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Features of Post colonial literature
Features of Post colonial literature
Features of Post colonial literature
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Of all the Indian English Novelists of today, Arun Joshi can truly be said to gain recognition. Joshi came into limelight with the publication of his very first novel, ‘The Foreigner’ which appeared in 1968. Joshi’s primary concern is with man’s anguished effort to find moorings for himself in the tumultuous sea of life. What is presented in Arun Joshi’s novels is not the common place East-West encounter but a poignant picture of ‘Angst’. The novel meets the needs of the modern world more boldly than poetry or drama. The novel The Foreigner reflects both constructive and disintegrating phases of contemporary society. Recently there has been a growing interest among the Indian novelists in English to present the experience of the modern predicament. As the novels after 1950s began to shift from the public to the private sphere and began to delineate the individual’s quest for the self in all its varied and complex forms and his problems and crises, Arun Joshi is in search for new themes renounced the larger …show more content…
It deals with the life of Sindi, a young man, in search of life. Sindhi was a perfect foreigner. He was not only a foreigner to the two cultures between which he shuttled but also to his soul. He was an orphan both in terms of relations and his emotional roots. He was brought up by his uncle who was settled in Kenya and believed that to love is to invite others to break out heart (69). Being the son of a mixed parentage i.e., his mother a British national and his father a Kenyan Indian, Sindi knows that he doesn’t belong anywhere. His entire view of life and responses are coloured by his childhood deprivation of love from his parents. Therefore he entertained a deep sense of insecurity, unreality and impermanance about things. His definition of his life is that of a lone journey in total darkness where twenty five years are largely wasted in search of wrong things in wrong places.
It is a coming of age story that outlines a boy’s personal growth and triumphs. Being able to reflect on the significance of the events that have led to his triumphs is critical, as it helps the reader understand their impact on his life and where he is coming from in the decisions he makes in the story. Such reflection is very important; as it makes the situations in the story more clear to the reader, and the story is then more easy and enjoyable to read. First person is the best point of view, in this story, for recounting these events, as it allows for a more personal and thereby more insightful reflection on the importance of the experiences he has. For example, the reader only learns of the importance of Paresh to the main character when he reflects “if I hadn’t tagged along with my family [that] day, I wouldn’t have met him that first time”(109). This indicates to the reader that Paresh will be an important figure in the protagonist’s life, which helps guide the reader’s understanding of the situation. The reader recognizes that Paresh will play a critical role in the main character’s life, and this helps the reader anticipate what may happen
When Sripathi and his family receive the news of Maya’s and her husband’s fatal road accident, they experience a dramatic up heaval. For Sripathi, this event functioned as the distressed that inaugurated his cultural and personal process of transformation and was played out on different levels. First, his daughter’s death required him to travel to Canada to arrange for his granddaughter’s reverse journey to India, a move that marked her as doubly diasporic sensibility. Sripathi called his “foreign trip” to Vancouver turned out to be an experience of deep psychic and cultural dislocation, for it completely “unmoors him from the earth after fifty-seven years of being tied to it” (140). Sripathi’s own emerging diasporic sensibility condition. Not only must he faced his own fear of a world that is no longer knowable to him, but, more importantly, he must face his granddaughter. Nandana has been literally silenced by the pain of her parent’s death, and her relocation from Canada to Tamil Nadu initially irritated her psychological condition. To Sripathi, however, Nandana’s presence actsed as a constant reminder of his regret of not having “known his daughter’s inner life” (147) as well as her life in Canada. He now recognizeed that in the past he denied his daughter his love in order to support his
The main character is Mrs. Das whom is flirtatious, careless, and needy. She and her husband take their family to see the country India for the first time. The tour guide Mr.Kapsi whom is curious, understanding, and quite aware. He sees something unusual at the beginning of the trip, but does not say anything. As the children continue their site seeing, the husband takes picture with his camera as if he lost in his own world. Meanwhile the wife gets to know the driver instead of site seeing. Mr.Kapsi is aware that the family is not like most Indians which lead him to be attracted to Mrs.Das. It states, “The family looked Indian but dressed as foreigners did, the children in stiff, brightly colored clothing and caps with translucent visors (29). This quote shows the difference in cultural clash as well the difficulty of communication. Mr.Kapsi tells Mrs. Das that he is an interpreter for a doctor which makes her believe she can discuss her personal business without him telling anyone. It states, “He decided to begin with the most obvious question, to get to the heart of the matter, and so he asked, “Is it really pain you feel, Mrs. Das, or is it guilt?”(39) Made the wife realized what she was truly feeling about her mistakes. After the conversation Mr.Kapsi did not look at the Mrs.Das the same way. The unusual
Jhumpa Lahiri’s book, Interpreter of Maladies, is composed of nine short stories, all of which have similar subject matter. One major theme which appears throughout the book is the difficulty of assimilation. Some characters, such as Mrs. Sen from the short story ”Mrs. Sen’s”, refuse to assimilate and face unhappy lives due to this, while other characters, such as Eliot from “The Third and Final Continent”, accept the new culture, grow, and appreciate the new opportunities given to them. Another major theme which appears throughout the book is marriage. Some of the stories are concerned with unhappy marriages, such as “A Temporary Matter,” whereas other stories, such as “The Third and Final Continent,” are more romantic; couples are happily married.
As fate disintegrates, Milind goes missing from Yudi’s life into the corrupt world of Bollywood called boys. At last, Yudi finds him again, only to witness that he has married a woman. The novel ends with a seemingly heart wrenching episode for Yudi as Milind visits him often for his own financial interests and Yudi just can’t let him go for his love. The novel brings into context the riots of Babri Masjid as Yudi worries and searches for the Dalit boy Milind.
In Lahiri’s story the attention and the plot of the story both stayed in one same direction that was the cultural clash. Lahiri’s story “Imperator of Maladies” revolves around people who are Indian’s living in India, Indian’s living in America or people Americans with an Indian decent. As her being a second generation immigrant in America, she realized at a very young age that her family is settled here but she was still not sure about the fact which place she could call her real home because of the different cultural she was witnessing in her everyday family life. In the story when the Das’s family did decided to visit India they did witness the same exact feeling. As the story progresses Lahiri gives us a brief background about Mr. and Mrs. Das as they both were born and raised in America but after sometime their retired parents decided to move back and spe...
Friends are reuniting with each other. There are many themes present in the book, The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian.One particular theme that is prsent throught the story is that there is always hope for friendship. This theme is very important, because it deals with friendship and how they fight, but forgive each other. Friendship is very solidarity. The reader should care, because maybe this has happened to you where you had fought with your best friend and it hurt. Also this could could happen to you in the future, so maybe you would want to be
Foreigners are frequently categorized and seen as interchangeable. The first two stories, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” and “Interpreter of Maladies,” are connected by how people are perceived when away from home, and the third, “A Real Durwan,” is connected to the earlier two because it shows how complicated individuals are when they are not thought of as apart of a group. The order is important because the first two narratives shows the reader how Indians in America and Americans in India are all perceived to act similar by native born people. In the final tale, Lahiri explains how people are not as homologous appear to be. “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” is set in America with an Indian-American family, two parents and a daughter, and
The novel “Family Life”, written by Akhil Sharma, is a sorrowful story that follows a family that had moved from Delhi. Akhil does an amazing job narrating the families’ ups and downs throughout the story. Even though the story has a heartbreaking background, he does a phenomenal job managing to keep the reader’s attention. There were points where the book was so hard to put down, because of the suspense of what is going to happen next. The story is told masterfully, from the dialog and actions of the characters, to the beautiful description of the scenery of the story. When your reading “Family Life”, it’s almost as you’re watching this heart-stopping story unfold right in front of your very eyes.
