Is Liquidity Risk Management Important For Rbs Finance Essay - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 4 Words: 1277 Downloads: 6 Date added: 2017/06/26 Category Finance Essay Type Argumentative essay Did you like this example? Liquidity and Liquidity Risk management, both are important for organisation so there is not single question regarding its importance towards RBS. I can say yes because Liquidity Risk Management enable organisation to pay its debt when they come due with certain condition and specified manner. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Is Liquidity Risk Management Important For Rbs Finance Essay" essay for you Create order Yes, Liquidity risk management is important especially for financial organization as well as for banks. It enables organisation to pay its debts in time without loosing values of firms assets. Answer 1.3 No, Liquidity Risk Management is not as much important as other financial strategic decision making because If you some effective financial strategy in the business than Illiquid situation will never come to face. So financial strategic decision making is important for RBS as compared to Liquidity Risk Management. Answer 1.4 No, RBS will never depend on the Liquidity Risk Management because before last recession RBS was maintaining Liquidity risk even though RBS had faced shortage of cash. It is not much important for RBS than other risk management. Answer 1.5 Liquidity risk management is not important for only RBS but it is also important for all banks and financial institutions. Liquidity can make firm to enable to pay its obligations when they come due. Answer 1.6 Yes, I think it is important for RBS to maintain credit balance in both RBS and NatWest. Answer 1.7 Liquidity and its management both are the part of financial strategies of the business. RBS is a financial institute and it is quite necessary for them to maintain enough cash fund to pay its debts in time and liquidity risk policy enables to do so. Liquidity and Recession 2 What was the reason behind the last recession especially for Banking sector (RBS)? Answer 2.1 First of all last recession of 2007-2010 was came from United States of America by subprime mortgage crisis and it was impacted to only financial sectors of world and specially to western countries. End of 2006 and start of 2007 was boom time, there were only growth in the market. Banks were lending money in the market without any securities. Due to coming in overconfidence bye banks and investors, recession time start and it was reason for RBS also because before this time RBS was doing quite well. Answer 2.2 It was only due to overconfidence of financial institutions. Financial organizations came into over confidence and invested money in the market without any securities. This was the reason of global financial crisis. RBS was also come into trouble because of worthless acquisition. For business development RBS did lot of acquisition and invested lot of money even some of those acquisitions were useless and worthless. Answer 2.3 Reasons behind the last recession were sub-prime mortgage crisis, housing bubble and oil pricing bubbles. These three hurdles had also affected to RBS and all financial institutions and some of them were fall down. Answer 2.4 Lack of securities and overconfidence were reasons behind the global financial crisis. Answer 2.5 It is clear and everyone knows about the recession, its reasons and its effects. Sub-prime mortgage crisis was the main reason behind the credit crunch. Same things happened with RBS. Answer 2.6 Reasons for the last recession were housing price bubble, lack of liquidity fund, sub-prime mortgage crisis and increasing inflation. Answer 2.7 RBS was using acquisition techniques for business expansion. It was right but not suitable because reserve fund is also necessary during critical time to survive. RBS had not maintained liquidity fund and due to this, RBS had to face credit crunch. 3 Can liquidity risk management help organisation to survive during recession? If yes than how did it helped to RBS? Answer 3.1 If we talk in the context of last recession than I will say yes because last recession was only due to not available enough cash with organisation, and liquidity management is only key to solve this problem so it is quite true to say that LRM helps organisation to survive during recession. Answer 3.2 No, Liquidity risk management can help organisation to solve illiquid situation where as last recession was due to non availability of fund that business do need for their operation as well as to meet regular expenses. Liquidity Risk Management can not solve insolvency condition. Answer 3.3 Yes, it can help organisation to survive during credit crunch but at some extent only. Answer 3.4 Liquidity Risk Management is one of the risk management policies. It can help organisation to solve short term funding problem but last credit crunch was into action for almost 3 years. So it is not possible with Liquidity Risk management. Answer 3.5 Sometime it can help or sometime it can not. So it depends upon the circumstances of the problem. If