Language, Identity, and Cultural Representation in Modern Indian Writing: A Postcolonial Perspective

The Evolution of Modern Indian Literature is a 20th - 21st centuries wide domain which deeply analyzes the Negotiation of Language, Identity, and Cultural Representation, especially considering the impacts of the British Colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent. My paper focuses on the Indian Writer(s); a writer in English, a writer in the national language(s) of the country and a writer in a Lingua Franca; who, expressfully through Literature, post-constructively, identity through the written word, challenges, reclaims, and redefines, and in doing so exercising Creativity and Critical Thinking. Here, postcolonial (Bhabha, Spivak, Said) and post - modern in Literary Theory along with Linguistic Anthropology. Here, I have identified and will examine three major areas: 1. The Language of Power and the Language of Resistance, analyzing the English Language as a language of destruction (collaboration with the colonists); a language that is not a tool / weapon of the colonists, but, demonstratively a tool that empowers postcolonial engagement (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children; Roy, The God of Small Things); 2. The Crisis of Identity and Hybridity, where it is in relation to Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri where diaspora displacement, code-switching, gap / void and the tension with ‘Indianness’ and modernity (which is global); 3. Cultural Representation and the Politics of Authenticity; in the provision of Modern Traditions and Modern Narratives, how the neglect and / or the revival of the Contemporary Narratives is focusing on the Regional Languages (i.e Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil) and Oral Literature (Mahasweta Devi’s, Draupadi, Perumal Murugan’s, One Part Woman).