Authoring the Map in Ankush Saikia’s The Girl from Nongrim Hills

Abstract

The article attempts to explore and investigate how spatial dimensions participate within a novel to configure a map. The premise is not that the author attempts this consciously as the purpose of the author, especially in a thriller is more devoted to action. Given the fact that the written text in the words of Barthes is no longer that of the author, it is the choice of the reader to re-view the mapping within the text. The implied reading of the text is endeavoured to delineate how the novel in this case, a thriller, skilfully allows a colonial town in the far Northeast to manoeuvre its settings to achieve not just a better status but also allow to re-build cultural and social identities. The article has introduced various spatial theories to provide a context before trying a close reading of the novel. One of the objectives is also to query certain postulates such as the nature of marginalisation, the trope of the local vs global, the map of exotic tourist place and the relation to the modern, the nature of conflict and the construction of culture and identity. A key idea in the analysis is that settings had always been part of fiction and yet it was not read nor investigated as providing diverse meanings. With the advent of literary geographies and cultural geographies, the nature of settings has become more diverse and has provided nuances to comprehend varied mappings such as social, cultural, historical, aesthetic, exotic, marginal and so on.