Outside The Whale By Salman Rushdie Essay

“Imagine there’s No Heaven” is a letter written by Salman Rushdie who is a British Indian novelist and essayist. He is an atheist and is known for his unflinching criticism of religion. Rushdie contributed this letter to a UN-sponsored anthology, addressed to the six-billionth human child who was expected to be born that year. He attempts to discuss and answer two fundamental questions of life. “How did we get here? And, now that we are here, how shall we live?” However he diverts from his central thesis and most of his text malign and smear all religions while the two questions go almost completely unanswered. His tone is demeaning, scornful and he presents religious beliefs as being ridiculous. He makes absolute statements without any

The media’s representation on ethical/racial and colonial illustration is not always accurate; there are many stereotypes and critics always find something to be false. Realism also plays a big role in representing in what critics believe. (Shothat 178)

Who knew that a couple of words could start a whole adventure? In Salman Rushdie’s, “Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” Haroun Khalifa makes the mistake of asking his father, Rashid Khalifa, ‘What’s the point of it? What’s the use of telling stories that aren’t even true?’ (Rushdie 22). By asking this, Rashid gets hurt and breaks down. He takes his son on a storytelling job he has, and when he tries to tell a story, nothing comes out. This is how the adventure begins and follows the hero’s quest, because it has a departure, initiation, and a return.

“His anti-imperialist convictions were derived from his experiences as a police officer in Burma from 1922 to 1927. Once there, doing "the dirty work of empire," he became increasingly aware of the great evil in which he was participating” (Imperialism 1). This experience is shown in the short story Shooting an Elephant, Orwell narrates the incidents and his actions. The course of events which take place in the story are not that remarkable, although with the skill of the author’s writing it succeeds in bringing out the troubles of imperialism and powerful white men. Orwell shows that those who are content in their cozy royal homes should face the truth about the ways they are making their own existences worthless. In order to retain authority, they have lost control over their personal measures. Their obsession to rule and repress the natives of the countries backfired. Without their knowledge they had also come to the same helpless state as the natives, because they no longer owned their own decisions. “When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He became a hollow, posing dummy,” (Orwell 4). Orwell presents the truth of the consequences of Europe’s ruthless colonialism which eventually caused the fall of much of European global rule. With the defeat of places such as Germany and Italy, and devastation of France and Britain in the two World Wars, Europe's iron grasp over the rest of the world loosened. Because of this, one can say that there is no end to this anxiety. The party, the tormentor, and the tormented are all respectively worried and nervous. It is understandable why the people are stressed. What is more complicated is the psyche of the tormentor: it has a constant fear of losing power and control. This tendency of human nature is something that the authors of this period could not

The ground breaking text Orientalism written by Edward Said widened the arena for the post-colonial thinkers to consider the text with a new mechanism in Third World context. Orientalism has developed a purported approach of binary opposition to dismantling the East/West dualism in relation to Eurocentric edifice. The focal point of Said’s study is the ‘West’ and its observation of the ‘East’. The former having all positive traits: white, brave, dynamic, civilized, cultured, educated, rich of the ‘Empire’ identifies the ‘Eastern countries’ as the ‘Other’ with all the negative attributes: black, coward, static, barbaric, natural, uneducated poor people of the ‘Colony’-subjected to their contempt. The post –colonial

In one of George Orwell’s famous works The Road to Wigan Pier the man famously quoted “In order to hate imperialism, you have to be a part of it. (goodreads.com)” This quote symbolizes George Orwell’s attitude toward imperialism that is clearly expressed in two of his most famous essays, Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging. The quote also makes one think about what being a part of imperialism really means; For example, in both stories George Orwell’s character is portrayed as an English figure of authority in the occupied area of Burma. In both of George Orwell’s writings the groups of people that are split from each other are the British and native Indians. Orwell used many Symbols throughout his two famous writings to describe

Salman Rushdie’s popular young adult novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, sees heavy influence from the classic Arabic tales of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. The two main characters, Haroun and Rashid, see influence from a variety of sources in Islamic history as well, from culture to religion, ultimately coming together to represent the Islamic principle of Wahdad al-Vujud, or Oneness of Truth. This gives the reader a deeper layer of insight into the role of the main characters and their significance in the story by relating their tale to other ancient stories rooted within the author’s culture.

