Post-Colonial World - Essay Example

Post colonialism. The nineteenth century was marked by the decolonization of a number of countries. The time had its own characteristic features such as the arousal of a literature which disclosed the reactions of the people of the time. Post colonial literature is such a body of writings also called ‘New English Literature’. The people of decolonization were subjected to a form of cultural and political independency. The ultimate aim of post colonialism was combating the residual effects of colonialism on culture. It is concerned with the mutual understanding and growing, by moving beyond what the colonization offered. Post colonial theory was based on the two theoretical concepts of the time, related to identity, i.e. ‘otherness’ and ‘hybridity’. The colonized people were diverse in their nature and tradition .They are ‘other ‘to the colonizers but are different from one another also. Such a drastic situation was meticulous to India and Africa. Both the countries had shared the common pain of identity and tradition. A comprehensible understanding of the political and cultural aspects of the countries is needed to unravel the stories in its full meaning. ‘Midnights Children’ and ‘Nervous Condition’ are such great novels of the time dealt successfully with the postcolonial theory and there by the self search of the natives Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s children’ is a novel about Indian independence, the partition and their aftermath. The novel is Rushdie’s interpretation of a period of about seventy years in India’s modern history dealing with the events leading to the partition of India and beyond .The novel encapsulates the experiences of three generation of Sinai family living in Srinagar, Amritsar and Agra and then in Bombay and finally migrating to Karachi. Tsitsi Dambengara’s Nervous condition’ is set in the post colonial Rhodesia of 1960s. The narrator and the main character, Thambu, expresses her experience with colonization, as a child growing up from a poor African community, with tremendous correctness and detail. She is anything but typical. A great deal of the novel reveals the development of Thambu as she becomes a young lady and the relationship with her cousin Nyasha .As they mature we can identify the difference in their characters. Tsitsi also adopt the method of narration as Saleem in ‘Midnights children’ .Saleem works in a pickle factory by day and records his experiences in the night hoping that one day the world would taste the pickle of history. Alongside of Saleem’s history one can have a collective experience of the people and the history of nation. In Nervous Condition, more than Nyasha, Babamukuru represents a pure colonial subject or a mimic man. He is a product of western education and western means of success. He is the byproduct of colonial culture .Because of his possession of a white man’s quality, he achieves an astonishing position in his native society. .Naturally Thambu also wish to achieve more. The narrator’s own words untangle her mental pain. “Then I discovered that Nhamo had not been lying. Babamukuru was indeed a man of consequence however you measured him . . . Nhamos chorus sang in my head and now it sounded ominous. Its phrases told me something I did not though he was. He was wealthier than I had though possible. He was educated beyond books. And he had done it alone. He has pushed up from under the weight of the white man with no strong relative to help him. How had he done it? Having done it, what had he become? A deep valley cracked open. There was no bridge; at the bottom, spiked crags as sharp of as spears. I felt separated forever from my uncle. (p64) .Nyasha also suffers from such inner crisis. Though she is the product of western education, the inner aspects of her personality drag her to her native identity. Thus she suffers from physical and mental unrest that leads to mental illness. Nyasha is becoming a symbolic victim of pressure to embrace modernity, change, enlightenment and self improvement. According to Patel Raj the connection between the refusal to consume and refusal to behave as her father would wish, as her social position would suggest and as her colonial masters would demand suffuse the text”. Thambu also has a shift in her approach later. In chapter 10 she reveals it. “Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down this story. It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion”. The problem of identity crisis between the public and private strands is so complete in Midnights Children that it is not possible to separate them properly. The search for self is a common theme among the characters of the novel. In Karachi, Saleem, knowing that his sister is not in fact his blood relation, seeks identity with her in love. The character Padma on her part has a desire to identify herself with Saleem by having him, but it ends in a failure. It is this feature of interaction of historical and individual forces has made the narrator what he is. Rushdie creates in Saleem a chronicler who provokes much of the history he records and who enshrines in his personnel heritage the identity of India itself. Dilip Fernandez says ” Midnights children belong to the look back in anger or Protest type written by one who is alienated by exile or Expatriation haunted by an upsurge to look back even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt… to create fictions, not actual cities or villages. invisible one’s imaginary home lands , Indian of the