Indian Roots Research Articles

Caught in a Strange Middle Ground: Contesting History in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Salman Rushdie wrote these words in 1982, and the defensive tone makes clear that his position as an “Indian” writer was less than secure long before the “Rushdie Affair” and the infamous fatwa complicated the issue of his location. An Indian Muslim, born in Bombay, Rushdie has made his home in England since he left India for Rugby School at the age of fourteen. His parents gave him a third homeland when they moved to Pakistan while he was at Rugby. Becoming a British citizen, earning a Cambridge degree, marrying a British woman, and later marrying an American have further complicated his expatriate status. That his right to draw on his Indian roots is not universally appreciated is made clear by looking at a few of the names his critics have recently called him, such as “a self-hating Indo-Anglian,” or “the overrated Eurasian writer,” or “a hireling of Indian origin,” or even “the totally assimilated and assimilable, Westernized, British-educated Asian intellectual” (Jussawalla 114).

European or Caribbean: Jean Rhys and the Language of Exile

The question of identity in Jean Rhys's life and fiction is inextricably bound to condition of exile that shaped her perceptions and those of her characters. Rhys was truly a woman without a country. England, where she lived for most of her adult life, was a cold, unreceptive place for writer. Recognition came too late to compensate for a lifetime of loneliness and financial difficulty. The question of Rhys's West Indian roots is even more problematic. The daughter of a Welsh father and a white Creole mother, Rhys felt exiled even before she moved to England because she was cut off from black community in Dominica.1 Thus Rhys suffered from what Amon Saba Saakana describes as the mental condition of double alienation.2 Doubly dispossessed, Jean Rhys differs from black West Indian exiles who, as George Lamming points out, could never have felt experience of being in a minority.3 Jean Rhys is both Prospero and Caliban, a descendant of white colonizers but also, as a woman, colonized and excluded by patriarch's language. Carib Indian and African slave, both seen as wild fruits of Nature, share equally that spirit of revolt which Prospero by sword or language is determined to conquer.4 In her own way, Rhys also shares that revolutionary spirit: she wrests Prospero's language from him, inverts and subverts it in her fiction, and turns empty space between two worlds into a privileged place, exile's domain, by means of what Edward Said calls a contrapuntal

D’Arcy Mc Nickle: the Indian War that Never Ends or the Incredible Survival of Tribalism

D'Arcy McNickle was a remarkable man in many respects ; an administrator, historian, anthropologist and novelist, he left his mark in many different fields. Franco Meli presents McNickle's work as a novelist, stressing that in many Native American novels, the protagonist comes back home, returns to his Indian roots. Meli interprets McNickle's novels as depicting a tribal rather than an individual definition of « being ».

Título en español.

Se encontró un nuevo nemátodo en el suelo, alrededor de las raíces de la caoba Antillana, con caracteres específicos que lo separan de las tres especies incluidas actualmente en el género Trophurus Loof, 1956. En este artículo se describe y se ilustra (fig. 1) la nueva especie.

Chemical examination of plant insecticides

The roots of Derris scandens obtained from the Central Provinces of India have now been investigated in detail. From the chloroform extractives (7·0%) three crystalline substances could be isolated and characterised. There is no rotenone. The major component is scandenin, as in the case of the American sample examined by Clark; but the yield is much higher. The other two substances appear to be new compounds and are therefore named 'Nallanin' and 'Chandanin'. Lonchocarpic and robustic acids are not found in the Indian roots. Nallanin has the molecular formula C 26 H 26 O 5 , contains one methoxyl and two hydroxyls, one of which seems to be phenolic and the other alcoholic. On the other hand, Chandanin has the molecular formula C 29 H 30 O 7 possesses three methoxyls and four phenolic hydroxyls; it seems to be rather extraordinary in its characteristics.