by 

Ayah, whose real name is Shanti, a Hindu 

maidservant of the family. Through the agency 

of Ayah, Lenny experiences the outer world. A 

throng of admirers from all religions surround 

Ayah, ‘like moths around a lamp’. But when 

Lahore starts burning of religious riots, everyone 

becomes conscious of their religion. Ayah’s plan 

to elope with Dil-Nawaz fails. The men, jealous 

of her attraction to him, form a mob and march 

to the Parsi house demanding to know why they, 

the Parsis, are sheltering a Hindu. Their Muslim 

cook emerges trying to protect her. But the mob 

manages to trick little Lenny into blurting out 

that Ayah is hidden in the bathroom. They drag 

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her out, presumably to be raped and/or 

butchered. Thus Ayah is dumped after use as a 

whore in Hira Mandi. Later the Godmother 

saves her and sends across the Wagah border to 

India. 

Rada Ivekovic and Julie Mostov’s book 

From Gender to Nation (2006), comments on the 

gender agenda of nation-building exercise 

centering on women’s sexuality. Rada and Julie 

write in their Introduction to this volume: 

Gender identities and women’s bodies become 

symbolic and spatial boundaries of the nation. 

Women’s bodies serve as symbols of the 

fecundity of the nation and vessels for its 

reproduction, as well as territorial markers. 

Mothers, wives, and daughters designate the 

space of the nation and are, at the same time, the 

property of the nation. 22 

From Gender to Nation of Rada critique the way 

in which narratives of nationhood and 

womanhood naturalise and essentialise 

difference and hierarchy. Men rape and torture 

the women of the enemy country as a means of 

controlling the ‘other’. During the communal 

riots of Partition, women’s body became the site 

on which men wrote their most urgent narratives 

of community and the nation. Women from the 

enemy group were mutilated and inscribed to 

show their men that the enemy had claimed their 

most precious possession. The bodies of the 

women were then the signs on which the violent 

dialogue between men was conducted. Ayah in 

Ice-Candy-Man becomes a target from both the 

communities to establish each others’ stamp. 

Ananya Jahanara Kabir, a woman Partition 

scholar allegorically terms Sidhwa as one of the 

“Midnight’s Children” generation because she 

was a writer who while not born in August 1947 

was but a child at that moment. 23 The fictional 

details in the novel and the actual descriptions 

Sidhwa has recounted about her house and 

surroundings to various interviewers 24 over a 

vast span of time are in many ways identical. 

This coincides with Paul Cobley’s statement that 

‘......narrative is used not only to record fictional 

events but also to record events that actually 

happened’ 25 

Bapsi Sidhwa tells in one of her interviews to 

Alok Bhalla 

Women were literally sold like vegetables in the 

streets of Punjab for ten-twenty rupees. One 

cannot even imagine their physical and mental 

state. Men used to go down the streets with 

captive women, shouting “woman for Sale, 

woman for Sale!” 26 

As a token of revenge politics, Ayah is raped by 

erstwhile Muslim admirers and friends. The 

Ayah can be seen as a symbol of the Indian 

earth and the titular Ice Candy Man as the 

ravisher, a symbol of the many conquerors of 

India. She is raped in retaliation for the 

trainloads of dead Muslims and bags full of the 

breasts of Muslim women cut off by Hindu men. 

The Ayah who had fearlessly walked around 

Lahore with Lenny in tow is now confined to the 

enclosures of the Prostitute’s Quarters in Lahore 

and becomes what Lenny’s male cousin calls the 

opposite of the Virgin Mary – a whore. Sidhwa 

doesn’t succumb to award her women characters 

to be complete victims in her narrative. Lenny’s 

mother and grandmother try to rehabilitate other 

whores like Hamida, Lenny’s new Ayah, 

women who had become untouchables because 

their husbands did not like the idea of accepting 

back the wives. 27 Better-placed women, like 

Lenny’s mother, were busy rescuing such 

women on both sides of the new borders. A 

sense of rehabilitating the victims runs 

throughout the novel. 

The narrator girl, Lenny is a true 

subaltern since she is lame, a Parsi, a girl and a 

child. Sidhwa’s adoption unprecedented in the 

context of Partition literature of a marginal point 

of view – that of a Parsi girl who looks at reality 

with the immediacy and absence of prejudice 

typical of childhood – has enabled Sidhwa to tell 

her story with greater impartiality and to treat 

the problematic question of women’s rape and 

abduction from a gendered perspective. 

However, though Sidhwa emphasizes the 

vulnerability of women, like almost all who 

write on the Partition; Sidhwa is different in her 

refusal to make women only victims. Ayah has 

survived and rescued by the Godmother. 

Ice-candy-Man is a particularly 

inflected post-colonial fictional account of the 

Partition. It shows feminist frameworks through 

which the traumas of communal violence may 

be addressed. It does so by erasing the 

distinction between literary work and critical 

social history, producing what we may term 

counter-histories of the Partition of India. A girl 

upon the verge of sexual maturation sees the 

eruption of violence in the society around her to 

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be fundamentally analogous to the inherent 

violence that accompanies the new social role 

she is being thrust into as a woman. This is 

achieved through the presentation of the 

narrative from the character’s naive perspective. 

Kamran Rastegar reads Ice-candy-Man through 

this technique of character’s “naive 

perspective”. 28 This literary strategy in the text 

links the political, often nationalist violence of 

these stories to the intimate violence sustaining 

the structures of patriarchal social institutions 

within which the characters exist. 

About Daddy of Meena Arora Nayak 

came in 2000. It is the story of Simran Mehta, a 

daughter finding the violent roots of her father 

recounting the torture, suffering, grief and 

humiliation of Partition. It is Simran Mehta, the 

daughter’s harrowing journey into her father 

Manohar Mehta’s past. It is also an examination 

of the legacy of distrust and communal strife that 

continues to haunt India even sixty three years 

after the Partition. The plot of Nayak’s novel 

hinges on the ordeals of a young American 

tourist who is in India at the Wagah border to 

fulfil her father’s last wish and scatter his ashes 

there in absolution of his guilt following the role 

he had played during Partition. The idea of guilt 

of Partition descending down the generations is a 

new one for Partition fiction, but the associations 

are rather far-fetched, and the author seems to be 

more intent on spinning her story around notions 

of contemporary politics for an international 

audience. 29 

Fulfilling her father’s last wish, Simran, an 

American of Indian origin is at the Wagah 

border between India and Pakistan, sprinkling 

his ashes on the line of demarcation – the wound 

her father helped inflict. Daddy had asked his 

daughter 

Don’t cremate me in India……I cannot ask her 

to bear the weight of my pyre. I have taken from 

her enough. But sprinkle my ashes on the border 

so that my soul can feel the wound I helped 

inflict as long as it bleeds. 30 

Totally unprepared for the attitude of Indian 

officials towards foreigners, she finds herself in 

prison on charges of espionage. With the help of 

her American fiancé Scott, and a local journalist 

Arun, Simran is able to get out of jail, but is 

forced to go underground. Hiding from the 

police and immigration officials, she joins a 

peace organization where she meets Kalida, 

whose actions seem to epitomize Simran’s desire 

to bring peace between communities. The novel 

seems to say that the chaotic contemporary 

politics of today is a continuation of the legacy 

of 1947 Partition holocaust. Arun and Scott try 

to convince Simran that there is no essential 

relation between her father’s deeds before 

Partition and the politics today. 

As the plot unfolds, her father’s story 

becomes Simran’s own as she begins to realize 

the complexity of a culture in which there are no 

simple principles of crime and punishment, guilt 

and innocence, oppression and submission. The 

title of the novel itself signifies memory. It is 

about Daddy. For Partition writers this memory 

has not been a pleasant one. The whole 

generation of Partition fiction testifies this. One 

of the characters Kurban Bhai of the short story 

Partition says 

What rotten stuff do you teach in the name of 

history? You were saying partition happened. 

Don’t talk in the past tense. It’s not over yet. It’s 

happening – each moment, each hour. 31 

It is this truth that the novel About Daddy seems 

to project. Rape and other violently sexual 

crimes have operated as group resources for 

achieving masculinity. Sultana wants to forget 

the rape committed on her by a group of five 

policemen than register a complaint. Daddy has 

recounted to her daughter Sultana his heroic 

deeds during communal riots in India. Sultana 

narrates it vividly. Daddy watches an old woman 

fully naked with legs full of blood during 

communal riot at Nanowal. He sees small 

daughters crying over their mothers’ bloody 

corpses on the streets. Simran recounts that her 

Daddy was always guilty that he perpetrated the 

Partition of India and Pakistan. Simran too 

cherishes the same feeling. She starts thinking 

that every contemporary happenings of India 

have the roots in her father’s actions. The 

demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, made 

Daddy anxious and at his deathbed he takes a 

promise from his daughter to spread his ashes on 

the border as his last wish. 

Simran’s repeated pleas to the 

magistrate that she is just an American tourist 

and the tiny box she was carrying contained her 

father’s ashes and not bomb, falls on deaf ears. 

Simran had to comply with the rules. Simran 

realizes how her father an innocent boy, was 

transformed with the seeds of hatred by the 

keepers of religion. Though a Hindu, Daddy 

lived with Amjad, his friend at Lahore. Amjad’s 

mother treated Daddy like her son and the family 

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had to send Daddy to Nanowal on the 

threatening call given by their mosque to throw 

the kafir out of their house. When he was living 

with Gajji his gym teacher, an untoward incident 

happens. Gajji comes home unexpectedly in the 

morning in his tonga with his decapitated body 

full of blood. Daddy takes out the ancestral 

sword of Gajji and goes to a busy market. With 

his hair hung loose, he starts chopping heads one 

after the other and runs to America. Simran 

mechanically is obsessed to remember her 

Daddy, his hair wild around his head, his eyes 

glazed, blood dripping from his sword, standing 

in a street hacking at people with his sword over 

and over again, slicing off heads and arms. This 

memory haunts her very much. 

