Language Style and Variation in Contemporary Indian English Literary Texts 2022011471, 2022011472, 9781032211152, 9781032329956, 9781003266792

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Language, Style and Variation in Contemporary Indian English Literary Texts

Language, Style and Variation in Contemporary Indian English Literary Texts is a volume which examines the linguistic and stylistic forms of Indian English in new fictional texts to explore the power of language to construct meaning, express identity, and convey ideology. Specifically, this study proposes the elaboration and application of postcolonial stylistics, i.e. an interdisciplinary methodology that uses different disciplines, such as literary linguistics and postcolonial studies as a critical lens to read contemporary Indian authors like Jeet Thayil, Deepa Anappara, Avni Doshi, Tabish Khair, and Megha Majumdar. The linguistic fabric of their fiction is investigated in a series of case studies, observing the stylistic rendition of a wide range of themes and tropes, such as the representation of Otherness, drug discourse, lament, and the senses, which cumulatively portray aspects of the current Indian narrative scenario. The book develops ideas growing out of several disciplines to reach a fuller understanding of cultural phenomena in the postcolonial context, and by extension in the social world. Esterino Adami is an Associate Professor of English language and translation at the University of Turin, Department of Humanities, Italy. His main research areas include critical stylistics, postcolonial writing, and sociolinguistics. He has published articles and book chapters on lexical aspects of Indian English, naming and ideology in the postcolonial Indian world, metaphors for languages, the narrative rendition of specialised discourse (botany, food, the railways), and the semiotics of comics. He has authored Railway Discourse: Linguistic and Stylistic Representations of the Train in the Anglophone World (2018) and co-edited Other Worlds and the Narrative Construction of Otherness (2017, with F. Bellino and A. Mengozzi) and Within and Across: Language and Construction of Shifting Identities in Post-Colonial Contexts (2012, with A. Martelli).

“Esterino Adami’s book offers a fresh and compelling account of what he terms as ‘postcolonial stylistics’, essential for examining the linguistic representation of identity, society, and culture in contemporary Indian Writing in English. It is a well-researched book and will add to the existing scholarship on IWE and postcolonial studies.” Om Prakash Dwivedi, Bennett University, India “At last, a volume that takes equally seriously the linguistic content and literary criticism in recent Indian writing! Adami has taken on the challenge of the new postcolonial stylistics, and combines many different tools of the trade to give us in-depth analyses.” Peter K. W. Tan, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

142 The Theological Dickens Edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier 143 Connecting Literature and Science Jay A. Labinger 144 Migrating Minds Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism Edited by Didier Coste, Christina Kkona and Nicoletta Pireddu 145 Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care Edited by Katsura Sako and Sarah Falcus 146 Cultures of Currencies Literature and the Symbolic Foundation of Money Edited by Joan Ramon Resina 147 The Theory and Practice of Reception Study Reading Race and Gender in Twain, Faulkner, Ellison, and Morrison Philip Goldstein 148 Language, Style and Variation in Contemporary Indian English Literary Texts Esterino Adami 149 Narrative Worlds and the Texture of Time A Social-Semiotic Perspective Rosemary Huisman 150 The Words of Winston Churchill Jonathan Locke Hart For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Interdisciplinary-Perspectives-on-Literature/book-series/RIPL

Language, Style and Variation in Contemporary Indian English Literary Texts Esterino Adami

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Esterino Adami The right of Esterino Adami to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Adami, Esterino, author. Title: Language, style and variation in contemporary Indian English texts / Esterino Adami. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature ; 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022011471 (print) | LCCN 2022011472 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032211152 hardback | ISBN 9781032329956 paperback | ISBN 9781003266792 Subjects: LCSH: Indic fiction (English)—Criticism, Textual. | Indic fiction—21st century—Criticism, Textual. | English language—Style. | Literary style. | Narration (Rhetoric) | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PR9492.6.S78 A33 2023 (print) | LCC PR9492.6.S78 (ebook) | DDC 823/.9209954—dc23/eng/20220518 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011471 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011472 ISBN: 9781032211152 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032329956 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003266792 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003266792 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For my mother

Contents

Acknowledgements 1 Introduction 1.1 Language, Style, and Variation in Indian English Literary Texts 1 1.2 Aims of the Book and Case Studies 4 1.3 For a New Methodological Paradigm: Postcolonial Stylistics 8 1.4 Overview of the Book 11

xi 1

2 Indian English across Texts and Discourses 2.1 English in/and India 17 2.2 Indian English(es) and Linguistic/Stylistic Variation 22 2.3 Literary Texts and Contemporary Indian English Authors 24

17

3 Otherness, Style and Indian English ‘Decadent’ Fiction 3.1 The Language of Otherness in the Postcolonial Indian World 33 3.2 Author, Text, and Context: Jeet Thayil 34 3.3 Otherness and the Construction of Drug Discourse 36 3.4 Of Poets, Saints, and Sinners: Indian English and Postcolonial Heteroglossia 49

33

4 The Voices of ‘Lament’ in Indian English Literature 66 4.1 Language, Lament, and Literature 66 4.2 Author, Text and Context: Deepa Anappara 68 4.3 Constructing Empathy, Irony, and Texture 72 4.4 Author, Text, and Context: Avni Doshi 81 4.5 Remembering, Forgetting: Loss, Memory, and Identity 85

x

Contents 5 Languaging the Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction 5.1 Representing the Senses in Language and Fiction 97 5.2 Author, Text, and Context: Tabish Khair 101 5.3 The Pragmatics of Senses: Embodiment, Perception, and Suspense 104 5.4 Author, Text, and Context: Megha Majumdar 112 5.5 “You Smell Like Smoke”: Language, Sense(s), and Identity 118 6 Conclusions 6.1 New Tools and Theories for Indian English in Fictional Texts 130 6.2 Further Research: Other Genres and Research Extensions 132 Index

97

130

137

Acknowledgements

Many colleagues and friends from different parts of the world have helped me and contributed to the making of this book with valuable comments, suggestions, and references. They are too many to name here, but they know who they are and the way in which I have organised this project, moving between Indian English literature, cognitive stylistics, and narratology, reveals their important intellectual influence. I am also grateful to my family, in particular my niece Alessia, for their constant support and patience, especially in complex and difficult times, and in the hope for a better future.

1

Introduction

1.1 Language, Style, and Variation in Indian English Literary Texts The power of fiction, and texts in general, primarily lies in the power of language to construct meaning, elicit reactions, and circulate messages. Although in a traditional perspective, literature has been studied in relation to broad aspects such as culture, society, and history, I argue that in the complex contemporary age a more insightful approach to literary materials must start from the analysis of language, the real bricks and mortars of the text, which have to be unveiled if one aims to gain a better understanding, as “reading is also an act of digging. A reader is not only someone who stays on the surface of the text, but an active thinker and interpreter” (Khair 2011 in Khair and Doubinsky 2011: 15). Of course, analysing the language of literary texts does not mean that the traditional methods and ideas of literary studies have to be abolished, but rather they can be integrated, or adapted to an interdisciplinary, and richer, vision because a method of analysis that is based on various disciplines is able to grant a better interpretation of the text (Leech and Short 2007: 95–98). However, textuality is central to investigate the effects on the reader, and thus my approach, rather than offering a form of more traditional critical or literary theory, is situated in the tradition of cognitive poetics, also known as stylistics, a discipline that aims to study style, namely how language is used by authors, and which draws on the advances of cognitive sciences as well (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018: 3–11; Jeffries and McIntyre 2010: 1–29; Leech and Short 2007: 9–32; Mason and Giovanelli 2021: 1–19). Language use is at the basis of style and can be viewed as the idiosyncratic choice of an author, and since each text-producer is responsible for their own personal lexical, syntactic, and discursive selections, it is imperative to address the idea of variation, namely how creative writers produce a proliferation of different forms, expressions, and patterns that depart from a standard or monolithic dimension. Such a scenario further complicates its structures when we consider a local or non-native variety of language because, in this case, the linguistic features of the code (e.g. English) employed by the author DOI: 10.4324/9781003266792-1

2 Introduction are inextricably linked to a specific geographical area (e.g. English in India), and this adds layers of complexity to the rhetorical realisations of fictional discourse. These issues make up the starting point for the present study, which intends to explore language, style, and variation in present-day Indian English by considering the characterisation deriving not only from diatopic variation, i.e. change across space, thus the Indian variety of English (Bandyopadhyay 2010; Gargesh 2018; Sailaja 2009; Schilk 2011; Sedlatschek 2009), but also from stylistic rendition, i.e. how Indian authors strategically manipulate English as a literary medium of expression (Adami 2020; Chandran 2018; Muthiah 2012; Tickell 2019). To achieve this aim, this study applies an interdisciplinary methodology to the analysis of a selection of present-day Indian English fictional texts. In particular, I envision a new research paradigm that I label ‘postcolonial stylistics’, that is, a toolkit which merges stylistics (also known as literary linguistics or poetics), literary studies, and postcolonial theory. The term ‘postcolonial’ is sometimes abused, contested, and now perhaps even dated (Ashcroft et al. 2020: 168–173; Loomba 2015: 28–39; Varughese 2012: 1–17), and Ania Loomba (2015: 37) even warns of the limits of the field when it tones down subjectivity and designates “a vague condition of people anywhere and everywhere, and the specificities of locale do not matter”. To overcome such an impasse, Emma Dawson Varughese points out “a need for a shift in terminology” (2012: 9) and even proposes the more inclusive category of World Englishes literature, i.e. the literary production stemming from different Anglophone contexts and traditions, also considering the spread and power of English as a global language. Nonetheless, since my goal is primarily concerned with applied textual analysis and not a theoretical revision, I use the term as a shorthand for a number of loaded aspects concerning history, society, and culture that still deeply affect some geopolitical realities in the world today, such as India. In reality, contemporary Indian English literary writing is evolving from its postcolonial origins and now tackles a range of themes, motifs, and discourses that are both local and global. This novel approach to the study of language, style, and variation is particular promising since it benefits from the amalgamation of a host of tools, theories, and notions, including the frames of stylistics, for instance, cognitive metaphor theory, modality, and pragmatics (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018; Jeffries and McIntyre 2010; Stockwell 2002) against the backdrop of contemporary Indian postcolonial culture (Shoobie 2019; Singh 2013; Tickell 2019). Moreover, I argue that the benefits deriving from the combination of stylistics and postcolonial studies are bidirectional since, in this way, both disciplinary areas positively influence each other. Scrutinising postcolonial texts through stylistic tools guarantees a high degree of rigour, retrievability, and replicability (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018: 10–12; Jeffries and McIntyre 2010: 22–24) that objectively validate the results achieved in such a process, but at the

Introduction  3 same time the focus on postcolonial issues (Nayar 2010; Ramone 2011) leads stylistics to expand its critical horizon and consider non-canonical and non-western narratives from the English-speaking literary world, with the aim of revising and correcting the persistence of orientalising attitudes and stereotypes, even in the humanities. Today Indian English authors enjoy popularity and visibility all over the world, also thanks to the fiction produced by diasporic novelists (Shukla 2003). A vast amount of critical literature on affirmed Indian English authors, especially extremely popular novelists such as Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Amitav Ghosh, is presently available, and keeps growing (Grobin 2018; Tickell 2016, 2019; Wiemann 2017). The same cannot be said of scholarship on emerging, less affirmed, or new writers, in spite of the fact that they too depict current transformations in present-day Indian society and culture, sometimes from apparently marginal, and yet meaningful, angles, which in reality are vantage points for interpreting a dense reality. Hence the use of fictional works by such novelists as case studies for the investigation of the linguistic representation of identity, society, and culture in India today, thus approaching “emerging, post-millennial fiction that in itself is less easily identified by the allegorical motifs of traditional ‘postcolonial’ literary texts” (Varughese 2012: 2). By adopting such a perspective, I reject the claim that fiction is disconnected from actuality because such a domain constitutes a lens through which human societies represent themselves and convey messages, primarily by using language. As Yadav (2010: 194) points out, “any adequate account of fiction will need to recognize not only that fictional discourse is always a mixed discourse, a combination of fictional and nonfictional elements, but also that our reading of fiction engages many of the same protocols and considerations as our reading of nonfiction, including, centrally, the criterion of historical falsifiability”, hence the value of literature as a meaningful repertoire of motifs, expressions, and echoes. It is worth pointing out that linguistic studies of Indian English (e.g. Mehrotra 1998: 24–34; Sailaja 2009: 133–137) also include references to literary production as a wealth of important data mirroring social and cultural aspects. With such a premise, I take a sociological approach to literature that looks at “stories as data” (Varughese 2012: 24–57), namely one that considers language as the texture of narratives and discourses that not only reflect but also construct social reality, with the purpose of gaining a better comprehension of the loaded issues emerging from the case studies under scrutiny (e.g. identity, intolerance, and power). Scholars from a range of disciplines (e.g. Stockwell 2002) have demonstrated that narratives are not only linguistic encodings of experience, but also conceptual and discursive representations of reality, and therefore can be studied within the spectrum of stylistics, whose theories and tools permit us to assess the effects generated by language expressions at large. Naturally,

4 Introduction the analysis of the texts regards their narrative structures, but my idea of ‘language, style, and variation’ has a wider and more inclusive value (Clark 2013; Coupland 2007; Jeffries and McIntyre 2010) and highlights a threefold perspective. First, it is essential to view the central role played by language in voicing identity and cultural discourse, including literary texts. English in India is not ‘simply’ a linguistic code, or a relic of the colonial age, but rather a driving force that synthesises various issues such as prestige, modernity, and opportunities (Bedi 2020; Krishnaswamy and Burde 2004; Krishnaswamy and Krishnaswamy 2006) and that supports much fictional production. Second, the notion of style can be read as a series of semantic and rhetorical choices that characterise the works of present-day Indian English authors. Its expression coincides with the effects generated by the resources that writers use to construct meaning and represent identity. Although it is not easy to pigeonhole the term, given its wide semantic scope, referring, for example, to genre, period, and even non-verbal communication (Wales 2011: 397–401), it is clear that when we deal with style, “we are usually attending to some aesthetic dimension of difference” (Coupland 2007: 1). Third, the notion of variation shows how contemporary, and less known, Indian English writing differs from other Anglophone literary production, and even from other major Indian English authors. In a parallel way, the term also suggests the problem of distinction, or deviation from a standard language (Indian English versus standard British English). Therefore, bearing in mind that scholars such as Bill Ashcroft (2009), Ravinder Gargesh (2018), and Ismail S. Talib (2002) have foregrounded the vitality, tension, and complexity of the language question in the postcolonial world, in the following chapters I will stress the interconnection between language, style, and variation within the framework of postcolonial stylistics. In this respect, the implementation of a stylistic approach is innovative because it has the aim of unveiling not only the mechanisms of Indian English writing at play, but also the effects these generate in readers, as Varughese (2012: 56) argues: “the field of stylistics recognizes that, although scholars within literary studies agree on the existence of textual effects in literature, traditionally, very little has been offered concretely in its recognition and formulation”. Contemporary stylistics is an eclectic discipline that has drawn from linguistics and several other fields too (e.g. philosophy, cognitive science, and narratology) and therefore is able to provide a robust approach to the study of Indian English narrative fiction.

1.2 Aims of the Book and Case Studies This volume ambitiously sits at the interface between linguistic studies and literary studies: the central idea is to propose the concept of postcolonial stylistics, which is grounded on the application of the theories and tools of stylistics, to the study of postcolonial literature, in this case

Introduction  5 a selection of recent Indian English fictional texts, in order to provide new interpretive keys to such a vibrant cultural scenario. In particular, the volume examines the linguistic and stylistic fabric of Indian English in new fictional texts to explore the capacity of language to construct meaning, express identity, and convey ideology. Far from being a ‘mere’ example of diatopic variation, that is, a variety that departs from standard English, Indian English is a fundamental code for educated Indians across a range of domains, from politics to science and the law; but it is also a significant literary language, strategically employed by prolific and innovative authors today (Chandran 2018; Muthiah 2012; Sarangi 2018). Analysing their works requires a number of cutting-edge interpretative tools and discursive frames, within a broad reflection on the social, cultural, and political dimensions of the country (Jeffrey and Harriss 2014; Nair and deSouza 2020) as well as the contribution of postcolonial studies (Ashcroft et al. 2000; Dwivedi 2012). This project thus integrates a theoretical approach and empirical work, and is organised as a series of self-contained chapters based on selected case studies pivoting around an investigation of the stylistic traits of some present-day Indian English fictional texts. Specifically, the study proposes the elaboration and application of postcolonial stylistics as a critical lens through which to read a selection of contemporary Indian authors. The linguistic fabric of their fiction is investigated in a series of chapters based on specific case studies, observing the stylistic rendition of a range of themes and tropes, such as the representation of Otherness, drug discourse, lament, and the senses, which cumulatively portray some aspects of the current Indian narrative scenario. This volume builds on ideas growing out of several disciplines in an attempt to arrive at a fuller understanding of cultural phenomena in the postcolonial Indian context, and by extension in the social world, eschewing an essentialist vision of culture, i.e. deconstructing exotic or orientalised stereotypes of Indianness to embrace a wider concept of cultural plurality and diversity. The paradox of postcolonial India is that, to some extent, it has appropriated and reinvented colonial categories such as Orientalism and Otherness to impose a hegemonic view across a multifarious context, thus becoming ongoing processes in the political agenda (Ramone 2011: 84). The myth of Indian, or rather Hindu, unity as the essence of the country is, in reality, the fruit of ideological campaigns and initiatives of Othering, a term originally coined by Gayatri Spivak “for the process by which imperial discourse creates its ‘others’” (Ashcroft et al. 2000: 156), but which might be adapted to talk about some dynamics of power in the postcolonial world too. Such discourses have not only promoted a single system of values, i.e. those associated with a strict cultural and religious identity, but have also tolerated, if not openly supported, episodes of violence against minorities and peripheral subjects, such as communities of Muslims, Dalits (a general term to define the lowest castes, previously

6 Introduction termed ‘untouchables’), or Adivasis (i.e. the so-called ‘tribals’, or native groups of India) (see Nair and deSouza 2020, respectively 248–249 and 233–235). From a postcolonial perspective, Dwivedi (2012: 6) indeed warns about “the Hindu majoritarianism that continues to manoeuvre the ideologies of postcolonial India – by always positioning the Other as dangerous to its community and the nation”. The authors I examine in this volume often engage with and unpackage some of such discourses in order to look critically at present-day India, with its tensions and contradictions. All languages embody and circulate specific ideologies and worldviews, and Indian English is no exception in both its fictional and non-fictional domains. However, it must be noticed that literary works in English “are a valuable source of sociocultural knowledge not easily recoverable from grammar, dictionaries and textbooks” (Kachru and Smith 2008: 168), and therefore I set out to investigate a range of fictional texts by Indian English authors, some of whom belong to a diasporic context. For a researcher, narrowing down the object of study is always a specific point and the choice of the fictional works to be analysed is influenced by cultural questions of power, representability, and canonicity, i.e. it is undeniable that some literary texts are typically selected for academic activities and studies, but there might be more parameters to follow, for example in terms of the challenges, provocations, and schemas the narratives offer (Mason and Giovanelli 2021: 34–47). The writers and case studies I examine in this study are presented in the following descriptive table. In reading/interpreting the data in Table 1.1, one should always keep in mind that nowadays many Indian English novels are published and distributed in a variety of different editions/formats, often simultaneously. Therefore, in the case of certain Table 1.1 Summary of case studies Author

Title

Year of Text-type publication

Number of pages

Jeet Thayil Jeet Thayil

Narcopolis The Book of Chocolate Saints Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line Burnt Sugar (originally published in India as Girl in White Cotton) The Night of Happiness A Burning

2012 2017

Novel Novel

292 501

2020

Novel

346

2020

Novel

229

2018 2020

Novella Novel

154 293

Deepa Anappara Avni Doshi Tabish Khair Megha Majumdar

Introduction  7 novels, some differences may occur in publishing details (such as place of publication, number of pages, or even the choice of the title, as, for example, for the Doshi novel). The criteria for my selection mainly concern (a) the stylistic features they exhibit, in terms of innovative figurative language, narrative strategies, and linguistic characterisation, and (b) the time of publication (2010–2020), covering, that is, a very recent (and less critiqued) timespan of the scope of Indian English literature. The parameters behind my selection essentially regard innovative stylistic characteristics, which might not necessarily coincide with the stereotypical Indian English canon, although some of these authors have obtained broad public visibility and appreciation: Tabish Khair, for example, is an author who has won frequent awards for his writing (and commitment), whilst both Thayil’s Narcopolis and Doshi’s Burnt Sugar were shortlisted for the Booker Prize (in 2012 and 2020 respectively). Although this selection is subjective, such authors and fictions are prominent as they deal with topical and sensitive issues, such as the theme of the condition of children in slums, the role of marginalised subjects in contemporary India (e.g. hijra, women, and Muslims), and the weight of traumatic events stemming from communalism and intolerance. These authors are important because not only do they manipulate and test the potential of the language, but they also enrich the field of Indian English literature by providing an alternative viewpoint, going beyond the stereotypes and clichés of Indian English fiction. Moreover, there is a general lack of academic bibliography on such writers, since they belong to this very recent period, and this aspect constitutes a stimulating intellectual challenge for my research, as well as providing interesting material on which to assess the applicability of my critical proposal and interdisciplinary method. After outlining the main linguistic and stylistic features of contemporary Indian English writing, I aim to (1) identify some of the most relevant narrative techniques and tropes used by the Indian English authors under scrutiny here and (2) consider how creativity, conceptualisation, and meaning-creation interplay in a prolific way across the postcolonial Indian context. Thus, unlike other academic works which deal with the cultural world of India from either a linguistic (e.g. Bandyopadhyay 2010; Sarangi 2018) or a literary perspective (e.g. King 2012; Morey and Tickell 2005; Shoobie 2019), this volume is supported by the overlapping of various disciplines, spanning linguistic, literary, and postcolonial studies. The justification for this type of methodology is that, in order to comprehend a complex, plural world like the contemporary literary and cultural scenario of India, it is necessary to imagine, and implement, different analytical tools and approaches, exploiting the rigour of stylistic procedures of investigation but keeping in mind the complexity of the Indian postcolonial arena, in which various agencies are at work today.

8 Introduction

1.3 For a New Methodological Paradigm: Postcolonial Stylistics What is postcolonial stylistics? By this label, I refer to a new analytical method informed by the notions and tools of stylistics as well as those of postcolonial studies. Thus, it is an interdisciplinary approach that integrates the study of language mechanics with the theoretical interpretations of the postcolonial world. In this study I intend to apply this methodological approach to India, following the tradition of works such as Patil (1994), Talib (2002), and Ashcroft (2009), which innovatively turn a linguistic and cultural lens on postcolonial literatures. Clearly, as it typically occurs in interdisciplinary and experimental work, the question of terminological definitions is intricate because if, on the one hand, definitions are of course necessary to describe the meaning of a particular notion in order to avoid ambiguity, on the other, we should be aware that different disciplines adopt different taxonomies to outline the same object, hence the need for the researcher to adapt ideas and concepts. Loaded terms such as ‘postcolonial’ and ‘stylistics’ for example can be read from different angles, but my aim is to combine them to fruitfully question the manifestations of present-day Indian English fictional narratives, and how these engage with readers at large. Since “stylistics and cognitive poetics both foreground the importance of considering reading as a practice which does not occur in a vacuum” (Mason and Giovanelli 2021: 20), in my investigations I occasionally cite the response of real readers as they emerge from reviews in order to show how authentic reading is a social activity which is affected by the narrative techniques employed by the writers in question and which reflects the specific sociocultural context or situation (Kachru and Smith 2008: 31–39). Moreover, it is worth observing that both postcolonial studies and stylistics share a sense of commitment towards complex questions regarding identity, ethics, and social responsibility (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018: 325–328; Loomba 2015: 250–265) as their function is to unpack discourses of marginality and precarity, thus offering a real-world application to support individuals and communities. In this way, postcolonial stylistics aligns itself with the critical turn that has affected many disciplines in the humanistic field over the years, from cultural studies to literary criticism and ecocriticism: texts and discourses are seen not as neutral but rather as vehicles to carry a message and a viewpoint, often trying to affect, stimulate, or challenge readers, and the postcolonial Indian English world is no exception in this respect. For Leslie Jeffries (2010: 9), “some ideology may be naturalised to the extent that it becomes ‘common sense’ to members of the community”, but a critical approach to the language employed by authors can expose the mechanisms by which ideology and rhetoric operate and circulate certain values and visions of the world through words, texts, and discourses. In its interdisciplinary

Introduction  9 nature, postcolonial stylistics thus stands out as a particularly suitable method to evaluate the Indian English fictional domain. Whilst the contribution of postcolonial studies informs my methodological background, it is not possible to tackle the complexities of the Indian English scenario without considering the specificities of its sociocultural context, hence the need for multiple analytical tools and critical perspectives. As an illustration, let me briefly dwell on the ideological construction of Otherness that I have mentioned earlier: such an issue can be found in the supporters of Hindutva, i.e. the Sangh Parivar, a term that clusters together nationalist movements and parties such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), or the paramilitary volunteer association Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) (Nair and deSouza 2020). These groups and bodies often try to depict India as a monolithic Hindu reality, and hence they tend to label subjects that do not conform to their idea of the canon as exponents of alterity, and implicitly represent them as a threat to the democracy of the postcolonial state. In other words, they set up an explicit agenda that targets minorities, with a clash between the centre (the hegemonic state) and the periphery (the categories of minorities condemned to invisibility and devoid of a voice). As Loomba (2015: 28) notices, a “country may be both postcolonial (in the sense of being formally independent) and neo-colonial (in the sense of remaining economically and/or culturally dependent) at the same time”. The bitter irony of such a scenario is that it still implies the asymmetrical relations of power of the pre-1947 era, where the old dynamics between colonisers and colonised now take on new guises, with the latter category representing powerless subjects, such as women, Muslims, children, the LGBT community, or Dalit and Adivasi subjects. As the contributions contained in Dwivedi and Rajan (2016) demonstrate, the broad question of human rights has to be at the forefront of a serious discussion of postcolonial India today. For the investigations of the case studies, and since my analysis is chiefly concerned with the language put forward by the Indian English authors under consideration, I use specific stylistic and narratological categories, which are not usually employed by postcolonial or literary critics. Naturally, in the light of such vast academic fields as postcolonial studies and stylistics, it is not possible to fully trace all their many articulations, debates, and questions, and thus I assume that readers are familiar with their main principles. However, for the sake of clarity, some of the most relevant notions will be briefly contextualised in the following chapters, in particular those pertaining to stylistic approaches and tools, thanks to various bibliographical sources (e.g. Bal 2017; Bradford 1997; Gibbons and Whiteley 2018). For instance, in this study I frequently cite the idea of focalisation, which not only indicates a viewpoint, prism, or perspective (Bal 2017: 132–157; Rimmon-Kenan 2002: 73–87), but also includes the character’s “cognitive orientation

10 Introduction (complete or restricted knowledge of the world described) and emotive orientation (‘subjective’ or ‘objective’)” (Wales 2011: 164), thanks to the work of a character-focaliser, whose gaze organises the narrative. Given the eccentric complexity of Thayil’s writing (see Chapter 3), such notions are significant in the analysis. The same chapter also brings in the concept of heteroglossia, originally coined by Mikhail Bakhtin and extensively used in narratology to denote “the internal differentiation or stratification of language” (Wales 2011: 199), which I borrow to tackle the profusion of registers, voices, and styles activated by Jeet Thyail in his writing. It is worth noting that several of the tools I employ for my investigation derive from a cognitive matrix (Stockwell 2002, 2009) as they explore the working of the mind in producing and processing language, such as the principle of embodiment, which recognises the intimate link between mind and body (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018: 9), and its impact on linguistic forms such as the narrative rendition of the senses, lament, and memories, which I explore respectively in the fourth and fifth chapters with regard to authors like Deepa Anappara, Avni Doshi, and Megha Majumdar. Very often in the following chapters, I mention the theme of the body: not only because it assumes a particular value in the postcolonial scenario (Nayar 2010: 118–126), but in particular since its reconceptualisation has affected a large number of disciplines over the last decades (see the contributions in Fraser and Greco 2005). This theoretical shift has suggested for instance a revision of normative practices concerning aspects such as disability, illness, and ethnicity, but it has also pinpointed how the body can also be viewed in relation to language production and processing. Specifically, the idea of embodiment is central for the understanding of cognitive metaphors (Stockwell 2002: 105–119), namely conceptual structures that describe fundamental abstract concepts, underpin our figurative use of language, and function via a mapping, or correspondence, between two conceptual domains, defined as a source and a target.1 My analysis picks up some cognitive metaphors, such as storytelling is a drug with regard to Thayil’s Narcopolis, or bad is down with reference to the character of Jivan in the narrative by Majumdar. Similarly, some aspects of the texts are observed through the lens of pragmatics, the discipline that studies the meaning of utterance generated within context (Black 2006; Patil 1994; Yule 1996), rather than lexical or semantic meaning. The stylistic toolkit naturally comprises a series of tools and notions, for example modality, whose “main contribution to textual meaning is to reflect the producer’s opinion about what s/he is saying or writing” (Jeffries and McIntyre 2010: 77). Pragmatics, on the other hand, turns out to be particularly useful in the study of conversational discourse, for instance with concepts such as ‘face’ (public self-image), politeness (being aware of someone’s face), and the cooperative principle, with its five maxims (ideal rules of etiquette in a communicative interaction) that interlocutors are expected to follow

Introduction  11 (Griffiths 2006: 132–156; Kachru and Smith 2008: 19–28; Yule 1996: 35–46). The infringement of such maxims may create instances of face threatening acts, at character level, but also at author-reader level (Black 2006: 74–79), when the former deals with a controversial, sensitive, or challenging theme such as drugs for Thayil or ageing for Doshi. The linguistic investigation carried out in Chapters 3–5 will be based on these and other references, and will also include a short introduction to the authors and contexts, given that they may be less familiar to the reader. In order to apply empirical procedures, selected passages from the case studies will be subjected to stylistic analysis, moving from intuitive and impressionist observations to a technical and ingrained understanding of linguistic and cultural phenomena through an appropriate descriptive apparatus.

1.4 Overview of the Book After a brief description of the contacts between English and India, the second chapter tackles the notion of Indian English as a recognised variety in the plural domain of World Englishes, focusing on its linguistic and stylistic peculiarities, from borrowing from vernacular languages to non-standard syntax. It then illustrates the capacity of the language to shape some loaded issues such as identity, society, and power through the fictional domain, including works by diasporic (i.e. non-resident) Indian authors (Shukla 2003). In its final sections, the chapter provides a review of the current scholarship of Indian English studies and a background of the contemporary Indian English literary context. The third chapter pivots around the concept of ‘Otherness’, a keyword of much critical terminology in the field of postcolonial studies (Khair 2009; Ramone 2011: 79–101), and many other disciplines too, and examines the fictional production of Jeet Thayil, in particular his novels Narcopolis (2012) and The Book of Chocolate Saints (2017). Specifically, the meaning of Otherness is scrutinised with regard, respectively, to the rhetorical handling of the controversial theme of drugs (and drug discourse), and the Bakhtinian idea of heteroglossia seen as a wealth of different styles, voices and resources forging the idea of postcolonial decadence (Stilling 2018). In Narcopolis, the writer orchestrates his treatment of Otherness in a double perspective, thematic, on the one hand, with the image of an alternative Bombay/Mumbai that revolves around the world of drugs, and linguistic, on the other, with the strategic manipulation of various defamiliarising devices such as the constant deictic shifting of narrators and focalisers. Thayil’s exuberant style also informs the second novel under scrutiny, which takes the form of a heteroglossic discourse to celebrate Otherness and identity in new forms of Indian English writing. The investigation reveals that the narrative’s structure extensively exploits two textual stratagems, namely the presence of lists as cognitive components of meaning-construction and the use of aphorisms

12 Introduction as attention-grabbing devices that foreground controversial issues, challenge the character/reader, and contribute to the overall diegetic development. Thayil’s sense of Otherness, thus, is double inasmuch it is shaped from both a thematic and a stylistic perspective: not only does it pertain to bizarre aspects and motifs (the bohemian world of Bombay drugs, hijras, and mad poets), but it also marks the departure from traditional narrative models thanks to his imaginative elaboration of deviant forms of Indian English (e.g. borrowings from Hindi and Marathi, rhyming wordplay, but also unusual punctuation). Ultimately, the language used by the author points to Otherness as a form of identity and expression. Chapter 4 investigates the power of language to render the idea of lament as the expression of loss and pain into a fictional format that encourages empathy and exorcises grief. The case studies here are represented by Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (2020) and Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar (2020, first published in India as Girl in White Cotton). Applying the tools of postcolonial stylistics, here the examination concerns the way in which the authors orchestrate the narrative point of view, which is responsible for the effects generated in the reader such as empathetic identification or resistance, respectively exemplified by the depiction of the miserable life of slum children in the first case, and the disturbing, or in pragmatic terms face-threatening, image of hostile maternal relation in the second. For Anappara, the bleak story of a group of youngsters that live in a slum close to the city centre of a nameless Indian metropolis and try to solve the mystery of vanishing children provides a filter through which she can observe Indian society, especially in its most problematic aspects, such as the condition of marginalised subjects, children in particular, who have no access to resources and no possibilities. The young protagonists’ perspective is instrumental in voicing a lament about such social issues as precarity, poverty, and injustice, thanks to the penetrating stylistic makeup devised by the author. In a similar vein, the echo of a lament runs through Doshi’s novel, in which the protagonist Antara reconstructs her difficult past and her unhappy relationship with her ageing mother, Tara. In reality, the act of unearthing memory concerns both women and touches on sensitive aspects, and it also explores the way in which experience, including trauma and suffering, can be rendered linguistically and textually. Metaphors and images about remembering and forgetting abound in this story, and are often evoked via an embodied conceptualisation, for example with the metaphorical reconfiguration stemming from conceptual domains such as spatiality (containment in particular), such as when the protagonist figuratively imagines her mother “as a house I’ve moved out of, containing nothing that is familiar” (Doshi 2020: 136). The cognitive poetics approach adopted here contributes to a better understanding of Doshi’s postcolonial writing in acknowledging the complexities of the mental processes involved in the unfolding of the narrative.

Introduction  13 The fifth chapter too is grounded on a cognitive linguistic approach and analyses the fictional representation of sense(s), focusing on the way in which language mirrors the intertwining between the mind and the body. Here I propose a reading of Tabish Khair’s novella Night of Happiness (2018) and Megha Majumdar’s A Burning (2020) and argue how in these two texts the linguistic rendition of the senses (such as the gustatory, olfactory, and auditory) function at pragmatic, metaphorical, and cultural levels with the aim of producing emotional involvement and generating challenging questions in the reader. Some of the dialogues that take place between Anil Mehrotra and his employee Ahmed, in Khair’s novella, constitute an absurd interaction because they lack linguistic logical sense and so they flout the maxims governing the cooperative principle of verbal communication (Yule 1996: 35–46), but they also suggest a subtext of physiological sense perception (especially gustatory) seen as a device to portray the devastating consequences of intolerance, and eventually trauma. For the protagonist, this type of conversation generates an intense “sense of icy horror” (Khair 2018: 35), which is actually the product of politeness strategies adopted by the interlocutors in the construction of speech acts. The reference to the senses also characterises the representation of marginal identities such as subjects from the Muslim community or the world of hijras. Intertwining and overlapping the viewpoint of three characters, Majumdar interrogates the social and cultural tensions of contemporary India, the power of the media to magnify reality, and the imposition of hegemonic forces to neutralise diversity. The stylistic resources that the writer uses are concerned with the sensual domain too, as they describe and problematise bodies, movements, and details, for instance suggesting prison metaphors to talk about actual carceral conditions, but also to illustrate the body as a site of restrictions, in the case of hijra subjects. The analysis of the text also teases out how the representation of diversity across Indian society also takes the form of diatopically marked Indian English pidgin, for example with the character of Lovely, the hijra who aspires to become a Bollywood artist in spite of her poor education and liminal identity. The closing chapter considers the characteristics of Indian English as a literary language within a wider discussion of the role of English in the Indian context. The results of the textual investigations presented in the previous parts are used to support the usefulness, validity, and strength of postcolonial stylistics as a framework to approach and study literary texts from the postcolonial world. The hope is to stimulate and encourage fresh research and the application of interdisciplinary methods to other writers, but also genres and themes, such as romance, graphic novels, or digital literature (Nayar 2010; Tickell 2019; Varughese 2013), bearing in mind that it is possible to extend this analytical toolkit to the

14 Introduction scrutiny of non-fictional materials too since language, style, and variation can be studied in any type of text.

Note 1 Cognitive (or conceptual) metaphors are marked by the use of small capital letters, and the same convention applies to conceptual domains as well.

References Adami, Esterino. 2020. “More than Language and Literature: Postcolonial Connections and Linguistic Paradigms in Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s Indian English Fiction”. Le Simplegadi, 18.20: 44–54. Ashcroft, Bill. 2009. Caliban’s Voice. The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures. Abingdon: Routledge. Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen. 2000. Post-Colonial Studies. The Key Concepts. London: Routledge. Bal, Mieke. 2017. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bandyopadhyay, Sumana. 2010. Indianisation of English. Analysis of Linguistic Features in Selected Post-1990 Indian English Fiction. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company. Bedi, Jaskiran. 2020. English Language in India. A Dichotomy between Economic Growth and Inclusive Growth. London and New York: Routledge. Black, Elizabeth. 2006. Pragmatic Stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bradford, Richard. 1997. Stylistics. London: Routledge. Chandran, K. Narayana. 2018. “To the Indian Manner Born: How English Tells its Stories”. Hermēneus. Revista de traducción e interpretación, 20: 87–104. Clark, Urszula. 2013. Language and Identity in Englishes. Abingdon: Routledge. Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style. Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doshi, Avni. 2020. Burnt Sugar. London: Hamish Hamilton. Dwivedi, Om Prakash, ed. 2012. The Other India: Narratives of Terror, Communalism and Violence. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Dwivedi, Om Prakash, and Rajan, V. J. Julien, eds. 2016. Human Rights in Postcolonial India. London: Routledge. Fraser, Mariam, and Greco, Monica, eds. 2005. The Body. A Reader. London: Routledge. Gargesh, Ravinder. 2018. “Bi - / Multilingual Creativity in Indian English”. World Englishes, 38: 464–471. Gibbons, Alison, and Whiteley, Sara. 2018. Contemporary Stylistics. Language, Cognition, Interpretation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Griffiths, Patrick. 2006. An Introduction to English Semantics and Pragmatics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Grobin, Tina. 2018. “The Development of Indian English Post-colonial Women’s Prose”. Acta Neophilologica, 44.1–2: 93–101.

