Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

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Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India 281 Can I cream off awards from your melting-pot phase Do you medal yourselves when you meddle with my type[] Daljit Nagra 15 Artists, Rushdie suggests, are in the business of cultural mapping. In an interview, he asserts that his Booker-prize winning novel Midnight’s Children attempted to answer a cartographical imperative – to chart a new aesthetic map of his birth country because “India may be an ancient civilization but it’s also a new country”. He reasserts that “[o]ne of the things you have to do with new countries is to draw maps of them”; after providing the reader with these imaginative maps, writers can then “put [themselves] on the map”. 16 The White Tiger, published twentyseven years after Midnight’s Children, sets out to chart the underside of India’s new-found economic prowess by the hand of a protagonist who stands for “tomorrow” (p.6). Even though Adiga’s mapping of a Dark India might be seen as an opportunistic depiction of Indian destitution, it represents to some critics the future of a nation coming to terms with images of endemic poverty and underdevelopment, and of a literature in search of a new creative path away from what they perceive as wornout Rushdiesque motifs. In a rave review of The White Tiger, the British magazine The Economist lionizes Adiga as “the Charles Dickens of the call-centre generation”. 17 Following a familiar practice of comparing Indian novelists to Dickens (a critical tradition that seems to descend from comments on Mulk Raj Anand, a writer said to be “India’s Charles Dickens” 18 ), Charlotte Higgins describes Adiga’s portrayal of India’s glaring social contrasts as “almost Dickensian”, basing her comparison on the fact that, in the novel, “the unpleasant reality of contemporary Indian society is revealed via mordant sketches of characters, from millionaires in their air-conditioned tower blocks to the unfortunates who are trapped in poverty and who live literally below them, catering to their every whim”. 19 While these reporters liken Dickens to Adiga, Rushdie regards the Victorian novelist as “quintessentially Indian” and draws a parallel between Dickensian London and “the pullulating cities of India”, which could include the Delhi depicted in Adiga’s novel: Dickensian London, that stenchy, rotting city full of sly, conniving shysters, that city in which goodness was under constant assault by duplicity, malice and greed, seemed to me to hold up the mirror to the pullulating cities of India, with their preening élites living the high life in gleaming skyscrapers while the great majority of their compatriots battled to survive in the hurly-burly of the streets below. 20 In The Independent, a reviewer hails The White Tiger as “an Indian novel that explodes the clichés – ornamental prose, the scent of saffron Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at Senate House Library, University of London on November 29, 2010
282 Journal of Commonwealth Literature – associated with that phrase”, because it introduces readers instead to “an India where Microsoft call-centre workers tread the same pavement as beggars who burn street rubbish for warmth”. 21 In this context it comes as no surprise that Adiga’s narrative is greeted by a reporter from the Evening Standard as a “scathing, abusively satirical antidote to the romance of Rushdie” 22 and that in The Independent a reviewer writes that “Adiga could be classified as the anti-Rushdie, cleansing florid exotica from the fiction of India”. 23 Might these responses signal a shift taking place in the western reception of Indian novelists in English While this remains as yet an open question, the fact is that, in the control of cultural “authenticity” effected by these “agents of legitimation”, 24 the positive valuation of The White Tiger depends on an apparent opposition to a perceived tendency of IWE towards formal experimentation and exotic spice-related metaphors that readers generally tend to connect in their minds with Rushdie’s novels. This section began with the British poet Daljit Nagra’s self-reflexive remarks on the cultural commodification and consumption of otherness. Those lines, in particular his reference to the possibility of his “cream[ing] off awards”, encapsulate a problematic this essay attempts to unpack: how literary works and authors function as tradable commodities. Given that the marketing strategies used to promote The White Tiger to metropolitan readers clearly influenced its signifying processes, it is relevant to examine the social biography of the novel. As Arjun Appadurai contends, “we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories”. 25 As consumer items and marketable goods, Indian writers in English and their works are consistently classified into one of two categories, following niche marketing strategies: they are either “like Rushdie” or “not like Rushdie”. For instance, such labels were used to boost the cultural capital of the Booker shortlist in the 2007 competition when the Indian-born author Indra Sinha, shortlisted for his novel Animal’s People, was recurrently related to Rushdie in the print media. “Everyone pigeonholed as an ‘Indian writer’ is inevitably compared to Salman Rushdie”, remarks Sinha. 26 Indeed, Rushdie’s career, which began in advertising, served as a sanctioned precedent for Sinha’s literary celebrity debut. 27 In the 2008 Booker competition, critics in the media seemed to be pitting Rushdie against Adiga, who was welcomed as the voice of the new generation of IWE. In lieu of referring to Rushdie as “an authoritative literary father worthy of affiliation”, 28 as was in all probability the case with the 2006 Booker awarded to Kiran Desai, Adiga allegedly functions as a foil to both the Booker heavyweight himself and to Indian writers of “florid exotica” in general. Viewed in the context of a multi-dimensional model of the literary field, 29 Adiga’s appraisal relies – albeit in reverse – on Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at Senate House Library, University of London on November 29, 2010
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