| This project examines the prose fictions of contemporary South Asian writer Dr. Indira Goswami and interprets diverse marginal identities represented in her writings. Although postcolonial theory initially considered questions of margins and peripheries based mainly on an East-versus-West dualism, since the last thirty years, it has come a long way in understanding the concept of marginality. The postcolonial theory no longer refers to colonialism only to recover the voices of the marginalized people. Basing on this paradigm shift where the marginals are not defined exclusively vis-a-vis the Empire and colonialism, I show through the works of Dr. Goswami, how marginalization in a vastly diverse country like India takes place at various levels and cannot be compartmentalized into fixed categories of simple binaries. A study of her works reveals how local, heterogeneous issues, along with the politics of location, sometimes rework on subaltern and postcolonial theories by reducing subalternity to more of a relational than ontological identity. Thus, I demonstrate that Goswami's works open up opportunities to further dehegemonize marginality from the all-pervasive and all-inclusive Western perspective while exploring its particularity in diverse contexts. |
