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Between agency and exhaustion: Indian Anglophone literature and the neoliberal subject
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Between Agency and Exhaustion:
Indian Anglophone Literature and the Neoliberal Subject
by
Chinmayi Sirsi
A Dissertation Presented to the
Faculty of USC Graduate School
University of Southern California
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
Los Angeles, California
May 2017
2
Acknowledgements
The debts I have incurred in the writing of this dissertation run deep. Thanks first and foremost
to Margaret Russett: for taking on a vagabond project, for thorough and acute responses to my
work that improved it immensely, for seeing and nurturing the ambition behind the raw writing,
for always knowing exactly how much space to give me, and most of all for championing the life
of the mind. This project would not have taken off or survived but for Meg’s kindness and keen
eye; I could not have asked for a better chair.
Neetu Khanna’s arrival at USC in time for my last semester of coursework had the air of fate, or
at least of very good luck. My debts to Neetu are many, from a terrific graduate seminar to the
yearlong support afforded by her research assistantship, but I am most grateful for the excitement
and rigor with which she responds to my work and for the opportunity to have her as my
interlocutor.
Emily Anderson has been a pillar of support, encouragement, and efficiency, both as DGS and
committee member. I will always be thankful for her pithy characterization of my nebulous ideas
about postcolonial affect during my prospectus defense—“Why is the loss of loss a loss?”—that
pushed me to clarify the stakes of my work. I am immensely grateful for her well-timed
questions, advice, and support.
Special thanks to Panivong Norindr, who cheerfully agreed to join my dissertation committee at
a very late stage. I benefitted greatly from his ideas, questions, and insight at the defense, not to
mention his characteristic warmth and goodwill.
This dissertation was supported by USC’s College Doctoral and Research Enhancement graduate
fellowships. My sincere thanks to the USC Graduate School for the time, resources, and travel
3
these fellowships have afforded, as well as to the Writing Program and the English and
Comparative Literature departments for TA and RA appointments.
I am grateful to my teachers at USC for the brilliance of their seminars and the generosity of
their scholarship and pedagogy: David Lloyd, Hilary Schor, Jack Halberstam, Marjorie Perloff,
William Handley, Erin Graff Zivin, Akira Lippit, Bruce Smith, Joseph Boone, Heather James,
and Rebecca Lemon. Thanks also to the ever-cheerful and tireless Flora Ruiz for consistently
keeping chaos at bay, and to Janalynn Bliss for her timely help.
To my teachers before my time at USC, especially Anita Cherian, Sreekumar Menon, Madhava
Prasad, and Alok Bhalla, much thanks for inspiration and encouragement. Javeed Alam’s
brilliance and generosity live on in memory, and I am deeply thankful I had a chance to learn
from him. Particular thanks to Rajiv C. Krishnan, who planted the idea of graduate studies in the
U.S. all those years ago, and whose insistence on academic rigor is matched only by his tireless
guidance and support.
Friends and colleagues at USC have offered camaraderie and commiseration throughout this
process: many thanks to Megan Herrold, Stephen Pasqualina, Lauren Elmore, Alex Young,
Lacey Schauwecker, Lauren Weindling, David Openshaw, Sarah Vap, Michelle Brittan Rosado,
Vanessa Carlisle, Nada Ayad, Crystal Baik, and Sandy SoHee Chi Kim. Special thanks to
Samantha Carrick, who welcomed me into a new country and culture, showed me the ropes, and
extended friendship and practical support when I needed them most. Thanks also to Merve
Aktar, who offered comfort and understanding as we both navigated the particular difficulties of
international student life. Arunima Paul and Dheeraj Goyal created occasions for joy and relief
4
during this past, very stressful year; I am thankful for the unexpected gift of their company and
friendship.
In the last few years I have turned repeatedly to Neha Kamdar and Neeraja Rao for solace,
counsel, and laughter, and they have come through unfailingly. They are my strongest advocates,
and their friendship meant the world to me as I navigated the uncertainties of graduate student
life.
I could not have done without Suman Amarnath and Ira Sahasrabudhe’s friendship in these
years: my thanks especially for their company at the Jaipur Literature Festival and for the warm
hospitality of their home. Arjun Surendra has looked out for me and cheered me on from the start
of this program: I am grateful for his counsel, cheer, and terrible puns.
My parents put up uncomplainingly with my too long absences in the making of this dissertation,
while offering support and guidance from afar. Deepest thanks to my mother for teaching me to
love books and encouraging my early attempts at writing, and to my father for his cheerful,
hearty conversations that keep me grounded. My sister has had to nurse me back to health and
sanity on more than one occasion in these years, and I am grateful for her friendship.
Feroz Hassan believed in this project even (and especially) when I did not. There would have
been no dissertation but for his enthusiasm for my ideas, steadfast support, and example of hard
work and critical rigor. This dissertation is for him.
5
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 2
Abstract 6
Introduction New Realisms: Narrating the (Indian) Subject of Global Poverty 7
0.1: The ‘Everything’ Novel and Global Capital 11
0.2: “The Other India is the Leash”: Neoliberalism and Anti-Poor Rhetoric 14
0.3: Subaltern Studies and the “New Subaltern” 21
0.4. Caste and the Indian English Novel 25
0.5: Chapter Descriptions 42
Chapter 1 Amitav Ghosh’s Subaltern Legibilities 45
1.1: Location, location, location 49
1.2: The Elite-Subaltern Encounter 58
1.3: Death and the Subaltern 70
Chapter 2 The Nonfiction ‘Novel’: Narrative Nonfiction and the Politics of Visibility 80
2.1: Tragic Tales 88
2.2: Slumdog Millionaire and the Romance of Agency 92
2.3: “Deathworld” 96
2.4: Neoliberalism and the “Grid of Concordance” 101
2.5: The Good Subaltern: Ethical Trajectories 110
2.6: “Doubly in Shadow” 126
2.7: Who Speaks? 131
2.8: Poor Characters 139
Chapter 3 Entrepreneurs and Others: The White Tiger as Neoliberal Bildungsroman 147
3.1: The Bildungsroman: A Critical History 152
3.2: “The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian” 167
Afterword 202
Works Cited 206
6
Abstract
The Indian English (IE) novel was critical to the establishment of the field of Postcolonial
Studies in the late twentieth century, particularly in the Western academy. It supplied or
reinforced some of postcolonial criticism’s central interpretative frameworks, chiefly through its
fixation with the nation as primary theme and referent and its profound formal and linguistic
self-consciousness. This dissertation is situated in the aftermath of this high postcolonial
moment. It traces the emergence of a ‘new realist’ aesthetics in the twenty-first century by
tracking three major shifts in the IE novel’s trajectory in the wake of India’s transition from
welfare state to market economy: the use of a denotative and outward-looking realism over the
self-conscious and ‘magic realist’ forms of the 1980s and 90s, the replacement of the nation as
the IE novel’s basis for subject formation by a transnational neoliberal framework, and the
rejection of elite focal characters in favor of subaltern protagonists and narrators.
My overarching claim is that new IE realism builds a framework of the prevailing logics of
global capital in India to narrate not its proper subjects—the entrepreneurial and ruling classes—
but the very poor, who are marginal to but imbricated in its discourse. I understand new IE
realism as a formal experiment, an iteration of classical realism in its intimacy with capital, its
surfeit of metonymic and empirical detail, its use of traditional narrative techniques such as
omniscience, free indirect discourse, and bildung, and its elaboration of social conditions. That it
deploys these seemingly totalizing forms and techniques to narrate not the normative national
subject but the subject of poverty locates it in the realm of experiment. The politics of this
narration is the dissertation’s primary point of inquiry.
7
Introduction
New Realisms: Narrating the (Indian) Subject of Global Poverty
The day after he won the high-profile Man Booker prize for his allegory of neoliberal India, The
White Tiger (2008), the Indian English novelist Aravind Adiga said in an interview:
At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit
the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal
injustices of society. That’s what writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens did in the
nineteenth century and, as a result, England and France are better societies. That’s what
I’m trying to do—it’s not an attack on the country, it’s about the greater process of self-
examination (Jeffries, “Roars of Anger”).
The comment presents a well-rehearsed view of the novel as mirror to society and vehicle of
social critique. Adiga offers it in an attempt to define the novel form’s proper cultural role in the
context of India’s geopolitical rise in the twenty-first century. Rather incongruously, however,
Adiga’s point of comparison is the nineteenth-century European realist novel, widely understood
as a conservative form that, in Frederic Jameson’s words, “avoid[s] recognition of deep
structural and social change” (Jameson, “A Note” 261).
1
Standard critical accounts of the
classical realist novel have understood it as normative, assimilationist, and totalizing, complicit
with existing social relations and hierarchies. Similarly, postcolonial critics have demonstrated
classical realism’s complicities with imperialism, orientalism, and chauvinistic nationalisms,
2
1
This narrative of realism as complicit with dominance has been challenged throughout its critical career, but it is
still among the few standard accounts.
2
Postcolonial studies in particular has viewed realism as compromised, pointing out its complicities with
imperialism and later with chauvinistic nationalisms that reinforce dominant hierarchies. This was especially true
after Edward Said identified Orientalism as a form of “radical realism”—“anyone employing Orientalism…will
designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which then is considered
either to have acquired, or more simply to be, reality” (Orientalism 72).
8
while poststructuralist criticism’s delinking of language from referentiality aimed to discredit
any residual faith in realism’s ability to apprehend social reality.
Despite this chorus of detractions, the twenty-first century has seen a recuperation of
classical realist literary aesthetics in Anglophone fictions across the globe. In particular, a range
of postcolonial and ethnic novelists, Adiga included, are turning to realist techniques like
omniscient narration, free indirect discourse, ventriloquism, and the tracing of bildungs or
narratives of selfhood while also displaying a renewed faith in (a degree of) linguistic
transparency. While the conditions of the rise of these new realisms are entirely different from
those of classical realism, both emerge during periods of high capitalist growth
3
—classical
realism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and new realisms during the present
widespread consolidation of neoliberal economic policies across the globe—reiterating the
“intimacy” between capitalist growth and realist form (Shonkwiler and La Berge 1). In line with
this, new realisms take global capital as their primary referent, default condition, and basis for
subject formation in the twenty-first century.
How do new realisms narrate the massive and dynamic formation that is global capital?
Jed Esty and Colleen Lye have recently attributed the emergence of these realisms to the
integration of the post-Cold War world under a global capitalist “world-system” as well as to the
As critics Ulka Anjaria and Deepika Bahri point out, at its peak, postcolonial criticism was saturated by an anti-
realist, modernist-postmodernist aesthetic that viewed formal experimentation as radical, subversive, and central
to its politics even as it held realism as complicit with imperialist ideology, nationalism, and governmentality. For
instance, Anjaria quotes Simon Gikandi as a typical example of a critic invested in the anti-realist aesthetic: “It was
primarily—I am tempted to say solely—in the language and structure of modernism that a postcolonial experience
came to be articulated and imagined in literary form” (quoted in Anjaria 3). Eli Park Sorensen points to postcolonial
criticism’s “fetishization” of staple modernist aesthetics such as self-reflexivity, the foregrounding of textuality,
formal instability, metafictionality, and so on, which, he says, were seen as “the equivalents to specific political
values of postcolonial imperatives as such” (8, italics in orig). Imbued with such deep political import, modernist
literary techniques came to be established as dominant form in postcolonial literature.
3
See, for instance, Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel and Georg Lukacs’ The Historical Novel
9
end of the dominance of postmodern-postcolonial literary-critical practices of reading and
writing (277). They suggest that as the post-Cold War world begins to feel “more real, that is,
more concrete,” the key question is “what can, rather than what cannot, be represented in global
capitalism.” In other words, new realisms “take seriously the possibility…of representing the
world-system rather than thematizing its unrepresentability” (277). However, they grasp the
world-system not in its totality, not as a “foreclosed or fully narrativized entity” but in its
specific local effects (285). That is, from their “peripheral” vantage points, new realisms make
sense of life under global capital in its tangible local instances; for them, the world-system is
“partially, potentially describable in its concrete reality” (Esty and Lye 285, emphasis mine).
My dissertation brings this pairing of literary realism and global capital to bear upon the
field of twenty-first century Indian English (IE) literature. Repudiating the self-consciousness
and ‘magic realist’ experimentation of the 1980s and 90s in favor of denotative descriptions of
globalization’s “concrete realities,” IE literary discourse in the new century has taken a
particularly striking turn toward realism. IE realisms emerged in response to India’s transition
from postcolonial welfare state to market economy
4
and the rapid spread of global capital culture
that ensued. Generated within transnational networks of production, circulation, and reception;
set in a discursive landscape that includes corporate capital, state development initiatives, local
and foreign media, international NGOs, economic and aid agencies, and human rights groups;
and embedded in the neoliberal logics of economic agency, individual autonomy, and
empowerment, new IE realist literature is engaged in narrating the rapidly changing landscape of
4
The move came in 1991, when the Indian government adopted a major economic reform package, popularly
known as the “liberalization” that initiated a shift from welfare to market-oriented economics. See section 1 for
details.
10
global capital in contemporary India. Given this burgeoning local instance of globalization, I
understand new IE realism, following Esty and Lye, as a “peripheral” vantage point from which
to grasp the “concrete realities” of global capital. In addition, in light of the explicit ethical
commitments of writers like Adiga, I also understand new IE realism as social justice discourse
that deploys realist techniques to narrate global capital’s most precarious and vulnerable
subjects. That is, new IE realism builds a framework of the prevailing logics of global capital in
India to narrate not its proper subjects—the entrepreneurial and ruling classes—but the very
poor, who are marginal (“peripheral”) to but imbricated in its discourse. Finally, I understand
new IE realism as a formal experiment, an iteration of classical realism in its intimacy with
capital; its surfeit of metonymic and empirical detail; its use of traditional narrative techniques
such as omniscience, free indirect discourse, and the tracing of characterological bildungs; and
its elaboration of social conditions. That it deploys these seemingly totalizing forms and
techniques to narrate not the normative national subject but the subject of poverty locates it in the
realm of experiment. The politics of this narration is my dissertation’s primary point of inquiry.
The texts I read include canonical postmillennial IE novels—Amitav Ghosh’s The
Hungry Tide (2005), Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People
(2008)—as well as an emergent genre of ‘novelistic’ nonfiction that includes Sonia Faleiro’s
Beautiful Thing (2010), Aman Sethi’s A Free Man (2013), and Katherine Boo’s Behind the
Beautiful Forevers (2012). Part of a larger archive of nonfiction writings that takes new India as
its theme, this body of work is among the most distinctive aspects of new IE realism. I include it
in my study not only because it is engaged in the same project as the fiction—narrating the
subject of poverty in neoliberal India—but also because its form is strikingly similar to the realist
novel and it uses the same narrative techniques of omniscient narration, indirect discourse, and
11
ventriloquism. Reviewers have noted this tendency, comparing the nonfiction works listed above
to the novels of Dickens, Zola, and Balzac. Analyzing the effects of the genre’s use of a
seemingly totalizing structure like realism, I read these works as struggles for representational
control—in the degree of narratorial authority exercised or ceded—between the elite nonfiction
writer and her subject.
This dissertation thus evaluates the significance and suitability of new IE realism’s
emergence as a dominant literary form in India in its age of global capital. In what follows I will
lay out the various lines of inquiry that feed into this question, proceeding as much by example
and close reading as by hypothesis.
I: The ‘Everything’ Novel and Global Capital
Not all contemporary Anglophone realisms of global capital are peripheral. Esty and Lye’s
formulation of postcolonial/ethnic realisms as partial comes in contrast to novels that take global
capital in its entirety as their subject, often through a “transparent geographical incorporation of
the globe as a whole” (Johanson and Karl 206). A recent striking example of such work is Zia
Haidar Rahman’s In The Light of What We Know (2014), whose characters traverse the globe,
from the US and England to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, studying and working in
elite sites like Yale, Oxford, Wall Street, the British finance industry, and the UN. The novel
discusses mathematics, philosophy, liberalism, capitalism, geopolitics, racial politics in the post-
9/11 world, multiculturalism, the financial crisis, the humanitarian aid industry, expatriate life in
aid centers like Afghanistan, student life in the elite universities of the West, and experiences of
love, loss, friendship, depression, and violence under global capitalism. Critic James Wood has
observed that “In the Light of What We Know is what Salman Rushdie once called an ‘everything
novel’ […] Ideas and provocations abound on every page…there is …an atmosphere of
12
intellectual pluripotency” (Wood, “Arrival of Enigmas”). A similar pluripotency is visible in
Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), which is set in New York city: its elite, erudite narrator, a
Nigerian-born final year resident in psychiatry at the Columbia Presbytarian, appears to have
access to the whole world through his in-depth interests in literature, music, art, history, travel,
cultural theory, medicine, film, the cityscape, and a range of very diverse people and
conversations. While Open City does not travel to as many different geographical locations as
Rahman’s novel (except a notable trip to Brussels), it is able, in its ‘open’ness, to convey an
experience of New York as an experience of the world, even as it notes the extraordinary
privilege of this position.
How is it possible for these novels to appear to take the contemporary world in its
entirety as their referent? Neither novel is a narrative of uncomplicated privilege: their
protagonists are (variously) racialized, from immigrant and working class backgrounds, or
vulnerable in other structural ways, but they have grown into privilege, nurtured by elite
educational institutions and workplaces of the global North. As Wood observes of In the Light of
What We Know (in a point that applies equally to Open City), it “displays a formidable
familiarity with elite knowledge” even as it investigates the politics of possessing this
knowledge. These novels are about the cultural life of global capital as experienced by an ultra-
mobile transnational cultural elite centered in the global North; in their prolific knowledge of and
open access to ‘everything,’ their worlds can masquerade as the world. And while these novels
contain within them enough doubt and skepticism about this view, their visions are
fundamentally at odds with what Esty and Lye have called peripheral, or partial, realisms. A
novel like Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (2015) provides an illustrative
counterpoint: its characters also travel the world, but as economic refugees and undocumented
13
immigrants from India charting a dangerous journey to harsh jobs and underground lives in
England. Sahota’s realism traces these lives in thick detail, describing the overcrowded living
conditions, the punishing daily routines, and the low-paid, labor-intensive work—in restaurants,
construction sites, shop floors—that its desperate characters endure. This too is life under global
capital, the inner workings and mechanics that hold up its elite worlds, and Sahota’s novel
highlights a profoundly different experience of it than the novels of Rahman and Cole. My point
here is not merely about privilege and its lack in an unequal world; rather, that the novelization
of non-elite experiences of global capital cannot claim the same purchase on it as that of elite
experiences. The distinction here is about which subjectivity—and its novelization—can lay
claim to global capital as its referent, and which gets delegated to the status of immigrant, ethnic,
postcolonial, local, minor, diasporic, etc.
My purpose in outlining these modes of realist apprehension of the contemporary
moment is threefold; first, to emphasize, as we move into the specifics of the Indian context, that
while it might often appear as if IE literature takes the nation as its primary referent and is thus
more removed from the centers of global capital than works like In The Light of What We Know
and Open City, the twenty-first century texts this dissertation analyses are equally engaged in
tracing contemporary life under global capital. In fact, with the greater penetration of the English
language into the everyday worlds of India’s urban and semi-urban centers, there is a glut of new
IE genres and forms that narrate their characters as (Indian) subjects of the new global order,
calling attention to the ways in which “the state has become an increasingly ambiguous and
ambivalent point of articulation for subject formation in response to neoliberal hegemony”
(Johansen and Karl 208). Second, that the question of which subjectivity—and its novelization—
can lay claim to global capital as its referent is, in the Indian context, staged as an opposition
14
between the figure of the entrepreneur on the one hand and the subject of poverty on the other.
Finally, as will be seen below and in chapter 2, new IE realism is so deeply embedded in the
logics of global capital that its subject, divested of national markers, emerges as the subject of
global—not just Indian—poverty.
II: “The Other India is the Leash”: Neoliberalism and Anti-poor Rhetoric
In 1991, in a move that marked a critical turn in the destiny of the Indian nation, the Indian
government adopted a financial reform package, popularly known as the “liberalization,” to
initiate a shift from welfare state to market-oriented economics. In the years that followed,
restraints on foreign investment were lifted and markets deregulated; key sectors such as
banking, education, healthcare, and the media saw major privatization; and there was a huge
influx of global and transnational capital into the country’s urban centers. Significant cultural
and discursive changes ensued, as public culture shifted from welfare-oriented political
nationalism toward economic nationalism, and risk-averse financial conservatism gave way to an
aspirational enterprise culture with a fondness for the rhetoric of intrepid entrepreneurship. But
the benefits of liberalization did not ‘trickle down’ to the very poor: liberalization marked the
withdrawal of the state from major development sectors and sparked massive crony capitalist
scams. Even as the reforms drove up the growth rate, social and economic inequalities widened
and the human development index remained appallingly low, generating the now familiar idea of
India as a spectacular contradiction—rapid economic growth alongside extreme poverty. As
Amartya Sen and John Drèze have said of this: “the history of world development offers few
other examples, if any, of an economy growing so fast for so long with such limited results in
terms of reducing human deprivations” (ix).
These profound inequalities were compounded by the expansion of a middle class that, in
15
“represent[ing] and lay[ing] claim to the benefits of liberalization,” created new exclusionary
practices grounded in class and caste (Fernandes xxiv). At the same time, in keeping with
neoliberal cultures across the globe, popular and public discourse constituted the new ‘free’
market as emancipatory and democratic, a neutral avenue for new starts and autonomous selves
free of caste, class, religion, and driven by an ethic of competition and meritocracy. As Jeremy
Gilbert observes of neoliberal governance and culture:
Neoliberal government has increasingly legitimated its practices and the form of society
that they produce in terms of an ideal of meritocracy, which valorises a hierarchical and
highly unequal set of social relations while claiming to offer individuals from all
backgrounds an equal chance to compete for elite status (11).
Thus, even as massive poverty persists, India’s booming growth rate, alongside its
rhetoric of economic triumphalism, presents the liberalization as having transformed the country
from abject postcolonial nation to rising superpower. This rhetoric of economic nationalism,
alongside a flood of popular cultural texts like Slumdog Millionaire, peg India as a nascent
neoliberal paradise that values economic individualism and enables entrepreneurial self-making.
As neoliberal culture in India, following a well-worn worldwide script, “saturat[es] all spheres of
human activity by a market logic” (Johansen and Karl 203), the celebrated figure of the
entrepreneur—individualistic, competitive, and economically productive—is supplanting an
earlier model of upstanding middle-class citizens on the one hand and the rural poor as “the
archetypical objects of development” on the other as India’s normative national subject
(Fernandes xv).
Consider this profile of new Indian entrepreneurship, which is from Rana Dasgupta’s
book-length nonfiction account about the workings of neoliberal capital in the heart of India,
16
Capital: The Eruption of Delhi (2014). Dasgupta is interviewing Rahul Kapoor, a wealthy 25-
year-old entrepreneur with an Ivy League education, a fondness for risky investments, and a
penchant for thinking big. Competitive, confident, and acquisitive, Rahul is engaged in taking
over and rebranding his family’s traditionally run surgical supplies business. Dasgupta’s profile
of him shows that although Rahul is gay, and although he considers himself a liberal “at heart,”
he identifies primarily as an elite entrepreneur and businessman, even dubbing himself, only
half-ironically, a “stereotypically evil capitalist” (223). Rahul tells Dasgupta about the
tremendous excitement he feels at the prospect of building a business empire and the thrill he
gets from visiting the construction site of his current project, with its “huge piles of mud and
huge excavations” (223). For Dasgupta, the image holds other associations:
It happens that I have come to see Rahul directly from one of the camps set up for the
labourers who came to Delhi to work on the infrastructure for the Commonwealth
Games, and I am still disturbed by the experience. I cannot help responding to Rahul’s
comment with an account of what I have seen in that pathetically overcrowded place.
Workers and their families sleep in windowless corrugated iron shacks, and there are ten
toilets for about 3,000 people. With the monsoon rains, the whole place is under water:
wandering children have fallen into unseen holes in the ground and drowned; mosquitoes
have reproduced exuberantly and spread malaria throughout the camp. I have spent the
afternoon talking to those too sick to be out at work. They are not paid for the days they
do not work, and cannot visit a doctor. They wonder if they will ever make it back to
their far-off homes.
“It’s not necessary that it be so bad,” I say. It’s bad by design. It’s obstinately bad. It’s
impossible not to feel it is sadistic.
17
“I’m sure if I were to see that I would feel the same,” says Rahul. He pauses, thinking
about his feelings, and adds, “But if I saw those people, I am sure I would also feel
contempt” (224, emphasis mine).
It is the young Rahul, dreamer of multi-million dollar dreams, “entrepreneurial warrior,” and
promotor of the financialized nature of corporate capital (“money breeds money”), who is
representative of the new economy—not his father, who ran the business the old-fashioned way
for decades. Rahul speaks the language of the new nation; he is able to “articulate [his] dreams in
language that validates global capital” (Murty 211). This entrepreneurial figure has become
entrenched in popular discourse as the signature subjectivity of new India, key to the discursive
construction of the post-liberalization period as the age of “renewal” and “emergence” for the
nation (Murty 213, 226).
The subject of Dasgupta’s book is Delhi, seat of government and center of crony
capitalism, and the event referenced in the passage is the notoriously scam-ridden and botched
2010 Commonwealth Games, which were hosted in India that year. Among the many scandals
associated with the event were the crowded and dangerous conditions under which its
approximately 40,000 migrant construction workers were housed—in encampments dubbed
“labor camps” by the press. Disease was rampant and several workers died, and there were
allegations of labor law violations, poor payment, use of child labor, and severe negligence—all
this in a project overseen by the Indian government. Unfortunately, these conditions are hardly
singular; the construction industry is notoriously exploitative, and Dasgupta’s invoking of its
violence in response to Rahul’s unbridled excitement about unbridled capitalism is evidently
meant as a rebuke, or at least as a reminder of its costs. But the criticism fails when Rahul
casually speaks of his contempt for the laborers and their living conditions: his contempt for the
18
poor—for being poor. It is a sentiment well of its time, in that it forcefully illustrates what Vinay
Gidwani and Rajyashree Reddy have identified as the “regime of disengagement” in neoliberal
India: that in contrast to state and civil society’s ethical engagement—however nominal—with
the poor in the postcolonial welfare state, today neither the state nor the ruling elite seek such
ethical engagement (1653). Indeed, the valence and status of the term “poor” has undergone a
change in Indian public discourse, which, from the time of the Nehruvian state and up until 2-3
decades ago, rhetorically constituted and imagined the nation in the name of the poor (Gupta 9).
As Leela Fernandes points out, if workers or villagers were “the archetypical objects of
development” in a newly independent state with socialist commitments, today “mainstream
national political discourses…increasingly portray urban middle-class consumers as the
representative citizens of liberalizing India” (xv). In these mainstream discourses, the poor are
either entirely excluded from the triumphal narrative of economic nationalism or seen as dead
weight that the nation is forced to carry. The opening words of a campaign titled “India Poised,”
launched by a well-known newspaper in 2007, provide an illustrative image:
There are two Indias in this country. One India is straining at the leash, eager to spring
forth and live up to all the adjectives that the world has been recently showering upon us.
The other India is the leash (emphasis mine).
Dasgupta’s book is an example of nonfiction writing on India that explores this neoliberal
landscape, its social relations, and the subjectivities it shapes. The quoted passage from the book
is particularly illustrative of the thematic preoccupations of this genre as well as its embedment
in a transnational discursive context. First, it provides a snapshot of the neoliberal Indian
landscape—increased financialization, largescale social and economic inequalities and rural-
urban migrations, a callous and corrupt state, the discursive significance of the entrepreneur, the
19
ruling elite’s growing social and ethical disengagement, and pervasive anti-poor rhetoric.
Second, it brings out the transnational context in which narratives of Indian poverty circulate:
Dasgupta is a British citizen of Indian origin who currently lives in New Delhi; he has studied
and taught in American universities, and the landscape of his fictional work is distinctly global.
Capital: The Eruption of Delhi circulates in these global/transnational circuits, satisfying a deep
curiosity about the contradictions and paradoxes of contemporary India. In addition, Dasgupta’s
interviewee, Rahul, has an American Ivy League education and as a result considers himself a
“liberal…at heart” (223). Both belong to a new transnational elite class whose flexibility and
mobility contrast sharply with the rural migrant subject they discuss in the passage.
Finally, the passage locates a silent, exhausted subject of poverty at the center of these
narratives, even as neoliberal rationales construct her as an agential individual who deserves
“contempt” for being poor despite the availability of a free market with unprecedented
opportunities for advancement. Constructions of this subject within national and transnational
discourses of global poverty are the focus of chapter 2, whose readings will show that this same
subject is at the center of transnational human rights initiatives like foreign aid, charitable
donations and individual sponsorships, humanitarian organizations like Amnesty and the UN,
corporate social responsibility initiatives, and so on, whose programs of aid are increasingly
based on constructions of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ subjects. As Lilie Chouliaraki has
observed, transnational humanitarian solidarity in the twenty-first century is largely based on a
model of the human as an “individual holder of rights” who is “disembedded” from larger
structural injustices (74). As opposed to standard characterizations of the third-world subject of
poverty as passive victim, these discourses locate her struggles in the sphere of personal
responsibility (Madhok and Rai 649). Finally, this subject is also the target of local NGOs and
20
state development initiatives that also deploy the language of “agency” and “empowerment” in
the context of poverty despite the persistence of the oppressive and exclusionary social regimes
of caste, class, patriarchy, and religious and communal chauvinisms.
My particular interest in this period, as mentioned, is in a set of new realisms that narrate
not the emergence of the normative entrepreneur but the incorporation of non-elite subjects—
particularly subjects of poverty and labor—into the logic of neoliberalism. My chapters show
that these texts write the subject of poverty as embedded in, rather than excluded from,
neoliberalism’s rationalities of individual agency and empowerment while also being deeply
vulnerable to its economic violence. Cutting through current collective fantasies of the putative
emancipatory potential of neoliberal India, these texts narrate the subject of poverty as enmeshed
in the neoliberal logics of agency and self-making but in disempowering and exhausting ways.
Ultimately, new realism casts this exhausted subject in opposition to the popular figure of the
entrepreneur as the paradigmatic subjectivity of twenty-first century India, and in so doing,
severs the allegory between individual subject formation and national progress that is the
hallmark of classical realism.
5
Instead, as chapter 2 shows, these subjects emerge into a
transnational space where, divested of their national markers, they are received and read as
subjects of global poverty.
5
Classical realism is historically associated with the formation of normative national subjects. Critical accounts of
the European realist novel, particularly its dominant style, the Bildungsroman, understand it as a “soul-nation
allegory” that imagined the establishment of bourgeois individualism and citizenship within the framework of the
modern European nation (Esty 2012, 4). This was broadly true for early postcolonial novels as well, which were
“novels of nationalist Bildung,” whose protagonists’ formation “parallels and symbolizes that of the emergent
nation because he [and it is usually a he] is first patriot and ideal citizen” (Cheah 239). In this role, realism
legitimized and normalized the nation-state, “affirming the capacity of [its] systems to distinguish good citizens
and bad subjects” (Slaughter 124). In other words, classical realism reinforced the nation as container of normative
subject-formations even as it functioned as a narrative of “incorporation” and “demarginalization,” drawing
outlying subjectivities into the fold (Slaughter 125).
21
III: Subaltern Studies and the “New Subaltern”
New realism’s bid to narrate the subject of poverty under neoliberalism comes in the wake of the
now dated critical discourse of subaltern studies, a brief synopsis of which is called for at this
point as context. In 1982, a group of historians and social scientists brought out a collection of
essays, Subaltern Studies, which argued that official Indian history thus far had been written first
from a colonialist and then an indigenous elitist/bourgeois-nationalist point of view. The group
called for an alternative history of urban poor and rural peasant classes whose modes of
resistance to colonialism were, they claimed, significantly different from those of the elite
classes. Subaltern Studies was a new “grammar” of historical research, one that read the past by
positioning the subaltern as the “subject of history” in whom the agency of change is located
(Chatterjee 106). Subaltern resistances, in this reading, followed neither orthodox Marxist nor
nationalist logics; Subaltern Studies was thus a rejection of both the nationalist and Marxist
positions through which the discipline of history had thus far been practiced in India.
6
The word “subaltern” in the early period of this discourse was used to designate non-
elite—mostly peasant—subjectivities. In the late 80s, Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak entered the
conversation with two seminal essays, “Deconstructing Historiography” and “Can the Subaltern
Speak?” that complicated the import of the word significantly. As Partha Chatterjee later
observed, these essays marked “the poststructuralist moment in Subaltern Studies” (106). In the
former, Spivak reads the members of the Subaltern Studies group as unwitting
deconstructionists: their practice is a “ruptured” methodology that is a critique of humanism but
nevertheless falls back—perhaps strategically—on humanist notions of subjectivity, agency, and
6
Indira Gandhi’s Emergency of 1975 contributed in no small part to this disillusionment with nationalist politics.
22
totality. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak presents a sharper critique of positing such a
subject. Reading a conversation between Michel Foucault and Giles Deleuze in which they
discuss non-elite postcolonial subjects, Spivak claims that the two theorists imagine this subject
as unified and agential, a knowable subject who, with no way of being heard herself, lends
herself to be ventriloquized by the elite intellectual. Spivak opposed this construction, claiming
that subaltern consciousness is heterogeneous and unknowable, discontinuous with elite analyses
of relations between imperialism, the nation, patriarchy, globalization, feudalism, and so on. The
figure of the subaltern does not map on to these structures of visibility: “the subaltern cannot
speak” (Spivak 321).
It is important to note that Spivak was working not within a framework of human rights
but of representation. The question is not about whether the subaltern has agency, or how she can
gain it, but about subjectivity, in particular the assumption that subjectivities with no access to
the formal and official routes to normative subject formation—education, institutional discipline,
nationalism, family, and so on—are knowable and representable by elite normative subjects
formed along these lines. Reflecting on the essay twenty years after it was published, Spivak
writes: “The point I was trying to make was that of there was no valid institutional background
for resistance, it could not be recognized (228).” That is, the subaltern’s subject-formation occurs
under the radar of institutions, governmental discipline, and ideological structures and hence
cannot be read by those who inhabit these structures and frameworks. For Spivak, subalternity is
not a pure or untouched consciousness that contains the secret of some true resistance. As
Rosalind Morris clarifies: “subalternity is not that which could, if given a ventriloquist, speak the
truth of its oppression or disclose the plenitude of its being…[I]n Spivak’s definition, it is the
structured place from which the capacity to access power is radically obstructed” (8).
23
In 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe provided a clearer framework for
comprehending the contours of the word “subaltern.” In a critique of academic history,
Chakrabarty contends that the primacy of Europe in this discourse derives from the celebration
of the nation-state as “the most desirable form of political community (41),” an idea crystallized
both by European imperialism and third-world nationalisms. Chakrabarty points out the
entrenched correlations here: Europe, modernity, the nation-state, capitalism, and bourgeois
individualism. Third world histories, he says, are written as histories of transition towards the
ends of nationhood, modernization, and capitalism. This accounts for the language of failure and
lack that characterizes these histories, a lack that consigns nations of the Third world to the
“waiting room of history” (35). Chakrabarty speaks of this “waiting room” as a temporal lag: the
Third world is always in the past, transitioning toward a teleologically determined modernity.
For Chakrabarty, the historian, trained within the academic discourse of history, cannot escape
the collusion between history and the nation-state, cannot grasp the “antihistorical” narratives
that abound in the gaps of history (40). It is in these invisible, heterogeneous narratives, “other
narratives of the self and community” that do not look to the nation-state as “the ultimate
construction of reality,” that subaltern consciousness lie buried (37). The disciplinary historian,
by her very definition, cannot unbury them.
This conception of subalternity has been altered by the advent of global capital and the
incorporation of subaltern subjectivities into the urban landscape and workforce in the new
century. As “corporate capital…displace[s] the status once enjoyed by the postcolonial
developmental state” (Chatterjee 45), subalternity can no longer be conceptualized as being
outside the structures of power and visibility, lived as it is in the glare of the market. Recently,
Spivak spoke of the “new subalterns,” “who are not outside of circuits of power but integrated
24
into them in problematic ways” (Roy and Gunvald, “New Subaltern Politics”). Similarly, in an
edited volume of essays titled New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and
Resistance in Contemporary India (2015), Srila Roy and Alf Gunvald offered an alternative
conception of subalternity as “relational,” “intersectional,” and “dynamic,” signaling a formal
end to the concept as it was originally conceived.
My purpose in tracing this brief history of the concept of subalternity is to contextualize
its evolution within the discourse of the IE novel. An overwhelmingly elite formation, the IE
novel has a deep history of difficulty with representations of subalternity. To begin with, the
distance between disciplinary historian and subaltern subject that Chakrabarty notes exists
equally between elite writer and subaltern subject. In addition, the novel form’s emphasis on
renditions of interiority, inner life, and subject formation—that is, its practice of writing subjects
‘from the inside’—comes up against the unknowability of the subaltern subject. The IE novel
form has dealt with this unknowability through a history of erasure, silence, displacement, and
assimilation. In what follows I will analyze some of these maneuvers, using examples from key
IE novels.
IV. Caste and the Indian English Novel
It is a critical commonplace in the field of postcolonial literature that the Indian English (IE)
novel has historically taken the nation as its primary theme and referent (Sundar Rajan 203,
George 2). Standard accounts of the form emphasize the IE novel’s close affinity to the stages of
national development, from its origins in colonial aesthetics in the early twentieth century
through the certainties of the nationalist movement and nation-building, the disillusionment with
25
the nation, particularly post-Emergency,
7
and finally the narration and critique of the economic
triumphalism of the late 90s and 2000s. As Priyamvada Gopal claims in Nation and Narration:
[My]… argument is not so much that the nation is a ‘narrated’ entity in itself as that the
narration of nation gave the Anglophone novel in India its earliest and most persistent
thematic preoccupation, indeed, its raison d'être, as it attempted to carve out a legitimate
space for itself. The conditions of its emergence—out of the colonial encounter,
addressing itself to empire rather than to a specific region or community—meant that the
Anglophone novel in the subcontinent returned repeatedly to a self-reflexive question:
“What is India(n)?” (6, emphasis mine)
This centrality of the nation to the IE novel has critical implications for subaltern representation.
First, the IE novel has historically figured the nation’s fervent desire for a secular modernity
8
and
accordingly constructed its national subjects in opposition to caste, ethnic, linguistic, regional,
religious, and gendered affiliations (George 3). However, subjects who could afford not to be
defined by these affiliations were frequently elite, upper-caste, and upper-class, their ‘modern’
credentials coinciding with the aspirations of a nationalism deeply desirous of modernity.
Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan writes: “The nation-novel is written from a recognizably ruling class
perspective, with all that the description implies in its effects as ideology, politics, style, and
affect” (204). Similarly, Vivek Dhareshwar observes of Anglophone literary discourse, “A large
part of our intellectual discourse has in fact been an autobiography of the secular—read: upper
7
The “Emergency" refers to a state of emergency in India declared by the then Prime Minister Indra Gandhi in
1975. It remained in effect until 1977. Gandhi suspended elections, censored the press, imprisoned her opponents,
and severely curtailed civil and political rights. The event and its atrocities feature extensively in Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children.
8
As George observes, “to speak or write in English…is to address a national, and potentially, international
audience, and by doing so to take on the responsibility of presenting an ancient civilization in its modern phase”
26
caste—self, its origin, its conflict with tradition, its desire to be modern” (115). It is this
“secular—read: upper caste—self” that appears with unfailing regularity in IE writing. That is,
the archetypical subjectivities of the IE novel—modern, secular, educated, Anglophile,
progressive—are also inevitably upper-caste and -class and often male.
Rosemary Marangoly George offers a striking example of this through a reading of early
IE writer R K Narayan’s realism.
9
Narayan’s first novel Swami and Friends (1935), a largely
comic account of an upper-caste, middle-class childhood in small-town South India, introduced
the idyllic fictional town of Malgudi, whose rhythms, routines, and customs remained unchanged
despite the changing Indian and international landscape. Malgudi is a scene Narayan returned to
repeatedly through his long career and that even today is designated quintessentially Indian in the
popular imagination, framed by a nostalgic yearning for a simpler time. George demonstrates
that Narayan’s work achieved this simplicity by holding the “potentially disruptive aspects of
caste, gender, and class…under erasure” (58) in order to shape a narrative of “generic
‘Indianness.’” The seeming inclusiveness of this narrative concealed an entrenched homogenous
elite position in which “Hindu and Indian [were] interchangeable” and whose “upper-caste
location… [was] naturalized into invisibility” (65). George argues that the erasure of the
specificities of identity was so successful that Malgudi came to represent a generic Indian
(middle-class) childhood, “instantly recognized as every Indian’s childhood with the usual
allowances made for fictionalization” (77). This is particularly true after Swami and Friends and
other Malgudi books were adapted as a television series in the 80s, Malgudi Days, whose
9
Narayan’s was a realism of assumed transparencies. George shows that while he could adopt a sophisticated and
ironic style when writing for the foreign press, the simplicity of language, plot, and resolutions that constituted his
realism “were contrived with such a great degree of success that they were assumed to be ‘natural’ attributes of
his personality and writing style.” The success and popularity of his novels is substantially attributable to this
‘simple’ style.
