'An Autobiographical Myth': Recuperating History in Suniti Namjoshi's Goja. Issue 4 (2nd October 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Mehta, Divya
• Is Part Of: Life writing. Volume 16:Issue 4(2019)
• Page Start: 583
• Page End: 599
• Publication Date: 2019-10-02
• Subjects: Suniti Namjoshi -- myth -- class -- gender; Biography as a literary form -- Periodicals; Autobiography -- Periodicals; 809.93592
• DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2019.1633495
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1448-4528

Abstract

ABSTRACT: As an autobiography and elegy, Suniti Namjoshi's Goja (2000) poignantly captures the great odds against which the lost history of the Indian female subaltern or class/caste subordinate can be recovered from the social and textual margins to which it has been relegated for centuries. How are the facts of such a life to be presented? How reconciled with the scripting of the life of the upper-class autobiographer? Namjoshi gives the silenced voice its due through autobiographical mythmaking which attempts to re-live and re-script personal and social history. Imagined conversations with the family's long-deceased retainer, Goja, allow such mythmaking in Namjoshi's autobiography, representing the writer's long-term investment in the imbrication of fact and fiction, myth and reality, the imaginary and the historical. This paper proposes to show that although the author's quest to reconcile the class polarities of her childhood remains unfulfilled and incomplete, the autobiography contributes to an inventive alternative chronicling of a personal and larger social history. With its explicit commitment to fictionality, affective mythmaking, and literary representational strategies, Namjoshi's autobiography can be shown to prise open spaces and meanings which formal history and mainstream autobiography would not be able to access.