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Medial Visuality in the Contemporary Indian English Novel

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Medial Visuality in the Contemporary Indian English Novel THE POETICS OF THE REAL AND AESTHETICS OF THE REEL ― MEDIAL VISUALITY IN THE CONTEMPORARY INDIAN ENGLISH NOVEL Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie (Dr. phil.) vorgelegt der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Potsdam von Anna Maria Reimer POTSDAM 2015 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License: Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike 4.0 International To view a copy of this license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ Published online at the Institutional Repository of the University of Potsdam: URN urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-95660 http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-95660 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. A passage beyond ― writing India now ............................................................................. 3 1.1 Envisioned Pasts ― Imag(in)ed Futures .................................................................. 11 2. Trac(k)ing the real ................................................................................................................. 18 2.1 Aesthetics and poetics in an Indian perspective ..................................................... 28 2.2 An analytical sketch ..................................................................................................... 33 3. No God in Sight ..................................................................................................................... 42 3.1 Memento India ............................................................................................................. 48 3.2 Spec(tac)ularizing media ............................................................................................ 59 3.3 In/sight ― the Aesthetics of Politics ......................................................................... 73 4. The Last Jet-Engine Laugh ................................................................................................... 87 4.1 Shooting history ........................................................................................................... 94 4.2 Elementary particles — the subject in/of photography ....................................... 106 4.2.1 Days of future past ................................................................................................ 113 4.2.2 Durga’s daughters ................................................................................................. 119 4.3 Reading images, puzzling pieces ............................................................................. 125 5. Filming. A Love Story ......................................................................................................... 142 5.1 The Enigma of Arrival ............................................................................................... 146 5.2 Arrested mo(ve)ments ............................................................................................... 160 5.2.1 Reprising the Muslim social ................................................................................. 167 5.3 India at twilight .......................................................................................................... 172 5.4 Narrating (and) the archive ...................................................................................... 185 Appendix .............................................................................................................................. 195 6. The Bioscope Man ............................................................................................................... 196 6.1 The magic lantern, again ........................................................................................... 204 6.2 Black holes and caves—in modernity’s cradle ...................................................... 213 6.3 Of demons, dames and divine eyes ......................................................................... 230 6.4 An-Other Modernity? ................................................................................................ 239 Appendix .............................................................................................................................. 247 7. From Real to Reel―the Contemporary Matrix .................................................................... 248 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 262 Electronic Sources................................................................................................................... 295 TABLE OF ABBREVIATIONS NGIS No God in Sight TLJEL The Last Jet-Engine Laugh F Filming. A Love Story TBM The Bioscope Man IEF Indian English Fiction TWT The White Tiger HP Home Products TSOMA The Story of My Assassins A passage beyond ― writing India now 3 1. A PASSAGE BEYOND ― WRITING INDIA NOW The difficulties facing the Indian novelist are, no doubt, real enough. What is he to write about? To which ‘patron’ is he to offer his particular ‘crocus’? […]. Must the novelist’s be a scientific or realistic – or even naturalistic – approach to contemporary social problems? A clinical probe into society’s sores? […] Should the novelist write for entertainment – or edification? Should he write for the sophisticated – or for the masses? And the masses being still largely illiterate, what is one to do except turn out film-scripts! (Iyengar 1985, 321) In the context of the highly politicized field of postcolonial studies, I have suggested that all “truly” postcolonial texts are freighted with great and particular expectations. Within this matrix, the empire does not write, it writes back to an implied reader who is in eager expectation of its recriminations and its transformative message. There is, as it were, a brisk market fort his sort of literature in the metropolitan world […]. This circumstance and the associated phenomena of commodification and “selling out” have occasioned considerable comment, demonstrating a not unworthy concern with the embeddedness of art in the real. (Bahri 2003, 113f) It is not surprising, then, that the unprecedented integration of the world through money, media, and communication is often experienced as disturbingly threatening and altogether “real.” After all, satellites never set on the empire. (Aneesh/Lane/Petro 2012, 1) Set in a complex and dynamic social field marked by major faultlines, writing India poses a particular poetological challenge. The social divide which K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar1 hyperbolically invokes thus seems as topical today as ever ― a fact reflected in the subcontinent’s demographic divide into two Indias, “the smaller, yet running into more than 300 million people […] that is strident, aspiring and competitive, and the larger India, that is deprived and still awaiting the opportunity to share in the full fruits of democratic equity and development.” 2 If Indian English authors are overwhelmingly drawn from among the former group, their writing routinely ventures beyond into this other India, showing increasing interest in this “intractably non-Anglophone country.”3 At a time when the status of English as a global language of power can no longer be reasonably questioned4, this is fraught with poetological and political implications. 1 According to Riemenschneider, “the most authoritative voice” on Indian English writing in the latter half of the twentieth century. (Riemenschneider, Dieter. The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse, 1934-2004. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2005, 6). 2 Som, Reba. Gandhi, Bose, Nehru and the Making of the Modern Indian Mind. New Delhi: Viking, 2004, 21. 3 Trivedi, Harish. “Anglophone Transnation, Postcolonial Translation: The Book and the Film as Namesakes.” Semiotic encounters: Text, Image and Trans-Nation. Ed. Sarah Säckel, Walter Göbel and Noha Hamdy. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, 32. 4 Cf. Zare, Bonnie and Nalini Iyer. “Introduction: Problematizing Indian Literary Canons.” Other Tongues. Rethinking the Language Debates in India. Ed. Nalini Iyer and Bonnie Zare. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, xiv-xvii. A passage beyond ― writing India now 4 Assuming that it is “the history of language,” rather “than the geographical spread”5 that determines its literary status, English is undeniably a latecomer in the Indian literary arena. In so far it is hardly astounding that “[p]ostcolonial Indian writing in English is viewed by many Indians as a minor literature written in a major language.”6 In a global world preferring its literary products packaged in English, the choice of literary idiom automatically becomes a matter of commercial viability as Prasad points out: So writing India is seen as impossible when you write English. At best, the writers are seen as native informants giving ethnographic briefs to a Western audience, and at worst they are seen as constructing an image that the West wants to see. There seems to be a much greater acceptance now for Indian English writing, but there is still great resentment, perhaps an even greater resentment than before, amongst other Indian writers. (Prasad 2011, ix) The question of language is also intimately intertwined with the texts’ postcolonial identity: While some “cannot help wondering if this valorization of Indian writing (mostly Indian writing in English) is just another form of colonialism come back to haunt us,”7 others argue that “IEF has shed the trauma of colonial interpellation.”8 It seems clear in any case that the tension between local and global idea(l)s has shaped the force field in which IEF
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