I shall study how these fables imbued with satire, invective and caricature reflect the ways in which Namjoshi creates critical and conceptual spaces for the voices of lesbian minorities to be heard. Is a mere knowledge of the language concerned sufficient to know what the literary text communicates? Does not the reader require what Jonathan Culler calls “literary competence” in his work entitled Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (114)? My unravelling of Namjoshi’s idiosyncratic code will thus aim at gaining an implicit understanding of the operations of literary discourse. I shall show how by borrowing from Rabindranath Tagore’s modern fables, Namjoshi configures European and Eastern fabulist traditions, retells old tales from joltingly new perspectives, creates strange and foreign allusions, subverts known forms of authority, and underscores the need for reconfiguring new worlds.ĢWe shall see how Suniti Namjoshi uses the mode of the ancient and contemporary world fable to illustrate progressive liberal discourses in The Blue Donkey Fables, Feminist Fables, and the Conversations of Cow. By combining fables from different Western historic settings and eras with ancient Indian folklore, Namjoshi juxtaposes fables of Aesop and Phaedrus 1 with Vishnu Sharma’s Sanskrit beast fables in the Panchatantra 2 and Buddhist nativity fables in the Jataka Tales 3.

Namjoshi’s fictional world of talking human animals is fashioned in the same cautionary style as the Aesopic fable. Identifying the author’s need to give voice to her lesbian- feminist politics as the most crucial aspect of her writing, I shall consider how she deconstructs and subverts essentialised traditions and stereotypes through her fables and novels. We shall see how Namjoshi uses the mode of the fable to dress up animals in human interests and passions, and reconfigures on a canvas devoid of peripheral clues the dilemmas and choices of living beings from time immemorial. In this paper, I shall explore how Namjoshi’s diasporic narrative is alive with lesbian-feminist subjectivities that spark the creation of new spaces, postcolonial hybridity, and metamorphosing bodies and identities. Namjoshi’s fictional universe teems with hybridity, intermingling, ‘strangeness’ and ‘foreignness’ that come from the challenges of contending with stereotypes of race, sexuality and gender in a white heterosexual paradigm. 3 The Jataka Tales are Indian fables derived from Buddhist lore in the form of birth stories of Buddh (.).

2 The Panchatantra may have been written as early as the second century BC.

1 All references to the beast lore fables of Aesop that the Latin author Phaedrus translated from the (.).

Feminist Fables by Suniti Namjoshi