In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary

IN STEREOTYPE

Literature Now

LITERATURE NOW

Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Series Editors

Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures.

Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect

IN STEREOTYPE

South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary

Mrinalini Chakravorty

Columbia University Press       New York

Material in chapter 4 previously appeared in The Dead That Haunt Anil’s Ghost: Subaltern Difference and Postcolonial Melancholia PMLA 128, no. 3 (May 2013): 542–58.

Material in chapter 5 appeared in a previous form as Brick Lane Blockades: The Bioculturalism of Migrant Domesticity, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 3 (2012): 503–28.

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-53776-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chakravorty, Mrinalini.

In stereotype : South Asia in the global literary imaginary / Mrinalini Chakravorty.

    pages    cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16596-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-16597-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53776-6 (electronic)

1. South Asian literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. South Asian literature—21st century—History and criticism. 3. Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature. I. Title.

PK5416.C43    2014

891.4—dc23

2013040700

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Jacket design by Noah Arlow

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For

Lindon Warren Barrett

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Stereotypes as Provocation

  1.  Why the Stereotype? Why South Asia?

  2.  To Understand Me, You’ll Have to Swallow a World: Margins, Multitudes, and the Nation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

  3.  Slumdog or White Tiger? The Abjection and Allure of Slums

  4.  The Dead That Haunt Anil’s Ghost: Subaltern Stereotypes and Postcolonial Melancholia

  5.  From Bangladesh to Brick Lane: The Biocultural Stereotypes of Migrancy

  6.  Good and Bad Transnationalisms?: Outsourcing and Terror

Epilogue: The Afterlife of Stereotypes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book begins long before it takes the shape of one, sometimes in fragments and in conversations that only later seep into its pages. The ideas in this book first germinated in the many rich conversations I had with a fabulous cohort of mentors, colleagues, and friends at the University of California, Irvine.

As far as these things are knowable, the initial inspiration for the project came from David Lloyd’s seminar Modernity and the Irish Body, which to this day serves as my model for how to read meticulously while challenging the assumptions of texts even when succumbing to their pleasures. Irish colonial modernity, of course, was shot through with colonialist stereotypes of Irish otherness. Yet the fantastic recalcitrance of the Irish in appropriating and redeploying these stereotypes toward insurgent, countercolonial practices is a lesson that David taught so very well and one that endured with me. I feel deeply fortunate to have been inspired by David’s example, and for finding such a brilliant and generous interlocutor who spurred my early interests in cultural stereotypes and compelled me to run with it in my own way.

I am also grateful for the steadfast encouragement provided by Gabriele Schwab and J. Hillis Miller. My work has benefited immensely from their truly unorthodox and intellectually lively engagement. Gaby has been a friend and confidante without parallel; from her I have learned that scholarly curiosity should be motivational, ethically directed, and spellbinding. To Hillis, I am infinitely grateful for showing me the importance of tackling knotty problems with grace and diligence. He has also been a tireless advocate on my behalf, selflessly sharing both his sparkling reflections on literature as well as his immense experience of the profession. Indeed David, Gaby, and Hillis have persistently modeled a generosity of spirit and responsiveness that I can only hope to emulate. They have all read multiple iterations of this book in its present and former incarnations with unfailing enthusiasm and eye to detail. That the book is not perfect is no measure of their failure to offer timely and rigorous feedback; any shortcomings in the book remain indeed my own.

This book would not have been possible without Lindon Barrett, who continues to be a vital and prevailing influence in my thought and life; I dedicate this work to him. Above all, Lindon was a friend of the deepest, most fiercely loyal kind, and I miss his presence terribly. Without Lindon, I would have little concept of what it means to be truly passionate about living a life of the mind motivated by an acute desire to see a more reciprocal, equitable world. He was singular in encouraging a unique kind of intellectual camaraderie and risk-taking among his students and colleagues, many of whom were part of the cultural studies cohort that thrived in Irvine under his direction. I thank Leila Neti, Janet Neary, Amy Parsons, Arnold Pan, Bruce Barnhart, Naomi Greyser, Ginger Hill, Linh Hua, Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, and Jared Sexton for the many energetic conversations we had about culture, race, and representation as part of this group. Many other friendships sustained the initial conceptions of this project, including in particular those with Jeffrey Atteberry, Barbara Antoniazzi, Mariam Beevi, Lan Duong, Bond Love, Patricia Pierson, and Jim Ziegler. Rachel Meyer deserves a mention all of her own: she singlehandedly infused these years with fun, hilarity, gossip, and intellectual vigor for so many in her circle. I miss her zeal for life. At Irvine, thanks are also due to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Steve Mailloux, Julia Lupton, Jim Steintrager, Beheroze Shroff, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wolfgang Iser, Rey Chow, Homer Brown, Glen Mimura, Ketu Katrak, Rei Terada, Fredric Jameson, and Etienne Balibar.

