Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India 285
some critics perceive as a re-Orientalist construction of India in The White
Tiger, this article situates the debates about the perceived authenticity/
inauthenticity of Adiga’s portrait within the broader problematic of
so-called “real” Indiannness. As argued in countless studies, the quest
for authenticity in IWE is inescapably doomed to failure, because that
would imply the existence of a tangible origin (undermined from the
outset by the use of a non-autochthonous language introduced via British
colonization) against which to gauge it. In this respect Aamir Mufti, in
his discussion of “auratic criticism”, identifies
a pervasive language and mood in the contemporary critical scene that is
concerned with the inauthenticity of postcolonial culture, community, and
politics, and in which authenticity comes to attach itself to the concepts of
certain cultural practices as a kind of aura, as the practices themselves come
to be seen as resources for the overcoming of the forms of alienation that
are the result, and the subjective dimension, of the colonial encounter. 44
Although the concept of authenticity has been discredited by many in
contemporary critical discourse, it continues to play a prominent role in
the debates about IWE and remains a crucial element in enhancing the
appeal of non-western cultural products in a global market. Because it
continues to provide a fertile ground for discussion of IWE, the explanatory
potential of the concept of authenticity should not be dismissed. Indeed,
the “anxiety of Indianness” – or rather “anxiety about the anxiety of
Indianness”, as the novelist Vikram Chandra characterizes it in a direct
reference to the title of an influential essay by the critic Meenakshi
Mukherjee 45 – ultimately structures the reception of the novel and most
of the most fiery responses to it.
For the remainder of this section, I will briefly outline the workings
of the rhetoric of “real” Indianness as Chandra describes it and as it is
used repeatedly by reviewers, and then advance a reframing of this issue
in relation to The White Tiger. Such change of perspective will hopefully
allow for a reading of Adiga’s novel unconstrained by the unavailing
longing for authenticity under the guise of “real” Indiannness. The
recurrent issue of the Indianness of Indian English writing has elicited
a considerable amount of critical attention in recent years, as well as
motivated a substantial number of quarrels between critics and writers.
In “The Anxiety of Indianness” (1993), Mukherjee addresses the anxiety
(conceivably self-conscious) besetting Indian English fiction, which she
suggests results in a tendency to rely on an overabundance of markers
of “real” Indianness. Whereas the cause of this anxiety in earlier Indian
English authors such as Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan
“came out of their own desire to be rooted”, in the case of the new
generation of writers, in Mukherjee’s words, it “may be attributed to
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