Post-colonial literature and western superiority
verbally rejects the colonial authority of Mr. Brown, in attempting to ‘civil ize ’ his wife he adopts the same westernized tone of condescension.
Arundhati Roy’s 1997 Booker Prize winning novel The God of Small Things presents the Anglophilic foundations of class dynamics in modern India more overtly. Baby Kochamma is fervidly class obsessed and the novel’s greatest Anglophile, finding everything British to be inherently superior. In a moment in chapter two, she punishes the twins, Estha and Rahel, for speaking Malayalam (the native language of Ayemenem, India) and forces them to write lines; ‘” Impositions ” she called them - I will always speak in English, I will always speak in English. A hundred times each.’ 1 Baby Kochamma’s Anglophilia and assertions of her class status are clearly derived from feelings of insecurity surrounding her unrequited love in her youth for an Irish Priest (Father Mulligan). Her cruel persona resulting from this rejection by the west is representative of a generational colonial trauma of othering that provokes a need to ‘other’ others , as seen in her dehumanizing hatred of ‘ Untouchables ’ like Velutha. Similarly, Chacko, boasts of his Oxford degree, and the whole family is obsessed with The Sound of Music , evidence again that, as Chacko admits in chapter two: ‘ They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. ’ 2 Here, Roy references the way members of the ‘Untouchable’ caste must sweep away their footprints so that people of higher classes would not ‘ defile themselves ’ 3 by walking in them. She compares this to the behaviour of upper/middle class ‘ Anglophiles ’ like the Ipe family in metaphorically ‘sweeping away’ their Indian history in order to appease the ‘ departed conqueror ’ . 4 In a sense, despite their high social status as Indians, they are like ‘Paravans’ in relation to the British, made to feel shame for their history and servile in their worship of western culture. Both Ammu and Krishna ultimately find themselves trapped by their class, choosing to abandon their status in order to pursue authenticity. Krishna is a more pertinent example of this: he abandons the status granted to him as a teacher and lecturer at Albert Mission College in order to further connect to his spirituality and rebel against the western style of teaching. His friend, the ‘Headmaster’ of his daughter’s school, comments memorably on the way in which western-style education in India ‘ reduced us to a nation of morons; we are strangers to our own culture and camp followers of another culture, feeding on leavings and garbage ’ . Salman Rushdie states, ‘ to conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free ’ , 5 but here Narayan takes a different view, arguing that the answer does not lie in trying to prove one’s worth to the colon izer by imitating them, rather it is a refusal to seek this approval that frees the mind of the colonized. Put simply, Indian education is
1 Roy 1997: chapter 2, paragraph 7. 2 Roy 1997: chapter 2, paragraph 90.
3 ‘ Mammachi told Estha and Rahel that she could remember a time, in her girlhood, when Paravans were expected to crawl backwards with a broom, sweeping away their footprints so that Brahmins or Syrian Christians would not defile themselves by accidentally stepping into a Paravan's footprint. ’ Roy 1997: chapter 2, paragraph 270. 4 Talib 2002: ‘ According to Roy, “ being forced to identify with a conqueror, especially with a departed conqueror…is like being the child of a raped mother’’.’ 5 Rushdie 1991: paragraph 15.
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