Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English 3031068165, 9783031068164

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Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English Edited by Om Prakash Dwivedi

Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English “The anthology offers a range of ideas drawing from multiple registers of embodiment and life, confronting precarity and vulnerability at a time of neoliberal ascendancy. It grounds these insights in contemporary literary culture and shows us how South Asian authors respond to the challenges of instrumental rationality and the logic of the market. The engrossing anthology traverses theoretical debates and traces their echoes in literature, raising questions that are familiar and quotidian. The intervention is timely, scholarship compelling and advocacy subtle.” —Jyotirmaya Tripathi, Professor, IIT Madras, India “Globally, the neo-liberal turn has taken away guarantees from most regarding the life they desire or imagine will ever come to fruition. This contemporary moment has intensified long-term patterns of economic disenfranchisement, the vanishing of the welfare state, the privatization of publicly held utilities, the increase in pension insecurities, and the flexible regimes of capital that are based on contractual relationships rather than long-term job security. In this important text, Om Prakash Dwivedi brings together excellent essays from contemporary fiction in order to navigate this precarious terrain pertaining to contemporary South Asia.” —Kamran Asdar Ali, Professor, University of Texas, Austin “Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English offers thoughtful theorizations of the relationship between neoliberalism, precarity, and literary production. The essays in this anthology examine both precarious infrastructure and precarious bodies as represented in literary works and offer new insights into twenty-first century anglophone South Asian Literature. Professor Om Dwivedi has curated compelling essays by a distinguished group of scholars of South Asian, postcolonial, and global literatures. This book will be of great value for literary scholars.” —Nalini Iyer, Professor, Seattle University, USA

Om Prakash Dwivedi Editor

Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English

Editor Om Prakash Dwivedi School of Liberal Arts Bennett University Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India

ISBN 978-3-031-06816-4    ISBN 978-3-031-06817-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my sons Vedansh and Pranav

Foreword

Oxygen: Precarity and the Human– Nonhuman Interface I can’t breathe. It began as a medical symptom, an oppressive blockage in the respiratory system that put the word “ventilator” on everyone’s lips. Then it was a cry of desperation, the last words from George Floyd, turned into a rallying cry by millions of others. And finally, in an outsized sequel, the words have become elemental, apocalyptic, with raging wildfires and plumes of orange smoke extending from British Columbia to Southern California, pollution so far-flung as to block the sun in Central Europe (Leibniz Institute of Tropospheric Research). It is not entirely accidental that the three crises should converge in a space of months. Nor is it accidental that all three should rest on a simple physiological fact: our need to have free and unrestricted access to oxygen. Oxygen is the one resource on the planet we’ve always counted on. It gives us life even as it connects us to other living things. Keeping the oxygen flowing is not always easy. Humans happen to have a highly evolved respiratory system that can be easily sabotaged, making us precarious as a species, likely to become oxygen-deprived on any number of fronts. Even at rest, the average human breathes 10 to 20 times per minute. Between 2100 and 2400 gallons of air pass through our lungs every day. This nonstop oxygen intake exposes us to a growing list of pathogens and pollutants. COVID-19 is a respiratory disease, and so too are many other newly emerging infectious diseases, like SARS and MERS. As for wildfire smoke, we know now that it is rich in tiny toxins called PM2.5 – particulate vii

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matter of less than 2.5 microns – that can travel thousands of miles and damage our immune system from afar (Herschlag, 2020). In the twentyfirst century, every breath we take is a risk taken, a risk shared with every other creature on the planet. Precarity, seen through the lens of oxygen, is at once monstrously tangible and complexly diffused, with many of its causes coming from afar, and many of its downstream effects also not materializing until some distance into the future. Not limited to a single outcome, it is also not analyzable by a single metric. Evolving across space and time, it is shaped at every turn by forces both large and small, some of them human and some not. Especially at this juncture, with climate change looming ever larger on the horizon, and the COVID Delta variant still ravaging the globe, it is important to think about precarity as a human–nonhuman interface, the combined effect of chemistry, biology, and politics. Oxygen is a good index here, taking us from the physiology we inhabit, to the atmosphere we share, to the public health infrastructure of particular jurisdictions. From winter 2020 well into summer 2021, oxygen has been in short supply across the globe, though arising from different circumstances and affecting different communities. This shared lack suggests that precarity, though experientially devastating, could nonetheless be an important unifying force, the beginning of a reparative momentum cutting across political, economic, and religious divisions. On June 29, 2021, Lytton, a village about 150 miles northeast of Vancouver, broke Canada’s all-time heat record when its temperature soared to 49.6 C. The next day, fast-moving wildfires erupted. It “took maybe 15 minutes to engulf the whole town,” said Mayor Jan Polderman. About 90 percent of Lytton was destroyed. The blazes were ignited by lightning from dry thunderstorms, so intense that over 700,000 intracloud and cloud-to-ground lightning flashes were recorded in 15 hours, including more than 100,000 cloud-to-ground strikes. Satellite data showed massive smoke plumes in the sky, as gigantic pyrocumulus clouds shot up 55,000 feet into the stratosphere. These extreme weather patterns had also been observed during Australia’s devastating 2019–2020 fire season, when massive plumes also surged into the stratosphere and circumnavigated the globe. The NOAA report suggests that burning from September through March, the bushfires injected one million tons of smoke into the air, and produced the worst air quality ever recorded in parts of South New Wales, Queensland, and Victoria, with PM2.5 levels reaching 625μg/m3 in some places, which

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is to say, 62 times higher than the WHO air quality guideline (2021). The fires directly killed 33 people, but the smoke killed many times more. Four hundred and seventeen deaths, 1124 hospitalizations for cardiovascular problems, and 2027 hospitalizations for respiratory problems were due to the smoke (Cohen, 2020). In the Pacific Northwest, the burning of Lytton, the most tangible outcome so far of the 2021 extreme heat, brings back the hellish wildfires from the last two years. It also reminds us that climate change is the main driver of precarity in the twenty-first century. “I’ve watched a lot of wildfire-­associated pyroconvective events during the satellite era,” tweeted David Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA; “this might be the singularly most extreme I’ve ever seen.” While its global effects will be unfolding for months and even years to come, what becomes immediately clear is the precarity of indigenous populations. Lytton has long been home to the Nlaka’pamux community. Chief Matt Pasco of the Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council said that British Columbia government officials didn’t get in touch with him until hours after the fire began. When one finally did, it was to check on the safety of the livestock. “My cattle mean more to this province than Nlaka’pamux people,” Pasco said. Communications with First Nations “didn’t live up to expectations,” Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth acknowledged in a public statement. Coming on the heels of hundreds of unmarked graves of indigenous children discovered at residential schools, it speaks to longstanding and ongoing discriminations in Canada, a country that prides itself on being a liberal democracy. About 800 Nlaka’pamux tribal members were displaced by the Lytton fires. Other First Nations stepped up right away, providing food, shelter, and clothing. The Savage Society, a group of indigenous performers who use myth and fiction to create theater and film, set up a fundraising goal of $20,000, almost immediately bumped up to $50,000. By the afternoon of June 4, they had raised more than $345,000. But support networks, past and present, are by no means exclusively bound by indigeneity. In fact, the destruction of Lytton has shone an unexpected light on the opposite phenomenon: an ethics of care binding one marginalized community to another. Among the buildings reduced to charred earth was the Lytton Chinese History Museum, opened in 2017, and housing 1600 artifacts donated by local communities, with ties going back to miners and railroad workers in the nineteenth century. These Chinese immigrants were discriminated

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against from the very first – a head tax was imposed in 1885, followed by a total ban in 1923. Perhaps for that very reason, they also “had long histories of engagement and relationships with indigenous peoples,” said Henry Yu, professor of history at the University of British Columbia. “The history of Chinese and Indigenous peoples were kind of ignored as part of B.C. history,” so the loss of the museum is especially heart-­breaking (Nikitha and Renouf, 2021). But the collections have been digitized, and an online fundraiser aims to rebuild. Precarity is often an energizing force, a spur to creativity. It raises the hope that solidarity among marginalized groups isn’t impossible, that oxygen in various senses isn’t a zero-­ sum game. But what about oxygen coming in cylinders? Could a finite, non-­ shareable resource also lead to solidarity? Delhi during the months of April and May, 2021, offers an instructive example. As hospitals ran out of supplies and people stood in queues for hours to fill their cylinders, sometimes at exorbitant prices, three Sikh organizations stepped up and provided free oxygen to the best of their ability. The Hemkunt Foundation, Khalsa Aid, and the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee had this in common: a minority faith founded on “seva,” service to all, not limited by caste, gender, or religion. Sikh temples—gurdwaras  – have always provided “langar,” free meals for migrant workers and others in need. Earlier this year, they had gotten into trouble when they expressed solidarity with hundreds of thousands of farmers protesting against India’s newly formulated agricultural laws. However, that hasn’t stopped them from opening up “oxygen langars” now, mindful only of the lowest common denominator: the fact that oxygen is a necessity of life, its bodily deprivation felt in exactly the same way by Hindus and Sikhs. Precarity at this human–nonhuman interface unites us on the level of chemistry and biology. It carries an imperative that speaks for itself. The superb chapters in this volume invite us to reanimate the world on this basis. New Haven, CT Wai Chee Dimock

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References Allison Herschlag, Allison. 2020. The Long Distance Harm Done by Wildfires. BBC, August 23, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200821-­how-­wildfire-­pollution-­may-­ be-­h arming-­y our-­h ealth#:~:text=The%20smoke%20has%20even%20 been,cities%20as%20far%20away%20Seattle&text=But%20smoke%20from%20 wildfires%20can,compared%20with%20average%20air%20pollution. Li Cohen, “Australia bushfire smoke killed more people than the fires did,” CBS News, March 20, 2020. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/australia-­fires­bushfire-­smoke-­killed-­more-­people-­than-­the-­fires-­did-­study-­says/ NOAA Research News. 2021. “Giant Australian bushfire injected 1 million tons of smoke into the atmosphere.” April 15, 2021. https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2745/Giant-Australian-bushfireinjected-1-million-tons-of-smoke-in-the-atmosphere Leibniz Institute of Tropospheric Research. 2021. California Smoke Drifted as far as Europe in 2020 and Caused Heavy Clouding of Sun. ScienceDaily, June 1, 2021. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210601121813.htm Martins, Nikitha and Ria Renouf. 2021. Loss to our History: Lytton Chinese History Museum and 1600 Artifacts destroyed in Fire. CityNews 1130, July 6, 2021. https://www.citynews1130.com/2021/07/05/lytton-­c hinese-­h istorymuseum-­destroyed-­fire/

Acknowledgments

This book emerged from a series of discussions with Dieter Riemenschneider. Unfortunately, his ill health did not allow us to work together on this project. I am very grateful to Pramod K.  Nayar, Janet Wilson, Tabish Khair, Aleks Wansbrough, and Roderick McGillis for their generous and unfailing support over several years. I have learned and benefitted a lot from them for many years now, and I am highly thankful to them for the path they have made possible for me. Their suggestions and insightful comments have enriched this book. Special thanks go to K.S.  Rao, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, and Dhananjay Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru University, for providing me platforms to share some of my ideas from this project. I am grateful to them for their generosity. I am also thankful to Purushottama Bilimoria, S.K. Sharma, Gurumurthy Neelkantan, Wai Chee Dimock, Claire Chambers, Dhananjay Rai, Kamran Ali Asdar, Jagdish Batra, Johan Höglund, Anu Shukla, Scott Slovic, Jorge Diego Sanchez, Elisabetta Marino, O.P. Budholia, M.S. Pandey, Binayak Roy, Rajan Welukar, Rohit Singh, Pooja Agarwal, Sebastian Doubinsky, Rimina Mohapatra, Nilanjan Chattopadhyay, Y.S.R. Murthy, Bashabi Fraser, Claudia Egerer, Shobhit Sengar, Ramendra Singh, and Praveen Gupta for always supporting my work and ideas. Emily J. Hogg and Nicklas Hallen helped me by sharing articles whenever I needed them—thanks to you both.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish my mentor, late Professor Avadhesh Singh, could have been around to see this book in his hands. Unfortunately, he passed away too soon, causing an irreparable loss to my world. However, his fond memories make me understand the value of relationships and empathy. This book would not have been possible without the love and encouragement of my parents, my wife—Veena, my little sons, and my nephew— Kartikeya and niece Keshav, whom I am yet to meet but we already share a special bond, blurring the geographical distance. Finally, my thanks to Molly Beck at Palgrave for showing faith in this project, and for supporting it.

Contents

Introduction  1 Om Prakash Dwivedi Part I Precarious Infrastructure  31  Precarity as a Mode of Enquiry 33 Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes  Being Filthy Poor in Rising Asia: Precarity, Globalization and the Evolution of South Asian Literature in English 49 Neelam Srivastava  The Precarious Rule of Aesthetics: Form, Informality, Infrastructure 69 Dominic Davies Rural-to-Urban Migration and Precarity in The Story of My Assassins, Q & A and The White Tiger 87 Robbie B. H. Goh

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The Precarity of the Urban Spirit: Abha Dawesar’s Babyji, Diksha Basu’s The Windfall, and Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar107 John C. Hawley Part II Precarious Body 131  Purity, Precarity and Power: Prayaag Akbar’s Leila133 Pramod K. Nayar  Dragging Caste: Forms of Self-Making in Precarious Times149 Toral Jatin Gajarawala  “[S]titched Together by Threads of Light”: Perturbatory Narration, Queer Necropolitics as Biopower, and Transversality in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness171 Alberto Fernández Carbajal  The Precarity and Predatory Behaviour of the ‘Mediahideen’ in Fatima Bhutto’s Isis Novel The Runaways189 Claire Chambers  Imagining the Lives of Others: Ethics and Aesthetics of Representing Precarity in Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom215 Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp  Pride, Prejudice and Precarity in Sri Lanka: A Reading of Yasmine Gooneratne’s Sweet and Simple Kind241 Feroza Jussawalla

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 Why Do They Hate Us So Much? Precarity in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist255 Adnan Mahmutović  Precarious Cultures: Bangladeshi Novels in English and in English Translation277 Kaiser Haq Index297

Notes on Contributors

Alberto  Fernández  Carbajal  (they/he) is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton (London), where they teach English and Creative Writing, and where they are Equality and Diversity Officer for the new Research Centre for Literature and Inclusion. Their research is placed at the intersection of colonial, postcolonial, queer, and diaspora studies, with a particular focus on Islam. They are the author of two academic monographs: Compromise and Resistance in Postcolonial Writing: E.  M. Forster’s Legacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Queer Muslim Diasporas in Contemporary Literature and Film (2019). They have been an executive member of the Postcolonial Studies Association (UK) for three consecutive terms, as well as an international member of the Bodies in Transit research project. They are Article Editor for the open-access journal Postcolonial Text and Consultant for ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, and they regularly review articles and monographs for prestigious journals and academic presses. They are also a published fiction writer and poet, with an interest in exploring queer, trans, and non-binary identities. Their current academic research project is organized around the concept of trans*versality. Claire  Chambers  is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York, UK, where she teaches literature from South Asia, the Arab world, and their diasporas. She is the author of several books, including Britain Through Muslim Eyes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Rivers of Ink: Selected Essays (2017), and Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Recently, she edited Dastarkhwan: Food xix

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Writing from Muslim South Asia (2021), co-edited (with Nafhesa Ali and Richard Phillips) A Match Made in Heaven: British Muslim Women Write About Love and Desire (2020), and co-authored (with Richard Phillips, Nafhesa Ali, Kristina Diprose, and Indrani Karmakar) Storying Relationships (2021). Claire was Editor-in-Chief for over a decade of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Dominic  Davies  is a senior lecturer in English at City, University of London. He is the co-editor of  Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and the author of Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives (2019), along with other books, articles, and chapters. Om  Prakash  Dwivedi is Associate Professor of English Literature, School of Liberal Arts, Bennett University, India. His research interests lie in the field of Indian Writing in English, postcolonial literature, and cultural studies. He is the co-author of Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English (2014, with Lisa Lau; Palgrave Macmillan). His other important publications include Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market (2014, with Lisa Lau; Palgrave Macmillan), Tracing the New Indian Diaspora (2014). Toral  Jatin  Gajarawala  is Associate Professor of English at New  York University. She is the author of Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (2012). She is working on a project is titled “Ajnabi: An Existential Reckoning in South Asia.” Robbie  B.  H.  Goh  is Provost of the Singapore University of Social Sciences, and formerly Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. He publishes on Indian Anglophone Literature, Christianity in Asia, and Popular Culture. Recent books include Christopher Nolan: Filmmaker and Philosopher (2021), Language, Space and Cultural Play: Theorising Affect in the Semiotic Landscape (2019, co-authored with Lionel Wee), and Protestant Christianity in the Indian Diaspora (2019). Kaiser Haq  taught for over forty years at Dhaka University, and is currently Professor of English at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. A poet, essayist, and translator, he has been a Commonwealth Scholar, Senior Fulbright Scholar, and Royal Literary Fund Fellow; has published

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eight poetry collections, including Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems (2012) and Pariah and Other Poems (2013); six translated volumes, including Selected Poems: Shamsur Rahman (2016), Selected Poems of Shaheed Quaderi, The Woman Who Flew (2012), and The Triumph of the Snake Goddess (2015); and two anthologies, Contemporary Indian Poetry (1990) and Padma Meghna Jamuna: Modern Poetry from Bangladesh (2009). He has received the Distinguished Achievement Award for Creative Writing from SALA (South Asian Literary Association), the Sherwin W. Howard Poetry Award from Weber: the Contemporary West, and the Bangla Academy Prize. John C. Hawley  is Professor of English at Santa Clara University, past President of the South Asian Literary Association, author of Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction (2005), Islam in Contemporary Literature (2021), editor of India in Africa, Africa in India (2008) and many other volumes, and co-editor (with Revathi Krishnaswamy) of The Postcolonial and the Global (2007) and (with Gaurav Desai) of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh (2019). He is an associate editor of South Asian Review, a member of the executive committee of the African Literature Association, and the author of many essays on postcolonial literature, gender studies, and the intersection of religion and literature. Feroza Jussawalla  is Professor Emerita at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, NM, USA. She has taught in the US for forty years, at the universities of Utah, Texas-El Paso, and New Mexico. She is the author of Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English (1984), one of the earliest works on what became Postcolonial Literature. Since then she has edited or co-edited Conversations with V.S.  Naipaul (1997), Interviews with Writers of the Postcolonial World (1992), Emerging South Asian Women Writers (2015), Memory, Voice, and Identity: Muslim Women’s Writing from Across the Middle East (2021). Her collection of poems, Chiffon Saris (2002) was published by Kolkotta, Writer’s Workshop, and Toronto South review. She has numerous published articles and poems. Lisa Lau  a senior lecturer at Keele University (UK), is a postcolonialist with an international reputation for pioneering re-orientalism theory and discourse. An expert on South Asian Literature, she has worked on gender studies, literary geographies, diaspora and migration, and urban studies. She publishes on issues of representation, narrative, identity construction, class, power, precarity, commercial surrogacy, and hospitality. She has also

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worked with the World Bank on ten consultancies. Alongside her research in postcolonialism, she is currently working on Decolonising the Curriculum and associated issues. Adnan Mahmutović  is a Bosnian-Swedish writer and Associate Professor at Stockholm University. His major academic works include Ways of Being Free (2012), Visions of the Future in Comics (2017), The Craft of Editing (2018), and Claiming Space (2021). Ana Cristina Mendes  uses cultural and postcolonial studies to examine literary and screen texts (particularly intermedia adaptations) as venues for resistant knowledge formations to expand upon theories of epistemic injustice. Mendes is Associate Professor of English Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal, and serves on the board of the Association of Cultural Studies. Pramod K. Nayar  teaches at the Department of English, the University of Hyderabad, India. He is the author, most recently, of  Alzheimer’’s Disease Memoirs  (Springer Nature, 2021),  The Human Rights Graphic Novel (2020), Ecoprecarity (2019), and Bhopal’’s Ecological Gothic (2017), among others. Barbara  Schmidt-Haberkamp  is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her main research interests are postcolonial studies and eighteenth-century British literature and culture. She is author of a study of the history of literary criticism in Australia and of a study of the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s concept of criticism. She has (co-)edited several collections of essays on aspects of cultural transfer in eighteenth-century Europe, as well as an anthology of Contemporary Indian Short Stories (2006) and a collection of essays on ‘And there’ll be NO dancing’: Perspectives on Policies Impacting Indigenous Australia since 2007 (2017). Her most recent publications are the co-­ edited volumes Representing Poverty in the Anglophone Postcolonial World (2021) and Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World (2022). She is on the steering committee of the international n ­ etwork Challenging Precarity, as well as a member of the research training school Gegenwart/Literatur (Contemporary/Literature), funded by the German Research Council, and an elected member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.

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Neelam Srivastava  is Professor of Postcolonial and World Literature at Newcastle University, UK.  She has published on resistances to Italian colonialism, the Indian novel and life-writing, subaltern studies, and postcolonial print cultures. She is the author of Italian Colonialism and Resistances to Empire, 1930-1970 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is coeditor with Rossella Ciocca of  Indian Literature and the World: Multilingualism, Translation, and the Public Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She has also co-edited with Baidik Bhattacharya The Postcolonial Gramsci  (2013). Her first monograph was entitled  Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English  (2008). She co-convenes the  Postcolonial Print Cultures International Network.

Introduction Om Prakash Dwivedi

We gave everything … to make a dwelling out of it. Not just our earnings, we gave out the labor of our bodies to make this place. (Tabassum et al. 2009: 146)

The above-quoted passage highlights a precarious relationship between infrastructure and bodies, embedded within the capitalist framework of neoliberalism. This introduction, along with other essays in Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature, focuses on how precarity is the everyday experience of South Asia, driven and structured by different ways in which the role of government-corporate nexus has shifted from carementality to generating harm, insecurity, and vulnerability in the neoliberal age. The economic force of neoliberalism is primarily based on the idea of transaction, what one can do—the unlimited capacity of workers— and not interaction, and its transactional nature makes it aggressively calculative to the extent that lives are categorised into liveable and non-liveable zones. This book makes a claim that neoliberal strategies of accumulation and aggrandizement are programmed in a way to generate, sustain, and

O. P. Dwivedi (*) School of Liberal Arts, Bennett University, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_1

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nourish selective valued lives thus rendering other lives  precarious. Dettached from normativity, neoliberal forces persistently formulate mechanisms to lock the circulation of resources within certain groups. The conversion of and control over almost everything as resources for this selective group of valued lives has led to the emergence of a superstructure, which only thrives on its unregulated power to dispose and eliminate weak bodies. Under such extreme life conditions, morality and social justice are no longer viable. Efficiency of unprivileged lives and their maximised risk have become  the procedural codes of neoliberal regime, ensuring the supply of vital resources for selective valued lives—coercively, systematically, even legally. Life is determined by the philosophy of market, which is unregulated and uneven, hence, deprived of any welfare approach. The fractured socialist pluralism and democratic ethos thus lead to a continual precarity, foregrounding the replacement of elemental forces of life with a new, exceptional power of market. The representations of precarity in this book make us look at the capitalist social relations that have emerged and continue to thrive in South Asia post-1990s. Anxiety, job insecurity, zero-hours employment, environmental degradation, state violence, poor healthcare system, long working hours (aided and abetted by the surveillance cultures), bioeconomies, and fragmented families are the characteristics of the neoliberal age. There is also a strong consensus on the brighter aspects of neoliberalism, which is linked to  its ability to provide jobs and opportunities. However, one only has to examine the patterns of development to understand how it “borrow[s] from the future”, an ironical phrase used by Slavoj Žižek (2011, 997), not to ignore its extractive practices, and how it, cancels out the future itself. “Precarity”, “precariousness” and “precariat” are terms used to refer to such uncertain futures in the wake of neoliberal capitalism. These generalised risks and increased vulnerabilities, which this book terms as “precarity” have become symptomatic of the neoliberal age, setting out to reflect on the inequalities which are deeply embedded in our social system, particularly in the South Asian region. Examining the post-1990 social transformations in the South Asian region, which are inevitably linked to draconian policies of neoliberalism, this book sets out to identify precarious conditions and their manifestations in the recent literature of the region. With the dissolution of social infrastructures triggered by coercive and extractive forces, Martha Albertson Fineman suggests that life continues to become increasingly vulnerable. For Fineman, social infrastructures

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constitute “social assets” (2017)—the networks which are essential to sustaining life. It is for these reasons that this book looks at different dimensions of precarity in South Asian literature, linked as they are to neoliberal capitalism, increasing vulnerability with the eventual erosion of the welfare system. The contributors were not asked to adhere to a particular concept of precarity in their analysis of South Asian literature, as that would have reduced the theoretical purchase of the term. Rather, this book attempts to give space to a selection of approaches that have become prominent in South Asian literature recently. Rather than dealing with the history of precarity as such, this book examines a range of novels and some works of non-fiction to trace the forms and effects of precarity in the present socio-political and cultural imaginary of South Asia. Although this book consists of essays by a range of contributors, there is a consistent agreement among contributors in their point of view on South Asian precarity and its relations to neoliberalism. As such, this book argues that ontological insecurity generated by neoliberal capitalism and enforced by the state-corporations complex has led to the creation and proliferation of precarity. Even a prefatory glance at the oeuvre of South Asian writings in English is enough to suggest a new kind of literary history since the 1990s—a history which is mostly dominated by dark and pessimistic stories of development in the region. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000), Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower (2011), Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008), Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009), Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Asia (2013), Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom (2017), Tabish Khair’s Night of Happiness (2018) and Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) are among the novels which offer precarious accounts of the damages rendered by neoliberal capitalism.



Neoliberalism and Precarity

The salience of terms such as precarity, precariousness, and precariat, according to Emily Hogg, lies in “the way” they are “put to work by individuals and groups in order to contribute to the reshaping of those social realities” (2020, 1). The day-in-the-life structure of South Asia, driven as it is by emancipatory, even progressive terms, has failed  to offer much social security to its citizens. Arguably, the collusive consent between the state and corporate often results in exceptional forms of power that

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invariably ignores practice of collective development. A case can be made that the development discourse advocated by neoliberal ideologues have mostly turned out to be jargons, at least in the context of rising socialinequality in the region. Life continues to become more precarious as we witness new forms of capitalist exploitations in this region. Arguably, as capitalist forces continue to expand and take control of our daily lives, a larger section of society in this region has become increasingly vulnerable. Precisely, for this reason, I have argued elsewhere that “[P]rivatization and socialism do not go hand in hand unless there is provision for the intervention of the state in meaningful ways that can keep a watchful eye on the pulse of the nation.” (Dwivedi 2022, n.p.). Hence, it is needed to conceptualise frameworks, which can provide us with a lens to examine the compromised ontological conditions of “social spaces … often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 1991, 34) in South Asia. This book undertakes the task to examine the concepts of precarity, precariousness, and precariat, building on the work of Judith Butler and Guy Standing to show how, when used as critical terms, they make us aware of the reconfigurations of neoliberal society and the nation-state. These reconfigurations, driven by aggressive political systems and the subsequent weak social fabric, therefore, leads to precarious conditions in South Asia. A caveat needs to be lodged here that precarity as a life condition permeates both the global north and the global south, albeit in different forms and manifestations. The dominant role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its divisive agendas, being driven largely by the United States, has concomitantly led to the undermining of social conditions in South Asia, resulting in a more intensified precariousness in the region. Raju J Das underlines this deep level of inequality that attends the discourse and practices of neoliberalism. Das critiques the unfair outcome of neoliberalism in India, which “has produced a massive amount of economic inequality, insecurity, unemployment, and under-employment, casualization, informalization, greater labour exploitation and lax version of factory act implementation” (2015, 718). Andreas Wansbrough and I have discussed the undocumented ways of the gig economy’s procedural codes, causing further damage to social security: “Many of us have become even more reliant on the exploitation of the gig economy as food and supplies are delivered on demand. … and the gig economy was nearly synonymous with precarity and contemporary exploitation” (2022, 148). The speed of supply and consumption are both integrally vital to the gig economy.

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In his introduction to the book on South Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations (2016), Alex Tickell highlights how the 1990s marked a radical shift in the sociological performance in the region. Tickell takes recourse to fiction to examine the new contours of the region. He posits that “[S]outh Asia is now more fast-paced and competitive, more globalized and resource-hungry, more technologically networked and socially fragmented than ever before, and these transformations have proved productive for novelists, fostering … increasingly inventive literary expositions of citizenship and civic identity” (2016, 9–10). Tickell, however, does not use the term “precarity” to capture the varying degrees of social transformations, increased proletarianisation and uncertain futures that are ongoing in South Asia. In The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Arundhati Roy relates these transformations to neoliberal capitalism, which has seemingly undermined the democratic sovereignty of developing nations. Evidently, Roy could see the hand-in-glove relationship of neoliberal capitalism and nation-states. In this new kind of governance, the “realm is raw capital,” made possible by “conquests” of “emerging markets, … profits,” and “borders limitless” (2002, 145). Simon During echoes Roy’s thoughts by linking the deepened crisis emanating from the age of neoliberalism as “the politics of subalternity … largely absorbed into the machinery of emergent neo-liberal state capitalism” (2015, 57). During further argues that the subaltern politics has given way for a new class, that is the precariat. Consequently, During marks a new turn to precarity through the vertical and horizontal expansion of the subaltern class. It is in this way that During, as Janet Wilson, Cristina Gamez Fernandez and I have argued elsewhere (2020, 441), situates the dilemma of the post-1990s social reality arising out of neoliberal crisis. By examining post-millennial fiction and non-fiction, this book attempts to establish critical frameworks of precarity and precariousness as manifested in the everyday life in South Asia. It attempts to understand the ongoing social transformations and how life has become increasingly uncertain and dark due to “neoliberal rationality … [that] involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social actions” (Brown 2005, 39–40, emphasis original). Apparently, the process of neoliberalism has opened up a huge set of debates. One comes across various definitional frameworks of neoliberalism, making it a vexed theory. On the one hand, we have proponents such as Jonathon Church, Henry Simons, Scott Summer, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Jagdish Bhagwati, Louis Rougier, to name a few, who defend neoliberal practices on the grounds of their liberatory and empowering

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nature. On the other, opponents such as Samir Amin, David Harvey, Wendy Brown, Zygmunt Bauman, Pankaj Mishra, Arundhati Roy, Pablo Mukherjee, Rashmi Varma, and Tabish Khair, among others, critique neoliberalism for its extractive nature, which operates to maximise profit at the cost of human life and environmental catastrophe. In academic discussions on cultural production, the term is often used as a precursor to “postmodern”. According to Michael Manley, the neoliberal economy retained “a structure of economic control whose roots went far back as the seventeenth century” (1991, 24). No wonder, then, that Aleks Wansbrough, in his book, Capitalism and the Enchanted Screen (2020), argues that “[n]eoliberalism encourages paranoia as we become aware that we are always watched—our performance at work and indeed at life more generally, in the age of social media, is evaluated and ranked” (2020, 37). Neoliberalism is often taken for granted as a concept that equates freedom and democracy with the market. Milton Friedman, one of the main architects of neoliberalism in the USA and the UK but also Chile (where he advised Pinochet’s dictatorship), succinctly encapsulates the link between politics and economics in a doctrinaire manner: “there is an intimate connection between economics and politics, that only certain combinations of political and economic arrangements are possible, and that in particular, a society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom” (1997, 15). For Friedman, the market is “a direct component of freedom” (12), but this also explains the reason why the economies are prioritised over welfare measures. This equation, however, leads to a jettisoning of a carementality; for example, Friedman argues against public housing, calling it paternalism (178), and complaining that it would be better to just give poor people money. Evidently, he also opposed minimum wage laws and collective structures that limited the power of corporations. For Friedman, capitalism was the source of freedom. As such, Friedman seems to provide a clear example, as one of the key proponents of monetarism, of neoliberal thought. Yet neoliberalism remains difficult to define, because it exists at the level of economic theory, but also at the level of industrial relations. A further complicating factor is that neoliberalism is also connected to culture and forms of cultural consumption, leading to what David Harvey and others have framed as a narcissistic culture and enveloping the entirety of contemporary culture:

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The commodification of sexuality, culture, history, heritage; of nature as spectacle or as rest cure; the extraction of monopoly rents from originality, authenticity, and uniqueness (of works of art, for example)––these all amount to putting a price on things that were never actually produced as commodities. (2007, 166)

Indeed, one of the more ambitious analyses of the relations and tensions between these spheres is offered by Harvey in his important book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2007). Harvey draws on the relationship between neoliberalism and how it has changed our very conception of space and time, through technological innovations that have “compressed density of market transactions in both space and time” (4). As Harvey contends that neoliberalism gives rise to what he calls “time-space compression” (4), connected to postmodernity. But neoliberalism is not understood in cultural terms given Harvey’s Marxian credentials. While on a rhetorical level, Milton Friedman, for instance, associates capitalism with freedom and suggests a tension between state and capital, in practice neoliberalism has a much more complicated relationship with the state, as Harvey contends. The state must not just guarantee money, and use force, but also seek out new markets. Harvey, for instance, contends that recent wars fulfil neoliberal purposes of enriching private interests, by integrating nations into the market economy, sourcing new markets. Harvey uses the term “neoliberal state” to designate this more complex relationship between state and corporate power. Thus, neoliberalism invades cultural, political, economic, and social spheres. It is like a virus finding its way into social infrastructures, controlling and dominating, to the extent of eroding them. One can claim that neoliberalism turns everything into a commodity, right down to the very health of things—of each of us, of plants and animals and rocks and water and sand and sky—everything. While Harvey provides a holistic critique of neoliberalism, a more pluralist analysis of neoliberalism is offered by Steger and Roy, who argue that there exist variations within neoliberalism. They comment: Over the last quarter-century, “neoliberalism” has been associated with such different political figures as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Augusto Pinochet, Boris Yeltsin, Jiang Zemin, Manmohan Singh, Junichiro Koizumi, John Howard, and George W. Bush. But not one of these political leaders has ever publicly embraced this ambiguous label—

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although they all share some affinity for ‘neoliberal’ policies aimed at deregulating national economies, liberalizing international trade, and creating a single global market. (2010, 19)

These differences exist even for figures in close proximity: Thatcherism is distinct from Reaganism, and Blairism from Clintonism, imploring that we think in terms of “neoliberalisms rather than a single monolithic manifestation” (20). They further differentiate waves of neoliberalism, the first wave with Thatcher and Reagan—the rightwing version, and then a centre left with Clinton and Blair (159). As such, they maintain, there exists a plural of neoliberalisms. These neoliberalisms manifest in “three intertwined” forms: “(1) an ideology (2) a mode of governance (3) a policy package.” Despite its amorphous nature, it can be agreed that neoliberalism is a form of cultural and financial control, what Fredric Jameson terms as a “colonizing of the unconscious” since an individual’s life is subject to invisible forms of control such as surveillance, biometrics, and the algorithmic pattern of one’s activities on social media. In the neoliberal process, autonomous play is outrightly rejected, in fact, the autonomy is controlled, manoeuvred, and subjugated by economic forces. This happened with the USSR when it tried to assert itself against the rising force of the USA, and in the present-­ day context, one can see the same pattern of conflict between China and the USA, with the latter coercing itself over the former in its endeavour to sustain and strengthen its superpower structure. Having discussed an overview of neoliberalism, it needs to be outlined here that this book adopts the concept of neoliberalism as conceptualised by Tabish Khair in his book, The New Xenophobia (2015). Khair suggests that neoliberalism, unlike capitalism, marks a loosening up of the relations between capital, production and labour, with a relative abandonment of the traditional notion of labour. Under neoliberalism, “free play” of capital can lead to profit: much of financial capital is not invested in production or trade. In that condition, the state of the human being— someone who must work for his/her existence—is rendered precarious in ways that include the old proletariat, but also exceed it (2016, 31–40). Khair’s conceptualisation of neoliberalism makes us see that neoliberal governance has extended its control over all kinds of workers, not just the old-time labourers, and, in so doing, it has turned a large population in South Asia, into precariats. With the advent of artificial means of production (i.e. machines doing the work), the rise of a mindset that sees unions

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as an impediment, the neoliberal emphasis on the self, and the internalisation of part-time work without benefits, precarity has become a pervasive condition of South Asian life. For instance, short contracts, small start-ups, work-from-home etc., can all lead to states of precarity—not just the old ‘exploitation’ of the proletariat by capital. Then, one can find other forms of precarity—based on power/politics, as Butler notes—where entire groups are more easily marginalised, on the basis of race, religion, sexuality etc.—because they are not needed (emphasis mine) as much as in the past by capital, which can now grow without investment in production or trade. In this topsy-turvy situation, some theorists have argued that neoliberalism has shed its rhetoric of individualism. Aleks Wansbrough frames neoliberalism’s pretence regarding the emancipation of the individual as a vestige of the Cold War (42). He notes that “it is not unusual to see Soviet language and cultural significations of progress echoed in corporate activity. The corporate world speaks of goals less realistic than ‘five year plans,’ and engages in cleansing public confessions but in the corporate language of ‘self-assessments’ or ‘self-evaluations’” (95).

Defining Precarity, Precariat, and Precariousness Precarity, precariat and precariousness are theoretical tools, employed in a range of contexts ever since Judith Butler used the terms to denote a shared ontological condition of exposure and interdependency of bodies (2004). She writes, “[l]ife requires various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as a life”, and precariousness for Butler indicates living socially, open to “the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other” (2009, 14). The notion of co-­vulnerability or interconnectedness lies at the heart of Butler’s theorisation of precarity. This conforms to the definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary, which points out that the Latin word “precarious” means “given as a favour”, or “depending on the favour of another person” (n.p.). As a term and a concept, precarity predates Butler’s work. Critics like Andrea Muehlebach define precarity as “a shorthand for those of us documenting the multiple forms of nightmarish dispossession and injury that our age entails” (2013, 297). Allison relates precarity to a “psychic sense of unease, uncertainty, and a darkness about the present in a state of not becoming a future” (2015, 346).

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The word “precarity” finds its etymology in the French term précarité. The sociological provenance of precariat, precarity, and precariousness was rendered by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu used these terms to reflect on the overall socio-economic life in Algeria under French rule where everything was: stamped with precariousness. No regular timetable, no fixed place of work; the same discontinuity in time and space. The search for work is the one constant factor in an existence swept to and fro by the whim of accident. … The whole of life is lived under the sign of the provisional. (1963/1979, 66)

Bourdieu formulates precarity as a condition marked by an immense degree of uncertainty. This pervasiveness of uncertainty, according to the famous anthropologist Maribel Casas-Cortes, led to the EuroMayDay, which marked the eruption of protests against insecure job markets and borders in Italy in 2001 and, subsequently, spread to other parts of the world. The (Euro)MayDay activists have tended to use “precarity” to describe “a generalized condition.” Later, in her book, Frames of War (2009), Butler links “precarity” to citizens’ loss of agency, deprived of even grief and mourning. Suggesting ways to counter and erase global hegemonic regimes, Butler advocates a normative turn toward the framing of effective social policy to include issues of shelter, work, food, medical care, and legal status. Butler sees the ineffectuality of bodies to have control over themselves in the light of pernicious forces: “[w]e are acted upon, violently, and it appears that our capacity to set our own course at such instances is fully undermined” (2009, 16). Butler situates conditions of precarity emanating from “the institutions of temporary labour, of decimated social services, and of the general attrition of social democracy”, resulting in “a heightened sense of expendability or disposability that is differentially distributed throughout society” (2011, 13). She uses the term “precariousness” to highlight Levinas’s argument on the coercive relationship between the self and the Other: “[th]e face as the extreme precariousness of the other (167), leading to “the worldless vocalization of suffering” (114) by “a new group in the world, a [global] class-in-the-making” (Standing 2011, vii). Standing’s reference to this vulnerable group as precariats justifies Banki’s argument that “precarity of one kind may aggravate other precarities” (2013, 451). Standing goes on to argue that the precariat are “a detached group of socially ill misfits living off the dregs of society” (2011, 8), concurrently a

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relatively privileged “‘salariat’, still in stable full-time employment, some hoping to move into the elite”; “a smaller group of ‘proficians’, which “combines the traditional ideas of ‘professional’ and ‘technical workers’, as well as the “shrinking ‘core’ of manual employees, the essence of the old ‘working class’” (2011, 7–8) For Standing, the precariat is an insecure group, always under immense pressure to deliver for capitalists, which obviously entails immense workload, lesser freedom  and increased vulnerability. Critics, such as Joseph Choonara (2020), Elena Gasiukova and Ovsey Shkaratan (2019), and Ronaldo Munck (2013), question the relevance of the applicability of “precarity” to scale diverse ontological conditions of the new world. Notwithstanding the criticism that the concept has received, and continues to do so, the aim of this book is not to patrol the boundaries of what constitutes precarity, but rather to unpack its potential as a critical currency, or to use the term coined by the anthropologist Casas-Cortés, “a point of departure … something that is currently available to be taken up and used” (2014, 221) to examine the living conditions in the wake of the accelerated neoliberal capitalism and a concomitant weakened nation-state. Similarly, Francesco Di Bernado blurs the distinctiveness of the term by pointing out that it is “conceptually misguided to define precarity as a new condition characterizing a new social class” (n.p.). Bernado identifies precarity as “the condition of the working class under capitalism. It always has been, and it always will be” (n.p.). While one cannot deny Bernado’s claim, it needs to be understood that the nature of capitalism itself has undergone a radical change since the 1990s. Pointing to the new face of the neoliberal world, Samir Amin remarks that the “market invoked by conventional economists no longer exists. It is truly a farcical joke” (2010, 101). The commodification of the market has eventually commodified lives as well. Life under the neoliberal regime is measured in terms of value that it can assign to the duo of nation-state and corporations. Seen in the context of this systematic erosion of social relations and the concomitant social transformations under the neoliberal regime, it is no wonder to see a rampant rise in precarious conditions in South Asia. While there is some degree of truth that the South Asian region has attained economic gains in the recent past, the corollary of the gains to society also needs to be analyzed and tested since it provides the optics to see the living conditions of neoliberal society. This juxtaposition of the economic with the bios, according to Hardt and Negri, has resulted in extremely

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uneven conditions giving rise to the multitude subjects, which can never be “flattened into sameness, unity [and] identity” (2000, 140, 105). Seeing precariat as the multitude makes us record its varying degree of vulnerability that has spread thinly over a large section of society. It also helps us recognize fertile spaces of struggle from which one can frame both critique and resistance to neoliberal capitalism. However, this requires effective political, economic, and social will.  Adding to the notion of multitude, we can trace a new trajectory in the discourse of precarity, which is obviously linked to neoliberalism. For example, Ben Trott identifies the emergence of “[F]ree labour on the net”, and, in so doing, broadens the theoretical domain of precarity. Tiziana Terranova views this new class of digital workers as “netslaves”, ...voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited” (Terranova 2004, 73), Adding to Terranova’s categorisation of netslaves, Benn Trott argues that “[O]ne of the areas this (un)freedom of contemporary labour is at its clearest is in the digital and online work” (2004, 74), which connects to resources and disconnects and diffuses forms of life. For Trott, then, the precariat can be seen as “a body of productive and exploited subjects, far more heterogeneous in its make-up than its predecessor, ‘the proletariat’” (2013, 411). The claim to see precariats as a multitude also leads to the rise of a “risk society” (Beck, 1994). This is very much reminiscent of Pankaj Mishra’s scathing attack on overall outcome of the neoliberal ideology, driven by “a culture of aggressive selfishness, envy, rancour and animosity, which eventually exhausts and corrodes its participants from within” (Mishra and Sethi 2015, n.p.). Further, linking precarity with the multitude also makes us see the pervasiveness of the term, providing us a ground to raise questions about the continuous erosion of democracy. The nation-state’s proclivity to align itself with neoliberal capitalism and the attendant militarisation of the everyday life of its citizens in South Asia has eventually led to the rise of informal job market.  For example, the 68th Round data (2011–12) of National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) estimates a figure of around 61 million informal job creation within India post 1990s. One needs to recall Karl Marx here to restructure and repair our increasingly capitalist democracy: “[in] democracy … a human being does not exist for the sake of the law, but the law exists for the sake of human being, it is human existence. In a democracy, we are answerable … to one another” (Henry 1976, 88). Marx links the idea of private property with the creation of industry and oppressive class structure since the task of policy formulation and

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implementation are in the pockets of private organisations. It is no wonder that such policies lack social impact and mostly perpetuate and magnify the neoliberal tropes of wealth extraction at the cost of public life. These extractive policies, according to Pankaj Mishra, promote “[p]rofit-­ maximising individuals and businesses, … [and] can’t be trusted to extend social security to those who need it most” (2020, n.p.). In fact, in one of his other interviews, Mishra makes a scathing critique of neoliberal capitalism: “[e]verything has been reconfigured by it—from gender relations and mental health to the environment and electoral politics” (n.p.). As we can see, erosion of democractic values and social infrastructures accompanies the neoliberal world-making process. Commenting on the representation of the precarious work culture in South Asian literature, Michael K.  Walonen convincingly demonstrates the ways in which narratives of precariousness occupy a “central part of the ‘cultural wing’ of the neoliberal turn that has so radically altered the societies of South Asia and most of the rest of the world” (2019, 249) Similarly, Kevin Hewison and Arne Kalleberg highlight the global production chains and networks responsible for “considerable competitive pressures that have promoted the movement to precarious forms of employment” in many of the Asian countries (2012, 3). A rich passage from Mohsin Hamid’s How to Become Filthy Rich in Asia (2013) captures the process of precariousness inevitably linked to the capital: Becoming filthy rich requires a degree of unsqueamishness, whether in rising Asia or anywhere else. For wealth comes from capital, and capital comes from labor, and labor comes from equilibrium, from calories in chasing calories out, an inherent built-in leanness, the leanness of biological machines that must be bent to your will with some force if you are to loosen your own financial belt and, sighingly, expand. (119)

In the capitalist paternalism of churning out precarious lives, verbs, including, but not limited to, “suck”, “exhaust”, “compete”, “mute”, “control” play a vital role, finally, turning as they do, the working class into “burnout” figures (Han 2010). The cases of increased vulnerability, decimated social networks, capitalist democracy, weak bodies, chart new territories of precarity, which can be seen as emblematic of a burnout neoliberal society. Elsewhere I have argued that the “[M]odern society is a ‘burnout society,’ for it is driven and governed by the unequal structures of capitalism and its deep desire

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to immunize itself from others—races, cultures, nations—”, thus widening the already existing gap (Dwivedi 2020). This burnout culture is pervasive as much in South Asia as in other parts of the world and “that’s why the struggle against capitalism is an international and universal struggle”, which demands as much as the ideological positioning as movements (Chibber 2019). In fact, Chibber prioritises movements based on struggles (2019) so as “to create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall”, which, according to Lippman, “is the most elementary duty of the democratic state” (1914, 141). Hence, precarity that is encountered in developing nations, or, for that matter, a region such as South Asia, needs to be examined in greater details.

South Asian Literature and Precarity Here, at the twilight of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-­ first, even names like Gandhi, Tolstoy, Premchand, and Tagore have begun to disappear from people’s memories. The best-selling book in stores today? The Road Ahead, by Bill Gates. Uday Prakash, Peeli chatri wali ladki. (The Girl with the Golden Parasol 11–12)

The passage above ironically registers one of the main constituents of neoliberal capitalism; that is, the mirage of perpetual progress. Emboldened by the rhetoric of progress and open markets, it should come as no surprise to see a concomitant rise of the rising Asia discourse (as examined in detail in Neelam Srivastava’s chapter in this book) in various media platforms within and outside Asia. The changed reading habit is indicative of the big and unachievable dreams/targets that are sold to readers/citizens of the region and, in so doing, results in what Ettlinger sees as the “everydayness of precarity” (2007). As Lau and Mendes argue in this book, this shift to precariousness has become a prominent theme in South Asian literature since the 1990s. Likewise, Graham Huggan argues that this period marks a significant shift to the production of exotic literature from the South Asian region, placing more emphasis on the narratives of poverty, dark India, crime, corruption, communalism, and, at times, even the failure of postcolonial nations. Hence, it becomes increasingly vital to look at various forms of fear and vulnerability in the South Asian region that underpin precarity, for such literary representations hold the potential to strategise new modes of resilience, with a view to render more space to the eroded social structures in

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the region. The importance of social and physical assets to mitigate precarious conditions rendered by the state-corporation complex is examined in Pramod K. Nayar’s chapter in this book. Similarly, Jennifer Lawn makes a case that “a literary imaginary” might “invoke, and perhaps even cultivate, the apprehension of precariousness”, which she sees as vital to progressive politics in contemporary times (2017, 1028). Hardt and Negri suggest that the important political task is “to construct a new common language that facilitates communication, as the languages of anti-imperialism and proletarian internationalism did for the struggles of a previous era” (2000, 57). This turn to a new common language would ‘perhaps’ function “not on the basis of resemblances but on the basis of differences: a communication of singularities” (57). Ana Cristina Mendes links the task of this political activism to literature. She points out that the new literature of economically rising neoliberal Asia is a double-edged sword, eulogising the progress as it does, while, simultaneously, offering us minor windows to look behind the glaring “entrepreneurial rhetoric” and recognise the “infrastructural, educational, and moral challenges” posed by the periodic waves of developmentalism and linked to socio-economic transformations (2016, 220). Mendes’ suggestions can be seen, in line with Elleke Boehmer and Tickell’s elaborate and critical summarisation of the 1990s, as being extremely useful for anyone to understand these shifts in literature and theory. They argue that the 1990s “continued to shift and change, even as concentric understandings of the world have given way to multi-centred globalizing pictures showing variously intersecting peripheries and semiperipheries” (2015, 326). Boehmer’s and Tickell’s insightful summarising of the 1990s as the enmeshing of the peripheries and semiperipheries can also  be a useful ground to understand the accelerated rise of precarity. As we have seen, precarity is not delimited to any geographical space. It has moved from the peripheries, unlike the case with the subaltern, to semiperipheries as well. However, the impact felt by the global south is of a much severe degree than any other semiperiphery regions due to the abeyance of life-­sustaining assets. Precarity, then, can be experienced as being trapped between these two fluctuating sites in the age of neoliberal capitalism. Given the broad spectrum of the constellations of precarity, the twenty-first century consequently requires more frameworks of resilience. In her excellent book, Weak Planet (2020), Wai Chee Dimock influentially advocates such a model of resilience, drawing nourishment from “a mediating network” (2020, 7), and linking precisely to the regenerative

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ability of literature. Her framework is potentially rich to redress precarity in a world, which is deprived of normative frameworks. Her strategy to counter vulnerability is as follows: “[M]indful that the world isn’t what it should be and rarely able to effect a definitive cure, it always has room for one more try” (7). Poetic as these lines sound, this turn to literature evokes hope for resilience since we all know that hope sustains life. Dimock’s views are prefigured by Khair in his novel, Filming (2007). He writes: “[B]ut death comes on its own, finally; it always does—what has to be attained and preserved is always life”(2007, 309). Dimock and Khair convincingly point to a shift from governmentality to what I term “carementality”, which surprisingly is amiss in the game of capitalism, giving rise to precarious forms. Dimock goes on to add that “[P]ublic-facing and field-tested, such a method marks a crossover point from hermeneutics to politics, from the leisureliness of textual analysis to the urgency of repairing and reviving” (7). One can sense Dimock’s urgency to address the problems of social vulnerability in the present times. “Repairing” and “reviving” are not a one-time task; rather, they demand a continuous engagement, which can only materialise by strengthening the welfare system. Representations of these weak life forms hence become increasingly essential and literature is the best medium through which new solidarity can be imagined. Dimock’s framework asks for a self-reflexive approach and can be influential in offering therapeutic healing to the burnout syndrome of the everyday precarity. Hence, a study of South Asian literature becomes a potent ground to analyse precarity for they challenge and distort the eulogising stories of the developing nations. Any developing category requires more focus and care, given its susceptibility to exploitation. What are the costs of development that these regions pay? How fair is the entire play of development? How is precarity linked to the notion of development? Perhaps, one can find answers to these questions if one looks meticulously at “trucks” as a metaphor for modern life. If the incoming ones provide resources, the outgoing trucks contain remnants or waste materials, which are to be dumped elsewhere. In this seamless journey of incoming  resources and profit/outgoing risks and losses, accentuated as they are by the state–corporation duo, life itself is turned into a resource, to be used, exploited and then dumped. This study, therefore, makes a case that literary representations are capacious to imagine the condition of precarity arising out of the new constellations of class hierarchy, underpinned by vulnerability and insecurity. The book draws together research on the literary treatment of

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areas such as LGBTQ studies, infrastructure, urbanism, informal labour and rural–urban migration. These are diverse areas, but nonetheless constitutive of modern life; hence they demand an engaged socio-political discourse. As Simon Critchley cuttingly points out, “[P]olitics is always about nomination. It is about naming a political subjectivity and organizing politically around that name” (2007, 103). Critchley’s idea finds resonance in Rita Felski’s demand for literature to be seen as an act of “recognition” where readers identify these precarious lives and “come to see themselves differently by gazing outward rather than inward, by deciphering ink marks on a page” (2008, 23). Here the notion of affect seen as permeating out of texts is reminiscent of Mikhail Bakhtin’s call for a literary assemblage of social relations that holds enough merit. Bakhtin’s theorisation of “heteroglossia” is a potential tool to capture “diversity of speech” one encounters in the novel (308). The multivalence voice renders representational power to precarious life. Driven by normative principles, it subsequently poses ethical questions for readers. Raymond Williams terms this affective notification a “structure of feeling”, “a social experience”, which is processual, “often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which … has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics” (1971, 132; emphasis in original). In such notification, the text is aware of its limited viewpoint, yet capable of structuring itself in relation to the social context by giving space to other voices. This can be a ground to play out the differences, not for erasure, rather to render balance and structure what James Ferguson calls “dependence networks” (2013, 33), the abeyance of which produce precarity since such a dissolution marks a collapse of normativity and meaningful relationships. Replaced by asocial inequalities, the structure of feeling gets erased producing neutralised identities, and simultaneously retaining and, in fact, exacerbating any agency of representations. The construction of suffering and social injustices is central to decimate structures that emanate precarity. The pathological power of literature is powerfully captured by the character of Marcus, an Englishman in Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008): “here everyone is human and must try to understand each other’s mystery. Each other’s pain” (2008, p. 198). South Asia is a very wide category, including as it does India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives. Hence no single book cannot cover such a wide geographical range. Although Nepal has recently produced several engaging novels and poetry collections in

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English, the same cannot be said of Bhutan and the Maldives. This does not mean that the countries which do not find discussions here do not matter, or that they are less precarious. Their everyday life has also been rendered vulnerable by the surmounting challenges of border, economy and education. In fact, the Nepali writer Rabi Thapa points to this bourgeoning anguish and insecure future that underpins the country. In one of his recent interviews, he writes, “[P]olitical instability—or stagnation, if you will, in the sense of enduring corruption—clearly frustrates the Nepali youth, who refuses to accept the dysfunction that warps their futures” (n.p.). Perhaps the discourse on precarity in Nepal, or for that matter, other South Asian nations will soon find its place in another article or a book.

Structure of the Book The book examines the issue of precarity in South Asia literature through a discourse on “Infrastructure” and “Body”. While the primary focus of the book remains the anglophone texts, an attempt has been made to include a few translated texts as well to show how precarity is imagined and represented in such works. Whereas the precarious infrastructures are dealt with recourse to the urban–rural divide as examined by Lisa Lau, Neelam Srivastava, Dominic Davies, Robbie Goh, and John Hawley in this book, the issue of the vulnerable body is covered by Pramod K. Nayar, Toral Gajarawala, Alberto Fernandez, Claire Chambers, Barbara Schmidt-­ Haberkamp, Feroza Jussawala, Adnan Mahmutovic, and Kaiser Haq, Infrastructures are an integral part of the welfare system and social justice. In the recent past, however, it has been rendered precarious due to the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. In one of her interviews, Martha Fineman captures the irony of the neoliberal world where a certain class lives “in a world of gated communities, … have their own infrastructure like private jets and rail cars instead of relying on regular transportation, isolated plutocrats who are separating themselves from the shared aspects of society. They live above society …” (2016, n.p.) by compromising, at times, even sacrificing the lives of others, making them vulnerable in different ways. In the context of India, Rana Dasgupta steers this manipulated and weakened infrastructure to 1991, the point of accelerated changes in its social system. He posits that the idea of free market and booming economy ensured that “people of every age were cut off even from their recent existence” (2014, 47). Similarly, Shruti Ravindran

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(2015) sees the prejudiced infrastructure and life of “smart” cities as “dystopic and inequitable [and] may even turn into social apartheid cities, governed by powerful corporate entities that could override local laws and governments to ‘keep out’ the poor” (n.p.). For Fineman, the violence of the infrastructure becomes an everyday “tragedy” in which the network of state–corporation position themselves against citizens and suffering becomes paramount and perennial. Hence Fineman advocates that the whole issue of inequal infrastructure requires a thorough investigation with a view to “develop a robust language of state or collective responsibility, one that recognizes that social justice is realized through the legal creation and maintenance of just social institutions and relationships” (2019, 342). As we understand, infrastructures are central to survival and maintenance, or to use Dimock’s concept of repair and revival, of “bodies”. It would not be wrong to claim that the two are deeply interconnected, but severely punctured by the state–corporations draconian network, making life more precarious. This demands a renewed urgency to look at the treatment and functions of body in the neoliberal world. Since these precarious bodies of the “global south” has long sustained and nourished the bodies and infrastructures of the “global north”, it makes sense to examine the neoliberal politics of inclusion/exclusion, loss of agency, unwaged labour, restricted movements that continue to retain, even widen precarious forms of life in the region. The body of the “global south” continues to be the source of energy for the “global north”, with the only exception that the energy is financed and sponsored, hence precaritised, by rich corporations. They remain “bodies of extraction”, to use Mbembe’s phrase (2017, 40). Mbembe’s theorisation of extractivism is based on the precarious conditions rendered by capitalism. In this extractivism, Mbembe argues that a body becomes a site “from which great effort is made to extract maximum profit” (18), and hence it “could be discarded once it was no longer useful.” (40) In their introduction to a special issue of Interventions (2020), Rebecca Duncan and Rebekah Cumpsty offer a highly useful theorisation of the “body.” They see the millennial body treated as “mute matter, as expendable,” “transformed in the narrative into a body the resolute silence of which dramatizes the limitations to those taxonomies, on which the imperial programme as a system of exploitation and strategic exposures is founded” (2020, 590). Apparently, the millennial body can be seen as a metaphor for the eagle liver, which keeps feeding on its liver, and bears

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continuous pain, with no signs of relief. Duncan and Cumpsty advance Elleke Boehmer’s idea of body that bears contradictory signs. On the one hand, the sacrosanctity of the body attains greater significance through “literalisation” (2005, 135)—a strategy of deploying the body metaphorically to symbolise the “healthy” body of the nation. On the other hand, Boehmer sees the disintegration of body through a subsequent “figuration” (136), which eventuates in its fragmentation and manipulation. “Literalisation” and “figuration” thus represent the (un)making of the body and the nation. In so doing, precarity can be found in the continuum of these two processes that are directly linked to neoliberal ideology. Talking of the politics on “bodies”, Hollibaugh and Weiss raise their concern over the absence of discourse on LGBT.  They argue that “the particular struggles of queer and gender non-conforming people remain sidelined, both in scholarly work and in the LGBT and labor movements themselves” (2015, 19). Similarly, the female has long been a part of the unwaged labour and hence does not figure under the rubric of normative labour. The neoliberal moment provided them a sense of independence; however, Emily Hogg argues that “paid labour under the neoliberal regime does not necessarily provide an escape from, but often rather a new version of, precarity”, which is “accompanied by insecure and poorly paid work that is presented as empowering and a source of independence” (9). As one could see the body itself has been hijacked by vulture capitalism and other forms of agency, hence a turn to “carementality” becomes timely. I see “carementality” as the ethical framework of affective thinking, which promotes life-sustaining processes. “Carementality” promotes a pervasive culture of care and solidarity across and beyond communities. Driven not just by emotions but also by welfare actions, “carementality” demands networks of connectivity, interactions, infrastructures, and the application of social welfare measures. It attaches great significance to the rights of human beings to live a dignified life. It requires “infrastructures” and “bodies” to be driven by a principle of sahit, i.e., the wellbeing of all, not restricted to the purchasing power of any individual, but regenerative acts of nation-states. In fact, sahit also happens to lie at the very core of literature, the way in which it crowdsources voices from different corners, blurring the binaries, installing hope, and creating pathways for better humanity. By promoting and practising discourse of “carementality”, the infrastructures of humanity can be restored and strengthened. Its resilience can certainly challenge the frameworks of precarity.

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The book opens with a nuanced reading of precarity offered by Lau and Mendes. They apply the framework of precarity to an examination of life in urban India. They examine two novels from Indian writing in English, Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) and Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis (2012), to show how not just how livelihoods are precaritised, but also how entire lifeworlds become precarious. The chapter claims that the concept of precarity, translated into the literary text, provides the room to encapsulate the many precarities which impact the marginal spaces of Old Delhi and Bombay. The textual spaces of fiction usefully open up for scrutiny precarities that include the precarity of home, and the slow violence of precarity on identities, communal bonds, and societal fabric. The next chapter, by Neelam Srivastava, expands the theoretical purchase of precarity. Srivastava unpacks the way recent fiction by Mohsin Hamid and Aravind Adiga engage with question of precarity in South Asia, charting its counter-intuitive links to a fast-growing regional economy, part of a ‘rising Asia’ that registered unprecedented growth between 2007 and 2017. As fictions of precarity and globalisation, they engage deeply with changing notions of social class in South Asia, and thus offer connections with the category of “proletarian literature”, namely literature overtly by, for, or about workers, showing how they constitute a kind of popular hermeneutics for their precarious protagonists. The chapter goes on to examine the continuities and disruptions in literary narratives of inequality, peril, life uncertainty, and oppression in the region, with an eye to how the narrator–reader relationship evokes that between citizen and state. The following chapter by Dominic Davies marks an affective turn in the book. Building on an argument by the urbanist D. Asher Ghertner, Davies makes a strong case that it is increasingly the aesthetics of the city—the way that the urban landscape looks—that drives the most dramatic and often-violent restructuring of the physical environment, as well as the measuring out of who has the right to live, work, and be seen in the city. The chapter suggests a correspondence between this shift to the aesthetic and the trend to literary non-fiction in Indian city-writing in English. It offers a general discussion of the genre, before moving, in its second half, to a more specific analysis of three comparable examples: Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost & Found (2004); Rana Dasgupta’s Capital, The Eruption of Delhi (2014); and Kushanava Choudhury’s The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta (2017). Through brief readings of

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these three texts, the chapter focuses on literary non-fiction’s depiction of precarious urban dwellers to argue that the recent turn to non-fiction in Indian writing in English exposes India’s world-class aesthetic as a precarious fiction. Combining this reading with Judith Butler’s work on precarious life and recognisability in its conclusion, the chapter argues that these literary non-fictions upturn a dominant world class aesthetic to produce the urban precariat as essential—more essential, that is, than the global image—to the cities’ functioning infrastructure. Robbie Goh’s chapter reverses the gaze of precarity from the urban to the rural India. Goh shows how the urban processes capitalise on these rural social problems, exploiting the rural individuals in the name of the freedom and relative wealth that cities are supposed to offer. He examines the mysterious processes of power and privilege in the city as a recurrent thread that runs across the three novels, The White Tiger (2008), Q & A (2005), and The Story of My Assassins (2009). In so doing, the chapter sees precarity as a kind of neoliberal opiate, offering the romantic possibility of wealth and security for at least a few members of the downtrodden underclass, even as it depicts the inequality and oppression that are endemic in India. The ubiquitous nature of this theme of the precarity of the underclass reminds readers that this very prevalence is self-reinforcing: the masses of rural poor labourers migrating to the cities, the masses of cheap labour in the cities, facilitates their own exploitation at the hands of the unscrupulous wealthy and powerful. The concluding chapter in the section on “Infrastructure” further examines the ways in which the urban infrastructure produces precarious lives. In this chapter, John Hawley questions the rhetoric of the “rising India”, about the successes that are sometimes possible and about the particular kinds of losses that sometimes come in the wake of that success. Focusing in the first case on Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, on Vikas Swarup’s Slumdog Millionaire in the second and on Abha Dawesar’s Babyji in the third, the chapter presents a broad spectrum of motivations and tactics for advancing in one’s personal life, whether the focus is on monetary enrichment, caste escape, or sexual liberation—and discussing them against the backdrop of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, Rana Dasgupta’s Capital: The Eruption of Delhi, and Suparna Bhaskaran’s Made in India. The chapter goes on to analyze the challenges faced by youth that make the nurturing of their souls increasingly precarious in contemporary south Asia.

