(Dis/Re) Locating Identity and Culture

A Bhabhaian Reading of Jaladas’s Ramgolam

Abstract

The paper attempts to explore the identical and cultural location of the marginalized Sweeper community and how this location is dislocated by so-called mainstream society and the community’s struggle for relocating their identity, culture, and rights as fictionalized and textualized in Harishankar Jaladas’s novel, Ramgolam. The interactions among location, dislocation, and relocation can be viewed from Bhabhaian’s perspective as theorized through the discourses – ambivalence, hybridity, and mimicry. Jaladas narrativizes the sweepers’ attraction and repulsion to mainstream society in socio-cultural context, as taken place in colonial and even decolonial periods; consequently, the community has to experience the hybridization between their own identity and culture and those of the socially, economically, and politically empowered, thus being mimic. The article will show that Jaladas’s Ramgolam (2012) not only represents the narratives of ambivalence, hybridity, and mimicry but it also articulates the mimic sweepers’ attempt to relocate and re-search for their suppressed history, dislocated identity, and othered culture in both colonial and decolonial eras. The present paper has also examined ever unchangeable socio-cultural conditions of this othered community for its being colonial and decolonial victimization of othering, disintegration, and deprivation; colonization and decolonization remain the same to the othered of the othered, indeed