Local vs. cosmopolitan: A comparison of the home and the world and Midnights Children

Abstract

This essay through a comparative study of Tagore’s The Home and the World, originally written in Bengali, and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children highlights the disparities between Indian-English writing and Indian regional language literature that critics have drawn attention to by claiming that while the former aims at a conversation with the world, the latter concentrates on specific local situations. The two novels are separated by a span of sixty-six years. However, the cosmopolitan/local dichotomy between Indian-English and regional language Indian literature and not chronology, the traditional historical read, has been the governing principle for this comparative study of these two texts.