'Karma': Racisme og kolonialisme

An excellent example of colonialism and racism would be the short story Karma. In this story a man, by the name Sir Mohan is waiting in the waiting room of the train station. He is waiting in the first class waiting room and he is clearly an educated man. As you read on in the story we learn that he has spent some time in England, educating himself. In fact we notice that he has become so obsessed with the English way of living that he is only able to look upon his own background with despair. He speaks like an Englishman, he acts like and Englishman and he even does all the right tings to attract the attention of the Englishmen, but he has forgotten his roots and that makes him unaccepted in the Indian society. He is a racist because he despises his own kind and thinks of them as low beings. Even his wife is, to him, as low as anything can get, and he wants nothing to do with her family. He has become a racist because he has been colonised. He has tasted the sweet taste of another culture and he has become so obsessed with the English way of life, that he has become the racist that he is pictured like in the story. But even though he tries he can never escape the culture he has been born into and we see that, in the form of his arranged marriage and the way, the drunken soldiers, in the end of the story, throws him of the train. They see only the colour of his skin, and no matter how much effort Sir Mohan would have put into, trying to convince them, they would still have thrown him of the train. So, in Sir Mohan’s case it is a pretty bad thing having been colonised. He will never fit into any of the two cultures. He will always be looked upon as a foreigner in the English world and as a snob in his own culture. He is in sharp contrast to his, in his mind, nasty wife. She has accepted who she is and is accepted by her culture. She could not fit in the English culture, but at least she is not parted between the English and the Indian culture like Sir Mohan. In a way, I think Lady Lal lives a better life.