When Simran narrates this to Sultana her jail 

mate, she too narrates her own story that she 

killed two Hindu men who burnt her house and 

destroyed her whole family. Both the narratives 

intertwine and become almost one. Simran 

learns that Sultana’s family also like others is the 

victim of Partition communal riot. After three 

months when she is acquitted, immediately she 

goes to Iftekhar, the brother of Sultana. Entry to 

Karim Gali makes Simran realize the great ruin 

of Partition. Once upon a time, it was a Muslim 

occupied one and after all the Muslims ran to 

Pakistan, it was occupied by Hindus and others. 

She listens to the horrific stories of Khala, 

Ghulam Rasul, Iftekhar, Fatima and decides to 

help them to compensate her father’s guilt. She 

dares to stay on in India deceiving the police and 

disobeying the court order. 

She starts living in disguise. Police 

arrest is suspected and so Arun takes Simran to 

CCPH (Citizens for Communal Peace and 

Harmony), a peace organization at Jhakher. 

Kalida, the well-known peace activist takes good 

care of Simran. Simran voluntarily starts serving 

the organization by cooking, sweeping, printing 

to undo her fathers’ wrongs. But soon she 

realizes that Kalida is a fraud and has distributed 

seditious pamphlets in Sindh. Within few days of 

this act, a bomb blast takes place that kills many 

school children. Arun seems to glorify Kalida’s 

naxalite and terrorist activities as inevitable 

actions for peace. 

She walks out of the organization and on the way 

had to witness a communal riot. The Hindus are 

bent to take the Shivratri procession in front of 

the mosque and Muslims against it. Soon Kalida 

tries to stop the mob, but the sadhus step on him 

and the mob destroys the mosque. Daddy, after 

his wife’s death became more introverts and 

always would lie on his couch and recall of his 

horrendous past. Till Simran’s mother lived on, 

she ensured that Daddy’s past never troubled 

him. But after her death in a car accident on her 

way to pick Daddy from work, he became lonely 

and Simran understood his guilt and decides to 

undo it. But her noble gestures in India become 

meaningless in a land with contradictory laws. 

The second generation writers, like Anita Desai 

(1937), Bapsi Sidhwa (1938), Meena Arora 

Nayak, further removed in time from the events 

of Partition but clearly haunted by them, has had 

time to reflect on the meaning of events. Only 

The River Churning, Ice-Candy-Man and About 

Daddy become successful in articulating the 

sexual violence of Partition. Rest of the 

narratives just speak more of division and politics 

of Partition. 

The ‘narrative’ is different from both ‘plot’ and 

‘story’. E M Forster had made a distinction 

between story and plot. The first merely narrated, 

the second established a causal connection. 32 

Narrative, in a post structuralist world has 

acquired a new presence. Semioticians, linguists, 

philosophers, all have collectively helped 

transform the simple tale into a complex 

narrative allowing us to see the various levels of 

discourse present in it. The contemporary writer 

is part of this larger narrative both at conscious 

and unconscious levels. Elaborating upon the 

complexity of the narrative Paul Cobley points 

out 

.....as soon as we start to look more closely at 

this phenomenon, it is evident that the 

apparently natural impulse of storytelling or 

storylistening (or reading) is far from simple. 

......even the most ‘simple’ of stories is 

embedded in a network of relations that are 

sometimes astounding in their complexity. 33 

Men and women have different kinds of 

experiences. The manner of contextualising, 

analysing and communicating is different. 34 It 

seems easier for the male writer to distance 

himself from the physical and the emotional 

trauma that the women go through, and this 

feeling reiterates itself as we read through 

Yashpal, Chaman Nahal and even Khushwant 

Singh (who belonged to the same generation). 

However, Jyotirmoyee Devi, Mumtaz Shah 

Nawaz, Attia Hosain, Ismat Chugtai, Bapsi 

Sidhwa and Amrita Pritam shy away from these 

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details of the atrocities that were done on women 

during these riots. 

In Chaman Nahal’s Azadi, Rahmatullah Khan 

abducts Sunanda from the refugee camp and 

rapes her in a lonely room. The entire scene is 

marked by a sensuous relish. Arun finds 

Sunanda: 

Then he heard Sunanda weeping…. She was 

lying on the ground on an improvised bed of hay 

…. and he saw her legs. Between her legs and 

top of her, was lying a man......The moonlight 

was coming through the window in the larger 

room and Arun could see clearly. She was still 

weeping…. ‘Get off me now,’ she said in a tired 

voice. The man did not move. Instead he started 

laughing….. smugly, a high pitched, shrill 

laughter…. ‘I knew I’d have you one day,’ he 

said conceitedly. And he laughed again in 

triumph and satisfaction. ‘You’re a beauty,’ he 

was saying. 35 

This rape is built up in a leisurely manner. The 

cinematographic unfolding alleviates the sense 

of repulsion or shock that such a scene should 

create. The entire scene is suffused with an 

element of eroticism and the reader’s 

involvement tends to become voyeuristic. 

Women writers refrain from depicting graphic 

and unrestrained physicality because being 

women, there is a sense of identification with the 

victims. It is the violation of every woman’s 

dignity and so they make use of stories as when 

Ranna, in Ice-Candy-Man, listens to the stifled 

wails of women in the mosque in Pir Pindo: 

“Stop whimpering, you bitch, or I’ll bugger you 

again!” a man said irritably…….There was 

much movement. Stifled exclamations and 

moans. A woman screamed and swore in 

Punjabi. There was a loud cracking noise and 

rattle of breath from the lungs. Then a moment 

of horrible stillness. 36 

Without vulgarity, the entire import of 

the scene is conveyed to the readers. Thus 

women writers do not present this gruesome 

aspect of Partition through titillating scenes 

which tend to impair the impact of the narrative. 

The scenes are well placed and are integral to the 

narrative. They are not superimposed. The scenes 

are presented realistically without diluting or 

sensationalizing the effect. The male writers 

mostly restrict themselves only to the depiction 

of rape, abduction and dishonour of women. 

They do not look into their psychological impact 

or their long term ramifications on the victim. On 

the other hand, the women writers not only 

portray the victimization of women but also their 

mental trauma – their pain, suffering, endurance 

and resilience. 

Writing by women provides a critical 

voice within the writing of the history of the 

nation and seeks to explore the meaning of 

alterity within the tradition of Partition fiction by 

women writers. As patriarchy confers alterity on 

the experience of women, female experience is 

homogenised, marginalised, and subjected to the 

norm of male experience. Literary texts, through 

their recounting of torture, suffering, and grief, 

rescript the essentialist narrative of a masculinist 

fundamentalism that casts women symbolically 

as the dependent, sexualised other in need of 

protection. They also subvert the dominant 

nationalist narrative or nation that regards them 

as the communal other. 

The tools used by the writers are that of 

interrogation, introspection, or even a faithful 

and clinical depiction of events of the past. 

Partition experiences buried in the memories are 

unleashed and treated aesthetically in art. The 

archives of memory collected in literature speak 

for the subaltern experience, which has been 

overshadowed by official history. The different 

versions of Partition question the engineered 

‘forgetting’, the censoring as well as the denial 

of experience. Experiences of pain seldom enter 

historical records – they exist in the realms of 

pain and silence, and are to be found in memory, 

in fiction, in memoirs. To recover these 

experiences, we shall have to turn to such 

‘unconventional’ sources. 

IV 

The documentary narratives present 

issues like the relationship between women 

communities and the state; between women and 

their families; and between women and their 

men. It explicates the gendering of citizenship, 

multiple patriarchies of community, family and 

state as experienced by women in their transition 

to freedom, and examines the deep complicities 

between them. It interrogates not only the history 

we know but also how we know it. The focus 

here is on the marginalised sections including 

women, children, dalits and minority groups. 

The authors of the documentary narratives make 

women not only visible, but also central by 

looking at the memories of loss and violence. 

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The documentary narratives supply oral 

narratives and oral history. Journals, diaries, 

memoirs and personal accounts by people who 

were involved at that time give an extended 

force. Accounts of Kamlaben Patel, Anis 

Kidwai, Damyanti Sahgal; tragic oral stories of 

Zainab and Buta Singh; Bir Bahadur Singh’s 

oral recounting of the practice of assumed purity, 

untouchability, pollution in his village; 

interviews taken in a number of Sikh villages 

around Rawalpindi that reveals mass drowning 

incident of Thoa Khalsa as a revival of the 

Rajput tradition of self-immolation, fathers 

killing their daughters proudly with their kirpan 

as a sacramental act, women raped in the 

presence of husbands and young girls ravished in 

presence of parents and other incidents provide 

the most needed. The kinds of experiences 

people wrote about or described in their oral 

accounts, hardly ever figure in what we call 

‘traditional history.’ The argument is not of 

replacing or putting up against, conventional or 

factual histories of Partition. Rather these 

unconventional sources placed alongside such 

histories enrich and inform each other. 

It is also argued that the femalecentred 

texts challenge the silencing of women 

and counter the unabashedly masculinist 

narratives. Instead of subsuming such histories 

under the mantle of a supposedly gender-neutral 

discourse, feminist stories participate in the 

articulation of a diverse Indian female tradition 

both at the political and literary levels. Intensely 

realistic and personal, such narratives question 

the traditional patriarchal vision of nationhood 

and the circumscribed role of women in the 

economy of exchange in the modern nation. 

References: 

1 Urvashi, Butalia. The Other Side of Silence: 

Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi: 

Viking, 1998. p 5. 

2 Jill, Didur. “At a Loss for Words: Reading the 

Silence in South Asian Women’s Partition 

Narratives” in Topia 4. P 53. 

3 

Mumtaz Shah Nawaz. The Heart Divided. 

1957. New Delhi: Penguin, 2004. p vii. 

4 

See Author’s Note in her novel The River 

Churning: A Partition Novel. New Delhi: Kali 

for Women, 1995. P xxxiv. 

5 Ravishankar, Rao. Crossing the Barrier: A 

Descriptive and Evaluative Study of Partition 

Fiction. Ph. D thesis. Mangalore University. 

2003. P 21 - 22. 

6 Jain, Jasbir. Beyond Post-Colonialism: Dreams 

and Realities of a Nation. Jaipur: Rawat, 2006. P 

71. New Delhi: Prestige, 1999. P 105. 

7 Biographical details are from the ‘Author’s 

Note’ and ‘Introduction’ in Jyotirmoyee, Devi. 