27
immense popularity established the mythological status of Malgudi in the Indian middle-class
imagination. Says George about the Narayan’s cultural power:
In the years after independence, Malgudi had become the unviolated/inviolable India of
the Indian bourgeois nationalist fantasy and was replicated as such in the diasporic
imagination […And it] continues to serve as the best example of this serenely consumed
fantasy. Not that places like Malgudi or childhoods like Swami’s did not exist, but that
Narayan offered his readership the chance to partake of a very particular experience as
the heritage and legacy of every Indian, regardless of region, religion, caste, class, or
gender. Hence, to be socially reproduced as an urban, modern Indian was to accept this
rendition of one’s roots and to find complete satisfaction in Narayan’s picture of a
benevolent, caste-ordered, Hindu world. Thus […] Narayan’s Malgudi became the map
of a lovingly remembered and equally idealized past that was formative of “Indianness”
the world over (77).
10
Thus, for George, Malgudi is a potent mythology that draws a range of subjects—even and
especially those whose childhoods were nothing like Swami’s—into its fold by positing a deeply
particularized Hindu elite upper-caste identity as a generic and idealized ‘Indianness.’ This
Indianness is then available to those subjects marked by caste or class or gender who, having
nonetheless ‘achieved’ Indian modernity, can now ‘remember’ and revel in its idealized origins.
It is a fascinating reading that explains the continuing cultural appeal of Malgudi while also
10
George’s reading is borne out by borne out by an analysis of obituaries, fierce defenses of Narayan’s work by his
readers, and frequent instances of nostalgia for Malgudi Days in the popular (diasporic as well as resident)
imagination.
28
gesturing to the IE novel’s capacity to elicit consent for its erasures of region, religion, class,
gender, and especially caste.
Narayan’s contemporary, Mulk Raj Anand, whose seminal novel Untouchable was also
published in 1935, offers an illustrative counterpoint. Spanning a day in the life of a low-caste
‘untouchable’ toilet-sweeper Bakha, this unusual novel narrates his self-formation as a
Bildungsroman framed by the nationalist politics of the time. Caught between the Hindu caste
system and colonial modernity, Bakha should not have been an accessible subject to chart, but
the novel narrates him as suspiciously mappable. For instance, Bakha is disgusted at the thought
of consuming cooked food touched by other hands. While this may appear to be a general and
widespread feeling, it has a special, ritualized status in upper-caste Hinduism, for which it
signifies taboo. But as the novel shows, for members of the untouchable castes like Bakha, it was
not taboo, since they were often forced to subsist on leftover food collected from the community
they were forced to serve. Bakha’s disgust toward this food thus encodes a distinctly high-caste
Hindu feeling; in other words, it is Anand’s disgust, not Bakha’s. Thus, even a novel that is
explicitly about the atrocity of caste practices—a novel that purportedly focalizes Bakha and
writes him ‘from the inside,’ cannot hide its own disgust for the lower-caste ways of life. A
similar elite sensibility is in play when Anand writes Bakha as yearning for an English education.
Bakha has a fervent desire to “feel how it [feels] to read” that prompts him to buy an English
primer (39); he thus becomes Anand’s mouthpiece for the official nationalist discourse that
emphasizes education as the path to emancipation. Finally—and most significantly—Anand
writes Bakha as clean and beautiful, despite the demands of scavenging. In Anand’s words,
Bakha possesses a “queer sort of beauty” (20):
29
“What a dexterous workman,” the onlooker would have said. And though [Bakha’s] job
was dirty he remained comparatively clean. He didn’t even soil his sleeves, handling the
commodes, sweeping and scrubbing them. ‘A bit superior for his job,’ they always said,
‘not the kind of man who ought to be doing this.’ For he looked intelligent, even
sensitive, with a sort of dignity that does not belong to the ordinary scavenger, who is as
a rule uncouth and unclean (16).
[…]
His dark face, round and solid and exquisitely well defined, lit with a queer sort of
beauty. The toil of the body had built up for him a very fine physique. It seemed to suit
him, to give a homogeneity, a wonderful wholeness to his body, so that you could turn
around and say: ‘Here is a man.’ And it seemed to give him a nobility, strangely in
contrast with his filthy profession and with the sub-human status to which he was
condemned from birth (20).
Such aestheticization is central to Untouchable’s politics of subaltern representation. The
language of exception pervades the novel, describing Bakha as beautiful, clean, honest, just, and
intelligent, able to rise above his material circumstances unlike the other shrunken and defeated
untouchables in the community. It is thus not Bakha as abject but Bakha as he emerges both into
an abstract liberal conception of the human and the nationalist notion of the good subaltern that
Anand celebrates. It is only in this tempering of Bakha’s wretchedness, this aestheticization of
his mind and body, does he become knowable and palatable, a realizable novelistic subject. In
stark contrast is the depiction of his brother Rakha, whose brief appearances in the novel unleash
the full force of its loathing toward a “true child of the outcaste colony” (84):
30
[Rakha’s] tattered flannel shirt, grimy with the blowings of his ever-running nose,
obstructed his walk slightly. The discomfort resulting from this, the fatigue, assumed or
genuine, due to the work he had put in that morning, gave a rather drawn, long-jawed
look to his dirty face on which the flies congregated in abundance to taste of the sweet
delights of the saliva on the corners of his lips. The quizzical, not-there look defined by
his small eyes and his narrow, very narrow forehead, was positively ugly…He seemed a
true child of the outcaste colony…He had wallowed in its mire, bathed in its marshes,
played among its rubbish-heaps; his listless, lazy, lousy manner was a result of his
surroundings (84).
In this alternative, repulsed imagination of the outcaste lies the key to Untouchable’s ambiguous
representational politics, which leaves the silence of the ‘true outcaste’ undisturbed even as the
nationalist project of preparing for sovereignty and self-rule gets underway.
My purpose in discussing these erasures in the works of the two major early IE novelists,
Anand and Narayan, is to demonstrate the nature and origins of the IE novel’s long history of
profound difficultly with representing heterogenous, non-elite, and subaltern identities,
particularly casteized consciousnesses, as properly realized novelistic subjects or characters with
identifiable inner lives. While this difficulty continued to be in evidence throughout the IE
novel’s career, my interest lies in the 80s and 90s—the period immediately preceding the current
phase of representation—as a point of comparison. Below are some examples.
Upamanyu Chatterjee’s landmark novel English, August: An Indian Story, set in the 80s
and published in 1988, is a remarkable instance of an IE novel that consciously highlights its
own ineligibility to write subaltern subjectivities. It is focalized through 24-year-old Agastya
Sen—elite, urban, anglicized, and perpetually high—who, having recently joined the prestigious
31
Indian Administrative Services as a novice bureaucrat, finds himself in a small town called
Madna in the Indian heartland, a place he cannot comprehend or inhabit, and one he does not
care to get to know. A bureaucrat himself, the novelist Chatterjee has a keen and often comic eye
for the absurdities of small-town India, but unlike the gentle spirit of Narayan, which watches
over Malgudi with avuncular benevolence, Chatterjee describes a place gutted by poverty,
bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, and chaos in what reviewers have aptly called “savage”
prose. But mostly Chatterjee describes the inner life of an idiosyncratic and perpetually confused
Agastya, who has lived all his life in Delhi or Kolkata, studied literature in the English medium
in premier institutions that carry the legacy of colonial education, and is wholly out of place in
the semi-urban/rural Indian heartland. Spending his days in a haze of daydreams, masturbation,
and marijuana and alcohol, Agastya (or August, the name he goes by) sounds like an
unsympathetic character, but Chatterjee’s meticulous detailing of his profound alienation from
the subaltern spaces he is expected to administer struck a note with a generation of Anglicized
and globalizing Indian readers discovering their own distance from subalternity. In fact, English,
August has among the most accomplished renditions of interiority in IE writing, which makes its
sparse representations of the subaltern subjects who flit in and out of its pages that much more
striking.
Unlike in the works of Anand and Narayan, Chatterjee is aware of this disparity; his
novel dramatizes its own inability to narrate subaltern subjects by depicting Agastya’s attitudes
toward subalternity as uncomprehending and ignorant. This is particularly true with regard to an
incident of horrific violence toward the close of the novel: a group of ‘tribals’—indigenous
people living in forests with nearly no access to education, healthcare, or governance; that is,
classic subalterns—attacks a bureaucrat for molesting a tribal woman, cutting off both his arms
32
as punishment. Agastya and the other officials in the area, as well as journalists and activists,
discuss the incident thus:
Quotations from Mao tumbled out of their mouths alongside excited analyses of the tribal
dilemma. These tribals needed help to think, they said, because they felt anchorless in the
new world. “You have seen how simple they are” (291).
[…]
[Agastya said:] “Don't keep calling them simple, your attitude is condescending. They are
not merely simple, they are also extremely violent… Don't say they are simple, say they
are different, that's all.” …‘If [the bureaucrat] seduced a tribal woman, surely it was
equally true that she liked the seduction.” He stopped, out of a kind of bewilderment.
…[L]ater, around a huge fire near the jeep, the tribals danced for him. The men drank
some kind of tari (a local brew). “They used to drink all day,” breathed Rao hotly into
[Agastya’s] ear, “before we came. Their children began drinking it at six months. They
didn't know” (292-293).
[…]
The women danced, arm in arm in one row, a slow monotonous shuffle to a single
arrhythmic drum […] [Agastya] watched them, an orange sheen on black skin, shy smiles
at one another, faces turned to their feet, and he dreaded their innocence, for it was
dangerous, so tempting to corrupt.
The lights of two [water] tankers were seen in the distance. The dance broke up with
drunken yells of joy” (293).
Agastya and his companions’ attitudes toward the tribals swing wildly between simplistic
conceptions—they are simple or violent, seductive or innocent, ignorant or deceptive, powerless
33
or savage, joyous or drunk and dissolute, and so on—as though the novel, unable to render a
plausible subaltern perspective, were debating the very question of subaltern representability in
its pages. But the lack of complexity in these elite attitudes, as well as the “bewilderment” with
which they are articulated, effectively renders the scene a parody of serious debate. It is thus that
the IE novel, in a rendition focalized entirely through an elite subject, admits to and dramatizes
its own lack of knowledge of subaltern subjectivities, its inability to render even brief sketches
with conviction.
Not all IE writing of the time practices such self-consciousness. Consider the following
scene from Vikram Seth’s massive historical tome, A Suitable Boy (1993), a sort of Austenian
study of manners set in the newly independent India of the 1950s, whose key characters belong
to the middle and upper classes. In the scene, Haresh, a foreman at a Czech shoe company with
operations in India—an early instance of multinational capital—visits a colony of leather-
workers with his friend Kedarnath, a shoe trader. Having studied footwear technology in
England, Haresh is curious about local processes of leather-work and shoemaking. The colony is
inhabited by members of the chamar caste, an ‘untouchable’ social group whose traditional
occupation was tanning—the treating of animal hides to make leather—which was considered
‘impure’ and ‘polluting’ by caste Hindus. Haresh and Kedarnath, both upper-caste Hindus but
also secular moderns, are less interested in questions of caste pollution than in observing the
tanning process. But they are unprepared for the colony’s utter desolation:
[Haresh and Kedarnath] entered the warren of stinking paths and low huts, led by their
noses towards the tanning pits. The dirt paths stopped suddenly at a large open area
surrounded by shacks and pockmarked by circular pits which had been dug into the
ground and lined with hardened clay. A fearsome stench rose from the entire zone.
34
Haresh felt sick; Kedarnath almost vomited with disgust. The sun shone harshly down,
and the heat made the stench worse still. Some of the pits were filled with a white liquid,
others with a brown tannic brew. Dark, scrawny men dressed only in lungis stood to one
side of the pits, scraping off fat and hair from a pile of hides. One of them stood in a pit
and seemed to be wrestling with a large hide. A pig was drinking at a ditch filled with
stagnant black water. Two children with filthy matted hair were playing in the dust near
the pits (215).
Toral Jatin Gajarawala has identified this scene as an example of the Indian realist novel’s
practice of “smooth[ing] our transition to the specialized locations of poverty by sending us
along with an affable, middle-class narrator, or at least, middle-class positionality (135).” But
Haresh and Kedarnath, upper caste Hindus unfamiliar with the chamar colony, are far from ideal
guides to what is an utterly subaltern space, situated at the edge of town, isolated and ostracized,
and devoid of governance. The colony’s inhabitants too are silent, refusing to open themselves to
strangers; of those that do speak, one is drunk and demands money, and another assumes Haresh
and Kedarnath are from the government and complains about harsh duties on the leather trade as
well as harassment by local officials. When it becomes evident that Haresh and Kedarnath are
not government administrators but businessmen and traders, they fall under suspicion and are run
out of the colony, warned never to return. The novel’s brief excursion into subaltern space ends
thus, without the barest of information or insight into its subjects. The only connection Haresh
feels is to the crude tools of trade he observes, which fascinate him.
In contrast is the scene at the adjoining shoemaker’s colony that the two men visit next.
Marginally higher in the caste order than the leather-workers, the shoemakers are rendered more
visible by the proximity of their labor to capital. Haresh and Kedarnath discuss skills, materials,
35
deadlines, production costs, and standardization with a shoemaker, Jagat Ram, with whom they
also place an order for Haresh’s shoe company. The novel mentions Jagat Ram’s wife and
children and describes his workshop, but it is his labor, which feeds directly into the market, that
renders him visible. In Kedarnath’s words, Jagat Ram is unlike other shoemakers:
…[H]e has his own workshop. He’s reliable, unlike most of these shoemakers who, once
they have a bit of money in their pockets, don’t care about deadlines or promises. And
he’s skilled. And he doesn’t drink—not much. I began by giving him a small order for a
few dozen pairs, and he did a good job…now he is able to hire two or three people...
(215)
Later, when Haresh puts Jagat Ram’s skill to the test, he finds both the “mastery” of trained
shoemakers and a strong work ethic in the shoemaker’s performance. It is thus in his identity as
skilled laborer—an identity that capital can harness—and not as lower-caste shoemaker, that the
IE novel wants to see Jagat Ram. Unlike the leather-workers, who refuse the advances of capital
and trade and remain unreadable, Jagat Ram is representable in the secular modern IE novel to
the extent that he is incorporated into the logic of capital. As the chapters to follow will show,
this representational tendency of IE literary discourse becomes that much more pronounced
under globalization, even as caste remains a point of unreadability (Gajarawala 35).
The scenes from English, August and A Suitable Boy are just two representative examples
of the many, many erasures of the IE novel in the 80s and 90s; below I want to pause at one last
example before moving on to trace the trajectory of the problematic in the 2000s. The scene
below is from Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988), another landmark novel whose
investigation of the nation, nationalism, and borders in an increasingly transnational world was
central to postcolonial studies. In the scene, the narrator, who was ten years old, recalls
36
accompanying his middle-class Bengali family to visit poorer relatives—refugees from Dhaka
resettled in Kolkata—to a part of town he had never before seen. Looking out of from the
balcony of the relative’s house, he is confronted with the view of “little clumps of shanties”
surrounded by black pools of sludge. He sees women “squatting at the edges of the pools,
splashing with both hands to drive back the layers of sludge, scooping up the cleaner water
underneath to scrub their babies and wash their clothes and cooking utensils.” He also catches a
glimpse of a group of rag-pickers (131):
Running along the factory wall was a dump of some kind; small hillocks of some black
and gravelly substance sloped down from it towards the sludge-encrusted pools. Shading
my eyes, I saw that there were a number of moving figures dotted over those slopes. They
were very small at that distance, but I could tell they had sacks slung over their shoulders.
They were picking bits of rubble off the slopes and dropping them into their sacks. I
could only see them when they moved; when they were still they disappeared completely
– they were perfectly camouflaged, like chameleons, because everything on them, their
clothes, their sacks, their skins, was the uniform matt black of the sludge in the pools.
Our relative spotted me leaning on the railing and ran out. Don’t look there! she cried.
It’s dirty! Then she led me back inside. I went willingly: I was already well schooled in
looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility. (131, emphasis mine).
The scene is an important moment of reflection in the history of the IE novel. Embedded in a
novel whose central concerns are framed by the discourse and critique of the nation and the
experience of postcoloniality, the scene stages a confrontation of the bourgeois intelligentsia that
is the narrator’s family with the “disappearing” and “camouflaged” subaltern—glimpsed
intermittently and then dodged. It is thus that the IE novel, “prophet of modernity” and
37
“pedagogue of the people” (Sunder Rajan 204), deep in the midst of its focus on the nation and
national elite and immersed in describing the elite postcolonial condition, codes its inability to
know or render knowable a subaltern landscape.
As mentioned, these scenes are a few representative examples of the several erasures of
the IE novel. The emergence in the twenty-first century of (new) subaltern presence and voice in
the pages of IE literature is thus a dramatic occurrence. Two prominent examples are Adiga’s
The White Tiger and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, each written in the voice of a subaltern
character who is both protagonist and narrator. Given that despite its penetration into the
everyday worlds of India’s urban and semi-urban centers, English remains an elite literary
language, Adiga and Sinha invent elaborate fictional frames that involve speech, transcription,
and translation, as well as a transnational framework of reception, to advance a conceit of
subaltern speech. The White Tiger, a novel of self-formation, is written as a series of letters
(presumably translated from a recording) by entrepreneur Balram Halwai to a Chinese politician
in search of insights about how to replicate Indian entrepreneurial culture. It narrates Halwai’s
rise from bonded servant to wealthy and successful entrepreneur. Animal’s People is framed as a
series of tapes recorded in Hindi by a 19-year-old homeless boy injured and disabled by the
horrific Bhopal gas leak of 1984 (he has a spinal injury and walks on all fours, hence his name).
The gas leak in a pesticide factory in the town of Bhopal owned jointly by the US-based Union
Carbide India Ltd. and the Indian government exposed over 500,000 people to toxic gases,
killing thousands and leaving survivors ridden for decades by disability, environmental damage,
litigation, generational defects, and sustained exposure to toxic surroundings. Over the years, the
site of the disaster has received periodic attention in the international press. Animal’s People
narrates Animal’s experience of the disaster and its aftermath; the novel’s conceit is that Animal
38
records tapes in Hindi, which are then transcribed and translated into English and assembled into
a book by an Australian journalist without comment or intervention. Both novels are excessively
voluble, laying claim to a range of often offensive emotion and opinion, their protagonists
intemperate in their rage, lust, and defiance. But there is no hatred of the poor here, and no
sentimental idealization either, no “chain of sympathy” through which to easily access the
characters’ inner lives. While both protagonists are garrulous, neither is transparent, the novels
refusing the “transparent rendering of others” that is the mainstay of classical and social realism
(Gajarawala 39). In contrast, the novels function by setting the terms of engagement for their
affluent, English-speaking readers, terms that replace sentimentality, paternalism, and demands
for an inherently good subject with a claim to an equal world view and the right to narrate it.
Often, this implies a reversal of the habitual elite-subaltern exchange in the IE novel. For
instance, Animal’s People’s represents an encounter between a First World journalist and a Third
World subaltern subject as, unexpectedly, narrated by the latter. Similarly, in a reversal of the
familiar trope of middle-class narrators guiding readers into “specialized locations of poverty”
(131), in the scene below, Animal is the guide, leading a visiting American doctor to patients
affected by the gas leak. Also of note here is the text’s attempts at approximating Animal’s voice
by transliterating the English words he uses:
“Forget your doctress’s bag, forget you know Hindi, people will be shy to speak if they
know you can understand. Make out you’re some dumb fucking jarnalis [journalist].
Look around with big eyes. Sigh a lot, ask stupid questions in Inglis [English]. Then you
can see for yourself how things are.”
39
“Do we need an auto?” she asks…
“No more autos for you, Elli. You cannot enter the Kingdom of the Poor except on foot.
Come on, I’ll show you. Full tour. Everything. Follow me” (177).
Animal describes their tour into the colony not in terms of its dirt, filth, or desolation, as we have
seen the scenes above do, but in terms of Elli’s interactions with the inhabitants. It is only when
they reach the hovel where Animal lives that the language of repulsion, so common in elite
excursions into subaltern spaces in IE literature, is in evidence. In response to Elli’s repulsed
reaction to where he lives, Animal fumes:
“I’ll tell you what disgusts me about this place, which isn’t what disgusts you, such as
scorpions, filth, lack of hygiene, etc. It’s not that if I want a shit, I must visit the railway
line […] What really disgusts me is that we people seem so wretched to you outsiders
that you look at us with that so-soft expression, speak to us with that so-pious tone in
your voice.”
She asks very seriously, “Don’t people here deserve respect?”
“It’s not respect, is it? I can read feelings. People like you are fascinated by places like
this. It’s written all over you, all you folk from Amrika and Vilayat, jarnaliss,
filmwallass, photographass, anthrapologiss” (184).
This complaint about being forced to be part of a transnational set-up that demands a
performance of abjectness on the one hand and encourages spectatorship on the other supports a
reading of Animal’s People as an experiment in reversing the expectations of such a set-up.
Animal’s grievance against “jarnaliss, filmwallass, photographass, anthrapologiss” from Amrika
and Vilayat (Hindi for “foreign”) is a reminder that representations of poverty in twenty-first
century India are transnational and global affairs. The novel is less a paean to subaltern self-
40
representation—Animal is a ventriloquized by an elite writer after all—than an unpacking of the
discursive contexts of transnational engagements with Indian poverty in the new century, not
only in the foreign media but also in sites such as international aid agencies, humanitarian
organizations, activist and human rights groups, development initiatives, and transnational
citizen/subaltern solidarities. It is no wonder that subjects like Animal and Balram Halwai, The
White Tiger’s protagonist, appear to have little to no inner life; as chapter 3 will show, they are
imagined less as fully realized novelistic subjects than as emblems of neoliberal poverty and
subjectivity; in the conditions of their emergence
11
as well as in the conditions of their reception,
they are global subjects, constructed and received as such.
To reinforce this point, I want to draw attention to the status of caste in new IE realisms.
As seen above, the IE novel’s erasures of caste have been the most egregious, with critics
demonstrating that it evades caste by imbricating modernity with castelessness. Caste began as
and remained a point of unreadability in IE novel history, and this has not changed with twenty-
first century IE realisms. For instance, reading The White Tiger through a caste rather than class
lens, Toral Jatin Gajarawala recently demonstrated how caste is not a determinate category for
subject-formation for the novel even though it is an operative category in the protagonist
Balram’s world. Gajarawala’s reading of Balram as a middle-caste subject rather than casteless
subject of poverty reconfigures or at the very least complicates his narrative with caste rage, but
the novel sidesteps the question entirely. For Gajarawala, The White Tiger’s privileging of class
11
An American company was responsible for the gas leak that disabled Animal, while the “master” who shapes
Balram has lived and worked in New York. As for reception, Balram’s letters are addressed to the then Chinese
premier and Animal’s tapes are transcribed by an Australian journalist. In addition, the doctor who promises to fix
Animal’s spine is American.
41
conflict over caste makes it a typical instance of the Anglophone novel, which, she says,
demonstrates a “deep discomfort” with caste (144).
Following Gajarawala’s method of shifting focus from class to caste as a framework of
analysis in new IE realisms yields a surprising point: that while caste is often an operative
category in the world of the (new) subaltern subject being narrated, it is profoundly
underemphasized as a determinate category of subject-formation; often it does not figure as a
category at all. Consider this scene in Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing, a nonfiction account of
the life of a bar dancer before and after the ban on Mumbai dance bars in 2005. While caste is
part of the language and vocabulary of the book’s subjects, it does not figure in the book's
tracing of its subjects’ lives. The only explicit mention of caste at some length is the following
description of the most unwanted of bar dance customers:
But the worst customer barring none was the “chota mota chindi charmar chor.” This
peculiar dance bar phrase amalgamated the qualities that a dance bar considered most
undesirable—these included being stingy and of low caste, sometimes as low as that of
the girls themselves. A chamar chor was a misguided young man, most often in his late
teens or early twenties. He robbed things shiny and expensive-looking from his parents’
home and sold these to his friends or the petty thieves they knew, for what was known as
‘cheating ka paisa.’ He’d snatch cellphones casually laid on shop counters. Racing past
on a motorcycle, he’d tear purses from the arms of women in autorickshaws (45).
And so on. The subject of this narrative is unfortunate—he spends the petty money he steals in
the dance bars, then becomes indebted to the bar-owner, who exploits him for free labor or forces
him to participate in gang-wars, turning “a young, silly, petty thief” into a killer. Here again, in
the repeated use of the phrase “chamar chor” to describe this subject—chamar is a low-caste
42
designation—we see how caste becomes determinate, here of criminality and probably of a
premature death. As the narrator says, “If the chamar chor completed his bombay special (that is,
the killing assignment), there was no looking back. If he did not, there was no way back” (45).
Apart from this, there are no significant mentions of caste as an analytical category in
Beautiful Thing, which relies on an individualized account of its main subject, Leela, a bar
dancer, who emerges as a global subject at the close of the book in her pursuit of a dance job in
Dubai. Caste is thus not a determinate category for subject-formation in Faleiro’s book, except in
the case where it becomes overdetermined—to be a chamar chor, the book suggests, is to be as
good as dead. As will be seen in chapter 2, a similar example of overdetermination can be found
in Katherine Boo’s nonfictional Behind the Beautiful Forevers, whose one caste-determined
subject, also sketchily narrated, also ends up dead; subjects defined primarily by caste, when
they do appear in this body of postmillennial writing, die before they can be narrated. I think
these erasures are attributable to new IE realism’s enmeshment with the framework of global
capital, a framework into which caste is not easily translatable. In this formulation, caste
becomes the other of globalization and neoliberalism, which are the overarching narratives of
subaltern legibility in IE writing. That is, its subjects are narratable to the extent that they cohere
as unmarked global subjects, readable across transnational barriers.
V: Chapter descriptions
Chapter 1: Amitav Ghosh’s Subaltern Legibilities
This chapter re-examines the entrenched connection between death and theoretical
conceptualizations of subalternity in the context of neoliberalism. It reads Amitav Ghosh’s The
Hungry Tide, a novel set in the neoliberal present whose proverbially silent subaltern, Fokir,
remains inscrutable in death. But while death seals Fokir’s subalternity, it also enables the
43
incorporation of his family into the contemporary neoliberal economy. In the final scheme of the
novel, his family’s life is contingent upon Fokir’s death. Through a reading of the entrepreneur-
subaltern encounter in the novel—an encounter between narratives of exhausted selfhood and
individualist self-making—the chapter argues that Ghosh changes the terms of the debate over
subaltern representation by re-situating subalternity in the context of neoliberal narratives of
ambition and aspiration. It concludes with an analysis of ways in which some subaltern figures
become legible within the novel’s realist framework as others are doubly obscured.
Chapter 2: The Nonfiction ‘Novel’: Narrative Nonfiction and the Politics of Visibility
This chapter takes American journalist Katherine Boo’s account of a Mumbai slum, Behind the
Beautiful Forevers (2012) as its subject, situating it in the context of the contemporary discourse
of global poverty and examining the relationship between its author and her subaltern subjects.
Analyzing the book’s use of classic realist techniques, the chapter examines its negotiations of
voice and ventriloquism, omniscient narration and subject testimony, in light of Boo’s insistent
self-erasure from the text. It argues that while such self-erasure allows Boo to side-step the
dangers of exoticizing her subjects, the adoption of the third-person point of view, closely
resembling the omniscient narration of classic realism, imbues her with immense narratorial
control and authority and ends up undercutting her project of presenting an under-mediated
visibility.
Chapter 3: Entrepreneurs and Others: The White Tiger as Neoliberal Bildungsroman
This chapter reads Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, a novel of formation, through the
lens of the realist Bildungsroman. It proposes that the novel’s allegorical mode calls into play the
peculiar configuration of modern subject formation, national form, social organization, bourgeois
individualism, and democratic citizenship that constitutes the genre of the Bildungsroman, the
44
nineteenth century European novel form that originally posited a correspondence between self,
nation, and capitalist modernity. Suggesting that Adiga’s novel offers itself as a neoliberal
iteration of the genre, it shows that The White Tiger overturns traditional and established grounds
for modern personhood as posited by the Bildungsroman—education, social organization, and
national citizenship on the one hand and a fully realized inner life on the other—even as it
satirizes the bases of neoliberal selfhood, such as individualism, self-maximization, radical self-
interest, competition, and personal autonomy. Further, it will demonstrate that a distinctly non-
novelistic interiority—parodic, theatrical, consciously inauthentic—accompanies the
protagonist’s unconventional acquisition of upper class status. Reading The White Tiger as a
contemporary iteration of the Bildungsroman, particularly in its skepticism toward the value and
comforts of inner life, it argues that the novel exposes the perverse foundations of new India’s
fantasy of the perfect neoliberal subject: one who fully inhabits neoliberalism’s signature
subjectivity—entrepreneurship—in his public as well as private life.
45
Chapter 1
Amitav Ghosh’s Subaltern Legibilities
It is a critical commonplace in the field of postcolonial studies that the Indian English novel is a
nation-centric discourse. This preoccupation can be traced back to the origins of the genre
12
in
the periods immediately before and after Indian independence (1947), when writing in English
was called upon by a nationalist elite to “construct and consolidat[e] the image of a unified,
modernizing India for consumption both at home and abroad” (George 30). The argument goes
that the nation gave the IE novel “its earliest and most persistent thematic preoccupation, indeed,
its raison d'être” (Gopal 6); in a national public sphere where the English language itself was
associated with modernity, IE literary discourse was tasked with being both showcase and
repository of India’s secular modernity, in opposition to ethnic, linguistic, regional, caste, and
religious affiliations. This proximity between “nation and narration” intensified in the high
postcolonial years of the 1980s and 90s, after Salman Rushdie, in Midnight’s Children, invented
a protagonist born at the same moment as the modern Indian nation, plotting the narrative of his
self-formation and development along the lines of national history and destiny. While Midnight’s
Children and much of the IE literature that followed was critical of the Indian state, it remained
framed by and attached to the nation. As Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan puts it: “The paradox of the
postcolonial novel of nation lies typically in the deployment of nation as narrative material, in
combination with a critique of nationalism” (212).
Deploying the nation as narrative material locates the IE novel in a position of privilege
with regard to vernacular literatures, since it can claim to speak for and about the nation as a
12
Indian novels written in English date back to the late nineteenth century, although they were few and far
between. As a genre, the IE novel properly emerged in the mid-twentieth century.
46
whole. As Rosemary Marangoly George has argued, in the nation-building decades after
independence, IE literary discourse was central to the formation of an “Indian national literature”
for both a domestic and an international readership: a body of work not only “best presented in
English” but also reflecting “an elite Indian understanding of the relationship between nation,
identity, and literature” (1-2). As national literature, the nation-centric IE novel, “prophet of
modernity” (Rajan 204), was lifted above the purportedly parochial discourse of vernacular
literatures and anointed interpreter of the nation for Indian and transnational elites alike (George
16). In the course of its career, the nation-centric IE novel thus assembles, in Vivek
Dhareshwar’s striking phrase, an “autobiography of the secular”—by holding the specificities of
caste, region, gender, and religion-based identities under erasure (115). This implies that the IE
novel was not only written from a ruling class perspective for a ruling class readership; despite
the occasional (failed) attempt at representing subalternity, it was also written largely about
ruling class subjects, the colonial national elite and their descendants for whom the secular
nation was central to subject formation.
Among this dissertation’s central claims is that the advent of globalization and the
establishment of neoliberal culture has loosened the hold of the nation as the IE novel’s “most
persistent thematic preoccupation” (Gopal 6). It is not that the nation has disappeared, of course,
but that the colonial encounter and its postcolonial legacy that defined the nation and suffused
cultural production have been replaced by the encounter with global capital, even as the state has
become an “increasingly ambiguous and ambivalent point of articulation for subject formation in
response to neoliberal hegemony” (Johansen and Karl 208). My claim, as outlined in the
introduction, is that the formal consequence of a transnational global framework supplanting the
national is the emergence of a new denotative realism engaged in apprehending the changing
47
Indian landscape and narrating its most structurally vulnerable subjects. In the context of this
larger argument, this chapter proposes Amitav Ghosh’s 2005 canonical novel The Hungry Tide
as a major turning point in the IE novel’s trajectory.
I make the claim in three stages: first, I demonstrate that The Hungry Tide breaks away
from the nation-novel configuration and the ‘nation and narration’ paradigm by virtue of being
set in the utterly subaltern space of the Sundarban islands rather than in urban centers like
Mumbai or Delhi or in the more archetypical rural landscapes of Bihar or Uttar Pradesh. The
novel’s entrenchment in the specific physical, historical, and cultural context of the Sundarbans,
I argue, repudiates any attempt at reading it as national allegory. Second, I show that unlike the
IE novels of the 80s and 90s, for which subaltern subjectivity is an area of darkness (see
introduction for examples), The Hungry Tide confronts the IE novel’s representational limits—
but not by making an imaginative leap into the minds of its subaltern characters. Rather, it
approaches the question tangentially, narrating not the subaltern character’s inner life but her
particular enmeshments in the history, mythology, geography, environmental conditions, and
daily living practices of the place she inhabits. Here I also discuss Ghosh’s investment in
subaltern legibility in the context of its relationship with death, which has played a central role in
past theoretical and novelistic (dis)engagements with subalternity. Third, I argue that in The
Hungry Tide, the IE novel attempts a surrender of its authority and privilege as narrator and
interpreter of the nation by acknowledging its discourse of secular modernity as one of several
possible narratives, rather than the sort of ‘omniscience’ conferred on it by its status as national
literature. Ghosh does this, I show, by experimenting with the realist convention of omniscient
narration, which he deploys experimentally, such that The Hungry Tide’s secular narrative voice
periodically relinquishes control to poetic, mythological, folkloric, and simply ‘other’ voices,
48
thus breaking up the illusion of totality that omniscient narration creates and scaling back the
authority of the secular narrative tradition of the IE novel.
This discussion is framed by The Hungry Tide’s setting in the neoliberalizing landscape
of India in the early 2000s. The novel begins when two elite characters enter the subaltern space
of the Sundarbans: Kanai Dutt and Piyali (Piya) Roy. Kanai is a certified subject of new India: he
runs a company in Delhi that provides translators for embassies, businesses, and international aid
organizations and trains call center workers in “accent modification” (166). Originally from
Kolkata, he is part of India’s globalized elite: he travels abroad often, speaks six languages, and
is well-informed, well-heeled, and busy, his habitual stance an easy confidence in his “ability to
prevail in most circumstances” (4). Piya is an American cetologist of Indian origin whose
research on the Irrawady dolphin brings her to the Sundarbans. Trained in the discourse of
conservation and transnational humanitarian intervention, Piya brings with her a neoliberal
human and environmental rights framework. The novel’s other elite subjects are Kanai’s aunt
Nilima and her husband Nirmal, whose involvement in the Sundarbans began in the 1950s when,
committed to international socialism and interclass solidarities, they arrived in the islands to set
up in experimental classless society. While the experiment failed, the couple stayed on, although
Nirmal found it hard to reconcile the specificities of Lusibari with the revolutionary energies of
Marxism. When the novel begins, Nirmal has been dead for twenty years; Nilima, on the other
hand, made pragmatic forays into the community, working with local women to build a union
and set up a crafts center to sell their work in larger urban areas, wringing government support
for various outreach schemes, building a hospital and a Trust and generally establishing herself
as benefactor and village elder. In the novel’s schematic arrangement, Nilima represents the
discourse of neoliberal empowerment, particularly feminist neoliberal empowerment, which, as
49
Madhok and Rai have argued “coopt[s] and reformula[tes]… the feminist language of
empowerment…into one of a private striving enabled by active participation in market relations”
(649). The novel stages a series of encounters and networks of relationships between these elite
characters and the neoliberal discourses they represent on the one hand and its subaltern
characters, the fisherman Fokir and the nurse Moyna, as well as Fokir’s mother, Kusum, and
uncle, Horen, on the other. These elite-subaltern encounters are central to The Hungry Tide’s
narrative structure; in fact, their dynamics are visible in almost every scene.
What follows is a close reading of The Hungry Tide in order to support the claims above.
Given the novel’s epic historical and descriptive range and network of complex characters,
certain sections below are packed with summary and context. I have tried but only partially
succeeded in minimizing these instances.
I: Location, location, location
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) contains a section on the Sundarbans, an archipelago of
ecologically sensitive tidal islands and mangrove forests at the border of India and Bangladesh.
The forest in Rushdie’s novel is expressionistic, hallucinatory, shape-shifting, and baffling in its
physical and temporal disjointedness. While Rushdie’s narration is evidently a successful piece
of psychological realism in the ‘magic realist’ mode, the forest it depicts is entirely surreal, or
unreal; either way, it is merely a dramatic prop in the novel’s allegorical system. A quarter of a
century later, Amitav Ghosh set The Hungry Tide (2005) in the same forest, deploying a realist
narrative mode with precise physical, geological, and ethnographic descriptions
13
that root it in
the Sundarbans. In an interview after the publication of the novel, Ghosh says:
13
In fact, The Hungry Tide has become a canonical ecocritical text. While this is not my concern in this chapter, I
am struck by the ecocritics’ insistence about the exceptional nature of The Hungry Tide’s treatment of land and
50
[I]t always amazed me that people in Calcutta didn’t know much about the Sundarbans,
had no interest in it. It was a vast blankness, a sort of darkness […] I think one of the
reasons for this refusal to perceive is that in the popular imagination the Sundarbans was
a wilderness that had no narrative. It had no imaginative existence.
When I was writing The Hungry Tide, I would often think to myself: will the act of
writing this novel make this forest real? Will it give it an imaginative life? I do think to
some degree it has done that […] a narrative makes it possible for people to perceive and
think about places, and moments in time, that were previously unseen or invisible (Khan,
“History is at the Heart of the Novel”)
In pointing out that the islands are “vast blankness, a sort of darkness” for the residents of
Calcutta,
14
Ghosh highlights the utter marginality of the Sundarbans to the discourse and
imagination of the nation. The Sundarbans lie at the border between India and Bangladesh and
are among the most environmentally precarious and neglected places in the world. These islands
are regularly hit by cyclones from the Bay of Bengal; have little fresh water and thus poor
agriculture; little protection from the daily ebb and flow of the tide apart from crude mud walls
that break often; no industry to speak of; minimal electricity and other amenities; and are now
narrative. Jens Martin Gurr claims that “the text’s narrative and ecological concerns are interwoven” (70), that the
“entire plot literally grows out of the fundamental characteristics of the landscape” and that it “replicate key
features of the ecosystem” (70). Similarly, Roman Bartosch argues that the tide forms a “meta-structure of the
whole novel” (100-101). Alexa Weik reads The Hungry Tide in terms of “topophilia,” a term that “couples
sentiment with place” (Tuan quoted in Weik 122) and describes the affective bond between a natural environment
and its inhabitants. Sandra Meyer points to the ease of The Hungry Tide’s use of Rilke’s Duino Elegies; Rilke’s
poem, she says, stands alongside local mythology as a text that (in a phrase from the novel) “gives this land its life”
(159). This is just a selection from a body of ecocritical analysis that regards The Hungry Tide as unusual in its
linking of place and narrative.
14
The state capital of West Bengal, the state in which the Indian portion of the Sundarbans is located.
51
known to be in grave danger from rising sea levels. Most of the islanders live in “utter poverty,”
making do by fishing, honey-collecting, and subsistence farming (Jalais 2007: 3-4).
But the islands are usually associated not with deep impoverishment and
underdevelopment but with biodiversity. The more frequently deployed description is of the
Sundarban islands as a unique ecosystem supporting an exceptional degree of biodiversity, with
three wildlife sanctuaries and several acres of reserved forests for the protection of endangered
and rare species, including the Royal Bengal tiger. In tourism brochures as well as in
transnational wildlife conservation discourses that underpin organizations like the World
Wildlife Fund and the World Conservation Union, the language of biodiversity, an endangered
natural world, and environmental precarity obscures the equally precarious human presence on
the islands. As anthropologist Annu Jalais points out, there is a “long list of representations” of
the Sundarbans that sees its inhabitants as “superfluous,” or worse, a threat to its ecosystem.
State investment in these islands has been mostly in the form of conservation and tourism
initiatives that “illegitim[ize] and criminal[ize]” the local population (Jalais 2007: 7). For Jalais,
the Indian state and the global conservation discourse have consistently devalued human life in
the Sundarbans, their conservation efforts undertaken at the cost of rather than in collaboration
with the islanders.
All these particulars are salient to the plot and development of The Hungry Tide, to which
the choice of the Sundarbans as setting is central: unlike Rushdie’s psychological realism, which
could with a few adjustments be set in any generic forest, Ghosh’s narration is entrenched in the
local historical, environmental, and cultural conditions of the Sundarbans. It is also through these
details that the central subaltern character, Fokir, is outlined. In what follows I trace the violent
historical context that is Fokir’s inheritance and through which he is rendered.
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While The Hungry Tide is set in the early 2000s, it is haunted by an act of state violence
in 1979 which forms the novel’s historical backdrop. The incident, the eviction and massacre of
migrant settlers by the state machinery on the Sundarban island of Marichjhapi in 1979, is well
documented, though largely absent from public memory. In a sense it is a story of attachment to
place rather than nation, as well as a tale of dispossession in the name of national interest. Its
origins lie in the 1947 India-Pakistan partition, since which time, through the 50s, 60s, and,
subsequent to the formation of Bangladesh in 1971, the 70s, a large number of Bengali migrants,
largely poor lower-caste Hindus, entered the Indian state of West Bengal in search of a
livelihood. Coming from the former East Bengal, many of the migrants had ties to West Bengal
(relatives, language, familiar farming and weather patterns, and so on) but were prevented from
settling there; instead, they were dispersed to refugee colonies in states like Bihar, Orissa, and
Madhya Pradesh and forced to live and farm in unfamiliar, arid, and hostile environments
(Mallick 106). For instance, in the Dandakaranya camp in Madhya Pradesh, the migrants found
themselves in competition with the local tribal population for meagre resources even as they
struggled to cultivate the unfamiliar land. Maudood Elahi points out that the migrants were
“mostly cultivators accustomed to semi-aquatic and plain-land agriculture” and were unable to
adapt to the “rugged terrain and shallow soil of Dandakaranya” (220). Ross Mallick describes the
conditions in the refugee colonies as “prison camp conditions,” due to which thousands of
families perished of neglect and lack of relief supplies (Mallick 105).
