Imagining: Disrupting Colonial Imaginaries, Creating Postcolonial Stories

Stories emerge from our own imaginations and are influenced by the imaginaries of others. This chapter reveals how dominant and authoritative colonialist stories created in particular cultural, political and historical contexts can be displaced and challenged over time. Drawing on stories of an extraordinary road trip from Britain to India that my parents undertook in 1955, this chapter shows how colonial narratives, in which they had been enmeshed as colonised subjects, were entrenched in fantastical imaginaries of Britain as a modern, civilised and even glorious world. It was these accounts that fed their aspirations to travel from the colonial periphery to the imperial centre and moulded their expectations of what they would see and experience. However, as they encountered Britain up close, these preconceptions were disavowed, gradually being replaced as they created their own postcolonial, counter-stories.