mind. The interplay of the personnel and national histories is the most significant feature of Midnights children. To quote Linda Hutch eon “the post modern technique of magic realism is linked to post colonialism, in that they, of both deal with the similar oppressive force of colonial history in relation to the pang at present. The novel is such a fusion of fantasy and magic realism. The characters are living at present in great social and political disorder. The problem of identity is both personal and national theme .Saleem was born at the midnight of 15 august 1947 when India also become independent from British rule. The letter sent by the then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru at the time of his berth was an attempt from his side to establish his own identity as an Indian. ” Dear baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.” (p. 139) Saleem represents India in the past and at present .The reaction of the people towards decolonization was mixed and the current politics was also confused. Saleem’s own words disclose the facts “the ghostly essence of the perforated sheet, which doomed my mother to learn to love a man in segments, and which condemned me to see my own life — its meaning, its structures — in fragments also; so that by the time I understood it, it was far too late” (p. 119). . Saleem’s life is closely related to India’s birth, development and destruction. The coincidence of Saleem’s life with Indian history is depicted consciously, because both the nation and the protagonist were struggling to establish their identity. In quest for individual identity Saleem weaves together the stories of his family through several generations of India’s independence and partition, of the state of emergency in 1975,of Indian myths, both Hindu and Muslim,of the thousand and one children born in the first hours of India’s independence. In this he is forced to write the whole of Indian History experimentally with himself at the centre draws correspondence with events and his personnel life dissolving referentially into fantasy forging connections in order to confer meaning on chaos. To quote Stephen Slemon “a battle between two oppositional systems …each working towards the creation of a fictional world from the other”.. ‘The dream about India after decolonization totally depends on the fate of the children of the midnight in Rushdie’s novel. They have chosen to saw the weeds of future which would genuinely differ from anything the world had seen up to that time. Thambu in the Nervous Condition “also feel such alienation. Babamukuru and his children are treated not as purely English or not purely African .The morphed culture of her cousins agitates Thambu. Maiguru’s words clearly explains this .”I had not expected my cousins have certainly not so radically, simply because they had been away for a while, besides shona was our language . What did people mean when they forgot it”. There is irony that Thambu herself begins to make choice leading to her further away from her roots. The Englishness of Nyasha after returning to the native place creates a kind of disturbance in her mind .Both of them are aware of their lost culture. But with great pain they identify the fact that they can never fully erase the alien culture from their lives. Edward Said in his famous book ‘Orientalism’, had put forth the theory that the occident could not exist without orient and vice versa. The theoretical concepts can be seen in every action in ‘Nervous condition, ‘It’s bad enough…. When a country gets colonized but when the people do as well. That’s the end , really that ,s the end.”This is Nyasha ‘s opposition to Babumukuru’s opinion regarding a Christian wedding ceremony which gesture to another preoccupation in Dangeramba ’s work. It is clear that life of the nation has been altered by the for gin influence. The theory is true that the colonizer and the colonized cannot coexist without eventually influencing, even colliding with each other . Klaus Borner in The reception of Midnights Children in West Germany writes “Rushdie Has invariably stressed that imbibing western and eastern literary traditions should by no means be regarded as infidelity towards one’s own cultural heritage but as a broadening of horizons, a bridging of gaps.” According to France Fanon colonialism is a source of violence rather than reacting violently against the colonizers as seen earlier. This theory is true in the post colonial India. Rushdie also pictured it by constantly seeking a historical semblance in the life of his protagonist. The theory has its implication in Nervous conditions also. The violence was not geographical, but personnel. Nyasha and Thambu are now aware of the the need of restructuring post colonial life in order to generate a new position for themselves. It is clear that a proper understanding of the post colonial literature could do with the knowledge of the theory of the time which was purely derived from the postcolonial experiences of the writers, who were also molded by post colonial life. Work cited; Rushdie, Salman:- Midnights Children, Vintage 1980 Dangeremba, Tsitsi:-Nervous Conditions, The women’s press, London, 1988. Said, Edward:- Orientalism, Vintage Books ,U S,1978. Fanon, Frantz:-The Wretched Of The Earth, France, 1961. Slemon, Stephen:- Magic Realism As Post colonial Discourse, 1988 Patel, Raj:-Nervous Condition , The voice of the Turtle,1999 Borner, Klaus:-“The Reception of Midnights Children in West Germany”, Commonwealth Review Delhi, 1990 Read More