we talk in the context of last credit crunch, it can and it also did to many banking organizations. Answer 3.6 Risk Management policies are most important for all business organisation and Liquidity Risk Management policy is one of them. So it is also important and helpful for business organisation like as RBS. Answer 3.7 Now a day, Business can perform on the base of certain strategies and policies which can help an organisation to develop and run business even in tough conditions as well as to gain competitive advantages. So Liquidity Risk Management policy is one of them which help us to deal with short term payments and debts. Liquidity and Trust, Reputation and Solvency 4 From your point of view, is there any relation between liquidity and solvency? Answer 4.1 Yes, because liquidity and solvency are two sides of a coin and they are connected with each other. Illiquidity comes from insolvency but insolvency never comes from illiquidity. So I can say like as there is a relationship between liquidity and solvency. Liquidity is a part of solvency. Answer 4.2 No, there is not any relation between Liquidity and Solvency. Illiquidity doesnt come from insolvency but Sometime insolvency comes from the continuous illiquidity. So there is only on side relation, illiquidity comes from some business loses and wrong investment decision like as RBS did in past. Answer 4.3 Liquidity and solvency are connected with each other, so I can say that both have relation with each other. Answer 4.4 Yes, they both are two sides of a coin. If Illiquidity happens than insolvency will also happen after sometimes. There is a positive relation between liquidity and solvency. Answer 4.5 Yes, there is a relationship between liquidity and solvency. If company has sound liquidity management policy than insolvency condition will never come in the business. We have some example, Lehman Brother collapse, why? Because of improper management of fund and wrong investment decision, continuous illiquid situation surged insolvency. Answer 4.6 No, Answer 4.7 No, because Liquidity deals with short term debts and Solvency deals with long term debts. So there is not any relation between liquidity and solvency. 5 Do Liquidity Risk Management Policy help organisation to build trust and Reputation? If yes than how? Answer 5.1 I think yes, Liquidity can defiantly make an impact on trust and reputation of the company. In todays business world, all investors and stakeholders want to invest on those companies which are doing well by their business financial transaction. It means on time payment to creditors, dividend to shareholders, interest to banks and other loan holders, even wages to staff also. Liquidity helps organisation to pay its debts on time when it fall due. So Liquidity can do impact on trust of stakeholders and reputation in business world. Answer 5.2 Yes, Business transaction and in time payments in business always increase business reputation in the market and trust of stakeholders which do business with company. Reputation can also build up by other tools of business but trust of shareholders and stakeholders can only build by regular business. Answer 5.3 Yes, it definitely helps organisation to build trust and reputation.

Essay about The Events of Shakespeares Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar’s ambition for power drove the honorable Brutus to think negatively about Julius Caesar’s position of being the King of Rome. Negatively speaking, Julius Caesar’s ways of having most of the power and deciding not to listen to others except the ones that only tell him things he likes to hear, drove the power-hungary conspirators and the honorable Brutus to take his life away. The honorable Brutus shows his love for Rome by committing an act which he seems best fit for his city. Trying everything he can to put Rome in a democracy, the only solution he saw was to join the conspirators to murder Caesar and explain to the people why they committed such an act. A great friend of Julius Caesar Mark Antony, stood up for many things†¦show more content†¦Ã¢â‚¬Å"He plucked me ope his doublet and offered them his throat to cut†(I.2 276-277). One of the most negative things about Caesar is that he compares himself to things that are very incompara ble which eventually portray a signal to the conspirators that Caesar thinks that he has too much power and that he must be stopped. Caesar also listens to things he only likes to hear. He claims that he does not like flattery and will not accept it. Decius finds ways to flatter Caesar because it makes him feel more confident about himself â€Å"....If he be so resolved, I can o’ersway him..../....But when I tell him he hates flatterers, He says he does, being then most flattered† (II.2 218-225). Another case where Caesar just listens to things he likes to hear is when his wife is trying to make him stay home because of her dream, Decius interprets the dream in a form Caesar would like and makes him not stay home. â€Å"This dream is all amiss interpreted. Your statue spouting blood in many pipes..../....Signifies that from you great Rome shall suck reviving blood† (II.2 90-95). Caesar was very pleased â€Å"And this way have you well expounded it†(II.2 96). Even when his dear wife is trying to help him save himself he does not listen to her. She warns him about her dream of hisShow MoreRelatedShakespeare’s Julius Caesar Vs. Plutarch’s Julius Caesar1549 Words   |  7 Pageslike a colossusï ¿ ½(Julius Caesar 1.2.142-43). These words were spoken by Cassius, a character in Shakespeares play Julius Caesar. He is speaking about Julius Caesar and Caesars arrogance and overconfidence. This quote also shows how Shakespeare perceived Julius Caesar as a prominent and influential man of his time. However, this view is not shared by all of the biographers that chose to write about Julius Caesar. 