India on the Line: Globalized Labour in Postmillennial Indo- Anglian Literature

India On the Line: Globalized labour in postmillennial Indo- Anglian literature

Stephanie Stonehewer Southmayd

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for a Doctoral degree Department of English University of Toronto

“Modi at the call centre” by Rory Lavelle © Stephanie Southmayd, 2017

India On the Line: Globalized labour in postmillennial Indo-Anglian literature

Stephanie Stonehewer Southmayd

Doctoral Degree in English

Department of English University of Toronto

2017 Abstract

In this dissertation I look at the eruption of new subjectivities in postmillennial Indo-

Anglian literature in an era of globalization and neoliberalism, and, concurrently, the seeming disappearance of old myths and identities – at how, for example, the telephone of the call centre, in joining one person to another, is shown to create fissures in identity, family, and what is described as “traditional” Indian culture. I also examine the ways in which technology, particularly in the form of machines like the tape recorder, industrial factory equipment, and the

Internet, is depicted as mapping the formation of cyborg subjectivities in an era of rapidly changing and ever-broadening and improving modes of communication. These technologies seem at once to bring us closer together and further apart, fostering a greater sense of global solidarity and “connectivity” in previously isolated communities, in John Tomlinson’s terms

(1999, 30), but also setting out battle lines for revolutionary new Indian movements: between the international rich and poor, and more frequently the US and India. In the “pulp fiction” books addressed in this dissertation, written by such authors as Chetan Bhagat, Neelesh Misra, and

Brinda S. Narayan, globalization is depicted as oppressing and poisoning Indians but also freeing them from the chains of Western capitalism and even providing routes for nationalist innovation, creativity, and solidarity. Meanwhile, the more “highbrow” cosmopolitan texts, written by

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Aravind Adiga, Bharati Mukherjee, Indra Sinha, and Altaf Tyrewala, tend to evince a greater suspicion of nationalism and the utopian promises of neoliberalism. Each dissertation chapter addresses a different type of depressed and alienated protagonist – from the call-centre worker to the entrepreneur, to the cyborg-sahiborg and the exorcist-hacker – whose various triumphs of upward mobility and community-building are often, ultimately, oddly unconvincing and unmoving. Indian neoliberalism leads to a sense of anomie among these characters; even when they find community or professional and economic success, it never seems to be entirely or effectively dispelled. The unhappiness of these globalized literary avatars serves as warning – in some cases, probably involuntary – of the dark side of the glamour and glitz of globalized labour in India.

Acknowledgments

This dissertation grew out of my experiences in Gurgaon, India, in 2009, and could not have existed without the support and friendship of my colleagues there: Nikhil, Melanie, Gaurav,

Abhigyan, Pankaj, Catherine, Anshuman, and James. Thanks to all of you for the wit, wisdom, shared chaat, bummed cigarettes, and road trips.

Thanks are also due to Jill Didur at Concordia University, whose kind and insightful advice, instruction, and encouragement helped turned my vague and half-formed ideas about call centres into a viable MA thesis and set me up to continue my studies as a doctoral student.

I’m indebted to a number of people at the University of Toronto, where I completed my dissertation: my supervisor, Neil ten Kortenaar, for his kindness, guidance, and perceptiveness over the past few years; Victor Li, whose counsel always steered me in the right direction; and

Carol Percy, whose instruction determined the course of my dissertation, and whose friendship gave me ballast as I wrote. I’m also grateful to Marguerite Perry for her advice.

Chelvanayagam Kanaganayakam was my supervisor until 2014, and his warmth, expertise, and encyclopedic knowledge helped light my way.

I’m deeply grateful to my parents David and Christine, and my step-parents Alan and

Erin, for their humour and encouragement as I wrote this dissertation, and to my wonderful and funny siblings Sophie, Charlotte, and Tom. Judith and Tom also helped me see the comedy in the situation, and Anwesha Ghosh and Marissa Sinclair were the best comrades in postcolonial and

South Asian studies one could hope for. Frankie was a delightful companion along the path to doctoral completion.

Finally, I would like to express my profound gratitude to my partner Robert Benvie and dedicate this dissertation to him and my two-month-old daughter Lila May Southmayd Benvie.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... v Table of Contents ...... vi Introduction: The uneasy glamour of globalized labour ...... 1 The call centre: Ground zero for globalized labour in India ...... 1 The lingua franca of globalized labour and technologies: English and hegemonic accents ... 5 Nationalism, English, and popular fiction in India ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Globalization in India ...... 7 Nationalism and the nation-state in a globalized age ...... 13 Chapter 1 Uprising in the call centre ...... 26 Popular fiction and capitalism: an intimate relationship ...... 26 One Night @ the Call Centre: The call centre as global economic battleground and Chetan Bhagat’s didactic English ...... 30 A call-centre worker by any other name ...... 33 Accent neutralization and the erosion of identity ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Outsourcing and a betrayal of postcolonial India’s early socialist ideals ...... 35 “Operation Yankee Fear” and the upside to call-centre workError! Bookmark not defined. One Night’s linguistic conflicts ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Once Upon a Timezone: The international division of labour as global love affair ...... 44 “The most precious acquisitions”: English in the call centre and accent neutralization Error! Bookmark not defined. Globalization and the happy ending ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Bangalore Calling: Tradition and modernity in the call centre ...... 51 Accents and national identity ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Linguistic value in the call centre ...... 55 Success and ruin in the call centre ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Conclusion: Whither the call-centre worker? ...... 58 Chapter 2 The entrepreneurial anti-hero: The nationalist entrepreneur and the violence of innovation in The White Tiger and Miss New India ...... 64 A new (anti-)hero for a new India ...... 64 Entrepreneurship in India ...... 70 Mapping the place of the entrepreneur in India ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. The White Tiger: Globalization, violence, and nationalism ...... 80 Seeing double: Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India ...... 93 Entrepreneurship and diaspora ...... 95

Double consciousness and the globalized subject ...... 99 The cosmopolitan Indian author as nationalist entrepreneur hero ...... 111 To be a modern hero – and anti-hero – in globalized India ...... 118 Chapter 3 Cyborg and sahiborg: Technology, community, and enmity in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and Altaf Tyrewala’s Engglishhh ...... 120 Making a home in technology ...... 125 Animal’s People: Science and technology in India and the postcolonial activist-cyborg ...... 126 Technology and cultural hegemony ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. The cyborg politics of noise and sound ...... 137 Altaf Tyrewala’s “MmYum” and “Engglishhh©”: Doomed cyborgs and uncertain revolutions ...... 141 Data doubles and multiple identities ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. “The fence-sitters have it worst” ...... 152 Chapter 4 Exorcist and hacker: Magic and abstraction in the multinational ...... 163 Globalized finance and its monsters ...... 163 Unsung heroes of the digital age ...... 170 The exorcist, the nation, and globalized labour ...... 176 The exorcist as “dividual” ...... 186 “Lulz” and the de-abstraction of data ...... 193 “Fighting the odds” ...... 203 Conclusion: Bad books and neoliberal depressions ...... 204 Bad books...... 204 Murthy’s Law and depression ...... 209 Works consulted ...... 211

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Introduction: The uneasy glamour of globalized labour

No postcolonial hangover, no quixotic desire to reform the world, just a healthy, wholesome twenty-first century pursuit of wealth and prosperity. -Swati Kaushal, Piece of Cake

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English. -Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

The call centre: Ground zero for globalized labour in India

The call centre in “Hello,” the 2008 Bollywood film based on Chetan Bhagat’s blockbuster novel One Night @ the Call Centre (2005), is softly and flatteringly lit in shades of gold, rose, and violet; framed gold records hang, inexplicably, on its walls; and the urinals in the call centre’s bathrooms are painted to look like the open red mouths of blonde women. This

Bollywood vision of the globalized Indian workplace, site of an alternately warring and accommodating global modernity and neoliberal anti-American nationalism, glamorizes the call centre of reality – with its harsh neon lighting, din of a few dozen agents speaking at once, and claustrophobic rows of cubicles – beyond recognition. But even as the call centre of “Hello” offers a glitzy version of middle-class Indian office life against which its telegenic agents can pose attractively with shiny new telephones, headsets, and computers, the actors’ faces are often required to be puckered in frustration, boredom, thwarted ambition, and disappointment. The call centre, multinational office, and other iterations of globalization and globalized technologies are not all they are cracked up to be in One Night @ the Call Centre, Once Upon a Timezone, Miss

New India, and other popular or more “literary” postmillennial Indo-Anglian and diasporic novels of their ilk. The call centre’s high-tech glamour stands in stark contrast to the annoyances

1 2 of racist Americans on the other end of the phone line, bad bosses, and the pervasive sense that by working in the globalized site of the call centre and speaking in its ‘neutralized’ or

Americanized English lingo, the agents have abandoned their Indian cultures and identities.

Ultimately, however, in many of these texts globalization can provide the tools for some of their

(often middle-class, digitally savvy, and almost always male) protagonists to assert a hegemonic ideal of national identity and unity and thereby affirm India’s central place on the global economic stage. The call centre, then, is shown to be the site of both an ambivalent and often troubling but glamorous globalized modernity, and, for better or worse, a renewed and reinvigorated Indian nationalism built on globalized foundations.

A glut of Indo-Anglian popular fiction set in the call centre or multinational globalized workplace, or dealing more generally with technologies associated with globalization and globalized labour, has appeared in the postmillennial period, with Chetan Bhagat selling 50,000 copies of One Night on its first print run alone in India (Banerjee 288) and a legion of imitators published by Indian publishing houses Rupa, Hachette India, and Penguin India, among others, in short order afterward. Indeed, as Manisha Basu writes, “Publishing professionals have repeatedly cited Chetan Bhagat not just as a best-selling author, but as a marketing phenomenon that has radically changed the industry itself – so much so that Indian publishing in English could henceforth be divided into pre- and post-Chetan Bhagat periods” (168). While these books capture the energy and excitement of what the now-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in a bid to annex the general middle-class optimism associated with a neoliberalizing, post-‘License Raj’1 nation, has called “Shining India” – a sunny image of a modern, globalized and powerful India designed to engage the hearts of the upper and middle classes – they also reveal the deep

1 The term “License Raj” (“raj” means “rule” in Hindi) refers to the elaborate system of bureaucracy and red tape needed to run a business in India between 1947 and 1990.

3 concerns about cultural identity, homogenization, and the price of upward mobility at the root of the ‘New India.’ Although the Philippines has in recent years displaced India as the number-one international location for call centres,2 that these concerns remain crucial to Indian readers is clear from the continued success of novels dealing with outsourcing and globalized labour and technologies. Typically, these are set in multinationals and call centres, with How I Braved Anu

Aunty and Co-Founded a Million-Dollar Company by Varun Agarwal, The Corner Office by

Ashutosh Garg, Chaos Down Under by Nishant Kaushik, and the steamy Confessions of a Call

Centre Worker by Kris Yonzone all appearing from Rupa (publisher of One Night, bearing the motto “The House of Bestsellers”) as recently as the past few years. Rupa is not the only Indian publisher interested in cashing in on these subjects: Naughty Men by Siddharth Narayan, Now

That You’re Rich…Let’s Fall in Love! by Durjoy Datta and Maanvia Ajuta, and Jack Patel’s

Dubai Dreams by P.G. Bhaskar, all published by Penguin India in recent years, share similar concerns and themes. Not all of these texts fall within the definition of popular fiction, moreover; novels grappling with issues surrounding globalized labour, capital, and technologies have been published in the past decade by celebrated cosmopolitan authors like Aravind Adiga, Bharati

Mukherjee, and Indra Sinha, as well as the lesser known Altaf Tyrewala. Outsourcing, in short, is not just a matter of the rising or falling number of multinationals and call centres lining the roads of Gurgaon and Bangalore; it is metonymic of globalization itself, and the story of the call centre is a fable of sorts representing the middle-class Indian’s encounter with the phenomenon. Even if only approximately 1% of the Indian population (Nadeem 35) currently works in the outsourcing field, the call centre remains an object of fascination both in India and abroad.

2 While Filipino call-centre agents are paid higher wages, on average, than their Indian counterparts, corporations are increasingly willing to pay a premium for what they see as the former group’s greater facility with American idiom and knowledge of American culture (Bajaj).

What, then, is at stake for globalized middle-class India when it is, figuratively, at one end of the call centre’s phone line, in a set of complex negotiations both internally and with the

West? In the age of the internet, and against the backdrop of a volatile Indian GDP and global economy, globalization’s “rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependences that characterize modern social life” (Tomlinson 1999, 2) is overturning conceptions of middle-class Indian identity, nation, and culture. Globalization nonetheless simultaneously offers solutions to the difficulties it creates in this brand of call-centre lit, even as these quick fixes can be problematized by their authors – and are, indeed, problematized in even greater depth by the more “literary” cosmopolitan texts that likewise articulate the middle-class anxieties and ambivalence associated with globalization in India.3 In Chapter 1, I focus specifically on three call-centre lit texts before moving on in the following two chapters to other recent Indo-Anglian novels – more “high-brow” cosmopolitan ones – grappling with a number of the same issues. These latter texts are not necessarily located in the call centre, nor do all of them deal explicitly with outsourcing. They do, however, register the positive and negative valences of globalized labour, capital, and technologies in ways that can be strikingly similar to call-centre lit but display a far more ironic or nonchalant attitude to the nationalism that is treated so earnestly in the writing of Bhagat and his peers in Chapter 1. In Chapter 4, I return to the pulp genre with an extended analysis of Ramiah Ariya’s The Exorcism of Sathish Kumar, MBA and the internet- based solidarities it promotes over Indian nationalism.

What ultimately unites these works, besides their ambivalent treatment of globalized labour and technologies, is their formulations of new and imagined communities and types of solidarity among Indians affected by globalization – which is to say, all Indians. With

3 Amitava Kumar has termed the more ‘literary’ counterparts of call-centre lit “World Bank Literature.” This comprises recent Indian fiction that deals with globalization, complex connectivity and technologies, and the international division of labour.

5 globalization seeming to tear asunder traditional subjectivities and communities, and years of neoliberal policies weakening the power of collective labour and class consciousness, the ressentiment and depression of these texts’ globalized protagonists seem to stem from an overall sense of rootlessness and alienation. But globalized labour, subjectivities, and technologies, often figured as American or Western in origin, allow both our Indian heroes and anti-heroes alike to build new communities and alliances, many of which target American hegemony in favour of justice, equality, and, in a few cases, global market dominance for India.

The lingua franca of globalized labour and technologies: English and hegemonic accents

The English language in India, or certain privileged versions of it, is crucial to these novels: the call centre’s process of renaming its workers and ‘neutralizing’ or Americanizing their Indian-English accents represents, for example, the perceived cultural homogenization and alienation – but also the opportunities for upward mobility and community – enacted by globalization. In their positions as globalized labourers, and under the morally ambiguous tutelage of the multinational or call centre, outsourcing workers see their Indian identity broken down and reconstructed in a globalized form. Brinda S. Narayan’s book of interconnected short stories Bangalore Calling (discussed in Chapter 1), for example, argues that the call centre’s attempts to eradicate all signs of its workers’ Indian identity, through the adoption of certain privileged Western accents and names, result in the production of alternately sinister or comic ersatz globalized Indian-cum-Americans. Narayan suggests that English, or the use of certain forms of English performed over the phone line with Americans, nonetheless simultaneously allows Bitty Menon – or ‘Betty Adams’ – to proudly reassert her national identity. Meanwhile, in

Chapter 2 Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger and Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India reveal that the globalized entrepreneur’s attempts at mastering English and attaining success mirror those of the cosmopolitan postcolonial author to climb the bestseller lists.

Although globalization is – like modernity itself, and as a consequence of modernity – defined by an ongoing and constantly shifting sense of newness (Tomlinson 1999, 32-3), these recurring concerns with identity and culture echo longstanding debates surrounding the use of

English in India as well as nationalist discourses in the sub-continent. India’s nationalist and anti-imperialist movements have often seemed to defy Audre Lorde’s famous injunction that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Accordingly, just as Ashis Nandy in The

Intimate Enemy shows that British colonialism “managed dissent,” providing some of the tools of colonial resistance to early nationalist leaders, as well as creating a sense of Indian national identity that defines itself in opposition to the West (2), so do globalized labour and technologies offer similar weapons to characters in the novels under discussion through the use of English.

This anti-hegemonic employment of the English language, moreover, echoes long-established arguments around its ties to elite status and upward mobility in India, as well as its problematic role as a ‘link’ language in the sub-continent in its dual role as a colonial legacy and potentially homogenizing and oppressive linguistic power. Perhaps less obviously, this thematic trajectory also mirrors the popular or pulp form in which some of the novels under discussion appear. As

Richard Dyer reminds us, popular entertainment is defined by capital, which causes problems but eventually resolves them in a given narrative (27). Before I discuss these issues in more detail, however, I will look at the history of globalization and economic reform in India, exploring some of the theoretical implications of these phenomena for the Indian subject and his or her relationship to place, home, and cultural identity. Then, invoking the work of John Tomlinson, I will examine how globalization’s drive towards deterritorialization – in other words, towards the separation of culture and individual subjectivity from place – arises in conjunction with an urge for reterritorialization, a way of making oneself ‘at home’ in modernity, and what I argue is

7 represented in these novels by a uniquely globalized Indian nationalism or other forms of globalized community and solidarity, often with an anti-American bent.

Globalization in India

“Globalization” is a notoriously nebulous term and concept, with Zygmunt Bauman skeptically pronouncing it “a fad word fast turning into a shibboleth . . . [T]he more experiences

[globalization] pretend[s] to make transparent, the more they themselves become opaque’” (qtd. in Gupta 5). Indeed, it is described at once as a “displacement” of nineteenth-century imperialism

(Spivak 1999: 274) and an extension of “the earlier logics of empire, trade, and political dominion in many parts of the world” (Appadurai 2000, 3), which, however, stems less from imperialism’s “intended spread of a social system from one centre of power across the globe” than from a far less coherent and strategic proliferation of complex connections between the local and global, and which, furthermore, does not begin in a single locus of power and domination (Tomlinson 2008: 175 [italics mine]). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write that the world is now governed not by national imperial powers but by Empire, which they define as multinational corporate entities and organizations like the International Monetary Fund and

World Bank, and which act as "a unitary power that maintains the social peace and produces its ethical truths" (14). Although Hardt and Negri have been justly criticized by Rupal Oza, J.K.

Tina Basi, and others for their romanticization of the local in contrast to the homogenizing and hegemonic global, their arguments remain productive insofar as they help pinpoint the multiple and constantly-in-transition sources of neoimperial circuits of power and emphasize the diverse territories covered and occupied by these entities. Nonetheless, it is important to remember – as

Spivak reminds us in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (274-5) – that despite our “New World

Order,” the first and third worlds remain key concepts amid globalization, with the third world

8 continuing to operate as the principal source of inexpensive and unprotected labour and raw materials for the first world.

In this dissertation, I use the term “globalization” as, admittedly, something of a catch-all for a great many phenomena associated with political, economic, and technological changes since the turn of the new millennium. I often link it, as in the case of the call centre, with the formation of new connections (and disconnections) among subjectivities across the globe.

However, any analysis of globalization comes up against a variety of frustrating chicken-or-the- egg questions, ones that I cannot pretend to have the answers to: are, for example, what I deem

“globalized” or “globalizing technologies,” like the Internet, products of globalization, or did these in fact help produce globalization? And where does neoliberalism – the ideology developed in 1938 by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek that “redefines citizens as consumers [and] maintains that ‘the market’ delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning” (Monbiot

2016, NP) – fit into our understanding of the globalization experience? My sense is that neoliberalism is the attitude, as it were, driving globalization as we know it today; and once this attitude is internalized, as Monbiot puts it, “[t]he rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. [Meanwhile, t]he poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances” (2016, NP).4

Globalization and neoliberalism are not synonymous (just as, for example, the Internet cannot in and of itself be viewed as always representing a tool of neoliberalism), but the latter ideology seems to have almost completely coopted the former discursively. Globalization is now almost universally associated with neoliberal policy decisions: the privatization of public

4 See my conclusion chapter for more on this “neoliberal attitude” and Fisher’s theory that it results in a widespread and virulent depression.

9 resources, the systematic quashing of labour movements, and market fundamentalism (especially as it is connected to financialization)5, among others. Because of this conflation, it is easy to also lump in with globalization the concept of “capital,” itself an abstraction that I associate mainly in this dissertation with wealth and the interests of ‘Big Business’ and the global finance industry.

One cannot help but think that in tying themselves so tightly to globalization, and keeping the term itself so bewilderingly abstract, capital and neoliberal ideology deliberately make themselves appear inevitable – as impossible to resist or defy as a bad weather system.

However, in defining “globalization” so abstractly in this project, I recognize I am myself guilty of rendering the term so large, sweeping, and unclear that the phenomenon begins to seem as unavoidable and inescapable as the technologies I associate with it. I am no social scientist – but then neither are the authors I discuss in this project. My intention, consequently, is not to decisively explain what globalization is and entails, but the ways in which it is charted, and the different phenomena with which it is associated, in the texts I analyze. This does not mean that I always agree with these associations – that, for instance, globalization brings with it an insidious form of cultural homogenization, as we see in Brinda Narayan’s Bangalore Calling, or that neoliberalism and globalization are interchangeable terms – but that it is worthwhile to examine the primary modalities of globalization as these are imagined in the world of Indo-Anglian fiction. Whether these are “real” or “accurate” or not, they represent an objective reality to some authors and readers, and therefore warrant our attention, if only so we can think through what globalization means, and consider what has been done to the term to render it so all- encompassing and befuddling.

The merits of globalization, particularly as it takes shape in the form of the Indian multinational or call centre, are of course fiercely debated: Harish Trivedi – echoing Appadurai’s

5 See my notes on Appadurai in Chapter 4.

10 assessment of globalization as a phenomenon much like nineteenth-century imperialism, only writ large – grimly describes call-centre workers as lowly “cyber-coolies” eradicating their cultural identities at the behest of their neocolonial American overlords (2003).6 While Spivak,

Appadurai, and Tomlinson see neoimperialism as to varying extents deracinated from the nation- state, Trivedi views the United States as the new colonial power, rather than, more broadly speaking, Empire, the West, or the first world in general. This is a perspective that we will see repeatedly in the texts addressed in this dissertation. Nationalism tends to be more effective, after all, if one can give the Other a more distinct face and personality – in this case, that of the racist and unrefined American. Nadeem concurs that outsourcing processes bear troubling resemblances to colonial relations of power, though he does not attribute these solely to

American companies, but the ‘West’: “Just as the status of the colonial mimic men was contingent on the British colonial structure, so is the social position of offshoring workers dependent on the continued patronage of Western corporations” (58). Indeed, the grievances directed against outsourcing in Indian fiction and media frequently rehash complaints from the nineteenth century levelled by and against the middle-class clerks of Calcutta working for the

British: that the work demanded “long and fixed hours [and resulted in] impurity of language, food, and clothes” (Chakraborty 219-20).

Basi contends nonetheless that outsourcing in India offers women more freedom and argues that current academic and media discourses dealing with the ‘rescue’ of the (often female) call-centre agent “negate the call centre workers’ experience, effectively undermining their agency and silencing them” (11). As I have suggested, my aim in this introductory chapter and in this dissertation as a whole is not, of course, to determine whether outsourcing, the call centre,

6 The comparison of the outsourcing worker to a coolie is obviously flawed, as the original coolies were “unskilled” indentured labourers from far different backgrounds than the university-educated middle-class protagonists of most of these works. One senses Trivedi is aiming more for dramatic effect than accuracy here.

11 and globalization are themselves purely ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ but rather to examine some of the effects of these phenomena on Indian middle-class culture and identity, particularly as these pertain to nationalism and new forms of community. To look at globalization from this perspective allows me to better attend to the warring ideologies and sense of deterritorialization and reterritorialization inspired by globalizing processes in ‘new’ India. Indeed, these competing feelings of anxiety and optimism are often evidenced within the same novel and seen among both its champions and detractors, foregrounding the uncertainty and ambivalence that frequently mark the experience of global modernity among the middle classes.

Globalization in India is generally understood to have begun in the early 1990s with a loan from the IMF and sweeping economic reforms and liberalization initiated by the Congress

Party under then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (although Oza notes that Indira Gandhi in fact began loosening state control over the economy as early as 1974 [11], and Nadeem tells us that General Electric and American Express were offshoring service work to India in the 1980s

[16]). Continuing Singh’s reforms, the right-wing BJP, under current Prime Minister Narendra

Modi, has emphasized investments in technological and economic development, with a particular focus on encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation in the country. Accordingly, multinational corporations (including call centres) have settled or been founded in the country with surprising speed, offering members of the middle class and a newly emerging ‘digerati’ (Basi 37) relatively lucrative roles compared to traditional middle-class civil service jobs. This formation of a ‘new’ globalized India was accompanied by the concurrent rise of Hindutva7 in the 1990s with its emphasis on a static (and culturally homogenous) idea of Indian tradition. As Sugata Bose notes,

7 In Manisha Basu’s words, Hindutva is “an urban right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology” (ix). In contrast to “old” Hindu nationalism, which “was largely articulated in vernacular idioms, had strongly regionalist affiliations and was primarily associated with upper-caste agrarian aristocracies and mid-caste merchant capitalists,” Hindutva “aspires to be a pan-Indian, urban project” geared towards “the emerging, digitally-enabled, technocratic middle-classes of the nation.”

“the notion of changeless ‘Tradition’ in South Asia was always a myth, but perhaps never more so than at the present moment as South Asians negotiate their place in an arena of global interconnections in the throes of rapid change” (4). With globalization deracinating everyday experience and culture, as well as identity, from geographical location (Tomlinson 1999, 106), these myths grow in importance as a way of preserving one’s culture amid what may appear to be the loss of ‘tradition.’ Just as the call-centre worker, for example, is uprooted imaginatively from his or her home by performing an American voice and identity over the phone line with

Western callers, the experience of deterritorialization – of culture and identity becoming displaced from location – and thus alienation become central to modern bourgeois Indian life in the multinational era. But, Tomlinson tells us, deterritorialization is accompanied by reterritorialization: the impulse to build or reassert a new community, cultural identity, and set of myths (or to uphold old ones), even as these concepts may be modelled on monolithic concepts of dubious origin involving a pure and ancient Indian-Hindu identity. This recalls Dipankar

Gupta’s definition of culture as a set of “root metaphors” (32), which “when transplanted struggle for survival in alien, perhaps even hostile, surroundings. [People] cope by recalling vicarious space, but the reality of the site they are in now compels them to search for new meanings in their root metaphors and even to adopt new metaphors” (62).8 Likewise, in these novels, the root metaphors of Indian nationalism, transplanted to a new environment of transnational labour, assume globalized characteristics. Oza comments, moreover, that “in the context of India’s intensified encounter with global capital, the concomitant loss of sovereignty

…resulted in the displacement of capital onto national culture and identity.…(and) efforts were made to compensate for the loss of autonomy by establishing India’s independence and cultural

8 Gupta was referring to emigrants, but as I hope my discussion of these globalized literary avatars in Chapter 1 makes clear (see Shome, for example), many connections can be made between these groups – even though the avatars may never leave India.

13 difference from the West” (2). Globalization’s deterritorialization leads, then, to a sense of reterritorialization achieved through new forms of Indian nationalism or community, or a new set of nationalist root metaphors, many of which define themselves against an American Other, and through more rigidly defined concepts of what it means to be Indian. In call-centre lit, the call centre or multinational is the central site of these processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In the more “high-brow” works I discuss, however, globalization’s effects are located more broadly not only in the workplace but outside it, in slums, abandoned factories, fast-food restaurants, and protest marches, emphasizing their all-pervasive and lingering nature in a world otherwise defined by overwhelming volatility in the financial and job markets.

Nationalism and the nation-state in a globalized age

Although Appadurai and Hardt and Negri, among others, argue that the nation-state is more or less extinct in a globalized age, replaced by what the former critic calls “scapes” and the latter two theorists describe as Empire – and while, as discussed earlier, there has been a shifting of power from sovereign nations to multinational corporate entities – it is important not to underestimate the major role that the nation-state and nationalism continue to play in shaping the ideologies of a given populace. Nadeem describes a founder of renowned Indian outsourcing firm Infosys as boasting to reporters that when people enter the lush and verdant company grounds in Bangalore, they “come to a ‘make-believe world.’ [They] leave India behind” (58).

But Oza argues that India is not so easily abandoned: globalization and the concurrent loss of sovereignty of the nation-state actually bolster cultural nationalism and strengthen conceptions of national identity (124), thereby allowing the nation to maintain an emotional hold on the populace; as the state grows weaker, the nation grows stronger. Spivak, too, reminds us that

14 while capital has drawn up new geographical borders amid globalization,9 the world is “still marked by the boundaries of civil society” (1999; 399) and we are therefore still subject to the state’s dictates. Dipankar Gupta argues even more forcefully that “[t]he illusion that the nation- state is withering away is probably an outcome of the success of the nation-state… The bases of legitimate governance are so fully internalized that instruments of coercion are never fully visible” (22). I am not certain, however, that the apparently diminishing power of the state can be attributed entirely to its “success.” As discussed earlier, the current circulation of power in the world appears now less constrained by nation-states, indicating that globalization does in fact shape to some extent the current landscapes of international labour, power, and capital. But One

Night and other call-centre fiction support Oza’s argument and suggest that cultural nationalism is the primary form of reterritorialization amid the destabilizing effects of globalization’s deterritorialization, where, as Tomlinson notes, “[p]laces are no longer the clear supports of our identity” (1999, 106). With deterritorialization resulting in ontological insecurity, then, nationalism steps in to fill the void; in times of upheaval and war, when modern society seems to break down, nationalism blossoms most fully (2008, 85).

This form of nationalism, which serves to gird the Indian middle-class protagonists of call-centre lit and its more “high-brow” counterparts against the cultural uprooting enacted by globalization, is in fact informed and permeated by some of the features we have come to associate with globalization: technology, an entrepreneurial stance, and, as I discuss in greater detail in Chapter 1, a fluency in the English language, an Anglo-American name, and a

‘neutralized’ or privileged Western accent. Call-centre lit nationalism, then, deploys the weapons

9 We can think of the rise of special economic zones (SEZs), which operate as tax havens for corporations, encourage foreign direct investment, and are not governed by the same set of rules as the rest of the country in which they are located, as an example of how capital governs geography. The Special Economic Zone Policy was introduced to India in 2000.

15 of globalization even as it betrays a profound anxiety about the deterritorialization associated with globalizing phenomena. Because nationalism and the postcolonial nation-state are themselves symptoms of modernity (as critics as diverse as Benedict Anderson, M.K. Gandhi and Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, among many others, have pointed out) conceived as a decidedly mixed partial inheritance of imperialism, postcolonial nationalist movements tend to be informed by colonial ideologies. Partha Chatterjee, for example, indicates that Jawaharlal

Nehru, among other Indian nationalists, sought to modernize the nation by combining scientific and technological innovations with Indian spirituality; in contrast to Gandhi, Nehru argued that only by adapting Western technology to Indian ends could the country reach its development goals (139). Indeed, Chatterjee’s work Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986) argues that Indian nationalism is a “derivative discourse” by separating what he describes as its

“problematic” from its “thematic”: “At the level of the problematic, nationalist thought is not

Orientalist; the Other subject is not passive, has a subjectivity… But at the level of the thematic…nationalism is Orientalist because it relies on the post-Enlightenment system of knowledge [and] makes the same distinction between East and West” (38). Ashis Nandy likewise shows that some of the earlier Indian nationalists and proto-nationalists, such as Michael

Madhusudan Dutt and Swami Vivekananda, built their own writing or nationalist strategies around the Western cult of masculinity: Dutt, by rewriting the Ramayana to make Ravana the hero in Meghnavadh around the mid-nineteenth century, and Vivekananda, by insisting that

Indian men shake off what he perceived as their effeteness. Only bigger biceps and flagrant machismo, it seemed, could chase the British out of India and restore the country to its glorious past. But this masculinist Indian nationalism – which is reflected in the contemporary Hindutva movement in its emphasis on military might and virility (Oza 9) and the formation of right-wing paramilitary groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – was itself founded on the

Orientalist stereotype elucidated by Edward Said in Orientalism: that the Asian man was, in contrast to the supposedly more virile Western variety, too child-like, feminine, and ineffectual to govern a country.

In call-centre lit, this aspect of Indian nationalism repeats itself: just as anticolonial

Indian nationalists sometimes employed Western ideologies to develop their brands of postcolonial nationalism, so do the nationalist protagonists of this genre of fiction ground their valorization of Indian culture on, paradoxically, a foundation built using the tools of neoliberal globalization – in this case, the performance of various forms of English in the call centre.

Interestingly, the texts under discussion in this dissertation also often couch the ‘invasion’ of

India by a globalized and homogenizing American culture in martial metaphorical terms, echoing early Indian nationalists’ emphasis on masculinity and might. As Oza points out, however, these metaphors of ‘invasion’ are “problematic on various levels since [they] validat[e] claims about a unified Indian culture – in effect adding to existing Hindu Right discourses of a pure Hindu nation” (57). Nadeem, further, describes the Indian management of outsourcing firms often complaining about their workers’ childishness, lack of skill, and overall inability to be decisive leaders and entrepreneurs like their Western counterparts: “What is especially interesting,” he notes wryly, “is Indians recycling colonial-era tropes of cultural underdevelopment” (144). The nationalist logic of development therefore mirrors to a certain extent the racist paternalism of the British imperialists, in which the Indian is constantly out of step with the West’s march toward progress and modernity and confined, in Dipesh

Chakrabarty’s terms, to playing catch-up from the “imaginary waiting-room of history” (9). But can globalization ‘save’ India from itself? In other words, can Indian nationalism or other forms of community depicted in these novels, using the tools of globalization, provide India with a leading role on the world economic stage – or at the very least, justice and solidarity? Former

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, unsurprisingly, seemed to think so when he described the

Indian IT and outsourcing industry in 2007 as “the torch-bearer of India’s image in the world”

(Kumar 5). One imagines, in this formulation, a troupe of call-centre workers and programmers leading the populace of India out of the darkness and lighting the way for others to follow in their footsteps – as in the famous statue in Delhi, not far from where the Prime Minister lives, of

Gandhi leading the Salt March and all of India toward Independence.

The second layer of meaning to Singh’s statement – that India’s international ‘image’ will be improved by these workers and their mastery of the tools of globalization – is also important: finally, the rest of the world will be made to recognize India’s importance. Spivak nonetheless cautions us against “theories, however subtly argued, that support the idea that upward class mobility . . . is unmediated resistance” (1999: xii). In our globalized epoch, she writes, the “new gendered subaltern shoulders the system” (102); and this system relies on the continued silence of the subaltern and foreclosure of her resistance (373) to carry out its accumulation of capital. Cheap, unorganized labour in the third world is, after all, key to the international division of labour, particularly with the advent of technologies spurring rapid financial exchanges in the 1970s and the end of the Cold War in 1989 (275). Although the Indian middle classes who people the call centres and outsourcing firms are from relatively privileged, non-subaltern backgrounds, Nadeem claims that they, in fact, “shoulder the burden of the global restructuring of work” (3), as they are subject to harsh rules, their jobs are not secure, and their roles are not considered particularly important or challenging within their organizations.

Accordingly, not only will multinational capital fail to bring every Indian cappuccinos and word processors, in Spivak’s terms (1987, 168), but globalization will bring about a “global crisis” from which only a very select few will benefit. Meanwhile, the remainder of the population – but especially the subaltern – will (continue to) be forced to carry the burden of this wealth creation,

Atlas-like, on their shoulders. While the manufacturing sector in India may rely more on the subaltern, the service sector in India catering to the needs of the West is necessarily comprised of the English-speaking middle classes. Although obviously one cannot equate the two groups

(after all, offshoring labourers earn twice as much as 74% of other Indians [Nadeem 35]), it is nonetheless important to examine the experience of other groups in India who are affected by globalization. To ignore literature targeted at more affluent Indians would not only be to romanticize subalterns (i.e., tribals, Dalits, poor Indians who have reaped no benefits from globalization) as the only ‘authentic’ sites of information for the postcolonial academic, but it would mean ignoring the upswelling of new iterations of postmillennial nationalism and solidarity in India among the middle and upper classes.

If outsourcing is metonymic of globalization, then the English language – or, perhaps, certain privileged varieties of it – is globalization’s lingua franca. Consequently, discourses surrounding English often echo those pertaining to globalization. As with globalization, English is celebrated for its ability to overcome the woes of a post-Babel world by transcending linguistic divides and unifying disparate communities. Some Dalit and Tamil groups, for example, prefer its supposed ‘neutrality,’ as an international language, to other Indian languages like Hindi, which is sometimes linked to the north Indian Brahmin classes (Suman Gupta 2013, 163). Rita

Kothari also links the use of English and Hinglish in recent Bollywood movies and Indian advertising more generally with the growing acceptability of consumerism and materialism in the country. While English was once the language of the vamp and villain in Bollywood, when it was associated with sinful decadence and obnoxious snootiness, it is now associated with a distinctly Indian way of being young, fun, urban, and well-heeled (118). For the desi middle classes, “[c]onsumerism is not embarrassing,” Kothari declares ironically, “but a celebratory part of being Indian” (123). As we will see in Chapter 1, both globalization and an American-

19 accented English are linked in call-centre lit to crass materialism – as in the case of Bitty, who in

Bangalore Calling takes a job at a call centre, adopts the name ‘Betty,’ and soon finds herself lavishing all of her money on designer jeans and fancy jewellery. Call-centre lit displays its ambivalent relationship to globalization through scenes depicting accent neutralization in the call centre and featuring the use of English and Hinglish. Like globalization, moreover, English has been condemned for its neoimperialist and culturally homogenizing tendencies – which Altaf

Tyrewala satirizes to hilarious effect in his story “Engglishhh©,” discussed in Chapter 3. And finally, just as globalization may seem to promise upward mobility to certain privileged members of the Indian middle classes, so has a mastery of the English language in both past and present

(and likely future) often offered South Asians opportunities that their exclusively bhasha10- speaking counterparts have not been afforded. Sucheta Dalal notes that the more prestigious jobs in India are offered to English speakers, who were paid as much as 400-500% more than non- speakers in 2005 (Nadeem 249, note 43). This is, of course, particularly relevant in the context of the call centres and multinationals, which were drawn to India in the early 1990s at least in part because of the relative abundance of English speakers in the country.11 Accordingly, it is appropriate that call-centre lit and its more “literary” counterparts, with their concurrent attraction to and repulsion from globalization, are invariably written in English. As anti-hero

Balram says in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (see Chapter 2), there are some topics that can only be appropriately discussed in English.

One cannot discuss the complex status of the English language in India without first addressing its inglorious colonial beginnings there. In Masks of Conquest Gauri Viswanathan shows that starting in 1813 with the Charter Act, the colonial government took responsibility for

10 Indian vernacular languages 11 Guesses as to the exact number range from ten percent to twenty percent (Suman Gupta 161-2) to one-third in 2004 (Nadeem 249), to ten percent of the population in 2013 (Trivedi 2012, xix).

20 native education in the English language and English literature as a way of “[cultivating] a small group of elites [which] would learn English [and] pass it down, [and this would] result in a stability that even a political revolution [would] not destroy and upon which after ages may erect a vast superstructure” (116-7). The replacement of Persian with English in higher education and government offices, then, was intended to create a comprador class in India that would allow the

British Empire to maintain its grip over the country. This group of middle-class and upper- middle-class Indians would often later be termed ‘Macaulay’s Children’ after Lord Babington

Macaulay’s Minute on Education address of 1835, in which he intoned, “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (Bose 67). Whether Macaulay’s project was successful may be answered by Gandhi’s lament in his work Hind Swaraj:

To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them. The foundation that Macaulay

laid of education has enslaved us. I do not suggest that he has any such intention, but that

has been the result. Is it not a sad commentary that we should have to speak of Home Rule

in a foreign tongue? … We write to each other in faulty English, and from this even our

M.A.s are not free; our best thoughts are expressed in English; the proceedings of our

Congress are conducted in English; our best newspapers are printed in English. If this state

of things continues for a long time, posterity will…condemn, and curse us. (NP)

And yet despite the profound ambivalence evinced toward the language by some of the most celebrated Independence leaders, English proved sometimes to be convenient for the purposes of

Nehru’s diplomatic efforts and attempts to build national unity: in response to Tamil leaders’ calls for state secession in the 1950s and 60s, the prime minister announced his ‘three language formula,’ according to which Hindi would be the national language, English the ‘link’ language,

21 and the regional language would be taught in each given state’s curriculum (Bose 174). Much to the chagrin of some postcolonial nationalists, it appeared that even after the departure of the

British, English would continue to play a pivotal role in India. As Mathangi Krishnamurthy reflects, English remains a ‘link’ language not only domestically, but in terms of how it connects

India with the rest of the world (91-2) at the outsourcing firm or call centre.

The history of Indo-Anglian writing in India reflects the English language’s fraught heritage there. Because of its colonial underpinnings and ties to a cosmopolitan Indian elite, it has been accused of pandering only to elite readers and of failing to pose any real challenge to both colonial and postcolonial structures of power. In The Perishable Empire, Meenakshi

Mukherjee tells us, for example, that by the turn of the twentieth century, vernacular literatures in India almost invariably displayed some form of resistance to imperialism, while English writing “paid direct or veiled tribute to imperial rule” (16). Further, she claims that Indo-Anglian literature continues today to homogenize India and reduce it to a palatable form for Western audiences. Nationalist-cum-spiritual leader Aurobindo Ghose, moreover, compared an Indian author writing in English to a man walking on stilts (34); the act was unnatural, clumsy, and stiff.

Even now Indo-Anglian writing is often perceived within India as less ‘authentic’ than its vernacular counterparts, as Francesca Orsini discusses in her thoughtful article “India in the

Mirror,” even though, drawing on the work of Amit Chaudhuri, she argues that “Indian vernacular literatures are themselves modernity’s offspring, directly linked to the emergence of a bourgeois-secular sensibility and the development of a new, educated Indian middle class” (76) – all traits typically associated with English-language writing in India and contributing to its purported inauthenticity. While writers such as Salman Rushdie have attempted to craft a distinctly Indian form of English by code-switching between Hindi, Urdu, and English in works like Midnight’s Children, Harish Trivedi repeatedly criticizes the author for peppering his text

22 with words unfamiliar to western readers in order to proffer a marketable exoticism to the literary market (2012, xxvi).

But what are we to make of Indian novels that are written in English (but, like Midnight’s

Children, contain frequent usage of Hinglish12) and are aimed squarely at an Indian middle-class audience rather than – as is the case with more ‘literary’ Indo-Anglian writing – a cosmopolitan

Western one? Suman Gupta in Globalization and Literature, among others, has commented that contrary to expectations of the increasing homogenization of literature through globalization, with multinational publishing corporations dictating output in most countries, recent popular

Indian writing has been directed not toward a monolithic Western audience but rather to domestic communities (2009: 163-4). In a later article, Gupta discusses how English is

‘reclaimed’ in this commercial fiction as a native, national language (2013: 163-4). Basu further contends that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, “the Indo-English novel has reversed its prior fate [of being associated with the country’s elite] and quite decisively entered a field of national-popular forms” (167). While I generally agree with Gupta and Basu, I will argue that call-centre lit displays a far more vexed relationship with English – in particular, certain privileged varieties of English – and displays this ambivalence toward the language through notable instances of Hinglish code-switching. I will also show, however, that while English may lead to the globalized deterritorialization of the protagonists of this popular fiction, the language can also help further their nationalist aims and thereby result in reterritorialization. In the more literary works I discuss in Chapters 2 and 3, a similar discomfort with English is seen – one that may be connected with the cosmopolitan “high-brow” Indian author’s discomfort with her or his

12 I use Shannon Finch-Anderson’s broad definition of Hinglish: it can refer to “a fully nativized variety of English involving phonological transfer, structural borrowing, and calquing from Hindi and other Indian languages. [It] can also refer to lexical borrowing and single-word switches” and “a more dynamic mixing that occurs turn by turn in conversations, phrase by phrase in sentences” (53).

23 participation in a literary market that feeds on Otherness. Mathangi Krishnamurthy notes that

“English in India has always been political” (92); in these books Hinglish, English, and various forms of English accents take on many different, and even contradictory, political valences but are often paired with a feeling of unease.

Indeed, all of the texts I discuss in this dissertation are clouded by a sense of discomfort and dissatisfaction among globalized Indians – one that is often tied to an overwhelming feeling of alienation but is seemingly allayed through solidarity, unity, and community-building efforts.

These in turn are usually associated with some form of Indian nationalism, most notably in the call-centre lit, which uses the tools of globalization signified as originating in the West (or, more frequently, the US) to assume capitalist hegemony.

It is not difficult to trace a connection here between the social isolation experienced by these novels’ protagonists and the death of labour unions and class consciousness as neoliberalism has spread throughout the globe, with the state surrendering workers’ rights to the demands of the private corporation. Consequently, there seems to me to be a lingering sadness – or, at least, a deep ambivalence – to the conclusions of many of these texts, even after their heroes and anti-heroes appear to have found professional success and a community of peers, as if the trade-off between labour power for other forms of solidarity amid globalization is not, ultimately, judged to be an entirely fair or adequate exchange. With the sole exceptions of Brinda

S. Narayan’s Bangalore Calling, Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India, and Indra Sinha’s

Animal’s People, after all, these new communities are comprised largely of upwardly mobile

Indian men and, in more subordinate romantic or voiceless roles, women from a middle-class and university-educated background. These groups fail, in other words, to include the vast majority of Indians – the cleaners, the drivers, the construction workers – whose labour, rendered invisible in many of these texts, allows the call-centre worker, software programmer, and

24 multinational CEO to perform their own globalized duties.13 So, while these new communities’ quests for justice against Western hegemony are cheering, they necessarily remain incomplete.

