Cultural Hegemony and Hybridity in Khushwant Singh’s Karma.

Karma is a short story by Indian author Khushwant Singh. In this short story the writer has deftly mastered the skills of criticizing the Indians who hate or demean their own culture, especially the diaspora ones. Diasporas are the people who migrate from their motherland to other countries for various purposes. (Bill Ashcroft et. al. 2013) Exposure to multiple cultures make them ambivalent. They feel themselves lost in diverse cultural encounters. They suffer in inferiority complex. Being in different high cultural atmosphere they tend to hide their own selffelt low cultural identity. This cultural hegemony leads them to dilemma- a state of ambivalence in them. This identity crisis results in seer mimicry of the western culture. Mimicry is the process of reproducing as the almost same but not the quite. (Homi Bhabha, 1994) Through mimicking they alienate themselves from their own culture. The protagonist Mohan Lal is the exemplary instance of all the matters of discussion. This paper will investigate that the central character Sir Mohan Lal is an anglophile and a mimic man who through showing positive attitude towards British culture drives himself far from his own Indian culture. This cultural hybridity and alienation bring untold miseries and troubles to him at the end. Mohan Lal, a hybrid, lost his identity in the long run and was thrown away for despising his own culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]