Abstract
As a colonial author, Naipaul is deeply concerned with the exploration of the nature of the colony from a cultural and a political perspective. Being of Indian descent, his interest in pondering over Indian history and understanding its cultural identity is central to his fiction. In Magic Seeds Naipaul moves from the colonial India under British rule where the protagonist, Willie Chandran, was born to a post-independence rural India besieged by a Maoist insurgent group whose aim was to fight poverty and be trusted by poor villagers. Drawing from Bhabha’s concept of mimicry which holds that the colonized seeks to copy the colonizer thus producing a subject who is almost the same, but not quite, (Bhabha, 1994:86). This paper seeks to read Magic Seeds as a fictional parody of political mimicry based upon the information on the movement provided by Dipanjan and Debu in India: A Million Mutinies Now. Following Willie Chandran’s trials and tribulations as a member of a Maoist guerrilla in India, Naipaul dissects the divorce between foreign political discourse and Indian cultural heritage.
Highlights
As a colonial author, Naipaul is deeply concerned with the exploration of the nature of the colony from a cultural and a political perspective
Unlike Bhabha, who recognizes in mimicry an ambivalence that is "at once resemblance and menace" (1994: 86), Naipaul does not appreciate in mimicry any subversive potential; on the contrary, he sees in it a source of identity conflict and cultural dislocation: New postures in India, attitudes that imply new ways of seeing, often turn out to be a matter of words alone. . . . Indians have to reach outside their civilization, and they are at the mercy of every kind of imported idea
Irrelevant as it may seem at first sight, it brings about a rupture with the traditional idea of mimicry based on the binarism colonizer/colonized to move on to a "second- hand" mimicry; a repetition of a repetition, because the revolution depicted in Magic Seeds mimics Maoism which itself mimics Communism, both ideologies alien to Indian cultural or political tradition
Summary
Naipaul is deeply concerned with the exploration of the nature of the colony from a cultural and a political perspective. In Magic Seeds, he follows the same pattern and reveals the inner workings of the Naxalite revolution through the different revolutionary leaders Willie Chandran met during the time he spent in the movement.
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