Basu even links works of “call-centre lit” to a dangerous metropolitan Hindutva movement that posits a “young, English-speaking technocratic middle class as…the most authentic and authenticating aspect of the new India” (18). I’m reminded of the construction workers who lived and laboured next to the outsourcing firm where I worked in Gurgaon, in the Indian state of

Haryana, setting in careful order the bones of another outsourcing firm that would likely be very much like mine. You could see them working from the windows of the cars that the outsourcing firm hired to ferry workers to and from the office (much like the fleet of taxis Balram commands by the end of The White Tiger); but the windows were shut tight to keep in the precious air conditioning and it was difficult to hear their voices through the glass, or even to see them as anything but a colourful blur as the car sped towards the office parking lot. Such is the case with a number of the texts in this dissertation, in their silencing of non-middle-class voices, with their protagonists enclosed in a figurative bubble, an echo chamber, of steel and glass. The dissatisfaction these novels ultimately register requires readers to examine what has been lost or silenced in a globalizing but atomized India in addition to what may have been gained, and challenges them to look at creating more productive and inclusive communities in India and all over the globe – both inside and outside the slickly glamorous call centre and multinational.

Because as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, “‘Solidarity’ [means developing an understanding] that as ordinary people, our fates are tied together, and that one group’s liberation is dependent upon the liberation of all the oppressed and exploited” (NP). Otherwise, these communities risk embracing “the fantasy of Hindu supremacy, [in which] structures of imperial dominance do not

13 To be clear, I’m not arguing that unions have ever been able to create an ideal kind of community uniting all Indians from different backgrounds. I am suggesting, however, that in theory at least this has been one of the loftier goals of collective labour in India and elsewhere.

25 have to be radically dismantled; they can be merely transferred from western superpowers to an emerging force from the east” (Basu 18).

Chapter 1 Uprising in the call centre

India’s call centre industry: the sunshine sector, hotbed of sexual liberalism, bound by professional agreements, ripe for discussions of postcolonial subjectivity, evoking the guilt of Empire. -J.K. Tina Basi

Popular fiction and capitalism: an intimate relationship

It is appropriate that call-centre lit like Neelesh Misra’s Once Upon a Timezone and

Brinda S. Narayan’s Bangalore Calling would operate as a forum in which a new globalized capitalism and transnational labour are represented and negotiated. Mass-market fiction could not have existed, after all, without “the appearance of the masses and the urban, mediums of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” says Clive Bloom, for whom pulp is “the embodiment of capitalism aestheticized . . . and internalized” (14). As Bourdieu reminds us, cultural products belong to and in the market: there is no “sacred frontier” between one and the other (6).

Capitalism inevitably informs the content of popular fiction, given its themes of upward mobility, offering the reader a sense of optimism that he or she may rise from his or her current economic situation and attain a utopian happy ending, but also initiating a concurrent feeling of frustration that he or she has not yet attained the promised horde of treasure at the end of the capitalist rainbow. “Hence,” Bloom concludes, pulp fiction is, like capitalism itself, “both oppressive and liberating, both mass manipulation and anarchic individualistic destiny” (14). Of course, some critics have taken a far dimmer view of pulp. In 1944 Theodor Adorno and Max

Horkheimer argued that popular culture undermined the value of ‘real’ art and that the escapism they saw as inherent to the genre served to transform readers into passive consumers. However,

John Lough contends that the Frankfurt School “presupposes an audience of powerless dupes,

26 27 with all constituents making the same reading” (Danesi 270). And while pulp works are criticized for being ‘commercial’ and designed to sell in large quantities, the same can be said

(and has been said, by Graham Huggan in The Postcolonial Exotic) of more literary texts. It is perhaps more useful to understand pulp fiction, as Bloom does, as a “contradictory phenomenon, open to intervention and affording the opportunity for critical engagement by its audience”

(McCracken 19). Although the pulp work may, as Adorno and Horkheimer suggest, placate the reader, popular entertainment can also open a dialogue through its escapism and mould its audience’s concerns in ways that can be considered political as the “‘lessons’ learned from popular culture are used in [the] quest for political competence” (Combs 10).

Some of the discomfort that surrounds popular fiction likely stems from the genre’s disposability; as its name implies, from pulp it came, and to pulp it will likely someday return.

Janice Radway maintains that popular literature’s utilitarian function – as a tool for achieving pleasure, with reading being framed as a leisure pursuit – implied that it had no long-term value: once the book was finished, it could be thrown away (129-30). Thus, cheap pulp fiction “severed reading’s traditional connection to religious and scholarly meditation and contemplation and yoked it as an activity to the achievement of more immediate effects, be they pleasure, the acquisition of information, or simply passing the time” (142). Pulp was also linked, whether explicitly or otherwise, to a gendered style of reading: middle- and upper-middle-class women were often figured as the passive audience of this degraded literature – and this was, for its critics, another count against it (McCracken 27). But, as Raymond Williams writes, the negative reaction to pulp in Europe in the nineteenth century and onward was especially a reaction to “the socially repressive and intellectually mechanical forms of [the] new social order” (Radway 139) of capitalism, pointing once more to the connections between capitalism and popular fiction.

English-language pulp has long played a subversive, anti-colonial role in Indian literary history, with K.K. Lahiri (1881) and K. Chakravarty (1895) contrasting a utopian pre-colonial past against a dystopian colonial present (Khair 62). However, since the 1980s, Shobha De, who in novels like Socialite Evenings (1989) and Starry Nights (1991) writes from within the glamorous world of Bollywood and Mumbai upper-class society, has reigned as the premier author of contemporary English-language pulp fiction aimed at the urban Indian middle class.

Abhijit Gupta offers some context on this transition, noting that “[w]ith rising incomes, changing lifestyles and increased consumption among middle-class Indians in the post-liberalization era, there was room for new reading practices and narrative pleasures which had little in common with the more earnest and self-denying narrative practices of the 1950s and the 1960s” (1031).

These latter practices, Gupta continues, can be tied to the “spirit of austerity and nation building” of that era; post-liberalization fiction, however, revels in glitz and glamour. Nevertheless, while

De’s Bollywood-themed blockbusters will likely continue to dominate the English-language pulp market, a new genre of Indo-Anglian pulp or pulp-like fiction has emerged – that of the globalized workplace of the multinational and call centre – which combines an enthusiastic nationalism with a somewhat less decadent form of glamour. These latter works still likely represent an aspirational fantasy of success and upward mobility for many readers, but one that, in an exciting time of globalization promising to turn Indian rags to riches, may seem more achievable.

As with the bourgeois subject under capitalism, who within the myth of the capitalist dream can ascend the economic hierarchy as a ‘self-made’ man or woman capable of changing himself or herself for the better, the reader of pulp fiction can be seen as malleable, whether transformed into a passive consumer, after the Frankfurt model, or as an active reader who negotiates a fruitful relationship with the text. As Scott McCracken comments, “If popular

29 fiction turns the mind to mush, then that mush is also the fertile compost for new growth” (14).

This “new growth” often turns to the utopian:

Popular fiction engages in modernity’s need to colonize the future, to project new worlds

for ourselves. It engages with the modern sense of the ambivalent, indeterminate nature

of the present, a sense that the past has not finished who we are and that the future is still

open. In this vision, the world, its texts and we ourselves are incomplete and have the

potential to be remade. (13)

By reading the pulp text and empathizing with the protagonists, the reader is encouraged to shape ideas of her own ideal future – a utopian place in which, according to Richard Dyer’s writing on the escapist thrust of popular entertainment, losses in the reader’s reality under the capitalist system are eventually compensated for by capitalism: the protagonist’s boredom with life inside the capitalist workplace becomes enthusiasm; solitude and alienation are replaced with solidarity and community; and fragmented subjectivities become whole again. In other words, in call- centre lit the deterritorialization enacted by the global flows of capital and labour is soon followed by nationalism’s reterritorialization – which is itself enabled by globalization. In this way entertainment like One Night @ the Call Centre and Once Upon a Timezone – and, in a more ambivalent fashion, Bangalore Calling – responds to “real needs created by society” and

“provides alternatives to capitalism which will be provided by capitalism” (26-7). The Indo-

Anglian pulp fiction discussed in this chapter mirrors the form in which it appears and offers a nationalist happy ending – an alternative to the initially stifling globalized workplace in the novel

– through that same call centre or transnational workplace and the tools of globalization: in this case, through the English language, which as we have seen is often linked in media and academic discourses with a globalized literary and labour market. Ultimately English, and particularly the western Englishes valorized by the outsourcing marketplace (rather than, say, Hinglish), helps to

30 provide the protagonists with a route toward utopian visions of national community and success.

Accordingly, the utopianism to be found within popular fiction is somewhat circumscribed, as it must necessarily work from within the capitalist soil where it has taken root. However, this globalized capitalism is simultaneously undermined, as we will see, by a sense of alienation experienced by the globalized call-centre workers, reflecting the conflicted reception to globalization, and the concurrent sense of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that plays out among the Indian middle classes.

One Night @ the Call Centre: The call centre as global economic battleground

One Night @ the Call Centre is at once a romantic comedy, a self-help book with spiritual undertones, and a motivational management guide that seems at first glance to critique neoliberal narratives around globalization and capitalism but actually champions these neoliberal ideas with anti-American Hindutva and nationalist rhetoric. The main story, which in the framing narrative is told by a mysterious woman to Chetan Bhagat, relates (unsurprisingly) to one night in the lives of six call-centre employees. During the night they field phone calls from Americans, who are always represented as either racist or deeply stupid, squabble with each other and, finally, receive a revelatory phone call from God. With the intervention of the God character, the unhappy call-centre workers are able to achieve personal and professional success and ultimately save their call centre, with which they have a love-hate relationship, from being closed.

Dealing with the transnational workplace and featuring youthful, college-educated, and

English-speaking protagonists who resemble nothing so much as the novel’s target audience,

Bhagat’s book treats issues surrounding globalization and transnational labour. It focuses especially, however, on the valorization of a neutralized or globalized English, which is basically synonymous in Bhagat’s terms with American English (so, crucially, not the Indian Standard

English that grew out of British colonialism): the central characters are forced to adopt

Westernized English names and participate in language and accent “neutralization” classes.

Despite the ambivalence shown in One Night towards a “de-Indianized” or neutralized English,

Bhagat evinces pride in his novels’ casual and colloquial English, maintaining that his books are educational: they are “read by government-school kids, for whom English is very much a second language, and who know that they have to learn it if they want to get anywhere in life . . . my books often provide them with an entry point into that world” (Singh 2009). Bhagat’s work can accordingly be seen – and has been seen by the author himself (Burke) – as appealing not only to call-centre workers, but to ambitious readers wishing to enter such a globalized workplace.14

This may also explain a paradox that underlies One Night’s success: as discussed, English is the language of the Indian elite; pulp fiction, however, is typically viewed as a form of “low-brow” literature aimed at a mass-market audience. If this audience bought One Night and books similar to it in an effort to learn English or improve its knowledge of the language, then this may explain the novel and genre’s mass appeal despite the elite status of English in India. Bhagat, then, views

English largely as a tool of upward mobility; his objection is not to Indian Standard English, but to the denial of Indian identity implicit in the accent neutralization workshops and renaming practices he says are common at outsourcing firms. This valorization of a particularly indigenized English is, Basu says, characteristic of self-styled Hindutva intellectuals like Bhagat, who seek to spread both Hindi/Sanskrit and a “reterritorialized” or indigenized English, incorporating what Bhagat calls the “broken English” of the call centre (191), across the nation

(12). But, she asserts, in contrast to authors like Salman Rushdie or Arundhati Roy whose writing is respectively informed by Bombay Hindoostani and Malayalam, among others, Bhagat uses a form of English that “is decisively unbound from its regional affiliations and made to

14 Indeed, Krishnamurthy comments that many Indian call-centre agents join the call centre “in a bid to gain the requisite skills demanded of a professional, English-speaking, transnational worker” (57).

32 function as the most legitimate trans-local site – alongside and sometimes superseding standard

Hindi and/or Sanskrit – for the crystallization of an uninterrupted national consciousness” (12-

13). This conceptualization of English fosters a sort of forced unity but erases difference.

Reflecting Bhagat’s business acumen, however, it also serves to appeal to the greatest number of

Indian readers and effectively removes the possibility of alienating any group with a particular aversion to another regional or cultural one.

Chetan Bhagat writes in his afterword to One Night that his “call-centre cousins, sisters- in-law and friends” inspired his tale, “providing information, stealing various training materials and arranging meetings” (317). But in the novel’s framing story, a mysterious woman – who, as it turns out, is actually God in disguise – furnishes Bhagat (who is also a character in the book) with this information, chastising him for paying too little attention in his first novel to “the biggest group of young people facing a challenge in modern India” (14): the 300,000-strong men and women who work in the Indian call-centre industry. The author’s wording here is somewhat surprising; in many ways this group would appear to be among the main beneficiaries of globalization in India. After all, in a country where the majority of the population makes less than two dollars a day (Murphy 429), their pay is relatively high; and as English speakers many of them could find jobs outside the outsourcing industry quite easily. Instead, in One Night they are depicted as the underdogs of the country’s globalization story, their rights and dignity trampled upon by Americans. The character Vroom compares his dehumanizing call-centre work to prostitution:

“Every night I come here and let people fuck me.”. . . [He] picked up the telephone

headset. “The Americans fuck me with this, in my ears hundreds of times a night . . . And

the funny thing is, I let them do it. For money, for security, I let it happen. Come fuck me

some more,” Vroom said and threw the headset on the table. (216)

The problem with the call-centre (and thus globalization), Bhagat suggests, is that, as Vroom implies in this passage, it has resulted in a materialistic culture in India that mirrors American consumerism. Relatedly, working at the call-centre is tantamount to a betrayal of the nation-state and a sense of mythic pan-Indian values. This nationalist betrayal is linked closely to, and perhaps even rendered possible by, the accent neutralization and renaming practices of the call- centre, which undermine, erase, and distort a sense of ‘authentic’ Indian-ness.

A call-centre worker by any other name

One of the central goals of the call-centre in One Night appears to be the cultural homogenization of its workers: a unified and monolithic Indian identity is squelched and

American mimicry encouraged whenever possible, especially through the call-centre’s valorization of an Americanized or globalized form of the English language. The workers are, for instance, forced to change their names to Western ones – Shyam becomes Sam, Vroom (or

Varun) is transformed into Victor, and Radhika turns into Regina. Shyam is so deadened by this process of effacement that he passively relinquishes all control over his identity, saying,

“American tongues have trouble saying my real name and prefer Sam. If you want, you can give me another name, too. I really don’t care” (22). Shyam has been transformed for the worse by the call-centre: from an Indian man with an Indian name, he is now merely an uncaring and nameless cog in the ruthless machine constituting globalization. As Raka Shome has noted of real-life call-centre workers, not only does the worker assume an American-sounding name, but he or she must also assume the guise of an authentic American and perform this identity with callers (115). In changing Indian names to American ones, the call-centre and accordingly globalization upend all that people have known before—including names, meaning, and identity— thereby demonstrating a terrifying, god-like power.

Bhagat also critiques the call centre’s rule that workers use an Americanized

(synonymous with globalized or neutralized) form of English, in which most linguistic traces of their Indian origins are scrubbed away, including the common Pan-Indian blurring between the

/w/ and /v/ sounds in speech. Linguist Claire Cowie has studied how call centres teach their workers “accent neutralization:” before employees begin working, they take pronunciation classes and are given phonetics handbooks that “refer to the ‘elimination of regional influence’ and encourage trainees to become more comprehensible to native speakers of English by

‘improving pronunciation’” (321). Although Cowie finds that defining a “neutral accent” is difficult, as companies hold different views on what precisely constitutes a neutral sound, the ideal is usually that (in contrast to the call centre in One Night) it not sound entirely American, despite containing strong characteristics of the American accent; for example, it is typically rhotic15 (Cowie 324). However, it should not sound British either, and definitely not Indian

(323). As such, critics of outsourcing have accused call centres of distorting and even destroying

Indian identity by forcing Indian workers to “pass” as Americans, and this popular refrain is reflected in Bhagat’s novel.

In One Night, Shyam, who sometimes reluctantly works as one of the call centre’s beleaguered accent trainers, provides readers with an explanation of some of the difficulties of feigning a “neutralized” American accent:

You might think the Americans and their language are straightforward, but each letter can

be pronounced several different ways. I’ll give you just one example: T. With this letter

Americans have four different sounds. T can be silent, so “internet” becomes “innernet”

and “advantage” becomes “advannage.” (53)

15 Rhoticity in English takes place when the “r” sound is pronounced after a syllable or before a consonant.

Shyam’s use of the words “internet” and “advantage” is revealing. In this passage, an American accent appears to be linked to the internet – perhaps globalization’s most evident technological manifestation – and the consequent “advantage” that globalized labour can bring. Shyam’s explanation is also didactic, perhaps indicating Bhagat’s recognition that his audience is aware of the advantages that a neutralized accent can carry in a globalized India and is eager to learn more about it. The author’s disdain for this accent and the language training of the call centre is manifested through his spokesman Vroom, with the character inventing the nursery rhyme, “Go train-train, leave your brain” (53), to scold Shyam for his spinelessness. By speaking in the accented English of another nation, the workers are shown not only how to turn their backs on their national identities, but also to abandon their intellectual faculties in favour of Shyam’s passive, brainless acceptance of the call centre’s neoimperialist regime. Accent neutralization is accordingly figured here as a form of political neutralization. As with the call centre’s practice of renaming, accent neutralization, as depicted in call-centre lit, is linked closely with the distortion and disappearance of Indian identity. As I will argue, this is in turn related to a concern that globalized India is betraying national culture and identity and early post-Independence socialist ideals, as well as to fears of the rise of a mock-American materialist culture in the country.

Outsourcing and a betrayal of postcolonial India’s early socialist ideals

Jim Yardley writes that, amid India’s globalized economic boom and the flight of its population from village to city, Mohandas K. Gandhi “can sometimes seem to hover over modern India like a parent whose expectations are rarely met” (NP). While Gandhi valorized a simple village life free of material desires, and Jawaharlal Nehru, postcolonial India’s first prime minister, advocated a socialist political platform, globalized India under the current neoliberal gaze of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a far cry from a rural socialist utopia. This sense of globalized India’s betrayal of its founders also permeates call-centre lit: for instance, Bhagat

36 implies through the character of Vroom that by participating in outsourcing (and thereby, as we have seen, shedding their “true” Indian identity), the call-centre workers have turned their backs on the nationalist heroes of yesteryear who won India’s independence. As Vroom says, “Two generations ago, it was the young who made this country free – now that was something meaningful. But then what happened? We have been reduced to a high-spending demographic”

(278). Only when Vroom rejects his erstwhile materialism and delivers a stirring political speech at the end of the novel can he redeem himself in the eyes of the nation-state: he whips the call- centre workers into a frenzy by drawing on their hatred and resentment of their American bosses, proclaiming that “stupid Americans suck the life blood out of our country’s most productive generation” (279). An implicit connection is drawn, then, between the British Raj’s exploitation of colonial India and the American corporation’s mistreatment of postcolonial India. The crowd responds with “a collective scream” and “collective voice” (279), symbolizing Vroom’s political power: in the call centre, metonymic of globalized India, Vroom-as-political-leader has enacted a miracle of unity among the diverse members of his call-centre society. As such, One Night can be seen not only as a guide to the call centre that is geared toward Indian call-centre workers and aspiring call-centre workers, but it may also model behaviour to this group: Bhagat calls upon his readers to exert the same anti-imperialist power that India’s founders did, replacing their materialistic and mimetic ways—in the call centre, and outside it—with political resistance and nationalist solidarity. Only this, the novel tells us, can reverse the betrayal of the early

Independence leaders.16

16 Basu describes Bhagat’s form of nationalism as a “Hindutva [for] the new millennium – not only with a liberal, safe, scientific and free face but with a technologically viable aspect, as comfortable on platforms and portals like Twitter and Facebook, as it is with gods and goddesses, temples and priests” (181). (Bhagat also endorsed Modi before the 2014 elections, saying “You know a leader has the youth pulse when he can discuss job creation at length and is still up for a selfie!” [qtd. in Basu 181].)

As I have mentioned, the renaming and accent neutralization practices of the call centre have come under attack not just in Bhagat’s novel but also in the Indian media for the perceived role of outsourcing in the loss of “authentic” Indian identity and culture amid globalization. In an article about what he calls “cyber-coolies,” Harish Trivedi writes,

[Call-centre workers] speak in an accent that is . . . resolutely not Indian . . . it has, over a

long and rigorous training programme, been “neutralized.” A lot else in their personality,

biological clock, and identity has been neutralized as well. So, why do these eager young

souls have to pretend to be Americans, to be anyone but themselves? Why are they

obliged to lie . . . each time they open their mouths? (2003)

Tina Basi contends, however, that this popular refrain among opponents of outsourcing is wrongheaded and essentialist in its assertion that a ‘real’ Indian self, which can be assumed or dropped at will, exists at all (86). In a country as diverse as India, with its abundance of castes, classes, ethnicities, and religions, it is difficult to argue – as authors like Bhagat often seem to do

– for the existence of a monolithic ‘authentic’ Indian identity (or, for that matter, of an American one). One might also question the premise that learning at the call centre to speak in a different accent than one has been taught at home necessarily carries more negative effects than receiving an English education in India, where students are taught to speak with an accent that still hews strongly to British pronunciation. And, although the inherent racism of “accent neutralization” is obvious, with “the voice of the third world subject . . . literally erased and reconstructed in the servicing of the global economy” (Shome 110), it may also be important to ask why in Bhagat’s novel and in Trivedi’s critique, Indian Standard English, legacy of colonialism, is posited as better than American or neutralized English, which arises out of the needs of Western corporations. It is as if critics and authors such as these are concerned that a new diglossic situation is arising among forms of English in India, in which the American, globalized, or

38 neutralized variety is replacing the already elite Indian one in terms of prestige. One wonders, then, whether this is a case of Macaulay’s children fighting Macaulay’s cyber-children to maintain their perch at the top of India’s English-speaking hierarchy. Rather than attacking the accents used by call-centre workers by hewing to an essentialist dream of a single and definitive form of Indo-Anglian speech, and thereby furthering the hegemonic, elitist status of a given accent, it may be more helpful to focus on the ways in which empires and Empire have compelled their subjects to speak over time; and the possibility, as Trivedi saliently points out, that workers are being trained to mask their identities amid the “high-tech virtualized disciplining” (Shome 107) of Indian call centres.

The fear that Indian identity is facing homogenization amid globalization has been supported to some extent by scholars like Jonathan Murphy, who claims that Indian call-centre workers are part of a new middle class that shares its values with the middle class of the developed world (430). Bhagat’s inclusion of this theme accordingly reflects middle-class Indian concerns that globalization, as emblematized by the ‘neutralized’ English spoken in the call centre, is eroding and homogenizing Indian identity. Paradoxically, however, the tools of the call centre that Bhagat criticizes – including the lessons it teaches the workers about American culture and miming a non- Indian identity – eventually allow the novel’s characters to win, through a plan they call “Operation Yankee Fear,” upward mobility and a nationalist victory over the Americans. By capitalizing on their knowledge (gained through MTV, CNN, and their accent neutralization and American culture classes) that “Americans are the biggest cowards on the planet” (280), the workers – led by the newly political Vroom – tell their terrified callers that the

United States is being attacked by terrorists. Only if the Americans continue to call the call centre every hour, thus driving the call centre’s numbers upward, will they be saved from their terrorist foes: as the workers tell the Americans, “We will save this country. The evil forces will

39 never succeed” (284). The call centre is consequently saved from being shut down by its

American owners. Despite the vitriol directed towards the call centre in the novel, its survival is conceived as a positive outcome because the Indians have wrested control of it from their

American bosses, stemmed the threat of mass layoffs, and gained a sense of psychological mastery over the American callers (282). In Upward Mobility and the Common Good, Bruce

Robbins describes how literary works featuring an upward mobility narrative typically contain a

“Fairy Godmother” or donor figure who teaches a character how to climb the social echelon: oddly enough, despite its villainy and efforts towards cultural homogenization, the call centre appears to have similarly provided its workers with the tools to achieving success. Interestingly,

Bhagat’s representation of the call centre as a dead end for India and Indian youth abruptly ends once this nationalist victory over the United States is won; suddenly the call centre – though still officially run by Americans, and still catering to American callers – is no longer such a terrible place to work. While Vroom and Shyam leave the call centre to start their own web design company, their female colleagues Esha, Radhika, and Priyanka continue to work there (reflecting the gendered landscape of the call centre [Murphy 421]): despite the office’s problems, it provides them with the money to begin their journeys of upward mobility and independence, whether as a corporate fundraiser for an NGO, the principal of a preschool, or a liberated woman free of a philandering husband and abusive mother-in-law (Bhagat 309-10).17 At the end of the novel Bhagat no longer seems to have qualms about globalized labour; he merely wants India to dominate the global markets. It is not, therefore, capitalism that Bhagat is against; he simply

17 Basu rightly points out that the professions ultimately pursued by the female characters in the novel are highly gendered, and “it is the men [like Vroom and Shyam] who are given the responsibility of taking risks and becoming innovative” (175). Bhagat, she notes, is enthusiastic about women joining the Indian workforce – but only if they conform to traditional patriarchal guidelines (176). See Basu’s chapter “The After-life of Indian Writing in English” in The Rhetoric of Hindu India (Cambridge UP, 2017) for more of her excellent analysis of Bhagat’s instrumentalization of the Indian woman.

40 wants it to bear an Indian, rather than American, face, in the same way that he valorizes an indigenized form of English over a Western one. When we last see Shyam and Vroom in the novel, they are trying to find international clients for their web design company (309), and it is only a matter of time, Bhagat hints, before they will reign over their own multinational firm, striking a blow for Indian nationalism and market domination. Taking into consideration the aforementioned scene in which Varun/Vroom erases the differences of the call-centre workers and turns them into a collective entity by virtue of his impassioned speech, one may accordingly recall Basu’s description of metropolitan Hindutva as dissolving “all differences – of caste, class, religion, and region – . . . into a new Sanskritized Hindu nation that [can] be harnessed to a global Anglophone hegemony” (x). For Basu, “Bhagat provides contemporary Hindutva with a much needed apolitical face, resplendent in its upwardly mobile youthfulness” (184).

Emma Dawson Varuguese points out that in recent Indian literature, India’s newfound status as a so-called global superpower is echoed in the postcolonial subject’s willingness to adapt to and participate in a globalized world in flux (205). Of this “afterlife of the postcolonial condition,” Basu comments more critically that it is “characterized by a general civic culture in which the intellectual and political power of the narrative of decolonization has collapsed and nations have come to increasingly write themselves into empire, rather than oppose or counter it”

(x). Likewise, in One Night the protagonists’ agenda is more in keeping with their participation in a globalized marketplace than in engaging in any sustained resistance to neo-imperialism – even if this participation is itself framed as a form of resistance to the US. The call-centre agents are able to triumph over the novel’s villains by accessing upward mobility through the power of the transnational workplace. But even as capitalism solves these characters’ problems, it requires them to mimic their erstwhile foes – and, unlike more productive forms of mimicry that inspire resistance among the oppressed, it leaves the call centre untouched; in fact, thanks to the

41 workers, their transnational office is stronger than ever before. Nonetheless, the theme of the call centre ultimately providing its workers with nationalist community, upward mobility and a happy ending is echoed in other works of call-centre lit, highlighting the ambivalence with which outsourcing and globalization are seen in India. This sense of nationalist unity is, again, seen when Vroom reveals his plan to prevent the call centre in One Night from being shut down, and the office responds affirmatively to his entreaties for community and solidarity. Further, among the central characters, Shyam is reunited with Priyanka, Vroom with Esha, and Radhika moves into Esha’s apartment. Only two of the six principal characters make an attempt to reunite with their families after this; the remainder – most notably Priyanka – do not rekindle these relationships, finding community instead in their fellow employees or former employees of the call centre. Consequently, in One Night, one’s colleagues can replace one’s family as sources of strength and solace. The call centre can in this light be seen positively as a place where, through the power of communal action, one’s erstwhile family can be rejected and a new and improved family gained. Likewise, in popular entertainment, Dyer writes, an initial sense of fragmentation

–caused, crucially, by capitalism—is replaced by a theme of community resulting from capitalism, and represented by utopian feelings of “togetherness, sense of belonging” (25). As the economy changes with processes of liberalization and globalization, so does the Indian family; indeed, Bhagat has said a central theme of his writing is this generational divide

(McCrum). In her research into the changes being enacted in the middle-class family amid globalization, Heinreke Donner notes that concerns have arisen around “new intergenerational conflicts, which are often depicted as the inevitable consequence of economic transformation”

(29). And, as Nadeem discovers in his analysis of Indian outsourcing, “Offshoring workers are caught between (imagined) tradition and (imagined) modernity, anxiety and pride; restless to shake off family encumbrances but reluctant to fully do so” (181). The call-centre workers in the

42 novel have been altered by their transnational labour, ghettoized and alienated from their families by their late hours and globalized outlook. Basi comments,

Transnational Indian call-centre workers participate in globalizing discourses and

processes, by way of their interaction with people living outside India, which in turn

produce globalized identities. The production of these identities is contingent upon their

access to these globalizing processes and thus serves to create “disjunctures” [Appadurai

1996] between themselves and those not working in the call-centre industry. (34)

The workers’ alienation from less globalized Indians leads, then, to One Night’s call-centre workers creating the only community where they belong: the family created by their fellow globalized, transnational colleagues. Notably, popular cultural discourses around the alienating effects of globalization and transnational labour are turned inside out and rendered positive when the “natural” family is lost and a new office-family is gained. But this theme of happiness at the expense of Indian family and a sense of tradition is also reflected in some positive discourses in the media surrounding globalization and outsourcing: for example, journalist Anand

Giridharadas describes how “tales of call-centre jobs and freedom in the city” have begun to free

Indians from the confines of caste and religion. This troubling discourse holds that by replacing

Hinduism with capitalism, they can achieve a measure of success and happiness that was previously considered impossible. In other words, as Gaiutra Bahadur writes sardonically in a review of Giridharadas’ work, capitalism “accomplishes what the Naxalites and Nehru failed to achieve.” But, outside their bubble, the workers have grown distant from less globalized members of their society (often represented by their families), who are unable to understand their transnational subjectivities. This theme of alienation at once mirrors and expands on the stance of Jorge Heine and Ramesh Thakur, who write that globalization has led to “[t]he deepening of poverty and inequality – prosperity for a few countries and people, marginalisation and exclusion

43 for the many” (NP). Call-centre lit suggests that the upward mobility gained by India’s globalized middle classes working in the call-centre and transnational company results in the exclusion of “the many.” In addition, it produces a sense of anxious alienation or deterritorialization for those who, like the call-centre workers, are entering the ranks of “the few” and recognizing, on some level, that their newfound upward mobility and globalized subjectivity create new elite communities, even as, paradoxically, a sense of nationalist unity and reterritorialization is fostered in the books.

While Bhagat does not criticize the use of Indian Standard English in One Night, a certain ambivalence can nonetheless be discerned in the novel’s linguistic borrowing of Hindi at several significant moments, which troubles the book’s English linguistic utopia and sheds insight into an intriguing incongruity on the part of Bhagat, who writes exclusively in English. Channeling

Shyam, Bhagat includes flashbacks in the text to a happier time in the character’s life, before the call centre robs him entirely of his spirit and identity. In these sections of the novel, Hindi words are used for family relationships – as in didi (60), meaning “sister” – and the titles of songs

“Mahi Ve” and “Dil Chahta Hai” (115, 122), while in Shyam’s unhappy present Hindi words are used only to denote some of life’s basic necessities, including items of clothing like the salwar kameez and dupatta (225) and food and drink, such as parathas and chai (37-8), which have no real English equivalent. As Shyam slips further away from his ‘authentic’ Indian identity and his depression grows, his culture and family relationships likewise begin to melt away (as symbolized by the Hindi words’ disappearance from the almost completely English lexicon of the text), and his national identity is accordingly depicted as tied to India by only a few threads, reduced to significations of the bare necessities of life within India. Rather than revealing some form of subversive linguistic hybridity here, then, Shyam’s language shows that the English of the call centre comes to dominate all discussion of the call centre and life outside it; the hybridity

44 of Hinglish shifts slowly into the monopolistic stranglehold of English. This conflict between

English and Hindi is mirrored symbolically in One Night, with the novel’s love interest Radhika offered a symbolic choice between a relationship with Shyam, represented by the dhaba (a small, very informal restaurant on the side of a highway usually frequented by truck drivers), and one with Ganesh, a wealthy American of Indian heritage, who is represented by a five-star restaurant

(165, 301). While the dhaba, significantly referred to in Hindi (instead of, say, the English word

“truckstop”), is described as bearing greater emotional appeal, the English-signified five-star restaurant is elite and promises comfort—but lacks the cultural significance and pleasures of the dhaba. As we have seen, English is valorized in One Night as a tool with which to achieve reterritorialization via a nationalist victory and upward mobility. However, Bhagat’s occasional use of Hindi in the text relates English not only to wealth and comfort, but also to cultural alienation and deterritorialization and to the replacement of a more vital linguistic hybridity with a homogenizing English. Just as Bhagat displays ambivalence towards globalization, then, so does he reveal more generally his anxiety about the use of English in India as compared with a native language.

Once Upon a Timezone: The international division of labour as global love affair

Published in 2006, a year after One Night, Neelesh Misra’s novel Once Upon a Timezone is, as its title implies, a kind of light-hearted fairy tale set in an age of Indian outsourcing and globalization. Featuring the “upper-caste, middle-class, low-income” Neel Pandey, who is mandated by his New Delhi call centre to become ‘Neil Patterson,’ “a white guy working in New

York” (Misra 86), Once Upon tackles weighty matters like globalized labour and the international division of labour, national identity, homosexuality, race, and feminism in India and the US, but in a breezy and humorous manner rife with authorial asides that mix a heavy sardonicism with unabashed bathos. While in a more ‘literary’ work by, say, Rohinton Mistry,

45 the outing of minor lesbian character Minal could signal the start of a tragic and harrowing journey, Misra determinedly provides her, and the rest of his characters, with the happy endings a fairy tale requires. And unlike Bhagat’s work, which has at its heart a strong sense of bitterness

– and even vengeful anger – about India’s relatively subordinate position on the world economic stage in relation to the US, Misra offers readers a more cheerful multicultural and cosmopolitan take. In his text, tensions between the US and India – and call-centre worker and caller – are reconciled in the figures of Neel and his American crush Angela Cruz, whom he woos over the phone under the guise of his American identity and accent but whose heart is only won when

Neel embraces his Indianness. Nonetheless, the text reveals similar concerns as One Night about the effects of globalization on Indian identity. These become particularly evident in examining the prestige allotted to the English language in India and the positioning of various privileged and undermined accents in the global labour market. Globalization in Misra’s work – as manifested through the call centre, particularly in its American accent and culture classes – can have a deleterious, deterritorializing effect on Indian identity. On the other hand, it opens a space for reterritorialization through cosmopolitan upward mobility and companionship, reviving

Neel’s once-floundering sense of national pride and offering the character a distinctly nationalistic victory. In contrast to One Night, however, this victory is one in which the US and

India can coexist peacefully. In the pages that follow, I’ll look at how the English language and accent classes of the call centre are approached in the book in a way that signals both anxiety and optimism about the effects of globalization on India and its middle classes.

Like One Night, Once Upon highlights the global market value of a feigned American identity and expresses discomfort with the call centre’s requirement that the Indian worker assume an American mask. “The most precious acquisitions you will have to sacrifice at the workplace,” announces Ms. Lily, Neel’s “lean and mean” accent coach at the call centre (85),

“will be…your identity and your name” (86). The word “acquisitions” here is revealing: the call centre decouples the worker from his or her ‘true’ self, just as globalization itself deracinates culture from place and leads to deterritorialization, and identity under the tutelage of Ms. Lily becomes a mere acquisition amid the cultural fragmentation and rampant consumerism commonly associated with globalization. Misra lavishes much comic and scatological detail on

“India’s colossal cultural diversity…in all its…linguistic finery” in these scenes, showing how workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar pronounce ‘nervous’ as ‘narbhous’; those from

Uttaranchal and Himachal pronounce ‘sit down’ as ‘shit down’; Punjabi workers say ‘Be my gas’ for ‘Be my guest’; the Assamese say ‘dare’ for ‘there’; and, finally, men and women from Tamil

Nadu render ‘What are you doing?’ into ‘Vaat aar yoo doinggg?’ (88-9) But Ms. Lily’s accent lessons unify these disparate groups into a cohesive Americanized (and linguistically homogenized) whole; by the end of this chapter, her students become “foot soldiers for the massive American corporations.” Misra continues in this martial vein: “The battle was to create a surreal, seamless call centre world where there would be no continent, no country, just a huge network of transcontinental phone links, where thousands of sleepy men and women would chat nonstop with tormented, impatient, angry, rude and sometimes just plain dumb customers” (89-

90). The call centre is explicitly linked to the deterritorialization inherent to globalization and globalized labour in this passage, and certainly not in a celebratory way; rather, the world turns into a war zone in which the underslept workers are pitted against the dumb callers and neither are happy – as well as a world in which national identity no longer exists, reflected in the fact that neither group is defined by the terms ‘Indian’ or ‘American.’ Misra’s metaphor of war here recalls the call-centre workers’ ‘war’ against the American multinational and their callers in One

Night and likewise reflects a similar feeling of unease about globalization, which in the shape of the call centre is perceived as erasing both nation and national identity. Indeed, this narrative is

47 mirrored – as I discussed earlier – in academic discourses surrounding globalization, with

Appadurai, Hardt, and Negri, among many others, equating the rise of globalization with the downfall of the nation-state as we currently know it.

But even as the accent-homogenization practices of the call centre are criticized in Once

Upon, Misra does not attack the broader use of English in the Indian context. Rather, he employs

Hinglish in the novel – in contrast to his protagonist Neel’s use of Standard English – to mark class differences and for comic effect as characters like Rocky, procurer of illegal travel visas, and his minion the Voice bumble their way through the text and mangle ‘proper’ English. The

Voice, who is described as a naïve former rustic, perpetually uses the indicative present verb tense (“I am helping” [Misra 57]) rather than the present or future tense a North American might be more inclined to use. Unlike the metropolitan and high-caste Neel, the Voice is, despite his promising name, not an ideal call-centre candidate. According to Puja Gupta, an accent trainer at a call centre,

We have to eradicate all trace of Indianness so that [workers] begin to speak a more

global English…We tell people not to ask 'What is your good name' and we try to stop

them using the 'ing' form of the verb – to say 'I have' instead of 'I am having.' These are

genuine Indianisms and people would immediately know that the caller is not from the

U.S. This kind of language can hinder your communication with people from the U.K. or

the U.S." (Gentleman)

Instead of valorizing Hinglish in the text as another example of India’s diverse “linguistic finery,” or celebrating the non-standard use of diasporic Englishes as a subversion of the

American corporations’ dictates, however, Misra plays these language differences for laughs.18

18 This connection of Hinglish with comical buffoonery reflects the elitist and conservative viewpoint on language- mixing of critics like Trivedi: “the major peril of…promoting a demotic dialect like Hinglish is that we may soon be left with neither Hindi nor English but just Hinglish. It is the kind of thing that has already happened through an

At a meeting held by Rocky, for example, his inept friends boast of their mastery of English by crying, in place of ‘I speak English,’ “Myself speaking English!” (155), much to Rocky’s comical chagrin. (We are also told that his personal English expert is unable to attend the meeting because he needs to study after failing – wait for it – an English exam.) Hinglish, then, is not a viable alternative to the global, denationalized English language in the book; but neither is Hindi, which is for the most part linked in the text with a boring and passé sense of tradition and familial responsibility. The first instance of Hindi to appear in the book, notably, relates to

Neel’s recurring nightmare that his orthodox and strait-laced (and resolutely anti-American and anti-globalization) father will send him to Allahabad to tend to a mushroom farm, marry a conservative Indian farm girl, and accordingly sacrifice his global ambitions to Gandhian ideals of rural community and communal achievement (18).19 Misra carefully shows the value of

English as a linguistic commodity, as opposed to dull Hindi or low-class Hinglish, with Neel winning his job, a passage to the US, and his American wife all thanks to his English prowess – a skill that itself is made possible thanks at least in part to the call centre’s accent neutralization classes. So even as Misra criticizes the nightmarish nationless world brought about by American corporations and the linguistic homogenization associated with globalization, he also – like

Bhagat – accurately highlights the value of English in globalized India, where most higher education and prestigious jobs require some measure of English fluency. The many varieties of

interaction between native languages and colonially imposed English in several parts of Africa and the West Indies. A consequence of pidgin or a creole becoming the lingua franca in these countries is that this fractured, fragmented language is the only one most of their population has any access to. They can speak it and get by in it in their daily lives but it is doubtful if it can facilitate serious engagement of any kind or expression of any intellectual inquiry or creative conceptualization. When characters speaking in it are put into books, as for example in VS Naipaul’s early novels including that masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas, many characters sound irredeemably comic and half-witted just because they say things such as ‘What you doin’, man?’” (2013, xxiii). As is perhaps needless for me to mention, I strongly disagree with this characterization of pidgins and creoles. The work of Kamau Brathwaite is one example of the powerful and ‘serious’ poetry that can be created through language- mixing. 19 Similarly, in another work of call-centre lit, Piece of Cake by Swati Kaushal, the mother of narrator Minal constantly threatens her with being exiled to the countryside to can fruits and vegetables for the poor.

Indian English that are, crucially, not Hinglish are viewed in the book as native Indian languages in their own right; much as in One Night, it is a homogenized American accent that is demonized, not an ‘authentic’ Indian one.

Just as certain varieties of Indian English are deemed unproblematic in Once Upon, so is globalized labour held to be acceptable if it retains a distinctly Indian flavour and identity and adds to India’s prestige or helps it gain power. Neel’s facility with English, for example, allows him to meet Angela, but he is only able to win her over when he combines his linguistic prowess with Indian pride (as is the case with One Night’s Shyam and Priyanka). In a series of progressively more unlikely and absurd plot developments, Neel finds himself in the US, accompanying Rocky, the Voice, and a gang of Punjabi farmers and truck-drivers to New York

City – where Angela lives – and acting as their English interpreter at an international chess tournament. While the Punjabi men pretend to be chess experts and prepare, as part of Rocky’s scheme, to sneak away afterward to new lives in the US as illegal immigrants, Neel gives interviews to major American media outlets about chess strategies that he claims were invented by the non-existent National Chess Academy in India (231). Rather than pretending to be

American, as he has done for most of the book, Neel finally embraces his national identity in this scene and stands as the representative of the Indian team at this global event. And only when he commits to living in India for the rest of his life – after longing to move to Manhattan for much of the text – does he begin to win Angela’s respect after nearly losing her when she finds out that he is a “phoney” American (233). All of this is coupled with the nationalistic victory which, true to the overall tone of Once Upon, takes a light-hearted and silly aspect in the text: the earthy but clever Punjabi farmers-cum-chess masters somehow win their games against their Western opponents or receive a draw (225-7). Furthermore, Angela moves to India to be with Neel – reversing the typical immigration narrative and giving India the power in this new formulation of

50 geography and desire – and Neel, now a cosmopolitan and globe-trotting success, quits the call centre and sets up an outsourcing firm of his own (244). No longer a mere foot soldier for the

American corporation, he is now a proud Indian competitor – even if he, too, is invested in the sort of cosmopolitan, border-crossing, nation-eradicating outsourcing practices that are condemned earlier in the text. The call centre, then, provides the impetus for all of Once Upon’s happy endings and gives the protagonist the tools to succeed, even as Misra treats the American multinational with deep ambivalence for most of the text. Again, as Dyer remarks, in popular entertainment global capital creates the problems and tensions – such as Neel’s lack of pride in

India and the artifice of his American persona; in other words, his deterritorialization – that it then resolves, resulting in a reterritorializing globalized-nationalist conclusion for the character.

Once Upon can, in this context, be read most productively not as a subversion of globalization and American-led cultural homogenization, but, like One Night, as in fact asserting and reifying the importance and power of globalization and the multinational, provided these are presided over by Indians. The ending of the novel, in which the now-cosmopolitan Angela and Neel are married and living together in Delhi, may even be read as the symbolic culmination of the relationship of Indian call-centre worker and American caller: locked to each other for the rest of their lives in employee and client satisfaction; constantly crossing borders and cultures, but in a newly affirmative manner; and experiencing a love that transcends even the gratification of a job well done. Globalization and nationalism, then, become reconciled at the end of the novel, with

Neel’s sense of Indian nationalism newly grounded on globalized foundations.