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The section on the “Body” opens with Pramod K. Nayar’s thoughtful intervention in the field of bodily vulnerability. It looks at the way Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017) thematises precarity—not just individual, but across entire communities of vulnerable subjects. Closely aligned with Butler’s now-classic formulation in Precarious Lives and Frames of War, Nayar looks at vulnerability as less a weakness than a condition in which the state has a major role to play. It shows how vulnerable subjects are embodied and embedded—in specific ecosystems that rather than protect the subjects, seem to transform their vulnerability into dependency and helplessness. That is, eroding social apparatuses are the primary cause of eroding ‘social ontologies’, thus rendering precariousness to citizens. The chapter discusses three ‘assets’ as central to the vulnerable subject’s survival: human assets (such as education and health), physical assets (the infrastructure) and social assets (networks, social welfare measures). In Leila, all these forms of assets are responsible not for the amelioration of vulnerability, but it’s very opposite: the amplification of vulnerability into defencelessness. Toral Gajarawala adds to Nayar’s theorisation of vulnerable bodies with a strong focus on the Dalit lives. For Gajarawala, precarity is embedded in the daily lives of the Dalits. The chapter records Yashica Dutt’s memoir in a history of both “passing” and “coming out,” touching on seminal Dalit texts like Baburao Bagul’s When I Hid my Caste (2017) and Ambedkar’s own autobiographical writings, as well as the African-American experience to which Dutt often refers. It also mentions the contemporary work of two visual artists who address “passing” and the caste question in recent exhibitions: Rajyshri Goody (“Eat with Great Delight”, Ishara Art Gallery, 2019) and Shilpa Gupta (“Altered Inheritances”, Ishara Art Gallery, 2019). In doing so, the chapter suggests that the psychic elements of a casteised life, what the author refers to as ‘drag’, offers a more complex reading of passing. Both passing and coming out should be considered in relation to a philosophical and psychic precarity, which challenges basic notions of self and self-determination. Alberto Fernandez’s chapter extends the discourse on bodily vulnerability by examining Roy’s The Mistry of Utmost Happiness (2017). The chapter highlights the failure of the political commitments to socio-­ economic life in India. It is argued that the transgeneric form of novel blazes a new trail in the Indian English novel, creating overlaps between genres aimed at pushing against the constraints of mainstream narrative conventions. The chapter proposes that the concept of transversality allows

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us to appreciate Roy’s variegated yet committed political vision, which crosses barriers of faith, gender identity formation, and even treading into nationally contested spaces, in order to critique the precarity of trans, Muslim, and Kashmiri citizens in contemporary India. It is finally argued that Roy’s new novel urges her readers to think across and beyond their own epistemic locations, in emulation of Roy’s own exploration of those Indian subjects unlike herself. It is suggested, in conclusion, that this transversal depiction of people who are similar in some ways yet different in others, who are akin to each other yet distinctive in their experiences of precarity, perfectly matches the transgeneric ambitions of the novel, which experimentally merges genres in order to find new places from which to speak about Indian society. Claire Chambers sees precarity as a condition of social vulnerability and uses this model to analyse Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways (2019) and show how the characters in this novel are rendered precarious by the digital world. It goes on to explore the novel’s depiction of the glamour of globalised radicalism online, which eventually contributes to its three precarious runaway protagonists—Monty, Layla, and Sunny—joining a fictionalised ISIS called the Ummah Movement. The Runaways can very much be seen as a part of the discourse on the “burnout syndrome” that I have discussed earlier in this introduction. The novel forcefully captures the everyday digital life through TomTom apps, iMessage, WhatsApp’s ticks turning from grey to blue, FaceTime, taxi apps such as Uber and Careem, and Huawei keyboards, and ultimately suggests that too much investment in this ‘universe built on trading information’ (43) is damaging for the individual psyche. The issue of migration and the ensuing precarity gets rehearsed, albeit in a different way, in the next chapter by Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp. She argues that economic migration and the precarious lives of others are at the heart of Neel Mukherjee’s novel, A State of Freedom (2017). By foregrounding the ways in which such lives are subjected to representational processes, the novel addresses the pitfalls of “cross-class representation”, and thus opens up a site of contestation between authorial appropriation and a non-coercive narrative forum to explore the condition of precarity. The chapter first focuses on mode and perspective and deal with the ways in which Mukherjee meets the aesthetic challenge of representing precarious lives, namely by casting his novel in five stories which are linked by recurrent characters and situations, and secondly, by developing narrative perspective in a skillfully graded progression from the

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visitor’s outsider perspective in the first story to the free indirect discourse of the construction worker in the last story. It goes on to highlight the negotiation of Otherness and epistemic authority, focusing on how Mukherjee meets the ethical challenge of representing precarious lives. Feroza Jussawalla examines the precarious conditions in Yasmine Gooneratne’s novel Sweet and Simple Kind (2006), which also tells the story of Sri Lankan independence. Looking back on that period from the early 1950s to the 1970s, traces the development of neo-liberalism as the country moves away from its radical Marxist roots, both towards a neo-­ liberalism and a nationalism and the embracing of indigenous identity, so that the once-westernised, embrace nationalistic, local ways of being. But there is a hypocrisy underlying this due to the neo-liberal pursuit of wealth. Sri Lanka’s journey of precarity is played out against the bildungsroman of two young protagonists. There is also the language and cultural politics between the Tamils and the Sinhalese, which leaves a string of “grievable” bodies as the “frames of war,” highlighting the precarity of the “precariat.” The embeddedness of precarity in the neo-liberal framework gets examined in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Adnan Mahmutovic. The chapter argues that Hamid’s novelistic project has followed an implied mandate of the new cosmopolitan novel to chart global prejudice and the post-9/11 ethos. Despite the intellectual orientation towards the globe, Hamid’s gaze towards South Asia shows an implied paradox in the notion of migration understood both as a desirable freedom and a dislocation. The ideology of the free movement of goods and capital, sold as individual and communal freedom, effectively hides the precariousness that it causes. It makes global subjects see precarity as an inability to follow the capital. Following Judith Butler’s founding discourse, Mahmutovic argues that Hamid allegorises, quite absurdly, a precariat that has fallen for the illusion that it has to be saved from itself, a precariat that stages its own forgetting, and, in some sense, wonders why it hates itself. The concluding chapter, by Kaiser Haq, situates the precarious gaze in contemporary Bangladeshi life. He approaches a diverse range of recent Bangladeshi novels, either originally in English or in English translation, through the lens of precarity, both ‘cosmic’ and ‘official’. The chapter highlights how the evolution of Bangladesh has been attended by a series of violent episodes arising out of varied political aetiologies. The War of Independence of 1971 has been the most cataclysmic event and its fictional treatment has been instrumental in forging a sense of national

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identity. Haq’s analysis of a number of Bangladeshi novels in his chapter demonstrates how the Bangladeshi writers’ imagination has grappled with the disturbing theme of precarity.

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Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Steger, Manfred B., and Ravi K. Roy. 2010. Neoliberalism: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tabassum, Azra, et al. 2009. Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis. Trans. Sweta Sarda. New Delhi: Penguin. Terranova, Tiziana. 2004. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press. Thapa, Rabi. 2017. A candid conversation with Rabi Thapa. Interview by Amish Raj Mulmi. Scroll.in September 16. https://scroll.in/ article/850752/a-­new-­literary-­culture-­does-­not-­permeate-­in-­nepal-­unless-­it-­ comes-­bundled-­with-­flashing-­lights. Tickell, Alex. 2016. South Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Trott, Ben. 2013. From the Precariat to the Multitude. Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought. 3 (3–4): 406–425. Walonen, Michael K. 2019. Debunking the Myth of the Entrepreneur Through Narrative in the Contemporary South Asian Novel. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. 2 (2): 246–260. Wansbrough, Aleks. 2020. Capitalism and the Enchanted Screen. London: Bloomsbury. Williams, Raymond. 1971. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. London: Chatto & Windus. Wilson, Janet, Om Prakash Dwivedi, and Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández. 2020. Planetary Precarity and the Pandemic. Journal of Postcolonial Writing. 56 (4): 439–446. Žižek, Slavoj. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel And The Shadow Of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso.

PART I

Precarious Infrastructure

Precarity as a Mode of Enquiry Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes

Introduction: Considering Diverse Precarities Precarity has come back to prominence as a concept during this decade partly in response to changing conditions on the ground related to labour insecurities and the weakening of civil and political rights but also promoted by Guy Standing’s (in)famous 2011 book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Standing refers to the precariat as “globalisation’s child”, implying that precarity is an inevitable part of the fallout from modernity and global economic processes. Tracing the transformation from a “proletariat” to a “precariat”, Loïc Wacquant discusses a condition common to the United States and European Union at the turn of the twenty-first century wherein “the absence of a common idiom around and by which to unify themselves accentuates the objective fragmentation of today’s urban poor” (2007, 72). In turn, Standing warns that the precariat is no

L. Lau (*) School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, Staffordshire, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. C. Mendes School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_2

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longer an underclass but growing into a mass class, and a class in the making, expanding the experience and concept of precarity. Until Standing’s expansion of the term, precarity was mainly an economic concept about labour, understood as “a way of expressing livelihood insecurities associated with labour (working) conditions, including the implications of diminishing protections” (Suliman and Weber 2018, 1). Relatedly, Marcel Paret and Shannon Gleeson explain that precarious or insecure work treats workers as commodities, overlooking their human need for social protection, and is a product of neoliberalism or market-­ driven globalization (2016, 279). This understanding of precarity denotes, as Samid Suliman and Heloise Weber point out, not only the historical context of “‘orderly’ labour relations that were typified by the post-war, Fordist social contract” in which it arose, but a distinctive pattern of exploitation emerging from a specific condition of “spatial and temporal restructuring of the relationship between production, politics, and life” (2018, 4). Such a historically distinctive pattern of exploitation is associated with neoliberalization or neoliberal globalization, “wherein political and economic institutions and relations have been restructured in such a way as to maximize the geographical and social reach of capital, and facilitate processes of increasingly flexible accumulation” (ibid). Hannah Lewis et al. note that the erosion of the working classes also underpins “the rise of insecure, flexible and nonstandard employment relations over the past 30 years in the Global North” (2015, 584). This has resulted in post-­1970s European models of flexisecurity in workplaces (a strategy or social commitment for simultaneously maintaining security for the workforce and a flexible workforce, premised by a pro-active labour market, intended to protect the worker rather than the job) and flexploitation (an exploitation of the intended flexisecurity which creates worse labour conditions for the workforce), alongside the technologization and transnationalization of labour that result in “the formation of translocal communities and identities or subjectivities” (Sassen 2005, 463). The definition of precarity relating to the insecurity of labour and livelihoods is historically circumscribed to the post-1970s period in European contexts, where there was a crisis of labour resulting from the erosion of the Fordist social contract, compromising orderly labour relations. Relevantly, Standing’s book raised the profile of the concept of precarity by building on its original usage, based on the increasing insecurity of labour conditions in France and Europe, but extending it beyond European contexts. In other words, precarity no longer denotes only a

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labour crisis resulting from capitalistic practices characteristic of post-war Fordism. So, although “precarity” was coined to define an economic phenomenon related to labour conditions in the global North, there is increasing recognition of a need to appreciate the overspill of this precarity into other precarities, geographically and otherwise. Although Standing’s publication focused on workers in the mid-­ twentieth century who lacked the basic securities of residence, livelihood, societal acceptance, representation and opportunities for upward mobility, Paret and Gleeson (2016) point out that critics of precarity suggest a much longer, intersectional trajectory, particularly for women and people of colour who have long been excluded from labour security and other securities. Suliman and Weber (2018) also highlight some other objections to Standing’s framing of “the precariat class”: that labour insecurity has been seen in global migrant workers from at least the 1980s; and that large segments of the under or unemployed outside Europe and the West work in the so-called informal sector, which Standing does not accept as part of the precariat. Suliman and Weber counter Standing’s argument that the precariat are systematically losing the rights of citizens; they contend that the welfare state is part of the capitalist state, seeing welfare provisions as “a political commitment of embedded liberalism” (2018, 7). Ronaldo Munck (2013) is also critical of Standing’s publication, taking issue with his notion of a new and “dangerous” precariat or class. In Standing’s words, A group that sees no future of security or identity will feel fear and frustration that could lead to it lashing out at identifiable or imagined causes of its lot. And detachment from the mainstream of economic affluence and progress is conducive to intolerance. (…) This is why the precariat is the dangerous class and why a “politics of paradise” is needed that responds to its fears, insecurities and aspirations. (2011, 25)1

Munck dismisses Standing’s arguments scathingly, drawing attention to the fact that precarity has for too long been a commonplace, widespread condition of work and life in the global South and for many economic migrants to the global North: “It is a term that perhaps captures some of the feelings among Northern academics, themselves subject to casualisation and the end of job security. But is the term novel or even relevant, for the millions of workers and urban poor in the global South for whom precariousness has always been a seemingly natural condition?” (2013,

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747). Munck’s critique is along at least two fronts: firstly, that the discussion of precarity and the literature about the precariat are almost totally Northern-centric in both their theoretical framing and empirical reference points, eclipsing the experiences and struggling of the global South where precarity has long existed, albeit in different forms, for different reasons, and to a considerably larger extent beyond that of insecure labour markets. Second, the whole notion of a “dangerous class” is an insidious one; the “dangerous class” is not novel, Munck points out, being part of a racist construction long applied to the “Other” in the global South (2013, 759). Indeed, in Munck’s words, this categorization has arisen due to “[t]he degradation of the living conditions for those who were no longer peasants and not yet urban workers [which] inspired fear and revulsion among the classes which benefited from their exploitation” (2013, 759). Munck (2013) points out many other forms of precarity suffered by the global South, although different terms were used, such as the “marginality” of vast numbers of internal unemployed migrants in Latin America in the 1960s; “informality” in Africa, describing workers in the 1970s who fell outside the formal capitalist system; and the concept of “social exclusion” in Europe in the 1980s. As such, Munck indicts the term “precariat” as doing the South a disservice by acting “as a colonising concept (…) in classic Eurocentric mode, although its proponents are blithely unaware of these implications” (2013, 751). Suliman and Weber note that precarious labour has been the experience of the majority of the world, and dominant debates on precarity, such as Standing’s, are limited by Eurocentrism, and hence to a very particularized conception of development “that projects quite specific experiences as universal in a way that actually abstracts from the politics of global development” (2018, 11; emphasis added). Using Saskia Sassen’s words, “What is usually referred to as economic development has long depended on extracting goods from one part of the world and shipping them to another” (2014, 12). The elephant in the room—as argued by Munck, Suliman and Weber, and other critics of recent conceptualizations of precarity—is the failure to acknowledge that “the fulfilment of the implied universal entitlements in the European context was by no small part facilitated by the colonial and international division of labour” (Suliman and Weber 2018, 3). Standing’s publication has been criticized for its development concepts being too Northern-centric (Munck 2013) and Eurocentric (Suliman and Weber 2018), failing to consider that precarity has long been a condition for the

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global South. While Western states enjoyed social democracy, the inheritance of postcolonial states (given their colonial division of labour) meant that precarious lives and livelihoods were the norm for many in the global South. Suliman and Weber stress that their precarity “cannot be delinked from colonialism and its legacies” (ibid), and identify the precaritization of the global South as a key contributing factor that enabled welfare provisions in Western states. Other scholars also concur that “precarity is a colonizing and enslaving project and is constitutive of the contemporary moment of capitalism” (Agathangelou 2018, 2). Suliman and Weber (2018) take issue with Standing’s leaving the Southern precariat out of development discourse in particular—far from the precariat being left out of development, they are in fact “integral to the constitution of development itself” (2018, 10), just as insecure labour conditions are also constitutive of this kind of neoliberal development. As Ann Agathangelou phrases it, precarity is “an integral and existentially determinate phenomenon of capitalism” (2018, 1). However, there are arguments against precarity being a capitalism-­ driven condition or an effect of neoliberalization. Nancy Ettlinger, for example, argues that precarity “is located in the microspaces of everyday life and is an enduring feature of the human condition. It is not limited to a specific context in which precarity is imposed by global events or macrostructures” (2007, 320). Susan Banki focuses the definition of precarity not so much on the exploitative element of this condition but the insecurity resulting from vulnerability to this exploitation. This vulnerability seemingly cannot be avoided and is long term, sustained or arbitrary. As Banki observes, “Precarity suggests the potential for exploitation and abuse, but not its certain presence” (2013, 450). Banki explains that precarious work does not imply having any work or even being unemployed often, but the perpetual, looming threat of unemployment; likewise, precarious residency does not imply imminent deportation but its genuine possibility and thus looming threat. Banki’s work is critical in highlighting that the very threat of precarity, its looming or impending menace, precaritizes. Precarity does not mean the inevitable presence of exploitation and vulnerability, and does not require the fact or reality before precarity is experienced or created. Critically, Ettlinger and Banki underscore that the condition of precarity can exacerbate other precarities, including those related to the threat of the dismantling of support networks. At this point, it is helpful to turn to Louise Waite, who discusses the concepts of risk and vulnerability to “explore how they tessellate with the

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concept of precarity” (2009, 419). Waite contrasts precarity with concepts of risk, insecurity, uncertainty and vulnerability, finding that precarity has the analytical advantage because “it more explicitly incorporates the political and institutional context in which the production of precarity occurs rather than focusing solely on individualised experiences of precarity” (2009, 421). Waite cites Bridget Anderson’s 2007 working paper, which flags that focusing on the experiences of a vulnerable worker prioritizes the individual rather than the structural context in which relations are forged. Waite therefore suggests that, when sketching a critical geography of precarity, the focus should be turned to “exploring blame for the production of precarity” (2009, 421). Her championing of the concept of precarity is partly because precarity, more so than vulnerability, looks at contexts and legacies, laying out the bigger picture into which the individual’s risks are heightened and insecurities increased. In her words, “The potential of the term precarity over risk and vulnerability is thus in terms of what can be gained politically by adopting the term” (2009, 421). Waite’s championing of the concept of precarity as different from vulnerability highlights the power of refocusing: in a kaleidoscopic change, precarity looks at the contexts of production rather than putting the individual’s struggles under the microscope. This refocusing has been picked up by other scholars, such as Lewis et al.’s 2015 article studying the condition of hyper-precarity for migrant labourers who are exploited into carceral cosmopolitanism and lack of actual or acceptable alternatives in unfree labour, which asks the question of whether we should therefore focus on precarious work or precarious lives. Like Waite, Lewis et  al. and others, Marcel Paret and Shannon Gleeson also question the value of precarity as an analytical concept. They argue that the central significance of precarity is how it connects micro and macro experiences, “situating experiences of insecurity and vulnerability within historically and geographically specific contexts” (2016, 280). Waite points out that precarity could create possible rallying points for resistance, citing Foti (2005) that disparate neoliberal workers may turn to precarity to mobilize and envision alternatives to capitalist exploitation. Likewise, Paret and Gleeson note that the concept of precarity has “come to be associated with emerging movements seeking alternative politics to neoliberalism” (2016, 279). However, these authors anticipate a problem with this, arguing that “there is a possibility that struggles ‘from below’ will, in the end, lead to a shoring up of existing power relations” (2016, 288). This is supported by Lauren Berlant’s finding that, at its root,

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precarity is a condition of dependency (2011), which suggests the precariat are locked into a system which they are powerless to break out of, even if they can resist or protest it. Mara Ferreri and Gloria Dawson even talk of the process of habituating oneself to precarity, which they say is “essential to the logic of self-­ precarization” (2018, 434).2 However, even for those who “choose” to self-precaritize, Ferreri and Dawson note that stress and anxiety are significant barriers to living. Naomi Klein partially explains possible reasons for this embracing of precarity or self-precaritizing: because “generations who had grown up under neoliberalism struggle to picture something, anything, other than what they had always known” (2017, 119). Klein posits it as a failure of the imaginative capacity of the majority to envision a world very radically different from the present because most of us “find ourselves fully within capitalism’s matrix—so while we can demand slight improvements to our current conditions, imagining something else entirely is distinctly more difficult” (2017, 120). Standing was likewise pessimistic about the success or even possibility of the precariat pushing for social change, given that the precariat is warring with itself: an increasingly degraded working class scapegoating migrants for declining conditions (Paret and Geeson 2016). However, if the middle classes are increasingly becoming precaritized, is it more likely that they will resist the imposition of precarity given that, for them, it is a newly-arrived-at condition and one which they may not be ready to endure? In considering the more subversive uses or applications of precarity or the potential of the precariat (whether as a new social class or not; whether as a dangerous class or otherwise), Banki reminds us that the literature makes frequent reference to the fact that “precarity of one kind may aggravate other precarities” (2013, 451). Merjin Oudenampsen and Gavin Sullivan (2004) flag two types of precarity: existential precarity such as in times of war, military conflict or imprisonment; and precarity as “the condition of being unable to predict one’s fate or having some degree of predictability on which to build social relations and feelings of affection”. Both definitions of precarity are helpful to this chapter’s discussion of Arundhati Roy’s and Jeet Thayil’s literary depictions of the margins of urban India (Old Delhi and Bombay, respectively), where the Othered experience both existential and unpredictable precarities. The value of case-studying these two novels is, as Cressida Jervis Read notes, that, “By considering the narration of place as a spatial practice, the more subtle and contradictory processes of dwelling in the city are opened

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up for consideration, how people create spaces to live in and speak from in the maelstrom of city life” (2012, 87). The word “maelstrom” is apt, given the depiction of Old Delhi and Bombay by Roy and Thayil, enmeshed by menace, crime and riots, not to mention dire poverty. Studying resettlements which happened in the slum clearance drive during India’s state of Emergency (1975 and 1977), Jervis Read also utilized narratives as recalled by residents, thus justifying her methodology: “By engaging with both the content of the stories narrated, but also their social and spatial dimensions, narration can be seen as a social act and a spatial practice, as residents seek to emplot, incorporate and exclude others in difficult social relations” (2012, 87). Jervis Read highlights that, although narratives are not necessarily coherent, residents use narratives as strategies of emplacement or re-emplacements, emplotting themselves as a method of mediating between spaces and experiences of spaces, inserting themselves into the broader framings of the circulating discourses. She explains that “agency is redistributed” by recounting resettlements and explaining how actions were impelled by both the desire for opportunism and threats of violence. Likewise, the fictional representations of precarity in these two novels emplot a navigation of dangerous, precarious spaces, precaritizing the lives which occupy these spaces. Narratives act as re-­ presented remembrances which “add to, contradict, position and reposition themselves in stories, entwining people present and absent into the space and the act of telling” (2012, 89). The following section references two novels set in India that look at what Ettlinger (2007) called the “everydayness of precarity”, where strategies are developed to eke out certainties amidst uncertainty and insecurity. It appears to be the case that precarity is both deliberately generated and naturally occurring, and that the condition of precariousness is one that humans have to endure or, at the very least, engage with. The following section discusses these novels’ handling of societally induced precarities and how their unconventional characters confront them. An intersectional reading of these novels should be favoured, considering how the experience of subalternity in contemporary India is, as Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy point out, characterized by the intersection of socioeconomic precarity “with structures of power based in caste, gender, and sexuality to create patterns of exclusion, vulnerability, stigma, and disenfranchisement” (2015, 2). Intersectionality is understood as an analytic tool and a complex of social practices that create interdependent and overlapping systems of discrimination, in this case related to identity construction in

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the context of precarious global economies. bell hooks writes, “As far back as slavery, white people established a social hierarchy based on race and sex that ranked white men first, white women second though sometimes equal to black men, who are ranked third, and black women last” (1990, 52–53); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues, “Clearly, if you are poor, black and female you get it in three ways” (1988, 294).

Precarity, Mobilization and Politicization in Urban India: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis Arundhati Roy’s writings—in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and elsewhere, in her earlier novel The God of Small Things and prolific non-fiction collected in My Seditious Heart (2019)—contain a vigorous indictment of aggressive capitalism in India, which leads to the marginalization, exploitation and victimization of minority groups. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has been celebrated as an “artistic cry against injustice” and “a polyphonic protest” of “kaleidoscopic range” (Felicelli 2017), and lauded for its consideration of “the dispossessed, the marginalised, and the oppressed” (Navaratnam 2017). However, other reviewers, predominantly Indian reviewers, indignantly revile this novel on the grounds of what they observe as political inaccuracies and overblown polemics. Jagdish Batra, for example, accuses Roy of being influenced by terrorist camps and having a dystopic worldview, and only showing “the ugly and the rotten side of the body politic” (2017, 431). Batra condemns Roy’s novel because it “comes out of a political novel rather than a pure artistic attempt” (2017, 435)—although it remains unclear what for him may constitute a “pure artistic attempt”. Batra will not be the only reviewer who damns the novel for conflating politics with “inaccurate” artistic depictions, which are perceived as amounting to deceptions and misrepresentations. Disliking Roy’s politics, her detractors will be determined to dislike her fiction. The social diagnosis in contemporary social-realist fiction and its exposure of the capillaries of power by authors such as Roy denounce how the idea of India Shining (a political slogan devised to celebrate the Indian economic boom both internally and externally) fails to represent the entrenched poverty and widening social inequalities in urban India, as well as the deepening agrarian crisis in rural India.

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With her usual dare and panache, Roy’s most recent novel represents precarity with a difference—as creative agency rather than vulnerability, risk or insecurity. In a multitude of stories, Roy holds perpetrators and bullies (including systems and institutions) to account while demonstrating the creativity and courage undergirding her precariat’s insistence on their agencies. For example, the ways the character of the Muslim hijra Anjum, born with a “small, unformed, but undoubtedly girl-part” (2017, 17), deals with societally induced precarities (made up of various patterns of stigma, vulnerability and exclusion) through self-precaritization speak to the formation of creative interstices within the precariousness of lifeworlds. As Waite observes, precarity “conjures life worlds that are inflected with uncertainty and instability” (2009, 416). So widespread are lifeworlds infused with precarity at multiple and intersecting levels that some argue precarity is a human condition and not necessarily to be regarded as a social ill to be cured. For example, Ettlinger calls precarity “an enduring feature of the human condition”, given humans’ essentialist urge to construct illusions of certainty when confronted with uncertainty and vulnerability, which she explains is not limited to any specific context but simply a condition “imposed by global events or macrostructures” (2007, 320). Simon During takes a similar slant on the natural and inevitable presence of precarity in human experience. As he contends, “uneasiness and instability are primary to human existence”, and he takes this a step further to argue that capitalism as a mode of production generates precarity because capitalism “invests in insecurity” (2015, 22). Roy’s character of Anjum chooses as her home the liminal space of the graveyard after living for many years at the Khwabgah in Old Delhi. This is a renunciation of home that results from a politics of care, becoming instead the outcome of a condition of precarity. During notes that precarity “applies to those with unstable, or no, access to the institutions and communities best able to provide legitimacy, recognition and solidarity” (2015, 20). As an older generation hijra, Anjum had felt increasingly relegated from the transgender community’s definition in its desire to integrate into global queer movements working to overcome dimorphisms and the pathologization of medical discourses. She decided to move on— over time, Anjum’s shack at the graveyard is upgraded to a funeral parlour: “Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services” (2017, 79)—but in her newly adopted home, she is still confronted with the difference the others see in her:

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When she first moved in, she endured months of casual cruelty like a tree would—without flinching. She didn’t turn to see which small boy had thrown a stone at her, didn’t crane her neck to read the insults scratched into her bark. When people called her names—clown without a circus, queen without a palace—she let the hurt blow through her branches like a breeze and used the music of her rustling leaves as balm to ease the pain. (2017, 3)

In this respect, Banki observes that “social precarity does not describe an absence of supportive networks, but the potential for their dismantling”; as she warns, “precarity of one kind may aggravate other precarities” (2013, 451). This relates to Ettlinger’s (2007) geographical-inflected approach to precarity, which locates it in the microspaces of everyday life, thus broadening the concept from the economic sphere, from issues related to labour markets and economic security to other contexts of uncertainty and unpredictability such as the homes we create for ourselves. In this respect, Muñoz (2018) builds on Ettlinger’s work, studying the effects of chronic precarity in those everyday microspaces, citing the work of Javier Auyero (2012), which deems precarity, with reference to the case of Argentina, to be a state-produced means of keeping the urban poor submissive and “in their place”. Urban spaces mapped in creative practice can “explore and negotiate, and at times disrupt and reconstruct” (Boehmer and Davies 2015, 395). On the literary representation of India and Bombay in novel form, Jeet Thayil writes, concerning his novel Narcopolis (2012): “I’ve always been suspicious of the novel that paints India in soft focus, a place of loved children and loving elders, of monsoons and mangoes and spices. To equal Bombay as a subject you would have to go much further than the merely nostalgic will allow. The grotesque may be a more accurate means of carrying out such an enterprise” (Ratnam 2012). Narcopolis represents a world that no longer exists. By constructing this particular urban imaginary of Bombay in the 1970s, Thayil, in his own words, “wanted to honour the people I knew in the opium dens, the marginalised, the addicted and deranged, people who are routinely called the lowest of the low; and I wanted to make some record of a world that no longer exists, except within the pages of a book” (Ratnam 2012). Like many stories of poverty and slum-ridden India (and the global South), which are voraciously consumed by Western readerships, precarity may be the flavour of the moment amongst those who have positions of

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(relative) security, the kind of story which enables the consumer to feel smug, relieved, safely distanced from the unenviably precarious Other. In this respect, the interpretive communities fuelled by the great expectations surrounding a novel published twenty years after her Booker prize-­winning debut have created—and will continue to create—a particular reading framework. Roy’s character of Anjum is herself slightly taken aback by the horrified fascination her story engenders: ‘Others have horrible stories, the kind you people like to write about,’ she would say. ‘Why not talk to them?’ But of course newspapers didn’t work that way. She was the chosen one. It had to be her, even if her story was slightly altered to suit readers’ appetites and expectations. (2017, 26)

In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, another defiance of dominant norms and frames is Roy’s creation of the character of the indomitable Tilo, an upper-caste woman who dares to love a Kashmiri rebel despite all the odds stacked against him and their relationship. Not only do the precarities experienced in these novels affect the characters’ psyches, life choices and lifestyles, but such precarities are potentially isolating, affecting the ability to build community relations. Ettlinger’s (2007) discussion of the unpredictability of terror, for instance, is valuable in this context given the battleground that is some of the marginalized sites of urban India, where drug lords, gangs, thugs and other marginal groups predominate, and where/when, as Julia Cooper suggests, there is a possibility “that the other will adamantly resist his essential precariousness” (2016, 7). Paret and Gleeson draw on Ettlinger’s findings to discuss how precarity is “synonymous with uncertainty and unpredictability”, and particularly how the “unpredictability of terror” can have manifold manifestations, including “domestic and gang violence; the authoritarianism of formal and informal workplaces; various forms of surveillance; [and] ecological disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis” (2016, 280). In the face of imposed precarities in societies structured by gendered and racial domination, the characters in Roy’s and Thayil’s novels use their precarity for creative purposes. It is important to note that these are novels by authors who consider themselves as outsiders, at the margins of their mainstream societies/communities, and who not only represent othering and Others in twenty-first-century India but who celebrate the very

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otherness of the Othered while castigating the process of othering and those responsible for this process of representational and systemic inequality.

Conclusion Departing from a Northern or Eurocentric concept of precarity, this chapter offered a review of precarity as a mode of enquiry, examining how the concept has developed and metamorphosed, broadening in scope and application, and noting its political potential. The concept of precarity has always inherently contained the power of political mobilization. Another advantage that accrues to a refocused concept of precarity is its association with creativity. We looked at two works of Indian fiction written in English—The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Narcopolis—illustrative of precarity’s elements of mobilization and politicization in urban India. The textual spaces of fiction usefully open up precarities for scrutiny, including the precarity of home and the slow violence of precarity on identities, communal bonds and societal fabric. In fact, in considering the specific situation of Indian precarity, homing in on the stark realities of the precarious lives of a subcontinent wherein millions experience and negotiate precarity daily, we illustrated how the concept of precarity needs to also take on some other valuable extensions, beyond the economic and labour-­ related to the political. This section focused on more than just what types of precarities are represented, and with what consequences. Here, we also drew lessons from the empirical work of other scholars utilizing precarity theory, such as Solange Muñoz (2018), who looks at the microspaces of daily life by studying squatters awaiting eviction, focusing on the uneven impact on women. As Muñoz observes, “Urban precarity and home-making must be understood as collective experiences that produce cultural meanings and realities for a community of people” (2018, 422). The depictions of the Othered in Indian fiction in English, particularly those in poverty, frame precisely this struggle to find meaning and purpose because precarity produces cultural meanings that give rise to either despair or the outright rejection of societal norms and practices, and mainstream spaces, as a consequence.

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Notes 1. More recently, Standing’s (2017) call for a “politics of paradise” (that might be read as a sustainable globalism) defends the solution of a universal basic income to counteract the nefarious impact of the rise of the “dangerous” precariat. 2. Ferreri and Dawson, citing the work of Isabell Lorey (2015), underline the distinguishing features between “precariousness”, “precarity” and “precarization”: “precariousness is a shared condition of relationality, precarity is defined as a ‘category of order, a classifying designation of the distribution of precariousness in hierarchies of inequality,’ and precarization refers to ‘the governing of subjects through insecurity and destabilization and its accompanying subject formations’” (2018, 428).

References Agathangelou, Ann M. 2018. What Suicide and Greece Tell Us About Precarity and Capitalism. Globalizations 16 (5): 1–18. Anderson, Bridget. 2007. Battles in Time: The Relation Between Global and Labour Mobilities. University of Oxford, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Working Paper No. 55. Auyero, Javier. 2012. Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Banki, Susan. 2013. Precarity of Place: A Complement to the Growing Precariat Literature. Global discourse 3 (3–4): 450–463. Batra, Jagdish. 2017. Politico-Literary Response to Terrorism: A Study of Arundhary [sic] Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Humanities and Social Sciences Review 7 (2): 429–438. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boehmer, Elleke, and Dominic Davies. 2015. Literature, Planning and Infrastructure: Investigating the Southern city Through Postcolonial Texts. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51 (4): 395–409. Cooper, Julia. 2016. Common Bodies. The Ethics of Precarity Politics. Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 21 (2): 3–15. During, Simon. 2015. Choosing Precarity. South Asia: Journal of South Asian studies 38 (1): 19–38. Ettlinger, Nancy. 2007. Precarity Unbound. Alternatives 32: 319–340. Felicelli, Anita. 2017. Outside Language and Power: The Mastery of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Los Angeles Review of Books, June 21. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/outside-­l anguage-­a nd-­p ower-­t he-­ mastery-­of-­arundhati-­roys-­the-­ministry-­of-­utmost-­happiness. Accessed 15 May 2018.

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Ferreri, Mara, and Gloria Dawson. 2018. Self-Precarization and the Spatial Imaginaries of Property Guardianship. Cultural Geographies 25 (3): 425–440. Foti, Alex. 2005. Mayday! Euro Flex Workers, Time to Get a Move On! European Institute for Progressive Politics. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0704/foti/en/ print. Accessed 15 May 2018. hooks, Bell. 1990. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. London: Pluto Press. Jervis Read, Cressida. 2012. A Place in the City: Narratives of “Emplacement” in a Delhi Resettlement Neighbourhood. Ethnography 13 (1): 87–101. Klein, Naomi. 2017. No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Lewis, Hannah, Peter Dwyer, Stuart Hodkinson, and Louise Waite. 2015. Hyper-­ Precarious Lives: Migrants, Work and Forced Labour in the Global North. Progress in Human Geography 39 (5): 580–600. Lorey, Isabell. 2015. State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London: Verso. Munck, Ronaldo. 2013. The Precariat: A View from the South. Third World Quarterly 3 (5): 747–762. Muñoz, Solange. 2018. Precarious city: Home-Making and Eviction in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Cultural Geographies 25 (3): 411–424. Navaratnam, Subashini. 2017. Review: The ministry of utmost happiness. Star 2, June 23. http://www.star2.com/culture/books/book-reviews/2017/06/23/ book-­review-­ministry-­utmost-­happiness. Accessed 15 May 2018. Nilsen, Alf Gunvald, and Srila Roy, eds. 2015. New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Oudenampsen, Merjin, and Gavin Sullivan. 2004. Precarity and N/European Identity: An Interview with Alex Foti (Chainworkers). Mute, October 6. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/precarity-­a nd-­n european-­ identity-­interview-­alex-­foti-­chainworkers. Accessed 19 Oct 2018. Paret, Marcel, and Shannon Gleeson. 2016. Precarity and Agency Through a Migration Lens. Citizenship Studies 20 (3–4): 277–294. Ratnam, Dhamini. 2012. The History of Bombay No One Told You. Mid-Day, January 15. http://www.mid-­day.com/lifestyle/2012/jan/150112-­The-­ history-­of-­Mumbai-­no-­one-­told-­you.htm. Accessed 15 May 2018. Roy, Arundhati. 1997. The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo-Harper Collins. ———. 2017. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. London: Penguin Random House. ———. 2019. My Seditious Heart. London: Hamish Hamilton. Sassen, Saskia. 2005. The City: Its Return as a Lens for Social Theory. In The Sage Handbook of Sociology, ed. Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek, and Bryan Turner, 457–470. London: Sage.

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———. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. London: Macmillan. Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2017. Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen. London: Pelican/Penguin. Suliman, Samid, and Heloise Weber. 2018. Global Development and Precarity: A Critical Political Analysis. Globalizations 16 (4): 1–16. Wacquant, Loïc. 2007. Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality. Thesis Eleven 91 (1): 66–77. Waite, Louise. 2009. A Place and Space for a Critical Geography of Precarity? Geography Compass 3 (1): 412–433.

Being Filthy Poor in Rising Asia: Precarity, Globalization and the Evolution of South Asian Literature in English Neelam Srivastava

This chapter considers the new South Asian novels of the twenty-first century as autobiographical fictions of precarity. They present themselves on the world literary market as a form of writing that has globalizing aspirations. When compared to the Indian English novel of the 1980s and 1990s, influential literary narratives of inequality, peril, life uncertainty* and oppression in India have changed almost beyond recognition and have proliferated into a variety of forms that relate the rapidly transforming socio-economic conditions in the subcontinent. Precarity fictions of the kind we find in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) and Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013b) challenge the canonical forms of the Indian postcolonial novel as it came to prominence in the late twentieth century, and offer an intriguing intertextuality with popular genres such as the self-help book and print culture formats that

N. Srivastava (*) Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_3

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can be more commonly found in the secondhand bookstalls of South Asian urban markets than in university libraries. Precarity, as distinguished by Judith Butler from “precariousness”, which is shared across humanity, is a “politically induced condition” that produces subjects whose grievability is directly linked to an unequal level of wealth and an unequal exposure to risk of violence (Butler 2010, 28). For Butler, precarity and precariousness are overlapping conditions, yet they are often in conflict with each other. Indeed, precariousness “leads not to reciprocal recognition, but to a specific exploitation of targeted populations, of lives that are not quite lives, cast as ‘destructible’ and ‘ungrievable’” (Butler 2010, 31). In other words, human precariousness is often turned into politically induced precarity by acts of war or a hostile state. “Consequently, when such lives are lost they are not grievable, since, in the twisted logic that rationalizes their death, the loss of such populations is deemed necessary to protect the lives of the ‘living’” (31). In a bid to overcome identity politics, Butler retrieves once again the possibility of thinking a universal subject through cross-cultural solidarities against “precarity”: Precarity cuts across identity categories as well as multicultural maps, thus forming the basis for an alliance focused on opposition to state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit, and distribute precarity for the purposes of profit and territorial defense. (Butler 2010, 32)

Recent fiction by Adiga and Hamid explicitly engages with the question of precarity in South Asia, charting its counter-intuitive links to a fast-­ growing regional economy, part of a “rising Asia” that registered unprecedented growth between 2007 and 2017 (in stark contrast to the impact of the financial crash on Western economies) (World Bank, 2019). Beyond its philosophical recuperation by Butler as a way to theorize a shared collective project against the perceived impasse posed by identitarian claims, precarity is also a globalized labour condition that seems to have become a structural function of contemporary capitalism, as accounts of the “gig economy” demonstrate.1 The gig economy and precarious employment also create a deep connection to the figure of the entrepreneur in contemporary narratives of global capitalism, so much so that the term “entreprecariat” has been coined by Silvio Lorusso to refer to “the reciprocal influence of an entrepreneurialist regime and pervasive precarity” (2016).

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In literature, the entrepreneur carries multiple types of symbolic freight. As well as a metaphor for the self-fashioning inherent to the individualism of the modern novel, it can even be conceived as figuring the artist herself—as a “contentedly flexible and self-managed worker” (Brouillette 2014)—in the creative economy of the twenty-first century, which dovetails neatly and efficiently into the increasing popularity of gig work. The White Tiger and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia both feature a protagonist who fancies himself an entrepreneur, and whose narrative purpose is to teach the reader how he became one. The “new didacticism” (Blum 2018, 1113) of these novels takes on the form of autodidactic fictions: the how-to genre of self-help receives a South Asian makeover as they purport to guide the reader to success by showing her how to navigate the vast,  growing, formal and informal economies of India and Pakistan. Autodidactic or self-help manuals, which both novels style themselves on, are in many ways a product of precarity, both economic and educational, as critics have noted.2 The White Tiger’s protagonist, Balram Halwai, recalls his employer’s exasperated description of him to his wife Pinky: “‘He can read and write, but he doesn’t get what he’s read. He’s half-baked. The country is full of people like him, I’ll tell you that. And we entrust our glorious parliamentary democracy’—he pointed at me—‘to characters like these. That’s the whole tragedy of this country’” (Adiga 2008, 10). The new South Asian novel establishes a firm relationship with popular literature, such as the “rags-to-riches” story popularized by the global film hit Slumdog Millionaire, the popular philosophy sold in secondhand book stalls, and half-remembered folk sayings, all of which evoke the cultural frame of reference of its protagonist, who is a relatively unlettered man, the product of a “half-baked” education. Hamid in an interview remarks that “self-help books are huge in Asia”, because rapid urbanization and the rise of globalization have made unavailable the advice traditionally provided by extended kinship networks, due to increased migrations from country to city, seen as the hub of Asia’s economic boom (Hamid 2013a). This thought is echoed in an early passage of his novel: In the history of the evolution of the family, you and the millions of other migrants like you represent an ongoing proliferation of the nuclear. It is an explosive transformation, the supportive, stifling, stabilizing bonds of extended relationships weakening and giving way, leaving in their wake inse-

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curity, anxiety, productivity, and potential. Moving to the city is the first step to getting filthy rich in rising Asia. (Hamid 2013b, 14–15)

Here, as elsewhere in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, the narrative voice is simultaneously ironic and awe-stricken vis-à-vis such incommensurable social transformations. Both novels construct a radically different ideological world from that of the Indian novel in English of the 1980s and 1990s as enshrined in a number of literary histories of the subcontinent.3 Hamid in particular seems keen to shake off any “anxiety of influence” with regard to the previous generation of Indian novelists, such as Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor, Rohinton Mistry and Arundhati Roy, self-consciously marketing his literary wares in direct contrast to the baggy lengths and intricate plots of the “great Indian novel”: Why, for example, do you persist in reading that much-praised, breathtakingly boring foreign novel, slogging through page after page after please-­ make-­it-stop page of tar-slow prose and blush-inducing formal conceit […]? And what of the other novels, those which for reasons of plot or language or wisdom or frequent gratuitous and graphic sex you actually enjoy and read with delighted hunger? (Hamid 2013b, 19)

Hamid’s and Adiga’s novels mark a turn towards the Indian underbelly of the “millennial megacity” (Chakravorty 2014, 91). In the wake of bestsellers such as Vikas Swarup’s Q and A (2005), on which Slumdog Millionaire is based, and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004), the narratives also mark a shift in prose: simple, direct, sensationalistic, sexy, marked by an almost overdetermined allegorical and teleological structure. On closer examination, however, this bid for stylistic simplification cannot really be read as an anti-canonical departure or a courageous avant-garde move—Adiga, after all, won the Booker Prize in 2008 for The White Tiger, his first novel, and Hamid has been shortlisted twice for the same award. Rather than writing back, their novels have become the new prototypes of what engaged, bestselling South Asian fiction looks like. There is very little trace of the Midnight’s Children melancholia that coloured Rushdie’s and Ghosh’s retrospective glance at the failed promises of Indian nationalism and independence. These fictions shape a new teleology for the South Asian nation: its working-class narrators are young, optimistic, with a remarkably unified subjectivity,

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compared to Midnight’s Children’s rapidly disintegrating Saleem Sinai, though they are also realistic about the brutality, corruption and exploitation endemic to these rising economies. In both texts, there is a decisive rejection of the novel as a middle-class epic. In Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993), the rise of the Hindu professional elites in post-independence North India is simultaneously the story of Muslim decline; the end of feudal aristocracy in the region is linked in the narrative to the implementation of the Zamindari Abolition Act by Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian Congress Party, which aimed to modernize India by breaking up large landed estates in favour of small to medium-­ sized holdings. At the centre of the novel are three Hindu families and one Muslim family; it is the latter that is most marked by tragedy and social erasure, and it is a Hindu girl, Lata Mehra, who ultimately rejects her Muslim suitor (as well as the charming but idiosyncratic Calcutta Brahmin poet, Amit Chatterji) in favour of a “suitable boy” from her own caste. While secularist ideals are upheld in the public sphere (in many ways it is a resolutely anti-Hindutva novel), the private sphere is marked by social conservatism and a distinctly Hindu narrative voice. Subaltern characters such as the untouchable Kaccheru are presented sympathetically but briefly; similarly, Midnight’s Children is dominated by Saleem, the middle-­ class, high-born child, rather than by Shiva, his nemesis and alter ego, who was exchanged at birth with Saleem and who, unlike him, is born in a slum. If we are searching for subaltern narrators in Indian English literature, we would need to look more to the emerging genre of Dalit autobiographies in translation than to the novel.4 By contrast, the working-class and semi-illiterate narrators of Adiga’s and Hamid’s fiction directly confront their readers’ middle-class position by adopting a second-person address, much like Dalit autobiographies demand “a radical shift from the upper caste and upper class reader by insisting that such a reader not forget his/her caste or class privilege” (Mukherjee 2003, xxxvii). Central here is the readerly address: the experimental second-person adopted by Hamid in How to Get Filthy Rich and the epistolary form of The White Tiger recall the implicitly direct interpellations of Dalit life-­ writing. Dalit texts, however, are not promoted by publishers with massive marketing campaigns like the global Anglophone novels by Hamid and Adiga, and circulate in quite different literary markets and among different readerships (which of course change radically before and after translation into English). Reading these texts alongside Dalit and subaltern life-writing in terms of the autobiographical fiction genre, certain

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observations about injustice, inequality, social justice, revolution and resistance resonate across these bodies of writing. But the precarity of Dalit life is coded differently, and is related to the construction of a shared political identity that is missing from these novels. In what follows, I discuss how the two novels, through internal focalization via a South Asian “everyman”, offer a critique of contemporary South Asian precarity as well as a take-down of Indian middle-class fiction that has generally displayed forms of distanced sympathy rather than a committed solidarity towards subaltern struggles. This rejection of more elite literary modes is underscored by the novels’ intertextuality (one might also say tongue-in-cheek flirting) with popular literature, especially genres such as the self-help book and the thriller. As fictions of precarity and globalization, they engage deeply with changing notions of social class in South Asia, and thus connect to Sonali Perera’s category of “proletarian literature”, namely “literature overtly by, for, or about workers” (Perera 2014, 176). I conclude by briefly contrasting Hamid’s and Adiga’s autobiographical fictions of precarity in the “global Anglophone” mode with that of an Indian working-class author, Baby Halder, whose translated autobiography, A Life Less Ordinary, was published in English in 2006 (it was originally written in Bengali). My reading of class in Adiga and Hamid departs from Perera’s approach, though, as it questions whether working-­ class writing always implies a collective project of liberation, and suggests that the representational world in their texts, though it is structured by powerful social critiques, does not ultimately imagine an alternative to global capitalism.

The White Tiger Right from the start, The White Tiger sets up a direct address between its narrator Balram and the reader; as if to pre-empt accusations of pandering to a hypothetical “Western reader”, his narrative is ostensibly written in the form of a letter to the Chinese Premier, in order to reveal to him “the secrets” of India’s business success: “Apparently, Sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs” (Adiga 2008, 4). The first pages immediately establish Balram as an autodidact (as he says to the Premier, “I am a self-taught entrepreneur”, 6) by referencing the mass-market

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produced literature of secondhand book stalls in India, as, for example, the Exciting Tales of the Exotic East from which Balram gets his ideas about China: “it said that you Chinese are great lovers of freedom and individual liberty” (5). Such books’ popular anti-colonialism upends the racial stereotypes of Western discourse about the East by invoking Global South– South alliances, with an implicit historical reference to the “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai” rhetoric of the non-aligned movement uniting India and China. The evocation of such alliances, however, is not so much based on “Third World” solidarity as on the calm certainty that the centre of global capital has now moved to Asia, a “belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-­ skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, mobile phone usage, and drug abuse” (Adiga 2008, 6). It thus celebrates Asian globalization, in which, in Balram’s crude but powerful nativist rhetoric, both the brotherhood and the competition between India and China are a recurrent leitmotif. In promising to tell us his “life story”, Balram explicitly makes it a competing title with the American business books sold at traffic lights in Indian cities, establishing a self-conscious intertextuality with these texts, which also act as literary models for the narrative. He physically incorporates the graphic features of “those Cellophane-wrapped business books”, which have small sidebars: “At this stage of the story, to relieve you of tedium, I would like to insert my own sidebar into the narrative of the modern entrepreneur’s growth and development” (Adiga 2008, 228). This draws attention to the ways in which the novel engages in a dialogue with the literature of self-improvement, and “the receding fantasy that a book could change the present” (Blum 2018, 1114). Balram is literally “selling” us his story, in an ironic reference to the novel’s complicity with its own marketing (Karthika VK, Adiga’s one-time editor at HarperCollins India, has explained that The White Tiger was the first Indian novel in English to be marketed aggressively through a TV campaign in India itself; and most unusually for a novel in English, it sold upwards of 100,000 copies in India, more than either Midnight’s Children or The God of Small Things when they first came out). As quickly transpires, Balram the entrepreneur’s story is really the story of the deep-seated corruption of the Indian state, but as Balram the narrator knowingly tells his audience, “Stories of rottenness and corruption are always the best stories, aren’t they?” (Adiga 2008, 50). Balram instructs his intended Chinese reader about geography, creating a new map for

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postcolonial India: there are only two regions in it, the India of the Darkness and the India of the Light, a satirical take on the branding of “India Shining” promoted in the mid- to late 2000s to help boost India’s trade opportunities with global capital. The story of the entrepreneur is essentially an anti-idyll, namely an anti-­ pastoral, account of rural–urban migration, which incorporates the unplanned urban development, the “unintended city” that is the site of Indian global enterprise, as a key setting of the novel: In his journey from village to city, from Laxmangarh to Delhi, the entrepreneur’s path crosses any number of provincial towns that have the pollution and noise and traffic of a big city—without any hint of the true city’s sense of history, planning, and grandeur. Half-baked cities, built for half-baked men. (Adiga 2008, 52)

Both Adiga and Hamid feature the migration to the city as a necessary passage in the process of the entrepreneur’s self-realization (How to Get Filthy Rich, in its faux “how-to” structure, has a chapter entitled “Move to the City”). The White Tiger retains the Indian guidebook feel of previous Indian novels in English, being purportedly written to educate the Chinese premier about the greatness of Indian entrepreneurship, but unlike previous fiction, the narrative does not enter into a dialogue with historical writing about India.5 Rather, Balram’s account of Indian independence and of the Indian caste system is again autodidactic and pragmatic, cynical and denunciatory, rather than idealistic: “These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat, or get eaten up” (Adiga 2008, 64). Caste and origins matter less and less: this is not a novel about the construction of a national character, the “national longing for form” of Midnight’s Children; on the contrary the focus is on the shared condition of the poor in India. In narrating the darker realities of Indian globalization, Balram presents the India of the Dark as the necessary corollary of the India of the Light, just as “those whose lives are not ‘regarded’ as potentially grievable, and hence valuable, are made to bear the burden of starvation, underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death” (Butler 2010, 25). As Sarah Brouillette remarks, The White Tiger is about “those whose labor subtends the ascent of the ‘new India’ but who continue to be excluded from places like elite American-style suburbs and call centers and dot-com start-up enterprise zones” (2014, 96). Balram, as

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he knows full well, is no more than servant fodder for his master, Ashok Sharma, newly returned from America, who sees in the new India an opportunity that the West doesn’t offer to its middle class: “‘The way things are changing in India now, this place is going to be like America in ten years. Plus, I like it better here. We’ve got people to take care of us here—our drivers, our watchmen, our masseurs. Where in New York will you find someone to bring you tea and sweet biscuits while you’re still lying in bed […]?’” (Adiga 2008, 89). Admission to the suburban mall is a key gate-keeping ritual of Delhi’s economic hierarchy which Balram gradually learns to manipulate by dressing like his upper-class employers, discarding oversize logos that would announce his low-class origins in favour of a T-shirt whose minimalist branding communicates the high social capital of its owner. Malls feature prominently in fictions about Indian globalization; Hari Kunzru’s 2005 novel, Transmission, features a young IT worker, Arjun Mehta, whose “current favourite daydream was set in a mall, a cavern of bright glass through which a near-future version of himself was travelling at speed up a broad black escalator”, dressed in a button-down shirt and a “baseball cap with the logo of a major software corporation embroidered on the peak” (Kunzru 2005, 11). The Arjun of Transmission recalls Balram’s aspirational tendencies, though he belongs to a higher social class (he has a degree), and thanks to his qualifications is able to emigrate to “Amrika” as a digital coolie. There is rebellion against his condition (Arjun creates a computer virus that spreads globally; Balram ends up murdering his employer) but as with The White Tiger, it is presented as individual, rather than inspired by collective action. In Adiga’s case, this is perhaps because socialism is widely shown to be hypocritical and corrupt in India, and ineffective in protecting the poor and precarious. Balram, though a bright boy, is deprived of schooling at an early age and almost by pure luck lands a job as a driver for a wealthy land-owning family in his village (his insistence on the randomness of the occurrences that propel him on the path to success shares more than a passing resemblance to the game-show format of Swarup’s Q and A). His gradual coming to consciousness of his exploitation structures his narrative, though he also awakens to the realities of the wider world by overhearing the conversations of the family he works for–“politics, coals, China […] I absorbed everything—that’s the amazing thing about entrepreneurs. We are like sponges—we absorb and we grow” (Adiga 2008, 71). This reading of Balram’s story as a self-styled working-class Bildungsroman makes it

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comparable to Perera’s idea of proletarian literature. Freedom is a recurring trope of his narrative, reflected in his invocation of China as a land that has never let itself be ruled by foreigners, or when he is reflecting on how he has managed to escape his own condition of mental and physical servitude. Perera, in her critical account of global working-class writing, examines how the work of the American socialist writer Tillie Olsen is deliberately incomplete, unfinished, as if to signify the longue durée of the struggle for proletarian emancipation. She argues that “Olsen’s uncompleted book offers us a model for thinking a postindividualist form for the working-­class novel” (Perera 2014, 20). For Perera, the troping of working-class history as “writing beyond the end” and the collaborative form characterizes the utopian, hors-de-texte orientation of proletarian fiction. But according to this formulation, The White Tiger and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, even in purely formal terms, hardly qualify as working-class texts. On the contrary, they are highly individualized: differently from the 1990s Indian bestselling novels in English, these novels move away from a focus on the family as a central presence and structuring plot device (as we see in A Suitable Boy, Midnight’s Children, The Shadow Lines and The God of Small Things) and focus on the individual’s journey through a hostile economic and social environment. But unlike the “serial interrupted forms” described by Perera as emblematic of working-class writing, these novels about rising Asia display all the features of “self-evident progress narratives” (albeit from a frequently ironic perspective) which socialist ethics militates against (Perera 2014, 23). Critics have variously emphasized both novels’ satirical take on the amelioration promised by self-help manuals—thus reading them as critiques of teleological progress (Poon)—as well as noting how novels like How to Get Filthy Rich display a “commitment to a new didacticism […] proved by their willingness to risk such sentimentalism in the service of their moral visions” (Blum 2018, 1113). In terms of satire, The White Tiger reads as an anti-entrepreneurial novel, in fact; success through hard work is shown to be completely fallacious as a recipe. Success through corruption, crime and murder is more the reality for the would-be Indian entrepreneur, as conditions of labour (whether licit or illicit) radically differ across the profoundly uneven world he inhabits. Balram’s “Indianization” of self-help has been likened to V.S. Naipaul’s Mr Biswas and his reverence for Samuel Smiles’s Victorian classic, Self-Help. However, the structural conditions that might enable a reader to succeed in America or England thanks to Smiles’s manual do not apply in colonial Trinidad:

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[Mr Biswas] had bought one of [Samuel Smiles’s] books in the belief that it was a novel, and had become an addict. Samuel Smiles was as romantic and satisfying as any novelist, and Mr. Biswas saw himself in many Samuel Smiles heroes: he was young, he was poor, and he fancied he was struggling. But there always came a point where resemblance ceased. The heroes had rigid ambitions and lived in countries where ambitions could be pursued, and had a meaning. He had no ambition, and in this hot land, apart from opening a shop or buying a motorbus, what could he do? (Naipaul 1961, 71, qtd in Blum 2018, 1108)

And yet the fortune of self-help books in colonial and Global South contexts, observes Blum, emphasizes the role of textual agency in assimilating and appropriating the lessons of these books, in a situation of scarce educational resources, resulting in “new, nonelite reading practices, which strategically appropriated Anglo- American improvement discourse for personal and political ends” (Blum 2018, 1108–1109). In The White Tiger and How to Get Filthy Rich, the focalization through the subaltern narrator allows us to speculate that rather than being dismissive towards such popular forms of writing, the novels actively engage in mobilizing the hybrid epistemology of the self-educated men at the heart of their texts. Balram is not illiterate, but rather semi-literate, and so he wants to write a book. This is no oral tale. The subalternist drive of this narrative is not about recuperating the oral traditions of a subaltern subject, but rather about connecting Balram’s story to existing popular literature genres available to him as a nonelite reader, and thus implicitly denouncing the snobbishness of the middle-class reader who wishes to read The White Tiger as “quality fiction” by presenting them with a thriller-cum-murder story in the guise of a self-help book. Balram is, in other words, on a mission to educate his readers. One of his primary didactic aims is to explain the enduring role of servitude in the subcontinent, a seemingly anachronistic residue that should have no place in a modern global economy. And yet the link between the servant system in India and precarity is an example of a perfect meshing between oppressive Indian social traditions, the informal economy of South Asia, and the global gig economy.6 Adiga has commented in an interview on the ways in which the novel shows up the hypocrisy of the Indian middle class, when reviewers condemned his novel as akin to slum tourism. “All you have to do is write a story about the poor–who are the majority of this nation, as they are the majority of Asia, the majority of Africa, and Latin America– and the middle class critics and writers here will scream that you are being polemical and preachy” (Adiga 2009).

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This “working-class story” is also that of a middle-class man, Balram’s master, Ashok Sharma, but here the middle class is seen through the keen eyes of their working-class servants. There is a mirror-like relationship between the two: each is the other man’s alter ego. Ashok is “foreign-­ returned” and so has an external view on India, more “moral”, or so Balram thinks, until he seemingly becomes corrupted by his family and the politicians he has to deal with when he comes back to India. Ashok’s corruption is causally linked by Balram to his own, because “once the master of the Honda City becomes corrupted, how can the driver stay innocent?” (Adiga 2008, 197). While at the beginning of their working relationship, Balram looks up to Ashok as a god, Ashok alternately exoticizes and bullies his driver: “‘We rich people, we’ve lost our way, Balram. I want to be a simple man like you, Balram’” (Adiga 2008, 238). Ashok’s reverse idealization offers a sentimentalizing picture of the working class, and specifically of the servant class, the “bedrock of Indian middle class life” (Adiga quoted in Brouillette 2014, 88). Ashok trusts Balram because they come from the same village and because he has seen his family. There are attempts at connection on an equal footing, but they usually fail. This hierarchical intimacy does not breed true empathy, an issue complicated by the fact that for Indian servants, “elite domestic spaces function as a workplace and unlike other kinds of labour, domestic service entails a serious blurring of the ‘the conceptual divide between family and work’” (Mirza 2016, 7). The intimacy of shared spaces, such as the car, offers many moments of acute mutual awkwardness and echoes the mirror-like relationship between the two characters, as when Balram and Ashok catch each other both eyeing a girl in a tight T-shirt who is crossing the road, “her chest bobbing up and down like three kilogrammes of brinjals in a bag”: (This little rectangular mirror inside the car, Mr Jiabao—has no one ever noticed how embarrassing it is? How, every now and then, when master and driver find each other’s eyes in this mirror, it swings open like a door into a changing room, and the two of them have suddenly caught each other naked?). (Adiga 2008, 199)

The rear-view mirror of the car is the space where the subjectivities of master and servant meet on a level playing field, an intimacy that transcends hierarchical divisions but which, precisely for this reason, engenders social anxiety in both Balram and Ashok, and thus serves to further reinforce these divisions between them.

