Karaktärers synsätt och uppfattning : Hybriditet och västerlänningar i två indiska romaner av Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie

In the two novels, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, characters show that their preconceptions and encounter with the Westerners play a big role in how they view Westerners and/or Indians who have adapted to or grown up with the Western lifestyle. Due to Roy’s family being a group of “Anglophiles” and liking the British, they see Sophie Mol being half-Indian as positive. Padma, Saleem’s partner in Rushdie’s novel, on the other hand, is less familiar with the British and therefore has problems accepting that Saleem is half-English. This difference between how the two families view the half-breeds, Sophie Mol and Saleem, can also be connected to the long history of colonialism, where Roy’s family has been trained to like the British, whilst Padma was born after India’s independence and was not trained to like the former colonists. Similarly, Chacko is being more accepted for his adaptation to English ways by his family than Aadam is by his family. However, Chacko is not accepted by the English, where he feels that he belongs, which makes both Chacko and Aadam feel “rootless” in their home culture. It is through these preconceptions and different encounters that characters view and believe that there is a difference in behaviour between the Indian and Western women, and that Westerners have a need to have higher status than the Indians. This essay shows that Indians have different views depending on their knowledge, lack of knowledge, interest or lack of faith in the West