A STUDY ON THE POSTCOLONIAL ASPECTS IN SALMAN RUSHDIE'S MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN AND SUDHA MURTHY'S DOLLAR BAHU

Postcolonial literature refers to the works that are written by the authors of the colonized countries and engage in exploring the aftereffects of colonialism and its major impact on their culture, society and identity. It involves various themes such as migration, suppressed community, slavery, tolerance, gender and race. These are the elements that are present in postcolonial literature and are seen in notable works such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Sudha Murthy’s Dollar Bahu and so on. Midnight’s Children, written by Salman Rushdie, was published in 1981, and this novel brings together the politics, history, and state of the colonized India. Salman Rushdie uses magical realism in his work, where fantastical elements blend with the real-world setting. Sudha Murthy is an extraordinary Indian woman writer who grew up hearing the stories of the great Mahabharata and Ramayana. She depicts the Indian culture and values in her novels. She is famous for her social work. She has built two thousand three hundred houses for flood-affected people. Her contribution to the rural poor students is incredible. She built around seventy thousand libraries in various schools.

This paper tries to explore the multifaceted aspects of postcolonial India in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Sudha Murthy’s Dollar Bahu. Midnight’s Children is an extraordinary novel that depicts postcolonial India through various aspects such as cultural hybridity, identity crisis, transition of colonized India to independent India, individual experience and the collective memory, and linguistic complexities. Dollar Bahu was published in 2007 and analyses the themes of middle-class and upper-class family lifestyle, relationships and the clash between traditional and modern values. It further explores how money corrupts the way people look at one another.