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Balram’s life story includes a philosophical reflection on the reasons behind his state of servitude, the so-called Rooster Coop theory, stemming from his realization that as a lower-class member of Indian society, “the desire to be a servant had been bred into me” (Adiga 2008, 193). As in many Dalit autobiographies, his narrative contains the epiphanic moment in which he rejects his social inferiority and denounces the hegemony that has kept him in his place. As Perera remarks, “class is a relationship, not a fixed static object” (2014, 8), and this is demonstrated in the rapid transformation of the relationship between Balram and Ashok from that of servant and master to that of murderer and victim. In a Fanonian gesture, he kills his master as a way of liberating himself from his internalized condition of servitude, effecting the re-humanization through violence that is central to Fanon’s anti-colonialism. And yet his act does not serve to align him with the Naxalites who resist the landowners of his native village and who haunt his story, nor does it suggest an ongoing struggle for political liberation that continues outside the text. The murder is re-inscribed in his narrative as essentially another stepping-stone towards his economic fulfilment, and helps him realize his goal to become a “social entrepreneur”. The long-lost teleology of the Indian English novel (after the postmodern digressions, fractured national allegories and deeply unreliable narrators of the 1980s and 1990s Indian novel) is seemingly restored thanks to an individualist first-person narrator-turned-­ murderer, the literal embodiment of the Hobbesian homo homini lupus, who cannot imagine a self existing beyond the ever-expanding reach of capitalism.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia The White Tiger and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia are arguably postcolonial novels in the sense that they narrate a time and a space affected and shaped by South Asia’s achievement of political independence from British rule and involvement in the global economy. But their protagonists do not offer many reflections on postcolonial politics, concerned as they are with grasping what agency they can in a socio-economic environment that most of the time is hostile to their personal growth. They work to be competitive in a situation that requires them to be cut-throat and illegal. As is illustrated by World Bank graphs, India and Pakistan are among the world’s fastest growing economies despite the fact that they are also profoundly marked by uneven development: the narrators internalize

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their achieved success in the face of overwhelming odds not in terms of overt political rebellion, but rather articulating it as an Americanized “grit and determination to succeed, where the striving but plucky self is conceived as the allegory of the striving but plucky nation. The You of How to Get Filthy Rich and Balram the White Tiger are arguably Lukacsian “types”, mediating between the particular and the general: “this, [Lukacs] suggests, makes novelistic character the formal equivalent of social class as such, which similarly brought together disparate individuals into common cause” (McClanahan 2019). You and Balram, invested in their own economic growth which is coupled to that of the nation, project a unified subjectivity that recalls that of the earlier realist novel, which McClanahan argues was “the aesthetic correlative of the regulated wage contract […] with its commitment to representing protagonists who could remain consistent while they developed and matured and who could be free in their individual particularity but protected as constituents of a collective social class” (McClanahan 2019). Balram and You are hardly “protected” by the state and are cast in a near-permanent state of precarity (the protagonist of How to Get Filthy Rich also loses all of his wealth by the end of his life), but they do emerge as representatives of a new social class, a South Asian “everyman” relatively divorced from family ties and cultural anchoring, a product of first-generation migration to the city and an experiential understanding of the means necessary to overcome the inbuilt structural inequality of South Asia’s rapid economic growth. Labour coded as entrepreneurship in the texts is a means of self-­ fashioning, showing how capitalism harnesses predation, aggression, cunning and self-interest as desirable qualities of the modern businessman. In other words, labour by itself is not enough to succeed. But How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is more positive than its predecessor, The White Tiger– replacing cynicism with fatalism as its primary mood–and describes the entire life arc of its protagonist from birth to death, accentuating parallels with the explicit allegory of the morality tale and its universalizing message. In accordance with Beth Blum’s point that the “how-to ethos” is a mode of reading literature, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia offers itself as a manual for the inexpert reader to learn about globalizing South Asia, and specifically Pakistan. Literature’s didactic-moral function, which is of course also present in literature that presupposes more “elite” reading practices than the self-help book, is here foregrounded. This function ties into Hamid’s stated desire to write literature as a form of co-creation between reader and writer, and as a mode of political resistance:

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In my writing, I have tried to advocate the blurring of boundaries; not just between civilizations or people of different groups but between writer and reader. Co-creation has been central to my fiction, the notion that a novel is made jointly by a writer and a reader. Co-creation is central to my politics as well. I believe that we co-create the overlapping societies we belong to, large and small, and that we should be free to try to invent new ways of being and interacting. (Hamid 2014, xviii)

Hamid’s fiction, beginning with his first novel, Moth Smoke (2000), has always been “globally oriented”, not only in terms of its implied audience, but also in terms of its themes, which are modelled after major world issues such as 9/11, the Global War on Terror, the rise of Islamic State, and the so-called refugee crisis. Hamid’s novels are all explicitly political, and politicized, literary interventions, but without necessarily deciding those politics for the reader Rather, they introduce an interactive mode of reading the narrative in the novel, and by implication, the wider events underpinning that narrative, in which the reader is encouraged to make up their own mind, to decide for themselves the directions the text can take. As he remarks of his second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), whose narrative address alternates between an I and a you, “I wanted the novel to be a kind of mirror, to let readers see how they are reading, and therefore, how they are living and how they are deciding their politics” (Hamid 2014, 78). This “post-civilization” view of the world is played out in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia through the crafting of the main protagonist as the You of the text. The use of the you seems to be aimed at helping us identify with an otherwise incommensurable figure: the poor Asian everyman trying to beat terrifying life odds under conditions that are unimaginable for readers based in the Global North, and who by implication are also readers of Anglophone fiction. The lack of specificity in the text extends from the generic representation of the city the You moves to, to politics, to the state and even to love (his romantic interest is only known to us as the “pretty girl”)—the only detailed reality we encounter is that of economics. Even briefly appearing characters are only defined by their economic status or occupation, as the brother or technical assistant of You, evoking the naturalist novel, which turns “characters into protagonists in and through labor” (Bernes 2019). The lack of narrative specificity corresponds to the universalizing codes of the self-help book: the moral life lessons of the self-help book need to be accessible to and intelligible by anyone reading it, not just trained readers

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of literary novels, so that the conventions of the genre and the implied audience determine the generic characterization of You. As with The White Tiger, morality is for those who can afford it, and this in itself is a moral lesson. On his path to filthy rich status, You is making money by working for a “company” that sells expired goods to shopkeepers, replacing genuine labels with fraudulent ones. “Products do have inbuilt safety margins, and inventory turnover in the city is unusually high, so for the most part there should be limited risk to consuming what you sell. You are simply increasing the efficiency of the market” (Hamid 2013b, 91, my emphasis). The story of a young Pakistani man of humble origins striving for economic success offers its transnational readership an enhanced inter-cultural accessibility because his thinking internalizes the logic of the market, understood as a universal logic that governs the world we live in, which is coterminous with a “financial universe” (Hamid 2013b, 139). Capitalism is wrested from its European/Western origins and given a more properly global dimension, which in the novel is identified with “Asia”. The You is a self-made man: he wants to become rich; he is not just struggling to survive. How does this desire to pursue economic success square with precarity? Precarity would seem to define a condition that endangers us constantly, but in reality, pursuing economic success can help lift the You out of the precarity into which he was born. Living rent-free by purchasing a resident’s bond on his property “is a great aspiration for those of modest means, offering as it does security akin to home ownership, temporarily, for the duration of the bond. In the world of cooks and delivery boys and minor salesmen, the world to which you have belonged, a resident’s bond is a rest stop on the incessant treadmill of life. Yet you are now a man who works for himself, an entrepreneur …” (Hamid 2013b, 114, my emphasis). Hamid’s language is an intertextual echo of Balram’s. As in the case of Balram, the entrepreneur is a clearly recognizable category of man whose desire to lift himself out of the constant precarity of poverty coincides with the definition of those actively pursuing wealth. There is an underlying, sometimes explicit, recognition that the phenomenon of “rising Asia” and of the Asian tiger economy is being enabled by men like Balram and You. Indeed, such characters coincide with Rising Asia, “the century, more specifically, of the yellow and the brown man”, as Balram puts it (Adiga 2008, 7), a remark redolent of the ready-made philosophy of the bus stop chat, built on stereotypes and populist political

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takes. This brutal take on the rags to riches story is, however, not entirely critical of this kind of rise to success.7 Mrinalini Chakravorty has drawn attention to the ways in which the new South Asian fiction engages with stereotypes about South Asia. On the one hand, such fiction acknowledges the insidiousness of these clichés about Asians, but on the other, it acknowledges their relevance and inventive power for understanding how we relate to the crises of late modernity (Chakravorty 2014, 13). As fictions that are self-conscious about their positioning within the world literary market, The White Tiger and How to Get Filthy Rich make their stereotypes about South Asia transparent while simultaneously showing how they constitute a kind of popular hermeneutics for their precarious protagonists. English is their global medium, implicated and complicit in the enduring colonial discourse of the stereotype: “To understand the transnational traffic of stereotypes about South Asia […] is thus to acknowledge the unparalleled global purchase of the English language in which many of these stereotypes are communicated” (Chakravorty 2014, 37–38). I would like to end this chapter by briefly reflecting on the differences between these polished, self-aware English-language autobiographical fictions of precarity that write back to the canonical Indian English novel, and the writing of an actual domestic worker, Baby Halder’s autobiography-­ memoir A Life Less Ordinary (2006), which the author originally wrote in Bengali. The text was then translated into Hindi, and subsequently into English by the acclaimed feminist writer Urvashi Butalia. Halder frames her story in a simple, direct way, but her directness and simplicity create very different literary effects from the pared down minimalism of Hamid’s and Adiga’s narratives. It functions as testimony, rather than as self-help; its first-person narration does not purport to universalize her difficult life, nor does it offer any extended political reflections on the reasons behind her precarity. And yet, despite its apparent lack of sophistication, the style appears more innovative and experimental than either Adiga’s or Hamid’s, “questioning the ways by which working-class writing becomes reified as a canonical object” (Perera 2014, 20). The act of writing, and the reading which accompanies it, is achieved on borrowed, stolen time. Halder’s recollection of writing is inseparable from that of her uncomfortable sanitary arrangements; difficulty, interruption and lack of privacy mark both experiences and have a levelling function in the representation. Where she lives, it is as difficult to find a private place to read and write as it is to find a private place to take a shit. The self-perception of herself as unlettered,

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whose days are structured by her demanding schedule as a domestic worker, marks the very form of Halder’s autobiography, displaying the “resistance to formalization” found in working-class narratives where interruptions and absences mimic “the periodic breaks opened up in the working-class writers’ day” (Perera 2014, 7). Precarity in South Asia takes many forms, and fictions of precarity have not yet exhausted their creative possibilities.

Notes 1. See Annie McClanahan (2019) for a succinct and helpful account of the gig economy in relation to the US workforce; she reports that in 2016, about 35% of the US workforce (55 million people) did freelancing work of some kind, and that for 5 million people, freelancing or “temping” is their primary source of income. 2. See especially Blum 2018. 3. See Chaudhuri (2001), Mehrotra (2003), Gopal (2009) and Tickell (2016). 4. As Arun Prabha Mukherjee argues in her introduction to Omprakash Valmiki’s award-winning autobiography Joothan: A Dalit’s Life, “the dominant discourse of Postcolonial and Subaltern theories, which are often the frameworks used by Western academies to teach Indian literature, mostly Indian English literature, not only refuses to notice the high caste status of these writers but presents them as resistant voices, representing the oppression of the ‘colonized’” (Mukherjee 2003, xiii). 5. See Jon Mee (1998) for an instructive account of the reciprocal development of the Indian novel in English and Indian historiography of the Subaltern Studies collective. 6. As Brouillette remarks, the servant–master system of course “long predates India’s reincarnation as an ‘Asian tiger’, but the novel presents its continuation as integral to the functioning of the ‘new economy’” (Brouillette 2014, 88). 7. See Brouillette (2014) and Blum (2018) on this point.

References Adiga, Aravind. 2008. The White Tiger. New York: Free Press. ———. 2009. Interview with Aravind Adiga, the White Tiger. Interview by Lee Thomas. Fiction Writers Review. April 15. https://fictionwritersreview.com/ interview/interiew-­with-­aravind-­adiga-­the-­white-­tiger/.

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Bernes, Jasper. 2019. Character, Genre, Labor: The Office Novel After Deindustrialization. Post 45 (1). http://post45.research.yale.edu/2019/01/ character-­genre-­labor-­the-­office-­novel-­after-­deindustrialization/. Blum, Beth. 2018. The Self-Help Hermeneutic: Its Global History and Literary Future. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 133 (5): 1099–1117. Brouillette, Sarah. 2014. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 2010. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Chakravorty, Mrinalini. 2014. In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary, 2014. New York: Columbia University Press. Chaudhuri, Amit, ed. 2001. The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. London: Vintage. Gopal, Priyamvada. 2009. The Indian English Novel: Nation, History, and Narration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Halder, Baby. 2006. A Life Less Ordinary. Trans. Urvashi Butalia. New Delhi: Zubaan. Hamid, Mohsin. 2007. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. London: Penguin. ———. 2013a. He’s Seen Our Future. Interview by Bryan Appleyard. The Sunday Times, March 17. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ hes-­seen-­our-­future-­q30q6dvcn2g. ———. 2013b. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. London: Penguin. ———. 2014. Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London. London: Penguin. Kunzru, Hari. 2005. Transmission. London: Penguin. Lorusso, Silvio. 2016. What is the Entreprecariat?. Institute of Network Cultures. https://networkcultures.org/entreprecariat/what-­is-­the-­entreprecariat/. McClanahan, Annie. 2019. Introduction: The Spirit of Capital and the New Age of Deindustrialization. Post 45 (1). http://post45.org/2019/01/ introduction-­the-­spirit-­of-­capital-­in-­an-­age-­of-­deindustrialization/. Mee, Jon. 1998. “‘“Itihasa”; thus it was’: Looking through Glass and the Rewriting of History”. ARIEL 29 (1): 145–61. Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna, ed. 2003. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Mirza, Maryam. 2016. Intimate Class Acts: Friendship and Desire in Indian and Pakistani Women’s Fiction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mukherjee, Arun Prabha. 2003. Introduction. In Omprakash Valmiki, Joothan: A Dalit’s Life, translated with an introduction by Arun Prabha Mukherjee, xi-­ xvlii. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Naipaul, V.S. 1961. A House for Mr Biswas. London: Deutsch.  Perera, Sonali. 2014. No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Seth, Vikram. 1993. A Suitable Boy. New York: Harper Collins. Tickell, Alex, ed. 2016. South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations. London: Palgrave. World Bank. 2019. The World Bank in South Asia. https://www.worldbank.org/ en/region/sar/overview.

The Precarious Rule of Aesthetics: Form, Informality, Infrastructure Dominic Davies

Introduction: Rule by Aesthetics In his field-shaping study, Rule by Aesthetics (2015), the urbanist D. Asher Ghertner reflects on the urban politics of the global or ‘world class’ aesthetic in India. He writes: Rule by aesthetics is a process of translating broad aesthetic codes into a governing lens for organising urban space. Land uses that conform to dominant aesthetic codes thus appear as sensible features of the urban landscape, even if they violate the law. In contrast, land uses that defy these codes appear out of place, deemed spaces of relegation. Shopping malls and five-­ star hotels rise; slum settlements fall. In this way, rule by aesthetics sets in place a certain “hegemony of form”—what I have been calling a world-class aesthetic in Delhi. (Ghertner 2015, 125)

D. Davies (*) City, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_4

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Taking the subcontinent’s capital as an indicative case study, Ghertner invites us to understand the current reshaping of Delhi’s urban form not through economic interests and the rhythms of capital, nor through tensions and fissures in the city’s patchworked legal fabric, nor even through its latent and increasingly eruptive histories of sectarian division and violence. Of course, these forces are certainly at play and essential to any worthwhile grasp of Delhi’s dense and often contradictory infrastructures. But in play with and sometimes overriding these factors in urban governance is, Ghertner argues, the city’s outward aesthetics. In the twenty-first century, the way that the urban landscape looks or appears increasingly drives the most dramatic and often violent restructurings of the physical environment, while also meting out who has the right to live, work and be seen in the city. This urban aesthetic is regulated in accordance with an abstract representation of what the ‘global’ or ‘world class’ city is assumed to look like, and the ‘hegemony of form’ described by Ghertner is the materialisation of an overwhelmingly middle-class sensibility. Though it is often implemented through massive construction schemes and urban redevelopment programmes, it is not an entirely top-down endeavour: just as importantly, it is monitored by urban dwellers themselves, from government officials, politicians and civil servants to members of citizen-led organisations such as the notorious Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs). The result is an urban landscape ‘beautified’ through the removal of slums or hawkers that ‘look’ out of place, on the one hand, and the building of glistening infrastructure projects such as the Delhi metro or the construction of commercial ventures such as shopping malls, on the other. I want to emphasise at the outset of this chapter the cultural and political implications of Ghertner’s argument, for it will underpin my discussion throughout—I have after all adapted the title of his provocative thesis in my own. What is essential to grasp is that the image of the ‘global city’ does not arise as a re-presentation of the city itself. As an aesthetic, it cannot be pegged down as a unidirectional response to phases of economic growth or development, nor can it be understood as a symbiotic confluence of local cultures and international finance. Rather, in Delhi as in other cities across the subcontinent, the image and sensibility of a certain ‘world classness’ functions itself is a generative force, sometimes overriding economic imperatives and often undermining the law, all in order to justify and enforce the city’s material reshaping. Most readers will instantly recognise the generic ‘global city’ image or ‘world class’ brand, even if they have never come across the terms ‘global city’ or ‘world class’ city. A city’s ‘globalness’ is measured through its

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ability to distil a version of itself into iconic imagery. This imagery is a familiar blend of crisp lines and smooth curves, shards of steel and glass and glistening skyscrapers stretching up to dizzying heights. This ‘global iconism’ then communicates the association between that city and a very specific set of values—‘modern’, ‘developed’, even ‘civilised’—with precision efficiency to the rest of the world. Capital investors, corporate businesses, tourists and a global elite all search for a set of aesthetic signatures that subliminally promise a reliable, familiar and beautified urban form that accords with the aesthetic of other global cities. The skyline of Manhattan works this way, for example. It is so instantly recognisable that only a silhouette is needed to conjure the idea of New York, in spite of the fact that the skyscrapers of the financial district fail to capture that city’s thick historical and cultural milieu. Similarly, London’s skyscraper, ‘the Shard’—perhaps the epitome of this visual regime—need only be represented in a single block colour to transfer to the viewer an idea of the city as a centre of financial heft. This ability to communicate ‘globalness’ to an international audience almost instantaneously is, of course, in no small measure a legacy of these cities’ historic cultural and economic (and in London’s case, imperial) power. But it is accurate to say that these skylines have been specifically constructed to secure the cities’ continued recognisability and enduring influence on a global stage. In the attempt to insert themselves into this new visual field of global urbanism, Indian cities such as Delhi have blended the representation and reality—or signifier and signified—to a point of infrastructural confusion. Of course, urban planning and architectural practice is embedded in a long history of symbolic and material violence, or what I have called, with Elleke Boehmer, a postcolonial ‘planned violence’ (Boehmer & Davies 2018). We might take New Delhi, where the British Empire’s early twentieth-­century feats of engineering were designed to conjure visions of racial and global supremacy, as just one example of planned violence. But in a twisted continuation of these processes in the twenty-first century, the new global aesthetic has fully exceeded its symbolic role to become the decisive justification for often violent modes of urban governance, discriminatory infrastructure constructions, and increasingly privatised and securitised city living. The properly political implications of the ‘world class’ city reside in the use of a very specific aesthetic regime to justify and implement policies and actions with consequences that are most often violent for the precarious urban poor. For example, slums, even when legally constructed on purchased or unenclosed territory, come to be viewed as a blemish that

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tarnishes Delhi’s global image, especially around globally conspicuous events such as the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Under this rubric, the eviction and clearance of informal housing is justified on aesthetic terms, regardless of that eviction’s illegality. Slum clearances, along with comparable activities such as urban land grabs or the construction of exclusionary infrastructure projects, need no longer rely on surreptitiously identified legal loopholes or corrupt bureaucratic procedures. Instead, an amorphous vision of ‘globalness’—for which cities as incomparable as Dubai, Paris, Singapore and London are cited as reference—is used to justify eviction and displacement: ‘For the first time in postcolonial India’, writes Ghertner, ‘slums were deemed illegal because they looked illegal’ (2015, 183). Something as violent for the urban precariat as slum clearance, involving as it does the tearing down of homes and livelihoods, is not achieved via legal or corrupt methods in aid of the global city image; it is more exactly, and somewhat terrifyingly, justified in that image’s name. It is important to note that the supersession of this world class aesthetic over land rights and legal procedure is by no means the sole industry of Indian cities. Indeed, it is a tendency common to emerging centres of power across the whole of Asia, as the urbanist Aihwa Ong has shown. But Ong’s description of this regional process is again indicative, emphasising the widely accepted mantra that there is now ‘an art of being global’ (2011, 1–2). ‘Globalness’ is a quality that must be designed, drawn and represented through architectural forms that evoke a specific aesthetics, which in turn conjure up ethereal economic and cultural conditions broadly associated with ‘development’ and ‘modernity’. This takes place regardless of whether the economic and cultural qualities signified by those aesthetics are in fact actually there, while at the same time this vision occludes and erases much of what is there in the name of the global image. In a sense, the art of designing an aesthetic image has slipped from its outer position as superstructural adornment of a globalising city to become instead a sort of infrastructure itself: the aesthetic surface now undergirds in a materially meaningful sense the ‘deeper’ and often violent restructuring of the urban domain and its inhabitants. While we might therefore at first consider the world class ‘image’ or ‘aesthetic’ as a form of ‘representation’, to do so would be a mistake because of that word’s prefix. ‘Re-presentation’ is a secondary process, something that comes after the fact of that which is originally present or presented. In the case of Delhi, as Ghertner describes it, the ‘world class’ aesthetic does not simply represent urban form, after its design and

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construction: instead, the aesthetic itself has superseded other forcefields of power—capital, sectarianism, the law—that shape the city, even as it still interacts with those forces, for instance by attracting international capital. For those of us concerned with ‘representations’, as fields such as postcolonial studies tend to describe forms of literary and cultural production, this requires a drastic reconsideration of the ways in which certain aesthetics and texts might in fact, and to use Henri Lefebvre’s (1998) well-known phrase, ‘produce’ urban space as well, not to mention the precarious lives of those who inhabit it. Indeed, it is my contention here that texts that deliberately navigate the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction have the capacity to render the ‘hegemony of form’ currently restructuring cities such as Delhi as perforated, impermanent and precarious.

Stranger Than Fiction My central argument in this chapter is that the emergence of a rule by aesthetics in Delhi and India’s other megacities goes some way to explaining a coterminous trend towards the genre of literary non-fiction—as opposed, that is, to creative or literary fiction. This trend, I will acknowledge, is especially the case for Indian writing in English. This corpus tends, moreover, to be authored by writers who, though they are themselves based in India, have also lived in the global North (usually the US or Britain) for extended periods of time and have therefore accumulated— and are often explicitly writing for—a global as well as Indian readership. But it is for precisely this reason that I think the transformation of ‘world class’ aesthetics into a mode of urban governance in India can be tracked through a comparable shift from fiction to non-fiction writing. Speaking to the particular concerns of this volume, the two—rule by aesthetics and literary non-fiction—come together and clash especially around their approach to the cities’ most precarious urban dwellers. While I therefore argue that the non-fictional claim of literary non-fiction is often designed to expose India’s ‘world class’ aesthetic as a precarious fiction, I also contend that it more fully upturns this aesthetic to produce the urban precariat and other forms of informality as themselves infrastructural to the cities’ construction and ongoing function. The rise of literary non-fiction in Indian writing in English has been gathering pace since the turn of the twenty-first century. By 2012, the renowned British historian of India, William Dalrymple, was celebrating what he then called ‘India’s new wave of non-fiction’ (2012, n.pag.), and

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the movement has continued to grow ever since. It is worth listing just some of the titles of the best of these texts, all of which are drawn to India’s megacities (usually Mumbai or Delhi), for doing so reveals something of the broader cultural project at work: Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City (2011); Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars (2011); Pavan Varma’s Being Indian: Inside the Real India (2011); Anand Giridharadas’s India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking (2012); Akash Kapur’s Indian Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (2012); and Aman Sethi’s A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi (2012). As I have observed elsewhere (Davies 2016, 120–121), the issue of representation, especially as it is negotiated through a metaphor of surface and depth, is placed centre-stage by these non-fiction titles: their first clauses tend to conjure a ‘modern’ India by describing some sort of process or motion (‘Being’, ‘Calling’, ‘Becoming’), while the second makes a claim to reach beyond the aesthetic surface to recover and reveal something beyond it (‘Inside the Real India’, ‘Inside the Secret World’, ‘A True Story’) that is nevertheless, and somewhat paradoxically, aesthetically framed (‘A Portrait’). Even the title of Dalrymple’s own contribution to this non-fiction trend, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (2009), follows a similar formula. This pivot from an outward-facing, aesthetic surface to the revelation of a deeper truth that lies beyond or behind it is a literary technique no doubt with roots in earlier non-fiction movements across the global North (and in this sense it is not unlike the rise and transfer of the global city image itself). In his discussion of South Africa’s own twenty-first-century renaissance of literary non-fiction, Hedley Twidle notes a debt to US culture, where the ‘sense that a mere notation of the social milieu can outperform the carefully crafted imaginings of a novelist [became] a basic tenet of the “New Journalism”, stated perhaps most memorably by Philip Roth in 1961: “The novelist lies helpless before what he knows he will read in tomorrow’s newspaper. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures daily that are the envy of any novelist”’ (2012, 14). As Twidle summarises, invoking the old cliché, in this view the truth is simply stranger— and more interesting—than fiction. But what this characterisation of literary non-fiction elides is the fact that much novelistic fiction is of course itself based on ‘news’ from the ‘real’ world. A writer’s choice to produce a work of literary non-fiction is

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therefore a question less of content than it is of genre, an analytical shift that ‘allows one to probe the various types of “reality effect” established by different written modes [and] the various kinds of contract that they posit between text and reader’ (Twidle 2012, 7). Rather than the truth being simply stranger than fiction (there are plenty of fictionalised accounts of strange truths, after all), the decision to write in the genre of literary non-fiction should instead be read as an attempt to achieve a reality effect, one that is itself historical, situated within and responding to a particular socioeconomic or cultural context. This understanding of literary non-­ fiction as genre provides more solid ground on which to account for the rise in creative non-fictional responses to India’s cities, which is—as I am arguing—in no small measure a consequence of those cities’ coterminous reshaping by the ‘world class’ aesthetic and its hegemony of form. This contention is most obvious in Katherine Boo’s US National Book Award-winning Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life and Death in a Mumbai Slum (2012). Like its contemporaries, this title also pivots on the tension between aesthetic representation, which is implied to lack some sort of infrastructural depth, and the non-fictional element of literary non-fiction that allows it to drive at something more ‘real’ and immediate beyond (‘life and death’). More revealing still, the aesthetic surface that Boo’s title promises to get ‘behind’ turns out to be a billboard advert for a specialist tiling company. These tiles will adorn the homes of the Indian middle class with a surface eternally beautified (‘forever’) in accordance with an imported global aesthetic. While the metaphorical resonance with Ghertner’s notion of ‘rule by aesthetics’ is already in play, the fact that the billboard conceals a massive urban slum from international visitors arriving via plane into Mumbai’s airport doubles down on this enticing—and surely intentional—evocation. And yet, while it self-identifies and is marketed as non-fiction, Boo’s book is written in the form of novelistic fiction, narrated by an invisible author-God who is able to inhabit the inner conscience of her characters (see Davies 2018). In this sharp contradiction, Beautiful Forevers epitomises what I believe to be the broader, and shared, political project of much of India’s recent literary non-fiction. In an urban context where aesthetics are impinging upon and reshaping the material infrastructure of the Indian city, the move to non-fiction is a generic choice made in pursuit of particular ‘reality effect’, one that tries proactively to subvert those world class aesthetics by exposing them as little more than a fiction.

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Something similar is at work in the titles of the three texts that we will look at more closely in the second half of this chapter: Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004); Rana Dasgupta’s Capital: The Eruption of Delhi (2014); and Kushanava Choudhury’s The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta (2017). The title of Mehta’s book— which was published well ahead of the non-fictional curve and its cluster of publications around 2011 and 2012—indicates an explicitly expansive and roving take on Bombay, one that includes all of the infrastructural depths and spatial contradictions of its urban landscape. Dasgupta’s title, meanwhile, foregrounds Delhi’s dual status as the capital city of the subcontinent and the centre of a rapacious capitalist economy, before then positioning its non-fictional account of Delhi’s urban realities as ‘erupting’ through the city’s outward-facing global image. Finally, Choudhury’s most recent non-fictional account of his return to Calcutta lands on a word that is not quite ‘global’ or ‘world’, but comes very close to these in ‘epic’. In the subtitle, yet again, we find a pivot from an airborne ‘outside’ downwards to the level of the ‘streets’, that latter word indicatively chosen to suggest the narrative’s reaching towards a part of the city usually occluded by the crisp clean lines of shopping malls and corporate skyscrapers. It is to a more in-depth discussion of each of these three examples that I will now turn.

Bombay: Maximum City Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City is the author’s attempt to come to terms with his childhood city of Bombay after twenty-one years living in New York. Returning to India on the cusp of the millennium, Mehta adamantly insists on the name Bombay rather than Mumbai, positioning the latter within a resurgent nationalist milieu that, even in 2004, he associates with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP): ‘It is nonsense to say that Mumbai was the original name—Bombay was created by the Portuguese and the British from a cluster of malarial islands and to them should go the baptismal rights’ (2004, 142). Such non-fictional anecdotes are scattered through Mehta’s massive text, which at almost 600 pages feels as jampacked as the burgeoning city it describes. The book’s subtitle, ‘lost and found’, captures something of the multi-directional movement of Mehta’s narrative, which drifts along the many threads and leads thrown up by the city. In so doing, Mehta allows space for the city to breathe, his eye untrammelled by the cloistered vision of the global city aesthetic.

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Maximum City dramatises the shift from the global city’s outward-­ facing aesthetic to the on-the-ground reality of street life in Bombay through a notably vertical metaphor: If you look at Bombay from the air; if you see its location—spread your thumb and your forefinger apart at a thirty-degree angle and you’ll see the shape of Bombay—you will find yourself acknowledging that it is a beautiful city: the sea an all sides, the palm trees along the shores, the light coming down from the sky and thrown back up by the sea. It has a harbour, several bays, creeks, rivers, hills. From the air, you get a sense of its possibilities. On the ground it’s different. My little boy notices this. “Look,” Gautana points out, as we are driving along the road from Bandra Reclamation. “On the one side villages, on the other side buildings.” He has identified the slums for what they are: villages in the city. The visual shock of Bombay is the shock of this juxtaposition. (15)

Vision and perspective are crucial to Mehta’s descriptions of the city. Writing early on in his book, Mehta asks his readers—many of whom are no doubt likely to be international—to visualise Bombay from an aerial perspective. This may be the view from the plane via which they have arrived as tourists into the city, or even the representation of Bombay on a map. Mehta is at pains to point out that this representation is remarkably attractive: with its shoreline topography of palm trees and bays, Mehta conjures a vision of a tourist coastal retreat, one that accords with a ‘world class’ aesthetic and its obsession with clean urban waterfronts. But though he invokes this admittedly tantalising image, Mehta is also drawn to its various occlusions. In the first instance, by asking readers to physically open out their hand and recreate the shape of Bombay’s island districts, he brings home to them corporeally the visual abstractions nestled into this view from above. Then, without even a paragraph break, the ‘ground’ comes crashing up towards us, Mehta’s syntax replicating the ‘visual shock’ of the city’s stark juxtapositions. The most obvious of these—so obvious that even Mehta’s young son notices it—is the marked contrast between the city’s formal and informal enclaves: the massive concrete buildings, global capital calcified into solid materials, and their immediate neighbours, the rickety infrastructure of the slums. As Mehta’s narrative proceeds, interleaving carefully researched histories of the city with first-hand accounts of meetings with its inhabitants, the precarious residents of those informal spaces move centre-stage to

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become not somehow secondary to Bombay’s urban life, but rather fundamentally—even infrastructurally—constitutive of it. Mehta complains regularly of Bombay’s failing infrastructure: ‘plumbing, telephones, the movement of huge blocks of traffic. Bombay is not the ancient Indian idea of a city. It is an imitation of a western city, maybe Chicago in the 1920s’ (26). The comparison with Chicago, a city famously cited by James C. Scott at the beginning of his field-defining 1998 work of anthropology, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, is especially revealing here. At first, Mehta appears to be suggesting a rather crude neo-colonial comparison, one that positions cities in the South along a linear axis of development towards the metropolises of the North. But in fact, the reference is far more subversive than this, as Mehta drives instead at the absurdity of ‘imitation’ and critiques India’s attempt to import a foreign ‘world class’ aesthetic into an urban context that visually, and thus politically, disavows that global imagery. Moving further into the book, Mehta builds this critique of a governmental strategy predicated on visual aesthetics by centring the urban precariat themselves. On visiting a slum occupied by a group of Muslim women, he begins by noting the ‘sewers, which are open’, and which ‘run right between the houses [where] children play and occasionally fall into them’ (58). Mehta is attuned to the visual politics of the slum, while also insisting on the more immediate question of public health: ‘It’s not merely an aesthetic discomfort’, he writes, ‘typhoid runs rampant through the slum and spreads through oral-faecal contact’ (58). He pins these conditions directly to the failing infrastructure (‘open sewers’), rejecting a governance that views infrastructure as simply an aesthetic project to highlight instead its obligation to support urban life. Recounting the survival strategies of the Muslim women’s group, who have set up their own child-care centre (among other things), Mehta emphasises how an aesthetic-oriented urban governance overlooks the informal infrastructures that are actually holding the city together. As he writes: If there is hope for Bombay, it is in this group of slum women, all illiterate, and others like them. Much more than the men, the women have to deal with such issues first hand. […] We tend to think of a slum as an excrescence, a community of people living in perpetual misery. What we forget is that out of inhospitable surroundings, the people have formed a community, and they are as attached to its spatial geography, the social networks they have built for themselves, the village they have re-created in the midst of the city, as a Parisian might be to his quartier […]. (60–61)

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Mehta’s critique combines here the visual with the political to counter the disruptive beautification drives of slum clearances. He asks us to see beyond the surface-level aesthetics of the slum, so offensive to global city imagery, to consider that in fact here is where the ‘real’ city might be found. While critical of attempts to imitate American or European cities, which often drive the rule by aesthetics, Mehta still concludes his argument by making a sly comparison that brings his encounter with the slum women to a close. Their community, their self-built infrastructure, their way of seeing the city is, Mehta notes, close to a version of Parisian life— Paris being, of course, an iconic global city that has for decades been cited by redevelopers to justify displacement in Indian cities. In this subtle circulation, Mehta simultaneously objects to the discriminatory optics of global urbanism that are forced anachronistically onto Bombay, but he does so without himself losing sight of the most social aspects of megacities: the informal becomes, for Mehta, the infrastructural.

Delhi: Capital City Published a decade later than Mehta’s Maximum City, Rana Dasgupta’s Capital comes after the non-fiction peak of the early 2010s, but is comparably magisterial in its coverage and lyrical innovation. Born and raised in Britain, at the beginning of the book Dasgupta has recently moved to Delhi and, like Mehta, is trying to make sense of what he calls his ‘adopted city’ (2014, 45). However, while Mehta’s text performs a roving détournement through the city (‘lost and found’), Dasgupta sets out to document the lives of a more specific urban demographic. As he writes in the introduction to the book, he is interested especially in ‘the members of that rising, moneyed section of the Indian urban population who see themselves as the primary agents—and beneficiaries—of globalisation’ (xiv). From the outset, then, the self-identified subjects of Dasgupta’s book are the advocates for—and often implementors of—the global aesthetic that is ruling his city. But in fact, Dasgupta’s is a far more total portrait; not totalising, but cognisant of the fact that the middle-class image of the city cannot be understood without the urban precariat that hold the city together. As he drives through Delhi in the book’s opening pages (you cannot walk in Delhi, as you might in parts of Mumbai or Calcutta), these precarious lives are shown peculiarly adorning the infrastructure of the city itself:

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And for countless thousands of Delhi residents, these streets are not simply a passageway but a home, and their flesh is never far from moving vehicles. At this hour I can already see them settling down into resting places for the night. There are the throngs of refugees from “development” and “real estate”, the ones who lived relatively stable lives until they were displaced by the new factories and private townships of India’s boom. […] Here they sleep in the roving glare of headlights, their heads drawn in under their blankets. (21)

In this passage, Dasgupta reveals how the aesthetic-driven governance of India’s capital has literally turned the city inside out. The urbanist Asef Bayat has persuasively described the increasingly enclosed and privatised city, especially in the global South, as a ‘city-inside-out’ (2012, 112–113). Here, the most precarious urban dwellers are squeezed out into public space, the only place left for them to reside. As Bayat explains, rather than building public housing—a visible blemish on the urban landscape—or allowing informal communities to remain in view, global city governance instead invests in flashy infrastructure projects such as shopping centres and gated communities that purportedly conjure a ‘world class’ image. And yet, as Dasgupta shows, these aesthetic rhythms intensify the decimation of the infrastructures of informal communities and exacerbate the ‘inside-outing’ process. In Dasgupta’s vision, Delhi’s roads and other infrastructures are not only for sleeping: ‘the city’s outer surfaces function as a giant bedroom, bathroom, and closet for the hundreds of thousands who live in it unenclosed’ (2014, 22). That Dasgupta guides his reader through the city-inside-out from the point of view of the car highlights again a deeply visual politics of surface and depth, and visibility and concealment. We are peering with Dasgupta through the windscreen from the private space of his car, looking out at urban dwellers who have no access to any private space at all. All they can do is shrink away from ‘the roving glare of the headlights’—code, perhaps, for the roving gaze of the non-fiction writer and his readers. Meanwhile, as Dasgupta continues, Delhi makes half-hearted bids to appear as a city with a global image: Like so much of the rest of the city’s infrastructure, these gap-toothed flyovers look ancient even when they have only just been built. Delhi’s recent multibillion-dollar makeover, completed just in time for the 2010 Commonwealth games, is already difficult to remember: down the centre of

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the main roads, great sections of the new dividing walls have broken off and fallen into the path of traffic, while the roofs are falling off the rusty Games stadiums, whose car parks lie cracked and empty. (23)

The city itself is falling apart, leaking and crumbling in a ‘macabre’ infrastructure time of cancelled, dystopic futures. The obsession with global appearances may have restructured the city under the rule by aesthetics, but the new infrastructures built to impress an international viewer are drawn—in Dasgupta’s portrait, at least—to be themselves precarious: the car parks are not crammed with international visitors, but instead ‘lie cracked and empty’. The only solid chunks of the city that remain are concrete slabs of flyover, and it is these that have been seized upon by an urban precariat as the last space in which they might rest. The result is a weirdly posthuman image: the flesh of bodies adorns steel and concrete, literalising to the point of perversity the urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone’s notion of ‘people as infrastructure’, where infrastructure is understood not as pipes, wires or cables, but as ‘incessantly flexible, mobile, and provisional intersections of residents that operate without clearly delineated notions of how the city is to be inhabited and used’ (2004, 407). This vision of the city as a kind of organism, with its bones and flesh turned inside out, shadows Dasgupta’s descriptions of Delhi and builds throughout his book. The purportedly world class city begins to appear as a sort of relentlessly multiplying bacterium seen through a microscope. To begin with, rural Indians—already once displaced and desperate for work—build informal housing on the city’s outskirts. As the city grows, this land becomes valuable, and soon the slum dwellers are dispossessed and their informal constructions demolished to be replaced by deluxe high-rise flats and new luxury malls. The evicted slum dwellers move further out, but as the city expands these plots of land too become valuable, and the brutal process begins all over again. Both the appetites of capital and The Capital are insatiable: if the city of Delhi is the infrastructural manifestation of capital accumulation itself, then Dasgupta, the literary non-fiction writer, is the surgeon, peeling back the city’s beautified skin to reveal and probe the gutsy turmoil inside. As Dasgupta describes, his aim is to delve into ‘the torrent of Delhi’s inner life, and to seek there the rhythm, the history, the mesh, from which a city’s lineaments might emerge’ (45; my emphasis)—lineaments, of course, describing the outer skin of a body’s face or visage.

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Calcutta: Epic City Kushanava Choudhury’s Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta is a yet more recent contribution to India’s urban literary non-fiction genre. The book again follows the trope established by Mehta and Dasgupta, telling the story of its author’s return to India after a lifetime in New Jersey, and documenting his attempt to make sense of the new city in which he finds himself. There are marked differences between Calcutta and Delhi or Mumbai, however. Choudhury’s is a city ‘clueless about the global aesthetic’, lacking ‘the comforts of modern leisure’ expected by a ‘global elite’ (2017, xxiii). Early on, he compares Calcutta with Delhi in a rather disdainful discussion of the latter’s more violent predicament: Delhi has no distinct urban culture, no sense of its own swaggering particularity, no heart. […] Delhi is not so much a city as an agglomeration of “enclaves”, as many of its gated communities are literally called. Its rich residents turn inward into the privacy of their own atomised lives; its poor are largely shunted out of sight. Stop and ask for directions in Delhi and no one knows, because no one is truly of the city. Ask for directions on any Calcutta street corner and a half-dozen moustachioed men will appear out of nowhere, determined to direct you to somewhere. They may offer radically divergent views on the matter [but] it is their city, their streets, their neighbourhoods. (6)

Calcutta’s more positive image in this account emerges precisely through a politics of vision and aesthetics. Delhi’s unfriendliness, Choudhury supposes, arises from the removal of the urban precariat from view. While this conflicts slightly with Dasgupta’s reading of the city, the cloistering of ‘rich residents’ into their private ‘enclaves’ suggests that perhaps it is not the fact that the urban poor can’t be seen, and that rather it is the middle classes who refuse to look. This is exactly the rule by aesthetics, in which the hegemony of a single social group dictates the hegemony of a single urban form. Calcutta, by contrast, is home to still public streets where the city’s inhabitants might suddenly ‘appear out of nowhere’. Rather than Delhi’s infrastructure of shining white walls and large steel barriers, there is a suddenly visible social infrastructure in Calcutta that will help you to make your way through—or perhaps more accurately, get lost in—its urban landscape.

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Choudhury is especially interested in Calcutta’s half-hearted attempt to capitulate to the global aesthetic, highlighting the seemingly contradictory views that arise in this more peripheral city (than Delhi at least). ‘India’s corporate boom was trickling into the city’, Choudhury writes: Next to grazing fields dotted with palms and cows, the likes of IBM, GE and Pricewaterhouse-Coopers had built glittering glass temples to global capitalism. Premodern and postmodern India headbutted each other as if waiting to deliver the punchline to a cruel joke. A peasant and a programmer walk into a bar …. (6–7)

Choudhury’s customary humour drives at the absurdity of the ‘world class’ aesthetic and its attempt to occupy the full field of vision. One of the central contradictions of the rule by aesthetics is that it condemns itself to a restless and ongoing project: by turning the urban precariat out of their informally constructed homes, so-called blemishes are simply shifted elsewhere, sometimes to the outer edges of the city, sometimes onto the street itself. Moreover, in the Indian city’s haste to achieve the global image, the image itself has moved centre-stage, while the lasting infrastructure required to sustain it has been overlooked. Choudhury points to the hustlers of his city, street hawkers who ‘steal power from the overhead lines to run a paan shop’ or ‘builders constructing high-rises with sand passed off as cement’ (xxi)—not to condemn them, of course, but to point to the on-the-ground subversion of efforts to implement and adapt a ‘world class’ aesthetic. The claim to totality is the great lie of the global image, which is in fact fundamentally designed to conceal as much as it reveals. In Choudhury’s Calcutta, we have globalisation’s true image, what the Warwick Research Collective, following Fredric Jameson, have called its ‘singular modernity’: ‘the face of modernity is not worn exclusively by the “futuristic” skyline of the Pudong District in Shanghai or the Shard and Gherkin buildings in London; just as emblematic of modernity […] are the favelas of Rocinha and Jacarezinho in Rio and the slums of Dharavi in Bombay’ (2015, 12–13; see also Jameson 2012). Choudhury may invoke the ‘premodern’ and ‘postmodern’ as descriptive terms to signify a certain ‘aesthetic’ or ‘look’, but their coming together in his non-fictional prose reveals that they are both reality effects, equally products of modernity.

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In Choudhury’s account, Calcutta is a city that resists surface-level alterations: ‘the city is a palimpsest’, he insists: ‘Like the political exhortations on city walls that defy a simple whitewash’, so too do the ‘stories rubbed out and written over still seep through, if you know how to look’ (171). Choudhury’s image of political urban graffiti seeping through the ‘whitewash’ pivots a notoriously vandalising practice—associated with street-level and often anti-capitalist resistance—into an aesthetic terrain that attempts and fails to gloss over it with a single layer of paint. Rule by aesthetics might entrench itself infrastructurally, as in Delhi’s flyovers and car parks built for the Commonwealth Games. But even then, Choudhury argues, it is possible to see past that image and to subvert it so long as ‘you know how to look’: this visual training toward a different urban optics is the task literary non-fiction has set itself.

Conclusion: Informality as Infrastructure These three texts, along with many of the other non-fiction titles that I have listed above, all use their genre to attend—at least in part—to the lives of the urban precariat. This, I have tried to show, is central in their attempts to dispel their chosen city’s restructuring under a rule by aesthetics. For while Ghertner’s work so convincingly demonstrates the productive—as opposed to simply representational—qualities of the global city image-making, we might counterpose this with Judith Butler’s (2004, 2009) work on precarious life, which similarly asserts the productive force of representations—especially through and via the media, but also in other artistic and literary forms. Butler is, of course, speaking of a very different context (America’s imperial view of the Middle East), but the general shape of their work on precarity is useful to the conclusion that I wish to draw here. For us to grasp a life as grievable and thus precarious, Butler argues, it must fit into our ‘frames of recognisability’ that shape ‘the more general conditions that prepare or shape a subject for recognition’ (2009, 5). This is also exactly how Ghertner’s rule by aesthetics operates: certain urban lives and even infrastructures themselves are recognised as grievable, while others most definitely are not, a decision made according to conditions of recognisability dictated—in the case of the Indian megacity—by a ‘world class’ aesthetic.

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Any counter to this must therefore take seriously the overarching imagistic and aesthetic frames of global city governance. As Butler reminds us: The problem is not merely how to include more people within existing norms, but to consider how existing norms allocate recognition differentially. What new norms are possible, and how are they wrought? What might be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognisability? What might be done, in other words, to shift the very terms of recognisability in order to produce more radically democratic results? (2009, 6)

This is a subtle but essential nuance that deepens this chapter’s argument about the recent shift to the non-fictional in writings of the twenty-first-­ century Indian megacity. It is not enough simply to push for the inclusion of an urban precariat within the existing frames of global city governance. Rather, those frames of recognition must themselves be challenged, upturned and reallocated. The move to the non-fictional therefore sets about emphasising precarious urban lives as themselves essential infrastructures of Indian cities, and in so doing rewrites them as ‘conditions for recognisability’, to use Butler’s words. In this way, they demand that we recognise informality, constituted as it is in precarious urban living, not as somehow secondary to—or beneath, below or behind—the more ‘formal’ aesthetic visions of global urbanism and its associated regimes of planned violence. Instead, they insist with decolonial urban commentators such as Ananya Roy that we recognise ‘informality as a mode of urbanisation’ itself (2005, 148). Caught in the strange truths documented by literary non-­ fiction, this genre effects informality as a concrete and organising infrastructure of the Indian city, one that resists ‘world class’ urbanism’s hegemony of form.

References Bayat, Asef. 2012. Politics in the City-Inside-Out. City & Society 24 (2): 110–128. Boo, Katherine. 2012. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum. London: Portobello Books. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London & New York: Verso. ———. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London & New York: Verso. Choudhury, Kushanava. 2017. The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Dalrymple, William. 2009. Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

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———. 2012. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum by Katherine Boo: Review. The Guardian, June 22. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/22/beautiful-­f orevers-­k atherine-­b oo-­ review. Accessed 4 March 2022. Dasgupta, Rana. 2014. Capital: The Eruption of Delhi. London: Canongate Books. Davies, Dominic. 2016. Occupying Literary and Urban Space: Adiga, Authenticity, and the Politics of Socio-economic Critique. In South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations, 119–138. Palgrave: London & New York. ———. 2018. Literary Non-Fiction and the Neo-Liberal City: Subalternity and Urban Governance in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55 (1): 94–107. Faleiro, Sonia. 2011. Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars. London: Canongate Books. Ghertner, D. Asher. 2015. Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giridharadas, Anand. 2012. India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Jameson, Fredric. 2012. A Singular Modernity. London & New York: Verso. Kapur, Akash. 2012. India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India. New York: Riverhead Books. Lefebvre, Henri. 1998. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Mehta, Suketu. 2004. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. London: Review, Headline Book Publishing. Ong, Aihwa. 2011. Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global. In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, ed. Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong, 1–26. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Prakash, Gyan. 2011. Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Roy, Ananya. 2005. Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning. Journal of the American Planning Association 71 (2): 147–158. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Sethi, Aman. 2012. A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi. London: Jonathan Cape. Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture 16 (3): 407–429. Twidle, Hedley. 2012. “In a Country Where You Couldn’t Make This Shit Up”?: Literary Non-Fiction in South Africa. Safundi 13 (1–2): 5–28. Varma, Pavan. 2011. Being Indian: Inside the Real India. London: William Heinemann. Warwick Research Collective (WReC). 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Rural-to-Urban Migration and Precarity in The Story of My Assassins, Q & A and The White Tiger Robbie B. H. Goh

Migration is often accompanied by precarity, particularly for the class of what have been termed “abject cosmopolitans” excluded in various ways by state regimes, or the vulnerable classes suffering various consequences of “negative cosmopolitanism” (Nyers 2003; Kent and Tomsky 2017). Many of the international migrations in Asia—whether shorter-term labour migrations, or marriage migrations, or even the migrations of longer-­ term semi-skilled middle-class individuals—involve precarity in various forms, including but not limited to human rights issues, health and safety concerns, financial vulnerability, and other related themes, which have collectively received considerable scholarly attention to date.

R. B. H. Goh (*) Singapore University of Social Sciences, Clementi Road, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_5

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What has received rather less scholarly attention is intra-national migration and its related precarity. As with international migration, the socio-­ economic divide is prominent: professionals, managers, those in the upper middle classes, have the means to move about securely and to ensure a reasonably high quality of life wherever they may be stationed. It is otherwise with the working classes in many Asian nations, for whom even intranational migrations are accompanied by risk and hardship in the form of unreliable sources of income, unsanitary and unsafe housing, exploitation by employers and landlords, greater exposure to disease and accident, and various forms of social injustice at the hands of private and public individuals and agencies. While intra-national migration can be from rural to other rural regions, what is much more common—and much more precarious for the migrant—is intra-national migration from rural to major urban areas where jobs are more readily available and incomes higher than in most rural/agrarian areas. Urban precarity, for intra-national migrants from rural areas, is a significant phenomenon in many of the large Asian countries like China, Indonesia and India, among others. The large rural hinterlands of these countries predisposes them to uneven economic development and “left behind” regions where poverty and unemployment compel many workers to become migrant labourers, particularly in the cities with their lure of relatively high incomes. The large populations of these countries also means that rural-to-urban migration is high in absolute numbers, and places considerable pressure on the limited resources in cities. India, with its developing (but unevenly so, by region and sector) economy, its huge urban centres of Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Chennai, Bangalore and others, and the sizeable disparity between urban and rural salaries, is a notable case study of intra-national migration and its attendant precarity. The desperate movement of workers from “backward” states like Bihar to urban centres like Mumbai in search of jobs is well known, and depicted in films like Nitin Chandra’s 2008 documentary Bring Back Bihar and novels like Siddharth Chowdhury’s 2005 Patna Roughcut (Wajihuddin 2008). Bihar is not the only “backward” state seeing an exodus of labour migrants of course, with Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and other (predominantly Northern) states contributing to the outflows; there are an estimated 139 million intra-national migrants in India (Sharma 2017). Rao and Vakulabharanam (2019: 261–262) have described the essential features of precarity in this Indian rural-to-urban phenomenon: an

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“agrarian crisis”, an “urban…employment crisis”, and a “social reproduction crisis”. While the former (the hollowing out of agricultural labour and impoverishment of agrarian life) is no less pressing, it appears to be the latter two—the ungoverned and unreliable nature of urban employment for the working poor, and the lack of provision of basic social resources for them—which preoccupy the social consciousness and literary imagination, certainly judging by the prevalent themes in Indian Anglophone literature. Some of the peculiar features of urban precarity, for these internal migrants from India’s rural regions, include the “informality” of urban employment (transient and unregulated employment conditions, wage inequalities), violence, poverty, vice and moral decay arising from desperation, powerlessness, and the lack of autonomy (Rao and Vakulabharanam 2019: 262; Barnes 2018: 2–5; Asian Development Bank 2009: 9). It is perhaps unsurprising, but needs to be noted, that neoliberal theories of the market and labour policies reinforce these problems by dismantling “standard employment” in favour of more informal and irregular practices that reinforce socio-economic inequality and the vulnerability of the urban poor. The theme of internal migration and its attendant perils features prominently in Indian literature in English. There are many characters (major as well as minor ones) in Indian Anglophone novels who are labour migrants to cities, a ubiquity which reflects the reality of intra-national labour migration in India. Beyond being a background condition of many characters, the migration of rural workers is used to portray the city as a microcosm of national inequality, of a power and wealth imbalance that is depicted as insurmountable. What is also significant about such depictions of precarity in Indian Anglophone novels is that it inheres not just in urban life, but in the very process of rural-to-urban movements and relations. Urban processes capitalize on these rural social problems, exploiting individuals in the name of the freedom and relative wealth that cities are supposed to offer. Cities, discredited as zones of hope and opportunity for the marginalized, become lenses through which the problems of India are enlarged, not ameliorated. The consistent thematic treatment of rural-to-urban precarity (notwithstanding differences in narrative modalities) serves to underscore consistent truths about India within this novelistic imagination. Contrary to liberal dreams of cities as places of socio-economic opportunity, the novels

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in question suggest that they merely reconfigure the inequities and oppressions of caste, religion, class and other larger problems of India as a whole. The journey in/to cities—not just urban life, but the causalities which bring characters to and from cities—thus becomes a dismal Bildungsroman, a dis-enlightenment movement that counters discourses of liberalism and development. This pattern will be shown in three novels with different narrative modalities but similar thematic concerns: Tarun J. Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins, Vikas Swarup’s Q and A and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.

The Story of My Assassins: Rural Precarity and the Fate of the Urban Bourgeois Liberal This novel by journalist Tarun Tejpal has elements of a ripped-from-­ headlines story, and is supposedly based on Tejpal’s own experience as a journalist who was the intended victim of a supposed assassination plot while he was investigating government corruption (Valiyamattam 2016: 214). The unnamed narrator-protagonist who works for a journal in Delhi is told that there is a plot to assassinate him, and is given a police guard. Five suspects are eventually arrested, and while the narrator is inclined to accept the police’s account of their guilt at face value, his lover Sara—a passionate champion of the underdog—conducts her own enquiries and discovers that it is really a scheme to get rid of one of the assassins, Hathoda Tyagi (so called because he bludgeons his victims with a hammer). The deaths of the other four assassins, and their purported target, are just collateral damage in this twisted scheme. Hathoda is really marked for death because he is the most feared enforcer of a dacoit, Donullia, and his brother Gwalabhai, who have run afoul of their onetime ally, the Brahmin politician Bajpaisahib. When the brothers scheme to break their alliance in order to gain more power and influence, Bajpaisahib prepares his covert assault on them by removing their deadliest weapon. Hathoda and the other four assassins are given a contract on the narrator (ostensibly because the latter had written an article exposing government corruption in the grain business, although there are also rumours that he is in cahoots with ISI and Pakistani agents), not knowing that Bajpaisahib had already tipped off the Delhi police with instructions to execute the assassins at the scene of the crime. The assassination and execution are thwarted because of an unlikely bit of chance and sentimentalism: Hathoda sees the narrator’s

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wife Dolly feeding the neighbourhood mongrel, which touches the killer’s deep-rooted love for animals, and he refuses to carry out the mission and instead starts questioning the contract. The five are arrested, the Delhi police and courts go through a mockery of an investigation, while the intrepid and zealous Sara undertakes her own investigation. The bulk of the novel—as its title suggests—comprises the narrator’s account of the back stories of the five would-be assassins. Notwithstanding the rather far-fetched premise of the over-elaborate assassination plot, with its various misdirections and serio-comic conspiracies, the heart of the novel is the narration of each assassin’s background and how they came to be pawns in a system of manipulative power far too vast for any of them to comprehend or countermand. While the five certainly vary in terms of religion, regional origins, criminal disposition and other personal details, their stories collectively show the precarity of the rural oppressed in India, and their exploitation within the urban machinery. Chaaku (so called because his favourite weapon is a knife) is the son of a soldier, coming from a family of small landowners in Haryana. Bullied all his life by “the dominant group of the village school” led by “Bhupi, the biggest landlord’s son”, one day he draws the knife in retaliation, cutting his tormentors and unleashing a wave of violence by Bhupi’s family (Tejpal 2009: 129). Chaaku’s mother and aunt are gang-raped, their family retainer mutilated, and the whole farmstead is burnt. Chaaku is forced to flee with his uncle Tattu to work for another uncle Shauki Mama in the latter’s transportation business in Chandigarh. There his alienation from society is confirmed by boys who “introduced him to the excitements of Chandigarh’s cinema halls, restaurants and ornamental parks”, to drinking, racing on scooters and motorcycles, and other aspects of riotous city living (Tejpal 2009: 156). As Chaaku himself comes to reflect, “since fleeing the village he had learnt a million things; not one of them in the classroom” (Tejpal 2009: 157). When Bhupi’s family catches up with them in Chandigarh, Shauki sends him to Delhi where he is supposed to further Shauki’s efforts to extend and diversify his business, but instead comes under the corrupting influence of Shauki’s supposed agent Mr Healthy, who teaches Chaaku—merely “putty waiting to be moulded”—to betray his uncle while servicing Mr Healthy’s sexual needs (Tejpal 2009: 169).

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The novel explores—with imaginative sentimentality, often with lurid details of sex and violence—the backgrounds of the other four assassins in turn. Kabir M is a Muslim whose family originally came from rural Rohilla basti in Uttar Pradesh. Kabir’s story is shaped by that of his father Ghulam, who was traumatized by the murders and mutilations of the young men from the basti during Partition, and who flees for the nearby town of Bareilly to work in its cinema hall. Ghulam officially names his son “Kabir M” to remove the mark of his religion that he believes would doom his son to a similar life of communal constraints and fear in the rural basti. He insists that Kabir “belonged to the city, to a life of hygiene and elegance and polished speech and educated work” (Tejpal 2009: 235). However, the life of the English-medium mission school and his father’s aspirations for him to become an urbane citizen of modern India prove too much to live up to. He falls into the company of petty thugs and thieves, and when one of the gang assaults the son of the new superintendent of police, the whole gang is arrested and horrifically brutalized by the police. Kabir, his manhood permanently scarred by one of the policeman, his spirit broken, becomes a citizen, not of India’s cities, but their jails: He spent the next decade of his life sailing in and out of jails. Soon there was no town in the region that had not felt his thieving fingers, and hardly a jail that had not seen his gentle shadow on its walls. Bareilly, Shahjahanpur, Rampur, Moradabad, Haldwani, Almora, Dehradun, Mussoorie, Agra, Meerut, Pilibhit, Ferozabad, Farrukhabad, Lucknow, Kanpur, Varanasi, Allahabad, Amethi, Ayodhya, Gorakhpur, Barabanki…. (Tejpal 2009: 267)

Two of the assassins are street urchins, both part of the same gang that live on the Delhi train platforms. Kaaliya has run away from his family of itinerant snake charmers who eke out a precarious marginalized existence, tired of the “cursed life that was their lot” (Tejpal 2009: 310). Chini—so called because he is believed to have come from China, but at one point is identified as the “Manipur boy”, coming from one of the tribal peoples in that northeastern state—flees his home after his family is massacred and he is abandoned on a train by an “uncle”. Both boys fall into the gang of urchins led by Dhaka, and survive by picking pockets and running scams, dulling the edge of the pain that comes with their lifestyle by inhaling glue. They are also exploited and abused by a gang of older boys, and see

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some of their gang members kidnapped and killed, all while the police turn a blind eye or take their own cut from them. Ultimately they discover that …the big world was not for them. They had no tools to take it on—no language, no knowledge, no contacts, no money. On the other hand the station was no longer big enough. New young boys were filling the holes and roofs. (Tejpal 2009: 359)

The fifth assassin, Hathoda, is the most likely assassin of the lot, but he too has a similar story of abuse and fleeing an intolerable situation in the countryside. The son of an impoverished rural landowner, he endures the rape of his sisters by thugs hired by his uncle due to a family dispute. Showing the hot-headedness which is to define his character, he kills with a hammer his three cousins who taunt him about the rape. Thereafter he is forced to flee, and comes under the protection of the local bandit king Donullia, who similarly became an outlaw after killing his high-caste landlord and son for repeatedly raping his sister. He becomes “the very swordarm of the brigand”, travelling throughout North India at Donullia’s commands, inflicting death or maiming on the “oppressor” or “tyrant” chosen for punishment (Tejpal 2009: 456). Yet the novel makes it clear that his propensity for violence is to a significant extent motivated by a desire for social justice and a trust that the instructions from his patron Donullia fulfil that goal. His violence is also qualified by his soft heart, particularly for animals, which leads to the thwarting of the journalist’s assassination when Hathoda sees the latter’s wife playing with the neighbourhood cur on several occasions. Tejpal’s novel is ultimately a bourgeois liberal exposé of the condition of the Indian underdog. This perspective is spearheaded by the journalist’s mistress Sara, who persists in digging up the truth behind the official narrative of the killers and the assassination plot. Seen through the sympathetic lenses sponsored by Sara, the five killers are all victims of the same social conditions. Despite differences in their individual stories, what emerges in the novel as a whole is an overarching story of religious and social prejudice, police and political corruption, and poverty and oppression. The five would-be assassins flee crushing poverty, oppression and injustice in their respective rural homes, only to find it equally impossible

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to live in the various towns and cities in which they find themselves, and ultimately become sacrificial pawns in the big game played by the rich and powerful, with the frequent complicity of the police. The mysterious processes of power and privilege in the city is a recurrent thread in the novel, seen in the total lack of awareness on the part of the so-called assassins. So far removed are they from the realities of power in India that Chaaku does not even realize that he is betrayed by Mr Healthy whom he worships and for whom he betrayed his own uncle, nor does Hathoda realize that he has been sent to his death ironically because of his loyalty to Donullia and the latter’s decision to break ties with the powerful Brahmin Bajpaisahib. The other three are even further removed from any glimpse of the forces that doom them. Even more significant than this overarching sense of the hopelessness of these five poverty-stricken lives is the effect that this episode has on the urban bourgeoisie like the journalist and Sara. Sara, ostensibly the champion of the underdog, is consumed by her unending quest to discover a truth which in its completeness is beyond her, and to effect a justice which will never take place. By the time she can intervene in the case of the five accused, “they will already have served most of their sentence. So it goes in this godforsaken country” (Tejpal 2009: 512). Sara’s obsession ultimately takes her away from the journalist and ends their affair and alliance: But she had thrown a switch and removed herself from my field. It could have been pretence. But she was not even looking at me any more, choosing to talk to the dining-table about some new law regulating inmates in the prisons of Haryana. (Tejpal 2009: 512)

As for the journalist, he comes to realize even after his investigations into the truth that “There was no big picture….There were only endless small pieces, and all you could do was to somehow manage your own” (Tejpal 2009: 478). Even his attempt to capitalize on his experience by writing a book fails when the publisher’s lawyers advise of “legal issues” that would arise; he is forced to take a tabloid job where he is warned by the editor not to touch a whole list of powerful people—“so many names that I lost track”—but is free to “slaughter the rabbits” (i.e. the multitude) instead (Tejpal 2009: 479). Above the journalist, the seemingly more privileged and powerful—like his partner Jai, and the three investors in their magazine—are no more immune from money politics: a powerful businessman

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called Kapoorsahib bails out the magazine at terms disastrous to the owners and editors, and turns it into his own media mouthpiece, “full of political and strategic bombast, and hardly any reportage” (Tejpal 2009: 476). Delhi—India’s capital, the home of the journalist and where the assassination was supposed to take place—thus becomes a symbol of the absolute Gordian knot of Indian power politics and corruption. It is the source of precarity for the rural poor, like the five would-be assassins who are moved willy-nilly by the rich and powerful. However, by the end of the novel Delhi is also a zone of precarity for the would-be urban bourgeois liberals, who are no more adept at understanding and negotiating India’s politics than are the rural poor. There is of course a huge difference between the poverty and abuse faced by the underclass, and the mere humiliation and thwarted aspirations of the middle class. Nevertheless, if the five hapless assassins are “innocent pawn[s] in power games” (Valiyamattam 2016: 274), this is also true—and perhaps the more horrifying for being true—in many ways of the urban middle class in this novel.