In many ways, a book is a bit of a time machine that travels with the author over time. If this book’s expedition began in California, it has since crisscrossed many places and changed shape in each sojourn. At Kenyon College in Ohio, I benefited greatly from discussions with Jesse Matz, Ted Mason, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, Wendy Singer, and Joseph Campana. I also thank Sara Clarke Kaplan, Kirstie Dorr, and Asha Nadkarni for friendship, spirited optimism, and their conviction that what we dreamed collectively would always take us further. Across time and space, the direction the book ultimately traveled also profited from critical conversations with and the generous responses of Sangeeta Ray, Nancy Armstrong, and Warren Montag.

While the first inspiration for this book was formed in California, its final shape owes everything to the insightful and sustained support it received in Virginia. More than anything, this is a book born in Virginia. For this, my colleagues in the department of English at the University of Virginia deserve my most heartfelt gratitude. In particular, I thank Jahan Ramazani, Gordon Braden, Eric Lott, Caroline Rody, Steve Arata, Cristina Dela Colleta, and Karen Chase for offering sage advice during the first moments of revision. At key moments over the years, Susan Fraiman, Anna Brickhouse, Sandhya Shukla, Bruce Holsinger, Rita Felski, and Michael Levenson asked incisive questions and made invaluable suggestions that breathed new life into the project. I will forever be beholden to Susan, Anna, Bruce, and Sandhya for being such good friends and for being so ever ready to read and comment on new material at short notice. My thanks to Gordon Braden, Jahan Ramazani, Alison Booth, and Cynthia Wall, who, as chairs of the department, contributed more to the making of this book than they know.

For their resolute friendship, brilliant provocations, and timely strategic help in making sure that the project endured past my own insecurities with it, I am especially indebted to Deborah McDowell and Marlon Ross. From the first moment of our encounter, Debbie has been a stalwart friend and ally; her gift of looking past convention while remaining practical is one that has truly inspired. I thank her also for the opportunity to be involved in the rich intellectual life of the Carter G. Woodson Institute. In Marlon, I happened upon a perfect mentor. Indeed, I am at a loss for words to convey my appreciation of the help he has extended me over the years. He has a rare talent for asking the kinds of searching, probing questions that electrify your own thoughts. Beyond this, his ability to enter into subtle conversations on topics that are far afield of his own and to consistently grasp the larger stakes of an argument that at times were obscure even to me while making them, and his willingness to always say yes to requests to read, are profoundly astounding.

As much as writing is a solitary endeavor, it also thrives on nurture and sociality. For laughter, delectable foods, spritely conversation, and all manner of much-needed breaks, I thank my friends Sylvia Chong, Michael Puri, Neeti Nair, Jennifer Tsien, Geeta Patel, Kath Weston, Lisa Woolfork, Christopher Krentz, Yarimar Bonilla, Brad Pasanek, Jennifer Greeson, and Vicki Olwell. A special shout out is reserved for Zahid Chaudhary—coconspirator and last-minute reader par excellence. I have also been fortunate to have a team of outstanding graduate students at the University of Virginia who have interrogated, inspired, and contributed to my scholarship in ways that, while not always perceptible, are absolutely vital. I am proud to stand in solidarity with the path-breaking projects of Alwin Jones, Z’etoile Imma, Anuj Kapoor, Sonya Donaldson, Shermaine Jones, Alex Gil, Marie Ostby, Jesse Bordwin, and Annie Galvin. Anuj’s tireless research assistance and thought-provoking responses, especially in the last years of writing, have been equally energizing. I also thank the many others in my seminars and in the Postcolonial Studies reading group at Virginia whose insights have opened new avenues of thought at every turn.

