Abstract
Postcolonial discourse written in the aftermath of the colonial practice reverts the colonial discourse of the British authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries during which the colonial venture was in its highest peak. The colonialist discourse that used to be in the cultural centre of the literatures written in English marginalised the discourse of the colonised peoples, their language and culture; and pushed it to the peripheries. However, postcolonial discourse in the fiction of postcolonial writers who wrote in the aftermath of colonization forces the limits and comes to the centre from the peripheries. By due references to the traditional colonial novels, postcolonial texts create a reverse structure of novels in ideological opposition to the imperial centre. This study examines two postcolonial novels: Midnight’s Children, as one of the exemplary postcolonial texts by Salman Rushdie with its numerous allusions to the colonial past and the colonialist novels and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy who, despite being a younger writer, powerfully put forward a postcolonial discourse that functions as an anti-colonial rhetoric. This paper aims to compare the discourse of these postcolonial novels to the discourse of two colonial novels: A Passage to India by E. M. Forster and Kim by Rudyard Kipling.
Highlights
Postcolonial literature, by Indian authors in English, tends in most cases to convert the colonial discourse of the British colonial writers who wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
The undermining of the colonised non-European lands is true if we agree that “more than three-quarters of the people living in the world today have had their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism” (Ashcroft, 1989: p. 1)
In the light of this discussion, colonial and postcolonial literature, “on a superficial reading” embrace the majority of the world’s modern literatures, and in return, the “history of Europe for the past few centuries has been profoundly shaped by colonial interests” (Boehmer, 1995: p. 1)
Summary
Postcolonial literature, by Indian authors in English, tends in most cases to convert the colonial discourse of the British colonial writers who wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Salman Rushdie’s fiction in particular stands out as the most controversial one. In the tradition of colonial writing, such as those of E. M. Forster and Rudyard Kipling, the colonised land and its people are depicted through imperial eyes as the “other” that is to be re-discovered and re-defined.
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