By aggressively promoting Indian-English writers like Amit Chaudhuri, Pankaj Mishra and Manil Suri, the conglomerate publishing industry is engaging in the commodification of an exoticised Orientalism. The stereotype of Indians promoted by such works is of paralysed, fatalist characters, at sea in a world of hypermodernity. These novels reinforce westerners’ impression of an Indian subcontinent untouched by globalisation, feminism, capitalism and individualism. They serve as armchair tourism, resorting to fetishised symbols of Indian culture that the westerner feels at home in. The antidote to this ‘boutique multiculturalism’ is awareness of the fabric and texture of Indian life today, a living diversity played out in contesting realms of national and individual identity, often at sharp odds with the comforting notion of an unchanging India palatable to the bourgeois western reader.
For the novels’ reception, see, for example, reviews such as those by James Gerein in World Literature Today (Spring 2001), p. 316; Merle Rubin in the Los Angeles Times (8 January 2001); Richard Eder in the New York Times (22 October 2000); Sumana Raychaudhuri, ‘Beyond Mount Rushdie’, Nation (22 January 2001); Amitava Kumar in the Nation (24 April 2000); and Michael Gorra in the New York Times (28 January 2001).
2.
To understand the brand of multiculturalism being ‘imported’ through these writers, consider Huggan’s pointed query in The Postcolonial Exotic: marketing the margins (New York, Routledge, 2001): ‘Is multiculturalism a genuine attempt to move toward greater interethnic tolerance - toward a more equitable society in which different groups are awarded equal recognition - or is it a smokescreen that hides the continuing privilege of the dominant culture, and that defuses the ethnic tensions that threaten to divide the nation?’, p. xiii.
3.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, Pantheon, 1978), pp. 206-7. Said goes on to say that ‘the Oriental was linked thus to elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common an identity best described as lamentably alien’.
4.
According to Sumana Raychaudhuri, op. cit., ‘[Amit] Chaudhuri... tries to produce a miniaturist portrait of Calcutta by adding brush stroke upon brush stroke of minutely observed detail’, has ‘a nuanced ear for language’ and ‘offers one of the more lyrical descriptions of Bengali life that exists in English fiction’. This is a gross misreading of the aesthetics of the novel. Chaudhuri’s brush strokes, if we may call them that, do not add up to a painting.
5.
In the same review, Mishra writes disparagingly of how ‘freaks and freakish events now primarily define, for readers in the west, the fictional landscape of India; the intrinsic strangeness of the country, while providing fodder for colourful tales of magic in the realist manner, has become even more formidably opaque... Instead, writers attempt meta-narratives with large socio-political themes: whither secularism? democracy? Bombay? India? They seek to “represent” India to readers in the west, and more often than not lapse into overwriting and intellectual preening’ (New Statesman (11 September 1998), p. 46).
6.
Suri received a $350,000 advance from Norton after a bidding war involving eleven publishing houses (Chicago Tribune (13 March 2001)).
7.
The phrase is Merle Rubin’s, op. cit. ‘In an age in which many writers are doing the literary equivalent of handstands to catch our attention, Chaudhuri proceeeds with quiet, unobtrusive confidence....’
8.
This is from Sumana Raychaudhuri, op. cit., who engages nostalgically with the exoticism of the novel: ‘Jayojit’s brief interaction with a bhelpuri seller brings back to this reviewer many memories of the tangy snack, flavored with spiced tamarind water, sold by a particular vendor near Sunny Park in the city. A New World speaks to the expatriate reader of little, intimate, everyday things in Calcutta, reminiscent of the way that Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines, a novel set partly in that city, did a few years ago.
9.
It is Richard Eder, op. cit., who finds poetry in vacuity: ‘Mirroring Jayojit’s somnolence, the story fades away at times; mirroring its sweetness, the writing is lovely; mirroring the shards of painful memory that pierce the lethargy - nails through a fakir’s mattress - the languor of the summer narrative is interrupted by snippets of the year-round realities Jayojit has temporarily shed.’
10.
James Gerein, op. cit., points to the admiral, Jayojit’s father, ruling the household with ‘inconsequential tyranny’ as an example of ‘lush’ prose. Upon reflection, in a book so devoid of passion, this does qualify as exuberance for Chaudhuri’s style of writing.
11.
The phrase is Amitava Kumar’s, who writes that ‘Mishra’s writing is appealing because even in a small-town milieu you find the details of a complex dialogue with the West’ (Nation (24 April 2000)). He excuses the lack of romance in the book by speculating that Samar’s reading of western literature ‘is the book’s real romance’ and that Mishra, ‘mature about the drama of the self, remains almost quiescent about the new capitalism’. Almost?
12.
Chicago Tribune (13 March 2001).
13.
Gorra, op. cit.
14.
Shankar Raman, for instance, asks in Framing ‘India’: the colonial imaginary in early modern culture: ‘But what was this presence named “India” and towards whom was it directed? I suggest that by staging the East, the English theater imaginatively responded to tensions and contradictions internal to England and its colonial enterprise. What masqueraded as “India” was England itself.’ (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 17. See also M. Keith Booker’s observation in Colonial Power, Colonial Texts: India in the modern British novel that Nostromo and The Raj Quartet ‘can be read ultimately as statements about the social and political situation in Britain’ (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 133.
15.
Dorothy Figueira , The Exotic: a decadent quest ( Albany, SUNY Press , 1994), p. 2.
16.
Booker, op. cit.
17.
Quoted in ibid., p. 137.
18.
