ABSTRACT
This chapter compares two instances of the Bildungsroman, the Indian Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084 (1974) and Irish author Jennifer Johnston’s Shadows on Our Skin (1977). Mother of 1084 is set in the context of the Naxalite uprising of the late 1960s and early 1970s in India, and Shadows on Our Skin explores the Northern Irish Troubles of the same period. Johnston thematizes a working-class boy’s accelerated maturity in a context of sectarian violence, while Devi highlights an apolitical mother’s belated coming-of-age after her revolutionary son’s death. In each novel, the protagonist has to navigate a moment of social crisis as a result of which their socialization is thwarted or remains incomplete. There is a further analogy between the Indian Bengali and Northern Irish Bildungsroman: national self-determination converges in both novels with the divergent trajectories of the protagonist’s personal growth. Both novels depict regression rather than progression as the precondition of the bildung in the peripheries.
