The Dynamics of Desire and Entanglement in South Asian Fiction: Selected Works of Sidhwa, Roy, and Firdaus Kanga

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the dynamics of desire and the forms of suffering in the modern practices experienced by the South Asian parent generation because those practices are directly linked to their succeeding generation. It contends that in contemporary south Asia, the parent generation depicted in the selected South Asian texts is intertwined as they suffer from the pain of conventional as well as modern appeal. The key question that this study aims to pose is in what ways the entangled generation (parents) suffers while practicing the modern lifestyle? This paper offers a comparative textual analysis and character study based upon the reading of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Bapsi Sidhwa’s The American Brat (1993), and Firdaus Kanga’s Trying to Grow (1990). The study takes theoretical support from Homi K. Bhabha’s (1994) concept of ‘ambivalence’ and James Booth’s (1999) philosophy of a community’s political identity. However, this research proposes the concept of ‘entanglement’ as a predicament of the parent generation, and thereby does not rely entirely on the said theories. While introducing this concept, in other words, it pushes beyond the ideas and prescribed boundaries of postcolonial theory and political philosophy. Consequently, this study leads to the discovery of various ways in which the parent characters under study suffer within their respective contexts.