India: a watershed decade
This collection of fourteen critical essays is an eclectic mix of scholarship which addresses, in the editors’ words, “the new corpus of writing” (9) in Indian English fiction (IEF). This ‘new corpus’ refers to contemporary IEF, that which emerged in the first decade of this millennium and can be distinguished from seminal novels such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) and the work of well-known authors like Vikram Seth, Anita Desai or Shashi Tharoor. The editors suggest in their introduction that contemporary IEF has freed itself from the shackles of traditional theoretical categorization including ‘postcolonialism’ or ‘postmodernism’, yet they acknowledge that it is evidently concerned with the issue of transculturalism and mobility as international borders, both real and imagined, become increasingly porous.
The ‘study of a decade’ approach of this edited collection is an attractive one and will be of interest to those readers looking for a broad impression of IEF in the years 2000-2010. This book joins two other notable publications which employ the same approach and coincidentally were published in the same year (2013); E. Dawson Varughese’s Reading New India: Post-Millenial Indian Fiction and The Indian English Novel of the New Millennium edited by Prabhat K. Singh. There is considerable overlap across these three publications with Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, the motivational writing of Chetan Bhagat, and graphic novels all emerging as common subject matter. Nonetheless, such exciting scholarship on new and emerging literary genres along with critical discussions of how IEF has changed in the last decade are most welcome in the ever-expanding field of critical writing on fiction from or about India in the English language.
Charting new territory
The introductory chapter from the editors of this book provides a review of criticism on IEF from 2000-2010, focusing on three categories of publications: broad overviews of literature, books on single authors or texts, and those on specific themes. After detailing a comprehensive list of the current critical field, the editors suggest that their publication adds to the extensive canon by revealing how critical material on IEF in the decade of 2000-2010, “a watershed in India’s history”, might write India anew (13).
This aim seems to be borne out of a desire to argue for the current, or lasting, importance of IEF with the goal of exposing the present trends and preoccupations in fiction writing from India as it evolves alongside the country itself. The reader gathers this intention because, on the first page, the Introduction asserts that IEF has been “dismissed as derivative or dispossessed” (9); it does not however provide a reference for such criticism, thus leaving it unclear to which scholars or publications this edited collection is responding. Despite this, those interested in Anglophone fiction will have no doubt that IEF continues to break new ground and that it offers inventive and varied creative readings of modern India.
Writing India Anew is also framed as charting new territory in IEF since, in the decade under review, fiction writers are suggested to have now moved on from the long-held obsession with imperialism and nationalism. Indeed, empire and its effects are mentioned frequently throughout the Introduction as being irrelevant to contemporary IEF. This is an interesting observation that begs the question – what is the role of Empire in India or in Indian writing in English in the present period? IEF may have moved beyond a committed focus on the Raj, but clear connections to this historical period are apparent in many of the essays in this collection. For instance, among the themes discussed in the various chapters are India’s relationship with Britain and America, the ever-shifting forms of Indian nationalism, crises in national identity, language politics, class and gender inequalities, and India in a global context. Significantly, Bill Ashcroft, in his opening essay ‘Re-writing India’, explores the idea of the nation in post-Independence India, engaging largely with matters of (anti-)nationalism and (post-)colonialism in novels including Midnight’s Children. From the outset of this volume, then, it would seem that the legacy of imperialism continues to feature in critical material from this recent decade.
Identifying trends in the new canon
The edited collection is divided into four sections: Re-Imagining the Nation; Revisiting the Past; Reviewing the Present; Reinscribing Home. These sections are not all created equally since they contain four, two, six, and two essays respectively. ‘Reviewing the Present’ is the longest section with six essays, and perhaps is the most true to the book’s overarching purpose of exposing the latest trends in IEF, since it includes scholarship on science fiction, graphic novels and the effects of globalisation. Himansu S. Mohapatra’s critique of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is effective in debunking some of the claims of the novel and its supporters, while Nandana Dutta’s essay is thought-provoking on the topic of the everyday in women’s writing and the significance of small stories in the “post-postcolonial” novel (149). The four remaining chapters of the section are notable in their innovative approach to IEF. Subir Dhar’s focus is on the inspirational writing – ‘inspi-lit’ – of bestseller Chetan Bhagat; Sreemati Mukherjee’s subject is cyber-literature and the novel Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta; Abhijit Gupta’s piece offers an overview of the current state of Indian science fiction; and Rimi B. Chatterjee gives a comprehensive survey of comics and graphic novels and speaks to the potential for this genre in India. All of these essays are refreshing in their engagement with, what many readers will identify as, distinctly contemporary concerns and undoubtedly distinguishes them from the IEF of the 1980s for instance.
While the remaining sections of the book are less obviously connected to what the novelty of the decade 2000-2010 might be, Bill Ashcroft’s opening essay is commendable. His reasoned piece on contemporary Indian English novels is most effective in its argument that, following the (seldom-observed) anti-nationalist utopianism of Tagore and Gandhi, prominent novels and novelists reveal a deep skepticism about the idea of the nation state in independent India. Taking Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as a starting point, Ashcroft discusses some “inheritors of Rushdie’s prize-winning revolution” (29), that is, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Hari Kunzru’s Transmission. He contends that three themes emerge in how these novels express their resistance to nationalism: class and socio-economic inequality, inherited colonial borders and boundaries, and mobility in the global era. The author concludes that the historical skepticism of nationalism evident in the writings of Tagore and Gandhi abounds in contemporary literature, while it simultaneously maintains an eye on the past and the future, the home and the world.
Another compelling chapter which delves into theories about the nation-state in India, national allegory and literature is Krishna Sen’s discussion of Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown and M.G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song. Her argument is that the concept of ‘desh’ – “the land or place of one’s birth or familial origin, and therefore of one’s ancestral heritage and spiritual and cultural belonging” (76) – is more relevant when reading IEF, such as the novels above, than Western models of the homogenous nation. The two essays in the section called ‘Revisiting the Past’ are also stimulating in their engagement with the historical. Paul Sharrad explains how some contemporary writers have tried (with little success) to rework classics like the Mahabharata for audiences today, while Rituparna Roy considers Mughal India and art in her reading of Kunal Basu’s novel The Miniaturist. In the latter essay, Roy interestingly contends that a turn towards historical fiction is a “new trend of the decade 2000-2010” (112), as writers move past their preoccupation with the colonial in favour of the pre-colonial period. Unfortunately, there is little development of this claim which leaves the reader wishing for more, particularly because the edited collection as a whole often mentions potential trends in the recent canon of IEF without drawing any unified conclusions.
In the absence of editorial interludes at the beginning of each new section to create an argument for the book as a whole and to link the ideas within the diverse essays, it becomes somewhat unclear what the critical or theoretical trajectory of the collection is. It would have been useful to have some guidance on how these fourteen disparate essays address the editors’ initial questions: what makes this decade special? What is new about their approach? Alternatively, a concluding chapter would have been most valuable in answering the above questions and in offering the reader a cohesive analysis of these contemporary essays on Indian English fiction in light of India’s altered landscape in the first decade of the new millennium. As individual chapters, however, many of these essays will be of interest to general readers, as well as to students and scholars of the individual authors and texts. The list of references at the end of the book is also a useful resource on contemporary writing from India and literary theory.
Dr. Louise Harrington, Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta (louise.harrington@ualberta.ca)