In the Third and Final Continent, Jhumpa Lahiri uses her own experiences of being from an immigrant family to illustrate to her readers how heritage, cultural influences and adaptation play a major role in finding your true identity. The Third and Final Continent is the ninth narration in a collection of stories called the Interpreter of Maladies. In this story, it discusses themes such as marriage, family, society, language and identity. In this story, we focus on an East Asian man of Bengali descent who wants to have a better future for himself so he leaves India and travels to London, England to pursue a higher education. His pursuit for higher education takes place on three different continents. In India, he feels safe in his home country and welcomed, but when he travels abroad he starts to have fear and anxiety. Through his narrations, we learn how he adapts to the European and American and through these experiences he learns to assimilate and to adapt to the new culture he travels to.
Jhumpa Lahiri, the author of the story, “The Third and Final Continent,” grew up being aware of conflicting expectations from two different countries. As Jhumpa mentioned, “I was expected to be Indian by Indians and Americans by Americans (Lahiri, pg 50).” The Third and Final Continent leaves the reader with a positive notion of the immigrant experience in America. The narrator recalls his school days in London, rooming with other foreign Bengalis, and trying to settle in this new world. He talks about how when he was 36 years old when his own marriage was arranged and he first flew to Calcutta, to attend his wedding. This statement is unique because it depicts the differences between an American culture and an Indian culture. At the time of marriage he is 36 years old and he didn’t pick who he wanted to get married to. Marriage in India is something that most parents set compared to other countries where they can marry someone of choice. Indians settle down by an arranged marriage ma...
Recent years have witnessed a large number of Indian English fiction writers who have stunned the literary world with their works. The topics dealt with are contemporary and populist and the English is functional, communicative and unpretentious. Novels have always served as a guide, a beacon in a conflicting, chaotic world and continue to do so. A careful study of Indian English fiction writers show that there are two kinds of writers who contribute to the genre of novels: The first group of writers include those who are global Indians, the diasporic writers, who are Indians by birth but have lived abroad, so they see Indian problems and reality objectively. The second group of writers are those born and brought up in India, exposed to the attitudes, morale and values of the society. Hence their works focus on the various social problems of India like the plight of women, unemployment, poverty, class discrimination, social dogmas, rigid religious norms, inter caste marriages, breakdown of relationships etc.
Prasad, Amar Nath. “Identity Crisis in V.S.Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas”. Critical Response to V. S. Naipaul and Mulk Raj Anand. Edited by Prasad, Amar Nath. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2003. Print.
“’You are so very much like everything else in this country, inefficient, dirty, indifferent,’ he murmured”. (P. 178 l. 6-7). Sir Mohan Lal is the protagonist in Singh’s short story “Karma”. He appears very selfish; he likes to look himself in the mirror, and praise himself. He is a well-educated man, with a tie from the University of Oxford. He makes sure that there is a copy of ‘The Times’ next to him, so if passers should doubt that he is British, the English paper will surely convince them. He is determined to be as clean as possible, by using both soap and eau de cologne. He is not a man, who wants to smell like the rest of the mob. He is yearning for the British to come to him, so they can realize that he is as articulated as them. He is certain that he resembles a true English-man, and can see no difference between him and them. As a graduate from Oxford, he must be in their league, so he assumes that whomever he meets will accept him, and take him as an educated man. Sir Mohan Lal have been to England for five years, and in that time, he attended the University of Oxford. He has grown very fond of England; he sees it as a more sophisticated country than India. He identify India with filth, and feels pity towards the country, due to lack of elegance and finesse.
Salman Rushdie introduces his readers to numerous thought-provoking ideas through the novel. The attention to detail regarding Indian history, geography and culture are evidence that Rushdie is a native of India. “Salman Rushdie is the quintessential migrant: born in India, schooled in England, forced by his parents to move to Pakistan and finally exiled back in Britain”( Schröttner). The novel includes many major themes that are not only specific to India, but can be universalized as well. Rushdie includes the juxtaposition of destruction and creation, and fate and freewill, as well as themes surrounding identity crisis and fragmentation.