The River Churning: a Partition Novel. New 

Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995 and Debali 

Mookerjea-Leonard. “Quarantined: 

Womenand the Partition”. 

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/comparative_studies 

_of_south_asia_africa_and_the_middle_east/v02 

4/24.1mookerjea-leonard.html. 

8 

Jyotirmoyee, Devi. The River Churning: a 

Partition Novel. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 

1995.p xxvii. 

9 

Stree Parva refers to a chapter of the 

Mahabharata 

10 

Jyotirmoyee Devi. The River Churning: A 

Partition Novel. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 

1995. p 13. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2004 rpt 2006. 

p 108. 

11 Jill, p. 54. 

12 Bhisham, Sahni. Tamas (Darkness) Trans. Jai 

Ratan. New Delhi: Penguin, 1974.. p 5. 

13 Sukeshi, Kamra. “Narratives of Pain: Fiction 

and Autobiography as ‘Psychotestimonies’ to the 

Partition” in Bearing Witness: Partition, 

Independence, End of the Raj. New Delhi: Lotus 

Roli, 2003. P 186. 

14 

Viney, Kirpal. Ed. The New Indian Novel in 

English: A Study of the 1980s. New Delhi: 

Allied, 1990. P xxi. 

15 

Meenakshi, Mukherjee. Preface. The Twice 

Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the 

Indian Novel in English. New Delhi: Pencraft, 

1971 rpt 2001. p. 8. 

16 

See Bhisham Sahni. Tamas. P 6. Also see 

Smita Tewari Jassal and Eyal Ben-Ari. “The 

Partition Motif: Concepts, Comparisons, 

Considerations” in Jassal, Smita Tewari and 

Eyal Ben-Ari. Eds. The Partition Motif in 

Contemporary Conflicts. New Delhi: Sage, 

2007. P 25. 

12. Ritu, Menon. and Kamla Bhasin. Eds. 

Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s 

Partition. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998. p, 

xi; 

17 See Urvashi Butalia on the ‘Official Silence’ in 

The Hindu. 21 September 1997. 

18 

Sanga C Jaina. Ed. South Asian Literature in 

English. London: Greenwood Press, 2004. p 51. 

19 

Anita, Desai. Clear Light of Day. New Delhi: 

Allied, 1980 rpt Vintage 2001. p 44. 

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20 “Time For a New Messiah”. Interview with 

Shirish Koyal. Times of India. 4 Oct 2001. 

Bangalore edn: 8. 

21 Bapsi Sidhwa. Ice Candy Man. New Delhi: 

Penguin, 1988. The Water is filmed with the 

same title by Deepa Mehta recently. 

22 Rada, Ivekovic and Julie Mostov. Eds. From 

Gender to Nation. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2004 rpt 

2006. p 10. Jouvert: A Journal in Postcolonial 

Studies 1.2 (1997): 27 pp. l o j a n . 1998. P 9. 

23 Ananya Jahanara Kabir. “Gender,Memory, 

Trauma: Women’s Novels on the Partition of 

India”. Comparative Studies of South Asia, 

Africa and the Middle East. Duke University 

Press. Vol. 25, No. 1, 2005. P 177. 

24 

In Conversation with Bapsi Sidhwa” in 

Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home. 

New Delhi: Oxford, 2006. P 225. 

. 

25 Paul, Cobley. Narrative. London: Routledge, 

2001. p 29. 

26 

Alok Bhalla. Ed. Partition Dialogues: 

Memories of a Lost Home. New Delhi: Oxford, 

2006. p 237. 

27 

Ramachanda, Guha. India After Gandhi: The 

History of the World’s Largest Democracy. 

London: Picador, 2007. P 94. 

28 

Kamran Rastegar. “Trauma and Maturation in 

Women’s War Narratives: The Eye of the Mirror 

and Cracking India”. Journal of Middle East 

Women’s Studies. Vol. 2, No. 3. Fall 2006. p. 

22. 

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_ 

of_middle_east_womens_studies/v002/2.3rasteg 

ar.html 

29 

Ravishankar, 23. 

30 

Meena Arora Nayak. About Daddy. New 

Delhi: penguin, 2000. p 1. 

31 

Mushirul, Hasan and M Asaduddin. eds. 

Image and Representation: Stories of Muslim 

Lives in India. New Delhi: Oxford, 2000. P 110. 

32 

Forster E M. Aspects of the Novel. New Delhi: 

Atlantic, 1966. 1995. 

33 

Paul Cobley. P 2, 6. See Sudhir, Kakar. 

Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality. 

New Delhi: Penguin, 1990. P 1. 

34 

See Jasbir Jain. “Gender and Narrative: An 

Introduction” in Jasbir Jain and Supriya 

Agarwal. Eds. Gender and Narrative. Jaipur: 

Rawat, 2002. P ix – xxiii. 

35 

Chaman Nahal. Azadi. New Delhi: Orient 

Paperbacks, 1975. rpt 1988. p 307. 

36 

Bapsi, Sidhwa. Ice–Candy–Man. New 

Delhi: Penguin, 1989. p 203. 

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A Note on Foucault’s Notion of Discourse 

Dr. R.T. Bedre Dept. of English SSJES’ ACS 

College, Gangakhed. Dist. Parbhani. (M.S.) 

Mr.K.U. Gangarde Researcher and Project 

Fellow Department of English at SSJES’ ACS 

College, Gangakhed. Dist. Parbhani. (M.S.) 

Michel Foucault (1926 –1984) was a 

French philosopher, social theorist and historian 

of ideas. He was a professor of ‘History of 

Systems of Thought’ at the College de France, 

and lectured at the University at Buffalo and the 

University of California, Berkeley. Foucault is 

best known for his critical studies on social 

institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, 

the human sciences and the prison system, as 

well as for his work on the history of human 

sexuality. His writings on power, knowledge, 

and discourse have been widely influential in 

academic circles. He was listed as the most cited 

scholar in the humanities in 2007 by the ISI Web 

of Science (Wikipedia- Foucault). Power, 

knowledge, Archaeology, genealogy, episteme, 

dispositif, biopower, governmentality, 

disciplinary institution, and panopticism are his 

other notable ideas which earned him fame all 

over the world. His notable works are: Madness 

and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic: 

An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963), 

Death and the Labyrinth: The World of 

Raymond Roussel (1963), Order of Things: An 

Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), The 

Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Discipline 

and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977) and 

The History of Sexuality (1976). Foucault's 

works concentrate upon elucidating the 

particular power relations and discourses 

involved in different knowledge by way of an 

analysis of their respective histories. The present 

paper focuses on the Foucauldian notion of 

discourse. 

The notion of ‘discourse’ plays 

important role in contemporary literary theory. It 

is central in all the books written by Foucault. 

Although it is originated in the disciplines of 

Linguistics and Semiotics, it has been extended 

up to many branches of human sciences. It has 

been used in the academic disciplines such as 

literature, history, sociology, psychology, 

political science, culture, gender and 

postcolonial studies to define, explain and 

understand the problems in their respective 

fields of study. 

Discourse, according to Foucault, is 

related to power as it operates by rules of 

exclusion. Discourse therefore is controlled by 

objects, what can be spoken of; ritual, where and 

how one may speak; and the privileged, who 

may speak (Wikipedia-discourse). Discourse 

constitutes not only the world that we live in, but 

also all forms of knowledge and truth. Discourse 

generates truth or what some have called trutheffects. 

Certain discourses in certain contexts 

have the power to convince people to accept 

statements as true. Discourse thus is the means 

of power and it constitutes knowledge which is 

accepted in the society. Therefore, Foucault says 

in the first volume of his book ‘History of 

Sexuality’ that it is in discourse that power and 

knowledge are joined together. 

Discourse has become a central term for 

the poststructural critics who oppose the 

deconstructive method of analyzing the text. M. 

H. Abrams explains the concept of discourse as 

follows: 

In poststructural criticism, discourse … 

supplementing (and in some cases 

displacing) “text’’ as the name of the 

verbal material which is primarily 

concern of literary criticism. In poststructural 

usage, however, the term is 

not confined to conversational passages 

but, like “writing,” designates all verbal 

constructions and implies the 

superficiality of the boundaries between 

literary and non literary modes of 

signification. Most conspicuously, 

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discourse has become the focal term 

among critics who oppose the 

deconstructive concept of the “general 

text” that functions independently of 

particular historical conditions. Instead 

they conceive of discourse as social 

parlance, or language-in-use, and 

consider it to be both the product and 

manifestation not of a timeless linguistic 

system, but of particular social 

conditions, class structures, and power 

relationships that alter in the course of 

history. (To) Michel Foucault, 

discourse-as-such is the central subject 

of analytic concern. Foucault conceives 

that “discourse” is to be analyzed as 

totally anonymous, in that is simply 

“situated at the level of the ‘it is said’ 

(on dit)” (241). 

There are two strands of poststructuralist 

thought, first looks at text, textuality and 

discourse from the point of view of social 

control, power structure and subversive practices 

and second one is advocated by Jacques Derrida, 

Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes whose stress 

vividly seem on language. Being a linguist, 

Roland Barthes’ echoes Derrida’s views. Lacan 

was psychologist. He opines that unconscious is 

structured like language. His approach is purely 

that of a linguist. Foucault differs from other 

post structuralists. Foucault criticizes Derridian 

deconstruction as “mere rhetorical bag of tricks, 

a neat little pedagogy secure in its assumption 

that nothing exists outside the text’’ 

(Krishnaswamy, 57). 

