Celebrating Indigenous Culture and Identity in Ice Candy Man: A Postcolonial Critique

Zahid Khorshid Abbas ,Muhammad Tufail Chandio

doi:10.33195/jll.v4iii.254

Zahid Khorshid Abbas , Muhammad Tufail Chandio

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.33195/jll.v4iii.254

Copy DOI

Abstract

To justify colonialism and perpetuate colonial rule the colonizers appropriated their political, cultural, academic, literary, and linguistic supremacy which left a tinge of mimicry and hybridity among natives. The colonizers, being in the center, employed colonial discourse, Eurocentric historic construct, western education system, English language, missionary, and creative literature to portray the periphery, the colonized, as uncivilized, accultured, incompetent, uncouth, and diabolical evils. To rebut this, the postcolonial writers rejected colonialist ideology and cultural supremacy by asserting native culture, identity, language, and societal values. They actually disassociated themselves from cultural imperialism and celebrated their indigenous culture. The undertaken study analyses the portrayal of celebration of the indigenous culture and identity in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice Candy Man (1988-89) from the vantage point of postcolonial theory. It has been found that Sidhwa celebrates indigenous culture, identity, tradition, language, and localization in the novel. To this effect, she employs code-mixing to add indigenous semantics, delineates characters from the locality, asserts her Pakistaniness, and objectifies Pakistani leadership and narrative in the novel and thus she continues to live as a postcolonial writer.

Highlights

There is a projection of racial and cultural superiority in the Western colonialist ideology
The colonialist discourse asserts the superiority of the western civilization, culture, politics, education, and language system, which is rebutted by the contentions and tenets of postcolonialism
The colonial ideology is maintained by different means and ways such as enslavement, occupation of native land, imposition of certain laws, use of physical force, exploitation of labour resources and by objective murders which further means that colonisers do not have any emotional connections to the victims in colonised world, and celebrate the superiority of their indigenous culture over the colonized

Summary

Introduction

There is a projection of racial and cultural superiority in the Western colonialist ideology. Because of the colonial discourse and Eurocentric historical construct, the West stands at advantage in all walks of life even in literature whereas the depiction of colonized subjects in their texts remains compromised It is the time, as asserted by Merger, that around the globe the supremacy of the west has been both admitted and questioned as well. The colonial ideology is maintained by different means and ways such as enslavement, occupation of native land, imposition of certain laws, use of physical force, exploitation of labour resources and by objective murders which further means that colonisers do not have any emotional connections to the victims in colonised world, and celebrate the superiority of their indigenous culture over the colonized. The postcolonialism is diametrically opposite to the colonialism and it celebrates the indigenous cultures and makes colonized aware that they are not inferior to the colonizers in any walk of life and proving them to be equal to them

Methodology

Conclusion