Il Tolomeo Rivista di studi postcoloniali | A Postcolonial Studies Journal | Journal d’études postcoloniales | Revista de estudos pós-coloniais

Journal | Il Tolomeo
Monographic journal issue | 22 | 2020
Research Article | “The Road to Awesomeness”: The Environment, Language and Rhetoric in Chetan Bhagat’s Postcolonial India

“The Road to Awesomeness”: The Environment, Language and Rhetoric in Chetan Bhagat’s Postcolonial India

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss how environment, language and rhetoric interplay in the postcolonial context, in particular by focusing on Making India Awesome (2015), a recent collection of essays in which journalist and novelist Chetan Bhagat offers suggestions to handle many of the challenges of India, ideally positioning the country ‘on the road to awesomeness’. Although ecology is not specifically treated, it obviously constitutes the backdrop of the themes of the book as it intertwines with broad social and cultural domains. I will look at the postcolonial environmental intertext, and its ideological implications, which the author builds up via specific frames, metaphors and devices from an interdisciplinary perspective informed by postcolonial critique, environmental humanities and ecolinguistics. The purpose of the analysis thus is to provide a critical reflection on how language shapes, creates and hides values at the interface between the postcolonial and the environmental.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: July 10, 2020 | Accepted: Sept. 7, 2020 | Published Dec. 22, 2020 | Language: en

Keywords Postcolonial Environment • Rhetoric • India • Chetan Bhagat • Ideology

Copyright © 2020 Esterino Adami. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/Tol/2499-5975/2020/22/021


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