This book would never have been started, restarted, or finished without the constancy of love I have received from my family. I feel immeasurable gratitude for my father, Milan Chakravorty, who is my model for an unfalteringly energetic work ethic, modesty, and calmness of spirit. I thank him for asking time and again, Is the book finished yet?—a question that, while irksome, was infinitely motivational. My mother, Joba Chakravorty, has taught me through example that one must always be open to refashioning oneself. I continue to be sustained by her cheerfulness, wit, and belief in me. For my sister, Meenakshy: what can I say? The adventure continues, and I am so happy that she is on this ride with me. I admire her strength, intellect, and joy for life. My thanks to her for remarking so astutely on the whole manuscript, and for being ever so ready to talk about things. I am also delighted now to include my niece Shaanti in our mix, for her unparalleled enthusiasm and chatterbox inquisitiveness. Thanks are also due to Kamalesh and Bharati Banerjee, Robi Banerjee, Soumya Raychaudhuri, Uma Bose, Reba Verma, Kishalay and Swati Chakraborty, and Patrashila and Sulekha Bhattacharya for many kindnesses along the way. For being my family on a different shore, I thank R. M. Neti, Sanju, and Suseela Neti (especially for her many culinary offerings and camaraderie), and Jaya Leslie.

I am also lucky to be in the exquisite circle of love, life, and laughter that I share with Leila Neti, Jeffrey Atteberry, and Narayan Neti. For emergency reading, editing, and feedback, I couldn’t ask for a better person than Jeff. For his constant friendship, I am profoundly grateful. Leila, I thank, for unselfishly sharing her words and ideas in order to make sure that this is a better book than it was. I am glad for her brilliance, for our travels, and for the enduring closeness that comes from sharing life in full color. Narayan remains my source of wonder. I wait for when he can read the book and tell me what’s wrong with it while reassuring me, as only he can, that it’s okay. The fact is that all of these people will only feel joy when the book, imperfect as it may be, is before them, and for this I feel very fortunate.

Over the years, I have rehearsed portions of the book’s arguments at various conferences and colloquia, and I thank all those who offered valuable feedback. Specifically, I’m grateful to interlocutors at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA) conventions, the University of Oklahoma, Kenyon College, the University of Nevada, Reno, Old Dominion University, Pitzer College, Occidental College, and San Diego State University. I have also benefited tremendously from participating in the two-year-long Forced Migration Seminar organized by Alon Confino and Jeffrey Rossman and sponsored by the Page Barbour Initiative at the University of Virginia. Thanks are also due to the research librarians at the University of Virginia, the National Library, Kolkata, and the British Library, London. Portions of chapter 4 and 5 have originally appeared as articles in PMLA 128, no. 3 (May 2013), published by the Modern Language Association of America and in Modern Fiction Studies 58, no. 3 (2012), and I thank the editors at each journal for permission to reprint.

When my own belief in finding the book a suitable publishing home was ebbing, I was lucky that the manuscript received such timely, conscientious, and amazingly supportive editorial guidance as that given by Rebecca Walkowitz, Matthew Hart, and David James. Not only did Rebecca, Matthew, and David see it as a fitting addition for their series, Literature Now, they were also seminal in clarifying much-needed revisions for the whole structure and flow of the book, and in setting a manageable schedule. They renewed my faith in the blind submission process that is such a cornerstone of our intellectual lives, and for this I remain infinitely in their debt. In Philip Leventhal at Columbia University Press I found an editor who was unwavering in his support and care for shepherding the project through its various stages from securing readers reports in lightning swift fashion and onward. Without a doubt, the anonymous reviewers for Columbia University Press read the manuscript with care and made numerous invaluable suggestions that improved the book. It has also been a pleasure to receive meticulous and extraordinarily efficient copyediting advice from Whitney Johnson, Leslie Kriesel, and Patti Bower, and the aid of Heather Jones in preparing the index. I am grateful to them all for ensuring that the book is in print.

In Stereotype would not have been what it is without the institutional support given by the Regents at the University of California; numerous summer grants from the department of English and Comparative Literature at UC, Irvine; the Center for Writing and Translation, Irvine; the School for Criticism and Theory at Cornell University; a Midwest Faculty Seminar Grant from Kenyon College and the University of Chicago; the Diversity Fellowship from the Teaching Resource Center at the University of Virginia; and a Summer grant, a Sesquicentennial Fellowship, and a publication subvention from the University of Virginia.