In 1978, emboldened by the electoral victory of the Communist party Marxist (CPIM) in
West Bengal, a party that had consistently supported their petition to settle in the Sundarbans,
about 30,000 migrants left the Dandakaranya camp for a nearly uninhabited Sundarban island
called Morichjhapi. But the CPIM denied them permission to settle there, stating that the area
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was a Reserve Forest for wildlife and could not be farmed (Elahi 224). The settlers refused to
leave, putting down roots instead by establishing, over the course of about a year, “a viable
fishing industry, salt pans, a health center, and schools” (Mallick 107). In January 1979, in an
attempt at evacuation, the West Bengal government started an economic blockade to deprive the
settlers of food and water. Over the next few months, police and hired gangs destroyed granaries,
sunk boats, blocked medical treatment, and systematically starved the Morichjhapi setters
(Mallick 110). In May the operation intensified and several setters were raped and killed; in the
end, “at least several hundred men, women, and children” were killed and “their bodies [were]
dumped in the river” (Mallick 111). The area was evacuated, with many of the settlers forced
back to Dandakaranya and many others dead or missing. While figures have been hard to come
by because journalists were barred from the area, between 600-700 people are estimated to have
died either due to police firings or disease and starvation caused by the blockade (Jalais 2005,
2636). In subsequent years, the massacre was well documented, but there was no official
investigation and no charges were brought against those involved (Mallick 111).
Jalais, who has spent years working in areas around Morichjhapi, speaks of a continuing
sense of betrayal among the islanders with regard to the massacre, compounded by the fact that
the eviction was carried out in the name of environmental conservation (169). The government’s
prioritizing of conservation issues over people’s lives, backed as it was by plush sponsorship
from the World Wildlife Fund whose approach was focused on the landscape and its biodiversity
rather than human-animal co-habitation, is at the root of the islanders’ grievance (Mallick 115).
Jalais and Mallick both point out that the price of conservation efforts like WWF’s tiger
protection project is paid by the poorest of local populations, which are the most affected in
terms of evictions and displacements, denial of access to land and forests, unequal distribution of
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resources, and vulnerability to animal attacks (Mallick 118; Jalais 2008). On the Indian side of
the Sundarbans, for instance, an estimated 36-40 people are killed each year by tigers, a number
on the rise because people have been venturing deeper into the forest in search of honey and food
since climate change has diminished fish population in the rivers (Vidal 2008; Ethirajan 2012).
In turn, islanders have developed ways of cornering and killing tigers that enter villages in search
of prey (Vidal 2008). Conservation efforts in the area, backed by international aid agencies, are
directed at protecting the tiger rather than finding ways of dealing with the conflict. Jalais coins
the term “cosmopolitan tiger” to describe the human-tiger conflict in the islands to highlight the
prevalence of Western-centric conservation models in Third World contexts. She points out that
the popularity of these animals in the Global North, encouraged by organizations like the World
Wildlife Fund, World Conservation Union, and even Walt Disney animations has perpetuated a
global concern for their protection, which, while in itself admirable, ignores the question of their
co-habitation with humans and suppresses “alternative ways of understanding…wildlife” (Jalais
2008; 26). It also attracts large funds for the protection of the animals that are usually applied in
ways that harm those most dependent on the forests for their livelihoods (Mallick 118).
It is this place, with its deep legacies of violence, dispossession, and denial of livelihood
that provides an outline of the fisherman Fokir, in whose traumatic personal history are gathered
the historical and sociopolitical forces that have devastated life in the islands. Before Fokir was
born, his grandfather, a fisherman, was hunted and killed by a tiger while gathering firewood in a
reserve forest, and his grandmother, seeking work in neighboring Dhanbad, was sold into
prostitution. When Fokir was five, he witnessed his mother Kusum's death in the Morichjhapi
massacre; by that time, his father, a disabled migrant laborer who sold food to passengers at the
Dhanbad railway station, was already dead, pulled under the wheels of a train while waiting to be
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paid.
Fokir himself lives a precarious life, getting by on subsistence crab fishing—a forbidden
activity for which he is harassed by Forest Department officials—and risking attacks by tigers
and crocodiles. By the end of the novel, he too is dead, killed in a cyclone, a frequent cause of
death in these islands, which are under intense threat due to climate change. While these events
unravel in fragments, read together they present a chain of suffering, with each succeeding
generation unable to throw off its tragic legacy and each life shaped by oppressive state
mechanisms—massacre, displacement, harassment, deprival of livelihood, denial of land rights,
and environmental marginalization. For Fokir, who is untouched by institutional apparatuses
(educational, industrial, medical), contact with the state only results in disaster while, in
accordance with classic conceptions of the subaltern, the spaces of his subject-formation remain
obscure. A vivid memory of his mother, entangled with the mythology of the islands, provides
some glimpses, and events in the novel make it possible to put together a rough, obvious sort of
knowledge about him, but every time Piya or Kanai think they can grasp Fokir, they are proved
wrong—Fokir is neither the intuitive ecologist of Piya's imagination nor the listless simpleton
Kanai takes him to be. We are warned not to assume we can see Fokir, even as clues and
suggestions gather around him; the character is rendered almost entirely through the overlap of
his harrowing personal history with the history of the region. In all other ways the solitary Fokir
is the proverbial silent subaltern. He spends days in his boat on the waters, does not participate in
common social exchange, shuns money, eats what he catches, and lives by the rhythms of the
forest. He appears to develop a bond with Piya, but its nature, whether emotional or sexual or
both, is unclear, and although the fact that he dies protecting her from the flying debris of a
cyclone during a field expedition might contain a posthumous message of love, the message is
confused by his last words, which are the names of his wife and child. Again, in accordance with
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classic conceptions of the subaltern (see below), death seals the obscurity of Fokir's life, leaving
his character unreadable.
Several scenes in the novel attest to Fokir’s inscrutability and otherness. For instance,
Piya finds herself unable to settle into an impression about him, as here:
…he tilted his head back and sang a few notes. The melody surprised her, for it bore no
resemblance to any Indian music she had ever heard before—neither the Hindi film
music her father liked nor the Bengali songs her mother had sometimes sung. His voice
sounded almost hoarse and it seemed to crack and sob as it roamed the notes. There was a
suggestion of grief in it that unsettled and disturbed her.
She had thought that she had seen a muscular quality of innocence in him, a likable kind
of naïveté, but now, listening to this song, she began to ask herself whether it was she
who was naïve (83).
Sometimes he is described as a strange creature, as in the scene below:
Kanai too was watching Fokir. “I thought only parrots could sit like that,” he said to Piya
in a whispered aside.
It was then that Piya noticed that Fokir was not squatting on the floor as she had thought.
There was a raised lintel at the bottom of the doorframe and it was on this that he had
seated himself, squatting on his haunches and using his toes to grip the wood, like a bird
perching on the bar of a cage (54).
Elsewhere, he is described as “boulderlike:”
The boat rocked as if under the shifting of someone’s weight, and [Piya] glanced down to
see that Fokir was sitting up in the center of the craft with a blanket draped tent-like
around his shoulders. She had thought him to be asleep under the shelter, but there was a
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boulderlike immobility about him which suggested that he had been sitting there for some
time (92).
These descriptions lend Fokir a strange nonhuman air, as if he were part of the natural landscape
rather than the human world. He is also deeply familiar with the rhythms of the natural world,
able to predict the hunting and migration patterns of the Irrawady dolphins, much to Piya’s
delight. These peculiarities and opacities come in sharp contrast to the depiction of his wife,
Moyna. A trainee nurse in the hospital, Moyna has been schooled by Nilima in the language of
empowerment and self-making. She is competent, ambitious, and worldly; in contrast to Fokir,
she has a “sure grasp of the world and how to get by in it” (112). Disappointed in Fokir and
impatient with her circumstances, Moyna appears in the novel as a fiery figure, charged with
ambition and “desire as richly and completely imagined as a novel or a poem” (112). Kanai, the
quintessential entrepreneur, is sympathetic to Moyna’s drive to “better [her]self”: for him,
meeting her “in a place like Lusibari” is a “validation of the choices he had made in his own life”
(183):
It was important for [Kanai] to believe that his values were, at bottom, egalitarian, liberal,
meritocratic. It reassured him to be able to think, ‘What I want for myself is no different
from what everybody wants, no matter how rich or poor; everyone who has any drive,
any energy wants to get on in the world—Moyna is the proof.’...[T]his was a looking-
glass in which a man like Fokir could never be anything other than a figure glimpsed
through a rear-view mirror, a rapidly diminishing presence, a ghost from the perpetual
past that was Lusibari. But…despite its newness and energy, the country Kanai inhabited
was full of these ghosts, these unseen presences whose murmurings could never quite be
silenced no matter how loud you spoke (Ghosh 183).
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Thus does the narrative of new India, here upheld by Kanai, only see echoes of itself even in its
exhausted margins, even as aspirations in these margins are increasingly shaped by the new
enterprise ethic. It is against this logic of ambition and visibility that Fokir’s discordant life and
death are thrown into relief.
II: The Elite-Subaltern Encounter
Much of The Hungry Tide’s action occurs in the form of the dynamics of elite-subaltern
encounters. The novel stages the encounter between a combination of globalized, diasporic, elite,
and neoliberal sensibilities, the subjects of both economic privilege and culture capital, and a
marginalized, disinherited, refugee condition, brutalized and abandoned by the state, and “always
a part of the past” (165). While Piya and Fokir form a bond, and while, in the previous
generation, Nirmal falls in love with Fokir’s mother Kusum, the central encounter in the novel is
between Kanai and Fokir. Kanai comes to Lusibari with an extreme form of confidence born of
his entrepreneur status in new India; his attitude towards Fokir, when they meet, is a combination
of condescension, intimidation, and dismissal, an unthinking display of power. In the passage
below, Kanai, a large and self-assured presence, is mediating the hiring of a silent Fokir as a
guide for Piya’s research. Fokir is disengaged from the conversation; Piya notices that he appears
shrunken and reduced in Kanai and Moyna’s presence, “as if he didn’t exist” seemingly
“accustomed to being treated as if he were invisible” (Ghosh 173-4).
…Kanai went up to Fokir and said, in a loud, hearty voice, attempting friendliness, “Ha-
re Fokir; do you know me? I’m Mashima’s nephew, Kanai Dutt.” Fokir made no answer,
so Kanai added, ‘Has anyone told you that I knew your mother?’
At this Fokir tipped his head back. Now, looking him full in the face for the first time,
Kanai was startled by the closeness of his resemblance to Kusum: he could see her
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likeness in the set of his jaw, in the deep-set, opaque eyes, even in his hair and the way he
held himself. But Fokir, it seemed, had no interest in pursuing the conversation. After
briefly locking eyes with Kanai, he looked away without answering his question. Kanai
glared at him for a moment, then shuffled his feet and went back to his chair.
What was that about, said Piya.
“I was just trying to break the ice,” said Kanai. “I told him I knew his mother.”
“His mother? You know her?”
“I did,” said Kanai. “She’s dead now. I met her when I came here as a boy.”
“Did you tell him that?”
“I tried to,” said Kanai with a smile, “but he gave me pretty short shrift.”
Piya nodded. She hadn’t understood what had passed between the two men, but there was
no mistaking the condescension in Kanai’s voice as he was speaking to Fokir: it was the
kind of tone in which someone might address a dimwitted waiter, at once jocular and
hectoring. It didn’t surprise her that Fokir had responded with what was clearly his
instinctive mode of defense: silence (174-5).
Fokir’s rejection of the role of rural simpleton that Kanai assigns him is a refusal to surrender to
Kanai’s self-presentation as superior and more important. Fokir also rebuffs Kanai’s mention of
his mother Kusum, perhaps since he understands it not only as a pretense at friendliness but also
a travesty of Kusum’s memory; after all, Kanai is the favored subject of history and Kusum (who
was killed in Morichjhapi massacre) its victim, her tragic legacy etched on Fokir’s face.
This is the first of two encounters between Kanai and Fokir that are staged as
confrontations between the neoliberal subject of privilege and its impoverished, disinherited
other. In the second encounter, toward the close of the novel, their confrontation is more overt,
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bringing out the link between Kanai’s privilege and Fokir’s history of loss. Foreshadowed by a
dream Kanai has about “taking the same examination over and over again” (260), the incident is
structured like a mythological test of courage, will, or goodness, not so much an academic exam
as a “pariksha,” a “trial by ordeal” (260). This becomes literally true when Kanai and Fokir,
tasked with spotting dolphins for Piya, find themselves on the shore of the island of Garjontola, a
place named after the garjon tree but also associated with the tiger: the word garjon means “to
roar.” Since Fokir’s grandfather once survived a night there, the island has stood in local
mythology as a place of judgment. As Fokir and Kanai approach it, Fokir, in whose “barrier of
silence” there has been a “small opening” (262) due to an afternoon spent together, spots the
fresh foot-marks of a tiger on the shore. The finding prompts a question about Kanai’s ethics:
“Are you a clean man, Kanai-babu?”
Kanai sat up, startled. “What do you mean?”
Fokir shrugged. “You know—are you good at heart?”
“I think so,” Kanai said. “My intentions are good, anyway. As for the rest, who knows?”
“But don’t you want to know for sure?”
“How can anyone know for sure?”
“My mother used to say that here in Garjontola, Bon Bibi [the local goddess] would show
you whatever you wanted to know” (267).
A few minutes later, Fokir cements the stakes of their being in Garjontola: “No one who is good
at heart has anything to fear in this place,” he says, goading Kanai further inland (268). The
comment ties Kanai’s ethical choices to his fate on the island, setting up Garjontola as a
mythological place of judgment and punishment. Kanai’s hesitation in claiming an ethical life—
his “intentions are good, anyway,” but he cannot vouch for his actions and their consequences—
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places him in danger within this logic, and as the action proceeds he becomes increasingly
uncertain of himself. Fokir changes too, growing stronger, more defined, unlike his earlier,
“utterly unformed” self: “it was as though in stepping onto the island, the authority of their
positions had been reversed” (268).
Focalized wholly through Kanai, the scene takes on an eerie charge as it proceeds, with
the otherwise passive Fokir beginning to appear uncharacteristically menacing, seemingly taking
pleasure in Kanai’s discomfort. Confronted by the possibility of a tiger attack, the threat of Fokir,
and the structure of final judgment, Kanai experiences an unprecedented loss of control.
Tripping in the wet mud near the shore, he looks up at a smiling Fokir offering to pull him up
and suddenly the “blood rushes to his head”:
…obscenities began to pour from his mouth. Shala, banchod, shuorer bachcha.
His anger came welling up with an atavistic explosiveness, rising from sources whose
very existence he would have denied: the master’s suspicion of the menial; the pride of
caste; the townsman’s mistrust of the rustic; the city’s antagonism toward the village. He
had thought he had cleansed himself of these sediments of the past, but the violence with
which they spewed out of him now suggested that they had only be compacted into an
explosive and highly volatile reserve (269).
Kanai is thus brought to a point of horrible self-recognition through this distillation of his
position in the social hierarchy. The egalitarian and liberal values he holds dear crumble in the
face of his “atavistic” anger, a specific, historical emotion spouting from his deep class and caste
privilege. His hostility to Fokir, so far suppressed, unleashes itself here, and he realizes that it is
a hostility born not of mere personal dislike but from Fokir’s refusal to play the role of a low-
caste, low-class “menial” that Kanai has unconsciously assigned him. It is a moment of self-
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knowledge that also gives Kanai a glimpse of Fokir’s vision of him, a glimpse of himself
“through another set of eyes”:
…it was as though [Kanai’s] own vision were being refracted through those opaque,
unreadable eyes and he were seeing not himself, Kanai Dutt, but a great host of people—
a double for the outside world, someone standing in for the men who had destroyed
Fokir’s village, burnt his home and killed his mother; he had become a token for a vision
of human beings in which a man such as Fokir counted for nothing, a man whose value
was less than that of an animal. In seeing himself in this way, it seemed perfectly
comprehensible to Kanai why Fokir should want him to be dead—but he understood also
that this was not how it would be. Fokir had brought him here not because he wanted him
to die, but because he wanted him to be judged (270).
As Pablo Mukherjee has observed, this submission to the “subaltern gaze” is also the “giving up
of the claims to metropolitan power relations” (153). Seeing himself through Fokir’s eyes, Kanai
is forced into an admission of his complicity with the systems and networks of oppression to
which Fokir is subject. It is thus, through an emphasis on the depths of the nexus between power
and privilege, the perpetuation of legacies of powerlessness, and the repudiation of individual
ethical responsibility under neoliberalism, that The Hungry Tide highlights the links between the
success of a businessman in Delhi and the impoverishing of a fisherman in the Sundarbans.
The question of ethical judgment is further dramatized when Kanai, having sent Fokir
away by spewing curses at him, finds himself alone in Garjontola. The strange charge of the
chapter intensifies here, hinting at but never confirming a dream-like sense of unreality, of fear-
induced hallucination. Alone on the island, reeling with new self-knowledge, and still under the
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spell of the mythological logic of final judgment, Kanai is vividly aware of his vulnerability to a
tiger or crocodile attack. Then comes this terrifying moment of judgment:
[Kanai] opened his eyes and there it was, directly ahead, a few hundred feet away. It was
sitting on its haunches with its head up, watching him with its tawny, flickering eyes. The
upper parts of its coat were of a color that shone like gold in the sunlight, but its belly
was dark and caked with mud. It was immense, of a size larger than he could have
imagined, and the only parts of its body that were moving were its eyes and the tip of its
tail (272).
As the tiger watches, Kanai retreats and runs, heading back to the shore, there to be met by Piya,
Fokir, and Fokir’s uncle Horen. The dream-like intensity of the chapter ends here: not only does
Piya answer Kanai’s complaint about having been left alone on the island “so long” by pointing
out that he was there just ten minutes, Horen and Fokir counter Kanai’s report of the incident by
claiming that “there was nothing there. We looked…” (273). Horen also insists that Kanai could
not have survived an encounter with one of the famously man-eating tigers of the Sundarbans:
“If it had been there, you wouldn’t be here now” (273). Evidently Kanai was deeply unsettled by
his experience of the island, completely “out of his element,” his sense of time confused, his
paranoia activated. But, though the question has frequently engaged reviewers, the scene is
hardly about whether Kanai ‘really’ saw a tiger. Rather, I want to suggest that the appearance of
the tiger draws together a number of scattered issues, fusing the novel’s separate narrative
strands: 1) the logic of the omniscient narrative voice 2) the mythological and folkloric logic of
the legend of Bon Bibi, the forest goddess, part of the lifeworld of the islanders 3) the violent
history of the island, including its original wound—the massacre—and the transnational
underpinnings of the human-tiger conflict.
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To distinguish the stakes of these narratives, it is useful to view them through Dipesh
Charabarty’s notion, following Max Webber, of the way the “secular” and “disenchanted”
language of disciplinary history translates “lifeworlds” in which “gods, spirits, or the
supernatural have agency”:
Secular histories are usually produced by ignoring the signs of these presences [gods,
spirits, the supernatural]. Such histories represent a meeting of two systems of thought,
one in which the world is ultimately, that is, in the final analysis, disenchanted, and the
other in which humans are not the only meaningful agents. For the purpose of writing
history, the first system, the secular one, translates the second into itself (72).
The first system, written in “natural, homogeneous, secular, calendrical time,” takes for granted a
“modern historical consciousness” (101) and translates difference into the secular terminology of
the social sciences. Thus a plethora of specific gods get translated into “culture” or “religion,”
means of production narratives into capitalist teleologies, and all times and temporalities into
chronological and calendrical time. In this code, “claims about agency on behalf of the religious,
the supernatural, the divine, and the ghostly have to be mediated in terms of this universal”
(Chakrabarty 103). For Chakrabarty, writing about the presence of gods and spirits in the secular
language of this system is translating “into a universal language that which belongs to a field of
differences” (103). The point is part of a larger critique of historicism and the teleologies
inherent in disciplinary historical thinking, and its ultimate plea is for the interrogation of this
thinking in such a way that “we have at least a glimpse of its own finitude, a glimpse of what
might constitute an outside to it” (103).
Chakrabarty’s larger argument, continuous with Spivak’s, is that disciplinary knowledge
formed in the European tradition—which enmeshes modernity, the nation, capitalism, and
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bourgeois individualism—is anchored and framed by the nation-state; it cannot grasp “other
narratives of the self and community” that do not look to the nation-state as “the ultimate
construction of reality” (64). My interest in this is to ponder its implications for the IE novel,
which also, as we saw in the introduction, is deeply attached to the nation as the ultimate
framework for subject-formation and interpretation, as well as to the secular “disenchanted”
discourse of modernity. IE writing, as we have seen, has historically seen itself as emblem and
repository of India’s secular modernity, writing an “autobiography of the secular…self”
(Dhareshwar 115).
I want to suggest here that The Hungry Tide attempts to hold up both the secular
discourse of the IE novel and the enchanted discourse of non-secular lifeworlds—like the legend
of the goddess Bon Bibi, whose existence functions at the level of fact, not belief, in the islanders
lives. First, it thematizes the question, as for instance when Nirmal dismisses the islanders’ belief
in the legend of the goddess Bon Bibi as “false consciousness” (184), or when the young Kanai
is “unable to suppress the snort of laughter” at Horen’s matter-of-fact belief in Bon Bibi’s
influence over “all the animals of the jungle” (24). Nirmal’s response to Kanai’s derision is
telling: “Kanai! Don’t act like you know everything. You’re not in Calcutta now” (25). The
rebuke demonstrates the arrogance of the secular framework, implicit in the invoking of Calcutta
as a stand-in for a progressive national modernity as opposed to the ‘enchanted’ space of the
Sundarbans (“don’t act like you know everything”). Of course, the authority of panoramic
formations like the IE novel or disciplinary history lies in their “act[ing] like they know
everything”; Ghosh’s novel, I want to suggest, draws back from this authority by surrendering—
if briefly—the preeminence of the secular discourse over the enchanted.
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The Hungry Tide’s omniscient narrative voice is secular, elite, and cosmopolitan,
focalized only through Kanai, Piya, or Nirmal, never through any of its subaltern characters. The
narrative effect is of dispassionate description, compounded by the inclusion of scientific
discourse in the form of cetalogical history and method, the social history of modern human
settlement on the islands, and accounts of the human-tiger conflict. On occasion, this narrative
interacts with the ‘enchanted’ lifeworld of the island, where the presence of the forest goddess
Bon Bibi is treated as a matter of fact, and the same subjects—the origins of human habitation in
the islands, the daily appearance of dolphins at a tidal pool near Garjontola, the sharing of
territory between humans and tigers—are explained and understood mythologically, through
legend, song, and prayer. The novel’s translations of this mythology—from Bengali and Arabic
to English, from song to prose, through detailed descriptions of local theatrical performances—
while incomplete, decline to deploy a secular, disenchanted and flattened language to translate
them, working instead with rhythms, rhymes, cadences, and other such inflections. Thus The
Hungry Tide’s omniscient narrative voice—secular, descriptive, chronological, and rational—
periodically relinquishes control to poetic, mythological, folkloric, and simply ‘other’ voices:
Nirmal’s notebook, Fokir’s song in Kanai’s verse translation, Kusum’s narration of the
Morichjhapi resistance, and the Bon Bibi Johurnama are set up as testimonials within the novel,
framed but not narrated by the omniscient narrative voice. It is thus that The Hungry Tide breaks
up the illusion of totality that omniscient narration creates and scales back the authority of the
secular narrative tradition of the IE novel.
Despite the often inelegant attempts at a non-secular translation, however, the
metatextual context of an IE novel translating folklore for a cosmopolitan and global readership
calls attention to an inherent hierarchy. The scene in which Kanai encounters the tiger addresses
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this hierarchy: not only does the appearance of the tiger cohere within both the secular and
enchanted logics, these narrative strands are fused in order to bring out the question of Kanai’s
ethics. That is, the tiger episode can be read as part of the mythological logic of judgment that
Fokir advances, or it can be read in terms of the problematic nature of human-animal conflict in
the Sundarbans. Kanai, who has thus far always ‘acted like he knows everything,’ finds himself
not knowing how to read the episode, given the force of the mythological narrative as well as his
own suspicion that he might not be a good man after all. Neither does he know whether he really
saw a tiger. Thus Kanai’s utter unraveling at the episode is induced by the intrusion of the
mythological into his thus far coherent elite and secular self; through this logic, what could have
been a chance encounter with a tiger in tiger country—alarming in itself—also becomes an
occasion for ethical self-examination and psychological undoing. (As Kanai later writes to Piya,
“At Garjontola I learned how little I know of myself and the world” (291)). In the fact that the
question of whether he really saw a tiger is left open, the novel admits both readings, and the
hierarchy of the secular over the enchanted is—briefly—dismantled.
In the hands of a more mournful writer, Kanai’s undoing may have led to madness, but in
Ghosh’s schematic closure it becomes the site for a transformation of sorts. While the incident
prompts Kanai into returning to his life in Delhi to gather himself on his “own ground” (276), his
last act before leaving is a love letter to Piya that is also a significant act of translation. Earlier in
the novel, Piya had asked Kanai to translate a paean to Bon Bibi that Fokir had been taught as a
child and sang often, an old hymn in Bangla that was “deeply interpenetrated by Arabic and
Persian” (204). At that time, Kanai, citing the difficulty of the languages involved, had been
unable to provide a translation. It is this song, the myth of the origins of human habitation in the
Sundarbans, the “story that gave this land its life” (292), that Kanai now translates for Piya. It is
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an act of translation inextricable from Fokir, whose presence pervades it. As Kanai says in a note
accompanying the translation:
[The song] lives in him [Fokir] and in some way, perhaps, it still plays a part in making
him the person he is. This is my gift to you, this story that is also a song, these words that
are a part of Fokir. Such flaws as are in my rendering of it I do not regret, for perhaps
they will prevent me from fading from sight, as a good translator should. For once, I shall
be glad if my imperfections render me visible (292).
Kanai’s paradoxical anxiety about becoming invisible in relation to Fokir—as Fokir was once
invisible to Kanai—brings out not so much a reversal of their positions as the effect of the
experience of radical vulnerability in Garjontola on Kanai. The experience prompts him to
rethink his life and ultimately results in his scaling back his business to make time to translate
literature, a long-time personal desire. Kanai’s transformation—from the brusque, competent,
all-knowing, and often impatient entrepreneur at the novel’s beginning to the quiet, subdued, and
vulnerable translator at its close, which indicates a shift away from the instrumental ethics of
neoliberalism, is part of what I call The Hungry Tide’s fantasy ending, a point to which we will
return below.
But what of Fokir, whose emergence into visibility is no more than a faint trace? While
Fokir’s effect on Kanai and Piya may have been transformative, not much is said of their effect
on him. Instead, death seals his subalternity, and while the incident may be accidental—he dies
protecting Piya from the flying debris of a cyclone during a field expedition—its place in the
final scheme of the novel, in accordance with Li’s point, follows a sacrificial logic. Fokir’s
continuing disengagement from the prevailing neoliberal narrative renders his a life that
“count[s] for nothing” (270), and it is evident that his refusal to participate in the logic of
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neoliberal self-maximization is hindering his wife Moyna and his son Tultul’s incorporation into
it. Through the sacrifice of Fokir, the closural logic of The Hungry Tide presents a grim
conclusion: in the final scheme of the novel, Moyna’s extraction from subalternity is contingent
upon Fokir’s death. This is because his death not only frees Moyna, it also galvanizes Piya into
raising an international fund for Moyna and Tultul. The story of Fokir’s death circulates through
Piya’s cosmopolitan networks, moving enough people to raise money to buy Moyna a house and
secure Tultul a college education. It is thus, through the loss of her husband, that Moyna is lifted
from her state of impossible aspiration and propelled onto the “long road to hegemony,” a
journey that, while “necessary and desirable,” is fraught with loss and ambiguity (Spivak 217).
Fokir’s death thus enables his family to join the new economic order, underscoring the costs of
the kind of self-determination on offer in neoliberal India.
Moyna is not the only ‘winner’ in this narrative. As stated, in the novel’s closing pages,
Kanai revives his love for literary translation, scaling back (but not dismantling) his translation
and “accent modification” (166) business. Piya is devastated by Fokir’s death but rallies by
raising money for Moyna and Tultul. Moreover, she has a record of Fokir’s vast knowledge
about dolphin behavior and migration patterns, which she uses to obtain a grant to allow her to
work long-term in the Sundarbans. She understands from her experience with Fokir, however,
that the well-being of the local population must be considered in any such research; to this end,
she proposes working with the locals rather than bringing in other researchers. She also hires
Moyna to manage the grant, besides proposing to teach her English. Nilima too is satisfied,
thrilled at the prospect of employment and funding for Lusibari. In this exceptionally happy
ending, whose outcomes—Kanai’s continuing business, Moyna’s incorporation, Piya’s
transnational humanitarian fund-raising—are imbricated in the discourse of neoliberalism, each
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character benefits from Fokir’s death. The Hungry Tide thus demonstrates that neoliberalism is
indeed a narrative of happiness—for those able and willing to accept it. Those who do not must
fade, from its material worlds as well as its fantasies.
III: Death and the Subaltern
An addendum to the discussion of The Hungry Tide, this section examines the relationship
between death and subalternity. As discussed in the introduction, the largescale incorporation of
subaltern populations into the new market economy of the twenty-first century has changed the
contours of subalternity. The emergence of “new subalterns,” “who are not outside of circuits of
power but integrated into them in problematic ways” (Roy and Gunvald, “New Subaltern
Politics”), calls for an examination of the conditions under which the figure of the subaltern
emerges into visibility. As outlined in the introduction, Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak’s
intervention in “Can the Subaltern Speak”? draws attention to heterogeneous consciousnesses
that cannot be read along macrological structures of visibility like the nation, patriarchy,
imperialism, colonialism, and so on. The title of the essay, whose polemics have over the years
lent it to much satirizing, is in fact narrowly qualified in the text: “On the other side of the
international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the
epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, can
the subaltern speak?” (37) That is, can subaltern populations of the global south, constituted by
heterogeneous particularities that remain uninscribed along structures of visibility such as the
nation-state, colonialism, and globalization and denied access to the global north (that can only
hear dominant regional and local groups), be received and read across the International Division
of Labor? Moreover, given the pluralities that constitute subaltern consciousness, can Theory,
History, and the Novel claim its legibility and transparency?
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Spivak’s controversial example of sati, the practice of widow self-immolation, the
prevalence of which in colonial Bengal in the nineteenth century her essay analyzes as the site of
subaltern consciousness, is framed by this attention to the standardizing gestures of global
capital. Her claim is that the consciousness of the woman committing sati cannot be mapped by
the logic of colonialism, nationalism, or patriarchy and might thus carry an unarticulated (and
unarticulable) “model of interventionist practice” (63)—what resistance outside capital might
look like. Resistance in this conception is different from the rights-based discourse and protest
politics that liberal critical theory recognizes as resistance. Spivak’s analysis of sati is an attempt
to grasp the contours of this resistance, which lies at the very limit point of knowledge. However,
critics have argued that the reason it is impossible to conceive of or imagine is because the
subject of sati, by definition, immolates herself. They point out that in all its examples,
subalternity is linked to death: the subaltern subject is not unreadable because she cannot be
mapped but because, at the point at which she can be read as subaltern, death seals her
unreadability.
The other illustrative example of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Bhubaneshwari Bhaduri,
also throws up the same problem. The case goes thus: 16-year old Bhaduri committed suicide in
her father’s house in 1926. She left no note, but Spivak reads the fact that Bhaduri was
menstruating when she died as a sign that she was not pregnant—a necessary clarification at a
time when suicides by young women were commonly attributed to illegitimate passion. Spivak
also reads this as a reversal of sati: widows could not jump into their husbands’ funeral pyre if
they were menstruating but had to wait to be ‘clean’; Bhaduri waited until she started to
menstruate to commit suicide. But as Spivak points out, Bhaduri’s “intervention” in the narrative
of sati failed, for despite her “displacing gesture” (63), the suicide was still seen as the result of
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an inappropriate love affair, and it was only a decade later that Bhaduri’s involvement with a
revolutionary freedom-fighting group and its relation to her suicide came to light. Even after this
revelation, Spivak finds that members of Bhaduri’s family continue to attribute her death to illicit
love; Bhaduri’s attempt to control the message by “inscribing” it on her body has failed: “the
subaltern cannot speak” (187).
The example has been controversial, partly because the educated, middle-class Bhaduri
does not fit the traditional description of the subaltern. Spivak’s choice of her case may have
been an illustrative instance rather than a historical point, but the point has stuck, and
commentators have emphasized that the reading of Bhaduri as subaltern is predicated upon her
death—that death confers subaltern status upon her. In fact, as Victor Li argues,
conceptualizations of the subaltern have long been haunted by death. Li suggests that the concept
involves a sacrificial logic: it is only in death that the subaltern can securely be interpreted as
inaccessible. For Li, not only does death seal the subaltern’s alterity, but the concept “involves a
disturbing necroidealism and abandons the messiness and ambiguity of actual struggles for the
reassurance of a political ideal” (280). On the other hand, Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan has argued
that death is not “subject-constitutive” in the discourse of subalternity; rather, it is the subaltern’s
“volition, desire, and state of being immediately preceding such a death that structure her
subjectivity” (117). For Sunder Rajan, it is possible to dissociate death from subalternity, an
imaginative exercise she undertakes by identifying “‘traces’ of subalternity in the living.
How does the subaltern emerge into visibility, agency, ordinariness? What does a
subaltern delinked from death look like? This part of the chapter unpacks this question by
identifying “traces of subalternity” in living characters in a more recent Amitav Ghosh novel,
Sea of Poppies (2008). Reading an episode of sati narrated in Sea of Poppies, it uses Spivak’s
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terms—with their reference points of patriarchy-imperialism on the one hand and agency-
resistance on the other—to unpack it. Part 1 of a trilogy, set in eighteenth and nineteenth century
India against the backdrop of the opium trade between the British Empire and China, Sea of
Poppies is a flamboyant novel that takes Indian colonial history as its subject, working in the
space of transition between feudalism and mercantilism to capitalism. As Paresh Chandra has
remarked, the novel “narrates the exposure of Indian people to capitalist demands. […T]he
centre of Ghosh's work is the reconfiguration of the colonised subjectivity under the influence of
colonialism” (Chandra “A Review”). Sea of Poppies is thus set in a moment somewhat
analogous to the present moment in India: the reconfiguration of subjectivities in their encounter
with global capital. The link between the two moments is especially apparent when the advent of
modern Western imperialism is understood not only in terms of the experience of colonization
and the emergence of nationalisms but as the beginnings of “the global operation of a single
mode of production, namely the capitalist one” (Ahmad 103). Set during these beginnings, Sea of
Poppies narrates the passage of “coolies” or indentured laborers who were transported from
India to sugar plantations in places like the Caribbean, Mauritius, and Fiji to replace newly
emancipated slaves in the nineteenth century. These were epic journeys, often undertaken,
particularly by women, to escape the exploitative patriarchal feudal set-up in India, although life
on the other side as plantation workers was also—maybe equally—hard. As Pankaj Mishra puts
it, these journeys reveal the “bitterly paradoxical nature of colonial modernity: the unbearable
dialectic between enslavement and liberation.”
Sea of Poppies takes the story of one such journey as its subject. It begins with a
depiction of opium cultivation in what is now Uttar Pradesh, where employees of the East India
Company have systematically forced out subsistence agriculture and replaced it with the labor-
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intensive farming of poppy seeds in order to feed opium factories exporting to China. Early in
the novel comes this familiar structure of exploitation and nexus, with the logic of capital in full
evidence, dismantling subsistence structures in the name of market demand:
[The laborious cultivation of opium]… was bearable when you had a patch or two of
poppies—but what sane person would want to multiply these labors when there were
better, more useful crops to grow, like wheat, dal, vegetables? But those toothsome
winter crops were steadily shrinking on acreage: now the factory’s appetite for opium
seemed never to be sated. Come the cold weather, the English sahibs would allow little
else to be planted; their agents would go from home to home, forcing cash advances on
the farmers, making them sign asami contracts. It was impossible to say no to them: if
you refused they would leave their silver hidden in your house, or throw it through a
window. It was no use telling the white magistrate that you hadn’t accepted the money
and your thumbprint was forged; he earned commissions on the opium and would never
let you off. And, at the end of it, your earnings would come to no more than three-and-a-
half sicca rupees, just about enough to pay off your advance (28).
Caught in this trap is Deeti, an impoverished poppy farmer whose meager life is
disrupted by her opium-addicted and unloving husband’s impending death. Flung from the
dubious protection of marriage, Deeti anticipates an even more difficult life as a widow. Add to
this a villainous brother-in-law, Chandan Singh, who has raped her, fathered her child and will,
after her husband’s death, have control over her, and Deeti’s diminished life lays bare the
exploitation embedded in both traditional patriarchy and emerging imperialism (which are also
Spivak’s coordinates for mapping—or the failure of mapping—the sati). Trapped and desperate
to escape Chandan Singh, Deeti announces during a spat with him that she will burn herself on
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her husband’s pyre rather than submit to him. The words are powerful: Chandan Singh taunts her
for her “big-big words” (155) but backs off in the end, and Deeti begins to see sati-suicide as a
way out of her desperate situation. It is a decision born neither of devotion to her husband nor of
images of eternal wedded bliss in heaven, the traditional justifications for sati (always framed, as
Spivak points out, by the assertion that the women want to die), but of her loathing for Chandan
Singh:
There was a part of Deeti’s mind that acknowledged the reasonableness of [Chandan
Singh’s] proposal—but by this time her loathing of her brother-in-law had reached such a
pitch that she knew she would not be able to make her own body obey the terms of the
bargain, even if she were to accede to it. …Listen to my words: [she said] I will burn on
my husband’s pyre rather than give myself to you (Ghosh 154).
That the decision to commit sati is coded not by scriptural sanction but in terms of sexual
freedom and a refusal to “give [her]self”—a refusal based on disgust rather than fidelity to
marriage or sexual ‘purity’—shifts the discourse of sati from its traditional terms of the good
wife to questions of autonomy and selfhood. In her essay Spivak identifies two sentences as
circumscribing the discourse of sati—“White men saving brown women from brown men” (the
institution of colonial law against sati) and “The woman wanted to die” (the location of woman’s
free will in self-immolation)— both of which she deems inadequate and overdetermined as
readings of the sati’s consciousness. In Deeti’s case, neither of these apply: the English sahibs of
the area are in fact complicit in the sati-suicide, and Deeti’s reasons for choosing to self-
immolate do not follow the sanctioned script, making any foreclosure of the meaning along
scriptural lines impossible. In Sea of Poppies, then, the subaltern woman’s consciousness, lost
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somewhere between patriarchy and imperialism—the two poles around which, according to
Spivak, the unfreedom of sati revolves—begins to gain a slow visibility.
Plot summary will take this further. On the day of the immolation, a heavily drugged
Deeti is carried to the pyre by family members, but Kalua, a low-caste ox-cart driver, between
Deeti and whom there exists an impossible sympathy and attraction (Deeti belongs to a higher
caste), plots an elaborate rescue. In an unabashedly heroic move, he launches a surprise attack on
the funeral, snatches Deeti from the flaming pyre, and rows her away in a raft. Hunted and on the
run, the couple travel wide but cannot find work in a region impoverished by the poppy trade, so
they are relieved to be recruited as coolies to work on the sugar plantations in the island of
Mareech (Mauritius). Along with a group indentured laborers, they set sail to Mauritius in a ship
called the Ibis, owned by a British trader and manned not only by an American second mate but
also a motley crew of international lascars, ship-workers who speak a pidgin mix of English,
Bengali, and Chinese. The Ibis carries a vast cast of heterogeneous subjectivities: a dethroned
royal zamindar and a half-Indian, half-Chinese opium addict as prisoners, the Bengali-speaking
daughter of a French botanist posing first as a Bengali migrant and then as a lascar boy, a
fanatical Hindu devotee with the desire to build a temple in Mauritius, the leader of the lascars
who has traveled the world, a closeted gay first mate, and so on—a jumble of nationalities,
identities and half-identities, heterogeneous subjectivities that come to interact in unexpected
ways under the new and overarching flows of colonial trade and capital.
Several emancipatory narratives are embedded in this journey. First, in keeping with the
shift in discourse from traditional structures of being toward self-making, Deeti finds herself
changed as she begins her new life:
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Even then she did not feel herself to be living in the same sense as before: a curious
feeling, of joy mixed with resignation, crept into her heart, for it was as if she really had
died and been delivered betimes in rebirth, to her next life: she had shed the body of the
old Deeti, with the burden of its karma; she had paid the price her stars had demanded of
her, and was free now to create a new destiny as she willed, with whom she chose... (175)
While the juxtaposition of autonomy and sexual desire is familiar, it is the discarding of received
ways of being in favor of the emancipatory discourse of liberal capitalism (choice, destiny, self-
making)—a language that anticipates Deeti and Kalua’s insertion into the global labor market—
that is more significant. Deeti is aware of this shift in consciousness, and aware too that it is the
workings of colonial trade and capital that grant her “her new life,” which begins the day she sets
eyes on the ship, the Ibis:
“…her new self, her new life, had been gestating all this while in the belly of this
creature, this vessel that was the Mother-Father of her new family, a great wooden mai-
bap, an adoptive ancestor and parent of dynasties yet to come: here she was, the Ibis”
(348).
