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Title Postcolonial Discourse theory and appropriation: an analysis of Bapsi Sidwa and Arundhati Roy's Fictions

Author(s) Iesar Ahmad

Abstract The deployment of English language and its discursive practices entailed the emergence of appropriated English and its counter discursive practices. The postcolonial creative English writers in the invaded and partly in settler colonies nativitized the colonial language in the context of their multi-linguistic, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-racial colonized experiences. However, this dissertation is an attempt to focus on the dismantling and appropriating strategies inducted by Bapsi Sidhwa and Arundhati Roy in their narratives in the perspective of the geo-political and socio-linguistics settings of Pakistan and India. Both the novelists’ innovative linguistic and textual practices demonstrated in their texts denote the deconstruction and decolonization of the colonial language and its discursive practices. The induction of their appropriating strategies also implies the deconstruction of the western dominant ideologies as well as the indigenous hegemonic normative practices in the context of their complex colonized experiences. Likewise, both these creative English writers installed the subverting and appropriating strategies like neologism, transliteration, untranslated words, code-switching, code-mixing, translation equivalents and glossing on the linguistic and grammatical format of their mother tongues to foreground the lexico- semantic richness repertoire of their indigenous languages and the lived socio-cultural and geo-political concrete realities. In addition, these novelists employed the linguistic and textual practices to shoulder the weight of their hybridized experiences as the Standard English language and its norms were inadequate to address the hybridity, split identity, multiplicity of languages and variant culture in terms of the non-western settings of Pakistan and India. Consequently, their induction of appropriating textual strategies in their texts; demonstrated the alterity, resistance and difference from the privileged centre of epistemological and ontological norms. Accordingly, the dissertation in the postcolonial discourse theory and appropriation perspective attempts to investigate that the authenticity and purity of Standard English language is unsound and unrealistic. It also demonstrates that the purity of the western culture is based on myth and transcendentalism. The study explores as well that all language is marginalized and hybridized and all culture is intrinsically syncretic. It also substantiates that the nativitizing strategies inducted by Sidhwa and Roy in their texts de-hegemonized the Standard English and its coded referentilaity. Hence, their appropriating linguistic and textual strategies demonstrated in their narratives are also authentic and realistic as these incorporated and carried the ‘lived experiences’ and ‘message event’ rather than to some presumptive fixed referentilaity. Linguistically, the western purists may label Pakistani and Indian appropriated English and its counter discursive practices as mistakes, vernacular, atavistic and primitive but politically these variant englishes have de-marginalized and decolonized the linguistic and cultural hegemony of the metropolitan centre. The study motivates that appropriation of the colonial language is an accessible and trustworthy alternative instrument for the postcolonial creative English writers of Pakistan and India in terms of irreducible and irrevocable cultural syncreticism and linguistic hybridization.

Type Thesis/Dissertation PhD

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2009-01-01

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