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Colonialism

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Shampa Iftakhar:
Colonialism is a practice of the powerful over the less powerful.Some famous books are marked for representing colonialism. Among them Robinson Crusoe, the Heart Of Darkness, A Passage to India,  and Tempest are noteworthy. According to The Wall Street Journal, the five best books set in British  colonialism in East are:The Hamilton Case, China to Me, The Necklace of Kali,Sea of Poppies, and A Many-Splendored Thing .

Shampa Iftakhar:
1. The Hamilton Case

By Michelle de Kretser
Little, Brown, 2003

Conflicted, painfully snobbish Sam Obeysekere would rather be "under an imperialistic yoke than put [his] trust in a fellow who went about in sandals." Sam, an Oxford-educated Ceylonese lawyer, lives in colonial duality: a privileged member of the local aristocracy in 1930s Sri Lanka who plays cricket and attended a school "founded in 1862 by an Anglican bishop on the pattern of Eton and Rugby" and yet can be called a "nigger" on the streets outside his club. He makes a name for himself with a local murder case involving a British (read: white) tea-plantation owner. All this against a complicated, almost gothic backdrop of family dysfunction: not one but two smothered babies, glamorous mothers and sisters slowly going mad in evening gowns, the deep jungle always just outside. "The Hamilton Case" is an extraordinary, dizzyingly evocative portrait of Sri Lanka's colonial past, where "the British had entered the country's bloodstream like a malady which proves so resistant that the host organism adapts itself to accommodate it.
Source : internet

Shampa Iftakhar:
China to Me

By Emily Hahn
Doubleday, Doran, 1944

The people in Emily Hahn's frank and unapologetic memoir, "China to Me," seem like characters in a Noël Coward play, making an entrance, uttering their bon mots, then sweeping off stage. The palmy world of 1940s prewar Shanghai and British-governed Hong Kong is rendered in swish dinner parties and horse races attended by dashing expatriates knocking back champagne. Hahn, an American writer who cared not a whit for public opinion, kept gibbons for pets and had a baby out of wedlock with a married British intelligence officer. ("I don't know why I have always had so little conscience about married men," she writes languidly.) Cut to the war and the horror; she describes it all with appropriate solemnity but never loses the tone of a supremely acerbic society gadabout confiding in you at a cocktail party.

Shampa Iftakhar:
3. The Necklace of Kali

By Robert Towers
Harcourt Brace, 1960

For a refreshing, refracted perspective on colonial India—that of a U.S. State Department officer in the days "when the weird old body of the British Raj was at last thrashing like some foundering dinosaur towards extinction"— read Robert Towers's "The Necklace of Kali." Consulate Visa Officer John Wickham is part of what is called the "Jungly Wallah" set: "a shifting population of rich Indians, Persians, Armenians, poor but ingenious White Russians . . . and assorted American and Britons," who take their name from the club they all frequent. Wickham is a complicated, principled man, whose dealings with people from all strata of society mirror the uneasiness of a country on the cusp of a bloody independence.

Shampa Iftakhar:
Sea of Poppies

By Amitay Ghosh
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008

Amitay Ghosh uses a vast and vibrant canvas for "Sea of Poppies," the first in a trilogy that is still being written. Set in the years before the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century, when Britain was making a fortune from poppy crops in India, the story opens in the port city of Calcutta and brings together characters that include a low-caste giant who runs away with a widow; a mulatto sailor with "skin the color of old ivory"; and Paulette, a French orphan. These people will meet as they gradually make their way to the Ibis, a triple-masted schooner that is being prepped to take indentured workers to Mauritius, off the African coast. Ghosh revels in the joy of language—"as chuckmuck a rascal as ever you'll see: eyes as bright as muggerbees, smile like a xeraphim"—but he is also a splendid storyteller. In the last pages, the Ibis is being tossed by a mighty storm, the characters growing desperate. I was desperate, too, for the next book.

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