DECOLONIZING ENGLISH: AN ANALYSIS OF SELECT INDIAN ENGLISH NOVELS

Abstract

The examination of Indian national history and the history of India may clearly expound the fact that India has had a poly-colonial history. India has experienced the fire of subjugation, hegemony, control, conflict and crisis not of one political, economic, linguistic and social powers but of many. It is a known fact that India has been ruled and exploited by French, Dutch, Islam from the Middle East, and the British. It connotes the fact that India has experienced the burden of imperialism and colonialism. The economic and political powers along with linguistic and social did not only extent their empire but they enslaved the people of the country and make their subjects. This phenomenon of extending empire and creating a people into subjects can be viewed as the effect of colonialism and the process of colonization. The imperial power and the colonial masters subjugated, controlled and misappropriated history, culture, language and linguistic realities of India. Apart from economy, politics and all other forms of power, language and linguistic realities were used by the colonial masters to subjugate and to control the Indian subjects. English was used instrumentally to dominate and to control the epistemological realities of the people of India. The perpetuation of English into the existence of Indian life, education etcetera shaped ideology and consciousness of the people, as the English wanted. This epistemological construction enslaved or colonized the Indian mind. The political, intellectual and academic discourse of Postcolonialism questions the instrumental application of English by the colonial powers to subjugate and to enslave the Indian mind. It is commonly believed by the structuralists’ proponents of a Postcolonialism that it is only by decolonizing English, the Indian mind would be able to attain its own self and subjectivity. The phenomena of self and subjectivity can be explained through three major philosophical, critical and literary discourses; Empiricism, Cognitivism and Pragmatism. Empiricism locates the formation of self and subjectivity in the realities of the external or materialistic world. Cognitivism locates the genesis of self and subjectivity within the deepest layer of human mind and finally Pragmatism explains the fact that the self and subjectivity can be understood by integrating the tenets of Empiricism and the ideas of Cognitivism. They propound the fact that language does not only control the ontological ii reality of self but it also guides the epistemological processes. Since many decades, the colonial masters did not only misappropriate and distribute the history, culture and economy of the colonized country but they also unsettled the linguistic texture of the country. The postcolonial conditions of such countries allow them to explore and to reconstruct their linguistic texture. They also make a candid attempt of subverting the colonial form of English which has colonized not only the language of the country but also culture, history, politics and economy. Some postcolonial novelists who constitute the fulcrum of the study have made some remarkable linguistic experimentation so that the colonial form of English can be shunned and English would be unshackled from their dominance and for that matter the novelist employ many linguistic and non-linguistic strategies: code-mixing and code-switching, morphological reinvention, Syntactic restructuring, semantic/pragmatic expansion etcetera. The study exhibits the fact that these strategies play some significant roles in decolonizing the self, mind and language. It is an undisputed fact that self, mind and language are deeply intertwined into the textures of each other and one another. It is language which determines the mind of the subject and therefore all postcolonial writers from India and from all other countries which have some colonial experience have experimented with different aspects of English language which include phonological, morphological, semantic and pragmatic. The novelist employs different morphological strategies in order to introduce native elements so that the structure of English language can be debunked and a new form of language may be introduced which may represent the regional sentiments of the people of India or subject of the colonized territory at large. Arundhati Roy has introduced different strategies of word formation; reduplication or repetition, compounding, capitalization, neologism etc. Similarly, she also introduces different syntactic patterns which subvert the absolute order of English language. Further, she does bring out some similar experimentation on the level of semantics and pragmatics. In nutshell, her experimentation with the linguistic structures intends to create a new order of epistemological construction which may allow the native or the colonized to reflect upon themselves by bringing themselves into the complexes of symbolic order. It also encourages the possibility of the impossibility of making the voiceless, a voiced entity. iii Similarly, Kiran Desai employs the linguistic and cultural phenomenon called dialogism for the purpose of introducing polyphony, heteroglossia, linguistic experimentation and carnivalesque tendencies to disrupt and to dismantle the monological, absolutive and dominant form of English language. The novelist introduces several linguistic strategies at phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels. These experimentations have revealed that through these strategies the pure and hegemonic form of English language can be unsettled and the native elements of language can be introduced. Thus, the phenomenon of decolonization could be realized as a reality. Finally, Aravind Adiga in his The White Tiger expounds the condition of postcoloniality which pervades through different textures of society; historical, cultural, economic, political and social. The novelist has consistently made use of linguistic devices in order to decolonize the hegemonic form of English language and for that he contextualizes code mixing, compounding with English suffixes, one word utterances, use of slangs and taboos. Thus, the study concludes itself with the fact that the subversion of hegemonic form of English language through the introduction of many feature of Indian languages and the contextualization of many linguistic strategies; borrowings, compounding, reduplication, application of italicization etcetera may bring a decolonized form of English language. This decolonized form of English language may allow the Indian minds to realize their self and subjectivity. It may further help them in voicing and representing themselves.