ISBN 978-3-8233-8591-2 Contemporary Indian English Literature focuses on the recent history of Indian literature in English since the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981), a watershed moment for Indian writing in English in the global literary landscape. The chapters in this volume consider a wide range of poets, novelists, short fiction writers and dramatists who have notably contributed to the proliferation of Indian literature in English from the late 20th century to the present. The volume provides an introduction to current developments in Indian English literature and explains general ideas, as well as the specific features and styles of selected writers from this wide spectrum. It addresses students working in this field at university level, and includes thorough reading lists and study questions to encourage students to read, reflect on and write about Indian English literature critically. Sandten / Karmakar / von Knebel Doeberitz (eds.) Contemporary Indian English Literature Contemporary Indian English Literature Contexts - Authors - Genres - Model Analyses Cecile Sandten / Indrani Karmakar / Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz (eds.) Prof. Dr. Cecile Sandten ist Inhaberin der Professur für Anglistische Literaturwissenschaft an der Technischen Universität Chemnitz. © Universität Leipzig, SUK © Dibakar Mollique © Petra Hammermüller Dr. Indrani Karmakar ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der Professur für Anglistische Literaturwissenschaft an der Technischen Universität Chemnitz. Prof. Dr. Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz war Professor für British Cultural Studies an der Universität Leipzig. Cecile Sandten / Indrani Karmakar / Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz (eds.) Contemporary Indian English Literature Contexts - Authors - Genres - Model Analyses DOI: https: / / doi.org/ 10.24053/ 9783823395911 © 2024 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. 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Internet: www.narr.de eMail: info@narr.de CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 2627-0323 ISBN 978-3-8233-8591-2 (Print) ISBN 978-3-8233-9591-1 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-8233-0503-3 (ePub) Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. www.fsc.org MIX Papier aus verantwortungsvollen Quellen FSC ® C083411 ® 1 11 1.1 11 1.2 12 1.3 19 1.4 24 27 2 29 2.1 30 2.2 32 2.2.1 32 2.2.2 34 2.2.3 36 2.2.4 37 2.3 39 2.4 41 2.4.1 42 2.4.2 44 2.4.3 47 2.4.4 49 2.4.5 52 2.4.6 56 2.5 57 2.6 57 2.7 58 3 61 3.1 61 3.2 62 3.3 63 Contents Introduction - Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts - Authors - Genres - Model Analyses | Indrani Karmakar and Cecile Sandten, Chemnitz University of Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contemporary Indian English Literature: Genres and Authors . . . . . . Contemporary Indian English Literature: This Volume . . . . . . . . . . . . Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part I: From the 1980s to the 2000s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Salman Rushdie — Between East and West | David Walther, Greifswald University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Biography and Relevance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works and Topics — An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . East . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In-Between . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children’s Literature, Short Stories and Non-Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stylistic and Modal Specifics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Midnight’s Children: A Model Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Narrative Frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Question of Origins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Colonial Elements and Postcolonial Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Midnight’s Children, Democracy and Fractures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Essentialist Antagonists, the New Generation and Parvati-the-Witch Final Atomization and the Chutnification of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Study Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions | Indrani Karmakar, Chemnitz University of Technology . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Writing in English: The Language Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Writing Women: Texts and Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 65 3.5 69 3.5.1 70 3.5.2 75 3.6 78 3.7 79 3.8 80 3.9 80 3.10 81 4 85 4.1 85 4.2 89 4.3 96 4.4 98 4.5 99 4.6 99 5 103 5.1 103 5.2 104 5.3 108 5.4 113 5.5 117 5.6 119 5.7 119 5.8 120 6 121 6.1 121 6.2 123 6.2.1 124 6.2.2 125 6.3 132 6.3.1 133 6.3.2 134 “The New Indian Woman”: From Post-Colonial to Post-Liberalisation Thematic Concerns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Trajectory of Mother-Daughter Relationships: The Binding Vine (1993) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gender, Communalism and the Nation: Small Remedies (2000) . . . . . . Modernism or Social Realism: The Question of Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Study Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ephemera and Amit Chaudhuri’s Radical Modernist Aesthetic | Monika Fludernik, University of Freiburg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Meandering Gaze: From Sandeep to Jayojit and ‘I’ . . . . . . . . . . . . Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Study Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Female Body in Indian Women Writers’ Short Stories | Ellen Dengel-Janic, Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Short Story in India: Traditions, Significance, Themes . . . . . . . . . Githa Hariharan’s “The Remains of the Feast”: The Body as a Site of Transgression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Binapani Mohanty’s “Lata”: The Body as a Site of Shame . . . . . . . . . . The Short Story and the Phenomenology of the Female Body . . . . . . Study Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Condition-of-India’ Plays: Mahesh Dattani (1958—) and Poile Sengupta (1948—) | Maitrayee Misra, Central University of Odisha, India . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mahesh Dattani (1958—) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Themes in Mahesh Dattani’s Plays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion of Final Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poile Sengupta (1948—) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Major Themes in Poile Sengupta’s Plays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discussion of Mangalam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 6.4 140 6.5 141 6.6 141 6.7 141 7 143 7.1 143 7.2 144 7.3 149 7.4 152 7.4.1 152 7.4.2 164 7.5 170 7.6 171 7.7 172 7.8 172 177 8 179 8.1 179 8.2 182 8.3 194 8.4 197 8.5 198 8.6 198 8.7 199 9 201 9.1 201 9.2 205 9.3 210 9.4 213 9.5 217 9.6 218 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Study Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: The Diasporic Experience in the Poetry of Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker | Cecile Sandten, Chemnitz University of Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historical Background: Indian Poetry in English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theoretical Concepts: Diaspora, Hybridity, Interand Transculturality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Indian English Women Poets: Texts and Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sujata Bhatt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Imtiaz Dharker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Study Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part II: From the 2000s to the Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace | Asis De, Mahishadal Raj College, India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Glass Palace (2000): Themes and Narrative Structure . . . . . . . . . . Model Analyses of Three Passages from Ghosh’s The Glass Palace . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Study Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction | Oliver v. Knebel Doeberitz, University of Leipzig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Manu Joseph’s Serious Men (2010) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Study Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contents 7 9.7 218 9.8 219 10 223 10.1 223 10.2 226 10.2.1 226 10.2.2 229 10.2.3 232 10.3 234 10.4 235 10.4.1 235 10.4.2 239 10.5 240 10.5.1 240 10.5.2 241 10.6 244 10.7 245 10.8 245 10.9 246 11 249 11.1 249 11.2 252 11.3 257 11.4 264 11.5 268 11.6 269 11.7 270 11.8 270 12 273 12.1 273 12.2 276 12.3 280 12.4 287 Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India | Anna M. Horatschek, Kiel University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intersectional Identities — Intersectional Power Constellations . . . . . Gender Matters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Religion, Caste and Tribe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Global Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Skeletons Under Water: Repression and Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . Counterworlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nation Building and the Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nation Building in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Novel Nation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Study Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The South Asian Refugee Novel in English | Miriam Nandi, University of Leipzig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Doors to Safety in a Precarious World: Exit West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Planet on the Move: Gun Island . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On not Getting by (Undocumented) in Australia: Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contesting Border-Regimes, Imagining the Opposite: Conclusions . . Study Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New India, New Realism? Narrating Socio-Economic Change in Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty (2020) and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide (2022) | Hannah Pardey, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Approaching ‘New India’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aravind Adiga: Amnesty (2020) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pankaj Mishra: Run and Hide (2022) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Contents 12.5 292 12.6 293 12.7 293 12.8 294 13 299 13.1 299 13.2 303 13.3 311 13.4 316 13.5 317 13.6 317 13.7 318 321 323 Coda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Study Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Big Other and Big Brother: State Violence, Surveillance, and Censorship in Contemporary Indian English Drama | Ariane de Waal, University of Leipzig Introduction: Where to Look for Contemporary Indian Drama in English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . India as Big Other: Abhishek Majumdar’s The Djinns of Eidgah (2012) The State as Big Brother: Annie Zaidi’s Untitled 1 (2018) . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Study Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . About the Editors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contents 9 1 Introduction - Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts - Authors - Genres - Model Analyses Indrani Karmakar and Cecile Sandten, Chemnitz University of Technology 1.1 Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts India is made up of many ‘Indias’: many people, many cultures and many languages. India is a multifaceted and diverse country, where people speak and write in a variety of languages. Thus, it is also described by the simple but now-cliché term “unity in diversity” (cf. Wandel 2004), coined by the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in his book Discovery of India (2004 [1946]). India is a federal union, currently consisting of 28 states and 8 Union Territories; 110 different languages are spoken in the country. Apart from English, which has been one of the official languages since 1954 and is often used as a bridge language among Indians, there are 21 major or scheduled languages in India, each with its own system of pronunciation and writing. In some states, more than one major language is spoken and in several states, many different minor and tribal languages exist, for instance, in the northeastern state of Bihar. In addition, many different dialects are spoken all over India. Moreover, different languages have, at different times, been ‘privileged’ — have carried the most power and prestige. The ancient language of Sanskrit, no longer a spoken tongue, remains important as the language of the great Hindu literary epics and scriptures, including the Ramayana, the Bhagavadgita and the Mahabharata. The Ramayana, along with the Mahabharata, is the most influential Sanskrit epic that tells the story of the hero Rama, the prince of Ayodhya and his devoted wife Sita. Its composition is ascribed to the poet Valmiki (c. 300 BCE) and contains in its current form 24,000 couplets. The prince is banned from the kingdom of Ayodhya and lives in exile with his wife and his half-brother Lakshmana. The stories revolve around Rama’s fight against the demon king Ravana together with the ingenious monkey-general Hanuman. The Ramayana’s popularity persists in dances, songs, performances, comics and TV series. Bhagavadgita, translated as ‘The Beautiful Song by God’, is a 700-verse Hindu scripture that is part of the epic Mahabharata. It is considered to be one of the holy scriptures of Hinduism. The Urdu language dates back to the time when Muslim nations from the north and west invaded and settled in India. It developed as a result of the interaction between the soldiers of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire, who spoke Indian languages and Persian. Over time, a mixture of these languages emerged as a new language: Urdu. Hindi, a modern descendant of Sanskrit, is now spoken by roughly one-third of India’s population and is considered the most-spoken minority language. In this regard, it is important to note the development of the so-called “Hindi belt” that runs through the centre of India, dividing the country linguistically into Hindi-based and Dravidian-based languages, including, among the latter, Tamil. English was imported by the British when they invaded and colonised India and it remains a much-used language among the educated and the elite. The poet A. K. Ramanujan (1929-1993) describes how Sanskrit and English were his “father-tongues”, used by his father — English, to help him understand the imposed orderliness of colonial India and Sanskrit, to understand the stars, which he watched from the roof-top of the house — while his mother used her “mother-tongues”, Tamil and Kannada, to help him maintain vivid contact with the exciting “ordinary” world which surrounded his home “downstairs” (Ramanujan 1996: 449-450). The British first arrived in “India” (then the Indian subcontinent) as traders in 1589, although it was not until 1848, after more than two centuries of trade and colonisation, that India was declared part of the British Empire, also being referred to at the time as the “Jewel of the Crown”. Accordingly, Burton Stein writes: “In 1858, following the Mutiny and seemingly as a direct outcome, the East India Company was dismantled and its powers of government passed directly to the British Crown” (Stein 1998: 239). The great Indian Mutiny and Civil Rebellion of 1857 “was to reverberate through all the relations of the British Indian empire for the next ninety years. Large num‐ bers of sepoys,” Indian soldiers serving under British orders, “in the Bengal army rose against British rule and set out to restore a variety of previous ruling dynasties” (Stein 1998: 226). From the 1840s on, English became widely used as an official language, for instance, in universities. To this day, English remains one of the two official languages of India (alongside Hindi) and, in many ways, the language of the middle classes across the country, with over 129 million English speakers (Harvard Political Review n.p.). 1.2 Contemporary Indian English Literature: Genres and Authors The linguistic diversity described above is reflected in India’s rich literary output in all its many languages. Indian English literature, however, has a literary tradition that has grown and evolved over the past century. From the 1930s to the present, Indian English literature has also been shaped by the political and social changes that formed modern India when British colonisation was still a shaping power that was fought against but 12 1 Introduction - Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts - Authors - Genres - Model Analyses also embraced — in particular the English language — at least by an English-educated elite. In his essay “Minute on Indian Education” (1835), English historian and colonial administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) formulated the essential goals of the colonial education programme as an expression of an anglocentric sense of mission. Although wholly ignorant of Sanskrit or any other Indian language, he believed that “[a] single shelf of good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (Macaulay 1979 [1835]: 349). He further called for an image of the Indian according to British taste: “Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (Macaulay 1979 [1835]: 359). This paradox — writing in the language of the coloniser — can be observed in the earliest examples of Indian English literature, which can be traced back to the 1860s, specifically, to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s (1838-1894) novel Rajmohan’s Wife (1864), a text made available serially in the magazine Indian Field. More significantly, however, this paradox appeared to become particularly prevalent in the 1930s, when a small group of Indian writers began to experiment with the English language. These writers were Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004), Raja Rao (1908-2006) and R.K. Narayan (1906-2001), who were part of a cultural and intellectual movement that sought to redefine Indian identity and culture. They were British-educated and wrote in English, which was seen as a tool to assert modernity and reach a wider audience. They also aimed to convey their message to the British colonisers, who had not only imposed the English language on India but had also subjugated the entire country to British rule. This early phase of Indian English literature was marked by a focus on such themes as identity, culture and, more broadly, tradition and the question of how to address these issues vis á vis a modernist literary movement that the writers of that time sought to employ. Influenced by writers such as Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot and utilising a modernist style of writing, they infused their texts with a decidedly Indian setting and voice. For instance, in Mulk Raj Anand’s social problem novel Untouchable (1935), Anand criticises the abominable effects of the caste system in India through the experiences of the novel’s protagonist Bakha, an 18-year-old latrine sweeper. Apart from focusing on an outcaste’s life, Anand writes in English, which he infuses with a strong Punjabi flair. The term “Indian English literature” thus already comprises three aspects: a possible or supposed Indianness, a specific form (here the modernist novel) and the use of a non-Indian language as a creative language (cf. Riemenschneider 2005: 8 f.). The post-World War II period, including the Empire’s decline in the 1940s and 1950s, saw the emergence of a new generation of Indian English writers, including Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897-1999), Khushwant Singh (1915-2014) and Kamala Markandaya (1924-2004), in addition to Anand, Rao and Narayan, who continued to write in a socially critical (Anand), philosophical (Rao) and more light-hearted but nonetheless critically observant mode (Narayan). These writers continued to explore themes of identity, culture and the conflict between tradition and modernity, that is, the question of ‘Indianness’ in their writings, but they also engaged with the political and social 1.2 Contemporary Indian English Literature: Genres and Authors 13 changes that characterised India during that time. They wrote about the impact of colonialism, the struggle for independence and the challenges of nation building after India gained independence in August 1947. However, they also had to address the question of partition and its aftermath — the most traumatic experience during the time of independence — as depicted, for instance, in Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan (1956). Their works around that time were marked by a sense of disillusionment and a search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. The 1960s and 1970s, however, saw the emergence of a new literary movement in Indian English literature, known as Indian Writing in English. Topics addressed included the recurring problems of language and style as well as the rather critical question of the impact of Europe on the Indian imagination (cf. Guptara 1979: 18-34). Moreover, writers like Anita Desai (1937-), Nayantara Sahgal (1927-) — who was also a political activist — Kamala Markandaya (1924-2004) and Shashi Deshpande (1938-) used their works to explore a range of political and social issues, including commu‐ nalism, poverty and (gendered) oppression, concentrating specifically on women as their main characters. During this time, the ‘political novel’ became more generally a prominent tool with which writers addressed their political and social concerns. This movement was additionally marked by a focus on the experiences of the Indian diaspora: Indians or Pakistanis who had migrated to countries like Great Britain, the U.S. or Australia and had formed Indian or Pakistani communities there. They therefore explored themes such as displacement, diaspora and exile. Writers like V.S. Naipaul (1932-2018) and R.K. Narayan (1906-2001) wrote about the experiences of Indians who had migrated to other parts of the world and the challenges they faced in adapting to new cultures and identities. Following these writers came Salman Rushdie (1947-) who, in his now-classic Midnight’s Children (1981), heralded a new literary phase by focusing on postcolonial issues and migration in a writing style known as magic realism, which combines fantastical elements with realist details. “Magic realist novels and stories have, typically, a strong narrative drive, in which the recognizable realistic mingles with the unexpected and the inexplicable, and in which elements of dream, fairy-story, or mythology combine with the everyday, often in a mosaic or kaleidoscopic pattern of refraction and recurrence” (Drabble 1998: 603). This paved the way for new writers from the Indian subcontinent and abroad who were writing in English to explore new topics and styles. The 1980s were initially characterised by a more common theme: the question of how to place the Indian English novel within a national cultural context. This was interrupted by the postcolonial discourse introduced by Edward Said and his seminal study Orientalism (1978) as well as others, especially leading Indian critics and theorists such as Gayatri Spivak and 14 1 Introduction - Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts - Authors - Genres - Model Analyses Homi Bhabha, along with the subsequent publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), which contributed to the departure from the predominantly realist mode of the Indian English novel that had been practised since the 1930s. Consequently, the 1980s and 1990s saw a shift in Indian English literature towards postcolonialism. This literary movement was marked by a focus on the legacy of colonialism and the on-going impact of colonialism on Indian society. Such writers as Arundhati Roy (1961-), Amitav Ghosh (1956-) and Vikram Seth (1952-) have explored themes of power, identity and resistance. They have also critiqued the colonial past and the continuing influence of colonialism on Indian society. The 21 st century has seen a continuation of the themes and movements that have characterised Indian English literature, in particular, the question of the ‘Indianness’ of the works produced by Indian English writers. However, women writers who have appeared on the international literary scene have also brought about a shift towards a more global perspective. These include American Jhumpa Lahiri (1967-), American-based Kiran Desai (1971-) and Delhi-based Manju Kapur (1948-), who explore themes of migration, diaspora and identity in addition to bringing a decidedly female perspective to the fore. Further, with a number of prolific female writers, Indian English literature has experienced an upsurge in ‘feminist’ literature in India, in what is undoubtedly an Indian feminist trajectory. Writers like Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1956-), Anuradha Roy (1967-) and Shobhaa De (1948-) have investigated the experiences of women in India and the ways in which these women are shaped by society: struggling against patriarchal oppression on the one hand, while, on the other, exploring female identity and womanhood. Post-millennial writing in English from India and the diaspora has once more changed, as a consequence of the seemingly unrestrained introduction of media and IT technology on the Indian subcontinent. Writers are thereby invited to employ other forms of writing in conjunction with the new technologies, in what is referred to as ‘Indo chick lit’. Novels like Rome-based Kaushik Barua’s No Direction Rome (2017) or New York-based Nikita Singh’s Love@Facebook (2011) attest to these new, however commodifying forms of writing, making use of ‘oriental’ markers such as yoga, Indian spices, saris, bright exotic colours, meditation, bindis or tattoos of Indian deities, but also making reference to Facebook and the internet, thereby depicting an ‘Indo chick’ for global reception of a neo-liberalised India. A bindi is a brightly coloured dot (usually red) worn in the middle of the forehead by people in South Asia and the Indian subcontinent, particularly within Hindu and other religious communities. Writing from socially critical, geographically, culturally and linguistically diverse positions, it has become obvious that Indian English writers have felt particularly 1.2 Contemporary Indian English Literature: Genres and Authors 15 drawn to the narrative form, that is, the modern, postcolonial and diasporic Indian English novel. Analogously, India to date also has a strong poetic writing tradition with similar developments as outlined for the novel. Spanning over a century, Indian English poetry began with the works of Indian poets like Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the first non-European and the first poet to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 and Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949), who wrote in English during the early 20 th century. Indian English poetry has evolved over time and has been influenced by a variety of cultural and linguistic traditions, including English Romanticism and modern British and American literature, as well as Indian poetry in other Indian languages. Within this framework, Indian poets have incorporated elements of Indian mythology, culture, language and history into their works. Some notable Indian English poets include A.K. Ramanujan (1929-1993), Kamala Das (1934-2009), Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004), Dom Moraes (1938-2004), Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004), Jeet Thayil (1959-), Vikram Seth (1952-) and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (1947-), among others. In her free-verse poem “An Introduction”, published in her 1965 poetry collection Summer in Calcutta, Kamala Das poetically renders important the question of language. She affirms her idea of the freedom of the writer to use any language in which they feel comfortable, thus highlighting the relationship between place, language and identity. In this poem, the speaker’s strategy is to ask rhetorical questions. The irony contained in the questions implies a mockery of the addressee’s world view and value system by decidedly highlighting the speaker’s own situation and her “joys”, “longings” and “hopes”: […] Why not let me speak in Any language I like? The language I speak, Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest, It is as human as I am human, don’t You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing Is to crows or roaring to the lions, […]. (Das 1965: 59, ll. 9-17) Given the pluralistic traditions of India, Indian English poetry is, similar to the novel, variegated in terms of themes, topics and styles, often also critically exploring social inequalities, city life and the writer’s search for self. Turning to the genre of drama, however, the situation is slightly different than it is with the novel or poetry. The Indian theatre tradition has a rich and diverse history spanning over 5,000 years. It is believed to have originated during the Vedic age (c. 1500-500 BCE). More precisely, Indian theatre evolved from the Sanskrit theatre of the 2 nd century BCE. This theatre tradition included dramatic narratives, music and dance, and was derived from the concept of “natya”, the Sanskrit word for drama (Westlake 2017: 30). Sanskrit theatre served as a template for other theatrical forms 16 1 Introduction - Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts - Authors - Genres - Model Analyses that developed on the subcontinent, among them, the Natya Shastra, an ancient treatise on performing arts believed to have been written by Bharata Muni, an ancient sage (cf. Dace 1963: 249). It covers various aspects of theatre, including acting, stagecraft and music. Yakshagana, a traditional theatre form that originated in the state of Karnataka, is known for its vibrant costumes and makeup as well as its use of music and dance. Kathakali, perhaps the most well-known theatre practice, is a traditional dance-drama form renowned in the state of Kerala. It also uses elaborate makeup and costumes and employs very extravagant and set facial expressions and physical movements to convey emotions. Nautanki is a popular form of musical theatre that had its origins in North India. It is famous for its use of folk songs, dance and comedy to tell stories. Bhavai, a folk theatre form from Gujarat, puts satire and humour into practice to address social issues, whereas Jatra, a popular folk theatre form from Bengal, draws on music, dance and drama to tell stories (cf. Farley et al. 1993). India’s linguistic and cultural division into different regions, as described above, also resulted in a diversity of theatrical traditions. Non-commercial, regionalised folk theatre and its various traditions were performed throughout India up until the establishment of the British Raj, the period of British colonialism in India from 1858 to 1947 (Stein 1998: 239). However, theatre in India saw significant changes during and after British colonisation. The British introduced Western theatre forms, including English plays, opera and ballet, which then were performed in India during the colonial period. Theatre performances in English in India thus began to develop in the early 19 th century with the staging of English plays performed by British companies. The actors and plays came from London and served as role models for the playhouses in the colonies, including the institution of the popular proscenium stage typical of the architecture of London theatres (cf. Singh 1996: 121). The plays were introduced to entertain the British colonisers and bring a piece of their homeland to India, in particular to Calcutta, the cradle of English theatre in India. As Jyotsna Singh writes, […] such a re-creation of London’s theatrical scene in Calcutta signalled the transportation of British civilisation and culture from the metropolis to the new colony. Starting in 1775, when the Calcutta Theatre or the New Playhouse opened under the patronage of the then Governor General Warren Hastings, and continuing for a period of about a hundred years, English theatres in Calcutta entertained a largely British audience of officers, merchants, clerks and “adventurers” associated with the East India Company and later with the civil service. (Singh 1996: 121) As Singh points out, “[i]n their early years, these were exclusive playhouses, deter‐ mined to insulate themselves from the natives, so that even the ushers and doorkeepers at the Calcutta Playhouse were English” (Singh 1996: 122). Only gradually did these theatres open their doors to Indians, though only to elite, aristocratic Indians (cf. Singh 1996: 122). “By the mid-Victorian period, […] the ‘English-educated’ Bengali middle class as well as the property owning and trading rich had been exposed to English 1.2 Contemporary Indian English Literature: Genres and Authors 17 theatrical ideas and conventions and to Shakespeare fairly extensively” (Raha in Singh 1996: 123). In this context, Singh elucidates that, […] such an interest in Western drama coincided with the official colonial policy of promoting the English language and literature in India. As the British consolidated their presence in India, the impulse to educate the natives gained a wide consensus because it was based on an awareness that the rulers could only rule by co-opting a native elite as a conduit of Western thought and ideas. (Singh 1996: 123) Thus, the British education policy, in keeping with its “civilising mission”, began with Shakespeare as the hallmark of English culture and education. Concomitantly, during the early colonial period, Indian theatre was suppressed by the British, who viewed it as uncivilised and unrefined. During the later period, however, the British increasingly encouraged the development of Indian theatre as a means of cultural exchange and as a way of promoting their own cultural values, in particular through Shakespeare (cf. Gillies et al. 2002: 259-283). The first English play written and performed by an Indian was The Persecuted by thinker and Christian convert Krishna Mohan Banerjee (1813-1885), which was staged in Calcutta in 1830. However, it was only in the mid-20 th century that Indian English theatre began to gain prominence as a distinct genre. One of the major changes that occurred during the period before independence was the emergence of ‘modern Indian theatre’, which set out to combine Western and Indian theatrical forms. This new form of theatre was influenced by social and political changes in India, including the Indian independence movement and the rise of social reform movements. Some key figures who contributed to the development of modern Indian theatre include Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote plays that blend Indian and Western styles and B. V. Karanth (1929-2002), who experimented with traditional Indian theatre forms by fusing them with modern theatre techniques. Post-independence theatre in India continued to flourish, with many new voices emerging and much experimentation with different forms and styles. The National School of Drama, established in 1959, played a significant role in the development of modern Indian theatre by training new actors, directors and playwrights. Some prominent playwrights who contributed to the development of Indian English theatre include Girish Karnad (1938-2019), Vijay Tendulkar (1928-2008), Mahesh Elkunchwar (1939-), Rukhsana Ahmad (1948-), Manjula Padmanabhan (1953-), Mahesh Dattani (1958-) and Arvind Gaur (1963-) as well as some of the notable playwrights of more recent years, such as American Rajiv Joseph (1974-), Anupama Chandrasekhar and Annie Zaidi (1978-). Early playwrights wrote dramas that reflected the social and political issues of their times and often blended Indian and Western cultural influences, addressing, in a vibrant and dynamic mode, the socio-political and cultural context of modern India. This tradition of blending techniques and portraying social-critical concerns continued into later decades: Tughlaq (1964), by Girish Karnad, for instance, is a historical play 18 1 Introduction - Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts - Authors - Genres - Model Analyses depicting the political and social issues of 1960s India. The play is set during the reign of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq, a controversial figure in Indian history and explores themes of power, idealism and betrayal. Harvest (1997) by Manjula Padmanabhan, a well-known Indian playwright and novelist, is a dystopian play that tackles the issues of globalisation, capitalism and consumerism in modern India. The play conveys the story of a poor Indian family that ‘sells’ one of its members to a wealthy Westerner as an organ donor. Pakistani-British Rukhsana Ahmad’s political play A Peasant of El Salvador (1982) reflects the issues of social justice, human rights and globalisation in modern India, and Hypatia (1992) by Sadanand Menon is a historical play that delves into the issues of gender, power and philosophy in ancient Greece. Theatre has thus also contributed significantly to the development of critical voices within the framework of Indian English literature. As Anjali Roy (2000: 70) observes when looking at pre-independence writers and something that has quite frequently been commented upon as Indian writers’ coinages, the nativisation “of words, syntax or metaphors — are means of resisting English’s regulatory function in the colonial context”. This notion of how to use the English language creatively has been picked up by many writers in many genres over the past four decades. Raja Rao’s famous 1938 “credo” of conveying “in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own” and of infusing “into our English expression […] [the] temper of Indian life” (in the preface to Kanthapura), seems to still be relevant and has become the defining characteristic of all literary genres in Indian English literature. Consequently, Indian English writers employ social criticism, write about political issues, such as the awakening of India, the caste system or the upheavals during the pre-independence and post-independence periods, the domestic situation and gender aspects, as well as the desire, even if outside of India, to be indigenously grounded in India and to express this grounding, voiced through specific formal-aesthetic devices, word-jugglery, verbosity and a specific Indian or South Asian touch. 1.3 Contemporary Indian English Literature: This Volume A fundamental concern underlying this volume on Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts — Authors — Genres — Model Analyses is to acknowledge and highlight the contexts and current ideas that inform the field of Indian English literature within two broader frameworks. Accordingly, this volume is structured around two groups of writers and texts: one from the 1980s to the 2000s and the other from the 2000s to the current day. The preceding brief outline of contemporary Indian English literature and the overall outline of this volume serve as a useful general guide for students studying Indian English literature at a BA or MA level at a German university. More precisely, however, the essays in this volume cover a wide range of contexts, authors and genres as well as model analyses of selected texts. The primary objective is to provide students with an introduction and guide to more contemporary texts and approaches to Indian 1.3 Contemporary Indian English Literature: This Volume 19 English literature. That being said, no claim is made that this volume provides complete coverage of Indian English literature — this would be impossible to achieve in a single publication. Nonetheless, we take pride in the fact that this volume includes a large number of authors, ranging from well-known writers, such as Salman Rushdie, Shashi Deshpande, Amit Chaudhuri, Amitav Ghosh, Sujata Bhatt, Githa Hariharan, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga, to emerging writers, including Mohsin Hamid, Manu Joseph, Gautam Malkani, Anuradha Roy, Imtiaz Dharker, Abhishek Majumdar, Annie Zaidi and Pankaj Mishra. The ‘Further Reading Lists’ and ‘Study Questions’ provided in each chapter, along with reader-friendly info boxes, which provide students with visually straightforward information, will be particularly useful in helping students develop ideas and engage with the specific texts they may be required to read as part of their course work. This book has thus been designed to provide German students of English and American Literature, Cultural Studies, Mediaand Communication Studies as well as other related fields with a useful background of contexts for and basic information on Indian English literature as well as on the writers and concepts that have been chosen for the individual chapters, which are each followed by a selection of close readings. Our aim is to focus on the diversity that characterises contemporary Indian English literature by drawing attention to the historical, literary and cultural contexts this volume now reflects. The essays collected in this volume present a qualitatively and thematically broad spectrum of the field of Indian English literature and are all specialised studies in their own right, highlighting the manifold creative output of the writers upon whom the papers focus. Apart from discourses related to aesthetic notions, postcolonialism is one of the most prominent discourses, as it is part of a lively, sometimes conflicting, but pervasive Indian reality. Accordingly, Part I: From the 1980s to the 2000s begins with David Walther’s chapter on “Salman Rushdie - East, West”, which introduces students to postcolonial concerns in Rushdie’s works, such as the troubled identity of post-independence India and the precarious status of migrants and diasporic characters as well as economic and cultural imperialism, while also examining Rushdie’s formal-aesthetic strategies, such as magic realism and the grotesque. Specifically, students are provided with Rushdie’s biographical background, which places him within the larger context of Indian and global literature while explaining his literary and cultural significance. The chapter presents a categorised list of Rushdie’s works, highlighting the primary themes he addresses. Subsequently, Walther discusses Rushdie’s stylistic techniques, such as his use of hybrid language, syncretic postmodernism, archaic oral techniques, magic realism, grotesque satire and intertextuality. The analysis focuses on Midnight’s Children (1981), considered a significant text in postcolonial studies. It highlights the varied imagery used in the book, such as the perforated sheet, chutnification and fissured skin, as well as its self-reflexive narration and incorporation of cinematic techniques. 20 1 Introduction - Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts - Authors - Genres - Model Analyses Indrani Karmakar’s chapter on “Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions” concerns the literary works of Shashi Deshpande, a prominent Indian writer who first emerged in India’s anglophone literary scene in the 1970s and continues to garner critical attention. Foregrounding recurring concerns — women’s subjectivity, motherhood, intergenerational relationships — in Deshpande’s fictional writings (with a brief reference to her non-fiction works), Karmakar’s chapter emphasises how Deshpande’s literary texts speak to the larger socio-political context of postcolonial India. Within this framework, it shows how Deshpande gives particular attention to the idea of the ‘new Indian woman’, as explored and excavated throughout her texts by their dramatisation of a curious oscillation between tradition and modernity, a dichotomy that has its origin in the early 20 th century nationalist discourse on the woman’s ‘home’ and the ‘world’. Focussing on The Binding Vine (1993) and Small Remedies (2000), Karmakar demonstrates how Deshpande’s texts evince this dialectic of home and the world, one that assumes new valences in postcolonial and, most especially, post-liberalised India. Monika Fludernik’s chapter entitled “Ephemera and Amit Chaudhuri’s Radical Modernist Aesthetic” introduces students to the works of Amit Chaudhuri, an im‐ portant literary figure in contemporary Indian English literature, whose novels, as Fludernik argues, deserve more critical attention. The relative paucity of critical works on Chaudhuri’s novels, according to the author, can be attributed to the novels’ complete departure from postmodernism and magic realism evident in more popular ‘stars’ of Indian English fiction, namely Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy or Amitava Ghosh. What Chaudhuri’s fictions offer, in contrast, is an intimate engagement with literary modernism redolent of both British modernism and the particular modernist aesthetics espoused by the earlier generation of Indian English writers such as Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao. Analysing three of Chaudhuri’s novels — A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), A New World (2000) and Friend of My Youth (2017) — Fludernik illustrates how Chaudhuri embraces a ‘radical’ modernist aesthetics in his decisive rejection of plot and ‘storification’. In “The Female Body in Indian Women Writers’ Short Stories”, Ellen Dengel-Janic argues that the short story genre’s adaptability has allowed Indian women writers to experiment with various themes, styles, modes and narrative strategies. Using two short stories as examples, Dengel-Janic illustrates how Indian women writers have made a distinct contribution to the tradition of short story writing. Consequently, the chapter demonstrates how the short story in India is, at once, rooted in tradition but, at the same time, explores new themes and formal innovations. Engaging with Githa Hariharan’s “The Remains of the Feast” (1994) as an exemplary short story that challenges ideas of femininity and gendered identity via the representation of the ageing female body, Dengel-Janic introduces students to the story’s narrative and discursive production of the body in/ as text, which emerges as transgressive of class, caste and gendered norms and boundaries. In contrast, in the Odia short story “Lata” 1.3 Contemporary Indian English Literature: This Volume 21 (1986 [1993]) by Binapini Mohanty, the protagonist is a young woman and the female body is shown at its greatest vulnerability. Odia is an Indian language spoken primarily in the state of Odisha, India. The chapter thus highlights the politics of representation in conjunction with the aesthetics of the short stories, which are explored in a conjoined mode to show how they tease out silenced aspects of women’s existence. Maitrayee Misra’s “A Study of Select Contemporary Indian English Dramas” analyses the emergence of experimental and innovative plays in the post-independence era, particularly after the 1960s, which, due to their focus on performance, gained con‐ siderable success in India. Within this framework, Misra examines Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions (1993). Additionally, the chapter addresses the emergence of women dramatists following Second Wave Feminism in India and discusses Poile Sengupta’s Mangalam (1993) as an example of this trend, thus demonstrating how these two plays offer a depiction of Indian reality and ethos. The author argues that both plays can be considered ‘condition-of-India’ dramas. Cecile Sandten’s “Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: The Diasporic Experience in the Poetry of Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker” begins by outlining Indian English poetry from 1945 to the present and defining such concepts as hybridization and diasporic identity. Subsequently, Sandten argues that it is possible for the two poets selected to creatively explore and negotiate ‘border-territories’ or ‘imaginary homelands’ by shifting the focus of the creative writing process to other cultural, historical, regional and/ or linguistic backgrounds and settings. By introducing Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker, two contemporary women poets who embody ideas of dislocation, bilingualism and transculturation in their writing, this chapter is aimed at providing students with a fresh and critical perspective on the poetry of anglophone South Asian women through close readings of selected poems, while at the same time fostering a critical awareness of diaspora, transculturality and hybridity. Part II: From the 2000s to the Present begins with Asis De’s “Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace”. De introduces students to Amitav Ghosh (1956-), the first-ever Indian anglophone writer to receive India’s prestigious ‘Bharatiya Jnanpith’ literary award (2018) for an outstanding contribution to literature and literary philosophy. As De contends, Ghosh’s novels highlight socio-cultural interconnections at several points in time and space, effortlessly blurring the boundaries of class, language, religion and ethno-national identity. The chapter is divided into four sections, with the first providing an overview of Ghosh’s works, the second exploring themes in The Glass Palace, the third analysing short passages from the novel and the conclusion commenting on the novel’s educational value. With Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz’ “The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction”, the new millennium is introduced, a period 22 1 Introduction - Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts - Authors - Genres - Model Analyses which has propelled India to the very centre of global debates and recognition. As von Knebel shows, these developments have found ample reflection in the fields of anglophone Indian fiction, where authors in India and in the Indian diaspora in the West alike explore, screen and grapple with this mediated image of India in the new millennium. With a focus on the changing image of India in novels from the 1990s to the early 2000s, the author evinces that whereas Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) focuses on the misery of the poor and their survival in a neoliberal and increasingly globalised India of the 21 st century, Manu Joseph’s Serious Men (2010) is concerned with a portrayal of the Dalit people that leaves traditional literary depictions of passive suffering behind and instead represents a Dalit individual in his fight for recognition and wealth. A new shift in the perception of British Asians in Britain, von Knebel avers, is provided in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006), which is less concerned with the interaction between the migrant community and mainstream society, a dominant theme in diasporic fiction since the 1960s, but rather foregrounds everyday life and internal struggles within the South Asian diaspora in London. Anna M. Horatschek’s “Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India” scrutinises gender issues within the context of India’s cultural and religious diversity. Despite official bans on crimes such as rape, child marriage, widow burnings, ‘honour killings’ and other forms of violence against women, these continue to occur. Horatschek uses Anuradha Roy’s five published novels — An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008), The Folded Earth (2011), Sleeping on Jupiter (2015), All the Lives We Never Lived (2018) and The Earthspinner (2021) — to explore the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics. The chapter identifies four central themes: 1) Indian feminism and individual emancipation, 2) nation-building, 3) identitarian histories and 4) global contexts. Horatschek argues that the novels depict the struggles of women in multiple cultural and social contexts in India while simultaneously amplifying their global interconnectedness. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that Roy’s novels resist any simplistic portrayal of India as a postcolonial exoticist alterity. Miriam Nandi’s “The South Asian Refugee Novel in English” introduces students to the central themes of migration and exile in South Asian anglophone literature. Given the transcultural, global and potentially cosmopolitan character of anglophone Fictions of Migration (Sommer 2001), Nandi focuses on South Asian (rather than Indian) novels that represent and negotiate the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, including Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty (2020) and Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019). The novels centre on forced migration and border crossing in a world where peace and prosperity are limited to a small elite with Western passports. Nandi provides in-depth analyses of each novel, drawing attention to their narrative modes and forms of writing. She also contextualizes the global refugee crisis, focusing on climate change refugees in South Asia and provides background information on each writer as well as definitions of key terms, such as refugee, migrant, exile and diaspora. Hannah Pardey’s “New India, New Realism? Narrating Socio-Economic Change in Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty (2020) and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide (2022)” examines 1.3 Contemporary Indian English Literature: This Volume 23 how these two novels represent the “New India” through a narrative mode she terms “liminal realism”. This mode, Pardey argues, is different from the social realism of earlier Indian English novelists, as it is positioned between fiction and non-fiction and creates a documentary or journalistic style that reflects the effects of global capitalism in India. Through a close reading of the texts, Pardey demonstrates how Amnesty employs embedded letters, local newspaper articles and online forum discussions to ‘document’ a day in the life of an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant in Sydney, while Run and Hide mixes fiction and journalism and references the author’s non-fiction works, while also including a meta-fictional discussion on writing about socio-eco‐ nomic changes. The chapter concludes by encouraging students to explore Adiga and Mishra’s novels within the larger history of anglophone Indian literature. Ariane de Waal’s “Big Other and Big Brother: State Violence, Surveillance and Censorship in Contemporary Indian English Drama” maps out three starting points for researching contemporary Indian drama in English: playwriting awards, theatre festivals and international collaborations. The chapter focuses on two contemporary Indian playwrights who write political plays in English: Abhishek Majumdar, whose The Djinns of Eidgah (2012) addresses the Kashmir conflict, and Annie Zaidi, whose Untitled 1 (2018) is set in a dystopian future of all-encompassing state surveillance. De Waal argues that these two plays exemplify two divergent dramatic strategies for representing, reflecting on and resisting the abuse of state power. While the Indian state functions as a potent yet invisible ‘Big Other’ in Majumdar’s play, Zaidi stages the state as an omnipresent and overpowering ‘Big Brother’. Both playwrights draw on storytelling and myth to explore tactics for resisting state violence, surveillance and censorship. The author approaches the plays through the tools of dramatic analysis as they are taught in the English Studies curriculum, but also indicates how traditional dramatic theory falls short of adequately capturing the dramaturgy and dynamics of Indian English drama. Finally, we would like to conclude this introduction by paying tribute to our friend and co-editor, Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz, who conceived this project and worked on it with his characteristic diligence and dedication, but passed away most unexpectedly and far too soon. This book is for you, Oliver. 1.4 Works Cited Dace, Wallace (1963). “The Concept of ‘Rasa’ in Sanskrit Dramatic Theory.” Educational Theatre Journal 15 (3), 249-254. Das, Kamala (1965). Summer in Calcutta: Fifty Poems. Delhi: Rajinder Paul. Drabble, Margaret (1998). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Farley, Richmond P./ Swann, Darius L./ Zarrilli, Phillip B. (1993). Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. 24 1 Introduction - Contemporary Indian English Literature: Contexts - Authors - Genres - Model Analyses Gillies, John/ Minami, Ryuta/ Li, Ruri/ Trivedi, Poonam (2002). “Shakespeare on the stages of Asia.” In: Wells, Stanley/ Stanton, Sarah (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 259-283. Guptara, P. S. (1979). “The Impact of Europe on the Development of Indian Literature.” Review of National Literatures 10, 18-34. Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1979). Macaulay’s Speeches: A Selection. New York: AMS Press. Nehru, Jawaharlal (2004). The Discovery of India. New Delhi: Penguin. Ramanujan. A. K. (1996). The Collected Essays. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rao, Raja (1938). Kanthapura. Westport: Greenwood Press. Riemenschneider, Dieter (2005). The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse 1934-2004. Jaipur: Rawat Publications. Roy, Anjali (2002). “Making New Words/ Worlds: Options for the Indian Novelist in English.” In: Narasimhaiah, C. D. (ed.). Makers of Indian English Literatures. Delhi: Pencraft, 69-82. Singh, Jyotsna (1989). “Different Shakespeares: The Bard in Colonial/ Postcolonial India.” Theatre Journal 41 (4), 445-457. Sommer, Roy (2001). Fictions of Migration: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Stein, Burton (1998). A History of India. London: Blackwell. Wandel, Reinhold (2004). India — Unity in Diversity. Berlin: Cornelsen. 1.4 Works Cited 25 Part I: From the 1980s to the 2000s 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West David Walther, Greifswald University But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victo‐ ries, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is con‐ structed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death. (Rushdie 2010: 12) Abstract Salman Rushdie’s work remains a required area of study in any compilation of English Indian literature. His writing introduces students to postcolonial concerns such as the troubled identity of post-Independence India, the precarious status of migrants and diasporas, as well as economic and cultural imperialism, while also confronting them with literary modes such as magic realism and the grotesque. Furthermore, his style synthesizes a wide array of literary influences, bridging the gap between postmodern narrative techniques and archaic oral tradition, high and popular culture, East and West. The chapter is split into three sections. The first part provides students with a biographical contextualization, locating Rushdie in the wider context of Indian as well as world literature while explicating on his literary and cultural relevance. A categorized list enumerates his oeuvre, provid‐ ing mention of the primary topics Rushdie deals with. The second part elaborates on Rushdie’s stylistic specifics: hybrid language, syncretic postmodern and ar‐ chaic oral techniques, magic realism, grotesque satire and the high level of inter‐ textuality prevalent to his work. The third part consists of a model analysis in which Midnight’s Children (1981) will be introduced as a key text of postcolonial studies, deriving much of its force from its varied imagery — the perforated sheet, chutnification, fissured skin — its self-reflexive narration and the interleaving of cinematic technique. 2.1 Biography and Relevance The human experience is marked by cracks. In today’s divisive world, sieged by tribalism and the clamoring for essential identities, to stand between the lines and occupy such fractures is both vital and dangerous, as the life and literary recognition of Sir Salman Rushdie shows. Born in Bombay on June 19 th , 1947, Rushdie has since become one of the most influential authors hailing from the Indian subcontinent. Bombay was renamed to Mumbai in 1995, divesting itself of the colonizer-given name ‘Bombay’, ‘Mumbai’ being a reference to the Indian goddess Mumbadevi. However, while moving away from its colonial heritage, the new name also “sig‐ nalled an attempt to reimagine the city as an exclusively Hindu-Marathi place”, thereby leaving out its Muslim constituency entirely, reflecting a concomitant rise of Hindu nationalism (Herbert 2008: 140 f.). Thus, Mumbai, much like Bombay, remains a troubled name. Rushdie himself varies in how he approaches this re‐ naming, grappling with it in both his fiction and non-fiction. While keeping the decolonization aspect in mind, I will nevertheless use ‘Bombay’ in this chapter, as it features heavily in the model analysis of Midnight’s Children. As part of an affluent Muslim family, Rushdie was given privileged access to a high level of education, spending a part of his childhood at The Cathedral and John Connon School, Bombay, before leaving for Europe. There he first studied at Rugby School, Warwickshire, and later took history at King’s College, Cambridge. It is this early distance to the country of his birth that marks him as a part of the Indian diaspora — i.e. members of the Indian community who have migrated or settled outside of India — and which has contributed so strongly to the great influence he has had on spreading Indian English literature across the globe. Much of his work is characterized by the task of recapturing the country of his birth, while also staking out the difficulties of leaving it behind, having to find a place in a new, oftentimes hostile world. Indeed, Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988), the novels which have indelibly carved Rushdie’s name into the literary landscape, deal with this dual desire in turn. Both novels shine a light onto the two sides of Salman Rushdie commonly perceived: on the one hand, the terrific author whose command of postmodern techniques, magic realism and narrative traditions helped catapult Indian literature onto the world stage through his epic of post-Independence India; on the other hand, the man embroiled in death threats and book burnings, who spent ten years hiding from assassins in the wake of what has since come to be known as the Rushdie Affair, a sordid event of both cultural and political significance. As Midnight’s Children is part of the model analysis, it suffices at this point to say that this novel is a seminal work which has won multiple prizes since its publication, among them the Booker of Bookers and that it has been adapted for both the screen and the stage. Furthermore, of all of Rushdie’s works, Midnight’s Children has received the 30 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West greatest level of academic attention, given that its stylistic and topical preoccupations prefigure much of his later writing, while affording scholars a multiplicity of analytical approaches, be it through the lens of postcolonialism, gender, postmodernism, or numerous other perspectives. It was, in any case, the incredible success of Midnight’s Children that allowed Rushdie to quit his job as a copywriter for an advertising agency and become a fulltime writer. Although rich in narrative potential and certainly well received, it was not Shame (1983), the allegorical novel about Pakistan following Midnight’s Children, which pushed Rushdie once more into the spotlight, but The Satanic Verses (1988). The after‐ math of the book’s publication has become infamous, giving rise to a heated debate over creative freedom, authorial limits and the question of the sanctity of religious belief. While there were many speaking out in Rushdie’s defense, the fundamentalist fringe of the Muslim community took umbrage at what they considered to be blasphemy. Book burnings took place across the world, effigies of Rushdie’s likeness were incinerated on television and The Satanic Verses was banned in twelve countries (Netton 1996: 20), including the country of his birth, India. In a sad irony, it was on Valentine’s Day of 1989 when the religious leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, called out a fatwā, declaring Rushdie to be an enemy of the Faith to be executed, an order that would exact tragic deaths over the course of the following years. It took a decade of hiding, passionate speeches in his defense by notable literary names such as Günther Grass and Harold Pinter and numerous appeals to politicians to intervene before the threat to his life subsided to a level that saw him appear again more publicly. Unsurprisingly, large parts of his work from those ten years — Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) — are colored by the creative limitations placed on story tellers in the former and being forced to write in dark and destitute conditions in the latter novel. After several incognito visits to the US, Rushdie settled permanently in New York in 1999, right at the turn of the millennium. Although his new novels since then have continued to deal with the topic of migration and identity, their geographical focus has shifted like their author, now spanning to various degrees the entire globe from the Indian subcontinent to Britain and, later, America. Overall, then, at the moment of this writing, Salman Rushdie is able to look back on a literary output comprising fourteen novels, a short story collection, a memoir, a non-fictional account of Nicaragua, as well as numerous other essays and articles, many of which have been printed and reprinted in newspapers around the world. His writing has inspired a generation of writers as varied and globe-spanning as Amitav Gosh, Arundhati Roy, Emma Tennant and Zadie Smith (Kreutzer n.d.: 3). As a member of the Indian diaspora and a fierce defender of cosmopolitanism and democracy and having a foot in both the East and the West, Salman Rushdie, as he himself has noted, represents the comma between both worlds (Goonetilleke 2010: 131). He lives in the space where one ceases to articulate being one or the other and instead resolves oneself to being an uneasy amalgamation of both 2.1 Biography and Relevance 31 — an unfixed identity of vacillation and constant movement: indeed, the “shaky edifice we build out of scraps” (Rushdie 2010: 12). 2.2 Works and Topics — An Overview If one were to read Rushdie biographically, one could trace the moments at which the topical occupation of his work changes to the monumental incisions in his life. There is, in many cases, a geographical aspect to his stories that correlates with his own circumstances, which makes it a tempting proposition to categorize his work accordingly. Rushdie himself has done so when he published his short story collection East, West (1994) — a series of nine stories, divided in three parts: those of the East, those in-between and those of the West — and it provides a serviceable structure applicable to his work in general, which will be followed in this section. 2.2.1 East Of all the stories taking place in the Eastern hemisphere, Midnight’s Children (1981) remains the most famous. Adapted for the stage in 2003 by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the screen in 2012 by Deepa Mehta, it has since established itself as a hallmark work of postcolonial literature. The model analysis following the style section will introduce this work and the tragicomic life of its protagonist Saleem Sinai in more depth, specifically the tight link between Saleem and the country of his birth. For the story of Saleem is also the story of post-Independence India — a nation facing the task of recreating itself from the vestiges of its colonial and pre-colonial past. The novel uses the intimate relationship between Saleem and India to provide insights into this momentous time of change, steering the reader’s attention towards the attempt (and impossibility) of uniting all these linguistically diverse peoples under the banner of one nation, while simultaneously grappling with religious fundamentalism and the pressing question of how much democratic idealism can be sacrificed to the darker side of the project of nationhood. Published two years after Midnight’s Children, Shame (1983) directs our attention to the second country born from partition, farcically called Peccuvistan, a country riven with strife in which the dictators Raza Hyder and Iskander Harappa are vying for control. The story follows the lives of Omar Khayyam and Sufiya Zinobia, one a lecherous doctor born from three mothers, the other a girl whose mental development was arrested at the age of nine. Throughout the narrative, Rushdie places these polar opposites along an axis of shame: Omar’s life and wish for a marriage to Sufiya represents the ultimate end of shamelessness, whereas Sufiya in her childish purity grows more beast-like as the metaphorical shame of her countrymen suffuses her. While Shame can be read as a farcical and grotesque account of Pakistan, it also provides strong social commentary on the role of women in society, who at multiple times in the narrative are sacrificed for the ambitions of men. 32 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) portrays the history of the Zogoiby family through the eyes of Moraes Zogoiby, a man whose body grows and ages at twice the speed of a normal human. Much like Midnight’s Children, this novel is given a narrative frame in which the narrator is threatened by death and looks back on his life. Imprisoned by a former family friend obsessed with his mother, Moraes ‘Moor’ Zogoiby must write or die, which sees him create a rich narrative tapestry akin to that of Scheherazade of The Arabian Nights, with tangents that illuminate the tragic family history from their earliest point onwards. Unsurprisingly, then, and much in line with Rushdie’s often-utilized ab ovo style, after a brief introduction to Moor the story leaps into the far past, towards the narrator’s grand-grandmother and from there unfolds until his father, Abraham Zogoiby, a Cochin Jew of the lower class, comes to meet his mother Aurora, a willful artist from a rich family of spice merchants. The narrative adds and subtracts characters at will, embroiling them in suicides and other violent acts. It is through sex, love and gruesome disability that the protagonist — and by proxy Rushdie — pulls the reader through this web of far-reaching family relations, Indian politics and religiosity, terrorism and social inequality. One of the leadings images of the novel is that of the palimpsest, which Rushdie uses not only as a device to advance the plot through the material palimpsests fashioned by Aurora Zogoiby, but also to a wider thematic and metaphorical purpose. Historically, the creation of a palimpsest implies the erasure of previous inscrip‐ tions on parchment or papyrus to make them reusable. Thus, a good palimpsest would bear no trace of the old inscription. Moreover, the old scratched-out part and the new inscription of the palimpsest are also usually completely unrelated in terms of content. In literary theory, however, Gerard Genette has made use of the palimpsest as a metaphor in his conception of intertextuality, eliding the aspect of clearly distinct meanings. From a material standpoint, this kind of palimpsest would also be emblematic of bad craftsmanship by definition, as traces remain of the overwritten text which influence the reading of the new inscriptions and aid the creation of new meaning (Malinowski et al. 2021: 189 f.). Bombay itself has become a badly created palimpsest, as parts of the city are being overwritten by the numerous religious, capitalistic and nationalistic influences bearing down on it, creating an uneasy amalgamation in which the traces of Bombay’s past are contested by the new inscriptions of modernity. The Moor’s Last Sigh, as Kreutzer states, is Rushdie’s melancholic farewell to the city of his childhood (n.d.: 12), a point underscored by the brief appearance of Aadam Sinai, son of Saleem Sinai, who in Midnight’s Children symbolized hope for the potential of a future generation and in The Moor’s Last Sigh has grown into a cynical and cold adult. Salman Rushdie's most recent novel, Victory City (2023), presents the last of the predominantly Eastern narratives. The narrator presents the reader with a prose 2.2 Works and Topics — An Overview 33 translation of an old epic poem, found in a pot during an excavation, which details the life of Pampa Kampana, queen, prophetess, and at times conduit for godly beings. Pampa recounts the rise and fall of the Empire of Bisnaga, putting down a testimony of her own role in its founding and all the events shaping it until her own demise. The novel deals explicitly with many concerns Rushdie treats in other narratives as well, such as gender relations, the dangers of avarice, the allure of power and the magic-realist mixing of actual history — Bisnaga references an actual empire, specifically the Vijayanagara Empire, which arose during the 14 th century and fell in the 17 th century — and the fantastic: there are forests where time stops to matter and people can grow out of seeds, their entire histories being whispered to them. Moreover, just as in Midnight's Children, there is paid a remarkable amount of attention towards metafictionality in Victory City. Constantly, one is shown the constructed and fragmentary nature of historical accounts - not only through Pampa, who elides some historical moments and highlights others, but also through the narrator-translator, whose position comes with authorial power by default, no matter their professed neutrality and faithfulness to the poem. 2.2.2 In-Between The novels in this section are characterized by an oscillation between East and West. As such, they make their primary topics the negotiation between cultures, the life of migrants and the impact of colonial practices. Although it owes much to Rushdie’s interest in science fiction, his first novel Grimus (1975) falls into this category as well, as it already shows many of the elements that later become predominant in his oeuvre: the grotesque and bizarre, a playful attitude to time, as well as a commingling of Eastern and Western lore. None of these are fully fleshed out, however, and pale in comparison to the literary behemoths following closely after. This has led academia to pay this novel comparatively little attention, regarding it instead as Rushdie’s first, stumbling steps. The Satanic Verses (1988) deals with the intertwined fates of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, two Indian migrants who find themselves on a cloudy morning falling from the sky above Britain. Despite these circumstances, Gibreel sings happily: “‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! ’” (Rushdie 1998: 3). This introduction already foreshadows the general concern of the novel, in which Rushdie takes a closer look at the hybrid condition of migration — its requirement to leave some aspects behind while being reborn — and the tribulations suffered by those looking different. Showing the racially charged perspective often broadly applied to immigrants, Saladin Chamcha mutates over the course of his stay in London, taking on a devil-like appearance by growing horns and cloven feet. Gibreel on the other hand suffers from regular visions that provide him an insight into the life of a prophet called Mahound, a thinly veiled reference to the prophet Mohammed. 34 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West What has led to the strong reaction against The Satanic Verses are the allusions to Islam — blasphemous as some would argue — inherent to Gibreel’s visions. For one, the story of the prophet Mahound, the name itself an echo of medieval attitudes towards the figure of the prophet, is viewed through the eyes of a schizophrenic. One scene also involves a brothel whose sex workers have taken on the names of the prophet’s wives to arouse their customers. Lastly, the scene which gave the novel its name has widely been held up as one of the more troubling instances, as it insinuates that there once existed, for a brief moment, a set of verses “honouring the goddesses Manat, Uzza, and Al-Lat, which Mahound first includes in and then removed from the Qur’an” (Trousdale 2017: 6), thus implying that Islam has not always been strictly monotheistic. The Ground Beneath her Feet (1999) follows the meteoric ascent of the two pop-music icons and lovers Vina Apsara and Ormus Carma. Rai, a photographer, secret lover and childhood friend, documents their journey as the musical duo travels from India to Britain and from Britain to the US. As the first of Rushdie’s novels to concern itself with the US, The Ground Beneath her Feet plays heavily with pop cultural references which, in true Rushdie fashion, are embedded in various mythological frames such as the Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice or a subversion of the Grimm Brother’s Snow White. It is also in The Ground Beneath her Feet where, for the first time, the topic of love becomes truly prominent in Rushdie’s writing, having until then occupied only minor positions in his narratives (Kreutzer n.d.: 13). Shalimar the Clown (2005) presents Rushdie’s return to Kashmir, the valley of his birth and also the point of origin for Saleem Sinai’s narrative in Midnight’s Children. Now, however, the perilous political situation of Kashmir is moved into sharp focus in the fictitious village of Pachigam, the inhabitants of which practice kashmiriyat, a form of harmonious cohabitation in spite of religious and political differences. As the novel progresses, this practice of kashmiriyat becomes increasingly difficult: fundamentalism of a religious and political inflection threatens harmony from without, whereas the consequences of imperialism fracture the peace within, leading the eponymous Shalimar towards acts of murderous terrorism. Contrasting Shalimar’s terror-laden path, the journey of Max Ophuls presents the side of Western imperialism. Himself a survivor of the Holocaust, he takes Boonyi, Shalimar’s beloved, as a lover only to discard her once she has grown fat through Western consumerism and is with child. Tellingly it is the daughter of that union between West and East — first called India, then Kashmira — who is most equipped to withstand Shalimar’s rage. In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie weaves together a complex net of issues ranging from the role of women and the danger of political and religious fundamentalism to the cause-effect relation of imperialism and terrorism. The Enchantress of Florence (2008), lastly, takes us into the Renaissance, towards the city of Florence on the one hand, and the royal court of the Mughal emperor Akbar on the other. Niccolò Vespucci, a young man calling himself the Mughal of Love, finds his way to Akbar’s court, claiming to be of royal descent through his mother, a lost Mughal princess. Staving off death much like Scheherazade (a returning trope in Rushdie’s work), Niccolò 2.2 Works and Topics — An Overview 35 weaves a complex tale, captivating the court with an origin story that leads from India to Florence and later to the Americas, interleaving historical personages and their lives with moments of myth and fantasy. Linked through the figure of the Enchantress, Florence and Akbar’s court are shown in their differences and similarities. Being one of Rushdie’s more complicated novels, the Enchantress of Florence also provides a bibliography to follow the many historical references found therein. 2.2.3 West In Fury (2001), Rushdie’s first fully Western novel, the professor-turned-doll maker Malik Solanka ventures close to the edge of madness as he settles in New York City, far away from his family still living in Britain. Threatened by outbursts of terrifying rage of which he recalls little, Solanka soon finds himself enmeshed in a life of crime, sexuality, rage and politics. Fury mingles erudition with the profane, mythology with sex, everyday life with the grotesque. The thread running through the entire novel is the rage possessing everything, from countries to cities to individuals, while the Erinyes hover above, their screech heard throughout the world. The Erinyes are winged crones, located in Greek mythology and more commonly known as Furies. Configured as grotesque beings that relentlessly hound those who have done wrong or broken oaths, they follow their victims until they have exacted their bloody tribute. Incest, child abuse, pedophilia, racism, war: the echoes of such fury make this one of Rushdie’s bleakest stories, but one aptly titled. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015) presents the conflict between reason and unreason, logic and faith. War has broken out between the children of Dunia — hers a dynasty of humans with supernatural powers — and the dark djinns of the world. The story follows her children, some more benign than others, as they negotiate between the natural and the supernatural. The novel is a treatise on the benefits of reason and the dangers of unreason which also, however, reminds the reader that not all unreason is evil. The desires and dreams that grow from such wild impulses belong to humanity as much as the means to escape them, and so, poignantly, the tale ends on the acknowledgment that even if dreams turn bad, this state of existence is still preferable to having no dreams at all: “Sometimes, for we have not wholly rid ourselves of perversity, we long for nightmares” (Rushdie 2016: 286). The Golden House (2017) is told to us by the scriptwriter René, who has been brought up next to the place called Golden House. Much like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (1925), René is a bystander observing the tragedies unfolding around him. Only later he transcends this position as his story increasingly crosses that of the Golden family, comprising of Nero Golden, the dictatorial patriarch and his three sons: Petya, 36 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West suffering from Asperger’s, a man of startling genius mingling with the harrows of unrequited love and right-wing ideology; Apu, an artist and social critic mired in substance abuse; and D, short for Dionysus, the youngest, struggling with problems of gender identity. Escaping from a dark past in India, the Goldens are nonetheless beset by tragedy and death. The story is replete with pop-cultural and literary references and the narration itself poses the question of reliability as René involves himself with the Goldens, becoming increasingly complicit in their secrets. This novel, so Hoydis, also marks Rushdie’s conscious (if temporary) move away from magic realism towards a new form of ‘operatic realism’ that plays with genre conventions while dramatizing the increasingly blurred boundary of fiction and truth in the Trump era (cf. 2019: 168). Quichotte (2019) strongly relates to Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605). Similar to Alonso Quixano, Rushdie’s Quichotte is enamored by the idea of love, which drives him to the (comical) edge of madness. Creating an imaginary son called Sancho at the sight of a shooting star, he sets out on a quest to find the love of his life — in this case the actress Salma — who is not at all enthused by the sudden attention. Their journey takes Quichotte and Sancho through the US, continually pitting the question of love against that of racial and political division, as well as the trappings of modern consumer society. The narrative framework in which their story is embedded further complicates the novel. Quichotte and Sancho are themselves creations of the author Sam DuChamp, who muses about the impact his personal life has on the story he fashions. Jumping between these two diegetic levels, threading innertextual references through both, Quichotte sets out to prove that love, even if it is considered mad by the bleak realisms of the world, still triumphs. Of all of Rushdie’s works, this most recent one is certainly the brightest and most hopeful. Tragedy abounds as well, but it finds itself couched in the optimism that fiction — and by proxy, communication — has the power to shape the world and can therefore turn this ‘mad’ dream of a loving society into reality. 2.2.4 Children’s Literature, Short Stories and Non-Fiction Well received by critics, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) comprise Rushdie’s foray into children’s literature. Each book has been written for one of his sons respectively. Whereas Luka operates as a blend of video game narrative and mythological quest, Haroun links up to the debates about free speech engendered by the Rushdie Affair. Indeed, Haroun can be read as an allegory of free speech, as its protagonist interrupts the plan of a dread deity wishing to put a stopper into the ocean of stories, the place from which all creativity flows. Scholars have dealt with Haroun in multiple ways. Srinivas Aravamudan, for example, considers it “a banal didactic fiction” (1995: 327) since he believes that the novel conceptualizes free speech as a black-and-white matter. This criticism has been answered in turn by Andrew Teverson, who sees in Haroun’s intertextuality a strident resistance against homogeneity (2001: 454-457), and Eva König, who points to the many postcolonial 2.2 Works and Topics — An Overview 37 aspects of the novel that free it from any accusation of being a simple, one-sided allegory (2006: 57-61). What remains, then, aside from the story collection East, West, which has been men‐ tioned in the introduction, is Rushdie’s nonfiction. The Jaguar’s Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987) presents Rushdie’s travel account of his stay in Nicaragua, where he came to meet many of the revolutionary personages dominating Nicaraguan history; as well as Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012), which details Rushdie’s life in autobiographical fashion, providing an in-depth and personal account of the fatwā and the concomitant years of hiding, replete with tales of familial joy and romantic discontent, as well as encounters with notable literates such as Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, and others. Lastly, then, there are three collections of essays that anthologize most of the articles and nonfictional writing Rushdie has produced over the span of his career: Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991); Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 (2002); and Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020 (2021). A general overview of Rushdie’s publications can be found in table 1, which differentiates his texts through the categories outlined above. Rushdie’s Works East Midnight’s Children (1981) Shame (1985) The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) Victory City (2023) In-Between Grimus (1975) The Satanic Verses (1988) The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) Shalimar the Clown (2005) The Enchantress of Florence (2008) West Fury (2001) Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015) The Golden House (2017) Quichotte (2019) Others Children’s Literature Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) Non-Fiction The Jaguar’s Smile (1987) Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012) Essays Imaginary Homelands (1991) Step Across This Line (2002) Languages of Truth (2021) Table 1: Rushdie’s Works 38 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West 2.3 Stylistic and Modal Specifics Many of the stylistic elements that Rushdie employs in his works have already been mentioned fleetingly. Given that he draws from such a wide array of influences, however, laying a more solid foundation is necessary. First, then, one should consider the narrative techniques Rushdie frequently utilizes before taking a look at the modes in which he operates. Broadly speaking, Rushdie combines the archaic with the postmodern. Archaic, in this case, refers to the rich narrative history of India. Born in a country teeming with legends and narratives, Rushdie has allowed many of these old narratives to influence his novels, while also utilizing an oral mode of storytelling in honor of the oral narrative traditions of India. In some narratives such as Midnight’s Children or The Enchantress of Florence this orality occurs on a diegetic level through characters who serve as narrators to a perceived audience. However, even when the narrator stands outside the plot, as they do in Shame, they are often willful, providing ironic commentary but also, as Goonetilleke argues, occasionally admitting to a lack of knowledge (2010: 49). Goonetilleke also maintains that the narrator in Shame closely overlaps with Rushdie himself, which positions “the narrator/ Rushdie” as a postmodern warning to consider the novel “as fiction and as history” (2010: 49). What this perception of the narrator as an oral storyteller results in is a web of divergences rather than a straight line running through the plot. Oftentimes, one tangent leads to another as the story dwells on some characters, hurries past others, looping back and forth and weaving its narrative tapestry in “the colloquial street language of Bombay” (Rushdie 2021: 309). Joined to this oral style is a postmodern preoccupation with the deconstruction of clichés and tropes, the incessant play of intertextuality and intermediality, as well as the aim of evoking uncertainty, either by providing constant doubts as to the veracity of the narrator, through a self-reflexive narrative, or through the question of fragmentation: of time, narrative and identity. Quichotte, for example, is framed by the creative process in its entirety. Rushdie has created Sam DuChamp, who in turn creates Quichotte, a man fashioning himself a son. As such, the novel is self-consciously observing its own creation. In The Golden House, likewise, genres mix freely as the protagonist, a scriptwriter, switches between prose and cinematic script form; and in Haroun, where the child protagonist drinks from the creative water of the Ocean of Stories, one finds a dazzling display of intertextuality stretching centuries and continents as the text parodies fairy tale conventions by notating them, for example as “S/ 1001/ ZHT/ 420/ 42 (r)xi” or “G/ 1001/ RIM/ 777/ M(w)i” (Rushdie 1993: 73), calling to mind the Arabian Nights as well as the Brothers Grimm (Teverson 2001: 456). As a corollary, these postmodern techniques show that narratives and identities are fitted together piecemeal. Essentialist attitudes (of genre, culture and language) are to be viewed with skepticism, which in turn reflects the topical concerns of Rushdie’s novels. The nation’s claim to truth, the fallacy of monolithic personal identity, the linearity of time, the clean separation of diegetic levels, the purity of language: all of those resemble the clear surface of a lake, easily disturbed by a pebble — or, as the 2.3 Stylistic and Modal Specifics 39 case may be for Rushdie, shattered by words. Furthermore, there is perhaps no greater example for the disrupted myth of purity than the interspersion of Indian words in his narratives, to be guessed at by a Western audience, some of which will appear in the model analysis. These words (and indeed a specific indigenous English syntax) show the fundamental impurity of language and how liable it is to re-appropriation. Indeed, taken by writers from former colonies, language is often shown in its transient nature, its primary function one of cultural negotiation, which proves it to be not only a tool for colonization, but also one of resistance, serving to deal with the consequences of imperialism rather than further its spread. Despite this re-appropriation of language, the use of English is by no means an uncontested issue. While Indian English literature is not precluded from being “profoundly Indian in concern” (Mukherjee qtd. in Ashcroft et al 2002: 122), the focus on English as a whole — be it for literature or literary theory — has been called into question (ibid.: 117 f.). These narrative techniques, i.e. the oral mode of storytelling, the deconstruction of clichés and tropes, the employment of intertextuality and intermediality, the aim of evoking uncertainty, as well as the play with words and language, accompany the two primary modes in which Rushdie operates. Both of these modes provide his novels with a biting voice of satire, while also reserving moments of humor and wonder to keep them from turning too bleak. The first mode, magic realism, is of Latin American provenance but has spread across the world during the 20 th century, both in art and literature. Its influence can be felt in writers as varied as Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel María Márquez, Günther Grass, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Toni Morrison and others. In Lies that Tell the Truth (2005) Anne Hegerfeldt provides a list of five aspects that are most emblematic of the mode. First and foremost, magic realism speaks to a “co-existence of elements from traditionally incompatible codes” (Hegerfeldt 2005: 50). As the name suggests, realism is met with the fantastic, without these elements being “a hallucination, a dream […] or an outright lie” (ibid.: 51). In Two Years, Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights, for example, Rushdie’s protagonist Geronimo, an Indian gardener living in America, finds himself levitating: “It was on the Wednesday after the great storm that Mr. Geronimo first noticed that his feet no longer touched the ground” (2016: 20). Geronimo’s calm acceptance of his levitating nature becomes exemplary of the second aspect, which Hegerfeldt identifies as “matter-of-factness” (2005: 53); i.e. magic is considered as ordinary, or at least not improbable. The other side of that equation — “fantastic reality” (ibid.: 59) — shows the normal and everyday, however, as extraordinary. Fourthly, magic-realist texts tend to literalize metaphors and common sayings. “Characters,” so Hegerfeldt, “literally burn with love […] emotions can be touched and smelled, memories are looked for in literal corners or become cooking ingredients” (ibid.: 56 f.). The fifth and last modal aspect of magic-realism is “the production of knowledge” (ibid.: 62). As the analysis of Midnight’s Children will show, historiography is a major concern for writers of magic realism. Their characters — whether Rushdie’s or Márquez’s — are incessantly recording their lives and histories, 40 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West while simultaneously serving as a reminder of how shaky, how malleable, history truly is. The second mode which Rushdie often uses is the grotesque. Like magic realism, the term itself originated in the realm of art before spreading towards literature. Discoveries within the ruins of the Domus Aurea during the Renaissance brought to light an ornamental style uncoupled from the laws of physics and proportions, freely combining flora, fauna and humans caught in hybrid metamorphoses. Subjected to art criticism, the grotesque soon acquired a reputation as being both base and monstrous, but also farcical and burlesque (Barasch 2018 [1971]: 78-82). In the 20 th century, this divide calcified on an academic level. Whereas Wolfgang Kayser’s Das Groteske. Seine Gestalt in Malerei und Dichtung (1957) conceptualizes the grotesque as entirely negative, and any laughter engendered by it as diabolical in nature, Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal work Rabelais and His World (1965) shows the bodily grotesque as a means for resistance, toppling hierarchical structures through the ambivalent power of laughter. Although Bakhtin’s treatise on the carnivalesque is not without its problems, as feminist scholars in particular have taken Bakhtin to task for the use of images such as pregnant old hags or reducing the womb and femininity to childbirth, calling such conceptions “regressive in both the psychic and the political register” (Russo 2012: 29), its focus on the material body provides a fertile approach for literary analysis. At the center of the grotesque, then, stands the transgressed and transgressing multiple body — multiple because it is not only the physical but also the mental, social, cultural, political and linguistic body. A transgression which Rushdie utilizes freely, oscillating between the Kaysarian and Bakhtinian approach. Indeed, from Grimus to Quichotte, the bodily grotesque is ubiquitous: expulsions of bodily secretions; deformations, exaggerations and dismemberments; metamorphoses; acts of excess in eating, drinking, drug abuse and pornography, sex and wherever else opportunity for grotesque hedonism presents itself; as well as many more instances. The effect of these grotesqueries varies — some elate, some amuse, some horrify — but they present an inerasable aspect of Rushdie’s work. Combined with magic realism and the postmodern and oral narrative techniques mentioned before, this nearly inexhaustible list of grotesquery finds itself deeply embedded within the central topics of his narratives. In The Satanic Verses, the grotesque intersects with the question of immigration; in Shame, it underlines the conditions of patriarchal oppression; and in Quichotte, it signifies the political divide in the US. Wherever one looks, then, Rushdie has buttressed his story with these stylistic peculiarities, many of which will be encountered shortly, in the analysis of Midnight’s Children. 2.4 Midnight’s Children: A Model Analysis Since 1981, Midnight’s Children has been considered Rushdie’s most complex and engaging story, a fact which has made it the subject of myriad articles and book chapters. In this analysis, the focus lies on the aforementioned stylistic specifics and 2.4 Midnight’s Children: A Model Analysis 41 how they interact with the predominant themes of the novel. After an overview of the narrative frame, the analysis will turn to the question of origins and essentialist identity, before considering the novel’s colonial aspects and their postcolonial implications. Then the focus will shift towards the children who provide the story with its name, and the antagonists Saleem Sinai meets on his journey of retrospective self-creation — which is a quest both for his personal meaning and the meaning of India as a nation. Lastly, the analysis will turn to the potent image of chutnification and Saleem’s ultimate dissolution. 2.4.1 Narrative Frame Midnight’s Children is a tale told by Saleem Sinai who, at thirty-one years of age, has returned to the place of his birth. There he works in a bottling plant for chutneys and jams and writes down the episodes of his storied life. Padma, a woman working at the plant, has taken a liking to Saleem and listens to his story. From the start, the text makes us aware of the stark contrast between these two characters. As the complex prose foretells, Saleem is an erudite if self-aggrandizing narrator: “so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well” (Rushdie 2008: 4). Conversely, Padma is illiterate, head-strong, a “bitch-in-the-manger” (ibid.: 24) with little patience for Saleem’s narrative digressions — neither for an ‘excess of intertwined lives,’ nor when Saleem introduces metafictional elements that speak about the act of narrating itself: “Padma has started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-conscious” (ibid.: 83). As Ubaraj Katawal asserts, Padma, far from being a passive listener, serves as a speaking form of the subaltern: “She shuttles between the Western and the native cultural expectations […] She speaks, and speaks loudly” (Katawal 2013: 94). In this manner, she also upsets cultural expectations by being the one to eventually propose marriage to Saleem, thus inverting traditional gender roles. She “refuses to be completely interpellated by the traditional Hindu culture while still living inside it” (ibid.: 95). Scholars have interpreted her position variably, but most converge on her being a connection between Saleem and the lower rungs of India’s stratified society, thereby grounding his narrative and enabling a highly allegorical reading that sees Saleem’s personal history as the history of India. For different views regarding such allegorical readings, see Brennan (1989) and Fenwick (2004). Fenwick argues that, prompted by Padma, Saleem slowly moves away from his “consistently and almost obsessively metaphorized” (2004: 50) nar‐ rative over the course of Midnight’s Children, blending metaphor and metonymy. 42 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West Either way, as Saleem states, Padma is keen on curtailing his more extravagant literary excursions: “But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next” (ibid.: 44). Padma is not the only force ‘bullying’ Saleem to bring his narrative to its conclusion, however. Indeed, the opening paragraphs of the novel inextricably link him to India, as he states that he is “mysteriously handcuffed to history” (prompting the aforementioned allegorical readings), but also that he has to “work fast, faster than Scheherazade” if he wishes to find his meaning before his “crumbling, over-used body” (ibid.: 3 f.) breaks down completely. The effect the text produces here is one of opposites and contrasts, introducing two themes that thread their way through the entirety of Midnight’s Children: fragmentation and time. The analysis will turn to the specific motifs of these threads later. Important to remember at this point is that time in all its modes — linear, cyclical, or still — accompanies Saleem’s narrative. Furthermore, the epic of post-Independence India that is promised is not, as it were, founded on a singular identity and modes of cohesion. Instead, as signified by the hybridity of the author-reader situation, the image of the crumbling body, and the simultaneous urge to finish the story while endlessly digressing (if not for Padma), one is faced with the challenge that centuries of colonialism grown atop a vast pre-colonial history have left behind for the nation: the task of defining itself, of figuring out how to fuse all these disparate elements — multiple languages, religious identities, political directions, social stratifications — into the whole called India. This task of assigning meaning, while being the prerequisite for the creation of Indian identity, is nevertheless doomed to failure if it results in the conception of a monolithic identity. No one term, no one idea, history, story or person, so Rushdie seems to say, can hold the whole of this old-new nation. In the narrative process of self-creation, Saleem is by no means an unbiased source for his story. Rather, he “is an interested party in the events he narrates” (Rushdie 2010: 24). While seeking to dazzle with wit and erudition, he nevertheless makes mistakes, leaves out important events, or willfully misdirects. Sean P. O’Brien points to the multiple instances in which Saleem’s recollections of the past are fraught with mistakes (2015: 170). To one of them, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, Saleem admits on his own: The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time. […] Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything — to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role? (Rushdie 2008: 229 f.) Other such moments of “rearranging history” (Rushdie 2008: 361) occur throughout the story, leading Buchholz to note the “alternative world creating power of an author” (2013: 346). Likewise, Saleem muses that “in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade 2.4 Midnight’s Children: A Model Analysis 43 his audience to believe” (Rushdie 2008: 376). To such openly admitted fabrications are added multiple smaller errors, such as Saleem misidentifying the writers of the large Indian epics (the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyana) while simultaneously considering himself to be knowledgeable in Hindu stories. What these divergences from ‘fact’ ultimately speak to is the unstable nature of history and grand narratives. Saleem, containing multitudes, is made up of millions of such stories, all varied, all (mis)remembering differently, all creating India. It is no surprise, then, that the two numbers occurring most frequently in Midnight’s Children and other works by Rushdie are ‘1001’ and ‘420’. The former provides, much like Saleem’s self-stylization as Scheherazade, a clear link to the Arabian Nights. Just as Scheherazade is dependent on her facility for creation to stave off her and her sister’s death at the hand of their cruel husbands, Saleem, and by proxy India, is in need of a continuous, never-ending creative process for survival. Andrew S. Teverson has put it best (albeit for another one of Rushdie’s novels): “A thousand and one nights does not mean a thousand nights plus one night. It means a thousand nights and then one more night, and then one more night, and then one more night ad infinitum, where each night added will transform all the nights that have gone before and all the nights to come” (2001: 463). The second number, ‘420’, belongs to the realm of Indian cinema — another immense influence on Rushdie. Taken from the Indian penal code, ‘420’ is heavily associated with trickery and deceit. In the movie Shree 420 (1955), however, it is used by a protagonist who “saves a city’s underclass from exploitation” (Mishra 2007: 12), ultimately naming the entire city with it. This juxtaposition elevates the mode of ‘trickery’ and fabulist creation, moving it into a positive light. The number ‘420’ occurs in multiple instances in Saleem’s story: it takes him 420 days to mourn the death of his family (Rushdie 2008: 550); and the surviving children of midnight are numbered likewise (ibid.: 609). What these numbers also indicate is the freedom with which Rushdie mixes media, styles and source materials in Midnight’s Children: cinema blends with fairytale; ancient epics are juxtaposed with comic books; and advertisement embeds itself in the rich mythology of India. In the entire narrative frame, then, from the Saleem-Padma configuration to the massive web of intertextuality, shines through the recurrent theme: the impossibility of unitary identity as the old enters in a (sometimes uneasy) union with the new. 2.4.2 The Question of Origins Although Saleem-the-narrator guides the reader through his story, the moment of his birth is more than 150 pages away from when he first introduces himself. Indeed, the novel — separated in three parts — spends a substantial amount of time on the convoluted circumstances of his birth and his family history. In these opening sections, the reader is introduced to his ostensible grandfather, Aadam Aziz, who has just returned from studying medicine in Heidelberg and now lives once more in Kashmir, the valley of his birth. Upon his return — the year is 1915 — Aadam Aziz is asked to 44 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West cure the daughter of a local landlord. Taking the trip via boat, he soon meets an old acquaintance, the ancient boatman Tai, who has impressed Aadam in his youth with stories and tales of his immortality: “Aadam Aziz floated with Tai in his shikara […] and heard again and again the miraculous answers to that single terrifying question: ‘But Taiji, how old are you, honestly? ’” (Rushdie 2008: 12). In this scene there is already a confluence of problems. Tai, configured as immortal and unchanging, contrasts the Western-educated doctor, whose attaché proudly spells out HEIDELBERG. Tai feels insulted by Aadam’s westernized appearance: “‘Big shot,’ Tai is spitting into the lake, ‘big bag, big shot. Pah! We haven’t got enough bags at home that you must bring back that thing made of a pig’s skin that makes one unclean just by looking at it? ’” (ibid.: 18). Here, the West intrudes upon the East and the modern — the doctor’s stethoscope — becomes suspect once viewed by Tai, a symbol of unchanging time, who has rowed his shikara across the lakes of Kashmir since long before Aadam was even born. This friction is mirrored by the dizzying temporal jumps within the text: first from 1978 to 1915, and then, interspersed, by the flashbacks of his youth that carry Aadam Aziz even farther into the past. Aadam, so the narrator states, is in possession of a tremendous nose, “comparable only to the trunk of the elephant-headed god Ganesh” (ibid.: 9), and in one of his flashbacks, Tai points out to him that “Mughal Emperors would have given their right hands for noses like that one,” for it is “a nose to start a family on” as there would be “no mistakes whose brood they were” (ibid.: 9 f.). Aadam’s nose is thus tied irrevocably to questions of origin and ancestry, even though — in a satirical and slightly grotesque manner — Tai is quick to note that it is not only a nose for great patriarchs, but also for great amounts of snot (ibid.: 11). The analysis will return to the nose shortly, as it is an important Bakhtinian image in Midnight’s Children. For now, Aadam Aziz has reached his patient, Naseem, and Saleem-the-narrator thus introduces his grandmother. Naseem’s father insists that any inspection of his daughter’s body can only occur piecemeal, through a perforated sheet. Gradually, as Aadam inspects her over the span of several weeks, he comes “to have a picture of Naseem in his mind, a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts” (ibid.: 26). The atomization of the human body is a strong grotesque trope that Rushdie uses to great effect in creating this bizarre scene and it ties neatly into Rushdie’s preoccupation with fragmentation. Aadam’s inspections soon turn into courtship, mirroring the overall theme of learning to love a fragmented being — whether human or India itself. That the marriage between Aadam Aziz and Naseem — later called Reverend Mother — is a long but not necessarily happy one speaks to the difficulty of this endeavor. Nevertheless, their relationship prefigures Saleem himself, whose fragmentation is of a vastly more destructive kind. Many twists and turns lie between Saleem’s birth and the first meeting of his grandparents, and Saleem makes quite the mystery out of his heritage as he narrates the farcical history of the Aziz family. Suffering an endless deferral of answers, Padma is forced to question again and again: “Is that him? […] Is he going to be your father? ” (Rushdie 2008: 62). The truth Saleem reveals eventually is far more melodramatic. 2.4 Midnight’s Children: A Model Analysis 45 Once the Aziz family moves into the villa of an Englishman called Methwold, they also come into contact with Wee Willie Winkie, a poor local performer, whose wife Vanita is pregnant at the same time as Amina Aziz. Utilizing an old cinematic trope, the text sees Mary Pereira, the Christian ayah of the Aziz family, switch out both babies at birth, so that in actuality Vanita’s baby (Saleem) grows up as an Aziz, whereas the original Aziz baby (Shiva) grows up as the son of the poor performer Wee Willie Winkie. An ayah is, traditionally, a maid and caretaker in affluent Indian households. What confuses this issue further is the question of Saleem’s nose, for Saleem asserts that he undoubtedly has inherited the tremendous nose and Kashmir-blue eyes from Aadam Aziz. Thus follows the last complication, capping off this marvelous farce: Vanita’s pregnancy is the result from an illicit affair with Methwold, the former British landlord of Methwold Estate. This makes Saleem a hybrid of the West and the East, British and Indian, highand lowborn, leading Padma to exclaim in dismay: “What are you telling me? You are an Anglo-Indian? Your name is not your own? ” (ibid.: 158). As this development is laid bare in its entirety, Saleem assures Padma that none of this matters for his sense of filial belonging: “When we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made no difference! I was still their son: they remained my parents. In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts” (ibid., italics i.o.). As Clement Hawes points out, “Midnight’s Children enacts a cultural politics that explores the retrospective fabrication of origins” (1993: 148). That this endeavor of self-fashioning is thoroughly steeped in the act of literary creation also becomes apparent in the language Saleem uses when he describes his impending birth: By the time the rains came at the end of June, the fetus was fully formed inside her womb. Knees and nose were present; and as many heads as would grow were already in position. What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book — perhaps an encyclopedia — even a whole language. (Rushdie 2008: 133) By providing such a complex weave of Saleem’s origin, while also freely mixing in such a self-reflexive and metafictional perspective, the novel makes sport of the initial certainty that the ancient boatman Tai espouses. In the same sense should be conceptualized the idea of belonging to this new India, scattered as it is with the heritage of colonialism. India fully divesting itself of all its colonial vestiges appears improbable, but that does not matter, for the identity of India is plural and implicated in a constant process of self-creation, literary or otherwise, that allows it to accommodate its hybrid existence. 