Abstract

This chapter considers the way in which postcolonial Anglophone fiction has addressed the politics of caste. Largely fixated on the communal problem that it reads as the outgrowth of partition, postcolonial fiction has effectively abandoned the caste question in an attempt to create a national consensus. Beginning with V.S Naipaul, one of the few Anglophone writers who address caste, the chapter examines how such a paradigm has been set. Through an analysis of Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things (1997) and a series of novels that figure the servant (Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us (2006), Aravind Adiga's White Tiger (2008)) it is argued that caste has been eclipsed in this body of work by communalism, and "class" politics, the central categories of analysis, a reflection of a desire to map India within a global and globalized, and therefore more readable and transparent, framework of the Hindu and the Muslim, and the rich and the poor. Modernist and postmodern aesthetic practices, in these texts, confirm the ideological fictions underlying more realist writing rather than necessarily challenging them. The chapter juxtaposes this framework with the "castelessness" posited in the work of rising Dalit writer Ajay Navariya. In his fiction "castelessness" appears not as veil, or as "always something else" but in order to underline the structural role of caste for all figures of modernity, as well as to challenge the assumption that caste is a problem reserved exclusively for the Dalit.

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