1“English in culture, like the dollar in economics, serves as the medium through which knowledge may be translated from the local to the global,” observes Jonathan Arac in “Anglo-Globalism?” (Arac 40). The literatures in English emerging from the subcontinent in recent years testify to Arac’s statement in complex ways. They lend some credence to the centre-periphery model of “writing back” where a source literature is rewritten and radicalised by the borrower, and where the (one-sided) transaction demonstrates both the inequality of the historical affiliation and what Franco Moretti calls the persistent “asymmetry in international power” (56). They also, however, disturb this dated model of interconnection: by commanding a new spatial politics of the periphery and new morphologies, these literary interventions put in place new structures of difference that demand commensurate modes of critical reception. In this essay, I wish to look at three novels published to wide acclaim in the last two years, Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger (2008), Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008), and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), to examine the transculturation of the twenty-first-century Indian and Pakistani novel in English. I focus on the phenomenology of the works, on the passions of narrative voice, in particular, through which, I claim, Western literary forms and Standard English are unmade and remade.

2Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker prize-winning novel The White Tiger is strongly evocative of Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or, The Two Nations, which is plotted around the existence of two nations, the rich and the poor. Disraeli contrasts the oligarchy’s acquisitiveness and conspicuous consumption (a result of the dangerous liaison between “Venetian politics, Dutch finance, and French wars” with scenes of abject suffering of the working-class poor (Book 1, Chapter 3, 46). Disraeli, however, had little political sympathy with the two-nations theory held by his Chartist characters, and in his novel the marriage between the working-class girl and the aristocratic hero loses its subversive charge as it is revealed that Sybil is highborn. The novel eventually discredits the “Two Nations” theory by showing the poor as not a united front, but quarrelling factions. Disraeli’s interest in the “condition of the people” ultimately serves a pernicious Tory paternalism, which mandates that the aristocracy and Church look after the interests and moral condition of the degraded multitudes in exchange for trust and obedience. Adiga’s book is a disenchanted narrative of the Indian growth story that plays on the two-nation theory: the novel, however, also charts the rise of the picaro and the parvenu in contemporary India, which disturbs the fixity of class and caste categories and signifies the emergence of a growing middle class. Unlike Disraeli, Adiga explicitly attacks the benighted ruling class, but his representation of the subaltern is not free from paranoid projections about the brutality of the poor and the inevitability of violent proletariat uprisings. Adiga simply fails to make believable the character of an underdog like Balram whose name and date of birth are given by the state and who remains till the end a nameless, stateless actor.

3White Tiger is structured as a series of letters written over a period of seven nights. The author-narrator is Balram Halwai, formerly of the village of Laxmangarh in Bihar, who subsequently arrives at the prosperous suburb of Gurgaon, near Delhi, to work as chauffeur for the younger son and daughter-in-law of a feudal family, and who now lives incognito in cyber city Bangalore. The missives are addressed to Wen Jiabao, the prime minister of the People’s Republic of China, who is scheduled to visit India soon. The mobility narrative that ensues in staggered instalments is a grisly tale of deception, ambition, and blackmail, which reaches its logical limit with the murder of his master for a bag of money (with which Balram would reinvent himself as a New Indian entrepreneur).

4The ostensible reason for writing to the Premier of the People’s Republic of China—and, as Sanjay Subramanyam points out, the framing device is reminiscent of John Barth’s “Petition” from Lost in the Funhouse, addressed to the King of Siam (7)—is Mr Jiabao’s purported wish to meet Indian entrepreneurs “and hear the story of their success from their own lips” (4). India may lack “drinking water, electricity, a sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality,” but it does have an embarrassment of entrepreneurial riches, Balram asserts (4). He sees himself as one of Bangalore’s most successful (though unknown) entrepreneurs, and offers his life story, which would also serve as contrapuntal narrative vis-à-vis the airbrushed official story presented by the Indian government. Balram relentlessly presents two Indias: the shining new malls with their squalid counterparts for service staff, luxurious apartment complexes named Windsor Manor A and Buckingham Towers B with derelict living quarters for servants in the basement, the architectural sublime of industrializing India juxtaposed with slums (where the construction workers live), Johnnie Walker whisky and whisky third class (“English” liquor men and “Indian” liquor men), “Men with big bellies, and men with small bellies” (64), real blonde prostitutes for rich punters and counterfeit blondes for the less privileged (“What do you expect, for seven thousand? The real thing costs forty, fifty,” 235). The narrative conjures a hallucinatory reality for have-nots in country and city alike in a sparse style reminiscent of Munshi Premchand’s Hindi chronicles. Adiga provides a comprehensive aetiology of the postcolonial state’s nervous condition: incurable communal prejudices, the inexorable march of free-market capital, migration of labour from village to cramped industrial centres, extreme inequality between the classes, the chicanery of the so-called leaders of the people, the corruption of the Indian left.