Inevitably, though, the Ibis is not a vessel of emancipation. Deeti’s veneration of the Ibis, her
vision of it as liberator and producer of new lives, is countered not only by the cruelty enacted by
its officers on deck but also by its history as a slave ship (which lends the officers’ cruelty too a
history). The emancipation narrative is thus ridden with what Spivak has called “constitutive
contradictions.” But Deeti, whose helplessness under the old system had driven her to suicide,
here emerges as leader as well as representative voice of the coolies. Not only is she accorded the
status of an elder in the new community, she soon becomes visible to its regulators, who see her
as “inciting the others” (461).
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Deeti’s ascendency does not end with the end of Ibis’ journey; years later, in book 2 of
the trilogy, she returns as the head of a plantation “fami” (family) in Mauritius, still scolding,
negotiating, and managing her flock with authority. It is an authority derived not only from her
status on the Ibis and the voice she raised against the brutality there but also her visionary shrine,
where she has recorded in images the story of the events that led the laborers to Mauritius. In this
shrine—the “Memory-temple” (6)—Deeti has inscribed life-size narrative images both of the
events during the Ibis’ journey and the key characters of the novel. Combined with Deeti’s
prophetic vision, the shrine accords her the status of both narrator and representative of the group
of coolies. Add to this her established matriarchy of a vast family of workers on the islands, and
Deeti’s emergence from subalternity into visibility is complete. This occurs literally, in the
appearance of this evocative image in the novel:
Several photographs from this period of Deeti’s life have survived, including a couple of
beautiful silver-gelatin daguerrotypes. In one of them, taken in the Chowkey, Deeti is in
the foreground, still seated in her pus-pus, the feet of which are resting on the floor. She
is wearing a sari, but unlike the other women in the frame, she has allowed the ghungta to
drop from her head, baring her hair, which is a startling shade of white. Her sari’s anchal
hangs over her shoulder, weighted with a massive bunch of keys, the symbol of her
continuing mastery over the fami’s affairs. Her face is dark and round, lined with deep
cracks: the daguerreotype is detailed enough to give the viewer the illusion of being able
to feel the texture of her skin, which is that of crumpled, tough weatherworn leather. Her
hands are folded calmly in her lap, but there is nothing reposeful about the tilt of her
body: her lips are pursed tightly together and she is squinting fiercely at the camera. One
of her eyes, dimmed by cataracts, reflects the light blankly back to the lens, but the gaze
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of the other is sharp and piercing, the colour of the pupil a distinctive grey. (Ghosh 2008,
11)
Deeti’s self-possession and “mastery” are unmistakable, and unmistakably wrought by the self-
making possibilities and material embrace of the opportunities for autonomy that the imperial-
capitalist mode affords. Sea of Poppies thus offers an alternative narrative of subalternity, one
that involves what Spivak has called the “long road to hegemony.” However, in undercutting this
celebratory narrative with constitutive contradictions, the novel emphasizes not the emancipatory
potential of capitalism but its dialectic of selfhood. Finally, while Deeti’s subaltern
consciousness under sati remains unknown and unwritten, what is gained is a third pole,
autonomy and self-making under capitalism (the other two being patriarchy and imperialism),
around which the complexities of the question can cluster.
My purpose in offering this reading is to provide a contrast to The Hungry Tide’s
representation of Fokir. While The Hungry Tide does not voice Fokir’s thoughts—we have no
access to his interiority—Sea of Poppies sounds Deeti’s thoughts and traces her changing inner
life under capital. In other words, Sea of Poppies is an instance of subaltern ventriloquism, an
increasingly common feature of IE literature of the 2000s. Chapter 2 examines a similar narrative
frame—omniscient narration with subaltern ventriloquism—but in a nonfiction ‘novel,’
Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012).
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Chapter 2
The Nonfiction ‘Novel’: Narrative Nonfiction and the Politics of Visibility
Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People begins by staging an encounter between First World
journalist and Third World subaltern subject that is narrated, unexpectedly, by the latter. Sinha’s
19-year-old protagonist, Animal, was born a few days before the Bhopal Gas Disaster of 1984,
when a gas leak in a pesticide factory in the town of Bhopal, owned jointly by the US-based
Union Carbide India Ltd. and the Indian government, exposed over 500,000 people to toxic
gases, killing thousands and leaving survivors ridden for decades by disability, environmental
damage, litigation, and generational defects. Over the years the site of the disaster has received
periodic attention in the international press. The novel is set in 2004; Animal, whom the gas left
orphaned and disabled so that he walks on all fours (hence his name), is suspicious of foreign
journalists; he has sensed their “greed” and “hunger” (4) for stories of excess—of squalor,
suffering, and deformity—of which there are plenty in his neighborhood. When approached by
an Australian reporter offering to write about him, Animal initially refuses, arguing that none of
the books written about the disaster have changed anything; how would this be any different?
Sinha scripts a telling metaphor into the journalist’s response to Animal. The following account
of the exchange, narrated by Animal in the first person, is addressed to the journalist and
mediated by a translator, who speaks the first few lines:
“[The journalist] says it’s a big chance for you,” [the translator tells Animal]. “He will
write what you say in his book. Maybe you will become famous. Look at him, see his
eyes. He says thousands of other people are looking through his eyes. Think of that.”
I think of this awful idea. Your eyes full of eyes. Thousands staring at me through the
holes in your head. Their curiosity feels like acid on my skin.
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“What can I tell these eyes?” I demand…“What can I say that they will understand? Have
these thousands of eyes slept even one night in a place like this? Do these eyes shit in
railway tracks? When was the last time these eyes had nothing to eat? These cuntish eyes,
what do they know of our lives?” (7)
The grotesque image of thousands of eyes staring through the journalist’s at Animal aptly
metaphorizes subaltern representation in the scene of transnational reporting. It underlines both
the reporter’s large mediating role—the subaltern is seen ‘through his/her eyes’—and the
journalistic desire to be a transparent medium through which the realities of the world become
visible. It highlights the voyeurism of the watchers and the vulnerability of the watched. In
response, Animal demands control over his vulnerability; he stipulates that if he tells his story,
the resulting book must only contain his narrative, in his words (in translation from the Hindi),
with no journalistic commentary or intervention. This is the conceit of the novel: Animal speaks
his story over a period of time into tapes, which are later transcribed and translated, constituting
the entirety of the narrative.
It is thus that Sinha announces the project of Animal’s People: an investigation of
mechanisms of transnational subaltern visibility in twenty-first century India in the voice of a
garrulous and irreverent subaltern subject who sets his terms of engagement, laying claim to an
equal world view and the right to narrate it on a global stage. But Animal’s bid to snatch self-
representation from the jaws of representation does not necessarily imply success or agency: the
space between Animal and his readers, as he well knows, is rife with incomprehension and
opacity. The novel is less a paean to subaltern self-representation (Animal is a ventriloquized by
Sinha after all) than, among other things, an unpacking of the political and discursive contexts of
transnational engagements with Indian poverty in the new century, not only in the foreign media
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but also in sites such as international NGOs, economic and aid agencies, humanitarian
organizations, activist and human rights groups, development initiatives, and transnational
citizen/subaltern solidarities. The choice of Bhopal,
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which has over the years seen considerable
such activity around the medical, legal, and environmental ramifications of the gas leak, as the
novel’s geographical setting is thus apt. But Animal’s People is equally set in the geopolitical
context of “a new ‘global’ awareness of the problem of poverty” in the twenty-first century
against the backdrop of the widespread consolidation of neoliberal economic policies across the
globe (Gupta 13).
Sinha’s novel is part of a growing cluster of postmillennial Anglophone writing from and
about India that springs from this moment, approaching the problem of poverty through an
urgent but minute engagement with subaltern subjectivity that is unprecedented in the history of
the form. Novels like Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005), Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of
Loss (2006), Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us
(2006), and Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (2015),
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alongside a post-2010 wave of
literary nonfiction such as Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing (2010), Aman Sethi’s A Free Man
(2011), Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned (2011), Amitava Kumar’s Patna: A
Matter of Rats (2014), Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012), and, tangentially,
Rana Dasgupta’s Capital: The Explosion of Delhi (2014), are engaged in carving out a new
15
Sinha presents a barely fictionalized Bhopal he calls Khaufpur. Debjani Ganguly has characterized spectacular
spaces like Bhopal “deathworlds,” a formation that, she argues, forms a particular subset of the new “world
novel”: “The new world novel as a global literary form, I argue, has emerged at the intersection of post- 1989
geographies of violence, hyperconnectivity through advances in information technology, and the emergence of a
new humanitarian sensibility in a context where suffering has a presence in everyday life through the immediacy of
digital images” (Ganguly 145).
16
Sahota is a British citizen of Indian origin. The Year of the Runaways is set both in India and Britain, featuring an
undocumented dalit immigrant worker negotiating the sub-economies of London.
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politics and poetics of subaltern visibility within the transnational discourse on Indian poverty.
This is particularly discernable in the nonfiction, accounts obtained through years of shadowing
and interviewing slum-dwellers, bar dancers, sex-workers, hijras (a deeply reviled community of
transgendered individuals), manual laborers, garbage-pickers, subsistence farmers, prisoners, and
the homeless. Stemming from a proximity between elite writer and subaltern subject in an
exercise of what may be called “close writing,” this body of work repudiates broad-stroke
socioeconomic analysis as well as paternalism in favor of a detailed mapping of subaltern
subjectivities through descriptions of personal histories, work lives, labor practices, living
spaces, and speech as well as the meagre and largely repurposed materials, objects, and tools of
daily life. It is a practice different from ethnography in that it offers no disciplinary framework or
overt analysis, instead rendering narratively and anecdotally—and often mournfully—subjective
lives in the subaltern realm.
Such metonymic detailing of the daily apparatus of living—catalogs of the instruments
and contraptions of labor, minute descriptions of landscape and architecture, lists of belongings,
networks of relationships, and so on—alongside the use of ventriloquist techniques such as
omniscient narration, indirect discourse, reported speech, and quotations in a bid to construct
meticulous accounts of subjectivity render the emergent genre of literary nonfiction formally
resonant with classic realism. In fact, critics and reviewers have repeatedly compared this body
of work to the novels of Dickens, Zola, and Balzac, and indeed its faith in referentiality and
bildung, commitment to the primacy of individual experience, elaboration of social conditions,
and use of classic narrative techniques imply a recuperation of realist aesthetics (Sharlett, “Like a
Novel”). In a prescient comment in a 2011 article, Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan said of the genre
that it “inaugurate[d] a new realism in Indian Writing in English,” a form grounded in
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“experience, observation, research, involvement, and investigation” that translated the “burden of
nation” so heavily borne by the postcolonial Indian English novel into a “responsibility toward
the nation’s poor” (223-4). The literary nonfiction released in past five years confirms this; in it,
the writer’s pursuit of the subjective lives of the poor comes to stand in for the traditional Indian
English novel’s preoccupation with the nation. In literary nonfiction, which is shaped by the
forces of globalization rather than the legacies of colonialism (Sunder Rajan 224) and free of the
profound linguistic self-consciousness and reflexivity that marked the postcolonial period,
realism disassociates from nationalism and Orientalism (associations entrenched by postcolonial
theory) and opens itself up to experimentation. Assuming a formal starkness and a denotative
linguistic stance, it experiments with ventriloquizing subaltern voices in a nonfictional setting,
confronting anew the problematic of subaltern unknowability in an apparent bid to reverse what
Toral Gajarawala has called (Indian) “realism’s history of representational failures” (3).
That this experiment plays out in a transnational arena is integral to its constitution. As
mentioned, the twenty-first century has seen a heightened global awareness of the problem of
poverty (Gupta 13). The books mentioned above come partly in response: while they are situated
narratives of contemporary India, they also participate in a discourse on global poverty in the
context of the rapid spread of globalization and neoliberalism worldwide. They contextualize the
now familiar idea of India as a spectacular contradiction—massive economic growth alongside
extreme poverty—and engage the powerful wave of global approbation that imagines India as a
nascent neoliberal paradise. Further, Indian Anglophone writing, always something of a
transnational phenomenon given its elite, cosmopolitan, and diasporic practitioners, is now even
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more so:
17
rendering the postcolonial novel’s preoccupation with exile largely redundant, the
successful Anglophone writer today is part of a globalized elite world of frequent travel,
international education and employment, high mobility and ease of movement, faculty positions
at major universities, participation in the international literature festival circuit, and time divided
between multiple locations and residencies. While these writers—resident Indian, diasporic,
repatriated, or resident non-Indian,
18
or some combination of these—have some readership
within India, their work circulates more widely in the global North, featuring prominently in
bestseller lists and book clubs, reviewed in major publications, included in university syllabi and
Deans’ reading lists, and awarded prestigious international book awards. For instance, The
Beautiful and the Damned won the PEN American Center’s Open Book award; Beautiful Thing
was Time Out magazine's “Subcontinental Book of the Year,” one of the Economist’s and the
Guardian’s “Books of the Year,” and The Sunday Times “Best Travel Book of the Year”; A Free
Man was on the Oprah book club list; The White Tiger won the Man Booker Award; The Year of
the Runaways was nominated for the 2015 Man Booker; and Animal’s People was the winner of
the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book From Europe and South Asia. Besides, most of
these writers have studied and/or worked in the Global North: Sethi, Desai, Deb, and Adiga
studied at various points at Columbia University; Faleiro, who now lives in San Francisco, at the
University of Edinburgh; Sinha, a British copywriter of Indian origin, went to Pembroke College
17
As opposed to a whole new brood of IE writers like Anuja Chauhan, Chetan Bhagat, Amish Tripathi, and other
writers who don’t market their books transnationally and write exclusively for Indian audiences; their books are
translated widely into Indian vernacular languages.
18
In fact, the category of the “Indian writer in English” has always been blurred—Salman Rushdie left Bombay at
the age of eleven and never returned to live in India; the British historian William Dalrymple has lived in New Delhi
since 1989 and, in his capacity as organizer of the Jaipur Literature Festival, is central to the institution of Indian
English writing. The category has become only more porous given the ease of movement in the twenty-first
century.
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and lives in Sussex; Amitava Kumar, who teaches at Vassar College, studied at Syracuse and the
University of Minnesota; Rana Dasgupta, British of Indian origin, has lived in Delhi since 2001;
Amitav Ghosh, part of an older generation of writers, studied in Oxford and lives in New York,
and so on. Such profoundly transnational networks of production and reception raise the
questions of visibility that Animal poses at the beginning of this chapter: “What can I tell these
eyes? What can I say that they will understand?”
This lengthy list also signals the vast distance between elite writer and subaltern subject
that must be negotiated in order to achieve the “close writing” of subjectivities that literary
nonfiction aspires to. Unlike in the case of the fictional Animal, who insists on control over his
narrative, literary nonfiction ventriloquizes its real-life subjects in a bid to reconstruct their
speech. The choice of first or third-person narratorial perspective; the proportion of direct
quotations, reported speech, and free indirect discourse in the text; the decision to quote snatches
of dialogue directly in the vernacular; the playing up or suppression of the fact of translation—in
literary nonfiction, these narrative choices declare the degree of authority the writer exercises
over or cedes to her subjects’ speech. This chapter is a study of one such site of ventriloquism,
Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a nonfiction text that reproduces Animal’s
People’s narrative occasion of a foreign journalist’s desire to tell the subaltern subject’s story.
Staff writer for the New Yorker and Pulitzer prize awardee for covering poverty in the United
States, Boo is an American journalist whose account of life in the Mumbai slum Annawadi was
produced from over three years of ‘immersion’ reporting.
19
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
(henceforth Behind), published in 2012, has been hugely feted in the United States, winning the
19
Boo decided to write about poverty in India when she married an Indian academic and moved temporarily to
Mumbai in 2007.
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National Book Award for nonfiction as well as awards from PEN, the Los Angeles Times Book
Awards, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, while
also making the New York Times bestseller list and named book of the year by several
publications. In the UK, the book won the Oldie travel-writing award, was nominated for several
others, and was adapted and performed by National Theater. Boo has spoken in venues across
the globe since Behind’s publication, and the book has gained a prominent spot in the popular
discourse on poverty in the Global North. While Boo’s status as an outsider situates her work at
an angle to the books by Indian authors within the genre, it also emphasizes the global nature of
this discourse and offers a handy site for unpacking transnational visibilities. Moreover, Behind’s
formal choices directly engage the question of visibility: it imitates the classic realist novel in
form, reading less like journalism and more like a novel by Dickens,
20
by positing a disembodied
narrator and erasing Boo’s presence from the scene. As Boo explains in an interview, she wished
for a sort of maximum visibility for her subjects: “When you get to the last pages…I don’t want
you to think about me sitting beside Abdul [the protagonist] in that little garbage truck. I want
you to be thinking about Abdul” (Medina, “Q&A with Katherine”).
Behind’s deployment of realist techniques and its entrenchment in the discourses of
globalization and neoliberalism makes it an especially fertile instance of “new realism” as
Sunder Rajan describes it. Further, its use of omniscient narration and a ventriloquist technique
akin to free indirect discourse generate a new set of problematics for subaltern representation—
particularly the question of voice—in the new century. This chapter argues that Behind’s status
as a critique of neoliberalism is complicated by its imbrication in the neoliberal logics of
20
Minus the authorial intrusions!
Reviewers and readers have frequently invoked Balzac, Dickens, and Zola to describe Behind (Sharlett 196).
88
economic agency, individual autonomy, and regulatory human rights. Behind’s politics of
subaltern visibility, I want to suggest, are configured within the confines of the neoliberal
narrative, in that its subjects are narratable to the extent that they interact with and are framed by
neoliberal logics. This is not to indict Behind as aligned with these logics but to argue that its
critique is made from within a neoliberal framework rather than from some mythical outside.
Further, I argue that the singularity of Behind’s critique is its tragic vision of subalternity, which
cuts through current collective fantasies of the putative emancipatory potential of our time.
I: Tragic Tales
Addressing the question of subaltern ventriloquism in postmillennial literary nonfiction
necessitates an account of the changed stakes of representation in India in the new century. In
this section I will lay out these stakes in some detail. Literary nonfiction chronicling the very
poor has come of age at a time when the question of subaltern agency is deeply contested terrain.
On the one hand are proponents of the country’s new economic order for whom the subaltern is
freed from the “old restraints”—“family, caste, religious fatalism, Byzantine bureaucracy”
(Giridhardas)—by a market constituted as “inherently democratic and inclusive” (Murty 216),
offering unprecedented opportunities for entrepreneurial self-making. On the other is a critique
of the so-called free market as attended by deep and growing inequality, for which the subaltern
is a tragic figure eroded by state neglect, market exploitation, and societal disengagement. In
public discourse, while popular culture has established the entrepreneur as the paradigmatic
subjectivity of a triumphant post-reform nation (Murty 207), a marginal but robust critique has
repeatedly called attention to the exhaustion of life under its violent and exclusionist regimes.
The former narrative, while ubiquitous, is most cogently articulated by what Manu Goswami has
called the “neoliberal genre of emergence,” the popular narrative of India as a nation redeemed
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by free-market capitalism following the advent of economic reforms in the early 1990s
(commonly known as the “liberalization”) contained in postmillennial nonfiction such as
Gurcharan Das’s India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the
Global Information Age (2003), Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of
Modern India (2006), Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation
(2009), Patrick French’s India, A Portrait (2011, described by the author as an “intimate
biography of 1.2 billion people”), and Anand Giridharadas’s India Calling: An Intimate Portrait
of a Nation's Remaking (2011).
21
As the titles suggest, this body of commentary by first-world,
diasporic, and local pundits mythologizes ‘new’ India as a place “forever arriving, shining, and
booming” (Goswami, “The American Dream Outsourced”) and proclaims with varying degrees
of nuance a narrative of happiness—of “national renewal and re-emergence”—launched by the
liberalization (Murty 211). As Murty points out, subaltern agency is here defined not through
class or caste-based political mobilizations but through commerce, enterprise and consumerism
(216). It is a vision that reimagines the Indian poor as entrepreneurial, aspirational, consumerist,
and apolitical, in which the subaltern acquires agency as she, alongside the country’s cherished
software engineers, management professionals, and entrepreneurs, begins to “dream,” “desire,”
or “speak” in the “language of global capital” (216).
Contesting this narrative is a spectrum of critiques that highlights the intensified
inequality of the post-reform period. Coming from journalists, academics, writers, activists, and
environmentalists,
these critiques have posed an insistent challenge to the narrative of happiness
by highlighting the disconnection between economic growth and social progress and questioning
21
Among several others; this is an ever-proliferating genre.
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the notion of a market-fuelled subaltern agency.
22
Akhil Gupta, for instance, describes the
“massive political, administrative, and judicial (in)action” of the Indian state, which he claims
condemns an “estimated 250-450 million people to a premature and untimely death,” as
“thanatopolitics”—politics driven by death.
23
He sees India’s extreme poverty as a “direct and
culpable form of killing that is made possible by state policies and practices.” Gupta’s point is
that these deaths ought to be considered a “scandal” and a “tragedy,” on par with natural
disasters; he argues that the state’s belief in the market’s power to eradicate such immense
poverty is outrageous, akin to claiming that in the event of a natural disaster, instead of providing
relief and rehabilitation, the state should “concentrate on facilitating the rapid growth of the
economy so that the victims can at least find employment and help to better their own lives” (2).
As Gupta’s frustration illustrates, for critics of the post-reform ‘free’ market, the lives of the very
poor are lived in a continuous state of tragedy and precarity and cannot be thought in terms of
agency. For Gupta the consequences of such deadly poverty are “life-denying” (Gupta 2) in a
formulation similar to Abdul JanMohamad’s “death-bound subjectivity”: a subjectivity formed
“from infancy on, by the imminent and ubiquitous threat of death” (25).
24
This characterization of Indian poverty as tragic and death-bound brings out a crucial
difference between the two narratives of subaltern agency. David Scott’s conception of the
present as a tragic time, framed by the disappointments of the postcolonial era, is useful here.
22
In the words of Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, “The history of world development offers few other examples, if
any, of an economy growing so fast for so long with such limited results in terms of reducing human deprivations.”
23
In a concept similar to Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, which is based on the assumption that “the ultimate
expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and
who must die” (11).
24
JanMohamad employs this term to discuss subjectivities formed under slavery in America in the twentieth
century. Admittedly my invoking of the term in this entirely dissimilar context denies its specificity; my reason for
citing it is its focus on subject-formation under regimes of death (such as Annawadi) rather than, say, the more
biopolitical emphasis of a concept like Agamben’s bare life.
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Scott articulates this distinction in terms of Romantic and tragic narratives: the romance of the
“subaltern subject…[conceived of as] an agent who, with conscious intention, and by resisting or
overcoming the constraints of habitus…contributes to remaking her or his world from below”
and the tragedy of the ruin of this possibility, the failure of this agency (200-201, italics in
original). Scott argues that in assuming a teleology from oppression to emancipation, romance
“projects an imagined horizon toward emancipation for which the subaltern subject longs and
toward which he or she strives” (201). In this narrative, the self is “deontological,” ruptured and
extracted from its past, its relation to its own history “purely instrumental or utilitarian or
contingent (as opposed to constitutive)” (201). In tragedy, on the other hand, the self is enmeshed
in the past, “in contrast to the familiar constructivist emphasis on the self as little more than a
series of invented and therefore chooseable masks behind which lie an echoless vacancy” (Scott
214).
It is these conceptions of tragedy—Scott’s tragic sensibility as a corrective to the
romance of the ruptured, “deontological” (here neoliberal) self, Gupta’s contention about the
state of continuous crisis in the lives of the very poor, and JanMohammad’s formulation of
death-bound subjectivity—that underlie literary nonfiction’s pursuit of a mode of writing Indian
poverty that reflects the precarity of its subjects’ lives. In its very premise—the recording of
subaltern lives while they are lived—the genre finds its efforts thwarted by disease,
disappearance, arrests, suicide, and death. Shaped by such precarity, the formal politics of
literary nonfiction are different from those of mainstream journalism: while journalism reaches a
scene after an event, literary nonfiction enters a precarious scene—a slum, a dance bar,
homelessness—and waits for disaster. And disaster always comes. As it does to Leela, the bar
dancer in Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing, forced into prostitution by the 2005 ban on dance bars in
92
Mumbai and raped and beaten; to Ashraf, the homeless laborer of Sethi’s A Free Man, who
contracts tuberculosis and is dead by the time the book is published; to Abdul, the young garbage
sorter in Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, falsely accused of driving his neighbor to suicide,
and arrested and tortured. These events, part of larger tragic constellations, occur after the
nonfiction author has picked her scene and subject, the chronicle of ordinary life becoming,
inevitably, a chronicle of tragedy. In its effort to map subaltern subjectivities, literary nonfiction
thus discovers not the romance of the self but its exhaustion, structured by death and disaster.
Finally, it is not the fact of the suffering that literary nonfiction records but its formal
experimentation that renders it tragic in a more conventional sense. As Kathleen Sands notes,
“tragedy concerns not…profound suffering, but the telling of suffering. To define tragedy—to
explain what makes a tragedy ‘successful’—is to discern what makes profound suffering good to
tell” (83). It is literary nonfiction’s highly compelling and ‘successful’ telling of suffering, I want
to suggest, that situates it in the realm of the tragic.
II: Slumdog Millionaire and the Romance of Agency
This tragic vision of the subaltern is contested not only by romantic narratives of self-
making within domestic popular culture but also a powerful wave of global approbation toward
the idea of India as a nascent neoliberal paradise. A concentrated site that illustrates this is
Danny Boyle’s tremendously popular film Slumdog Millionaire (2008, henceforth Slumdog),
which is set in contemporary Mumbai and repurposes a thick mixture of poverty, desperation,
crime, abuse, exploitation, torture, corruption, rape, and communal violence into a classic
romance, a fantasy of agency acquired through a subaltern rereading and decentering of elite
knowledge. Strikingly, critical responses to Slumdog, both celebrations and critiques, uniformly
draw upon variations of romantic conceptions of subaltern agency. In what follows, I will
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summarize some of these responses in order to identify a range of positions on slums and
subaltern agency that crystallize the transnational discursive context of this chapter and provide
both a contrast and a more tangible framework for reading Boo’s tragic slum narrative.
As mentioned, responses to Slumdog have a consistently romantic tenor: the writer
Anand Giridhardas, for instance, celebrates the film in the New York Times as depicting India as
a “land of self-makers,” “a tribute to the irrepressible self…in a society now realizing it has
given the self too little...” Academics Ulka and Jonathan Anjaria argue that Slumdog represents
not so much “urban dystopia” as “urban possibility” (61) in its identification of a new and heroic
subaltern subject: “the urban navigator (57)…[who] mobilizes undertravelled pathways in order
to navigate an otherwise hostile urban landscape” to his/her advantage (65). Claims to agency
and dignity also came from a group of Mumbai slum-dwellers, who organized small-scale
protests at the film’s release, objecting to the ‘dog’ in Slumdog (“I am not a dog,” read the
posters) and the depiction of Indian poverty as mere spectacular backdrop (“Poverty on sale”).
On similar lines, the film’s depiction of Dharavi, the cluster of slums at the heart of Mumbai, as
filthy, overcrowded, and volatile sparked a debate on the slums as rightful dwelling or degraded
and illegitimate space. Commentators argued that in contrast to Slumdog’s sweeping visuals of
Dharavi as violent and decaying, the slum and its residents are central to the economic and social
life of Mumbai. As urban researchers Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava wrote in the New
York Times, Dharavi is “the most active and lively part of an incredibly industrious city”
(“Taking the Dog out of Slumdog”). Political scientist Mitu Sengupta reiterated this in
Counterpunch, arguing that Slumdog falsely depicts Dharavi as a “feral wasteland,” and instead
offering this near-utopic vision of slum life:
Dharavi teems with dynamism, and is a hub of small-scale industries, whose estimated
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annual turnover is between US $50 to $100 million. Nor is Dharavi bereft of governing
structures and productive social relations. Residents have built strong collaborative
networks, often across potentially volatile lines of caste and religion. Many cooperative
societies work together with NGOs to provide residents with essential services such as
basic healthcare, schooling and waste disposal, often compensating for the formal
government’s woeful inadequacy in meeting their needs. Although these under-resourced
organizations have touched only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, their efforts must be
acknowledged, along with the fact that slum-dwellers, despite their grinding poverty,
have lives of value and dignity, and a resourcefulness that stretches far beyond the
haphazard, individualistic survival-of-the-fittest sort shown in Slumdog (Sengupta,
“Slumdog Millionaire’s Dehumanizing View of India’s Poor”).
In this rather celebratory description, the slum is an idealized and self-regulating space where
collaboration and solidarity cut across deeply entrenched caste and religious differences, an
almost enchanted realm where everyone gets along and collective action is widespread. It is a
vision of the slum-dweller as heroically resourceful, civic minded, peaceable, and relentlessly
toiling, trapped in a liberal construction of the human that Elizabeth Anker has recently argued is
at the heart of international human rights discourse. For Anker, the conception of a wholesome,
intentional, and agential individual, based on the notion of inherent human dignity, “posits a
dangerously purified subject” and excludes a range of subjectivities from “full personhood”
(4).
In this light, Sengupta’s critique of Slumdog’s dystopic slum is both an a romanticization and a
diminishing of the slum-dweller.
The key question here is not so much the validity of these arguments as the fact that they
rely on different versions of a romantic narrative of subaltern agency, depicting the slum-dweller
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either as a self-maker whose entrepreneurial spirit is set loose by the twenty-first century or the
diligent, resourceful, and dignified subject legitimized by liberal human rights discourses. A
rather bizarre instance is the Dharavi slum tour, a guided walk-through patronized almost
exclusively by foreign tourists that has grown significantly in popularity post-Slumdog. As
journalist Srinath Perur tells it, the tour offers up the slum both as revelation and curiosity,
aiming to “dispel myths about poverty and slums” and “emphasize the economic vibrancy of the
community.” Accordingly, its first stop is Dharavi’s recycling industry, one of its “economic
mainstays,” followed by glimpses of activities such as soap manufacturing, tailoring, baking,
tanning, metalwork, and block-printing—informal small-scale enterprises carried out in homes,
roofs, and garages. Seen this way, the slum is a busy, buzzing place that, in Perur’s words,
“conveys a sense of glorious vitality”— an impression strengthened by the tour guide’s assertion
that its Hindu and Muslim communities co-exist in peace—and the foreign tourist, expecting
Slumdog-like filth, discord, and decay, is otherwise educated (Perur, “Santa Claus aa rahe hai”).
One such tourist was Times journalist Simon Crerar, who visited Dharavi in 2009, his interest
prompted in part by his love for Slumdog. In his report, titled “Why you should see Dharavi,”
Crerar extols the symbolism of the slum space:
The few hours I spend touring Mumbai’s teeming Dharavi slum are uncomfortable and
upsetting, teetering on voyeuristic. They are also among the most uplifting of my life.
Instead of a neighborhood characterized by misery, I find a bustling and enterprising
place, packed with small-scale industries defying their circumstances to flourish amidst
the squalor. Rather than pity, I am inspired by man’s alchemic ability to thrive when the
chips are down.
To deploy images of Southern poverty as a parable for a universal (but manly!) capacity to
96
endure is a trick that circulates with especial force in the Global North (where, moreover, the
mythic resilience of Mumbai holds a soft spot).
25
Crerar’s account is structurally similar to the
Slumdog fantasy: in both, self-invention and enterprise emerge, in Scott’s terms,
“deontologically” from squalor and sewage in what is ultimately an ‘uplifting’
26
narrative. The
slum is envisioned not as urban India’s area of darkness but as a site of its new enterprise culture,
where resourceful individuals cut through erosive circumstances to flourish, where the myth of
romantic self-making is taking root.
27
III: “Deathworld”
On the other hand, Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers offers a tragic account of the
slum as brutal, death-bound, and deeply lacking in solidarity.
28
Though situated in the same
transnational discursive space as Slumdog—widespread Western interest in India’s contradictions
as rising economic power and center of global poverty, the pervasive rise of neoliberal
economics, the global prominence of the discourse of entrepreneurship and self-making, the
legitimate subject of human rights, and so on—Behind repudiates Slumdog’s joyful immersion in
the vitality and absurdity of new India by locating the story in the cost of slum enterprise. The
following comparison between Crerar and Boo’s panoramas of the slum recycling industry
illustrates this generic contrast; the first excerpt is from Crerar’s “Why you should see Dharavi”:
We visit the plastic recycling district, where discarded containers are sorted by colour,
crushed into machines, melted into spaghetti-like strips of plastic, then cut into tiny
25
Crerar’s article, addressed to British readers, is titled “Why You Should See Dharavi.”
26
“Uplifting” is a word that figures repeatedly in reviews and reactions to Slumdog. Theories on the success of the
film also turn on this point.
27
In his NYT article, Giridhardas reads the appeal of this vision in the global North as the result of an identification
with India as a kindred sphere in the early stages of neoliberalism.
28
Pankaj Mishra characterizes Annawadians’ lack of solidarity, their struggles against each other, as an “undercity
blood sport.”
97
pellets before being reconstituted into everything from children’s toys to washing
machines. Up three stories we emerge into blazing sunshine to discover huge mounds of
plastic being sorted, roofs as far the eye can see, and, in the distance, the luxurious
enclave of Bandra...
Narratives of Mumbai, cinematic or literary, love panoramas, and Crerar’s follows a long
tradition of such scenes, evoking familiar images of color amongst squalor, order amongst chaos.
His staccato narration of the plastic recycling industry as mechanical, automatic, and spectacular
obscures the labor it involves, announcing a vision that loves the hum of enterprise. Compare
this to Boo’s account of the daily business of poring over and sorting through mounds of trash
for recycling in Annawadi, a slum just outside the Mumbai International Airport:
Every morning, thousands of waste-pickers fanned out across the airport area in search of
vendible excess—a few pounds of the eight thousand tons of garbage that Mumbai was
extruding daily. These scavengers darted after crumpled cigarette packs tossed from cars
with tinted windows. They dredged sewers and raided dumpsters for empty bottles of
water and beer. Each evening, they returned down the slum road with gunny sacks on
their backs (xii).
It is precarious, laboring human presence—the darting bodies, the sorting hands, the bent
backs—that generates this scene, a focus on the bodily costs of slum enterprise that is retained
throughout the book. Consider the advice that Abdul, a young garbage trader, receives from his
father about assessing the value of trash: “Use your nose, your mouth, and your ears, not just
your scales…chew the plastic to identify its grade. If it’s hard plastic, snap it in half and inhale.
A fresh smell indicates good quality polyurethane” (xvi). Such attention to the corporeality of
garbage sorting—the toxicity of smelling, tasting, and inhaling trash on a daily basis—pulls back
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from the romance of slum entrepreneurship. Boo is unflinching in her attention to the horrible
effects of this toxicity on her subjects’ bodies, emphasizing how their very means of livelihood is
also a site of ruin. As in this account of Sunil, a stunted 13-year-old waste-picker who
desperately wants to grow taller:
To jumpstart his system [into growing], he saw he’d have to become a better scavenger.
This entailed not dwelling on the obvious: that his profession could wreck a body in a
very short time. Scrapes from dumpster-diving pocked and became infected. Where skin
broke, maggots got in. Lice colonized hair, gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled
into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which of
the scavengers would be the next to die (35).
Such a wager is not an anomaly in Annawadi, whose landscape is suffused with death
and disease. In the three years of Boo’s reporting, unnatural and “excess” death comes
continuously to the slum, in untreated illness, accident, suicide, and murder, with the young
bearing its brunt. In one of the book’s first images of death, a two-year old child, sick with
tuberculosis (a common disease in Annawadi), lies drowned in a bucket of water. Boo later
explains that young girls, too often thought a liability, “died all the time under dubious
circumstances”; moreover, “sickly children of both sexes are sometimes done away with,
because of the ruinous cost of their care” (76). As the narrative progresses it feeds on more dead
and dying young: 15-year-old Kalu, who steals scrap metal from the airport, is the victim of a
graphic and horrifying homicide, possibly by airport security; 16-year-old Sanjay, Kalu’s friend,
is so terrorized by the police inquiry and torture following Kalu’s death that he commits suicide;
15-year-old Meena, abused and tyrannized by her family, kills herself to escape an early
marriage that would relocate her to a rural life of drudgery. Behind sketches each of these
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children briefly but vividly—Kalu’s popular enactments of Bruce Lee; Sanjay’s good looks and
pronounced South Indian drawl; Meena’s secret phone conversations with a boy she likes—
before following them to their gruesome deaths. Numerous other unnatural deaths are mentioned
in passing: an injured beggar dying on a footpath as people step around him, a sanitation worker
dead after an endless wait for a heart valve, slum-dwellers dying of untreated asthma, lung
obstructions, and tuberculosis aggravated by a dust-spewing concrete plant nearby, a 16-year-old
who claims to have murdered his father because the father had strangled his mother, and
decomposed bodies turning up in the sewage lake bordering the slum. The climactic death
around which Behind’s ‘plot’ turns is that of Fatima, a disabled woman who sets herself alight in
the slum’s main square. In Boo’s narration, these deaths, especially the suicides, create a chain,
spurring imitations, each making the next that much more thinkable:
While the deaths of Kalu and Sanjay shook the boys who lived on the road, Fatima’s
death was the one that strobed in and out of the minds of Annawadi women. Two months
after the public spectacle of her burning, it had insinuated itself into countless private
narratives…
One night the brothelkeeper’s wife doused herself with kerosene in the maidan, called out
Fatima’s name, and threatened to light a match. Another night, a woman beaten by her
husband did light the match. She survived in such a state that Manju and her friend
Meena…began discussing more fool-proof means of suicide (178, emphasis mine).
Meena does kill herself eventually; rat poison rather than fire is her method of choice.
The ubiquity of early and unnatural death thus marks life in Annawadi, whose residents
“grow up under the threat of death, a threat that is constant and yet unpredictable” (JanMohamad
25). If Boo’s project is the elaboration of subjectivity under such conditions, it must reckon with
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Annawadi’s “death-bound” lives, where daily proximity to death penetrates the “capillary
structures of subjectivity,” in JanMohamed’s striking phrase, and redefines the contours of life.
As Abdul says to Sunil:
Do you ever think when you look at someone, when you listen to someone, does that
person really have a life? … Like that woman who just went to hang herself, or her
husband, who probably beat her before she did, I wonder what kind of life is that…I go
through tensions just to see it. But it is a life. Even the person who lives like a dog still
has a kind of life. Once my mother was beating me, and that thought came to me. I said,
“if what is happening now, you beating me, is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it
would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too (198-9).
This stark definition of life—being beaten for the rest of one’s days—saturates Boo’s narration
of Annawadi, which emerges as a sort of ‘deathworld.’ As opposed to the figure of the urban
navigator that Anjaria proposes in her reading of Slumdog—the subaltern who “mobilize[s]
undertravelled pathways in order to navigate an otherwise hostile urban landscape” to his/her
advantage—Annawadi’s residents are trapped by their deadly geography, encircled as they are
by the airport, luxury hotels, and the busy Airport highway that borders their homes. Here “buses
and SUVs barrel down the road” (5); children step “obliviously from the roadsides into traffic”
(242); scavengers who get hit by traffic bleed to death on the roadside; and Abdul fears for his
life while driving his rickety auto full of trash to recycling plants. The “road boys,” who brave
several layers of security to steal from the airport’s recycling bins, are regularly beaten and
humiliated by airport security and the police (49). Five luxury hotels surround Annawadi,
mocking emblems of an unattainable life, even as the threat of demolition looms—the ever-
present possibility that the city will reclaim the prime real estate on which the slum is built,
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expelling its residents onto the streets of Mumbai. Living in the shadow of this threat and off the
refuse of the hotels and airport, Annawadians experience what Vinay Gidwani and Rajyashree
Reddy have called the imposed “superfluity” of their lives keenly. As Abdul’s brother Mirchi
puts it: “Everything around us is roses…and we are the shit in between” (xii). Or as Boo
narrates, “Annawadi boys broadly accepted the basic truths: that in a modernizing, increasingly
prosperous city, their lives were embarrassments best confined to small spaces, and their deaths
would not matter at all” (236).
IV: Neoliberalism and the “Grid of Concordance”
Reported between 2007 and 2011, spanning the peak of the Indian economic boom, Behind...
locates this image of the slum-dweller as ‘waste’ in the context of a rapidly globalizing and
neoliberalizing economy, with Annawadi’s daily precarity playing out against the new narratives
of ambition, aspiration, and wealth in post-liberalization India. As Gidwani and Reddy point out,
the current economic order, with its rapidly growing consuming classes, has produced an “urban
underclass living off the commodity detritus of…global circuits,” forming “unwanted, often
deadly, urban micro-ecologies” (1650). They argue that under neoliberalism, this underclass has
been rendered as “excess matter…‘surplus humanity’ that is superfluous to a regime of capitalist
value” (1650, emphasis in original). In an important argument, they identify the formation of a
distinct “regime of disengagement” in post-reform India, claiming that as opposed to state and
civil society’s ethical engagement
29
with the underclass in the Nehruvian welfare state and its
afterlife, today “neither the apparatuses of the state nor the urban bourgeoisie seek this social
engagement” (1653). The result is the formation of “undercitizens,” segregated urban groups of
29
With qualifications: “however nominal,” “at least the desire for it” (Gidwani and Reddy 1653).
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“surplus humanity” whose precarious livelihoods are nonetheless dependent on the connected
material worlds of globalization. For instance, Boo observes that 2009 was a propitious time for
garbage trade in Annawadi because construction in China in preparation for the Beijing Summer
Olympics had raised the price of scrap metal worldwide, prompting some waste-pickers to steal
metal fixtures from the airport’s parking lot at great risk. On the other hand, the marked drop in
international tourist traffic to Mumbai following the terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal hotel hit
the garbage business hard, as did the global recession. Abdul and his friends’ livelihoods thus
depend on the interconnectedness of the global economy even as their own situation is isolated,
precarious, and death-ridden.
