Articles
“Aravind Adiga: A Critical Biography”
The White Tiger broke new ground in Indian English fiction for its move away from some of the genre’s common themes and aesthetics. In contrast to the writings of previous Indian winners of the Booker Prize, The White Tiger noticeably eschews pathos and rejects the sensitive and emphatic portrayal of characters from marginalized sections of society as seen in the writings of Rohinton Mistry, and the righteous sense of injustice or anger against the system as seen in Arundhati Roy. Rather, Balram Halwai, The White Tiger’s protagonist, is a ruthless self-promoter, his frustrations at the obstacles put in the path of his social advancement generating a sense of gritty motivation that leads him to become a social climber at all costs.
“Femme Fatale Talks Back: Meenu Gaur on Feminist Filmmaking”
Meenu Gaur is a British South Asian filmmaker, director, and screenwriter. She cowrote and codirected the 2013 Pakistani feature film Zinda Bhaag with collaborator Farjad Nabi. Gaur’s newest project is a six-episode web series called Qatil Haseenaon Ke Naam, released globally on Zee 5 in December 2021. The story revolves around several women suffering under the daily grind of patriarchy and misogyny, who take agency over their own lives to enact vengeance on those who have mistreated them. The series uses a noir aesthetic that refuses the high art/low art distinction, offering a pulpy and blood-soaked vision of female empowerment. I spoke with Meenu Gaur about the new series and how it advances a “desi noir” aesthetic.
“India’s Fans and India’s Future”
There are millions of die-hard film fans around the world, but it might be said that their affective intensity is particularly concentrated in the cinema halls and the public spaces of India. Fans in India come from all walks of life: they are men and women; straight and queer people; adults, grandparents, and children; Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians. As such, could fandom point to a new kind of future, one that transcends rather than reinscribes differences?
“Queering the Indian Novel”
In September 2018, Section 377 of the colonial-era penal code was ruled unconstitutional by the Indian Supreme Court, at long last decriminalizing homosexuality in the country. By most accounts, this is a joyous, but also late, decision, belying the huge proliferation of queer activism, writings and cultural production that has become an essential part of the Indian public sphere over the last several decades. Although much of the discourse generated by these oppositional queer movements was centered around the battle to get 377 overturned, there has also been a rich diversity of fictional texts that have striven to document the diversity of queer lives, not only in their political action, but also in their most quotidian. This has taken place in English, of course, but also across languages and across the urban-rural divide. Works like Sachin Kundalkar’s Marathi novel Cobalt Blue (2013) and Vasudhendra’s Kannada volume of short stories Mohanaswamy (2015) take pains to describe in beautiful but also painful details the torments of queer love.
“The Goddess of Loss: Indian Literature in English after Arundhati Roy”
In June of 1997, on the verge of graduating from high school, I received an award for my study of foreign languages, a book wrapped in blue shiny paper. As I opened it, a small clipping from TIME slipped out—an article on an Indian writer, Arundhati Roy, whose novel was taking the literary world by storm. My prize was Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things (1997). I sat down to read it immediately.
“Mazaa: Rethinking Fun, Pleasure and Play in South Asia”
While researching the lives of day labourers in New Delhi for his book, A Free Man, the journalist Aman Sethi meets Ashraf, a housepainter who enjoys drinking with his friends and, because he works freelance, has the ability ‘to tell the maalik (boss) to fuck off when [he] want[s] to’. Ashraf’s sense of freedom in not having steady employment compels Sethi to think differently about the way journalists write people’s lives in India. Throughout their time together, Ashraf stubbornly refuses to let Sethi turn his life into an allegory for neo-liberal precarity. So, when Sethi urges Ashraf to narrate the ‘basic facts’ of his life, Ashraf complains: ‘You take the mazaa (fun) out of every story’. As Sethi’s requests continue to prove futile, he realises that Ashraf’s insistence on mazaa—the Hindi/Urdu word for fun or pleasure—is not only a claim to fun, but a resistance to being made representative of some larger story that, Sethi admits, ‘for all purposes, I had already written’.