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Report on Recruitment in an Organisation Provides Recommendations

Question: Discuss about the Report on Recruitment in an Organisation. Answer: Introduction Human resource management is an approach that allows business organisations in managing the human element in their workplace using a number of functions, such as recruitment and selection, training and development, career development, performance management, etc. By improving the working conditions for the employees and by fostering stronger employee-employer relations, human resource management aims at optimising the performance of the workforce to achieve better organisational results (Hendry, 2012). Recruitment and selection Recruitment and selection is one of the most important core functions of a human resource manager. Recruitment and selection is a process of identifying job openings or vacancies in a workplace, advertising those job openings through difference channels and then finding out the best possible candidates to fill up the identified job openings (French Rumbles, 2010). Recruitment and selection has become one of the most important aspects of strategic human resource management as business organisations are aiming at achieving higher organisational success by strengthening their recruitment and selection procedures and also by aligning them with the organisational strategies. Retail industry Retail industry was started back in the ancient industry and involves the process of selling consumer goods and services through multiple channels of distributions. From small brick and mortar shops, the retail industry has grown to large supermarkets, such as Walmart, Tesco, etc. (Rahate, 2015). The earlier retail industry saw the growth of small brick and mortar shops which were run by owners along with 2-3 employees to assist them in customer dealing. The present day retail industry is dominated by multinational companies that have large supermarkets and are even offering online goods and services. Such retailers have millions of employees working for them throughout the world. For such retail companies, human resource management is posing a big issue when it comes to recruitment and selection of employees for running business operations. Therefore, this assignment is aimed at studying the problems that the retail industry is facing in recruitment and selection of employees and re commending strategies that will allow the human resource managers in retail industry to address these issues. Recruitment and selection problems in retail industry The retail industry has grown to be one of the biggest industries on the world and is offering employment opportunities to millions of people throughout the world. Due to high number of employees working in the retail sector and because of increasing competition in the retail sector, the human resource managers are facing a number of issues in managing the human resources working in the retail sector. Some of the major problems that the human resource managers in retail sector are facing are related with leadership development, goal alignment, employee perception, promotion and policies, internship programs, overstaffing, etc. but one of the critical human resource issue that almost all retail companies are facing is related with the recruitment and selection of employees. A lot of job seekers have been attracted by the retail industry because of the opportunities that it offers along with flexible working hours. However, from a human resource point of view, recruiting candidates for retail companies have always been tougher than it seems because of some peculiar characteristics of the industry. First of all, in the retail industry, the process of recruitment and selection is highly decentralised. Even though some major retail companies have their own dedicated human resource departments but most of the companies in retail industry do not have dedicated human resource departments and all of the recruitment activities are carried out by the store managers themselves, who are no experts in the field of human resource management. For such managers, recruitment and selection can be a difficult task as they lack sufficient knowledge about the assessment criterions that are used by professional human resource managers to assess skills and competencies of the employees. Thus, efficiency