46 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West 2.4.3 Colonial Elements and Postcolonial Implications Before turning to the children who have given the novel its name, the analysis will first take a look at the elements of colonialism found in Midnight’s Children and what their postcolonial implications are. Given that Rushdie has written his Bombay epos in English, the most obvious colonial residue one can point to is, of course, the language itself. However, far from delivering a story whose characters speak pitch-perfect British English, Rushdie instead makes use of hybridity once more, clearing the space for a form of indigenous English, a disruption to the colonial standard and a subsequent re-appropriation of English for his novel. On the technical side, this shows in a preponderance of untranslated utterances, such as “funtoosh” when the speaker feels “washed-up”, but also the veritable cornucopia of food Rushdie dishes out: “ladoos, pista-ki-lauz, meat samosas, kulfi” (Gorra 1999: 195). The word funtoosh is another nod towards the Indian world of cinema, specifically to the likewise named movie Funtoosh (1956), in which “a man called Ramlal ‘Fun‐ toosh’, the latter an attribute rather than a name, insane due to a personal trauma, is located in an ‘International Madhouse’” (Mishra 2007: 12). Likewise, some of his characters use idiosyncratic interjections, like Reverend Mother when she speaks about Saleem’s uncle Mustapha: “There is a time to sleep, whatsits‐ name, and a time to wake! Listen: Mustapha is making many hundreds of rupees a month, whatsitsname, in the Civil Service. What is your husband. Too good to work? ” (Rushdie 2008: 190). Then there is the matter of syntax. Here, one of the more illustrative examples is a grotesque scene in which, on a corpse-strewn battlefield, a man attempts to haggle with Saleem over his spittoon and does so in a delightful way: “Ho sir! Absolute master thing! Is silver? Is precious stone? You give; I give radio, camera, almost working order, my sir! Is a damn good deals, my friend. For one spittoon only, is damn fine. Ho yes. Ho yes, my sir, life must go on; trade must go on, my sir, not true? ” (ibid.: 519). As Gorra notes, it is not necessarily the amount of mistakes that enliven this scene, but rather a “liberation from the rules of standard English,” which in turn “creates a shameless energy that is at once monstrously inappropriate and yet absolutely right” (1999: 195). On the narrative side, the linguistic tension can be gleaned in Saleem’s education as well. Despite being Bombay-born, he is so thoroughly steeped in English that at school his “two worst subjects are Marathi and Gujarati, Bombay’s chief indigenous languages” (Rushdie 2008: 192). Investigating every moment in which Midnight’s Children deals with India’s colonial past would go far beyond the scope of this analysis, so three salient instances will serve to make the point: William Methwold; Evie Burns; and the Breach Candy Swimming Club. One of the more obvious symbols for colonialism within Saleem’s life is his home, Methwold estate, and the brief contact his family has with its previous owner, 2.4 Midnight’s Children: A Model Analysis 47 William Methwold, who sells it to them on the condition: “that the houses be bought complete with every last thing in them” and “that the entire contents be retained by the new owners” (Rushdie 2008: 126). This happens before Saleem’s birth, but its effects can be felt throughout the narrative, echoing a drive towards Anglicization. In the estate, Saleem’s father picks up an overly affected way of talking, mirroring Methwold. And, as Samir Dayal argues, “it is equally telling that the Methwold estate retains the Englishman’s name” (1992: 432). Likewise, the portrait of Mr. Raleigh which hangs in Saleem’s room features prominently in the household. It is no accident that Saleem identifies his destiny with the outstretched finger of Mr. Raleigh, itself a stridently colonial symbol. Aside from the estate itself, the figure of Methwold — Saleem’s biological father — serves as a representation of colonialism. Saleem describes him thus: “He had a head of thick black brilliantined hair, parted in the center” (Rushdie 2008: 125). The parted hair is particularly relevant, as it signifies the partition of the Indian subcontinent into Pakistan and India upon Independence. This partition occurs, ultimately, in the precise moment of Saleem’s birth, shortly after Methwold leaves the estate with a last, bizarre appearance: William Methwold raised a long white arm above his head. White hand dangled above brilliantined black hair; long tapering white fingers twitched towards center-parting, and the second and final secret was revealed, because fingers curled, and seized hair; drawing away from his head, they failed to release their prey; and in the moment after the disappearance of the sun Mr. Methwold stood in the afterglow of his Estate with his hairpiece in his hand. (ibid.: 153) Methwold’s hair proves to be an illusion, much like the endlessly uttered justifications of a civilizing mission during the British colonial enterprise, the legacy of which is far from illusory, even after Independence. In the center stage of the estate, ringed by buildings, Methwold appears to take his last bow, like a showman in a circus ring, or a puppeteer, before he “flings his thatch through the window of his motor-car […] and drives away” (ibid). The struggle between independence and colonial leftovers is also exemplified by Saleem meeting Evelyn ‘Evie’ Lilith Burns, who proves to be his temporary childhood crush. She is described as a domineering girl, who quickly manages to garner the attention of everyone by her sheer presence — in this case through her bicycling abilities. Concluding her introduction to the Indian friend group by saying, “‘From now on, there’s a new big chief around here. Okay, Indians? Any arguments? ’” (ibid.: 253) she shifts the colonial aspect away from the original colonizer, the British, to a newer global iteration found across the ocean, the United States of America. Whereas the US presence can be felt in Midnight’s Children through an overabundance of advertisement, it proves by far the lesser colonial influence, and so the relationship between Saleem and Evie deteriorates quickly and ends with her leaving Bombay behind. Finally, there is the Breach Candy Swimming Club, which houses a swimming pool that can be seen from Methwold estate, specifically Saleem’s room, and “where pink 48 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West people could swim in a pool the shape of British India without fear of rubbing up against a black skin” (ibid.: 124 f.). Throughout his childhood, Saleem witnesses the battle of a man called Pushpa Roy against this racial injustice: “Saffron bathing-cap on his head, green trunks wrapped in flag-hued towel, this Pushpa has declared war on the whites-only policy of the baths” (ibid.: 172). Yet whenever Pushpa goes through the entrance, “hired Pathans seize him, Indians save Europeans from an Indian mutiny as usual” (ibid.). Pushpa Roy is removed from the premises by the very people who should have helped him establish fairness and equality. This is a scene playing out multiple times in Saleem’s childhood, as Pushpa heroically tries to enter the whites-only baths. The link between Saleem, colonialism and swimming pools does not end there. A much more personal note (for Pushpa Roy is ultimately a stranger, albeit a heroic one) is struck by the fate of Saleem’s sister, the Brass Monkey. She goes to “a school full of tall, superbly muscled Europeans, who swam like fish and dived like submarines” (ibid.: 254) and who can be observed from Methwold estate as they practice in the Breach Candy Club, in the same India-shaped pool to which Pushpa has tried, and failed, to gain access. Saleem’s sister soon latches onto these girls “as a sort of mascot” and he describes feeling “genuinely aggrieved with her for perhaps the first time” (ibid.: 254). Thus, the struggle between independence and colonial remnants is felt by Saleem all around him: in the room where he sleeps, in the friends he keeps company, in the people on the streets he watches, in the language he uses and even in the initial willing self-subjugation of his sister. 2.4.4 Midnight’s Children, Democracy and Fractures Whereas the fragmentation of Saleem’s grandmother (observed through the perforated sheet) is to be understood metaphorically, Saleem is quick to point out that the fissuring of his skin happens literally: I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug — that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history […] has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. (Rushdie 2008: 43) Having introduced his broken body on the first page, the text continues to impress on us the severity of Saleem’s fracturing being as the story progresses. Here, as elsewhere, the influence of magic realism is keenly felt. The metaphorical has become literal — Saleem, the human allegory for post-Independence India — is fissuring from the impact of all the multiplicities he seeks to contain. This link between Saleem and India stems from the timing of his birth which coincides with Indian independence. To be precise, on August 15 th , 1947, right “on the stroke of midnight” Saleem is born, and thus “mysteriously handcuffed to history” (Rushdie 2008: 3). Saleem is one of 1001 children born in the first hour of midnight and, crucially combining history with the 2.4 Midnight’s Children: A Model Analysis 49 fantastic, these midnight-blessed children acquire magic. The closer a character is born to midnight itself, the greater those powers turn out to be. As one of the two children born precisely at midnight, Saleem is thus endowed with the extraordinary ability of telepathy, gaining later in life access to the “inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike,” which “jostled for space within my head” (ibid.: 232). In other words: he possesses a form of inward communication and insight through which he personifies the democratic optimism and pluralism threading through post-Independence India, and which overlays his personal search for meaning with that of the nation itself. How does Saleem come into his powers? Here the analysis returns to his prodigious nose and enters the mode of the grotesque, joining it to that of magic realism and the satire of origins. As the ancient boatman Tai has indicated for Aadam Aziz, such a majestic organ is liable to congest, and young Saleem suffers from just such a nasal congestion, describing his nose as “permanently bunged-up, and as useless as a wooden sikh-kabab” (ibid.: 214). He eventually acquires his abilities during a voyeuristic and somewhat incestuous bathroom scene. Taken on its own, the scene can also be read as simple shock and an aversion to being found hiding, which makes Saleem continue watching his mother. However, the number of other scenes along incestuous lines — rubbing against his celebrity aunt (Rushdie 2008: 347); overlaying the faces of his lover with the image of his sister (ibid.: 553) — make that a somewhat tenuous claim. Hiding in a washing chest, Saleem observes his mother pleasuring herself, unable to look away from his mother’s bottom, “black as night, rounded and curved, resembling nothing on earth so much as a gigantic, black Alfonso mango” (ibid.: 223). This equation of food and his mother’s body then leads to a fatal sniff, as a pajama cord becomes stuck in his nostril: Pajama-cord rises painfully half an inch further up the nostril. But other things are rising, too: hauled by that feverish inhalation, nasal liquids are being sucked relentlessly up up up, nose-goo flowing upwards, against gravity, against nature. Sinuses are subjected to unbearable pressure … until, inside the nearlynineyearold head, something bursts. Snot rockets through a breached dam into dark new channels. Mucus, rising higher than mucus was ever intended to rise, Waste fluid, reaching as far, perhaps, as the frontiers of the brain … there is a shock. Something electrical has been moistened. (Rushdie 2008: 223) The breached borders inside Saleem’s head correspond to the voyeuristic transgression which precedes Saleem’s apotheosis. The nose becomes the gateway for the outside to invade the inside: on the literal level conjoining pajama cord and mucus, on the metaphorical level making Saleem the receptacle of the million voices of India. He 50 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West becomes, as it were, a radio, able to adjust the frequency through which he observes the people of his country. As Saleem’s fracturing body indicates, the optimism that such an ability might inspire increasingly comes under siege as he grows older. The revelation of his power follows on the heels of violent language riots taking place in Bombay, through which the text foreshadows the initial difficulty of linguistic diversity that telepathy presents, for “the voices babbled in everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Luck-now Urdu to the southern slurrings of Tamil” (Rushdie 2008: 232). Still, for now these difficulties are overcome once “language faded away and was replaced by universally intelligible thoughtforms which far transcended words” (ibid.: 233). Thus, endowed with the power of observation, he seeks out the other children of midnight, realizing that of 1001 only 581 have survived — the astute mathematician will have calculated that the unfortunate children who did not make the cut number 420 -, the others having fallen prey to the dismal circumstances such as poverty and societal as well as religious strife. Indeed, on the whole, Saleem is not spared the darker aspects of human life on his voyeuristic excursions: “I was a landlord in Uttar Pradesh, my belly rolling over my pajama-cord as I ordered serfs to set my surplus grain on fire . . . at another moment I was starving to death in Orissa, where there was a food shortage as usual: I was two months old and my mother had run out of breast-milk” (ibid.: 240 f.). Thus, the vital aspect of Rushdie’s brand of magic realism becomes visible: He is not interested in creating fantastic worlds to escape, but rather seeks to show through the fantastic a truth that mere realism could not as easily capture. While still recounting the events leading up to his birth, Saleem also already hints at the brutality of sectarian division. A genial Hindu merchant called Lifafa Das, who provides local children with music and pictures of foreign cities, is maligned by a little girl due to his religion: “‘You’ve got a nerve, coming into thith muhalla! ’ I know you: my father knows you: everyone knows you’re a Hindu! ! ’” (ibid.: 98, italics i.o.). Tensions rise as bystanders join in, calling him “‘Mother raper! Violator of our daughters! ’” (ibid). The grotesque crescendo soon finds its climax as school children start chanting, “‘Ra-pist! Ra-pist! Ra-ray-ray-pist! ’ without really knowing what they’re saying” (ibid.: 99). Likewise, altercations between the merchant class and the criminal organization Ravana, named after a “many-headed demon”, fall into the schematic of divisiveness within the Indian population, leading to arson as a godown (a warehouse) is burnt down, smoke gathering “like a ball in the discolored morning sky” (ibid.: 96). Both of these scenes occur within the same chapter, which tellingly announces Saleem’s birth to the world at large. Yet the ‘many-headed monster’ is a term that occurs multiple times throughout the story as a whole, always used for crowds and the disparate multitudes of India. In any case, following his initially optimistic inclination, Saleem seeks to address these problems of division and strife by founding the M.C.C., the ‘Midnight Children’s Conference’, which, as Michael Gorra asserts, has its real-world counterpart in the INC, the Indian National Congress (1999: 189), though the INC members are assuredly not 2.4 Midnight’s Children: A Model Analysis 51 children. Through the power of telepathy, Saleem provides the surviving children of midnight a forum in which they can meet and discuss the future of the country. The M.C.C., however, is destined to fail, as the children populating its ranks are not immune to their parents’ faults. One of Saleem’s more harrowing statements is his comment that “children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, and it was the poison of grown-ups which did it for us” (Rushdie 2008: 355), signifying a disillusionment about the fate of the new generations, which are supposed to overcome the adult strife surrounding them. 2.4.5 Essentialist Antagonists, the New Generation and Parvati-the-Witch Although many minor antagonists plague Saleem’s life, the predominant ones are Shiva and the Widow. The first, Shiva, has been born at the stroke of midnight as well. He is the biological progeny of the Aziz family but grows up as Wee Willie Winkie’s son. Contrary to Saleem, who is primarily engaged in intellectual musings, the text attributes to Shiva many of the characteristics belonging to his namesake, specifically destruction and fertility. Shiva is one of the primary deities of Hinduism and has historically acquired a plethora of names and aspects. In the early Vedic period, he was commonly known as Ruda and depicted as “a powerful mage figure with erect phallus and horned animal mask” (Wolpert 2006: 48). In the later post-Vedic epics, the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyana, he came to be known as Shiva, “who incinerates the cosmos and all its beings”. This aspect, however, is counteracted by “his creative nature”, sym‐ bolized by “an erect phallus, the linga, a ubiquitious symbol in Shaivite temples” (ibid.: 49). Moreover, in the Vedic epics, Shiva also “seduced the wives of the Rishis […], sons of Brahmā” (ibid.), another important deity of Hinduism. The former predilection shows itself in “the gifts of war” (Rushdie 2008: 277), which assert themselves as Shiva leads underground gangs in Bombay and later becomes a military officer. The latter shows as he satisfies a tremendous sexual appetite by regularly sleeping with the wives of other men upon reaching adulthood. Saleem and Shiva spring from a similar well of legend, and while Saleem-the-narrator does not tire to speak of Shiva’s destructive potential, he also openly stylizes himself as Ganesh, an elephant-eared deity considered a stenographer in Hindu iconography. The magical powers of these polar opposites center around a prominent part of their body each: “Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees and knees and nose” (ibid.). The confrontation that first clarifies their positions as enemies occurs during a meeting of the M.C.C., where Shiva — “a short, rat-faced youth with filed-down teeth and two of the biggest knees the world has ever seen” (ibid.: 304) — declares the 52 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West future trajectory of the conference: “‘So! Lissen, my father said I got born at exactly midnight also — so don’t you see, that makes us joint bosses of this gang of yours! Midnight is best, agreed? So — those other kids gotta do like we tell them! ’” (ibid.: 305). Naturally, Saleem seeks to preserve the democratic nature of the conference: “I had in mind something more like a, you know, sort of loose federation of equals, all points of view given free expression” (ibid.). There follows a heated exchange in which their two conflicting visions of India collide. For Saleem’s India, the search for meaning within a framework permitting plural opinions is paramount, yet for Shiva there is but one reason, one valid opinion — the rule of strength: “Everybody does what I say, or I squeeze the shit outa them with my knees! ” (ibid.). The second antagonist, Indira Gandhi, alternatively called the Widow, is the political extension of Shiva’s dogma. A fictional character in this story, she nevertheless has her correlate in real life, having served as India’s Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977, and 1980 to 1984. On October 31 st , 1984, Indira Gandhi was shot by her own Sikh bodyguards — Satwant Singh and Beant Singh — supposedly in revenge for a preceding military operation green-lit by her. While Rushdie is justifiably harsh in his criticism of her in Midnight’s Children, in an essay on her assassination he nevertheless notes: “All of us who love India are in mourning today. It is of no importance whether we numbered ourselves amongst Indira Gandhi’s most fervent supporters or her most implacable opponents; her murder diminishes us all, and leaves a deep and alarming scar upon the very idea of India […]” (Rushdie 2010: 41). Although she never becomes a fully figured presence like Shiva, appearing through intermediaries in the novel, Indira Gandhi nevertheless haunts Saleem’s life throughout Midnight’s Children. Sometimes she appears in the form of reluctant retrospection — “the Widow has done for me” (ibid.: 268) — sometimes as a dream, robbing Saleem of all intelligibility: […] the Widow’s hand is lifting one by one the children green their blood is black unloosed by cutting fingernails it splashes black on walls (of green) […] the Widow laughs her tongue is green but her teeth are black. And children torn in two in Widow hands which rolling rolling halves of children roll them into little balls the balls are green the night is black. (Rushdie 2008: 288) Contrasting his usual erudition, the abandonment of syntax and punctuation evoke a relentless flow of words echoing the feverish nature of his dream. This fear is well-founded. In the comparatively short history of post-Independence India, Indira Gandhi figures prominently as the one who declared a state of emergency from 1975 to 1977. This period, aptly titled the Emergency, saw the Indian public subjected to a vast assortment of governmental overreaches. Her political opponents found themselves 2.4 Midnight’s Children: A Model Analysis 53 imprisoned, the press was censored, and reports emerged of a campaign aimed at the forced sterilization of ‘undesirables’ led by her son Sanjay Gandhi (Frank 1996: 252). Todd M. Kuchta asserts that these forced sterilizations have impacted over 3.7 million people (1999: 213). Such attempts at ‘beautifying’ or homogenizing society are picked up several times in Midnight’s Children. It occurs, for instance, as a group of uniformed youths (all looking, so Saleem states, like Sanjay Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s son) appears in front of the magician’s ghetto, where communist magicians of all religious denominations have provided Saleem with refuge after the Pakistan-Indian war of 1971 in which he played a part. Encroaching with bulldozers, these uniformed youths soon turn the camp to rubble in their search for homogenous beauty: “‘this slum is a public eyesore, can no longer be tolerated’”, decries their loudspeaker; “‘… all persons will follow orders without dissent.’” (Rushdie 2008: 599). Another instance of this beautification of society occurs much earlier, when Saleem contemplates his new-found power of telepathy, comparing it to transistor radios, “which will never cease, in our part of the world, to symbolize impotence” (ibid.: 231), since they are a reminder of the heinous practice of bribing people with electronic gadgets to urge them towards sterilization. The theme of forced sterilization returns in the final confrontation between Saleem and Indira Gandhi. Imprisoned after having been taken from the magician’s ghetto, Saleem and 420 other children of midnight — all except Shiva — are subjected to a process that Saleem calls “Sperectomy: the draining out of hope” (ibid.: 611). Here, the grotesque returns in full force: Yes, you must have all of it: however overblown, however Bombay-talkie-melodramatic, you must let it sink in, you must see! What Saleem smelled in the evening of January 18th, 1977: something frying in an iron skillet, soft unspeakable somethings spiced with turmeric coriander cumin and fenugreek … the pungent inescapable fumes of what-had-been-excised, cooking over a low, slow fire. (Rushdie 2008: 614) By linking the act of cooking — the apparent banality of adding spices to food — with the horror of castration, the text evokes the true grotesque nature of enforced sterilization, which for Saleem stands as emblematic for the hopelessness of his aspirations. The horror of forced sterilization occupies Rushdie beyond Midnight’s Children. In East, West he returns to the topic in the short story “The Free Radio”, where a love-struck youth called Ramani exchanges his fertility for a free radio in order to impress a local widow. The story exacts its force primarily through the stark con‐ trast of youthful naivety and the radio bribe which so callously abuses it. Indeed, the fumes of homogenization and Indira Gandhi’s legacy are both ‘pungent’ and ‘inescapable’. Starting in 1947, the democratic dream inherent to Saleem’s vision 54 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West of post-Independence India is slowly dwindling, cooking, as it were, above a ‘low, slow fire’. So it is under the antagonistic influences of Shiva and the Widow that Saleem’s ambition crumbles. Both serve as the opposites to his vision of India. It is feasible to conceptualize these dual antagonists as two further aspects of Midnight Children’s magic realism, Shiva correlating with the magical on account of his powers, whereas Indira Gandhi mirrors more closely the part of realism. Parvati-the-Witch, a child of midnight born comparatively close to Saleem, offers a contrast to these overbearing antagonistic forces. In Hindu iconography, Parvati is the wife of Shiva, their mythological union being famous for the feat of having sex for 36,000 years (Wolpert 2006: 50). In Midnight’s Children, mirroring her namesake, Parvati has sex with Shiva as well, and the child of that union, Aadam, later is adopted by Saleem. Shiva, in line with his mythological counterpart, is uninterested in family life, and so the job of rearing the child falls to Saleem. Aadam, named after his grandfather (who is his biological grandfather), is endowed with giant ears and an immense capacity for listening: “He was born with ears which flapped so high and wide that they must have heard the shootings in Bihar and the screams of lathi-charged dock-workers in Bombay” (Rushdie 2008: 587). This tracks with Hindu mythology in so far as that Ganesh, the elephant-headed God of Hinduism, is the son of Shiva and Parvati. Since Saleem stylizes himself as Ganesh-like, however, he clearly establishes a secondary link between himself and Aadam. Once more, then, Rushdie circles the question of origin in a playful manner, this time in the form of the mythological progeny of India, the result of the tripartite union of Saleem (Ganesh), Shiva and Parvati; and just like Saleem was born during Indian independence, so too is Aadam born right as Indira Gandhi institutes the Emergency (Baston-Tudor 2014: 24). Parvati does not only birth Aadam, however. At the start of the Indian-Pakistani war of 1971, Saleem (at that point living with his family in Pakistan) loses his memory because he receives a hit to the head through a flying spittoon. Using the cinematic trope of amnesia as a starting point, the text sees Saleem move on a journey of self-discovery which ends in Parvati’s magical basket, the method by which she smuggles him across the frontlines, back to Bombay. In her basket, the dark, womb-like space Parvati offers him, he regains his memories. This, so Baston-Tudor, equals a rebirth, and leads her to conclude that Parvati-the-witch “embodies the alternative, the dichotomic pair of yet another witch — the Widow” (2014: 25). Rushdie plays here with the idea of nationhood and how it is conceptually tied to motherhood. Indira Gandhi, the Widow, calls herself Mother India — “India is Indira and Indira is India” (Rushdie 2008: 597) — and is configured as an autocratic and tyrannical form of birthing the nation; whereas Parvati, being part of a pluralist community of magicians, presents a more optimistic and democratic form, by (re)birthing Saleem who identifies himself as India (Baston-Tudor 2014: 29). Ultimately, though, it is the Widow who wins out in this struggle, as Parvati perishes in the magicians’ ghetto once Sanjay Gandhi’s Youth Movement turns it into rubble. 2.4 Midnight’s Children: A Model Analysis 55 2.4.6 Final Atomization and the Chutnification of History Drained of hope by the Sperectomy, his skin cracking under the strain, Saleem returns to the scene of his birth with his son Aadam in tow. Back in Bombay, Methwold estate has become an apartment complex close to a bottling plant operated by his old ayah Mary Pereira — the very same who exchanged him at birth, the “criminal of midnight” (Rushdie 2008: 639). In this bottling plant, Saleem meets Padma, his faithful listener, thereby returning in cyclical fashion to the original narrative frame with which the text started. The image of chutnification, which seeps through the entire novel, is indeed one of Rushdie’s most potent images for pluralism and metafictionality. What Saleem does in this bottling plant, and by telling his story, is to create the smells of memory: Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time! I, however, have pickled chapters. Tonight, by screwing the lid firmly on to a jar bearing the legend Special Formula No. 30: “Abracadabra,” I reach the end of my long-winded autobiography; in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I’m afraid, with the shadows of imperfection. (Rushdie 2008: 642) Thus, each chapter he writes and recounts to Padma corresponds to one specific jar of chutney — a food that is predicated on the comingling of various ingredients, that cannot exist, by definition, without hybridity. Here, the analysis briefly circles back to the way Saleem-the-narrator has presented himself throughout the novel: self-conscious and erudite, but also, at times, frightfully unreliable. This unreliability now joins the process of chutnification, gaining a new meaning in the process. For the history he writes down is not the linear and official history of his country, the clear substance wished for by Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, but rather his own — a history of which millions more exist, all told differently, all combining, in their aggregate, into India. Which leaves, in the last analysis, the final image of the novel, the dissolution of Saleem as he succumbs at last to “the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes” (Rushdie 2008: 647): “I am the bomb in Bombay, watch me explode, bones splitting breaking beneath the awful pressure of the crowd […] Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust” (ibid.). The tragicomic life of Saleem Sinai ends with his breaking apart, unable to contain any longer the pluralities of India. In the streets of Bombay, his fragmentation (ironically itself a form of cohesion within the narrative structure, as it emerges like a red thread from the very first chapter) is completed. While the tone of these last passages can be read with a dystopian inflection, particularly if one pairs it with the horror of the Emergency, the Indian-Pakistani war, and the death of Saleem’s family, as well as all the other inequities he has suffered, John Su makes a convincing case when he argues that in Midnight’s Children, “failure contains an implicit utopian promise” (2001: 562). Indeed, the entire novel stresses the necessity of 56 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West diversity and pluralism. Uncontainable multitudes represent merely the most extreme form of this particular image. Contrary to traditional epics, where a sole hero figure can change events, Saleem’s failure as a heroic protagonist ultimately constitutes a counter tradition, repudiating Indira Gandhi’s one-person-rules-all approach. In this final Bakhtinian image, then, the complete and grotesque atomization of the body shatters the idea of monolithic India one last time, as the idea of uncontainable multitudes is brought to its most extreme conclusion. 2.5 Study Questions ● How do Salman Rushdie’s novels depict India and Bombay/ Mumbai in particular? Does that depiction change over time? If so, how and why? ● Think about the role of women in Salman Rushdie’s novels: can you provide examples for some who have agency and some who do not? If so, what leads to the loss or gain of agency in these specific instances, and which literary or aesthetic tools (if any) are used to underline the issue? ● How is migration portrayed in Salman Rushdie’s novels? What challenges do migrants face as they enter a foreign country? ● Can you point out moments of magic realism or the grotesque in the novels? What could be their purpose in these specific instances? ● Is the novel The Satanic Verses islamophobic? 2.6 Further Reading Booker, M. Keith (ed.) (1999). Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie. New York: Hall. Abdulrazak, Gurnah (ed.) (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/ CCOL0521847192. Thiara, Nicole Weickgenannt (2009). Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography: Writing the Nation into Being. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1057/ 9780230244412. Goonetilleke, Devapriya C.R.A (2010). Salman Rushdie. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kluwick, Ursula (2012). Exploring Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction. New York: Rout‐ ledge. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780203134139. Eaglestone, Robert/ McQuillian, Martin (eds.) (2013). Salman Rushdie: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury. Ghosh, Tapan Kumar/ Bhattacharyya, Prasanta (eds.) (2016). Mapping Out the Rushdie Republic: Some Recent Surveys. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2.5 Study Questions 57 2.7 Works Cited Primary Sources Rushdie, Salman (1993 [1990]). Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Puffin Books. — (1998 [1988]). The Satanic Verses. London: Vintage. — (2008 [1981]). Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage. — (2010 [1991]). Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Vintage. — (2016 [2015]). Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. London: Vintage. — (2021). Languages of Truth. Essays 2003-2020. London: Jonathan Cape. Secondary Sources Aravamudan, Srinivas (1995). “Fables of Censorship: Salman Rushdie, Satire and Symbolic Violence.” Western Humanities Review 49 (4), 323-329. Ashcroft, Bill/ Griffiths, Gareth/ Tiffin, Helen (2002). The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. 2. ed. London/ New York: Routledge. Barasch, Frances K. (2018 [1971]). The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings. Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI: 10.1515/ 9783111715100. Baston-Tudor, Cerasela (2014). “Indian Women, Religion and Politics in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.” Cultural Intertexts 1/ 2, 20-29. Brennan, Timothy (1989). Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1007/ 978-1-349-20079-5. Buchholz, Laura (2013). “Unnatural Narrative in Postcolonial Contexts: Re-Reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” Journal of Narrative Theory 42 (3), 332-351. DOI: 10.1353/ jnt.2013.0004. Dayal, Samir (1992). “Talking Dirty: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.” College English 54 (4), 431-445. DOI: 10.2307/ 377839. Fenwick, Mac (2004). “Crossing the Figurative Gap: Metaphor and Metonymy in Midnight’s Chil‐ dren.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39 (3), 45-68. DOI: 10.1177/ 0021989404047046. Frank, Katherine (1996). “Mr. Rushdie and Mrs. Gandhi.” Biography 19 (3), 245-258. DOI: 10.1353/ bio.2010.0239. Goonetilleke, Devapriya C. R. A. (2010). Salman Rushdie. 2. ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gorra, Michael (1999). “‘This Angrezi in Which I Am Forced to Write’: On the Language of Midnight's Children.” In: Booker, M. Keith (ed.). Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie. New York: Hall, 188-204. Hawes, Clement (1993). “Leading History by the Nose: The Turn to the Eighteenth Century in Midnight's Children.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 39 (1), 147-168. Hegerfeldt, Anne C. (2005). Lies That Tell the Truth: Magic Realism Seen Through Contemporary Fiction from Britain. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 58 2 Salman Rushdie — Between East and West Herbert, Caroline (2008). “‘No Longer a Memoirist but a Voyeur’: Photographing and Narrating Bombay in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44 (2), 139-150. DOI: 10.1080/ 17449850802000522. Hoydis, Julia (2019). “Realism for the Post-Truth Era: Politics and Storytelling in Recent Fiction and Autobiography by Salman Rushdie.” European Journal of English Studies 23 (2), 152-171. DOI: 10.1080/ 13825577.2019.1640422. Katawal, Ubaraj (2013). “In Midnight's Children, the Subalterns Speak! ” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 15 (1), 86-102. DOI: 10.5325/ intelitestud.15.1.0086. König, Eva (2006). “Between Cultural Imperialism and the Fatwa: Colonial Echoes and Postco‐ lonial Dialogue in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” International Fiction Review 33 (1-2), 52-63. Kreutzer, Eberhard (n.d.). “Salman Rushdie.” In: Domsch, Sebastian et al. (eds.). Kritisches Lexikon Zur Fremdsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur: Edition Text + Kritik, vol. 10, Ravensburg: Munziger. Kuchta, Todd M. (1999). “Allegorizing the Emergency: Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory.” In: Booker, M. Keith (ed.). Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, New York: Hall, 205-24. Malinowski, Bernadette/ Nebelin, Marian/ Sandten, Cecile (2021). “Von der Schichtung zur Palimpsestierung: ‘Palimpsest’ als kulturwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriff.” Semiotik 43 (1/ 2), 177-212. Mishra, Vijay (2007). “Rushdie and Bollywood Cinema.” In: Gurnah, Abdulrazak (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 11-28. DOI: 10.1017/ CCOL0521847192.002. Netton, Richard Ian (1996). Text and Trauma — An East-West Primer. London/ New York: Routledge Curzon. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780203036600. O’Brien, Sean P. (2015). “‘Both Masters and Victims of Their Times’: Engaging Aporetic Time in Midnight’s Children.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 50 (2), 164-178. DOI: 10.1177/ 0021989414533688. Rushdie, Salman (2010 [1991]). Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. New York: Vintage Books. — (2021). Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020. New York: Random House. Russo, Mary (2012). The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. New York: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780203609965. Su, John J. (2001). “Epic of Failure: Disappointment as Utopian Fantasy in ‘Midnight's Children’.” Twentieth Century Literature 47 (4), 545-568. DOI: 10.2307/ 3175993. Teverson, Andrew S. (2001). “Fairy Tale Politics: Free Speech and Multiculturalism in Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” Twentieth Century Literature 47 (4), 444-466. DOI: 10.2307/ 3175990. Trousdale, Rachel (2017). “Salman Rushdie and Islamophobia.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52 (3), 439-454. DOI: 10.1177/ 0021989417695859. Wolpert, Stanley A. (ed.) (2006). Encyclopedia of India. 4 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 2.7 Works Cited 59 3 Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions Indrani Karmakar, Chemnitz University of Technology Abstract This chapter concerns the literary works by Shashi Deshpande, a prominent In‐ dian writer who first emerged in India's Anglophone literary scene in the 1970s and continues to garner critical attention. Foregrounding recurring concerns — namely, women’s subjectivity, motherhood, intergenerational relationships — in her fictions (with a brief reference to her non-fictions), the chapter emphasizes how her literary texts speak to the larger socio-political context of postcolonial India in which they come to exist. Particular attention is given to the idea of ‘new Indian woman’ as explored and excavated throughout Deshpande’s texts by their dramatization of a curious oscillation between tradition and modernity, a dichot‐ omy that has its origin in the early 20 th century nationalist discourse of the home and the world. Nonetheless, as the chapter highlights, Deshpande’s texts evince how such a dialectics of home and the world assumes new valences in postcolonial and, especially, post-liberalized India. The chapter also considers Deshpande’s deployment of the aesthetic modes of domestic realism and modernism in her portrayal of domestic space becoming a site of negotiation, involving distinctly regulated mobility of women between the so-called public and private. Locating her works within the corpus of what can be called the second-generation Anglo‐ phone Indian writing, this chapter intends to offer fresh critical perspectives on Deshpande’s literary texts, with which to understand the evolving trajectory of women as well as women’s writing in postcolonial India. 3.1 Introduction This chapter introduces eminent Indian writer Shashi Deshpande, who first emerged in India’s Anglophone literary scene in the 1970s and continues to garner critical attention. Born in 1938 in Dharwad, Karnataka, Deshpande hails from an illustrious literary family; her father, Sriranga, was a renowned Sanskrit scholar and Kannada (language spoken in Karnataka in Southwestern India) dramatist. One of the key figures of Indian English literature, Deshpande, belongs to the generation that came of age with the independence of India in 1947, occupying a significant position in what can be called the ‘second generation’ of Indian English literature. Imbued with a feminist aesthetic (here I am using the term to mean aesthetics inspired by and inspiring gender concerns, female experiences and feminist perspectives), most of her literary works — belonging to genres as varied as novels, short stories, essays, and more recently, memoirs — primarily, though not exclusively, focus on women and their position in a society constituted by the complex nexus of patriarchy, class, caste and religion. This chapter starts by locating her work within Indian English literature and, drawing upon the existing scholarly research, moves on to consider some salient concerns in her fiction, particularly those relating to her representation of women, to examine how her literary texts speak to the larger socio-political context of postcolonial India. 3.2 Writing in English: The Language Question Reading Deshpande and locating her work in Indian English literature necessitates understanding the language question of the literary production of the postcolonial country, especially in the context of the time — the late 1960s and the early 1970s — when Deshpande appeared in the Indian literary scenario. In her essays and short non-fictional prose, Deshpande has addressed the initial predicament she felt about writing in a language that came with the colonisers and remained within a privileged class (Deshpande 1997: 65). In a way, this concern resonates with the often quoted statement by another renowned Indian writer of the earlier generation, Raja Rao, in the preface of his 1938 novel Kanthapura: “[…] one has to convey in a language that is not one’s own, the spirit that is one’s own” (1938: vii). The later part of Rao’s assertion is of particular interest here: “we cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the larger world as part of us” (Rao 1938: vii). Rao wrote this before India’s independence in the formative days of Indian English literature, meaning that the question of English as an Indian language has since evolved in postcolonial times. However, Rao’s comment still holds relevance in its articulation of the distinctiveness of Indian English writing, a singularity emanating from the unique blend of “strangeness and familiarity, institutional power and familial intimacy” (Majumdar 2005: n.p.). Deshpande, for whom English has been the only language of her creative expres‐ sion, owing to her English education, grew up with two other languages, Marathi and Kannada. Consequently, her writing has been profoundly impacted by the “lan‐ guage-imbricated” aesthetics (Khair 2018: n.p.), as she writes, “if my writing language was English, the world of my two languages — Kannada and Marathi — was where my writing was located. My connections to the cultures of these two languages were very strong, and my writing reflected this” (Deshpande 2021a: n.p.). This locatedness is to be emphasised here, as it endows Deshpande’s fiction with a sense of specificity and connectedness apropos of the cultural context the narratives are set in. Put differently, what is particularly noticeable in Deshpande’s fiction is how the fictional world is moored in the local and regional in India, mostly in Maharashtra and Karnataka, the places she belongs to. While her predecessor Anita Desai’s protagonists are often identifiable with their Western counterparts (perhaps because of Desai’s background of mixed parentage) or have connections to the Western world, Deshpande’s fiction operates exclusively within India. This rootedness merits special attention: by the time Deshpande’s second novel If I Die Today came out in 1982, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s 62 3 Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions Children (1981) started creating ripples in the world of Indian English literature, resulting as it did in a spurt of Indian English fiction dealing with the nation and “national allegory” ( Jameson 1986), often involving the diasporic scenario outside India. In this context, Deshpande’s decisive rootedness in the local and sustained engagement with “home” makes her stand out. However, this focus on the domestic space is far from confining as writer and critic Tabish Khair aptly avers that Deshpande “used the domestic space as a house to look out of. The domestic situate the narrative, but they were looking out of the windows and doors” (Khair 2018: n.p.). This interconnectedness of the home and the larger world will be discussed further in the forthcoming sections. It bears mentioning, though, at this point, that this movement between the home and the world lends itself to the critical discussion of several aspects of Deshpande’s works. While this home/ world connection underscores the gender politics addressed and explored throughout her works, this also relates to her access to the worlds of English and Bhasa literature (literature in other Indian languages), a confluence that shapes her fiction through the “multiplicity of intertextualities from different cultures” ( Jain 2003: 195). Such convergence manifests in her use of both Indian mythologies as well as Western literature — be it her use of the Hindu mythical Krishna-Sudama story in her debut novel The Dark Holds No Terror (1980) or the protagonist’s recitation of T.S. Eliot’s verse drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935) in the novel Small Remedies (2000). 3.3 Writing Women: Texts and Contexts Discussing her memoir Listen to Me (2018) with another Indian author, Githa Hariharan, Deshpande says the following in response to Hariharan’s question about different power dynamics limned in her fiction: The family is a microcosm of society and the same power politics that exists in society is in play in the family as well. […] As a writer, I often felt at the receiving end of this idea that […] women who write about women confine themselves to the family and home. I remember in my early days as a writer an interviewer asked me that since I wrote only about ‘in here’, and not about ‘out there’, did I not feel circumscribed, limited? And I had to think what ‘in here’ and ‘out there’ meant. I then understood that I could not think of them as two rigidly exclusive categories, one more important than the other. (Deshpande 2021a: n.p.) This incisive comment by Deshpande illuminates some of the major concerns her fiction excavates and gives us an entry point into her fictional world. Deshpande here challenges the widely held belief that the family and home are apolitical spaces free from the influence of the more powerful forces at work outside. In other words, she questions the neatly drawn boundary between the public and private, reminding us of feminism’s well-worn but still relevant slogan — “the personal is political”. Indeed, in many of her novels, populated by complex female characters, the narrative focus is on the family or home with all its conflicts, ambiguities and paradoxes — as the primary 3.3 Writing Women: Texts and Contexts 63 site of patriarchal power entrenched and inscribed in the larger social structure as well as the much-desired space of refuge and solace (Chew 2005: 71; Sunder Rajan 1993b: 231). Correspondingly, the constructions of gender, especially the prevalent and shifting ideas of womanhood and motherhood, occupy a crucial position in her novels (Bhalla 2006: 66; Jackson 2010: 104). Most of her fictional works feature protagonists who are middle-class, educated, modern and seemingly self-sufficient. The crux of the narrative generally resides in the protagonists’ oscillation between the familial and societal norms and expectations — pronounced and subtle — centred around the family and the new-age understanding of individual freedom, agency and autonomy. Crucially, as will be discussed shortly, the past and the present, denoting tradition and modernity, respectively, are not presented as two discrete categories but rather puzzlingly entangled. Moreover, such a merging of past and present speaks to the specific construction of womanhood of the time and space the characters inhabit. For example, in her debut novel, The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980) (inspired by one of her earlier short stories, “A Liberated Woman”), the protagonist, Sarita, a successful doctor, returns to her parental home after years of estrangement. She severed her connection with her parents when she defied their expectations by marrying her classmate, a promising young poet who happened to be from a lower caste. Sarita, who chose her conviction over conformity, comes back years later upon receiving the news of her mother’s death. Her return is, in fact, precipitated by an even more troubling event: she is repeatedly raped by her husband whose sudden sadistic impulses appear to have been elicited by his “emasculated” thwarted ego. As Sarita struggles with her inner turmoil to reconcile her incompatible emotions and expectations, at some point, she reflects: “it was much easier for women in those days to accept, not to struggle, because they believed, they knew there was nothing else for them. And they called that Fate” (Deshpande 1990: 69). The protagonist’s resistance to a fatalistic attitude commonly held by the women of earlier generations speaks of her specific subject-position as a woman of the new age, while her dilemmas underpin the tenacious hold of the conventional ideas of womanhood, one that demands sacrifice and self-effacement. The inner conflict is palpable in the following passage in which she considers leaving her job, a thought that brings her nothing but a sense of self-loathing: “I saw myself, the end of my sari tucked into my waist, hair tied into a neat knot, smiling at them all as I served them. And all of them smiled back at me. A mother in an ad, in a movie, dressed in a crisply starched, ironed sari. Wife and mother, loving and beloved. A picture of grace, harmony and happiness. Could I not achieve that? ” (Deshpande 1990: 81). The gloomy undertone of the passage describing the complete picture of the “perfect family”, with even the sartorial details of the mother meticulously mentioned, serves to ironise this ideal. In another novel, That Long Silence (1988), Jaya is a conscientious writer torn between her integrity as a writer and the compulsion to pander to the market’s demands of gimmicky and stereotypical portrayals of women in gossipy magazines. This dilemma in her professional life is, in a way, connected to her personal life, given 64 3 Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions the way she was brought up in a middle-class family amidst the ethos of compliance and conformity. This predicament is compounded by the crisis in her family, the ever-widening gap between herself and her husband in a perfunctory marriage that she wryly describes as “two bullocks tied together by a yoke” (Deshpande 1989: 5). As her husband faces allegations of corruption at his workplace, the chasm between the couple keeps broadening. When the couple moves to a new place owing to the changed circumstances, the isolation induces Jaya to confront the long-buried silence within herself: The evening after we came here, Mohan and I, to this Dadar flat […] a picture of the four of us at a meal came to me in the same way, like a glossy, coloured advertising visual. We smiled, we laughed; I, the mother, served them with ‘love and care’; Mohan, the head of the family, smiled indulgently, and the children were lively and playful. A visual — yes it had to be only that; for I could not find the words to match the picture. When I tried, what came through was our normal dinnertime conversation — the scum of hostility floating to the top, marring a placid, clean surface. (Deshpande 1989: 3-4) The echo of the previous quotation from The Dark Holds No Terror is sufficiently audible in this passage. The opposing dictions used here effectively capture the sharp contrast between the glorified image and the stark reality. The central themes of these two novels are different, and so are their narrative tones: The Dark Hold No Terrors is “tumultuous” while That Long Silence is “eerily calm” (Menon 1999: 225). Yet, despite the divergent thematic and tonal characters of the narratives, what is dominant is this overlapping concern surrounding the prevalent constructions of womanhood and women’s negotiation with it. 3.4 “The New Indian Woman”: From Post-Colonial to Post-Liberalisation To appreciate Deshpande’s engagement with the pervasiveness of the construction of womanhood — and its supposed prerequisite, motherhood — and the concomitant oscillation between the home and the world, it is essential to contextualise Deshpande’s fiction in post-colonial India striding towards modernisation and development, with the image of the woman continuing to occupy a pivotal position in the collective imagination. Here, it is useful to be reminded of the overwhelming “glorification” of motherhood in India (cf. Krishnaraj 2010: 3). As such, motherhood within the heterosexual framework of sacrosanct marriage remains a much-venerated concept, drawing upon the religious and mythological figures of such women as Sita and Savitri. Sita in the Hindu mythological epic Ramayana is the character who is revered and worshipped as the ideal woman because of her sacrifice for her husband Rama. She 3.4 “The New Indian Woman”: From Post-Colonial to Post-Liberalisation 65 accompanies Rama in his exile for fourteen years, is always loyal and faithful to‐ wards him despite all her ordeals and makes a perfect mother to his sons. Savitri is the mythical female character who led an ascetic life for the sake of her husband’s life and succeeded to convince Yama, the God of death, not to take her husband’s life. Consequently, in the Hindu-Indian family, the wife’s position is validated once she becomes a mother (cf. Kakar 1978: 65 f.). More importantly, ideals surrounding moth‐ erhood function as the key to gender identity in that they set out the parameters for womanhood and prioritise biological reproduction (cf. Krishnaraj 2010: 13; Bagchi 2017: 17). The idealisation of motherhood and the concept of womanhood based on it can be traced to the writings of (late 19 th century) nationalist writers such as Swami Vivekananda and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who “linked [the] traditional image of sacred motherhood to the modern concept of the motherland, hoping thereby to give a new sanctity to the concept of nation in an essentially apolitical society” (Nandy 1980: 311). Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) is the monastic name of Narendranath Datta, a Bengali Hindu reformer of the 19 th century India. A celebrated proponent of Hin‐ duism, Vivekananda travelled widely to introduce the teachings of Hinduism to the West. One of his most famous visits was at the 1893 Parliament of World’s Religions in Chicago, where he introduced the Western audience to Yoga, medita‐ tion and Vedanta, a school of Hinduism. His idea of spirituality and religion was intimately connected to cultural nationalism. A founding figure of modern Bengali literature, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s (1838-94) novel Anandamath (1882) was a sacred text for the nationalist movement, its use of the Sanskrit phrase “Vande Mataram” (Hail Motherland) becoming a mantra for the nationalists. Chatterjee’s novel Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) is considered the first Indian novel written in English. The nationalist movement against the British colonisation drew on Hindu religious texts and the multiple mother goddesses within Hinduism — both the benevolent and the violent incarnations — to construct an idea of the motherland, ‘Bharat Mata’, who needs to be saved by her sons from the foreign power (Ramaswamy 2010: 4; Sarkar 2001: 253). However, the Indian nationalist movement had a complicated and problematic relationship with the ‘woman question’. Nationalist discourse, which was formed 66 3 Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions to oppose the colonialist power, constructed an image of woman which moved to the centre of anti-colonial political strategy, but ultimately remained restrictive for women’s emancipation (cf. Bankin Chandra Chatterjee 1993: 622-632). At the heart of anti-colonial rhetoric, there existed a dichotomy of the ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ represented by India’s own identity and that of the colonial power respectively. In other words, in the anti-colonial narrative, the Indian nation’s identity was conceived in terms of its long tradition of spirituality, which, the narrative claimed, was superior to the materialistic colonial power; this identity based on religious and spiritual traditions was to be preserved by all means. Within this ideological framework, the woman was positioned as the symbol of the country’s true self — the inner domain which should be preserved and saved from outer influences (ibid.: 624). Partha Chatterjee analyses the nationalist construct of woman and how it creates a gendered division of space: Applying the inner/ outer distinction to the matter of concrete day-to-day living separates the social space into ghar and bahir, the home and the world. The world is the external, the domain of the material; the home represents one’s inner spiritual self, one’s true identity. The world is a treacherous terrain of the pursuit of material interests […]. It is also typically the domain of the male. The home in its essence must remain unaffected by the profane activities of the material world — and woman is its representation. (ibid.) Thus, the polarised ideas of the spiritual and material corresponded with the notions surrounding home and the world, the spaces which were assigned to female and male respectively. In the preservation of the spiritual self of India, where ‘woman’ became the symbol of the nation, the anti-colonial discourse imbued the traditional or mythological images of women and the mother goddess with qualities of self-sacrifice and benevolence (cf. Bagchi 2017: 51-73). Interestingly, nationalist discourse’s centrifugal and centripetal forces simultane‐ ously pulled women in different directions that proved to be both constraining and enabling for them. The nationalist movement sought not to confine women in the domestic area physically but encouraged their political mobilisation in the anti-colonial struggle; however, this apparent agency was to be operated within a normative patriarchal framework (cf. Katrak 2006: 397). In such a patriarchal setting, women’s sexuality was not supposed to transgress the traditional institutional boundaries of marriage and motherhood, for this would threaten the division of the private and public locations assigned to men and women. The construct of the “Indian woman” - a figure endowed with “cultural refinement” but construed as non-threatening and compliant - “has generalised itself among the new middle class, admittedly a widening class and large enough in absolute numbers to be self-producing, but is irrelevant to the large mass of subordinate class” (Chatterjee 1993: 632). This construction of womanhood is then revised and reconfigured in the post-col‐ onial time with the country and its women subjects marching towards economic prosperity and opportunities. In other words, these ideals of womanhood with a certain degree of mobility and constraint continue in the post-colonial time while the balancing 3.4 “The New Indian Woman”: From Post-Colonial to Post-Liberalisation 67 act of tradition and modernity, inner and outer space, becomes even more complex and strenuous. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, in her 1993 book Real and Imagined Women, analyses the construction of the “new brand of woman” in the contemporary cultural discourse, paying particular attention to commercial advertisements in print media and television. Sunder Rajan argues that this “New Indian Woman” invariably refers to the “urban educated middle-class career woman” and that “she is ‘new’ in the senses both of having evolved and arrived in response to the times, as well as of being intrinsically ‘modern’ and ’liberated’” (Sunder Rajan 1993a: 124). It is crucial to keep in mind that the economic liberalisation in the 1990s created a massive market, generating, as it did, numerous advertising campaigns for consumer products — from food and clothes to contraceptives, beauty products, household products and so on (ibid.: 125). The target market for this was the upwardly mobile middle-class women who were either financially independent or had some control over the family’s financial decisions (ibid.: 126). Crucially, as Poonkulaly Gunaseelan argues, this market-driven idea of the new woman did not align with the “political project of feminism” of what can be called the second wave of the feminist movement in India (Gunaseelan 2018: 93; Kumar 1993: 51). Instead, it co-opted some tenets from the agenda of the women’s movement to further its capitalistic aims (cf. Sunder Rajan 1993a: 124; cf. Gunaseelan 2018: 93). While the feminist movement in India sought to transform the material reality (protesting against such issues as dowry, rape and female foeticide), these sanitised pictures of women’s mobility in the popular culture essentially entrenched traditional and mythological narratives of womanhood, slightly, albeit effectively, altering them with a superficial idea of agency and autonomy. Dowry is a cultural practice and wedding ritual, which stemmed from the patri‐ archal and patrilineal social structure. During wedding, dowry is given by the bride’s family to the groom’s in the form of money, jewellery, land or other goods. Although illegal since 1961 through the Dowry Prohibition Act, this practice is still prevalent in many parts of India and often causes torture and deaths of brides whose families cannot afford to pay the dowry promised in the wedding. Set in this cultural context, Deshpande’s fiction intimates multiple dimensions of these constructions of womanhood and motherhood, tearing the veneer of these convenient, non-confrontational ideas of the new modern woman. Here, it is worth recalling the quoted passages from the novels in the earlier section, for they suggest how the protagonists are very much the constructs of their time, negotiating the gender expectations as wife and mother even while questioning them. 68 3 Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions 3.5 Thematic Concerns As evinced in the discussion so far, Deshpande’s fictional world is imbued with a feminist aesthetic as she herself says, “if I was driven by anything, it was by a great desire to tell women’s stories, to show women as they were, not as they had been painted through the centuries” (Deshpande 2021a: n.p.). The significance of such an act of ‘telling women’s stories’ can hardly be overstated, especially if considered in the context of the developing corpus of Indian English literature in the 1970s, with the luminaries mostly being male figures. Importantly, though, an acknowledgement of this representation of women is as crucial as it is fraught with ambivalence. The ambivalence stems from the possibility of ghettoisation of women’s writing against which Deshpande has spoken in her non-fictional works (more recently, her 2021 essay collection Subversions: Essays on Life and Literature). On the one hand, the quick labelling of certain literature as ‘only’ women’s writing and, more worryingly, the implicit assumption about such a category as inherently inferior is a symptom of patriarchal entitlement. On the other hand, the emergence of the category of women’s writing is a specific feminist project to recover and retrieve women’s voices silenced and suppressed in the dominant culture (cf. Tharu and Lalita 1991: 25). In the Western context, women’s writing as a new disciplinary field started to emerge with such influential works as Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977) and The Mad Women in the Attic (1979) by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, that traced female literary history and tradition and devised methodology to read women’s works. Interestingly, in many of Deshpande’s fictions, the trope of women’s writing is a potent method through which the narrative progresses. Not only do we find protagonists who are themselves writers (such as Madhu in Small Remedies, Jaya in That Long Silence, Indu in A Matter of Time) but also an attempt to salvage a history long buried and silenced. Even though women populate the fictional world, the thematic concerns are varied and multifarious. That said, there are recurring tropes that merit our consideration, especially if we are to appreciate Deshpande’s representation of women. What is particularly striking is that the narrative arc often traces a development — an internal journey — culminating in a more profound realisation. Discussing this narrative development, Elizabeth Jackson observes that Deshpande’s fictions “typically begin with a crisis” and are followed by an “intense period of introspection” on the part of the protagonist (2010: 168). Such “cathartic crisis”, thus, Jackson avers, serves as a major narrative strategy. Jasbin Jain compares this strategy to the traditional Bildungsroman, viewing it as growing up not through the “adolescent period but into selfhood” (2003: 264). In its explorations into selfhood, Deshpande’s fiction often grapples with the constructions of womanhood in myriad ways, be it through the trope 3.5 Thematic Concerns 69 of self-discovery or quest for selfhood, portrayals of motherhood, marital discord or sexual violence. Furthermore, even though the protagonists are often middle-class, the fictional representation is hardly class-bound, for what figures prominently is the relationship among women across generation, class, caste and religious divides. This interaction and even confrontation among women inhabiting different times and spaces and their attendant ideologies and affiliations tease out the shifting ideas of gender roles and women’s negotiation, internalisation and even perpetuation of procrustean ideologies (cf. Menon 1999: 226). As mentioned, in her representation of the changing status of women, Deshpande often focuses on motherhood, laying bare its trials and tribulations and, in turn, complicating the mythologised images. Continuing to deliberate on Deshpande’s engagement with the changing dynamics of women’s connection with each other and the larger society, the next sections consider two of Deshpande’s texts that mark the author’s transition from the inner to the outer world in a more explicit sense of the word. 3.5.1 The Trajectory of Mother-Daughter Relationships: The Binding Vine (1993) Set in the bustling metropolitan Bombay in the 1990s, the novel follows the life of its autodiagetic narrator, Urmi, and the ostensibly unlikely connections she forges with women of different classes and generations. The protagonist is an educated, modern, working woman who recently lost her baby daughter and has an uneasy relationship with her mother. A grieving mother, Urmi comes across Shakutai, a working-class woman whose daughter, Kalpana, has been brutally raped. Another important character is Urmi’s mother-in-law, Mira, who is present in the novel only through the writing in her diary (as she died before the beginning of the novel), which Urmi discovers. Mira’s diary records her suffocating and abusive marriage and strained relationship with her mother, who remained unhelpfully silent about the daughter’s plight. The way Deshpande constructs these characters — mothers and daughters — does not simply portray a picture of victimised Indian womanhood; rather, as the following discussion will demonstrate, she sketches the contours of the mother-daughter relationship that assumes new shapes and retains old struggles. Deshpande refuses to identify “one core theme” for this novel, since it deals with many issues including the “recovery of women’s writing” and “sexual domination of women’s bodies” (Bhalla 2006: 49-50). However, she does acknowledge that “to a large extent, this novel is about mothers and daughters” (Deshpande, qtd. in Bhalla 2006: 50). A crucial concern worth mentioning here is the silence that, until recently, surrounded the mother-daughter relationship in India, a country marked with a pervasive son preference. In his psychoanalytical study of childhood and society in India, Sudhir Kakar indicates a bias in anthropological research which focuses on the development of boys and “skip[s] female childhood altogether” (1978: 66). Myths, he 70 3 Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions argues, are equally “sparing of their bounty towards the daughters” (ibid.). Writing on this one-sidedness prevalent in mythical narratives in prioritising the boy child, he remarks, “in a patriarchal culture myths are inevitably man-made and man-oriented. Addressing as they do the unconscious fears and wishes of men, it is the parent-son rather than the parent-daughter relationship which becomes charged with symbolic significance” (ibid.: 67). In relation to religious and mythical narratives, Rajender Kaur makes another astute point that even Sita and Draupadi (the major female characters from the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, respectively) do not have mortal mothers, thus underpinning a cultural absence of the mother-daughter dyad. This absence, according to Kaur, is paradigmatic as it is “symptomatic of the neglect to this relationship” (2012: 56). The silence that hovers over this relationship has been felt in the literary productions as well. In her 1996 article, Radhika Mohanram argues that “stories of mother-son and father-daughter relationships abound in Indian mythic as well as modern literature, but there is a curious silence on the thematic of mother-daughter relationships” (1996: 20). Published in 1993, Deshpande’s novel can well be considered one of the initial attempts to break the silence on this theme in Anglophone Indian writing (Karmakar 2022: 74). It is important to remember that the emergence and prominence of this theme in women’s fictions from the mid-1990s (by such writers as Manju Kapoor and Githa Hariharan) can be attributed to the changing roles of women in a rapidly mod‐ ernising India, with more opportunities open to women, particularly those belonging to the rising middle-class (especially, in the post-liberalised India in the 1990s). The newly configured ideas of mobility, freedom and sexuality and their confrontation with tensile traditionalism provided the “narrative impulse” to thematise this relationship through which the writers responded to and probed the evolving time and cultural values (Raja and Souter 2010: xiii). The mother-daughter relationship in The Binding Vine can be analysed from both psychological and socio-cultural perspectives. Deshpande’s characters inhabit various classes of modern India (precisely Maharashtra, bordering on Karnataka) in the 1990s. Her narrativisation of the mother-daughter dyad primarily brings forth three concerns: the ambivalence in the relationship between mother and daughter, a sense of conflict and tension which gradually turns into recognition of these conflicts, and the final development of a closer connection between the two. The novel’s tone and mood, varying from brooding melancholic and self-reflexive to occasionally indignant, if subdued, contribute to its depiction of an ambivalent and fraught nature of mother-daughter relationships. The narrative projects its protagonist, Urmi, as a new woman in the 20 th century sense of the term — modern, liberated and professional (Lau 2006: 162). The new Indian woman is then juxtaposed with the “other” woman, Shakutai who belongs to a much lower class. The stark difference between these two women inhabiting different spaces in a “diversified urban setting” (Batty 2010: 116) is underscored repeatedly in the narrative — be it through the materiality of the spaces they occupy or the accessibility 3.5 Thematic Concerns 71 of the social network they afford or lack. While the novel thus accentuates the diverse experiences of mothers and daughters belonging to different sections of society, the narrative, primarily through the “fractured movement of the internal consciousness” gradually constructs a quiet sense of solidarity (Majumdar 2005: n.p.). The novel begins with the protagonist Urmi grieving over the death of her baby daughter, Anu. This loss is important in the narrative insomuch as Deshpande proceeds to portray how this sense of loss is shared by other mothers and daughters, and how they negotiate and combat this loss. As she mourns her daughter, Urmi reflects, “I wanted so much for Anu; now, it’s all gone, there’s nothing left of all my hopes for her. We dream so much more for our daughters than we do for our sons, we want to give them the world we dreamt of ourselves” (Deshpande 1993: 124). This speaks of more than a mother’s grief for her dead daughter. What Deshpande underlines here is that the ‘world’ a woman dreams for herself often remains inaccessible due to constraints imposed on young females. The longing for that world is offloaded by the mother onto the daughter. Importantly, Deshpande’s nuanced narrative evinces a sense of identification that is shared by mothers across social classes. Urmi discerns a connection with another mother, Shakutai, in their dreams for their respective daughters. She remembers that Shakutai told her “I wanted Kalpana to have all that I didn’t” (ibid.). Thus the narrative deftly makes these two mothers who inhabit different places in society, identify with each other through their individual, unfulfilled ambitions for their daughters. A fluid movement between the present and past, represented in the main plot and sub-plot, respectively, characterises the novel. The narrative shows the protagonist’s gradual understanding and growing empathy for the mother-daughter bonds which she experiences in her long-dead mother-in-law Mira’s writing and in her encounter with Shakutai, a mother who is almost on the verge of losing her daughter. Mira’s own conflict with her mother makes Urmi reflect on the relationship with empathy and enriches her understanding. A line from Mira’s poem reveals a daughter’s refusal of her mother: “to make myself in your image was never the goal I sought” (Deshpande 1993: 124). These words have significant effect on the narrative in terms of Deshpande’s charting of the nuances of the mother-daughter relationship. In the novel, we see conflicts between the mother and the daughter: their expectations clash and their views differ. A continuation of this conflict between mother and daughter is apprehended by Urmi when she wonders whether her daughter would have felt a similar desire not to see herself in the mother’s image (ibid.). This refusal and rejection of the mother comes close to ‘matrophobia’, or the fear of becoming one’s own mother, an issue that American feminist and poet Adrienne Rich addressed in her seminal book Of Women Born (1976). In her book Rich writes about this matrophobia as one of the many distortions that the mother-daughter relationship endures in a patriarchal culture. 72 3 Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) was an American poet and writer whose seminal work Of Women Born (1976) has been foundational in feminist scholarship on mother‐ hood, contributing to the emergence of Motherhood Studies. Synthesising personal and scholarly narratives on motherhood, in this book Rich differentiated mother‐ hood as a patriarchal institution from mothering as a potentially empowering and transformative experience. Through this influential work, Rich also challenged second-wave feminism’s reluctance towards, if not an outright rejection of, moth‐ erhood. Deshpande’s literary representation, however, suggests something beyond matropho‐ bia: ironically, in their attempt to repudiate their mothers, the daughters end up becoming a shadow of their mothers, as these lines from Mira’s diary record: “whose face is this I see in the mirror, | unsmiling, grave, bedewed with fear? | The daughter? No, Mother, I am now your shadow” (ibid.: 126). Here the daughter’s feeling cannot be defined adequately in relation to the idea of ‘matrophobia’, for the rejection of the mother’s identity is shot through with an underlying compassion. The daughter here also identifies herself with the mother even if she does not want to. The desire to be separated from the mother is simultaneously undone by identifying even more closely with her. This sense of identification, often unintended on the part of the daughter, adds to the texture of the relationship in this novel. A crucial point in the narrative occurs when Urmi’s mother, Inni confesses about sending baby Urmi to her grandmother. At this moment, Urmi realises that her mother’s helplessness and lack of mothering have significantly affected their relationship. Deshpande movingly represents the moment at which a daughter comes to realise her mother’s subjection and her resentment gives way to an understanding of vulnerability. Cutting across cultures, Rich’s analysis of the mother-daughter complications within the patriarchal family setting powerfully resonates here. Rich maintains that it is “easier by far to hate and reject a mother outright than to see beyond her to the forces acting upon her” (1976: 235). She argues that daughters’ view of their mothers is often blocked by their mothers’ apparent opposition to them, for it is difficult for the daughters to recognise the societal factors which influence the mothers. In the novel, Urmi’s rejection of her mother can be chalked up to an inegalitarian domestic setting. But finally, she is able to see her mother beyond the constraints imposed on her. This particular moment of revelation and reconciliation in this mother-daughter narrative is poignantly humane: this revelation leaves Urmi feeling exposed, as if her “armour” has fallen off. After the breakdown in front of her daughter, Inni feels unburdened, having confessed her helplessness and guilt; but Urmi says, “I don’t feel weighed down, either. It’s something else. A sense of being vulnerable and naked, as if some armour I’ve been wearing all these years — against what? — has fallen off ” (Deshpande 1993: 200). The word “armour” too denotes the heavy burden Urmi has been carrying so far. Yet the question “against what” suggests that she does not quite comprehend what she has 3.5 Thematic Concerns 73 been wearing the armour to ward off. Staging this encounter, the novel suggests that once the reason for emotional estrangement is removed, the daughter identifies even more intensely with her mother — it is their shared sense of loss that at once makes them vulnerable and makes them connect with each other in a positive recognition of their renewed relationship. Interestingly, the fragmented nature of the narrative corresponds and even contrib‐ utes to the depiction of such a fraught understanding of this relationship. Expatiating on the modernist aesthetics in Deshpande’s fiction, Saikat Majumdar avers, “just like the fragments of Mira’s diaries, the stories […] come to us not through any ordered realist narration, but in fractured bits and pieces” (2005: n.p.). Such “fragmented subjectivities” as aptly termed by Majumdar, lend themselves to the novel’s depiction of ambivalent mother-daughter relationships. Modernist aesthetics refer to certain styles and modes that emerged with the literary movement in the late 19 th century in the Western world. Some of modernist writers are Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Modernism involves an experimental writing style with non-linear narratives, free flowing discourse and long internal monologues. Importantly, Deshpande does not create a stereotypical picture of powerless Indian mothers and daughters. Women constantly challenge ideas and question conventions in this novel, whether this is through Kalpana’s fearless and upright nature, reminisced by her mother or Urmi’s progressive thinking. Urmi is concerned for Kalpana, taking the initiative to report her rape to the police, but she can now fathom the silence that surrounds women like Kalpana and Shakutai. Furthermore, in the novel, we witness some tessellation between all mothers and daughters. Through their shared sense of loss (the death of Urmi’s daughter Anu, and Kalpana’s brutal rape), these women eventually form a strong communal bond as Shakutai finally consents to report her daughter’s rape after her continued interaction with Urmi, and Urmi decides to publish Mira’s poems. The mother-daughter relationship, however ambivalent and tension-ridden, serves as the fulcrum for potential solidarity. The way in which the narrative organises itself around mother-daughter dyads allows the conflict and estrangement in this relationship to play out. Deshpande does not make her protagonist reject her mother outright but rather makes a conflict fester between them, which is resolved at the end of the novel. The narrative also highlights the complexity resulting from patriarchal structures, causing a rift in the relationship while there is a subterranean flow of compassion. In sum, her representation of the mother-daughter relationship accords positive recognition to the coexistence of conflict and compassion that characterises the relationship. Also, it envisions a connectedness between women — mothers and daughters — whereby they refuse to be silent and make their stories heard. 74 3 Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions 3.5.2 Gender, Communalism and the Nation: Small Remedies (2000) If The Binding Vine is Deshpande’s first novel that marks a physical and explicit transition from the domestic to the public realm, Small Remedies continues this literary project even more rigorously. In The Binding Vine the story primarily revolves around women’s relationship with each other in a patriarchal class-ridden system hostile towards women. The narrative scale is relatively larger and overtly political in Small Remedies as the stories of the individual women are interwoven with the political condition of the volatile nation. The trope of maternal loss that gives the narrative its impetus in The Binding Vine continues to reverberate in this novel too, albeit differently. Set in the 1990s in the aftermath of the dismantling of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya and the consequent carnage that shook the subcontinent, the novel is a deep meditation on communal and gender identity woven in an intricately layered narrative of memory and music. A 16 th century mosque in the northern town of Ayodhya, Babri Mosque was de‐ molished by the Hindutva mob on December 6, 1992. Hindutva is a political ideol‐ ogy to reimagine India as a Hindu country as opposed to its current secular identity. The demolition caused nationwide riots affecting both the Hindu and Muslim pop‐ ulations, but mainly the Muslim community in Bombay. Over 150,000 people were forced to leave, hundreds were killed, and more than 100,000 sought sanctuary in makeshift camps inside the city. Like the previous novel, Small Remedies also deploys an autodiagetic narrator, Madhu, a bereaved mother mourning the loss of her seventeen-year-old son killed in the communal riot. Despite the similarity of the trope, Deshpande’s characterisation is different, underscoring the different ways maternal trauma might function. As such, in contrast to the protagonist in The Binding Vine, who refuses to let go of grief, this novel’s protagonist, Madhu is desperate to escape the trauma of this unbearable loss and takes up an assignment of writing a biography of an eminent Hindustani classical (classical music of North India) singer Savitribai, an enigmatic figure. This writing project brings her to a place where she reconnects with people she once knew closely, thus occasioning an encounter between her past and present. This temporal encounter assumes a larger dimension since grappling with the present for the protagonist requires a reckoning with her past, an act that scholar Shirley Chew interprets as the “self-fashioning and shaping power of memory” (2005: 75). Using a non-linear narrative that moves back and forth in time and often makes different temporalities converge in the narrator-protagonist’s fractured consciousness, the novel explicates a retrieval of women’s lives from the silence that shrouded them in the past. Here the silence pervading women’s lives — be it Savitri Bai, Leela, or the protagonist, Madhu herself — is even more complex, for the silence denotes their contradictory aspirations, rebellion, compromise, or even, in the case of Savitri Bai, 3.5 Thematic Concerns 75 complicity in the nation’s failing social cohesion. Moreover, through these diverse women and their association with people of different castes, classes, religions and languages, even in a small locality of Neeamgaon in Mumbai, the novel underscores the very plurality of India, something that is worryingly threatened by the rise of the Hindu Right. Examining this religious aspect, Caroline Herbert comments, “as Deshpande is concerned with the experiences of women across the 20 th century, a corollary of this discussion is the changing position of the woman and the Muslim as ‘respectable’ figures in the national imaginary” (2015: 70). What Herbert’s observation astutely points out is that Deshpande’s sustained engagement with gender marginality gets extended to communal marginality with this novel. This extension in the authorial gaze responds to the rise of Hindutva ideology in India, a right-wing movement that seeks to reimagine India as a Hindu country, excluding Muslim and other religious minorities. Indeed, through the figure of Ghulam Saab, the Muslim lover of Bai, whom the narrative presents only through memory with an air of silence and non-recognition around him, the narrative dramatises this crisis on a personal level, even as it does so on a larger national level by choosing the aftermath of a communal riot as its setting. Returning to the question of diverse women characters, we see that Leela, a mother-like figure for Madhu, was a Hindu widow who discarded the life of compliant domesticity and became an activist. She joined the Communist Party of India, took part in the resistance against the Emergency imposed by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and worked with the striking labourers and railway workers. The Emergency in India was imposed by the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975 and lasted for 21 months until 1977. The order gave the prime minister the power to curtail civil liberties and the cancellation of elections. The press was banned, and the majority of Indira Gandhi’s political rivals were imprisoned for a significant portion of the Emergency. This period remains infamous for the gross human right violations. Leela’s personal life was equally norm-defying as she, despite being a Hindu widow, later married a Christian man. As the narrative progresses, the mystery of Savitri Bai’s life gradually unfolds. The protagonist comes to know that her career as a professional singer was not welcomed or encouraged by her in-laws, owing to her status as a housewife in a Brahmin household. Additionally, the “height of criminality” (Deshpande 2000: 75), according to the conventional standard, was Savitri Bai’s involvement with a Muslim lover, Ghulam Saab. Crucially, an active reflection on the women’s life stories makes Madhu realise the ‘Law of the Threshold’ these women defied (Lal 1995: 13): I’ve begun thinking that writing about Bai, I am writing about Leela as well. And my mother and all those women who reached beyond their grasp. Bai moving out of her class in search 76 3 Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions of her destiny as singer, Leela breaking out the convention of the widowhood, racing out from her small room to the world, looking for justice for the weak, my mother running in her bare foot … but they paid the price for their attempts to break out. (Deshpande 2000: 284) In her book The Law of the Threshold (1995), Malashri Lal uses this term to formulate a “methodological resource for feminist literary criticism in India”. Lal uses the threshold not only as a ‘real’ bar or a spatial concept that demarcates a public/ private divide but also as a psychological bar that dictates subordination to a code imposed or internalised through “totems and taboos of human conduct” that restricts the full development of the female (1995: 12). The threshold is considered an important determiner between domestic and public enterprise — the border for significant decisions in life. The words “racing”, “running”, “breaking” denote a movement in both literal and met‐ aphorical senses. Significantly, though, this understanding of women’s norm-defying mobility does not present an unproblematically heroic and celebratory picture. For example, through the character of Savitri Bai, Deshpande does not only present the woman-artist battling caste, gender and religious prejudices in achieving her artistic aspiration; rather, the way Madhu gradually unravels her life in her effort to write the biography shows a character replete with contradictions. Savitri Bai’s final ascent to the legendary status is dependent on her self-presentation as a ‘respectable’ Hindu woman. She moulds a public image of herself by subscribing to the demands of an honourable woman, never disclosing her relationship with her Muslim lover. Nor does she mention her daughter Munni to her biography writer, Madhu, let alone an acknowledgement of Ghulam Saab’s connection to Munni. Through these shadowy aspects of her life, Deshpande touches on the larger concern of religious division; the absolute reticence looming over the character of Ghulam Saab corresponds to the larger narrative of the ‘collective amnesia’ surrounding the experiences of Muslim subjects in India (cf. Herbert 2015: 28). In a subtle and intricate fashion, the novel illustrates these majoritarian demands through the mother-daughter conflict, a trope that figures in this novel even more intensely without the possibility of reconciliation. The conflict once again speaks of an impossible situation underscored by social codes of honour and respectability. Munni, the daughter of Savitri Bai and Ghulam Saab deliberately wants to distance herself from the scandal of her mother’s life, choosing to identify as the daughter of her mother’s husband. Also, later in her life, we see her flaunting “mangalsutra” (a necklace worn by many Hindu women) as a married Hindu woman, changing her name and erasing the identity of her previous life marred by her mother’s scandal. Madhu ruminates: “Munni wanted respectability, and therefore she rejected everything that was associated with her mother — music, genius, ambition, freedom” (Deshpande 2000: 224). 3.5 Thematic Concerns 77 As is often the case with Deshpande’s novels, a probing take on motherhood is here too, not least because a childless mother is the narrator and focaliser in the novel. This mother-daughter conflict that the protagonist has witnessed in her childhood, later prompts her to ponder over the maternal identity. In returning to her past, Madhu remembers and re-discovers the seemingly usual and unusual life trajectories of women she knew in her childhood and in later life. Through Madhu’s gaze Deshpande not only dissects romanticised pictures of motherhood, but also renders its paradoxes and ambiguities: I get some images of motherhood in movies I see myself through the songs that speak of maa ka pyar but real life shows me something different. Munni’s mother who ignored her daughter; Ketaki’s mother, stern, dictatorial, so partial to her sons; Sunanda, sweetly devious and manipulating; Som’s mother — so demanding. (Deshpande 2000: 51) Every adjective used here, taken together, denotes the intricacies of this experience, stubbornly resisting any easy formulation of maternal identity. Along with these somewhat unembellished vignettes of motherhood, we also see motherhood in its most poignant and wrenching state through Madhu’s love for her son and the all-engulfing emptiness she feels after his tragic death. This maternal loss and grief through which the novel depicts the wounded nation in a way disrupts the glorified image of the motherland, Bharat Mata. However, the narrative charts an attempt at healing and recovery as we see Savitri Bai’s Muslim student Hasina, performing Raga Maulkans (an Indian classical Raga) in a meditative state, as if offering Namaz, and later singing a Bhajan, a Hindu devotional song. Madhu reflects: “Bai never sang Bhajans … now her student Hasina, a Muslim woman, sings this poem, composed centuries ago by a woman, a Hindu woman, whose entire life was a statement of her faith” (Deshpande 2000: 319). For a mother who lost her son to a religious frenzy, this uniting image — which is indicative of the age-old syncretic ethos of India realised in its classical musical tradition — is as assuaging as it is hope-inducing. The narrative thus delineates mothers and the nation without romanticising any of them, probing them with an austere unsentimentality, but attaining, through this process, an understanding that is profoundly humane. 3.6 Modernism or Social Realism: The Question of Aesthetics The formalistic aspects of Deshpande’s fiction have been a matter of contestation among literary critics, the debates wavering between social realism and modernism (see Chakladar 2006: 85; Majumdar 2005: n.p.; Batty 2010: 116; Ben-Yishai 2017: 301). As is evident from the preceding sections in this chapter, Deshpande’s fictions generally follow a realistic mode in terms of the plots, settings and turn of events. Sometimes the novels even grapple with searing social issues such as sexual violence or communal violence depicted in The Binding Vines and Small Remedies, respectively. This aspect gestures toward a certain kind of social realism that the fiction largely adheres to. 78 3 Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions Ayelet Ben-Yishai views this realism as a deliberate and potent strategy that furthers the fiction’s project of locating truth in “social relation” and “quotidian details” (2017: 301). Jasbir Jain compares her type of realism with that of Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Margaret Drabble, “writers who alike reject the polarities of the unidimensional portrayals, who deconstruct both romantic and heroic images of women” (2003: 17). Extending this strand of argument, Elizabeth Jackson asserts that because of Deshpande’s emphasis on memory, questioning and reflection, the “real” that emerges from such realism is complex and unstable as opposed to a “cohesive whole” (2010: 102). Departing from this idea, Sunder Rajan regards this realism and the persistent focus on the domestic space as undermining Deshpande’s feminist project on the ground of its supposedly constricted character (1993b: 168). Notwithstanding these traits of realism apparent in the novels’ plots and events, the narrative technique that Deshpande often deploys belies and defies such realism. Her non-linear and non-chronological narratives wavering between past and present (as we have seen in both the novels discussed here), the narrative’s persistent focus on the individual’s interiority — often fractured and fragmented — long brooding internal monologue, and the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique — all these chime with modernist aesthetics. Perhaps the most prominent example of using this stream of consciousnesses is That Long Silence in which a substantial part of the narrative is organised in the form of an extended rumination of the homodiegetic narrator Jaya reflecting on some existential questions. Deshpande’s other novels deploy different narrative focalisation; for example, we see both first-person and third-person narration and free indirect discourse in The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980) and A Matter of Time (1996). As regards the narration, Jasbir Jain identifies that Deshpande’s protagonists’ “observer-narrator status […] allows both comment and introspection, criticism and confession” (2003: 130). Referring to the novel The Binding Vine and particularly the poems from Mira’s diary, Saikat Majumdar highlights the fragmented nature of the writing expressed not in an “ordered realist” narration but in “bits and pieces”, resembling the split subjectivity of the narrator (Majumdar 2005: n.p.). The seeming dualities in aesthetic strategies — an interplay of realism and modernism — deployed in her fiction could well be connected to the ambiguities and paradoxes the narratives animate. 3.7 Conclusion This chapter has aimed at introducing Deshpande’s works, paying particular attention to her engagement with gender politics in her fiction, while also attending to the question of language and aesthetics. This focus on gender is undoubtedly a significant aspect of her fiction, but by no means an exhaustive account of her works, which is beyond the remit of this chapter. It should not escape our attention that even though Deshpande’s fictions demonstrate an intense engagement with women’s lives, hardly in this body of fiction do we see any exoticisation. The writer never appears to be what 3.7 Conclusion 79 Meenakshi Mukherjee aptly terms the “champion of oppressed woman” (Mukherjee 2000: no. pag). While a distinct feminist aesthetic manifests in the narratives’ careful unravelling of the inequalities and power asymmetries within the family and the larger society, Deshpande’s works are neither didactic nor appear to be a feminist manifesto. On the contrary, the narrative world, as demonstrated, is complex and laden with ambivalence. 3.8 Study Questions ● Make an analysis sheet for each novel. Consider the following questions: what key concerns emerge from the novels as the framing ones? How are the novels structured? What literary devices are used? ● Comment on the narrators of each novel. What is the narrator’s language — the tone and mood — like? ● How does gender intersect with other identity constituents — class, caste and religion — in the novels? ● Do you identify overlapping motifs and patterns in these two novels? What are their implication and significance? ● “How could I ever longed for amnesia? Memory, capricious and unreliable though it is, ultimately carries its own truth within it. As long as there is memory, there’s always the possibility of retrieval” (Deshpande 2000: 324). These are the concluding lines of Small Remedies. How does memory function in the novel? What effect does it have on the narrative’s structure? ● What does The Binding Vine say about the retrieval of women’s writing? ● Discuss the notion of the “threshold” by Malashri Lal. Can you apply this concept to the novels? Do the characters in the novels extend or challenge the concept? 3.9 Further Reading Batty, Nancy Ellen (2010). The Ring of Recollection: Transgenerational Haunting in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789042031012. Bhalla, Amrita (2006). Shashi Deshpande. Tavistock: Northcote House. Geetanjali Singh, Chanda (2016). “‘Womenspace’: Negotiating Class and Gender in Indian English Novels.” In: Jussawalla, Feroza/ Fillerup Weagel, Deborah (eds.). Emerging South Asian Women Writers: Essays and Interviews. New York: Peter Lang. DOI: 10.3726/ 978-1-4539-1577-6. Herbert, Caroline (2015). “Muslim Culture and Minority Identities in Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies.” In: Chambers, Claire/ Herbert, Caroline (eds.). Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representations. London: Routledge, 70-85. DOI: 10.4324/ 9781315764382. Jackson, Elizabeth (2010). Feminism and Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing. London: Pal‐ grave. DOI: 10.1057/ 9780230275096. 80 3 Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions — (2011). “Gender and Space in Postcolonial Fiction.” In: Teverson, A./ Upstone, S. (eds.). Postcolonial Spaces. London: Palgrave. DOI: 10.1057/ 9780230342514. Jain, Jasbir (2003). Gendered Realities, Human Spaces: The Writing of Shashi Deshpande. New Delhi: Rawat. Majumdar, Saikat (2005). “Aesthetics of Subjectivity, Ethics of ‘Otherness’: The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande.” Postcolonial Text 1 (2), https: / / www.postcolonial.org/ index.php/ pct/ article/ view / 284. — (2015). “Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction.” In: Anjaria, Ulka (ed.).-A History of the Indian Novel in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/ CBO9781139942355. 3.10 Works Cited Primary Sources Deshpande, Shashi ( 1989 [1988]). That Long Silence. New Delhi: Penguin Books. — (1990 [1980]). The Dark Holds No Terrors. New Delhi: Penguin Books. — (1996). A Matter of Time. New York: The Feminist Press. — (1993). The Binding Vine. New Delhi: Penguin Books. — (2001 [2000]). Small Remedies. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Secondary Sources Bagchi, Jashodhara (2017). Interrogating Motherhood: Theorizing Feminism. Kolkata: Stree. DOI: 10.15215/ aupress/ 9781771991438.01. Batty, Nancy Ellen (2010). The Ring of Recollection: Transgenerational Haunting in the Novels of Shashi Deshpande. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789042031012. Ben-Yishai, Ayelet (2017). “‛By its very presence’: Conventionality and commonality in Sha‐ shi Deshpande’s realism.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52 (2), 300-315. DOI: 10.1177/ 0021989415594841. Bhalla, Amrita (2006). Shashi Deshpande. Tavistock: Northcote House. Chakladar, Arnab (2006). “Of Houses and Canons: Reading the Novels of Shashi Deshpande.” ariel: A Review of International English Literature 37 (1), 81-97. Chatterjee, Partha (1993). The Nation and its Fragments. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chew, Shirley (2005). “‘Cutting Across Time’: Memory, Narrative, and Identity in Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies.” In: Morey, Peter/ Tickell, Alex (eds.). Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 71-88. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789401202596. Deshpande, Shashi (1997). “Where Do We Belong: The ‘Problem’ of English in India.” Kunapipi 65 (13), 65-84. 3.10 Works Cited 81 — (2021a). Listening to the Woman’s Voice. https: / / guftugu.in/ 2018/ 12/ 31/ listening-to-the-wom ans-voice/ (last accessed: 17.09.2022). — (2021b). Subversions: Essays on Life and Literature. New Delhi: Context. Gunaseelan, Poonkulaly (2018). “Splitting/ Violating the New Indian Woman in Shashi Desh‐ pande’s The Dark Holds No Terror.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 66 (1), 91-103. DOI: 10.1515/ zaa-2018-0009. Herbert, Caroline (2015). “Muslim Culture and Minority Identities in Shashi Deshpande’s Small Remedies.” In: Chambers, Claire/ Herbert, Caroline (eds.). Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representations. London: Routledge, 70-85. DOI: 10.4324/ 9781315764382. Jackson, Elizabeth (2010). Feminism and Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing. London: Pal‐ grave. DOI: 10.1057/ 9780230275096. Jain, Jasbir (2003). Gendered Realities, Human Spaces: The Writing of Shashi Deshpande. New Delhi: Rawat. Jameson, Frederic (1986). “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15, 65-88. DOI: 10.2307/ 466493. Kakar, Sudhir (1978). The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Karmakar, Indrani (2022). Maternal Fictions: Writing the Mother in Indian Women’s Fiction. London: Routledge. Katrak, Ketu (2006). Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kaur, Rajender (2012). “Embodying Resistance, Enforcing Obedience: Mother-Daughter Relation‐ ships in Recent Indo-Anglian Fiction.” In: Deakins, Alice H./ Bryant Lockridge, Rebecca/ Sterk, Helen M. (eds.). Mother and Daughters: Complicated Connection Across Cultures. Maryland: University Press of America, 47-60. Khair, Tabish (2018). “How to Read Contemporary Indian Literature.” https: / / petergraarupweste rgaard.com/ 2018/ 11/ 26/ how-to-read-contemporary-indian-literature-an-interview-with-tab ish-khair/ (last accessed: 17.09.2022). Krishnaraj, Maithreyi (2010). Motherhood in India: Glorification Without Empowerment? New Delhi: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780203151631. Kumar, Radha (1993). The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India 1800-1990. New Delhi: Kali for Women. Lal, Malashri (1995). The Law of the Threshold: Women Writers in Indian English. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Lau, Lisa (2006). “The New Indian Woman: Who Is she, and what Is ‘New’ about her? ” Women’s Studies International Forum 29 (2), 159-171. DOI: 10.1016/ j.wsif.2006.03.002. Majumdar, Saikat (2005). “Aesthetics of Subjectivity, Ethics of ‘Otherness’: The Fiction of Shashi Deshpande.” Postcolonial Text 1 (2), https: / / www.postcolonial.org/ index.php/ pct/ article/ view / 284 (last accessed 20.02.2023). Menon, Ritu (1999). “Afterword.” In: Deshpande, Shashi. A Matter of Time. New York: The Feminist Press, 219-238. 82 3 Writing Women in India: Critical Perspectives on Shashi Deshpande’s Selected Fictions Mohanram, Radhika (1996). “The Problem of Reading: Mother-Daughter Relationships and Indian Postcoloniality.” In: Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth (ed.). Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationship in 20th Century Literature. Texas: University of Texas Press, 20-37. Mukherjee, Meenakshi (2000). “On her own terms.” The Hindu, 07 May 2000, https: / / www .uni-saarland.de/ fileadmin/ upload/ lehrstuhl/ ghosh-schellhorn/ Tas_Datenbank/ South_Asia_ __Diasporas/ Hindu_ReviewRemedies.pdf (last accessed: 27.02.2023). Nandy, Asis (1980). At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raja, Ira/ Souter, Kay (2010). An Endless Winter’s Night. An Anthology of Mother-Daughter Stories. New Delhi: Women Unlimited. Ramaswamy, Sumathi (2010). The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India. Durham: Duke University Press. DOI: 10.2307/ j.ctv11319m9. Sarkar, Tanika (2001). Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari (1993a). Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. London: Routledge. — (1993b). “The Feminist Plot and the Nationalist Allegory: Home and World in Two Indian Women’s Novels in English.” Modern Fiction Studies 39 (1), 71-92. Rao, Raja (1938). Kanthapura. Westport: Greenwood Press. Rich, Adrienne (1976). Of Women Born. New York: Norton. Tharu, Susie/ Lalita, K. (1991). Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present. New York: Feminist Press. 3.10 Works Cited 83 4 Ephemera and Amit Chaudhuri’s Radical Modernist Aesthetic Monika Fludernik, University of Freiburg Abstract Amit Chaudhuri is one of the most interesting contemporary authors from South Asia, but an author who writes in a tradition that does not follow the postmod‐ ernism and magic realism of the best-known Indian authors like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy or Amitav Ghosh. This article introduces the reader to the work of Amit Chaudhuri, places him in the tradition of literary Modernism and illus‐ trates his style of writing on the example of three of his novels: A Strange and Sublime Address, A New World and Friend of My Youth. 4.1 Introduction Amit Chaudhuri (1962-) is among the most important contemporary Indian authors of Bengali background and writing in English. This status can be corroborated by reference to Bruce King’s Rewriting India (2014), in which he treats Chaudhuri, among others, alongside Pankaj Mishra, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Tabish Khair and Jeet Thayil. Amit Chaudhuri, born in Calcutta/ Kolkata (Bengal, India) on 15 May 1962, grew up in Bombay/ Mumbai. He studied in the UK, first at University College London, then in Oxford (Balliol), where he completed his PhD thesis on D. H. Lawrence and thus on modernism. His creative writing in the English language spans a variety of genres. In 1999, Chaudhuri returned to Kolkata, but spends half the year in the UK. His first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), won first prize in the Betty Trask Awards of 1991, was shortlisted for the 1991 Guardian Fiction Prize and received the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in 1992. Books by this author: A Strange and Sublime Address (1991). London: Heinemann. Afternoon Raag (1993). London: Heinemann. Freedom Song (1998). London: Picador. A New World (2000). New York: Vintage International. The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (ed.) (2004). New York: Vintage Books. The Immortals (2009). London: Pan Macmillan. Odysseus Abroad (2015). London: Oneworld. Friend of My Youth (2017). London: Faber and Faber. Already in 2003, the entry on Chaudhuri in the edition of Twenty-First Century British and Irish Novelists (Ellen 2003) devoted some ten pages to the novelist, poet and critic, but could not yet mention the other four novels that have meanwhile (2022) appeared nor his books of essays, especially Clearing a Space (2008a) or his recent extensive career in Indian music performance (see his comments on the raga in Finding the Raga, 2021). Not least because of Chaudhuri's presence on the London stage of littérateurs, he is a very prominent author, known in particular for his first and probably most impressive novel, A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) (cf. Bellehigue (2010), Austin (2011), Wiemann (2013), Beluau (2018), Shetty (2018), Chakraborty/ Kumar (2020) and Fludernik (2021)). Despite this, criticism of Chaudhuri’s fiction, with the exception of discussions of A Strange and Sublime Address, has been less than extensive. His literary and cultural criticism has garnered more attention, and also disagreement, than has his output as a novelist. To some extent, this is due to the fact that his writing is very different from that of the stars of English fiction from Southern Asia — Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Sara Suleiri or Amitav Ghosh. Ganguly even classifies his work as “post-Rushdian” (2000: 94). Ironically, Chaudhuri himself has forcefully argued against the alleged exoticism of the English Indian novel (see 2006, 2008b and his debate with N. Majumdar 2008, 2011). While his writing is often being thrown by critics into the same category of authors of exoticism and of English-language writing in South Asia, Chaudhuri'’s work, in fact, seems to be in a category of its own since it also differs from that of other major authors from India: Shashi Deshpande, Manju Kapur, Shashi Tharoor, Shobhaa Dé or Vikram Seth. (In this list I am excluding the mainly expatriate and diasporic authors like Meera Syal, Mohsin Hamid or Hari Kunzru [in the UK] or Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander, Vikram Chandra, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Jhumpa Lahiri or Rohinton Mistry [in the USA and Canada], although the distinction between expatriate authors and stay-at-homes has become more than fuzzy with global mobility.) Amit Chaudhuri’s fiction shares with many fellow artists his focus on the Indian (upper) middle class, to which he and his family belong; novels by Nayantara Sahgal, Shashi Deshpande and Upamanyu Chatterjee also stay within the confines of the world these authors know from their own personal experience. This should not come as a surprise since it is this class that sends its children to English-language schools and later to university in the UK or USA; for these writers the use of English as their native language and their literary mother tongue is a key factor in choosing English for their writing. Yet even authors venturing into the realm of lower-class native life like Aravind Adiga, who writes in English, have come under the suspicion of catering to so-called re-orientalism (Lau 2009, Lau/ Dwivedi 2014) since their depiction of India as a country of poverty and crime is criticized as a kind of re-orientalization. A disparaging depiction of India is interpreted as reverting to the negative stereotypes about India current in colonial discourse similar to the remarks of Miss Laiter in 86 4 Ephemera and Amit Chaudhuri’s Radical Modernist Aesthetic Kipling’s “Yoked with an Unbeliever” (which present India as exotic, dangerous and rife with criminality): Miss Agnes Laiter. She had reason to cry, because the only man she ever loved — or ever could love, so she said — was going out to India; and India, as every one knows, is divided equally between jungle, tigers, cobras, cholera, and sepoys. (Kipling 1990: 62) Chaudhuri himself in A Strange and Sublime Address notes the existence of a “folk-tale Bengal” in which “myths and ghosts and Bengal tigers roamed” (1991: 63). Yet clearly, Chaudhuri does not belong to these exoticist authors. He simply stays well within the couche social of his own background, but also focuses on the non-exotic and even banal of middle-class quotidian life (cf. Ganguly 2000; S. Majumdar 2013). What makes Chaudhuri so exceptional, however, is less his (lack of) social com‐ mitment but his refusal to present plot(s). In this he echoes the practice of British Modernism, where Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, Ford Madox Ford or E. M. Forster just as rarely stepped down into the realm of the working classes. Modernism is a literary style and movement arising around 1890 in the novels of Joseph Conrad and Henry James. It reached its culmination in the works of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein and other writers in the 1920s and 1930s. Modernism opposes itself to the Victorian novel (especially Henry James, one of the initiators and key practitioners). One usually distinguishes between experimental or tech‐ nically innovative modernist works by the authors mentioned above and those (e.g. by D.H. Lawrence) that are stylistically more traditional but noteworthy for high‐ lighting the representation of characters’ psyche, a feature also prominent in the novels of the experimental representatives (with the exception of Hemingway). More importantly, Chaudhuri has a comparable fascination with the minutiae of everyday life, with poetic language and with art as a realm divorced from life, politics, class and, particularly, money. The material that Chaudhuri’s novels are made up of consists in the humdrum events and conditions of the quotidian, of the non-sensational, the non-significant, the unexceptional. He also shares with Modernist masters their suspicion of plot, since plot keeps the reader looking for a resolution, an ultimate significance, a point — precisely that which Chaudhuri refuses to supply. As S. Majumdar argues, Chaudhuri’s depiction of “a profusion of marginal details” is “represented with a lyricism rarely associated with them” (2013: 159); Chaudhuri’s texts take the reader from one impression “on to the next detail, towards a promised wholeness that never materializes” (ibid.: 160). This inclination to value the unobtrusive and to dwell in the experiences of the unnoticed, of that which is usually considered unworthy of literary representation, can likewise be treated as an affinity to literary Modernism. Thus, Ellen (2003: 40) 4.1 Introduction 87 argues that Chaudhuri’s novels “focus on the lives of Indian characters told in a style that has more in common with Virginia Woolf than Rushdie.” However, in contrast to Modernism, which tried to counteract the abyss of meaninglessness in modernity by balancing its force by resorting to epiphanies, myth and intertextual framing, Chaudhuri’s modernism is not focused on “fractured texts” or polyphonic writing, but on portraying the real (Shukla/ Shukla 2004: 11). Chaudhuri eludes Modernism’s attempt to heal the fissures of modern life by means of mythic resignification, less so in A Strange and Sublime Address (see Fludernik 2021), but certainly in many of his later novels. These later texts remain resolutely mired in the ephemera of everyday life and foreclose avenues to important developments or outcomes. There is, however, a further aspect of Chaudhuri’s work which was the one most significant for my own interest in Chaudhuri’s oeuvre, namely his predilection for an aesthetics of leisure, of drift, of allowing oneself to follow the current of mood and indulging in passive acquiescence. Chaudhuri, for a research project on otium in contemporary South Asian fiction, became one of our key authors besides Nayantara Sahgal (Rich Like Us, 1985), Upamanyu Chatterjee (English, August, 1988), Pankaj Mishra (The Romantics, 1999) and Anita Desai (The Artist of Disappearance, 2011). The Latin term otium (‘Muße’) describes leisure time originally in contrast to military activity or negotium, i.e. work-related activities in the framework of a political appointment. In modernity otium is increasingly associated with time spent for one’s own pleasure. Chaudhuri’s characters and scenarios stage the abandonment to chance, to the moment; they refuse a life of hectic ambition and workaholism. Whether we follow Rangamama in Odysseus Abroad (2014) through the streets of London or the first-person narrator through Bombay (Friend of My Youth, 2017), or observe Jayojit wasting his time in the flat of his parents during his holiday in A New World (2000), it can be seen that these characters always lack impetus and direction and enjoy doing nothing or appreciate little observations that others would regard as unimportant and below their level of attention. Whether Chaudhuri is implicitly criticizing the hectic world of global capitalism (as does Upamanyu Chatterjee in English, August) or whether he is trying to rediscover the ‘stoniness of the stone’ in Shklovskyan fashion by paying attention to the fleeting existence of small things, of moments, visions and thoughts usually occluded by our focus on purposes and destinations, the net result of his écriture is one of stepping outside the commitments of narrativized life. Defamiliarization/ Ostranenie was coined by Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984). The terms refer to a technique used in art to ‘make strange’ familiar objects or things in literature in order to afford the reader a new 88 4 Ephemera and Amit Chaudhuri’s Radical Modernist Aesthetic or unfamiliar perspective on them. Shklovsky’s example is the rediscovery of the ‘stoniness of the stone’. Chaudhuri remarks on the poet Arun Kolatkar’s “defami‐ liarization of the commonplace” (Chaudhuri 2008a: 94; Bellehigue 2010: 105) and also extends Shklovsky’s ostranenie to a discussion of realism (ibid.: 94 f.). On Chaudhuri and defamiliarization see also Shukla and Shukla (2004: 16 f.) and Shu‐ kla (2004: 56 f.). The scenarios of Chaudhuri’s novels are often images of freedom and calmness, and this is what they share with the definition of otium (Muße) that the collaborative research centre focused on (cf. SFB 1015, 2022). In that reading, otium occurs in pockets of time set aside from ordinary life and freed from the constraints and responsibilities which usually regulate our everyday experience. Secondly, this seclusion from surrounding stress and duties allows for the experience of purposelessness (which may however be turned into artistic purpose). Due to its rarity and preciousness, such moments or brief periods of otium are also perceived as highly valuable and precious as well as personally enriching (Hasebrink and Riedl 2014; Gimmel and Keiling 2016; Saint-Amand 2011). What is significant in Chaudhuri’s deployment of leisure in his fiction is the extension of moments of leisure to long periods of time — childhood, vacations, Sundays — thus naturalizing the otherwise rare and extraordinary experience of otium and claiming for it a kind of normality or counterlife. In what follows I will concentrate on three novels and illustrate some of Chaudhuri’s key themes. 