Abstrakt: | Even though the British colonial rule over India ended in 1947, its spectres
haunt the nation until this day. Since then, Indian postcolonial writing—both of the
realist and fantastic kind—has attempted to reconcile the past of the nation with its
present, addressing the legacy of the haunting spectres of the colonial rule. With that
in mind, the following article seeks to explore the way in which Vandana Singh,
in her short story “Delhi,” engages in a discussion concerning the intersection
between spectral hauntings of the colonial past and the counter-discursive, revisionist
practice of reclaiming and rewriting the colonial narrative by the Othered subject
personified by the protagonist. Adopting the postcolonial discourse as well as theory
of science fiction as the primary methodological framework, the paper argues that
for Singh, the act of haunting facilitates reclamation of the lost history and memories
of the city and ultimately contributes to the revision of the colonial account. Thus,
in Singh’s “Delhi,” the spectres of the past become liminal, incorporeal entities, no
longer confined to the sphere of abstraction and metaphor, enabling the postcolonial
act of writing back. |