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Indo-Anglian fiction: the new Orientalism

Houston, Texas

By aggressively promoting Indian-English writers like Amit Chaudhuri, Pankaj Mishra and Manil Suri, the conglomerate publishing industry is engaging in the commodification of an exoticised Orientalism. The stereotype of Indians promoted by such works is of paralysed, fatalist characters, at sea in a world of hypermodernity. These novels reinforce westerners’ impression of an Indian subcontinent untouched by globalisation, feminism, capitalism and individualism. They serve as armchair tourism, resorting to fetishised symbols of Indian culture that the westerner feels at home in. The antidote to this ‘boutique multiculturalism’ is awareness of the fabric and texture of Indian life today, a living diversity played out in contesting realms of national and individual identity, often at sharp odds with the comforting notion of an unchanging India palatable to the bourgeois western reader.

Key Words: Amit Chaudhuri • boutique multiculturalism • colonial nostalgia • Indo-chic • Manil Suri • Pankaj Mishra • postcolonial literature

Race & Class, Vol. 47, No. 4, 1-25 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0306396806063855


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