Boo offers her narration of these buried lives as a corrective to both transnational
celebrations of subaltern agency in neoliberal India and widespread perceptions of the Indian
poor as “emblems of abjectness” (247). In a note to readers at the close of the book, she tells us
that, impatient with “snapshots” of Indian success or squalor—either “accounts of people who
were remaking themselves and triumphing in software India…that elided early privileges of
caste, family, wealth and private education” or “stories of saintly slumdwellers trapped in a
monochromatically miserable place…until saviors (often white Westerners) galloped in to save
them”—she set out to “know more about ordinary [Indian] lives” (249). These lives, she found,
were “neither mythic nor pathetic…and certainly not passive”; like everyone else, they were
“improvising, often ingeniously, in pursuit of new economic possibilities of the twenty-first
century” (249). Boo identifies the patterns of this pursuit, the unpacking of India’s current
“infrastructure of opportunity” (247). as the central concern of her project, asking questions such
as “how ordinary low-income people, particularly women and children, were negotiating the age
of global markets”; “who got ahead and who didn’t, and why, as India prospered”; and how the
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“pursuit of opportunity in [this] unequal, globalized world” is configured (249). These questions
locate the subjects of Boo’s investigation squarely within a narrative of rampant globalization
and neoliberalism. Neoliberal India is Behind’s referent, a place of “breakneck globalization”
where everyone wants to go “from zero to hero, fast” (29) and “there is too much wanting,” a
“hive of hope and ambition” in an “ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive” time in which
mothers raise children “for a modern age of ruthless competition” (111). Here, state structures
are dominated by market protocols, and vice versa; for instance, Abdul’s experience of the
criminal justice system as a “market like garbage,” where “innocence and guilt [can] be bought
and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags” (107) or his astute understanding that the so-called free
market pits social and ethnic networks against each other. It is the Annawadians’ position in this
neoliberal narrative that illuminates their lives for Boo. That Boo’s stated intention to “know
more about ordinary lives” (251) slips into a study of the “infrastructure of opportunity” (247)
and the “pursuit of new economic possibilities” (249) embeds ordinary life entirely within a
neoliberal framework. As I will argue, Behind’s politics of subaltern visibility and legibility are
configured within the confines of this slippage, in that its subjects are narratable to the extent that
they interact with and are framed by neoliberal logics.
Two caveats before we proceed. Firstly, I don’t mean to baldly allege, as Mitu Sengupta
does, that because Behind… focuses exclusively on the failings of the state, its “subtle alignment
with the neoliberal narrative is unmistakable.” That Boo’s book is a critique is explicit in its
examination of the “profound and juxtaposed inequality” (244) of neoliberal India, its lack of
“justice and opportunity” for the poor, and its vision of the slum as a tragic deathworld.
30
The
30
Moreover, although state neglect is unquestionably its target, Behind… is more sensitive to the state-corporation
nexus than Sengupta allows.
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neoliberal temper Sengupta intuits in Behind is valid but not so much as an alignment with as a
“saturation”
31
in neoliberal logics. In their article, “Reading and Writing the Economic Present,”
Emily Johansen and Alissa Karl argue that contemporary literature, while implicated in forms of
neoliberal power and consent, cannot be accounted for by “oversimplified models of resistance
or capitulation” to the market (205). Similarly, for Peter Veremeulen, the significance of
contemporary works of literature lies “not in their assertion of their specious autonomy from the
market, but rather in their singular inflections, distortions, and refractions of socioeconomic
forces” (275). Further, as Johansen and Karl suggest, literature under neoliberalism “formalize[s]
the economic present in a way that makes visible its development and stakes” (210). It is in this
sense of Behind’s imbrication in market logic, its analysis of the instruments of neoliberal power
and consent, and its crystallization of the present’s representational stakes, rather than in terms of
resistance or capitulation (or alignment), that I want to read its “singular inflections…of
socioeconomic forces” (Veremeulen 275).
Secondly, although the terms visibility, legibility, and narratability as they relate to
literary representations of subalternity are inextricable, I would like to propose the following
working definitions for the purposes of this chapter. “Legibility” is the literary production of a
transparent subject, a function of the degree of intelligibility of motive and desire a character
enunciates or implies. “Visibility,” following Spivak, refers primarily to the possibilities and
obstructions in the reception of the subaltern subject, particularly in transnational contexts; it
depends on the extent to which the subject’s legibility is translatable across elite-subaltern
divides. “Narratability” refers to those subjects, or those aspects of subjectivities, that are
31
In Johansen and Karl’s usage (203).
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considered speakable within a text’s framework against all that the text chooses not to say.
32
In
the context of subaltern representation, narratability is perhaps best understood in opposition to
the category of the “unnarrated,” which encompasses the excluded, the forbidden, the
unspeakable, and so on (Miller 4).
33
These categories, garnered from novel theory and the
subaltern studies discourse, are inflected by neoliberalism in ways that are central to the
unfolding of this chapter. In what follows I will outline some of these ways, particularly as they
play out in Behind, before proceeding to a close reading; it should be noted, however, that these
categories are porous and my definitions heuristic.
The neoliberal framework inflects the categories of legibility, visibility, and narratability
in a variety of ways. For instance, the axiomatic status of economic self-interest and individual
self-realization within neoliberal rationality has complex implications for the literary
construction of a legible subject. Of course, trajectories of individual experience have been
central to novelistic realism since its emergence in 18
th
century Europe against the backdrop of
the rise of liberal capitalism. During this period, the allegorical and romantic literary characters
of the 17
th
century became the novelistic subjects of the 18
th
, with an emphasis on selfhood,
particularity, and lived experience. Zak Watson argues that realism effected this transformation
in character through a novelistic legibility (or plausibility) produced by the alignment of desire
with self-interest:
As a genre, the realistic novel relies on a transparency of desire that provides a readerly
index of the plausibility of character and action. As Nancy Miller writes,
“[P]lausibility…is an effect of reading through a grid of concordance” in which
32
For instance, D A Miller defines the nonnarratable as ‘lack,’ the unnarrated as ‘exclusion.’
33
These definitions are culled from narrative theory, studies of realism, and subaltern studies.
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characters are measured against certain maxims. Part of the grid of concordance for the
novel is an instrumental understanding of desire, which means characters seem most
plausible when they act most clearly in their own legible interests. The instrumental
understanding of desire is nothing more or less than the identification of desire and self-
interest. (33, emphasis mine)
For Watson, a self-evident and teleological self-interest illuminates a character’s desires. But
how is self-interest (and thus desire) to be rendered so transparent, so objectified? Watson argues
that this is possible because realism engages paradigmatic rather than arbitrary or singular
desires: “Realistic fiction…discovers …the narrative of desire embedded in the culture that gave
birth to it” (36). Gérard Genette makes a similar point about intelligibility of character when he
asserts that there exists a “relation of implication between the particular conduct attributed to a
character and a given, general, received and implicit maxim,” and that “to understand the
behavior of a character is to be able to refer it back to an approved maxim” (Genette quoted in
Miller 36). Under neoliberalism, these approved maxims—economic self-interest, “radical
individualism,” “self-proprietorship” (Johansen and Karl 203), growth over equity, competition
over inclusion, entrepreneurship over political agency, a commonsensical ethic of survival and
profit-making, and so on—products of the broad social reach of economic rationalities and the
translation of market logics into cultural norms, render this narrative of desire fairly apparent.
Watson’s argument that legibility in realism is the result of aligning desire with self-interest is, in
the context of neoliberal literature, inflected thus: characters are legible to the extent that their
desires and motives align with the collectively sanctioned maxims of economic self-interest and
individual self-realization as the telos of human action. This does not imply, of course, that all
characters move inexorably toward the realization of economic self-interest, but that, as I will
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argue in the case of Behind, characters whose desires and motives are not illuminated by these
maxims are left un-narrated, rendered un-narratable. These un-narratable subjects are ‘subaltern’
in Spivak’s terms, subjects whose desires and motives are not objectifiable along prevailing
maxims of desire and power and who thus cannot be represented or grasped.
As for those subjects who are narrated, visibility—the possibility of (transnational)
reception—depends on the extent to which their legibility is translatable across North-South or
elite-non-elite divides. With Behind, several conditions mediate this possibility even at the site of
production: Boo’s status as a rank outsider with a Western elite educational and institutional
background, her reliance on translators to interview her subjects, the Annawadians’ reticence and
reluctance to speak to her, her compulsive need to extract a coherent narrative out of the flurry of
epistemological uncertainties and contradictions that dog her reporting; and so on. Moreover, as
will be demonstrated, Boo’s choice of third- rather than first-person narration obscures the scene
and source of utterance, and her heavy reliance on her subjects’ stated motives and desires—as if
there exists an easy correspondence between subjectivity and self-narration, desire and speech—
appears to altogether bracket the problem of representational opacities. After all, Spivak’s
critique of subaltern representation is leveled at this very presumption of a self-present subject
that knows and speaks her desire and is thus available to be ventriloquized by the Western elite
intellectual. At the same time, though, this is a 25-year-old argument that must be adjusted for
the extensive establishment of neoliberal conditions in India in the twenty-first century. The
largescale absorption of subaltern populations into the urban underclass and the increasing
institution of the dominant maxims of contemporary political economy—economic agency and
possessive individualism—implies that a degree of shared values between the global North and
the rising economies of the South may be and are presumed, although articulated with material
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conditions that are by no means equal. Spivak herself has gestured to this in a comment about the
“new subaltern,” who has been absorbed into circuits of neoliberal governmentality (rather than
existing outside them) but in problematic and punishing ways (Roy and Gunvald, “New
Subaltern Politics”). In light of such continuities, however uneven, certain subalternities are
translatable along neoliberal rationales and thereby gain a measure of transnational visibility. In
other words, those subaltern subjects of the global South are (partially) visible whose desires and
motives are intelligible within a shared framework of neoliberal capital and its cultural
repercussions.
Further, as Lilie Chouliaraki points out, feelings of transnational humanitarian solidarity
in the twenty-first century (feelings that Behind calls forth and harnesses) are based on a model
of the human as an “individual holder of rights” who is “disembedded” from larger structural and
neocolonial injustices (63). Chouliaraki argues that the Western bearer of humanitarian sentiment
is “today called to enact solidarity as an individualist project of contingent values and
consumerist activisms” in a model that “avoids politics and rewards the self” (15). Reciprocally,
human rights have a “neutral character” and summon representations of individual endeavor and
identifiable selves rather than arguments about structural inequalities (15). As Chouliaraki points
out, the contemporary encounter between “western spectator and vulnerable other” is a
“mirror[ing]…an often narcissistic self-reflection that involves people like ‘us’” (4). The
narratives available to fulfill such a brief are arguably limited to accounts of individual character
and struggle that circumvent larger political and ideological apparatuses.
Narratability, in this context, is the choice of subjects or aspects of subjectivities that the
neoliberal capitalist framework allows against all that which goes unnarrated. While not properly
separable from visibility, narratability is useful as a distinct analytic in the context of Behind
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because it enables the sorting of visibilities and opacities within a subaltern realm rather than in
comparison to it. That is, it demonstrates that even in a project that undertakes the narration of
subaltern subjectivities in a subaltern world, and even when that narrative is one of death and
tragedy, some subjects are cast “doubly in shadow” not by chance but by selection (Spivak 258).
Such opacities undercut the claim implicit in Behind’s omniscient narrative stance that Annawadi
is a coherent and knowable world. By deploying distinctly realist narrative techniques and an
impersonal, disembodied narrator, Boo extracts a lucid sequence of events and detailed accounts
of subject-formation from her three years of reporting in Annawadi. The resulting narrative
affects an all-seeing authority and comprehensiveness built on an appearance of full authorial
access to events and inner lives, creating a closed, remarkably coherent world that is undeniably
novelistic in form, complete with maps of interiority that approximate the classical bildung. As
will be demonstrated below, these individual trajectories, narrated in detail, form a contrast to
two types of unnarrated subjects: those whose lives do not map on to neoliberal logics and those
who are constructed not on the basis of self-narration (as the narrated subjects are) but assembled
from accounts supplied by neighbors and acquaintances. Moreover, as opposed to a sort of
unmarked wholesome humanity granted to the narrated subjects through depictions of selfhood
and interiority, the unnarrated are particularized, marked by caste, gender, disability, and death
by suicide. For although Behind touches upon all sorts of social and cultural specificities of the
slum space, it does not dwell on identities or deep histories, underemphasizing their influence on
subject-formation and instead positing deeply individualized subjectivities formed in the shadow
of capital. In the following close readings I will detail the opacities that come to light in reading
Behind through the grid of legibility, visibility, and narratability defined here, proposing that
these opacities not only undercut the book’s all-knowing narrative posture but also unpack the
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stakes of representation in transnational sites like it in the contemporary neoliberal moment.
V: The Good Subaltern: Ethical Trajectories
Boo’s choice of narratable subjects is founded on a well-rehearsed colonial-neocolonial
narrative trope: the ethical other. As Inderpal Grewal points out, transnational critiques of
neoliberalism can sometimes lead to “a utopian search for the pure, uncommodified self or
a…longing for the uncontaminated Other” (19, emphasis mine). Such a quest appears to be key
to Boo’s choice of narratable subjects. In an Author’s Note at the close of the book, Boo declares
a preoccupation with the Annawadians’ ethical life, professing “astonishment” that despite the
“contraction…of our moral universe” and the “sabotag[ing of] innate capacities for moral action”
that she believes poverty produces, “some people [in Annawadi] are good, and that many people
try to be” (253-4, italics in original). Boo terms such self-fashioning an exercise of the “ethical
imagination” and spends a significant portion of the book tracking its trajectories. In narrative
terms, this translates into an attempt at mapping interiorities and sites of subject-formation that
resembles the “narrative of developing selfhood” that is classical bildung (Anjaria 134). This is
especially true of Abdul, Manju, and Sunil, whose transition from adolescence to young
adulthood Boo narrates as an ethical journey, locating a desire for incorruptibility at the center of
their imaginations and abstracting from them an urgent need to achieve an idealized self-image.
Written as autonomous subjects of ethical choices and desires for self-realization—choice being
coded in the neoliberal lexicon as agency—these stories are framed as individual struggles for
blamelessness in a site that makes blamelessness impossible (as Boo observes early in the book,
“to be poor in Annawadi…[is] to be guilty of one thing or another” (xviii)). It is these
subjectivities that Boo dwells on, draws out, and narrates in the thickest of detail. The exercise of
individual ethical imagination within a neoliberal framework becomes the basis for legibility in
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Behind, with ethical agency being posited as a precondition for narratability.
Consider this description of 19-year-Manju, the daughter of a petty slumlord with
political ambitions, Asha. Asha is adept at misappropriating government funds meant for public
welfare and exploiting desperate slum-dwellers for profit. Her young daughter Manju, on the
other hand, a student on her way to becoming Annawadi’s first female college graduate, tries to
make up for her mother’s transgressions by running a bridge school for slum children for a small
government stipend. Even as Asha, aided by a network of corrupt local authorities, defrauds the
government and cheats her neighbors, Manju “hunger[s] for virtue”:
Annawadians agreed that Manju was nicer than she had to be, given her looks, her
mother’s political connections, and her punishing schedule. Mornings, she went to
college. Afternoons, in the family hut, she ran the slum’s only school. In the other hours,
she provided cooking, cleaning, water-collection, and laundry services to her household
of five. These obligations were fulfilled by sleeping only four hours a night, and rarely
impinged on her temperament… (57).
Manju’s attractive, laboring, and generous presence animates the slum landscape. Boo
meticulously maps the girl’s thoughts as she goes about her various chores one morning,
thoughts mainly about her mediocre English college education that involves deciphering the
mysteries of Congreve’s The Way of the World (a relic of India’s still-robust colonial educational
system). Boo writes Manju’s struggle to reframe the play to reflect her own experiences as a
glimpse into her inner life. As Manju moves through the slum, working hard to get an education,
cooking and cleaning for her family, gathering the slum’s children for a school session, teaching
them English rhymes, protecting a child from his mother’s vicious abuse and dressing his
wounds, pleading with Asha on behalf of distraught slum residents, wearing a pretty blue sari to
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attend a celebration, aspiring to a middle-class romance, dressing in jeans and giving up cheap
jewelry in a desire for upward mobility, studying to be an insurance agent, training with a
civilian defense corps, and so on, she emerges both as an ethical, “uncontaminated Other,”
predicated on goodness, beauty, innocence, idealism, diligence, and compassion and as a nascent
neoliberal feminist subject aspiring to individual and economic agency.
As does Abdul, Behind’s main protagonist. Immensely hardworking and responsible,
devoted to his parents, peace-loving and rather timid, the reticent 17-year old is written as an
earnest, long-suffering, and irreproachable subject who works all day, refuses the relief of illicit
drugs, and practices honesty in trade. Having begun to work at the age of six, and having spent
his childhood and adolescence building the family’s garbage business, Abdul supports his
parents financially, pays for his siblings’ education, and is determined to stay out of trouble.
Over the years he has single-handedly expanded his garbage business and saved enough money
to pay the first installment for a plot of land outside the city, the acquisition of which will place
his family well on its way out of poverty. The plan and is to build a house, further develop the
garbage and recycling operation, marry the girl his parents have picked out, and usher his family
into the lower middle-class. At the chronological start of the book, Abdul is thus poised for the
happy ending of a quintessentially romantic narrative of slum entrepreneurship, awaiting his
reward for being good. For his friend Sunil, a 13-year-old waste-picker who is similarly
preoccupied with goodness, the central ethical question is how to escape self-loathing. Having
made his first ever disposable income by helping a friend pilfer scrap metal from the airport,
Sunil treats himself to a Hollywood movie and a full meal, expecting to finally experience the
fabled joys of consumerism. Instead, as he says, he is overwhelmed with self-hate and decides to
return to waste-picking:
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Sunil wasn’t sure that his reasoning [in choosing waste-picking over stealing] would
make sense to anyone else. It had something to do with the fact that, on the most
profitable day of his life, he’d failed to reach the state of exhilaration that other boys
called “the full enjoy” … He sometimes said of being a scavenger: “I don’t like myself,
doing this work. It’s like being an insult.” He thought he might like himself even less,
being a thief (49).
While Abdul, Manju, and Sunil veer away from the ethical as the narrative progresses, it
is worthwhile to pause at these introductory portraits of them as primarily ethical and moral
agents. Recent critiques of international human rights discourse are useful in parsing this
construction, since Behind makes the same liberal humanist assumptions and belongs to the same
discursive landscape. Resonating with Boo’s assertion that people have “innate capacities for
moral action” (254) is Chouliaraki’s contention that the crux of contemporary human rights lies
“not simply in postulating the individual as the universal bearer of rights, but in recognizing
that…[s/he] is simultaneously a figure of inherent benevolence, a moral subject with a natural
inclination to care for others” (33, emphasis mine). For Chouliaraki, it is the positing of this kind
of moral agency that calls forth the “cosmopolitan solidarity” that drives sympathy- and
identification-based human rights initiatives like transnational charity, individual sponsorships,
donations to aid organizations, and so on. As mentioned, she argues that humanitarianism has
undergone a “fundamental mutation” under neoliberal capital, where the encounter between
“western spectator” and “vulnerable other” is no longer an “ethical and political event” but based
on an identification with “people like ‘us’” (4). This recalls Anker’s argument that the demand
within human rights discourse for moral agents “posits a dangerously purified subject.” Anker
contends that the danger of such a narrow definition of the human is that it “enshrines certain
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qualities as constitutive of humanity… simultaneously ostraciz[ing] others…from the purview of
full personhood” and posits a “pauperized, unidimensional, and strangely lifeless vision of the
human that…authorizes the democratic public sphere’s many exclusions” (4). Similarly, Costas
Douzinas argues that transnational human rights under neoliberal capital function as “a device of
social regulation…by defining the limits of the subject and perpetuating hierarchies of human life
on a global scale” (Douzinas quoted in Chouliaraki 35, emphasis mine). In Behind, this narrow
definition comes into play most starkly in the unnarrated figure of the ethically suspect Fatima.
Part VII of this chapter, an examination of how the disabled and disturbed Fatima is constructed,
deals with this question in detail. Suffice to say here that, defined by allegations of duplicity,
callousness, vengefulness, hypersexuality, and malevolence, Fatima forms a stark contrast to
Abdul and Manju. The figure of Fatima is unnarrated not because the text overlooks her but
because, written as ethically dubious and resistant to widespread maxims of survival and self-
care, she is impossible to sympathize or identify with. More importantly, unlike Abdul or Manju,
she gets no say in her own story.
To stay with Abdul and Manju, both give up the pursuit of goodness as they grow older,
their morally flawless introductory portraits giving way to ambiguity and loss. In Abdul’s case,
his life takes a drastic turn when he is accused—falsely, according to Boo’s carefully
documented reportage—of abetment in Fatima’s suicide. Abdul and his ailing father are arrested
and tortured, and his sister imprisoned. His siblings quit school, and the family’s savings are
squandered in bribes to the police. His mother is exhausted and disoriented, driven to illness. His
brother Mirchi takes over the garbage trade but has no talent for it, and the family slides into
poverty. Abdul’s wedding plans fall through. Eventually, after months of imprisonment during
which their health declines, Abdul’s father and sister are released due to lack of evidence. Abdul
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is remanded to a juvenile detention center and eventually released on the condition that he visit it
thrice a week to certify his presence in the city. The family loses its garbage business to a
competitor and has to start over. The romance of entrepreneurship lies dead.
It is against the backdrop of this crisis that Boo closely discusses the exercise of Abdul’s
“ethical imagination” (253), its awakening and its loss. Being detained at the juvenile center
allows Abdul the first long rest from work he’s ever had, and “something happen[s] to his heart”:
he finds himself feeling sorry for others, though “it [is] unlike him to be sympathetic” (129). He
also becomes reflective, especially after his encounter with “The Master”—his first ever teacher
at his first ever formal educational setting—who is invited to the center to lecture detainees on
moral behavior, and whose meandering and manipulative talk affects Abdul immensely:
The Master’s words lit up a virtuous path. Be generous and noble, offer up your flesh,
agree to be eaten by the eagles of the world, and justice will come to you in time. It was a
painful way to go through life, but Abdul was drawn to the happy ending.
He assessed himself to have been virtuous in some ways. […] But he could have been
better and more honorable. He could still be.
[W]hen The Master spoke of…respectability and honor, Abdul thought the man’s stare
had blazed across the rows of heads and come to rest on him alone. It was not too late, at
seventeen or whatever age he was, to resist the corrupting influences of his world and his
nature. An awkward, uneducated boy might still be capable of righteousness: he intended
to remember this and every other truth The Master spoke (132, emphasis mine).
The Master’s teachings locate justice in the sphere of personal responsibility and sacrifice rather
than in the judicial system, placing on these lost children an even greater burden while absolving
the state apparatus of it. In Boo’s narration, Abdul’s sense of being singled out is a
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choreographed affect that calls upon him to assume the full weight of his redemption. He accepts
this weight unquestioningly, assessing himself by the Master’s standards of “honor” and
“respectability” and judging himself inadequate: although he has been fairly conscientious,
rejecting drugs and brothels, never fighting, lying only occasionally, rarely disobeying his father,
and working honestly, he thinks he can do better. In Boo’s telling, it is this moral self-assessment
that drives Abdul’s decision not to plead guilty to the suicide abetment with which he has been
falsely charged, even though such a plea is his only chance of a pardon.
Boo devotes significant attention to an explication of Abdul’s inner life at crucial points
during the crisis. A metaphor he often invokes to describe his pursuit of the ethical life becomes
key to its narrativization:
...[Abdul] thought about water and ice. Water and ice were made of the same thing. He
thought most people were made of the same thing too. He himself was probably little
different, constitutionally, from the cynical, corrupt people around him…if he had to sort
all humanity by its material essence, he thought he would probably end up with a single
gigantic pile. But here was the interesting thing—ice was distinct from—and better
than—what it was made of. He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In
Mumbai’s dirty water, he wanted to be ice. He wanted to have ideals (218).
But, Behind suggests, poverty renders ideals unrealistic and moral corruption inevitable.
Moreover, unlike his cinematic counterpart in Slumdog, Jamal Malik, who is brutalized by the
police but appears to emerge unscathed (yet another ‘deontological’ break), Abdul is marked by
the trauma of being tortured, his sense of self fundamentally altered. The book ends with Abdul
still awaiting trial, shuttling endlessly between Annawadi and the juvenile center, and accepting
that a “suspended state between guilt and innocence was his permanent condition” even while
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yearning to be formally cleared of the charges. The lack of judicial acknowledgement proves
fatal to his ethical imagination: even as his self-image becomes entangled with the implication of
guilt, the loss of time, loss of business, his family’s desperate circumstances, and the memory of
torture scramble his moral compass. By the end of the book, Abdul declares that he has
relinquished the pursuit of the ethical. On his thrice-weekly visits to the juvenile center, he hopes
to run into The Master to admit as much:
…that he had tried to be honorable in his final years as a boy, but wouldn’t be able to
sustain it now that he…was a man. A man, if sensible, didn’t make bright distinctions
between good and bad, truth and falsehood, justice and that other thing. “For some time I
tried to keep the ice inside me from melting,” was how he put it. “But now I am just
becoming dirty water, like everyone else. I tell Allah I love him immensely, immensely,
but I tell him I cannot be better, because of how the world is” (241).
The narrative of Abdul’s self-formation ends here, the loss of ethical imagination
furnishing a sort of closure. The life he is left with—the trial indefinitely deferred, the business
in ruins, the wedding called off, the spirit wounded, and the plot (of land) lost—cannot support
another beginning, a new dream of emancipation. Rather, with the threat of demolition hanging
over Annawadi, Abdul’s life remains disaster-prone and, I want to suggest, tragic. Of course
Abdul is no eminent, heroic, and ill-fated protagonist of conventional tragedy who incurs the
wrath of the gods. But as Rita Felski points out in her introduction to Rethinking Tragedy, critics
have called attention to a modern tragic mode that replaces gods and fate with “the ineluctable
power of social forces or unconscious desires” and takes “Everyman rather than a great man” as
tragic protagonist, arguing that in modernity, “tragic extremity springs from the mundane rather
than being opposed to it” (10). Democracy, Terry Eagleton contends, expands the scope of
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tragedy by notionally extending the promise of progress and justice to all even as poor social
conditions negate these ideals, resulting in a “tragic gulf” between desire and realization, or as
Felski puts it, structure and agency. Such broad definitions are not meant to altogether evacuate
the category of the tragic of its formal and substantive elements but to rethink its shape against
the backdrop of democracy and liberal capitalism. As Felski points out, although such ever-
broadening definitions render it a contentious literary category, there is considerable consensus
that in its various forms tragedy “undermines the sovereignty of selfhood and modern dreams of
progress and perfectibility, as exemplified in the belief that human beings can orchestrate their
own happiness” (219). While this is possibly true in any era, I would argue that tragedy enacts an
especially potent critique of the neoliberal tenets of deontological self-making and
“radical…self-proprietorship” in its capacity to expose their fragility (Johansen and Karl 203).
Critics also concur that tragedy refuses moral absolutes, presenting a “complex intertwining of
internal motives and external imperatives” in an ethically ambiguous and disordered emotional
and physical landscape (Felski 12). Felski calls attention to this in a well-rehearsed comparison
between tragedy and melodrama: melodrama depicts a “morally legible” universe of pristine
absolutes whereas tragedy stages an internal struggle, a conflict, following Hegel, “between
competing rights rather than between right and wrong.” And while melodrama allegorizes
conflict, in tragedy conflict is “enacted in the divided desires and psyche of a single protagonist”
(10).
It is possible to discern a tragic shape in Boo’s narration of Abdul in accordance with
these parameters. To begin with, there is the shift from the clear-cut, “morally legible”
introductory perspective in which Abdul appears to be guileless and blameless to the murky
complexities of a life without “bright distinctions between good and bad, truth and falsehood”—
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a shift from a melodramatic register to a tragic one. Secondly, Abdul learns that his pursuit of the
ethical is incommensurate with his circumstances, but his psychological struggle involves not so
much a binary choice between ethical and unethical behavior as the anguish of having to
abandon a framework through which he has thus far interpreted himself. This might not replicate
in exact terms the conflict of “incommensurable goods” that is tragedy, but it sets up a drama of
irreconcilability between ethical responsibility and stark necessity that comes close (Sands 84).
Finally, Abdul’s relinquishing of the ethical framework is less an explicit turn to deviance or
criminality than an abandonment of discourse, a loss of the practice of self-reflection and
evaluation.
34
In the logic of Behind, his giving up on the ethical is a surrender to illegibility that
resists Boo’s narratorial desire to write a bildung: Abdul, so ethical and consequentially so
legible thus far, now refuses to cohere, exiting the plot at a critical moment and denying Boo the
logical resolution, the charting of “a coherent narrative of developing selfhood” (Anjaria), the
“fusion of process, telos, and self-presentation” that is bildung (Gadamer 48).
35
As mentioned
above, such an undermining of the sovereign, autonomous self stages a critique of neoliberal
34
As anthropologist James Laidlaw has argued: everyday ethics is based on the fact that humans are inevitably
“evaluative.”
35
This is also true of Sunil, the boy who wishes to escape self-loathing by scavenging rather than stealing. As we
saw, Sunil’s vision of a good life—a full meal, a movie, money in his pocket—pales before his more compelling
vision of moral uprightness. In the end, however, like Abdul, Sunil understands growing up as a surrender to
circumstances:
Sunil…was also developing a formula for not hating himself while doing work that made him loathsome to
his society... “Always I was thinking how to try to make my life nicer, more okay, and nothing got better,”
Sunil said. “So now I’m going to try to do it the other way. No thinking how to make anything better, just
stopping my mind, then who knows? Maybe something good can happen” (243).
Sunil’s trajectory is not so much the loss of the ethical as the end of self-evaluation, an abandonment of discourse
(“No thinking how to make anything better, just stopping my mind…”). He does this, he says, to give life a chance
to surprise him with “something good.” But even this mild hope is undercut. As the threat of slum demolition
intensifies, Abdul predicts that Sunil will soon be homeless, “sleeping on city pavement.” Behind’s ending
reinforces the ominousness of this, leaving us with an image of the puny Sunil perched on a narrow ledge 70 feet
above the hazardous Mithi river (the river “with the body count”), scavenging for garbage, poised to fall. That the
“eleven cans, seven empty bottles, and a wad of aluminum foil” on the ledge makes this dangerous venture a
“lucky” haul for Sunil underscores the precarity of life in Annawadi and the futility of attempting bildungs of its
residents as they commit suicide, are murdered, disappear, or wander off ledges.
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individualism, disrupting its romantic narrative of agency and marking Abdul’s trajectory as
tragic. It is in this capacity to signal the tragic within the culture of neoliberalism that Behind’s
critique is at its most potent; despite (or perhaps due to) its enmeshment in a neoliberal politics
of visibility, the book is able to offer a vision of the tragic subaltern that cuts through collective
fantasies of the putative emancipatory potential of our time.
Moreover, Behind’s narration of Manju exposes the flimsy grounds on which these
fantasies are built. As mentioned, Manju is written as a diligent and conscientious young woman
who “hunger[s] for virtue” (62). As the narrative advances, her trajectory, like Abdul’s, turns on
the loss of the ethical. Manju remains a compassionate presence through most of the book even
as she deals with a succession of disappointments and sorrows: a friend’s suicide, distress at her
mother Asha’s trading of sexual favors for political ones, distress also at Asha’s worsening
exploitation of slum-dwellers, a failed attempt at an aspirational, inter-class romance, a
disintegrating family, unending chores, the prospect of unemployment after college, and
incomprehension at the watered-down colonial education she is receiving. Moreover, Asha is
trying to negotiate a marriage for her with a soldier from a relatively prosperous family back in
their village in the Vidarbha region, and Manju senses that if she doesn’t find employment soon,
she will be forced to yield. For Manju, “marrying into a village family was like time-traveling
backward” (183); she fears that her brother’s playful teasing—that she will have to cover her
head, spend all her time waiting on her parents-in-law, and be lonely since her soldier husband
will be away all the time—will in fact be the shape of her life. Before this can happen, however,
Manju’s fortunes change: one of Asha’s many money-making ventures succeeds when a
government official chooses her bogus nonprofit as a front for illegally diverting funds from a
program for universal education. The program, designed to draw child laborers, girls, and
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disabled children to school, is flush with state money, a cut of which Asha, as director of a chain
of (fake) schools, will receive every month. Asha carries out the fraud by enlisting Manju as co-
conspirator in order to fulfill the official requirement of an educated superintendent. Manju is
unsettled but does not resist; she has been brought up to obey her mother, and she “[isn’t] about
to refuse the secondhand computer that soon [comes] through the door” (229). As money begins
to come in, the family grows prosperous, acquiring an internet connection, a motorcycle, a way
out. Manju’s enthusiasm for her (real) slum school wanes and she abandons it, although the
slum’s children still call her “teacher” and “look at her expectantly, unwilling to believe that
their education was over” (229). The distance Manju has traveled is immense, from dedicatedly
running the slum’s only school to participating in a massive fraud that deprives the most
underprivileged of children of their chance at education.
Unlike as in Abdul’s case, the loss of Manju’s ethical imagination is accompanied by a
surge of prosperity and upward mobility. Having joined the network of elects illegally divvying
up welfare funds, Asha and Manju are now “member[s] of the overcity” (232), foot soldiers of a
corrupt ruling elite, running a fake nonprofit with potential gains from both state and foreign aid
organizations. While this trajectory—ethical dereliction accompanied by material gain—might
look like old-fashioned corruption, it is peculiarly refracted through the discursive and political
landscape of neoliberal India. Jyotsna Kapur explains this landscape as a “radicalized” phase of
capitalist (under)development, where “money is not generated via the production of goods but
the further circulation of money as commodity” (200). She argues that this and related neoliberal
imperatives like the revolving door between state and business have produced a “finance
bourgeoisie” with a “personal ethic that considers cheating and strong-arm tactics as the only
way to get things done” (201). This “Dickensian world of a shadow, informal economy based on
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networks, deals, and deception” understands “hustling, pushing, and peddling” as necessary
ways of getting ahead (Kapur 208, 201). For Kapur the typical neoliberal subjectivity is
thoroughly instrumental, comprising a “deeply cynical generation that is suspicious of
all…moral claims,” willing to use and be used “in a world it believes is completely immoral and
driven by profit” (212). This is the class that Manju, as an aspirational and desiring subject
formed outside of it, is poised to inhabit. She leaves behind days of endless drudgery, a
substandard education whose pretenses as a source of opportunity were always false, a life of
want and unfulfilled desire, as well as her compassion for and advocacy of the slum’s children
and her vision of herself as good.
36
This is evidently not neoliberal ideology’s established
romantic narrative of agency and emergence, but it is not a scandal either, not in the landscape of
casual corruptions and deceptions Kapur describes, where cynical self-interest is expected rather
than stigmatized, and distinguished from criminality.
37
But Behind’s own intense investment in
ethical agency scripts as scandalous not only Manju’s misuse of public resources but also the
near-inevitability of the loss of her ethical imagination.
Moreover, it is entirely possible that, under certain conditions, Manju’s change of fortune
could look like a romantic narrative of opportunity and agency. Boo notes that fake economic
and educational activity is routinely staged in Annawadi for the benefit of visiting journalists,
implying that the foreign media is particularly vulnerable in this regard. In an episode that
encapsulates this point, Asha, long before her fake school scheme succeeds, finds a way to spin a
36
In anthropologist Web Keane’s definition of the ethical: “To be ethical is to be invested in a way of life and to live
up to some vision of what a good person ought to be.”
37
There are echoes here of Slumdog Millionaire, where the child Jamal’s conning career is signaled as acceptable,
even enjoyable, but his brother’s criminal career is not. A number of films in this era depict similar ethical
trajectories, positing a shift from a Nehruvian-era uprightness to a narratively approved street-smart astuteness.
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government-sponsored self-help women’s group to her advantage. The program is supposed to
help low-income women pool their savings and provide loans at low interest rates to one another
in times of need. But Asha, who is in charge, manipulates it by first excluding the slum’s poorest
women from the group and subsequently loaning them—these same excluded and impoverished
women—the group’s pooled money at high interest rates. When introduced to foreign journalists,
the scheme is pitched as a successful empowerment initiative:
[W]hen foreign journalists came to Mumbai to see whether self-help groups were
empowering women, government officials sometimes took them to Asha. Her job was to
gather random female neighbors to smile demurely while the officials went on about how
their collective had lifted them from poverty. Manju would then be paraded in as Asha
delivered the clinching line: ‘And now my girl will be a college graduate, not dependent
on any man.” The foreign women always got emotional when she said this.
“The big people think that because we are poor we don’t understand much,” [Asha] said
to her children. Asha understood plenty. She was a chit in a national game of make-
believe, in which many of India’s old problems—poverty, disease, illiteracy, child-
labor—were being aggressively addressed. Meanwhile the other old problems, corruption
and exploitation of the weak by the less weak, continued with minimal interference (28).
By narrating such an incident, Boo implicitly claims for herself a more clear-eyed, less gullible
perspective than the foreign journalists’—and indeed the acuity of Behind’s critique lies in its
consistent refusal to romanticize claims of agency and resistance in Annawadi. Boo’s treatment
of Manju’s liberal arts education is a case in point: Manju’s literature and psychology syllabi
introduce her to texts like Congreve’s The Way of the World, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway, and Freud’s theories of the unconscious. Not only is such an apparently
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exclusive emphasis on the Western canon questionable, but, as Boo discovers, Manju has never
read or even seen any of these texts! Since all that is required of her is to regurgitate in her exams
the simplified summaries and notes her substandard college provides, Manju is denied the critical
benefits or pleasures of reading, learning the notes by rote instead.
38
Moreover, this is an
educational context in which exams are often rigged, as Asha discovers to her relief when,
required to take courses at an Open University in order to maintain her (fake) teacher status, she
is told her class will be provided answers to exam questions in advance. Behind recognizes the
bleakness of such an educational landscape and signals as much in its derision for the foreign
journalists’ susceptibility to the affect of a college education. This figure of the credulous foreign
journalist is an implicit reminder that Manju’s eventual attainment of economic autonomy
through fraud can be staged and received as a narrative of romantic agency: a bright,
hardworking, and impoverished young student, set to be Annawadi’s first female graduate,
despairs of finding employment even as she juggles exams, household chores, and running the
slum’s only bridge school. Her dedication to the school brings her to the attention of an
education department official who, recognizing her capabilities, entrusts her with the operation
of a collective of schools endowed with abundant state support. The young woman and her
students both thrive as a result. It is the sort of well-rehearsed and winning fairytale of individual
initiative and deserved rewards that attracts media attention, makes audiences happy, never gets
old.
This fairytale narrative also fits neatly into the discourse of development in twenty-first
century India. State involvement in Manju’s story (the scam originates in an education
38
Though Manju clearly practices critical reading, evident especially in her reading of Dr. Faustus.
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department official and state personnel are involved at every level) invokes the development
context and focuses it in particular on the question of women’s agency. Sumi Madhok and Shirin
Rai, among others, have drawn attention to a neoliberal discursive turn within development
rhetoric in India, visible in the deployment of the third-world woman as agential rather than
passive. Madhok and Rai argue that the scene of neoliberal development “coopt[s] and
reformula[tes]… the feminist language of [agency and] empowerment…into one of a private
striving enabled by active participation in market relations” (649). As opposed to standard
imperialist or neo/colonial characterizations of the third-world woman as victim, recent
representations, while acknowledging her disempowering circumstances, locate her struggles
against poverty and oppression in the sphere of personal responsibility (649), attributing success
or failure in overcoming them to individual ability (661). Within such a framework, Manju’s
‘success’ can once again look like empowerment through the exercise of feminist agency—a
triumphant developmental initiative, just like Asha’s self-help group.
Explicitly charted against these normative national and transnational expectations,
Manju’s complex ethical trajectory enacts a critique of neoliberalism by uncovering the
corruption behind its fantasies of economic growth and autonomy. That fraud emerges as
Manju’s only option at the close of a sustained investment in the ideals of education, financial
independence, and ethical life suggests an incommensurability: given her formation as a subject
with a history of deprivations, an unscrupulously ambitious mother, expectations of a better
material life, no employment prospects, and frustrated individualist, consumerist, civic, and
feminist desires—a non-elite subject formed in the wake of a neoliberalizing economy that is
leaving her behind—it appears that Manju can have either economic agency, with its attendant
autonomies and freedoms, or ethical imagination. Her eventual adoption of a framework of
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cynical self-interest unravels neoliberalism’s pretenses to subaltern/non-elite liberation and
feminist empowerment. Manju’s trajectory calls to mind a somewhat similar configuration in
Adiga’s The White Tiger (the subject of chapter 3), a novel that, as Betty Joseph argues, satirizes
neoliberal ideology by presenting an “illegitimate” character, a criminal at large, as a
businessman whose “appropriation of the neoliberal virtue of entrepreneurship as primitive
accumulation, extortion, bribery, and criminality” exposes the “dissimulations of contemporary
political and economic agendas” (91-92). Manju’s capitulation to cynical self-interest likewise
exposes the elite, corrupt, and exploitative underpinnings of individual agency as it is gloriously
envisioned in the neoliberal imagination. It satirizes, to borrow Joseph’s word, not only
neoliberalism’s claims of delivering sovereign selves, democratic freedoms, and vast new
agential opportunities but also the networks of transnational visibilities that enable such claims.
