Postcolonial Servitude: Interiority and System in Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

This article focuses on Pakistani-American writer Daniyal Mueenuddin’s notable first collection of interlinked short stories In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009) as an example of an emergent wave of contemporary transnational fiction that foregrounds the figure of the domestic servant as central rather than marginal and emphasizes diverse servants’ vulnerability and agency. The essay situates Mueenuddin’s fiction in the contexts of Anglophone South Asian literary history and Pakistan’s postcolonial feudal system and argues that he makes a significant intervention by crafting strategies of subaltern representation that explore servant interiority and highlight the interlocking systems of power that dehumanize stigmatized subaltern individuals locked in domestic servitude. It examines the intersections of gender, sexuality, and class evoked in Mueenuddin’s stories; the psychic complexities of individuals who struggle against habitual abjection, subordination, and disempowerment; and the ways that servants, working in the intimacy of employers’ homes, strive to ameliorate their lot within frameworks of patriarchy, corruption, and violence. Mueenuddin’s cultural work aims to shift readers’ ways of seeing, defamiliarize the familiar, and encourage empathy and ethical action in specific postcolonial contexts.