Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Arundhati Roy'

The aim of this essay is to critically consider Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things from a postcolonial feminist perspective, with a special focus on how she models different representations of women, taking as a background the discussions within postcolonial feminism about subalternity and the representations of women from the so-called Third World in theory and literature, as well as the concept of agency from Cultural Studies. This purpose is reached by studying and comparing three main female characters in the novel: Mammachi, Baby Kochamma and Ammu, centering on their different ways of relating to the male hero of the novel, Velutha, an Untouchable in the lingering caste system of India. The essay argues that Roy has contributed with diverse representations of subaltern women in the ‘Third World’ who—despite their oppressed and marginalized status—display agency and are portrayed as responsible for their own actions.

This thesis presents a creative-analytical hybrid production in relation to the stylistic distinctiveness in The God of Small Things, the debut novel of Arundhati Roy. Roy’s text drew the world’s gaze after winning the Booker Prize in 1997. Many studies have been written on diverse aspects of the book, and much has been said regarding the writer’s style. However, those studies rarely focus on the minutiae of Roy’s writing and this thesis provides a greater degree of detailed analysis. The objective is to achieve a deeper understanding of the relationship between style and literary aesthetics in The God of Small Things by studying the stylistic patterns behind Roy’s resonating poetic prose. The stylistic study is carried out adopting two approaches: the corpus-based approach (Part A) and the empirical-creative approach (Part B). The first section provides a stylistic analysis concentrating on the most significant stylistic features of the novel. The study is based on the list of style markers rendered by Leech and Short, Style in Fiction (1981) and elaborated according to the following key aspects that were extracted from the repertoire using my intuitive observation of the novel. These chosen style markers taken together represent key aspects of Roy’s style: (1) Lexis—Roy’s very frequent and particular utilization of adjectives; (2) Grammar—the high concentration of minor sentences and the listing of noun phrases in the text; (3) Figures of Speech— repetition and neologism. The second section presents a self-written pastiche which aims at imitating Roy’s style in literary prose and adapting its approach to a Chinese context. The creative process serves as an experiment on taking pastiche writing as an “experiential” approach to stylistics. In addition, since the resemblance of the pastiche to Roy’s style should not be the only value of the piece, some key themes in the original text are also reproduced. The analysis in Part A illustrates patterns of Roy’s stylistic choices. On the use of adjectives, Roy tends to arrange adjectival elements in sequence, construct a fixed “like” sentence structure, and adopt combining word forms and affective adjectives. On minor sentences, Roy chooses to separate adverbial phrases, sentence fragments starting with “like”, “as though”, and clauses beginning with “that”, “which”, “and”, “but”, “or”. As for repetitions, there is repeated use of set phrases, sentence patterns and recurrent appearance of certain lines and images. Lastly, on neologisms, Roy’s patterns of creating new words include hyphenation, direct merging, and prefix/suffix building. The pastiche is entitled Hong Kong Locust Stand I. By juxtaposing with the original, it is found that many stylistic features in The God of Small Things, are present in the pastiche, though with variation. While stylistic elements cannot totally be independent from the theme, the atmosphere, character and plot of the pastiche also demonstrate qualities representing those in Roy’s novel. The pastiche presents an innovative and respectful way to come to terms with Roy’s style through selective imitation and creative adaptation. In conclusion, it is hoped that this study opens the way for further hybrid studies of style that incorporate both analytical and creative approaches.