Great Performances: “Amitabh Bachchan in Deewaar”
Possibly his most famous role, Amitabh Bachchan’s performance in Yash Chopra’s Deewaar (1975) is certainly one of his best, in part for how it represents the “angry young man” from the earlier film, Zanjeer (1973), in which Bachchan made his name as Hindi cinema’s top superstar. The angry young man is a figure largely credited to the writing team of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, known as Salim-Javed, who are seen to have given expression to the voice of subaltern discontent in a 1970s India increasingly disillusioned by the failure of the state to follow through on the promises made at independence. Many have praised Bachchan’s performances in these films, but little attention has been given to the role of his performances in modulating the affect of anger and thus shaping the angry young man as more than merely “angry.”
“Global Pakistan in the Wake of 9/11”
The events of 9/11 brought Pakistan once again into a global light, but largely through negative representations. I argue that Anglophone Pakistani literature written since 2001 has been the key site of contesting these negative representations by offering a new understanding of Pakistan’s place in the global imaginary. The chapter will show how internationally well-known authors Kamila Shamsie, Mohammed Hanif and Mohsin Hamid are among those involved in rethinking Pakistan’s place in the world through their novels and, in this way, in thinking the global novel anew.
“The Realist Impulse and the Future of Postcoloniality”
Americanah marks a significant break from the postcolonial novel. First, it is set in the present rather than in the past. Second, it fuses the trope of an unresolved postcolonial melancholy, specifically an emigrant’s relationship with her homeland, with contemporary questions of race in the United States, where questions of identity have shifted after the election of its first black president. Additionally, while it rehearses the failures of postcolonial nationalism, the novel questions those representations when Ifemelu moves back to Lagos at the end. Lastly, the aesthetics of the blog—which appears in snippets throughout the text—put pressure on conventional notions of literary writing while gesturing to the new and more transparent modes of knowledge production characteristic of the digital age.
“‘A True Lahori’: Mohsin Hamid and the Problem of Place in Pakistani Fiction
The transition from Moth Smoke to The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a movement from the subjective experience of Lahore – its landmarks and its lived hardships – to an “objective” (in a Hegelian sense) understanding of the city, as a place to be acted upon rather than an actor in its own right. The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s Lahore becomes a place of ambiguity, calling into question global knowledge of Pakistan. By refusing to represent the narrator and his interlocutor in a conventional sense, and by emptying out the Lahore novel and filling in its center with the story of global finance and the war on terror, Hamid suggests that Pakistan as a place is under threat of being reduced to its representation in the language of security.
“Madhur Bhandarkar and the New Bollywood Social”
Bhandarkar’s particular predicament seems to be that his films are neither gritty and realist enough nor melodramatic and spectacular enough. Indeed, he seems to be profoundly aware of the vacillations of representation that are necessary for a commercial, melodramatic and non-realist mode such as popular cinema to represent social concerns. Upon closer look, his films portray an acute awareness of the possibilities and limitations of popular cinema though extended experiments with realism and political film-making.
“Slumdog Millionaire and Epistemologies of the City”
A majority of voices have been somewhat cynical about the film’s success. Many critiques come from a well-founded mistrust of popular culture and an awareness of the largely racist and imperialist history of cross-cultural representations of India and the East in Western film, media and literature. These critiques rely on a generalized skepticism of the political potential of melodramatic film. However, what most critics have overlooked is how Boyle’s film offers a possibility for rethinking the relationship between popular cinema and the contemporary Indian urban experience precisely through its fantasy plot. This necessitates revising long-held assumptions within literary and urban studies, such as the monoglossia of filmic texts and the necessarily conservative politics of melodrama and fantasy, along with reconsidering Boyle’s longer engagement with the aesthetics of urban life.
“Fifty Years Later, Shrilal Shukla’s ‘Raag Darbari’ is being reborn”
A conference was held recently at Delhi University to commemorate 50 years of Shrilal Shukla’s Hindi novel Raag Darbari. Shukla was an IAS officer who wrote Raag Darbari based on his experiences in rural UP, winning the Sahitya Akademi award for it in 1969. The book went on to capture the imagination of Hindi readers. Funny, nihilistic, and brutally satirical, Raag Darbari is a novel that continues to resonate in the Indian imagination today.