Even though Boo distances herself from the figure of the credulous foreign journalist
advancing dubious visibilities, Behind is part of this network, albeit in more complex ways. As
stated, Boo’s conflation of her desire to document “ordinary life” with studying India’s current
“infrastructure of opportunity” (247) embeds Behind’s vision of ordinary life entirely within a
neoliberal framework. Moreover, the book configures a deeply individualist ethical agency as the
basis for narratability: subjects are narratable not only to the extent that they are framed by
neoliberal logics but also to the extent that they articulate their self-understanding as ethical
negotiations with neoliberal rationality, as Abdul and Manju do. This leaves several subjects un-
narrated and un-narratable. In what follows I enumerate some of the specificities of this un-
narrability in order to further unpack Behind’s politics of visibility.
VI: “Doubly in Shadow”
To begin with, as opposed to a profound interiority attributed to Manju and Abdul based
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on their self-understanding, the unnarrated are denoted by markers such as caste, gender, and
disability. The story of 15-year-old Meena’s suicide is an instance. Meena, a Dalit child and the
first girl to be born in Annawadi, was trapped in a violently patriarchal family, kept from school,
forced to cook and clean all day, confined to the family hut at most times, and regularly beaten
by her brothers for minor transgressions. She was expected to be married soon and move to the
family village, where caste chauvinism was apparently far worse than in Mumbai. Behind’s brief
comments on the subject depict caste discrimination as more or less confined to rural India:
To both Meena and Manju, marrying into a village family was like time-traveling
backward. In Asha’s village, people of the Kunbi caste still considered Dalits like Meena
contaminated: unhygienic people relegated to the outskirts of town and tolerated in Kunbi
homes only when picking up garbage or dredging drains. If a Dalit touched a cup in such
a house, it had to be destroyed (183).
In this vision, the city, especially its young, renounces caste in favor of alliances based on
secular and personal preferences:
Like most young Annawadians, the girls considered the caste obsession of their elders to
be an irrelevant artifact. Manju and Meena had become friends because they both loved
to dance, and stayed friends because they could keep each other’s secrets (66).
Not only does this picture belie the ugly dynamics and structural caste-based discrimination in
urban India, its binaries—urban-progressive/rural-backward, urban-casteless/rural-caste-
ridden—alongside the suggestion that caste prejudice in Mumbai is generational and fading,
vastly simplify the matter, designating caste practices as pre-modern (“time-traveling
backward”), apart from capital and urban life and unassimilated into the narrative of
globalization. In fact, as several critics have emphasized, caste as it is practiced in neoliberal
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India is a “new product of the encounter with modernity” rather than a mere relic of the past
(Chatterjee 22). This is not to question the crushing power of caste in rural areas but to assert yet
again that, while the city may offer more emancipatory possibilities, there exists no “linear
continuum of progress” from rural to urban, no automatic acquisition of agency and freedom in
the move from village to city (Madhok and Rai 650). A minor incident provides an instance:
during a visit to her family village Meena observes, to her great surprise, that the boy she is
engaged to marry rinses his own plate after a meal rather than leaving it to the women in the
household. The city-born and -bred Meena has never before encountered a man participating in
housework. The event may not be consequential—we know nothing else about the boy—but it
does point to unimagined possibilities of partnership and sharing and illustrates the fallacy of
axiomatically designating the rural as “backward” (183). In Behind’s portrayal, however,
Meena’s life appears entirely bound by this logic, located outside the field of opportunity or
autonomy; as Boo notes, although “everything on television announced a better India for
women…[t]his new India of feisty, convention-defying women wasn’t a place Meena knew how
to get to.”
Behind does not ‘close write’ Meena: there is no mapping of inner life, no charting of
ethical trajectory; unlike Abdul or Manju, whose words and thoughts populate the book’s pages,
Meena’s words are rarely quoted or reported. Instead, she is described in a series of brief,
theatrical sketches—her “wide, thrilling film-star smile” (66), her sky-blue sari, borrowed from
Manju and worn with narrow pleats, her secret visits to a phone booth to call to a boy she liked—
before we encounter the scene of her suicide. And while the suicide and its immediate
circumstances—multiple demands and beatings by her brothers—are narrated in some detail, the
explanations offered, such as a misogynist and violent family, a forced engagement, and fear of
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intensified caste discrimination follow a conventional script of caste and patriarchal
victimization. While any suicide is partially explicable at best, in the absence of access to
Meena’s interiority, these terms—caste and patriarchy—are rendered determinate of her life and
death, her specificities lost in their scale. Such a portrayal is especially stark in contrast to Manju
and Abdul, whose caste and religious affiliations—Manju belongs to the middle-order Kunbi
caste and Abdul’s is among the three dozen Muslim families in Annawadi—are mentioned but
not treated as formative. Manju’s caste is hardly mentioned. And while Behind records the fierce
prejudice directed at Abdul—he is bullied by “strapping Hindu boys”; lives in fear of Mumbai’s
militant Hindu groups who terrorize Muslim and migrant workers; and, in an instance of casual
bigotry, characterized by Asha as making “Dirty Muslim money, haram ka paisa” (ill-gotten
gains)—its role in the shape of his life is underemphasized and unassimilated into his ethical
trajectory (27). In fact, identity, particularly caste, is hardly a factor in Behind’s study of the
“infrastructure of opportunity” (247) in India, although identity-based discrimination is deeply
entrenched in the current economic landscape. As Emily Davis has pointed out, while its
advocates perceive social forces as “incidental factors that thwart economic progress,”
neoliberalism in fact “produces and perpetuates generations of ingrained understandings of
individual and group identity” (217). Behind’s imbrication in this framework generates identity,
especially caste, as a blind spot: while it surfaces in the Annawadians’ vocabulary, it is
profoundly underemphasized as a determinate category for subject-formation—except in
Meena’s case, where it becomes overdetermined. In this brief appearance of caste specificity,
especially Dalitness, in the text only to be claimed by suicide, the Dalit girl-child is rendered the
classic gendered subaltern, a subject “doubly in shadow” (Spivak 258), impossible to narrativize
except generically and through macro-narratives. It is thus that, even in a project that undertakes
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the narration of subaltern subjectivities in a subaltern world, it is the caste-specific, Dalit
gendered subject that gets quickly exhausted, becomes unnarratable.
It is possible of course that Boo had less access to Meena than to Manju and Abdul.
Moreover, caste is especially tricky terrain for foreign journalists, gullible or otherwise. But
Boo’s competence is not at issue here; I am interested not in mounting a critique of Behind on
the basis of caste but in unpacking it as site and interlocutor of transnational visibilities. That
Abdul and Manju are produced in this site as unmarked and individuated subjects, their lives
framed within a logic of autonomy and agency, recalls Chouliaraki’s argument that transnational
encounters with suffering others are no longer considered political and ethical acts but are based
on identification with individual striving that sidesteps the politics of structural inequalities. My
point is that Abdul and Manju emerge so sharply in contrast to Meena in this set-up because in
their desires, struggles, ethical imaginations, and failures, they are generalizable as subjects not
just of urban Indian poverty but of global poverty. That is, framed primarily as poor neoliberal
subjects in a globalized urban center, they can be abstracted from local conditions to represent
such subjects elsewhere in the global South. As Akhil Gupta explains, the term “‘global poverty’
favors a context-free, or at least contextually thin, understanding of poverty” (23):
[G]lobal poverty functions…to decontextualize poverty, and to reduce different forms of
suffering to the same scale. The paradox of “global poverty” is that it draws attention to a
phenomenon that urgently needs action, and it invites such action on behalf of a range of
players on the global stage. However, the visibility of “global poverty” is purchased at
the price of decontextualization…(27)
This is not to deny the detailed work of chronicling Annawadi and its garbage traders that Behind
performs but to point out that the positioning of Abdul and Manju as unmarked subjects of global
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poverty sets them up as objects of solidarity for transnational civil society whereas subalterns
like Meena, rendered un-narratable due to their caste and gender specificities, are read as victims
to be merely pitied. What goes unremarked here is that the discourse of poverty is inseparable
from caste, communal, patriarchal, and other structural chauvinisms.
VII: Who Speaks?
Narratability in Behind also turns on its subjects’ self-articulations, or the lack thereof: the un-
narrated Meena and Fatima are assembled from accounts supplied by others rather than in their
own words, while the speech of those narrated is sometimes quoted, sometimes reported, and
often ventriloquized. But at times the question “who speaks?” gets tricky, inextricable from the
literary techniques Behind deploys to mask the scene of speech. Boo’s use of omniscient
narration and indirect discourse ensures that this scene—interviews with subjects, conversations
among Annawadians recorded while she was shadowing them, the vagaries of translation (since
Boo doesn’t speak the local languages)—does not enter the text of Behind. Instead, as
mentioned, the book reads like a novel by Dickens, imitating the classic realist novel in form and
producing a closed, knowable, and remarkably coherent world. In what follows I will first
enumerate some ramifications of such a deployment of omniscient narration in a nonfiction
setting and subsequently unpack Behind’s ventriloquisms, eventually returning to the un-narrated
figure of Fatima. I will argue that the un-narratability of figures like Fatima undercuts Behind’s
all-knowing stance and uncovers the perhaps inevitable overreach and intrusiveness of its
omniscient narrator.
To begin with, Boo achieves the effect of disembodied narration through insistent self-
erasure; in keeping with classic journalistic conventions, she never utters the pronoun “I,”
obfuscates all narrative occasions, and deflects any curiosity about her investigative methods and
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encounters with subjects on to the subjects themselves. As she explained in an interview after the
publication of Behind, she did not want to become a character in the book: “When you get to the
last pages…I don’t want you to think about me sitting beside Abdul in that little garbage truck. I
want you to be thinking about Abdul” (Medina, “Q&A with Katherine”). Such self-erasure not
only sharpens the focus on Annawadi but also smoothens the tricky ethical terrain of encounters
between a female white American journalist and her postcolonial subaltern subjects. In Behind’s
paratexts
39
—the Author’s Note at its close, interviews and lectures, her website—Boo speaks of
the experience of reporting from Annawadi for over three years: falling into the sewage lake,
being an object of curiosity and ridicule, growing into a fixture in the daily life of the slum,
sharing a camera with its children, working with translators, “running afoul of the police” (251),
stepping out of Annawadi and into the luxury hotels surrounding it to use their restrooms, and so
on. She mentions her “lousy health” before she started the project, her apprehensions about
“negotiating monsoon and slum conditions” (248), and anxieties about being out of her depth as
a foreign reporter with no specialized knowledge about India. She also offers as anecdotes her
subjects’ impatience with her repeated probing of their memories. This outburst by Abdul,
recorded in the Author’s Note, provides a glimpse: “Are you dim-witted, Katherine? I told you
already three times and you put it in your computer. I have forgotten it now. I want it to stay
forgotten. So will you please not ask me again?” (252). These paratextual words are startling:
they call attention to Boo’s presence and mediation, so skillfully hidden thus far, and hint at
possible tensions between her and her subjects. But none of this—the spectacle of Boo’s
39
In Gerard Genette’s schema, interviews are epitexts—markers outside the key text that shape its reception, and
markers within the text—prefaces, afterwords, titles, and so on are peritexts. Genette categorizes both these
markers as paratexts: More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold…or as Phillippe
Lejeune put it, “a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text.”
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presence in the slum, the reticent subjects, the crowded scene of translation, the refusal to
remember or speak, the relationships between Boo and the Annawadians—finds its way into the
pages of Behind. Instead, Boo combines her immersive experience of Annawadi with intensive
investigative journalism, conducting hundreds of interviews and cross-checking them against
three thousand public records to construct a ‘view from nowhere’ and posit a disincarnate, all-
knowing narrator who weaves in and out of the minds of subjects/characters.
This bid for omniscience obscures the scene of reporting and closely intertwines author-
subject viewpoints. Consider this description of daybreak in Annawadi:
Abdul rose with minimal whining, since the only whining his mother tolerated was her
own. Besides, this was the gentle-going hour in which he hated Annawadi least. The pale
sun lent the sewage lake a sparkling silver cast, and the parrots nesting at the far side of
the lake could still be heard over the jets. Outside his neighbors’ huts, some held together
by duct tape and rope, damp rags were discreetly freshening bodies. Children in school-
uniform neckties were hauling pots of water from public taps. A languid line extended
from an orange concrete block of public toilets. Even goats’ eyes were heavy with sleep.
It was the moment of the intimate and the familial, before the great pursuit of the tiny
market niche got under way (4).
Were it fiction, this passage would be unremarkable, an example perhaps of “internal
focalization,” which according to Genette’s compilation of critical definitions is a “vision
avec”—narration with a “restricted field,” where “the narrator says only what a given character
knows” As nonfiction, however, the paragraph generates an enmeshment of authorial and
characterological viewpoints and speech that thwarts Genette’s well-known injunction to always
distinguish between “who speaks?” and “who sees?” Evidently designed to picture Annawadi for
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readers, this panoramic passage provides little referential information. Is it Abdul or the narrator
who ‘sees’ the scene? If Abdul, why would he need to note in such fine detail sights he
encounters every day? The defamiliarized vocabulary suggests an outsider’s vision while the
instances of free indirect speech (“Besides, this was the gentle-going hour in which he hated
Annawadi least”) indicate focalization through Abdul. Further, if the passage is based on
Abdul’s speech, his actual vocabulary is hidden: we are not privy to the words Abdul used that
generated this scene: it is unclear whether these words are translation, paraphrase, or altogether
Boo’s words. And finally, if the vision is entirely Boo’s and only apparently focalized through
Abdul, can it lay claim to the status of nonfiction?
This question of “who speaks?” gets increasingly muddled as the narrative advances,
particularly with the appearance of what Genette (speaking of Proust) calls polymodality: “three
modes of focalization, passing at will from the consciousness of [Proust’s] hero to that of his
narrator, and inhabiting by turns that of his most diverse characters” (207). For Genette, this
phenomenon produces a “deliberately non-organized” narratorial position based on “the
concurrence of theoretically impossible focalizations, which shakes the whole logic of narrative
representation” (210-211). If such an overreach of authorial authority in fiction is “anomalous,”
in nonfiction its implications are truly bewildering (Culler 12). Consider Jonathan Culler’s
response to Genette:
Doubtless, if Proust can always be caught in flagrant violation of the system, this is
because the categories for the description of narrative discourse are in fact what we may
for convenience call a model of the real world. According to this model, events
necessarily take place both in a particular order and a definable number of times. A
speaker has certain kinds of information about events and lacks other kinds. He either
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experienced them or he did not, and generally he stands in a definable relationship to the
events he recounts. However true this model may be, there is nothing to prevent
narratives from violating it and producing texts which involve impossible combinations.
(10, emphasis added)
In fiction, that is. Nonfiction is by definition based on “what we may for convenience call a
model of the real world.” Behind attempts to circumvent the limitations of this model through its
extensive research and fieldwork: Boo explains in the Author’s Note that she witnessed most of
the events narrated in the book, and for those she didn’t, her investigative method consisted, as
mentioned, of hundreds of interviews as well as cross-verification with 3,000 official records
obtained from hospitals, the morgue, and the police. This witnessing, vast research, and
interviewing undergirds Behind’s rhetoric of knowing, allowing Boo to present not only a single,
definitive narrative but also to claim for it the status of a truth that tells itself, without the need
for a speaker. It is this conceit that allows Behind’s variable and impossible focalizations to exist
on the same narrative plane.
For instance, chapter 7 begins with a focalization through Fatima, hospitalized after her
attempted self-immolation. We are privy to her feelings as she is transported into the ward: she
feels for once “like a person who counted,” attended as she is by a stream of Annawadi women
who usually shun her. We learn that she experiences her injured state as an expansion of
influence and even agency: “she didn’t need to see herself to know she was bigger. The swelling
was part of it, but there were other ways in which the fire had increased her” (99). It is through
Fatima that we glimpse Abdul’s mother Zeherunisa, terrified of the criminal charges levelled at
her family, “cowering outside the room” (100). Bits of free indirect speech strengthen this
focalization; when Asha attempts to broker peace between her and the Hussains, for instance,
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Fatima sees through her: “Fatima understood that Asha intended to take a commission…She was
burned, not mental. But it was too late to tell the truth” (101, emphasis mine). Halfway through
the chapter, however, the focalization lifts to accommodate a narratorial account of the sequence
of events since Fatima’s suicide attempt: her charge that the Hussains had set her on fire, their
subsequent arrest, and the refutation of the charge by an eyewitness:
But by the next morning the Sahar Police had learned that Fatima’s statement was false…
If a charge against the Hussains was going to stick, and money from the family extracted,
a more plausible victim statement was required. In order to help Fatima make such a
statement, the police had dispatched a pretty, plump government official to [the hospital]
(101).
Subsequently, focalization through Fatima resumes as she reconstructs her official statement,
modifying her complaint from attempted murder to incitement to suicide and laying the bulk of
the blame on Abdul. The rationale for this is narrated in yet another instance of free indirect
speech:
Abdul Hussain had threatened and throttled her, she said in her statement. Abdul Hussain
had beaten her up.
How could you bring down a family you envied if you failed to name the boy in that
family who did most of the work? (102, emphasis mine)
Finally, the section closes with a disorienting glimpse into the government official’s thoughts:
[The] Special Executive Officer…departed the hospital room to begin her real work.
With this improved witness statement, and several other witness statements she hoped to
influence at Annawadi, she thought she could make a handsome profit from the Hussains
(102, emphasis mine).
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It is impossible to discern the scaffolding behind this scene: who speaks these thoughts and to
whom? Did Fatima, admitted to the hospital’s burn ward, injured and in pain, tell Boo of her
scheme to falsely incriminate the Hussains? How does Boo have access to the corrupt scheming
of a government official? In the Author’s Note Boo explains her method of relating thoughts:
When I describe the thoughts of individuals…those thoughts have been related to me and
my translators, or to others in our presence. When I sought to grasp, retrospectively, a
person’s thinking at a given moment, or when I had to do repeated interviews in order to
understand the complexity of someone’s views—very often the case—I used paraphrase
(250, emphasis mine).
This method not only masks actual speech but also renders unclear which parts of the narration
are based on what was said directly to Boo, what was reported second-hand, and what is
conjecture and paraphrase, “grasp[ed] retrospectively” (250).
Such narratorial weaving in and out of the minds of characters suggests not so much
variable focalization as omniscient or “nonfocalized narration,” where the “narrator knows more
than the character, or more exactly says more than any of the characters knows” (Genette 189)—
surely a problematic proposition in a journalistic context. This is especially true regarding
Behind’s account of the Hussians’ chaotic courtroom trial. Focalized in turn through the narrator
and various witnesses and observers, the trail involves juggling between three languages—
Marathi, Hindi, and English—and a stenographer proficient only in one, resulting in frequent
misunderstandings, in addition to a rushed ‘fast-track’ process, an impatient judge, false
testimonies, a flurry of personal hostilities, a transfer of judges mid-way, and a courtroom made
so noisy by sounds of traffic from an open window and a clattering ceiling fan that the accused
are unable to hear the progress of their case. As the narrator tells it, on one such day:
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The misconstrued witnesses and the mystified accused all got on the same train to return
to their regular, contentious lives in Annawadi, where they would stew about what they
thought had happened but couldn’t know for sure (212, emphasis mine).
The narrator, on the other hand, does claim to know for sure, and is able to provide a lucid
account of the web of relationships and antagonisms as well as sort the reliable testimonies from
the false.
40
The narratorial function becomes a function of judgment.
It is thus that Boo’s choice of third-person narration in the interests of a deep focus on
Annawadi paradoxically effects a narratorial overreach. The classically novelistic third-person
narration that Boo adopts entails a fictive narrator, a sort of coordinating mechanism, that
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth calls a “presiding consciousness”: “an abstraction that exists in order to
break down the discontinuities that limitations introduce into experience [and] to bridge the
manifest gaps in material existence” (66). For Ermarth, such a narrator is not based on a real-
world model at all: it is a de-individualized consciousness, a perspective that “exists apart from
[and] between particulars; it is everywhere and nowhere...” (86). Only such a mechanism,
“unencumbered by flesh and blood and daily living” (Dowden quoted in Ermarth 66), can
sidestep the compulsions of “location and identity” to mediate between characters, texts, and
readers (Ermarth 67). This is how the realistic apparatus works. But in the absence of the
mediations of fiction, as in Behind, projecting such a narrator has a paradoxical effect: while it
allows Boo to de-emphasize her presence in the service of cultivating a deep focus on her
subjects, it also requires her narrator to assume an all-seeing authority with full access to events
40
In a similar vein elsewhere, even as the narrator provides an account of 15-year-old Sanjay’s suicide, the boy’s
mother, left in the dark and desperate for the reasons behind his death, walks around in a daze, asking: “How to I
sleep without knowing?” (173). Here again, the narrator’s knowledge exceeds the character’s, and the nonfiction
setting changes the stakes: one cannot help but wonder—if Boo was at the scene, why didn’t she tell the woman
what she knew?
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and minds and posits Annawadi and its subaltern residents as knowable, mappable, and
representable. It produces a “realistic universe,” which, in Leo Bersani’s striking phrase, is one
of “compulsive intelligibility” (Bersani quoted in Ermarth 85) enforcing impossible continuities
of event and transparencies of character. But as ethnographer Diane Goldstein has shown, the
writing of traumatized or vulnerable subjects involves a profound narrative confusion, a “deep
untellability”: “a state in which narratives of experience become fragmented, incoherent, and
chaotic, if articulated at all” (184). Goldstein argues that “chaos and untellability manifest
themselves in narrative…as ineffability, as fragmentation, as dissociation, and as devaluation”
(180). Boo’s smooth realistic narrator masks this chaos, ordering information and utterances into
lucid sequences. Moreover, Behind’s nonfiction status inevitably identifies Boo with her
narrator, not only because Boo’s is the unifying consciousness that drives the narrative but also
because her presence is consistently felt in the iron grip with which she shapes the material into
coherence.
VIII: Poor Characters
The copious use of a narrative style akin to free indirect discourse (FID) to represent
consciousness is key to this production of coherence. In the most basic sense, FID, where “a
character’s idiom is audibly mimicked by the narrator” (Shaw 591), is a technique for rendering
characterological thought or speech in the narratorial voice, maintaining the grammar and tense
of narration. It “reproduces the character’s own mental language…in the guise of a narrator’s
discourse” (Cohn 14). Consider this reference to the quick end to Abdul’s early schooling,
excerpted from Behind’s Prologue:
Of course [Abdul] would be fast. He’d been sorting since he was about six years old,
because tuberculosis and garbage work had wrecked his father’s lungs. Abdul’s motor
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skills had developed around his labor.
“You didn’t have the mind for school, anyway,” his father had recently observed. Abdul
wasn’t sure he’d had enough schooling to make a judgment either way. In the early
years, he’d sat in a classroom where nothing much had happened. Then there had been
only work. Work that churned so much filth into the air it turned his snot black. Work
more boring than dirty. Work he expected to be doing for the rest of his life. Most days,
the prospect weighed on him like a sentence. Tonight, hiding from the police, it felt like a
hope (xiii, emphasis mine).
This could be a fairly straightforward example of FID—characterological thought transposed
into the ‘grammar’ of narratorial language. However, not only does it mask any referential
information about the scene of speech (as discussed), it also reimagines Abdul’s speech as
thought. That is, while the italicized portions are evidently constructed out of Boo’s interviews
with Abdul, Behind’s narrative logic conveys them as thought, or the articulation of his “inner
voice” (Cohn 60) in contrast to his father’s quoted speech. In fact, this passage is characteristic
of Behind’s Prologue, a boomingly artificial reconstruction of Abdul’s attempt to avoid arrest
after Fatima’s attempted suicide interspersed with a range of contextualizing thoughts about the
Hussains, their neighbors, and Annawadi’s landscape. The passage scrambles the logic of FID;
rather than mimicking Abdul’s speech, it renders his words, spoken in an entirely separate setting
(the interview), as thought
41
in an act of narratorial intrusion that fallaciously equates speech
with consciousness, self-narration with subjectivity. Such an exercise of narratorial authority, I
want to suggest, makes Behind’s peculiar rendering of FID a site of encounter between Boo and
41
Except for rare instances, Behind narrates characterological speech and thought in a uniform narratorial idiom,
possibly because her subjects’ words reach Boo only in translation.
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her subjects, a site, even, of a struggle for representational control.
In an essay titled “The Novelist and her Poor,” Elaine Freedgood sets up a suggestive
opposition between narrator and character in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton in the context of
novelistic writing about the industrial poor, particularly the use of FID. Freedgood observes that
FID’s ideal subjects are readers like Emma Bovary whose thoughts are the debris of bad
romances and novels. For such a mode of narration, subjectivity and interiority are “literary
effect[s]”; after all, FID is “perhaps not so much a representation of subjectivity as a
representation of the intertextuality of representations of subjectivity, including those we make to
ourselves about ourselves”: a “satire of the way in which we all recycle language” (219).
Freedgood argues that by ventriloquizing the “flotsam and jetsam” of characterological minds
like Bovary’s, FID humiliates and shames them, making “characters poor so that narrators can
remain rich” (218-219). But Mary Barton, although a “deeply undemocratic” novel, altogether
eschews FID in the narration of its poor characters, to their inadvertent benefit. Freedgood
observes that the novel depicts its poor as too literal-minded and constricted to abide any reading
material apart from a “literal and respectful realism” that is “immediately for and about them,”
and argues, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that Gaskell’s poor characters “perhaps simply do
not read enough” for the practice of FID: they are understood as shaped by forces other than
reading and use language that is too different from the narrator’s. Represented only from the
“outside,” they are thus unwittingly spared the “invasion” of FID, so that they “remain intact as
possible subjects”:
Their interiority in unknown, but it is not nonexistent. Gaskell’s characters are poor in
spirit, poor in material goods, poor in intellectual accomplishment, but they are wealthier
than the average fictional character that will succeed them in that they can potentially
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represent themselves…This gap [the absence of FID]…is a space of freedom for the
characters, who cannot, finally, be spoken for in their entirety as subjects and who
therefore have yet to be represented fully in novelistic terms (220).
The implications of this argument for Behind are interesting. Firstly, Freedgood’s claim
that the absence of FID in Mary Barton inadvertently shields the subjectivities of the poor from
“being spoken for” by an invasive narrator reverses the axiom
42
that the realist apparatus is
singularly able to represent subjectivity by probing the depths of characterological inner life, that
the “transparent rendering of others” is “the central concern for the realist novel” (Gajarawala
39). Instead, it posits FID as a site of struggle for representational control between narrator and
(poor) character—one in which, however, the narrator always gets the final word. This is in
fiction; in a nonfictional realist text like Behind whose stated aim is the exploration of the
subjectivities of the poor, FID becomes even more emphasized as a site of struggle and invasion.
Consider these passages that describe Fatima, a disabled woman who lived in the shack next to
the Hussains. Sentences are numbered for easy reference:
There was now a three-inch barrier between [Abdul] and the One Leg, who took lovers
while her husband was sorting garbage elsewhere (1). In recent months, Abdul had had
occasion to register her only when she clinked past on her metal crutches, heading for the
market or the public toilet (2). The One Leg’s crutches seemed to be too short, because
when she walked, her butt stuck out—did some switchy thing that made people laugh (3).
The lipstick provided further hilarity (4). She draws on that face just to squat at the shit-
hole? (5). Some days the lips were orange, other days purple-red, as if she’d climbed the
42
Of course realism’s capacity to represent marginality has been questioned repeatedly. Freedgood’s argument
questions it for fresh reasons.
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jamun tree by the Hotel Leela and mouthed it clean (6). (xvi)
It is uncertain whether this entire passage is a report of Abdul’s view of Fatima or if, in sentences
3, 4, 5, and 6, there sound other voices from the Annawadi community. Sentence 5 is most likely
a direct quotation, although the use of italicization rather than quotation marks, which appear
elsewhere in Behind, clouds the issue: are the words spoken or projected? Quoted or something
like FID? What is clear from the passage is that Fatima is an object of ridicule in Annawadi, and
that she herself has not spoken yet.
Here is the passage that follows immediately after:
The One Leg’s given name was Sita. She had fair skin, usually an asset, but the runt leg
had smacked down her bride price. Her Hindu parents had taken the single [marriage]
offer they got: poor, unattractive, hardworking, Muslim, old—‘half-dead, but who else
wanted her,’ as her mother had once said with a frown. The unlikely husband renamed
her Fatima, and from their mismating had come three scrawny girls. The sickliest had
drowned in a bucket, at home. Fatima did not seem to grieve, which got people talking.
After a few days she reemerged from her hut, still switchy-hipped and staring at men with
her gold-flecked, unlowering eyes (xvi).
Here again, there is no evidence of Fatima’s speech; instead, clauses like “the runt leg had
smacked down her bride price” sound unidentified Annawadian voices. In fact, like much of
Behind’s commentary on Fatima, this passage has the tone of reported speech, although it
employs a technique closer to FID: the recounting of Annawadian public opinion, channeled
through Boo’s sources, and rendered as omniscient narration without the niggling tags of “he
said, she said, they said.” Thus is Behind’s Fatima defined by others in a variety of ways, often
through gossip and rumor. Renamed by her husband, bemoaned by her mother, and taunted by
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the community, which suspects her of drowning her tubercular daughter and mocks her interest
in make-up and sex, she emerges early in the book as an outcast, especially due to her frank
expression of sexual need:
The most preposterous of [Annawadi’s] dreamers was One Leg. Everyone thought so.
Her abiding interest was in extramarital sex, though not for pocket change alone. That,
her neighbors would have understood. But the One Leg wanted to transcend the affliction
by which others had named her. She wanted to be respected and reckoned attractive.
Annawadians considered such desires inappropriate for a cripple.
The last sentence, which is reported, seals Annawadians as the generic source that shapes
Behind’s Fatima. Despite the narratorial voice’s careful use of the community’s pejorative
appellation One Leg—a translation of the Hindi word for “lame” (langdi)—only when
channeling these voices, a distinction that implies that “One Leg” is different from “Fatima,” this
gap remains unexplored. In the harsh landscape of Behind, Fatima is “One Leg,” outlined for us
by contemptuous neighbors who “whisper” about her endlessly (32).
Finally, while there is little evidence that Boo was able to interview her, Fatima is
sometimes ventriloquized, through FID, in small acts of narratorial intrusion that narrate her
from the inside:
Only in the hours when the men [her lovers] came…did the part of her body she had to
offer feel more important than the part she lacked.
[T]he fire had increased her…here at [the hospital]…she continued to feel like a person
who counted...of all the new experiences Fatima was having in the burn ward, the most
unexpected was the stream of respectable female visitors from Annawadi (100).
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It is thus that the text speaks Fatima, and in so doing humiliates and scapegoats her, eventually
explaining away her self-immolation by attributing to it clear motive and design: the jealous wish
to destroy the Hussains by incriminating them. Her own version—that they incited her to suicide
by continuous harassment—is reported as inconsistent and confused, and her death-bed
statement deemed false; in fact, Behind writes the suicide itself as an act of spite and
vindictiveness. It is thus that, in an ironic echo of Spivak’s Bhubaneshwari Bhaduri, Fatima’s
final message—that the Hussains harassed and drove her to death—remains unrecognized and
disbelieved. Unlike in the case of Gaskell’s poor, by speaking Fatima from the inside as well as
representing her through her neighbors’ eyes from the outside, Behind explains and exhausts her
even as it denies her the right to speak for herself. In contrast to the fictional Animal, who
negotiates his representation by refusing to be mediated by the Australian journalist, Fatima is all
mediation. Her seeming lack of an “ethical imagination” and her status as “surplus…,
superfluous to a neoliberal regime” (Gidwani and Reddy 1650) deny her a voice in Behind’s
representational economy, rendering her but a plot point in other people’s stories.
Conclusion
I have argued in this chapter that the singularity of Behind’s critique is its ability to sustain a
tragic vision of subalternity within the framework of neoliberalism, even as its imbrication in this
framework demands unmarked, globally identifiable and recognizable ethical agents as subjects.
Further, the adoption of omniscient narration and realist aesthetics imbues Boo with immense
narratorial control and authority and undercuts her project of presenting an under-mediated
visibility. The failure of the experiment opens to the larger problematic of this dissertation: the
significance and suitability of “new realism’s” emergence as the dominant form of critiques of
neoliberalism in postmillennial Indian English writing. The next chapter takes the question to the
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“new social realism” of Arvind Adiga’s political novel The White Tiger (Anjaria 115).
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Chapter 3
Entrepreneurs and Others: The White Tiger as Neoliberal Bildungsroman
Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) is a novel of formation. The protagonist Balram Halwai
announces this early on: he is about to tell his “life’s story (6),” “the story of his upbringing”
(11), of how he “got to Bangalore and became one of its most successful (…) businessmen,” a
“self-taught entrepreneur” (6). Such prefatory declarations are characteristic of the first-person
Bildungsroman, whose “opening lines articulate [an] implicit narrative contract…promis[ing]…a
story of how the narrator became a narrator” (Slaughter 229). In The White Tiger, this
retrospective first-person account comes in the form of an epistolary conceit: the novel is written
as a collection of letters to the (then) Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who is purportedly on a visit
to Bangalore in search of advice about fostering entrepreneurial spirit in China: “to meet some
Indian entrepreneurs and hear the story of their success from their own lips [and]…to know the
truth about Bangalore” (4). Halwai, who dubs himself “‘The White Tiger’; A Thinking Man;
And an Entrepreneur; Living in the world’s center of Technology and Outsourcing” (3), offers
his thoughts in response:
…in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man
now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through
buggery, mobile phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth
about Bangalore.
By telling you my life’s story.
…When you have heard the story of how I got to Bangalore and became one of its most
successful (though probably least known) businessmen, you will know everything there is
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to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious
twenty-first century of man.
The century, more specifically, of the yellow and the brown man.
You and me. (6-7; italics in original)
The passage weaves far-ranging tropes into the plot of Halwai’s self-development. By
claiming that the “story of [his] life” contains the “truth about Bangalore,” where Bangalore is
synecdochic of the new enterprise culture of technological development, outsourcing, and a
massive services sector, Halwai ties his personal narrative to the economic destiny of post-
liberalization India. But unlike his predecessor Saleem Sinai of Midnight’s Children (1981),
whose disintegrating body, “handcuffed to history,” allegorizes the postcolonial nation, Halwai
enacts the bildung of an emergent neoliberal India breaking free of its third-world past. Halwai’s
claim, though, goes even further: that the trajectory of his self-development will reveal the shape
of all entrepreneurship in the twenty-first century—the century, he declares, of India and China.
The White Tiger’s opening pages thus announce an intention to deploy entrepreneurship as a
trope to allegorize the decline of the West and the rise of the Asian century. China’s status in this
allegory is, however, nominal: while addressed to the Chinese premier in a show of anti-West
solidarity, Halwai’s rhetoric in these pages—a mix of bombast, self-satire, and pride masking a
postcolonial inferiority complex—is fixated on the Indian fantasy of economic rise and world
domination.
In her essay on the subject, Betty Joseph coins the term “neoliberal allegory” to describe
The White Tiger’s “figur[ing] of the nation as a struggling individual emerging…from long-term
postcolonial economic woes…to take its rightful place on the international stage” (69). Building
on this, I propose that the novel’s allegorical mode calls into play the peculiar configuration of
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modern subject formation, national form, social organization, bourgeois individualism, and
democratic citizenship that constitutes the genre of the Bildungsroman, the nineteenth century
European novel form that originally posited a correspondence between self, nation, and capitalist
modernity. Adiga’s novel, I suggest, engages the history of the genre, offering itself as a
neoliberal iteration. It poses anew, in the context of the Indian economic present, the question
that drove Franco Moretti’s seminal inquiry into the nineteenth century Bildungsroman: how
does the closed form of the novel contain the “boundless dynamism,” the “endless growth,” of
capitalism? (6) That is, how is the ever-growing, shape-shifting world of capital narratively and
formally delimited, as it must be in order to be fashioned into a novel?
Moretti found his answer in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century Bildungsroman,
which, he argues, stages an allegorical resolution of the tension between limitless growth and
narrative containment through character, specifically through the self-development of a young
protagonist who must pass from a formless youth into a stable and fully socialized adulthood.
For Moretti, the figure of youth is the central trope in this schema: it forges “mobility” and
“interiority” as the chief characteristics of the modern protagonist, where mobility suggests both
class advancement and unprecedented possibilities for travel, and interiority implies a new inner
restlessness, uncontainable within traditional and fixed social structures (5). In themselves,
however, these characteristics would produce a never-ending or at best open-ended chronicle of
ceaseless mobility and ever-changing interiority that is antithetical to novelistic form. Moretti
argues that this radical open-endedness is restrained by the other defining feature of youth: its
impermanence. He demonstrates that the classical Bildungsroman fixes the achievement of an
assimilated, settled adulthood as the end point to the narrative of self-development and stages a
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reconciliation between individual subjectivity and societal convention, determining a limit for
the protagonist’s self-formation, or bildung.
Understood as such, the Bildungsroman has a deeply counter-revolutionary formal
structure that depends on and naturalizes existing social relations. It posits a self-actualized state
of habitual routine and social normalcy as the goal of human life and produces its protagonist as
a predictable, well-adjusted citizen-subject who not only does not threaten the prevailing liberal
democratic capitalist order but can also be trusted to reproduce it (Slaughter 178). In other
words, as critics have observed, the Bildungsroman, as the dominant form of the European realist
novel, imagined the growth and establishment of bourgeois individualism and citizenship within
the framework of the modern nation-state.
Class and social position were central to who got to be thus imagined. As Nancy
Armstrong points out, in order to be a protagonist in an eighteenth-century novel, “a character
had to harbor an acute dissatisfaction with his or her assigned position in the social world and
feel compelled to find a better one” (4). Further, the novel “create[d] an individual”—that is,
narrated the development of modern selfhood—by depicting “an interiority in excess of the
social position that individual is supposed to occupy” (8). It was this surplus interiority, spilling
over that which “tradition had attached to the positions composing eighteenth-century British
society,” that made a character viable as a protagonist (4). In other words, for the early British
realist novel, upward social mobility was a precondition for interiority, the protagonist’s self-
development narrated as class advancement, and vice versa. While in the eighteenth century this
tendency co-existed with other narrative traditions in Britain, it became plainly evident in the
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canonical realist works of the nineteenth.
43
This is not to claim that mobility is the only
determinant of the protagonist’s subjectivity but to venture that historically, the novelization of
modern self-development has arguably been entwined with the acquisition of class status.
In this chapter I want to carry this suggestive linking of interiority and mobility to a
consideration of The White Tiger as an allegory of neoliberal self-development in contemporary
India. In this my objective is not so much to demonstrate The White Tiger’s strict adherence to
the genre but to deploy the broad conceptual sweep of Bildungsroman criticism to construct a
productive framework to close read the novel. In what follows I will briefly review the critical
history of the Bildungsroman, tracing the broad shifts and continuities in its classic European,
imperialist, colonial, and postcolonial renderings. My purpose in presenting this account is
twofold: first, to outline the Bildungsroman’s efforts at narrative containment through symbolic
mediations between capitalist modernity and subject formation, and second, to explore the status
of marginality in its discourse, particularly the representation of the inner lives of marginal
characters as the form travels from the empire-building capitalism of the West into the colonies
and post-colonies. Part II of the chapter will use the insights of this critical history to present a
reading of Adiga’s The White Tiger—a novel that maps the bildung of a ‘servant,’ Balram, who
becomes a successful entrepreneur by murdering his feckless upper-class ‘master’—as a
postcolonial neoliberal Bildungsroman. It will show that The White Tiger overturns traditional
and established grounds for modern personhood as posited by the Bildungsroman—education,
social organization, and national citizenship on the one hand and a fully realized inner life on the
43
Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Jane Eyre,
Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady, to name but a few. In Middlemarch, mobility takes the form not of class
advancement but of Dorothea’s rejection of the landowning class in favor of modern individualism. Also reference
Alden, Social Mobility in the English Bildungsroman, for exceptions.
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other—even as it satirizes the bases of neoliberal selfhood, such as individualism, self-
maximization, radical self-interest, competition, and personal autonomy. Further, it will
demonstrate that a distinctly non-novelistic interiority—parodic, theatrical, consciously
inauthentic—accompanies Balram’s unconventional acquisition of upper class status. Reading
The White Tiger as a contemporary iteration of the Bildungsroman, particularly in its skepticism
toward the value and comforts of inner life, I argue that it exposes the perverse foundations of
new India’s fantasy of the perfect neoliberal subject: one who fully inhabits neoliberalism’s
signature subjectivity—entrepreneurship—in his public as well as private life.
I: The Bildungsroman: A Critical History
The Bildungsroman is a novel of education and socialization, the narrative of an individual’s
coming of age as a social being. Grounded in the German philosophic concept of Bildung, which
denotes aesthetic education, self-cultivation, and a teleological arc of development, the classical
late eighteenth-century European Bildungsroman was an account of its subject’s attainment of
maturity and personhood, his/her integration into and containment by the contemporary social
order. This subject was not merely socially compliant; as Moretti argues, the Bildungsroman
narrates a young protagonist’s “internaliz[ation]” of social norms to a point at which “there is no
conflict between individuality and socialization, autonomy and normality, interiority and
objectification” (16, italics in original). The classical Bildungsroman is a narrative of perfect
incorporation, where individual subject formation “coincides without rifts with … social
integration,” and all events lead to “one ending, and one ending only”: the stabilization of
personality, the merging of a protagonist with his world, the reproduction of the social order
(Moretti 16, 7).
