KAMILA SHAMSIE'S BURNT SHADOWS AS AN INTERTEXTUAL RE-WRITING OF FORSTER'S A PASSAGE TO INDIA

The present paper attempts to analyze Kamila Shamsie’s use of intertextuality in her novel Burnt Shadows. The term intertextuality was coined by Julia Kristeva which refers to the presence of a text within some other text. The term being derived from the concept of dialogicality or dialogism propounded by Mikhail Bakhtin rejects the idea of the closure of meaning and accentuates the dialogicality of texts. It explains how literary texts are always in a state of continuous dialogues with other texts. Literary texts, in this dialogic process can question, alter and even modify the previous texts and can also anticipate response from the future texts. The postcolonial writers, being influenced by the colonial oppression and marginalization take an interrogational stance in their writings. They show resistance in their literature by re-reading and re-writing the colonial texts. This re-reading and re-writing, being important tools of intertextuality, is found to be very helpful for postcolonial purposes. This study attempts to analyze the use of intertextuality by a Pakistani postcolonial writer Kamila Shamsie and explains how her appropriation of A Passage to India, which is a canonical intertext exposes the colonial tactics of controlling the colonies.