Narrating "dark" India in Londonstani and the White Tiger: Sustaining identity in the diaspora

Abstract

In Indian Anglophone writing up to about the 1990s, a romantic narrative strand, working in parallel with a metafictional "encyclopaedic" form in other texts of the period, reflects a more hopeful and positive attitude towards Indian society, and an implicit confidence in its potential redemption. Many later works by Indian diasporic writers show a much more negative and critical attitude to India, catalysed by persisting socio-political problems such as corruption and communal violence. This "dark turn" in Indian Anglophone writing is very clearly seen in works such as Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger and Gautam Malkani's Londonstani, which seem to allow little or no possibility for India's social problems to be resolved, and indeed make that irresolvable violence and confusion their particular theme. Yet in a way this "dark" India ironically becomes the means of a distinct cultural focus, a narrative mode of engagement with the homeland that, irrespective of its negative social view, is a means of sustaining cultural identity within the homogenizing and deterritorializing forces of globalization. © The Author(s) 2011.