Interrogating Strategies of Justice and Racial Politics: A Post-colonial Reading of Abir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man

Febin Vijay¹ and Priyanka Tripathi²

¹Junior Research Fellow (PhD), Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. febinvijay777@gmail.com

²Associate Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. ORCID: 0000-0002-9522-3391.

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.20

Abstract

The present article begins with a brief historical account of the exclusionary politics of Western crime fiction, with most of the works representing the East as ‘exotic other’ while assuming the subject position themselves. A post-colonial analysis of Abir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man (2016) is conducted to study how the novel deals with questions of justice and racial politics, and further encompasses a brief inquiry into it can be positioned as an anti-colonial text which advocates a move towards decolonization. The text can be seen as representing the body of work by writers who give voice to the oppressed within colonial contexts and vehemently refuse the idea of being inferior.

Keywords: post-colonial, justice, race, crime, violence.