Hybridity in Postcolonial Indian Novel: The Novel &amp;lt;i&amp;gt;Heat and Dust&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; in Focus

Paulos Geremew

doi:10.11648/j.cls.20210703.13

Abstract

Hybridity has become a fashionable and recurring theme in the modern world, particularly in the area of postcolonial studies. Hybridity help us reading and scrutinizing postcolonial texts, which thus reveals issues of intermixing, mode of resistance and voices of the marginalized. Accordingly, this paper tries to show hybridity in a postcolonial situation, by scrutinizing Heat and Dust, a postcolonial Indian novel in English. It has used the critical arguments and concepts of theorists, basically of Homi K. Bhabha, who expounds his ideas on hybridity in his seminal work, Location of Culture (1994). Applying descriptive-qualitative method, the study shows the contemporary world embraces East and West are inextricably intertwined and hybrid in their culture, language and identity. Heat and Dust explores hybridity, one of the key elements of postcolonialism, and throughout the novel the writer explicitly and implicitly expounds cross-culturalism, interdependency and coexistence between the two cultural elements, colonizer and colonized, Britain and India. In this analysis it is revealed that characters, basically western characters, as the major narrative of the novel is from this view, transform and change in terms of their identity, culture and even outlook. The analysis brings forth how the two entities, colonizer-colonized are intermingled and interdependent, instead of the notion of binary opposition, harsh category, and depicts India, both in its colonial and postcolonial period home as well as strange to westerners.

Highlights

As a result of English education, English literature, especially the novel emerged to be prominent as Naik [12] points out that “One of the most notable gifts of English education to India is prose fiction for though India was probably a fountain head of story-telling, the novel, as we know today, was an importation from the West”
In his other extensive study, A History of Indian English Literature (2009), Naik adds “Indian English literature began as an interesting by-product of an eventful encounter in the late eighteenth century between a vigorous and enterprising Britain and a stagnant and chaotic India” [13]
“For the novel, properly so called, we have to wait till the latter half of the nineteenth century”, and he goes on to add “The early Indian English novel is derivative and imitative of English models” [10]

Summary

Introduction

As a result of English education, English literature, especially the novel emerged to be prominent as Naik [12] points out that “One of the most notable gifts of English education to India is prose fiction for though India was probably a fountain head of story-telling, the novel, as we know today, was an importation from the West” In his other extensive study, A History of Indian English Literature (2009), Naik adds “Indian English literature began as an interesting by-product of an eventful encounter in the late eighteenth century between a vigorous and enterprising Britain and a stagnant and chaotic India” [13]. Gopal states that “the rise of prose and prose fiction in nineteenth-century India is intimately connected to the growth of a bilingual native middleclass, a Hindu middle-class intelligentsia in Bengal, the West region to come under formal British rule” [8]

Objectives

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion