ABSTRACT

While a great portion of colonial discourse penned by the colonizers have voiced anxieties of the empire, in defining the colonized other, do not house similar anxieties to define the 'other.' In any asymmetric set of social relations, a position of perceived inferiority is very easily reified and internalized. Just as the colonizer, the colony's construction of the other also comes with its purpose, to reiterate and politicize the ideology of difference and use it for the revision and reconstruction of their own society. While for Krishnabhabini Das, British society provided both an alternative and caution about how one should appropriate the manners and customs of the colonizers, Toru Dutt's fantasy society is almost ideal yet cruel and fatalistic. The running leitmotif of these texts is that the authors, in varying degrees, envision freedom and empowerment through the colonizer's culture.