Dual Readership and the Role of the Exotic Interpreter in Postcolonial Indian Literature
As India celebrated its 50th year of independence in 1997, Salman Rushdie boldly proclaimed in a letter to The New Yorker that “”Indo-Anglian” literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books.” This declaration, repeated in an introduction to a book on Vintage Indian literature between 1947 and 1997. This statement caused a stir in the Indian literature community, especially among older theoreticians who noted Rushdie’s inability to write in any lanuage other than English as evidence for his strong bias. Later on that year, Arundati Roy, another author of the “Indo-Anglian” genre, won the Booker prize for her novel, The God of Small Things. Certain similarities between Rushdie’s prize winner, Midnight’s Children and Roy’s novel suggests some critical aspects of what the western audience, including Booker judges, value in postcolonial Indian literature. Both Rushdie and Roy are themselves outsiders to mainstream Hindu-centric India. Rushdie, an atheist born to Sunni Muslim parents, moved to England at the age of eleven and remained there until past his college education, while Roy, born to a Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father who abandoned her, spent her youth in several different cities within India, including a brief stint in Italy. Both Midnight’s Children and The God of Small Things maintain this outsider perspective with their protagonists, Saleem Sinai and the fraternal twins Rahel and Estha. In this paper, I will argue that the perspective of a exotic digestible outsider is a key element of what the Booker prize rewards in postcolonial Indian literature. Moreover, I will argue that these novels worldwide success are also because the ability of the authors to balance their novels against the expected dual readership, and include components uniquely aimed at each of its two main readership groups, the Western audience, and the literate English-reading Indian population.
- Vivek
I agree with Vivek’s viewpoint on the indian anglophiles.
I feel that there needs to be a bridging of two such worlds which they provide.
In order for the western readers to assimilate the eastearn culture more easily is achieved by the fact that these books are written from a perspective which is partly shared by them.
Familiarity is required for comfort. In order for western consumers to want to buy these books they need to be able to follow the book and its characters with a certain sense of familiarity and not be completely alienated and lost in a book which is completely foreign in all aspects which becomes tiresome and tantamount to reading a textbook rather than an entertaining novel.
If, as Vivek suggests, “Indo-Anglian” literature is centered around “exotic digestible outsiders,” then I can’t help but wonder what the specific characteristics are that make a protagonist appealing to both Western and Eastern audiences. Are Western audiences drawn to the mystique and strangeness of an Indian protagonist, or are they comforted in the many similarities that can be drawn with more traditionally Western characters? Similarly, does Saleem, for example, have the power to engage an Indian audience because of his proximity to Indian history, or his strange detachment from it? Either way, I think this is a great topic to explore in your paper.