Decoding the Rhetoric of Resistance in Barindra Ghose’s Prison Memoir The Tale of My Exile

Resistance to oppression is critical to the progressive transformation of any unjust socio-political setup. Across the history of human civilization, resistance to hegemonic powers has taken various forms and dimensions such as revolutionary political and social organisations, acts and movements of civil disobedience, militant rebellions, as well as discursive resistance. Amongst these, discursive resistance, or the contestation of dominant narratives and value systems that undergird rule of oppression, is a less conspicuous yet potent weapon of opposition. The aim of the present paper is to identify the rhetoric of resistance in one such oppositional text, Barindra Kumar Ghose’s prison memoir, The Tale of My Exile: Twelve years in the Andamans (1922). Employing a qualitative methodology of close reading of the selected primary text, the paper decodes various literary strategies employed by the writer to delineate his experience of incarceration in the service of a political counter-narrative. These rhetorical tools are not just aesthetic embellishments, but function to spotlight key dimensions of colonial imprisonment which are strategically represented for the purpose of counter-hegemonic advocacy. In this way, the paper demonstrates that autobiographical storytelling employs language and narrative tools for particular discursive interests. Ultimately, the paper aims to contribute to the growing body of scholarship that locates literary and cultural texts as significant sites of cultural and political resistance.