Postcolonial Inscribings - Indian Identities

The attempt to define the term postcolonialism raises controversies. While it is considered that postcolonialism could be explained as a discourse between those who colonize and those who are colonized, even if it addresses matters such as race and racism, gender and ethnic, national and exile, there is also a denotational function explained by Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins as such:

“The term post-colonialism – according to a too-rigid etymology — is frequently misunderstood as a temporal concept, meaning the time after colonialism has ceased, or the time following the politically determined Independence Day on which a country breaks away from its governance by another state. Not a naïve teleological sequence, which supersedes colonialism, post-colonialism is, rather, an engagement with, and contestation of colonialism’s discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies A theory of post-colonialism must, then, respond to more than the merely chronological construction of post-independence, and to more than just the discursive experience of imperialism” (230).

Postcolonial literature can be said to represent everything that can be justifiably encompassed by the postcolonial cannon as defined, also including themes such as hybridity, displacement and race. My aim is to analyze Salman Rushdie’s work “The Satanic Verses” and “The Buddha of Suburbia” by Hanif Kureishi comparatively by focusing on one of the most interesting aspects of postcolonial literature: the debate centered on matters of exile and identity, of nation, imperialism and the effects of colonialism.

Race is one of the terms that can be used in order to define the characters of both novels, but especially that of Hanif Kureishi. Karim Amir, the narrator-protagonist, a mixed-race teenager, who is a child of two cultures as he defines himself as follows:

“I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of English, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. But I don’t care – Englishman I am (though not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere. Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored” (Kureishi 3).

Robert Young considers that hybridity “implies a disruption and forcing together of any unlike living things”, that hybridization can “consist of the forcing of a single entity into two or more parts, a severing of a single object into two” and concludes that “hybridity thus makes difference into sameness, and sameness into difference, but in a way that makes the same no longer the same, the different no longer different” (26). Transposing these definitions into “The Buddha of Suburbia”, Karim seems to suffer of the “impossibility of essentialism” syndrome due to the fact that he seems locked between two worlds, questioning his cultural background and his ethnic belonging because although he is “an Englishman”, he is still submitted to abuses that Indians suffer because of their physical appearance. The son of an Indian father and an English mother who considers himself English, but in a strange way, Karim is searching to escape suburban south London and as the book presents his transition from adolescence to adulthood, he is periodically confronted with problems that derive from being part of a minority race. In “The Location of Culture”, Bhabha considers that

“The colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference. It is a disjunction produced within the act of enunciation as a specifically colonial articulation of two disproportionate sites of colonial discourse and power: the colonial scene as the invention of historicity, mastery, mimesis or as <<the other scene>> of Entstellung, displacement, fantasy, psychic defense, and an <<open>> textuality” (107-108).