Ruskin Bond's "Whispering in the Dark": A Fantastic Quest for Identity (Critical Essay‪)‬

THIS ARTICLE SEEKS TO EXPLAIN HOW FANTASY IS EMPLOYED IN A SHORT story in a metafictional manner to demonstrate the symptoms of unconscious dithering in the minds of a racially and culturally mixed community called the Anglo-Indians. British rule in India gave birth to the Anglo-Indian community, consisting broadly of people who are racially mixed and people of otherwise purely British descent who chose to stay in India even after the end of British rule in the country. Those who stayed faced the excruciating conditions of the tropical plains, which told heavily upon the health of the British officials; hence, the hill stations on the Himalayas grew up as convalescent centers for these ailing officials. The male members of the community who worked for the Empire in the plains had their women comfortably nestled in the salutary conditions of the mountains. These conditions determined the history and identity of the Anglo-Indian community in the Himalayas. During the sixty years after India's Independence (1947), the community dwindled in population as new generations of the community went to live in English-speaking countries and the older generations passed away. Ruskin Bond, who is popularly known as a children's writer, was born in a Himalayan hill station called Kasauli on 19 May 1934 of such Anglo-Indian lineage. (1) An exponent of the literary genre of semi-autobiographical fantasy, Bond recasts his experiences of living through the anxieties and pleasures of cultural hybridity in India during the Nationalist Freedom movement and afterwards. Most of his novellas and short stories hide a fervent quest for identity, the concerns of which are historically and culturally inflected. The appeal of the Indian atmosphere, especially that of the cultural and ecological space of small towns, was so fervent that Bond felt the conditions of staying in England from 1951 to 1955 quite alienating. This brief sojourn, however, was fruitful in that the nostalgic memory of his Indian life triggered his first novella, a Bildungsroman, entitled The Room on the Roof. The title fetched its seventeen-year-old author the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. Back in India, Bond continued to submit freelance stories and essays to English-language papers and journals published from India. In 1980 the Indian division of Penguin Publishers responded to the increasing demand of Bond stories by bringing out organized and authentic versions of this widely published author. (2)