Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India 289
to its “reality”. By foregrounding the material and cultural differences
between himself and westernized diasporic writers, Adiga seems to be
privileging a notion of authenticity based on a stark divide between
the national subject and the diasporic. The writer’s use of the present
continuous verb tense in “I’m still standing” and “[I’m still] worrying”
again stresses his rootedness in present-day Mumbai, while his reference
to the queues, the over-crowded trains and the contaminated drinking
water seems to sustain Chandra’s argument that “Real India”, seen as a
site of everyday concrete struggle, is “approachable only through great
and prolonged suffering”. 58
Conclusion
For Rushdie, authenticity is “the respectable child of old-fashioned
exoticism” in the sense that “[i]t demands that sources, forms, style,
language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogeneous and
unbroken tradition. Or else.” 59 The author cuts his last phrase short in
all probability to draw attention to the fact that cultural expressions
falling outside the “fantasy of purity” are regarded by the self-appointed
gatekeepers of authenticity as non-existent and are therefore left
unacknowledged. The accusations faced by Adiga of inauthenticity in the
representation of a Dark India and of complicity with re-Orientalism,
originating for the most part from Indian critics, are far from original.
The contentious critical issue over authenticity in IWE will no doubt
continue to divide commentators, and will almost certainly continue to
frame further discussions of The White Tiger. Following the pervasive
rhetoric that Chandra deconstructs, authors such as Adiga (and to
some extent Rushdie) are constrained by the need to “explain” India
to western readers and hence fall back on easily decoded rhetorical
tropes of “real” Indianness. In the end, Adiga’s “anxiety of Indianness”,
as expressed in the Man Booker Prize website interview, illustrates
the multiple ways in which India is enmeshed in an unending process
of cultural commodification. Indeed, the appeal of a Dark India in the
literary marketplace – or, more accurately, the favouring by the Booker
judges’ of representational strategies that purportedly offer a revamped
(exotic) India to the twenty-first century (western) reader – relies heavily
on a previous contestation of discourses, facilitated by authors such as
Rushdie, surrounding India and its allure as exotic other.
NOTES
The author wishes to thank David Callahan (University of Aveiro, Portugal)
and Lisa Lau (University of Keele, UK) for helping her shape the arguments
presented in this article.
Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at Senate House Library, University of London on November 29, 2010