Bangalore Calling: Tradition and modernity in the call centre

While Brinda S. Narayan’s book of interconnected short stories Bangalore Calling20 is in a colourful paperback format, written in an English interspersed with various Indian languages, and occupied with themes centering on the Indian call centre, globalization, and nationalism, it is less easy to classify it as a work of call-centre lit than One Night or Once Upon. Its price at 295 rupees is significantly higher than that of the other works; its short story format does not fit easily within the blockbuster paradigm; the back cover contains blurbs from several respected scholars and journalists; and, perhaps most importantly, the book’s sense of utopia at its conclusion – following Dyer’s injunction that popular entertainment must close with a capitalist utopian conclusion – is far weaker than in the other texts discussed thus far, providing a foretaste of the even more ambivalent literary works analyzed in Chapters 2 and 3. This in turn recalls

Pierre Bourdieu’s insight in Distinction that more ‘highbrow’ works of entertainment contain a sense of distance from the worlds they depict (5). Narayan does not always allow her audience to empathize with the call-centre staff she depicts. Some characters, like Yvette and Bitty, are flawed yet sympathetic; but it is difficult for the reader to find anything to like about Natalie, a racist American religious fundamentalist who visits the Indian office. Furthermore, by showing that global capitalism – again, in the form of the call centre and multinational – leads to despair and ruin for some workers, but a new sense of purpose and nationalist pride for others, Narayan’s work does not offer quite the same victorious endings we see in the other two texts.

Abhijit Gupta comments on popular and literary fiction in India: “in recent years, the border separating the two has proved to be a porous one, with frequent crossings in both directions. This in turn has weakened the established dichotomy between the popular and the

20 Interestingly, Narayan’s title alludes to “London calling,” which was used by the BBC to identify itself during World War II when broadcasting to occupied countries.

52 literary, and has called into question our practice of applying different critical tools to the works so classified” (1023). In combining literary with popular elements, Bangalore Calling functions as a sort of liminal space between the pulp works I have discussed in this chapter and the more

‘highbrow’ books like Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New

India that I’ll discuss in the following chapters. All of these books, I argue, echo widespread concerns around globalization and nationalist responses to globalizing phenomena. Although

Narayan seems far warier than Bhagat and Misra of ‘New India’ and all it entails, like them she upholds nationalism and pride in national identity and culture as a remedy to the influx of culturally homogenizing Americanization – and like them, she links this influx with the martial, using metaphors of war to describe its penetration of Indian identity and culture. Through the lens of English and the use of various accents and identities in the global marketplace, the author also shows that the deterritorialization inherent in the globalization of the call centre is eventually met with an attempted reterritorialization, which takes the form of nationalism and national and cultural pride. In its heavily nationalist slant, Bangalore does not fit easily into the mould of highbrow world literature, one of whose principal characteristics is its emphasis on cosmopolitanism and hybridity rather than nationalism (Brouillette 60). That Bangalore can be situated right on the border of popular and literary forms of Indo-Anglian literature signals not only the dominance of globalization and its effects on middle-class Indian mindsets but internationally too, given that ‘literary’ Indian work tends to be geared towards a metropolitan

Western audience and written by diasporic authors living in the West. A concern with globalization, then, would appear to be a global phenomenon, with the call centre acting as the locus of these anxieties and hopes. As with my discussion of One Night and Once Upon, I’ll look at Bangalore’s focus on the accent neutralization of the call centre, use of Hinglish, and larger function of the call centre as a symbol and site of globalization in the text, and will examine how

53 these reflect broader discourses about the Indian call centre as glamorous object of international fascination.

In “Over Curry Dinner,” call-centre accent trainer Yvette struggles with the moral implications of her job, which she sees as rendering once-‘authentic’ Indians into “a population of half-breeds, counterfeits and shams, who belonged neither here nor there” (8). For example, after Yvette teaches her class of call-centre “freshers” to speak with an American accent, a formerly “diffident woman now flaunted a false brashness [and a] Tamilian flung his American r’s with the spunk of a novice soldier” (4). Her co-trainer Akriti, meanwhile, criticizes Yvette’s misgivings, telling her, “man, you’re one hell of an uptight person . . . Here I am, giving them a chance to . . . learn the lingo, walk the talk and you keep interjecting with moral science lessons

[about the superiority of India to America] . . . C’mon, ya, it’s a global world, everyone has a choice, and they can be whatever they want to be” (19). The cover of the book, furthermore, features a glaring and ferocious Uncle Sam pointing his finger at the reader – an image that brings to mind recruitment posters in the US in times of war. Americanness, then, is associated here with martial aggression, which in turn is reminiscent of the ‘terrorism’ of Bhagat’s call- centre workers and Misra’s Indian “foot soldiers” for American multinationals. Tomlinson likewise notes that discourses attacking the supposed cultural homogenization inherent to globalization often use “the peculiarly martial language of 'invasion', 'attack', 'assault' and so on rather than the neutral or even positively valued notion of 'influence'” (23).

As in One Night and Once Upon, English does not seem to be as problematic in the context of call-centre lit as the American accent with which the workers are taught to speak; while English appears for the most part to have become a national language in the text (reflecting

Aijaz Ahmad’s comments that this has long been the case in highbrow Indo-Anglian literature

[77]) and therefore does not rob Indians of their cultural identity and heritage. Non-Indian

54 accents and the nefarious Americanizing influence of the call centre lead Narayan’s workers to such bad behaviours as crass materialism and a lack of filial respect, as in the story “Platinum”, and debauchery, drug addiction, and (horrors!) rock and roll, as in “Magic Mushrooms”. Rather than celebrating hybridity, then, as is the case in much highbrow Indo-Anglian literature,

Bangalore Calling evinces a deep anxiety about it.21 If Bangalore’s conservatism seems at times somewhat laughable, it nonetheless emphasizes the Indian middle classes’ anxiety surrounding the purported cultural homogenization enacted by globalizing processes. It is worth reiterating, however, that national identities are not static and fixed entities that are first pure and then, with the onslaught of globalization, become contaminated by the moral decay Narayan associates with outsourcing and the call centre. Although one cannot discount the influence of modernity, imperialism, and neoimperialism, identities and cultures are always in the process of change and being shaped by outside influences. Moreover, as Benedict Anderson reminds us in Imagined

Communities, national identity and nationalism are themselves symptoms of modernity, just as globalization is a part of modernity. Although Narayan sometimes appears to see globalization and nationalism as dialectically opposed forces (as do the other works discussed in this chapter), it is more productive to see them as coterminous forces – as arising, in other words, often in conjunction with each other. Narayan indeed suggests in “Over Curry Dinner” that for every

Akriti ‘selling out’ her Indian authenticity in favour of a global identity and upward mobility, there is an Yvette who counters this homogenization with her own brand of nationalist

21 Notably, the author also problematizes Yvette’s nationalism by showing readers that she is from an Anglo-Indian family and raised on prejudice and the subsequent fear of both literal and figurative forms of contamination (8). Nonetheless, she is probably the most sympathetic character in the book; her resistance to the call centre is seen as heroic, and she is referenced more often than any other character in the work. Yvette also functions as a stand- in for the author figure, as the novel closes with the character determined to write a work of fiction on the call centre.

55 cheerleading. The call-centre workers’ deterritorialization, accordingly, is met with the reterritorialization of national pride.

Linguistic value in the call centre

While One Night depicts a fairly homogenous linguistic universe in which every character speaks more or less the same kind of English peppered with Hindi, and Once Upon uses Hinglish mostly for comic effect, Bangalore features certain notable instances of Hinglish or other vernaculars in the predominantly Standard English text to indicate the inequality inherent to globalization. Therefore, although the book does not criticize the English language directly as it is used in the Indian context, or in any case shows far less concern with English, broadly speaking, than with the global marketplace’s valorization of the American accent, it does show that certain classes are shut out of the opportunities of globalization regardless of their proficiency in adopting an American accent. In “The Callus Demon,” for instance, driver

Panduranga, charged with ferrying higher-caste and higher-class call-centre workers between their offices and homes, can only speak Kannada and Telugu with a few snatches of Hindi at the beginning of the story. Accordingly, the text is more interspersed with bhasha than any of

Narayan’s other tales (with the exception of “Deodorized,” another story about a low-caste worker). Panduranga’s chief antagonist is a call-centre agent whom he names the Rakshasa – a

Hindu demon that devours human flesh – and who won’t allow him to listen to his Telugu religious music in the cab. Instead, the worker imperiously demands that the driver only play

Western rock and roll and complains to Panduranga’s boss when he refuses, who in turn threatens to fire the hapless driver. The complaining passenger only speaks in English and, significantly, addresses the driver with Americanisms like ‘dude’ and ‘man’ (44). Panduranga meanwhile must “[cloak his] grievances in sullen silence” (31), trapped by his inability to speak

56 the elite language.22 By the end of the story, however, Narayan tells us that the driver’s “mastery over English had, in the recent past, overtaken his proficiency in Hindi” (45) because he is repeatedly forced to engage with his insufferable passenger. Panduranga is now also discouraged and disempowered, an erstwhile true believer now angry with his god (45). Like a Rakshasa, then, the English-speaking call-centre worker seems to feed on the driver’s hope and faith, leaving him an empty shell at the end of the story. English, particularly American English, is consequently linked to power for those who have mastered it, and injustice and powerlessness for those who cannot speak it fluently. There are losers amid globalization, Narayan tells us; and

Panduranga, lacking the English required to build a career and achieve upward mobility in the call centre or in a globalized world, is one of them.

In Bangalore Calling, the insidious power of the call centre directly or indirectly leads to tawdry sex, family discord, materialism, huge amounts of debt, and, as I have discussed, a loss of national pride and ‘authentic’ indigenous culture. But as in One Night and Once Upon, the call centre is also able to offer some tools to its workers to combat the negative effects of globalization. Bitty Menon, one of Narayan’s most tragic and beleaguered call-centre worker characters, is rendered by the call centre into the American ‘Betty Adams’ in the story

“Platinum.” This process of renaming and re-accenting seems to lead immediately to virulent materialism and thus her identification “more with the Kate Andersons of America than with colleagues at her centre. She was, after all, saving up every hard-earned rupee to pay for those new Gucci sunglasses” (81). She picks fights with her father, a doctor of Ayurveda, who is figured in the story as the very embodiment of an affirmative and authentic Indian tradition – and

22 Nadeem describes a manager at an outsourcing firm as commenting that English fluency in the key determinant of workers’ ability to ascend the corporate ladder (126). Accordingly, Panduranga spends most of the story in the call centre’s basement waiting for the agents to finish work – he is both literally and figuratively at the bottom of the call centre’s power structure.

57 who, notably, often speaks to his daughter in Malayalam or Kannada to prescribe her Ayurvedic remedies, although she only ever replies in English and dismisses what she sees as his outdated advice (77; 85-7). The story ends with her desperately alienated from her parents and trapped in her newfound globalized modernity, which stands in contrast to what Bitty sees as her father’s serene sense of tradition, “unshakeable morality [and] preening righteousness” (93). “Platinum” ends, in other words, with Bitty’s deterritorialization: the call centre uproots her from local tradition and culture, leaving her desperate and alone – an unhappy hybrid in a family of

‘authentic’ Indians otherwise untainted by globalization.

But just as globalization leads to deterritorialization, so does it offer the possibility of concurrent reterritorialization through an affirmation of national and cultural identity and pride.

Our heroine Bitty reappears in Narayan’s story “Deliver Us From Evil,” in which she receives a secret abortion before her shift at the call centre. There, “despite Bitty putting on her best

Midwestern voice” (257), an American caller asks if ‘Betty’ is Indian.

‘Yes,’ said Bitty, dropping her accent. Why bother when [the caller] knew anyway? . . .

‘So what’s your real name? It can’t be Betty Adams?’ [the caller] said, her voice crusted

with contempt. ‘It’s Bitty Menon.’ She pronounced it like [her father] did, her n’s

emphatically nasal. ‘Goddamned Indians don’t understand a shit [sic]. I don’t want to talk

to a fucking Indian,’ [the American replies.] ‘You know something, mahdum,’ said Bitty,

switching to her nasal Malayali-English. ‘I don’t want to speak in a fuhking accent

eidherrr. I guess we zimmbbbleee don’t have a choice, do we?’ Her parents, if they’d

been listening, would have understood her headphone speak, the only time in a billion

calls. Usually they found her words perplexing. (257)

When Bitty stops performing her American identity at the call centre and recovers her indigenous one through her own Malayali-English accent, she is able to define herself against

58 her Western callers, rather than identifying with them, as she did earlier – much to her detriment

– in “Platinum.” Moreover, in actively using her own father’s nasal accents, as we see in this passage, she is able to repair her relationship with her parents and shed the alienation and fragmented subjectivity brought about by her erstwhile globalized hybridity. In the story’s last lines, Narayan writes, “Bitty wasn’t sure when she left the centre that night if it was a hormonal shift or something else, but she was awash in relief. When she got home, she buried herself in her mother’s soft sari: ‘Love you, Amma,’ she said, snug and fearless, a warmth spreading inside her for the first time in many months” (258). In contrast to One Night, globalization does not give Bitty a ‘new and improved’ family or community of global hybridized peers, but it does help her return to her old family. Accordingly, the call centre offers Bitty the chance to both lose her national identity and retrieve it once more through globalization’s own tools: by engaging with invariably unsympathetic American callers who allow her to reterritorialize and redefine herself again as proudly Indian.

Conclusion: Whither the call-centre worker?

The call-centre lit discussed in this paper often offers a happy ending – an alternative to the initially stifling, alienating, and deterritorializing globalized workplace in the novel – through that same call centre or transnational workplace. These sites ultimately provide the protagonists with, to varying degrees, a route toward utopian visions of community, success, and reterritorialization. Accordingly, the utopianism to be found within popular fiction is somewhat circumscribed, as it must necessarily work from within the capitalist soil where it has taken root.

However, this capitalist happy ending is simultaneously undermined: in One Night and

Bangalore Calling, globalized workers are alienated from less globalized members of their society, as represented by their traditional families. Although the workers in One Night band together in solidarity, forming stronger community bonds, they ultimately seem to operate at a

59 great remove from less globalized Indian subjectivities than theirs. Their newly globalized, hybrid personas and ways of speaking can only be fully understood by each other, and a sense of alienation therefore still prevails at the call centre and multinational. While the endings of these novels are therefore to some extent utopian, the call centres and transnational companies they depict reflect Foucault’s vision of the heterotopia; as such, they “suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (3). What they do, in other words, is reveal in miniature the larger macro processes enacted by globalization and alternately champion and undermine these. In addition, the heterotopias depicted here occupy a space between Foucault’s heterotopia of crisis – in which an extreme transition in identity is undergone, as with the adolescents and pregnant women that Foucault lists – and a heterotopia of deviation, “in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed” (5). The workers described in call-centre lit undergo a profound transition within the call centre or transnational workplace, assuming a hybrid identity not quite Indian and yet not Western or American –an identity we may only be able to describe, vaguely, as

‘globalized’ – which places them in a heterotopia of crisis. On the other hand, their alienation from their given societies indicates that in some sense they also work from within a heterotopia of deviation, where their globalized identities are regarded as deviant by their families, therefore forcing them to create families out of their colleagues. In entering the heterotopian zone of the call centre and transnational workplace, the protagonists of call-centre lit grow increasingly hybridized as they are taught to mimic American accents and assume new names. Homi K.

Bhabha famously writes in The Location of Culture that hybridity subverts the colonial “rules of recognition” and creates new sites of power, even as, in his 2006 prologue to the Routledge edition, he comments ruefully that the global cosmopolitanism of outsourcing “readily celebrates a world of plural cultures and peoples located at the periphery, so long as they produce healthy

60 margins within metropolitan societies” (12). Raka Shome further argues that the virtual diaspora of the call centre indicates that “hybridity need[s] to be delinked from [its] taken for granted association with disruption and resistance” (119). As Shome, Narayan, and Trivedi, among others, would have it, the hybridity of the call-centre workers is deeply problematic – in contrast to the accepted postcolonial valorization of hybridity – as it serves only to reinforce the homogenization they see as inherent in globalization.

This leads me to a question that has often come up in my study of these books, particularly while poring over academic grant applications where the well-worn postcolonial tropes of subversion and resistance had to be foregrounded repeatedly in order to prove my project’s value: apart from its evident nationalist anxieties about the deterritorializing effects of globalization, is call-centre lit – and, by extension, the middle-class Indians who form its protagonists and make up the bulk of its readership – at all subversive of or resistant to global capital and globalizing phenomena? Can call-centre lit even be described as “postcolonial literature,” when the latter is typically linked (whether accurately or not) with narratives of resistance against imperialist or neoimperialist hegemony? Dawson Varuguese argues that books like One Night have moved ‘beyond the postcolonial’: in her view, postmillennial fiction in India typically “engages with the contemporary” and “explores issues of the globalized world in relation to the country from which the writing is produced” (229). Instead of dwelling on past injustices or international inequality, she says, these novels celebrate India’s sunny future amid globalization. In a similar vein, India’s English-speaking middle classes are described by

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad as:

tak[ing] India’s new status [as emerging superpower] for granted . . . and mov[ing] on to

talk of economic opportunities. This commitment to their own idea of India and their

central role in its economic rise makes the middle classes sure of themselves. But. . . they

do not, on the whole, extend a sense of solidarity to the poor; they often do not

acknowledge the role of the state in their own rise or its capacity to solve any of the

country’s problems; and they are, in general, politically apathetic.

Nadeem echoes this sentiment in commenting that this middle-class apathy, combined with a vague but fervent enthusiasm for Indian globalization, generally pervades the Indian call centres he studies: most call-centre workers and managers he spoke to only wanted to beat the West at its own game by decisively replacing the US as a world economic superpower (71). This group is, he concludes, “a comprador bourgeoisie” (61).

As I hope to have shown, however, I think this reading of call-centre lit (and some of its higher-brow antecedents), as well as the political sympathies of the middle classes of ‘new

India,’ is too simplistic. First, it presupposes snobbishly that Indian popular fiction and its audience have been duped by the promises of globalization and more enlightened scholars like ourselves must convert them into subversive dissidents acceptable to liberal Western academic tastes. (It is notable, too, that the most ‘highbrow’ of the works analyzed in this chapter,

Bangalore Calling, is also the one least optimistic about globalization and global labour.) While globalization undeniably causes severe problems of inequality, one must be wary of taking what

Tomlinson describes as a “touristic” (2009, 108) and romanticized view of a pure indigenous authenticity – which, as we see in the books discussed, is simply the other face of deterritorialization: a reterritorialization fuelled by a renewed nationalism based on a mythic and monolithic Indian tradition, culture, and identity. In the face of the vitriol levelled against the

‘new’ Indian middle classes one may recall Nandy’s comparison of fifteenth-century Aztec priests refusing to convert to Christianity, even when threatened with death by their colonial overlords, with hypothetical Brahmins in the same situation: Nandy informs us that the Brahmins would doubtless split their personalities in this instance and convert to Christianity. “To them,”

62 he writes, “the conversion and the humiliation would be happening to a self which is already seen and felt as somebody else or as somebody else’s. This is a self from whom one is already somewhat abstracted and alienated” (108-9). The Aztec priest is deemed heroic and the Brahmin seen as a coward, Nandy suggests, because the Aztec effectively steps out of the way to allow imperialism to occur more smoothly; but the Brahmin remains marked by a negatively-valenced hybridity and remains a thorn in the side of both colonials and nationalists, who share common myths about racial and cultural purity (111). In his or her hybridity, the call-centre agent can perhaps be likened to this hypothetical Brahmin. We want the middle-class globalized worker to be more heroic in the face of globalization – but why? Is it because it is easier for the postcolonial academic to ‘rescue’ the subaltern (who is, like the Aztec, voiceless, as Spivak famously describes) than to save the conflicted bourgeois white-collar worker? Must all postcolonial works deserving of our attention be populated by martyrs;23 and do academics in other, whiter fields of English literature require the same in order to secure their funding?

Second, pace Dawson Varuguese, I see postmillennial Indian literature in English as displaying far more concern with the international division of labour and homogenization of culture under globalization than the optimism she sees there. With their martial metaphors for globalization and attention to the attendant loss of cultural pride, the call-centre books show both optimism for the future and a sense of mourning for the past and what is being lost, as well as attention to global inequalities in power and labour, particularly between India and the US.24

Finally, the attention to the global in these books (and the Indian middle classes’ fascination with

23 See Victor Li’s work on necroidealism. 24 Of course, one of the problems with this viewpoint, as I alluded to at the end of my introductory chapter, is the Indian bourgeoisie sees globalization primarily as a form of cultural imperialism – of the alien American culture infiltrating the local one, which can be remedied by a renewed focus on “pure” Indian culture and tradition – which ultimately allows them to protect their own class interests and ignore domestic forms of inequality and injustice, including caste prejudice.

63 the global, as is evidenced from the domestic success of call-centre lit) may suggest that “‘the global’ increasingly exists as a cultural horizon within which we…frame our existence. …A sense of our mutual dependency combined with the means for communicating across distance is producing new forms of cultural/political alliance and solidarity” (Tomlinson 1999: 30).

Certainly, global solidarity is not always on view in call-centre lit: with the sometime exception of Once Upon, these books instead define the American as the Other from which nationalist

Indian identity and culture must at all costs be distanced. Perhaps globalization will only bring further acrimony between cultures, as is so often depicted in call-centre lit. But it may also open up new avenues for cross-cultural understanding and dialogue that don’t rely on the call centre’s phone lines or accent training courses in order to take place.

Chapter 2 The entrepreneurial anti-hero: The nationalist entrepreneur and the violence of innovation in The White Tiger and Miss New India

A new (anti-)hero for a new India

On 26 May 2014, former tea-seller – or chai wallah – Narendra Modi was elected Prime

Minister of India. Having served for many years as chief minister of Gujarat, one of India’s richest states (and one regarded in the national imagination as home to its savviest business minds), Modi is emblematic of globalized India’s emphasis on economic development, corporate enterprise and entrepreneurship. His “Start Up India” and “Stand Up India” initiatives launched in 2016, for example, are designed to foster entrepreneurship in India and encourage commercial banks to provide loans to entrepreneurial scheduled castes and women. “Stand [U]p India aims to empower every Indian and enable them to stand on their own feet. Today’s job seekers will be job creators of tomorrow,” Modi announced of the scheme (Jain, NP). His own biography might seem to make this case for him: as an erstwhile lowly tea-seller, his rise to power appears to herald the dawn of a “new” India in which caste oppression and relative poverty can be overcome by dint of hard work and acumen.

In tandem with India’s (apparent) budding status as home to globalized and upwardly mobile entrepreneurs, we have entered an era of Indian-English writing that reflects Modi’s concern with business and entrepreneurship, and features the emergence of a novel kind of nationalist hero and anti-hero. This heroism does not come in the shape of a radical grassroots

Tribal movement, however, or in a figure like anti-globalization activist and scholar Vandana

Shiva. Rather, in Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger (2008) and Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India

64 65

(2011) this hero (who can just as easily be described as an anti-hero) assumes the far more banal and unheroic guise of the middle-class entrepreneur and businessman or businesswoman fashioned by globalization out of the raw clay of South Asian potential. Gurcharan Das, former

CEO of the Indian division of Procter & Gamble and a vocal champion of globalization, writes in 2000 of India becoming “unbound” by Rao’s economic liberalization in the early 1990.

Likewise, this protagonist is initially unhappily constrained by the mores of the ‘old’ India.

Globalized capitalism, however, loosens these chains and sets the hero on his or her journey toward success while asserting India’s power on a global economic stage, with “the wealth of the west [beginning] again to drain eastwards, in the way it did from Roman times until the birth of the East India Company” (Dalrymple NP). Given Modi’s own vexed and violent past as the former Chief Minister of Gujarat, where he was implicated in the 2002 riots that resulted in the deaths of 1,0000 people (many of them Muslim), it is not surprising that this vision of success is frequently ironized or rendered with ambivalence. In some cases, too, the hero’s naive innocence is increasingly tarnished and finally destroyed as this character becomes anti-hero or, at best, a deeply flawed hero. The nationalist entrepreneur, then, is a contentious and ambivalently rendered symbol of the new India. As I will discuss in this chapter, he or she often acts with violence to destroy or replace the old India and consequently grows isolated from society, as represented by the hero’s family. Because, furthermore, the face of this new India bears uncomfortable similarities to its previous incarnations, in the form of the colonial oppressor or corrupt Indian businessman and politician, the hero – who, again, by the end of the texts has become far more of an anti-hero – is rendered by the authors as both disappointed and disappointing. As such, this literature functions as a dark vision of middle- and upper-class India at a moment of globalized crisis; even as a sort of subcontinental (self-) portrait of Dorian Gray, in which the glitz, novelty, and glamour of globalized India hides some unappealing truths.

To that end, in the entrepreneur’s anxieties and ambitions we find striking parallels to the plight of the postcolonial Indian author. Like the entrepreneur, the Indian author uses English to access a wider reading audience in the West; and like Balram and Anjali/Angie, the entrepreneurs of Adiga and Mukherjee’s novels, the author must ‘package’ and sell India – albeit, here, in the form of a novel, rather than as the American-accented voice on one end of the phone at the Indian call centre or as the voice of the ‘new’ India reaching out to the Chinese premier. The novelists behind the popular call-centre lit genre tend to hail, furthermore, from a different background than some of their more high-brow predecessors like Amitav Ghosh or

Khushwant Singh; far from the halls of Delhi’s prestigious St. Stephen’s College, many of these authors attended various outposts of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology and, before taking to the literary arts, worked as financial analysts at multinational corporations like

Deutsche Bank or marketing specialists at General Mills. The postmillennial Indian author is, in other words, as much a creature of globalization as is the smooth-talking Indian entrepreneur depicted in these novels. Although the higher-brow novelists discussed in this chapter, Aravind

Adiga and Bharati Mukherjee, may seem to hew closer to our established conception of the postcolonial cosmopolitan Indian author than, say, Chetan Bhagat, Anish Trivedi, Neelesh Misra or Swati Kaushal, their participation in the crafting of a globalized Indian nationalist hero speaks to the ways in which call-centre lit now informs what is commonly described as literature. While

Sarah Brouillette characterizes high-brow world literature, for instance, as tending toward the formal, not realist, as being more inclined “to throw[ing] off clichés of third-world embattlement,” and as delivering a “not nationalist but ‘hybrid’” message (60), White Tiger and

Miss New India are in fact realist works that do seem to contain a strain of call-centre-lit-style nationalism, as evidenced in the complicated figure of the entrepreneurial hero. This nationalism is, however, tempered by a sense of ambivalence and the suspicion that although a globalized

India may topple global economic hierarchies and Western hegemony, it will only do so by imitating the negative example of colonizers and corrupt politicians.

These novels delineate a nationalist hero (and, ultimately, anti-hero) for their time, just as other eras, and other nations, have provided the middle and upper middle classes with the heroes they need and deserve. Ian Watt’s exploration of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and economic analyses of the eponymous character as Homo economicus – or Rational Economic Man – offer insight into this unlikely hero. Susan F. Feiner writes that Crusoe-as-Homo-economicus “seems to epitomize the competitive, self-interested, isolated individual – shrewd, calculating, and devoid of sentiment, the personification of capital” (206). In its postmillennial Indian literary avatar, however, this character – while bearing most of the traits Feiner lists, as I’ll discuss further – paradoxically works not only in his or her interest, but in the interest of his or her nation to restore to it economic power, typically at the expense of the West. This character, then, is a sort of postcolonial avenger in a business suit, taking back from the West what was, and what continues to be, stolen from the nation. He or she is also a figure of postcolonial ressentiment.

Much like the call-centre workers of One Night, nationalist entrepreneurs Balram and Anjali evince varying degrees of hostility towards the West (and the Indian old guard) and express an urgent need to play catch-up with the US. The use of English and mimicry of various types of accented Englishes are, furthermore, an important tool used by some of the entrepreneurs in these texts to claw their way to the top of the social echelon. If these characters embody the aims of capital, then English is the currency they use to better command, acquire, and consume.

The entrepreneur-as-hero trope marks a significant change from more traditional middle- class and upper-middle-class Indian perceptions of the entrepreneur, in which this figure is associated less with heroism than with the vulgar nouveaux riches in cities with close ties to outsourcing, including Gurgaon and Bangalore. (As we will see, however, the latter linkage with

68 vulgarity continues to heavily inform the portrayal of the nationalist entrepreneur.) I’ll look in this chapter at Gurcharan Das’s history-cum-management-handbook on Indian entrepreneurship

India Unbound25 and discuss the persona required by globalization, which Shehzad Nadeem describes as ““somewhere between a servile cog and dashing business leader” (138) – in stark contrast to what Nadeem sees as the naukar, the servant, who represents what he views as the traditional Indian non-competitive “culture of deference” (156). While I concede that this represents an overly rosy view of Indian tradition, the books I address in this chapter often present the Indian entrepreneur as both hero and, particularly in Balram’s case, troubled anti- hero, with these representations mirroring the complicated relationship the country’s middle class has with this figure. However, whether this figure is problematized or not, he or she brings a kind of symbolic glory and power to the nation. Just as globalization has been widely seen as diminishing the status of the nation but, in the books I examine, actually has the effect of increasing nationalist fervor, so does entrepreneurship here work in the service of the nation. The journey toward achieving this entrepreneurial identity is fraught with obstacles, however, as the protagonists of these novels must engage in a battle with other would-be entrepreneurs, a globalized system of capital that still functions largely at the expense of the Global South, and with an elite Indian old guard deeply reluctant to cede its place to these ‘technorati’ nouveaux riches.

To cope with these antagonists and oppositional forces, the nationalist entrepreneur is often blood-thirsty and violent or linked with violence – like globalization and globalized capital

(Acheraiou 168), and like Prime Minister Modi himself. Furthermore, like Robinson Crusoe (for

25 Indian books in English valorizing entrepreneurship and advising would-be entrepreneurs have, like call-centre lit, themselves become hugely popular in India over the past ten years. See, for example, the works of Rashmi Bansal and Hindol Sengupta, and Young Turks: success stories and tips of 13 tech startups, by Shereen Bhan and Syna Dehnugara.

69 whom Friday is a mere tool, not a person) on his deserted island, he experiences a sense of isolation. This isolation stems, more specifically, from a sense of alienation from family, tradition, and an ‘old’ India perceived as largely unaffected by earlier modes of globalization – although, paradoxically, this isolation sometimes leads finally to new forms of nationalist community. Violence follows this hero and propels him or her toward success, even as it links the hero with a greater Indian family tree of historical personages who are portrayed frequently as at once heroic and exploitative of the nation. Finally, the English language and various forms of hegemonic spoken English furnish linguistic capital to this nationalist hero, just as this character simultaneously becomes her- or himself, to varying extents, the embodiment of capital over the course of these narratives. Just as Marx writes presciently that “[i]n bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality,” these novels highlight the tensions inherent to a society where globalization allows capital to travel at previously unimagined speeds and to penetrate the heretofore “safe” spaces of home and family. Amid these processes capital grows increasingly human in aspect and humanity progressively more technologized and capital-like in its aforementioned isolation, violence, and consumption. Where Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, R.K. Narayan’s Waiting for the

Mahatma and Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable feature Gandhi as a nationalist hero (albeit at times a flawed one), reflecting the hope and anxiety of those turbulent times, so does the nationalist hero/anti-hero of postmillennial Indian writing reflect the concerns of a faction of society that insists on rapid change even as it fears the loss of tradition and the violence that globalization entails.

Clad in business suit, afflicted by the pallor and dark undereye circles endemic to the globalized Indian office, and “straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time” (Adiga 6), the entrepreneurial nationalist hero may be less savory than the

70 postcolonial revolutionary of our political ideals. Sneharika Roy comments that in The White

Tiger “[t]he ‘sly civility’ of the postcolonial subject . . . seems to have given way to the ‘sly servility’ of the neo-colonial subject” (62), undermining Bhabha’s notion of mimicry and imitation constituting what he describes as “spectacular resistance” (172). However, beneath that starched shirt and calculating gaze lies a radical as intent on dismantling the status quo of global inequality – at least, as it relates to India’s relationship to the West – as he or she is, at first glance, in upholding it. And if these characters are able to simultaneously make money and win respect and power for themselves by doing so, serving the neoliberal “enterprise of the self” while furthering the nationalist cause, then who is to blame them? Aren’t they, as Modi might say, simply “standing on their own feet” in the society that moulded them?

Entrepreneurship in India

In Shobha De’s raunchily humorous potboiler “Sultry Days” (1994) a character nicknamed ‘God’ – and the narrative’s anti-hero – transforms over the course of the novel from left-wing campus radical to cynical businessman capitalizing on communal rage to make a profit.

Profoundly lacking in integrity but excelling in terms of sheer chutzpah, God wins over readers with his cheeky entrepreneurial stance on India and Indian society, even as we see him ruthlessly exploiting its weaknesses. As J.K. Tina Basi argues, “Economic changes in India have historically been linked to the larger context of constructing an Indian national identity” (33), and De suggests cannily that God’s metamorphosis similarly reflects a transition in middle-class

Indian mores from socialist-style idealism to entrepreneurial capitalism. But while De encourages her readers to feel some measure of disdain for God even as we cannot help but like him, the authors I focus on in this chapter depict Indian entrepreneurship as, crucially, sometimes a boon to Indian nationalism as opposed to God’s affable but insidious parasitism. As Gurcharan

Das argues, the entrepreneur has not traditionally been a respected figure in the country, as,

71 historically, he has occupied a relatively low position in the caste system (xiii). The sort of attributes demanded of the globalized entrepreneur have, moreover, not been viewed as particularly desirable ones by the vast majority of middle-class and upper-class Indians. Without the traits of individualism, ruthlessness, and commitment to innovation, a would-be entrepreneur cannot vanquish his competitors. As Das notes, however, attitudes are changing: young Indians from rural villages tell him of wanting to work for “Bilgay,” the richest man in the world, at

Microsoft rather than finding employment with the civil service, as their fathers might have done

(xiv). “After the economic reforms,” Das says, “our business houses have acquired new respectability and are on the rise socially. More and more people in our society want to emulate them and become entrepreneurs” (150). We should look at Das’s findings with skepticism as, despite the effectiveness of some of his arguments, his perspective is heavily informed by his stints as CEO of Procter and Gamble India, and the author is heavily invested, so to speak, in the corporatization of India. His conclusions are nonetheless supported by the more scholarly research of Arvind Rajagopal, who comments that “If, previously, the images concerned were in terms of jai jawan, jai kisan, all Indians are my brothers and sisters, and generally espoused a credo of Nehruvian cooperativism, now it is more in terms of achieving fulfilment through consumption; from Be Indian Buy Indian, it is now, To Buy is Indian” (73). Nadeem, meanwhile, sees a shift in middle-class Indian culture from “[a world] in which marriage is arranged by the family, gratification is delayed, and the individual is engulfed and defined by a dense web of family and social obligations” to one in which “an autonomous, pleasure-seeking self . . . derives succor from family but is more defined by the voluntary choices it makes” (51).

To understand this shift in cultural attitudes, it is helpful to first examine in some more detail historical middle-class and upper-class perspectives on Indian entrepreneurship and business, particularly in terms of how these were tied to the ideas of the nation and nationalism.

As discussed, Gurcharan Das argues that entrepreneurship has not traditionally been a highly valued trait nor the businessman a well-respected figure in India. As William Dalrymple notes, the nabobs of the East India Company were “the original corporate raiders,” and even today the joint-stock company remains colonial Britain’s most significant contribution to Indian business.

Entrepreneurship and business, then, were associated with the greed and brutality of the British

Empire in its capacity as the first and most powerful multinational corporation. Indeed, during the Raj period, Indian entrepreneurs were often viewed as collaborationist, and rightly so: during this time, Bose and Jalal comment, “there was . . . a strong strand of collaboration [with the

British] by Indian social groups, especially merchant capitalists, who helped undermine the regional states which they had bank-rolled in the past” (49). Nor was the coming of

Independence in 1947 to alter the general suspicion and disdain surrounding entrepreneurial labour in India. In his 1909 work Hind Swaraj, Gandhi notes with chagrin, “I fear we shall have to admit that moneyed men support British rule; their interest is bound up with its stability.” He also writes,

The workers in the mills of Bombay have become slaves…If the machinery craze grows

in our country, it will become an unhappy land…By using Manchester cloth we only

waste our money; but by reproducing Manchester in India, we shall keep our money at

the price of our blood, because our very moral being will be sapped, and I call in support

of my statement the very mill-hands as witnesses. And those who have amassed wealth

out of factories are not likely to be better than other rich men. It would be folly to assume

that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than the American Rockefeller.

In India Unbound, however, Das finds Gandhi to have been more sympathetic to business and the businessman than it would at first appear: “a bania [or of the merchant caste] himself,

[Gandhi was not] contemptuous of commerce like Nehru. He came from Gujarat, which had

73 many ports and vigorous commerce, and where the merchant was held in esteem. Gandhi believed that a businessman’s wealth was not his own but held in trust for the rest of society”

(24). While in Hind Swaraj business appears to leech the strength of the nation and the wealthy entrepreneur or businessman acts against the best interests of India, Das proposes instead that

Gandhi believed business could work for and on behalf of the nation.26

Meanwhile, Jawaharlal Nehru – who, along with daughter Indira, operates as bumbling antagonist to all things entrepreneurship-related in India Unbound – is depicted by Das as stubbornly and wrong-headedly opposed to engaging in US-style commerce in his commitment to a ‘mixed economy’ of “capitalism for the rich [and] socialism for the poor” (85), or “the

‘controls’ of socialism with the ‘monopolies and lobbies’ of capitalism” (98). This view is similar to that espoused by Bose and Jalal, who from their perch on the other side of the political spectrum view Nehru as “[projecting] a brand of socialism and commitment to social justice that could appeal to the populace while taking care to cultivate the support of state officials as well as the fat cats of Indian capitalism” (175). While free-market enthusiast Das sees the spectre of

Nehruvian socialism behind every failure of the Indian economy in the last seventy-five years or so, and the so-called License Raj that lasted until the economic liberalization of the 1990s as

Nehru’s unhappy legacy, Bose and Jalal comment that these plans weren’t socialist enough:

“From the mid-1950s India pursued a strategy of capital-goods-led import-substituting industrialization. While it was able to build a heavy industrial base that the planners had envisioned, little progress was made in the direction of combating poverty, illiteracy and disease” (175). From either perspective, Nehru’s economic policies and their legacies are found

26 Partha Chatterjee notes that Gandhi was turned into a proponent of industry by various business interests and government officials in the years after his death. When, for example, a factory manufacturing train wheels was opened, Nehru told the crowd that despite his well-publicized objections to the Indian railroad, Gandhi would have been pleased by this development (154). Chatterjee maintains, however, that this was not a “cynical fraud perpetuated on the Indian people” by Nehru but a sensible way of boosting the Indian economy.

74 profoundly wanting. And, in the years to follow, as the economy stagnated, the dreams of

Independence seemed to grow increasingly distant for the vast majority of Indians.

We might expect the happy ending to Das’s tale of economic woe to become manifest upon the Congress Party’s first steps towards the liberalization of Indian economy in the early

1990s. Indeed, Das says, it resulted in great growth for the Indian economy and in the seeds of innovation and entrepreneurship being planted. But he tells us that the authors of this liberalization plan, Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, are reluctant to accept any credit for what Das views as their spectacular, if wildly incomplete, achievement, with Rao distancing himself from Das’s praise in an often uncomfortable interview between the two (223).

This reluctance to celebrate economic liberalization and the globalization of India is in turn, Das proposes, symptomatic of a more widespread continuing anxiety and contempt surrounding issues of money and business. As we saw in One Night, where Shyam, Vroom, and their friends must break free of their helpless passivity and assume leadership roles, this insecurity around money and national self-identity results for some critics in a culture of servitude and servility unable to foster the environment required in India for the entrepreneur to flourish. From this commerce-focused perspective, “innovation” in particular – very loosely defined in management lingo as an ability to invent, change or make new and then monetize – is touted as the key to successful entrepreneurship. Das complains that innovation has only recently started to blossom in the very specific and elite section of Indian society he addresses here:

We may not be tinkerers, but we are a conceptual people. We have traditionally had a

Brahminical contempt for manual labor, which was relegated to the lowest caste,

Shudras, who were also denied knowledge. A tinkerer combines knowledge with manual

labor, and this produces innovation. Our entrepreneurs, who come mainly from the higher

merchant caste, have also shied away from manual labor and technology. This may be

another reason why we did not produce innovation and failed to create an industrial

revolution. (xvii)27

“We,” Das tells us, have, as “our” birthright, a natural ability for computers, mathematics, and abstract thought that has been passed down from Brahmin to Brahmin over the centuries. But entrepreneurship is a trait that must be learned by these Brahmins in order to grow the Indian economy. (It is not entirely clear where this leaves, for example, Muslims in India.) Nadeem, who studies call centres in India, says that the tendency of Indian managers and executives like

Das to attribute this perceived lack of innovation and innovativeness to the weakness and passivity of latter-day Indian culture and society “recycle[s] colonial-era tropes of cultural underdevelopment” (144). We can likewise see this prizing of entrepreneurial innovation – and how it has come to define the power of a nation – reappearing in the frequent refrain offered to

Americans distraught about the possibility of losing their high perches in the world of technology, high finance and business: that, as former US President Obama said in his 2011

State of the Union Address, “We need to out-innovate . . . the rest of the world . . . The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation…What we can do ─ what America does better than anyone else ─ is spark the creativity and imagination of our people . . . In

America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living.” More recently, current president Donald Trump apparently held discussions with tech billionaire Bill Gates centering on his goal of making the US “a leader in innovation” (Miller NP). Even if the US is falling far behind on some metrics like GDP or employment rates, this discourse goes, it will remain superior to its perceived inferior double, its Asian mimic. This echoes Das’s discourse of ingrained national traits: the American is ‘born’ to innovation as an ingrained trait, just as the

27 Das’s recurrent use of the “we” pronoun is instructive here, and throughout his work, in terms of showing the reader who is addressed in his call-to-arms and which social groups are largely ignored. Obama’s “we” similarly imagines the nation as united behind him.

Brahminical Indian possesses an ingrained talent for abstract thinking as his Hindu birthright.

Accordingly, although the nation comprises a collection of individuals, it can also be compared to an individual in terms of the collective set of attributes that form the national character; it is understood, then, both as “a collective individual” and “a collection of individuals” by its denizens (Bose 6-7). Moreover, without innovation, the Asian worker lacks the spark that turns the boring-but-dependable naukar plodding away at his or her job into a hotshot global entrepreneur manipulating the digital universe with a few clicks of a mouse. If Chakrabarty famously imagines India as, within historicist consciousness, remaining trapped in the “waiting- room” of history and doomed always to play catch-up to the West, so does this commerce- focused perspective envisage Indians as trapped in the back office of the business world, relegated to comparatively menial tasks and thus to an inferior position in the realm of innovation and entrepreneurship. Only once tradition is cast aside and innovation and entrepreneurship become second nature to the Indian middle and upper classes can the nation hope to compete with the West and, in Obama’s terms, “win the future.” Innovation, then, stands not only for invention or novelty in this discourse but for the ability to embrace, accommodate, and further the progress of modernity in the Indian nation.

As difficult as it is to define such a nebulous term as “innovation,” it is even harder to limn the figure of the entrepreneur, particularly given that many of the sources for the words we tend to associate with the term “entrepreneurship” – like “individualism,” “consumption,” and

“capital" – are derived from specific Western historical periods and circumstances. To extrapolate these to the Indian example here risks placing India back in Chakrabarty’s aforementioned “waiting room” of history, in which India must necessarily follow the course already well charted by the West. Nonetheless, one cannot discuss this entrepreneurial hero in

India without referring to some of these ideas – especially because some of the principal thinkers

77 behind the embracing of economic liberalization in India draw on these very ideas to make their case. Das, for example, writes that India should be able to accomplish the same things that the

West has but within a much shorter time, by skipping an industrial revolution and engaging in a knowledge revolution based on technology (350; 364). Importantly, although Das sees India as ultimately triumphing over its more developed peers, and, injecting industrial capitalism with what he deems a specific brand of Indian spirituality (xix),28 he also depicts the country as following – or sauntering along, as a slow but steady elephant-style economy rather than an

Asian tiger – in the footsteps of Western ‘progress.’ Prime Minister Narendra Modi, meanwhile, told a cheering crowd of non-resident Indians at Madison Square Garden in September 2014 that the twenty-first century will belong to India thanks in large part to its youthful demographics and focus on technology. The Times of India describes how, in one of the stranger moments of this speech, Modi told his audience that India had historically been stereotyped by the West as “a nation of black magic and snake charmers,” but that, affirmatively, technology – in the form of the computer mouse – has replaced the snake: "Our ancestors used to play with snakes. We play with mouse [sic]. Our youths move the mouse and they shake up the world.” Furthermore, like

Das, he sees progress in the country as rapid and unstoppable (timesnow.tv). Modi’s envisioned path for India is the same as for other capitalist countries and involves playing catch-up – and then surpassing – historical economic leaders like the US and Britain. According to this

28 Das accordingly allows the Indian to escape, through religion and spirituality, the situation of mechanized slavery that the Western labourer is trapped within: as Max Weber writes, “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the 'saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.' But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.” (181)

78 narrative, “Indian history, even in the most dedicated . . . nationalist hands, remains a mimicry of a certain ‘modern’ subject of ‘European’ history and is bound to represent a sad figure of lack and failure. The transition narrative will always remain "grievously incomplete’” (Chakrabarty

40). Even if India is catching up and will, according to the viewpoint evinced by Das and Modi, eventually overtake its peers, it must at once posit itself as having been delinquent and in need of a radical overhaul of national character in order to win its rightful leading role on the global economic stage. As such, and at the risk of anachronism or painting my argument with an overly broad brush, I define “individualism,” drawing on Ian Watt’s discussion of Robinson Crusoe, as the idea of “every individual’s intrinsic independence both from other individuals and from that multifarious allegiance to past modes of thought and action denoted by the word ‘tradition’ – a force that is always social, not individual” (60). Watt attributes this primarily to the rise of modern industrial capitalism and Protestantism. Individualism is often the defining term of the entrepreneur in these works, pointing to the isolation of this figure from other people and tradition. Because the entrepreneur must constantly focus on innovation and novelty, there would appear to be no room in his or her project for the past.

