Identity into today’s social networking world is very important. Who you are, and who your friends are has become ever more important in today’s super connected world. The twentieth century based film “The Mystic Masseur” by Ismail Merchant which is based on the novel The Mystic Masseur by V.S. Naipaul is a coming of age story that deals with the search for identity. The protagonist, Ganesh in Mystic Masseur is searching for who he is and faces unique obstacles in becoming himself.
The Mystic Masseur by V.S. Naipaul, narrates the story of Ganesh, a Hindu man struggling to find his place in a society that is divided between Indian and British cultures. Ganesh fights to find his place in the shifting culture of Trinidad. He changes from his Indian culture to British culture. Ganesh lives in Trinidad in 1957 when Great Britain are colonizers of the country and Indians are still migrating to Trinidad to work. Great Britain has a large influence on India and Trinidad at this time therefore in Trinidad there are two separate competing cultures. Ganesh sees the detachment between the two but is undecided on which side of the country he belongs to. He is torn between the culture which he is raised in and which his father is a part of, which is the Indian culture and the British culture which credits his education, because at this time, enrolling in college was seen as the British culture.
Ganesh is trying to find himself. He is changing his career and is torn between two cultures that reside in Trinidad, the Indian culture and the British foreign colonizer culture. As Ganesh struggles to find his place in the changing culture of Trinidad, he moves from the Indian culture to the British culture.
"I myself believe that the...
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...torn between the two cultures in Trinidad. He chooses the culture he will find more in, and be amongst other people who are equally intellectual. He goes from failing as a teacher to giving up on being a mystic masseur to an accomplished politician. The characters in the movie also influence the career roles that Ganesh takes on throughout the movie. Ganesh’s drive and passion also helps the transformation all through the movie. He bounces back from lowly roots to a political official in Trinidad as well as a respected masseur and religious writer/scholar. The Mystic Masseur by V.S. Naipaul illuminates the reconstruction of Ganesh from the Indian culture to the British culture, where he found his self-worth, where he belongs and he found himself.
Work Cited
Naipaul, V.S. The Mystic Masseur, André Deutsch, 1957. Print
Siddhartha progresses from an aloof and slightly arrogant youth, not unlike young Grendel, to a wise, satisfied man.
Our identities are constantly evolving throughout our lives to adapt to certain people and environments. Lars Fr. H. Svendsen states “Self-identity is inextricably bound up with the identity of the surroundings” One’s morals and characteristics are forever changing and these self resolutions are influenced by the encompassing aspects of life such as significant events, environmental revolutions and one’s relationship with another. Due to factors sometimes beyond our control, one’s self prowess is merely an expression of their own prior experiences which conclusively preserve and maintain a state of fluctuation for one’s character. A similar concept is evident in the film ‘The Sapphires’
Sometimes religion can be a necessity for comfort. Over time, we may already possess our very own identities and then develop different ones after a tragedy. In order to easily move on from a plight, some sort of comfort or security is needed, whether its time, family, friends, a sport, or religion. In the novel, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, one can clearly see the viewpoint of how Gogol’s life over time has evolved from American to Bengali. With the comfort of his Bengali life he’s able to push through the tragedy of his father’s death. However, apart from when Gogol needs his family and culture for comfort, he is simply a true American.
The clash between Hinduism and Christianity in A Passage to India parallels the conflict between the Indians and the English. Hinduism is best represented in the novel by Professor Godbole, and Christianity is epitomized in Mrs. Moore. Mrs. Moore comes to India with the kindness and understanding heart of a devout Christian but leaves morose and peevish. Perhaps she is haunted into this state by Professor Godbole's strange song:
In attempting to define the history and modern identity of postcolonial nations, Partha Chatterjee calls to attention the many paradoxes inherent in the cultural fabric of India. It is a country, he notes, with a modern culture based on native tradition that has been influenced by its colonial period. This modern culture contains conflicts and contradictions that create the ambiguity in India’s national identity. U. R. Anantha Murthy’s understands Indian culture as a mosaic pattern of tradition and modernity. He writes of a heterodox reality where the intellectual self is in conflict with the emotional, the rational individual experiences the sad nostalgia of the exile from his traditional roots and in fluctuating between belief and non-belief he works out his dilemmas. This paper attempts a reading of the transgression of “Love Laws” in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things as not only the representation of this heterodox modernity in the personal domain as a reflection of the larger national conflict but also a postcolonial writer’s dilemmas in search for an identity and their troubles in expressing it.
J. Eng. Lit. Cult. becomes merely “Street” as (does) Lingayat Street, Mudliyar Street and half a dozen others in Toturpuram” (5) in a gesture of egalitarianism whose effects are literally, as well as symbolically, disorientating. The sense of displacement is compounded by changes that have occurred on the street itself over the last few decades- “instead of the tender smell of fresh jasmine.... in scented sticks and virtue, instead of the chanting of sacred hymns the street had become thud with the haggling of cloth merchants and vegetable vendors, (and) the strident strains of the latest film music from video parlours” (5-6). The incursion of these loud and nestling registers of cultural change into the sanctuary of Sripathi‟s study mirrors more significant assaults on his sense of traditions including most worryingly, the refusal of his children to lead the lives he has imagined for him: his daughter Maya has broken off her engagement to an Indian man to marry a Canadian with whom she now lives in Vancouver, and his son Arun has rejected a tradition job in favour of a career as an environmental activist. Sripathi responds to the affronts by ceasing to communicate, literally, in the case of Maya, with whom he has stopped corresponding, and figuratively, with Arun and the rest of his family, through a retreat into an increasingly self enclosed world. The narrative traces the gradual expansion of his consciousness, a process initiated by Maya‟s death in a car
...zation leads to Gogol’s discovery of his true identity. Although he has always felt that he had to find a new, more American and ordinary identity, he has come to terms that he will always be the Gogol that is close to his family. While Gogol is coming to this understanding, Ashima has finally broken free from relying on her family, and has become “without borders” (176). No longer the isolated, unsure Bengali she was when arriving in Cambridge, Ashima has been liberated from dependent and powerless to self empowering. The passing of her husband has forced her to go through her life as a more self-reliant person, while at the same time she is able to maintain her daily Indian customs. This break-through is the final point of Ashima’s evolution into personal freedom and independency.
