Prose of the World

More than a quarter-century after its initial publication, Fredric Jameson’s controversial essay “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” retains something of an unfortunate relevance to Anglophone fiction from India. The central claim in that essay—that all Third World cultures are characterized by a fusion of private and public lives and that this fusion ensures that all narratives (especially the novel) from such cultures are structured on the paradigm of the national allegory—still continues to resonate with an overarching trend of Indian English fiction. Ever since the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the novel many consider to be the seminal national allegory for postindependence India, the genre has continued to prosper and to gather critical and commercial momentum on a global scale.

Jameson’s essay has provoked heated debate on several fronts—not only in the literary contexts where it makes its most obvious intervention but equally notably in the application of Hegelian and Marxist frameworks to understand cultural phenomena. Responses structured around Jameson’s literary archive have been critical of the sweeping nature of his argument, while discussions of his theoretical approach have been more ambivalent. The methodological issue, moreover, has caused considerable ideological unrest between Western and non-Western Marxists. Aijaz Ahmad’s celebrated critique, in “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” however, finds the essay lacking on both empirical and theoretical grounds. As Michael Sprinker sums it up, Ahmad faults the essay on: “(1) the level of political and social theory (the three worlds), (2) the level of empirical cultural description (postmodernism vs. national allegory), (3) the level of cultural politics and ideology.”1

Ahmad refutes the empirical validity of Jameson’s argument through a consideration of archives both in South Asia and the United States. Sprinker deepens Ahmad’s critique through a discussion of American cultural texts, including those produced by minority writers, where politics is far from being “pushed into the recesses of the unconscious,”² as Jameson claims it to be. Ahmad’s criticism of Jameson’s methodology is also acute at the level of political and territorial classification, significantly the stratification of the First, Second, and Third Worlds, which for Ahmad is an inconsistent way of conceiving the world. It is at the methodological level, however, that Jameson’s supporters have concentrated their efforts, even when they have withheld support from the empirical content of his claims. Imre Szeman, for instance, is enthusiastic about Jameson’s use of the Three Worlds theory, which, as he sees it, seeks “to develop a system by which it might be possible to consider these texts within the global economic and political system that produces the third world as the third world.”³ Szeman argues that such a system serves the useful purpose of providing a cultural cartography that is linked to “totality as a central concept in social and political criticism,” upon which Jameson has consistently insisted and for which he has been so often misunderstood.⁴ Nicholas Brown similarly points to Jameson’s flawed general assumptions about literature produced at the periphery of capitalism but reminds us of the essay’s important theoretical insight, namely, its use of the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic to understand world literature. Within this dialectic, “Third World” literature, in the manner of the superior consciousness of the slave, possesses “materialistic consciousness” of the situation that produces it.⁵ The presence of this materialistic consciousness in Third World literatures indicates its political and epistemological superiority to their First World counterparts. The means of deciphering this consciousness is, for Brown, not fundamentally different from “the mode of interpretation as ‘socially symbolic act’ that he recommends for European texts in The Political Unconscious.”⁶

My concerns in this chapter, however, have far less to do with an entry into this old but still vigorous debate than with the peculiar resonance that Jameson’s generic claims have had for the Indian-English novel since Midnight’s Children. As Ahmad has successfully shown, especially through the examples of Urdu literature, it is very clear that there is no significant preoccupation with the paradigm of the national allegory in the indigenous-language literatures of the Indian subcontinent. However, the greater problem with Jameson’s essay—which, it seems to me, none of its interlocutors have indicated so far—is not that Jameson is wrong but that he is right. Here I’m in agreement with him—and a sad agreement it is—over the empirical aspect of his claim inasmuch as it applies to the specific literary archive on which I focus in this chapter, rather than the philosophical structure of his methodology, which is not my subject here. As Ahmad and others have pointed out, the biggest weakness of Jameson’s argument lies in its sweeping nature, in its claim to cover “all third world literature,” a large claim that has nonetheless found occasional support among scholars even in the subcontinental context. For instance, in her multigeneric reading of modern Indian art forms, Geeta Kapur reads the convergence of the private and the public in late colonial and postcolonial aesthetic texts—including the novels of Rabindranath Tagore and the films of Satyajit Ray and Anand Patwardhan—as bearing out the relevance of the Jamesonian claim about the “national allegory being the pre-eminent paradigm of Third World literature.”7 While I have my own differences with Kapur’s position, what I’m concerned with is the peculiar applicability that the Jamesonian argument seems to have when it is confined to a specific discursive field within the vast, multilingual, and multicultural domain of South Asian literatures—that of the Indian-English novel from the 1980s on. Following Rushdie’s celebrated novel, the national allegory has indeed become a privileged narrative paradigm in popular and critical discourse. The fact that Jameson is correct when it comes to this specific segment of Third World literature indicates not, as Jameson suggests, a revelation of the political consciousness of the genre but rather, as I would like to argue, a serious limitation. My empirical agreement with Jameson therefore comes at the expense of a deeper ideological disagreement with his claim. To elaborate this ambiguity, let me turn to post–Midnight’s Children Indian-English fiction to consider it in some detail.

Midnight’s Children was published in 1981. The years following its publication, leading up to the mid-1990s, were perhaps the richest for novels that aspired to the model of national allegory in Anglophone India. (Jameson’s essay, it might be noted in passing, appeared in 1985, in the journal Social Text.) The decade following this period, leading up to the present day, has seen the publication of significant novels deviating from this dominant public-historiographic norm. These include Booker-winning novels by two women, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, both of which engage in a far more immediate and sensual apprehension of private, regional sensibilities, existing in greater independence from the nationally constructed public space that the national allegory allows. In 2008, the Booker again went to another Indian writer, Aravind Adiga, for The White Tiger, a novel that troubles the middle-class national narrative from a very different angle—from the dark underbelly of crime and violence hidden by the postmillennial climate of economic boom that has increasingly come to define the domestic and global image of India in the twenty-first century. These significant novelistic achievements notwithstanding, the shadow of the national allegory still looms large on the wider horizon of Anglophone Indian literature and still dominates critical discussion about it. One must acknowledge, however, that a preoccupation with the ideas and problems of nationhood, especially in its relation with colonialism and its legacies, is not unique to the post-1980s Indian-English novel. Such concerns are reflected in earlier Indian-English fiction, probably most famously in the Gandhian-socialist novels of Mulk Raj Anand or Raja Rao’s 1938 novel Kanthapura. As some critics have suggested, there is a possible link between the position of English as a national language in a country of more than forty major regional languages, on one hand, and English-language fiction’s engagement with pan-Indian issues, on the other. In a comparable situation, Chinua Achebe had claimed that the title of the “national literature” of Nigeria properly could only be claimed by literature written in English, while those in the various regional languages could only be considered “ethnic literatures.”8 It is possible to see the urge to project a “national literature,” working within the English-language literatures of Anglophone Commonwealth nations, leading to an emphasis on national motifs over those relating to regional specificities. However, much of this projection, from both within and without, is a function of the way the chronology of literary history is constructed. Since the modern literatures of most developing nations have, in one way or another, been affected by post-Renaissance European colonialism, this chronology and, accordingly, the literary canon itself get constructed around defining history of that colonialism and are consequently interpreted in “colonial” and “postcolonial” terms.

