The Messiah of Ogd: An Ode to Nonsense

Abstract

Sometimes it takes nonsense to understand sense. And sometimes, it takes a child and his/her nonsensical question for the whole sense of the world to collapse. This paper is an attempt to study Anushka Ravishankar’s nonsensical children’s novel Ogd. Ravishankar through her novel, deconstructs religion, science, logic and language; entities looked upon as the final end of meaning. And in doing so, she sheds light on the process of meaning-making. Using Edward Lear’s Limericks and Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the paper attempts to understand the genre of nonsense in its act of deconstruction. And the paper tries to analyse the novel through the lens of what has been understood from Lear’s and Carroll’s works of nonsense. Using some of Derrida’s ideas, the paper attempts to understand Ravishankar’s novel in detail.