Q & A: Urban Precarity and Filmi Romance If The Story of My Assassins is a reversal or frustration of a liberal bourgeois exposé (which nevertheless magnifies the precarity of the common Indian), Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A uses elements of the Bollywood romance to heighten but also ironically undercut the pathos of the Indian underclass. The novel’s premise is that an impoverished orphan with little formal education manages to win a TV game show (Who Will Win a Billion, or W3B), simply because his eventful and precarious life happens to expose him to the answers to questions which coincidentally he is asked on the game show. In addition to the absurd degree of coincidence this involves, there are also elements of intelligence, grace and humour shown by the protagonist Ram and his friend Salim, not to be expected in individuals as marginalized and oppressed as they are, but perhaps in keeping with the conventions of the Bollywood films beloved by the two boys and constantly referenced throughout the novel. The protagonist, Ram Mohammad Thomas—a name, like that of Kabir M in The Story of My Assassins, that is intended to placate India’s inter-­ communal tensions, and does actually serve him well in the course of the novel—is abandoned as a baby at the Church of St Mary in Delhi. His origins are thus obscured, but his short-lived adoption by a couple

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“originally from Nagercoil in Tamil Nadu” because he was “a perfect match for [the wife’s] dark skin” suggests that he is the child of a woman from the far south who was probably indigent and unmarried (Swarup 2005: 50). After the death of his guardian Father Timothy, he is sent to the Delhi Juvenile Home for Boys, where he meets Salim, who “comes from a very poor family, which used to live in a village in Bihar” (Swarup 2005: 94). Echoing the story of some of the characters in The Story of My Assassins, Salim’s entire family is burnt alive by a Hindu mob seeking vengeance for a perceived desecration of a Hanuman temple, and he jumps on a train which takes him to Delhi where he “lay on the platform for two days, cold and hungry, delirious with fever and grief” (Swarup 2005: 95). Over the course of the novel, Ram—at times with Salim, at times on his own—goes through an incredible series of adventures mainly in the three large urban centres of Delhi, Mumbai and Agra. The adventures, told to a pro bono lawyer Smita Shah who swoops in to rescue him when he is detained and brutalized by the police for allegedly cheating to win the W3B show, are not told in chronological order, but rather in order of the relevant questions on the show as Ram plays the show’s recording to Smita. The show, with its extravagant cash prize of a billion rupees, represents the ultimate urban elite aspiration, the fairy-tale rags-to-riches prospect. Ram also has an ulterior motive in joining the show—to take revenge on the host Prem Kumar, a sadist who has victimized two women in Ram’s life—but the important cash prize does allow him to realize the bourgeois aspirations of himself and his circle, and takes them out of the poverty and oppression they encounter in their earlier lives. The boys’ adventures underscore the precarity of the underclass within India’s socio-economic structure, the oppressive power of the urban elite who control them. While The Story of My Assassins recounts some of these abuses in pseudo-journalistic sensational style, Q & A uses a serio-comic tone appropriate to the Bollywood filmi romances beloved by Salim and Ram (Valiyamattam 2016: 182). Details of horrific abuse are qualified by the fact that the hero is expected to win out at the end, and rescue the fair maiden. Again, the important device of the game show is the (as it were) moral cover for this unflinching and at times lurid account of Indian society. The Delhi Juvenile Home, which is the setting for the early part of the boys’ lives, is the antithesis of the urban dream symbolized by the game show. It is the collection point for the diffusive victims of India’s unequal society:

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They came from the slums of Delhi and Bihar, from the shanty-towns of UP and even from as far away as Nepal. I heard their stories of drug-addicted fathers and prostitute mothers. I saw their scars from beatings at the hands of greedy uncles and tyrannical aunts. I learnt of the existence of bonded labour and family abuse. And I came to fear the police. They were the ones responsible for sending most of the boys to the Juvenile Home. Boys caught stealing bread from a roadside stall or hawking black-market tickets at a theatre, and unable to bribe the constable. Or, most often, framed simply because the inspector didn’t like their face. (Swarup 2005: 93)

The boys, already permanently “diminished” in their own eyes by the home, are also prey to a pederastic deputy warden, Gupta, who almost rapes Salim. Gupta sells the boys to a gangster, Maman, who takes them to Mumbai with the intention of adding them to his troupe of child beggars whom he maims in order to gain more pity from people. The two boys escape from Maman’s clutches, but the good fortune through which this is possible only highlights the precarity of these impoverished children in India’s cities. Ram obtains a job as a servant to an ageing Bollywood star, Neelima Kumari, while Salim finds work as a delivery boy. Both boys live in a “chawl”, “a bundle of one-room tenements” which are “the smelly armpit of Mumbai” (Swarup 2005: 70). Overhearing the family drama next door through the thin walls, Ram gets involved when he develops a brotherly affection for the girl next door, Gudiya (who grows up to become the attorney Smita Shah who later comes to Ram’s rescue), who is sexually harassed by her father. The novel makes it clear that this family drama typifies working-class life in the city: when Ram tries to get the chawl supervisor to do something, he is told …I know the daily stories of wife-beating and abuse and incest and rape, which take place in chawls all over Mumbai. Yet no one does anything. We Indians have this sublime ability to see the pain and misery around us, and yet remain unaffected by it. So, like a proper Mumbaikar, close your eyes, close your ears, close your mouth and you will be happy like me. (Swarup 2005: 83–84)

Ram protects Gudiya by pushing her father off a staircase and, thinking him dead, is obliged to flee back to Delhi, where he works for the Australian defence attaché, Colonel Taylor. He has to endure the racism and condescension of his employers, robbery attempts by the servants (and accusations of being a thief), and Colonel Taylor’s video surveillance of the

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entire household, before Colonel Taylor is made persona non grata for espionage activities. Leaving Delhi to return to Mumbai, Ram is robbed by a dacoit on the train, and shoots him in a struggle. Jumping trains, he finds himself in the city of Agra, where he fakes his way into a job as a freelance tour guide at the Taj Mahal, and lives in a crowded tenement. There he sees more suffering and human misery, including his friend Shankar who dies of rabies because he is disowned by his wealthy mother who refuses to pay for the expensive medicine that could save him, the maid Lajwanti who turns in desperation to theft when her rich employer refuses her a loan to pay for the wedding dowry of her younger sister, and a cobbler whose son dies because he cannot afford medicine for him. He also falls in love with Nita, a young girl who is prostituted by her pitiless brother who refuses to allow Ram to buy her freedom. Salim has his own adventures in parallel to Ram’s, including being molested in a cinema by a man who turns out to be his film hero Armaan Ali (incognito, to hide his secret homosexuality). He is almost recaptured by Maman, but manages to escape on a bus, only to be almost killed by an angry Hindu mob. He is rescued by a Muslim passenger, Ahmed Khan, who turns out to be a contract killer. When Ahmed receives a contract to kill the film producer Abbas Rizvi who has taken the fledging actor Salim under his wing, Salim deviously substitutes Maman’s photo for Rizvi’s, thus ending the life of the gangster who would have mutilated the boys and enslaved them as beggars, while saving the life of the producer who can further his acting dreams. The relentless catalogue of human suffering endured and observed by the boys is only made tolerable by the filmi conventions that the novel constantly alludes to, and which promise a happy ending. Indeed, Ram not only wins the game show, but in doing so also exacts revenge on the host Prem Kumar (who is probably killed by the gangsters financing the show, after its financial ruin) for his abuse of Neelima and Nita. His wealth allows him to help various people in his life, including bailing Lajwanti out of jail and paying for her sister’s dowry, helping finance Salim’s film career, buying Nita’s freedom, and living the life of a wealthy man with her. There is some justification to Ram’s final explanation of his good fortune—that “luck comes from within” (Swarup 2005: 361)—since many of the happy consequences come from the courage (to run or fight), compassion for others, intellectual curiosity (or nosiness), and mental quickness that he shows throughout the novel. However, this does not change the fact that the misery and suffering depicted throughout the novel actually take place

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in “chawls all over Mumbai”, in Agra, Delhi and other parts of India. Victims of crushing poverty, religious violence, criminal intimidation and exploitation, sexual abuse, police corruption and complicity, for whom Ram’s good fortune comes too late to save, are not helped by the novel’s romance ending. Q & A in this sense can be seen as a kind of neoliberal opiate, offering the romantic possibility of wealth and security for at least a few members of the downtrodden underclass, even as it depicts the inequality and oppression that are endemic in India.

The White Tiger: Precarity as Revenger’s Tragedy Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger uses many of the tropes of rural-to-urban precarity, but its novelty comes in the form of an ostensible reversal of fortune, the triumph of the underdog against all odds. While Q & A also sees a reversal of the protagonist’s fortune, The White Tiger eschews that novel’s romance sentimentalism, the triumph of good over evil (both that of individual villains and of society). While this means that The White Tiger does not have as happily facile an ending as Q & A—ignoring the suffering of many other characters encountered by Ram, who cannot share his good fortune—the former novel is as exceptionalist in its own way, in its depiction of the kind of exceptional ruthlessness that is required for the underdog to win. The White Tiger, unusual in the corpus of Indian Anglophone literature in that it is a depiction of the triumph of the underdog (without recourse to the kind of filmi conventions seen in Q & A, or Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone) against the powers in Indian society, prepares us for that exceptionalism from the beginning. The protagonist-narrator, Balram, is the eponymous White Tiger, a figure he consciously identifies with, distinguishing himself from the other Indians who are symbolized in animal terms. The ordinary Indian he describes in the analogy of the “Great Indian Rooster Coop”, where the masses are controlled and exploited by the powerful few—an animal imagery repeated when he imagines his brother Kishan, whose body is wasting away laboring for his family, as being the chicken meat that he eats in the curry prepared for him when he visits his rural home (Adiga 2008: 73, 149). His employer Ashok, American-educated and more kind natured than the rest of his family, is seen as “the lamb”—a symbol that becomes even more appropriate when Balram sacrifices him by slitting his throat, in order to steal the money that will secure his own future (Adiga 2008: 120).

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Balram imagines himself in contradistinction to these passive individuals, and even in contradistinction to other men of power (the village landowners described as the “Stork”, “Buffalo”, “Wild Boar” and “Raven”). He is the White Tiger, so called by the visiting school inspector who is impressed by his mental acuity: “the rarest of animals—the creature that comes along only once in a generation” (Adiga 2008: 30). However, he is unable to break out of his lot of rural poverty by legitimate means: the promised scholarship does not materialize, and he has to leave school to help provide for his family and satisfy his rapacious grandmother Kusum. Realizing the trap of poverty and ignorance that his village (Laxmangarh, in rural Bihar) and its society poses, he defies family, geography and culture, running away to Delhi to become the city driver of the Stork’s family. After suffering constant exploitation and humiliation by the family (with the possible exception of the more kind-hearted Ashok), he endures the last straw when they seek to make him the scapegoat for a hit-and-run accident that appears to have resulted in the death of a homeless person. Although in the final analysis he does not have to go to prison for Ashok’s wife who was driving the car—simply because, as another commentary on urban precarity for the underclass, no one seems to have noticed the death of another street person—the resentment against the oppressive wealth and power of his employers causes him to kill Ashok and steal a bag containing 700,000 rupees, with which he starts a new life for himself, taking on the name “Ashok Sharma” in an ironic tribute to the employer he sacrifices for his happiness, and starting a business in Bangalore in South India. The symbol of the White Tiger is thus not only a hint of Balram’s exceptionalism—that he is truly an Indian who comes along “only once in a generation”, but also of the savagery that must be unleashed for this White Tiger to be truly free. Not only must he kill Ashok in order to realize his dream, but he also has to effectively kill his own family, whom he knows will be the victims of a horrific retaliation by his employer’s family. In his moment of clarity and decision—when he sees a white tiger caged at the zoo—he dictates a letter to his family apologizing for his sacrifice of them as well: “I can’t live the rest of my life in a cage, Granny. I’m so sorry” (Adiga 2008: 239). As a kind of compensation, he rescues his nephew Dharam from the fate that befalls the rest of the family, taking him

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along when he starts his new life in Bangalore. Like a revenger’s tragedy, Balram’s escape from the Indian “Rooster Coop” can only be effected by a violence and treachery which seems disproportionate even to the wrongs that Indian society and its elite class do to him. It is telling that the employer he murders in order to attain the money, Ashok, is the gentlest and kindest of the family, so that in a sense Balram displaces onto Ashok’s body the savage retribution he should really inflict on the Stork and his more exploitative other son. It is also telling that the violence against Balram’s own family that he knows will come as a result of his actions is not only disproportionate to his Granny Kusum’s controlling ways and greedy exploitation of his labour, but also results in the deaths of other family members who had not wronged him. As with the other two novels, the city is the promise of a better life, but also the deflation of that promise. Balram does find a job and a better salary than he could possibly have hoped for in Laxmangarh, but he also finds the perpetuation of many of the debilitating socio-economic factors that plague rural India. The ready supply of cheap rural labour means that middle-class employers can oppress Balram and other servants and treat them with contempt. Caste, religious and class prejudice follow him to the city, exacerbated by the fact that he is a “Country Mouse” (as one of his fellow drivers calls him) unused to the ways of the city. The same driver (christened, in turn, “Vitiligo-Lips” because of his skin affliction) sums up city life in an introductory lecture to Balram: The main thing to know about Delhi is that the roads are good, and the people are bad. The police are totally rotten….Our masters are not such a great lot, either. (Adiga 2008: 103)

This introduction is fulfilled by Balram’s experiences, from the scorn and poor living conditions imposed on him by his employer, to the general social conditions of poverty and homelessness that he sees, the brutality of the police, and the corruption and bribery of those in power like his employer’s family and the “Great Socialist” who pretends to champion the poor while lining his own pockets with bribes. While Balram sees his eventual home in Bangalore as a positive contrast to the “darkness” of Delhi and the rest of North India, the reader suspects

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this to be yet another unreliable claim. Even as a wealthy entrepreneur in Bangalore, in a city whose entrepreneurial spirit and openness to change he contrasts markedly with the caste-bound conservative North, Balram encounters the same socio-economic backwardness, corruption and political weakness he saw in Laxmangarh and Delhi. He transcribes a news report from All India Radio: In other news, the chief minister of the state today announced a plan to eliminate malnutrition in Bangalore in six months. He declared that there would be not one hungry child in the city by the end of the year. All officials are to work single-mindedly toward this goal, he declared. Five hundred million rupees will be allocated for malnutrition eradication. In other news, the finance minister declared that this year’s budget will include special incentives to turn our villages into high-technology paradises… .(Adiga 2008: 249)

Balram dismisses this as “crap” because it is similar to the rhetoric he has heard before, and plasters over the same socio-political ills he has encountered before. Bangalore even gets a visit from the same corrupt politician, the “Great Socialist”, who had run things in the North, suggesting the reach of that corrupt power politics even in this Southern India of “light”. Balram’s complicity in this system is noticeable. He is only able to establish his transportation company in the face of well-established rivals, by bribing the police to close down the rival companies. When one of his drivers kills a boy in a road accident, it echoes the earlier episode which threatened to send Balram to jail as a scapegoat for his employer’s wife. Balram pays off the police and the bereaved family, an act which he sees as marking his moral distinction from his old employers, yet the distinction is a dubious one, since he still perpetuates the money politics, exploitation of the poor by the rich, and corruption which characterized the earlier episode. Despite his claims that Bangalore and his life in it represent a different “New India”, he is ultimately plagued by episodes and anxieties that nothing has changed: “Getting caught—it’s always a possibility. There’s no end to things in India, as Mr. Ashok used to say” (Adiga 2008: 275). This sense of sameness is recognition that Balram (through violence and ruthlessness) may have changed his position within India’s structure of exploitative inequality, but he has certainly not changed anything about the system itself.

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Conclusion The precarity of India’s rural poor depicted in these three novels is corroborated by many other possible examples, from Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People to Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance to Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games to Amitav Ghosh’s Circle of Reason to Arundhati Roy’s Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and many others. There is almost a repetition ad nauseum of the familiar threats to the underclass, from the poverty, caste-­ based oppression and communal violence of rural India, to the police brutality, appalling living conditions, and political corruption and oppression in the city. The ubiquitous nature of this theme of the precarity of the underclass reminds readers that this very prevalence is self-reinforcing: the masses of rural poor labourers migrating to the cities, the masses of cheap labour in the cities, facilitate their own exploitation at the hands of the unscrupulous wealthy and powerful. This exploitation in the form of unregulated and underpaid employment (in the extreme) keeps the underclass powerless to improve their condition (through education, collective action, the use of information), and thus perpetuates the whole process. The three novels discussed here—The Story of My Assassins, Q & A and The White Tiger—offer an interesting spectrum of possibilities and narrative modes. In The Story of My Assassins, conditions prove to be far too powerful against the marginalized individuals, who are moved willy-nilly by political machinations and suffer their fates (imprisonment, mutilation, abuse and even death) with varying degrees of passivity. The interesting perspective in this novel is the effect that these underclass stories have on the characters (like the unnamed journalist, his partner Jai and his lover Sara) who have claims to be urban elites themselves. The novel ultimately reveals that since power in India resides in the rarefied stratosphere of the very elite few, then even those who would seem to possess the economic and social capital to be immune to this power actually do not understand and cannot access it. Precarity, in this novel, proves to apply (mutatis mutandis) to the bourgeois liberal intelligentsia as well, who are not immune to at least the threats and disruptions to life, career and personal happiness that the shadowy powerful can inflict. In Q & A, social conditions are shown to be surmountable, with the suggestion that it is not Ram’s outrageous luck that is responsible for this, but rather the “luck…from within” which inheres in Ram’s infallible

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kindness and courage (Swarup 2005: 361). Yet of course even this kind of inner resilience is itself exceptionalism that stretches credibility, given Ram’s background and hardships, and given the number of other marginalized characters who fall along the way. This exceptionalism is sustained by the kind of Bollywood filmi expectations that the novel constantly gestures towards. In The White Tiger, a bitingly satirical novel, exceptionalism is again employed to imagine the underdog overcoming precarity and seemingly joining the ranks of the urban elite. Once again the exceptionalism comes in the form of inner qualities that can somehow sharply distinguish the individual from the poor masses, but in this case those qualities are an unusual ruthlessness, treachery and violence. Even with these forms of exceptionalism, both these novels conclude with the realization that for others, precarity is pervasive and deterministic. The India of “light” does not offer any solutions to these pervasive threats, any more than it offers Balram the guarantee of continued safety and prosperity.

References Adiga, Aravind. 2008. The White Tiger. New York: Free Press. Asian Development Bank. 2009. Urban poverty in India. New Delhi: BS Books. Barnes, Tom. 2018. Making cars in the new India: Industry, precarity and informality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chowdhury, Siddharth. 2005. Patna Roughcut. London: Picador. Kent, Eddy, and Terri Tomsky. 2017. Introduction: Negative cosmopolitanism. In Negative cosmopolitanism: Cultures and politics of world citizenship after globalization, ed. Eddy Kent and Terri Tomsky, 3–27. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Nyers, Peter. 2003. Abject cosmopolitanism: The politics of protection in the anti-­ deportation movement. Third World Quarterly 24 (6): 1069–1093. Rao, Smriti, and Vamsi Vakulabharanam. 2019. Migration, crises, and social transformation in India since the 1990s. In The Oxford handbook of migration crises, ed. Cecilia Menjivar, Marie Ruiz, and Immanuel Ness, 261–278. New York: Oxford University Press. Sharma, Krishnavatar. 2017. India has 139 million internal migrants. We must not forget them. World Economic Forum, October 1. https://www.weforum.org/ agenda/2017/10/india-­h as-­1 39-­m illion-­i nternal-­migrants-­we-­must-­not-­ forget-­them/. Accessed 28 October 2019. Swarup, Vikas. 2005. Q & A. London: Black Swan. Tejpal, Tarun J. 2009. The story of my assassins. Brooklyn: Melville House.

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Valiyamattam, Rositta Joseph. 2016. Personal and national destinies in independent India: A study of selected Indian English novels. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Wajihuddin, Mohammed. 2008. “Bihari” has become an abuse. Times of India, August 10. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Review/Bihari_has_become_ an_abuse/articleshow/3347091.cms. Accessed 20 February 2011.

The Precarity of the Urban Spirit: Abha Dawesar’s Babyji, Diksha Basu’s The Windfall, and Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar John C. Hawley

Pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps in South Asia is a romantic myth that was always mostly aspirational and nowadays even less factually descriptive. “As one highly significant aspect of contemporary globalization,” writes Margrit Shildrick in 2019 in the South Atlantic Quarterly, “neoliberalism pursues a policy of putative self-dependency and rational self-management that seem at odds with the widely recognized capacity of globalization to undermine the certainties of spatial and temporal orientations” (Shildrick 2019, 595). Years ago, individuals in various social classes did not have equal opportunities for success in business and elsewhere, and certainly do not have them today. Sharryn Kasmir suggests that “precarity has always been a feature of capitalist societies” and that

J. C. Hawley (*) Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_6

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“precariousness has perpetually characterised working people’s lives, especially in the Global South” (Kasmir 2018, online). Kasmir also notes that “informal, temporary, or contingent work is the predominant mode of livelihood in the contemporary world, where garbage picking, performing day labor, selling petty commodities, and sourcing task-based ‘gigs’ through digital platforms exemplify some of precarity’s many forms.” The problem is evident not only in various forms of manual labor: those employed in intellectual labor in categories such as academia increasingly fret over the inequities routinely dished out to contingent laborers who make up the majority of their ranks and live without the security of a tenured position in their schools. But Kasmir goes on to make the following argument: Precariousness is also used to denote a general, pervasive ontological condition of vulnerability, displacement, and insecurity, not explicitly tied to the contemporary form of neoliberal capitalism or class relations, but instead characteristic of transhistorical and existential forces. This philosophical framing inspires close-to-the-skin descriptions of precariousness that highlight experiences and feelings of anxiety, disenfranchisement, and loss of hope for the future. (online)

Anxiety, disenfranchisement, and loss of hope for the future: in this chapter I wish to demonstrate how this philosophical understanding of the precarious condition, in some ways not very far from what an earlier age characterized as the “thrownness” (Martin Heidegger’s Geworfenheit) of the existential context of individual subjectivities (Bauman 2000), informs the lives of young Indians in three major cities: Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai. Taken together, these sites of precarious striving are emblematic of what social psychologist David Neilson describes as class variegated denial of precarity, which therapists seek to counter with acknowledgment of the condition and, then, by motivating and guiding the individual’s search for forms of social resistance and self-actualization.

Delhi: Spending Capital To look at contemporary Delhi is to look at the symptoms of the global twenty-first century in their most glaring and advanced form. (Dasgupta 2015, 439)

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In 2013 The Hindu newspaper estimated that, by 2020, “the median individual in India [would] be 29 years, very likely a city-dweller, making it the youngest country in the world” (Shivakumar 2013). Chetan Bhagat, Mohsin Hamid (2013), Arundhati Roy, and a good many other novelists have analyzed what it is that this “young South Asia” is seeking, and while arguably addressing different segments of youthful society, the novelists generally each self-consciously seek an audience from among “the best and the brightest” among the strivers—by which they mean those who maintain a hold on their “souls,” who have at least an inkling that there may be greater goals worth striving for than material acquisition (and who have the luxury to wonder about such things). For their part, it will come as little surprise that these young citizens, intent on succeeding but finding endless obstacles thrown by society in their paths, universally talk of corruption as a defining characteristic of their public lives (Hawley 2017).1 At the same time, the controversial recommendations of the Mandal Commission, submitted at the end of 1980 and officially accepted by Prime Minister V.  P. Singh in August of 1990, that sought, so it was argued, to level the playing field for the various social classes, have to date not been implemented in most Indian states (Indian Express). This incompletion is, no doubt, a relief to some of the young, judging from the protests from members of various classes of Indians (and for multiple and often opposite reasons) when they were proposed some decades ago (Anon 2015, 2016). Nonetheless, the sluggishness of this project is demonstrative of the intransigence of the structural obstacles that members of this democracy (some might say, plutocracy) face all their young lives (Mani 2021). This potentially explosive and impending source of social malaise—the growing numbers of young people with agonizingly disparate access to agency in South Asian society—has increasingly become the focus of South Asian fiction, with a great many coming-of-age novels structuring their narratives around financial precarity among the poor (especially those who move to cities) and other classes who sometimes succeed in acquiring a tenuous grip on greater security, or who inherit it, but who are often shown in such novels as having done so at the cost of degrees of ethical and cultural impoverishment. This chapter is about striving in India, about the successes that are sometimes possible, and about the particular kinds of losses and psychological insecurities that are described in some of these novels and attributed to the forces of precarity and the structures of power.

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The epigraph beginning this discussion of Delhi suggests the history and geographical setting into which the young are born and where they forge their mature sense of self: the major cities of India, which Rana Dasgupta describes as prophetic symbols of something larger than a South Asian dilemma. Dasgupta theorizes that the west’s confident familiarity with the history of “progress,” the gradual “civilizing” of the frontier by a rather brutal central state that roots out local mafias (the robber barons, etc.), is really not the historical vector for cities in the rest of the emerging world. The time for that systematic imposition of order has now passed, he argues. “The tale of the modern city,” he writes, “was that of the absolute inevitability of the victory of unified, centralized administrative power over everything else. The accompanying fear—that all vitality would eventually be lost and human beings would no longer know or love anything except the mechanisms of their own control—was never sufficient to put the brakes on this unidirectional expansion” (2015, 434). In the emerging places in the world, on the other hand, “the formal will never defeat or even rival the informal. Large portions of their cities will continue to be self-administered by communities who are little known to authorities or to each other. They will continue to build architectural and social systems that are both ingenious and unknown. In the grip of ‘globalisation’ they will remain quite foreign and untamed” (435). Precarity is, thus, compensated for on the local level in rhizomatic social structures outside the structures that encourage global networks. Even very well-traveled westerners find cities like Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata overwhelming, perhaps oppressive, certainly in need of greater obvious order. But in Dasgupta’s experience (and his views here might well be disputed by other South Asians), “many even of the most Westernised of my co-citizens find the singular eye of the Western state excessively pedantic and tiring, and find relief in India’s more paradoxical multitude of authorities” (2015, 435). The implication seems to be that for those who grow up in what appear to westerners as cities that are becoming ever-more dystopic, this effervescent mayhem is much livelier, with its nurturing pockets of familiarity, of personal internal maps and an individualized hermeneutics of getting through the metropolis—and life. “If the city of Delhi is globally interesting,” he writes, it is not because it is an example of a city on its way to maturity. It is interesting because it is already mature, and its maturity looks nothing like what we were led to expect, in times past, that mature global cities looked like. This

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city, with its broken public space, with its densely packed poor living close to some of the most sweeping, most sparsely populated areas of any big city anywhere in the world, with its aspiring classes desperately trying to lift themselves out of the pathetic condition of the city into a more dependable and self-sufficient world of private electricity supplies and private security— this is not some backward stage of world history. It is the world’s future. (2015, 439)

And this, Dasgupta argues, is a reality “we are all heading towards” (2015, 439). Dasgupta suggests, therefore, that familiarity does not breed contempt. It breeds desperation, and sometimes ingenuity. As novelist Aravind Adiga puts it, “Delhi is a city where civilization can appear and disappear within five minutes” (Adiga 2008a, 241). Reading Dasgupta’s description against the sociological analysis of Zygmunt Bauman, one can see how “precarity” is simply the air that one breathes in Delhi. Building on Mikhail Bahktin’s description of the “cosmic” precarity that is the existential human condition, Bauman notes that this cosmic condition, a vulnerability inherent in living because of natural hazards, is rendered more obvious by an “official” precarity that is fortified by visible and invisible structures of power in contemporary society—religion, government, and so on (Bauman 2016). In short, these official agents, for varying reasons and with a multiplicity of explanations, turn individuals and social groups against other individuals and social groups. And this is very much the world that Dasgupta finds in his interviews with the people of Delhi, from all social classes: “Delhi had become a society that had, in its bleakest moments, ceased to believe in the idea of society—which was why the state, and religious identities, and other surrogates for ‘society’, were so fetishized. And when there is no society, you might as well despoil away, because you cannot harm a society that does not exist. If you don’t do it, everyone else will, and for just the same reason” (Dasgupta 2015, 312). If, as I noted earlier, writers like Chetan Bhagat, Mohsin Hamid, and Arundhati Roy heard from South Asian young people that corruption was a constant in their lives, this is much the same as what Dasgupta heard from those with whom he spoke, and he offers a criticism of the self-defensive source of these various corruptions: “Corruption does not stem primarily from wicked or greedy individuals; it comes from destroyed social relations” (312).

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On such constantly shifting grounds and in an environment of increasingly uncertain social relations, the understandable rationale for self-­ protective individual striving among the talented young can lead not only to questionable ethical decisions but also to creative transgressions of tried-and-true norms. Abha Dawesar’s Babyji (2005) typifies this brave new world in which protagonists are making choices and shaping themselves in unexpected and transgressive ways, characters who are portrayed as complicated and not wholly blameless in their choices and the consequences of those choices. In her review of the novel for India Today, Tara Sahgal writes that “Babyji is at once a coming-of-age story, a coming out story, a rebel yell against the moralising forces that would prefer people with ‘unconventional’ sexualities to just disappear and a critique of India’s caste and class divisions. It is a genuine inquiry into the absurdly simplistic systems of thought that human societies love so much” (Sahgal 2005, online) Set in 1980s Delhi, it is the story of Anamika (nicknamed Babyji by her servant), a 16-year-old schoolgirl from a Brahmin family who is very good at quantum physics. She would seem to be exactly the sort of citizen that the structures of power would choose to develop and thrive and benefit from all that is not precarious. The fly in the ointment, though, is her sexuality: she is increasingly self-confident juggling three simultaneous affairs who two women older than herself (one her teacher, twice her age, and one the family servant) and a fellow student, with whom she is quite aggressive. The book won the 2005 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian fiction and the 2006 Stonewall Book Award for fiction. The complexity of the morals of her coming out are honest and, judging from the reaction from one lesbian reviewer, somewhat upsetting. “I don’t know what to think about Babyji,” she writes. This is going be less of a review and more of an unpacking of my emotions. It’s one of the most uncomfortable reading experiences I have had. … Anamika is manipulative and demanding, frequently pushing into areas of questionable consent with all three of her partners. Maybe it’s as simple as saying that Anamika functions as both victim and perpetrator in this book, often at the same time. And maybe that’s a reality that I don’t want to face, that it’s possible to be both, and that the question of who’s in the right is not so easy to answer. (Danika 2015, online)

One suspects this is the impact the author intended, demonstrating the essentially precarious condition of young lesbians in India to whom

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society does not offer ‘clean’ choices that do not force one to be both victim and perpetrator. In an interview for Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre the novelist explained the rambunctious world in which she herself matured: “In the Delhi I grew up in,” she says, “everything happened. Married women fell in love with pubescent girls, boys climbed up sewage pipes to consort with their neighbors’ wives, and students went down on their science teachers in the lab. But no one ever talked about it” (2013, 3). The notable difference between her generation and that of her parents, perhaps, is this desire to, in fact, “talk about it.” Anamika stitches her life from sexual exploration and an intense and deep interest in scientific objectivity and theory, possibly disturbing the reader with the ease that accompanies this seemingly incompatible imaginative matrix: I was reading a popular book on chaos theory which said that three implied chaos. I wanted chaos because then I could create my own patterns with it. I saw the beautiful fractal diagrams in the book and could see Sheela [the school friend] and India [the teacher] and Rani [the servant] inside one of those diagrams, getting smaller and smaller, the pattern repeating endlessly. I closed the book feeling sure I was doing the right thing with my life. Chaos was modern physics, it was the science for today (Dawesar 2005, 49).

One might argue that Babyji’s triangulation of relationships is a personal mapping of her part of the world, a world that otherwise cannot be a reliable subject for any traditional ‘cartographer,’ portraying a shifting terrain as it always seems to be. Hers is an attempt to negotiate daily life in a metropolis that typifies the chaos of precarious contemporary life, the city described by novelist Aman Sethi as follows: For as long as I can remember, Delhi looked like a giant construction site inhabited by bulldozers, cranes, and massive columns of prefabricated concrete; but the rubble has masked the incredible changes and dislocations of factories, homes, and livelihoods that occurred as Delhi changed from a sleepy north Indian city into a glistening metropolis of a rising Asian superpower. Working-class settlements like Yamuna Pushta, Nangla Machi, and Sanjay Amar Colony were flattened by government demolition squads to make way for broader roads, bigger power stations, and the Commonwealth Games. (Sethi 2012, 38-39)

On one hand, as Anamika notes, “Indians, myself included, must immediately place everyone we meet. We are a nation of taxonomists….

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The system works. It is a science, thousands of years old, that has been taken to the level of a fine art” (Dawesar 2005, 5). But this taxonomic obsession, this need to place each individual in a particular place in an imagined personal classification system, is one of the structures that the character, perhaps without yet acknowledging it, has chosen to oppose because there is no acceptable classification of a person like herself. She professes to hate “the ageism of Delhi and its antediluvian norms… [that] precluded serious bonding with people older than you” (4), and this prepares her to enter into the relationship with the woman she chooses to call by a nickname: “I felt the urge to call her something. Something that no one else was called. A word that was not a name and that was still proportional to the immensity of the revelation unfolding within me. ‘India’ was the first thing that slipped silently from my lips” (4). Of all the possible names she might have chosen, one wonders—why this one? What aspects of this blossoming relationship echo the young student’s burgeoning understanding of her place in the nation? “I imagined India, the woman,” she writes late in the novel, “as just as great a mystery as the land…. I knew then that I would always be in her grip, because like my other India, the greater India, she had a hundred different moods. She could surprise me when I least expected it and be many things all at the same time” (Dawesar 2005, 242, 251). She notices India’s skin is dark and India asks, “‘Do you think fair is lovely, just like everyone else?’ … ‘No, I think you are as beautiful as our country itself,’ I said” (251). This rather broad identification of the nation with the socially unacceptable foregrounds the transgressive nature of a character who embraces her precarious condition as a creative chaos—much like the city of Delhi itself. Such embrace of instability and complexity in one so young and intelligent certainly goes against the grain of the image of the striving student seeking advancement in contemporary society, getting good grades, moving on to graduate school, finding a well-paying job. Again, though, it marries Anamika’s emotional life with her scientific imagination: “I thought of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Just as one could never be certain of one’s exact position given one’s momentum at any instant, I could never be certain of the exact consequences given the impulses of my heart at any instant. And to know my heart with unfailing accuracy was crucial if I was going to be true to myself” (Dawesar 2005, 346). Being true to herself has a political component in the novel, as well. In her Wheeler Centre interview the author emphasized that one of the earliest decisions she had made in approaching the writing of this new book

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was to have it take place in Delhi at the time of the riots opposing the recommendations of the Mandal Commission. “Schools in Delhi were still closed,” Anamika observes. “North India burnt like a large funeral pyre. The smell of kerosene and young upper caste flesh invaded villages where the reservation policy made no difference because there were no schools, no colleges, no drinking water” (253). The protagonist is against the recommendations of the Commission, arguing: “The Mandal recommendations are perverse. If a lower caste guy gets admission on the basis of merit, he won’t count in the reserved category. Reservations are for those who won’t make it on merit” (Dawesar 2005, 126). Some might read this as a rather conservative stance from one who, in so many other ways, is transgressive. She feels personally under attack, though, since it is time for her to move on to college. In the book’s rather abrupt conclusion, after applying to Harvard (and she underscores the school’s motto: “Veritas”), Anamika’s final statement is simply the word “Meritas”—Latin for “deserved” and a play on the criticism she and others have voiced against Mandal. She’s leaving India, circumventing the Mandal complications, and hoping to get into a great school overseas, based on merit. Brahmin though she may be, she has been placed by her author in a situation in which her country seems rigged against her—like the relationship with an older woman named India. Oftentimes, the Delhi under scrutiny is dissected for the humor that lies just below the surface of the obvious tensions and inequities (Anon 2017). Diksha Basu’s The Windfall (2018) typifies this lighthearted approach, reminiscent of V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) and other novels of that ilk. Basu describes her intent in writing the book as follows: I don’t think it’s as simple as, ‘Oh, look at the poor slum children smiling through their poverty,’ which is often how some literature from India is perceived. I don’t think it is black and white. ... I think wealth can be destructive just as much as poverty can be destructive. And wealth can be irrelevant, and wealth can also bring a family together in a completely different and unexpected way. If it was as simple as a destructive power of wealth, I think less people would aspire to it. I think all of it is much more complex than that. And my characters fall into seeing that, and seeing that what their expectations were of wealth continuously gets challenged. (Garcia-Navarro 2017, online)

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Reviewing the novel for The New York Times, Jennifer Senior describes it as “a story that’s the stuff of Amartya Sen’s worst nightmares and Tom Wolfe’s sweetest dreams” (2017, online). It is a rather familiar and predictable plot line, a semi-rags-to-riches comedy of manners about 52-year-­ old Anil Jha, his wife Bindu, and their 23-year-old son Rupak, who is studying business (but wishing to study the humanities) at Ithaca College in New York. Jha has become fabulously wealthy by selling a website that he has worked on for five years, making an outrageous amount of money in the sale, but then watching as the new company makes ten times as much. They move rather ostentatiously from the very inappropriately named Mayur Palli (Home of the Peacock) to Gurgaon, a very wealthy community in Delhi. His Mercedes has arrived, and many more acquisitions follow, since “the fact that he didn’t have the traditional trappings of success worried him these days. He liked fitting in” (Basu 2018, 2). The system has set him up for a form of precarity that does not threaten one’s physical existence, but one’s honest acceptance of mortality. The neoliberal dream of ever-increasing wealth distracts from the central existential questions that the poor cannot evade: Why am I here? And for how long? This financial windfall does not simplify his life or make him any happier. As Senior suggests, Basu’s novel demonstrates the so-called hedonic treadmill (see Positive Psychology) that sets up an endless competition and comparison with the wealth of others. One of these new neighbors is Mr Chopra, who displays his own wealth by replicating the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in his foyer. Chopra himself is suffering the treadmill complex because his even-more-affluent neighbors are moving out of India altogether, to Kensington in London. If this is an instance of the empire writing back, the author clearly indicates that the colonizer provided the vocabulary—and it is one of survival of the fittest. Many reviewers thought the novel was entertaining, with some less enthusiastic: “at times the humor feels forced, strained. Each of the characters is flawed, but those flaws seem to elicit pity rather than sympathy. At a certain point, their moneyed lives don’t seem as funny as they do alienating and sad. There’s something unsettling about all this” (Kirkus). In her New York Times review, Senior pushes this idea a bit further, suggesting that “Rupak [the son] is supposed to be the soul of the novel, the one who’s genuinely foundering in ways that aren’t designed for laughs. He’s dating two women at once (one Indian, one American), and he’s flunking his masters program in business administration at Ithaca College, wishing he could study film instead. He leads a life that’s conflicted, caught betwixt

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and between — just like his parents. He should be sympathetic” (Senior 2017, online). But he is too programmatic, even if he occasions the theme of the novel from his American girlfriend who tells him: “You’re a confused child. Stop blaming everything else—stop blaming your parents, stop blaming India, stop blaming America. Figure out who you are and just be that person” (Basu 2018, 173). It seems a very western analysis of a character and culture that has far more layers than the character making the observation. Nonetheless, Rupak silently agrees, thinking to himself that “She was right. He was a coward who was terrified about what other people thought about him” (174). The question seems too significant for this comedic novel to handle: Just how are members of the youthful generation, caught between the old and the new, to figure out who they are, and how they can actually be that person in a society with structures of power that militate regimentation by class?

Bangalore: Please Stay on the Line Men and women in Bangalore live like animals in a forest do. Sleep in the day and then work all night. (Adiga 2008a, 255)

Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger (2008a) makes a fitting transition from Delhi to Bangalore, since its protagonist, Balram Halwai, travels from the rural village of Laxmangarh to Delhi, where he gets his introduction to real corruption (and ends up killing and robbing his master), and then on to Bangalore, where he breaks free from his low caste, sets up a cab company and becomes a successful businessman, a modern entrepreneur in striving India. Adiga succeeds in showing the cages that hold the protagonist in place before he finds a way to break free and become the tiger but, as Balram notes, “The new generation, I tell you, is growing up with no morals at all” (Adiga 2008a, 271). He, of course, is a member of that generation. On some level, one might compare Babyji’s self-proclaimed but comparatively tame “chaos” with that of the world of Balram, a world of actual lived chaos over which he decides, come hell or high water and regardless of inherited custom, to impose control. Both characters, living in different Indias, choose to violate social norms to forge freer lives—lives that the older generation would condemn outright, and that the structures of power either thwart or co-opt. Interviewed following the award of the Booker, Adiga has said that the book is “at its heart, the story of a man’s quest for freedom” (Adiga

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2008b, online) The protagonist’s crucial discovery, early on, is that life is a trap from which he must escape. Adiga said he wished to describe a character quite different from himself, noting his own middle-class background and Balram’s low caste as a sweets maker. He wanted to portray “the invisible men in India, the poor, what they want, and how they are trying to take control of their lives.” And the course to ‘enlightenment,’ if that is not too cynical a term for the course of instruction that changes Balram’s understanding of his means toward greater agency in the world, is harsh. He learns that “only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed— hunted, beaten, and burned alive by the masters—can break out of the coop” (Adiga 2008a, 150), while admitting that “that would take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature.” Then he manages to step outside his class consciousness and see what was keeping others from moving up: “The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters, or entrepreneurs…. The coop is guarded from the inside” (2008, 166). He learns that “each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time” (217). Once he brutally murders his master and steals enough money to move to Bangalore and finance his own “start-up,” he changes his name to Ashok Sharma and becomes a well-respected pillar of society. His success, as he sees it, represents that of the rest of the nation: Am I not a part of all that is changing this country? Haven’t I succeeded in the struggle that every poor man here should be making—the struggle not to take the lashes your father took, not to end up in a mound of indistinguishable bodies that will rot in the black mud of Mother Ganga? True, there was the matter of murder—which is a wrong thing to do, no question about it. It has darkened my soul. All the skin-whitening creams sold in the markets of India won’t clean my hands again. (Adiga 2008a, 273)

The difference between the rural towns and Bangalore, he concludes, is a matter of freedom: in Bangalore, “if a man wants to be good, he can be good. In Laxmangarh, he doesn’t even have this choice” (Adiga 2008a, 262). The rural towns are populated by those enslaved by fate, who must do whatever they can to live from day to day. In an ironic reference to the Buddha, Balram announces, not only to his erstwhile compatriots from the village but to the naïve reader, as well, that “I have woken up, and the rest of you are still sleeping, and that is the only difference between us”

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(2008a,  271). In the process of killing his master, he has “switched sides”—“I am now one of those who cannot be caught in India” (2008a,  275). This, one supposes, is a swipe at the notion that pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps is a transactional choice and the necessary first step to subvert one’s fate and embrace the neoliberal dream. Since the protagonist ends up in Bangalore, where so many work in call centers, it is appropriate that he tells the story as one long letter, as if we are actually being held in thrall while he spins the tale that sells his product: his new and improved self. But the reader’s likely response is very likely not the one that Balram would hope for—we are appalled by his moral disintegration, despite his comparative worldly success. But Adiga has chosen the setting well—the call center as emblematic of the new India and a fortress against precarity. Indeed, Liam Connell demonstrates that there has arisen a cottage industry focused on, for example, call centers as iconic representations of these disparities, in such novels as Chetan Bhagat’s One Night @ the Call Center (2005), Neelesh Misra’s Once Upon a Timezone (2006), Anish Trivedi’s Call Me Dan (2010), Brinda S.  Narayan’s Bangalore Calling (2011), Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India (2011), and Kris Yonzone’s Confessions of a Call Centre Worker (2013). Connell concludes that there is some ambiguity in such works, seeking at once “to celebrate and lament the changes to Indian society” (2017, 190). There is something of a national pride in India’s place in a competitive global economy represented in new industries such as the call center (with varying degrees of acknowledgment of the precarity of such jobs), coupled to a generational conflict that (more than in similar novels in earlier developmental periods in the west) calls into question the cultural values of the earlier generations. In a somewhat stuttering way, such novels express optimism that the nation is rapidly taking its place as a major player in a world beyond its shores, but such celebrations are troubled by youthful protagonists who represent confusion and uncertainty about what that nation is actually becoming in the process. Indeed, “the ability of a small middle-class to benefit from India’s foreign-facing investment while the majority of Indians remain impoverished may speak directly to the limits of globalization as the celebrated form of neoliberal internationalism” (Connell 2017, 228). Film and fiction in South Asia since 1990 often attempt to valorize both the political passion of the founding fathers of the nation and the business acumen of the subsequent generations, but Connell notes that more of this creative work, while sometimes celebrating “the success of India’s new billionaires,” more pointedly underscores

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the “vast disparities of wealth, conditions of workplace uncertainty as well as an affective alienation between generations” (190).2 The call center, rather than a gateway to a brave new world, can be construed as the twenty-first-century version of a Victorian mill town. What such accommodation to new systems of enslavement demands of participants  (see Singh 2003) becomes the subject matter of books like Ghachar Ghochar. As Deborah Smith observes in her review for The Guardian, this novella is a chilling demonstration of “the power of leaving things unsaid” (2017 online). It begins as a simple domestic tale, apparently a parable teaching the benefits of a successful family business venture, in this case a spice trading business initiated by the uncle and whole-heartedly supported by everyone else in the family. But an ominous undercurrent builds slowly: “It’s an unwritten rule that all members come to the family’s aid when it is threatened” (Shanbhag 2017, 18), much as in a film about the Mafia. It becomes clear early on that everyone has become financially dependent upon the goodwill of that uncle and it is in their best interest to keep him happy. When an unknown woman comes to the house asking to see the uncle, who quickly disappears into the back rooms and refuses to acknowledge her, the family insults her and sends her on her way. The narrator’s new wife, Anita, is outspoken in her outrage against her husband’s family’s odd behavior, suspecting an injustice has been done to the stranger. Her minor rebellion does not please the family: How was I to explain to her that Chikkappa [the uncle] must be protected at all costs? She wouldn’t understand. For that, she would need to have lived through those earlier days with us—when the whole family stuck together, walking like a single body across the tightrope of our circumstances. Without that reality behind her, it’s all a matter of empty principle. (Shanbhag 2017, 20-21)

The book provides a slowly building demonstration of the corruption prevalent throughout the machinations that keep in place the “official” precarity that Zygmunt Bauman describes. In Shanbhag’s novella, the victims are quietly complicit in their own enslavement. To separate themselves out from the pack—by taking an antagonistically ethical stand, for example—would likely lead to one’s ostracization, and perhaps worse. The events are divided by an invisible line between the time before succumbing to the demands of business success, and the time after the family has joined others in urban Bangalore in making the necessary pact with

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the devil. Representing the earlier time—simpler, slower, poorer—is the narrator’s father. He is the mouthpiece for homely axioms throughout the book, ideas that seem remarkably sane to the reader even if the family, as Anita observes at one point, treat the father like a mental patient—“Appa enjoys our current prosperity with considerable hesitation, as if it were undeserved. He’s given to quoting a proverb that says wealth shouldn’t strike suddenly like a visitation, but instead grow gradually like a tree” (Shanbhag 2017, 24). The other family members interpret the same facts from a more practical point of view: “Could money acquired overnight also not depart with equal haste?” (Shanbhag 2017, 48). Anita, not especially likable but nonetheless the book’s representative for honesty, is doomed to be ground beneath the wheel of the neoliberal juggernaut. Though they had been a typical lower middle-class family in Bangalore, the invisible precarity of their position had become clear to them when the father was made redundant eight years before his scheduled retirement. It was at this point that he had given all his savings to his brother for this one throw of the dice, and Chikkappa had taken that gift and begun the spice business. Everyone is so desperate to avoid the precarious life that the salaried employee knew before that they choose to allow Chikkappa to take whatever means he deems necessary to “lubricate” the necessary officials. Anita, on the other hand, is the daughter of a schoolteacher and is naïve to the ways by which her husband merited his remarkably good salary without ever doing any work. As her husband muses, “let’s face it: there’s a vast difference between the moral underpinnings of a business family and the household of a salaried teacher” (Shanbhag 2017, 79). There had been a certain unavoidable closeness in their earlier life, but in the new home they “were locked in the cells of individual rooms, and there was no opportunity to exchange casual confidences” (Shanbhag 2017, 61). In their earlier time of limited means, “all purchases were discussed among the whole family” (82). They lived within a budget, and “none of[them] had the courage to buy anything without involving the others” (83). In the new life, as he tells Anita, “It doesn’t matter who’s doing what as long as it all runs smoothly” (89). Anita refuses to be part of this us-against-the-world family pact, warning her husband that “there was no telling what could go wrong…. Everyone should want to stand on their own feet” (90). The morally compromised narrator’s bemused reflection shows how far his family has come from their earlier days: “A man in our society is supposed to fulfill his wife’s financial needs, true, but who knew he was expected to earn the money through his own toil?” (93).

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This central crisis in the novel serves as a warning that ‘success’ in the neoliberal dream may be a chimera. The story begins in a Coffee House, and then returns there at the end. For the narrator, this place represents “how beautiful this city was a century ago,” since the photographs on the wall “evoke a gentler, more leisurely time” (Shanbhag 2017, 1). For the narrator, this one place “still manages to belong to that world.” This safe space provides a sanctuary against the mayhem that awaits customers outside its doors. Escaping the purpose-driven world outside, the narrator sheepishly admits he has no real reason to stop here—but he does so, at least once each day, and describes the handsome laconic waiter, Vincent, as the closest thing to a divinity in his life, and the Coffee House as the closest place to a temple that he ever enters for solace. Vincent is from the same world as Appa, the narrator’s father who is bemused, frightened, or overwhelmed by the world his brother has fully engaged—the world of corruption and worldly success. Therapist, priest, or psychoanalyst, Vincent quietly listens. “How can I possibly hide from this all-knowing man,” the narrator asks, “the fact that I’m desperate to unburden myself?” (9) Arguably, this desperation and the isolation that occasions it arise from the precarity of the family’s moral compass. In the closing scenes of the book, as the narrator muses over the ominous disappearance of his outspoken (and honest) wife, his father brings home some biscuits—“it had been a while since Appa had bought anything on his own initiative” (Shanbhag 2017, 107)—and, in a Proustian moment, the narrator bites into the simple treat and has a revelation: “After all this time it still tasted the same. If anything, it was richer now for evoking a simpler time” (107). He looks around the table, and everyone seems to be relishing a moment from long ago, when they lived more closely as one unit, had simpler needs, had less moral baggage. He remarks that “It was as if Anita’s absence had allowed us to be ourselves again, without inhibitions” (Shanbhag 2017, 110-111). But the scene is reminiscent of a Martin Scorsese film—an oddly amoral celebration at the dining room table after the interloper who had threatened the family’s ill-gained security has been dissolved in acid. On his next visit to the Coffee House, the non-judgmental Vincent quietly suggests to the narrator, “Sir, you may wish to wash your hand. There’s blood on it” (118). If Anita accepted ‘success’ in life as uncertain, the rest of the family seeks to control that uncertainty and in the process render their moral collapse all the more likely.

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Mumbai: Happy Endings If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India. (Adiga 2008a, 236)

This idealistic notion, which the “White Tiger” attributes to the poet Iqbal, has unexpected consequences in that character’s life. Iqbal suggested that the act of recognizing what is beautiful in the world frees one from slavery, in whatever form that “slavery” takes in one’s circumstances (rich or poor). For the White Tiger, ironically, this ‘beauty’ demanded the embrace of amorality; more pointedly, in his own case it demanded he serve only his own interests and do whatever it takes to gain power and agency. The consequence in his own life was deeper enslavement. Vikas Swarup’s Q & A (2008), adapted into the wildly popular 2008 film, Slumdog Millionaire, seems to be the stereotypical rags-to-riches tale that the white Tiger—and Bollywood—would point to as the consequences of learning ‘how to paint’ and happily ending up filthy rich in rising Asia. The novel and especially the film have met with criticism within India for setting in stone western stereotypes about the subcontinent. Salman Rushdie, of all people, condemns the novel as “a corny potboiler, with a plot that defies belief…. [based upon] a patently ridiculous conceit” (Guardian 2009, online). One assumes Swarup, and the film’s directors (Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan), would concur with that criticism, and affirm that Rushdie, picaresque novelist with outlandish plot details of his own in such stories as The Satanic Verses, is clearly missing the point of the novel and confusing the norms of the film’s genre with, for example, a documentary. Central to the appeal of this novel/film is its several young protagonists’ varying strategies and successes at overcoming the structures of power that are patently obvious and brutally dismissive of assault by individuals, and the characters’ concurrent struggle to maintain a semblance of self-respect as they make their personal choices. The “victory of unified, centralized administrative power” (2015, 434) that Dasgupta describes as the given for western notions of progress and civilization is here skewered as corrupt and self-perpetuating, less a marker for progress than for efficient social control. Jamal Malik (in the novel, Ram Mohammad Thomas—the name an amalgam of several parts of religious India) is arrested by the police, at the instructions of a game show’s producers, when he correctly answers all necessary questions and legitimately is entitled to the prize money (which

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the producer does not have in the bank). The course of the book/film is the protagonist explaining how he happened to have known all the answers; he attempts to demonstrate this by showing how those answers were, in fact, just about the only answers that he could have answered correctly. Fate simply smiled on him, finally, after doing everything it could to frustrate his rise to a better station in life; karma brings him full circle, allowing him to win a metaphorical lottery out of all the possible questions that life might have presented at that very moment in time. What appeared to have been horrible events turned out, in the game show, to have been a winnowing of possibilities, a schooling in what, serendipitously, was to be the route to millions of rupees. Life teaches a totally ‘chaotic’ lesson: the protagonist’s life cleaning toilets, killing oppressors, rescuing prostitutes from thugs, and so on was the course that everyone should have chosen (rather than, let us say, pursuing a degree from an IIT) if their goal had been to lie there on this particular pile of loot. Viewed from a less rosy point of view, of course, the unlikely course of his life, turning obvious precarity into incredible security, proves the opposite lesson: one’s apparent agency, no matter one’s station in life, is an illusion—and, as a consequence, everyone is living on a razor’s edge, lurching toward a most uncertain future. If this ‘happy’ ending offers a bittersweet lesson, something of a parable of unavoidable precarity that trumps all the other examples discussed earlier in this chapter, there is one final example that goes further and challenges all the ‘liquidity’ that characterizes Bauman’s dissection of (post) modernity, and this example is not in fiction. Recall that Bauman argues that the naturally precarious situation of living as a biological unit in a particular time and place is rendered more obvious by an ‘official’ precarity that is fortified by visible and invisible structures of power in contemporary society—the structures of religion, government, and so on (Bauman 2016). The example is the last chapter in Suketu Mehta’s Pulitzer Prize-­ winning study of Mumbai, Maximum City (2005). Having interviewed Mumbai residents from all walks of life—members of Hindu and Muslim gangs, a bar dancer, members of the Bollywood high life, many villagers who have come to the city to improve their chances in life—Mehta turns finally to the remarkable Ladhani family. Sevantibhai Ladhani, a very successful metal and diamond merchant, is the patriarch of a Jain family about to “take diksha” together—himself, his wife, both in their early forties, and their nineteen-year-old son and their seventeen-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. Sounding, perhaps, like the narrator or Appa in Ghachar

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Ghochar, Sevantibhai complains that “Before, we used to know who was who in the whole village. Nowadays we don’t even know who lives in the next flat” (Mehta 2005, 502). Ladhani is seeking Moksha (salvation) for his entire lineage by renouncing Samsara (worldly life). But before doing this, they will show everybody that they aren’t leaving the world because they have failed in it; they will go out in the full noonday light of worldly success. In one month, they will go to the Gujarat town and give away, physically throw away, everything they have earned up to this point: between $2 million and $3 million. It will be a dramatic rejection of Bombay, of the sole reason why anybody would want to live there. Once your desire to make money stops, you should leave by the next train.” (Mehta 2005, 499)

They will never return to Mumbai; other cities are allowed, but “Bombay is the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Jain religion” (505). Thus, they reclaim agency by embracing and accelerating their now-­acknowledged precarity. Their happy ending, involving not just one individual but an entire family, seems extreme—more than that of a simple hermit in Buddhism or Christianity, for example—so extreme that it reads as grotesque, as too strange to be believed, as an ending, certainly, but so close to suicidal that it is hard to embrace as ‘happy.’ One thinks of the various young people in the stories touched upon in this chapter and then reads about the children in the Ladhani family. This renunciation, chosen by the father on behalf of them all, seems an impossibly cruel future that he foists upon the other members of his family. “Now we are only united by selfishness” (Mehta 2005, 499), Sevantibhai announces, explaining why the sons will never again see their mother, and he will never again see his daughter. The book’s author looks at the daughter and observes that “this is a Bombay girl who now will never go to a movie, put on makeup, go on a date, or go to college. She will never return to the city she grew up in” (510). Seven months after the diksha ceremony, Mehta visits Sevantibhai to see how they are doing. “He hasn’t seen the woman who was his wife for four months now…. He doesn’t know when he will see her or the girl who used to be his daughter again. Neither do the boys who used to be his sons” (527). In a precarious age, striving takes many forms—and even taking diksha may be one of them. The freedom to redefine oneself, to distance oneself from an earlier, seemingly more secure generation, may offer a fluidity in

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which one appears to be drowning (Adiga 2008b). For those in the west, it may offer the perverse appeal that becoming a hippy and dropping out of society once offered. But since contemporary precarity is not only a personal crisis but also a burgeoning problem across entire societies (more visible in some classes, but nonetheless persistent across them all), the response cannot be simply an intentional choice by individuals—it must entail a decision across entire societies. As David Neilson puts it, since the dominant response to the crisis by authoritarian governments is the “active fostering of social division” (2015 online), the difficult but necessary strategy that must be worked toward moves in an opposite direction: the psychological premise of a progressive resistance to the neoliberal project is to offer an alternative to denial. In short, tools for calmly accepting, and without anxiety, unpleasant changes in the form of deepening precarity are needed. Such tools are required before people will be able to cope with the emotional disquiet, ‘uncertainty’ (Layton 2010), and ‘intellectual pessimism’ (Gramsci 1971) that is integral to the search to fully grasp the consequences of neoliberal-led global capitalism; and that together comprise the first step to the formation of a collective ‘determination of will’ (Gramsci 1971) to construct and pursue a progressive alternative. (Neilson 2015, online)

Against the isolation of urban precarity—the sense that, surrounded by so many, we are individually of no significance—social psychology offers the time-honored prognosis: as Helen Keller said, “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”

Notes 1. Real control, so the story goes, remains in the hands of the same few families. “Three trading communities (the Marwaris, Gujaratis and Parsis) play a disproportionate role in the control and ownership of Indian publicly-traded firms. However, their role is skewed towards smaller, younger, and lower market share firms, and there is significant turnover in the identity of the largest firm over time. The results are similar for family control and ownership. Overall, the results do not support the entrenchment perspective, and instead supports the view that these social groups are the primary vehicle for raising funds among smaller, younger, and low market-share firms. However, neither do the results support the view that Indian firms are rapidly embracing a managerial model with diffuse shareholdings” (Mani, 1).

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2. Although his setting is unnamed, in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia it is likely Pakistan, and thus technically outside the geographical boundaries of this chapter. But he certainly is in tune with the writers under discussion here. His narrator offers an increasingly cynical (some might say, very honest) set of Dale Carnegie-like guidelines for “making it” in contemporary South Asian society: move to the city, get an education, don’t fall in love, avoid idealists (especially those who congregate around universities), learn from a master, work for yourself, be prepared to use violence, befriend a bureaucrat, “patronize the artists of war,” “dance with debt,” focus on the fundamentals, have an exit strategy. Some of these are, perhaps, less prescriptive and more descriptive of the course taken by his narrator, the course of whose life undercuts the value of the advice he has offered the reader. He is, in fact, a fine example of an unreliable narrator, one who begins with an apparent wisdom far in advance of his years, but ends pitiable and alone. His narrator asks the question that lies at the heart of this chapter: “Is getting filthy rich still your goal above all goals, your be-­ all and end-all, the mist-shrouded high-altitude spawning pond to your inner salmon?” (Hamid, 77).

References Adiga, Aravind. 2008a. The White Tiger. New York: Free Press. ———. 2008b. Interview. YouTube. 15 October. Online https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=s4tAPvWVorY. Accessed 30 August 2019. Anon. 2017. Review of The Windfall. Kirkus 15 April. Online. https://www. kirkusreviews.com/book-­reviews/diksha-­basu/the-­windfall/. Accessed 27 August 2019. ———. 2015. Sunday story: Mandal Commission Report, 25 years later. The Indian Express 1 September. Online https://indianexpress.com/article/india/ india-­o thers/sunday-­s tor y-­m andal-­c ommission-­r eport-­2 5-­y ears-­l ater/. Accessed 28 August 2019. ———. 2016. The hedonic treadmill—are we forever chasing rainbows? Positive Psychology 9 May. Online https://positivepsychology.com/hedonic-­treadmill/. Accessed 27 August 2019. Basu, Diksha. 2018. The Windfall. London: Bloomsbury. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2016. Strangers at Our Door. Malden, MA: Polity. Connell, Liam. 2017. Indian Call Centres and the National Idea. In: Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel, by Liam Connell. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 189-232. Danika. 2015. Review of Babyji. The Lesbary 1 May. Online https://lesbrary. com/2015/05/01/danika-­reviews-­babyji-­by-­abha-­dawesar/. Accessed 28 August 2019.

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Dasgupta, Rana. 2015. Capital: The Eruption of Delhi. New York: Penguin. Dawesar, Abha. 2005. Babyji. New York: Anchor. Garcia-Navarro, Lulu. 2017. Interview with Diksha Basu. 25 June. National Public Radio. Online. https://www.npr.org/2017/06/25/534135422/ a-­new-­delhi-­family-­learns-­to-­navigate-­wealth-­after-­a-­windfall. Accessed 27 August 2019. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Prison Notebooks: Selections. London, UK: Lawrence & Wishart. Hamid, Mohsin. 2013. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. New  York: Riverhead. Hawley, John C. 2017. What Does Young South Asia want? Can Chetan Bhagat, Mohsin Hamid, and Arundhati Roy tell us? Texture: A Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 1 (1): 1–12. Kasmir, Sharryn. 2018. Precarity. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Initially published 13 March https://doi.org/10.29164/18precarity online https:// www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/precarity. Accessed 15 August 2020. Layton, L. 2010. Irrational Exuberance: Neoliberal Subjectivity and the Perversion of Truth. Subjectivity 3 (3): 303–322. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2010.14. Mani, Dalhia. 2021. Who controls the Indian economy: The role of families and communities in the Indian economy 2001, 2005, and 2009. Asia-Pacific Journal of Management. https://www.iimb.ac.in/sites/default/files/inline-­files/mani-­ forthcoming.pdf. Accessed 25 August 2019. Mehta, Suketu. 2005. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. New York: Vintage. Neilson, David. 2015. Class, precarity, and anxiety under neoliberal global capitalism: from denial to resistance. Theory and Psychology 25.2 online https://journals-­s agepub-­c om.libproxy.scu.edu/doi/full/10.1177/ 0959354315580607. Accessed 16 August 2020. Rushdie, Salman. 2009. Review of Slumdog Millionaire. The Guardian 28 February. Online https://www.outlookindia.com/blog/story/salman-­ rushdie-­a-­fine-­pickle/1587. Accessed 2 September 2019. Sahgal, Tara. 2005. Review of Babyji. India Today 18 July. Online https://www. indiatoday.in/magazine/society-­t he-­a rts/story/20050718-­b ook-­r eview-­ babyji-­abha-­dawesar-­787712-­2005-­07-­18. Accessed 28 August 2019. Senior, Jennifer. 2017. Review of Diksha Basu’s The Windfall. New York Times 28 June. Online. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/books/review-­ windfall-­diksha-­basu.html. Accessed 27 August 2019. Sethi, Aman. 2012. A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi. London: Jonathan Cape. Shanbhag, Vivek. 2017 [2013]. Ghachar Ghochar. Trans. Srinath Perur. New York: Penguin. Shildrick, Margrit. 2019. Neoliberalism and embodied precarity: some crip responses. South Atlantic Quarterly 118 (3): 595–613.

