Subaltern Voices And Narrative Resistance In Indian Fiction

Abstract

The question of narrative authority over India's story animates this paper's examination of how Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie two writers who could hardly be more different in temperament and technique—have attempted to represent subaltern experience in their major novels. Drawing on Gramsci's concept of the subaltern and Spivak's still-unsettling challenge regarding subaltern speech, this paper argues that both The God of Small Things and Midnight's Children develop narrative strategies specifically designed to disrupt dominant historiography and make space for voices typically excluded from official accounts of the Indian nation. Serious attention is also given to the objection that English-language fiction by privileged cosmopolitan authors may transform subaltern experience into commodity rather than genuine representation. The analysis extends to Mahasweta Devi and Rohinton Mistry, whose different approaches Devi's confrontational minimalism, Mistry's patient social realism the picture in useful ways. The central contention is that subaltern representation in Indian fiction is most powerful when it is most honest about its own limitations