At home as an ‘outsider’: Subarnalata and Othappu: The Scent of the Other Side

Abstract

The phrase ‘at home’ connotes familiarity, happiness and safety, while the image of an ‘outsider’ evokes the opposite sentiments. It is ironical and a seeming contradiction to feel as an ‘outsider’ in one’s own home. Though many literary texts have portrayed the poignant stories of characters who feel alienated within the precincts of their home, it is with the advent of feminist writings that ‘home’ as a site of alterity has been fully explored. The paper, by focusing on two novels, Subarnalata, a Bengali novel published in 1966 (English translation published in 1997), and Othappu, a Malayalam novel published in 2005 (English translation published in 2009), attempts to project the uncritical binaries such as home-outside world, secular-religious, and reason-emotion, and thereby problematises the concept of ‘alterity’ itself. We have tried to look at ‘alterity’ from a psychological perspective and explain it using the construal-level theory of psychological distance.