From Indianness to Englishness: The foreign selves of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, and Salman Rushdie’s Salahuddin Chamchawala

Abstract

In Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, the protagonist Saladin Chamcha, born Salahuddin Chamchawala, undertakes a journey to England in order to escape his Indian identity and refashion himself as a “goodandproper Englishman”. In my article I read this journey of Chamcha through the prism of other similar journeys towards England and “Englishness”, which recur frequently in the past 200 years of Indian history. By highlighting the common elements that underline these different journeys, I seek to examine the desire to become “English” that they manifest and which forms an important, though critically neglected, facet of Indian middle-class self-fashioning under the colonial impact. The Satanic Verses, written four decades after India formally ceased being a colony of Britain, is central to this project because it is not only one of the most nuanced representations of the middle-class Indian desire for Englishness but also simultaneously an exploration of the sociocultural cul-de-sac to which this desire ultimately leads.