More over in his most influential book 

‘The Order Of Things: An Archeology Of 

Human Sciences’ Foucault says that ‘man’ (or 

the subject of humanist discourse in general) as 

a figure is drawn in sand at the ocean’s edge, 

soon to be erased by the coming 

tide((Krishnaswamy, 58). It means discourse 

shapes everything in the world. Man is also a 

creation of discourse. He may disappear soon 

arrival of the new form of knowledge. Thus 

discourses constitute objects, concepts subjects 

and strategies. Further Abrams puts: Michel 

Foucault’s view that the discourse of an era, 

instead of reflecting preexisting entities and 

orders, brings into being into the concepts, 

oppositions and hierarchies of which it speaks; 

that these elements are both products and 

propagators of “powers”, and social forces; and 

that as a result, the particular discursive 

formations of an era determine what is at the 

time accounted “knowledge” and “truth,” as well 

as what is considered to be humanly normal as 

against what is to be criminal, or insane, or 

sexually deviant (Abrams, 183). 

What Foucault writes in his book 

History of Sexuality is worth quoting here: 

“What is said about sex must 

not be analyzed simply as the surface 

projection of … power mechanism. 

Indeed, it is in discourse that power and 

knowledge are joined together. And for 

this very reason, we must conceive 

discourse as a series of discontinuous 

segments whose tactical function is 

neither uniform nor stable. To be more 

precise, we must not imagine a world of 

discourse divided between the accepted 

discourse and excluded discourse, or 

between the dominant discourse and the 

dominated one; but as multiplicity of 

discursive elements that can come into 

play in various strategies … Discourses 

are not once and for all subservient to 

power or raised up against it, any more 

than silences are. We must make 

allowance for the complex and unstable 

process whereby discourse can be both 

an instrument and an effect of power, 

but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, 

a point of resistance and a starting point 

for an opposing strategy. Discourse 

transmits and produces power; it 

reinforces it, but also undermines and 

exposes it ….” (Foucault, 100-1) 

Thus the above discussion leads one to 

think that discourse is nothing but a way of 

seeing and thinking about the world. It refers to 

a particular mind-set bound by philosophical 

assumptions that influences a person to interpret 

the world in a particular fashion. It is also 

referred to analyze the systems of thoughts, 

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ideas, images, patterns of language, culture, 

network of social institutions and other symbolic 

practices. It produces concepts and truths. And it 

is to be understood as a part of social structure 

itself. Some questions that arise within this 

framework, are: How some discourses maintain 

their authority? How some 'voices' get heard 

while others are silenced? Who benefits and 

how? 

Works Cited: 

Abrahmas, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 

7th Ed. Singapore: Thomson Heinle, 2004. 

Foucault, M. The Order of Things: An 

Archeology of Human Sciences. London: 

Tavistock, 1973. 

Howarth, D. Discourse. Delhi: Viva Books, 

2002. 

Jadhav, Kamlakar. Speech Act Analysis of 

Political Discourse. Kanpur: Asha Prakashan, 

2009 

Krishnaswamy, N. John Varghese et al. 

Contemporary Literary Theory. New Delhi: 

Macmillan India Ltd., 2001. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Foucault 

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Harland’s Superstructuralism- 

A Bridge between Structuralism 

and Post- structuralism 

Chikte Ashok Bhimrao, 

Research scholar , 

People’s College , Nanded. 

Contanct No. : 9921955734 

Email-Id: chakrashok1@gmail.com 

Man from the beginning of the civilization investigated the answers for the thing’s which wondered him. 

So many philosophers, thinkers, polymaths and ideology-makers have tried their best to exhumate the 

essence of existence, being and truth. So many schools, beliefs, dogmas and isms tried to unearth the 

structure and core of the episteme of life. This structure of episteme and knowledge lured the men from 

his genesis and is still continued to the great exodus of mankind. There is a long chain of thinking men- 

Thales, Zeno, Epicurus, Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Locke, Hobbs, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, Saussure, 

Foucault and Derrida. One new man has joined in the chain of thinkers and that is Richard 

Harland(Richard:p1) Richard Harland, a British philosopher, whose philosophical treatise on Superstructuralism 

and Post-structuralism have, literally shook the world of literary theory. Harland is also a 

popular novelist of steam-punk-type-fiction. His Vicar-series and Worldshakers made him famous among 

science-fiction readers. Harland reveals the colonial hegemony, alien-attacks and extra-territorial life. In 

1987 he turned literary theory and philosophy(ibid:p3). Superstructuralism is not an alien theory in the 

world of literary criticism. So many philosophers tried to mingle structuralism and post-structuralism. 

Though Foucault called himself a hard-core post-structuralist, had a soft corner for the structuralist 

concepts like the power of centre and chronology of cultural evolution. It’s true that post-structural key 

concepts like Derridean Deconstruction, Foucauldian historicity, Baudrillardian virtual-reality and 

Lyotardian conditionality of structuralism have formed the post-modern world, but these elements proved 

themselves unable rather impotent to discard structuralism as a theory, as a study and as an ideology. [3] 

Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the 

subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics.At a time when structural linguistics was facing 

serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, 

structuralism appeared in academia in the second half of the 20th century and grew to become one of the 

most popular approaches in academic fields concerned with the analysis of language, culture, and society. 

The structuralist mode of reasoning has been applied in a diverse range of fields, 

including anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, and architecture. The most prominent 

thinkers associated with structuralism include the linguist Roman Jakobson, the anthropologist Claude 

Lévi-Strauss, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the literary 

critic Roland Barthes. As an intellectual movement, structuralism came to take existentialism's pedestal in 

1960s France. Proponents of structuralism would argue that a specific domain of culture may be 

understood by means of a structure—modelled on language—that is distinct both from the organizations 

102 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1


of reality and those of ideas or the imagination—the "third order". In Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, for 

example, the structural order of "the Symbolic" is distinguished both from "the Real" and "the 

Imaginary"; similarly, in Althusser's Marxist theory, the structural order of the capitalist mode of 

production is distinct both from the actual, real agents involved in its relations and from 

the ideological forms in which those relations are understood. According to Alison Assiter, four ideas are 

common to the various forms of structuralism. First, that a structure determines the position of each 

element of a whole. Second, that every system has a structure. Third, structural laws deal with coexistence 

rather than change. Fourth, structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface or the 

appearance of meaning. In the 1970s, structuralism was criticized for its rigidity and ahistoricism. Despite 

this, many of structuralism's proponents, such as Jacques Lacan, continue to assert an influence 

on continental philosophy and many of the fundamental assumptions of some of structuralism's critics 

(who have been associated with "post-structuralism") are a continuation of structuralism. 

Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a 

series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s. The label 

primarily encompasses the intellectual developments of prominent mid-20th-century 

French and continental philosophers and theorists. The post-structuralist movement is difficult to 

summarize, but may be broadly understood as a body of distinct responses to Structuralism. An 

intellectual movement developed in Europe from the early to mid-20th century, Structuralism argued that 

human culture may be understood by means of a structure-—modeled on language (ie., structural 

linguistics)—that is distinct both from the organizations of reality and the organization of ideas and 

imagination—a third order.(Richard:p8) The precise nature of the revision or critique of structuralism 

differs with each post-structuralist author, though common themes include the rejection of the selfsufficiency 

of the structures that structuralism posits and an interrogation of the binary oppositions that 

constitute those structures.Writers whose work is often characterised as post-structuralist include Jacques 

Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva. The movement is closely 

related to postmodernism. As with structuralism, antihumanism, as a rejection of 

the enlightenment subject, is often a central tenet. Existential phenomenology is a significant influence; 

one commentator has argued that post-structuralists might just as accurately be called "postphenomenologists." 

Some have argued that the term "post-structuralism" arose in Anglo- 

American academia as a means of grouping together continental philosophers who rejected the methods 

and assumptions of analytical philosophy. Further controversy owes to the way in which looselyconnected 

thinkers tended to dispense with theories claiming to have discovered absolute truths about the 

world. Although such ideas generally relate only to the metaphysical (for instance, metanarratives of 

historical progress, such as those of dialectical materialism), many commentators have criticized the 

movement as relativist, nihilist, or simply indulgent to the extreme. Many so-called "post-structuralist" 

writers rejected the label and they don’t have any manifesto. 

It’s not hard to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. But it is quite hard to 

grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our 

society and help to shape it. It’s also true that inherited from the past no longer seem to fit the reality 

experienced by a new generation. Therefore in various parts of the world, new methods of analysis have 

been developed whose conclusions reveal the limitations one of Eurocentric philosophy and thinking. 

New concepts of literary forms and modes have been proposed new notions of the natural perception. 

Superstructuralism is a fine example of this. Super structuralism tries to cope with structuralism and poststructuralism 

harmonious. 

According to Harland Superstructuralism is not a theory or an ideology, rather it’s a fragmental discourse 

of continues thinking. He asserts – 

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Superstructuralism- I coin the term to cover the whole field of structuralists, Semioticians, 

Athusserian Marxists, Vulgar Marxists, Foucaultians, Derrideans, and Post-structuralists.It’s in a 

sense, larger intellectual phenomenon over structuralism and beneath Post-structuralism. 

(Ibid:p13) 

Harland clearly reject that the concept of superstructure in a mere copy of classical superstructure. 

Harland also confess that he is not aware of Hegelian concept of base-and superstructure .Harland also 

assets that his theory isn’t a direct attack on Derridean active nihilism or Foucauldian passive 

territorialization. The structuralists are those who share a characteristic way of thinking about bare 

structure of any concept. Structural linguists like Saussure and structuralist-semiotician like Barthes also 

accept the fault of structuralism. But it’s true that there is also a chronological progression from the earlier 

structuralists, who tries its best within specific disciplines, to the latter semiotician, who unintentionally 

proclaims a single overarching study of culture as a whole. Thus structuralists only focus about surface 

level of human world.(Richard:p15) Thus, in this respect, Superstructuralism represents what Foucault 

would call an existence of underlying framework of approach and actual process. Hence one can say that 

Levi-Strauss or Baudrillard declares a war on Foucault. These hostilities are still conducted over a 

common ground; Harland hails post-structuralists as a small fish in big pond. This special way of thinking 

about superstructures in fundamentally is that it unites with the active and passive way of thinking. In 

fact, it is probably fair to assert that the influence of Superstructuralism upon the contemporary semiotics 

is mainly in the area of method and technique. Thus we can assert that Superstructuralism is not a counter 

human science. Thus the study of Superstructuralism will open a new horizon in the field of literary 

theory. 