To apply John Urry’s observations in The Tourist Gaze: leisure and travel in contemporary societies to this brand of literature: ‘People’s basic motivation for consumption is not therefore simply materialistic. It is rather that they seek to experience “in reality” the pleasurable dramas they have already experienced in their imagination. However, since “reality” can never provide the perfected pleasures encountered in daydreams, each purchase leads to disillusionment and to longing for ever-new products’ (London, Sage, 1990), p. 13.
19.
Recall Said’s observation about Caussin and Carlyle that ‘the Orient need not cause us undue anxiety, so unequal are Oriental to European achievements’, Orientalism, op. cit., p. 152.
20.
Said has pointed out that the old Orientalism used to associate the Orient with ‘not only fecundity but sexal promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire’, to serve as romantic fantasy for bourgeois Europeans (ibid.), p. 188.
21.
On the function of the ‘local character’ who ostensibly guides the foreign tourist through the back regions of social life in a purported show of authentic or demystified experience, see, for instance, Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: a new theory of the leisure class (Berkeley, University of California, 1999).
22.
As usual, this has been praised. Akash Kapur writes of the scenes between Samar and Catherine , ‘Mishra’s exploration of the gap between cultures comes to life with heartbreaking immediacy’ , New York Times (27 February 2000).
23.
Ira Pande, writing in India Today, notes the lifelessness of the characters in Mishra’s work and suggests that he should stick to non-fiction (24 January 2000). But, writing in the American press, Akash Kapur, op. cit., doesn’t mind the comparison of The Romanticsto A Passage to India, saying that Samar’s relationship with Catherine ‘suggests all that is untranslatable across worlds’. But the point is precisely that Mishra attempts an orientalist translation. Kapur recognises that Samar too is a tourist, but he doesn’t seem to be aware of the orientalist freight involved in this designation. Kapur reminds us of Mishra’s praise of Chaudhuri ‘as a painter not of large and garish Indian murals, but of portraits in miniature of everyday life’, adding nonsensically that ‘the distinction, of course, is an artificial one’. He compounds the nonsensicality by saying that ‘it is when Mishra paints both murals and miniatures... that his passage from critic to novelist is most successful’.
24.
Stanley Fish, ‘Boutique multiculturalism, or why liberals are incapable of thinking about hate speech’, Critical Inquiry (Vol. 23, no. 2, Winter 1997), pp. 378-95.
25.
In an interview, Suri said: ‘I fit in so easily and so completely [in America] because I knew everything about the U.S. because I’d seen it in American films, Mad magazine and Archie comics’ (Chicago Tribune, op. cit.).
26.
There is no shame about admitting the provenance of these melodramatic plot devices. According to Suri, ‘This is also a classic thing in Indian films. It’s one of the four or five plots that you find most often, that a Hindu and a Muslim - they fall in love and then they have to run away’ (interview with Lisa Simeone, ‘Manil Suri talks about his book The Death of Vishnu’, Weekend All Things Considered, National Public Radio (18 March 2001)).
27.
Edward Said again: ‘The Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these’, Orientalism, op. cit., p. 177.
28.
In another interview, Suri says: ‘The trick was to not make him [Vishnu] too noble. At some point, I took a course with Vikram Chandra, the writer, and he had an interesting comment after reading the first two chapters. He said he was worried that Vishnu might become a sort of Indian white man’s guilt, and he said, “Don’t let that happen.” So the trick was to balance the two sides of Vishnu’ (‘Manil Suri talks about his book’, op. cit.). Not only should the western reader be spared guilt about Vishnu but, by making him a lovably deluded visionary character, let there be no guilt among Indian westernised readers either.
29.
His pieces, such as ‘Murder in India’, New York Review of Books (15 August 2002); ‘The Afghan tragedy’, New York Review of Books (17 January 2002); and ‘Death in Kashmir’, New York Review of Books (21 September 2000), consist of generalities so inane that one marvels at Mishra’s daring in offering them as ‘insights’ from an insider. Praising his model Narayan, the original Indian ‘miniaturist’, Mishra says, not disapprovingly, that ‘Narayan rejects... any real engagement with the modern world; fear and insecurity seem to lie concealed underneath his complacent humor’, and that his later writing reveals ‘a kind of intellectual self-narrowing that is often the result of the colonial’s bewilderment and resentful pride before the metropolitan culture that has partly formed him’, ‘The great Narayan’, New York Review of Books (22 February 2001). Such assertive generalities lead one to wonder if Mishra might not be offering an unconscious description of his own narrative shortcoming. ‘Murder in India’ comes complete with Mishra’s own Akbar fantasy as a nostalgic antidote to India’s current communal troubles, reminiscent of the orientalist Stanley Lane-Pool’s meditations on Akbar’s greatness and exceptionality as a tolerant Oriental. Mishra brightens the contemporary multiculturalist’s day by claiming that Hinduism and Islam didn’t exist as identifiers in India until ‘our own time’. Mishra’s journalism is an extension of what MacCannell calls the ‘staged authenticity’ that purports to provide privileged information to the curious tourist about the inner operations of an alien culture.
30.
Echoing Mishra, Chaudhuri has called Rushdie-like novels ‘huge baggy monsters’ (quoted in ‘Why are so many Indian books about pickles?’, New Statesman (13 August 2001)). In Huggan’s terms, Mishra and company meet ‘the minimum requirements for ethnographic realism as a written anthropological form: namely, the avoidance of authorial intrusion; the contextualisation of indigenous concepts; and the emphasis on daily events that represent the reality of a particular way of life’ (Huggan, op. cit., p. 42).
