What are They Reading: Readership Discrepancy and Literature in India

Abstract

The emergence of the post-Nehruvian independent India saw the rise of Indian writings in English, especially the Diasporic narratives have continued to attempt an authentic picture of India abroad. With the tendency to portray Indianhood through sensationalist, exoticizing lens; these narratives have curiously garnered an international appeal for its self-consciously righteous and culturally self-deprecative textuality; qualities that have been notoriously attributed to the marketable nature of IWE narratives. While significant concerns have been raised about the disparity of the portrayal of India accessible to the Western audiences, against the ground reality of a cultural multiplicity that thrives on its native soil; implications of such fetishizing and othering stances on the reception of a national identity, also requires scrutiny. This article looks at the consequential conflict of Indias, complicating the relationship and the act of reading Indianness in India and abroad; in the context of refamiliarizations of estranged national and cultural identities be it the New Americanized immigrant generations or the Westernized native Indian youth. The paper seeks to problematize the insistence of an overarching Indian culture and the politics of minority erasure that it implicates, analyzing Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger using the method of critical textual analysis, in the light of existing scholarly literature.