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Shivakumar, Girija. 2013. India is set to become the youngest country by 2020. The Hindu online 17 April. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/ india-­is-­set-­to-­become-­the-­youngest-­country-­by-­2020/article4624347.ece. Accessed 27 August 2019. Singh, Khushwant. 2003. The End of India. New Delhi: Penguin. Smith, Deborah. 2017. Review of Ghachar Ghochar. The Guardian 27 April. Online https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/27/ghachar-ghochar-vivek-­ shanbhag-­review. Accessed 30 August 2019. Swarup, Vikas. 2008. Slumdog Millionaire (formerly published as Q & A). San Francisco: HarperCollins. Wheeler Centre. 2013. Abha Dawesar on Babyji, India and creativity. 4 April. Online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMOjysWcxhE. Accessed 28 August 2019.

PART II

Precarious Body

Purity, Precarity and Power: Prayaag Akbar’s Leila Pramod K. Nayar

In Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017), a young mother looks for her missing daughter, taken away by a mysterious organization, the Council, simply because their household is ‘modern’ and consists of a Hindu mother (Shalini) and a Muslim father (Riz). In the incident where the daughter is taken away, the father is beaten and eventually ‘disappeared’ without a trace. Shalini is also arrested—although ‘arrest’ implies the presence of a state apparatus, which is not very evident in the novel—and detained for an extended period, drugged and tortured. Later, recovering, Shalini embarks on a search for Leila, eventually tracing the route taken by her servant-maid, Sapna. Sapna, she discovers, has flourished in the new regime, and has a daughter the right age to be Leila. Convinced that Sapna’s daughter is indeed Leila, Shalini decides to find them. Visiting Sapna’s palatial home, Shalini confronts her. Sapna denies that the girl with her is Leila, claiming, instead that she is her own, Sapna’s, daughter. Her pleas not having any effect, Shalini is escorted out by the guards.

P. K. Nayar (*) University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_7

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When leaving she glimpses the girl and thinks—believes—she has the same dimples as Shalini does. Leila thematizes precarity in ways that foreground not just individuals but entire communities of vulnerable subjects. “Precarity”, as employed here, is a “politically induced category” (Butler’s phrase in Frames of War). Butler writes: Precarity cuts across identity categories as well as multicultural maps, thus forming the basis for an alliance focused on opposition to state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit, and distribute precarity for the purposes of profit and territorial defense. (2009: 32)

‘Precarity’ is linked and resonant with ideas and concepts of vulnerability as well. We see this alignment in Butler’s own Precarious Lives and Frames of War, and in more recent anthologies such as Judith Butler et  al.’s Vulnerability in Resistance (2016). The term’s dominance now in Western Critical Theory, one could say, is absolute. Critical work on precarious classes, precarity and climate, and precariat public sphere, to name a few areas, has developed the idea of precarity along various lines. The conditions of the precariat in the workplace, for instance, have attracted attention (Casas-Cortés 2014). The focus on precarity and vulnerability has enabled those in the field of Human Rights to develop a perspective based not on claims but on situated and embodied states of vulnerability (as theorized by Martha Albertson Fineman 2008, 2010). In the specific case of India, literary and cultural studies have explored the idea of precarity when dealing with disaster, Dalits and marginalized communities, and Human Rights. It must be noted that in terms of the literature, precarious lives and vulnerable identities have had a long tradition in Indian fiction. Vulnerable classes, communities and castes and conditions of precarity have been a part of the social realist fiction tradition, from Mulk Raj Anand’s (often controversial) representation in Untouchable to Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. The domestic space as a space that induces vulnerability has been the subject of fiction as diverse as R.K. Narayan’s The Dark Room and Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors. More recently, Amitav Ghosh’s fiction has examined precarious lives in Bengal’s history, from the era of colonial rule (the Ibis trilogy), to Partition (The Shadow Lines), to the dispossession of people in Bengal (The Hungry Tide). Authors and social commentators such

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as Arundhati Roy, in their fiction and public writings, have been consistently concerned with the making of the precariat and of vulnerable lives (Nayar ‘Mobility’ 2017b; Mendes and Lau 2020). After Martha Albertson Fineman, I see vulnerability, a sharper concept, in my view, within ‘precarity’, as less a weakness than a condition in which the state has a major role to play. Fineman (2008) writes: I want to claim the term ‘vulnerable’ for its potential in describing a universal, inevitable, enduring aspect of the human condition that must be at the heart of our concept of social and state responsibility. (2008: 8)

Fineman defines vulnerability as arising from our embodiment, which carries with it the ever-present possibility of harm, injury, and misfortune from mildly adverse to catastrophically devastating events, whether accidental, intentional, or otherwise. (9)

It is “understood as a state of constant possibility of harm” (11). For Fineman, vulnerable subjects are embodied and embedded—in specific ecosystems that rather than protect the subjects, seem to transform their vulnerability into dependency and helplessness. That is, eroding social apparatuses are the primary cause of eroding “social ontologies” (Turner 2006). Here social apparatuses are the social institutions that Fineman sees as central to the condition of protecting/exploiting the vulnerable. In the neoliberal economy, as critics have pointed out, specific classes of people have been rendered vulnerable and disposable. For the Global South the consequences of both neocolonialism and neoliberalism have been disastrous, with the disenfranchising of more and more communities, the erosion of social and welfare measures and dispossession, among others (Munck 2013). It is the nexus between neoliberalism’s political systems, corporate interests and globalizing processes that produces entire cities of the “precariat”, of which the most tragic example would be Bhopal (Nayar, Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic, 2017c). I have elsewhere argued: India, from the last decades of the twentieth century, enmeshed in globalized circuits of capital and technology, has begun to privilege the sciences. It also insists on centers of learning to define themselves as centers of production of particular skill sets demanded by industry. Also vulnerable, therefore, is the process of critical thinking itself in this emphasis on science and technology and industry- driven skill-based courses. Conformity to the demands

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of the industry, in other words, rather than critical thinking, is to be the goal of the university/ college. Empowerment is automatically assumed to be empowerment through a certain kind of learning and employment—one determined by capitalist industry and globalized corporates. Yet, in the age of flexi-jobs and ever-diminishing social security, employee protection, and welfare nets, the newly ‘empowered’ remain a precariat. The shrinking of the public sector with its welfare measures and pro-employee laws drives the unemployed toward the more corporatized modes of employment. This does not necessarily shift them out of the precariat public sphere, unless we see the thriving consumerism enabled by the employment as a means of empowerment. (“Postcolonial Humanities” 2017c: 114)

Fineman sees three “assets” as central to the vulnerable subject’s survival: human assets (such as education and health), physical assets (the infrastructure) and social assets (networks, social welfare measures). In Leila all three forms of assets Fineman discerns are responsible not for the amelioration of vulnerability, but its very opposite: the amplification of vulnerability into defencelessness.

Purity and Precarity Shalini at one point thinks: “A sense of security is our abiding illusion” (21). This illusion of security is reiterated throughout the novel in the form of two intertwined discourses: of purity and securitization. The idea of purity was phrased as a desire, very simply: “we simply want to live with people who follow our own rules. From our own community…This is only our community. We want to keep our homes pure. Our surroundings” (33). The next step then is the putting into practice of this sense of ‘pure’ community: Purity came to have different meanings across the city. Some people wanted no meat at all, some would eat only fish. In other areas Muslims were evicting anyone who drank alcohol or ate pork. Once a community had control its society revived laws written by colony builders a hundred years ago, ensuring land could not be sold to those who did not belong. (33–4)

The discourse of purity manifests in physical forms: the segmentation of the city into caste-/community-based ghettos. In an extended passage, Akbar summarizes the developments:

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Real estate listings became like matrimonials: Brahmin-only, Yadavs-only, Thakurs-only, Parsis-only. You couldn’t buy or rent unless deemed fit by birth….Soon the city was in segments: the Tamil Brahmin Sector, Leuva Patel Resience, Bohra Muslim Zone, Catholic Commons, Kanyakubj Quarters, Sharif Muslimeen Precinct, Maithil Acres, Chitpavan Heights, Syrian Christian Co-op, Kodava Martials. (35)

“Filth in the air. In character,” says a security guard to Shalini’s father (40). The symbolic boundary-maintenance that Mary Douglas sees as the foundation of the principles of taboo and pollution acquires a concrete form in Leila in the form of these ghettos. Walls are built, borders guarded. There is no right of movement. This is the second discourse of purity, one which sees purity as the means of securitization. Securitization is the creation of impermeable, patrolled walls and identities. Akbar speaks of youth killed for intercaste marriages (120). The word ‘purity’ is almost always associated with the word ‘order’ in the novel. Guards, doctors, godmen and the citizens associate one with the other, and emphasize that the loss of purity—defined as lineage and caste/community/religious lines—is the loss of social order. Those in favour of the new urban cultures argue that their community identities are at risk from ‘impure’ practices and in-migration. That is, their presumed precarity and vulnerable status stems from being open to contamination by outsiders. Purity and purification is therefore the ‘natural’ response to perceived precarity, as we shall see. Riz’s brother warns Shalini about how Leila is being brought up in the East End of the city: “we are a city that needs order. Rules. We don’t want her mixing with everyone” (69). Leila has to know “our culture”, he stresses (70–1). A godman rants: “Politicians, judges, bureaucrats, media…they have made the city impure with their impure rule. They have no respect for our oldest rules” (91). In the process of emphasizing purity, there is an appeal to tradition and antiquity: They think they know better than the rules that governed us for centuries. (91)

In the place of the impure city, the godman promises: The perfect city. A place of order, discipline. Clean and pure. Those who do not obey our rules must feel the strength of our history. (92)

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In the place of embodied vulnerability being emphasized, Akbar directs us to what Catriona Mackenzie and others call “situational vulnerability”: …by which we mean vulnerability that is context specific. This may be caused or exacerbated by the personal, social, political, economic, or environmental situations of individuals or social groups. (2014: 7)

The tragic point is that the more one struggles against the imposition of rules purportedly designed to reduce vulnerability, the worse one’s vulnerability becomes. For Mackenzie et al., this is pathogenic vulnerability: Pathogenic vulnerabilities may also arise when a response intended to ameliorate vulnerability has the paradoxical effect of exacerbating existing vulnerabilities or generating new ones. … Pathogenic vulnerability may result when social policy interventions aimed to ameliorate inherent or situational vulnerability have the contradictory effect of increasing vulnerability. A key feature of pathogenic vulnerability is the way that it undermines autonomy or exacerbates the sense of powerlessness engendered by vulnerability in general. (9)

The discourses of purity and securitization, as noted, are cast as measures to keep the communities’ identities pure and safe. Those who find themselves vulnerable to the ‘impure’ seek refuge in guarded enclaves, as Dipanita, one of Shalini’s friends, tells her when they meet several years after the events. Thus, ironically, the greater the pursuit of security and purity, the greater the chances that even a small error may cost the transgressors a great deal. This pathogenic vulnerability, where the security measures were in place to reduce vulnerability but serve only to exacerbate it, is made clear by Dipanita: Atul [her husband] tells me all the time. That’s why I couldn’t call you home. community is the most important thing nowadays … we have to be careful what the neighbours think. Meeting you today was risk enough. That’s why no one would come today, not one of the gang. We aren’t allowed to meet Tower people, you know. It’s too much risk. I just can’t. I won’t bring any risk to my kids. (159, emphasis added)

Later, she adds:

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I promised Atul I wouldn’t see you any more… (160)

And when Shalini asks, “Will I see you again?” she records Dipanita’s response: She looks worried, wringing her hands. ‘It’s difficult, Shal. Very hard…But I don’t lying to my husband. It’s the kids. He’d throw me out if he knew I was staying in touch. I can’t endanger my kids.’ (162)

The irony that Akbar directs us to is what Mackenzie and others have identified as pathogenic vulnerability. The “risk” that Dipanita mentions twice in the conversation with Shalini indicates that, despite the heightened securitization and ghettoization, the fears and anxieties over being contaminated have not disappeared. “Risk” is the leading of precarious lives, of their pathogenic vulnerability. That is, it is possible to see that the measures strengthening the community’s borders against impurity produce in the residents an exaggerated fear of even minor ‘impuritization’. Thus, Dipanita appears to lack all confidence in her secure life when she meets Shalini. So exactly how have the purity-security measures enabled a less vulnerable situation for Dipanita? Living in perpetual fear of risking her purity and that of her children, Dipanita exhibits signs of a ‘new’ vulnerability. Akbar thus inverts the assumption that purity secured in this fashion is not a guarantee of security; rather it engenders new forms of insecurity. The “impure”, however, is not just a category of people excluded from the enclaves and the Sections. “Slummers”, the poor, are also kept out. It is not clear if they are deemed to be impure, but they have no access to services and live at the bottom of the social order. We are repeatedly told of the lack of human assets for these people: no water, no hygiene, no health care. That is, these are classes of disposable people, whose lives and deaths are not grievable and who are seen solely as a source of precarious contamination and therefore are rendered vulnerable themselves to greater and greater control and oppression. Shalini ventures forth into such an area where the ‘scavenger community’ lives. Here are the most vulnerable of the population, as the woman tells Sapna: even Sapna, residing in the Towers (where those who provide various services to the Council and its Ministries are kept). People like Shalini in the Towers may have “broken” the Council’s rules (about purity) but, as the woman says, they still have “toilets, fans, electricity,

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flush” (182). She rants: “even when they break the rules they’re too good to be put out here with us…We don’t get anything. We don’t deserve it. (182)… The hot air from the air conditioners pumping air into the Sectors causes fires in the slums (183)”. These are spaces where there are no assets: physical, social or human. They are the most vulnerable people in the city. There are no social institutions that safeguard these people. Akbar suggests that even among the vulnerable there is a clear caste/class organization of the people: those like Shalini are vulnerable but still better off than the Slummers.

The Effluence of Affluence In the unnamed city, there is, outside the ghettos, only garbage and slums. People living outside the sectors are “Slummers” and everywhere there is the stench. Leila in fact foregrounds waste and smell as the key visual and olfactory images throughout. At one point, Akbar says: “[p]urity One is the only sector wall that’s not impossibly filthy. Everywhere else the stench is overwhelming…sometimes you see Slummers wading through the garbage, looking for things to sell” (3). A few pages later, Shalini, while walking, notices “the rancid smell, and the rats, big as cats, scuttling out from the garbage” (8). And: All the way down this road … there is a dense, growing pile of trash that has shaped over the years into an incline covering half the street. Festering peels, thick tickles of fluid, unidentifiable patches of white and yellow, bulging polythene packers breached at the gut, oozing. Soaked, blackened raglike emanations, long as dupattas… (9)

Intensifying the sense of a damaged ecosystem—central to the physical assets of a country—is the image of a land rendered barren. There are no fields because there was a massive water crisis that made agricultural land turn into waste lands (20–1). “The birds were long gone, the trees naked of leaves’(12), writes Akbar. The summer temperatures were higher than ever and groundwater was down “almost to zero” (66–7). Waste is what troubles the borders of the Sectors, rising up against the walls themselves: “trash hurtles down the Sector walls” (9). The common areas are “never cleaned”, we are told (9). The scavenger classes live in a slum that is next to a “dumping ground” (175) and consists of a “river of blue and black tarpaulin roofs fed by a

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monsoon of migrants” (176). The smell is so bad that Shalini is retching within minutes. One inhabitant tells her of the toxic wastes that are dumped in their area—“drums filled with red acid”—month after month (181). Then they are subject to the visits by Repeaters, the law enforcers who come and beat up the residents. There are frequent fires wherein people lose their homes, and often their lives (183). The world of Leila is an eco-disaster area. Waste is everywhere. Waste, Patricia Yaeger tells us, is a site for reading an “alternate history”, an “emblem of selves socially and economically shattered” (106, 108). Wasted landscapes present a history of the world itself. Like Yaeger, Guy Hawkes and Steven Muecke argue that waste “is a product of time”; it represents a “historical force… monuments to catastrophic loss” (xiv). In Leila, we see waste across almost every page, climaxing in the area that Shalini visits: with people living in filth. The production of waste in Leila is two-pronged, then: material waste and “wasted people” (Bauman 2004). Such wasted people are ‘cast away’ because, being socially abject, they are “seen to represent a threat, a fact that legitimizes their exclusion from the social fabric … are regarded as abject, lowly and despicable and, to return to etymology, are ‘cast away’” (Arya 2014: 7). This casting away is the creation of vulnerability within the social structures of precarity that mark the city. The Sectors were, as is clear, meant to cater to specific communities, whose main concern in life was to secure their purity. The process of keeping anything pure meant to throw out the abject, the impure. Akbar suggests that the waste we see outside the Sector walls is created out of this drive for purity: throwing out and banishing to the beyond people and things that are declared to have no, or little, value. That is, the wastes in Leila are the means through which purity is secured by those inside the walls. Without the threat of waste and its contamination of the (illusory) purity, there would be no Sectors. Waste is indispensable for the Sector and its social order. The emphasis on purity results in the expulsion of ‘wastes’, whether these are effluents from the factories inside the Sectors or unwanted people. Leila foregrounds the cultural economy of waste here, by showing how the unwanted people are at the receiving end of toxins, bad air and poisonous by-products of modernity. The progress towards purity depends on processes of exclusion and expulsion, whether it is in the form of hybridized families such as Riz-Shalini’s or the hot air from the air-­ conditioners that cool the domes under which the rich lead their lives.

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Conclusion: Precarity and the Dystopian Imagination There are two key conclusions I wish to draw from the above reading of Leila. Both have been gestured at already, but I would like to make them more explicit. First, the purity campaign, geared towards securing the ‘in’ against vulnerability fails, as seen in the case of Dipanita. Haunted by a new vulnerability of possible contamination even when she meets an old friend, Dipanita is worried about taking ‘risks’. Now, securitization is meant to communicate a sense of invulnerability, of safety. The people in the Sectors, Shalini recognizes, live in this delusional state: “A sense of security is our abiding illusion” (21). Linked to questions and structures of power— walls, guards, check-posts—exerted upon and by the communities on their ‘members’, the aim is to instil this sense (or illusion) of security, of invulnerability. Yet, as Dipanita shows, there is no sense of invulnerability. Examining the structure and epistemology of invulnerability, Errin Gilson writes: Invulnerability is a central feature of masterful subjectivity because it solidifies a sense of control, which is, indeed, an illusion … If vulnerability is openness to being affected and affecting, then invulnerability is closure to those modes of being affected that bring us into contact with our own vulnerability most vividly… Invulnerability, accordingly, is a stance that enables us to ignore those aspects of existence that are inconvenient, disadvantageous, or uncomfortable for us, such as vulnerability’s persistence. As invulnerable, we cannot be affected by what might unsettle us. (2011: 76)

Further, invulnerability is based on ignorance. Building on the work of Nancy Tuana, Gosslin identifies four forms of ignorance that inform invulnerability: (1) knowing that we do not know yet not caring to know, (2) not even knowing that we do not know, (3) not knowing because (privileged) others do not want us to know, and (4) willful ignorance (76). Now, in Leila, the last appears to be the dominant ideology informing the Sector people. Aware that life is impure and reliant on an openness to the world, they choose to ignore this knowledge. Aware that severe repression produces discontent and unhappiness, those in the Sector choose to pretend it does not exist. This is brought home to Shalini (we never really get to see and know the Sector people) in her encounter with the slum-dweller Sapna (not her former servant).

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The irate woman tells her: ‘They only listen when you people complain. From inside the walls. Inside the sectors.’ (184, emphasis in original)

Shalini replies: ‘I’m not one of them, Sapna. Why don’t you understand? I’m not like them.’

And Sapna retorts: ‘Yes, you are, lady. Whatever they have done to you. That is what you don’t understand.’ (184, emphasis in original)

Both Shalini and Sapna are pointing to the lack of understanding, of ignorance, in the other. Shalini does not willingly accept that she remains, despite her horrific life, a member of the privileged classes. Wilful ignorance that, despite her vulnerability, she is a notch above the utterly vulnerable Sapna in the slums induces her attempt to convince the latter that she is not privileged. Shalini’s sense of her own vulnerability is read as invulnerability, power and masterful subjectivity by the far less privileged Sapna. Then, Dipanita’s illusion of security is prised wide open when her old friend, Shalini, returns to her life and they meet. Invulnerability drawn from her new life within the enclave, however illusory, collapses when the external element—implicitly a threat—enters her life. Only by ignoring what Shalini means to her, has meant to her, can Dipanita keep her illusion of invulnerability. Akbar demonstrates that there can be no invulnerability in a system such as this. The illusion of control, safety, security and invulnerability is under threat precisely because the contamination—in the form of Shalini—is very close and very likely. Further, by pointing to the discontent among the Slummers, Akbar implicitly signals a likely social unrest and rebellion against the Sectors. The class distinctions and the poverty that structure the new social order, Akbar suggests, are potential risk factors to the kind of life led by the people inside the walls. In short, the people behind the walls are not invulnerable, although they may believe they are. By spatially and functionally separating themselves from the rest (they even take roads built far above the general population), the people in the Sectors labour under the illusion of invulnerabililty, but this is wilful ignorance around the possible risks such an unequal and unjust social order carries.

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Second, it is evident that in the state where Leila is set, there are no provisions for the vulnerable Slummers. If, as people like Judith Butler have argued, vulnerability and dependency invokes responsibility among the better-off people and the state, Akbar’s dystopia points to the collapse of social and state responsibility towards the vulnerable. Errin Gilson writes about the vulnerability model: The vulnerability model offers up a rather direct logic of the relationship between vulnerability and responsibility: vulnerability exists and manifests in a dependency relationship, and so the responsible party is the person to whom another is vulnerable and upon whom the other is dependent. (40)

The state in Leila has no responsibility towards the vulnerable. Even those it protects, in the form of policed housing and ghettos, are not immune to the loss of invulnerability. Thus, vulnerability is compounded by the non-­ responsive state. There is something more to be said about the vulnerability model, as it works in Akbar’s novel, and that involves the theme of ‘wounded attachments’. A ‘vulnerable subject’ is one determined by her/his “wounded attachments”. Wendy Brown argues: [Political identity] installs its pain over its unredeemed history in the very foundation of its political claim, in its demand for recognition as identity. In locating a site of blame for its powerlessness over its past, as a past of injury, a past as a hurt will, and locating a ‘reason’ for the ‘unendurable pain’ of social powerlessness in the present, it converts this reasoning into an ethicizing politics, a politics of recrimination that seeks to avenge the hurt even while it reaffirms it, discursively codifies it. Politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics and can hold out no future-for itself or others-­ that triumphs over this pain. (1993: 406)

When Shalini meets her former servant, Sapna, the latter makes sure Shalini understands that power equations have changed: that Shalini is a supplicant, a vulnerable dependent, and Sapna is now in power. From the former state of social powerlessness, Sapna now is in charge and even threatens Shalini. Shalini is humiliated throughout the visit, and debases herself willingly too, in the quest for her daughter. What plays out is the “wounded attachment” Wendy Brown explicates in the passage cited. Sapna’s memories of her life in the Riz-Shalini household, with the real

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and perceived insults, are still the constituents of her identity, and her politics. In Brown’s terms, her insults towards Shalini are instances of the “politics of recrimination that seeks to avenge the hurt even while it reaffirms it, discursively codifies it”. But—and this is crucial—under all the sense of power and wealth, Shalini detects something else: But Sapna’s voice is cultured. Beneath spaghetti straps her shoulders are copper and lightly burnt from a beach holiday. She has acquired the wariness of wealth. She’s trying to figure out what I want. (197)

The last two observations imply that there lurks under the veneer of sophistication an old insecurity. Immediately after this, we see the veneer slip off. When Shalini, out of curiosity, asks Sapna: “How did you come into the political sector? To Officer’s Circle?” Sapna exhibits all her vulnerability: “We don’t belong here, is that it?” (198–9) Despite the guards, the wealth and the connections in the present, Sapna’s retort gestures towards the wounded attachment to the/her past that she still carries within her. Thus, Sapna’s politicized identity as the wife of an important official in the new dispensation remains grounded in pain, which comes to the fore when she encounters Shalini. Shalini’s arrival, like a contaminant, an infection, prises open the invulnerability that Sapna wears, and goes deep into her wounded attachments. This is exemplified in the angry response she offers Shalini when the latter suggests that Sapna’s daughter is really Leila: We’re in the heart of everything here. The centre of power, of the city. The top of the pyramid. There can be no question of impurity. Even the hint of a suggestion that my daughter is a girl like Leila and my husband won’t be able to do a thing. They would take her away immediately. I’d never see her again. (203–04)

And she adds: “Leave me and my daughter out of it. You’ll get us both into trouble” (204). That Shalini could very well recall the events that separated her from Leila, and Sapna’s possible role in the events, is what drives Sapna’s insecurity. Her reference to ‘impurity’ and the possible loss of her daughter suggests that nobody, even in the Sectors, is immune to the charge (proven or not) of impurity. This is precisely Akbar’s point: that there is no invulnerable life, there is no guaranteed safety. Anyone, with

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any kind of past, can be accused of impurity, bringing to an end their ‘safe’ life. In short, Akbar points to the fragility of this illusion of purity, invulnerability and power. Indeed, it would not be too far-fetched to say that in Akbar’s depiction, the charge of impurity could well be a sort of autoimmune disorder that will inevitably arise in conditions of extreme control and repression. Akbar’s novel paints a dystopian world. In this world, those who lead lives clearly identifiable as vulnerable and precarious and those who lead lives inside an illusion of invulnerability are both victims. The pursuit of purity renders everyone, whether inside the walls or outside, potentially impure. This possible contamination and the loss of purity haunts everyone, including those like Shalini’s former friend Dipanita and former servant Sapna. Engineering purity as a determining concept and an ideology enables the categorization of people as legitimate citizens, or not. Purity as an ideal is harnessed to power to enable the wealth of a few, simultaneously producing the disenfranchisement of others. In Akbar’s dystopian imagination, precarious lives are exploited, rendered helpless. The state is governed—and we can see echoes of contemporary lives and nations here—by anachronistic notions of purity and symbolic gestures of the same. Dystopia, then, is a state founded on precarious lives.

References Akbar, Prayaag. 2015. Leila. New York: Simon and Schuster. Arya, Rina. 2014. Abjection and representation: An exploration of abjection in the visual arts, film and literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Malden: Wiley. Brown, Wendy. 1993. Wounded attachments. Political Theory 21 (3): 390–410. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious lives: The powers of mourning and violence. London: Verso. ———. 2009. Frames of war: When is life grievable? London: Verso. Butler, Judith, et al., eds. 2016. Vulnerability in resistance. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Casas-Cortés, Maribel. 2014. A genealogy of precarity: A toolbox for rearticulat-­ ing fragmented social realities in and out of the workplace. Rethinking Marxism 26 (2): 206–226. Fineman, Martha Albertson. 2008. The vulnerable subject: Anchoring equality in the human condition. Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 201 (1): 1–23.

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———. The vulnerable subject: Anchoring equality in the human condition. Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 201(1), 2010. The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State. Emory Law Journal 60: 252–275. Gilson, Erinn. 2011. Vulnerability, ignorance, and oppression. Hypatia 26 (2): 308–332. Hawkins, Guy, and Steven Muecke. 2003. Introduction: Cultural economies of waste. In Culture and waste: The creation and destruction of value, ed. Guy Hawkins and Steven Muecke. Washington, DC: Rowman and Littlefield. Mackenzie, Catriona, et  al. 2014. Introduction: What is vulnerability and why does it matter for moral theory? In Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds (eds) Vulnerability: New essays in ethics and feminist philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-32. Mendes, Ana, and Lisa Lau. 2020. The precarious lives of India’s others: The creativity of precarity in Arundhati Roy’s the ministry of utmost happiness. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 56 (1): 70–82. Munck, Ronaldo. 2013. The precariat: A view from the South. Third World Quarterly 34 (5): 747–762. Nayar, Pramod K. 2017a. A postcolonial humanities manifesto. Rendezvous 43 (1-2): 113–122. ———. 2017b. Mobility and insurgent celebrityhood: The case of Arundhati Roy. Open Cultural Studies 1 (1): 46–54. ———. 2017c. Bhopal’s ecological gothic: Disaster, precarity, and the biopolitical uncanny. Maryland: Lexington. Turner, Bryan S. 2006. Vulnerability and human rights. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania. Wiley. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Malden. Yaeger, Patricia. 2003. Trash as archive, trash as enlightenment. In Culture and waste: The creation and destruction of value, ed. Guy Hawkins and Steven Muecke, 103–116. Rowman and Littlefield.

Dragging Caste: Forms of Self-Making in Precarious Times Toral Jatin Gajarawala

A future version of me danced in front of my eyes…. (59)

If, historically, “coming out” has been a gay thing, how do we name the revelation of caste identity? The closet theorized by Eve Sedgewick has become the dominant trope for the space of concealed identities, buried skeletons, and the history of queerness. But Yashica Dutt’s memoir steers this metaphor in a different direction. In this young journalist’s story, “coming out” is the revelation of a caste identity, one historically so reviled that it is liable to endanger friendships, love stories, and both professional and actual lives. We live in a time of caste atrocity. In the last several decades, Dalit (“untouchable caste”) writing has emerged on the Indian cultural scene and provided the shock of revelation to those who knew and did not know. Stories of village life and brutal poverty, of atrocities and rape, as well as the mundane forms of deprivation

T. J. Gajarawala (*) New York University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_8

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and humiliation have reached a wide audience in multiple languages and regions. These works have also outlined a new subjectivity, where Dalit as an anti-caste identity implies resistance, reform, and radicalism. Underlying this is the assumption of an authentic Dalit way of seeing and being. Dutt’s story is at an angle to this body of work as well, as it explores not simply the assertion of a Dalit identity, but its concealment: the long labor of assimilation and “passing” that actually precedes it. In her memoir, a compelling mélange of family history and social commentary, the author of the Tumblr page “Documents of Dalit Discrimination” details her own “documents,” like the birth certificate that attests to her Scheduled Caste [SC], and the Dalit caste name ‘Nidaniya’ that her grandfather abandoned. Decades of dissimulation, and the legitimate privileges it ensures, ensue, before the eventual revelation. But Dutt’s “coming out” is after a lifetime of swallowed insults—thin gold earrings and plaited hair, English classes and birthday cake—the labor of which forms the compelling narrative of this book. Costuming, cross-dressing, masquerade and mimicry: as Dutt says, “Artifice is not easy.” Even more brutal are accidental errors and cruel misreadings; when Dutt’s mother comes to see her at her college hostel, the broken luggage strap on her shoulder and her clothes dirtied by the train floor reveal everything, changing irrevocably her daughter’s life at school, puncturing her veneer. Caste, she reminds us, as she was so routinely reminded, is “the invisible arm that turns the gears” (9). Coming Out as Dalit is thus distinct in its delicate presentation of a second order complexity: the tacit acknowledgment of Dalitness and its elaborate cover, which can be generated only in a context of mixed-caste modernity, often that of institutional spaces. That putatively caste-blind spaces produce the most pressing need for dissimulation reminds us that the very notion of the modern in India, and modernism itself, has been constructed as caste-free. In Ajay Navariya’s story “Tattoo,” the revelation happens at a public gym; in many others it is the university. Sujata Gidla, daughter of college lecturers, and student at IIT Madras, puts it this way, in Ants Among Elephants: “You can tell the truth and be ostracized, ridiculed, harassed,” or “you can lie.” If people believe your lie, she goes on, “you cannot tell them your stories. You cannot tell them about your life. Because your life is your caste, your caste is your life” (5). The absurdity of this philosophical equation is as follows: authenticity engenders risk, and potential social quarantine, and dissimulation engenders risk of a different sort, and a psychic break. What else is communicated in the process

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of caste evasion; what kind of psychic transformations ensue, and what kind of social critique does it (silently) voice? Dutt’s memoir, the direct impetus for which was the tragic death of the young student Rohit Vemula in 2016 and his startling and beautiful suicide note, is primarily a narrative of Dalit life and an insistence on its political and social urgency. But the memoir, which circles around the metaphors of passing, performance, and the closet, raises a series of compelling problems in subaltern social life, most prominently: How does the everyday violence of a stratified society produce new social forms and strategies? This chapter situates Dutt’s memoir in a history of both “passing” and “coming out,” touching on seminal Dalit texts like Baburao Bagul’s When I Hid My Caste (2017) and Ambedkar’s own autobiographical writings, as well as the African-American experience to which Dutt often refers. I also mention the contemporary work of two visual artists who address forms of evasion and the caste question in recent exhibitions: Rajyshri Goody (Eat with Great Delight, Ishara Art Gallery, 2019) and Shilpa Gupta (Altered Inheritances, Ishara Art Gallery, 2019). In doing so, I suggest that the psychic elements of a casteized life, what I refer to as ‘drag,’ offer a more complex reading of often strategic caste evasion. Caste evasion, “passing,” and coming out should be considered in relation to a philosophical and psychic precarity, which challenges basic notions of self and self-determination.

Genealogies I Dutt’s story begins in Rajasthan, where a familial history of social mobility long preceded her own. On both paternal and maternal side, the strategic decision-making of the family set a precedent for our own protagonist’s life. That genealogy includes soldiery in the British army, and civil service in Rajasthan, including the police force and the state excise department. In fact, Dutt’s paternal grandfather became the first Dalit divisional superintendent in Rajasthan, while his first wife supported him in this process through manual scavenging. In other words, Dutt’s ‘passing’ was prefaced by the inescapable logic of inter-India migration, urban life, caste ascendancy, and Sanskritization, which two generations later could hardly be undone. That complexity, some might say contradiction, is present in a daughter’s tremulous appreciation for her mother’s determination, which single-­ handedly launched the family toward the middle-class, if into a teeteringly

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precarious version. Dutt’s mother’s story, worthy of a book in its own right, is the thread that runs through the narrative: marriage to a man soon to be revealed as an alcoholic, a suicide attempt by jumping from the roof, a broken ankle, ‘acting’ the part of a Brahmin girl from UP, her 1980s-style perm, kitten heels and dark metallic eyeshadow. In one backward glance, Dutt recalls a photograph of her mother from her childhood school function, “wearing a gorgeous pair of cream-coloured heels, the crepe bandage still visible on her foot” (20). She also recalls that the piercing pain from this injury made it difficult to sleep. Her mother’s attempts to solidify the stability of the household are central to the formative experiences of our protagonist’s life. Dutt mentions her mother’s purchase of Laali, the “brick-red cow,” as an attempt to adopt upper-caste habits. The young Yashica carries burlap sacks of hay on her back for the calf now tied in their garage. And yet this attempt, as Dutt notes, is a composite of implausibilities, both from the perspective of Dalit authenticity and Brahmin façade, both of which strain the imagination in Rajasthan. But her mother does manage to secure the education of her children, including a place for Yashica at an English medium boarding school, against the wishes of the extended family. Here, her daughter would be ‘pretending every breathing, waking and sleeping moment’ (26), mimicry being a consummate practice, a reflection of the extent to which caste is interwoven in the very fabric of everyday life. The forms of masquerade continue, to an ironic degree, as in the call center, where Yashica, unlike her Delhi University classmates who eat three meals a day and have money for snacks, takes a job. Her sharp English lands her work at T-Mobile, selling cellular packages to elderly Britons in rural England. The job requires a cover story, a fake British name, a concocted British accent, and a curated pitch. “As it turns out,” she notes, “when we told them that were calling from Gloucester, England, they didn’t exactly believe us” (63). Yashica subverts T-Mobile’s protocols and makes several sales, abandoning the artificial script. While passing as upper caste, Dutt is asked to pass as British. As a Dalit, Dutt is forced to pass as upper caste. As an Indian she is forced to pass as English. The circuitous logics of performance in the text abound. And yet, the irony of passing and its enabling ability (Dutt propels herself into the prestigious St Stephens College, Delhi University) is, as Dutt says, that “my dalitness still weighed heavy on me; I dragged its carcass behind me though my childhood into adulthood” (9). This is a powerful metaphor—the burden of the carcass is, of course, a Dalit one, for those

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castes were responsible for the disposal of dead animals, and thus bound and polluted by their labor—but the carcass or broom as signifier is now the invisible identity. It is also no idle metaphor, but one derived from material life1 signifying the near yet far, the contemporaneous yet historical, weight of descent-based drag. I underline Dutt’s use of the term drag here because it suggests both the weight, the heaviness of a stigmatized caste identity and its phenomenological burden, and the switch, the flourish, the performative change of garb and identity. Dutt drags her/a past along with her, while occasionally participating in the “drag” that is engendered by upper-caste norms and styles. This performance, however, has little of the play and cheek associated with its contemporary iteration, and more to do with earlier practices of adaptation and translation. But drag is another mode of critique of the liberal individual subject, for whom, theoretically both the philosophical and political self is unencumbered by the world. Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks, would describe the “weight” of the white gaze (90), a weight that descends upon the radical visual event of being seen and pierced by the other, and from which the subject was prior to this protected. Jean Paul Sartre will refer to this as a slime, an existential agony, through which the modern subject is forced to move, weighted down by history, inured to flight (630). Drag, the beast of burden, the inveterate companion, is what accompanies the figures in the following narratives.

Genealogies II Coming Out as Dalit consistently underlines the caste-based nature of those performances, and the terrible psychic toll they take. Although the author is sanguine about the strategic nature of caste evasion—for jobs, she says, to be able to rent a house, to preempt a teacher’s disdain—the costs of leaving forms of Dalitness behind are myriad. Not only is there the most basic question of culture—food, music, language, and, of course, names—there is the crisis of false consciousness, of existential inauthenticity, challenged both by Simone de Beauvoir and Bhimrao Ambedkar. The lie—practiced, perfected, routinely rehearsed—becomes the only real. Ambedkar, the guiding figure, still, of Dalit politics and cultural life, retells one episode of his early years that is relevant here. Ambedkar left India in 1913, on a scholarship to Columbia University, funded by the Maharaja of Baroda. From there, he moves to London, to work toward a doctorate in Economics. But upon return to India in 1917, he is forcibly

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plunged into the routine nature of everyday dissimulation: requiring a place to stay, he lands in a Parsee hotel. The terror! Ambedkar is forced to dissimulate despite having none of the necessary accoutrements, no sadra, no kashti, simply because he has no place left to go. After 11 days, this is what he writes in his autobiographical sketches. “I felt that I was in a dungeon and I longed for some human being to talk to. But there was no one. In the absence of the company of human beings I sought the company of books, and read and read. Absorbed in reading, I forgot my lonely condition. But the chirping and flying about of the bats, which had made the hall their home, often distracted my mind and sent cold shivers through me—reminding me of what I was endeavouring to forget, that I was in a strange place under strange conditions. Many a time I must have been angry. But I subdued my grief and anger thinking that though it was a dungeon, it was a shelter, and that some shelter was better than no shelter. So heart-rending was my condition that when my sister’s son came from Bombay, bring my remaining luggage which I had left behind, and saw my state, he began to cry so loudly that I had to send him back immediately. In this state, I lived in the Parsi inn, impersonating a Parsi” (676). Let us take a moment to parse the nature of the terror described here. After five  years in Europe and America, Columbia University and then London School of Economics, Ambedkar’s consciousness of his own untouchability was, as he says, “wiped from his mind.” In this episode, there is the brutal recognition, re-cognition, which is also a repetition, of his untouchable status, the first philosophical act of his homecoming (this is in 1917; he will eventually say to Gandhi, “I have no homeland.”). But the sense of estrangement that pervades this passage—the cold, the bats, the dungeon—is provoked by a feeling of utter alienation—of being alien. The estrangement from his fellow man, intrinsic to the social order of caste, is further compounded by the fact of impersonation—alienation from the self. That existential homelessness, combined with the absurdity of the alienation of the caste condition for the newly returned doctoral student, and the resulting drive to conceal made simultaneous with the constant threat of revelation, prefigures a central thematic of modern Dalit writing, from Baburao Bagul’s When I Hid My Caste to Yogesh Maitreya’s recent Flowers on the Grave of Caste. In Bagul’s now canonical story, “When I Hid My Caste,” a worker from Bombay seeks employment in Surat. When asked about his caste, he dissembles: “Why do you ask me my caste? Can you not see who I am? Me, I am a Mumbaikar. I fight the good fight. I give my life in the defence

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of the right. I have freed India from bondage and I am now her strength. Got that?” (117). Later, when asked again in advance of letting a room he insists, “You shouldn’t speak that way in front of me, a new citizen of a new Bharat. We’re all the creators of the new nation. There are no dhedas, no poor, no Brahmins” (118).2 Disturbed as he is by this periodic questioning, our protagonist insists on concealment as the only way to keep his job, and to let a room. He chooses to take the moral high ground, insisting on the social revolution that was to accompany decolonization, the post-caste language of citizen, fraternity, nationhood. His plan is foiled, however, by the brave Kashinath Sakpal. Kashinath, when asked the same question, says, “I’m one of Dr Ambedkar’s party, of his caste. My name is Kashinath Sakpal, of Mumbai, Kala Chowk.” When threatened by the Brahmin, the Kshatriya, Kashinath bellows, “I’ll tell your foreman a thing or two about the Constitution of India. And that will land you all in jail. I’ll get you thrown out of your jobs. Out you’ll go, like ants flicked away.” In addition to the sense of empowerment provided by the Constitution which can make of the upper castes mere ants, there is Kashinath’s courage—brazen and uncowed. Our protagonist, on the other hand, protected by his deception, is tormented, “terrified,” “disgusted,” “disturbed,” “disheartened” (121). Though he attempts to defend his kin without drawing attention to himself (“Who is Untouchable? Fire is untouchable. The sun is untouchable. Death is untouchable!”), his poetic language only confirms to others his upper-caste status. “I am the artisan of the new joys of the common man. I am a warrior in the cause of humanity…I am a citizen-worker. I among those who lead Manu’s backward nation to glory. I am a poet!” (123). The psychic effects of this false presentation, and the accolades it receives, are somehow debilitating. “Where I had once spoken with the freedom of the blowing wind, now I measure every word and considered its effects. Like a frightened rabbit, I tried to keep people at bay. I who had once bathed in the crowded river of Mumbai’s humanity, who had watched people as silently as a butterfly so that I might know them better, was now forced to crouch, weeping in the cruel dark, in order to conceal the secret of my caste” (127). The passing narrative in the Dalit context raises the perpetual fear of revelation as an organizing narrative principle. It is worth underlining how powerful is this urban immersion, not reliant on caste revelation or concealment, but simply on population excess. The outskirts of Surat offer no such freedoms, and the knowledge of his own caste and the efforts of deception produce a psychological prison.

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Things only become worse, however. Not only does the young man’s Sanskritized Hindi mark his distinction from precisely he who he aims to defend, it provokes the unwanted esteem and resulting deference of Ramcharan. Ustad, Ramcharan calls him, when he says, “we are both sons of the same soil, sons of the same language…. We are artisans of the new, which is why we have a responsibility to life!” (131). He insists that Masthur come home with him; his wife Saraswati touches his feet out of respect, and offers him water, as the ‘guru’ of a brahmin.3 It is in this sanctuary of upper-caste life, marked by sindoor, the baithak, Saraswati’s devotion, that the protagonist experiences once again a new and terrible burden, not of deception in and of itself, but of inauthenticity. Of course, the story comes to an end with blows suffered as others burst into Ramcharan’s home, revealing Masthur’s identity.4 In Ambedkar’s brief life narratives, the necessity of masquerade is consistently underlined. As a child traveling to Koregaon to visit his father, waiting for a transport that never arrives, he is forced to dissimulate as Muslim, “as there was no possibility of our getting water if we spoke the truth.” Although his Urdu was very good (“so as to leave no doubt that he was a real Muslim”), “the trick did not work.” Even in the Parsi hotel, his entry is based on the premise that he is a Hindu—where Hindu can only mean upper caste. The situation eventually unravels: “It was in fact a fraud, and the fraud was discovered” (676). These short retellings play an important role in a genealogy of ‘passing,’ as anachronistic as the term appears (though historically these episodes are in fact congruent with the term’s usage in the United States). In these moments, fabrication and masquerade are the only solution. There is either water or not, dissimulation or thirst. It is, in fact, the cart driver who suggests this route to the children. That evasion, then, is a dialectical response to the inability of the casted subject to participate in the universal order or that of the postcolonial nation (Masthur cannot be the “artisan,” “the new man,” or a “new citizen of a new Bharat”). Caste evasion—or the strategic and temporary adoption and discarding of identities in the face of risk—is part of the everyday life of the precarious subject.

Figures of Alienation The lie that cannot be told, the life that cannot be revealed, combined with the ever present threat of revelation as well as a profound sense of humiliation: the philosophical problem generated by caste concealment is

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that of authenticity. In the Sartrean formulation, this problem has a unique ontology as the individual moves between being-in-itself (en soi) and being-for-itself (pour soi) and being-for-others (pour autrui). The solid versus the fluid, ‘facticity’ versus the ‘transcendent’: the individual, Jean-­ Paul  Sartre would argue, is always beyond his situation, that which is given, conferred, and inherent. In valuing the experiential, in insisting, as one character does in No Exit, that ‘you are your life, and nothing else,’ the individual was described as the sole guarantor of freedom, prior to his ‘being-for-others.’ This was of course a philosophical freedom, long prior to a political one, and yet it offered a realm of self and self-action that would have powerful resonances in many contexts beyond WWII, the European theater, and the tragedy of mass slaughter. Consequently, however, the denial of freedom—the denial of human agency—is the origin of Sartrean bad faith and estrangement. “This denial is not a liberation but an inauthentic flight,” writes Simone de Beauvoir. Suraj Yengde writes of this routine dissimulation as “Christian, Buddhist, atheist or ‘no more a Dalit,’” as a normative element of contemporary society in which Dalits ascribe to “meta-identities,” incomplete and anxiety-ridden. Ambedkar would introduce conversion as the sole solution for the actualization of the fullness of the Dalit human personality, “the golden life” (111).5 If in these frameworks authenticity is the “truth of the ontological self,” the evasion of that freedom spells disaster. Of course, the embodied experience of race—the body alienated from its own self—is Frantz Fanon’s productive corrective to Sartrean authenticity, further expanded by Black studies. To what extent can the racialized—and I would add casteized— subject transcend given the symbolic weight that denies her consciousness and humanity? Richard Wright, for example, would draw on existentialism, and the notion of freedom suggested here, to theorize the African-American experience. But it was Fanon’s work, in particular, that raised the question of forms of being on which freedom impinges, rather than liberates. In the paradigmatic moment that psychically yields the entirety of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon is fingered on the metro, fixed by the gaze and the digit of a white child. Fanon goes on to write of shame, torment, pursual, of being dissected, determined, enslaved, and the psychic damage to his own self. As the critic Lewis Gordon writes, “In Black Skin, White Masks there is the struggle of embodied consciousness weighted down by a social world that fixes some people into an overdetermined point as one would train a microorganism injected by a dye” (187).

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The caste context is not generated from the same phenotypic otherness, predicated as it is on different forms of difference. But analogous moments of self-estrangement are peppered throughout Coming Out as Dalit. When Dutt’s mother arrives at her hostel, her daughter suddenly sees her anew. “When she walked into the room the first time she came to visit, her clothes were soiled from the dirt from the train floor and she was carrying a duffel bag whose strap had broken on the way. It was when I saw the looks on the faces of my roommates that it hit me: Mum was no longer the glamorous, well dressed woman from my childhood. And with that single look, my roommates came to the conclusion that St. Stephen’s or not, I wasn’t one of them. And for this reason, for the rest of the year that I stayed there, I wouldn’t be able to overcome this” (63). Dutt sees them see her mother, and as a result must see this figure anew. The fixed gaze Fanon describes, and the distorted mirror that it produces, is here transferred to the mother. In another moment, Dutt describes a lifetime confrontation with the reservations debate. And yet despite her intuitive sense of the injustice of caste privilege and the necessity of state-sponsored placement measures, a terrible shame about “grabbing the resources” as a reservations candidate grips her, all the while acknowledging that she “had internalized the arguments that anti-reservationists make” (96). Caste passing requires her silence, and further produces a critique almost directly at odds with the reality of her own situation. Fanon’s reflections are relevant to the casteized subject insofar as they highlight the problem of authenticity in a world that both values it as a premise and is hostile to it as a practice. Given this context, caste evasion might also be seen as a strategic self-protection from ontological (and not just material) insult. That insult occurs in a social context in which, alongside rigid forms of segregation, there are routine forms of refusal, and resistance, as well as assimilation. Caste passing would seem to confirm the material and metaphysical hierarchy suggested by the logic of Sanskritization or Ashrafization, the adoption of specifically upper-caste habits in the service of social advancement. Typically anathema from the perspective of Dalit studies as Dutt herself will emphasize—“Life style changes tend to accompany a deeper subscription to Brahminical patriarchy and authoritarianism” (8)— Sanskritization would be traditionally considered as part of reformist efforts to both sanitize Dalit cultural life and to denature forms of identity. As an analytic lens, too, such reformist narratives that focus on vegetarianism or other forms of aspirational changes that ‘code’ as upper caste would occlude forms of political action and struggle (Satyanarayana and Rawat,

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25). Beyond Sanskritization, caste passing operates alongside ethnicization, or the transformation of caste identities into ethnicized communities or societies, as well as social revisionism, whereby certain communities refashion and rewrite historical origins.6 These forms of destabilization are the much broader context in which caste evasion might be read. However, the sense of epistemic violence generated by an adopted identity is not present in the Sanskritzing logic of self-improvement, social arrival, and assimilation, nor in the forms of rewriting and rethinking that are premised on historical or moral superiority. This is the province of passing alone. Passing would also disable the solidarity of community and the activism it engenders, as well as the tabulation of everyday casteist violence. Dutt’s “Documents of Dalit Discrimination” suggests how important these documents are, for the transcription of micro and macro aggressions that move beyond their bodily archives. Both of these factors are premised, of course, on the establishment of Dalit identity. Gordon notes that “As imitation, what is lacked is an original advantage of the self as standard. The imitation, in other words, is held by a standard of not being itself. It fails, in other words, even in its achievement. To achieve imitation is to fail at what an imitation imitates, namely an original” (188). The tragic element of the subject who passes is a kind of isolation from both the original and its double. Given that passing is performatively and socially distinct from an assimilationist strategy (ideological investment in hierarchy) as well as resistant Dalit unreading practices (ideological critique of said hierarchy), how might we understand it? To return us for one moment to Gordon’s reading of (caste) ontology via Fanon: “Sartre articulates the quality of being found in the sticky weighted down historical racial schema, one with the agony of consciousness of disavowed freedom…His argument is that the négre thus struggles with the meaning of her or his freedom, wherein the reality of the struggle is the manifestation of unfreedom” (195) [italics mine]. Fanon thus serves as a kind of corrective to the Sartrean paradigm, or at least the exposure of its underside: freedom as an interior norm until confronted with the world. “For the body ensnared by a social world infected with dehumanizing cultural forces,” writes Gordon, “the movement […] is from being forced into a thing under the weight of descriptive edicts, to the interrogative, where possibility is posed by the phenomenon of questioning” (196). If the subject anticipates precisely that antagonistic subject/world relation, rather than simply being

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conditioned to it, passing can also be understood as a kind of self-­ protection against ontological insult. Rather than exposure of flayed skin, social practices of passing serve as a temporary protective shield in an atmosphere of danger, until a welcome security prevails. If passing is read as a psychic struggle, and it is in and of itself a ‘manifestation of unfreedom,’ then what kind of social critique of modern Indian life does it suggest?

Styles, Modes, Methods Caste evasion and caste passing should be understood comparatively, as reflections of less stratified forms of modernity, migration, and social mobility, combined with the various forms of temporariness and social crisis that produce “ontological precarity.” I will mention two thought-­ provoking examples here. One revelatory intertext is Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the Jewish condition post WWII. “Man,” she writes, “is a social animal and it is not easy for him when social ties are cut off. Moral standards are much easier kept in the texture of society. Very few individuals have the strength to conserve their own integrity if their social political and legal status is totally confused. Lacking the courage to fight for a change in our legal and social status, many of us decided instead, to try a change in identity…And this curious behavior makes matters much worse. The confusion in which we live is partly our own work (116).” Arendt’s concern is for the Jewish assimilationist, “more German than the German,” who is caught in an existential bind. But the historical conditions that produce the assimilationist posture—the absolute rupture, she says, of private lives, relatives lost in the camps, denationalization, exile, the loss of home, language, and any sense of security—are, of course, in extremis. Assimilation, tragic as it is in Arendt’s account, is dialectical, an end, while also a means. The other pathway is a different kind of death. Interesting that Arendt actually metaphorizes the pariah, he who chooses the non-­ assimilationist path and will eventually become “the vanguard of [his] peoples, if they keep their identities” (119). But it is the African-American tradition which offers an entire discourse on passing; some theoretical insights from this body of work and the early twentieth-century genre of the ‘passing novel’ are relevant here. The phenomenon of passing, in that context, is generated by the structures of Jim Crow America, which legalized discrimination on the basis of race and produced an atmosphere of menace and violence for ‘colored people.’ The

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passing novel—James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and Walter White’s Flight (1926), among others—is understood to have been created by this structural imperative, to circumvent social conditions through the temporary adoption of tropes of whiteness. Strategic, in terms of opportunity, and yet revelatory in terms of access and new forms of subjectivity, passing in the African-American context was tied to a particular historical moment. As such, given the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, passing is now putatively understood as an obsolete phenomenon, says Michelle Elam, “quaintly, and nostalgically, gone the way of gramophones, congolene and flappers” (749). A new language of hybridity, diversity, métissage, and multiculturalism has also attenuated the benefits of such strategies of racial accession. The very category as one that is performative—as in Judith Butler on gender troubling or Stuart Hall on presence and positioning—has democratized the notion of passing to such an extent that it is seen as the default of modern social life. And yet, as Elam suggests, passing is still an important contemporary cultural analytic from which to consider identity formation, even if understood in the constructivist sense (determined on a daily basis but through repetition), which would challenge its pejorative connotations. In other words, passing as a concerted effort to transcend racial subjugation is canceled by notions of identity that underscore its liberatory, accessible, fungible aspects. For Elam, this shows that passing can “point the way to figuring subversive new norms” (763).7 A second point: passing in the caste context would thus have to be placed alongside the range of performative acts, strategic and haphazard, intentional and oppressive, that are governing the contemporary. A recent art installation by Shilpa Gupta, Altered Inheritances: 100 (Last Name) Stories, universalizes this. A series of framed abstract photographs are bisected by narratives of name changes. In this exhibit, the name change is the tangible sign—the phenotype one might say—of caste/race/ethnic transcendence, and may be tactical or emotional or aspirational. The exhibit of segmented and sliced picture frames, each of which is captioned by first person micronarratives of alteration, unnerves the logic of photography. Sometimes in the typewriter font of official documentation, other times in a hurried handwriting, each caption justifies the change of name. RAM BAHADUR DARNAL, né PARAIYAR says, “I did not want to be left out because of my caste.” MAYAVI GHATANI née BISWAKARMA explains, “Ours is a lower caste surname. The reason we shifted to a new

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surname was not to elevate ourselves to a higher caste.” The combination of the name transformation alongside the bisected frames—names crossed out and photos cut—suggests the futility of re-piecing together origin stories, given the future orientation of the project. Photographic logic and photographs, too, framed here but against genealogy, fixity, and posterity—no one keeps the names of their fathers—are divested of their typical ability to capture, fix, and preserve. But the interesting element of Gupta’s installation is the universalization of this transformative project—embraced by Chinua Achebe and Bob Dylan, by the former slave, the Anglo-Indian, the Korean subject of Japanese rule. The slave ship ledger is then juxtaposed—bisected—with the young woman from Nepal; Malcolm X (né Little) is sitting wedged next to Jeyannathan R___. The universalization of the name change—and hence of ‘alteration,’ a much more delicate and potentially subversive metaphor than passing, deprovincializes caste strategizing, one of many forms of accession, Sanskritization, and, yes, even rebellion. Gupta’s demi-cut plaques also highlight the IIT Kanpur case of 2006 in which 200 students changed their surname to ‘Bharat’—India— in order to protest caste-based patrimony. A comparative intellectual ‘frame’ suggests the extent to which the process of self-making is essential to modern subjecthood. This often involves passing, in Gupta’s cabinet, which eventually makes a new kind of authenticity available. Alteration— often microscopic shifts—also captures the strange dialectics of both Darnal and Ghatani: passing may be generated by the individual, but also by a generational logic that precedes, as in Dutt’s story. It may also then demand its own undoing and unlearning. Ghatani reclaims a caste name adopted by the passing/Sanskritizing gesture of the previous generation, just as Darnal does the opposite. Implicit here is the larger historical narrative against which passing emerges: Alteration thus seems like a valuable, and occasionally radical, way to assess what would typically be referred to pejoratively as passing by the Dalit subject. Still, the most compelling cases are those in which—as for Yashica Dutt—social and caste hegemonies make other life worlds untenable. What is thus gained by such alteration, both materially and experientially? Caste maneuvering, and the artfulness of Dutt’s narrative, draws attention to the performativity of the everyday: the curation of a biography for the job interview, the presentation of birthday cakes as a flourish of class privilege. How do we enact those flashes of our future selves in the routines of everyday life?

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Dutt points out, for example, that Ajmer, a city with a “hard-to-miss colonial hangover,” and “quasi-cosmopolitanism,” owing to a mix of communities including Marwaris and Jains, “presented the perfect platform to transcend our caste” (18). The historian Ajantha Subramaniam, writing of the “dialectics of lowercaste assertion and uppercaste claims to meritocracy” (277), describes this as a self-marking. Due to the Dravidian movement, and in response to the Mandal Commission and the expansion of caste reservations, caste marking was conceived of as not something simply for the Dalit subject to bear, but rather also reflective of upper caste practices of self-marking and unmarking through which one was to make caste belonging consistent with merit (279). “He could stop de-­ Brahminizing his Tamil,” says one respondent. Subramaniam writes that the expansion of the reserved category to nearly half the student body generated an everyday diagnostics of caste through which everything from dress to facility with English and performance in classes came to be scrutinized for evidence of quota status (283). The concern among dominant castes was to perform as ‘non-reserved.’ The passing of the Dalit subject might be read as reflective of the more general self-fashioning of Indian modernities—often casteless modernities—alongside other modes of self-­ marking. This is further complicated by the question of faith, an important issue that falls beyond the scope of the chapter here. These forms of self-making and marking are historical and social, as they are individual. In fact, they are intergenerational. Dutt’s passing is preceded by her family’s, which is made possible by the routine shifts required by the Indian Civil Service, from Ajmer to Merta City, from Gangapur to Devgarh, to Jaitaran, while our protagonist shifts from Ajmer to Mussoorie and back, and her mother from Ajmer to Delhi. Though her parents were of the sweeper caste, their routine dislocation and only periodic engagement with the father made it possible if not plausible for a child to answer ‘Parashar Brahmin’ to the inevitable question at school. Even Dutt’s grandfather adopted the first name Victor, when working at the Oberoi in Delhi. To what extent, in other words, is Dutt’s situation not hers alone, but rather paradigmatic? Is the passante, in the small world of the college-going Dalit student, a kind of social norm? Thirdly, the key issue that emerges from a study of passing is the radical sense of precarity that underlies this project: risk, instability, fugitivity, refusal, revelation. In a poignant moment, after the careful elaboration of each move, each new house, each new job, and each new lie, Dutt writes, “If it sounds like a trite script from an art movie, that’s how it felt, too….

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Everything about our life somehow continued to feel temporary” (53). The precarious nature of Dutt’s situation is paradigmatic: the family routinely runs out of money in between her father’s haphazard visits, her mother and three children find ways to eat on 20 rupees per week, holes emerge in the brick of their crumbling home. Her mother teaches, then stitches, then opens a store, then becomes an NGO worker, a school taxi driver, then an insurance agent. The protagonist’s youth is also marked by all the generic features of a global precariat compounded by the particularities of a postcolonial society: haphazard and piecemeal work, both developing and insecure, alongside rapacious and digital economies. Yashica works as a kindergarten helper, a high school tutor, a call center worker, an events promotor at fashion shows, a greeter at marathons, and of course as an interviewer and ghost writer. Even at Columbia University, she lives at the YMCA, watching fights erupt, and sharing a shower with others. And the parting gift of the gig economy, on which she relies solely and which allows her to pay for her university degree, is a profound sense of shame (64). I cite one exemplary  moment here: “When for the first time in my life, I received a text message alerting me to the R9200 salary deposit in my bank account, an obscene amount for any nineteen-year-old in 2005, let alone one in my position I felt numb… I knew that I had earned this money at a job I was driven to in an AC cab, where the hardest part of my day was talking to people. Meanwhile Mum would be hitchhiking to deliver her pamphlets on HIV/AIDS and working for six hours at a stretch to finish a sari petticoat which would fetch her R50” (64). Even as Dutt becomes part of a tenuous credential-bearing precariat, the image of her mother drags/hovers behind. Dutt’s passing emerges as a strategy or tactics for living in a material world, as well as a solution to an existential philosophical dilemma. I italicize solution because despite the narrative force of Dutt’s book, which emphasizes deliberation, reflexivity, and revelation, passing often operates in the space between deliberate and unconscious, the space of Bourdieu’s habitus, and it is often actualized by silent acquiescence—neither performance, nor refusal, but silence. Dutt writes, for example, that “hiding my caste was something I internalized” (36). Dutt, too, wore plaits in her hair and thin gold hoops, while watching her mother’s enthusiastic experiments in vastu shastra for their crumbling home. From her grandfather who dropped his name, to her mother who insists that the last four rupees found in corners are “for baking a cake,” passing becomes a mode of dignified  living, an everyday feature of life, a silent secret. It is only upon moving to New  York, Dutt writes, “that I learned to accept my lower

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caste” (135). This caste-blind or caste-ignorant space allows for reflection, as it does a relief from risk and the constant threat of revelation.