and return of recruitment and selection programs in most of the retail companies is not as high as expected (Barrett, 2016). Secondly, one of the most annoying problem related with recruitment and selection in the retail industry is the fluctuating human resource demands. As discussed above, most of the companies, which are operating in the retail sector, do not have dedicated human resource departments that can continuously analyse the human resource demands of the workplace and design recruitment and selection processes to fulfil the demand. Also, the profitability and the productivity of the companies operating in the retail industry are highly dependent on the number of employees that are handling the workplace and are restocking the shelves. More the employees, more is the productivity while the profitability will suffer whereas lesser employees will result into a decreased productivity but increased profitability (Brunot, n.d.). Furthermore, the retail industry also experiences higher employee turnover ratios than any other industry. Added with lesser workforce planning, higher employee turnover rati ons can make recruitment and selection a night mare for the managers of retail companies outlets. Therefore, a major issue that the retail industry faces in terms of recruitment and selection is the fluctuations in demand and supplies. Thirdly, recruitment and selection in the retail industry is generally face-to-face. Most of the times, the candidates applying for a job in a retail company will directly approach the store manager of a company and will ask for a job. The store managers, on the other hand, can be quite busy and cannot allocate much of the resources to recruitment and selection programs. It is also possible that in time of great need, the managers might not have any candidate seeking a job in their company and even if they have, the need of the moment makes them recruit the employees without making any assessment of their skills and qualities. As a result, face-to-face recruitment or walk-ins are also major problems related with recruitment and selection in the retail industry (KHILLARE, 2016). Fourthly, for retail companies, the rate of no-shows for job interviews in very high. Retail industry can experience instances where they are on a hunt for candidates but no potential candidates turn up for the interviews because of the stiff market competition. Further, the retail industry also experiences seasonal customer activities. In holiday seasons, Christmas month, Halloween, etc. retail companies can experience a steep rise in customer foot fall in their stores and to deal with such fluctuations, the retail companies have to keep the process of recruitment and selection as an on-going process. High employee turnover ratios also add up to the problems and there is almost a vacancy or more available in the retail companies and the managers are recruiting employees throughout the year. A major disadvantage of on-going recruitment process is that it can disrupt the business and training costs may not be recouped if the workforce leaves even before they can make a contribution to wards the productivity of the organisation(employer.careerbuilder.com, n.d.). Fifthly, retail companies are highly dependent on their workforce for becoming productive and competitive. A retail company that is not recruiting the right people at the right time might not be able to offer the right services to the customers and the level of customer satisfaction might decrease, which will further increase the chance of losing a loyal customer. Moreover, the competition amongst retail companies is so high that the customers can always find a new retail company in case they are not satisfied with the services of the company that they have currently chosen. Thus, recruiting and selection of wrong people can also lead to the failure of a company (Singh Mishra, 2008). Sixthly, retail companies require very less educational qualification or prior experience to hire a candidate, which exponentially increases the pool of candidates applying for jobs in retail companies. Because of an increase in the pool of candidates, the retail industry receives application from a diverse group of candidates that are different in terms of age, religion, cultural backgrounds, ethnicity, etc. and each one of them is an eligible candidate for the job. Thus, it becomes very difficult for the human resource managers working in the retail industry to identify the people who can contribute more towards the success of their organisation. Lastly, another major issues related with recruitment and selection in the retail industry is that the recruitment decision made by the managers can have a potential impact on their customer base. For example, candidates applying for a job in retail sector are also going to be the customer of the business. They must have approached the manager for a job because they are attached to the brand and a rejection can potentially have an impact on the customer base (Barrett, 2016). Recommendations to deal with recruitment and selection problems in retail industry The competition