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The IUP Journal of English Studies

Aravind Adiga's Amnesty: A Critique of Globalization

Article Details

Pub. Date	: June, 2023
Product Name	: The IUP Journal of English Studies
Product Type	: Article
Product Code	: IJES090623
Author Name	: Bhupendra Nandlal Kesur and Anil Vandeo Andel
Availability	: YES
Subject/Domain	: Arts & Humanities
Download Format	: PDF Format
No. of Pages	: 08

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Abstract

Aravind Adiga is one of the contemporary authors who has engraved his name in Indian Writing in English by winning the celebrated Booker Prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger. He has studied in universities abroad and later emigrated to Australia. This journey of Adiga in the alien land enabled him to accumulate experience, which is reflected in his writing. His novel Amnesty is set in Australia. It registers the happenings of a day in the life of the protagonist. This paper examines how in the novel Adiga explores immigration and cultural and identical crises, which are the outcomes of the process of globalization.

Introduction

Immigration is a widely observed and complex phenomenon which has affinity with multiplicity of aspects like economic, social, political, and cultural in the age of globalization. The world has shrunk like never before due to technological advancement which eventually spurs the pace of migration. According to Tacoli and Okali (2001), migration is one of the most evident and crucial aspects of globalization. Usually, people migrate seeking better opportunities and a better lifestyle within countries and across borders. The pace of global immigration is the outcome of the process of globalization. According to UN DESA (2019), "The UN dataset, 'International Migrant Stock 2019,' finds international migrants have increased from 51 million since 2010 to 272 million in 2019. This figure means that the share of international migrants in the global population has grown faster than the world's population." To procure the citizenship of a rich and developed country is not a piece of cake for many immigrants. The citizenship is rendered more easily to first-world people unsurprisingly as compared to their counterparts in third-world societies. Lochner (2014, 36) avers that the "wilful blindness, an ostensible inability to recognize the individual beyond his skin color, is the result of society's racial prejudice; skin color becomes the basis for discrimination, denying the shared, bodily vulnerability with the other."