A large number of novels in the literary canons of developing nations tend to be based upon a certain vision of history. Within the archive of Anglophone Indian national allegories, this vision of history coincides with what Fernand Braudel has identified as the history of the event, understood as both the major marker and determinant of human life. The thrust of narrative is on events that have appeared to be unique, sensational, and disruptive, moving farther and farther away from what Stanley Cavell calls the endlessly repeated conditions of human life. And it is hardly surprising that the canon of events, in this narrative vision, is constructed primarily around the defining moments of colonialism, anticolonial struggle, and liberation, as Amit Chaudhuri argues in his essay “Modernity and the Vernacular”: “The only way India enters history is, evidently, via colonialism.”⁹ Under the predominance of narratives of the national public sphere, what gets left out are the spaces enclosed by not only the ordinary but also the private and the regional sensibility, which are rarely reducible to an allegory of the national public sphere.

However, the separation of a national public sphere from the domain of private or domestic life remains problematic in the Indian context. Modern conceptions of the public sphere in the West significantly derive from the sociological model developed by Jürgen Habermas.10 In Habermas’s formulation, the public sphere is primarily a space for discursive exchange that originates in eighteenth-century Europe as a venue for critical debate on aesthetic matters. Soon, however, the nascent public sphere comes to enable the possibility of crucial debates on the functions of the state, though it remains limited to men of a certain social and economic status. Another influential Western theorist of the private-public divide, Hannah Arendt, looks back to the Greek polis instead of eighteenth-century Europe but also identifies the public sphere as a space where humanistic discourse comes to constitute political praxis.¹¹ For Habermas, the rise of mass culture in the twentieth century essentially pushes the public sphere from the Kantian model of public reason, turning it into a space for passive consumption rather than of rational-critical debate. For Arendt, a comparable erosion of the critical-discursive function of the public sphere happens through the rise of the social, by which capitalism broadens the scope of economic labor to emancipate it from the realm of the household to a new public space.¹² None of these formulations, however, effectively aligns with South Asian society, especially considering local customs and social practices, such as that of arranged marriage, which shapes private and intimate kinships according to collectively decreed criteria such as caste, religion, and the position of planets on individual horoscopes. South Asian historians like Indrani Chatterjee and Sumit Guha have convincingly argued this disjuncture with Western conceptions of the public-private divide.¹³ At the same time, however, the reality of an inner or spiritual domain of national culture as opposed to that of the outer or practical domains of the professions, economy, and statecraft have also been theorized by historians and cultural anthropologists of the Subaltern Studies Collective, notably by Partha Chatterjee.¹⁴ In his study of anticolonial resistance in nineteenth-century India, Chatterjee distinguishes between the inner and the outer domains, into which national culture was split by the narratives constructed by such resistances.¹⁵ Admittedly, the spiritual domain is not exactly the same as, or wholly coincident with, the private self, and the public self is also more than a sum total of “economy and … statecraft … science and technology.”¹⁶ On the other hand, something like a public narrative of spirituality and religion has also been dominant in India. But even so, the parallels between the two models has to be at least partially clear, most notably when Chatterjee identifies the home and the family as crucial sites of the inner domain of national culture.¹⁷ On the other hand, as Chatterjee writes, “the history of nationalism as a political movement tends to focus primarily on its contest with colonial power in the domain of the outside, that is, the material domain of the state.”¹⁸ It is at moments like this that the affinities come to the surface—between the conception of the public-private divide, on one hand, and, on the other, that of the separation of the inner and the outer domain that has been a crucial aspect of anticolonial struggle.

This same emphasis on spheres of culture that coincide with the public and the outer domains has also been the privileged subject of the national allegories. To follow Chatterjee’s arguments, which he bases on an elaborate archival study of nineteenth-century Bengal, the inner domain, in spite of its marginalization in the official histories of the nation, was, in fact, a crucial if indirect site of national culture—in this case, of anticolonial resistance. “The home, I suggest,” writes Chatterjee, “was not a complementary but rather the original site on which the hegemonic project of nationalism was launched.”19 Chatterjee’s claim here is something of an exact reversal of the paradigm of the national allegory. Rather than the story of the private self reflecting the embattled public history of the nation, the private self constitutes a crucial site of anticolonial struggle. The agents of this struggle are at pains to maintain the private sphere’s distinction from the struggles in the outer, public sphere, as indeed the success of the struggle is contingent on the maintenance of this very distinction.

It is not fully clear whether Jameson is theorizing the realities of postcolonial, precolonial, or colonial cultures, but the novelistic national allegories clearly foray into all three directions. Midnight’s Children tells the story of the nascent republic from the moment of independence onward, and I. Alan Sealy’s Trotternama does something similar, whereas Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel and Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass go back at least to colonial times, and Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain looks back even further. But either way, these novels reiterate celebrated public narratives that are recognizable to a national middle class and even to readers in the metropolitan West by dint of the dramatic markers of history, such as the partition of the colonial nation, the moment of independence, communal riots and parliamentary crises in the independent state, and recognizable figures such as Gandhi and Nehru. The inner, private life is present only as an allegorical reflection of the outer, public domain. Such a construction, even if it doesn’t produce “third world writing” as “narratively simplistic or overly moralistic,” as Imre Szeman argues in his defense of Jameson, “it necessarily and directly speaks to and of the overdetermined situation of the struggles for national independence and cultural autonomy in the context of imperialism and its aftermath.”20 With the outer domain of national culture thus weighed down by the primary story of the embattlement with colonialism and the formation of a national identity following decolonization, the novelistic national allegory tends to flatten out the individual nuances and the regional idiosyncrasies of the inner domain for the sake of an essentialized version of the public sphere. As the new nation-state forges out its nascent identity following decolonization—the secular, socialist, democratic republic that India has set out to be—the dominant mode of its self-imagination is most visibly carried out on a national scale, that is, by a pan-Indian middle class that shares a common historical education about colonialism, decolonization, and postcolonial development, an education that dominates the bourgeois consciousness. The most significant narratives about postcolonial identity emergent during the post-1981 period often reflect this imagination. The fate of the fictionalized child born on the very stroke of India’s independence cannot be his own but must instead belong to the nation. Such allegorical conflations implicitly construct a hierarchy of binaries where constructions of the public are more significant than the private, and the latter’s reality, notwithstanding its private idiosyncrasies, is made to fit into certain perceptions of the former.

Sensational events, Nadia Seremetakis argues, “are almost pre-selected as narrated history, and certainly there is an ensemble of cultural, economic and political institutions and technologies devoted to their ongoing recitation.”²¹ By embodying the national-bourgeois version of history and the Nehruvian vision of the secular socialist republic, the thriving subculture of the novelistic national allegory adds to this narrative ensemble. There is, moreover, an alliance between the dramatic events of history foregrounded by the national allegory and a corresponding narrative-technical investment in the fantastic, the fabulist, and the dramatic. The loud and extroverted narrative style of these novels dramatically disrupts realism and corresponds with a preoccupation with the boldest lines of mainstream historiography, which necessarily provides a telescopic vision of the nation. Formal subversiveness, in other words, comes to frame the historiographic conservatism at the heart of the genre. Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel, both in its title and its thematic scope, epitomizes the magnitude of ambition represented by the post–Midnight’s Children Anglophone Indian novel. The epic dimension of The Mahabharata, from which the novel takes its title and narrative framework, is envisioned as the necessary scale of narration, while the more ambivalent term “great” becomes an alibi for the grand, the spectacular, and the supernatural disruption of ordinary reality. The radical leaps through public-historical time become an index of a mythicized Indian consciousness of temporality. A disruptive and experimental formal structure, therefore, curiously enables the transhistorical space within which an easily recognizable version of India takes shape.

