In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

 )NTRODUCTION !GENCY IN THE -ARGINS!LTHUSSER 'ANDHI 3AHGAL Nayantara Sahgal’s autobiographical works and novels repeatedly present the resisting marginalized Gandhian figure as a literary symbol of human freedom and choice—an agent rather than an entirely, ideologically, constructed subject. Her argument deserves close consideration: that one pushed into the margins by social, cultural, or political determinism should claim the agency to oppose such oppressive determination and, what is more, find alternative programs of self-actualization and meaning. In presenting such characters at a time when her country, India, was itself under the oppressive system of colonialism and soon after under the threat of neo-colonialism, Sahgal makes an argument for the inherent worth of the human person. Her narratives trace the contours of power in its manifestations of injustice and justice but, in a very Gandhian sense and particularly in the characters’ conscious adoption of the virtuesoftruthandnonviolence(MahatmaGandhi’s satyaandahimsa),refuse tosuggestthatpersonsareconstructedsubjects.Inotherwords,Sahgal’snarrativestracethevariedwaysinwhichthesubjectofGandhianideologyisformed . This subject, interestingly enough, is far from homogeneous or objectified as constructed; rather, it is influenced to some extent by multiple ideologies and state apparatuses, such as education and political parties that function ideologically , not through blatant coercion. The narratives make it increasingly clear that ideology has consequences. One level of consequence is at the representational , in literary representation that allows the author to engage in consciousness -raising writing. However, Sahgal’s subject of ideology is not entirely determined by that ideology; rather, the subject’s agency is manifested in resistance and in a search for justice and truth, often involving suffering in one’s own person. Theories of the subject and of ideology developed by Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey are useful to understand Gandhian themes themselves as ideology. Yet, Sahgal’s Gandhian literary representations go further to counter the structuralist tendencies of these theories so as to explain the movement of the conditioned or supposedly totally determined subject towards agency.  4HE !GENT IN THE -ARGIN Grammatically, the “subject” is unstable, in so far as it can be anything, anyone, or any event that takes the spot of the subject in a sentence. This instability is due to the fact that the subject is externally determined. In the deterministic turn that theory has taken, most obviously in Marxist analysis, where the economy determines the subject, albeit in the last instance, and in the linguistic turn pithily put by Ludwig Wittgenstein as “the limits of language ... means the limits of my world” (5.62), more enigmatically stated by Jacques Derrida as “there is nothing outside the text” (Of Grammatology 158) to deconstruct the centring of/in language, the coherent individual is considered a myth of humanism, and what is available to us is the constructed subject. This view of the subject has provoked various interpretations of Sahgal’s works that fail to theorize how a totally constructed subject can be represented as resisting. In “Elliptic Feminism and Nationalism in Nayantara Saghal’s Rich Like Us,” Harveen Sachdeva Mann convincingly argues that “the national question ” takes priority over feminism in Sahgal’s works. However, the reason she advances for such priority can be logically challenged. According to Sachdeva Mann, it is the unchangeable (determined) fact of Sahgal’s birth and class that causes such ellipses in “the woman question” in her work: “Born into modern India’s premier political family, the Nehrus, and brought up in a household in which female children did not feel the pressure of being female, Sahgal subordinates the woman question to the national question in the narrative” (103). Mann’s premise is that ideological determination occurs at a very early stage, in childhood, and that it is almost impossible to escape. This argument also precludes the possibility of ideological conditioning , sometimes of the opposite kind, later in life, or the possibility of choice (incidentally a key foundation of feminism) and human agency that allows Sahgal to present male and female characters who are marginalized thematically and narratively as eventually acquiring agency. In her 1998 dissertation on the works of Nayantara Sahgal, Suchitra Mathur, through the framework of poststructuralism presented by Gayatri Spivak, also argues that ideologies of gender and nationalism fully determine the productions of “the postcolonial intellectual.” Joya Uraizee, in This Is No Place for a Woman (2000), makes a similar constructivist argument. “Sahgal,” she writes, “is severely limited in her social criticism because her elite status keeps her removed from the daily contact with economic hardship and exploitation” (46). Uraizee’s conclusion that Sahgal has always led an...

Share