From the time of childhood, the world becomes full of imaginary lines. From property borders to adult spaces, people quickly learn that certain spaces denote special uses. This extends to the idea of nationalism in which people who exist in certain spaces are loyal to that space and believe they possess qualities unique from people in other spaces. Nationalism is especially important in post-partition India in which citizens attempted to draw cultural lines between themselves and the West. This can be seen in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines in which the Grandma represents cultural nationalism which conflicts with Tridib’s representation of border crossing. This can also be seen in other texts such as Gandhi’s Autobiography and Natyantara Saghal’s Rich Like Us. Both texts examine the relationship between India, the West, and social class while attempting to simultaneously exist in that tension.
First, in Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines the character of the Grandma works to represent the idea of cultural nationalism. The Grandma is deathly afraid of laziness and insists that everyone in her household be in constant motion, never idling or resting. She believes that this is linked to poverty and poverty is the reason that the British can oppress India. This is a representation of cultural nationalism because the Grandma wants India to triumph over their oppressors. This falls in line with Gandhi’s texts in which he confesses he started eating meat in order to grow strong and conquer the British. The idea was that the British can only win as long as they continue to be strong through eating meat which is similar to the Grandma’s idea that the British could overcome India through wealth and hard work. The Grandma also supports Dh...
... middle of paper ...
...e food, clothing, and people are strange. He views the West as pushy and wasteful. This view also coincides with Rich Like Us where the West is dirty and unwanted. All things West are elite but a threat to Indian culture as well as the movement of India forward toward a new culture.
In conclusion, cultural nationalism is demonstrated through the Grandma in The Shadow Lines but opposed by the character of Tridib and his idealization of Western culture. Also, Gandhi’s autobiography works to add another viewpoint on the struggle between India and the West. His attempts to reconcile the Western world in which he lives with the India that he loves is a tension that all Indians face in this time period. In addition, Rich Like Us contributes its take on the power struggle between the West and India in addition to examining the role of the poor within this reform.
As Indians living in white culture, many problems and conflicts arise. Most Indians tend to suffer microaggressions, racism and most of all, danger to their culture. Their culture gets torn from them, and slowly, as if it was dream, many Indians become absorbed into white society, all the while trying to retain their Indian lifestyle. In Indian Father’s Plea by Robert Lake and Superman and Me by Sherman Alexie, the idea that a dominant culture can pose many threats to a minority culture is shown by Wind-Wolf and Alexie.
Presenting an authentic portrait of contemporary India during the Emergency era imposed by Indira Gandhi, India in the novel is bound with its timeless chain of caste exploitation, male chauvinism, linguistic strives and communal disharmony. Further the tyranny of the power - hungry politicians over the poor – hungry citizens is unveiled as Mistry depicts the humiliating condition of people living in Jhopadpattis, deaths on railway tracks, demolition of shacks on the pretext of beautification, deaths in police custody, lathi charges and murders in the pretext of enforcing Family Planning.
... Pakistan to surrender during the Indo-Pakistani War helped the Bengalis establish a sovereign state for themselves. The distribution of the racist pamphlets against the minorities showed Shiv Sena's chauvinistic and fascist regime. Indira Gandhi's corrupt government, socialist regime and her controversial scandals such as giving her son's company government money and the 1971 Nagarwala scandal were also revealed. All of these political events influenced the background of the novel and the characters’ everyday lives. .
North Gwinnett Middle School. "Indian Nationalism and Gandhi." Slide Share. Last modified February 2, 2011. Accessed January 16, 2014. http://www.slideshare.net/templep79/indian-nationalism-and-gandhi.
Jess, an Indian girl whose parents came to Britain in search for a better life, struggles to find mutual ground for cultural norms of her parents, and the cultural norms of the society she lives in. Her parents have adapted some cultural elements such as mobile phones, but those are all merely just a means to adapt to a modern culture they don't feel they belong to, or rather don't want to belong to. Because, when it comes down to moral values, they are not concerend with gadgets or such they have adapted from British culture, they rather feel the importance of belonging to their Indian community in Britain, rather than the British community. They are concerened only with what their Indian communi...
The novel aims at projecting the ethical aspect of Indian immigrants in Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut novel The “Namesake”. In the nineteenth century the immigrants were migrating to the west as indentured labourers but now they migrate for the prospect of career building and profit making. But in both the cases culture plays a very important role in their life. In their socio-political liminality and marginal statues, the immigrants enjoy life in economic subjugation but have an emotional emancipation in their contra acculturation. In the super structure of America’s multicultural society they have cross-cultural experiences. This helps them to reconcile between their inherited and acquired selves for consolation. The immigrant Indians in a dilemma romanticise the dazzles of American civilization and retain their faith in tradition, custom, culture, history, myth, legend and folklore for emotional satisfaction. In the liberal and secular social environment of America, they are occupied in economic professionalism being pre-occupied with the dilemma of cultural past they familiarize their consciousness in the cultural practices. In cross-cultural experiences they discover their marginality in a fix and hybridity in flux. As an “imagined community” they bridge the polarities through the cultural ethics and try their best not to be contaminated by the materialistic temptations. Their identity is restrained as ‘luminal personae’ and ‘transitional being’ and it becomes culturally impregnable in the thought of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’. They realize that the cultural available of India cannot be substituted with the material plenitude of America. The socio-cultural sensibility of the immigrants cannot be modified in American milieu since the inherit...
