Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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
284 Journal of Commonwealth Literature “free radios to people who are so keen on popular music”. 39 Balram’s life-story and The White Tiger’s dissection of India’s economic success might well be construed as a follow-up to Rushdie’s story’s depiction of the period of the Emergency. “Authenticity” and “Real India” Writing my book [Midnight’s Children] in North London, looking out through my window on to a city scene totally unlike the ones I was imagining on to paper, I was constantly plagued by this problem, until I felt obliged to face it in the text, to make clear that [...] what I was actually doing was a novel of memory and about memory, so that my India was just that: “my” India, a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions. Salman Rushdie 40 Rushdie celebrates the idea of “hybridized, mongrel truth”, and contends that “we should avoid at all cost any pedigreed version of the truth”. 41 Even though the reaction of Indian readers both in the subcontinent and in the diaspora to The White Tiger was multifarious, neither wholly hostile nor adverse, Adiga still faced the recurrent accusation of complicity with re-Orientalist – and hence “inauthentic” – representations of India. In this respect, Kanchan Gupta claims that he: crafted his novel in a manner that it could not but impress the Man Booker judges who see India as a seething mass of unwashed hordes which worship pagan gods, are trapped in caste-based prejudices, indulge in abominable practices like untouchability, and are not worthy of being considered as an emerging power, never mind economic growth and knowledge excellence. 42 Against those such as Gupta who posit that “authentic” representations depend upon finding a space exterior to western market forces, this article maintains that a “hybridized, mongrel truth” is enabled in The White Tiger by playing the rules of the global literary marketplace, rather than by escaping from it. Ultimately, both the protagonist of Adiga’s novel and the “truth” he tells about Rising India play out a “hybridized, mongrel truth”. Furthermore, Balram and his “reality” are strategically inauthentic: through intentional self-contradiction and ironic character development, Adiga’s failure to achieve (an in itself untenable) authenticity is deliberate. In Huggan’s formulation, authenticity stands as the “currency at play in the market place of cultural difference”. 43 The White Tiger takes Huggan’s terms one step further by blatantly choosing to stage “inauthenticity” while simultaneously holding up for critical scrutiny the novel’s own complicity with the marketing of an Exotic India. Departing from what Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at Senate House Library, University of London on November 29, 2010
Page 1 and 2: The Journal of Commonwealth Literat
Page 3 and 4: 276 Journal of Commonwealth Literat
Page 9: 282 Journal of Commonwealth Literat

Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?