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  • Essay / The Subaltern Turn: Rereading Tughlaq by Grirish Karnad

    “As we grow older as a race, we realize that history is written, that it is a kind of literature without morality. That among its actuaries the ego of the race is indissoluble and that everything depends on whether we write this fiction through the memory of the hero or the victim. » Derek Walcot (The Postcolonial Studies Reader 371) Based on Orientalism by Edward Said (1978); a new stage in the history of literacy criticism that heralded the postcolonial school of criticism, many revisionist approaches emanated to question self-proclaimed "truths" and "facts" as well as the history behind stories in order to discover the other side of the coin. The Subaltern Studies Group, founded in 1982, is another name for these emerging schools which seek to develop a new critique of colonialist and nationalist perspectives in the historiography of colonized countries. This article focuses on one of the most influential playwrights of our time, Girish Karnad, and his seminal play Tughlaq, which has been critically acclaimed for its multiple layers of meaning and significance. Time and again, critics have explored postcolonial political perspectives in the play. However, the objective of my article is to establish a subaltern turn in this same movement. From the outset, it must be emphasized that, consciously or unconsciously, Girish Karnad does not share the political objective of the Subaltern Collective and that we do not find intertextual elements in either. two. However, it will be interesting to find a parallel between the two. The article initially discusses the origin and purpose of the Subaltern Studies Group. The final section discusses the piece and its different motifs. The final section seeks to draw a parallel between K...... middle of paper ......Print.Das, Veena Noble. “Search for tradition in the drama of Karnad: the plays of Girish Karnad. » Modern Indian drama in English. Hyderabad: Taurus Printers, 1988. Print.Dharwadkar,Aparna. “Historical fictions and postcolonial representation: reading Tughlaq by Girish Karnad. » PMLA, 110.1 (1995), pp43-58.Print.Gramsi, Antonio. Selections from prison notebooks .Trans. Quintim Horace and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.Print.Guha, Ranajit. ed. A Reader of Subaltern Studies 1986 – 1995. New Delhi: OUP, 2012.Print.Karnad, Girish.Tughlaq.New Delhi: OUP,2010.Print.Naikar, S.Basavaraj. “Tughlaq as an experimenter” Ed .Tutun Mukherjee. Girish Karnad'a Plays: Performances and Critical Perspectives. New Delhi: Pencraft, 2008.Print.Tripathi, Vanashree. Three pieces by Girish Karnad. A study in poetics and culture. New Delhi: Prestige, 2004. Print.