Shantaram

Shantaram is one of many epic novels set in India but told by descendants of colonizing cultures, and looking at the work through the lens of postcolonial studies illuminates key criticisms that some scholars and critics have put forward. Although set in the 1980s and published in 2002, Roberts’s lens is that of a white descendent of a colonial culture experiencing the culture that was economically exploited; as such, it bears similarities to works such as Rudyard Kipling’s Kim or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, novels in which an exotic setting is the emotional landscape for the narrative arcs of white characters. Though Shantaram does not share those novels’ frequent dehumanization of nonwhite characters, it does contain elements of what scholar Edward Said calls orientalism: the depiction of Asian cultures through the mediating lens of Western understanding of those cultures (as opposed to letting those cultures be defined on their own terms). Some critics say that novels like Shantaram recreate the economic structures of colonization, with a white narrator imbuing a “Western projection onto and will to govern over” an Eastern colonialized nation like India or those in Africa or the Middle East (Jhouki, Jukka. “Orientalism and India.” 1 Jan. 2006).

While earlier colonial novels explicitly depicted native inhabitants of colonized lands as lesser, novels like Shantaram’s overly romanticized visions of the country and its inhabitants are no less othering or exoticizing. The culture of Mumbai in Shantaram is depicted as both alluring and dangerous, titillating and risky, and there’s an unspoken assumption that this is tied to something intrinsic in the culture—the Mumbai of Shantaram is a one-dimensional place without the nuance or complexity of the real city during the time period. In addition, many of the most sympathetic main characters are white, and while Prabu is arguably the most sympathetic character, he also serves as comic relief many times in the novel, which signals to the reader that his status is less important. The lack of complexity in most native Indian characters in Shantaram calls into question the novel’s ability to convey Mumbai and its citizens accurately.

With Shantaram’s recent adaptation to Apple TV in 2022, more audience members of the television show and the book have expressed their discomfort with the white protagonist’s depiction of Mumbai, which is complicated by the semi-autobiographical nature of the story; critics could argue that the act of writing the book is itself a mirror of the act of colonization. That said, the novel does address US involvement in aiding Afghani fringe groups against the Russians prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center in 9/11 and America’s subsequent war against Iraq and Afghanistan, which only serves to highlight how deeply entrenched white cultures are in battling over territory in the Middle East and East. The novel therefore shows that despite the lack of overt political colonial efforts in these counties, colonialism in the form of economic and political exploitation continues.