Shantaram

Shantaram is one of many epic novels set in India but told by descendants of colonizing cultures, and looking at the work through the lens of postcolonial studies illuminates key criticisms that some scholars and critics have put forward. Although set in the 1980s and published in 2002, Roberts’s lens is that of a white descendent of a colonial culture experiencing the culture that was economically exploited; as such, it bears similarities to works such as Rudyard Kipling’s Kim or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, novels in which an exotic setting is the emotional landscape for the narrative arcs of white characters. Though Shantaram does not share those novels’ frequent dehumanization of nonwhite characters, it does contain elements of what scholar Edward Said calls orientalism: the depiction of Asian cultures through the mediating lens of Western understanding of those cultures (as opposed to letting those cultures be defined on their own terms). Some critics say that novels like Shantaram recreate the economic structures of colonization, with a white narrator imbuing a “Western projection onto and will to govern over” an Eastern colonialized nation like India or those in Africa or the Middle East (Jhouki, Jukka.