4.2 The Meandering Gaze: From Sandeep to Jayojit and ‘I’ It may be well to start with Chaudhuri’s first and most impressive novel, A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), a third-person novel, predominantly in the mode of figural narrative, i.e. focalized through the eyes of the boy Sandeep, who is on a visit to his maternal uncle in Calcutta. The rituals of everyday life are observed by Sandeep from a child’s perspective but also from the external viewpoint of a stranger, a family member living in Bombay and hence unfamiliar with Calcutta and only resident with the family there during vacations. This position of partial belonging and unbelonging accounts for the exoticism of what Sandeep observes, whether it is the rituals of his uncle’s departure for work, his singing in the bathroom or his aunt’s religious practices. Since everything is a holiday, Sandeep is also a kind of tourist observing life as it flows along in partially unintelligible manner, particularly in a series of surprising aperçus. Aperçu is French and means ‘perceived’. The term is used to denote a (usually shrewd or pertinent) comment on a matter currently being discussed, a contribu‐ tion to ongoing conversation. It is also employed to refer to a brief summary or digest. 4.2 The Meandering Gaze: From Sandeep to Jayojit and ‘I’ 89 These apperceptions have been linked in criticism to Calcutta’s status of a less perfect kind of modernity, of its preservation of the village in the metropolis — a viewpoint that is both critical and nostalgic (see Wiemann 2013 for an excellent account). Other critics have connected Sandeep’s visual trajectory to flânerie. A flâneur is a stroller, somebody who leisurely walks along, aimlessly observing his or her environment, which prototypically is an urban one. Flânerie is the noun denoting this activity of drifting along. Popularized by Charles Baudelaire (1821- 1867) and referring to fashion-conscious men (dandies) ambling, rambling and sauntering along the new Parisian boulevards erected by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891), who was prefect of the Département Seine between 1853 and 1870. The flâneur is also a key figure in Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk (Arcades Project), an unfinished work which Benjamin (1892-1940) composed be‐ tween 1927 and 1940 and in which the visual experience of the man about town strolling down the arcades or the Parisian boulevards is being analyzed. The Pas‐ sagenwerk focuses, among other things, on the arcades, on fashion, on exhibitions, on advertising and interior design. It therefore mirrors the visual perceptions of the pedestrian leisurely taking a stroll down the boulevard. Given Sandeep’s touristy perspective and Chaudhuri’s modernist aesthetics, this initially seems a convincing move, but it ultimately fails to persuade. For one, Sandeep — unlike the prototypical flâneur — does not stroll through Calcutta appreciating what he sees (or even being overwhelmed by it); moreover, his experience of what he records is not as a registrar of city life but mostly as a participant in communal outings with his mother and aunt, taking walks with his uncle or musing about the unfamiliar aspects of his cousins’ family life. When Chakraborty and Kumar (2020) claim that the narrator operates like a flâneur, they fail to note that the main perspective is Sandeep’s; and their emphasis on the narrator persona (who is not strolling through Calcutta) is misplaced. What is perhaps most striking in a reading of the novel is the tempo. There are no really important events except for the uncle’s stroke and his hospital treatment later in the text; most things that happen are recurrent. As Hoene (2016) demonstrates so insightfully, sounds play a crucial role in Sandeep’s experience of life with his uncle’s family and this soundscape is particularly important to characterize family atmospherics and the rhythms of daily events (see also Dhar 2004: 42 f.). Thus, the hectic time in the morning before Chhotomama leaves the house for work, with the revving of the engine of his old car, is followed by a peaceful period of relaxation in the house once he is gone. A similar rhythmic alternation could be argued to punctuate the scene of the power cut in which darkness and light succeed one another (I have discussed this at length in Fludernik 2021). Bellehigue (2010: 107) also remarks upon the abrupt opening of the novel in which the arrival of the taxi and the scrambling 90 4 Ephemera and Amit Chaudhuri’s Radical Modernist Aesthetic of the cousins into the house create a turmoil contrasted with the aunt’s peaceful and quiet posture at the head of the staircase (see Chaudhuri 1991: 1). In addition to choosing a child’s perspective, which defamiliarizes what Sandeep observes but by doing so opens up new insights as well, Chaudhuri’s deployment of metaphor and simile likewise provides a corresponding means of rendering the familiar new or uncanny. As Bellehigue (2010: 113 f.) has illustrated, the novel contains many animal metaphors, for instance babies looking like “koi fish caught from the Hooghly river” (Chaudhuri 1991: 5; see also Dhar 2004: 44). Sandeep’s “sauntering eye” (Belle‐ higue 2010: 106 f.) focuses on unexpected, because not prototypical, perceptions of his surroundings. Since Sandeep is on vacation, the combination of the child’s viewpoint with a static and atelic course of occurrences is particularly appropriate; his temporal frame is one of blissful liberation from the school routines of home and his own family, and there are no expectations of big events, resolutions to ongoing endeavours and the like — the vacation is to be enjoyed in its variety and extension and it is obvious that it will end, though it will be resumed the following year. In this manner the idea of a vacation — a very modern practice restricted to those classes who can afford it — is collapsed with the much more traditional figure of the seasonal holiday of family reunion and its frame of recurrence within the yearly cycle. Although Afternoon Raag (1993), with its equally sidelined setting among students, should here deserve a more extensive analysis (for a superb analysis of the aesthetic functions of ragas as laid out in the novel see Austin 2011: 8-10), I want to move on to Chaudhuri’s later fiction. In particular, I want to consider his generalization of the template of modernist aesthetics and its application to scenarios that are closer to prototypical modernist locations (e.g. London) and characters, i.e. adults. These texts therefore declare themselves more clearly as defamiliarizations of standard expectations and novelistic plot conventions. A New World (2000) stages another family visit, but this time it is one that has lost the happy and benign tone of the child’s exciting openness to new glittering life in Calcutta. Instead, we have Jayojit Chatterjee, an American-based economist, who visits his parents with his son during the sweltering heat of the April to July period. The title of the book is telling and tellingly ambiguous. It can refer to at least three things. On the one hand, the new world is that of America, a world which has made it possible for Jayojit to lose custody of his son after his wife’s divorce from him. The formerly glorious view of the United States has turned to an experience of disappointment and almost Joycean paralysis. The son, Vikram (Bonny), likewise, represents the USA, but does so negatively by being constantly active with his technical gadgets and barely having any communion with the grandparents or his father, let alone with anybody else in the apartment building in which they are staying. One wonders, as things are again presented from Jayojit’s figural perspective, what is the son’s holiday experience. Has he been carted across the globe to fulfil his father’s family duty of a visit to the grandparents? Is he bored? Vikram does not learn the vernacular, nor does he interact with sons from other families known to the Chatterjees. Secondly, the new 4.2 The Meandering Gaze: From Sandeep to Jayojit and ‘I’ 91 world is that economically frightening neoliberal capitalist world of globalization which has diminished Admiral Chatterjee’s financial status upon retirement (see Ellen 2003: 48). This new world is one that the parents are faced with and that Jayojit himself understands only imperfectly (see also Shukla and Shukla 2004: 5 f.). Finally, there is the new world of India for Jayojit and his son, which is new to the extent that they are no longer familiar with the old native country; it is a new Calcutta which displays quasi-exotic aspects, of taxi drivers and their routines, of being cheated financially as a tourist etc. This is an orientalist image of India, in which the old colonial stereotypes are now being revived from the perspective of the USA-returned Jayojit and his ‘American’ son, with some of the negative ascriptions, however, actually due to globalization and its impact on people’s behaviours. Jayojit’s visit is completely unstructured. He enjoys his “addas” (discussions) with his father (Chaudhuri 2015: 11), but most of the text is taken up with Jayojit’s ( Joy’s) sleeping, showering, eating, and rarely taking a stroll or going shopping (for soap and at the end of the visit for presents). He takes Vikram with him on some of these excursions, but not to the bank or when he gets his flight confirmed. The entire visit is experienced in a dilatory manner; haphazard decisions on whether to act or what to do are interspersed with chance encounters with Dr Sen or Mrs Gupta on the staircase or in the lift and the exchange of polite remarks with them (compare Ganguly 2000: 87). The excessive heat at this time of year is one of the reasons for the inactivity of the visitors, but the parents, too, are mostly immobile. There is no explanation why Joy cannot choose a better time of year for his visit and why he does not take his parents out to a restaurant or elsewhere, especially to some air-conditioned place. The oppressive heat is mirrored in the atmosphere of dereliction in the flats, emblematized by the table tennis table that is discovered to have been vandalized (Chaudhuri 2015: 176), but also by the implicit unease caused by the lazy maids and taxi drivers in the vestibule and driveway (“indolent”, “lounging” — ibid.: 2). Jayojit resents being taken for a moneyed American expatriate, but allows himself to be cheated by taxi drivers, grumbling at their impertinence rather than generously tipping them. Although the Chatterjees are not poor and Joy does not make contact with beggars or dire poverty, the general feeling is one of dereliction and despondency, invoked by the Admiral’s straightened financial situation and his dependency on his son’s support. The aimlessness of Joy’s holiday is underlined by his inability to come to a decision regarding a second marriage, a project of his father who is unhappy to have lost his grandson to the ex-wife of his son. But Jayojit also lacks the impetus to go looking for a mate and drifts along emotionally as well as in his daily doings. Although the ‘dalliance’ (S. Majumdar 2007) exercised by Joy is externally and psychologically motivated, it is less convincing as flânerie than the drifting along described in relation to Sandeep as a child or to student Ananda and his uncle Rangamama in Odysseus Abroad — hence the impression of Joycean paralysis. The question is whether this lack of options, or the lack of interest in options, too, are in any way simply a record of the family visiting routine where visitors withdraw into a kind 92 4 Ephemera and Amit Chaudhuri’s Radical Modernist Aesthetic of cocoon of being with their close ones and where the outside world does not seem to matter very much. In this reading one could argue that the novel allows the visitor Jayojit a concentration on himself, on his body and on details of his surroundings. Thus, Joy notices a pile of his mother’s folded saris and the sound of the air-condition’s rattling, a perception that offers the opportunity for a particularly fine descriptive passage: Again and again, but with no obvious regularity in the intervals, the chik stirred, creaked, with the sigh of south-easterly breeze, and beyond, the guttural murmurs of idle drivers, the punctilious beating of the metal, hovered with an air of expectancy. (Chaudhuri 2015: 47) On the other hand, the novel’s depiction of doing nothing can be regarded as a criticism of Joy or an astute analysis of his lack of force. In this reading, the aesthetics of otium turns into an aesthetics of boredom, though it would still be describable within a Modernist framework. It is therefore important to proceed to Chaudhuri’s Friend of My Youth (2017) in order to contrast the depiction of Jayojit’s “lazy two-month holiday” (Ganguly 2000: 87) with another visit by an expatriate Indian (the first-person narrator) to family and a narrative that has a similar scarcity of events. Friend of My Youth complements the aimlessness of the script of the family visit with the overall theme of the ‘friend of my youth’; the main focus of the book is the character Ramu, the friend of the title, whose unexpected absence from the scene (he is in a clinic getting treatment for his addiction) serves as a trigger eliciting memories in the narrator of Ramu as a person and of meetings with him during former visits. By this canny device the lack of plot is compensated for by one great theme (friendship with Ramu), without providing for any definitive trajectory of a development or resolution since no reunion takes place during the visit. Instead, the novel is suffused with memories of Ramu in a variety of settings and contexts. None of these are significant in the sense of being emblematic of Ramu’s character, or of particular crucial stages of the two men’s friendship. Rather, they seem to provide a chain of beads on a necklace of encounters or moments of togetherness which are being savoured in memory. The novel thus suggests that the first-person narrator and Ramu share the memory of a sequence of meetings that constitute their friendship since friendship builds on having experienced the same things together, however trivial or in themselves unimportant. The novel therefore is a tour de force in preserving the aesthetics of the quotidian and the refusal of plot while, at the same time, counteracting the drift into overall banality by the delineations of how memories operate to construct and maintain personal closeness despite physical absence or distance. This comes out particularly in the function of place as a container for associated memories. Meetings and conversations with Ramu are invariably situated in relation to a scenario. For instance, the brief section on pages 158-159, which opens with the utterance “I really liked Rani Rao” (Chaudhuri 2017: 158), continues with a description of where this conversation is or was taking place — the use of the present tense in the novel is significant since it 4.2 The Meandering Gaze: From Sandeep to Jayojit and ‘I’ 93 presentifies the now of past experiences and tends to obscure the shift from present to past, thus signifying the ineluctable presentness of memory in present consciousness. In fact, the novel seems to suggest, Jayojit’s life is constituted as much by one’s memories as by what he is doing or where he happens to find himself. The section continues: The stretch is residential. There’s a park on our right. A few house staff dawdle on the footpath. The houses are a tropical mix of bungalow, art deco, and colonial. The lane leads to the T where Nigerian junkies, in the early eighties, furtively darted from one doorway to the other. We admire the poise of the houses. We know exactly where we are but imitate visitors who are lost. (ibid.) The depiction not only provides an architectural analysis of the neighbourhood, including a reference to “house staff ”, which therefore hints at the importance of class for this residential area. It moreover gives rise to past memories in which the two friends observed the “Nigerian junkies”. The bemused reference to their pretending to be tourists that have got lost moreover reintroduces the distance between the resident who has stayed on and the expatriate who returns to the same place, but with a cognitive difference. Ramu’s continuous presence is more important than the architecture — the city may change, but the fact of having Ramu with one provides for a continuity of orientation and emotion. As I can vouch for as an expatriate Austrian, it is odd to return to one’s native environment which keeps changing (different shops, for instance) while being engraved in memory in its old shape. It is also odd to return home and live in a hotel, acting like a tourist, yet with perfect local familiarity. Chaudhuri’s novel opens up a new perspective also on autobiography or the telling of one’s life. Since the narrator carries the same name as the author and is also a writer who has come to Bombay for a reading of his fiction, it is difficult not to take this text as autobiographical. In fact, the “I” even talks about his novel The Immortals (Chaudhuri 2017: 26). Yet the narrator qua Chaudhuri himself insists on the text being a novel, underlining its difference from ‘straight’ memoir: “The genre of ‘autobiography’ presumes you first live your life and then pour it into a piece of writing” (ibid.: 87). This is what Chaudhuri the character is saying to the interviewer in the novel. Before this point, the interviewer has remarked how a short story can be novel-like in giving the reader a sense of a whole life (the reference is to Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and “A Day in the Country”). Later in the book, the narrator addresses the relationship of author and homonymous character in the context of discussing the title of the novel we are reading (loaned from an Alice Munro story): The book is a novel. I’m pretty sure of that. What marks out a novel is this: the author and the narrator are not one. Even if, by coincidence, they share the same name. The narrator’s views, thoughts, observations — essentially, the narrator’s life — are his or her own. The narrator might be created by the author, but is a mystery to him. The provenance of his or her remarks and actions is never plain. (Chaudhuri 2015: 144) 94 4 Ephemera and Amit Chaudhuri’s Radical Modernist Aesthetic As Day (2017) comments: It’s a moment of metafictional tricksiness which in less assured hands might feel arch, but Chaudhuri’s mastery is such that it strikes you as utterly plausible: simply the kind of thing a writer-narrator in a book by Amit Chaudhuri would have on his mind. (Day 2017: n.p.) What this setup allows Chaudhuri to do is to avoid the usual kind of memoir or autobiography in which one provides an overall explanation of one’s life, often celebrating successes, coming to terms with failures or arguing for particular attitudes and the retrospective confirmation of earlier decisions — ‘When I chose the offer to accept to go abroad, I was right to do so; it has all worked out beautifully’. Or: ‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’. Such globalizing summaries and evaluations, I would argue, are of course precisely what Chaudhuri tries to circumvent. Life is not a narrative, Chaudhuri wants to say; it is a series of disconnected moments, and to create a story from this material is to falsify and reinvent that life, to interpret and fictionalize it. Whereas Chaudhuri, on the contrary, is interested in giving life back to us in its rawness, its haphazardness, in its as yet unformed condition of kernels that often tend to be linked and expanded into a narrative. This is a move very much in parallel to Modernism’s rejection of the Victorian novel and its successors. In Modern Fiction (1919), Woolf had opined that life isn’t like that at all: our actual experience of life is not that of a well-formed plot (even though, as linguists and cognitive scientists argue, we keep telling stories about our life, generating them, revising them and reconstructing them as we proceed, from one period of our life to the next - see, for instance, Bruner (1991) and Williams (2009)). Woolf argues: “Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide” (1966: 105); and: “The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot […]” (ibid.: 106). Woolf ’s focus on “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” with its “myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent” (ibid.) foregrounds a notion of the quotidian that is distinct from the realistic details provided by Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells or John Galsworthy, whom she accuses of “spend[ing] immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring” (ibid.: 105); the kind of quality of the everyday that she is interested in is the opposite of the concrete and realistic and gives rise to epiphanies in the minds of her characters. In the famous formula from the essay she characterizes “life” as “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us” (ibid.: 106). It is this saving resignification of the unordered ephemera of life that Chaudhuri deliberately circumvents by underlining the value of disorder and lack of narrativizable short-circuits of meaning. 4.2 The Meandering Gaze: From Sandeep to Jayojit and ‘I’ 95 4.3 Summary In this chapter I have argued that Chaudhuri’s fiction is a particularly important example of English language literature from India and that it is unique in its specific form and intentions. Chaudhuri’s oeuvre eschews the postmodernist-postcolonial framework that has been so successful in drawing attention to South Asian fiction. By espousing a Modernist aesthetic (perhaps in the wake of Naipaul and in continuation of the phalanx of early Indian writers in English — Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao, but also Nayantara Sahgal, Kamala Markandaya) — Chaudhuri remains in the tradition of Indians wanting to find an audience both at home and abroad. Yet his Modernism is more radical than that practised by his predecessors in that he returns to the inspiration of Modernism, especially Woolf and Joyce, to take a stance against easy storification and the importation of significance into what is meant to remain fleeting and insubstantial. As I have argued, Chaudhuri hit upon this outlook because in his first novel he imitated Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist with its (initial) child’s perspective. His work as a poet and a musician must also have been a contributing factor. The line of development I have sketched moves from this extremely successful early discovery of the everyday in A Strange and Sublime Address and Afternoon Raag to a perhaps less aesthetically viable A New World and on to very sophisticated remodellings of the pattern in Odysseus Abroad and Friend of My Youth. If A New World appears to be less of a success, this is so exclusively in terms of an alleged celebration of the banal and the quotidian, and the emphasis is here on celebration. Clearly, that novel, too, is an insightful study of vacationing, of finding oneself with time on one’s hands, of facing one’s home from a distancing expatriate perspective. The disappointment lies merely in taking this text to be part of a ‘narrative’ of Chaudhuri’s intention to promote a particular kind of anti-discourse to the plot-centred novel. One will therefore do well to dismiss disappointment and acknowledge that the novel is perhaps a study of how leisure and boredom change our perspective on our surroundings. It is also a text with a much more obvious emphasis on the protagonist’s psychology, perhaps with a view towards ironizing Jayojit’s holiday trajectory through the months of April to July. In any case, what is outstanding are the achievements of Odysseus Abroad and Friend of My Youth. For reasons of space, I could not do any justice to the first of these texts (as a former Joyce specialist I would probably have gone on and on), but I have tried to point out where Chaudhuri’s resort to memory as a structuring device deepens the impact of the everyday banal in the latter novel. And this intensification of the message thanks to the framework of memory is not one that has been added to Modernist tenets but one directly derived from Modernist texts, productively extending a feature of Modernist prose that was already quite prominent: after all, Mrs Dalloway, in Virginia Woolf ’s novel of the same title (1925), keeps thinking back on her experiences with Peter Walsh, a theme that accompanies the novel like a basso continuo. The crucial function of memory lies in its structuring of the quotidian into significance; yet in the significance lies the trace, the trace which, returning to the same location or thinking 96 4 Ephemera and Amit Chaudhuri’s Radical Modernist Aesthetic back on the scene, allows one to revive that ultimately banal exchange or perception, to heighten and ennoble it by weaving it into a thread in the woof of reminiscences, laden with emotional affect. There remains one issue that I would briefly like to raise in relation to Chaudhuri, namely his position in the current frame of postcolonial studies and the South Asian novel, i.e. within that theoretical bracket or within that ideology. Saikat Majumdar in Prose of the World has argued that the everyday is a device of resistance to colonial oppression, and that its subversive potential is observable even in Woolf and Mansfield. Much as I esteem Majumdar’s clearly very incisive analysis of Modernism’s critical deployment of the quotidian, I believe that this analysis of Chaudhuri could be questioned. It is obvious that Chaudhuri’s texts militate against a capitalist and neoliberal narrative of acquisition and self-fashioning within a consumer and career frame — in so far, he clearly mirrors the critique conveyed by Upamanyu Chatterjee in English, August. However, I strongly feel that the ‘postcolonial’ element is entirely missing in Chaudhuri. It appears to me that Majumdar does not go far enough: in dealing with Chaudhuri’s texts, one does not need to bring in the whole baggage of colonialism and post-colonial critique. The novels are novels about India, and they reflect postcoloniality only on the margins. As Chaudhuri argues, the poets writing in English “make no overt attempts to ‘appropriate’ or ‘subvert’ the language, because the English language was already theirs, linked not so much to the colonizer as to their sense of self and history” (2008a: 118). That colonialism does have an impact within Chaudhuri’s thinking can be seen in another chapter of Clearing a Space, where he argues that Indian adoption of the Modernist style of writing went beyond “negotiation between a ‘native’ idiom and a ‘foreign’ cultural paradigm” by displaying a “relocation of the meanings of modernity, modernism, native idiom, history, aesthetics, and politics, in a way we might not have been familiar with if we’d only read the European or American modernists” (2008a: 148). In terms of A New World, the impact of colonialism and globalization is present but diffuse. Admiral Chatterjee has problems making ends meet, and this is due to the after-effects of Indian independence and, in particular, to later budget-related government policies bearing on India’s civil service (see also Shetty 2018: 60). The British do not directly have anything to do with this situation. Likewise, the fact that Chaudhuri’s protagonists (like himself) are often expatriates (see also Ganguly 2000) reflects a common situation among India’s upper middle classes, namely their sending their children abroad to universities in the anglophone world and causing a brain drain in the home country. Of course, an Indian state in which English was not a major administrative language might have a different educational system and cause fewer families to send their sons off to the UK or the USA. However, given the current situation of globalization, it is highly unlikely that Indians with excellent school results would not also apply to the top international universities. What I am saying is that Chaudhuri’s critique of globalization need not be taken to have anything to do with Britain or colonialism in any specific manner. Nor do I see 4.3 Summary 97 Chaudhuri as improving the lot of the subaltern or as occupying the position of the subaltern as Majumdar suggests. What Chaudhuri’s texts foreground is an art focused on India in all its detail and specificity. That this detail is sometimes taken to be inflected with ‘Western’ views, as C. J. S. Wallia has argued (cited in Ellen 2003: 45), may be true, but it reflects the particular social status of Chaudhuri’s protagonists and their situations of homecoming. The criticism that Chaudhuri has garnered on account of his thematics by scholars like Nivedita Majumdar and other proponents of anti-exoticism is due, I would contend, to their assumption that novels have the purpose to depict life as it is in India and that they should show up the ravages of colonialism. Not only is ‘life as it is’ impossible to depict — in South Asia, whatever reality you have is extremely variegated, and authors will have to opt for particular selected chunks of it. Secondly, the novel has no responsibilities to be ideologically aware, even if authors do of course very often discuss political issues. As a Modernist in spirit and practice, Chaudhuri, I assume, has an ideology of art for art’s sake, of liberalism. He therefore claims his right to narrate the lives of people like himself in their experiences of homecoming. Others may write about Parsee households, women in a train coupé or migrants in India affected by Covid. If authors want to be heard internationally on these issues they too will have to resort to English, or to translation. Rather than merely criticising what Chaudhuri does not write about, it is perhaps most productive to appreciate what he does offer his readers and to enjoy his astute and well-crafted delineations of everyday life, of its inanities but also of its considerable though fleeting pleasures. As Neel Mukherjee says in acknowledging Chaudhuri’s genius: In what sense are Amit Chaudhuri’s plotless meditations novels? Nothing, after all, happens in them; pages are expended describing, in exquisite prose, the cursive curl of a letter, or someone dozing off. Written seemingly out of life, these books are beautiful, intensely observed, yet static and inconsequential — more mood pieces than novels. That Chaudhuri has been pushing away at form, trying to make something new of the novel, may not have been obvious from his early work, but nowhere is his project more apparent than in […] Odysseus Abroad. (Mukherjee 2015: n.p.) 4.4 Study Questions ● Select a passage from Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway and a passage from Chaud‐ huri’s A Strange and Sublime Address. How do they compare? Are there different conceptions of modernism? ● How are the servant figures portrayed in Chaudhuri’s novel? Do you agree with what Amit Ray argues in his essay “They Also Serve: Amit’s ‘Radical’ Elite and their Menials: A Deconstructive Approach” (2004)? ● Consider the variety of syntax in Chaudhuri’s oeuvre: Are there particular reasons for long or short sentences? 98 4 Ephemera and Amit Chaudhuri’s Radical Modernist Aesthetic ● Concreteness and vagueness of detail are prominent characteristics in the fictional world: What examples can you find in the novel? How do your chosen examples of vagueness and concreteness connect to the perceptions and mind-set of characters noticing these details? ● How does Chaudhuri space out temporal development in employing ellipsis or using linking formulae (“in the meantime”, “three days later”)? 4.5 Further Reading Alexander, Vera (2003). “Cross-Cultural Encounters in Amit Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag and Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies.” In: Mair, Christian (ed.). The Politics of English as a World Language (Cross/ Cultures 7). Leiden: Brill, 375-383. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789401200929. Dwivedi, Rini (2004). “The New in A New World.” In: Shukla/ Shukla (eds.) (2004). The Novels of Amit Chaudhuri. An Exploration in the Alternative Tradition. New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 116-130. Galvàn, Fernando (2004). “Amit Chaudhuri.” In: Nasta, Susheila (ed.). Writing across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk. London: Routledge, 216-228. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780203342480. Hall, Molly Volanth (2018). “The Banal Sublime of Postcolonial Bombay and Calcutta: The Embodied Ghosts, Falling Bodies, and Tangled Webs in Chandra’s Dharma and Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address.” Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 7 (1), 95-117. DOI: 10.1353/ jlt.2018.0004. Majumdar, Saikat (2004). “Of that Time, of that Place: Modernism and Indian English Fiction.” In: Shukla/ Shukla (eds.) (2004). The Novels of Amit Chaudhuri. An Exploration in the Alternative Tradition. New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 19-37. Ray, Mohit K. (2004). “They Also Serve: Amit’s ‘Radical’ Elite and their Menials: A Deconstructive Approach.” In: Shukla, Anu/ Shukla, Sheobhushan (eds.) (2004). The Novels of Amit Chaudhuri. An Exploration in the Alternative Tradition. New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 131-150. Stilz, Gerhard/ Dengel-Janic, Ellen (eds.) (2010). South Asian Literatures. (Postcolonial Literatures in English: 256). Trier, Germany: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Wiemann, Dirk (2008). Genres of Modernity: Contemporary Indian Novels in English. Leiden: Brill. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789401206549. 4.6 Works Cited Primary Sources Chatterjee, Upamanyu (1988). English, August: An Indian Story. London: Faber & Faber. Chaudhuri, Amit (1991). A Strange and Sublime Address. London: Heinemann. — (1993). Afternoon Raag. London: Heinemann. — (2009). The Immortals. London: Pan Macmillan. — (2015 [2000]). A New World. London: One World Books. 4.5 Further Reading 99 — (2017). Friend of My Youth. London: Faber and Faber. — (2022 [2014]). Odysseus Abroad. London: Faber and Faber. Desai, Anita (2011). The Artist of Disappearance: Three Novellas. London: Chatto & Windus. Kipling, Rudyard (1990 [1888]). “Yoked with an Unbeliever.” In: Kipling, Ruyard. Plain Tales from the Hills. London: Penguin Books. Mishra, Pankaj (2000 [1999]). The Romantics: A Novel. New York: Anchor Books. Sahgal, Nayantara (1993 [1983]). Rich Like Us. London: Sceptre. Secondary Sources Austin, Patrycja Magdalen (2011). “Local Histories, global Perspectives in Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address and Afternoon Raag.” Postcolonial Text 6 (2). https: / / www.postc olonial.org/ index.php/ pct/ article/ viewFile/ 1261/ 1168 (last accessed: 05.01.2023). Bellehigue, Myriam (2010). “Everyday Horizons in Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address.” Commonwealth 33 (1), 105-116. DOI: 10.4000/ ces.8320. Beluau, Julie (2018). “‘On a Road between Two Cities’: Relocating the Myths of the Indian Nation in Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) and St Cyril Road and Other Poems” (2005). In: Dodeman, André/ Raimbault, Élodie (eds.). Literary Location and Dislocation of Myth in the Post/ Colonial Anglophone World (Cross/ Cultures 202). Leiden: Brill, 21-33. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789004361409. Bruner, Jerome (1991). “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1), 1-21. Chakraborty, Sovan/ Kumar, Nagendra (2020). “A Theater Called Spectacle: Phantasmagorical Urban Space in Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address.” South Asian Review 41 (2), 177-190. DOI: 10.1080/ 02759527.2020.1740421. Chaudhuri, Amit (ed.) (2004). The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. New York: Vintage Books. Chaudhuri, Amit (2006). “The East as a Career.” New Left Review 40 ( July-August), 111-126. Reprinted in Chaudhuri, Amit (2008a), 85-99. Chaudhuri, Amit (2008a). Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture. Oxford: Peter Lang. Chaudhuri, Amit (2008b). “Notes on the Novel after Globalization.” In: Chaudhuri, Amit (2008a), 195-213. Chaudhuri, Amit (2021). Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music. New York: New York Review Books. Day, Jon (2017). “Review: Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri — Autofiction Examined.” The Guardian, 30 August 2017. https: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2017/ aug/ 30/ friend-of-my-y outh-amit-chaudhuri-review (last accessed: 15.12.2022). Dhar, Subie (2004). “A Strange and Sublime Address: Amit Chaudhuri and the Fiction of Sensibility.” In: Shukla, Sheobhushan/ Shukla, Anu (eds.) (2004). The Novels of Amit Chaudhuri. An Exploration in the Alternative Tradition. New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 38-50. Ellen, Mary Robertson (2003). “Amit Chaudhuri.” In: Molino, Michael R. (ed.). Twenty-First Century British and Irish Novelists. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 39-49. 100 4 Ephemera and Amit Chaudhuri’s Radical Modernist Aesthetic Fludernik, Monika (2021). “Narrating Otium: A Narratology of Leisure? ” Journal of Narrative Theory 51 (2), 179-199. Ganguly, Debjani (2000). “Of Unremarkable, Un-Rushdie-like Lives: The Diasporic ‘Local’ in the Latest Fiction of Amit Chaudhuri.” CRNLE Journal 2000, 84-95. [Please note: no volume number. CRNLE Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, Adelaide] Gimmel, Jochen/ Keiling, Tobias (2016). Konzepte der Muße. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Hasebrink, Burkhard/ Riedl, Peter Philipp (ed.) (2014). Muße im kulturellen Wandel: Semanti‐ sierungen, Ähnlichkeiten, Umbesetzungen (linguae & litterae 35). Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/ 9783110351743. Hoene, Christin (2016). “The Sounding City: Soundscapes and Urban Modernity in Amit Chaud‐ huri’s Fiction.” In: Sandten, Cecile/ Bauer, Annika (eds.). Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis (Cross/ Cultures 188). Leiden: Brill/ Rodopi, 363-378. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789004328761. King, Bruce (2014). “Amit Chaudhuri: Places and Spaces.” In: King, Bruce. Rewriting India: Eight Writers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 84-107. Lau, Lisa (2009). “Re-Orientalism: The Perpetration and Development of Orientalism by Orien‐ tals.” Modern Asian Studies 43 (2), 571-590. DOI: 10.1017/ S0026749X07003058. Lau, Lisa/ Dwivedi, Om Prakash (2014). Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English. Basing‐ stoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1057/ 9781137401564. Majumdar, Nivedita (2008). “When the East Is a Career: The Question of Exoticism in Indian Anglophone Literature”. Postcolonial Text 4 (3), https: / / www.postcolonial.org/ index.php/ pct/ article/ view/ 858/ 636 Majumdar, Nivedita (2011). “Speaking with a Forked Tongue: A Rebuttal of Amit Chaudhuri on Indian Anglophone Literature.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 17 (1), 103-119. Majumdar, Saikat (2007). “Dallying with Dailiness: Amit Chaudhuri’s Flâneur Fictions.” Studies in the Novel 39 (4), 448-464. Majumdar, Saikat (2013). “Amit Chaudhuri and the Materiality of the Mundane.” In: Majumdar, Saikat. Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire. New York: Columbia University Press, 135-168. DOI: 10.7312aliforna/ 9780231156950.003.0004. Mukherjee, Neel (2015) “Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri — Audaciously Redraws the Modernist Map: Review.” The Guadian, 07 February 2015. https: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2015/ feb/ 07/ odysseus-abroad-amit-chaudhuri-review-audaciously-redraws-modernis t-map (last accessed: 15.12.2022). Saint-Amand, Pierre (2011). The Pursuit of Laziness: An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment. Trsl. Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sonderforschungsbereich SFB 1015 / Collaborative Research Centre CRC 1015 (2022). “Otium. Societal Resource - Critical Potential”. https: / / www.sfb1015.uni-freiburg.de/ en? set_languag e=en (last accessed 14.03.2023). Shetty, Sandhya (2018). “Spartan Luxury: A Poetics of Finitude and Fullness in A Strange and Sublime Address.” In: Ramsey-Kurz, Helga/ Kennedy, Melissa (eds.). Uncommon Wealths in Postcolonial Fiction. Leiden: Brill/ Rodopi, 57-75. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789004359581. 4.6 Works Cited 101 Shukla, Sheobhushan (2004). “The Unfamiliar Familiar in A Strange and Sublime Address.” In: Shukla, Sheobhushan/ Shukla, Anu (eds.) (2004). The Novels of Amit Chaudhuri. An Exploration in the Alternative Tradition. New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 51-66. Shukla, Sheobhushan/ Shukla, Anu (2004). “The Novels of Amit Chaudhuri: An Exploration of the Alternative Tradition.” In: Shukla, Sheobhushan/ Shukla, Anu (eds.) (2004). The Novels of Amit Chaudhuri. An Exploration in the Alternative Tradition. New Delhi: Sarup and Sons. 1-18. Wallia, C. J. S. (n.d.). “Review of Chaudhuri’s Freedom Song.” India Star Review of Books. https: / / web.archive.org/ web/ 20030603231252/ http: / / www.indiastar.com/ wallia21.html (last accessed: 05.01.2023). Wiemann, Dirk (2013). “Cities of the Mind-Villages of the Mind: Imagining Urbanity in Contemporary India.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 61 (1), 59-72. DOI: 10.1515/ zaa.2013.61.1.59. Williams, Bernard (2009). “Life as Narrative.” European Journal of Philosophy 17 (2), 305-314. DOI: 10.1111/ j.1468-0378.2007.00275.x. Woolf, Virginia (1966). “Modern Fiction.” In: Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays by Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2. London: The Hogarth Press, 103-110. 102 4 Ephemera and Amit Chaudhuri’s Radical Modernist Aesthetic 5 The Female Body in Indian Women Writers’ Short Stories Ellen Dengel-Janic, Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen Abstract The literary genre of the Indian short story, while firmly rooted in tradition, con‐ tinually ventures into new themes and formal innovations (Viswanathan 2010 [2000]). Owing to the genre’s inherent flexibility, it has provided Indian women writers with an effective creative medium for experimentations. This chapter concerns itself with this particular genre, focusing on two Indian women writers and their representation of the female body. Githa Hariharan’s “The Remains of the Feast”, serves as a prime example of a short story that challenges conventional notions of femininity and gender identity through the portrayal of the female body. This chapter examines how Hariharan's text questions dominant discourses of femininity, presenting an aging woman's body as a catalyst for cultural rebellion against strict gender and caste norms. Conversely, Binapani Mohanty’s Odia short story “Lata” features a young protagonist, showcasing the female body’s vulner‐ ability. However, Mohanty’s protagonist transforms her story of rape and brutality into a tale of agency and recovery, shifting a once-shameful narrative into one of dignity. This chapter, therefore, melds the politics of representation and the aes‐ thetics of these short stories, considering them intertwined (cf. Sunder Rajan 1995), to unearth silenced aspects of women's lived experiences. 5.1 Introduction The genre of the short story, “the chameleon of literary genres” (Nayhauss 1977: 68, cited in Brosch 2007: 10), invites a wide range of themes, styles, modes and narrative strategies that many Indian women writers have found attractive. Perhaps due to its “pluralistic adaptability” (Brosch 2007: 10), its variety and the inherent impossibility of a rigid definition, Indian women writers have taken up the challenge to experiment with the genre and have made their specific mark on the tradition of short story writing. Ample praise has been showered on collections such as, for example, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), written in the diaspora, and Anita Desai’s and Shashi Deshpande’s collections, conceived in India, as they are a valuable resource for a feminist investigation of gender in Indian culture. The short story in India is, on the one hand, rooted in tradition but, at the same time, explores new themes and formal innovations (cf. Viswanathan 2010 [2000]). In my chapter, I will engage with Githa Hariharan’s short story “The Remains of the Feast” (1993) as an exemplary short story that challenges ideas of femininity and gendered identity via the representation of the female body. I will discuss the short story’s narrative and the representation of the body as a site of transgression. Hariharan’s short story portrays a woman’s ageing body as the source of undisguised cultural rebellion against the strict rules of gender roles and caste discipline. In the Odia short story “Lata” (1993 [1986]) by Binapani Mohanty, in my analysis, I will work with the English translation by Jayanta Mahapatra (Kali for Women 1990), on the other hand, the protagonist is, in contrast, a young woman and the female body is shown in its greatest vulnerability. Odia is an Indian language spoken in the state of Odisha. The Odia short story tradition was founded by Fakir Mohan Senapatí (1843-1918) with the publication of “Rebati” in 1898. Other writers of the early period of the Odia short story are Chandra Sekhar Nanda and Laxmikanta Mohapatra. Their topics range from criticism of poverty and inequality to love and romance, as well as the life of common people. In the next phase, realism, reform and the struggle for Independence were of great interest to Odia writers of short fiction. Among the most well-known authors are Godabarisha Mishra, Godabarisha Mohapatra and Kalandi Charan Panigrahi. From the 1960s until the present day, the tradition of short story writing expanded its scope and themes, including middle-class life and the transformation of joint-family structures as well as a more general discussion of Humanism, Socialism and Existentialism. For more information and a selection of short stories translated into English see, for example: Mishra, Manoranjan (ed.) (2020). Contemporary Odia Short Stories. Dublin (Ohio): Black Eagle Books. Mohanty creates a heroine whose story of rape and experience of brutality eventually result in her recovering from trauma and gaining agency by identifying the perpetra‐ tors, thus a story of the female body’s violation is transformed into a dignified tale of female agency. Therefore, in my chapter, the aesthetic aspects and the political implications of the short stories will be regarded as conjoined (cf. Sunder Rajan 1995) in order to analyse how Indian women writers explore generic conventions of the short story to address taboo topics of women’s existence: caste transgression, in Githa Hariharan’s story, and rape in the story by Binapani Mohanty. 5.2 The Short Story in India: Traditions, Significance, Themes In India, the short story has a long tradition of storytelling to draw on. The folk tale traditions, for example, as Mohan Ramanan’s study English and the Indian Short Story (2000) documents, have provided a great variety of techniques and strategies 104 5 The Female Body in Indian Women Writers’ Short Stories for storytelling in the form of the brief story. Famous collections of tales such as the Panchatantra showcase ample examples of this short narrative: In matters of strategies for storytelling, or weaving a narrative, or creating a frisson or generating suspense, Indians have a fine native provenance to go by and need not seek Western models. Without doubt the Indian short story is built on strong indigenous foundations. (Ramanan 2000: 106) Panchatantra, the most famous collection of animal folk tales in Sanskrit, com‐ posed c. 200 BCE, has been translated into many languages and influenced story‐ telling techniques across Asia and Europe. The interconnected fables contain life lessons, as well as political and moral ideas. These models for storytelling, are certainly influential in both the reception and production of the short story in India. Thus, the popularity of the short story can be noted in contemporary short fiction writing in the Indian languages as well as in English. India is known for its great number of languages, most of which are varieties of 15 principal ones. 22 languages are officially recognised by the government of India in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution, and they belong to several language families: Indo-European, Dravidian, Austroasiatic among others. The total figures of Indian languages range between 122 and 400, which do not include regional dialects. English is an official language in seven states and is also used by the Indian Judiciary. The literary tradition of the short story encompasses a long indigenous tradition as well as modern developments of the genre across a great variety of Indian languages. Even though some critics claim that the short story in English merely portrays a “minor facet of Indian life” (Ramanan 2000: 6) and propagate that “India exists to a large extent in her languages and in the specific, in particular locations, societies and geographical spaces” and that writers such as “Basheer, Mahasweta Devi, Ashokmitran and others in the various Indian languages clearly represent the plurality of Indian life and India’s diversity” (ibid.), the short story in the Indian languages and in English presents a whole spectrum that would be incomplete if considered as separate traditions. Padmini Mongia is supportive of the Indian short story in English because she sees the capability of English to create an Indian cultural setting. Mongia further claims that English as a medium for short story writing does not have to be questioned in terms of its adequacy for representation: 5.2 The Short Story in India: Traditions, Significance, Themes 105 This new fiction is perhaps best distinguished by its unabashed use of English as a legitimate language for the expression of an ‘Indian’ reality. Unlike the earlier literature in English, which has been around for well over a hundred years, the post-Rushdie literature in English uses the language with a difference. (Mongia 2001: 295) At the same time, Mongia admits that the short story in English by Indian writers is marked by self-consciousness in their use of English as the language of the more privileged stratum of society: As with much Indian writing in English, there is a self-consciousness that marks the stories in In Other Words, a self-consciousness often discernible in terms of the slightly apologetic nature of several of the narrators, who are acutely aware of their upper-middle-class status in a country where class distinctions are easy to detect and can often be seen as marked by the use of English as the medium for creative expression. (Mongia 2001: 295) The use of English with a tendency to self-consciousness and an apologetic tone is balanced by the adaptation of English to the Indian setting that it describes in the short stories. The encounter of language with the setting in the short story undoubtedly leads to a hybridisation of the genre. Similarly, the author and critic S. Viswanathan’s assessment of the short story as a polyphonic art form attests to the “process of interiorisation” in favour of the usage of English for the communication of an Indian reality (Viswanathan (2010 [2000]: 184). By ‘interiorisation’ Viswanathan refers to the confident and natural use of English as a medium of expression. Ramanan even posits that writers in Indian languages might be advanced in their will to experiment with the short story, both in terms of genre and topic: We have thus far spoken of the Indian English short story but modernity is just as available in stories in the Indian languages. Writers in these languages have learned from both English and non-English masters — Irish, French, Russian. In sheer complexity and in the exploration of those new experiences [Sunder] Rajan speaks about, perhaps they have been ahead of writers in English. (Ramanan 2000: 5) Concluding from this, the short story is a modern Indian genre that thrives in Indian languages and has also been embraced by Indian writers in English to explore contemporary issues and concerns. Therefore, it is justifiable to consider this generic tradition as a complementary one. Regarding the development of the short story as a genre that has been adapted and adopted to suit the contemporary taste of Indian readers, it is possible to see the genre’s capacity for experimentation as its core quality. In Indian literature, the short story is treated as a vehicle for experimentation with new and perhaps unfamiliar topics. Ramanan, among others, posits that the variety of topics and themes for Indian short story writers range from the historical and political to the personal and psychological, but that new themes such as, for example, “[n]ew sexual mores, fresh possibilities in human relations, marriage, motherhood are explored” (2000: 5). He further argues that writers have “expanded the significance of the genre, widened its horizons and 106 5 The Female Body in Indian Women Writers’ Short Stories made the short story a potent vehicle of social and psychological change” (Ramanan 2000: 5). As such a vehicle, the short story has found famous practitioners such as the writers Anita Desai and Shashi Deshpande who have explored the genre for more than two decades. Desai’s and Deshpande’s short fictions present a variety of themes in contemporary Indian culture, on family relationships, on difficulties growing up in the microcosm of the family but they also tackle themes beyond the scope of the domestic and familial sphere. Indian women writers have utilised the genre of the short story to negotiate and probe the issues of gender, class, caste and sexuality. The shortness of the genre, as has been noted by some critics, invites the writer to experiment with new themes as well as innovative aesthetic concepts (cf. Cox 2022: 59). Despite the fact that the short story is often regarded as the lesser form in comparison to the novel, as a genre it can be easily adapted to serve the writer’s needs and as a craft rather than an art, it may be easier to produce (cf. Pratt 1981: 191). As the short story is defined as “manageable” and therefore seen as feminine (Robbins 2022: 294), women writers are perhaps encouraged by the literary market to devote themselves to this genre. Even though Ruth Robbins discusses women writers from Europe, the US, Canada and New Zealand, I would claim that Indian women writers deal with the same predicament as they are similarly confronted with patriarchal norms and values. Therefore, this approximation of women writers and the lesser form of the short story proves problematic, as Ruth Robbins points out: Short fiction often has some of the same attributes as the lyric: as lyric is to epic, so the short story is to the novel. It can be an intimate form, focused on a single incident which values ‘the personal, the closely detailed, the miniature’ and does not risk a woman writer’s status as appropriately feminine. But — and this is the double bind for women writers — if this is what women writers do and the reasons for doing it are focused on maintaining their femininity, ‘By implication, the short story becomes both a lesser form and about all women can manage.’ This is a double bind that feminist criticism has not always been able to avoid in its own judgements. (2022: 296) The “personal, the closely detailed, the miniature” is socially associated with the female gender but it is employed by women writers as an opportunity to explore the macrocosm of the social world through the microcosm of women’s everyday experience. It is important to look at the representation of the personal and detailed experience in the short story and its reshaping by the conventions of the genre. The genre of the short story, its mode of experimentation and its emphasis on craft have the advantages of a great focus on a single element and its exploration in the various narrative facilities of the short story: the foregrounding of narrative voice, detail and fragment, the use of symbols and metaphors, as well as the more emphasised use of beginnings and endings. The short story as a genre is very often defined by its element of reduction and brevity resulting in a closer focus on particularities rather than an extensive exploration 5.2 The Short Story in India: Traditions, Significance, Themes 107 of a theme. It famously tells the “fragment of a life rather than a whole life” (Pratt 1981: 182). This, as Renate Brosch suggests, produces a greater complexity and per‐ formativity of the genre (cf. Brosch 2007: 55). In view of the brevity, condensation and focus on a fragment, the short story can be defined by cognitive dissonance, as Brosch explains. To be more precise, the short story’s fragments, elusiveness and gaps produce a lack of understanding or cognitive dissonance in the reader. Therefore, according to her study, the reader’s engagement needs to be more active in deciphering the many levels of meaning in the short story. Moreover, literary scholar V. S. Pritchett dwells on the allusive and fragmented characteristics as well as its purposeful incompleteness and its leaving certain ideas inexpressible as Alisa Cox posits, “Pritchett’s belief that ‘the short story is perfectly fitted to the glancing, allusive, nervously decisive and summary moods of contemporary life’ echoes both Edgar Allan Poe and Elizabeth Bowen in its alignment of the short story with a modern, fragmented sensibility” (Pritchett 1966 in Cox 2022: 57). At first sight, the above-mentioned characteristics are based on the analysis of western short fiction, but close attention to these characteristics in the following analysis of two short stories by Indian women writers will show that they are applicable to the Indian tradition of the short story as well. My examination of the stories, one by Indian English writer Githa Hariharan and one by Odia writer Binapani Mohanty, will consider the short story as a genre that is suited to the needs of Indian women writers who wish to draw attention to the detailed and personal aspects of women’s lives. For their purposes, the so-called “lesser” form is perfectly suited: the possibility to relate intimate details, its emphasis on craft, reduction and fragmentation. 5.3 Githa Hariharan’s “The Remains of the Feast”: The Body as a Site of Transgression “The Remains of the Feast” by Githa Hariharan tells the story of a young woman’s grief over her great-grandmother’s death, a woman of a different generation who subversively acts out culinary desires in the last stages of a terminal illness. Githa Hariharan (1954-) is an acclaimed writer of novels, short stories and essays. In 1993, she won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel for The Thousand Faces of the Night (1992). She has also edited a collection of stories, A Southern Harvest (1993), translated from Indian languages. Her latest novel I Have Become the Tide was published in 2019 by Simon and Schuster India. 108 5 The Female Body in Indian Women Writers’ Short Stories Books by this author: The Thousand Faces of the Night (1992). New Delhi: Penguin. The Art of Dying (1993). New Delhi: Penguin. The Ghosts of Vasu Master (1994). New Delhi: Penguin. When Dreams Travel (1999). London: Picador. In Times of Siege (2003). New York: Pantheon. Fugitive Histories (2009). New Delhi: Penguin. I Have Become the Tide (2019). New Delhi: Simon and Schuster. The story begins with a death and a smell: The first-person narrator describes the lingering smell of her great-grandmother, Rukmini, after she has died. It is reminiscent of “a pressed, faded rose” and “a candle put out” (Hariharan 1993: 9) and thus introduces the aspect of sensory impressions as well as the significance of memory. It is only through these two aspects that the narrator can re-create an image of her great-grandmother. In fact, the emphasis is laid on the phenomenology of the body and the meaning of sensory perceptions for the narrator’s understanding of her great-grandmother. Phenomenology is a movement in philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl, Mar‐ tin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty among others that focussed on the experi‐ ence of the world through the subjective individual and emphasised the perception of reality, of objects and things in contrast to a pure rational contemplation of life and ideas. A vivid image is created by the narrator’s representation of the great-grandmother’s three main characteristics: her laughter, her cravings for forbidden food and her dying. The short story thus leaves other facets of her character untold and does not paint a more informative and encompassing image of the old woman. Was she a matriarch, a good wife and mother? Was she kind and patient, or headstrong and angry? These are questions that are left open, and by being left undefined, they loom importantly in the story. The great-grandmother’s characterization starts off with her disposition. Her humour is a dominant characteristic and is described as “uncontrollable”, breaking a tabu as she finds the death of her only son hilarious because he dies a respectable and sophisticated man when he reaches old age, whereas, she, an uneducated woman from the rural parts of India, outlives him. Through the description “giggling like a little girl” (9), a non-conforming and unconventional as well as authentic image is called to mind. Such unconventional behaviour becomes even more pronounced when Rukmini unexpectedly revolts and crosses the boundaries of caste, class and gender in her desire for forbidden food. 5.3 Githa Hariharan’s “The Remains of the Feast”: The Body as a Site of Transgression 109 In the following, the focus will be on the representation of the ninety-year-old protagonist whose idiosyncratic manners at the end of her life question particular norms on femininity in Indian culture. The short story begins with her death and thus her absence is emphasized, but retrospectively, the story tells of her final days in a very sensual and vivid manner describing in detail, how she unexpectedly and indecorously wishes to eat food that was formerly forbidden to her according to high caste discipline. With regard to diet, the norms and rules are prescribed by caste practices. The Indologist Axel Michaels posits that “[i]n many ways, food is regulated by dietetics, the acceptance of food by norms of commensality, work by professional norms specific to castes” (2021: 326). The great-grandmother thus transgresses caste rules very explicitly and the family’s shock is great. Her transgressive behaviour becomes even more of a provocation of caste sensibility when she asks for food in a flirtatious manner that alludes to the connection between food and sex (cf. Raja 2005). Another transgression that the great-grandmother wilfully commits is her wish for a red silk sari. The red sari is traditionally worn by brides in India and symbolizes young womanhood that is tightly linked to the ideal of a woman as a wife (cf. Lamb 2000: 214). By referring to this ideal of femininity, a whole set of references is subtly inferred. It might be, firstly, the reference to youth and bridehood, the past of the old woman, it can also be read as a challenge to the ideal of the wife as the great-grandmother no longer has the status of a wife and thus does not fit this traditional ideal of wifehood. As a third reference, the red sari worn by the bride also implies that a woman’s sexuality, albeit clandestinely, is alluded to. In the use of the symbol of the red sari, the essence of the short story’s genre becomes visible: the symbol references several discourses on womanhood but does not openly suggest that one reference should be preferred over another. The cognitive dissonance that is created contributes to the effect of the reader’s engagement with the complex representation of its central female character, the great-grandmother. While the old woman’s desire is portrayed in the final wish for the luxury of the red sari, this might be considered as part of her transgression of ideal femininity and expression of her sexuality. Yet, it can also symbolise youth and bridehood and thus also comprises a transgression of the role of the great-grandmother whose status is no longer that of a traditional wife but, as a widow, she is supposed to personify chastity. It is interesting, however, that, from the perspective of the narrator, the red sari “glittered like her childish laughter” and is transformed into a character trait of the great-grandmother. Her childish but light-hearted disposition is reflected in the garment that has symbolic power, as noted above. Despite this, she is denied being cremated in the red sari, and conformity is reinstated by the narrator’s mother who is shocked by the outrageousness of the old woman’s demand. Her transgression is a threat to the relative’s normative ideas on women’s proper behaviour. And while they accept her desire for forbidden food, they stop at granting Rukmini her last wish of wearing red silk. In her death, her transgressive behaviour ceases with her, leaving a sense of absoluteness. Life and death are made to appear as similar contrasts as desire 110 5 The Female Body in Indian Women Writers’ Short Stories and norm, as transgression and rule. To live, albeit only just before her death, means for the great-grandmother to taste the forbidden and unknown pleasures beyond the rules of her class, caste, and gender. To die means to be under the control of the ones who police the boundaries of her existence, who prescribe the proper behaviour for a woman, who is ageing and dying. The female body in her death is inscribed with the only meanings that are socially and culturally acceptable. Despite the re-inscription of norms upon her death, what remains more pertinent is how the narrative expresses a variety of sensory experiences: sensations of smells, noises and tastes. It is crucial that such sensory information is foregrounded in the characterization of the great-grandmother. Rather than giving insight into her charac‐ ter’s traits and disposition, the story activates the sensory perception in the reader. The story furthermore intensifies this aspect by its continuous description of smell and noise: musty, overripe smell, burping and farting. Besides, the great-grandmother is described as a “moody camel” that snaps and bites when she is finally hospitalised due to the final stages of her cancer. It is cancer that she succumbs to, which is said to “lick[ing] clean everything in its way” (Hariharan 1993: 9). The sensory impressions are rather compelling and provide a leitmotif in the story. From descriptions of eating and drinking, laughing inappropriately and childishly, to the minutia of smells and odours. There are, furthermore, descriptions of the food that the great-grandmother now wishes to eat and the noises she makes while relishing the rich and unhealthy dishes. The manner in which she asks for these is rendered as “flirtatious”, and the kind of food such as, for example, Christian cakes, ice cream, biscuits and samosas are non-Brahmin and share the aspects of sweetness, richness, or spiciness. The richness of the food and the flirtatious and clandestine manner in which it is consumed are markers of a sexual desire that cannot be otherwise expressed. This rebellious expression of sensuality and pleasure is neatly juxtaposed with the studies of anatomy that the narrator must do in order to pass her medical exam. Her approach to the body is therefore marked by the science of anatomy, the classification of the body as an object of study. In anatomy, the aim is to precisely name and categorise various aspects of human physicality. The short story, as a genre, could be understood as the opposite, as the imaginative engagement with the human mind and psychology. The narrator is aware of the discrepancy between her anatomical studies and her desire to know her great-grandmother more intimately: “I am still a novice at anatomy, I hover just over the body, I am just beneath the skin. I have yet to look at the insides, the entrails of memories she told me nothing about, the pain congealing into a cancer” (Hariharan 1993: 16). The young medical student is very much involved with what the body can tell her on a scientific level, but the “entrails of memories” and the “pain congealing into a cancer” she is unable to detect or understand. It is in the form of the narration, that will then result in the short story, that the narrator can fathom more about her great-grandmother than she could from a purely medical perspective. Through her narrative, she can relate to her, and approximate her personality using the details that she reveals about the great-grandmother’s inner desires and physical pleasures. Yet, 5.3 Githa Hariharan’s “The Remains of the Feast”: The Body as a Site of Transgression 111 what is in her memories or what pain she suffered during her lifetime is left unspoken. It is only in the sentence cited above, that the narrator refers to the fact that cancer could have been a symptom of unhappiness. Another approach and an expression of the narrator’s exploration of her great-grandmother’s personality is when she returns to the food stalls in the town to taste similar dishes as her great-grandmother did in the final stages of her illness. Such an experience is different from the medical analysis and quite dissimilar to the examination of the past but expresses the closeness and attachment by the shared sensory experience. It is the body that provides the connection between the old woman and the narrator. In this manner, the old woman teaches the younger one to make connections through the body rather than to merely objectify it in her medical approach. Yet, the ending of the short story takes a different turn. Just like the beginning it ends with a description of a sensory experience: the smell that lingers after the great-grandmother’s death. The smell triggered the memory in the first place, and at the end of the story, the narrator opens the windows to let out the smell, to stop the haunting memories. Instead of her great-grandmother’s old saris, she places new medical books in the cupboards, “solid and like armed soldiers” (Hariharan 1993: 16). What is being replaced is the smell that signifies the memory of a body that was strange and transgressive in the last stages of her illness. Instead, the solidity of science and medicine are used as the armour against the painful loss of a person who perhaps dared too much in her willingness to transgress the norms of caste and gender. Similar to washing the body clean after her death, ridding it of unsanctified desires, the smell in her room is exorcized with the help of science. “The Remains of the Feast” is a short story that foregrounds sensory perception over characterisation and plot. Instead of giving more information about the character of the great-grandmother, her past, her relationships, and her role in the family, the narrative renders the particular sensations that are tied to the functions and physicality of the body. By engaging the senses, the story itself becomes a phenomenological impression of a particular moment in a person’s life. This phenomenological aspect is reinforced by the narrative strategy that the story employs. The narrator gives her impression of her great-grandmother in the form of sensory perception and invites the reader to share these perceptions. Even more so, the first-person narrator produces a subjective voice that enhances immersion into the story and its point of view, and, simultaneously, opens up the story to an integration of the sensory aspect into the cognitive understanding of its significance. Telling the story, the narrator re-creates her great-grandmother’s body through her individualised perspective. Her motivation behind telling the story might be that she needs to come to terms with her great-grandmother’s death. But it also reflects on her as a young woman who studies medicine, a woman who has different opportunities in contemporary India, different from the old woman’s fate. From this point of view, the story gains even more complexity since it not only tells a story of desire in the face of death and a tale of a woman’s transgression of cultural norms, but it gives 112 5 The Female Body in Indian Women Writers’ Short Stories insight into the difficult position of a young woman who is still trying to define her identity in the spheres of the private life of the family and the public life of a doctoral student. The transgressions that she renders in her narrative, may be the beginning of her own journey into adulthood. While she reminisces about the time with her great-grandmother, she also implicitly asks larger questions about femininity in contemporary India. In conclusion, one might say that “The Remains of the Feast” lays emphasis on the physicality of the body and its desires. By using sensory pleasures and experiences as a leitmotif, the story sheds light on the phenomenology of a gendered body. The great-grandmother’s unforeseen desires late in her life pose greater questions for the young female doctoral student about the norms circumscribing women’s lives. As she witnesses how her great-grandmother’s body is washed clean of her forbidden pleasures, she is confronted with the cultural limitations of female existence. She is the only person in the family who would have granted the final wish to wear a red silk sari on her deathbed. Yet, the narrator is forced to realise that such transgressive behaviour lies outside the cultural norms and customs, which dictate appropriate behaviour for women such as, for example, which colour is appropriate for which stage in a woman’s life. In “The Remains of the Feast”, it is the cognitive dissonance and the gaps in the story that contribute to its overall effect. While the reader is invited to share the detailed sensations, there is not much information on the characters, their traits, or their relationships with others. The narrator selects the focus of her narrative so that an exceptional, yet elusive image of womanhood is created. This results in an unconventional impression of a woman whose most dominant characteristics are the ones connected to her body. Such unconventional behaviour as shown in the old woman’s physical desire emphasises the possibility of overcoming inhibitions imposed by caste, class and gender. 5.4 Binapani Mohanty’s “Lata”: The Body as a Site of Shame In the short story “Lata” by Binapani Mohanty, originally written in Odia, the protagonist is a young woman who, after having left the abusive household of her in-laws is raped by several villagers during the Holi festival and leaves her home out of fear and shame. Binapani Mohanty (1936-2022) was a Sahitya Akademi Award winner and a professor of Economics at the Sailabala Women’s College. Mohanty published nov‐ els, short stories and poems in Odia. In 2020, she was awarded the Padma Shri, one of the most prestigious awards bestowed by the Indian government. Her works have been translated into English, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali and Marathi among others. 5.4 Binapani Mohanty’s “Lata”: The Body as a Site of Shame 113 Books by this author: Kasturi Mruga O’Sabuja Aranya (1967/ 1999). Calcutta: Writers Workshop. Pata Dei: A Collection of Short Stories (1986). Kataka: Vidyapuri. Asru Anajala (1992). Kataka: Granthamandira. Manasvini (2002). Bhubaneswar: Kadambini Pablikesanas. Kunit, Kuntala, Shakuntala (2005). New Delhi: Kalpaz Publications. The story, which starts on the night of the Holi festivities, renders the character of Lata in a rather obscure fashion as the authorial narrator does not provide insight into the character’s thoughts, and the perspective remains external throughout the whole story. A closer investigation of the narrative discourse shows that it is the absence rather than the presence of the main protagonist that is significant in formulating a statement on the representation of women in Indian literature and culture in this example. Lata’s departure is framed by the depiction of Holi and thus the narrator intertwines the protagonist’s plight with the setting of the short story and its cultural significance. Right from the beginning, the narrative opens with a description of Lata that is placed firmly within the setting, the Holi festival in spring: Somewhere around midnight, Lata left her home and disappeared. No one knew to where. It was the full moon night of Holi, with moonlight splashing over the entire village. The deities had finally been brought to the festival grounds after being carried from house to house. […] Just once a year, and so hard to get hold of; how it comes and goes in the twinkling of an eye! And if one did not want to possess it, it seemed as though everything piled up, the grime and dust of the year sat heavy on both body and mind. And it was as if Lata went on smiling, yet inside her the fears of years settled in like ghosts. So on a full moon, festive nights like this one, Lata mingled with the crowds leaving her house to watch the jatra after offering her customary worship. (Mohanty 1993: 43) Lata’s disappearance is framed by the festival, and thus the buoyant and festive atmosphere is contrasted with the secret leaving of the protagonist. Holi is a violent spring festival and is often interpreted as the momentary reversal of order and social normativity. But the apparent disorder and chaos is in fact an organised and intended disruption. Marriot McKim describes this aptly in his anthropological account: […] I began to see the pandemonium of Holi falling into an extraordinarily regular social ordering. But this was an order precisely inverse to the social and ritual principles of routine life. Each riotous act at Holi implied some opposite, positive rule or fact of everyday social organization in the village. (McKim 2006: 109) From this point of view the social world is only mirrored in the riotous festivities of Holi, and thus the protagonist Lata, who is already outside the social order because she has left her in-law’s house without a valid explanation, does not partake in the social order-disorder dichotomy that is occasioned by Holi. 114 5 The Female Body in Indian Women Writers’ Short Stories The order-disorder dichotomy inherent to Holi is a pattern that the story itself repeats: the festivity of Holi, the rape of the protagonist, the deities that are returned to the villages and Lata who is driven away by her traumatic experience. This pattern is repeated in the opposition of inside/ outside. Outside the night of Holi is proceeding, but inside the house, Lata’s loneliness and isolation are manifest. Externally, Lata seems to be smiling and internally, she experiences “the fears of years settling in like ghosts” (Mohanty 1993: 43). What remains outside and unspoken are the horrors of abuse and rape suffered by the protagonist, and this is contrasted by what is inside the story: the villagers and their festivities. This is explicitly stated when Lata is described in the state she is in, probably after the rape: “The festivities of the village remained outside her, did not touch her at all. And no one needed to know the inner world she dwelt in, or where her thoughts lay, save herself ” (Mohanty 1993: 43). Her inner world is not disclosed, and the narrator’s comment on the fact that her thoughts are only known to her, keeps a respectful distance to the character’s emotional reality. Notably, the dichotomy of inside and outside is also carried on in the structure and development of the plot: the main traumatic events are effectively absent from the story: the abuse of her in-laws that leads to her departure from their household and a return to her father’s house, the rape in the night of Holi, the birth of her son and all events that are omitted preceding her reappearance in the village at the end of the story. All events centred on the protagonist are therefore absent and silent, thus turning her whole character into a marker of obscurity: “Lata remained a forgotten entity, a useless question mark” (Mohanty 1993: 44). It is undoubtedly her departure from her father’s house during the night of Holi that turns her into a silent marker in the story. Thus, the story refrains from describing a number of successive events on the level of the plot, but rather focusses on the gaps and silences created by the character’s absence. When her father dies of grief, the house becomes a haunted place where her absence becomes a ghostly presence: From that day Jagu Behera’s house stood shut, as though forever. A small, one-room house with a narrow veranda and inside, just a tin trunk, a couple of reed mats, and some torn sheets. […] Slowly, the shuttered, silent house took on a haunted air, and inexplicably, passers-by seemed to hear the loud drawn-out calls of Jagu Behera coming from its livid darkness. (Mohanty 1993: 44) The trauma and grief of Lata’s family are merely manifest in the forsaken and bare house. But the darkness of the house is filled with the cries of grief of Lata’s father Jagu. Similar to the smell of the great-grandmother in “The Remains of the Feast” that lingers on after her death, Lata’s absence is perceptible in the haunted house. In the story, the absence becomes a significant concept since it poses the question of the motivation behind the absence. For the narrator in “The Remains of the Feast” the great-grandmother’s absence triggers an engagement with her transgressive behaviour, and in “Lata” the absence draws attention to the character’s reasons for her departure since it was forced by her feeling of shame. 5.4 Binapani Mohanty’s “Lata”: The Body as a Site of Shame 115 To a readership familiar with the epics of Ancient India and the epic’s literary tradition, the departure of Lata might be a reminder of the Ramayana and its main heroine Sita. The Ramayana, along with the Mahabharata, is the most influential Sanskrit epic that tells the story of the hero Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, and his devoted wife Sita. Its composition is ascribed to the poet Valmiki (c. 300 BCE) and contains in its current form 24,000 couplets. The prince is banned from the kingdom Ayodhya and lives an exiled life with his wife and his half-brother Lakshmana. The stories revolve around Rama’s fight against the demon king Ravana and the ingenious mon‐ key-general Hanuman. The Ramayana’s popularity persists in dances, songs, per‐ formances, comics and TV series. In the popular epic stories, Sita, the young wife of the hero Rama, is forced into a number of exiles, some of which are voluntary, but others are also forced. First, Sita insists on sharing Rama’s exile when he is banned from Ayodhya (Venkatesananda 1988: 64). But later in the tale, she is abducted by the demon king Ravana and is thus experiencing a double exile: away from her home and away from her husband. A third exile, and this is the most obvious reference to Lata, is imposed on her when Rama exiles Sita because her chastity during her stay in Lanka is doubted. The epic’s heroine has to flee and live alone with her children in the forest. Sita has to withdraw into absence for the king to be secure in his position of power as a respected ruler. Lata, in the short story, has already left the position of a wife but she still needs to leave the village and her home to preserve cultural notions of purity and femininity. To her, a life in exile is preferable to a life of shame at home. Yet, differently from her epic foil, Lata reappears at the end of the story with her own version of the truth about the crime committed against her. Undoubtedly, by employing the intertextual reference to the Ramayana and retelling it for the purposes of the short story, the narrative emphasises the character’s perseverance rather than her powerlessness. Lata’s strength is shown as a culmination as well as a twist at the end of the short story. As a closure to the narrative, the secret and untold event about the night of Holi and the sexual crime committed by the villagers is suddenly disclosed, when Lata is pressed to inform the villagers about the father of her child. By giving voice to the young woman at last, the story shifts the perspective from the woman’s silent suffering to her attained agency. First, however, the description preceding the naming of the perpetrators enforces an image of female identity as powerless: Lata’s meagre knowledge, acquired from a few years in primary school, was hardly sufficient to show her a way out of her troubles. Nor did she have a father or a brother who could be a support to her. Finally, the villagers came together and decided that Lata had to leave the village or else they would set Jagu’s hut on fire. (Mohanty 1993: 47) 116 5 The Female Body in Indian Women Writers’ Short Stories Her lack of education and her status as a single woman would definitely lead to her marginalisation in the village community but, to the reader’s surprise and unprepared pleasure, she takes back her rightful place among the villagers. Her existence, which so far was a series of abuses culminating in the night of her rape, ceases to be one of silent suffering. She wills herself to speak the truth in front of the villagers without fearing the possible consequences. Instead of retreating further into the position of shame, she frees herself from it by pointing at the rapists. With this act, she clearly voices her story, tells what happened to her, and thus shames the community that had previously tried to expel her from their midst. It is this act of taking control of her own story that empowers Lata in the end. Not only does she finally speak out about her painful experience, but she also names the rapists openly and unashamedly. The scene after her revelation is described as follows: The whole atmosphere changed. The old and middle-aged exchanged glances, the young gave knowing smiles. No question was asked and none answered. Meanwhile the old women flopped down on the veranda as though spent. Ramu, Bira, Gopi, Maguni, and Naria kept their eyes on the ground. (Mohanty 1993: 48 f.) The shame silently expressed through the stares on the ground is shifted away from the female protagonist to the perpetrators of the rape. Thus, the revelation changes the power structure in the village as the woman who is on her own, without the support of her family, and even threatened to be ostracised and banned from her home, takes charge of the situation, and establishes the truth about the rape. In the short story, through the absence and exile of the protagonist, the opposition of inside and outside, the untold and the told, the narrator creates a culminating ending that shifts the perspective from external to internal. This implies that the absence of both character and her internal thoughts is turned into a presence of the character at the end of the story. She embraces her own situation and takes charge by being unafraid to name the perpetrators. She, therefore, acquires agency in a community that had threatened to marginalize her. Lata no longer heeds the social boundary established by feelings of shame and embarrassment, while simultaneously claiming her rightful position and status in her own community. As a field of experimentation, the short story thus creates a space for shifting perspectives on female agency within restrictive communities. 5.5 The Short Story and the Phenomenology of the Female Body Short stories are often centred on a fragment rather than a whole life, they are full of allusiveness rather than explicitness (cf. Pratt 1981: 191; Cox 2022: 56) and therefore can allow the narrator to focus on a particular aspect such as, for example, the body in “The Remains of the Feast”. The female body as a fragment of a whole life shows 5.5 The Short Story and the Phenomenology of the Female Body 117 that the reduction to the physical offers an important exploration of femininity in general: it demonstrates the limitations of female existence as the body is utilised to serve and to be submissive to rules and regulations of gender and caste, to adhere to religious dietary prescriptions etc. The fragment that is foregrounded in the short story, however, shows the body from a different perspective, placing it at the centre of attention. By leaving out details about Rukmini’s past life, the story “The Remains of the Feast” emphasises what is central in a demonstrative reconsideration of the female body’s value. The body has desires, and these desires open up new possibilities beyond the prescriptions of gender, caste and class. Similarly, the critic Ira Raja claims that the story “contravenes the authority of a religious-cultural discourse concerned with self-control and salvation, of which she is meant to be the ideal subject” (2005: 78). It is undeniably the body of the old woman that becomes a site of the transgression of normative behaviour as prescribed by rules about food, dress and decorum. Adaptable and flexible, the genre of the short story is a popular medium for Indian women writers in English and in Indian languages. As “a potent vehicle of social and psychological change” (Ramanan 2000: 5) the short story is a great repository for unfamiliar and unconventional depictions of forbidden desires, transgression of ideas of old age as well as the body as a site of shame as well as resistance. At first sight, the focus on the detailed and uneventful aspects of women’s lives is well suited to the aspects of the reduction and fragmentation of the generic craft of the short story. Through the “lesser” form, seemingly ordinary lives become the sites of expressing the above-mentioned desires and transgressions that reveal how women are restricted and burdened by their socially sanctioned roles in a patriarchal culture. It is safe to say, that the genre of the short story, with its narrative predispositions, offers ample opportunities for women writers to pay close attention to the details of everyday life, to the whole intricate story, to aspects of the body and shame, to ideal femininity and its transgression. Not only do the short stories by Indian women writers zoom in on the details of everyday lives and intimate moments, but they also offer a particular perspective on the female characters they choose to portray. They often focus on the imperceptible aspects of women’s existence: suppressed wishes and shameful experiences. The great-grandmother in “The Remains of the Feast” eventually expresses her desire for the prohibited dishes in a Brahmin household, and Lata openly declares who has committed a violent physical crime against her. The reason why these characters can openly refer to their bodies lies in their capacity to overcome, or rather, defeat shame. Shame is a powerful social demarcation, and, as Axel Michaels claims, “boundaries of shame and embarrassment [are] an internalization of social boundaries” (2021: 326). Such internalisation of the social boundary guarded by the feeling of shame is revealed in the short stories as an artificial line of demarcation that can, by pure will or desire, be stepped over. And the short stories I have discussed here offer a field of experimentation and change for the characters who are capable to confront the unseen and shameful aspects of their lived experiences. By doing this, by challenging the limits of women’s 118 5 The Female Body in Indian Women Writers’ Short Stories lives, the characters in the short stories open up new possibilities of being a woman beyond traditional and customary conventions. 5.6 Study Questions ● How do Indian English women writers use the short story as a genre? What are the possibilities that can be explored? ● Why do you think should the Indian short story in English be read alongside the short story in Indian languages? ● How are narrative techniques used to present the themes of the short stories? ● Does the short story as a genre engage with innovation, experimentation and transgression? Can you identify such characteristics in the examples analysed in this chapter? ● Occasionally, the short story places significance on what is NOT told, thus creating “cognitive dissonance”. What are the most important aspects that are omitted and how do they contribute to our engagement with the short stories’ themes? ● Both stories employ the female body as a site of resistance and/ or agency. How would you regard the importance of the body in short stories? 5.7 Further Reading Michaels, Axel (2021). Hinduism: Past and Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003). Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham/ London: Duke University Press. DOI: 10.2307/ j.ctv11smp7t. Mongia, Padmini (2001). “Confession and Self-Making in Fiction of Contemporary Indian Women Writers.” In: Durix, Jean-Pierre (ed.). Telling Stories: Post-Colonial Fiction in English. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Nayhauss, Hans-Christoph von (1977). Theorie der Kurzgeschichte. Stuttgart: Reclam. Raja, Ira (2005). “Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies: Appetite, Modernity and the Middle Class in Two Indian Short Stories in English.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40 (1), 73-89. DOI: 10.1177/ 0021989405050666. Ramanan, Mohan (2000). English and the Indian Short Story: Essays in Criticism. Hyderabad [et al.]: Orient Longman. Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari (1995). Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. London/ New York: Routledge. Viswanathan, S. (2010 [2000]). “The Indian Short Story: Towards a Location Chart.” In: Stilz, Gerhard/ Dengel-Janic, Ellen (eds.). Postcolonial Literatures: Sources and Resources South Asia. Trier: WVT, 181-184. 5.6 Study Questions 119 5.8 Works Cited Primary Sources Hariharan, Githa (1993). “The Remains of the Feast.” In: The Art of Dying and Other Stories. Delhi: Penguin, 9-16. Mohanty, Binapani (1993 [1986]). “Lata.” In: Kali for Women (eds.). Truth Tales: Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of India. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 43-49. Secondary Sources Brosch, Renate (2007). Short Story: Textsorte und Leseerfahrung. Trier: WVT. Cox, Alisa (2022). “Writers on the Short Story: 1950-Present.” In: Delaney, Paul/ Hunter, Adrian (eds.). The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 56-74. Lamb, Sarah (2000). White Saris and Sweet Mangoes. Berkeley: University of California Press. McKim, Marriot (2006). “Holi: The Feast of Love.” In: Hawley, John Stratton/ Narayanan, Vasudha (eds.). The Life of Hinduism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 99-114. DOI: 10.1aliforniarnia/ 9780520249134.003.0008. Michaels, Axel (2021). Hinduism: Past and Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mongia, Padmini (2001). “Confession and Self-Making in Fiction of Contemporary Indian Women Writers.” In: Durix, Jean-Pierre (ed.). Telling Stories: Post-Colonial Fiction in English. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789004490710. Pratt, Mary Louise (1981). “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It.” Poetics 10 (2-3), 175-194. Pritchett, V. S. (1966). “The Short Story.” London Magazine 6 (6), 6-9. Raja, Ira (2005). “Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies: Appetite, Modernity and the Middle Class in Two Indian Short Stories in English.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40 (1), 73-89. DOI: 10.1177/ 0021989405050666. Ramanan, Mohan (2000). English and the Indian Short Story. Hyderabad [et al.]: Orient Longman. Robbins, Ruth (2022). “Gender and Genre.” In: Delaney, Paul/ Hunter, Adrian (eds.). The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 293-312. Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari (1995). Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism. London/ New York: Routledge. Venkatesananda, Swami (Übers.) (1988). The Concise Ramayana of Valmiki. Albany: State University of New York Press. Viswanathan, S. (2010 [2000]). “The Indian Short Story: Towards a Location Chart.” In: Stilz, Gerhard/ Dengel-Janic, Ellen (eds.). Postcolonial Literatures: Sources and Resources South Asia. Trier: WVT, 181-184. 120 5 The Female Body in Indian Women Writers’ Short Stories 6 ‘Condition-of-India’ Plays: Mahesh Dattani (1958—) and Poile Sengupta (1948—) Maitrayee Misra, Central University of Odisha, India Abstract In the post-independence era (post-1947), to be more specific, after the 1960s, Indian drama in English mostly adhered to two main cultural categories, the ‘sec‐ ular’ and ‘modern’. Dramatists belonging to this phase became more successful than their forerunners, as they were “writing plays to be acted” (Chakraborty 2014: 3). Unlike their predecessors, these dramatists were experimental and in‐ novative in treating their country’s history, myth, socio-cultural and political re‐ ality. To interrogate this dramatic representation of and engagement with social conditions, this chapter will consider Final Solutions (1993) by the prominent In‐ dian male dramatist Mahesh Dattani (1958-) and female playwright Poile Sen‐ gupta’s (1948-) two-Act play Mangalam (1993). Arguably, there are only a few women dramatists who have earned sufficient critical acclaim, though surpris‐ ingly, the idea of ‘Indian woman’ remains a recurrent motif in Indian English drama. However, following the surge of the Second Wave Feminism in India dur‐ ing the 1970s, Indian women playwrights have created powerful texts, scrutinising the social and cultural conditions pertaining to women’s lives. It was from this period onwards that Indian English drama by women dramatists has started thriv‐ ing. These women dramatists have remained successful in projecting Indian so‐ cio-cultural realities. By focussing on Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions and Poile Sengupta’s Mangalam, this chapter will analyse the two plays as ‘condition-of-In‐ dia’ dramas, since both plays launch into themes such as anger, aggression, abuse, discrimination, identity crisis, gender inequality and fundamentalism. 6.1 Introduction India retains a magnificent history of dramaturgy which one can comfortably connect with Bharat’s Nāṭyaśāstra. This ancient treatise on drama, written in Sanskrit (and considered the ‘fifth Veda’), provides a set of directives by Bharatamuni, and hence, establishes a strong tradition for future Indian drama. However, Indian drama gradually got affected by other external factors and started to drift apart from this ancient classical tradition over time. Especially after the recommendations of Macaulay’s Minutes (1835) following the introduction of English education in the British colonial period, the Indian intelligentsia began exercising their newly acquired skills in English by writing poems, novels and even dramas. Macaulay’s Minutes was authored by Thomas Babington Macaulay on 2 February 1835. In his Minutes, Macaulay proposed that English should be introduced as the medium of instruction in the educational system of colonial India, and it should also be the official language as well. Hence, Macaulay is credited with the official introduction of English Education in India. The then Governor General of India, William Bentinck issued necessary orders for the implementation of the Minutes on 7 March 1835. The earliest instance of Indian drama in English — The Persecuted by Krishna Mohan Banerjee — dates back to 1831. In the remainder of the British colonial times in India, playwrights like Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Harindranath Chattopadhyay (1898-1990), A. S. Panchapakesa Ayyar (1899-1963), T. P. Kailasam (1884-1946) and Bharati Sarabhai (1912-1986) wrote plays based on the traditional Western model to depict cultural aspects of India. A remarkable change in socio-cultural conditions can be noticed with the post-in‐ dependence or post-colonial era. During the 1950s, the Government took several initiatives — establishing the Sahitya Natak Akademi in 1952, the National School of Drama in 1959 and organizing the National Drama Festival in 1954 — to support the performing arts. This led to the proliferation and development of ‘Bhasa theatre’, the other name for plays written and performed in regional languages of India, e.g. Marathi, Bengali, Hindi, Kannada etc. Amid such conditions, there was less chance for the growth of Indian English drama. Even if some plays in English were produced, they were translations of the Bhasa plays. It was around the 1960s that the Indian English drama came out of the crisis with the historical and political plays of Asif Currimbhoy (1928-1994). The dramatists inspired by Currimbhoy’s spirit during the 1960s and 1970s were Pratap Sharma (1939-2011), Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004), Gurucharan Das (1943) and Girish Karnad (1938-2019). Among these playwrights, Karnad was the most experimental in fusing myth, history and folklore and giving it a modern dimension (cf. Sinha et al. 2019: 10). However, some critics pointed out that the English language, first of all, is not the natural medium of expression for many Indians; secondly, it is spoken mainly by the urban elites of India. Therefore, the appeal of Indian English drama was “confined to the people of this sophisticated class only” (Rai 2006: 13). The emergence of playwrights like Mahesh Dattani (1958-), Manjula Padmanabhan (1953-), Dina Mehta (1961-), Poile Sengupta (1948-) and Uma Parameshwaran (1938-) during the 1980s initiated a new chapter in the history of Indian English drama. These playwrights experimented with dramatic techniques and devices and projected the contemporary Indian scenario. They started voicing issues such as gender roles, gender discrimination, violence, pseudo-communalism, homosexuality, women’s subjugation and patriarchy which were suppressed and remained unnoticed for quite a long time. Their earnest effort to Indianize the English language can be witnessed in their 122 6 ‘Condition-of-India’ Plays: Mahesh Dattani (1958—) and Poile Sengupta (1948—) deliberate inclusion of regional words and the implementation of Indian syntax. It can well be realized how “drama went on adapting itself to the times, responding to historical and social circumstances, imbibing new influences, even the western influence, diverging into rural and urban, professional and amateur, traditional and experimental” (Deshpande 2019: x), paving the way for the emergence and proliferation of a very ‘secular’ and ‘modern’ Indian drama. This essay will focus on the literary texts of two eminent Indian English playwrights, Mahesh Dattani and Poile Sengupta, respectively, to put forward the general facets of contemporary Indian English plays. 6.2 Mahesh Dattani (1958—) Mahesh Dattani is the first Indian English playwright to win the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 1998. The Sahitya Akademi Award is one of the most prestigious literary awards in India. India’s National Academy of letters, the Sahitya Akademi, was inaugurated on 12 March 1954 by the Government of India. It has recognised 24 Indian languages including English and annually awards literary works written in these languages. Born in Bangalore on 7 August 1958 to Gujarati parents, Dattani studied at the Baldwin High School, where using the vernacular language was strictly prohibited and communicating in English was mandatory. However, this strict discipline in school had never been able to dissuade Dattani from watching the performances of plays in Gujarati, Marathi or Kannada, as his family frequently visited the playhouses in Bangalore to watch such dramatic performances. Later in an interview, Dattani reveals: “I realized I had to unlearn a lot that I learnt in school. That is when my true education really began” (Ayyar 2004: n.p.). He completed his graduation from St. Joseph’s College with History, Economics and Political Science. He chose Marketing and Advertising Management as subjects in his Master’s degree to help his father with his business. However, in 1984, he formed his theatre group in Bangalore, known as ‘Playpen’. Under his direction, his theatre group performed classical Greek dramas as well as contemporary dramas. However, Dattani was more interested in directing and performing Indian English plays: “I wanted to do more Indian plays [and that] became a challenge, because there weren’t many good translations or, there may have been good translations, but they didn’t do anything for me” (Mee 2002: 14). This lacuna motivated Dattani to change his role from a director to a playwright, and as a result, in 1988, he wrote his first play, Where There’s a Will. He explains that writing plays really happened more out of necessity because I wanted to do more Indian plays in English. But the translations that were available didn’t do justice to the original. So 6.2 Mahesh Dattani (1958—) 123 I thought, why not try my hand in writing the plays myself and it’s quite ironic that what I began to do out of necessity became a passion. (Uniyal Pant 2005: 176 f.) For his achievements as a playwright, he not only acknowledges the influence of Vijay Tendulkar and Tennesse Williams but also admits the contribution of Alyque Padamsee and Lilette Dubey in the successful production of his plays. His dramatic oeuvre includes: Where There’s a Will (1988), Dance Like a Man (1989), Tara (1990), Bravely Fought the Queen (1991), Final Solutions (1993), Night Queen (1996), Do the Needful (1997), On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998), Seven Steps Around the Fire (1999), The Swami and Winston (2000), Tale of the Mother Feeding Her Child (2000), Thirty Days in September (2001) and Clearing the Rubble (2004). 6.2.1 Major Themes in Mahesh Dattani’s Plays There is no doubt that Mahesh Dattani’s plays have enriched the genre of Indian English drama by delineating social, cultural, communal or political reality. In the “Preface” to his Collected Plays, Dattani states: “I am certain that my plays are a true reflection of my time, place and socio-economic background” (Dattani 2000: xv). The ‘true reflection’ in Dattani’s plays is not merely the reflection of the “malfunction of the society” (Roy 2002: n.p.); instead, his plays are like “freak mirrors” that boldly project the “grotesque images of that pass for normal in our world” (ibid.). Born and brought up in the urban Indian milieu, Dattani, in his plays, represents the urban reality with which the reader/ audience could easily associate. Most of his plays result from his keen observation of social issues. The portrayal of these social issues, however, intimate the playwright’s impartial or unbiased stance. According to Dattani, it is not the playwright’s responsibility to explain the inherent message of the plays; it is the reader/ audience who should give some effort to understand these contemporary plays in terms of their social background and message: “[…] the theatre is a collective experience and the audience have to finish in their own heads what the playwright began” (Nair 2001: n.p.). The plays project Dattani’s earnest endeavour to unveil the veiled yet existent reality — to voice the voiceless and to bring to notice the unnoticed. He often selects the structure of the urban middle-class Indian family as the microcosm for the Indian socio-cultural space. The issues of gender discrimination and gender roles have been handled with utmost sincerity by Dattani. His play Tara (1990), which revolves around the Siamese twins Tara and Chandan, reveals how an Indian family prefers the boy to the girl and, consequentially, how the girl becomes a subject of neglect and oppression. Dance Like a Man (1989) challenges the stereotypical construction of masculinity through Jairaj, the male protagonist who is passionate about dancing, an activity which is not considered a masculine occupation. Issues like homosexuality and transgender identity that are often oppressed, get a central position in Dattani’s plays. Do the Needful (1997), Dattani’s first radio play for the BBC, On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998) and Night Queen (1999) deal with 124 6 ‘Condition-of-India’ Plays: Mahesh Dattani (1958—) and Poile Sengupta (1948—) the issues of forced arranged marriage and homosexuality. Seven Steps Around the Fire (1999), another radio play, projects the killing of a ‘hijra’ (intersex and/ or transgender person) called Kamala, who is murdered because of her love affair with a minister’s son. The term hijra refers to eunuchs, hermaphrodites and transgender individuals. In the Indian subcontinent Hijras are recognised as the ‘third gender’. These four plays handle “gay themes of love, affiliation, trust and betrayal, raising serious ‘closet’ issues that remain invisible” (Kuthari Chaudhuri 2005: 51); at the same time, the plays serve as impassioned pleas for some “empathy and sensitivity to India’s queer culture” (Kuthari Chaudhuri 2005: 51). Likewise, his play Alag Mausam (A Different Season, 2005) depicts the love relationship between two HIV-positive persons. Dattani’s unflinching engagement with such an urgent social issue as child abuse is demonstrated in his play Thirty Days in September (2001). Plays such as Final Solutions (1993), The Swami and Winston (2000) and Clearing the Rubble (2004) put forward the exigent concerns of religious fundamentalism and communal disharmony. The wide range of themes — communalism, religious fundamentalism, domestic politics, homosexuality, gender roles, gender discrimination and patriarchy — which Dattani deals with in his plays aptly portray the contemporary scenario of India. 6.2.2 Discussion of Final Solutions Final Solutions: A Stage Play in Three Acts was first performed on 10 July 1993 at Guru Nanak Bhavan, Bangalore. It was translated into Hindi by Shahid Anwar in 1998 for the Asmita Theatre. The play is spatially set in a town called Amargaon, in the household of Ramnik Gandhi; and temporally, the play shuttles between two different time periods, the late 1940s (the post-partition times) and the present. Within three acts, the play portrays the different moral outlook of three generations of a Hindu family who give shelter to two Muslim boys during a riotous situation. Dattani uses the family as a microcosm of Indian society to focus on the issues of communal disharmony, religious fundamentalism, fanaticism, aggression, riots, identity crisis, subjugation of women, anger, paranoia and bigotry. Alyque Padamsee, the director of Final Solutions, has rightly pointed out that this is “a play about a family with its simmering undercurrents” (Padamsee 2000: 161). Along with the three female characters, Daksha/ Hardika, Aruna, Smita and three male characters, Ramnik Gandhi, Bobby and Javed, the Chorus constituted of five men and ten masks on sticks is an “omnipresent factor throughout the play” (Kuthari Chaudhuri 2005: 78). Putting on either “the Hindu or the Muslim masks” (Dattani 2000: 164), the Chorus represents two different religious communities, Hindu and Muslim. From the very beginning, 6.2 Mahesh Dattani (1958—) 125 especially in the stage direction in Act I, Dattani mentions that Daksha and Hardika are projections of the young and the old age of the same woman: This belongs to the young Daksha, who is in fact the grandmother, also sometimes seen as a girl of fifteen. There are several instances when Hardika, the grandmother, and Daksha, the young bride, are on this level at the same time, although they are the same person. (Dattani 2000: 164) This reflects Dattani’s innovative venture in taking the reader/ audience back and forth in time. The presence of an oil lamp and an electric bulb in the same room indicates two different times: to show this temporal movement he uses the trope of a personal diary belonging to the fifteen-year-old Daksha. The diary, when opened by Daksha, goes back to the 1940s and the closure of the diary focuses on the old and aged Hardika in the present time. Act I opens with Daksha reading out her diary-entries from 31 st March 1948. As she had written down her innermost thoughts or secrets in the pages of the diary, she reads out her mind like a monologue sitting motionless on the stage. She is a girl of fifteen who is married to Hari. To match with her husband’s name, Daksha’s in-laws have changed her name to Hardika. Moreover, her dream of becoming a singer like Noor Jehan is shattered as her in-laws are against her singing. Noor Jehan (1926-2000) was a legendary Pakistani singer, actor, composer and film director. She was honoured with the title Malika-e-Tarannum which means Queen of Melody. She had a command over Indian Classical music and became popular for her Ghazals (a genre of music) and Qawwali (Sufi devotional singing). Some of her notable films in which she had performed as an actor as well as a playback singer are Zeenat (1945), Anmol Ghadi (1946), Jugnu (1947) and Anarkali (1958). These inner frustrations make her feel that she is a nobody in the family, that she is just not a matter to anyone, even outside the home. To make her diary entries appear serious, she writes about Indian Independence: “Like last year, in August, a most terrible thing happened to our country. We . . . (tries hard to read her handwriting) . . . gained independence. You should have seen it” (Dattani 2000: 165). Not only this, Daksha’s narration takes us to her ancestral place in Hussainabad, where the post-partition riots had killed her father. The memory of this shocking event forces her to close the diary and allows the old Hardika to appear before us and comment on the present situation: “After forty years . . . I opened my diary again. And I wrote. A dozen pages before. A dozen pages now. A young girl’s childish scribble. An old woman’s shaky scrawl. Yes, things have not changed that much” (Dattani 2000: 166). Through this device of personal diary Dattani not only merges the “two distinct phases of the same character, separated by forty years” but also deftly suggests that “the narratives of hatred too 126 6 ‘Condition-of-India’ Plays: Mahesh Dattani (1958—) and Poile Sengupta (1948—) have not changed much” (Banerjee 2014: 283). Moreover, the diary of Daksha/ Hardika helps to establish “the history of division — the sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’” (Multani 2007: 111). This ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy becomes evident when the Chorus, wearing the Hindu masks, bursts out in anger against the Muslims, who, according to them, have destroyed their chariot, Gods and even the land: CHORUS 1. The procession has passed through these lanes Every year, For forty years! CHORUS 2, 3. How dare they? CHORUS 1, 2, 3. For forty years, our chariot has moved through their mohallas. CHORUS 4, 5. Why did they? Why did they today? CHORUS 1. How dare they? CHORUS 2, 3. They broke our rath. They broke our chariot and felled our Gods! CHORUS 1. 