%0 Journal Article
%T From Indianness to Englishness: The foreign selves of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, and Salman Rushdie¡¯s Salahuddin Chamchawala
%A Sayan Chattopadhyay
%J The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
%@ 1741-6442
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0021989416670697
%X In Salman Rushdie¡¯s novel The Satanic Verses, the protagonist Saladin Chamcha, born Salahuddin Chamchawala, undertakes a journey to England in order to escape his Indian identity and refashion himself as a ¡°goodandproper Englishman¡±. In my article I read this journey of Chamcha through the prism of other similar journeys towards England and ¡°Englishness¡±, which recur frequently in the past 200 years of Indian history. By highlighting the common elements that underline these different journeys, I seek to examine the desire to become ¡°English¡± that they manifest and which forms an important, though critically neglected, facet of Indian middle-class self-fashioning under the colonial impact. The Satanic Verses, written four decades after India formally ceased being a colony of Britain, is central to this project because it is not only one of the most nuanced representations of the middle-class Indian desire for Englishness but also simultaneously an exploration of the sociocultural cul-de-sac to which this desire ultimately leads
%K Indianness
%K Salman Rushdie
%K Michael Madhusudan Dutt
%K Nirad C. Chaudhuri
%K The Satanic Verses
%K Englishness
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0021989416670697