Amrita Satapathy

Shifting Images: England in Indian English Writing Amrita Satapathy

For the West, the East has often been synonymous with the ?exotic', the ?barbaric', and the ?irrational' signifying a people without history and without an evolving identity. The ?other' is also all the things that the West does not stand for or is not familiar with. This attitude, famously defined as ?Orientalism' by Edward Said has shaped Western writings on India. However, the way the writers in the East have historically viewed the ?West' has not been given the attention it deserves. The book Shifting Images examines the ambivalence and the anxieties on the part of the Indian writers who sought to negotiate between the East and the West in their autobiographies/travelogues and discover patterns underlying them. It shows how the eastern world has projected the complex and many layered views of the West. Most Indian writers in English thought of England as an ideal land and longed to visit it some day. Some of them eventually came to settle in this land. Some of them went to this ?hallowed' land as visitors. Each one had his own idea of England/West. Shifting Images is an attempt to offer an insight into the complex and shifting relations between the East and the West.