Transgression as a mode of resistance and transformation is significant yet largely untheorized in postcolonial literature. This dissertation is concerned with theoretical and textual practices by which transgression can be studied as a locus of agency and difference toward the possibility of fostering moments and spaces of transformation. To that end, it explores various enabling counter-hegemonic modes of strategy and tactic with a focus on the body in the texts of Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie. Transgression does not simply give rise to the capacity of resistance to transform the dominant structure. Rather than dwelling on a mere sequence or repeat of events, this dissertation focuses on critical points of grounding for a new beginning as well as powerful metaphorical effects of practice, which defy essentialist discourses and raise possibilities of an alternative discursive space. Drawing upon a range of textual examples, the study critically examines not only the workings of prevailing norms but also the ways in which transgressive desire and practice enable marginalized characters to become ‘bodies that matter’ rather than being banished to the ‘abject zone.’ This dissertation reflects a complex intertwining of postcolonial, sexuality and gender, feminist, and cultural studies vis-à-vis transgression and agency. Therefore, the arguments made in this study represent an array of ideas drawn from various disciplines and discourses, especially from theorists such as Michel Foucault, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Bill Ashcroft, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jacques Lacan. This hybrid approach puts essentialist discourses—mediated by colonial history and postcolonial reality—under scrutiny to rethink the question of power and agency in exploring the possibility of subaltern others’ transformation into subjects of their own history and experience in specific contexts. By arguing the importance of the strategic use of essentialism based on everyday practice, I also emphasize the need to problematize the hegemonic concept of history so as to trace reterritorialization and repossession on the part of the silenced or invisible who live on borrowed time in minimal space. The highlight of this research is to explore how the established boundaries are expanded, redefined and redrawn in the circulatory, recursive structure of transgression and protest, opening the way for transforming oppression or abjection into agency. With this critical lens in mind, I heed the dynamics of similarity and difference in the narrative as a framework of postcolonial critique to provide a new reading of postcolonial texts.

No romance O Deus das Pequenas Coisas (1997) de Arundhati Roy, as transgressões são atitudes que se configuram como abundantes na narrativa, sendo realizadas em sua maioria pelos personagens marginalizados. A fim de obter uma compreensão mais profunda das razões que impulsionam tanto a narrativa quanto os personagens a cometer estas infrações, elas foram divididas em três níveis neste trabalho: pós-colonial, sociopolítico e afetivo. São aqui analisadas as transgressões dos personagens Velutha, Ammu, Estha, Rahel e Sophie. Os níveis das transgressões, suas motivações e os conceitos de trauma individual e cultural são colocados em contraponto para aprofundar a análise da narrativa do romance. No nível pós- colonial, são empregados conceitos de Panikkar (1969), Festino (2007), Forter (2014) e Outka (2011), enquanto Sztompka (2000, 2004), Alexander (2000) e Joseph (2010) permeiam o nível sociopolítico, finalizando o nível afetivo com Caruth (1995), Bose (1998) e Almeida (2002). A hipótese deste trabalho é de que Roy foca nas transgressões para, em primeiro lugar, criticar determinados elementos da sociedade indiana, e para provocar reações em seus leitores. Esta é sustentada através da citação de seus ensaios e discursos na análise do romance.
In The God of Small Things (1997), from Arundhati Roy, the transgressions are substantial throughout the narrative, as the majority of them are performed by marginalized characters. In order to comprehend more deeply the reasons which propel the narrative and the characters to such violations, they were divided into three levels in this work: post-colonial, socio-political and affective. The transgressions analyzed here are the ones performed by the characters Velutha, Ammu, Estha, Rahel and Sophie. The levels of the transgressions, their motivations and the concepts of individual and cultural trauma are all correlated so that the intentions of the narrative are elucidated. In the post-colonial level, the concepts of Panikkar (1969), Festino (2007), Forter (2014) and Outka (2011) are applied, whereas Sztompka (2000, 2004), Alexander (2000) and Joseph (2010) are used for the socio-political level; the affective level is observed with notions from Caruth (1995), Bose (1998) and Almeida (2002). The hypothesis of this work is that Roy focuses on the transgressions of minor characters not only to criticize particular elements from the Indian society but also to trigger the reaction of the readers. This is supported by her essays and speeches quoted along the analysis of the novel.