Sara Suleri has warned that the perceived irreducibility of “Otherness” as a privileged category in colonial and postcolonial cultural epistemologies too easily reinforces the “exotic,” whose inscription in Orientalist studies such epistemologies had originally set out to displace. “Alterism” thus replicates the “exotic” in such approaches. “As such,” Suleri writes, “contemporary rereadings of colonial alterity too frequently wrest the rhetoric of otherness into a postmodern substitute for the very Orientalism that they seek to dismantle, thereby replicating on an interpretative level the cultural and critical fallacies that such revisionism is designed to critique.²²

I would argue that the various novels that claim the dimension of the national allegory, different as they are from one another, end up catering to such essentializing and “alterizing” theoretical approaches to Indian literature. The disruptive spectacularity of their narrative technique catalyzes such approaches and constructs the genre as an object of colonial alterity. At the same time, this “alterizing” narrative approach forms an ironic, if less readily observable contrast to the mainstream political vision upheld by the genre. The curious marriage of a postmodernist skepticism of realist narration to the supposed “alterity” of Indian discourse and reality, to a great degree, enables the construction of this overarching genre. But the national allegory also receives foundational support from an unlikely ally, the stabilizing vision of a secular-socialist India, which it successfully conceals under its formal subversiveness. In the process, the genre marginalizes several other planes of consciousness that are not only central to the sociohistorical realities of India but also to their literary representations.

The domestic space enclosed by the home and the family, for instance, offers a segment of reality that I think gets overshadowed in the end not only by the dramatic historical content of the national allegories but also by its accompanying generic investment in the grand, the fantastic, and the supernatural. The reality offered by this marginal space is that of the banal and mundane aspects of the domestic everyday, which often disappear because of their very ubiquity. In spite of their supposed interest in the marginal, the quirky, and the idiosyncratic, the major national-history novels, such as those by Rushdie, Tharoor, and Kesavan, are filled with the tremors of the dramatic transformations in its public history. True to the principles of magic realism, in both Midnight’s Children and Looking Through Glass, the quotidian reality of the domestic domain simply forms the backdrop of realism against which the fantastic erupts.23 The disruptive appearance of the fantastic, moreover, reflects the dominance of the grand public-sphere narratives that ultimately shape the contours and texture of private sensibility in such novels. Such is the event, as in Kesavan’s novel, of a physical fall transporting the protagonist through time to a moment of the past that is central to national history—the Quit India movement of 1942.

As recently as in May 2008, in a talk given at Stanford University, Salman Rushdie reiterated one of the convictions that shape the worldview of many of his novels, probably nowhere more importantly than in Midnight’s Children: that the possibilities for a distinct private sphere in the contemporary world are increasingly limited by the ever-expansive influence of the public sphere and its turbulent upheavals. According to Rushdie, the quotidian domestic sphere such as that in Jane Austen’s novels was insulated from dramatic public-historical events such as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Such insulation is no longer possible in the present moment of global history, where the private is increasingly determined by the public. The question as to whether an individual private sensibility today is less or more independent from public-historical events is not my subject here, nor is Rushdie’s reading of the supposed insulation of the domestic domain from macropolitical history in Austen’s fiction, both of which could be subject to more debate than Rushdie’s talk allowed. The important point here is that it is precisely this conviction that has, through the seminal influence of Midnight’s Children, come to define the ethos of the national allegory in Anglophone Indian literature.

However, both the private sphere of consciousness and the regional evocation of reality figure prominently in the vernacular literatures of India, as well as in the discourses of cultural nationalism from the colonial period. Thus, the predominant emphasis placed by the Anglophone novel on the spectacular macropolitics of colonial rule, anticolonial resistance, and the development of the postcolonial nation-state is somewhat curious. There could be any number of reasons behind this shift toward the primacy of a nationally conceptualized historiography, including the coming of age of a certain generation of novelists. Possibly a certain length of time had to pass after 1947—after Indian independence and the trauma of Partition—to make fictional conceptualization of the national self in pan-Indian spaces politically exigent. Moreover, the fact that most of these novelists worked in the English language possibly drew them toward nationalized public spheres as opposed to the quirks of the local and the private. As some have argued, the complex national political situation in the late 1970s, leading to what is considered by many as the end of Nehruvian India, was perhaps occasion enough for its insistent formulation or its questioning in fiction.24 “The publication in 1981 of Midnight’s Children, a Nehruvian epic,” writes Amit Chaudhuri, “coincided, oddly, with the beginning of the end of Nehruvian India.”²⁵ In calling Rushdie’s novel “a Nehruvian epic,” Chaudhuri undermines the subversive potential claimed by the formal techniques of the national allegory. Jon Mee, on the other hand, is more optimistic about the subversive appeal of the genre:

Even a cursory glance at the range of well-publicized novels published during this timeframe reveals the predominance of the national narrative mode and, with it, a preoccupation with the ideas of nationhood as valorized in public historiography. One of the earliest national narratives of this generation, I. Allan Sealy’s Trotternama, was published soon after Rushdie’s novel, and like Midnight’s Children, it was originally conceived with a narrator born on the midnight hour of India’s independence—an idea Sealy decided to drop after reading Midnight’s Children. Even so, in keeping with the paradigm of the national allegory, in Sealy’s novel the fate of the narrator mirrors that of the nation. Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989), probably one of most direct formulations of the genre, retells the Sanskrit epic The Mahabharata in the landscape of colonial and postcolonial India, beginning with the Congress-led anticolonial movements and continuing into political intrigues and rivalries in the independent nation, all on a national scale. Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) uses tropes and devices associated with magical-realist narrative modes and traditions of Indian oral storytelling to narrate another version of this pan-Indian story, this time beginning with the fading glory of the Mughal dynasty and simultaneously the rise of the British East India Company. Chandra’s narrator in this novel, Sanjay, is a figure somewhat similar to Rushdie’s Saleem. Reincarnated after death as a monkey, he tells the entertaining tale in order to stave off Yama, the god of death. Published the same year, Mukul Kesavan’s Looking Through Glass similarly employs magical-realist narrative reversals, and it recounts the final years of the Indian struggle for independence, this time from the perspective of a Muslim family in 1940s Uttar Pradesh. Clearly, apart from the fact that the proliferation of such fictions gestures toward a critical juncture of Indian history and historiography, the influence of Rushdie’s text remains overwhelming. This influence is made clear not only in the thematic concerns but the narrative and stylistic methodologies of these novels. As Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan points out, “to write fiction in English in India today is to write in the shadow of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.”27 It is abundantly clear that this influence ends up operating in a theoretical complicity with Fredric Jameson’s valorization of the Third World national allegory.

