THE “STRANGER KINGS” IN RITA CHOWDHURY’S CHINATOWN DAYS: A STUDY

Abstract

Marshall Sahlins talked of the prospect of stranger kings to narrate the succession of the authority
especially in the Fiji islands and asserted that great kings or monarchs of the once prominent
kingdoms or societies had been always a ‘stranger’ king. But in this paper I would like to suggest that
the select theory could be elongated a bit and be related to various sort of rulers or leaders apart from
the ‘kings’, it would be applicable also to those who had not been the kings in the literal sense yet
possessed power and authority, holding a position of control over a certain group of population. The
book Chinatown Days had introduced some such characters who were not the ‘kings’ but possessed
the utmost traits of the stranger kings. I would like to apply Sahlins’ stranger king theory to noted
Assamese writer Rita Chowdhury’s translated text “Chinatown Days”.