Reframing History through Imagination: A Study of Arupa Patangia Kalita's Josnar Jhitas

This paper aims to examine how Arupa Patangia Kalita frames an alternate version of history through imagination with special attention to her fictional work Josnar Jhitas (2022). Her projection of history in the cited novel can be viewed from two ways – her unconventional reading of past and her preference to understand history from the perspective of the unmapped, unexplored, and unrepresented. An attempt has been made to analyze her novel as a model of history of the voiceless and the marginalized rather than those of historical figures as novels that enhance family than nation in their juxtaposition of public and private histories. In her novel, migration and displacement are viewed only from the historical angle, thereby portraying migrants as victims trapped in the cauldron of history. Hence the study will focus on the writer’s effort in the representation of a parallel history of Indian freedom struggle which is solely from the perspective of the marginalized/ the subalterns/ the other.