Code Switching or Code Mixing as the postcolonial counter discourse strategy in Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice-Candy-Man (Cracking India)

Abstract

This study is an attempt to investigate code-switching and code mixing (CS and CM) strategies installed by Bapsi Sidhwa (Sidhwa) in her novel, ‘Ice-Candy Man’ (ICM) as a counter discourse to contest the authenticity and universality of the western discourses and its discursive norms. In addition, it explores how with the deployment of such literary practices; it deconstructs the binary opposition like “light/darkness” “East/West”, “self/Other”” and “Presence/Absence’ in the postcolonial counter discourse perspective. The fundamental aim of the study is also to validate the CS and CM strategies to foreground the ambivalence, resistance and difference in her novel (ICM) as a counter discourse. The study has also a great implication in terms of the pedagogical, theoretical, political and cultural perspectives of the postcolonial counter discourse. The research methodology concentrates on the interpretation of the selected texts mainly from the novel (ICM) in the context of the postcolonial discourse perspective. The study concludes that such literary and textual practices of (CS and CM) are also realistic and authentic; which simultaneously also reflect an alternative vantage site to foreground the linguistic, textual varieties and cultural diversities in terms of the globalization and digitalization settings. The study also recommends that in this age of trans-borders and trans-cultural melting zones, and widespread forced or by consent migration linguistic variations and cultural diversities must be celebrated as an advantageous site of difference and resistance. It also advocates that the creative English writers like Sidhwa and her discourses may be disseminated extensively in order to demystify and unmask the Anglo-American’s Discourses of misrepresentation as well as to address the metonymic gaps in terms of the global literary and academic perspective.