6 Unimagined Communities Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy
Chandra’s and Nagarkar’s texts share a transmodern subtext, an insistence on the impossibility of thinking the modern as the outcome of an autonomously Western development: Where Chandra reconfigures the long history of crosscultural interpenetration from which modernity results as a worldly formation to be held in a contrapuntal perspective, Nagarkar retrieves the pensée sauvage of bhakti as a definitely non-derivative genre of modernity in its own right. Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993) employs an entirely different strategy that pushes genre, now in the narrowest possible sense of literary formula, back on the agenda: For what Seth’s novel appears to execute is the docile reproduction of that type of social-realist novel that, according to Benedict Anderson, became instrumental in the forging of the national imaginary. This social realism of A Suitable Boy has often been noted, and so has that novel’s contribution to the “narrating [of] India in English”.1 Given both the media hype that accompanied the publication of the book,2 and its obviously undiminished popularity, it is surprising that A Suitable Boy has received comparatively little scholarly attention – a fact which, as Graham Huggan mischieveously conjectures, possibly has to do with that novel’s lack of “self- conscious intellectual sophistication that might encourage, as it has certainly done for Rushdie’s work, the type of theoretically informed research that is a
1 Tabish Khair, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels. New Delhi (OUP) 2001: 112. See also Mala Pandurang, Vikram Seth: Multiple Locations, Multiple Affiliations. Jaipur & Delhi (Rawat) 2001; Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism. London & New York (Routledge) 1996; Meenakshi Mukherjee, The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. Delhi (OUP) 2000. 2 See Pandurang, Vikram Seth, 103—04; and M. Prabha, The Waffle of the Toffs: A Sociocultural Critique of Indian Writing in English. New Delhi & Calcutta (Oxford and IBH Publ.) 2000: 165.
158 Genres of Modernity current requirement of the academic profession”.3 Since Huggan’s focus is the commodification, as exotic, of the postcolonial in a global culture industry circuit of consumption, his statement is not intended as an opening for a piece of closer critical consideration of A Suitable Boy; yet he hints in passing at some of the qualities of the book that would make it deserving of a more thorough examination. Among these, Huggan mentions the idiosyncrasies of the book “as a late twentieth-century historical novel”; as “a subtle example of [...] generic code-switching – historical novel, political allegory, domestic melodrama, exotic romance, and so forth”; and, by conclusion, as a “more self-conscious work than has generally been supposed”.4 With this last proposition, Huggan alludes to a consensus about some “‘clear-window’ narrative aspirations and [...] easy-going transparent style”5 that Seth allegedly employs in A Suitable Boy. According to Jyotsana Singh, this transparency effects an illusionism in which “the author does not question the constructed nature of both the writing of the novel and the history it purports to present”.6 At the outset of my reading of A Suitable Boy I would like to pick up Huggan’s suggestion and pursue it by questioning the well-nigh naive illusionism ascribed to the book.
6.1 Welcome to reality
In the light of a discussion of the times of India, Seth’s consistent replication of the dead idiom of nineteenth-century realism all too obviously falls into place with the body of work discussed so far: Employing and reanimating precisely that representational apparatus whose structural effects Anderson places at the centre of the construction of the emergent imagined national community, Seth displaces the problematisation of nation-ness fully onto the level of form as such. Unflinchingly, the book keeps simulating and virtually producing exactly that kind of homogeneous empty time that, as Jonathan Culler paraphrases Anderson’s argument, makes the novel “a formal condition of imagining the nation – a structural condition of possibility”.7
3 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic. Marketing the Margins. London & New York (Routledge) 2001: 75. 4 Ibid., 75. 5 Himansu S. Mohapatra & Jatindra K. Nayak, “Farewell to Jane Austen: Uses of Realism in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy”. The Postcolonial Jane Austen. Ed. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan & You-me Park. London & New York (Routledge) 2000: 189—204; 190. 6 Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues, 166. 7 Jonathan Culler, “Anderson and the Novel”. Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson. Ed. Jonathan Culler and Pheng Cheah. New York and London (Routledge) 2003: 29—52; 48.