Political independence stranded older anglophone writers as nostalgic local colorists

Evidence

The group started publishing fiction in English well before Indian Independence in 1947. Narayan’s first book, Swamiand Friends, was published in 1935. If the emergence of a mode of production of identity recognizably “postcolonial” by a younger group meant a setting wild of the private space of the mother tongue, then negotiated political independence set this earlier group adrift, away from the current from which the postcolonial monstrous would emerge. They become novelists of the nation as local color, the nostalgic rather than the hyperreal. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1957

Categorization

• XREF: The older generation that kept a code-switching private vernacular relation forms the ‘nostalgic’ pole against which the younger ‘reterritorialized’ generation is defined — two endpoints on the ironic-to-literal identity spectrum.