5Balram’s misadventures take him from the world of “Darkness,” the stagnation and ruination of the Indian village and small-town, to the world of “Light,” the metropolitan destinations of hordes of immigrant workers. His master, Mr Ashok, is an American-educated feudal heir who has recently returned to India, and whose father and brother have willed him away from a provincial life in Dhanbad to the bigger game that is cosmopolitan Delhi. At first Ashok seems different from the “old-school master” (112) that is his brother Mukesh or his father, the Stork: Westernized and superficially liberal, he is initially made uneasy by the inequitable distribution of wealth and goods between the classes and widespread corruption of Indian society. He is married to the Christian and Indian-American Pinky, who feels equally thwarted and estranged in the Hindu family carceral and the country. Balram negotiates the indignities of his servile existence with customary deference tempered with customary mischief:

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A time-honoured servants’ tradition. Slapping the master when he’s asleep. Like jumping on pillows when masters are not around. Or urinating into their plants. Or beating or kicking their pet dogs. Innocent servants’ pleasures. (185)

7He largely conforms to his class role, and is dutiful even, till the “story gets much darker” (113). In a fit of drunkenness, the desperately unhappy Pinky Madam takes the wheel and runs over a street urchin, and Balram is forced to sign a statement of culpability. The hit-and-run accident is quickly hushed, but a horrified Pinky walks out of the marriage. Ashok comes unstuck in the face of this development and his behaviour toward Balram reverts to atavistic master-slave exchanges. “The landlord inside him wasn’t dead, after all,” notes Balram wryly as Ashok violently accosts him for aiding his wife’s escape to the airport (182). Balram’s responses lurch confusedly from contempt to pity to rage as Ashok succumbs to a life of drunken debauchery: “Do we loathe our masters behind a façade of love—or do we love them behind a façade of loathing?” (187). As his employers shamelessly pander to politicians to cover up a massive tax fraud, Balram finds himself deranged with fury. In Sybil, Disraeli had highlighted the correlation between the felonious origins of the Venetian oligarchy and the moral disorientation of their subjects. Balram makes a similar point: “once the master of the Honda City becomes corrupted, how can the driver stay innocent?” (197)

8Adiga deftly demonstrates how the increasingly psychotic Balram cathects with abject, occluded others and an objectal world—the large dark fruits in a Cellophane bag, the buffalo in the butcher’s quarter in Old Delhi, the line of defecators in the slum where construction workers lived—in the absence of meaningful human communication between the classes. The relationship between master and slave is one of physical intimacy and cultivated distance. “I swear, I was ready to make a full confession right there … had he said the right word … had he touched my shoulder the right way,” Balram states (257). Ashok’s growing non-regard for Balram precipitates an inevitable violent correction, as prefigured by the cautionary tales in the Murder Weekly. Balram hatches a lethal plot to get his hands on the minister’s ransom, justifying it as an act of avenging, not avarice, and as the cleansing violence of an insurrectionary world:

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And even if you were to steal it, Balram, it wouldn’t be stealing.
How so? I looked at the creature in the mirror.
See—Mr Ashok is giving money to all these politicians in Delhi so that they will excuse him from the tax he has to pay. And who owns that tax, in the end? Who but the ordinary people of this country—you! (244)

10He kills Mr Ashok on a rainy night with an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, crushing his skull and slitting his throat, and disappears to Bangalore with Rs. 700,000 in cash.

11Adiga’s use of the epistolary form is strategic for the transmission of the autobiographical tale of “a Half-Baked Indian” (10), whose access to power/knowledge is fortuitous, discontinuous, and tragically incomplete:

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sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins. (10-11)

13The epistolary novel radicalises the notion of authorship with its constitutive doubleness—doubleness of author (the writer of the letters and the writer of the novel) as well as the doubleness of the reader (the addressee of the letter/reader of the novel). It induces a related ontological uncertainty around the question of temporality. Are we reading the letters as they are written, or in the form in which the intended addressee receives them? Does the fact of the letters’ publication and dissemination in the public sphere imply that the missives were intercepted? Who owns the letter, the sender, receiver, or interceptor? The abstract ideality of the letter, in White Tiger, instead of offering a contrast to the materiality of bodies, heightens our sense of the immateriality of Balram Halwai’s body.

