Proceedings of The 11th International Conference on Humanities, Psychology and Social Sciences
Year: 2020
DOI:
Anxiety as a Spring of Motivation: A Critical Study of the Select Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa
Shraddha Dhal
ABSTRACT:
Parsi community is confronted with a menace of extinction due to diverse factors such as low birth rate, strict laws against religious conversion and extreme urbanization. This closed way of living directs the collateral emergence of ethnic anxiety in its members regarding its survival in the next century. The instinctual adaptability into their instantaneous ambiance has been a mainspring of survival for these dwindling community members who have been witness to the centuries of social and cultural cataclysms. Sidhwa, being an indispensable part of this community, epitomizes herself on behalf of her community and tries to surmount this anxiety in a creative comportment. Her desire to triumph over the authorial anxiety is clearly reflected in her efforts to get herself transcended beyond her own limit. Her works are not confined within individual anxiety; they are, rather contextualizes a clear lacunae of the community as a whole. The present paper closely scrutinizes various key aspects of Parsi community and its sensibility through the novels of Bapsi Sidhwa. The fear of assimilation and an undiminished appetite for the eternal perpetuation of their own identity in post colonial India and consequent emigration to the West is a manifestation of centuries-old anxieties, which too has been the focal point of Sidhwa’s works.
Keywords: anxiety, motivation, ethnicity, identity, Parsi community.