Introduction 15 Jeffrey, Craigg, and Harriss, John. 2014. Keywords for Modern India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jeffries, Leslie. 2010. Critical Stylistics. The Power of English. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffries, Leslie, and McIntyre, Dann. 2010. Stylistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kachru, Yamuna, and Smith, Larry E. 2008. Cultures, Contexts and World Englishes. New York: Routledge. Khair, Tabish. 2009. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness. Ghosts from Elsewhere. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Khair, Tabish. 2018. Night of Happiness. New Delhi: Picador India. Khair, Tabish, and Doubinsky, Sébastien. 2011. Reading Literature Today. Two Complementary Essays and a Conversation. New Delhi: Sage. King, Bruce. 2012. “Varieties of Indian literature”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48.4: 443–448. Krishnaswamy, Natesan, and Burde, Archana S. 2004. The Politics of Indians’ English. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Krishnaswamy, Natesan, and Krishnaswamy, Lalitha 2006. The Story of English in India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press India. Leech, Geoffrey, and Short, Mick. 2007. Style in Fiction. A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. Harlow: Pearson. Loomba, Ania. 2015. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. Abindon, Oxon: Routledge. Majumdar, Megha. 2020. A Burning. London: Scribner. Mason, Jessica, and Giovanelli, Marcello. 2021. Studying Fiction. A Guide for Teachers and Researchers. London: Routledge. Mehrotra, Ram Jama. 1998. Indian English. Texts and Interpretation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Morey, Peter, and Tickell, Alex, eds. 2005. Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Muthiah, Kalaivahni. 2012. “Performing Bombay and Displaying Stances. Stylized Indian English in Fiction”. English World-Wide, 33.3: 264.291. Nair, Rukmini Bhaya, and deSouza, Peter Ronald, eds. 2020. Keywords for India. A Conceptual Lexicon for the Twenty-first Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Nayar, Pramod K. 2010. Postcolonialism. A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum. Nihalani, Paroo, Tongue, R.K. and Hosali, Priya. 2000. Indian and British English. A Handbook of Usage and Pronunciation. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Patil, Z.N. 1994. Style in Indian English Fiction. A Study in Politeness Strategies. New Delhi: Prestige. Ramone, Jenni. 2011. Postcolonial Theories. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002. Narrative Fiction. London: Routledge. Sailaja, Pingali. 2009. Indian English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sarangi, Jaydeep. 2018. Indian English Novels. Texts, Contexts, Language. New Delhi: Authorspess. Schilk, Marco. 2011. Structural Nativization in Indian English Lexicogrammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

16 Introduction Sedlatschek, Andreas. 2009. Contemporary Indian English. Variation and Change. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Shoobie, Mostafa Azizpour. 2019. Cosmopolitanism in the Indian English Novel. New York: Peter Lang. Shukla, Sandhya. 2003. India Abroad. Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Singh, Prabhat K., ed. 2013. The Indian English Novel of the New Millennium. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Stilling, Robert. 2018. Beginning at the End. Decadence, Modernism and Postcolonialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics. London: Routledge. Stockwell, Peter. 2009. Texture. A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Talib, Ismail S. 2002. The Language of Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Tickell, Alex. 2016. “‘An Idea Whose Time Has Come’: Indian Fiction in English After 1991”. In Tickell A., ed., South Asian Literatures. Contemporary Transformations. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 37–58. Tickell, Alex, ed. 2019. The Novel in South and South East Asia since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Varughese, E. Dawson. 2012. Beyond the Postcolonial World Englishes Literature. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Varughese, E. Dawson. 2013. Reading New India. Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English. Bloomsbury: London. Wales, Katie. 2011. Dictionary of Stylistics. Abingdon: Routledge. Wiemann, Dirk. 2017. “Indian Writing in English and the Discrepant Zones of World Literature”. Anglia, 135.1: 122–139. Yadav, Alok. 2010. “Literature, Fictiveness and Postcolonial Criticism”. Novel. A Forum on Fiction, 10.1: 189–196. Yule, George. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2

Indian English across Texts and Discourses

2.1 English in/and India I started the previous chapter by underling the intimate connection between language and literature, and the need to revise current approaches to exploring narrative fiction, especially in the light of new theories and tools provided by cognitive stylistics. But the investigation of Indian English literary discourse implies, first of all, a reflection on the productive, multifaceted, and dense bond between a code (English) and a country (India, although before 1947 the colonial territory included other parts of the Indian subcontinent, such as the territories that are now officially Pakistan and Sri Lanka), which developed through time, from the seventeenth century onwards. India, in fact, is the third-largest publisher of English-language books in the world, after the UK and the USA, and this is an example of the special relationship that the country has with English. Naturally, the publishing industry regards not only the fictional domains, but many others as well, such as the law, mass media, education, and science and technology, hence the large number of publications and texts. To a certain extent, it could be argued that this type of link applies in varying degrees to the entire Anglophone world (Schneider 2007), which was reshaped by the colonial experience: however, in the case of India, such a relationship is even more salient for a number of historical, cultural, and social factors, which in turn generate various implications about the positive/negative perception of the language, seen either as an external intruder or an internal tool of emancipation (Adami 2021). In this vein, Sridhar (2020: 243) does not hesitate to affirm that “the story of English in India is, in an important sense, the story of modern India”. In this chapter, after providing a brief description of the contacts between English and India, I look at the idea of Indian English as a recognised non-native variety in the plural domain of World Englishes, focusing on its linguistic and stylistic peculiarities, such as borrowing from vernacular languages (in the Indian context defined with the Sanskritderived Hindi word bhasha, which means ‘language’ (Nair and deSouza 2020: 303–305)) and non-standard syntax, and I also illustrate how the DOI: 10.4324/9781003266792-2

18  Indian English across Texts and Discourses potential of this variety is aptly exploited and reinvented by new Indian authors in the fictional domain, which by now constitutes an important global literary market. The very first contacts between English and India date back to 1600, when the East India Company was granted a Royal Charter for the creation of trade centres: merchants were then followed by missionaries, whose schools and educational projects started giving visibility to English and secular knowledge. English was not the only foreign language to penetrate the subcontinent, given the expansion of Portuguese, Dutch, and French trading settlements (Krishnaswamy and Burde 2004: 81–87; Krishnaswamy and Krishnaswamy 2006: 5–13). Scholars agree that the turning point for the spread and reinforcement of English in India coincides with the dispute opposing the Anglicists and the Orientalists, namely those who either supported English as a language of progress and development, or were in favour of the classical oriental languages such as Sanskrit and Arabic (Krishnaswamy and Krishnaswamy 2006: 14–16). The debate climaxed with the so-called Macaulay Minute (1835), named after Thomas Babington Macaulay, the head of the committee of public instructions who totally endorsed the primacy of English over the other languages, thus reshaping the sociolinguistic scenario of India and determining the current situation. The Minute indeed imposed the implementation of English education and also identified English as the language of administration (1837) as well as a requirement for sitting the Indian Civil Service Examination (1853), which was instrumental for the development of the colonial apparatus. However, such an operation had political implications too, for example with the birth of the Indian National Congress in 1885 since “Indians had, for the first time, a uniform system of education, one that was similar to that of their rulers and exposed them, ironically, to values of liberal democracy” (Sridhar 2020: 249). The presence of English across the territory became even more firmly rooted after the 1857 first war of Independence (previously known as the Sepoy Munity), and the following decades with a constant series of contacts between Britain and India, which was metaphorically viewed as the Jewel in the Crown. As Mukherjee (2010: 171) notes, “the late nineteenth century marks the beginning of the emergence of ‘educated’ Indian English, i.e. a standardizing form of Indian English”, in other words the period triggered a process of nativisation by which exonormative references were gradually replaced by virtue of endonormative practices that transformed the language at different levels (phonological, morphological, lexical, and discursive). Even the achievement of independence in 1947 did not solve the language (and education) question in the new country, which still centred around the position of Sanskrit, Hindi, Hindustani, and English, since “the serious opposition from the south and Bengal to either Hindi or Hindustani led to a situation in which no language was chosen to be the national language of the country” (Sailaja 2009: 111).

Indian English across Texts and Discourses  19 As a result, the Constitution, which was written in English and proclaimed in 1950, defined Hindi as the national language, while the official language status of English was to expire after 1965. However, subsequent amendments made the two languages co-official, giving English the atypical position of official Associate Language (EAL). In reality, to understand the real role and function of English in the Indian context, it is fundamental to observe the vitality and complexity of multilingualism (in its diaglossic forms too) that has always characterised the country, and affected the political arena as well (Chandra et al. 2008: 125–134). The collected volume Language in South Asia (Kachru et al. 2008) maps out the sociolinguistic wealth of the Indian subcontinent, and underlines how this impacts social, cultural, and educational processes. The questions of English or the vernacular as the language of education intertwine with social and cultural ideologies of primacy, but also generate important consequences in terms of literacy, progress, and welfare. In this perspective, English becomes a symbol, a commodity that enables subjects to improve their family and background conditions, and at the same time stands as a barrier dividing the middle- and upper- classes, who are educated in English, from the rural part of the population whose regional language schooling is limited and provisional, therefore condemning them to marginalisation (Adami 2012; Rubdy 2008). For a number of reasons, it is not easy to determine the exact number of people who can speak English across India, considering the different levels of proficiency, the functions they serve, and the difficulty in collecting accurate demographic data. The estimates provided by scholars can differ extensively according to the parameters they employ, but the 2011 Census of India records English as a first language for 256,000 people, as a second language for 83 million people, and as a third language 46 million (Census of India 2011), and therefore as a whole English is the second-most widely spoken language after Hindi. However, the position of English remains unique in this context (John 2013). Different labels have been attached to English in India, viewed as a link language to bridge communication between the Hindi-speaking belt in the north and the Dravidian languages-based south (Sailaja 2009: 110–112), or as a modular code to express selected aspects of Indian identity (Krishnaswamy and Burde 2004: 152–155). Moreover, the Indian variety of English has been defined as postcolonial, in particular with the application of Edgar Schneider’s (2007) dynamic model of the spread and transformation of English across the world, which seeks to rebalance previous linguistic theories of language spread and variation. Such a model looks at the history of languages in contact, specifically through the relationships between colonisers and colonised, and is based on five developmental stages: foundation (the arrival of English in a new territory), exonormative stabilisation (the settler’s linguistic reference), nativisation (the

20  Indian English across Texts and Discourses emergence of a new language variety), endonormative stabilisation (the gradual acceptance of the new variety), and differentiation (the acknowledgement of the new variety). According to such a model, Indian English may be located in the fourth stage, even if the situation is unstable: “an endonormative attitude as such is definitely gaining ground, but it is also far from being accepted” (Schneider 2007: 171). But there also scholars who do not support the idea of postcolonial English or postcolonial variety as they consider such a definition reductionist or inaccurate: in her discussion of the negotiation of power between English and Hindi, Rashmi (2012: 23), for example, proposes viewing English in India as “a mediator in a variety of cultural and political realms”. The bibliography on Indian English and Indian English writing is particularly vast: I do not intend to offer a complete review of previous studies and I limit myself to briefly mentioning some ground-breaking references, starting with the monumental work of Braj Kachru, whose important research collected in volumes such The Indianization of English. The English Language in India (1983), The Alchemy of English. The Spread, Functions and Models of Non-Native Englishes (1986), and Asian Englishes. Beyond the Canon (2005), and in many other papers, book chapters, and articles, has, on the one hand, opened up new ways of looking at language spread and change and, on the other, recognised the richness of Indian English among the many different diatopic varieties tackled by scholars. Academic works are concerned with various areas such as the general phonological/morphological/syntactic and lexical features of Indian English (Adami 2010; Mukherjee 2010; Sailaja 2009; Sridhar 2020), the complex pathway of the emergence of Indian English from a colonial background to the contemporary globalised age (Auddy 2020; Bedi 2020; Krishnaswamy and Burde 1998; Krishnaswamy and Krishnaswamy 2006), and the indexes of Indian English across genres, discourses, and text-types (Goswami 2010; Mehrotra 1998) as well as other sociolinguistic, sociocultural, and educational aspects of Indian English (Adami 2012; Agnihotri and Khanna 1997; Gupta and Kapoor 1991). Some studies such as Nihalani et al. (2000) propose a comparative study of British and Indian English, which may still reveal some traces of an exonormative attitude, but this volume was originally published in 1979, hence the persistence of the idea of Indian deviance from standard English. Clearly today there is a much wider array of scholarly opinions: Betangeri (2017: 179) for example argues that in the Indian context “to speak a Standard English, that is British English or American English, is to uproot oneself from one’s Indianness to become British or American”, thus rejecting the colonial heritage and suggesting a new hybrid identity, in which the English language is mainly used for pragmatic reasons (world trading, education, the connection between the north and the south, and so forth). The hybrid gist of Indian

Indian English across Texts and Discourses  21 English is often underlined in popular, informative publications such as John (2013), who draws on examples of this variety in a diachronic fashion from various domains such as advertising, political discourse, and epistolary literature. The linguistic, stylistic, and pragmatic features of Indian English have also been detected with regard to the fictional domain, with the contributions of Bandyopadhyay (2010), Muthiah (2012), and Patil (1994) for instance. Naturally, present-day scholarship employs new accurate investigative tools to tackle the complexities of Indian English. For example, both Schilk (2011) and Sedlatschek (2009) are methodologically grounded on corpus linguistics and base themselves on statistical evidence: the former looks at the Indian and the British components of the International Corpus of English, along with a 100-million-word web-derived corpus of acrolectal Indian newspaper language and corresponding parts of the British National Corpus, whereas the latter draws data from the Kolhapur Corpus and the International Corpus of English and considers the degree of lexical and grammatical nativisation, and compares contemporary Indian English to other varieties in the world (such as British and American English). As mentioned above, the impact of English (and English studies) on modern India is so strong that recent academic projects go beyond the confines of language and literature and examine several other repercussions and themes tied to English, such as deploying feminist perspectives, for example, or the contribution of Dalit groups to English or a new critical pedagogy (Mahanta and Sharma 2019). In this book, I look at the role and power of Indian English as a literary code for expression, which is affected by the intricate linguistic debates that are vehemently discussed in the country, similarly to what happens in other postcolonial scenarios. Some of these disputes foreground the tension between major and minor languages (for example Hindi in the north, Dravidian languages in the south, and minority or ‘tribal’ languages elsewhere), the impact and drive of English as a tool for modernisation, social climbing, and welfare, and the Indianisation of English vis a vis the need for global communication (Nair and deSouza 2020: 308–301). Although in the following chapters I deal with fictional language, it is undeniable that the authors’ stylistic choices also constitute aspects of the composite linguistic question of India. As a rule, the language that surfaces in the narratives I analyse represents a standard form of Indian English, thus generally aligned with World English, but at times it displays a series of marked diatopic features, suggests creativity at work, and reveals the influence of English in contemporary India. In the next sections, I provide an outline of the main characteristics of Indian English and some references to Indian English literature (and culture).

22  Indian English across Texts and Discourses

2.2 Indian English(es) and Linguistic/Stylistic Variation Approaching a diatopic form of language means dealing with variation at three core levels, namely phonetics and phonology, lexis, and syntax, i.e. areas in which Indian English exhibits a broad degree of differentiation from standard English, and I here offer some descriptive generalisations of Indian English, drawing examples from published scholarship, in particular Mukherjee (2010), Sailaja (2009), and Sridhar (2020), bearing in mind of course that “the term ‘Indian English’ is an abstraction as are idealizations such as General Indian English and Standard Indian English” (Sridhar 2020: 253), given the scope of variability of the language according to a host of parameters, such as social class, education, and provenance of the speakers, as well as the capacity of authors to manipulate rhetorical and narrative strategies. Alterations are particularly relevant in the area of vocabulary, which presents large numbers of borrowings from other languages. The interest of lexicographers in Indian English is also proved by a peculiar publication entitled Hobson-Jobson. The Anglo-Indian Dictionary, originally published in 1886 to collect words and phrases commonly used in the Indian colony. Although this work has some etymological inaccuracies or simplifications, it certainly shows the capacity of the language to incorporate loanwords and receive influences from other languages and cultures during exonormative stabilisation in the colonial time and before the proper nativisation process (Schneider 2007: 165). Such lexemes typically refer to domains like flora, fauna, and culture (e.g. betel, dhoti, nabob). Sailaja (2009: 72) proposes the definition of “restricted items”, namely “those items that have not made it into native varieties of English” and that belong to various cultural domains, such as food and religion. These restricted items are not lexicalised Indian words, which are now known in the English-speaking world and commonly recorded by English monolingual dictionaries (e.g. guru). Instead, they are used only in India, or are related to certain states or parts of the country, and this feature also appears in Indian English novels, such as English, August by Upamanyu Chatterjee (1988), for example, which hints at the language divide between the north (the Hindi-speaking belt) and the south of the country, or many of the works by Amitav Ghosh that frequently features Bengali terms. Traditionally, the lexis of Indian English is mainly derived from British English as a result of colonialisation, but due to the effects of globalisation, the spread of social media, and the economic models from the USA, the impact of American English is rapidly growing, specifically affecting the parlance of younger generations. However, still today there seems to be a preference towards the British variety of English, in particular among young female speakers, even if it may still denote traces of the colonial past (Bernaisch and Koch 2016). In reality, the question of how speakers perceive a certain variety is complex

Indian English across Texts and Discourses  23 because it vividly touches on aspects of collective and individual identity, in particular in postcolonial contexts, where attitudes and feelings move across different phases of the evolution of English according to Schneider’s model. English in India is saliently characterised by innovation and creativity, resulting from compounded structures that may take different patterns, such as noun + noun (‘hill station’), adjective + noun (‘creamy layer’, indicating the rich parts of underprivileged castes), and noun + verb (‘air dash’, meaning to rush by air). Hybrid forms generated by the combination of English and another Indian language are also numerous, and can be exemplified by expressions such as ‘lathi charge’ (a charge by the police with sticks of bamboo, in Hindi called ‘lathi’) or ‘double-roti’ (a kind of flat bread). Indian English shows a marked preference for Latinate terms (‘opine’ instead of think) or even archaic expressions, which are the relics of the colonial period (‘do the needful’, or the adverb ‘thrice’). But it also manifests its originality via initialisms, acronyms, clippings, calques from vernacular languages, and semantic shifts, in which English words assume a new meaning: the verb ‘pass out’ for instance takes up the meaning of ‘to graduate’ (Nihalani et al. 2000: 137). As far as the morphosyntactic level is concerned, the non-standard characteristics of Indian English can be found in the use of stative verbs in a progressive aspect, the use of verb particles, the unstable use of the article (or use of zero-article), the employment of all-purpose tag question (‘isn’t it’ for all subjects, or the addition of Hindi tag ‘na?’, meaning ‘no?’), redundant prepositions (discuss + about), and reduplicated or reduced items/phrases to express emphasis (respectively illustrated by forms such as ‘it’s all sticky’, and ‘give me three to four minutes’). In reality, the level of morphosyntactic variation can also reveal the competence of the speakers, and as such should be “best placed on a cline” (Sailaja 2009: 40). Turning to the phonetic and phonological dimensions of Indian English, it is possible to identify a set of various features, including the usage of simple long vowels replacing diphthongs, the removal of distinction between [v] and [w], or the presence of rhoticity or invariant pronunciation of [r] before vowels (Sailaja 2009: 17–38). Of course the peculiar nature of Indian English is attested in other areas as well, such as the broad organisation of discourse and communication, with the employment of linkers, address forms, and kinship terms, or aspects of politeness such as expressions of agreement and disagreement, greeting, and other kinds of verbal etiquette (Kachru and Smith 2008: 41–58; Sailaja 2009: 85–91; Sridhar 2020: 263). These are part and parcel of everyday communication and are also used by some of the characters that appear in the literary texts I examine in my work. As a matter of fact, linguistic studies can also support the analysis of fictional materials: suffice to mention a couple of examples such as Patil (1994), who applies tools and frameworks borrowed from pragmatics to

24  Indian English across Texts and Discourses scrutinise a corpus of canonical Indian English novels (from Mulk Raj Anand to Salman Rushdie), and Muthiah (2012), who introduces the notion of ‘stylized’ Indian English to discuss some of the characters of Rohinton Mistry’s novel Family Matters (2002). As already mentioned, the very notion of Indian English in reality indicates a plethora of questions, features, and issues because it illuminates a reality that is particularly complicated from a historical, geographical, and social angle. In Mukherjee’s (2010: 176–177) view, the centrifugal forces that move Indian English further away from native Englishes, on the one hand, and centripetal forces that keep the norms of Indian English close to native Englishes for the sake of international intelligibility, on the other, are in a state of equilibrium, determining a steady state of progressive forces of language change and conservative forces of (native) norm persistence. Moreover, thanks to its large number of speakers and its utilitarian nature, “Indian English is likely to stay and to defend the compartmentalized domains which it controls” (Schneider 2007: 172), whilst it continues its process of endonormative stabilisation, according to the dynamic model of the evolution of postcolonial Englishes. Actually, such a scenario is made even more complex by the presence of pidginised forms, which in the Indian context were sometimes known as Baboo English, Boxwallah English, and Butler English (Sailaja 2009: 112–115). Even today there is an emergence of mixed or mingled forms of Indian English, which can be grouped together under the umbrella term “Minglish” (Sridhar 2020: 273). The productive fusion between Hindi and English known as Hinglish has engendered a wealth of linguistic innovations, and serves various communicative and emotional functions across a spectrum of informal and semi-formal domains such as call centres, cinema, and advertising, through which speakers can build or negotiate their own persona (Kathpalia 2019; Kothari and Snell 2011).

2.3 Literary Texts and Contemporary Indian English Authors As mentioned above, the role of English in India is primarily utilitarian since it operates as the lingua franca of the educated and powerful elite, which in turn had the ironic effect of unifying the nation in its Independence movement, and it continues today as a vital tool of inter state communication in every field, including creative literature. (Sridhar 2020: 272)

Indian English across Texts and Discourses  25 Along with many other formal domains, in fact, literary discourse has allowed Indian English authors to reach a wide, and often international, readership. In reality, this is not a new phenomenon if we consider that the first attempts to utilise English by Indian authors can be traced back to the eighteenth century, although recognition was chiefly achieved from the 1930s with important names like Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, and K. R. Narayan and culminated in the literary production of the last three or four decades, with the publication of ground-breaking narratives by Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Amitav Ghosh. To reflect on the rootedness of English in Indian cultural life, a significant writer like Anita Nair (1996: 221–222) has coined a metaphor based on the idea of metonymy, i.e. a logical correlation between the whole and the part, defining English as one of the shades, or components, of a complex picture, “a fabric of different textures and colours, so inextricably woven together that to pull them apart would be to tear the fabric, to turn a perfectly serviceable garment into a pile of unusable rags and shreds”. This material synaesthetic image (evoking both touch and sight) conceptualises the unicity and centrality of English within the Indian context and expressively sums up a range of (hi)stories, dynamics, and circumstances. Like the complexities and implications projected by the wide category ‘Indian English’, the label ‘Indian English writing’ is also problematic inasmuch as it pieces together ideologies, aims, and preoccupations of various kinds: nonetheless, as Mund (2022: 7) holds, it “is the youngest among the literatures of India but the most vibrant one, which has the ability to be part of the Indian experience while reaching out to a larger English reading constituency all over the world”. However, it should be stressed that India has produced and keeps producing literatures in other regional languages as well, which in turn are sometimes translated into English and attract a wider audience (Naik 2003; Rahman 2007), once again bringing to the fore the language question. In general, the way in which novelists appropriate the diatopic features of Indian English from real life contributes to the uniqueness of Indian English fiction and foregrounds its originality and energy. In other words, in the Indian context “English is no longer viewed as a foreign language by many writers – it is actively adopted as an appropriate vehicle for the literary encoding of genuinely Indian cultural experience and story-telling” (Mukherjee 2010: 177). In literary genres, the rendition of such features may vary extensively, and although today fictional texts in Indian English are generally addressed to both global and local readers, thus providing a stable degree of semantic transparency and accessibility, from a stylistic angle they can nonetheless appear either particularly noticeable, or alternatively close to standard English. In the former case, the notion of variation reshapes language in innovative manners and exploits a series of techniques to construct narratives, ranging from the

26  Indian English across Texts and Discourses simple italicisation of untranslated foreign words to more complex strategies like glossing, syntactic fusion, and code-switching (Ashcroft 2009: 175–182; Talib 2002: 136–154). There are different reasons why authors select marked forms of Indian English in their writing: for instance, their purpose may be to express identity, reduce social distance, or convey cultural or ideological messages. Specifically, when a character is linguistically foregrounded, this highlights their background, social position, or other elements: for example, the defamiliarising idiolect of the hijra Lovely in Majumdar’s A Burning (2020) is fabricated to suggest some “reduced and pidginized forms of English, so-called basilects” (Mukherjee 2010: 174). Traits of the flavour of Indian English can also be identified in the flowery style, unconventional slang, and polyphonic texture that Jeet Thayil, in Narcopolis (1995) and The Book of Chocolate Saints (2017), elaborates to depict his idea of postcolonial decadence and otherness, or in the speech acts that Tabish Khair assigns to Anil Mehrotra and his employee Ahmed in Night of Happiness (2018), when they have to negotiate social interactions such as offering, accepting, and evaluating acts of politeness. Turning a linguistic lens on fictional language is crucial because it permits us not only to spotlight deviance, but also to examine its social and cultural stance: “stressing variability has been important in order to resist the ideological assumption that what matters in language is linguistic uniformity and ‘standardness’” (Coupland 2007: 4). According to Bhatt (2004: 44), “the most visible expressions of hybridity (for those outside India) appear in literary forms, especially in the work of postcolonial writers” and in fact, in their works, Indian English authors have managed to express the cultural complexities of their country by reshaping a global language. Sometimes the imaginative process of the Indianisation of English in the literary field (Bandyopadhyay 2010; Ganapathy-Doré 2011; Sarangi 2018), which benefits from various strategies, has been described with the metaphorical neologism of “chutnification”, originally applied to the works of Salman Rushdie, like Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988), to indicate the meshing of different styles, voices, and characteristics of English in India, namely with a substratum of loanwords and influences from regional tongues and diachronic varieties. Chutnification, therefore, can be viewed as a colourful metaphor for what Sridhar (2020: 266) labels Minglish, explaining it as a “mirror of one type of new Indian culture: it is a bridge between cultures, a tool of cultural assertion”. Indian English literature, also enriched by the works produced by diasporic writers, indeed stands out from the wide panorama of world literatures in English, thanks in particular to the linguistic diversity and distinctiveness it displays: examples abound and comprise narratives as diverse as Farrukh Dhondy’s Bombay Duck (1990), Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1994), and Aravind

Indian English across Texts and Discourses  27 Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), whose stylistic repertoires weave in and reveal the tensions, values, and meanings of modern India. Thus, considering the influence of regional languages, Chandran (2018: 90) holds that “English and the bhashas coalesce meaningfully into an idiom perfectly suited for readers to be in the precincts of an Indian felicity”. In some cases, the extravagant nature of Indian English is aptly commodified by expatriate authors as a selling piece of orientalism, thus becoming a strategy to penetrate the global literary market, although in reality this is a scenario governed by several agents, such as publishers, novelists and readers, and trends, for example the promotion, exclusion, or affirmation of certain mindsets, as the scholars collected in Dwivedi and Lau (2014) argue in their inspection of Indian English local and diasporic writing. The worldwide recognition of Indian English fiction, further celebrated by important prizes and awards, has also attracted the attention of academia, with a proliferation of studies and essays on specific novels, authors, or styles (see for example Ganapathy-Doré 2011; Sen and Roy 2013; Singh 2013). It is not easy to sum up the different waves and tendencies of Indian English authors, and the myriad questions they have dealt with in their texts, but I would like to point out the vivacity of this field, especially in the case of recent authors, who have reinvented themes, perspectives, and symbols to talk about contemporary India. In a certain measure, they too are the expression of a New India, which has been deeply affected by the political reforms, economic innovations, and social changes that started during the 1990s and that also impacted on the sociolinguistic and sociocultural scenario (Chandra et al. 2008: 475–506). In Sen and Roy’s (2013: 13) words, in fact, that epoch led to a series of transformations, with the result that today “English has lost much of the old ideological baggage of being a colonial import since the aspiring youth in urban India now regard it as a necessary tool for global opportunities”. However, many of the positive developments of that period – the rise of the middle-class, the improvement of sanitation and services, the growth of companies and salaries – were rebalanced by the drastic emergence of social tensions and issues such as the increase in inter-religion hostility (exacerbated by the Ayodhya controversy between Hindu and Muslim factions, and the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque), the spread of nationalist parties and formations (such as the Bharatiya Janata Party), and the reinforcement of a certain identity politics (the Hindutva thought that imagines and pigeonholes the whole of India within the frame of Hindu culture, irrespective of other cultures). Because “literary production is not only about the creation of literary texts but also about the production of social identities and the differences between them” (Rashmi 2012: 7), these loaded

28  Indian English across Texts and Discourses questions are often addressed in the production of Indian English writers, including the texts I investigate through the frames of postcolonial stylistics in the following chapters, where I also contextualise the authors and works I take into account. It is worth noticing that, parallel to the affirmation of the main exponents of Indian English writing who enjoy worldwide popularity, the literary scenario has a range of ramifications, experimenting with less known genres and styles, for instance crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy fiction, graphic novels, or the even more culturally specific call centre narratives and cricket narratives, which unearth social values, cultural practices, and new ideas of Indianness (Varughese 2013). Cumulatively, the effort of contemporary writers like Chetan Bhagat, Sarnath Banerjee, and Vandana Singh is to discuss the evolution of the country in its complex manifestations, anxieties, and contradictions, by depicting aspects such as the demographic increase, the urban expansion, and the revival/rewriting of myths and epics, and to reach this goal, they manipulate English innovatively. As Sen and Roy (2013: 17) affirm, today’s Indian English fiction, then, mirrors the socio-cultural dynamics of a country changing so swiftly that it inevitably inspires new forms and content, and new language registers from the subversive energy of Rushdie-esque chutnified English to the mercurial hybridity of urban India’s vernacular-cum-English patois. The spread of Indian English fiction functions at least on two levels: domestic and international. In the first case, a factor that that has contributed to its popularisation and commercialisation, in particular in its lowbrow genres, is the enlargement of the Indian printing industry, with new publishing houses that spread the so-called ‘Metro reads’, launched by Penguin India in 2010, as well as literary festivals and editorial projects for the translation of regional fiction into English (Naik 2003; Rahman 2007; Varughese 2013). Furthermore, the Indian diaspora has enabled authors to showcase their work and gain an international readership, as important writers like Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Aravind Adiga have uncovered a range of aspects and themes of India. The texts that I use as case studies to investigate in the following chapters represent some of the new literary voices of India, and it is worth noticing that from a metatextual perspective, the linguistic theme somehow surfaces through these stories as a kind of overarching frame because, in different degrees, they all mention or signal the presence of English in a multilingual and multicultural context. The protagonist of Thayil’s narratives, Newton Francis Xaviers, for example, uses English for his poetry, following the tradition of the Bombay poets of the 1980s, whereas the difficult or even scarce

Indian English across Texts and Discourses  29 implementation of English-language teaching, as part of the educational curriculum, touches on the lives of the slum children created by Anappara. But English is also seen as a symbol attached to a new rising bourgeoisie, or in the case of Khair’s protagonist, to an artistic intelligentsia, with the main character of Doshi, against the backdrop of other languages, as well as a necessary commodity for the hijra Lovely, who tries to learn English in order to become a ‘real’ Bollywood actress. However, I am not tackling the idea of language as a literary theme, but rather I aim to undertake a detailed, though by no means exhaustive, linguistic and stylistic analysis of some narrative experiments. As explained in the introduction, I specifically propose to apply a methodology that I term postcolonial stylistics since it combines ideas and frameworks from different disciplines, views stories as data, and investigate the readers’ response. In particular, the rigorous examination of language in its forms, patterns, and metaphors “acts as a further bridge across the social science-literary studies divide” (Varughese 2012: 56) and favours an interdisciplinary method that is close to the idea of the sociology of literature, in which fictional discourse is regarded as a valuable domain and representation of the social world, and its dynamics, contradictions, and ideologies. This study therefore is not simply concerned with the diatopic features of Indian English in literary discourse, but is devoted to disclosing the rhetorical mechanisms and patterns put forward by the writers I deal with in my case studies, following a linguistic and cognitive stylistics approach (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018; Jeffries and ­McIntyre 2010) specifically adapted to address the Indian postcolonial literary world.

References Adami, Esterino. 2010. “Indian English in Use: A Pukka Language”. In Palusci, O., ed., English, but not Quite. Locating Linguistic Diversity. Trento: Tangram Edizioni Scientifiche, 195–211. Adami, Esterino. 2012. “English Language Education in India Today”. In Esch, E. and Solly, M., eds., The Sociolinguistics of Language Education in International Contexts. Bern: Peter Lang, 147–168. Adami, Esterino. 2021. “Of Monsters, Deities, and People: Conceptualising English Language in the Postcolonial World”. In Rizzato, I., Strik Lievers, F., and Zurru, E., eds., Variations on Metaphor. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 110–126. Agnihotri, Rama Kant and Khanna, Amrit Lal. 1997. Problematizing English in India. New Delhi: Sage. Ashcroft, Bill. 2009. Caliban’s Voice. The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures. Abingdon: Routledge. Auddy, Ranjan Kumar. 2020. In Search of Indian English. History, Politics and Indigenization. London and New York: Routledge.

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Bandyopadhyay, Sumana. 2010. Indianisation of English. Analysis of Linguistic Features in Selected Post-1990 Indian English Fiction. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company. Bedi, Jaskiran. 2020. English Language in India. A Dichotomy between Economic Growth and Inclusive Growth. London and New York: Routledge. Bernaisch, Tobias and Koch, Christopher. 2016. “Attitudes towards Englishes in India”. World Englishes, 35.1: 118–132. Betangeri, Ankur. 2017. “A Case for the Standardization of Indian English”. Indian Literature, 61.1: 171–181. Bhatt, Rakesh M. 2004. “Expert Discourses, Local Practices and Hybridity. The Case of Indian Englishes”. In Canagarajah, S., ed., Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice. New York: Routledge, 25–54. Census of India. 2011. https://censusindia.gov.in/2011-common/censusdata 2011.html (accessed 5 December 2021). Chandra, Bipan, Mukherjee, Mridula, and Mukherjee, Aditya. 2008. India since Independence. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Chandran, K. Narayana. 2018. “To the Indian Manner Born: How English Tells its Stories”. Hermēneus. Revista de traducción e interpretación, 20: 87–104. Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style. Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dwivedi, Om and Lau, Lisa, eds. 2014. Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ganapathy-Doré, Geeta. 2011. The Postcolonial Indian Novel in English. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Gibbons, Alison and Whiteley, Sara. 2018. Contemporary Stylistics. Language, Cognition, Interpretation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Goswami, Pallavi. 2010. Recent Trends in Indian English. A Linguistic Study of Print Media. New Delhi: Readworthy. Gupta, R.S. and Kapoor, Kapil, eds. 1991. English in India. Issues and Problems. Delhi: Academic Foundation. Jeffries, Leslie and McIntyre, Dann. 2010. Stylistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. John, Binoo K. 2013. Entry from Backside only. Hazar Fundas of IndianEnglish. New Delhi: Rupa. Kachru, Braj, Kachru, Yamuna, and Sridhar, S.N. eds. 2008. Language in South Asia. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Kachru, Yamuna and Smith, Larry E. 2008. Cultures, Contexts and World Englishes. New York: Routledge. Kathpalia, Sujata S. 2019. “Redefining Gender Stereotypes in Indian English TV Advertising”. World Englishes, 38: 486–499. Kothari, Rita and Snell, Rupert, eds. 2011. Chutnefying English. The Phenomenon of Hinglish. New Delhi: Penguin Books India. Krishnaswamy, Natesan and Burde, Archana S. 2004. The Politics of Indians’ English. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Krishnaswamy, Natesan and Krishnaswamy, Lalitha. 2006. The Story of English in India. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press India. Mahanta, Banibrata and Sharma, Rajesh Babu, eds. 2019. English Studies in India. Contemporary and Evolving Paradigms. Singapore: Springer.

Indian English across Texts and Discourses 31 Mehrotra, Ram Jama. 1998. Indian English. Texts and Interpretation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Mukherjee, Joybrato. 2010. “The Development of the English Language in India”. In Kirkpatrick, A., ed., The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes. London: Routledge, 167–180. Mund, Subhendhu. 2022. The Making of Indian English Literature. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Muthiah, Kalaivahni. 2012. “Performing Bombay and Displaying Stances. Stylized Indian English in Fiction”. English World-Wide, 33.3: 264–291. Naik, M.K. 2003. “Indian Pride and Indian Prejudice: Reflections on the Relationship between Regional Indian Literatures and Indian Writing in English”. Indian Literature, 47.4: 168–180. Nair, Anita. 1996. “A Coat of Many Colors”. In Baumgardner, R.J., ed., South Asian English. Structure, Use and Users. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 221–230. Nair, Rukmini Bhaya and deSouza, Peter Ronald, eds., 2020. Keywords for India. A Conceptual Lexicon for the Twenty-first Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Nihalani, Paroo, Tongue, R.K., and Hosali, Priya. 2000. Indian and British English. A Handbook of Usage and Pronunciation. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Patil, Z.N. 1994. Style in Indian English Fiction. A Study in Politeness Strategies. New Delhi: Prestige. Rahman, Anisur. 2007. “Indian Literature(s) in English Translation. The Discourse of Resistance and Representation”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 43.2: 161–171. Rashmi, Sadana. 2012. English Heart Hindi Heartland. The Political Life of Literature in India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rubdy, Rani. 2008. “English in India. The Privilege and the Privileging of Social Class”. In Tan, P.T.K. and Rubdy, R., eds., Language as Commodity. Global Structures, Local Marketplaces. London: Continuum, 122–145. Sailaja, Pingali. 2009. Indian English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sarangi, Jaydeep. 2018. Indian English Novels. Texts, Contexts, Language. New Delhi Authorspess. Schilk, Marco. 2011. Structural Nativization in Indian English Lexicogrammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English. Varieties around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sedlatschek, Andreas. 2009. Contemporary Indian English. Variation and Change. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Sen, Krishna and Roy, Rituparna, eds., 2013. Writing India Anew. Indian English Fiction 2000–2010. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Singh, Prabhat K., ed. 2013. The Indian English Novel of the New Millennium. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Sridhar, S.N. 2020. “Indian English”. In Bolton K., Botha W., and Kirkpatrick A., eds., The Handbook of Asian Englishes. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 243–277.

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Talib, Ismail S. 2002. The Language of Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Varughese, Emma Dawson. 2012. Beyond the Postcolonial World Englishes Literature. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Varughese, Emma Dawson. 2013. Reading New India. Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English. London: Bloomsbury.

3

Otherness, Style and Indian English ‘Decadent’ Fiction

3.1 The Language of Otherness in the Postcolonial Indian World Otherness constitutes a key feature in the broad field of postcolonial literatures, mirroring as it does the shapes of cultural diversity, as demonstrated by a very large body of scholarship, stemming from Edward Said’s ground-breaking Orientalism (1995) to more recent studies and essays (Ramone 2011: 79–101). The very idea of the Other originally derives from a Freudian and post-Freudian framework, in particular with the work of Jacques Lacan regarding the formation of subjectivity, and it has been studied from a variety of perspectives, thanks to influential theorists and thinkers like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. Thus, it is a complex notion, built on a binary sense of opposition (self vs other, white vs black, civilisation vs. barbarism, and so forth) and used to express the opposition of identity. According to Ashcroft et al. (2000: 155), “in post-colonial theory, it can refer to the colonized others who are marginalized by imperial discourse, identified by their difference from the centre and, perhaps crucially, become the focus of anticipated mastery by the imperial ‘ego’”. As such, Otherness is assumed as a paradigm by Orientalist thought, and utilised to carry on certain ontological and epistemological views that justify the taming and control of difference. In his scholarly work, Tabish Khair has tackled the theme of Otherness with regard to postcolonial literature, but he has also reflected on possible influences and connections, such as the Gothic genre, and has shown how there are links between the two fields that draw, manipulate and foreground difference in terms of ethnicity, gender, class, and more, keeping in mind that “what the Other signifies is the ineradicability of difference” (Khair 2009: 158), and such aspect emerges significantly in the case of authors who appropriate and abrogate a non-native language such as English for Indian writers. It is not my purpose here to embark on a new theoretical discussion of the seminal notion of Otherness, in the light of its vast critical bibliography, and therefore I interpret the term as a characterising feature of identity for the narrative discourse expressed in Indian English fiction, i.e. DOI: 10.4324/9781003266792-3

34  Otherness, Style and Indian English an umbrella category that can be applied to a range of forms and patterns. In this chapter, however, I specifically look at Otherness in relation to the fictional production of Indian author Jeet Thayil, and I adopt a different perspective: rather than a mere notion of cultural, historical, or ethnic alterity, with the opposition between the self and the other, I expand the idea of Otherness as a form of deviance from standard, in particular examining how the author’s texts flesh out deviant characters, symbols, and styles in the attempt to revise the literary representation of postcolonial India. For Thayil, in fact, the concept of ‘subaltern subject’, which according to Spivak (1988) refers to marginalised, oppressed, and unrepresented individuals, is made even more complicated because the Indian author focuses on a host of eminently liminal figures, spanning mad poets, broken addicts, and eccentric artists. Such a choice is political and ideological because it involves a challenge to the traditional monolithic representation of literary India based on postcolonial stereotypes, and echoes Loomba’s argument (2015: 58) that “human beings internalise the systems of repression and reproduce them by conforming to certain ideas of what is normal and what is deviant”. In other words, following a Bakhtinian perspective, the very idea of monologic and authoritative discourse – one which marginalises and annihilates alterity – is fragmented by means of heteroglossia, i.e. the presence of many entangled voices (Allen 2000; Bakhtin 1981, 1984; Black 2006; Clark 2013), and in fact in this type of writing we are given access to those peripheral and alternative identities which nonetheless belong to the manifold Indian cultural scenario and deserve visibility and expression. Here I examine the stylistic and linguistic representations of Otherness in Thayil’s writing and see how these traverse poetic, pragmatic, and aesthetic dimensions. In the following section, my focus will be on the intricate theme of drugs in its various ramifications, which to some extent still seems to be peripheral in Indian English literature, probably because of its controversial, sensitive, and potentially distressing nature. Subsequently, I move on to reinterpret Otherness filtered through the nuances of postcolonial decadence by following Stilling (2018) to study some aspects of Thayil’s prose such as the cognitive complexity of discourse presentation, the paradigm of heteroglossia as a meaning-making tool, and the unfolding of lists and aphorisms, which demonstrate the expressive potential of Indian English as a literary code.

