Post-colonial fiction in India - Essay Example

Post-colonial fiction seemed interesting to me for various reasons. Most significantly, it addresses the value systems of colonialism from the point of view of writers from once-colonized nations. However, I was fascinated to realize that post-colonial works did not necessarily have to come from once-colonized nations, and they were not always the works which were published after the official end of colonialism. Novels like A Passage to India, for instance, may contain both colonial and post-colonial views. Therefore, I understood post-colonial literatures as those which address the colonial situation and its values, from the time it started, by writers from both the colonizing and colonized countries. This understanding inspired me to approach an established work of fiction in the light of binary divisions, and reflect on how they are deconstructed in order to see colonialism as a cultural construct that seeps into the consciousness of those who are in power, even in the national democratic circle. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children drew me into a lot of conflicting and intriguing questions regarding post-colonial literatures. I must admit that it is a difficult novel to read and grasp, but once we get into the core of it, it is deeply engrossing. One does not need to have specialist knowledge of Indian culture and history to understand it, though it may help one understand all the inner nuances. However, the general idea one gets from the novel itself can lead one to more reflective thoughts about post-colonial theory. I felt from the beginning that the novel presented a multicultural space where West, East, class, gender, race and caste collided. I felt that Rushdie did this deliberately in order to raise a few interesting questions about the way history is quite often written, from the view-point of dominant sects. In Midnight’s Children, the history of Independent India evolves through people’s individual histories. In my paper, I highlighted the fact that Rushdie tries in his novel to contest the political versions of Indian history and replace it with a novelist’s version, which in turn is an attempt to represent the people’s version. By questioning the way the so-called democratic government took to autocracy in the times of the Internal Emergency in India, Rushdie further stresses the fact that the voices of media and ordinary people can be silenced in such a situation. Many stories remain unheard, while many voices are blocked. Thus the official version of incidents, which eventually become the official version of India history, has a lot of missing portions. As a novelist, Rushdie tries to fill these missing portions with the voices of underprivileged people. I did also argue that Rushdie avoids a single perspective in his narration. There are multiple voices in his story, which represents the multicultural crowd of India. The narration also deviates from the regular representations of Hindu voices that were a feature of Indian fiction before his book. He has a Muslim protagonist Saleem Sinai, but by making him suspect in pedigree and narration, Rushdie dilutes the possible religious clashes and quest for relevance. The reader realizes that Saleem is Hindu and Muslim at the same time, as much as he is the product of the West and the East. Moreover, he belongs to both the upper, middle and lower classes by birth and life experiences through various phases. His voice does not represent a specific identity. It keeps changing. This seemed to be a fascinating idea to me because it makes impossible for readers and critics to point out a particular point of view Rushdie projects in his work. This questions the simplistic ideas of binary divisions that constituted colonialism, and some kinds of post-colonial readings. I was also interested in the way postmodernist narrative techniques were used in the novel as an aid to its post-colonial approach. There is a listener in the novel itself – Padma, who is all the time skeptical of the plausibility of Saleem’s narration, but keeps on nudging him to tell more. The book could be considered a historiographic metafiction which brings in obvious comparisons among the novel the novels of Gunter Grass and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. However, I argued and substantiated that Rushdie’s work, even as it adapts international trends in narrative, remains an original work in the way it treats Indian culture and history. Rusdhie’s theory of transcendence seemed very powerful to me, and I used that towards the end of my paper to substantiate the fact that my approach to the work can be justified with the help of the author’s thoughts on his work. I used some of the well known post-colonial theorists in the work, and can think of many more to give it depth. I found some close links between Edward Said’s thoughts on the subject of identities and attempts to make one’s voice heard, and Rushdie’s attempt to present his novel in varying voices, though they came through the single character Saleem Sinai. The works on Rushdie’s novel by Tomothy Brennan was very useful, though there were some accusations that he misunderstood some of Rushdie’s narrative techniques. I found the book as a useful source to understand the concept of ‘third world cosmopolitan’ writers, who were basically different from the writers of once-colonized nations who generally remained in their own country and wrote in either English or their regional languages. DCRA Goonetilleke also provided some deep insights regarding Rushdie’s novels, covering his fictional range. I could comprehend the evolution of Rushdie as a writer after reading Goonetilleke’s book about Salman Rushdie. I also made use of works about Rushdie by Nila Shah, Sudhendu Shekhar and T.N. Dhar. All these writers exhibit their inside knowledge of the Indian post-colonial situation, which seemed very useful for any Western student who is not lucky enough to experience Indian life in reality. Ania Loomba’s book about Post-Colonial theory, though a bit difficult to understand for those who are beginning to learn about the theory, contained a lot of information and insights. However, the book which helped me immensely to understand the novel better was none other than Rushdie’s non-fiction work itself – Imaginary Homelands. It explained in clear terms what Rushdie had to say in his novel, and how to approach it as a novel that deals with history. For any future work on the topic, I could bring in more theorists and writers like Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, Harish Trivedi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Elleke Boehmer, Meenakshi Mukherjee and so on. I think of my paper as an attempt to understand post-colonial theory in general and also to apply some of its tools to analyze a novel from India. I understand that I did take up a difficult task as a student, but was really glad to see it as a challenge that I could face with some hard work. Understanding the novel was difficult at first but I grasped it reasonably well with the help of proper background reading. The novel itself was my inspiration to undertake this study, and once I started thinking about the paper, everything fell into place, and I managed to get all the rele4vant secondary books in time. Read More