How, then, can the highly individualistic entrepreneur also operate as a nationalist hero or anti-hero in the books I discuss in this chapter when nationalist movements so often rely on community and an imagined sense of tradition? Although, as C.B. Macpherson argues in The

Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, late-seventeenth century political philosophy, in particular in the work of John Locke, viewed the self as an individual’s private property – instead of the member of a collective or moral entity – and the individual’s responsibility to society as nil (3), both colonial and early nationalist forms of individualism posit the individual in terms of how he or she is connected to the colonial state. Under nationalist individualism, Purnima Bose describes, “each individual (such as an Indian) becomes a synecdoche of the collective individual

(such as India), which is differentiated from other collective individuals (such as Britain)” (6).

Bose goes on to write about a form of Indian nationalism she calls “heroic nationalist individualism,” which in the form of her subject Kalpana Dutt “has several distinguishing features, including a belief in the efficacy of armed struggle waged by an elite segment of the native population, which identiﬁes ‘success’ with ‘’blood sacriﬁce’ . . . and according to which individual acts of bravery encourage others to become nationalists” (14). Furthermore, as Partha

Chatterjee emphasizes, nationalist discourse ironically contains traces of the imperial ideologies the former resists. In this chapter I want to show how the postmillennial forms of globalized nationalism we see in Miss New India and White Tiger at times echo these earlier forms of nationalism in their links to violence. The protagonists of these works can hardly be described as

Indian Crusoes, but in their brand of postmillennial postcolonial nationalist individualism, they bear an uncanny resemblance to Crusoe-as-Rational-Economic-Man as the embodiment of capital and of globalized capitalism: violent, isolated, fixated on the development of India as global economic powerhouse, and likely to use certain forms of English as a kind of linguistic currency.

As oxymoronic as the term “nationalist individualism” may sound, I argue that it is precisely the absurdity and even hollowness of this concept that renders the heroes of these novels into deeply flawed and even antiheroic characters by the denouements of their respective tales, and which, furthermore, makes the globalized nationalism discussed here so fascinating.

While their “heroic” acts are framed in the texts as achieving some kind of victory over the West or the US, they are just as explicitly tied by Adiga and Mukherjee to a brand of globalized neoliberal entrepreneurship that does not and will never allow the good of the nation to be considered before the individual. If, indeed, the nation does benefit in any manner from the

“heroic” entrepreneur’s acts in White Tiger or Miss New India, it is in a morally repugnant way

80 that involves corruption, murder, terrorism, and debt. So, although Balram and Anjali are, like

Kalpana Dutt, connected with violence, neither he nor she behaves according to the old- fashioned nationalist mode of collective sacrifice in which Dutt participated. To muddy things further, however, a careful reader can find signs of a sort of reluctant and sneaking appreciation from Adiga and Mukherjee for Balram and Anjali in the novels. As we will see, these upwardly mobile characters are implicitly compared, morally, with members of India’s moneyed classes, and both groups are found to be lacking – with the latter hinted to be models for, or at least partly responsible for, the former’s eventual moral decay, and therefore particularly reprehensible in their corruption of innocence. Although it is all too easy to confuse the voices of the protagonists with their authors, as I will discuss we can even detect a glimmer of hope for India’s future from

Adiga and Mukherjee, even if their troubled protagonists are grabbing for its reins.

The White Tiger: Globalization, violence, and nationalism

Although call-centre lit can be accused of being overly optimistic – and even naïve, to varying degrees – about the liberating powers and utopian qualities of the transnational workplace, books like One Night remain ambivalent about certain aspects of India’s globalization story: in particular, they betray some guilt about the possibility that the country’s

‘outsourcing generation’ is turning its back on its freedom-fighting anti-colonial heroes, indicating a suspicion that globalized, transnational labour is merely one symptom of a new form of imperialism. Their depiction of changing subjectivities amid Indian globalization – with old identities lost and new ones found – is also ambivalent, in that the globalized identity can seem to have an alienating, isolating and morally destructive effect on its bearer.

As a Booker-award-winning cosmopolitan novel that was popular both inside India and out (with over a million copies sold since its publication, and 200,000 hardcover copies sold in

India alone), Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) is in many regards very different from

81 call-centre lit novels; however, in its treatment of upward mobility in a globalizing India it engages with many of the same pervasive themes and concerns as call-centre lit, even if Adiga – like Mukherjee – approaches them from a more ‘serious’ critical angle that often bleakly undermines both the utopian aspects and the fears around globalization seen in One Night.

Moreover, though by no means a work of pulp fiction, the novel seems to comment on its own non-literary, pulp-like characteristics, including its story arc and clichéd, sensationalistic content, before undercutting the fantastic nature of such entertainment and offering the ‘real’ version of the tale: Balram asks, “Now, what happens in your typical Murder Weekly story . . . ? A poor man kills a rich man. Good. Then he takes the money. Good. But then he gets dreams in which the dead man pursues him . . . Doesn't happen like that in real life. Trust me” (176). Likewise, in

White Tiger we are promised an “authentic” view of the dark underbelly of India’s economic miracle, as described by narrator Balram in a series of letters to former Chinese prime minister

Wen Jiabao that detail the protagonist’s socio-economic climb upward – achieved via what he calls an “act of entrepreneurship” (8), the murder of his employer Ashok – and his moral descent.

Balram as nationalist entrepreneur (anti-) hero embodies the violence of capital. However, his entrepreneurship also paves the way, he tells us in a whimsical aside (3-4), for a world in which

China and India will become powerful economic actors who will gain a nationalist victory and leave the West behind. Although this characterization of Balram is deeply ironized, Adiga’s representation of his anti-hero is far more ambivalent than it might at first appear. Like Anjali,

Mukherjee’s Miss New India, Balram is something of a disappointment as far as heroes go; but also like Anjali, whether he is a force for good or bad in India remains unclear, and Adiga even suggests that when the dust of globalization settles he may represent a better – albeit very compromised, obviously – alternative to India’s corrupt and brutal past leaders.

None of the action in White Tiger is situated directly in a call centre (although Balram in his final incarnation as entrepreneur runs a driving service for call-centre workers), but this hasn’t stopped the Economist from calling Adiga “the Charles Dickens of the call-centre generation” (qtd. in Mendes 281). Indeed, themes of outsourcing and Indian globalization permeate almost every aspect of the story. Like his stated influences Dickens, Balzac, and

Flaubert, Adiga, a former journalist, aims to expose the injustice of globalized India in an attempt to create a better society (Davis). Globalization and the ‘new’ capitalism seem most often to be represented in the novel by the city of Gurgaon and its flashy, Western-style malls, in which “huge photos of handsome European men and women hang on each wall” (83), and by outsourcing, which Balram sees as leading to mobility and thus “real estate, wealth, power, sex”

(167). Even Balram’s privileged master Ashok longs to participate in these utopian globalizing processes, saying, “I wish I were doing something else. Something clean. Like outsourcing.

Every day I wish it" (116) – perhaps furnishing Balram with his idea to found a company providing call-centre employees, the ultimate representatives of global outsourced labour in

India, with chauffeurs to and from their office. As with globalization, however, only some members of society are able to participate in and profit from these changes: when he is still

Ashok’s driver, Balram watches as security guards forbid a man wearing sandals from entering a

Gurgaon shopping mall, recollecting that “What was happening…was one of those incidents that were so common in the early days of the shopping mall, and which were often reported in the daily newspapers under the title ‘Is There No Space for the Poor in the Malls of New India?’”

(81). Accordingly, Adiga indicates, this ‘new’ globalized India can be even more unaccommodating to its poor than the ‘old’ India.

Nonetheless, there are some indications that space can be made in the upper echelons of

Indian society for someone like Balram. However, he or she must first be willing to emulate the

83 bad behaviour of the middle and upper classes. The nationalist entrepreneur, then, is linked to their violence. In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel, Adiga reveals that the difference between a character in his book of short stories Between the Assassinations (set in the 1980s) who wishes to do harm to his master but ultimately resists the temptation, and Balram in White Tiger is that the latter has been gravely affected by the economic boom in India; inundated with images of success garnered from television and the Internet, he casts aside his servitude and surrenders to his murderous impulses. In short, globalized capitalism causes Balram’s problems with the master-servant relationship in that it makes him aware of his own frustrations and unhappiness, but it then solves them by suggesting a sort of dog-eat-dog ‘act of entrepreneurship’ to him.

“[The story in Between the Assassinations] ends so differently because it’s set in a different

India,” Adiga says. This perspective is reminiscent of that of Anand Giridharadas, who in India

Calling writes that the formerly disenfranchised have begun to assert themselves due to the advent of globalized capitalism and transnational labour in India. As Bahadur notes,

Giridharadas argues that “Capitalism allows Indians to imagine and even realize lives outside their fates (kismet) and prescribed roles (karma). Servants might become masters.” Adiga shows that Balram claims his place in the new capitalism of a new India – but in an evidently far darker, more cynical light – with murder and theft. Globalizing India may endow its subaltern population with the capacity to achieve freedom from its masters, but only if this population reacts with the violence and brutality linked here with capital. As Marshall Berman writes,

“modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish” (15). Globalization in White Tiger likewise unites friends and enemies alike in violence.

Balram accordingly imitates the behaviour of his various masters. Most innocuously, he absorbs the obsession of his first master, a landlord nicknamed the Stork, and places gaudy chandeliers everywhere in his home, including the drawing room and the toilet (63). Also like the Stork, who was known in Laxmangarh for throwing fishermen to the ground and stomping on their chests before taking their money (88), Balram delivers the fatal blow to Ashok, the landlord’s son, after stabbing him by pinning him to the ground and kneeing his chest, and then stealing his money (161). He even takes the first name of his victim, calling himself “Ashok

Sharma” at the end of the novel. We can see the space of the car driven by Balram, and directed by Ashok, as a transnational site in which new subjectivities are moulded: Pinky is an American- born Indian and Ashok has been educated in the US with seemingly more liberal views than his brother and father. As Balram observes the cosmopolitan conversation between husband and wife, his perspectives on the world change and his old identity is replaced to a certain extent by a new, even diasporic consciousness: “by eavesdropping on them, I learned a lot about life, India, and America . . . Many of my best ideas are, in fact, borrowed from my ex-employer or his brother or someone else whom I was driving about” (26). As Bruce Robbins writes, the protagonist of an upward mobility tale is often taught by a fairy godmother or donor character how to behave in order to achieve success (1-3). In White Tiger, these donor characters are the

Stork and Ashok, indicating the negative qualities of Balram’s ascent into the middle class, and hinting that the new Indian middle class may not be much better than the old one.29 George

Monbiot has written of call-centre workers that “the most marketable skill in India today is the ability to abandon your identity and slip into someone else’s” (qtd. in Basi 1); in White Tiger,

29 This results at times in the novel taking on many of the aspects of a South Asian Bildungsroman: Balram comes of age as a nationalist entrepreneur and, as Franco Moretti submits with regard to the nineteenth-century European example in The Way of the World, this youthful protagonist mirrors the profound shifts taking place in a society that envisions itself as moving from tradition to modernity.

Adiga shows that this assumption of a slippery globalized identity can have gruesome consequences. Purnima Bose has shown that historically “heroic nationalist individualism” in

India ties victory to “blood sacrifice” and “armed struggle” (14), which in turn inspires other

Indians to take up the nationalist cause. This spirit of valiant nationalist violence, needed in the context of the anti-colonial struggle against the British, is echoed but also twisted and distorted in the neoliberal globalized context with Balram’s journey toward success, and toward making the twenty-first century that “of the brown man” (Adiga 4).30 Although, accordingly, Adiga emphasizes the violent underpinnings of the New India and its continuities with unglobalized

India, the novel also seems to suggest that the oppressed have no other choice than to fight the systemic violence of their society with a reciprocal violence of their own, and that there is consequently a strain of nationalist heroism, albeit a deeply problematic and discomfiting one, to be found in the bloody rise of the New India. That Balram’s act of violence is directed not against the foreign imperialist but one’s fellow countryman, however, ultimately underscores the moral repugnance associated with his “victory” by Adiga.

Capital and the globalized entrepreneur are associated not only with violence but with the eventual isolation of the individual. The fear that globalization has led to the dissipation of the

Indian family and the loss of tradition is a common one in India; as one corrupt politician tells

Ashok, upon hearing of his imminent divorce, “Marriage is a good institution. Everything's coming apart in this country. Families, marriages – everything” (119). At the end of the book, and as a result of his new, alienating globalized identity, Balram is alone, suspicious of his one remaining family member and young nephew Dharam; in fact, he does not even mention Dharam

30 Balram’s violent struggle to ascend the social ladder via capitalist entrepreneurship is, interestingly, linked with the rise of the Naxalite movement in the novel and their own struggle to defeat the elite. This is only ever presented as ominous gossip in the world of White Tiger, however, implying that the real story of the New India is found in Balram’s rags-to-riches tale.

86 throughout most of the novel – seeming to have forgotten him, Balram tells the Chinese premier,

“I've got no family anymore. All I've got is chandeliers” (63). Furthermore, in an interview with the Guardian, Adiga (apparently sincerely) echoes this sentiment, noting that when Balram sacrifices his family to his own ambitions, “This is a shameful and dislocating thing for an Indian to do…But the family ties get broken or at least stretched when anonymous, un-Indian cities like

Bangalore draw people from the villages. These really are the new tensions of India” (Jeffries

NP). And once the family is gone, alienation sets in as the protagonist is dislocated and deterritorialized from a ‘purely’ Indian subjectivity to a hybridized, transnational one: in the New

York Times, Giridharadas writes of one of India’s new “self-made” entrepreneurs, “Misal, like the students he taught, was in revolt against the old fixedness. But once that revolt was complete, a person could find himself utterly alone” (NP) Like capital, of which the entrepreneur is an embodiment, Balram is alone and isolated. Richard Dyer writes that in popular entertainment a sense of fragmentation and alienation for reader and protagonist alike is “‘papered over’ in the text with a sense of community (‘togetherness, sense of belonging, network of phatic relationships’)” (qtd. in Lacey 160). In contrast to the pulp works addressed in Chapter 1, and despite its status as a work of entertainment, Adiga does not include this sense of familial community in his novel, showing his misgivings about the ‘new India,’ which allows upward mobility but only at an exorbitant price.

However, the author also refrains from displaying any nostalgia for the romanticized notion of the family upon which some nationalist concepts of the ‘old India’ rest. In his interview with Wachtel, Adiga describes how in White Tiger he attempts to take on all of the middle-class

“foundational myths of India,” one of which is the sanctified space of the traditional Indian family. In a passage in which he seems to serve as Adiga’s mouthpiece, Balram explains that the

“Great Indian Rooster Coop” – the character’s name for the system which allows a “handful of

87 men” to force “the remaining 99.9 percent…to exist in perpetual servitude,” like animals – is

“the pride and glory of our nation, the repository of all our love and sacrifice, the subject of no doubt considerable space in the pamphlet that the prime minister will hand over to you, the

Indian family” (97). This family, dominated by Balram’s nasty, cunning grandmother Kusum, plays a large part in the murder of Balram’s mother; removes him from school to throw a big wedding, thereby drastically reducing his chances of escaping the gloomy tubercular future of his relatives; and aims to keep him oppressed and dependent on his masters by taking the bulk of his salary every month. So, although the novel points to globalization and the new entrepreneurship’s significant role in the disintegration of the Indian family (or its evisceration, in the case of Balram’s family) and, accordingly, to a growing sense of alienation among the country’s rising classes, it also indicates that the disappearance of the “traditional” Indian family, allegorically represented by Balram’s kin, is not necessarily to be mourned.

The globalized entrepreneur is also linked with novelty and innovation, and, as such, we often see this figure turning his or her back on tradition and the sacred cows of the cultural past.

Another of the middle-class ‘foundational myths of India’ against which Adiga takes aim, as he explains in his interview with Wachtel, is Gandhi, certainly a great proselytizer for Indian tradition – or rather, Adiga says, the idea of Gandhi or “what’s been done with him.”31 As in One

Night, there is a sense that the upwardly mobile capitalists, entrepreneurs, and outsourced labourers of a new globalized India have betrayed the ideals of Gandhi and other early Indian nationalists. Balram, for instance, refers to the idea of Gandhi with contempt, as a “fucking joke” and representative of the coat of whitewash used by India’s politicians to hide the realities of the

31 In an interview, Bharati Mukherjee outlines a similar perspective: “‘Gandhian’ is another of those Indian words that can stand for anything the speaker wishes, even when it stands in contrast to Gandhi’s teaching,” Mukherjee says. “If you’re ‘spreading the riches to the poor’ (by whatever means) you’re Gandhian. If you’re from the lower castes and lower classes and make money, you can claim ‘Gandhism.’ This is meant to show the corruption of the ideal, not to cast aspersions on the Mahatma” (Apte NP).

88 nation and maintain the view that India is purer and more spiritual than other countries (4). But, more importantly, we see that his behaviour is not exceptional: it is difficult to find any character in Balram’s world – whether he or she is involved in the ‘new India’ or not – who adheres to these “moral and saintly” (3) Gandhian principles. In fact, a portrait of Gandhi on the wall becomes for Balram merely a barometer of how despicable and hypocritical a given character is: upon meeting a shopkeeper, Balram reflects that “He was sitting under a huge portrait of

Mahatma Gandhi, and I knew already that I was going to be in big trouble” (22). This betrayal of

Gandhi’s precepts is framed as an ongoing theme in India’s history, not a new development stemming from a globalized milieu; Balram’s attitude of contempt is only a reflection of that of his middle-class ‘old India’ predecessors. This perspective is perhaps not altogether different from Das’s opinion, and that of a number of Indian commentators like Kamal Nath, that India’s socialist leaders – and Nehru in particular – have betrayed the Indian populace (xii). Both views see Indian socialism as a failed experiment, even as Das and others who share his opinion pin the blame on socialism, and both look to a cutthroat form of Indian entrepreneurial capitalism to remedy the failures enacted by socialist policy in India. So, while White Tiger is most obviously read as a critique of Indian neoliberalism and the cult of the entrepreneur, it should likewise be read as deeply critical of the failures and corruption of the Indian political establishment.

In addition, as with the myth of the family, Adiga indicates that Gandhi’s ideals around

Indian subjectivity, or what these have been moulded into by subsequent generations, are used by the upper classes to keep men like Balram docile and easily manipulated within the ‘Rooster

Coop’:

Go to a tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea

shop—men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and

under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish,

unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still "boys." But that is your fate if you

do your job well—with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have

done it, no doubt. (29)

Even India’s independence, brought about by the people Balram refers to disgustedly as “all those politicians in Delhi” (36), is ridiculous and false in the eyes of Adiga’s protagonist: “India has never been free,” he tells the Chinese premier. “In 1947 the British left, but only a moron would think that we became free then” (13). This derisive tone stands in sharp contrast to the lionization of the anti-colonial leaders in One Night, where their heroic example is used by

Vroom to spur the call-centre workers to action and to assert their own nationalist version of freedom from their American imperialist bosses. White Tiger in contrast suggests that some of

Gandhi’s ideals are better gone, as they have only contributed to the subjugation of the country’s subalterns.

The often negative stance of the novel toward both the new (or globalized-capitalist) and old (or nominally “traditional” Nehruvian-socialist) India largely undermines both the utopian sense of office-community we saw in One Night and that work’s seeming anxiety around a globalized India’s betrayal of its anti-colonial nationalist leaders. It also breaks down in large part the dichotomy between the two Indias – globalized and non-globalized – found in the pulp works discussed in the first chapter of this dissertation. There is, however, a similar feeling of ambivalence around the opportunities afforded or inspired by the country’s new capitalism:

Adiga has said that Balram could not have thought to escape the “Rooster Coop” and achieve freedom from servitude and mobility into the middle classes without the advent of globalization and pervasive capitalist ideas of success in India. Notably, however, the anti-hero can ultimately only do so by mimicking many of the most ignominious traits of his middle-class predecessors

90 and assuming a new globalized (and alienated/alienating) identity as Bangalore entrepreneur

“Ashok Sharma.”

In its violence, oppression, and greed, globalized India may appear to be founded on a new iteration of colonialism: “Same story, different characters,” Arundhati Roy writes of the

World Bank’s involvement in India’s neoliberal gutting of the country’s natural resources, asking, “must we really go over that ground again?” Is Balram merely another example of Roy’s

“same story” of the unfettered greed of globalized capitalism? Perhaps not. After his employee kills a cyclist in a car accident, Balram’s behaviour is far more ethical than that of Ashok and the

Stork in a similar situation earlier in the novel, when a drunk-driving Pinky, Ashok’s wife, hits a child on a highway and the family attempts to pin the blame on Balram. The erstwhile driver says, “But I had to do something different; don't you see? I can't live the way the Wild Boar and the Buffalo and the Raven lived, and probably still live, back in Laxmangarh. I am in the Light now” (176). The new middle class of a globalized India may even therefore represent a slight, if deeply vexed, improvement on the old one. Of India’s brave new world, Balram rhapsodizes:

I can't tell you how exciting it is to me. General Electric, Dell, Siemens—they're all here

in Bangalore. And so many more are on their way…This entire city is masked in smoke,

smog, powder, cement dust. It is under a veil. When the veil is lifted, what will Bangalore

be like? Maybe it will be a disaster: slums, sewage, shopping malls, traffic jams,

policemen. But you never know. It may turn out to be a decent city, where humans can

live like humans and animals can live like animals. A new Bangalore for a new India.

And then I can say that, in my own way, I helped to make New Bangalore (179-80).

More than anywhere else in the novel, this passage encapsulates the ambivalence with which the

‘new India’ has been greeted by its middle and upper classes. After following Balram’s

Bildungsroman-esque course toward upward mobility throughout the book, it is difficult not to

91 be cheered a little by this anti-hero’s improbable success, made possible by an environment in which a new globalized capitalism has arguably made it easier for India’s less privileged classes to assume entrepreneurial roles and triumph over their former masters. The widespread neoliberal idea that the new capitalism, and more specifically transnational labour, plays a decisive role in providing more independence and agency to Indian subjects is therefore echoed in the case of the male subaltern in White Tiger – albeit, admittedly, with a great deal of ambivalence on Adiga’s part.32 That Balram sees his victory as in some manner heralding a greater Indian (and Chinese) victory on the world economic stage in the twenty-first century also finds resonance in the nationalist refrains of Das and other business-friendly commentators like

Narendra Modi, who likewise promised voters to make “the 21st century India’s century”

(Burke), and former Congress minister Kamal Nath, who in India's Century: The Age of

Entrepreneurs in the World’s Biggest Country, writes that if the 19th century belonged to Britain and the 20th century to the US, "the 21st century is poised to be India's century" (1). Although

India’s future remains to some extent “veiled” by the messy work of building up capitalism in the country, and despite his generally extremely critical take on Indian globalization, Adiga suggests that the neoliberal vision of India as global economic powerhouse articulated by entrepreneur-(anti)hero Balram may in fact be a somewhat more affirmative one than the ‘old’

India, at least for its poorer citizens.

That India will replace the United States in dominating the world, by virtue of its denizens’ plucky entrepreneurship and innovative spirit, is further shown in Balram’s references

32 To be clear, I am not at all suggesting that Adiga is acting as a cheerleader for Modi’s neoliberal vision for India. The novel is obviously critical of the optimistic pronouncements about the ‘new’ India that Balram and Modi are so fond of making. I do think it is important, however, to note the more hopeful moments – like this one – where Adiga appears to be reluctantly rooting for his anti-hero, as these capture the ambivalence with which the Indian middle and upper classes regard globalization.

92 to self-help books, as he claims that this book, in the form of his letters to Wen Jiabao, constitutes an updated form of this type of writing:

See, when you come to Bangalore, and stop at a traffic light, some boy will run up to

your car and knock on your window, while holding up a bootlegged copy of an American

business book, wrapped carefully in cellophane and with a title like: TEN SECRETS OF

BUSINESS SUCCESS! Or BECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR IN SEVEN EASY

DAYS! Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday. I am

tomorrow. (4-5)

Balram’s “memoir” in White Tiger, then, is framed as a business manual aimed at creating new

“White Tigers,” or new versions of Balram, all over the subcontinent. Like capital, the entrepreneurial Balram must reproduce himself endlessly, reminiscent of Benjamin Franklin’s dictum that “money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on . . . He that murders a crown [through wasting time and not making money], destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pounds” (qtd. in Weber

351). Weber points out that “it is the spirit of capitalism which here speaks” (352) in Franklin’s comments, and Balram’s desire to spread his lessons throughout India and create “a school full of White Tigers, unleashed on Bangalore” (275) recalls this framing of capital reproduction as both a spiritual and moral calling heavily informed by Franklin’s Protestant work ethic. Little wonder that one of the last sentences of the novel is “I think I am ready to have children” [276]; in the same way that global capital reproduces itself through the machinations of the entrepreneur, so does Balram feel a duty to create more of himself. Again, it is hard to know what to make of this: are we supposed to view this transformation of poor children into a league of hungry, globalized White Tigers as frightening and disturbing, joyful and empowering, or simply inevitable? But to expect the novel to answer this question decisively one way or another

93 is to miss the point; our ambivalence is Balram’s, caught between a neoliberal confidence in the power of entrepreneurship and underpinned by a sense that we should root for the anti-heroic underdog, and the suspicion advanced by people like Arundhati Roy that the New India shares all of the worst habits of the old one.

Seeing double: Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India

If White Tiger shares surprising commonalities with its call-centre lit counterparts in its ambivalence with regard to the India Shining narrative, so does Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New

India advance a number of the same themes and perspectives, echoing Adiga’s simultaneous skepticism and optimism about globalized India. What distinguishes these cosmopolitan and relatively high-brow texts from the more popular call-centre lit works, however, is the degree of pessimism they evince through the shared violence and isolation of their nationalist entrepreneurial heroes Balram and Anjali. The novels’ protagonists themselves, however, could not be more different. In Mukherjee’s 2011 novel protagonist Anjali Bose – restless and reckless, yet, unlike Balram, singularly submissive to the whims of more powerful forces – is posited as the embodiment of a newly globalized and vibrant middle-class India and thus of capital and entrepreneurship themselves: isolated, violent, but also filling the role of nationalist avenger, reaping justice from the West through commerce and entrepreneurship. After fleeing the ‘old’

India, in the form of her childhood home Gauripur, for the IT and business process outsourcing centres of Bangalore, Anjali ultimately finds success amid the greener pastures of the Indian technology sector. Accordingly, through her young, middle-class protagonist, Mukherjee presents the new face of India, as it were, to an international readership. This face is not one marked by dire third-world poverty, but instead belongs to an attractive and upwardly mobile character who “light[s] up a room like a halogen lamp” (Mukherjee 7) – recalling former Prime

Minister Manmohan Singh’s description of the Indian IT and outsourcing industry in 2007 as

“the torch-bearer of India’s image in the world” (Kumar). If a less globalized, rural India can be described as “the Darkness” (12) – as Balram terms it in White Tiger – then this new India will, in Singh’s symbolic terms, light the way for the nation to assume a position of power and privilege on the world stage.

While Anjali is indeed the embodiment of globalized India and as such operates as an odd blend of entrepreneurship and nationalist sentiment in the text, the face she offers us in the pages of Miss New India is also always an ambivalent one: bewildered and uncertain, Anjali is torn between two homes and visions of her nation, and accordingly between multiple conflicting identities and desires. As one reviewer comments, she is a “strangely passive character who stumbles onto society-changing events and influential people, [and] doesn't so much change her own life as wait for her life to be changed” (Rhor). Her signature line – “I haven’t the foggiest”

(Mukherjee 16, 155, 156, 199, 210, 321) – signals the uncertainties and sense of powerlessness of life amidst globalization. Like Adiga, Mukherjee accordingly undercuts, to some extent,

Modi’s triumphalist neoliberal vision of the new face of India. Mukherjee’s new India, as incarnated by Anjali, is always possessed of a double consciousness, looking in multiple directions concurrently and torn between plural and uncertain states of being.

In this way Mukherjee, best known as a chronicler of the Indian diaspora in the US, links the experiences of those who, like Anjali, live and have never left globalized India, with those of more traditional diasporic subjects – like Jasmine, the author’s most famous heroine, who in her eponymous novel emigrates from India to the US. Mukherjee, who in researching her novel repeatedly visited Bangalorean call centres and spoke with young women in the business (Apte), therefore answers Raka Shome’s call to move from an exclusive focus on “North Atlantic geographies (which has usually characterized studies of diaspora and hybridity) to Asian geographies and their emerging modernities under neoliberal globalization” (107). In Miss New

India, Mukherjee builds on and challenges our understanding of diaspora, immigration, and exile by relating these ideas to Anjali’s experience in globalized India, in which the diasporic movement is Anjali’s aforementioned emigration from old India to new India and which is, in turn, symbolic of India’s own collision with globalization. More importantly for my purposes, however, she presents her audience with a very ambivalently rendered nationalist-entrepreneurial hero; one who distances herself from the past in the form of the ‘old’ India and is repeatedly linked with the violence associated with the entrepreneur’s replacement of the old with the new – a notion affiliated with Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.” Although Anjali is not an entrepreneur in the strict sense that Balram in The White Tiger is, she is deeply immersed in the world of commerce and outsourcing and, to paraphrase Foucault, an “entrepreneur of [her]self”

(2008: 226); and while by the conclusion of the novel Anjali seems to strike a blow for Western reparations to India through her work as a debt collector, her nationalist “heroism” is deeply problematized. The double vision that permeates the text also informs our vision of Anjali as

Indian hero, then: on the one hand, we root for this hapless underdog to succeed; but on the other, as Mukherjee illustrates, she remains something of a cipher, and even anti-hero, to author and audience alike.

Entrepreneurship and diaspora

How can the diaspora and diasporic subject be used to illuminate globalization and its valorization of a nationalist entrepreneurship, and vice-versa? First, and most obviously, with the advent of air travel, the second wave of Indian diaspora carried emigrants ─ like Mukherjee herself ─ to American shores, where computer firms were soon to hire large numbers from this usually well-educated group and some of its children and grandchildren. (Recall Ganesh,

Shyam’s diasporic competitor for his former girlfriend’s affections in One Night @ the Call

Centre; to Shyam’s chagrin and envy, he works at the Microsoft head office.) Already, then, the

Indian diaspora in the US is widely associated with cosmopolitan global travel and globalizing technologies. But the diasporic focus on novelty – a new home, a New World – can also be extrapolated to the situation of the nationalist entrepreneur in globalized India. The focus of the entrepreneur on the new and innovative mirrors in some ways the diasporic subject’s mission to make a home for him- or herself in an alien environment.

Edward Said writes of the “aesthetic principle” (143) of exile, “For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally” (147). Although Said’s comments tend to be associated more with European intellectual exiles like Adorno than with economic migrants, in this case they also reflect the diasporic subject’s contrapuntal, doubled state of being. Mukherjee’s novel is, as I have mentioned, permeated by a concern with doubleness, in the form of copies, mimicry, repetition, binaries, and forgeries. This double vision allows Mukherjee to show that globalization may repeat the oppressive dynamics of colonialism and to explore how the globalized-subject-as-Indian-nationalist-entrepreneur produces the dark double of the terrorist.

Just as Anjali is overwhelmed by a sense of doubleness, similar to the diasporic sense of double consciousness, so is Miss New India itself, in terms of both its themes and its form. And, while

Mukherjee’s earlier works detailing the diasporic experience may have valorized the diasporic subject’s journey of transformation (as in Jasmine and her Banerji series), she evinces a great deal more ambivalence in her mapping of the new face of globalized India and nationalist entrepreneurship.

Just as there are many ways of encountering globalization, whether through the transnational processes at play in a Bangalore call centre, for example, or through the virtual global networks that can bind dispersed minority communities together, so are there countless

97 ways to leave and return to one’s home. (We have already seen, for instance, how in the space of the car, Balram assumes a more diasporic consciousness thanks to the inadvertent teachings of the cosmopolitan Ashok and his American-born wife Pinky.) The term ‘homeland’ itself becomes fuzzy in a globalized time; as Vijay Mishra argues, “the ‘homeland’ is now available in the confines of one’s bedroom in Vancouver, Sacramento or Perth. In short, networking now takes over from the imaginary” (4). If the Indian call-centre worker assumes an American name, operates on American time, and tells American callers that she was born in Rock City, Illinois

(as Anjali must, albeit briefly and to little success, in Miss New India [239]), then has he or she not traversed some diasporic terrain of the imagination? In the midst of globalizing processes such as these and their blurring of once-stable concepts like homeland and the host country, some of the more rigid classifications used by critics to define modes of belonging within the diaspora begin to look somewhat dated. As James Clifford notes, “Diasporas usually presuppose longer distances” (304). Shome argues, however, that one does not need to make a long-distance journey to belong to the diaspora: the virtual and imaginative confrontation with globalization – in this case, “the culture of the call centers” – “manifests a . . . situation that reflects . . . the logics of diaspora – such as the production of racial hybridity, transnational crossings . . . displacements and dislocations, and more.” To see Anjali’s move from her hometown to adopted home as a diasporic transition is, accordingly, to “unsettle many of the dominant frameworks of diaspora that have characterized postcolonial studies in the western academy” (107-8). Taking into account the rise of globalization and new forms of leaving and returning home, it is imperative that we start including these narratives in the discussion of diaspora in order to gain insight into both the traditional diasporic subject and the intra-national diaspora of a globalized

India.

While Anjali’s time at the call centre is short, her relocation to Bangalore, the city most often upheld as a microcosm of the ‘new’ India of outsourcing, necessarily means that she too is subject, in an imaginative sense, to the transformative effects of globalization. Anjali is caught, for instance, between the double identities of ‘Angie,’ her bold, hybridized, entrepreneurial

Bangalore self; ‘Janey Busey’ from Rock City, Illinois, the American persona she crafts for the call centre; and ‘Anjali,’ an embodiment of small-town India she wishes to escape (236). The character also discovers that Bangalore “work[s] off the American clock. Everything about

Bangalore – even its time – [is] virtual” (114). Just as India itself has seen a transition under globalization from Nehruvian socialism to Modi’s neoliberalism, Anjali transitions from the

‘old’ India of Gauripur to the virtual globalization of Bangalore, in which time itself is rendered double and diasporic – with its globalized citizens tracking time zones contrapuntally.

Mukherjee’s positioning of Miss New India as the final volume within (but also outside) her Tara

Chatterjee trilogy accords with this view – in novels like Desirable Daughters (2002) and The

Tree Bride (2004)33 the author details the more traditional diasporic shift from India to North

America of Tara Chatterjee, a writer who records the Indian diasporic experience; and Anjali is ultimately, “in effect, adopted” (Mukherjee 328) by the extended Banerji-Chatterjee family at the conclusion of the novel. Mukherjee thus highlights the lineage linking the traditional diaspora of Tara Chatterjee to the new diaspora comprising people like Anjali, who travel from ‘old’ India to ‘new,’ globalized India.

Finally, Mukherjee’s narrative cannot be described as either that of a journey of arrival to the host ‘country’ of a new, globalized India or of a return to the old India. While the novel mostly takes place in the new India of Bangalore, it ends with Anjali’s return to Gauripur and a

33 Mukherjee explains that Tara Chatterjee “would have been narrator of the third, except that the publisher of the first two (Thea Books of Hyperion) went out of business…So I had to rewrite the third volume for a new publisher in order that it could stand alone” (Apte).

99 sort of problematized homecoming scene presided over by Anjali’s mentor and father figure, the expatriate American Peter Champion: “the blue door opened, and there was Peter at the top of the stairs . . . ‘Welcome, welcome,’ he called” (328). However, even this happy scene, in which

Peter’s home is described as the source of light and chatter on a dark, empty street, is figured as only a temporary visit to a city far different from the one Anjali left behind (326). As such, the character of Anjali reflects Clifford’s criticism of Safran’s definition of diaspora, albeit in the

South Asian context: that “there is little room in his definition for the . . . ambivalence about physical return and attachment to land which has characterized much Jewish diasporic consciousness” (Clifford 305). Traditional distinctions between the exile and immigrant in

Mukherjee’s work, and their attitudes toward home and adopted or temporary home, are therefore complicated through Anjali’s ambivalent view of Gauripur and Bangalore, in which the protagonist feels alienated from both her homes but simultaneously drawn to them as well.

Double consciousness and the globalized subject

Not only does Bharati Mukherjee expand our understanding of diaspora in Miss New

India, but she also incorporates an overweening sense of double consciousness into the pages of her novel, thereby highlighting its importance in our ongoing discussion about diaspora, nationalist entrepreneurship, and globalization. W.E.B. DuBois describes double consciousness, in terms of the African-American experience, as a state of “two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (NP). Postcolonial scholars have likewise noted this state of doubleness in the colonized subject under imperialism, as in Edward

Said’s comment that the exile’s experience is always contrapuntal (143). This sense of double vision shapes the themes and form of the novel in its emphasis on forms of doublenesss –

100 including replicas, counterfeits, and repetition – and, as we will see, Mukherjee suggests that even a mere copy can contain a crucial truth and authenticity lacking in the original.

Just as the diasporic text is permeated by doubleness, so is the globalized piece of writing. After all, as in diaspora, globalization separates identity from place, as John Tomlinson points out (1999, 106). For Tomlinson, this results in the possibility of a new cultural awareness that rests in two places at once: the local and the global – even as globalization’s complex connectivity weakens the hold of the local in favour of an affirmative “sense of our mutual dependency” across the globe (1999, 30). In a later work, however, and drawing on Habermas,

Tomlinson argues more darkly that modernity results in a “fragmented consciousness” as tradition falls away and one’s world grows increasingly unfamiliar; this consciousness, furthermore, “is not able to construct satisfying rational narratives of social meaning” (2008,

168). In either the first, more positive case or the bleaker, alienating second scenario, like the diasporic subject, a globalized subject may look at the world with a sense of double consciousness, where both the old world and the new world, local and global, and tradition and modernity, are contained in a single moment.

In Miss New India this sense of doubleness can be seen in Anjali’s ambivalent attitude to her arrival in Bangalore and her return to Gauripur. The character is torn between the old India and the new, globalized version of the nation – and, Mukherjee suggests, this double vision reflects the new India’s own fraught position, caught between comfortable but sanctimonious and oppressive tradition, often figured as the rural village or, in the case of Miss New India, the small Bihari town; and modernity, in the shape of the animated but frightening city with its proliferation of skyscrapers, espresso bars, and call centres. The diasporic sense of doubleness also manifests itself in the novel as a concern with and anxiety over copies, counterfeits, and

101 repetition.34 More specifically, in one iteration of this anxiety, Mukherjee voices the concern that the movers and shakers of the new India – the ambitious, upwardly mobile, and ruthless entrepreneurs – are mere doubles of India’s colonial oppressors, putting the purported progress of the nation since its independence in 1947 into question. Anjali’s landlady, the racist and

“stuck-in-the-Raj” Anglo-Indian Minnie Bagehot (124), is twice described, for example, as “the bones under the building boom” (138, 274): the colonial foundation that, mixed with the bones of its victims, allows ‘India 2.0’ to flourish as an updated copy of imperialism. While living with

Minnie, Anjali discovers a hidden corridor containing gruesome military portraits that depict

“Bodies of Sikhs [which] lay stacked like firewood[;] walking among the bodies were uniformed

British soldiers, grinning broadly. One had his foot on the head of a dead Sikh, striking the pose of the Great White Hunter” (137). This scene is echoed later in the text, when the Bagehot home is plundered by “evil forces” (247) in the shape of Asoke, Minnie’s plotting butler, the upwardly mobile but corrupt Rajoo and his army of “squatter kids,” and the auction house they work for

(245). As Anjali is led away by the police, who falsely accuse her of terrorism and killing

Minnie, “Her foot [crunches] the photo of dead Sikhs, which [lies] on the ground, stripped of its pewter frame, something new for the trash bin of history” (251). Bangalore’s new elite of

“property triads” (275) are also closely linked to the colonial forces here; it is they, after all, who send the Sikhs, in a bleak repetition of history, back to the “trash bin.” As Anjali notes,

“Minnie…had been cantonment Bangalore’s spit-and-polish opportunis[t]. In Asoke and the auction house crew she recognized a twenty-first-century update” (246). This is not a particularly original insight; we see it in White Tiger as well, and historians of India like William Dalrymple draw explicit connections between the officials of the East India Company and Indian CEOs and

34 Notably, Tara Chatterjee, Mukherjee’s own double or stand-in in the text, sends Anjali a book about doubleness, The Echo Maker by Richard Powers, which features a character with Capgras syndrome: the delusion that one is surrounded by imposters or doubles.

102 billionaires who use their abundant cash flows to control the country. But it is also significant that Anjali, Mukherjee’s would-be entrepreneurial protagonist, finds herself in the position of the

White Hunter here, with her foot atop the photographic replica, the double, of the Sikh corpse.

As the embodiment of capital, the aspiring entrepreneur (even, apparently, a powerless and desperate one like Anjali) can inadvertently take on a monstrous aspect, similar to Marx’s description of “Capital [as] dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks” (1977: 342). Perhaps this is why, as Berman writes,

“the bourgeoisie are the most destructive and violent ruling class in history” (100). As the embodiment of globalized capital and a (new and upwardly mobile) member of the bourgeoisie, the entrepreneur not only, as a globalized subject, views the world from an aforementioned doubled perspective, but the character is herself marked by a sense of doubleness as both monster and hero and murderer and victim.

Miss New India’s sense of double vision with regard to the violence of globalization and capital can also be seen in Mukherjee’s tying of globalization to terrorism, much as Adiga ties

Balram’s rebellion to the Naxalite revolution in White Tiger. More than twenty years before the publication of Miss New India, the protagonist of Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine encounters in New

York City the Sikh terrorist who killed her husband. According to Anthony Alessandrini, this scene “suggests the kinds of conjunctions created by global flows of labor” (275-6); Jasmine and her dark double, the terrorist, are bound together not only in their shared histories but in their diasporic identities, which are rendered possible by globalization. Mukherjee therefore suggests that emergent modernities, in the form of characters like Jasmine and Anjali, are inevitably twinned to violent counter-modernities, in the shape of the terrorist. She foregrounds this theme even more strongly in Miss New India, emphasizing that Anjali’s dark twin, the terrorist

Husseina Shiraz from Hyderabad, bears a remarkable resemblance to her: upon meeting

103

Husseina, Anjali thinks, “We could almost pass for sisters, more than my own sister and I could”

(113) – and, in fact, the roommates call each other sisters multiple times in the text (256, 263).

Furthermore, before Husseina flees the Bagehot house, she trades wardrobes with Anjali and then, unbeknownst to Anjali, steals her identity, becoming in effect a counterfeit version of the girl from Gauripur – leading the police, later, to accuse the bewildered Anjali of participating in a terrorist plot (256-7). As in Jasmine, then, both diaspora and globalization are inextricably tied to and doubled by terrorism. By highlighting the resemblance between Husseina and Anjali in her most recent novel, however, and by showing that Anjali helps Husseina to escape the country

(albeit inadvertently), Mukherjee suggests that her audience attend to the part played by globalization in creating terrorism and even mirroring it, in globalization’s own potential for destruction and violence. While the nationalist entrepreneur may not be directly implicated in the violence that surrounds her, she acts as a replica or double of the violent figure and vice-versa; this in turn points to the violence of the entrepreneur who razes homes to build factories and shops, shuts down labour movements with armed goons, or pollutes neighboring rivers and lakes.

Marshall Berman describes modernity as “any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it” (5). As Berman shows, however, this task is enormously difficult given the “permanent revolution” that modernity creates (96). To exist in this state of chaos, in which all that was sanctified and valorized in the past “melts into air,” a new form of subjectivity is produced. Berman writes, “In order for people, whatever their class, to survive in modern society, their personalities must take on the fluid and open form of [modern] society. Modern men and women must learn to yearn for change: not merely to be open to changes in their personal and social lives, but positively to demand them…” (95). Furthermore, he tells us, “They must learn not to long nostalgically for…the real or fantasized past, but to delight in mobility, to

104 thrive on renewal, to look forward to future developments in their conditions of life and their relations with their fellow men” (96). The nationalist entrepreneur in these novels meets

Berman’s criteria for modernity in several important ways: he or she leaves the ‘old India’ and the past behind and is deeply concerned with upward social and financial mobility. However, the entrepreneur is, as a result of his or her enforced (or self-enforced) separation from the past, often isolated and alienated from society, although sometimes he or she is able to develop a new community of other individuals to help compensate for this loss. The entrepreneur nonetheless experiences sadness at his or her exile and inability to return to the family and society that once felt like home. Again, we should be reminded of the exiled diasporic subject, for whom, as

Edward Said writes, “homecoming is out of the question” (142). Mukherjee’s ‘Miss New India’

Anjali must likewise flee her home in Gauripur when she learns she will be forced to marry the man who has brutally raped her. When her sister Sonali also rejects her, claiming her escape from Gauripur has heaped shame on the Bose family, Anjali begins to see the ‘old’ India of her youth changing from “something green and lush and beautiful to something barren and hideous”

(74). Anjali longs nonetheless for the forgiveness of her father, who haunts her still wearing the noose with which he hangs himself after her flight to Bangalore (260), and in her darkest moment she desires only to hear the voices of her family in Gauripur (262). If her father’s tyrannical rule can be likened to that of a political state (traditional ‘old’ India in miniature), and

Anjali’s refusal to be married as “a declared stand against a homeland’s policies” (Barkan and

Shelton 4, qtd. in Mishra 20-1), then again, Anjali would, in these terms, be classified as in a state of perpetual exile as a modern and globalized subject.