3.2 Author, Text, and Context: Jeet Thayil In the variegated Indian English literary context, the figure of Jeet Thayil stands out thanks to the uniqueness of his writing and creative work across different genres. Born in 1959 in Mamalassery, in the Kerala district of Ernakulam, Thayil comes from a Syrian Christian family, a religious context in which “services are still conducted in Aramaic,

Otherness, Style and Indian English  35 the language of Jesus” (Taneja 2018). His education mainly took place at Jesuit schools and often brought him out of India, to Hong Kong for example, but in particular to the USA, where he studied Fine Arts (in New York). The poetic vision of the author in the various creative domains he is engaged with is certainly influenced not only by his cultural and religious background, but also by his cosmopolitan experiences and contacts, as shown by the range of his eclectic and innovative productions. Thayil is a prolific writer, who has published extensively, experimenting with different genres and styles, moving across as well as overlapping poetry, fiction, and music. In a recent interview given to the Times of India (2020), with his usual provocative and witty tone, he affirmed: “I am a musician, a poet, a novelist, and an editor. There are times when each of these disciplines bleeds into the other. I am always happy to plagiarize myself”. Subtly, the embodied idiomatic expression he uses (‘bleeds’) somehow alludes to his second novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints, and the medieval tradition of Catholic relics, but it also evokes a broad reference to art as a multiple and fertile terrain. His verses also appear in the Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry (2015) and as a poet, he has authored five collections of lyrics: Gemini (1992), Apocalypso (1997), English (2004), These Errors are Correct (2008), and Collected Poems (2015). Moreover, Thayil has edited several collections of poems such as the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008) and 60 Indian Poets (2008) as well as a collection of essays entitled Divided Time: India and the End of Diaspora (2006). His artistic work also concerns the domain of music. In 2012, he was commissioned to write the libretto for Babur in London, a production organised by the Opera Group, which pivots around the figure of the founder of the Mughal empire in northern India, Babur (1483–1530), to discuss issues such as contemporary London’s multiculturalism and the ideas of religion and fanaticism. Thayil is also interested in contemporary music and he is a songwriter and a guitarist too, and started his music career in the 1980s as a guitarist for a short period in the band Atomic Forest. Today, he is part the of the electro-pop duo Sridhar/Thayil, which he formed in 2007, with Suman Sridhar, a singer, actor, and artist with a background in Hindustani and Carnatic music, with the aim of combining and hybridising different genres, mixing jazz, blues, and Indian classical music. In the fictional realm, Thayil is mainly known for his trilogy of novels dedicated to the plural, grotesque, and weird faces of Bombay: Narcopolis (2011), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, The Book of Chocolate Saints (2017), and Low (2019). Thayil’s debut novel offers a portrait of the world of drugs and humans in Bombay between the 1970s and 1980s and represents a unique reshaping of Indian narrative fiction by virtue of its mesmerising elegance, intoxicating deepness, and audacious creativity.

36  Otherness, Style and Indian English According to a review published in The Guardian, in this book the author unpicks the complexities, contradictions and hypocrisies of Indian life with surgical elegance: the good Muslim selling heroin while complaining about brazen women, the queenly beggarwoman who makes the street her living room, and the Hindu praying in church, an action that saves her from the mob but not her fate. (Rushby 2012) Talking about the genesis of his fictional work in an interview with the Indian Express (2017), Thayil explains that the manuscript of Narcopolis was originally around 800 pages long, which he then reduced to 300, but what was left out in reality constituted the basis for his later novels, in particular The Book of the Chocolate Saints. The three novels are tied by a number of links, vivid echoes, and recurring characters, and scrutinise different aspects of identity, and moments of the history of India, or rather Bombay. The last of the trilogy is Low, which, as the writer states, “brings the story kicking and screaming into the harsh light of our current historical moment, where innocence has been replaced by dread” (Times of India 2020). This was followed in 2021 by Names of the Women, which uncovers and discusses some female characters from the Gospel, from Mary Magdalene to Herodias and her daughter Salome, and their ideological misrepresentation.

3.3 Otherness and the Construction of Drug Discourse The broad notion of Otherness is a kind of dominant index in postcolonial discourse (Khair 2009; Ramone 2011), but in the case of Jeet Thayil it takes on unusual shapes, particularly in the novel Narcopolis, which contains some linguistic and narrative renditions of drug discourse considered as a token for alterity. The novel pivots on the perspective of drug culture as a means to represent forms of alternative identity and give voice to social outcasts in India, i.e. a set of eccentric characters populating 1970s Bombay, which includes a verbally exuberant hijra (i.e. a transgender person in the South Asian context), a blasphemous postmodern painter, and a Chinese exile. At first sight, Thayil focuses on the dejected outskirts of Indian society, but he actually displays the plural meanings of identity and he does so by adopting a highly digressive narrative technique that puzzles the reader in its numerous and chaotic stratifications. Dealing with the intertwining complexity of drug discourse and its possible stigma is certainly not easy for many reasons, but here I focus on its fictional version and take up how Boon (2002: 5) interprets it: namely a wide-ranging area, or “an open field of interdependent cultural

Otherness, Style and Indian English  37 activity, which would include both drugs and literature, one in which science, biography, literary analysis, and ethnography are used as necessary”. In this vein, and following the interdisciplinary approach of postcolonial stylistics (e.g. Ashcroft 2009; Fludernik 2009; Rimmon-Kenan 2002; Stockwell 2002; Talib 2002), I argue that the writer does not merely construct a bizarre assortment of outcastes, bohemian characters, and stories of Otherness, but rather he appropriates and reinvents a disturbing – and somehow stigmatised – issue to unearth and chart the hybrid territories of the human condition, thus going beyond the boundaries of the postcolonial world. Although, in pragmatic terms, namely on the author-reader level, dealing with an upsetting theme like the world of drugs in narrative fiction may constitute a face-threatening act that can annoy, provoke, or even bother readers (Black 2006: 74–76), this operation is deliberate and, in his intricate literary works, Thayil tries to exploit this topic to expose the correlations between identity, Otherness, and society. Thus, it can be argued that his narratives tactically manipulate language with the intent to challenge, modify, or reverse collective images, background knowledge, and ideologies typically attributed to the many aspects of the drug theme. The fascination of writers for drugs and the theme of drug-taking in fiction run through different countries and traditions. Many ­important voices from British and American literatures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Aldous Huxley, Philip Dick, Stephen King, and Irvine Welsh are associated with drugs. In particular, it was during the Romantic/ Decadent period (essentially covering the entire nineteenth century) that drugs somehow acquired visibility through the circulation of texts and discourses. Consequently, the habit of drug consumption emerges as a “complicated matrix of historical, cultural, and scientific developments” (Boon 2002: 6) and it also contributes to the western construction of Otherness, often in connection with ideas of orientalism and exoticism, in which opium stands out as a symbol of eastern corruption and threat to Victorian society (Milligan 1995; Said 1995). Furthermore, Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis fictional trilogy, which comprises Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015), has drawn attention to the interpretation of opium as a cardinal issue in the subtle colonial dynamics engaging Britain, India, and China during the colonial era. Roughly until the twentieth century, the use of recreational drugs, such as opium, was tolerated, if not even consolidated in the west, in spite of some attempts to mitigate its spread and its social repercussions, still in a somewhat ambiguous environment since “neither the law nor the literature of the nineteenth century were focused on the impact of drugs on the mental functioning of individuals” (Dent 2019: 15). Of course, other literary traditions too have dealt with the theme of narcotics and other substances, for instance with the key figure of

38  Otherness, Style and Indian English Charles Baudelaire and his Les Paradis artificiels (1860), which includes Le poème du haschisch and Un mangeur d’opium, and which was a source of inspiration for many English-language authors, from the Victorian age to the present time. Baudelaire’s idea of opium and drugs as a means to access aesthetic experience more deeply through thoughts, dreams, and enhanced perception, somehow surfaces in Thayil’s narrative writing, and to a certain extent even in his life. The French poet is an important inspiration in Jeet Thayil’s writing, spanning both his poetry and fiction: the collection These Errors are Correct features a poem entitled ‘To Baudelaire’, and in Narcopolis he is explicitly mentioned. However, contemporary Indian postcolonial literature does not appear to openly tackle the theme of drugs, probably because of a certain entrenched resistance to handling such sensitive or potentially unsettling topics, which are still considered a kind of taboo in some South Asian contexts, and often still regulated by prescribing norms of behaviour. There are of course some exceptions, such as Like a Diamond in the Sky by Shazia Omar (2009), a novel that provides a kind of sociological lens on the desolate scenario of Bangladeshi youth through the creative slang coined by drug addicts and dealers, the use of innovative code-mixing and the rendition of different diegetic voices. The presence of drugs in fiction (and in some cases the use of drugs for writers) actually signals a broader reflection on their subterranean presence and controversial rootedness in society, considering that “literature and drugs are two dynamically developing domains of human activity that have coevolved alongside and interpenetrated with many other such domains, human or not” (Boon 2002: 8). In fact, with their seductive and annihilating power, drugs partake of the evolutions and tensions of society, spanning all layers, and this aspect is frequently reflected in fictional works, starting from the assumption that narrative fiction can also be considered as a peculiar mirror for the dialogic representation of the self and the other, thus including the dimensions of alterity. Moreover, although the language of fiction pertains more to imagination, as an invented form of storytelling, unlike the representation of nonfictional discourse, there are interconnections between the two realms: bearing in mind real-life cases of addictions, Davies (1997a: 226) for example points out that “drugspeak has a life of its own […] and that verbal reports are rather more than cheap and convenient indicants of how other things ‘really are’”. This affirmation lends support to the fact that language (in fiction and other genres) embodies the power not only to portray, but also to conceptualise and understand reality through the workings of the mind, and consequently it is instrumental in the textual construction of the drug field. A key word that has often been associated with Otherness, or alterity, is deviance, a polysemic term, often used as interchangeable with deviation, which refers to the idea of departure from a specific norm and can

Otherness, Style and Indian English  39 be applied to different areas. Otherness and deviance share some traits in their ontological nature, such as the fact that they entail the meaning of diversity and uniqueness against a prescribed palimpsest of normality. In discussing the sphere of crime in contemporary English-language fiction, Gregoriou (2007) for example articulates this category in a tripartite perspective that considers its sociological, linguistic, and generic dimensions. According to this view, deviance seems to emerge as a theory of divergence, respectively regarding instances of (1) human behaviour that are considered abnormal, non-standard, and deplorable, (2) defamiliarising linguistic structures that break expectations in communicative situations, and (3) the transformation and manipulation of a genre’s conventions, constraints, and styles. The reading of crime fiction that Gregoriou puts forward may be extended to literary drug discourse too, in particular in the acknowledgement of more than a simple dualistic vision (good vs. bad, acceptable vs. unacceptable), but rather of a scale, or continuum, of meanings, reactions, and sentiments projected on what is or appears to be different from the norm. Drug discourse as conceived by Jeet Thayil, accordingly, belongs to and somehow problematises the fields of Otherness and deviance. In the specific case of this author, in fact, the development of the drug domain cannot be reduced to a mere celebration or blaming of narcotics in general, but rather it illuminates the site from which stems a plurality of entangled stories that intimately explore the manifestations (and possible overlapping) of human identity (and its Otherness) revolving around, or being affected by, the subject of drugs. When he was asked about whether art and addiction could be linked by some correspondence, Thayil replied in this way: There is not, unless you mean the countless works of art that were never created because of the addiction that destroyed the artist. The number of artists who have not battled addiction and still managed to produce good art vastly outnumbers the other team. (Times of India 2020) Astutely and provokingly, the author plays with the myth of writers addicted to the use of drugs, at times suggesting his own past drug experience, or instead downplaying this type of connection. However, the novelist is openly concerned with the fate of those subjects who were not able to find a social role in 1970s Bombay, and he also considers the weight of addiction with its tentacular or magnet-like allure and its repercussions on the sphere of the self. These are some of the provocative issues that the writer deals with as he elaborates on the linguistic and textual interstices of his novels via a wealth of rhetorical devices. I now look at the narrative structure of Narcopolis, which immediately appears to be a very complex work, organised in four parts (defined

40  Otherness, Style and Indian English ‘Books’), with a plurality of conflicting narrators and focalisers (Bal 2017: 18–22; Bradford 1997; Rimmon-Kenan 2002), generating concatenations of stories, memories, and hallucinations, which technically can be defined as text worlds (Gavins 2007) and introduced by a very dense prologue. Mainly set in the Bombay of the 1970s, the story of Dom Ullis, a Syrian Christian Kerala-born addict who returns to India after some time in the USA, is abundantly interspersed with the narrations of other characters. These include Dimple, a beautiful hijra, who works in an opium khana (i.e. an opium den) in Shuklaji Street (the city’s oldest red lights district), Newton Pinter Xavier, a sacrilegious postmodern artist, and Mr Lee, a Chinese expatriate, whose memories are metatextually juxtaposed with references from an imaginary book entitled Prophecy, which his father wrote in the Maoist period. Much of the novel, indeed, is grounded upon “a cast of narrators, each taking over the telling of the story so seamlessly that sometimes it is unclear whether one narrator has left and another has picked up” (Pius 2014: 182). The constant shifting of intersecting narrative levels certainly constitutes a challenge to the reader, who has to navigate a succession of diegetic planes, pushing into and popping out of different text worlds, and might even suggest a kind of drug-induced stupor, a suspension of the senses, and a shuffling of beliefs, memories and visions. Not only does Thayil foreground the sense of addiction, especially to chandu/chandoo (Hindi for opium), but he also points out different facets of Otherness, thus shedding light on those marginal and often subjugated layers of society that are usually voiceless and neglected. In their irreverent exuberance, these characters may be viewed as belonging to the category of the Carnivalesque (Bakhtin 1984), which, according to Graham Allen (2000: 22), “celebrates the unofficial collective body of the people and stands against the official ideology and discourse of religious and state power”. Therefore, they contest social norms and mainstream culture as they trigger, assume, and develop the alterity paradigm. Unlike a substantial part of contemporary Indian literature that praises the social and economic growth of the country (the so-called ‘Shining India fiction’), this novel seems to detect marginal routes, heading to the dark heart of the country, a site which indeed stands in antonymic terms with the current ideology of fast-developing territories such as India. In thus doing, as noted by Bornstein (2014), Thayil’s writing also becomes a sort of ethnographic portrait of the disenfranchised classes of India and a source of valuable insights into societies in transit, and to some extent in crisis. As O’Connor (2015: 14) holds, thanks to such peculiar and alternative characters, the novel becomes “a site of resistance against the growing rise of intolerance in India” inasmuch as it portrays liminal categories and individuals, from drug addicts to hijras, who are not typically contemplated by the canonical discourse of representation,

Otherness, Style and Indian English  41 and who yet struggle against processes of homogenisation and hegemony. In an interview with Bose (2012: 39), Thayil expands on this point and holds that “it’s hard to imagine today, but there was a time when Bombay was a place of freedom, not fear, a place where you could say anything to anybody without first ascertaining which community they belonged to”. It is not possible here to unpack all the hyperbolic narrative stratifications conceived by the author, and I thus limit my investigation of Otherness to some traits of the main characters. The array of their voices collectively builds up an indexical (and vertiginous) sense of alterity as well as a metonymic representation of an entire city, Bombay, which, with its lacerating contrasts and idiosyncrasies, has had deep connections with the opium trade since the early colonial period, as Farooqui (2006) explains. I consider the two types of textual indicators for characters outlined by Rimmon-Kenan (2002: 61–72), namely direct definition (such as using lexical items such as particular nouns or adjectives) and indirect presentation (through the rendition of characters’ action or speech). I also consider other stylistic devices, including onomastic references, which might suggest symbolic meanings, as in the character of Rumi, a violent and bigoted drug dealer who bears “ironically the name of a Sufi poet who taught tolerance” (King 2012: 444), thus triggering an escalation of inner contradictions. Amongst the unusual characters of the novel, Dimple is an important figure, because not only does she illustrate the bohemian atmosphere of the opium khana, but being a hijra, she provides an alternative viewpoint in her non-binary identity: Woman and man are words other people use, not me. I’m not sure what I am. Some days I’m neither, or I’m nothing. On other days I feel I’m both. Both men and women are so different, how can one person be both? Isn’t that what you’re thinking? Well I’m both and I’ve learned some things, to my cost, the kind of thing you’re better off not knowing if you mean to live in the world. For example I know something about love and how lovers want to consume and be consumed and disappear into each other. I know how they yearn to make two equal one and I know they can never be. What else? Women are more biologically and emotionally, that’s well known and it’s obvious. But they confuse sex and the spirit; they don’t separate. Men, as you know, always separate: they separate their human and dog natures. And then she said, I’d like to tell you more about it, about the family resemblance between men and dogs, because I have plenty to say, as you may have guessed, but what would be the point? There’s little chance you’d understand, after all you’re a man. (Thayil 2012: 11)

42  Otherness, Style and Indian English This citation conveys in a nutshell the linguistic construction of (double) identity for Dimple, and is rich in repetitions (the personal deictic pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’), parallelisms (‘I’m’, ‘I feel’, ‘women are’, ‘they separate’), oppositions (‘woman’, ‘man’), rhetorical questions (‘how can one person be both?’), and negative structures (‘not’, ‘neither’, ‘nothing’). To reinforce the tone of the passage, the speaking character even seems to address the reader directly (‘Isn’t that what you’re thinking’) in order to build a sort of dialogic relation. Cumulatively, these elements operate as linguistic triggers and textual practices (Jeffries 2010a, 2010b) that invite, or even challenge, the reader to reflect on the naturalisation of ideologies (Jeffries 2010a: 8–10) by which social roles are constructed and assigned by following dominant discourses of categorisation. Gender classification and its narrative representations are typically cast into a binary structure of mutually exclusive elements (man/woman), but here the author, through Dimple’s words, draws the readers’ attention to the interconnections between gender and identity, the latter understood not as a mere stable category but rather as a dynamic practice, endowed with its own linguistic means (Hall 2013). Provocatively, he seems to suggest looking for contrastive meanings to revise strict boundaries and dual definitions, especially considering the entrenched and ambiguous gender ideologies governing a traditional context such as India, in which “transgender subjects are often exploited” (Jeffrey and Harris 2014: 82). However, it is worth recalling that in Indian society hijras occupy a marginal, and yet sometimes ambiguously powerful position, being tied to some religious beliefs and even mentioned in some versions of traditional epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, although they are also frequently associated with prostitution, thus adding layers of meaning to their social role (Nair and deSouza 2020: 257–258; Newport 2017). The full meaning of identity, therefore, emerges as an in-between, fluid positioning, which allows a broader comprehension of life in its plural forms because for the author Dimple “is male and female, a Tiresias-like figure, whose familiarity with both sexes gives her tremendous uncommon knowledge, if not wisdom” (Bose 2012: 41). I cannot thus agree with Newport (2017: 96) when she affirms that “the novel is unable to situate Dimple and instead renders her as a figure of excess and, simultaneously, of nothingness” since the text explores the transformations of a transgender character that merges questions of identity, gender, and the Mumbai underworld. Interestingly, now more literary authors seem to be engaged with the depiction of hijras and their issues, such as Arundhati Roy, for example, with Anjum, one of the protagonists of her The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). It has already been mentioned that onomastic echoes constitute an important resource for character-making, and, according to Windt (2005: 44), “as signs of language, names have a double ontology”, because, on the one hand, they are part of the norms regulating a sociocultural

Otherness, Style and Indian English  43 system and, on the other, they may bear idiosyncratic meanings tied to a single individual. In the case of Dimple, they display a multiple (or split) sense of self, since in her female identity she was initially named after the Indian actress Dimple Kapadia, and subsequently after another cinema star, Zeenat Aman, but her multiplicity is even signalled by the label hijra, an Urdu-Hindustani word originating from the Semitic root hjr meaning ‘leaving one’s tribe or group’. Thus, for Dimple, the manifestations of inner identity, which here synthesise and integrate opposites, match with the mechanics of cultural Otherness, in an effort to negotiate feelings, perceptions, and positions (Van Bonn 2012), or move across and beyond socially-constructed boundaries and restrictions. Otherness is also a defining feature for Newton Pinter Xavier, the Indian artist and heavy drinker who bears the name of the “patron saint of Goa and Japan and of navigators and aimless travellers” (Thayil 2012: 53), also combining references to mathematics (Newton), Catholic piety (St. Francis), and Catholic fanaticism (Francis Xavier as Goa’s inquisitor). Thus, naming here endorses mixed connotations of wandering, precision, and devotion, and the character eventually starts frequenting the Bombay chandu khana, where Dimple works. Known for his scandalous work including “the pictures of Christ with blue skin, with doe eyes, kaajal and a caste mark” (Thayil 2012: 26), Xavier is also the author of lyrics, which provide metatextual references, and he is also the protagonist of the second novel by Thayil, The Book of Chocolate Saints. The character is based on references to the Goa artist Francis Newton Souza, one of the founders of the Progressive Art Group of Bombay (1947), as well as the English-language Indian poet Dom Moraes who Thayil met thanks to his father. One of the poems by Newton Xavier is set in a dystopian future and deals with the persistent themes of exile and diaspora, in other words, a yearning to move, as shown in the closing distich: “What I wanted was to be elsewhere, / Somewhere, anywhere but there” (Thayil 2012: 33). The novel can also be considered as a chain of multiple frame narratives (Fludernik 2009: 28), because it unfolds a number of stories within a macro diegetic structure and is frequently governed by intertextuality via embedded citations from other (real or invented) books, writings, and sources. In this way, the author and his various cunning narrators seem to engage the reader in the reinterpretation of difference as a possible quest for the meaning of life. To a certain extent, this strategy suggests a textual floating close to magical realism (Van Bonn 2012), a stylistic component often present in Indian English fiction that linguistically is triggered by shifts between different narrative levels, such as when the ghost of Mr Lee occasionally haunts opium smokers and breaks into one of the storylines, for example. Moreover, in Book Three, the intradiegetic narrator recounts Rashid’s experience of entering and living the dreams of others, perhaps echoing the supernatural characters of Rushdie’s Midnights’ Children.

44  Otherness, Style and Indian English The linguistic rendition of dreams and nightmares is a complex question because it concerns a mental experience, which is somehow indebted to cognitive processes and difficult to pin down in terms of perspective, sensation, and understanding. When Rashid assumes the role of internal focaliser, his speech is irrational and even hallucinatory: Dreams leak from head to head; they travel between those who face in the same direction, that is to say lovers, and those who share the bonds of intoxication and death. That’s why the old Chini’s head is in mine. I’m dreaming Dimple’s dream and I want to stop but I don’t know how. (Thayil 2012: 187) This extravagant scene somehow evokes the tones of magical realism, with its load of fantasy and imagination intruding into and influencing the flow of the story, but it may also be the outcome of the intoxicating effect of opium and other drugs like garad, a form of low-grade heroin that entraps most characters in the last part of the novel (set in Bombay in the early 2000s). The tone of the passage, in reality, is achieved thanks to various rhetorical means, for example the use of the orientational verb ‘leak’, which does not habitually collocate with ‘dreams’. Here it triggers synaesthetic and estranging connotations, suggesting the overlap between the material and the immaterial. In addition, by virtue of a process of personification, the latter noun indicates a sort of agent able to perform actions (‘travel’), whilst, as a mental process verb, ‘dream’ is semantically expanded to denote ‘access’ or, rather, ‘be catapulted in’, since Rashid’s following words seem to entail an unpleasant sensation. The repetitive illogical verb phrase ‘to dream someone’s dreams’ provides accessibility to another text world and compels Rashid to intimately share someone else’s feelings in spite of his own unwillingness, testified by a verb of volition (‘want’). Activated by a determiner (‘those’), parallelism too is at work here, with the clash between lovers and drug addicts, the latter portrayed with an explicit echo of death, thus a further element contrasting with the idea of love, which ultimately engenders a type of ‘constructed opposition’, namely between those linguistic items “whose oppositional relationship arises specifically from their textual surroundings” (Jeffries 2010b: 1). The narratological and cognitive complexity of the text is anticipated and condensed in the lengthy prologue, entitled “Something for the mouth”, which consists of a defamiliarising six-and-a-half page long sentence. Superficially, both the prologue and most of the novel are based on a first-person narrator, Dom Ullis, but in actuality his perception, especially via the use of free indirect discourse (Bal 2017: 47–52; Bradford 1997; Rimmon-Kenan 2002), is juxtaposed with, substituted by, or mixed with the voices of other characters. In particular, the very long

Otherness, Style and Indian English  45 prologue is significant, as it can be seen as a sort of monologue, built as an attention-grabbing structure, which speculates on the nearly coterminous roles of author, narrator, and focaliser (Gavins 2007; Stockwell 2002). The prologue-monologue intertwines its double subject(s), with a ‘narrating I’ (the real narrating voice of the author/character) and a ‘narrated I’ (the projection of the narrative role onto other characters), and deliberately traverses different diegetic levels, thus generating complexity in meaning: Bombay, which obliterated its own history by changing its name and surgically altering its face, is the hero or heroin of this story, and since I’m the one who’s telling it and you don’t know who I am, let me say that we’ll get to the who of it but not right now, because now there’s time enough not to hurry, to light the lamp and open the window to the moon and take a moment to dream of a great and broken city, because when the day starts its business I’ll have to stop, these are night-time tales that vanish in sunlight like vampire dust – wait now, light me up so we do this right, yes, hold me steady to the lamp, hold it, hold, good, a slow pull to start with, to draw the smoke low into the lungs, yes, oh my, and another and now we can begin at the beginning with the first time at Rashid’s when I stitched the blue smoke from pipe to blood and eye to I and out into the blue world – and now we’re getting to the who of it and I can tell you that I, the I, you’re imagining at this moment, a thinking someone who’s writing these words, who’s arranging time in a logical chronological sequence, someone with an overall plan, an engineer-god in the machine, well, that isn’t the I who’s telling this story, that’s the I who’s being told, thinking of my first pipe at Rashid’s, trawling my head for images, a face, a bit of music, or the sound of someone’s voice, trying to remember what it was like, the past, recall it as I would the landscape and light of a foreign country, because that’s what it is, not fiction or dead history, but a place you lived in once and cannot return to, which is why I’m trying to remember how it was that I got into trouble in New York. (Thayil 2012: 1–2) The speaking voice here complicates the effect of focalisation because it blends an external and internal gaze, handling different kinds of deixis that produce (and complicate) distance, complicity, and reliability. From a cognitive poetics angle (Stockwell 2002: 41–57), in particular, the text emphasises the perceptual shift (the different entities or voices), with almost obsessively recurring personal and relative pronouns (‘I’, ‘you’, ‘who’), sometimes premodified (‘a thinking someone’), as well as temporal and spatial shifts, signalled by time adverbs (‘now’), back-shifting verb phrases and expressions (‘thinking of’, ‘once’), grammatical tenses

46  Otherness, Style and Indian English (‘which obliterated its own history’) and locative expressions (‘Bombay’, ‘a great and broken city’, ‘at Rashid’s’, ‘in New York’). Therefore, this is the first step and setting-up of a narrative framing device, which involves various entities such as narrators, focalisers, and addressees that, far from adhering to what is announced as an “arranging time in a chronological logical sequence”, undermine linearity and order through a wealth of ramified stories, or voices. Interestingly, as Stanyon notes in her discussion of metaphors in De Quincey’s opium wars essays, in reality the word pipe highlights its status as a wind instrument associated with voices and vocal pipes, and with the cultural poetics of pipes as conduits and connectors: pipes often link the low with the high, or, in the case of smoking, different states of consciousness. (2020: 20–21) In this light, the pipe becomes an important index of polyphony and interconnection that unlocks the character’s ability to speak out and represent facets of identity and alterity. Moreover, a closer reading reveals that the way in which the opium pipe is mentioned is indebted to the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia, “an extension or variation of personification, in which an inanimate object is given human attributes, or an object and human are blended” (Wales 2011: 347). In the writer’s imaginative treatment, in fact, the object seems to be given agency and address directly the characters/readers by using imperative forms (“hold me steady to the lamp, hold, good, a slow pull to start with”), thus generating new estranging effects, or perhaps suggesting the intoxicating effect of the drug. The stylistic outcome of Thayil’s prose coincides with an experimental form of free indirect discourse “with its fusion of time and mental spaces” (Wales 2011: 46), in this case aiming at reproducing the viewpoint and subjectivity of a character under the intoxicating effects of drugs. Interestingly, the narrative depiction of characters under the effects of drugs or other substances that alter their state of mind is often a complex operation that appropriates forms of discourse presentation, in particular free indirect discourse. In this respect, cognitive stylistics provides useful tools for the mapping of such relations and meanings, for example showing how the mind style of a fictional alcoholic character is organised through the orchestration of speech and thought (Rundquist 2020). Readers’ responses to the overflowing complexity of the text may vary because not only is the theme of drugs difficult to manage per se, but, as argued above, the very narrative architecture conceived by Thayil may slow, confound, or impinge on the reading process. However, difficulty in the attentional processing is aimed at producing a reaction (or

Otherness, Style and Indian English  47 provocation) and ultimately a discussion of important issues. From the very beginning, the urge to tell and listen to stories – a kind of Scheherazade syndrome that affects most characters – contributes to the general framework of the novel, because the text is actually organised in a myriad of stories (featuring memories, expectations, and fantasies too). Dimple, for example, is defined as a “story addict, the kind of reader – if she had been able to read – who hated to get to the end of a book” (Thayil 2012: 15), but it is in the very beginning of the novel that the inclusive first-person subject affirms his intention to “be giving in to the lovely stories” (Thayil 2012: 7). This aspect might be viewed through a conceptual lens, in particular with the idea of cognitive metaphor (Montagne), which as I explained in the introductory chapter connects two domains (source and target) to create “a new knowledge domain with its own image-schematic structure” (Gavins 2007: 5). The metatextual motif that regularly surfaces through the narrative may be rendered in the cognitive metaphor storytelling is a drug, thus with a conceptual mapping of narratives and the desire to narrate as a sort of endless compulsion and attraction that further echoes the idea of addiction. As the novelistic architecture is instrumental in the depiction of the characters’ identity, it also reveals its cognitive nature as “narratives are one of the fundamental aspects of understanding” (Stockwell 2002: 122) and fiction as parable incorporates, elaborates, and reshapes a wealth of knowledge, memories, and ideas. Moreover, the double pattern of drug discourse and Otherness is here reinforced thanks to the allusion to Thayil’s autobiographical elements, since many reviews of the novel (including Bornstein 2014 and King 2012) note the author’s alleged personal experience with the world of narcotics, and it is too tempting not to mention how the narrative format (i.e. the idea of constructing and eliciting stories) also constitutes a practice and method commonly found in various educational services, including rehabilitation techniques, as illustrated among others by Davies (1997a), so that drug-addicts are asked to narrativise their own experience in order to produce material considered useful for enhancing reflection and motivation. My analysis of Narcopolis has tried to unearth how Thayil employs various language resources to portray forms of Otherness, with a particular focus on liminal subjects, through the articulations of drug discourse, hence subverting a monolithic mainstream vision that pigeonholes individuals and identities by constructing specific notions of social belonging and/or cultural exclusion. The adoption of the drug domain as a centripetal force in the text allows the writer to question fixed norms of respectability and normality as he delves into the complexities and contradictions of postcolonialism (and to a certain extent postmodernity and globalisation). Not only does he illustrate the destructive effects

48  Otherness, Style and Indian English of intoxication, including neurological impairment, but he also deconstructs the cultural and social implications underlying the idea of addiction (Davies 1997b). For Dimple, for instance, addiction is “an antidote to loneliness” (Thayil 2012: 230), but she also adds that it isn’t the heroin that we’re addicted to, it’s the drama of the life, the chaos of it, that’s the real addiction and we never get over it; and because, when you come down to it, the high life, that is, the intoxicated life, is the best of the limited options we are offered. (Thayil 2012: 231) Although it may sound like a justification for illegal activities and the use of recreational drugs, her point concerns more the stratifications and unevenness of society than a hedonistic attitude, and, as such, it interrogates common perceptions, ideologies, and stereotypes by calling for attention and reflection on this dramatic problem. In this light, the drug question dramatically foregrounds a landscape of precarity and marginality, especially for those subjects that have been condemned to liminality for their Otherness. Qualitative support has been provided here to show that Jeet Thayil builds his ambiguous writing as an allegory of opium abuse. But this writer does not provide clear-cut answers to the questions of drug use and its effects on society, nor does he simply side with one celebratory or stigmatising vision, but rather he plays with a range of intertextual and symbolic elements. The image of detoxifying treatment, for example, is rendered in the form of a pun, whose ironic connotations sadly cast doubts on the future: indeed, a type of bitter sentiment is encoded in the name of the facility where Dom takes Dimple, which anticipates a condition of hopelessness: “Safer, the rehab centre where I’d taken my most recent unsuccessful cure” (Thayil 2012: 223). Tackling a thorny issue such as drugs, which society deeply associates with diversity, threat, and apprehension, the novelist sets out a broad framework of speculation on the meanings, imaginings, and workings of identity and alterity, in their conflicting relationship not only with the world of drugs but also with society at large (Montagne 1988). In this light, for Davies the meaning of addiction goes beyond a set of restricted connotations, because it “is not simply a state of a person; nor an inherent pharmacological property of drugs […], it is a way of thinking (a ‘construct’), and it is the psychological consequence (‘output’) of a many faceted system” (1997a: 22), and as such it represents inner feelings, weaknesses, and perceptions of the self. Ultimately, Otherness turns out to be another side or dimension of identity, even in a plural perspective, and this paradigm lies at the root of the text here considered, as Thayil himself in an interview with Bose (2012: 39) affirms that “addiction is the only means of exaltation and of escape”. From this perspective, Narcopolis is

Otherness, Style and Indian English  49 a celebration of the cultural mixture of Bombay along with the broken expectations and impossible visions of some of its people, who believe in the “hybrid reality of modern India” (O’Connor 2015: 11).

3.4 Of Poets, Saints, and Sinners: Indian English and Postcolonial Heteroglossia This section is dedicated to the investigation of the second novel by Thayil, in particular by applying the notion of postcolonial decadent literature recently elaborated by Stilling (2018). Some decadent themes the idea of opium, already appear in Narcopolis, but it is with The Book of Chocolate Saints that the novelist elaborates them fully. The focus of my analysis is on language strategies, and specifically the recourse to polyphony and heteroglossia as stratagems for the representation of idea of identity and art, in particular via the use of aphorisms and lists. Thayil’s The Book of Chocolate Saints is a recent Indian English elegiac novel that returns to imaginary poet and painter Newton Francis Xavier in the attempt to fictionalise the cultural environment of the Bombay poets and artists of the 1970s and 1980s (Bird 2017; Khullar 2018) and its heritage. A non-chronological narrative that looks like a sort of enquiry, the text is particularly complex in its mishmash of first-person and third-person narrators. By virtue of its convoluted stratification of voices, styles, and tones, it cumulatively seems to generate a sense of postcolonial decadence. At the same time, it also appropriates, and develops, the fin-de-siècle debate on the value of art as a means to express and question human identity, in particular focusing upon its main artiste maudit, and other bizarre and elusive characters too. In fact, this elliptical novel continuously extends and reshapes its locative and temporal deictic dimension by shifting from India to the UK and the USA, embedding memories of the late colonial time, the flowering years of new Indian poetry, and the post 9/11 period as well. Although postcolonialism and decadence superficially seem to be incompatible or distant concepts, Stilling (2018) convincingly exhibits their fruitful interconnection, in particular with reference to the genres of poetry and visual arts. Here I adopt his argument to corroborate a stylistic investigation of Thayil’s multivoiced writing, and my research question concerns the ideological effects of productive strategies such as heteroglossia, intertextuality, and symbolism used by the author in the narrative (Allen 2000; Bakhtin 1981, 1984; Clark 2013). Given the thematic scope of the novel, I also consider the complex and at times uneasy, or decadent, relation between the self and the realm of art in the postcolonial context, as exemplified in the sulphurous main character. A number of extracts containing an illustration of different modes of narration including listing style and aphorisms are taken into examination to tackle this type of kaleidoscopic narrative

50  Otherness, Style and Indian English and the analysis will be set against the intersection of different disciplines, methodologically drawing on stylistics, narratology, and postcolonial discourse. As Dowling (1986) theorises, late Victorian decadence did not merely bring a mere flourishing of sensationalism and provocation, from Walter Pater to Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, but also inaugurated a debate on language, art, and culture, now observed from a romantic philological perspective. The legacy of such a fecund period filters through epochs and arises in the postcolonial scenario too, in which contemporary “artists reinvent fin-de-siècle aestheticism as a means of capturing the ‘worldliness’ of postcolonial and diasporic experience while drawing attention to the lingering legacy of colonialism in the contemporary literary and artistic establishment” (Stilling 2018: 12). Such a discourse mainly concerns poets and visual artists, but it can certainly be extended to fiction, as in the case of Thayil, whose work emphasises modernity against the backdrop of the (colonial) past through a range of echoes. Of course, the key term here is decadence, “a simple word but a complicated notion” (Weir 2018: 1), which however fittingly applies to Thayil’s writing, music, and personal life too, and which Stilling discusses in the following manner: It is perhaps because ‘decadence’, like ‘progress’, describes the trajectory between relative, even arbitrary points and because its contents are so difficult to pin down that it proves so pervasive as a term that enables comparisons between disparate cultures and historical periods. It allows for synchronic comparisons between cultures emerging, like spores on a wheel, from the same declining empires around the same time, even as it allows for comparisons between historical formations that may rise and fall centuries, even millennia apart. (Stilling 2018: 17) Hence the justification for Stilling to consider the work of postcolonial writers and artists as diverse as Agha Shahid Ali, Yinka Sonibare, and Derek Walcott through the lens of decadent discourse, and I argue that the same is possible with Jeet Thayil, considering his rich prose and poetry. In The Book of Chocolate Saints, the central character is once again the poet and painter Newton Francis Xavier, here depicted as an alcoholic and a seducer of young women, but much space is also devoted to his biographer Dismas Bambai, who interviews the poet’s mentally instable mother Beryl Xavier, his first school and university tutors, and others to enrich his sensationalist work. To a certain extent, Bambai, whose name is a mispronunciation of Bombay, suggests Thayil’s autobiographical experience as a young Indian man in New York, when he lived and worked in the States and had to deal with ethnic discrimination too.

