The Exotic Other – A Postcolonial Approach ...

The Exotic Other – A Postcolonial Approach to Tabish Khair’s the Things about Thugs

Author Name : Nand lal Gurjar

ABSTRACT

Subjugation of one people or race by another people with the help of hegemonic tactics is colonialism.  With the so called European enlightenment binary concepts such as ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’, west versus non-west, the ‘European’ and ‘the other’came forth. Such concepts were enlarged when European imperialism spread across the continents and such new dichotomous binary pairs were developed, remodelledand even enlarged.  Especially the orient human was invested with stereotypical inhumane attributes such as inferior, violent, lazy, dangerous, primitive, irrational and sexually promiscuous and mysterious. The white man in return took the task of making the native a cultured man. In this process the white man portrays the culture of the natives as primitive and carrying all the dark human traits and makes them ashamed of it. The natives starts mimicking the colonizer but never completely becomes one or never accepted by the colonizers/westerner’s as one of them. Thus his identity itself becomes undetermined. In this way the colonizer subjugated the rights of the colonized. Over time theorists such as Franz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi K Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak revealed the hollowness and baselessness of such binaries.  Tabish Khair, a modern postcolonial writer and critic is trying to push the barriers through his various works and redefine the colonizer and colonized relationship by means of deconstructing and reconstructing it. He deals with the concepts such as ‘othering’, ‘eurocentricism’ ‘hybridity’ and identity crisis in colonial cultures during and after colonial hegemony. This paper intends to explore and investigate the othering of postcolonial people in Tabish Khair’s work, The Things about Thugs (2010) which is set in the Victorian era England, in the light of postcolonial studies. The novel has been analysed in terms of depiction of the other, as well as the power relations and hierarchy between the colonizer and the colonized. Further it attempts to explore the theoretical and narrative reflections of post colonialism in the selected text.

Keywords: - Post colonialism, Eurocentricism, Othering, identity crisis, The Things about Thugs, close reading