Shattered Realities, Torn Nations: (Post)Modernism in J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day

Abstract

This chapter pits two vastly different novels against each other: J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, a postmodern narrative dealing with the siege of British colonials during the Indian War of Independence of 1857; and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day, a modernist novel invested in the psychological and personal legacies of late colonialism and Independence in an Indian family whose individual situation recalls the collective plight of the postcolonial nation. The counterpointing of these postmodernist and modernist texts will aid my exploration of the manifold impact of Forster’s modernist concerns in fiction written after the end of Empire. If the pairing of Paul Scott and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in the previous chapter allowed me to challenge the critical bias against Scott’s alleged nostalgia as a British writer tackling the Raj and the equally restrictive view of Jhabvala as a merely counter-discursive writer, then the juxtaposition of The Siege of Krishnapur and Clear Light of Day helps me interrogate, respectively, the allegedly conservative and revolutionary efforts of Farrell’s and Desai’s novels. I propose that Farrell’s text tackles with aplomb the textuality of Passage and undertakes a discursive dissection of Forster’s vision which interrogates the colonial gaze whilst magnifying the epistemic concerns already articulated in Forster’s work; meanwhile, I argue that Desai’s novel evidences the internalization of Howards End’s spectral legacies, whose ghostly presence is felt in Clear Light of Day’s structural, symbolic and allegorical dimensions.KeywordsGrand NarrativeDomestic SpaceIndian LandscapeNascent StateBritish ImperialismThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.