The pan-Indian public domain, in most of these novels, overcomes the regional topographies that are often admittedly inscribed in these fictional spaces. Bombay is important in Rushdie’s work, and Sealy’s protagonist comes from a Parsi background; the topos of Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel, however, is pan-Indian to the point of being unrecognizable. By an act of a magical geographic conflation, a country (sometimes, the entire subcontinent) with a billion people and a plethora of major regional languages and cultures are presented in a unified topos that is best recognizable to the metropolitan theorists of the postcolonial novel as well as to the Anglo-American literary marketplace. Meenakshi Mukherjee argues that the anxiety of Indian-English fiction to portray a pan-Indian milieu contrasts with the vernacular literatures’ focus on the local and the concrete. Her argument echoes Achebe’s conferral of the status of Nigerian national literature on only what is written in English but without, it seems to me, the affirmative, indeed, celebratory force of Achebe’s observation. In her essay on Midnight’s Children, Bishnupriya Ghosh sums up Mukherjee’s point: “Writers in English always create a unified imaginative topos out of Indian heterogeneity, while bhasha (literally, “language,” but here implying the vernacular) writers are more tuned to local and regional specificities.”28 Indeed, in their focus on concretely evoked regional specificities, the social-realist as well as the fabulist modes of vernacular narratives indicate a commitment to what Amit Chaudhuri calls “cultures and localities that are both situated in, and disperse the idea of, the nation.”²⁹ That many of these localities are not even within the physical boundaries of India is indicated in the range of examples Chaudhuri provides, which includes the Bengali village Nischindipur of Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay as well as the Africa he had never been to; the London, Sylhet, or Lucknow of Quarratulain Hyder’s Urdu short stories; and the Czechoslovakia of Nirmal Verma’s Hindi fiction. The spatial, demographic, and historiographic practice of the national allegories, on the other hand, is, to a large extent, an imaginative creation of the urban, liberal elite from a pan-Indian middle class; it reflects the homogenizing urge that these novels conceal under their surface disruptiveness. The model of the national allegory therefore creates the “imagined community” par excellence, a trope that finds increasing resonance in a postmodern world where globalization and diaspora are overarching realities for larger and larger numbers of immigrant populations. That the center of the commercial reception and critical recognition of this narrative model is often the diasporic intellectual community is hardly surprising, but the resultant canonicity of the genre does not do justice to the plenitude of alternative imaginations of time and space that have gradually come to be overshadowed under their predominance.

The predominant literary climate in India following the publication and canonization of Midnight’s Children in some significant ways resembles that of South Africa in the late apartheid years, in its preoccupation with the upheavals in the public spheres, especially those of a certain spectacular significance. Just as an urgent concern with a traumatized public sphere has defined the dominant genre of South African protest literature, a valorization of the Nehruvian model of the secular socialist nation has determined the novelistic national allegory in India. While the limitations of fetishizing the spectacle in literary narratives have been pointed out by a number of South African activists, critics, and writers, Njabulo Ndebele’s “Rediscovery of the Ordinary” most clearly lays down the terms of this critique by calling for an engagement with minute, mundane details of “intimate knowledge” as opposed to the “spectacular” events of the public domain. If the uneventfulness of the ordinary has been understood by twentieth-century theorists of the ordinary to enable a perspective from which to better appreciate events, Ndebele has richly demonstrated this understanding within the embattled cultural politics of the global South, where the relation between the ordinary and the event does in fact form the subject of some of the most vital debates.

Within the domain of Anglophone Indian literature, the writer who bears an intriguing affinity to the polemical position once occupied by Ndebele in South African literary culture is Amit Chaudhuri. Chaudhuri has been the most articulate voice in expressing a persistent critique of the ethos of the national allegory that had, at one point, come to be nearly synonymous with Anglophone Indian literature. The clearest enunciation of this critique has been The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, which he has edited, in particular, the essays that form the editorial introduction to the volume.30 In these essays, Chaudhuri points out that notwithstanding the national allegory’s claims to a subversive and experimental narrative form, the genre is driven by an ideological conformity to the Nehruvian vision of modern India. Like Ndebele, therefore, Chaudhuri has been the most significant dissenting voice amid the general narrative valorization of the dramatic events of mainstream history. Intriguingly, like Ndebele, Chaudhuri is a critic who is also a well-known writer of fiction. Like Ndebele’s Fools, moreover, Chaudhuri’s fiction has been an implicit critique of the existing preoccupation with the valorized notions of postcolonial nationhood. Chaudhuri explores the ordinary and the idiosyncratic in a private sensibility, refusing, in the process, its easy alliance with the mainstream public sphere. While Chaudhuri does not directly use Ndebele’s term “the ordinary,” his own novels focus on the same theoretical problematic that the “ordinary” delineates. His fiction illustrates how the revelatory power of the mundane in the everyday life of private individuals troubles the constructions of spectacular nationhood that shape the narrative model of the national allegory.

Thus, like Ndebele, Chaudhuri provides a valuable alternative tradition of contemporary postcolonial writing that deserves far greater attention than it has received so far. The publication of his anthology in 2001 is a pivotal moment in the articulation of this tradition. Chaudhuri makes this clear most strikingly at a talk he gave at Columbia University in the fall of 2002. In that talk, he described his anthology as his best work of fiction so far. The oxymoronic appeal of such a claim overshadows the statement’s indirect hint at an ideological conflict, which indicates why this claim is especially striking. Not only has this conflict affected the disciplinary paradigms of world Anglophone literary studies, but it has also decisively shaped the evolution of English studies on the whole, especially within its institutionalized spaces, which have increasingly been rent apart by the conflicting ideologies of literary theory and creative writing. Among other things, the strain of deconstructive irreverence initiated in the 1970s, more often than not, still keeps theory and criticism at an unfriendly distance from each other. A version of the liberal humanist impetus in literature that had produced poet-critics in the 1930s and 1940s—on both sides of the Atlantic—on the other hand, continues to be a relative rarity, more so within the academy.

It is, however, an odd mixture of this poststructuralist skepticism and a mistrust of this very skepticism that shapes the ways in which the role of writer and critic come together in the career of Chaudhuri, who has, since 1991, published five novels, a collection of short stories, a volume of poetry, the anthology mentioned above, a collection of essays, and a critical study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry, based on his Oxford doctoral thesis. Clearly, it is the very importance of deconstructive criticism in the significantly titled D. H. Lawrence and “Difference” that impels Terry Eagleton to crystallize the conflicted relationship between theory and creative writing in acrid sexual satire. “A male theorist in a roomful of male poets,” Eagleton writes in his review essay on Chaudhuri’s book, “is usually made to feel, spiritually speaking, that he is decked out in spangled tights and a tutu.”31 Chaudhuri, on the other hand, he rightly argues, “finds Derrida’s theories congenial not in spite of being a distinguished fiction writer and poet himself, but because of it.”³²

But a more comprehensive reading of Chaudhuri’s works shows us that Eagleton is only half right and that Chaudhuri can be notably uneasy about deconstructive methodologies as well. In the preface to his book on Lawrence, Chaudhuri writes:

My suspicion of theory came from being the kind of writer I was, and still am to a certain extent; the writer who believes that language can transform reality. As post-structuralist theory questions the independent existence of a “reality” outside signification, and endlessly delays the connection of signifier to signified, sign to meaning, it is easy to see why a writer who believed what I did would be in conflict with it. At the same time, curiously, critical theory liberated my quest to articulate my own “difference” as reader and writer, and the “difference” of my historical relationship with English literature. It enabled me to transfer my own “difference” to that site of unity and wholeness, “Englishness.”³³

In his introduction to The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, Chaudhuri objects to the application of poststructuralist critiques of notions of realism and authenticity in the context of Indian cultural production. Within the discursive space of twentieth-century Western philosophy, poststructuralism critiqued such notions as they were modeled during the European Enlightenment, though some philosophers like Derrida trace such notions back to the origins of Western metaphysics. The radical rupture of reality enacted by the Anglophone Indian novels modeled on the frequently magic-realist, national allegoristic tradition of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Chaudhuri argues, reproduces this poststructuralist skepticism of “realism” and “authenticity” within an Indian context.34 This reproduction of poststructuralist unease, he suggests, should itself be taken with skepticism, as it often does violence to indigenous traditions where notions of “realism,” “authenticity,” and “truth” have not always had the same uneasy position they have held in many Western traditions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Chaudhuri’s concern here reveals a humanistic faith that shapes the depiction of the mundane through a certain investment in realist narration that poststructuralist theory, and postmodernist fiction following it, has severely ruptured. In his introduction to a collection of his essays and reviews put together in 2008, he writes: “My own explorations in tracing a trajectory, an arc of Indian ‘reality’ and the mundane—especially in the face of epic and fantastic narratives that Indian literature has been made synonymous with—attest, hopefully, to the fact that the humanism I speak of is a critical resource, partly because its own true location is now peripheral and ambiguous.”³⁵ Such a humanism, and the realism that embodies it, according to Chaudhuri, “has been a fundamental and unquestioned component of Indian art, from classical dance to the epics of Valmiki and Vyasa, the court poetry of Kalidasa, and the modern lyrics of Tagore,” unlike, what he calls the uneasy centrality of realism in Western culture.³⁶ As controversial as these large claims may be, they deserve critical attention not only in their demonstration of an alternative ethos to the category of the postcolonial national allegory but also with respect to a reading of Chaudhuri’s distinctive oeuvre of fiction, which has been largely marginalized in critical studies of Anglophone Indian literature.

