Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

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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
290 Journal of Commonwealth Literature 1 Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger, London: Atlantic, 2008, p.50. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text. 2 Other noteworthy literary depictions of a Dark India are Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy (1994), Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (1995), Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (2006) and Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace (2000) and Sea of Poppies (2008). 3 Adiga was the fourth Indian writer to be awarded the Prize. The three previous Indian-born winners were: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981); Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997); and Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (2006). The 2008 Booker longlist also included Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies. Along with Adiga, Ghosh was one of the six novelists shortlisted for the Prize. 4 Quoted in Erica Wagner, “Aravind Adiga wins Man Booker Prize with The White Tiger”, The Times, 15 October 2008. Retrieved 15 October 2008 at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/ article4944850.ece 5 Somak Ghoshal, “Booker for the Billion”, The Telegraph, 23 October 2008. Retrieved 25 October 2008 at http://epaper.telegraphindia.com/TT/ TT/2008/10/23/ArticleHtmls/23_10_2008_008_019.shtml 6 K. R. Usha, “Two Destinies”, Phalanx, n.d. Retrieved 11 March 2009 at http:// www.phalanx.in/pages/review_current_2.html 7 Graham Huggan, The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p.vii. 8 ibid., p.x. Sarah Brouillette calls this phenomenon “the industry of postcoloniality” (Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace, New York: Palgrave, 2007, pp.15-43). 9 Huggan, The Post-Colonial Exotic, p.13. 10 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Diary”, London Review of Books, 6 November 2008. Retrieved 11 March 2009 at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n21/subr01_.html 11 Anis Shivani, “Indo-Anglian Fiction: The New Orientalism”, Race & Class, 47, 4 (2006), 9. Shivani focuses on works by Amit Chaudhuri, Pankaj Mishra and Manil Suri. 12 Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands”, in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, London: Granta, 1991, p.16. 13 Akash Kapur, “The Secret of His Success”, The New York Times, 7 November 2008. Retrieved 10 November 2008 at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/ books/review/Kapur-t.html_r=1 14 Rushdie, “The New Empire within Britain”, in Imaginary Homelands, pp.129-30. 15 Daljit Nagra, Look We Have Coming to Dover!, London: Faber and Faber, 2007, pp.6-7. 16 Una Chaudhuri, “Imaginative Maps: Excerpts from a Conversation with Salman Rushdie”, in Salman Rushdie Interviews: A Sourcebook of His Ideas, ed. Pradyumna S. Chauhan, Westport, CT.: Greenwood, 2001, p.28. 17 “His Master’s Voice”, The Economist, 11 September 2008. Retrieved 12 September 2008 at http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfmstory_ id=12202501 Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at Senate House Library, University of London on November 29, 2010
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