Abstract

My dissertation, entitled Dharmic-ethics: the Ethical Sociality of the Self in Postmodernism and Post-colonialism, dynamizes the concepts from the Indian philosophical tradition to engage a discussion of ethical action in twentiethcentury literatures. I investigate the philosophical underpinnings of the Bhagvada Gita as representative of Indian ethos in which, ontologically speaking, death does not exist. This ontological conception is fundamental to Indian darshana, and has its all-important corollary in the fact that Indian ethics is not premised on the Other. This provides a striking constrast with Western post-structuralist philosophies that essentialize the experience of the Other as well as the singularity conferred by the experience of death. Comparing post-structuralist and ancient Indian tenets, I synthesize a comprehensive ethics for the purpose of literary criticism. Having set-up some of my philosophical and theoretical concerns in the first-two chapters, I analyze four contemporary texts for their ethical contours: Draupadi, a short story by Mahasweta Devi, Waiting for the Barbarians, by J.M. Coetzee, The Moor's Last Sigh, by Salman Rushdie, and Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. In Draupadi, my analysis attempts to explain the culminating moment of the story, in which there is a breakdown of signification as a naked, raped and bleeding Draupadi confronts the police chief, who for the first time in his life feels an unnameable fear. I suggest that Draupadi's actions represent a state of trigunatita. Similarly, the magistrate in J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians finally rises to the challenge of finding an ethical vindication for his life in the face of the recent and barbaric onslaught by the Third Bureau of the Empire, of which he, too, is an official. His actions can be understood as those of selfsacrifice in the Gandhian philosophy. Rushdie's The Moors Last Sigh allows me to pinpoint the inspiration of his creative genius, one that is caught between two competing ontologies, the Western and the Indian. Finally, I explore the dimensions of Pynchon's Zone in Gravity's Rainbow from a dharmic-ethical perspective, arguing that events in this postmodern zone conform to the ethical expectations of an Indian universe.