Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India 283
Rushdie’s status as marketable commodity in the literary marketplace.
As Erica Wagner comments in The Times, “it is perhaps fitting” that in
the year when Midnight’s Children was elected “The Best of the Booker”
to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Prize, the winner should
be “a compelling portrait of modern India, The White Tiger, that takes
his country – and the reader – into the present day, a follow-up to the
moment of a country’s conception that Rushdie portrayed”. 30 Likewise,
praising Adiga’s novel as charting a new imaginative territory, Sudipta
Datta asks the writer during a post-Booker win interview to consider
if IWE “has finally shed the Rushdie hangover”. Adiga answers that
he does not believe “it had a hangover”; he adds that authors such as
Kiran Desai, Amitav Ghosh and Rohinton Mistry are not “remotely like
Rushdie” and yet “each is a very great writer”, which demonstrates the
vibrancy and diversity of current South Asian writing. 31
Following Richard Todd’s analysis of literary texts as market
commodities, the particular process of literary canon-formation facilitated
by the Booker Prize is “commercial as well as literary (what’s ‘in’ what’s
everybody reading this season)”. 32 It is necessary, then, to regard the
above critical exchanges as artificial and strategic. Besides, the opposition
between Rushdie and Adiga’s narrative thematics is ill-founded. Rushdie’s
vision of India, for instance in the short story “The Free Radio” (1994), is
possibly as dark as Adiga’s unremitting satire and gore-and-grime realism
in The White Tiger. “The Free Radio” is the tragic-comic story of another
“half-baked” Indian, Ramani, a naïve rickshaw driver who voluntarily
submits to a vasectomy for the sake of his new wife, a widow with five
children, but especially because he believes he will win a transistor radio.
The historical setting of the short story is the dark political climate of
the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975 – “the beginning of
a continuous midnight”, as Rushdie’s narrator Saleem Sinai puts it in
Midnight’s Children. 33 “The Free Radio” particularly exposes the major
nasbandi (sterilization) campaign carried out under the leadership of
Indira and her son Sanjay Gandhi. Medical personnel had sterilization
quotas to fill, and money or a “brand-new first-class battery-operated
transistor radio” 34 were the incentives offered to those willing to submit
to the procedure. 35 It is in this context that Ramani, a representative of
the uneducated and economically deprived Indian underclass, willingly
enters the “big white caravan” of the Indian National Health Service in
exchange for a free radio. 36
After realizing there is no reward, he moves to Bombay in search
of Bollywood stardom. Ramani is described by the narrator, a retired
teacher, as “an innocent, a real donkey’s child”, 37 and this innocence is
also political. 38 Through this self-delusional character of a rickshaw-wallah,
Rushdie uncovers the naivety of those who think that politicians provide
Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at Senate House Library, University of London on November 29, 2010