Countering the Empire: Appropriating Nativity and Resistance in the Selected Pakistani Poetry of Taufiq Rafat

Abstract

     Postcolonial writers appropriate native culture by presenting the colonized people in the central position. They create counterarguments to the colonial practices of the colonized natives. Posetry as a literary genre plays a crucial role in creating resistance against hegemonic practices employed by the powerful colonials. This paper aims to explore the Appropriation as a tool utilized by Postcolonial writers to establish counter-arguments against the malpractices of colonial orientalists. This study will also investigate colonial writers like Rudyard Kipling, who indulge in epistemic violence by misrepresenting the people of Eastern backgrounds while privileging the white colonial masters. Pakistani poets in English adopt a pattern of resistance to colonial hegemony by utilizing the philosophy of Appropriation. These writers like Taufiq Rafat rightly appropriate the native ideology into the same language of colonizers by bringing the native characters from the sideline into the mainstream. This study by using the method of Textual Analysis aims to draw a comparison of Rudyard Kipling, a British writer, and Taufiq Rafat, a Pakistani writer. It would see the approach of these two writers towards the portrayal of characters from Eastern and Western backgrounds. For analysis, the Postcolonial Theoretical Framework from the theory of Appropriation formulated by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (2004) will be utilized.