…….…, “Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and the Blurring of National Boundaries”. Conference issue of South Asian Review 25.3; 2004.
Anchita Ghatak, writes, ‘A Life Long Ago chronicles, through family memories, the changes affecting post colonial South Asia…It also raises some important questions about class, caste, community, religion and gender that continue to trouble us in contemporary times” (vii-ix). In very cryptic and short chapters the writer unveils storehouse of humanity deep within her own heart. Simplicity of narration is her best ornament to reach the largest part of humanity and farthest core of the reader’s mind reviving their ethical sense. Humanism stands for two basic values: first and foremost, love of fellow beings and solidarity of mankind without distinction of race, caste, creed or nationality and second intellectual integrity and scientific spirit according to which all beliefs however firmly held, are liable to modification or rejection in the light of further knowledge and experience. In chapter one, the narrator, a little girl of ten years of a Hindu family describes her kinship with Majam Dada who proves what true humanism is and how love of fellow beings can win over all barriers of caste, class or even distance. The first chapter opens with the news of Dada’s death, “For fifty years, I had been oblivious to the frozen tears inside. And those tears were now streaming down my face”(1; ch. 1) Such was the bond of humanity among the writer and Majam dada that the narrator at her very tender age could easily make out that her foster mother who was
Aravind Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger published in 2008, and a winner of Booker Prize examines the issues of religion, caste, loyalty, corruption, urbanization and poverty in India. The novel besides receiving critical acclaim was also lambasted by some in India for giving in to western prejudices and playing up to their image of a poverty stricken, slum governed country. Some even went to the extent of calling it a western conspiracy to deny the country’s economic progress. It seems ...
They dresses, words and lives like a foreigner but couldn’t leave their cultural identity as the native of India. As in India, whether the problem is big or small, there will be a person to solve it or they themselves find solutions without breaking their relationship. The people in India will not break their relationship easily like the foreigners. They’ll live together till the end and believes that the relationship was made by God not by man. When there is a revelation, truth, lack of love and care are recovered. The love and care towards children from childhood till the end are done only by the parents of India, though they dislike or angry on them still they’ll do their responsibility as a parent. The identity struggle can also be shown when they have a problem, as a citizen of foreign country they could have broken their relationship when they were not happy with each other. But still, they stay together and live together as a diaspora of Indian culture and solve the misunderstanding, problems and pain. Lahiri’s diasporic writing “Interpreters of Maladies”, brings out the struggle for identity, and commitment of life in the multicultural milieu of Bengal and Boston and the
Tagore outlines the oppression of the past in his interesting yet profoundly genuine illustration Kartar Bhoot ("The Ghost of the Leader"). As the regarded pioneer of a nonexistent area is going to bite the dust, his terrified supporters dem...
Leonard Woolf considers E.M Forster’s novel A Passage to India to be a representation of ‘’the real life of politics in India, the intricacy of personal relations, the story itself, the muddle and the mystery of life’’ (Jay, 1998). Fosters novel has been the subject of literary criticism from many angles given the highly controversial subject matter which is called into question as to whether it is a genuine representation of India under colonisation written from an objective experience, and whether this attempt to represent India is successful or a failure. The question of how successful this representation of India and the British occupation of the country is will form the argument of this work. Forster makes it known to the readers of the novel that when he first began to compose A Passage to India he had felt that he did not know India well enough to continue in an accurate portrayal, therefore returned later to India before completing the novel. In the time of his second visit, Forster felt that he was able to understand the ways in which the Anglo-Indians behaved towards the natives and also that he became better acquainted with the Indian natives. This would suggest that his writing would be objective portraying both sides of the divide without prejudice towards either class.
Until a child is eighteen years old, the parents have full responsibility. They provide a stable and loving environment for their children. As the leaders in a household, caring and loving parents also maintain the bonds that hold the family together. However, absence of loving parental guidance can create tension between family members. Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day shows how war, specifically the partition of India, affects a particular family. The partition of Indian in 1947 created the separate countries of India and Pakistan, consequently ripping families apart. The partition, initiated by India’s independence from Britain, attempted to accommodate irreconcilable religious differences between Muslims and Hindus by forming the Islamic Pakistan. In Clear Light of Day, the Das children’s relationship with their parents causes lasting sibling conflict that mirrors this social and political upheaval of India.
The intent of Gandhi in Gandhi's inten was to remove the India he loved from trusting in the greatness and infallibility of Western Civilization and to encourage her to take pride in India’s own identity as a civilization and culture. His enthusiasm slightly exaggerates the grandeur of India and accounts for some margin of error in his esteem for his homeland, but Gandhi’s overall message is sound and wise; India must be proud of her heritage and mindful of sacrifice, for by these means, true freedom and true swaraj will be reached.