PROLOGUE

STEREOTYPES AS PROVOCATION

How might a literary festival mediate the slippery shuffle of cultural stereotypes between real and phantasmic terrains? Does staging a representation of a certain culture, say of South Asia, in a book, film, or at a festival inevitably open it to the world as an immutable type? How might we think about the collusions, collisions, and transformations that ensue when cultural representations in whatever form seem indistinguishable from stereotypes? What are the conditions under which cultures circulate or congeal globally? What are the ethical responsibilities and political risks that make claiming and disowning stereotypes so crucial to how we read the Anglophone novel today?

This book attends to these questions by prying into the stereotype’s perceived flatness, arguing instead that it is the stereotype’s elasticity that makes it indispensable to how global fiction is read. In Stereotype confronts head-on the ambivalent nature of the stereotype, both as a general concept and in its particularly prevalent South Asian iterations. The book theorizes the seductive force of the stereotype as an explanatory mechanism while complicating our understanding of the use and persistent allure of predictable representations of South Asia. One of its core arguments is that the uses and effects of stereotypes must be considered from multiple positionalities. Through an examination of a host of real and imagined stereotypes—hunger, crowdedness, filth, slums, death, migrant flight, terror, outsourcing—In Stereotype makes the case that such commonplaces about other worlds are crucial to shaping the ethics of global literature. The book draws on the influential work of Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Michael Ondaatje, Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, and Chetan Bhagat, among others, to show how stereotypes about South Asia offer us insight into the material and psychic investments of contemporary imaginative texts. By probing contexts ranging from the independence of the Indian subcontinent, to poverty tourism, civil war, migration, domestic labor, and terrorist radicalism, this book introduces an interpretive lens for reading the ethics of literary representations of cultural and global difference. Broadly, In Stereotype reevaluates the stakes of a contemporary fascination with transnational novels and films that manufacture global differences even as they stage intersubjective encounters between cultures through the use of stereotypes.

Let us turn to the scene of a festival to see how questions about reading and cultural fluency swirl around stereotypes. From its inception in 2006 the Jaipur Literature Festival, which advertizes itself as the Kumbh Mela [popular pilgrim festival] of Indian and International writing, has attracted both critical praise and derision.¹ Supported by the Sahitya Akademi (the Indian government’s official institute for literary and cultural studies), and with private sponsorships, the festival is held on the resplendent grounds of the Diggi Palace in Jaipur. The festival boasts that over five days in January, it brings together writers and readers from across India and the wider world: from America, Europe, Africa, and from across the breadth of South Asia so that they may, for free, indulge audiences in the appreciation of literary and other arts.² By all reports, the efforts of the festival’s organizers, including William Dalrymple, the British travel writer on India; novelist Namita Gokhale; and the event and entertainment company Teamwork Production, have ensured an ever-burgeoning attendance at this popular literary fete.³

Indeed, the eagerly anticipated festival program each year reads as a veritable Who’s Who of contemporary literature. Such writers as J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri, V. S. Naipaul, Orhan Pamuk, Hanif Kureishi, Jamaica Kincaid, Ahdaf Soueif, Ian McEwan, Hari Kunzru, Aminatta Forna, Vikram Seth, and Wole Soyinka have electrified global attention on the event. The festival has also featured some of the best-known and emerging Anglophone writers from India, such as Anuradha Roy, Kiran Desai, Chetan Bhagat, Pico Iyer, Tishani Doshi, Jeet Thayil, Indra Sinha, and others. Initially criticized for not including enough Indian-language events, the festival has since 2007 staged panels such as Translating Bharat and On Women, Outcastes, Peasants, Rebels, and has launched books such as that of the translated anthology of Tamil feminist poetry, Wild Girls, Wicked Words, in an effort to integrate Dalit, subaltern, and vernacular issues. Dalit writers at Jaipur have included Omprakash Valmiki, Chandra Bhan Prasad, and Kancha Ilaiah, while Mahasweta Devi, well known for her feminist fiction on Bengal’s tribals, most recently delivered the keynote address at the literary mela.⁴ As Rashmi Sadana notes, In terms of the density of writers from different backgrounds in India, for these few days it [the festival] has become a fecund literary space … [where] substantive discussions do occur.⁵

