1. Rereading Indian Writing in English
The White Tiger – Arvind Adiga
Narcopolis – Jeet Thayil
Nation, Narrative & Novel
Tue, 6th Nov., 2012
ASC, Uni. Of Mumbai, Mumbai
Dilip Barad
Dept. of English
M.K. Bhavnagar University
Bhavnagar – Gujarat
dilipbarad@gmail.com
www.dilipbarad.com

2. Let us discuss . . .
• Creative writing vs/and criticism!
• Tagore and Gandhi: The idea of Nation
• Umashankar Joshi – The Idea of Indian Literature
• E V Ramakrishnan – Relocating …
• Nation & Narration: Homi K. Bhabha
• Farrukh Dhondy – nation and novel
• Terry Eagleton: Political Criticism
• Cultural criticism – four goals
• Narrative structure - Memory Novels
• Rereading texts: Politics of
awards/rewards/western audience

3. Tagore & Gandhi
• Both Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi were
against the nation-state – Swaraj vs Suraj
• For Tagore, the concept of India was not
territorial but ideational i.e. India for him was not
a geographical expression but an idea.
• His view of nationalism was more about
spreading a homogenised universalism than
seeking political freedom for India.
• Gandhi – ‘our struggle for freedom is to bring
peace in the world’.

4. Umashankar Joshi – ‘The Idea of Indian Literature’
• Umashankar Joshi – The Idea of Indian Literature –
“Indianness is rather an ongoing search for, a vision of, a
pattern of Indian literature and culture to which the
literature and culture in every part of the country is more
or less converging”.
• “… We shall always be viewing the composite identity of
Indian literature within the parameters of the composite
culture of India.”
• “…True Indianness transcends India and genuine
Indianisation is a synonym for humanization.”
• Indian ethos is one of synthesis rather than exclusiveness
… plea for swaraj in ideas.
• K. Satchidanandan – ‘Umashankar Joshi and the Idea of Indian Literature’ – Indian Literature 268)

5. E. V. Ramakrishnan – relocate Indian literature
• relocate literature in the context of caste,
religion, region, gender etc… issues of
everyday struggles… Literature is shaped by
the material condition of society.”

6. Homi K. Bhabha: ‘Introduction: Narrating the
Nation’ (Nation and Narration)
• Nation – the modern Janus: the uneven development
of capitalism inscribes both progression and regression,
political rationality and irrationality in the very genetic
code of the nation – it is by nature, ambivalent.
• Nation is narrated in ‘terror of the space or race of
the Other; the comfort of social belonging, the
hidden injuries of class, the customs of taste, the
powers of political affiliation; the sense of social
order, the sensibility of sexuality; the blindness of
bureaucracy, the strait insight of institutions; the
quality of justice, the commonsense of injustice; the
langue of the law and the parole of the people’.

7. Homi K. Bhabha: ‘Introduction: Narrating the
Nation’ (Nation and Narration)
• It is to explore the Janus-faced ambivalence of
language itself in the construction of the
Janus-faced discourse of the nation.
• Nation is an agency of ambivalent narration
that holds ‘culture’ at its most productive
position, as a force for ‘subordination,
fracturing, diffusing, reproducing as much as
producing, creating, forcing and guiding’.

8. Homi K. Bhabha: ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’
(Nation and Narration)
• The ambivalent, antagonistic perspective of
nation as narration will establish the cultural
boundaries of the nation so that they may be
acknowledged as ‘containing’ thresholds of
meaning that must be crossed, erased and
translated in the process of cultural production.
• What kind of cultural space is the nation with its
transgressive boundaries and its interruptive’
interiority?

9. Farrukh Dhondy: The Nation and the Novel
(3 Nov, 2012 – ToI)
• How is South Asian writing in a universal
human context to be evaluated? Perhaps as all
literature has ever been? The European short
story was born of the parable and the fable.
• The novel in England, France, Russia and
Germany was, in an important way, born of a
crisis of religious faith.

