chaudhuri in frankfurt: "the irresponsible misfit"

At this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, which started today, India is the "guest of honor" (last time round, it was the Arab world). There should be some interesting coverage over the next several days. The best thing I've seen thus far is this interview with Amit Chaudhuri, who has perceptive (and delightfully worded: Rushdie is "a sort of hallucinatory cliff behind which we cannot see") observations about vernacular literatures, Rushdie-itis, anglophone globalization, and more. I was particularly interested in notion of how "middle-class India's perception of itself" shapes the kinds of stories that (some of) Indian writing in English tells. Chaudhuri argues that IWE is almost inherently "ambitious", because the temptation to represent the whole of India--as opposed to the local, the specific--is present. It's an interesting critique in light if his own work--which, though it shifts from Bombay to Oxford to Calcutta and onwards--has a specific, finely focused texture. In his novels one gets a very strong sense of the fabric of daily life in a given place, no matter how rooted or restless that life may be.

He writes:

The dividing line between postcolonial pride and imperialistic ambition is very small for the middle class in India -- one lapses into the other very easily.

India' cities are increasingly home to an upwardly mobile middle class. We have long entertained ambitions of being a regional superpower, once that was achieved, a world superpower economic or otherwise. Now we have our Security Council aspirations as well, and our diaspora doesn't look particularly like people lost in exile but are contributing economically and to the idea of this growing prestige of India. And Indian writing in English reflects that and traverses that thin line between postcolonial pride and imperialist ambition. I would be happy with a writing that is more ambiguous about its own position and wish it would be less triumphant. I feel alienated from that personally as a writer.

[....]

For me the position of the outsider is of great importance to the health of any society. For any cultural practice, whether it's academic or literary, the position of the outsider, the misfit, the daydreamer and even of failure are very important categories in the creation of a truly energetic and self-critical social and intellectual space. They are important components because of the latent critique of power that they have in constituting our imaginative life.

My anxiety is that in the last 20 years India, typically for a globalizing country, hasn't theorized a position for the outsider or for the misfit or for failure. Its rhetoric is concerned with success in various ways. So Indian writing in English or any other phenomenon is always spoken in terms of success and if it is not successful, it becomes invisible.

Right now we do not have a space for the irresponsible misfit, which means we do not have a space which is at an angle to power.

I'm reminded of this intriguing, if sometimes incoherent, essay from Orhan Pamuk, who likewise finds himself concerned with the rise of a globalizing middle-class bearing a triumphant narrative of itself and a tendency towards nationalist pieties. I find both sly little parallels and stark disjunctures between the two countries, and the grounds of any comparison are always shifting. But I have often thought that the "space at an angle to power" is wedged open wider--and the people inside speak in a more raucous, spirited babel of voices--in India than in Turkey. The irresponsible misfit may not be winning the Booker Prize, but surely she is there (and less likely to be getting hauled into court under article 301 charges...)