As mentioned, however, there are compensations for this exile from the past and its attendant sorrows. In a novel in which the often tongue-tied protagonist speaks strangely little, one of her longest speeches is revealing in its enthusiasm for her newfound freedom and embrace

105 of her individualism: “I have been in Bangalore only three weeks. I have no job, no paycheck, and no family here. But I have seen more and learned more in Bangalore than I have from twenty years in Gauripur. Here I feel I can do anything” (166). Anjali’s attitude reflects Marx’s comments that amid the maelstrom of modernity the bourgeois subject replaces his or her family and almost all traces of the past – tradition, religion, old habits – with capital (Berman 106). But the uprooting of this subject from familiar and well-trod terrain can also allow him or her to blossom in new ways – in other words, to explore new subjectivities and paths (109), as Anjali does, or attempts to do, in Miss New India. That Anjali, furthermore, joins a new family in the form of the upper-class and semi-diasporic Banerji family at the end of the novel (328) comes as a bonus to the character, allowing her to be symbolically reborn into the upwardly mobile and globalized classes. The past is accordingly washed away, with Anjali surrounded by her adoptive brothers and declaring to herself in the final pages of the text that “[s]he had no memories. Her memories were only starting now. Her life was starting now” (324). Because the character of the nationalist entrepreneur hero in post-millennial Indo-Anglian fiction in turn mirrors that of global capital, we see that this figure must likewise necessarily be highly individualistic in order to attain his or her entrepreneurial goals, but still have strong connections to nation and community and a fierce dedication to the promotion of India as economic superpower. For Anjali, however, these stances are tempered by the fact that she stands only for the New India and firmly shuts the door on the old one, and thus is linked solely to a select and largely elite group of cosmopolitans like the Banerjis. This fairy-tale ending is also at odds with the novel’s previous more grimly realist tone, suggesting either that Mukherjee was at a loss as to how to wrap things up for her often lifeless heroine, or – to give the author a little more credit – that such an exaggeratedly and hollowly happy ending is most appropriate to a tale dealing so deeply in counterfeits, fakes, and artifice. Any feeling of global interconnectedness that Tomlinson relates to globalization, as one

106 of the boons of globalizing processes, emerges here moreover only in the knowledge that global markets are connected, with one country’s stock rising or falling at the expense or benefit of another. This is rendered particularly apparent through the trope of outsourcing: as Mr. GG says of his own company Vistronics, itself engaged by American firms as an outsourcer, “We might have started out as an appendage technology, but we’ve evolved. Now we’re outsourcing to

Kenya and Bangladesh. And do you know what? I see us, in maybe three years, outsourcing our technology to the United States” (Mukherjee 163).

This may be one of the reasons why Anjali’s role as nationalist (anti-)hero in Miss New

India (and its fairy-tale ending) ultimately feels so disappointing. At the conclusion of the novel, after Anjali fails to become a call-centre agent, she begins work as a debt collector for

RecoverySys, another outsourcing agency that specializes in recovering unpaid debt from

Americans, by levelling first “compassionate authority” over her hapless callers, then “credit- score damage, then…legal intimidation” (318). She is not yet an entrepreneur in the sense of having started her own business, but as the unnamed narrator of the final chapter of the novel explains, Anjali has succeeded in her enterprise of the self, having assumed a near-legendary status as successful businesswoman in Gauripur: “she’d gone to fabled Bangalore and worked hard and found a modest position, then risen within it . . . [Peter Champion] said she . . . would come to his corporate management class and give a little talk. If we were ready to listen, and to act, she had lessons to teach us” (326). Furthermore, as Mukherjee indicates, debt collection contains more obvious agency and power than call-centre work. After all, while Anjali sees employment at a call centre as, echoing Weber and punning on the nature of the job, just “a job, not a calling” (284), Mr. GG considers her to have been “born to be a debt collector” (306). Her adoptive cousin, the wealthy and cosmopolitan Rabi Chatterjee, tells Anjali she “was right to back out” of the call-centre work, and when Anjali protests that she didn’t back out but “screwed

107 up” her opportunity, Rabi says, “Something in your soul wouldn’t let you settle for a call center .

. . You’re cut out for something bigger” (277). Anjali is not meant to “serve” the West, as Parvati explains that call-centre work demands (242), but to challenge it – to demand it pay up. Upon being offered an interview with the debt recovery company, Anjali’s thoughts turn to her own nationalist mission, which, ambivalent as it is, only renders her generation’s project more difficult:

My new beginning is here [in Bangalore at RecoverySys], but [is] different from Baba

and Mama’s generation. They had to fight the British; their big fight was to establish an

independent India and create a nonaligned world. Theirs was a struggle . . . against

communalism and caste-ism and poverty and superstition and too much religion. They

were lucky. Their fights weren’t easy, but simpler and clearer than mine . . . I’m terrified,

tempted, and corrupted by the infusions of vast sums of new capital. (306)

As dubious as Anjali’s claims may be, they reflect a sense of a continued nationalist fight for

India’s future as fought by a new generation of middle-class technorati. While in one sense this development can be read as an affirmative ending, with the postcolonial subject recovering the

‘debt’ owed to her by global hegemonic forces (occupying the role of antagonist previously played by colonial Britain), from another, darker perspective, Anjali must now act as the stooge for these neoimperialist forces, and her success is necessarily tied to theirs. In an interview published soon after the novel’s release, Mukherjee describes her protagonist as “morally slippery – she experiences, and she moves on, unlike her sister and mother” (Apte). Like globalizing New India, which must by nature be constantly moving forward in search of novelty and innovation, Anjali’s entrepreneurial heroism is double-sided, helping some and hurting others.

108

This sense of doubleness also informs Mukherjee’s representation of the inherent artifice of her narrative – as a double, an artistic copy, of the ‘real thing.’ After a dark night of the soul in a prison cell, for example, Anjali realizes that her cell phone is missing, but “Getting a replacement wasn’t the same. A replacement will be a copy. All the names on speed dial will be copies. I am just a copy” (262-3). Other characters notice Anjali’s ability to replicate and mirror her beholders: “you’re like a reflecting pool,” her surrogate mother Parvati tells her. “You give back wavy clues to what we are or what we’re going to be” (321). Furthermore, replicas of

Anjali, in the shape of photographic doubles, abound in the text: first, in the photograph taken of the character for her matrimonial advertisements; second, in a Bangla magazine selling her image as the ‘new’ face of the modern Bengali woman; and third, as the “Mona Lisa of the

Mofussils.” In all three cases, Anjali’s image is used to sell the character to an eager audience, whether of husbands, fellow young Bengalis, or appreciators of art; “[a]n emergent class of

Indian entrepreneurs” (271), for instance, buys out the entire exhibition featuring Anjali’s Mona

Lisa photograph. This reflects Anjali’s nature as an entrepreneurial embodiment of global capital, which is always reproducing itself or offering up ‘new and improved’ versions of itself, twinned by her status as a hot commodity to fellow entrepreneurs. As we have seen, this sometimes manifests itself in the form of a replica of colonialism and colonial violence, as in

Mukherjee’s twinning of Anjali with the terrorist Husseina. It likewise recalls a central refrain of anti-globalization critics and activists: namely, that globalization results in cultural homogenization, conjuring up images of a bleak world overtaken by strip malls and McDonalds and Starbucks outlets, in which a Chennai suburb is a grotesque replica of one in Dallas. It should also remind us, however, of Walter Benjamin’s famous argument in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) that mechanical reproduction – as seen, for example, in film and photography, with which Anjali is associated in Miss New India – removes

109 the “aura” of authenticity of the original in an age of capitalism. Not only does this process reflect the tendency in modernity to embrace what is new, but it also results in a devaluation of what was previously held to be sacred or authoritative; therefore mechanical reproduction simultaneously drives modernity (Benjamin 218-23).35 As John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing, with the introduction of mechanical reproduction “images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free” (32-4). In particular, in our globalized era of the Internet, images can be reproduced and distributed at almost unfathomable speeds. Once again, then, we see a common refrain that appears in all of the texts analyzed in this dissertation, among pulp and cosmopolitan authors alike: that the at-once liberating and oppressive characteristics of new technologies, which in an age of globalized but Western-affiliated capital strip art, rituals and traditions of their sacrosanct status and uproot and overturn cultural identity; however, they can also open new imaginative vistas and possibilities. In her capacity as both capital-like being and commodity in Mukherjee’s novel, nationalist entrepreneurial hero and anti-hero Anjali is both replica and replicator: she is only one of “millions like her” who have set

India “on fire.” Peter Champion, moreover, somewhat enigmatically tells his students in

Gauripur that she is “just one in a billion, but each of us had it in us to be another one in a billion” if they listen carefully to Anjali’s business lessons (326). The final pages of Miss New

India leave us envisioning a new globalized society full of Anjalis and would-be Anjalis, all of whom have the capacity to liberate India through their economic upward mobility or to enslave it under a neoimperialist regime through their links to violence and their “moral slipperiness” – but

Mukherjee and the book aren’t quite sure which outcome is more likely. As Peter Champion

35 While Benjamin was referring here to mechanical reproduction and technology, which are not to be conflated with capitalism in his work, there is a sense in all of the novels discussed in this dissertation that technology is the handmaiden of Western globalization and capital, even if it can be made to serve Indian interests and create new kinds of solidarity and community. See in particular Chapter 3 and 4.

110 asks, “We know we are in the middle of a revolution, but is that a good thing? Where will it end?

Are we riding a tiger, have we started something we can’t control?” (167).

Finally, in addition to the sense of double vision – in the novel’s concern with copies, repetition, and counterfeits – running through its thematic content, Miss New India’s sense of doubleness also informs its formal elements. This manifests itself, whether deliberately on

Mukherjee’s part or not, in the recycled quality of the plot and characters, the clichéd way almost all of the characters speak, and the wildly repetitive quality of Mukherjee’s writing – all of which may have led to the unenthusiastic response the novel has received since its publication. Critics have noted the book’s often banal, flat quality, with its “oddly antique plot” and characters

(Sacks). Indeed, the novel seems to crib – heavily, at times – from Great Expectations and

(again, reminiscent of Jasmine) Jane Eyre: Minnie Bagehot is an Indo-Anglian Miss Havisham, bitter, ensnared in the past, and ultimately doomed – in her own words, “a recluse in a mausoleum” (155) – while Anjali and her love interest call each other “Miss Bose” and “Mr.

Gujral” (302) in a scene that recalls Jane and Rochester’s flirtatious exchanges.36 The sense of doubleness and repetition pervading the novel, then, manifests itself in certain formal elements of the novel as characters and a plot that read as recycled versions or doubles of earlier characters and narratives. Kapur, meanwhile, comments of Miss New India that “India’s old stories are being replaced by new ones, equally clichéd, about boundless opportunity”: although, as I have discussed, the novel is decidedly not an unabashedly optimistic tale of rags to riches in a globalized world, it admittedly ends on a ‘local girl makes good,’ Horatio Alger-esque note when we are told by the unnamed narrator in Gauripur that Anjali had “succeeded in ways our

36 As I discussed briefly in the White Tiger section of this chapter, Adiga’s writing also recalls realist Victorian texts in its focus on social justice and the ironically humorous turnarounds in social position similar to what we find in Dickens and Balzac. These earlier works’ narration of the effects of industrialization on Britain and France, respectively, is mirrored to some extent in Adiga’s and Mukherjee’s attention to industrialization in its more postmillennial globalized form; both authors, clearly, see themselves as participating in this tradition.

111 teachers always told us we could too” (326). Although it is doubtful that in all these cases

Mukherjee was aware of these insertions of doubleness or repetition (rather than, say, in need of a better editor), they may also point to her suspicion about these rags-to-riches tales that have grown threadbare with overuse. Her concern that a generation of young Indian women has fallen prey to certain myths underlying capitalist ideology is paired or doubled, however, with a cautious optimism that the New India is a better India.

Mukherjee shows, in the end, that the face of New India may appear to be a sunnier one than that shown to an international audience in the past. However, the author indicates that this face is an ambivalent one. In Miss New India, the globalized subject is caught between the reassurance and stability of family and home, in the form of the ‘old’ India, just as she longs to escape its repressive traditions; and excited and hopeful about the opportunities of the ‘new’

India, her adopted home, even as she recognizes its crafting of counterfeit identities and repetitions of colonial oppression. As a nationalist entrepreneurial (anti-)hero, as well, Anjali is a morally ambiguous figure, linked as she is with violence, colonialism, and the multinational, but also standing in for a rising India able to claim reparations from the West. This reflects

Mukherjee’s own feelings towards globalization: as she asks in an interview, “How you view the

‘new India’ is a function of your vision . . . Is the ‘boom’ in India a fragile and temporary thing, doomed to passing, or a permanent feature of the Indian landscape?” Appropriately for a book dealing so heavily in repetition, doubleness, and cliché, Mukherjee answers her own question with the clichéd phrase, “The jury is still out.”

The cosmopolitan Indian author as nationalist entrepreneur hero

I want to turn now to show how the nationalist-entrepreneur hero figure looks from some angles very much like the cosmopolitan diasporic Indian author. In her immensely informative analysis of postcolonial authors’ troubled relationship to their audiences and the globalized

112 publishing industry, Sarah Brouillette draws on Masao Miyoshi to make a fascinating comparison of the “employees of transnational corporations in their guise as efficient managers of ‘global production and consumption, hence of world culture itself’ (60) and postcolonial cosmopolitan authors. Through their globalized protagonists working in transnational circumstances, Adiga and Mukherjee are surreptitiously engaged in Brouillette’s concept of strategic exoticism and “general postcolonial authorial self-consciousness” which is comprised of “a set of literary strategies that operate through assumptions shared between the author and the reader, as both producer and consumer work to negotiate with, if not absolve themselves of, postcoloniality’s touristic guilt” (7). Adiga and Mukherjee’s protagonists reflect the traits of their creators – their self-conscious efforts to undermine their own packaging and selling of India to a

Western audience and their use of certain kinds of English as a form of global currency (whether the globalized world of business and finance or the literary market). White Tiger has, notably, been greeted by some critics as a more authentic account of contemporary India than those found in other cosmopolitan Indian writing in English. Ana Cristina Mendes notes that the book has been received as a welcome antidote to the “IWE” (Indian writing in English) phenomenon largely represented by Indo-Anglian writers like Salman Rushdie; peeling back the mango and spice metaphors and doing away with the formalism of Rushdie and his peers, Adiga has been regarded by some as giving a more honest, less exoticized account of Indian life – the ‘true’ story of globalization’s dark underbelly (Mendes 281-2). Other critics, however, have perceived it as merely “selling a refurbished exotic idea of the subcontinent to western readers” (276). Sanjay

Subrahmanyam writes in the London Review of Books, for example, that “This book adds another brick to the patronising edifice it wants to tear down.” Kanchan Gupta contends meanwhile that Adiga cynically “crafted his novel in a manner that it could not but impress the

Man Booker judges who see India as a seething mass of unwashed hordes which . . . are not

113 worthy of being considered as an emerging power, never mind economic growth and knowledge excellence” (qtd. in Mendes 284). A Western audience would only be content with the framing of India’s globalization as horror story, in other words; as Gupta rightly points out, this gives

Westerners nervous about losing their privileged position on the world stage both comfort in their own moral superiority and an exciting thrill of fear ─ their Asian competitors are violent savages, almost animals in their brutality. So, even as White Tiger has been read by others as a welcome addition to the wider cultural discourse usually dominated by neoliberal voices of authors like Thomas Friedman, for the same reasons it has been criticized for being too bleak, provoking “roars of anger” (Jeffries) in its gloomy outlook for India’s past, present, and future.

Even as the novel offers this seemingly ‘authentic’ glimpse into the true, grim nature of

‘shining India,’ it also destabilizes notions of authenticity. Adiga draws attention to his own participation in the publishing industry with attempts to undermine the global literary value of

“othered” authenticity. The author employs strategies that ultimately put into question any such claims to authenticity, changing the reason for Wen Jiabao’s visit to India and thereby destabilizing historical reality, and placing the words “I’m no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth?” into Balram’s mouth (287-8). Ankhi Mukherjee also contends that the epistolary form of the novel necessarily enhances our sense of the “immateriality” of the narrator

(11). Further, as Balram himself admits, he is “half-baked” (10), with gaping holes in his knowledge resulting from his early withdrawal from school; any information he provides must therefore be questioned carefully, even as he asks the reader to trust his account of the ‘real story’ (176). Contradictions and uncertainties such as these foreground, whether intentionally on

Adiga’s part or not, the absurdity of a reader’s quest for authenticity within the literature of the

‘exotic Other.’ Just as the book addresses a globalized India and the transnational workplace, so does it deal – critically – with a globalized literary marketplace and the currency of authenticity.

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White Tiger self-consciously addresses the aspirational function of the English language: among his accomplishments, Balram boasts, he has a website featuring his motto “‘We Drive

Technology Forward.’ In English!” (169). The emphasis placed on the word ‘English’ humorously highlights the premium placed on the language in contemporary India, where it is widely considered a vehicle of upward mobility. We can also read this, however, as Adiga’s ironic and self-reflexive commentary on his own use of English in staging the thoughts of a character who cannot express himself in that language – clearly, the author is writing for an international audience, and Indian writing in English, a language that Salman Rushdie calls “the most powerful medium of communication in the world” (qtd. in Huggan 64), is practically guaranteed a larger audience than a novel written in, for instance, Telugu or Tamil. As such,

Adiga’s use of English in this novel operates as a route to a sort of upward literary mobility, paralleling the aspirations of his protagonist for economic success through the language.

Following Brouillette’s work on postcolonial authors’ ambivalent relationship to the global literary marketplace, then, it seems to me that White Tiger likewise calls our attention to Adiga’s strategies in dealing with the demands of a globalized publishing industry to “register anxiety about the political parameters of the literary marketplace” (Brouillette 1).

As well, we are told that, much like former chaiwallah Narendra Modi, Balram’s English skills are weak. The character’s thoughts accordingly seem to have been translated by Adiga into the letters we read in the novel. Subrahmanyam comments critically, “We are meant to believe – even within the conventions of the realist novel – that a person who must really function in

Maithili or Bhojpuri can express his thoughts seamlessly in a language that he doesn’t speak.”

Worse, he argues, Adiga uses British phrases and expressions to convey the thoughts of a character who couldn’t possibly know these words. Mukherjee, however, rightly argues that

“This logical inconsistency . . . testifies to the larger point Adiga is making about the unslakable

115 global aspirations of local capital (and the insinuation of the global in the local in a post-internet, call-centre universe)” (15). The English employed in White Tiger displays the prevalence of this language as the lingua franca of globalization, wherein even the crudest, most simple-minded

English colloquialisms have seeped into the Indian conversation. At the beginning of the novel

Balram tells the Chinese president, “Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English” (3); likewise, Adiga seems to be saying, a novel treating the problems of globalization – and globalization in the literary marketplace – is most appropriately written using that language.

Earlier in this chapter I looked at Mukherjee’s association of Anjali with capital. In her incarnation as the “Mona Lisa of the Mofussils,” for example, and as the cover girl for a magazine positioning her as the ‘new’ Bengali woman, Anjali’s face sells. The numerous mentions of Anjali’s “halogen smile” (e.g. 7, 300) also point to the character’s metafictional quality: because of their brightness, halogen lamps are frequently used in film and television and on the stage, where the artistic counterfeit of real life is acted for an audience. In all of these examples, Mukherjee emphasizes her fictional character’s artificial quality – as an artistic double of the real ‘Miss New India’ figure the author wishes to narrativize here – and this character’s bankability in a global literary market. As Alessandrini reminds us, “The global purchase of fiction written in English brings with it the possibility – or is it the danger? – that any individual text can be taken as a particular community ‘finding its voice’” (268). Even if, as Faith Johnston points out, at times Anjali “seems only a device for investigating the perils and rewards of the

New India for women,” by emphasizing the inherent artifice of her fictional character,

Mukherjee indicates that she is wary of becoming the literary spokeswoman for or anthropologist of the ‘new’ India and women like Anjali. On the other hand, the author also demonstrates that the artificial artistic creation, or copy, can reveal a truth not readily visible in the original: in one

116 of the concluding scenes of the novel, for example, a photograph is taken of a fox bat, and Anjali remarks that “in the zoom lens their true nature appeared, and their name held true: foxes. Sharp- faced, intelligent dogs, with wings” (325). With Miss New India, Mukherjee offers a snapshot of another mysterious creature, the new Indian woman, hoping to reveal the truth beneath the glossy surface of globalized India.

Like White Tiger, Miss New India plays up the use of certain valorized forms of English in globalized India. And, as in a number of works of call-centre fiction, in Mukherjee’s novel we are treated to a description of how an ‘accent neutralization’ class works to change Indian voices into either an Americanized or a sort of corporate, pan-Western ‘neutral’ one. The words that

Anjali is taught to speak – “please, deliver, development, circuitry, executive, address, growth, management, garbage, opportunity” – (231) are indicative of the double-sided nature of English as the lingua franca of globalization, with the subservient please placed alongside the more commanding executive and management, and with garbage mentioned in the same breath as opportunity. As in some of the other call-centre lit we’ve looked at, this process is linked to violence and a way of speaking that emphasizes efficiency and hardness over what is depicted by these authors as the warmth and softness of an Indian accent: “[Parvati] instructed the students to press the upper teeth down on the lower lip so that a crisp v didn’t dissolve into a whooshy w.

She drilled the trainees hard, but not even Anjali got the th in growth, hearth, and thought. So much easier to catch the staked fence of a t and an h approaching and settle on a plump, cozy, softened d” (232). When a student rebels, telling the accent instructor that the classes are

“humiliating…I am a citizen of India. I don’t give a damn that Mr. Corporate America doesn’t like my accent!” she calmly ignores his critique and teaches the remaining students to pronounce

“’Quitters never win, and winners never quit’ and [keeps] them at it until ‘vinners’ and ‘kvitters’

[are] wrung from their tongues.” Only those students who are willing to combat what the

117 instructor terms their “[m]other-tongue influence problems” (231) and succumb to the desires of

‘Mr. Corporate America’ can win at the game of globalization.37

That the globalized entrepreneur – and cosmopolitan diasporic Indian author – must use certain valorized modes of English to achieve her goals comes as no surprise; as was discussed in

Chapter 1, ‘neutralized’ or American accents operate in these novels as a highly valued form of currency – even if they may result in fissures between culture and identity for the Indian speaker adopting a new accent. The aforementioned clichéd, repetitive language Mukherjee uses in Miss

New India speaks to the doubled linguistic quality of the ‘new’ India, where call-centre agents like Husseina and Anjali must counterfeit an American identity and, accordingly, American speech patterns in their use of the English language. As I have noted, Anjali’s smile is described numerous times as halogen-like in its luminescence, and the character repeats “I haven’t the foggiest” over five times in the course of three-hundred-and-twenty-eight pages. This sense of repetition extends itself to the clichéd way in which the characters speak. Minnie has “lost her marbles” and India has “gone to the dogs” (200); and, describing her bitterness at having to leave

India, Husseina tells Anjali, “Spilled milk, water under the bridge, sleeping dogs, et cetera, et cetera” (130). Nonetheless, speaking a relatively ‘native’ Indian language offers no respite from this crushing sense of doubleness for our Miss New India: Anjali feels alienated from “topsy- turvy” Bangalore and its denizens, in terms of both the “southern rhythms, the weird vowels and thudding consonants” of the Kannada spoken by native Bangaloreans (255) and the cliché-ridden

Americanisms of her fellow globalized migrants who work at the call centres. While Anjali’s subservient, Americanized call-centre voice is, surprisingly, ultimately found to be unconvincing and she is not hired by any of the Bangalore firms, it is revealing that she is eventually de facto

37 That “Corporate America” is framed here as both domineering and male, and the globalized subject as submissive and female, echoes sexist nationalist Indian rhetoric about the effeminizing effects of imperialism and neoimperialism.

118 adopted by Parvati Banerji, the aforementioned instructor who teaches the American elocution and culture classes to Indian students, and that this adoptive mother coaches Anjali on hiding her accent for her job interview as a debt collector (318). The use of certain types of English, then, plays an important role in guiding Anjali toward her destiny as an entrepreneurial (anti-)hero recouping the debt owed to India by the hegemonic West. This parallels the case of the postcolonial author: South Asian and Indian authors tend to be particularly linked with cosmopolitanism, Brouillette writes, because they “combine social privilege with subversion: writing in English, they are available for consecration as embodying a national or supranational voice, unmoored from the more ‘minor’ perspectives identified with regional vernacular writing”

(87). While Mukherjee is not as explicit as Adiga in tying a mastery of English to a more privileged position in the global literary market, this connection between the English language and success is nevertheless notable and reminiscent of the connection made by her character

Jasmine in an earlier novel; that “to want English was to want more than you had been given at birth, it was to want the world” (68). In contrast to Anjali and Jasmine, however, Mukherjee comes from an elite background and was educated thoroughly, like most Indian elites, in

English; writing in English, therefore, is unlikely to be anywhere near the struggle it is for her protagonists. Nonetheless Mukherjee’s recurrent foregrounding of the importance of English mirrors the importance of English in the literary marketplace, where novels written in any other language find only very small audiences and smaller domestic publishers.

To be a modern hero – and anti-hero – in globalized India

Marshall Berman writes that “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are” (15). The nationalist entrepreneur anti-hero similarly seems to offer both growth and

119 destruction to readers, India, and the world. While the call-centre lit discussed in Chapter 1 also evinces ambivalence with regards to globalizing New India, the relatively more high-brow White

Tiger and Miss New India display a deeper degree of ambivalence in emphasizing the violence and isolation associated with globalized entrepreneurship, the leitmotif of the neoliberal success story. But the similarities between the call-centre lit and the award-winning cosmopolitan novels are instructive: they all, to varying degrees, associate globalized India with the rise of the Indian and the fall of the Westerner and accordingly display a kind of cutthroat but often self- consciously problematized nationalism. It is important to attend to this nationalism, as it offers much-needed insight into not only the literary history of postmillennial India – an area which until now has largely been ignored – but into the discourses of globalization and nationalism themselves. We are, in short, looking to the future of our globalized world. Must globalization in its current neoliberal form divide and conquer rather than bring about the widespread solidarity so many globalization theorists long for? Although the novels discussed in Chapter 1 and 2 may suggest this is the case, we will see in Chapters 3 and 4 that globalized technology – despite being framed as Western or American in origin and therefore somewhat sinister – can offer more room for solidarity.

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Chapter 3 Cyborg and sahiborg: Technology, community, and enmity in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and Altaf Tyrewala’s Engglishhh

Maintaining and joining, the telephone holds together what it separates.

-Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book

Globalization is a brutal phenomenon. It brings us mass displacement, wars, terrorism,

unchecked financial capitalism, inequality, xenophobia, climate change. But if globalization is

capable of holding out any fundamental promise to us, any temptation to go along with its havoc,

then surely that promise ought to be this: we will be more free to invent ourselves.

-Mohsin Hamid, Discontent and Its Civilizations

History has been rewritten. It is now hsstroy. Nothing will be the same again.

-Altaf Tyrewala, “Engglishhh©”

Somewhere a telephone rings. It sounds once, then twice, before you pick up, your breath catching in your throat as you rush to answer the call. What happens next, as you hold the receiver tightly against your ear, is described by Avital Ronell in The Telephone Book:

Your picking it up means the call has come through. It means more: you’re its

beneficiary, rising to meet its demand, to pay a debt. You don’t know who’s calling, or

what you are going to be called upon to do, and still, you are lending your ear, giving

something up, receiving an order. It is a question of answerability. Who answers the call

of the telephone, the call of duty, and accounts for the taxes it appears to impose? (2)

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A synecdoche of technology, as banal and mundane as it can be magical and transcendent,

Ronell lyrically plays with Roland Barthes’s “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of the

Narrative” to describe how the telephone gives (and makes demands), in its creation of easier and more rapid modes of global communication and even, sometimes, new forms of community and solidarity, and in the identity it imposes on the recipient of Ronell’s “call of duty.”

Simultaneously, however, she elucidates how the machine takes away; saddling recipients of the call with onerous new responsibilities and knowledge and them of the freedoms they may once have had, their subjectivities are necessarily altered, and old identities and habits are lost, sometimes irrevocably.

In previous chapters, I looked at the eruption of new subjectivities in India amid globalization and, concurrently, the seeming disappearance of old myths and identities – at how the telephone of the call centre, in joining one person to another, creates fissures in identity, family, and what is described as “traditional” Indian culture. In this chapter, I look at technology, particularly in the form of machines like the tape recorder to map the formation of cyborg subjectivities in an era of rapidly changing and ever-broadening and improving modes of communication. As depicted by Sinha and Tyrewala, these technologies seem at once to bring us closer together and push us further apart, fostering a greater sense of global solidarity and

“connectivity” in previously isolated communities, in John Tomlinson’s terms (1999, 30), but also setting out battle lines for revolutionary new Indian movements: between the international rich and poor, in Sinha’s work, and Global North and South or West and East, in Tyrewala’s.

Technology can oppress and poison globalized Indians but also free them from the chains of

Western capitalism and even provide routes for innovation, creativity, and solidarity – albeit, in

Tyrewala’s case, ones that render the utopian promises of globalized technology somewhat suspect. In this regard, we may recall Heidegger’s comments in The Question Concerning

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Technology, where techne is “the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic.” These texts likewise emphasize the creation, the “bringing-forth,” of new subjectivities and ideas amid globalized technology. Heidegger also draws connections between techne and episteme. “Both words are names for knowing in the widest sense,” says Ronell in her interpretation, and “[t]hey mean to be entirely at home in something, to understand and to be an expert in it” (212).

Indeed, in the texts analyzed in this chapter, characters become so “at home” in technology that the technological becomes figuratively embodied in them; the machine starts to appear corporeal and the body mechanical. Dipankar Gupta writes, likewise, that upgrades in technology can lead to drastic changes in what he terms the “root metaphors” of culture, nation, and tradition (40), and, therefore, to huge changes in subjectivity. Animal, in Indra Sinha’s novel

Animal’s People, finds his body twisted and disfigured (but also, in some interesting ways, improved and made unique, as the character learns) by the technologies employed by the

“Kampani” – a clear stand-in for Union Carbide, which in 1984 unleashed a devastating toxic disaster on the city of Bhopal, in central India. But technology, in the form of a tape recorder given to Animal by a sympathetic Western reporter, also literally offers the character a voice and becomes not only a sort of larynx but a mechanical brain functioning as a repository for his most visceral thoughts, memories, desires and fears.

It is in this second capacity that technology becomes techne, a poetic act of self-creation for Animal, and the audio tape here both records and enables the creation of a creative memoir and jeremiad against the devastating forces of corporate globalization. Alongside this textual analysis, I will historicize my reading by looking at India’s technological past, from the colonial period until the turn of the millennium, as well as various critical perspectives on this history.

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This is because Animal’s People engages heavily – principally in the form of the novel’s haunting central event: the toxic disaster at the company factory – with India’s technological past, the failed promises of machines and science dedicated to the spread of capitalism, and the potential of technologically enacted solidarity to build a better future for the subaltern. This in turn mirrors the work of critics like Andrew Feenberg, who sees potential for resistance and agency in technology so long as it is divorced from capitalist technocratic society. Feenberg argues that

[t]he technocratic tendency of modern societies represents one possible path of

development, a path that is peculiarly truncated by the demands of power. Technology

has other beneficial potentials that are suppressed under capitalism and state socialism

that could emerge along a different developmental path. In subjecting human beings to

technical control at the expense of traditional modes of life while sharply restricting

participation in design, technocracy perpetuates elite power structures inherited from the

past in technically rational forms. In the process it mutilates not just human beings and

nature, but technology as well. A different power structure would innovate a different

technology with different consequences. (53)

It is, furthermore, this relatively hopeful and optimistic Nehruvian view of technology that ultimately makes Animal’s People resemble certain postcolonial Indian attitudes towards science and the machine. At the end of the novel, Animal is endowed with cyborgian characteristics that allow him to participate in community-building and which even, Sinha suggests, render him into the voice of a new revolutionary movement. In this sense, I argue, Animal is not just a cyborg but what I call a sahiborg (a portmanteau combining the words “sahib”38and “cyborg”) to

38 “Sahib” is an Arabic word meaning “holder, master or owner” that has subsequently passed into Hindi and Urdu usage. It is often associated with colonial British rule, but I want to de-link it from these connotations to suggest a more positive form of mastery tied to social justice and activism.

124 indicate the formation of a new technology-informed identity and perspective through which one experiences, as Animal does, a sense of hopeful possibility – and even of potential mastery – of a globalized future.

While Sinha’s novel references a revolutionary movement – crucially, not only formed of

Indians, but comprising poor citizens from the entire globe – that may arise as a result of technology and body combining in some clement manner, the short story “Englisshhh©” by

Altaf Tyrewala offers us a glimpse of a future in which English, the language of globalization and technology, is transformed into a weapon used by the Global South against the North.

Tyrewala’s novella “MmYum’s,” meanwhile, narrativizes the tragic destiny of the displaced and commodified globalized body, when Arnold MmYum, a thinly disguised stand-in for the Ronald

McDonald mannequin on a bench (inexplicably ubiquitous in Indian McDonald’s outlets), comes to life and becomes radicalized against Western capitalism ─ with pitiful and hilarious results. A

Frankenstein-like creature, Arnold is a cyborg who, like Animal, desires change and revolution, but fails to achieve mastery of his globalized future and therefore never becomes what I deem the cyborg’s more powerful incarnation, the sahiborg. In this section of the chapter I look in particular at Kalindi Vora’s analysis of the commodification of the body amid globalization and new forms of exploitation enabled by technology. I also foreground Tyrewala’s work as a satirical critique of the contemporary glorification of Internet technology and of both pro- and anti-globalization Indian movements, in contrast to Animal’s People’s more optimistic outlook on technology and science and the revolutionary movements growing out of the spread of globalized technology. I note, however, that Tyrewala’s perspective is not entirely bleak but sees potential value in the chaos and anarchy resulting from a “hacked” status quo. This may reflect a new middle-class Indian perspective on technology: one that is relatively more suspicious of

Nehruvian technological utopianism but still open to its possibilities.

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Making a home in technology

What do we call the person who becomes so “at home” in globalized technology that he begins to literally embody this technology?39 In the pages that follow, I’ll look at Donna

Haraway’s notion of the cyborg as well as A. Aneesh’s more recent sociological work on the

“data double” in the Indian call centre and Western corporation, among others, to determine whether these concepts adequately capture our cyborgian Indian protagonists. Although, as we will see, technology is frequently posited in India as the solution to all the country’s ills, Indian nationalism is, somewhat surprisingly, a less important concern in these novels than in the ones discussed in previous chapters of this dissertation. The man-machine hybrid does, to varying extents and with differing intents, topple or attempt to topple current global power imbalances between North and South. The transformation of India into world economic champion – a desire we saw articulated in One Night @ the Call Centre, among others – is consequently gestured at, often with a great deal of irony, but Indian techno-nationalism is rejected in favour of global solidarity, in the case of Animal’s People, and Hindutva-style nationalism and anti-American sentiment are satirized in “Englisshhh©” and “MmYum’s.” As Tomlinson argues, “A sense of our mutual dependency combined with the means for communicating across distance is producing new forms of cultural/political alliance and solidarity” (1999: 30). Globalization

“dissolves the securities of locality [but] offers new understandings of experience in wider – ultimately global – terms.” The tales of technology discussed in this chapter reflect Tomlinson’s argument that in the era of globalization nationalism can be eschewed in favour of a more global perspective. Perhaps this is because of the way technology – through the Internet, telephone, and even the relatively old-fashioned tape recorder – can carry our voices all over the globe, opening

39 I use the word “he” here deliberately, as the protagonists of these novels are all male, reflecting the fact that women are still not encouraged to participate in the STEM fields as men are, and that science and technology remain territory almost exclusively controlled by the most privileged members of society.

126 possibilities for international solidarities (and, admittedly, antagonisms) with its “penetration of localities” (Tomlinson 30). Perhaps it is also because the cyborg figure is never the “authentic” or “pure” product of a nation but always a hybrid, a mix of parts from all over the world, and a mutt of a machine. Most technological devices are, after all, crafted in a number of different factories spread all over the world and then assembled to be sold and distributed again internationally. In the books I discuss here, however, they are marked as Western or American in origin but as bearing or gradually assuming Indian characteristics, making their hybridity a distinctly cultural and racial one. The texts analyzed in this chapter consequently begin to look much like the ringing telephone I introduced at the beginning of this chapter; as the call is answered, or the book is opened, these works signal the possibility of new global communities or enmities and the creation of new subjectivities and loss of old ones.

Animal’s People: Science and technology in India and the postcolonial activist-cyborg

In his novel Animal’s People, Indra Sinha describes a community and environment fragmented and laid waste by science and technology in the guise of the Western factory that continues to poison everything around it. “Step through one of these holes [in the factory walls],”

Animal tells us, coaxing us forward into the heart of the toxic danger zone, and “you’re into another world. Gone are city noises, horns of trucks and autos, voices of women in the

Nutcracker, kids shouting, all erased by the wall . . . Insects can’t survive here. Wonderful poisons the Kampani made, so good it’s impossible to get rid of them, after all these years they’re still doing their work” (29). Science and technology have completely transformed the environment here, removing its “Indianness” and leaving it a toxic wasteland – or, in

Tomlinson’s terms, a “non-place,” a “bleak local[e] of . . . solitude [and] silence” (110) constituting the fall-out of globalization in its worst, most violent incarnation. And yet, as critics such as Itty Abraham, Rupal Oza, Partha Chatterjee and Rohit Chopra note, science and

127 technology are frequently valorized in India as nationalist tools to remedy the subcontinent’s ills and give it a leading role on the world stage; indeed, in this passage, Sinha has Animal ironize that valorization by sarcastically rhapsodizing over the Kampani’s scientific prowess in creating

“wonderful poisons.”

In the following pages, I want to examine the relationship of postmillennial Indo-Anglian fiction to the science and technology of globalization – first, in terms of how new, cyborg-like subjectivities are created in such an environment, for better or worse; and second, how the self’s affiliations to the nation and nationalism are in turn changed by this transformation. In my analysis of Animal’s People, I’ll suggest that while science and technology in the service of globalized capitalism (associated primarily, but not exclusively, with the West) engender the problems faced by the central characters, they also eventually allow them to face these challenges and foster new identities, relationships, solidarities, and global revolutionary movements. This latter vision of science and technology echoes certain current neoliberal discourses surrounding the rosier, more affirmative side of globalization but without, obviously, the neoliberal faith in market forces and corporate power. It is also, perhaps more surprisingly, reminiscent of postcolonial India’s historical framing of a uniquely Indian form of science and technology (that is, distinct from the materialist and corrupt Western version), which is frequently associated with nationalist goals of development as well as social justice but, as we will see in the following pages, is also obviously deeply controversial. How, after all, can India avoid the moral pitfalls the West has tumbled into? The idea requires, problematically, that

Indians be more spiritual, more “pure” and less stereotypically “masculine” than their Western brethren – a concept which has its roots in colonial stereotypes and, later, nationalist chauvinism.

Little wonder that scientific and technological knowledge should historically be revered by the elite and middle classes of India when, as Abraham avers, one putative aim of the British

128 imperialist “civilizing project” was to bring modernity – in the form of the machine and industry and, eventually, the spread of scientific knowledge40 – to the masses. Indian postcolonial society, as a result, fetishizes science and technology in its race toward development, with the postcolonial hangover entailing a profound sense of anxiety about its own abilities and perceived failures (8). Crucially, however, many Indian nationalists determined that their aim in developing these areas would not be to merely imitate the West but to bring to them a uniquely spiritual

Indian angle free of Western greed and materialism, even as that particular notion of

“Indianness” was heavily informed by certain Western colonial perceptions of Indians, going back as far as the medieval Book of John Mandeville, as an admirably spiritual but ultimately ineffectual, irrational, and effeminate people. (As Nandy asks, “Must a society always choose between materialism and spiritualism, between hard realities and unreal dreams? Or is the perception of such a choice itself a product of Kipling’s imperial mission?” [80]). Chatterjee describes 19th-century nationalist Bankimchandra, for instance, as wanting to combine science and technology with spirituality; only in doing so, he claimed, would Indians become a more powerful and masculine race, thereby ridding itself of the traits that had allowed India to become open to invasion (64). Roughly half a century later, Jawaharlal Nehru likewise wished to combine a certain innate sense of “Indianness” with Western know-how (Chatterjee 139), with his policy focused largely on building dams and on industry as opposed to agriculture, as well as on promoting secondary education. Sometimes this Indianness was associated with spirituality for Nehru; but more often it took the form of a pointedly non-capitalist, socialist form of

40 Chopra writes, “It was only after 1835 [with Macaulay’s Minute on Education], when the colonial administration extended its patronage to scientific education in the medium of English, that Indians were granted the opportunity to prove their scientific abilities” (qtd. In Prakash 15). Prakash suggests that this revealed, paradoxically, that their colonial overlords thought Indians were capable of learning rational thought, but it also supported the Orientalist idea that without British intervention the Indian subjects would remain irrational and savage.

129 economic policy. In any case, and whether in the guise of spirituality or socialism, Nehru’s goal was, like Bankimchandra’s, to separate science and technology from the crass materialist pursuits associated with the West. As Chopra suggests, “The framing of the Nehruvian project in accordance with socialist goals meant that science and technology, by association, were authorized as instruments of social justice” (112). Today, technology continues to play a similar valorized role in India, as Chopra discusses at length in his work Technology and Nationalism in

India, with the rise of technocultural Hindu nationalism.41 In an essay in Chutnefying English

Pramod K. Nayar writes, “The Internet facilitates mainstream as well as subcultural politics.

Online campaigns increasingly replicate, extend, expand and augment offline political action . . . online political work has proliferated rapidly since the late 1990s” (71). Nayar cites Manuel

Castells’ work, which shows that online political protests and communities are replacing increasingly powerless trade unions and political parties, “[enabling] loose coalitions, ad hoc assemblages and spontaneous mobilizations to ‘substitute’ for permanent and more organized structures” (71-72).

There is still much debate, however, over whether the Internet can actually function as a subversive political tool. The Society for Knowledge Commons, based in India, notes in its article “Digital Colonialism & the Internet as a Tool of Cultural Hegemony” that the Internet,

“due to its systems of governance, has become a tool for the unchecked spread of the neo-liberal ideology – turning citizens of the global south into nothing but commodities to be exploited.”42

The unnamed author continues,

41 Ironically, “[t]he India of the twenty-first-century Hindu nationalists is founded on a forgetting of the achievements of the Nehruvian Indian state…The irony is that technocultural Hindu nationalism could not have emerged had it not been for Nehruvian nationalism and the Nehruvian emphasis on science and technology” (Chopra 170). 42 Recall, for example, Facebook’s attempts in 2016 to bring what it called “Free Basics,” a free app that would allow millions of Indians to gain Internet access – but only through Facebook’s software, which reserves users to a few sites chosen by the company. Of the scheme, technology writer and venture capitalist Om Malik stated, “Maybe I’m suspicious because my family has told me their personal story of the British Raj or maybe because I

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Due to models of business established in the online economic sphere, users are seen as

nothing but commodities – [and] corporations, without providing any reward and often

without their knowledge, harvest the data of global citizens. The lack of regulation of the

online space has lead [sic] to the creation of massive monopolies of global North based

MNCs (such as Google, Facebook and so on) which hoover up the data of global citizens

in order to generate profits for themselves. Users have become “products” to be sold to

advertising agencies.

Interestingly, the Society for Knowledge Commons is itself an internet-based group of researchers, scientists, and activists formed at the NETmundial meeting in Sao Paolo, Brazil, in

April 2014. The NETmundial initiative, moreover, describes itself on its webpage as a “new approach to Internet governance & cooperation towards the Internet as a shared, neutral, & global resource for human solidarity & economic progress.” This discourse foregrounding the double-edged nature of globalized technology is especially evident in the NETmundial group’s observations, in which the Internet is at once an instrument of Western hegemony and a tool that can eventually help dismantle it.

Although the Internet plays a relatively minimal role in the text,43 Animal’s People echoes this double-edged perspective on technology in detailing the long quest of a community for justice from the multinational corporation, the “Kampani,” which poisoned it – as well as from the corrupt government bureaucrats who allowed the company to pay only minimal damages. Social justice, then, is a major concern in the novel, and Sinha correspondingly shows

have read books that over and again detail how a commercial spearhead (The East India Company) came bearing gifts and made way for British imperialism. Regardless, I am suspicious of any for-profit company arguing its good intentions and its free gifts” (qtd. in Taub). Indian regulators ultimately blocked the app. Facebook Board of Directors member Marc Andreessen then revealingly tweeted, in response, "Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?" (Taub) 43 See Chapter 4 for more on the Internet.