Conclusion Drag, as I’ve suggested, in Dutt’s narrative and others, should be understand as a concept with a phenomenological cast(e): it cannot be measured qualitatively or empirically, nor can it be read by normative affective metrics. Although humiliation may be one element of its core, as discussed by Gopal Guru, I refer more to its means.8 Like a Fanonian weight, it has elements of civilizational burden; like Sartrean slime, it is a problem generated by a current historical moment. But drag also speaks to the intergenerational lingering, as well as a historical violence, and its routine interruption that punctures the everyday of the contemporary. Much more akin to Cristina Sharpe’s contemplation of the wake, drag is the friction that reduces the aerodynamicity of forward movement, or thrust, but it can only be generated by that motion. It is not a phenomenon that could be recognized or registered without mobility, distance, succession, transcendence. As Dutt moves from depleted industrial town to Sophia convent school boarding, what accompanies her is a plastic bag of ubtan. Mixed by her mother into a thick paste to control her darkening skin, the ubtan is routinely forced upon Dutt as a child. Upon her departure, the young caretaker at Sophia is given explicit instructions to maintain the ubtan routine, which she uses to humiliate her young ward. Dutt herself tries to honor her mother’s request; however, she is just a child, and dried flakes that remained out of reach during her bath routinely flake off during class, prompting the derision of her classmates. “I would quickly and wordlessly scrub it off when someone noticed that I still had some of my ‘Dalitness’ sticking to me” (30). This is a moment of repetition in Dutt’s life; she returns to the hostel each season with a new packet, and “fresh fodder for the bullying” (32). And yet, she cannot bear to throw it away. “During those long months away from home, that bag was my connection to my mother” (32). The ubtan, suggestive of the shame of color, the desperation of caste concealment, and her mother’s efforts, is a contorted souvenir, or memento mori. In that gesture, however, is a refusal, a certain glance askew.9 Sartrean ‘slime,’ Fanonian ‘weight,’ the ‘drag’ to which Dutt refers, is recast by Fred Moten for a different moment, as nimble and creative tactics, a refusal to be pinned, placed, fixed.10

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What of the perverse gift that emerges from doubling? The double vision of the migrant, imagined by so many, or the Black person in America, articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois, suggests an intellectual logic that constantly presages its end. If in Souls of Black Folk one must see oneself as another, sometimes tactically so (Dutt laughs at her flaking ubtan—at her mother—on the outside, even as she cringes within [317]), it also generates a two-ness: two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, a second sight (51). Although for Du Bois the subject can solely see himself with the dissonant eyes of another, sociologist Paget Henry suggests a “potentiated double consciousness,” what Gordon explains as the “demonstration of the contradictions of the imposed self (the fall after the fall) on the lived reality of the self in mundane life, which offers itself as a dialectical demonstration of conflicting cultural logics where once universals become particularized” (191). When “universals become particularized” and when experience becomes theoretical, this potentiated consciousness emerges, “born of a dialectical critique of the second ontological structure… the social world then emerges as an object of critical inquiry, communication, and engagement” (Gordon 197). After internalizing the upper-caste logic of the Mandal debates, Dutt eventually asks herself, “Why had I overlooked the fact that caste was an artificial construct without logic or reason? Why hadn’t I realized that what I had accepted as normal was an unfair set of practices created so that the powerful could retain their power?” (135). This consciousness is in fact prefigured at several moments in the text, though none so powerful perhaps as that of her Columbia University classmates’ “horror and righteous anger.” The entire book, in fact, its narrative drive, works toward this epiphanic realization, and toward a participation in a powerful universalist critique, precisely that critique that Bagul’s character longs for. “I,” he says, “who had watched people so that I might know them better…..” In case it need be said, Black studies and the circulation of knowledge and theory it engendered has augured these moments—helped to “make the social world an object of critical inquiry”—many of which would not have been otherwise possible. The uncomfortable truth is that the moment of realization, as well as certain post-caste freedoms, may be enabled by passing and the potentiated double consciousness it can engender. Drag thus conjures that which comes with us, and that which cannot be left behind, that which slows the forward thrust of the arriviste, the thorns on which the mobile might snag, the conceptual space between the putative burden of authenticity and the putative freedom of fiction. That one

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member of a family would be chauffeured in an air-conditioned car while another hitchhikes to work with truckers demonstrates the juxtaposition of Indian economies side by side, but also the terrible tragedy, the drag on the propulsive, who ‘succeeds’ only to consistently be reminded of its costs. In one small splurge at the sight of her first salary, Dutt purchases some minor things. She is immediately reprimanded by her college roommate, for being so profligate as her mother suffers. The shame stays with her but we as readers must ask, what kind of society makes her available for reprimand? It seems particularly relevant that the metaphorical unraveling of our narrator’s guise emerges in the course of writing the ‘Identity essay’ portion of the application to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Faced with the blank page, and the word ‘bhangi’ hovering over her, Dutt writes both of her caste and of learning to conceal.11 The entire narrative, in fact, is occasioned by her definitive break with her past guise, and the book’s prologue and diegetic beginning (“Maine sub ko bata diya main Dalit hoon” [I have told everyone that I am Dalit], she says to her mother) is, in fact, its metaphorical end (xx). This final yet primary moment once again underlines the role of Dutt’s mother in this narrative, a thread that warrants a book in its own right. The portrait of Dutt’s mother in this story is a lyrical, empathetic section of a life narrative, at once biography and autobiography. Throughout, the mother is there, literally and metaphorically, in school and home, in dream and reality, as model and foil. Dutt’s mother almost singlehandedly launches the family beyond its given conditions, and one of her central mechanisms is ‘passing.’ Dutt’s most important life narrative moments are triangulated via her mother: they prompt moments of awakening and revelation. While this would typically be seen as a kind of cultural truth, this thread also underlines the important theme of gendered negotiations in a casteized world. From internal cringe to eventual revelation, everything circles around the figure of the mother. Motherhood here is a series of workarounds, hacks, and wholescale jugaad, what Dutt calls elsewhere a curated performance, combined with dogged persistence. Interesting that both Suraj Yengde in the recent book Caste Matters and the artist Rajyashri Goody in Eat with Great Delight (Ishara Gallery, Dubai, 2019), too, foreground mothers, motherhood, and forms of gendered kinship. In her photo essay Goody captures both the trials and also simple joys of Dalit family meals. One table is ‘set’ with a series of Dalit ‘cookbooks,’ fabricated from key moments in Dalit literature, as from Omprakash Valmiki’s

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Joothan; along the wall are Goody’s own recast family photos, mothers, grandmothers, foods. The genre of the photo album as well as the cookbook, in a delicate sleight of hand, becomes a space to showcase the pleasure and camaraderie of familial commensality and women’s work, a site of what Suraj Yengde would call ‘dalitality’ and ‘dalit love.’ For this, Yengde turns to the mother—his grandmother, in fact—as a model of sociality, kinship, and relation, a model on which a new world might be built. Idyllic, certainly, but one that foregrounds the particular struggles and benevolence of a gendered, casted, identity. In the context of caste India, the only India, Dutt would say, the presence of a book like Coming Out as Dalit begs a philosophical question: What does society do with the casted subject, too Dalit to be understood as ‘Indian,’ ‘modern,’ or ‘assimilated’? That new Dalit subject fits uncomfortably in the historically upper-caste concepts and categories that have dictated the parameters of the modern. In today’s world, Dutt herself admits that sometimes “she almost forgot she was Dalit.” It should be said that for Dutt, caste evasion is a kind of moral tragedy; her other in the book, the figure who in fact prompts both the memoir and Dutt’s emergence, is Rohith Vemula “who did nothing to bury his dalitness” (xv). Dutt’s explanation, as is clear, is that of the tactician: “We create upper-­ caste identities—stolen badges—that help us gain entry to a space that will reject us the moment it finds out who we really are. We nervously flash these IDS anytime we are grilled about our origins” (xi). And yet, between the initial practice of dissemblance and the eventual revelation, an entire life is lived; life emerges, in fact, “in passing,” producing, the constant doubling of identity, and the bifurcated gaze. The conclusion we are to draw is that life-in-passing is a feature of caste existence, and a kind of philosophical prerequisite to the moment of revelation, one that can inaugurate a new and radical form of subjectivity.

Notes 1. See Gopal Guru’s discussion of this metaphor derived from Barrington Moor: “the conversion of the corporeal body into…the walking carrion which thus becomes deeply repulsive” (14). Guru refers to this as a walking carcass. V. Geetha writes, “He takes on literally and figuratively the weight of what is ejected after use and thereby becomes himself and object that can be expended.”

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2. In Hazari’s Outcaste, the narrator of this autobiography mentions the strategic use of the Gandhi cap to blend in with the crowd (61). 3. Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiography Joothan includes a similar scene, of invitation to a Maharashtrian Brahmin home in Bombay during Chaturdashi, based on the misreading of the surname Valmiki as well as the narrator’s “cultured and cultivated” bearing (110). 4. It is worth mentioning that it is Ramcharan’s wife who attempts to protect him and tends to his wounds. 5. “To change this degraded and disgraceful existence into a golden life, conversion is absolutely necessary” (Ambedkar 111). 6. See, for example, Christophe Jaffrelot’s discussion of ethnicization and Dravidian identity as one path of caste de-hierarchization. In contrast, there is the neo-Kshatriyaization in the transformation of certain caste groups, derived in part from the Sanskritizing methods offered by the Arya Samaj, or the revision of the historical/mythological narrative of the Valmikis. In contrast to the latter, there is the revisionism of the Halalkhor, derived from a recasting of Bhangi community as morally superior, ‘halalkhor,’ in attendance to the physical body of the prophet. See Joel Lee’s “Who is the true halalkhor?” 7. Tangentially, Dutt’s narrative, concluding with the experience of Columbia University (like B.R. Ambedkar) and ‘written from a comfortable chair in a café in Chelsea,’ reminds us that caste is an American problem. 8. See Humiliation, ed. Gopal Guru. Humiliation, here, becomes the counterpoint to self-respect: self-respect is its eventual transcendence. 9. See Campt. “The concept of fugitivity highlights the tension between the acts or flights of escape and creative practices of refusal, nimble and strategic practices that undermine the category of the dominant.” These practices of refusal, operating alongside practices of disengagement, are central to Black fugitivity and extend beyond common understandings of resistance. Refusal is the embodied knowledge at the core of social visions of being that are irreconcilable with liberal, difference-making state projects. 10. For Moten, for example, mayonnaise is not Sartrean slime but “intermediary,” “between solid and liquid,” and “has a relationship to the sublime.” 11. Neha Bhujang describes, in “Documents of Dalit Discrimination,” the moment of caste realization as prompted by “the checking of a box.”

References Arendt, Hannah. 1994. We Refugees. Altogether Elsewhere, 100–119. London: Faber & Faber. Bagul, Baburao. 2017. When I Hid My Caste. Delhi: Speaking Tiger Books.

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Bhujang, Neha. https://dalitdiscrimination.tumblr.com/post/139129906947/ my-­parents-­had-­to-­say-­you-­are-­my-­mother-­my. Accessed 30 April 2021. Campt, Tina. 2014. Black Feminist Futures and the Practice of Fugitivity. Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 Lecture, Barnard College, October 7. Du Bois, W.E.B. 2004. Souls of Black Folk, Ed. Manning Marable. London: Taylor and Francis. Dutt, Yashica. 2019. Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir. New Delhi: Aleph Books. Elam, Michele. 2007. Passing in the Post-Race Era: Danzy Senna, Philip Roth, and Colson Whitehead. African American Review 41 (4): 749–768. Geetha, V. 2012. Bereft of Being. In Humiliation, ed. Gopal Guru. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gidla, Sujata. 2017. Ants Among Elephants. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Goody, Rajyshri. 2019. Eat with Great Delight. Ishara Gallery, Dubai: Body Building. Gupta, Shilpa. 2019. Altered Inheritances: Home Is a Foreign Place. Dubai: Ishara Gallery. Guru, Gopal. 2012. Humiliation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hazari. 1969. Autobiography of an Outcaste. New York: Praeger. Lee, Joel. 2018. Who Is the True Halalkhor? Contributions to Indian Sociology 52 (1): 1–27. Maitreya, Yogesh. 2020. Flowers on the Grave of Caste. Pune: Panther’s Paw Publications. Sartre, Jean Paul. 2013. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Subramniam, Ajantha. 2019. The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Valmiki, Omprakash. 2003. Joothan, Trans. Arun Prabha Mukherjee. New York: Columbia University Press. Yengde, Suraj. 2019. Caste Matters. New York: Penguin Viking.

“[S]titched Together by Threads of Light”: Perturbatory Narration, Queer Necropolitics as Biopower, and Transversality in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Alberto Fernández Carbajal

After the global sensation The God of Small Things1 became in 1997, a début novel accorded the Booker Prize, it took Arundhati Roy twenty years to publish a second long work of fiction. The Ministry of Utmost

This chapter is affiliated to the Research Project ‘Bodies in Transit 2’ (Ref. FFI2017-84555-C2-1-P), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the European Regional Development Fund, and the Spanish Research Agency. I also wish to acknowledge the kind mentoring of Professor Ananya Jahanara Kabir, whose sharp reading of Roy’s novel and generous guidance on Kashmir scholarship have been highly instrumental to my own analysis.

A. F. Carbajal (*) University of Roehampton, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_9

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Happiness came out in 2017 to a mixture of ecstatic and puzzled reviews.2 Only two years later, Roy’s collected essays saw the light under the title of My Seditious Heart. This thousand-page volume proves that Roy was not idle between The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (henceforth Ministry); in fact, the expansive, overlapping, and in many cases insistent nature of Roy’s essays seems to match the varied interests articulated in Ministry. In ‘Come September,’ Roy intimates that ‘[f]iction and non-fiction are only different techniques of storytelling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning’3 (2019, 187). In Roy’s phrasing, art seems to equal pleasure, whereas social commentary constitutes a struggle. While such a distinction may partly help explain Roy’s vexation with the novel as a genre, Ministry does not lend itself to such a facile compartmentalization of fiction and non-fiction. Roy’s novel requires an interpretive model acknowledging the blending of both modes of writing in an attempt to reveal the social role of storytelling and its relationship with historical truth in contemporary India. If we distill the different elements of Roy’s book, Ministry essentially interweaves two characters’ plots and related subplots, united by a child, Miss Jebeen the Second, who is actively mothered by both protagonists: on the one hand, we have the hijra Anjum, an Indian Muslim character born intersex and identifying as a woman, who, estranged from her gharana (a hijra household), creates a community of misfits in a graveyard dubbed the Jannat Guest House and Funeral Parlour; on the other, there is Tilottama (shortened to Tilo), a cisgender Indian woman—an architect, in thinly veiled reference to Roy herself—whose mother gave her away and subsequently adopted her, and who becomes romantically involved with Musa, a Kashmiri activist with a tragic personal history. A text dealing with trauma, Ministry suitably works backwards: we gradually piece together the tragic pasts of Tilo’s and Musa’s families, respectively involving relationships across caste barriers—like The God of Small Things—and the violent struggle for freedom in Kashmir. In turn, Anjum’s story involves a carving of a queer niche in Old Delhi against the Indian societal strictures of caste, creed, gender and sex, and class, in defiance of contemporary India’s neoliberal economy. Roy fractures these interlaced narratives, dancing in and out of them in a challenging way. However, this is not merely a tale of two cities, Delhi and Srinagar, or of two tales at war with each other, but rather it is the particular aesthetic codification of Roy’s transversal vision, which works laterally in order to join in—and

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conjoin—the plights of others, committed thus to a plurality of viewpoints and not focused on one overarching social issue. Redeploying the mathematical notion of transversality, Félix Guattari argues: ‘So long as people remain fixated on themselves, they never see anything but themselves. Transversality is a dimension that tries to overcome both the impasse of pure verticality and that of mere horizontality: it tends to be achieved when there is a maximum communication among different levels’ (2015, 113; original italics). Transversality involves a looking beyond one’s subjectivity and transcending vertical social hierarchies and horizontal subalternities, as a converging of multiple directions of travel and orientations. I argue that Roy’s second novel works transversally, moving laterally between subject positions that are different from her own as a middle-class cisgender Indian woman of historical Brahmin heritage, but which remain the focus of her political solidarities. The heavily contested Valley of Kashmir looms large in Ministry. Tilo’s papers’ patchwork of journalism, police records, relayed rumors, dictionaries, and the fictional narrative framing them complicates the novel’s structure and how it is to be interpreted. Filippo Menozzi lucidly suggests that Roy’s logic ‘does not result in a postmodern play with textuality but rather in a form of digressive realism with potential ethical implications, […] defined [as] an “aesthetic of the inconsolable”. This aesthetic mode moves away from the conventions of realist fiction in order to maintain realism’s deeper ethical imperative’ (2018, 20). Reviewing Ministry, Parul Sehgal writes: ‘Is novel the right word, though? I hesitate. […] More than a novel, this book wants to be an offering. It isn’t concerned with the conventional task (or power) of fiction to evoke the texture and drama of consciousness. Instead, it acts like a companion piece to Roy’s political writings’ (2017, 36–37; original emphasis). The novel seems to have been gestated alongside Roy’s recently collected essays, but Sehgal does a disservice to Roy’s narrative elsewhere by stressing its fable-like simplicity and linking it to The God of Small Things, for at the heart of Roy’s writing about Kashmir is the very real problem of identifying the truth, given its routine manipulation by the agents of the Indian nation and its accomplices in the press. As Ananya Jahanara Kabir argues, when it comes to Kashmir, ‘representation ceases to be a “merely philosophical problem” of distinguishing fact from fiction, and instead, capitalizing on such “epistemic murk,” becomes “a high powered medium of domination”’ (2009, 20). In addition, Stuart J. Murray suggests that ‘While the “technological apparatus” renders the

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body speechless, Agamben suggests that the “media apparatus” effects a similar death, transforming language into bodiless speech, pure spectacle, propaganda. These are the gears and mechanisms of biopolitical power’ (2008, 204). India’s biopolitical hold on Kashmir benefits from the ‘epistemic murk’ and the ‘propaganda’ that renders Kashmiri bodies speechless, through both physical torture or murder and media manipulation. In Ministry, the regular juxtaposition of a story and its subsequent retellings by the press and the police, sometimes then rewritten in its allegedly ‘accurate’ version, is meant to challenge the reader, replicating the arduous task of establishing the truth in contemporary Kashmir. Roy’s overlaying of conflicting narratives may disrupt Ministry’s flow, but it does so in a way that is purposefully perturbing. Sabine Schlickers and Vera Toro introduce “perturbatory narration”: a concept designed to describe complex narrative strategies that disrupt immersion in the acquired process of aesthetic reception. […] The coexistence in many literary and filmic narrations of what seemed incompatible narrative strategies gave rise to a narratological dilemma. It was with the intention of subsuming and integrating this complex interplay of deception, paradox, and/or empuzzlement into the critical consideration of literature and film that we developed the model of combined narrative devices and the framing concept of perturbatory narration. (2018, 1)

This concept defines complex narrative techniques defying sustained aesthetic appreciation by throwing different paradoxical narrative elements into the mix. I argue that Ministry enacts the concept of perturbatory narration. If the disruptive overlaying of conflicting narratives, made up of a collage of seemingly non-fictional sources and fictionalizations narratologically playing across genres and media, can perturb the aesthetic reception of Ministry, then Roy’s combination of the gritty depiction of Kashmir and the pluralist utopia of the Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services can further alienate the reader by paradoxical juxtaposition. In fact, the sheer contrast in the portrayal of death and places of memorialization in the intermixed Kashmiri and Indian sections of the novel helps us appreciate the perturbingly queer necropolitics at work in Roy’s novel. A concept made famous by Achille Mbembe, necropolitics refers to the phenomenon whereby ‘the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’ (2003, 11). As Mbembe goes on to explain, ‘[t]o

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exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power. One could summarize in the above terms what Michel Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has taken control’ (2003, 12; original emphasis). In dialogue with Hegel, Mbembe also establishes that ‘the human being truly becomes a subject—that is, separated from the animal—in the struggle and the work through which he or she confronts death’ (2003, 14; original emphasis). The nation state (in the case of Kashmir, the central Indian government and its political and military agents) flexes its sovereign muscles on Kashmiri citizens through routine-like necropolitics, thus paradoxically enabling Kashmir’s citizens’ Kashmiri national subjectivity while necropolitically enforcing their Indianness, evidenced in the violent policing of borders, which Stephen Morton (2014) examines in earlier literary depictions of military checkpoints in Kashmir. Meanwhile, extraneous and indigenous disruptors (Pakistanis, Afghans, and Kashmiris of different political persuasions) challenge the contours of India’s continued necropolitical displays of sovereignty. Ministry’s depiction of necropolitics in Kashmir is concerned with the figure of the martyr and with graveyards as places of Kashmiri nationalist memorialization, in keeping with existing discourses; yet, I propose Roy’s text suggests that martyrs’ graveyards serve to normalize necropolitics in Kashmir and to keep the local population resigned to India’s ongoing occupation. In other words, according to Ministry, in burying and continuing to honor their dead, Kashmiris remain in the deadlock of Indian necropolitics, paralyzed by collective grieving. On the other hand, the queer community of the Jannat Guest House— whose name means ‘Paradise’—led by the hijra Anjum, offers a queer— because transgressive and anti-normative—version of necropolitics as a resilient form of biopower. Jasbir K. Puar builds on Mbembe’s work and furthers a queer form of necropolitics, intimating that ‘[i]n the face of daily necropolitical violence, suffering, and death, the biopolitical will to live plows on, distributed and redistributed in the minutiae of quotidian affairs not only of the capacity of the individual subjects but of the capacity of populations’ (2007, 33; my emphasis). As Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco observe in Queer Necropolitics, Puar’s elaboration on Mbembe ‘attempts to make sense of the expansion of liberal gay politics and its complicity within the US “war on terror”, while calling our attention specifically to the “differences between queer subjects who are being folded (back) into life and the racialized queernesses that emerge through

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the naming of populations”, often those marked for death’ (2014, 2). As an anti-capitalist postcolonial writer, Roy ensures that her version of queer necropolitics does not involve complicity with US-led globalization and with the appropriation of liberal gay discourses for imperialistic ends. Ministry’s queer community of societal outcasts, whose caste, gender identification, and faith, among other identity categories, mark them as outsiders to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindu and neoliberal envisioning of India, enact a ‘biopolitical will to live’ within spaces devoted to the dead that establish queer necropolitics as a form of transgressive biopower challenging the logic of India’s neoliberal economic principles. The concept of necropolitics has already featured in prominent scholarship on Kashmir. Kabir suggests that the issue of embodiment ‘returns discourse and representation to the meeting ground of biopolitics and necropolitics, into the “space of death” as “threshold for illumination as well as extinction”’ (2009, 19–20), a place where Kashmiri nationalist subjectivities crystallize at the very moment of India-sponsored death. In addition, Mohamad Junaid suggests that ‘the primary mode of communication between the [Indian] occupation and its subjects had become “necropolitical.” The occupation subjugated life […] to its power of death’ (2019, 32–33). Junaid goes on to argue that ‘[t]he intensified necropolitics of the occupation might even be a result of the global rise of routinized “brutality,” […] as an everyday savage and cruel attitude toward those considered “losers.” Yet, as historical evidence shows, peoples’ fates are interconnected, especially in the present era’ (2019, 34). In light of Junaid’s transversal gesture, the Indian occupation of Kashmir attempts to divide and rule in a manner not dissimilar to that of the erstwhile colonizers, killing off Kashmiris in a global necropolitical trend of disposal of those deemed ‘losers’—or, put differently, of those perceived as lacking in sovereignty. Yet, the realities of people’s lived experiences reveal an interconnectedness transcending the stiff compartmentalizations of macropolitical discourses. The hijra character of Anjum becomes Ministry’s main antidote to the troubling necropolitics assailing the Valley of Kashmir. Sarah Newport observes: In the past, hijras have mainly been associated with Hinduism, drawing on their traditional occupation of badhai, performing and granting blessings at occasions associated with fertility using powers granted by goddess Bahuchara Mata. However, three important aspects complicate this tradi-

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tional image of the hijras which are increasingly being recognized in the academic literature, namely: the ambivalence of their position within Hindu society, their multi-religious traditions which include, but are not limited to, Hinduism, and their widespread move towards sex work in recent years. (2017, 89–90)

Newport’s mapping of hijras helps us envision their position in Indian society: they are related to Hinduism and have a main Hindu patroness, although there are several of them; however, despite their ancient position in Hindu traditions, especially in relation to issues of fertility, they exceed Hinduism; they are ambivalently regarded—indeed they are often derided and ridiculed—and they usually undertake sex work because of the precarity of any lifestyle dependent on individual donations. It would not be disproportionate to say that hijras generally belong in the margins of Indian society, a society that while still reliant on Hindu aesthetics remains cisheteropatriarchal and only respects hijras and ruefully disburses donations because they allegedly have the power to both bless and curse. Roy’s choice of Anjum as one of the main characters in Ministry is therefore highly political, and it challenges mainstream assumptions about hijras: Anjum is not a Hindu but a Muslim; she carves her livelihood without badhai, without the protection of a gharana, and even without cursing anyone; and she, for better or worse, never becomes a sex worker, circumventing, altogether, any socially acceptable or unacceptable forms of work or productivity. Instead, Anjum dedicates her life to giving shelter and protection to others, in an embodiment of transversality. In creating the character of Anjum and the other hijras surrounding her in the first section of Ministry, Roy demonstrates that she is knowledgeable about the history of the hijras of South Asia,4 yet she also renders Anjum a complex character who does not fully fit western conceptions of trans identity, hence challenging the potentially homogenizing globalizing impetus of western LGBT discourses. Assigned male at birth and given the masculine name of Aftab, Dr Nabi presently avers that ‘he was not, medically speaking, a Hijra,—a female trapped in a male body—although for practical purposes that word could be used. Aftab, he said, was a rare example of a Hermaphrodite, with both male and female characteristics, though outwardly, the male characteristics appeared to be more dominant’ (2017, 16–17). Dr Nabi’s discourse may be jarring to contemporary queer readers, hermaphrodite being now considered a pejorative way of describing someone who is intersex. In pointing out Aftab/Anjum’s rarity

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in modern India, Dr Nabi also homogenizes hijras as being, on the whole, feminized men. Vinay Lal suggests that ‘[t]he hijras themselves most often distinguish between those who are born hijras—that is, with ambiguous genitals—and those, an undoubtedly much larger number, who are made such through castration’ (1999, 119). Contemporary studies suggest that the great majority of hijras are, essentially, male-to-female trans persons; yet, traditionally, it would seem ‘real’ hijras—and please note the scare quotes—are those who are born intersex. Anjum is thus a rarity, but a traditional one, fitting a vernacular South Asian conception of hijra identity. Nonetheless, Anjum also defines herself as a woman, and surgically transitions, although with distressing results: ‘Dr Mukhtar’s vagina […] turned out to be a scam. It worked, but not in the way he said it would, not even after two corrective surgeries’ (2017, 28). Confronting the politician Mr Aggarwal later in the novel, Anjum inwardly gives vent to her gender dysphoria and her frustrated desire for anatomical womanhood: She, wanting to pluck the very stars from the sky and grind them into a potion that would give her proper breasts and hips and a long, thick plait of hair that would swing from side to side as she walked, and yes, the thing she longed for most of all, that most well stocked of Delhi’s vast stock of invectives, that insult of all insults, a Maa ki Choot, a mother’s cunt. […] He who believed he was always right. She, who knew she was all wrong, always wrong. He, reduced by his certainties. She, augmented by her ambiguity. He, who wanted a law. She, who wanted a baby. (2017, 122; original italics)

What Anjum struggles with here, despite her being seemingly ‘augmented’ by her ambiguity, are the strictures of both sex and gender: she desires features related to the female anatomy (wide hips, a vagina that metonymically stands for full reproductive functions) and to feminine performativity (thick long hair that allows her to sashay down the road). But it is being capable of becoming a biological mother that constitutes Anjum’s deepest desire. In her classic study, Serena Nanda observes that ‘[i]n addition to the hierarchical guru-chela [teacher/disciple] relationship, there is fictive kinship by which hijras relate to each other. Rituals exist for “taking a daughter” and the “daughters” of one “mother” consider themselves “sisters” and relate on a reciprocal, affectionate basis’ (1986, 36). My main qualm with Nanda’s assessment of these relationships between hijras is that they are deemed ‘fictive’ merely because they transcend bloodlines.

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Anjum eventually becomes adoptive mother to two daughters, thus extricating herself from the shackles of biological determinism. Toward the end of novel, the narrator quotes the hijra Saeeda as stating that, due to sex reassignment surgery becoming better and more affordable, hijras were due to disappear and people would not have to live through their experiences any longer, to which Anjum responds: ‘“It wasn’t all bad […]. I think it would be a shame if we became extinct’” (2017, 409). Despite Anjum’s earlier desire for cisnormative femaleness, here she seems to be at ease with being transgender and seemingly celebratory of hijras as a culturally distinct third gender.5 The narrator goes as far as telling us that Anjum ‘mocked what she called the “trans-france” business, and stubbornly insisted on referring to herself as a Hijra’ (2017, 38), thus resisting westernization. In summary, Roy’s novel offers us a hijra protagonist who defies neat categorization, at once at odds with the impositions of gender and sex yet also happy to be distinct from both cisgender men and women. In this sense, Anjum is corroborating Lal’s argument that ‘hijras may well be both male and female, nonmale and nonfemale; and it is just as possible that they may be neither male nor nonmale, neither female nor nonfemale’ (1999, 131). In other words, Anjum and other hijras dismantle the dualistic Aristotelian logic that is such a pillar of western understandings of gender and sexuality, and thus Roy posits them as inimical to totalizing western sexual taxonomies. After one of her fellow hijras in Anjum’s gharana competes for Zainab’s affections—Zainab being Anjum’s first unofficially adopted daughter— Anjum’s wounded maternal sensibility prompts her to quit the hijra household, ending up in the dilapidated graveyard that will become the Jannat Guest House. The narrator observes: ‘For months Anjum lived in the graveyard, a ravaged, feral spectre, out-haunting every resident djinn and spirit […]. She stopped grooming herself, stopped dyeing her hair. […] Facial hair, which she had once dreaded more than almost anything else, appeared on her chin and cheeks like a glimmer of frost’ (2017, 63). Anjum becomes a liminal queer specter, somewhat between the living and the dead, her body resistant to both death and the strictures of living out her gender. In their recent reading of the novel in light of the notion of precarity, Ana Mendes and Lisa Lau argue that ‘Roy’s novel represents with a difference the conditions of precarity experienced by the recurrently Othered in India, pushing back the boundaries of precarity. This precariat reacts not with a desperate clutching at the assumed securities of social life, but counterintuitively, audaciously taking on more precarity,

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thus seizing the prerogative of choice rather than accepting relegation […]’ (2020, 71). While I agree that the Old Delhi graveyard’s denizens audaciously embrace their precarity, I argue that this queer community does not simply ‘push back the boundaries of precarity,’ but altogether dissolves such boundaries, effectively refusing to comply with the logic of India’s neoliberal global economy, by rejecting a social hierarchy based chiefly on citizens’ financial contribution or productivity. Encouraged by her disparate collection of friends, Anjum ostensibly channels her individual queer necropolitics into a collective biopolitical mission dissolving the neoliberal logic of globalized India. Discussing how hijras transcend even the designation of a ‘third gender,’ Lal ponders an uncharted zone constituted ‘not merely as a politics of knowledge of hijras, but as a hijra politics of knowledge’ (1999, 133). This hijra politics of knowledge, I argue, is translated by Roy into a queer necropolitics as biopower, a vindication, kickstarted by a queer citizen, of places traditionally associated with the dead as homely spaces for the living. Furthermore, as the narrator writes, ‘[t]he only real criterion was that Jannat Funeral Services would only bury those whom the graveyards and imams of the Duniya had rejected’ (2017, 80). Alex Tickell observes that this is ‘a space of both literal and figurative exclusion: a zone where those who are not accepted or welcomed in wider society can find a kind of sanctuary’ (2018, 108). Anjum’s queer necropolitical enterprise is therefore devoted to the socially marginalized who find no other place of burial in Delhi’s Hindu-normative spaces, thus becoming a transgressive space for both life and death, countering societal discrimination with pluralism and inclusivity. The Jannat Guest House transcends the identity categories splitting people apart and denigrating them in India’s neoliberal Hindu-nationalist project. Unmasking her friend known as ‘Saddam Hussain,’ a Hindu Dalit pretending to be a Muslim, when he fails to recite the Qur’an, Anjum says: “You’re a Chamar like all those other boys you worked with in the mortuary. […] [Y]ou were lying to me and I don’t know why, because I don’t care what you are … Muslim, Hindu, man, woman, this caste, that caste, or a camel’s arsehole. But why call yourself Saddam Hussain? He was a bastard, you know.” Anjum used the word Chamar and not Dalit, the more modern and accepted term for those that Hindus considered to be “untouchable”, in the same spirit in which she refused to refer to herself as anything other than

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Hijra. She didn’t see the problem with either Hijras or Chamars. (2017, 85; original emphasis)

With her irreverent hijra wit, Anjum reveals the transversal founding ethos of the Jannat Guest House, which stems from her vernacular queer sensibility: she does not make distinctions based on people’s faith, gender, or caste; she also has no use for modern western or indigenous nomenclatures, since she sees no shame in being an untouchable or a hijra; it is the caste-obsessed and cisnormative Hindu majority that has laden these identity categories with dishonor and inhumanity. Anjum’s fiercely anti-­ modern pluralism imbues the Jannat Guest House with a sense of unreality. With a transgeneric nod toward sci-fi, the narrator describes: ‘When the sun grew hot, they returned indoors where they continued to float through their lives like a pair of astronauts, defying gravity, limited only by the outer walls of their fuchsia spaceship with its pale pistachio doors’ (2017, 92). Anjum and Saddam’s gauche queer dwelling may seem like no other place precisely because it is like no other place in India: it is Roy’s testing ground for a queer necropolitics channeling a transversal biopolitical will to live, in a space whose dwellers are not segmentalized according to societally enforced identity categories, and impervious to productivity. If Tilo, the Indian architect involved in social struggles brought up by a single mother, somewhat resembles Roy herself, who also grew up without a regular father figure, then Ministry’s fascination with mothers and daughters may be seen as stemming from Roy’s own concerns with motherhood, as well as with the limitations that cultural understandings of biology impose on maternity. Lal observes that ‘Hijras do often tell stories that betray their desire for a child, but they recognize that wish as belonging within the realm of impossibility’ (1999, 129). Ministry revokes this view, making maternity a real possibility despite society’s biocentrism; in fact, the creation in the novel of affective bonds beyond blood-lines constitutes yet another prominent facet of Roy’s transversal vision. John McLeod writes: ‘For those inward of or interested in the so-called “adoption triad” (birth-parent, adoptive parent, adoptee), the significance of consanguineous relations and models of personhood is particularly acute and contested […], not least because adoption materialises ways of family-­ making that do not require biogenetic legitimation and dispense with the security of blood-lines’ (2017, 31). Ministry’s mother–daughter relationships, first between Anjum and Zainab, and then, simultaneously, between Anjum and Miss Jebeen the Second and between Tilo and the same child,

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contest biocentrism and the social capital ascribed to bloodlines, while the story of Miss Jebeen’s birth-mother eventually links all the women in not even a triad but a foursome of affections and transversal solidarity. The narrator tells us that, after a few weeks of moving into the Khwabgah, Zainab ‘began to call Anjum “Mummy” (because that’s what Anjum had begun to call herself). The other residents (under Anjum’s tutelage) were all called “Apa” (Auntie, in Urdu), and Mary, because she was Christian, was Mary Auntie’ (2017, 31). In Anjum’s linguistic mapping of Zainab’s adoptive family, Anjum is clearly the mother figure. This throws up an initial challenge ending up in Anjum’s departure from the hijra household because she desperately attempts to mimic the exclusive nature of cisgender biogenetic maternity, a biological yet also discursive bond that links birth-mother and child alone. As she later distressfully begs of Zainab: ‘If [Saeeda]’s Mummy, then who am I? […] Nobody has two Mummies’ (2017, 47). In refusing to allow for Zainab’s filial affections to be shared with other members of the gharana, Anjum finds herself struggling with internalized cisnormative and biocentric understandings of motherhood, which dictate a single and exclusive link between one mother and one daughter. The fact that Ministry suggests happiness lies beyond blood is cemented by Anjum’s second mothering attempt, a maternity she shares with Tilo and with Miss Jebeen the Second’s birth-mother, the Maoist militant Revathy. This Miss Jebeen is dubbed the Second because, according to Tilo, ‘[t]he baby was Miss Jebeen returned’ (2017, 215). In other words, she is the second coming of her lover Musa’s daughter Miss Jebeen, who was killed, alongside her mother, by a stray police bullet during a martyr’s funeral in Kashmir. According to Tilo’s thoughts, this girl ‘would settle accounts and square the books. Miss Jebeen would turn the tide’ (2017, 215). Tilo’s initial kidnapping and eventual sharing of Miss Jebeen with Anjum and the rest of the queer community at the Jannat Guest House cannot be extrapolated from her own troubled relationship with her mother. We are told that Tilo’s conception ‘had been a scandal […]. The man […] belonged to an “Untouchable” caste […]. Tilo’s mother was sent away until the baby was born and placed in a Christian orphanage. In a few months she returned to the orphanage and adopted her own child. Her family disowned her. She remained unmarried’ (2017, 155). Tilo’s mother is hence both her birth and adoptive mother. Tilo’s troubled relationship with her is a combination of transgression (i.e., inter-caste sentimental relations) and sublimation (i.e., relinquishment and adoption),

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which partly explains why she is troubled by biological motherhood and terminates her pregnancy by Musa. Tilo subsequently mothers Miss Jebeen the Second, in a way that obviates biocentric understandings of parenting, and which becomes her way of coming to terms with her complicated relationship with her deceased birth/adoptive mother. When Tilo’s life with Miss Jebeen becomes untenable in her flat in New Delhi because of their exposure to police enquiries, they join Old Delhi’s queer graveyard, where ‘Anjum was waiting for them—an ecstatic smile shining out from among the tombstones. […] She enveloped both Tilo and Miss Jebeen in a bear hug, kissing both of them several times’ (2017, 303). The Jannat Guest House becomes a place of queer biopower, where maternity beyond both bloodlines and the strictures of gender and sex becomes possible. Here, a letter is received from Miss Jebeen’s dead birth-­ mother, a Maoist Adivasi woman who reveals that Miss Jebeen was the result of rape by a gang of police officers. An example of queer necropolitics is then deployed alongside biopower: The next day Dr Azad Bhartiya procured a red flag. Revathy’s letter was put into an airtight container and then it was wrapped in the flag. While it was buried he sang the Hindi version of “The Internationale” and gave her a clenched-fist Red Salute. Thus ended the second funeral of Miss Jebeen the Second’s first, second or third mother, depending on your perspective. […] Dr Azad Bhartiya tried to teach Miss Udaya Jebeen—she of the six fathers and three mothers (who were stitched together by threads of light)—to clench her fist and say a final “Lal Salaam” to her mother. (2017, 427; my emphasis)

Roy’s necropolitics is purposely queer, offering a funeral by proxy with communist iconography for an Adivasi woman whose biological child is in turn brought up by a cisgender woman and a hijra, with the three mothers not belonging in a hierarchy of importance dictated by blood or the neoliberal economy, but being, instead, ‘stitched together by threads of light.’ McLeod argues that biocentric models ‘invest in the idea of origin as possessing exclusive explanatory power, and they identify certain particulars of personhood as commensurate with one’s origins that hold their significance indefinitely: place of birth, consanguineous kin, the racialized identity of biogenetic parents, national culture that happens to obtain at the location of nativity’ (2015, 25). Roy’s creation of Anjum, Tilo, and Miss Jebeen and their three-way mothering challenges the biocentric

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construction of personhood as solely reliant on origins dictated by birthplace, consanguinity, and caste. A lot is set in store by Miss Jebeen the Second’s auspicious presence in the Jannat Guest House by the end of the novel, whose closing lines tell us that ‘things would turn out all right in the end. They would, because they had to. Because Miss Jebeen, Miss Udaya Jebeen, was come’ (2017, 438). Miss Jebeen’s messianic role in the novel is not difficult to pinpoint; she becomes, in a way, the perfect embodiment of Roy’s transversal vision: she is the biological daughter of a Maoist Adivasi woman; the adopted daughter of a middle-class Indian woman romantically linked to Kashmir and of a working-class Muslim hijra; she is also the symbolic reincarnation of a Kashmiri girl killed by the Indian police’s violence, and conceived out of the Indian police’s sexual violence against her birth-mother. In this sense, Miss Jebeen the Second represents the resilience of India’s many precarious bodies whose will to live exceeds the Indian nation’s aggressive neoliberal necropolitics, and as such she embodies Roy’s hope for India’s future. In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed states: ‘The very expectation of happiness gives us a specific image of the future. […] The promising nature of happiness suggests happiness lies ahead of us, at least if we do the right thing’ (2010, 29). In Roy’s ambivalent vision, made up in equal measure of abstract optimism and material pessimism, this future is shaped by a happiness born out of transversal solidarities and of a stubborn refusal to abide by neoliberal notions of productivity. It is Roy’s prerogative as a politically committed literary writer to give us this transversal anti-capitalist vision, whether we think it too idealistic or otherwise, but it is up to everyone else to find the different ways—for, as Ministry reminds us, there is always more than one way—to make it possible.

Notes 1. Pranav Jani argues that ‘[w]hile Roy’s writings offer a devastating and powerful critique of modernity and help to rally the forces of the Left whenever they appear, they offer no alternative to that modernity’ (2010, 230), yet despite this pessimism he also positions The God of Small Things against Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as the single contemporary Anglophone Indian text that can decenter Rushdie’s bourgeois cosmopolitanism. For other sources on Roy’s first novel, see Ranjan Ghosh and Antonia Navarro Tejero (2009), Amitabh Roy (2005), Alex Tickell (2007), and Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal (2012).

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2. For a small selection of Ministry reviews, see Joan Acocella (2017), Jeremy Seabrook (2017), Terry Hong (2017), Francine Prose (2017), Donna Seaman (2017), and Eleanor Birne (2017). 3. Roy is self-confessedly vexed by being labeled a ‘writer-activist.’ In her essay ‘The Ladies Have Feelings, So … Shall We Leave It to the Experts?’ she writes: ‘Now, I’ve been wondering why it should be that the person who wrote The God of Small Things is called a writer, and the person who wrote the political essays is called an activist’ (2019, 111). Her ensuing theory explains that political writers pick sides, whereas writers are not supposed to stick to one single political agenda but should prize sophistication and a plurality of viewpoints. Roy playfully intimates: ‘I’m all for discretion, prudence, tentativeness, subtlety, ambiguity, complexity. I love the unanswered question, the unresolved story, the unclimbed mountain, the tender shard of an incomplete dream. Most of the time’ (2019, 112). What she means is that she likes the complexity afforded by fiction but she also has political allegiances, something that comes across strongly in Ministry and that creates synergies between her literary and political writings. 4. Roy deploys popular narratives of hijra identity and of hijras’ position in South Asian history, which are orally shared by hijras for collective self-­ empowerment in the face of contemporary precarity. As Jennifer Ung Loh observes, ‘[b]y maintaining that they enjoyed a position of privilege “in the past” or “in history”, hijras make a comparison with their relatively low respect in modern society. […] Using narratives and developing an association with historical figures is an ongoing “mythmaking” process’ (2014, 29). The novel reflects this by reclaiming hijras as figures of trust in Mughal India’s Islamic court, where they were allowed in the women-only zenanas due to their sexual status as eunuchs. As Roy’s character Ustad Kulsoom Bi exclaims, following a brief mention of a eunuch’s laughter in the historical archive: ‘That is our ancestry, our history, our story. We were never commoners, you see, we were members of the staff of the Royal Palace’ (2017, 51). Hijras’ status in Mughal India is explored in scholarship by Ina Goel (2016) and Adnan Hossain (2012). Ministry also maps hijras’ ‘special place of love and respect in Hindu mythology’ (2017, 51). Hindu God Ram turned to his followers on the outskirts of Ayodhya, telling all the men and women to return to their homes; when he finally revisited the same spot, he found the hijras had been waiting ‘faithfully for him at the edge of the forest for the whole fourteen years’ (2017, 51). Ung Loh recalls that ‘[a]s a result, Rāma is touched by their devotion and he blesses them, saying they will rule the world in the “future”’ (2014, 32). The Ram story is also recorded by Serena Nanda (1986) and Gayatri Reddy (2003). Curiously, this story demonstrating the hijras’ ‘love and respect’ in Hinduism is told as a joke on them in Kushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel (1990, 376). Singh’s is one of the

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first major modern Indian novels in English to give prominence to a hijra character, yet Bhagmati’s hijra subjectivity is always channeled through the diegetic narrator’s cisgender and supposedly heterosexual perspective, being often the object of ridicule, while also being a key figure of solidarity. I must thank Shital Pravinchandra for directing me to Singh’s work. 5. As Alessandra Diehl et al. observe, ‘in India, the Supreme Court has ruled out homosexuality as a crime […] and has given legal recognition to the third gender and stated that people of the third gender have equal rights to education, jobs and social benefits’ (2017, 391); in addition, they note how ‘the Supreme Court of India in April 2014 recognised the ‘third gender’ status of hijras and other transgender groups’ (2017, 393). So hijras have been legally recognized as a third gender and apportioned equality in Indian law, even if, in the practicalities of their daily lives, they are still the objects of routine social discrimination.

References Acocella, J. 2017. Civil Wars. New Yorker, May 19. Agarwal, Nilanshu Kumar, ed. 2012. Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things. Howrah: Roman. Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Birne, Eleanor. 2017. Men with Saffron Smiles. London Review of Books 39 (15): 29–31. Diehl, Alessandra, Denise Leite Vieira, Marina Milograna Zaneti, Ana Fanganiello, Pratap Sharan, Rebecca Robles, Jair de Jesus, and Mari. 2017. Social Stigma, Legal and Public Health Barriers Faced by the Third Gender Phenomena in Brazil, India and Mexico: Travestis, Hijras and Muxes. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 63 (5): 389–399. Ghosh, Ranian, and Antonia Navarro-Tejero, eds. 2009. Globalizing Dissent: Essays on Arundhati Roy. Abington and New York: Routledge. Goel, Ina. 2016. Hijra Communities of Delhi. Sexualities 19 (5/6): 535–546. Guattari, Félix. 2015. Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955–1971. Trans. Ames Hodges. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e). Haritaworn, Jin, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco, eds. 2014. Queer Necropolitics. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Hong, Terry. 2017. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Library Journal 142 (14): 69. Hossain, Adnan. 2012. Beyond Emasculation: Being Muslim and Becoming Hijra in South Asia. Asian Studies Review 36: 495–513. Jani, Pranav. 2010. Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

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Junaid, Mohamad. 2019. Disobedient Bodies, Defiant Objects: Occupation, Necropolitics, and the Resistance in Kashmir. The Funambulist 21: 30–35. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. 2009. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lal. Vinay. 1999. Not This, Not That: The Hijras of India and the Cultural Politics of Sexuality. Social Text 61: 119–140. Loh, Jennifer Ung. 2014. Narrating Identity: the Employment of Mythological and Literary Narratives in Identity Formation Among the Hijras of India. Religion and Gender 4 (1): 21–39. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. McLeod, John. 2015. Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2017. Against Biocentrism: Blood, Adoption, and Diasporic Writing. Études Anglaises 70 (1): 28–44. Mendes, Ana, and Lisa Lau. 2020. The Precarious Lives of India’s Others: The Creativity of Precarity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 56 (1): 70–82. Menozzi, Filippo. 2018. Too Much Blood for Good Literature: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and the Question of Realism. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55 (1): 20–33. Morton, Stephen. 2014. Sovereignty and Necropolitics at the Line of Control. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50 (1): 19–30. Murray, Stuart J. 2008. Thanatopolitics: Reading in Agamben a Rejoinder to Biopolitical Life. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5 (2): 203–207. Nanda, Serena. 1986. The Hijras of India: Cultural and Individual Dimensions of an Institutionalized Third Gender Role. Journal of Homosexuality 11 (3/4): 35–54. 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. Prose, Francine. 2017. The Passion and Rage of Arundhati Roy. New York Review of Books 64 (12): 16–18. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Reddy, Gayatri. 2003. ‘Men’ Who Would Be Kings: Celibacy, Emasculation, and the Re-Production of Hijras in Contemporary Indian Politics. Social Research 70 (1): 163–200. Roy, Arundhati. 1998. The God of Small Things. London: Flamingo. Roy, Amitabh. 2005. The God of Small Things: A Novel of Social Commitment. New Delhi: Atlantic. Roy, Arundhati. 2017. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. London: Hamish Hamilton.

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———. 2019. My Seditious Heart: Collected Non-Fiction. London: Hamish Hamilton. Schlickers, Sabine, and Vera Toro, eds. 2018. Perturbatory Narration in Film Narratological Studies of Deception, Paradox and Empuzzlement. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. Seabrook, Jeremy. 2017. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness/The God of Small Things. Resurgence and Ecologist 306: 55–57. Seaman, Donna. 2017. A Supermarket of Grief. Booklist 113 (18): 13–14. Sehgal, Parul. 2017. Arundhati Roy’s Fascinating Mess. Atlantic 320 (1): 36–39. Singh, Khushwant. 1990. Delhi: A Novel. New Delhi: Penguin. Tickell, Alex. 2007. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. ———. 2018. Writing in the Necropolis: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Studies 18 (1): 100–112.

The Precarity and Predatory Behaviour of the ‘Mediahideen’ in Fatima Bhutto’s Isis Novel The Runaways Claire Chambers

Introduction Fatima Bhutto is a high-profile emerging author of Pakistani, Afghan, Lebanese, and Iranian heritage. She constructs The Runaways (2019a) as a highly composite novel, replete with intertextuality, intermediality, and portrayals of various forms of technology. Perhaps this mosaic structure is a way of upholding her own and others’ diverse backgrounds, and rebutting narrow ideas of cultural or identitarian purity. In this chapter, I will argue that Bhutto articulates the importance of attending to the precarity and layered humanity of others (even violent others) by forging new and heterogenous modes of nonviolence amid Manichaean twenty-first-­ century geopolitics and technologies. I divide my discussion into two halves, first exploring the issue of precarity by relating to the novel Judith

C. Chambers (*) Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_10

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Butler’s three main books on this topic. In the second half my discussion moves on to consider what happens to precarity in the increasingly digital world inhabited by Bhutto’s characters. There is a personal impetus to Bhutto’s artistic emphasis on what I will term, following Butler’s latest (2020) book, forceful or aggressive nonviolence. Born in 1982, she was raised knowing that her grandfather, prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had been hanged in 1979 after a military coup by General Zia-ul-Haq. In 1985 an uncle, Shahnawaz, suffered a mysterious sudden death, probably a murder by poison, in France. When she was just fourteen her beloved father, Murtaza (1954–1996), was also murdered, close enough to the family home for her to hear the gunfire. She wrote about his assassination in a traumatized volume of poetry published eighteen months later, entitled Whispers of the Desert (1998). Eleven years after Murtaza’s death, her aunt, Benazir, would be assassinated in December 2007, another cataclysmic event for Pakistan and one that I have written about elsewhere (Chambers, 2020). Bhutto went on to discuss Benazir’s assassination,1 alongside an exploration of her family’s history more broadly, in her passionate memoir Songs of Blood and Sword (2010). In the final lines of that autobiography she writes of feeling sick of Pakistan, of having no ‘place in [her] heart’ for the country any more, and wanting to escape it because of all the violence she has experienced. But whenever she tries to put the Islamic Republic behind her, ‘I hear the sound of […] mynah birds. And I know I could never leave’ (2010: 438). In the nonfiction book, Bhutto showed her great promise as a writer, but this would be followed by an uneven debut novel, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (2013). I like to think that her second novel The Runaways is more successful in part because it takes these tropes of mynahs (one of which birds even adorns the cover of the first UK edition), as well as young people longing to run away from both the subcontinent and the South Asian diaspora, and weaves them into a spirited, meditative, and extremely timely narrative. Moreover, in this 2019 novel, Bhutto makes searing comments from various narrative persp using the word ‘aggressive’ to ectives on precarity, identity politics, and radicalization. Her adoptive mother is Lebanese and her biological mother Afghan, while her grandmother was KurdishIranian. Meanwhile, Bhutto spent some of her formative years in the Middle East (especially Syria) and Pakistan, before studying at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). This affords her a uniquely insightful geographical triangulation between Pakistan’s biggest city of

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Karachi; Portsmouth and London in the UK; and Dubai and various locations in Iraq in the Middle East. Perhaps, too, the hybrid, transnational nature of her novel and its negative portrayal of all forms of violence function as implicit protest against the bloody deaths or endangerment of many in her family.2 The Runaways follows the lives of three young individuals—Anita Rose (also called Layla), Sunny, and Monty—who, for various reasons, go to Iraq to join a fictional extremist group known as the Ummah Movement (based on Isis3). The novel probes issues of social inequality, alienation, and religious extremism, with a love story grounded in the disastrous reality the characters find themselves in. The names of the lovers—Layla and Monty—function as a clear allusion to the star-crossed lovers Layla and Majnun from Arabic legend.4 Yet the novel’s catastrophic conclusion ultimately suggests the profound irony and subversion of such a resemblance. In a co-authored book (Phillips et al. 2021) Indrani Karmarkar and I have written about the novel’s humanizing portrayal of love. There our critical gaze was largely trained on the focalization of Monty, a young boy from a wealthy family in Karachi, who lives a privileged life of luxury and mobility between the UK and Pakistan. Monty falls in love with Layla, or Anita Rose, who comes from a poverty-stricken Christian family in Karachi.5 Aspiring to a life of dignity and freedom, Anita Rose, through various means, adopts the identity of Layla and is admitted to an elite institution, the Karachi American School, where she meets Monty. However, to fund this expensive education, her brother Ezra (who had launched the siblings’ shapeshifting by adopting the Muslim name of Feroze) pimps her out to high-paying Arab contacts in Dubai. The trauma of her rape and the sex tape of Layla that is subsequently distributed is probably the major push factor behind the girl’s radicalization, though readers are privy to scant narrative causality. As Judith Butler writes in a comment that can be applied to Layla’s vulnerable gender position, ‘There are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence than others’ (2004: xii). The abused woman disappears to become an icon of the Ummah Movement. This leads Monty to frantically search for her in the desert, like the legendary lover Majnun for his lost Layla. Masculinity is an important theme in the novel. Monty wants to be a man in the right way: to ‘man up’ for his father, who doesn’t think much of his machismo and views him as gender-nonconforming, an only son coddled by his distractedly religious mother. Later, for Layla, Monty

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‘risk[s] his life to prove to [her] [...] that he was another kind of man’ than the ones who have preyed on her. Despite his uncharacteristically macho journey through the desert, she rejects him, ‘no matter what kind of man he tries to be’ (Bhutto, 2019a: 396).6 Monty is a highly unusual jihadist, since for a boy from his class in Karachi to join an Islamist movement in the Arab world would be almost unheard of. As with several other plot holes in this novel, Bhutto creates an aporia. Since readers consequently have to account for his journey to Iraq themselves, love, as well as an aspiration to prove his masculinity, seems to plug the causal gap. Yet the yawning socio-economic gulf between Monty and Layla is something the girl can never forget. This is demonstrated in the scene when Monty takes her to the high-end Karachi restaurant Okra. Monty refuses to allow his Pashtun driver Tano to step out of the car to eat while the young couple dine on Okra’s overpriced fish and chocolate lava cake. This results in Layla’s refusal to do more than pick at her food. Instead she has it packed up, and she gives the lavish leftovers to Tano after their meal. As Layla aligns herself with Tano and other servants, she distances herself from Monty and his kind by referring to them dismissively as ‘these people’ (304). It is at this moment that Layla moves beyond Monty and his elite set, the ambivalence of their love relationship never being fully resolved and her precarity regularly surfacing in the novel. It should not escape our notice that The Runaways’ third protagonist Sunny, too, is vulnerable to love’s vicissitudes. That said, Sunny is less constant than Monty about the object of his affections. Sunny is the novel’s British Muslim character, having grown up in Portsmouth with his Indian Muslim father.7 The teenager is good-looking and popular with the opposite sex, but his success with women quickly gives him ennui: ‘He didn’t want any of those girls, brown or white. He was done with all that’ (41). Instead, as we will see, he turns to an online world, dabbling with religion and politics. From there he moves on to matchmaking apps such as Tinder or Scruff and, more furtively, a proxy server to access YouPorn. As Hussein Kesvani notes in Follow Me, Akhi, a study of British Muslims’ online behaviour, ‘[t]he dominance of social media as the site of conversations and interactions in modern life inevitably means that it will impact the most intimate parts of our lived experience’ (2019: 238–39). Despite the apps’ enabling reach, Sunny continues to find his own sexual preferences and others’ articulation of consent hard to understand. Hamlet-like, Sunny ‘lurked and hesitated, swiping left all the time’ (52). He forms close bonds with a German fitness trainer named Stefan who works at his gym,

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and later with his own radicalized cousin Oz. More than for either of those men, though, he feels love for a Syrian refugee DJ named Aloush. As ever, passion and devotion are expressed through ocular tropes: ‘Sunny felt Aloush, he saw him. And in that moment he understood that, for the first time, he too had been seen’ (228). Being really seen, whereby the veil of racism which causes brown people’s ‘invisibilization’8 is ripped away and their humanity recognized, is the express desire of both male protagonists when it comes to their sexual relationships. Like a ghost in the machine or a surveillance chip in artificial intelligence, Bhutto examines her characters’ lives both on- and offline in all their fullness. In an interview she has posed the question, ‘When are we going to start trying to understand the radicalised instead of just condemning them?’ (Bhutto, 2019b: np.). Exploring the limits of empathy and the ethical implications of humanizing the terrorist, she adds her voice to Butler’s call that ‘dominant forms of representation can and must be disrupted for something about the precariousness of life to be apprehended. […] Those who remain faceless or whose faces are presented to us as so many symbols of evil, authorize us to become senseless before those lives we have eradicated, and whose grievability is indefinitely postponed’ (2004: xviii). Put differently, instead of erasing terrorists or representing them as irredeemably monstrous, there is an urgent need to depict them as deserving of grief. (We’ll come to Butler’s theorization of grievability and related concepts later on.) Bhutto suggests that we should approach people who have committed evil acts as humans in the round. Similarly, in Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion, Elleke Boehmer advocates an ‘alternative reading of terror.’ Such a reading would contextualize so-called terrorism within the state violence of global (neo-) colonialism instead of dehistoricizing it within post-9/11 constructions as ‘savage and irrational, an irruption of the primitive’ (2015: 147). Finally, Jasbir K. Puar affirms the need for proximity when talking about terrorists. Close scrutiny means they are not held at the arm’s length of difference, but are instead scrutinized for their personal idiosyncrasies, unique social circumstances, and ‘the interiority of familiarity and complicity’ (2017/2007: 61). I want to argue that in The Runaways Bhutto presents us with just such an alternative reading of terror that is alert to structural violence, and just such a proximate view of the specificity, interiority, and precarity of the terrorist.

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Precarity In Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2016/2009), Judith Butler gives readers a detailed understanding of precarity and the precariat. Precarity is commonly, and rightly, associated with class, being interpreted as social vulnerability, another term of which Butler is fond. They characterize precarity as being at once embodied and relational: Each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies—as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of a publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure. (2004: 20)

Here they allude to the precarity of bodies, our rupturable skin and easily failing organs. Humans’ sociability and sexuality connect us to other bodies within relational networks. Demonstrating the interdependence of all humans and the fallacy of individualism, Butler writes in Frames of War (2016/2009: 21): ‘To say that life is precarious is to say that the possibility of being sustained relies fundamentally on social and political conditions, and not only on a postulated internal drive to live.’ Always mindful of the social and the political, they show that we experience mourning and grief in the face of the loss of that other whom we love, averring, ‘Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something’ (2004: 23). When a person you love dies, something of your identity goes with them and you won’t be the same again. And that’s normal, that’s human: to suppress it means that you open yourself up to that dehumanization process which Sunny undergoes when he renounces Aloush and goes to Iraq. But the Bush administration which Butler critiques (and, by extension, Trump and his followers more recently) regard some lives as precarious and not worth as much as others. Precarity is experienced by those most at risk of ‘danger, destitution, and death’ (Butler, 2020: 166) in the unequal social imaginary of the twenty-first century. Other cultural theorists have taken Butler’s notion of precarity and extended it to cover new ways of working, especially in the gig economy amid the global, digitized capitalist system.9 The contiguous word ‘precariat’ of course derives from Marx’s emphasis on the proletariat but, as Daniel Susskind crisply indicates, the newer term shows that in the context

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of neoliberalism, ‘more and more work is not just poorly paid, but also unstable and stressful’ (2020: 215). This is true both for Pakistan and the South Asian Muslim diaspora in Britain, the two main loci Bhutto surveys. Precarity in Pakistan reflects the country’s low gross domestic product, at just 1284.7 per capita in 2019. Britain’s GDP per capita dwarfs that, at 42,300.3. However, within even that ostensible affluence in the UK there are still pockets of precarity, most notably among British Pakistanis and British Bangladeshis, who suffer much higher unemployment and lower income than the UK’s national average. Through her portrayal of Anita Rose’s mother working tirelessly as a servant in Karachi but the family remaining below the poverty line, or the lack of opportunities and inadequate education Sunny receives in Portsmouth, Bhutto demonstrates that precarity cannot solely be set on a global north–global south axis. Structures of power which generate precarity in Pakistan or South Asia at large are clearly also at work in the South Asian diaspora. Butler crystallizes their conceptualization of who the precariat are in the idea of grievable and ungrievable lives. As they write, in an uncharacteristically succinct statement and rhetorical question: ‘Some lives are grievable, and others are not [...] [W]hat counts as a livable life and a grievable death?’ (2004: xiv–xv). Butler’s emphasis on relationality, mourning, and the ungrievable resonates powerfully with the fiction of Kamila Shamsie, too, and might be used by other critics to frame productive discussion of Parvaiz’s unburied body and Aneeka’s protest to be allowed to grieve her brother properly in Shamsie’s 2017 novel Home Fire. Butler is too intersectional a thinker to limit precarity to social class, as some scholars who have come after them have done. Writing Precarious Life in the white heat of the violent policies and activities of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and other American Neoconservatives in the early phase of the War on Terror, they show that precarity is not merely an issue of capital and class. In the present dispensation, this vulnerability also clearly pertains to race and religion, among other identity signifiers: Is a Muslim life as valuable as legibly First World lives? Are the Palestinians yet accorded the status of “human” in US policy and press coverage? Will those hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives lost in the last decades of strife ever receive the equivalent to the paragraph-long obituaries in the New York Times that seek to humanize—often through nationalist and familial framing devices—those Americans who have been violently killed? Is our capacity to

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mourn in global dimensions foreclosed precisely by the failure to conceive of Muslim and Arab lives as lives? (2004: 12)

What, then, should be the response from those precarious Muslims who are not seen as fully human, whose lives are demonstrably not conceived of as lives, and whose deaths are viewed as not grievable in the eyes of Euro-American regimes and media? Should they turn to violence, as do Parvaiz in Home Fire and in The Runaways Sunny (and in descending order of ferocity also Layla and Monty)? In The Force of Nonviolence, Butler emphasizes that the experience of being deemed ungrievable impacts on the young and the living, as well as the dead and their mourners. Drawing on an eclectic range of sources from Walter Benjamin and Frantz Fanon to Black Lives Matter, they show that only certain people—white, male, heterosexual adults—are seen as true selves, who can marshal the argument of self-defense. The fantasy of individuation and the sovereign self leaves others outside the frame who are not accorded the status of the self, or seen as defendable and grievable. These black and brown people, women, LGBT+ individuals, and children are hailed as ungrievable, unseen but simultaneously also hypervisible: ‘[t]o be grievable is to be interpellated in such a way that you know your life matters; that the loss of your life would matter; that your body is treated as one that should be able to live and thrive, whose precarity should be minimized’ (2020: 98). Black Lives Matter resists this callous interpellation by showing that the loss of precarious lives, too, is important, concerning as it does real selves who are grieved by other interdependent selves left behind. Yet to those viewed as ungrievable, whose precarity is maximized instead of being minimized by those in power, Butler nonetheless calls for an espousal of nonviolence. Nonviolence, they argue, can be full of righteous anger rather than saintly and equanimous, but, crucially, it must not reproduce the violence it opposes. This is because they believe that the use of violence is a slippery slope that will lead resistors to become like their oppressors. They sum up their argument about violence’s easy corruptibility in this powerful rhetorical question: ‘[W]hat distinguishes the violence of the regime from the violence that seeks to take it down?’ (2020: 24). In other words, even if resistance begins amid lofty ideals, the use of violence quickly means a blurring of the lines between the oppressor and the oppressed. Those people who supposedly take up arms as a means to

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an end usually find that, once they have put further violence out into the world, it fails to stop there. Such a question as that posed by Butler may pertinently be put to the character of Sunny. It is easy to discern Sunny’s precarity as the son of Sulaiman Jamil, that mimic man10 who aspires to a ‘neat and clean’ England (16) which constantly disappoints him. The India-born, goraphile father puts pressure on Sunny with his ‘delusional, unreachable expectations’ (267) for his son’s success as a London banker, notwithstanding their small house amid Portsmouth’s dreary impoverishment. Sunny’s prospects are limited from the outset, due to deprivation, racism, and Islamophobia, despite his having been born in Britain. As Butler writes, he experiences a ‘politically induced condition of maximized precariousness [as part of …] populations exposed to arbitrary state violence [… which] rationalize[s] wars against predominantly Muslim populations, but also […] argue[s] for limits to immigration to Europe from predominantly Muslim countries’ (2016/2009: 26). Were he to follow the self-­ improvement path his father wants for him, having failed at it himself, Sunny would most likely be thwarted by mainstream society’s ethnic profiling and anti-Muslim assumptions. Sunny’s exclusion from the ranks of those who are considered fully human and therefore fully grievable is made plain by one teacher. The headteacher reminds him scornfully, ‘This is Europe’ (268), after he has slammed his racist schoolmate Ben’s head into the table for drawing a swastika on a Jewish kid’s bag. Even though Sunny tells this authority figure he was born in Britain and is not a migrant, she counters by saying that Europe is civilized and nonviolent unlike his behaviour. In doing so, she highlights the precarious citizenship even of the British-born son of a migrant. Moreover, the Charlie Hebdo murders when in January 2015 the Kouachi brothers attacked the offices of the satirical and racist magazine in Paris, killing twelve, sparks an Islamophobic attack on Sunny when he is on the bus. It is true that the woman who spits at him is said to be ‘mad,’ but again Bhutto foregrounds the gaze (and perhaps also the politics of (mis)recognition (see Taylor, 1994; Butler, 2016/2009: 2–12), as the woman looks at him ‘like she knew him. Like she knew who he was and hated him for it’ (267). In the same chapter Sunny pushes Monty to the ground just because the latter asks him, in pained tones, ‘Why didn’t you just move away?’ if he was bothered by his sleep-talking. And in a way, Monty’s question encapsulates the whole (non)violence debate.

