| 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 |
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