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Critics have pointed out that this model is more hypothetical than illustrative. Moretti
himself concedes that it has a “fairy-tale-like closed” structure that is “fully possible only in the
precapitalist world” of “static” social norms, and that it is at odds with the “boundless
dynamism” of modernity (28, 27; italics in original). Nonetheless, for Moretti, the nineteenth
century Bildungsroman retains this closed structure. As mentioned, he argues that by deploying
the figure of youth as a central trope, the Bildungsroman was able to contain modernity’s ever-
changing world. Youth epitomized the generational discontinuities and restlessness of the age of
capital even as its impermanence narratively limited its potential for endless mobility and ever-
developing interiority (4, 6). The transience of youth allowed the Bildungsroman to narrate its
subduing, its passing into an adulthood in which “external compulsion” and “internal impulses”
are “fused…into a new unity” (Moretti 6). As D A Miller observes, this closural move enabled
the reconsolidation of social norms, effecting an “increased social cohesiveness,” a “reconfirmed
normativeness,” and a “renovated pedagogy for reproducing the community thus fortified in a
younger generation” (122). Thus were youth’s rebellious energies reined in and rendered benign,
its formlessness given shape. As Jed Esty says in his pithy summary of Moretti’s argument:
“[T]he European Bildungsroman’s historical vocation was to manage the effects of
modernization by representing it within a safe narrative scheme” (4).
Building on Moretti, Esty and others have suggested that the Bildungsroman embedded
its safe closures in the “bounded” form of the nation, which “gives a finished form to modern
societies in the same way that adulthood gives a finished form to the modern subject” (Esty 4). In
that era of romantic nationalism, the nation, symbolically replacing supposedly lost divine order,
was the “proper cultural container” of the Bildungsroman’s “allegory of development,”
supplying a sense of historical continuity even as its (the nation’s) own bid to legitimacy was
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reinforced by the Bildungsroman (Esty 4-6; Vermeulen and de Graef 243). The classical
Bildungsroman was thus an allegory of national progress—Bakhtin calls it the “image of man
growing in national-historical time” and Esty calls it a “soul-nation allegory”—that worked to
both solicit and reflect social consent (Bakhtin cited in Esty 5, emphasis in original; Esty 4).
Rooted in the German romantic tradition of aesthetic education and self-cultivation, it fused
narratives of self-actualization and national destiny by deploying “tropes of organic flourishing”
that served to establish the nation as the default frame of reference and citizenship as the default
subjectivity for the modern subject (Vermeulen and de Graef 243). The national-era
Bildungsroman was thus one of many ‘technologies’ of the production and reproduction of self-
regulating national citizen-subjects (Slaughter 112). In imagining the nation-state as “the highest
and most natural form of human sociality” and the citizen as the “most fully developed form of
the human personality,” it supplied readers with a sanctioned cultural vocabulary and grammar to
narrate their own processes of socialization, their own bildungs, as “stor[ies] of citizen-
subjectivation” (Slaughter 117-118). In all this, the Bildungsroman worked to naturalize the
nation-state, burying its “foundational…violence” in “patterns of organic growth,” plotting a
teleological and counterrevolutionary narrative of citizen formation as inexorable, and serving to
“dispel the threat of irreducible alterity” (Vermeulen and de Graef 244-245). It is thus a genre
devoted to “valorizing existing power relations by narrativizing the process of socialization”
(Castle 22). As will be seen below, in these conservative, assimilationist, hegemonic, and
normative drives, this complicity with the dominant political order, are revealed the
Bildingsroman’s “universalist pretensions,” its “impulse of imperialism” (Slaughter 118).
Critics agree that while the national-era Bildungsroman model described above was
always more well-defined in theory than in example, even this relative stability was dismantled
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by imperialist expansion and its empire-building offices, as the Bildungsroman’s incursion into
the “non-national” spaces of the colony produced narratives of “backwardness, anachronism, and
uneven development” that disrupted its developmental logic (Esty 37, 69). The modernist period
intensified this rupture: as the frame of reference shifted from closed national form to the “open
metanarrative” of globalization, plots of personal destiny began to narrate not progress but
“stories of stasis, regression, and hyperdevelopment,” generating Bildungsromane with an “anti-
teleological model of subject formation” (Esty 25-27,14). Esty argues that the modernist novel
transformed the Bildungsroman’s trope of impermanent, end-oriented youth to that of endless,
“frozen” youth, and that in the worlds of Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf’s “untethered” and “stunted”
young protagonists, modernization is imagined as a “constant revolution” that exceeds the
symbolic containment of the nation, and capitalism is a “permanent process which has no end or
aim but itself” (7, 37; Arendt 137 quoted in Esty 37). These works register the asymmetries
between modernization’s purportedly progressive drive and the “underdevelopment” of the
colonies. In this way, endless youth in the modernist Bildungsroman comes to figure “what never
fully modernizes and what is always modernizing”—in other words, the faltering of the
teleological model of history and the failure of imperialist ideology as a universal foundational
discourse for modern subject formation (Esty 60-70).
This failure is particularly visible in fractured bildung narratives of colonial subjecthood.
Colonial modernity throws the terrain of bildung—education, cultivation, and training for
citizenship—into conflict. Modernist-colonial Bildungsromane narrate subject formation as a
tension between resistance and submission to colonial institutions, particularly education,
producing narratives of interrupted growth and distorted endings. Gregory Castle argues that the
Bildungsroman form cannot accommodate the “traumatic” formation of the colonized subject
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(369), whose horizon of development is split between colonial power, nascent nationalisms, and
communitarian life-worlds. Through a reading of Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young
Man, Castle contends that British education in metrocolonial centers worked to block rather than
advance the self-development of the adolescent colonial subject by positing an impossible
socialization as its ideal (370). For Castle (following Albert Memmi), Portrait is a modernist
Bildungsroman that narrates the “developmental trauma” and “catastrophic adolescence” of the
colonial subject, who is taught to desire a foreign self-cultivation whose fulfillment is foreclosed
by the withholding of “normative educational goals and vocations … most prized by the
colonizers” (371). Similarly, Gauri Viswanathan has argued that the institution of English studies
in colonial India in the mid-nineteenth century was rooted in “strategies of sociopolitical
control,” its Eurocentric curriculum an “active instrument of Western hegemony” (166-167). The
ends of colonial education were thus not political citizenship and socialization (as in the narrative
of classic bilding) but the production of subjects, the work of subjectivation (Gandhi 60,
Chakrabarty 32). Thus disjointedly constituted, the subject of colonial education experiences the
desire for an autonomous, coherent, and idealized self as “a failed dream,” a “transgression”
(Castle 371). The bildung concept thus “cannot contain or explain a colonial condition or
experience, cannot make sense of the dehiscent interiority of the colonial subject, cannot
recognize it, much less legitimize it” (Castle 375).
Of course, the tension between linear progressive temporality and its opposite (variously
defined, more below) is hardly the preserve of novel history. Indeed teleological thinking is part
of the general explicatory framework of post-Enlightenment thought, shaping moral, political,
and legal philosophies as well as modern disciplinary formations. Its logic is especially stark in
the discourse of imperialism, which announces itself to the colony as modernity. The claim is
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rooted in the idea that modern European history is a “master narrative” that the colonies, in their
own processes of becoming nation-states, are bound to repeat (Chakrabarty 27). As Dipesh
Chakrabarty argues in the seminal Provincializing Europe, academic history (and derivative
social sciences) bases the narrative of postcolonial state-building on the universalization of the
nation-state form, writing modern third-world nations as “histories of transition” towards the
teleological ends of “development, modernization, and capitalism” (31). For Chakrabarty, history
posits entrenched correlations between ‘Europe,’ modernity, capitalism, bourgeois individualism,
and the nation-state. It narrates the transitions from (putative) pre-modernity to colony to nation,
from feudalism to capitalism, from peasant to citizen, in terms of the establishment of modern
political, social, and cultural institutions tied to national identity. In this way, much like the
Bildungsroman, it universalizes the nation-state as “the most desirable form of political
community,” delegitimizing “other narratives of the self and community that do not look to the
state/citizen bind as the ultimate construction of sociality” (Chakrabarty 41, 37). While these
other narratives exist, Chakrabarty laments that they “will never enjoy the privilege of providing
the metanarratives or teleologies” of history as we know it (37). Historiography for Chakrabarty
is thus constitutionally teleological, with the achievement of statehood, capitalist modernity, and
citizenship as its telos. In this the classic Bildungroman form is closely linked to and entirely
complicit with History, the concept of Bildung being among “those universal forces,” those
“modern progressive drives, that in their Enlightenment origins were imagined to manifest
themselves in the ideal forms of nations and national subjects” (Slaughter 112). It is no wonder
then that the Bildungsroman form perseveres in decolonializing and postcolonial contexts (see
below), legitimizing the new nation state, nurturing the bond between independent nation and
self-governing individual, offering a model of patriotic citizenship for the newly emancipated
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postcolonial subject to emulate, and finally, constituting a national literature that simultaneously
posits and presupposes a fully formed nation-state.
To return briefly to Chakrabarty’s point, one would think that the “other narratives” that
he mourns, “configurations of memory” (37) other than national and historical, were abundant in
the literary and cultural practice of the colonial period in India—and they were, in mythology
and folklore, non-chronological and episodic literature, and spiritual discourse. But narratives of
subject formation under colonial modernity, particularly (although not only) Anglophone ones,
had to contend with the anxieties of colonial influence. As Ulka Anjaria has shown, for Indian
writers of the early twentieth century, the realist aesthetics of colonial literature were an emblem
of modernity and an “object of desire” (14-15), to be adopted and emulated. Further, the new
nation, eagerly anticipated, had to be continuously imagined and disseminated in culture, and
what better way than through the reciprocal allegories of self and nation? But postcolonial
Bildungsromane had to contend with modes of selfhood and subjectivity different from classic
bourgeois individualism. Firstly, the imposition of a foreign horizon of social expectation by an
education that disguised a “civilizing mission” rendered the colonized subject’s private and
public worlds “radically incommensurate,” producing a “split subjectivity” (Gandhi 60, Castle
370) that was antithetical to the Bildungsroman’s cohesive form. Secondly, as many have
pointed out, the classic European model of liberal individualism, which designates citizenship
and politics to the public sphere and domesticity and inner life to the private, did not find full
replication in the colony. This was especially true of the private sphere: as Chakrabarty observes,
it was not that the conventions of the European bourgeois private self, which “pours itself out” in
the novels, letters, diaries, and autobiographies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, did
not appear in colonial India, but that Indian versions preferred to discuss public life even in
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autobiographical settings, belying the confessional mode that characterized the writing of the
“endlessly interiorized” European private subjectivity (35).
The construction of this “endlessly interiorized subjectivity” was, as Nancy Armstrong
has argued, inextricable from the history of the Western, particularly the British, novel. The
classic British realist novel offered a mode of affective interiority based on contemplation,
reflection, and communion with oneself, as well as a profound negotiation with societal order
and convention that prompts self-scrutiny and self-correction. It was a model dependent on the
material conditions that made privacy possible—great houses and parks, private rooms,
opportunities for solitude and leisure and for reading and writing, and so on—conditions that
linked the cultivation of (novelistic) interiority to social identity. It has become a critical
commonplace that this model of interiority was societal, governed by class organization and
regulated by a socially mediated morality. That is, the Victorian private self was merely a
“deferred public self” (Chakrabarty 35); if it was the more privileged site of interiority—the
subject’s ‘true’ self—the heightened moral self-consciousness of the Victorian novel required it
to cohere with the subject’s public role. In other words, what one was had to be in agreement
with what one appeared to be (Trilling 114).
Lionel Trilling understands this mode of writing interiority as “sincerity.” In Sincerity
and Authenticity, Trilling defines sincerity in the realist novel as “the degree of congruence
between feeling and avowal” or a correspondence between selfhood and public role—
a definition that emphasizes laying oneself open to public scrutiny in “all [one’s] truth.” As such,
sincerity in the Victorian novel depends on the “intractability of the English social organization”
(114):
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[T]he English novelists of the nineteenth century…would all of them appear to be in
agreement that the person who accepts his class situation, whatever it may be, as a given
and necessary condition of his life will be sincere beyond question […]
…it is their assumption that the individual who accepts what a rubric of the Anglican
catechism calls his “station and its duties” is pretty sure to have a quality of integral
selfhood […]
[In these novels] …a man is what he is by virtue of his class membership. His sentiment
of being, his awareness of his discrete and personal existence, derives from his sentiment
of class (115; emphasis mine).
In this framework, the concept of duty—familial, national, civilizational, social—mediates class
and interiority, “since it [duty] so nearly matche[s] one's own inner imperative, which, in the
degree that one respond[s] to it, assure[s] one's coherence and selfhood” (118, emphasis mine).
Upward mobility in this socially stratified context is only possible for a coherent, morally
upright, and dutiful self who is also gifted, that is—to return to Armstrong—a subject whose
“interiority [is] in excess of the social position [s/he] is supposed to occupy.” The narrative of
self-formation for such a subject takes the shape of her passage into a social position
commensurate with her giftedness and moral integrity. On the other hand, as Trilling observes,
these same novels “mercilessly scrutinize those of their characters who [are] ambitious to rise in
the world” without an interiority to match (115). Such characters are often cast as villains:
…the villain of plays and novels is characteristically a person who seeks to rise above the
station to which he was born. He is not what he is: this can be said of him both because
by his intention he denies and violates his social identity and because he can achieve his
unnatural purpose only by covert acts, by guile (16).
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It is exactly such a demonization of social ambition without moral depth that is
thematized in The White Tiger and will be central to part II of this chapter. Suffice to note here
that in the classic realist tradition, an elevated social identity could serve as an external marker of
a fully realized interiority, even as the novel form, in its growing consciousness of social
inequalities, was expanding to include a host of minor and marginal characters (Woloch 29).
Alex Woloch has argued that the “achieved interiority” of the Bildungsroman protagonist comes
at the price of the distorted subjectivities of minor characters, who facilitate her full development
while their own interiorities remain unelaborated. For Woloch, minor characters perform the
psychological labor that the protagonist uses, responds to, and surpasses as she becomes more
herself; they are the grindstone upon which her interiority is polished. As he puts it, minor
characters, conceptualized as “subordinate beings who are delimited in themselves while
performing a function for someone else,” are the “proletariat of the novel” (27). This is
figuratively as well as literally true: the maids and manservants, cooks, gardeners and
groomsmen, the “faithful retainers” of Victorian fiction whose work makes the protagonist’s
development possible, are consigned to a marginality in which the Bildungsroman has no
interest. Similarly, as Elaine Freedgood has demonstrated, the objects and materials that so
copiously fill the pages of the Victorian novel, from mahogany furniture to sugar and tea, tell not
the story the novel narrates but the story it “secretes”: violent histories of slavery and ecological
ruin in the wake of colonialism (36). These histories lie “hid[den] in plain sight” in the
nineteenth century Bildungsroman even as it trains its readers to ignore their role in the
“achieved interiority” of its putatively “freestanding” protagonist (Freedgood 35, Woloch 27).
It is on these disenchanted grounds, formulated in Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial
thought, that the classic “sincere” novelistic self lies dismantled. The concept of authenticity, on
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the other hand, has proved more durable as a basis for character. In Trilling’s schema, the
discourse of the self shifts toward authenticity in the twentieth century following the
disintegration of the apparatus of sincerity, a breakdown he claims was necessary for the self to
“develop its true, its entire, freedom” (47). Authenticity, an “intensified sense of personal
identity” changed the focus from publicly oriented selfhood to a self in search of itself as
something other than a mere internalization and performance of external social and moral norms
(Trilling 47). For Trilling, authenticity calls for a “more strenuous moral experience…a more
exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in… and a less acceptant and
genial view of the social circumstances of life” (11). The authentic self rejects the categorical
self and the life of happiness and stability prescribed in the Bildungsroman in order to discover
itself “beyond sincerity and hypocrisy” (Appiah 75). Authenticity allows a greater claim to the
privacy and disorder of inner life; in Anthony Appiah’s description, it is a drive to “escape from
what society, the school, the state, what history, has tried to make of us” (75).
Like Chakrabarty, who notes that autobiographies in the late colonial period in India
depict public participation rather than private confessional selves, Appiah points out that the
twentieth century search for an authentic self beyond societal apparatuses was a peculiarly
European affair, mystifying to postcolonial nations that were endeavoring to enter history rather
than to escape its sweep. As Appiah observes about writers in mid-twentieth century Africa:
For Africa, by and large, this authenticity is a curiosity: though trained in Europe or in
schools and universities dominated by European culture, the African writers' concern is
not with the discovery of a self that is the object of an inner voyage of discovery. Their
problem—though not, of course, their subject—is finding a public role, not a private self.
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[…] When Ngugi wa Thiong'o says that “the novelist, at his best, must feel himself heir
to a continuous tradition,” he does not mean, as the Westerner might suppose, a literary
tradition: he means, as any African would know, “the mainstream of his people's
historical drama.” It is this fundamentally sociohistorical perspective that makes the
European problem of authenticity something distant and unengaging for most African
writers.
[…] So that though the European may feel that the problem of who he or she is can be a
private problem, the African asks always not “who am I?” but “who are we?" and “my”
problem is not mine alone but “ours” (76; emphasis mine)
Framed thus, Appiah’s postcolonial writer understands the search for selfhood in the time
of decolonization—one apart from or in excess of its formation by colonial education—as
inextricable from the narrative of national emergence. In other words, literatures of
decolonization are national allegories. This infamous claim, proposed by Frederic Jameson in
1986— “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled
situation of the public third-world culture and society”—turned upon a well-rehearsed critical
distinction between first- and third-world conceptions of the public and the private. Jameson
observed that “radical split” between the private realm of “sexuality and the unconscious” on the
one hand and the public domain of “classes, of the economic, and of secular political power” on
the other was a tenacious cultural truism in the advanced capitalist countries of the West. In his
words, “We [that is, we in the West] have been trained in a deep cultural conviction that the lived
experience of our private existences [that is, authentic selves] is somehow incommensurable with
the abstractions of economic science and political dynamics” (69). In contrast, in the third-world
novel, the private was also articulated in political and social terms, marking the enmeshment of
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personal trajectories with larger structures and social relations. It must be noted that in the 1970s
and 80s, about and during which Jameson formulated this claim, the Western literary world was
both less multicultural and more involved in exploring subjective experiences in the private
realm than it is now. At the same time, the reciprocal allegories of self and nation that he
observed in the postcolonial texts he read are undeniable, perhaps because he chose novels from
the early decolonizing period. As Pheng Cheah shows, despite their critique of the violence of
nationalism, novels written during this period “remain novels of nationalist Bildung, where the
protagonists’ lives parallel the history of their nations” (240). Thus, as critics have argued, even
as the Western Bildungsroman fell into decline in the latter decades of the twentieth century
following the stabilization of the liberal nation-state, the postcolonial world embraced the form.
It is worthwhile to follow Jameson’s claim about the nature of the private-public
distinction in late capitalism. In an interview with Mark Fisher, political theorist Jeremy Gilbert
identifies the same distinction not so much as libidinal/non-libidinal as the disconnect between
the personal and the political that took root in the 1980s in advanced capitalist countries through
the institution of neoliberal disciplinary and managerial policies in the workplace. Gilbert calls
this the “depoliticization of work, and, more broadly, of everyday life” (91), the “decoupling” of
work life from political life:
We [the workers] didn’t have to believe [in these policies], we only had to act as if we
believed [in them]. The idea that our ‘inner beliefs’ mattered more than what we were
publicly professing at work was crucial to capitalist realism. […] We were required to
use a certain language and engage in particular ritualized behaviors, but none of this
mattered because we didn’t ‘really’ believe in any of it.
[…]
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MF: …We acquiesce at work because work and ‘what we really are’ have to remain
separate.
[…]
JG: It’s been clear for a long time that neoliberalism effectively offers us a bargain
whereby we accept the lack of collective control over our physical or social environment
in return for a very high level of personal autonomy outside the sphere of work: the
logical correlate of that is to accept a mode of subjectivity which ultimately accords all
value and intensity to an entirely private domain of personal consumption” (93, emphasis
mine).
Thus we arrive at a paradox: the privileging of inner life under neoliberal capitalism produces a
reversal of “sincerity” as Trilling described it; the nineteenth century caveat ‘what one is must be
in agreement with what one appeared to be’ has transformed into ‘what one really is must be
separated from one’s work.’ That is, what one is must be safeguarded, protected from what one
is called upon to appear to be in the workspace, which—incidentally—has taken over the sphere
of the “public.” For Gilbert, such a mode of being reinforces the literary assumption that “the
interior life is the privileged site of authentic selfhood” while undercutting the value of political
or collective life (93). In this scenario, traditional novelistic interiority is aligned with the forces
of neoliberal governmentality, thus maintaining the novel’s historical enmeshment with the rise
and establishment of capitalism (although admittedly the novel’s cultural role has been
diminishing and is greatly reduced at the moment).
As for Jameson’s postcolonial and therefore necessarily national allegories, they continue
to reflect the workings of a partially established liberal democratic framework, which produces
variations, rather than replications, of the public-private distinction elucidated above. As Cheah
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points out about the early decolonial Bildungsromane that Jameson reads: they are undoubtedly
national allegories, but they are not traditional Bildungsromane in that they are unable to
construct or imagine fully realized national subjects. These texts are “marked by despair, or at
least a greater awareness of the vicissitudes of the protagonist’s bildung, which often ends
tragically” (240). That is, even though it is allegorical and delimited by the nation, the
postcolonial Bildungsroman cannot count on the certainties of the form, since it must
continuously imagine and reimagine into being the very nation that is supposed to contain it. As
Cheah says: “The predicament of decolonization is that there is no pre-existing community for
the individual to be reconciled to” (243). The postcolonial Bildungsroman is thus less a
straightforward allegory for nation-building than the “most appropriate symbolic expression” for
the decolonizing nation’s search for form, its need to escape the persistent sense of
“homelessness” and loss produced by the colonizer’s interruption of its own bildung (Cheah
243).
This lack of a stable social and political structure in the postcolony has persisted into the
present neoliberal age, even in purportedly liberal democracies such as India. As critics have
argued, in contrast to the relatively stable systems of socialization in advanced capitalist
countries—the school and the family (following Althusser), as well as newer lines of subject-
constitution like training in consumerism and contractual relations—the vastly less regulated and
incompletely formed Indian nation-state continues to produce heterogenous and unpredictable
configurations of subjectivities. In other words, while advanced liberal capitalist democracies
have an achieved form and clearly established systems of socialization, within the emergent
neoliberal Indian state there persist what Madhava Prasad has called “contestations over the state
form” (11) that underscore its (the Indian state’s) unfinished nature. This scenario is rendered
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vastly more complex under the current global world order, whose disciplinary neoliberal
economic regime functions alongside the country’s vastly inconsistent and uneven capitalist
(under)development. In the following section, I will close read The White Tiger as a perverse
iteration of the Bildungsroman—a postcolonial neoliberal Bildungsroman—to show that it
challenges and undercuts the prevailing rhetoric of entrepreneurship as a sort of pure new
subjectivity that will rescue the Indian nation from its postcolonial past.
II: “The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian”
Early in The White Tiger, Balram Halwai describes a conversation between him and his
America-returned employer, Ashok, conducted for the benefit of Ashok’s wife Pinky. The
exchange takes place inside a stationary car; Halwai, who works as a chauffeur for Ashok’s
family, has just been asked to pull over.
[Mr. Ashok] leaned forward…and said, politely as ever, “Balram, I have a few questions
to ask you, all right?” “Yes, sir,’ I said. “Balram,” Mr. Ashok asked, “how many planets
are there in the sky?” I gave the answer as best as I could. “Balram, who was the first
prime minister of India? And then: “Balram, what is the difference between a Hindu and
a Muslim?” And then: “What is the name of our continent?”
Mr. Ashok leaned back and asked Pinky Madam: “Did you hear his answers?” “Was he
joking?” she asked…“No.” That’s really what he thinks correct answers are.” She
giggled when she heard this: but his face, which I saw reflected in my rearview mirror,
was serious. “The thing is, he probably has…what, two, three years of schooling in him?
He can read and write, but he doesn’t get what he’s read. He’s half-baked. The country is
full of people like him, I’ll tell you that. And we entrust our glorious parliamentary
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democracy”—he pointed a me—“to characters like these. That’s the whole tragedy of
this country” (7).
Ashok’s words are illustrative of a standard upper class and caste objection to representative
democracy in India: insufficiently educated ‘masses’ being ill-equipped for political
participation. This correlation between education and political rights highlights a deeply
undemocratic high class/caste position that brandishes its educational qualifications as
intellectual achievements while discounting the lack of a viable public education system and
controlling the definition and circulation of what counts as knowledge. As Leela Fernandes has
argued, India’s middle classes habitually employ a set of “privatized strategies designed to gain
individual benefits,” such as patronizing private schools in lieu of organizing politically for a
workable public school system (131). Ashok’s questions, meant to expose Balram as a bad
citizen and squanderer of democratic privileges, reveal the faultlines of Ashok’s own deficient
understanding. The questions are based on “general knowledge,” that loosely defined category
centered on the acquisition of superficial and disconnected facts culled from a formal education.
Affectionately called GK, ‘general knowledge’ circulates as a prized commodity in the Indian
education market, the subject of innumerable study guides, primers and quiz contests, large and
small. Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire is based on this phenomenon, but while Boyle’s film
fantasizes about the heroic acquisition of elite knowledge (and wealth) through informal and
unofficial routes, The White Tiger, in giving us a protagonist whose answers are incorrect,
emphasizes the role of formal education as an upholder of power relations.
Balram, who attended a government-run school for a few years before being put to work
to help pay off his family’s debts, grasps the nature of formal education even as a child. Like
most public schools, his is utterly dysfunctional: its single teacher, who hasn’t been paid in
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months, misappropriates funds marked for uniforms, meals, and infrastructure, and sleeps during
class time. The highlight of Balram’s brief school years is a visit by an education official, who
finds that, while other students can hardly read, Balram’s reading comprehension and (ironically)
‘GK’ skills are impressive. The reading material is a description of Bihar:
We live in a glorious land. The Lord Buddha received his enlightenment in this land. The
River Ganga gives life to our plants and animals and our people. We are grateful to God
that we were born in this land (29, italics in original).
Having seen the Ganga in Benaras strewn with human and animal bodies during his mother’s
funeral, however, Balram knows this to be untrue; the Ganga is the “black river,” “the river of
death…whose grip traps everything that is planted in it, suffocating and choking and stunting it”
(12). The young Balram has begun to sense the disparity between the cultural nationalist rhetoric,
disseminated in abundance in schools, and lived realities. So when asked to repeat a prominent
politician’s message to children, he complies—“Any boy in any village can grow up to become
the prime minister of India”—but knows better than to believe (30). His performance is however
flawless; the inspector is pleased and christens him “the white tiger”—that “rarest of
animals…[which] comes along only once in a generation”—living amidst a “jungle” of “thugs
and idiots” (30). Soon after, Balram is removed from school, but he carries both the epithet and
his skepticism of platitudinous official narratives into adulthood, advising Jiabao not to believe
the standard cultural rhetoric about the Ganga as India’s holy, life-giving river.
Now, you have heard the Ganga called the river of emancipation, and hundreds of
American tourists come each year to take photographs of naked sadhus at Hardwar or
Benaras, and our prime minister will no doubt describe it that way to you, and urge you
to take a dip in it.
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No!—Mr. Jiabao, I urge you not to dip in the Ganga, unless you want your mouth full of
feces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of
industrial acids (12).
The frank utterance of this uncomfortable truth early in the novel encapsulates the promise of
authenticity implicit in Balram’s claims to the Premier—that his version of India is unofficial
and true, true because unofficial. By representing both the Prime Minister and the school
inspector as mouthpieces of the official nationalist line, Balram identifies the state with its
educational apparatus and declares them both untrustworthy. As he writes to Jiabao:
One fact about India is that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from
the prime minister and turn it upside down and then you will have the truth about that
thing (12).
Thus, in contrast to the normative bildung narrative that aligns the personal with the
national via education, The White Tiger offers a subjectivity formed in opposition to formal
schooling and cultural nationalism. Such a trajectory is in itself not new; as shown in part 1, the
subject’s resistance to being socialized into existing systems is part of the history of the
Bildungsroman, particularly in its post/colonial versions. To cite a compelling instance: Richard
Murphy argues that in Joyce’s Portrait, Stephen’s failure to reconcile self and society “generates
the meaning of the text…redefin[ing] success in the Bildungsroman from external, social
reconciliation to a compensatory self-knowledge won in exclusion from society” (8, emphasis
mine).
44
Similarly, critics have argued that the protagonists of postcolonial Bildungsromane
44
Leela Gandhi makes a similar point about a very different text: in a discussion of Mohandas Gandhi’s
autobiography, the classical nonfictional bildungsroman My Experiments with Truth, she points out that Gandhi
remembers his early colonial education with disdain, regretting that his “teachers failed to give him an adequate
‘knowledge of self’” (65).
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often ‘find themselves’ by breaking from, not integrating with, the traditional ideological
apparatuses of state, family, and society. But the focus of these arguments is the emergence or
discovery of an inner life apart from and in opposition to social norms—a exploration of the
authentic self, often by an upper/middle-class protagonist, and often via the pursuit of the
aesthetic. In contrast, Balram, no longer a student in a substandard government school but a child
laborer in a tea shop, is indifferent to the drama of inner life and aesthetic self-cultivation.
Instead, he practices “total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity” in the performance of
his labor, turning the “crush[ing]” drudgery of the job into a “profoundly enriching experience,”
and giving himself a “better education” than he could have acquired in school (43).
Instead of wiping out spots from tables and crushing coals for the oven, I used my time at
the tea shop in Laxmangarh to spy on every customer at every table, and overhear
everything they said. I decided that this was going to be how I would keep my education
going forward—that’s the one good thing I’ll say for myself. I’ve always been a big
believer in education—especially my own (44).
As will be seen from the readings below, this is the first of several instances when Balram
practices “dishonesty” and “insincerity” toward his exploitative work sites while his ‘true’ self is
engaged in pursuing an education in entrepreneurship. Suffice to note here that in The White
Tiger the loss of or resistance to formal education leads not to a “compensatory self-knowledge”
but to knowledge of the world, an acquisition of worldliness and, eventually, entrepreneurship.
As we will see, in this schema, formal education is understood as a form of indoctrination into
the untruths of cultural nationalism, to which entrepreneurship is offered as the authentic, clear-
eyed corrective.
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My interest here is not so much the false dichotomy of schooling vs. experience but the
centrality—and perversity
45
—of the concept of education in Balram’s self-narration. While the
plot of his self-development may resemble the familiar, much-rehearsed narrative of material
advancement through the acquisition of street-smart skills, Adiga’s sardonic use of the word
“education” to describe Balram’s situation—a child laborer, forced to quit school to live and
work long hours in a tea shop cleaning floors, his only opening to the world the snatches of
conversations he overhears—emphasizes the failure of the education system, and by extension of
the purportedly liberal democratic state, in fulfilling the most basic of its functions. But Balram
comes to value this failure. In response to Ashok’s description of him as “half-baked,” he
embraces the term:
He was right, sir…“The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian.” That’s what I ought to
call my life’s story. Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked,
because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with
a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics
remembered from school textbooks (…), sentences about politics read in a newspaper
while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn
pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its
snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like
lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep—all these ideas, half
formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your
head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-
formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with
45
As Shameen Black argues, The White Tiger deal in “discourses of perversity” (298)
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The story of my upbringing is the story of how a half-baked fellow is produced.
But pay attention, Mr. Premier! Fully formed fellows, after twelve years of school and
three years of university, wear nicesuits, join companies, and take orders from other men
for the rest of their lives.
Entrepreneurs are made from half-baked clay (8, emphasis mine).
The passage encapsulates The White Tiger’s overturning of the concept of education,
establishing a sort of crude genealogy for Balram’s oppositional self-formation. First, it deploys
violent corporeal metaphors to describe his informal, “half-baked,” education: mastication and
indigestion (the half-digestion of half-cooked ideas), sodomy/rape (half-formed ideas
“buggering” one another), and birth (“making more half-formed ideas), emphasizing the visceral
nature of Balram’s learning (“open our skulls”) and undercutting standard constructions of
education as primarily cerebral or intellectual. Second, it references Nirad C Chaudhuri’s
Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), a classic nonfictional colonial Bildungsroman in
which a very erudite, very Anglophile Chaudhuri narrates his intellectual self-formation under
the British colonial regime in Calcutta in a bid to demonstrate that he—and by extension (elite)
India—is equal to the project of liberal democratic citizenship. Autobiography’s dedication, a
classic and self-conscious example of elite subject-formation under colonial modernity, reads
thus:
To the memory of the British Empire in India / Which conferred subjecthood upon us /
But withheld citizenship. / To which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: / “Civis
Britannicus sum” / Because all that was good and living within us / Was made, shaped
and quickened / By the same British rule.
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“Civis Britannicus sum,” that is, “I am a Roman Citizen.” As critics have observed, Chaudhuri’s
claim speaks of an immense longing to be considered a legitimate citizen—not subject—of
Western modernity, in support of which he offers his wide-ranging knowledge of Western
history, culture, and canon as something of a ticket. The White Tiger’s mocking reference to this
classic Bildungsroman, which privileges the role of education in the making of citizens,
overturns its premises and pits the new entrepreneurial spirit directly in opposition to India’s
colonized past. In particular, it mocks the Indian education system, which continues to carry the
dead weight of its colonial origins, and which in the novel’s schema stands for conformity and
subjectivation. In other words, the “half-baked” nature of Balram’s training repudiates not only
the hold of formal education but also of the postcolonial condition on (new, emergent) India.
Rhetorically throwing off the postcolonial inferiority complex that has detained India in “the
waiting room of History” (to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s striking phrase) all these years, Balram
announces India’s entry into history on its own terms. Entrepreneurship is here figured as
freedom—from the ideological state apparatus as well as the postcolonial condition—an “escape
from what society, the school, the state, what history, has tried to make of us” (Appiah 75). This
description, originally used by Anthony Appiah to define the concept of individual authenticity,
neatly maps on to Balram’s model of how entrepreneurship is produced in postmillennial India—
as a vessel of the true, authentic spirit of a nation finally allowed to take wing.
The overturning of the traditional role of education is only the first stop in this trajectory
for Balram; to escape history, he must also shake off the village’s feudal landlords, a family in
whose employ he ends up even after he moves to an urban center. Consistent with the novel’s
use of animal imagery as an extended metaphor for the Indian “jungle,” Balram describes the
landlord family—the Sharmas—as the Stork, the Wild Boar, the Raven, and the Buffalo, each
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named after the “peculiarities of appetite” identified in him. The Sharmas exercise extensive
control over the village of Laxmangarh, dividing the spoils of the entire community among them:
the Stork owns the river, taking a cut from the fisherpeople’s catch; the Wild Boar owns all the
agricultural land, paying day laborers a pittance while retaining all profits; the Raven owns the
village’s grazing lands, demanding monetary as well as sexual services in payment; and the
Buffalo owns the means of transportation, taking a third of the meagre earnings of rickshaw-
pullers like Balram’s father. In addition, they are sexual predators and loan sharks, and it is at
their behest that Balram is taken out of school and put to work in tea-shops, first in Laxmangarh
and a few years later in Dhanbad, the nearest mid-sized urban center. In an endeavor to escape a
life of endless bondage, Balram, having identified a need for drivers in Dhanbad’s growing
economy, finds a way to learn how to drive. But no-one will hire him: his method of looking for
a job—“knocking on gates and front doors of the rich”—is ineffective; everyone knows “you
[have] to know someone in the family to get a job” (50). After weeks of this Balram happens
across the Sharmas’ city residence, where, spotting the Stork, he invokes their feudal bond,
begging for a job:
Swoosh!—As soon as the gate was open, I dived straight at the Stork’s feet. No Olympic
runner could have gone in as fast as I did through those gates…
You should have seen me that day—what a performance of wails and kisses and tears!
You’d think I’d been born into a caste of performing actors! And all the time, while
clutching the Stork’s feet, I was staring at his huge, dirty, uncut toenails, and thinking:
What is he doing in Dhanbad? Why isn’t he back home, screwing poor fishermen of their
money and humping their daughters? (51)
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The scene marks the beginning of an elaborate performance of servility and submission
that Balram enacts to gain and retain employment with the Sharmas. Raised in a feudal setting,
he instinctively recognizes and assumes the cloying posture expected of him: eagerness to serve;
gratitude for the opportunity to serve; daily displays of inferiority, indebtedness, and self-
effacement; blanket acceptance of culpability for any problems or glitches; humility in the face
of punishment; and so on—in short, his life and labor in return for the ‘pleasure’ of serving his
“masters.” As he says in reply to the Stork’s question about how much he expects to be paid, a
question he recognizes as a “test”:
“Absolutely nothing, sir. You’re like a father and mother to me, how can I ask for money
from my parents?
“Eight hundred rupees a month” [$11-$15, depending on the exchange rate], he said.
“No, sir, please—it’s too much. Give me half of that, it’s enough. More than enough.”
“If we keep you beyond two months, it’ll go up to one thousand five hundred [$22-$30].”
Looking suitably devastated, I accepted the money from him (55).
In The White Tiger’s developmental schema, this exaggerated exercise of insincerity is necessary
not only to enable Balram’s survival but also to conceal his growing entrepreneurial spirit, which
dare not speak its name in this setting. Employed at a pittance ostensibly to drive one of the
family’s two cars, Balram becomes not a driver but a “servant.” As he observes, “In India…the
rich don’t have drivers, cooks, barbers, and tailors. They simply have servants” (58). The
Sharmas own all of Balram’s time and labor; his duties include cooking and cleaning,
babysitting, bathing the family’s dogs, washing and massaging the Stork’s dirty feet every
evening, and being at hand to attend to the smallest of the family’s whims. Also part of the job is
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a series of humiliations: verbal and physical abuse, as well as mockery, ridicule, and
dehumanization.
It is thus evident that, although Balram moves away from rural India—the supposed heart
of feudalism—into urban centers, first to Dhanbad and then to Delhi, and although he manages
to transition from unskilled laborer to skilled professional, the social relations governing his
labor remain feudal, not contractual. As Balram explains, he gets hired because the Sharmas
know him; that is, they know “exactly” where his family is (56, emphasis in original). In other
words, they can be secure in his loyalty because it is understood that any treachery on his part
will be met with violence against his family in Laxmangarh, as is common practice. Balram
illustrates with the fateful tale of the Sharmas’ former domestic servant, who they suspected of
deceiving and betraying them. Not only did the Sharmas’ henchmen torture and murder this man,
they also destroyed his family back in Laxmangarh:
But then…the Buffalo…also went after the servant’s family. One brother was set upon
while working in the fields; beaten to death there. That brother’s wife was finished off by
three men working together. A sister, still unmarried, was also finished off. Then the
house where the family had lived was surrounded by the four henchmen and set on fire.
Now, who would want this to happen to his family, sir? …
The Stork and his sons could count in my loyalty (57).
The threat of gruesome violence thus hangs over the process of Balram’s hiring, undercutting
possible emancipatory trajectories—rural to urban, unskilled to skilled, day laborer to salaried
employee, footpath to lodgings—and locking Balram into the precarious position of bonded
laborer. As the Stork’s explanation to his sons about the advantages of hiring Balram shows, he
sees Balram as chattel and intends him to remain so: “A driver in his forties, you get, what,
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twenty years of service, then his eyes fail. This fellow will last thirty, thirty-five years. His teeth
are solid, he’s got his hair, he’s in good shape” (56). It is thus clear to Balram from the day he
joins the Sharmas’ employ that the emancipatory possibilities he expected to access by becoming
a driver in urban India would not be realized in this setting. That is, in contrast to the rhetoric of
liberalization that codes new India as a meritocracy with opportunities for individual autonomy,
the prescribed formal paths to such autonomy—personal initiative, employment, ambition, hard
work—cannot loosen the grip of feudalism on people like Balram. By demonstrating that these
formal paths are closed to Balram, The White Tiger emphasizes his formation in opposition to, or
sometimes adjacent to, but never along, legitimate narratives of neoliberal selfhood.
It is important to note that, despite India’s status as a liberal democracy that accords its
citizens civil rights and liberties, political freedoms, and equal protection under the law, Balram
effectively has no protections against the feudal order. Neither is he allowed to exercise the one
form of political expression purportedly available to all—the vote. Narrating a series of incidents
he has witnessed that highlight the corrupt workings of representative democracy—elections
scams and voter frauds, violent coercive techniques to force voter compliance, illicit deals and
nexus between politicians and the police, and so on—Balram experiences the “splendor of
democracy in India” as an elaborate charade, especially since his is one of the votes bought and
sold by the village administrators. As he comments about his fugitive status:
The police know exactly where to find me. They will find me dutifully voting on election
day at the voting booth in the district compound in Laxmangarh in Gaya District, as I
have done in every general election since I turned eighteen.
I am India’s most faithful voter, and I still have not seen the inside of a voting booth (86).
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While these failures of the social and political apparatuses are central to Balram’s
trajectory, The White Tiger reserves its most satirical gaze for a certain progressive liberalism,
parodically figured by the Stork’s mild-mannered younger son Ashok, whose kindness to Balram
sharply contrasts the rest of the family’s casual cruelty. Ashok is sophisticated and cosmopolitan,
a man who has traveled the world, lived and worked in New York, and is in an inter-faith
marriage against his family’s wishes. He is an identifiable trope in the IE novel tradition: the
liberal elite English-educated individual deployed to model, for a kindred readership, an ethical
and affective engagement with the poor.
46
Over the years, a range of prominent IE novels have
depicted emotionally charged solidarities between aberrant and often gendered or otherwise
excluded elites and oppressed, impoverished, lower-caste and -class subaltern subjects. Written
from the point of view of the ruling class subject,
47
these novels consistently frame the conduct
of inter-class/caste relationships as elite ethical dilemmas. We see this in varying degrees of
preoccupation and complexity in works such as Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence (1990),
Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993), Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August (1988), Vikram
Chandra’s Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
(1997), Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1998) and The Hungry Tide (2005), Kiran Desai’s
The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us (2006), Amit
Chaudhuri’s The Immortals (2009), Manu Joseph’s Serious Men (2010), and more recent works
such as Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy (2008-2014), Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014), and—
an important diasporic instance—Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (2015), to name a
46
As Toral Jatin Gajarawala points out, these characters serve, for the middle-class reader, as familiar guides into
“specialized locations of poverty” (135).
