Hybridity in Postcolonial Indian Novel: The Novel Heat and Dust in Focus

Abstract

Hybridity has become a fashionable and recurring theme in the modern world, particularly in the area of postcolonial studies. Hybridity help us reading and scrutinizing postcolonial texts, which thus reveals issues of intermixing, mode of resistance and voices of the marginalized. Accordingly, this paper tries to show hybridity in a postcolonial situation, by scrutinizing Heat and Dust, a postcolonial Indian novel in English. It has used the critical arguments and concepts of theorists, basically of Homi K. Bhabha, who expounds his ideas on hybridity in his seminal work, Location of Culture (1994). Applying descriptive-qualitative method, the study shows the contemporary world embraces East and West are inextricably intertwined and hybrid in their culture, language and identity. Heat and Dust explores hybridity, one of the key elements of postcolonialism, and throughout the novel the writer explicitly and implicitly expounds cross-culturalism, interdependency and coexistence between the two cultural elements, colonizer and colonized, Britain and India. In this analysis it is revealed that characters, basically western characters, as the major narrative of the novel is from this view, transform and change in terms of their identity, culture and even outlook. The analysis brings forth how the two entities, colonizer-colonized are intermingled and interdependent, instead of the notion of binary opposition, harsh category, and depicts India, both in its colonial and postcolonial period home as well as strange to westerners.