Yet, as most commentators on the festival note, the festival has a flashy, dazzling quality to it that seems to thrive on spectacle. Alongside serious literary conversations are marquee visits by socialites, celebrities, cricket icons, and film stars that alternately fuel buzz, stir controversies, and keep watchers gawking at what sometimes appears to be a theater of the absurd. So, for instance, the event is known as much for its party scenes, banquets, musical interludes, dance performances, and orchestrated celebrity sightings as for its literary meditations. A literary mela in India, it seems, must also feature the exhilaration of a visit by Oprah or Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan, a possible encounter with cricketer Rahul Dravid, soul-making advice doled out by Deepak Chopra, parental counsel given by Amy Chua (of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother fame), and even a spiritual audience with the Dalai Lama. The frivolity of the festival perhaps sparks television personality Barkha Dutt’s fawning question to Oprah about how her first experience of India has been, which in turn yields from Oprah the vacuously obvious reply, More people than I have ever seen in my life.⁶ In tandem during Oprah’s much publicized visit to Jaipur, however, were the fierce protests and resulting controversy that raged about Salman Rushdie’s impending second visit to the festival to discuss his novel Midnight’s Children. What inevitably follows such incongruous juxtapositions of the bizarre and serious are intense disagreements about how the festival coheres, or rather makes incoherent, representations of South Asia on a global stage. Almost uncannily, the festival itself—even as it presents a platform for negotiating representations of the subcontinent—seems to mime a stereotype about South Asia’s fantastic inscrutability.

Some of these stories veer toward the comedic—such as the many gaffes and cultural insensitivities that Oprah’s attitudes toward India reveal. In episodes of her show on India that aired following her foray to Jaipur, Oprah, as Rajyashree Sen mockingly notes, succeeded in showing India as Westerners imagine it, one stereotype at a time.⁷ If Oprah’s inability to grasp Indian eating habits, arranged marriages, or slum life is easily attributable to gauche stereotypes, questions about Jaipur’s staging of literary and popular culture in South Asia turn weighty in other contexts.⁸ The festival seems mired in murky debates over the ethics of how cultural authenticity may be staged, the risks of cultural tourism assumed, or the value of free speech and the foibles of literary and intellectual elitism expressed. William Dalrymple, one of the conference principals, and writer Hartosh Singh Bal, for instance, have been embroiled in an ad hominem war of words, accusing each other of failing to understand what it means to be Indian, or to represent India. Bal accuses Dalrymple of enlivening Raj nostalgia, claiming that Dalrymple has appointed himself the pompous arbiter of literary merit in India.⁹ This, Bal claims, reveals how English mediates our own social hierarchy, concluding that if Jaipur matters as a festival, it is because of the writers from Britain it attracts.¹⁰ For Bal, the festival typifies how to take note of India requires making use of a certain romantic association that stretches back to the Raj.¹¹ Pointing out that "the British contingent, Brown, Black, and White, make up a minority within the minority of the firangi contingent," Dalrymple’s retort to Bal is a caustic defense.¹² In it, Dalrymple evinces his long and intimate ties to India, including his own body of work; defends the festival’s promotion of Dalit, bhasha, and minority Indian literatures; and accuses his detractor of reverse racism. Bal’s ire toward him, Dalrymple writes, is the literary equivalent of pouring shit through an immigrant’s letterbox.¹³

The quarrel between Bal and Dalrymple evidences how quickly trivial concerns that the festival may too easily trade in cultural stereotypes skitter toward truly damming ones. At the heart of Bal’s and Dalrymple’s tussle are the matters of cultural and racial authenticity, past colonial violations and present neocolonial inequities, and ultimately the ethics around how certain representations of South Asia are to be read. If Bal stereotypes Dalrymple and his staging of an Indian spectacle as a colonial hangover, Dalrymple jarringly appropriates for himself a particularly injurious stereotype—that of the ex-colonial immigrant in Britain—abjected through racial violence. In both instances, but particularly the latter, the gap between ground and figure that these stereotypes are supposed to cover is vast. That this dispute invites other disputes—Dalrymple’s claim that he conceived, co-founded and co-directed the festival, for example, is hotly contested by Pramod Kumar, who claims to be one of the originators of the event—speaks to the volatility of the stereotypes it engages and energizes.¹⁴