131 an almost Nehruvian perspective on the potential of science and technology for enacting positive change and giving the subaltern more political agency and forming new, more socially conscious, subjectivities. Our protagonist is Animal, who in the text’s memorable first line tells us, “I used to be human once” (Sinha 1), and who, maimed as a small child by the poisons of the company factory, now walks on all fours. Because of this and his raucous and ferocious behavior, he has been nicknamed “‘Jaanvar, jungle Jaanvar’ [or] Animal, wild Animal” (Sinha

15). The novel begins with Animal’s response to receiving a tape recorder, a “tape mashin,” on which our protagonist records his long, digressive, and highly impressionistic monologues for a

Western reporter investigating the human cost of the chemical disaster. Animal is justifiably skeptical at first about the journalist’s intentions and the Western audience that will read his words and feed on his trauma. He tells the “Jarnalis” from “Ostrali,” “You were like all the others, come to suck our stories from us, so strangers in far off countries can marvel there’s so much pain in the world. Like vultures are you jarnaliss” (3). Animal is, moreover, dubious that he will ever be correctly understood by Eyes (as he names his audience) through the medium of the tape recorder and, ultimately, the printed page: “For you they’re just words written on a page.

Never can you hear my voice, nor can I ever know what pictures you see” (21).

Community and solidarity are still, at this point, an impossible dream for Animal; the distances between him and the rest of the world – and even the people who surround him in his home city of Khaufpur – are insuperable. The journalist’s machine – notably, figured as from the

West and catering to Western curiosity – and Animal nonetheless grow closer throughout the novel until, in a sense, they become one. Gone, by the final one hundred pages of the novel, are

Animal’s self-conscious references to the machine and the Western audience, which showed his discomfort with feeding Eyes all of his stories. Rather, as the novel proceeds, the lines blur between Animal’s immediate experience and the contents of the tape recorder. Although it soon

132 becomes clear that Animal is recounting episodes from his recent past, for example, the text presents these stories as interior monologues in the present tense. On pages 273-5, for example, his more self-conscious discourse becomes interior monologue for the first time in the book when he addresses Somraj, allowing us – Eyes – to become privy to his most intimate thoughts without his erstwhile self-conscious, self-reflexive comments on the machine and the strangeness, and hopelessness, of relating his life to strangers and forming any kind of understanding or community with them. The most notable conflation of Animal with the tape recorder takes place when he attempts suicide with the Datura pills with which he has been poisoning Zafar, when the machine becomes one with the stream of consciousness narrative poured forth by Animal. Although we know that this experience is mediated by the machine and the passage of time since the actual events occurred, it is presented in raw and visceral terms, as well as in the present tense, which make the machine seem no longer to be outside Animal but inside him, recording every thought, every feeling, and every hallucination, as it appears (334-

46).

Because Sinha is at great pains to present this sense of immediacy and intimacy between the recording and Animal’s experience, it makes sense to see the machine as accompanying the protagonist throughout these experiences and, through this process, allowing Animal to develop a cyborg self. Animal subsequently becomes, paradoxically, more human and capable of emotional connection by virtue of his newfound cyborg-like, mechanized qualities, as when

Animal is designated a human being by his oft-nemesis Farouq (364), who until this point has been among Animal’s worst tormentors. His animal-ness, furthermore, becomes something positive and unique; no longer does Animal curse his body but instead he treasures his difference. By the conclusion of the novel, he tells us,

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See Eyes, I reckon that if I have this operation, I will be upright, true, but to walk I will

need the help of sticks. I might have a wheelchair, but how far will that get me in the

gullies of Khaufpur? Right now I can run and hop and carry kids on my back, I can climb

hard trees, I’ve gone up mountains, roamed in jungles. Is life so bad? If I’m an upright

human, I would be one of millions, not even a healthy one at that. Stay four-foot, I’m the

one and only Animal.

In addition, while the book begins with Animal looking out purely for his own selfish interests, it ends with the character vowing to set free his friend and potential romantic interest Anjali, a prostitute, and with the thought that a “fixed” body would not be able to carry children and provide (literal) support to his community. Animal has transitioned from a dog-eat-dog world, in other words, to one where animals, machines, and people can help and support each other. While capitalist science and technology turn the young protagonist into what he terms an animal-like state, in which he must crawl on all fours, a kinder and gentler version of technology – tied now to community, solidarity, generosity, and justice – provides him with a more socially conscious self.

Does Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, devised in 1985 to “build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism and materialism” (Haraway, NP) and which I have used in the preceding pages of this chapter, capture the changes we see in Animal and in a society increasingly dependent on globalizing technology? After all, Haraway acknowledges that her essay is aimed at women, and Animal identifies as very much a heterosexual male (and readers of Animal’s People are often treated to the character’s own boastful descriptions of his penis growing erect, as on pages 36, 45, 46, 76. 79, 176, 227, and 231). Haraway’s manifesto has come under fire, moreover, for its Bhabha-esque “vague optimism in which all transgressions of boundaries are welcomed, without adequate consideration of content or the difficulties involved.

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In this way, the theory of the cyborg perpetuates the standard assumptions of leftist (and proto- hippy) critique,” where “[t]ie-dye T-shirts are swapped for leather deathpants and ethnic beads for prosthetic hardware in a desperate bid for contemporaneity” (Fernandez and Malik, NP).

With these arguments in mind, is “the cyborg” a misnomer for what Animal becomes by the conclusion of the novel? Does the term fail to account for the challenges of a techno-hybridized identity in globalized India?

In the first case, I would argue that, as a number of critics including Edward Said and

Ashis Nandy suggest, in colonial and neoimperialist discourse the Other is often treated as feminine, monstrous and irrational. Animal is in fact not only a postcolonial Other but describes himself as a kind of monster, half-human and half-animal – an Other – even in his home of

Khaufpur, among fellow victims of the toxic disaster. Haraway includes the monster in her cyborg typography, noting that “[c]yborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate.” “Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations,” she writes. “The

Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centred polis of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman” (all NP). Animal – a cross between human and animal, organic being and machine – therefore emerges as a clear cyborg and weathervane for the growing tolerance and openness regarding the crossing and transgression of boundaries (pace Fernandez and Malik), of his community when he increasingly becomes involved with activism against the Kampani and faces less derision from Khaufpuris.

Although Fernandez and Malik’s critique of Haraway’s famous essay is humorous in its virulently anti-hippy stance (and, certainly, the point about a general valorization of hybridity is well taken; see my earlier section on call centres for more on this), it seems to me they willfully misread her work. Haraway’s cyborg is not all sunshine and rainbows, academic-friendly

135 subversion and resistance: rather, the cyborg is also the “awful apocalyptic” result of the West's neoimperialism, even as the cyborg subverts the notion of original Edenic unity that, Haraway says, Western epistemologies are founded on. Furthermore, she notes,

From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on

the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the

name of defense, about the final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of

war (Sofia, 1984). From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social

and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and

machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. (NP)

While cyborgs and border-crossing are, to be sure, frequently valorized in her essay, Haraway does not flinch from the dark militaristic origins of the science and technology that render the cyborg possible, in the same way that the characters of Animal’s People use a more spiritual and community-oriented form of technology to attempt to enact change. This is, in other words (and as Fernandez herself points out), a case of the servants using the master’s tools to bring down or disrupt the master’s house.

Haraway maintains that “Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies,” and this is indeed the case in Animal’s People – and for most of its readers. As Feenberg and Haraway (among many others) observe, many of us in the postmodern, heavily technologized twenty-first century are cyborgs, particularly those of us who belong to the middle and upper classes and are glued, typically, to our tablets, mobile phones, and laptops, whether for work or at play. Andy Clark wrote in 2003, moreover, that “We are all cyborgs,” and Brian Rotman says that we have been “natural-born cyborgs since the beginning of the species.” But Animal is so extraordinarily cyborg-like, such a “disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self” (Haraway), that he works as an exemplar

136 of the potential emancipatory power of technology in the novel. This is not only rendered manifest in the Australian reporter’s tape recorder working as a sort of second larynx for Animal, in which his voice is rendered audible to Westerners and boy/animal is merged with machine. It is also made clear in the way he is associated with a global, postmodern form of consciousness and a plethora of voices that transcends the boundaries between organic and inorganic, animal and human, and “civilized” communication and chaotic noise.

A detailed analysis of the book’s first page provides more insight into the cyborg’s power. In the introductory (and, despite appearances, completely fictional) “Editor’s Note,” we are told that “This story was recorded in Hindi on a series of tapes by a nineteen-year-old boy in the Indian city of Khaufpur. True to the agreement between the boy and the journalist who befriended him, the story is told entirely in the boy’s words as recorded on the tapes. Apart from translating to English, nothing has been changed” (NP). Already the reader understands that while Animal’s words are mediated through translation, his story should be read as authentic, and Animal is once again, through his own “true” narrative, conflated with the contents of the machine. Any previous sense of textual authenticity is undercut, however, by the fact that

Khaufpur is an entirely fictional city – a stand-in for Bhopal – even if the page ends with the words, “Information about the city of Khaufpur can be found at www.khaufpur.com” (NP).44

This is our first suggestion that not all is what it seems in Animal’s People, and that truth is above all always necessarily contested, mediated and constructed in a world of globalized technology. We are then told that Animal’s story contains “[d]ifficult expressions” in French, and that “[s]ome tapes contain long sections in which there is no speech, only sounds such as bicycle bells, birds, snatches of music and in one case several minutes of sustained and

44 The website is still meticulously maintained, containing horoscopes, matrimonials, and classified ads for Khaufpuri citizens. As far as I could see, the site contained no indication that the city and its denizens are fictional.

137 inexplicable laughter.” We already know that Animal believes he can read minds, and he states that “there’s a lot to tell, it wants to come out. Like rejoicing, the world’s unspoken languages are rushing into my head. Unusual meanings are making themselves known to me. Secrets are shouting themselves into my ear, seems there’s nothing I cannot know” (11). As such our narrator operates as a kind of transmitter not only for his own immediate experience but for a great number of other voices in the novel, whether living, dead or imaginary, including that of the Kha-in-the-Jar, a two-headed foetus poisoned and deformed, like Animal, by the Kampani

(57-8). But in this passage we see that Animal operates as an even more inclusive transmitter of the noises of existence – one that includes music, here framed as a kind of universal language tying Elli and Somraj together, as well as animal and non-organic sounds. In contrast to ordinary technology like the Internet, moreover, which usually explains, classifies, and disseminates information, Animal’s cyborg narrative sometimes results, in the case of the mysterious laughter, in more questions than answers for the reader. It is nonetheless important to note that Animal is usually a fount of knowledge, providing context and explanation to non-Indian audiences (and putative listeners of the tape-recording machine), as in the following somewhat unsubtle aside:

“Eyes, you want to know what is an auto, it’s a scooter-rickshaw with three wheels” (50). This should be compared with the dark face of technology displayed by the company, which places barriers on open access to knowledge: it is unwilling, for example, to reveal the contents of its insecticides, and therefore save victims’ lives with information pertaining to their poisons, because it fears letting out its “trade secrets” (322) and losing its grip on its market share.

The cyborg politics of noise and sound

Animal’s linguistic inclusiveness, via the tape recorder, recalls Haraway’s comment that

“Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly . . . That is why cyborg politics insist on

138 noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine.”

Although Haraway was referring to the (fruitless and ultimately harmful) struggle within feminism for absolute discursive consensus, her thesis uncovers interesting layers of meaning in the Indian context of Animal’s People, where, after first assuming a murderous guise under the

Kampani’s cutthroat capitalist regime, technology takes on a more affirmative, almost spiritual and transcendent, form in the shape of Animal and his tape recorder. Accordingly, although technology in its capitalistic and poisonous initial guise in the novel robs people of their voices

(in the character Somraj’s case, literally so, when on the night of the disaster he loses his legendary capacity for singing), the cyborgian manifestation of technology, via Animal and his tape recorder, actually renders more voices and noises audible, returning them to sound from silence, making them public knowledge, and – with the help of other technologies – sending them around the world to be consumed by a global audience.

We may skeptically regard Animal’s transmission as yet another example of the commodification of the postcolonial experience, also known as Graham Huggan’s “postcolonial exotic.” Indeed, Animal addresses the tendency of Western journalists to sell Third World

“disaster porn” to smug First World audiences in the first pages of the novel, suggesting that

Sinha is at some pains to distinguish this text from ones of that ilk. The author does not appear to share the cynical view that Animal’s story is geared to placate the tastes of Western audiences; instead, he posits Animal as in control of these transmissions in a way that the character wasn’t when he first encountered the Australian journalist. The story here is not, after all, delivered second-hand through the Western interpreter, but straight from the Animal’s mouth, as it were.

In delivering this narrative, then, Sinha indicates that the technologized cyborg self of globalization can remedy, to an extent, the ills of a science and technology that had previously been used in the service of capitalist greed. This is despite the fact that, as Haraway mentions,

139 the cyborg gains its power, at least initially, from more destructive uses of science and technology: “The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.” This cyborg self consequently embodies the optimistic stance on a new, particularly Indian technology held by early Indian nationalist leaders, which can escape its destructive Western roots, as I discussed earlier in this chapter. But is Animal a “nationalist hero” in the service of India, like some of the other characters discussed so far in this dissertation? What, more specifically, is the cyborg’s connection to the nation and nationalism in a globalized age? I turn again to Haraway for answers:

The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family…The

cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream

of returning to dust. …[Cyborgs] are wary of holism, but needy for connection — they

seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party.

At first glance Animal’s People may seem to posit a nationalist theme of Indians fighting corrupt

Westerners for justice, but in fact the novel reflects more of Haraway’s connection-based cyborg politics – a politics based on global community and solidarity rather than national identity.

Indians are not depicted universally in the text as heroic victims, for the rich and powerful, including lawyers and politicians, are often shown to be working in league with the Kampani

(152-3). The Khaufpuri activists also reveal a global awareness in their chants of “ASIA,

AFRIKA, AMRIKA SHAKE” (264). When Zafar is fasting, furthermore, he tells Animal he is only one of many Zafars spread across the globe (296), suggesting that a nascent sense of global community and solidarity is growing based on grassroots activist movements challenging entities like the Kampani, whether in India, Mexico, or Dubai.

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In contrast, then, to some of the other novels I have discussed in these pages, there is no sense here of India taking the reins of capital and beating the West at its own game, but rather of making the world more unified and connected; more, in other words, like the one that, Sinha writes somewhat nonsensically, existed “before humans set themselves apart and became clever and made cities and kampanis and factories” (352). This is not an entirely homogenous and homogenizing world, however, but one similar to the connected-but-not-harmonized cyborg landscape described by Haraway. Animal’s white American friend Elli, for example, cries at one point in frustration, “Animal’s People!45 I don’t understand you!” (183). Although failures of understanding and communication break out within the group of activists, a sense of unity exists nonetheless, suggesting that global solidarity requires difference and variety to work most effectively; in other words, a plurality of voices and opinions, rather than a single monolithic one, is needed to fight capitalist hegemony. This perspective should be contrasted to the one shown by the Kampani. As opposed to the face-to-face interactions of the activists, the company has no face to show; we see in Zafar’s dream that it instead takes the shape of a huge concrete building (228-9). In his vision, the Kampani is unattached to any particular culture, but is homogenous and homogenizing – a “non-place” (Gupta 22-3) representing the dark side of globalization: a “bleak local[e] of . . . solitude [and] silence” severed from “place, memory, and identity” (Tomlinson 110). Although, conversely, globalization and globalized technology allow the activists to band together with others like them all over the world, Sinha suggests that, as with Ellie and “Animal’s People,” they can maintain their differences and cultural heterogeneity even while fighting a common enemy.

It is fitting, then, that the novel’s last words constitute both a dark warning to this enemy and a call to action for community and solidarity: “All things pass, but the poor remain. We are

45 That Elli’s words form the title of the novel, of course, suggests the importance of this world vision to the text.

141 the people of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will be more of us” (366). The statement is at once grim – in that Animal prophesies more “Apokalis”-style events, like the toxic accident that devastated Khaufpur and therefore more dispossession and poverty resulting from globalized technology – and hopeful – in that a global community of “the poor” can be built out of such disastrous events. The poor will, in other words, look much like Animal himself and bear cyborg-like qualities of their own. The cyborg is therefore an ambiguous figure of hope and despair, created by a homogenizing and violent globalized technology but able to use this technology to attack oppressive power structures. In the next section of this chapter, the distinction between the more optimistic vision of what I call the “sahiborg” – the cyborg who feels somewhat in control of his or her future and even hopeful about revolutionary change and solidarity, as in Animal’s People – and the more skeptical portrayal of the cyborgs or man- machine hybrids represented in Tyrewala’s work is rendered clearer. This latter cyborg does not feel a sense of mastery over a globalized future and does not really seek heterogeneous forms of solidarity and unity, but instead cynically tries to monetize global community with the promise of revolution. The cyborgian spectrum found in these texts represents the range of identities formed out of globalized technology, and simultaneously mirrors prevalent middle-class attitudes to science and technology in India, whether wary but optimistic, in Sinha’s work, or more jaundiced and skeptical, in Tyrewala’s.

Altaf Tyrewala’s “MmYum” and “Engglishhh©”: Doomed cyborgs and uncertain revolutions

While Animal’s People depicts a community that has been destroyed but is starting to be renewed by technology and science, Altaf Tyrewala’s novella “MmYum” and short story

“Engglishhh©,” from his 2015 collection Engglishhh©, paint a far bleaker picture of globalized technology in India and its avatars, in the forms of, respectively, Arnold, a Ronald McDonald-

142 like mascot-clown, and Roohann Shahha, the creator of a numerology-based version of the

English language. Although it claims to be connected to the energies of the universe,

Engglishhh© is not actually very different from ‘real’ English. It is, however, explicitly aimed at subverting Western hegemony (and making the neoliberal schemer Shahha a tidy fortune, to boot). These avatars are, like Sinha’s protagonist Animal, cyborg-like figures, featuring characteristics native to both human and machine and combining the “natural” and “artificial” or man-made. In these works, too, we see globalized technology helping to develop new forms of subjectivities in Indian society: just as Animal is turned by the Kampani’s technological and scientific know-how, in terms of its highly efficient poisons, into a man who moves on four legs, so does technology reinvent Rohan Shah, “your run-of-the-mill dyslexic child” (Tyrewala 16-

17), into a would-be linguistic terrorist and language entrepreneur, and Arnold MmYum, a clown statue, into a sentient and desperately lonely scapegoat for all of the ills of globalization. Unlike

Animal, however, Arnold, the beleaguered “plasto-plastic” anti-hero of “MmYum,” learns that

“beneath the benign-seeming veneer of existence was the face of a killer. It is only a matter of time before the world begins to maim and cripple each of its inhabitants. The ones who lasted longest weren’t necessarily blessed, they just ran the fastest” (191). In other words, globalized technology, which renders new forms of community connection and solidarity possible in

Animal’s People, only alienates and makes hollow the denizens of “MmYum,” albeit in often absurd and blackly hilarious ways.

Tyrewala’s tongue-in-cheek tale “Engglishhh©” demonstrates the ludicrousness of pitting the notion of “ancient Indian” (read: brahmanic Hindu) tradition against the threat of globalization and globalized technology designated as Western in origin, particularly as these relate to English, the language of globalization. But it also offers interesting insights into the formation of anti-globalization subjectivities that are themselves the products of globalizing

143 processes, echoing thematic patterns we saw in earlier chapters of this dissertation.

“Engglishhh©,” like Animal’s People, illustrates the possibility of a new global solidarity movement enabled by technology, but whereas Sinha’s work was inclusive of the West, the

“revolutionary” movement outlined in the story designates the West or Global North, particularly the US, as the enemy. We soon learn, however, that in addition to being a postcolonial radical dedicated to dismantling the capitalist machine (or cynically adopting this mantle), Rohan Shah is at least partly dedicated to enacting revenge on the “language that had caused him immeasurable humiliation throughout his life” (19) as a dyslexic young man. Tyrewala suggests, finally, that Shahha’s so-called “terrorism” is little more than a cynical posture aimed at commodifying Third World discontent.

This more jaded and satirical perspective of the potential of globalized technology to form new subjectivities and communities is perhaps reflective of our relationship to the Internet, which in its first mainstream incarnations, in the 1990s, seemed to open up the possibility of global solidarity and communication, but which now appears destined to be monopolized by a few American companies for the conceivable future. In The People’s Platform (2014), for example, Astra Taylor dismantles techno-utopian visions of the Internet as a tool for fighting inequality and promoting democracy, arguing instead that in its current guise it “reflects and even amplifies real-world inequities as often as it ameliorates them” (10). Meanwhile, our computer activity is carefully monitored by governments and corporations, with more suspect activities relegated to the anarchic “Dark Web,” constituted by “darknets” which are not indexed by search engines and which tend, in the popular imagination, to be associated with terrorism, pornography and drug-dealing. While, in addition, the Internet initially signalled freedom from the status quo, it has ultimately helped to make labour more exploitative, emotionally exhausting

144 and time-intensive (Nadeem 78), ushering in an era of technological neoimperialism, as explored by Kalindi Vora in her work Life Support.

In contrast to a great deal of other techno-skeptic discourse (Taylor 6), Vora is able to avoid the pitfall of anthropomorphizing or assigning technology like the Internet or telephone an overly dominant role and ignoring the social structures in which these technologies are manufactured and used. For Vora, globalization picks up where colonialism left off, “creating a system that evacuate[s] resources, labor, and value from those spaces to invest it in the Global

North, much as the former colonial metropoles have benefitted from a similar exploitation of what world systems theory named the ‘peripheries’” (11-12). These exploitative processes rely strongly on the formation of a second virtual self, the “user,” “data form,” or “data double”

(among a host of other names), which is the disembodied and decontextualized online presence of the globalized subject – a figure “stripped of body and community in front of the terminal and positioned as [a] detached technical subject[t]” (Feenberg 59). The user turns the wheels of globalized capitalism on the internet, providing services through online, perhaps outsourced labour, consuming products, and choosing to be entertained by various forms of content, all of which activities are closely tracked by corporations that sell our data to other corporations.

Citing Aneesh, Vora remarks that in the case of the call-centre agent, his or her “data form,” the online or telephonic persona constructed by the agent to serve the customer in the Global North, is more valuable to the global economy than his or her ‘real’ self (53). I argue, however, that while the plight of the call-centre worker may be the most obvious marker of this disembodiment and decontextualization of self, this process is in fact common, in varying degrees, to the middle- class subject everywhere. In Tyrewala’s stories, too, we see this effect taking place in the world outside (but still heavily informed by) the outsourcing firm, among people – and objects – that are not call-centre workers but are subject to the same kinds of transformations into new selves.

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Aneesh maps the creation of the “user” self, “system identity,” or “data double” to the

“bureaucratic identity” created by the modern state to track the movements of members of the governed society by such measures as surveys and legal and linguistic standardization (93). Our identities, under this state, assume material shape as birth certificates, drivers’ licenses, and passports, among others, which name us and, in various ways, seek to define us. He distinguishes the bureaucratic identity from the system identity, however, noting that the latter’s “workings take place in the background” of one’s computer activity, often without our explicit consent, giving these intrusions into our data something of a nefarious aspect. (In contrast, we present our government-issued identification papers typically in “real-life” encounters, where we are perhaps more aware, however unhappily or uncomfortably, that our personal details are being checked and recorded.) System identities, moreover, are derived from the needs of systems, be they corporate, financial, medical, judicial and otherwise, to track user behaviors. These identities are, in other words, “created solely for the purpose and health of another system; [they are] functional for the system but not necessarily for the person” (Aneesh 94). Whereas conventional identities tend to develop “from an interaction between the person and social structure, [where] both shape and are shaped by the other to the point where it is difficult to give a complete description of either in isolation,” system identities are, Aneesh avers, “a one-sided affair where the person’s contribution is mostly a passive one. One is no longer emotionally or cognitively mobilized in identifying practices; rather, one becomes a recipient of multiple identities.” These identities are shaped by our credit history, medical records, and browsing histories, among other things.

Although Aneesh’s claims about the more passive nature of system identities are highly debatable, and indeed he admits that one can assume a more active role with regard to the system identity by virtue of changing one’s behaviors online, it is enlightening to consider them (as Vora

146 does) in relation to how globalization and globalized technology and labour affect subjectivities in strikingly similar ways.

Vora returns us once again to the figure of the call-centre agent who is particularly implicated in the creation of a system identity given its frequent disparities from her “real” self: the system identity in her daily workplace interactions may have a Westernized name and location, for instance, or a neutralized accent. She also, by virtue of having to convey a message that is not her own (but one dictated by the employer) to the caller, faces a “kind of decorporealization and a severing of ‘living connections’” (99). This process is amplified by the fact that call-centre workers typically live in globalized cities like Bangalore and Gurgaon, which are associated with transnational communication and circulation. Vora observes that in these places the worker’s body “gets reconstituted as it negotiates spaces in these cities and the economies that operate there, becoming an archive of specific skills and practices as well as a node within a larger production scheme of transnational business processes” (72).That the worker is forced to parrot the employer’s words and live in a globalized city is a fairly commonplace situation for the middle classes everywhere; it seems to me that the more important factor uniting these traits – including the sense of decorporealization and passivity, of becoming a “node” – is the technological means employed to create or form the new identity, namely, the telephone and internet-enabled computer, which are used to create the new laboring persona for the employee of the globalized multinational corporation. Reminiscent of Marshall

McLuhan’s comments on technology as human prosthetic and extension of consciousness,

Ronell writes, speaking principally of the telephone, that “[t]he ear, eye, even skin, have been divested of authority as they acquire technical extension and amplification in media” (109).

Chopra remarks meanwhile of the internet that the experience of being online is frequently conceptualized as “inhabiting a residence, locality, or geographic territory” (237) – of becoming

147 at once more and less than a physical body as one figuratively disappears from the non-virtual realm before being re-embodied in the virtual zone as the user or data double.

Technology, in other words, doubles the body just as it disembodies the user, reproducing a person as a voice, image, or text – or what Aneesh and Vora call, with somewhat sinister undertones, a “specter” of the self (53). This troubling sense of doubling and doubleness, and the ability to reproduce easily through technology what may initially seem unique and distinctively human, is common in discourses around globalization, particularly ones levelled against outsourcing. As I discussed in my chapter on entrepreneurship, the Western media – and some

Indian management voices, as Nadeem documents in Dead Ringers – frequently focus on how

Indian workers lack the innovative skills of the West and are often content with passive mimicry of their Western counterparts (most frequently in the form of call-centre agents reproducing

American and UK accents and names). Even critics of globalization and outsourcing in India frame their arguments in terms of Indian workers being made into Western clones (see Chapter

1). Of this trend, Vora writes insightfully, “Discourses about India as a site of mimicry and reproduction of what the United States and Europe have initiated in high-tech industries, as opposed to innovation, engage colonial legacies of racialized labor allocation as well as an understanding of ‘reproduction’ as relatively unimportant work” (67). The Indian cyborg subjectivities featured in Tyrewala’s novella “MmYum” and story “Engglishhh©”, which result, following Haraway’s definition, from new globalized technologies, are constantly described as twinned or easily reproduced and both reflect and satirize these discourses. While, at the end of

Animal’s People, Animal delights in his own individuality and uniqueness, turning down the operation that would rid him of what he sees as his defining characteristic, in “MmYum” Arnold is dismayed that he is one of many mascot-clowns manufactured to be exactly like him in all but his sentience. In “Engglishhh©”, meanwhile, twinning and mimicry are depicted as subversive

148 activities – but then Tyrewala subverts this seeming subversion by showing that Shahha is merely being a good capitalist by cynically commodifying postcolonial rage. This reflects a social anxiety around the increasingly easy reproductions enabled by technology, which double even the figure of the human labourer into a cyborg-like creation, as well as, perhaps, fears around the cultural homogenization perceived as resulting from American-style globalization (of which McDonald’s, the clear model for MmYum’s in the story, is usually upheld as the prime example). With these themes of doubleness and twinning, Tyrewala illustrates how workers are devalued and considered as highly replaceable in the Global South, but also shows how they might fight back – in ways that are surprisingly similar to those seen in Animal’s People and

Nehruvian rhetoric.

On a hot May night in downtown Mumbai, “MmYum” begins, “when the staff at

MmYum’s downtown Mumbai branch is busy festooning the alfresco section in preparation for yet another brat’s birthday party, the chain store’s mascot-clown decides he’s had enough. To hell with his Protestant work ethic. He could no longer endure the tropical heat, the din of traffic, or the prospect of being molested by yet another horde of monstrous pre-teens” (135). Fed up,

Arnold leaves his bench at the MmYum location behind, only to discover that life outside the restaurant is far more difficult and disheartening than he could have expected. Most Indians are, at best, “creeped out” (138) by the sight of him; and at worst would-be radical Indian nationalists seek to burn him in effigy as a symbol of American take-no-prisoners capitalism and greed, or torture and brainwash him into proselytizing for their cause.

Again and again Arnold is figured as a cyborg – as having been manufactured by the powerful and anonymous forces of globalized technology out of hyperbolically unnatural materials like “plasto-plastic” (a term Tyrewala seems to have invented for both its technological and scientific ring and hyperbolically redundant exaggeration of plasticness) and forced, as a

149 mascot, into the service of globalized capitalism to stand as its garishly painted emblem.

Tyrewala’s description of the plastic clown46 is disturbing in its invocations of Arnold not only as cyborg but Frankenstein’s monster, underlining the author’s links between the character and a scientific knowledge gone awry: “His multicolored body parts had been spray-painted onto his plasto-plastic frame, intrinsic as a human’s skin. For some fortuitous reason, Arnold’s creator had fashioned the clown’s lips out of soft rubber, enabling him to close his grinning mouth. In all other aspects, Arnold considered himself cursed by his unknown creator” (135). Tyrewala renders even more explicit Arnold’s cyborgian nature when the mascot-clown is held hostage by a group of left-wing revolutionaries who blame him for the ills of American hegemony and globalized capitalism, terming him a “neo-liberal thug,” “neo-colonial murderer,” “stooge of capitalist greed”, and “shitty symbol of puerile global merchandising” (146). Strangely, however,

Arnold is comforted by their derision and radicalized to some extent by their anti-capitalist ideologies:

Despite the horror of what he had just endured, Arnold was relieved to discover that he

wasn’t some causeless random accident of dummy manufacturing. While the origin of his

consciousness was as yet a mystery, it was clear, from the way those people out there

were ready to tear him apart, that something had preceded Arnold, something that was

immense and destructive and…closely connected to him. (148-9)

Because Arnold is not purely machine but also human-like in his sentience, he cannot remember his own ancestral connections to the destruction and violence of globalized capitalism, which is figured as having spawned him and his mascot-clown kind. If, in other words, he was entirely machine, he would act in perfect compliance with the corporation’s wishes; but because he is a

46 The figure of the clown is also closely allied with that of the fool and jester, who as Bakhtin shows (and we see in, for example, Shakespeare’s King Lear) fulfills a subversive role in challenging power and authority.

150 cyborg, and therefore something different from what the corporation had intended to create, he is unable to completely connect himself to that higher power, even as he is paradoxically relieved – as a human being might be – to learn of the existence of the god-like being that created him. This section, in any case, emphasizes the eruption of new subjectivities brought about by globalization and globalized technology and labour, despite the neoimperialist intentions of

Arnold’s creators.

This dissertation’s author at a McDonald’s outside Bharatpur, India © Stephanie Southmayd, 2009

When Arnold attempts to return to his erstwhile home after barely surviving his unhappy experiences in the “real world,” he finds a replica of himself on the restaurant bench. The effects of the left-wing revolutionaries are still visible as he gazes in horror at the scene: “Arnold notices something that tells him everything he needs to know about MmYum’s and its capitalist workings. The new Arnold, still lifeless by all indications, has been fastened to the bench and floor with six-inch screws that had been driven in through the backs of his palms and into his feet” (137). Combining aspects of the cyborg and Christ figure, this second Arnold figure also

151 gradually develops sentience and an aversion to his life on the MmYum’s bench. After the first

Arnold flees the MmYum’s outlet again, leaving his doppelganger behind, the restaurant manager tells the second Arnold, “You are inconsequential. There are dozens of mascot-clowns like you being manufactured even as we speak” (169). Manufactured replication, in Tyrewala’s terms, is part of what gives the cyborg some of its machine-like properties, but these are construed in this section of the novella as damaging and detrimental to Arnold’s more human side. Capitalism – in the form of the globalized corporation – does emotional and physical violence to the cyborg in replicating it many times over and then attempting to trap it in its workplace. Tyrewala consequently echoes concerns surrounding globalized capitalism’s creation of workers in the Global South who are seen as cheap imitations of the Western labourer and who, in the neoimperialist racist world view inherited from colonialism, are perceived as easily replaceable by another Indian worker exactly like them.

Tyrewala’s cyborg is also a victim of the greed and unassuageable hunger that drive globalized capitalism: “Like an astronaut locked away permanently inside his body-shaped space suit, Arnold experiences the usual human appetites and sensations, but lacks the means to relieve himself. Why this hunger in him if there was no stomach to fill? . . . Why this incessant, unrelenting suffering?” (154). Arnold is depicted symbolically in the novella as a sort of

Tantalus of the globalized world: burdened by cravings but lacking a stomach, he is literally and figuratively deprived of the means to satisfy his desires. This is another aspect of the cyborg’s dark side, and one that undermines the concept of the subversive activist-cyborg that Haraway envisions, or what I have called the sahiborg.47 This is also where the importance of a term distinguishing Sinha’s and Haraway’s more upbeat vision of the cyborg and Tyrewala’s unhappy

47 Although Animal repeatedly refers to his sexual frustrations and unsatisfied desires over the course of Sinha’s novel, we’re told on the final page that he will be using his surgery money to purchase the freedom of a prostitute friend who conveniently reciprocates his affections.

152 cyborg must be made clear, as the latter author shows that Haraway’s machine-human hybrid may be helpless in the face of a globalized future engineered by Western corporations. The cyborg in “MmYum” is both emblematic of globalized capitalism and its victim: disembodied by means of the technology that has created him and ever hungry, ever searching for a satisfaction and peace that cannot be attained, Arnold is like the consumer who spends his life on the Internet

– in the shape of a bodiless “user” self in cyberspace, hollow and artificial, and as distant as an astronaut from the “real world.”

“The fence-sitters have it worst”

At first glance, Arnold appears to be of American origin, and the focus of Tyrewala’s satire thus appears to be the Western consumer. Indeed, he sounds at times like a disgruntled and racist tourist from the Global North who has been abandoned by his tour group in the middle of downtown Mumbai: “the stranded mascot-clown yearned to be reabsorbed into MmYum’s empire. Anything was better than being stuck on these savage Developing World streets filled with brown people and mangy dogs” (137). While he has never been to the US and appears, in fact, to have been “born” (manufactured) in India, the character does not identify as Indian, nor is he identified as Indian by left-wing revolutionary Aftab, who describes Arnold as possessing

“Caucasian poise” (155). But there are indications that readers are meant to draw connections between Arnold and what Aftab describes as “Westoxicated” (155) Indians, including ones who claim to detest the globalized India they see growing up insidiously around them. Arnold is first brought into contact with the left-wing revolutionaries by failed novelist Unnati Lodha, who despite being fiercely anti-globalization, sneaks into a MmYum’s to gulp down American food while desperately hoping she won’t be seen by any of her comrades. Her case, Tyrewala tells us, is a common one for a certain group of middle- and upper-middle-class Indians:

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American junk food has a lure that not even the most passionate anti-capitalist can resist.

One taste of onion rings, one sip of cola, or one sampling of a mayonnaise-doused deep-

fried chicken cutlet is enough to infect one with a lifelong craving for these so-called

foods. The fence-sitters have it worst – the ones who embrace the spoils of free markets

while being simultaneously revolted by the joy they derive from roaming in malls,

working for foreign companies, wearing Western brands and surreptitiously gorging on

Western junk food. Lacking both the moral rigour of radicals and the blissful indifference

of the masses, these guilt-ridden fence-sitters are destined to lives of paralysing shame

and unbounded wantonness. (139)

Like Arnold, these “fence-sitters” work for foreign companies and are at once drawn to and repelled by Western hegemony, emblematized here as the MmYum’s chain. And, like Arnold, these Indians have been displaced to varying extents by the forces of globalized technology, seeming to belong neither to the West nor to India. Tyrewala consequently uses his novella to satirize and critique the plight of the Indian middle class in the age of globalization, where old certainties around nation and belonging are shaken and a person can, in his or her exposure to globalized technology, find himself or herself in the position of the cyborg – not the powerful one set out by Haraway and depicted by Animal in Indra Sinha’s novel, but, in its most extreme incarnation as Arnold, a pathetic and doomed creature hollowed out by globalization.

Arnold’s sentience and thus cyborg-like nature do not subvert Western hegemonic globalization, even if the mascot-clown is ultimately radicalized against capitalism by the group of left-wing revolutionaries. The new subjectivity brought about by globalized technology is consequently an unhappy, unliberated, and deeply ambivalent one, even if both Arnolds do conclude the novella by finding each other and, perhaps, finding some sense of community in each other’s presence. In “Engglishh©”, on the other hand, doubling and mimicry do, at first

154 glance, appear to contain a Bhabha-esque subversive potential, but Tyrewala simultaneously undercuts this potential subversion by emphasizing the cynicism behind it.

“Engglishh©” is written in the form of an advertisement for and set of instructions to a new language narrated by an unnamed but seeming true believer in the cause, who may or may not also be Roohann Shahha (formerly Rohan Shah), the inventor of this new tongue. “Compiled by a team of seventeen numerologists after years of fevered calculations,” the text ironically boasts, “Engglishhh© contains more than 200,000 English words respelled in accordance with ancient Indo-Puranic principles.” The language is aimed furthermore at “curing the ill effects of

English, bestowing on its users positive vibrations and fruitful karmic results” (11). This emphasis on Hindutva, through Tyrewala’s reference to ancient Hindu literatures and a time- worn and venerable tradition aimed at banishing Westernization from India,48 suggests that, like the Hindutva movement, the Engglishhh© language is as much a part of globalization as

McDonalds is, constituting as it does a response to globalizing phenomena. Oza, for example, writes that “Cultural nationalism…is a strategy of displacement of concern for the insecurities generated through globalization to concerns of patriotism and strength” (124), pointing to the rise of the Hindutva movement and its obsession with “traditional culture” as an example of this displacement. As Bernard Cohn reminds us, furthermore, this binary between tradition and modernity is rooted in colonialism and imperialist discourse: “Cultural forms in societies newly classified as ‘traditional’ were reconstructed and transformed by and through this knowledge, which created new categories and oppositions between colonizers and colonized, European and

Asian, modern and traditional, West and East” (ix). Tradition is, therefore, a consequence of modernity and therefore always necessarily modern in its own right.

48 The Sanskrit word “Puranas” means “ancient, old”, and the term refers to traditional Indian tales, especially myths and legends.

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Likewise, “tradition” is conceptually so nebulous as to seem as if it were invented only to show certain groups of people how to behave and what to feel at a given moment in time, performing an imagined and idealized culture in which the past is both fetish and pastiche. Of the current discourses around tradition that have sprung up around globalization, Bose and Jalal comment that “[i]n spite of very strong and persistent, often localized, traditions, the notion of changeless ‘Tradition’ in South Asia was always a myth, but perhaps never more so than at the present moment as South Asians negotiate their place in an arena of global interconnections in the throes of rapid change” (4). Tomlinson adds that “one consequence of the 'imagining' of such a stable past is the obscuring of the essentially dynamic and often 'hybrid' nature of cultures”

(2008, 92). By tying Engglishhh to the Hindutva movement and the notion of an ancient Hindu tradition, Tyrewala suggests that this new language is at least partly the creation of an oppressive and culturally chauvinistic delusion, which has in turn been manufactured as a response to the insecurities resulting from globalization in India and which mirrors the globalized nation’s neoliberal obsession with entrepreneurship. Only invented in the United States in 1954, the copyright symbol that appears after each use of the word “Engglishhh” also humorously subverts this sense of ancient tradition and religious awe, pointing to inventor Roohann Shahha’s participation in the global markets and entrepreneurial attempts to “cash in” on his language.

Finally, although the narrator of the story eschews the use of pirated software to translate English into Engglishhh (13), the idea that Engglishhh is derived by numerologists turning words and symbols into numbers, which are then turned into words again, closely mirrors the act of coding a software programme, with language changed into binary numbers (namely, 1s and 0s) that ultimately appear to audiences as a decipherable language or set of symbols. The Engglishhh language – and Roohhan Shahha, whose dyslexic mind (in tandem with the team of numerologists) acts as the machine translating words from one tongue to another – therefore

156 operates like a cyborgian entity in that it was created out of globalized technology and capital.

As we have seen, in “MmYum” this spells a uniquely pathetic destiny for the cyborg and results in an unwilling compliance with Western hegemony.

This is not necessarily the case for “Engglishhh©”, however. Despite its connections to global capital, the Engglishhh language is simultaneously construed, albeit heavily ironically, as subversive. Our narrator tells us that for a time Engglishhh was considered “little more than the private obsession of a man whose increasingly misspelled letters and emails convinced people that dyslexia had gnarled his brain beyond repair. Little did they know that this ‘deranged dyslexic’ was plotting the ultimate revenge on a language that had caused him immeasurable humiliation throughout his life” (19). That Roohann Shahha created the language as an attack on the stranglehold of the English language on his education in India indicates the latter’s hegemonic status in the country. As Aneesh recalls, reflecting on the “neutralization” of English at the Indian call centre and his own ambivalent reactions to it,

Among a large body of India’s non-English speakers, it remains very much an imperial

language. Growing up in India, I remember my distress at being spoken to in English.

Having attended ‘Hindi-medium schools’ for my entire education until college, I could

never respond in English. In panic, I would forget even the simple sentences I had learnt

while taking English in school. These occasional nonconversations in English would put

me crushingly in my place. English was a probing measure of personal worth. (17)

As I discussed in earlier chapters of this dissertation, English is widely considered – both inside and outside India – as the premier language of globalization and, as Aneesh describes it, a marker of both one’s personal and net worth. The linguistic hegemony of English has been amplified rather than undermined by the Internet: according to the NETmundial group, approximately 60% of web pages are in English, but only 10-15% of the world’s population can

157 speak it. Appearing on a superficial level to represent an aggressive attack against English, the de facto language of Western hegemony, Engglishhh becomes wildly popular in Afghanistan,

China, Uzbekistan, Latin America and the Middle East, as well as Cuba (15) – all places with deeply uneasy or hostile relations with the United States. Again, the Engglishhh language is reminiscent of technology in its uniting of computer users in distant corners of the globe, creating “[v]irtual communities [which] promise a ‘third place,’ aside from work and home, where the frayed fabric of sociality, a casualty of the brutal functionalism of the modern world, can be rewoven into wholeness” (Chopra 239). So, the alienation of modernity, which in

Tyrewala’s work is often synonymous with Westernization and globalized technology, is ironically remedied by technology, itself frequently linked with the modern. The story closes with Roohhan Shahha’s declaration of war against the Western world or Global North:

“Engglishhh© maarks t een o Worsteen doomnatnn oof t worllld. I ha been ploootn and wtiing foor t daaay too cm foor many yrss. Oonee dy t whool worllld wiil bea spkng Engglishhh© aanndd we ppl of possst-colinal brown-skned nation will ha t laast laugh. Maark yy words, whit dvl, maark yy words!”49 (22) Shahha intends English’s dark double, Engglishhh, to function as the weapon to destroy Western neoimperialism and unite postcolonial nations in anti-Western solidarity, even as its power crucially stems from its roots in English’s linguistic hegemony. The solidarity which it creates among these nations, furthermore, can only be purchased through

Shahha – which is reminiscent of how, Taylor says, the Web 2.0 model (in companies like

Facebook and Google) “trades on our sociability – our likes and desires, our observations and curiosities, our relationships and networks – which is mined, analyzed, and monetized…Web 2.0

49 Tyrewala does not provide a translation for Shahha’s speech. Here is my own attempt at a translation of this deeply complex language: “Engglishhh© marks the end of Western domination of the world. I have been plotting and waiting for this day to come for many years. One day the whole world will be speaking Engglishhh© and we people of post-colonial brown-skinned nations will have the last laugh. Mark my words, white devil, mark my words!”

158 is not about users buying products; rather, users are the product” (14). So, while in Animal’s

People global solidarity is seen as anti-capitalist, working to tear down neoimperialist structures of oppression, seven years later in the 2014 story “Engglishhh©,” we see this kind of international community as actually working in the service of capital.

The story therefore ends on an ironically victorious note, unlike “MmYum,” in which we are aware that at least one of the Arnold statues will die on a desolate mountaintop after the novella ends (177-78). In its darkly humorous way, it even recalls the conclusion of Animal’s

People, in which the cyborgian Animal issues a call for solidarity among the oppressed peoples of the earth, the “people of the Apocalypse.” But while the conclusion of Sinha’s novel evinces a more hopeful tone, predicting increased solidarity among the world’s poor, “Engglishhh©” is somewhat less sanguine: it satirizes anti-Western activist sentiment and foregrounds its hypocrisies and pettiness, even as it recognizes to some extent – in Roohann’s humiliation and the popularity of the language in certain key nations – the validity of this feeling and the elite and hegemonic status of English in India, as well as the subversive potential of a mocking mimicry.

