Life in Colonial India: Reading through Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Six Acres and a Third (original) (raw)

"Satire, Literary Realism, and the Indian State: Six Acres and a Third and Raag Darbari"

Economic and Political Weekly, 2006

s literary device of using satire served a dual purpose. It was a strategy that made possible a veiled criticism of the colonial state and the norms it imposed but was also an admission of self-mockery. This tradition of satire and self-mockery is carried further in novels that depict the disillusionment the citizen experienced in the post-colonial state, most evocative in Shrilal Shukla's novel of post-Nehruvian despair, Raag Darbari. The use of satire strikes a bitterly mocking tone, yet the humour assuages, lifts the narrative from being a work of utter desolation to one the reader can understand, mourn and yet laugh.

Humour and anticolonial discourse in the early novels of

2020

The paper explores the use of humour as a literary device to protest, criticize and reject the ruling class and its culture in the early novels of R. K. Narayan. He, generally labeled as an apolitical writer, maintains the equilibrium between tacit criticism of the colonial system and the projection of Indian values, thereby building a counter narrative against the British hegemony with his subversive humour. His lighthearted humour is overtly charged and politically loaded with strong anticolonial arguments that open new vistas and presents humour as a literary weapon. R. K. Narayan appears naive and is engaged in the apparent projection of Indianness, but behind the veil of simplicity, his writing emerges as a strong medium of criticism.

Critiquing Colonialism and Middle-Class Dominance -A Postcolonial Study of Six Acres and a third

IJELS, 2022

The intervention of colonial laws and administration in the indigenous society of Odisha caused a lot of upheavals in the native's life. Along with the colonizers, the middle-class people also took advantage of the laws to exploit the innocent and illiterate lower class Odias. Fakir Mohan Senapati's path-breaking novel Six Acres and a Third skilfully mirrors this impact of Colonial intervention in Odia society. By giving a vivid picture of Colonialism and middle class dominance and oppression, Senapati exposes the system of his day and presents it in a satiric manner as an act of resistance. The novel, providing a micro picture of Colonialism and oppression of natives by the middle class people like Zamindars and Lawyers, depicts a number of social issues and implicitly critiques the whole system.

Humour and anticolonial discourse in the early novels of R. K. Narayan

Alexandru Ioan Cuza University Romania, 2020

The paper explores the use of humour as a literary device to protest, criticize and reject the ruling class and its culture in the early novels of R. K. Narayan. He, generally labeled as an apolitical writer, maintains the equilibrium between tacit criticism of the colonial system and the projection of Indian values, thereby building a counter narrative against the British hegemony with his subversive humour. His lighthearted humour is overtly charged and politically loaded with strong anticolonial arguments that open new vistas and presents humour as a literary weapon. R. K. Narayan appears naive and is engaged in the apparent projection of Indianness, but behind the veil of simplicity, his writing emerges as a strong medium of criticism.

Humour and Sadness in Postcolonial Novel: Emotional Ambivalence in Early Anglo-Indian Novels

Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları, 2023

The deployment of humour and sadness together in postcolonial literature invites important discussions on ambivalence. These two juxtaposing themes in postcolonial novels reflect not only the cultural clashes effectively, but also the emotional ambivalence of the characters. While the use of humour and sadness turns the anti-colonial novels into sub-historical texts, the tragicomedy created in this context provides an opportunity to view history from an individual perspective and re-interpret it. This can be observed within the early novels of Salman Rushdie, particularly in Shame, Midnight’s Children, and The Satanic Verses, Hanif Kureishi and Arundhati Roy. The excerpts taken from these novels indicate that the cultural clashes occurred by the confrontation of Eastern and Western cultures inevitably bring humour and sadness together. Yet, the occurrence of these juxtaposing uses of humour and sadness reveals an emotional ambivalence as well as cultural ambiva lence of the main sub-continental characters in these works. This paper, therefore, argues that colonial practices, as represented in Rushdie, Kureishi and Roy’s novels in question, function to create a juxtapositional unity of humour and sadness that create the emotional ambivalence of colonial subjects who are not only hybridized culturally but also traumatized individually.

Gandhian Values and Indian English Fiction

Akshara, 2021

This paper explores the impact of Gandhian thoughts on the Indian English Fiction, and how the promulgation of Minutes on Education (1835) established the hegemony of the Western knowledge system over the prevailing system of Indian education. Resultantly, India witnessed a new class of English speaking gentlemen, produced by the English missionary schools to assist the Empire to achieve the much cherished objectives of Macaulay. They were offered important positions in the Imperial set up of government, facilitating British rule in India. Though the first generation Indian writers writing in English imitated the Western authors as their role model and fashioned their writing pattern accordingly, they paved way for their literary successors to embody unjust power dynamics originated with the idea of imperialism. The paper also investigates how the incorporation of Gandhian ideas in oeuvres of illustrious Indian authors provides a plausible picture of constructive influence on masses across all sections of Indian society.

Caste, Class and Gender: The Subalte rns in Senapati's Six Acres and a Third

Kazim ali, 2019

The novel presents a plethora of social evils and conniving accounts of corruption, conspiracy and exploitation. It is aboutlife in the Oriya village of Gobindapur, dominated by the exploitative zamindar, Ramachandra M angaraj.He rises from a very humble background to become one of the richest landlords of Cuttack. Having received only two acres of land in the beginning, he succeeds in acquiring as much as eighty-six acres. Six Acres and a Third presents different subjects as subalterns placed at different levels in the social hierarchy.In this paper I would attempt to study the novel from the prism of the downtrodden, the suppressed and the exploited-the subalterns.