Mahima Singh
Ruskin Bond has grown up
during an important phase of history. He was Born and brought up in India
during the 1930s when the freedom struggle in India was at its zenith, World
War which lasted from 1939 to 1945 and immediately after that the event of
Independence and chopping up of the country, there is a certain trauma involved
for the writer who was British in color and blood but Indian in his
sensibilities. One of the most important questions which he tries to raise
through his fiction is the “abjection “of the Anglo -Indian and English
families which remained behind after the independence. The
black and white world of the British Raj has been depicted in the ghost stories
of Ruskin Bond which are an allegory of wrecked world of the colonizing mission
of the empire. The concerns which Bond raises in these stories don’t pertain so
much to the natives. These stories underline the decayed situation of the white
families left behind after the Raj was over. His ghost stories are a constant
reminder of empires hollowed mission in the East and what it has done to its
own people.
Natives, gothic, women,
British Raj, anti-heroine, abject.
VOL.14, ISSUE No.1, March 2022