Gopinath Mohanty: The Asian ‘Achebe’ Adhikari Ramesh Chandra Lecturer, Department of English, MPC (Govt.) Jr College, Baripada, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India, Email id: romi_chabra@rediffmail.com Online published on 18 July, 2017. Abstract The entire nineteenth century, especially the second half of it, witnessed the cultural and religious upheaval in India under the influence of Western culture. Believing that the civilisation of India was barbaric and superstitious, the colonisers thought of civilising their colonies by Western ideology and philosophy. But the missionaries had different missions. They brought along with them a new world of Christendom and intervened into the interests – livelihood, work, cultural practices, lifestyle, food habit, social behaviour, social infrastructure – of the rural population and aboriginals without caring to understand the socio-cultural peculiarities of the place. Moreover, the imperialism of the Christian missionaries failed to recognise the ‘wretched of the earth’ – marginalised, downtrodden and subaltern. In addition, the indigenous people who was not a part or chose not to be a part of the course of Christianisation fell victims to the seductive ideology of the missionaries. Needles to say, there had been a radical change in their ideas, value systems, beliefs, cultural practices and so on and so forth. Moreover, its abuses had been examined by writers from varied backgrounds. One of the authors to address such issues in literary works was Gopinath Mohanty who explored how the ‘sons of the soil’ fell prey to the hidden agenda – cultural domination – of the British colonisers. Gopinath Mohanty, championing the cause of the tribal, effectively showed the plight and sufferings of the primitive people borne out of European practices. Top Keywords Aboriginal, Christianisation, Colonise, Imperialism, Indigenous, Missionary, Primitive. Top |