Conclusion

Abstract

“It is the moment of the boomerang … it comes back on us, it strikes us, and we do not realize any more than we did the other times that it’s we who have launched it” (Sartre 1968, 20). In a sense, this sums up the trajectory of Indian writing in English (IWE) which has in many ways failed (although not entirely) to challenge literary neo-colonial European hegemony. Texts, and what Edward Said (2001) rightly refers to as the “worldliness of a text,” legitimise the cultural hegemony of the West and strengthen its structure; this was so during the days of colonisation and appears to be the same today in our world of nations. The truth-making techniques of contemporary IWE, coupled with mutations of Orientalisms into re-Orientalisms, are highly problematic, failing to undermine European hegemony, instead, perpetrating Orientalisms in new but equally damaging forms.