The Crisis of Postcolonial Modernity: Queer Adolescence in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy and P. Parivaraj's Shiva and Arun (original) (raw)
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Commonwealth Essays and Studies
The decolonial concept of "coloniality of power" expounded by Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo appears particularly apposite in relation to postcolonial social formations whereby discursive legacies of colonisation, such as modernity, rationality and progress, continue their operations of "management and control" (Mignolo 2018, 143). 1 As Mignolo suggests, "surrounding the idea of modernity is a discourse that promises happiness and salvation through conversion, progress, civilization, modernization, development, and market democracy" (142). Coloniality of power connects colonial to postcolonial societies such that formal decolonisation or independence from European imperial powers does not necessarily translate into dismantling structures of power in postcolonial societies. The following essay therefore focuses on those continuities of power held over subaltern subjects, such as women, queers and ethnic/caste subalterns for whom the coloniality of power-a fully functioning legacy of colonisation-is the most manifest in South Asia. Holding on to the usefulness of notions such as "revolution as evolution" in terms of independence from European powers and the temporal marker "post" of the postcolonial, i.e., the revolution that would encompass an evolution in time, I scrutinise the inability of this evolution to transform colonial into postcolonial modernity. Through a reading of queer adolescent fiction from South Asia, this essay analyses the contours of the promise of decolonisation from imperial powers, which materialises as a series of muted revolutions or revolutions-in-waiting. 2 In terms of staging the vexed encounter between queer adolescence, adulthood and postcolonial modernity, Shyam Selvadurai's first novel Funny Boy (1994) and P. Parivaraj's sole novel Shiva and Arun (1998) provide a generative ground for critical
RELUCTANT “INNER SPACE” AND FORBIDDEN “OUTER SPACE”: QUEER IDENTITY IN SHYAM SELVADURAI’S FUNNY BOY
Shyam Selvadurai’s debut novel compellingly speaks of negotiation of the cultural values invested in girls' play and boys' games, of strong- headed mothers and emancipated daughters, of the nationalist struggles between Tamils and Sinhalese, and of gay versus heterosexual relationships. It is a story of Arjie, a young boy’s passage to adolescence and maturity with the upheavals of growing political unrest. The paper argues Arjie’s journey to his own ‘queer identity’. The paper investigates not only how sexuality exiles the protagonist from the girls, different feminized sites and eventually his own family, but also how ethnicity plays a major part in exiling from each other. Against this backdrop the paper analyses the protagonist’s development of queer identity and the protagonist’s ability to transgress the borders of gender, ethnicity and desirability
Middle Flight, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2019
Migration entails multiple levels of exiles in Sri Lankan Canadian author Shyam Selvadurai’s novel Funny Boy (1994) that render the protagonist Arjie as an epitome of the multiply exiled ‘other’ in a post-colonial Sri Lanka of the 1980s ravaged by communal conflicts and violence. The multiple displacements that the narrative portrays provide for nostalgic re-collection and re-presentation of the past, where the ‘home’ has been alienated by the multiple ‘intersectional’ strands of social, cultural, sexual, political and personal narratives and their clashes. All of these strands collude in the narrative of Arjie – the queer diasporic protagonist – who embarks on a quest to tell his story, poignant with loss, love, and longing. Given the growing relevance of and need for the critical study of queer diasporic literature, this paper looks into these intersecting aspects of the multiply exiled queer diasporic subject, in the context of various spaces of belonging and exile, and attempts to explicate the intricacies of a narrative that portrays the travails of the queer diasporic subject for lost homes, loves, and memories.
Fractured Resistance: Queer Negotiations of the Postcolonial in R. Raj Rao's The Boyfriend
2012
"This paper focuses on the discussion of South Asian queer identity as it relates to the state of the postcolonial nation. It pays particular attention to the ways in which queerness engages with postcolonial fractures of the heteropatriarchal nation- class, caste, language and religion among other divisions. Focusing on R. Raj Rao’s novel The Boyfriend (2003), I work contrary to the logic of romantic idealization that would position the postcolonial nation against repressive homophobic statutes of colonialism. My reading suggests that the postcolonial nation is complicit with the former colonial project in marginalizing and policing queerness. "
Towards a Post-Queer Modernity: The Reclamation of Same-Sex Literary Cultures of/in India
Lapis Lazuli, Vol. 9, No.1, 2019
The idea that the discourses and the praxes of sexualities need to be critically interrogated, problematized, and rethought of has gained ground in the recent past, and the issue of ‘modernity’ has come to occupy one of the key positions that inform and complicate this project. However, the singular idea of ‘modernity’ is both inadequate and detrimental towards the plurality of modernities in the non-West, necessitating a rethinking through what Dilip Gaonkar and Charles Taylor theorize as ‘alternative modernities.’ In this context, research on the modernities of ‘queer’ sexualities can be re-oriented through a consideration of what has been theorized as the ‘post-queer’ by Peter Jackson, David Ruffolo, and Adam Green. This paper considers ‘alternative modernities’ and the ‘post-queer’ co-relationally and attempts at interrogating the idea of a multivalent post-queer modernity through a discussion of some key queer literary and critical texts published in the past two decades in India.