References:- 

1.Harland Richard, Superstructuralism, New Delhi, Routledge, 2010, 

2. Ibid 

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Harland 

4. Harland Richard, Superstructuralism, New Delhi, Routledge, 2010, 

5. Ibid 

6.Ibid. 

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Structural and Post-Structural Theory: Literature as a 

Chincholkar B.B. 

Head, Dept. of English, 

Rajarshi Shahu 

Mahavidyalaya, 

Parbhani. 

Special Use of Language 

Kharabe R. P. 

Ph.D. Research Scholar, 

J.J.T. University, 

Rajasthan. 

Siraskar K. G. 

Ph.D. Research Scholar, 

J.J.T. University, 

Rajasthan 

. 

Abstract:The paper has been attempted to explore language through structural and post-structural theory. The 

paper mainly focuses on the concepts of structural linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson, structural 

anthropologist, Lavi-Strauss, structural semioticians such as Greimas and Barthes and the deconstructive 

philosopher, Jacus Derrda. Also further tries to present difference between the ordinary and literary language. To 

sum up, it is explained that the language of literature plays crucial role to demonstrate contextual meaning of 

selected text. 

Key words: Structural and Post-structural theory, Ordinary and Literary language. 

Structuralism originates to the Swiss 

linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s idea of 

sign as a union of signifies and the 

signified in his Course in General 

Linguistics (1915). The term, 

‘structuralism’ refers to the works of 

structural linguists such as Saussure, 

Jakobson and structural anthropologist, 

Lavi-Strauss and structural semioticians 

such as Greimas and Barthes. Ferdinand 

de Saussure projects language as a sign 

system that communicates in relationships 

or inter-dependence. According to him, a 

sign consists of a signifier (sound image) 

and signified (concept) and the 

relationship between the signifier and the 

signified is arbitrary. A sign also gives 

meaning only in relations to the totality of 

other signs. 

A structuralist critic views the 

work of literature as a kind of meeting 

place for different systems of meaning. In 

this regard Roland Barthes quotes; 

‘The text is not a line of words 

releasing a single theological 

meaning but a multidimensional 

space in which a variety of 

writings, none of them original, 

blend and class. 1 

Thus, structuralism accepted that 

language does not directly latch on the 

facts, but that all expressions in a given 

language acquire their meaning through 

contrast with the meaning of other 

expressions. As applied in literary studies, 

structuralist criticism conceives literature 

to be a second-order signifying system that 

uses the first-order structural system of 

language as its medium, and is itself to be 

analyzed primarily on the model of 

linguistic theory. In brief, structuralism 

offers a theory of literature and a mode of 

interpretation. Structural analysis does not 

move towards a meaning of a text. The 

work, as Barthes says, is like an onion: 

A construction of layers (or levels, 

or systems) whose body contains, 

finally no heart, no kernel, no 

secret, no irreducible principle, 

nothing except the infinity of its 

own envelopes- which envelop 

nothing other than the unity of its 

own surfaces ( Style and its Image, 

10) 

Also, it is important to note that 

structuralists apply a variety of linguistic 

concepts to the analysis of a literary text, 

such as the distinction between phonemic 

and morphemic levels of organization, or 

between paradigmatic and syntagmatic 

relationships; and some critics analyze the 

structure of a literary text on the model of 

the syntax in a well-formed sentence. 

However, the aim classic literary 

105 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1


structuralism is not to provide the 

interpretation of single texts, but to make 

explicit, in a quasi-scientific way, the tacit 

grammar (the system of rules and codes) 

that governs the forms and meaning of all 

literary productions. As Jonathan Culler 

put it in his lucid exposition, the aim of 

structuralist criticism is “to construct a 

poetics which stands to literature as 

linguistics stands to language.” 

(Structuralist Poetics, 1975, P.257) 

However, in the structuralist view, 

what had been called a literary ‘work’ 

becomes a texi; that is, a mode of writing 

constituted by a play of internal elements 

according to specifically literary 

conventions and codes. These factors may 

generate an illusion of reality, but have no 

truth-value, nor even any reference to a 

reality existing outside the literary system 

itself. 

Post-structuralism is a 

continuation and simultaneous rejection of 

structuralism- not only literary 

structuralism but even more so the 

anthropological structuralism. Poststructuralism 

is generally some of the 

major claims of structuralism, and since it 

has its origins in the second half of the 

1960s, when literary structuralism is still 

developing, it does indeed make sense to 

see them as two forks of one and the same 

broadly anti-humanist and linguistically 

oriented river. According to Derride, 

Saussure’s theory of sign consisting of 

signifier and signified is another version of 

the traditional concept of speech and 

writing. As Derrida states it: 

The notion of the sign always 

implies within itself the 

distinction between signifier and 

signified, even if they are 

distinguished simply as the two 

faces of one and the same leaf. 

The notion remains therefore 

within the heritage of that 

logocentrism which is also 

phonocentrism: ‘absolute 

proximity of voice and being, of 

voice and the meaning of being 

and the ideality of meaning. 2 

In this way Derrida discards these 

three disciplines-metaphysics, linguistics 

and structuralism-as they have treated 

writing as secondary to speech. He calls 

this concept of writing as ‘vulgar concept’. 

Derrida’s intention is to liberate language 

and criticism from the totalizing and 

totalitarian influence of metaphysics. 

It is very noteworthy that 

Derrida’s new concept of writing is based 

on three complex words: ‘difference’, 

‘trace’, and ‘arche-writing.’ Difference 

means two actions: differing and 

deferring. Differing is the one not being 

another. It is spatial. Deferring is 

something being delayed or postponed. It 

is temporal. According to Derrida each 

sign performs double function differing 

and deferring. Hence, the structure of the 

sign is conditioned by differing and 

deferring and not by the signifier and the 

signified. This means that a sign is 

something that is unlike another sign and 

something that is not the sign. Each sign 

differs from another sign and it has its 

power of deferment, the capacity to 

postpone. 

Post-structuralism is unthinkable 

without structuralism. As I have already 

suggested, it continues structuralism’s 

strongly anti-humanist perspective and it 

closely follows structuralism in its belief 

that language is the key to our 

understanding of ourselves and the world. 

Still, although it continues its antihumanism 

and its focus on language, poststructuralism 

simultaneously undermines 

structuralism by thoroughly questioning- 

‘deconstructing’-some of its major 

assumptions and the methods that derive 

from those assumptions. Post- 

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structuralism continues structuralism’s 

preoccupation with language. But its view 

of language is wholly different from the 

structuralist view. In fact, language is at 

the heart of the differences between 

structuralism and post-structuralism. As 

we have discussed, structuralism applied 

originally linguistic insights to culture in 

general and literary structuralism applied 

them to literary texts. 

Language is culturally determined 

behavior. Language is a system of 

communication used by people living in 

society. In the beginning there were only 

visual signals but later on the use and the 

importance of the language was brought to 

notice. Language can be used on various 

ways. Ordinary language is used for 

everyday communication while literacy 

language activity to be studied as socially 

patterned behavior. Our daily life takes us 

through a series of activities involving the 

use of languages. In the literature, 

language is used in various ways to serve 

its aim. Language as a used in everyday 

gossip in scientific reports, in commercial 

or political persuasion and a number of 

other more or less every functions is the 

ordinary language. On the other hand, 

language as used in literature is literary 

language which is often not lucid and has 

multiple meanings. On comparative lines, 

ordinary language is informative and 

consists of original flow of thoughts while 

the literary language seems to be artificial 

and can be termed as aesthetic. Ordinary 

language is not deviant from the norm but 

literary language is creative and deviant 

from the norm. 

Literary language plays very vital 

role in the development of vocabulary and 

structure of language. Literature helps to 

internalize the grammar of language. 

Rizzo in his essay, ‘The Teaching of 

English Literature in the Italian 

Educational System’, comments; 

Literature provides authentic 

examples of language in use so 

that students have an opportunity 

of internalizing the grammar and 

working out the meaning of words 

form the context. 

Thus, the language used in 

literature is very much deviant from the 

ordinary language. Literature helps to 

know and understand the various types of 

deviations such as phonological deviation, 

syntactic deviation, lexical deviation, 

semantic deviation and use of figure of 

speech. Literary language sometime is 

very difficult to understand because of its 

use in context and its deviations. For 

instance, in lexical deviation, it occurs due 

to deviation of words. Here poet or writer 

uses various words to express his feelings 

or thoughts. And poet’s words may not 

find in dictionary. Sometimes, poets create 

new words to their purpose and it occurs 

due to the deviation in the use of words. 

Hopkins creates new words in his poems; 

for instance, words, ‘the unchilding’, 

‘unfathering’, ‘window making sea’. 

While studying this kind of deviation 

through structural and post-structural 

approach, it has many difficulties to 

understand the literary language. 

According to the structrualist, a sign 

consists of a signifier (sound image) and 

signified (concept) and the relationship 

between the signifier and the signified is 

arbitrary. A sign also gives meaning only 

in relations to the totality of other signs. 

Such assumptions are not clearly able to 

expose the meaning of the lexical 

deviation in the literary language. 

In literary language, the semantic 

deviations are used to express the 

intentional meaning. Semantic deviation 

occurs in terms of meanings and meanings 

can be expressed in many ways. For 

examples, William Wordsworth in 

Prelude says, ‘the child is the father of the 

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man.’ As concerned to this line, the poet 

compares the innocence of the child to a 

man and says that the child is more nearer 

to God. Also, another poem, Deffodils, 

Wordsworth says, ‘Ten thousand saw I at 

a glance’. In this regard, the structural and 

post-structural approach is unable to 

expose the meaning of the words and 

lines. 

To sum up, it is important to note 

that the language of literature plays crucial 

role to demonstrate contextual meaning 

therefore many deviations occurred in this 

language. In fact, language is at the heart 

of the differences between structuralism 

and post-structuralism. As we have 

discussed, structuralism applied originally 

linguistic insights to culture in general and 

literary structuralism applied them to 

literary texts. 

But it is difficult to understand in the 

context of literary language especially in 

the concerned with literary deviations. In 

short basically literature gives an exposure 

to the different cultures of the world. 

