LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:11 November 2013
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.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Myth as Male Conspiracy:
A Study of Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night

Dr. Vandana Goyal, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.

Abstract

In this paper, an endeavour has been made to study the very basics of the creative dynamics of Indian women fiction through a close study of Githa Hariharan’s The Thousand Faces of Night. The position of Indian feminism on the role of myth in woman’s life/fiction would be discussed primarily. Does this fiction validate myth without any challenge? Or does it resist its authority? Is myth a sacred construct? Or is it a conspiracy of the so-called phallocentric social set up? Is myth indispensable? Or can it be done away with? I shall try to answer these pertinent questions to bring out the response of Indian women writing towards the mythical and the archetypal.

Keywords:Myth, Feminine, Patriarchal, Post-modern

Mindset Behind Indian Women Fiction

It is pre-supposed that there is a definite mindset that goes into the very formation of the burgeoning corpus of Indian women fiction. An attempt to discover the broad possible contours of this mindset with all the attendant risks of reductivism is undertaken to arrive at the very poetics of this mindset. “An integral part of the feminist critical project in the West has been to re-evaluate the ideological underpinnings of dominant genres be they high or low, realist or fantasy.”1

On Defining Myth

To begin with, it is necessary to understand what a myth is all about. In common parleys myth signifies” any story or plot, whether true or invented.”2 To some myths is an authentic source of history, fossilized history. Michael Grant goes a step further when he terms myth as “para-history”, which records not what happened but what people at different times, said or believed had happened.”3 Myth, as Northrop Fyre would constantly remind us is the very grammar of our language. It provides a structure to our imagination. Myths are not easy to disown. Jungian psychology would tell us that they are ingrained in our consciousness irrevocably. Myths bequeath us the very co-ordinates of our behaviour. Myths are heralded as universal fables that have a paradigmatic value in all environs. In post-modern terms, myth as grand-narrative is not accepted as a harmless, apolitical, value-free story or a fable. Myth is taken as a closed, value-loaded narrative which tends to erase the minor differentiations of race, nationality and gender in favour of the dominant and the powerful. Myth is the mischief of the mighty. Post-modernists warn us against this granted linearity of the mythical.

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

Dr. Vandana Goyal, M.A, M.Phil., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Government Post Graduate College
Hisar 125001
Haryana
India
vandanagoyal16@gmail.com
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