A pool of anglepoised light : the legacy of colonialism in three Indian novels written in English

Abstract

This thesis examines the work of three major Indian novelists belonging to consecutive generations whose responses to the legacy of colonialism emerges from and signals important historical shifts in postcolonial India. Focusing on three novels, the first written in the period immediately preceding independence, the last in the late 1990s, the thesis demonstrates that the colonial legacy is a dynamic force informing and shaping the consciousness of the Indian novelist writing in English. The similarities and differences between Raja Rao's Kanthapura (1938), Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) demonstrate that the residual effects of colonialism remain forcefully felt but the responses to those effects are so various as to undermine the notion that there is a single, stable colonial legacy, This thesis, focusing on three novels in particular, is not concerned with postcolonialism as a global condition but with the changes that have occurred within Indian writing in English.