Upanayan Publishers, 2022
A greater tolerance for people with diverse sexual orientations and sexual identities has been observed in several parts of the world. Though to some extent, it conspicuously found that the people belonging to Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons have been able to attain assimilation in the mainstream of society and culture in some countries as a whole, the condition is drastically sad in other countries. People have their lifestyles, use of language, way of expression, feelings and behaviour. They have been denied living a peaceful life. They are deprived of all kinds of facilities and forced to live in extreme poverty. Even if they have tried to seclude themselves from mainstream society, they have often been the target of negligence and hatred. But if we try to locate its root cause, such discrimination is mandatory irrespective of caste, class and the importance of their gender. In this chapter, I aim to find out how the mainstream of Indian society and culture dominate these people throughout the years. Along with it postmortem, the dupe-headed role of the mainstream society. It will focus on the sorrowful life cycle of the people who have not been allowed to express their feelings, emotions, desires, ideas, and preferences as these may destroy the richly manipulated foundation of society. Though they have been allowed to move out of their homes and seek employment, but they have always been pushed down secondarily. Apart from these, the article will delve deeper into exploring the tricky Indian society where people lead a queer life challenging various norms. It makes a significant intervention in critically analyzing the emergence of queer studies in India. To explore such, I will be focusing on the contemporary Indian fiction of Meena Kandasamy's When I Hit You (2017), Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), Abha Daweasar's Babyji (2005 )and R. Raj Rao's Hostel Room 131(2010).
Notes on Queer Politics in South Asia and its Diaspora
This chapter on South Asian writing in The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (published by CUP, December 2014) maps the LGBT politics of writing in the region as the battle against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code continues to define its modes of existence and engagement.
A Discordant Harmony – A Critical Evaluation of the Queer Theory from an Indian Perspective
Queerness or rather queer sexuality in India has always been the favourite child of debate and discussions. Queer identity in India has always suffered through the dilemma of to be or not to be. As Dasgupta puts it, " Identities are complicated to begin with and become more complicated when relating them to nation and sexuality ". Given the diversity of India in terms of not only culture but ethnicity as well, Indian sexual identities are the product of " Mulipicitous effects and perceptions of tradition, modernity, colonization and globalization " (Dasgupta, 2011) that are more often in conflict with each other than in a harmonious synthesis. The main argument of this paper is to trace a lineage of queerness in India both in terms of its representation in literature by analyzing The Editor (1893) and The Housewife (1891) by Rabindranath Tagore; Lihaaf (1941) by Ismat Chugtai; and R. Raja Rao's The Boyfriend (2003), and how it prevailed in reality or the societal perception of the same. Providing a literature review by building a bridge in between the ancient and the contemporary India, the paper attempts to trace the missing links of when and how queerness went behind the curtains only to reappear in front of a more complicated, confused and probably a more rigid audience.
Foregrounding Queer Spaces in Contemporary Indian English Fiction for Young Adults
JETIR, 2019
The dimension of Indian young adult literature is far away from the mainstream literature. Nevertheless, there have been few known contributions of writers of post Raj like R. K. Narayan, Ruskin Bond and Mulk Raj Anand but it is not certain that their target readers are exclusively meant for adolescent readership. In fact, their readership is not directed by anybody in the Indian scenario. Since last decades there have been a tremendous change in the arena of young adult literature and that is the depiction of queer characters in the Indian English fiction. Here the word 'queer' has been used as an umbrella term for the LGBT community. Two novels "Slightly Burnt"(2014) by Payal Dhar and "Talking of Muskaan" (2014) by Himanjali Sankar have been selected for analysing queer spaces as exemplary of contemporary young adult Indian English fiction. Extending through the methodology of queer theory this article interrogates the narrative voices that claim heterogeneity as normal against homosexuality. Moreover, an attempt has been made to study and bring out the element of ambivalence delineated in the authorial voice, queer representations and the adolescent perspective.