Speak or Speak Not: An Analysis of Two Female Characters in Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace from Subaltern Perspectives

Abstract

Ghosh, in his The Glass Palace, portrays the female characters with paradoxical qualities. Though they are subalternised in diverse ways, there are some moments when they challenge the elites' imposition of subalternity on them. They do it by decoding the elites' ideology established and made permanent through their self-made institutions and practices . The trajectory of this decoding eventually widens the way of their dealing with their elite counterparts. Their empowerment is a very intrinsic entity that emerges with their realisation of their self-worth . The major thinkers of the Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) reveal the issues of subalternity and empowerment in their innumerable discussions. Contrarily, the thinkers such as Gayatri Spivak opine that it is quite impossible for women to speak. If it is, as she opines, possible for them to speak, there will be no one to listen to them. The female characters in Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace namely Dolly and Ma Cho are with the paradoxical qualities of speaking and not speaking . Sometimes they speak which in other times, turns into silence. Thus, they travel between their perceptions of voicing and non-voicing. I71is article, initially, attempts to examine how Ghosh's female characters namely Dolly and Ma Cho are subalternised and so made voiceless. Furthermore, it explores how they get empowered or get voices or are able to possess voices in their distinctive ways.