Reference 

1 Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author 

in Image-music-Text’, 146. 

2 B. K. Das, Twentieth Century 

Literary Criticism, New Delhi: 

Atlantic publishers, 2005. 

3 M.Nagarajan, N. Krishnaswamy, 

S. Verma. Modern Applied 

Linguistics, New Delhi: 

Macmillan India Limited, 2002. 

4 Johan Lyons, Language and 

Linguistics an Introduction, 

Cambridge: Cambridge University 

Press, 1981. 

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Literature and Literary Theory: An Introduction 

Dr. Sanjay G. Kulkarni 

Asst. Prof. in English 

N.S.B. College, Nanded 

There is lot of talk about Literature and 

literary theory in literary and cultural 

studies. The impossibility of maintaining a 

clear-cut distinction between ordinary, 

day-to-day communication/language and 

literary communication/language has been 

pointed out by many scholars but never 

come to the conclusion. Then one may 

have to know the definition of literature 

and Literary Theory to clear this 

distinction. 

According 

to 

N.KRISHNASWAMY, Literature is 

nothing but that transforms a verbal 

message into a work of art, a thing of 

beauty, a text with its own literary texture. 

To elaborate this J.L.Austin says the 

example of a man and wife when they 

marry in front of priest it assumes a 

religious value with no literariness. But in 

a play and film same statement has a 

literary and fictional value. We know that 

there is a connection between literariness 

and reality or between fiction and fact. 

As Ezra Pound says, Great 

literature is simply language charged with 

meaning to the utmost possible degree. It 

is not for an age but for all time, not for 

any particular region or people. The 

purpose of great or timeless literature to 

humanize life, and the job of critics is to 

interpret and measure the worth of a text 

by testing it against the accepted great 

texts as the best evidence of taste; great 

literature needs to be interpreted because it 

reveals human values only suggestively. 

These notions about great 

literature and ideas about how to 

appreciate, interpret it were very simple 

and straightforward. But the world as well 

as word keeps changing. The continuing 

change in the formation of social system, 

attitudes, values and ideas are explained in 

sociology in terms of what is called the 

wave theory; the same applies to literature 

and related notions. Basically, it is 

assumed that there are three waves. The 

First Wave was The Agrarian Revolution 

where was a time when life was more 

village centered, family centered and 

community centered. Imagination and 

perception was based on local experience 

with a desire for universalizing the local 

perceptions. Added to this the second 

wave was the Industrial Revolution which 

brought the resultant urbanization, 

Consumerism & Capitalism. Similar to 

this in third wave information technology 

has shifted repetitive tasks to machine like 

Robots, Computers etc. in the information 

revolution. Towards the end in our 

thinking every living thing changes the 

world, the word (i.e. the language), our 

perceptions, ideas & attitude; anything that 

does not change is dead. Notice that the 

word change is used both transitively & 

intransitively: we change the world and 

the world changes us; we change and 

world changes; similarly, we change the 

word and changes us; we change and the 

word changes. The world as well as the 

word is dynamic and not static; both are 

living organisms and the interactive 

process is highly dynamic. Literature 

being a reflection or imitation-the 

imaginative or intense expression and 

interpretation-of life (an escape from 

personality says Oscar Wilde), when our 

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notions about life change, our ideas about 

literature too are bound to change; and 

they have changed. 

Criticism has also changed in the 

course of time. This is revealed by 

literature in the way we use the word; for 

example, we talk not just about literature 

with a capital L but about Classical 

literature, Oral & Written literature, 

Religious literature, Adult literature, 

Children literature, Folk literature, Pop 

literature, Tribal literature, Tourist 

literature etc. This shows that imaginative 

literature is only one aspect of literature 

and it can not be equated with the whole 

says John Varghese in his book, 

Contemporary Literary Theory. 

In earlier part we pointed out 

the Introduction of literature but in present 

we will see the definition of literary 

theory. It is neither the theory of anything 

in particular, nor a comprehensive theory 

of things in general. Theory has radically 

changed the nature of literary studies and 

the systematic account of the nature of 

literature and of the methods for analyzing 

it. Theory is a bunch of names; it means 

Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce 

Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, & Gayatri Spivak 

for instance. 

So what is theory? According to 

the Jonathan Culler in his book Literary 

Theory, it is the part of the problem lies in 

the term theory itself, which gestures in 

two directions. On the one hand, we speak 

of theory of relativity, for example, an 

established set of propositions. On the 

other hand, there is the most ordinary use 

of the word theory (i.e. theory signals 

speculation). 

A theory must be more than a 

hypothesis: it can’t be obvious; it involves 

complex relations of a systematic kind 

among a number of factors; and it is not 

easily confirmed or disproved. If we bear 

these factors in mind, it becomes easier to 

understand what goes by the name of 

theory. Theory is literary studies is not an 

account of the nature of literature or 

methods for it study it is a body of 

thinking and writing whose limits are 

exceedingly hard to define. The most 

convenient designation of this 

miscellaneous genre is simply the nick 

name theory, which has come to designate 

work that succeed in challenging and 

reorienting thinking in fields other that 

those to which they apparently belong. 

This is simplest explanation of what 

makes something count as theory. Works 

regarded as theory have effects beyond 

their original field. Theory in this sense is 

not a set of methods for literary study but 

an unbounded group of writings about 

every thing under the sun, from the most 

technical problems of academic 

philosophy to the changing way in which 

people have talk about and thought about 

the body. 

The genre of theory includes 

works of anthropology, art history, film 

studies, gender studies, linguistics studies, 

philosophy, political theory and sociology. 

The works in question are tried to 

arguments in this field, but they become 

theory because their visions have been 

suggestive or productive for people who 

are not studying those disciplines. Works 

that become theory offer accounts others 

can use about mining, nature and cultural. 

If theory is defined by its 

practical effects, as what changes people 

views, makes them think differently about 

their objects of study and their activities of 

studying them. The main effect of theory 

is the disputing of common sense; 

common sense views about meaning 

writing literature, experience. For 

example, theory questions the conception 

that the meaning of an utterance or text is 

what the speaker had in mind. 

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Thus, theory is an attempt to 

show that what we take for granted as 

common sense is in fact a historical 

construction, a particular theory that has 

come to seem so natural to us that we 

don’t even see it as a theory. As a critique 

of common sense and exploration of 

alternative conceptions, theory involves a 

questioning of the most assumptions of 

literary study, the unsettling of anything 

that might have been taken for granted; 

what is meaning? What is an author? What 

is it to read? What is the subject who 

writes, reads, or acts? 

To see the example of some 

theory one may take two celebrated 

theories which involve critiques of 

commonsense ideas about sex, writing, 

and experience. There are several 

important things to note about this 

example of theory. For one thing, 

literature is about sex; literature is one of 

the places where this idea of sex is 

constructed, where we find promoted the 

idea that peoples deepest identities are 

tried to the kind of desire they feel for 

another human being. Foucault has been 

especially influential as the inventor of 

new historical objects: things such as sex, 

punishment and madness. His work treat 

such thing as historical construction and 

thus encourage us to look at how the 

discursive practices of a period, including 

literature may have shaped things we take 

for granted. For second example of 

theory, Foucault illustrates some 

differences within theory as we saw in the 

writings of Jacques Derrida. Rousseau 

also follows this tradition, which has 

passed into common sense, when he 

writes; languages are made to be spoken; 

writing serves only as a supplement to 

speech. Here, Derrida intervenes, asking 

what a supplement is. But Webster defines 

it as some thing that completes or makes 

an addition. 

What we learn from these texts 

is that the idea of the original is created by 

the copies and that the original is always 

deferred – never to be grasped. The 

conclusion is that our common sense 

notion of reality as some thing present, 

and of the original as something that was 

once present, proves untenable: experience 

is always mediated by signs and the 

original is produced as an effect of signs, 

of supplements. 

Foucault and Derrida are often 

grouped together as ‘post-structuralists’ 

but these two examples of ‘theory’ present 

striking differences. Derrida’s offers a 

reading or interpretation of texts, 

identifying logic at work in a text. 

Foucault’s claim is not based on texts in 

fact he cites amazingly few actual 

documents or discourses but offers a 

general framework for thinking about texts 

and discourses in general. Derridsa’s 

interpretation shows the extent to which 

literary works themselves, such as 

Rousseau’s Confessions, are theoretical; 

they offer explicit speculative arguments 

about writing, desire, and substitution or 

supplementation, and they guide thinking 

about these topics in ways that they leave 

implicit. Foucault, on the other hand, 

proposes to show us not how insightful or 

wise texts are but how far the discourses 

of doctors, scientists, novelists, and others 

create the things they claim only to 

analyze. Derrida shows how theoretical 

the literary works are, Foucault how 

creatively productive the discourses of 

knowledge are. There also seems to be a 

difference in what they are claiming and 

what questions arise. Derrida is claiming 

to tell us what Rousseau’s texts say or 

show, so the question that arises is 

whether what Rousseau’s texts say is true. 

Foucault claims to analyze a particular 

historical moment, so the question that 

arises is whether his large generalizations 

hold for other times and places. Raising 

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follow-up questions like these is, in turn, 

our way of stepping into ‘theory’ and 

practicing it. 

So what is theory? Four main 

points have said by Jonathan Culler in his 

book, Literary Theory to study us such as 

1) Theory is interdisciplinary 2) Theory is 

analytical and speculative 3) Theory is a 

critique of common sense 4) Theory is 

reflexive, thinking about thinking in 

literature. As a result, theory is 

intimidating. One of the most dismaying 

features of theory today is that it is 

endless. 

Theory makes you desire 

mastery: you hope that theoretical reading 

will give you the concepts to organize and 

understand the phenomena that concern 

you. This very short introduction will not 

make you a master of theory, and not just 

because it is very short, but it outline 

significant line of thoughts and areas of 

debate, especially those pertaining to 

literature. 

