Postcolonial Indian Literature in English: Narayan, Jhabvala, Rushdie :: Essays Papers

Postcolonial Indian Literature in English Narayan, Jhabvala, RushdieIndian literary productions in English which is accessible to us in the West, still has its grow in colonial literature and the tensions between East and West. A European naturalism is often present a concern to posit India as an arena at bottom which Western readers can identify realities is inherent within much of this writing. The following are three examples of the progression of post-Independence literature.Twenty age after Independence, R.K.Narayan was still tackling issues of colonialism. The Vendor of Sweets (1967) takes us through the tensions integral to a family in which two generations belong to two different cultures. Ascetic Jagan belongs to an of age(predicate) India of family and history his son to an India increasingly subject to the foregrounding of the commodity and a dramatic industrialisation. Narayan explores the inevitable clash of what is, in many ways, both a colonial and a post-colonial encounter Jagan, a follower of Gandhi and a veterinarian of the wars against British Imperialism, must attempt a negotiation of an ethos invasive to his ingest definitions of nationality Mali, without this structure, must reconcile an American capitalism with Indias own sense of what constitutes a modern nation.This theme is continued in Ruth Prawer Jhabvalas Heat and rubble (1975). Again two generations, this time British, must come to terms with an foreign culture. Whilst Olivias adventures are romanticised, Jhabvala attempts to explore in a more sophisticated personal manner the amicable outlay of Anglo-Indian relations with the higher Muslim classes and Olivias step-grand-daughter is confronted with an India that stiff hidden in the works of Kipling, Forster or Narayan. Leelavati the beggar-womans life, if not her behaviour, demonstrates an unusual social awareness of the lowest castes. It is to be noted that the East-West dichotomy within the after generation has become less strained modern Britain is expected at a time to accept India on its own terms.Salman Rushdie, whose work has been produced in the eighties and nineties, has remote himself from the sites of both nationality and naturalism but remains in an engagement with scotch colonialism and its consequences.