2, 3. This is our land! How dare they? CHORUS 1. It is in their blood! CHORUS 2, 3. It is in their blood to destroy! CHORUS 4. Why should they? CHORUS 5. It could have been an accident. CHORUS 2. The stone that hit our God was no accident! CHORUS 3. The knife that slit the poojari’s stomach was no accident! CHORUS 4, 5. Why should they? It could have been an accident. (Dattani 2000: 167) Similarly, the Chorus in Muslim masks vent out their anger and frustration against the Hindus for blaming them: CHORUS 1. Their chariot fell in our street! CHORUS 2. Their God now prostrates before us! CHORUS 3. So they blame it on us? CHORUS 1. Was the chariot built by us? CHORUS 2, 3. Blame the builder of those fancy thrones. CHORUS 4. A manufacturing defect! CHORUS 5. Doesn’t their God have a warranty? A slow drumbeat. The Chorus gathers. CHORUS ALL. We are neither idol makers nor breakers! Breaks away. CHORUS 5. But they blamed it on us! (Dattani 2000: 170) The emphasis on ‘they’, ‘you’, ‘their’ and ‘us’ in the dialogues of both the Hindu and Muslim Chorus reflect the intense communal division and resentment between 6.2 Mahesh Dattani (1958—) 127 these two religious communities. The two Muslim characters, Bobby and Javed, who were running to escape the wrath of the Hindu mob/ Chorus, are given shelter by Ramnik Gandhi. Embodying an intense hatred, the Hindu Chorus, consider Ramnik a “traitor” because he is unwilling to hand over the two Muslim boys to them. Hardika, the senior-most member of the Gandhi family and Aruna — Ramnik’s wife, are also unhappy with Ramnik’s decision. If the memory of her father’s killing in the communal riots makes Hardika stern towards Bobby and Javed, it is Aruna’s fundamentalist mentality that makes her unsympathetic towards the two Muslim boys. Act I ends with the aggressive fanaticism of the Hindu Chorus, threatening the Gandhi family: CHORUS ALL. You mad man! They’ll stab you in the back! They’ll rape your daughter. (Smita enters.) You heard us? Throw them out! (Dattani 2000: 188). The seriousness of the communal tension prevails in the second Act of Final Solutions. The Chorus, now squatting haphazardly, discusses the broken chariot and the curfew on the street. They question the utility of the curfew and they are also doubtful about the intentions of the political leaders: CHORUS 1. There is heartache, We doubt the leader’s intentions, (Ticks up his Hindu mask.) They want our blood to boil. They have succeeded. (Wears his mask.) (Dattani 2000: 190) Thus, the Chorus reveals the guileful nature of the Indian politicians and traces their cunning ways to induce a resentful agitation. However, while the Chorus unleashes its frustrations, the scene in the living room of the Gandhis is different. Smita, the daughter of Ramnik and Aruna, surprises everyone by disclosing that she knows Bobby and Javed: SMITA. Why am I being asked all these questions? I recognize two boys and . . . and this is what you do! (Pause. Points to Javed.) This is Tasneem’s brother, Javed and this . . . is Babban — Bobby — Tasneem’s fiancé. (Dattani 2000: 190) The revelation of her daughter’s acquaintance with these two Muslim boys enrages Aruna to such an extent that she wants Ramnik to stop Smita’s studies in college. Her conservative Hindu sentiment makes her resentful towards Bobby and Javed and presents her as a religious fanatic. As a ‘civilized host’, Ramnik offers the boys some food and shelter. When he learns that Javed has come to Amargaon in search of a job, he immediately offers him a position in his saree shop. At this point, his daughter Smita protests against this job offer and reveals the actual reason behind Javed’s arrival: SMITA. Those . . . parties! They hire him! That’s how he makes a living. They bring him and many more to the city to create riots. To . . . throw the first stone! (Dattani 2000: 199) Like the first and second Acts, a tension persists in Act III as well. The Muslim Chorus is found discussing about hiding themselves, which shows that they were involved in some gruesome activities and now they are afraid of being caught: 128 6 ‘Condition-of-India’ Plays: Mahesh Dattani (1958—) and Poile Sengupta (1948—) CHORUS 1. Should we be swallowed up? Till they cannot recognize us? Should we meld into anonymity so they cannot hound us? Lose ourselves in a shapeless mass? Should we? Can we? (Dattani 2000: 200) Bobby and Javed look stressed as Javed’s identity as a riot-rouser had been unveiled by Smita. Daksha rereads her diary and takes the reader/ audience back to the 1940s when she had formed friendship with a Muslim girl called Zarine. Daksha, a music lover, used to visit Zarine’s place to listen to the records of Noor Jehan. The diary says that Zarine’s family is undergoing financial trouble as her father’s “dry fruits and mithai shop had caught fire a few months ago. Nobody knows how the fire started. They lost thousands of rupees” (Dattani 2000: 201). With the closure of the diary, the audience is brought back to the present, into the living room of Ramnik Gandhi. Ramnik suspects Javed and starts interrogating him about his association with the militant group. He also tries to empathize with Javed’s situation and explains to Bobby the following: “I have to give him all the chances that I can possibly give. Isn’t that what any liberal-minded person should do? ” (ibid.: 204). In response to Ramnik’s liberal-mindedness, Bobby tells the story behind Javed’s transition. He explains how Javed, who used to be the “hero, smart and cocksure” (ibid.) changed into an arrogant hoodlum. There is an incident from childhood when a postman requests Javed to hand over a letter to its addressee. The addressee of the letter, a Hindu Brahmin, instructs Javed to leave the letter on the wall, and then “the man came out with a cloth in his hand. He wiped the letter before picking it up, he then wiped the spot on the wall the letter was lying on and he wiped the gate! ” (ibid.: 205). Hindu Brahmin is the top tier of the four-fold division (chatur-varna system) of Hindu society since the Vedic period. The word ‘Brahmin’ has been derived from Sanskrit ‘Brāhmaṇa’ and the Brahmins are considered to be aware of the ‘Brāhma’ — the impersonal divine that animates the cosmos. Brahmins are considered the transmitters of Vedic lore, the priests, the spiritual teachers or Gurus. The other three ‘varnas’ are Kshatriyas (the warriors controlling land), Vaishyas (the traders controlling market) and Shudra (the service providers). The feeling that his touch contaminated that Hindu man’s letter and his household, provokes Javed to throw pieces of meat and bones into the man’s yard. According to Bobby, this incident completely changes Javed and instigates him to connect with the militants. Before leaving the place of the Gandhis the following day, Bobby wants to perform one final deed. So, he approaches Aruna’s pooja room (prayer room), picks up the Hindu deity Lord Krishna’s idol and places it on his palm. 6.2 Mahesh Dattani (1958—) 129 The word pooja is a Sanskrit word which implies an act of worship. In Hinduism ‘Pooja’ refers to the rituals of worshipping and offering homage to the Gods and goddesses. The pooja room is considered as the most sacred space of any Hindu household. It’s a space where the idols of the deities are placed and worshipped for wellbeing and prosperity. Lord Krishna is one of the revered Hindu Gods. As per the ancient scriptures of Hinduism he is the eighth incarnation of Lord Vishnu. He is portrayed as having a blue or black complexion, holding a flute and accompanied by a cow or herd of cows. He is worshipped as a God of love, compassion and protection. References to Lord Krishna can be found in ancient Indian texts like the Mahabharata or the Bhagavad Gita. Then, exulting in happiness, he exclaims to everyone present in the room: BOBBY. See, Javed! He doesn’t humiliate you. He doesn’t cringe from my touch. He welcomes the warmth of my hand, He feels me. And He welcomes it! I hold Him who is sacred to them, but I do not commit sacrilege. (To Aruna.) You can bathe Him day and night, you can splash holy waters on Him, but you cannot remove my touch from His form. You cannot remove my smell with sandal paste and attars and fragrant flowers because it belongs to a human being who believes and tolerates, and respects what other human beings believe. That is the strongest fragrance in the world! (Dattani 2000: 242 f.) This ‘final deed’ of touching the idol of the Hindu God can be considered as Bobby’s determined attempt to liberate Javed from dogmatic religious belief that plants the “seeds of communal hatred, resulting in violence” (Kumar Singh 2017: 83). Bobby’s intention was also to break the psychological barriers of the excessively devout Aruna who treated these two Muslim boys as untouchables. He wanted to make Aruna aware that her God does not deem anyone to be impure neither does her God feel embarrassed or get polluted by a Muslim touch (cf. Kumar Singh 2017: 83). Thus, Bobby duly becomes the spokesperson for Dattani, who suggests that only “the spirit of tolerance, co-operation and accommodating the ‘other’” (Ghosh 2018: 84) can help in discarding the bigotry and fundamentalism prevalent in Indian society. Hardika, who can never forget the horrors and trauma of the communal riots, still blames Bobby and Javed for everything. Her son Ramnik insists that she should forget and forgive, and also explains that they are not to blame because they are Muslims. He reveals the dark deeds of his own family to Hardika: RAMNIK (looks at her with pity). It’s their shop. It’s the same burnt-up shop we bought from them, at half its value. (Pause.) And we burnt it. Your husband. My father. And his father. They had it burnt in the name of communal hatred. Because we wanted a shop. Also they 130 6 ‘Condition-of-India’ Plays: Mahesh Dattani (1958—) and Poile Sengupta (1948—) learnt that . . . those people were planning to start a mill like our own. I can’t take it any longer. I don’t think I will be able to step into that shop again . . . When those boys came here, I thought I would . . . I hoped I would be able to . . . set things right. I — I wanted to tell them that they are not the only ones who have destroyed. I just couldn’t. I don’t think I have the face to tell anyone. (Dattani 2000: 244) With these six characters and a Chorus, Mahesh Dattani, in his Final Solutions, aptly points out the evils of communal hatred. The Chorus or the Mob in the play reflects a chaos and is “symbolic of our own hatred and paranoia” (Padamsee 2000: 161). The aggression and violence reflected by the Chorus represent the upheavals in Indian society caused by religious fundamentalism and communal disharmony. Family, which in the Indian context is always considered a safe and secure space and an emblem of support, is presented differently in the play. Dattani unhesitatingly pinpoints how the system or structure of the Indian family can be oppressive enough to subjugate a woman’s status and ambitions and cause an identity crisis. All three female characters in the play are victims of this conservative domestic space of the family. Due to the pressure of the in-laws’ family, Daksha had to discard the name given by her parents and become Hardika. Not only that, she had to give up her fascination for music. Aruna, being brought up in a very orthodox familial set-up, is neither able to question her beliefs nor is she able to understand that her blind faith can be suffocating for others. The college-going Smita becomes a victim of this conservative mindset. That religion sometimes may act as an agent of suppression becomes evident in Bobby, who deliberately hides his actual name Babban: BOBBY. That’s because I was ashamed of being myself. He wasn’t. RAMNIK. Ashamed? BOBBY. Yes. Like being apologetic. For being who I was. And pretending that I was not a part of my community. For thinking that I could become superior by not belonging. (Dattani 2000: 206) Although the play’s title accommodates the word ‘Solutions’, at the end of the third Act, the reader/ audience feels helpless in finding not a single solution offered by Mahesh Dattani. Ketaki Datta in her article “Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions: A Reconsideration” is of the view: “In the conclusion of this play […], there is a striving for reaching an amicable solution, but it is still dubious, rather an expiatory note dominates. Which, then, the Final Solution is? ” (Datta 2014: 265). As an efficient playwright, Dattani signals his reader/ audience about the innate prejudices and hatred, and hands over the responsibility to find feasible solutions for these problems themselves. 6.2 Mahesh Dattani (1958—) 131 6.3 Poile Sengupta (1948—) Born as Ambika Gopalkrishnan in 1948 in Ernakulam, Kerala, Poile Sengupta is considered one of the most prolific Indian English playwrights. Although she is an established dramatist now, she began her career as an actor in the Bangalore Little Theatre in the 1970s. Her association with this theatre enabled her to gain a profound understanding of the technicalities of the stage: I believe that coming to theatre as an actor before writing for the stage was extremely important for my writing. I understood the dynamics of the stage, the effect provided by sound and light inputs, the way the sets contribute to the visual excitement, how choreography and music can add another dimension to the script. I have been able to appreciate the actors’ needs and the director’s viewpoint when writing a play. (Singh 2012: 87) In 1995 she formed her own theatre group, known as Theatre Club, in Bangalore, which was converted into a trust by her in 2008. Regarding her interest in drama, she acknowledges the influence of her great-grand‐ father, her parents and her husband, Abhijit Sengupta, all associated with the theatre. She also expresses her indebtedness towards her seniors in Bangalore Little Theatre. According to Sengupta, the challenges of writing dialogues or conversations in direct speech and the challenge of writing in English for the stage influenced her to write plays. Like Mahesh Dattani, who earnestly wanted to produce and write more in English for the Indian stage, Sengupta also reflected the same zeal, as she shared in an interview: “English is the language of my thoughts, of my creative effort. So when I began to script plays, I naturally used English” (Singh 2012: 82). To justify her stance, Sengupta prefers to portray the urban Indian scenario, where her characters are “urban, educated in the English medium, and working and living in an environment in which English was the only language of communication — where no other common language was available” (Singh 2012: 82). Besides English, she speaks five other Indian languages: Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali, Hindi and Kannada. Her preference for English as the medium of expression has never encouraged her to deny her multilingual identity, as the “knowledge of multiple languages” has helped her “to have a more comprehensive view of the Indian milieu and create a wide variety of authentic characters” (Singh 2012: 83). She began her career as a playwright by participating in a play scripts contest organized by The Hindu in 1993. The play she wrote for the contest was Mangalam (1993). Her literary oeuvre also includes the following plays: Inner Laws (1994), A Pretty Business (1995), Keats Was a Tuber (1996), Collages (1998), Samara’s Song (1999), Alipha (2001) and Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni (2001). In 2010, Routledge published a collection of her plays known as Women Centre Stage. Her contribution to children’s literature is undoubtedly remarkable. The Department of Culture of the Government of India conferred on her a Senior Fellowship 1999-2000 to write plays for children. Eventually, she wrote Yavamajakka! (2000) a full-length musical play and Good Heavens! (2006), a collection of seven one-act plays for children. 132 6 ‘Condition-of-India’ Plays: Mahesh Dattani (1958—) and Poile Sengupta (1948—) 6.3.1 Major Themes in Poile Sengupta’s Plays What characterises Poile Sengupta’s plays is not only their setting in urban India but also their engagement with contemporary issues. Moreover, her plays feature the troubled condition of women in India as Sengupta explains that “women, and children […] seem to be the worst sufferers in any conflict, whether familial, social or political” (Sengupta 2010: 8). Her play Mangalam (1993) deals with domestic violence and child sexual abuse. Another play Inner Laws (1994) exposes the antagonism between mother and daughter-in-law and the negligence towards women’s education. The play also points out how the material reality forces the woman to define her beauty standards. Language has always been a matter of interest and challenge for Sengupta. Her utmost effort in fashioning and reframing English sentences in Indian syntax can be found in Mangalam (1993). Keats Was a Tuber (1996) examines the faulty ways of teaching English in India. It expresses doubts whether the English language has eroded the “colour and richness” of the “many tongues” (Sengupta 2010: 236) present in India; and also interrogates the plausibility of using the English language to express the Indian sensibility. By dealing with the issue of language in Keats Was a Tuber (1996), Sengupta claims that she allowed herself to explore her “relationship with the English language” and “to express unabashedly [my] deep love for it” (Sengupta 2010: 236). Alipha (2001) and Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni (2001) are companion plays in which the theme of revenge becomes both a point of commonality and difference. In a note to her play Alipha, Sengupta writes that if revenge is explicitly the theme of Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni, it becomes “the promise of justice” (Sengupta 2010: 340) in Alipha. In addition to revenge, the play Alipha explores the human emotions of love, lust, greed, anger and hatred. The themes of social injustice and economic inequality are also highlighted. Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni brings together, for the first time, two mythological figures from two different Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Ramayana is a revered ancient Indian epic and a sacred text in Hinduism. It tells the story of Lord Rama and his wife Sita. The epic is divided into seven books and is over 24,000 verses long. The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the other being the Ramayana. It is believed to have been composed between 400 BCE and 400 CE. The Mahabharata is a vast epic that consists of 18 books and around 100,000 couplets. Now and then, the two characters, Shoorpanakha and Shakuni, take the reader/ audi‐ ence to the ancient times of the epics and “pull […] them into present-day relevance” (Sengupta 2010: 377). By enabling the two villains from the epics to share their 6.3 Poile Sengupta (1948—) 133 personal histories, Sengupta challenges the typical condemnation of the evil or vicious characters in mythology and puts forth the message that one is never born as an evil person or a villain; the socio-cultural circumstances are responsible. Samara’s Song (1999) is more political and experimental than Sengupta’s other plays. She blends the idea of the Greek Chorus and the traditional Indian Sutradhar in this play through three historians who are disabled, or physically impaired: one blind, one dumb, one deaf. Sutradhara: In Sanskrit ‘sutra’ means thread and ‘dhara’ means the holder. Su‐ tradhar literally means ‘one who holds the thread’. In traditional Indian drama (Sanskrit dramas as well as folk dramas in many regions), the Sutradhar often acts as a narrator who can introduce the characters, perform invocations, appear in critical moments and comment on the dramatic situation. Scholars often connect the use of these three characters with the legend of the three wise monkeys representing the iconic Asian maxim “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”. To raise questions related to democracy, governance, bureaucracy, political snobbery and war, Sengupta gives such “names to the characters which would identify them with a region or a community” (Sengupta 2010: 434). 6.3.2 Discussion of Mangalam Mangalam is Poile Sengupta’s first full-length play, which for its social pertinence won a special prize in the Hindu-Madras Players Playscripts Competition in 1993. It was first performed on January 14, 1993 by Mahesh Dattani’s theatre group Playpen at Guru Nanak Bhavan, Bangalore. It is amid the domestic space of the household that Sengupta sets her play Mangalam. The first Act, with three scenes, is temporally set in the 1960s in a small town in Southern India, and the second Act, with four scenes, is set in the contemporary urban society in Chennai. In Act 1 Sengupta uses the play-within-a-play technique and gives a modern and unique touch to this technique by making the audience of the play the characters in Act 2. The plights of the characters in Act 2 remain the same as in Act 1. Sengupta claims that be it the 1960s or the present, the plight of women in India is always the same. To indicate that “nothing really changes” and that the “sameness […] is deeply disturbing” (Sengupta 2010: 22), she has chosen this play-within-a-play device in Mangalam. Besides the sameness of the events or themes, it is the two different time periods in which the two Acts are set and the use of two different Englishes — an English with Tamil syntax in Act 1 and a sophisticated urban English in Act 2, that mark the difference. The title of the play is based on the name of the central character Mangalam, who never appears physically in either of the Acts. However, her presence permeates 134 6 ‘Condition-of-India’ Plays: Mahesh Dattani (1958—) and Poile Sengupta (1948—) throughout. That she is dead becomes evident from the stage direction in Act 1, Scene 1, where the reference to “the garlanded photograph of a woman” (Sengupta 2010: 24) can be found. The absence of Mangalam also becomes clear when Thangam arrives to mourn the death of her little sister in Act 1, Scene 1: THANGAM: Why did she have to go before me? What a big sinner I am! She goes before me, my little sister, my Mangalam. O! O! How can I bear it? (Sengupta 2010: 26) Act 1 opens with a gloomy description of the household of Dorai. There are chairs that are “uncomfortable”, tables which are “ugly”, dolls are made of plastic and kept “untidily”, art objects are “clumsy”, and at the door, there is an “unsightly pile” (Sengupta 2010: 24) of shoes. Amid such bleak ambience lies the photograph of the deceased Mangalam. The couple Mangalam and Dorai are parents to five children: Sriram, Mani, Usha, Chitra and Kannan; among them, Sriram has settled abroad; Mani, who is a banker, is married to Revathy; Usha is also married to a rich businessman; Chitra and Kannan are pursuing their studies. The play opens with Mani scrutinizing official papers and his wife Revathy doing her hair. While plaiting her hair, Revathy criticizes her mother-in-law for giving a lot of household objects and ornaments to her older daughter Usha. She intends to clarify how she is neglected and not taken care of, as she is the daughter-in-law and not the family’s daughter. The sudden arrival of Thangam, Mangalam’s older sister, changes the mood of the scene. She arrives to mourn the death of her sister and, at the same time, evokes a sense of mystery behind the death. As Dorai, the widower, complains about Thangam’s prolonged wailing, Thangam immediately starts speculating about her sister’s death. She neither accuses Dorai directly, nor does she brush aside her suspicion of him: DORAI: What is all this noise about? This is a house of mourning, not a butcher’s shop. THANGAM: Ayyo! Ayyo! My poor sister! Thank God she did not live to hear this. To be talking of butchers today. But what else can I expect from my brother-in-law? He has been like this since the day he tied the thali around that poor girl’s neck! Thali! It was more like a rope. (Sengupta 2010: 28) The comparison of a ‘thali’ to a rope is highly significant in this context, as ‘thali’ here stands for the customs of marriage, and rope symbolizes a noose. A thali is a necklace worn by the married Hindu women. Usually the ‘thali’ is first tied round the neck of the women during her marriage by the groom. Though people of Southern India (Kerala, Tamil Nadu) use this term ‘thali’, it is popularly known as Mangalsutra all over India. Sengupta tries to highlight how the institution of marriage in India proves to be detrimental for its women. Thangam considers Dorai as a “Kali-yuga raakshasan” 6.3 Poile Sengupta (1948—) 135 (Sengupta 2010: 30), which roughly translates as ‘demon of the Kali Yuga’, of whom Mangalam was scared, and it is out of this fear only that she died. In the ancient Indian scriptures (the Vedas), a Yuga is referred to as a long cycle of time and means epoch or era. According to the Hindu cosmology, there are four Yugas — the Satya Yuga, the Treta Yuga, the Dvapara Yuga and the Kali Yuga. With the passing of every Yuga, the world experiences a change and an evolution. With the advent of Kali Yuga, it is said that there will be a sharp decline and fall of morality and spirituality; strife, discord, quarrel prevailed in society. The name of this Yuga is associated with the demon called Kali. With his arrival and presence, the individuals of the society became vicious and demonic. The Hindus believe that the present time is the Kali Yuga. Rakshashan is the Sanskrit word for demon. Thus, the term Kali-Yuga Rakshashan signifies a vicious and a ruthless person belonging to the Kali-Yuga, an era filled with sin. Thangam repeatedly challenges Dorai’s patriarchal dominance. When Dorai claims his paternal rights by imposing his aspirations on Chitra, it is Thangam who pulls him down by referring to his past deeds: DORAI: (Stiffly.) My wife wanted Chitra to go for higher studies. I will see that my daughter becomes an IAS. THANGAM: And what happened when my sister wanted to study? And when Usha got that scholarship? Did you allow them to study? Now, because I want to get this girl married, you want to do the opposite. You think I don’t know you after all these years? I did not even want you in the family. (Sengupta 2010: 34) The acronym IAS is an abbreviation for the Indian Administrative Service. Along with the Indian Police Service (IPS) and Indian Forest Service (IFS), IAS is regarded as the foremost civil services in India. The couple Kamala and Vaithi, who are family friends of Dorai, arrive amid the ongoing arguments. Sengupta presents this couple as outsiders who are curious to know what is happening in others’ households. In the first Act, the couple explains that they have come to console the family, but actually, they are more eager to find out the cause of Mangalam’s death: KAMALA: Akka was so healthy. She never even complained of a head ache. I came to see her, you know, before we left for Madras and she was perfectly alright. (Trying to prise out information.) When did it happen? What actually happened? People are saying so many things. You know how nosy people are. They always make big things out of something small. (Sengupta 2010: 37) 136 6 ‘Condition-of-India’ Plays: Mahesh Dattani (1958—) and Poile Sengupta (1948—) At this juncture, a female voice-over can be heard, which announces: “Women die many kinds of deaths; men do not know this” (Sengupta 2010: 37). This inclusion of the female voice-over serves as a female chorus that represents a woman’s inner turmoil, pangs and suppressed emotions. The “many kinds of death” uttered by this female voice-over signifies not only the physical death but the death of a woman’s emotions, dreams, confidence, spirit and self-esteem. This female voice-over in the play, shows a gruesome picture of the opression and strangulation of the woman’s voice by dominant patriarchal structures: VOICE-OVER (FEMALE): Her life is made up of threads, When a man knows this, her fragile secret, He holds the power to tear it to shreds. (Sengupta 2010: 47) Against this backdrop of mourning and arguments, shocking news regarding the elopement of Chitra with a non-Brahmin boy further complicates the situation. Dorai not only abuses his daughter by calling her a prostitute but also gives a verdict that the girl is dead to him and that he would never allow her to step into the house’s threshold. The threshold here has both a literal and a metaphorical dimension. While on the one hand, it refers to the actual threshold of the house, as mentioned, it also denotes ‘an act of transgression’ that has been committed by Urmi by crossing the threshold in the first place when she defied the caste dictates. He also expresses hatred towards his elder daughter, Usha, because she took sides with her mother, Mangalam. The final scene of the first Act reveals two significant events which the characters have been, more or less, trying to suppress for too long. Through a heated argument between Revathy, the daughter-in-law and Dorai, it is revealed that Dorai used to torture and abuse Mangalam, both verbally and physically. The only time she smiled and laughed was when he was not there in the house: REVATHY: Once he was gone for three days, and she laughed like a young girl, she sang songs. But when he was here, he made her suffer. He gave her children year after year so that he could see her suffer. Every night, he made her suffer. (Sengupta 2010: 69) This extreme suffering, according to Revathy, compelled Mangalam to swallow a whole strip of sleeping pills and thus commit suicide. To subdue his guilt before Thangam, Dorai opens up about his suspicion regarding the parentage of his eldest son Sriram. He insinuates that Mangalam was pregnant before marriage and that Sriram is the result of that illicit affair of Mangalam: DORAI: (Exploding.) What do you mean, this man? I ruined her, is it? I ruined her? Is that what you think? Alright. … Since your parents did not tell you then … let me tell you now after thirty-one years … your sister was pregnant when I married her. Pregnant! With another man’s child. (Sengupta 2010: 71 f.) He further justifies his innocence by depicting his helplessness before Mangalam’s rich father, who had given him a job, paid for his sister’s marriage, also paid the doctor’s fee 6.3 Poile Sengupta (1948—) 137 when his father was unwell. But Thangam’s description of her sister’s plight puts forth the vulnerability of many Indian woman residing within the so-called safe domestic space of the family: THANGAM: So you stayed with her because of your greed for money. You stayed with her so that you could punish her every minute of her life. You mocked her and taunted her, you tortured her. I have seen the marks of your hands on her body. I have seen your nail marks. (Sengupta 2010: 73) The issue of discrimination of women pervades the Indian society: while men’s fidelity is seldom a matter of concern women become easy victims of abuse. Thangam, in the first Act, raises her voice against such discrimination. However, the response that she gets from Dorai demonstrates that the seed of discrimination is deeply rooted in the psyche of the society and hence will not be easily uprooted: THANGAM: So what? Did you tell her the names of the women you had slept with? What about that married woman who used to come to the temple everyday … DORAI: It is different for a man. (Sengupta 2010: 74) The twist in the plot comes with a revelation of a secret that thirty-one years ago when Mangalam was a little girl, she was sexually abused by her brother-in-law, the husband of Thangam. Hence, the first Act comes to an end with a confession from Thangam: THANGAM: (sobbing) I had gone to the temple. For ten minutes. … And he … he was drunk … she was just a child … a flower … my little sister … (Sengupta 2010: 78) Unlike the first Act, the setting of the second Act is more “elegant”, “expensive” (Sengupta 2010: 79), sophisticated and decorative. The characters of the second Act confirm that they have witnessed a play in Act 1. It is Suresh who states first that “Oh, the play … it was terrible … like a Tamil film in English … rape, illegitimate son, suicide, wife beating….” (ibid.: 80). The playwright identifies the characters in Act 2 with the characters in Act 1: Sumati is Usha, Suresh is Mani, Sreeni is Dorai, Vaithi is Nari, Vaidehi is Kamala, Revathy is Radha, Kannan is Vikram, only Thangam remains the same. The characters in this Act discuss the themes they witnessed in the play. It is Sumati who is highly touched by the play and who can relate her personal life to the plights of Mangalam as depicted in the play. The issue of being disrespectful towards women and objectifying them, whether they belong to the family or the circle of friends, is expressed in this Act when Suresh is chided by his elder sister Sumati: SURESH: That’s not true. I have a lot of respect for Amma. And for you also … when you are not yelling at me. SUMATI: So that means that the moment a woman doesn’t fit into the category of being a mother or a sister, she’s baggage … (With a look at her mother.) sexual baggage. (Sengupta 2010: 88) 138 6 ‘Condition-of-India’ Plays: Mahesh Dattani (1958—) and Poile Sengupta (1948—) Sumati also breaks her silence regarding the one-sided love of her mother Thangam towards Suresh. She complains that since childhood, she had marked Thangam’s extra care and concern for Suresh, which had compelled her to grow up by herself: “You brought me up efficiently, correctly, but without soul” (Sengupta 2010: 92). Sengupta here criticizes the bias of Indian parents towards only the male child in the family. Being a caring mother, Thangam always keeps an eye on the activities of Suresh. This allows her to discover an “extremely passionate letter” (ibid.: 109) inside the pages of a book. Initially, she suspects that the letter is from one of the girlfriends of Suresh, but later realizes that the letter is addressed to her husband Sreeni. She perceives that the marital bond she cares for has become feeble as Sreeni has been unfaithful towards her for a long time. Among all the male characters in Act 2, Vikram is exceptional for his sensitivity towards women. He is the one who can mark the impressions of anxiety and frustration on the face of Sumati. However, it is Vikram who does not bother about the pledge taken by their parents to fix the marriage between Radha and Suresh. For him, the life of his sister is more important than the commitments of marriage made by his parents, and therefore he warns Radha about Suresh: VIKRAM: Yes … I find he has become rather careless about his friendships, especially with women. … He treats them like pieces in a chess game … like pawns … he uses strategies and ploys and then, once he’s … . (Sengupta 2010: 118) Just like the first Act that ended with a revelation of Mangalam’s past, the second Act also reaches its denouement with the revelation of the dreadful past of Sumati. Sumati had suffered sexual abuse as a young child at the hands of Nari, the father of Vikram and Radha. Sumati’s memories of the abuse are so traumatic that they continue to plague her now. In the final scene after seeing Nari, she surrenders to fits of fear and starts screaming “No! Uncle! No! …” (Sengupta 2010: 127). Mangalam, the title of the play, is a Sanskrit word which means auspicious, welfare or good fortune. Surprisingly, the events projected in the play are unpropitious, mainly related to verbal abuse and sexual harassment of women, men’s unfaithfulness towards women, domestic violence and the discrimination of women. Throughout the play, Sengupta tries to break the illusion of the supposedly safe domestic structure of the family and marriage. The two domestic spaces of the family depicted in the two acts prove to be less safe than the outer world. That the ties of marriage can transform into the ties of a noose becomes evident in the portrayal of Mangalam, Usha and Thangam. Sengupta’s mastery lies in her implementation of the female voice-over. This female voice-over gives voice to the long-suppressed agonies of the silenced women in the play: VOICE-OVER: Because a woman has patience, she is not allowed to speak; others speak for her, and she never learns the words. 6.3 Poile Sengupta (1948—) 139 Because a woman is strong, she is not to be protected; others violate her, and she must pay for their trespass. (Sengupta 2010: 77) A question arises: Can no ray of hope be found in Mangalam? In an interview Poile Sengupta mentions that despite living “in a troubled, patriarchal world”, her woman characters are “strong and capable of speaking and acting for themselves” (Singh 2012: 83). The “No”, uttered assertively by Sumati at the end of the final scene of Act 2 to resist any abuse, brings home the point. Sengupta also considers the portrayal of “the new Indian male” in Vikram as a hope in the play. Moreover, the last song sung by the female voice-over in Act 2, Scene 4 depicts women as firmly rooted as trees: […] the women will stay like strong-rooted trees; they will stay and hold the ends of the world together. (Sengupta 2010: 128 f.) 6.4 Conclusion The plays Final Solutions and Mangalam exhibit great variety in their experimentation with dramatic techniques, language and the use of the Chorus as a mob and female voice-over. Whereas Dattani uses the trope of the diary to shift between two different time zones, Sengupta selects the play-within-a-play technique to shuttle between past and present. The plays successfully demonstrate that the issues from the past are still prevalent in the present by repeatedly transporting the reader/ audience back in time. To Indianize the English language, both playwrights meticulously insert Hindi and Tamil words in their plays. Both playwrights employ the theatrical device of the Chorus to present the untold and suppressed emotions of the characters. Gender inequality is a common aspect for the two playwrights, as both of them pull the issues related to women’s oppression from the fringes and bring them to the centre stage. There is no doubt that these two playwrights hardly offer any solution to the social and cultural problems depicted in these plays. Instead, they only act as guides to make the reader/ audience aware of the problems prevalent in today’s India. Their efficient handling of themes like anger, aggression, abuse, discrimination, identity crisis, gender inequality and fundamentalism delineate them as playwrights who are experts in presenting the condition-of-India through their dramatic productions. 140 6 ‘Condition-of-India’ Plays: Mahesh Dattani (1958—) and Poile Sengupta (1948—) 6.5 Study Questions ● What are the major themes in Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions? ● Mahesh Dattani’s plays are considered as realistic plays. What are your views on Final Solutions? ● Comment on the three women characters belonging to three different generations in Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions. ● How does Poile Sengupta’s Mangalam portray women’s subjugation and sexual oppression? ● What are your views on the female characters presented in Mangalam? Are they presented as subservient or defiant? How do they negotiate with patriarchal dictates? ● What is the significance of the Chorus or Mob in Final Solutions and the Female Voice Over in Mangalam? 6.6 Further Reading Banerjee, Samipendra (2014). “History Through Modernity: An Analysis of Final Solutions.” In: Chakraborty, Kaustav (ed.). Indian Drama in English. Delhi: PHI Learning, 279-287. Datta, Ketaki (2014). “Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions: A Reconsideration.” In: Chakraborty, Kaustav (ed.). Indian Drama in English. Delhi: PHI Learning, 264-278. Ghosh, Amrita (2018). “Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions: A Counter Discourse to the Issue of Communalism.” Literary Endeavour ix (3), 81-84. Kuthari Chaudhuri, Asha (2005). Mahesh Dattani: An Introduction. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Multani, Angelie (2007). “Final Solutions? ” In: Multani, Angelie (ed.). Mahesh Dattani’s Plays: Critical Perspectives. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 109-121. Singh, Anita (2012). “An Interview With Poile Sengupta.” Asian Theatre Journal 29 (1), 78-88. 6.7 Works Cited Primary Sources Dattani, Mahesh (2000 [1993]). Final Solutions: Collected Plays, Vol.1. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Sengupta, Poile (2010 [1993]). Mangalam — Women Centre Stage: The Dramatist and the Play. New Delhi: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780367818654. Secondary Sources Ayyar, Raj (2004). “Mahesh Dattani: India’s Gay Cinema Comes of Age.” Gay Today 8 (48), n.p. 6.5 Study Questions 141 Banerjee, Samipendra (2014). “History Through Modernity: An Analysis of Final Solutions.” In: Chakraborty, Kaustav (ed.). Indian Drama in English. Delhi: PHI Learning, 279-287. Chakraborty, Kaustav (2014). “Introduction.” In: Chakraborty, Kaustav (ed.). Indian Drama in English. Delhi: PHI Learning, 1-18. Datta, Ketaki (2014). “Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions: A Reconsideration.” In: Chakraborty, Kaustav (ed.). Indian Drama in English. Delhi: PHI Learning, 264-278. Deshpande, Shashi (2019). “Introduction.” In: Sengupta, Poile (2010 [1993]). Mangalam — Women Centre Stage: The Dramatist and the Play. New Delhi: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780367818654. Ghosh, Amrita (2018). “Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions: A Counter Discourse to the Issue of Communalism.” Literary Endeavour ix (3), 81-84. Kumar Singh, Nidish (2017). “Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions: Deconstruction of Communal‐ ism.” International Journal on Multicultural Literature 7 (2), 77-84. Kuthari Chaudhuri, Asha (2005). Mahesh Dattani: An Introduction. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Mee, Erin B. (2002). Drama Contemporary: India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Multani, Angelie (2007). “Final Solutions? ” In: Multani, Angelie (ed.). Mahesh Dattani’s Plays Critical Perspectives. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 109-121. Nair, Anita (2001). “An Unveiling of a Playwright in Three Acts.” The Gentleman, 5 May 2001. Padamsee, Alyque (2000). “A Note on Final Solutions.” In: Dattani, Mahesh. Collected Plays, Vol.1. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 161-162. Rai, R. N. (2006). “Perspectives and Challenges in Indian English Drama.” In: Tandon, Neeru (ed.). Perspectives and Challenges in Indian English Drama. New Delhi: Atlantic, 11-23. Roy, Elizabeth (2002). “Freak Mirrors and Grotesque Images.” The Hindu, 15 March 2002. Singh, Anita (2012). “An Interview With Poile Sengupta.” Asian Theatre Journal 29 (1), 78-88. Sinha, Arnab Kumar/ Bhattacharya, Sajalkumar/ Lahiri, Himadri (eds.) (2019). Contemporary Indian English Poetry and Drama: Changing Canons and Responses. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Uniyal Pant, Ranu (2005). “Conversation with Mahesh Dattani.” In: Pant, Tanu/ Dhawan, Rajinder Kumar (eds.). The Plays of Mahesh Dattani. New Delhi: Prestige, 176-184. 142 6 ‘Condition-of-India’ Plays: Mahesh Dattani (1958—) and Poile Sengupta (1948—) 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: The Diasporic Experience in the Poetry of Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker Cecile Sandten, Chemnitz University of Technology Abstract This chapter offers a study of the poetry of two contemporary women poets, Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker, whose works reflect a migrant perspective, resonating as they do with such concerns as ‘home’, ‘belonging’, ‘identity’ and ‘culture’. In‐ deed, ‘diasporic’ literatures are imbued with tropes of hybridization or blending of cultures. As such, the concepts of home and belonging figure abundantly in diasporic literatures, often through the writers’ personal experience of migration. This chapter argues that the poets creatively explore and negotiate so-called ‘bor‐ der-territories’ or ‘imaginary homelands’ (the latter, a term coined by Salman Rushdie), while redirecting their focus of the creative writing process to other cultural, historical, regional and/ or linguistic backgrounds and settings. Engaging with these issues, the chapter aims at providing students with a fresh and critical perspective on Anglophone South Asian women’s writing. It also presents ideas and materials with which to foster a critical awareness of the concepts of diaspora, transculturality and hybridity that have emerged out of the academic field of Postcolonial Studies. 7.1 Introduction The hybridisation and fusion of cultures in literature is a common trope explored in diasporic literatures. Often triggered by the personal experiences of the writers — their migration, diaspora, loss of communal contacts and feelings of dislocation —these works are frequently ruminations on the very concept of ‘home’, ‘belonging’, ‘identity’ and ‘culture’. In this essay, it will be argued that it is possible to creatively explore and negotiate what might be called ‘border territories’ or ‘imaginary homelands’ (the latter term was coined by Salman Rushdie in his eponymous essay collection from 1991) while shifting the focus of the creative writing process to other cultural, historical, regional and/ or linguistic backgrounds and settings. Using her syncretic style of writing, the poetry of Indian-born, American-educated, German-based poet Sujata Bhatt (1956-) also exemplifies the process of dislocation, hybridisation and transculturation, a process that allows her to critically engage with her own experiences of multiple migration. In the Evangelisches Kirchenlexikon (Fahlbusch 1996: 602-606), the term syncretism is defined as a process of cross-cultural encounters. These encounters occur in the course of migration, colonisation and subjugation. For instance, the cross-cultural encounters of different religions are a result of missionary activities. Biculturality is also explored in the poetry of the female South Asian writer Imtiaz Dharker (1954-), who was born in Pakistan and divides her time between Scotland, Wales and India. She thereby also turns her attention to a migrant perspective that reaches back to the time of the Partition of India and Pakistan on 15 August 1947, with its ensuing horrors, including communal riots, a mass exodus on both sides of the border, killings and violence against women. By offering a study of the poetry of these two contemporary women poets — Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker — the aim of this chapter is to provide students with a fresh, critical perspective on contemporary Indian English women poets as well as to present ideas and materials with which to foster a critical awareness of the issues of diaspora, hybridity and transculturality that have emerged out of the academic field of Postcolonial Studies. While this chapter is not intended to provide a complete survey of the genre of poetry in Indian English literature from its very beginnings to the present day, what it will do is offer an introduction and a case study analysis of the two Indian English women poets of the Indian/ South Asian diaspora. Consequently, this chapter is divided into five sections. The first briefly sketches the primary concerns of poets from India from 1945 to the present who write in an English voice. The second section gives a brief definition of the concepts of diaspora, hybridity and transculturality within the framework of Postcolonial Studies. Moreover, it seeks to present a synoptic view of the discussion of these terms in literary studies. The subsequent sections survey two individual poets and offer close readings of a thematic selection of their poems. 7.2 Historical Background: Indian Poetry in English Indian poetry written in English has a long history. The English language, as one of the most enduring legacies of British colonialism, has, over the centuries, led writers to adopt a variety of poetic styles, adhering, however, for a long period of time more persistently to the styles of the English Romantic poets and only later to those of the modernist era. Eventually, Indian English poets also began to write in a mode that can now more generally be termed ‘Indian English’ poetry, since the writers have critically and creatively explored different styles and forms as well as infused the English language with a decidedly Indian or South Asian inflection. This implies that the writers have included the depiction of the specifics of flora and fauna, religious particulars (e.g. Indian mythology, Hinduism, Partition), people of different castes and backgrounds, cityscapes, landscapes or moods, and have employed linguistic code-switching, which 144 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker is the introduction of words from Indian languages into the English text or, as Indian English writer Raja Rao expounded regarding the use of English as an Indian English writer: to “convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own” (Rao 1938: vii). When it comes to linguistic particulars, in their seminal study The Empire Writes Back (1989), Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin argue that “the most common method of inscribing alterity by the process of appropriation is the technique of switching between two or more codes” (1989: 71), by also leaving a “selection of certain words […] untranslated in the text” (ibid.) which assists in imparting “cultural distinctiveness in the writing” (ibid.). With a focus on poetry written since the time of India’s independence, Rajeev S. Patke describes where the writers came from and what connected them: “The poets writing in English came from a variety of backgrounds bridged chiefly by their choice of language. Most read, and quite a few taught, English as an academic subject, others worked in journalism or the media” (Patke 2003: 241). The most important male poets to emerge following India’s Independence include, in particular, Dilip Chitre (1938-2009), Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004), Keki N. Daruwalla (1937-), Adil Jussawalla (1940-), Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004), P. Lal (1929-2010), Jayanta Mahapatra (1928-), Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (1947-), Dom Morares (1938-2004), R. Parthasarathy (1934-), Gieve Patel (1940-) and A. K. Ramanujan (1929-1993). These writers have been referred to as the first generation of Indian poets writing in English. Not all of these writers wrote solely in English, and for some of them English was their first language, yet they all felt “the temptations of embracing English” due to the language’s “range and scope” (Patke 2003: 244). English had come to India as part of Thomas Babington Macauley’s educational programme, stipulated in his Minute of 1835, which was introduced to the Indian élite and middle classes to ‘civilise’ the Indian subcontinent through education (cf. Macaulay 1935). As a consequence, English became the “chief instrument of modernity for India” (Patke 2003: 245). Therefore, a concern for all poets has been to aid in “fostering a new poetry in the process of finding a voice for themselves” (ibid.: 245 f.) along with reaching a “wider audience: at home, among the urban élite; abroad, among the discerning (or at least the more sought-after) readership from the West” (ibid.: 245) by attempting to go beyond mere imitation, of which writers from India writing in English were often accused (cf. ibid.). Early Indian English women poets who wrote under the British Raj, including Toru Dutt (1856-1877) and Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) during the late 19 th (Dutt) and early 20 th centuries (Naidu), were initially confronted with prejudices similar to those women were facing more generally in patriarchally structured societies all over the world. The British Raj was the rule of the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947. 7.2 Historical Background: Indian Poetry in English 145 In particular, they were blamed for addressing domestic issues or the picturesque in their poems, they were accused of triviality, and male poets at that time “were worried about the feminization of poetry” (Gibson 2016: 66). As “daughters of Christian converters or members of the Brahmo Samaj” (ibid.: 68), Dutt and Naidu had an advantage over most other women, who had no access to education and the oral tradition. Brahmo Samaj (Sanskrit: Brahma Association) is a Hindu reform organisation founded by Ram Mohan Roy in Calcutta in 1828. Although the Brahmo Samaj never had many members, its influence on the spiritual life of Bengal was considerable. Dutt and Naidu engaged in a spectrum of topics that ranged from the question of the writer’s identity to socially relevant issues. Naidu voiced these concerns in “nationalist and secular lyrics” (ibid.: 77) while Dutt, “overtly self-positioned as heir to the English and French Romantic poets” (Lootens 2016: 90), wrote on in a language designed to depict the sensibilities of modern India (cf. ibid.: 88). As second-generation female poets, Kamala Das (1934-2009) and Eunice de Souza (1940-2017) occupy an important position within the framework of poetry written in English in India around the 1960s. According to literary scholar and poet Eunice de Souza, Das “mapped out the terrain for post-colonial women in social and linguistic terms. […] And in her best poems she speaks for women, certainly, but also for anyone who has known pain, inadequacy, despair” (de Souza 1997: 8), thus not addressing any openly feminist concerns. Nonetheless, her poems, apart from being “confessional” (Rao 2016: 236), indirectly tackle female homosexuality and individualism in a resilient manner (cf. ibid.: 241). As Raj Rao elucidates, in contrast to Das’s poetry, “Eunice de Souza’s aesthetics and her poetic credo are different […] both in terms of her attitude to love and in terms of the economy and sparseness with which she uses language” (ibid.: 246). Moreover, as Rao adds, “[h]er politics are feminist and womanist, as well as radical, while her aesthetics are masculine and canonical, as well as conservative” (ibid.: 247). This, according to Rao, can be seen in poems in which she writes “about marginalized women’s victimization” (ibid.). Womanism is supposed to be a less academic but rather sensual term made known by African American writer Alice Walker in her book In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983). The term first appeared in the U.S. in the 1970s to define Black feminism in contradistinction to White feminisism which Black women felt su‐ perimposed on them, since the latter is grounded in Western philosophy. Whereas womanism is “family-centered” and focuses on black/ female relationships as well as “race, class and gender”, feminism, in contrast, as Clenora Hudson-Weems 146 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker writes, is “female-centered” and focuses on “gender issues” women and girls face, globally (cf. Hudson-Weems 2001: 138-139). Many of the male as well as female writers of the first and second generation began their writing careers after India’s Independence, more precisely, after 1947, continuing into the 1960s and peaking in the 1970s, with a number of publishing houses at home but also those abroad (cf. Patke 2003: 146) turning to a more modernist mode of writing, clearing it “of all historical or mythopoeic baggage” (ibid.: 247). According to literary theorist Northrop Frye, “[m]ythology projects itself as the‐ ology: that is, a mythopoeic poet usually accepts some myths as ‘true’ and shapes his poetic structure accordingly” (Frye 1990: 64). A “mythopoeic aspect of litera‐ ture” addresses “fictions and themes relating to divine or quasi-divine beings and powers” (ibid. 116; emphasis added). Nissim Ezekiel’s style, in particular, is characterised by irony, but also more elaborately by “dry statements [that] are preferred to metaphor or image; imagery [that] doesn’t always carry the full weight of feeling; sense [that] overrides emotions; feelings [that] are overshadowed by the need to rationalise” (Patke 2003: 247), as well as by making the city the main topic of his poems (cf. ibid.: 248). Indian English poets of the third generation, such as Melanie Silgardo (1956-), Meena Alexander (1951-2018), Manohar Shetty (1953-), Imtiaz Dharker (1954-), Vikram Seth (1952-), or Sujata Bhatt (1956-) published their first works in the 1980s (cf. Shah and Nayar 2000: 13). Nila Shah and Pramod Nayar write that it was particularly the second generation of “women poets [who] questioned the patriarchal system and began to articulate both a resistance and self-confidence. The resistance to religious and social codes”, more specifically motherhood, marriage and the submission to the role of a demure Indian wife, were critically assessed and “[s]elf-confidence” was gained and displayed with a new awareness of “the female body/ desire as a site of pleasure (Shah and Nayar 2000: 13.). Thus, the second generation of women poets paved the way for the above mentioned third-generation writers. Other topics that became prominent in the poems of third-generation writers, including Bhatt and Dharker, are displacement and a nostalgia for a lost home and past, as, for instance, in Dharker’s ‘city’ poem “Hiraeth, Old Bombay” (Dharker 2014: 23), or the question of how to use one’s mother tongue if it has been lost as a result of migration, as in Bhatt’s poem “Search For My Tongue”, a poem that is bilingual: written in Gujarati and English with an additional Gujarati script (Bhatt 1988: 63-70). As Shah and Nayar point out, Bhatt seeks “to retain an Indianness” in her poetry, “while being carefully assimilatory about [her] adopted cultures” (2000: 19). 7.2 Historical Background: Indian Poetry in English 147 With regard to women poets who came after Kamala Das and Eunice de Souza, Shah and Nayar indicate that they “describe the sordidness of marriage and ‘love’, to express their criticism of patriarchal cultures frankly and poeticise the search for an authentic identity of their own” (2000: 20; italics i.o.). Moreover, there “is also a lifting of inhibitions in their expressions of sexuality and desire. The woman’s body figures prominently in many of these poets” (ibid.). This is the case in Dharker’s poem “Pur‐ dah” (1997: 14-21) and Bhatt’s poems “Muliebrity” (1988: 26) and “White Asparagus” (1991: 98), which criticise women’s (self)oppression and celebrate women’s strength and sexuality, respectively. Purdah means “curtain”. Metaphorically speaking, it denotes veiling. This veiling or Purdah is considered a form of modesty expected of women in some Muslim and Hindu communities. In these communities, physical segregation of the sexes and the requirement that women cover their bodies so that their skin and form are covered and concealed are common. Women in these communities are also required to live in a zenana, the women’s quarters in the house. Apart from “neoromanticism” and the “historical” to create “a specific cultural/ histor‐ ical location” (Shah and Nayar 2000: 21), contemporary poets address social problems such as religious violence, sexuality/ homosexuality (e.g. in the poems of Indian English poet Raj Rao, who has been the first outspoken gay rights activist in India) and the seeking of the self in the world, along with creating witty, ironic, satiric and humorous poems, or self-reflexive poetry addressing “the art of composition, the poet’s dilemma, the anticipation of response and the issue of craftsmanship” (ibid.: 25). Neo-romanticism is a broad movement, crossing artistic boundaries that place more importance on the representation of internal feelings. Neo-romanticism be‐ gan in Britain around 1880 (e.g. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)), but later spread to other parts of the world, including Eastern Europe, America and even India. Within this framework, Shah and Nayar show that women writers of that period, beginning in the 1980s, also focus on an understanding of the self (the feminine — not necessarily the feminist), in contrast to the patriarchal order in which they were brought up. As self-assured independent women/ writers, they had, however, begun to question this patriarchal order, and were thus also forced to negotiate the ‘other worlds’ they constantly encountered and actively incorporated into their lives and poems. In addition, the writers of the third generation, such as Melanie Silgardo, “move away from radical modernist techniques. They are more concerned with the portrayal and assessment of their family background, their own lives and relations with others, and 148 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker their immediate environment” (Dulai 2000: 188). When it comes to female writers of Indian descent who have lived in the diaspora, these topics pinpointed by Surjit S. Dulai need to be included, since issues and topics such as hybridity, interand transculturality, the language question and the search for identity come to the fore. The following section will explain some of these concepts as they are employed within the framework of Postcolonial Studies. 7.3 Theoretical Concepts: Diaspora, Hybridity, Interand Transculturality The terms diaspora, hybridity and interand transculturality presuppose an openness to, and creative reception of, the disparate and heterogeneous cultural environments writers such as Bhatt and Dharker have inhabited and creatively explored as well as the problems connected with constant migratory processes that result in the loss of home or the search for (cultural) identity. The literal meaning of diaspora is “dispersal”. According to Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau, the first exile, in 587-539 BCE, is the reference point for the various biblical texts of the Old Testament (e.g. Ezekiel, Isaiah) that define Judaism, e.g. Isaiah 11: 11-12, as the hope of returning to the Promised Land or Jerusalem (cf. Chaliand and Rageau 1995: 4-72). When defining the term ‘diaspora’, it is recommended that the term’s meaning be expanded beyond the rather confining notion given in the Bible, where the term is mostly used in the context of a Jewish experience outside the Jewish homeland. Chaliand and Rageau thus maintain that there is a widespread tendency to apply the term ‘diaspora’ to the Chinese and Indian communities that were scattered across the globe when European imperialism was at its height in the second half of the 19 th century in Southeast Asia and the United States. These groups ought indeed to be classified as diasporas (or perhaps semi-diasporas, given the continued existence of a state where the vast majority of their compatriots live), insofar as they meet many of the criteria that define the diaspora condition. According to Chaliand and Rageau, there are four criteria that constitute the specific realities of a diaspora, “the collective forced dispersion of a religious and/ or other ethnic group, precipitated by a disaster, often of a political nature”, “collective memory, which transmits both the historical facts that precipitated the dispersion and a cultural heritage (broadly understood) — the latter often being religious”, the group’s will “to survive as a minority by transmitting heritage”, and “the time factor”, since “[o]nly time decides whether a minority that meets all or some of the criteria described above, having insured its survival and adaptation, is a diaspora” (Chaliand and Rageau 1995: xiv ff.; all italics i.o.). A diaspora, thus, protects its members from losing touch with their roots and connection with their homeland. Contrarily, the concept of diaspora runs the risk of not providing a space into which the new country and its respective culture can be integrated or incorporated. Moreover, James Clifford describes diasporas as follows: “Diasporas usually presuppose longer distances and a separation more like exile: 7.3 Theoretical Concepts: Diaspora, Hybridity, Interand Transculturality 149 a constitutive taboo on return, or its postponement to a remote future. Diasporas also connect multiple communities of a dispersed population” (Clifford 1994: 304). Clifford further elucidates that “diasporas are not exactly immigrant communities” (ibid.: 311) since it is necessary to distinguish, “for example, affluent Asian business families living in North America from creative writers, academic theorists, and destitute ‘boat people’ or Khmers fleeing genocide” (ibid.: 313). In addition, as Clifford claims, diasporic experiences are always gendered, as he fittingly demonstrates by turning to the experiences of women. Within this framework, the following two aspects are pertinent, since women “[o]n the one hand, maintain […] connections with homelands, with kinship networks, and with religious and cultural traditions [that] may renew patriarchal structures. On the other, new roles and demands, new political spaces, are opened by diaspora interactions” (ibid.: 313 f.). Thus, as Clifford argues, “women sustaining and reconnecting diaspora ties do so critically, as strategies of survival in a new context” (ibid.: 314). Accordingly, literary scholar Emmanuel S. Nelson writes in conjunction with South Asian women writers: Many emerging women writers […] have begun to engage in their works the complicated politics of their (dis)locations: their narratives carry the inscriptions of their complex perspectives — perspectives that are simultaneously shaped by their ethnicity, gender, migrancy, and postcoloniality. (Nelson 1993: xii) Thus, for a diasporic writer, diasporic life centres around the binary idea of living in the host country, with the wish to return to the homeland (in a more or less distant future) and specific identifications and dis-identifications with the host culture, which often trigger feelings of dislocation, nostalgic memories and the need to use the creative writing process to recreate the past within in the present, as Salman Rushdie has most aptly elucidated in his essay collection Imaginary Homelands (1991). Rushdie says about the Indian writers who live outside their homeland: “It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost” (Rushdie 1991: 10). Accordingly, Rushdie reflects on the lost and metaphorically scattered homeland in the sense of reflection and new perspectives: “The broken pots of antiquity, from which the past can sometimes, but always provisionally, be reconstructed, are exciting to discover, even if they are pieces of the most quotidian objects” (ibid.: 12). As previously stated, writers who have experienced migration have to deal with lost pieces of memory and the past, but the (new) conceptualisation of identity also plays a significant role in this process, as sociologist and Cultural Studies scholar Stuart Hall addresses in assessing the notion of cultural identity in the sense of “‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’” (Hall 1990: 225). Since both concepts, that of ‘diaspora’ and that of ‘cultural identity’, are closely linked with respect to the idea of the mixing of cultures and the process of the search for cultural identity, the concept of ‘hybridity’ provides a helpful tool for the analysis of postcolonial texts. 150 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker The term ‘hybridity’, from the Latin hybrida, originally rather derogatorily referred to the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar, “2 A person of mixed descent or mixed ancestry. Now offensive; 3 A thing derived from heterogeneous sources or composed of incongruous elements” (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 2007: 1301; italics i.o.). The term has been positively reassessed within the framework of Postcolonial Studies, in particular, by literary scholar Homi Bhabha in his seminal text The Location of Culture (1994), and has been fruitfully applied to the interpretation of postcolonial literatures, since ‘hybridity’ suggests the impossibility of essentialism and describes what has been called the ‘third space’, which Bhabha defines as a strategic non-place (political space). In this sense, the term ‘hybridity’ also denotes a ‘process of intercultural negotiation’. This indicates the need to acknowledge that the ideology of ‘purity’ is a myth, as culture, by its very nature, is impure, processual, hybrid and syncretic. Bhabha has politically functionalised this concept by establishing the term as an intercultural metaphor in which the binary constructions of alterity and identity, centre and periphery, master and slave are replaced by the notion of ‘either, or’, a strategic non-place that instead depicts culture’s interstices and negotiable character. Bhabha’s “‘third space’ […] enables other positions to emerge, […] displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives […]” (Bhabha in Rutherford 1990: 211). This process includes the idea of ambivalence as well as a potential for conflict and negotiation, and often results in political or radical forms of resistance in relation to ‘Western texts’. To differentiate between the terms interand transculturality, it should be clarified that the term interculturality refers to the actual processes of cultural mixing in texts that are infused with a variety of cultural, historical and linguistic aspects (cf. Sandten 1998: 29-32), whereas the expression transculturality, when applied to migration literature, has set out to problematise the idea of cultures as homogenous, single entities which the term interculturality still contains. The term interculturality describes the culturally syncretic contexts and environments that writers, as in the case of Bhatt and Dharker, inhabit and consciously use in their productive and creative writing process (cf. ibid.). An intercultural mode of writing therefore implies an active and selective exchange of the source culture with one or more foreign (syncretic) cultures; what ensues is a form of conscious cultural identity formation, epitomised in the lyrical persona, who is frequently in search of cultural, national or local identity within the host culture, often through a confrontation with other cultures (cf. Sandten 1998). A transcultural approach in literature, in contrast, implies complex practices of hybridisation (cf. Welsch 1999: 194-213) and a move away from postcolonial theories. According to German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, a postcolonial approach would be too intimately linked to the historical, cultural and political condition of (post)colonisation to be applicable to ‘other’ globally and culturally hybrid contexts that are characterised by notions of exchange and transformation (cf. ibid.). In the literary field of Postcolonial Studies, there has been a fairly recent shift in emphasis away from the literary practice of ‘writing back’ and ‘rewriting’ aimed 7.3 Theoretical Concepts: Diaspora, Hybridity, Interand Transculturality 151 at correcting colonial misrepresentations, towards a transformational and interand transcultural process. The latter allows writers from the former British Empire or secondand third-generation writers/ immigrants to employ literary strategies that aesthetically highlight their own very individual situations, the historical, political and social conditions in which their respective home countries find themselves (i.e. power structures), or even the circumstances of their literary production in an enhanced mode of cultural hybridisation. However, a ‘transcultural’ approach is also not necessarily without conflict. The latter nonetheless acknowledges the ‘clashes’ as well as the potential inherent in encounters between different cultures and the way in which these are discussed in a variety of texts, contexts and media. Poems that, relating to the poet’s migratory processes, creatively explore different cultures, languages, histories or environments, in the sense of “productive reception” (Schulte 1994: 32), are also often characterised by the depiction of a movement of cultures and people (personae) across national, regional or social boundaries and by the transformations that result in and from these crisscrossings. These transforma‐ tions are most frequently reflected in aesthetic form, the presentation of the lyric persona/ speaker and their perceptions, along with the choice of words, rhyme, rhythm, tone of voice and expressions. Productive reception is always carried out through an interplay between appropriation and defamiliarisation that eventually reveals the potential held by negotiation and clashes. When it comes to the productive reception of different cultures, histories or languages, although ambivalent modes of writing are often employed, an intensive discussion of language and self (the lyrical persona) is also frequently used to articulate an identity or to even formulate, however it is defined, a cultural or national consciousness (cf. Döring 1996: 691). 7.4 Indian English Women Poets: Texts and Contexts In examining the two Indian English women poets, Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker, the following sections will first introduce the writers and their thematic concerns before analysing a selection of their poems within the framework of the concepts outlined in the theoretical sections above. 7.4.1 Sujata Bhatt Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, India, in 1956. She grew up in Pune (India) and in the United States, where her father’s career as a virologist took the family. After initially enrolling in medical studies, she later switched to Literature and received a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the renowned Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She has published eight collections of poetry with Carcanet Press in Manchester, apart from numerous poems in anthologies and journals, particularly in PN Review. Bhatt’s first collection, Brunizem (1988), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award. Subsequent collections include Monkey Shadows (1991), 152 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker The Stinking Rose (1995), Point No Point (1997), Augatora (2000), A Colour for Solitude (2002), Pure Lizard (2008), and Poppies in Translation (2015). Her Collected Poems was published in 2013. In addition to having been the recipient of other important awards and appointments as a Fellow at a number of institutions of learning and writing, a few of Bhatt’s shorter poems have also ‘travelled’ the London Tube as part of the “Poems on the Underground” initiative, launched in 1986 and still ongoing today, as an effort to bring poetry to a wider audience. Her work has been widely anthologised, broadcast on radio and television, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Bhatt has been living in Germany since the late 1980s, dividing her time between the city of Bremen and other locations as an enthusiastically received performer of her poems at poetry festivals, literary events and conferences. In nearly all her poems, Bhatt examines the relationships between literature, diaspora, memory and cultural identity. To that end, she employs a variety of personae (lyrical voices) who bridge continents, languages and identities. Specifically, Bhatt uses intertextual and intermedial poetic strategies to explore and convey the hybridity of her Indian diasporic experience (cf. Sandten 2021a: 295). The concept and writing strategy of intertextuality can be traced back to the French poststructuralist scholars Julia Kristéva and Gérard Genette, who, in their works, established the notion that every literary text is based on earlier literary texts and that intertextuality is therefore prevalent in all literary production. Ac‐ cording to Kristéva, there is “dialogue among several writings” (1980: 65; cf. Gen‐ ette 1997: 2). In her comprehensive study, Intermedialität (2002), literary scholar Irina O. Rajew‐ sky speaks of intermediality as occurring when media boundaries are trans‐ gressed (cf. Rajewsky 2002: 52) and when, in a single work of art, traces of at least two conventionally distinct media can be identified. She does this, for example, by drawing attention to one of her favourite German early expressionist painters, Paula Modersohn-Becker, or by creatively adapting the etchings, lithographs and paintings of the Portuguese artist Paula Rego and by recalling her South Asian childhood memories as well as India’s Hindu traditions, rewriting and often also undermining spiritual texts, myths and figures. Her intertextual and intermedial mode of writing is particularly exemplified in the poetry collection A Colour for Solitude, in which Bhatt creatively explores at least 26 self-portraits by Paula Modersohn-Becker apart from adapting a number of other paintings by this famous artist. Echoing Stuart Hall’s notion of diaspora as a “recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity” (Hall 1990: 235) as well as the idea that “diaspora identities are those which are 7.4 Indian English Women Poets: Texts and Contexts 153 constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (ibid.), in her poetry Bhatt constantly probes a poetics of diaspora, hybridity and interand transculturality, discovering and re-enacting the unsettling predicament of her personae’s displaced cultural identities, thereby creatively exploring new worlds. Bhatt was brought up speaking Gujarati (in Ahmedabad) and English as well as Marathi and Hindi (in Pune) during her childhood in India. She claims Gujarati as her mother tongue but English as her writing tongue. She is tri-cultural and tri-lingual by birth, migration and marriage, adding German as a third language, along with English and Gujarati, to her linguistic stock, often using Gujarati and German words and/ or entire sentences in her poems, thus engaging in a form of linguistic code-switching. For example, the title of the collection Augatora is an old German word which means “gate of the eye” or “gate of seeing”. With this, Bhatt also alludes to the idea of the visionary imagination and of opening the eyes to the world. Her early poetry is largely characterised by the poet’s reflections on her migrations, recalling her childhood memories in India, often in conjunction with Hindu myths but also related to her American experience, whereas in her later poems, she more elaborately turns to a plethora of other places, writers, artists and environments that are used to prompt her creative writing process. She is thus able to easily roam through other cultures, languages, and histories. Bhatt writes mainly in English, a language she learned at the age of five, when the family lived in New Orleans for three years (cf. Sandten 1998: 21, 137). And despite her experience of the English language as a colonial ‘remnant’, it is a willingly chosen means of creative expression for the poet. At the same time, the English language, as a former language of domination, triggers feelings of ambivalence (cf. Sandten 1998: 137), as in the poem “A Different History” (Bhatt 1988, 37): Which language has not been the oppressor’s tongue? Which language truly meant to murder someone? And how does it happen that after the soul has been cropped with a long scythe swooping out of the conqueror’s face — the unborn grandchildren grow to love that strange language. (Bhatt 1988: 37, part 2, ll. 19-29) In this poem, with its telling title, which epitomises the speaker’s reflection on history as something not owned by the West, the persona presents the dilemma of growing up with a language that had been imposed on many people by colonial rule. Yet, English is the language loved by the subsequent generations. This conveys a changed and active approach to dealing with the problem of the English language (cf. Sandten 1998: 137). However, the maintenance of regional languages becomes problematic when the loss 154 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker of the mother tongue also becomes connected to the loss of the homeland, which eventually stands for the loss of identity. Bhatt addresses this problem in some of her bilingual poems. One of these is the poem “Search For My Tongue” (Bhatt 1988: 63-70). This poem is from her first collection, Brunizem (1988), and deals with the persona’s fear of losing her mother tongue and the conflict of living with two languages, English and Gujarati, of which she fears the latter will become lost. The word Brunizem is a neologism developed by two American agronomists. The word stems from French and Russian: ‘bruni’ means brown and ‘zem’ means earth. This term stands for Sujata Bhatt’s complex combination of sensual, erotic and earthy elements and serves as a metaphor for her three life worlds. The poem “Search For My Tongue” was initially written in Gujarati. This gives preference to the mother tongue, since it is the language that initiated the creative writing process. The stanzas in Gujarati are transcribed by the poet into the English alphabet and then translated into English (cf. Sandten 1998: 138). Through the English translation, the priority of Gujarati is, however, relativised, and yet, the English language does not achieve equivalence. Through this arrangement, Bhatt shows that the ‘foreign’ (for the reader) language cannot be understood immediately without the translation, thereby also illustrating a reversed power structure and indigenous sovereignty over the language (cf. ibid.). To reflect on the persona’s fear of losing her mother tongue, the poet employs a pronounced metaphor of nature. The ability to speak is associated with the flow of water — “my tongue can only be / where there is water” (ll. 51-52) — or with the tail of a slippery lizard, thus emphasising the double meaning of “tongue” — as both language and the actual tongue. The tongue in the mouth is also in a wet environment, and sometimes when speaking, it can happen that what is desired to be said cannot be adequately expressed, especially with regard to learning and mastering foreign languages (cf. Sandten 1998: 138): Days my tongue slips away. I can’t hold on to my tongue. It’s slippery like the lizard’s tail I try to grasp but the lizard darts away. (Bhatt 1988: 63, ll. 1-5) In the further course of the poem, the persona reveals that she cannot live with two languages at the same time outside her home country. She thus once again problematises her fear of losing her mother tongue and her subsequent desire to retain it. To talk about these feelings, the persona addresses a poetic “you”. She suggests a conversation by answering a question posed by this “you” (cf. Sandten 1998: 138): 7.4 Indian English Women Poets: Texts and Contexts 155 You ask me what I mean by saying I have lost my tongue. I ask you, what would you do if you had two tongues in your mouth, and lost the first one, the mother tongue, and could not really know the other, the foreign tongue. You could not use them both together even if you thought that way. And if you lived in a place you had to speak a foreign tongue, your mother tongue would rot, rot and die in your mouth until you had to spit it out. I thought I spit it out but overnight while I dream, […] (Bhatt 1988, 65-66, ll. 80-96) The persona dreams that her mother tongue grows out of her mouth overnight like a flower opening its bud, thereby displacing the other language. The mother tongue is stimulating for the creative handling of the new language, since the other language — the poem is deliberately written in two languages — is not completely displaced (cf. Sandten 1998: 139). In the third and final part of the poem, the persona, who reveals to be living in Maryland, receives a tape recording from a relative in India. The cousin pronounces her name correctly and has recorded for her — perhaps by chance — the familiar sounds of home (cf. Sandten 1998: 139). When, in her dream, the persona recovers her mother tongue, she realises that she has lost India, her homeland. Simultaneously, she learns from the tape recording that no one can take away her mother tongue and her memories of home. The tape recording reconstructs the past as a synchronous moment of the present. But it only allows — from a distance — an indirect perception of the homeland. The persona is thus dependent on the exchange with the homeland via the tape to experience that her mother tongue and her memories remain part of her identity (cf. Sandten 1998: 139). In the poem “Search For My Tongue”, the poet illustrates that the experience of migration is always one of unbelonging, which, to a large extent, is established through language: “And my mother in the kitchen, / my mother singing: […] I can’t hear my mother in English” (ll. 179-180). The necessary search for a linguistic identity following migration causes ruptures, as thoughts are put forward in Gujarati but translated into English. In the poem “Search For My Tongue”, uprootedness and alienation are thus thematised as traumatic experiences of the persona. The diasporic experience is also highlighted in the poem “The One Who Goes Away” from the collection The Stinking Rose (Bhatt 1995: 3). The lyric persona of this poem is 156 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker shown to be a representative of a South Asian diaspora who develops a consciousness of “cultural insularity” and links this to the idea of an “unstable cultural identity” (Schulte 1994: 74). On the one hand, the term “cultural insularity” indicates the experience of loss and loneliness, while, on the other hand, it stands for the possibility of possessing a “home” outside the homeland (cf. Sandten 1998: 44). The poem “The One Who Goes Away” opens with a quotation from American poet Eleanor Wilner, to which, during the course of the poem, a lyric persona attempts to respond. The poem consists of 15 stanzas and a total of 70 lines, which vary in length. Stanzas 1, 4, 7 and 13 each consist of two lines. Stanza 6 contains only one line. The poem begins with “But I am the one / who always goes away” (ll. 1-2) which is repeated in variation several times in the poem: “I am the one / who always goes away” (ll. 20-21 and 56-57) and in the final stanza, “I am the one / who always goes / away with my home / which can only stay inside / in my blood — my home which does not fit / with any geography” (ll. 65-70). Stanzas 10, 11 and 12 stand out from this regularity in that an implicit addressee is spoken to: Look at the deserted beach now it’s dusk — no sun to turn the waves gold, no moon to catch the waves in silver mesh — Look at the in-between darkness when the sea is unmasked she’s no beauty queen. Now the wind stops beating around the bush — While the earth calls and the hearth calls come back, come back — (ll. 42-55) In addition, these three stanzas are characterised by the depiction of nature in negations and a calling out to the addressee. Generally, the poem is written in the form of organic poetry, which includes the use of free verse and a specific rhythm as well as repetitions and variations surrounding certain perceptions. Organic Poetry is a formal poetic structure which belongs to an open form favoured in what is described as free verse or organic poetry. The poet’s experience and perceptions — including internal perceptions, e.g. dreams — shape the devel‐ opment of each line and stanza, not according to strict prosodic criteria but in a 7.4 Indian English Women Poets: Texts and Contexts 157 subjective rendering of perceptions and feelings the poet wants to express (cf. Lev‐ ertov 1973: 14; cf. Sandten 2004: 194). Variations and echo constellations create sound effects that suggest connections or disconnections. The romantic motif of ‘being constantly on the move’, to which a confessing persona is assigned, is a prominent device. Since too much strangeness can destroy pre-existing identities, the poet’s organic lyricism is a means of creating unities where there may no longer be any. The tendency towards isolation implied in the poem can also be interpreted as an expression of self-protection on the part of the speaker. These three motifs point, on the one hand, to the processuality and constant movement that underlie travel (“To help the journey / coconuts were flung / from Juhu beach / into the Arabian Sea —” (ll. 11-14)), and, on the other, to the experience of diaspora, marked by the loss of home and — if the term loneliness can be understood positively in this instance — of a self-sufficiency, wherein home can exist in the “self ”, with no concrete geographical location, as the last stanza exemplifies, in spite of the experience of being uprooted. Since the persona is the “one / who always goes away” and since the “first time was the most — / was the most / silent” (ll. 1-5), it becomes obvious that leaving “home” has been a constant experience in the life of the speaker, which is underlined by the adverbs “always” (repeatedly) and “first”. That the country the persona leaves is India is signified by concrete geographical and cultural markers: “with the soft noise / of saris flapping in the wind” (ll. 9-10) or “coconuts were flung / from Juhu beach / into the Arabian sea” (ll. 12-14). Yet, the persona also ponders the possibility that “Maybe the joy lies / in always being able to leave —” (ll. 29-30). Since the persona, and most likely her family, “weren’t allowed / to take much” (l. 38), the speaker proudly proclaims that she “managed to hide / my home behind my heart” (ll. 40-41), thus hinting at the idea of being able to secretly take her home along with her. This is also underlined by the alliteration of the “h” in the three words “hide”, “home”, “heart” — thereby emphasising this notion. In the subsequent stanzas of the poem, coming after the more reflective ones on nature, a different image prevails, namely that of the necessity of leaving home and the utter incongruity of, however defined, an ‘intact’ home that does not fit into the new environment: 158 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker I am the one who always goes away. Because I must — with my home intact but always changing so the windows don’t match the doors anymore — the colours clash in the garden — And the ocean lives in the bedroom. (ll. 56-64) The persona formulates the idea that although she has her intact home with her, it is in constant flux. The content and arrangement of verses 61 to 64 show that various everyday items signifying “home” do not fit in, due to their differences: “windows”, “doors”, “the colours clash in the garden”, and “the ocean lives in the bedroom”. The last aspect forms the climax, since the ocean has taken over the bedroom. This surreal image of a huge ocean living in a small bedroom, of nature having invaded the most private of spaces, reinforces the idea that different cultural lifestyles “clash”, even though the home is intact. This surreal image seems amusing at first, but upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that the constant changing of homes also triggers confusion. The persona obviously accepts her disorientation, however, because she has no choice but to live with the constant changes: “Because I must —” (l. 58). The persona’s realisation that she is the one who always has to go away is eventually underlined by the metaphor of the ocean living in the bedroom, which also represents movement in the form of journeying, travelling or sailing. But the image of the ocean in the bedroom also stands for a desire for tranquillity. The bedroom, signifying a place that is usually only visited at night, to sleep, is thus transformed into a restless place due to the ocean living there and — metaphorically speaking — dominating the persona’s most private space. Thus, the poem “The One Who Goes Away” addresses departures to new places, migration, diaspora, loss of home, uprooting and alienation, while at the same time proudly announcing that “home” is “intact” and “with” the persona, that it “can only stay inside” in her “blood” and “does not fit / with any geography” (ll. 59, 67-70). Apart from focusing on the topic of the loss of and search for language, identity and home as part of an individual diasporic consciousness, Bhatt continuously turns to other cultural, historical and linguistic contexts, which she creatively explores, and thus writing in a mode that can be termed hybrid and interor transcultural. As Don Paterson puts it on the back cover blurb of Poppies in Translation (Paterson 2015, n.p.): Bhatt’s poetry “[…] everywhere reveals a deep engagement with the other arts. Her configuration of her multiple influences makes for fascinating reading, and she finds resonances and correspondences across cultures and disciplines a more circumscribed experience and vision could not”. In nearly all her poems, Bhatt immediately relates questions of belonging and un-belonging, the method of labelling and the poet’s personal experiences and percep‐ 7.4 Indian English Women Poets: Texts and Contexts 159 tions in myriad constellations — from a decidedly female perspective. In Poppies in Translation, as in all her collections, she connects many worlds, this time including Indonesia, South Africa, Estonia, Lithuania, Ireland, Shetland and Nicaragua, with various cultural identities, namely her Indian, American and German selves. The latter are explored by, for instance, creatively engaging with the post-war German writers Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, or, as Bhatt mentioned during a personal conversation in June 2017 and as the collection makes unmistakably clear, by using the German language to a greater extent than in the other collections. As was a prominent focus in her third poetry collection, The Stinking Rose (1995), in which garlic in its abundant manifestations is alluded to, envisioned and creatively appropriated, in Poppies in Translation, too, natural objects, such as poppies, are ever-present: “these red poppies / with their black souls in the wind” (in the poem “Schlafmohn, Blaumohn: Allerleilustblume”), (ibid., 10-12; italics i.o.). Bhatt thereby also employs an older approach to her writing alongside a newer one she has incorporated in this more recent poetry collection. Accordingly, in Poppies in Translation, the writer brings together a sizable cross-sec‐ tion of issues, such as the mother-daughter relationship, death (e.g. of friends and fellow writers), her engagement with other writers or philosophers ( John Ashbery, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Pearse Hutchinson, Sappho, Hildegard von Bingen, Husserl), Greek and Indian mythology, travels to other countries and places (there are also several allusions to Japan), different species (e.g. scorpions, elephants, butterflies, plain tiger butterflies, frogs, storks, monkeys), plants (in particular, the poppies), the arts (here, Hans Wap, who created the cover image and three illustrations for the book, Wols and Paula Modersohn-Becker), or languages (Bahasa Indonesia, Sanskrit, Gujarati, English, German, Latin). Bhatt uses these to question and decon‐ struct ideas of a singular identity and to challenge established essentialisms. It would be impossible here to trace the arguments for and against her poetry being categorised as “Indian-English”, but a useful starting point would be the few poems that focus on India, such as “Palitana” (Bhatt 1995: 96), “By the Railway Tracks, Ahmedabad” (ibid.: 97), “Notes from India” (ibid.: 98), “Sea Turtles” (ibid.: 99), or “Sisyphus” (ibid.: 100). These are a blend of Bhatt’s personal memories of her childhood and specific people in India, particular situations she has experienced or imagined, Indian mythical figures and actual places, e.g. Palitana, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Bay of Bengal, or references to typical Indian birds, such as crows, peacocks and vultures, to which the poet has already alluded to in some of her earlier poems. A sense of history informs many poems, most obviously those in which Bhatt focuses on Mahatma Gandhi, the Berlin Wall, Glasnost, specific important persons and personal memories that are historically inflected. There are reminders of the detailed ways in which the traces of history, particular places, landscapes and specific people influence the here and now. Sometimes, this is articulated in sharply ostensible observations and phrases, as in the poem “1980” (Bhatt 1995: 91), in which Bhatt charts, in seemingly everyday language, the most important events of the decade indicated by the title of the 160 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker relatively short poem, or in a poem entitled “Crear” (ibid.: 44-45), in which the speaker elucidates that “Gandhiji / serving his first prison sentence/ in 1908, in South Africa” is “reading / Carlyle’s biography of Robert Burns — which he did” (ll. 13-15). These aspects are subsequently mixed with the poet’s present journeying (here, Scotland), memories of the persona’s personal past related to her grandfather and her daughter, and the year 1989 — the year her daughter was born and the year in which the Berlin wall came down. In other poems, social themes are presented as criticism that addresses ‘universal’ societal problems pertaining to women. As a case in point, women, especially in patriarchal societies in ancient times as well as contemporarily, are threatened with honour killings, as depicted in “Straight Through the Heart” (Bhatt 1995: 102-105), one of the most moving narrative poems in the collection. Although Bhatt should not be considered a political or feminist poet, and despite the fact that in her poetry, she uses words and metaphors that pertain to violence or violation, knives, sticks, stealing, killings, death, the Holocaust or war, there is also something new in her expression — she more subversively explores the politics of cultural difference and womanhood. This can be specifically observed in the above-mentioned poem, in which the phrase, “Her home, a village in any country” (l. 41), alludes to the somehow ‘universal’, but nonetheless political topic of female honour killings. The speaker of the poem reveals that the poem is based on “an article in the newspaper” (l. 21) about a girl who was eight years old when she was raped. She kept silent until the night she was married because she knew, due to the shame this rape would have brought upon the family, she would have been killed. Believing that her family would understand, she eventually tells them, on the night of her wedding, that she was raped at the age of eight. They nonetheless kill her. By referring to women from classical Greek and Hindu mythology, such as Medusa’s daughter or Shakti’s sister, Bhatt recounts women’s fateful experiences throughout the centuries, up until contemporary times, “This happened five hundred years ago, / this happened five minutes ago” (ll. 37-38). By asking questions and telling a story, she voices concern for the oppression of women with regard to their sexuality, bodies, lives and genuine lack of rights: She knew too much for a girl of eight. She knew she was being raped, and she knew that if she spoke, if she spoke out and named that sin, she would be killed. (l. 13-16) […] I call her Medusa’s daughter, Shakti’s sister — Her home, a village in any country — (39-41) […] And how did she know so much? 7.4 Indian English Women Poets: Texts and Contexts 161 Had she seen a sister killed? An older sister who told her everything, showed her the meaning of violation — of the sacredness of the body - An older sister who taught her another language? (ll. 57-62) […] They did not listen, did not understand — straight through the heart — (ll. 104-105) In many of the poems, as in the one quoted above, Bhatt constructs ‘the political’ through the fabric of ‘the personal’. Similarly, “Today” (Bhatt 1995: 3) is fashioned around an intimate detail of the personal and the familiar but addresses a political, yet common and very contemporary question: “How can you be in exile / when you live with the one you love? ” (ll. 2-3). In other poems, Bhatt focuses on German writers and artists, like Ingeborg Bach‐ mann and Paul Celan in “Schlafmohn, Blaumohn: Allerleilustblume”, (ibid.: 10-12, italics i.o.), “…bis wir kleine Fische geworden sind… ”, [‘until we have turned into little fish’; transl. C.S.] (ibid.: 29, italics i.o.) and “Florence” (ibid.: 30), or on Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker in “Self-Portrait as a Soul — Paula Modersohn-Becker to Rainer Maria Rilke, 2 November 1908” (ibid.: 34, italics i.o.), “Another Daphne” (ibid.: 36), and “Blumenmuskel” (ibid.: 38, italics i.o.), a poem about the evening primrose, or in “A German Education” (ibid.: 32), a poem that relates to the writer’s eight-year-old daughter, who has to learn “Rilke’s autumn by heart” (l. 2) and “[…] con‐ tinues reciting Rilke’s poems / with unrelenting discipline / for her beloved teacher” (ll. 37-39) since “This is home: / her father’s language — ” (ll. 40-41). By focusing on those other writers (as well as Sappho, Lise Sinclair, Wojciech Bonowicz, Ioana Ieronim and Hildegard von Bingen), artists and art exhibitions, Bhatt imaginatively inhabits, re-invents and re-inscribes their voices and stories, employing an intermedial or ekphrastic mode of writing. Ekphrasis is defined as “the verbal representation of visual representation” (Hef‐ fernan 1993: 7). Clüver describes the term as “the verbal representation of a real or fictitious text in a non-verbal sign system” (1997: 26). The German term is “Bildgedicht”, which is a verbal or poetic rewriting, for instance, of a painting. Bhatt had already used the latter to a great extent in her earlier poetry collections, most extensively in A Colour for Solitude (2002) — a collection that prominently focuses on the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker and a great number of her self-portraits, which Bhatt, in an ekphrastic mode of writing, appropriates in her poetry (cf. Sandten 2004: 193-209). 162 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker The intricate weaving of connections between literature, the arts and different cultures cumulatively works to give Bhatt’s poetic voice a multi-layered perspective and suggests that while literature and the arts gave shape to the past, they also influence the present, both surprising and empowering the speaker. Alongside the cultural and personal examination of multiple selves, there is an exploration of philosophy and meta-poetry, in which Bhatt manages a poised balance between a cultural figure, self-revelation, and poetic control. The poem “Viriditas: Hildegard and Jesus” (Bhatt 2015: 51-54) is an apt example of this blend, revealing a philosophical-religious as well as personal approach to this German universal scholar (‘Universalgelehrte’), Hildegard von Bingen, who lived during the Middle Ages. Not only is this collection generously inscribed with the traces of many other writers, but the “Notes” (ibid.: 134 f.) — as always — indicate a referencing that suggests the productive use of a literary awareness in the creation of her poems. She thus stresses the need to employ and appropriate other voices — at times, also through employing a synaesthetic writing strategy — in subverting existing stereotypes of her myriad personae, re-inscribing them with new life and endowing them with new ideas, hopes, and possibilities of life. Synaesthesia is a mode of writing in which words that depict colours, sounds, smells or other perceptions used to describe certain places and situations are com‐ bined, compelling the reader to simultaneously deal with different stimuli. Indeed, it is possible to now define typically ‘Bhattian’ poetry in terms of its tropes, rhythms and language: the constantly evolving interrelationship of exclusive topics and her syncretic and even synaesthetic mode of writing render her poetry unique. Therefore, in her poems, Bhatt refuses to be drawn into any single category, preferring instead, it can be argued, to affirm a kind of hybrid identity in her speakers. Poppies in Translation — as the term “translation” already indicates — aptly conveys the pleasures, opportunities, and perceptions — also by way of synaesthesia — of being a transcultural Indian-English woman writer who is constantly re-negotiating and probing her many and increasingly different self-selected environments. Bhatt articulates her poetic voice through those other voices, species, spheres, countries, artworks and writers to signal points of transnational and transcultural connection — the “resonances and correspondences across cultures and disciplines” (Paterson 2015, n.p.), as the Captain in the poem “A Captain’s Confession” (ibid.: 115, l. 17) puts it: “Whose country is this? ” He immediately responds to his own question with the following one: “Does it matter? ” (l. 17). Accordingly, Bhatt has built upon old stock (India, America, Germany) to provide new ideas — exploring hybrid and interand transcultural identities. Bhatt’s poems radiate an irreverent sense of curiosity and surprise as they deftly reject an ‘ethnic’ classification, posing questions instead, with an extraordinary sensitivity to the normality and absurdity of life, e.g. when myths are translated 7.4 Indian English Women Poets: Texts and Contexts 163 into everyday life situations. In this context, Bhatt’s poems not only interrogate still-prevailing patriarchal structures, but they also challenge them, with serenity, and devoid of anger. 7.4.2 Imtiaz Dharker Imtiaz Dharker was born in Pakistan in 1954 and grew up as a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow, Scotland, where the family had immigrated “when she was only a year old” (Basu 2016: 389). She returned to India by eloping with an Indian Hindu, and after the marriage ended in divorce, has divided her time between London, Wales and Mumbai. Dharker is a poet, artist and documentary filmmaker. Her mixed heritage and ‘nomadic’ lifestyle are the focus of her writing. In her poems, she continuously scrutinises her personae’s geographical and cultural displacements, conflicts and gender politics, while also questioning conventional ideas about home, freedom and faith, searching for meaning and identity. Dharker has created award-winning artworks and films and has published six books with the publisher Bloodaxe: Postcards from God (including the poem “Purdah”) (1997), I Speak for the Devil (2001), The Terrorist at my Table (2006), Leaving Fingerprints (2009), Over the Moon (2014) and Luck Is the Hook (2018). All her poetry collections are illustrated with her thematically close and detailed line drawings, which form an integral part of the books. She is one of very few poet-artists who integrate their artwork into their poetry. However, the drawings are not illustrations of the poems, but work around the same theme, serving as an extension of the poems’ themes; only rarely does Dharker write ekphrastic poems (see “True (The Bathers, Paul Cézanne)” 2014: 68, italics i.o.). Dharker was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, which was presented to her by the late Queen Elizabeth II. in the spring of 2015. She has also received a Cholmondeley Award and a British literary award from the ‘Society of Authors’ and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Over the Moon was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry in 2014. Her poems are included on the British GCSE and A-Level English syllabi, and she has read to more than 25,000 students a year at “Poetry Live! ” events all over the country. The British “General Certificate of Secondary Education” (GCSE) is compa‐ rable to the German “Mittlere Reife” (“Oberschulabschluss”). She has held a large number of solo exhibitions of drawings in India, London, Leeds, New York and Hong Kong. She scripts and directs films, many of them for non-government organisations in India, working in the areas of shelter, education and health for women and children. In 2015, she appeared on the iconic BBC Radio 4 164 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker programme Desert Island Discs (cf. Young 2015). Her work centres on themes of freedom, cultural intolerance, everyday life and gender politics. According to Basu, “Dharker’s bilingual sensibility was shaped by her encounter with English in Scotland and her exposure to Urdu as the language of her home” (Basu 2016: 390). Having spent time in Mumbai, Maharashtra, she has also been exposed to Marathi. Moreover, as Basu writes, there are “snippets of Punjabi found in Dharker’s poetry” which seem to “echo a lost past of pre-Partition, undivided India and an undivided Punjab that she inherits from the memories of her family” (ibid.). In nearly all her poems, Dharker, through her lyric speakers and the use of Punjabi words, reflects on her biculturalism. By focusing on childhood memories and memories of visits to India and negotiating the speaker’s present-day search for identity in the ever-changing environments she traverses, she presents a liminal space of being in-between, sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes with complacency. However, many poems also particularly reflect on the speaker’s Pakistani background, contemplating her family’s traumatic experience of migration to Scotland in the early 1950s. Each poem bears the imprint of, on the one hand, local idiosyncrasies of personality and, on the other, the multicultural experience, demonstrating specifically the concern with the relationship between poetic craft and the legacy of migration and colonialism/ partition. As someone who was from the very beginning a critic of Islam, the religion in which she was brought up (cf. Basu 2016: 394), Dharker also seriously reflects on women’s lives in this context. Dharker’s earlier collection of poems Postcards from God (1997), includes the poem “Purdah”, consisting of “Purdah I” and “Purdah II”. ‘Purdah’ means a ‘veil’ or ‘curtain’ for women within a Muslim framework. In these poems, Dharker critically explores women’s confinement as a result of oppressive religious traditions and rules. Here, a woman’s only place is “inward” (Dharker 1997: 4, ll. 21, 36-37), simultaneously a non-place and, ultimately, a dangerous place. “This cultural indoctrination into a sense of sin is formalised through the practice of veiling or purdah” (Basu 2016: 394 f.). Since the veiling has consequences for the woman in terms of her appearance and movement, not only in the public sphere but also in the private sphere, the second part of “Purdah” (part II) portrays the hypocritical, dangerous and even corrupt side of the veiling of women. The idea of endangerment is even more explicitly depicted in the poem “The Haunted House” (Dharker 1997: 31), which, on the one hand, is a warning to women, as the house represents a torture chamber, while, on the other, is also a place to which the addressee in the poem seems to go of her own free will, thus being in line with the system in which she has been brought up. In her collection The Terrorist at My Table (Dharker 2006), the poet “responds to injustices faced by Muslims as result of the racial profiling and surveillance unleashed in a post-9/ 11 world” (Basu 2016: 396). Accordingly, the title poem epitomises two spheres, the inside and the outside: inside is the kitchen, which, however, is rendered abstract or disjointed, since “sentences” are sliced into “onions” (Dharker 2006: 22, ll. 1-2) and outside is “Gaza” (l. 20), “Palestine” (l. 31), “Jerusalem” (l. 38), places that immediately lend the poem a political stance. By starting off the poem with the idea 7.4 Indian English Women Poets: Texts and Contexts 165 of the speaker slicing “sentences to turn them into onions” (l. 1), that is to cook them, she hints at the continuous negative news reports, which are, for instance, about “A train / blown up, hostages taken” (ll. 8-9). The speaker is listening to the news while in her home in “Pollokshields” (l. 10), an area in Glasgow’s Southside district, where, as the speaker discloses, it is raining. As the speaker reveals, this is, however, only one way of presenting the news. It can be delivered this way or that, “chopped” or “sliced”: “Here are the facts, fine / as onion rings. / The same ones can come chopped or sliced” (ll. 24-25). The image of the onion being chopped or sliced also relates to its many different layers, implying different truths that need to be told, which the lyric persona attempts to depict and uncover through the slicing and chopping of the onion: the “Knowledge” (l. 28, with a capital “k”) the addressee “can choose / to give away” (ll. 28-29). She invites the terrorist to her table (“Here is the food”, l. 18), that is, to the common everyday activity of sharing food, which is put on a “tablecloth” of “fine cutwork, / sent from home. Beneath it, Gaza / is a spreading watermark” (ll. 19-21), demonstrates the speaker’s troubling situation, having come from a country herself (“home”) where there is a high threat of terrorism from Islamic extremism. Put differently, by sharing the “Knowledge” that the news is possibly biased, since it will “leave a stain” (l. 30), in other words, ‘dirt’, the persona suddenly becomes the invited guest: “Your generosity turns my hands / to knives, / the tablecloth to fire” (ll. 35-37). It turns out that it is the speaker who feels the need to reveal the truth in a situation in which she is enraged, since her tablecloth “sent from home” turns “to fire”. The last two lines of the poem “Outside, on the face of Jerusalem, / I feel the rain” (ll. 38-39), render the outside world visible again, where it is suddenly no longer rainy Pollokshields but — as if in a magic realist movement — Jerusalem, a city where the three major Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, exist simultaneously and which two states, Israel and Palestine, claim as their capital, resulting in constant conflict. Dharker seems to thereby assert that religious fundamentalism and the media’s reporting on it, whether here or there (“Gaza / is a spreading watermark”, ll. 20-21), is a “delicate thing / haloed in onion skin” (ll. 33-34). The idea that a terrorist can be from here or there is scrutinised more closely in the poem “The right word” (Dharker 2006: 25f.). This poem addresses the question of what to call someone who is suspected to be a terrorist. It thereby both challenges and undermines stereotypical notions and prejudices about being confronted by a supposed stranger, who may not be violent or unfamiliar, after all. Yet, the speaker is not sure what to call this person: “terrorist. […] Is that the wrong description? […] freedom-fighter. […] I haven’t got this right. […] hostile militant. […] guerrilla warrior. […] martyr […] a child who looks like mine. […] a boy who looks like your son, too” (ibid.). The speaker invites this person, who is “Just outside the door […] Outside my door”, a child, to eat with them. And, as it turns out, this child behaves in a very respectful and well-mannered way, thus eschewing the stereotype of the terrorist: 166 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker The child steps in and carefully, at my door, takes off his shoes. (ll. 32-34) Dharker’s Leaving Fingerprints (2009) collection also visually presents an innovative artistic response, in this case, to the biometric regime. However, as Das writes, “the fingerprint depicts the opposite of what a fingerprint is meant to be: it is no more a unique recognisable element of one’s individual identity or claiming a sense of belonging; rather, it stands as a metaphor for absence and emptiness” (Das 2020: 56). What is taken at face value, the irrevocable association with the terrorist or the fingerprint, the latter of which has to be shown at a biometric border checkpoint as a definite proof of identity, is constantly questioned as part of her criticism of the neo-colonial treatment of people within the country of migration. This epitomises Dharker’s political awareness as a person who has experienced migration. Hywel Dix explains: “Dharker herself belongs to a number of different communities in a global sense: Indian, Pakistani, British (including but nevertheless distinct from Scottish and Welsh) and even — as some of her poems portraying transnational feminism make clear — American” (Dix 2015: 55). This notion is visually underlined by the graphic/ typographic artwork that enhances the collection, since the pencilled lines Dharker creates in all her artwork do, here, in fact resemble fingerprints. The experience of being a migrant and, for that matter, living in a diaspora and thus being a minority, is a recurring topic in Dharker’s poetry, as highlighted in the poem “Minority” (Dharker 1997: 157) from her early collection Postcards from God. Here, the lyrical “I” discusses her position within the several contexts in which she has lived, invoking South Asian colonial-era indentured labour on sugar cane plantations, yet ending with the notion that she is looked down upon because she is the perpetual “foreigner” wherever she goes, which has been the case ever since her birth: I was born a foreigner. I carried on from there to become a foreigner everywhere I went, even in the place planted with my relatives, six-foot tubers sprouting roots, their fingers and faces pushing up new shoots of maize and sugar cane. All kinds of places and groups of people who have an admirable history would, almost certainly, distance themselves from me. (ll. 1-12) The line “I was born a foreigner” thus hints at the fact that the speaker, a woman originally from Pakistan, a country which, due to the political situation, her parents 7.4 Indian English Women Poets: Texts and Contexts 167 had to leave when Dharker was only one year old, does not have a home in the sense of a national belonging to an original native country. In addition, the speaker accuses other people of being racist. Many poems in Dharker’s fifth poetry collection, Over the Moon (2014), speak of the passing of her late husband Simon Powell and can be interpreted as poems of mourning. “Hiraeth, Old Bombay” (Dharker 2014: 23) is a case in point. In this poem, the speaker bemoans both the “Old Bombay”, or, more precisely, Bombay’s “Naz Café”, which, like the “Old Bombay” (of the 1980s, before the opening of India to Western capitalism and technology) no longer exists, and her late husband. The Naz Café, a once-famous venue, known for “the best view and the worst food in town” (l. 4), was frequented by film directors and actors from the Mumbai film industry. Equipped with “plastic chairs” (l. 6), “sticky rings on the table-top” (l. 11), close to “Marine Drive” (l. 8) and “round the bay / to Eros Cinema and the Talk of the Town” (ll. 8-9), it is imagined by the speaker to have been a perfect place to linger (cf. l. 17), if only it had not disappeared, together with the city’s name, Bombay. The poem is written in conditional clauses (past perfect conditional II), beginning with the sentence: “I would have taken you to the Naz Café / if it had not shut down” (ll. 1-2), and ends with the stanza: I would have taken you to Bombay if its name had not slid into the sea. I would have taken you to the place called Bombay if it were still there and if you were still here, I would have taken you to the Naz café. (ll. 19-23) “The Welsh word ‘hiraeth’ (hiraɨθ), which Dharker uses in the title of her poem, means homesickness for a home to which one cannot return, or for a home which may never have existed, as well as an intense form of longing or nostalgia and grief for the lost places of one’s past” (Sandten 2021b: 58). Dharker uses a Welsh word to explore the idea of homesickness and the loss of home, but perhaps also as a nod to her late husband’s Welsh origin. Dharker’s poetry collections notably reveal the complex historical links between Pakistan, India and Britain, and demonstrate how the personal is always intricately intertwined with the political. Correspondingly, the poet’s migration and multicultural background are addressed in other poems in Over the Moon when the speaker wishes to be elsewhere and/ or someone else. This is aptly highlighted in the poem “In Wales, wanting to be Italian” (Dharker 2014: 30), in which the speaker, who is revealed in the poem to be sixteen and in Glasgow, in addressing a poetic “you”, searches for the right word to express her idea of wanting to be elsewhere, elucidated with her question in the first stanza: Is there a name for that thing you do when you are young? There must be a word for it in some language, probably German, or if not it is just 168 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker asking to be made up, something like Fremdlandischgehörenlust or perhaps Einzumanderslandgehörenwunsch. (ll. 1-7) With the two words “that thing” (l. 1), the first of which is demonstrative pronoun, used for emphasis, and the second, an abstract noun describing a not-precisely designated object or entity, whatever the persona wants to address initially remains obscure. The two long German compound words, consisting of “fremdländisch, gehören, Lust” and “ein zum anderes Land, gehören, Wunsch” in this specific combination, are made-up words, which, if literally translated, express foreignness, country, belonging, one fits with the other, desire and wish. The second stanza, “living in Glasgow, / dying to be French, dying to shrug and pout / and make yourself understood / without saying a word? ” (l. 8-11) raises the question of whether living in Glasgow and perhaps speaking with a Glaswegian accent, which is considered the worst in the UK, might not be necessary if the persona imagines herself speaking and behaving like someone from France. The third stanza addresses the rhetorical question: “Have you ever felt like that, being / in Bombay, wanting to declare, / like Freddie Mercury, that you are / from somewhere like Zanzibar? ” (ll. 12-15). Attention thus turns to one of the most famous queer rock musicians of all times, Freddie Mercury, who was born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar to Parsi-Indian parents, attended English-style boarding schools in India from the age of eight and returned to Zanzibar after completing secondary school. In 1964, his family fled the Zanzibar Revolution, moving to England (cf. Richards and Langthorne 2016). Dharker thereby calls attention to other unexpected migrant stories involving people who have become celebrities in Great Britain. Still, in the fourth stanza, the persona asks, “What is it called? ” (l. 16) and puts forward the idea of being sixteen and “longing to be Italian, / to be able to say aloud, / without embarrassment, Bella! Bella! / lounge by a Vespa with a cigarette / hanging out of your mouth, and wear / impossible pointed shoes? ” (ll. 16-22, italics i.o.). The German compound words defined above seem to express the persona’s desire to belong somewhere else in order to be able to be herself: Scotland, France, India, or Italy, as the last stanza makes unmistakably clear — calling out Italian words, riding a Vespa, smoking a cigarette and wearing “impossibly pointed shoes”. Thus, the persona embraces the idea of migration and of perhaps being different and developing dreams of self-assertion within a diasporic community. The poem “Ghazals on the Grundig, Pingling in Pollokshields” (ibid.: 52 f.), is focused on the mixing of cultural signifiers, such as “ghazals” and a “Grundig TK20” (l. 2): a radio transmitting “Lahore via Germany / on Sunday mornings in Pollokshields” (ll. 5-6). It thus depicts the persona’s childhood memories, reflecting on how she learned “ghazals”, that is, Urdu songs, over the radio, thereby enhancing the idea of a diasporic life in Glasgow, re-enacting ‘home’. Vividly, in numerous poetic variations and experiments, and in conjunction with and underlined by her drawings, Dharker’s poems retell migrant stories and the search for cultural identity within a bicultural and often multilingual environment. In this context, 7.4 Indian English Women Poets: Texts and Contexts 169 the word ‘identity’ can be taken as a signifier of cultural negotiation or representational transgression, since Dharker’s poems constantly transgress cultural boundaries and explore hybrid and diasporic experiences — with a decidedly female voice — within the framework of the political, the religious and the personal. 