14“Neither you nor I can speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English,” goes the first line of Balram’s first letter to Wen Jiabao (3). Balram is a keen imbiber of the English spoken in the backseat of his car, but he does not speak English—as he assumes would also be the case of the Chinese premier. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam states:

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We are meant to believe—even within the conventions of the realist novel—that
a person who must really function in Maithili or Bhojpuri can express his thoughts seamlessly in a language that he doesn’t speak. (8)

16This logical inconsistency, I would argue, testifies to the larger point Adiga is making about the unslakable global aspirations of local capital (and the insinuation of the global in the local in a post-internet, call-centre universe). As Dipesh Chakrabarty said of Marx’s philosophical category of capital, it is always “planetary (or global) in its historical aspiration and universal in its constitution” (654). Balram Halwai’s narrative medium does not mix Indian languages or appropriate the accreted Indian English that more virtuoso auditors like Vikram Seth or Upamanyu Chatterjee effortlessly use. Adiga purportedly translates to English the thoughts of a man devoid of an English education, but while the cognitive and affective structures of Balram Halwai’s musings may resonate as Indian, the language and idioms are not drawn from North Indian vernaculars. Shoddy colloquialisms like “kissing some god’s arse,” “wasted himself through buggery,” “Time to dip my beak in her,” “half-baked” and “mutt” sound like a mixture of the ephemera the Indian student picks up in his years abroad and an estranged, almost Orientalist, take on Indian slang and patois. “What does Balram sound like,” Sanjay Subramanyam wants to know:

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… whose vocabulary and whose expressions are these? On page after page, one is brought up short by the jangling dissonance of the language and the falsity of the expressions. This is a posh English-educated voice trying to talk dirty, without being able to pull it off. (9)

18More positively, perhaps, the inauthentic translation that is The White Tiger marks the emergence and viability of a universal and nonsynchronic language, and its trajectory across the conflicting imperatives of diverse histories. It is the botched mobility story of an Indian underdog told in the language of the most mobile strata of international capitalism and a world literary system. And while Adiga’s novel marks the emergence of a universal language, the stability of universals is simultaneously undermined through the historical difference that his “translation” struggles to neutralize.

19The White Tiger has the ingredients of a thriller except that the revelation of the murderer—“I slit Mr Ashok’s throat” (42)—comes in the very first chapter of the book, and the narrative does not consequently move inexorably and seductively toward exposure followed by expedient resolution. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize, works better in this respect. The novel begins with what looks eerily like a hostage situation, as Changez, a bearded Pakistani man, detains an American in a restaurant in the Old Anarkali district of Lahore with his life story:

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I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services. (1)

21The narrative that follows is a dramatic monologue in prose. Changez plies his listener with food and drink while teasing out his life story, the tale of a young Muslim boy from a shabby genteel background who was educated at Princeton on scholarship and went on to work at Underwood Samson & Company, a New York firm specializing in pitiless appraisals of ailing companies on the verge of takeovers. Ace student Changez knows by his senior year that he is “a perfect breast, if you will—tan, succulent, seemingly defiant of gravity” (5) and is momentarily euphoric to land the job at the valuation firm. The other Princeton privilege he holds dear to his heart is his growing friendship with Erica, the American princess with a past, and the cultural access this alliance provides.

22The mobility plot and romance plot in Changez’s life trundle onward despite occasional digressions, detours, and misrecognitions, and Changez predictably loves New York (“I was in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker,” 37) till 9/11 erupts on his TV screen and the world political scene. Erica, who has developed a melancholic attachment to her dead lover, cannot withstand the powerful nostalgia that 9/11 invokes. Changez is surprised to feel elated at the thought that “someone has so visibly brought America to her knees” (83). He gradually allows himself to feel the bewilderments, cultural estrangements, and rage of a reacculturated Muslim in post 9/11 New York and an out-of-joint nation. In his role as purveyor of American expansionism he identifies with the Christian boys captured by the Ottoman empire and brainwashed to fight ferociously against their own people: “I was a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war” (173). His willing and untroubled assimilation thus far is rudely interrupted by intractable cultural difference. Erica disappears; Changez chucks the American dream to return to Pakistan a secular nationalist.

