Charul Jain
Majority of the narratives that are handed down to
us orally or in written literatures have been written from the perspectives of
power, whether they be the patriarchal, religious or authoritarian dominance.
Most of these literatures fail to take into account the perspectives and
positions of minorities, suppressed or subaltern individuals, groups or
communities. In the postmodern and postcolonial literatures sometimes, we see
an attempt at making an alternative reading of these discourses and presenting
a point of view that was so far unheard of or unrecognized. Dipesh Chakravarty
in his essay ‘Minority Histories and Subaltern Pasts’ talks about the
impossibility of having a single narratorial voice about incidents and contends
multiplicity of voices of recording history or pat. Linda Hutcheon too in her
book A Poetics of Postmodernism talks about the possibility of multiplicity of voices
and interpretations regarding historical narratives. A section on Genesis in
the Old Testament of the Bible, puts on record the story of rape of Dinah and
resultant bloodshed. Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent presents the story from the perspective of Dinah
who calls it a consensual act between two lovers belonging to warring factions
and unacceptability of this liaison. Similarly, Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice
narrates the events from the perspective of the Bennets, a middleclass family.
A counter narrative by Jo Baker ‘s Longbourn looks at the events though the eyes of a house
maid and alters the narrative. This paper makes an attempt to look at these two
counter-narratives vis a vis the popular works that we are habitual of studying
giving voice to subaltern minority characters in the
main narratives.
minority literature, counter narratives, subaltern voices, Anita Diamant, Jo Baker
VOL.12, ISSUE No.2, March 2020