SOURCE: Mohan, Rajeswari. “The Forked Tongue of Lyric in Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 32, no. 1 (1997): 47-66.

In the following essay, Mohan explores the effects of English literary studies on the subjectivities of the postcolonial urban Indian middle class in Desai's works, suggesting that the unspoken gendered and imperialist premises of colonial culture limit the potential and aesthetic growth of the colonized.

Over the last few years, ambivalence has emerged as the paradigmatic stance of postcolonial theory. While this might be attributed to the ascendancy of poststructuralist theory in academic discourses, from a materialist point of view one might argue that this ambivalence is symptomatic of the problem that decolonization is more than the physical displacement of the colonizer, itself not a tidy and punctual process. Colonization forces a fundamental rearticulation of culture and reconfiguration of social priorities. As a result, liberation struggles, after...