7.5 Conclusion As a result of their multicultural lives, the Indian English diasporic women poets Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker share common tropes. For instance, they critically explore different countries, cultures, traditions and myths on the basis of their own experiences of migration, experiences that trigger the idea of constantly having to recreate something like “home”. They voice concern for women in patriarchal societies, creatively investigate the notion of the woman writer and centre on the personae’s searches for self. Both poets write in free verse, incorporating internal rhymes, alliterations, ellipses, onomatopoeia (sound words), repetitions and variations of words and lines. They experiment with language, creating poems in dialogue form, as in Dharker’s “What the women said” (2006: 74), poems in the Japanese poetry style known as haiku, or sonnets, as in “Undine” (Dharker 2014: 41). They also write narrative poems, such as Bhatt’s “Devibhen Pathak” (1991: 46-51), “Mozartstrasse 18” (1991: 57-61) and “The Hole in the Wind” (2000: 63-71; for a discussion of the latter poem see Sandten 2000/ 2001, 87-98). And they write concrete poems, such as Dharker’s “Seal” (2009: 14) or “Don’t Miss Out! Look Right Now for the Journey of a Lifetime! ” (2014: 62 f.). Bhatt also writes in a style known as organic poetry. Concrete Poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem. In concrete poems, letters, forms, spaces, words, fonts, shapes and images are played with in an attempt to visually simulate the topic they address at content level (cf. Sandten 2008: 87, FN 2). Moreover, the two poets live in diasporic conditions, attempting to come to terms with their past, negotiating constant cultural border-crossings and cultural transformations. This implies that since people living in diasporic conditions tend to be reduced to an exclusionary position within the receiving culture — even within some liberal multicultural societies — the concept of diaspora involves the rather difficult notion of “unbelonging” to both the homeland and the receiving country. Clifford underlines this: “Peoples whose sense of identity is centrally defined by displacement and violent loss cannot be ‘cured’ by merging into community. This is especially true when they are the victims of ongoing, structural prejudice” (Clifford 1994: 307). This is also, to a greater or lesser extent, what these two writers experience. Since merely “merging” is not an option, their writings thus formulate the necessity to define themselves by 170 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker way of constantly re-negotiating their multiple cultural heritages, settings and familial bonding. In their poems, Bhatt and Dharker creatively change the frames of reference, in a constant endeavour to view, from a certain instructive and enlightening distance, both foreign cultures and those they themselves newly inhabit. What the two poets experience by way of migration and diaspora, however, and what is revealed in their interand transcultural mode of writing, is often a blessing and a curse. Within this framework, the migratory processes experienced by writers whose work falls within a postcolonial context generate new and unconventional voices that are modified by culture-historical and, in the case of women writers, gender-specific concerns. In conclusion, it must be pointed out that Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker have not yet received much scholarly attention (for Bhatt, cf. Sandten’s numerous publications). This is due to their focus on poetry, along with Bhatt having resided in Germany for the last four decades and Dharker being a Muslim writer. In this chapter, theoretical approaches have been combined with close readings of poetic texts that render themselves particularly well-suited to the exemplification of a poetics of diaspora, hybridity, interand transculturality as well as the search for cultural identity. The argument is thereby made that in conjunction with the itinerant lives of these two Indian English women poets and within the discursive framework of loss, home, unbelonging and cultural identity, there lies an urgency to reconfigure the ways in which modes of self-perception and self-representation ultimately structure the very process of writing. 7.6 Study Questions ● How does the structure and form (line breaks, stanza order or literary devices) of the poem you chose for analysis correspond to its specific thematic representation (search for identity, hybridity, diaspora, transculturality)? ● Analyse the tone of the poem. How does the speaker feel with regard to the poem’s subject? ● How does gender intersect with identity constituents — class, religion, culture? ● In the poem under discussion, how does the poet represent ideas of loss, home, homelessness? Support your findings with quotations from the text. ● Discuss the notion of ‘diaspora’. Can you apply this concept to the poems you have chosen for your discussion? Do the speakers in the poems acknowledge or challenge this concept? Support your findings with quotations from the text(s). ● In what ways are the biographies of the poets reflected in the poems? Be careful to differentiate between the poet and the speaker/ lyric persona of a poem. 7.6 Study Questions 171 7.7 Further Reading Agarwal, Malti (eds.) (2011). Women in Postcolonial Indian English Literature: Redefining the Self. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers. Chaudhuri, Rosinka (2016). A History of Indian Poetry in English. New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/ CBO9781139940887. Crane, Ralph J. (2000). Shifting Continents / Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kuortti, Joel (2002). Indian Women’s Writing in English: A Bibliography. Jaipur: Rawat Publica‐ tions. Loomba, Ania (1999). Colonialism/ Postcolonialism. London/ New York: Routledge. Menozzi, Filippo (2019). “Fingerprinting: Imtiaz Dharker and the Antinomies of Migrant Subjectivity.” College Literature 46 (1), 151-178. DOI: 10.1353/ lit.2019.0005. Mishra, Vijay/ Hodge, Bob (1994 [1991]). “What is Postcolonialism? ” In: Chrisman, Laura/ Wil‐ liams, Patrick (eds.). Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. New York/ London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 276-290. Sandten, Cecile (1999). “Sujata Bhatt in Interview with Cecile Sandten.” Kunapipi: Journal of Post-Colonial Writing XXI (1), 110-118. Young, Robert (1995). Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London/ New York: Routledge. 7.8 Works Cited Primary Sources Bhatt Sujata (1988). Brunizem. Manchester: Carcanet Press. — (1991). Monkey Shadows. Manchester: Carcanet Press. — (1995). The Stinking Rose. Manchester: Carcanet Press. — (1997). Point No Point. Manchester: Carcanet Press. — (2000). Augatora. Manchester: Carcanet Press. — (2002). The Colour for Solitude. Manchester: Carcanet Press. — (2008). Pure Lizard. Manchester: Carcanet Press. — (2013). Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet Press. — (2015). Poppies in Translation. Manchester: Carcanet Press. Dharker, Imtiaz (1989). Purdah. Delhi: Oxford University Press. — (1997). Postcards from God. Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books. — (2001). I Speak for the Devil. Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books. — (2006). The Terrorist at my Table. Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books. — (2009). Leaving Fingerprints. Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books. — (2014). Over the Moon. Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books. — (2018). Luck is the Hook. Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books. Rao, Raja (1938). Kanthapura. New York: New Directions. 172 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker Secondary Sources Ashcroft, Bill/ Griffiths, Gareth/ Tiffin, Helen (1989). The Empire Writes Back. London/ New York: Routledge. Basu, Lopamudra (2016). “The Language of Diaspora: Meena Alexander, Sujata Bhatt, Imtiaz Dharker.” In: Chaudhuri, Rosinka (ed.), 389-403. DOI: 10.1017/ CBO9781139940887.026. Bhabha, Homi (1994). The Location of Culture. London/ New York: Routledge. Chaliand, Gérard/ Rageau, Jean-Pierre (1995). The Penguin Atlas of Diasporas [Atlas des Diaspo‐ ras, English], transl. from French by A. M. Berrett. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Chaudhuri, Rosinka (ed.) (2016). A History of Indian Poetry in English. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. DOI: 10.1017/ CBO9781139940887. Clifford, James (1994). “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9 (3), 302-338. Clüver, Claus (1997). “Ekphrasis Reconsidered: On Verbal Representation of Non-Verbal Texts.” In: Langeroth, Ulla-Britta/ Lund, Hans/ Hedling, Erik (eds.). Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 19-33. Das, Devaleena (2020). “Stripping, Veiling, and Inscribing: Devising the Body in the Works of Sylvia Plath, Imtiaz Dharker, Shirin Neshat, and Randa Abdel-Fattah.” HECATE: A Women’s Interdisciplinary Journal 46 (1-2), 44-66. Dix, Hywel (2015). “Transnational Imagery in the Poetry of Imtiaz Dharker. Anglistik 26 (1), 55-67. Döring, Tobias (1996). “Rev. of The Black Album: A Battle Between Opposing Forces and a Plea for Pluralization.” Hard Times 56, 18-20. Dulai, Surjit S. (2000). “Nissim Ezekiel and the Evolution of Modern Indian English Poetry: A Chronology.” Journal of South Asian Literature 35 (1/ 2), 178-191. Fahlbusch, Erwin (ed.) (1996). Evangelisches Kirchenlexikon: Internationale theologische Enzyklo‐ pädie. 3. Aufl. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 602-606. Frye, Northrop (1990). Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 10 th ed. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Genette, Gérard (1997 [1982]). Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Transl. by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Gibson, Mary Ellis (2016). “Transforming Late Romanticism, Transforming Home: Women Poets in Colonial India.” In: Chaudhuri, Rosinka (ed.), 64-81. DOI: 10.1017/ CBO9781139940887.005. Hall, Stuart (1990). “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In: Rutherford, Jonathan (ed.). Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 222-237. Heffernan, James (1993). Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University Press of Chicago. Hudson-Weems, Clenora (2001). “Africana Womanism: The Flip Side of a Coin”. Western Journal of Black Studies 25 (3), 137-145. Kristéva, Julia (1980 [1977]). “Word, Dialogue, and Novel.” In: Roudiez, Leon S. (ed.). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Transl. Thomas Gora et al. New York: Columbia University Press, 64-91. Levertov, Denise (1973 [1960]). The Poet in the World. New York: New Directions. 7.8 Works Cited 173 Little, William/ Brown, Leslie (eds.) (2007). Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 2 Vols. Clarendon, Oxford. Lootens, Tricia (2016). “The Locations and Dislocations of Toru and Aru Dutt.” In: Chaudhuri, Rosinka (ed.), 114-129. DOI: 10.1017/ CBO9781139940887.006. Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1935 [1838]). Speeches of Lord Macaulay with his Minute on Indian Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nelson, Emmanuel. S. (ed.) (1993). Writers of the Indian Diaspora: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. New York: Greenwood. Paterson, Don (2015). Cover endorsement. Poppies in Translation by Sujata Bhatt. Manchester: Carcanet Press. Patke, Rajeev S. (2003). “Poetry Since Independence.” In: Mehrotra, Arvid Krishna (ed.). A History of Indian Literature in English. London: Hurst, 241-275. Rajewsky, Irina O. (2002). Intermedialität. Tübingen: UTB. Rao, R. Raj (2016). “Interpretative Testimony: Kamala Das and Eunice de Souza.” In: Chaudhuri, Rosinka (ed.), 235-250. DOI: 10.1017/ CBO9781139940887.016. Richards, Matt/ Langthorne, Mark (2016). Somebody to Love: The Life, Death, and Legacy of Freddie Mercury. San Rafael: Weldon Owen. Rushdie, Salman (1991). Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta. Rutherford, Jonathan (1990). “Interview with Homi Bhabha. The Third Space.” In: Rutherford, Jonathan (ed.). Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 207- 222. Sandten, Cecile (1998). Broken Mirrors. Interkulturalität am Beispiel der indischen Lyrikerin Sujata Bhatt. Frankfurt/ M.: Peter Lang. — (2000/ 2001). “Blended Identity: Culture and language variations in the poetry of the Indian German-Resident Poet Sujata Bhatt.” Connotations: A Journal of Critical Debate 10 (1), 87-98. — (2004). “Kindred Sisters: Sujata Bhatt’s Poetic Adaptations of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s Self-Portraits.” In: Bode, Cristoph/ Domsch, Sebastian/ Sauer, Hans (eds.). Anglistentag Proceed‐ ings München 2003. Trier: WVT, 193-209. — (2008). “Politics, Plurality and Parody: Postmodern Experiments in Contemporary Scottish Poetry by Edwin Morgan, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead and Jackie Kay.” Anglistik: Mitteilungen des Deutschen Anglistenverbandes 19 (1), 85-98. — (2014). “‘Home was always far away’: Intertextual and Intermedial Poetic Appropriations of Double Consciousness in Sujata Bhatt’s Pure Lizard.” Special Issue: Mapping Diasporic Subjectivities. Journal of South Asian Diaspora 6 (1), 7-18. DOI: 10.1080/ 19438192.2013.828498. — (2021a). “Sujata Bhatt’s Poetry in a Cross-Cultural German Context.” In: Bahri, Deepika/ Me‐ nozzi, Filippo (eds.). Teaching Anglophone South Asian Women Writers. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 295-303. — (2021b). “Postcolonial Urban Aesthetics: The Poetics of Location and Dislocation in a Selection of ‘Bombay’ Poems.” Anglistik 32 (3), 53-69. Schulte, Bernd (1994): “Traditionalism versus Modernism or: Tradition and Modernity? Some Reflections on the ‘Stability of Instability’ in Post-Colonial Studies.” In: Reckwitz, Erhard/ Ven‐ narini, Lucia/ Wegener, Cornelia (eds.). Traditionalism vs. Modernism: Proceedings of the 174 7 Contemporary Indian English Women Poets: Sujata Bhatt and Imtiaz Dharker Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English. Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 25-35. Shah, Nila/ Nayar, Pramod K. (2000). “Introduction.” In: Shah, Nila/ Nayar, Pramod (eds.). Modern Indian Poetry in English: Critical Studies. New Delhi: Creative Books, 11-30. Souza, de, Eunice (ed.) (1997). Nine Indian Women Poets: An Anthology. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Welsch, Wolfgang (1999 [1997]). “Transculturality - the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” In: Featherstone, Mike/ Lash, Scott Lash (eds.). Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World. London: Sage, 194-213. Young, Kristy (2015). “Kristy Young Interviews the poet Imtiaz Dharker.” Desert Island Discs. BBC Radio 4. 15 July 2015. https: / / www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/ b061pgrv (last accessed 23.12.2022). 7.8 Works Cited 175 Part II: From the 2000s to the Present 8 Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace Asis De, Mahishadal Raj College, India Abstract Winner of numerous awards, Amitav Ghosh (1956-) is the first-ever Indian An‐ glophone writer to receive the prestigious literary award of India known as ‘Bhar‐ atiya Jnanpith’ in 2018 for an outstanding contribution to literature and literary philosophy. Ghosh’s novels broaden the sense of socio-cultural interconnection at several points in time and space and blur the boundaries of class, language, religion and ethno-national identity. This chapter, organized into four sections, explores one of his successful novels, The Glass Palace (2000), “the first of Ghosh’s historical novels on the radical transformation of the socio-political scenario in South Asia” (De and Vescovi 2022b: 18). It traces some of Ghosh’s recurring themes which include the migration of the subaltern, the expansion and decline of Empires and families, exile and plight of individuals in the whirlwind of political events and violence, the intrusion of science and technology in public life, the rise of plantation economy in Southeast Asia and the role of Indian indentured la‐ bourers there, Japanese occupation in the backdrop of the Second World War and finally, the interrelationship of family stories and histories. The first section of this chapter overviews Amitav Ghosh’s literary works and locates the writer in the continuum. The second section explores The Glass Palace focusing on Ghosh’s themes employed in the narrative. The third section, model analyses of three short passages, uses close reading to probe some key concerns of the novel. The ‘Con‐ clusion’ sums up the chapter and comments on the pedagogical potential of The Glass Palace. 8.1 Introduction Born in India on 11 July 1956, Amitav Ghosh, the writer whose literary works have been translated into more than thirty languages, is known for an extraordinary art of storytelling in his novels which showcase different cultural spaces and accommodate anthropological and historical research, travel experiences, autobiographical elements and philosophical reflections alongside literary imagination. Ghosh’s essays have been widely published in literary magazines like Granta, The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times, and later anthologized as non-fiction under the titles The Imam and the Indian (2002) and Incendiary Circumstances (2005). Apart from these two anthologies, Ghosh has published a seminal non-fiction work entitled In an Antique Land (1992), which emphasizes the illusory nature of borderlines simultaneously depicting the author’s preoccupation with history, culture, ethnicity and his travel experiences in Egypt. Two more nonfictional works, based on Ghosh’s travel experiences in Southeast Asia are Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998) and Countdown (1999). The literary influences on his ideas and works, as Ghosh confirms in some of his interviews (Aldama 2002, Chambers 2005, Vescovi 2009), range from Melville and Marquez, Balzac and Boswell to Naipaul, Proust, Irving and Ondaatje. Ghosh acknowledges “an enormous influence” of Satyajit Ray — the Indian filmmaker, on his ideas and thoughts, in an essay entitled “Satyajit Ray,” which has been published in Tabish Khair’s book Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion (2005). Ghosh has earned an impressive list of awards (see Ghosh 2011), including the Padma Shri Award (2007) conferred to him by the President of India for his contribution to Arts and Literature, and Bharatiya Jnanpith (2018), awarded to him as the first-ever Indian Anglophone writer for his outstanding contribution to literature and literary philosophy. Author of nine novels including the ‘Ibis trilogy’ to date, Amitav Ghosh is interested in charting the multiplicity of human experiences in different historical times — mainly in the geographical region of South and Southeast Asia — by constantly redefining the self in newer spatial realities. His first novel The Circle of Reason (1986), set in India, the Persian Gulf and Egypt, represents through its hero Alu’s expeditions several encounters between the East and the West, reason and passion, or the local and the global. The second novel, The Shadow Lines (1988), moves back and forth in time and space between the narrator’s family in Calcutta and Dhaka and the Price family in London, aiming at a philosophical understanding of the significance of borderlines between nations and their people on political and cultural levels. Ghosh’s third novel The Calcutta Chromosome (1996) brings together features of the detective novel, science fiction and historiography by moving back into the past, sweeping through the crucial years in the history of malaria research conducted by Ronald Ross in India in the late 19 th century. The fourth one — the grand historical novel that many readers often consider as Ghosh’s masterpiece, is The Glass Palace (2000), which “not only chronicles the transformations from colonization to globalization in one corner of Asia, but also reminds us how the waves of history have shaped the lives of people across transcultural spaces” (De 2022: 257). The novel and its critical dimensions will be explored in detail in the following sections of this chapter. Amitav Ghosh’s fifth novel The Hungry Tide (2004), set in the mangrove-clad archipelago of the Indian Sundarbans, showcases his meticulous depiction of the rivers with the aquatic bio-diversity, the river dolphins, the crabs and crocodiles alongside the Royal Bengal tigers inhabiting the region. Sundarbans is the mangrove-forested delta of the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin on the northern coast of the Bay of Bengal in South Asia. A region of more than 10,000 square kilometres and shared between India and Bangladesh, the Sun‐ darbans is a cluster of hundreds of low-lying islands, rivers and creeks and home to many rare botanical and wildlife species including Gangetic dolphins, estuarine 180 8 Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace crocodiles and the royal Bengal tiger. The name of the region may have been de‐ rived from a mangrove species called ‘Sundari’. In his novels Amitav Ghosh has mainly focused on the Indian share of the Sundarbans which is approximately 40 % of the entire region. The narrative of The Hungry Tide may be seen as “an attempt to write history en miniature” (Hoydis 2011: 293): the story is about Sir Daniel Hamilton, a Scotsman who bought ten thousand acres of land in the Sundarbans to build a settlement in colonial India. It focuses on the history of the port-town of Canning, the flush of victimized lower-caste Hindu refugees from Bangladesh after 1971, their settlement and eviction from an island called Morichjh-pi in 1979, and refers to historical references to devastating cyclones. The novels in the Ibis trilogy, comprising of Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015), “incorporate historical research into sharply realized imaginative fiction” (Thieme 2022: xiii). The Ibis trilogy, set in 19 th century India and China, contextualizes the history of opium production and trade in relation to the economic interests of the British Empire, leading up to the First Opium War. The First Opium War (1839-1842) is an armed conflict that broke out in China between the British and the Chinese Qing dynasty, as the Chinese royal power made an attempt to stop the illegal trade in opium mainly conducted by the British merchants and their allies. In May 1839, the Chinese government forced Charles Elliott — the British Superintendent of Trade in China, to hand over the huge warehoused opium at Canton (Guangzhou) for destruction. This sparked the con‐ flict which flared up in war in November 1839. The British remained victorious when the First Opium War ended on 17 August 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking allowing the British merchants to carry on free trade of opium. Ghosh’s ninth novel and the latest by now, is Gun Island (2019), which is set in Kolkata and the Sundarbans in India, Brooklyn and Los Angeles in the United States, and in Venice in Italy. It “upholds the issue of migration of both human beings and non-human creatures from their homes and accustomed environments to distant, unfamiliar places” due to the climate crisis and its impact on the local ecological order (De 2021: 68). Amitav Ghosh conceptualizes ecological refugees first with reference to his ancestors in The Great Derangement (2016), one of his potent non-fictions based on the Berlin Lectures delivered at the University of Chicago (2015). This non-fiction, divided into three sections subtitled “Stories”, “History” and “Politics”, primarily addresses the pressing planetary crisis of climate change and questions the partitioning of human culture from nature and the anthropogenic environmental degradation across the world. 8.1 Introduction 181 Anthropogenic is a scientific term that refers to the change or transformation of a natural system or sphere, directly or indirectly caused by human beings. The term is mostly used in the domains of climate studies, environmental education and research. As the etymological root is concerned, the word has been derived from the compounding of two Greek words — Anthropos and geneia. The book also explores human reluctance to acknowledge the scale and intensity of weather-related disasters, addressing these issues from literary, historical and political perspectives. Since 2020, Ghosh has been experimenting heavily on literary forms and techniques, which is very much evident in the three latest compositions: Junglenama (2021), a verse adaptation of the folklore of Bon Bibi (a popular legendary deity in the Sundarban); The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) which Ghosh subtitles as “Parables for a Planet in Crisis”; and the latest nonfiction The Living Mountain (2022), subtitled as “A Fable for Our Times”. Ghosh’s recent experimentations over literary forms beyond fiction and non-fiction, writing verse adaptations, parables or even fables, foreground his alternative styles of storytelling and aesthetic versatility. However, in most of his novels, Ghosh’s creative imagination finds its foundation in factual history and often illustrates the constant interaction between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ cultures. His literary works take a closer look at human migration and the transformation of ethno-cultural practices. The figure of the refugee in Ghosh’s novels “has transformed over time, even as [Ghosh] consistently attends to the socio-economic and cultural specificity of South Asian migrants via the strong ethical engagement of a storyteller” (De 2023: 108). Human movement through oceanic and riverine waterways finds expression in almost every novel, beginning with The Glass Palace through The Hungry Tide and the Ibis Trilogy to Gun Island. The principal characters in Ghosh’s novels appear to be cosmopolitans, though often bound by the ties of circumstances and endeavour, language, culture and community interests. The major fictional characters in Ghosh’s novels dwell in transcultural spaces, where plurality is a compulsory condition. 8.2 The Glass Palace (2000): Themes and Narrative Structure The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh’s fourth novel, is a multi-layered historical grand narrative divided into seven parts and further subdivided into forty-eight chapters accommodating stories of crisscrossing fortunes of three families split over three countries in Asia. Grand narrative or metanarrative is a comprehensive incorporation of history and knowledge in a broad narrative frame. Originally coined by Jean-François Lyotard in his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), the 182 8 Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace term attempts to present a totalizing view of socio-cultural phenomena and his‐ torical events based upon some kind of universal values or scheme. Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Glass Palace has often been seen as a grand narrative as it narrates the historical, socio-economic and political transformation of a considerable part of the Indian subcontinent over a timespan of more than a century. Ghosh has dedicated the novel to his “father’s memory” and acknowledged that “the seed of this book was brought to India long before my own lifetime by my father and my uncle, the late Jagat Chandra Datta of Rangoon and Moulmein, ‘The Prince’, as he was known to his relatives” (Ghosh 2000: 549). “More than the previous texts”, Julia Hoydis observes, “the novel negotiates the tension between active and passive forms of (political) resistance and explores the danger of misplaced ideals, the means of achieving personal and political independence as well as potential remedies in order to recover a sense of selfhood in the colonial/ post-colonial context” (2011: 255). In these statements, Ghosh is critical of the enduring legacy of the colonial empire, as evident in the construct of the commonwealth and its specific forms of commemoration. As the following discussion will demonstrate, the ideological thrust of Ghosh’s The Glass Palace challenges such perpetuation of hierarchical identities (racial and otherwise) and rigid conceptualisation of the past and memory from a dominant Western and colonial perspective. The Glass Palace shows an almost chronologically linear narrative with less exper‐ imentation than his other works and the fictional locale is primarily set in three countries - Burma, India and Malay. Employing an overarching time-span of more than a century (beginning with the Third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885 and ending with Aung San Suu Kyi’s movement for democracy in 1996), the novel is concerned with issues like the deposition of the Burmese King Thebaw and his exile to India, colonial rule and capitalism in timber trade and rubber plantation and indentured labour, Japanese invasions and the role of the Indian National Army during the World War II, aspects of modernism like photography and the automobile and above all, the interrelationship of family stories and histories. The Third Anglo-Burmese War (1885) is the final of the three wars fought be‐ tween the Burmese and the British in the 19 th century. It took place during 7-29 November, 1885 after the British Viceroy in India, Lord Dufferin, ordered the British Indian Army to proceed and capture Mandalay. After the short-lived war ended, entire Burma was annexed to the British Empire after the issuance of a proclama‐ tion in January 1886. 8.2 The Glass Palace (2000): Themes and Narrative Structure 183 King Thebaw in Ghosh’s novel The Glass Palace is a real-life character, who has usually been spelt by the historians as King Thibaw (1858-1916) of Burma — the last Burmese sovereign, deposed and exiled to India for the remainder of his life after the Third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885. Partly inspired by Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, Indian writer Sudha Shah has written a book about ‘the Fall of the Royal family of Burma’ entitled The King in Exile (2012) which has been published by Harper Collins. The Indian National Army (INA), also known as the “Azad Hind Fauj”, was formed by Indian nationalists in 1942 in Southeast Asia. Under the leadership of Captain Mohan Singh, the aim of INA was to secure Indian independence with Japanese assistance. Initially composed of the Indian prisoners of war captured by the Japanese army in Malay and Singapore, it adopted volunteers from the Indian diaspora in Malay and Burma. The INA even had a women’s regiment called the ‘Queen of Jhansi’. In 1943, the Indian National Army was revived under the lead‐ ership of Subhas Chandra Bose and the INA flag was first hoisted on Indian soil on April 14, 1944 at Moirang, 45 km from Imphal. After the WWII, the activities of the INA came to a halt due to the defeat of Japan. Almost 25,000 Indian soldiers of the INA were arrested as prisoners of war. The Red Fort trial of the captured INA officers in Delhi earned massive public support which obliquely indicates a rela‐ tively rapid end of the British Raj in India. The title of the novel, The Glass Palace, links Ghosh’s story with Burmese history of the last sovereign Konbaung dynasty by referring to the central pavilion of the historical royal palace built by King Mindon (1853-1878) in 1857 at Mandalay, though the narrative does not accommodate King Mindon but his son King Thibaw as a fictional character (Ghosh modifies the name as King Thebaw). The central pavilion of the Burmese royal palace was popularly known as the Glass Palace for it was a “vast hall with shining crystal walls and mirrored ceilings” (Ghosh 2000: 7) and “a dazzling emblem of the country’s elegance and self-sufficiency” (Mukherjee n.d.). Among the seven sections of the narrative, the first part, subtitled “Mandalay,” shows the arrival of an impoverished eleven-year-old orphan Indian boy named Rajkumar in the city of Mandalay just days before the arrival of the British Indian Army in 1885. The army has appeared in Mandalay to depose the Burmese King Thebaw and to annex his kingdom to British India. The British Imperial Army or British Indian Army remained the major section of the military of the British Empire in India before independence in 1947. Formed in 1859, it mainly consisted of Indian soldiers and British officials. The British In‐ 184 8 Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace dian Army had its important role both in the WWI and the WWII. The British Indian Army should not be confused with the British Army in India that precisely meant the British Army units sent to India. In relation to Ghosh’s novel The Glass Palace, it should be mentioned that the British Indian Army prevented a large-scale massacre by stopping the advancement of the Japanese forces at Imphal in India during the WWII. Ghosh connects the plot of The Glass Palace with the events of the Third Anglo-Burmese War, as Rajkumar meets Dolly, the youngest handmaid of the Burmese Queen Supayalat in the ‘Glass Palace’ during the anarchic melee of the war. Being overpowered by an obsessive love for Dolly, Rajkumar promises to meet her again. Ghosh leaves an opening for the future, as Rajkumar becomes a rich businessman in the course of time, tracks down Dolly and marries her. Regarding Ghosh’s selection of time in the narrative, critic Anshuman Mondal argues that “the main narrative takes place between 1885 and 1942” (2007: 112). He further comments on “the beginning of the end of British colonialism in Asia” (ibid.: 113) by pointing out that the year of the Third Anglo-Burmese war (1885) also “coincides with the formation of the Indian National Congress” and “1942 coincides with the Quit India movement” (ibid.: 112) led by Gandhi. Both events are two major points in the history of anti-colonial resistance in South Asia. The novel remaps the history of Burma, the ‘golden land’, from its feudal past to democracy through successive stages of colonial rule, autocracy and military Junta rule alongside the resultant changes in its peoples’ lives. Simultaneously Ghosh accommodates the revisionist historiographic stories “of ‘The Long March’ of thousands of Indians fleeing Burma in fear of the Japanese occupation in 1942, the history of the Indian National Army (INA)” (Hoydis 2011: 255). Chitra Sankaran characterises The Glass Palace as “an imaginative testimony to the predicaments of individuals who were caught in the crosscurrents of a larger history” (Sankaran 2012: xviii). Apart from Ghosh’s interest in revisionist historiography in the novel, the theme of territorial dislocation becomes prominent as the deposed Burmese King Thebaw and his royal family is subsequently exiled to Ratnagiri, a real-life coastal town between Bombay and Goa overlooking the Arabian Sea, in India. Along with historical figures such as Thebaw or Queen Supayalat, there are ‘ordinary’ fictional characters — Rajkumar, the protagonist of the novel, Saya John Martins, a Catholic Christian of Chinese origin and Rajkumar’s mentor, and Dolly, one of Queen Supayalat’s handmaidens who later becomes Rajkumar’s wife. All these characters experience territorial dislocation that substantially alters their cultural identity. Professionally a teak-supplier, Saya John was a foundling and “brought up by Catholic priests, in a town called Malacca” (Ghosh 2000: 10). In the course of time, Saya John comes to Burma and employs the ‘orphan’ Rajkumar as an assistant in his teak trading business. The question of belonging and home is a crucial one especially when someone experiences 8.2 The Glass Palace (2000): Themes and Narrative Structure 185 a dislocation for belonging is an essential component in identity formation. During his initial days in Mandalay, Rajkumar is addressed as a ‘kalaa’, which in Burma refers to a foreigner from across the sea. This word, derived from ‘kalaa pani’ (meaning ‘black water’ of the sea), is essentially connotative of diasporic movement and border crossing. Dolly, Queen Supayalat’s teenager handmaiden, first experienced dislocation along with the Burmese royal family after the deportation of King Thebaw to India. Dolly proves herself sincere enough in her attempt to negotiate with the new Indian cultural space as she instantly learns “a few words of Tamil and Hindustani” (Ghosh 2000: 54) to find grip on her diasporic condition that has destabilized her Burmese identity. Years later, while considering the prospect of her married life with Rajkumar in Burma again, she grows anxious of her culturally hybrid status, as she confides to Uma, the distict-collector’s wife who befriended her: “now I would be a foreigner — they would call me a kalaa like they do Indians — a trespasser, an outsider from across the sea” (Ghosh 2000: 113). As the word ‘kalaa’ connotes individual diasporic identity in Burma, the group-iden‐ tity of Indian indentured labourers as ‘coolies’ in the oil-fields of Burma or in the rubber-plantations in Malaysia, it signifies their subject position sometimes as perish‐ ing, sometimes as strong and enduring (see Pillai 2012, Bhautoo-Dewnarain 2012). Rajkumar, himself a representative of the old labour diaspora, becomes a prosperous businessman in Burma also by importing Indian indentured coolies to work in the British oil-fields for which he often moved to South India with Baburao, an Indian coolie-recruiter. The fictional character of Ilongo Alagappan, a successful political figure in Malaysia, is the son of a Tamil indentured coolie-woman who can be seen as the representative “sign of the passive female victims of the plantation system” (Pillai, 2012: 61) compelled to negotiate her identity of the coolie-woman with that of a subject of sexual exploitation. Part five of the novel, subtitled ‘Morningside’, showcases the wretched condition of the Indian indentured labour diaspora in the rubber plantations: “in Malaya the only people who lived in abject, grinding poverty were plantation labourers — almost all of whom were Indian in origin” (Ghosh 2000: 346). How massive the diasporic movement of Indian indentured coolies to the rubber plantations in Malaysia was, becomes evident as Matthew tells Uma, “They have a saying you know — ‘every rubber tree in Malaya was paid for with an Indian life’” (Ghosh 2000: 233). It is interesting to note that despite their contribution to the plantation economy of Malaysia, the Indian indentured labour diaspora was called ‘Klang’, “a derogatory reference to the sound of the chains worn by the earliest Indian workers who were brought to Malaya” (Ghosh 2000: 346) as Arjun learns from an arguing shopkeeper just after his arrival in Malaysia. Territorial dislocation, whether individual or in groups, unsettles the attachment to the land of origin and thus destabilizes the previous identity. It happens as with the old Indian indentured labour diaspora, so with the ‘new’ diaspora of the former soldiers of the British Indian Army, who have now turned revolutionaries and become members of the political association known as the Ghadar Party, the diasporic Indian nationalists: 186 8 Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace “Many of these immigrants were Sikhs — experience of living in America and Canada served to turn many of these former loyalists into revolutionaries … they had become dedicated enemies of the Empire they had once served” (Ghosh 2000: 222). These instances in the novel demonstrate how the diasporic dislocation from India lead to a conversion from loyalty to enmity towards the British colonial rulers. The Ghadar Party was an international political organization established by dia‐ sporic Indians in 1913 at San Francisco in the United States with the sole nationalist aim to free India from the British Raj. The word ‘Ghadar’ has its etymological root in Urdu, meaning ‘revolution’. Under the leadership of Lala Hardayal, Bhai Par‐ manand, Pandit Kanshi Ram Maroli and Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna, the members of the Ghadar Party patronized Indian freedom fighters with arms and funding. After the WWI ended, the party split into Communist and anti-Communist factions in America and was ultimately dissolved in 1948 after the Indian independence. Alongside the theme of diaspora or territorial dislocation, in The Glass Palace, Ghosh introduces the ideas of cultural hybridity and cosmopolitanism. Ranging from the Burmese King to the ordinary people like Rajkumar, Dolly and Saya John, the latter appear as cultural hybrids who adopt several cultural traits and mannerisms, language and even food habits of the host society for better cultural assimilation. On the contrary, the Burmese Queen Supayalat “wears her Burmese clothes till her death” which upholds her conscious resistance and “refusal to accept her exile in India” (Hoydis 2011: 260), even though she sometimes feels ‘intrigued’ by Uma’s sari “in the new style” (Ghosh 2000: 105), which is “an important signifier of Indian ‘national’ identity” (Mondal 2007: 118). Beni Prasad Dey, the Cambridge-educated Indian Bengali district-collector of Ratnagiri, undoubtedly “one of the few Indians in the British civil service” (Hawley 2005: 104) is a product of Macaulay’s English-language higher education policy in colonial India. This fictional character of the Collector may well be seen as a cultural hybrid as his identity “is shown to have thoroughly absorbed the colonial ideology of the civilizing mission” (Mondal 2007: 118). Macaulay’s English-language higher education policy is a shift in the history of the Education System of colonial India that was adopted by the then Gover‐ nor-General of India William Bentinck in 1835. Commonly known as Macaulay’s Minute, this policy was framed by Thomas B. Macaulay and aimed at ‘civilizing’ the Indian natives to produce “persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (Macaulay 1979 [1835]: 359). Most of the second-generation fictional characters in the novel have hybrid identities as evident in the names of Rajkumar’s sons who have an Indian name, as well as a Burmese 8.2 The Glass Palace (2000): Themes and Narrative Structure 187 name: the elder called Neeladhri (Indian) or Sein Win (Burmese), and the younger as Dinanath (Indian) or Tun Pe (Burmese). Though it was customary among the resident Indians in Burma, this practice of having two names is an example of cultural hybridity. Further examples of cultural hybridity emerge through the Burmese princesses’ activities of wearing saris and changes in their hair-style, indicating “a slow transition towards a hybrid Indian-Burmese identity” (Mondal 2007: 118). As the ethnic identity of dislocated individuals undergoes a transition towards hybrid identity over time, the questions of identity also transform on a larger social scale. The novel later portrays the rising tension between the Burmese and the resident Indians in Burma, where the Burmese accuse the Indians of living like the exploiting colonialists (Ghosh 2000: 240). Writing on this transformation, Hoydis observes: “Ghosh’s contrasting of the Indian perception of Burma and vice versa destabilizes both Burmese and Indian identities” (2011: 259). The novelist’s emphasis on the arbitrariness of the fixed notions of ethnic identity and belonging is evident in King Thebaw’s growing fondness of pork dishes during his exile, Rajkumar’s fascination for the Burmese “mohingya noodles” (Ghosh 2000: 482; original emphasis) and in his repeated mutterings, “the Ganges could never be the same as Irrawaddy” (Ghosh 2000: 544). As the individuals were undergoing cultural transition in the course of time, so were the societies they lived in. The British occupation of Mandalay had substantially changed the place: capitalist economy of the British Empire took over the erstwhile feudal agrarian pattern and businessmen and contractors like Saya John and Rajkumar flourished and earned huge profits. Extraction of timber from the Burmese forests, digging up oil-fields, the rush of indentured labourers and businesspeople from India, rubber-plantation economy — all contributed substantially to the transformation of the societies in Burma and later, in Malaysia. Mondal remarks that “the novel demonstrates how the economic and the political were two sides of the same colonial coin and it explicitly figures economic exploitation of land, resources and people as a counterpart to political oppression” (Mondal 2007: 113 f.). At the end of chapter seven, Queen Supayalat foresees the future of such ruthless colonial exploitation: They took our kingdom, promising roads and railways and ports, but mark my words, this is how it will end. In a few decades the wealth will be gone — all the gems, the timber and the oil — and then they too will leave. In our golden Burma, where no one ever went hungry and no one was too poor to write and read, all that will remain is destitution and ignorance, famine and despair. We were the first to be imprisoned in the name of their progress…. A hundred years hence you will read the indictment of Europe’s greed. (Ghosh 2000: 88) Queen’s words, very much in the tone of “the postcolonial critic” (Hawley 2005: 115), lays emphasis on “Europe’s greed” and the colonial exploitation of the economy of Southeast Asia. In chapter ten of The Glass Palace, Ghosh describes the ‘earth-oil’ wells of Burma located beside the Irrawaddy river near Mount Popa and the rush of the Europeans and the Americans there, exposing the insatiable appetite of “Europe’s greed”. However, with his steep economic rise, Rajkumar moves from Mandalay to 188 8 Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace Rangoon, which could be seen as a movement from a peripheral position to the centre and a repositioning of the diasporic self in search of a stronger identity. His subsequent investments in the rubber-plantations in Malaysia and his business association with Matthew Martins, Saya John’s son, insists on Rajkumar’s strategic accumulation of wealth from the global flow of capital in Southeast Asia. The colonial modernity of the early 20 th century introduced some scientific and tech‐ nological innovations such as automobiles and photography, which Ghosh addresses in The Glass Palace. References to different brands of cars have been used throughout the novel as a symbol of success, affluence and a modern life. Matthew remains very fond of cars throughout his life and “every incident of importance was hailed by a new model of car in his life” (Hasan 2013: 186). Rajkumar also uses different types of cars; Neel is seen to drive; Dinu uses a Skoda while driving through the city of Yangon in the final chapter of the novel. Though the reference to photography in the narrative comes first with Mrs. Khambatta, the Parsee woman who took Rajkumar’s wedding photograph at Ratnagiri, the theme of photography has mainly been elaborated with Dinu alias Dinanath, Rajkumar’s youngest son. The novel’s concern with photography and the multiple “references to Dinu’s changing camera models” (Hoydis 2011: 281) come under Ghosh’s historiographic agenda. In the third part of the novel, as Rajkumar takes his family to Malay on a tour, Dinu manages a Brownie camera from Dolly. Brownie Camera is a brand of handheld camera marketed for child-photogra‐ phers by the Eastman Kodak Company. Introduced first in February 1900 and de‐ signed by Frank A. Brownell, this low-priced ($1 each unit), point-and-shoot model became instantly popular. From this point to the end of the novel, photography becomes an inseparable part of Dinu’s identity. In an interview with Alessandro Vescovi, Ghosh makes a candid confession that behind the fictional life of Dinu, he had in mind the Indian photographer Raghubir Singh: “I thought of Raghubir in writing about Dinu, and it was my way of saying goodbye to Raghubir” (Vescovi 2009: 138). However, Dinu’s quiet and perceptive nature finds space during his spontaneous aesthetic engagement with photography: “It was only when Dinu had a camera in his hands that he seemed to relax a little” (Ghosh 2000: 226). After meeting Alison at Morningside in Malaya, it is photography that helps Dinu bridging their differences and coming closer to her. Hoydis rightly observes that for Dinu, “photography is a tool to explore the limits of linguistic expression” (2011: 283 f.). As Dolly meets Dinu in Burma after years of estrangement, photography becomes an alternative of language: “Instead of talking, Dinu photographs his mother in order to overcome their distance […] and to express his pent-up emotions” (Hoydis 2011: 284). It is a photograph of Aung San Suu Kyi on the front cover of a magazine that helps Jaya discover Dinu as the photographer and 8.2 The Glass Palace (2000): Themes and Narrative Structure 189 it eventually leads her to travel to Myanmar in search for him. In the final part of the novel, Dinu’s photo-studio, known as the ‘Glass Palace’, becomes the venue for public communication of political philosophy: “Here in the Glass Palace photography too is a secret language” (Ghosh 2000: 510). Though Dinu takes classes on the aesthetics of photography there, his lectures imply a “philosophy with political ramifications” (Hawley 2005: 112). In the Myanmar of the 1990s, where freedom of speech is strictly subjected under censorship, where “nothing that is worth saying can be spoken in ordinary language”, photography acts as the aesthetic medium of expressing the “imagined desire” (Ghosh 2000: 509) for liberty and democracy. Therefore, it is Dinu’s photo-studio, the ‘Glass Palace’, that becomes “a symbol of humanism and hope for Burma’s future and presents a transcultural space for the intersection of ethics and aesthetics” (Hoydis 2011: 286). Returning to the second-generation characters, they become prominent from the fourth part of the novel, where Ghosh introduces the twenty-one-year-old Arjun — Uma’s nephew, who after the completion of his training in the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun joins the British Indian Army. The character of Arjun is quite substantial in the novel, as in an interview with Chitra Sankaran, Ghosh comments: “I suppose the seeds of Arjun’s character were planted for me by many different people, including my father, who was in the Second World War” (Sankaran 2012: 2). As an officer, Arjun appears successful in negotiating his ‘Indian’ identity with the colonial conditioning of Indian soldiers in the British Indian Army, as Kishan Singh, Arjun’s subordinate ‘batsman’, tells Arjun’s sister Bela that of all the Indians in the regiment, Arjun is the “most English” (Ghosh 2000: 297). Ghosh puts forward the conflict in relation to soldiering in a colonial Empire and the spirit of nationalism from this point. As Arjun and his battalion move to the frontiers of Afghanistan, he comes to know from his fellow officer Hardayal Singh alias Hardy about the mutiny of a Sikh unit in Bombay. The incident of Hardy’s humiliation by a British sergeant calling him “a stinking nigger” (Ghosh 2000: 339) at Bombay’s Sassoon docks, brings forth the issue of racial denigration in colonial India. Though Hardayal’s family had a long history of service in the British Army, he grows increasingly sceptical of his role as soldier in the British Indian Army. Hardayal’s doubts begin to plague Arjun. However, in the face of the Japanese attack, as Arjun’s regiment starts moving to Singapore, many units of the British Indian Army begin deserting the regiment. Arjun is wounded and saves himself narrowly from the advancing Japanese troops by hiding in a drain with Kishan Singh. Next morning, they find Hardayal and come to know that most of the Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army have changed sides to the Japanese for the cause of Indian National Movement. Indian National Movement is no singular event of anticolonial resistance that aimed at the independence of India from the British Raj. Rather, it may be seen as a series of movements ranging from violent uprisings to peaceful protests. Begin‐ 190 8 Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace ning with the Indian Revolt of the soldiers in 1857 (identified by some as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’), Indian National Movement includes the political activities of the Indian National Congress (established 1885), sporadic violent conflicts between young freedom fighters and the British officials, and also nation-wide protests like ‘Non-cooperation Movement,’ ‘Civil Disobedience Movement’ or ‘Quit India Move‐ ment’ against the British administration. Indian leaders like Gandhi, Tilak, Go‐ khale, Nehru, Sardar Patel and Subhas Chandra Bose along with many more sig‐ nificant figures acted out their roles in the struggle for Indian Independence which ultimately materializes in 1947. Arjun’s dilemma is now at its height, and he ultimately accepts Hardayal’s offer of joining the Indian National Army. One may understand readily why, in an interview with Chitra Sankaran, Amitav Ghosh tells her that “Arjun’s predicament […] at the end is a profoundly ethical predicament” (Sankaran 2012: 13). All the words he has heard from people around him at times such as “weapon” (Ghosh 2000: 376), “tool”, “instrument” (ibid.: 407), “slave” (ibid.: 438, 522), “Klang” (ibid.: 346), work together to lead him to an epiphanic vision. Arjun’s paradoxical situation, his professional role as a ‘real’ loyal soldier serving the country, and his gradual identification of himself as a colonial subject, brings forth the issue of interpellation behind the colonial enterprise. Interpellation is a concept introduced by the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990) to indicate the process by which an individual is constituted within a certain ideologically structured field. The individual is ascribed with a social role or subject position conducive to the maintenance of that ideological structure. To identify someone as interpellated is to say that the individual has been successfully brought into accepting a certain role. In The Glass Palace, the colonial British Indian Army is that state apparatus in which Arjun finds himself interpellated. While lying injured in the Malayan jungle, he finds himself as a formless lump of clay which is being moulded on a potter’s wheel. In the course of the novel, Arjun gradually realizes that he is a doubly subjected slave of the British Empire. Apart from the issues discussed so far, Ghosh’s The Glass Palace is essentially a chronicle that accommodates multiple families, both in their formation and dissolution. Ghosh tells Frederick L. Aldama in an interview that the novel “was started as a family memoir, a project in chronicling a family history” (Aldama 2002: 88). However, it is worth noting that although Ghosh describes The Glass Palace as “a family memoir”, he does not depict a ‘complete’ family in the entire first part of the novel, except for the Burmese royal family: Rajkumar is an orphan and Ma Cho is a single woman; Saya John has a son but his wife is dead; Dolly is an orphan girl working as Queen’s handmaiden in the royal palace. It is only from the second part that ordinary middle-class families 8.2 The Glass Palace (2000): Themes and Narrative Structure 191 appear: Rajkumar arrives at Ratnagiri and marries Dolly; the Collector Beni Prasad Dey comes to Ratnagiri with his young wife, though he dies at the end of this section. In the third part, families grow: Dolly gives birth to two sons; Matthew and Elsa Hoffman marry, settle in Malaya and eventually Elsa gives birth to a son and a daughter. Part five of the narrative depicts the marriage of Rajkumar’s elder son Neel and Manju, Uma’s niece. After this one, no marriage has been described and families break into pieces. Rajkumar finally takes the decision to leave Burma with the remaining members of his family, Dolly, Manju and the baby Jaya. Their migration to India (historically, this refugee influx is known as the ‘Long March’) is presented poignantly by showing how the man, who was once the timber-tycoon of Rangoon, carried tarpaulin-wrapped packages of clothes and bundles of firewood like a destitute through the mountainous northern Burma, jungles and rivers. Part seven of the narrative is replete with the deaths of many characters, leading to the untimely breaking of families. However, amidst the tragedy, the novel also highlights the resilient spirit of individuals to survive under all circumstances. As Ghosh depicts the rise and fall of empires, crises in postcolonial nation-states or the decline of power and economy, the making and breaking of families contribute to the narrative tapestry of The Glass Palace whose members transgress any fixed attachment, identity or a sense of belonging. In the final part of the novel, the episode of Jaya’s meeting with Dinu, now a man of eighty-two living alone in Yangon after the death of his wife, displays the desire of the Burmese common people for freedom and democracy while critiquing the postcolonial chaos and authoritarian rule of the military Junta government. Dinu informs Jaya how his wife faced humiliation at the Scrutiny Board’s office for writing a story that the military junta authority of General Ne Win disliked. Criticizing Myanmar’s (formerly Burma) cultural scenario, Dinu reflects how every single literature written these days aligns with a reductive idea of ethnic essentialism. Ethnic essentialism is a rather reductionist idea of individual cultural identity where the basic determinants are issues like ethno-natal community identity, na‐ tionality, language, religion, gender identity alongside many more cultural factors which categorize an individual within the social construction of a community or nation. Ethnic essentialism becomes strategic in the framework of postcolonial theory, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak finds it. To Spivak, essentialism can become a political tactic when minority groups, nationalities, or ethnic groups mobilize their interests on the basis of commonality shared historical, cultural, political or gendered identity. His discontent with such distorted ‘authentic nationalism’ is the reason behind his fascination for the political ideology of Aung San Suu Kyi and her democratic demonstrations in Yangon. When Dinu comes to see Jaya off at Yangon airport and 192 8 Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace asks her about Rajkumar, Jaya informs him about Rajkumar’s death following a cardiac arrest and tells him that she and Bela had taken his ashes to the Ganges. Dinu cries out murmuring: “I remember how he’d always said that for him, the Ganges could never be the same as Irrawaddy” (Ghosh 2000: 544). At the end of the narrative, Dinu’s remark betokens the complex interplay between transnational migration, transcultural attachment and hyphenated identity. Transcultural identity refers to an anti-essentialist sense of the self in the context of migration literature in the era of globalization. Considered much different from ethnic, bicultural or multicultural identities, transcultural identity insists on the processing and integration of multiple cross-cultural experiences over the ethnic cultural identity of an individual and implies multiplicity of liberatory and coun‐ ter-hegemonic discourses. The idea of transcultural identity proposes an inclusive approach to almost all the foundational terms of identification like home, religion, language and cultural traits. Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace could clearly be categorized as a historical novel since it “defends the principles of human progress against the slanders and distortions of imperialism” (Lukacs 1962: 317) and reinserts “communities into the past, rescuing them from the marginal positions to which they have consciously been consigned” (de Groot 2010: 148). The linear and close-to-factual presentation of the narrative, where Ghosh features real-life historical figures (the Royal couple Thibaw and Supayalat, Gandhi, Aung-San Suu-Kyi) with subtle political questions, responds to the format and agenda of realistic novel in which historical figures stay in the background, while the focus remains on the ordinary human beings. Ghosh has prioritized the perspective of the disempowered to enliven the past and thus added a political urgency to the narrative, incorporating the socio-cultural, political and economic legacies and mechanisms of empire. The apparently ordinary but major characters often stand for larger historical forces: for example, Rajkumar and Saya John as icons of capitalist economy, Uma as the spirit of liberal humanism, Arjun as the agonized colonial subject, Hardy as an icon of young Indian nationalism, and Dinu as the face of socialist internationalism (Mondal 2007: 158; Hoydis 2011: 258). The novelist shows how historical events can communicate transnationally, often by even deconstructing the very notion of nationhood. The Glass Palace can also be read as a novel featuring modernity and cosmopolitanism, as most of the fictional characters remain highly mobile outside their socio-cultural spaces of origin. The female characters in the novel are not merely meek representatives of a culturally ‘closed’ domestic space. From Queen Supayalat and the Princesses to Dolly, Uma and Jaya — all of them prove themselves “charismatic and competent in dealing with the cross-cultural currents they face” (De 2022: 267). Compared to their ethnic identities, most of the fictional characters in The Glass Palace are cultural hybrids, and it 8.2 The Glass Palace (2000): Themes and Narrative Structure 193 implies that cosmopolitanism is not a product of Western colonial modernity (Hawley 2005: 113; Hoydis 2011: 258; De 2022: 268 f.). According to Kwame Anthony Appiah cosmopolitanism “is infinite ways of being” (Appiah 2007: 174). Accordingly, as I argue elsewhere, Ghosh’s The Glass Palace can be read “not just as a ‘historical’ novel, but as an emancipatory narrative experience with an inclusive spirit of cosmopolitanism” (De 2022: 270). 8.3 Model Analyses of Three Passages from Ghosh’s The Glass Palace This section accommodates model analyses of three short passages extracted from The Glass Palace. Since this novel has been narrated in the fashion of chronicling family-stories through several historical periods across countries and transcultural spaces, the readers should notice how issues like British imperial expansionism, the collapse of dynasties, migration, exile and confinement, ethno-racial differences, food habits and dress, the transformation of cultural identity, colonial capitalism, oil-field and plantation economy, elite peoples’ fascinations for photography and automobiles in 20 th century India and Malay, imperial soldiering in the British Indian Army, Indian nationalism, and even the Burmese democracy in the 1990s, alongside the effects of history on individual lives have been represented with multidimensional affective nuances. The first passage in this section has been extracted from Chapter Five of Part One (“Mandalay”). This passage is concerned with King Thebaw’s reflections on human migrations during his exilic transportation to India from Burma: The King raised his glasses to his eyes and spotted several Indian faces along the waterfront. What vast, what incomprehensible power, to move people in such huge numbers from one place to another — emperors, kings, farmers, dockworkers, soldiers, coolies, policemen. Why? Why this furious movement — people taken from one place to another, to pull rickshaws, to sit blind in exile? And where would his own people go, now that they were a part of this empire? It wouldn’t suit them, all this moving about. They were not a portable people, the Burmese; he knew this, very well, for himself. He had never wanted to go anywhere. Yet here he was, on his way to India. (Ghosh 2000: 50) This excerpt written in free indirect discourse, showcases King Thebaw’s reflections on the mysterious power of the British Empire and its economy, compelling people ranging from the “emperors” to the “coolies” to move across their respective countries of origin to unfamiliar places. John C. Hawley observes that in Rangoon, “where the British had transported almost more Indians than there were Burmese, the King pauses to think on his way to exile in India” (Hawley 2005: 115) about the severity of the fate of exile. The reference to sitting “blind in exile” is not a casual one, as there is an historical allusion to the last Indian Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, who was 194 8 Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace exiled by the British to Rangoon (a reverse movement to that of Thebaw) from India some thirty years back. Bahadur Shah Zafar or Bahadur Shah II (1775-1862) was the last Mughal emperor of India. Apart from being a royal character in the Indian history, he was a poet, musician and calligrapher. Though he had hardly any real political authority, Shah II ascended the throne in 1837 and was transported with his family to Rangoon by the British administration in 1857 as an exile for the remainder of his life. Bahadur Shah Zafar was not just the last Mughal emperor of India, but also a prominent figure in India’s First War of Independence. William Dalrymple, the Delhi-based Scottish historian and writer has authored a narrative entitled The Last Mughal (2006) on the last days of Bahadur Shah Zafar in Delhi during the outbreak of the revolt in 1857 and the ‘Fall’ of the Mughal dynasty in India. Through the fictional character of the deposed Burmese sovereign Thebaw, Ghosh foregrounds the conflict between the ‘furious movement’ of people and the Burmese spirit of cultural attachment and rootedness to the place of origin. The passage also underscores a bitter tone of irony, as is often the effect of the free indirect discourse, as the deposed Burmese King Thebaw still thinks of “his own people” who have now become “a part of this (the British) empire”. The King may find it his royal responsibility to think of his erstwhile subjects in Burma as they “were not a portable people”, but “his own” status now is no more than that of a prisoner of war on the way to exile at a far-away place. Though King Thebaw “had never wanted to go anywhere” outside Burma, his predicament of exile is situational in the historical context of the expansionist aggression of the British Empire. The second passage extracted from Chapter Seven of Part One (“Mandalay”), focusses on the cultural transformation of the young princesses of the Burmese Royal Family, which is evident in their appearance and acquisition of new languages: In their early years in India, the Princesses usually dressed in Burmese clothes — aingyis and htameins. But as the years passed their garments changed. One day, no one quite remembered when, they appeared in saris — not expensive or sumptuous saris but the simple green and red cottons of the district. They began to wear their hair braided and oiled like Ratnagiri schoolgirls; they learnt to speak Marathi and Hindustani as fluently as any of the townsfolk — it was only with their parents that they now spoke Burmese. (Ghosh 2000: 76 f.) This passage foregrounds the cultural hybridity of the four Burmese princesses and their gradual transition to an Indo-Burmese identity. The references to “aingyis and htameins” — ethnic Burmese clothes, emphasize the royal family’s adherence to ethno-cultural dressings in the early years of exile while the reference to “saris” implies the cultural transition. The narrator casually dismantles any clear sense of time associated with this transition: “no one quite remembered when, they appeared 8.3 Model Analyses of Three Passages from Ghosh’s The Glass Palace 195 in saris.” The change of fortune is evident in the description of the quality of the “saris” the princesses wear: “not expensive or sumptuous saris but the simple green and red cottons of the district”. Even the princesses’ change of hairstyle, “braided and oiled like Ratnagiri schoolgirls”, highlights the disappearance of their ‘Royal’ identity, as well as their assimilation in the ‘local’ cultural space of Ratnagiri. The princesses’ skill of acquisition of local Indian languages like “Marathi and Hindustani” further emphasizes their assimilation in the ‘local’ culture. However, the narrator does not forget to mention that the princesses use Burmese in the domestic space while conversing “only with their parents”. The conflicting ideas of Indian nationalism and soldiering in the British Indian Army, plague Arjun’s thoughts after his fellow-soldier Hardayal puts some questions before him. The third passage extracted from Chapter Thirty-four in Part Six (“The Front”), selected for analysis, showcases the ethical dilemma: But ask yourself, Arjun: what does it mean for you and me to be in this army? You’re always talking about soldiering as being just a job. But you know, yaar, it isn’t just a job — it’s when you’re sitting in a trench that you realize that there’s something very primitive about what we do. In the everyday world when would you ever stand up and say — ‘I’m going to risk my life for this’? As a human being it’s something you can only do if you know why you’re doing it. But when I was sitting in that trench, it was as if my heart and my hand had no connection — each seemed to belong to a different person. It was as if I wasn’t really a human being — just a tool, an instrument. This is what I ask myself, Arjun: In what way do I become human again? How do I connect what I do with what I want, in my heart? (Ghosh 2000: 406 f.) Unlike the previous passages this third one is an extract from a dialogue where Hardayal addresses Arjun and insists on the moral point behind soldiering in a colonial army quite intimately, as he calls him “yaar” (meaning ‘friend’ in Hindi). Taking almost the role of conscience and positioning themselves in the same situation — “you and me to be in this army” — Hardayal attempts to differentiate between soldiering as profession and as a passionately moral engagement for the nationalistic cause. It appears that Ghosh subtly upholds the difference between the western and the Indian attitudes to soldiering through Hardayal’s view: Arjun, like Captain Bluntschli in George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man (1894), takes “soldiering as being just a job”, whereas Hardayal insists on the “connection” between a soldier’s “heart” and his “hand” passionately holding the arms against the enemy to defend his country. The intricate relationship between nationalism and soldiering surfaces as the soldier finds himself not as “a human being, just a tool, an instrument”. Hardayal confesses that his dilemma in connection to his duty as a soldier in the British Indian Army and his ethno-national identity as an Indian has confused him so severely that he doubts, “In what way do I become human again? ”, lamenting the loss of his “human” status. It is important to “connect” activities with meaningful purpose, Hardayal tells Arjun, in order to avoid moral and ethical predicaments. Arjun feels convinced and decides 196 8 Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace ultimately to fight against the British Indian Army as a soldier of the Indian National Army before his tragic death in Burma. 8.4 Conclusion In The Glass Palace, as in many other novels, one of Ghosh’s preferred themes is the effects of history on human lives, individual predicaments and transformations. Stories of families being made and unmade, the rise and fall of empires, change of fortune and identity in the whirlwind of historical events constitute the narrative of The Glass Palace, where Ghosh’s role is not just of a novelist but that of a cultural historian. In an interview with Elleke Boehmer and Anshuman Mondal, Ghosh calls The Glass Palace his first novel “about the dome of empire” (Boehmer and Mondal 2012: 34). As the chapter has demonstrated, “all sorts of empires come under criticism within the pages of this novel” (Hawley 2005: 123). Interestingly, the identity of the unnamed narrator of The Glass Palace is revealed as Jaya’s son only in the final chapter of the novel, adding an element of surprise to the narrative. This narrative aspect, however, has a personal resonance for the author, as Ghosh says the following: “the day I sat down to write this book - the book my mother never wrote” (Ghosh 2000: 547). Alongside an effective storytelling, Ghosh reconfigures the narrative locations in several spatio-temporal orders with minute imaginative details: the Burmese city of Mandalay, Thebaw’s Glass Palace and the deposition scene of King Thebaw in 1885, the activities in the teak and rubber plantations and in the oil fields at the beginning of the 20 th century in Burma. The novelist recounts the almost forgotten history of the Long March of the refugees from Burma to India in 1942, the scenario of the warfront in Southeast Asia during the WWII, even the political demonstrations of Aung San Suu Kyi in 1996 to appraise the political history of the subcontinent alongside its chaotic postcolonial present. Ideas like interpellation and cultural translation come forward in the characterization of Arjun and the collector Beni Prasad Dey, both hailing originally from Calcutta, who stand as the personified representation of the “colonial ideology of the civilizing mission” (Mondal 2007: 118). The role of memory in the novel is crucial, as is the attachment to a place: at the end of the novel, Dinu’s recollection of his father Rajkumar saying, “the Ganges could never be the same as Irrawaddy” (Ghosh 2000: 544), underscores the spirit of rootedness over the “furious movement” of people witnessed by King Thebaw in the first part of the narrative. The transformation of the Glass Palace of Mandalay, commonly known as the “Hmnam nam dor” (Carter 2012: 15) into Dinu’s photo studio named ‘The Glass Palace’ in Yangon metaphorically evokes the historical transformation of empires into postcolonial nation-states struggling for rights and identity. 8.4 Conclusion 197 8.5 Study Questions ● Is Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace a historical novel? Why? ● Comment on Ghosh’s choice of settings in The Glass Palace. What do the different settings in the novel imply? ● Beginning with the presentation of the Third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885, Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace accommodates the devastation of WWII and the political destabilization in Myanmar in the second half of the 20 th century. What is your reflection on Ghosh’s treatment of the political in the novel? ● Comment on Ghosh’s representation of the themes of exile and refuge in The Glass Palace. How are exile and refuge depicted? Which characters are particularly affected and what is their respective approach to their specific situation? ● How does the text represent the issue of cultural hybridity? ● Give an overview of the scientific and technological innovations which changed the views and values in the early 20 th century, as shown by Ghosh in The Glass Palace. ● The political economy of the British Empire transformed the Burmese society thoroughly. How is this transformation represented in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Glass Palace. ● How is the anthropogenic transformation of the environment promoted by the British colonial economy in Burma and Southeast Asia? Please write a brief answer to this question with reference to Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace. ● How does the idea of the family remain important in Ghosh’s The Glass Palace? ● What role does photography play in The Glass Palace? ● How is Arjun’s dilemma in the face of a rising nationalist spirit portrayed? ● How does Ghosh deal with the issues of food and cuisine as vehicles of cultural identity in The Glass Palace? ● How can an inclusive spirit of cosmopolitanism be found in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace? Discuss this concept with suitable references to the novel. 8.6 Further Reading Aldama, Frederick Luis (2001). “The Glass Palace (India).” World Literature Today 75, 132-133. Aung-Thwin, Maitrii (2018). “Connections, Contact, and Community in the Southeast Asian Past: Teaching Transnational History through Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace.” In: Wong, Jane Yeang Chui (ed.). Asia and the Historical Imagination. Singapore: Springer Nature (Palgrave Macmillan), 155-179. Bhautoo-Dewnarain, Nandini (2012). “The Glass Palace: Reconnecting Two Diasporas.” In: Sankaran, Chitra (ed.). History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction. Albany: SUNY Press, 33-46. 198 8 Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace De, Asis (2022). “Transcultural Identity and Cosmopolitanism in The Glass Palace.” In: De, Asis/ Vescovi, Alessandro (eds.). Amitav Ghosh’s Culture Chromosome. Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 253-272. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789004360341. Geeti, Jebun Ara (2021). “Discourse of Power under Power Play: An Analysis of Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace between Displaced Diaspora and Nondiaspora.” Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature 2 (3), 1-7. DOI: 10.46809/ jcsll.v2i3.62. Gupta, R. K. (2006). “‘That which a man takes for himself no one can deny him’: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace and the Colonial Experience.” The International Fiction Review 33, 18-26. Hawley, John C. (2005). Amitav Ghosh. New Delhi: Foundation Books, 103-125. Moolla, F. Fiona (2022). “Time, Space, Love in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace.” In: De, Asis/ Vescovi, Alessandro (eds.). Amitav Ghosh’s Culture Chromosome, Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 25-41. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789004360341. Mujumdar, Aparna (2012). “Modernity’s Others, or Other Modernities: South Asian Negotiations with Modernity and Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace.” South Asian Review 33 (1), 165-184. DOI: 10.1080/ 02759527.2012.11932869. Nair, Rukmini Bhaya (2003). “The Road from Mandalay: Reflections on Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace.” In: Khair, Tabish (ed.). Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 162-174. Pillai, Shanthini (2012). “Resignifying ‘Coolie’: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace.” In: Sankaran, Chitra (ed.). History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction. Albany: SUNY Press, 47-64. Roy, Binayak (2020). “‘Not at Home in Empire’: Precarity, Fragility, and Resistance in Ami‐ tav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace.” Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies 8 (2). DOI: 10.5744/ jgps.2020.1011. 8.7 Works Cited Primary Source Ghosh, Amitav (2005 [2000]). The Glass Palace. New Delhi: Harper Collins. Secondary Sources Aldama, Frederick Luis (2002). “An Interview with Amitav Ghosh.” World Literature Today 76 (2), 84-90. DOI: 10.2307/ 40157268. Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2007). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London: Penguin. Bhautoo-Dewnarain, Nandini (2012). “The Glass Palace: Reconnecting Two Diasporas.” In: Sankaran, Chitra (ed.). History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction. Albany: SUNY Press, 33-46. 8.7 Works Cited 199 Boehmer, Elleke/ Mondal, Anshuman A (2012). “Networks and Traces.” Wasafiri 27 (2), 30-35. DOI: 10.1080/ 02690055.2012.662317. Chambers, Claire (2005). “The Absolute Essentialness of Conversations.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 41 (1), 26-39. DOI: 10.1080/ 17449850500062790. De, Asis (2021). “Human/ Non-human Interface and the Affective Uncanny in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island.” Rile/ Jile — An International Peer Review Journal 7 (1), 64-80. De, Asis (2022). “Transcultural Identity and Cosmopolitanism in The Glass Palace.” In: De, Asis/ Vescovi, Alessandro (eds.), 253-272. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789004360341. De, Asis. (2023). “Refugees to Worker-migrants: Transformation of Cross-border Migration in Amitav Ghosh’s Novels.” In: Gandhi, Evyn Lê Espiritu/ Nguyen, Vinh (eds.). The Routledge International Handbook of Refugee Narratives. New York: Routledge, 100-111. De, Asis/ Vescovi, Alessandro (eds.) (2022a). Amitav Ghosh’s Culture Chromosome: Anthropology, Epistemology, Ethics, Space. Leiden/ Boston: Brill. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789004360341. De, Asis/ Vescovi, Alessandro (2022b). “Introduction.” In: De, Asis/ Vescovi, Alessandro (eds.), 1-22. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789004360341. de Groot, Jerome (2010). The Historical Novel. London/ New York: Routledge. Ghosh, Amitav (2011). Awards. https: / / amitavghosh.com/ about/ award/ (last ac‐ cessed: 08.03.2023). Hasan, Nazia (2013). “Tracing the Strong Green Streaks in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh: An Eco-critical Reading.” Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi’s Bi-monthly Journal) LVII (1), 182-193. Hawley, John C (2005). Amitav Ghosh. New Delhi: Foundation Books. Hoydis, Julia (2011). ‘Tackling the Morality of History’: Ethics and Storytelling in the Works of Amitav Ghosh. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag. Khair, Tabish (ed.) (2005). Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Lukacs, Georg (1962 [1937]). The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin Press. Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1979 [1835]). Macaulay’s Speeches: A Selection. New York: AMS Press. Mondal, Anshuman A (2007). Amitav Ghosh. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mukherjee, Meenakshi (n.d.). “Review of The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh.” https: / / amitavgh osh.com/ books/ the-glass-palace/ (last accessed 23.10. 2022). Sankaran, Chitra (2012). “Diasporic Predicaments: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh.” In: Sankaran, Chitra (ed.). History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction. Albany: SUNY Press, 1-15. Thieme, John (2022). “Foreword.” In: De, Asis/ Vescovi, Alessandro (eds.), viii-xviii. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789004360341. Vescovi, Alessandro (2009). “Amitav Ghosh in Conversation.” ariel: A Review of International English Literature 40 (4), 129-141. 200 8 Stories at the Crossroad of Histories: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace 9 The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction Oliver v. Knebel Doeberitz, University of Leipzig Abstract The new millennium has propelled India to the very centre of global debates and recognition. Not surprisingly, these developments have found ample reflection in the fields of Anglophone Indian fiction, where authors, in India and in the Indian diaspora in the West alike, explore, screen and grapple with this mediated image of India in the new millennium. As scholars have also pointed out, whereas up to the 1990s the prevalent tendency in Anglophone Indian fiction was to offer a rather benevolent and positive portrayal of postcolonial Indian society, the later 1990s and especially the early 2000s have witnessed a growing dissatisfaction with social and economic developments in India among writers, in stark contrast to India’s official campaigns of nation branding. This direction of literary works has been conveniently subsumed by some scholars under the label of ‘dark India’ (cf. Mendes 2010, Goh 2011). This chapter investigates several post-2000 texts in an exemplary fashion to highlight some important new trends in Indian writing in English. Three novels will be explored more closely to bring to the fore some innovative approaches in recent Anglophone Indian fiction. Whereas Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) focuses on the misery of the poor and their survival in a neoliberal and increasingly globalized India of the 21 st century, Manu Joseph’s Serious Men (2010) is concerned with a portrayal of the Dalit people that leaves traditional literary depictions of passive suffering behind and instead represents a Dalit individual in his fight for recognition and wealth. A new direction of looking at the British Asians in Britain is provided in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006), which is less interested in the interaction between migrant community and mainstream society, a dominant theme in diasporic fiction since the 1960s, but rather foregrounds everyday life and internal struggles within the South Asian diaspora in London. 9.1 Introduction The new millennium has propelled India to the very centre of global debate and recognition. Fuelled by its groundbreaking economic reforms of the 1990s and by the rising tide of globalization, India represents a glaring example of the complexities faced by postcolonial societies which are drawn into the orbit of a neoliberal economic order. Moreover, with measures such as the controversial ‘India Shining’ campaign (2004) or the ‘Incredible ! ndia’ tourist promotion (2002), the country has undertaken great efforts to brand itself as both a successful modern economy and a veritable tourist destination ready for the 21 st century. Not surprisingly, these developments have found ample reflection in the fields of Anglophone Indian fiction, where authors, in India and in the Indian diaspora in the West alike, explore and grapple with this mediated image of India in the new millennium. Indeed, the first decades of the 21 st century have provided a number of widely-ac‐ claimed and commercially-successful literary texts dealing with India or the South Asian diasporic communities in the West, among them Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006), Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (2006), Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2007), Manu Joseph’s Serious Men (2011), Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis (2012), Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young (2017), Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House (2017) and, perhaps most famously, Aravind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger (2008), winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize of that year. Many of these texts have brought an imagery of India to the fore that oscillates between that of a successful economy with a prospering middle class and growing international presence and that of a country still plagued by appalling poverty, religious strife and caste-based injustice. As scholars have also pointed out, whereas up to the 1990s the prevalent tendency in Anglophone Indian fiction was to offer a rather benevolent and positive portrayal of postcolonial Indian society, the later 1990s and especially the early 2000s have witnessed a growing dissatisfaction with social and economic developments in India among writers. Their literary explorations stand in stark contrast to India’s official campaigns of nation branding, and this thrust of literature has been conveniently subsumed by some scholars under the label of ‘dark India’ (cf. Mendes 2010; Goh 2011). Robbie B. H. Goh, for example, argues that many more recent texts have shed “the accompanying affection for characters and human nature, and the hope for the redemption of the community, that is seen in the older generation of writers in English” (2011: 331). Visions of India in diasporic writings of the 21 st century display a multitude of different perspectives, with some writers treating “Indian culture monolithically oppressive, while others continue to romanticize Indianness, yet still others exoticize, eroticize and ethnicize the east for western consumption” (Singh and Chetty 2010: 1). In the field of Black British and British Asian writing, in particular, there has been a marked tendency to broaden the thematic field in the new millennium. Black British and British Asian writing is a term used to refer to literary texts by authors of African, Caribbean or Asian descent in the United Kingdom. After the Second World War, many immigrants arrived from Britain’s former colonial territories (most notably from the Caribbean and India), leading to the growth of diasporic communities, particularly in British towns and cities. 202 9 The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction Whereas fiction in the 1980s and 1990s was still predominantly concerned with addressing the issues of migration, the complex relationships between tradition and (Western) modernity and also the position of diasporic communities within British mainstream societies, many novels published after 2000 have concentrated on what Sten Pultz Moslund has termed “postmigration” (2019: 105). Moslund states that […] many writers (who happen to be black or brown) are less concerned with what has come to be known as the obligation of representation and choose to write about themes that have very little or nothing to do with racialization or cultural differences. Instead, black and brown characters with various cultural backgrounds are offered in representations of everyday life in Britain (and the complexities of life in general) and are no less universal in this regard than the habitually taken-for-granted white character with an (equally unmarked) Anglo-Saxon background. (2019: 107) This shift away from the experience of migration and an accompanying ‘obligation of representation’ and related topics represents a noticeable departure and, as Moslund contends, also requires a new academic vocabulary outside the tried-and-tested range of notions of hybridity and ethnic belonging (cf. Moslund 2019: 116). Indeed, this new direction in literary representations of India and South Asian diasporic communities in the West has been accompanied by fresh perspectives in literary criticism. Due to the rise and ongoing institutionalization of postcolonial studies in many universities in the West, the new millennium has, to a much greater extent than before, shed light on the role of the commodification of literature produced both in former colonial territories as well as in the diaspora of Western countries, most prominently the United States and the United Kingdom. Foundational scholarly texts such as Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic (2001), Sarah Brouillette’s Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), Rainer Emig and Oliver Lindner’s collection of essays Commodifying (Post)colonialism (2010) or Om Prakash Dwivedi and Lisa Lau’s collection of essays Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market (2014) have investigated the mechanisms by which postcolonial literatures are marketed and sold to mainly cosmopolitan readers in rich Western countries longing for exotic narratives about India that have “become the global flavor of the season” (Nabar 2014: 13). Processes of globalization in the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries, with their hegemonic flows of information have, as Vrinda Nabar argues, “unfortunately reinforced unreal stereotypes and essentialized cultural and national spaces, especially in First World/ Third World formulations of societies and identities” (2014: 16). More recent scholarship has also claimed that the present is shaped by a certain ‘re-orientalism’ in which, as Lau and Mendes argue, “South-Asian authors, for instance, are aggressively promoted in order to make a marketable commodity out of exoticizing the Orient or products from the Orient” (Lau and Mendes 2011: 2, Dwivedi and Lau 2014: 1, Nabar 2014: 14). 9.1 Introduction 203 Orientalism is a term popularized by Edward Said’s book bearing the same title and published in 1978. The concept of Orientalism describes how Western intel‐ lectuals, artists and travellers constructed their own vision of the East, the Orient in particular, as being based on polar opposites to the West. According to Said, these stereotypical depictions of the East have been employed to claim Western superi‐ ority in colonialist discourse. However, the claim that re-orientalism operates through a “collaboration between western powers and ‘elite Orientals’” (Lau and Mendes 2011: 3) is itself problematic, since it could well raise the accusation of ‘false representations’, as well as the question of who decides about the appropriateness of representations of postcolonial societies, apart from largely neglecting the rich criticism on Said’s original concept in the first place. A different direction of recent research on Indian literature in English is proposed by scholars such as Rosemary M. George who problematizes parts of the established patterns of postcolonial scholarship, especially the often-unquestioned focus on internationally acclaimed novels by Indian writers and, in her view, the neglect of non-English Indian fiction. More importantly, even, George criticizes that many scholars still investigate Indian writing in English almost exclusively through the lens of colonialism and its effects, which, as George fears, “‘maps’ the non-West as tidy variations on the same difference” (2013: 210) and ties in with Moslund’s focus on ‘postmigration’ mentioned above. Moreover, scholars such as Pramod K. Nayar lament what they see as the reductive postcolonial perspective of Western readership as being exclusively lured by stereotypes and exoticism and instead emphasize that the success of Indian literature in English today has as much to do with “India’s global iconicity” and its growing soft power in the 21 st century (Nayar 2014: 38). Nayar has a point here, since, unfortunately, much of postcolonial criticism still sticks rigidly to this important, but limiting perspective which, it can be argued, belittles authors and readers alike and suggests their complicity with an updated ‘orientalism’ that is supposed to be at work everywhere and, crucially, neglects the reception of Indian writing in English in non-Western parts of the world, such as South America (cf. Larkosh 2010: 124). This article investigates three post-2000 novels in an exemplary fashion to highlight some important new trends in Indian writing in English. Whereas Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) focuses on the misery of the poor and their survival in a neoliberal and increasingly globalized India of the 21 st century, Manu Joseph’s Serious Men (2010) is concerned with a portrayal of the Dalit people that leaves traditional literary depictions of passive suffering behind and instead represents a Dalit individual in his fight for recognition and wealth. 204 9 The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction Dalit is a self-applied term used for the members of the lowest castes in India’s caste system. Opting for the word ‘Dalit’, meaning ‘broken’ or ‘scattered’ in San‐ skrit, lowest caste people employ it as a sign of community and also of resistance to the discriminatory structure of the Indian caste system. Up to this day, Dalits are denied their full legal and constitutional rights, especially in rural areas. A new direction of looking at British Asians in Britain is provided in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006), which is less interested in the interaction between the migrant community and mainstream society, a dominant theme in diasporic fiction since the 1960s, but rather foregrounds everyday life and internal struggles within the South Asian diaspora in London. 9.2 Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) Aravind Adiga’s 2008 novel The White Tiger is undoubtedly one of the most well-known and successful Indian Anglophone novels of the early 21 st century. Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction of 2008 and appearing on the New York Times Best seller list, the novel has attracted widespread commentary for its portrayal of India in a globalising world. Aravind Adiga, born in 1974 in Madras (now Chennai), grew up in Mangalore and, after moving to Sydney/ Australia with his family, studied in Sydney, New York City and Oxford and then embarked on a career as a financial journalist. He now lives in Mumbai. His debut novel, The White Tiger, was awarded the Booker Prize in 2008. Books by this author: The White Tiger (2008). London: Atlantic Books. Between the Assassinations (2009). London: Picador. Last Man in Tower (2011). London: Atlantic Books. Selection Day (2016). London: Picador. Amnesty (2020). London: Picador. The White Tiger is also one of the Indian novels in English which have gained considerable attention in scholarly criticism. Major topics here focus, for instance, on comparing Adiga’s work to that of Salman Rushdie (Mendes 2010), the portrayal of neoliberal economic practices (Adkins 2019; Schotland 2011), questions of identity (Goh 2011; Gui 2013; Kaya 2018), the role of the caste system (Waller 2012, Gajarawala 2012, Saxena 2021) or the presence of animal imagery in the text (Walthers 2014). An epistolary novel that consists of letters written by the protagonist to the Chinese premier, The White Tiger centres on the story of the first-person narrator Balram Halwai 9.2 Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) 205 who is born into a lower-caste family and grows up in the small village of Laxmangarh. Balram manages to get a job as a driver with the rich Mr Ashok, son of one of the landowners around Balram’s home village, who has recently returned from the US. In order to escape his status as a servant and to free himself from the abominable living conditions of the poor, he both robs and kills his employer and successfully establishes his own business of a taxi service in the booming city of Bangalore. Motivated by the upcoming visit of the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, Balram, now having renamed himself Ashok Sharma to escape prosecution by the police, pens seven letters to the prospective guest from the North to explain how India ‘works’. As several scholars point out, the novel can be regarded as a Bildungsroman that traces the development of Balram from rural poverty to urban prosperity (cf. Mendes 2010: 279). Throughout the novel, two versions of India are continually evoked by Balram, the ‘India of Light’ consisting of the wealthy metropolitan spaces shaped by the Indian middle and upper classes and the ‘Darkness’, the rural regions with their innumerable impoverished and dingy villages where India’s poor are located and lead lives of almost unimaginable squalor. However, whereas the ‘India of Light’ is also inhabited by the urban poor outside the fancy shopping malls and gated residential areas, the ‘Darkness’, on the other hand, likewise contains a highly stratified society with wealthy landowners dominating the village residents. To a large extent, Balram’s narrative aims at explicitly deconstructing positive foreign perspectives on India and its economy, apparent, foremost, in its lecturing of the Chinese premier inherent in Balram’s uninvited letters to the politician, composed over the course of several nights. For example, the self-fashioning of India’s politicians as humble and peace-loving followers of the universally revered Gandhi is treated with contempt by Balram, who mocks the practice of showering foreign guests with “small take-home sandalwood statues of Gandhi” while at the same time maintaining a system of colossal corruption and injustice (Adiga 2008: 5). Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) was an Indian lawyer and leader in India’s anti-colonialist struggle against the British. With his famous strategy of non-vio‐ lent protest, Gandhi managed to unite Indian resistance against colonial oppression leading to the independence of India in 1947. One of the most famous politicians in 20 th century history, Gandhi was shot by a Hindu nationalist in 1948. Moreover, by describing the ‘holy’ river Ganges as filled with black mud containing “faeces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven kinds of industrial acid” (Adiga 2008: 15), Balram tears apart one of the most prominent venues for the Western tourist gaze and perhaps the most iconic symbol of an exotic, primarily Hindu India. This deconstruction of both admiring outsider perspectives on India as well as the country’s self-fashioning as an enticing mixture of tradition, mystique and cutting-edge technology appears all-encompassing in the novel, offering 206 9 The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction a stark contrast to India’s ambitious nation branding in the 21 st century. It includes the depiction of corrupt business policies in Delhi and Bangalore, the plight of rural living conditions as an antithesis to the alleged purity of the Indian countryside, the status-obsessed consumerism of the wealthy, and it also tears apart the notion of the Indian family as a bedrock of the allegedly healthy organic communities as espoused by the image of Mother India. Mother India is a term used as a national personification of India which first appeared in the late 19 th century. Mother India as a Hindu goddess is revered in India, and also lent her name to a famous 1957 film drama by Mehboob Khan. During his time as driver with Mr Ashok and his family, Balram is treated rather like a slave, and his jobs include having to take care of his employer’s dogs and washing his feet. The climax of Mr Ashok’s slave-like treatment of Balram appears when a drink-driving Mrs Pinky Madam, the Americanized Indian wife of Mr Ashok, runs over a human being on the streets of Delhi. To escape prosecution, the family urges Balram to take responsibility for it and to accept a looming prison sentence (cf. Adiga 2008: 167). Grotesquely, in order to persuade Balram to sacrifice his freedom, he is repeatedly addressed as “part of the family” (Adiga 2008: 165). Adiga has his readers torn between sympathy with his protagonist and rejection of Balram’s actions and philosophy, which is magnified by creating a character that “vacillates uneasily between approaching the image of the entrepreneur with sincerity and sarcasm, […] between self-celebration and self-hatred, between triumphalism and catastrophism” (Brouillette 2011: 44). Far from remaining an innocent victim of caste, poverty and circumstances, Balram himself complies with this system of injustice, preferring ruthless individualism and deriding any underclass solidarity. When he finds out about his fellow driver’s secret Muslim belief, he instantaneously forces him to hand over his acquired privileges and becomes “servant number one from now on in this household” (Adiga 2008: 109). Finally, when Balram murders his employer and steals his money to set up himself as a business entrepreneur in Bangalore, his conversion to transgressive anti-hero is complete. As Sara D. Schotland claims, his criminal deed and his subsequent career as an entrepreneur are not so much acts of rebellion, but rather show that “Balram becomes the new master, enriching himself but at the same time perpetuating a neocolonial structure” (Schotland 2011: 2). Akshya Saxena, in her survey of Dalit characters in recent Anglophone Indian fiction, goes even further and sees Balram as representative of a specific type of Dalit entrepreneur who “are their own advocates, and tend to be unapologetically dishonest, violent, insincere, and misogynistic” (Saxena 2021: 63). Consequently, these anti-heroes do not offer a solution to the plight of the poor, but rather exacerbate inequality and predatory economic practices. Moreover, Alexander Adkins contends that Balram and his criminal actions reflect “the incursion of neoliberalism into the developing world” 9.2 Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) 207 (Adkins 2019: 170), thus presenting India in the grip of ominous global economic forces that foster a pernicious dog-eat-dog mentality among rich and poor alike. The narrative power of the novel also lies in its extensive use of animal imagery. Balram is called a ‘white tiger’ by one of his teachers and uses it as a self-reference throughout the text, underlining the special status of himself as somebody who transgresses class and caste boundaries. Moreover, as Sundhya Walther points out, “[t]hrough identification with the non-human other, the human protagonist recognizes his own animalization as a result of his subaltern position” (Walter 2014: 580). In her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak? ” (1988), Gayatri Spivak argues that the subaltern (oppressed individual, peasant, proletariat) cannot be represented ade‐ quately in the academic textual tradition; this consists of failures of representation at two levels: representing the subaltern by imitating what she/ he would say about her/ his oppression; political representation in the sense of speaking for the op‐ pressed subaltern. The rich landowners around Balram’s village are called “the Stork”, “the Wild Boar”, “the Raven” or “the Buffalo” (Adiga 2008: 24 f.), whereas the workers in the tea shops are named “human spiders” (Adiga 2008: 51). Drivers are looking at their telephones “like monkeys” while waiting for their masters (Adiga 2008: 153), and Balram feels “happy as a dog” when being praised by his employers (Adiga 2008: 165). Among the most vivid descriptions in the novel is Balram’s comparison of the coercive nature of Indian society to a rooster coop in the market: Hundreds of pale hens and brightly coloured roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, […]. The roosters in the coop smell the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around. They know they’re next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with human beings in this country. (Adiga 2008: 173 f.) As a telling symbol of repression, the rooster coop illustrates the plight of the Indian poor as well as their ongoing obedience in the face of repression and misery. With the blood, the faeces and the organs signalling a violent disintegration of bodily boundaries, the poor appear as fodder for the rich, whereas the presence of the word ‘ brothers’ in Balram’s description further dissolves the man-animal dichotomy. This conflation of the boundaries between man and animal is also apparent in Balram’s view on his country’s colonial past: See, this country, in its days of greatness, when it was the richest nation on earth, was like a zoo. A clean, well-kept, orderly zoo. Everyone in his place, everyone happy. […] And then, thanks to all those politicians in Delhi, on the fifteenth of August, 1947 — the day the British left — the cages had been let open; and the animals had attacked and ripped each other apart and jungle law replaced zoo law. (Adiga 2008: 63 f.) 208 9 The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction Here, the pairing of civilization and domesticated nature with the influence of the British and the law of the jungle with India’s postcolonial subjects perpetuates the ‘Orientalist’ gaze of European superiority, with the formerly colonial Indian subject mourning the days of imperial order. Of course, this notion clashes starkly with prev‐ alent perspectives on the evils of European colonialism and the ongoing neo-colonial aspirations of the West, as criticised by Indian intellectuals such as Arundhati Roy (Roy and Sephal 2019). It also questions the merits of the whole enterprise of postcolonial statehood, since Balram concludes that today’s law of the jungle only leaves “two destinies: eat — or get eaten up” (Adiga 2008: 64). Here, the novel offers a particularly bleak vision of contemporary India, challenging the country’s self-fashioning as the world’s largest democracy as well as its appeal as a rich spiritual culture for Western visitors. In the years following the publication of the novel, there has been a lively debate on the text itself, but also on the question of postcolonial literature and its uneasy relationship with a mainly cosmopolitan, Western readership and its alleged desire for exoticized texts on India. For example, in her article on Adiga’s novel, Ana Cristina Mendes contends that The White Tiger can be regarded as part of a discourse that re-designs India for Western readers and thereby employs tried and tested represen‐ tational strategies that construct India as an exotic ‘Other’ (2010: 289). According to Mendes, the text appears as “another covert way —through the use of extremely effective self-reflexive representational strategies — of selling a refurbished exotic idea of the subcontinent to western readers” (2010: 276). This ‘exotic idea’ is the tale of the misery of India’s poor, of undernourished children, a polluted environment and slave-like labour — a mixture that might be shocking and alien, but also immensely interesting. Likewise, in his review on the novel, the writer Somak Ghoshal argues that “the West has at last given Indian writers a formula to get to the big prizes” and that “bad imitators of Naipaul and Rushdie are most welcome”, treating Adiga’s portrayal of India as a conveniently packaged commodity for Western consumption that is nowhere near the works of canonized writers of Anglophone Indian fiction (Ghoshal 2008). However, other readings of the novel by Indian critics have praised the way Adiga shows the corrupting influence of the West on India, with some scholars even arriving at the essentialist and ideologically-charged conclusion that the novel shows in an exemplary fashion how the West undermines the ‘purity’ of “our pristine culture” (Wani and Singh 2015: 1668). In several interviews Adiga himself emphasized that his intention in creating The White Tiger was to both counter the dominant narratives on the opportunities of globalization for India in the media and in the Indian governments’ campaigns of nation branding and to make the life of the utterly poor visible to the wider world (TheBookerPrizes 2008). Moreover, the author has responded to the criticism of his novel by the Indian establishment with a pessimistic outlook, claiming that “if they react with such naked fury to works that question their right to rule India, then this can only be a sign of trouble ahead” (Adiga, in Thomas 2009). In 2021, the streaming 9.2 Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) 209 platform Netflix released a film adaptation of Adiga’s novel, directed by the American screenwriter and director Ramin Bahrani. Treated as a “compulsively watchable class parable” (Ide 2021) and also as a gloomier response to Danny Boyle’s more optimistic film Slumdog Millionaire (2008) (Scott 2021), itself an adaptation of Vikras Swarup’s novel Q & A (2005), the responses by commentators, critics and the general film audience undoubtedly testify to the lasting success of Adiga’s bleak vision of poverty and caste in 21 st century India. 