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Este estudo apresenta uma análise da obra The God of Small Things, da escritora indiana Arundhati Roy (1961), na qual ficção e episódios históricos, relativos às conseqüências da colonização inglesa na Índia, mesclam-se em um espaço e tempo míticos, favorecendo uma análise baseada na Teoria da Narrativa Poética, conforme a formulação de Jean-Yves Tadié (1978). Com esse enfoque, são examinados vários aspectos ligados à narrativa como personagem, narrador, espaço, tempo, mito, estrutura e estilo, buscando compreender as vozes lírica e social da obra, que ecoam em seu universo híbrido, composto de elementos da cultura oriental e da ocidental.
This dissertation presents an analysis of the book written by the Indian writer Arundhaty Roy (1961), entitled The God of Small Things, in which, fiction and historical facts related to the consequences of the British colonization in India are brought together in a mythical setting that favors an analysis based on the theory of the lyrical novel, as presented by Jean-Yves Tadié (1978). With this approach, aspects related to the narrative genre, such as, character, narrator, setting, myth, structure and style are explored in order to reveal the lyrical and social voices that eco in its hybrid universe that mingles eastern and western cultural traits.

Cette thèse met en regard trois romanciers contemporains écrivant en anglais, A. Roy, J. Winterson, S. Rushdie, autour de la notion d’excès. A partir d’une analyse textuelle précise, chaque auteur est d’abord étudié séparément sous l’angle du mouvement, première réalisation de l’excès : passage (Rushdie), va-et-vient (Winterson), retour (Roy), esquissant des thèmes communs: travail sur la forme (corps et roman), la voix, l’imaginaire. En synthèse, les liens entre les trois écritures sont retissés mettant en évidence les formes de l’excès :stratégies de mélange par hybridation et tissage, effets de débordement par accumulation et surenchère. Enfin, l’excès permet de placer les trois romanciers dans une position singulière sur la scène du roman contemporain et sur la question de la représentation : la réponse à l’épuisement postmoderne par une esthétique de la démesure qui affirme la substantialité du réel par le débordement organique tout en passant par le biais d’un imaginaire délirant
This thesis compares three contemporary novelists writing in English, A. Roy, J. Winterson, S. Rushdie, through the question of excess. With a precise textual analysis as a starting point, each author is first studied separately from a perspective of movement: passage (Rushdie), to and fro (Winterson) return (Roy) - dealing with common themes : form (of the body or of the novel), voice, the imaginary. In a last section, the links uniting the three writers are interwoven, revealing the various forms excess can take : blending strategies through hybridization and weaving, overflowing effects through accumulation. Lastly, excess allows us to assert the singular position of these novelists on both the contemporary literary scene and the issue of representation : it functions as a response to the postmodern exhaustion through an aesthetic of disproportion and outrageousness, asserting reality’s substance through organic proliferation as well as through the unleashing of a wild imagination

