Tracing Tribal Women’s Identity in Mohanty’sParaja: A feminist Prexis

Abstract

This paper attempts to examine the English version of GopinathMohanty‘s novel Paraja. The novel portrays the struggle for survival of the Paraja tribe in Orissa .The Paraja becomes in the novel representatives of the down –trodden and oppressed section of the society where even their women folk and children are not spared the horrors of subjection .The novel sensitises the readers to the millions of tortured indigenous people all over the world. The novel attempts to picture how tribal men and women becomes slaves and gotis to the dominant class and pays for their ignorance and innocence. Tribal girls become sexual commodities and discarded as a plaything. The issues pertinent to this study is what happens to women characters in the scene of exploitation and what is the nature of exploitation .Since the novel is about the tribal way of life ,we also get a glimpse of how tribal women are represented in literature.