Chaudhuri’s own fiction is less driven by a nationally ambitious political or historical narrative than by the literal evocation of the everyday lives of people in specifically evoked regional settings. More often, in fact, Chaudhuri is less interested in such larger narratives than he is in their odd, local variations, not in the public sphere but within idiosyncratic spaces of the domestic domain. There is a moment in his first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, when during a relaxed morning at home, the uncle of the novel’s ten-year old protagonist, Sandeep, comes across three young boys from his family occupied in a game of role-playing, in which they pretend to be “freedom-fighters.” Suddenly, the uncle is provoked by the fact that Sandeep has chosen to impersonate Mahatma Gandhi. Excitedly, he champions the Bengali nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose over Gandhi, delivering a passionate tirade against Gandhi, which becomes both politically meaningful and circumstantially hilarious: “By a magical suspension of disbelief, he forgot that he was talking to Sandeep and Abhi and Babla; he saw, in front of him, three conservative, pro-Congress intellectuals.”37

A moment such as this has symbolic importance in Chaudhuri’s fiction. It is not so much a trivial moment itself (indeed, its political implications mark it as anything but trivial) as it is a metaphor for the power of the trivial in the face of the grander political narratives of anticolonial struggle. It is, as such, a metafictional moment, in which something as idiosyncratic and private as a children’s game reveals the place of a significant motif in the national anticolonial narrative, namely, the reception of its key figure, Mahatma Gandhi. The incident of the role-playing game, moreover, illustrates the interdependent relationship between everyday life and the configuration of locality. In his passionate articulation of a “local teleology and ethos”—to borrow Arjun Appadurai’s phrase in his essay “The Production of Locality”—Chhotomama (literally, “youngest maternal uncle”) exemplifies a local subject, a crucial concept in the tradition of fiction embodied in Chaudhuri’s work. Local knowledge, Appadurai argues, is inextricably linked to the production of local subjectivities and local neighborhoods, wherein they are recognized and organized, as Chhotomama’s subjectivity here organizes itself through its interpellation into regional political ideologies.

Gandhi, while considered the most significant national leader of modern India and the celebrated champion of nonviolent resistance globally, has often been the subject of intense criticism in India, for a range of reasons, from his role—or the lack of it—in the sensitive issue of partition of India to his championing of certain groups and individuals in the course of the freedom struggle. This is not the place to elaborate on such controversies, but some of the fiercest criticisms of Gandhi have been regional; in Bengal, this has sometimes taken the form of the near-fanatical deification of the Bengali nationalist Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and a subsequent criticism and occasional vilification of Gandhi. Gandhi was known to have favored Nehru over Bose in national politics, which contributed to Nehru’s rise to prominence. Bose eventually formed his own militant movement of freedom struggle, with alliances that remain somewhat controversial. In the rather comical behavior of Sandeep’s uncle, we have a very realistic example of this political regionalism.

The location of a larger political narrative in a site of familial behavior not only resonates with the immediate textures of quotidian life, but it also has a special significance from the perspective of revisionist historiography. Some South Asian historians have recently argued that even revisionist histories have ignored the family even while integrating other peripheral categories and voices. “The history of the family,” Indrani Chatterjee writes in Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia, “has long been the poor relation in the great household of South Asian history, which enthusiastically adopted the study of colonialism and nationalism, and has increasingly made room for peasants, women and the environment.”38 While the family occupies a central place in many of the national allegories with regard to their plot structures, more often than not the private and the familial turn out to be allegorical reflections of national structures and political events and lack significance in their own right. Chaudhuri’s fiction, however, places an almost exclusive emphasis on such familial spaces, through which the tangible texture of locality is woven.

The provincial, for Chaudhuri, is a rich and unique space where the banal is produced in a kind of immediate materiality. In A Strange and Sublime Address, through the young eyes of Sandeep, we see middle-class Calcutta, a city caught between the opposing forces of the metropolitan and the provincial; suffering economic and political stagnation, it is still suffused with a unique cultural flavor. The short novel describes Sandeep’s stay in Calcutta, which he and his parents visit from their home in Bombay to spend a summer with the family of his mother’s relatives. The everyday life of this family is the subject of this novel, but through Sandeep’s eyes, the very banality of this life is rendered magical. The novel opens with an affirmation of the unattractive banality of this ambience and marks Sandeep’s first glimpse of this world: “He saw the lane. Small houses, unlovely and unremarkable, stood face to face with each other.”39 The “unlovely” and “unremarkable” houses are synecdochic of the protagonist’s experience of Calcutta on the whole. In his evocation of the subdued magic of the drearily provincial, Chaudhuri shows a strong aesthetic affiliation with the major regionalists of European modernism, especially Joyce. The “strange and sublime address” in the novel’s title is a trope that foregrounds the porous borders of the provincial, through which it miraculously blends into the universal. It is the address Sandeep finds written on the first pages of his cousin Abhi’s book:

A colonially inflected local literary culture offers, for Chaudhuri, one of the richest spaces for this dialectic of the provincial and the metropolitan. Perhaps the most fully developed illustration of this curious model of what one might call cosmopolitan provincialism is to be found in the figure of the private tutor in the story “Portrait of an Artist,” a story with a noticeably Joycean title. The “mastermoshai,” a title that is roughly translated as the tutor (more literally, the reverend master), is a classic figure of banal Bengali provincialism inflected by a colonially inherited model of cultural cosmopolitanism. He personifies a culture where the banality of the provincial and the excitement of the cosmopolitan exist in a kind of symbiosis without intruding upon each other’s authority. There is a historical logic to this apparent contradiction, to be sought in the nineteenth-century phenomenon of the Bengal Renaissance, a movement of social reform and cultural production unprecedented in the history of the province. It is a movement that ushered a colonial modernity and a culturally hybrid middle-class sensibility, a quotidian version of which we see in mastermoshai. Provincial cosmopolitanism is the defining feature of his social persona as well as his cultural sensibility. On his very first meeting with the autobiographically modeled narrator, who writes poetry, mastermoshai asks, “in an English accent tempered by the modulations of Bengali speech: ‘Are you profoundly influenced by Eliot?’”42 The odd friendship that develops between the sixteen-year-old boy and the middle-aged man grows through the mutual cultivation of a literary imagination informed by the aesthetics of European modernism reshaped in the provincial Bengali sensibility. Thus Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger shape their discussions, which are punctuated by assertions such as “Every writer needs his Pound.” Their relationship, which also sees itself as emulating that of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses, grows around this unique dialectic of the provincial and the cosmopolitan, becoming:

