Naipaul's Magic Seeds: A Parody of Political Mimicry

Abstract

As a colonial author, Naipaul is deeply concerned with the exploration of the nature of the colony from a cultural and a political perspective. Being of Indian descent, his interest in pondering over Indian history and understanding its cultural identity is central to his fiction. In Magic Seeds Naipaul moves from the colonial India under British rule where the protagonist, Willie Chandran, was born to a post-independence rural India besieged by a Maoist insurgent group whose aim was to fight poverty and be trusted by poor villagers. Drawing from Bhabha’s concept of mimicry which holds that the colonized seeks to copy the colonizer thus producing a subject who is "almost the same, but not quite," (Bhabha, 1994:86). This paper seeks to read Magic Seeds as a fictional parody of political mimicry based upon the information on the movement provided by Dipanjan and Debu in India: A Million Mutinies Now. Following Willie Chandran’s trials and tribulations as a member of a Maoist guerrilla in India, Naipaul dissects the divorce between foreign political discourse and Indian cultural heritage.

Keywords

• india
• intertextuality
• mimicry
• maoism
• naxalism
• parody
• peasants