“Gay Bombay and Queer Futures”
Parmesh Shahani’s book Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India is a fascinating text that marks a contemporary moment of possibility for India’s queer communities. Although originally published in 2008, ten years before the repeal of Section 377 in September 2018, the book’s optimism, playfulness and sense of experiment make it potentially even more relevant for today’s moment, when long-standing activism and judicial petitioning have finally borne fruit, leaving time and energy for creative envisionings of India’s queer futures. Like so much contemporary queer writing in India, Gay Bombay does not live in Section 377’s shadow, but probes the depths of queer experience in the city beyond the domains defined by the law, marking out spaces of pride, desire, “love and (be)longing.”
“Realist Hieroglyphics: Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel”
In what many consider to be a postrealist age, what are the new modes emerging that reflect a continued investment in representing contemporary life? This question has particular relevance for the novel today, with the globalization of literary styles and the intensified transnationalism of characters and settings. We have seen a range of novels over the course of the first decade of the twenty-first century that return to realism as a means of exposing contemporary political inequities. This double gesture—toward realism on the one hand and a concern with structural injustice on the other—constitutes what I call a new social realism, a mode that dialectically transcends early twentieth-century progressive writing and the self-conscious aesthetics of a Rushdean postmodernism in order to draw attention to social inequities in India today.
“‘Lady Lolita’s Lover’ shows us there can be no Great Indian Novel right now”
When Mumbai dinner party conversations turn to the contemporary state of Indian literature today, most often it is lamented. “Where is the great Indian novel today?” participants often ask, disappointed with the recent commercialisation and popularisation of the novel form. Indeed, despite the new crops of prize-winning fiction, it is hard to find one recent novel that represents a contemporary paragon equal in status to the heavy hitters of the 1980s and 90s. But from the perspective of literary history, “greatness” is a term that should be looked at with nuance.
“Indian Fiction: Why the English vs. Bhasha debate no longer makes sense”
Early English fiction did not emerge in a distinct sphere of its own but rather in relation to and in dialogue with innovations in the bhashas that were taking place at the same time. Often, individual authors wrote in both English and one of the bhashas. Thus, less than a decade after publishing his one and only novel in English, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay founded a Bengali magazine, Bangadarshan, in which he hoped to invigorate the Bengali language in public life, where English had largely found sway. Likewise, Toru Dutt and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote both in Bengali and English – and, in the case of Dutt, in French as well. These examples show how the modernity that emerged in India was always already polyglossic. Thus we not only dispel associations of foreignness attached to the nineteenth-century Anglophone novel in India but also see how an analysis of the English novel cannot be separated from accounts of colonial modernity across languages.
“Amitav Ghosh and Aravind Adiga: Two ways to write English in India”
Adiga tells the story of the present, and Ghosh’s trilogy reads like a paean for a lost time. Adiga allegorises the future of the Indian novel, and Ghosh memorialises an Indian English whose time has come and gone.
“‘Relationships which have no name: Family and sexuality in 1970s popular film”
This essay argues that popular film of the 1970s opened up a space for representing new kinds of social relationships, but within and based on its use of melodramatic formulas. I argue that over the course of the long 1970s we see not radical rupture, but a process of repetition and resignification whereby generic formulas such as the lost-and-found plot and the love triangle were re-presented, and their constitutive elements rearranged, in order to generate alternatives to conventional kinship and romantic paradigms. It is in this indirect way that these films bring to light lived experiences of fraternity, love and desire at the margins of social legibility.
“Staging Realism and the Ambivalence of Nationalism in the Colonial Novel”
The constant vacillation between referential and performative modes characterizes social realism in colonial India, with significant implications for the relationship between the novel and the nation. While realism has historically provided the crucial link between the novel and the nation—offering narrative structures suited to represent the linear temporality, the teleology, and the rationalism that undergird nationalist discourse—attention to the performative dimensions of literary realism unsettles this connection. If realism is not always and consistently linear, for instance, but veers into a performative mode that interrupts the narrative with the alternative register of synchronic time, then the novel cannot adequately provide the temporal structure necessary to narrate the nation into being. Rethinking the aesthetics of social realism is thus a means not only of interrogating the critical aesthetics of realism under colonialism but also of rethinking the relationship of the novel to the nation at large.