in the retail industry and the presence of some major players that are dominating the global market makes it imperative for retail business organisations to deal with their problems in the field of recruitment and selection so that they can remain competitive in the market. Some recommendations that can be used by retail outlet managers to deal with recruitment and selection issues are discussed below: First of all, workforce planning should be treated as an integral part of business. By regular workforce planning, the managers working in retail outlets will be able to understand the human resource demand and supply patterns in the industry and will be able to cope up with the fluctuating demands in a better way (Staniforth, 2016). Secondly, retail companies should offer carefully designed compensation and benefits to the employees. by providing the employees with added benefits, the retail managers can bring down the employee turnover rates, which would ultimately help them in dealing with certain issues related with recruitment and selection of employees. Thirdly, the managers working in retail outlets should consider hiring employees on a temporary basis when the seasonal activity or footfall is there. The managers should be prepared for seasonal activities in advance so that they do not feel a shortage of human resources and can carry out their work operations with ease. Temporary human resources will also help them in serving the customers in a better way and maintain profitability. Further, it will also help in dealing with fluctuations in human resource demands (Retailthinktank.co.uk, n.d.). Fourthly, the managers working in the retail sector should store candidate profile as an important piece of information. Rather than rejecting the job requests put up by candidates, the management can store their information and can keep it for future references. This way, neither the candidates will feel demoralised and the company will also be able to find potential candidates whenever there is a need in the outlets. Lastly, the companies operating in the retail industry should make it a point that they have more employees working as permanent staff rather than hiring staff on a temporary basis. The managers can then arrange for training and development of permanent staff members in order to keep them engaged, motivated and also to retain them in the longer run. This way, managers will also be able to execute succession planning strategies for such employees and it will become easier for the managers to strengthen their recruitment and selection process because of the presence a dedicated and engaged pool of employees. Conclusion The retail sector is one of the most competitive sectors in the global economy and is responsible for a major portion of the global GDP and employment opportunities. The issues that retail companies are experiencing in the recruitment and selection of their employees can have a major impact on their business activities if not dealt with properly. Thus, it is important for the managers operating in the retail industry to get more awareness about these issues and look into the above recommendations in order to strengthen their recruitment and selection process. Bibliography Rahate, A. (2015). Top 15 Worlds Biggest Retail Giants. Retrieved May 19, 2017, from listovative.com: https://listovative.com/top-15-worlds-biggest-retail-giants/ French, R., Rumbles, S. (2010). Recruitment and Selection . Managing and Developing People. Hendry, C. (2012). Human Resource Management . Routledge. Barrett, D. (2016, October 2016). Six recruitment challenges that retailers must conquer. Retrieved May 20, 2017, from hrzone.com: https://www.hrzone.com/talent/acquisition/six-recruitment-challenges-that-retailers-must-conquer Brunot, T. (n.d.). HR Challenges in the Retail Sector. Retrieved May 20, 2017, from yourbusiness.azcentral.com: https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/hr-challenges-retail-sector-1648.html KHILLARE, D. S. (2016, March). Challenges Of Human Resource Practices In Retail Sectors : in India. International Journal of Engineering Technology, Management and Applied Sciences, 4(3). employer.careerbuilder.com. (n.d.). Recruiting and Retaining Top Talent in the Retail Industry. Retrieved May 20, 2017, from employer.careerbuilder.com: https://employer.careerbuilder.com/jobposter/small-business/article.aspx?articleid=ATL_0170RETAIL Singh, B. D., Mishra, S. (2008, July). Indian Retail Sector- HR Challenges Measures for Improvement. Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, 44(1). Staniforth, J. (2016, March 31). The best online recruiting resource for HR, In-house Recruiters and Hiring Managers. Retrieved May 20, 2017, from vacancy-filler.co.uk: https://blog.vacancy-filler.co.uk/how-to-fix-the-recruitment-problems-in-the-retail-sector Retailthinktank.co.uk. (n.d.). What changes are retailers making to their HR strategies and operational practices to adapt to the recession? Retrieved May 2017, from www.retailthinktank.co.uk: https://www.retailthinktank.co.uk/whitepaper/what-changes-are-retailers-making-to-their-hr-strategies-and-operational-practices-to-adapt-to-the-recession/

