Theory, Literature, and Dialogue: Bakhtinian Consciousness in New Indian Literature

Abstract

Emerging new literature has facilitated a dialogue among the alternative aesthetics created by new literature with an interpolation of central theoretical discourses. It opens an avenue for theories travelling across cultures to decipher intricacies involved into contemporary world. Today we live with a global consciousness that illustrates the formulation of a new postcolonial-postmodernist ‘I’. Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogic consciousness, the unfinalizable self and the idea of the relationship between the ‘self’ and ‘others’ lead us to understand this postcolonial-postmodernist framework as reflected in many Indian literary and cultural discourses. It throws light on how we perceive an individual entity in relation to the specific socio-cultural code which inhere multiple intercessions. Present article attempts to discover the fundamentals of the ‘postcolonial-postmodernist liberation’ through the case study of two selected Indian literary texts by Arvind Adiga and Amitav Ghosh. Both the texts explain the psychology behind the working of dialogic consciousness and the intercession involved in the formulation of postcolonial-postmodernist subject. It may be elucidated through the understanding of mechanism that always strives to attain a point of equilibrium. Representing the postcolonial-postmodernist psychology which questions various cultural norms, it initiates a dialogue between freedom and restrictions, individual and social, and real versus virtual. It turns out an everlasting quest for refined version of the metamorphic ‘self’ shaped by the dialogic consciousness of the postcolonial and postmodernist world.