Otherness, Style and Indian English  51 Interestingly, names and naming are two areas through which prominence is given to certain features because they give contours to conceptual deixis, in particular relational deixis, regulating the stratified dynamics between author, narrators, and characters (Stockwell 2002: 46). As mentioned above, the main character’s name concentrates contradictory and suggestive aspects, while the names of his parents (Frank and Beryl) are actually taken from real life as they are the same as Dom Moraes’ parents, and even the name of the imaginary hometown (Forgottem) of Thayil’s protagonist is a sort of pun, rich in connotations. It is not easy to sum up the overall organisation of the novel, which articulates a number of narrative subplots and intertextual references, sometimes amplified by unreliable narration, but some semiotic considerations may also help us to understand the ambitious goals of Thayil’s project. I am referring to the structural and paratextual elements of the novel, which contains a prologue followed by seven sections (books), each preceded by a poem from the fictitious anthology “The Book of Chocolate Saints (Unpublished)” and a final epilogue. Other interesting aspects include the Dedication page, which reads “In memory of Dom Moraes (1938–2004)”, thus sanctioning the direct bond between the author and his putative father, as well as a quotation from Eric Gill, the eccentric and scandalous English sculptor, typeface designer, and printmaker, associated with the Arts and Crafts movement (18880–1920). This quotation brings to the limelight the metaphorical and symbolic theme of sanctity as a mystic, and yet real, condition for the individual: “What is the mark that distinguishes the good from the bad, in works as in men? Holiness is the only word for it”. Moreover, the Indian hardback edition of the novel displays a detail from Manu Parekh’s painting The Last Supper (2017) on the book cover. Cumulatively, therefore, the novel asserts its bizarre characterisation and activates a series of echoes from decadent discourse, such as mentioning poets like Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud. A notion that can be utilised to tackle the stylistic complexity evoked by Thayil’s writing is the idea of polyphony, which indicates “literally the simultaneous combination of parts or elements or voices” (Allen 2000: 22). This is tied to the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia (‘other’ + ‘tongue/voice’), which defines “language’s ability to contain within it many voices, one’s own and other voices” (Allen 2000: 29, emphasis in the original). In this light, the narrative scaffolding that surrounds the story is realised by a plethora of postcolonial linguistic strategies (Ashcroft 2009; Talib 2002), spanning various genres and forms, such as interviews, letters, emails, citations, fictitious poems, lists, continuous time and space deictic shifts, mixture of genres (fiction/poems), modes of narration (1st/3rd person narrator; reported speech, apostrophic ‘you’), naming and literary onomastics, and linguistic repertoires (varieties of English + borrowings from Hindi and Marathi). Significantly, the last

52  Otherness, Style and Indian English point reminds the reader of the complexities and tensions of India’s multilingual scenario, particularly if we consider that Xavier, following the example of the real-life Bombay poets, does not use his native tongue, Konkani, but adopts English as his first language, and this is a political choice. Clearly, the author’s heteroglossia implies a range of ideological effects, in particular concerning the representation of a plurality of voices and styles viewed as an inescapable condition of being, which in turn generates a form of intertextuality that juxtaposes India and the world across time and space, thus strengthening the correlation between identity and the need/desire to narratively record experience and build symbols. But the use of heteroglossic varieties of English has also linguistic implications since it “induces linguistic and cultural anxiety for a previously monoglot nation or one that wishes to preserve monoglossia as a mythical golden standard” (Clark 2013: 159). However, it should also be recognised that heteroglossia may also bring about interpretative problems connected with reliability since the reader of The Book of Chocolate Poets is often puzzled by the various narrators and characters, and consequently does not know who should be trusted in this intricate arena. The novel’s polyphony is realised via different stylistic features, such as the succession of narrators and focalisers, but one that recurs particularly, and therefore appears as a marked element, is the use of lists and enumeration. It is worth recalling that lists constitute not only the very first and most basic form of knowledge organisation, but also cognitive modes of classification. For Bowker and Leigh Star, human beings have a natural tendency to classify and make lists, created according to specific parameters, and the two scholars provide the following definition: “a classification is a spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal segmentation of the world. A ‘classification system’ is a set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things can be put to then do some kind of workbureaucratic or knowledge production” (2000: 10). Lists cut across genres and modes, and terminologically are often indicated as taxonomies, encyclopaedias, menus, archives, shopping lists, agendas, and so forth, while historical and cultural examples of them abound in every epoch and place, ranging from the listing style of epic poems to experimental literatures and other narratives and authors as diverse as the Tain, in the ancient Irish context, Rabelais, Moby Dick, and Borges. In all these examples, lists function as attention-grabbing rhetorical devices, and like complex paintings offer much more than what appears on the surface. The Italian writer and intellectual Umberto Eco, for instance, ambitiously turned this type of structure into a form of hyperbole in his peculiar book The Infinity of Lists (2009) by compiling a sort of anthology of lists taken from a range of fields such as literature, art, and history: clearly Eco’s project is a sort of postmodern provocation, or original challenge to rationality, definiteness, and categorisation, and all

Otherness, Style and Indian English  53 the criteria that govern them, and the effect that listing can engender at a conceptual level. A list, in fact, can not only display a collection of items linked together by following the function of the list itself, but it can also overflow into endless catalogues through which human beings try to order and explain life and the world around them. From this perspective, lists could be governed by two principles, based respectively on essence and on property. The former refers to substances, which are finite and known, and thus create finite, orderly, and coherent lists, whilst the latter leads to catalogues organised by analogies and affinities that are not apparently distinguishable and identifiable, thus with many arranging criteria. However, it might be argued that all lists aim at coherence, which is a cardinal point in information science, a field that is concerned not only with the analysis of information but also with collection, storage, and retrieval. The notion of coherence (viewed as rigour or scientificity) should then be replaced by salience, which expresses the most meaningful aspects of the list for both the author and the reader of the list within a specific context. The building blocks of this type of list, then, are either foregrounded or backgrounded according to the values they convey within the purpose of the text itself. In linguistics, lists are textual functions connected with enumerating, and partially with exemplifying, but they are also akin to the notion of apposition, defined by Katie Wales (2011: 30) as “a sequence of units (usually noun phrases) with identical reference and grammatical function”, which typically operate through appositional markers or connectives such as ‘namely’ or ‘that is to say’. Whereas apposition takes up different syntactic forms and functions (Meyer 1992), from a conceptual and psychological angle, enumeration can be understood in a twofold way, as lists of three or more than three objects. The ideological power of enumeration then may differ according to the structure it adopts: for Jeffries (2010a: 73) “the ubiquitous three-part list seems to imply completeness, without being comprehensive, and often appears to supplant real content, particularly in contexts where positive image-making is seen as important”. On the contrary, lists that display more than three elements give the impression of being genuine, literal, and explicit, thus drawing attention to each single component. Most of the time, Thayil’s narrative offers examples of huge lists, which semantically and pragmatically exploit the accumulation of different items (words, phrases, clauses), with the result that the hyperbolic and defamiliarising lists contained in the novel convey a symbolic salience as a new, and alternative, index of the Indian postcolonial world, different from the stereotypical images produced by canonical authors. For Thayil, lists are multivoiced apparatuses that trigger intertextuality, and as Allen (2000: 1) points out, “meaning becomes something which exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual

54  Otherness, Style and Indian English relations. The text becomes the intertext”. In the novel, lists are plentiful and refer to poets, artists, saints, places, deities, and many other categories, extensively intertwining a chaotic profusion of allusions. For example, when Dimas Bambai interviews Good Lol in New York to enquire about Newton Francis Xavier, she says that he loved making lists, and in particular he was busy with a “list of suicide saints […] a partial list because a complete list would be endless” (Thayil 2017: 248). Significantly and symbolically, it must be noted that the issue of saintliness is not new for Thayil since he hinted at it in his first novel, although in that context it was more an allusion to the poetic inheritance of Jean Genet to epitomise “pimps, prostitutes and poets in a city where the gutters are above ground” (Bose 2012: 43), whereas now it becomes a key narrative device. It is not by coincidence that extensive lists constitute a device frequently found in decadent literature, as demonstrated for example by the extravagant lists of objects such as flowers, books, and paintings that the neurotic aesthete meticulously describes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ plotless novel à rebours (1884, translated into English as Against Nature or Against the Grain). During the last phase of the Victorian age, the triumph of decadent aestheticism manifested itself in tandem with the colonial habit of importing and collecting exotic objects from faraway territories, from textiles to masks and statues, and therefore symbolically lists are also another link between Thayil’s writing, postcolonialism, and decadence, although in the case of the Indian author lists are not simply a catalogue of references, but unveil more complex echoes and meanings. The following is an example of Thayil’s overabundant lists, in which figurative and emotional force is given by the wealth of names of poets and artists from different countries and times who have committed suicide: He [NFX] opened the notebook and said the list would begin at the beginning with the Book, because nowhere does the Bible condemn self-murder. How could it when martyrdom was an early variant of suicide? And if suicide was a religious act then suicides were the unacknowledged saints of the universe. Beginning with Samson under the pillars. Or Saul taking to his sword, his name cursed for all, like Saint Judas, the second most famous biblical suicide. Or Jesus himself, whose death was a pact the Son made with the Father, Jesus and all his apostles, self-made suicides to a man. He said he had come to a conclusion that a complete list was too difficult an enterprise even for him, asking to making a world-sized map of the world. Instead he would begin with poets and proceed not chronologically but sideways, starting with the earlier Romans such as Lucretius and Lucan and Labienus. Or Attila Jozsef who answered to the name of Pista, because after consultation with the neighbours his foster parents decided that the name Attila did not exist and when he found it

Otherness, Style and Indian English  55 years later in a story about the King of the Huns he threw himself on literature as on a sword. Mayakovski the gambler, partial to Russian roulette, failed prophet whose gunshot was heard around the world. Sergei Yesenin’s blood-written goodbye, his patent leather shoes and the handheld noose like a scarf around a neck his neck because there was nothing new in dying or in living. And Marina, unable to work, penniless from slaving on the hard ship, her husband and daughter taken, abandoned by her lovers, and begging in advance for her son’s forgiveness. The pharmacist Georg Trakl, whose sweet secret daffodils, the white sleep, the silver hand, the silver scent of daffodils, the red body of the fish, the red poppy, the red wolf, the purple grapple, the green silence, the green flower, the rain, the blue grief, the soft blue footsteps of those who had risen from the dead. Gérard de Nerval, who told his aunt, this life is a hovel, don’t wait up, and hanged himself with an apron string. Renaldo Arenas sick in New York City, and his note, Cuba will be free, as I already am. Ana Cristina Cesar harnessing the evil of writing to confront desire, who gave in on a London street. And Celan deep in the Seine, free to be Ancel again. […] Virginia, bombed from two homes, left on the banks of the River Ooze her hat and cane and a letter to Leonard: everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. Walter Benjamin in Spain, on a trudge to nowhere, transit cancelled, delivered by morphia, whose friend Koestler borrowed some and tried it too, but failed, and tried again forty-three years later, this time taking with him a wife. […] Emilio Salgari, seppuku in a forest, raging against his publishers, to whom he wrote, at least have the decency to pay from my funeral. Diane Arbus who said if she had photographed Maryiln, suicide would have been writ plainly on her famous face, as it was on her own, Diane, with her downers and slit wrists and overkill. John Minton, friend, drinking partner, hoarder of Tuinals, painter at odds with an abstracted time. Ray Johnson’s backstroke from the Sag Harbor bridge, Frida’s painkillers, Dora Carrington’s pistol, Pollock speeding and the tree he aimed for, the miniaturist Daswanth’s dagger, Witkiewicz tied to his lover, who revived, Arshile Gorky wifeless, studio, burnt down, broke and yearning for clarity. Dalida and her luck the third time round. Richard Brautigan and Feddie Prinze and Leslie Cheung, who stepped from the Mandarin Oriental in Central, twenty-four floors to the street below. And the actresses of the Indian south. Silk Smitha, who took the poor woman’s recourse and wound dupatta to ceiling fan. Lakshmisree and Nafsia Joseph, also Monal, also Shobbha, all of seventeen. Fatafat Jayalakshmi’s sleeping pills. Prathyusha’s juice and poison in a parked car. Divya Bharati, fooling on the ledge under her window. And my old friend and collaborator, the poet Narayan Doss, dead drunk and dead on platform two of Churchgate Station,

56  Otherness, Style and Indian English and if the cause of death was a heart attack the true cause suicide by alcohol. And the list would end as it began, with a Roman poet, say Cesare Pavese on a hotel bed, writing, ‘Okay, don’t gossip too much’, because he knew that gossip would become part of his myth, the poet’s suicide myth, which, as we know, is the most powerful of all suicide myths. (Thayil 2017: 248–251) Such a massive list, textually organised with no paragraph breaking, is in reality much longer, and here is reproduced in an edited version. Of course, the list is not complete in spite of its apparently boundless size and scope because other items might be added, also considering that “all information systems are infused with ethical and political values” (Bowker and Leigh Star 2000: 321). In other words, even if the reader can notice the key verbs ‘begin’ and ‘end’, the general effect is mesmerising, and the criteria by which the list is organised is not transparent, as Newton Francis Xavier himself imagines this list as a “world-size map of the world”. Moreover, it is structurally ambiguous because it overlaps a form of apposition, with items modified by other elements illustrating identification (‘the pharmacist Georg Trakl’), designation (‘Mayakovski the gambler’), explanation, or reformulation. Stylistically, the passage is constructed via the use of conjunctions (‘and’, ‘or’) and an abundance of semantically (and emblematically) intertwined phrases, clauses, and sentences that generate an effect of Fowlerian over-lexicalisation (Wales 2011: 298), with peculiar decadent and symbolist reminiscences, but it also utilises other techniques, such as chromatic connotations (‘the red poppy’, ‘the green flower’), in particular by virtue of a synaesthetic process of metaphorisation (‘the blue grief’, ‘the green silence’). Cumulatively, the structure of the list here, and in other parts of the novel, catalyses the reader’s attention because its abundant items function as textual attractors, i.e. objects that stimulate readers’ attention. In particular, some of the elements of Thayil’s lists are foregrounded because they exhibit the features that Stockwell (2009: 25) labels “fullness” and “aesthetic distance from the norm”, respectively defined as “richness, density, intensity” and “beautiful or ugly referents, dangerous referents, alien objects denoted, dissonance”. As a matter of fact, Thayil’s language as a whole sensibly departs from the usual style adopted by postcolonial Indian authors to mix up reverberations from the discourses of decadence, mysticism, and allegory against a complex narrative palimpsest, so that it is not always easy to track down narrating voices as they fade away in a network of stories within stories, fictional interviews, and imaginary poems. However, the passage reproduced above is noteworthy because it primarily brings to the fore the image selected by the author to capture and discuss a number of cultural and postcolonial issues, i.e. the allusion

Otherness, Style and Indian English  57 to the figure of the saint, thus demonstrating that “classifications are powerful technologies” (Bowker and Leigh Star 2000: 319). In a very decadent and even mystical vein, through the fictional aid of Newton Francis Xavier, Thayil reverses the prototypical features of the saint and imagines suicides as saints because “martyrdom was an early variant of suicide” and consequently “suicide was a religious act” (Thayil 2017: 248). However, the supposed infinity of this list persuades the protagonist to focus on poets, thus equating sanctity and poetry, and hence the copiousness of poets (and other artists) that constellate the entire extract. The allusion to poetry of course is a homage to the intellectual circle of the Bombay poets, who are weirdly depicted in the novel as “poets who sprouted from the soil like weeds or mushrooms or carnivorous new flowers, who arrived like meteors, burned bright for a season or two and vanished without a trace” (Thayil 2017: 50). Such a peculiar metaphorical description draws from the domain of nature and indexes connotations of danger, or ambiguity (‘weeds’, ‘carnivorous new flowers’), but also evanescence. It also operates with a didactic purpose, like a message of tempus fugit, the expression that Virgil used in Book 3 of Georgics, but it also resonates with the words used by Walter Pater (1873) in his essays on the Renaissance, and similarly suggests other possible ties with the world of decadence (Weir 2018), such as the idea of vanitas, the Latin expression that indicates the transiency, and ephemerality, of life, which derives from Ecclesiastes. Whilst on the one hand, the verbose style of the author in preparing long lists may require great creative and attentional input from readers, on the other it certainly provides suggestive characterisation and subtle metaphors. As the title of the novel metatextually evokes poems and saints, it is the premodifier ‘chocolate’ that functions as an attentiongrabbing element. Why should saints be defined in this way? The term ‘chocolate’ is pragmatically a form of face threatening act, namely a form of sacrilegious characterisation that challenges readers to refresh and revise prototypical features of membership (the category of saints). Even more importantly, other inferences come into the picture, introducing and framing the discourse of ethnic belonging and implicitly colourism. Evidence of this type of conceptualisation stems from Thayil’s personal experience within the Syrian Christian religion, when he was “surrounded by an iconography of blond, blue-eyed saints” (Taneja 2018). However, the question related to skin colour cannot be passively treated by an Indian writer, and in an interview he affirms: I realised that so many of the saints that we think of as white, as Caucasian, were not. […] They were swarthy, dark skinned, black haired, unwashed men and women. I got very excited and I started looking for these saints and it’s astonishing how many there are. (Taneja 2018)

58  Otherness, Style and Indian English Thayil extensively applies the filters of postcolonial decadence to build up his narrative and points out how Xavier, as a child, was frequently brought by his mother to Christian churches in Goa to admire the statues, and relics, of saints and martyrs that attracted popular religiosity. The two even had a game, as his mother recounts: “whenever we saw a brown saint, not a white saint but a brown one, and there are several if you know where to look, then the one who saw it first would give the other a pitch” (Thayil 2017: 15). Beryil Xavier, Newton’s mother, is herself an outlandish character, who ends her days at the Bangalore Institute of Mental Health, and spotlights the mystical connection with saints and divinity with stories “about Joan of Arc, our direct ancestor, about the links between the Goddess Kali and the Black Madonna of Byzantium” (Thayil 2017: 18). To sum up, therefore, the theme of saintliness is an expedient for Thayil to handle questions related to ethnicity as a paradigm of identity, split between colonial heritage, local religions, and manifold modernity. Newton Francis Xavier is undoubtedly the prototypical illustration of the artiste maudit, here in the guise of a doomed Indian, alcoholic, and provocative dandy, whose personal quest aims at aestheticism and beauty and who advocates a revitalisation of the canon. In other words, the character weaves in a dialogue between the self and the arts, always in the shadow of the real poet Dom Moraes, and he strives to stage the inner sense of identity through artistic, provocative, and unconventional modes in the postcolonial world, thanks to the effect of decadence and a sense of history. Xavier’s flamboyant personality places him in the category of artists who “reinvent fin-de-siècle aestheticism as a means of capturing the ‘worldliness’ of postcolonial and diasporic experience while drawing attention to the lingering legacy of colonialism in the contemporary literary and artistic establishment” (Stilling 2018: 12). Another stylistic infrastructure through which the novelist appropriates and elaborates decadent themes and forms, from mysticism to myths of ancient times, often takes the form of the aphorism, which “is a pithy statement or maxim expressing some general or gnomic truth about (human) nature” (Wales 2011: 27). First used by Hippocrates in antiquity, and then perfected by authors as diverse as Confucius, Jesus, and Nietzsche, for Hui the term refers to “the shortest of genres” (2019: 1), but sometimes its definition is akin to or overlaps other textual typologies such as proverbs, adages, epigrams, and brief moral sayings. Morson (2012) for example expands the genre to include a number of short forms such as apothegms, which indicate unclear or mysterious messages, and riddles, which are prototypically attached to the classical story of Oedipus and the Sphinx (Lass et al. 1987: 209), but also paradoxes, deathbed wits, and sardonic maxims. Incidentally, it should be added that the Sphinx is a mythical creature that reverberated in decadent fiction and art, along with the Chimaera, a monster that symbolises imagination

Otherness, Style and Indian English  59 and fantasy. Typically, aphorisms are built in an apodictic form, designating necessarily true or self-evident utterances, or instead impossible ones, and their function and power derive from being elements of an assertive author–narrator, habitually marked by the use of the present tense, which ultimately generates the effect of proximity, emphasis, and firmness. Although aphorisms are usually associated with general truths and are sometimes used to express humour, an opinion, or a statement of wisdom, their meaning is not always transparent, and may indeed reveal an enigmatic dimension and require the active collaboration of the reader to decode the meaning synthesised in this microform. Capitalising the lexical and syntactic compactness of its structure, the aphorism still emerges today in a range of more or less canonical, or fluid, forms, in particular in online environments and on social platforms, from tweets to memes and GIFs, to assert its communicative power. Aphorisms can also be viewed as narratorial devices, whereby the speaking character provides the reader with a sort of guidance, and in Thayil’s novel they also constitute an echo of Bohemian (or rather Wildean) decadence. However, from a pragmatic angle, aphorisms can be viewed as face-threatening acts at narrator–reader level (Black 2006: 74) because they violate the cooperative principle that regulates the relationship between interlocutors (Yule 1996: 36–38) by concentrating in a few words complex meanings and references that actually should be spelt out differently, and more extensively. In the narrative, Xavier’s aphorisms usually enrich the flow of the text, and somehow also appear to apostrophically address the reader, for example in the interview given to Dismas Bambai, from which I extrapolate instantiations of aphorisms such as “Art makes nothing happen but it survives”, “I prefer not to live in the past”, and also “One must be true to one’s own clichés” (Thayil 2017: 74). But aphorisms may also surface in a question-and-answer exchange between characters, such as when Farzana Amanella Kaur, an arts activist, reports a previous interview with Newton Francis Xavier to Bambai: Q: May I ask you why you drink so much? A: Such a question, useless and terrifying. Q: You mean there’s no reason why you drink so many vodkas and beer chasers? A: yes, there’s a reason. Someone has to do it. Someone has to drink as much as can be drunk. Q: Do you have to drink as much as can be drunk every time you drink? A: I have to.

60  Otherness, Style and Indian English Q: Why do you have to? A: I t’s better than being a banker or a chartered accountant or a chime lesser. (Thayil 2017: 227, emphasis in the original) Aphorisms in the guise of witty comments typically require an engagement with an audience, and “a social place where a crowd of the right people has gathered” (Morson 2012: 69), which in the case of Xavier can be an official meeting, a poetry reading, or simply a casual exchange with people not previously known. The artist employs aphorisms in his private life too, for instance with his partner and muse, Goody, when they travel to Delhi: “Boredom is an upper-class privilege. Count yourself amongst the fortunate” (416) and “Smoke is a way to communicate with the dead, a more effective method than relying on a medium, whose presence, as in a quantum theory, changes the nature of the communication” (438). The first aphorism is quite evocative of a certain type of decadence, and for Morson (2012: 63) “apothegms of process imagine boredom as a key force in life. Boredom is a nothing understood as a something, an ever-present absence people would do almost anything to avoid”. Sometimes the alcoholic poet’s aphorisms even emanate from cognitive metaphors, as in the following example, based on a container metaphor structure: “This is not my life and I do rather wish I could get out of it” (438), which is realised via a locative expression referring to an image schema, namely a mental structure about the sensory/bodily experience of the individual. In this way, although not devoid of puzzling connotations, Xavier’s aphorisms seem to treat philosophical or moral truths, and in so doing they work as inspirational patterns to motivate certain views, weakening the margins between fiction and non-fiction. The presence of numerous aphorisms seems to clash with the abundance of lists that I have tackled above, as the two patterns operate in antithetically different modes, one through synthesis and brevity, the other through explicitness and copiousness. In order to read the coexistence of the two, I bring in some considerations from Hui’s essay, in particular his argument that “the aphorism is a dialectical play between fragments and systems” (2019: 12). Drawing a suggestive parallel between the aphorism and the fragment, the scholar points out the impossibility of simultaneously catching the multitude of reality and the world, and its numberless layers of meaning, and therefore anchors the focus to the part, rather than the entirety. In Hui’s (2019: 14) words, “textual criticism’s greatest desire is the reconstitution of the whole, yet […] the wholeness of an artefact—whether it be a text, painting, sculpture, or building—is in fact nothing but a fantasy”. In this perspective, the strategic use of aphorisms for Thayil has the effect of triggering an internal system of balancing with the pattern of the lists, in order to

Otherness, Style and Indian English  61 calibrate the text, and offer an attempt, or illusion, for the author/character, to interpret and understand the meaning of life (and art) against the backdrop of other postcolonial preoccupations. Hui, also, adds that an aphorism, in this sense, is a mark of our finitude, ever approaching the receding horizon, always visible yet never tangible. It pushes us to the edge of what can be grasped; it reaches for the je ne sais quoi. Beyond the horizon of language, thinking can go no further. A vector that simultaneously points within and without the boundary—horos— of discourse, the short saying limns the very boundaries of thinking itself. (2019: 16) A system of equilibrium between the part and the whole (the shortness of the aphorism and the abundance of the list) thus arises and endorses the diegetic process. Many of the aphorisms uttered by Newton Francis Xavier, and other characters too, showcase the relevant use of the context, the city of Bombay, viewed not as a mere geographical canvas, but rather as a paradigm to reinvent identity, and ties, i.e. a place that becomes “the city of dreams, the utopian city of possibilities, the dystopian city of crime and corruption” (Bird 2017: 656). Manifestly, much of Thayil’s writing is inspired by the Bombay poets and the cultural environment of the 1950s–1980s, from Nissim Ezekiel and Gieve Patel to Adil Jussawalla, and his fascination with these authors notably impacts on his style and poetics, in particular on his vivid portrayal of the city. According to Khullar (2018: 112–113), for example, “Bombay emerged in their work less as a discrete place than as an approach to art-making that reinscribed relations of power between the postcolonial city, imperial metropole, and Gandhian village”. Thayil’s literary Bombay thus stands out from the postcolonial fictional domain, being very different from the images produced by other authors such as Rohinton Mistry and Aravind Adiga. More generally, Jeet Thayil’s project discusses and problematises art (covering both writing and painting, and other forms too) as a mirror for the depiction and comprehension of human experience, following illustrious decadent predecessors, from Oscar Wilde to Gabriele D’Annunzio, with their faith in art as life. In this respect, the rhetorical devices that he uses, from pantagruelic lists to witty aphorisms, lend support to the manipulation of identity, to condense the role of art in life and to provoke the reader with the bulk of the world or its revealed unexpected ‘truths’. In closing this chapter, it is worth stressing the connections between postcolonialism, Otherness, and ideology (Khair 2009), and the narrative complexities of the postcolonial decadent novel exemplified by Thayil’s narrative, which pivots around the quest for expressive means to represent the inner self (in terms of different genres and perspectives),

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issues of aestheticism, and a sense of meaning as well as provocation and unconformity. With the early postcolonial writers in mind, Stilling (2018: 289) holds that “the language and tropes associated with decadent literature and art provided the means with which to critique the corrupt political, social, and artistic conditions of emerging national cultures, leading them to revise the idea of decadence in the process” and the same can be applied to Thayil’s plural narrative as well. The writer, in fact, unravels the manifestations of heteroglossia as a strategy to reshape monologic discourse and unlock voices ‘out of the box’ in the postcolonial Indian world, in particular in the form of the novel, whose strength can be summarised by “its capaciousness” (Bose 2012: 39). The different stylistic and rhetorical patterns that characterise the author’s production eventually may be revised through the principle of “unfinalizability”, which, according to Bakhtin (1984: 166), concerns the impossibility of monolithic and monologic representation due to the interplay of different, and inevitable, discourses through which the dynamic relation between the self and the other emerges. Heteroglossia thus makes the normative borders of writing (and understanding) permeable by promoting a multiplicity of unfinalisable, i.e. fluid, characters, whose identities, actions, and meanings always evolve in a dialogic system, which endorses the nature of “language as pluralistic” (Clark 2013: 158) as exemplified by Thayil’s selection of unconventional and excessive characters. More generally, it is a project of literary appropriation of art as a counter-discourse to depict identity in its multiple dimensions, orbiting around beauty, excesses, and the metaphor/provocation of saintliness, whereas ‘decadence’ becomes a means to rewrite/reread a segment of Indian society and history anew. Ultimately, the author goes beyond stereotypical figurations of Bombay as a cultural site of encounters and hybridisations, giving a textual voice and life to the emarginated since “one of the powers of fiction is that it can reinstate the erased and the disappeared” (Bose 2012: 39).

References Allen, Graham. 2000. Intertextuality. London: Routledge. Ashcroft, Bill. 2009. Caliban’s Voice. The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures. Abingdon: Routledge. Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen. 2000. Post-Colonial Studies. The Key Concepts. London: Routledge. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. “Discourse in the Novel”. In Holquist M., ed., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist). Austin: University of Texas Press, 259–422. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (ed. and trans. C. Emerson). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bal, Mieke. 2017. Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Otherness, Style and Indian English  63 Bird, Emma. 2017. “‘The Things not in the Picture’: Bombay’s Poets and the Re-representation of the City”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 53.6: 644–658. Black, Elizabeth. 2006. Pragmatic Stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Boon, Marcus. 2002. The Road of Excess. A History of Writers on Drugs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bornstein, Erica. 2014. “Stories of Poverty in India”. American Ethnologist, 41.1: 180–186. Bose, Siddhartha. 2012. “An Interview with Jeet Thayil”. Wasafiri 27.1: 38–43. Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Leigh Star, Susan. 2000. Sorting Things Out. Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Bradford, Richard. 1997. Stylistics. London: Routledge. Clark, Urszula. 2013. Language and Identity in Englishes. London: Routledge. Davies, John Booth. 1997a. Drugspeak. The Analysis of Drug Discourse. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association. Davies, John Booth. 1997b. The Myth of the Addiction. London: Routledge. Dent, Chris. 2019. “Nineteenth-Century Law, Literature and Opium”. Open Library of Humanities, 5.1.67: 1–19. https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.465. Dowling, Linda C. 1986. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Farooqui, Amar. 2006. Opium City: The Making of Early Victorian Bombay. New Delhi: Three Essays Collective. Fludernik, Monika. 2009. An Introduction to Narratology. Abingdon: Routledge. Gavins, Joanna. 2007. Text World Theory. An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gregoriou, Christiana. 2007. Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, Kira. 2013. “Commentary I: ‘It’s a hijra’! Queer Linguistics Revisited”. Discourse and Society, 24.5: 634–642. Hui, Andrew. 2019. A Theory of the Aphorism. From Confucius to Twitter. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Indian Express. 2017. “Jeet Thayil Was Inspired by ‘Soothing Sound’ of His Father’s Typewriter”. 7 December, https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/ books/jeet-thayil-interview-narcopolis-the-book-of-chocolate-sins-4971962/ (accessed 27 April 2021). Jeffrey, Craigg and Harriss, John. 2014. Keywords for Modern India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jeffries, Leslie. 2010a. Critical Stylistics. The Power of English. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffries, Leslie. 2010b. Opposition in Discourse. The Construction of Oppositional Meaning. London: Continuum. Khair, Tabish. 2009. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness. Ghosts from Elsewhere. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Khullar, Sonal. 2018. “‘We Were Looking for Our Violins”: The Bombay Painters and Poets, ca. 1965–76”. Archives of Asian Art 68.2: 111–132. King, Bruce. 2012. “Varieties of Indian Literature”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48.4: 443–448.

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Lass, Abraham H., Kiremidjian, David, and Goldenstein, Ruth. 1987. Dictionary of Classical and Literal Allusion. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth. Loomba, Ania. 2015. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Milligan, Barry. 1995. Pleasures and Pains. Opium and the Orient in 19th-Centutry British Culture. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. Meyer, Charles F. 1992. Apposition in Contemporary English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montagne, Michael. 1988. “The Metaphorical Nature of Drugs and Drug Taking”. Social Science & Medicine, 26.4: 417–424. Morson, Gary Saul. 2012. The Long and the Short of it. From Aphorism to Novel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nair, Rukmini Bhaya and deSouza, Peter Ronald, eds. 2020. Keywords for India. A Conceptual Lexicon for the Twenty-first Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Newport, Sarah Elizabeth. 2017. “‘Unnatural Offences’, Postcolonial Problems. The Ambivalent Position of Hijras in Contemporary Indian Law and Literature”. South Asian Review, 38.1: 87–99. O’Connor, Maurice. 2015. “The Narcotic Memes of Bombay”. Wasafiri, 30.3: 11–16. Pius, T.K. 2014. “The Narrative Strategy in Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis”. International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities, II.VI: 177–192. Ramone, Jenni. 2011. Postcolonial Theories. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002. Narrative Fiction. London: Routledge. Rushby, Kevin. 2012. “Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil. Review”. The Guardian, 17 February, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/17/narcopolis-jeetthayil-review (accessed 27 April 2021). Rundquist, Eric. 2020. “The Cognitive Grammar of Drunkenness. Consciousness Representation in Under the Volcano”. Language and Literature, 29.1: 39–56. Said, Edward W. 1995 [1978]. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books. Spivak, Gayatri C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. In Nelson C. and Grossberg L., eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 271–313. Stanyon, Miranda. 2020. “Organ Pipes and Bodies with Organs: Listening to De Quincey’s First Opium War essays”. Literature & History, 29.1: 19–36. Stilling, Robert. 2018. Beginning at the End. Decadence, Modernism and Postcolonialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics. London: Routledge. Stockwell, Peter. 2009. Texture. A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Talib, Ismail S. 2002. The Language of Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Taneja, Preti. 2018. “Interview with Jeet Thayil”. The Guardian, 9 February, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/09/jeet-thayil-interview-manbooker-narcopolis-book-chocolate-saints (accessed 27 April 2021).

Otherness, Style and Indian English 65 Thayil, Jeet. 2012. Narcopolis. London: Faber and Faber. Thayil, Jeet. 2017. The Book of Chocolate Saints. New Delhi: Aleph. Times of India. 2020. “I Don’t Worry Too Much about Genre: Jeet Thayil”. 2 June, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/books/interviews/recap-twitter-chat-with-jeet-thayil/articleshow/76151109.cms (accessed 27 April 2021). Van Bonn, S. 2012. “Narcopolis: A Literary Review”. South Asia Journal. 21 March, http://southasiajournal.net/narcopolis-a-literary-review/ (accessed 27 April 2021). Wales, Katie. 2011. Dictionary of Stylistics. Abingdon: Routledge. Weir, David. 2018. Decadence. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Windt, Benedicta. 2005. “An Overview of Literary Onomastics in the Context of Literary Theory”. Onoma, 40: 43–63. Yule, George. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4

The Voices of ‘Lament’ in Indian English Literature

4.1 Language, Lament, and Literature This chapter discusses the linguistic and stylistic rendition of lament across two contemporary Indian English novels, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara (2020) and Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (2020, published in India as Girl in White Cotton). In the light of the plural value of the theme under consideration, it is necessary to bear in mind that the manifestation of lament can of course be viewed as a key form of expression in human culture. Anthropologically, all cultures and societies have had and still have their own literary forms to convey (and somehow exorcise) pain and suffering, and notably narratives (including fiction, eulogies, and speeches) are a means through which lament is textualised, communicated, and tackled. Stockwell (2009: 81) does not hesitate to affirm that “the lament is one of the oldest forms of literature, no doubt with precursors in oral forms of the expression of loss and grief”. Literature in fact is an expressive means that makes it possible to give contours to experiences, elaborate sensations, and extract meanings (Mason and Giovanelli 2021: 97–109): it is no surprise then that the very idea of lament is part and parcel of human life, and consequently it reverberates through different genres such as fiction and poetry, with the therapeutic intent of recording and alleviating suffering and wailing. Lament as a trope is also present in Indian English literature. It certainly inspired authors during the Raj to give voice to the colonised subjects, who were marginalised and subjugated by imperial powers that exploited the entire subcontinent. It reached dramatic peaks during the transition phase with the Partition between India and Pakistan (1947) and became a warning against the brutality and carnage of communalism and fanaticism that is depicted in texts such as Train To Pakistan by Khushwant Singh (1956), but it also notably reappeared in the postcolonial age, for example with the writing of Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri, to denounce the failure of the new democratic country to tackle old questions of caste and social discrimination, or the perpetuation of autocratic policies against different types of minorities, in terms of gender, ethnic, or religious belonging. The persistence of the inequalities DOI: 10.4324/9781003266792-4

The Voices of ‘Lament’  67 of the caste system, the failed promises of the welfare system, and the neoliberal adherence to global exploitation all lead to some form of lamentation because they coincide with the annihilation of individuals and communities, and hence create the desire or rather the need to express a crying out as an admonition for future generations to avoid certain situations and mistakes. Over the years, Indian authors, in particular those using English as a literary mode of expression, have skilfully manipulated the theme in their works, offering different ways to interpret it and encouraging readers to go beyond its surface (Morey and Tickell 2005; Tickell 2016). To some extent, lament is often associated with India, a country still suffering from a number of serious social questions such as poverty, inequality, and a lack of infrastructure, in spite of the intense development that has taken place over the last decades and led to many economic and social improvements. In the cultural Indian landscape, lament appears as the testimony of those subjects who are marginalised, persecuted, or obliterated. In this chapter, I focus on the narrative rendition of lament with regard to children and female characters, specifically in the daughter-mother relationship, through an analysis of the stories by Anappara and Doshi. The stylistic representations of lament are varied, and naturally depend on a range of factors, such as conventions, idiosyncrasies, and contexts, and here I look at this theme from a cognitive perspective in order to consider how linguistic forms are utilised for the representation of lament and the effects these generate in readers. In particular, the reaction to the two novels may be empathetic identification or resistance, respectively considering the depiction of the miserable life of slum children in the first case, and the disturbing, or in pragmatic terms face-threatening, image of hostile maternal relations in the second. Such an approach does not envisage literary discourse in antithesis to nonliterary discourse, but rather it juxtaposes and integrates the two since the cognitive linguistic mechanisms that operate in the two domains are essentially the same (Mason and Giovanelli 2021). It is worth stressing once again that this idea belongs to the recognition of the power of embodiment, i.e. the spectrum of continuities between physical experiences and conceptual activities (Stockwell 2002, 2009), and brings to the fore the complexity of human experience and its narrative or fictional representation. From this angle, our understanding of the world around us combines aspects of the concrete and the abstract, so that our minds and bodies work together and produce sense and meaning. Reading through the lens of embodiment permits us to decipher how texts not only reflect reality but also invite us to react and respond within a process of projection, so that real readers enter text worlds and build empathetic bonds with fictional characters. Of course, such an argument does not merely consider the theoretical and artificial notion of implied reader to whom the text is ideally addressed (Bal 2017; Fludernik 2009: 155; Wales

68  The Voices of ‘Lament’ 2011: 219), but rather real readers, people in the flesh. Willis (2018: 129), for example, does not hesitate to hold that “texts also produce affective and bodily responses: tears, nausea, arousal, the feeling of the hair rising on the back of the neck”, and this might be the case when our virtual immersion in the fictional story-world is acute and we seem to share the character’s experiences on a physiological level as well. According to Stockwell (2009: 77), there is no physical difference between feeling anxious in life and feeling anxiety in a fictional situation; no difference between feelings of love or attachment evoked by a lyric and those evoked in everyday life; no material difference between sadness that brings tears during a literary experience and the sadness of a life-changing event. I argue that such a notion is fundamental in studying how the novels by Anappara and Doshi challenge the readers to produce an emotional response to the construction of fictional lament, in terms of empathy or distance, although of course it is vital to be aware of the cultural specificities of the contexts under investigation (the Indian postcolonial world). Hence, the justification of locating my approach in the experimental field of postcolonial stylistics, adopting the theories and tools of literary linguistics as well in order to examine how these Indian English narratives build meaning and how readers respond to them.