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“Novelness” of Novel in the Essay: From the Prehistory of Novelistic 

Discourse by Mikhail Bakhtin 

Abstract: 

--Mr. S.S. Duthade, 

Gram Vikas Sanstha’s, 

Arts College, Bamkheda T.T., 

Tal. Shahada, Dist. Nandurbar 

The essay “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse” (1940) is one of the noteworthy essays ever written by Mikhail 

Bakhtin. The essay talks about the genre ‘Novel’ in general. The novel according to him is such a category which has 

distinguished features as well as vastly larger varieties and territories. For him novel is more a force than genre. He has 

expressed his view about novel’s “Novelness” in his present essay “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse.” He 

reemphasize that the novelistic word arose and developed not as a result of narrow literary struggle among tendencies, 

style, abstract word- views-but rather in a complex centuries long struggle of cultures and languages. It is connected with 

major shift and crises in the fate of various European languages and the speech life of people and not mere literary style. 

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), one of the 

20 th century renowned philosophers and reputed 

theorists. He contributed in various branches of 

knowledge such as philosophy, linguistic, 

cultural studies and postmodern literary theories. 

It would be no exaggeration to call him 

distinguished thinker. As a thinker he has 

presented his own views on various aspects of 

studies. For instance, he maintained that” the 

form and meaning of language are constantly 

shaped and guided by history and culture.”From 

this he wanted to show that history and culture 

plays very crucial role in giving birth and shape 

to the language. Besides this he has also coined 

or invented certain terms or concepts such as 

“heteroglossia” meaning co-existence of 

different verities within a single code. 

“Dialogism,” meaning acting and reacting to a 

particular point in time and space. From all this 

it is clear that his contribution as theorist and 

thinker is noteworthy and remarkable. 

“Dialogic Imagination”, a collection of 

four essays ever produced Bakhtin reveals his 

contribution. The essay “From the Prehistory of 

Novelistic Discourse” (1940) is one of the 

noteworthy essay the writer has written. The 

essay talks about the genre ‘Novel’ in general. 

The novel according to him is such a category 

which has distinguished features as well as 

vastly larger varieties and territories. For him 

novel is more a force than genre. He has 

expressed his view about novel’s “Novelness”. 

In 19 th century the form novel became 

increasingly popular, but unfortunately it has not 

been given importance as an area of study. 

Novel, according to him is the reduced 

size of history. It is a branch of philosophy 

which explores the philosophical problems 

surrounding the theory. Bakhtin shows that the 

novel is well suited to the postindustrial 

civilization in which we live, because it 

flourishes varieties. The essay is divided into 

three parts. In the first of the essay Bakhtin has 

given stress on saying that how the novel during 

17 th and 18 th century could not recognized as an 

independent form. Poetic genre remained an 

unexplored. It concentrated on fine different 

stylistic approaches: 

1) Use of direct words by author. 

2) Neutral linguistic description. 

3) Introduction of literary tendencies such as 

Romanticism, Naturalism, and Impressionism 

etc. 

4) Author’s personality to analyze the language. 

5) The novel is viewed as rhetorical genre. 

He further compares the novel with all 

other genres. As in the novel “poetic Imagining” 

is used but rarely as compared to other genres. 

In the novel the author could express his ideas 

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and observation only with the help of 

“language.”Conversation remained the 

fundamental constitutive element of all 

novelistic style as well as controlling image. 

Therefore, no unity in the language, the author’s 

comment is found at any of the novels language 

level. It shows that literary language is not 

represented precisely but a mixture is found, as 

compared to that of other forms of literature. 

Therefore, author’s language is used in the 

novel. During the initial part, only two factors of 

the novels are considered. They are ‘laughter’ 

and ‘Polyglossia.’ These two factors in the 

prehistory of the novelistic discourse are the 

subjects of the present essay. 

In the second part of the essay Bakhtin 

talks about how the various factors from ancient 

time paved the way for giving independent 

identity to the novel. Parody, according to him is 

one of the ancient ‘direct word’ methods, which 

was used in poetry. A parody may represent 

ridicule these features of the sonnets. It is also 

used in periodic epic. He says that Homer in his” 

War between the Nice and the Frogs” has used 

parody. Therefore, periodic travestying, that is 

comic and serious treatment together in a text 

which was found in Roman Literature. The 

language broke through the grim atmosphere of 

seriousness of the middle ages to produce the 

work, as part of Renaissance in literature. For 

this reason Roman literature which is identified 

as low literature created immense number of 

periodic-travestying forms. The provided satires, 

epigrams, table talks, folk arts etc. It was, 

therefore, Rome that taught European culture, 

how to laugh and ridicule. Therefore it is a shift 

from parody to periodic-travestying played key 

role in giving shape to novel, rather it is skit 

from language to style, style to parody and 

parody to periodic-travestying. Therefore, 

language itself serves as a means of the direct 

expression. In this new context the “Image of 

language” or image becomes direct word. So, 

language, parody dialogic, scene from everyday 

life, humor etc. brought together in the novel, 

the Bakhtin calls it “Heteroglossia” to make the 

novel whole. One who creates a direct wordwhether 

epic; tragedy or lyric deals with the 

meaning and the object and themes are born and 

grow to maturity in the language. Therefore, the 

power of a language dominated in literature says 

Bakhtin. 

It is not the one language but many 

languages come together and form a single 

language, Bakhtin calls it “Polyglossia.” For 

instance Roman Greek and Latin contribute a lot 

in the term “Polyglossia” such diversity or 

hybridization is influencing in the growth of 

novel. Even the Roman Literature at the outset 

was characterized by trilingulism. This 

Polyglossia is also called interlamination. The 

interlamination of major national languages like 

Latin and Greek can be seen. Therefore, the 

speech diversity within languages, thus, has 

primary importance for the novel. Its full 

creative consciousness only under conditioned 

of an active polyglossia. 

In the third and final part of the essay, 

Mikhail Bakhtin talks about stylistic problems 

during Hellenistic period. It was the problem of 

quotations. The quotations were varied 

sometime direct half hidden and some time 

directly hidden. The boundary lines between 

someone else’s speech and one’s own speech 

were flexible, ambiguous, often deliberately 

distorted and confused. On the other hand the 

role of parody in middle age was extremely 

important. But in modern time the function of 

parody are narrow and unproductive, parody has 

grown sickly. It pared the way for a new literary 

and linguistic consciousness as well as for the 

great Renaissance of the novel. Apart from this 

medieval scholar apparently tools this 

grammatical treatise completely, seriously and 

contemporary scholars are far from unanimous. 

The important genres such as “sortie” and 

“Rabelais and Cervantes” laid the foundation for 

the novelistic world. 

Conclusion: 

While concluding, the writer says that 

primarily the familiar strata of folk language that 

played such an enormous role in the formulation 

of novelistic discourse and composition of the 

novel as a genre. He reemphasize that the 

novelistic word arose and developed not as a 

result of narrow literary struggle among 

tendencies, style, abstract word- views-but rather 

in a complex centuries long struggle of cultures 

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and languages. It is connected with major shift 

and crises in the fate of various European 

languages and the speech life of people and not 

mere literary style. 

References: 

1. Benita Parry, Problems in Current Theories of 

Colonial Discourse in the Oxford Literary 

Review (1987) 

2. Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The 

Dialogical Principle (1984) 

3. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, 

Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Poetics (1990) 

4. David Lodge, After Baktin: Essays on Fiction 

and Criticism (1990) 

5. David Lodge, 20th Century Modern Criticism 

(1988) 

6. Seturaman, Contemporary Criticism: An 

Anthology (MacMillian) (1989) 

7. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An 

Introduction Oxford; Basi Blackwell (1983) 

8. Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism: A 

Short History, NewDelhi, Oxford (1967) 

9. Raman Selden: A Readers Guide to 

Contemporary Literary Theory, Brighton, The 

Harvester Press (1985) 

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Phenomenological Criticism: A Study 

--Pastapure. D.A. 

Vai. Dhunda Maharaj Deglurkar Collge 

Degloor Dist Nanded. 

Phenomenological criticism was started by Germen thinker Edmund Husser (1859-1938). It is method of 

philosophical enquiry which lays stress on perceivers vital and central role determining meaning. It shows that the 

underlying nature of human consciousness and of phenomena (thing appearing). This critical approach involves 

and entry to an investigation of the underline nature and essence of a work of literature. 

Keywords : Phenomena, consciousness, intentional, perception, perceiver etc. 

Phenomenology was established by the 

German thinker Edmund Husserl (1859- 

1938). The tern ‘Phenomenology’ can be 

describe as ‘Phenomena’ is greek word 

which means ‘things appearing’ and ‘logo’ 

is also a greek word the shows knowledge. 

So phenomenology means knowledge of 

things appearing. It is method of 

philosophical enquiry which lays stress of 

perceivers vital and central role 

determining meaning. Phenomenology 

claims to show us the underline nature of 

human consciousness and of ‘phenomena’. 

This was an attempt to revive the idea that 

the individual human mind is the centre 

and origin of all meaning. As for as 

literature and literary theory is concerned, 

The phenomologist critical approach 

involves and entry to an investigation of 

the underline nature and essence of a work 

of literature. 

Phenomenology has had 

widespread philosophical influences since 

it was put forward by Husserl in 1900 and 

later and has been diversely developed by 

Martin Heidegger in Germany and 

Maurice Merleau–Ponty in France. It has 

greatly influenced Huns-Georg Gadamer 

and other theorist concerned with 

analyzing the conscious activity of 

understanding language and has directly, 

affected the way in which may critic 

analyze the experience of literature. 

In 1930 the Polish theorist Roman 

Ingarden (1893-1970). Who wrote his both 

in polish and German adapted the 

phenomenological viewpoint and concept 

to a formulation of the way we understand 

are respond to a work of literature. In 

garden’s analysis, a literary originate in 

the intentional act of consciousness of its 

author “Intentional”. In the 

phenomenological sense that the act are 

directed towards an object. These acts, as 

recorded in a text, make it possible for a 

reader to re-experience the work in his or 

her own consciousness. 

Husserl’s conception of 

phenomenology has been criticized and 

developed not only by himself by his 

student Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger. 

