Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (original) (raw)
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"Venus in India" is unique amongst pornographic literature of the long nineteenth century for being located almost exclusively in the Indian subcontinent. As men, goods, and services streamed across trade routes and expanded the frontiers of British dominion, there was a concomitant layering to the fluid, trans-cultural economy of British desire. It is this consuming anxiety generated by protracted and direct contact with the racialized other which this paper evaluates. The infrastructural and institutional paraphernalia of the British Raj act as active determinants in the nexus of desire and intercourse in this text. The narrator, a military man happily and faithfully married by his own estimation, laughs “at the idea that there existed, or could exist, a woman in India, who could raise even a ghost of desire in me”. However, it is within the carefully racialized confines of British India that desire is generated and finds recurrent realisation in the text. Accordingly, in considering the various gradations of desire as they operate and frame the action and logic of Venus in India, this paper will not just consider how the forbidden and the taboo work closely to inform each other, but also how the spectre of interracial desire serves as an agent of both political and libidinal titillation.
Partitioned Identity In Mahesh Dattani’s Where Did I Leave My Purdah: The Aftermath Of Rape
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Rape has been a serious issue since a long time. The position of women has been precarious in a world of men. The physical assault that is committed against women is itself an offensive act. But the impairment etched by rape on the victim's mind is more disastrous than the act itself. It devastates the woman's mental fiber who is wronged. Mahesh Dattani's play Where Did I Leave My Purdah primarily emphasizes the life of a "doyenne" (Dattani 40) of the theatre, Nazia who migrates to India from Lahore in 1948 just after the Independence during the Partition but it addresses issues that involves coercion accomplished through rape and its corollary on a mind that is sensitive. Even today when we hear the word 'partition', we cannot stop ourselves from imagining the gruesome, heinous scenario of 1947 which the people of both nations had experienced. The dreadful macabre did not fall over a particular person or on a particular community, rather it destroyed the rich cultural heritage which these two nations enjoyed once upon a time, as a single, united nation. But the price which the innocent common people paid for the freedom of their nation is the horrific experience for a life time, even the generation which came into existence much after that of partition had experienced its aftermath and the effects have left abrasions on the minds of people. Independence and partition came together in 1947 and is an important event in the history of the world. While there was a happy note for obliterating the British Raj from the face of the nation, there was a parallel note of sorrow and destruction for the decision of partitioning a vast united nation. Partition not only brought economic loss, communal uprisings but also a loss of identity for the migrants. Princes became paupers, people who had shelters became shelterless and those who earned food, suffered for a single crumb of victuals. The crisis of identity persecuted people. The men lost their family members, properties, their ancestral lands and their cult but women besides losing all these things, lost one more thing, their self, their own body. Rape becomes the ultimate weapon of terror which the male uses against the "other" (Beauvoir) and induce fear in them. The forceful intruding of the male genital in the female's body not only impose male's natural superiority on the female but also symbolizes male's celebrations of his "manhood" (Brownmiller) as he succeeds in conquering the female body for his pleasure, despite her physical resistance. The fear of rape acts like the 'lakshman rekha' for all women say from the prehistoric times to today's present time, to keep women under check, to force them to become submissive to all mighty powers of manhood. Women's body can be compared to the fort and hymen is the protective sheath.
Migration and Diasporas: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2020
The contemporary Indian English (diasporic) writers, by tracing the roots and routes of the colonial discourses, fabricate the 'diasporic imaginary' to disseminate truth and testaments about their 'homelands'. The global reception of such lopsided projection functioning in post-colonial Indian terra firma, linked to the common Western premises on the Orient-philistine, cantankerous, and unprogressive or the 'other'-promulgates that the West still seizes authority of representation over the excolonies like India. Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Mask (1952), Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism (1955) in general, and Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), in particular attempt to divulge the latent leitmotif of Europeans' use of stereotypes on the African, South Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Delving deep into South Asian territories (especially the Indian subcontinent), Salman Rushdie's cutting-edge novel Midnight's Children (1981), which dismantles the entire discourse of Indian writing in English, is considered to be the first seminal text, popularly known for peregrine projection of India. The use of exoticism in the novel not only invites the attention of global scholars but also paves new paths for emanant authors. Consequently, the inclinatory ideas of India after the post-1981 ‘Rushdie affairs’, reinforces the practice of ‘colonial stereotypes’. Thus, the present paper, conjoining the ideas of Said, intends to extrapolate colonial stereotypes in Indian English fiction with special reference to two novels—Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) as both the works, embracing substrata of India, reanimate the use of colonial image.