Defamiliarisation in Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song

Abstract

              Freedom Song is the third novel by Amit Chaudhuri, a well established name in the field of literary fiction. The novel is about the everyday lives of two closely related middle class Bengali families who live in Calcutta.  It is about the relationship of two friends as they grow up together and grow old. The novel describes how a middle class family manages the wedding of their son who is inclined towards politics and has even joined a political party. Basically, the novel is about the everyday, ordinary, mundane lives of the Bengali family that lives in Calcutta. The novelist renews our perceptions of the familiar by the process of defamiliarization and thus makes things interesting. The concept of defamiliarization derived from the Russian word, ‘ostranenie’, was introduced by Victor Shlovsky in his essay, ‘Art as Technique’. Defamiliarization is about renewing our perceptions of the daily, routine things with the help of literary devices and tropes like simile, metaphor, imagery and so on. It is about perceiving ordinary, mundane things in a new light. This novelty in which we perceive daily, habitual things with the help of literariness in the language becomes important. In the present paper, we will go through various examples of defamiliarisation and see how the familiar things have been defamiliarised in the novel, Freedom Song.