The Politics of Anglophone Indian Literature in the Global Age MK Raghavendra

THE WRITING OF THE NATION BY ITS ELITE This volume examines the idea of India as it emerges in the writing of its anglophone elite, post-2000. Drawing on a variety of genres, including fiction, histories, non-fiction assessments – economic, political, and business – travel accounts, and so on, this book maps the explosion of English language writing in India after the economic liberalization and points to the nation’s sense of its growing importance as a producer of culture. From Ramachandra Guha to William Dalrymple, from Arundhati Roy to Pankaj Mishra, from Jhumpa Lahiri to Amitav Ghosh, from Amartya Sen to Gurcharan Das, from Barkha Dutt to Tarun Tejpal, this investigation takes us from aesthetic imaginings of the nation to its fractured political fault lines, the ideological predispositions of the writers often pointing to an asymmetrically constituted India. A major intervention on how postcolonial India is written about and imagined in the anglophone world, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of cultural studies, literature, history, and South Asian studies. It will also be of interest to general readers with an inclination towards India and Indian writing. MK Raghavendra is a writer on culture, literature, and politics, specializing in film, particularly its political side. After getting a master’s degree in science and working in the financial sector for over two decades, he has become a full-time writer. He won the National Award, the Swarna Kamal for Best Film Critic in 1997, and received a Homi Bhabha Fellowship in 2000. He has authored several volumes of academic scholarship from international publishers – Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema; Bipolar Identity: Region, Nation and the Kannada Language Film; The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium: Bollywood and the Anglophone Indian Nation; and Locating World Cinema: Interpretations of Film as Culture. His recent publications also include Philosophical Issues in Indian Cinema: Approximate Terms and Concepts (Routledge, 2020) and a book on politics, The Hindu Nation: A Reconciliation with Modernity (2021). He has also published four volumes of popular film criticism. His writing has been anthologized internationally, and he has written journalistic pieces on a variety of political and cultural issues for The Hindu, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Firstpost, and Deccan Herald. He has contributed essays to national-level journals and periodicals including Economic and Political Weekly, Caravan, Frontline, The Book Review, and Biblio: A Review of Books. He is Founder-Editor of Phalanx, an online journal dedicated to debate. LITERARY CULTURES OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH Series Editors: Russell West-Pavlov University of Tübingen, Germany Makarand R. Paranjape Director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India Recent years have seen challenging new formulations of the flows of influence in transnational cultural configurations and developments. In the wake of the end of the Cold War, the notion of the ‘Global South’ has arguably succeeded the demise of the tripartite conceptual division of the First, Second and Third Worlds. This notion is a flexible one referring to the developing nations of the once-colonized sections of the globe. The concept does not merely indicate shifts in geopolitics and in the respective affiliations of nations, and the economic transformations that have occurred, but also registers an emergent perception of a new set of relationships between nations of the Global South as their respective connections to nations of the north (either USA/USSR or the old colonial powers) diminish in significance. New social and cultural connections have become evident. This book series explores the literary manifestations (in their often intermedial, networked forms) of those south – south cultural connections together with academic leaders from those societies and cultures concerned. Editorial Advisory Board Bruce Robbins, Columbia University Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford Laura I. P. Izarra, University of Sao Paulo Pal Ahluwalia, University of Portsmouth Robert J. C. Young, New York University Simon During, University of Queensland Véronique Tadjo, University of Witwatersrand THE WRITING OF THE NATION BY ITS ELITE The Politics of Anglophone Indian Literature in the Global Age MK Raghavendra For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Literary-Cultures-of-the-Global-South/book-series/LCGS THE WRITING OF THE NATION BY ITS ELITE The Politics of Anglophone Indian Literature in the Global Age MK Raghavendra First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 MK Raghavendra The right of MK Raghavendra to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-54129-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-55422-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09347-3 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Apex CoVantage, LLC For Indian Review of Books, and those involved in it, Subashree Krishnaswamy, Revathi Venkataraman, Vidya Mani and its publisher the late KS Padmanabhan CONTENTS Series editors’ preface ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1 1 Politics and literary style: Arundhati Roy’s essays and interviews (2001–14) 20 2 The well-born Englishman in India: William Dalrymple’s White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in 18th Century India (2002) 34 3 Unfinished renunciation: Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City (2004) and Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis (2012) 48 4 The anglophone hierarchy: Chetan Bhagat’s fiction and non-fiction (2004–14) 64 5 A desirable nation: Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity (2005) 75 6 Taking sides: Pankaj Mishra and Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006) 87 7 Nation as exposition: Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (2007) 102 vii Contents 8 Past as pastiche: Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) 113 9 Economics without politics: Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century (2009) 124 10 The other half: Tarun J. Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins (2009) 139 11 Dharma and ideology: Gurcharan Das’s The Difficulty of Being Good: The Subtle Art of Dharma (2009) and India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong India (2012) 150 12 Democracy and the lesser nation: Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen’s An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (2013) 162 13 Cultural capital: Jhumpa Lahiri and The Lowland (2013) 177 14 Rarefied spaces: Barkha Dutt’s This Unquiet Land: Stories from India’s Fault Lines (2015) 190 15 An unresisting people: Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India (2016) 203 Afterword 212 Bibliography 219 Index 224 viii SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE The ‘Global South’ is a descriptive and analytical term that has recently come to the fore across a broad range of social sciences disciplines. It takes on different inflections in varying disciplinary contexts – as a mere geographical descriptor, denoting a network of geopolitical regions, primarily in the southern hemisphere, with a common history of colonization; driven by processes of transformation (the Global South has and continues to be the site of an ongoing neo-colonial economic legacy as also of a number of emergent global economies such as India, China, Brazil, and South Africa); as an index of a condition of economic and social precarity which, though primarily manifest in the ‘global south’, is also increasingly visible in the North (thus producing a ‘global south’); and, in the end, as a utopian marker, signifying a fabric of economic exchanges that are beginning to bypass the Northern economies, and, gradually, a framework for political coop- erations, especially from ‘below’, which may offer alternatives to the hegemony of the Euro-American ‘North’. Literary cultures are a particularly pregnant site of south–south cultural analy- sis as they represent the intersection of traditional and modern cultural forms, of south–south (and north–south) cultural exchange, particularly via modes of translation and interlingual hybridization, and refract various discourses of knowledge in a highly self-reflexive and critical fashion, thereby demanding and enabling an interdisciplinary dialogue with literary studies at its core. Hallowed connections between literary production and the postcolonial nation notwith- standing, transnational south–south literary connections have usually marked the (anti-)colonial, postcolonial, and indeed contemporary digital epochs. Thus, literary cultures form one of the central historical and contemporary networked sites of intercultural self-articulation in the Global South. This series intervenes in the process and pre-empts the sort of bland institu- tionalization which has forestalled much of the intellectual force of postcolonial studies or the more recent world literature studies. It proposes wide-ranging interventions into the study of the literary cultures of the Global South that will establish an innovative paradigm for literary studies on the disciplinary terrain up until now occupied by the increasingly problematized areas of postcolonial studies or non-European national literary studies.

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