Social injustice in Taslima Nasrin’s Shame: A representation of the conflicts between the majority and the minority people in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

Among hundreds of social phenomena and problems, hegemony has significant role to form society structure. Throughout history and in all societies, hegemony is the most complicated social problem which causes an endless conflict between the majority people and the minority people. Discussions concerning hegemony are widely elaborated in many scientific books, references, and literary works. One of the literary works which exposes such phenomenon is Taslima Nasrin’s Shame. Taslima Nasrin’s Shame tells about the demolition on 6th December 1992 of the 16th century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, U.P., India, and its devastating fallout in Bangladesh where, in reputed vengeance, temples were destroyed and the (minority) Hindus overnight became victims of insensitive and barbaric violence at the hands of Muslim ruffians on prowl. Even the Bangladesh’s government as though does not care and ignores that injustice for its folk.

Thus, this study is aimed to find what the injustices between majority and minority people and its effect in Taslima Nasrin’s Shame novel. Then, to achieve the problem of the study, the researcher use Gramsci’s hegemony theory as one method of this research. The data of this research are collected from Taslima Nasrin’s Shame. The researcher himself becomes the research instrument in the process of data collection and data analysis.

Based on the researcher’s analysis, the hegemony causes the injustice for subordinated people in Bangladesh. The hegemonic people almost never give a space for subordinated people to taste the beauty of living together and full of peace. There are some conflicts occurred between those dominant and subordinated people. There are three basics of conflict, first is gender, here the novel shows that rape is infringement of a woman and her body and tries to establish that a woman is subordinate to a man. The second is region; it occurs since India is divided into two Pakistans (East Pakistan and West Pakistan) and one India. The last is religion and this is the most problematic occurs in Bangladesh.