ABSTRACT
The novels in this sample contain powerful cultural markers, which I refer to as a sense of “Indianness.” Signifying culture is an important task for Indian children’s authors: as I established in Chapter 1, the novels in this sample are viewed by many as nation-building tools in India and are produced and disseminated within the realm of multicultural children’s literature in the diaspora. Therefore, they must project a strong sense of cultural identity recognisable to readers from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Indianness is thus imagined in these novels through a variety of textual techniques, including characterisation, which I discussed in Chapter 4, descriptions of clothing, which I discuss in Chapter 7, intertextuality, setting, and the practice of positioning recognisably
Indian objects as central to plot development. These last two techniques are my focus in this chapter, as they relate to the need of previously colonised nations to establish cultural markers in their literature. Signifi cantly, all of the novels published in India are set in India, and half of the diasporic novels are set partially or wholly in India, suggesting that engagement with place is an important part of both postcolonial and multicultural children’s literature. In some cases, particularly in several diasporic novels, the country of India effectively functions as another character in the narrative.