In a sense, the festival as a showcase of South Asian literary investments in the global arena is inseparable from the politics of what kinds of representations of the subcontinent are seen as permissible within the public sphere. Unsurprisingly, the most fractious disputes at Jaipur have been over the questions of free speech and religious and caste tolerance. In other words, these controversies have provoked passionate disagreements about whether certain stereotypes that emerge from them reflect the reality of India or its more vitriolic symbolic figurations. In 2012, when Oprah’s visit promised to eclipse the festival, what is known as the Rushdie Affair also threatened to derail it. The fatwa and violence that shadowed the publication of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses may seem a thing of the past, but protest over the author’s attendance revealed how it still simmers as a spectacular flashpoint of cultural contestation. Following protests and death threats, it was widely reported that Rushdie was coerced into cancelling his visit, while four authors—Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Ruchir Joshi, and Jeet Thayil—served as proxies, reading from The Satanic Verses. The fact that they faced legal trouble for doing so sparked numerous commentators to reflect, as Deji Olukotun does for PEN America, that the festival itself has become a sort of proving ground for free expression in India, where writers both reflect on human rights questions and directly experience its breach.¹⁵ Whether or not this is true, the festival’s staging of literature from, about, and in South Asia provokes deep contentions about what it means to represent the subcontinent. These skirmishes illuminate how stereotypes about India function as synapses that traffic between real and imaginary ways of how India may be read as part of the global literary and cultural marketplace.¹⁶

The theater of the stereotype aligned with the Jaipur Literature Festival illustrates the symptoms of stereotyping with which this book is concerned. In literary contexts, stereotypes muddle distinctions between real, historical conditions and their surreal aesthetic figurations. Even the staging of the scene of literary conversations, such as that of the festival, necessitates ethical negotiations about how South Asia circulates globally as a sign of a fixed or versatile cultural type. The sign, writes Roland Barthes, is a follower, gregarious; in each sign sleeps that monster: a stereotype.¹⁷ The myriad provocations that have sprung from the Jaipur Literature Festival make the urgency of locating and reading the ethical charge of aesthetic stereotypes all the more pressing. As both gregarious and monstrous signs, stereotypes pose critical questions for how representations of South Asia are generated and fathomed. In a sense, the fact that the festival itself, repeatedly characterized as chaotic, and controversial, has come to stand in for a certain representation of South Asia speaks to the slipperiness of stereotypes.¹⁸ Even when seeming to order a world—the festival as an organized forum for South Asian literature—the festival as stereotype escapes such ordering. The highly charged public arguments—about whether the festival should embrace a conspicuous consumption of literary arts alongside other glitz, whether Anglophone contexts overly dominate native language issues, whether some forms of free speech should be curtailed as hate speech, and the like—reveal instead the vast political and ethical stakes involved in reading the festival itself as a representational window into India.

Beyond this, the Jaipur Literature Festival provides an example for what happens in the world of fiction itself, particularly within global Anglophone fiction, when certain works are self-consciously sampled as exemplary of South Asia.¹⁹ The difficulties of representing South Asia, apart from stereotypes, are what the festival allows us to glimpse. Speaking at the event, Amit Chaudhuri made the observation that, if, as an Indian writer today, you write about say a samosa, you’ll be criticized for selling out to the West or deliberately exoticizing India. The Indian imagination, in its current form, has no room for the samosa in samosaness.²⁰ It is this fluctuation between real and representational South Asia that stereotypes, whether of samosas or something other, track. This book also follows the difficult politics of reading that such representations of South Asia initiate. If one of the problems is that the real thing, place, people, milieu, etc., is obscured by the politics that attach to its representation, then the other is the spectacular mobility of such stereotypes. To put it in another way, stereotypes often slide, as this book will reflect, seamlessly from page to picture and back as they do from literary to popular cultural consciousness and back, thus gaining a kind of widespread cultural currency.

The novelist Amitav Ghosh offers this as his reflection on the uproar over Rushdie’s visit to Jaipur: But the controversy also raises questions about another issue that touches directly upon writing: this is the way in which literature is coming to be embedded within a wider culture of public spectacles and performances.²¹ Ghosh’s point touches upon two very seemingly disparate aspects to the festival that coalesce in the debates over Rushdie and free speech. The first is the manner in which the festival crystallizes all such ethical questions that arise around literary works in the form of social spectacle, or "tamasha, as he calls it. The festival as a cultural spectacle, he argues, displaces issues central to literary representation itself onto other realms. Thus, the interaction between writerly intention and reader reception foregrounded by the tamashastan of the festival’s arena usurp the ethical problem posed by the literary text itself. Ghosh critiques the spectacular stage of the festival as an inadequate and obscuring forum for arbitrating the deep anxieties about how certain groups are perceived and represented, a task he sees as intrinsic to books themselves.²² Rather, he says, books should have lives of their own," and readers should be able to relate to the world of the book unmitigated by the politics of its presence in such book fairs.²³

