Gita Mohan  (University of Salford, U.K.)
Bilingue AND Hybrid : Bridging the gap between Indian Anglophone and Maghrebian Francophone Literature

In a recently-published collection of essays titled Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies, Anne Donadey and H.Adlai Murdoch had this to say about Postcolonial Studies and Francophone Studies : 'Both fields focus on similar issues, such as : diaspora and hybridity, nationalism and transnationalism, gender and race, multilingualism, opposition and ambivalence, and the need to rewrite colonial history'( Donadey & Murdoch, 2005 : 1). In my paper, I will be embarking on a comparative study of literature from two entirely different regions - India and the Maghreb, the latter being a collective term used to denote the former French colonies in North Africa (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia). I believe that clear-cut boundaries can no longer exist between postcolonial Anglophone and Francophone literature, in the light of increasing translations of such works.

All the four countries in my study have undergone myriad cultural, social and linguistic transformations under various rulers over the centuries, most notably under their former European colonizers. Literature now produced (in the language of these former colonizers) in India and the Maghreb show remarkable similarities in both Form and Content - be it the long prose narrative style or digressions (recalling the Oral literary traditions of yore) or indeed the focus on an individual's identity in a postcolonial world. As Susan Bassnett feels, 'Comparison of forms and contents across post-colonial literatures offers a wealth of possibilities' (Bassnett, 1993: 76). Translation Studies today facilitates comparisons of Anglophone and Francophone texts.

Drawing on a range of theories right from Said's Orientalism and Bhabha's notion of hybridity to Abdelkebir Khatibi's notion of the bilingue, this paper discusses works by prominent Indian and Maghrebian writers like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Assia Djebar, and hopes to broaden the limits of postcolonialism by means of interdisciplinarity.