Postcolonial Literature an Example of the Topic Literature Essays by

Postcolonial Literature - Historical, Political and Cultural contexts Generally, ideologies of nation and nationalism together with theories of modernity and postcoloniality are explained through the recordings of history in all their political, economic, cultural, historical, and archeological implications. It is the analyses of these implications that postcolonial scholars find useful in holding empire accountable, if not for anything else, at least for querying history. Romila Thapar in "The Past and the Prejudice" foregrounds the intellectual impetus behind the colonial method of writing history. She begins by saying: Need essay sample on "Postcolonial Literature - Historical, Political and Cultural contexts" topic? We will write a custom essay sample specifically for you Proceed Students Often Tell EssayLab specialists: I'm don't want to write my essay. Because I want to spend time with my friends Essay writer professionals suggest: Get Help In Writing An Essay Buy College Papers Buy Written Essays Online Assignment Help Buy Essays Cheap There is a qualitative change between the traditional writing of history and history as we know it today. The modern writing of history was influenced in its manner of handling the evidence by two factors. One was the intellectual influence of the scientific revolution, which resulted in an emphasis on the systematic uncovering of the past and on checking the authenticity of historical facts. The other was the impact on the motivation of history by the new ideology of nationalism, with stress on the notion of a common language, culture and history of a group. Indeed, historical studies the world over have assumed special significance in proving the background of nationalism. Thapar also acknowledges that the Enlightenment agenda and the European mode of writing the nation in tracing nationalist trajectories were structurally manipulated to fashion the history of the colonized peoples. Going beyond such an overtly fictive telling, the Subaltern Studies Group argues that there is another layer of colonial domination by showing that historiography of newly emergent nations (as in the writing of nation/nationalist struggles) borrows heavily from pejorative, imperial methods to often ignore, even delete subaltern historiography in order to privilege elitist, official versions. In fact, this argument echoes one of Frantz Fanon's most brilliant insights, wherein he excavated and scrutinized the damaged psyche of the colonized people to show how the native mirrors the desires of the colonizer. Recently, in "Absences in History" Aloka Parasher has foregrounded that debate by posing a challenge to scholarship which relies on poststructural vocabulary to decode colonization and re-encode a new historiography. She says that in our new post-modern consciousness we apparently privilege the margins of the past by constructing a new difference of the other "other" which has all the elements of heterogeneity, multivocality, and open-endedness, but the space and item where these margins of the past meet are the center of history... In a study of pre-modern society [colonized nations] then, where history as we understand it today was an alien concept, we privilege a modern notion of history [that of a de-colonized nation] and all that it entails so that it becomes central, and the object of study to remain distant and marginal. Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses presents a cacophony of voices, most of them "unfamiliar," a polyphonic babble contesting the right to speak. Far from valorizing "verse" and its ideology, The Satanic Verses demonizes it. This text asserts the centrality of the margins, transgressing and interrogating boundaries of genre, class, time, traditions, geography. If Vikram Seth Golden Gate is Barthes' comfortable "text of pleasure," The Satanic Verses is Barthes' "text of bliss": Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with pleasure. Rushdie's text is indeed discomforting. The loss it imposes is the loss of familiar aesthetic pleasures: truth is neither beauty, nor beauty necessarily truth, and you need to know much, much more than that in this life. Indeed, if we are to trust this novel, truth and beauty and being are all provisional and precarious. It is not surprising, then, that Rushdie's work has become more a historical icon than an aesthetic artifact. As he writes of a character in Midnight's Children, he is "handcuffed to history" (a fine phrase later used by Uma Parameswaran in titling an essay about Rushdie work). When the furor over The Satanic Verses and the Ayatollah's fatwah was at its height, it was commonly said that The Satanic Verses was the most talked-about novel that was never read. The implications of this statement are double: first, that it is primarily a political, not an aesthetic, document; and second, that it is, as some critics stated at the time, unreadable, perhaps even not a "good" book. That is, it does not deliver pleasure in the