9.3 Manu Joseph’s Serious Men (2010) Manu Joseph, who had been working as editor of, amongst other publications, The Times of India, won instant literary fame with the publication of his debut novel Serious Men in 2010. Serious Men was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2010 and also won the Hindu Best Fiction Award in the same year. Manu Joseph was born in 1974 in Kottayam/ Kerala. After his studies at Loyola College/ Chennai and Madras Christian College he started his career as a journalist. He lives in Delhi. Joseph’s first novel Serious Men was published in 2010 and won both the PEN/ Open Book Award and The Hindu Literary Prize. Serious Men was adapted as a feature film by Indian film director Sudhir Mishra in 2020. Books by this author: Serious Men (2010). London: W.W. Norton. The Illicit Happiness of Other People (2012). London: HarperCollins. Miss Layla, Armed and Dangerous (2017). Brighton: Myriad Editions. Sudhir Mishra is an Indian screenwriter and film director. Starting his career in the early 1980s, Mishra has directed many films throughout his long career, among them Dharavi (1991), Chameli (2003), Inkaar (2013), and a filmic adaptation of Manu Joseph’s novel Serious Men (2020). Mishra has received numerous awards, among them the Indira Gandhi Award (1987), the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi (1991) and the Yash Bharti Award (2016). The main protagonist of the novel Serious Men, which proceeds chronologically and consists of seven parts, is the Dalit Ayyan Mani who works as a secretary at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai, is married to his wife Oja and has a ten-year-old son, Adi. The family lives in a tiny apartment in a squalid building in one of Mumbai’s slums, and in order to build a better future for his son, Mani resorts to trickery and blackmail to make his son appear a mathematical genius. A second main strand of the novel centres on Mani’s Brahmin boss Arvind Acharya, a renowned elderly astrophysicist, who enters into a fateful romance with his only female colleague, 210 9 The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction Oparna Goshmaulik. After ending the affair, Acharya is deceived by Oparna, loses his job and is finally reinstated as the head of the Institute due to Mani’s cunning dealings. Around the time of the publication of Serious Men, the Indian public experienced a string of intense debates about caste-based quotas and reservations for Dalits in government funded institutions which Joseph picks up and comments upon in his novel (cf. Lokhande 2016: 63). Literary criticism of the novel has focused predominantly on Mani’s position as a Dalit (Nair 2014, Lokhande 2016, Suvarna 2021) and the role of space and gender (Parvati 2020). In particular, the representation of the Brahmins, the ‘serious men’ working at the Institute, and the Dalits as diametrically opposed castes in Indian society comprises a central topic in Serious Men. Mani frequently reflects on his position and the structural injustice he suffers from as a Dalit person, particularly the Brahmins’ ‘gracious’ insistence on equal opportunities and merit which starkly ignores their inborn privilege and is therefore rejected by Mani as hypocritical (cf. Joseph 2010: 55). Mani’s view on the caste system and its impact on his life is summed up in his conversation to Sister Chastity, the Principal of his son’s school, who wishes to convert Mani to Christianity: The Brahmins were three thousand years in the making, Sister. Three thousand years. At the end of those cursed centuries, the new Brahmins arrived in their new vegetarian worlds, wrote books, spoke in English, built bridges, preached socialism and erected a big unattainable world. I arrived as another hopeless Dalit in a one-room home as the son of a sweeper. And they expect me to crawl out of my hole, gape at what they have achieved, and look at them in awe. What geniuses. ( Joseph 2010: 20) Mani here hints at the policy of the Brahmins to transfer their ancient claim to superi‐ ority to the modern world, adapting their philosophy to dominant European influences and thus safeguarding their positions. Also, Mani’s depiction of his abominable living conditions (“to crawl out of my hole”) continues the de-humanization of the Dalit people used to introduce the ‘BDD chawls’, and it also discloses parallels to the use of animal imagery in Adiga’s The White Tiger. Mani’s weapon is the sarcasm that he metes out to Sister Chastity, who, in her role as a Christian nun, represents the foreign observer. Mani’s rejection of the dominant Brahmin narrative of Indian history extends to his attitude towards religion. By throwing her statues out of their apartment, for instance, Mani reprimands his wife Oja’s devotion to Hindu gods, which, as he claims were created by the Brahmins and serve to uphold their superiority over Dalit people (cf. Joseph 2010: 47). With great cunning, Mani manages to trick the world into believing that his son Adi is a mathematical genius by bribing reporters, gaining access to exam papers illegally and, finally, by even manipulating his boss Acharya into becoming complicit with his scheme. The reader can follow Mani’s motivation for these risky steps since the text offers abundant insights into his world view and his sense of unjust treatment by a society with a strict social stratification that excludes him and his family. Mani’s 9.3 Manu Joseph’s Serious Men (2010) 211 sarcasm extends to his thoughts on the astronomical work done in the Institute by the ‘serious men’, as shown in a dialogue with another Dalit ‘peon’ at work: ‘One year later,’ Ayyan whispered, ‘another man will say, “No no, it is not a White Dwarf, it is a Brown Dwarf.” A year later, someone else will say, “No no, it is not a Brown Dwarf, it is not a star at all, it is a planet.” Then they will argue whether it is a rocky planet or a gaseous planet and whether there is water out there. That’s the game, my friend, that’s exactly the game.’ ( Joseph 2010: 24) Mani’s perspective on the astronomical achievements of the Institute appears indeed comical when compared to what matters in his own life. This research, as far removed as possible from the affairs of the here and now, also symbolizes the great detachment of the Brahmin scholars in acknowledging their own privilege that provides the resources for their academic activities and thus their importance beyond Mumbai and India as such, whereas Dalits like Mani, deprived of the opportunity to talk about such issues, are exclusively restricted to the confines of their local neighbourhood and their basic survival. To Mani, then, this research can only appear as a ‘game’, something that in no way helps to alleviate the plight of the poor, but rather strengthens the hierarchies that he sees as such a monstrous obstruction to his own life and well-being. In his musings on his underprivileged position, Mani also evokes space as a crucial component in stating that “[i]t was so easy to be the big people. All you had to do was to be born in the homes where they were born” ( Joseph 2010: 76 f.). In fact, the novel’s emphasis on the structural injustice of the caste system is achieved also by contrasting the residential characteristics of the two main characters Mani and Acharya, which, moreover, exemplifies the great importance given to spatial aspects in Joseph’s novel. Life in the BDD chawls in Mumbai, already constructed by the British to provide housing for the urban poor, is portrayed with vivid detail, comprising “a hive of the thousand one-room homes carved inside a hundred and twenty identical three-storeyed buildings” and with many people “all heaped under a single roof in gigantic clusters of boiling tenements” ( Joseph 2010: 6). The references to the heat and the dwelling of insects clearly outlines Mani’s living conditions as something to be endured beyond any meaningful residential agency. The family of three lives in a one-room apartment, “exactly fifteen feet long and ten feet wide” ( Joseph 2010: 9), with all characters having to organize their routines and their privacy within these walls. On the other hand, the residence of Acharya is likewise portrayed with elaborate detail. Situated nine floors above the ground and “glaring at the Arabian Sea” ( Joseph 2010: 61), his residence is part of the ‘Professor’s Quarters’, and the multi-room apartment even has a cook and a maid and also includes a storeroom (cf. Joseph 2010: 64). With the music of Pavarotti drifting through the rooms and with huge bookshelves covering the walls (cf. Joseph 2010: 64), Acharya’s apartment appears as the residence of a member of the global academic and cosmopolitan elite with its signifiers of ‘high culture’. Towards the end of the novel, by playing a secretly-recorded Brahmin conversation about the “racial character of intelligence and the unmistakable cerebral limitations 212 9 The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction of the Dalits, Africans, Eastern Europeans and women” ( Joseph 2010: 280) to an astonished public, Mani manages to stir up a minor riot in which the Institute is raided by protesters. However, by using tricks and deceit in trying to build a better future for his son, Mani’s solution to the plight of the Dalits seems to lie rather at the level of the individual who manages to see through the Brahmin myths and to use the prevalent structures to his or her own advantage rather than fighting for social change, another parallel to Balram’s dealings in Adiga’s The White Tiger. Also, the final concession by Mani that it is not possible to continue fooling the public about his son’s alleged mathematical skills offers little optimism but rather shows how discrimination and poverty remains such a deeply-entrenched part of contemporary Indian society. The author himself treats his novel as a deliberate attempt to create a representation of the Dalit people that overcomes typical ways of looking at the poor India, claiming that the Indian upper class usually expresses compassion for the Dalits, but that this is very reductive: “I think the poor in India are increasingly very empowered, and the time has come when the novel can portray them in a more realistic way. Mani is still an underdog but that is due to his circumstances, not due to his intellect or aspirations” ( Joseph in Page 2010). The publication of Serious Men has attracted much praise, but also considerable criticism, especially in India itself. Not surprisingly, the main thrust of arguments here focused on the portrayal of the protagonist as a Dalit, which can also be linked to a greater presence and visibility of Dalit authors and intellectuals in the 21 st century (cf. George 2013: 2010). For instance, Bandari Suvarna argues that the novel neglects the Dalit struggle for political empowerment, imbues Mani with innumerable detestable characteristics and also accuses Joseph of ignorance due to his own upper caste background (cf. Suvarna 2021: 107). Chitra T. Nair, on the other hand, praises the novel as “a social document mapping the experience of Dalits” that has “successfully registered the nuances of contemporary life” (Nair 2014: 241). Many Western reviews have often focused less on the text’s social criticism, but rather on how it negotiates the universal complexities of the human character, treating it, for example, as “an astute comedy of manners” (Carty 2011). The novel was adapted as a film by Netflix in 2020 and garnered mixed receptions. Filmed by Sudhi Mishra, the film included some major changes to the novel. Some critics have again taken issue with the portrayal of the Dalits in the film, regarding it as an anti-Dalit agenda due to its negative portrayal of Mani’s aspirations (cf. Sharma 2020) while other reviews find the depiction of social struggle unconvincing or even “too English”, hinting at a commercial filmic tradition that attracts global success and is destined for a predominantly Western audience (Srivatsan S 2020). 9.4 Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006) The novel Londonstani by Gautam Malkani, who holds a degree in sociology in Cambridge and worked as an editor with the Financial Times at the time of the novel’s 9.4 Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006) 213 publication, received considerable media attention, not least because of its emphasis on depicting the reality of teenage life in middle-class Indian communities in Hounslow. Gautam Malkani, born in Hounslow/ London in 1976, studied Social and Political Science at Christ’s College/ Cambridge and started his career as a financial jour‐ nalist in 1997. He currently lives in London. Books by this author: Londonstani (2006). London: Fourth Estate. Scholarly criticism of Londonstani focuses primarily on ethnicity and multiculturalism (Mitchell 2008, Gunning 2010, Moslund 2019), on the role of masculinity as part of identity formation (Husain 2014) and on the contextual climate of the British book market, the creative industries and their desire for non-white authors (Brouillette 2010). In addressing the lives of British Asian teenagers in South London, Malkani explores a topic that received glaring media coverage in the first decade of the new millennium, not only because of the ‘7/ 7 London’ bombings of 2005, in which young British Asian men had carried out terrorist attacks involving numerous casualties, but also due to a subsequent debate on British Asian people’s widespread dissatisfaction with their role within British mainstream society (cf. BBC News 2007). Londonstani, narrated by its white British protagonist Jas, consists of three different parts, and whereas the first section, ‘Paki’, introduces the setting and the group, the second part, ‘Sher’, centres on their new criminal business association with Sanjay as well as Jas’s romantic encounter with the Muslim girl Samira. The final part, ‘Desi’, depicts how Jas is rejected by Samira and is also ostracized by his friends, who disapprove of his romantic encounter and his violation of their rudeboy conventions. Rudeboy is a Jamaican slang term to describe followers of Jamaican ska music. The term originated in the 1960s and hints at the oft-violent behaviour of this street subculture. Rudeboy culture rose to fame in Britain in the late 1970s when the style and conventions of this youth subculture became a prominent topic in public de‐ bates about immigration. The group of desi teenagers that the narrator joins is led by Hardjit, the group’s athletic and macho leader who brags about his street-fighting capacities, rejects any form of integration into British society and discloses an ethno-nationalist worldview. The term desi refers to the descendants of immigrants from South Asia and is used by diasporic communities in the UK (cf. Gunning 2010: 119). 214 9 The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction Ravi complements Hardjit’s macho stance by boasting about his unlimited sexual energy and success with women while Amit continually relates how his mother does not accept the behaviour of his brother’s bride and demands respect. As teenage wannabe criminals, Jas and his friends, although they should be more concerned with retaking their A-levels, steal mobile phones and reprogram them, largely in order to keep up a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption involving German luxury cars, extravagant club nights and fashion. When they meet with Sanjay, a former banker in the city, they are drawn into bigger criminal activities with Jas finally being caught trying to steal mobile phones from his own father’s mobile phone business. In creating a white protagonist who struggles very hard to belong to the desi subcultures of his friends, Malkani has put the question of identity and its performative rites at the very centre of Londonstani. In order to claim membership to this group of juvenile, self-fashioned thugs, stressing a virile masculinity appears as a top priority, which also includes intense heterosexual boasting and a deliberate rejection of sophistication and education. It also requires a full-blown rejection of homosexuality so that verbal abuse frequently involves references to “batty boys” (cf. Malkani 2006: 10). Apart from this emphasis on sexual prowess and hypermasculine behaviour, very much at the core of the group’s self-fashioning as ‘rudeboys’, the insistence on ethnic roots is another cornerstone of their rules and conventions. This is apparent in ostracizing some British Asians who are regarded by the group as ‘coconuts’ because they appear to be too ‘Western’. For instance, Jas muses that one of these “mothafuckin coconuts” is “so white […] inside his brown skin, he probably talked like those gorafied desis who read the news on TV” (Malkani 2006: 21). Moreover, membership among the desi rudeboys of Hounslow also requires unabashed consumerism, testified by wearing the right brand of clothes and, more importantly, sitting in an appropriate, expensive car and having “the blingest mobile fone in the house” (Malkani 2006: 41). Michael Mitchell argues that by performing hypermasculine behaviour and displaying the symbols of material wealth, the group “realise that the consequences of failure to achieve one’s own performative identity is to be forced into an objective role created by the more powerful” (Mitchell 2008: 332). Thus, rudeboy culture marks the group’s strategy to escape potential racist attacks by mainstream society and, on the contrary, allows Hardjit and his friends to dominate by means of superior ‘desi masculinity’. Jas himself, despite his many efforts at imitating his desi friends, represents someone who stands rather at the periphery of hardcore rudeboy behaviour. For example, in a scene in which Hardjit is beating up a white fellow pupil, a ‘gora’, Jas attempts to make a verbal contribution: After all, Ravi had spotted the white kid in the first place an Amit’d helped Hardjit pin him against the brick wall. […] To make up for my useless shitness I decided to offer the following carefully crafted comment: — Yeh, bredren, knock his fuckin teeth out. Bruck his fuckin face. Kill his fuckin … well, his fuckin, you know, him. Kill him. This was probably a bit over the top but I think I’d got the tone just right an nobody laughed at me. (Malkani 2006: 9) 9.4 Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006) 215 The passage encapsulates much of the central topic of the novel, namely Jas’s desire to become part of the group and to acquire an authentic desi identity, but it also discloses his superior intellectual position that acknowledges the necessity of deliberate performative actions. As Sarah Brouillette contends, Jas and his conscious codeswitching presents to the reader a “welcome alternative to the other characters’ unselfconscious participation in what is basically represented as a set of antisocial and self-deceiving macho postures” (Brouillette 2010: 13). The passage, moreover, reveals how Jas distances himself from his own white British ethnic background in naming Hardjit’s victim ‘the white kid’ and, in subsequent passages, Jas refers to “the gora’s body” or “the gora’s head” when mentioning him and even addresses him directly as “white boy”, thereby employing abusive desi language as a way of gaining entrance into a full-blown rudeboy identity (Malkani 2006: 11). Besides Jas’s fascination for the culture of British Asian youth in South London and his struggles to articulate his identity, the rift between the traditions of the homeland and life in a modern European metropolis forms another major theme in Londonstani. Most crucially, perhaps, the novel depicts a diasporic community in which internal racism is rampant. Figures like Hardjit are constantly policing the boundaries of what a proper desi identity should entail, and this is complemented by a broad condescension towards British mainstream society. Moreover, the text also shows how Muslim, Sikh and Hindu identities within the South Asian community are treated as being at odds with each other by the central characters, with Hardjit claiming that it is best to “stick wid our own kinds”, which implies a deliberate self-segregation (Malkani 2006: 66). Apart from its focus on the internal hierarchies of the diasporic community and its relationship to mainstream British society, Londonstani also addresses generational conflicts in how cultural practices should be followed, such as that about the question of marriage and its many complexities. Arun, the brother of Jas’s rudeboy friend Amit, is challenged by his mother’s complaint that Arun’s soon-to-be bride Reena and her family do not show enough respect towards the family of the groom, which reflects the unequal status of sons and daughters in traditional Indian marriage constellations. The conflict finally leads to Arun’s suicide, by far the most dramatic event occurring in the novel, which entails a bleak view on the continuing role of traditional forms of ethnic belonging and which perpetuates a sense of dislocation for the younger generations of British Asians, regarded by Jas as “family-related shit” (Malkani 2006: 282). As Mitchell remarks, Malkani has crafted a representation of the parent generation whose obligation to the culture of their ancestral homeland is “motivated more by anxiety over the opinions of others of their own community, with whom they feel in constant competition, than by natural social interaction” (Mitchell 2008: 335). Thus, the segregation of the Indian diasporic community appears to be a matter of deliberate self-policing, similar to Hardjit’s insistence on ethnic exclusivity, whereas British mainstream society is represented by outreaching figures like Jas’s teacher Mr. Ashwood and his plea for tolerance and mutual understanding, in line with the official multicultural policies of the British state in the early 2000s. 216 9 The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction On a narrative level, Malkani employs several twists that surprise the reader, such as the revelation towards the end of the novel that the book’s protagonist is actually not part of the desi community but a white teenager trying to be accepted among his rudeboy fellows (Malkani 2006: 340). In this context, Malkani attempted to recreate the language of desi youth in South London, which requires some adjustments on the side of the reader: “U hear wot ma bredren Jas b chattin? Hardjit says, welcoming my input. — If u b gettin lippy wid me u b gettin yo’self mashed up” (Malkani 2006: 9). This passage shows a complex fusion to include linguistic authenticity, apparent in using common text-message abbreviations, an expletive-ridden language, as well as Cockney slang and the verbal repertoire of global hip hop culture. The incorporation of vocabulary from Hindi and other Indian languages throughout the novel also attempts to increase the representation of an authentic language of desi youth in suburban London. Not surprisingly, given the position of the author as one who was educated in Cam‐ bridge and has a successful career in journalism in central London, many commentators and critics raised their scepticism at Malkani’s claim to crafting a real-life portrayal of desi communities in the suburbs of London (cf. Brouillette 2010: 9). Kasim Husain criticized that the seemingly endless malleability of ethnic identity inherent in Jas’s imitation of a desi rudebody culture “positions the novel firmly within neoliberal multicultural discursive terrain” (2014: 560) and is, moreover, based on “a narrow account of ethnicity that paradoxically reinforces hegemonic cultural impressions of British Asian masculinity as threatening and strictly traditional” (Husain 2014: 555). Husain also takes issue with the novel’s tackling of ethnicity as largely devoid of past and present manifestations of racism, seeing it as “a symptom of what Jodi Melamed terms ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’, where structural antiracist critique recedes and ‘designer desiness’ is the sine qua non of the good life of the new ‘bling-bling econom‐ ics’” (2014: 551). Furthermore, the marketing campaign preparing and accompanying the publication of Londonstani has led to quite a few raised eyebrows. At the time of the novel’s publication, the author provided ample online material that elucidated his motivation in creating the novel and bolstered his claim of authenticity (cf. Gunning 2010: 124). 9.5 Conclusion As shown, the three novels discussed above reflect on the realities of either India or the Indian diasporic community in Britain in a post-2000 world. The influence of global developments and neoliberalism is present in many ways, from Balram’s musings on the location of India within the world economy in The White Tiger to the fusion of many cultural trends in the creation of a diasporic teenage desi-identity in Londonstani to the socially exclusive access to a world beyond India in Serious Men. Perhaps the most significant development in the texts discussed above, and in recent Indian fiction in English in general, is their rejection of the binary of West and East as 9.5 Conclusion 217 a fundamental organizing principle in the perception of their protagonists. Although Western readers might still be interested more in reading exoticizing tales about a mysterious, unfathomable ethnic Other so dominant in late 20 th century Indian fiction in English, novels like The White Tiger or Londonstani refuse to repeat again and again the established patterns of showing postcolonial Indian society as still exclusively suffering from its colonial legacies or of migrant experience as being exclusively shaped by ethnic roots and an imaginary homeland. What they show, instead, is the messiness of identities, the often-shifting importance of fixed signifiers of belonging, or the sense that East and West alike are caught in the maelstrom of unleashed neoliberalism. They thereby pose a challenge to their Western readers: the challenge of letting go of the neatly-divided identities of Western self and non-Western Other. In doing so, texts like The White Tiger, Serious Men and Londonstani and many others in recent years offer avenues for tackling the large questions of identities in a neoliberal, globalized 21 st century. 9.6 Study Questions ● How does Adiga construct his protagonist Balram as an ambiguous character in The White Tiger? ● How does Adiga use animal imagery in Adiga’s The White Tiger? What are its effects? ● Adiga has been criticised, especially by Indian intellectuals, for presenting a too negative portrayal of contemporary Indian society in The White Tiger. Do you agree? ● How does Manu Joseph’s novel Serious Men depict home in terms of living conditions and spatial comfort? How do the text’s formal and aesthetic strategies contribute to this portrayal? ● Give an overview of the critical reception of Joseph’s portrayal of the different sections of Indian society in Serious Men in journalist commentary and in literary criticism. Which position do you find most convincing? ● Comment upon the evaluation of British mainstream society by the different protagonists in Londonstani. ● What role does the display of various types of masculinity play in Londonstani? ● Is Malkani’s employment of his white British protagonist Jas (whose ethnic identity is only revealed at the very end of the story) in Londonstani convincing to you? Give reasons. 9.7 Further Reading Adkins, Alexander (2019). “Neoliberal Disgust in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Journal of Modern Literature 42 (3), 169-188. DOI: 10.2979/ jmodelite.42.3.10. 218 9 The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction Brouillette, Sarah (2010). “The Creative Class and Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 51 (1), 1-17. DOI: 10.1080/ 00111610903249807. — (2011). “On the Entrepreneurial Ethos in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” In: Lau, Lisa/ Mendes, Ana Cristina (eds.). Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics: The Oriental Other Within. London: Routledge, 40-55. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780203814543. Goh, Robbie B.H. (2011). “Narrating ‘Dark’ India in Londonstani and The White Tiger: Sustain‐ ing Identity in the Diaspora.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 46 (2), 327-344. DOI: 10.1177/ 0021989411404995. Mendes, Ana Cristina (2010). “Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45 (2), 275-293. Moslund, Sten Pultz (2019). “Postmigrant Revisions of Hybridity, Belonging, and Race in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani.” A Review of International English Literature 50 (2), 105-136. DOI: 10.1353/ ari.2019.0016. Nair, Chitra T. (2014). “Postmodernist Indian Sensibilities: Manu Joseph’s Serious Men as a Socio-Cultural Document.” International Journal of Multidisciplinary Approach and Studies 1 (1), 223-240. 9.8 Works Cited Primary Sources Adiga, Aravind (2008). The White Tiger. London: Atlantic Books. Joseph, Manu (2012). Serious Men. New York/ London: W.W. Norton. Malkani, Gautam (2006). Londonstani. London: Fourth Estate. Secondary Sources Adkins, Alexander (2019). “Neoliberal Disgust in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Journal of Modern Literature 42 (3), 169-188. DOI: 10.2979/ jmodelite.42.3.10. BBC News (30.07.2007). “Many Asians ‘do not feel British’.” BBC News, 30 July 2007. http: / / new s.bbc.co.uk/ 2/ hi/ uk_news/ 6921534.stm (last accessed 14.06.2021). Brouillette, Sarah (2007). Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1057/ 9780230288171. — (2010). “The Creative Class and Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani.” Critique: Studies in Contem‐ porary Fiction 51 (1), 1-17. DOI: 10.1080/ 00111610903249807. — (2011). “On the Entrepreneurial Ethos in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” In Lau, Lisa/ Mendes, Ana Cristina (eds.). Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics: The Oriental Other Within. London: Routledge, 40-55. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780203814543. Carty, Peter (2011). “Serious Men, by Manu Joseph.” Independent, 11 June 2010. https: / / www.in dependent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/ books/ reviews/ serious-men-manu-joseph-1996797.htm l (last accessed 23.06.2021). 9.8 Works Cited 219 Dwivedi, Om Prakash/ Lau, Lisa (2014). “Introduction.” In: Dwivedi, Om Prakash/ Lau, Lisa (eds.). Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1-9. DOI: 10.1057/ 9781137437716. Emig, Rainer/ Lindner, Oliver (eds.) (2010). Commodifying (Post)Colonialism: Othering, Reifica‐ tion, Commodification and the New Literatures and Cultures in English. (Cross/ Cultures 127 / ASNEL Papers 16). Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789042032279. Gajarawala, Toral (2012). Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste. New York: Fordham UP. DOI: 10.5422/ fordham/ 9780823245246.001.0001. George, Rosemary Marangoly (2013). Indian English and the Fiction of National Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/ CBO9781139626903. Ghoshal, Somak (2008). “Booker for the Billion.” The Telegraph online, 23 October 2008, https: / / w ww.telegraphindia.com/ opinion/ booker-for-the-billion/ cid/ 538220 (last accessed 20.05.2021). Goh, Robbie B. H. (2011). “Narrating ‘Dark’ India in Londonstani and The White Tiger: Sustain‐ ing Identity in the Diaspora.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 46 (2), 327-344. DOI: 10.1177/ 0021989411404995. Gui, Weihsin (2013). “Creative Destruction and Narrative Renovation: Neoliberalism and the Aesthetic Dimension in the Fiction of Aravind Adiga and Mohsin Hamid.” The Global South 7 (2), 173-190. DOI: 10.2979/ globalsouth.7.2.173. Gunning, Dave (2010). Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. DOI: 10.2307/ j.ctt5vjkp1. Huggan, Graham (2001). The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. Husain, Kasim (2014). “‘Bling-bling Economics’ and the Cultural Politics of Masculinity in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani.” South Asian History and Culture 5 (4), 551-568. DOI: 10.1080/ 19472498.2014.936202. Ide, Wendy (2021). “The White Tiger Review — Gripping Adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s Class Parable.” The Guardian, 23 January 2021. https: / / www.theguardian.com/ film/ 2021/ jan/ 23/ -th e-white-tiger-review-ramin-bahrani-aravind-adiga (last accessed 14.06.2021). Kaya, Göksel (2018). “Ambivalence of Identity as an Extension of Colonial Discourse in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies 6 (2), 28-36. DOI: 10.7575/ aiac.ijclts.v.6n.2p.28. Larkosh, Christopher (2010). “Reading ‘South Asia’ in Dangerous Times (And Other Lessons from the Future).” In: Singh, Jaspal K./ Chetty, Rajendra (eds.). Indian Writers: Transnationalism and Diasporas. New York: Peter Lang, 121-131. Lau, Lisa/ Mendes, Ana Cristina (2011). “Introducing re-Orientalism: a new manifestation of Orientalism.” In: Lau, Lisa/ Mendes, Ana Cristina (eds.). Re-Orientalism and South Asian Iden‐ tity Politics: The Oriental Other Within. London: Routledge, 1-14. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780203814543. Lokhande, Hanumant A. (2016). “Regulated Representation of the Lower-Caste Characters in Manu Joseph’s Serious Men.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English 7 (5), 61-70. Mendes, Ana Cristina (2010). “Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45 (2), 275-293. DOI: 10.1177/ 0021989410366896. 220 9 The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction Mitchell, Michael (2008). “Escaping the Matrix: Illusions and Disillusions of Identity in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006).” In: Eckstein, Lars et al. (eds.). Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 327-340. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789401206587_020. Moslund, Sten Pultz (2019). “Postmigrant Revisions of Hybridity, Belonging, and Race in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani.” A Review of International English Literature 50 (2), 105-136. DOI: 10.1353/ ari.2019.0016. Nabar, Vrinda (2014). “Writing India Right: Indian Writing and the Global Market.” In: Dwivedi, Om Prakash/ Lau, Lisa (eds.). Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 13-31. DOI: 10.1057/ 9781137437716_2. Nair, Chitra T. (2014). “Postmodernist Indian Sensibilities: Manu Joseph’s Serious Men as a Socio-Cultural Document.” International Journal of Multidisciplinary Approach and Studies 1 (1), 223-240. Nayar, Pramod K. (2014). “Indian Writing in English as Celebrity.” In: Dwivedi, Om Prakash/ Lau, Lisa (eds.). Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 32-47. DOI: 10.1057/ 9781137437716_3. Page, Benedicte (2010). “Manu Joseph’s Controversial Tale of Caste Wins Indian Literary Prize.” The Guardian, 02 November 2010. https: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2010/ nov/ 02/ manu-j oseph-india-serious-men (last accessed 25.06.2021). Parvati, M. S. (2020). “The Politics of Gendered Spatializations: A Study of Cityscapes in Manu Joseph’s Novels.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 12 (5), 1-5. DOI: 10.21659/ rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s11n4. Roy, Arundhati/ Sejpal, Avni (2019). “How to Think About Empire.” Boston Review, 3 January 2019. https: / / www.bostonreview.net/ articles/ arundhati-roy-thinking-about-empire/ (last ac‐ cessed 26.05.2021). Saxena, Akshya (2021). “Purchasing Power, Stolen Power, and the Limits of Capitalist Form: Dalit Capitalists and the Caste Question in the Indian Anglophone Novel.” ariel: A Review of International English Literature 52 (1), 61-90. DOI: 10.1353/ ari.2021.0002. Schotland, Sara D. (2011). “Breaking Out of the Rooster Coop: Violent Crime in Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger and Richard Wright’s Native Son.” Comparative Literature Studies 48 (1), 1-19. DOI: 10.5325/ complitstudies.48.1.0001. Scott, A. O. (2021). “‘The White Tiger’ Review: Don’t Call Him a Slumdog.” The New York Times, 21 January 2021. https: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2021/ 01/ 21/ movies/ the-white-tiger-review-.htm l (last accessed 14.06.2021). Sharma, Suparna (2020). “‘Serious Men Review’: Ancient Prejudice Posing as a Post-liberal Narrative.” Deccan Chronicle, 04 October 2020, https: / / www.deccanchronicle.com/ entertai nment/ bollywood/ 041020/ serious-men-review-ancient-prejudice-posing-as-a-post-liberal-n arra.html (last accessed 15.06.2021). Singh, Jaspal K./ Chetty, Rajendra (2010). “Introduction.” In: Singh, Jaspal K./ Chetty, Rajendra (eds.). Indian Writers: Transnationalism and Diasporas. New York: Peter Lang, 1-7. Srivatsan, S. (2020). “‘Serious Men’ movie review: For all the primitive minds.” The Hindu, 09 September 2020, https: / / www.thehindu.com/ entertainment/ reviews/ serious-men-movie-rev iew/ article32730464.ece (last accessed 23.06.2021). 9.8 Works Cited 221 Suvarna, Bandari (2021). “An Identity Undermined: Manu Joseph’s Serious Men from a Dalit Perspective.” International Journal of English and Studies 3 (5), 105-110. The Booker Prize (2008). “Aravind Adiga, Shortlisted Author for the Booker Prize 2008.” 15 October 2008, https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=s4tAPvWVorY (last accessed 02.06.2021). Thomas, Lee (2009). “Interview with Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger.” Fiction Writers Review, 15 April 2009, https: / / fictionwritersreview.com/ interview/ interiew-with-aravind-adiga-the-wh ite-tiger/ (last accessed 02.06.2021). Waller, Kathleen (2012). “Redefinitions of India and Individuality in Adiga’s The White Tiger.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14 (2), 1-8. DOI: 10.7771/ 1481-4374.1965. Walther, Sundhya (2014). “Fables of the Tiger Economy: Species and Subalternity in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Modern Fiction Studies 60 (3), 579-598. DOI: 10.1353/ mfs.2014.0042. Wani, Imityaz A./ Singh, Satpal (2015). “The Cultural Dominance of West in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” The Dawn Journal 4 (2), 1161-1169. 222 9 The Darkness and Beyond: Post-Millennial Trends in Anglophone Indian Fiction 10 Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India Anna M. Horatschek, Kiel University Abstract The government of India ratified the United Nations’ Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1983, yet added a Declaration that subordinates the commitment to the personal laws of Muslim, Christian and Parsee communities. Anuradha Roy (1967-) exposes the ensuing cultural specificity concerning issues of gender, sexuality, religion and politics in each of her five novels. My essay deals with all novels, yet focuses on The Folded Earth (2011), Sleeping on Jupiter (2015) and All the Lives We Never Lived (2018), concentrating on four central topics: 1. Indian feminisms: In all books, women have to generate an identity that com‐ prises their creativity and their sexuality despite stifling cultural traditions. They find inspiring counterworlds in the arts and in nature. 2. Nation Building: Feminisms in India, from their beginnings, have been closely interrelated with Nation Building. By critically evaluating the traditions they inhabit, the protagonists also negotiate the ongoing project of forging an Indian national identity and ask: What does this identity have to be like to enable a good life for all sexualities, castes, religions and geographical regions in India? 3. Identitarian histories: While the fictional characters perceive the present by intense sensual awareness, the past is retrieved and constructed through memory. All novels illustrate the questionable validity any identitarian (invented) tradition and history can claim. 4. Global contexts: The Indian protagonists’ struggle in multiple cultural, reli‐ gious and social contexts are embedded in global networks to counter any notion of India as a postcolonial exoticist alterity. 10.1 Introduction Anuradha Roy was born in 1967 in Kolkata and in her childhood accompanied her father, a geologist, on field trips in rural India. She studied English Literature at the University of Calcutta and in Cambridge, UK. Roy worked at the Oxford University Press in New Delhi as an editor, before she, together with her husband Rukun Advani, in 2000 moved to Ranikhet, a town in the Himalayas, and founded Permanent Black, a publishing company focusing on academic literature that today is one of India’s major academic imprints. Roy has hitherto published five novels, namely An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008, abr. Atlas), The Folded Earth (2011, abr. Earth), Sleeping on Jupiter (2015, abr. Jupiter), All the Lives We Never Lived (2018. abr. Lives) and The Earthspinner (2021, abr. Earthspinner). Roy also works as a journalist, and her essays and reviews have appeared in prestigious newspapers and magazines in India, the US, Britain, and most recently in John Freeman’s Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World (2020), where renowned writers from all over the world give their perspective on climate change. Roy’s novels have been translated widely — Atlas alone was translated into eighteen languages — and were awarded with prestigious prizes like the Economist Crossword Book Award (2011), the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature (2016) and the Tata Book of the Year Award for Fiction 2018 (2019). And yet, there is very little critical literature available, except for some reviews and a few essays. This neglect may be attributed to the reductive canonisation of a very small body of texts as ‘Indian Literature in English’ for the Western literary market with a predominance of diasporic novelists (cf. Ahmad 1992: 43-71, 73-94, 243-285). This essay will deal with all of Roy’s five novels, with a thematic focus on the identitarian politics dramatized in each text. Creating an individual identity in Roy’s novels is intricately interrelated with the on-going process of nation-building in India, focussing on how “power relations operate in specific contexts and how they intersect with other power relations” (Menon 2012: 175). At the end of this essay, I shall briefly situate Roy’s novels as political literature in the frame of Indian Literatures in English. Indian nation building started with the struggles against the British Rule in the middle of the 19 th century that led to the Declaration of Independence in 1947. However, Independence was attained for the atrocious price of the violent Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, which dislodged between 10 and 20 million people along the religious difference of Hindu and Muslim creeds. And yet, independence did not automatically establish a nation in accordance with “the western notions of nation-state in which, ideally speaking, language, religion, and political sovereignty have co-terminus boundaries” (Sharma 2015: 1), because with 22 officially recognised languages, out of 780 (Devy 2014), a multitude of castes and tribes (adivasis) with their own religions, socio-economic structures and hierarchies, and with a so-called ‘personal law’ for Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, and Hindus, issues of caste, tribe, gender, sexuality, religion, language and cultural traditions are central obstacles to create the ‘imaginary homeland’ of a unified nation; at the same time, each of these aspects fundamentally enables and restricts the possibilities for individual identity formation. Zoroastrians are an influential ethno-religious group in India with an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 members. According to their own not entirely reliable historical sources, they initially migrated from Persia in the 7 th century AD, when Persia was 224 10 Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India conquered by Muslims. Other waves of migration took place in the 16 th - 18 th centuries due to religious persecution. Therefore, they are also called Parsis. Imaginary Homelands is a collection of essays by Salman Rushdie, written between 1981 and 1991. It focuses on the impossibility of writers in the diaspora to ade‐ quately represent their homelands, in that they replace with their imagination what they cannot remember from personal experience. Yet this strategy to construct a past is not limited to diasporic writers but is characteristic of any cultural work at constructing an individual or national history - and thereby an individual or na‐ tional identity. The term imaginary homeland is here used in this extended sense. In order to account for the fact that in any identity construct many political and social power structures come together, Kimberly Crenshaw coined the term ‘intersec‐ tionality’ in 1989 (Crenshaw 1989). This concept implies that the social, political and cultural factors intersect in specific constellations in different cultures and nations. In India, the extreme diversity of indigenous, religious and cultural communities is additionally amplified by colonial and post-colonial influences from the so-called West, ‘so-called’ because the umbrella term ‘the West’ suggests a monolithic homogeneity of the respective regions that has never existed. My interpretations shall focus on issues of individual intersectional identity forma‐ tion as a magnifying glass to illustrate the problems involved in building a national identity. The following aspects of intersectional identity constellations can be found with various emphasis in all of Roy’s novels, namely gender and sexuality, religion, caste, tribe and global contexts. To counter these heteronomous conditions of identity formation, the individual characters in all novels turn to the arts and take refuge in ‘nature’ in a very broad sense. In most of Roy’s novels, formal traits also imply significant assertions concerning identity formation. Thus, four of Roy’s five novels for the most part are first-person narratives, and in the third-person narrative Atlas, at least the final chapter, where events culminate, is told from a first-person perspective. All first-person narrators address traumatic experiences and reflect on the unreliability of memory to reconstruct the past. Three novels are artist’s novels with extended deliberations on writing, painting, dancing, landscaping and pottery. This pronounced artistic self-reflexivity is not the only postmodern trait; additionally, all of Roy’s novels comprise metafictional comments, multiperspectivity, the intermingling of historical or biographical fact and fiction, a variety of genres and media like diary entries, letters, poems, visual icons as chapter headings, and intertextual references to English literature, especially of the 19 th century canon. Although the traits mentioned above can be found in all of Roy’s novels with varying prominence, I shall restrict the examples to a few instances to provide exemplary readings. 10.1 Introduction 225 Metafiction is a style of prose writing that draws the attention of the reader to the fact of its constructedness. The most obvious case is a narrative text where a fictional or historical writer-narrator comments on the process of writing a nar‐ rative text. 10.2 Intersectional Identities — Intersectional Power Constellations Considering India’s extreme diversity of languages, castes, tribes, religions, and cultural traditions, Radhakrishnan considers “the concept of identity […] a normative measure that totalizes heterogeneous ‘selves’ and ‘subjectivities’” (Radhakrishnan 1996: 158), because identity always assumes the appropriation and exclusion of specific traits for the construction of a homogenous self-image. Roy’s novels emphasise the selective structure of any identity and illustrate the fact that each individual identity is bound to interlocking systems of social and political power that can be either oppressive or empowering. Central significance in this respect is given to gender, religion, and the influence of the so-called West. 10.2.1 Gender Matters The dominant focus of Roy’s novels lies on gender matters, exposing “gender difference as both structuring and structured by the wide set of social relations” (Sangari and Vaid 1989: 3). In three of Roy’s five novels, the first-person narrator is a woman, and in the third-person narrative Lives, Myshkin Rosario retrieves the life of his mother Gayatri Rosario, who left him and his father when he was nine to find herself as an artist, with her narrative voice presented in her letters to a friend in Canada. Each novel depicts women who have to generate an identity that comprises their potential as a creative and sexual human being in the face of stifling cultural traditions and misogynist power constellations that are frequently enforced with physical and psychological violence. Thus, in Earth, the first-person narrator is incarcerated by her Hindu father when he finds out that she loves a Christian man; in Atlas, a major character locks up his wife in one room after she goes mad from excessive loneliness and starts yelling obscenities, and in Jupiter, the female narrator was traumatised in a supposed charity foundation dedicated to the education of orphaned girls headed by a sadistic Guru, intent on sexually abusing the girls and brutally raping them seven days after their first menstruation (Roy 2015: 175). In quite a few cases, however, rigid gender hierarchies are not enforced by men, but are effective through internalisation by the women themselves. When, in Atlas, the young widow Meera falls in love with the widower Nirmal, she interrogates herself: “What had unleashed this sudden lechery? ” (Roy 226 10 Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India 2008: 160), and she rather leaves the house without explanation than to disclose that her employer, Nirmal’s brother, is sexually molesting her (ibid.: 160, 170 f.). The minute and often brutal rendering of these trials justifies Nivedita Menon’s claim that the situation of women in India cannot simply be subsumed under Western forms of female oppression without qualification, because such an approach would erase the particularities of region, social, and religious contexts and level all differences, whereas “some […] arguments work in plural contexts, others do not” (Menon 2012: x). Already in the 1980s, Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) criticised such an approach by Western feminists, because it neglects the cultural specificity of gender concepts. Indeed, this specificity of gender politics in India merits a closer look in order to better understand the situation of women in India. “Gender Equality” is one of the “Sustainable Development Goals” that the UN aims to realize by 2030 (United Nations 2015). The government of India committed themselves to this goal in 1983 when they ratified the CEDAW (Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women), yet added a Declaration that contradicts the commitment by subordinating it to the personal laws of Muslim, Christian, and Parsee communities. Similar reversals had occurred before: After Indian independence in 1947, the emancipatory vision of the Hindu Code Bill, which in the 1940s aimed to redress Hindu women’s loss of rights during the colonial era, was sacrificed to India’s nation-building policies (cf. Dwivedi and Rajan 2016: esp. 17-30; Menon 2012: 24-32, 149-157). This shows that in India, issues of gender politics are intricately interwoven with the policies of nation building, as patriarchal cultural traditions persist in all castes, and in nearly all religious, ethnic, and social communities in India (cf. Menon 2012: 23, 31 f.). In Roy’s novels, the way out of these social and political restrictions does not lie with political activism. This scepticism stems from the historical entanglement of female political activism with nation building since the 1930 All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) (cf. Chaudhuri 2004: xix-xxiii), that was furthered by the appeal of Gandhi for women to participate in activist campaigns. Thus Gandhian-inspired activism took the form of the first organization of women workers — the Self-employed Women’s Association (SEWA) — in Ahmedabad in 1974. […] According to historians of the women’s movement, Nandita Gandhi and Nandita Sha, “it was in these alternative development activities, mass struggles and agitations that middle class and working class women participated in great numbers and with militancy.” ( John 2008: 3) In line with these historical constellations, in Lives Gayatri Rosario’s husband Nek Chand in the 1930s is a glowing nationalist who follows the woman leader Mukti Devi. Rendered in free indirect speech, he muses: Why shouldn’t [his wife Gayatri] go where she pleased (within reason, naturally)? Women had rights too. This was what he had heard Mukti Devi say only the other day at a Society 10.2 Intersectional Identities — Intersectional Power Constellations 227 for Indian Patriots meeting when she made a fiery speech exhorting men to bring their wives out of purdah, make them join the fight for independence. (Roy 2018: 74) However, the struggle for national freedom from colonial oppression does not neces‐ sarily entail the struggle for women’s freedom from gender restrictions, as Gayatri very clearly perceives. When, incensed about his wife’s unappeasable desire to become a professional painter, Nek Chand accuses her: “Our country is in turmoil, our people are fighting for freedom and you think only of yourself ” (ibid.: 90), she, in a rebellious speech, exposes that his patriarchal concept of freedom is solely reserved for the national cause and expressly does not apply to the freedom of women: What good will the great nation’s freedom do for me? Tell me that! Will it make me free? Will I be able to choose how to live? Could I go off and be alone in a village as Walter [Spies] has been doing? Could I be there and paint as well? Or walk down the street and sing a song? Could I spend a night out under the stars away from the town as your father did the other day? Even Myshkin [their son] is freer than I am! Don’t talk to me about freedom. (ibid.: 91) At the end of Lives, the author in her extensive “Acknowledgements” (Roy 2018: 331-335) gives her own summary of Walter Spies’ life: “Born in Germany in 1895, Spies spent most of his life in Bali, where he met both Rabindranath Tagore and the renowned dancer Uday Shankar. He wanted to learn Sanskrit and come to India to research Indian dance forms, but he was drowned at forty-seven when the ship on which he was a prisoner of war was bombed and destroyed” (Roy 2018: 331). And Roy readily admits that “this is a novel in which fiction and history overlap” (ibid.). Trying to soothe her, he contends: “I know you had hobbies, I want you to have them. Everyone needs hobbies. Especially women, who are so bound up in the home” (ibid.: 92), not understanding that to perceive her painting as the hobby of an underemployed woman is devastating her. Gayatri’s outbreak mirrors feminist critiques of the fact that the history of partition “has focused on Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims — or more correctly on Hindu and Sikh and Muslim men”, whereas “differences of gender or caste, those difficult things that complicate the borders of what we see as identity have, by and large, been glossed over” (Butalia 2000: 235). However, because violence against women dominates the media coverage about India in the West, other aspects of Indian women’s roles are little known. While — as the narrator of Lives points out — the historical Indian poet and novelist Maitreya Devi was observed with suspicion when she studied Sanskrit in Calcutta in the 1930s (Roy 2018: 145), according to the 2010 statistics of the Sixth Economic Census released by the Indian Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (2019), there are more female professors, especially in the natural sciences, and more female entrepreneurs in India than in many Western countries. Roy’s novels dramatize these developments 228 10 Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India by the fact that all female narrators and protagonists are educated professionals: The narrator of Earthspinner studies in Cambridge UK; the narrator of Jupiter lived in Norway for most of her life when she was adopted there as an orphan after her escape from the gruesome ashram of a sexualised sadistic guru, and now works as a filmmaker; the female protagonist of Lives has travelled with her father all over India and in Bali, met Tagore personally, and ultimately lives and works as a painter on her own. Originally an Ashram is a spiritual hermitage or a Hindu monastery in India, where a guru and his disciples live. Today, there are non-denominational ashrams also in other parts of the world, mostly in secluded places to offer spiritual retreats with extensive practice of yoga, meditation etc., often for a considerable amount of money. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali poet, writer, playwright, com‐ poser, philosopher, social reformer and painter, who wrote the Indian as well as the Bangladesh national anthem. In 1913, Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Asian laureate. He travelled to over 30 countries on five continents and reshaped Bengali poetry and music in the so-called Bengal Renaissance. He op‐ posed the British Raj and supported Indian independence, yet rebuked strongly nationalist movements. Maya, the female narrator of Earth, after losing her husband, escapes to Ranikhet, a small town in the Himalayas, where she works as a teacher in a Christian school and befriends the 17-year-old illiterate peasant girl Charu. And Charu eventually learns to read and write so she can read the letters her beloved sends her from the city, where he works, and when she fears to lose him, she musters her courage and in an adventurous bus journey finally finds and secures him for herself as her husband. Though this may appear a rather ambivalent achievement of feminine self-assertion, in the context of Indian gender roles Charu’s journey illustrates the great difference between gender stereotypes in Hindu traditions — dramatized in Maya’s ordeals — and village or tribal gender norms. 10.2.2 Religion, Caste and Tribe The most traumatic instance of Indian nation building is the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, inciting extreme violence and a series of ferocious outbreaks between Hindus and Muslims in India, and between India and Pakistan until today, transforming religion nearly exclusively into a political marker. Accordingly, a central focus of Roy’s 10.2 Intersectional Identities — Intersectional Power Constellations 229 novels lies on fierce animosities and steep hierarchies between Hindus and Muslims, leading quite often to physical violence and in some cases to death. In Roy’s novels — and in present day India — to be a male, educated Hindu of an upper caste is the most empowering status, especially if paired with economic security. Although negative discrimination because of Caste has been banned in 1948, castism is still a central criterion of social hierarchisation not only in Hinduism, where its historical origins lie, but in almost all aspects of everyday life in India, irrespective of religion. Yet in Roy’s fictional worlds, especially Hindu religious authorities are described as brutalised patriarchal despots of families, villages and ashrams. In Earthspinner, two Hindu “priests in white lungis” (Roy 2021: 149) together with the envious village witch Akka provoke the crowd to destroy a huge ceramic temple horse and punish the artist and his helpers, by denouncing an Urdu poem carved ornamentally onto the artwork by a Muslim calligrapher as a sacrilege. As a result, the people turn into a violent mob, nearly kill Elango, the creator of the horse, destroy the horse and murder the old Muslim. A lungi is a man’s skirt, tied around the waist below the navel and worn on the Indian subcontinent. It is more comfortable in the heat than trousers. While Muslims — and Christians — are constructed by Hindu characters as the intracultural alterity, outright disdain is vented on tribal people, the so-called Adivasis. This complex intersection of Hinduism, Islam, tribalism and castism is dramatized in Atlas, where a Hindu priest, obsessed with caste and ‘race’, denies Mukunda access to the puja room — the room of ritual worship in Hinduism — in the house of his Hindu foster parents, because it is unclear of which caste he is, “born of a Santhal mother” (Roy 2008: 95). Santhals are the largest adivasi (indigenous) community in the Indian subconti‐ nent. On the other hand, Mukunda — after having been educated in a Christian school — betrays Muslims as well: When his Muslim landlord, benefactor and friend Suleiman Cacha and his family have to flee from Calcutta because of the anti-Muslim raids in 1945, he entrusts his house and his parrot to Mukunda, who has become a brutal estate broker. Mukunda recollects: They did not return to see the country cut in two in 1947 or to watch the British leave, they did not return for the speeches and the new flags. They were away during the worst of the killings and of course, since they were Muslim, I did not expect them among the refugees who staggered into Calcutta. They must have found something for themselves in East Pakistan — that was the explanation I gave myself — they must have put down roots, and perhaps they 230 10 Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India could write and send for Noorie [the parrot] one day. I did not want to let in the thought that they might never have reached Rajshahi at all, that they might have been slaughtered on the way. (ibid.: 192 f.) When he badly needs money though, Mukunda sells the house — and upon Cacha’s return nine years later he has to admit that the broken man and his wife take the news “as if he were the criminal and my sins had become his. Cacha said, […] ‘We’ve lost too much to worry about losing the house […]. My brother, uncle and nephew were all killed in the riots, […] I heard they had been disembowelled, and then…. [sic]’” (ibid.: 278). Such a positive depiction of Muslim characters contradicts the widespread intracul‐ tural stigmatisation of Muslims in present day India. Additionally, the intricate power relations between the various aspects of social and political stratification manifest in this storyline refute the simplistic and ideological claim of the Hindu nationalist movement — which has gained increasing influence and support since the 1980s —, that the rivalry between Muslims and Hindus is a constant in Indian history, thus foregrounding the religious conflicts in order to construct a homogenous nation under Hindu control (cf. Kakar 1996: 14). Roy’s novels counter this version of a historical irreconcilability between different religions and cultures in India by blurring religious demarcations, for example when the Hindu narrator of Earthspinner is awarded the “Farhana Abdulali Endowment for Girls’ Education meant for Muslim girls” (Roy 2021: 10) to study at the elite university in Cambridge, UK, because she has visited a Muslim school. With such narrative strategies the novels support the image held by the Western-educated liberal and progressive elite, that India is a “composite culture” in which the different traditions can co-exist peacefully (Kakar 1996: 17). The authoritarian stance of Hindu male characters also defines the power relations in Hindu families, where the father is the guardian of moral rules, especially of gender rules: thus in Earth, the father expulses Maya from the family when she marries a Christian against his will, while the mother secretly keeps in contact with her; in Lives, Gayatri Rosario at first sight seems to enjoy exceptional freedom, because her husband is convinced that she should be able “to do whatever she wanted, go where she pleased, wear what she wished — within reason” (Roy 2018: 141). Yet ‘reason’ is a euphemism for and synonymous with his restrictive gender rules, because — as their son later realises — “each of her little liberties depended on his acquiescence” (ibid.). Accordingly, he puts up with the artistic passion of his wife for painting as a whim — and says so, but strictly refuses to acknowledge it as the central aspect of her identity that needs to be taken on eye level with his devotion to “go on marches for freedom” (ibid.) in the process of Indian nation building in the 1930s and 40s (cf. ibid.). When Gayatri is accompanying the German artist Walter Spies to Bali, “she had fallen as low as a woman could, she had left her child and husband for a lover. A foreigner” (ibid.). But in reality, Spies is homosexual, and Gayatri is following him to Bali to live for her art. 10.2 Intersectional Identities — Intersectional Power Constellations 231 Though in Roy’s novels, violence and aggression mostly emanate from male Hindus, there are positive exceptions - at first glance: In Earth, the narrator’s father wants to make Maya “the first female industrial magnate of this country” (Roy 2011: 62), however, as it turns out, not for her own good but for want of a son as the intermediate link for his grandsons: “Why am I earning all this money if not for my grandsons? ” (ibid.). Without second thoughts, however, Myshkin, the narrator of Lives, opts for naming a street after Begum Akhtar Marg, “[a] woman who had given the world passion and music all her troubled life — and they only name roads after politicians” (Roy 2018: 17) — but he is marked as a “crank” (ibid.); his grandfather who “stood at an odd angle to things around him”, defied society by taking his daughter on extended travels in Asia and “got tutors for Gayatri to learn languages and painting as well as dance and classical music, all this in an age when women sang and danced to entertain rich men and were derided for it” (ibid.: 26). More importantly, his grandfather did this to nurture his daughter’s creative and artistic potential. Similarly, Nirmal in Atlas provides Meera with a moment of individual relief from the rigidly life-denying rules of conduct for a young widow through which she is on the verge of starvation, when he offers her to eat fish, and Suraj, a thoroughly westernised — and somewhat questionable — Hindu character in Jupiter, is utterly disgusted by the self-immolation and self-abasement of devoted believers at a Hindu temple (cf. Roy 2015: 63). 10.2.3 Global Contexts While Roy’s novels focus on the intersectionality of identity politics in multiple cultural, religious and social contexts in India, they also make clear that these struggles are embedded within global networks. They thereby prevent any notion of India as a postcolonial exoticist alterity and instead expose the complex entanglement of individual identity formation and world history. Thus, the final test the narrator of Earthspinner has to undergo for her endowment to study in the UK consists in “a dinner with the grandees of the city, watching like prospective in-laws, my mother said, to see if I knew a fork from a knife and could make vivacious small talk and laugh, but not too loudly” (Roy 2021: 11). Obviously, the scholarship implies neo-colonial hierarchies because the mentee has to behave according to the Western gender stereotype of the modest and well-educated young woman, who is versed in Western table manners, thus highlighting the anthropological observation that eating habits all over the world form a central marker of cultural belonging or exclusion. It also turns out that the fellowship through an extremely low budget is meant to make the beneficiary “frugal, virtuous, grateful. A good girl” (ibid.: 12). Another intense interpenetration of individual identity formation and global — mostly Western — military and literary history is dramatized in Lives. Myshkin, the first-person narrator, is named by his grandfather after “the epileptic prince in a book by Dostoevsky […] ‘I’m not an idiot,’ I said. ‘When you read The Idiot you’ll want to 232 10 Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India be one,’ he said. ‘Innocents are what make humankind human’” (Roy 2018: 12). In the summer of 1942, Myshkin runs to the railway station to see a train with prisoners of war from the Second World War: “Italian prisoners of war were being sent mainly to Rajasthan, Poles to Jamnagar, and Germans to Dehradun […]. My grandfather said the world had been replicated in miniature at that camp” (ibid.: 19). This episode highlights the historical fact that during World War II (1939-1945), because the British held over six hundred autonomous Princely States in India as colonies, British India officially declared war on Nazi Germany in 1939 and sent over 2.5 million soldiers to fight under British command against the Axis Powers. For Myshkin’s mother, the world war ultimately destroys her life plan: Having left her family to go to Bali with Walter Spies, she is left destitute and sick when the German Spies is arrested as a suspect Nazi spy, and she is warned by a mysterious Japanese to leave Bali and return to India as soon as possible. In one of her last letters to her former friend now living in Canada she writes: “I’m a mean old woman now, Lis, shrivelled up with rage. How could it have ended this way? Just when my life was turning a curve and what lay ahead was beautiful. How could a war thousands of miles away have done this to me? I am furious about everything. If they gave me a gun, I’d kill” (ibid.: 304). But the West does not only impinge in negative ways on the characters’ lives in India. Not only do the characters in Atlas, Lives and Earthspinner listen to music from Bach to Schubert, discuss art developments in Europe and Bali, read and repeatedly refer to books by Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and Gertrude Stein, and in Lives discuss literary aesthetics with extended unmarked references to poems by the Romantic poets Shelley and Keats (cf. Roy 2018: 26), but Roy’s novels themselves are saturated with marked and unmarked intertextual references, especially from English literature of Romanticism, Victorianism and Modernism. Thus, many of the first-person narrators are orphans, like in Charles Dickens’ novels: In Jupiter, the first-person narrator — possibly of tribal origin — loses her family in a brutal raid on her hut and is raised in an orphanage headed by a sadistic guru; the narrator of Lives is left by his mother when he is nine because she leaves her family to go to Bali with the historical German artist Walter Spies and the English ballet dancer Beryl de Zoete in order to dedicate her life to painting; in Atlas, Bakul’s mother dies while giving birth to her, and Mukunda, the son of a Santhal woman and possibly fathered by Amulya, Bakul’s father, is raised in a Christian orphanage paid by Amulya. Beryl Drusilla de Zoete (1879-1962) was an English ballet dancer, orientalist, dance critic and dance researcher. She travelled extensively in Bali and South Asia to investigate Indian dance and theatre traditions. Together with Walter Spies she wrote Dance and Drama in Bali (1937), which is still a standard reference. 10.2 Intersectional Identities — Intersectional Power Constellations 233 The motif of an orphan in literature often implies that these characters have to devise a life on their own, because they do not have the support, but also not the fetters of cultural traditions handed on by the parents. Mukunda explicates this: Among parent-owning boys, I began to feel a sense of freedom as I grew up: They had a hundred things forbidden them, I had none. I could make myself as I pleased. I was free of caste or religion, that was for the rest of the world to worry about. I felt released from the burden of origins, from the burden of belonging anywhere, to anyone. (Roy 2008: 179) Other striking examples of intertextuality are various references to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: In Atlas, the young widow Meera reveals her socially unacceptable love for Nirmal in her paintings — “They were a declaration of love” (Roy 2008: 148) — just like Jane Eyre’s socially condemned feelings for Rochester are disclosed in her paintings (cf. e.g., Chapter 13 in the novel); and Gayatri’s impassioned speech in Lives about the freedom she is denied because she is a woman, recalls Jane Eyre’s speech on the attic about the freedom she cannot find in Victorian society because of dominant gender roles. 10.3 The Skeletons Under Water: Repression and Memory Growing up in a world of palpable and often violent religious tensions, extremely restrictive gender stereotypes, as well as rigid caste and class segregation, many characters have to find their identity not only by transcending these stifling living conditions — or at least find a niche in this world —, but also by coming to terms with traumatic experiences of loss — of father, mother, the entire family, the family home, a beloved teacher —, often under extremely violent circumstances. Earth supplies a striking symbol for such repressed instances of the individual lives, namely Lake Roopkund, where the narrator’s husband died under mysterious circumstances. Roopkund, also called Mystery Lake or Skeleton Lake, is a glacial lake in the Utta rakhand state of India located in the Himalayas at an altitude of 5,020 metres and a popular trekking destination. Only about three metres deep, Roopkund is widely known for about 500 ancient human skeletons visible at its bottom when the snow melts, supposedly — as popular legend has it — from a group of pilgrims who got into a terrible hailstorm in the 9 th century. Just as the past is only preserved in these gruesome relics, the narrator Maya has nothing but a few belongings of her husband Michael and his tour backpack without knowing anything about the circumstances of his death. In concord with psychological theories, Maya - like the traumatised narrators in several novels of Anuradha Roy - for quite some time tries to repress the terrible experiences of the past, to keep the skeletons under water, as it is. Thus, in Lives, Myshkin, whose mother left the family and was branded as a fallen woman in his family history, states: “I have shaped my past for myself. It fits me well enough now, I can live in it. It is a shell into which I can retreat without fear of injury. I do not want to change it for a 234 10 Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India new version of the past” (Roy 2018: 95). But at the end of the book, he has thoroughly revised the image of his mother, making the same journey as my mother, by train, ship, steamer, boat, across the Indian Ocean, past a thousand islands […]. I will go to the museums in Java and Bali and find her paintings, I will find the houses she inhabited, the rooms she worked in, the village potter who became her teacher. (ibid.: 328) Similarly, the narrative of Nomita in Jupiter traces her slow way out of the traumatic closure of her psyche by painful memory work. Ultimately, all traumatised first-person narrators of Roy’s novels undergo such a fundamental change by facing the unbearable event of their past and thus open up the possibility for a new future. 10.4 Counterworlds The strength to address and at least partly transcend social injustices, heteronomous identity slots and violence — especially between Hindus and Muslims — is found by the protagonists of Roy’s novels in the counterworlds of nature and in the arts. 10.4.1 Nature Nature offers a counterworld in four distinct ways, namely as an imaginary measure to put the social and political present of the fictional world into perspective, as emotional counterpoint in human-animal relationships, especially with dogs, as a geographical counterpoint to urban or at least communal surroundings and as body politics. Thus, in Earthspinner, the narrator’s father, a geologist — like the author’s father was —juxtaposes the violent historical, social and biographical upheavals with the changes on an immense geological scale to preserve his equanimity by adopting a bird’s-eye-perspective on the devastating changes going on in his immediate surround‐ ings. “My father would have said change was the work of the earth spinning, spinning as it always had” (Roy 2021: 159). However, the narrator makes clear that the changes she observes are not caused by ‘nature’, but are the result of religious identitarian politics, capitalist greed, caste and class animosities and individual revenge. Another concrete counterpoint to such detrimental forces shaping the immediate private and public life is the loving relationship with an animal, in most novels with a dog. Characters are defined by the way they care for dogs — and how the dogs accept them. In Earthspinner, the narrator claims that in her past marked by violent animosities between Hindus and Moslems, “more than […] anything else that took place in the world, what changed the configuration of earth-sun-sky in that year of unimaginable wonders and bloodcurdling horrors was the young dog that Elango found in a forest” (Roy 2021: 30). The dog escaped a brutal ambush of highwaymen, who nearly kill the driver and leave his wife, whom they threaten to rape, traumatised for the rest of the book, when the potter Elango finds him in the forest and names him Chinna. 10.4 Counterworlds 235 Henceforth, the dog is a walking symbol of unconditional love, stirring deep feelings of caring, tenderness and belonging in nearly everyone he meets. He is introduced as the incarnation of love when, driving with his original owners in their car, “the dog [is] so frantic with love that he musters all the strength in his body to clamber over to the front seat” (ibid.: 31). That he attaches himself to Elango marks the potter as a person who also strives to live his life in peace and mutual understanding, working as a potter despite financial hardships and sticking with his love for the Muslim girl Zorah, who got away with a lame leg from a Hindu raid on her family, in which her brother was killed. Several central characters leave their social community altogether to escape unbear‐ able and in some cases life threatening strictures: In Earth, Maya flees from Calcutta to a secluded town in the Himalayas after the death of her husband, and with the help of Michael’s Christian pastor finds a job as a teacher in a Christian school; Elango in Earthspinner secretly builds the sacred horse he has dreamt of close to a pond where he finds good clay, and where he is sheltered from the prying eyes of the villagers and the harsh judgements of the local Hindu priests. The narrator of Jupiter at the end of the novel returns to Norway, where she had lived as an adopted orphan, and in a self-ordained ritual celebrates the conquest of her trauma inflicted by a sadistic guru by swimming nakedly in a secluded lake at midsummer night and thus taking an initiatory baptism for her new life (Roy 2015: 252). And for Gayatri Rosario in Lives, as her son recollects, “[t]rees, grasses, the sun, the sky, the moon, these were closer to her than humans, they were her religion — as they have become mine. My father went through his entire life oblivious of the natural world” (Roy 2018: 323). What his father missed by explicitly declaring nation building his religion instead of harkening to nature, is illustrated with reference to an anecdote told by Tagore: I blew out the lamp […] with the idea of turning into bed. No sooner had I done so, through the open windows, the moonlight burst into the room, with a shock of surprise. […] Even if I had remained blind to it all my life - […] even then the moon would have still been there, […] waiting for me as she has throughout the ages. (ibid.: 323 f.) Yet Myshkin relativises the possibility of such a near mystic experience in contempo‐ rary India by continuing this extended metaphor with the critical observation: “These days, when the sky is glowing with the thousand neon lights of Muntazir’s new markets and streets, the moon struggles and the stars are switched off […] leading their own remote lives, a million years away from our blighted world” (ibid.: 324). Other characters find a counterworld to the heteronomous rules of society and the self-delusions of role playing and memory in their own body, namely their sensuality, their loves and desires. In Lives, the narrator quotes a poem by Tagore to illustrate his distrust in the authenticity of mental memory in contradistinction to sense-centred body memory: “I cannot remember my mother / But when in the early autumn morning / the fragrance of the shiuli floats in the air / The scent of the morning prayers in the / temple comes to me as the scent of my mother” (Roy 2018: 22). 236 10 Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India Especially taste and smell assume an importance hardly ever found in Western literature, where the sensual perception of vision, sound and touch predominate. In Atlas, Meera, a very young widow nearly starving to death by the Hindu “[w]idow’s diet, […] all fast and hardly any proteins” (Roy 2008: 121), wishes to “eat everything I’m forbidden. I’d like to eat everything once before I die” (ibid.: 150). When she finally even eats fish that Nirmal, who has fallen in love with her without ever admitting this, has brought her, this terrible transgression for her is an act of emancipating her individual sensuality: “There! I’ve done it! Tasted the forbidden fruit! ” (ibid.: 153) Similarly, Mrs Barnum, an Anglo-Indian woman thought of derogatively as “mixed blood” (ibid.: 55) by her husband, takes Kananbala, “the local mad woman” (ibid.), to an old fort, and encourages her to eat meat, cake with eggs, even drink wine — which Kananbala experiences as an act of rebellious liberation: “Kananbala took another long sip, giving Mrs Barnum a look of mingled fear and triumph” (ibid.: 85). However, the most striking instance of individual desire as normative counterpoint to a socially prescribed moral conduct in this novel is dramatized, when Mukunda, a tribal man who has a wife and a child and Bakul, a Hindu woman with whom he grew up, have made love, and the following dialogue ensues: “’Haven’t we done something wrong? ’ ‘Do you think so? Are you unhappy? ’ ‘No,’ she said vehemently. ‘Why should I be? I felt as if I had promised myself something all my life and now I’ve done it.’ A curious serenity now gripped me too” (ibid.: 244). Mukunda in his function as the narrating I comments in hindsight: “I felt no guilt or self-loathing. I did not see it as any kind of unfaithfulness to my wife. Making love to Bakul was an inevitable and self-contained event, natural and obvious. I was wrong, of course, but my mind had no space or time for other thoughts that evening” (ibid.: 246). The book however, in contrast with the narrator’s self-deprecating ‘I was wrong, of course’, does condone this atrocious breach of foundational taboos in Indian society, and Mukunda and Bakul, in a highly improbable and utopian ending, do find a way to live with each other, though — like Jane Eyre and Rochester — in a house far removed from society. But unconditional trust in one’s sensuality and sexuality is not without its dangers: There are many examples, where characters live their sexual desires without any restraint like the sadistic guru in Jupiter, abusing and raping young girls; Raghu, who brutally flaunts the devotion of his homosexual lover Badal, but then again is sexually humiliated by a mysterious monk; Meera’s employer, who in Atlas is sexually molesting the young widow (Roy 2008: 160; 170 f.) so she finally has to leave his house to protect herself, or British and Hindu Indian men in the same novel, who interpret the freedom of Santhal women to move about without accompaniment as a licence to consider and treat them as prostitutes. Similarly, nature as geographical locus is no place of romantic isolation. Thus, in Earth, even the remote village of Ranikhet in the Himalayas is not secure from the onslaught of petty and grand politics: On the one hand, the protagonists of impending elections have become puppets of overarching political and economic agents who aim 10.4 Counterworlds 237 to establish the rule of Hindutva through intimidation, for example by threatening to close down the Christian school where Maya works. Hindutva is a nationalistic political ideology of India. It was coined in 1923 and is held today among other parties by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party of Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister since 2014. It aims at ethnic and cultural homogeneity and advocates Hindu supremacy, specifically over Muslims, who comprise about fourteen percent of India’s population. Some critics see Hindutva as a right wing, fascist ideology. On the other hand, there are very concrete business interests in ‘developing’ the beautiful area into a tourist hot spot. Additionally, Diwan Sahib, an eccentric relic of princely India and one of Maya’s best friends in Ranikhet, is beleaguered by journalists as well as academics, because it is rumoured that he possesses love letters of Neruh’s passionate affair with Edwina Mountbatten, who came to India in 1947 with her husband, the last Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten. But more importantly, there are hailstorms, fatally low temperatures, predators like leopards, and accidents that kill people in Earth, a river flooding a house and ultimately causing the death of Bakul’s mother in Atlas, and murderous muggers that wait at desolate highways far away from any village and city in Earthspinner. Finally, climate change is taking its toll even in the remotest places of the earth: Thus, in Earth, Diwan Sahib, who made it a ritual to visit the school once every year to imitate animal voices for the children, in his last visit only offers a long soliloquy on the loss of animal and plant diversity - to the great dismay of his uncomprehending audience. Nature in all its manifestations has to be tamed and formed in artful ways in order to realise its potential as positive counterforce to social and political power structures, in short: it has to be cultivated. This aspect is dramatized in the narrator of Lives, Myshkin Rosario, who is a professional of landscape gardening to the chagrin of his father, who had high plans of social advancement for his exceptionally intelligent son. But Myshkin finds satisfaction in the observation that “changing landscapes was slow business” (Roy 2018: 16), just like it takes time to change the handed down image of his mother as a loose woman by revising the traumatic loss of her when she left him as a nine-year old from a cultural, and not from a social or moral perspective. While as a child that has been abandoned without explanation, I had felt nothing but rage, misery, confusion [, a]s an old man trying to understand my past, I am making myself read of others like her, I am trying to view my mother somewhat impersonally, as a rebel who might be admired by some, an artist with a vocation so intense she chose it over family and home. (ibid.: 146) 238 10 Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India 10.4.2 Art The second realm of alternative realities to the socially-defined order of things is art. Three novels are artist’s novels, namely Lives, Earthspinner, and, to a lesser extent, Jupiter, with extended deliberations on writing, painting, dancing, landscaping, filming and pottery. These pronounced self-reflections allot various functions to art, namely as a counterworld to social and political restrictions and upheavals, as a historical tradition supplying a cultural instead of a national identity, as an international network of reciprocal inspirations leading beyond biographical region and political boundaries, and as the royal road to ascertain one’s individual identity in the face of stifling heteronomous rules of conduct. For the father of Gayatry Rosario, Agni Sen, in Lives, “[w]hen the world was in turmoil and devastation appeared inevitable, art was not an indulgence but a refuge” (Roy 2018: 26), because, as an extended unmarked, though nearly verbatim reflection on the poem “Ozymandias” by the British Romantic Shelley and on Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” expounds: the power and tyranny and cruelties of those civilisations did not survive, the rulers fell and their courtiers lay in parallel lines of narrow marble caskets next to their king, their cats and wives too, but the beauty that had been created remained. […] Power crumbles, people die, but beauty defeats time, he declared in the way middle-aged men have of imparting wisdom to the young. (ibid.) In the 1920s and 30s, Agni Sen takes his young daughter “to the Borobudur, to Angkor Wat, to the temples of Bali. He would show her there was a shared cultural universe in Asia which had not been swallowed up by colonisation” (ibid.: 27). On the other hand, the novels illustrate that art does not thrive by shutting itself off from foreign input but that it lives on reciprocal acknowledgement and inspiration. Thus Myshkin is watching Boris Karloff in The Walking Dead (ibid.: 147), he and his mother listen to Strauss, Bach and Schubert, his mother’s major source of inspiration was her friendship with the German musician, painter, stage designer, dance instructor and translator Walter Spies (1885-1942) (cf. Schindhelm 2018), whom she follows to Bali; and Elonga, the artist potter from Earthspinner, is invited to offer highly appreciated pottery workshops in Cambridge UK at the end of the novel. For Sara, the narrator of Earthspinner — just as it was for Gayatri and Myshkin in Lives —, practicing an art in itself is the royal way to individual identity: As she can barely afford enough food in Cambridge from the Indian endowment she got, she spends her free time in “a pottery studio, free for students” (Roy 2021: 13), and by reviving her skills of pottery remembers her pottery teacher Elango, who had to leave their village because he as a Hindu loved a Muslim girl; in Jupiter, Nomita has become a photographer and filmmaker, who is trying to work through her traumatic past in a film about the ashram where she was abused. For her, art is the medium to transgress cultural boundaries in contradistinction to the ashram, where in the painting classes the girls were taught: “’Stay inside the line, never go out. Understand? ’ […] That we were never to go outside. Outside the line was danger. Outside we would be killed or locked up in jail” (Roy 2015: 42), while in fact 10.4 Counterworlds 239 they are tortured and nearly killed inside the ashram if they do not obey the perverse desires of the guru. 10.5 Nation Building and the Novel In Indian literatures, nationality has occupied centre stage, especially in Indian Literatures in English and in their critical reception. Ulka Anjaria allots an entire period of her “history of the Indian novel in English to the movement known as ‘progressive writing’ in the early 20 th century, when the novel was taken to the service of a range of nationalist visions” (Anjaria 2015: 1). Ganesh Devy sees not only the Indian Novel in English, but the general endeavour of writing literary histories in Europe implicated in the cultural work of nation building (Devy 1998: esp. 6), and Simon Gikandi perceives the entire discipline of English studies “as a field that was central to the life of the modern national subject, its institution of exegesis was wrapped up in some of the most essentialist forms of the national imagination […]” (Gikandi 2011: 16). 10.5.1 Nation Building in India The problem with Indian nation building is that “the post-independence Indian State despite its multi-ethnic character has been engaged in a project of nation building which subscribes to the western notions of nation-state” (Sharma 2015, 1). The historian Eric Hobsbawm explicates several problems by pointing out that the ideal of the na‐ tion-state “is no older than the 18 th century” (1990: 3), “the criteria used for this purpose — language, ethnicity or whatever — are themselves fuzzy, shifting and ambiguous” (1990: 6), and identification with the ‘imagined community’ of a nation ultimately serves the interests of powerful elites bent to maintain their supremacy. From this view, the nation-state is itself a colonial legacy, and since the 1980s, postcolonial and feminist theory have exposed that the concept of the self-determined, culturally homogeneous nation-state as the political manifestation of a ‘modern’ society hides the internal divisions and power asymmetries in postcolonial countries that exist from tradition and as a result of colonial imposition (cf. Chakrabarty 2008, esp. ix-xxi; Lal 2005 and 2015). Consequently, Indian intellectuals from historical, sociological, feminist, tribal, and Dalit perspectives are questioning the adequacy and desirability of the entire concept of a ‘nation’ for the political future of India. Roy’s novels side with these critical assessments of a monolithic national identity, since such a construct necessitates the forcible suppression and exclusion of the majority of cultural, ethnic and religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent, a political strategy the consequences of which Roy’s novels often brutally illustrate with the hardships of individual identity formation for characters not conforming with the nationalist — some critics even call it fascist — Hindu-male right-wing Hindutva ideology that has been pushed by Narendra Modi since his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) won the elections in 2014. The consequence is, as Anuradha Roy states in a 2018 240 10 Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India interview, that “[i]nequality here has never been more catastrophic” (Armistead 2018). By extending the topic of nation building into the 1930s in Lives, where Myshkin’s father wants to die as a martyr in the freedom fights, because “[t]he only god he followed was the Nation” (34), her novels open up a critical perspective onto the whole tradition of nationalist activism and its dangers. And in hindsight, even the slightly comic anecdote of a mere hanger-on like Kamal in Atlas, who dresses up in Gandhian garb as a selling point — “Gandhi and all that, you know. What with so much nationalism in the air, I thought that as a manufacturer of traditional remedies I’d better look the part” (108) —, acquires a sinister undertone. Additionally, given the programmatic intermingling of individual lives and national issues in Roy’s novels, the problems concerning the constructedness and unreliability of the past in an autobiographical or biographical account, acquire far reaching theoretical significance when transferred to the historiography of a nation. Myshkin in Lives warns his readers at the beginning of the novel: In telling the story of any life, and certainly when telling our own, we cannot pretend we are narrating everything just as it happened. […] I am certain I truly remember these things and have not built impression up from stories and photographs. Yet the older I grow, the less certain I am of certainty. (23) However, while Myshkin fundamentally revises the inherited family history concern‐ ing his mother, in India incompatible historiographic versions on a national scale persist that have cast the Partition as an event that defines Hindus and Muslims in India (and Pakistan) “perhaps most fundamentally, as […] Muslims and Hindus alone” (Pandey 2001: 16), thus reducing Hindus and Muslims to their religious identity, only. 10.5.2 A Novel Nation In Roy’s novels, the problems of individual identity highlight faults of the on-going nation building by sorting out, which traditions should be preserved or even retrieved, and which traditions have to be discarded to enable a life in dignity not only for women, but also for non-normative sexualities as well as cultural groups and ethnicities that are marginalised by monolithic nationalist identitarian narratives, like Hindutva in India. Capturing the internal refraction of individual identities along multiple axes as intersectional identities, the narratives show that there is no private individual identity distinct from a national or global world, but that identity is always already embedded in a cultural and national context. The various life stories ask: What does a national identity have to be like to enable a good life for the diversity of sexualities, castes, religions and geographical regions that make up the world of the narrativised contemporary India in the novel? Roy’s novels supply two powerful symbols for a viable national identity in India, a house in her first novel Atlas, and a horse in her most recent novel Earthspinner. 10.5 Nation Building and the Novel 241 In a one-page Prologue in Atlas, an unidentified voice describes the old photograph of a house that forms the central motif of the entire novel and that in the end offers a home for Mukunda and Bakul, two characters marginalised by society, who, in a love relationship, break foundational taboos of their fictional presence. The house is described as “a folly, a Roman-looking affair with tapering pillars soaring to its arched roof. […] Watery eddies frozen at the click of a shutter lick the pillars of its long verandah” (Roy 2008: 1). This house has been designed “with the help of an Anglo-Indian architect trained in Glasgow, whose plan seemed to provide a judicious mix of West and East” (ibid.: 13). The mysterious house that has obviously been shaped by architectural traditions of various continents and ages, paradoxically forms the central symbol for continuity in a world of radical change, but it is threatened to be immersed in the river ever changing its course over time — and at the time of the fictional present may have vanished already. To turn this place, removed from any village or town, into a refuge for Mukunda and Bakul against all odds, the house — according to Hanquart-Turner —, becomes a metaphor not only for Bengal, the location of the story, but for all of India: So that to the question ‘Who shall inherit Bengal? ’ the answer is, of course, Mukunda and people like him, because his obscure roots and complicated life-story make of him the very epitome of the Bengal population in its diversity […] even if the country has been mutilated by Partition and the exclusion or marginalization of the Muslim community, as shown in his relationship with Suleiman Cacha. […] [ J]ust like the house was a metonymy for Bengal, Bengal itself can be seen as a metonymy for the whole of India. (Hanquart-Turner 2017: 65) To stay with this metaphor, Roy’s novels try to rescue — or rebuild — this house of many cultural traditions, where religion, caste, tribe, nation, gender, sexuality do not divide, but reciprocally fructify each other. A similarly utopian vision is materialised in the dream horse that Elonga builds in Earthspinner. The world revived in the memories of the first-person narrator is dominated by violent animosities between Hindus and Muslims, the destruction of local traditions and the replacement of spiritual cosmologies by capitalist economy and individual greed. The principal counter realms for the deficiencies of the fictional present in Roy’s novels — art and nature — both meet in Elango and in his most important artwork, the magnificent statue of a horse that appeared to him in a dream, emanating from that realm of the human psyche where the rules of logic, social segregation, and hierarchy do not apply: A horse was in flames. It foamed beneath the ocean breathing fire and when it shook its mane the flames coloured the waves red and when it erupted from the water it was as tall as a tree and the fire made the crackling sound of paper. It towered above the low-roofed house Elango lived in. (Roy 2021: 35 f.) Elango is the descendant of the Kummarths clan, who in the past pottered sacred horses for Hindu temples. But for Elango, building the horse is mysteriously connected to 242 10 Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India winning the woman he loves, a Muslim girl from the neighbourhood. As a final touch, he has the horse’s body engraved with ornamental scripture by the blind calligrapher “old Usman” (ibid.: 149), Zohra’s grandfather, who chooses an Urdu poem by the 15 th century Indian poet and mystic Kabir (1440-1518). The poem reads: “Listen carefully, Neither the Vedas / Nor the Quràn / Will teach you this: Put the bit in its mouth, / The saddle on its back, / Your foot in the stirrup, / And ride your wild runaway mind / All the way to heaven” (Kabir 2015: 132; italics in the original). Kabir rejected all religious creeds in his poetry and castigated meaningless rituals in all religions, but especially in Hinduism and Islam. Assuming the voice of his God, he says: “I am neither in temple nor in mosque: I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash: Neither am I in rites and ceremonies, nor in Yoga and renunciation” (I. 43). Kabir also claims that “[i]t is needless to ask of a saint the caste to which he belongs; […] Hindus and Moslems alike have achieved that End, where remains no mark of distinction” (II. 45-46). The poet furthermore states that “Yoga and the telling of beads, virtue and vice — These are naught to Him” (XXI. 71). Perfectly in tune with Kabir’s message, the horse, built in the tradition of sacred Hindu temple horses by a Hindu potter for a Muslim woman, and ornamented with a Kabir poem in Urdu, the script of the Muslim tradition, transcends Hinduism and Islam, and heralds a world beyond religious animosities, economic exploitation, as well as caste and class struggles. When Elonga sees “the stately horse of his long-ago dream” (Roy 2021: 132) freshly burnt for the first time, even to himself it appears as “a divine being” (ibid.: 141). When he reveals the horse to the public, for a few days it is admired by everyone: Some perceive it as a commodity to be sold to grand hotels for immense sums of money, some appreciate it as the resurrection of the caste tradition. But the dogmatic intervention of two Hindu priests and the evil chant of a malevolent woman called Akka, the witch, transforms the crowd into religious fanatics who violently destroy the horse, kill the old calligrapher, badly hurt Elango and force him and his beloved Zorah to flee from the place, because otherwise they would be murdered. In this way the narrative illustrates that the religiously legitimised fundamentalist identity politics of present-day India represented by Hindu priests programmatically ban the vision of a mutually enhancing co-existence of various religious and cultural traditions, manifest in the horse. The refusal to subscribe to one monolithic narrative of a unified nation with hegemonic validity claims also manifests itself in the pronounced multiperspectivity of the novels, often mixing first-person narratives and omniscient passages. Especially Jupiter exposes this narrative strategy by juxtaposing the perspectives of three older women friends on their first joint excursion to the Vishnu Temple in Jarmuli (Roy 2015: 22). They are Latika, a widow desirous of a man without admitting this even to herself, with a daughter living in Florence (ibid.: 28), Vidya, with “her habitual efficiency and practicality” (ibid.: 25), whose son is working in the film industry (ibid.: 23), and Gouri, nearly immobile because of her weight and with onsetting dementia. Rendered in third person omniscience, their attitudes to Nomita Frederiksen, an Indian woman aged 25 (ibid.: 10), expose the fears, hopes, and strategies of survival 10.5 Nation Building and the Novel 243 they have adopted in the course of their lives, and highlight very individual approaches to the modernisation of their country because Nomita is a striking appearance. Her hair resembles a bird’s nest braided with coloured threads, the ears are spiral bound with silver and copper rings and donning earphones, her jeans are cut “with a dozen zips that traversed the legs”, and she is tattooed (ibid.: 22). Ostensibly she comes from Oslo “to research a documentary. […] On religious tourism, temple towns, all of that” (ibid.: 23), but in reality she returned to India to work through the trauma of losing her family by violence and then being sexually abused in an ashram. 10.6 Conclusion Taking the narrative strategies this essay outlined together, the marked integration of global influences in terms of topics, character cast and formal traits, on the one hand, distinguishes Roy’s novels from any ‘postcolonial literature’ as an “act of rebellion against the incorporating tendencies of European and American neo-universalisms” (Ashcroft et al. 2002: 120), while, on the other hand, the insistence on the intra-national diversity of religions, ethnicities and cultural traditions in India subverts India’s post-independence claim to subsume the vast diversity of existing cultural traditions under the rubric of a homogenous nation. Instead, they gesture towards a “global ecumene”, where “the interconnectedness of the world, by way of interrelations, exchanges and related developments” (Hannerz 1992: 7) transcends politically-marked boundaries. The narrative strategies demand the acknowledgement of ‘alternative modernities’ (Gaonkar 2001; Ashcroft 2013), because cultural difference “conditions the way in which [other cultures] integrate the truly universal features of modernity” (Taylor 2001: 180), and in exemplary storylines and iconic symbols offer the identitar‐ ian vision “of a different political ethic or teleology […], one that is underwritten neither by the Western subject of Enlightenment nor by a reactionary and essentialist nativism” (Radhakrishnan 1996: 193). In this way, Roy’s novels perform an act of ‘cultural memorization’, “an activity occurring in the present, in which the past is continuously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future. […] cultural memory, for better or for worse, links the past to the present and future” (Bal 1999: vii). This act of reconstructing the past from the perspective of the present in India is an explosive political issue, with the Hindutva’s “larger agenda to rewrite the Indian past to serve present-day political interests […] which center around an imagined Hindu golden age of scientific progress interrupted by Muslim invaders who sought to crush Hindu culture and peoples” (Truschke 2020; see also Lal 2015: 7 f.). Against this biased reactionary misrepresentation of Indian history, Roy sets her own historical version: “[…] I think the very people the rightwing are trying to crush into nothingness are the unstoppable forces now — women and Dalits, people from the lower castes — battered but undefeated. In the past 70 years there has been such profound social change that there is no going back to the dark ages the right is trying to return us to. If I did not believe that, it would be hard to live” (Roy in Armitstead 2018). 244 10 Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India 10.7 Study Questions ● An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008) How do you interpret the significance of solid structures and fluidity in the novel, forming a central dichotomy in the images of houses and water (flood, river)? ● The Folded Earth (2011) In which way does the relationship of the narrator Maya to Diwan Sahib dramatise an ambivalent — or perhaps a differentiated — attitude towards the role of the Indian elite during the British Raj? ● Sleeping on Jupiter (2015) Why does the narrator have to return to Norway in order to overcome her traumatic experiences in India in a self-ordained ritual? ● All the Lives We Never Lived (2018) International travel is a central motif of the novel. How does this motif comment on the war? In which way is it significant that the narrator at the end of the novel is repeating the itinerary of his mother? ● The Earthspinner (2021) To do pottery is a central motif of the novel. How is this motif employed to connect the individual unconscious with art and history? How does doing pottery connect the characters with their individual as well as their cultural and historical past? How is the relation between the past evoked by this handicraft related to the historical present of the fictional world? 10.8 Further Reading Chaudhuri, Maitrayee (2004). “Introduction.” In: Chaudhuri, Maitrayee (ed.). Feminism in India. New Delhi: Kali for Women, xi-xlvi. Hanquart-Turner, Evelyne (2017). “‘Who Shall Inherit Bengal? ’: A Reading of Anduradha Roy’s An Atlas of Impossible Longing.” In: Crowley, Cornelius/ Ganapathy-Doré, Geehta/ Naumann, Michel (eds.). Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 79-86. Menon, Nivedita (2012). Seeing Like a Feminist. Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India. Sen, Tuhin Shuvra (2019). “Rejecting ‘the Feminine Mystique’ in Quest for Self-fulfillment: A Study of Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit you: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife and Anuradha Roy’s All the Lives We Never Lived.” Language in India 19 (4). 456-464. Singh, Shailendra P. (2019). “Memory and Loss in Anuradha Roy’s All the Lives We Never Lived.” Research Chronicler 7 (1). Lau, Lisa (2014). “‘Reverse Orientalism’ and Whimsy.” In: Lau, Lisa/ Dwivedi, Om Prakash (eds.). Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 56-78. DOI: 10.1057/ 9781137401564. 10.7 Study Questions 245 10.9 Works Cited Primary Sources Roy, Anuradha (2008). An Atlas of Impossible Longing. London: MacLehose Press. — (2011). The Folded Earth. New York: Free Press. — (2015). Sleeping on Jupiter. London: Quercus/ MacLehose Press. — (2018). All the Lives We Never Lived. London: Quercus/ MacLehose Press. — (2021). The Earthspinner. Welbeck/ London: Mountain Leopard Press. Secondary Sources Ahmad, Aijaz (1992). In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso. Abirami, R. (2020). “Psychological and Physical Dislocation in Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping On Jupiter.” Language in India 20 (2), 77-81. Anjaria, Ulka (2015). “Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures.” In: Anjaria, Ulka (eds). A History of the Indian Novel in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-30. DOI: 10.1017/ CBO9781139942355. Ashcroft, Bill (2013). “Going Global: The Future of Post-Colonial Studies.” In: Dwivedi, Om Prakash/ Kich, Martin (eds.). Postcolonial Theory in the Global Age: Interdisciplinary Essays. Jefferson, North Carolina/ London: McFarland & Company, 35-49. Ashcroft, Bill/ Griffiths, Gareth/ Tiffin, Helen (2002 [1989]). The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London/ New York: Routledge. Armitstead, Claire (2018). “Anuradha Roy: ‛Inequality in India has never been more catastro‐ phic’.” The Guardian, 16 July 2018. https: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2018/ jul/ 16/ intervie w-arunadha-roy-book (last accessed: 28.06.2022) Bal, Mieke (1999). Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover: University Press of New England. Brontë, Charlotte (1977 [1847]). Jane Eyre. London/ Melbourne/ Toronto: Everyman’s Library. Butalia, Urvashi (2000). The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Durham: Duke University Press. Chaudhuri, Maitrayee (2004). “Introduction.” In: Chaudhuri, Maitrayee (ed.). Feminism in India. New Delhi: Kali for Women, xi-xlvi. Jerina, Jove/ Chithra, G.K. (2020). “Getting Through the Cognisant Minds of the Characters in Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter.” Journal of Critical Review 7 (5), 595-597. DOI: 10.31838/ jcr.07.05.123. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2008). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Differ‐ ence. Princeton/ Oxford: Princeton UP. Crenshaw, Kimberle (1989). “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989 (Iss. 1, Article 8). http: / / chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/ ucl f/ vol1989/ iss1/ 8 (last accessed 18.10.2022) 246 10 Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India Devy, Ganesh N. (1998). ‘Of Many Heroes’: An Indian Essay in Literary Historiography. London: Sangam Books. Devy, Ganesh N. (ed.) (2012-present). People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI). www.peoples linguisticsurvey.org. [Some volumes have been published 2014-2021 by Telangana: Orient Black Swan]. Diego-Sanchez, Jorge (2020). “Entrenched Evil Against Women: Corporeal and Spiritual Violence in Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter.” In: Escobedo de Tapia, Carmen/ Moreno-Alvarez, Alejandra (eds.). Spiritual and Corporeal Selves in India: Approaches in a Global World. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 106-120. Dwivedi, Om Prakash/ Rajan, V. G. Julie (eds.) (2016). Human Rights in Postcolonial India. London: Routledge India. DOI: 10.4324/ 9781315651460. Gaonkar, Dilip Paramshwar (ed.) (2001). Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Gikandi, Simon (2011). “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality.” In: Connel, Liam/ Marsh, Nicky (eds.). Literature and Globalization: A Reader. London/ New York: Routledge. Gorra, Michael (2011). “Love and Real Estate in South Asia.” The New York Times Book Review. ht tps: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2011/ 06/ 26/ books/ review/ book-review-an-atlas-of-impossible-long ing-by-anuradha-roy.html (last accessed 23.12.2023). Hannerz, Ulf (1992). Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. Hanquart-Turner, Evelyne (2017). “‘Who Shall Inherit Bengal? ’: A Reading of Anduradha Roy’s An Atlas of Impossible Longing.” In: Crowley, Cornelius/ Ganapathy-Doré, Geehta/ Naumann, Michel (eds.). Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 79-86. Hobsbawm, Eric (1990). Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cam‐ bridge: Cambridge University Press. Horatschek, Anna Margaretha (2020). “Mixed Attachments in Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana” (1971). In: Wiegandt, Kai (ed.). The Transnational in Literary Studies: Potential and Limitations of a Concept. Berlin/ Boston: Walter de Gruyter. 21-43. DOI: 10.1515/ 9783110688726-002. John, Mary E. (2008). “Introduction.” In: John, Mary E. (ed.). Women’s Studies in India: A Reader. Gurgaon: Penguin Books India, 1-19. Kabir (2015 [1915]). Songs of Kabir. Translated by Rabindranath Tagore. Mansfield Centre, USA: Martino Publishing. Kakar, Sudhir (1996). 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DOI: 10.4000/ samaj.6636. 248 10 Anuradha Roy: Female Identities and Nation Building in India 11 The South Asian Refugee Novel in English Miriam Nandi, University of Leipzig Abstract This chapter explores the ways in which the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ has been represented and negotiated by contemporary South Asian novelists. Specifically, it introduces Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2016), Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) and Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty (2020). All three novels revolve around the themes of forced migration and border crossings in a world in which peace and prosperity are limited to a small elite with European, American, or Australian passports; yet they differ from each other with regard to their settings and in particular, their narrative make-up and mode. Hamid and Ghosh combine a realist mode of story‐ telling with magical and futuristic elements, thereby articulating a sense of hope‐ fulness in an otherwise devastating context. By contrast, Adiga stays within a realist mode of storytelling, which he combines with a late-Modernist temporal framework, as he relates one single day in the life of an undocumented migrant in an increasingly hostile Australia. The chapter also includes background infor‐ mation on each individual writer, i.e. their work so far, typical formal features and thematic foci of their writing, and provides definitions and explanation of key terms such as magic realism or indentured labour. 11.1 Introduction Migration and exile have been central topics in Indian English literature from the mid-20 th century onwards, and “fictions of migration” (cf. Sommer 2001) have been a vibrant field of academic study (cf. Upstone 2011). Many Indian-English authors are no longer based in India, most notably, Salman Rushdie, but also lesser-known writers such as Indra Sinha, an environmentalist writer born to a bi-national British-Indian family who is now based in France. If we were to pin down the starting point of the debate on the role of migration in Indian English literature, we would most likely choose the publication of Salman Rushdie’s essay collection Imaginary Homelands, in which he reflects on the role of exile in the Indian-English novel, concluding that “exiles or emigrants or expatriates” will invariably be “haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim” (Rushdie 1991: 10) their former home. By extension, he constructs the Indian-English novel as a “broken mirror” reflecting back a myriad of different “imaginary homelands” (ibid.). The message continues to resonate particularly in the 21 st century with a staggering number of 65.3 million people forced into exile (Sandten 2017: 1) because of war and natural disaster. The present chapter picks up on an issue that Rushdie’s essay, probably because of its seminal character, does not explore in much detail. Rushdie conflates the experiences of the exile, i.e. the person who is forced to leave their home country and the expatriate, i.e. the white collar worker or business professional who can move easily across continents. Probing this conflation, my chapter introduces novels in which forced and undocumented (and not professional) migration take centre-stage. Specifically, my chapter explores Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), a novel that intersperses its grim realism with magical and futuristic elements, Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), which juxtaposes Bengali myth with a thriller plot and ecological reflections on the devastating consequences of climate change for the Global South and Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty (2021 [2020]), which relates a day in the life of an undocumented migrant in an increasingly hostile Australia. All the three novels respond in their own way to what is often called the ‘refugee crisis’, as they revolve around the theme of forced migration and border crossings in a world where peace and prosperity are limited to a small elite with European, American, or Australian passports. The three novels are relatively recent, but the issues they tackle such as escaping from violence and the fracturing of the nation state, are not new. The foundational trauma for large parts of South Asia, i.e. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, was the partition of what was then British India into (a predominantly Muslim) Pakistan and (a religiously diverse, but still predominantly Hindu) India in 1947, an event in which borders were drawn in haste and without much reflection. When India gained independence in August 1947, tensions between Muslim and Hindu politicians led to the creation of two nation-states: a Muslim Pakistan and a religiously more diverse but predominantly Hindu India. Yet, none of the regions that were divided by the new border was religiously homogeneous. This led to a mass exodus — by train, by bullock cart, on foot — of about 12 million people with Muslims leaving for Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs for India. The partition also led to massive outbreaks of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and rape. About 2 million people are estimated to have been killed on the journey or in mob violence in the nine months after independence. The creation of a predominantly Muslim Pakistan entailed that East and West Pakistan were separated by a vast geographical territory (more than a 1,000 miles) that belonged to India. Differences in language and a sense that East Pakistanis were not properly represented in the government and administration gave rise to discontent and tensions, which resulted in the secession of East Pakistan in 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh. The frictions were intensified as the government of India gave the secessionist substantial military support, which ultimately led to the creation of an independent Bangladesh in the same year. This second partition also entailed massive outbreaks of violence and an estimated 8 to 10 million people fled across the new border. 250 11 The South Asian Refugee Novel in English The partition forced a staggering number of about 12 million people to cross the newly created border (Daiya 2016: 1). An estimated 2 million people were killed in outbreaks of ethnic cleansing and mob violence (ibid.), a still unknown number of women raped and abducted (Butalia 2000: 53-84). Writers like Kushwant Singh (technically an Indian novelist) and Bapsi Sidhwa (a Pakistani writer) both keep returning to the moment of the partition insisting that the horrible violence affected both sides of the newly created border and all sides of the religious divide and, furthermore, left religious minorities such as the Sikhs and the Parsis with no place to go (on the impact of the partition in South Asian literature, see, for instance, Kabir (2015)). As the trauma of exile and mass migration (ironically, and no less tragically) connects the literatures of the nation-states in South Asia, I deliberately included Mohsin Hamid, a Pakistani-born writer, in the chapter, and thus use the term “anglophone South Asian literature” rather than Indian English literature. Furthermore, South Asians were beginning to be scattered across the globe already in the 19 th century (thus, way before the creation of an Indian nation state), as labourers were needed in basically all parts of the British Empire once slavery became abolished. In a system of ‘indentured labour’, which entailed that the labourers got into debt with the colonial administrators for their journey which they then had to ‘work off,’ often for decades, about 1.5 million people were moved from South Asia to the Caribbean, to East and South Africa, Mauritius and Malaysia. The descendants of the indentured labourers, such as the Indo-Trinidadian writer V.S. Naipaul, are also important voices in the literature of the South Asian diaspora (see Mishra 2007). Indentured labour was a system of importing labour power across vast geo‐ graphical distances. The system worked to a great disadvantage of the indentured labourers, who often had gotten into debt with their employer — ironically, for the passage from their place of origin to their place of work — and had to work off their debt. The indentured labour system goes back to the 16 th century, but it became particularly prominent in the 19 th century, as labourers were needed to work on the cane fields in the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery, or to build the railways in South Africa. The workers came from various different parts of Asia (China, Fiji etc.), but Indian / South Asian labourers were the largest group comprising about 1.5 million people. The three novels introduced in this chapter thus contribute to a literary discourse that has a long tradition. Yet, they also respond to a historical moment (the so-called refugee crisis) that is relatively recent and engage in an intermedial dialogue with other forms of constructing this moment such as print and broadcast journalism and digital culture. 11.1 Introduction 251 11.2 Doors to Safety in a Precarious World: Exit West Exit West is the fourth novel by Mohsin Hamid, a Pakistan-born writer who divides his time between Lahore (Pakistan), London and New York. Its success with global audiences and critics parallels only a handful of novels from South Asia, possibly Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). It was nominated for the Booker Prize twice and ranked among the best ten books of the year 2017 of the New York Times. As a result, Hamid has been characterized “as the golden child of the ‘global novel’” (Mączyńska 2021: 1091), as his “fictions cross continents, trace the tentacular reach of global capitalism, and investigate new modes of digital interconnectedness” (Mączyńska 2021: 1091). Exit West spans several settings, from an unnamed city in an unnamed country, which according to Shazia Sadaf is “quite identifiable as Pakistan” (2020: 639), to Mykonos, Vienna, London and concluding in Marin County, in the San Francisco Bay Area. It tells the story of Nadia and Saeed, two students in their twenties whose home country becomes a site of civil war. As the war approaches their city and their existence and live is in danger, they are forced to leave. The structuring element of the novel is the appearance of ‘magic doors’ all over the world, which seem to have the capacity to compress time and space so that whoever walks through them is transported from one place in the world to another. Nadia and Saeed with the help of a trafficker find one of the doors that leads them to safety in Mykonos where they are stranded in a camp of refugees, passing their time in a protracted state of waiting and insecurity. In Mykonos, another door opens which leads them to Vienna, where a door opens which brings them into a flat in Kensington, which gradually fills with other refugees, some from Nadia’s and Saeed’s country, but many from other places of the Global South. Nadia feels at ease among the international crowd of flat-squatters, whereas for Saeed the existence in the house is jarring and he feels suspicious of the other occupants. As more and more refugees arrive in London, the atmosphere becomes increasingly hostile: British “nativists” attack the migrants. When mob violence does not stop, the couple again searches and finds another door which leads them to Marin County. At their final destination the couple grows even further apart, so that Nadia decides to leave Saeed. The two meet again in a distant future, “half a century later”, and decide to visit the Atacama Desert in Chile to gaze at the stars, a dream they had nurtured when they had met in the unnamed city (Hamid 2017: 229). The story of Nadia and Saeed forms the main plot of the novel. It is punctuated by short episodes, which are linked to the main plot through the device of the magic doors. On a winter night in Tokyo a Yakuza encounters two Filipino girls clad in summer clothes in a cul-de-sac (Hamid 2017: 26 f.); and in Amsterdam an old Dutchman befriends a “wrinkled” Brazilian, who arrived in the Netherlands through one of the doors (ibid.: 172 f.). The two become lovers and use the secret door to move back and forth between Rio de Janeiro and Amsterdam. The connection between the main plot and the various episodes, which never actually converge into different plotlines but remain open-ended and scattered, is temporal, as signalled in introductory phrases 252 11 The South Asian Refugee Novel in English like “[a]s Saeed’s email was downloaded from the server […] far away in Australia a pale-skinned woman was sleeping alone in the Sidney neighbourhood of Surry Hills” (ibid.: 5). The simultaneity of the narrated events and the magic movement through space stand in for the “global hyper-connectivity” (Knudsen and Rahbeck 2021: 444) that characterizes our digital age, while at the same time creating an otherworldly atmosphere. The device of the magic doors is blended with detached, realist descriptions of neoliberal postmodernity: Saeed and Nadia meet in a class on “corporate identity and product branding” (Hamid 2017: 1), they have their first date in a generic Chinese restaurant that “was distinctively lit by what looked like candle-filled paper-lanterns, but were in fact plastic, illuminated by flame-shaped, electronically flickering bulbs” (ibid.: 20), and the first thing they see in Mykonos is a “beach club, with bars and tables and large outdoor loudspeakers and loungers stacked away for winter” (ibid.: 99). Exit West has been (too hurriedly, I think) designated a magic realist text (see Lagji 2018) for the obvious reason that it uses magic elements — the magic doors — in an otherwise realist setting. The term magic realism or interchangeably magical realism refers to a style of writing which fuses fantastic and real-world elements. Unlike fantasy literature, magic realist fiction often has a real-world setting, in which magic events occur or, conversely, ordinary events are represented as if they were fantastic. Another fea‐ ture of magic realist writing is the literalization of metaphors such as the doors in Exit West. Magic realist fiction subtly subverts Western concepts of reason and science and has been read as a predominant mode of postcolonial writing from Latin America, India and Africa. Although the term has been useful, its conflation of form and national or geographical origin has come under critical scrutiny in the past decades. And yet, the magic doors are really the only magic element in the text. What is more, the overall verbal texture, the tone, and the mood in Exit West hardly overlaps with canonical South Asian magic realist novels: whereas Rushdie’s language is “brash, jocular, daring, and deeply clever” (Kabir 2015: 11), excessive and hyperbolic, Hamid’s tone is often dry, matter-of-fact and more traditionally realist. Also, the way he constructs landscapes and animal kingdom departs from the lush lyricism of magic realist novels such as The God of Small Things. Therefore, I would read Hamid’s insertion of the magic doors as an echo, or a ‘tipping of the hat’, to an earlier generation of postcolonial South Asian novelists. The God of Small Things is a novel by Indian English writer Arundhati Roy that was published in 1997 and was awarded the Booker Prize in the same year. Some critics suggest that this novel is not magic realist either, as the magic elements in 11.2 Doors to Safety in a Precarious World: Exit West 253 the text can be explained away by the “heightened imaginative perspective” (Tickell 2007: 57) of Roy’s child protagonists. Yet, with its interest in subversion, trans‐ gression and excess, and its atmospheric, magical construction of everyday life, the novel draws heavily on the magic realist tradition, even if it might not embrace it tout court. For a definition of the term see Hegerfeldt (2004). See Thieme (2003) for a concise discussion of magic realism in the context of postcolonial studies. Exit West’s main theme is not the subversion of Western rationality or historiography, but a critique of the “radically inequitable ways in which corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally” (Butler 2012: 30). As Cecile Sandten suggests, refugee literature such as Hamid’s can be fruitfully brought into dialogue with Judith Butler’s concepts of “precarity” and “grievability” (see Butler 2004, 2009): Butler denounces that the lives of citizens in the global North are considered to be more “grievable” than narratives of “distant suffering” (2012: 135) in the global South. In reducing the distance between the migrants’ precarious lives and the citizens of the global North, Exit West has been read as “transforming the precarity of the migrant” (Veyret 2019: 112). The precarious lives refugees like Nadia and Saeed are forced to endure become ‘relatable’ as the fashionable term has it; they are no longer safely tucked away. Yet the sort of proximity or empathy that the novel creates “should not be confused with an empathy that identifies the other via the self ’s own terms, allowing the empathiser to deny his or her own precarity and bask in a self-construction of being noble, generous and benevolent” (Carter 2021: 626). Exit West actually keeps the reader’s gaze at bay, and never fully penetrates the inner lives of the characters. This is effected by Hamid’s interesting usage of narrative voice and perspective. The narrator in Exit West has frequently been described as “omniscient” (Knudsen and Rahbeck 2021: 448), which is misleading, as the knowledge of Hamid’s narrator is mostly limited to external events. The reader hardly ever enters the mind of the characters, except for some small passages in which the thoughts and emotions of Saeed and, even more rarely, Nadia are conveyed. Hamid’s interesting use of voice and perspective is central to the reading of the novel. Exit West keeps the Western gaze at bay; it refuses to sentimentalize its characters, to make them objects of neo-colonial pity and goodwill. While the novel does invite empathy for the plight of the refugees (see Knudsen and Rahbeck 2021: 443, Carter 2021: 623) and shifts the perspective from the increasingly barricaded nation-states in the global North to the people seeking refuge from war and natural disaster, Hamid avoids the tropes that characterize even the most benevolent variants of media representations of the ‘refugee crisis’. In this vein, he eschews the life-threatening journey on a boat or on trucks. He only briefly touches upon the devastating experience of violence and loss, emphasizing the disruption of arrival instead. As his characters enter the affluent nation-states through magic doors, he also avoids the scandalous narrative of crossing borders ‘illegally’. Conversely, Exit West prompts its readers to reconsider their conceptions of movement and time through the lens of the refugee’s 254 11 The South Asian Refugee Novel in English experience. As Amanda Lagji shows in her article “Waiting in Motion”, Exit West subverts conceptions of movement and stasis, as it pictures moving and immobility as overlapping states rather than as contrasts or mutually exclusive entities (see Lagji 2018: 220). In this vein, waiting, a characteristic experience of the refugee (waiting for the right to asylum, waiting for the next move etc.), is not just pictured as an experience that has to be endured, as a moment in which time becomes “slow and thick” (Schweizer 2008: 2), but as a way of being-in-the-world that can also be transformed and used subversively: Nadia and Saeed pretend to be tourists (Hamid 2017: 108), leisurely traversing the island of Mykonos and exploring its picturesque sites, thus using the time spent in waiting in an unexpected, subversive manner. In the process, time spent in waiting becomes potentially agreeable and not just bearable. In appropriating leisured, white, middle-class activities, Nadia and Saeed re-assert their agency. There is even a streak of humour in the passages relating Nadia’s and Saeed’s stay in Mykonos, as Nadia, when putting up their tent, decides that “it was like playing house” (ibid.: 107) and thus draws attention to the resilience and agency of the refugee. The way Hamid constructs his characters similarly contests clichés and preconcep‐ tions. When Saeed first encounters Nadia, he assumes that she is religious judging from her attire, as she is “always clad from the tips of her toes to the bottom of her jugular notch in a flowing back robe” (ibid.: 1). The following episode unfolds when Saeed tries to ask her out after class: ‘You don’t say your evening prayers? ’ she asked. Saeed conjured up his most endearing grin. ‘Not always, sadly.’ Her expression did not change. So he persevered, clinging to his grin with the mounting desperation of a doomed rock climber: ‘I think it’s personal. Each of us has his own way. Or … her own way. Nobody’s perfect. And, in any case —’ She interrupted him. ‘I don’t pray.’ She continued to gaze at him steadily. Then she said, ‘Maybe another time.’ (Hamid 2017: 2-3) In this passage, Saeed is the focalizer and the narrative centres on his comical attempts to please her. The narratologist Gérard Genette distinguishes narratives along the lines of ‘who tells’ and ‘who sees’ the events in a narrative. He coined the term focalization to spell out the question of perspective (or ‘who sees the events’). Focalization can be internal, i.e. what we see is limited to the mind of an individual character, or ex‐ ternal, the perspective is restricted to outward events, excluding feelings and thoughts, or zero, which means that the perspective is not limited at all. 11.2 Doors to Safety in a Precarious World: Exit West 255 Nadia, in contrast, remains silent, her thoughts as inscrutable to Saeed as to the reader. Yet, she is the one who controls the exchange with her steady, expressionless gaze. Just as her body is obscured by the black robe, her inner life, her emotions and motivations, remain opaque. Nadia’s gaze exudes confidence and marks her as a strong presence in the novel, but her more intimate private feelings are not revealed. By constructing Nadia as opaque and difficult to point, but not as obscure or mysterious, as a target of sexism but not as its victim, Hamid avoids and navigates the many pitfalls that a writer could risk in constructing Muslim women. A few pages further on, the besotted Saeed eventually finds a good moment to ask her why she wears the black robe if she does not pray, to which she replies, smiling: “So men don’t fuck with me” (Hamid 2017: 16). The chapter ends with Nadia’s statement, with her confident yet factual and dry voice. Thus, Nadia is a hijabi but not a believer, she lives a feminist’s life but does so avoiding the public gaze. In the next chapter, the narrator reveals her ‘backstory’ which features a family who disapproves of her independent spirit to such an extent that she leaves them, breaking a foundational taboo in her milieu, but this backstory is related in fragments, without much narrative elaboration and affective fullness. The gaze of the narrator hardly ever penetrates her inner life; he grants her the kind of privacy that is typically denied to refugees who are forced to tell their most intimate trauma of persecution, violence and life-threatening journeys when applying for refugee status. Another important difference between Nadia and Saeed is their response to the cosmopolitanism of their Kensington flat, in which refugees from various parts of the global South live together. While Saeed reacts with a sense of growing unease to the fact that they are the only people from their particular part of the world, which leads him to seek out his fellow countrymen in other parts of the city, Nadia “does not depend on filiations like family or community for happiness” (Knudsen and Rahbeck 2021: 446). She comes to realize that her ‘flatmates’ whom she had considered to be Nigerians “were in fact not Nigerians” (Hamid 2017: 144), and that they had both — falsely — relied on similar categories as the British “nativists” (ibid.: 132), such as the nation-state, citizenship and the division between alien and foreign. As Josephine Carter points out in her persuasive reading of Hamid’s work, Exit West highlights that the division between citizen and refugee is unstable and fluid, only “determined by the random convergence of time and space in any particular individual’s life” (Carter 2021: 633). The difference between the two solely depends on the birth-right of the citizen, which is an “inherited status” (Carens 1987: 252 qtd. in Carter 2021: 633) and might well be “the modern equivalent of feudal privilege” (ibid.). The novel encourages its readers to re-think the binary classifications of alien and foreign, of citizenship and exile, and has thus been interpreted as projecting migration as a universal human experience, a reading that Hamid himself suggests in a variety of interviews (Knudsen and Rahbeck 2021: 443). For this reason, some critics suggest that Exit West encapsulates Pheng Cheah’s con‐ cept of “postcolonial literature as world literature” (Cheah 2016; see also Cheah 2014), 256 11 The South Asian Refugee Novel in English that is, a literature that constitutes imaginary worlds and provides “the ethico-political horizon” (Cheah 2016: 5 qtd. in Knudsen and Rahbeck 2021: 444) for imagining new and different ways of belonging and filiation (see also Helgeson et al. 2020). Indeed, there is also a streak of “radical hopefulness” (Knudsen and Rahbeck 2021) in Exit West, as it creates an imaginary world in which walls become magic doors, and refugees find shelter from war and terror. Exit West is as much a novel about spatial boundaries and their violent repercussions as a reflection on temporality in a global, digital world. The magic doors, “rectangle[s] of complete darkness” (Hamid 2017: 8), stand for the time-space compression facilita‐ ted by digital culture and the ubiquity of smartphones, which are, after all, also black rectangles. Thus, the novel’s temporal register is one of simultaneity, as is conveyed through the recurring usage of “meanwhile”. Simultaneity is also what connects the otherwise unconnected episodes with the main plot. Time in Exit West is not “its horizontal, linear passage” but has “vertical dimensional quality” (Sadaf 2020: 644). To summarize, Exit West draws attention to the precarious lives of refugees, while avoiding to sentimentalize and victimize them. Hamid’s construction of character contests and subverts stereotypes of Muslim migrants. Through the inclusion of magic doors, which enable a safe passage from one space to another, the novel articulates a sense of hopefulness without actually becoming utopian. It is a novel that speaks a lot to our present moment, while also articulating a sense of timelessness and universality. 11.3 A Planet on the Move: Gun Island Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island relates the devastating impact of climate change on the landscapes of Bengal and the ensuing plight of climate refugees from the Bengal area scattered across the globe. At the same time, it also plays with Bengali folklore and is constructed in terms of a ‘page-turner’ plot, in which a mythical story is interlaced with mysterious disappearances and a final rescue. Gun Island alone already demonstrates Amitav Ghosh’s versatility as a writer. His work blurs the boundaries between genres and modes, as he combines medical history with science fiction in The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), ethnography with memoir in In an Antique Land (1992) and literary criticism and climate change writing in The Great Derangement (2016). He has also innovated the historical novel from a postcolonial angle in his Ibis Trilogy (2008-2016), which charts the colonial history of the Indian Ocean, and in his novel The Glass Palace (2000), which re-writes the history of British India spanning a whole century and a plethora of places, such as Myanmar (or “Burma”), India and Malaya. Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 as a son of a diplomat and a housewife. His family originally hailed from the eastern parts of what is now Bangladesh. They left before the catastrophic outbreaks of violence during the partition, but the themes of displacement, movement and exile run through all of his novels and his non-fiction. Ghosh spent his life ‘on the move’ from early childhood onwards, gaining his first doctoral degree in Oxford, conducting fieldwork in Burma, Cambodia and in Egypt 11.3 A Planet on the Move: Gun Island 257 and held a number of academic posts in the United States and in India (see Mondal 2013: 6). Yet, despite the global and cosmopolitan framework of his life and work, the place that shapes and colours his imagination is the city of his birth, Calcutta. Ghosh’s protagonists often belong to a specific group of Calcuttans, the bhadralok, literally meaning “gentle folk” in Bengali, but more specifically denoting the English-educated, upper stratum of the middle class that gained a certain position of power in the colonial administration. The bhadralok were a product of the colonial reorganization of India in the first half of the 19 th century, but quickly evolved into a cultural force of their own right. The bhadralok culture of reading and discussion — the Calcutta book fair remains the largest of its kind in the world — shaped Ghosh’s imagination. His characters are often urban, well-educated and multilingual, bookish and introvert, and his plotlines brim with historical or scientific detail that tell of Ghosh’s own baffling intellectual prowess. At the same time, Ghosh’s novels also acknowledge (with more than a hint of regret) the bhadralok’s distance from the rural folk culture of Bengali peasantry, a culture that used to connect urban and rural spaces as well as different classes with each other: [T]he urban bhadralok tradition had fashioned itself under the colonial gaze and, in the course of its ‘modernization’, had gradually discarded or purged those elements of rural folk culture that the upper middle classes had originally shared with the peasants. (Mondal 2013: 34 f.) Gun Island is told by a homodiegetic narrator, who in many ways encapsulates a specific Bengali bhadralok character type: Deen Dutta is an urban, cosmopolitan persona, based in Brooklyn with family ties to Calcutta. He deals with ancient books and has a special interest in the 17 th century. On a family gathering in Calcutta, he learns about the central myth of the story, the adventures of the Gun Merchant Bundoki Sarkar. The myth is constructed as a folktale in the narrative, while it also bears some resemblance to the Odyssee. The Gun Merchant crosses oceans (the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and then the Mediterranean) to escape his feud with Manasa Devi, goddess of snakes and other poisonous animals. Manasa Devi is the goddess of snakes, who is worshipped in Bengal and Northeast India. There are various legends regarding her parentage: according to some, she is the daughter of Lord Shiva; yet other legends state that she is the daughter of a sage. Because her parentage is not entirely clear, she has never been elevated to be placed among the principal gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon. Some re‐ searchers place her story among the folk traditions of the Adivasi, i.e. the indige‐ nous minority of India that is ostracized by the Hindu majority. The myth is transmitted orally, and the only written fragments of the tale are etched on a shrine in the Sundarbans. On visiting the shrine, Deen meets two young Bengali men Tipu and Rafi, whose native landscape in the Bengal delta is gradually destroyed 258 11 The South Asian Refugee Novel in English by floods and storms. The two men embark on a journey from the Bengal borderlands to Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and then, on a boat across the Mediterranean. The journey of the two young climate refugees, who, as is later revealed, are actually a couple, thus mirrors the journey of the Gun Merchant. In the process, Ghosh creates an interesting, otherworldly sense of time, as “we are both back inside the seventeenth-century novel and in the increasingly deranged — unexpected, earthly, and unearthly — world of the present” (Nuttall 2020: 461). The novel is replete with echoes and mirroring. Deen discovers with surprise that the tourist industry in Venice relies on the labour of undocumented Bengali migrants, whose rustic dialect reminds him of his East Bengali origins. Venice is threatened by rising sea-levels as are the coaster borderlands between India and Bangladesh. An Ethiopian woman on the boat crossing over from Egypt to Sicily is constructed as a larger-than-life mythical figure, mirroring the Black Madonna of the church Santa Maria de Salute, whose ancient precursor is the Minoan goddess of snakes, and hence, is constructed as a ‘double’ of Manasa Devi (see also Newns 2021: 17). Landscapes blur into each other, as the lagoon of Venice reminds Deen of a “patch of Bengali countryside […] an estatuarine landscape of lagoons, marshes, and winding rivers” (Ghosh 2019: 162), and the uncanny sound of shipworms eating their way through the piers of Venice echoes the sounds of crabs in Deen’s Bengal. The novel’s most characteristic, organizing element is the fluidity of boundaries between different historical eras, between myth and reality, and between nature and culture. Gun Island establishes connections and affinities between times, figures and phenomena that appear to be unrelated. In this vein, human mobility — Deen’s travel from Calcutta, to Brooklyn, to LA, or the refugees’ movement through South Asia and the Middle East — is paralleled by the movement of animals and forces of nature. River dolphins are driven from their feeding grounds by toxic waste (Ghosh 2019: 106), bark beetles originated in warmer climates wreak damage in forests in Oregon (ibid.: 119 f.), a poisonous water snake usually not found in the Northern hemisphere kills a dog in California (ibid.: 144), and a venomous spider, a brown recluse, is found, for the first time, in Venice, “because it is getting so much hotter in Europe” (ibid.: 223). Thus, Gun Island lends itself to ecocritical readings, according to which nature is endowed with agency, rather than being regarded as a mere source for the human imagination as “ecocritics reject the notion [common in most other literary theories] that everything is socially and / or linguistically constructed” (Barry 2017: 252). According to ecocriticism, “nature really exists, out there beyond ourselves” (ibid.) and thus, ecological disasters such as the flooding of the mangrove forest, so evocatively described in Gun Island, are not linguistic events but hard material facts. That said, ecocriticism does not espouse a naïve view of nature, and nor does Ghosh. His novel draws attention to the neo-colonial (and hence, socially constructed) circumstances that support a refinery owned by an international conglomerate to use the river delta as a site for toxic dumping without facing legal consequences. The toxic waste destroys the ecosystem and hence the livelihood of the people living there, but environmental 11.3 A Planet on the Move: Gun Island 259 groups are helpless in the face of the “giant conglomerate that’s got politicians in its pockets on both sides of the border” (Ghosh 2019: 105). Ghosh uses the character of the cetologist Piya Ganguly, a character who had already appeared in his novel The Hungry Tide, to highlight the environmental disasters that force Bengalis on both sides of the border into exile. It is through Piya that Deen learns about “oceanic dead zones”, i.e. “vast stretches of water that have a very low oxygen content - too low for fish to survive” (ibid.). In estuaries where rivers meet the sea these dead zones affect river deltas as well, leading to massive fish kills and destroying the livelihood of the fishermen. Thus, nature is constructed as vulnerable to the forces of human-driven global capitalism, but not as passive. The natural environment also acts upon the human characters, as Rafi is bitten by a king cobra and only barely survives, and huge forest fires devastate California while Deen and his Italian friend Cinta attend a conference in LA (ibid.: 135). Storms and tropical cyclones, which also feature strongly in Ghosh’s environmental‐ ist essay The Great Derangement and his earlier novel The Hungry Tide, are a recurrent theme in the novel. Gun Island’s final chapters conjure up images of increasing storms, as in the chapter “Winds”, which opens with Deen’s realizing “that the weather had taken an odd turn […], the sky had turned dark. Banks of cloud, of many shades of colour, ranging from silvery to almost black were scudding and whirling across the heavens, swept along by fierce and changeable gusts of winds” (ibid.: 267). The winds built up into a storm so heavy that walking becomes difficult, and flowerpots are swept from balconies crashing on the pavement. The narrator’s tone remains matter-of-fact and descriptive. The storm is not constructed as a symbolic image of the narrator’s inner life, but as a force in and of itself that is endowed with conspicuous agency: the wind is “scudding and whirling,” “draughts […] whistle,” and the “ageing timbers” create a “chorus of indignant creaks and groans” (ibid.). A few pages later into the novel, the area is hit by a tornado, “a twisting, serpentine form […] spinning and dancing above a green cornfield” (ibid.: 272). The tornado is constructed as if it were an animal, a snake (“serpentine form”) and as having a “mouth” which “bit[s] into the ground” (ibid.: 272). The snake-like quality of the tornado links it with the goddess Manasa Devi, its open “mouth” highlights its uncanny agency. Thus, Gun Island has been read as capturing what Ghosh calls “the ‘environmental uncanny’ (Ghosh 2016: 42) engendered by climate change and the human-caused pollution in many ways” (Varma 2021: 90). The last chapter of the novel is entitled “Storm”, punning on the Italian word for a flock of birds in flight, “storma” (Ghosh 2019: 307), which accompanies the rescue boat that Deen’s Italian friends have organized to save the refugees. With the sudden, miraculous appearance of “millions of birds” (ibid.: 306) and somersaulting dolphins and whales the novel introduces irrealist elements into an otherwise real-world setting. Yet, like Exit West, Ghosh’s novel never actually espouses a magical realist aesthetics tout court, such as presenting the realist as fantastic or subverting the discourses of science and history. As Ursula Kluwick has pointed out, Ghosh “questions the 260 11 The South Asian Refugee Novel in English effectiveness of magical realism as a mode of representing climate change precisely because climate change must be outside the reaches of doubt” (2020: 17). Ghosh explains in his environmentalist essay that extreme weather events such as cyclones and tornados are “urgently, astoundingly real” (2016: 27) and that representing them as surreal or magical “would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling — which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time” (ibid.). Rather than subverting or ironizing historiography and science as Salman Rushdie, Ghosh insists that what he depicts as a novelist is very much a history of the most immediate present and that climate science has a lot to say on this specific moment. Ghosh’s reliance on supernatural elements in the last chapters of the novel and on prescience, premonition and foreknowledge, which he introduces through the character of Cinta, is particularly striking. Sara Nuttall reads these elements as constructions of a new and innovative form of time that is neither a utopian take on the future nor a nostalgic construction of an idealized past, but instead “a form of ecstatic time intensified into a[n] overwhelming, riveting, and devastating event” (Nuttall 2020: 457). Furthermore, Ghosh reverses stereotypical notions of reason and superstition as he locates premonition and belief in the supernatural in a European character (Cinta) and associates the scientific worldview with an Indian character (Piya). The clichés are also contested through the spatial make-up of the novel: the “stormo” of birds and the uncanny tornado occur in Italy, while the cyclones in the Bay of Bengal (another storm) in the opening chapters are described in a factual manner and have, in fact, an equivalent in the real world. Ghosh here uses another character from his earlier novel The Hungry Tide, the social worker Moyna, to provide a ‘backstory’ on cyclones in the Bay of Bengal. As Moyna relates, cyclones are common in the area and a warning system introduced in the 1990s has helped to keep casualties low. However, due to climate change, cyclones have become more intense with devastating, long-term consequences. In this vein, Cyclone Aila that hit the Sundarbans in 2009 devastated not just the landscape of the Sundarbans but the social fabric of the region: Hundreds of miles of embankment had been swept away and the sea had invaded places where it had never entered before; vast tracts of once fertile land had been swamped by salt water, rendering them uncultivable for a generation, if not forever. The evacuations too had produced effects that no one could have foretold. Having once uprooted their villages many evacuees had decided not to return, knowing that their lives, always hard, would be even more precarious now. Communities had been destroyed and families dispersed; the young had drifted into the cities, swelling already swollen slums […]. (Ghosh 2019: 52 f.) Ghosh constructs the topic of internal migration from the villages to the city slums as an event that is felt locally but was caused by the modes of production and consumption of global capitalism. Whereas in The Hungry Tide, the environmental focus does not go beyond the region of the Sundarbans, echoing what ecocritic Ursula Heise calls the tendency for “reterritoriazation” (2010: 160) in ecocriticism, i.e. the importance 11.3 A Planet on the Move: Gun Island 261 of having a sense of place, connection to nature, thus highlighting dwelling rather than moving, Gun Island articulates a sense of place that is both rooted and global. Tipu is portrayed as wearing a “Net’s T-Shirt and baggy jeans [which] would not have looked out of place in Brooklyn” on his trip to Manasa Devi’s shrine in the Sundurbans, and he speaks English “like an American” (Ghosh 2019: 56), unnerving Deen by calling him “Pops” like any spoiled American teenager. Rafi, a fisherman’s son of little means, is first introduced as speaking Bangla “with the rustic lilt of the Sundurbans” (ibid.: 79), but this image is countered a few passages further on, as it is Rafi who reminds Deen that there is no reception for his cell phone. It shames Deen that he had “assumed that Rafi would be unacquainted with cellphones simply because he was a Sundurbans fisherman” (ibid.: 94). The passage highlights that even the most remote local spaces are impacted by globalization, and that global capitalism, albeit destructive and devastating in the region, also creates the information infrastructure which, in turn, aids those affected by climate catastrophe to try to escape into the Euro-American world. Tipu explains how he and others use digital culture (“[…] it starts with a phone and voice recognition technology” (ibid.: 66)) to create networks of what can only be called human trafficking. Deen is shocked, initially, but remains silent at Tipu’s rebuttal: ‘You ever tried planting rice Pops? You’re bent over double all day long, in the hot sun, with snakes and insects swarming around you. Do you think anyone would want to go back to that after they’ve seen pictures of their friends sitting in a café in Berlin sipping caramel lattes? ’ (ibid.) The irony that it is the same phones that are produced in a system of abject exploitation also become a source of knowledge for those desiring to escape said exploitation, projecting images of a different, comfortable life and putting refugees in connection with traffickers. The phenomenon is of course not entirely new but goes back to an earlier “power-geometry” (Massey 1993) under colonialism. In the last chapter, Deen reflects on the relationships between chattel slavery, indentured labour and contemporary human trafficking: like refugees, coolies too had been policed and preyed upon by ‘coyotes’ and overseers; they too had been crammed into confined spaces […]. Yet there was a vital difference — the system of indentured labour, like chattel slavery before it, had always been managed and controlled by European powers. The coolies had often no idea where they were going […]. (Ghosh 2019: 303) He goes on that, “it was the countries of the West that now know very little about the people who were flocking towards them” (ibid.: 304). The West’s ignorance of the people who work on their construction sites or clean their houses stands in direct opposition with the conspicuous knowledge that digitally-savvy young men like Tipu and Rafi have about the laws and the loopholes of the countries they try to enter. Deen highlights that the unequal structures of power are still in place — the former colonies 262 11 The South Asian Refugee Novel in English are still largely producers of goods to be consumed in the former colonial centres of power — but they have become brittle and porous, like the borders that Tipu and Rafi are crossing. As images of attractive consumer goods, of affluence and peace, flash on the smartphone screens of young (and not so young) people across the globe, people like Tipu and Rafi want themselves to be consumers of the goods that are produced in their home countries, and, indeed, “how could they not? ” (ibid.). The passage shows the strong ethico-political streak in Ghosh’s work (see also Hoydis 2011: 12), which is robustly postcolonial in the sense that it seeks to redress the unequal distribution of power between the former colonial powers and the postcolonial nations in the global South. Just as his Ibis Trilogy and The Glass Palace put forgotten histories of indentured labour and South-South networks between India and Burma back on the historical record, Gun Island and The Hungry Tide construct a “history of the vanishing present” (Spivak 1999) as the postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak puts it in a different context. Ghosh is right to assume that the inhabitants of Europe know very little about the reasons why Bengalis risk the horrible journey to make it to places like Venice, and his novel very much is an attempt to put these stories back on the agenda, to create a memory of this ‘other’ present. Gun Island is new and innovative in the sense that it not just involves human stories, but also the fate of the non-human — landscapes, rivers, forests, animals. These non-human actants may not be ‘protagonists’ as Deen or Cinta, but they are not blank slates for the human imagination either. They have histories, characteristics and agency, but they are also vulnerable and under constant threat. Studying Ghosh’s novels in a classroom in the global North can be a challenge. Not just because students (and often, educators as well) lack context and an immediate relationship to the characters from their everyday environment, but because of Ghosh’s programmatic, ethico-political, almost didactic mode of writing. Ghosh makes a political argument, while at the same time teaching a lesson — on history, science, nature, political constellations etc. — and that does not go well with every reader. A reviewer in the Indian daily The Hindu certainly resents Ghosh’s approach arguing that [f]iction is a jealous mistress, demanding a writer’s fidelity. As soon as she smells a rival, in this case the ‘cause’, she ups and leaves. By committing himself so strongly to writing an ‘environmental’ novel, Ghosh has fallen foul of her. At every turn, his theme dominates, overriding the storytelling. (Roy 2019: n.p.) The metaphor the critic uses here might not be particularly good writing either, but the reviewer does have a point with respect to the way Ghosh constructs characters, particularly female characters. Deen emerges as a round character, who morphs and develops during the course of the novel, and Rafi and Tipu, though only constructed through Deen’s voice and perspective, are compelling. By contrast, his most important female character, the Italian historian Cinta, is a Jungian sage at best, a character 11.3 A Planet on the Move: Gun Island 263 whose main function is to aid the protagonist on his quest, and, at worst, the cartoonish Italian professor from a British campus novel — eccentric, glamorous, well-dressed. Carl Gustav Jung, or C. G. Jung, as he is usually called, was a psychoanalytical thinker and practitioner who suggested that a person’s psychic life is never exclu‐ sively individual but partakes in a ‘collective unconscious’. He identified specific ‘archetypes’ such as ‘the mother’, ‘the sage’, ‘the hero’ etc. that he thought recur in the unconscious across individual and cultural differences. His concept of the archetype had a substantial impact on literary criticism in the post-War period but is now seen as dated because of its essentialism and universalism. Her premonitions are very much functions of the narrative encapsulating the novel’s concern with constructing alternative temporalities and blurring boundaries, but they are not constructed in a way that resonates immediately with a reader looking for an immersive read. Her backstory — her husband and daughter were killed by the Mafia — is most likely intended to be tragic but might also be viewed as a bit of a cliché. One might speculate if Ghosh is reversing hierarchies by constructing the West as a stereotype, just as South Asian characters routinely have been portrayed as stereotypes in European literature, but maybe this is an over-interpretation. What is safe to conclude is that Cinta is assigned a very clear role and function in the narrative: she is constructed as a helper, as a source of alternative knowledge for the protagonist. She serves the purpose of suggesting a non-linear, fluid concept of time and history, in which everything finds “echoes in something that has already happened” (Nuttall 2020: 461). It is Cinta who ponders a mythical, ecocritical holistic, non-dualistic view on nature and the human: “What if the faculty for storytelling were not specifically human but rather the last remnant or our animal selves? A vestige left over from a time before language, when we communicated as other living beings do? ” (Ghosh 2019: 141) and it is Deen who contests her musings. Here as in other parts of the novel, Ghosh is raising ethical questions and these questions are often more central than the individual psychology of a character. 11.4 On not Getting by (Undocumented) in Australia: Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty (2021 [2020]) is the most recent of the novels discussed in this chapter. Published in 2020 it is set in Australia and relates one day in the life of the undocumented Sri Lankan migrant Danny who works as a cleaner and is faced with a terrible moral dilemma. Either he covers up a murder or he does the right thing and gets deported to one of Australia’s infamous detention centres. Like his seminal novel The White Tiger, which won the Booker Prize in 2008, Amnesty explores the societal limits of moral dignity for disenfranchised “brown men” (Boyagoda 2020: 47) in a world in 264 11 The South Asian Refugee Novel in English which power and agency are distributed unequally. Making ethically sound decisions, Adiga suggests, is tied to a position of privilege; if you do not have the right passport, if you are poor and without any means, you cannot afford to do the right thing unless you are willing to pay a very heavy price. Danny’s Vietnamese-Australian girlfriend Sonya, a vegan and believer in LGBT rights and socialism, is a cartoon version of this moral naïveté, an allegory or type rather than a fully developed character. The same is true for the other set of characters that appear in the novel. Radha, Danny’s Indian-Australian employer, is the prototypical social climber, the “good immigrant” and obedient neoliberal subject, a class of people Danny calls “Icebox Indians […] because they always wore black glasses never seemed to sweat, even in summer” (Adiga 2021 [2020]: 49). Dr Prakash, Radha’s boyfriend and killer, is constructed as the epitome of evil, a cold-blooded murderer whose threats and blackmails fill vast parts of the novel, steering the sympathy of the reader towards Danny and intensifying his moral dilemma. The only character who is not an allegory is Danny himself. He is the protagonist of the novel and all the events are filtered through his eyes. The reader follows him in his devastating dilemma that fills one day in his life. The pace of the storytelling is usually so slow that discourse time (the time as represented in the narrative) and story time (the time we need to read the text) converge, which creates a sense of immediacy and restlessness. Adiga punctuates the temporal structure of the novel with deictic markers announcing the time of day. These markers are indented and written in bold font, which is reminiscent of popular forms of life writing such as the diary or the blogpost: 12: 57 p.m. On the sunlit face of an old brick warehouse was a white stenciled sign that looked as old as civilized life in Sydney: REX SIMPSON FINE CLOTHES FOR MEN. Beside the letters emerged a ghost-like silhouette of a hatted gentleman. Danny wished he had a hat like that. It would hide his stupid golden hair. How proud he had been of it just an hour ago. He looked down at his phone. I am hungry now cleaner. (Adiga 2021: 121; emphasis i.o.) With its intermedial inclusion of digital culture and its references to consumerism and advertising the passage is very characteristic for Adiga’s writing. Adiga, who worked as a financial journalist before he became a novelist, is an acute observer of consumer culture and the negative effects of neoliberal capitalism. Here, as in other passages of the novel, Adiga includes advertisements written in capital letters, echoing their unnerving capacity to catch our attention even if we never intended to go shopping. Furthermore, Adiga uses a mixture of psycho-narration “Danny wished he had a hat like that”, and free indirect thought “It would hide his stupid hair. How proud he had been […]” to give us access to Danny’s mind. Mimetic storytelling, i.e. the direct inclusion of a character’s thoughts and observation without any narratorial commentary and introduction, prevails as Adiga does not explain that the text written 11.4 On not Getting by (Undocumented) in Australia: Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty 265 in italics is a text message by Dr Prakash, but leaves it to the reader to infer that they have entered Danny’s consciousness. While the use of mimetic storytelling invites identification with the disenfran‐ chised refugee, Adiga’s language is never actually sentimental, but often satirical and in-your-face. Danny finds his girlfriend Sonja on VeggieDate, as he learns that the “best-looking [women] in Sidney are vegans” (Adiga 2021: 23), and although he loves mutton and pork, he does “have a feel for a good scam” (ibid.). Furthermore, Adiga uses a series of comical onomatopoeia to describe Danny’s work as a cleaner, the “vroom” (ibid.: 209) of the “Turbo Model E” (ibid.: 12) vacuum cleaner, the “Badadadoom” (ibid.: 15) and the “Prrrrp” (ibid., italics i.o.) as the machine moves over carpets. Moreover, he mockingly reports that “[i]n Australia the unwritten rule is that the cleaner never bends down to touch anything below the level of a coffee table” (ibid.: 14) whereas in Sri Lanka “the maid […] will never touch anything above the level of the coffee table for fear of being accused of theft” (ibid.: 15, italics i.o.). Equally satirical, Amnesty is filled with allusions and references to popular media discourses and the idiom of neoliberalism such as entrepreneurship, advertising, and self-help. It is riddled with messages from Danny’s phone company (ibid.: 18, 207, 208), road signs (ibid.: 137, 160), newspaper clippings (ibid.: 57-58, 253), official emails by “the Commonwealth of Australia” (ibid.: 171), and conversations from digital culture (ibid.: 39), all of which are presented in a different font. In these references, Adiga breaks with the usual font — he uses courier for newspaper articles and quotations from the internet, capital letters for road signs and ads, italics for emails — and thus exposes the hypocrisy and altogether laughable ideology of the neoliberal idea of the self as economic project. As Danny’s phone company assures him that they “continue to build a mobile network for the future” (ibid.: 16, italics i.o.) and nudge him to “buy a new 3G phone as soon as possible from our website, our many convenient retail stores, or any of our retail partners” (ibid., italics i.o.) Danny knows full well that he cannot buy a new phone as he would have to show his passport for the purpose. Whereas the Australian state denies him “medical care, a driver’s license, police protection” (ibid.: 19) and thus proves to be entirely dysfunctional for those without the right passport, the neoliberal mechanics of consumerism and advertising still work seamlessly. Another striking characteristic of Amnesty’s formal make-up is its inclusion of lists, which serves as another satirical reference to the neoliberal discourse of self-improve‐ ment. Like Balram, the narrator of The White Tiger, Danny watches those in power to imitate their behaviour and keeps mental lists and charts so that “[n]o one would ever again mistake him for someone born out of Australia” (Adiga 2021: 17). In the process, Danny learns how to understand rugby (“never call it rugby”, ibid.: 67; italics i.o.), how to keep his sinuses healthy (ibid.: 25) as he cannot risk getting a fever, and a lists of suspect “activities” of undocumented migrants to the “Border Watch Hotline” (ibid.: 86), through which he gathers knowledge about the things that would give him away. His motto “Observe, understand, and make a chart. Danny’s way” (ibid.: 17) is both an ironic echo of the neoliberal injunction to track one’s behaviour, to make plans 266 11 The South Asian Refugee Novel in English and to-do lists, and a crucial necessity in his fight to avoid detention. As narrative form, the list also encapsulates the open-ended structure of the life of the undocumented migrant. Lists, unlike classical forms of narrative, do not have an inner logic, a “telos”, and a plot structure (see von Contzen 2018). They do not tell a story in the way classical narratives do, they do not have a conflict nor a resolution. They just stop at some point, but they do not close. Danny’s struggle to scrape a living is similarly open-ended, as the main conflict in his life remains unresolved. The one thing that could grant Danny closure, i.e. the eponymous Amnesty granted to a small handful of migrants granting them the status of a legal citizen, is unattainable. The temporal structure of the novel is further punctuated by the inclusion of flashbacks through which we learn that Danny has been living in Australia for four years. These flashbacks are introduced through headers using the same font as deictic markers stating the time of day and relate that Danny had made previous attempts at legal migration. Before his arrival in Australia, he had worked in Dubai and upon returning to Sri Lanka was mistaken for a terrorist with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and tortured in questioning. Broken and disappointed — even his own father did not believe him — Danny uses his father’s savings to pursue studies at a dodgy Australian college which “wooed foreigners to Wollogong and sucked fees from them for two years, at the end of which, arming them with framed certificates of post-graduate competence, MBAs and MTechs, it turned them loose to tar roads, install windows, and wok-fry noodles in Australia” (Adiga 2021: 173). When Danny realizes that he has been cheated, he follows the example of a fellow student and stops attending classes. He drifts into illegality, living in the storeroom of a grocery store, cleaning houses for cash. Danny, like millions of undocumented migrants, ends up in the impossible situation that he is neither entitled to a visa nor can he hope to receive leftist goodwill — he arrived by plane, not on a boat running from a “burning country” (ibid.: 182): What you did not do was fall between those two by coming to Australia legally and then sliding under, appearing to be one thing and then becoming another because that made you an illegal’s illegal, with no one to scream for you and no one to represent you in court. (ibid.: 182-83, italics i.o.). Adiga’s novel is very much aware of the politics of its own reception not just because it constantly draws on the language of the marketplace (Adiga is a best-selling author after all), but also because it also mocks the moral sentiments of what his (presumably) passport-carrying, middle-class readership, “people like the librarians at Glebe and left-wing women at train stations who would help you (would rush to help, then to post photos of their generosity on facebook)” (ibid.: 182). The mocking, self-reflexive tone of the novel heightens its oppositional energy and raises awareness for the radically unequal distribution of life chances between those who can afford to be subjects of goodwill and those to whom goodwill can be granted. As John Masterson puts it in his reading of Adiga’s earlier work, the “self-reflexivity” (2013: 52) of Adiga’s novels 11.4 On not Getting by (Undocumented) in Australia: Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty 267 also prompts us to think about the transnational capitalist structure of the publishing industry, an industry that has justifiably been criticized for defusing the political criticism articulated in postcolonial fiction by turning it into yet another consumer product (Huggan 2001, Brennan 1997). The novels discussed in this chapter might indeed also be consumer products, “commodity fetishes setting publisher’s pulses racing in anticipation of projected profit margins” (Masterson 2013: 52), but they still retain a tremendous “counterhegemonic urgency” (ibid.). 11.5 Contesting Border-Regimes, Imagining the Opposite: Conclusions All three novels differ considerably in terms of their mood and tone, character constellations and temporal structure. Amnesty is bitingly satirical and in-your-face, whereas Exit West and Gun Island have an earnest tone. While Exit West spans several decades, Gun Island covers a year and a few months, and Amnesty focusses on a single day. Yet, the novels also have some interesting affinities. They all criticize what Pablo Mukherjee has described as “the pernicious logic of borders” (Mukherjee 2010: 112) both in the geographical sense, as material places of guarded fences and checkpoints, and in the social-political and legal sense (see also Brah 1996: 3). With its unrelenting dark humour, Amnesty exposes the vainglorious assumptions about who is entitled to legal migration and who is not in affluent nation-states such as Australia. Exit West draws attention to the terrible realities of living in a war zone and the actual implications of Europe’s border regimes. Gun Island highlights the terrible impact of climate change and gives human face to the climate refugees of South Asia. Aside from voicing political criticism, the three novels also share a concern with ethics and hope. Gun Island ends with a utopian vision of open borders and natural harmony, Exit West constructs a world in which borders become magic doors and escaping from danger becomes a real possibility. Amnesty constructs the undocumented migrant as an essentially sympathetic figure, who makes an impossible ethical choice under very precarious circumstances. The novels share a hope for modes of conviviality that go beyond the logic of the nation state. In Exit West and Gun Island this sense of hope is articulated in a way that recasts the traditional forms of realism. In Amnesty, while not exactly envisioning a speculative alternative to the present condition of the refugee, Danny’s moral integrity creates a sense of humanism and hope. To close this essay, I would like to turn to an issue that some readers might find troubling: neither of the authors discussed in this chapter is a refugee. They divide their time between various continents and spaces, but clearly have never experienced the violent displacement that their characters have gone through. Although all the three authors have researched their topic thoroughly and engaged in careful conversations with refugees, the texts that have emerged from these conversations are literary novels, hence, works of fiction, not witness-accounts or pieces of long-form journalism. As a 268 11 The South Asian Refugee Novel in English consequence, some readers might find the novels elitist, or even accuse their authors of appropriating stories that should not told by elite, cosmopolitan writers. I would like to caution against such accusations. It is true that real-life refugees have told their stories and been published (see, for instance, Ealom 2021), and it would of course be fruitful and interesting to compare such memoirs with one of the three novels. Yet, for most undocumented migrants becoming an author is not an option. Not just because only a few people (refugee or passport-carrying citizen, black, brown or white) have the financial, intellectual and temporal resources to become a writer, but because refugees run incredible real-life risks if they tell their story, risks that cosmopolitan, passport-carrying, middle-class writers like Adiga, Ghosh and Hamid never have to face, be it detention, or deportation into a part of the world that is barely habitable, or re-traumatization. Thus, the precarity of the refugee’s experience may (paradoxically) call for a position of safety, privilege and comparative freedom so that the stories can be told without fear of reprisal. The three novels open windows (albeit not magic doors) to lives without safety, without freedom to move, without even the very basic privilege of carrying a passport. They are not memoir or autobiography, but they are devastatingly beautiful works of art. And as such, they can still do long-term political good. 11.6 Study Questions ● Create a one-pager for each of the novels. First, gather some basic information on the author (keep it short! ) and then consider the following questions: What are the main themes (no plot summary, just the most important themes), the recurring images and motives and how is the novel structured? ● Pick a passage from one of the novels and do a formal analysis: Who speaks and who sees in the passage? How are spaces and borders constructed? How would you describe the relationship between outward spaces and the perceived atmosphere? What is the role of time (duration, flashbacks or flashforwards, etc.)? ● Read the references on the partition (Butalia, Daiya, Kabir) in the works cited section. Where are differences and overlaps between the way Butalia tells the story of refugee women and the way the character of Nadia is represented in Exit West? ● The chapter relies on a division between voluntary and forced migration. However, this dichotomy could also be scrutinized. Could the novels still be read in terms of Rushdie’s idea of the “imaginary homeland”? ● How does one of the novels compare with another work by the same author, (for instance, Exit West with The Reluctant Fundamentalist, or Gun Island with The Hungry Tide, or Amnesty with The White Tiger)? Questions 3 and 5 could also be expanded to become more extensive research projects (term papers, BA theses. 11.6 Study Questions 269 11.7 Further Reading Gallien, Claire (2018). “Refugee Literature.” Special Issue. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54 (6). Huggan, Graham (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/ oxfordhb/ 9780199588251.001.0001. Kanwal, Aroosa/ Aslam, Saiyma (2018). The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Pakistani Writing. New York: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/ 9781315180618. Mondal, Anshuman (2013). Amitav Ghosh. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Singh, Jyotsna/ Kim, David (2016). The Postcolonial World. New York: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/ 9781315297699. 11.8 Works Cited Primary Sources Adiga, Aravind (2021 [2020]). Amnesty. London: Picador. Ghosh, Amitav (2019). Gun Island. London: John Murray. — (2016). The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — (2005). The Hungry Tide. London: The Borough Press. — (2008). Sea of Poppies: Ibis Trilogy Book 1. London: John Murray. — (2012). River of Smoke: Ibis Trilogy Book 2. London: John Murray. — (2016). Flood of Fire: Ibis Trilogy Book 3. London: John Murray. Hamid, Mohsin (2017). Exit West. Hardmondsworth: Penguin. Sidhwa, Bapsi (1989). Ice-Candy-Man. Delhi: Penguin Books India. Singh, Khushwant (2012). Train to Pakistan. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publisher. Secondary Sources Barry, Peter (2017). Beginning Theory. 4 th ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Boyagoda, Randy (2020). “Migrant State of Mind.” New Statesman 149 (5537), 48. Brah, Atvar (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. New York: Routledge. Brennan, Tim (1997). At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Butalia, Urvashi (2000). The Other Side of Silence. Durham: Duke University Press. Butler (2009). Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London/ New York: Verso. Butler, Judith (2012). “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26 (2), 134-151. DOI: 10.5325/ jspecphil.26.2.0134. Carens, Joseph (1987). “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders.” Review of Politics 49 (2), 251-73. Carter, Josephine (2021). “How Far Are We Prepared to Go? Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and the Refuge Crisis.” Textual Practice 35 (4), 619-638. DOI: 10.1080/ 0950236X.2020.1745877. 270 11 The South Asian Refugee Novel in English Cheah, Pheng (2008). “What is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity.” Deadalus 137 (3), 26-38. DOI: 10.1162/ daed.2008.137.3.26. — (2014). “World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature.” New Literary History 45 (3), 303-329. DOI: 10.1353/ nlh.2014.0021. — (2016). What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham: Duke University Press. von Contzen, Eva (2018). “Experience, Affect, and Literary Lists.” Partial Answers 16 (2), 315-327. DOI: 10.1353/ pan.2018.0022. Daiya, Kavita (2016). “Partition.” In: Ray, Sangeeta/ Schwarz, Henry (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Wiley Online Library. DOI: 10.1002/ 9781119076506.wbeps287. Ealom, Jaivet (2021). Escape from Manus. New York: Viking Penguin. Hoydis, Julia (2011). Tackling the Morality of History: Ethics and Storytelling in the Works of Amitav Ghosh. Heidelberg: Winter. Hegerfeldt, Anne (2004). “Magic Realism, Magical Realism.” The Literary Encyclopedia. https: / / www.litencyc.com/ php/ stopics.php? rec=true&; UID=682. Heise, Ursula (2010). “Deterritorialization and Eco-Cosmopolitanism.” In: Connel, Liam/ Marsh, Nicky (eds.). Literature and Globalization: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 157-170. Helgeson, Stefan/ Neumann, Birgit/ Rippl, Gabriele (2020). Handbook of Anglophone World Liter‐ atures. Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/ 9783110583182. Huggan, Graham (2001). The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London/ New York: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780203420102. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara (2015). “‘Handcuffed to History’: Partition and the Indian Novel in English.” In: Anjaria, Ulka (ed.). A History of the Indian Novel in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 119-132. DOI: 10.1017/ CBO9781139942355.008. Kluwick, Ursula (2020). “The Global Deluge: Floods, Diluvian Imagery, and Aquatic Language in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Gun Island.” Green Letters 24 (1), 64-78. DOI: 10.1080/ 14688417.2020.1752516. Knudsen, Eva Rask/ Rahbek, Ulla (2021). “Radical Hopefulness in Mohsin Hamid’s Map of the World: A Reading of Exit West (2017).” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 57 (4), 442-454. DOI: 10.1080/ 17449855.2021.1889641. Lagji, Amanda (2018). “Waiting in Motion: Mapping Postcolonial Fiction, New Mobilities, and Migration through Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West.” Mobilities 14 (2), 218-232. DOI: 10.1080/ 17450101.2018.1533684. Mączyńska, Magdalena (2021). “‘People Are Monkeys Who Have Forgotten That They Are Monkeys’: The Refugee as Eco-Cosmopolitan Allegory in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 28 (3), 1089-1106. DOI: 10.1093/ isle/ isaa082. Massey, Doreen. (1993). “Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” In: Bird, John/ Putnam, Tim/ Ticker, Lisa (eds.). Mapping the Futures. New York: Routledge, 60-70. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780203977781. 11.8 Works Cited 271 Masterson, John (2013). “Aravind Adiga: The White Elephant? Postliberalization, the Politics of Reception and the Globalization of Literary Prizes.” In: Iqbal Viswamohan, Aysha (ed.). Postliberalization Indian Novels in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 51-66. Mishra, Vijay (2007). The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora. New York: Routledge. DOI: 10.1080/ 09502369608582254. Mondal, Anshuman A. (2013). Amitav Ghosh. Manchester: Manchester University Press. DOI: 10.7228/ manchester/ 9780719070044.001.0001. Mukherjee, Meenakshi (1971). Twice Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English. New Delhi/ London: Heinemann. Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo (2010). Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Con‐ temporary Indian Novel in English. Basingstoke/ Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1057/ 9780230251328. Newns, Lucinda (2021). “‘The Sea Cannot Be Fenced’: ‘Natural’ and ‘Unnatural’ Borders in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La Frontera and Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. DOI: 10.1093/ isle/ isab044. Nuttall, Sarah (2020). “Pluvial Time/ Wet Form.” New Literary History 51 (2), 455-472. DOI: 10.1353/ nlh.2020.0026. Roy, Vaishna (2019). “Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh: The Bengali Merchant in Venice.” The Hindu, 26 June 2019, https: / / www.thehindu.com/ books/ books-reviews/ gun-island-by-amitav--ghos h-the-bengali-merchant-in-venice/ article28097687.ece (last accessed: 13.02.2023) Rushdie, Salman (1991). Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. New York: Vintage Books. Sadaf, Shazia (2020). “‘We Are All Migrants through Time’: History and Geography in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 56 (5), 636-47. DOI: 10.1080/ 17449855.2020.1820667. Sandten, Cecile (2017). “Representations of Poverty and Precariousness in Contemporary Refugee Narratives.” Postcolonial Text 12 (3-4), 1-15. Sommer, Roy (2001). Fictions of Migration: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien. Trier: WVT. Schweizer, Harold (2008). On Waiting. New York: Routledge. Spivak, Gayatri (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Tickell, Alex (2007). Arundhati Roy. London: Routledge. Thieme, John (2003). Postcolonial Studies: The Essential Glossary. London: Arnold. Varma, R. Sreejith (2021). “Gun Island. By Amitav Ghosh.” English: Journal of the English Association 70 (268), 89-91. DOI: 10.1093/ english/ efaa045. Veyret, Paul (2020). “The Ethical Re(turn) in Postcolonial Fiction.” Postcolonial Interventions 5 (2), 106-138. DOI: 10.5281/ zenodo.3924531. 272 11 The South Asian Refugee Novel in English 12 New India, New Realism? Narrating Socio-Economic Change in Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty (2020) and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide (2022) Hannah Pardey, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf Abstract Focusing on two literary representations of the ‘New India’, the chapter provides formal analyses of Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty (2020) and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide (2022) to demonstrate that the novels employ a narrative mode which I refer to as ‘liminal realism’. Largely devoid of those modernist, experimental or comic elements which characterise the social realism of Indian English novelists like Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao or Hanif Kureishi, the liminal realism of post-2000 Anglophone Indian fiction is located at the threshold between fiction and non-fic‐ tion, creating a documentary or journalistic style that serves to negotiate the dis‐ ruptive effects of global capitalism in India on the aesthetic level. Complying with the liminal socio-economic position of its protagonist, Amnesty’s liminal realism manifests itself in embedded letters, local newspaper articles and online forum discussions which function to ‘document’ a single day in the fictional life of an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant in Sydney, Australia. By comparison, the liminal realism of Run and Hide involves a mixture of fiction and journalism, var‐ ious references to the author’s essays and non-fiction books and a meta-fictional discussion of how to write about and represent the socio-economic changes wrought by the global economic order. Highlighting the capacity of the realist mode to accommodate different social experiences across space and time, the chapter concludes with a list of further reading material and study questions, encouraging students to position Adiga and Mishra’s novels within a larger his‐ tory of Anglophone Indian literary production. 12.1 Introduction Rather than presenting some definitive sequence of aesthetic and/ or thematic devel‐ opments, literary history is a scholarly construct, built on categories and concepts whose boundaries are as arbitrary and fluent as those created to define specific groups of writers or periods of writing. While generally applicable, this observation assumes particular significance in the context of postcolonial literatures like Indian English fiction. Adopting a postcolonial critical perspective, one may conclude that Anglophone Indian literary history — divided into a series of ‘Western’ modes like realism, modernism or postmodernism — reinforces colonial hierarchies of power, for not only does this model establish the kind of coherence and linearity which informs Western middle-class ideals of progress (Nandy 2002: 5), but it also suggests that the production of Indian literature in English is derivative or secondary. Against this backdrop, and while acknowledging the practicality and usefulness of such models, including the possibility to compare and contrast literary texts, it is mandatory to recognise their ideological implications. Some scepticism is thus warranted vis-à-vis labels like ‘new’ which have gained currency as the defining feature of post-millennial India and Indian writing in English more specifically. The ostensibly omnipresent catchphrase ‘New India’, associated with the ‘India Shining’ media campaign which was launched by the right-wing conservative Bharatiya Janata Party in the context of the 2004 political elections, is commonly employed to refer to the country’s massive efforts at forging a leading position in the global economy (Clini 2022: 21; Detmers 2011: 537). Owing to “a series of economic liberalization policies” (Oza 2011: 1071) in the mid-1970s as well as its growing globalisation in the following years, India “has entered the international stage as a nation of superlatives” (Lindner 2008: 7) that, since the new millennium, is usually credited with being the largest democracy, having the largest population, diaspora and cities, housing the fastest growing economy, including its prospering IT industry, or making the greatest contributions to both the global film industry and Anglophone world literatures. Deriving from the Greek ‘diaspeirein’ meaning ‘dispersal’ or ‘scattering’, the term diaspora originally used to refer to the (mostly) forced displacement of religious communities in Jewish history. Since the 1960s, African studies scholars have ap‐ plied the term to investigate the experiences of ethnic and/ or racial minorities. A key concept in postcolonial studies, representatives of the discipline stress its ca‐ pacity to examine smalland large-scale migration processes in the colonial past and the postcolonial present, including their literary representations. Following decolonisation, numerous Indians migrated to metropolitan centres like London, partly recruited by the British government to cope with post-war labour shortages, partly seeking to escape their socio-economic hardships in the postcolony. Today, approximately 32 million Indians live outside India, constituting the world’s largest overseas diaspora. Notably contradicting the marketing image of India as “a country of unrestricted opportunities”, recent Indian literary texts in English emphasise that being “the future global superpower” (Brosius 2010: 1) entails superlatives of the opposite kind. In distinct contrast to the original meaning of the label, literary representations of the ‘New India’ reveal the insidious logic of capitalism by pointing to the country’s simultaneous “wealth accumulation and urban slum growth” (Singh 2018: n.p.), its ever-increasing socio-economic conflicts or gender inequalities, to mention but a few examples. 274 12 New India, New Realism? Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide How precisely do Indian English authors represent the unparalleled socio-economic changes that are conveniently subsumed under the ‘New India’ label? To what extent and effect do they draw on and deviate from the conventions of Indian writing in English? Do they appropriate the techniques of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) or Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) which combine the social realist mode with modernist or experimental elements to represent marginalised Indian lives at the dawn of independence? (Social) Realism is a genre or mode that came to prominence in 19 th century Britain, i.e. a period marked by the Industrial Revolution and massive socio-eco‐ nomic change. Negotiating the norms and values of an emerging industrial middle class, the realist novels by Charles Dickens or Elizabeth Gaskell can be further specified as ‘condition-of-England’ or ‘social problem’ novels and represent “in‐ dustrialization, urbanization and class conflict, furthermore eliciting a deep con‐ cern with the precarious living conditions and status of the underprivileged, who are seen as harmful to social stability” (Detmers 2011: 539). The set of literary conventions commonly associated with the term was appropriated by Anglophone Indian writers from Mulk Raj Anand to Hanif Kureishi whose social realism “takes as its primary purpose the elucidation of social ills, in which the literary work is intended at least in part to function as political writing, to inspire people to action” (Anjaria 2015: 133). Do they adopt the magical realist mode developed by novelists like Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, 1981) and Amitav Ghosh (The Circle of Reason, 1986) to negotiate the ambiguities of the postcolony? Or do they adjust the aesthetics of Indian diasporic writers like Hanif Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia, 1990) and Meera Syal (Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, 1999) whose social realism, spiced up with comic elements, questions stereotypes about the Indian diaspora in Britain with humour? In order to answer those questions, the following pages focus on two contemporary examples of Indian English writing, Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty (2020) and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide (2022). Substantiating the above-mentioned insight into the constructedness of literary history, my discussion of the novels hints at their innovative combination of various narrative modes and generic patterns. However, I argue in particular that Adiga and Mishra’s representations of the socio-economic changes wrought by global capitalism redefine the social realist mode devised by earlier generations of Indian English writers. Implying that the realist mode proves flexible enough to accommodate widely different social experiences across space and time, Ulka Anjaria discusses Adiga’s debut The White Tiger (2008) as an example of what she calls ‘new social realism’, i.e. a mode that is marked by a “contradiction between the realist impulse to represent social issues and the potential unknowability of those issues” (2015: 130 f.) and thus “befit[s] the unknown content of new political arrangements in 12.1 Introduction 275 the twenty-first century” (ibid.: 131). Applying her notion to more recent examples, my chapter illustrates that, instead of using an “aesthetics of indeterminacy” (ibid.: 123), Adiga and Mishra’s novels employ a mode that I, drawing on recent redefinitions of liminality, call ‘liminal realism’, i.e. a narrative mode that, largely devoid of both experiment and irony, is located at the threshold between fiction and non-fiction. Liminality derives from the Latin ‘limen’ which means ‘threshold’. In postcolonial studies, the term is associated with Homi K. Bhabha who proposes that The Location of Culture (1994) exists “in the realm of the beyond” (1994: 1, original emphasis), i.e. in border or ‘hybrid’ spaces where simple binaries (such as inside vs. outside, past vs. present, us vs. them) and established thought patterns collapse. Adopting Marie Segrave’s notion of ‘legal liminality’ to discuss Amnesty, Ana Cristina Mendes and Lisa Lau helpfully expand Bhabha’s narrow focus on relatively privi‐ leged postcolonial subjects; instead of stressing the creative potential of ‘hybridity’ or ‘liminality’, they employ the concept to emphasise the perilous position of “ir‐ regular migrants” who seek “to belong in the host country, or at least be legalized, while gripped and besieged by myriad daily fears […] that their legal status will be discovered” (2022: 2). My definition of liminal realism differs from Julia Breitbach and Bénédicte Meillon’s studies which employ the term to examine Don DeLillo’s photographic mode and the relationship between human and non-human worlds in ecoliterature, respectively. Characterised by embedded letters, newspaper articles, online forum discussions and references to non-fiction books, the liminal realism of post-2000 Indian English fiction creates a documentary or journalistic style that serves to negotiate the disruptive effects of global capitalism in India on the aesthetic level. Well aware that such an aesthetics potentially revives postcolonial debates about realism, the subsequent section provides a brief overview of scholarly approaches to Anglophone Indian literatures, putting special emphasis on the extent to which the critical concepts developed by postcolonialists emerge from anxieties about the misconception of realism among postcolonial audiences. 12.2 Approaching ‘New India’ Recent contributions to postcolonial studies’ materialist strand are a case in point, illustrating the debates around literary productions, aesthetics (realism, for instance) and their connection with global capitalism. Following the publication of Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic (2001), postcolonial practitioners have paid closer attention to the material conditions of producing, distributing and consuming postco‐ lonial literatures in a global age. Indeed, Huggan and his peers have helpfully broadened the discipline’s concern with representational practices by shifting the focus to the 276 12 New India, New Realism? Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide neo-colonial power structures of what is now commonly referred to as a ‘global literary market’ (Brouillette 2007) or ‘postcolonial cultural industry’ (Ponzanesi 2014). A mere glance at the info boxes on Adiga and Mishra or the bibliography at the end of this chapter suffices to realise that the analytical frameworks suggested by Huggan or Sarah Brouillette and Sandra Ponzanesi support the study of contemporary Indian English fiction and its apparent dependence on ‘Western’ — or, rather, UK and US — publishing houses, literary prizes, journals and newspapers. In this light, it is not surprising that scholars increasingly bemoan the commodifi‐ cation of Anglophone Indian writers and texts (Dwivedi and Lau 2014). Investigating Mishra’s debut novel The Romantics (1999), among other examples, Anis Shivani asserts that the novelist caters to the demands of “the conglomerate publishing industry” by “engag[ing] in the relentless exoticisation of the mundane and everyday other, in the process reinforcing some of the shallowest stereotypes of Indian character” (2006: 2). Similarly, Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes have recently revived Edward Said’s notion of ‘Orientalism’ to stress that Indian English literary production fosters “new manifestations of Orientalism” (2011: 3). Remarkably, whereas Said used the term to study “how colonialism institutionally created a wide-ranging body of knowledge” (McLeod 2010: 24) — in fact, a set of stereotypical assumptions and beliefs — about the East to justify colonial exploitation, Lau and Mendes’s idea of ‘re-Orientalism’ underlines the extent to which Indian English writers “come to terms with an Orientalized East […] by complying with perceived expectations of western readers” (2011: 1). Lau and Mendes’s contention gains special momentum vis-à-vis the so-called ‘dark turn’ in Anglophone Indian fiction which relates to the current popularity of narratives — primarily written by diasporic novelists (Goh 2011: 331) and told from strikingly non-ironic perspectives — about “the underbelly of India, the slums, the destitution, the crime and the inequalities” (Lau and Mendes 2012/ 13: 138). A range of commercially successful novels as well as their screen adaptations attest to the preference for poverty-stricken and, at times, criminal protagonists among post-2000 Indian English authors. For instance, The White Tiger, which was only recently turned into an epon‐ ymous Netflix movie (dir. Ramin Bahrani, 2021), represents neoliberal India with its main character, Balram Halwai, who starts out as a servant before he kills his employer and turns himself into “a Dalit entrepreneur” (Saxena 2021: 62) in the megacity of Bangalore. Following a comparable trajectory, the protagonist of Vikas Swarup’s Q&A (2005) and its highly acclaimed adaptation Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle, 2008), Jamal Malik, escapes Mumbai’s Juhu slums by succeeding in a Hindi version of the quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Poor and unlawful characters also populate the pages of Amnesty and Run and Hide, even if their developments hardly amount to success stories. The main character of Adiga’s novel, Danny — short for Dhananjaya Rajaratnam — represents an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant who, constantly afraid of being ‘dobbed in’ and deported, cleans the apartments of wealthy Sydneysiders, whereas Arun Dwivedi, the protagonist and first-person narrator of 12.2 Approaching ‘New India’ 277 Mishra’s text, seeks to escape his “lowly social background” (2022: 6) with a degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) but, in contrast to his business-minded college friends and Dalit capitalists to be, chooses to live in a remote Himalayan village, translating Hindi fiction for rather little money. However, and despite this plethora of examples, I wish to complicate Mendes’s definition of ‘Dark India’ as “a new-fangled object of exoticist discourses” (2010: 276) and the concomitant approach to the above-mentioned texts as offering mere “exotica of poverty” (Mendes and Lau 2015: 710). To begin with, I take particular issue with the terms ‘dark’ and ‘re-Orientalism’, for not only do they reinvigorate colonial and racist discourses and stereotypes, but they also tend to rehearse the limitations of Said’s notion which neglects, among other aspects, the capacity of both the colonisers and the colonised to resist (McLeod 2010: 56-61). It is therefore no coincidence that, if applied to study recent Indian fiction in English, the terms show a tendency to undermine the agency of its writers and readers alike, sidelining, for instance, Brouillette’s insight that postcolonial authors’ positioning in the global literary market is characterised by high levels of self-reflexivity “about the act of writing itself ” or “their careers as authors” (2007: 68). Unsurprisingly, then, Brouillette’s contribution to Lau and Mendes’s collec‐ tion on ‘re-Orientalism’ suggests exchanging the term with ‘meta-Orientalism’ in order to take account of the textual strategies by which novelists like Adiga register their self-conscious engagement with Orientalist discourses (Brouillette 2011: 54; Davies 2016: 122; Detmers 2011: 539). By contrast, there have been few attempts at acquitting the readers of Indian English fiction — or postcolonial literatures more generally — from the complicity charge. Arguably, Huggan’s postcolonial exotic, built on expectation rather than empiricism, expresses the critic’s anxiety that middle-class readers without a substantial training in postcolonial (and) literary theory may mistake realism for a reflection of ‘reality’. Yet while the narrative conventions of realism — a preference for mimesis, plots that follow a cause-and-effect logic, life-like characters and apparently transparent mediation techniques, to name but a few — may foster such concerns, they are at least partly unfounded as Huggan does not investigate actual readers. Considering fresh insights into the consumption practices of postcolonial readers (Pardey 2020, 2023), I do not wish to contest that ‘Western’ audiences may approach novels like Amnesty and Run and Hide as autobiographies or understand them as the ‘authentic’ “expression and manifestation of the individual psychic life” (Brouillette and Coleman 2020: 586). They may also turn to the texts to confirm their Orientalist stereotypes, for instance by reading the magical realist representation of Danny’s hometown, Batticaloa — where “[t]he fish can sing” and the kadal kanni, mermaids, emerge out of the lagoon” (Adiga 2021: 1, original emphasis) —, or Arun’s decision to live in a monastery at the Tibetan border as proof of Sri Lanka’s ‘odd difference’ (McLeod 2010: 53) or “the existence of a spiritual East” (Clini 2022: 23), respectively. Nonetheless, I would like to point out that postcolonial audiences are ethnically and geographically more diverse than the implied reader construct of many a postcolonial scholar suggests. This observation applies in 278 12 New India, New Realism? Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide particular to India which “is now home to the third largest number of English speakers, globally, outside the US and UK” (Tickell 2016: 4) and an ever-expanding middle class which encompassed close to 70 million Indians in 2010; apart from being “widely identified outside India as a key market for global corporations” ( Jeffrey 2017: 79), India’s middle class has, since then, steadily “increased [its] disposable income for leisure activities” (Varughese 2016: 176), not least the consumption of Anglophone Indian novels. In the face of such numbers, including the shifting power relations that they imply, one may scrutinise postcolonial studies’ “continued investment in the lasting effects of colonialism” (Anjaria 2015: 114). And although I would not go as far as postulating “the increasing outdatedness of the postcolonial” (ibid.), I contend that the study of Adiga and Mishra’s novels requires critical approaches that, rather than stressing the differences between East and West, take into account how the global economic order entangles East and West alike, albeit to fundamentally uneven effects (Chibber 2013: 150 f.). Such an approach is proposed by Anjaria who, combining textand context-oriented perspectives, claims that Indian English novelists like Adiga devise a new realism to negotiate the “rearrangement of the world system” (2015: 118). This mode, Anjaria avers, is marked by a “double gesture — toward realism on the one hand and a concern with structural injustice on the other” (ibid.: 114); yet while it maintains Anand or Rao’s “commitment to representing social injustices through a materialist lens” (ibid.: 115), it breaks with the “poetics of visibility” (ibid.: 120) or “rhetoric of certainty” (ibid.: 130) which defines the social realism of an earlier generation of Anglophone Indian novelists. Anjaria attributes this deviation to global capitalism whose effects, she states, are “as yet unknown” (2015: 115). Accordingly, novels like The White Tiger, rather than providing ready answers, offer “as-yet unanswerable questions about the nature of representation” (ibid.) by using open spatio-temporal structures that subvert linear notions of history (ibid.: 118) or animal imagery that resists unambiguous interpretation (ibid.: 119). A source of inspiration for my reading of Adiga and Mishra’s novels, Anjaria’s article demonstrates the capacity of the realist form to adapt to shifting socio-economic experiences. However, her argument is compromised by two shortcomings which I would like to address. Firstly, Anjaria underemphasises the complexity of the social realist mode as developed by Anand, Rao or, to name a female representative, Kamala Markandaya. To be sure, Anand’s Untouchable, set on one day in the life of the 18-year-old protagonist Bakha, a Dalit who works as a latrine sweeper in a northern Indian garrison town, adopts a chronological structure; on the other hand, the novel’s complex narrative situation, mixing the representation of Bakha’s dreams and memories with authorial comments, produces anything but unambiguous effects. Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve (1954), to provide another example, presents India’s decaying agricultural society through the life story of the widow Rukmani who, narrating her past in a series of flashbacks, employs intricate horticultural symbols that defy easy interpretation. Secondly, and drawing on my reading of Adiga 12.2 Approaching ‘New India’ 279 and Mishra’s novels, Anjaria overemphasises the tentative outlook of contemporary Anglophone Indian novels in the realist mode. As the following sections illustrate, Amnesty and Run and Hide combine the patterns of numerous realist sub-genres — e.g. the Bildungsroman, crime fiction, the epistolary and migration novel — with textual elements which push realism to its non-fictional limits, in the process developing a realist aesthetics that, instead of evoking indeterminacy or unknowability, documents the effects of global capitalism in notably firm and consistent ways. 12.3 Aravind Adiga: Amnesty (2020) Adiga’s choice to set his novel in Batticaloa and Sydney rather than the ‘New India’ may hint at the author’s awareness that such an aesthetics evokes “the often fraught politics of authenticity” (Tickell 2016: 4 f.). Aravind Adiga was born in 1974 in Chennai (southern India) into a middle-class family. He grew up in Mangalore and Sydney and studied English at Columbia University in New York and Magdalen College in Oxford. Adiga was a South Asia correspondent for Financial Times and Time before he moved to Mumbai to work as a freelance journalist and writer in 2006. Since the publication of his debut novel, The White Tiger (2008), which was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize, he rates as one of the most acclaimed representatives of contemporary Indian English fic‐ tion. Books by this author: The White Tiger (2008). New York: Free Press. Between the Assassinations (2008). London: Picador. Last Man in Tower (2011). London: Atlantic Books. Selection Day (2016). London: Picador. Amnesty (2021 [2020]). London: Picador. As the critical reception of his debut indicates, “[t]he Anglophone Indian novel”, especially of the diasporic kind, “has long been preoccupied with debates about its authenticity, its penchant for trading its connections to exotica for western audiences” (Shingavi 2014: 1). Indeed, The White Tiger has been criticised for its ‘inauthentic’ account of a Dalit character, for instance in Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s contribution to the London Review of Books; alluding to its author’s degrees from Columbia and Oxford, he notes that “[t]his is a posh English-educated voice trying to talk dirty, without being able to pull it off. […] What we are dealing with is someone with no sense of the texture of Indian vernaculars, yet claiming to have produced a realistic text” (2008: n.p.). While I do not wish to downplay the social dimension of language which is raised by a critic with obvious knowledge about Indian vernaculars, I would like to suggest that conceptions of realism as ‘realistic’ may have encouraged Adiga to complicate 280 12 New India, New Realism? Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide autobiographical approaches by placing his protagonist Danny first in Sri Lanka and then in Australia. In addition, Amnesty’s spatial setting invites readers to recognise capitalism as a ubiquitous socio-economic structure that not only encompasses but also exceeds the ‘New India’. Yet although Amnesty can be read as “a migrant’s tale” (Rashid 2020: n.p.), the novel markedly differs from the representations of migration by other Indian diasporic writers like Syal or Jhumpa Lahiri (e.g. Interpreter of Maladies, 1999) as it resists the application of notions like hybridity — or at least urges its audiences to realise “that other, economically enforced dispersal of the poor” (Parry 2004: 73). In contrast to the comparatively well-off immigrant characters inhabiting the suburbs of multiethnic London in Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, Danny is an ‘illegal alien’ in the bustling City of Sydney who, having overstayed his student visa, has turned himself into “a man without rights in this world” (Adiga 2021: 41, original emphasis). When we first meet Danny, he is in his fourth year as an undocumented immigrant, living in the storeroom of the grocery shop of an extortionate Greek named Tommo and spending his days cleaning the apartments of young professionals like “Daryl the Lawyer” (ibid.: 12) or “Rodney Accountant” (ibid.: 28) who reside in Sydney’s affluent suburbs. Unsurprisingly, Danny’s sense of space is defined by Sydney’s rigid social hierarchies. Just as the protagonist of The White Tiger, who distinguishes between “Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies” (Adiga 2008: 54), Danny categorises Sydney into “two kinds of suburbs — thick bum, where the working classes lived, ate badly, and cleaned for themselves; and thin bum, where fit and young people ate salads and jogged a lot but almost never cleaned their homes” (Adiga 2021: 11, original emphasis). As this early comment on the city’s socio-economic inequalities suggests, Danny, similar to the character of Alia in Mishra’s Run and Hide, is “not into identity politics” (Mishra 2022: 249). Rather, his manifold means of ‘blending into’ Sydney’s social fabric result from his undocumented status. Mendes and Lau thus rightly remark that “Danny does not want to achieve an identity change (from Sri Lankan Tamil to white Australian), but merely to have his presence in Sydney invisible to his Australian […] hosts” (2022: 13). Ironically enough, his obsession with invisibility entails the “constant surveillance” of those “people desensitized to the comforts of their citizenship” (Young 2020: n.p.). Interspersed with “notes to himself ” (Adiga 2021: 4), which are typographically set off from the main narrative (e.g. ibid.: 25, 67 f., 78), Amnesty illustrates “Danny’s way” (ibid.: 17) of coping in an environment of suspicion and surveillance that explicitly encourages citizens to report cases of ‘illegal’ immigration, for instance via the “Immigration Dob-in Service” (ibid.: 86, original emphasis) hotline: “[o]bserve, understand, and make a chart” (ibid.: 17). His ‘Us and Them’ list is particularly telling in this regard: 1. 1st and foremost difference: posture. 2. Beards (us — too wild) and then haircuts (too docile). 3. Paunch. Young Australians don’t have paunches. 4. Also don’t spit in public. 12.3 Aravind Adiga: Amnesty (2020) 281 5. Class (but have no class compared to people back home. (ibid.: 17, original emphasis) Indeed, large parts of the novel show Danny searching for “the magic keys to Australianness” (ibid.: 36) which includes more than the look of an Australian — “fresh highlights of gold” in his hair to appear less as “an overseas threat” (ibid.: 5) — and “the tongue of an Australian” — “[n]ever say receipt with a P” (ibid.: 37, original emphasis). Similar to Balram in The White Tiger, Danny adopts an entrepreneurial mindset and invests the little money he has in “a portable vacuum cleaner, Turbo Model E” (ibid.: 3) to fashion himself, although not without irony, as a ‘Legendary Cleaner’ (e.g. ibid.: 12, 46, 62, 88). Notably, the very object that is meant to support his invisibility in Sydney’s social structure stresses his position as ‘alien Other’: “[s]trapped to his back was what resembled an astronaut’s jet-booster — a silver canister with a blue rubber nozzle peeping out and scarlet loops of wire wrapped around it” (ibid.: 3). This early description of Danny’s outer appearance is significant as it foreshadows that, ultimately, he cannot remain “unnoticed and undiscovered” (McCann 2020: n.p.). Yet one may equally read the vacuum cleaner as a symbol of capitalist critique, for it is on the novel’s closing pages that Danny spots “[a]nother astronaut” who is “Nepali, for sure, probably from the least prosperous part of the country” (Adiga 2021: 248). Arguably, this encounter serves to indicate “systemic social inequalities, where host countries with neoliberal capitalist economies exploit the needs of the desperate from sending countries, filling their labour gaps cheaply and without needing to socially provide for these migrant labourers” (Mendes and Lau 2022: 4). The “small but thorny” (Adiga 2021: 6) cactus that Danny buys for his Vietnamese girlfriend Sonja and carries around with him throughout the day which defines the novel’s dominant temporal frame, lends itself to a similar reading. Marking him as an ‘alien Other’, Danny also represents the thorn in the side of Australia’s booming economy that, just as in the ‘New India’, not only fosters “increased social mobility” but also creates “new divides” (Anjaria 2015: 115). It is, however, no coincidence that Amnesty demonstrates this capitalist logic of exploitation in the specific context of Australia which, irrespective of its vanishingly small percentage of ‘illegal’ immigrants or visa overstayers, implements “the most draconian restrictions” (Rashid 2020: n.p.) to preserve the illusion of a homogenous island population. The novel easily reveals the contradictions and hypocrisies that inform these restrictions by pointing to the many hyphenated identities that populate the bustling streets of Sydney, among them Danny’s “Japanese-Brazilian” (Adiga 2021: 13) friend Abe or the “Chinese-Malaysian” (ibid.: 132, original emphasis) Lin, part of a group of ‘illegals’ who regularly meet in front of Glebe library to exchange news about Australia’s immigration laws. The “cherry pickers from Vietnam, Indonesia, Tonga, [and] Fiji” (ibid.: 223, original emphasis) whom Abe encounters while working illegally on a fruit farm in the countryside equally emphasise Australia’s dependence on and exploitation of migrant workers. As Danny explains in one of his many schematic statements on the global economic order: “They’re bringing in brown and black people 282 12 New India, New Realism? Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide and putting them in slums near the airport and train station. To be slaves for white people” (ibid.: 130). Danny’s plain “facts of life” (ibid.: 130) are illustrated by his complex migration history that, primarily related in flashbacks and partly in the form of quasi-documen‐ tary material, including his online forum discussion with an Australian immigration officer (ibid.: 38-41) and diary-like notes on his first to “Fourth Year as an Illegal” (ibid.: 222-226, original emphasis), stretches over the whole novel. The reader learns that, fleeing from the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009) and the 2004 tsunami (ibid.: 43, 158), Danny was lured into migration. As the sarcastic third-person narrator comments: This was the racket: Mackenzie College wooed foreigners to Wollongong and sucked fees from them for two years, at the end of which, arming them with framed certificates of post-graduate competence […], it turned them loose to tar roads, install windows, and wok-fry noodles around Australia. White people were cheating foreigners, and foreigners were cheating white people, and no one in the college seemed happy. (ibid.: 173) When Danny drops out of this “ripoff ” (ibid.: 39) college and overstays his student visa, he becomes “free” and “trapped forever in Sydney” (ibid.: 178), for he violates the very rules that he otherwise observes so closely and precisely. Having “com[e] to Australia legally and then sliding under” (ibid.: 182), he suddenly finds himself in a “custom-made cell within the global prison” (ibid.: 183). Crucially, had he entered Australia illegally, for instance “on a boat” (ibid.: 167), and placed his application right away, his chances of being granted asylum would have been much better. Since he “arrived by plane, legally, with a visa printed on [his] passport” (ibid.: 182), an inserted letter from the Commonwealth of Australia informs him, it seems that “it was only within the country that you have decided […] you are a victim of state persecution” (ibid.: 171, original emphasis). It is such “bureaucratic caprices” (Rashid 2020: n.p.) that the novel discloses with piercing clarity. After all, Danny’s story suggests, arbitrary and inconsistent categories like ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee’ hardly “describe social order but rather shape […] power relations” (Schrover 2017: 434; Mendes and Lau 2022: 8). Representing “neither mere stubbornness nor defiance” (Mendes and Lau 2022: 7), Danny’s refusal to leave Australia is born of desperation, and the novel underscores this prevailing sense by employing multi-layered animal metaphors which may ring a bell with readers of Adiga’s debut. Yet while, in The White Tiger, the titular animal serves to illustrate Balram’s unconditional strife for a place in India’s ‘tiger economy’, the use of animal images in Amnesty primarily functions as a means of characterising the experiences of Danny as an undocumented immigrant (Mondo 2023: 3). Like a chased animal, Danny constantly seeks hideouts in the “jungle” (Adiga 2021: 4) of the city’s suburbs — with their “tropical plantains, begonia leaves […] and frangipani trees” (ibid.: 8) — or centre — where the zebra crossings resemble “the painted and tattooed war body of the hunter” (ibid.: 34). These images point attention towards Australia’s dehumanising immigration laws which deprive ‘illegals’ like Danny of basic human rights. Danny’s status as ‘easy prey’ is further underlined by the novel’s myriad 12.3 Aravind Adiga: Amnesty (2020) 283 references to all kind of birds, such as crows and pigeons, cormorants and seagulls or magpies and mynahs, that follow every step of Danny from a position of surveillance. Usually appearing “in flocks or in groups” (Mondo 2023: 49), they also emphasise the protagonist’s involuntary isolation which results from the government’s dispersal strategies. The presence of the birds, together with the text’s constant hints at bushfires (e.g. Adiga 2021: 9, 21, 44, 110, 185), creates an “atmosphere of unrelenting stress and paranoia” (McCann 2020: n.p.). However, and testifying to the novel’s ambiguous use of animal imagery, Danny shows features of both the hunted animal and the huntsman when he is suddenly placed in the midst of a crime plot. It is crucial that he spots the eponymous Australian spider (Adiga 2021: 20) in the apartment of “Daryl the Lawyer, House Number Four” (ibid.: 12), for it is right across the street that the police investigates the murder of Danny’s former client — “[s]trong woman, House Number Five, Radha: wide-hipped, muscled” (ibid.: 35). Danny immediately suspects another of his former clients, thinking that, “[i]f something had happened to House Number Five, then House Number Six would know, surely” (ibid.: 31). ‘House Number Six’ refers to the secret lover of Radha Thomas, Prakash Wadhwa, “an icebox Indian” (ibid.: 76) with serious gambling problems who lives rent-free in one of the apartments owned by Mark, a realtor and Radha’s husband, — and knows about Danny’s undocumented status. At first glance, this plot and character design indicates a substantial commercial investment. Originating “in the industrializing and modernizing milieus of Western Europe in the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries” (Goh 2014: 143), crime fiction continues as one of the most popular genres, not least among Indian English writers and readers (Varughese 2016: 163-180). A quick look at Adiga’s Between the Assassinations (2008) or Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (2007) and Swarup’s Six Suspects (2007) suffices to determine that Amnesty’s suspects, i.e. Prakash and Mark, are in good company. And while, according to Australian immigration law, Danny has himself committed a crime, Radha’s murder allows him to assume the opposite role of an investigator, evoking the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories rather than the whodunit of the ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction. Admittedly, Danny’s amateur status and Sydney’s claustrophobic feel are reminiscent of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. On the other hand, Amnesty hardly presents a range of red herrings but, quite the contrary, affirms the identity of the murderer, Prakash, after approximately one fifth of the novel when Danny “[s]croll[s] down to the nineteenth entry in the phone book” — House Number Six — and “presse[s] the green call button” (Adiga 2021: 57). But if Amnesty’s crime plot is not centrally concerned with the mystery element, which functions does it serve? Robbie B.H. Goh relates the crime plots of contemporary Indian English novels to their British precursors when he stresses their capacity to negotiate “social anxieties” (2014: 143). I agree with this finding but would like to suggest that Amnesty’s crime plot by no means indicates fears about “the stubborn persistence of a quasi-feudal culture that seems to prohibit India’s entry into the flows of global capital” (ibid.: 143). 284 12 New India, New Realism? Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide On the contrary, and apart from reinforcing Danny’s dilemma — “if I tell the Law about him, I also tell the Law about myself ” (Adiga 2020: 88) —, the novel’s crime plot functions to illustrate how far Australia’s immigration policies threaten rather than maintain social order. It is by casting an undocumented immigrant in the role of an investigator and thereby imbuing the novel’s title with a double meaning that Adiga makes his “argument for […] amnesty” (Mendes and Lau 2022: 4). Put bluntly, the refusal to grant amnesty to a character like Danny may entail the (unwitting) reward of another criminal offence, namely the murder of Radha Thomas. Amnesty means “a pardon for a political offence; immigration amnesty has been used to allow irregular migrants to remain in a country legally” (Mendes and Lau 2022: 4). Scholars working in the fields of human rights and migration studies tend to disagree over the effects of amnesty; while some, including Anne McNevin (2013: 183), highlight its potential to acknowledge the substantial contributions of migrant labourers to the global economy, others point to public concerns that am‐ nesty indicates “the capitulation to or rewarding of past law breaking” (Mendes and Lau 2022: 3). There is consensus, however, that amnesty reinforces established power relations as it involves “a show of benevolence […] by a higher power that can pardon an illegal action” (Mendes and Lau 2022: 3; Bosniak 2012: 442). Indeed, Danny’s “emotional wrestling” (Nevius 2021: n.p.) may disturb the sense of security and stability among his frequently evoked “imaginary Australian audience” (Adiga 2020: 70, 104, 137), for he is far from certain what to do. For several hours, in which Danny and Prakash alternate in their roles of the hunter and the hunted, the reader is placed in “Danny’s buzzing mind” (Upchurch 2020: n.p.) which constantly “weighs the risks of deportation against the burden of responsibility” (Plunkett 2020: n.p.). The novel’s “jumbled narrative style” (McCann 2020: n.p.) draws attention to the protagonist’s mental chaos as much as its multiple perspectives that shift abruptly and, owing to Amnesty’s ambiguous structure of address, are altogether hard to distinguish. By way of example, consider this sentence: “When you first come to Australia, the skin of these [gum] trees can frighten you, because they remind you of leprosy and other things that are still feared back home.” (Adiga 2020: 29) Who is speaking here? Is it Danny or the text’s unidentified third-person narrator? And who precisely is addressed? Readers ‘back home’ or larger audiences? Another example: “Hide in Sunburst, or sit with your own kind, Danny. That’s how you’ll survive this day” (ibid.: 65). As in the first case, the quote highlights the novel’s indeterminate aesthetics on the level of narrative transmission as it remains unclear whether we are reading the benevolent advice of an omniscient narrator or Danny’s monologue. As its ambivalent narrative situation implies, Amnesty does not provide ready answers in the style of Kiran Rao, a successful Indian film director and producer who has a cameo in Adiga’s text as the author of an invented self-help book, Through My 12.3 Aravind Adiga: Amnesty (2020) 285 Contradictions You Grow. At first admired by Danny (e.g. ibid.: 12, 36), Amnesty soon ridicules the kind of multicultural advice that it provides, particularly when the novel’s murder plot picks up speed: Danny felt himself standing before an audience like the one Kiran Rao had addressed the previous day at the Sydney Festival. Yes, sir: that’s it. I knew something about the dead woman no one else did. My very position as an illegal gave me, strangely enough, this unique power, and I used it to do some good. Through my contradictions, you grow. (ibid.: 55) Yet if Amnesty’s narration is marked by a tentative aesthetics, as evinced in the previous quotes, the novel’s overall structure “takes realism to its limits”, i.e. “to the ostensibly transparent registers of journalism, the tourist guidebook, and the letter” (Anjaria 2015: 130). Presented in the form of a record that covers less than 12 hours (a time frame that, just as Danny’s occupation, evokes Anand’s Untouchable), the novel starts at “8: 46 a.m.” (Adiga 2020: 5), when Danny enters the train to suburban Sydney to perform a string of cleaning gigs, and ends at “7: 03 p.m.” (ibid.: 248), when he tells Sonja that he informed the police about his suspicion. Including 54 time-stamped entries, with some consisting of merely one or two sentences (e.g. ibid.: 33, 205) and others — especially those with flashbacks to Danny’s home, his migration history or his fraught relation with Radha and Prakash — of a couple of pages, Amnesty provides clear temporal markers which “present a diegetic time that is unfolding simultaneously in the time of reading the text” and thereby “engineer a meeting of the novel’s present with the reader’s” (Anjaria 2015: 118). Moreover, and since they establish a sense of coherence or cause and effect, the time stamps emphasise Danny’s frequently articulated belief that “Aussies are a logical people, a methodical people” (Adiga 2020: 6, also 37, 63, 220). Presenting his ‘case’ in front of his imaginary “audience of logical, sensible Australians” (ibid.: 236), Danny seeks to enhance the credibility of his record with documentary evidence like the ‘Year as an Illegal’ inclusions which are mentioned above. Further liminal realist elements are local newspaper articles like “Another Death in Villawood” (ibid.: 58 f.), that report yet another suicide in one of Sydney’s detention centres, or a letter from the Commonwealth of Australia (ibid.: 171 f.), which details the reasons for rejecting Danny’s request to change his visa. Crucially, the same aesthetics is used to represent both the failure of Danny’s persuasive efforts and the certainty that a ‘man without rights’ (e.g. ibid.: 46, 137, 160, 234) cannot enforce rights without terrible consequences. It is an article in The South Sydney Express which informs the reader of Amnesty that “the person who tipped off on the hotline […] is now being processed for deportation to his home country” (ibid.: 253). Bringing Danny’s struggles as an undocumented immigrant to an irrevocable conclusion, the newspaper article functions as a significant example of the novel’s liminal realism, illustrating the disruptive effects of the global economic order. 