In Ana Mirandas Amrik (1997), Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things (1997) and Jeanette Wintersons The Passion (1987) created around the same time by writers from Brazil, India and England politics and poetics of transgression become interconnected in many ways. From a comparative perspective, I explore this dynamic having as a basis the fact that these works reveal an equivalent concern with the transgressive intertwinement of body and writing. Considering the portrayal, also common among these three works, of protagonists represented by subversive figures, I discuss the development of disruptive processes perpetrated on the systems that oppress and subordinate subjects, especially patriarchy. Then, I examine the movements of disorder depicted in these literary texts, also through the body and writing, that attempt to question and destabilize totalitarian discourses. I dwell, in particular, on the issue of the rewriting of history from the margins, as an element that enables the emergence of voices often silenced, and on the questioning of the gendered concept of madness, which, across time and space, still emerges as a sign that retains asymmetrical power relations. With the aim to provide a contemporary reading of these narratives, I base my analysis on gender studies, with a focus on feminist literary criticism and psychoanalytic theories.
Nos romances Amrik (1997), de Ana Miranda, O deus das pequenas coisas (1997), de Arundhati Roy, e A paixão (1987), de Jeanette Winterson, criados praticamente na mesma época por escritoras originárias de países distintos - Brasil, Índia e Inglaterra, respectivamente -, políticas e poéticas da transgressão se encontram de várias maneiras. A partir de uma perspectiva comparatista, exploro essa dinâmica tendo por base o fato de as obras revelarem uma preocupação equivalente com o entrelaçamento transgressor do corpo e da escrita. Considerando-se a utilização, igualmente comum às três obras, de protagonistas representadas por figuras subversivas, discuto o consequente desenvolvimento de processos de contestação dos sistemas de opressão e subordinação dos sujeitos, em especial o patriarcalismo. Em seguida, examino os movimentos de desordem elaborados, também pela via do corpo e da escrita, nesses textos literários, em suas tentativas de questionar e desestabilizar discursos totalitários. Detenho-me, em especial, na questão da reescrita da história a partir das margens como elemento capaz de possibilitar o aparecimento de vozes comumente silenciadas, e na problematização do conceito gendrado da loucura, que, atravessando tempos e espaços, ainda é usado como um signo de manutenção das relações assimétricas de poder. Objetivando uma leitura contemporânea das narrativas em questão, valho-me, portanto, de uma metodologia bibliográfica dos estudos de gênero, embasada pela crítica literária feminista e pelas teorias psicanalíticas.

In the two novels, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, characters show that their preconceptions and encounter with the Westerners play a big role in how they view Westerners and/or Indians who have adapted to or grown up with the Western lifestyle. Due to Roy’s family being a group of “Anglophiles” and liking the British, they see Sophie Mol being half-Indian as positive. Padma, Saleem’s partner in Rushdie’s novel, on the other hand, is less familiar with the British and therefore has problems accepting that Saleem is half-English. This difference between how the two families view the half-breeds, Sophie Mol and Saleem, can also be connected to the long history of colonialism, where Roy’s family has been trained to like the British, whilst Padma was born after India’s independence and was not trained to like the former colonists. Similarly, Chacko is being more accepted for his adaptation to English ways by his family than Aadam is by his family. However, Chacko is not accepted by the English, where he feels that he belongs, which makes both Chacko and Aadam feel “rootless” in their home culture. It is through these preconceptions and different encounters that characters view and believe that there is a difference in behaviour between the Indian and Western women, and that Westerners have a need to have higher status than the Indians. This essay shows that Indians have different views depending on their knowledge, lack of knowledge, interest or lack of faith in the West.

This essay investigates women’s situation at home and in society, in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, from a gender performance perspective. The essay also explores the pedagogical implications of using the novel in the EFL classroom. The gender performance perspective is explored through the analysis of three female characters, Ammu, Mammachi and Baby Kochamma, whose lives reflect women’s struggle to escape traditional caste values, patriarchy and colonial power. The pedagogical perspective focuses on existing trends in literature and language teaching and the possibilities that postcolonial literary texts have to offer in the EFL classroom.