“Metropolis” is something of a paradoxical word to describe such a cultural setting. Part of Calcutta’s “metropolitan” nature, in fact, hinges on its inherent cultural longing for worlds outside its spatial and temporal frontiers, its perpetual dream of the dramatic in the middle of its banal, local reality. Such is the peculiarly resolved synthesis of the banal and the dramatic through which the narrator gets the final glimpse of this world, of his cousin literally on stage, “dressed in silk and costume jewelry as a medieval king,” but who is, in the end, shaped by his awareness that “Calcutta is his universe; like a dewdrop, it holds within it the light and colours of the entire world.”⁴⁴

The dialectic of the cosmopolitan and the provincial also appears in his second novel, Afternoon Raag, which consists of a series of sketches about the life of an Indian graduate student in England moving back and forth between Oxford, where he studies, and Bombay, where his parents live. The ways in which representations of the ordinary and the dramatic, the local and the global, are placed in an almost dialectical relation with each other is heightened not only by the “foreignness” of the novel’s Oxford locale but also through subdued reminders that this particular “foreignness” has a special relevance to the colonial history that shapes the protagonist’s character. It also reminds us that definitions of the “local” are never absolute, just as the way banality, even though it is frequently conceptualized universally, can only be concretely apprehended at a local level. This is how disparate forms coexist and even merge in the Oxford room of another student:

Such a celebration of the duality of the ordinary and the exceptional, the local and the distant, the crucial and the marginal, puts each side in perspective. It critically defines the spirit and ethos of student life—and in a larger sense, the contradictory life-worlds inhabited by intellectuals. What remains understated, however, is the transcultural significance of this duality, wherein “the green, semi-pastoral life in Oxford” is an object of colonial desire for the upper-middle-class Indian student. So are “the exciting imaginary worlds” of “faraway countries,” whose awareness has been historically instilled through the cultural and ideological effects of imperialism, which have radically reoriented the spatial imagination of the colonial subject. While life in Oxford constitutes in the subject’s immediate present, the faraway countries remain elusive, shaping the duality of fulfillment and deferral of desire that in turn molds the movement between the dramatic and a banalized everyday. The dialectical nature of this relationship is evident in the way the public and the private, the ordinary and the grand, the near and the distant, curiously become the most distinct at the very moment they seem to merge into one another, as in the description of the magazine seller in the Bombay neighborhood where the protagonist takes leisurely walks:

In his essay on Chaudhuri, Terry Eagleton identifies Chaudhuri’s involvement with Derridean textualities “as a play of traces, revisions, supplements, erasures, repetitions and the like.”47 The deconstructive strain is marked in Chaudhuri’s fiction through the endless fractured strings of whimsically culled ordinary details, intermittent views of daily rituals, ruptured characterizations and subjectivities, and, most of all, in the endless play of difference that continually places affective imaginations of the banal and the extraordinary in a dialectical relationship with each other. In A Strange and Sublime Address, as the evenings bring the daily power cuts and the city is immersed in darkness for an hour or two, Sandeep’s uncle takes his sons and nephew for a walk along the streets. The stray glimpses into people’s lives, from windows and house porches, seems to Sandeep to contain infinitely interesting stories that were, however, never destined to completion or fullness:

But why did these houses seem to suggest that an infinitely interesting story might be woven around them? And yet the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer, like Sandeep, would be too caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up life, and the life of a city, rather than a good story—till the reader would shout “Come to the point!”—and there would be no point except the girl memorizing the rules of grammar, the old man in the easy-chair fanning himself, the house with the small, empty porch that was crowded, paradoxically, with many memories and possibilities. The “real” story, with its beginning, middle and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist.⁴⁸

Such stories—or rather the promise of them—are the very stuff of Chaudhuri’s fiction. They are, moreover, metafictional in the way they foreground the ethos of his work. Unlike many introspective writers, who delve deeper into the human psyche, for Chaudhuri the deepest wonders of life seem to lie on its very surface, on the quotidian materiality of its daily texture, indeed, in the banality of their aesthetic. Implicit in this vision is a certain impatience with what Michael Taussig calls the “ideational.” This vision moves away from conceptual depths, staying rather on the more immediate plane of the “imageric and sensate.”49 Different from a determined linear or vertical intellectual pursuit, it is, as Taussig describes it, a “flitting and barely conscious peripheral vision perception unleashed with great vigor by modern life,” the vision that has as its ideal archive “the modern everyday.”⁵⁰ The sense of interiority generated in this vision is much too fickle, much too distracted to believe that any one fragment of this fabric contains a sustained significance that is worth a deep pause. This is where the roving eye becomes something of a deconstructive reader who believes that there is no single monolithic text to be read but rather an endless number of fragmentary texts, equally pleasant and subversive. Like the stories Sandeep suspects are contained in the houses he sees, they never quite add up to a comprehensive whole, even though they teasingly promise wholeness.

It is no coincidence that one of the most notable paradigms of South Asian revisionist historiography, the Subaltern Studies Collective, has used poststructuralist, especially deconstructive, reading strategies to retrieve figures and spaces marginalized by both colonial and bourgeois-nationalist models of history writing. As Vinayak Chaturvedi argues in his introduction to an anthology of subaltern historiography, Subaltern Studies has transitioned from a collective producing Marxian histories of colonial India to one practicing poststructuralist readings crossing temporal, regional, and disciplinary boundaries.⁵¹ However, it is in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty that we witness the most intriguing version of the collective’s relation with deconstruction. Deconstructive reading strategies are crucial in Chakrabarty’s identification of a specific kind of disciplinary crisis, or aporia, within the professional discourses of history: “Subaltern pasts thus act as a supplement to the historian’s pasts. They are supplementary in a Derridean sense—they enable history, the discipline to be what it is and yet at the same time show what its limits are.”⁵²

I would suggest that the isolated fragments of the quotidian foregrounded in Chaudhuri’s fiction approximate the effects of such subaltern pasts, not only with respect to the dominant canons of historiography but also with those of novelistic aesthetics, especially in postcolonial Anglophone Indian contexts. The deconstructive aspect, however, remains only a subdued undertow in Chaudhuri’s work. The consequent narrative of delicate “supplementarity” in his work, in fact, echoes the strand of subaltern history theorized by Chakrabarty in an earlier essay, which appears to be something of a theoretical predecessor to the “time-knots” and “subaltern pasts” in Provincializing Europe. The “fragmentary and episodic” model of history he had proposed in his 1995 essay “Radical Histories and Question of Enlightenment Rationalism” seems very much to be the historiographic equivalent of what Chaudhuri achieves in his fictional narration.53 Chakrabarty’s essay, however, is a negotiation of the somewhat contesting worldviews of Marxism and deconstructive philosophies.

Certain Marxists may object to such parallels between models of subaltern history and Chaudhuri’s fiction, which often demonstrate many of the social and intellectual elitisms of European modernism. Nevertheless, I insist on the parallels, encouraged by Chakrabarty’s assertion that subaltern pasts constitute a disciplinary and not an identitarian issue—that is, they are more intimately tied to crises in the discipline of history than to marginal identities. As Chakrabarty puts it, subaltern pasts can very well belong to privileged groups, specifically to theoretically intractable moments and situations in their lives. Chaudhuri’s fiction is a perfect example of this, in its preoccupation with the marginal moments of the everyday in the lives of the middle and the upper-middle class of urban India. It is the banality of these moments that his fiction celebrates so lyrically, as opposed to the fully developed narrative significance in fiction that places more weight on its realist mission.