Tyrewala himself relies on mimicry and doubleness in his work to problematize glowing neoliberal discourses about Indian liberalization in an age of globalization, but also to attack the sometimes reactionary, chauvinistic, and cynical discourses of anti-globalization activists. As discussed, the MmYum’s franchise is a dark reflection of McDonald’s and Arnold MmYum of

Ronald McDonald, for example, while Engglishhh is the warped twin of English and Roohann

Shahha the new and improved double of the erstwhile Rohan Shah. This emphasis on doubleness

– whether in language or in subjectivity, or both – is reflected in Tyrewala’s subtitle for the collection, also titled Engglishhh©: “Dispatches from a hyperreal nation.” The adjective

“hyperreal” implies a caricaturization or gross exaggeration of reality, and conversely – in the artistic context – extreme realism. The “hyperreal”, furthermore, stands for the inability to tell

159 the difference between reality and simulation in a postmodern society where advanced forms of technology blur the boundaries between the two. Tyrewala’s stories blend realism with fantasy and tragedy with satire in an age of globalized technology and new subjectivities and ways of being resulting from technological innovations. The term “hyperreal” and its suggestion of a doubled reality (whether extremely realistic or grotesquely distorted) also brings us back to Vora and her assertion that the US uses India as a site of cheap reproduction of Western labour, in reality and in media discourse (67). “MmYum” emphasizes the problematic outcome of this kind of passive reproduction through the lonely figure of Arnold, but in “Engglishhh©” mimicry and linguistic reproduction (or, more accurately, re-production – re-writing the English language) opens some avenues for resistance, even if Tyrewala treats this outcome with heavy irony. The fact that in the latter work Tyrewala himself is participating in mimicry (of an alternative linguistic Hindutva, and of an advertising pamphlet) means that his story works as a less ironic form of resistance – in short, by resisting both Western hegemony but also the oppressive or opportunistic rhetoric of the anti-Western and Hindutva movement.50 If Tyrewala ultimately does not see a way to create a more genuinely subversive and revolutionary solidarity and community of the kind suggested by the conclusion of Animal’s People, then he at least points toward the possibility of a subversive literature that, in satirizing our world today, draws our attention to the absurdities and oppressions of globalization and therefore opens a space for thinking of better ways to combat its ills. The “aha” sound we find at the end of Roohan Shahha’s new Engglishhh- ed name, therefore, brings to mind both the sound of discovery and of laughter: one that combines its devastating discoveries about contemporary globalized Indian society with satirical, but not entirely hopeless, laughter.

50 Interestingly, Basu argues perceptively that the “ideologues of Hindutva seek to reterritorialize and provincialize English to such a degree that it is no longer a foreign tongue, but one as intimately known across the land as the invented tradition of Sanskritized Hindi” (12).

160

Vora writes, “The same technologies developed for the extraction of life for accumulation elsewhere can be used to form, or imagine forming, different types of collectives beyond the nation-state, institutionalized religion, class-based organizing, and so forth.” In this she echoes the largely affirmative rhetoric of critics like Feenberg and Haraway, and authors like

Indra Sinha, who also, despite some skepticism, see fruitful possibilities in technology and the creation of new forms of technologically enabled solidarity and community. As we have seen, however, Tyrewala is more skeptical: technology enables the creation of new selves and languages but these are frequently problematized or ironized, either doomed and tragic, in the case of Arnold, or savvy and subversive but also cynical, in the case of Roohann Shahha. I began this chapter with the image of a telephone ringing, and new subjectivities gained and old ones lost, as well as the possibilities to be found in new global connections, which result from answering the call of globalized technology. Animal answers the call and becomes a victim of global technology – his victimhood is foisted upon him by the Kampani in the form of the toxic accident – and his “normal” body and identity as a human being is lost. However, a new four- legged animal self is born that, eventually, through the intervention of a Western reporter, also becomes connected, through the reporter’s gift of a tape recorder, to the global publishing industry. While globalized technology at first separates Animal from his community in

Khaufpur, it ultimately allows him to issue his call for international solidarity of the “Children of the Apocalypse” and his promise that the global poor will continue fighting for justice. This, I argue, is what makes Animal a “sahiborg”: technology enables him to achieve a sense of mastery of his and his community’s destiny in a globalized era, where global solidarity seems to point the way towards overthrowing corrupt and oppressive power structures governed by the international elite. I have also suggested that this attitude may reflect the more affirmative view of technology as a vehicle for global solidarity in 2007, when the novel was published and when, as Taylor

161 writes, a prevailing view was that in a digital world, “We are the ultimate deciders, fully in charge of our media destinies, choosing what to look at, actively seeking and clicking instead of having our consumption foisted upon us by a cabal of corporate executives” (3).

Arnold too answers to globalized technology and becomes its victim (again, as in

Animal’s case, victimhood is forced upon him by the MmYum company that, like Victor

Frankenstein, creates and abandons him); in the course of the story, he becomes sentient, combining the traits of man and machine in a new cyborg-like subjectivity. This subjectivity is profoundly alienating and reflects, as I have argued, the plight of the cosmopolitan, globalized individual whose home is both nowhere and everywhere, as Arnold’s is.51 Finally, Roohann

Shahha’s new language, Engglishhh, constitutes the inventor’s response to the call of English and the globalized technology that has spread its hegemonic influence all over the earth. The language creates a sense of community and solidarity among the anti-American nations that embrace it, but Tyrewala heavily ironizes this revolutionary potential: the story uses the neoliberal entrepreneurial rhetoric of a sales brochure and suggests Shahha is hypocritically capitalizing on postcolonial discontent and social injustice.52 As I have indicated, this more skeptical attitude to the revolutionary potential of technology and the cyborg might reflect the story’s later publication date, in 2014, by which time perhaps some of the shine had come off

Web 2.0, resulting (in India and elsewhere) in a sense of disappointment in the Internet and its purported and much-vaunted ability to create global community and solidarity and thus foment

51 Even if both sentient Arnolds find each other at the end of “MmYum,” we have already been told that one of the Arnolds will ultimately suffer a lonely and solitary death on a mountain top, indicating the ephemerality and superficiality of this sense of community. 52 One recalls Dale Beran’s description of Donald Trump: “Trump’s ventures . . . represent this fantasy: this hope that the working man, against the odds dictated by his knowledge, experience, or hard work will one day strike it rich — Trump University, late night real estate schemes, the casinos. Trump himself, who inherited his wealth, represents the classic lucky sap. But Trump also equally represents the knowledge that all of that is a lie, a scam that’s much older than you are, a fantasy that we can dwell in though it will never become true, like a video game.”

162 revolution and change. Tyrewala’s cyborg then, in contrast to the sahiborg, lacks this feeling of mastery over a globalized future; whether global solidarities are established or not, the world ultimately still looks much the same – run by capitalist greed and a solidarity underlined only by a common enemy, even if Shahha does promise revolution once his coffers are filled.

Neither Tyrewala’s nor Sinha’s views on technology are Manichean: technology is necessarily a reflection of the social structures that create it, and the sahiborg and cyborg function as ways to comment on contemporary Indian society and its vexed and at times skeptical but ultimately optimistic relationship to science and technology in a globalized age.

They do, however, indicate that technology is creating (and re-creating) fissures in the very social structures, both inside India and out, that have built and distributed it. This brings me back to one of my epigraphs: “Maintaining and joining, the telephone holds together what it separates” (Ronell 4). Globalized technology can create solidarity by bringing people together, but it can also separate communities insofar as it renders all too clear the hegemonic voice on the other side of the phone line: that of a brutal and violent globalized capitalism rife with corruption, often depicted as originating in the West or Global North, and serving as an agent of the neoimperialist exploitation of postcolonial labour. The oppressor and the oppressed, joined by the call of technology, are thus rendered ever more divided and distant as battle lines are drawn. Whether we will ultimately be rendered into cyborgs or sahiborgs by our technologies and societies, as cynics doomed to pseudo-revolution or as possible activist-masters of the globalized future, remains to be seen.

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Chapter 4 Exorcist and hacker: Magic and abstraction in the multinational

Everything is possible. Nothing is possible. Nothing hurts any more, until the consequences crash through the screen. -George Monbiot (NP, 2017)

Globalized finance and its monsters

In the film The Exorcist (1973), a young girl turns with swift and shattering ease into a monster.

Our first indication that little Regan MacNeil is not your average 12-year-old occurs when she interrupts a party thrown by her Hollywood actress mother only to urinate on the floor, looking blankly and passively on as the guests’ faces droop from expressions of cheerful curiosity to ones of horrified repulsion. Soon after, under the eyes of her terrified mother, and before those of its first audiences of disturbed film-goers, the sweet and youthful face of actress Linda Blair assumes, in its demonic aspect, a rotten and curdled milky-green look reflecting the spiritual corruption already gnawing at her prepubescent core.

In its often excruciating two-hour-and-twelve-minute runtime, The Exorcist treats its viewers to a real smorgasbord of the symptoms of demonic possession, from Regan’s infamous head-spinning trick to some equally notorious, and still very difficult to watch, acts of depravity involving a crucifix. Even now, the film can leave some viewers feeling nauseated and filthy – much, in fact, as if one is covered with the slime Regan frequently retches up at her exorcists. As with the physical act of vomiting, however, for some the viewing experience can have its benefits: we typically become sick when something is wrong with our bodies, and vomiting, while deeply unpleasant, allows us to rid ourselves of this toxic element. Just as Father Kassas

164 expels the demon from Regan’s body, so can the film be a purgative experience for certain viewers – a cathartic way of facing one’s personal and social demons.

The continuing power of The Exorcist, one of the highest-grossing horror movies ever made, accordingly lies not only in its shock value but in its sometimes retrograde yet insidiously effective harnessing of issues that tend to disturb “ordinary” people: the abjection of the female- identified body, for instance, and a fear of mental illness. Among the worst of these themes, perhaps, is the implication that a hellscape lies not merely after death but within the still-living body and soul. Regan’s internal corruption is, moreover, symptomatic of the evils of the zeitgeist,53 which are figured principally in the film as intergenerational conflict between an anarchic, debased, and uncontrollable younger generation and an almost equally immoral older one rooted in order and the status quo, combined with and mirroring an erosion of trust and faith in the state and religion. At the end of the film, the latter group gains the upper hand, in a manner of speaking – only Father Kassas, a middle-aged Catholic priest plagued by a lack of faith, can save Regan, although to do so he must offer his own body up to the demon before defenestrating himself. Religion and order win. Sort of.

His profound spiritual uncertainties notwithstanding, Kassas fulfills his role as exorcist well. An exorcist, after all, gets rid of bad things. A sort of exterminator for the soul, in cultural texts like Friedkin’s film the exorcist identifies and attempts to destroy the social corruption, the invisible worm, at the heart of the sick rose of society. Likewise, demonic possession operates as a sort of symbolic shorthand for the social ills of globalized finance and speculation in Ramiah

Ariya’s novel The Exorcism of Sathish Kumar, MBA (henceforth ESK). Arjun Appadurai describes our globalized world as powered by financialization, which is founded on the idea

53 The epigraphs of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, on which the movie was based, point to certain specific evils of the age – the Vietnam War, the Holocaust, and the Kennedy assassinations – as shaping and provoking Regan’s demonic possession.

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“that risk itself [can] be monetized, allowing a small set of actors to take risks on risks.” Hence the rise in the financial markets of the derivative, “an instrument that has allowed financial technicians and managers to make virtually every part of our everyday lives susceptible to monetization” (125). One might think of credit default swaps, for instance, which monetized the risk (and the risk on risk, and so on) inherent to mortgages on houses and which led in large part to the global financial crisis of 2007-9. As a result of financialization, Appadurai argues, we all54 bear risk now, whether we work in the financial industry or not, subject as we are to the monetization of our own student loans and mortgages, among other things.

This process of financial abstraction – of turning houses into credit default swaps, and education into derivatives of student loans – reflects and recalls the tendency of globalization more generally to render abstract what is “real” and material. Building on the work of Anthony

Giddens, John Tomlinson links the invention of the clock to a separation of space from place

(1999, 49-52) and expands this phenomenon to address the “deterritorialization” of modernity:

“the weakening or dissolution of the connection between everyday lived culture and territorial location” (128; see Introduction for more on Tomlinson). Globalized technology is likewise built on these abstracting processes, with Tung Hui-Hu commenting that computer science

typically divides a technical apparatus into a series of so-called abstraction layers. These

layers move progressively from the least abstract to most abstract. In the case of

networks, for example, the physical link on the bottom – fiber-optic cable, Ethernet

copper wire – form the layer of least abstraction. Various protocols in between (Internet

Protocol, then Transmission Control Protocol on top of IP) form the middle layers, with

the application layer on the very top (the software built on networking protocols, such as

54 Appadurai states that this phenomenon has been slower to hit the Global South than the North, but that its effects are already beginning to be seen.

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streaming video) being the most abstract. This model also describes other technologies,

such as operating systems or algorithms, usually through three to seven layers of

abstraction. (35)

The weakening of these connections that abstraction necessarily entails serves to make globalization and its tools mysterious, as most people do not understand the financial jargon underlying derivatives and the intricacies (or perhaps even the basics) of how computers and smartphones work. Rather, we put our faith in technological innovations and hope they do not steer us too far astray.

A few critics assert that even the “experts” of globalized finance rely on a sort of blind faith – a form of magical thinking and divination – to predict the vagaries of the stock market.55

Appadurai writes, “it is possible to identify a series of magical practices (by which I mean both coercive and divinatory performative procedures) at the heart of global capitalism and, in particular, the financial sectors. These practices are premised on a general, absolute, and apparently transcendent faith in the market” (24) – what we usually call neoliberalism, the philosophy that undergirds the global machinations of capital today. Laura Bear, furthermore, draws on anthropological accounts of magic to explain capitalism’s dependence on speculative finance instruments like derivatives, with divination involving “technologies of imagination” wielded by an elect group “that invoke an invisible realm and make it visible in order to explain the past, present, and future” (410). In this realm experiences become laden with “excessive and

55 There is arguably no “real” way to predict which way the markets will move, even by the experts. Appadurai cites Elie Ayache, who in The Blank Swan argues “that the fact that prices are expressed in numbers has led to the mistaken belief that these numbers belong to temporal sets that are susceptible to probabilistic understanding. Ayache’s entire argument about contingency, price, trading, and markets is based on the refutation of this massive consensus and leads him to propose that we need to make a radical distinction between probability (including ideas about outliers, random walks, and fat tails) and simply consider prices, particularly those that the market provides or admits for derivatives, as being radical contingent events that are created without reference to any preceding patterns, trends, tendencies, or causes. They are generated only through the act of trading . . . and reflect nothing other than this contingent event” (Banking 84).

167 multiple significance” that is discerned by that same elect set: “seers who work with the performative power of words” and “promise to draw humans closer to knowledge of the hidden patterns of society and the universe.” These financial seers perform an important role in our endlessly abstracted and confusing world, giving us (and almost certainly themselves) the sense that our senseless economic universe is dictated by a reason and logic only they can fathom and explain. In layering market movements with significance, too, these experts appear to reinvest them with the meaning – the connection to the “real” – that financialization removes in its process of abstraction. The uncertainty of existence is therefore, in at least one respect, tamed, and the nervous investor can rest easier knowing his or her money is safe in the benevolent hands of the market. Indeed, capitalism’s intimate relationship with magical thinking is well reflected in ESK. At a sorcerers’ meeting Arjun stumbles upon, the head sorcerer proclaims, “Th[e] art [of sorcery], with its closely guarded wisdom and ethical rules, now faces its greatest threat, possibly in history. We assembled here, and in these councils around the world, are . . . being corrupted from the inside. Corporations have invaded our space” (Ariya 164-5). An intergenerational conflict between one powerful sorcerer, Idumban, and his wayward son, who is providing magical tools to the villainous PH multinational firm, likewise reflects capital’s grip on magic in

India and the tensions to which it has given rise.

Appadurai cautions that the global financial crisis has done nothing to stem the tide of financialization. Instead, derivatives and other such ways of monetizing risk are only becoming more global:

Banks, hedge funds, and insurance companies are aggressively pushing their way into

new markets, lobbying for legislation that will bring the same untrammeled debt markets

from which they profited (and which also crashed in 2008) to the countries of the Global

South. Thus, it is only a matter of time before the countries of the Global South also find

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themselves fully exposed to the volatility, inscrutability, and extra-legality of the

derivative-based financial markets of the North. (Appadurai 126)56

ESK implicitly depicts an India in which this process of financial abstraction appears to be creeping in, even though this phenomenon is never broached directly: rather, in the novel, corporations are magical and all-powerful entities harnessing formidable tools of surveillance and technology, as well as sorcery, in order to control nearly every aspect of the globalized subject’s life, and abstraction appears in different, sometimes magical and linguistic, forms. This manipulation by capital of the Indian subject’s existence culminates in CEO Sathish Kumar’s demonic possession, which again is symbolic of the plight of a monstrously financialized society in which magic has become another capitalist weapon in its arsenal.

However, demonic possession and exorcism in ESK also work as a remedy to the ills of financialization and globalized capitalism by calling attention to the nefarious practices and magical thinking of the Indians and Westerners working within the financial markets. Ariya does not ask us to give up “magic,” accordingly, but to seek new ways of working within the current paradigms of financialization, principally in the form of an abstraction of subjectivity and de- abstraction of language, data, and information, to bring about community, solidarity, and resistance. Furthermore, he looks to digital resistance groups like Anonymous57, Anonymous

India, and WikiLeaks as models for these forms of identity- and imagination-based subversion.

I define the “exorcist” of this chapter as a globalized Indian subjectivity formed from a certain set of problems and solutions enacted by globalization and globalized labour and

56 Interestingly, Ritu Birla argues that speculative capitalism has a longer history in India than may be suggested here, with her historical analysis of colonial financialization in India leading her to conclude that “[t]he regulation of vernacular futures markets in India and their coding in law and policy may inform a genealogy of contemporary neo-liberal governance as speculative governance” (406). 57 When I refer to “Anonymous” (as opposed to “Anonymous India”), I’m referring to the global organization as a whole rather than the group that identifies itself specifically as Indian.

169 technologies. The exorcist can therefore be looked at alongside the call-centre worker, the entrepreneur, and the cyborg-sahiborg of my previous chapters as numbering among the often- overlapping new selves emerging from globalization in contemporary Indo-Anglian literature aimed at an audience subject to these same globalizing processes. When Sathish Kumar, CEO of the Chennai-based Indian outsourcing firm BSM and employer of ESK’s bumbling hero, computer programmer Arjun Palani, becomes possessed by the demon Vellaya Thevan, a chain of events is set in motion leading to the revelation of some of the most stunning secrets of the global financial markets and its major players. The possession also emphasizes the spirit of irreverence and trickery used by internet groups like Anonymous to subvert power in its various forms, with Arjun, his friends, and Sathish Kumar himself all taking part in this form of subversive mischief-making. In helping sorcerer Idumban to exorcise Sathish of the spirit, Arjun is able to help expose the devious nature of global finance (in the shape of PH) to the wider world, much as Anonymous and WikiLeaks were together able to reveal state secrets in 2012.

Furthermore, just as both Anonymous and WikiLeaks have faced criticism for, respectively, their juvenile and offensive humour and their criminal recklessness (most recently, for the latter, outing gay people in Saudi Arabia in a huge data dump in August 2016), so too do Arjun, his friends, and Sathish at times act irresponsibly and even unethically, hacking into private company accounts, for example, and insulting important business executives. Only by becoming a monster – in Sathish’s case, literally so – can one defeat the monsters of globalized finance.

In contrast to many of the other globalized Indian subjectivities discussed thus far in my dissertation, Arjun ultimately turns his back on corporate upward mobility in favour of a continued search for justice, transparency, and radical community among other “exorcists” like himself. While the possession of Sathish Kumar opens the door to comic mischief, play, and subversive trickery, the exorcism also leads to a new sense of global responsibility, and even

170 moral seriousness, for Arjun. As his friend, the Anonymous India hacker Raj, drily informs love interest and political science whiz Malini, “We are not normal human beings. We are computer programmers.” “That makes you special?” she retorts mockingly. Raj replies: “That plus the pressure of being India’s engines for growth . . . We are men of steel. Hearts of iron. Unsung heroes of the digital age”(78). While Raj’s tongue is evidently firmly in cheek in this passage,

Ariya suggests in ESK that hacktivism and digitally enabled resistance constitute valid – and even maybe heroic – ways of subverting the corrupt, and corrupting, deep financialization of globalized capital.

Ariya’s generally optimistic take on hacktivism reflects a growing fascination in Indian popular culture with hackers. In Bollywood films A Wednesday! (2008), Don 2 (2011), Kahaani

(2012), and Mickey Virus (2013), among others, a proficiency with computers is depicted not as merely the domain of pimply teenagers glued nerdishly to their desk chairs, but as a sign of being cool and tough: a useful talent that proves the hero’s intelligence just as it helps defeat the bad guys. Anonymous India appears to be very active: in 2015, for example, a member hacked the website of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India to protest its release of public information on people who had emailed the authority about its stance on net neutrality. The group has an active web presence at http://anonopsindia.tumblr.com, which provides updates on its latest exploits or “ops” (operations), and has over 40,000 likes on its Facebook page.

Unsung heroes of the digital age

We are first introduced to protagonist Arjun as a lazy and ineffectual worker who perversely hopes, as he enters his busy office building, that he will be laid off that day – for the fourth time in his short computer programming career. His company, the Chennai-based outsourcing firm BSM, has been in a shambles since CEO Sathish Kumar started engaging in bizarre and outrageous displays before a shocked and amused internet audience:

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His last appearance in public went viral on YouTube. In that video, you can see our

beloved leader snarling, shouting and showing his middle finger to Bill Gates at a

NASSCOM conference. Then you…see Sathish attempting to storm the stage while

shouting obscenities at the titans of Indian industry (5).

At first, it seems as if Arjun’s wish to flee BSM’s rapidly sinking ship will come true: a team of human resources executives summons him ominously to a conference room where the company’s top brass awaits. Instead of being dismissed from the organization, however, Arjun is told that he is being transferred into the mysterious EXM team, which appears to consist solely of himself, with his new tasks including “1. Get ganja 2. Get the girl 3. Get dimethyl tryptamine58” (17).

Arjun does not quite know what to think of this plan, especially coming from the stuffed shirts around the boardroom table who instruct him haughtily that he is not allowed to ask any questions or tell anyone about his job transfer. Nonetheless, Arjun sets out to complete the tasks he’s been given, saying,

I did look forward to [management’s] appreciation if I delivered the ganja package. I had

been fired thrice before, for not ‘performing’ to expectations. My previous managers had

told me I was not a team player; not a goal-oriented person; not a person with a positive

attitude. I did not have the ‘can-do’ spirit. Three years out of college, I had learnt that I

was pretty dispensable in an organization. Now, I was ready to go underground to prove

otherwise. (28)

Along the way, he teams up with former colleague and pro hacker Raj, who reveals the startling reason behind Sathish Kumar’s outrageous behavior: “It seems they want to exorcise some

58 DMT, a powerful hallucinogenic drug that is illegal in most countries. It is rumoured to mirror the effects of a near-death experience.

172 demon from the CEO.” When Arjun, in astonishment, repeats “Demon?”, Raj replies glibly,

“‘Yes. Probably a metaphor. I assume they mean that they are going to restructure the organization or something’” (22-3). However, the normally perceptive Raj is wrong in this case:

CEO Sathish Kumar really is possessed by a demonic spirit, which has been summoned by PH, a former outsourcing client of his company and an evil American hedge fund seeking to discredit

Sathish for the secrets he has passed onto WikiLeaks. These secrets were in turn shared with

Sathish by whistleblower and programmer Subbu, a member of Anonymous who had worked on creating technology for the hedge fund before being murdered by PH. But if the world believes the CEO is having a mental breakdown, then it will have a far more difficult time buying the

WikiLeaks story that PH is unleashing a virus that will wreak havoc on the global market to the benefit only of the hedge fund and its investors.

With the help of internet vigilante group Anonymous, including the savvy hacker Raj; as well as Malini, descendent of the demonic spirit Vellaya Thevan, the “girl” on the EXM team’s checklist, and clever political science student; and a team of sorcerers, chief among whom is

Idumban, who doubles as an American-educated neurologist, Arjun is able to go to Ahi, the afterlife. In Ahi, Arjun sets things right, quelling a civil revolution started by a sorcerer working for PH Capital and ridding Sathish of the spirit of Vellaya Thevan – who then goes after his rightful target, the sinister Mr. Anderson of the American hedge fund. Meanwhile, PH Capital faces an OPEC investigation and international outrage.

In the last pages of the novel, Arjun is summoned back to the boardroom where he first received his EXM team assignment. Throughout the course of the narrative, he has learned that his company management intended to offer him as a sacrifice to the demon in the CEO’s stead and that all of the managers – even the comparatively decent Sathish – are sociopaths obsessed with “the interests of [their] shareholders” (Ariya 141). Far from offering congratulations to

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Arjun for exorcising Sathish and fulfilling the three tasks he was given, management attempts to transfer him to Tanzania. He cheerfully refuses then quits the job before apparently deciding to return to Ahi to rescue Subbu, the Anonymous India whistleblower who had revealed the hedge fund’s dastardly plans to Sathish, thereby displaying a spirit of community, loyalty and generosity not shown by the management of his former company.

What I have just described is the convoluted and confusing but often hilarious and insightful story of The Exorcism of Sathish Kumar, MBA. While the plot is best described as gloriously wacky, it also deals insightfully with contemporary hot-button issues like outsourcing, whistleblowing, Anonymous and hacktivism, Stuxnet, and the use of drones in warfare, among other things. Perhaps surprisingly, this irreverent and quirky novel – which is pulp fiction much like Chetan Bhagat’s One Night @ the Call Centre, published in paperback form, with a relatively low price and a cartoon image on its front cover – also affirms but often complicates some important recent critical texts about globalization, technology, and culture, including Arjun

Appadurai’s Banking on Words and Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy:

The Many Faces of Anonymous, her anthropological investigation into the internet group

Anonymous. Ariya’s fictional volley against globalization and its technologies is especially important, as I have mentioned, insofar as it delineates the exorcist: one of the globalized subjectivities to have emerged from the unique combination of circumstances faced by the Indian white-collar worker today.

These subjectivities are embodied in Ariya’s work by Arjun, the exorcist, and Sathish

Kumar, the possessed CEO. Again, as in the film The Exorcist, Sathish’s possession is symptomatic of the spiritual (and economic) corruption and anxieties plaguing the nation as a sort of demonic manifestation of the zeitgeist. But in contrast to the movie, the possession is construed as in some ways an affirmative, even emancipatory, experience – if not necessarily for

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Sathish himself, then for an amused public and employees like Arjun and Raj. Just at the moment

Sathish decides to become a whistleblower for WikiLeaks against the more powerful American multinational, he is possessed (literally) by a spirit of irreverence, mischief, and even violence that leads him to attack his top management and flip the bird to the almighty Microsoft founder

Bill Gates and various Indian VIPs. One rebellion, then, paves the way for a still more outrageous rebellion. Even the “demon” who possesses Sathish is far less frightening and evil than “Captain Howdy,” the diabolical creature that takes hold of Regan McNeil; he is an erstwhile warrior chief of the eighteenth century who fought against the British colonials and, from the underworld of Ahi, attempts to foil the efforts of any individual who might bring about some great disaster to India – incorrectly, in the case of Sathish. The possession of Sathish

Kumar, in other words, stands for the process of resisting the manipulations of the hegemonic economic order (even though, ironically, its representative, PH Capital, orchestrated the scheme) and assuming the role of a sort of rebellious trickster figure. In ESK, irreverence and mischief appear necessary to subvert oppressive power structures – no matter whether this occurs in silly, absurd, misguided and compromised ways.

As in the case of Anonymous, as detailed by Coleman, Ariya indicates that this spirit must be “exorcised” at a certain point in order for matters of global injustice and globalized economic corruption to be addressed more seriously. Coleman tells us “it is vital to understand how Anonymous underwent [in 2008] a metamorphosis from underworld trolls into public- facing activists,” and we see this reflected both in Arjun’s character development and the novel’s shift in focus from the more absurd hijinks of the possessed Sathish Kumar to Arjun’s journey of upward moral (rather than corporate or social) mobility and of learning to assume greater responsibility for one’s fellows. So, while Ariya stresses the importance of a spirit of rebellion and mischief that characterizes internet vigilantes like Anonymous, he also recognizes the

175 seriousness of social justice and shows greater faith in its ability to change the world for the better. In this intimate relationship in which one informs and helps create the other, the possessed figure and the exorcist are ultimately two sides of the same socially responsible subjectivity.

Where does nationalism – such an omnipresent theme in the other works I have discussed, and a major concern of my project – fit into this scenario? In the next section of this chapter, I will look at how a humorous sense of anti-American sentiment saturates ESK.

However, the text is also, like Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, careful to show that American corporations are not the sole or even the worst villains of the globalization story; comprador

Indians immersed in globalized business, like the management of Arjun’s company BSK, are no less treacherous and violent foes. The exorcist therefore shows a strong commitment to online communities of rebels and whistleblowers – like Anonymous India and WikiLeaks – and a more ambiguous allegiance to the nation.

After discussing the globalized cosmopolitanism and more explicit resistance techniques of the exorcist Arjun in ESK, I look at how the exorcist uses Western techno-capitalist strategies of abstraction and counter-abstraction to defy and mock his antagonists. What unites my arguments in this chapter is the increasing prevalence, amid globalization and the rise of ubiquitous financialization and internet technologies, of a sense of abstraction and resultant growing distance between person, place, and space. The novel reflects the sense that everything

– from identity to information – is mediated many times over in a globalized India, with selves separated from bodies and words cleared of meaning.

Obviously, my emphasis on Anonymous, Anonymous India, and hacktivism more generally throughout each of these sections reveals the extent to which I think Ariya models his portrait of a globalized and rebellious subjectivity, moulded by often unjust conditions for Indian tech workers and corrupt financial markets, on these online vigilante groups – both in their flaws

176 and their more admirable qualities. This is evidenced not only in the text’s frequent explicit references to Anonymous (Ariya 51) but to hacking more generally (10, 54, 67, 112, etc.), which is featured enough that the illicit activity begins to appear almost a banal, everyday exercise, and in the text’s themes, which I argue suggest symbolic, discursive and historical connections to

Anonymous. The exorcist figure examined in this chapter therefore often seems to bear the smiling Guy Fawkes mask of Anonymous and Anonymous India – at once faceless59 and famous, belonging to no community and pledging allegiance to no one, but still part of a powerful network of resistance.

The exorcist, the nation, and globalized labour

Belonging to the genre of “call-centre lit,” or popular fiction centered on topics of outsourcing and other kinds of globalized labour, ESK shares many traits with works like Chetan

Bhagat’s One Night @ the Call Centre and its more high-brow and cosmopolitan cousin,

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. Like the other texts I have discussed so far, ESK is concerned with subjectivities that emerge from globalized India and the technologies that run it – especially as these characters navigate their way around nationalism, Western hegemony and anti-American sentiment, new forms of community and social mobility in the globalized workplace, and the legacies of colonial and postcolonial resistance. This section of the chapter is therefore focused on looking at connections and distinctions between the exorcist subjectivity featured in ESK and other ones I have addressed – the call-centre worker, the entrepreneur, and sahiborg – in order to limn their similarly globalized pedigrees.

As with One Night and Brinda Narayan’s Bangalore Calling, ESK grants us insight into a workplace where, reflecting the neoimperialist world order and continuing impact of

59 Notably, the front cover of ESK features a man with no face – only a blank space where his features should be.

177 colonialism, white men call the shots: they are the sneering voices on the other end of the telephone at the call centre, the source of outrageous and exploitative demands from the head office, and, in the case of Ariya’s text, the Outsourcing Clients From Hell: PH Capital, an

American hedge fund that has outsourced its villainous work of creating a virus to BSM, the firm where Arjun works as a lowly programmer and where Sathish Kumar is CEO. Like Bhagat,

Ariya knows this environment well: according to his LinkedIn page, he is an information architect and IT director based in Chennai who works with clients in the US and Europe. ESK is, however, far less nationalist than Narayan and Bhagat’s texts; it often humorously shares the anti-Americanism of those two works but leaves out the nationalist spirit that gradually takes over protagonists like Shyam and Bitty. When Arjun is soundly pummeled by “Big Bruce,” PH’s hired muscle, he tells readers, “I could feel tears streaming down my face. Being a grown man and getting beaten up is not good for your ego. I wanted to run back and punch the guy who had attacked me, fully knowing that he could break me like a twig. Damn the FBI! Down with

American imperialism!” (33) Even Arjun’s anti-Americanism here seems more of a humorous symptom of his wounded pride than an actual political stance. Ariya therefore depicts a world where, in contrast to One Night’s triumphant conclusion, nationalist sentiment becomes largely irrelevant amid globalization: communities are formed among the technologically adept rather than those sharing a nation, and white men are despised not so much for their global hegemony but for their lofty positions as important clients at the outsourcing firms where Arjun toils.

Nonetheless, a sense of ‘Indianness’ remains. This is clearly illustrated in a scene set in a local café, Aachi’s Dosa Shop, which is frequented exclusively by “a sad mix of programmers”

(87) who work alongside Arjun in the outsourcing industry. “Clumps of these sad excuses for human beings sit around and discuss the week’s happenings – usually complaints about heartless managers, unreasonable clients, psychopathic HR and such cheery oppressors of the technical

178 community” (87-8), Arjun tells us, and the café is “their last remaining refuge” (88) in a world where they are routinely disregarded and exploited. Indeed, such is the dark plight of India’s computer programmers that even our narrator Arjun – part of this community himself – displays clear disgust for his own kind in this passage. Furthermore, while Basu describes the Hindutva- informed call-centre lit of One Night as written by and for aspirational “young men [who are] engineers and managers, and full of a vaunted awareness of their own youthful success, [and who] fashion themselves as icons” (17), ESK revels humorously in the socially awkward geekiness and lack of professional success of its protagonist. Interestingly, this recalls

Anonymous’s own tradition of self-mockery: as Coleman tells us, the Guy Fawkes mask worn by members recalls not only the hero of Alan Moore’s graphic novel-turned-movie V for

Vendetta, a heroic anarchist trying to upend a dystopian society, but a popular meme character on 4chan60 named Epic Fail Guy, who according to hacker wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica61 is known for “going about various methods of failing completely” and is usually depicted as a stick figure wearing a Guy Fawkes mask.

Beneath this community’s humorous self-loathing and mockery, however, lies a strong loyalty to its members. When a group of white men from PH Capital attempts to attack Arjun, his friends Malini and Raj, and Sathish at Aachi’s, where they have been hiding out, the café’s beleaguered programmers – believing that the Americans are outsourcing clients demanding that the programmers work even more intense and demanding hours – rally to defend Arjun and his friends: “The . . . white man panicked and turned to run. Someone tackled him as he rushed for the door, and a few of the patrons jumped on him in a mess of dosa, sambhar, and chutney . . .

60 4chan is an internet-based message board. First intended solely for anime fans, it now has a dark reputation for cruel, racist, and offensive humour and has been described as “the avant garde of the far right” (Beran NP). 61 The Encyclopedia Dramatica is itself known for racism and trolling its readers, so all information from the site should be taken with a pretty hefty grain of salt.

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We skirted the mess in the middle where a very white man was having spicy chutney poured down his throat” (92). Although this brawl is not framed explicitly as taking place between

Indians and Americans, reflecting instead a sense of community found among programmers versus their white clients, Ariya cleverly shows that a feeling of ‘Indianness,’ as symbolized by the spicy Indian foods which are here weaponized against the bland American palates of PH

Capital’s “very white” agents, cannot be completely ignored, even in an age of globalization. A sort of underground nationalism still makes an appearance, then, in this scene. However, for the exorcist subjectivity I’m describing, the “technical community” is far more important than nationalist concerns, particularly since Arjun’s primary antagonists include the Indian management of BSK, where he works.

This exorcist subjectivity furthermore undergoes a journey of upward mobility similar to ones we’ve already followed in previous chapters – albeit with some peculiar twists. As a programmer at an outsourcing firm, Arjun begins the novel at the bottom of the office hierarchy:

Employees are split into three categories: the top ten per cent, middle seventy per cent,

and bottom twenty per cent. The bottom twenty per cent are gone if Warren Buffet

sneezes and the stock market falls. They get no respect, and are maintained in the

company rolls to fill up auditoriums. The middle seventy are gone if something like the

9/11 attack happens. They get no respect either, but they are tolerated. The theory is that

you can run a company with just ten per cent of its employees. Somehow, the entire top

management always finds themselves in the top ten per cent. It’s a mystery. When my

former boss told me about the List, I was troubled. ‘Am I in the top ten?’ I asked him. I

was naïve then, much younger. He laughed hysterically. The List is like the American

drone system. Everyone denies its existence. But people get smoked constantly based on

it. (7)

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Although Arjun has been laid off from the position in which he was informed about “the List,” it does not appear his job at BSK is much better: he is still, after all, among the aforementioned

“clumps of . . . sad excuses for human beings” eating their dosas pitifully at Aachi’s every Friday night. Ariya’s allusions in this passage are instructive: employment in India is dependent solely on what happens in the United States, from its premier investor catching a cold to an incident of the magnitude of the 9/11 attacks. For 90% of the staff of Indian companies, Arjun reveals with his violent references to aerial attacks and mass murders, employment is war: a vicious struggle to maintain one’s position in an inequitable world where America can unleash death and destruction from above and, in the outsourcing sphere, inflict mass layoffs on India from the

American head office. As a graduate of a “government school” (17) and, apparently, of a lower class and caste than his company’s management, Arjun is particularly vulnerable to the tectonic shifts taking place within a globalized organization.62 As he explains when the novel begins,

“Three years out of college, I had learnt that I was pretty dispensable in an organization” (28).

When, however, Arjun is forcibly conscripted into the EXM team – a task for which he is chosen based on his unfortunate resemblance to a drug dealer (Ariya 18) and, we soon infer, his utter uselessness as an employee – our hero is able to display a kind of social and cosmopolitan mobility that stuns his haughty managers and impresses not only sorcerer Idumban, the nearest source of authority in the novel, but also the villainous Americans (Ariya 141). Ariya has great fun in playing with corporate management’s trite tropes about upward mobility in the workplace

– as when an executive asks Arjun, “how would you like to take your career to the next level?”

(15) Of course, his new position in the EXM team does not actually represent a move upward in the company’s hierarchy. But in a very literal sense, by helping to exorcise Sathish of the demon, he does go to a new level: the alternate dimension or world of Ahi, the afterlife. The novel also,

62 Arjun is, in fact, much like Chetan Bhagat’s ideal reader – see Chapter 1.

181 of course, presents Arjun with an alternate hierarchy of magical powers, which the American characters recognize and seek to master.

Arjun does, however, experience a perverse sort of upward mobility in terms of his corporate success. While the character is able, at least nominally, to accomplish the three tasks given to him as the sole member of the EXM team, he also – whether through ineptitude or mischievous cleverness – often flubs them by not following orders: the marijuana that he passes onto management (as a way of soothing the possessed Sathish who behaves violently) comes from the American antagonists, suggesting it may be laced with decidedly uncalming ingredients; he “gets the girl,” Malini, but also ends up getting the police involved despite management’s pleas to keep the plan secret; and finally, he takes the DMT himself, contrary to management’s plans, and assumes the sorcerer role in exorcising Sathish by visiting the netherworld of Ahi. Most importantly, he helps Sathish reveal the truth about PH’s plan to control the global markets – which, it emerges, BSM’s Indian management didn’t want to be revealed for fear of destroying shareholder value, even if this meant betraying CEO Sathish

(141). Arjun is therefore rewarded at the end of the novel with lacklustre thanks and congratulations from management, and with exile masquerading as upward mobility within the corporation. When Arjun enters management’s conference room at the end of the text, he is told,

“Arjun Palani, great job. Your role in the EXM teams has exceeded expectations . . . You have followed instructions clearly. Our success is largely due to that . . . For your contributions, we would like to offer you an onsite opportunity. It will be a great experience for you” (233). The

HR executive proceeds to offer him the aforementioned position in Tanzania, which is framed as more of an exile – designed to assuage the guilty conscience of management – than a promotion.

Arjun rejects this “opportunity” and leaves the company offices for the last time. As the novel closes, he is telling the parents of Subbu, the Anonymous whistleblower programmer, that he

182 knows where their long-disappeared son is, indicating the start of a new magical adventure in

Ahi.

The journey chronicled in ESK is therefore not really one of corporate and economic upward mobility, as was seen in texts like Miss New India and White Tiger, but is instead one of social and moral upward mobility that is focused on creating solidarity among underdogs and bringing dark truths to light, rather than on the culmination of individual desires such as improving one’s class status or financial position. At the beginning of the novel, Arjun informs us,

I was not a Team Player. My manager had talked about the Team as if it were a single

organism. I learnt that the Team wanted more work. I abhorred work. It was obvious that

the Team hated me. I was bringing them down, according to my manager. ‘How can we

change this for the better?’ he asked. I thought for a while and then suggested that I could

be proactive and create ‘win-win’ situations. He did not seem convinced. (6)

As evidenced by the final lines of the book, Arjun has transformed from an apathetic ne’er-do- well to one with a fierce loyalty to his programmer community; even though he has never even met the enigmatic Subbu, he is determined to find him in Ahi. While his former company management was treacherous and greedy in betraying CEO Sathish Kumar, Arjun conversely shows a newfound spirit of responsibility and solidarity, much as Animal eventually does in

Animal’s People in joining the anti-Kampani protesters.

As I have suggested, this moral shift in Arjun, ESK’s exorcist figure, from apathetic alienation to engaged solidarity, equipped with a seemingly newfound interest in social justice, mirrors a sociohistorical shift charted by Coleman in her research on internet collective

Anonymous. Coleman traces the group’s general shift from “ungovernable trolling pandemonium to engage[ment] in the global political sphere,” locating one of the first incidents

183 of the latter movement in “OpTunisia,” which brought down the Ben Ali government and is thought to have led to the Arab Spring.

As Coleman tells it, at its inception Anonymous was mainly concerned with “trolling”63 and the “lulz” – a term derived from “lol,” internet parlance for “laugh out loud,” and, according to Coleman, “a deviant style of humor and a quasi-mystical state of being” – that centered on pranks pulled over the internet and were often, though not necessarily (as in the case of its attacks on the Church of Scientology), related to internet or programming-related issues, like net censorship and file-sharing.64 While, as I explore later in this chapter, the “lulz” still inform the irreverent spirit of Anonymous greatly and even help define the group’s stance against current capitalist society, Coleman argues that, in 2008, with the efforts of Anonymous members like

Slim Amamou, the group started to take a broader perspective on the world and became more immersed in solidarity and social justice movements:

Anonymous had long appealed to Amamou. As his country inched closer to full-blown

revolution, he wanted the faceless collective closer. So he “summoned” Anonymous to

appear. He thought that if an operation took off, it would force the world’s media to stop

ignoring Tunisia. Although he called for Anonymous, he was not naive: “‘Anonymous is

not your personal army” is a refrain which he knew well. “You cannot control

Anonymous,” he told [Coleman] emphatically, castigating [her] after [she] asked him

63 Coleman defines “trolling” as “the targeting of people and organizations, the desecration of reputations, and the spreading of humiliating information.” 64 Dale Beran describes the rise of “the lulz” on the 4chan website far more critically: “like adolescent boys, 4chan users were deeply sensitive and guarded. They disguised their own sensitivity (namely, their fear that they would be “forever alone”) by extreme insensitivity. The rules, like everything else, were always half in jest. Everything had to be a done with at least a twinkle of winking irony. This was an escape route, a way of never having to admit to your peers that you were in fact expressing something from your heart, in other words — that you were indeed vulnerable. No matter what a user did or said, he could always say it was ‘for the lulz’ . . . The accepted standard was a sort of libertarian ‘free speech’ banner, in which isolated man-boys asserted their right to do or say anything no matter someone else’s feelings. This meant generally posting pornography, swastikas, racial slurs, and content that reveled in harm to other people” (NP).

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what he would change about Anonymous if he could. All you can do is hope they will

arrive. Fortunately, they did . . . Many joiners were still skeptical. As Quinn Norton

reported for Wired, many “didn’t think either the op or the revolution had a chance.” But

it turned out to be one of the group’s most stellar operations, ushering in a transformation

from Anonymous to Anonymous Everywhere.

Anonymous’ interest in social justice matters only grew with the success of OpTunisia. The group famously became involved, perhaps even more controversially, in the Steubenville and

Rehtaeh Parsons rape cases, releasing the private information of the accused rapists and investigators, who were widely seen as remiss in their duties and even cagily more sympathetic to the rapists than victims. While journalists like Ariel Levy for the New Yorker have condemned these actions as juvenile and sexist, Coleman suggests, “the work of politics and social transformation requires, and can bear, a diverse toolkit—from fine-tuned government interventions to rowdy subversive tactics [like those of Anonymous].” While “[w]e should be wary of christening any particular approach as a magic bullet,” she argues that Anonymous’ harnessing of the spectacle draws much-needed media attention to neglected issues like rape culture. And it would be a mistake to underestimate the power of hacktivism: take, for example,

Iceland’s Pirate party, composed of activists, hackers, and anarchists, which made major gains at the October 29, 2016 elections to oust a centre-right government and form a majority coalition with other parties.

