________________
136
/
Jijnäsä
18. Re-mapping Culture through Literature: Narratives as Vehicles of
Culture
Usha Bande
"The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust more to him, armed with his primer, than I do the soldier in full military array, for upholding and extending the liberties of his country."
Lord Brougham in a speech in the House of Commons, 29 Jan. 1929
Cultural implication of the colonial experience is one of the significant aspects of literature studies in the post-colonial period. The main preoccupation of the literature of the erstwhile-colonized countries has been to resist the imperial myths and fallacies by writing back to the center. The effort is to preserve one's self-image and establish an indigenous identity. As Franz Fanon opines, colonialism not only enslaves a people politically, it devalues their pre-colonial history and invades their culture. The victims of this historical process suffer loss of identity and undergo psychological conflicts. In the post-colonial era, therefore, the urgent need of the society is to re-possess its past and take control of its own reality by "charting the cultural territory," to use Edward Said's words. In literature this is termed as reinscription'. What Said asserts in his Culture and Imperialism is that while identity is crucial to the post-colonial, just to define it, as “a different identity” is not enough. The important thing is to be able to see and show others that even the Subaltern has had a history capable of development, as part of the process of growth and maturity. That is where re-writing or reinscription assumes significance. While some Indian critics see post-colonial theory of literature as “ideologically an emancipatory concept" given to a "rigorous scrutiny on the continuities and ruptures in the decolonized societies" some others question its efficacy and efficiency for the Indian situation. These critics feel that though the post-colonial literature tends to write back to the center it does not solve the question of 'marginality. Post-colonialism, Jasbir Jain asserts is a "question of attitude which goes beyond the attempt to confront colonialism to become an attempt to transcend it, to step outside the influence and the framework, to reclaim an autonomous and free identity".
In this paper an attempt has been made to study three Indian English novels to see how the authors reclaim their identity by re-mapping their cultural territory and how by reverting to the traditional narrative strategies they work out an indigenous framework. The novels selected for discussion are Arun Joshi's The City and the River (1990) and The Last Labyrinth(1981), and Gita Mehta's A River Sutra(1993). The discussion will focus on the narratives, analyzing the cultural consciousness of the