Naomi Segal argues that banal objects exist in naturalist and symbolist fiction in radically different capacities. In naturalistic fiction, they are strictly functional and referential, thus contributing to the creation of setting or the depiction of characters. They are located, in most cases, in their positions of conventional material utility. Symbolist fiction culls a few objects from everyday life and elevates them into transcendental metaphoric grandeur, ironically heightening their banality by this paradoxical act. The anonymous banality of the quotidian object or practice that is resistant to either modes of meaning making therefore comes into existence only when the two modes clash, “when objects which have no place in the poet’s world intrude and make their claim.”⁵⁴ The transformation of elements of the everyday into the banal is thus a narrative act, one that creates a paradoxical aesthetic value.

A roving eye such as Sandeep’s in A Strange and Sublime Address or the young graduate student’s in Afternoon Raag takes in a profusion of marginal details: fish and chicken bones on discarded dinner plates, swirls of dust on city pavements, the random collection of magazines hung up on jute strings in magazine shops. All of these exemplify “un-poetic” objects that intrude “in the poet’s world,” here represented with a lyricism rarely associated with them. Moreover, none of these details is integrated within the referential order of naturalistic fiction, but neither are they quite elevated into symbolic grandeur. The only meaning that materializes is through this very difference or deferral, whereby the reader always moves on to the next detail, toward a promised wholeness that never materializes. Chaudhuri’s fiction, however, does not enact a drastic break with realism, as magic-realist narratives are likely to do. The idiosyncrasies of his fictional choices are not that of a man physically slipping into the past or a child possessing the powers of radio transmission but of the odd, momentary gaze on an old, cracked table in an English pub or of the careless lines of music sung by a man in his shower. Like the peripheral textual fragments of texts with which deconstruction is preoccupied, such as a footnote, a parenthesis, a punctuation mark, or a casual allusion, such markers of the quotidian remain perpetually supplementary, never adding up to a coherent narrative. The cross-cultural milieus of the fictions, moreover, make it clear that banality is not only a predominantly local construct but is also an important precondition for the evocation of the local.

The awareness that ordinariness—or, for that matter, extraordinariness—is a cultural construct is never far removed from Chaudhuri’s fiction. It is striking how often the conflicting production of such categories becomes a subject itself, not only within the culturally fractured subjectivities of diasporic characters like Sandeep, Jayojit, and the nameless Oxford graduate student but also within the ostensible unity of a given culture, where the identification of the ordinary and the dramatic, the familiar and the unfamiliar, is shown to be a historical act. The imagination of the growing child is a rich ground for the mutual interaction of the fantastic and the familiar. Shobha mami, the aunt in the story “Beyond Translation,” is such a comforting source of familiarity to the children. Her presence frees up their minds to run wild in the realm of fantasy: “My aunt—whom I will call Shobha mami—hovered around as we sat with our books in our hands; her presence brought us comfort while our minds raced with demons, usurped kingdoms, seashores, and collapsing houses.”55 In A Strange and Sublime Address, the description of Sandeep’s uncles daily busy preparation before he rushes off to work hinges on a similar conflict of the banal and the mythical, creating a curious mood of comic urgency:

The immediacy of life asserts itself over the transcendental unreality of death through the familiar banality of the sociophysical space of the home. The assertion of social and physical immediacy can, in Chaudhuri’s world, just as easily banalize death at the very moment that seeks to ritualize its sublimity, as in the Shraddh ceremony, something of a Hindu counterpart to the memorial service. This is what happens to Mr. Mitra, the middle-aged protagonist of the story “Real Time,” in such a ceremony: “He felt bored; and he noticed a few others, too, some of whom he knew, looking out of place. Shraddh ceremonies weren’t right without their mixture of convivial pleasure and grief; and he couldn’t feel anything as complete as grief.”59 Boredom is the ultimate anticathartic emotion; it resists the social and psychological catharsis that the ritual of the Shraddh is ideally meant to achieve. The failure of this catharsis and the banalization of experience that it brings, however, constitute the very reality of the experience of living, which is defined by a longing for this affective catharsis as much as it is marked by the frustration of such a longing.

The delicate dialectic of the banal and the dramatic as constituent of the texture of everyday life becomes particularly vivid in the metafictional sensibilities of Chaudhuri’s autobiographically inflected protagonists, whose engagement with the world effectively reflects on the way his fictional worlds are created in the author’s mind. In The Immortals, the protagonist Nirmalya dreams of the sea. The Arabian Sea, which fringes the city of Bombay and lies adjacent to his family’s residence, in these dreams takes on all-engulfing proportions, entering a cinematic frame that stretches the quotidian into the surreal: “But the balcony had become the front rows of a movie theatre, and the flat itself was like the inside of a cinema; a cinema that was elegant and in business, but strangely empty.”⁶⁰ Yet this surreal world that visits him in the reality-stretching moments of his dream never entirely loses its familiar banality, a sense that stays with him as he wakes up in the morning: “Next morning, he woke up with a sense of the other world he’d visited still upon him, of having gone and returned from an elsewhere that was familiar, banal, and yet, unexpectedly, magnificently on the brink of destruction: he knew no one survived the flood.”⁶¹ Neither the banal nor the magnificent, in Chaudhuri’s flâneur sensibility, is quite complete without the other, and if real life has a dreamlike quality about it, dreams, too, are magically haunted by the banality of the familiar.

Flânerie, however, in these novels is not a mere metaphor for the way the observant sensibility slides through the textures of quotidian life. As it is in texts by Baudelaire, Joyce, Woolf, and Eliot, flânerie is literalized in the way urban neighborhoods are evoked in Chaudhuri’s fiction through the simultaneously attentive and distracted sensibility of its protagonists. Like Joyce’s and Woolf’s urban fictions, walking in the city plays a significant role in Chaudhuri’s work. Sandeep walks through Calcutta during routine blackouts, Nirmalya meanders through Bombay, and there are the endless perambulations of the older protagonists in Afternoon Raag and A New World. In Afternoon Raag, it is the sensibility of the modernist urban flâneur that shapes the protagonist’s sense of the city’s spatiality: “There is no centre in Oxford, only different points of reference, from each of which the conception of the city is altered slightly.”62 For Jayojit in A New World, who comes from Iowa with his young son to visit his parents in Calcutta, the habit of flânerie provides something of a concrete remooring into the city’s environment. Neighborhoods initially appear more alien and bewildering but eventually materialize through a familiar ordinariness:

Flânerie has been read not only as a significant aesthetic experience of urban modernity, as it clearly is to the variously displaced characters in Chaudhuri’s fiction, but also as one that reveals the cartography of power within such a modernity. While cultural anthropologists like Michel de Certeau have provided foundational theorizations of “everyday practices” such as walking, feminist critics like Rachel Bowlby and postcolonial readers like Enda Duffy have located specific modes of power politics within the modernist literary practice of flânerie.64 In Chaudhuri’s fiction, flânerie, perhaps more significantly than any other everyday practice, sets into motion the semiotic play of differences that not only define a deconstructive narrative aesthetic but also mark the fragmented nature of postcolonial subjectivities. It is this empowering play of differences that enables the Indian graduate student to conceive a decentered vision of the city of Oxford, the proverbial center of the intellectual and academic authority of the British Empire. For Jayojit, this play of differences revealed through his aimless walking stakes out both the startlingly unique color of the urban neighborhood and his own dislocation within it.

Chaudhuri’s critical writing also reflects an intense awareness of the political significance of flânerie. He speculates on conditions that make the existence of the flâneur possible in the milieu of postcolonial Calcutta. Chaudhuri’s writing on flânerie and its significance within modernist culture constitutes part of his reading of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Meditations on the Limits of Western Notions of Modernity and History.” It is an interesting place to find Chaudhuri’s thoughts on flânerie because Chakrabarty’s arguments about disciplinary crises of history writing, as I have tried to show above, resonate with the epistemological significance of the quotidian fragment in Chaudhuri’s own work.

