From Buchanan to Adiga: The Colonial Legacy of Communicating Bharat's Identity

This paper explores the impact of colonial era narratives and how they, and their likes, have almost resulted in their modern Indian adaptations, which have shaped Bharat’s global perception, hindering its socio-political and literary progress. Communication is when information is shared between two individuals. Effective communication is key to national identity, yet Bharat has long been misrepresented, mostly deliberately, through Eurocentric literary and print media frameworks. From Buchanan’s missionary lens in An Apology for Promoting Christianity to Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, English language narratives, both colonial and postcolonial, have perpetuated a distorted image. Gauri Viswanathan, in her Masks of Conquest (1989), argues that English literary education was a tool of ideological control, shaping Bharat’s image and internal self-perception. This colonial legacy continues to this day, as Indian English Literature often caters to Western expectations, reinforcing frameworks that once justified the dominance of the colonial powers. Drawing on Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic and Gayatri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak, this research critiques how elite, western-educated intellectuals mediate subaltern voices, creating a literary gatekeeping system that suppresses counter-narratives. Ultimately, this paper contends that Bharat’s progress lies in countering past representations and actively reshaping the narrative through strategic communication in media and literature.