Gogol is not completely cut off from his roots and identity. He tries to reject his past, but it makes him stranger to himself. He fears to be discovered. With the rejection of Gogol’s name, Lahiri rejects the immigrant identity maintained by his parents. But this outward change fails to give him inner satisfaction.
One’s identity resides in their heart and to call it out, one must dig deep inside themselves and discover their true purpose. For some, this is an easy process and they know who they truly are, but for some like Gogol Ganguli, this is not the case. In Jumpha Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, different cultures, traditions, and lifestyles are explored as Gogol struggles with finding his true identity. Being a part of two cultures, living up to his parents expectations, and having two contrasting lifestyles affect the struggle for Gogol to find himself throughout his life.
It rips off the rose-eyed lenses that people look at India through, and it exposes the corruption and darkness that occurs within its borders. The character, Balram, is a sort of anti-hero who climbs his way to the top by adopting the methods of those he once and still possibly detested. Through every wrongdoing he does, he is constantly struggling for self-justification in order to have a healthy conscience and enjoy being at the top (Kapur). I think this narrative was successful because the protagonist wasn’t necessarily the “the good guy”. It depicts how good people must resort to bad things because of the limitations placed upon them, and that surpassing those limitations by indulging in questionable practices is the only way to find success in such a situation. Adiga critiques the potential downfalls of a neoliberalist society, for while it benefits those who are successful, it harshly punishes those who struggle to be. By telling the tale of a man who was still technically morally good become the necessary evil that he hated in order to become successful, that Adiga was able to effectively portray the cons of such a free market
British Imperialism in India deeply affected attitudes to politics, society, community, nation, and gender and intercommunity relations. This inevitably conditioned the thought process of the then common masses as well as the intelligentsia. Colonialism in India and also elsewhere made it impossible to understand the history of the country and what emerged was deconstructed notions largely conditioned and shaped by the imperialist’s missions to ‘civilize’ the colonized and the broad agenda of the ‘white man’s burden’. Studying Rabindranath Tagore from this broad rubric shall lead one to understand how Imperialism and colonialism moulded and shaped his entire career as the polymath who ventured into the arenas of literature, art, and politics and into the daily lives of common masses. Tagore’s political thoughts, apparently seeming dispassionate, can actually be studied vis-à-vis their dialogical relation with the socio- cultural conditions of India at the macrocosmic level and Bengal at the microcosmic level. He was the hybrid or the cosmopolitan man who took India to the rest of the world in her entire glory as well as agony. Ranajit Guha, the subaltern historian, regards him as “a most accomplished historian”, and is of the view that “the Indian past has been thematized in many different ways in his narrative poems, plays and novels” and his essays “stand for an original vision distanced no less from the colonialist historiography propagated by the Raj and the ideologues of imperialism than from the narrowly sectarian Hindu view of the past that had been influential in nationalist thought since its formulation by Bankimchandra Chatterjee in the 1870s.” (Guha 75, 76) Colonialism, with its baggage of vices, also ushered in th...
In the following essay I will discuss a number of readings and films from this semester and their theories on identity including Sartre, Life of Pi and “Lars and the “Real” Girl”. I will present these theories as I understand them and what the writer is trying to say regarding whether or not we have control over our identities. I will also present my take on these ideas and how I can apply them to my life and my identity.
Kim gives a vivid picture of the complexities in India under British rule. It shows the life of the bazaar mystics, of the natives, of the British military. There is a great deal of action and movement, for Kipling's vast canvas painted in full detail. The dialogue in the novel makes use of Indian phrases translated by the author, they give the flavor of native speech in India. They are also touches of the native behavior and shrewdness.
As in representations of the other British colonies, India was used by colonial novelists as a tool of displacement of the individual and re-affirmation of the metropolitan whole. There are three methods by which this effect is achieved. The first method displays an unqualified reliance on a culture too remote to be approached except physically: a hero or protagonist in a pre-mutiny novel is at liberty to escape to India at a moment of crisis, rearrange his life to his advantage and return to a happy ending and the establishment of a newly defined metropolitan life. Dobbin of Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) and Peter Jenkins of Gaskell's Cranford (1853) exemplify this well. Even the child Bitherstone of Dickens' Dombey and Son (1848) regards India as his salvation.
They are equally mindful of the need to fight against imposing rule of the British government as their historical counterparts. Patriotism in his protagonists does emerge very distinctly. His central character is an ordinary man who wants to make his presence felt, his voice heard. Ghosh’s sturdy assurance that nationalism also burns in the heart and spirit of unhistorical figures makes him give voice to their patriotic zeal. Hence his greatest and utmost concern in including history into his works of fiction is to bring to the fore ordinary individuals, who search for examples to create history for themselves. Refusing to allow his individuality to be inundated in the surge of history the ordinary citizen of a nation attempts to carve a place for himself in the period of history. Thus Ghosh’s novels re-create the ordinary citizen as a distorted and transgressed