2009-10 AM Fictions of India - Expert Group on Environment

Expert Group on Environment

Group: Representations of India

Kim

- Nostalgic representation of Kim‘s environment

“‘We shall get good lodgings at the Kashmir Serai,’ said Kim [...]. The hot and crowded bazaars blazed with light as they made their way through the press of all the races in Upper India, and the lama mooned through it like a man in a dream.” (p. 17)

- References to India’s past

“There is no city – except Bombay, the queen of all – more beautiful on her garish style than Lucknow [...]. Kings have adorned her with fantastic buildings, endowed her with charities, crammed her with pensioners, and drenched her with blood. She is the centre of all idleness, intrigue, and luxury, and shares with Dehli the claim to talk the only pure Urdu.” (p. 120)

- Nostalgia persists throughout the novel which covers several years and contains various settings all over India

- Surrounding dominated by British people is set apart

“The great old school of St. Xavier‘s in Partibus, block on block of low white buildings, stands in vast grounds over against the Gumti River, at some distance from the city“ (p. 120)

Untouchable

- Novel covers only one day

- Reader get immediately confronted with a description of the outcastes‘ colony

“The outcastes’ colony was a group of mud-walled houses [...]. And altogether the ramparts of human and animal refuse that lay on the outskirts of this little colony, and the squalor and the misery which lay within it, made it an ‘uncongenial’ place to live in.“ (p.9)”

- The environment outside the outcastes‘ colony is portrayed opposed to the description of the protagonist‘s home place

“The lane leading to the outcastes’ street was soon left behind. [...]. He sniffed at the clean, fresh air around the flat stretch of land before him and vaguely sensed a difference between the odorous, smoky world of refuse and the open, radiant world of the sun.” (p. 33)

- References to Indian past:

“It was as if the crowd had determined to crush everything, however ancient or beautiful, that lay in the way of their achievement of all that Ghandi stood for.” (p. 137)

- Separation of the environment into two worlds more tangible to the reader than to Bakha?

Midnight's Children

- Changing portrayal of environment

- Dependent on historical development

- Kashmir: beautiful place, no soldiers (cf. p.5)

- Pakistan (exile): environment marked by military presence (cf. p.396)

- Pakistan (Harachi): ugly & stinky (cf. p.427)

- Magican Ghetto: portrayal of poverty, though not negatively (cf. p.539)

         -> “In the Shadow of a Mosque“