Colonial Consciousness In Gita Mehta’s Raj

Document Type : Primary Research paper

Author

Professor, Department of English GLA University, Mathura (UP, 281406), India

Abstract

India has a colonial history of more than three hundred years. Since then, at every level of its journey, the country had to face trials resulting from the effects of imperialism levied upon it by the British. The worst affected was the psycho-cultural level as it directly influenced the common man. In quite a few cases it resulted into an identity crisis for the natives, which finally lead to an abject surrender to the so called Western superiority. Gita Mehta’s fiction Raj (1993) is an account of such colonial impacts of the British rule on India. It is a tale of an intricate saga of impacts of imperialism on the psyche of the colonised society. However, although in a subtle manner, it also talks about some positive influences that came to India, by default, along with colonialism. The present paper aims to explore the above hypotheses from the narrative of the book.

Keywords