Language and the postcolonial city: The case of Salman Rushdie  

Oleh:

Khanna, Stuti

Jenis: Article from Article
Dalam koleksi: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 46 no. 3 (Sep. 2011), page 397-414.
Topik: advertisements; Bombay; chutnification; lettered city; minor literature; signs
Fulltext: Language and the postcolonial city.pdf (164.15KB)

Isi artikel

This article examines the ways in which the fact of writing about the postcolonial city of Bombay inflects the language of Rushdie’s novels. With specific reference to Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the article proposes that a productive analysis of language in Rushdie can be made by replacing the unwieldy and diffuse category of Indian English with the more meaningful contextualization provided by the category of Bombay English. It goes on to argue that while Rushdie’s “chutnified” language offers an enabling point of entry into the complex, multilayered and heterogeneous socio-economic fabric of the Third World postcolonial city, it fails to tease out the relations of power and privilege that are intimately tied to the ways in which language, even a “chutnified” one, is deployed.

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