Anita Desai’s Voices in the City: A Discourse of the Postcolonial Modernity

Abstract

The present chapter aims to explore Anita Desai’s concern for the impact of the modernity in the era of the postcolonial India which she fictionalizes in her novel Voices in the City. She draws a map of the cracks and fissures the postcolonial modernism left on the society. Postcolonial theory tries to interrogate structures of changing social mobility after the colonial period ends. Voices in the City voices the cry of a city which undergoes through multiple wounds which the era brings in the name of better human civilizations. The chapter attempts to re-read the novel as a significant discourse on structures of postmodernity in the postcolonial India.

Keywords: modernity, modernism, postcolonial, colonial period, postcolonial modernity.