Reader Response to Postcolonial Narratives in Contemporary South Asian Fiction

Abstract

Modern South Asian fiction in English, which includes novels such as Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, is concerned with the history and psychology of colonization, partition, and globalization. Although postcolonial literary criticism in relation to this literature has generally been concerned with the author's methodology and textual construction, relatively little work has been done in terms of how the reader interprets these texts. In this essay, reader response theory, especially the transactional approach, the idea of the implied reader and textual gaps, and interpretive communities will be explored. The theory asserts that a socio-cultural position of the reader as a diasporic reader, South Asian reader, or Western reader determines which textual spaces are attended to, how untranslated languages and cultural references are treated, and how the text can be read as resistance, testimony, or exoticized spectacle. The article formulates a conceptual framework of postcolonial reader response on the basis of existing theories of postcolonialism and reader-response; provides a comparative chart of exemplary texts and the principal postcolonial issues that emerge in those texts; and delineates a chart connecting reader-response and postcolonial scholars with their respective interpretative functions. The article identifies the difference between interpretive communities as a problem and an opportunity.