Ethics of Power Dismantled: A Reading of Meira Chand’s A Choice of Evils

Abstract

The exercise of power in a society is accepted as endemic to humans as social beings. The principles of order and control are essential for the proper functioning of any social system to affect the desired outcome. Michael Foucault has conceived power as the ability to create change in society or in the behavior of individuals, be it positive or negative. Power, “a practice of self” as Foucault calls it, must be exercised with ethics. Meira Chand is a South East Asian woman writer who has penned eight novels. She was born and educated in London. She spent much of her adult life in Japan and India and now resides in Singapore. She is one of Singapore’s most well known literary writers. She specializes in accurate and well researched historical novels. Her novels such as A Choice of Evils, A Far Horizon and A Different Sky deal with the evils of war and how it affects the lives of a disparate group of fictional characters.  This paper attempts to examine how power structures influence the lives of common people particularly during major wars fought in history. The paper also tries to expose how the exercise of power has negatively affected the lives of a massive group of common men. The paper also argues that Meira Chand’s fiction has spanned through history questioning the authority of power creating negative reverberations in the lives of innocent people.