4.2 Author, Text and Context: Deepa Anappara Born in Palakkad, in the southern Indian state of Kerala, Deepa Anappara worked as a journalist from 1997 to 2008, especially in Delhi and Mumbai. As a reporter, Anappara decided to investigate social contexts in which the lack of education goes in tandem with poverty and marginalisation. One of the direst questions that modern India still has to face regards the unfair access to education and the dramatic fraction this creates in terms of future career and social progression, also in terms of gender discrimination (Thomas 2016), as well as the impact this generates: it is a vicious circle because low quality schooling (in rural areas as well as urban slums, often imparted in a vernacular language, as mentioned in the second chapter) does not provide children with opportunities and hence perpetuates the precarious conditions of life that many youngsters have to cope with, as they are compelled to work from an early age, often in very unhealthy or dangerous conditions. Although theoretically the Indian state recognises and guarantees education for all, with the 2009 Right to Education Act, for example, the successful implementation of pedagogical policies is still uncertain, thus massively affecting future generations, not only in terms of material welfare but also with regard to ethical questions. In the words of Bajaj (2016: 63),

The Voices of ‘Lament’  69 in fact, “children are citizens in our present, not in some distant future, and are central to the India human rights project”. But the social question of children is much wider since many of them frequently disappear for various reasons, making India one of the countries in which the number of missing children constantly peaks, exacerbating an already grim scenario. Drawing on her personal experience and professional background, Deepa Anappara decided to turn to fiction in order to call attention to such a dramatic problem. In the Afterword of the novel, she notices that “as many as 180 children are said to go missing in India every day” (Anappara 2020: 342), but she also recognises the important work of charities and organisations that try to fight such a plague. The genesis of the novel is complex because Anappara’s first approach to literary discourse began with a creative writing course that she attended in London, before she joined the University of East Anglia to pursue a master’s degree, where she submitted a thesis that included the embryo of the novel. The novel was published in 2020 under the title Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, and it has won a number of prizes and obtained very positive reviews (Beckerman 2020; Corrigan 2020). As the writer explains in the Afterword, she naturally had to be very careful about avoiding stereotypical representations of poverty, lack of education in India, and especially street children, a severe social problem that is often overlooked by official authorities. For Nair and DeSouza (2020: 228): Although India, the second most populous and fastest-growing economy, is home to the world’s largest population of street children, we still do not have any agreed definitive and accurate official figure of the number of children for whom city streets are home. They escape official attention and are not counted in censuses and surveys, as these are designed and conducted around counting housed people. Children on Indian streets are brave but profoundly vulnerable survivors. They have run away from incest, violent and substance-abusing guardians, starvation, cruel step-parents and even horrendous massacres. They have been forced to live by their wits on the street, find food, work or beg to get money, fight for whatever they need, fend off older bullies and all the time carry a well of emptiness in themselves because the significant adults in their lives have failed them. These children often carry the scars of earlier negative experiences of which they do not speak until they trust the people around them. They sometimes show a strange combination of the maturity of adults coupled with the joy, vulnerability and innocence of a child. Anappara’s project is, in reality, ambitious because it concerns not only the uneven conditions of life for a consistent portion of India’s children, who are essentially condemned to silence and annihilation because of

70  The Voices of ‘Lament’ the corruption of society, but also how such a heavy theme is viewed, and the chain of prejudices it creates, especially when some categories, such as those representing ‘the Other’, are deemed responsible and taken as scapegoats. Constructing and seeking out an enemy to blame for the disappearance of children are indeed signs of the manifestation of intolerance that cast long shadows over the country with regard to minorities or non-canonical identities, an issue that frequently appears in the texts I consider in this study. Indian newspapers from time to time report the lynching of men seen as the culprits for some murderer, rape, or other form of criminality, and afterwards they are forced to rectify their news stories when no clear evidence is produced in court. This naturalisation of ideologies reinforces the fear of the Other embodied by those subjects who do not belong to mainstream society, in terms of religion, ethnicity, or gender, for example. As the editor of The Other India (Dwivedi 2012: 1) writes, “it is those in power who suppress the rights of the weak, periodically producing and reproducing a new Other, which suffers mental trauma and physical violence, often accompanied with deaths”. Within a broader project of cultural hegemony that crystallises the entirety of India into a Hindu homeland in spite of its century-old plurality, brought about by Hindutva currents, politicians, and discourses, Muslim individuals in particular are often viewed as ideal tokens of Otherness onto which people can project sentiments of suspicion, hostility, and intolerance. The issue of how the lament of children is eventually phagocytised by the hypocrisy of a system that appropriates such a painful question to spread prejudice constitutes an important thread in Anappara’s narrative. The story convincingly takes up the viewpoint of children, although adults too are present, with three main characters: Jai, an imaginative boy who loves TV crime programmes, and his friends, Pari, a diligent and clever student, and Faiz, a Muslim boy who works in a shop in the settlement. Essentially, the story centres around the attempt by these youngsters to find out about a series of mysteriously vanishing children, the first of whom is Bahadur, a classmate from the basti (slum) where they live, in a nameless Indian megalopolis, close to the new metro line. Slums are still a significant part of the social landscape of India today, with all their problems of sanitation, illegality, and welfare, and suffice it to mention that the majority of Mumbai’s population lives in this type of settlement. As Nair and deSouza (2020: 146) explain, “in North India, the term used is basti or even ‘colony’”, a word that betrays a past intrinsically tied to the Raj period. The novel is characterised by a polyphonic interspersing of tones, voices, and sensations that mix up fantasy and reality. The immaterial and material sides of Anappara’s fable are in fact summoned up in the very title, which contains a reference to legacy of magic, in the evocation of the djinn, and the modernity of the present era, the purple metro line that epitomises the mirage of

The Voices of ‘Lament’  71 welfare. Apparently a joyful activity, the children’s investigation will bring to light the inequalities, the sorrow, and the precarious conditions of all those marginal subjects, who have to live on the outskirts of Indian society and are constantly exploited by the system of booming development, dramatically rebalancing the image of Shining India in favour of a darker and devastating reality. However, the children believe that the person responsible for the kidnapping is a djinn, a fairy-tale creature from the Islamic tradition, known in many oriental cultures, and depicted as either a benevolent or malevolent spirit. It is evident that the image of the djinns is a sort of metaphor for some of the troubles of present-day India that leads to a collective cry bemoaning the misery of people against the hypocrisy, corruption, and malfunctioning of a number of social structures, from the educational sector with its overcrowded and decrepit schools to the police forces, whose agents keep bribing the slum residents. Although the author’s discourse is built upon a realist style – the novel does not openly cite the intervention of the supernatural  – Jai’s first-person narration cannot be totally detached from his own confused imagination, hence a subtle interplay of echoes and suggestions: the reader will never find the djinns in the story and yet they seem to haunt many episodes. Various stylistic means contribute to the overall organisation of the text and to the way in which readers respond, by experiencing empathy and other feelings in particular. Structurally the book is organised into three parts, each containing short chapters, whose title in reality is the beginning of the text that follows. Most of chapters are perspectivised through Jai, who essentially dominates the “discoursal point of view as the relationship, expressed through discourse structure, between the implied author or some other addresser, and the fiction” (Leech and Short 2007: 218), but there are also chapters which are focalised via the single victims of the snatching (Bahadur, Omvir, Aanchal, Chandni, Kabir and Kadhifa, and Runu) and narrated in the third person, a strategy whereby readers become the spectators of the abduction of the youth, and are compelled to share their anguish. To understand the narratological frame created by Anappara, it is important to distinguish between those who speak and those who see in a story-world, also considering that, according to Rimmon-Kenan (2002: 74), “speaking and seeing, narration and focalization, may, but need not, be attributed to the same agent”. This idea is relevant in the case of the chapters told by an external omniscient narrator, but focalised through the victims of the vanishing because, in these parts, the discourse is reported thanks to a heterodiegetic (and to some extent) unreliable voice, but the focalisation is internal as the gaze belongs to the children in question, thus depicting an emotional closeness. Significantly, the two types of fiction (Jai’s and the omniscient voice’s) differ in their verbal orchestration since the former uses the present tense to provide a sense of proximity and reality, whilst the latter

72  The Voices of ‘Lament’ adopts the past tense. As Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short (2007: 243) argue, “when the author breaks away from the narrative past, and adopts the aphoristic present tense, we must assume some relevance to the narrative” and in fact such a formal differentiation operates as a stratagem to foreground the fear, displacement, and uncertainty of youth.

4.3 Constructing Empathy, Irony, and Texture According to the tenets of contemporary cognitive stylistics, the way in which we react to texts can be explained by considering the mental mechanisms, conceptual structures, and emotional spheres we activate during the reading process, which often leads to “a process of identification as a reader draws on real-world knowledge to make connections between the world depicted in the text and the real world” (Mason and Giovanelli 2021: 108), thus generating a feeling of empathy. As Keen (2007: 4) argues, “empathy, a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect, can be provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s condition, or even by reading”. Some textual elements in fact have the power to generate certain feelings in us, and thus they function as tools of attraction or neglect because they give contours to features such as topicality, activeness, and largeness (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018: 149–161; Mason and Giovanelli 2021: 97–109; Stockwell 2009: 17–55). If we consider that most of the narration is filtered through the eyes of a nine-year child, we can understand why some details are given prominence and acquire meaning: it is obvious that very complex social matters such as progress, corruption, and intolerance will be handled differently by a young narrator. In successfully constructing the viewpoint of a child narrator, the author encourages a form of identification, particularly thanks to situational similarities by which the readers retrieve their memories as children and compare and contrast them with the dire narration offered by Jai and the others. The readership’s reaction therefore coincides with empathy towards the young protagonist and his band, although “it is not easy to distinguish between empathy and sympathy and the two terms are often used interchangeably in everyday speech” (Wales 2011: 133). However, empathy is usually interpreted as ‘feeling with’ unlike sympathy which relates to the idea of ‘feeling for’, so that a kind of bond is established between the real readers and the fictional narrator. A more precise definition is that proposed by Caracciolo in his survey of child narrators in ‘atypical’ strange narratives, for which “empathy is a form of mental simulation or role-taking, in which a subject ‘tries on’ the perceptual, emotional, epistemic, or axiological perspective of another subject” (2014: 184), because it relates to a number of aspects that might be triggered together or separately in constructing the illusion of closeness. This explains the metaphorical expressions typically employed to speak about empathy,

The Voices of ‘Lament’  73 such as ‘to step into someone else’s shoes’, or ‘to walk into someone else’s shoes’, or other spatial phrases such as being ‘drawn into’ the character’s life or mind. To some extent, such constructions are related to the experiential metaphor that Stockwell (2009) examines in his exploration of the cognitive process of reading, with the concept of moving or being transported as elements to define the intensity of the experience itself. Empathy, which actually involves both emotion and cognition, can be elicited by fictional texts by means of different strategies. According to Keen, it can be realised in two ways in particular, namely (1) character identification, referring to “naming, description, indirect implication of traits, reliance on types, relative flatness or roundness, depicted actions, roles in plot trajectories, quality of attributed speech, and mode of representation of consciousness” (2007: 93) and (2) narrative situation, covering the nature of the mediation between author and reader, including the person of the narration, the implicit location of the narrator, the relation of the narrator to the characters, and the internal or external perspective on characters, including in some cases the style of representation of characters’ consciousness. (2007: 93) Evidently, Keen’s categories are not clear-cut, but function as umbrella terms for a range of many aspects, including the cognitive negotiation of meaning between author, text, and reader. Within a broader stylistic frame, empathy is also linked to evaluation and as such it works through a number of devices and strategies. In the novel the most relevant structure through which empathy is elicited regards the perspective of the child narrator, which mirrors his tribulations and his coming to terms with the harsh scenario of life in a basti. Very often, Jai’s words portray the world around him in its material precarity, although they are often illuminated with reassuring sensations that stem from positively connoted lexical items, such as types of food or games or belongings. For Leech and Short (2007: 146), “physical description can invite an empathic response from the reader” and this stylistic depiction of materiality for Anappara is strategic because it interrogates the opposite poles of wealth and poverty too. The run-down area in which Jai and his family live appears in antithesis to the huge towers of flats that dot the rich quarters of the city that surrounds the slum. In the following passage, the young protagonist observes these two antonymic worlds during one of the frequent blackouts that often affect the district: I turn to look at the buildings that have fancy names like Palm Springs and Mayfair and Golden Gate and Athena. They are close

74  The Voices of ‘Lament’ to our basti but seem far because of the rubbish ground in between, and also a tall brick wall with barbed wire on top that Ma says is not tall enough to keep out the stink from the rubbish mounds. There are many grown-ups behind me but through the spaces between their monkey caps I can see that the hi-fi buildings have light now. It must be because they have diesel generators. Our basti is still dark. (Anappara 2020: 16) Here some textual attractors are at work to create the child’s ironic vision, in particular bearing in mind the following points: (1) the presence of items expressed by concrete nouns premodified by defining adjectives (‘rubbish ground’, ‘tall brick wall’, ‘diesel generators’), (2) the colouring of the scene through fantasy and day-dreaming, with the grand names of the buildings, which clearly activate a sort of speculation with myths of welfare in the USA and the UK (‘Palm Springs’, ‘Mayfair’, ‘Golden Gate’, ‘Athena’), and (3) the effect of oppositional meaning realised by time deictics (‘light now’ versus ‘still dark’) to mark the incompatibility of the worlds of the bourgeoisie and the poor. The curious neologism “hi-fi buildings”, which designates high blocks of luxurious flats, is another example of the boy’s linguistic creativity and is related to desire and wishes, perhaps with regard to an electronic equipment to listen to music that no-one can afford in the slum. In such a stylistic realisation, the reader is implicitly asked to adopt the boy’s gaze and view creating a dramatic irony that runs along a “double perspective (of reader and of character)” (Wales 2011: 240) and that eventually produces an empathetic environment because we are implicitly asked to share Jai’s self-positioning. The idea of setting up a child narrator for a story is a complex challenge for writers as they have to take into account a series of various identitarian aspects. In the case of Deepa Anappara, her experience as a journalist dealing with social questions about infancy, education, and poverty is certainly an important help, but what really matters is her project to articulate such voices since this reveals her attitude towards youth and the contemporary Indian social scenario. Moreover, “since literature is dependent on language to describe emotional life, it demands a rich and multi-faceted vocabulary to convey the nuances of meaning that young readers may not have mastered yet” (Nikolajeva 2001: 446). This is not a mere question of lexis but rather a combination of different stylistic techniques that characterise the construction of child narrators and characters in Anappara’s text. Jai, for example, displays a process of self-awareness regarding his identity and subjectivity, although his wording does not seem to distinguish fantasy from fact completely, and so the two dimensions somehow overlap: “three weeks ago I was only a schoolkid but now I’m a detective and also a tea-shop boy” (Anappara 2020: 130). The jocund atmosphere of the young affects different verbal

The Voices of ‘Lament’  75 forms, for instance, on the onomastic level, with the name ‘Samosa’ that the protagonist gives to a stray dog that often accompanies him. However, the protagonists’ speech does not hide or mitigate the evils of Indian society, such as the exploitation of children who are forced to work in precarious conditions, as readers can learn from Jai’s confessions about his job at the tea shop: “I have to scrub and scrub, and my fingerprint turn blue from the icy water and my legs hurt from squatting to wash vessels” (Anappara 2020: 130). Such a short quotation from the novel is sufficient to encapsulate the tribulations, and lament, of the children, which is realised by a series of evaluative items. The deontic modal verb ‘have to’, the repetition of the onomatopoeic verb ‘scrub’ and the transformative verb ‘turn’, with its before/after change, are some of the means whereby we access the unstable and wretched world of child workers in the slum. As already mentioned, the tone of the writing is realistic, although from time to time there are elements that provide ambiguity and puzzle the reader, in particular the many references to the djinns: even if they do not materialise, these creatures haunt the words and thoughts of the children and give rise to several possible interpretations of the mysterious disappearances. As literary figures, djinns (sometimes also spelt as jinn or genie) appear in Indian English fiction, sometimes with prominent roles, such as in Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie (2015). Regarded as spirits, demons, or supernatural creatures, either benevolent or malevolent, they are also present in pagan rites, are said to have superpowers such as shape shifting, and are often considered responsible for misfortune and possession. In Anappara’s narrative, they serve different functions because on the one hand they reverberate through the fantasies of the children, but on the other they may symbolise dark secrets about power, agency, and subjugation. Not only are they evoked as villains taken from legends and myth, but they may also represent projections of real-life criminals engaged in frightful human trafficking that the children have to cognitively translate into fantasies as they are not able to accept them as real. The supernatural dimension is also rapidly evoked on the toponomastic level because some of the characters live in, or orbit around, Bhoot Bazaar, a place named after “the friendly spirits of the people who had lived in these parts hundreds of years ago when the Mughals had been kings” (Anappara 2020: 53). Incidentally, “the term bhoot is familiar to almost every child in contemporary India, an intrinsic part of India’s folklore and its life-worlds” (Nair and DeSouza 2020: 79) and therefore, as a symbolic echo from the old Vedic texts to the popular beliefs, it reinforces the children’s perspective. Dealing with the djinns also exhibits the children’s intense storytelling activity which emerges from their experiential activity: narrative is in fact a significant multi-sided activity for kids that touches on the spheres of identity, emotion, and cognition,

76  The Voices of ‘Lament’ and is also a pedagogical tool to approach and understand the surrounding world. Although narratives can be counted as the bricks and mortar of any human civilisation since they encode experience and construct discourse (Bal 2017; Fludernik 2009), scholars point out that cultural specificities may affect the construction of stories, especially in the case of children. For example, Gorman et al. (2011) investigate how children from different ethnic groups produce and organise narratives by following a number of “creative and stylistic conventions: organizational style (topic centered, linear, cyclical), dialogue (direct, indirect), reference to character relationships (nature, naming, conduct), embellishment (fantasy, suspense, conflict), and paralinguistic devices (expressive sounds, exclamatory utterances)” (2011: 167). Through their empirical research, the scholars claim that “the different use of creative features is reflective of children’s home cultures and socio cultural expectations” (Gorman et al. 2011: 176). Such a consideration may be extended and adapted to the novel of Anappara because Jai, who comes from a Hindu background, and Faiz, who comes from a Muslim family, talk about djinns in slightly different ways. However, it should also be remembered that djinns here represent a productive form of cultural syncretism because they testify to the hybridity of various religions and practices that have traversed India through the centuries. Obviously, the linguistic treatment of the djinns offered by the children is grounded upon emphasis and hyperbole as they are imagined as huge, monstrous creatures. However, the reference to the djinns may also have a metaphorical value because they somehow allude to religious tensions, aggravating the communal question and its potential for new riots. The following quotation is part of Jai’s narration and echoes what he hears at the tea shop: Today’s news is spiky with fear. People say they are worried about leaving their children alone. They blame the police who asked Chandni’s parents for a bribe instead of filing a complaint. Some people want to organise a protest against the police, others say that can only end with machines crunching our houses. One man says the pradhan and his Hindu Samaj party are planning a demonstration. Only Hindu children are being taken; therefore, the snatchings must be the work of Muslims. Another man says Aanchal’s boyfriend is a Hindu; that breaking news must come from Naina, or her eavesdropping, bleach-whitened customer. It doesn’t stop people from blaming Muslims though. Most of Duttaram’s customers are Hindus. They say Muslims have too many children and treat women badly. They say ultimately you can’t trust people who write from the right to the left like Muslims do in their demon language. (Anappara 2020: 198, emphasis in the original)

The Voices of ‘Lament’  77 In reporting the rumours of the basti about the mysterious disappearances, the boy implicitly refers to some of the evils of contemporary Indian society, such as the endemic corruption of authorities like the police and the Pradhan (the chief of the right-wing party), and the conflicts that lacerate communities, expressed by a tragic syllogism: the abducted children are Hindu and consequently the kidnapper must be Muslim, which promulgates and naturalises certain ideological views. The discursive (pejorative) construction of Otherness becomes a sort of populist voice by which Muslims are depicted in very negative terms through specific ideologies (they ‘have too many children and treat women badly’), and even their own language is viewed as an index of cruelty, diversity, and incompatibility thanks to the bizarre evaluative collocation with the term ‘demon’. Being a child, Jai is not part of such positions, and yet his words signal anxieties and confusion. The dramatic style of the author is dispersed through the entire novel, especially in the description of the decrepit facilities of the basti such as the common toilets, the claustrophobic houses, and the paucity of goods, but it progressively increases and assumes dark tones as the children continue to vanish incessantly, and it probably reaches its climax when even Jai’s sister disappears: All night people search for Runu-Didi. She can’t be found. I believe it and I don’t believe it. Ma and Papa return home. Ma’s hair sticking to her cheeks. Papa’s eyes redder and bulging. I ask them if I can go out to look for Didi. My secret plan is to find Samosa and let him track Didi. Ma says I’m not to move. I have been in this night before. This is the night Bahadur went missing, and also the night Omvir and Aa’nchal and Chandni and Kabir and Khadifa disappeared. Pari and her ma turn up. Pari sits on the bed and Pari’s ma cries even more than my ma. Faiz visits with his ammi. ‘What are these mullah-types doing here?’ a chichi asks, jutting her chin at Faiz’s ammi. I am floating above everyone, watching them cry, watching them trade gossip. Some people are here only to feast on our tears and words. They’ll carry our stories in their lips that stick out like beaks and feed them to their husbands or friends who aren’t here. (Anappara 2020: 269) The passage exhibits an emotional intensity to stimulate empathetic bonding thanks to a plethora of linguistic devices. This aspect in particular is realised thanks to modality, “one of the major systems involved in the communication of attitudes through language” (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018: 109). Specifically, modality is instrumental in communicating the tragedy of the moment: the auxiliary structure ‘can’t’

78  The Voices of ‘Lament’ expresses the impossibility of a certain state, whilst the evaluative vocabulary (‘redder and bulging’) conveys the perspective of the boy. The passage also contains address forms typically found in Indian English, with words like chacha and ammi, used for an uncle or an adult in general, and mother, that provide a layer of genuineness (Sailaja 2009: 86–87) to the text and a sense of emotional proximity to the speaking voice. Yet the weight of intolerance that affects the basti is hinted at by means of naming: the expression mullah-type is subtly given a pejorative connotation to suggest an index of criminality. Moreover, the boy’s sadness embraces the attitude of the people, who do not show any genuine feeling of solidarity but rather seem to be interested only in gossip, possibly sensationalist. Jai’s focalisation operates in a speculative way to receive the impact of the shock through a childish fantasy of disembodied distancing (‘I am floating’), but also through an elaborate process of metaphorisation. Gossips are seen as objects that can be traded, and words become a food that will be devoured by the morbid curiosity of people, who are eventually turned into distressing zoomorphic images of birds feeding their brood. The bizarre scene synthetises the sense of loss for the child, while the text implicitly asks for the collaboration of the reader in experiencing such dismay. Jai’s reflections on the escalating catastrophe have a wide scope and are assembled in an introverted and provocative style when he wonders “I feel as if a hundred butterflies are fluttering inside my chest. What is a whole life? If you die when you’re still a child, is your life whole or half or zero?” (Anappara 2020: 332). Much contemporary scholarship has praised the capacity of empathy stemming from narrative fiction to stimulate positive feelings such as solidarity, fraternity, and equality, although the very empathetic process, through the imagining of characters and their adventures, might also engender problems of cognitive dissonance in readers. For Best (2020: 281), “in making those representations part of a reader’s cognitive economy, they create a challenge for the brain’s reality monitoring circuitry to keep track of that which has been processed from without and within”. This is not to say that empathy negatively affects comprehension of the world: fiction has its own limits because it is an invented discourse, but nonetheless it stimulates a critical reflection and an embodied experience. In all types of narrative, “both authors and readers are working to produce meanings from within sign systems and their associated conventions of meaning and interpretation” (Willis 2018: 125) and Anappara uses a range of stylistic means to trigger the reader’s identification with the protagonist by taking into account their mental schemas and knowledge structures, such as the miserable conditions of life in postcolonial India’s slums. The disappearance of Runu makes the text progressively more and more obscure, as the entire family is

The Voices of ‘Lament’  79 stricken by pain, even though the child’s dream-like dimension tries to soothe the expanding gloom: Our house is full of bad dreams. Ma has them and I have them too. In my dreams, Runu-Didi flies out of a balcony in the Golden Gate building, spreading out her giant wings. She’s Jatayu from ancient times, but she’s also wounded and bleeding. Ma doesn’t tell what her dreams are. From the way she gets up screaming, I can tell they are dreadful. (Anappara 2020: 340) The extract is significant because, from the very beginning, when the house is conceptualised through a container domain with the phrase ‘full of’, it displays some of Jai’s stylistic expressions. His language reveals the juxtaposition of reality and imagination because his sister, identified thanks to a familiar form of address with the Hindi term didi, is described by referring to Jatayu, the demigod from the Ramayana endowed with wings like an eagle or vulture, which here clearly stand as a symbol of freedom, although the character is pictured as in pain. The mixture of nightmare and hope reflects the protagonist’s confusion, which is typical of adolescence in its chaotic formation, and may be viewed as a form of lament, or an emotional strategy to handle such a devastating trauma. Throughout the novel, the author speaks about the kidnappings in ambiguous terms in order to capture and challenge the reader’s attention, since it is never explicitly explained how and why these take place. The investigation carried out by Jai and his friends does not identify the culprit, but the entire text is disseminated with clues that allude to possible cases of human trafficking, or even worse, motifs such as organ trade. Many of these traces seem to pivot around a mysterious woman, “dressed in a white-and-gold salwar-kameez, silky black hair falling down her shoulders, wearing sandals with heels as long as pencils” (Anappara 2020: 312), whom everyone addresses as ‘Madam’ and who lives in a high rise luxury flat called Golden Gate. Is Anappara’s fictional world totally hopeless then? To answer such a question, we need to observe how the author observes a balance between different styles, perspectives, and themes in order to depict some aspects of India’s complex reality. The empathetic bonds that are encouraged via Jai’s focalisation lend support to a new approach to the country’s endemic issues such as street children, corruption, and marginalisation because they produce emotional investment in relation to the broad context. In Nair and DeSouza’s words (2020: 140): Just as life is multidimensional, poverty too has many faces. Poverty is much more than just earning low and insufficient incomes.

80  The Voices of ‘Lament’ It also about poor health and education, deprivation in knowledge and communication, inability to exercise human and political rights and the absence of dignity, confidence and self-respect. It follows that human development is a concern with equality of opportunities, not merely with equality of incomes. In the ultimate analysis, human development is a concern with social justice and the dignity of human lives. The narrative’s intensive texture, “the experiential quality of textuality” (Stockwell 2009: 14), that reverberate through Anappara’s story foreground a series of social questions that are embodied and projected by various stylistic features. The author does not wish to stick to stereotypical images of piety in illustrating the iniquities of present-day India, but rather swiftly challenges readers to see through the eyes of her characters, children in particular, in the hope of freeing the text from external ideologies. However, her empathetic writing is not a kind of magical potion by which real-life problems are solved immediately, and according to Keen (2007: 146), “though novel reading certainly involves role-taking imagination, for novels to change attitudes about others and inspire prosocial action requires more than just reading”. I have mentioned that the positive effects originating from empathy in fictional texts are to be taken with care and often cannot be measured objectively unless we have empirical evidence through experiments. Moreover, we should also be aware of the critical complexities of the notion of empathy that I have employed to tackle Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line because if the term refers to a generalisation of human feelings, a sort of universalism, in reality it seems to be at odds with the very essence of postcoloniality, which is diversity and multiplicity. In other words, the question of empathy cannot ignore the specific sociocultural aspects of the context: although all human beings and communities share some typical features, there are differences that impact on practices, beliefs, and actions. Intelligently, the narrative does not propose to decontextualise the Indian scenario, but it aptly weaves in references to its social and cultural structures, along with the treatment of the children’s condition. The different attitudes of the characters cumulatively craft a wide canvass for the representation of identity, in a delicate balance between sadness and irony. We can see this, for example, when in the very last paragraph of the novel Jai ponders over his life: Then I see the star again. I point it out to Samosa. I tell him it’s a secret signal, from Runu-Didi to me. It’s so powerful, it can fire past the thickets of clouds and smog and even the walls that Ma’s gods have put up to separate one world from the next. (Anappara 2020: 341)

The Voices of ‘Lament’  81 In conceptual terms, the boy’s lexical choices are significant because they suggest an opposition between materiality and immateriality (‘walls’, ‘clouds and smoke’), or something that may be touched and something that is ethereal, also evoking memory and hope for the future. Beyond the apparent simplicity of the protagonist’s linguistic style, noticeably indebted to fantasy, confusion, and imagination, it is possible to unpack the way in which the novelist encodes the harsh reality of Indian slums into meaningful patterns and metaphors. Even when Jai’s entire life is turned upside down, and he and his family move to another basti, the boy shows “a stubborn lightness, a will to believe in the possibility of deliverance in this fallen world” (Corrigan 2020). This type of attitude is in line with what Anappara declares in her Afterword, when she says that in spite of the precarious conditions of life for many of the disadvantaged, what really matters is “the children’s resilience, cheerfulness, and swagger” (2020: 343), all qualities and attributes that inevitably govern the entire textual architecture of the novel.

4.4 Author, Text, and Context: Avni Doshi This section continues the exploration of textual forms of lament by looking at another Indian writer, Avni Doshi, and her novel Burnt Sugar. In particular, it investigates how the idea of lament does not acquire a public dimension, but rather expresses an intimate voice, that of the protagonist and her identity, within a complex family history. Although Doshi is frequently described as an American or more generally westernised writer, as she was born in Fort Lee (New Jersey) in 1982 and educated in the USA and the UK, I consider her as part of the wide category of Indian artists and authors who live and work outside India. The daughter of Indian immigrants, Doshi typically spent the winter seasons in Pune and also lived in some parts of India, working as an art curator in museums in Delhi and Mumbai. As a result, her writing is tied to Indian culture, here represented in its new, global or cosmopolitan manifestation, and offers a stimulating example of how contemporary Indian English literature keeps reinventing itself through migration, but is at the same time also “a response to the expression of Indian nationalism” (Shoobie 2019: 39). In various interviews, Doshi affirms that it took her several years to finish the original manuscript, not only because of the complex, intense, and somehow disturbing themes she deals with, but also because of the frequent moves to different cities and countries in the world. Doshi has also added that the distressing relationship between a mother (Tara) and her daughter (Antara) that represents the backbone of the novel is not actually autobiographical but intends to display the difficulty of human contact within families. The relationship theme between parents and children is often ingrained in Indian English fiction, for example with

82  The Voices of ‘Lament’ novels as diverse as Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters (1998) and Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field (2019), but here significantly, and symbolically, the two main characters have a very similar name, and such an onomastic expedient can be seen to further stress bonds, opposition, and intimacy. The story also evokes the figure of the mystic and religious leader Chandra Mohan Rajneesh, globally known as Osho, whose Pune ashram (set up in 1976) gathered people from the entire world. The fictional version of such a charismatic and controversial guru mesmerises Tara, who accepts to live in his hermitage, along with her daughter and other peculiar characters like Kali Mata, an American woman fervent with oriental mysticism. The decision to adopt a new lifestyle, so radically different from standard social norms and conventions, has devastating consequences in building or destroying relations and emotions, and, as Bari (2020) writes, “Tara finds liberation, and how hard it is for Antara to distinguish between her mother’s pursuit of self- determination and acts of selfishness”. Doshi’s debut novel was originally published by Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins India in India in 2019, under the title Girl in White Cotton. After a very positive reception, the following year the novel was released in the UK by the British publisher Hamish Hamilton, with a new title, Burnt Sugar, an expression that activates puns revolving around conflicting taste, but also suggests forgetfulness, when one does not remember to melt sugar properly while baking a cake. Moreover, the title somehow alludes to the passage in which Antara the protagonist, after having discovered analogies between Alzheimer’s and type 3 diabetes, decides to give her mother more sugar because she is no longer able to cope with the progressive devastation brought about by the disease, illustrated as a “descent into the abyss” (Doshi 2020: 193). For this and other aspects, the book generated a number of controversies and heated responses. However, its global success is demonstrated by several acknowledgments and prizes, which are justified not only from Doshi’s deft prose, but also from the dense and sensitive issues she deals with, from the hostility of a mother-daughter relation to the idea of end-oflife care. These offer readers a broad series of stimulating themes and demonstrate the energy of present-day Indian English fiction, because the novel eventually “resists showing only monstrosity” (Bari 2020) and instead scans human relations, conflicts, and transformations. The narrative’s lament is centred around the fuzzy perimeter of memory, namely how stories, identities, and discourses regularly surface and disappear in the history of a family, specifically in the difficult relationship between a bizarre mother and a displaced daughter: the former totally detached from social roles and structures, the latter at the mercy of apparently incomprehensible events. Built in the first-person narration and providing the point of view of a young artist, Antara, the story in reality mixes up the diegetic levels of past and present in order to show

The Voices of ‘Lament’  83 her approach to life and the burden of Tara, her mother, who forced her to live in an ashram when she was a young girl. In particular, Antara regrets the lack of pyar, a term that is “used to describe almost all kinds of love, whether it is towards one’s lover, parent, children or friends” (Nair and deSouza 2020: 89) and that conceptually belongs to the idea of bhāva (a significant emotion spanning different types of bonds, including that between a mother and her child) (Nair and deSouza 2020: 89). But the bitterness of the protagonist has to come to terms with the fallibility of memory, in particular considering the disintegrating personality of Tara, who is now diagnosed with senile dementia, hence the disconcerting fading of memories, and even the very doubt of memory, the (in)capacity of human beings to preserve the past against the backdrop of desires, dreams, and regrets. Married to Dilip, who was educated in the United States and then had to move to Pune for work, Antara is an artist interested in different types of materials and techniques “by sketching from memory, something loose and formless, a fleeting impression” (Doshi 2020: 90), but now her main anxiety is for her mother, whose sense of memory is gradually vanishing because of ageing. Even the consultations with doctors and the treatments they suggest do not bring a solution to Tara’s progressive oblivion because, in Antara’s words, “the present becomes a fragile thing which, moments later, seems to have never happened” (Doshi 2020: 7). But the current health of the elderly woman is also an impulse for Antara to reassess her own past, when she had to cope with the eccentricities of a mother attracted by the charm of a guru and his followers. Tara indeed “found her husband’s house was full of loneliness and boredom” (Doshi 2020: 66), and therefore she joined a hermitage with her young daughter in order to stay with Baba, a charismatic leader who “travelled in a Mercedes Benz and collected VHS tapes of Brigitte Bardo” (Doshi 2020: 66), a figure clearly reminiscent of the real-life Osho. Tara’s life is made even more complicated by the appearance of Reza Pine, a photojournalist she falls in love with and with whom she decides to live after the ashram period. The emotional triangle between Antara, her mother, and her new lover is intricate, and is not devoid of jealousy, envy, and rancour, and certainly aggravates their lives until the man suddenly leaves them and migrates to the United States: it is an “unbearable situation created in a culture quick to judge, to expel and especially to circumscribe the lives of women” (Charles 2020). The original version of Doshi’s novel had a different title, which condensed some of the overtones of chromatic symbolism of the Indian cultural context. Here, the colour white has a range of meanings and references: typically associated with the Hindu goddess of knowledge, Sarawati, it is the only colour widows are allowed to wear, and is frequently used by people at funerals. Because it is regarded as the absences of colour, or rather the gist of colour itself, it symbolises withdrawal

84  The Voices of ‘Lament’ from ordinary life and routines, and as such it is used by pilgrims, hermits, and their followers. Antara recognises the plural value of such a colour, for example in the following passage in which she speaks about the clothes that her mother keeps in various old cupboards: And then, one shelf below, are the other clothes. These are more familiar to me. There are few faded block-prints on worn cotton, but mostly everything is white. If I hold them to my face, I can still smell their body, as though she wore them just yesterday. I can smell the neglect, the damp, the misery that grows in the absence of sunlight. These cottons are coarse, the kind worn for work. The whites are still bright, some glaring and almost blue, the white of widows, of mourners and renunciants, holy men and women, monks and nuns, the white of those who no longer belong in the world, who have already put one foot on another plane. The white of the guru and his followers. Maybe Ma saw this white cotton as the means to her truth, a blank slate where she could remake herself and find the path to freedom. For me it was something different, a shroud that covered us like the living dead, a white too stark to ever be acceptable in polite society. A white that marked us as outsiders. To my mother this was the colour of her community, but I knew better: the white clothes were the ones that separated us from our family, our friends and everyone else, that made my life in them a kind of prison. (Doshi 2020: 47) This passage explains Doshi’s original title and polarises the meaning of the colour white for Tara and Antara: the former interprets it as a way to rejuvenate and reinvent her life, away from a claustrophobic social environment, and the latter considers it as an imprisoning emblem, a closure to the surrounding world. The text above adopts a listing style that foregrounds the multiple meaning of white through enumeration and exemplification (Jeffries 2010: 66–76), and in a parallel fashion synthetises the opposition between an absent mother and a confused daughter. A synaesthetic representation of purity emerging from the conglomeration of sight, smell, and texture, the white cotton clothes that Tara and Antara have to wear in the commune also become a fragment of memory in the present, bringing back memories of difficult days. But, as mentioned above, we should also remember that in the Indian subcontinent the colour white is associated with grief and mourning, hence more connotative layers and intertexts. Given Doshi’s creative effort to deal with a plethora of dense themes, from the idea of failed parenthood to the deleterious effects of ageing, it is inevitable that the readers’ (and reviewers’) response is varied and even contradictory. The writer’s literary project is deliberately provocative by constructing a discourse of bitter feelings, in which characters try to navigate through their lives. In her review, for example, Bidisha (2020) affirms that “there is a generational accretion of horror that gives the

The Voices of ‘Lament’  85 novel a towering, mythic quality”, to emphasise the effect of such a narrative and its capacity to expose hidden and unsolved sentiments. Similarly, the Indian review of the novel by Basnet (2021) predicts that “the book will make you either think, weep, or laugh” on the grounds of its emotional and provocative intricacy, thus expressing a deep appreciation of the writing’s capacity to engage with the public, even in the case of sensitive ethical questions. Most of the newspaper reviews speak about how the reader tends to mentally process characters and actions, sometimes suggesting a possible embodied interpretation. In his piece for The Washington Post (2021), Charles holds that “this is a novel stained with all manner of fluids, excretions and smells, and the narrator fights an almost constant sense of nausea”. Many episodes from the text could support this point, ranging from the years Antara spent at the ashram or begging in the streets, to the period of the Bombay carnage witnessed by Rezi, and with their intensity, they galvanise the presence of the body and can be read through the idea of the embodied self, put forward by contemporary cognitive studies (Stockwell 2009: 4–5).

