Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

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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 Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at Senate House Library, University of London on November 29, 2010
286 Journal of Commonwealth Literature the pressures of the global marketplace”. 46 In reaction to Mukherjee’s critique, Chandra, in a perceptive and polemical examination of what he dubbed “The Cult of Authenticity” strikes back at what he calls the “anxiety about the anxiety of Indianness”, that is, the accusation that “a real reality that was being distorted by ‘Third World cosmopolitans’”. In what has become a classic reference text in this debate, the novelist argues that Indian “cultural commissars” (for the most part critics such as Mukherjee) traffic in authenticity; in doing so, they act as gatekeepers of Indianness, availing themselves of the ability to “identify a ‘Real India’” and monitoring which aesthetic practices are “properly Indian” and which are not. 47 He quite straightforwardly resists the concept of an authentic Indian literature springing from “a deep, essential connection to a ‘real’ Indianness”. On this point, it is worth quoting aspects of his argument at some length: To write about India in English is at best a brave failure, and at worst a betrayal of Indian “realities.” [...] Indo-Anglian writers write for a Western audience. [...] Indo-Anglian writers make too much money. [...] A lot of Indo-Anglian writers live abroad, so they are disconnected from Indian realities, and are prey to nostalgia; and besides, the bastards are too comfortable over there and don’t have to face Delhi traffic jams and power cuts and queues for phones and train tickets and busses, and so they don’t suffer like us and so they can’t possibly be virtuous enough to be good artists. 48 The publication of The White Tiger once again resurrected the debate over authentic literary representations of India by Indian English writers, and markedly so after the novel was awarded the Booker. Critiques focusing on the “inauthenticity” of Adiga’s novel particularly questioned the capability of a highly-educated author (who studied English literature at Columbia and Oxford universities and who is a former correspondent in India for Time magazine) to grasp the experience of the Indian underclass. Specifically, some reviewers accused the novelist of devising an “inauthentic” lead character. For instance, Akash Kapur pointed out that Balram’s “credulousness and naïveté often ring false”, and proceeded to conclude that, “[i]n their surfeit of emblematic detail”, a few sequences in the novel “reduce the characters to symbols”. 49 Adiga had the stated intention of writing a novel about, in his own phrase, the “invisible men within India”, that is, about individuals coming from a cultural and social background very different from his own. 50 Nonetheless, he would inevitably have to face the customary critical accusation of fabricating narratives about the poor of India chiefly for an affluent and/or western Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at Senate House Library, University of London on November 29, 2010
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