Locating the Anglo-Indian Self in Ruskin Bond

A Postcolonial Review

By (author) Debashis Bandyopadhyay

Publication date:

01 January 2011

Length of book:

168 pages

Publisher

Anthem Press

ISBN-13: 9780857289438

Ruskin Bond's life - and, for that matter, his semi-autobiographical works - are allegories of the colonial aftermath. His is an odd but exemplary attempt at absorption as a member of the Anglo-Indian ethnic minority, a community whose role in the shaping of the postcolonial Indian psyche has yet to be systematically analysed. This study explores the dialogue between the biographical and authorial selves of Ruskin Bond, whose subjectivity is informed by the fantasies of space and time.

Acknowledgements; Introduction: Reading ‘Self’ in a Semi-Autobiographical Author; Sense of Exile: An Anglo-Indian Context; Text versus Context: Space and Time in ‘The Room on the Roof’ and ‘Vagrants in the Valley’; Quest for an Authentic Literary Grain: Two Versions of ‘The Eyes are not Here’; Conscious/Unconscious Dialectic: Stories of the Mid-Career; Invoking History to Resist Drives: Tension Revisited in ‘A Flight of Pigeons’; Self in Abject Space: ‘The Playing Fields of Shimla’; Conclusion: Self in Liminal Space; References; Index

'Debashis Bandyopadhyay’s ‘Locating the Anglo-Indian Self in Ruskin Bond’ is an engaging study of an Anglo-Indian writer attempting to establish his identity in the immediate aftermath of Indian emancipation. Bandyopadhay employs judicious biography in service to a sophisticated but accessible psychoanalytic model of ego formation to produce exemplary readings of Bond’s texts.' —Edward O’Shea, Professor of English, The State University of New York at Oswego