comfortable and comforting aesthetic codes we know and to which we respond. Indeed, the novel may refuse to allow the kinds of pleasure that The Golden Gate provides. But Verses has embedded within it other semiotic codes of pleasure: the codes of literary realism, as we can see in the multiplicity of detail, as well as in the insistence on history. In addition, many critics have commented on Rushdie's work as embodying magical realism, or as being postmodernist in its metafictionality. Still other critics have demonstrated the literary and linguistic playfulness with which Rushdie entertains, teases, and pleases the reader. My point in bringing up such well-known literary categories as "literary realism," "magical realism," and "postmodernism" is again to ask us to focus on the uses of the aesthetic in the genre of the postcolonial. Rushdie's politics, his particularity of place, ethnicity, race, his evocation of the frightening "Other reader," do not come exclusive of aesthetic technique. Nor is that aesthetic merely a matter of ornamental decoration. Rushdie's text makes enormous claims to the experience and the discourse of the aesthetic, in o rder to claim its power and its moral force for itself. Rushdie's text, no less than Seth's, sets out to give pleasure. But the nature of those pleasures are different. One way of expressing that difference is in Barthes' terms, the comforting text of pleasure and the discomforting text of bliss. But this structure has an in-built hierarchical ranking--pleasure as lesser than bliss--with which I'm uneasy. Another way, perhaps, of expressing the difference of pleasure might lie in the difference between two of the definitions of the aesthetic that I used at the beginning of this paper: pleasure as evoked by formal expression, and the pleasure evoked by the expression of being of a particular social identity. I would reverse the categories of "minor" and "major" as Jameson uses them in his essay. While Seth's novel makes claims to being major by drawing upon the familiar pleasures of the aesthetic, it is, finally, "minor" because, in making an aesthetic claim to pleasure on primarily literary, formal grounds, it reinscribes the traditional separation of art and politics as forever separate. This is a fairly small, exclusive stage for the operation of the aesthetic experience. In some sense, Rushdie's novel, too, could be called "minor," but in a different sense, and a political sense. JanMohamed and Lloyd speak, not of being minor, but of becoming minor, that is of deliberately choosing to ally oneself with the groups of those who are historically disenfranchised, racial and ethnic minorities, women of all races and ethnicities, all the groups characterized by "difference" from the dominant classes: "'Becoming minor' is not a question of essence . . . but a question of position: a subject-position that in the final analysis can be defined only in 'political' terms--that is, in terms of the effects of economic exploitation, political disenfranchisement, social manipulation, and ideological domination on the cultural formation of minority subjects and discourses". To use this definition of "minor" for Rushdie's work is to follow Jameson's separation of the aesthetic and the political, to perceive the formal properties of Rushdie's text as "flaws" that detract from its provision of pleasure, and, finally, to see it as primarily political rather than aesthetic. But Rushdie's work makes forceful claims for its own aesthetic status. Unlike Seth's, it does not make a singular claim to the pleasures of aesthetic form. Rather, it makes plural aesthetic claims: it chooses to "become minor," in JanMohamed and Lloyd's sense, discomforting us with the expression of "minor" identities, with its "political" identity. But it simultaneously assaults us with formal, aesthetic demands on our attention; that is, it insists on its "artistic" identity. In doing so, it refuses to allow us, as readers, to safely separate art from politics, private from public, experience from knowledge, our private selves from the body politic. This gives it a more expansive, more inclusive stage to operate as a verbal artifact, as a piece of literary artifice: both art and politics, both aesthetics and history, both personal and collective. Here, the pistol shots neither replace nor compete with the concert: they are an integral part of the music. In other words, Rushdie Satanic Verses forces us to reformulate Jameson "Freud versus Marx" as "Freud is Marx"--and this may make it a "major" work, after all. Rushdie's work also suggests the ways in which history has perpetually undermined that dream of wholeness, leaving behind a "deep disorder," a legacy of cultural violation and dependency. The fully autonomous identity for which his characters yearn remains impossible; and the mimicry of other peoples and other values becomes inevitable. Rushdie's work stands as a later moment in both the literature and the historical process of decolonization; he takes what Bhabha describes as that "separation from origins and essences" as his starting point. In attempting to