Global Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Social Classes in Khushwant Singh’s I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale: A Colonizer-Colonized Struggle?

Professor Rosana C. Pinotti

This research paper explores Khushwant Singh’s novel I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale focusing on the struggle between the colonized and the colonizer, as well as the various roles that the different social classes seem to play in their respective contexts. To achieve this aim, a well-defined corpus was selected, which comprises some fictional conversations and narrative pieces from the novel, analysed from a critical and literary perspective. The result of the present study should be interpreted as one of the multiple plausible readings that may arise in the process of understanding Khushwant Singh´s historical piece that involves the reader in the realm of India´s mysticism, and faces him/her with the challenge of deciphering the complexity and ambiguity of the social struggle beyond the binary opposition colonizer/colonized.