Mapping the Postcolonial Mind: A Digital Analysis of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy

Abstract

As literary educations navigate the "Digital Turn," the mixing of Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers a transformative lens for decoding complex narrative structures. This paper executes a computational analysis of two pillars of Indian postmodernism: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. By utilizing Transformer-based Natural Language Processing (NLP); specifically, the RoBERTa model, this study quantifies "postcolonial irony" and linguistic hybridity. The research transitions from traditional close reading to "distant reading" (Moretti, 2013), mapping the emotional volatility and character networks which define the "postcolonial mind." Results indicate that AI can successfully identify the fragmented "staccato" emotional arcs and the "chutnification" of language that characterize the Indian postmodern experience.