Silenced Voices and Violent Narratives: A Comparative Analysis of Tabish Khair's The Thing About Thugs and P Sachidanandan's The Book of Destruction.

Postcolonial "writing back" and resistance concur on their common goal to question, subvert and critique imperialist and hegemonic discursive practices. Former postcolonial writing attempted to provide agency to the subject from within the binaries of the colonized Self and the colonizing Other. However, the conceptual categories of hybridity, liminality and contrapuntal reading, as explicated by postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Edward Said respectively, provide better discursive strategies which enable voicing the hitherto silenced voices, which also enable breaking away from the limiting framework of binaries. Through an analysis of P Sachidanandan's The Book of Destruction (2005; translated in 2012) and Tabish Khair's The Thing About Thugs (2012), which pivot the Indian secretive cult of thugs and the practice of thugee, this paper argues that the discussion of thugee and the narratives of violence in the novels do not just validate the need to understand and accept "deviant" cultures, but also provide the context to discuss postcolonial issues of marginalization, identity and the creation of alternative narratives which subvert/resist the macro narratives created by imperialism and the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]