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Yet ‘Why d[o]n’t you just move away?’ is a piece of wisdom11 that Sunny rarely contemplates. Trained by Oz, who one time beat up the jealous boyfriend of a girl he had been trying to seduce, Sunny always responds to even the mildest of challenges with violence of thoughts or deeds, including wanting to do harm to the racist headteacher. His is an impotent, individualistic rage aligned with ineffectual social media posturing. In Leaderless Jihad, security analyst Marc Sageman12 outlines that this is typical of many violent extremists, who ‘were in search of thrills, fame, and glory. […] As new born-again novices, they constantly proselytized their beliefs and enthusiasm for the fight. They wanted to impress their friends’ (2008: 70). Sunny takes out his frustrations on the innocent, rather than formulating a humanitarian, relational, and directed form of nonviolence targeting the powerful. As Butler’s rhetoric suggests, even if Sunny’s violence began amid idealistic notions of creating a utopia in Iraq, little comes to distinguish it from the brutality of the British foreign policy it seeks to combat. Bhutto presents us with what the Pakistani political activist and novelist Tariq Ali has called a ‘clash of fundamentalisms’ (2002) between the global north and the jihadists. Indeed, the extra-judicial liquidation approach of outside forces (particularly from the US, UK, and Russia) in Iraq and Syria is met with equally violent destructiveness by the Ummah Movement. Sunny’s conduct reaches its nadir when he kills the mayor of Nineveh or Ninawa. In this scene, Sunny’s ‘British accent [is] stronger than Monty has ever heard it’ (382). When he shouts Allahu Akbar as he strikes the fatal blow, Bhutto makes it clear that the Arabic language ‘is not his own’ (383). The author’s satire of the upstart diasporic jihadist is probably intended as an illusion to Isis’s ‘Beatle,’ the Cockney Kuwaiti Mohammed Emwazi known as Jihadi John (see Mekhennet, 2017: 369–401; Lewis and Hamid, 2018: 135), or, before him, al Qaeda-affiliated Yorkshire-­ accented Mohammad Sidique Khan of the 7/7 London bombings (Lewis and Hamid, 2018: 134). This illustrates, in Butler’s terms, that British shows of strength overseas are not so different from Sunny’s supposedly countercultural resistance. Sunny may have experienced precarity, but he quickly conforms to the jihadists’ predatory practices, preying as they do on the precarious: young people, the sexually confused, Iraqi nationalists, and women. Bhutto dedicates the novel to young people who died while resisting violent extremism, calling both Aitzaz Hasan Bangash and Mashal Khan ‘Shaheed’ or martyr on the frontispiece (v). Aitzaz Hasan was killed in

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January 2014 by a bomber who detonated his suicide vest as the fifteen-­ year old went to protect his 2000-pupil school in the Shia-majority district of Hangu in Pakistan’s northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkwha (Khan, 2015). Three years later, Mashal Khan was leading a protest campaign against corruption at the Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, also in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. University authorities retaliated by accusing the twenty-three year old of blasphemy. This inflammatory and baseless charge incensed a mob of his fellow students, who dragged Mahsal out of his accommodation and filmed his murder (Rasmussen and Baloch, 2017). Both killings sparked social media outrage, with the respective hashtags #AitzazBraveheart and #IamMashalKhan trending. By evoking these courageous youth in her dedication, under the slogan ‘the brave and the defiant are never forgotten’ (v), Bhutto signals her strong belief that precarity can be offset by that true resistance, both real-world and digital, which might be called a forceful nonviolence. Interestingly, the final ‘person’ she dedicates The Runaways to is nameless: ‘And always, forever, for the Beloved’ (v). Here she plays with the conventions of the Urdu poetry held so dear by Layla. In ghazals and other Sufistic poetry (as in English metaphysical poems), the Beloved might signal a human lover or God, and the speaker’s devotion could be romantic and sexual, or spiritual and religious. Butler argues for a relational, interdependent (rather than individualistic) ethics of nonviolence. Inspired by Gandhi’s positive idea of satyagraha as ‘truth force’ instead of the more negative terms ‘nonviolence’ or ‘passive resistance,’ they advocate nonviolence as something muscular, repeatedly using the word ‘aggressive’ to describe it. This nonviolence is not drifting, soft, and lacking in agency as Monty is for much of the novel, but uses embodiment to resist actively without the deployment of violence against the other. In The Runaways’ context, nonviolence might more fruitfully be related to the Islamic concept of jihad than to violent extremists’ distortion of the term or to the Sanskritized satyagraha, which Butler (following Gandhi) deploys. Jihad is often, and simplistically, defined as a holy war in the name of Islam, just as both Oz and Sunny ‘jihadsplain’ it to their impressionable followers in terms of killing unbelievers (207; emphasis in original). However, the term is more truthfully translated as ‘struggle in the way of Allah’ (Waines, 2003/1995: 162) or an ‘ethic of striving’ (Peters, 2005: 269). All of the five pillars of Islam stem from jihad, for the profession of faith, praying, giving alms to the poor, fasting, and performing Hajj each require spiritual effort. And Islam’s emphasis on the struggle for justice is articulated in the Prophet Mohammed’s

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declaration: ‘The highest form of jihad is to speak the truth in the face of an unjust ruler’ (qtd. in Noorani, 2002: 45). This is even acknowledged from Sunny’s perspective when he reminisces, ‘All he had known of Islam before Oz had gone off to fight in Syria was mercy. He had known Islam only for its refuge, its tolerance. It was submission, not violence’ (120). Just as with Gandhi’s truth force, jihad should be about speaking up rather than punching down. Contrary to Sunny’s wild claims in the novel’s second half, jihad involves a forceful striving for personal integrity and against injustice in ways that tessellate productively with Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence and Bhutto’s dedication of The Runaways to Bangash, Khan, and the Beloved. Butler follows Sigmund Freud in urging, ‘We must rally behind love’ (2020: 269), and this clarion call also resonates with The Runaways. The novel suggests that if Anita Rose/Layla hadn’t been on the receiving end of hate and sexual violence, and if Sunny had followed his loving instincts, the ensuing violence would never have happened. That said, Monty’s decision to join the Ummah Movement is because of his love for Layla, so a suggestion is made that this tender affect can be destructive, bound up as it is (as Butler themselves show, again via Freud) with the opposite emotion of hate. In many of what we might call the Isis novels of the last five years, there is an oscillation between the heteronormative family and queer desire. Families and same-sex desire function as centripetal and centrifugal forces pushing or pulling characters out of their inertia and toward radicalization. Indeed, in earlier novels dealing with groups including the Taliban and the Tablighi Jamaat, such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2004) and Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim (2011), queer or even pedophilic same-sex desire is problematically framed as part of the Islamist militants’ deviancy. As Puar writes, ‘the invocation of the terrorist as a queer, nonnational, perversely racialized other has become part of the normative script of the U.S. war on terror’ (2017/2007: 37). The mainstream automatically taints same-sex desire with homophobic tones. But Bhutto suggests that if Sunny had followed his desires, violence could have been avoided. The last words of the novel are: ‘Sunny thought Monty—whose face was slightly tanned, the bridge of his nose burnt from the sun—was somehow more beautiful than when they first met’ (422).13 Readers have not been made witness to his interior thoughts in this regard, with him having seemed until this point to hate Monty or at least view him derisively. The final sentence, however, implies that Sunny’s same-sex desire never abated despite his relocation to a violently conservative locus.

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(Social) Media Technology contributes to the characters’ susceptibility to violence, and in another aspect of this multifaceted novel, Bhutto examines Pakistan’s (and global) malleability and reinvention in a digital age. Bhutto presents readers with a dizzying array of media. Examining television, for instance, she shows that British reality TV programs hinge on alcohol regardless of their performers’ and audiences’ social demographics, with Monty channel-­ hopping between ‘one reality show of English teenagers binge-drinking in Spain to another reality show of chinless heirs drinking in Chelsea’ (31). These references to Love Island and Made in Chelsea contrast with television-­ viewing in Pakistan, where twenty-four hour breaking news urgently recounts General Pervez Musharraf’s arrest in 2013. Around the same time, a stern Muslim TV preacher puts a bored, rich mother in Karachi under his spell. She gives away most of her possessions and starts praying five times a day. Sunny is a young BBCD—or ‘British-Born Confused Desi’ (28; emphasis in original)—who rejects his father’s quest for assimilation in Britain. Instead, he experiences alienation and painful sexual yearning in the disUnited Kingdom, riven as the nation is by racism and violence. Sunny retreats into an online realm, where he ‘watch[es] the world through Facebook and Twitter’ (41). He also goes on Instagram and later, as the novel moves forward in time to 2017 and Sunny is on his trek to Nineveh/ Ninawa, he struggles with a new platform, bemoaning: ‘Fuck knows how Snapchat works’ (207; emphasis in original). As Brittany Stewart notes, Sunny will develop an avid following as he treks through the desert, ‘posting comments on Tumblr and recording videos on Snapchat where he “smooths his hair down, checking his reflection in the camera, before winking and sticking his tongue out” (207)’ (Stewart, 2020: np.). Writing of the jihadist characters in Chris Morris’s film Four Lions (2010), Philip Hammond observes: ‘These are “mediahideen”, obsessively re-doing their martyrdom videos despite having nothing much to say’ (2011: 175). We might view Sunny in this vein, since as his impact grows so too does his self-consciousness and vanity, and yet his knowledge of Islam and global geopolitics is extremely limited. It should be noted, though, that in the early stage of his online persona, the alluring prism of social media is an illusion. Sunny’s posts are met with indifference, reinforcing his loneliness and depression.

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Whereas Sunny becomes enthralled by ‘jihadi cool’ (Sageman, 2008: 158–60) or ‘jihadi chic’ (Picart, 2017), his Indian Muslim father Sulaiman Jamil has long been fascinated by the suave British spy character James Bond from the well-established medium of film. Readers are informed that Sulaiman watches the Bond films of the 1970s and early 1980s ‘in cinemas clouded with the honeyed smell of beedi, masala chai and potato samosas’ (15). As when Bibles circulate on the banks of the Ganges (Bhabha, 2004/1994: 145–74), the message of Bond is hybridized in the smoky and spicily scented Indian context. More than Bond’s sexual prowess and derring-do, Sulaiman and his friend are overawed by the neat cleanliness of MI5’s offices (16). It is in pursuit of such a ‘neat and clean life’ (20, 22) that Sulaiman lights out for England. Yet as we have already seen, he is met with disappointment, since what he finds in the UK is a country mired in ‘postcolonial melancholy’ (Gilroy, 2005). The order, glamour, and good sanitation of his imagination give way to ‘the poverty of takeaway boxes strewn on the roads, festering in unheated homes and the waiting rooms of betting shops, jeans exposing pale buttock cleavage, women slack under clingfilm skies’ (22–23). This is postcolonial melancholia crosscut by a stark rich–poor divide. About two decades pass and Suleiman is dismayed to discover that his teenage son Sunny takes no interest in what Sameer Ahmed has called the James Bond franchise’s ‘post-imperial virility’ (2018: 29). Instead, Sunny goes online to pose a question: ‘Why we strong Muslim men always gotta go around in jeans and suits and ties like we don’t got a PROUD culture of our own?’ (39; emphasis in original). Rejecting Bond’s suited-and-booted model of masculinity, Sunny grows a beard and sports simple T-shirts with track pants. His cousin and mentor Oz goes further, ‘wearing a starched shalwar suit,’ discarding his eyebrow-ring and gold chains, and smelling ‘distinctly, heavily, like oudh’ (97; emphasis in original). In Terror and Taboo, Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass argue that for contemporary thriller writers, terrorists are replacing spies and ‘terrorism [i]s a substitute for espionage.’ Certainly, Sunny is fascinated by the purveyor of terror as a ‘new exemplar of inscrutable wickedness’ (Zulaika and Douglass, 1996: 3). Yet, rather than wanting to beat the terrorists as James Bond invariably does, he is open to joining them. It is at this juncture that Sunny discovers Islam via YouTube videos of Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X and, later, more mainstream sermonizing. In his British-Pakistani argot—mimicked brilliantly by Bhutto—he writes on Facebook: ‘Yo, fiqh is the key’ (42; emphasis in original). Fiqh is Islamic

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jurisprudence, which has little to say about Muslims living in non-Muslim lands (see Lewis and Hamid, 2018: 104), so it seems doubtful that fiqh would be the ‘key’ to Sunny’s problems. Like most violent extremists, here Sunny betrays his lack of religious training and education (Sageman, 2008: 60, 157). Not coincidentally, at this ‘lone wolf’ stage of his radical consciousness-raising, nobody responds to Sunny’s Facebook post. It takes Sunny’s media-savvy cousin Oz to launch him to virality. Just back from Syria and newly banned by Instagram for inflammatory posts, Oz persuades Sunny to run away from his demanding family, the desi girls who bore him, and Aloush, the Arab DJ he longs for. Dazzled by the glamour of globalized radicalism to which Oz introduces him online, Sunny heads for Mosul. There he garners digital acclaim for his selfies with Kalashnikov in hand. Sunny names this weapon Rita, like the beloved serenaded by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in ‘Rita and the Rifle.’ Lines from this poem are used as the epigraph to The Runaways: ‘I was lost in Rita for two years | And for two years she slept on my arm | […] And we were born again’ (np.; Darwish, 2001: 157–58). For all three of the novels’ runaways,14 this emphasis on being born again is underscored in their own journeys toward or away from radicalization as born-again Muslims. However, it is ironic that here the meaning of the great revolutionary poet is inverted, to bathetic effect. Darwish was in love with an Israeli woman, despite his fervently pro-Palestinian politics. As such, his poem is about the humanity and the transcendence of love, as well as love’s demise because the couple are on opposing sides of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Sunny debases this into love for a weapon, as politics and violence trump humanity and love. It is especially hypocritical that he publicly gives his gun a woman’s name, since in his private life he has little interest in the opposite sex and has treated one girl, the underage Naya, with contemptuously misogynistic sexual violence. Uploading progressively more inflammatory posts to a swelling group of followers, Sunny joins the fictionalized Isis (it is surely no coincidence that the Ummah Movement’s acronym is a resounding ‘Um’). He responds to identity confusion by asserting an aggressive image of himself online, one that erases his troubled past and vacillation between different objects of affection. As Michelle O’Reilly et al.’s research shows, the internet can act as a testing ground to young people wishing to experiment with various personae, particularly as it often grants anonymity. It is well known that this anonymity is open to exploitation by bullies and trolls since, as Sageman notes, the sense of egalitarian intimacy that exists online

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has as its ‘flip side’ a vociferous ‘hate speech that is not conceivable offline’ (2008: 115). The internet’s toxicity and anonymity can ‘facilitate disinhibition in teenagers’ (O’Reilly et al., 2018: 602). We see this with Sunny, since the more followers he gains, the more extremist verbiage he spews. That being said, it is not total disinhibition, for when he wants to say ‘Fuck off’ to one online interlocutor, he reminds himself that ‘he has to sound right, sound woke, be an inspiration to his fans’ (206; emphasis in original). As his social media platforms attract great engagement, he has to choose his words more carefully so as not to alienate these newfound ‘fans.’ It is worth pausing to consider that in one parenthetical aside, Butler writes, ‘if someone holds views that are not in line with the nationalist norm, that person comes to lack credibility as a speaking person, and the media is not open to him or her (though the internet, interestingly, is)’ (2004: xx). The extreme edges of the internet are what intrigue Bhutto, as these have opened up the media to a range of voices that would previously not have been regarded as credible and would never have passed the mainstream media’s gatekeepers. Sunny’s susceptibility to both poor mental health and an addiction to social media bears scrutiny through a new, digital lens that has in recent years adapted Butler’s notion of precarity. This has been called ‘information precarity,’ which its theorists define as ‘the condition of instability that refugees [for example] experience in accessing news and personal information’ (Wall et al., 2017: 240). In the contemporary world, which as Bhutto acknowledges (43) rests on information and what Shobana Zuboff has called ‘surveillance capitalism’ (2019), the phone is a precious possession. Migrants and refugees value it for the intimacy, links to home, and access to information it brings, viewing the phone as ‘a crucial resource akin to food’ (Wall et al., 2017: 241). Although they are ‘runaways’ rather than refugees, we see this exemplified through both Sunny’s and Monty’s desperate need in the desert for data. There is a granular detailing of their frustration with a lack of coverage amid the cryptic signs their phones give them of 4G, EDGE, GPRS, or no signal at all. Monty regularly waits until Sunny is sleeping to try to access a buffering video of Layla’s latest speech, and Sunny hate-watches footage of Oz spouting populist clichés about Muslims in a motivational talk he gives at Davos. Despite their dramatic and involuntary displacement(s), migrants are digital natives (Prensky, 2001) who chafe at their information precarity. Phoebe Moore (2018: 79–139) calls the kind of digital vulnerability migrants face ‘Precarity 4.0,’ whereby in the gig economy laborers work

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harder for less money, their rights stripped away as they are tracked and surveilled. Such an online life of being ‘always on,’ Moore suggests, seldom brings happiness to young people, ‘but often involve[s] underemployment, anxiety, mental health issues and sickness’ (2018: 84). This is a precarity that does not necessarily line up with complete destitution like that of Anita Rose and her family. As Bhutto puts it, it is instead ‘the poverty of the educated and overfed’ (23). Significantly, Sageman writes about violent extremists tending to be ‘drifters’ (like the student drop-out Sunny), who ‘spend a large amount of time on the Internet.’ These loafers are radicalized by their experiences of ‘vicarious poverty’ (2008: 79, 48–50), often through seeing images of the suffering of fellow Muslims online. It is noteworthy that Sunny shores himself up against information precarity by paying for roaming via his father’s bank account. This suggests that despite his disdain for the older ‘brown Englishman’ he is financially reliant on the earlier, pioneer generation of migrants. Sunny meets fellow jihadist Monty when the two men volunteer for a 150-kilometer hike across the desert to engage in a battle for Nineveh. A spoilt boy from Karachi, Monty is the son of a doting mother who these days is in thrall to a televangelist. His father, a secularist from a family of ‘disaster capitalis[ts]’ (30) who profited from the partition of the South Asian subcontinent, is constantly on his phone brokering business deals or admiring the hourglass figures of Bollywood starlets. Somewhat neglected by his parents, as we have seen Monty is in love with Layla, a former schoolmate. In pursuing her to the deserts of Iraq, he is armed only with his Thuraya. The sheltered boy is proud of having haggled with a Saddar shop owner to buy this state-of-the-art satellite phone. Yet he was cheated—ironically by Tano, the same driver Monty mistreated at the Okra restaurant—and the Thuraya reveals its fault when he needs it most. Monty seems, at first, to be similarly expensive but useless, though the novel’s denouement discloses that there is more to him than meets the eye. The most mysterious of the three, Layla hails from Machar Colony in a deprived area of Karachi called Gulshan and is smart, but less privileged than Monty. At their American school, a teacher tweets after history lessons to generate greater interest from his disaffected pupils. Layla challenges his #NeverForget for the Holocaust, asserting: ‘those who oppress don’t get to hashtag themselves as the victims’ (88–89). Despite this bichrome worldview, she used to be open to shades of grey. In Karachi, she sought ‘e-liquid for her e-smokes’ (89) and performed sex acts for Monty without inhibition. One day she left him with no explanation, and

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he traced her to the  Ummah Movement. She has become Um’s poster girl, allegedly showing the ‘calibre’ (145) of the women prepared to join the extremists. Now ‘[p]eople were watching, millions of people’ (271), as Layla’s speeches are recorded for a panoply of social media platforms. Framed by the online male gaze (Mulvey, 2009/1989), she uploads propaganda films to LiveLeak, hectoring her followers about structural inequality, Western inequities, and the ideal Islamist response. In the men’s almost biblical or Qur’anic journey across the desert, Sunny in particular is constantly desperate to charge his phone, which functions as compass, flashlight, and GPS, as well as providing a conduit to the outside world. Phones buzz on silent like a whisper from another plane and an iPhone light is compared to a ‘halo’ (179)—the answer to a spiritual question. But Um proves to be an electronic illusion, what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1988) would have called a simulacrum. Oz, who persuaded Sunny of the need to fight for Islam, now ghosts his cousin from his safe home in England. The former radical refuses to answer the young jihadist’s multimedia messages. He has performed ‘nano-surgery’ (193) on his social media platforms to touch up his own image as an anti-radicalization leader. There are clear echoes of Maajid Nawaz from Quilliam, a pro-Prevent Agenda organization, in the character of Oz. Like Oz, Nawaz is viewed by many Muslims as a turncoat figure, ‘an Uncle Taimoor, backstabbing traitor’ (300). He used to belong to the radical group Hizb ut Tahrir, and then threw himself equally enthusiastically into the controversial counter-extremism group Quilliam. As Philip Lewis and Sadek Hamid suggest, this sort of person seems to embody the suspicion harboured by many British Muslims that as far as the mainstream is concerned, ‘the best Muslim is the ex-Muslim’ (2018: 108). On becoming an ‘apostate’ (331; emphasis in original), Oz founds the Reforming Radicals organization. In this guise, he emails a wide and appreciative audience newsletters dealing with such topics as Islam’s alleged misogyny, how to recognize that a loved one has been radicalized, and mendacity and religion (235, 399). This is heavily ironic, since Oz will slut-shame Layla for her sex tape, was largely responsible for Sunny’s decision to join the jihadists, and lied about the life his cousin would experience in Iraq. As a rejoinder to these slick communications, Sunny steps up his own rebrand, smoothing out doubts and fears to present his one-dimensional facade as a confidently vicious, selfie-obsessed insurgent.

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Conclusion This novel, which expertly takes on technology including TomTom apps, iMessage, WhatsApp’s ticks turning from grey to blue, FaceTime, taxi apps such as Uber and Careem, and Huawei keyboards, ultimately suggests that too much investment in this ‘universe built on trading information’ (43) is damaging for the individual psyche. Love can also be misleading for individuals, notwithstanding Butler’s claim that we should rally around it. Sageman argues that ‘in-group love’ contributes more to radicalization than ‘out-group hate’ (2004: 274; 2008: 86–88). This is borne out by the motivations of The Runaways’ two male jihadists, which revolve around kinship, friendship, sexual desire, and romantic love. Layla is a different case, propelled as she is by more intense precarity—Precarity 1.0—as a poor, Christian woman. And financial precarity (Precarity 4.0 as well as a vicarious poverty) also contributes significantly to Sunny’s journey to so-called jihad. Here Monty is the odd one out in not being motivated by precarity, because of his privileged background, except in relation to the fragility of his masculinity. An alternative source of succour that is better than tech or love and hate, Bhutto intimates, may be found in the poetry of Darwish, Habib Jalib, Mir Taqi Mir, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and the music of Tupac Shakur, Frank Ocean,15 and Fairuz. These art forms hold within them the potential to ‘imagin[e] a radical new world’ (294). They enable individuals to soar above the difficulties and limitations of their lives. Unlike the anti-­ intellectual selfie-snapping radicals, musicians and poets fight oppression through nonviolent means (109), without becoming indistinguishable from their oppressors amid mutual blood-letting. While Bhutto clearly endorses such nonviolent artistic fights against ‘oppression and injustice’ (109), she shows that the jihadists’ resistance is insuperably contaminated by online pretense and real-world violence, bigotry, and discrimination. It is important to question the whole idea that literature promotes empathy, which is often overstated. Some Auschwitz wardens had a great love of literature but, as George Steiner observes (1969: 23), their reading of Shakespeare and Goethe in no way diminished these guards’ murderous impulses. Authors like Ian McEwan, Philip Pullman, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and even the Prime Minister Boris Johnson (2005) have all tried, much less convincingly than Bhutto, to depict Muslim terrorist characters in fiction. These male, non-Muslim novelists share in common an urge to wage war on religion, professing that transcendence is only to be found in

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nature, love, and art. For most of these authors, literature is the pinnacle of art, and so narrative—and its messiah, The Writer—is almost deified. I’d argue against this. Writers can be bigoted. Rather than being ‘legislators of the world,’ to quote Percy Bysshe Shelley (1904/1840: 90), writing doesn’t automatically make one a better person. We need to be suspicious of authors’ claims in this regard, as they have a vested interest in aggrandizing the ethical and empathetic powers of literature. Nonetheless, I agree with Pheng Cheah when he argues that literary writing is ‘a world-making activity that enables us to imagine a world’ (2016: 44). This is also a highly sensate world. Note that historical and other academic narratives aren’t usually as bodily—as embodied—as they might be. The Runaways, as we have seen, is full of scopic imagery, but it also abounds with the experiences of two other senses in particular—hearing and touching.16 Recent writers are preoccupied with the senses to show the mainstream that British Muslims are human and grievable. In accordance with Shylock’s speech from The Merchant of Venice—‘Hath not a Jew hands, organs, | dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with | the same food, hurt with the same weapons’ (III.i.46; Shakespeare, 2006/1600: 122)—they feel what you, the mainstream, are feeling. And, in addition to being sensate and embodied, the novel has a power and a truth. Despite its aporia, Bhutto’s text achieves a great deal, with the world of her novel allowing some readers to better understand the lives of precarious runaways tempted by radical solutions to their problems. Acknowledgments  I am grateful to the entire class of 2020 taking Muslim Translations of Britain for their brilliant contributions to the module, despite the privations of the Covid-19 pandemic. Among these students, I would like to single out Alex Grinsted, Bri Stewart, Natasha Dhawan, and Lydia Jones for especially warm thanks.

Notes 1. Fatima Bhutto disliked her aunt and hates Benazir’s husband, former prime minister Asif Ali Zardari, blaming him in particular for her father’s death, while viewing Benazir as having been complicit in the murder. 2. Here I would like to thank Alexander Grinsted, whose outstanding master’s essay on Fatima Bhutto’s half-brother, the queer Pakistani visual and performance artist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jr, proved inspirational to this introductory section.

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3. Isis is just one of a panoply of names used by and imposed upon the group also known as (the so-called) Islamic State, IS, ISIL, Daesh, ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fı ̄ ‘l-‘Irāq wa-sh-Shām, and ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah. In this chapter, I follow the Guardian’s usage of lowercase ‘Isis,’ because the newspaper’s coverage is well reputed and circulates widely, and because this allows me to draw attention to the Ummah Movement’s acronym ‘Um’ later in this chapter. 4. Layla–Majnun, a story of thwarted love, has tenacious cultural value in the Middle East and Muslim South Asia. It features a young man, Qays, who becomes known as ‘Majnun’ or mad lover, as he combs the desert looking for his lost and unattainable beloved. Bhutto’s spelling of Layla’s name may also reference The One Thousand and One Nights, which is transliterated from Arabic as Alf Layla wa-Layla. 5. In a recent human rights report on Pakistani Christians Call It by Its name: Persecution! (2019) Desmond Fernandes argues that Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office regularly turns a blind eye to the severe plight of Christians in Pakistan because this is a controversial topic with the country’s Muslim majority. 6. Subsequent references are to this (2019a) edition of Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways, and will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text. 7. Bhutto may have chosen Portsmouth for her setting in part because of Ifthekar Jaman, who went from the city to join Isis in Iraq where he built up a staunch online following. Jaman belonged to a radical gang in Portsmouth known as the ‘Al-Britani Brigade Bangladeshi Bad Boys’ (Kesvani, 2019: 176), four others of whom also died fighting in Syria or Iraq. Although as British Bangladeshis these Portsmouth extremists belong to a different ethnic group than the fictional Sunny, their criminal swagger and technological know-how is similar. 8. This term ‘invisibilization’ is taken from Hammond, 2008. See also the novel’s depiction of a Sikh street-cleaner who is working to help but is unobserved by two white lovers (58). 9. The term is popular in academia, especially for discussing the precarious lives of those whom Amitava Kumar, writing about the US context in World Bank Literature, calls ‘adjunct faculty’ (2003: xxiv–xxv): early career lecturers working from contract to contract with no sick pay, holiday wage, or future assurance. 10. It may be worth reminding readers that The Mimic Men is a novel by V. S. Naipaul in which the Trinidadian-British writer limns ‘mimicry’ as the psychological by-product of Caribbean colonial history. Naipaul’s idea of both colonized people and migrants as mimic men and ‘impersonators’ (1995/1967: 234), who ‘took apples to the teacher and wrote essays about visits to temperate farms’ (1995/1967: 166), has been influential

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for the work of many postcolonial theorists. Most notably, Homi Bhabha undertook a complex reworking of the subject in his essay ‘Of Mimicry and Man’ (2004/1994: 121–31). 11. ‘Why didn’t you just move away?’ inverts the question asked of the corpses of three dead migrants, killed by the burning sun as they try to enter Kuwait, by their smuggler Abul Khaizurain at the end of Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s famous novella Men in the Sun: ‘Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank?’ (1999/1962: 74). 12. Now a forensic psychiatrist and counter-terrorism advisor, it is crucial to realize that Sageman used to be on the CIA’s payroll. Because of his right-­ wing background, a healthy dose of scepticism is in order when reading his books—as useful as they are in parts. Chapter 5 of Leaderless Jihad is particularly problematic, since in it Sageman rhapsodizes at length on American exceptionalism and alleged religious tolerance. He claims that the emphasis on assimilation in the US (and, to a lesser degree, France) accounts for less animosity among the Muslims in those countries and fewer home-grown terrorist attacks than in Europe. This argument has not aged well, especially when one considers that many such attacks have taken place in both the US and France since 2008, when Sageman published his book. Even more risible are his dark warnings regarding ‘radical environmentalist extremists,’ about whose claims that human activity is destroying the planet he raises an eyebrow, predicting that ‘[s]uch logic practically invites the use of biological agents […] [in] a completely different type of terrorism that could threaten the existence of the human race’ (2008: 176–77). He also has a gender blindness, which in Leaderless Jihad manifests as his extolling ‘the rights women enjoy in the West’ (2008: 69) as a reason why few Muslim diasporic women had at that time followed their male counterparts in journeying to jihadism. The ensuing decade has made Sageman’s words ring hollow, especially when one considers ‘jihadi Janes’ such as the real-world Shamima Begum or the fictional Layla. 13. I would like to thank Natasha Dhawan for suggesting this point. 14. In addition, we might think of Oz, whose newsletter’s strapline is ‘A Rebirth’ (399). 15. Sunny’s idol is Frank Ocean, the first openly bisexual hip hop star, whom the young British Muslim believes is a poet (50, 198). Like Sunny and Monty, Ocean grapples with ‘nonnormative masculine identities,’ but unlike them in his music and public persona Ocean refuses to fall in line with the dominant ‘hypermasculine, hypersexual and heteronormative’ script (Dhaenens and De Ridder, 2015: 283, 284). In her Acknowledgements, Bhutto remarks that Ocean’s music ‘was a balm for me too’ (423).

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16. See my book Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels (Chambers, 2019) for more on the five senses in some other, related texts.

References Ahmed, Sameer. 2018. Fighting in the Shadows: Empire and Moral Regeneration in Skyfall. Media Education Journal 63 (Summer): 29–33. Ali, Tariq. 2002. The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. London: Verso. Anam, Tahmima. 2011. The Good Muslim. Edinburgh: Canongate. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. Simulacra and Simulations. In Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster, 166–184. Cambridge: Polity. Bhabha, Homi K. 2004/1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bhutto, Fatima. 1998. Whispers of the Desert. Karachi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2013. The Shadow of the Crescent Moon. Delhi: Penguin. ———. 2019a. The Runaways. London: Viking. ———. 2019b. Fatima Bhutto on Radicalisation: We Need to Understand Rather Than Condemn. Penguin.co.uk. 1 March. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2019/mar/fatima-­bhutto-­interview-­on-­understanding-­radicalisation/ Boehmer, Elleke. 2015. Postcolonial Writing and Terror. In Terror and the Postcolonial, ed. Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, 141–150. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. ———. 2016/2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. ———. 2020. The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. London: Verso. Chambers, Claire. 2019. Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2020. Benazir Bhutto in Life, Death, and Letters (Part 1). 3 Quarks Daily. 24 February. https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2020/02/bb-­ bibi-­benazir-­bhutto-­in-­life-­death-­and-­letters-­part-­1.html. Accessed 3 May 2020. Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What Is a World: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Duke: Duke University Press. Darwish, Mahmud. 2001. Rita and the Rifle. In The Rhetoric of Violence: Arab-­ Jewish Encounters in Contemporary Palestinian Literature and Film, ed. Kamal Abdel-Malek, 157–158. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dhaenens, Frederik, and Sander De Ridder. 2015. Resistant Masculinities in Alternative R&B? Understanding Frank Ocean and The Weekend’s Representations of Gender. European Journal of Cultural Studies 18 (3): 283–299.

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Fernandes, Desmond. 2019. Call It By its Name: Persecution. London: British Asian Christian Association. Gilroy, Paul. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Hammond, Laura. 2008. Strategies of Invisibilization: How Ethiopia’s Resettlement Programme Hides the Poorest of the Poor. Journal of Refugee Studies 21 (4): 517–536. Hammond, Philip. 2011. The War on Terrorism as Comedy. In Screens of Terror: Representations of War and Terrorism in Film and Television since 9/11, ed. Philip Hammond, 171–184. Arima: Bury St Edmunds. Hosseini, Khaled. 2004. The Kite Runner. London: Bloomsbury. Johnson, Boris. 2005. Seventy-Two Virgins. London: HarperCollins. Kanafani, Ghassan. 1999/1962. Men in the Sun: And Other Palestinian Stories. Hilary Fitzpatrick (trans.). London: Lynne Rienner. Kesvani, Hussein. 2019. Follow Me, Akhi: The Online World of British Muslims. London: Hurst. Khan, Aurangzaib. 2015. ‘Aitzaz Hasan: The Lad Who Would Be a Hero.’ Dawn. 6 January. https://www.dawn.com/news/1155090/aitzaz-hasan-the-ladwho-­would-­be-­a-­hero Kumar, Amitava, ed. 2003. World Bank Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lewis, Philip, and Sadek Hamid. 2018. British Muslims: New Directions in Islamic Thought, Creativity and Activism. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Mekhennet, Souad. 2017. I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad. New York: Henry Holt. Moore, Phoebe V. 2018. The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts. Abingdon: Routledge. Morris, Chris (dir.) 2010. Four Lions. Actors: Riz Ahmed, Kayvan Novak, and Adeel Akhtar. Sheffield: Warp. Mulvey, Laura. 2009/1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Naipaul, V.S. 1995/1967. The Mimic Men. New York: Vintage. Noorani, A.G. 2002. Islam and Jihad: Prejudice Versus Reality. London: Zed. O’Reilly, Michelle, et  al. 2018. Is Social Media Bad for Mental Health and Wellbeing? Exploring the Perspectives of Adolescents. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 23 (4): 601–613. Peters, Francis E. 2005. The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition, Volume 1: The Peoples of God. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Phillips, Richard, Claire Chambers, and Nafhesa Ali. 2021. Storying Relationships: Young British Muslims Speak and Write about Sex and Love. London: Zed, forthcoming.

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Picart, Caroline Joan ‘Kay’ S. 2017. American Self-Radicalizing Terroists and the Allure of ‘Jihadi Cool/Chic.’ Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Prensky, Marc. 2001. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1.’ On the Horizon 9 (5): 1–6. Puar, Jasbir K. 2017/2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rasmussen, Sune Engel, and Kiyya Baloch. 2017. Student’s Lynching Sparks Rare Uproar in Pakistan Over Blasphemy Killings. Guardian. 26 April. https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/26/lynching-of-a-student-sparks-uproarin-­pakistan-­against-­blasphemy-­laws Sageman, Marc. 2004. Understanding Terror Networks. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2008. Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Shakespeare, William. 2006/1600. In The Merchant of Venice, ed. M.M. Mahood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shamsie, Kamila. 2017. Home Fire. London: Bloomsbury. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1904/1840. A Defense of Poetry. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Steiner, George. 1969. Language and Silence: Essays 1958–1966. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stewart, Brittany. 2020. Unpublished Dissertation. York: University of York. Susskind, Daniel. 2020. A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond. London: Penguin. Taylor, Charles. 1994. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Waines, David. 2003/1995. An Introduction to Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wall, Melissa, Madeline Otis Campbell, and Dana Janbek. 2017. Syrian Refugees and Information Precarity. New Media & Society 19 (2): 240–254. Zuboff, Shobana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile. Zulaika, Joseba, and William A.  Douglass. 1996. Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism. New York: Routledge.

Imagining the Lives of Others: Ethics and Aesthetics of Representing Precarity in Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp

Introduction “Dispossession and inequality are among the more persistent themes that resonate in many of the works produced in the first decades of the twenty-­ first century”, writes Kanishka Chowdhury in his recent survey “Globalization and the South Asian Novel” (2019, 161), while Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, in her contribution “The Novel of India” to the same volume, cites Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others as examples of “a new kind of political engagement taking shape in the novel in English” (2019, 37). Displacement and inequality are the two major themes in the novels of Indian British writer Neel Mukherjee.1 His first novel Past Continuous (2008), republished in the UK under the title A Life Apart (2010), tells two stories of migration that display a keen

B. Schmidt-Haberkamp (*) University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_11

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focus on the hazards of diasporic existence. Mukherjee’s second novel, The Lives of Others (2014), focuses on the destinies of the extended, multigenerational middle-class family of the Ghoshes in the house they share in Calcutta during the late 1960s. While the heterodiegetic narrative explores in graphic detail the vanities and vulnerabilities of the comfortable and complacent bourgeois clan amidst strikes and uprisings in the streets, one of the younger sons, Supratik, joins the Naxalite insurgency and goes to live among the poor peasants and tribals, spelling out his experiences and observations on the precarious “lives of others” in long letters that he writes to an undisclosed recipient. Rajan reads Supratik’s letters as “the manifesto of a new kind of imaginative fiction (at least in English) in its radical identification with people outside the social sphere of the author” (2019, 36). Sonia Faleiro, in her review of Mukherjee’s third and most recent novel A State of Freedom (2017), has a point when she argues that “Mukherjee writes about the rich only in order to write about the poor” (2017). At the same time, while his novels invite, if not demand, empathy towards the destitute and marginalized, “Mukherjee does not indulge in a facile condemnation of poverty and exploitation”, as Rajan rightly argues, adding that, however, “the great questions of the ethics of violence, the futility of struggle […] and the cost of human suffering are never forgotten” (2019, 37). The ways in which Mukherjee, in A State of Freedom, eschews propaganda and didacticism and instead, through the formal arrangement of his novel, his politics of perspective and the narrative techniques employed, displays a keen awareness of the ethical and aesthetic challenges posed by the representation of precarious lives will be the major concern of this contribution. Inequality, economic migration and the precarious lives of others are also at the heart of Mukherjee’s novel A State of Freedom. Apart from being a continuation of its author’s experiment with form, the novel makes clear that vulnerability is distributed unevenly2 and features prominently such populations as described in Judith Butler’s seminal definition of precarity as designating “that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. Such populations are at heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and of exposure to violence without protection” (2009, 25-26). In A State of Freedom, consisting of five linked narratives and set in contemporary India, Mukherjee tells excruciating tales of poverty, violence and pain suffered by his protagonists whose lives count as “nothing”3 in a

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country characterized by crushing social and economic inequality. In their not always successful battle for survival, Mukherjee’s protagonists are forced to leave their homes and to enter new dependencies, as, for example, domestic helps or construction workers in the city; those who have the chance leave the country altogether for Britain and the US, only to return as alienated tourists to their country of origin. As the novel progresses, Mukherjee increasingly places centre-stage protagonists that, beyond the spectacular, are victims of what Rob Nixon has termed the “slow violence” of economic and environmental exploitation (2011) and Elizabeth Povinelli “economies of abandonment”, designating “modes of exhaustion and endurance that are ordinary, chronic, and cruddy rather than catastrophic, crisis-laden and sublime” (2011, 132). More specifically, Mukherjee’s protagonists are victims of encompassing socio-cultural exclusion, such as villagers doomed to an early death because food or public health services are not available to them, domestic helps utterly dependent on their employers in Mumbai and other cities, construction workers with random incomes whose lives are put at risk because safety regulations are disregarded, or forest-dwelling adivasis in Jharkhand in danger of being expelled from their home grounds for their commercial exploitation and harassed by forest guards and paramilitaries alike.

Ethics and Aesthetics of Representing Precarious Lives Representing precarious lives poses both an aesthetic and an ethical challenge since it concerns the power of and over representation inevitably involved in the appropriation in words and images of disenfranchised groups with usually limited access to self-representation. Scholars in the field of poverty and precarity studies have amply commented on the pitfalls resulting from the asymmetries of power between those represented and those representing.4 To give but a few examples, representations of precarious lives can serve to make visible marginalized groups and thus raise awareness and empathy, or they can confirm stereotypes of diverse kinds. They can call for political action or merely serve the emotional needs of readers; they can spectacularize those represented into passive victims and objects of the voyeuristic gaze, or emphasize their agency and resilience, which, again “runs the risk of romanticization and idealization” (Lister 2004, 125). Othering can work to stabilize the boundaries between

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those represented and those representing, but it can also serve to prevent the representation of others as objects of positive knowledge, and by showing respect for difference enhance their sense of dignity. Much depends therefore on the way such narratives are framed or configured. “The frame”, Judith Butler has pointed out, “does not simply exhibit reality, but actively participates in a strategy of containment, selectively producing and enforcing what will count as reality” (2009, xiii). Barbara Korte and Georg Zipp have introduced a “box of analytical tools” (2014, 12) for approaching representations of poverty in literature, which proves a useful starting point for analysing representations of precarity in literature and other media. Their “figurations [or, configurations] approach to poverty literature” starts out from the assumption that “literary texts mould images and imaginations of the world through their specific textual elements and structures” (ibid.). The authors suggest that, firstly, we need to investigate the configuration of “lifeworlds” “in terms of the text’s characters and the environments in which these characters are situated” (ibid.). Secondly, we need to pay attention to the formal aspects of the text: the “modes and associated styles”, “such as realism, sentimentalism, sensationalism or humour” (ibid. 13); next, “a text’s perspectivisation, that is, its narrating and focalising agents” (ibid.), and, finally and closely linked, voice (speaking for/about/as the other) and agency. The following analysis of Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom will work with the analytical tools outlined. It will show that the novel is an imaginative, highly self-reflexive engagement with the complexities of representing precarious lives. By foregrounding the ways in which such lives are subjected to representational processes the novel addresses the pitfalls of “cross-class representation” (Christ 2014, 37) and thus opens up a site of contestation between authorial appropriation and a non-coercive narrative forum to explore the condition of precarity. I will first focus on mode and perspective and deal with the ways in which Mukherjee meets the aesthetic challenge of representing precarious lives, namely by casting his novel in five stories which are linked by recurrent characters and situations, and secondly, by developing narrative perspective in a skillfully graded progression from the visitor’s outsider perspective in the first story to the free indirect discourse of the construction worker in the last story. Next I will go into the negotiation of Otherness and epistemic authority, focusing on how Mukherjee meets the ethical challenge of representing precarious lives. The ethical challenge is directly addressed in the first two stories, which feature protagonists who live in Britain and the US and return

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“home” to India; both stories question their responses to “the spectrum of human agony” (8) they find themselves confronted with and their “fail[ure] to imagine how other people live” (71). The third story about a vagrant and his dancing bear, while it continues to negotiate Otherness, serves to illustrate the ultimate inaccessibility of the lives, minds and emotions of others and thus to blast epistemic certainty. Finally, focusing on the three stories with their indigent protagonists, I will analyse Mukherjee’s representation of his protagonists with a view to agency and gender. Rather than presenting his protagonists as passive victims of systemic inequality, Mukherjee emphasizes throughout his novel their agency and, at the same time, explores the limits to resilience. His novel investigates the meaning of freedom to those who are dependent on others for their survival. It also shows how caste and class issues intersect with gender by foregrounding the particular plight of his female protagonists who are not only prey to male violence, but as girls and women “got no expectations” (78).

Mode and Perspective A State of Freedom consists of five linked stories of varying length and with different narrative perspectives, each one featuring a different protagonist. Each of the stories stands alone; however, they are linked not only by their common themes of displacement and inequality but also by recurrent characters and situations. The first and comparatively short story, a heterodiegetic narrative, features a Calcutta-born academic now living in the US as he takes his American-born son on a tour of North India’s Mughal sites to familiarize him with his heritage. He realizes that, after twenty years in the US, he is totally alienated from his country of origin, a mere “tourist in his own country” (8, 18) who perceives with horror the beggars and cripples he encounters. On their journey they encounter a man with an animal in chains, and near their Agra hotel a construction worker falls to his death: these two, peripheral characters in this story and twin brothers, as later turns out, Lakshman and Ramlal, will become the protagonists of the third and the fifth story, respectively. The second story, an autodiegetic narrative, foregrounds the relationship between employers and domestic helps. Its unnamed narrator is another NRI, a London-based designer, who is on his annual visit to his parents in Mumbai, with whom he constantly quarrels about their disparaging attitudes towards domestic helps. He takes an interest in their Bengali cook Renu, secretly visits her home in

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the slum and, on invitation, her family in the village of Putihari in Medinipur, West Bengal, thus “looking into other people’s lives” (54). On his next visit to his parents he learns that Renu, a domestic help who answers back, has been dismissed; Renu consequently disappears from the novel. Another housemaid working in his parents’ home, Milly, a minor character in this story, becomes the protagonist of the fourth story. After the narrator’s brief excursions into slums and villages in the second story, the third and fourth stories, both of them heterodiegetic narratives with frequent internal focalization, plunge readers into the lives of the rural destitute. The protagonist of the third story is Lakshman, who, crushed by poverty and imminent starvation, trains a bear to dance and leaves home with it to roam the towns and villages in the ultimately futile attempt to make a living. The fourth story, with a hundred pages of novella-length and subdivided into ten chapters and an epilogue, focuses on the lives of Milly and her childhood friend Soni, tribals from Jharkhand, who suffer unspeakable deprivation and violence and are oppressed by both the police and the Naxalite fighters. While Soni joins the Naxalites and is eventually killed, Milly at the age of eight is sent to work as live-in domestic help in a succession of households in Dumri, Jamshedpur and Mumbai. We follow her over ten years, as she is subject to exploitation, segregation and, finally, imprisonment by her employers in Mumbai. She marries the man who rescues her, and the end of the story shows her juggling a number of jobs as domestic help to ensure the education of her children. The fifth and final narrative, delivered in unpunctuated free indirect discourse, gives the reader unmediated access to the despair of the construction worker Ramlal, who, terminally ill with asbestosis and in mortal danger because safety regulations are ignored, reviews his life of abject deprivation and his present hopeless situation just before he falls to his death from the scaffolding. Thus the novel comes full circle, not least in terms of its temporal and spatial structure, returning to the accident that the academic in the first story witnesses from inside his car, emphasizing at the same time the cohesion of the fragmented narrative form and, with its abandonment of syntax and the incomplete final sentence, its further fragmentation and fraying: “in one breath all of his life in one breath because everything is air everything pouring up around the rushing arrow that he cuts through the unimpeded air its short embrace he is husk of course he is at last” (275). As the very title of Mukherjee’s novel suggests, the narrative form of A State of Freedom was inspired by V. S. Naipaul’s In a Free State of 1971,

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with which Mukherjee likes to see his own novel in conversation (see Joseph 2017; Punch Magazine 2018). In a Free State is subtitled A Novel With Two Supporting Narratives; however, as Mukherjee points out, it consists of the eponymous and longest narrative “In a Free State” and four supporting narratives, the “two supporting narratives” plus the prologue and the epilogue (Punch Magazine 2018; Mukherjee 2018a). Thus, both novels share the same number of narratives and their varying length, as well as the themes of displacement and their investigations into the nature of freedom. Mukherjee is full of admiration for the “formal audacity and novelty” of Naipaul’s novel (Punch Magazine 2018) that he sees in its departure from the narrative conventions of the realist novel by which it “normally” provides coherence, namely “plot, character, and continuity” (Mukherjee 2018a), thus masking “the extreme selection process that is plot” (ibid.; cf. also Joseph 2017). Naipaul’s novel provides a model by “letting a sequence of unlinked stories converse with each other and allowing that invisible conversation, rather than anything on the page, to provide a coherence that has deeper, stronger foundations than a conventional, seamlessly plotted realist novel” (ibid.). About A State of Freedom, Mukherjee has remarked: I wanted to write a novel with all the connective tissue taken out, and also to see how much I could push realism towards anti-realist modes (such as the ghost story) while working within the realist framework and with its accepted generic topoi. What would a love-child between realism and anti-­ realism look like? (Joseph 2017)

Of the surreal passages in the novel, the most obvious one is the sense of disconnectedness and disintegration experienced by the tourist in the first story; others concern the shifting borderlines between human and non-human in the third narrative. According to Mukherjee, “[a] ghost story of sorts runs through the novel […] every character in the novel is a ghost of sorts, existing but unperceived, marginal but obstinately real” (ibid.). This is particularly true of the unprivileged characters in the novel, who are only fleetingly perceived from behind the window screens of a car and hover, as it were, between two strictly separated worlds, their homes in the slums and villages and the households and hotels of the middle class.5 The novel’s realism, again, is effected by the non-fictional places and ethnic communities mentioned, and above all, by its accumulation of detail, be it food or environments, and its close descriptions of actions,

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including suffering and acts of violence which are hard to stomach, like the lynching of a servant for stealing, the torturous taming of the dancing bear, Naxalite fighters putting an axe to a boy’s hand, or the slow and painful dying of a young mother from a tumour. Details, Mukherjee argues, “should allow readers to feel they’re inhabiting a real world, a world solid, dense, and, above all, convincing and truthful” (Joseph 2017). The main effect of his choice of structure, however, is that the fragmentation of the novel into five narratives gives it an “unfinished quality” (Yanagihara 2018), the episodic and kaleidoscopic set of snapshots preventing closure and conclusion. Instead, it offers the kind of “inconclusive illuminations […] A realism not of representation and closure but of invention and openness” which Simon During has described as characteristic of “the contemporary literature of precarity” (2015, 83). The reader, as Mukherjee has put it, is “able to watch each of these characters for a time, but never allowed to come to a conclusion or make a simple judgement” (Joseph 2017). According to him, “[t]he fact that the structure of A State of Freedom reflects the fractured and disrupted lives of the characters is an added bonus, something serendipitous” (Punch Magazine 2018). Theorists of the short story collection or cycle have pointed out that the genre activates readers by requiring them to make connections and “to fill […] in the blanks” (Davis 2001, 92) between individual stories. This participation in the production of the text’s meaning forces readers’ awareness of their own reading position and thus complicates their moral responses to a higher degree than the totalizing effect of the novel.6 Finally, Mukherjee’s choice of genre can be conceived as emphasizing the interrelatedness of families, communities or Indian society as a whole, down to the “interdependency” and “cohabitation” of mankind, including the resulting moral obligation “to find political and economic forms to minimize precarity and establish economic political equality”, as outlined by Judith Butler (2012, 150).7 The fundamental principle of human interrelatedness, according to Butler, results from the shared existential condition of precariousness or vulnerability8: “there is no living being that is not at risk of destruction” (2009, xvii). While A State of Freedom demonstrates that precarity is unevenly distributed, as mentioned above, it also shows that the “perpetual perishability of life” (Elze 2017, 26) likewise affects those privileged when the first narrative, like the last, ends in death: The Indian-American academic touring India’s sights with his son is blind to his son having contracted a sudden illness and finds him dead in his bed

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the next morning. The narrative concludes with the bleakest of sentences: “Next to him, the child was dead” (22). While in Naipaul’s novel the narratives are linked by their common theme, in A State of Freedom they are additionally linked by recurrent characters and the progressive development of perspective from the tourist’s outsider perspective in the first narrative to the unpunctuated free indirect discourse of the construction worker in the last narrative. The socially and economically marginalized and, accordingly, peripheral characters in the first two narratives—the construction worker, the domestic help, the vagrant with his dancing bear—turn into the protagonists of the following three narratives. Thus they gradually turn from objects only fleetingly perceived and summarily described to subjects in and of their own stories. Mukherjee has commented on the politics of perspective in his novel as follows: […] no issue [but migration] crystallizes so much the dividing line between insiders and outsiders, those who have and those who are in search of something to have. I wanted to look hard at the idea that one person’s life may not hold much value for another but it is everything to the person whose life it is; it matters to him or her more than anything else in the world. I wanted to bring maximum dignity and seriousness to depicting lives from the perspective of the person to whom it belongs, not just in any technical point-­ of-­view kind of way, but also morally and philosophically by making any gap between narration and the subject of narration tend towards zero. (Punch Magazine 2018)

While the “dividing line between insiders and outsiders” in spatial and social terms is never bridged but upheld by a number of recurrent tropes, such as the car or the hotel, as we shall see, the gradual transition towards “making any gap between narration and the subject of narration tend towards zero” is effected by the development of narrative perspective. The heterodiegetic narrative situation of the first narrative serves to maintain the alienated tourist’s complete detachment from the environment and people observed; internal focalization accentuates his sense of disconnectedness and disorientation. The second narrative is the only one to feature an autodiegetic narrator; it gives the reader a first-hand impression and evaluation of the visitor’s ultimately failing attempts to connect with the objects of his observation and interest, the precarious lives of others, more specifically, the life of his parents’ cook. With the third, heterodiegetic

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narrative, the novel leaves the environments and perspectives of those privileged. Lakshman and his dancing bear turn themselves into spectacles for others; internal focalization here serves to give readers an insight into Lakshman’s hopes and despair, but also into his likewise failing attempts to access the mind of his companion, the bear. The fourth and by far longest narrative about the domestic help Milly and her childhood friend Soni is a heterodiegetic narrative with varying character focalization. The heterodiegetic narrator, who never foregrounds the act of narration, provides in plentiful detail a panorama of the two young women’s lives that covers well over ten years, numerous characters and changes of place, while internal focalization affords the reader access to the protagonists’ inner lives, their traumas, their friendship and their different assessments of their situations. The final narrative, cast in free indirect discourse with its oral syntax and diction, seems to dispense with the mediating function of the narrator altogether when we seem to enter Ramlal’s mind directly, of course still within the pronominal reference system of the framing discourse and in the educated English of the whole novel. Still, with respect to the development of narrative perspective outlined, this is the closest the reader gets to witnessing a precarious life, which is no longer spoken about but given an, if simulated, autonomous voice.

Negotiating Otherness and Epistemic Authority Ethics and aesthetics are, of course, closely entangled. A novel’s formal aspects, such as discussed—mode, perspective and voice—frame readers’ reactions and attitudes towards the lives represented, which may range from compassion to revulsion or detachment. Asked by an interviewer, “[as] someone living a life so vastly different from many you write about, how do you achieve this empathy? How do you approach, for example, a character like Lakshman?” Mukherjee responded: “You imagine him; that’s all there is to it. […] we [writers] squeeze our eyes tight shut and imagine what it is like to be another person and launch ourselves into his or her life” (Punch Magazine 2018). While Mukherjee here might refer to the particular capacity of fiction to give faces and voices to people rarely encountered by authors and their readers and more often than not submerged in statistics, A State of Freedom evidences its author’s awareness that the case is more complex than stated in the interview. The particular ethical burden that cross-class representations place on his novel is addressed in the first two narratives with their outsider protagonists,

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“sheltered first-world liberal[s]” (8), and their perceptions of and responses to precarious lives, which ultimately remain unreadable to them. Thus the novel from the start negotiates Western intellectuals’ assumed capability to represent the other, the imperialist knowledge production that had already been critiqued by Gayatri Spivak: “The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other. This project is also the asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subjectivity” (1988, 280). The academic in the first narrative, who returns as a tourist to his country of origin, reacts with “horror, shame, pity, embarrassment, repulsion but, above all, a desire to protect his son from seeing them” to the beggars and cripples he finds himself confronted with, summarily described as “the spectrum of human agony” (8). He is concerned about the “indifference and blindness” of the others and wonders whether “his life in the plush West had made him skinless” (ibid.), that is, has sharpened his sensitivity to poverty and illness while, he suggests, this sensitivity lies dormant amongst resident Indians. This is one of the passages that have earned Mukherjee trenchant criticism from a reviewer of the novel in the Indian Express, Samantak Das, according to whom Mukherjee’s novel is striking “all the right guilt-ridden-anti-capitalist-liberal-pink-lefty chords so beloved of the West’s educated classes”.9 However, not only is the protagonist proven wrong in later narratives—Milly, for instance, owes her survival to acts of kindness from one of her employers and also from her future husband—but the opening narrative, fittingly cast in impressionistic style, foregrounds his own blindness and inability to form his sensory perceptions into a coherent whole to be interpreted. His sense of disconnection is complete, extending, tragically, even to his son’s “unreadable expression” (10); he is “blinded” (11) by the sun, his “senses [are] disengaged and distant” (16), and in his “rising anxiety” (17) he is no longer sure he is not having a nightmare (19). The appropriative gaze is inverted: While he fails to read his environment and those around him, his “lostness [is] read shrewdly” by guides and beggars (10), and at Fatehpur Sikri he is struck by “a feeling that the walls and stones and cupolas and courtyards were all, as one organism, watching him and his son” (17). While the narrative complicates epistemic authority, it introduces readers at the same time to the sharp segregation between the privileged and the unprivileged. The Indian-born academic, who has made a successful career in the US, returns as a tourist and enjoys the comforts of staying in

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a hotel and travelling India in a car with a driver. He is an eerie echo of Renu the cook’s nephew in the second narrative, who has left his family in poor rural Medinipur on a scholarship for Heidelberg and now does a PhD in particle physics. Renu works in six homes to financially support him; at the same time, she and her family bemoan his absence and emphasize the importance of home and the dangers of alienation that the protagonist of the first narrative suffers from: “Nothing doing, this living far away” (81). Tourism, as the most privileged form of travel, clashes sharply with the multiple displacements the unprivileged characters in the novel suffer in order to make a living; in the same way, the hotel forms a sharp contrast to their homes in rural India or in the slums in the city, as does the tourist’s journey by car to their wanderings and bus rides. The car in particular serves as a recurrent trope of spatial and social segregation, sealing off the safe and privileged space inside from the dangers and destitution of the world outside, while the driver is one of those ghosts, an in-between creature that hovers between the two spheres. In the first narrative, this contrast between inside and outside is foregrounded: The academic and his son view the country and its population mostly from the safe distance inside their car, they perceive Lakshman and his bear only when he knocks on the car window, and the academic, “for the briefest of flashes” (6), sees the blood-stained piece of ground where the construction worker Ramlal fell to his death, before the car window, “the slit” (6) to reality, closes again. This is echoed in the last narrative when Ramlal becomes obsessed with his memory of a boy who had given them tangerines from a bag inside the car: “[A]ll he wanted to be was the pampered son of a rich man who rode in cars and looked out at the world from behind a pane of glass which could be lifted up or down depending on how much of the world you wanted it could be turned on or off like a tap” (272). However, in Ramlal’s experience upward social mobility does not exist in India: “[Y]ou had to be born into the life inside” (273).10 In A State of Freedom, the trope of the car is taken up at the beginning of the second narrative, when the unnamed I-narrator, a London designer on his annual visit to his Calcutta-born parents in Mumbai, watches from inside his car the rain pouring down, transforming the world into “that of an Impressionist painting” (27); the spray turns the offshore mosque into a “fairytale dream-vision castle”, and the narrator “is too mesmerized” by this scene of “accidental enchantment” to “pay much attention to the long-range view of plagued humanity seeking succour”, that is, the “seriously maimed, crippled and diseased people begging” who normally

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crowd the walkway to the mosque (27). It becomes instantly clear that the narrator, as his very profession suggests, is particularly sensitive to the aesthetics of his environment rather than to the lives of its inhabitants, and prone to aestheticizing it, also linguistically, as he is writing down the story of his encounter with his parents’ cook Renu. It begins with the words: “When I think of her—not often admittedly, before I decided to write this […]”. (25). Like in the passage quoted before, the unprivileged are not ordinarily at the centre of his attention.11 In his review of the novel for The New  York Times, Michael Gorra argued that the narrator of the second narrative provided a model for the reader: “A State of Freedom requires those of us who live comfortably to imagine a world in which almost no one ever does […]. Indeed, the Londoner who narrates the book’s second part makes just such an effort, in effect modelling what Mukherjee asks of his readers” (2018). He is a complicated model, though, as his penchant for aestheticizing his environment has already shown. Unnamed, he is a type rather than an individual. Through his regular visits to his family, he is more closely connected to his origins than the protagonist of the first narrative, leading “a divided life […] in two countries”, hoping to have “saved a few things to belong to each of them solely, without flowing between the two” (34). What separates him from his parents is their “old, old battle” (29) about the position of “servants”, as his parents call them, or “domestic helps”—the “politically correct tag” (35-36) the narrator prefers—in India’s social hierarchy. While the narrator with his “liberal-educated” attitude (39) likes to consider them as equals—occasionally struggling with his cultural training, which fills him with shame—his mother chides him for his “word-­chopping and equality high-horse” (79): “You live abroad, you don’t understand the culture here” (78). In his narrative we learn that it is, in fact, not his living in the West that has changed his attitude but the trauma of witnessing his father maltreating their young live-in maid that made him “cross […] over to the wrong side of the ‘us versus them’ equation” (45). Before the reader even gets to Milly’s experiences in the fourth narrative, several instances in this second narrative point to the Othering and dehumanizing of domestic helps, including another memory of the narrator of the public lynching of a servant accused of stealing while a huge crowd watched the “entertainment” (58). These scenes, described in gruesome detail, provide a first close-up of what is meant by lives which count as “nothing to others” (241) or are not considered “grievable”, in the words of Judith Butler.12

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That the narrator takes an interest in his parents’ cook Renu, increasingly engages her in conversation, secretly visits her home in the slum, and eventually, encouraged by Renu, even her family home in the village is above all connected to his passion for food: He wants to write a book on regional Indian cuisines to counter their flattening out in the West; he watches Renu cook, asks her for recipes or orders her to cook certain dishes. The narrative abounds with detailed descriptions of Bengali dishes and their ingredients, which stimulate the reader’s sensory imagination. Food serves the narrator as a means to reconnect with his Indian, more precisely Bengali, identity; for his parents, who “shower their mostly absent son” (256) with the most luxurious food, it is a way of expressing their love for him. However, while the narrator’s emphasis on diversity and specificity appears laudable, food for him is ultimately a lifestyle item and cooking an artistic, creative pursuit; he cannot imagine that the lack of food is a matter of survival for the poor. “[F]ood”, as Mukherjee put it in an interview, “is the most fundamental site on which wealth/poverty plays out” (Punch Magazine 2018). In contrast to the narrator, Renu has a functional approach to food and rejects the offer to take home leftovers: “‘Naaah, I don’t need it, I eat only one meal a day, rice and boiled vegetables. I have no use for all that’” (62). The “two opposite valences of food” (Punch Magazine 2018) as marking class divides clash sharply in the novel, when in the following narratives with their focus on the rural destitute the reader is confronted with descriptions of hunger and starvation. Her mother’s cries “are etched indelibly in Milly’s memory—‘The pangs of hunger are great pangs, it’s a burning. God gave us stomachs to punish us’” (188); to Milly, the opportunity to take home leftovers, not having to worry about food, provides “a kind of freedom” (257). As a result, the narrator, with whose liberal attitudes the reader is made to sympathize, does not cut an entirely positive figure. Indeed, his interest in Renu increasingly comes across as invasive. Despite his numerous questions and the information reluctantly provided by his mother, Renu’s life and thoughts remain inaccessible to him; he does not get to know the reason why Renu and Milly constantly quarrel, neither does he learn that Renu juggles six jobs in order to support her nephew’s studies at Heidelberg until he visits her home village. He wards off her request to find a job for her “in [his] country”, feeling defeated and ashamed (59). He secretly goes to look at the slum she lives in, turning himself into a spectacle for its inhabitants because he is easily identified as an “outsider”

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(53), and takes flight as his mounting feeling of discomfort grows unbearable: My discomfort escalated and it was not only because of the stares. Edicts from a middle-class upbringing on looking into other people’s lives through their open doors and windows combined with a liberal sensitivity acquired later in life, about treating the poor as anthropological fieldwork or a tourist attraction, to produce a mixture of dread, guilt and self-loathing. I turned tail. (54).

