For a general, Western audience in the habit of regarding history as a record of events following one another in chronological order, postcolonialism is “the historical period or state of affairs representing the aftermath of Western colonialism”,2 and in this mainstream visualised sequence of events, the historical period in question covers a span of time of approximately fifty years of the last century. Historians identify 1947 – which marks the independence of India – as the beginning of the end of the British Empire; whereas its final stage is associated with 1997 when the handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China occurred. Based on a rough calculation, it took Great Britain around three hundred years to develop into the British Empire but only fifty years for that empire to fall.