Esta tese analisa os romances 'O paciente inglês', de Michael Ondaatje, e 'O deus das pequenas coisas', de Arundhati Roy, em seus questionamentos de identidade nacional, no caso do romance de Ondaatje, e de gênero, no caso do romance de Roy, e teoriza uma 'poética da fluidez' por meio de um trabalho comparado com relação à linguagem e as imagens associadas a liquídos e fluidos. Em ambas as obras, o tempo e a organização textual são cíclicos; os espaços são múltiplos e desafiam as leis físicas; o questionamento de uma verdade histórica única é relacionado ao contar estórias e às leituras que os personagens fazem delas; o papel da memória é valorizado e histórias e estórias múltiplas são resgatadas. 'O paciente inglês' questiona noções de uma identidade nacional estável e valoriza a geografia do corpo, as vozes dos personagens e as memórias individuais, enfatizando a autodeterminação individual. O deus das pequenas coisas contesta caracterizações unitárias e cristalizadas de gênero e permite representações mais complexas e fluidas. A narrativa apresenta os personagens vinculados a imagens de fluidos e questiona a caracterísitca tradicionalmente relacionadas ao feminino ou ao masculino, valorizando a complexidade de suas caracterizações. Até mesmo os antagonistas são caracterizados de forma complexa. O romance reformula as possibilidades de representações de gênero, questiona qualquer noção de uma identidade estável e oferece imagens que são desestabilizadoras. A poética da fluidez discutida nesta tese questiona narrativas totalitárias e homogeneizantes. Em relação às possibilidades lingüísticas, esta poética destaca o caráter performativo da linguagem, as relações entre a língua, a ludicidade com as justaposições e elisões e apresentação textual dos dois romances em que as duas narrativas são em alguns momentos metamorfoseadas em varias outras. As várias folcalizações e os diferentes gêneros textuais apresentados são componentes de uma poética que valoriza as contribuições metalinguísticas que a própria literatura tem a oferecer ao fazer literário. O trabalho realizado com a linguagem se relaciona com a desestabilização da solidez de identidade dos personagens e a consideração de uma fluidez identitária que sofre, constantemente, processo de tentativa de solidificação e de desestabilização. Os efeitos de uma poética da fluidez, no caso de 'O paciente inglês' e 'O deus das pequenas coisas', são os questionamentos de nacionalidade e de gênero e, também, a sistematização de uma poética contemporânea que utiliza imagens e metáforas associadas a líquidos e fluidos para discutir esses questionamentos e propor uma teorização para possíveis leituras.

This thesis argues that a prominent concern among contemporary writers of fiction is the recuperation of lost or occluded histories. Increasingly, contemporary writers, especially postcolonial writers, are using the medium of fiction to explore those areas of political and cultural history that have been written over or unwritten by the dominant narrative of “official” History. The act of excavating these past histories is simultaneously both traumatic and liberating – which is not to suggest that liberation itself is without pain and trauma. The retelling of traumatic pasts can lead, as is portrayed in The God of Small Things (1997), to further trauma and pain. Postcolonial writers (and much of the world today can be construed as postcolonial in one way or another) are seeking to bring to the fore stories of the past which break down the rigid binaries upon which colonialism built its various empires, literal and ideological. Such writing has in a sense been enabled by the collapse, in postcolonial and postmodernist discourse, of the Grand Narrative of History, and its fragmentation into a plurality of competing discourses and histories. The associated collapse of the boundary between history and fiction is recognized in the useful generic marker “historiographic metafiction,” coined by Linda Hutcheon. The texts examined in this study are all variants of this emerging contemporary genre. What they also have in common is a concern with the consequences of exile or diaspora. This study thus explores some of the representations of how the exilic experience impinges on the development of identity in the postcolonial world. The identities of “displaced” people must undergo constant change in order to adjust to the new spaces into which they move, both literal and metaphorical, and yet critical to this adjustment is the cultural continuity provided by psychologically satisfying stories about the past. The study shows that what the chosen texts share at bottom is their mutual need to retell the lost pasts of their characters, the trauma that such retelling evokes and the new histories to which they give birth. These texts generate new histories which subvert, enrich, and pre-empt formal closure for the narratives of history which determine the identities of nations.

