India re-loaded: Vikas Swarup’s Slumdog millionaire as a postcolonial novel

Abstract

Once “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire, India for some time ceased to be the focus of interest for the British writers. Largely due to the success of its film version, Vikas Swarup’s Slumdog Millionaire (Black Swan, London, 2005, originally called Q and A) again drew the attention of the Western world to the problems postcolonial India has to face: poverty, crime, sex abuse, exploitation of children, police brutality and many more. In this paper, however, we are not going to compare the two versions of the story, i.e. the novel and the film, but primarily concentrate on the textual commentaries in the context of postcolonial theory and literature. Of particular interest for us there will be the problem of language since one of the most fundamental questions in postcoloniality is in what language the postcolonial writer should write, and even though it is evident that Swarup—an experienced Indian diplomat—uses English for his novel, we know it is certainly not a complete answer. Therefore, Kamau Brathwaite’s theory of a “nation language” will be discussed in an attempt to formulate the paper’s main thesis as to the national, postcolonial character of Vikas Swarup’s Slumdog Millionaire.