Preserving Cultural Identity through Indian English Literature

Abstract

The literature produced in India in English is a unique and highly complicated presence of colonial legacy and a powerful instrument of post-colonial resistance. English in India, as a result of its peculiar historical context, came out of the period of British rule of the Indian subcontinent never a neutral language, it was the language of governance, prestige and, in the hands of its colonizers, the deliberate exclusion of indigenous epistemologies. But paradoxically, generations of Indian writers have appropriated it and made it the weapon that has been used to register all that colonialism was trying to obliterate: the textures of caste, the plurality of religious life, the rhythms of the village and the city, the memories recorded in myth and folklore, the weight of partition and displacement, and the quiet dignities of everyday Indian experience. This paper suggests that, at least in the case of Indian English Literature, it has been, and remains an important force of preservation and renegotiation of cultural identity, not by documenting the identity, but by engaging it in active, creative and sometimes subversive ways with the English language and with the Indian civilizational inheritance. It looks at the work of the Indian writers who have developed alternative cultural imaginaries that go beyond the defining characteristics of ‘Indianness' as a monolithic and stable cultural structure to create new, dynamic worlds of negotiation between tradition and modernity, locality and globality, memory and imagination, drawing inspiration from R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and the diasporic and postmodern voices of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai. The paper also takes up some important theoretical frameworks from Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Frantz Fanon to shed light on the ideological aspects of this literary project.