碩士
國立中山大學
外國語文學系研究所
95
Arundhati Roy’s debut novel The God of Small Things, set in a small village called Ayemenem in the southwestern India state of Kerala, where Roy was raised, tells a story of the Ipe family. Nestled insides the centre of the family chronicle spanning from the country’s colonial period to its independent present is a heartbreaking tragedy resulted from a profane romance involving a transgression of the Love Laws that takes the reader’s breath away. Love Laws, an oxymoronic term Roy creates for her novel, points toward the cultural basis upon which Indian society addresses its traditional and strict control of caste segregation and sexual discrimination. In the cross-border tension caused by the conflict between human desire and Indian socio-political constructs that suppress individual liberty Roy does not only depict the social reality in India but also proposes a scathing critique of the multilayer social restraints on Indians’ bodies and minds. Individual bodies attached to the culture, first of all, are the vehicles of various cultural signs that allotted according to the caste difference and gender asymmetry; at the same time, bodies are the specific location where the infliction of society’s power to discipline and to punish takes place. Body contact that pursues forbidden love as relief from the social oppressions leads to the ultimate penalty, death, which can destroy the body and also scar the witness’s mind. Focusing on two innocent children’s difficulty in piecing the memory fragments together to come up with a belated response to the tragedy and their melancholy fixation about the lost beloved, Roy tries to reveal the lingering effect of trauma and the symbolic death happening to the victims who can’t work through the trauma but trapped by it instead. Roy deliberately provides the novel a traumatic structure consisted of aesthetic poetics, sensual narratives, ungrammatical phrases, repeated images, fragmental passages, etc., to convey a literary experience of trauma to the reader as if they are dealing with trauma when reading the novel. Through discussing the Love Laws from a historical perspective, Roy purposes to suggest that the major trauma in The God of Small Things doesn’t belong to a particular age or place. All Indians in the past, the present and the coming future share the same trauma because the Love Laws have already been a significant part of Indian culture and the practice of Love Laws will continue to traumatize Indian people from generation to generation. Besides tackling the Love Laws as the cause of Indians’ national trauma by presenting the oppression of laws, the novel also offers a remarkable point of view to discuss the cruel nature of love when love is employed as a conditional reward for the obedient in the rhetoric to command, to regulate, to threaten, to bargain, and to inspire loyalty. People’s unceasing desire to win and to give love, against our common belief in love’s sublime value, may bring about hurt, pain, fear, jealousy, mistrust, quarrels, etc., all of which can make a deep cut in any human relation or even cause more serious destruction what is generally considered as the consequence of the exercise of the power of law in its tug of war with love.

碩士
國立中山大學
外國語文學系研究所
100
In 2001, after more than sixty years of independence, India came to be coined into the acronym, BRIC, recognizing India for her emerging economic development status. Liberalization of India’s economy since 1991 from stringent state control has resulted in the opening up its markets to world participation in the form of lowered trade barriers, and invitation of foreign direct investments. Such changes in the economy have stirred up both external and internal imaginations of a globalized India no longer focused exclusively on her films, television, and literatures, but as an intricately woven entity of conglomerate spheres involving economics, demographics, histories, political science, and so on. This is to inspect the composites of each arena through historical surveys and position each arena’s globality with their respective locality to suggest what they produced for the world, in addition to how globalization produced them. In doing so, the popular culture of the Indian cinema(s) and the Indian television are analyzed as dialogues between Indian nation state and the global rest, striving to differ from the unidirectional discourse of cultural imperialism/hegemony by the general West in the process of globalization. Extensive examples are drawn to map the contours of a globalized India, as well as other social issues are also addressed by introducing Arundhati Roy－who has written extensively on various subjects linked to globalization－for a comprehensive picture of the issues the nation is currently embroiled in in its encounter with globalization. Drawing on Arundhati Roy’s criticism of corporate globalization, the suggestion of a morally and socially responsible globalization is evoked for an alternative global imagination to belonging.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to analyse the conception of marriage in the works of two Indian female authors, namely Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's novels Sister of My Heart and its sequel The Vine of Desire and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. The thesis consists of two parts. The objective of the theoretical part is to portray the position of marriage within Indian society and to introduce two female authors and their novels where the theme of Indian marriage plays a significant role. The practical part of the work focuses on a thorough analysis of three chosen female characters. Their roles within the marriage and the influence of marriage on their lives will be further discussed. The result of this part will be an overall comparison of how the chosen authors approach the theme of traditional Indian marriage in their works. . KEY WORDS Indian society, arranged marriage, marriage of one's own will, Indian vs. American marriage, social roles related to marriage, transgressions of marital laws, divorces

