A Critical Analysis Of “Matter And Manner” In Amrita Pritam’s Autobiography ‘Shadows Of Words’

Abstract

The present study entitled “A critical analysis of “Matter and Manner” in Amrita Pritams’s Autobiography Shadows of Words. This study explores how Pritam has employed” Matter and Manner in her autobiography novel Shadows of Words. This novel is highly metaphorical and imagistic in its narration. The term “Matter and Manner” is taken from Mathew Arnold’s The Study of Poetry and adopted it in this research as a research methodology. The grand subject matter does fix the grand manner (style). As Arnold has stated that, “greatness of matter is inseparable from greatness of manner”.  If the subject is grand, the grand style will be followed automatically in the process of narration. The term “Matter” means the content of particular literary work “Matter” means the way in which the story is written. The aim of the present study is to investigate how employment of manner and matter go hand in hand and to exhibit how they are blended as a writing method in her novel Shadows of Words.

Amritam Pritam was a prolific poetess of the twentieth century and a versatile genuius. Her poems essays, short stories and novels written in Hindi and Punjabi have been translated into more than thirty regional and foreign languages. Among the fellow Indian writers of her times, she occupies a unique position. This ‘uniqueness’ arises because of her foray into both lovely and harsh imaginative world which, apart from being confessional outpouring of a sensitive soul, is also a reflection on the patrichal social constraints.

Pritam’s poignant poems publicized the plight of Punjabi women, who had woven their suffering in a conservative milieu, into folk songs sung softly behind voluminous veils and in the privacy of the kitchen to which they were perpetually doomed. The present book attempts to throw a light on the works and achievements of the famous post-colonial Punjabi and Urdu female writer, who through her excruciating thoughts, depicted the struggles and challenge of Indian women during latter half of the twentieth century.