Surviving Colonialism - A Study of R.K Narayan, Anita Desai, V.S Naipaul

Surviving Colonialism demonstrates the possibility of reading resistance to British colonialism in India from a variety of cross cultural perspectives. It develops how the ideas of liberation and the diverse reality of the Indian nation challenge colonialism and its aftermath. The study begins with a critique of the rhetoric of equalit and unity in the nationalist writings of Aurobindo, Gandhi and Nehru Its main concern is with the literary interpretation of postcolonial experiences of resistance and survival in selected works by R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai and V. S. Naipaul, focusing especially on their distinct ways of dealing with authenticity and cultural identity as they construct versions of what it means to be Indian. Chandrra Chatterjee is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Delhi, India. She is the author of The World Within: A Study of Novels in English by Indian Women. She is currently researching postcolonialism at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

This book is a result of a research grant given to me by the University of Antwerp. I am grateful to them and to the India Study Centre for their support. I would like to thank my colleagues, students and friends both in Antwerp and Delhi for encouraging me and taking interest in my work. Special thanks are due to Isabel Hoving, Geert Lernout and Vivian Liska for reading the chapters and offering helpful suggestions. I am indebted to Johan van der Auwera and Chris De Lauwer for their advice and help. Thanks to Vivian and Katrien for sharing their room with me and providing an excellent work atmosphere. A number of people helped me to obtain books and articles relevant to my study; I would like to thank Isabel, Hema, Ibha Mashi, Priti, Aditi and Chimoni for their generosity. I also thank Eric and Vera for helping to sort out computer related problems. This work would have never been completed without the support of my family. I am grateful to my mother-in-law for taking over the household during those exhausting months when the manuscript was being written. My daughters took an active interest in my work. Their faith in me inspired me to meet deadlines. This book owes much to the encouragement, patience and support of my husband, who helped me with word-processing and invaluable advice.

The presence of the ideal of liberation relates uneasily to the twin realities of colonialism and nationalism. Due to a strong socio-religious tradition, the challenge that nationalism faced in India was that it had to acquire an Indian flavour. Contact with western ideals of liberation forced it to retain their ideas of freedom and progress. This study examines whether the construction of national identity can survive the offensive of colonialism. It participates in the on-going debate that postcolonialism includes both the aftermath of colonialism and anti colonial struggles in the form of nationalist movements. This study focuses on the resistances to colonialism both as a direct result of British rule, and as forms of ancient customs which were encouraged by the British for their economic and administrative advantages. This resistance ran together with the facts of colonial domination, and today it has to acknowledge that oppression still exists in different forms in India. So, a re- colonising process is an inevitable part of postcolonialism. In India post-coloniality is a process which is continuously being formed. It is expressed by anti-colonialism, by its complicity in the re-colonising process, and also by its presence in the various quotidian ways in which resistance is offered to dominating authority. Aware of the economic and political reasons of defining India in various ways, my text studies how the concept of national identity is a pluralistic one. It begins with an examination of how Aurobindo, Gandhi, and Nehru not only systematically expounded their theories on nationalism in India, but each in turn also constructed specific subjectivities for the nation. The paths of cultural regeneration that they suggested varied according to what they considered to be threats to the formulation of indigenous value systems. The emphasis was upon the people who were said to have given themselves up to bondage. The attendant solutions always emphasised the element of responsibility which could be inspired by religious and social obligations. I feel that at this point nationalism had to contend with charges of exclusion and subordination. The intellectual and moral leadership of philosophers and politicians built a rhetoric of equality based on an ideological unity, and constructed the framework of the Indian "nation". The fissures in such a construction of national identities became apparent in the decades after Independence. Social forces that agreed to fall in with the claims of modemisation, and the ethnic and religious minorities who opposed the colonial rulers, were not ready to be tied up in a singular definition of the Indian nation. While identifying the points of convergences between the political agendas of nationalism and colonialism, this study then proceeds to re connect the history of English education in India with the grounds for building up struggles for independence, as well as with the advent of Indo-English fiction. In the three following chapters this work looks at three novelists of Indian origin who have distinctive ways of dealing with authenticity and cultural identity, as they construct versions of what it means to be Indian. The chapter on R. K. Narayan situates itself in the last decade before Independence. It identifies that the dual compulsions that Indo-English creative writers faced upto the second decade of the 20th century were (a) the unpliability of the English language as it was used in India then, and (b) the urgent need to unyoke India from foreign domination. The forces of colonial encounter were recollecting themselves into new cultural moods and linguistic formations. My reading of Narayan's novels focuses on the question of how the novelist sustains his constructions of a national self between the ideological pulls of tradition, and approximation to the colonial past. As an alternative I show how Narayan creates a fiction of simple details of Indian life, deliberately projecting the irrelevance of western influence in this self contained world.

I argue that it is evident from the novels that colonial inheritance has become an integral part of India's culture, and question Narayan's image of a restorative "home" based on strong Hindu Brahminical model. In the second chapter I suggest that it is possible to read the concept of woman's freedom in India within the framework of a legacy of colonialism. The Independence struggle saw the need of harnessing female energy and using women as an important metaphysical dimension of the ideology of nationalism. I place lives and experiences of women within the country's political and socio-economic realities to chart how colonialism and nationalism converged on the woman's question. To understand the stagnations that this included, I study the novels of Anita Desai from the point of intersection between gender and nationalism. The four novels I study in detail show Desai's insistence upon exploring and breaking open the myths of mainstream nationalism.

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