Humour and Sadness in Postcolonial Novel: Emotional Ambivalence in Early Anglo-Indian Novels

Abstract

The deployment of humour and sadness together in postcolonial literature invites im- portant discussions on ambivalence. These two juxtaposing themes in postcolonial nov- els reflect not only the cultural clashes effectively, but also the emotional ambivalence of the characters. While the use of humour and sadness turns the anti-colonial novels into sub-historical texts, the tragi-comedy created in this context provides an opportunity to view history from an individual perspective and re-interpret it. This can be observed within the early novels of Salman Rushdie, particularly in Shame, Midnight’s Children, and The Satanic Verses, Hanif Kureishi and Arundhati Roy. The excerpts taken from these novels indicate that the cultural clashes occurred by the confrontation of Eastern and Western cul- tures inevitably bring humour and sadness together. Yet, the occurrence of these juxtaposing uses of humour and sadness reveals an emotional ambivalence as well as cultural ambiva- lence of the main sub-continental characters in these works. This paper, therefore, argues that colonial practices, as represented in Rushdie, Kureishi and Roy’s novels in question, function to create a juxtapositional unity of humour and sadness that create the emotional ambivalence of colonial subjects who are not only hybridized culturally but also trauma- tized individually.