10. F.D.: Nation & Novel
• when a culture ceases to live and assess itself
by the laws of Moses or Jesus, when Dorothea
of Middlemarch or Anna Karenina or Emma
Bovary feel what they feel and do what they
do, they can call upon no strictly biblical
justification.
• It takes George Eliot, Tolstoy and Gustave
Flaubert to construct a form which captures
those nuances of feeling and brings an
inclusive sympathy to the possibilities of
human and social behaviour.

11. F.D.: Nation & Novel
• The novel in the European context was called
upon to supply in narrative the definition of
'love', 'faith', 'loyalty', 'generosity', 'compassion',
'priggishness', 'snobbery', 'war', 'peace' and every
other abstract noun in the dictionary.
• It took up where faith left off and did the
opposite of what heroic myths used to do. Some
European writing, the novels of Dostoevsky and
the philosophical works of Nietzsche took this
crisis of faith and the death of myth head on,
asking and explicitly answering questions.

12. F.D.: Nation & Novel
• And South Asia?
• Of which necessity was South Asian writing in
English born?
• The obvious answer is nationalism and the
struggle for Independence.
• The influence of the writing, though widely
translated, suffered from the limitation of
being in English.

13. F.D.
• At the same time as this contribution to
nationalism was formulated, a far more
influential media was coming into its own.
• Film became the lingua franca of India and it
exclusively dedicated itself to the various
purposes and themes of nationalism,
asserting India's great past (Raja
Harishchandra), and following a Gandhian
agenda in attacking untouchability (Achhut
Kanya) and elevating the status of women
(Razia Begum).

14. F.D.
• The cinematic definitions created and were
bound by myth. Modernity, the urbanisation
of India, new institutions, industrialisation,
global imports, rampant capitalism and
corruption (whew!) were changing India and
though the myths persisted, were modified
and increasingly seen to be fantasy or
escapism.

15. F.D.
• The task then of the new cinema and of South
Asian writing was to distance oneself from the
myth and describe and dissect the
personalities and possibilities of existence that
emerge.

16. Terry Eagleton: Political Criticism
• “There is no need to drag politics into literary
theory(text), it has been there from the
beginning.”
• This should not surprise – for any body of theory
(text) concerned with human
meaning, value, language, feeling and experience
will inevitably engage with broader, deeper
beliefs about the nature of human individuals and
societies, problems of power and
sexuality, interpretations of past history, versions
of the present and hopes for the future.
• Literary Theory: An Introduction

17. Cultural Studies
• Four Goals:
• First, Cultural Studies transcends the confines
of particular discipline such as literary criticism
or history.
• Second, Cultural Studies is politically engaged.
• Thirdly, Cultural Studies denies the separation
of “high’ and “low” or elite and popular
culture.
• Finally, Cultural Studies analyzes not only the
cultural work, but also the means of
production.
• A Hand book of Critical Approaches to Literature – Wilfred Guerin, Labor et all.

18. Narrative – Memory Novel: Dipesh Chakrabarty
• One needs to understand the relation between
memory and identity”, the “shared structure of a
sentiment”, “the sense of trauma and its contradictory
relation to the question of the past”.
• Trauma is memory.
• One of principal arguments seems to be that “the
narrative structure of the memory of trauma works on
a principle opposite to that of any historical narrative”.
• According to him, “a historical narrative leads up to the
event in question, explaining why it happened, and
why it happened when it did, and this is possible only
when the event is open to explanation. What cannot
be explained belongs to the marginalia of history.”
• ‘Memories of Displacement: The Poetry and Prejudice of Dwelling’ in Habitation of Modernity, pp
116-17.

19. The White Tiger
• Title: Symbol of White tiger in Chinese myth
• Reading text:
• Blurb
• Pg. 6, 8, 10,12.
• You see, I am in light now, but I was born and
raised in Darkness . . . Please understand, Your
Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an
India of Light, and an India of Darkness. The
Ocean brings light to my country. .. But the river
brings darkness to India – the black river. (read
pg. 15)
• Pg. 19: Inside, you will find an image of a saffron-
coloured creature, half man half monkey…

20. • Stories of rottenness and corruption are always
the best stories, aren’t they?
• Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
• “But this is your fate if you do your job well – with
honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would
have done it…. I did my job with near total dishonesty,
lack of dedication, and insincerity…:
• Read pg. 63, 64. about caste
• ‘The villages are so religious in the Darkness”
• Democracy! Pg. 96-102 “I am India’s most faithful voter,
and I still have not seen the inside of a voting booth’.
• Pg. 318:all the skin-whitening creams sold in the markets
of India won’t clean my hands again.
• Conclusion: pg. 319-320 – I will never say I made a
mistake that night in Delhi when I slit my master’s throat.

