Postcolonial Perspective in the Booker Prize winning Fiction from India

Abstract

The emphasis of the present research work has been to explore the four Booker prize Indian English novels through a postcolonial perspective. The thesis was undertaken to understand the evolution of Indian literature in general and Indian English fiction in particular over the years. The exploration of the four major works by celebrated novelists has enlightened me on many aspects of India, Indian people and Indian literature. The study has provided me a fascinating and rewarding experience. The novels that are taken up for the study are: Salman Rushdie s Midnight s Children, Arundhati Roy s The God of Small Things, Kiran Desai s The Inheritance of Loss and Arvind Adiga s The White Tiger. The critical study of these four novels in connection with each other yields more powerful insight into the understanding of the postcolonial scenario of Indian society. newlineHence, this study seeks to examine the postcolonial perspective dripped through the four select novels. The thesis contains a detailed study of Indian English fiction as a genre, postcolonial theory, earlier as well as current history of the Booker prize, the depiction of life and literary career of the select novelists through their biographies and exploration of postcolonial aspects in the select novels. newlineThe four novels under study represent a mirror of Indian Society. The novelists deal with various themes. They depict Indian society and dilemmas of developing national identity after colonial rule. The issues such as caste and class, multiculturalism, feminism, violence, cultural dislocation and crisis of identity are dominant in their writing. The novelists explore postcolonial chaos and despair, misuse of power and exploitation, centre and marginality, voices of subaltern, history, immigration, oppression and political unrest through their writing in an effective manner. The appealing subjects of these novelists are margin between cultures, tradition and modernity, religion and politics, globalization, hybridity and otherness, orientalism, diaspora, the pro