REPRESENTATION OF INDIA IN SELECT NOVELS

Book excerpt: The book is an attempt to analyze the construction of India by five authors in their seminal works of literature. The first of the five novels is A Passage to India by E. M. Forster published in 1924. Chronologically, it is followed by Midnight’s Children, the “Booker of Bookers” for the year 1993, published in 1981 by Salman Rushdie. The third one is The Great Indian Novel , modeled on the Great Indian Epic, The Mahabharata, published in 1989 by Shashi Tharoor. The fourth one belongs to the canon of Regional Literature and is composed by Kamleshwar. The original title is Kitne Pakistan published in 2000 and the English translation Partitions came in 2006. The book makes use of the text in Hindi for reference and quoting. There are two reasons for this: first, language is not merely a medium between the text and the reader, but also something that carries a ‘voice’. The use of Hindi by Kamleshwar has a bearing on the kind of di scourse bei ng generated, as di scussed l ater. Secondl y, language acts in a cultural context and hence the impact that it carries is properly highlighted only in the original language in which the work has been composed. A translated work is, at times, not able to convey the spirit behind the words. The quotes from the text have been given in Roman script. The last one taken is Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, published in 2006 and the winner of the “Man Booker Prize” in the same year.