4.5 Remembering, Forgetting: Loss, Memory, and Identity From the very beginning of the text, it is evident that memory is a cardinal point in Doshi’s writing: it is a strategy to organise narration but also a way to unfold identity and question the sense of life, especially when it reverses its perspective in a radical realignment due to the human body’s deficiencies – the effects of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia – but also when it informs art in its quest for meaning. Antara is an artist whose work draws attention to the labyrinthine pathways of the self, covering memories, views, and feelings. Before applying some of the notions and methods of stylistics to the story written by Doshi, I present some linguistic and cultural considerations about memory, which should reinforce my argument and investigation, specifically acknowledging that it is a domain which receives much critical attention today, cutting across different fields, from social care to history and informatics: The nature of memory and remembering is notoriously an issue of great public interest and concern, well beyond the English-speaking world, as well as a topic of intense specialist study. We worry about memory loss and memory enhancement, memory distortion and memory construction, recovered memory and false memory; about how eyewitnesses remember and misremember, how we remember trauma and are haunted by reminiscences; about national memory and cultural memory as well as personal memory; about politicians’ truths and lies about the past; about mementos, memorials, monuments, and other objects that trigger memory retrieval. (Sutton in Amberber 2007: 43)

86  The Voices of ‘Lament’ There are different approaches to tackle the multi-faceted notion of memory, from the philosophical and phenomenological to more recent trends grounded in neurobiology and computational studies, and researchers are also interested in cross-linguistic investigations to see how different languages conceptualise and lexicalise words for memory (see the contributions contained in Amberber 2007). Of course, it is almost a truism to affirm that memory is a fundamental concept in human civilisation (Draaisma 2001; Whitehead 2009), linked to time according to Plato and Aristotle’s thought, and the cognitive mechanism through which we store, organise, and increase our knowledge of the world in order to develop, progress, and understand the world around us, hence the conceptualisation of memory through a range of metaphorical or idiomatic expressions. These may be realised in a myriad of ways, referring to conceptual domains (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018: 205) such as spatiality (containment in particular), with figurative forms as diverse as ‘wax tablets’, ‘rooms in a house’, ‘stores’, ‘computer programs’, ‘library’, and even ‘subway maps’ (Roediger 1980; Whitehead 2009). In fact, similarly to what happens with cognitive metaphors like the mind is a container and ideas are objects, memory is often figuratively viewed as a box, a container, or another type of space, in which specific memories are deposited, and can be organised, retrieved, or even lost. Such a type of conceptualisation for memory is in tune with Antara’s point of view. After she speaks with her mother’s doctor about Tara’s lack of memory and temporal lapses, she elaborates a metaphorical image of this kind: “at the end, she will be a house I’ve moved out of, containing nothing that is familiar” (Doshi 2020: 136). It is an emotionally striking expression because it postulates the idea of containment as a sort of intimate space for human and family relationships, a mother metamorphosed into a house, which however is empty eventually, and so devoid of the memories that had been accumulated over the years. Moreover, the image indexes the double bond of love and hate that connect and separate the two women, bringing to the fore the painful sense of loss inevitable with an illness like senile dementia as well as the (in) capacity of recollecting, narrating, and living in the social world. The approach to and understanding of such condition (see the chapters in Hughes et al. 2006) inevitably triggers sensitive and loaded discussions about identity, personhood, and the body, and such echoes reverberate in the narrative by Doshi too. The two prototypical lexical items that are associated with memory are the verbs ‘remember’ and ‘forget’, which from a traditional perspective of grammar and lexical semantics are treated respectively like ‘look’, ‘listen’, ‘touch’ and ‘understand’, ‘infer’, and ‘realise’, and hence within the distinct categories of perception and thought, although not all scholars agree on such a form of opposition as they highlight the conceptual correlation between the two. In my discussion, I adopt Biber

The Voices of ‘Lament’  87 et al.’s (1999) more comprehensive label of mental verbs to see how Avni Doshi astutely employs these stylistic forms and their connotations to articulate her narrative discourse. The two verbs, in fact, constitute a sort of diegetic pattern that apparently seems to function in a binary way, as Tara forgets things from her past and Antara remembers episodes from her earlier life; but in reality the two frequently overlap and question the very idea of narrating memory, objectivity, and reliability. Furthermore, the two verbs are foregrounded by the constant reference to Antara’s dementia, a condition which can impinge on cognitive ability and reshape linguistic performance: scholars (for example Hamilton 2019) have demonstrated how in a conversational situation speakers affected by such a disease tend to negotiate their senses of face (self), often shifting between different stages or sensations such as anxiety, shame, and even anger, in their (in)capacity to manage memory and the consequence of forgetting or remembering specific details and episodes of their past. Remembering is a sort of key word eminently associated with Antara: on the one hand, it is the term that permits her to share with the reader her complex and neglected past, in the attempt to tame the animosity and bitterness that simultaneously links her and detaches her from Tara, but also her identity as an artist, experimenting with different materials to express and elaborate meaning. Sometimes the act of remembering is not explicitly stated but it operates by triggering a past world story, for example when the protagonist reconsiders his father, an important businessman from whom Tara separated, or when she speaks about her difficult life in the ashram. These chapters are graphologically marked by the italicised year of reference, which functions as a sort of title for the following text. However, the theme of memory is intimately incorporated into Antara’s artistic role as her narrative voice affirms: “my art is not about lying. It’s about collecting data, information, finding irregularities” (Doshi 2020: 25). Throughout the text, the author hints at an embodied conceptualisation of memory, whereby memories, like objects, are gathered, preserved, or lost, and this justifies the creation of metaphors and images linked to libraries and museums. The analogy between remembering and collecting, two semantically related verbs, is also significantly expressed by the diary that Antara used to keep as a young child. As a personal document, the diary was a peculiar artefact, though it was “not the kind the other girls at school kept – no entries about romance and boys and dreams and wishes. Mine was a collection of moments from the past, the ones I could remember anyway, primarily a list of grudges” (Doshi 2020: 142–143). Contrarily to what one might think, for Antara, recording memories in her diary is not a simple form of self-expression, but a method for negotiating social and familiar relations since her mother appears quite frequently, but her father is obliterated from her pages.

88  The Voices of ‘Lament’ As she grows up, Antara extends this to her artistic activity and the way in which she makes her drawings and portraits in order to distance herself from her encroaching mother: “all the images that were a record of moments in my life, memories, but also my becoming, the making of me that is separate from her” (Doshi 2020: 102). However, remembering operates in opposition to, or rather in tandem with forgetting, because the two elements are part and parcel of the discourse of memory, as demonstrated by critical voices as disparate as the early Greeks, the Enlightenment philosophers, and Freud (Whitehead 2009: 13–14). In the novel forgetting is the verb that epitomises the current condition of Antara’s mother, a woman who used to memorise things exceptionally. The protagonist consults many doctors and experts and is informed that Tara’s memory is weakened and damaged by the disease: “the hippocampus is the memory bank and, in this disease, the vaults are being emptied. Long-termed memory cannot be formed, short-termed memory vanishes into the ether” (Doshi 2020: 7). Metaphorically, here, memory is seen as a precious and valuable object that has to be stored in a bank, whose vaults are usually employed to house gold or other expensive items. However, memory cannot resist the attack of the disease and consequently it has to fade away. This idea of memory as something concrete is recurrent in the novel and implicitly suggests the (im)possibility of its reliability: if memory can be created and elaborated, to what extent will it be reliable? This is a crucial question that Antara discusses with a life coach when her mother’s diseases have a dramatic impact on her life, her marriage, and her work: ‘Reality is something that is co-authored,’ the woman says. ‘It makes sense that you would begin to find this disturbing. When someone says that something is not what you think of it as, it can cause slight tremors in the brain, variations in brain activity, and subconscious doubts begin to emerge. Why do you think people experience spiritual awakening? It’s because the people around us are engaged. The frenzy is a charge that’s contagious’. Are you saying my mother is contagious? No, I’m not. Though maybe I am, in a sense. We actively make memories, you know. And we make them together. We remake memories too, in the image of what has become unreliable. The doctor says my mother has become unreliable. We are all unreliable. The past seems to have a vigour that the present does not. (Doshi 2020: 176) The extract is interesting because it foregrounds the manipulability of the theme of memory, and implicitly its agency, thanks in particular to the causative verb ‘make’, intensified by the premodifier ‘actively’.

The Voices of ‘Lament’  89 The life coach’s words point to the fluid nature of memory, in which ideas and episodes are not static but change according to our cognition and perception: in this light, memories can not only be made, but even remade, and, as a consequence, memory is obfuscated by unreliability with its ideal list of plausible versions, thus affecting the very idea of narrative. As Bal (2017: 145) argues, memories are unreliable – in relation to the fabula – and when put into words, they are rhetorically overworked so that they can connect to an audience – for example, a therapist, a judge, a political gathering. Hence, the story the person remembers is not identical to the one she experienced. In the passage from the novel above, the advisor also underlines how unreliability actually affects everyone, not only those with medical impairments or other similar conditions, and for Antara this is a disturbing moment because it may even test her own storytelling, where the memories of her embittered infancy are chronologically pieced together on the narrative canvas. To a certain extent, moreover, the years spent at the ashram with her mother constitute a traumatic period for Antara, as she was compelled to live in a precarious, anarchic, and alienating way, begging for food and sleeping rough, and of course this contributes to shaping her memories. Autobiographical narratives are discursive renditions of experience that exploit memory, or rather they represent a genre that “constitutes an important art of memory” (Whitehead 2009: 10): Antara’s story revolves around her effort to come to terms with her distressing past, and her relationship with an uncaring mother, but naturally it is biased, as it is filtered through her own gaze, her personality, and her unsolved issues. The entire narrative is ambiguous at times, and the fact that the two protagonists have very similar names may seem to suggest a partial overlapping of voices, which endorses uncertainty and complexity. It is also worth stressing that the protagonist’s account displays an embodied attitude in the sense that her speeches frequently evoke the correlation between mind and body, in particular when she considers her early years at the ashram, or when she looks at her body as it is gradually transformed by pregnancy. To some extent, this aspect also concerns Tara, whose frail body is the biological mirror of her vanishing memory, although the narrative foregrounds the representation of Antara in her corporeal and mental dimension, in particular through the stylistic depiction of a split self, a notion stemming from the juncture of cognitive science, linguistics, and narratology to “include all cases of a character or real life individual being divided and/or duplicated in any way in a narrative” (Emmott 2002: 54). Thus, it is a notion that defines the different layers of personality or identity in a character, which may

90  The Voices of ‘Lament’ operate thanks to different rhetorical devices and forms. The concept of split self might even be the consequence of a medical condition or a traumatic event (such as schizophrenia or a neurological impairment), in which the subject experiences the perception of a doubling of their personality. Examples of split self (Emmott 2002) can include the different personalities of characters when comparing their present and past diegetic levels since their consciousness and mind might have changed consistently: the narrating subject of the now-discourse may not be the same as the subject of the past, or their speculative work in the case of alternative personas, in particular through modal markers. This can result in different versions of the same fictional figure: a hypothetical subject of a boulomaic modal world is different from the character daydreaming or imagining a dissimilar reality or situation. I now consider a couple of instantiations of Antara’s split self. The first instantiation is uttered by the woman, in the present, when she looks back on her past, remembering herself as a seven-year-old child leaving the guru’s community in 1989. The second scene regards the narration in which Antara recalls the period when she was looked after by her grandmother and lived at her father’s house: it was a very difficult time for her because her father and her new wife had moved to the United States, and along with a new abandonment she had to face up to the transformation of her body and mind as a 13-year-old adolescent: Sometimes I can feel that girl crowing at the back of my throat, trying to come out through any orifice she can. But I swallow her until the next time she wants to be born again. (Doshi 2020: 88) I had started to suspect that someone else was living in my body, taking up temporary residence and making herself at home. She was opening me up from the inside, causing the appearance of stretch marks and discoloured skin. Hair had appeared in greater quantities where I didn’t want it, and I couldn’t keep up with the demands of depilation. And I was eating for a multitude, it seemed, satisfying a bottomless hole of hunger. (Doshi 2020: 150) Both extracts signal the irruption of change, where the clash between the child and her alter ego is linguistically arranged by means of imageschemas, namely “kinaesthetic knowledge structures, based on bodily experiences in space” (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018: 210), such as in, out, container, and realised by locative and movement expressions like ‘at the back’, ‘come out through’, ‘in my body’, or ‘opening me up from inside’. From a cognitive approach, the underpinning structure is the body is a container, in which we can find two selves, or

The Voices of ‘Lament’  91 personas, struggling to impose themselves over the other. This type of schematic representation is grounded upon three components (interior, exterior, and boundary), which are projected by conceptual metaphors, and therefore the body is viewed as a space that contains/constrains the other, or as a limit than can be crossed by another version of the self. Lexical choices too are revelatory of Antara’s split self as they include mental activity verbs (‘feel’, ‘suspect’), bodily references (‘throat’, ‘skin’), and psychologically symbolic elements (‘orifice’, ‘inside’). The idea of split self also draws attention to the temporal backdrop, thanks to the intertwined discourses of split personality and memory stemming from the types of tense used by the author (present simple, past perfect, past continuous): the first quotation is situated in the present story world and indicates that Antara still thinks about her troubled past in a complex acceptance or negotiation of her memories, whereas the second textualises the narrative in a distant past, whose emotional load is nonetheless still problematic. The way in which Antara treats such epiphanic memories is not always the same, as it reveals her own attitude and perspective. In this respect, the trope of memory indicates the manifestation of stance, which for Wales (2011: 391) regards the “use of language in speech and writing to convey personal feelings, attitudes or judgments concerning the propositions being expressed” and operates through different items, devices, and forms. In particular, verbs such as remember and forget may also convey an epistemic stance because they accord with the character’s certainty or uncertainty about what is being treated in the discourse, thus influencing point of view, colouring subjectivity, and framing the narrative’s perimeter. Memory words then express degrees of modality since “there are many different ways to think about what has happened before” (Sutton in Amber 2007: 42) and therefore Antara and Tara’s pasts do not always coincide. It is worth considering that “‘memory’ […] is not something that objectively exists – a ‘thing’, or a distinct and clearly delimited aspect of human nature” (Wierzbicka in Amberber 2007: 14). The two women’s handling of memory deeply informs their own perspective and assessment of life in general as they both have to come to terms with their past. In reality, structurally, the reader is given access to the story through Antara’s viewpoint since the entire novel follows a first-person style, and so both narration and dialogues reflect her attitudes and interpretations. Clearly in the case of Tara, her inability to remember is exacerbated by her illness, a neurological disorder that progressively and inexorably damages the brain by killing its cells to favour dementia and cognitive decline, whereas with Antara the author challenges the reader to accept a selective reconstruction of the past, which however is also a form of storytelling and problematises the access to voice for subjects with problematic, disabled, or unhealthy bodies and other conditions

92  The Voices of ‘Lament’ (Frank 1995). For the protagonist, her mother’s lack of memory is a puzzling mystery for which there is no answer, despite her own metareflective attitude: Sometimes, I refer to Ma in the past tense even though she is still alive. This would hurt her if she could remember it long enough. Dilip is her favourite person at the moment. He is an ideal son-inlaw. When they meet, there are no expectations clouding the air around them. He doesn’t remember her as she was – he accepts her as she is, and is happy to reintroduce himself if she forgets his name. I wish I could be that way, but the mother I remember appears and vanishes in front of me, a battery-operated doll whose mechanism is failing. The doll turns inanimate. The spell is broken. The child does not know what is real or what can be counted on. Maybe she never knew. The child cries. I wish India allowed for assisted suicide like the Netherlands. Not just for the dignity of the patient, but for everyone involved. I should be sad instead of angry. Sometimes I cry when no one else is around – I am grieving, but it’s too early to burn the body. (Doshi 2020: 4) The fictional rendition of such dramatic conditions is deliberately marked by emotional overtones: first of all, Antara openly admits to the reader that she is more inclined to use the past tense, which is typical of narrative and communicates distance, when she refers to her mother. Tense is an important indicator of memory and can be viewed as a deictic marker to signal the speaking character’s position in time: as already noted, the entire novel alternates between the use of present and past tenses, the former used in a non-past fashion for Antara’s present and the latter employed with the value of preterite (a completed action in the past) for her past (Wales 2011: 418–419). In cognitive stylistics terms, the protagonist adopts a speculative view by virtue of hypothetical, alternative story-worlds contained within the main story-world (such as her own, for example), to accept not only the deterioration of her mother’s body and mind, but also her persistent psychological weight, which is still the cause of much frustration, resentment, and negativity. This sense of double vision is activated by a range of devices, in particular adverbial phrases such as ‘even though’ and ‘still’, the use of the modal auxiliary ‘would’ for past, and the conditional conjunction ‘if’, which cumulatively allow the shift into another story-world. This works in a balance with the ‘now-level’ of the narrative, realised by the syntactically simple sentence that refers to the relationship between Dilip and Tara in the present. Antara’s mental elaboration dominates the next paragraph, which starts with a counterfactual volitive verb (‘wish’) indexing an unfulfilled

The Voices of ‘Lament’  93 desire, that is, a form of boulomaic modality, “the modal system of ‘desire’, used to indicate the extent to which a speaker finds a particular proposition desirable or undesirable” (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018: 111), as the woman would like to be someone different. In her despair, the anguish and displacement that derive from such a situation govern a figurative representation of Tara through the embodied image of the doll, whose batteries are out of order. Not only is the metaphor emotionally charged by depicting the inevitable frailty of the human body, but it also seems to communicate a sort of psychological regression, suggesting the condition of children and their world, in which it is not easy to understand and accept evil, pain, and loss. Antara’s agony is overwhelming and disorienting, and the end of the passage it becomes a sort of confession; but in reality her unstable voice displays mixed feelings (‘sad’, ‘angry’) that even contemplate the possibility of medical aid in dying for people under certain circumstances. As a whole, Antara’s relationship with her mother is complex, difficult, and frequently terse because it painfully touches on, and disrupts, many sensitive issues, as well as offering prototypical images of motherhood and daughterhood, especially in a society that still shows a tendency towards tradition, with the symbol of the mother (maa) sacrificing herself for her children. As Nair and deSouza (2020: 263) note, “not just confined within the family, maa is imbued with larger symbolic/figurative connotations embracing geography and culture”, and as an emblematic reference, in India, it illuminates an essential and generative principle across many referential fields such as the concepts of mother-tongue and mother-land, but it also establishes links with divinity, pivoting around the Sanskrit term devimatas (Kinsley 1986: 132–150), for example, with the presence of Hindu ‘motherly’ goddesses, even in their terrifying aspect, such as Parvati, Durga, and Saraswati. The clash between mother and daughter is constantly amplified by Doshi and probably reaches its climax when Antara understands that she is pregnant and that her family is set to enlarge, an issue that implicitly brings to the fore more problematic aspects about parenthood, with a reversal of roles whereby a daughter becomes a mother. Essentially, Doshi’s novel is a work about private memory, but nonetheless it also touches on a public and collective dimension (Whitehead 2009: 123–152), in particular when it evokes the danger of communalism with the atrocious riots that followed the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 (Nair and deSouza 2020: 346–347), documented by Rezi and his photographs. In general, the idea of public memory, especially in relation to delicate historical episodes such as this one, is an important archive that writers exploit to construct their stories and shake society, but Doshi prefers to unearth the intimate baggage of the memories of a woman who has to reconsider the conflictual bond with her neglecting mother suffering from dementia. Such a drastic need to rebalance the feelings of love and hate constitutes the provocative

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backbone of the narrative. In this light, the novel is defamiliarising, perplexing, and to a certain extent challenging since it represents a deliberate pragmatic face-threatening act at the authorial/narratorial level (like the choice of the topic, for example), a provocation or even an offence to the general readership as they are asked to excavate the roots of human identity and the relationship between parents and children. However, in thus doing, the author illuminates and disentangles complex themes such as the load of memory, the complicacy of identity, and the ethical questions about the frail condition of human beings, enriching and updating the current scenario of Indian English literature, and showing how “the body also has its own capacity to retain and recall the past, but memory nevertheless remains a crucial underpinning for, and foundation of, our sense of self” (Whitehead 2009: 58–59).

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Mason, Jessica and Giovanelli, Marcello. 2021. Studying Fiction. London: Routledge. Morey, Peter and Tickell, Alex, eds. 2005. Alternative Indias: Writing, Nation and Communalism. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Nair, Rukmini Bhaya and deSouza, Peter Ronald, eds. 2020. Keywords for India. A Conceptual Lexicon for the Twenty-first Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Nikolajeva, Maria. 2001. “The Changing Aesthetics of Character in Children’s Fiction”. Style, 35.3: 430–453. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002. Narrative Fiction. London: Routledge. Roediger, Henry. 1980. “Memory Metaphors in Cognitive Psychology”. Memory and Cognition, 8.3: 231–246. Rushdie, Salman. 2015. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. London: Jonathan Cape. Sailaja, Pingali. 2009. Indian English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Shoobie, Mostafa Azizpour. 2019. Cosmopolitanism in the Indian English Novel. New York: Peter Lang. Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics. London: Routledge. Stockwell, Peter. 2009. Texture. A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sutton, John. 2007. “Language, Memory, and Concepts of Memory: Semantic Diversity and Scientific Psychology”. In Amberber, M., ed., The Language of Memory in a Crosslinguistic Perspective. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 41–65. Thomas, Sonja. 2016. “Education as Empowerment?: Gender and the Human Right to Education in Postcolonial India”. In Dwivedi, O.P. and Rajan, V.G., eds., Human Rights in Postcolonial India. London: Routledge, 66–92. Tickell, Alex. 2016. “‘An Idea Whose Time Has Come’: Indian Fiction in English After 1991”. In Tickell, A., ed., South Asian Literatures. Contemporary Transformations. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 37–58. Wales, Katie. 2011. Dictionary of Stylistics. Abingdon: Routledge. Whitehead, Anne. 2009. Memory. London: Routledge. Wierzbicka, Anna. 2007. “Is ‘Remember’ a Universal Human Concept? ‘Memory’ and Culture”. In Amberber, M., ed., The Language of Memory in a Crosslinguistic Perspective. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 13–39. Willis, Ika. 2018. Reception. London: Routledge.

5

Languaging the Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction

5.1 Representing the Senses in Language and Fiction Throughout my investigations I have often stressed the relevance of the interrelation between mind and body in today’s critical debate (Gavins and Steen 2003; Gibbons and Whiteley 2018; Stockwell 2002), in particular in the light of recent cognitive approaches and advancements, which theorise that the way in which language operates to conceptualise the world we live in cannot be detached from a broader consideration of both mind and body, namely the notion of embodiment with its emphasis on the senses. With this premise in mind, I now look at the representation of the sense(s), viewed as meaning-making sites, in Indian English authors such as Tabish Khair and Mega Majumdar. Specifically, I elaborate on how the fictional depiction of the five senses does not have a merely descriptive function in the text, but rather enhances the development of the narrative by virtue of linguistic devices and modes, and affects the manner in which readers interpret the story-worlds invented by the writers. Such an argument is supported by recent cognitive linguistic and neurolinguistic scholarship, according to which “language and the senses appear to be intimately connected in that exposure to sensoryrelated language triggers the activation of sensory brain areas” (Littlemore 2019: 125). As Wales (2011: 215) argues, “descriptions may evoke not only visual images, but also sound […], and other sensory experiences, form and content working together”. Clearly, the idea of expressing the senses through a linguistic prism is part of a broad discussion on the human capacity of interpretation, and the very word ‘sense’ is polysemous, covering a number of meanings (Howes 2005). The Oxford English Dictionary online (2021) for example records an assortment of 26 possible definitions, with their subcategories, for the lexeme (as a single noun), starting with the ideas of sense as meaning, but for the purpose of my investigation it may suffice to mention the following entry: Originally: any of the faculties of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch; any of the five senses; an organ of sense (obsolete); (in plural sometimes) these faculties collectively as opposed to the intellect, DOI: 10.4324/9781003266792-5

98  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction spirit, etc. In later use more generally: any of the faculties by which external or internal stimuli are perceived, involving the transmission of nerve impulses from specialized neurons (receptors) to the brain. Such a definition apparently promotes a binary structure (the bodily perceptual versus the intangible intellectual), but actually it sanctions the embodied nature of the five senses since they constitute a (psycho)physiological response of the individual’s organs to external stimuli that will be elaborated by the brain (Littlemore 2019: 123–149). The linguistic illustration of the senses also intersects the area of modality, in particular perception modality (a subtype of epistemic modality, concerned with the notion of truth, knowledge, and understanding), according to which “the speaker’s confidence in the truth of a proposition is based not on their own knowledge but on their faculties of perception, usually visual but also auditory” (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018: 112). Traditionally, the senses are viewed as five, and such a categorisation dates back to Aristotelian thought, specifically, his De Anima, Book II, which deals with sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, and asserts their central role in human culture. In reality, contemporary science has revealed that the idea of the senses is much broader and can manifest itself in multiple ways, for instance with the sense of balance, the sense of agency, and the sense of effort, but in this chapter I limit myself to the traditional categorisation of the senses and their fictional rendition. Moreover, given my focus on the texture of the narrative discourses I consider here and the effects these engender in the broader readership, I do not bring in the rich philosophical traditions of Hindu aesthetics, for instance with the concept of rasa that “emerges primarily as a spectrum of fleeting emotions, rendered stable by one’s propensity for savouring them selectively” (Nair and deSouza 2020: 102), or the conceptualisation of auditory, visual, olfactory, and gustatory qualities that emerge from Vedic texts, but rather I look at the world of the senses as an apparatus by which individuals create and codify meaning, and I focus on the way in which these are rendered in the stories by Khair and Majumdar. Human culture has habitually tended to emphasise sight and hearing over the other senses, and evidence lies in the statistically more relevant idioms, set phrases, and proverbs that involve these two domains. Some of the numerous examples, which can be easily retrieved from dictionaries and other common sources, include ways of saying and expressions such as ‘see fit to do something’, ‘see red’, and ‘all that jazz’. The other senses, instead, have often been marginalised because their fuzzy conceptual boundaries do not allow us to pin them down to exact expressions. Even in synaesthetic metaphors, in which one sense is suggested by reference to another (Littlemore 2019: 137–148), they tend to play a less important role, that is, they function as modifiers rather than

Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction  99 as central elements: ‘sweet silence’ (taste modifies sound) makes sense and is common and transparent, but ‘silent sweetness’ (sound modifies taste) is not common, and looks rather defamiliarising, or opaque. Therefore, as Diaconu (2006) holds, the so-called ‘lower senses’ (smell, taste, and touch) are not frequently discussed by scholars, even if they too contribute to the general construction of discourse and can provide a plethora of suggestions. For Nuessel (2018: 104) in fact, “creative writers use various verbal, linguistic, and typographical means to achieve original and novel literary strategies that allow the reader of a text to hear, see, feel, smell, and taste what a character does”. The verbalisation of the lower senses poses challenges to novelists of course, in the representation of taste or smell, for example, because it is not just a question of vocabulary, with words that are able to depict particular types of sensations, but more prominently in the effort to modulate the text in order to evoke clear feelings in the mind of the reader, by activating their embodied response. The presence of the senses in fictional writing is significant, in its attempt to unveil the auditory, visual, kinaesthetic or tactile, olfactory, and gustatory dimensions, which naturally require different rhetorical expressions and means, and once again the idea of verbally illustrating the lower senses turns out to be complicated. There are however some notable examples of how such senses have been fictionalised and transformed into important mechanisms of meaning creation. Patrick Süskind’s ground-breaking novel Perfume. The Story of a Murderer (1985) is one such example because it centralises the olfactory sensation, which apparently looks impossible to define through words because of its proverbial ephemerality, and utilises it to frame the entire story as smells, odours, and fragrances become the building blocks of the novelist’s project. Indian English authors have also widely exploited the depiction of the senses, given their expressive potential, in particular in connection with food (and spices) that naturally bring to mind echoes of taste and smell. Some notable configurations are those invented by Salman Rushdie, whose magic jars of chutney are used to preserve memory and history in Midnight’s Children (1981), or the potions to affect sentiments created by the protagonist of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices (1997). Other fictional texts could be mentioned of course, but the important issue here concerns the revaluation of the senses in various creative domains including literature and art, and subsequently many other disciplines, which have produced a series of new theories and ideas, in particular thanks to the cognitive turn and its recognition of the embodied self. It is also worth noticing that in a parallel fashion, the depiction of the senses in narrative texts can be read from a Bakhtinian perspective too, which draws attention to the corporeal status of humanity, thus eliciting sensory reactions. The senses are invested by this type of representation because, as Allen (2000: 22) affirms, they conjure “images of

100  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction huge bodies, bloated stomachs, orifices, debauchery, drunkenness and promiscuity”, and in suggesting the impact of many sensations spanning texture, smell, and taste (Littlemore 2019: 123–124) they also challenge the prescribed order, and norms of representability, or decorum, encouraging a reflection on their inner meanings. But a serious discussion on the understanding of senses must consider the role and effect of language because it is the means that humans employ to verbalise their sensations. However, different cultures construct their worldviews, including the portrayal of the senses, differently and by using different languages, and, as a consequence, a particular language may also embed inevitable limits because it shapes or constrains the senses and perceptions for that community of speakers. Therefore, language mediates between the subject’s conscience and the surrounding objective world, as Majid and Levinson (2011: 9) explain: Language, then, plays a fundamental intermediary role between the subjective, individual nature of sensation and the cultural world that constructs the perceptual field. The cultural world provides the sensory environment – the smells, the tastes, the colors, the shapes, the spaces, the sounds that we perceive. Biology provides the individual’s sense organs and the cortical processing of sensations that process the sensory information. But without language our sharing of perceptual experience would be confined to shared environments and shared biology: a mechanical sharing without intersubjectivity. What language adds is the projection outwards from the individual psyche of private sensations now clothed in public representations, and conversely, the introjection of public representations into private psychology – with all the effects already noted in the color and odor domains. Language gives us intersubjective sensory experience, without which there could not be a social science of the senses. From this angle, and with its double process of projection and introjection, the language of the senses offers important indicators of the constant effort of human beings to scan the world and answer ontological questions. Therefore, the linguistic depiction of the senses, in particular the lower senses, in the fictional domain reveals some of the author’s intentions and ideologies, and in the following sections I scrutinise how writers such as Tabish Khair and Megha Majumdar illuminate sensory experiences in their stories. The stylisation of the senses, in this light, operates as an overarching meaning-making frame for the expressions of various issues. As the editor of The Empire of the Senses argues, “the ‘senses’, in fact, are not just one more potential field of study, alongside, say, gender, colonialism, and material culture. The senses are the media through which we experience and make sense of gender, colonialism and material culture” (Howes 2005: 4).

Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction  101 To some extent, the recognition of the salient role of the senses in cultural discourse lends itself easily to the discussion of trauma, since this is frequently the outcome of those contexts in which the senses and the body are injured, abused, or fractured. Although the term trauma “is slippery: blurring the boundaries between mind and body, memory and forgetting, speech and silence” (Bond and Craps 2020: 14), the authors I examine in this chapter seem to be interested in the correlation between the senses and trauma because they both explore the contours of contemporary Indian identity by assessing the impact of different kinds of trauma, personal and collective, as well as their dominant ideologies. The two writers in fact pick up the idea of the trauma which derives from physical and emotional violence against minorities to challenge and deconstruct stereotypical images of the Indian cultural scenario, going beyond the rhetoric of multiculturalism, modernity, and progress. Moreover, they also reflect on how these ideas move from the individual to the surrounding society in the name of a collective dimension that not only forms the shadowy underside of memory but, more precisely, shapes and defines the very contours of what is recalled and preserved; what is transmitted as remembrance from one generation to the next; and what is thereby handed down to us, in our turn, to cherish or discard, but above all to reflect critically upon. (Whitehead 2009: 14)

5.2 Author, Text, and Context: Tabish Khair The first author I am considering in my exploration of the senses in literary discourse is Tabish Khair, whose extensive work covers various genres and types of writing, spanning fiction, poetry, academic scholarship, and journalism. Khair was born in 1966 in Ranchi, and grew up in Gaya, a small but historically and culturally relevant town, traditionally believed to be the place where Gautama Buddha reached enlightenment. A prolific and committed intellectual, who now works as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Arhus, in Denmark, Khair belongs to the category of diasporic (NRI) artists, and as such he has authored several novels, novellas, and short stories that frequently concern the manifold question of Indian identity, in its broad spectrum. His first fictional work was The Bus Stopped (2004), which was followed by other narratives such as Filming: A Love Story (2007), The Thing About Thugs (2010), How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (2012), Just Another Jihadi Jane (2016, published in India as Jihadi Jane), and Night of Happiness (2018). Khair has also written a number of important studies devoted to Indian English literature and comparative literature, such as Babu Fictions: Alienation in Indian English Novels (2001), The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from

102  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction Elsewhere (2009), and The New Xenophobia (2016), in which he discusses various styles, tropes, and motifs from both Indian and World literature. His lyrics have appeared in different anthologies and journals, and he has recently published Quarantined Sonnets (2020), a volume in which he experiments with and rewrites Shakespeare’s works to exorcise the fears of the Covid-stricken era. Here I am focusing on his short novel, or novella, Night of Happiness, whose genre aptly shifts between the tones of gothic, crime, and communalism discourses. The story adopts a non-linear narrative mode, with frequent anachronies, moving between the present and the past by means of analepsis, and it revolves around two main characters: a successful businessman, Anil Mehrotra, who acts as the narrator and focaliser of the story, and his reliable handyman, Ahmed. As the onomastic echoes of the two reveal, they belong to and index the major religions of India, although the first is rather secular, and not interested in religion, whilst the second follows the precepts of Islam, and in particular Shab-e-baraat, a small festival that he translates as “the night of salvation” (Khair 2018: 14), the word baraat covering a wide semantic perimeter, referring to happiness as well. That special day, in the words of Ahmed, is celebrated to “recall our ancestors, those who are dead, the ones gone before us to the realms of eternal peace and joy, the ones who made us possible on this earth” (Khair 2018: 15). For Mehrotra, what characterises Ahmed is not only his trustworthiness but also his ability to speak many eastern and western languages, including Thai, German, and even Japanese. After a very long day at work and in order to avoid the chaos caused by torrential rain, Mehrotra offers his employee a lift home, and when they reach the place, Ahmed invites his boss to have a cup of tea, although he explains that Roshni, his wife, will not join them as she observes the purdah, the separation between the male and female spaces in Muslim contexts. As the narrator enters the small flat, the text progressively displays some slightly defamiliarising clues, such as an old photo of Roshni, whose somatic features are more Nepali or Manipuri than North Indian, a window that had been left open apparently for no reason, or the fact that, when Ahmed speaks with his wife in the kitchen, only his voice can be heard. Of course, such impressions are the result of specific lexical items and evaluative forms that cumulatively encourage the reader to mentally construct a blurred and somehow ambiguous image. But the situation becomes even more estranging when the man is offered some halwa, a special confection that is very popular in many Asian countries, purposely made on that occasion. In fact, Mehrotra receives a plate with some nimkis (savoury snacks eaten across the Indian subcontinent) but no halwa at all: Ahmed diligently mimes the act of scooping the inexistent dessert with a little spoon and this generates doubts and puzzlement in his manager, who is not only unable to understand the bizarre scene, but also to react, and therefore he feels

Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction  103 compelled to participate and simulate the act of eating the sweet. From this moment, the entrepreneur becomes obsessed with Ahmed’s outlandish behaviour and cryptic past, and he contacts a detective agency to find out about Roshni, a woman that no-one is able or allowed to see, and the reason for her husband’s mysterious shyness. What follows is the progressive reconstruction of Ahmed’s life, which infuses the narrative with a strong sense of suspense, often rendered through different diegetic planes and the opposition between the nowtime of the story, with Mehrotra excavating the past of his employee, and the then-time, with the succession of Ahmed’s intricate past vicissitudes. Born and raised in Phansa, a small town close to Bodh Gaya, Ahmed exploited the flow of tourists from all over the world, wanting to visit Buddhist sites, to develop his propensity for languages, and there he also met his future wife Roshni. As he reinforces his faith in Islam (he grows a beard and regularly attends the Friday prayers), there are however some episodes that strike him deeply. When his father dies, Ahmed and his mother, referred to with the affectionate Urdu address form Ammajaan, want to visit the man’s tomb, but the woman is stopped by the graveyard caretaker on the basis of religious discrimination against women. This and other similar episodes exacerbate Ahmed’s sense of religion: his wife for example is not accepted by the mohalla, the Islamic community where the two live, because of her physical characteristics, in particular her dark skin and almost Chinese eyes, and eventually the woman decides to fully adopt purdah. The career of the man further improves and he obtains important positions in Mumbai and in Surat. Mehrotra suspects that Ahmed might have embraced religious fanaticism, secluding his wife from the world under the practice of purdah, but the investigator tells him something very different, linked to the temporal context of 2002, a year sadly known for its violent riots across Gujarat, which divided and devastated both Hindu and Muslim communities. In 2002, when a train of Hindu pilgrims was set on fire as it returned from the site of Ayodhya, where a mosque had been pulled down because it was considered an offence against the birthplace of Rama, causing 58 casualties, intrareligious violence potently erupted and triggered clashes in various towns and cities, with a death toll of more than a 1,000 people (790 Muslims and 254 Hindus), as well as many cases of rape and abuse (Chandra et al. 2008: 620–630). As the narration metatexually discloses its dark secrets, Mehrotra learns that the pitiless mob of Hindu fanatics stormed different areas in Mumbai to systematically hunt for Muslims: when Ahmed was out of town, they found Roshni in their flat and viciously killed her, after pouring “kerosene on her bowed head” (Khair 2018: 130). Such devastating brutality seriously affects Ahmed’s mental health as unconsciously he cannot accept the death of his wife: in his traumatised worldview, therefore, she is still alive, preparing the special halwa for Shab-e-baraat and serenely living in her purdah condition. The

104  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction man’s psychological disorder can be understood as a form of dissociation, stemming from idée fixe, that is, “ideas or beliefs by which traumatized individuals have become possessed” (Bond and Craps 2020: 147). However, Ahmed does not elaborate a form of dissociation by trying to remove the object that haunts him, but rather in this case he nourishes that very object – the thought and obsession of his wife, affectionately waiting for him at home and churning special foods for the celebrations. Symbolically, in the story reported by Mehrotra, Roshni is a spirit, an absent character. According to the principles of Islam, ghosts do not exist (djinns are not ghosts, in fact), but for Ahmed the shock of communal violence is so overwhelming that psychologically the idea of the ghost is the only way to try and reconstruct a life, looking for an (im)possible sense of relief: “he was living a fiction, and that fiction was gradually living him” (Khair 2018: 134). Mehrotra tells Ahmed that he cannot continue their collaboration and gives him a year’s salary, but later he discovers that the Muslim former worker has been found dead in his flat, “lying in bed, eyes open, with something like a grin on his face” (Khair 2018: 149). A number of dense themes crisscross the narrative, from the weight of religious customs and intolerance to the idea of how the mind reacts to tragedy, especially in the consideration of feelings and bonds. Khair employs a range of stylistic means to construct his story, and in particular he exploits the rendition of the senses, from the fragrance and taste of the invisible halwa, to the nauseating smell of burning bodies during the riots, to captivate the reader’s attention in an effort to map out human conscience.