21. Narcopolis
• Bombay: I found Bombay and
opium, the drug and the city, the
city of opium and the drug Bombay.”
• Drug literature – Opium: symbolically represented as
the idea of religion, films, sex, freedom, memory and
dreams.
• The narrative is true to its subject matter – opiated,
hazy, viewed through foggy smoke, dream like
sequences, stream of consciousness at another level.
• . . .Soporo’s book, within Lee’s father’s book (Zheng He),
within the story of Lee’s life, as told to Dimple, within
the pipe’s narration, as told to narrator Dom, within
the book Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil. (Interview_2)

22. Dimple/Zeenat
• The story of eunuch Dimple / Zeenat: Pg. 11 & 289
• Like Bombay’s, Dimple’s name does not remain fixed.
She was originally (re)named after the beautiful Dimple
Kapadia, of the film Bobby (the plot of which rings with
familiar themes). She is (re)renamed, again after a film
star— this time Zeenat Aman—by Rashid, who takes
her to a movie (Hare Rama Hare Krishna), in which
“Zeenie” plays a character who has renamed herself
Janice and run away from home.
• Again, we have this undercurrent of exile and
separation. In fact, the word hijra is etymologically
related to the Arabic hjr, which refers to leaving one’s
tribe.
• Sarah Van Bonn: SouthAsianJournal:Literary Review

23. Dimple/Zeenat
• Rashid gives Dimple a new name and a new identity
when he asks her to begin wearing a burka.
• For a while she enjoys slipping between her two
identities.
• Dimple has always found some power in deciding what
to wear—be it burka, sari, or “trousers because it
allowed her . . . to act like a man when she wanted to.”
She recognizes that “clothes are costumes, or disguises.
• The image has nothing to do with the truth. “And what
is truth? Whatever you want it to be. Men are women
and women are men. Everybody is everything.”
• Sarah Van Bonn: SouthAsianJournal:Literary Review

24. • Dimple moves between
religions, genders, states of
reality, time, clothes, names, roles.
• She dreams she is rich; she identifies with
Jesus because he is poor.
• She learns to use new languages: teaching
herself English, learning to swear in Cantonese
from Mr. Lee.
• Sarah Van Bonn: SouthAsianJournal:Literary Review

25. • Dimple is not even entirely a woman, and still
she is defined by men, a victim of their
violence, forced into prostitution, name
changed, named (twice!) after an object of
beauty, at times required to wear a hijab.
• Narcopolis tells the stories of, as Thayil puts
it, “the degraded, the crushed, whose voices
were unheard or forgotten, but whose lives
were as deserving of honor as anyone else’s.”

26. No strong female characters…
• … excepting Dimple, who though in many ways
female, is biologically male and doesn’t see herself as
solely a woman.
• The only other female characters we see are
wives, girlfriends, prostitutes, many of whom are
literally in cages, wives who are compared to
whores, whores who are secretly wives, and a few poor
souls taken out by the pathaar maar.
• Even the few women who assert some autonomy or
sense of control (Mr. Lee’s love, or Jamal’s Fahreen) are
defined by their relationships to the male characters—
are in one way or another under the thumb of men.
• That’s how it realistically was, and is, in a male
dominated society like the one the novel depicts.

27. Reading novel . . .listening writer . . .
• Dimple’s traumatic memory pg.66
• Mughals – pg. 274
• Suicide bomber – pg. 275
• Trauma of memory: pg. 275-276
• Yusuf khan pg. 282
• Gandhi: pg. 286.
• Soporo – freewill in action (pg. 249) – Patthar-maar
• The chinese digression – Story of Mr. Lee – postcolonial masterstroke
(pg. 118)
• Jeet Thayil’s Interview (10 mins)
• Interview_2

28. Thank You!
www.dilipbarad.com