47
As Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan shows, the “nation-novel” (or the postcolonial novel) is “written from a recognizably
ruling class perspective, with all that the description implies in its effects as ideology, politics, style, and affect”
(203).
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few prominent examples. The White Tiger breaks with this tradition not only by narrating
Balram’s point of view (rather than Ashok’s) but also by turning the character type of the
socially and emotionally engaged elite ally on its head, dismantling Ashok’s initial warmth and
sympathy for Balram to reveal a subjectivity acting relentlessly in line with its own class
interests.
It is worthwhile to pause briefly here to explore this shift from representations of elite
(attempts at) ethical engagement to Adiga’s depiction of narrowly self-interested disengagement
and exploitation by the ruling class. In part, this reflects the new “regime of disengagement” in
post-reform India identified by Vinay Gidwani and Rajyashree Reddy, who argue that as
opposed to state and civil society’s ethical engagement—even if nominal—with the underclass in
the Nehruvian welfare state and its afterlife, today “neither the apparatuses of the state nor the
urban bourgeoisie seek this social engagement” (1653). Of course, this is not to claim that the
novels listed above frame all their elite-subaltern relationships as ethical dilemmas but to point
out that in works similar to The White Tiger (Manu Joseph’s Serious Men, Rana Dasgupta’s
Capital: The Explosion of Delhi), none of the inter-class/caste relationships are framed as such.
In other words, IE writing depicting the rise of Indian neoliberalism is unable to imagine elite-
subaltern solidarities, even if utopically—or tragically. The emblematic tragic-utopic IE novel of
elite-subaltern ties, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), is a productive
comparative text to The White Tiger in this regard. Both novels, winners of the Man Booker,
critically applauded as well as reviled, and canonized almost instantly after their release, are
focal IE texts of their time. In what follows, I will briefly analyze Roy’s novel in order to
establish some distinct transitions in the IE novel’s trajectory from pre- to post-2000.
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Perhaps the most influential IE novel of the 90s, The God of Small Things (1997) depicts
an inter-caste relationship that is ultimately destructive to both parties. Roy’s tragic imagination
is the sharpest example of the tendency in postcolonial IE literature to depict fateful inter-
caste/class interdependencies in which the elite characters, in despair over their own superfluity
and unable to act ethically in the face of widespread suffering, cast their lot with the subalterns.
48
As mentioned above, these elite characters are often gendered or excluded from ruling class/caste
privileges in some form, and although aware of their relative advantages, they exude a felt lack
of agency. This is all the more pointed in Roy’s novel because its protagonists are children,
seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel. Their world is destroyed when their mother Ammu, the
divorced daughter of a family of upper-caste landlords in Kerala, falls in love with the
“untouchable” Velutha, a transgression that triggers a brutal assault against him. State, feudal,
patriarchal, caste, and local political machineries conspire to torture and murder Velutha and to
manipulate the twins, who love him dearly, into giving false witness against him. A series of
related events complicate the narrative: Estha is molested; the twins’ nine-year-old cousin
drowns; Velutha’s father, loyal to the feudal and caste order that has ruled his life, betrays him.
In the end, Velutha’s death destroys Ammu, who is banished from the family home and dies
soon after, setting the twins adrift:
Esthappen and Rahel both knew that there were several perpetrators (besides themselves)
that day. But only one victim. […] [Velutha] left behind a Hole in the Universe through
which darkness poured like liquid tar. Through which their mother followed without even
48
Often these characters are stand-ins for their elite writers, who, as Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan has argued,
“internalize a subtle sense of entitlement that is often accompanied…by the weight of an exacerbated
consciousness of responsibility” (203).
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turning around to wave good-bye. She left them behind, spinning in the dark, with no
moorings, in a place with no foundations (182).
The burden of guilt for Velutha’s murder is borne not by the systems that killed him but by the
twins, who grow up into disoriented adults; in a peculiar sort of solidarity with the silenced
Velutha, Estha stops speaking altogether, while Rahel drifts hauntedly through her life. They are
tormented not only by the deaths but also by their own betrayal of Velutha, despite the fact that,
seven years old and blackmailed into lying to the police, they had little or no agency in the
matter. The novel turns obsessively around this breakdown in its formerly idealized inter-caste
relations between the twins and Velutha: a pair of upper-class/caste children, presented with a
choice between seeing their mother sent to prison and falsely testifying against an “untouchable”
man they love, choose their mother:
In the years to come they would replay this scene in their heads. As children. As
teenagers. As adults. Had they been deceived into doing what they did? Had they been
tricked into condemnation?
In a way, yes. But it wasn’t as simple as that. They both knew that they had been given a
choice. And how quick they had been in the choosing! They hadn’t given it more than a
second of thought before they looked up and said (…) “Save Ammu.” Save us. Save our
mother (302).
The choice is a tiny exercise of agency by two frightened and manipulated children with almost
no room to maneuver, but it counts significantly in the novel’s reckoning of the injured and the
injuring, as well as in the twins’ own introspections. They never recover themselves from this
moment, instead living out the idea that the only ethical response to a fate such as Velutha’s is to
share it in some way, to withdraw from the exercise of agency in their own lives. Thus the twins,
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now motherless, grow up “without a brief,” “with no hint of plot or narrative,” trapped in a sort
of anti-bildung narrative of catastrophic self-formation (182).
My purpose in delving at some length into Roy’s extraordinary tragic imagining of elite-
subaltern relations is to point to two major tendencies it articulates that The White Tiger later
departs from. First, the novel identifies a hierarchy of injury, where the twins’ losses—their
mother and cousin’s deaths, the loss of their childhood, their separation from each other—while
devastating, are posited as unmournable in the face of the profound historical and social violence
that destroys Velutha. It is the knowledge of this violence and of their own implication in it that
prevents the twins from mourning and moving on; in the emotionally charged landscape of The
God of Small Things, the nation itself is figured as a continuous tragedy that cannot be gotten
over. What prevents the twins from getting over their personal loss is not its enormity—though it
is enormous—but its “small[ness]” in the face of “worse” losses of a national scale. Thus even as
it is critical of any kind of chauvinistic nationalism, The God of Small Things imagines elite-
subaltern solidarities as framed by the nation. In this schema, to identify with subalternity is to
identify with the nation, and vice versa: unlike in traditional postcolonial Bildungsromane where
the subject-nation allegory is particularly strong (see section 1), here the nation figures not as a
“cultural container” for the elite subject’s development narrative but as the catastrophe that
arrests her growth as well as the tragedy she must be willing to be part of. For the twins, this
means going through their lives “nursing someone else’s sorrow” and “grieving someone else’s
grief” because their own is “small” in comparison:
…that in some places, like the country Rahel came from, various kinds of despair
competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That
something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast,
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violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That
Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and
contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own
temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and
truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it
mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had
happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war
and horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.
So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in
shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative
smallness of his misfortune (20).
The alternative to this “brittle” elite apathy, the novel suggests, is a sort of helpless emotional
identification with the victims of historical and social violence, a refusal to be comforted; in
other words, the adoption of a melancholic pose in response to witnessing structural human
rights violations.
I want to suggest that this melancholic affect, which is at the heart of The God of Small
Things and which resonated so deeply at the time of its release, has lost its urgency and currency
under neoliberalism. Melancholy is no longer a viable literary affect in the IE novel, whose
concern, as this dissertation argues, is shifting from elaborating the inner lives of elite witnesses
of structural injustice to exploring subaltern experiences of it. In The God of Small Things, while
the elite characters’ inner lives are shaped or narrated in relation to Velutha—Ammu in her
erotic relationship with him, and later the twins in their guilt—Velutha’s own thoughts remain
largely unelaborated. In contrast, even as Balram fully realizes his entrepreneurial subjectivity in
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relation to Ashok, The White Tiger is written in his—Balram’s—voice, or the voice of the
socially oppressed character. As will be seen below, the authenticity of this voice has been
controversial, given that its author Adiga belongs to the ruling class;
suffice to say here that
while both novels are primarily elite accounts of social atrocities, and both writers offer
themselves as witnesses, Roy’s stance in The God of Small Things is one of almost unbearable
melancholy, whereas Adiga’s in The White Tiger alternates between parody and rage, neither of
which are particularly novelistic affects. In fact, as Shameem Black argues, affect in The White
Tiger is post-humanitarian; that is, it adopts a pose of skepticism toward “grand narratives of
human rights, humanitarian action, and rights-dispensing.” Black too compares Roy and Adiga,
noting that while The God of Small Things unearths the violence of international human rights
discourses, Roy’s larger commitment, elucidated in her subsequent body of polemical nonfiction,
is to the traditional human rights framework. In contrast, neoliberal attitudes toward human
rights, like Adiga’s, register their “participation in the classical humanitarian project in ironic,
parodic and even perverse terms” (298). As seen in chapter 2 as well as part 1, the forces of
liberal humanism, humanitarianism, and the novel, particularly the Bildungsroman form, are
deeply enmeshed; as mentioned, James Slaughter has shown that modern humanitarianism is
built on the nineteenth century Bildungsroman’s vision and version of personhood. Thus The
White Tiger’s post-humanitarian affect, its satirizing of human rights regimes, is yet another
overturned traditional framework that shapes Balram’s oppositional subject-formation.
In what follows I will argue that it is this opposition to the very narratives that structure
personhood in the Bildungsroman (as seen in part 1) that explains The White Tiger’s construction
of an interiority for Balram that is parodic, theatrical, and oddly blank—a distinctly non-
novelistic interiority. Such a construction is different from post/modernist literary depictions of
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inner life as fragmented, aleatory, discontinuous, and so on, since these have always claimed to
represent authentic subjective and psychological experience, often in opposition to realist
convention. It also breaks from Bildungsromane with traditional structures, which are profoundly
invested in the notion of psychological depth: the classic Bildungsroman, which demands an
elaborate and “sincere” (as per Trilling) reconciliation of interiority with social norm; the
modernist, whose fragmented and contradictory portraits of fragmented and contradictory
consciousness further the novelistic doctrines of authenticity and unlimited selfhood; the
post/colonial, which mines its protagonist’s “traumatic” self-development and consciousness,
split between national, colonial horizons, and personal horizons; the female, whose protagonists,
negotiating for autonomy with patriarchal, often racist and colonial, structures, find their
loyalties divided between “legitimating and rebellious plots” (Slaughter 371) of self-
development; and finally the post-2000 surge of American and ethnic-American realist
Bildungsromane, which map the contemporary moment by forging often tragic protagonists with
deeply conflicted horizons of socialization and the inability to be the self-owning, self-
sustaining, and self-maximizing selves that the current neoliberal order demands.
49
The White Tiger, on the other hand, makes no claims to psychological verisimilitude,
instead announcing its allegorical intent early on. Moreover, while the novel deploys mimetic
techniques, particularly in its spatial descriptions of urban and rural landscape, the blatantly
artificial epistolary framing and the obscuring of its narrative occasion (it is never entirely clear
49
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013), Junot Diaz’s The Brief and
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and This is How You Lose Her (2012), Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015),
Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies (2015), Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton (2016), Jeffrey Eugenides’
Middlesex (2002) and The Marriage Plot (2011), Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008), Teju Cole’s Open City (2011),
and Akhil Sharma’s Family Life (2014), to mention a few names from a long list of postmillennial American and
ethnic-American Bildungsromane.
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how the letters to the Chinese premier are supposed to be authored by a non-English speaking
Balram) locate it in the a figurative realm, or at the very least, “at a complex counterpoint
between illegibility and transparency” (Anjaria, Realist Hieroglyphics 115). These seeming
anomalies, alongside Adiga’s use of a sort of idiomatic American English, have prompted
complaints about The White Tiger’s lack of authenticity. As historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam
grumbles:
We can’t hear Balram Halwai’s voice because the author [Adiga] seems to have no
access to it. The novel’s…central character…comes across as a cardboard cut-out.
[…]
[Balram] uses a series of expressions that simply don’t add up. He describes his office as
a “hole in the wall.”…On another matter, he sneers, “They’re so yesterday.”… Dogs are
referred to as mutts. Yet whose vocabulary and whose expressions are these? On page
after page, one is brought up short by the jangling dissonance of the language and the
falsity of the expressions. This is a posh English-educated voice trying to talk dirty,
without being able to pull it off…What we are dealing with is someone who has no sense
of the texture of Indian vernaculars, yet claiming to have produced a realistic text.
[…]
We are meant to believe—even within the conventions of the realist novel—that a person
who must really function in Maithili or Bhojpuri can express his thoughts seamlessly in a
language that he doesn’t speak.
The essence of the complaint is that Balram is a caricature, a “cardboard cut-out”
protagonist in a seemingly realist setting whose words do not match the inner reality the reader
imagines for him, or who lacks an inner dimension altogether. Similarly, Bishnupriya Ghosh
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notes that readers have faulted The White Tiger for its “reductive fabulation of the subaltern”—
once again a compliant about Balram not being real, or a fully realized novelistic subject. In the
same vein, novelist Akash Kapur in the New York Times detects “an absence of human
complexity in The White Tiger”; which “reduces its characters to symbols.” But he finds Adiga’s
ethnographic and spatial observations, particularly of rural Bihar, “more convincing”—that is,
more authentic—offering the following details culled from the novel as support:
In some of the book’s more convincing passages, Balram describes his family’s life in
“the Darkness,” a region deep in the heartland marked by medieval hardship, where
brutal landlords hold sway, children are pulled out of school into indentured servitude
and elections are routinely bought and sold.
It is exactly such a representation of India as exotic in its violence and corruption that novelist
and nonfiction writer Amitava Kumar objects to in The White Tiger. Announcing that he himself
hails from the region where the novel is set, Kumar finds it rendered unrecognizable in Adiga’s
writing. He finds the feudal villains “utterly cartoonish”—in fact he sees in each page “inevitably
something that sounded false”—but what troubles him most is the “trite” and “offensive”
depiction of “ordinary people”: “the novelist seemed to know next to nothing about either the
love or the despair of the people he was writing about.” In his review of The White Tiger for The
Hindu, Kumar meditates upon the concept of novelistic authenticity, claiming that while newer
resident Indian novelists like Adiga, whose work is increasingly based on their journalism and
travel across the country, might think they have access to an authentic India, their (in his
opinion) superficial reportage “is only an inoculation against the charge of inauthenticity”:
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It hides larger untruths. Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel’s more
traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the
larger world meet.
This critique is at the heart of the general dissatisfaction with Adiga’s Balram as a novelistic
protagonist: that he does not possess a delineated inner life sufficiently separated from the outer
world. It is an objection that highlights the incongruity presented by what I’m calling The White
Tiger’s non-novelistic affect. The novel constructs a sort of empty chamber where all that
traditional novelistic interiority is made of—emotion, attachment, relationships, etc. on the one
hand and culture, nation, citizenship, class, education, etc. on the other—lies dismantled. Unlike
traditional bildungsromane that emphasize psychological depth, in The White Tiger the focus
repeatedly shifts to insincerity—that is, a theatrical performance of sincerity.
Balram usually enacts these routines in response to the Sharmas, giving them the standard
performance of servility expected of him. As the novel progresses and his connection to the
family narrows to a relationship with Ashok, however, the performances get more elaborate, like
in this passage describing the first time Balram drives Ashok and Pinky:
“Did you see what the driver did?” [Mr. Ashok asked]
My heart skipped a beat. I had no idea what I had just done. Mr. Ashok leaned forward
and said, “Driver, you just touched your finger to your eye, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Didn’t you see, Pinky—we just drove past a temple”—Mr. Ashok pointed to the tall,
conical structure with the black intertwining snakes painted down the sides that we had
left behind—“so … So Balram here touched his eye as a mark of respect. The villagers
are so religious in the Darkness.”
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That seemed to have impressed the two of them, so I put my finger to my eye a moment
later, again.
“What’s that for, driver? I don’t see any temples around.”
“Er … we drove past a sacred tree, sir. I was offering my respects.”
“Did you hear that? They worship nature. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
The two of them kept an eye open for every tree or temple we passed by, and turned to
me for a reaction of piety—which I gave them, of course, and with growing
elaborateness: first just touching my eye, then my neck, then my clavicle, and even my
nipples. They were convinced I was the most religious servant on earth (77).
At this point there is no insidious intent to Balram’s pretense, merely a willingness to please and
an astute reading of what kind of behavior will please. There are several similar instances: when
Ashok, shocked at the living conditions in the “servants’ quarters” assigned to Balram in
Dhanbad, promises to change them, Balram protests:
“Please don’t do that, sir. This place is like a palace for us.”
That made him feel better. He looked at me. “You’re from Laxmangarh, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.” […]
“What’s it like?” Before I could answer, he said, “It must be so nice.”
“Like paradise, sir” (68, emphasis mine).
Except that Laxmangarh is nothing like paradise, as Balram has explained to Jiabao in his
opening letter:
Your Excellency, I am proud to inform you that Laxmangarh is your typical Indian
village paradise, adequately supplied with electricity, running water, and working
telephones; and that the children of my village, raised on a nutritious diet of meat, eggs,
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vegetables, and lentils, will be found, when examined with tape measure and scales, to
match up to the minimum height and weight standards set by the United Nations and
other organizations whose treaties our prime minister has signed and whose forums he so
regularly and pompously attends.
Ha!
Electricity poles—defunct.
Water tap—broken.
Children—too lean and short for their age, and with oversized heads from which vivid
eyes shine, like the guilty conscience of the government of India. Yes, a typical Indian
village paradise, Mr. Jiabao (16-17)
Balram lies to Ashok not out of a sense of pride or loyalty for his village—he has none—but
because he instinctively realizes that to keep his job, he must uphold Ashok’s illusions about
himself as a stereotypical village bumpkin, morally simple but upright, religious, free of drink
and sex, appreciative of his job, salary, family, and above all, his ‘masters.’ It is a role Balram
must perform continuously, unceasingly, upholding the illusion at every opportunity he is
presented. For instance, here is Balram falsely claiming to Ashok that he sends his wages home
to support his family every month:
[Mr. Ashok] whipped out his wallet—it was fat with notes—and flicked out three notes
onto the table […]. You’re sending some of it home, aren’t you?
“All of it, sir. Just what I need to eat and drink here—the rest goes home.”
“Good, Balram, good. Family is a good thing” (121).
And here he is, much later in the novel, playing a simpleton consoling his drunk and heartbroken
employer by telling him stereotypical stories about village grannies. A part-angry, part-tender
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internal monologue runs through the scene, emphasizing not only the theatricality of the scene
but also Balram’s straddling of the line between Ashok’s feelings and his own:
“Sometimes I wonder, Balram [Mr. Ashok said]. I wonder what’s the point of living.
The point of living? My heart pounded. The point of your living is that if you die, who’s
going to pay me three and a half thousand rupees a month?
“You must believe in God, sir. You must go on. My granny says that if you believe in
God, then good things will happen.”
“That’s true, it’s true. We must believe,” he sobbed.
[I said]: “Once there was a man who stopped believing in God, and you know what
happened?” … “His buffalo died at once.”
“I see.” He laughed. “I see.”
“Yes, sir, it really happened. The next day he said, ‘God, I’m sorry, I believe in You,’ and
guess what happened?”
“His buffalo came back to life?”
“Exactly!”
He laughed again. I told him another story, and this made him laugh some more. Has
there ever been a master-servant relationship like this one? He was so powerless, so lost,
my heart just had to melt. […] I talked to him about the wisdom of my village—half
repeating things I remembered Granny saying, and half making things up on the spot […]
I philosophized—I joked—I even sang a sing—all to make Mr. Ashok feel better.
Baby, I thought, rubbing his back … you big, pathetic baby (159-160).
The scene underscores Balram’s ability to read Ashok while at the same time rendering himself
entirely opaque, playing the role of rural simpleton to perfection. But it is also the moment in the
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novel when Balram, who has always understood the theater of servitude as such, finds himself
unable to gauge the authenticity or falsity of his own performance, and realizes he may be on the
path to true servility:
I put my hand out and wiped the vomit from his lips, and cooed soothing words to him. It
squeezed my heart to see him suffer like this—but where my genuine concern for him
ended and where my self-interest began, I could not tell; no servant can ever tell what the
motives of his heart are.
Do we loathe our masters behind a façade of love—or do we love them behind a façade
of loathing? (160)
The choice of words—love and loathing—is not arbitrary: Adiga both emphasizes and
parodies the erotics of the relationship between Balram and Ashok. As Aijaz Ahmad points out
in his discussion of The God of Small Things, sexuality is a commonly acknowledged realm of
interiority, an external marker of the ‘true’ inner self; modern cultural production has seen the
“immense proliferation” of the idea of erotic desire as that “zone of experience where human
beings discover what they truly are.” This is also how traditional Bildungsromane deploy desire,
love, and marriage, their plots fusing love and self-recognition. The White Tiger parodies this
novelistic enmeshment of love, desire, and the self by framing the master-slave narrative as a
contrived fairy tale, as in the scene when Balram first sees Ashok:
…I was about to turn away—when I saw a figure on the terrace, a fellow in long white
loose clothes, walking around and around, lost deep in thought. I swear by God, sir—[…]
the moment I saw his face, I knew: This is the master for me.
Some dark fate had tied his lifeline to mine, because at that very moment he looked
down. I knew he was coming down to save me. […]
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Such idealization recurs a few times in the novel, but it is undercut either by its own overtly
dramatized quality, or by a bitter witticism. For instance, Balram claims that from the beginning
he understood Ashok without the need for words— “From the start, sir, there was a way in which
I could understand what he wanted to say…”—but dents the fantasy by adding: “the way dogs
understand their masters.” Elsewhere, when Balram first speaks of Ashok, he calls him his “ex,”
implying yet again that the relationship was romantic:
Tonight, I want to talk about the other important man in my story.
My ex.
Mr. Ashok’s face reappears now in my mind’s eye as it used to every day when I was in
his service—reflected in my rearview mirror. It was such a handsome face that
sometimes I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Picture a six-foot tall fellow, broad-shouldered,
with a landlord’s powerful, punishing forearms; yet always gentle (almost always—
except for that time he punched Pinky madam in the face) and kind to those around him,
even his servants and driver (38).
The chinks that show through this declaration of love (domestic abuse, feudalism, cruelty)
undermine its sincerity. Moreover, there is no evidence of a homoerotic charge between Balram
and Ashok; they are both depicted as examples of a misogynist and predatory heterosexual
masculinity. In any case, Adiga soon abandons the romantic framing; my purpose in pointing to
it is to emphasize that The White Tiger’s satirizing of love and desire—the traditional preserves
of novelistic interiority—is yet another blow to the concept, and yet another example of the
Balram’s parodic and theatrical inner life.
The romantic framing brings back the question of the elite-subaltern relationship in The
White Tiger, which forms the crux of the narrative of Balram’s emergence from an oppositional
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subject position into a fully realized entrepreneurial subjectivity. As stated above, in order to
become fully himself, Balram must not only escape feudalism but also destroy the edifice of
liberal progressivism as represented by Ashok. In Ashok, The White Tiger portrays the Indian
liberal elite as insidiously protective of property and caste-class privilege, upheld by a feudal
heritage that it only seemingly disavows. Ashok’s father and brother are openly casteist and
bigoted, but Ashok sees himself as liberal, progressive, and humane. He “knows nothing about
caste,” asserts that Hindus and Muslims are the ‘same,’ rebukes his father for violence toward
Balram (“Do you have to hit the servants, Father?”),” and prefers vegetarian food because he
“doesn’t believe in killing animals needlessly.” In the novel’s satirical system, these gestures get
coded as shallow and absurd, particularly as any progressive assertion on Ashok’s part crumbles
at the slightest inconvenience to himself. It is alongside and against Ashok that Balram the
entrepreneur begins to take shape; their relationship is the continuation of Balram’s “education,”
which is complete only when Balram eventually murders Ashok.
At the beginning of their relationship, however, there appears the possibility of an
emotional and affective solidarity between Balram and Ashok. To begin with, when Ashok
decides to move temporarily to Delhi to handle the family’s (corrupt) interests there, Balram is
sent with him, and he becomes Balram’s particular “master.” During these first few days in
Delhi, Ashok seems promising as an ally to Balram, sympathizing with Balram’s confusion with
the city’s geography and defending him against his wife Pinky, who calls Balram a “hick from
the village,” and his brother Mukesh, whose impatience is cruel:
“This moron,” [Mukesh] said, “see what he’s done. He’s got lost again.” He stretched his
hand and smacked my skull with it […]
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[Mr. Ashok said]: “Just put yourself in his place, Mukesh. Can you imagine how
confusing Delhi must be to him? It must be like getting to New York for the first time
was for me.” […]
At that moment I looked at the rearview mirror, and I caught Mr. Ashok’s eyes looking at
me: and in those master’s eyes, I saw the most unexpected emotion. Pity (101).
Soon after, an incident between Balram and Mukesh—who Balram calls the Mongoose—draws
a stronger reaction from Ashok. At the end of an excursion into the city, Mukesh, getting out of
the car, is convinced he is missing a rupee (a very minor sum amounting to just over a cent). He
“snap[s] his fingers” and insists that Balram “get down on his knees” to look for it on the floor
the car. Balram “sniff[s] in between the mats like a dog,” but comes up empty:
“What do you mean, it’s not there? [the Mongoose demanded] Don’t think you can steal
from us just because you’re in the city. I want that rupee.”
[Mr. Ashok said]: “We’ve just paid half a million rupees in a bribe, Mukesh, and now
we’re screwing this man over for a single rupee…
“That’s how you corrupt servants. It starts with one rupee. Don’t bring your American
ways here” (117).
After looking unsuccessfully a while, Balram takes a rupee from his own pocket and, pretending
to have found it on the car floor, offers it to Mukesh, who greets it with “childish delight … as if
it were the best thing that had happened to him all day.” Later Balram notices that the incident
has greatly disturbed Ashok, who is “on the verge of tears,” presumably at his family’s treatment
of Balram.
Ashok’s behavior is consistent with the pattern of melancholic witnessing of social
injustice by elites, as discussed above. But unlike in The God of Small Things, Ashok is an active
197
participant and beneficiary of the oppressive system, and his is an easy melancholy; as the novel
progresses we see several instances of it, but no attempt at radical solidarity. It is thus no surprise
that, at a moment of crisis in Ashok’s—and consequently Balram’s—life, their relationship
breaks down altogether. Shameen Black has characterized this moment, in which Ashok
participates in his family’s dehumanizing of Balram and threatening his life and freedom, as “the
logical end of servitude” (337). Its specifics are as follows: Late one night, Ashok’s wife Pinky
insists on driving, even though she is drunk. While a giggling Ashok, also drunk, looks on, Pinky
evicts Balram from driver’s seat and takes the wheel. Driving recklessly despite Balram’s
protests and pleas, she ends up running over a homeless child. The next day the Sharma family
decides that Balram should take the fall for the accident. The dynamics of the scene in which
Ashok’s brother and their family’s lawyer convey this decision to Balram are telling:
[The Mongoose] sat down on the table, and said, “Sit, sit, make yourself comfortable,
Balram. You’re part of the family.”
My heart filled up with pride. I crouched on the floor, happy as a dog, and waited for him
to say it again…[H]e said again, “You’re part of the family, Balram” (141, emphasis
mine).
Anticipating his employers’ gratitude for his support and loyalty to Ashok during the accident,
Balram is thrilled to be seen, and seen as family. The moment when he realizes that the two men
are looking to extract a false confession from him thus comes as a profound shock:
[The lawyer said]: “The judge has been taken care of. If your man does what he is to do,
we’ll have nothing to worry about.”
“My man will do what he is to do, no worries about that. He’s part of the family. He’s a
good boy” [replied the Mongoose].
198
“Good, good.” The man in the black coat looked at me and held out a piece of paper.
“Can you read, fellow?” “Yes, sir.” I took the paper from his hand and read:
I, Balram Halwai…do make the following statement on my own free will and intention:
That I drove the car that hit an unidentified person or persons on the night of January 23
this year. That I then panicked and refused to fulfil my obligations to the injured party or
parties by taking them to the nearest hospital emergency ward. That there were no other
occupants of the car at the time of the accident. That I was alone in the car, and alone
responsible for all that happened (143).
The intense fear and panic Balram feels at the thought of going to prison is only
exacerbated by the thinly-veiled threats that the Sharmas make against his family back in the
village if he doesn’t comply. To all this Ashok remains detached, leaving his brother to handle
the situation. And while the confession doesn’t come to pass—no-one reports the accident—a
profound rage Balram did not know he had bubbles to the surface after the incident. These
emotions—fear, terror, and later, rage—are by far the most heartfelt and satire-free sentiments
Balram has expressed so far, and it is upon this new psychological depth that his new
entrepreneurial self is built. The first act of this new self is the robbery and murder of Ashok;
that is, the destruction of the existing, increasingly ineffective liberal order which refuses to
acknowledge its roots in feudal and other oppressive structures, and whose abstract universal
values are of little use in the warlike landscape of neoliberalism. What is of use is the sizable
amount of money Balram recovers from Ashok, money he uses to establish a cab service for the
burgeoning call centers of Bangalore. Thus does Balram break free of the life of servitude,
disregarding the danger to his family back in Laxmangarh; while he realizes that murdering
Ashok will result in the Sharmas annihilating his family in revenge—in fact he later reads a news
199
report that confirms this—he recognizes that this “sacrifice” is necessary if he is to make a clean
break. It is thus that The White Tiger figures the foundations of Indian entrepreneurship as
murky, desperate, enraged, and on the run from its past.
Balram’s fugitive status is soon overwritten by his success as an entrepreneur. The clean
break he makes from the feudal structure as well as from a family he has always described as
parasitic set him free to finally live his true self, to grow into and fully inhabit an entrepreneurial
subjectivity he has had to thus far keep under wraps. He travels to Bangalore, India’s major
center of globalized capital and the city most associated with outsourcing and IT success, and
using the opportunities for anonymity and reinvention the neoliberal market offers a rich man—
for he is now rich—launches a start-up with the stolen money. Using some of it to bribe the local
police into shutting down another company so his can take its place, and the rest to launch a taxi
service that ferries call-center employees to their night jobs, Balarm settles into life as a
successful entrepreneur. As he says with characteristic irony: “It’s true: a few hundred thousand
rupees of someone else’s money, and a lot of hard work, can make magic happen in this
country.”
Entrepreneurship is a subjectivity Balram inhabits naturally and fully, at ease with its
demands and conventions.
Once I was a driver to a master, but now I am a master of drivers. I don’t treat them like
servants—I don’t slap, or bully, or mock anyone. I don’t insult any of them by calling
them my “family,” either. They’re my employees, I’m their boss, that’s all. I make them
sign a contract and I sign it too, and both of us must honor that contract. That’s all. If they
notice the way I talk, the way I dress, the way I keep things clean, they’ll go up in life. If
they don’t, they’ll be drivers all their lives. I leave the choice up to them. When the work
200
is done I kick them out of the office: no chitchat, no cups of coffee. A White Tiger keeps
no friends. It’s too dangerous (259).
This is the completion of Balram’s socialization, if socialization, to repeat Moretti’s definition
quoted at the beginning of this chapter, is perfect incorporation into larger societal structures, the
“internalization” of social norms to a point at which “there is no conflict between individuality
and socialization, autonomy and normality, interiority and objectification.” At this point in the
novel, the closural expectation would be of neoliberal triumph (however ironic): an exploited and
abused subaltern kills his upper-caste and -class master, symbolically eliminating the feudal
system that had entrapped generations of his forefathers and, gaining a foothold in the new
economy, escapes his servant status into the neutrality of the free market. Instead, the novel ends
in another death; one of Balram's taxi-operators, driving recklessly to keep to schedule, kills a
poor young bicyclist. Balram manages the situation, as he says, “by thinking like a rich man.”
He pays off the police and offers money to the family of the dead boy, a job to his brother.
...it was not his [the taxi-driver's] fault. Not mine either. Our outsourcing companies are
so cheap that they force their taxi-operators to promise them an impossible number of
runs every night. To meet such schedules, we have to drive recklessly; we have to keep
hitting and hurting people on the roads. It is a problem every taxi-operator in the city
faces. Don't blame me (267).
Balram's transformation from a victim of the feudal order who breaks free at a huge cost
into an agent of the free market is unmistakably ironic, but what is more striking is the ease and
glee with which he inhabits his entrepreneurial subjectivity. Despite The White Tiger’s many
departures from the traditional Bildungsroman form, Balram ends up achieving upward mobility
and acquiring a fixed interiority at the close of his bildung, even though he steps into the
201
readymade subjectivity of the Indian entrepreneur rather than growing into it. Thus Adiga’s
realism brings us to a point where the non-novelistic, parodic, and performative interiority that
he creates for Balram is finally rendered authentic. This interiority is figured as a state of
perfection for Balram: entrepreneurship is both his authentic self and his proper public role, the
subjectivity that he can fully, unreservedly inhabit. Here he has no use for family (who are dead
because of him), friends (he trusts no-one), or a private realm. He is alone, isolated, and
paranoid, working at night, scouring the streets and cafes during the day for business ideas to
better understand his clientele; all he is and all he feels and all he appears to be and all he has
been is poured into a single, realized identity. It is the fantasy of the perfect postcolonial
neoliberal subject, whose private life maps neatly onto his public, both are deployed in the
service of capital, and the violence foundational to the entrepreneurial subjectivity is continually
buried under its triumphalism.
202
Afterword
In “Naya Kayadaa” (New Custom), a short story from Ajay Navaria’s collection Unclaimed
Terrain (2013, translated from the Hindi), a Dalit professor, on his way from Delhi to his home
village, is mistaken for an (upper-caste) Thakur by a tea-seller at a bus station. When he
discovers that the professor is Dalit, the tea-seller is enraged and creates a scene—he has a
separate set of glasses reserved for Dalits, but the professor has already sipped from a ‘regular’
glass. A rather rowdy crowd gathers, forcing the professor into a corner and finally prompting
him to buy the glass he ‘polluted.’ In a fit of defiant but helpless rage, the professor then smashes
the glass on the platform. None of the trappings of a seemingly casteless modernity—education,
urban upper class status, professorial status, neutral (and expensive) attire, and so on—can rid
the professor of the contempt his Dalitness evokes. It is this specificity of caste experience that
the world of the IE novel fails to acknowledge, as its social justice discourse subsumes caste
under class or focuses on religious and communal conflict, rather than caste atrocities and crises,
as the nation’s original wound (George 54). As Toral Jatin Gajarawala reminds us through her
reading of The White Tiger using a caste lens rather than the exclusively class lens that the novel
itself employs, in the IE novel, caste is not a determinate category for subject-formation even
when it is an operative category in the protagonist’s world. Gajarawala’s reading of Balram as
upper middle-caste Halwai rather than casteless, working class poor reconfigures or at the very
least complicates his narrative with caste rage. Without a caste analysis, what we miss is that The
White Tiger’s “staging of the contest between the ‘last’ and the ‘first’ is misleading”; while his
economic class status is low, Balram also belongs to a middle—not low, not Dalit—caste. He is
not the real “last”:
203
…the real “last” (the referent, so to speak) has been preemptively written out of the
competition…Balram gets a brief glimpse of these vaguely figured last, but this isn’t their
story. And of those last who do not make it to the city, his brother, for example, very little
can be said. Though Balram’s success confirms that not only the first remain first, it also
confirms that the last remain the last (150).
The world of IE literature denies this specificity of description and analysis in its
discounting of caste as a determinant of subjectivity and its emphasis (as this dissertation has
shown) on global capital as the overarching framework for subaltern legibility. In this
formulation, caste remains the “other of modernity” (Pandian 1735), specifically of global
modernity. However, as critics have emphasized, caste as it is practiced in contemporary India is
a “new product of the encounter with modernity” rather than a mere relic of the past (Chatterjee
22). That is, contemporary caste practices are not merely feudal and outmoded intrusions into
modern India but formations that have molded and adapted to its workings: like the professor in
Naya Kayadaa, Fokir and Moyna in The Hungry Tide, and Meena and Fatima in Behind the
Beautiful Forevers, the contemporary caste subject is also a global subject, formed and
exhausted by both caste and neoliberal logics. Unlike in the case of Naya Kayadaa, however,
The Hungry Tide implies but does not speak or address Fokir and Moyna’s Dalitness, even as in
Behind, both Meena and Fatima are doubly obscured. Moreover, as Gajarawala points out, “caste
crisis is not only a Dalit problem”; that is, caste hierarchies are maintained not only through
explicit violence but also the “daily dance of decision-making by uppercaste individuals” acting
in accordance with caste norms. Further, neither does acquisition of class status “invalidate” a
caste analysis (157). It is the specificity of these intersections that IE literature loses in its
profound underemphasis on and unease with caste.
204
This dissertation has argued that the “new subaltern,” who is incorporated into the
circuits of globalization and neoliberalism rather than existing outside of them, emerges into
representation in the transnational space of twenty-first century IE realism such that her visibility
is no longer in question. Instead, twenty-first century IE realism sorts visibilities and opacities
within the subaltern realm: that is, it shows what about the new subaltern is received in elite
circuits as visible and what as obscure as she becomes integrated into the discourses of neoliberal
governmentality and social justice. In so doing, IE realism emphasizes the subject’s imbrication
in neoliberal logics over national as well as caste frameworks. Having studied and demonstrated
IE realism’s representations of new subalternity as thus embedded, I want to join several existing
critical voices to suggest that studies of IE realism would benefit greatly from being conducted in
tandem with contemporary vernacular (bhasha) literatures, particularly of writers like Navaria
who stake the same claim to narrating a secular modernity as Anglophone writers. While such an
analysis goes beyond the timeline of this dissertation, it is part of my larger inquiry and will form
the basis for further study.
The second field of inquiry the dissertation leads into is the emergence of “peripheral”
realisms across the globe, as discussed in the introduction. One such site, contemporary
American and ethnic-American narratives of subject formation, is of particular interest in its
location at the absolute center of global capital. As discussed in the introduction, panoramic
‘everything’ novels sometimes convey an experience of this center as an experience of the
world. My interest is in less panoramic but equally prominent and epic (and already canonized)
narratives such as Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie Americanah (2014), Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015), Akhil Sharma’s
Family Life (2014), Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies (2015), Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy
205
Barton (2016), Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot (2011), and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch
(2013)—to name but a few of the growing number of realist bildungsromane to emerge out of
the American literary scene in the last 5-7 years. These novels map the contemporary moment by
forging lost, unmoored, or tragic protagonists with deeply conflicted horizons of socialization
and the inability to be the self-owning, self-sustaining, and self-maximizing selves that the
current neoliberal order demands. As Wendy Brown claims, neoliberal reason in advanced
capitalist contexts constructs subjects “on the model of the contemporary firm” who are expected
to behave “in ways that maximize their capital value in the present and enhance their future
value” through “practices of entrepreneurialism, self-investment, and/or attracting investors”
(Brown 22). Given this landscape, I am interested in two lines of inquiry: how and why do
contemporary American and ethnic American novels narrate subjects who are not viable within
the neoliberal landscape—who fail its demands for entrepreneurial individualism—as viable
novelistic subjects? Relatedly, given that the generalized global language of business,
management, and neoliberal success blocks other affective vocabularies of self-making, how
does the novel, particularly the bildungsroman, narrate selfhood and interiority in advanced
capitalist contexts?
206
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
The Indian English (IE) novel was critical to the establishment of the field of Postcolonial Studies in the late twentieth century, particularly in the Western academy. It supplied or reinforced some of postcolonial criticism’s central interpretative frameworks, chiefly through its fixation with the nation as primary theme and referent and its profound formal and linguistic self-consciousness. This dissertation is situated in the aftermath of this high postcolonial moment. It traces the emergence of a ‘new realist’ aesthetics in the twenty-first century by tracking three major shifts in the IE novel’s trajectory in the wake of India’s transition from welfare state to market economy: the use of a denotative and outward-looking realism over the self-conscious and ‘magic realist’ forms of the 1980s and 90s, the replacement of the nation as the IE novel’s basis for subject formation by a transnational neoliberal framework, and the rejection of elite focal characters in favor of subaltern protagonists and narrators. ❧ My overarching claim is that new IE realism builds a framework of the prevailing logics of global capital in India to narrate not its proper subjects—the entrepreneurial and ruling classes—but the very poor, who are marginal to but imbricated in its discourse. I understand new IE realism as a formal experiment, an iteration of classical realism in its intimacy with capital, its surfeit of metonymic and empirical detail, its use of traditional narrative techniques such as omniscience, free indirect discourse, and bildung, and its elaboration of social conditions. That it deploys these seemingly totalizing forms and techniques to narrate not the normative national subject but the subject of poverty locates it in the realm of experiment. The politics of this narration is the dissertation’s primary point of inquiry.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Sirsi, Chinmayi
(author)
Core Title
Between agency and exhaustion: Indian Anglophone literature and the neoliberal subject
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
English
Publication Date
03/06/2018
Defense Date
01/19/2017
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
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Tag
Amitav Ghosh,Aravind Adiga,Indian English novel,Katherine Boo,neoliberalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,realism,subaltern studies
Language
English
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Electronically uploaded by the author
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Russett, Margaret (
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)
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csirsi@gmail.com,csirsi@usc.edu
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Sirsi, Chinmayi
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The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
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Tags
Amitav Ghosh
Aravind Adiga
Indian English novel
Katherine Boo
neoliberalism
realism
subaltern studies