23The East/West clash of cultures that leads to Changez’s reinvention in America is prefigured early in the novel. During a summer trip to Greece with fellow Princetonians, the island of Rhodes, fortified by ancient ramparts against the Turks, “much like the army and navy and air force of modern Greece,” gives Changez pause for thought. “How strange it was for me to think I grew up on the other side!” (26). Despite the distributive and redistributive flows of capital, labour, texts and commodities brought about by globalisation, Hamid suggests that the West and the East still strain to find nationalist self-definition in reactive or contestatory modes. This colonial interpretative framework, however, dulls the edge of Hamid’s political critique. Hamid neglects to look more strenuously at the depredations, corruptions, and failures of modernity in the postcolonial state. In his discussion of Pakistan post 9/11, Hamid focalizes on the terrifying brinkmanship between the nuclear neighbours, India and Pakistan, following the December 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament, and especially the role played by America in pressurizing Pakistan (through India). He does not, however, mention two key indigenous developments that rocked Pakistan in 2002: terrorist outrages within the country that threatened to destabilize the transition to democracy following the October parliamentary elections, and also growing anxieties concerning the future of civil-military relations following the transition. Changez may have returned home, but American cultural imperialism remains his mainframe of reference. He pays his class dues to continue to receive the Princeton Alumni Weekly. He writes a single letter each year to Erica on the anniversary of her disappearance, which is always returned unopened.

24An intriguing feature of the narrative voice in The Reluctant Fundamentalist is the absence of what Isobel Armstrong, in her review of Browning’s poetry, calls “the nervous energy of thinking itself, the halts and blocks of the effort” (93). The story of Changez’s radicalisation in the event of a neo-colonial war is punctuated with lovingly detailed accounts of quotidian bourgeois life in peacetime Pakistan: the Punjab Club memberships of the fading aristos, the carefully maintained Toyota Corolla, the Christian bootlegger who delivers booze in a Suzuki pickup, the rolling blackouts and gaudy lights of Lahore by night, the brothers and sons that appear in the signage of filial businesses. The point Hamid is making with subtle irony of course is that Changez is possibly not a fundamentalist at all, and his posturing as such is an indictment of the unequivocal message America’s war on terror sent to the global south: if you are not with us you are against us. It is not made clear what Hamid means by fundamentalism—Changez’s activities, if his words to the American are to be believed, seem to be confined to advocating, on campus, “a disengagement from your country by mine,” training students to see the parallels between war and international finance, and pressing on them “the merits of participating in demonstrations for greater independence in Pakistan’s domestic and international affairs” (203). Can fundamentalism be redeemed as a mode of “focus[ing] on the fundamentals,” as the Underwood motto goes?

25M. H. Abrams identifies an important feature of the dramatic monologue when he points out that the speakers in monologues are generally unconscious of their deepest truths. Changez—another one of literature’s endless talkers, like Balram Halwai—is interchangeably a self-conscious casuist and an unconscious self-deceiver. The dialectic set up in the first paragraph of the novel—“native of this city” and “speaker of your language”— translates, in Changez’s dealings with the stranger, to a menacing game of identification and difference with a symbolic America. The American is clearly in the wrong place at the wrong time: a time of what Bhabha calls “the living perplexity of history” (306), and a fluctuating space, that “zone of occult instability” (Fanon 227) that marks the emergence of a violent national consciousness. The resolution of the novel is brilliantly ambiguous: is Changez, the political gadfly, the Anti-American rabble-rouser, the quarry, a Kurtz waiting for his Marlow, or is he choreographing with manic calm the decapitation of yet another agent of American interests? Changez’s sly reference to the story of the Headless Horseman from The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow obviates both possibilities:

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I must admit, I am sometimes reminded of the sound of those spectral clip-clops when I go for nocturnal walks by myself. How they make my heart pound! But clearly you do not share my pleasure at this thought; indeed you appear decidedly anxious. (194-95)

27Again, is Changez’s painstaking annulment of the idea of America the inevitable consequence of his late patriotism, or was his decision to quit “just the superior opportunism of a well-trained appraiser of ailing companies, who knows which way the wind is blowing,” as James Lasdun puts it (2). The one-sided conversation remains intelligent till the end, in plain Queen’s English, without a trace of waywardness, vernacular eccentricity, or slang, stiffening in rare instances to signal a preternatural defensiveness or deliberate withholding. It ends as the best dramatic monologues do,

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to quote James Kincaid, with a “careful balance of the humorous and awful, the detached and immediate” (236).

