Pitfalls of Caliban’s Resistance: A Study of Shakespeare’s The Tempest from Postcolonial Perspective Elham Hossain 1 Abstract What leads people onto the streets to demand the right of speaking their mother tongue? Conspicuously, it is the desire to construct their own perception and define their identity. As language is power, it works as a potent instrument of cultural control in the hands of the colonizers. It is a system of naming, branding, labeling, marginalizing and subordinating an individual as well as a community. So, when it comes into the possession of the colonized, it turns into a voice of protest- a voice of self-identity. Language purports to give access to the vast intellectual resource of the colonizers. By appropriating it, the colonized can appropriate the whole stem of knowledge of the colonizers and thus, they can bring about transformation of their situation. Caliban asserts in resentment that the benefit of his learning Prospero’s language is that he can now curse him in his language. Also, for liberty he intends to burn Prospero’s books that serve as a source of his hegemony. But if he could have a command of Prospero’s books or discourse, then he might have a chance to develop a counter discourse and challenge Prospero’s authority. Caliban’s resistance against Prospero may be metaphorically interpreted as an attempt for national emergence. But a continuous negotiation and engagement that may be termed, according to Mannoni (1956) as ‘dependence complex’ regarding national and cultural self- definition exist between Caliban and Prospero. It postdates the colonial connection and situates it in a past from which the former colony has now presumably emerged. This paper seeks to make a postcolonial study of The Tempest with a special focus on the shortcomings of Caliban’s resistance against Prospero’s hegemony. Keywords: Discourse, pitfalls, hegemony, identity, stereotype, transformation If examined from New-Historicist perspective, then the relation between Prospero and Caliban makes The Tempest a colonial text. But Caliban’s resistance in Prospero’s language has made this text interesting for the post-colonial readership. Bill Ashcroft et al’s book The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literature (1989) emphasizes the concept of resistance of the post-colonial generation in the language of the colonizers. Mannoni has diagnosed the problems of the colonizers and branded them as their psychological problems that “stem 1. Associate Professor and Head, Department of English, Dhaka City College