286 12 New India, New Realism? Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide 12.4 Pankaj Mishra: Run and Hide (2022) Despite his exceptional ability to “hop, skip and leap” (Adiga 2020: 90, also 161, 198) — he used to be a triple jump champion back in school (e.g. ibid.: 4, 73, 79) —, Danny cannot evade the injustices of global capitalism which, in Amnesty, appears as “a big, international World Cup or Olympics” in which “people [are] running from countries that were burning to not-yet burning ones” (ibid.: 182). By contrast, and as the title of Mishra’s novel insinuates, the protagonists of Run and Hide seek escape from their “dire lower-middle-class straits” (Mishra 2022: 6) by participating in and profiting from said socio-economic order — or so it seems. Pankaj Mishra was born in 1969 in Jhansi (northern India). He studied commerce and English at the University of Allahabad and the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and is currently based in London. An astute observer of the effects of global capitalism, Mishra has experimented with various fictional and non-fictional forms to negotiate India’s rapid socio-economic change. His first novel, The Ro‐ mantics (1999), won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His sharp political and social comments regularly appear in renowned journals and newspapers, such as Granta and The Guardian, The London Review of Books and The New Yorker. Books by this author: Butter Chicken in Ludhiana. Travels in Small Town India (1995). New Delhi: Penguin. The Romantics (1999). London: Picador. Age of Anger. A History of the Present (2017). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bland Fanatics. Liberals, Race and Empire (2020). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Run and Hide (2022). London: Hutchinson Heinemann. Mixing the generic patterns of the Bildungsroman, the epistolary novel, the (fictional) memoir and the romance, the novel compares and contrasts the lives of three “master‐ minds of the ‘New India’” (Rashid 2022: n.p.), namely Virendra Das, Aseem Thakur and the first-person narrator Arun Dwivedi. Unlike Adiga’s plot-driven text, Run and Hide is a slow-paced and carefully composed “novel of character” (Massie 2022: n.p.) that comprises 22 chapters in four parts. It features unspecific temporal markers — ‘once’, ‘one day’, ‘often’ or ‘then’ and ‘now’ — and covers roughly half a century in the lives of the social climbers, from their impoverished childhood days in rural India over the humiliating experiences at Delhi’s IIT — “one of India’s hothouse technical colleges whose alumni include Google’s CEO” (Rashid 2022: n.p.) — to the jet set of Indian megacities like Bangalore or London and New York. At first glance, Run and Hide follows the conventions of the Bildungsroman, with Arun’s voice shifting between the experiencing and the narrating I. The latter emerges in expressions like ‘I recall’, ‘I remember’, ‘I can now see’, ‘looking back now’ or 12.4 Pankaj Mishra: Run and Hide (2022) 287 ‘in retrospect’ which serve to indicate both a temporal and moral distance to his former self. This distance is reinforced by the text’s contrasting character constellation. For while Arun, Aseem and Virendra are initially “bonded by a mutual desire for self-reinvention” (Sacks 2022: n.p.), facilitated by “a new hyper-connected world of unprecedented possibility” (Mishra 2022: 67), their lives take vastly different shapes. While Aseem and Virendra — whom Arun, half admiringly, half disparagingly refers to as “mascot[s] of triumphant self-invention” or “self-made modern Indian” (ibid.: 91) men — turn themselves into a “cultural impresario” (ibid.: 104) and a hedge fund billionaire at Wall Street, Arun hides away in his “Himalayan sanctuary” (ibid.: 154) in Ranipur, a small village in Himachal Pradesh, to translate Hindi literature into English. Given that, towards the end of the novel, Aseem is imprisoned for sexual harassment and Virendra commits suicide in a “correctional facility in Massachusetts” (ibid.: 17, 269), Arun’s is — perhaps — not the worst choice. As the dire fates of his two college friends imply, Arun “examines the consequences of capitalism, globalization, and the violence of greed on communities, families, and individuals” (Kirkus 2022: n.p.) in a ‘circuitous’ (Mishra 2022: 19) but clear style that bears a marked resemblance with Mishra’s essays and opinion pieces. In fact, Tanjil Rashid, in his review of the novel for The Guardian, suggests that Run and Hide may be approached as a fictional rendition of the author’s biography when he remarks that Mishra “write[s] about India’s development from an inward-looking, custom-bound society to a neoliberal global player” that “instigated his own elevation from the deprived, semi-rural landscape of his birth to a London postcode nestled among the liberal elite” (2022: n.p.). In this context, one might add that, just like his narrator Arun, Mishra moved to Mashobra, another small village in Himachal Pradesh, in the 1990s and worked for a range of Indian magazines before he embarked on a career as a writer. Furthermore, and read alongside a passage from one of his many non-fiction books, The Age of Anger (2017), Mishra’s novel arguably builds on the author’s empirical knowledge: “I can attest […] to the ruptures in lived experience […], the emotional and psychological disorientations and the abrasions of nerves and sensibilities that have made the passage to modernity [i.e. global capitalism] so arduous” (Mishra 2017: 32). This is not to revisit the problem of authenticity which I have addressed earlier in this chapter. Rather, the preceding examples serve to illustrate the extent to which Adiga and Mishra adopt remarkably different perspectives on and approaches to authorship. Moreover, they help explain why Mishra’s liminal realism involves a mixture of essayistic, journalistic and literary elements. Mishra, in his fictional engagement with India’s socio-economic transformations, draws on his experience as an author of a range of book-length essays and countless contributions to “every major newspaper” (Rashid 2022: n.p.). Writing on the popularity of right-wing nationalists, including India’s current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Mishra, in The Age of Anger, notes “[…] a moral and spiritual vacuum […] filled with anarchic expressions of individuality and mad quests for substitute religions and modes 288 12 New India, New Realism? Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide of transcendence” (Mishra 2017: 27). This sentence finds echoes in the novel through the observations made by Arun and Alia, as evidenced in the following quotations: […] our attempts to make ourselves, to become ‘real men’ simply by pursuing our strongest desires and impulses, with no guidance from family, religion or philosophy (Mishra 2022: 4) There is a whole generation, maybe two generations, of fucked-up men in India. […] People without a moral compass. (ibid.: 19) Such matter-of-fact observations and straightforward statements made by many of the characters in the novel read like variations of its author’s socio-political commentary. Similar to Adiga’s Amnesty, which employs articles, letters and online discussion to push realism to its boundaries, the liminal realism of Mishra involves “transactions between journalism […] and fiction” (Tickell 2016: 7). Contrary to a non-fiction book like Age of Anger, however, Run and Hide consistently reflects on its fictionality, which is highlighted by various intertextual references and the juxtaposition of Arun’s voice with the voices of two other “proto-writers” (Seaton 2022: n.p.), namely Aseem and Alia, Arun’s ex-girlfriend and prime addressee of his narrative. Before turning himself into a novelist, Aseem repeatedly expresses great reverence for V. S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian-born British writer who even makes a cameo appear‐ ance at one of his literary parties (Mishra 2022: 84 f.). Aseem is most impressed with Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River (1979) and adopts the neoliberal creed of its main character Salim: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” (qtd. in Mishra 2022: 3) Salim’s insistence to ‘trample on the past’, mentioned close to a dozen times by Arun or Aseem, equally shapes and substantiates Aseem’s world view, even if he, somewhat ironically, keeps mispronouncing “his favourite word, ‘career’ as carrier” (Mishra 2022: 52, also 60, 63) throughout the novel. Accordingly, Aseem’s “resolve to achieve in adult life everything his excessive, hungry soul had longed for” (ibid.: 51) involves the denial of everything “that smelled of the past and appeared to constrain the many possibilities of knowledge and pleasure in the present and future” (ibid.: 140), including his origin and parents — a choice that Arun, in an ironic twist of neoliberal parlance, refers to as “complete liberation” (ibid.: 97). As Arun’s comment suggests, Aseem’s literary activity serves the first-person narrator of Run and Hide to develop a writing style of his own which markedly differs from (the references to) Aseem’s novels. Arun takes special issue with Aseem’s “all-knowing first-person narrators” (ibid.: 105) and “noisy flamboyant storytellers” (ibid.: 186) who, according to his taste, “seemed wholly oblivious of the eternal questions: Who are we? What are we here for? Is there any reality beyond our ever-shifting desires, and their stubbornly unsatisfactory fulfilments? ” (ibid.: 105) Read as a meta-fictional comment, this assessment of Aseem’s novels not only invites readers of Run and Hide to compare and contrast different representations of the ‘New India’ but also functions to articulate definite answers concerning “a set of as-yet unanswerable questions about the nature of representation itself ” (Anjaria 2015: 115). 12.4 Pankaj Mishra: Run and Hide (2022) 289 A similar effect is created by the non-fiction approach to India’s socio-economic changes by Alia whom Aseem first introduces to Arun as “a sort of Indian that didn’t exist when we were growing up, from a conservative Muslim background but very much in tune with the global progressive zeitgeist” (Mishra 2022: 158). Throughout Run and Hide, Arun’s love interest is engaged in writing “a secret history of globalisation” (ibid.: 17, 266) that centres on “crooked global elites” (ibid.: 261) or “hollow men” (ibid.: 267) like Aseem and Virendra. Just as Aseem’s novels, Alia’s non-fiction never materialises on the pages of Run and Hide; rather, its representation is almost exclusively filtered through Arun’s critical perspective. Accordingly, and resembling the effect of Aseem’s self-righteous narrators, Alia’s writing lacks a personal dimension. As Arun tells her in his retrospective narrative, “your imagination was […] capable of holding only big political causes: poverty, injustice, imperialism and neo-liberalism”, whereas “[i]ndividual experiences or palpable things […] slipped through it” (ibid.: 265). At first fascinated by Alia’s glowing presence on social media, Arun is gradually irritated by her “aggressive self-promotion” (ibid.: 159), not least because it reminds him that “[w]e had come to each other from such different worlds” (ibid.: 236) — Alia a former model who is always putting on “a slightly aloof, preoccupied look” (ibid.: 187), Arun a moderately successful translator who is always “fearing exposure of [his] low-caste origins” (ibid.: 247). Arguably, it is because of her privileged background that Alia fails to consider Aseem and Virendra’s “specifically Indian torments, especially the complex injuries of caste and class inflicted early on many successful men of their generation” (ibid.: 190). Caste (/ kɑːst/ ) is a term coined by Portuguese merchants and traders meaning ‘pure breed’. It references a complex and rigid social hierarchy that — based on the Man‐ usmriti, one of the major legal texts on Hinduism — divides Hindus into Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (warriors) and Vaisyas (farmers, merchants and traders). Positioned outside the hierarchy, Sudras, which are also referred to as Dalits (meaning ‘oppressed’ in Sanskrit) or ‘untouchables’, were associated with degrading or ‘polluting’ manual occupations, such as latrine cleaners or street sweepers. While caste has determined almost all dimensions of Hindu social life for centuries, urbanisation and globalisation have rendered the system somewhat less influential in recent years, although some scholars caution that India’s ab‐ sorption into the neoliberal world economy may just as well multiply social hier‐ archies and inequalities ( Jeffrey 2017: 3). Indeed, the novel’s romance or “poor-boy-meets-rich-girl trajectory” (Chakraborty 2022: n.p.) is first established when they meet in Alia’s freshly refurbished Ranipur villa which, in glaring contrast to Arun’s modest cottage, “stood on the highest part of the ridge, claiming superiority” (Mishra 2022: 154). Arun’s thoughts on their budding relationship, which soon entails a prolonged stay at Alia’s fancy apartment in London, 290 12 New India, New Realism? Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide invite a comparison with the migration experience of Amnesty’s protagonist Danny. Emphasising the extent to which he profits from the match, Arun relates that “I had been elevated above the meanness that was the fate of immigrants to the city. And, unlike them, I had in mind the comforting knowledge that I could go back, that I didn’t have to, after all, be here” (ibid.: 244). Crucially, and despite his comparatively privileged position, Arun still recalls his desire to “become invisible” (ibid.: 247) and hide from the many meaningless brunches and parties with Alia’s affluent expatriate friends. Paradoxically enough, then, Alia’s money and popularity ease his initiation into and enhance his desire to distance himself from London’s diasporic communities. Further developments between the couple explain how the novel Run and Hide came about, for it is merely by accident that Arun writes an account of the ‘New India’. The novel’s plot construction indicates that Arun’s decision to start writing results from his sense of “mortifying guilt” (ibid.: 240) about how disrespectful he has treated the women in his life. Firstly, he leaves his mother — a somewhat stereotypical “figure of sorrowful submission” (ibid.: 28) who is always “cooking, sweeping, scouring, milking, kneading, knitting, darning and sewing” (ibid.: 124) — to spend his time with Alia, at first in a fancy “yoga retreat” (ibid.: 199) in Pondicherry, later in her London apartment, and does not even return to take part in his mother’s funeral. Secondly, he leaves Alia without a word of farewell — “I just didn’t know how to explain myself to you” (ibid.: 285). Against this backdrop, writing letters functions as a means of confession or self-therapy or — as Arun puts it — “a mode of self-anaesthetising, and perhaps one way of achieving immunity from total despair” (ibid.: 320). The novel’s epistolary form is significant because it reveals a similarity between Arun and his college friends that he, however, works hard to deny. For though he may not agree with Aseem and Virendra that “ten thousand fucks, expensive fellatio, a suite at the Pierre, a Greek-revival mansion in East Hampton, or intellectual and literary glory could be permanent modes of self-fulfilment” (ibid.: 184), Arun’s behaviour towards his mother and Alia suggests a common cowardice and “ruthless egotism” (ibid.: 325). Notably, the same cowardice and selfishness characterises the epistolary form which, despite enabling Arun’s self-awareness that he is, after all, not so different from Aseem and Virendra, reinforces unequal patterns of communication. Signalling an indirect and temporally displaced mode of communication, Arun’s letter writing assigns a thoroughly passive role to Alia who, Arun admits at any rate, “would have different memories” (ibid.: 184). On the other hand, Arun’s representation of the ‘New India’ and its “hollow men” (ibid.: 267) not only deviates from Aseem’s novels and Alia’s non-fiction book by paying close attention to “the details of our class backgrounds” (ibid.: 191) but equally insinuates that India’s socio-economic transformations encourage gender inequality. While explaining their huge appeal to him and his college friends, Arun’s astute observations about the neoliberal rhetoric of freedom and possibility ultimately disclose that the past cannot be ‘trampled on’ or easily ‘caste away’ (Tandon 2022: n.p.). For Arun and his friends, at least, the ‘New India’ “amount[s] to running this 12.4 Pankaj Mishra: Run and Hide (2022) 291 way and that, uncertain of our destination and looking back enquiringly all the time” (Mishra 2022: 140). Remarkably, a similar observation applies to the consequences of global capitalism; just as Danny in Amnesty, Arun finds it impossible “to stay away from the noise of the world” (ibid.: 83) or to evade the “scrutiny and judgment and impersonation” (ibid.: 133) which define India’s socio-economic order. In this context, the transformations which take place in Ranipur are a case in point. Once a “peaceably and humbly self-sufficient” village that has a “healing” (ibid.: 145) effect on Arun, Ranipur cannot “remain immune to the explosion of energy and ambition” (ibid.: 146). In the course of the novel, the property that contains Arun’s cottage is bought by “a pioneering entrepreneur” (ibid.: 146) who, together with the help of migrant labourers (reminiscent of Danny), converts it into yet another “playground of the rich” (ibid.: 151). Indeed, the ‘noise of the world’ does not even stop at the doorsteps of a small monastery near the Tibetan border where Arun, in a “Buddhist desire to withdraw from the world” (Chakraborty 2022: n.p.), attempts to “let go of everything that involves getting somewhere and being something” (Mishra 2022: 307). Disturbed by the social media news that Aseem is officially accused of having sexually harassed Alia, he bitterly concludes that, “though we console ourselves that we can always run and hide, there is no real escape” (ibid.: 326). Rather than suggesting an open ending, this statement serves to stress the inescapability of global capitalism and its disruptive effects which Run and Hide, similar to Amnesty, negotiates with the mode of liminal realism. 12.5 Coda In his discussion of what he refers to as ‘dark’ Indian novels, such as Adiga’s The White Tiger and Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006), Goh affirms that the “critically detached position” of Indian diasporic writers appears “to allow little or no possibility for India’s social problems to be resolved” (2011: 332, 327). Yet, the postcolonial scholar equally confirms that the novels “mark out a cultural territory of one’s own against the most powerful deterritorializing effects of globalization” (2011: 343). My discussion of two recent Indian English novels suggests that such a cultural territory is, in fact, unavailable. Moreover, and distancing myself from notions like ‘Dark India’, I have argued that Adiga’s Amnesty and Mishra’s Run and Hide employ liminal realist modes to negotiate the all-encompassing mechanisms of post-millennial global capitalism. Marked by a world-systemic outlook that exceeds the narrow binarism of East and West, Adiga and Mishra’s novels may use tentative narrative elements, such as ambiguous narrative situations or meta-fictional discussions about the ‘appropriate’ way of representing the ‘New India’. However, their dominant liminal realist mode, which manifests itself in letters and newspaper articles or references to non-fiction books and complies with the in/ voluntarily liminal positions of their protagonists, advances an aesthetics of determinacy that discloses the socio-economic inequalities of capitalist globalisation. Since the (hi)story of capitalism is still in the making, it remains 292 12 New India, New Realism? Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide to be seen how Anglophone Indian novelists modify realism as a tool of socio-economic representation and critique in the future. 12.6 Study Questions ● Compare your observations with the realist mode in Amnesty and Run and Hide. To what extent do the two novels draw on and/ or deviate from 20 th century examples in terms of generic patterns, plot and character designs, narration and imagery? ● Consult literary studies dictionaries (Childs/ Fowler, Cuddon) to familiarise your‐ self with the forms and functions of crime writing. Why does Amnesty adopt this structure? How does it influence the novel’s representation of ‘illegal’ immigra‐ tion? ● Analyse the employment of animal imagery in Amnesty. How does it affect the novel’s constructions of character and space? ● Comment on the complex narrative situation in Run and Hide. Why does the novel combine elements of the Bildungsroman, the epistolary novel, the (fictional) memoir and the romance to represent socio economic change in India? ● Look up the term ‘metafiction’ and use it to study the narrative levels in Mishra’s novel. Why does it employ characters who engage in writing activities? How do Aseem’s novels and Alia’s non-fiction book contrast with Arun’s account of the ‘New India’? ● How are the critical concepts discussed in this chapter — e.g. ‘diaspora’, ‘liminality’, the ‘postcolonial exotic’, ‘re-Orientalism’ — reflected in the formal features of Adiga and Mishra’s novels? 12.7 Further Reading Anjaria, Ulka (2015). “Realist Hieroglyphics: Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies 61 (1), 114-137. DOI: 10.1353/ mfs.2015.0005. Childs, Peter/ Fowler, Roger (2006). The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. London: Rout‐ ledge. Cuddon, J. A. (2013). A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 5th edition. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Dengel-Janic, Ellen (2007). “South Asia.” In: Eckstein, Lars (ed.). English Literatures Across the Globe: A Companion. Paderborn: Fink, 133-157. Detmers, Ines (2011). “New India? New Metropolis? Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a ‘Condition-of-India Novel’.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47 (5), 535-545. DOI: 10.1080/ 17449855.2011.614790. Döring, Tobias (2008). Postcolonial Literatures in English. Stuttgart: Klett. Goh, Robbie B. H. (2014). “Global Goondas? Money, Crime and Social Anxieties in Ara‐ vind Adiga’s Writings.” In: Dwivedi, Om Prakash/ Lau, Lisa (eds.). Indian Writing in 12.6 Study Questions 293 English and the Global Literary Market. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 143-163. DOI: 10.1057/ 9781137437716_9. Mendes, Ana Cristina/ Lau, Lisa (2022). “Hospitality and Amnesty: Aravind Adiga’s Narrative of Legal Liminality.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 25 (4), 468-484. DOI: 10.1080/ 1369801X.2022.2099940. Mondo, Costanza (2023). “A Bird’s-Eye View over Sydney: Animal Imagery in Amnesty by Aravind Adiga.” Alicante Journal of English Studies 38, 43-57. DOI: 10.14198/ raei.2023.38.03. Sarkowsky, Katja/ Schulze-Engler, Frank (2012). “The New Literatures in English.” In: Middeke, Martin et al. (eds.). English and American Studies. Theory and Practice. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 163-177. Saxena, Akshya (2021). “Purchasing Power, Stolen Power, and the Limits of Capitalist Form: Dalit Capitalists and the Caste Question in the Indian Anglophone Novel.” ariel: A Review of International English Literature 52 (1), 61-90. DOI: 10.1353/ ari.2021.0002. Singh, Amardeep (2018). “The Indian Novel in the 21st Century.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. DOI: 10.1093/ acrefore/ 9780190201098.013.414. Varughese, E. Dawson. (2016) “Genre Fiction of New India: Post-Millennial Configurations of Crick Lit, Chick Lit and Crime Writing.” In: Tickell, Alex (ed.). South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 163-179. DOI: 10.1057/ 978-1-137-40354-4_9. 12.8 Works Cited Primary Sources Adiga, Aravind (2008). The White Tiger. New York: Free Press. — (2021 [2020]). Amnesty. London: Picador. Mishra, Pankaj (2017). Age of Anger. A History of the Present. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. — (2022). Run and Hide. London: Hutchinson Heinemann. Secondary Sources Anjaria, Ulka (2015). “Realist Hieroglyphics: Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies 61 (1), 114-137. DOI: 10.1353/ mfs.2015.0005. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bosniak, Linda (2012). “Arguing for Amnesty.” Law, Culture and the Humanities 9 (3), 432-442. DOI: 10.1177/ 1743872111423181. Breitbach, Julia (2012). Analog Fictions for the Digital Age: Literary Realism and Photographic Discourses in Novels after 2000. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Brosius, Christiane (2010). India’s Middle Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780203814116. 294 12 New India, New Realism? Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide Brouillette, Sarah (2007). Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1057/ 9780230288171. — (2011). “On the Entrepreneurial Ethos in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” In: Lau, Lisa/ Mendes, Ana Cristina (eds.). Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics: The Oriental Other Within. London: Routledge, 40-55. Brouillette, Sarah/ Coleman, John R. (2020). “Prizing Otherness: Black and Asian British Writing in the Global Marketplace.” In: Nasta, Susheila/ Stein, Mark U. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 584-597. DOI: 10.1017/ 9781108164146. Chakraborty, Abhrajyoti (2022). “Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra review — new India, old ideas.” The Guardian, 14 February 2022, https: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2022/ feb/ 14/ run-and -hide-by-pankaj-mishra-review-new-india-old-ideas (last accessed: 05.04.2023). Chibber, Vivek (2013). Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London/ New York: Verso. Clini, Clelia (2022). “Poverty, (Neo)orientalism and the Cinematic Re-Presentation of ‘Dark India’.” In: Schmidt-Haberkamp, Barbara et al. (eds.). Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World. Leiden: Brill, 21-39. DOI: 10.1163/ 9789004466395_003. Davies, Dominic (2016). “Occupying Literary and Urban Space: Adiga, Authenticity and the Politics of Socio-Economic Critique.” In: Tickell, Alex (ed.). South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 119-138. DOI: 10.1057/ 978-1-137-40354-4_7. Detmers, Ines (2011). “New India? New Metropolis? Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a ‘Condition-of-India Novel’.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47 (5), 535-545. DOI: 10.1080/ 17449855.2011.614790. Dwivedi, Om Prakash/ Lau, Lisa (eds.) (2014). Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1057/ 9781137437716. Goh, Robbie B.H. (2011). “Narrating ‘Dark’ India in Londonstani and The White Tiger: Sustain‐ ing Identity in the Diaspora.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 46 (2), 327-344. DOI: 10.1177/ 0021989411404995. — (2014). “Global Goondas? Money, Crime and Social Anxieties in Aravind Adiga’s Writings.” In: Dwivedi, Om Prakash/ Lau, Lisa (eds.). Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 143-163. DOI: 10.1057/ 9781137437716_9. Huggan, Graham (2001). The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780203420102. Jeffrey, Craig (2017). Modern India: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/ actrade/ 9780198769347.001.0001. Kirkus (2022). “An astute, discomfiting journey into a wasteland.” Kirkus, 1 March 2022, https: / / www.kirkusreviews.com/ book-reviews/ pankaj-mishra/ run-and-hide/ (last accessed 05.04.2023). Lau, Lisa/ Mendes, Ana Cristina (2011). “Introducing Re-Orientalism: A New Manifesto of Ori‐ entalism.” In: Lau, Lisa/ Mendes, Ana Cristina (eds.). Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics: The Oriental Other Within. London: Routledge, 1-14. DOI: 10.4324/ 9780203814543. 12.8 Works Cited 295 — (2012/ 13). “Authorities of Representation: Speaking To and Speaking For: A Response to Barbara Korte.” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 22 (1), 137-143. Lindner, Oliver (2008). “Introduction.” In: Linder, Oliver (ed.). Teaching India [anglistik & englischunterricht, 72]. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 7-16. Massie, Allan (2022). “Book Review: Run and Hide, by Pankaj Mishra.” The Scotsman, 24 February 2022, https: / / www.scotsman.com/ arts-and-culture/ books/ book-review-run-and-hide-by-pan kaj-mishra-3585285 (last accessed: 05.04.2023). McCann, Michael J. (2020). “Amnesty: A Novel.” New York Journal of Books, 18 February 2020, https: / / www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ book-review/ amnesty-novel (last accessed: 05.04.2023). McLeod, John (2010). Beginning Postcolonialism. 2 nd edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McNevin, Anne (2013). “Ambivalence and Citizenship: Theorising the Political Claims of Irregular Migrants.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 41 (2), 182-200. DOI: 10.1177/ 0305829812463473. Meillon, Bénédicte (2022). Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth. Lanham: Lexington Books. Mendes, Ana Cristina (2010). “Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45 (2), 275-293. DOI: 10.1177/ 0021989410366896. Mendes, Ana Cristina/ Lau, Lisa (2015). “India through Re-Orientalist Lenses.” Interventions: In‐ ternational Journal of Postcolonial Studies 17 (5), 706-727. DOI: 10.1080/ 1369801X.2014.984619. — (2023). “Hospitality and Amnesty: Aravind Adiga’s Narrative of Legal Liminal‐ ity.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 25 (4), 468-484. DOI: 10.1080/ 1369801X.2022.2099940. Mondo, Costanza (2023). “A Bird’s-Eye View over Sydney: Animal Imagery in Amnesty by Aravind Adiga.” Alicante Journal of English Studies 38, 43-57. DOI: 10.14198/ raei.2023.38.03. Nandy, Ashis (2002). Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Nevius, Mandy (2021). “Amnesty: A Novel.” Manhattan Book Review, https: / / manhattanbookrev iew.com/ product/ amnesty-a-novel/ (last accessed 05.04.2023). Oza, Rupal (2011). “Showcasing India: Gender, Geography, and Globalization.” Signs: Journal for Women in Culture and Society 26 (4), 1067-1095. Pardey, Hannah (2020). “Middlebrow Postcolonialisms: Studying Readers in the Digital Age.” Special Issue: Postcolonial Cultural Studies. Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 31 (3), 67-88. DOI: 10.33675/ ANGL/ 2020/ 3/ 8. — (2023). Middlebrow 2.0 and the Digital Affect. Online Reading Communities of the New Nigerian Novel. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Parry, Benita (2004). “The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies.” In: Lazarus, Neil (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 66-80. DOI: 10.1017/ CCOL0521826942.004. Plunkett, Felicity (2020).“ An acute and witty satirist offers a bleak take on Sydney.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 May 2020, https: / / www.smh.com.au/ culture/ books/ an-acute-and-witty-s atirist-offers-a-bleak-take-on-sydney-20200514-p54t32.html (last accessed 05.04.2023). 296 12 New India, New Realism? Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide Ponzanesi, Sandra (2014). The Postcolonial Cultural Industry: Icons, Markets, Mythologies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1057/ 9781137272591. Rashid, Tanjil (2020). “Amnesty by Aravind Adiga review — a migrant’s tale.” The Guardian, 20 February 2020, https: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2020/ feb/ 20/ amnesty-by-aravind-adiga -review (last accessed: 05.04.2023). — (2022). “Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra review — a lyrical letter from the new India.” The Guardian, 23 February 2022, https: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2022/ feb/ 23/ run-and-hide -by-pankaj-mishra-review-a-lyrical-letter-from-the-new-india (last accessed: 05.04.2023). Sacks, Sam (2022). “Fiction: Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Run and Hide’ Review.” The Wall Street Journal, 11 March 2022, https: / / www.wsj.com/ articles/ fiction-pankaj-mishra-run-and-hide-book-rev iew-11647013867 (last accessed: 05.04.2023). Saxena, Akshya (2021). “Purchasing Power, Stolen Power, and the Limits of Capitalist Form: Dalit Capitalists and the Caste Question in the Indian Anglophone Novel.” ariel: A Review of International English Literature 52 (1), 61-90. DOI: 10.1353/ ari.2021.0002. Schrover, Marlou (2017). “Labour Migration.” In: Hofmeester, Karin/ van der Linden, Marcel (eds.). Handbook Global History of Work. Berlin: De Gruyter, 433-468. DOI: 10.1515/ 9783110424584-023. Seaton, Lola (2022). “Pankaj Mishra’s divided self.” The New Statesman, 23 February 2022, https: / / www.newstatesman.com/ culture/ books/ 2022/ 02/ lone-wolves-and-wall-street (last accessed 05.04.2023). Segrave, Marie (2019). “Theorizing Sites and Strategies of Differential Inclusion: Un‐ lawful Migrant Workers in Australia.” Theoretical Criminology 23 (2), 194-210. DOI: 10.1177/ 1362480619827527. Shingavi, Snehal (2014). “Capitalism, Caste, and Con-Games in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Postcolonial Text 9 (3), 1-16. Shivani, Anis (2006). “Indo-Anglian Fiction: The New Orientalism.” Race & Class 47 (4), 1-25. DOI: 10.1177/ 0306396806063855. Singh, Amardeep (2018). “The Indian Novel in the 21st Century.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. DOI: 10.1093/ acrefore/ 9780190201098.013.414. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (2008). “Another Booker Flop.” London Review of Books 30 (21), https: / / www.lrb.co.uk/ the-paper/ v30/ n21/ sanjay-subrahmanyam/ diary (last accessed 05.04.2023). Tandon, Bharat (2022). “Caste Away: A Bildungsroman of a Twenty-First-Century India.” Times Literary Supplement, 4 March 2022, https: / / www.the-tls.co.uk/ articles/ run-and-hide-pankaj -mishra-book-review-bharat-tandon/ (last accessed: 05.04.2023). Tickell, Alex (2016). “Introduction.” In: Tickell, Alex (ed.). South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1-17. DOI: 10.1057/ 978-1-137-40354-4_1. Upchurch, Michael (2020). “Aravind Adiga’s complex ‘Amnesty’ unfolds over just 12 hours but encompasses worlds within worlds.” The Seattle Times, 14 February 2020, https: / / www.seattl etimes.com/ entertainment/ books/ in-amnesty-an-immigrants-world-comes-caving-in-over-t he-course-of-just-12-hours/ (last accessed: 05.04.2023). 12.8 Works Cited 297 Varughese, E. Dawson. (2016) “Genre Fiction of New India: Post-Millennial Configurations of Crick Lit, Chick Lit and Crime Writing.” In: Tickell, Alex (ed.). South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 163-179. DOI: 10.1057/ 978-1-137-40354-4_9. Young, Kristen Millares (2020). “In ‘Amnesty’, an immigrant is put in an impossible position.” The Washington Post, 18 February 2020, https: / / www.washingtonpost.com/ entertainment/ books/ in-amnesty-an-immigrant-is-put-in-an-impossible-position/ 2020/ 02/ 18/ 45105cdc-525 6-11ea-929a-64efa7482a77_story.html (last accessed: 05.04.2023). 298 12 New India, New Realism? Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty and Pankaj Mishra’s Run and Hide 13 Big Other and Big Brother: State Violence, Surveillance, and Censorship in Contemporary Indian English Drama Ariane de Waal, University of Leipzig Abstract This chapter begins by mapping three starting points for researching contempo‐ rary Indian drama in English: playwriting awards, theatre festivals and interna‐ tional collaborations. It calls attention to two contemporary Indian playwrights who write political plays in English, Abhishek Majumdar and Annie Zaidi. The two plays that serve as case studies for this chapter are Majumdar’s The Djinns of Eidgah (2012), which addresses the Kashmir conflict, and Zaidi’s Untitled 1 (2018), set in a dystopian future of all-encompassing state surveillance. The chapter ar‐ gues that these two plays exemplify two divergent dramatic strategies to repre‐ sent, reflect on, and resist the abuse of state power. While the Indian state func‐ tions as a potent yet invisible ‘Big Other’ in Majumdar’s play, Zaidi stages the state as an omnipresent and overpowering ‘Big Brother’. Both playwrights draw on storytelling and myth in order to explore tactics of resisting state violence, surveillance and censorship. This chapter approaches the plays through the tools of dramatic analysis as they are taught in the English Studies curriculum, but it also indicates how traditional dramatic theory falls short of adequately capturing the dramaturgy and dynamics of Indian English drama. 13.1 Introduction: Where to Look for Contemporary Indian Drama in English In recent years, scholars have repeatedly referred to Indian drama in English as “vibrant and dynamic” (Singh 2018: 30), “innovative” (Kulkarni 2019: 45), and “getting richer by the day” (Naveen 2019: 21). Less enthusiastic voices, at least, assert that “the prospect of Indian English drama is not bleak” (Kharbe 2019: 69). In spite of these positive appraisals, there seems to be a consensus that anglophone Indian drama has been critically “neglected” in comparison to the novel, short fiction, and, to a lesser extent, poetry (Naveen 2019: 20). From the viewpoint of students and scholars of English Studies based in Germany or elsewhere in Europe, this assessment can easily be corroborated. Most English and postcolonial literature curricula in the global North cover novels by Salman Rushdie or (non-)fiction by Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh, but students are unlikely to have heard of even the most famous writers of Indian English plays. To give a poignant example: Mahesh Dattani was the first Indian English dramatist to receive one of the most prestigious literary awards in the country, the Sahitya Akademi Award (conferred by India’s National Academy of Letters), for his selection of works Final Solution and Other Plays in 1998. While this recognition could be considered a watershed moment for anglophone Indian theatre, Dattani can perhaps best be characterised as ‘unheard of ’ in Western academia. Due to the lack of an established anthology, it is difficult to adequately describe the corpus of Indian English drama. The sparsity of sources is exacerbated by a predominant scholarly focus on playwrights who do not (primarily) write in English (Kulkarni 2019; Naveen 2019). Most of the scholarly literature in the field focuses on Mohan Rakesh, Vijay Tendulkar, Girish Karnad and Badal Sarkar, who rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s as the leading playwrights writing in Hindi, Marathi, Kannada and Bengali, respectively. These authors, many of whose works have been translated into English to great acclaim — in Karnad’s case, by the writer himself — are usually seen as having prepared the “background for contemporary […] Indian English theatre” (Kulkarni 2019: 45) — hence, to use a theatrical metaphor, they hardly take centre stage in its history. A useful attempt to approach contemporary Indian English drama in terms of a “canon” can be found in a scholarly collection on Contemporary Indian English Poetry and Drama (2019), edited by Arnab Kumar Sinha et al. The editors trace the origins of contemporary Indian English drama to “the 1960s, when Asif Currimbhoy, the first major voice of this canon, started writing plays” (Sinha et al. 2019: 9). They identify the 1980s as a particularly vibrant phase, with “pioneering dramatist” Dattani exploring the “socio-cultural reality of India” and breaching new topics, such as mental health and sexual abuse (ibid.: 10). Yet, as their survey accentuates the period of dynamic dramatic production in the 1980s, it offers no detailed account of plays that might lay claim to ‘contemporariness’ two decades into the 21 st century. For students based at German universities who wish to brave these difficulties to get acquainted with contemporary Indian English drama, three starting points can be suggested. The first is to research literary awards, and particularly playwriting awards. As Dattani’s success demonstrates, Indian English drama has won the highest literary accolades. Several awards are dedicated specifically to new anglophone plays. Examples include the Sultan Padamsee Playwriting Award, founded by the Theatre Group of Bombay and the Hindu Playwright Award conferred by The Hindu, the second biggest English-language newspaper in India in terms of circulation. Both awards are designed to recognise and promote original playscripts in English penned by Indian authors — or, as the Theatre Group (2014) has put it, “[p]laywrights who write in English, but speak with an Indian Voice”. While browsing through the lists of recent prize-winners may give a good sense of the astounding variety of topics covered by Indian English playwrights, the playscripts thus distinguished are often unobtainable from German libraries, bookshops, or even online booksellers delivering to Germany. For instance, V. Balakrishnan’s plays Sordid (2019) and God’s Will (2022), which won him the Hindu Playwright Award and the Sultan Padamsee Award, appear to be 300 13 State Violence, Surveillance, and Censorship in Indian English Drama rewarding sources for an analysis of contemporary issue-based theatre in English, yet neither playscript is easily accessible. Another avenue into contemporary Indian English theatre is offered by theatre festivals. Over a dozen festivals that showcase Indian alongside international perform‐ ances have emerged since the turn of the century. As Amitesh Grover (2020) has noted, “festivals have become the new honours; they are seen to bestow legitimacy on artistic work”. A British Council-founded website about “Festivals from India” (2023) provides an overview of the dates and scope of these festivals, some of which include hybrid options and may thus be followed from locations outside India. One festival that focuses on English-language productions is Short+Sweet South India in Chennai, which features ten-minute performances of original playscripts in English as well as dance, music and cabaret. Recordings of two award-winning plays from the 2017 instalment, Song of Love by Sunil Vishnu K. and The History Boys by Mathivanan Rajendrana, can be found via the venue’s YouTube channel (Prakriti Foundation 2017a and 2017b). My third suggestion is to study Indian plays in English that have emerged from international collaborations. This approach, which I would advocate mainly for pragmatic reasons, can be seen as problematic from a postcolonial point of view, as it might lead to a privileging of Indian writers who have been pre-selected by the Western institutions that usually provide the funding and resources for such collaborative work. The extent to which scholarship of contemporary Indian theatre is entrenched in neo-colonial paradigms continues to spark vital discussions in the field (Prakash 2021: 11 ff.). But this problem is not necessarily circumvented by limiting one’s research to plays solely produced in India. Theatre director Chandradasan (2021: 39), for instance, sees contemporary Indian theatre as thoroughly reflecting the “westernised urban ethos” engrained in India’s system of governance, its social and education system and its economy. Ashis Sengupta’s verdict that “[c]ontemporary theatre in India is neither naïvely imitative of the West nor enthusiastically nativist” (2022: 17) gestures towards a helpful middle ground. It would be wrong to assume that transnational theatre collaborations automatically result in “cultural imperialist exploitation […] of non-Western cultures” (Sengupta 2022: 17) or that only artists who cater to Western aesthetics will be contracted to produce their work at venues in the global North — although these are, certainly, valid concerns. When it comes to the accessibility of materials, Indian English plays that have been staged at or co-produced by British theatres, for instance, are simply much easier to obtain for students based in Europe, as they are more likely to have been published by UK outlets. The work of British South Asian theatre companies should also be mentioned here, foremost among them Tara Arts, Tamasha and Kali Theatre Company, as providing valuable materials for research. When accessing Indian English drama through either of the routes proposed here, students are encouraged to bear in mind that they are looking at an exclusive segment of contemporary theatrical production in India. If “discourses on Indian theatre and performance have remained largely middle-class and urban-centric” (Prakash 13.1 Introduction: Where to Look for Contemporary Indian Drama in English 301 2021: 13), this exclusivity is even more pronounced when limiting one’s enquiry to text-based productions in English, thereby excluding vernacular, regional and folk theatres. Anglophone plays will primarily be staged in the metropolitan centres and for socioeconomically privileged theatregoers. “Writing in English”, Anita Singh remarks, “has its own snags, for not being the language of masses but that of the urban elite, for being the language of the colonizers” (2019: 147). Beena Agrawal corroborates that “the tendency to write drama in English” was originally “treated as a sign of colonial order. However, the use of English works as a link language between diverse linguistic groups” (quoted in Kulkarni 2019: 46). Hence, Indian English drama also has the potential to attract linguistically diverse audiences, even if these might hail from the upper strata of society. This chapter calls attention to two Indian playwrights writing in English who have not yet received adequate scholarly attention: Abhishek Majumdar and Annie Zaidi. These two writers form part of what Amanda Lal (2022) has recently described as a “whole new generation of younger dramatists [who] work and have published in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Kolkata — some even facing political trouble like Abhishek Majumdar — without any critical assessment whatsoever”. As Majumdar has reported in interviews, he has faced interrogations by the authorities and threats from various pressure groups for his political plays, such as his trilogy about the Kashmir conflict or his drama about Tibetan protestors, Pah-La (2017). In consequence, his plays have occasionally been banned from being performed. Despite winning several playwriting awards over the past decade and having his plays staged at prestigious venues like the Royal Court Theatre in London, Majumdar’s work has been the subject of few scholarly accounts (Sengupta 2017; de Waal 2020). And even though Zaidi, for some commentators, “tops the list” of “upcoming” female Indian playwrights writing in English (Patel 2018: 119), her poetry and prose are more frequently discussed than her dramatic output. The two plays that will serve as case studies for this chapter, Majumdar’s The Djinns of Eidgah (2012) and Zaidi’s Untitled 1 (2018) exemplify two dramatic strategies to represent, reflect on, and resist the abuse of state power. Majumdar’s and Zaidi’s approaches are complimentary insofar as the Indian state functions as a potent yet invisible ‘Big Other’ in The Djinns of Eidgah, whereas it is staged as an omnipresent and overpowering ‘Big Brother’ in Untitled 1. Both playwrights heavily draw on storytelling and myth in order to explore tactics for resisting state violence, surveillance and censorship. In the following, I will approach the plays through the tools of dramatic analysis as they are taught in the English Studies curriculum but also show where dramatic theory, as reflective of classical ideals and generic norms, falls short of adequately capturing the dramaturgy and dynamics of Indian English drama. 302 13 State Violence, Surveillance, and Censorship in Indian English Drama 13.2 India as Big Other: Abhishek Majumdar’s The Djinns of Eidgah (2012) The Djinns of Eidgah premiered in Mumbai as part of the Writer’s Bloc Festival in 2012 and opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2013. The play forms part of a trilogy that Majumdar has written in response to the Kashmir conflict. Abhishek Majumdar is a playwright, director, and co-founder of the Banga‐ lore-based theatre companies Indian Ensemble and Bhasha Centre. Majumdar writes in English, Hindi, and Bangla. His work has been distinguished with various awards, including the Metro Plus Playwriting Award for Harlesden High Street (2010), the Toto Fund’s Creative Writing Award for An Arrangement of Shoes (2010) and the International Theatermakers Award for his contribution to the theatre in 2021. Plays by this author: Harlesden High Street, first performed by Indian Ensemble, Bangalore, 2010 An Arrangement of Shoes, first performed by Theatre Counteract, Bangalore, 2011 Afterlife of Birds, first performed by Indian Ensemble, Bangalore, 2012 The Djinns of Eidgah, first performed at the Writer’s Bloc Festival, Mumbai, 2012 Pah La, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, 2019 Kashmir conflict: Kashmir has been a disputed territory since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, when the region became divided. Since then, the south‐ ern parts of Kashmir ( Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh) have been administered by India, and the northern and western parts (Azad Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan) have been administered by Pakistan. The clash between these two countries “has resulted in a cul de sac situation in the Valley, letting the real issue being hijacked by Islamist outfits” (Sengupta 2017: 11). Since 1989, the Kashmir Valley has been the site of an armed conflict between Indian security forces and militant Kashmiri separatists. Majumdar’s play captures the suspension of Kashmiri life between opposing forces, particularly between the Indian military and the protestors and militants contesting what they see as an unlawful occupation of their homeland. The play is set in Indian-administered Srinagar (the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir) and centres on the orphaned siblings Ashrafi and Bilal, whose father was killed by gunfire while travelling by bus to a wedding in Ashrafi’s company. In two out of the play’s fifteen scenes, the audience witnesses fourteen-year-old Ashrafi receiving trauma therapy treatment by a child psychiatrist, Dr Baig. Early on in the play, Bilal is seen training with his football team at Bakshi Stadium and expressing the hope that, should he get selected for the national team, he could get his sister “treated in a good hospital somewhere 13.2 India as Big Other: Abhishek Majumdar’s The Djinns of Eidgah (2012) 303 outside” (Majumdar 2013: 20). These hopes are shattered when Bilal is arrested and tortured after his discovery of the mutilated bodies of his football teammates in a mortuary, prompting him to adopt the protestors’ tactics of throwing stones at representatives of the Indian state. By showing the “pelting of stones at security forces”, Majumdar references a common form of protest in Kashmir and thus documents real events (Sengupta 2017: 15). However, the play cannot be classified as a realist drama, as it features several scenes set in an indeterminate, dream-like time and place and ghostly characters such as the eponymous Djinns. The play ends with an epilogue in which Baig reconciles with the Djinn of his son at the Eidgah of Srinagar, an Islamic prayer ground on the outskirts of the city. In terms of its form and dramatis personae, The Djinns of Eidgah illustrates Sengup‐ ta’s argument, considered above, that Indian theatre should neither be seen as merely ‘imitative’ of Western forms nor as ‘enthusiastically nativist’. The play draws on both classical Greek drama and traditional Urdu storytelling, resulting in a blended aesthetic that upends simplistic East-West binaries. Majumdar adapts a performative tradition called Dastaan goi, a traditional Urdu form of storytelling that emerged in the 13 th century and “was revived in India in the 1990s” (Kumar 2023: 123). The relevance of Dastaan goi to the dramatic universe created by Majumdar will be discussed in more detail towards the end of this section. First, we will look at the play’s compliance with ancient Greek theatrical traditions. Considering two out of the three classical Aristotelian principles, the unities of time and place, we can easily determine that the play dissolves these. It begins with a flashback scene set in Ashrafi and Bilal’s childhood home in Pakistan-administered Mirpur, in which their father is telling them a Dastaan, then accompanies the protagonists through two violence-filled days in the lead-up to peace talks between Kashmiris and Indians in Srinagar, and ends in an indefinite space and time that the stage directions describe as “Suspended Time. Between Life and Death” (Majumdar 2013: 97). In contrast, when it comes to the unity of action, most scenes — apart from the opening storytelling scene — seem to advance one plotline, revolving around the characters’ reactions to and protest against the impending peace talks, which are due to take place on Eid, an Islamic holiday, in spite of the killing of two young Kashmiri boys by Indian military forces. Even if the play has fifteen scenes, rather than five acts, the dramatic structure and dramatis personae of the play roughly correspond to the conventions of tragedy, with the role of the tragic hero being split between Bilal and Baig. The structural elements of Gustav Freytag’s pyramid framework (rising action, climax, falling action and catastrophe) are discernible in the first half, the middle, the second half, and the ending of the play, respectively. These structural aspects merit closer analysis. The rising action builds mounting pressure on Bilal to join the clandestine meetings of protestors who are organising a procession in defiance of a government-imposed curfew, which would jeopardise Bilal’s dreams of becoming a professional footballer. The climax of the play takes place in Scene 8, when Baig fights with his colleague Dr Wani over the Kashmir liberation movement, which spells out the two sides between 304 13 State Violence, Surveillance, and Censorship in Indian English Drama which all characters are subsequently forced to choose. While Wani has come to perceive the increasingly lethal clashes between Indian army forces and Kashmiri protestors as “so brutal that I don’t understand my role inside the safety of these [hospital] walls anymore” (Majumdar 2013: 48), prompting her to quit her job and join the protest movement, Baig rejects protestors and jihadis alike as self-declared “freedom fighter[s]”, whose tactics he sees as “no less violent than the Army” (ibid.: 53). His decision to stay aloof from the protests and follow through with his participation in the impending peace talks hardens. The climax exposes Baig’s tragic flaw, the conventional hamartia of Greek tragedy, namely his stubbornness and inability to tolerate ambiguity. In Greek tragedy, the hero typically has an inherent flaw or shortcoming that leads to their inevitable downfall. The term ‘hamartia’ goes back to Aristotle’s Poetics and is usually translated as an “error of judgment”. While in some tragedies ha‐ martia takes the form of a mistake with devastating consequences, the tragic flaw can also be a more static personality trait. Well known examples include Oedipus’s hubris, Othello’s jealousy, or Hamlet’s indecisiveness. As Wani tells him in Scene 8, “You know what your problem is Baig Sahib. You are a great doctor but a poor storyteller. You have one story about everything […]. I really wish we had another Dr Baig in the valley. Someone who could […] [s]how you more than one possibilities [sic] to your Dastaan” (ibid.: 54). Bilal’s tragic fall, in turn, is set in motion by his decision to join the pro-liberation side in Scene 11. Whereas Bilal is last seen on stage in a police cell in Scene 13 and his imminent death at the hands of the police force is only hinted at, Baig is shot on stage in the penultimate scene. The ending of the play can thus unequivocally be characterised as a catastrophe, which spells death for both heroes. At second sight, however, neither the plot nor the character development neatly matches the conventions of classical Greek drama. First of all, Bilal’s path towards catastrophe is not linear. For the most part of the play, he clings to the belief that he can avoid taking sides and, instead, escape from the conflict zone through his rise to football stardom. In Scene 11 he visits the government hospital’s mortuary not out of grief for his teammate Khaled, but in order to snatch the football shoes off the corpse for his upcoming participation in the trials, since his own shoes have become ragged. Only when Bilal discovers, gaspingly, that the feet have been severed from his teammates’ corpses does he start “throw[ing] stones,” as the stage directions reveal, “one after another at the window of the mortuary in rage” (ibid.: 70). His descent into catastrophe thus begins, structurally speaking, too late in the play, and Bilal’s sudden change of mind makes his fierce ripostes to Baig in his last scene somewhat difficult to comprehend. Insisting that Baig will not “trade” a Kashmiri militant in to negotiate his release, Bilal starts to echo Wani’s scathing criticism when he taunts Baig: “You are 13.2 India as Big Other: Abhishek Majumdar’s The Djinns of Eidgah (2012) 305 blind, Baig Saheb. Absolutely blind. You are treating our minds … I wish I could treat your soul” (ibid.: 83). The theme of blindness references one of the most iconic heroes in Greek tragedy — King Oedipus, who is metaphorically blind to the truth of having married his own mother, and who physically blinds himself after discovering this tragic mistake — and thus further positions Baig as the tragically flawed hero. Yet, in contrast to classical dramatic conventions, Baig is not driven towards death by his tragic flaw or by the consequences of his actions. Instead, he dies rather unexpectedly because, like Bilal, he embarks on a radically different course of action towards the end of the play. In the penultimate scene, set at the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) barracks adjacent to the Eidgah, Baig stumbles into a confrontation with a Hindu soldier: BAIG. You Indians want to meet on Eid [for the peace talks]. S2. (Snaps.) What do you mean Indian you asshole? What are you? […] You are not Indian? Then why am I protecting you? BAIG. I am not Indian. […] I am Kashmiri. But I am not Indian. (Majumdar 2013: 93-94) Having spent all previous scenes casting doubt on the cause for Kashmir’s freedom, Baig’s identification as “Kashmiri”, and as explicitly “not Indian”, marks a strong turning point. When the increasingly enraged soldier forces Baig, at knifepoint, to join him in a Hindu prayer, Baig refuses. It becomes clear that Baig has given up his hopes for a diplomatic solution to the conflict; forced to choose between allegiance to his ethnic and religious identity or pacifying the Indian soldier by praying with him, he refuses to betray his Kashmiri Muslim roots. In consequence, the soldier shoots him. Thus, at the end of the play, both protagonists die due to their newly found convictions, rather than suffering an inevitable downfall stemming from a tragic flaw or error. Reading the play against classical Greek dramatic traditions illuminates more than its partial compatibility with these conventions. It is instructive to pay attention to the precise ways in which Majumdar deviates from the Aristotelian model. First, the unity of time jars with the play’s interest in charting the effects of past traumatic events in the present and in reading a present-day conflict against the mythological settings and characters retold through the Dastaan goi tradition. Second, the unity of place cannot be upheld in a play that seeks to trace the pervasive consequences of conflict in Kashmir, from military barracks to hospital rooms, football stadiums, and into people’s homes. Third, and this is where The Djinns of Eidgah departs most productively from the classical Greek model, the significance that tragedy attributes to highly individualised heroes and their tragic flaws and decisions appears incompatible with the messy realities of the open-ended and violent conflict in Kashmir, where the lines between friend and enemy, terrorist and freedom fighter, ‘them’ and ‘us’, are perpetually shifting. The play avoids attaching undue weight to either Bilal’s or Baig’s actions. Their eventual opposition to Indian security forces does not have any larger 306 13 State Violence, Surveillance, and Censorship in Indian English Drama implications for the population of Srinagar, or for the future of Jammu and Kashmir. While the denouement of the play may settle their fates (Bilal’s death being implied), the ending of the play raises more questions than it answers: has Ashrafi, who appears in the penultimate scene as a quasi-Djinn, approaching the Hindu soldier at the Eidgah with a stone in her hand and repeatedly intoning the phrase “I will come back again … and again” (Majumdar 2013: 97), survived, or is she already haunting Indian forces as a ghost? What will become of the peace talks, now that Baig is dead? Can there be a solution to this convoluted conflict? How many more people will lose their lives before that happens? If audiences cannot glean easy answers from watching the play performed — “You could hardly expect Majumdar to propose a solution to the Kashmir conflict”, as one reviewer of the UK performance remarked (Billington 2013) — The Djinns of Eidgah nevertheless takes a stand. Even though Majumdar pits proand anti-separatist arguments against one another, as in the heated discussion between Baig and Wani, he clearly condemns both India’s and Pakistan’s interference with the Kashmiris’ right to self-determination. The Indian state, especially the impunity with which its military and police organisations operate, is criticised most scathingly in the play. This led one reviewer of the Mumbai production to find fault with Majumdar’s “‘othering’ of a certain kind of India”, particularly through the depiction of the “ignorant and racial Hindu soldier” (Phukan 2012) encountered above. The Indian government, or the “government of Jammu and Kashmir” (Majumdar 2013: 78) more specifically, looms large over the discourse of the play as an invisible yet powerful Other. All of the characters, apart from Ashrafi and Bilal, position themselves with regard to this Other. Khaled remarks on the curfew that “the Indians want you to remember that you are not supposed to disturb the […] ‘peace talks’ with the sons of bitches while their soldiers breathe down your neck” (ibid.: 15; original emphasis). Teammate Mushtaq insists that Bilal should ask Baig “to not go for the talks with the Indians” (ibid.: 20). In her discussion with Baig, Wani observes: “These Indians. […] I can’t tell what is more worrying […]. When they are openly hostile or when they are pretending to be friendly” (ibid.: 30). Baig is the only character who does not join the chorus of voices condemning the government. He tells Wani: “Sometimes, I start believing the Indians. Maybe, we won’t be able to handle this place, if it were given to us” (ibid.: 29). It is noteworthy that, even though Baig provocatively assumes a paternalistic perspective on Jammu and Kashmir here, he still speaks of “the Indians” as Kashmir’s Other; the ‘them’ versus ‘us’ binary remains intact. While the government of Jammu and Kashmir, and the Indian state more generally, functions as an invisible big Other in the play, the two soldiers stationed at the CRPF barracks, who are seen in three scenes, lend a human face to the executive branch of government. They are the only characters on stage who express a pro-Indian nationalist attitude that is openly hostile towards the indigenous population. When Soldier 1 criticises Soldier 2 for the action described in the stage directions as “praying to pictures of Hindu gods” (ibid.: 36) in a bunker located right next to the Eidgah, an 13.2 India as Big Other: Abhishek Majumdar’s The Djinns of Eidgah (2012) 307 important Islamic site, Soldier 2 insists: “this is our country” (ibid.: 37). Even though Soldier 1 retorts that “[t]his is not our country. We are sitting here” (ibid.), he goes on to paint a threatening picture of Kashmiri protestors as violent and irrational “hordes”: “Tomorrow not only will they get here, they will get here with stones in their hands and blood on their hands […], with all those slogans pumping their blood onto their foreheads” (ibid.: 38, 40). The play debunks these stereotyped views of the local population through its portrayal of a diverse set of Kashmiri characters, who are genuinely torn between Indian offers of peace talks, Islamist calls for jihad, and the separatist protest movement. By offering a complex and multi-layered view of the Kashmir conflict, the play bestows no legitimacy on the Indian state’s view of Kashmir as an “integral part” of its territory, and it casts serious doubt on the notion that India’s ostensibly secular nationalism — which, in the past decade, has given in to a rather blatant form of Hindu nationalism — can “accommodate people irrespective of caste and creed” (Sengupta 2017: 10). While the Mumbai reviewer’s criticism of Majumdar’s “‘othering’ of a certain kind of India” may thus be justified, the play expresses equal scepticism towards Pakistan’s role in the conflict. The Pakistan-administered parts of Kashmir are primarily mentioned as the site of jihadi training camps in the play (Majumdar 2013: 50, 82). The Pakistani government, by omission, seems to have no stake in the peace talks nor in any other diplomatic endeavours in Jammu and Kashmir. Despite including multiple conflicting voices on the Kashmir conflict, the play’s political impetus is not an impartial or relativist one, I would argue. As has been indicated, the nationalist narratives about Kashmir propagated by India (Kashmir as “the site of dissident, unpatriotic, terrorist-sympathizing Muslims” [Bharucha 2014: 66]) or by “Pakistan’s aggressive claim to Kashmir as part of its territory” (Sengupta 2017: 15) are equally invalidated. Against reductive views of Kashmir as a pawn in power struggles occurring between India and Pakistan, Majumdar mobilises an inherently theatrical tactic in order to point out the vital potential of storytelling as a meaningful, life-sustaining strategy. The opening scene, set in Bilal and Ashrafi’s childhood home, is of special importance in establishing the significance of storytelling in the play. The very first line spoken on stage by their father, Abbajaan, is: “Which one? ” (Majumdar 2013: 9), as he asks his children which story they would like to hear. From the outset, then, there is a sense of contingency and variability: the story, or stories, that one tells will determine one’s outlook on the conflict. Having consulted with both children, Abbajaan tells them a tale about Amir Hamza, “the general of the Army of the prophet” (ibid.: 10). In this Dastaan, Hamza is at war with “the army of the devil” (ibid.). His daughter Fatima tells him that she has met with two Djinns, who “have broken the illusion of war”, and that her eyes have transformed into two stars in the sky: “The moment your eyes meet my eyes, you will break the illusion too” (ibid.: 12). Abbajaan finishes his recital of the tale by telling his children: “if you look up at the sky … you will find Fatima’s eyes waiting for her Abba to break the illusion” (ibid.: 13). 308 13 State Violence, Surveillance, and Censorship in Indian English Drama The Dastaan told in the opening scene fulfils a number of functions. Within the diegetic frame of the play, imaginatively inhabiting the world of Dastaan goi serves as a means to escape the harsh realities of conflict. As Abbajaan puts it: “If the children are good, the Dastaan becomes the blanket” (ibid.: 9) — a line that Bilal repeats for Ashrafi in Scene 5 when he tells her a Dastaan in order to soothe her after a nervous attack (ibid.: 35). Second, the Dastaan offers an interpretive framework, both for the characters within the play and for the audience, in order to make sense of the blurring frontlines of an intractable conflict. In Scene 5 Ashrafi begins to blend the world of the Dastaan that Bilal has started to recite with the violence she has recently witnessed: “The king the prophet […]. Didn’t a boy die yesterday? […] Did he go to Allah […] or has he now become a Djinn? ” (ibid.: 34 f.). In Scene 11, set at the mortuary, Ashrafi again draws on Dastaan characters in order to make sense of an otherwise incomprehensible turn of events. When she notices that Bilal is about to take up the pelting of stones, Ashrafi imagines the appearance of a Djinn, who tells her: “It is time your highness. For Hamza to return. To return as your beloved Bhaijaan [brother]” (ibid.: 68). Hence, her brother’s joining up with the protestors becomes translatable for her into the familiar narrative pattern of Amir Hamza fighting the army of the devil, which helps to assuage her sense of confusion and helplessness. In addition to the sense-making strategy that storytelling provides within the diegetic frame of the play, the recurring mode of Dastaan goi serves as an interpretative tool for the audience. To recall Wani’s criticism of Baig, telling “one story about everything” is exposed as a fallacious strategy to make sense of the Kashmir conflict. The arguments of the proand the anti-separatist side can easily be rebutted by the opposing camp. The most helpful interpretation of the Kashmir conflict is not offered by any of the characters discussed so far, but by the ambiguous figure of the Djinn. Reversing the Shakespearean scenario of Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost of his father, Baig repeatedly encounters the Djinn of his son, who was killed after becoming involved with Islamist militants, at the Eidgah. During their first prolonged meeting, in Scene 10, Baig rejects the claim to martyrdom that is implied by burying militants at the Eidgah, stating that “[t]hese boys are fighting, out of anger. Anger at themselves” (Majumdar 2013: 60), but the Djinn corrects him: No Abbu [father]. No. […] They are fighting for their Djinns. […] It is not a war of right and wrong. For cars and jobs. Of books and blankets. It’s a war of the living and the dead. Between those who are fighting for tomorrow and those who are laying down their lives for eternity. These boys Abbu, will keep coming back, again and again. […] All of us are in-between. […] [I]n this madness, in this chaos, in this churning ocean of violence, not only have our lives got mixed … so have our deaths. Our stories, our gods and demons and angels … have all collided. […] Don’t expect reason from a world gone wrong Abbu … don’t wish the universe into an understandable falsehood …. this is real Abbu … and reality cannot be that simple. (ibid.: 60-63) 13.2 India as Big Other: Abhishek Majumdar’s The Djinns of Eidgah (2012) 309 The Djinn rejects dominant readings of the Kashmir conflict in terms of moral absolutes (“a war of right and wrong”) or economic necessities (“For cars and jobs”); neither does he see it as a mythological, story-world war (“Of books and blankets”). Instead, the key to understanding the “churning ocean of violence” that is Kashmir is paying attention to the “in-between”: the grey area between right and wrong, reality and myth, past and present, life and death. The Djinn’s speech can thus also be understood as a self-reflexive comment about the play as such: The Djinns of Eidgah cannot explain the conflict in Kashmir in terms of “an understandable falsehood” or point to any “simple” solution, to use the Djinn’s phrases, but what it can achieve is to indicate how “[o]ur stories, our gods and demons and angels … have all collided”. In other words, by a layering of past and present and by blending scenes of a realistic or documentary nature with more dream-like and surreal sequences, the play can shed light on the complex fabric of the conflict and on several of the threads that compose it, without suggesting that these could be easily disentangled. That the Djinn’s interpretation of the conflict is, ultimately, sanctioned by the play as a whole becomes apparent in the epilogue. After having been shot, Baig enters the Eidgah and becomes one of the in-between creatures that ‘live’ there. In an emotionally highly charged final monologue, he questions the guidance that the Quran can provide for the population of Kashmir: “On the day of judgment, if Allah asks me, am I right or wrong … I will ask him in-turn […] why didn’t you say anything about us in your book? We, the people of in-between … what do we choose, where do we go? ” (Majumdar 2013: 98). Baig’s closing speech once again emphasises the fallacy of telling one linear story about the situation in Kashmir, as the Quran does not seem to provide “the chapter for my world” (ibid.: 98). One can conclude from this that neither legalistic interpretations of Jammu and Kashmir, invoked through India’s reliance on the “Instrument of Accession” (Sengupta 2017: 10) which secures Indian rule in the region, nor religious fundamentalist misinterpretations of the Quran to legitimise jihad can lead to stability in the region. Against such reductive ‘readings’ of Kashmir, Dastaan goi as an inherently “combined Indo-Pak, Muslim-Hindu tradition” (Kumar 2023: 123) provides a mode of storytelling that is responsive to divergent perspectives and interests and encourages pluralistic interpretations. The Djinns of Eidgah productively blends the Dastaan goi tradition with elements drawn from classical tragedy to stage the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir in terms comprehensible for an international audience. The generic, semiotic, and linguistic hybridity of the theatre event echoes the demand, as expressed by political science scholar Navnita Chadha Behera, to see “Kashmir’s plurality [as] an asset and not a liability [which] must therefore be firmly embedded in the peace process” (2016: 56). 310 13 State Violence, Surveillance, and Censorship in Indian English Drama 13.3 The State as Big Brother: Annie Zaidi’s Untitled 1 (2018) Where Majumdar’s play depicts the physical and psychological effects of state violence, Annie Zaidi’s play Untitled 1 addresses a different aspect of state abuse of power: surveillance and censorship. Annie Zaidi is a multiple award-winning author of plays, novels, short stories, poetry, and nonfiction in English. In 2018, Zaidi won the Hindu Playwright Award for Untitled 1; in 2019, she won the Nine Dots Prize for the memoir Bread, Cement, Cactus; in 2020, her novel Prelude to a Riot was awarded the Tata Literature Live! Awards for fiction. Her latest novel City of Incident was published in 2022. Books by this author: Three Plays: Untitled 1 / Jam / Name, Place, Animal, Thing (2018). Odisha: Dhauli Books. Prelude to a Riot (2019). New Delhi: Aleph. Bread, Cement, Cactus: A Memoir of Belonging and Dislocation (2020). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. City of Incident (2022). New Delhi: Rupa Publishing. The Indian state, absent from yet significant to Majumdar’s dramatic world as ‘Big Other’, here recurs as a dystopian ‘Big Brother’ watching and controlling its citizens. Zaidi won the Hindu Playwright Award for the playscript of Untitled 1 in 2018, and the play premiered at Prithvi Festival in 2019, directed by Danish Hussain, who also performed the lead role. The play is divided into two acts with ten and seven scenes, respectively. As Meghna Majumdar (2018) writes in The Hindu Times, “[t]he play itself is barely dramatic”. Many scenes feature the reading of a text to the audience, rather than any on-stage enactment. This is the case because Untitled 1 is also the title of a text within the play. The protagonist, Vishwas, is a middle-aged writer who secretly produces this untitled manuscript and reads excerpts of it to the theatre audience, while being on a state-sponsored fellowship programme where the literary output he produces on a networked computer is being measured in real time. In the first scene of Act 2 Vishwas is put on trial for illegally producing “off-grid material” (Zaidi 2018: 38). The audience learns that Vishwas has run a text-production software called “Infinite Monkey” (ibid.) on his office computer to distract from his clandestine work on the handwritten manuscript of Untitled 1. His wife, Dina, appears in court to plead lunacy on Vishwas’s behalf and thus secure his release. In the final scene Vishwas’s caseworker, government representative Satyajit, tells Vishwas that Untitled 1 “is still in circulation” (ibid.: 54) as the government continues to track down and confiscate all copies. He advises Vishwas to join a writing therapy programme where he could continue to write — under the provision that he would “destroy what is created when [he] leave[s] the facility” (ibid.). 13.3 The State as Big Brother: Annie Zaidi’s Untitled 1 (2018) 311 In the following, I will approach the play by drawing on the concept of the state-of-the-nation drama. The second half of this section turns attention to the play’s self-reflexive interrogation of artistic freedom and censorship in present-day India. The term ‘state-of-the-nation play’ was coined in the context of British theatre studies to describe a particular kind of drama that emerged in the UK in the 1970s. As Dan Rebellato explains, “the state-of-the-nation play […] tended to focus on specific, fully realized individual characters […] against a greater sense of history in motion” (2013: 248). Plays thus described “hold together the public and the private”, thereby reflecting “the structure of the nation-state”, where the state regulates citizens’ lives through political organisation and institutions of justice, whereas the nation “binds people together through shared temperament, language, history, culture, landscape and so on” (ibid.). The state and the nation, the public and the private realm, constitute the two forces whose interplay conceptually organises the state-of-the-nation drama. In Zaidi’s dystopian play Untitled 1, the reciprocal relationship between state and nation, or government and population, has become unhinged. The various branches (“departments”) of Zaidi’s fictionalised Indian government regulate every aspect of citizens’ lives. Satyajit works for the department of “[p]ublic communication” (Zaidi 2018: 20), which advocates the philosophy “Move your tongue to move the world” (ibid.: 22). This department monitors people’s verbal and written interactions over telecommunications channels, the internet, and through bugged private homes, charting their engagement with others in terms of activity graphs. In Act 1, Scene 3, set in Vishwas’s office, Satyajit confronts Vishwas about the poor performance related to his “usage. Voice, across three apps. … Data use is slipping. Downward trend for two years. Only, a spike in voice calls made the old fashioned way. Once or twice a month. You only had two conversations with your own wife last week” (ibid.: 18). After Satyajit’s exit from the scene, Vishwas picks up the phone for an entirely dispirited conversation with his wife: “My graph is down. Can we talk for five minutes? … What’s for dinner? […] Do we have any biscuits at home? … Should I pick up some macaroons? … Okay, Dina. It’s okay now. See you later” (ibid.: 20 f.). As is also reflected in Dina’s banally mundane telephone conversations with a sister who never makes an on-stage appearance, the citizens in this surveillance state only talk to one another to keep the graphs up. The risk of being classified as an “invisible tongue” (ibid.: 22) — a pun on Adam Smith’s well-known political-economic concept of the invisible hand — is evident from Satyajit’s frequent intrusions into Vishwas and Dina’s home. Where Smith thought of the invisible hand as the government’s instrument to subtly regulate market dynamics, Zaidi invokes the “invisible tongue” as an ineligible option in a state where every citizen needs to open their private thoughts up to scrutiny. As reviewers of the premiere remarked (Syed 2019), the dystopian scenario of Untitled 1 has obvious intertextual links to George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four (first published in 1949). For instance, the department of communication (and especially Satyajit’s slogan “The truth wins” [Zaidi 2018: 22]) references Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, and notions such as the “invisible tongue” recall Orwell’s neologisms Newspeak 312 13 State Violence, Surveillance, and Censorship in Indian English Drama and Doublespeak. Yet I would argue that the overall tone and atmosphere evoked by the playscript deviate from the pervasive sense of menace in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ‘Big Brother’ state in Untitled 1 exercises its power by coaxing citizens into cooperation through a system of sanctions and rewards. Its structure and nomenclature — e.g. of “citizen outreach” being managed through “communications investigator[s]” (ibid.: 17) — are more reminiscent of the service industry than of Orwell’s Thought Police. Satyajit as the key representative of the surveillance state uses a language that remains deliberately friendly and collegial throughout the play. He repeatedly euphe‐ mises the state’s encroachments on citizens’ privacy by using disarming adjectives and modifying adverbs: for instance, he comradely warns Dina that the “department is a bit concerned about tongues that move only inside people’s heads”, and he announces a raid to her with the words: “This is just a casual sort of search. If we find something, then well, we’ve found something” (ibid.: 22, 33; emphases added). Instead of coming across as the menacing henchman of a totalitarian regime, Satyajit appears as the “[s]lick and suave” (Syed 2019) representative of a complex bureaucratic organisation. As noted above, the state-of-the-nation play typically traces the trajectory of highly individualised characters against the backdrop of official state politics and larger historical circumstances. This is clearly the case with protagonist Vishwas, who is trapped in the government’s fellowship programme, where his artistic freedom is being stifled. Recalling Rebellato’s comment that the nation “binds people together through shared temperament, language, history, culture” (2013: 248), one can easily see how the cultural bonds between Zaidi’s citizens have become severed. Due to the all-pervasive surveillance and control exerted by the government, there are no spaces left where citizens could experience the nation as a community. This is also reflected in the fact that Vishwas and Dina only appear on stage together twice in the seventeen scenes; most of their exchanges are mediated through Satyajit, who admonishes Vishwas for the lack of verbal interaction with his wife and, in turn, interrogates and informs Dina about her husband’s activities (Zaidi 2018: 18 f., 23). The only verbal interactions between citizens witnessed on stage are conversations devoid of meaningful content or emotional substance, whose primary intention is the production of quantifiable social engagement that will improve the state-monitored graphs. The effects of surveillance on the social fabric that Zaidi traces also recall more recent dystopian representations, such as Charlie Brooker’s television series Black Mirror (2011-). Black Mirror was first released in 2011 by Channel 4 and taken over by Netflix in 2016. Black Mirror is a British dystopian television series created by Charlie Brooker. Set in the near future, each episode features one particular technological invention, which seems convenient or captivating at first but, with few exceptions, comes to entrap or destroy the protagonists. 13.3 The State as Big Brother: Annie Zaidi’s Untitled 1 (2018) 313 The worry over social engagement graphs in Untitled 1 is especially reminiscent of one episode of Black Mirror, “Nosedive” (directed by Joe Wright), in which the primary aim of every citizen’s social interaction is to increase their personal ‘ratings’, i.e., a constantly fluctuating digital score of their popularity. The scenery and props used in the premiere of Untitled 1 aesthetically reinforced the sense of a thoroughly digitised environment. Reviewer Siraj Syed (2019) praised the performance of Untitled 1 for “creating a surveillance set-up, with technology at its core, […] with blue tablets and cameras everywhere, […] even the back-drop served as a multiple CCTV monitor”. When looking at production photographs and videos available through Prithvi Theatre’s promotional channels, it is evident how the use of blue, neon, and strobe lights, white sterile surfaces, and strict geometric frames amplified the cold technological setting of the show (Prithvi Theatre 2019). The intertextual links of the play to literary and televisual formats with a transna‐ tional appeal, as well as its exploration of a globalised digital and surveillance culture, might suggest that this is a state-of-the-globe play, rather than a comment on the present condition of India. This impression changes once attention is turned to the interspersed scenes where Vishwas sits reading to the audience. Whereas there is no national community that would bind together the citizens within the diegetic frame of the play, Vishwas’s soliloquies invite the theatre audience to form a temporary substitute community. Spectators are positioned as the listeners who are allowed to gain confidential insights into Vishwas’s secret manuscript. His Untitled 1 mainly retells and comments on ancient myths about a dynasty of Indian rulers from the time of the Mauryan Empire (around 322 to 185 BCE) and is thus not as politically explosive as one might assume from Vishwas’s need to write covertly. His work can perhaps best be described as a structuralist approach to India’s founding myths. In an excerpt read in Act 2, Scene 1, Vishwas explicitly refers to “foundational myths” as “[s]tories that tell us who we are” (Zaidi 2018: 40). He categorises Indian myths according to a number of motifs and plots, including “stories […] about orphaned and abandoned royal babies” (ibid.: 13), “stories of kings who have a hundred sons” (ibid.: 14), or “about Indian kings who go in disguise as women to rescue someone” (ibid.: 41). The thread that runs through these loosely assembled stories is a reflection on poison, which Vishwas alternately dissects as a literary metaphor, a chemical substance, an environmental toxin, and in terms of its spiritual dimension (ibid.: 25, 27, 32). It is left to the audience to draw connections between and make sense of the web of stories that Vishwas reads to them. By paying attention to the recurring theme of poison, for instance, one could conclude that Vishwas’s (and perhaps Zaidi’s) aim is to demonstrate the cross-cultural and transhistorical universality of the trope of betrayal. The play could thus be seen to encourage spectators to look towards ancient myths as precedents for the culture of suspicion that has morphed into a full-blown surveillance culture in the 21 st century. A more poststructuralist approach to the play would stress its refusal to be pinned down to a clear message or intention. After all, Vishwas’s manuscript is classified as “politically incendiary […] material” (Zaidi 2018: 35) partly 314 13 State Violence, Surveillance, and Censorship in Indian English Drama due to the impossibility to identify the form or genre of the work. As Satyajit tells the court in Act 2, Scene 1: “There is no narrative. No plot. One brief anecdote follows another. There is no clarity on whether it is fiction or history or historical fiction” (ibid.: 40). As becomes clear from Satyajit’s frequent interrogations about the genre in which Vishwas is writing while he is still on the fellowship programme, fictional genres provide seemingly reliable frames within wich writers ‘on the grid’ can move safely. As Satyajit puts it towards the end of the play, readers “keep reaching for fiction. Page turners. Fantasies. Escape” (ibid.: 45). The most incendiary material, in contrast, is one whose form is indeterminate, as is the case with the deliberately open and fragmented Untitled 1. Against Satyajit’s vision of readers who dull their senses by immersing themselves in escapist fantasies or captivating page-turners, Vishwas’s secret manuscript challenges readers (and the audience) by encouraging them to look for links and actively interpret the text. On a meta-theatrical level, Vishwas’s refusal to entice readers through plot hooks or twists is reflected in Zaidi’s deliberate choice of a rather undramatic format. This could be seen as a calculated refusal to shock, please, or entertain and, instead, an attempt to engage audiences on an intellectual level. Despite exploring a globalised digital and surveillance culture, Untitled 1 offers a specific critique of surveillance and censorship in 21 st century India. As Zaidi notes in the preface, the play ended up “reflecting [her] own fears as a writer, a citizen, and a woman. We are witnessing several battles around privacy, digital rights, free speech, and debates about the role of writers in shaping ideas about freedom” (2018: 8). Recent scholarship has warned about “India’s worrying slide towards a rights-restrictive ‘surveillance democracy’”: as Sangeeta Mahapatra (2021: 1) explains, “the government has introduced a panoply of digital-surveillance measures, normalising the shift from targeted surveillance to mass surveillance”. With her dramatic fiction, Zaidi seems to suggest that writers have an important role to play in civil society’s efforts to resist mass surveillance and censorship in India. The fact that Vishwas manages to break out of the restrictive ‘grid’ and find a readership willing to engage with his manuscript — as Satyajit admits in the final scene, “Untitled 1 is still in circulation” (Zaidi 2018: 54) — gestures to the capacity of writers to resist state power. Even in a dystopian scenario where the government monitors citizens’ social interactions and intrudes on their private thoughts, literature serves as a medium that can build an alternative audience or readership. This surprisingly hopeful message is reflected on a meta-theatrical level by the fact that Zaidi’s own playscript has successfully circumvented state censorship. In an interview with publisher Naveen Kishore, Zaidi has spoken of her sense of incredulity when she learnt that, “even in this day and age, you have to send your script to the censors before a performance. […] And nobody lobbies for the law to be changed. […] How is this [colonial-era] law still okay in a society like ours, in this time? ” (Dublab 2021). As a fictional model of the writer who circumvents censorship, Vishwas succeeds in outwitting state surveillance and bringing his ‘incendiary’ material into circulation. But this success can only be perceived on the play’s meta-level. Within the diegesis 13.3 The State as Big Brother: Annie Zaidi’s Untitled 1 (2018) 315 of the play, Vishwas rather seems to end up as another tragic hero, who has failed to realise his aims. Having told Satyajit in an earlier scene that “[w]e all want a grain of truth to survive” (Zaidi 2018: 47), he admits defeat to Dina in the penultimate scene: “Nobody will remember us. Or this. My little moment of … Nobody will tell this story as it was” (ibid.: 53). In the final scene, Satyajit’s apparent triumph over Vishwas is structurally reflected in the fact that Satyajit gets to speak a long closing monologue whereas Vishwas exits the stage as the muted and defeated writer, bereft of a political voice and channel of communication. However, on a meta-level, the positioning of the audience as a collective that listens to and interprets Untitled 1 guarantees the ongoing circulation of the fictional incendiary text. It is almost ironic that Zaidi won the prestigious Hindu Playwright Award for Untitled 1, thereby increasing the visibility and critical acclaim of a text that criticises not only state censorship but also the logic of the literary marketplace. Through Vishwas’s retreat from the writers’ grid, Zaidi critically comments on the commercialised metrics through which each literary work becomes a quantifiable and classifiable product (in terms of length, genre, etc.) and according to which a writer’s success is rendered measurable and comparable. This is, for instance, reflected in Satyajit’s overblown praise for Vishwas in Act 1, Scene 8: “You know, you are one of our fastest writers. Not just one of the best, the fastest. The sheer number of words you can put out […]. Nobody else was putting out a book a year. And all those columns in the zines! ” (Zaidi 2018: 28). As Zaidi signals with Vishwas’s off-grid writing, artistic freedom can be protected by embracing ambiguity and ambivalence and by seeking out an alternative, emancipated readership who are tasked with interpretation, rather than immersion. The deliberately ambiguous nature of the manuscript in Zaidi’s play brings us back to the first play considered in this chapter; Vishwas’s refusal to produce classifiable and marketable literary content recalls Majumdar’s rejection of one-sided narratives about the Kashmir conflict and the Djinn’s suggestion to tell multiple and ambivalent stories. 13.4 Conclusion The two playwrights analysed in this chapter both rely on the dramatic form to represent clashes between the individual and state power. Both Majumdar and Zaidi point to the potential of storytelling to build alternative communities that can provide a respite from state violence or surveillance. In both cases, the telling of stories that lie ‘in-between’ fact and fiction, myth and reality, history and the present, or stories that defy genre categories and state appropriation, proves to be a meaningful alternative to the grand narratives of nationalism or totalitarianism. As the analysis of two contemporary plays in this chapter has demonstrated, Indian drama in English is indeed vibrant, dynamic, and innovative. Plays like The Djinns of Eidgah and Untitled 1 offer compelling insights into the sociocultural reality of contemporary India and Kashmir. Even though Majumdar and Zaidi dramatise real issues by responding to the Kashmir 316 13 State Violence, Surveillance, and Censorship in Indian English Drama conflict and the censorship of writing in India, both playwrights do so by drawing on non-realist forms (such as dystopia) or characters (such as Djinns). Their main commonality is that both plays invoke the power of storytelling to resist the state’s abuse of power. Whereas Majumdar’s dramatisation of Dastaan goi illuminates the need to allow for multiple, conflicting storylines and pluralist voices in the Kashmir conflict, Zaidi’s staging of Vishwas’s reading from his secret manuscript highlights the power of the theatre event to forge alternative, if temporary, communities. In conclusion, both playwrights embrace theatre’s potential to open up “islands of resistance” (Valavane 2021: 85) in the present “prolonged wave of late capitalism”, which Sengupta has aptly characterised as “an odd mix of neoliberalism, crony capitalism, corporate-Hindutva alliance and censorship in India” (2022: 182). 13.5 Study Questions ● What are the advantages and disadvantages of writing in English for contemporary Indian playwrights? Which factors might contribute to a playwright’s choice of English? ● What are some of the topics and political issues that contemporary Indian playwrights address? In what ways might the dramatic form lend itself more than prose or poetry to the representation of these issues? ● How would you characterise the function of storytelling in the plays by Majumdar and Zaidi? Which effects does storytelling have on the characters and their interaction with one another and with the audience? ● To some extent the protagonists analysed in this chapter are all individuals caught in a conflict with the Indian state. How does each of them deal with this conflict, and which strategies to resist state power do the plays explore through these characters? ● Can you think of ways in which the staging of the two plays discussed in this chapter can substantially affect their reception? Think about casting decisions, acting style, scenography, the use of music and sounds, costumes and props, lighting etc. Which artistic or dramaturgical decisions would you make if you were involved in staging one of these plays? 13.6 Further Reading Bharucha, Rustom (2014). Terror and Performance. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/ 9781315794488. Lal, Ananda (ed.) (2019). Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press. Sengupta, Ashis (ed.) (2017). Islam in Performance: Contemporary Plays from South Asia. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama 13.5 Study Questions 317 Sengupta, Ashis (2022). Postdramatic Theatre and India: Theatre-Making Since the 1990s. London: Methuen Drama. Shivaprakash, H. S. (ed.) (2021). Ins and Outs of Indian Theatre. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Sinha, Arnab Kumar/ Bhattacharya, Sajalkumar/ Lahiri, Himaldri (eds.) (2019). Contemporary Indian English Poetry and Drama: Changing Canons and Responses. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 13.7 Works Cited Primary Sources Majumdar, Abhishek (2013). The Djinns of Eidgah. London: Oberon Books. Zaidi, Annie (2018). Three Plays: Untitled 1 / Jam / Name, Place, Animal, Thing. Kindle edition. Secondary Sources Behera, Navnita Chadha (2016). “The Kashmir Conflict: Multiple Fault Lines.” Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs 3 (1), 41-63. DOI: 10.1177/ 2347797015626045. Bharucha, Rustom (2014). Terror and Performance. London: Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/ 9781315794488. Billington, Michael (2013). “The Djinns of Eidgah — Review.” The Guardian, 22 Octo‐ ber 2013, https: / / www.theguardian.com/ stage/ 2013/ oct/ 22/ djinns-of-eidgah-review (last ac‐ cessed: 11.01.2023). Chandradasan (2021). “Contemporary Indian Drama: Exploring Stage Possibilities and Staging Possibilities.” In: Shivaprakash, H. S. (ed.). Ins and Outs of Indian Theatre. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 35-42. De Waal, Ariane (2020). “Living Suspiciously: Contingent Belonging in British South Asian Theater.” Humanities 9 (3), 1-12. DOI: 10.3390/ h9030085. Dublab (2021). “The Quarantine Tapes 179: Annie Zaidi.” https: / / www.dublab.com/ archive/ the -quarantine-tapes-179-annie-zaidi-03-31-21 (last accessed: 11.01.2023). Festivals from India (2023). “Theatre.” https: / / www.festivalsfromindia.com/ genres/ theatre/ (last accessed: 02.01.2023). Grover, Amitesh (2020). There Will Be Trouble: Curating Theatre in India. https: / / www.hakara.i n/ amitesh-grover-3 (last accessed: 02.01.2023). Kharbe, Ambreen (2019). “History of Indian English Drama: A Brief Overview.” Research Scholar 7 (4), 59-70. Kulkarni, S[hyam] A[vinash] (2019). “Recent Trends in Indian English Drama.” Research Journey 145, 45-48. Kumar, Sanjay (2023). Performing, Teaching and Writing Theatre: Exploring Play. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 318 13 State Violence, Surveillance, and Censorship in Indian English Drama Lal, Ananda (2022). “Indian Drama in English.” Indian Writing in English Online, 13 May 2022, ht tps: / / indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/ indian-drama-in-english-ananda-lal/ (last accessed 17.01.2023). Mahapatra, Sangeeta (2021). “Digital Surveillance and the Threat to Civil Liberties in India.” GIGA Focus Asia 3, 1-12. Majumdar, Meghna (2018). “‘Untitled — 1’: The Luxury of Privacy.” The Hindu, 06 August 2018, https: / / www.thehindu.com/ entertainment/ theatre/ untitled-1-the-luxury-of-privacy/ article24611939.ece (last accessed: 23.01.2023). Naveen, Mallam (2019). “The Indian Drama in English: Its Stage Worthiness.” IJCIRAS 2 (1), 20-22. Patel, Jagruti J. (2018). “Voices of Indian Women as Playwrights in Wider Perspective.” Bharatiya Manyaprad 6 (1), 112-122. Phukan, Vikram (2012). “The Djinns of Eidgah Play Review.” Mumbai Theatre Guide, https: / / w ww.mumbaitheatreguide.com/ dramas/ reviews/ 20-the-djinns-of-edigah-english-play-review .asp# (last accessed: 12.01.2023). Prakash, Brahma (2021). “Theatre Trap: A Critique of Mainstream Theatre Scholarship.” In: Shivaprakash, H. S. (ed.). Ins and Outs of Indian Theatre. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 11-30. Prakriti Foundation (2017a). “Short+Sweet Theatre Festival South India (2017) — Song of Love or A Boy, a Girl & a Song.” https: / / youtu.be/ 0S-gt53mzgo? si=TWdCY7ZeUiGgMdGV (last accessed: 28.08.2023). Prakriti Foundation (2017b). “Short+Sweet Theatre Festival South India (2017) — The History Boys.” https: / / youtu.be/ 6OO-9_CSWw0? si=nG6tz-GZOpBGG66y (last accessed: 28.08.2023). Prithvi Theatre (2019). “#PrithviFestival — UNTITLED 1. Show Details.” https: / / www.youtube. com/ watch? v=8GvLag54l64 (last accessed 23.01.2023). Rebellato, Dan (2013). “From the State of the Nation to Globalization: Shifting Political Agendas in Contemporary British Playwriting.” In: Holdsworth, Nadine/ Luckhurst, Mary (eds.). A Concise Companion to British and Irish Drama. Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 245-262. Sengupta, Ashis (2017). “Introduction: Performing Islam in South Asia.” In: Sengupta, Ashis (ed.). Islam in Performance: Contemporary Plays from South Asia. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1-42. — (2022). Postdramatic Theatre and India: Theatre-Making Since the 1990s. London: Methuen Drama. DOI: 10.5040/ 9781350154117. Singh, Anita (2019). “Re-drawing Boundaries of the Canon: Indian English Women Dramatists.” In: Sinha, Arnab Kumar/ Bhattacharya, Sajalkumar/ Lahiri, Himaldri (eds.). Contemporary Indian English Poetry and Drama: Changing Canons and Responses. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 147-166. Singh, Jaspal (2018). “Mahesh Dattani: Affirming English as the Language for Modern Indian Theatre.” International Journal of Innovative Knowledge Concepts 6 (5), 30-34. Sinha, Arnab Kumar/ Bhattacharya, Sajalkumar/ Lahiri, Himaldri (2019). “Introduction: Mapping the Contemporary Indian English Poetry and Drama: New Directions and Challenges.” In: Sinha, Arnab Kumar/ Bhattacharya, Sajalkumar/ Lahiri, Himaldri (eds.). Contemporary Indian 13.7 Works Cited 319 English Poetry and Drama: Changing Canons and Responses. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 1-16. Syed, Siraj (2019). “Prithvi Festival 2019: Untitled 1, Review — Poison, Its Forms, Uses and Doses.” https: / / www.filmfestivals.com/ blog/ siraj_syed/ prithvi_festival_2019_untitled_1_review_poi son_its_forms_uses_and_doses (last accessed 23.01.2023). Theatre Group Bombay (2014). “Sultan Padamsee Playwrighting Awards.” http: / / theatregroupo fbombay.com/ sultan.html (last accessed: 02.01.2023). Valavane, Koumarane (2021). “The Contemporary Stage.” In: Shivaprakash, H. S. (ed.). Ins and Outs of Indian Theatre. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 82-92. 320 13 State Violence, Surveillance, and Censorship in Indian English Drama About the Editors Indrani Karmakar is Assistant Professor at the Chair of English Literatures, Chemnitz University of Technology, where she previously held her Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship. Her research interests lie at the intersection of postcolonial literature and gender studies. She is the author of Maternal Fictions: Writing the Mother in Indian Women’s Fiction (2022) and co-author of Storying Relationships: Young British Muslims Speak and Write about Sex and Love-(2021). Her works have appeared in such journals as-Wasafiri, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Moving Worlds. Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz (2 January 1975 - 17 February 2023) was Professor of British Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig. An expert in British literary and cultural studies, he had a wide range of research interests and published extensively on areas as diverse as adaptation studies, Black British culture, comedy, India, 18 th century culture, music videos, postcolonial studies, (London) urban cultures, utopias, and dystopias. In recent times, he has focused on the DFG-funded research project called "Adaptationen von Robinson Crusoe in der Anglophonen Literatur and Populärkultur im 21. Jahrhundert". Some of his monographs include Solitary on a Continent: Raument‐ würfe in der spätviktorianischen Science Fiction ( 2005), "Matters of Blood": Defoe and the Cultures of Violence (2010). His recent works on British literary and cultural studies include, among others, his co-edited volume London Post-2010 in British Literature and Culture (2017). Amidst his diverse array of research interests, he consistently published on Indian and South Asian Anglophone literature, including book chapters and articles on diasporic writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Meera Syal and Hanif Kureishi as well as his co-edited book Teaching India. Reihe Anglistik & Englischunterricht. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2008. Cecile Sandten is Professor of English Literatures at Chemnitz University of Technol‐ ogy. Her research interests are in Postcolonial Theory and Literatures, Indian English Literature, Black and Asian British Writing, Shakespeare in comparative perspectives, Urban Literary Studies, and Narratives of Flight and Asylum. Her publications include the monographs Re-Reading Shakespeare in Postcolonial Literatures (2015) and Broken Mirrors: Interkulturalität am Beispiel der indischen Lyrikerin Sujata Bhatt (1998). She is an expert on the Indian English poet Sujata Bhatt. Among others, she has co-edited volumes on Industrialization, Industrial Heritage, De-Industrialization: Literary and Visual Representations of Pittsburgh and Chemnitz (2012), Stadt der Moderne (2013) (with a chapter on Indian English graphic novels), Detective Fiction and Popular Visual Culture (2013) (with a chapter on Indian Sherlock Holmes re-writes), Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis (2016), Crisis, Risks and New Regionalisms in Europe: Emergency Diasporas and Borderlands (2017), Narrating Flight and Asylum (2022) or a Special Issue on “Voices of Their Own: South Asian Women’s Writing”, ZAA (Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (2018). Apart from her on-going interest in Indian English literature, she is currently working on two research projects, “Postcolonialism in the Metropolis” and “Narrating Flight and Asylum.” 322 About the Editors About the Contributors Dr. Asis De is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English (UG and PG) and Director of Research (Humanities and Social Sciences) at Mahishadal Raj College, India. He also acts as the Secretary of Faculty Council of Postgraduate Studies at Mahatma Gandhi University, West Bengal, India. His main field is identity research in diasporic cultural spaces with references to Anglophone Indian and World literatures. In publications and conference presentations in many countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and in the United States, he has worked on migration studies, cultural identity, transnationalism, ecological humanities, disability studies and tribal studies. He has completed three research projects funded by the Ministry of Education (Govt. of India). His latest publication is a co-edited volume entitled Amitav Ghosh’s Culture Chromosome: Anthropology, Epistemology, Ethics, Space (2022) published by Brill [Cross/ Cultures 216]. Dr. Ellen Dengel-Janic received her Ph.D. from the University of Tübingen. She taught English Literature at the University of Stuttgart and is now a lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Tübingen. Her major interests are in the field of Postcolonial and Gender Studies, Indian Literature in English and British Film and Cultural Studies. In her dissertation with the title “‘Home Fiction: ’ Narrating Gendered Space in Anita Desai’s and Shashi Deshpande’s Novels” she discusses the concept of gendered space and nationalism in Indian women’s writing in English. Ariane de Waal is a Senior Lecturer in British Cultural Studies at Leipzig University. She holds a PhD from Ruhr University Bochum. In 2017 her monograph, Theatre on Terror: Subject Positions in British Drama, was published by De Gruyter. Ariane de Waal has published articles and book chapters on British South Asian theatre, on the performative articulation of whiteness and neoliberal citizenship, and on the intersections of queer studies and ecocriticism with contemporary British drama. She has also co-edited a volume on Birth and Death in British Culture: Liminality, Power, and Performance (Cambridge Scholars, 2012), a special issue on “Bodies on Stage” (Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2013), and a special issue on “Terror on Tour: Borders, Detours, and Contingencies” (Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 2020). Monika Fludernik is Professor of English Literature at the University of Frei‐ burg/ Germany. Her major research interests include narratology, linguistic approaches to literature, especially metaphor studies, ‘Law and Literature’, postcolonial studies and 18 th century aesthetics. She is the author of, among others, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (1993), the award-winning Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996), An Introduction to Narratology (2009) and Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction and Fantasy (2019). She has (co-)edited several collections of essays, for instance Hybridity and Postcolonialism (1998), In the Grip of the Law (2004), Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory (2011), Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature (2014), Narrative Factuality: A Handbook (2019) and Being Untruthful: Lying, Fiction, and the Non-Factual (2021). Articles have appeared in, among others, Text, Semiotica, The Journal of Historical Pragmatics, English Literary History, New Literary History, Textual Practice, ariel, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Diacritics, Poetics Today, Narrative, Style, The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature and The James Joyce Quarterly. Anna Margaretha Horatschek is Professor at Kiel University, Germany, and held the Chair for English Literature from 2000-2018. She has been member of the German Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg since 2011, and was the Academy’s Vice President from 2016 - 2021. She studied English Literature, Philosophy, and German Literature in Germany and USA, received her B.A. from UC Berkeley, USA, her PhD with a dissertation on Richard Brautigan from Freiburg, Germany, and qualified as professor with a habilitation treatise on identityand alterity-constructs (nation, gender, ‘race’) in novels by Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence. In 1998, she spent one year as Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland, USA. Her research focuses on knowledge production, consciousness studies, identity/ alterity constructs, self-concepts in historical perspective, intermediality in English and American Litera‐ ture, Indian Literatures in English (gender, ecocriticism), concepts of justice in global comparison. last publication (ed.) is: Competing Knowledges - Wissen im Widerstreit, DeGruyter (2020). Dr. Maitrayee Misra is an Assistant Professor (Guest Faculty) of English, at the Department of English Language and Literature, Central University of Odisha, India. She has been awarded the Junior Research Fellowship in 2015 by the University Grants Commission. Her research interests revolve around Postcolonial Anglophone Literature and Cultural Studies. In her publications and conference presentations in Asia (India, Nepal, and Bhutan), Europe (Germany, Spain, Austria, and the UK), the United States, and Egypt, she has mainly concentrated on topics such as diasporic dislocation, cultural memory, cultural space, and transculturality. She is one of the contributors of the volume A Companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ( James Currey: 2017). Miriam Nandi is Professor of British literature in a global frame at the University of Leipzig. She holds a PhD degree and a habilitation from the University of Freiburg and is an alumna of the School of Criticism and Theory (Cornell University). Her research interests include Indian English literature, postcolonial theory, disability studies and early modern life writing. She is the author of M/ Other India/ s (Winter, 2007), Gayatri Spivak (Bautz, 2009), and Reading the Early Modern Diary (Palgrave, 2021). Dr. Hannah Pardey is a post-doctoral researcher at Heinrich Heine University Düs‐ seldorf. She obtained her doctoral degree at the University of Hanover where she taught before transitioning to the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf in October 2023. She 324 About the Contributors teaches in the Department of Anglophone Literatures/ Literary Translation and coor‐ dinates the programme of the Centre for Translation Studies. She has published articles and chapters on the intersections of postcolonial cultural studies, middlebrow studies, digital reception studies and the history of emotions. Her monograph Middlebrow 2.0 and the Digital Affect concerns the material conditions of producing, distributing and consuming the new Nigerian novel online. Her current project, “Wuthering Waters: Maritime Working-Class Movements across the Atlantic, 1800-1900”, investigates fictional and non-fictional texts to reconstruct the everyday practices of resistance of the nineteenth-century transatlantic working classes. David Walther studied English and German at the University of Greifswald and the University of Manitoba. He is currently working on his dissertation concerning the grotesque in Salman Rushdie’s works. He recently contributed multiple entries to DIGITENS, an encyclopedia of British sociability, and held talks on solarpunk as an emerging genre and Indian English literature. About the Contributors 325 ISBN 978-3-8233-8591-2 Contemporary Indian English Literature focuses on the recent history of Indian literature in English since the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981), a watershed moment for Indian writing in English in the global literary landscape. The chapters in this volume consider a wide range of poets, novelists, short fiction writers and dramatists who have notably contributed to the proliferation of Indian literature in English from the late 20th century to the present. The volume provides an introduction to current developments in Indian English literature and explains general ideas, as well as the specific features and styles of selected writers from this wide spectrum. It addresses students working in this field at university level, and includes thorough reading lists and study questions to encourage students to read, reflect on and write about Indian English literature critically. Sandten / Karmakar / von Knebel Doeberitz (eds.) Contemporary Indian English Literature Contemporary Indian English Literature Contexts - Authors - Genres - Model Analyses Cecile Sandten / Indrani Karmakar / Oliver von Knebel Doeberitz (eds.)