29The White Tiger and The Reluctant Fundamentalist are “glocal” novels, to use a term used by David Damrosch with reference to non-governmental groups in the 1990s that sought to “think globally, act locally.” To quote Damrosch,

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In literature, glocalism takes takes two primary forms: writers can treat local matters for a global audience—working outward from their particular location—or they can emphasize a movement from the outside world in, presenting their locality as a microcosm of global exchange. (109)

31Adiga pitches for a global audience—just as Balram Halwai writes to a pan-Asian development narrative—playing native informant, albeit a fallacious one, through the misadventures of a character who is both cultural insider and interloper. Adiga seems to rethink globalisation in the postcolony by making a minority negotiate its power and pitfalls. With Hamid, the trajectory is reversed: the excursiveness of Changez’s journey to America and his affiliative identification with the transnational New Yorker are both undone by the final return to Pakistan and filiative, national structures. Both Balram and Changez are “self-translator[s],” to borrow a term used by Emily Apter to describe Edward Said (277). Both strain to explain, translate, mediate, and present, to a “glocal” audience, the clashing imperatives and competing cultures of local and global worlds.
The most insouciant of the three key works mentioned in this essay is Mohammed Hanif’s first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, and I would like to discuss it briefly by way of closing the argument. Unlike The White Tiger or The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Hanif’s novel is not set in twenty-first century India or Pakistan. The ostensible subject matter is the mysterious death of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, President of Pakistan between 1978 and 1988, aboard “Pak One,” which crashed, killing General Zia, a host of senior army generals, and the American ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel. A Case plays on the polymorphous signification of a “case”: the crates of mangoes that were loaded on the plane (and that may have contained a can of nerve gas, which debilitated the pilots); a case for investigation that counts, among its suspects, a blind woman, a snake, a mango-loving crow, a canister of nerve gas, an army of tapeworms, and the shell of the imposing C-130 Hercules that is, however, rigged, and a powerful symbol of the ponderous body politic in Pakistan eviscerated from within. The narrative obsessively circles the case (and the cases) in the months preceding the crash, dissociating it from the larger politics of the US standoff with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. This is after all the 1980s, when America colluded with General Zia to train and equip the Afghan mujahideen as they fought their Soviet foe.
The novel’s protagonist is Ali Shigri, a junior trainee officer in the Pakistani Air Force. Like Balram Halwai and Changez, he is a survivor, “the one who got away” (3), the hero of the Bildungsroman (or what Priya Joshi calls the “nationsroman”) who exquisitely suffers the depredations of history yet lives to tell the tale. Ali is increasingly convinced that his father, Col. Quli Shigri, was murdered on the orders of General Zia. Shigri hatches a complex plot to avenge his father’s death, implicating in the process comico-pathological military types and the squadron laundryman’s snake. The thickening of the plot in the countdown to the assassination has a parallel narrative that shows General Zia’s paranoid descent into a comic state of disorientation and psychic dereliction in the last months of his life. Through his casestudy of the increasingly befuddled Zia, Hanif satirizes, with implosive comic effect, the pernicious liaison between religion and militarism that haunts Pakistani politics. In a telling moment, the President’s head is lodged between Pakistan’s national flag, and the flag of the Pakistani army, as he probed by the gloved and lubricated finger of a Saudi doctor. He looks at the army flag, and at the famous slogan underneath the crossed swords that the Founder of the Nation had given the country as its birthday present and motto: “Faith. Unity. Discipline.”

Suddenly, the slogan seemed not only banal and meaningless to him but too secular, non-committal, almost heretical…. He felt the doctor’s breath on his arse…. It also dawned on him that when the Founder came up with this slogan, he had civilians in mind, not the armed forces. This slogan, he told himself, had to go. His mind raced, searching words that would reflect the true nature of his soldiers’ mission. Allah had to be there. Jihad, very important. (82-83)

He threw tantrums, he cried, he smashed his head against the black marble wall of the Khana Kaaba, he sprinted around it as if he was in some kind of competitive run, not on a pilgrimage. (155)