5.3 The Pragmatics of Senses: Embodiment, Perception, and Suspense Khair’s Night of Happiness can be approached from different critical perspectives, and my analysis privileges the linguistic study of the sensory components, namely how the rhetorical rendition of the senses is instrumental in the author’s project to deal with loaded issues such as identity, trauma, and memory, considering in particular pragmatic aspects in the character’s conversational exchanges. When we speak about the senses, we often tend to overemphasise sight and sound to the detriment of the others. It is true that we construct our impression and understanding of the world through what we retinally see and the language we acoustically produce and hear, but this is only a partial picture because our sense of awareness can also be affected by taste, smell, and touch in our everyday experience of the surrounding context. With such premise in mind, I evaluate how the text explicitly evokes gustatory and olfactory dimensions to convey paradoxical effects of proximity and distance, and tie up with metaphors of memory. In particular, I set out to investigate the domain of the sense(s) in the text, concentrating

Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction  105 on a double perspective: (1) the interactional meaning-making process between characters through dialogue, i.e. the creation of sense in linguistic terms (Leech and Short 2007: 128–134), and (2) the narrative representation of physiological sense perception (gustatory in particular) as a metaphorical engine, i.e. the senses of smell and taste, which from the angle of cognitive research are “most closely tied to memory, particularly emotional memory” (Littlemore 2019: 134). The entire narrative condenses a number of loaded issues about identity, intolerance, and memory by foregrounding a defamiliarising speech between the first-person homodiegetic narrator Anil Mehrotra and his employee Ahmed, in which the offering of a ‘special’ halwa apparently activates weird face-threatening acts and yet fosters empathetic bonds to respond to trauma. My main research question therefore concerns how the textual rendition of the sense(s) in the storytelling operates at pragmatic, metaphorical, and cultural levels with the aim of producing emotional involvement and generating challenging questions and particular effects in the reader. The story is mainly arranged in a discursive format, with a predominance of narration perspectivised through Mehrotra’s international focalisation, which “occurs when the point of view is linked directly to a character” (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018: 100), and which also determines a biased, or at least partial, vision, since Mehrotra’s storytelling is based on his own ideologies, beliefs, and values. The narrative also exhibits some forms of interaction: dialogues at character level are present, and they reveal the articulations of the plot. Therefore, the application of critical tools and notions borrowed from the field of pragmatics, a discipline that as I explained in the first chapter studies meaning in context rather than general lexical meaning, can aid in the appreciation of the text, in particular considering seminal notions such as politeness, cooperative principle, and conversational implicature (Black 2006: 72–79). As a rule, conversations are built on politeness, “essentially a matter of consideration for others” (Patil 1994: 32), which means that speakers should be aware of the others’ public self-image, and are also expected to follow the cooperative principle, a theoretical assumption based on the four Gricean maxims of quantity, quality, relation (or relevance), and manner in order to favour the normal and regular exchanges of utterances between interlocutors (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018: 83–95; Leech and Short 2007: 231–254). According to such maxims, in a conversation, participants should (1) exchange the appropriate amount of information, (2) be truthful, (3) be relevant with their words, and (4) be brief and orderly for the purpose of the communication (Griffiths 2006: 134–135; Patil 1994: 31–32; Yule 1996: 36–37). Although this is a theoretical model, speakers are expected to organise their utterances along these general guidelines: if they fail to do so, intentionally or unintentionally, certain parts of the conversation tend to stand out,

106  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction hiding or expressing inner meanings and intentions, and may generate a form of conversational implicature, “an additional unstated meaning that has to be assumed in order to maintain the cooperative principle” (Yule 1996: 128). When the entrepreneur drives Ahmed to his flat and spends some time there to eat the special confection, their sketchy discourses gradually acquire defamiliarising echoes, since the latter’s conversational turns seem to somehow embed forms of illogicality, as they do not adhere to the maxims. The dialogues between the two characters are often incorporated into the narration (i.e. reported via indirect speech), but some of Ahmed’s words are presented directly and function as face threatening acts because they are quite puzzling, as they seem to imply a different meaning from what is literally stated: He joined me on a chair next to the sofa. ‘Another five minutes, she says,’ he added. ‘Though you will excuse me for serving no halwa; it is not ready yet.’ Then he started, as if he had heard something, and said. ‘No, no, don’t worry; Mehotra sa’b has to leave soon.’ Obviously he was replying to his wife in the kitchen, though I had not heard anything, perhaps because the storm had not died down completely. But as he sat there, ears pricked one would say, as if listening to his wife again, I tried to pay attention, and all I heard was the sound of the dying rain and a TV in a neighbouring apartment. Ahmed shook his head seemingly in mild amusement and, excusing himself, went back to the kitchen. Ahmed was a soft speaker, and I could hardly hear him as he conversed with his wife in the other room. But I did catch a few words of what he said to her: ‘No, not necessary… You don’t understand, Roshni… Oh well, as you wish then, as you wish.’ All of it in Hindustani, of course. Strangely, his wife must have been whispering, for I did not hear her at all, not above the squabble of a saas-bahu serial coming from the TV set next door. Perhaps she kept her voice veiled from strangers too? I tried not to give much thought to it, refusing to heed the murmur of a doubt. (Khair 2018: 28) Ideally, the passage integrates a conversation between Ahmed and his wife, but the words of the latter are not expressed in any way: Mehrotra, who is the reporting agent here, gathers the impression that he is not able to hear the voice of the woman on account of the fact that perhaps she has a low voice, or because of the stormy weather outside. In the passage, various items and forms support this impression, for instance via speculative hypothetical phrases (‘as if he had heard something’), rhetorical questions (‘she kept her voice veiled from strangers too?’), modal

Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction  107 words (‘obviously’), items of negation (‘I had not heard’), and evaluative adverbs (‘strangely’). The lack of Roshni’s voice in actuality discloses a transformation of the communicative act, which is not a real dialogue between two subjects, but rather a sort of monologue because, although Ahmed gives the impression of verbally interacting with another person, the voice of the woman is not present at all. In this fashion, Ahmed is strategically foregrounded since in a conversation the one who has more turns displays more visibility and power, and here the man totally holds the floor. Naturally, some of these speech acts could be justified by the parameters of politeness such as status, rank, and membership, which for Yamuna Kachru and Larry E. Smith (2008: 42–47) regulate specific contexts of culture. For example, in certain cultural milieus male speakers dominate the conversation unlike female speakers. However, the issue of sex difference is used here by the writer to instil suspense because it provides an aura of mystery and doubt, pointing out how “appearances may be deceptive, perceptions (even self-perceptions) might prove inaccurate, and simplifications inevitably lead to misunderstandings and mistakes” (Marino 2019: 52). Amplified by the reference to purdah, for Mehrotra this moment spotlights the invisibility of Ahmed’s wife, and implicitly underlines the subaltern position of women in patriarchal cultures, because not only is she absent, but even her voice is muted, and this starts instilling a sense of ambiguity as the narrator and the reader wonder why the woman cannot be seen or heard, with the parallel effect of activating a schema of religious gendered seclusion that is sometimes practised in Islamic families in the Indian subcontinent too. When Ahmed informs Mehrotra that the dessert is ready, the sense of smell seems to mark the conversation and is textually evoked by sensory words: You know, Ammajaan taught this recipe to Roshni. Roshni makes it exactly as she used to. Can you smell it? He sniffed appreciatively – or was it anxiously? – and got up. It relieved the atmosphere of brooding expectation that had settled on us when Ahmed had abruptly discontinued his narrative. […] I sniffed discreetly. There were food smells in the air, but they could well have been from adjoining flats – there was nothing distinctive about them. I prepared myself to be enthusiastic about some insipid fare, which is the usual burden of being served a dish someone else has grown up with. (Khair 2018: 31) The conversation between Ahmed and Mehrotra once again proceeds awkwardly because it refers to an ambiguous situation in reality: the former’s question does not entail a reply because the latter is unable to sense the smell of the halwa, hence the illogical and, in pragmatic terms,

108  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction face-threatening scenario derived from the infringement of the maxim of relevance (Black 2006: 76–79). Mehrotra cannot in fact understand what is happening because his face, i.e. his idea of self, does not seem to be recognised by the other in the communicative act, and even seems to be baffled. As Kachru and Smith (2008: 55) affirm, “conventions for expressing politeness in linguistic interaction have been developed in speech communities to reduce conflict and maintain ritual equilibrium”, but here the text signals much discomfort for the narrator, which is another clue to the uncertainty surrounding Ahmed and his entire life. This type of feeling is bound to sensory perception vocabulary since lexemes expressing the olfactory and gustatory experience reverberate through the extract, in particular with the recurring term ‘smell’, used as both a noun and a verb, related words (‘sniffed’), or those referring to taste (‘insipid’). Manner adverbs constitute another important device for the construction of such an environment: ‘exactly’ links the present narrative time of the story to the past by evoking the figure of Ahmed’s mother; ‘appreciatively’ and ‘anxiously’ index the man’s feeling and attitude, and at the same time mirror Mehrotra’s perplexity; his stance is also shown by ‘discreetly’, another adverb that has a pragmatic force, as an element that here adheres to the typical roles of guests and hosts in their conversation script. In other words, Mehrotra feels he has to keep following the rules of etiquette, assuming the role of the polite guest within a prototypical script, even if the situation is evidently absurd: his conversational strategy is based on a face saving act, in an attempt to mitigate or correct the incongruity of roles, positions, and acts in the communicative exchange. However, the climax of the absurd is reached when the imaginary halwa is served to Mehrotra, whose bewilderment leaves him speechless, thus rendering their conversation uncooperative again. In spite of the businessman’s timid reaction, Ahmed’s role as a host is exemplary and collaborative, thus totally respecting the rules of formal etiquette. For instance, during the conversation, he often uses a suitable honorific to address his boss, ‘sa’hab’, a word of Arabic origin, sometimes also spelt sahib or sahab, and slightly reminiscent of colonial echoes. This form of address is still common in the Indian subcontinent and demonstrates that “relationships in India are rather more clearly defined than in Western societies” (Sailaja 2009: 86). Nonetheless, as the dialogue goes on, it becomes clear that there is some mismatch between the two men, which engenders a sense of irrationality, and implicitly annoyance for the narrator, who is in charge of reporting the episode. Although Ahmed’s sentences are grammatically correct and well organised, and thus have locutionary value, they also seem to possess inferences that Mehrotra does not find appropriate or even real, and so he wonders what the illocutionary intent of the other’s words can be. In particular, Ahmed’s utterances flout the maxims of quality and relevance since, for

Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction  109 Mehrotra, his employee’s questions refer to something (the halwa) that does not actually exist, making the necessary shared background presupposition (the act of eating a dessert when a host offers food to a guest) totally inconsistent: Then he gave his slow smile and said, ‘Go ahead, Mehrotra sa’ab; you have not touched it. I promise you, it is delicious. Exactly as Ammajaan used to make it. If anything, even a bit better!’ What could I do? What could I have done? How could I tell a person who was eating ghostly halwa that my plate did not contain that food either? I picked up a couple of nimkis and popped them into my mouth, that icy muffler strangling me now, my fingertips cold and numb. No, no,’ said Ahmed, ‘try them with the halwa. That is the best combination. I picked up a nimki and dipped it in my plate, as though using it to scoop up some halwa. Then I carried it gingerly to my mouth. I put it in and chewed slowly, doubtfully, which Ahmed probably took for appreciation, for he looked pleased, relieved even, and nodded before returning to his plate. I could feel the nimki in my mouth, but of course there was no taste of halwa. (Khair 2018: 34–35) The acts of speech (such as ‘go ahead’, ‘try them with the halwa’) that Ahmed employs to convince Mehrotra to behave naturally and ‘eat’ the imaginary sweet (‘try them with the halwa’) can be classified as directives, which “speakers use to get someone else to do something” (Yule 1996: 54). Essentially, it is a strategy to pragmatically and conceptually re-create the world because, for the host, the pudding does exist and is an integral part of what is happening. The man’s attitude is also intensified by a commissive, a speech act that “speakers use to commit themselves to some future action” (Yule 1996: 54), because Ahmed tries to reassure his boss about the taste of the halwa with the phrase ‘I promise you’, which contains a communication verb (Biber et al. 1999: 370) and underpins the construction of the relationship between the interlocutors since promises are a “means of conveying that the speaker is cooperating with the addressees” (Patil 1994: 145). However, the narrative, which is organised from the viewpoint of Mehrotra, also displays some embodied vision aspects because it is not just an act of seeing, but a fuller experience. To illustrate the madness of the situation, the narrator relies on perception structures, intermingling mental and sensory devices that concern taste-related terms (‘delicious’, ‘better’, ‘mouth’, ‘scoop’, ‘chewed’) as well as dynamic verbs (the actions performed by the man to eat the invisible dessert) and speculative verba sentiendi (‘I could feel’) that strengthen his own subjectivity. In reality,

110  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction Mehrotra’s reaction filters indirectly into the narration rather than being explicitly uttered in the dialogue, and this allows the author to further mark his stance. The material characterisation of the absurd dialogue taking place between the two men is in stark contrast with the impalpability and ephemerality of the imaginary halwa, which can be regarded as a sort of symbol of other meanings. Ahmed is fully convinced of the seriousness of his behaviour and ends the meeting with his boss by using expressive and representative acts of speech, which respectively illustrate his feelings and beliefs (Yule 1996: 54): Then I put the plate down and made my excuses. I was late: the missus was waiting for us to go to a dinner. Ahmed looked slightly disappointed. ‘It was too rich for you, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘You left most of the halwa untouched’. (Khair 2018: 37) Ahmed’s attitude is further reinforced by the verbal structure he employs, a declarative sentence, with a question tag, which functions as an assertion, a statement of a truth, triggered by a process of deduction: the man infers that the dish was too much for Mehrotra since, in his mental world, he actually sees some leftovers, hence the lack of rationality that destabilises and irritates the narrator. The passages I have examined above mainly disclose suggestions about the idea of taste textualised as a cog in a broad diegetic mechanism, but in reality in the novel there are important references to the other senses as well, smell in particular. For Mehrotra, smell is a perceptual device that brings to the fore the passing of history and time, and therefore conjures memory; when he thinks about Muslim areas, for example, he links the image of diaspora with olfactory manifestations: Strange, isn’t it, incense and kebab – those are the good memories that I associate with my cursory incursions into Muslim colonies. Smells, memories that travel in the wind, as if they carry, encapsulated in themselves, the history of a people who have moved, and moved, and moved. (Khair 2018: 73) In this light, odour becomes a volatile token of diasporic memory, whose frailty and untouchability are a sort of figurative reflection of the condition of the migrant, and implicitly the reference here is to the Islamic communities that settled in India through time and that had, and still have, to cope with discrimination and marginalisation. However, the author also anchors the sense of smell to the sphere of the supernatural, an element that intensifies the nearly ghostly nature of the narrative, with an uncanny episode that takes place a year after Ahmed was made

Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction  111 redundant, when Mehrotra finds “something wrapped in a clean white towel” (Khair 2018: 141) on his desk. The underlexicalised term (Wales 2011: 430) ‘something’ stimulates the narrator’s (and the reader’s) curiosity and is then explained as a tiffin box, i.e. a typical metal lunch box frequently used in South Asia, which immediately attracts Mehrotra’s attention, especially thanks to its olfactory strength: A delicious smell was emanating from it. There was cinnamon in that fragrance, and cardamom, and half a dozen other minute herbs and seeds I could not identify for they grow on an earth I have seldom stopped to observe. The smell had a physical presence. It swirled out of the tiffin box and filled the room in waves. It evoked a strange feeling of longing and peace in me, and I could feel my mouth water. In the light of what happened, I have thought of this moment again and again, and I assure you, what I have felt at the moment was peace and longing – not the longing of unrequited desire but a longing that came with a feeling of trust in a fulfilment. Had I felt terror then, or even doubt, I would have understood it better. […] I opened the first compartment. It contained nimkis, exactly like those Ahmed had served me in his flat. I took it off and put it aside. The deeper bottom compartment contained halwa: it was of a consistency much denser than a dip but not solid; its colour was that of rain clouds in monsoon, a dark, pregnant grey. The fragrance filling my office came from the halwa. I took a mimki, dunked it in the halwa and popped it into my mouth. It was delicious. It was heavenly! (Khair 2018: 142–143) The narrator’s evocative description coincides with a process of sensualisation, by which the sense of smell becomes a synaesthetic paradigm (the immaterial ‘smell’ revealing a ‘physical presence’) of meaning making, not only in its constitutive lexical elements (the different spices and herbs mentioned in the text), but also in its power to reconcile old pains and unsaid truths: if Ahmed’s story is grounded on the devastating experience of intolerance that literally destroys human bodies and their identities, his inheritance is a hope for forgiveness, favouring positive feelings rather than a desire for vengeance. For the protagonist, smell and taste, and in a certain measure touch, since there is a specification about the texture of the dessert (‘denser’), are now epiphanic means to come full circle with a story that warns about the perils of communalism and fanaticism. Stylistically, the novelist interplays with openly positive or positively connoted appraisal patterns and words (‘delicious’, ‘minute herbs’), even marked by hyperbole (‘heavenly’), or through chromatic metaphors (‘its colour was that of rain clouds in monsoon’). However,

112  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction in reality, Mehrotra’s olfactory, gustatory, and tactile experience complicates the flow of the narration because it exclusively pertains to the man, since no-one else is able to see or smell the flavoursome ‘magical’ halwa. Bringing with him the halwa and some chocolates he had previously bought, Mehrotra starts chatting with his chauffeur while being driven to Ahmed’s place to thank him for the kind gift, and he praises the confectionaries of the Indian subcontinent, but again the conversation fails to progress because the driver affirms that he had recently had a cold that still affects his nose, and so he is unable to perceive the smells his employer talks about. The apparently minor detail of the chauffer’s cold provides a layer of rationality to an otherwise impossible situation, which in actuality anticipates the dramatic end of the entire story since Mehrotra will soon find out about the death of Ahmed. The investigation of the stylistic depiction of the senses that Khair elaborates in his novel indicates that they are embodied even when they subtly betray the influence of various genres like the gothic and mystery, which in this case are adapted to orchestrate a story denouncing the horror of human intolerance, namely violence and fanatism against minorities. Interestingly, all the senses are manipulated and overlapped in the narrative: the invisibility of both Roshni and the halwa pertains not only to sight, i.e. something that cannot be seen, but also to the tactile domain because both cannot be touched either. It is worth stressing how, from a psychological perspective, touch is extremely important in the relationship between the self and the Other, for example in the very first contact between mother and baby, whilst it projects the idea of intimacy as well. To gain a better understanding of the cognitive and allegorical dimensions of the story, I have proposed a reading based on the detection of sensory words and references as they convey a broad range of meanings, whereas the absurd episode of the halwa stands out as a sort of metaphor for a traumatic experience, which eventually draws attention to the inability of humans to communicate, for example in those contexts in which bigotry, subjugation, and fundamentalism prevail, but it also admonishes us about the acritical labelling of identities and (hi) stories since, “the One and the Other may play interchangeable roles, depending on one’s perspective or point of observations” (Marino 2019: 66–67). In this light, deciphering what words mean in contexts can help to understand intentions and senses projected by individuals in the complex postcolonial Indian world.

5.4 Author, Text, and Context: Megha Majumdar To continue my exploration of how the representation of the senses can function as a significant stylistic device in present-day Indian English fiction, I now turn to Megha Majumdar, another diasporic author who was born and educated in Kolkata in 1983 and moved to the United States

Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction  113 to study social anthropology at Harvard University. Her debut novel, A Burning, was published in 2020 and received different responses from readers and reviewers. Anglo-American newspapers greeted the novel with much appreciation (Charles 2020; Sandhu 2021; Sehgal 2020), praising the author’s swift three-voiced narrative and its provocative denunciation of discrimination, inequality, and corruption in India today. However, Indian commentators reacted differently: Amrita Dutta (2020), for instance, holds that although the narrative is engaging, it is nonetheless “a strangely tongue-tied one, with significant silences and erasures”, exploiting the exoticisms of Indian English style for a global audience and failing to capture the complexities of how sociocultural systems influence perceptions of life through tentacular media and other strategies: the tyranny of news and politics on the human mind has never been more oppressive, but it is in art and fiction that one might hope to find catharsis and meaning, and not merely an anthropological reflection of changing societies. Even more negative is the evaluation penned by Ashutosh Bhardwaj (2020), who does not hesitate to define the text as an expression of an ideological view, which still perpetuates images of orientalism and neocolonialism because “it distorted the histories of colonised societies, imposed on them a false memory whose burden they would carry forever and, ironically, forced them to bow in gratitude towards the novelists for narrating their lives”. It becomes clear then that the two polarised evaluations of the novel reflect conflicting opinions on how identity, society, and politics are pictured in narrative fiction. Certainly, Majumdar’s story is the product of a diasporic consciousness that tries to mediate between the multi-layered arena of Indian culture and its accessibility to external subjects, and yet it has the power to foreground questions of discrimination, inequality, and abuse, which have to be considered for a genuine understanding of contemporary India, a context still suffering from various social problems. In fact, like some of the other fictional works I have investigated in this study, Majumdar’s narrative spotlights the discrimination against the Muslim community, and hijras as well, that regularly takes places, but it also teases out human fragility faced with the tentacles and allures of power, and its ethical entanglements, for example when dreams of welfare bring individuals to ignore ethical questions and only pursue their own objectives. The main diegetic backbone of the story is concerned with a young Muslim girl called Jivan, who lives in a Kolkata slum and works for a clothing store. When a train waiting at a railway station near Jivan’s settlement is attacked, causing a high number of victims, unsurprisingly all social media evoke the image of terrorism, which in India is

114  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction stereotypically viewed as a figment of Islamic fundamentalism, and the girl decides to react with a politically committed statement. The following quote graphologically emphasises the girl’s thought and critique, but the narration also suggests doubts and fears: And then, in the small, glowing screen, I wrote a foolish thing. I wrote a dangerous thing, a thing nobody like me should even think, let alone write. If the police didn’t help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean, I wrote on Facebook, that the government is also a terrorist? (Majumdar 2020: 5–6, emphasis in the original) In other words, Jivan is aware of her own liminal condition (‘someone like me’) and yet decides to challenge the public discourse of hegemony and hierarchy against the so-called minorities. The girl’s sentiment is foregrounded thanks to italicisation, a graphological device that increases the force of her rhetorical question, triggered by a double conditional form that discloses the speculative dimension of the passage. The Facebook post attracts a huge public response as it seems to index a value of anti-patriotism in a country in which monolithic cultural and political positions are systematically emphasised thanks to campaigns promoting Hindu values, and the influences of Hindutva ideology. Evidence of how such a discourse of discrimination and hierarchy is being constructed in India today appears in various social domains, and it is not a coincidence that religious belonging was used as a parameter for granting Indian citizenship to members of persecuted minorities when the new Amendment act to the 1955 Citizenship Law was passed in December 2019. Because the new law does not provide Muslim subjects with such a possibility, it caused much heated debate, protest, and resentment. In the light of such a conflictual environment, Jivan is arrested and medially presented as the ideal culprit for public opinion (or rather objectified as the ‘Other’ to be expunged from the system), as the novel follows her attempts to demonstrate her innocence against the corruption of the judicial and carceral system, wherein, in Foucauldian terms, “physical punishment and torture lose their spectacular forms and the state’s power over the human body operates far more obliquely through the prison or the asylum” (Loomba 2015: 67–68). However, the story interlaces with two other main characters: Lovely, an uneducated hijra, who strives to become a Bollywood star, and PT Sir, a physical education teacher in a rundown school, who is mesmerised by the dynamics of power and how these impact on and drive people, especially when he starts approaching the local right-wing political party. The presence of a hijra makes it possible to spotlight another minority category, whose social position is ambiguous and unstable, at the same time respected and abused: if on the one hand, hijras are often

Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction  115 called to bless weddings and births, on the other they are also denied dignity because of their transgendered identity, and sometimes even seen as prostitutes (Nair and deSouza 2020: 257–258; Newport 2017). But they are also defined by the idea of “‘performance culture’, which is a coming together of rituals, community structures, traditions, and performative markers of the Hijra identity” (Gupta 2019: 71). Lovely, in her broken pidgin, expresses the desire of an individual who wants to fulfil her dreams as an artist, and also tries to improve her English competence with private lessons given by Jivan. She is an exuberant character and, in Sehgal’s (2020) words, “deprived of conventional education – aside from occasional acting classes – she is a student of street life, conjuring the inner lives of everyone she sees, filing away their expressions and gestures to better inhabit her roles”. Instead, PT Sir is the exemplification of how the lower middle class’s aspirations are phagocyted by corruption and immorality, in particular with the populism promoted by certain political parties. Gradually, the man accepts the dishonesty of the system to pursue his interests and obtain personal advantages, putting aside ethical issues. A political party called Jana Kalyan Party, in fact, gives him the chance to improve his economic situation, turning him into a fake witness for a number of judicial cases, either favouring or testifying against particular defendants. In this fashion, he becomes a means for the party to spread and naturalise certain ideologies, in particular through inflammatory speeches: although the text never mentions words like Hindu and Hindutva, it is apparent that the author aims to alert the reader to their promulgation of a certain religious and cultural superiority over the other components of the multicultural scenario of India. Lovely and PT Sir could be crucial in the trial against Jivan and save her from capital punishment, but for different reasons they both refuse to do so preferring to be bribed by the system, the former with an engagement for a new film, and the latter with the promise of a better job with several benefits. The novel dramatically ends with the girl condemned to the death penalty. A Burning is characterised by some interesting rhetorical and stylistic choices. First of all, the three protagonists provide intersecting and complementing points of view, thus displaying the deep tensions and contradictions of Indian society. The diegetic structure covers chapters of varying length: 21 on Jivan, 11 on Lovely, and 16 on PT Sir. Interestingly, it is worth noting that while the girl and the hijra’s narrations are in the first person, “PT Sir is represented in a close third-person present, a voice no less alive than the self-presentations of Jivan and Lovely, but one which appropriately distances us from this stiffly moralizing man of military bearing” (Wood 2020). Moreover, the appellative of this character (acronym + title) is particularly attention-grabbing and symbolic: on the one hand it conforms to the Indian English etiquette for honorifics since “children (or even older students) refer to their teachers

116  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction using either the subject they teach or their names” (Sailaja 2009: 87), but on the other it also anonymises the man, through a clever onomastic operation that seems to set up a distancing effect and defeat personal responsibility, in the name of a ‘diluted’ identity, or populism. The novel also includes some short parts defined as ‘interludes’, which are organised as simple narrative reports of speech acts (Leech and Short 2007: 259–260) and give the impression of objectivity in order to foreground sensible topics, such as the condition of marginality imposed by hegemonic forces, or dramatic circumstances, such as episodes of communal ferocity. In its entirety, the novel is infused with sensory descriptions that range from the smoke and screams of the train attack to the odours and textures of life in prison, and the make-up that Lovely wears to impersonate her roles during her casting and performances. The fictional representations of the senses is part of a wider project to investigate forms of marginalisation and suffering, and according to Sehgal (2020), Majumdar’s descriptions of life, of stench and bodies, of stifled ambitions and stoked resentments, feel instructive, a rejoinder to the ways reality is so commonly distorted, whether by the nationalist project to rewrite history or by sentimental and sensational media narratives, all of which come in for tart critique. In this respect, the depiction of the senses is an important element in the author’s narrative. The question of diatopic variation is also significant because one of the most defamiliarising aspects of Majumdar’s literary discourse is the marked departure from standard English in Lovely’s homodiegetic narration: the hijra in fact exclusively employs verb phrases in the continuous aspect, even with stative verbs (Biber et al. 1999: 270– 275; Mukherjee 2010: 175), for example uttering sentences like “I was knowing the truth. The truth was that Mrs. Debnath was not wanting a hijra in the house” (Majumdar 2020: 12) and “We are all knowing what is happening to hijras who are displeasing police” (Majumdar 2020: 64). According to Sailaja (2009: 48–49), the use of progressive forms is commonly attested in many varieties of Indian English, and, in this case, it may be an interference from the character’s mother tongue, Bengali, thus adding tones of verisimilitude. The linguistic phenomenon of interference “occurs when one language shows an influence on another, or intrudes on its grammar” (Talib 2002: 143) and in Lovely’s account it manifests itself in various forms. Indeed, the character also uses plenty of borrowed vernacular terms, followed by glossed explanations or paraphrases, and other features of Indian English such as indefinite quantifiers. What emerges is a form of pidgin, or a hybrid basilect (Mukherjee 2010: 174) that mirrors Lovely’s background and social provenience, namely a rural community whose members do not easily

Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction  117 have access to education (in particular English language education). Furthermore, since Lovely’s idiolect is peculiarly attention-grabbing, it can be viewed as a way to foreground various seminal questions from the character’s complex past, in particular referring to Indian society’s incapacity to accept her gendered identity (Hall 2013), and her sense of Otherness too. Thus, for the novelist, it is a political choice to express her commitment to contest exclusion. In a meta-reflexive way, Lovely is aware of the key role of English, the new language of power in India and in the world, and she tries to improve her knowledge of such a language thanks to Jivan’s tutoring. However, it is also important to notice that, as a whole, the language of Majumdar’s story is unsophisticated and does not frequently display marked features of Indian English, such as on the level of morphosyntax. The only area that presents peculiarities is vocabulary, with frequent culture-bound terms, taken from the domains of food, religion, and business. However, even in this case, which again is relevant only in Lovely’s chapters, the text is accessible to the reader who is not familiar with Indian culture by virtue of various techniques such as glossing or rewording, exemplified by phrases such as “an enterprising phucka walla, a seller of spiced potato stuffed with crisps shells” (p. 42) or “a sack of kochuri, fried bread, and a tub of alur dom, potato curry” (p. 258). The presence of restricted items and other diatopic characteristics (Sailaja 2009) is always noteworthy since it indexes a linguistic process of Indianisation of the English language adopted by Indian authors, whereby “local languages constructions, lexicons, and idiomatic expressions keep adding an Indian feature to narratives designed to be consumed by both Indian and international audiences” (Shoobie 2019: 45). The use of some of these tactics may depend not only on the writers’ idiosyncratic choices, but also on the editorial policies adopted by marketing and publishing industries at global level (see the chapters contained in Dwivedi and Lau 2014). Nonetheless, the perception and reception of variations from standard English can be of a different type as they reflect questions of style, politics, and acceptability across the English-speaking world (Talib 2002: 118–136). For instance, they can be regarded as a means to display genuine multiculturality and multilingualism, but for some they appear as orientalising or domesticating devices that still project a stereotypical image of India, as Amrita Dutta (2020) argues in her review of Majumdar’s novel, in which she criticises what she defines as “jarring annotations” that weigh down the narrative flow. In varying degrees, the narrative hints at the dense idea of education as a propulsive force up the social ladder, but also as a tool to exercise power through persuasion: PT Sir, a modest teacher, manages to emerge from the crowd thanks to his rhetorical skills, and will eventually be assimilated in a complicit way by the hegemonic structures of power – the Jana Kalyan Party, which celebrates values of religious and cultural

118  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction purity against the multiculturalism of India, evoking in this way the idea of Hindutva and political formations such as the nationalist, right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In exploring and denouncing marginalisation, Majumdar also considers the correlation between the senses and the meaning of trauma in her novel: Jivan’s life is turned upside down after her public comment on Facebook, and the time she spends in jail is a real trauma for her, detached from her family and friends. Lovely experiences and speaks about other types of trauma, such as the sentiment of being strongly rejected by her own family. A hijra’s trauma also concerns the tensions between mind and body that transgender people have to cope with as well as the risks of the medical operations they endure in order to physically transform themselves, especially in difficult unsuitable contexts. Lovely, for example, recalls the death of another hijra due to of a lack of care during the operation. PT Sir, instead, has a different relation to trauma because he learns how to crystallise and disremember it: for example, after his rallies in various areas and villages, he simply prefers to ignore the fact that Muslim subjects and families may be lynched by the mob galvanised by biased politicians. In other words, his trauma is the incapacity to feel humanity and empathy, sacrificed in the name of self-interest. With the aim of gaining further insights into the writing of Majumdar, I focus on the textual depiction of the senses as a way in which the writer articulates her fiction and critique of contemporary India and touches upon sensitive and controversial aspects.

5.5 “You Smell Like Smoke”: Language, Sense(s), and Identity The title of this section quotes the very beginning of the novel under consideration and is a sentence uttered by Jivan’s mother, addressed to her daughter, when the girl returns home after the train attack. At the same time, it is a simple and yet suggestive image because it seems to convey embodied elements such as the sense of smell and the idea of smoke, but it also configures something dangerous, because from a semiotic perspective the very word ‘smoke’ is an index of fire, a term whose echoes start resonating for the reader from the very title. In the Indian context, the double image of smoke and fire may be related to clashes, violence, and intolerance, and frequently traverses much Indian English fiction that deals with communalism, intrareligious struggles, and similar themes, for instance the destruction and burning of carriages full of people, fleeing from their villages and towns, trying to reach a new homeland, depicted by Khushwant Singh in Train to Pakistan (1956), the provocative novel dedicated to the carnage of Partition, with the large-scale killing of both Muslims and Hindus. In Majumdar’s narrative, the sense of smell imaginatively works in tandem with other senses to build up a complex canvass, a sort of palimpsest on which different

Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction  119 identities are inscribed, in particular those of Jivan, Lovely, and PT Sir. Although the depiction of the senses does not seem to be central in the fictional architecture invented by Majumdar, in reality it provides keys to the interpretation of the narrative, in which a range of stylistic devices is used to express, and manipulate, identity and power. Jivan’s first-person narration is replete with sensory references, in both her past and present experience: although the novel juxtaposes the fate of three main characters, it also unveils their previous lives, offering a critical gaze into the contemporary evolution of Indian society. In particular, during her detention, Jivan agrees to tell Purnendu, a journalist, about her story in order to orientate public opinion, unaware that the media will instead exploit her to create a new shocking case of terrorism and anti-patriotism. Through the girl’s diary-like account, the reader understands that Jivan and her family originally lived in a small village, whose abundant mineral resources drive a ruthless operation of eviction to the advantage of multinational corporations, with the support of corrupted local authorities and the police. Incidentally, it is important to notice that many contemporary Indian English authors have drawn attention to such a type of motif and have inaugurated an ecocritical reflection on the exploitation of natural and human resources throughout the country including for example minority groups such as the Adivasi communities, with the stories by Hansda Sowvendra Shekar (Adami 2020). Jivan’s description of that period clearly adopts an embodied perspective and emphasises materiality and the dire conditions of the environment: in my village, the dust of coal settled in the nooks of our ears, and when we blew noses it came out black. There were no cows, no crops. There were only blasted pits into which my mother descended with a shovel, rising with a basket of black rock on her head. (Majumdar 2020: 76) Chromatically, the connotations of this passage intensify the weight of the chore and communicate a sense of misery, also subtly signalled by the opposing verbs ‘descend’ and ‘rising’, which are respectively grounded upon the cognitive patterns down is bad and up is good, i.e. to enter the mine is seen as a very negative and dangerous experience, whereas to leave it (to return to surface level) has a positive tone. The unhealthy presence of coal dominates and shrouds the territory, investing human beings as well, and turning them into shapeless, grotesque figures. Jivan’s mother, for instance, is depicted in this way, and the girl affirms that “the lines in her hands – lifelines, they call them – were the only skin not blackened” (Majumdar 2020: 77). The awareness of how bodies are not only an external reflection but also an integral part of individuals is central to the novel and engages with the representation of identities and their minds. At times, the author seems to produce bodily

120  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction characterisation from a Bakhtinian angle (Allen 2000), emphasising the body as a tool through which social order is overturned: for example, when the people from the village try to oppose the policemen and the workers who are about to raze down their poor huts “with asbestos and turf roofs”, they throw “urine bombs” and “dry cakes of shit” at them (Majumdar 2020: 79). The blasphemous details of such bizarre items seem to indicate the people’s rootedness and their bodily dimension and attachment to an earthy origin, but also their frailty and impotence because, as Jivan remarks, “we had no real bombs. We had our bodies and our voices, our saved waste long gone” (Majumdar 2020: 79). The police charge eventually destroys the settlement and also causes several health problems to the girl’s father, which will be exacerbated by inadequate medical treatment, an episode that constitutes another example of the disparity of treatment for marginal subjects and groups in a society that segregates or even annihilates Otherness. The relation between bodies and the senses is particularly significant with regard to the carceral environment. In both fiction and non-fiction, the dire conditions of the prison system stand out as disturbing topics, and often generate a range of significant cognitive metaphors and images, which demonstrate the cultural interpretation of prisons against the backdrop of a society changing over time. According to Fludernik (2005a), the very idea of prison is so rooted in the human psyche that it conceptually reverberates through numerous linguistic expressions, in particular metaphors about prison (e.g. prison is x) and prison metaphors (e.g. life is a prison), which cumulatively define a sort of carceral imaginary, namely “a pool of associations that can be accessed in indiscriminate fashion” (Fludernik 2005b: 17). In the Indian context, many authors have tackled the theme of detention, from Sachin Garg’s novel We Need a Revolution (2016) to reportages such as Behind Bars: Prison Tales of India’s Most Famous by journalist Sunetra Choudhury (2017). For Jivan, imprisonment means not only a lack of freedom but also a new reconfiguration of the senses, from unsavoury food to dirty toilets and the uncomfortable, dusty beds that the inmates have to use. The rendering of the olfactory side, specifically, is built up to conceptualise feelings of physical discomfort, which takes many forms such as “the stench of sweat which rises off” the guards (Majumdar 2020: 92). The bad smell schema that prototypically readers trigger in accessing these story-worlds underlies the type of language employed by the writer. Generally speaking, bad odours are “deemed a violation of decorum, especially in the current sanitized Western culture” (Nuessel 2018: 108) and actually they are often viewed as clichés of a certain ideological and orientalist representation of India, with its teeming markets, messy streets, and problems of sanitation. Here however the narrative foregrounds domains such as jail and poverty, which are universally imagined to communicate distressing sensations, irrespective of their location, and this

Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction  121 extends to smells too. Yet occasionally such a mental schema is also recalibrated to express the social context of convicts having to live together and share everything. The compositeness of the olfactory sphere can be affected by various connotations, and this allows us to see how even petty objects become important rewards in such a degrading environment, returning an almost forgotten idea of humankind. The moment when Americandi, a cellmate of Jivan whose name is a sort of pun on the nationality term American, boasts her new perfume, seems to engender positivity and serenity, although in reality it is a way to camouflage the dire conditions of her reality. Smell is volatile, untouchable, and ethereal par excellence, exactly like Jivan’s temporary highheartedness as she recognises the miscellany of sensualised items that intersect with one another: I wipe my nose with the back of my hand, and sniff the air around me. It smells like roses and chemicals. It smells like a disguise. Beneath it, there is sewage and damp and washed clothes hung to dry. There is indigestion and belching and the odor of feet. (Majumdar 2020: 96) The extract capitalises the lexical opposition of olfactory terms (the combination of ‘roses’ and ‘chemicals’ that produces something unreal, ‘a disguise’), but it then expands its plethora of suggestions to other senses such as taste (suggested by ‘indigestion’ and ‘belching’) and even touch and texture (‘damp’). The effect projected by such stylistic devices is to underline the dehumanising condition of the prison, which neglects and mortifies the female desire for beauty, elegance, and self-respect, thus exacerbating the inmates’ lives. Moreover, some of the articulations of the embodied language employed to portray the world of the prison seem to be compatible with conceptual images such as the body is a container (for the emotions) (Sullivan 2019: 198), thus strengthening the correlation with the senses. Let us observe, for instance, the following linguistic realisation, which refers to Americandi: “her veins are crooked, like flooding rivers” (Majumdar 2020: 50). In figurative terms, the girl’s distress, anger, and desperation are mapped on to the elements of nature, in particular rivers, which in Indian culture are often associated with female deities. The author depicts confinement in a vivid manner, attempting to illuminate the inmates’ personal histories, but overall the text is affected by bitter irony: in describing the heavy routines of the institution to the journalist, Jivan tries to show the failures of the system, and of her case in particular, but in reality her own narrative will be recycled by the media as a selling point. In other words, as Fludernik (2005b: 24) argues, “the carceral imaginary remains a fantasy world, an exotic heterotopia that displaces our real-world emotions into the safe and apolitical realm of

122  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction fiction”, and in fact in the Majumdar novel, the sensualised words of the girl do not manage to affect public opinion, hence the dramatic ending of the story. By extension, this type of metaphor-based reasoning applies to other expressions, and other characters too, for example the body is a prison, which clarifies the existential tension of many transgender people in India and in the world. For hijras, the self-perception of the body is a complex matter, repercussions of which affect their everyday life, in particular in their relationship with the various segments of Indian society. As I specified in the third chapter, the role of transgender subjects in such a context is particular because it reveals an ambiguous area of deferential acceptance and discriminatory rejection: on the one hand, hijras are invited to cast their blessings on specific rites and practices, such as weddings and birthdays, but on the other they are frequently marginalised or considered unworthy sex workers, abused even by the police. In her first-person non-standard style, Lovely discloses the tribulations she had to cope with, from infancy to adulthood, which reflect her gradually emerging gendered positioning, in particular when she confesses that in the outside world, I was wearing boy’s shorts and a boy’s haircut, and playing cricket. But secretly, at home, I was trying lipstick. I was wearing my mother’s saris once, twice, thrice. The fourth time my uncles were persuading my father to kick me out of the house. (Majumdar 2020: 124) Over the last decades, scholarship spanning disciplines such as the social sciences and the humanities has extensively treated the theme of the body, also viewed as a site of sociocultural and political conflict (see the chapters in Fraser and Greco 2005), but suffice it to repeat that in a prospect of cognitive stylistics the body is interpreted as the very first means through which the human being approaches and tries to understand the surrounding reality since it is the filter that we intimately know thanks to its shapes, rhythms, and pains. New projects and experiments are currently attempting to inspect “a number of ways in which the bodies that we occupy and our perceptions of those bodies shape the way in which we use embodied metaphor to form our world view” (Littlemore 2019: 105), thus examining ideas of a (dominant) normalcy and a (peripheral) otherness, two pillars of postcolonial theory (Loomba 2015). In the case of Lovely, the body she had been born with ‘mismatches’ her real identity, hence the embedded expressions relating to the senses, such as sight (the colour of her lipstick) and touch (the texture of her sari). From that moment, Lovely joins other hijras and learns their activities such as singing, dancing, and “the art of charming strangers” (Majumdar 2020: 124). When she turns 18, she adopts her new name (the previous one is never revealed) during a colourful and exciting ceremony

Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction  123 in which Arjuni Ma, the head of her group, consecrates her novel identity, while Lovely dances with the other hijras whom she now considers her sisters. Again, this moment, which signals the beginning of a new, more aware life for the character, is rendered by means of an embodied perspective: “the Bollywood classics on the stereo were making me feeling like a star, like my body was silk and gold” (Majumdar 2020: 125–126). Wrapped in the various layers of a beautiful sari, Lovely perceives her body in a different and satisfying way, in which the corporeal and the mental dimensions are harmoniously combined and evoked by synaesthetic references to silk and gold, combining touch and sight. According to current neurolinguistic studies, “people with synaesthesia appear to engage with embodied metaphor on a highly personal and emotional level” (Littlemore 2019: 149), hence Lovely’s joyful reaction and intense experience. Some hijras of course decide to undergo a surgical operation to modify their bodies in order to mark their sexual transformation, but Lovely does not opt for such choice after a terrible episode that had taken place before her ceremony. Her friend Ragini, accompanied by Arjuni Ma and Lovely, is operated on by an greedy and incompetent dentist, without any anaesthetic. Narrated from Lovely’s viewpoint, the passage is dramatically intense and cruelly remarks the boundaries of the body: When I was opening my eyes, so much bright red blood was in between Ragini’s legs. I was thinking that Ragini was now a full woman. She was even getting a period. Then I was thinking, Ragini is dead. Then, Ragini was not dead. She was a ghost. She was not screaming, not crying. Her head was lolling from right to left, and she was shivering like she was having 104 degrees fever. Her hands in my hands were blocks of ice. I was letting them go and crying. ‘Arjuni Ma, see what Ragini is doing! She is acting strange!’ Arjuni Ma was watching the doctor like an eagle. At last, with the help of many rags and one no-question-asking taxi driver, we were cleaning up Ragini’s wound and transporting her back to the house. For three-four days she was having high fever, and we were piling more sheets on her to sweat out the temperature. Finally, one day, Ragini was up, accepting the sugar water I was bringing her. She was taking one sip and smiling. I was giving all my thanks to the goddess that day. I was believing in miracles. When Ragini was starting to spend the evenings sitting with us in front of the TV, dancing with her hands when her favourite songs were playing, I was smiling and smiling. I was holding her hand and never letting her go. Then, one morning, she was not waking up. “Ragini!” we were calling, “Ragini, wake up!”

