Colonial ambivalence in Waiting for the Mahatma?

The portrait Narayan paints in the novel, Waiting for the Mahatma, allows him "to treat a potentially ponderous theme, the escape from emotional and imaginative dependence on the colonial power, without disturbing the deft ease of his narrative. The fading of the old imperial roll of honour and its replacement by a new nationalist martyrology is caught in the contrast between Sriram's father, killed in Mesopotamia, whose memorial has shrunk to the meagre proportions of the buff envelope that brings his monthly pension, and Bharati's father, killed in the Congress agitation of 1920, whose death is proudly remembered."