The main objective of this research project is to analyse how the novels The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy and The Inheritance of Loss (2006) by Kiran Desai can help readers and scholars construct an idea of India and of the Indian cultural identity. In order to develop this theory it is necessary to look into three aspects which are crucial to the building of knowledge on a nation, its culture and people and these are, national history, identity and cultural representation through different artistic production, including fictional narratives. Historical processes are the key to the unfolding of present circumstances and fundamental to the construction of a national identity that makes sense collectively. However, the perceptions of the past change according to philosophical and ideological trends, placing historical objectivity in the hands of its subjective counterpart. It is cultural theory and how it evolves in simultaneity with the world and its social, political, economic and technological development that in effect dictates the forms and expressions that give shape to societies, nations and identities. The function of narrative whether as text, visual arts, film, architecture, dance and other creative expressions of the self, is to tell a story. And every moment of every living being can be told in a story. History too is a story and though in the past it focused mostly on the grand deeds of the European nations, with postcolonialism new stories began to emerge, revealing a world of diversity and deconstructing traditional views of the shaping of the past and the power relations involved. However, this new approach to the historical, cultural and political dialectic was achieved through the effect of the postcolonial narrative which used Western forms and structures, such as the novel and the English language, to achieve its aim. This appropriation of language and form resulted in an inversion of power relations as a cultural metaphor. For the purpose of such a debate, the present dissertation focuses on the two novels by Roy and Desai and is divided into three main sections each of which deals with one approach to the thesis. The first chapter contains the historical approach, in the second I discuss postcolonial theory and the third analyses the relation between anthropology and fiction.
O objectivo principal deste projecto é de analisar como através dos romances The God of Small Things (1997) de Arundhati Roy e The Inheritance of Loss (2006) de Kiran Desai é possível construir uma ideia da Índia e da identidade cultural Indiana. O desenvolvimento desta teoria implica a análise e o estudo de três aspectos fundamentais para o conhecimento mais aprofundado de uma nação, a sua cultura, e as suas pessoas. São estes a história nacional, a identidade e a sua representação cultural através da produção artística, da qual as narrativas fazem parte. Os processos históricos são primordiais como chave para o desenrolar das circunstâncias presentes e fundamentais para a construção de uma identidade nacional com um sentido do colectivo. No entanto, percepções do passado mudam consoante as tendências filosóficas e ideológicas que as nações atravessam, colocando a objetividade histórica à mercê da sua contraparte subjectiva. Portanto, é a evolução da teoria cultural em sintonia com o desenvolvimento social, político, económico e tecnológico do mundo que determina as formas e expressões que definem as sociedades, as nações e as identidades. A função da narrativa enquanto texto, artes visuais, filme, arquitectura, dança ou outra manifestação cultural criativa, é o contar de uma história. A disciplina de história também conta uma história. E embora no passado a história ocidental focasse principalmente os grandes acontecimentos das nações Europeias, com o pós-colonialismo novas histórias surgiram revelando a importância de um mundo de diversidade, servindo para desconstruir visões estáticas da história e das relações de poder. Esta nova abordagem à dialética histórica, cultural e política foi conseguida através do efeito das narrativas pós-coloniais que fizeram uso de formas e estruturas ocidentais como o romance e a língua inglesa para atingir os seus objectivos e alcançar um público mais amplo. A apropriação da língua e da forma resultou numa inversão de poderes transformando-a em metáfora cultural. Este debate foca-se nos dois romances de Roy e Desai e está repartido por três secções principais, onde em cada uma é desenvolvido um dos ângulos de abordagem desta tese. O primeiro capítulo contém uma abordagem histórica, o segundo é uma discussão da teoria póscolonial e no terceiro é analisada a relação entre a antropologia e a ficção.