124  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction I was splashing water on her face. I was pinching her toes. Somebody was putting an old shoe in front of her nose, in case the smell of leather was helping. But Arjuni Ma was seeing, and I was seeing also, that Ragini was gone very far from us. Her eyes were still, her lips were cracking, her skin was bloodless. Ragini was dead. (Majumdar 2020: 128–129) As already pointed out, Lovely’s defamiliarising idiolect displays some features typical of Indian English pidgins, such as the use of progressive rather than simple forms for both action and state verbs, a strategy that intensifies the idea of proximity to the characters and renders the scene more vivid. Since “the use of the progressive normally implies that the action is not yet finished” (Wales 2011: 343), the narrative’s temporal deixis is redesigned to suggest the instability of the protagonist’s life, but it also add layers of dramatic awareness of the inevitable consequence of the operation (the verb phrase ‘was seeing’ employed for both Arjuni Ma and Lovely). The centrality of the body as well as that of the mind become dominant paradigms for the passage above, in terms that expose the intimacy of womanhood, such as ‘period’, as well as the expression ‘full woman’, but also the idea of physical pain, expressed by medical emergency (‘104 degrees fever’), attention-grabbing chromatic elements (‘so much bright red blood’), and a range of various sensory expressions regarding temperature, smell, and texture (‘shivering’, ‘blocks of ice’, ‘splashing water’, ‘smell of leather’, ‘cracking’). The corporeal and emotive suffering suggested by the episode is made even more evident when the reader considers the illegal and unhygienic context that hijras wanting to have the operation have to accept. Lovely is shocked by such a dreadful experience and as a consequence decides to keep her body integral: “so I was sure I was never wanting the operation. I was wanting to stay half-half my whole life” (Majumdar 2020: 130). For a hijra, such a decision is not easy because it recalls a conflict between body and identity and is often also regarded as a justification for discrimination: Lovely is married to Azad, a man who buys and sells electronic products, but his brother cannot stand her and is always ready to scold and insult her, in particular because of her inability to bear children, hence his intolerance and brusqueness. Marginalisation is an important theme of this novel and concerns various characters. Lovely and Jivan, for example, share a condition of liminality, albeit for different reasons: the former for reasons of gender and the latter for religion. In Lovely’s metaphorical reconfiguration, both conditions of second-classness can be imagined in terms of monstrous bodies, such as the bodies of insects and vermin that people commonly find not only repulsive, but more importantly fragile and defenceless, and that can be

Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction  125 therefore subjected to torture. Lovely’s dreams of stardom are exploited by the corrupt system to construct a public enemy, the Other, in this case the Muslim subject that is alien to the dominant Hindu context: “I am truly feeling that Jivan and I are both no more than insects. We are no more than grasshoppers whose wings are being plucked. We are no more than lizards whose tails are being pulled” (Majumdar 2020: 213). The entomological and zoomorphic reference condenses the impression of misery attributed to, or rather imposed on those who are not tolerated by the hegemonic forces and are dehumanised by such cruel images. In the novel the exemplification of corruption and bribery is the character of PT Sir, who is not essentially evil, but who gradually falls under the spell of power, when a nationalist local party convinces him to act as a witness in courts against those subjects that may be an impediment to the establishment of a monocultural view, for instance a man who “belongs to the wrong religion, the minority that encourages the eating of beef” (Majumdar 2020: 119). The sensory allusion to food and taste brings to the fore the alimentary prescriptions of Hinduism, by which certain types of food are forbidden, and are therefore considered as a divide between categories of what can be socially accepted and what must be culturally rejected. The question of food practices and taboos is often appropriated by extremist groups, and within the Hindutva ideology it becomes a social engine to mobilise the mass, and sometimes lead them to commit atrocious actions, such as when the mob lynches a Muslim family. At first, PT Sir is unable to understand the naturalisation of these ideological views, with their load of violence, but, progressively succumbing to his selfishness and desire for social redemption, the teacher passively ignores the devastating effects of fanaticism. His rallies and public speeches are the rhetorical means to spread populist ideas of unity, pride, and belonging, also promising benefits for the uneducated crowd through various linguistic devices such as inclusive pronouns (us versus them), positively connoted words, and evaluative vocabulary. However, such situations can easily degenerate, for example when during his visit to a village to support the Jana Kalyan Party for the upcoming local elections, some rioters interrupt him to inform the audience that a sacred cow has been killed, a story that naturally triggers violence against the Muslim inhabitants of the settlement. In order to underline the cruelty of the episode, there is a shift in perspective and this part is told in an interlude entitled ‘The villagers visit the beef-eaters’, focalised through the viewpoint of the fanatics. Such a choice has a double purpose: on the one hand, it disconnects PT Sir from communalism to show his hypocrisy and rejection of responsibility, and on the other it adopts an embodied tone, which emotionally challenges the reader to question the germ of intolerance. When the rowdy Hindu crowd assaults the poor house of a Muslim family, the narrative disturbingly foregrounds the materiality of sufferance as bodies are violated, abused, and tortured

126  Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction in a descriptive style. Nonetheless, PT Sir is not unduly shaken by such a dramatic eruption of viciousness, as the omniscient narrator remarks: “from somewhere, even he is not sure where, he has acquired a politician’s persona” (Majumdar 2020: 273). In other words, the writer exhibits how the deep mechanisms of power transform human beings with the promise of material welfare: the last chapter of the novel sanctions the definite conversion of the man to a new hierarchy of values, devoid of moral principles and obsessed with personal success. His achievements (a comfortable new flat, a generous salary paid by the party) leave no space for regrets or doubts: not even the presence of a woman in a crowd who reminds him of Jivan, and looks like a spectre, can break his novel ideology, even if the girl’s execution still drives campaigns of protest and activism: Among the frowning men in the crowd, some looking his way, others distracted by a pen of TV cameras off to the side, a woman stands, looking at PT Sir. She pays no attention to the man with the basket of chips who makes his way through the people. She pays no attention to a man with arms folded who digs his elbow in her side. When a breeze picks up, it fails to cause a ripple in her dupatta, the one she was not allowed to keep for modesty. PT Sir knows who she is. Isn’t she the ghost who begs him for mercy? Isn’t she ghost who searches the gaze of her teacher, hoping that he might offer rescue? Maybe that is why they had the white curtain up at the court – not so that Jivan could not influence his testimony, but so that he would not have to face her. (Majumdar 2020: 288) This extract is organised in third person narration, but adopts PT Sir’s focalisation, in particular in the transition from the first to the second paragraph, and concentrates on visual elements, exemplified by lexical items such as ‘gaze’, ‘white curtain’ (used a sort of screen in court), and ‘face her’, to produce emotional investment. Unlike the story by Khair that I examined earlier, here the reference to the ghost, first mentioned with the generic depersonalised noun phrase ‘a woman’, is deliberately vague, being actually an absence of body rather than a real presence that does not respond to the laws of nature (the wind cannot move her clothes), and is eventually neutralised by the rhetoric of the teacher when he impassively delivers his speeches to support the subtle annihilation of diversity. However, both Khair and Majumdar’s texts refer to the sensual domain to speak about a complex historical and cultural period for India, encouraging reflection on the ambiguity of the senses and their power to convey meaning, especially in times of confusion, which in Howes’ (2005: 11) words “may be experienced as an illness in the body of society of the individual”.

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128 Sense(s) of Indian English Fiction Griffiths, Patrick. 2006. An Introduction to English Semantics and Pragmatics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gupta, Ankush. 2019. “Trans-lating Hijra Identity: Performance Culture as Politics”. International Federation for Theatre Research, 41.1: 71–75. Hall, Kira. 2013. “Commentary I: ‘It’s a hijra’! Queer Linguistics Revisited”. Discourse and Society, 24.5: 634–642. Howes, David, ed. 2005. The Empire of the Senses. The Sensual Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg. Kachru, Yamuna and Smith, Larry E. 2008. Cultures, Contexts and World Englishes. New York: Routledge. Khair, Tabish. 2018. Night of Happiness. New Delhi: Picador India. Leech, Geoffrey and Short, Mick. 2007. Style in Fiction. A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. Harlow: Pearson. Littlemore, Jeanette. 2019. Metaphors in the Mind. Sources of Variation in Embodied Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loomba, Ania. 2015. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. Abindon, Oxon: Routledge. Majid, Asifa and Levinson, Stephen C. 2011. “The Senses in Language and Culture”. The Senses and Society, 6.1: 5–18. Majumdar, Megha. 2020. A Burning. London: Scribner. Marino, Elisabetta. 2019. “An Unwilling Suspension of Misbeliefs: Acknowledging the Complexity of Reality in Night of Happiness by Tabish Khair”. Acta Neophilologica, 52.1–2: 59–68. Mukherjee, Joybrato. 2010. “The Development of the English Language in India”. In Kirkpatrick, A., ed., The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 167–180. Nair, Rukmini Bhaya and deSouza, Peter Ronald, eds. 2020. Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the Twenty-first Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Newport, Sarah Elizabeth. 2017. “‘Unnatural Offences’, Postcolonial Problems. The Ambivalent Position of Hijras in Contemporary Indian Law and Literature”. South Asian Review, 38.1: 87–99. Nuessel, Frank. 2018. “Sensory Representation in Literature”. Semiotica 222: 101–112. Oxford English Dictionary. 2021. www.oed.com (accessed 30 August 2021). Patil, Z.N. 1994. Style in Indian English Fiction. A Study in Politeness Strategies. New Delhi: Prestige. Sailaja, Pingali. 2009. Indian English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sandhu, Sukhdev. 2021. “A Burning by Megha Majumdar Review – A Brilliant Debut”, The Guardian, 13 January, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2021/jan/13/a-burning-by-megha-majumdar-review-a-brilliant-debut (accessed 20 July 2021). Sehgal, Parul. 2020. “A Terrorist Attack Sparks the Plot of Megha Majumdar’s Powerful Debut Novel”. The New York Times, 2 June, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/06/02/books/review-burning-megha-majumdar.html (accessed 20 July 2021). Shoobie, Mostafa Azizpour. 2019. Cosmopolitanism in the Indian English Novel. New York: Peter Lang. Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics. London: Routledge. Sullivan, Karen. 2019. Mixed Metaphors. Their Use and Abuse. London: Bloomsbury.

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Talib, Ismail S. 2002. The Language of Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge. Wales, Katie. 2011. Dictionary of Stylistics. Abingdon: Routledge. Whitehead, Anne. 2009. Memory. London: Routledge. Wood, James. 2020. “A Début Novel’s Immersive Urgency”. The New Yorker, 1 June, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/08/a-debut-novelsimmersive-urgency (accessed 19 July 2021). Yule, George. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

6

Conclusions

6.1 New Tools and Theories for Indian English in Fictional Texts In this study, I have tried to look at the field of Indian English fiction by reflecting on the need to experiment with new tools and frameworks borrowed from different disciplines. Traditionally, the evaluation of Indian English literary texts is seen as part of the wide area of postcolonial literatures, in which the methods and approaches mainly derive from literary studies. Of course, the contribution of postcolonial studies is of great importance since it provides the necessary background to identify the dynamics of power, social tensions, and new configurations of identity for those territories affected by the colonial experience. Certainly, “postcolonial theory is well placed to address the changing world” (Ramone 2011: 203), but nonetheless, in the light of the complexity of our contemporary age, there is a need to go beyond the paradigm of the postcolonial world English literatures, to paraphrase Varughese (2012). Therefore, fine-tuned research must recognise the specificities of the Indian English world, in which contemporary authors deploy language to orchestrate their depiction of important aspects of society and culture. Although, in academia, literary and linguistic studies have often been seen in antithetic opposition, almost forgetting that literature is made of words, and that language constructs all rhetorical genres, including fiction, in reality they are contiguous and share many points. I totally support the conviction of those scholars who argue that the way in which we use linguistic structures is revelatory not only of our identity, but also of our ideologies and intentions, and this functions for literary texts too (see for example the debate on language, reality, and fiction in Leech and Short 2007: 121–141). As Mason and Giovanelli (2021: 1) note, “using our most recent knowledge of linguistics to unpick and understand these choices, and the styles that result from them, is the best way to approach any text, of any genre or period”. Such a view thus centralises the meaning-making function of language in fictional discourse too and promotes the integration of new critical filters. My

DOI: 10.4324/9781003266792-6

Conclusions  131 proposal therefore is to further develop the new research paradigm I labelled ‘postcolonial stylistics’, which sits at the interface between stylistics and postcolonial studies, and aims to gain insights into the production of new Anglophone authors, in my case from India. Indeed, the application of tools and notions derived from stylistics (in particular in its cognitive principles) to postcolonial literary discourse can represent a new, rigorous, and valid method to explore the contemporary Indian English literary scene. In the preceding chapters, I have utilised a range of notions and principles taken from cognitive poetics, such as embodiment, schemas, and deixis to deconstruct the strategies adopted by Indian English authors, and the effects these generate when readers enter the fictional worlds created by Jeet Thayil, Deepa Anappara, Avni Doshi, Tabish Khair, and Megha Majumdar, whose narratives provide a wealth of linguistic data. These writers represent a new, or less well known, wave of literary exponents, and as such they enrich the contours of Indian English literature, especially in their apt use of metaphors, devices, and techniques, and they testify to the lively nature of the Indian cultural context, which thanks to its diasporic dimension (Shukla 2003) now transcends geographical borders and addresses a global audience. The complexities of modern India on the one hand still signal some traits of its postcolonial baggage (negotiation between centre and periphery, the persistence of unequal opportunities, endemic ethnic or religious contrasts), but on the other they also depict a changing landscape, in which different social and cultural forces are at play (Shoobie 2019; Tickell 2016; Varughese 2013). This can be seen in the literary representations offered by the writers I have selected for my discussion. As I have argued in this book, there is a special historical, cultural, and pragmatic link between English and India: Indian English is an important diatopic variety utilised by a large number of speakers (Mukherjee 2010; Sailaja 2009), who master it with different levels of competence and employ it in an assortment of domains, either official, like education, law, and administration, or informal, with the creative phenomena of hybridity, lexical innovation, and non-standard forms, as in the case of Hinglish (Sridhar 2020). However, I have pointed out that Indian English is also a language for literary communication (Bandyopadhyay 2010; Patil 1994; Talib 2002), which over the last decades has gained global attention thanks to key authors such as Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Aravind Adiga. The way in which Indian English authors have appropriated, reshaped, and tested the expressive potential of English is remarkable since they produce a unique, innovative, and engaging style based on their defamiliarising syntactic, lexical, and pragmatic choices, as they depart from standard literary and linguistic models,

132 Conclusions endorsing the idea of difference against the backdrop of the canon. Hence, the other two key words (style and variation), which along with the broad idea of language are at the heart of my project. Thus, the goal of this study is not only to offer and generate a wider discussion of Indian English literary texts, but also to call for reflection on new tools and frameworks to be used for such a type of production. Routinely, postcolonial scholars do not utilise notions from stylistics or linguistics at large: they often recognise the centrality and the many implications of the language question in the postcolonial world, but nonetheless they then turn to traditional literary, or sometimes cultural, filters to approach the manifold essence of English-speaking authors. Instead, in my analysis, I have insisted on the value of language in a pragmatic sense, analysing how authors manipulate styles and forms to convey their messages, as well as the way in which readers respond to such texts and discourses (Gibbons and Whiteley 2018; Stockwell 2002). Therefore, I have stressed the implementation of postcolonial stylistics, a methodology that by borrowing notions and ideas from different disciplines can effectively contribute to unpacking stratifications of meaning, as is evident from the discussions I have carried out in the previous chapters. There is no need to meticulously recapitulate all the previous investigations, but I would like to stress that my findings shed light on significant aspects of contemporary Indian English literature, and the way in which authors give voice to themes, preoccupations, and tensions. Thayil’s bizarre writing, which feeds a profusion of multiple perspectives, lists, and aphorisms, uncovers some ‘new’ traits of the Otherness of India, introducing drug discourse and postcolonial decadence, and going beyond orientalised stereotypes and schematic representations of India. The conceptualisation of lament is pictured in the narrative fiction of both Deepa Anappara and Avni Doshi, as they activate strategies to stimulate empathy for the marginalised children who live in slums, or discuss the load of memory, and the double act of remembering/forgetting. The critical apparatus of postcolonial stylistics has also permitted to detect how the senses are translated into patterns, which can, for instance, influence the articulation of conversational turns in an apparently absurd fictional dialogue, in the case of Tabish Khair, or betray the correlation between the body and the mind, after a traumatic experience such as a terrorist attack, in the case of Megha Majumdar.

6.2 Further Research: Other Genres and Research Extensions In my project, I have essentially dealt with the linguistic architecture of the literary genre par excellence, the novel, but it should be noticed

Conclusions  133 that other genres (such as poetry or drama) can provide important indications and suggestions about the work of contemporary Indian English writers. The literary world of present-day India is indeed composite, and along with traditional genres such as novels and short stories, it unfolds other products like graphic narratives, crime fiction, sci-fi, fantasy stories, chick lit, and crick lit (Varughese 2013), namely all those forms of writing that until recently used to occupy a satellite position in terms of canonicity, but are now gaining new spaces of readership thanks to their innovative and experimental gist. The call-centre stories by Chetan Bhagat, the graphic novels by Sarnath Banerjee, or the speculative worlds created by Vandana Singh (Mongia 2014), for instance, may still be disdained, or at least viewed as types of ‘less serious’, popular and non-canonical literature, but their very presence discloses a dynamic context, which is invested by new tendencies, energies, and values, and which cannot escape the globalised world either, in particular considering the role, position, and power of English and its non-native varieties (Kachru and Smith 2008). In other words, such narrative materials testify to the vitality of the Indian English cultural scene: on the one hand, they offer new representations of the rich cultural canvass of India today, and on the other they challenge readers to revise their schemas, expectations, and feelings about the country and its many shapes. The interplay of language, style, and variation is therefore vital, and suitable investigative tools are necessary if we wish to gain a better understanding of these and other works as well, also bearing in mind multimodal narratives (texts that exploit different modes, devices, and signs such as cinema, TV series, and videogames). Since stylistics is interested in linguistic manifestations originating from any genre or text type, and since the field of postcolonial studies is not simply concerned with literary forms, it follows that the paradigm of postcolonial stylistics may be extended to other cultural or discursive spheres, including non-fiction. Jeffries (2010), for example, has put forward the idea of critical stylistics, which innovatively combines the methods of stylistics and critical discourse analysis, to scrutinise how apparently simple or even banal textual practices used in everyday language (e.g. contrasting, enumerating, and negating) are actually instrumental in circulating ideological messages that have effects on real people. In the light of this and other theoretical innovations, I argue that a robust linguistic analysis, informed by the background of postcolonial critique, can be fruitfully applied to other domains, such as political speeches, advertising, and humour (Jeffries and McIntyre 2010), in which words and ideas matter, and are often employed with a persuasive goal. Incidentally, in India such domains play an important role in the spread of ideologies, visions, and meanings, and

134 Conclusions therefore they deeply affect society and social practices. There are now some scholarly attempts to explore these and other research avenues, by focusing, for example, on the language of Indian English newspapers (Goswami 2010), or considering the tropes and features of Indian English TV advertising (Kathpalia 2019). Such studies are valuable as they enrich the discussion of English in India, and its textual manifestations, although they typically do not employ a cognitive stylistics approach, nor as a rule do they explicitly acknowledge the postcolonial component of the Indian world vis a vis other local culture (Ashcroft 2009; Rashmi 2012). Even if the contemporary Indian context is clearly very different from its colonial predecessor, there still are some affinities, or heavy legacies, such as how power is hierarchically constructed and managed, for example, or how mainstream society meticulously pigeonholes, labels, and controls minorities in the construction of national rhetoric. It is undeniable that postcolonial critique has helped to enlarge the broad ethical discourse by taking into account such situations and relations. Specific notions such as conceptual metaphors, modality, and deixis refer to mechanisms of language, and their investigation can reveal how writers employ structures and how these are interpreted by readers/hearers. The manner in which certain ideas or values, such as the postcolonial wide-ranging term Otherness, are conceptualised through language is an important vehicle to impact society and individuals, and as such can be a driver for the political or educational agenda of a country, thus bringing about consequences in the real world. Moreover, as previously highlighted, the theoretical background of contemporary poetics pays attention to empirical research with a strong sense of commitment and ethical responsibility: very often, loaded social questions about the intolerance of communalism, the disenfranchising of marginal subjects, and the unfair access to welfare expressively emerge from the so-called ‘Global South’, which comprises several parts of the postcolonial world too. India is an important piece of the worldwide socio-political jigsaw, not only in merely demographic or economic terms, but also and especially by virtue of its time-honoured history and culture, and therefore its fictional (and non-fictional) representations deserve to be read critically in their dialogic relations with other contexts. It thus becomes imperative to keep updating and revising analytical tools for the study of such discourses, and their new and future textual manifestations (Ramone 2011: 191–206). As the scientific (and political) inheritance of both stylistics and postcolonial studies, no longer ancillary disciplines, but valuable, modern, and rigorous keys to deciphering language, culture, and by extension the world we live in, continue to influence the work of scholars from different fields, postcolonial stylistics may provide answers to unavoidable questions, and encourage a rethinking of paradigms, in the hope for a deeper understanding of the world (including

Conclusions  135 the very cogent aspect of the environment), with the aim of promoting a sense of inclusion, tolerance, and equity for all.

References Ashcroft, Bill. 2009. Caliban’s Voice. The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures. Abingdon: Routledge. Bandyopadhyay, Sumana. 2010. Indianisation of English. Analysis of Linguistic Features in Selected Post-1990 Indian English Fiction. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company. Gibbons, Alison and Whiteley, Sara. 2018. Contemporary Stylistics. Language, Cognition, Interpretation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Goswami, Pallavi. 2010. Recent Trends in Indian English. A Linguistic Study of Print Media. New Delhi: Readworthy. Jeffries, Leslie. 2010. Critical Stylistics. The Power of English. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jeffries, Leslie and McIntyre, Dann. 2010. Stylistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kachru, Yamuna and Smith, Larry E. 2008. Cultures, Contexts and World Englishes. New York: Routledge. Kathpalia, Sujata S. 2019. “Redefining Gender Stereotypes in Indian English TV Advertising”. World Englishes, 38: 486–499. Leech, Geoffrey and Short, Mick. 2007. Style in Fiction. A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. Harlow: Pearson. Mason, Jessica and Giovanelli, Marcello. 2021. Studying Fiction. A Guide for Teachers and Researchers. London: Routledge. Mongia, Padimini. 2014. “Speaking American: Popular Indian Fiction in English”. Comparative American Studies, 12.1/2: 140–147. Mukherjee, Joybrato. 2010. “The Development of the English Language in India”. In Kirkpatrick, A., ed., The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes. London: Routledge, 167–180. Patil, Z.N. 1994. Style in Indian English Fiction. A Study in Politeness Strategies. New Delhi: Prestige. Ramone, Jenni. 2011. Postcolonial Theories. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rashmi, Sadana. 2012. English Heart Hindi Heartland. The Political Life of Literature in India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sailaja, Pingali. 2009. Indian English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Shoobie, Mostafa Azizpour. 2019. Cosmopolitanism in the Indian English Novel. New York: Peter Lang. Shukla, Sandhya. 2003. India Abroad. Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sridhar, S.N. 2020. “Indian English”. In Bolton K., Botha W., and Kirkpatrick A., eds., The Handbook of Asian Englishes. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 243–277. Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics. London: Routledge. Talib, Ismail S. 2002. The Language of Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge.

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Tickell, Alex. 2016. “‘An Idea Whose Time Has Come’: Indian Fiction in English After 1991”. In Tickell, A., ed., South Asian Literatures. Contemporary Transformations. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 37–58. Varughese, Emma Dawson. 2012. Beyond the Postcolonial World Englishes Literature. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Varughese, Emma Dawson. 2013. Reading New India. Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English. Bloomsbury: London.

Index

acrolect 21 acronym 23, 115 address form 23, 78–79, 103, 108 Adiga, Aravind 28, 61, 131 Adivasi 9, 119 Allen, Graham 34, 40, 49, 51, 53, 62, 99, 120, 127 analepsis 102 Anappara, Deepa 6, 10, 12, 29, 66–69, 71–81, 94, 132; and Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line 12, 66, 69–70, 80, 94 aphorism 11, 43, 49, 59–61, 132 apothegm 58, 60 apposition 53, 56 Arabic 18, 108 Aristotle 76, 98 Ashcroft, Bill 5, 8, 14, 26, 29, 37, 51, 62, 134 Ayodhya 93, 103 Baboo English 25 Babri mosque 27, 93 Bakhtin, Mikhail 10–11, 34, 40, 49, 51, 62, 99, 120 Bal, Mieke 9, 14, 40, 62, 67, 76, 89, 94 Banerjee, Sarnath 28, 133 Bangalore 58 basilect 26, 116 basti 70, 73–74, 77–78, 81; see also slum Baudelaire, Charles 38, 51 Beardsley, Aubrey 50 Bengali 22, 116 Bhabha, Homi 33 Bhagat, Chetan 28, 133 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 9, 118 bhasha 17, 27

body 40, 85–86, 89–94, 97, 101, 114, 118, 120–125, 132; see also container metaphor; embodiment Bollywood 13, 29, 114, 123 Bombay (Mumbai) 11–12, 35–36, 39, 40–46, 49–50, 52, 57, 61–62, 68, 75, 81, 103 Bombay poets 28, 49, 52, 57, 61 borrowing 11–12, 17, 22, 26, 51, 132 Boxwallah English 25 Bradford, Richard 9, 14, 40, 63 British National Corpus 21 Butler English 25 Census of India 19, 30 Chatterjee, Upamanyu 22 Chimaera 58 Choudhury, Sunetra 120 citizenship 114 Clark, Urszula 4, 14, 34, 49, 52, 62–63, 95 cognitive dissonance 78 cognitive metaphors 2, 10, 47, 60, 86, 120 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 37 communalism 12, 14, 15, 66, 93, 95–96, 102, 111, 118, 125, 134 compound 23 container metaphor 12, 60, 79, 86, 90, 121 cooperative principle 10, 13, 59, 105–106 Dalit 9, 21 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 61 deixis 11, 45, 42, 49, 51, 74, 92, 124, 131, 134 Delhi 60, 68, 81 De Quincey, Thomas 37

138 Index deviance 20, 26, 34, 38–39, 63; see also Gregoriou, Christiana Dhondy, Farrukh 26 diaspora 6, 16, 28, 43, 50, 58, 110, 112, 135; consciousness 113; literature 3, 11, 26–27, 101; and memory 110 dialogic 38, 42, 62, 132 dialogue 58, 76, 105, 107–108, 110, 132 diatopic 5, 20–22, 25, 29, 116–117, 131 Dickens, Charles 37 Dick, Philip 37 Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee 99 djinn 70–71, 80, 104 Doshi, Avni 6, 7, 10–12, 14, 29, 66–67, 81–90, 92–95, 131–132; and Burnt Sugar 6–7, 12, 14, 66, 81–82, 94–95 drug 5, 11–12, 34–35, 39–41, 44, 46–48, 132 Dutch 18 Eco, Umberto 52 education 13, 17–20, 22, 29, 35, 68–69, 74, 80, 96, 114, 117, 131 Education Act, Right to 68 embodiment 10, 12–13, 67, 97, 104, 131; see also Stockwell, Peter empathy 68, 71–73, 77–80, 94, 95, 105, 118, 132; and identification 12, 67; and resistance 12 endonormative 18, 20, 24 English as Associate Language (EAL) 19 exonormative 18–20, 22 face 10, 87, 108 face saving act 88 face threatening act 11, 12, 37, 57, 59, 67, 94, 105–106, 108 Fludernik, Monika 37, 43, 63, 67, 76, 95, 127; and prison 120–121 focalisation 9, 45, 71, 78–79, 105; see also Stockwell, Peter free indirect discourse 44, 46 French 18 Freud, Sigmund 33, 88 Garg, Sachin 120 Gavins, Joanna 40, 45, 47, 63, 97, 127 genre 4, 13, 20, 25, 28, 33–35, 38, 49, 51–52, 58, 61, 66, 89, 101–102, 112, 130, 132–133

Ghosh, Amitav 3, 22, 25, 131 Gibbons, Alison and Whiteley, Sara 1–2, 8–10, 14, 29–30, 72, 86, 95, 97, 105, 127, 132, 135; and image-schemas 90; and internal focalisation 105; and modality 77, 93, 98 global literary market 27, 30, 117, 127 Goa 43, 58 Gregoriou, Christiana 39, 63; see also deviance Gujarat 103 heteroglossia 10, 11, 34, 49, 52, 62 hijra 7, 13, 26, 29, 36, 40–41, 43, 63, 114–116, 118, 124, 128 Hindi 12, 17–24, 31, 40, 51, 79, 135 Hindu 5–6, 9, 27, 36, 70, 76–77, 95, 103, 114–115, 125; aesthetics 98; goddess 83, 93, 95 Hindustani 18, 35, 43, 103 Hindutva 9, 27, 70, 114–115, 118, 125 Hinglish 24, 30, 131 Hobson-Jobson. The Anglo-Indian Dictionary 22 Huxley, Aldous 37 hybridity 20, 23, 26, 28, 30, 49, 76, 131 hyperbole 41, 52, 53, 76, 111 hypothetical 90, 92, 106 idiolect 26, 117, 124 Indian Civil Service Examination 18 Indian Constitution 19 Indian English 2–9, 11–31, 34, 78, 96, 116–117, 127–128, 135; etiquette and honorifics 115; fiction 33–34, 43, 49, 66, 68, 75, 81–82, 94, 97, 101, 112, 119, 130–133; pidgin 124; newspapers 130; style 113; TV advertising 130 Indian National Congress 18 interference 116 International Corpus of English 21 Jeffries, Leslie 8, 15, 42, 44, 53, 63, 84, 95, 133, 135; and McIntyre, Dann 2, 4, 10, 15, 29, 30, 133, 135 Kachru, Braj 20; and Kachru, Yamuna, Sridhar, S. N. 19, 23 Kachru, Yamuna and Smith, Larry E. 11, 15, 23, 107–108, 128, 133, 135 Kapur, Manju 82

Index  139 Khair, Tabish 6–7, 11, 13, 15, 26, 36, 61, 63, 97, 98, 100–107, 109–112, 126, 128, 131–132; and Night of Happiness 6, 13, 15, 26, 101–102, 104, 128; and Otherness 33, 61; and reading 1 kinaesthetic 90, 99; see also sense King, Stephen 37 kinship terms 23 Kolhapur Corpus 21 Lacan, Jacques 33 Lahiri, Jhumpa 28, 66 lament 5, 10, 12, 66–68, 70, 75, 79, 81–82, 132; see also Stockwell, Peter list 53–54, 56–57, 61, 87, 89; see also style loanword 22, 26; see also borrowing locutionary value 108 Loomba, Ania 2, 8–9, 114, 122 Macaulay Minute 18 Mahabharata 42 Majumdar, Megha 6, 10, 131, 15, 100, 112, 128, 131–132; and A Burning 6, 13, 15, 113, 115, 128 memory 12, 82–89, 91–96, 99, 101, 104–105, 110, 113, 129, 132 mental verbs 87 metonymy 25, 41 minority 5, 9, 21, 66, 70, 101, 112, 114, 119, 125, 134 Mistry, Rohinton 28, 61 modality 2, 10, 77, 91, 134; boulomaic 90, 93; deontic 75; epistemic 98; perception 98 monologic 34, 62 Moraes, Dom 43, 51, 58 morphosyntax 23, 117 Mumbai see Bombay Muslim 13, 27, 70, 76–77, 103–104, 110, 113–114, 118, 125 Nair, Anita 25 naming 43, 51, 73, 76, 78; see also onomastic Narayan, K. R. 25 neologism 74, 26 non-native 1, 17, 33, 133 Omar, Shazia 38 onomastic 41–42, 51, 65, 75, 82, 102, 116; see also naming

opium 37, 38, 40–41, 43, 44, 46, 48–49, 63–64; see also drug Osho 82–83 over-lexicalisation 56 Partition 66, 118 Pater, Walter 50, 57 personification 44, 46 phonology 18, 22–23 pidgin 13, 24, 26, 115–116, 124 politeness 10, 13, 15, 23, 26, 31, 105, 107–108, 128, 135; see also cooperative principle polyphony 26, 46, 49, 51, 52, 70 Portuguese 18 postcolonial 2–13, 19–21, 23–24, 26, 29, 33, 36–38, 47, 49–51, 53, 56, 61, 66, 68, 78, 80, 112, 122, 130–134; city 61; stereotype 34; stylistics 2, 8, 29, 37, 68 postcolonial decadence 11, 26, 34, 49, 54, 58, 132 postcolonial decadent literature 49, 61 pragmatics 2, 10, 14, 16, 23, 65, 104–105, 128–129 prison 13, 84, 114, 116, 120–122, 127 progressive form 116 prosopopoeia see personification Raj 66, 70 Raj, Mulk 24, 25 Ramayana 42, 79 Rao, Raja 25 rasa 98 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 9 Rimbaud, Arthur 51 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 9, 15, 37, 40–41, 44, 64, 71, 96 Roy, Arundhati 3, 25, 42, 66 Rushdie, Salman 3, 24, 25–26, 28, 75, 96, 99, 131 Sanskrit 17, 18, 93 Saraswati 93 schema 6, 40, 78, 90, 107, 120–121, 131, 133 Schneider, Edgar 17, 19, 20, 22–23, 24, 31 sense 5, 10, 13, 40, 97–101, 104–105, 110, 112, 116, 118–122, 126, 128, 132; auditory 13, 98–99; gustatory 13, 98–99, 104–105, 108, 112; olfactory 13, 98–99, 104, 108,

140 Index 110–112, 120–121; tactile 84, 99, 111, 112, 121–122, 124; see also kinaesthetic Seth, Vikram 26 Shab-e-baraat 102–103 Shekhar, Hansda Sowvendra 119 Singh, Khushwant 66, 118 Singh, Vandana 28, 133 slum 12, 29, 67, 70–71, 73–75, 95, 113 Souza, Francis Newton 43 Sphinx 58 Spivak, Gayatri 5, 33 split self 89–91, 95 stative verbs 23, 116 Stevenson, Robert Louis 37 Stockwell, Peter 2, 3, 16, 37, 51, 64, 72, 96–97, 132, 135; cognitive matrix 10; embodiment 67–68, 73; focaliser 45; lament 66; narratives 47; textual attractors 56; texture 80 story-world 68, 71, 92 style 1–2, 4, 11, 13–15, 26, 30–31, 56–57, 76–77, 78, 81, 95, 117, 122, 126, 128, 131–135; Indian English 113; listing style 49, 52, 84; mind style 46 Surat 103 Süskind, Patrick 99 synaesthetic 11, 25, 44, 84, 98, 123 Syrian Christian 34, 40, 57 Talib, Ismael S. 4, 8, 16, 26, 32, 37, 51, 64, 116–117, 129, 131, 135 tense 59, 71–72, 91–92 textual attractors 56, 74; see also Stockwell, Peter

texture 3, 16, 64, 72, 80, 96, 98 Thayil, Jeet 6, 11, 26, 34–37, 39–50, 53–54, 56–60, 63–65, 131, 136; and The Book of Chocolate Saints 6, 11, 26, 35–36, 43, 49–52, 57, 64; and Narcopolis 6–7, 10, 11, 26, 35–36, 38–39, 47–49, 64 Tickell, Alex 2, 3, 13, 16, 96; and Morey 7, 15–16, 67, 96 trauma 12, 13, 70, 79, 85, 101, 104–105, 118, 127 Urdu 43, 103 variation 1–2, 4–5, 13–14, 16, 19, 22–23, 25, 30, 31, 46, 116, 128, 132–133; see also style Vedic texts 75, 98 Verlaine, Paul 51 vernacular language 11, 17, 19, 23, 28, 68, 116 Vijay, Madhuri 82 Virgil 57 Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) 9 vocabulary 22, 74, 99, 117; evaluative 78, 125; sensory perceptive 108 Wales, Katie 4, 10, 16, 46, 53, 56, 65, 67, 72, 74, 91–92, 96–97, 111, 124, 129 Welsh, Irvine 37 Wilde, Oscar 50, 61 Yule, George 10, 11, 13, 16, 59, 65, 105–106, 109–110, 129