In Jean Rhys’s “The Day They Burned the Books” and George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”, the protagonists in the respective works explore the implicit and explicit influences of imperialism and colonialism in society and how it affects their characters. Rhys and Orwell dwell into various distinctions of power dynamics, ranging from racial power structures to cultural power structures, which are presented in how Rhys and Orwell portray the colonizers and colonized, and both authors illustrate how imperialism affects their characters’ beliefs and understanding of the world at large. Through a close examination of Jean Rhys’s “The Day They Burned the Books” and George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”, Jean Rhy and George Orwell reveal the economic,

It may be discerned from the quotes displayed above that Rushdie, a writer not renowned for suffering fools gladly, accords Kipling some epistemological superiority. Yet when examining images of race and blood in Kipling, the critic turns most frequently to Kim, and I contend that the short

Charu Gupta’s work, ‘Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India’, published in 2001, provides an enlightening view on themes including gender, sexuality and religion, all in the context of the British Colonialism and the rise of the Hindu nationalist ideology. In the second chapter, ‘Redefining obscenity in Aesthetics and Print’, Gupta focuses on the “moral panic” in Colonial India regarding representations of sexuality and ideas of obscenity in print. (p.30) She examines the attempts made by British Colonial and Hindu moralists to utilize printed literature in order to promote a civilised, celibate society, and scrutinizes the ways in which this was used to police and discredit particularly female, but also male sexual and social identities. Gupta then sets this against the apparent obscenity and semi-pornographic nature of popular literature, and argues that this provided a “serious challenge” to the moralist mind-set by resisting and inverting the elite’s attempts to control the Hindu public. (p.30) This view provides an insightful understanding of the diversities and consistencies of print culture, and throughout the chapter, Gupta corroborates her points utilizing a broad range of literary and textual evidence, including books, poems, pamphlets, songs and advertisements, which

One of the many ways that postcolonial literature accomplishes the task of challenging the hegemony of western imperialism is through the use of a ‘canonical counter-discourse,’ a strategy whereby ‘a post-colonial writer takes up a character or characters, or the basic assumptions of a canonical text [where a colonialist discourse is developed directly or indirectly], and unveils [its colonialist] assumptions, subverting the text for post-colonial purposes’. (Tiffin, 1987) Such a revolutionary literary project is evidently realised in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, a prequel that ‘writes back the centre’ of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Rhys is categorical about her conscious authorial intention: ‘I immediately thought I'd write a

There are many ways to understand “Haroun and the sea of stories” novel. I would analyze that as he referring to Iran. And here is why I think that he is referring to Iran When I first read the story I notice something weird the author described the city of Rushdie in a miserable shape “There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities.” (13) Since I started reading the story I was thinking if it was just a fairy tale why the author would describe their city as the saddest city. In fairy tales, usually authors describe the city as a happy city. And Then, when I focused on the name of the city “Alifbay” I realized that it is the first two letters of the Urdu Alphabet which is the main language in Iran. Therefore, Rushdie’s

Lagaan (2001), through the setting of Hindi cinema and the popular appeal of cricket, charts an alternative history of India, from the colonised past of 1893 to an ideal post-colonial future. Using elements of pop culture, the director Ashutosh Gowarikar transforms the singularity of Champaneer’s struggle against triple-lagaan, into a microcosm of an Indian nation’s ideal path toward self-rule. Notably, this self-rule is ideologically centred ex ante on Gandhi’s vision of self-sufficient village units, as mentioned in Hind Swaraj . In doing so, Gowarikar is able to (a) tell the historical tale of colonial rule and oppression in India, and (b) through dealing with Champaneer’s internal struggles toward becoming a self-sufficient village unit, highlight current thorny issues of Indian politics.

V.S.Naipaul’s “An Area of Darkness” is a semi-autobiographical account of a year he spent in India in 1964 in which he describes the country from his outlook. The book is written in the first person narrative voice and Naipaul uses descriptive passages very well to outline his themes. The title ‘’An Area of Darkness’’ refers to India and many of the negative aspects of the Indian culture is highlighted and Naipaul seems to see the whole bleakness of the culture at every stage. Naipaul gives the reader a vivid insight into the various sects and cultural systems dominating India. Naipaul analyses the whole colonial process and there is a copious references to the Hinduism and Muslims and Buddhism and he paints some vivid pictures of the

Despite having drastically different perspectives, E.M. Forster and Mulk Raj Anand display a common disdain for British imperialism and racism while sharing in a struggle to fully capture the complexities of the British Raj while still spreading their intended message in their novels, A Passage to India and Untouchable.