Assuming that the nation is a cultural signification and a discursive formation, this article attempts to evaluate the role played by narrative literature in the construction of a form of resistance against the post-modern forces. This is done with the help of an analysis of the Malayalam writer, Sara Joseph's novel Alahayude Penmakkal (The Daughters of Alaha, 1999). It thus challenges and rewrites the conventional modernist forms of historiography and concepts of nation formation. The subaltern perspective from which the novel is narrated, uses the decentred collective subjectivity of a provinciality (rather than the individualist subjectivity of the high modernist novel), which is identified with the wretchedness of the earth to narrate how masses of the marginalized other have been consciously excluded from the bourgeois narratives of the nation by the knowing subject of the modernist historian. What is narrated in the novel, the article argues, is the nether side of the history of civilization. The article uses insights of the conceptualizations of Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Fredric Jameson and Partha Chatterjee, among others.

The dialectic of the local and the global seems to have displaced the traditional oppositions between the particular and the universal and most contemporary discussions on the political, socioeconomic and cultural issues are centred around and governed by the postmodern ideas of global governance, global citizenship and the "end" theories. The postmodern has also brought with it a heavy intellectual baggage of the image and architecture accompanied by a perceptible decline in the interest of the literary mode. In such an environment it may seem ironic that one dares to think of "obsolete" notions such as "nation" and "nationalism" and a literature that attempts to not only narrate the nation "allegorically" but also to map the history of nation from a subaltern perspective¹. Post-colonial theories have emphasized the ties between literary texts and concepts such as "nation" and "nationalism" and there is general agreement among writers as varied as Ernest Gellner, Miroslav Hrosch, Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, Timothy Brennan, Adrian Hastings, Clifford Geertz, and Homi Bhabha that the role played by imaginative literature in the construction of a nation cannot be ignored. So long as the nation is believed to be a "discursive formation," and cultural expressions are recognized as participating in the formation and growth of a nation, in the context of the global dispensation where the status of culture and its consumption is radically different from what it was in the modernist period, it is not irrelevant to look into the role played by literature in the construction of a form of resistance against the hegemonic forces that dominate the cultural sphere of the contemporary world. This essay is an attempt to examine the Malayalam writer Sara Joseph's novel, Alahayude Penmakkal (The Daughters of Alaha [1999]), as a "national allegory" and it argues that this novel narrates the nation the "other" way. The first part of the essay will concern itself with the theoretical implications of the proposal and the second part looks into the novel from the perspective of these theoretical implications.

Writing the Nation the Other Way: Sara Josephs Alahayude Penmakkal, discursive formation, post-modern forces, historiography, conceptualizations, global governance, discursive formation, theoretical implications, cultural expressions, global dispensation.