define an independent India's "national longing for form," he uses what: he terms a "historically validated eclecticism" to mount an attack on "the confining myth of authenticity" itselfan attack located in the very ground of his work's language. The most important writer that Anglophone South Asia has yet produced, Rushdie remakes English into a new Indian language called "Angrezi," in a move that at once destabilizes the imperial idea of a standard English to which one must conform and challenges the nativist assumption that there's only one "good, right way" to be Indian. For Paul Scott India provided the mausoleum for "the last two great senses of public duty we [British] had as a people . . . the sense of duty that was part and parcel of having an empire"--the duty, once having taken possession of India, to govern it responsibly and well--"and the sense of duty so many of us felt that to get rid of it was the liberal human thing to do." In literary terms the first approximates to Kipling and the second to Forster. Yet the dichotomy between them no longer seems so clear. They disagree as to what ought to be done about imperialism, but the rhetoric through which each writer depicts India is many ways the same. Both, for example, see the Raj as outside history; both are subject to what the historian Francis Hutchins calls "the illusion of permanence" on which the Raj depended. Nevertheless, Scott's distinction between those "two great senses of public duty" remains a good one, and his own achievement in The Raj Quartet ( 1966- 1975) lay in synthesizing the work of his predecessors to show how those duties came inevitably into conflict. From Scott the rhetoric of English India leads to the work of the two major novelists of the Indian diaspora, Rushdie and the Trinidadian Hindu V. S. Naipaul; a brief comparison of their work will provide this chapter's conclusion. Other important novels have of course emerged from England's engagement with empire in other parts of the globe. One thinks especially of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea ( 1966), and Timothy Mo's historical novel about the founding of Hong Kong, An Insular Possession ( 1986), not to mention the national literatures of Australia or Nigeria or South Africa. Yet nowhere was the British literary encounter with imperialism so complex, or of so sustained a quality, as in India, the oldest and most important of Britain's conquered territories; hence this chapter's emphasis. But the British novel of Africa is also important, and its terms differ in interesting ways from those in which the British saw India. Before turning to Naipaul and Rushdie, we will therefore pause to examine some of its major motifs. According to Ahmad, postcolonial theory subsequently favors the work of the migrant intelligentsia of Third World origin based in the West. Said and his followers are taken to task for assuming that writers like Salman Rushdie (to whom Ahmad is consistently hostile) represent the authentic voice of their countries of origin. Instead, Ahmad locates them within the politically dominant class fraction of their host society, to which texts like Shame, like postcolonial theory itself, are in the first instance deemed to be addressed. Ultimately, Ahmad implies, a lot of such work needs to be placed within metropolitan discursive traditions such as Orientalism and Ahmad takes Said severely to task for failing to see how a text like Satanic Verses belongs to a long tradition of anti-Islamic sentiment in the West. When Third World culture 'proper' is addressed in postcolonial theory, Ahmad argues, most attention is given to those texts which 'answer back' to imperial and neo-colonial culture--for instance, the fictional ripostes to Heart of Darkness by figures as diverse as Chinua Achebe, Wilson Harris and Tayib Salih. According to In Theory, this attention to work that has been, in a crucial sense, interpellated by Western culture simply reinforces the traditional relationship between centre and periphery which underlay all discourse, political and cultural, of the colonial period. There is thus a damaging tendency 'to view the products of the English-writing intelligentsia of the cosmopolitan cities as the central documents' of the national literature of the country in question. In the process those aspects of Third World culture which are most genuinely independent of metropolitan influences and of allegiance to the national bourgeoisie, such as literatures written in regional Indian languages, are either neglected or ignored. Resources Ahmad, "Literary Theory and Third World Literature: Some Contexts", In Theory, pp. 68-9. Procter, J. (ed.) (2000) Writing Black Britain 1948-1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology,Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rushdie, S. (1988) The Satanic Verses, London: Viking Penguin. Rushdie, S. (1991) Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, London: Granta/ Penguin. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978. Thapar, Romila. "The Past and the Prejudice." New Delhi: National Book Trust of India, 1980.