In repeatedly drawing our attention to Anonymous’ underground involvement in contemporary culture and the prevalence of hacking in a world that seems ever more controlled, mapped, and determined by the internet, Ariya signals the links between his exorcist subjectivity and the members of Anonymous, who have likewise made something like an upward moral shift, throughout the group’s history, from apathy and isolation to community and solidarity. While the

185 merits of Anonymous’s interventions are still hotly debated, and rightly so, Ariya seems generally optimistic about this form of subversion and rebellion. This is especially evident in the sense of pre- and postcolonial disappointment and failure that pervades the novel, principally in the shape of Ahi, the land of the dead. This should sound familiar – we saw it in White Tiger, when a portrait of Gandhi in the office of a bureaucrat always signals political corruption, and in

One Night, which through the characters of Vroom and God accuses its main characters of betraying their anti-colonial predecessors. Ariya frequently hints that Ahi is not only a place where people go after they die, but a home for former Indian freedom fighters who had worked to topple the colonial regime.65 For instance, Vellaya Thevan, the demon lord of Ahi, is a former warrior chief who fought against the British and is still looking for worthwhile foes. Nowhere is this theme clearer, however, than in one of Arjun’s first conversations with the denizens of Ahi, who wear traditional Indian clothing and speak in Tamil rather than English (and are thus marked as distant from the postcolonial globalized subjects who otherwise populate the novel).

Their questions centre on the outcome of the Mutiny of 1857 and the status of the East India

Company, and Arjun’s most talkative interlocutor compares his state of living death in Ahi to a term in Vellore (183) – a prison opened by the British in 1867 that is still operational today – which is known for housing such impressive Southern Indian freedom fighters as Indian presidents V.V. Giri and R. Venkatamaran.

In contrast to One Night, which optimistically asks readers to take their cues from earlier postcolonial freedom fighters, ESK, with a sort of wry melancholy, indicates that precolonial and

65 Although the section of the text dealing with it is probably the novel’s least successful one, Ahi is rich symbolic terrain. In addition to its colonial implications, it is described as a sort of “network” and “collective space” of human brains, which “evolved telepathy . . . just so [they] could live after death” (157-8). The sorcerer Idumban explicitly links this network to “the computer network of our times. . . The brain simply serializes identity and memory into this network, at the time of death.” Ariya therefore seems to suggest, strangely enough, that some level of dividualization is inescapable and inevitable, even in the afterlife – although, perhaps, the fact that capital is seemingly uninvolved in this process makes it less predatory and more affirmative for the author.

186 postcolonial forms of resistance against British imperialism have only led to an equally bleak – and perhaps even worse – situation for most contemporary middle-class Indians, who are brainwashed into obedience by the corporations they labour for. When his Ahi interlocutor asks

Arjun, “Are there better gurus? . . . Have you made some progress in that end, better philosophies in this age, at least?” their visitor can only drily reply, “You asked about the East

India Company? There are thousands of such corporations now. In the Living world, we are all kept busy working for them and buying from them. We do not think much about philosophy anymore…But we have found the meaning of life. It is shareholder profit” (183-4). His last sentence, of course, echoes the justifications of his management for working with the evil PH corporation, as when BSM executive Aman tells him, “Our loyalty is not to Sathish. Nor is it to

Subbu or the global economy. Our loyalty is to the shareholders. We do whatever it takes to keep the company afloat. That is our mandate” (142). All of this has the effect of rendering earlier forms of resistance against imperialism, as symbolized by Arjun’s bewildered and passive interlocutors in Ahi, irrelevant (and even symbolically “dead”) in the current neoimperial context, where power and capital take the form of the faceless abstraction of the shareholder.

ESK therefore signals that the strategies of digital resistance and community-forming engaged in by Anonymous and other hacktivist groups may be more appropriate and powerful in globalized

India than earlier, more traditional ones – at least when it comes to fighting the neoimperialist cult of the shareholder and anonymous capital.

The exorcist as “dividual”

It can be difficult to differentiate BSM management’s loyalty to shareholders from

Arjun’s loyalty to fellow programmers like Subbu and his CEO Sathish. Is this relatively valorized latter form of community and solidarity a “traditional” kind of fealty that hews more closely to earlier and less globalized forms of capitalism? I would argue that this is a misreading

187 of Ariya’s text – rather, both forms of loyalty and community are built on a set of shared affiliations with strangers (or near-strangers) who are linked by globalized forms of communication and finance technologies including the internet. One is therefore not more

“traditional” than the other; instead, both show the abstracting influence of globalization, in which circles of kinship broaden to include people one has never and will probably not ever meet in person but who may share the same set of values despite other differences and even antagonisms (although Arjun’s closest relationships are still his friendships with Malini and Raj).

This overwhelming feeling of abstraction in ESK – of body separating from spirit, of the globalized human becoming a discrete and volatile set of affiliations and interests rather than a complete and fully-formed individual – is powerfully figured in the opening pages of the book, when Arjun is preparing to journey to Ahi. Idumban tells Arjun, “I will take care of your body”

(2), while his spirit embarks on its fantastic voyage. Indeed, ESK depicts a world where it has become increasingly easy to separate one’s body from one’s “spirit.” This “spirit” can be likened to the aforementioned set of affiliations and loyalties of the globalized person, as well as more generally to the “user” of a given technology and the digital double examined in my chapter on the cyborg. Like Arjun going to the land of Ahi, in other words, the Internet user leaves her body behind while her digital double – her abstracted online self – goes to other virtual terrains. This also reflects the process of financialization, as in the process of creating derivatives an asset is

“endlessly mediated” until it ceases in some sense to exist as a material object (Appadurai 108).

In tackling the subject of the dividual and how it is used against the forces that create and shape it, we return to my question about the difficulty in differentiating between the various forms of loyalty shown by the villains and heroes of ESK. I think the variance lies in the former’s faith in and reverence for a powerful global hierarchy, and in the latter’s lack of them. This difference can be helpfully elucidated by what Appadurai, channeling Deleuze, conceives of as

188 the “dividual.” Appadurai describes its creation in the following way: “the erosion of the individual and the rise of the dividual is largely an effect of the workings of financial capitalism since the early 1970s and in particular a collateral effect of the spread of the derivative form as the quintessential tool of making money out of uncertainty in this era of financialization” (101).

The abstraction of finance (from, say, a house to a contract-based housing derivative that represents the house, like a credit default swap) is also responsible for the abstraction of the individual into the dividual – from a ‘complete’ person to a self that is divided into a great many volatile and separate parts and predilections, interactions, affiliations, and associations.

Appadurai terms this process as, at its worst, “predatory dividualism”: “the slicing and dicing of individuals into a variety of risk-bearing scores [which] is then bundled up (securitized) to make the bundled dividuals the bearers of an increasingly abstract and systemic risk in which their capacity to unite as individuals is irretrievably eroded” (145). We can also see this process at work among the companies which make up Big Data in order to “atomize, partition, qualify, and quantify the individual so as to make highly particular features of the individual subject or actor more important than the person as a whole.” More specifically, the consumer is rendered into a series of numbers attached to his or her purchases, among other internet activities, “so as to make these parts of the individual combinable and customizable in such ways as to render moot or irrelevant the idea of the ‘whole,’ the classic individual” (109-10).

Appadurai calls this shift in subjectivity from individual to dividual ““ideal for the masking of inequality, for the multiplication of opaque quantitative forms that are illegible to the average citizen, and for the multiplication of profit-making tools and techniques, which can escape audit, regulation, and social control”; he then grimly informs us that the rise of the dividual is irreversible (101-2). In other words, not only does the flesh-and-blood consumer become abstracted into a series of numbers or volatile group of discrete marketable affiliations

189 amid dividualization – at best, a Facebook profile and a tweet on Twitter instead of a person – but this process also enables the flourishing of abstract and “opaque” types of capital, as with a futures equity that represents a commodity like wheat which, through various contracts, is in fact several levels abstracted from it. This sense of growing abstraction in the realms of consumer and financial data in turn allows capital to swoop in and feed, vulture-like, without sharing the spoils.

Appadurai affirms, however, that all is not lost for those unlucky enough to find themselves outside the global elite – that is, for the ordinary citizen unable to participate in the expensive habit of speculating on the stock markets or scavenging for valuable data. Rather than rejecting dividualization (which as we have seen is impossible anyway, since the process is irreversible), we should embrace the new forms of sociality and solidarity that it allows: what

Appadurai describes as the “temporary associations with many other kinds of energies and agencies in the world, only some of which take the forms of what we now think of as the human individual” (147). Indeed, in places like Mumbai, for instance, slum activists are “pursuing a progressive brand of dividualism” that involves a “strong ideology of anti-individualism,” as well as an “aversion to descriptions of their collective identity in terms of class, interest group, party, or faction, all of which they regarded as misleading ways of talking about their sense of community” (120).

Perhaps we can see hacktivism, Anonymous, and Anonymous India as moulded by the same forces as these activist groups and therefore as bearing some notable characteristics in common. At the risk of lumping these vastly disparate groups together into one absurd and unwieldy category, there are similarities between how Appadurai describes the activists and the ways in which Anonymous functions. This is not as unlikely a pairing as it may seem: both groups of activists do, after all, arise not only in response to globalized capitalism but are to

190 varying extents also created and united by globalized capitalism. The National Slum Dwellers

Federation (NSDF) of India – also known as SPARC – is part of a global community that includes, among others, Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), which the NSDF’s website calls “an international network of organisations of the urban poor in over twenty countries in

Asia, Africa and Latin America who share ideas and experiences and support one another in gaining access to adequate land, infrastructure and housing.” The repeated use of the word

“network” here and on the website emphasizes these groups’ reliance on forming community and solidarity channels through technologies like the internet, where many have a strong presence.

Contrary, then, to the cliché of the slum dweller – and the global poor more generally – failing to participate in the so-called “internet revolution” and watching wistfully as the future passes them by, some of these groups are in fact crafting global relationships and spreading information and innovation through these technologies.66

Meanwhile, the actions of Anonymous – with its often juvenile humour, largely male and sometimes misogynist membership, and well-documented missteps – can seem to pale in comparison to the technology-enabled efforts of SDI. It is interesting to note, however, that

Anonymous, Anonymous India, and the slum activist group Appadurai describes embrace similar ideologies of anti-individualism. Anonymous India has insisted in interviews that “[t]here is no hierarchy” in the organization: “We are just a bunch of free individuals commanded by our instincts” (Khan NP). In addition, like the activists in Mumbai, Anonymous India resists working with the Indian government because it is only interested “in what caste we belong to” (Khan

NP), signaling an aversion to being defined through traditional oppressive social categories.

Coleman writes, furthermore, that “[r]egardless of how far and wide the fame of Anonymous

66 This view of the global urban poor as eager to mobilize and establish solidarities can be justly criticized as utopian; it is equally important to recognize that certain groups of the urban poor (in Myanmar and Indonesia, for example) do not have the same history of mobilization.

191 spreads, personal identity and the individual remain subordinate [in the group] to a focus on the epic win” – the prank and the hack. This rejection of individual fame67 runs contrary to much of what we see in our world today, Coleman notes, “from the mass media, which hires…celebrities as news anchors, to the micro-media platforms that afford endless opportunities for narcissism and self-inflation.” (The cult of the entrepreneur-hero detailed in Chapter 2 also testifies to this trend.) This quest for fame is, furthermore, symptomatic of Western-style globalized capitalism, where personalities are transformed into “personal brands” and the self becomes just another source of potential capital. Coleman cites anthropologist David Graeber, who links this kind of competitive hyper-individualism with C.B. Macpherson’s concept of “possessive individualism,” where we begin to perceive “everything around [us] primarily as actual or potential commercial property.” Anonymous’s resistance to this outgrowth of capitalist self-promotion appealed to the aforementioned Slim Amamou, key player in one of Anonymous’s most successful activist efforts: the revolt in Tunisia. Coleman writes that Amamou

described Anonymous as the number zero: the all-powerful number, the non-number . . .

Embodying the idea of void and infinity, zero was long held in the West as a heretical

concept, only entering usage in mathematics and philosophy during the intellectual, and

political, ferment of the Enlightenment. Zero—the ultimate placeholder, refusing a

concrete identity.68

In rejecting fame-seeking behavior and embracing the politics of the faceless collective, then,

Anonymous and other activist groups buck, through the use of the internet, the trends that the internet in its most hyper-individualist incarnations promotes: self-promotion through self-

67 Notably, Anonymous ended its relationship with WikiLeaks because it perceived Julian Assange as being overly hungry for fame (Halliday NP). 68 This is reminiscent of activist leader Zafar’s speech in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (see Chapter 3) on the “power of zero” (229); because the poor activists have zero, or little to lose, they are stronger than their wealthy oppressors.

192 generated content on conglomerate-owned social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and

Twitter, all of which a person who is looking to capitalize on his or her personality or “brand” must curate expertly to garner the most clicks – and all to the greater profit of the conglomerate, which counts on this kind of enthusiastic voluntary labour to make money. This is akin to the kind of “predatory dividualism” (145) Appadurai refers to when he writes of Big Data and other corporate entities turning helpless neoliberal subjects into a set of opportunities to accumulate capital. In using the term “predatory,” however, Appadurai may be overlooking to some extent the complicity with which fame-seeking dividuals embrace technologies of self-promotion.

While “the slicing and dicing of individuals into a variety of risk-bearing scores [which] is then bundled up (securitized) to make the bundled dividuals the bearers of an increasingly abstract and systemic risk in which their capacity to unite as individuals is irretrievably eroded” (145) is certainly predatory behavior, how do we account for internet users who willingly engage in the process?69

In a culture where the latter trend prevails, Arjun is skeptical that a non-hierarchical society can be achieved. He tells a citizen of Ahi, “You have a world free of hunger and thirst, where people do not have any purpose. You cannot organize a community this way.” Pressed further, he says, “You need to create a hierarchical structure. A corporation. Something in which people are rushing around creating things.” His interlocutor protests that they do not need anything in Ahi. “Yes, that’s the genius of it. You can make people believe they need a lot of things. You can then create those things. You can have competition, and it excites people” (Ariya

69 This is not intended as a slight against YouTube performers but is rather intended to acknowledge their agency and sometime complicity in the dividualizing process. Consider politically subversive Indian artists like Mr. India, who primarily spread their criticism of Assamese politics, Donald Trump, and Modi’s policies through the YouTube medium (Marvel NP). Mr. India even has a ditty titled “Open Song to Chetan Bhagat” in which he calls the author a “war-monger” and asks Bhagat to kill himself before insisting that he’s only joking and signing off, “Long Live Mother India!” The “self-branding” of the enterprise of the self, when turned to artistic and political ends, can bear some interesting fruit.

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207). This cynical appraisal of modern society and its irrational hunger to consume and compete only underscores, in Ariya’s novel, the need for an Anonymous-style activist intervention where hierarchies are dismantled in favour of nonidentarian, dividual-based community networks.

Indeed, in having his protagonist ultimately abandon the corporation and its hierarchies to find

Subbu, the missing Anonymous programmer, Ariya shows us that even disbeliever Arjun can no longer sustain his cynicism amid the new kind of non-individualistic internet-enabled activism that Ariya foregrounds in ESK.

Essentially, in the same way that Appadurai tells us that activists of today must “leverage and resocialize our dividuality by exploiting the deep logic of the derivative form,” so do

Anonymous and other activist groups like the ones mentioned by Appadurai in Mumbai harness the anonymizing and faceless – the abstract – quality of the dividual to find unity and solidarity.

In other words, they take globalized capitalism’s unique ability to render both capital and subjectivity abstract and use it to their advantage. The “exorcist” of this chapter, who as I have repeatedly said is affiliated with Anonymous, is therefore itself a faceless and abstract but increasingly powerful figure, indicating a possible new iteration of globalized activist subjectivity in India – or, at least, in Indian literature.

“Lulz” and the de-abstraction of data

Arjun, the exorcist character, therefore “exorcises” the demons of globalized capitalist abstraction, in the form of an abstracted subjectivity (the “dividual” or “algorithmic identity”), to render it a valuable tool for solidarity and greater transparency. He does so by revealing the information hidden behind the abstracted language of globalized capitalism. Appadurai argues in

Banking on Words that the 2007-8 financial collapse was driven by a “failure of language” in derivatives like credit default swaps or CDS (1). These are contracts based on the future price of a given financial asset (like a house in the case of the CDS), which promise that one trader will

194 pay another a pre-determined amount of money should the price of that asset reach a certain level. While money is of course already an abstract concept, the derivative takes this sense of abstraction, through the written language of the contract on which it is based and the dispersal of contracts based on a single asset among many Wall Street players, to an entirely new level.

Appadurai explains,

The derivative is an asset whose value is based on that of another asset, which could itself

be a derivative. In a chain of links that contemporary finance has made indefinitely long,

the derivative is above all a linguistic phenomenon, since it is primarily a referent to

something more tangible than itself: it is a proposition or a belief about another object

that might itself be similarly derived from yet another similar object. Since the references

and associations that compose a derivative chain have no status other than the credibility

of their reference to something more tangible than themselves, the derivative’s claim to

value is essentially linguistic. (2016, 4)

Consequently, in contemporary finance a great many number of levels of abstraction separate the derivative contact from the asset it represents. This is rendered possible through computer technologies and networks that can devise ever-increasing ways to split the derivative contract between a greater number of traders (in turn diluting each trader’s monetary risk and responsibility for the performance of the asset) in ever more sophisticated ways. While the global elite tends to profit from these risk-taking exercises, ordinary people become passive hostages to the whims of Wall Street, with their assets rendered into abstract game pieces for traders to play with (Appadurai 2016, 119). In the case of the housing market collapse, for instance, “every link in the promissory chain was built on greater risk, as distance from the underlying asset was increased. The greater the distance between the two, the larger the gap between the real value of the underlying stock of homes and the overall derivative system based on housing” (9). All of

195 this constitutes a “failure of language” insofar as the promissory language of the derivative contract is false and deceitful on a systematic level – again, as with the American housing market collapse, in which the value of housing mortgages was grossly (and deliberately) overstated by a number of respected players in the world of contemporary finance. It is, furthermore, the intensely abstracted nature of derivative contracts that allows such schemes to proliferate: first, as Appadurai suggests, because the endless chain of contracts separates the “real” asset’s value from that of the imagined asset; and second, because the actual monetary risk itself becomes abstract, spread as it is among so many traders – very few of whom expected their bluff to be called, as the collapses of AIG and Lehman Brothers indicate.

Thus, by encouraging ever greater abstraction in the form of long chains of written derivative contracts, globalized finance turns language into a tool for making money, often at the expense of the people who nominally own the assets on which the contracts are based, and who cannot parse the highly complex and obfuscatory technical language of the contracts (or, more likely, are not able to access them at all). While from Wall Street’s perspective, then, derivatives can be highly effective at generating capital, Appadurai describes them as being deeply implicated in a “failure of language” because the written promises on which derivative contracts are based are repeatedly broken. This environment, in turn, forms an appropriate backdrop for the repeated failure of language and preponderance of nonsense in ESK. A key sentence – “That does not make any sense,” repeated by Arjun on pages 87, 106, and 124 – defines the misunderstandings in language and deliberate obfuscations of meaning (often in the shape of jargon spouted by management or corporate entities) that litter the novel. Much of Ariya’s comedy comes, for instance, from the confusion the lowly software engineers experience when faced with ESK’s magical elements: in Raj’s mistaken belief that the EXM team’s mission is to

“exorcise some demon from the CEO” is nothing more than a silly corporate metaphor for an

196 organizational restructuring (22-3), or when Arjun wonders of his new acquaintance Idumban,

“Was he really a sorcerer or was that the new name they gave corporate consultants?” (69). This extends beyond the magical realm into the more realistic one, as when Arjun describes his company’s employees, like himself, as being called “associates” by management (6), with the latter implying a sense of equality and connection (“association”) in the organization that may simply not exist.70 Ariya’s subtext is, of course, that corporate and management jargon – the argot of corporate globalized labour – also constitutes something of a failure of language, mirroring that described by Appadurai in the world of finance, with the use of words growing so abstract, even absurdly nonsensical, that meaning becomes muddled for those ‘not in the know’ of management and executive ranks. Rather than serving as a vehicle for communication and connection, language in the world of ESK accordingly excludes, conceals, and confuses. While, certainly, group argot has always performed this at once exclusionary and community-building role, Ariya is at pains to show that its locus is within the management headquarters of the corporate office and that it is inextricably tied to, and moulded by, the corrupt and deceitful power structures controlling global finance.

One response to these financial and cultural developments can be found in Anonymous’s valorization of what it calls the “lulz”: the ever-evolving sense of dark humour shared by its members, which Coleman describes as “deviant” and “quasi-mystical” (2). Integral to the “lulz” is pranks or “trolling.” The Encyclopedia Dramatica website states, in its entry for “lulz”, that

Anonymous gets big lulz from pulling random pranks. The pranks are always posted on

the internet. Just as the element of surprise transforms the physical act of love into

something beautiful, the anguish of a laughed-at victim transforms lol into lulz, making it

70 This seems to be a common practice. At the India-based outsourcing firm where I worked as an editor, most of my colleagues bore the title of “research associate.”

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longer, girthier, and more pleasurable. Lulz is engaged in by Internet users who have

witnessed one major economic/environmental/political disaster too many, and who thus

view a state of voluntary, gleeful sociopathy over the world’s current apocalyptic state, as

superior to being continually emo.

Rather than sit around being “emo”71 and passively mourning the dire state of our world,

Anonymous chooses to turn mockery into a bigger political statement that makes shame into a performance and a source of public entertainment and outrage. Crucially, in contrast to the abstracting and anonymizing “dividual”-making processes of globalized capitalism I mentioned earlier, this performative shaming involves making information less abstract. After all, the “lulz” are derived from Anonymous’s philosophy that, as Coleman writes,

any information thought to be personal, secure, or sacred is a prime target for sharing or

defilement in a multitude of ways. Lulz-oriented actions puncture the consensus around

our politics and ethics, our social lives, and our aesthetic sensibilities. Any presumption

of our world’s inviolability becomes a weapon; trolls invalidate that world by gesturing

toward the possibility for Internet geeks to destroy it—to pull the carpet from under us

whenever they feel the urge.

This form of surveillance on the part of Anonymous and other hacktivist groups means that personal information, like photos and addresses, are made public. An accused rapist may, for instance, have his name and address revealed, as in the Steubenville case of 2013. A person suspected of terrorism, based on nebulous internet detective work, may also have his or her private details made public by a member of the website Reddit, as was the case in the 2013

Boston marathon bombings. Whereas, as Appadurai argues, capital today makes language and

71 “Emo” refers not only to a genre of confessional music that grew and faded in popularity over the past twenty- five years or so, but to what Wikipedia describes as “a stereotype that includes being particularly emotional, sensitive, misanthropic, shy, introverted, or angst-ridden.”

198 data more obscure and abstract, hacktivists like those in Anonymous tend to tear the mask of abstraction from their targets, which can result in more clarity for its audience, at least in its offering of surplus information, but also in more vulnerability and undeserved attention for the people whose identities they reveal.

Clearly, this form of activism has a number of serious and troubling drawbacks. Internet

“vigilante mobs” (of which members of Anonymous may or may not be a part) can and do make terrifying threats against people who happen to antagonize internet trolls. The “GamerGate” controversy of 2014, for instance, shone a spotlight on the frequent harassment of women over the internet. When Anita Sarkeesian criticized the misogynistic depictions of women in video games in a video she named “Tropes vs. Women,” she received violent threats from, among others, a detractor who named himself “Marc Lepine,” after the man who, in 1989, committed the mass murder of 14 women in a university classroom in Montreal, and who promised

Sarkeesian in a letter that he would bring a gun to her public talk in Utah. Another opponent devised a video game in which users could punch Sarkeesian’s face with each click of a mouse

(Wingfield NP). These activities constitute trolling insofar as they make the source of the feminist critique of video games – Anita Sarkeesian – their specific target, turning her from an abstract, faceless voice on the internet to a specific and named woman who is marked as deserving of gendered violence. While it is important to note again that Anonymous did not take credit for any of the GamerGate actions and, indeed, its members may not have been involved in it at all, it is equally important to examine such troubling instances of internet activism that run counter to some of the more utopian narratives of internet-based resistance. This allows us to take a more measured approach to these phenomena – one that despite its many merits may be somewhat lacking from Coleman’s overall very affirmative view of Anonymous, and certainly

199 an approach that is important to maintain when working within the postcolonial field, which so often depends on tales of subversion and resistance to leaven all its dark talk of neoimperialism.

More recently, an article appeared on Medium.com by Dale Beran describing 4chan – the likely birthplace of the concept of the “lulz” and the meme, and where a number of hackers still congregate – as “the skeleton key to the rise of Trump.” Beran calls the website’s early users a

“bullying and anarchic society of adolescent boys – or at least, men with the mindset of boys –

particularly lonely, sex starved man-boys, who according to their own frequent jokes about the subject, lived in their parents’ basement.” Not much has changed since then, apparently.

According to Beran, Trump’s presidential victory among younger voters is due in large part to

“all these disaffected young men . . . waiting for a figure to come along who, having achieved nothing in his life, pretended as though he had achieved everything, who by using the tools of fantasy, could transmute their loserdom (in 4chan parlance, their ‘fail’), into ‘win’” (NP). Their rooting for Trump, Beran says, is a manifestation of a sort of cynical, despairing and contemptuous humour: they are screwed, America is screwed, and the world is screwed – so why not elect the most incompetent loser of them all for one final bitter laugh?72 Although the members of Anonymous cannot and should not be conflated with 4chan users (as Beran does repeatedly), one must look at the darker outgrowths of the lulz as an expression of “mocking cruel anguish,” far from the more palatable sort of leftist revolutionary play that Coleman describes.

Furthermore, in an interview about his fascinating Prehistory of the Cloud, Tung Hui-Hu criticizes hacktivists like Trevor Paglen, who attempt to subvert state surveillance through

“sousveillance,” or putting the surveyors themselves under surveillance (again making the

72 Obviously, there can be no doubt as well that the deeply misogynist and anti-feminist tone of much of 4chan’s discourse also lay behind Hilary Clinton’s defeat.

200 abstract less abstract and more personal, attached to private information and personal identities): when Paglen photographs CIA agents and makes them public, Hui-Hu argues, “There’s a literally duplicative method there of xeroxing and copying. The idea of resistance through the use of tools of surveillance, watching the watchers by using the same tools that they have and trying to counter them by adopting their tactics . . . all of these tactics are only reduplicating the structure of power that is animating the cloud” (Sutcliffe). In Prehistory, Hui-Hu specifies that

“the sousveillers and the regime they seem to oppose share a set of tactics as well as a common belief: namely, that in order to effect change one must actively engage as a user. [However,] the discourse of a ‘user’ as an active participant or freelancer comes out of a neoliberal ideology of economic efficiency. Hence, even attempts at countersurveillance reinforce this subject position.” Ultimately, he says, hackers’ work is too readily co-opted by capital, which generally welcomes the free labour of hacktivists, as this only allows corporations to appropriate their innovations. When in June 2015 Anonymous India accused the Reliance Jio app of being susceptible to hacking because its developers had failed to encrypt data, for example, Reliance responded with outrage and denial in a series of Tweets.73 Aside from the bad press, however, the company benefits from this work; Anonymous India has effectively tested its security for free.

So much for the master’s tools dismantling the master’s house, then. It is difficult, however, to see how one can ever escape this conundrum. Can internet-enabled resistance ever be fruitful or does it only ever provide ballast to neoliberal structures of power? Are hacktivist pranks, moreover, merely an exercise in boredom and juvenile cruelty, which (inadvertently or not) make data more readily available to internet users only to use the same information to target people for violence and harassment? Certainly, Anonymous India does not make a case for the

73 See http://anonopsindia.tumblr.com/post/121836356361/told-truth-with-facts-about-reliance-jio-chat-app

201 group having a strong set of activist principles when it tells the Hindustan Times that its philosophy is, rather puzzlingly, centered on “fighting the odds” (Khan NP). Appropriately,

Ariya himself writes on his Goodreads webpage, “I am an author (now), hugely interested in politics; and use that as material for my writing. If making political ideas into fiction does not work, I just write plain, straight political opinion. It is much shorter that way. Much less painful.” Besides, however, a general antipathy towards corruption in his home state of Tamil

Nadu (Ariya is an active member of the Arappor Iyakkam NGO), it is not entirely clear what his political beliefs entail. This encapsulates the dilemma faced by any commenter intent on studying Anonymous: when a group’s politics are as varied and obscure as Anonymous’s are, how can we hope to weigh in on their place in society?

This sense of ethical uncertainty about Anonymous and its tactics is prevalent in ESK too.

The possessed Kumar’s antics –cursing Bill Gates and the “titans of Indian industry” in a viral video (5) – are intended by the novel’s villains at PH to discredit Kumar as a madman before he can publicly expose the truth about their plans. This scheme shares not a little in common with

Anonymous’s trolling campaigns, which also entail the humiliation of representatives of large organizations, including corporations, in a public digital arena. When, furthermore, Arjun finds the EXM team’s vision statement, he notes that “the document read[s] like something written by the hacker group Anonymous, not a bunch of MBAs” in its all-caps exhortations to “FREE THE

LEADER from the clutches of the terrible demon, protector of the World of Ahi, the unassailable

VELLAYA THEVAN. RETRIEVE ON HIS WISHES the incriminating DATA on PH Capital.

FREE! RETRIEVE! PUBLISH! EXPOSE! WE SWEAR REVENGE!!!” (68). The focus in the vision statement on “freeing” information is clearly intended by Ariya to echo the hacktivist discourses of Anonymous and WikiLeaks, and, as Arjun observes, the tone is bizarre coming from the highly secretive and stodgy management team he has come to know.

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To some extent, the fact that Arjun and his hacker friends share certain hacktivist-like characteristics with their antagonists at PH and the treacherous management team can be explained by the co-option of electronic resistance by the state and industry alike. Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, for instance, say that hackers only “point out the problem, and then run away.

Capital is delighted, and thanks the tactical media outfit or nerd-modder for the home improvement” (cited in Hui-Hu 18). Ultimately, however, what distinguishes the novel’s “real” hackers from their corporate imitators is their desire for information to be rendered clear to the public, while the latter – despite their deceptively Anonymous-like vision statement – are interested only in maintaining power through secrecy (which is why PH and the BSM management team eventually begin to work in cahoots against Arjun and Kumar). And, although hacktivism, at least in its more juvenile antics and aggrieved and inflammatory tone, is occasionally associated with the novel’s villains, its heroes also successfully practice forms of resistance that recall those of Anonymous and WikiLeaks, such as leaking the information about

PH to the public. In an important symbolic move, Arjun is even eventually able to co-opt PH’s drone – the ultimate contemporary emblem of secret neoimperial violence and surveillance74 – and use it as a bargaining chip with another one of Raj’s hacker friends. This signals a first small victory of David over Goliath for the hackers, as well as a victory for hacker-style transparency over state-industrial secrecy. So, while hacktivism may occupy something of an ethical grey space in ESK, with both heroes and villains dabbling in Anonymous-like tactics, Ariya likewise suggests that the central project of electronic resistance groups like Anonymous and WikiLeaks is overall a felicitous one: it clears the stultifying and obscuring clouds of abstraction and secrecy

74 As Arjun says of the American drone program, “Everyone denies its existence. But people get smoked constantly based on it” (Ariya 7).

203 from language and information. This is a victory for the little guy, Ariya indicates, in whom the state and capital have literally and figuratively invested in keeping ignorant.

“Fighting the odds”

To limn Ariya’s exorcist figure, as I have done here, requires me to grapple with the ethical uncertainties of hacktivist groups like Anonymous and its various incarnations. As Ariya indicates in ESK, the exorcist is Anonymous, and Anonymous is the exorcist: the nerdy and faceless underdog uncovering and even sometimes expelling the corruption and rot at the heart of contemporary globalized society. But Anonymous cannot be reckoned with in simplistic moral categories, and Ariya signals that the group’s particular geography of resistance – with its lack of clear leadership and ideologies and its focus on the spectacle – is well suited to our own often nonsensical and endlessly abstracted and mediated world.

Fred Moten writes, “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly”

(Moten et al. 141). Moten is, I think, gesturing at the ways in which different and even antagonistic communities (in his case, privileged whites and black resistance groups) can unite against a common enemy without necessarily ceding all their differences – via a common recognition of our miserable circumstances and the powerful forces that have, sometimes with our complicity, helped shape these. What is most powerful and notable about Ariya’s exorcist, and by extension, Anonymous, is not perhaps its effectiveness at subverting hegemony but rather its ability to shine a light on the dark underbelly of globalized capitalism, thereby fomenting solidarities – as tense and temporary as these may ultimately be – where and whenever they’re needed.

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Conclusion: Bad books and neoliberal depressions

You can’t allow policies that allows [sic] China, Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, India. [Sic] You can’t allow policies that allows business to be ripped out of the United States like candy from a baby.

-Donald Trump on outsourcing, 23 April 2016

I look forward to working with Prime Minister Narendra Modi who has been very energetic in reforming India’s bureaucracy. Great man. I applaud him.

-Donald Trump on Prime Minister Modi, 16 October 2016

I am a big fan of Hindu [sic]. I am a big fan of India.

-Donald Trump on India, 16 October 2016

Whether the status of Chetan Bhagat’s . . . works as ‘commercial fiction’ or ‘pulp fiction,’ in contradistinction to the high literary products of India’s international belletrists, is laudable or not, the designation is perhaps useful for scholars attempting to come to terms with what many think is an unfortunate turn in the tenor of Indian writing in English.

-Manisha Basu (192)

Bad books

Much has changed since I moved in 2008 to Gurgaon, India, to work in the Indian outsourcing field, and since – at least partly as a way of addressing my own experiences there – I started my research, back in my home of Canada, on this project in 2011. Although the economic crisis had already begun by the time I assumed my position as editor in the “Cyber City” corporate park of

Gurgaon, the mood (to my foreign First World and privileged gaze, at least) remained generally optimistic and breezy among my colleagues. One Night @ the Call Centre and its legion of imitators were still prominently displayed at the bookshop next to Cyber City’s Pizza Hut franchise, and its Bollywood adaptation, Hello, was playing in the movie theatres to great promotional fanfare. A few weeks after I started, a security guard at Gurgaon’s Sahara mall

205 proudly informed me that his daughter worked at the same office I did, performing IT work for a major Canadian bank. Meanwhile, in the dusty alleyway behind the office buildings where workers hurriedly smoked cigarettes and snacked on hot and delicious chaat like pakora and paratha, sneaking in their too-short breaks between phone calls and emails, companies like Red

Bull and their marketing “street teams” would routinely be seen giving away free merchandise as a way to secure the brand loyalties of the powerful new Indian middle- and upper-class technorati. The collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, and near-apocalyptic financial fallout, furthermore, actually helped rather than hindered the Indian outsourcing business – or so we were told – as investment banks and other corporate leviathans slashed employee numbers in the Global North and looked South for cheaper labour. As critics like

Kalindi Vora suggest, these companies continued the long tradition of Empire and capital’s assumption of resources and labour from India at bargain-basement prices. But the atmosphere in the company’s cafeterias, outdoor spaces, and even its gym appeared pretty upbeat compared to the Canadian offices I knew: as call-centre lit often accurately depicts, the mood seemed to me to be festive among the young, confident and flirtatious employees, despite the intense physical and emotional stresses of many jobs there, and I felt as if I had wandered into a fun group study session at a college rather than just another dull workplace.

Perhaps simply because I grew more accustomed to this office environment, however, the mood appeared to darken over the course of the year. The numbers of workers thinned on the company “campus” as contracts between the outsourcing firm and its employees went unrenewed without any explanation, and the anxiety, irritation, and tension of the Western financial analysts whose work we edited was contagious. By the end of 2009, when I had returned to Canada, almost the entire editorial team, which was composed of six Indian editors and three Western ones, had left or been sacked. Suddenly the world depicted in One Night and

206 other works of call-centre lit appeared far bleaker than it had to me before – and I was left wondering if it had always been that way, and whether, during my outsourcing year, I had merely fallen prey to the celebrations of neoliberalism and globalization that ruled both the

Indian and Western media. With, moreover, the rise to power of Donald Trump, whose election campaign promised to cut down outsourcing and keep American jobs in the US,75 it seemed increasingly that globalized labour and call-centre work – obviously a central focus of this dissertation – could become an irrelevant and relatively quick-lived thing of the past, leaving behind only a sense of puzzled bemusement and one question for everyone involved, whether on the calling or receiving end of the call-centre phone line: What exactly was that?

Indeed, the texts discussed in this dissertation – even the more celebratory call-centre lit – are deeply informed by this sense of uncertainty about the benefits and pitfalls of neoliberal globalization. Beyond this overweening sense of doubt, too, we find a host of depressed and alienated protagonists – from the call-centre worker to the entrepreneur, to the (relatively more hopeful) cyborg-sahiborg and the exorcist-hacker – whose various triumphs of upward mobility and community-building are often, ultimately, oddly unconvincing and unmoving. For instance, in Chetan Bhagat’s work, discussed in Chapter 1, upward mobility is reserved only for the male characters, and only then by emulating the worst behaviors of their Indian and Western bosses.

The entrepreneurs of Chapter 2 are associated with heroism but simultaneously (and sometimes confusingly) undermined by authors Aravind Adiga and Bharati Mukherjee to gesture at the flimsy foundations of the neoliberal cult of entrepreneurship in India and elsewhere. In Chapter

75 Given Trump’s pro-corporate policies and friendly relationship with PM Modi (with whom, of course, he shares a number of traits in common, including a virulent sense of xenophobic and anti-Muslim nostalgia), the consensus on Wall Street, as far as I can determine, seems to be that the Indian outsourcing business will not be affected too significantly by his term in power. With the Brexit and Trump’s election in 2016, however, a number of screeds appeared in the Indian and Western media heralding or decrying the end of globalization and neoliberalism. See, for example, Yakabuski.

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3, Indra Sinha’s protagonist and “sahiborg” Animal finds solidarity and contentment (notably, this is framed in anti-corporate terms, as his community of protesters is built around resisting capital), but Arnold and Roohann Shahha, Altaf Tyrewala’s cyborgs, are pitiful or shady figures.

The community of disgruntled citizens Shahha builds around Engglishhh, for instance, is depicted as having fallen victim to the machinations of a con man adept at appropriating the language of postcolonial anti-American discontent. Although Engglishhh appears at first glance to be the cure for the linguistic hegemony of English, its power is still reliant on English’s hegemonic status in the Global South, and Shahha’s invocation of Hindutva in his marketing spiel only heightens our sense of his potentially dangerous cynicism. Finally, in Chapter 4

Ramiah Ariya depicts hacker communities like Anonymous India as presenting a positive alternative to more traditional forms of nationalism; nonetheless, as I argue, the goals of these groups can be at best politically dubious in its claims of fighting on behalf of the “little guy,” and at worst misogynistic and violent.

In many of these texts, then, Indian neoliberalism – a concept often used interchangeably with that of globalization – leads to a sense of anomie among its characters, which, even when they find community or professional and economic success, never seems to be entirely or effectively dispelled. Could this rendering of a middle-class moral breakdown be related to the lack of critical enthusiasm – and even outright loathing – with which many of these books have been greeted?76 Basu describes the Bhagat era as heralding something of a literary dark age for

Indian writing in English, both in terms of style and content (170-1); but is there nothing to be said in defense of these works?

76 Even the Booker award-winning and best-selling White Tiger has a large number of detractors. See, for example, “Diary” by Sanjay Subrahmanyam and “Roars of Anger” by Stuart Jeffries.

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In The Selfish Capitalist, psychologist Oliver James writes that "in the entrepreneurial fantasy society," we learn "that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough, regardless of their familial, ethnic or social background – if you do not succeed, there is only one person to blame" (qtd. in Fisher 2013). Mark Fisher responds, accordingly, that “[d]epression is the shadow side of entrepreneurial culture, what happens when magical voluntarism confronts limited opportunities” (2013).77 The unhappiness of many of this dissertation’s protagonists serves as warning – in some cases, like Bhagat’s, probably involuntary – of the dark side of the glamour and glitz of the globalized multinational and outsourcing work in India, especially as these relate to technologies that are framed by the texts as Western and capitalist in origin, and therefore as suspect. In the Introduction, I described neoliberalism as having largely coopted the concept of globalization, as well as an attitude that guides and defines globalization. Symptomatic of the “neoliberal attitude” or Fisher’s

“entrepreneurial culture,” this depression is a type of feverish misery informed on one side by ressentiment and a sense of vicious competitiveness with other would-be entrepreneurs, and on the other by disgust and loathing for the self. Consequently, I do not entirely agree with Basu in her wholesale condemnation of the work of Bhagat and his kin (although certainly the embrace of Hindutva should be denounced in the strongest terms possible). These texts are worthy of attention if only because a more nuanced and complicated reality sometimes slips through their cracks, one that in its embracing of neoliberal attitudes actually seems to discredit its own myth- making more effectively than a book that we in academe can applaud more comfortably.

77 Fisher’s solution to this depression is a return to class consciousness and eschewal of identitarian politics among the left wing. I tend to agree with “John Bull,” however, who in the comments for Fisher’s deeply controversial article “Exiting the Vampire Castle” (2013) writes, “If the writer’s intention is to purge the left of its love of grudge matches and in-fighting, then I’m not sure how well this succeeds, but it’s clear that new strategic thinking is needed. But dividing class vs. identitarianism isn’t that helpful. Laclau and Mouffe for instance covered this territory well in “Hegemony and Socialist Strategy” and have pointed to how both can work together in a ‘chain of equivalences,’ a series of democratic and socialist movements acting in a broad, pluralistic alliance (though by no means entirely unified).”

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Murthy’s Law and depression

Aravind Adiga’s 2011 book Last Man in Tower both chronicles the gradual descent of this feeling of depression on the members of a Mumbai building cooperative, and seems presciently to depict a global landscape in which Donald Trump can become president of the

United States. In contrast to White Tiger and most of the other texts I examined in this dissertation, the topic of outsourcing is never broached in the novel; instead, Adiga tackles the death of the socialist mores of the ‘old’ Indian middle class, especially as embodied by idealistic retired teacher Yogesh A. Murthy, affectionately nicknamed Masterji, and their replacement by the more bullying and selfish Modi-style globalized neoliberalism of the ‘new’ India, all through the lens of the shady wheelings-and-dealings behind the intensely competitive housing market in

Mumbai. In the novel, the members of Vishram Society, a housing cooperative in Mumbai, are offered large sums of money to abandon their homes so that a luxury building can be constructed there. When Masterji refuses to leave the building and therefore puts the other members’ generous financial settlements at risk, they retaliate with taunts, childish bullying, vandalism and, finally, violence. Without romanticizing the ‘old’ India, which Adiga shows to often be hypocritical and self-serving, he strongly condemns the ‘new’ Indian middle and upper classes just as he remains somewhat sympathetic to the greed and depravity that take over formerly admirable characters. Construction magnate Shah, a bombastic, violent, and dishonest Trump- like figure whose machinations (and money) help corrupt the members of the cooperative, is for instance represented as dying slowly from his exposure to the toxic dust and chemicals of the construction process. Despite his doctor’s warnings, however, he cannot stay away from the construction sites he loves. His entrepreneurship, then, is depicted by Adiga as merely a very lucrative form of suicide, more of a fatal addiction or a sickness than a vice. The symbolic implications of this depiction of neoliberalism as dangerous and contagious illness extend to the

210 other members of the cooperative who succumb to the lure of Shah’s cash and participate, whether actively or not, in Masterji’s murder. Although the erstwhile members of the cooperative find the upward mobility they desire, the final pages of Last Man reveal almost all of them to be worse off than when they started: consumed with guilt, socially isolated or ostracized, and even, in the case of the members’ children, physically and mentally sicker than before. In calling our attention to the injurious effects of neoliberalism as an attitude, Adiga leads us to look at the political implications and even underpinnings of the disturbing news I read this morning: that, according to the World Health Organization, global depression rates are up almost

20% since 2005.

In this era of Indian globalization, there are a number of identities one can try on for size or be saddled with (especially, as these books have shown us, if one is male and from a middle- or upper-class Hindu background); in this project, I have only discussed a few of the avatars – and in almost all of the cases, relatively privileged ones – populating the Indo-Anglian fictional landscape. With the continued reign of neoliberal policies over the planet, all of which seem to be increasingly defined and supported by a racist nostalgia and depression, and which are becoming increasingly synonymous with the seemingly inescapable phenomenon of globalization, it is time to look far more closely at the books addressing our current situation – whether we consider them “bad” or not – to determine the avatars wrought by globalization, what we want from globalizing processes, and what we must strenuously resist.

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Works consulted

Abraham, Itty. The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1999. Print.

Acheraïou, Amar. Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.

Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Print.

---. Between the Assassinations. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Print.

---. Last Man in Tower. London: Atlantic, 2012. Print.

Agarwal, Varun. How I Braved Anu Aunty and Co-Founded a Million-Dollar Company. New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2014. Print.

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literature. London: Verso, 1992. Print.

Anderson-Finch, Shannon. “More than the sum of its parts: Hinglish as an additional communicative resource.” Ed. Kothari, Rita and Rupert Snell. Chutnefying English: The Phenomenon of Hinglish. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2012. Print: 53-70.

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