The use of language in Post Colonial Literature

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Code-Switching and linking the margins : V .S Naipaul 's A House for Mr Biswas as a vehicle for class movement in literature

Imagine for a second that all the Anglo-Saxon world 's literary characters were lined up one by one chronologically . We start off with Chaucer 's characters and move our way up to Wilde 's dandies , and then up to Marlow who is framed in the background by a few tribesmen in the Congo , and then suddenly we have Mr . Biswas . For

the most part Colonialist literature has contained Caucasian characters as their center with the inclusion of some distant races as support . The subjects of colonialism were barred entry to the privileged world of Colonial literature by their inability to conform to Colonialist 's cultural practices their expression of culture both in language and custom did not meet with the stringent and racist codes required for literature V .S . Naipaul , who was originally consigned to the category of commonwealth writer ' by the British press , has managed to place the subjects of Anglo-Saxon 's colonialism , into the same canon with their oppressors . Marlow , muddling his way up the river , now sits adjacent to Mr . Biswas who curses in his Creole English struggling to pay off debt

Unlike Mr . Biswas , Naipaul 's own writing is often steeped in the vernacular of his Oxford education , but he faithfully records the breaches with colonial grammatical rules through extensive code-switching making low-caste Indian Christian converts into...