According to Stephen hicks** write that to 

understand phenomenology one must 

indentify its root in the philosophy of 

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his ‘The 

Critics of Pure Reason’ Kant distinguish 

between ‘phenomena’ (object as 

interpreted by human sensibility and 

understanding) and ‘noumena’ (Object as 

thing in themselves) which human cannot 

directly experience. Husserl derived many 

important concepts central to 

phenomenology from the works and 

lectures of his teacher, the philosopher and 

psychologists Franz Brentano and Carl 

Stumf. An important element of 

phenomenology, that Husserl barrowed 

from Brentano is ‘Intentionally’ (often 

describe as ‘aboutness’), the notion that 

consciousness is always consciousness of 

something the object of consciousness is 

called the intentional object, and this 

object is constituted for consciousness in 

many different ways. Through for 

instance, perception, memory, retention 

and pretention signification etc. 

throughout these different intentionalities, 

Though they have different structure and 

different ways of being about the object, 

an object is still constituted as 

the same identical object in direct 

perception as it is in the immediately 

following retention of this object and the 

eventual remembering of it. 

As George poulet say’s. 

“When I read as I ought….. with 

the total commitment required of any 

reader”, 

Then. 

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“I am thinking the thoughts of 

another…. But I think It is as my 

very 

own…. My consciousness behave 

as though it were the 

consciousness of another” 2 

George Poulet has also undertaken 

in a number of book to tell the story of the 

varying imaginative treatment of the topic 

of time throughout the course of western 

literature, regarding these treatments as 

correlative diverse modes of lived 

experience. In these histories Poulet sets 

out to identify “for each epoch a 

consciousness common to all 

contemporary minds,” he claims, however, 

that within this shared periodconsciousness. 

The consciousness of each 

author also manifests its uniqueness the 

influence of the criticism of consciousness 

reached its hight in 1950’s and 1960’s 

then gave way to explicitly opposed 

critical modes of structuralism and 

deconstruction. Many of its concept and 

procedures, how ever surrive in some 

forms of reader-response criticism and 

reception-aesthetic. 

Hans Robbert Jauss an important 

German exponent of reception theory. 

Jauss discuss the reader role from the 

philosophical ‘Hermeneutics’ of Hans- 

George Gadamer a follower of Heidgger 

Gadamer argues that all interpretation of 

past literature arise from a dialogue 

between past and present our attempt to 

understand a work will depend on 

questions which our own cultural 

environment allow us to raise. At the same 

time, we week to discover the questions 

which the work itself was trying to answer 

in its own dialogue with history. 

Thus phenomenology is a modern 

philosophical tendency that emphasizes 

the perceiver. Object can have meaning, 

Phenomenologist’s maintain, only an 

active consciousness (a perceiver) absorbs. 

In other words object exits if and only if 

we register them our consciousness. 

References:- 

i. Abrams M.H. (2004), “A Glossary 

of literary terms,” seventh edition., 

prism book pvt. Ltd. 

ii. George Poulet, (1969). 

“Phenomenology of reading.” 

iii. Selden Raman, (1989) A reader’s 

guide to contemporary literary 

iv. 

theory, 2 nd ed, university press of 

Kentucky. 

WWW.wikipedia.com 

117 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1


A Reading of John Milton’s On His Blindness in the light of Deconstruction. 

-- Phutke S.N 

P.A.Holkar College, 

Ranisawargaon. 

Recently numbers of scholars have 

devoted themselves to the task of practicising 

literary theory in the classroom. This is 

becoming essential in demand with the 

contemporary trends in literary criticism. The 

present effort through the paper is to show how a 

familiar poem ‘On His Blindness’ leads the 

reader to an indeterminate position in the light of 

Deconstruction. The pioneer of this theory was 

Jacques Derrida. He was a prominent French 

philosopher. He put forth his views in his three 

well known books entitled Of Grammatology, 

Writing and Difference, and Speech and 

Phenomena. 

He is not the first person to use the 

term deconstruction, although it has become 

synonymous with him. The oxford English 

Dictionary (Vol 3,106) records that one 

McCarthy used this word in1882 in his 

Nineteenth Century: “A reform the beginning of 

which must be a work deconstruction.” It is 

derived from the French verb ‘deconstuire’ 

means to undo the construction of, to take to 

pieces. Perhaps this sense of ‘taking to pieces’ 

may have led the general perception of Derrida’s 

deconstruction with destruction alone. When we 

examined carefully the quotation from Oxford 

English Dictionary, it has become obvious that 

the work of deconstruction is not simply and 

solely for the sake of destruction. Whereas it is 

only a means to reform. Even though Derrida 

and his followers do not explicitly state such a 

‘reformation.’ It is implicit that they are aiming 

towards a radical change in our way of thinking. 

De……..con……..struct…….. ion 

Diagram. 

The analysis of the word 

‘deconstruction’ may be useful here to clarify 

the meaning of the term and show the relation 

between destruction and construction in 

deconstruction. The diagram shows that 

deconstruction comprises both destruction and 

construction, giving room for the explanation 

that there is no destruction without construction 

and vice-versa .This suggest the simultaneous 

co-existence. Also “De-” has three semantic 

functions i) relating, ii) reversing, and iii) 

intensifying. The relating “de-” refers to 

“down”, “away”, “apart”, “aside”, in such words 

as destruction, decrease etc. The reversing “de-” 

indicates a reversal of process as in demote, 

denationalize, denaturalize etc. and the 

intensifying “de-” adds emphasis to the root as 

in delimit, depict, deprave. All these three 

functions are involved in deconstruction. To 

limit the function of “de-” to one or the other 

would amount to going against the very spirit of 

“free play” that is main characteristic of 

deconstruction. 

It is supposed that deconstruction is very 

difficult to define, but it is not totally beyond the 

category of definition. Barbara Johnson have 

identified and discussed deconstructive reading 

strategies in a very simple manner in her essay 

Teaching Deconstructively (P.140-48). Her chief 

aim is to show how these strategies are useful in 

classroom situation to discuss on any work. She 

has given seven points, although these are not 

exhaustive in any way. These are ambiguous 

words, undecidable syntax, incompatibilities 

between what a text says and what it does, 

incompatibilities between the literal and the 

figurative, incompatibilities between explicitly 

fore grounded assertions and illustrative 

examples or less explicitly asserted supported 

supporting material, obscurity, and fictional selfinterpretations. 

For Milton’s ‘On His Blindness’ the 

first two strategies are employed. Firstly 

ambiguous words – means multiplicity of 

meaning and secondly an undecidable syntax 

118 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1


allows itself to be indeterminate. There are 

different opinion about the exact date of 

composition and the time when he becomes 

blind. As ordinary mortal human being he raises 

questions about God’s justice but as a pious 

puritan he accepts his lot. When we see this 

poem in the light of deconstruction reveals its 

undecidability. There are number of variations 

of this poem. For instance Davis and Davis, 

Hughes, Palgrave. These variations are not only 

concerned with the title ‘On His Blindness’ by 

which it is popularly known, although not given 

by Milton himself, but also with punctuation, 

capitalization and spelling. Most of the edition 

like Palgrave has chosen to retain ‘On His 

Blindness’. Bernard and Elizabeth Davis have 

preferred to change the capital “H” to small “h”. 

Some of them have not given any title, but they 

identify the sonnet by the Roman numeral xix. 

All these changes in the title evoke the usually 

irrelevant question. Whose blindness is talked 

about in the poem? It may appear obvious that 

the poem is about Milton’s blindness. However, 

the suspicion is strengthened by the capital “H” 

in “His” which conventionally refers to the God. 

It is important to note that both “His” and “his” 

are used in the poem frequently. Now it should 

be observed that editorial use of small “h” may 

be an attempt to fix the blindness once and for 

all with John Milton. 

The dubious nature of “His” or 

“his”, divine and human is further complicated 

by what Barbara Johnson calls the undecidable 

syntax. It is sentence structure that allows an 

ambiguity. The undecidable syntax in “On His 

Blindness” is the rhetorical question “Doth God 

exact day-labour, light denied?”(Ramachandran 

& Achar,48) Generally, it is supposed to 

contain a negative response and the “patience” 

also prevents the “murmur” by a reconciliatory 

tone which in any way is in opposition to 

Milton’s sincere wish to serve his master. When 

we paid close attention to the use of adverb 

“fondly” the problem deepens. Usually “fondly” 

is substituted by foolishly and said that Milton 

shows his humility. To proceed from a 

deconstructive angle, the fool in foolishly is a 

jester. The fool like the one in King Lear is a 

professional fool in the royal court who makes 

the mad king understand life by his intelligent 

and meaningful discourse. The foolish poet 

Milton, who asks an intelligent question about 

Gods justice, is in fact, throwing the questions of 

blindness to explosively ambiguous meanings, 

including the blindness of the poet, God, Justice, 

the world, the poem, the language, the reader 

and so on. 

The problem gains additional force 

through the very first line “When I consider how 

my light is spent?”( Ramachandran & Achar,48 

) Why Milton does used the active voice in the 

subordinate clause and passive voice in the 

object. Through “how my light is spent?” does 

he suggest that somebody else spent his light, 

that is eyesight? Could that somebody be God? 

If so, what kind of God is He/he? Perhaps the 

last question may lead the reader to correct 

notion of “God” that functions as an 

authoritative source of fixed meaning. In this 

way from above it is clear that the conflicting 

forces within text leads to indeterminate 

position. It is apt to conclude with Derrida’s 

opinion, “language bears within itself the 

necessity of its own critique” (Lodge & 

Wood,112) 

Reference: 

1) Palgrave, Francis. The Golden Treasury. 

Third ed., supplemented by Lawrence 

Bunyan. London:Macmillan, 1977. 

2) Ramachandran, C.N. & Radha 

Achar,ed., Five Centuries of Poetry. 

Macmillan,1991. 

3) Lodge, David & Nigel Wood, ed., 

Modern Criticism and Theory: A 

Reader. New Delhi:Pearson 

Education,2007. 

4) Johnson, Barbara. Teaching 

Deconstructively, Atkins & 

Johnson,1985. 

5) Davis, Bernard & Elizabeth Devis, ed., 

Poets of Early Seventeenth Century. 

London:Routledge & Kegan Paul,1967. 

119 PLTL-2012: ISBN 978-81-920120-0-1

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