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The IUP Journal of English Studies

Body on the Boundary: Figuring the Excessive Body in Devdutt Pattanaik's The Pregnant King

Article Details

Pub. Date	: June, 2022
Product Name	: The IUP Journal of English Studies
Product Type	: Article
Product Code	: IJES040622
Author Name	:Rajni Mujral
Availability	: YES
Subject/Domain	: Arts & Humanities
Download Format	: PDF Format
No. of Pages	: 07

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Abstract

This paper studies the role of body as a trope of reversal and negotiation through the figure of a male pregnant body in Devdutt Pattanaik's The Pregnant King (2008). The narrative posits the body in a zone that lies beyond the normative boundaries. Body being material in nature redefines itself by exceeding its boundaries and thus becomes a significant trope to embody reversals and negotiations. For this, it takes insights from Mikhail Bakhtin's observations on the notion of the body in his discussion of carnival and grotesque realism. Pattanaik's narrative maps the reversal that emerges in a non-dominant space by keeping the body in the center of discussion. It widens the notion of the materiality of the body by positing the male body in the experience of childbirth. It also brings the embodied experience into consideration: the experience of the lived body. Both the materiality of the body and its lived experience are brought into focus as distinct features of the body. The experience of the lived body is put at disjuncture with the materiality of the body in the narrative. Thus, the narrative celebrates this excessive nature of the body

Introduction

Carnivalesque Reversals
Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque originates from popular culture. The event of the carnival creates a new structure within the official structure by renegotiating and reversing its own basis. Carnival, being a public event, brings the everyday-the common and the non-dominant into focus. It is the everyday that takes the central role here and pushes its boundaries to involve the official in it. By positioning itself on the borderline, it reveals the possibility for a new structure by reversing the existing order. The reversal occurs by employing and making use of the existing parameters. Its positioning itself is subversive as it denies any binary logic. Rather, it is suggestive of a spectrum where the nature of the event is to be taken into consideration over a continuum. Its refusal to be part of a category through its positioning at the borderline