Postcolonial Psyche in English Novels from India and Africa

Abstract

Purpose: Postcolonial Themes in English Novels from India and Africa is a thematic analysis of four novels, two from India and two from Africa. The novels are: Anita Desai’s Cry the Peacock, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Matigari. They represent the vast postcolonial writing which has emanated from these two lands as a result of the disaffection that indigenous writers felt that colonialism had exacted on their people, culture and literature. The novels stand out in their treatment of the postcolonial themes of conflicts between the colonial and the local, the past and the present, the traditional and the modern, the communal and the individual aspects of the European colonial legacy in both India and Africa. A study in Postcolonial English novels from India and Africa is important as it may unfold the comparative experience of the effect of colonial period and the literary reaction by English language novelists from these two lands, which were subject to more or less similar colonial master.

Findings: The study reveals that all the four novels share in common the strong postcolonial theme which is at the crux of everything that follow. The story of the coming and going of the colonial powers in India and Africa had left their mark and it was not naturally compatible to the peoples of the populace in these two environments that were both colonized by the British.

Methodology: This article is based on a textual analysis of primary and secondary materials. The primary materials were obtained from the four selected English novels from India and Africa: Anita Desai’s Cry the Peacock, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s Matigari. The secondary materials were obtained from various books and articles published on the novels and on the subject of discussion as well.