“In the Waiting Room of History,” a review essay of Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, Chaudhuri identifies in the figure of the flâneur and the streets of Paris Walter Benjamin’s conceptualization of “an alternative version of modernity and space” opposed to the paradigms of speed and progress set up by Hitler’s autobahns. The flâneur, Chaudhuri argues, is a subversive reader of history, one who “deliberately relocates its meanings, its hierarchies.”65 This reading of the subversive flâneur assumes a pointed significance as Chaudhuri tries to locate the flâneur in colonial cities—Dublin and Calcutta. The possibility of the flâneur’s existence in Calcutta, he argues, is related not only to the internal crises of Western notions of modernity but also to the manner in which such notions were valorized in nineteenth-century Bengal. His identification with one of the most celebrated quotidian activities in modern urban literature clearly resonates with his protagonists’ penchant for bored, lazy flânerie as a way of mooring themselves within local and foreign cityscapes. But more importantly, it reflects, through the languorous, wandering quality of the fictions, the estranging effect of cross-cultural encounters. In a more recent essay on the Indian poet Arun Kolatkar, Chaudhuri invokes Benjamin’s essay “The Return of the Flâneur.” Benjamin’s flâneur, he reminds us, is happy to trade grand historical monuments for “the scent of a single weathered threshold or the touch of a single tile.”⁶⁶ Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children has inaugurated what he calls the “monumental view of Indian history in literature,” celebrating “the great reminiscences, the historical frissons, everything that was so much junk to the flâneur.”⁶⁷ Chaudhuri’s own work, like that of Kolatkar, whom he so admires, points to an alternative tradition of Anglophone Indian writing, that of the flâneur’s fascination with the fragments of dailiness.

Even though certain quotidian objects, habits, and practices continue to be important in Chaudhuri’s fiction—such as that of walking in the city—the general texture and orientation of the quotidian transform themselves in his later work, partly because of shifts in the nature of the worlds they depict. The worldview of his fiction begins to change as it begins to depict the rapidly changing India of the 1990s, when drastic economic restructuring and shifts in political ideologies begin to cause noticeable alterations in people’s values, attitudes, personal habits, and lifestyles. This movement becomes clear from his third novel, Freedom Song, onward. This novel is set in the Calcutta of the 1990s, caught between a decadent Communist government and the incoming forces of globalization. The narrative moves through the day-to-day incidents in the lives of a few families, whose members occupy such diverse roles as members of the local Communist party, organizers of Marxist street theater, and corporate troubleshooters for dying public companies. The novel marks a wistful, even nostalgic moment of the gradual passing away of the older, more organically connected, humanistic world of Chaudhuri’s first two novels, whose lyrical style emanated from some essential quality of the life they portrayed. The new world is defined by globalized capitalism and advanced technology, with the disturbing rise of religious fundamentalism as the backdrop. In his first novel, the tantalizing sense of the everyday was produced by objects such as the maidservant’s broom, “swiping away dust in an arc with its long tail,” and “the tranquil bedsheets on the old beds.” In “Real Time,” a story in his 2002 collection, a call on a cell phone represents the intrusion of the banal, everyday reality of business and officialdom into the mournful sublimity of a memorial service.

Even though the politics of the shifting public sphere seem more urgent in some of his later work, his primary focus continues to be on the ambivalent nature of individual lives: on the fractured aggregations of private whims, desires, and ideals that are always held in unpredictable relationships with larger public ideologies and behavior patterns. What remains crucial in such portrayals is the subtle tension between the concrete, peculiar individuality of private lives and the collectivities they form, communities that are often imagined into existence. Such a coming together of individual, private selves from within the concealing folds of larger collectivities is exemplified in the Indian custom of arranged marriage between two people who, until the marriage proposal, have been strangers to each other. In Freedom Song, Bhaskar is about to have his life knotted to a stranger culled out of such an imagined community.

Chaudhuri is sociologically insightful in choosing a key ritual of Indian society that troubles Western conceptions of the public-private split. Even the most private and intimate of kinships, that of marriage, is organized not on the basis of preexisting personal relationships between individuals. Rather, it is contingent on the collective parameters of such kinships as decreed by society and religion, including the matching of caste and subcaste and the planetary positions on the prospective bride and groom’s horoscopes. The social rite of arranged marriage is not only a very familiar one in the given cultural context but is, in fact, one of the defining customs of this society and its vital kinship structures. Yet it is a custom that comes as alien to many outside cultures, notably to the individualistic West. In his lyrical description of this custom, Chaudhuri retains an ambivalence that enfolds a sense of an outsider’s wonder into the familiarity and the knowledge of an insider. It was not so much the “growing up” of the girl that was “secret” or “random and unpredictable” by itself. Rather, it is the suddenly conjured possibility of her being wedded to Bhaskar that has highlighted the strangeness of the fact that her past has been so utterly alien and anonymous to Bhaskar and his family, in spite of the insignificant physical and communal distance between them. But this sense of surprise and wonder sounds only an undertone in an otherwise unsurprised, detailed description of the entire social processes framing the arranged marriage from the vantage point of someone familiar and knowledgeable about such processes.

“The auto-ethnographic self,” argues James Buzard, “makes omniscience its project, painstakingly representing its cultures in order to be seen to be absent from it: depicting the culture and erasing the acculturated self are the same enterprise.”69 A necessary ambivalence must therefore mark the autoethnographic self, whose literary exponents might include a writer such as Amit Chaudhuri as well as James Joyce, the figure who provided the immediate context for Buzard’s argument. When the authorial consciousness represents a diasporic sensibility—be it the modernist artist in exile or a mobile, cosmopolitan novelist from the globalized present—such a sensibility becomes a natural vehicle of this ethnographic ambivalence. Brought up in Bombay but having spent eighteen of his adult years in England and living in Calcutta since 1999, Chaudhuri inhabits this ambivalence not only in relation to India but also, more specifically, to the Bengali culture and community that he writes about, whether in Bombay, Calcutta, or Oxford. If the “master narrative of ethnography,” imperial in character, never loses “its footing in western rationality” even as it chronicles alien cultures,⁷⁰ the autoethnographic self necessarily troubles this clear schism between subject and archive, ethnographer and community. Inasmuch as Chaudhuri’s fiction possesses traits of autoethnography, it must, as it does, refuse to commit itself fully either to the outsider’s wonder or to the insider’s easy familiarity.

The consequent perspective, here as well as in those of his novels that have diasporic protagonists, is always fractured. This fracture is doubtlessly accentuated by the description of Indian, indeed, regional cultural realities in a colonial language that has become an uneasy but integral postcolonial legacy, as Raja Rao famously articulated in his foreword to his novel Kanthapura.⁷¹ This focus on the familiar through this perspective that is almost but not quite familiar is crucial to the creation of the duality of the ordinary and the extraordinary so essential to Chaudhuri’s fictions. This duality, articulated via culturally fractured subjectivities, indicates the fragmented, partial, and often subversive relationship of postcolonial cultures with European paradigms of modernity, which draws the attention of a historian like Dipesh Chakrabarty as much as it attracts a fiction writer like Amit Chaudhuri. Chaudhuri often creates the sense of an everyday defined in time and place by focusing on such elements of it that are of deepest familiarity within the culture but foreign and out of the ordinary to those outside it. It is a reminder that the quotidian is, more often than not, a deeply local construct. Yet it is this sense of the ordinary and the familiar as constructed within a culture that becomes the privileged producer of knowledge not only to outsiders but also to those half-insiders with fractured subjectivities that represent the culture’s relationship with colonial modernity.