After New India: Diasporas, Anglophonisms, Returns by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan
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After New India: Diasporas, Anglophonisms, Returns by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Shannon Jackson, Co-Chair Professor Colleen Lye, Co-Chair Professor Pheng Cheah Professor Lawrence Cohen Professor Michael Mascuch Professor Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan Summer 2016 © Copyright by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, 2016. All rights reserved. Abstract After New India: Diasporas, Anglophonisms, Returns by Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Shannon Jackson, Co-Chair Professor Colleen Lye, Co-Chair After New India is a literary and cultural study of the Anglophone discourse on the rise of a “New India” after the economic liberalization of the country in the early 1990s. The project asks whether India’s putatively “global” ascendance has, in fact, as both popular and critical sources aver, decentered expatriate writers and exhausted diasporic tropes that were central to the writing and study of Indian Anglophone literature as “postcolonial” literature. In order to pursue this question, I focus on the contemporary literary registration of three aspects of India’s rise that map onto my sub-titular terms, “diasporas, Anglophonisms, returns”: first, the epochal, but ultimately counterfactual, temporal inversion in which India begins to represent world futurity vis-à-vis its diasporas in the West; second, the literary-critical discourse on the simultaneous globalization and indigenization of Indian English; and third, the empirical social fact of reverse migration to India, specifically by Indian Anglophone writers from the United States and United Kingdom. In readings of global icons, fictions, and nonfictions that have been central to the New India discourse, After New India shows how New India emerged through “East-East” encounters between diasporic and national figures of the Indian Anglosphere, who pursued their fellow Indians as proxies and informants in both real and narrative time. In so doing, the project argues that the rise of New India—a rise that inspired returns from diaspora to the nation—merits a critical return to diaspora as well. The three chapters of this project consider how the New Indian icons of the expatriate writer and the call center agent, national and diasporic novels by Chetan Bhagat, Bharati Mukherjee, and Raj Kamal Jha, and popular, nonfictional narratives of Indian ascendance written by diasporic repatriates including Suketu Mehta and Amit Chaudhuri differently mediate intersubjective encounters in the New Indian Anglosphere. Together, my readings show how longstanding worries about the illegitimacy of a colonially-bequeathed Indian English underlie the literary-critical turn away from postcolonial tropes (chapter one), novelistic preoccupations with call center English and the wordless subaltern (chapter two), and the repatriation of Indian writers seeking compensatory identification with their New Indian Others (chapter three). All of 1 these movements can be understood as attempts to resolve the problem of diasporic Anglophonism in India through the “East-East” encounter. Ironically, After New India argues, they also evince the vitality of the diasporic vantage and significant transformations within Indian Englishes, plural, that render moot the assumption of Anglophone exceptionality. The Conclusion turns to the graphic novels of Sarnath Banerjee in order to offer a final word on the aspiration of self-return and a speculative account of the promise of India’s “redevelopment” after New India. 2 “World history travels from east to west; for Europe is the absolute end of history, just as Asia is the beginning.” —G.W.F. Hegel “…the future has become present but does not resemble the idea of it that one had in the past.” —Gérard Genette “Because, friend, I have had a miff with Fate, for things are not what I thought they were, what they seemed they were, and what might-have- been I wish they were!” —G.V. Desani i CONTENTS Acknowledgments iii Preface v Introduction Confronting New India 1 Chapter 1 Expatriate Writers and Call Center Agents: Twin Subjects of the New Indian Anglosphere 27 Chapter 2 Fictions of Encounter: Call Centers, Coolies, and the Novel of New India 53 Chapter 3 Nonfictions of the Future: The Repatriate and the Genre of Emergence 81 Conclusion Redeveloping India 112 Works Cited 123 ii Acknowledgments When I was deciding between doctoral programs in the spring of 2009, a colleague advised that I choose Berkeley Rhetoric because the majority of students thanked the Graduate Student Services Advisor in the acknowledgements of their dissertations. This, it seemed to my colleague, was a sign of a generous community and infrastructure of support, and it factored into my own decision-making. Seven years later, it is my privilege to thank my community of supporters within and beyond Rhetoric. Shannon Jackson first heard my voice and stood by me through the twists and turns of graduate school and my thinking. Thank you, Shannon, for the example of your social works. Colleen Lye asked the questions that needed to be asked; without her, this dissertation would have been much longer, but no better. Colleen, thank you (thank you!) for saying yes—and no. Thanks to Pheng Cheah and Lawrence Cohen, for planting so many of these seeds. To R. Radhakrishnan, for true interlocution, encouragement, and friendship. Also at Berkeley: My thanks to Michael Mascuch, for stepping in at the eleventh-hour. To Maxine Fredericksen and Marcus Norman for being the Graduate Student Services Advisors I’d hoped for, and more. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Gautam Premnath, and Juana María Rodríguez were critical voices and teachers on the journey. Marc Goble appeared across the time-zones at just the right time. For heartening reception of my conference presentations and essays, or for general encouragement along the way, Anjali Arondekar, Florian Klinger, Toral Gajarawala, Rochona Majumdar, Saikat Majumdar, William Mazzarella, E. Dawson Varughese, and especially Rey Chow, without whose work I most certainly would have taken another path. Robyn Wiegman is still my chosen mentor, the one she has always implied I don’t need. Deborah Thomas and John L. Jackson, Jr.: idols. John again, for redeeming this whole business with his brilliance and humanity. At Berkeley, I was fortunate to be part of dissertation working groups convened by Colleen Lye in English and Mel Chen in Women’s Studies that confirmed, crucially, that there are shared stakes, after all. Thanks especially to Christopher Fan and Sunny Xiang, dearest fellow travelers! Other Berkeley friends, compatriots, and readers have inspired and buoyed me throughout this process: Himali Dixit, Paul Nadal, Jennifer Pranolo, Chiara Ricciardone, Karin Shankar, Amira Silmi, Micah White, and Hentyle Yapp. Chiara again, and not just in Berkeley, for such nourishment, for being the friend of my adulthood. In Princeton: Kimberley Duong, Marc Greif, Gabrielle Jackson, Noah Salomon, and Nikhil Anand, for sitting with me at lunch. In Chicago: Sneha Annavarapu, Andy Graan and Elina Hartikainen, Maeve Hooper, Carly Knight, Malini Ram and Matt Moraghan, Andy Knight and Johanna Ransmeier, Hiram Rogers, Bob Sitko, Philip Sugg, and Rachel Wallace. Sneha, Maeve, Carly, and especially Phil, for allowing me to rehearse some of this aloud with you. My newfound cohort: Nasia Anam, Daniel Elam, Roanne Kantor, and Hayden Kantor. Cortnay Varela, to whose art I aspire. Many of the ideas presented here were first worked through in articles and review essays for other venues, and I’ve received incisive feedback from a number of wonderful editors: Jonathan Abel, Umme Al-Wazedi, Madhurima Chakraborty, Merve Emre, Charlotte Eubanks, iii Christopher Fan, B.P. Giri, Padma Maitland, Saikat Majumdar, Sharon Marcus, Jyothi Natarajan, Aarti Wani, and Caitlin Zaloom—thank you. India Currents authorized my first scribblings and has made space for me for over fifteen years, a space of literal column inches and virtual relations, a space to which to return. Thank you to all the editors and writers I have worked with through that magazine—and to my readers, thank you. At UC Berkeley, I’ve received crucial material support from the Department of Rhetoric, the Graduate Division, the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality, the Institute for International Studies, and the Center for Race and Gender. My tremendous thanks to the American Association of University Women for a 2014-2015 American Fellowship. Gratitude, and much love, to my Ammamma (Lily Tharoor), my Patti (Alamelu Srinivasan), Smita Tharoor, and Shashi Tharoor, for presenting “India” as a provocation; to my in-laws, for their love and calm; to my cousins for being brothers; to my brother, Ananth Tharoor Srinivasan, for an unrivaled soundtrack and wavelength; to my parents, Shobha Tharoor and Raj Srinivasan, for the example of your commitments, for being in, within, under, and implicated in so much of this, for reading, for keeping faith, for everything— To Mrinalini Arden, my heart. And finally, to Brandon—whatever becomes of this is with and for you. iv Preface This is not the dissertation I intended to write. But then, how much do one’s intentions count “in the web of actions” on which the production of a dissertation ultimately depends?1 When I entered the department of Rhetoric in 2009, I had two years experience working as the Editor of an ethnic magazine called India Currents and a Bachelors degree in the beguiling interdisciplinary formation of “Literature.” This was neither English nor Comparative Literature, but Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, by another name. My undergraduate honors thesis had been a close, involved, and embattled reading of a work of literary and cultural theory (not a work of literature, but a work of theory) that radically problematized the ethnic narratives I would go on, as magazine editor, to produce.