Language issues in postcolonial writing: reading select Indian English novels

Background: Indian English fiction inherits English as a language of colonial administration and education while remaking it for multilingual Indian experience. Objective: To compare how five major Indian English novels convert the problem of English into narrative form and distribute voice, intelligibility, and social authority. Methods: This qualitative comparative study closely reads narrative voice, syntax, register, code-switching, untranslated lexis, translation effects, accent, and silence in Kanthapura, Midnight’s Children, The Shadow Lines, The God of Small Things, and The Inheritance of Loss. Interpretive categories derive from postcolonial theory and world-Englishes scholarship. Results: The corpus moves from Rao’s oralized English through Rushdie’s hybridity and Ghosh’s polyphony to Roy’s strategic opacity and Desai’s global English of aspiration and humiliation. Linguistic innovation identifies who may narrate, who must translate, and whose speech receives authority. Conclusions: Indian English in these novels is a practice of linguistic citizenship. Nativization contests standard-English authority without automatically dissolving caste, class, gender, or market inequalities.