Colliding Cultures, Negotiating Identities: Dimensions of Gender and Ethnic Othering in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy

Name of Author : Godhuli Goswami

Abstract: A 1996 New York Times literary review of Shyam Selvadurai’s debut novel Funny Boy comments thus on the authorial perspicacity that is on display in the text – “Throughout “Funny Boy”, Shyam Selvadurai writes as sensitively about the emotional intensity of adolescence as he does about the wonder of childhood. He also paints an affectionate picture of an imperfect family in a lost paradise, struggling to stay together in troubled times.” (Hower) Indeed, Selvadurai’s partly autobiographical saga succeeds in seamlessly enmeshing two apparently distinct yet complementary narrative strands - the deeply personal and the flagrantly political - into an organic whole that seems to speak to the reader with a temperate voice of reason. The employment of a weather metaphor will perhaps not be incongruous to describe a novel like Funny Boy since the protagonist Arjie Chelvaratnam, in all his childhood innocence and adolescent glory, appears to be the literal eye of the storm, the central vortex around which the mighty forces of varying ideological storms and currents operate. As fate would have it, on one hand Arjie, a Tamil Hindu, finds himself at odds with the ethnic majoritarian parameters that inform the sense of Sri Lankan national identity, and on the other hand, he finds himself at the mercy of the hegemonic heteronormative discourse that demonises unconventional anomalies like his homosexuality. Funny Boy thus becomes a narrative articulation of institutionally ratified Othering on accounts of both ethnicity and deviant sexuality and the quest of the protagonist to find agency in the face of dogmatic rejection of nonconformism. In Selvadurai’s own words, “It tells the universal story of the search for self and the search for love in a hostile world.”

Keywords : Gender and Ethnic Othering, Funny Boy, Colliding Cultures

DOI :