ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter addresses the question of whether the phenomenon of Indian self-fashioning as English has finally come to an end. As I have already argued, the desire to anglicise one’s self was inextricably bound with the presence of the English colonisers in India as the political, social, and cultural elites. With the disappearance of those colonisers as the reference group for the Indian middle class, the phenomenon of anglicisation started to wane during the second half of the twentieth century. However, the very fact that a number of contemporary Indian English novelists have chosen to prominently focus on anglicised Indian characters in their writings signify that the desire for English self-fashioning has not become entirely irrelevant in modern times. Even though it has ceased to be a viable mode of self-fashioning in independent India, it survives as a cultural cul-de-sac that needs to be worked through in order to progress beyond its barren promises. I explore such an attempt to engage with and ultimately displace the phenomenon of Indian self-fashioning as English by reading Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses which attempts to go beyond the colonial-era binary of “Englishness” and “Indianness” and open up a new space of cultural possibilities.
