Arijit Goswami
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Gorubathan Government College, Kalimpong, E-mail: arijit.goswami80@gmail.com
Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s16n1
Abstract
The modus operandi of categorising European and especially British authors as representative of the hegemonic colonial enterprise that subjugated the Indian sub-continent for nearly two hundred years is a common analogy while dealing with the colonial era. The seemingly simplistic logic is problematised, when a British author, closely related to the ruling administrative set-up voices dissent, whereas the colonised intelligentsia fails to register minimal protest in their literary works. The article would try to decipher the anti- orientalist discourse with special reference to the literary representation of cholera epidemics in Fanny Parkes’s Wanderings of a pilgrim in search of the picturesque (1850), during the patriarchal-colonising enterprise in vogue and envisage to compare Lal Behari Day’s Folktales of Bengal (1883), which fails to express the reality of an epidemic-devastated land and displeasure of the commoners towards the ruling class for their inept handling of the epidemics.
Keywords: Colonization, Cholerize, Dissent, Anti-orientalism