Mulligatawny Dreams: Encountering the No-Man’s Land Between the Mother Tongue and Post-Colonial Language

Abstract

Decolonization does not end with the colonizing power being physically removed from the colonized nation. Centuries of cultural hegemony wreaks havoc on the fabric of a state to the point of being unrecognizable from its previous state of existence. The battle to reclaim a national identity post colonization is not an easy one, especially when it concerns a multicultural, multilingual, state like India. One of the most obvious manifestations of deliberate anti-colonial actions is the rejection of colonial rules of language. This becomes especially interesting when the said language is now the global lingua franca, inevitable to functioning in an increasingly globalized world.

Post-colonial writers offer much in the activism against colonial dictates of language. This paper looks at how a colonial language, one that is dominant in a post-colonial society, is encountered by writers. The paper focuses on the poetry of Meena Kandasamy in general as an anti-colonial , language-specific , dynamic narrative tool and specifically on the poem “Mulligatawny Dreams” . Her language deliberately subverts English language rules;  often foregoing punctuation, using words from her native Tamil without a footnote or an appendix, culturally specific references etc. All of these deliberate actions making a statement inviting the reader to research and make the effort to learn and understand the poetry and its references, much like the rest of the world and especially Indians have been taught through the centuries to understand British cultural references and history forsaking our own.