He is not only together with his father’s Indian friends, Anwar, Jeeta and their daughter Jamila, Karim’s best friend and sexual partner but also with his unhappy and alcoholic British relatives Jean and Ted. From the beginning, Karim does not give the impression to be particularly interested in his own heritage, but shows a strong desire to escape the shabbiness of the suburbs, where “people rarely dreamed of striking out for happiness” (Kureishi 1999, p.8) The novel is presented from a raced perspective through Karim’s consciousness, while being the son a British woman called Margaret and an Indian father called Haroon.
Thus, in what ways has Hanif Kureishi sought to redefine the relationship between the colonial margin and the metropolitan center?įirstly, what makes the novel so valuable is Karim portrayed as a middle-class Indian-Pakistani boy who cuts into the ambivalent experience of Britain’s South Asian community. In this novel, ambivalence and in-betweenness of the hybrid identities in multicultural Britain is represented through the main character Karim where his cultural mixture in terms of social, ethnic and even national identity seems to be mistreated and even swallowed by his pride to find somewhere he can belong to.
As multiculturalism is not a new phenomenon in European history, neither are its literary and artistic manifestations, where the suburban and metropolitan novel The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, lies in escaping the limitations of postcolonial ethnicity dictated by the immigrant condition.
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