Tribal concerns in literature: A comparative study of things fall apart and the ancestor

Abstract

'Tribe' means a group of people living at a particular place from times immemorial. Tribes are named differently at different places according to their geographical positioning, their social stratification in the society and so on which makes them distinctive from others. Tribes are rich in their culture, customs and folk tradition etc. There are few authors all over the world who writing tribal literature and their social life is rich in their creative works. The foremost objective of this research is to analyze the tribes issue in literature as a discourse in societal, customs, traditional, rituals within the reference of the writings of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Gopinath Mohanty's The Ancestor . Chinua Achebe (African novelist) and Gopinath Mohanty (Indian novelist) are two significant novelists who have made a bold attempt in raising of Canon in tribal literature. Both Achebe and Mohanty represent to their traditional or historically transformed images, rituals and social structures of their own common, but diversified culture. A thematic approach from tribal concerns perspective has been adopted for this study.