the hard-labor job without complaining, make sure that the children of Touchable Syrian Christian enjoy education at Touchable schools, and make sure that the
women cook the food for the household and give sexual pleasure to the men. Any deviation from the ideology forces the repressive side of the apparatuses to punish the
deviant. Seen through classic Marxist, the ideology is criticized in the way that it makes man become the slave of his own products by the subsumption of labour under
capital Elsjer 181.
D. Theory of Subaltern
In the study of post-colonialism, the term hegemony and subaltern are frequently used. This thesis, however, borrows the term from the post-colonial study
because Ammu’s fate resembles that of the oppressed people of the colonized country.
There is no doubt, however, that the analogy is very close to seeing the novel as a post-colonial one as it is set in the post-independence India. The difference is that
in this thesis, Ammu is seen as an individual that does not have the privilege to “speak” as she is oppressed by her surroundings that is already interpellated by the
Love Law. The term subaltern refers to the non-elite or subordinate social groups. It is at
once without any particular theoretical rigor and useful for problematizing humanist concepts of the sovereign subject Landry and McLean 203. In the context of India,
subaltern represents the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom described as the ‘elite’ Landry and McLean 203. The subaltern
project, triggered by Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? In 1988, is purposed to write the history from below, meaning to give voice to the oppressed group that cannot
speak their aspiration of their life. According to J.C. Young in Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, being a subaltern means to be in the lower class or in the
social groups that are in the margins of a society. To be included in the group of subaltern means being a person without agency due to his or her social status 10.
Spivak loosely borrowed the term subaltern from Gramsci in Can the Subaltern Speak to discuss the story of sati. In sati, Indian widows attempt to commit
suicide by throwing themselves to the cremation fire of their deceased husbands. This tradition was considered to be an obligatory in some rural Indian areas as an act to
show deep sorrow of losing the supreme male of the house. English colonizers, however, tried to stop this practice as it was not in accordance to Western humanity
values. The abolition of this rite by the British has been generally understood
as a case of White men saving brown women from brown men. White women - from the nineteenth century British Missionary
Registers to Mary Daly - have not produced an alternative understanding. Against this is the Indian nativist argument, a parody
of the nostalgia for lost origins: “The women actually wanted to die.” 68.
In raising this issue, Spivak was not advocating the suicide for sacrifice. Instead, she underlined the fact that neither the British nor the Indian asked the
widows’ perspective. The story was told, either in the voice of white males or Indian males. The female’s perspective was never been put into consideration. In her
opinion, these unheard voices are the true subaltern. According to Spivak, the link to the struggle of the subaltern is simply the
desire. In arguing this, she refers to the study of psychoanalysis. She elaborated the chaining relation between desire, object, fixed subject, and repression. According to
Spivak, it is either the subject that lacks desire or the desire that lacks a fixed subject. Whereas, there will be no fixed subject except by repression 68. Therefore,
repression creates the machine to produce desire, and it is the burning fuel for transgression of the subaltern. This is in accordance to Ammu’s desire that leads her
to transgress the boundaries of the Love Law.
E. Theory of Mimicry
