Dystopian Bildungsroman: Rasa, Emotions, and Identity in Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Clone (2018)

Abstract

Bildungsroman is a genre that concerns the formation of individual identity and particularly focuses on the moral and psychological growth of the protagonist in a novel. This article aims to analyze the bildungsroman process in a dystopian context, primarily focusing on the significance of emotions in the dystopian society of Clone (2018) by Priya Sarukkai Chabria. This study scrutinizes the emotive structure of the novel based on two kinds of emotional movements: firstly, the psychic and textual movement of emotions is explored using Bharata’s rasa theory and, secondly, the spatial significance of emotions in social spaces is probed through phenomenological inquiry into the anatomy of shared emotions in the text. Through this theoretical approach, this article addresses the following questions: (a) How does a dystopian context problematize the identity formation of the protagonist in Clone? (b) How does the dystopian genre treat emotions in its structure and how instrumental are they to the identity formation of the bildungsheld in the selected novel? (c) How does Chabria manifest rasa theory and emotional movement in the structure of the novel?