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Chapter 8: Indian Literature Abroad
- University of California Press
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153 chapter 8 Indian Literature Abroad In chapter 5, “At the Sahitya Akademi,” the idea of literary nationality meant bringing in but also equating numerous region-based languages into a central framework. In that schema the English language was a mediator between other Indian languages, making it integral to forging a contemporary literary field as well as helping to define literary modernity itself. As we move beyond Delhi to the centers of Indian English literary production “abroad” one might ask, What happens to the pursuit of literary nationality outside of India? In this chapter, an alternate aspect of this concept emerges as authors and critics define “India” with a view to the “outside.” This act of defining resonates both within the nation and beyond its borders, and requires us to ask: What are the literary borders in an age when publishing is multinational, increasingly digital, and writers often move between two or more nations and sometimes languages? The publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in 1981 is seen as a literary watershed, an almost universally accepted “start date” for the transnational “boom” in Indian English writing and, more generally, for the opening of Anglo-American literary markets and audiences to postcolonial immigrant writing. After Rushdie, Indian novels in English are often understood as having emerged from a global or diasporic culture rather than a national one. This characterization is most often framed as a narrative of success for Indian novels 154 | Indian Literature Abroad in general and, as Amit Chaudhuri writes, has a particular resonance with the professional-class, immigrant success narrative: “And so the Indian writer in English must be co-opted into this narrative of success and record growth; anything else, during this watershed, is looked upon with anxiety. The writer mustn’t cause anxiety; in our family romance , he’s the son-in-law—someone we can be proud of, can depend on, who is, above all, a safe investment.”1 At the same time, the themes of these post-Rushdie novels are often perceived as being nationalistic, or at least about national concerns, paradigms, or narratives. The language of these novels, English, is the language of global mass communication, and as a result, these novels have become a form of transnational mass communication. All the while, there is an assumption that English is politically neutral, but might English, at times, also be actively neutralizing? Might it stamp out the very politics that it wishes to forge, the things, we are told, that can only be said in English? Here, through an analysis of how Indian literature was staged in England in the 1980s versus New York in the late 1990s, I consider how Indian English fiction has gone from being grounded in the politics of particular places to being framed as a deterritorialized literary flourishing, thereby denuding its political relevance in an era of transnational literary production. This chapter explores several facets of the discourse on the globalization of Indian literature and some of the spoken and unspoken questions that underlie the politics and aesthetics of books that are published across borders and read by transnational audiences. As books and authors “travel,” the question of place does not become less important; rather, a new set of ethics emerges regarding the idea of place itself. staging literature Chapter 1 of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children first appeared in 1980 as an excerpt in the British literary magazine Granta. The theme for the issue was “The End of the English Novel,” a bold pronouncement for a new publication edited by an American from a garage in Cambridge, England. In his editorial preface, Bill Buford characterized the emergence of novelists like Rushdie as nonwhite former colonial subjects, many of whom were now British citizens, who were “writing back” in a style and language and with an imaginary scope that seemed to be surpassing English (read: white) writing. Buford went on [174.129.93.231] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:09 GMT) Indian Literature Abroad | 155 to describe the English novel as having become parochial, of looking inward and to past glories; of being timid, not inventive enough, and not exhibiting or containing something new. As for the new British writers, who were not necessarily white, Buford wrote: The fiction of today is . . . testimony to an invasion of outsiders, using a language much larger than the culture. . . . Today, however, the imagination resides along the peripheries; it is spoken through a minority discourse, with the dominant tongue...