The Inheritance of Victory: Postcolonialism and Orientalism in Indian Booker Prize-Winning Novels
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2024
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en
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The Booker Prize is among the most well-known and esteemed literary prizes in the world. For a long time, only English-language novels from the Commonwealth of Nations were eligible to win the Prize. Novels from periphery nations such as South Africa and India are less likely to win the Booker Prize than British novels, and numerous commentators have noted that periphery Commonwealth novels seem to need to adhere to certain expectations and preferences in order to have a chance to win the Booker Prize. Commonwealth Booker Prize winners tend to be novels which heavily focus on the lingering effects of colonialism in their subject countries, engage with Orientalist stereotypes about these same countries, and altogether avoid topics and concepts which may alienate or confuse a British reader—such is the standing hypothesis. This thesis aims to discover whether or not, and to what extent, this is true of Indian Booker Prize-winning novels in particular. Three novels were analysed for the purposes of this thesis: The God of Small Things (1997), The Inheritance of Loss (2006), and The White Tiger (2008). All three novels turned out to be laden with postcolonial and Orientalist modes of storytelling, with veneration of Western culture and institutions and extensive portrayals of unsanitary Indian metropolises being among the most recurring narrative elements. However, The God of Small Things and The Inheritance of Loss do manage to shed the label of stereotypical Commonwealth Booker Prize winner to a certain extent through their use of non-English phraseology and heavy reliance on regional histories, both of which diminish the ease of reading for a British audience.
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