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Behind The Beautiful Forever Katherine Bou Analysis

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Katherine Boo’s Stereotypical Delineation of Contemporary India in Behind the Beautiful Forever: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Under city Abstract The Western writing about India has always been a grotesque and is the common trend right from the day of Britain rule in India. This trend is still continuing in this 21st Century. Britain had lost its hold on Indian subcontinent in 1940’s and there persists the interest in viewing India through their colonial eyes. India’s embrace of globalization has reawakened their preexisting biases. Through their writings they distort real story of India so as to give emphasis to their superior status. In contemporary non-fiction books written by western writers’ they portray “East” as savage minded, criminals and “West” as superior, dominant type. Through this envision they created an image of East as the “Other” which is no way similar to them. This ideate distinction between East and West formed the basis of Edward Said’s “Orientalism”. The Eurocentric superiority perception compels them to distort the reality according to their preferences. The new tropes of representing East as the ‘other’ can be seen in Katherine Boo’s …show more content…

Katherine Boo through this book openly projects her biases through the imaginative representation of the lives of people in India. She is ignorant of India’s past and in her portrait of concurrent situations in India, she is openly dishonest .Boo claims that this book is her first hand account of the condition of people of India’s slum but this cannot be fully relied as it is not true representation of real

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