Indian Colonial Literature

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I. Tentative Title: Rewriting History: Countering the British Narrative of India’s Colonial Experience II. Research Problem Colonization of India by the British has been an essential theme in the novels of Indo-Pakistani postcolonial writers. These writers have time and again used novel as a tool to counter the narrative of colonial literature and to demonstrate the narrative of the colonized native. The use of fiction as a tool to rewrite history has been a well-established practice in the field of postcolonial literature across the globe. The inference is that account of India’s colonial experience represented in literary works of British writers is partial in historical context as it overlooks the subjugation of colonized Indians. In this…show more content…
Forster in their novels Jewel of the Crown, Kim, and A Passage to India have reported their conception of India under the British Raj completing their ‘white man’s burned’ by civilizing the native. These literary works have been critically analyzed in the previous decades from a post-colonial perspective which exposes their partial representation of India and the Indian colonial experience. In relation to this, Pakistani and Indian authors like Kamila Shamsie and Bali Rai in A God in Every Stone and City of Ghosts respectively in their recent works of historical fiction have tried to re-explore the Indian colonial experience. Through means of my thesis I aim to explore the reason these Indo-Pakistani writers have chosen to set their plots in India’s colonial history. Also, I aim to compare and contrast in a ‘contrapuntal’ that in what ways have these Indo-Pakistani writers tried to counter British version of India delineated in their novels. The contrapuntal study of British writers in contesting them with the Indo-Pakistani writers have not been explored earlier which makes this study…show more content…
The chapter will aim on establishing the ‘colonialist narrative’ of India through experience of their primary characters i.e. Kim and Daphne. Also, the chapter will aim to explain stereotyping of native Indian characters as ‘savage others’ in comparison with the characterization of English characters in these aforementioned novels. Moreover, the chapter will explore how Kipling and Scott commented on the interaction between the colonizers and colonized within the novel. In doing so, the chapter will comprehensively discuss aforementioned issue and establish Kim and Daphne’s fictional

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