Narrating “Dark” India in Londonstani and The White Tiger: Sustaining Identity in the Diaspora

Abstract

In Indian Anglophone writing up to about the 1990s, a romantic narrative strand, working in parallel with a metafictional “encyclopaedic” form in other texts of the period, reflects a more hopeful and positive attitude towards Indian society, and an implicit confidence in its potential redemption. Many later works by Indian diasporic writers show a much more negative and critical attitude to India, catalysed by persisting socio-political problems such as corruption and communal violence. This “dark turn” in Indian Anglophone writing is very clearly seen in works such as Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani, which seem to allow little or no possibility for India’s social problems to be resolved, and indeed make that irresolvable violence and confusion their particular theme. Yet in a way this “dark” India ironically becomes the means of a distinct cultural focus, a narrative mode of engagement with the homeland that, irrespective of its negative social view, is a means of sustaining cultural identity within the homogenizing and deterritorializing forces of globalization.

The Overseas Indian and the political economy of the body in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

“…India is characterized as a “dark” region, socially backward due to its caste system, corruption, appalling educational and other social systems, seemingly insurmountable income divide, and other such factors. This is particularly true of the North Indian “heartland” of Bihar (from which Balram hails) and surrounding states, but rather less true of some of the more progressive parts of India which have been the beneficiaries of foreign investment and influence – such as the high-tech city of Bangalore in South India, where the fugitive Balram transforms himself into an entrepreneur (Goh, 2011). This transformation, against all the odds that Indian society stacks against a poor, uneducated, low-caste, and unconnected individual like Balram, can only happen after he does the unthinkable: robbing and murdering his rich employer, and in the process consigning his extended family to a painful retribution.…”

The Sinhalese Diaspora: New Directions in Sri Lankan Diasporic Writing

“…For the past three decades, much research has been carried out on the vigorously flourishing Indian writing in English (IWE) (Chakladar 2000;Huggan, 2001;Bahri, 2003;Morey and Tickell, 2005;Shivani, 2006;Brouilette, 2007;Majumdar, 2008;Atreyee and Rajan 2009;Mendes, 2010;Mukherjee, 2010;Goh, 2011;Gupta, 2012;Sen and Roy, 2013;Lau and Om, 2014) and there is no doubt but that the case has been convincingly made for the disproportionately large role the Indian diasporic writing community has played in the representation of the country within the global literary arena. The scenario for Sri Lankan writing in English (SLWE) is not dissimilar in how its diasporic output has also had the lion's share of world attention paid to SLWE, though this literary subculture has netted much less critical global literary attention thus far, being much smaller in scope than its Indian counterpart.…”