Naipaul's Magic Seeds
As a colonial author, Naipaul is deeply concerned with the exploration of the nature of the colony from a cultural and a political perspective. Being of Indian descent, his interest in pondering over Indian history and understanding its cultural identity is central to his fiction. In Magic Seeds Nai...
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2019 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ddd.uab.cat:203859 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://ddd.uab.cat/record/203859 https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.5565/rev/indialogs.116 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | India Intertextuality Mimicry Maoism Naxalism Parody Peasants Intertextualidad Mimetismo Maoísmo Naxalismo Parodia Campesinos |
| Sumario: | As a colonial author, Naipaul is deeply concerned with the exploration of the nature of the colony from a cultural and a political perspective. Being of Indian descent, his interest in pondering over Indian history and understanding its cultural identity is central to his fiction. In Magic Seeds Naipaul moves from the colonial India under British rule where the protagonist, Willie Chandran, was born to a post-independence rural India besieged by a Maoist insurgent group whose aim was to fight poverty and be trusted by poor villagers. Drawing from Bhabha's concept of mimicry which holds that the colonized seeks to copy the colonizer thus producing a subject who is "almost the same, but not quite," (Bhabha, 1994:86). This paper seeks to read Magic Seeds as a fictional parody of political mimicry based upon the information on the movement provided by Dipanjan and Debu in India: A Million Mutinies Now. Following Willie Chandran's trials and tribulations as a member of a Maoist guerrilla in India, Naipaul dissects the divorce between foreign political discourse and Indian cultural heritage. |
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