“A League of Thayir Own” – An Analysis of Linguistic Trends in Select Fictional Works by Arundhati Roy and Anita Nair

Abstract

Indian Writing in English (IWE) is evidently a linguistic legacy of the British colonial rule that takes pride in its pluralistic multicultural tradition. Postcolonial women writers like Arundhati Roy and Anita Nair who represent the “new makers of world fiction”, proclaim their artistic independence and insight through their literary works by negotiating between the two great traditions: one inherited and the other acquired. The beauty and strength of their works lie in their linguistic ability to depict a sociocultural reality unmistakably rooted in an Indian milieu. A common characteristic found in a majority of IWE works is the liberal usage of crosslinguistic and crosscultural lexical terms that are code-mixed or code-switched in the narratives resulting in interwoven hybrid texts. Roy and Nair have also attempted a process of relexification by using pan- Indian terms, localisms, calques pertaining to sociocultural habits such as chewing paan or mastering kalaripayattu, Indian English compound words like ‘Non-Veg restaurants’, hybridised English idioms like ‘a fly in one’s paal kanji’ and so on, ignoring the linguistic conventions of Standard English. The strategies of appropriation and abrogation employed by Roy and Nair in their novels in an attempt to ‘nativise’ and use the English language as an ethnographic and subversive tool to “write back to the centre”, is comparable to the indigenous art of making thayirsaadam (curd rice), a favourite item in South Indian cuisine. This article intends to investigate how the authors use the English language creatively by means of deliberate linguistic choices and innovative use of various linguistic forms to depict their fictional personas and imaginary worlds in a realistic manner.