LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 11 : 3 March 2011
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.

HOME PAGE

AN APPEAL FOR SUPPORT

  • We seek your support to meet the expenses relating to the formatting of articles and books, maintaining and running the journal through hosting, correrspondences, etc.Please write to the Editor in his e-mail address languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com to find out how you can support this journal. Thank you. Thirumalai, Editor.

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIAL

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Contributors from South Asia may e-mail their articles to
    B. Mallikarjun,
    Central Institute of Indian Languages,
    Manasagangotri,
    Mysore 570006, India     mallikarjun@ciil.stpmy.soft.net.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and booklength reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2010
M. S. Thirumalai
 
Web www.languageinindia.com

Joshi's The Foreigner - Within and Without

P. Bala Shanmuga Devi, Ph.D.

Cover page of The Foreigner

A Narrative of Sindi

Sindi of The Foreigner is a product of multiple continents, born in Africa to an Indian father and an English mother, brought up by his Indian uncle, educated in England and America, feels always a 'nowhere man' who finally gets his anchorage in his ancestral home India, after a long struggle in loneliness and misconstrued detachment of inaction.

The typical confused state of a postmodern youth, who is always amidst crowds but always alone, is depicted. When June Blyth sees him for the first time in a party with all the dancing and drinking around, wherein, Sindi is the ex-officio host, she asks "Why do you look so sad?" (Foreigner 22).

The turbulent inner world of the protagonist is delineated in this interesting novel. Sindi is painfully aware of "twenty-five years largely wasted in search of peace, and what did I have to show for achievement: a ten-stone body that had to be fed four times a day, twenty-five times a week. This was a sum of a lifetime of striving."(Foreigner 92) "Death wipes out everything, for most of us anyway. All that is a big mocking zero" (92).

Even the institution of marriage is unreasonably scary to Sindi. When June asks for a reason, he avers, "I might have had reasons to begin with, but now I was only aware of a dull fear. I was afraid of possessing anybody and I was afraid of being possessed, and marriage meant both" (91).

Questions about Freedom: No Choice in Birth or Death?

When Sindi keeps on voicing such philosophies Karl shouts at him thus: "You Indians and your mealy mouthed philosophies! The trouble with you is you have never known war. If you were bombed every night for a year, why, even a month, I would like to see how many of you would still go around preaching The Bhagwad Gita" (67). Karl also adds that whether we cooperate or not we are bound to lose our freedom wherein, Arun, an accomplice of Karl, replies after a long silence: "But you are never free, Karl. How can anybody take away your freedom when you never had it in the first place? All freedom is illusion. You had no choice in your birth nor do you even choose your death" (68).

June disagrees with him and says that we do have a choice in death and one can choose to end whenever he chooses to. She adds, "If everything is beyond control then how do you suppose we live from day to day?" for which Arun dreamily replies, "Random events happen around you forcing you to make decisions propelling you on through life. It is only our vanity that makes us imagine that we are leading our own destiny" (68).

This and many more philosophical responses voiced by Joshi are found in all his novels.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Balbir Madhopuri's Changiya Rukh - A Critique of Dalit Identity and Politics | Multiple Nested Triglossic Situation in Pakistan | Problems Encountered by Arab EFL Learners | Language and Nomenclature Imbroglio among the Kukis | Indigenous Language Abandonment in the Religious Domain in Murree - A Family Report Analysis | A Comparative Study of New Woman through the Female Protagonists of Kamala Markandaya and Shashi Deshpande | A Look into the Causes of Language Choice among Female Students in Academic Setting in Pakistan | Census and the Aspects of Growth and Development of Bangla vs. Bangla-Hindi Bilingualism -With Special Focus on West Bengal | Joshi's The Foreigner - Within and Without | To Investigate the Sense of Teacher Efficacy between Male and Female Teachers of Secondary Schools of Wah Cantt. | Comparative Study of Cost Effectiveness of Formal and Non-Formal System of Primary Teacher Certificate Programme in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Pakistan) | Sudha Murty's Short Stories as a Motif of Values | Standard English as a 'Fiat Code' and the Dwindling Faith behind It | Effect of the Use of Motivational Techniques on the Academic Achievement of the Teachers at the Higher Education Level in Pakistan | A Critical Analysis of the Function of Mass Media Language as a Tool of Social Oppression | The Use of Films in the Teaching of English in India | A Comparative Study of Effectiveness of Concept Attainment Model and Advance Organizer Model in Teaching of English in Teacher Education Course | The Effect of Cooperative Learning on Academic Achievement of Low Achievers in English | Imagining a Borderless World: A Comparative Study of Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda | Teaching English in Schools: Problems and Solutions - A Case Study from Rajasthan, India | Socio-cultural Patterns of the Tamil Brahmin Community in the Novels of R. K. Narayan | Effects of Multimedia Glosses on Aiding Vocabulary Acquisition in EFL Environment | English Language Teaching in Rural India - Issues and Suggestions | Teaching Paragraph Writing - "Bilingual" Newspapers as Tools | A Study of Teachers' Academic Qualification, Morale and Their Teaching Behaviour | Syllable Onset Clusters and Phonotactics in Pahari | Literary Criticism as a Shared Set of Measurement | Ted Hughes's Poetry - The Problem of the Evil of Self-Consciousness | Travelogue as a Literary Genre | Bim's Unfailing Strength in Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day | Impact of Education on Development of Self-Concept in Adults | An Analysis of the Lack of Primary English Language Skills among the Technical Students of Hindi Speaking States | Emergent Literacy Experiences in the Classroom - A Sample Survey in Mysore City | ICT Enabled Language Learning Using Handphones - An Experimental Study | Creative Writing in Language Classes | Business Communication: Techniques and Methods by Om P. Juneja and Aarti Mujumdar (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2010) | Word Formation in Surjapuri | Beatrice Culleton and Her April Rain Tree - Identity Crisis of the People of Mixed Races of Colonization | A PRINT VERSION OF ALL THE PAPERS OF MARCH, 2011 ISSUE IN BOOK FORMAT. This document is better viewed if you open it online and then save it in your computer. After saving it in your computer, you can easily read all the pages from the saved document.

Call for Papers for a Language in India www.languageinindia.com Special Volume on Autobiography and Biography in Indian Writing in English | Call for Papers for a Special Volume on Indian Writing in English - Analysis of Select Novels of 2009-2010 | HOME PAGE of March 2011 Issue | HOME PAGE of Language in India | CONTACT EDITOR languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com

P. Bala Shanmuga Devi, Ph.D.
Department of English
A.P.C. Mahalaxmi College for Women
Thoothukudi 628002
Tamilnadu, India
devibala25@yahoo.com

 
Web www.languageinindia.com
  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknolwedged the work or works of others you either cited or used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian scholarship.