Postcolonial Indian Literature in English: Narayan, Jhabvala, Rushdie

Postcolonial Indian Literature in English: Narayan, Jhabvala, Rushdie

Indian literature in English which is accessible to us in the West, still has its roots in colonial literature and the tensions between East and West. A European naturalism is often present; a concern to posit India as an arena within 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 years 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 old 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 veteran of the wars against British Imperialism, must attempt a negotiation of an ethos invasive to his own definitions of nationality; Mali, without this structure, must reconcile an American capitalism with India's own sense of what constitutes a modern nation.

This theme is continued in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust (1975). Again two generations, this time British, must come to terms with an alien culture. Whilst Olivia's adventures are romanticised, Jhabvala attempts to explore in a more sophisticated manner the social outlay of Anglo-Indian relations with the higher Muslim classes and Olivia's step-grand-daughter is confronted with an India that remains hidden in the works of Kipling, Forster or Narayan. Leelavati the beggar-woman's 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 later generation has become less strained: modern Britain is expected now to accept India on its own terms.

Salman Rushdie, whose work has been produced in the eighties and nineties, has removed himself from the sites of both nationality and naturalism but remains in an engagement with economic colonialism and its consequences.