Although he writes in defense of Rushdie’s right to attend, Ghosh reflects on the larger conditions of the occasion that warrants that books be publicly scrutinized by readers in the presence of authors, who are then held publicly accountable for the worlds they imagine. It is this straight-line correspondence between authors, texts, and readers that Ghosh finds most troubling about how festivals market literary consumption. Ghosh’s argument that books should be regarded as speaking for themselves and stripped of festival-style arbitration is important for a few key reasons. It situates the conflicts that rage in public over group representations as a textual one, always in excess of the mediating influences between readers and the author. Further, it allows us to step away from the overly local contexts of how a particular book is presented in its context, to consider a range of its significations across various cultural terrains. And, lastly, it suggests that the type of anxiety a book generates about what it represents may not always be readable in the context of publicly avowed positions. Rather, the ethical quandaries of a text may in fact engage some deeper dilemma about how group stereotypes are invoked, function, and transform across aesthetic and cultural spectrums.

Indeed, it is interesting to note that the organizers of the Jaipur Literature Festival have themselves become wary of the type into which this event seems increasingly cast. In the aftermath of the festival’s Rushdie Affair, Dalrymple wrote, Increasingly we have seen ourselves, and the festival we run, caricatured beyond all recognition.²⁴ It seems here that Dalrymple is recognizing one force of stereotypical rendering into which the festival has fallen. As caricature, the event imagined as a robust contemplation of literary culture in South Asia seems to have morphed into something static and unrecognizable from its ideal form. The solution that he later proposes to this problem is to elevate the level of critical discourse at the event. To do away with the festival’s stereotype as a superficial and warring cultural tour of exotic India, he reveals a new strategy: I thought I’d sock them with Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha for a year.²⁵ The entry of postcolonial theory on the scene is precisely how the festival staged itself in 2013. Aside from Mahasweta Devi’s keynote, there were proper literary critics of difference in attendance who might situate the event itself as a version apart from its ready stereotype. Ironically, immediately following Spivak’s panel, which was widely praised as well as dismissed, Spivak in an interview relayed her experience of the exercise thus: I have never sat in a panel where no one [from the audience] asked me a single question.²⁶ The failure that Spivak’s comment points to is not about the failure of literary critics such as Spivak and Bhabha to communicate meaningfully about postcolonial literature. Rather, this attempt by the organizers to counterpose proper criticism to popular ones of the festival misses the main problem that haunts it. The variously articulated, often conflicting stereotypical idioms through which South Asia becomes legible in artistic work may be deliberately given to opacity and estrangement. The ethical considerations produced by the alienation effects of stereotypes, in other words, need to be thought beyond what may be hashed out in public conferences even in the presence of revered critics. Hence, the kinds of passionate disagreements that the staging of literary culture in Jaipur has provoked suggest that there are crevasses that cannot be traversed by the artifice of a quick theoretical fix. The festival as stereotype, in other words, conjures phantasms about South Asia whose ghosts cannot easily be laid to rest.

What vision of the global south prevails in our encounters with art—specifically narrative art—that turns on cultural stereotypes? This is the main question that motivates the substance of In Stereotype. As the example of the festival shows, stereotypes of uneven global development circulate freely in global literary texts and contexts alike. They provoke disputes that stem from well-known narratives about civilizational backwardness and progress, about the world divided into dangerous and safe zones. The prevalence of such stereotypes in contemporary literary texts, however, also reflects the vexed position of readers caught in their thickness. They compel consumers of the global novel to confront a set of ethical questions: How does my presence as a reader involve me in these storied images of suffering elsewhere in the world? What attention do these novels call to us as voyeurs into life-worlds mediated by stereotypes? How do representations about the lives of others conjoin phantasmic ideas about cultural otherness with life as it is lived by real people, in real places? Moreover, what kind of an ethical web do portraits of ruptured communities and disavowed lives construct in which we find ourselves so tangled?

For as readers must often admit, repelled as they may be with narrative stereotypes, they are often oddly moved by them. It is why global novels about other worlds continue to endure and allure. The encounters between readers and texts, however, always remain singular. Each act of scrutiny remands viewers as individual, meaning-producing witnesses called on to relate to shifting yet set representations influenced by their own singularly differing subjectivities, their sense of self as affective and social beings, their racial, cultural, and gender identifications. This is to say, the most salient understanding