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

  4HE )NTERPELLATED ±)² 'ANDHIAN )DEOLOGY AND THE !UTOBIOGRAPHICAL 'ENRE “The self ... that no one has ever seen or touched or tasted.”—James Olney Louis Althusser explains the subjectification process in terms of what he calls “interpellation.” A subject is always already interpellated by ideology. Interpellation is the act of hailing—“Hey you there!”—the individual responds , and in responding becomes a subject (Lenin 163). Accordingly, the “reality” of ideology is in this subjectivity—in this impact of ideology on the subject. In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (Lenin), where he defines the subject, Althusser does not explain the case of an individual who fails to respond to such hailing. He mentions “class struggle” as a form of refusal, but he does not elaborate on the process of resistance. Paul Smith, accordingly , reads Althusser’s subject as the nondivided “individual” incapable of resistance and hence uses the alternative term “agent” to signify the resisting subject. However, a close examination of Althusser’s theory of “overdetermination ” shows that it admits contradictions and plurality, the possibility of ideologies in the theory of ideology. The situation of contradictory and multiple interpellation emanating from the ideologies acknowledges then the complexity of the subject. Althusser’s subject can thus be an agent. In representing the resisting marginalized figure as an agent, those works of Sahgal that have often been categorized as autobiographies present challenges that are specifically linked to genre. The conundrum of these works is that the agency of the autobiographical “I” relies, ironically, on the condition of marginalization. A theory of Marxist and neo-Marxist literary analysis poses some challenges for a study of such works. Particularly apparent is the problem of the author. In “On Literature as an Ideological Form,” Balibar and Macherey once more insist on the difference between “a writer” and “the author” (87). The former, they note, is the term for the subject of ideology who writes; the latter is an ideologically constructed concept that suggests independence and individuality, and hence creativity rather than any  4HE !GENT IN THE -ARGIN subjection to a dominant ideology. The word “author” is thus, according to them, a false construction advocated by the dominant (bourgeois) ideology in an attempt to further interpellate both writers and readers as free agents and not the controlled subjects of ISAs such as the publishing house or the academy. Such a theoretical framework asks for caution in examining the genre of the autobiography. It thus becomes more difficult to assume “freedom” and “choice” in the act of writing the autobiography where the protagonist is simply the “I” or the self of the author, here Nayantara Sahgal. It becomes difficult to substitute the term “author,” or, for that matter, “self” or “I” for the name that appears on the front cover, Nayantara Sahgal. Similarly, for Macherey and Balibar, the product ceases to be “the work” and becomes “the text,” where the work sustains the myth of wholesomeness attached to the author as free agent and the text partakes of the uncertainties and contradictions of ideological interpellation. The text is indeed mediated in ideology. In A Theory of Literary Production, Macherey identifies the place of the “literary project” between the “historical project” and the “ideological project” (268). According to Macherey, “All literary works are determined by their relation to an ideology” (261). Here, he rejectsAlthusser’sattempttoprivilegeliteratureasaspecialcategorybetween ideology and science. Along Machereyan terms, then, it can be said that Gandhian ideology has a “say” in the production of Sahgal’s autobiographies and that to an extent it decides the content as well as the form of the texts. Macherey draws a direct relationship between the form of the literary work and ideology—“The history of forms,” he says, “corresponds to the history of ideological themes” (91). Studies on Prison and Chocolate Cake (henceforth Prison) and From Fear Set Free (henceforth Fear) refer to these texts as “autobiographies,”1 but even a cursory reading of the “autobiographies” of Sahgal reveals that the narrative focus on others rather than the self suggests characteristics of the memoir, not the autobiography. These works have received scant attention from critics of Sahgal. Mangat Rai, Sahgal’s second husband and co-writer of the collection of letters Relationship: Extracts from a Correspondence (henceforth Relationship), well after reading Prison and Fear, wrote to Sahgal asking her to write “an autobiography”: “You enjoy writing so why not start an autobiography for me, for I’d like to know you, where it started, what happened, who came, who went, what they did...

Share