Dharma: the Portrayal of Hybridity

This project explores hybridity – a term proposed by Homi Bhabha for the combination of cultures – in four eras: the new novel Dharma follows the journey of a hybrid character in contemporary Britain, while the critical work analyses hybridity depicted at the colonial highpoint of the 1910s (in Kunzru’s The Impressionist); in a decolonising Britain of the 1950s (in Naipaul’s The Mimic Men), and during the post-colonial 1980s under Thatcher (in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses).
Dharma is the 63,000 word story of teacher-entrepreneur-politician, Arun Patel MP, whose bid for the Labour Party’s leadership is undone by a sex scandal. Relationships with two women complicate this: Antonia Cohen, a masked Impressionist with a debilitating skin condition who has her own television show, and Grace Hamid, a headteacher who runs the large primary school in Edmonton Green where Patel taught the children of recent immigrants. Brexit, Trump and coronavirus provide a backdrop alongside the characters’ hybridity – Patel is a mixed-race Hindu, Cohen is Jewish, and Hamid is a mixed-race Muslim.
The critical work – Breaking free: mimicry, hybridity and the self-awareness of Saladin Chamcha, Pran Nath and Ralph Singh – examines how characters are presented by authors as having constructed a performed identity and the effect of this on our reading of their character, in the work of Rushdie, Kunzru and Naipaul – in relation to the ideas of Bhabha, Said and postcolonial theory on hybridity. The thesis applies these to Ralph Singh’s mimicry and subsequent self-examination in Naipaul’s The Mimic Men; Pran Nath’s mimicry and fracturing of self in Kunzru’s The Impressionist; and how Saladin Chamcha’s mimicry gives way to the potential for hybridity in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, with reference to other works by Naipaul, Rushdie and Kunzru as a counterpoint. Throughout, the analysis situates hybridity within the social and political context described in the novels and explores its different iterations.