His insights won from his visit remain hazy and are overwritten by his emotional reactions. The question that preoccupies him after his visit to the slum is “whether each of these rooms was the entire house and home of one family” (54). The reader receives an answer to this question in an extended, detailed and informative description of Milly’s home in the same slum towards the end of the fourth narrative, delivered in a matter-­ of-­fact tone that “neither denies nor sentimentalizes her tough living conditions” (Nair 2018). The narrator’s peeking into “other people’s lives” reaches a climax when, encouraged by Renu, he visits her family home in the village of Putihari in Medinipur. This visit becomes a lesson in social awkwardness for him: He feels ashamed because he worries about the cleanliness of the bed, the use of the outdoor toilet, the quality of the food, ultimately “feeling like an insensitive ogre of privilege trampling through their hardbitten lives” (71). The description abounds with questions, emphasizing class barriers and his lack of understanding for the lives of the rural poor: “I had failed to imagine how other people live” (71).13 The character of the narrator echoes Supratik’s concerns in Mukherjee’s previous novel, The Lives of Others, who, having joined the Naxalite insurgency and desiring to live with and as “those who had nothing” (Mukherjee 2015, 148), constantly reflects on his outsider status, his middle-class background that separates him from the rural poor and the accessibility “of the lives of others” for him (ibid. 146). What saves the I-narrator’s voyeurism in A State of Freedom from turning into what has variously been called “‘poverty porn’, ‘slumspoitation’” (Krstic 2012) or “classploitation” (Lemke 2016, 9), narratives that project middle-class fantasies upon precarious others, is the intense self-reflexiveness of his narrative, to the extent that his subjective, emotional response (shame, most of the time) almost obliterates the world beyond his inner life. At the same time, of course, his self-centredness, like that of the protagonist of the first

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narrative, stands in the way of appreciating the precarity of others, let alone mitigating it. Readers are so easily lured into accepting the “liberal-­ educated” (39) narrator as a role model for themselves that it is not until having read Milly’s praising the kindness of his mother in the fourth narrative that they become aware that it is the narrator’s mother who, despite her insistence on class boundaries, takes an interest in and is informed about her employees’ lives and supports them by offering time off work or food to take home; it is she who intervened in the public lynching of a domestic help and “protest[ed] against their barbaric behaviour” (58). It belongs to the attractions specific to linked stories that characters are shown from different perspectives, with the result that readers are tempted to return to an earlier presentation of a recurring character and correct or supplement their first impression. The third and central narrative featuring the vagrant Lakshman and his dancing bear forms a bridge between the first two and the last two narratives: It is the first to focus on the perspective and lives of the ‘Others’, the rural destitute; at the same time it presents a variation of the themes of Othering and epistemic authority that the first two narratives emphasized. By making a bear the companion of Lakshman and co-protagonist, the narrative addresses animal rights, doubling the focus on human rights, and negotiates the “supposedly ‘insuperable line’ […] dividing beings that count from those that do not” (Garrard 2004, 136). It emphasizes that the boundary between the species is arbitrary because of their shared capacity for suffering; “precariousness”, Judith Butler had already pointed out, “is a condition that links human and non-human animals” (2009, 13). Exploring the play of similarity and difference in the relationship between humans and animals, the story of Lakshman and his bear at the same time emphasizes the necessity to respect difference. Lakshman’s life is marked by utter deprivation: an orphaned childhood, social exclusion because Lakshman14 and his twin brother Ramlal have pointed faces that make them look like foxes—a first hint at the merging of the boundaries between humans and animals—and the imminent threat of starvation. The reader meets Lakshman despairing because he does not know how to feed his wife and children and also the family of his brother who left to find work in construction. His despair turns him into a violent man who marvels at “the stranger that he has become” (109). When he finds a bear cub, he plans to train it for entertainment to make a livelihood; a qalandar, not without pointing out to the Hindu Lakshman that the practice is a Muslim prerogative and illegal, helps him prepare the bear

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for the training regime, that is, remove the bear’s canines and pierce its muzzle with a heated poker to pass a rope through it.15 The mutilation of the bear and its subsequent “training”, that is, ferociously beating it into submission, are described in great detail over numerous pages. While the qalandar argues, “They are animals, their pain doesn’t last. […] They heal quickly, they’re strong. It’s we, humans, who are weak” (99), thus denying the animal’s capacity for suffering and marking out the divide between the species, the focus of the description, by contrast, is on the bear’s suffering and its reactions, its “unearthly squeal” (98), its shrieking and roaring, and its attempts at self-protection. They echo Lakshman’s own howling and screaming with despair, as the bear’s captivity echoes Lakshman’s “feeling of being buried alive” (161)—foreshadowing also the violence and imprisonment suffered by the characters of the fourth narrative. Indeed, the similarity between human and animal increases as Lakshman and his bear begin to tour the villages. Unlike the narrator of the second story, the bear is given a name—Raju—and is thus individualized, and in the course of their journey it turns into a companion of sorts for Lakshman, for whom it is not a burden but “the only freedom he has ever known” (161). Bear and man both struggle for their survival and share the same needs: They compete for food and water, and they seek shelter from the sun and from the rain. The narrative bristles with suspense because, on the one hand, Lakshman is afraid of the bear, fully aware that it could tear him to pieces with its claws that “look like miniature swords made out of grey iron” (152), and on the other hand, he forgets to keep the safety distance, absent-mindedly strokes Raju’s back, and ascribes human attributes to him, such as gratitude, friendliness or enchantment. Raju never does attack him, though, not even when accidentally untied. As hard as he tries, the bear’s emotions and wants remain “unreadable” to Lakshman (136); any sense of epistemic certainty and authority is thus blasted. At the end of the narrative, when Lakshman despairs upon finding that the money he had saved to survive the rainy season is lost, Raju, unleashed again, “comes up to him with hesitant steps and tries to take his head between his paws” (162); neither Lakshman nor the reader can decide whether this means that the bear is putting Lakshman in mortal danger or trying to comfort him. “What does the animal think?” are the final words of this central narrative of the novel that addresses the question of how we envision alterity and relate to others whose difference cannot be assimilated.

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Agency and Gender By laying bare the schemes by which lives deemed worthy are separated from lives deemed unworthy, in foregrounding the (capacity for) suffering of the latter group, and at the same time emphasizing the necessity to respect their difference, Mukherjee prepares the ground for representing precarious lives in the final three narratives of his novel in a way, as he put it, that would “bring maximum dignity and seriousness” to their depiction (Punch Magazine 2018). Instead of presenting his protagonists to the reader as passive victims of systemic inequality, as lacking fundamental rights and being subject to forces beyond their control, he foregrounds alternative frames of perception by focusing on his characters’ self-agency and resilience and their struggle for dignity and self-esteem. Agency as “the socially constructed capacity to act” (Barker 2012, 241) characterizes individuals as purposive and autonomous beings who are invested with a degree of choice and control over their lives. It is true that all of Mukherjee’s indigent protagonists are denied the right to life and physical integrity and are forced from their homes to make a livelihood. However, the detailed descriptions of their struggle to survive, their capacity for friendship and companionship, their care for their families to whom they send money, the pride they take in their respective achievements, even their repeated screaming with despair stand in the way of diminishing them to stereotyped characteristics of passive and silenced victimhood. Instead, they struggle to maintain their self-esteem and address the injustice done to them. Renu takes care to point out to the narrator of the second narrative that her family are not poor (60); she is “a servant [who] answer[s] back” (39) and gives free vent to her moods, which ultimately costs her her job, and she refuses to collect her outstanding salary (82). Lakshman hates to be taken for a beggar and refuses to accept “crumbs from the rich people’s table” (116); the state of physical neglect he gets into when touring the villages with his bear fills him with disgust and shame (139). Milly prides herself for being far better at Hindi than her Bengali employers in Jamshedpur and during their absence defies their rules (200-201). Before he falls to his death, Ramlal demonstrates complete awareness of the safety regulations in construction work that are required by law but ignored where he works (274). With respect to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, Jens Elze has commented on the ambivalence resulting from the novel’s constant oscillation “between the urge to communicate an unbearable and dehumanizing

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plight and the wish to project the maintenance of human dignity and subjectivity outside the narrow exotic frame of victimhood” in combination with “the demands of a Western readership that craves to consume both authentic dignity and humanitarian suffering” (2017, 178). Elze reads the “reclusive dignity” foregrounded in the rather positive ending of Sinha’s novel as “an explicit manipulation in order to render the narrative more salvageable on a global literary market” (ibid.). While A State of Freedom displays the same kind of ambivalence and competing urges, the endings of the individual narratives as well as of the novel as a whole are more accurate to the diegetic events and refrain from any romanticization or idealization by exploring the limits to resilience: Renu’s fate is unpredictable since she disappears from the novel, Lakshman’s hopes for survival are thwarted, and Milly’s childhood friend Soni and Ramlal are both dead by the end of the novel. The only survivor is Milly, who, however, owes her life to the mercy and kindness of others. Reflecting on her disjointed life, she is given the clearest articulation of self-agency: “Her life is not fragmented. To her, it has unity and coherence. She gives it those qualities. How can movement from one place to another break you? Are you a terracotta doll, easily broken in transit?” (263). Finally, the fourth and longest narrative with its female protagonists Milly and Soni, Munda from Jharkhand, demonstrates that precarity is gendered and thus unevenly distributed even among those socially and economically marginalized. Mukherjee emphasizes the particular plight of his female protagonists who are not only victims of male violence— Lakshman beats his wife, Soni’s sister is raped by government officials— but as girls and women “got no expectations” (78), as is repeated time and again. If education is the key, as the novel suggests through the character of Milly, Mukherjee’s female protagonists are particularly disadvantaged because education is barred from them. At the age of eight, Milly, an avid learner, is taken out of school and sent to work as a housemaid in a distant village because the family desperately needs the money: “‘Studying’”, her mother impatiently counters Milly’s protest, “‘What good is that for a girl? You’ll be more useful bringing in some money’” (172). Gender plays a role in Soni’s decision to join the Naxalites;16 “‘[W]e are women. […] We are forgotten’” (213), she argues, determined to leave a mark in life: “‘I’ll be immortal, written about in the Party’s letters and papers for other comrades to read’” (216). Renu sends money to support her nephew’s education but has her own daughter married off. The pervasiveness of gender inequality in Indian society is highlighted when Milly with keen attention

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listens to the noise of her slum, songs, people shouting, TV shows, all of them framing girls and women along established gender norms (260). Although her husband counters her wish to send their daughter to secondary school—“‘But she’s a girl, what’s the point of educating her to such a high level? There’s the boy to think of now’” (ibid.) —Milly, defying patriarchal authority, is determined to provide both for her daughter’s and for her son’s education. Here again, diegetic events preempt any facile hope for change: Renu and Milly display the agency of women who sacrifice their own needs on behalf of other family members; the village school Milly and Soni attended is closed down and “used as a base by the Army to flush out guerillas” (195) before the building is blown up by the Naxalites.

Conclusion “I remain unconvinced that fiction—or the arts, in general—has any traction in the real world”, Mukherjee has stated in an interview (Yanagihara 2018); at the same time, he argued that “[f]iction must be a quarrel with the times; otherwise why write?” (ibid). While A State of Freedom testifies to his belief in the “social work” narrative performs (Griffiths and Mead 2018) by making visible those marginalized and allowing silenced voices to be heard, the extreme deprivation described in his novel leaves no doubt that the empathy it aims to effect needs to turn into responsibility and action to effect socio-political change. However, political action also requires an act of the imagination, a vision for change. “Imagination allows human beings to conceive a reality different from that which they are experiencing and to understand their world as part of a changeable past and future”, Gareth Griffiths has argued (2018, 9). Narratives, again, play a fundamental role in our perception and interpretation of the world; they negotiate the struggle over cultural hegemony and meaning, defining who functions as the speaking and perceiving subject and who functions as the subordinate object of the narrative. A State of Freedom displays its author’s keen awareness of the power politics of narratives and of the particular aesthetic and ethical challenges posed by the representational appropriation of disenfranchised groups. The formal arrangement of the novel, its politics of perspective, its negotiation of likeness and difference, its blasting of epistemic authority, and its complicating of discourses of victimhood result in a highly self-reflexive engagement with the complexities of representing precarious lives.

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Together with the accumulation of detail, including the names of existing places and ethnic groups, they work to make the condition of precarity distinct and entice the reader to research the history of those economically and socially marginalized. Mukherjee’s tone is never judgmental or polemical; at the same time, his descriptions of extreme poverty “are neither laced with mystique and wonder, nor described in exploitative terms that might invite condescension, pity or revulsion” (Nair 2018). While this analysis has worked with the conceptual framework of Judith Butler’s humanist ethics of vulnerability, loss and mourning, Mukherjee’s novel aims exactly at avoiding the pitfalls that their ethics has recently been charged with: substituting “abstract humanity for historical humanity” (Danewid 2017, 1683) and turning “questions of responsibility, guilt, restitution, repentance and structural reform into matters of empathy, generosity, and hospitality” (ibid. 1675), resulting in “a politics of pity rather than justice” (ibid. 1681). Above all, with its intense self-reflexivity, A State of Freedom demonstrates that the novel can serve as a medium of reflection that helps us to understand how we conceive of precarity.

Notes 1. “I consider myself an Indian writer who lives and works in London and spends part of the year in the USA” (Joseph 2017). 2. See Judith Butler in Precarious Life: “There are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence than others” (2004, xii). 3. Mukherjee, Neel. 2018. A State of Freedom. London: Vintage, 216. All parenthetical references are to this edition. 4. See, for example, Korte and Zipp (2014, 3-5 and 12-15); Korte (2014, 7-8); Korte and Regard (2014, 10-11); Christ (2014, especially 36-47); and Lemke (2016, 6-9); see also Shameem Black (2010) on imagining alterity and representing social difference, especially the introduction, “Towards an Ethics of Border-Crossing Fiction”, 1-18. In postcolonial studies, the classic text to examine the challenge that subaltern subjectivities pose to representational form is, of course, Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). 5. See also the epigraph to the novel quoting a Syrian refugee at the border of Austria, August 2015: “Migrants? We are not migrants! We are ghosts, that’s what we are, ghosts”. 6. See also the articles by Klein (2022)  and Kossew (2022) on short story cycles.

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7. See also Klein (2022) on the short story cycle as addressing and effecting “relationality”. 8. Butler seems to use the terms “precariousness” and “vulnerability” synonymously, while precarity, as defined above, is sharply distinguished from precariousness. 9. Das argues: “A central takeaway from this beautifully written novel is that if one is born in middle-class, relatively privileged, urban India (a member of the English-medium class) one can only imbibe democratic and human values, and develop the ability to look critically at oneself, if one lives in the West; remaining in India dooms one to continue one’s horrifically solipsistic middle-class existence, treating everyone who is one’s social inferior with contempt and brutality” (Das 2017). Mukherjee, thus, is another example of the habitual criticism of contemporary Anglophone Indian novelists “for producing ‘negative’ representations of India for their readerships in the global North” (Davies 2016, 121). 10. Naipaul’s eponymous novella In a Free State, which features a road trip, might have provided a model, as might the epilogue to Naipaul’s novel with the narrator, a tourist in Egypt, ruminating on “[his] stranger’s eyes” (Naipaul 1978, 246) and his driver’s attitude towards the tourists: “I couldn’t tell what he thought” (ibid., 244). In Aravind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger (2008), the car also is a prominent trope of social and spatial segregation; see, for example, Adiga (2008, 112, 116). 11. See also the narrator’s extensive description of the lighting and colours when he watches Renu queueing at the tap because there is no running water in the slum where she lives (41). It is usually his mother who provides the information he lacks, such as why Renu has to queue at the tap. 12. See Butler in Precarious Life: “Some lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?” (2004, xiv-xv). 13. Mukherjee takes care not to homogenize the poor. The narrator learns from Renu that she comes “from a family of rice farmers. They owned the land they cultivated, so they were not poor, or certainly not the kind of poor one associates with the term ‘Indian farmer’” (60). 14. His name derives from the Hindu epic Ramayana, in which Lakshmana is the younger brother of Rama and the twin brother of Shatrughna. 15. Qalandar, or Kalandar, is the generic term for a Muslim ethnic community, recognized by the Indian government as an economically deprived tribe, who used to make a livelihood with performing bears and monkeys until hunting and capturing bears was outlawed in 1972. The debate about the cruel treatment inflicted on the bears, on the one hand, and the need to

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offer alternative livelihood options to the qalandars, on the other, continues until the present day; see Radhakrishna (2007). 16. On the representation of the female Naxalite in A State of Freedom, see Gorman-DaRif (2018); for an analysis of fictions of the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency, see Malreddy (2016), and Sarkar and Manna (2020).

References Adiga, Aravind. 2008. The White Tiger. New York: Free Press. Barker, Chris. 2012. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 4th ed. London: Sage. Black, Shameem. 2010. Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels. New York: Columbia UP. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. ———. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. ———. 2012. Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26 (2): 134–151. Chowdhury, Kanishka. 2019. Globalization and the South Asian Novel. In The Novel in South and South East Asia since 1949, ed. Alex Tickell, 158-71. The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 10. Oxford: OUP. Christ, Birte. 2014. The New Poverty Studies. Current Concerns and Challenges. In Key Concepts and New Topics in English and American Studies, ed. Ansgar Nünning and Elizabeth Kovach, 31–54. Trier: WVT. Danewid, Ida. 2017. White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History. Third World Quarterly 38 (7): 1674–1689. Das, Samantak. 2017. (Im)Balance of Power. The Indian Express, July 29. https:// indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/imbalance-­o f-­p ower-­n eel-­ mukherjee-­a-­state-­of-­freedom-­4772024/. Accessed 25 February 2020. Davies, Dominic. 2016. Occupying Literary and Urban Space: Adiga, Authenticity and the Politics of Socio-Economic Critique. In South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations, ed. Alex Tickell, 119–138. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Davis, Rocío G. 2001. Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short Story Cycles. Toronto: TSAR Publications. During, Simon. 2015. From the Subaltern to the Precariat. Boundary 2 42 (2): 57–84. Elze, Jens. 2017. Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel: Literatures of Precarity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Faleiro, Sonia. 2017. A State of Freedom by Neel Mukherjee—other Indias. Financial Times, July 14. https://www.ft.com/content/5083bd02-­655f-­ 11e7-­8526-­7b38dcaef614. Accessed 17 March 2020. Garrard, Greg. 2004. Ecocriticism. London and New York: Routledge.

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Gorman-DaRif, Meghan. 2018. Post-Magic: The Female Naxalite at 50  in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom. South Asian Review 39 (3-4): 298–310. Gorra, Michael. 2018. A Novel That Echoes Naipaul, Exploring the Limits of Freedom. The New  York Times, January 19. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/01/19/books/review/neel-­mukherjee-­state-­of-­freedom.html. Accessed 9 March 2020. Griffiths, Gareth. 2018. Introduction: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? In The Social Work of Narrative: Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary, ed. Gareth Griffiths and Philip Mead, 1–11. Stuttgart: ibidem. Griffiths, Gareth, and Philip Mead, eds. 2018. The Social Work of Narrative: Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary. Stuttgart: ibidem. Joseph, Anjali. 2017. Neel Mukherjee in Conversation with Anjali Joseph. Wasafiri, August 8. https://www.wasafiri.org/article/neel-­mukherjee-­ conversation-­anjali-­joseph/. Accessed 9 March 2020. Klein, Dorothee. 2022. Overcoming the ‘Crisis of NonRelation’ through Formal Innovation: Aboriginal Short Story Cycles. In Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World, ed. Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, Marion Gymnich, and Klaus Peter Schneider, 55–70. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Korte, Barbara. 2014. Narrating Poverty and Precarity in Britain: An Introduction. In Narrating Poverty and Precarity in Britain, ed. Barbara Korte and Frédéric Regard, 1–17. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Korte, Barbara, and Frédéric Regard. 2014. Narrating ‘Precariousness’: Modes, Media, Ethics. In Narrating “Precariousness”: Modes, Media, Ethics, ed. Barbara Korte and Frédéric Regard, 7–15. Heidelberg: Winter. Korte, Barbara, and Georg Zipp. 2014. Poverty in Contemporary Literature: Themes and Figurations on the British Book Market. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kossew, Sue. 2022. Precarious Lives in Tony Birch’s Common People (2017). In Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World, ed. Barbara Schmidt-­ Haberkamp, Marion Gymnich, and Klaus Peter Schneider, 73–87. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Krstic, Igor. 2012. Slums Analog / Slums Digital. parapluie 28. http://parapluie. de/archiv/slums/slumdarstellung/. Accessed 25 February 2020. Lemke, Sieglinde. 2016. Inequality, Poverty, and Precarity in Contemporary American Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lister, Ruth. 2004. Poverty. MA: Polity Press. Malreddy, Pavan Kumar. 2016. Solidarity, Suffering and ‘Divine Violence’: Fictions of the Naxalite Insurgency. In South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations, ed. Alex Tickell, 217–233. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Mukherjee, Neel. 2010. A Life Apart. [Past Continuous, 2008]. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. ———. 2015. The Lives of Others, 2014. London: Vintage (Chatto & Windus). ———. 2018. A State of Freedom, 2017. London: Vintage (Chatto & Windus). ———. 2018a. Displacing the Displacement Novel: V.S. Naipaul’s In a Free State. The Paris Review, February 20. https://www.theparisreview.org/ blog/2018/02/20/rereading-­v-­s-­naipauls-­free-­state/. Accessed 20 March 2020. Naipaul, V. S. 1978. In a Free State. Harmondsworth: Penguin (1971). Nair, Sonia. 2018. A State of Freedom. Meanjin Quarterly, March 1. https:// meanjin.com.au/blog/a-­state-­of-­freedom/. Accessed 25 February 2020. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke UP. Radhakrishna, Meena. 2007. Civil Society’s Uncivil Acts: Dancing Bear and Starving Kalandar. Economic and Political Weekly 42 (42): 4222–4226. Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder. 2019. The Novel of India. In The Novel in South and South East Asia since 1949, ed. Alex Tickell, 3-43. The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 10. Oxford: OUP. Sarkar, Debjani, and Nirban Manna. 2020. Left-wing extremism in India: Red terror through the novel. Literature Compass 17 (11): 1–14. Sinha, Indra. 2007. Animal’s People. New York: Simon & Schuster. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: U of Illinois P. The Punch Magazine. 2018. Interview/Profile: Neel Mukherjee: Lives Apart. January 24. http://thepunchmagazine.com/the-­byword/interviews/neel-­ mukherjee-­lives-­apart. Accessed 9 March 2020. Yanagihara, Hanya. 2018. Neel Mukherjee: Fiction Must Be a Quarrel with the Times. Literary Hub, January 11. https://lithub.com/neel-­mukherjee-­fiction-­ must-­be-­a-­quarrel-­with-­the-­times/. Accessed 17 March 2020.

Pride, Prejudice and Precarity in Sri Lanka: A Reading of Yasmine Gooneratne’s Sweet and Simple Kind Feroza Jussawalla

Introduction The Sweet and Simple Kind (2009) is Yasmine Gooneratne’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice set against the backdrop of both Sri Lankan independence and the subsequent Sinhala nationalist movement. The story is complicated not just by the anticolonial movement, but also by the postcolonial/neo-colonial Tamil-Sinhala issues. The “sweet and simple kind” of the title are the “precariat” of Sri Lanka, not just the suffering poor, but the women in particular, whose lives are made “grievable,” to use the phrase coined by Judith Butler, by patriarchy, class and gender discriminations. Mirroring perhaps her own growing up, Gooneratne traces the bildungsroman of two female characters: one from a privileged background, Tsunami; and her lower-class cousin, Latha, who is more intellectually

F. Jussawalla (*) University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_12

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inclined. The class struggle of 1950s Sri Lanka is seen through the experience of these two cousins. Itis complicated by the arrival of a wealthy businessman from India, Sujit Roy, who is not only the Darcy of the novel, but also the agent of neo-liberalism. While Chomsky dates the advent of “neo-liberalism” from the 1970s (Lydon 2017), it was already developing in the immediately “postcolonial countries,” countries such as India and Sri Lanka, and even Nigeria and Kenya, since independence, even if the “Nehrus” attempted to introduce a socialist order. Neo-imperialism and neo-liberalism emerged simultaneously in postcolonial South Asian countries, which became obsessed with being “western” and wealthy in their own right. As the postcolonial politicians gained power, they became neo-­ imperialists, and neo-liberals, buying in to the neo-imperial politics of countries such as the U.S. and also emerging countries such as Saudi Arabia, whose geopolitical power was grounded in their oil resources, which were in such demand among western economies. As wealth increased the interest in capital increased, spawning neo-liberalism. All of these developments fostered a fascination with westernization, a hangover from colonialist days that intensified in the face of nationalist tendencies. It was said that traditional dress such as khadis and dhotis were now being worn in Jaguars and Mercedes Benzes. Spun cotton, which Gandhi had wanted to be the clothing of the populace, so that he could deny the purchase of Manchester manufactured cloth, became an expensive fashionable commodity. Towards the end of this novel, we see the commodification of the once-colonized westernized native Herbert Wijensinha into a “man of the people,” in native dress, but still pursuing wealth. These neo-liberal times led to an explosion in bribery and corruption. The title of the book itself, Sweet and Simple Kind, is from Eartha Kitt’s song, “Just an Old Fashioned Girl,” no doubt often played and heard on Radio Ceylon, the voice of modernization and westernization. The nouveau riche neo-liberals who haunted the British clubs after the British left and so were allowed in, suddenly became identified as the new imperialists. Much of this is reflected in the history of Radio Ceylon, so faithfully followed, even in India, as “Radio Ceylon,” per se … a name of privilege. This is clearly chronicled in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982). In Sri Lanka, western music plays its own role, long after independence and even after the country’s name change to Sri Lanka. It broadcast western music, the Big Band dance parties, almost as though the Gatsby era of the roaring twenties was suddenly playing out in the East. Could these be the first neo-liberal postcolonials, whose new imperialism of

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“postcolonial politicians,” the “men of the people,” is unconcerned with the “precarity” of their people. Gooneratne’s Sweet and Simple Kind shows us that both “precarity” and neo-liberalism existed on the subcontinent at the advent of independence, long before they were recognized as such by contemporary theorists such as Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky. In the remainder of the chapter, I hope to show how Gooneratne demonstrates this in her novel of epic proportions, some 710 pages. Kanishka Goonewardena chronicles this development in Sri Lanka, in her essay “Populism, Nationalism and Marxism in Sri Lanka: From Anti-­ colonial Struggle to Authoritarian Neoliberalism” (2020, 289). She writes, “With a historical perspective spanning from anti-colonial struggle in the late colonial era to the contemporary conjuncture of neoliberalism and populism, it demonstrates how the radical left in Sri Lanka, a credible contender for state power in the decades immediately before and after the independence from the British empire in 1948, was eclipsed as a viable political force by nationalist forces after the consolidation of an authoritarian-­populist form of neoliberalism in 1977.” What can be considered “neo-liberalism” actually existed simultaneously with the independence movement. Goonewardane notes that it was the radical left that played an active role in Sri Lankan independence, and this can be seen in the novel at hand. It is one of the characters, Latha’s teacher, a Mrs. Philips, who is married to a Marxist activist, who is instrumental in ensuring that Latha goes to Perdaneya to study to gain nationalist and Marxist roots, rather than go to the UK as Latha had planned. But the wealthy cousin, Tsunami, who thinks her name is a Japanese name of privilege, is from a more Westernized and privileged family; though she also ends up at Peradeneya, is the one who is fascinated by Sujit Roy, a veritable “neo-liberal” Darcy. Sujit saw nothing wrong with his wealth or his western Cambridge education: “I’m a methodical, hardworking businessman,” he had told Tsunami (Gooneratne 2009, 534). Life had treated Roy well, and he did not see any reason why it should not continue to do so … his life plan involved sun-warmed days cruising the Mediterranean in boats of his own manufacture… Admittedly, the isles of Greece with which Sujit’s imagination had played as a boy had been replaced by the beaches of southern Ceylon, but his dream of combining life’s purpose with messing about in boats had been achieved in good measure. (534)

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He was methodical and money-minded, even in his choice of Ceylon for a habitat. Poised on the cusp of Europe and Asia, the island’s manifold attractions have spun their enchantments through the centuries, capturing numberless unwary travellers who had originally been bound in other directions. In the 1950s Ceylon had all the colonial charm of Bombay and Singapore, without the burgeoning population of those cities and their overcrowded throughfares. Roy found English-speaking, Westernized Ceylon very much to his taste. (535)

And, might I add here, his financial taste, which was to build a business empire. In him we have the seeds of neo-liberalism as they begin to be sown. He acquires a “gleaming new Opel Kapitan,” a “well-appointed office,” a “modern flat” (535). By the end of the book, Sujit has become the true neo-liberal industrialist/financier; he is even implicated in the murder of a minister and in all sorts of bribery and corruption scandals. The postcolonial world was not waiting for “neo-liberalism” of the Reagan-Trump kind to creep up on them. By the 1970s, it was already there. But it was not recognized by the Chomskys as such, perhaps because the third world was not on their horizons. It was also alive and well in Chinua Achebe’s Man of the People, though this is a novel set in a later period. This entire saga of the journey from radical Marxism to neo-liberalism plays out in Sweet and Simple Kind along the bildungsroman journey of the two young protagonists, Tsunami and Latha. They move towards nationalism and identity respectively; Latha towards nationalism and Tsunami towards a more cosmopolitan neo-liberalism. Gooneratne is herself from a well-known and wealthy political family and now an anglicized British Australian upper-class strata, having subsequently been awarded an OBE. All bildungsromans set against independence struggles, are journeys along precarity… both precarious in the ordinary sense of the word, and precarious as intertwined in social and political movements. They mirror the experiences of young people growing up at the moment of independence. They are a trope for the growth of the country. Both country and characters lose their innocence. Butler writes, “Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense

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guaranteed” (Butler 2004, 25) and in Butler’s sense of the word, where the “face” (139) of the “Other” is not recognized and the life made “grievable.” For Butler, as she writes in her chapter “Precarious Life” (128–151), the non-recognition constitutes “precarity” more than does poverty. And it is this journey of “precarity,” that encompasses our Darcy-­ like capitalist businessman, Sujit Roy, who comes to Sri Lanka to “develop” it, that I want to trace in this chapter. Sweet and Simple Kind is the quintessential “Postcolonial” novel. It is “postcolonial,” not just because it is set in the post-colonial period, but because it embodies all the literary characteristics I have come to consider “postcolonial.” Elsewhere I have written extensively about how the genre of the bildungsroman,1 of a protagonist coming to an awareness of his/her identity and growing into a sense of nationalism, is the defining genre of the novels that make up the postcolonial canon. These novels are often also complicated by politics and “precarity” in that they consider or represent the movements against colonialism, the violence and the grieving bodies, and also the economic disparities. Often the young protagonists are witness to this and they ponder how to negotiate these controversies and conflicts. But first let’s look at the precariousness of the protagonists’ journey. A child, often of ten or eleven years of age, is navigating a turbulent historical moment, an ever-changing, ever-challenging world with few guides, if any, where everything they knew is being challenged. This in itself is precarious. I have just used the word “guides,” which of course draws from the journey of the traditional hero as articulated by Joseph Campbell. Taking this paradigm, the “holy grail” our heroes or heroines undertake the search for, in the nationalist moment, in an increasingly post-colonial world, would be a sense of nationalism, of belonging to their country, their “home” culture, and their awareness of where they belong and who they are. This is a journey fraught with what Judith Butler, in her monumental Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, would call “violence, mourning and politics” (Butler 2004, xiv). Some terms need definition here. For the definition of post-colonial versus “postcolonial” as metaphor, not pegged in a chronological moment, but as a trope for the life of a country or a nation, I turn to Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge’s now vastly lauded review of Ashcroft and Griffiths’ Empire Writes Back. In their essay, “What is “Post(-)colonialism?” they peg the term with a “hyphen” to the chronological moment of colonialism: “‘Post-colonial’ thus becomes something which is ‘post’ or after

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colonial.” (1994, 276). Postcolonial (without the hyphen) constitutes an attitude of postcoloniality, an anti-hegemonic frame of thought. I have extended this attitude to encompass a coming into an awareness of identity, particularly an indigenous identity, one of belonging to a nation, a culture, a community, whether imagined or real. The concept of “nationalism” is fraught with controversy and unfortunately linked to neo-­ liberalism, as the newly independent also become the newly rich. But to come to this awareness the hero or heroine has to undertake a journey, which, for the purposes of this essay, I will call a “precarious journey,” alongside precarity: grieving bodies, grieving cultures, losses of home, and language, recreations that don’t fit and yet an evolution of nation and an identification with nation and culture. Precarity, according to Judith Butler, is the recognition of the “precariousness of life”: those whose lives are marked by the “others” among us and whose lives are marked by mourning and loss, caused by violence. I repeat here for emphasis that according to Butler, in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009), “Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed” (25). She adds, “Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support” (25). Not only do the two characters, Latha and Tsunami, suffer from the failing networks of support, the working-class Sinhalese, feeling displaced by the Tamils suffer from failing networks of support. As they clash, there are uprisings that leave “grievable bodies.” There is murder and bribery and manoeuvring. Sri Lanka has certainly seen its share of violence, mourning and loss in the last century and since independence. With Sinhala linguistic and cultural nationalism immediately and contemporaneously with their independence movement, and the resistance against the Indian Tamils, or the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983–2009) certainly left a trail of mourning and loss. As Kanishka Goonewardena remarks in her essay, “Populism, Nationalism and Marxism in Sri Lanka: From Anti-colonial Struggle to Authoritarian Neoliberalism,” Sri Lanka made the journey from the early Marxist radicals fighting the colonizers to being in the hold of neo-liberals. Along the way, the journey was marked by immense strife between the Sinhala and the Tamils against a backdrop of Buddhism, that is, violent colonizing Buddhism, the kind we are seeing in Burma today.

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In her “Violence Spilt Blood Smashed Glass,” Maryse Jayasuriya details the violence and mourning recorded by Sri Lankan women authors such as Kamala Wijeratne and Jean Arsanayagam. She notes Wijeratne’s Sinhalese nationalistic strain, but also her bemoaning the agonies of war (2008, 86). There has been, as Kanishka Goonewardena notes in her essay “Populism, Nationalism and Marxism in Sri Lanka: From Anti-colonial Struggle to Authoritarian Neoliberalism,” exactly that, an “authoritarian neoliberalism.” It is exactly that the trajectory of the movement from anti-­ colonialism to authoritarian neo-liberalism that forms the backdrop to Yasmine Gooneratne’s seemingly Jane Austenian “nineteenth-century-­ type” novel Sweet and Simple Kind (2009). We can see the pattern of the dominance of the bildungsroman as the favoured genre of postcolonial authors all the way from R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends, through Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things to the most recent novels emanating from what we consider the postcolonial world, such as Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. They also embody very particular characteristics, such as each protagonists’ cross-cultural encounter with the colonizing western culture, the conflict between westernized education and indigenous learning. This is the moment of “culture contact,” and culture conflict that the young protagonists of these novels must negotiate. These are, as Mary Louise Pratt would say, “contact zones,” “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other.” (1992, 7). This is the situation of each of these bildungsromans, because they are novels that tell stories of young people growing up in and finding themselves in cross-cultural situations, where their culture interacts with that of the colonizer, there is an epistemic violence and they question whether to turn inwards or to turn towards “transnationalism.” Every contact with the colonizer’s culture and educational system and religion creates a transnational situation. While the term “transnational,” particularly transatlantic transnational, originally indicated the ability to move and adjust across the Atlantic, between either the US and Britain or Britain and India, and assimilate within those cultures, in the culture contact with the colonizer and the culture contact with the colonizer, each encounter causes a “transnational” situation. The term has taken on more of an economic turn as it deals with the poverty and exclusion that typify the condition of migrancy. But we can definitely see it in this situation, of original culture contact between the colonizer and the native especially as we look at the two young ladies growing up in Gooneratne’s novel, because they are, indeed,

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transnational figures. They embody the British and the indigenous Sri Lankan identities. Steven Vertovec postulated that transnationalism is a concept mostly concerned with “migrants” and dispersed ethnic groups, and economically challenged immigrants (2009, 53). But you can see the transnationalism also in the young protagonists who embody both the western and the local and can’t decide which way they lean, especially as they are going through the independence movements of their countries. Transculturation happens when two cultures come together syncretically and there is a moment of awareness of the differences and yet a recognition of each other at the moment of cultural contact: “Ethnographers have used this term, [transculturation], to describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture” (Pratt 1992, 7). One definitely sees this in how the anglicized Sri Lankan characters select and invent them or reinvent themselves in the light of local politics from the learning, the education that has been imparted to them by the colonizers. All this identity split creates precarity not just for those who belong to the “precariat,” the oppressed rising laborers, in this case the Sinhala farmers and laborers rising both against the European and Indian colonizers. Every question that Mary Louise Pratt raises can be analysed in this novel: The concept of transculturation serves to raise several sets of questions. What do people on the receiving end of empire do with metropolitan modes of representation? How do they appropriate them? How do they talk back? (7)

Most importantly, transnationalism and transculturalism encompasses the question of language, language contact and language colonialism or rejection. What should be the language use and preference of the postcolonial individual? This, of course, has been the basis of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s influential and much-debated treatise, Decolonizing the Mind (1986). All decolonizing countries struggled with the question of language, particularly in South Asia. In my first book, Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English (1984), I made an extensive study of Indian critics’ attitudes towards writing in English compared with writing in native languages. I also interviewed major postcolonial writers from Achebe and Ngugi to Raja Rao for my co-edited collection, Interviews with Writers of the Postcolonial World (1998), and found that English was the preferred language of communication, because, as Raja Rao said in his “Preface” to Kanthapura, English is as much a language of our make up

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as Sanskrit or Persian before it. Yasmine Gooneratne, in her interview with Deborah Weagel, states that, … English is essentially a craftsman’s tool, and not a bludgeon. A good writer must make use of the best tools that are in his possession, and who can deny that the English language offers rich resources to the writer who trains himself to use it? As for the “centrality of English language and literature in postcolonial studies,” would anyone with a proper knowledge of the modern literatures of India, Africa, Ireland and the West Indies see anything to regret in that? (272)

In Sri Lanka, where the text at hand is studied, the question of language, whether to learn/espouse/denounce, revoke the colonizer’s language, is intensified by the multiplicity of languages, that came with the palimpsest of colonizations, layer upon layer, Buddhist, Indian, specifically Tamil, Dutch and English. There was also the question of the colonizers’ religion. The protagonists in bildungsromans in general and in this text take a journey of introspection and learning and finally coming to awareness of where one belongs. It also plays a very important part in the economy and neo-liberalism. All the ex-British colonies enjoy economic advantage in these days of call centres and internet development because of the gift that the colonizer left them with, the English language. I have identified this pattern of the bildungsroman, the young protagonist’s journey along the “precarious,” journey from colonialism to postcolonialism, in several novels written in English, whether in India, Africa, or the US southwest, or even in the novels of contemporary diaspora writers. It is a veritable paradigm, through which one can identify the literary characteristics of novels we can consider “postcolonial.” Along the way, the protagonists, whether male or female, tread a precarious fine line of “precarity.” They encounter poverty, class differences, caste differences, and critique through younger eyes the neocolonial world that emerged after the colonizers’ departures. If we stretch this paradigm anachronistically backwards towards, say, Kipling’s Kim, we see this same of sense of coming into an awareness of oneself politically, and nationalistically, not as, say, an alienated young person undergoing adolescent angst, as in Catcher in the Rye, but as young people, whether male or female, making their way through a “precarious world,” a world that is changing politically, economically, which is challenging what they were raised with and opening their eyes to the “precariat.”2

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Yasmine Gooneratne’s Sweet and Simple Kind definitely follows this pattern. It is the story of two young female cousins, Tsunami and Latha, growing up against the backdrop of Ceylon/Sri Lanka’s independence (1948) and the rise of the Sinhala Nationalist movement, often embodied and expressed through language politics. Despite their close relationship, there is a very definite class and education gap between the two. Latha’s mother, a Mrs. Bennet reincarnation, is a government schoolteacher preoccupied with making her students, especially the westernized ones who come her way, aware of their Sinhala heritage. As they grow up together, the reader is made aware of both the class and the cultural differences. Gooneratne, herself a Cambridge-educated, extremely Westernized Sri Lankan, is not shy about dropping literary names, from Macaulay to Milton to Leigh Hunt, and, in particular and extensively, D.H. Lawrence and Oscar Wilde. Again, in her interview with Deborah Weagel, Gooneratne attributes the study and learning of English literature to the superb poetry, such as that of Derek Walcott, of which she is particularly fond, that has emerged from the postcolonial world (273). This has echoes of Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, which is peppered by references to western popular music. western reading audiences, often unaware of the particular context, wonder why. But I myself grew up listening to Radio Ceylon and learned my love of American music from it. To be westernized was the “hip” thing to do. One particular story that Tsunami, the wealthy and privileged protagonist is supposed to be reading, is Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, which stayed with me as a trope for the bildungsroman of the two young ladies. This supposed fairy tale is, in reality, a metaphor for the speaking subject. The little mermaid gives up her voice to make herself into something else so she can be pleasing to the man she loves. “One must suffer to be beautiful,” Tsunami, the westernized, wealthier cousin says to Latha (47). The Little Mermaid’s prince coming to the island is the colonizer seen from afar. She is an “other,” a “subaltern,” as Gayatri Spivak would say, in her now-famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The two young ladies in the novel seem to absorb this myth; they literally give up their voices as they want to be subsumed into the fascination with westernization of Latha’s father, Herbert Wijensinha. In a neo-liberal, nationalist world, he turns himself into a politician espousing a nativeness and indigeneity which is actually “foreign” to him. The two young ladies, Latha and Tsunami, learn from each other. Latha develops a desire to study culinary arts in London, learning from Tsunami

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to value being British and cosmopolitan, but also maintaining the local tradition that women must go into women’s fields. In her interview with Deborah Weagel, Gooneratne says that one of the themes of the novel Sweet and Simple Kind is the way in which young girls are groomed for marriage (270). Gooneratne also contrasts the Westernized education the girls receive from the Burgher teachers in the Anglican mission school with the local Buddhist school, the Amarapalli Maha Vidyalay. It is one teacher, a Mrs. Philips, whose husband Rajan is a great “nativist,” who calls Latha’s family to encourage them to send Latha to Peradeniya, the local university, rather than the more westernized University of Ceylon. They were initially uncomfortable with the nativization. Gooneratne notes in the novel that, “When Independence came to Ceylon in 1948, it was received by local people with mixed feelings of satisfaction and foreboding” (159). Mrs. Philips believed in a “New World Order,” a freedom from both the Dutch Burgher settlers and also the British colonizers. But there is yet another settler colonial influence to be fought and that is the infiltration of language, particularly of the south Indian Tamils. Latha’s father is very aware of this. His Tamil, Indian Christian friend Rajan Phillips, the husband of the teacher who has taken Latha under her wing, lays out what is perhaps the most important issue of decolonization that plagued the countries decolonizing at that time during the 1950s, whether India, Kenya, or Sri Lanka: ‘You’re right to be concerned, Mr. Wijensinha,’ Rajan said at last, ‘If people lose the ability to communicate with each other and they are divided by politics or language—’ ‘The politics of language rather,’ interrupted Herbert. ‘Certainly the politics of language, we will be entering upon a dangerous period in the country’s history. On the other hand, change of one kind or another has to take place. (177)

The young girls are caught in this culture contact situation, and need to decide where their loyalties and aspirations lie. As they navigate their way through university, they are constantly aware of change and conflict. ‘O-Fac? Kultur? What are you talking about?’ ‘O-Fac’s campus-speak for Oriental Faculty. We’re too Western educated, too darned uppity for their taste. They think of us as Kultur.’ (312)

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Throughout this novel, the indigeneity and nativization is met with mixed emotion and ambivalence. Sinhala [wrote Paula] became as you know the official language of the country by an Act of Parliament: there was public rejoicing at the time, but the euphoria seems to be wearing off now. Many people we know resent the removal of English from its former position of supremacy … as long as English is well taught and continues to be a means of communication between communities, and of contact with the outside word and Tamil continues to be used in areas where Tamil speakers predominate, why should this bit of legislation be a problem for anyone? (470)

This is the set up for the precarious situation to come that plagues Sri Lanka today: the language politics and identity politics that set the Sinhalese against the Tamil Tigers, a war that India was drawn into. From here on the novel takes on a more political character. The movement of Sinhala nationalism begins and the “Darcy,” of the novel, the Cambridge-educated Indian businessman, Sujit Roy, previously mentioned at the beginning of this essay as an embodiment of the neo-­ liberal, who Latha, the Elizabeth Bennet of the novel, loves, gets mixed up in this nationalist movement, which begins its attack on him. So, against the background of a seemingly innocuous love story plays out a “precarious” nationalist movement. And class and wealth warfare. They ask him to speak Sinhala or to sing the national anthem (638), one that, even as I write this, rings in my head, because of my own immersion in Radio Ceylon: “Oh Lanka mata … namo namo namo mata.” Sujit Roy is unable to do so. The Sinhalese labourers got into their heads that they had a duty to defend their motherland from marauding Tamils, and started looting Tamil homes, raping Tamil women, and beating up Tamil laborers and public officers. Apparently they were absolutely confident that the police wouldn’t interfere. The Tamil laborers in the Polonnaruwa sugar-cane plantation fled when they saw the crowds approaching and hid themselves among the sugar cane. The hoodlums in the crowds set the sugar cane alight, and flushed them out. As they emerged screaming for mercy, all of them—men, women and children—were cut down with grass cutting knives and kathi, or smashed to pulp with heavy clubs … they order[ed] them to speak a Sinhala sentence. If anyone fails the test or dares to refuse, he gets beaten up or stabbed. (618)

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Of all the postcolonial bildungsromans, this novel most illustrates the precarious existence of ordinary citizens in nationalist movements. We see here “violence, vulnerability and mourning” (Butler 2004, 31). The very people, Paula and Rajan Philips, who had ignited the stirrings of nationalism in the westernized young ladies were having to hide in their homes. In 1958, the race riots begin and an Emergency is declared. While the novel basically comes to an end here, Sri Lanka’s trouble and long war to rid Sri Lanka is yet to begin. What is important here is that we see the precariousness of nationalist movements, as they are overtaken by neo-liberalism They are strewn with grieving lives. The raw encounter both with the colonizer and with breaking away from the colonizer causes us to perceive the encountering as “precarious” (Butler 2004, 51). There is “pride” and “prejudice” in this novel: Pride at being western, prejudice against the unwesternized and uneducated, the precariousness of such attitudes and the consequent precarity, the turmoil, the loss of life, under the neo-colonial, neo-liberal government. It may not all be “sweet and simple,” but it is “sweet and sour.”

Notes 1. Jussawalla, Feroza, “Kim Huck and Naipaul: Using the Postcolonial Bildungsroman to (Re)define Postcoloniality,” Links & Letters 4, 1997 25–38, in “Teaching R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends College Literature vols. 19–20 1992–1993, and in the Introduction to Conversations with V.S. Naipaul, Mississippi, University of Mississippi, 1999. 2. The “precariat” is a term developed by Guy Standing indicating a class lower than the proletariat whose existence is almost always shifting and in jeopardy.

References Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. ———. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Gooneratne, Yasmine. 2009. Sweet and Simple Kind. London: Little Brown. Goonewardena, Kanishka. 2020. Populism, Nationalism, and Marxism in Sri Lanka: From Anti-colonial Struggle to Authoritarian Neoliberalism. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 102 (3): 289–304. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/04353684.2020.1780146.

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Jayasuriya, Maryse. 2008. Violence Spilt Blood Smashed Glass. In Perspectives on South Asian Women’s Writing, ed. F. Jussawalla and D.F. Weagel, South Asian Review 29 (1): 83–102. Lydon, Christopher. 2017. Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy. TheNation.com. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/ noam-­chomsky-­neoliberalism-­destroying-­democracy/. Accessed 3 March 2022. Mishra, Vijay, and Bob Hodge. 1994. What Is Post (-) Colonialism? In Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 276–291. New York: Columbia University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Vertovec, Steven. 2009. Transnationalism. London: Routledge.

Why Do They Hate Us So Much? Precarity in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist Adnan Mahmutović

The post-9/11 question “why do they hate us so much”, the founding ideological question of neo- imperialism, confronts us with an uncanny, historically fixed clarity in the identification of us and them. The “us” is vaguely the democratic West but more specifically America. The “them” is vaguely everyone else, but more specifically Muslims. While Judith Butler has questioned the legitimacy of this question and examined the way it gives rise to justification of neo-imperialism, they do not seem to see this question as something the implied “them”, the Muslims, could ask. Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist stages a liberation of the question from its fixed meaning, and brings about a possibility of “us” and “them” signifying any speaking/asking subject. Thus, the question can even be asked by a subject as specific as a violent fundamentalist/ extremist, as well as a subject as vague and often faceless as the massive

A. Mahmutović (*) Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_13

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precariat(s) of the world.1 The freedom implied in the ambiguity, although often dangerous and potentially violent, is a necessary precondition, in Hamid’s work, for seeing and understanding the precariat, and, on the basis of this seeing, building a structure of global ethics. Hamid’s oeuvre, which I have so far analysed as part and parcel of post-9/11 Muslim fiction (Mahmutović 2018), has unfailingly honoured the implied mandate of the global novel to chart and critically examine the state of cross-national affairs. From his first modern allegory, Moth Smoke (2000), over a series of fictions and essays, to the most recent Exit West (2017), Hamid has shown a consistent concern with the effects of nationalism and globalization on populations that are increasingly moving locations or at least fantasizing about global movement. The success of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which defies many truisms of contemporary US publishing (Behdad 2008, 295–6), shows that many issues at stake in this novel resonate across a diverse number of ethnoscapes and mediascapes, to use Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) terms. Despite the intellectual orientation towards the globe, Hamid has infallibly sought to turn our gazes towards the South Asian context, even in works which do not explicitly state particular Asian settings. There seems to be, Hamid shows, an implied paradox in the now globally popular notion of migration when it is understood both as a desirable state of being (freedom) and dislocation (force). Hamid’s characters often move because they want to escape either the state of precarity or the risk of becoming the precariat. Changez, the protagonist of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, says: “I felt I was entering in New York the very same social class that my family was falling out of in Lahore” (Hamid 2008, 97). We find the migration out of pure material necessity as well as something spurred on by a global version of the American dream as it is exported to Asian locations, as the character of Jim tells Changez: “I get where you’re coming from, Changez. You’re hungry, and that’s a good thing in my book” (Hamid 2008, 10).2 This type of movement implies that most people have neither a sense nor an access to agency, that is, an affirmation of freedom that globalization is supposed to bring to different localities. The freedom of the movement of goods and capital is, in other words, sold as the ideology of individual and communal freedom. In order to confirm the ideological truth, glocal subjects have to at least desire such freedom. This ideology, Hamid shows, serves to effectively hide the precariousness that it causes in diverse Asian settings, with a predominant orientation to Pakistani places. This ideology makes global subjects see precarity less as the state caused by the freedom of capital and

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more as an inability to follow this flow.3 Hamid creates characters who are in-between states or positions, at borders of things. This mode of storytelling in which the core mass of precarious life is always only seen by proxy, and thus always at risk of being missed-neglected-forgotten, infallibly places the burden on the reader, constantly putting the reader to an ethical test. Indeed, Hamid engages in “destabilizing the reader’s identification through hyperbole, strategic exoticization, allegorical layering and unreliable narration, but also defamiliarizes our relation to literary projects of national identification” (Morey 2011, 136).4 In order to analyse Hamid’s way of approaching precarious life and the precariat, I will of course turn to Butler’s founding discourse in Precarious Life (2004). While it is most common in literary analysis to look at the state of the field, I will deliberately stage a more singular dialogue between a particular work of literary art and theory in order to show that two discourses produced independently with little time between them can be so uncannily in tune when approaching topics which burden global populations: terrorism, capitalism, globalization, America’s position and politics in the world, wealth distribution, circulation of ideology, and so on. In fact, one could argue that Butler’s understanding of the issues at stake in the novel of a cosmopolitan Muslim writer is the kind of understanding, or at last an attitude, that Changez wants his reluctant listener (the American) to have by the end of the story. I posit Butler as the response-­ able global audience Hamid’s story seems to ask for, and which stands in contrast to the deafness of the American interlocutor in whom Changez’s story only produces further enmity and increases the distance that fixes Changez’s life as that which Butler calls “ungrievable life”. This allows me to analyse the main point in all Hamid’s work: the reader’s ability to detect and see through their prejudices and consequently effectuate an ethical response. The novelistic discourse always allows us to access deeper complexities than any theory can, but a thorough dialogue between them allows us to, for instance, see how Hamid’s paradoxical figure of the reluctant fundamentalist allegorizes, or even embodies, both the precariat and its root causes. This paradox is what makes Changez say, “I lacked a stable core … and for this reason, when she reached out to me for help, I had nothing of substance to give her” (Hamid 2008, 168). This point is a reference to the identity of the dangerous precariat, the faceless mass that is always read as potentially volatile/violent. Changez allegorizes, quite absurdly, a precariat that has fallen for the illusion that it has been saved

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from itself, that has run away from itself, a precariat that somehow stages its own forgetting and ends up wondering why it hates itself.5 Although precariat is a general term that applies to anyone who satisfies certain criteria, both Hamid and Butler zoom in on contemporary Muslims in the post-9/11 global climate. As Anna Hartnell writes, Hamid’s novel casts “Muslims as an interruptive presence on the global stage” (Hartnell 2010, 341). Following Ali Behdad’s critical historicist argument that “the project of national identity in the US perpetually returns to the figure of the alien by way of defining itself and promoting a normalized notion of citizenship that itself is a symptom of historical amnesia” (Behdad 2008, 290), we can see that the difference in the post-9/11 era is that there are, as Morey shows, increasing ways to strip Muslims of their civic rights which are examples of “nations suspending the due operations of the laws by which they are supposed to be defined” (Morey 2011, 137). The rhetoric of deterritorialization of citizens suspected of terrorism, who are in a sense worse than any criminals and do not even deserve prison but something of the ancient practice of banishment, speaks for itself.6 In an interview with Amina Yaqin, Hamid says that the tone of the novel was carefully chosen to resonate “with many Western preconceptions about Islam, or about people from the Muslim world that they belong to something that is anachronistic, which is from the past, something overly formalised” (Yaqin 2008, 46). Characterizing the perceptions of Muslims as something that is out of time, Hamid shows how a global discourse turns real lives into what Butler calls ungrievable lives, which I will discuss in more detail later. The point to carry with us through the analysis is that this act of assigning certain categories of lives a different temporality is the most effective dislocation and the most effective Othering. Subjects that presumably belong to another space, implied in racist words, “Go home!” are still acknowledged as a legitimate physical entity. So, for instance, Changez’s return to Pakistan would in a racist discourse be the right answer to the directive. But when lives are seen as out of time then the reduction is absolute. It is like in the Back to the Future movies where a character must return to their original time for the world to avoid worst case scenarios. Lives out of time, by implication, could, and perhaps should, disappear quite without a problem since they never really belong here in the first place.7 Terminologically, the bottom line is that the precariat and precarious life signify politically created subjects whose grievability as human life is directly linked to an unequal level of wealth and exposure to violence.

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Indeed, for Butler, precarity is also understood as vulnerability: “Each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies—as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of a publicity at once assertive and exposed” (Butler 2004, 20). Precariat may derive from Marx’s proletariat, and I will discuss it in terms of class and global economy, but the reason Butler’s discourse resonates with Hamid’s is because they conceptualize the precariat in terms of grievable and ungrievable lives (Butler 2004, xiv–xv). This question is at the heart of Hamid’s novel where the protagonist appears, at least a for a moment, a monster who is not just failing to grieve for the victims of 9/11 terrorist attacks, but is perhaps incapable of grieving for the lives that should be globally grievable by default: the American lives. He turns out to be the kind of Muslim who is not only unable to immediately grieve American lives, but is happy at their loss. This character is then as such utterly precarious and ungrievable, first by being a Muslim in general and second by being, presumably, a fundamentalist, that is, someone who is, by definition, out of his time and a subject for whom any show of sympathy and/ or empathy would be something unethical. In other words, according to Butler, in the global context, lives such as those of the 9/11 victims or Charlie Hebdo are supposed to be automatically grievable not just because they are human, but because they belong to the category of grievable lives. Not to grieve for them is to define oneself as a monster. At the same time, what Changez knows and shows when he refers to the Americans’ inability to think of their allied Pakistanis as potentially grievable lives (in the imminent conflict with India) is that his reaction comes from this knowledge of the separation between grievable and ungrievable lives. Changez knows that he did not need to come across as a monster but still wanted to open the discourse to that possibility as well. Coming back to the US in the 9/11 aftermath, he automatically fell into this category. Objectively, no one could know he smiled but this smile seems to have become an implied default characteristic of all Muslims. Of course, Changez changes quite quickly after that initial response, but the fact of the immediate reaction remains as a reminder of his instincts. In this situation, Hamid’s reader is, as always, asked to make a choice: to interpret and act upon that interpretation. As such, interpretation is shown to be, ultimately, a political act. This uncomfortable freedom of interpretation and a demand for response and responsibility, in my view, grounds Hamid’s ethos towards the precariat. Before we can expand on this notion, which is central to both Hamid and Butler, we need to look at the explanation model which

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Hamid, along with a plethora of international writers and critics, brings up when he speaks about radicalization: global economy. In the novel, global capitalism is the core cause of the precariat in the world. It lifts some places and people but in the process it seems to bulldoze over a great many more, and above all it is inherently blind to human value as such. This blindness is in the novel dramatized through a consistent avoidance of direct description of the precariat. Instead, it is mainly in relation to something else, by way of inference, that one gets any sense of what the precariat may be like and how it may feel about being precarious. This is perhaps most poignantly described in the blindness of Erica’s father to the American precariat and his role in the world while he accesses Pakistan: Economy’s falling apart though, no? Corruption, dictatorship, the rich living like princes while everyone else suffers. Solid people, don’t get me wrong. I like Pakistanis. But the elite has raped that place well and good, right? And fundamentalism. You guys have got some serious problems with fundamentalism. (Hamid 2008, 63)

In this condescending remark which upsets Changez, the man shows he can and will dismiss another country, looking at it from the outside, while not considering his own position. In this way, the Pakistani precarity is left to be implied and doubly suppressed in the discourse because the American is a part of the processes that globally cause the state global masses are in. The anger that rises in Changez comes with the identification with that precarity although he is thousands of miles away from it and eating luxury food in a penthouse. The oddity of Changez somehow being the one to evoke this invisible precariat, for which he will one day leave the US and start a fight, is a way to, through discourse, show how doubly the precariat is hit. Erica says to him: “‘You’re touchy about where you come from. It shows on your face. … and I think it’s good to be touchy sometimes. It means you care’” (Hamid 2008, 64). General conditions in Pakistan are described by proxy through the techniques of similarity and difference. When in Valparaiso, Changez says: the home of Neruda did not feel as removed from Lahore as it actually was; geographically … but in spirit it seemed only an imaginary caravan ride away from my city … The neighborhood was a poor one, with colorful murals like graffiti on the walls and children racing by on wooden carts that appeared to be shipping crates to which wheels had been attached. (Hamid 2008, 167)

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The poverty in Pakistan is described with reference to another place, thus both showing how the precariat is constantly hidden through local and global processes and how globally related the precariat really is. Hamid evokes the precariat in his home city Lahore, and Pakistan in general, by creating a character who supposedly achieved the American dream. Changez is one of “only two Pakistanis … from a population of over a hundred million souls” (Hamid 2008, 3) to get into Princeton. After a lot of hard work, he is “invited into the ranks of the meritocracy” (Hamid 2008, 4) when he secures a job at prestigious firm Underwood Samson (US) but only after the interviewer Jim denigrates his origin from the “ancient capital of the Punjab” (Hamid 2008, 9) by saying, “‘Do your friends here know … that your family couldn’t afford to send you to Princeton without a scholarship?’” (Hamid 2008, 9). In an extensive discourse to the American that spans several pages, Changez speaks in detail about falling from his class over at least three generations and having to seek his fortune in the US (Hamid 2008, 10–12). The note about generational difference is a semi-subtle note which hints at the increase in the precariat over several decades. Although not everyone is directly poor, the general sense is that the country as such is on a downward spiral. Frequent evocations of the glorious past accentuate the current situation: Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians. Now our cities were largely unplanned, unsanitary affairs, and America had universities with individual endowments greater than our national budget for education. To be reminded of this vast disparity was, for me, to be ashamed. (Hamid 2008, 38)

As noted earlier, the Pakistani situation is always related through description of other places, peoples, situations and urbanities, and the reader is left to infer. This betrays a form of shame Changez carries with him throughout, the shame that a once proud and rich country is not managing to catch up: “I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy’s sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost” (Hamid 2008, 81). Noticing that he is seen as lower class by rich Americans, Changez several times points out that he is from the Pakistani upper class but in some way still always confirming the downward spiral, which is the crux of it all, and thus, in a way, confirming the American’s attitude:

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Our situation is, perhaps, not so different from that of the old European aristocracy in the nineteenth century, confronted by the ascendance of the bourgeoisie. Except, of course, that we are part of a broader malaise afflicting not only the formerly rich but much of the formerly middle-class as well: a growing inability to purchase what we previously could. (Hamid 2008, 11–12)

This explains why Changez, at Princeton, conducted himself “in public like a young prince, generous and carefree” while quietly he had “three on-campus jobs” (Hamid 2008, 12). The way he perceives himself as a potential precariat is evident immediately after the scene with Erica’s father. Changez rides a cab driven by a Pakistani. The class difference between him and the driver is glaring but Changez is acting as the hurt one, the angry one, as if he was closer to the precariat than the driver. Without pushing it too much, I see a parallel in this anger and his abandoning of the wealthy lifestyle with that of bin Laden, who went from being a wealthy magnate to a man in a cave. Changez’s turmoil and his understanding of the state of Pakistan as such and its growing precariat is described in Manila, shortly before 9/11: Since you have been to the East, you do not need me to explain how prodigious are the changes taking place in that part of the globe. I expected to find a city like Lahore—or perhaps Karachi; what I found instead was a place of skyscrapers and superhighways. Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops—like a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as Grease. But Manila’s glittering skyline and walled enclaves for the ultra-rich were unlike anything I had seen in Pakistan. I tried not to dwell on the comparison; it was one thing to accept that New York was more wealthy than Lahore, but quite another to swallow the fact that Manila was as well. … I attempted to act and speak, as much as my dignity would permit, more like an American. (Hamid 2008, 73–4)

This scene, once again showing something about Lahore and Pakistan in general by proxy, is interesting in the characterization of the reluctant precariat. Changez keeps being split about where he really belongs, with whom he identifies, and why. Obviously, the fact he can act as an American or choose to leave it all behind is a choice the real precariat does not have, but the paradox of identification vs. the objective state of being is extremely significant. One of the breaking points, which makes him rethink his

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allegiances and find a more objective understanding of his position and his actual working in the world is in fact in Manila where he “became disoriented” thinking of how much his work contributes to creating precarious life. The metonym for such life, in the guise of “the driver of a jeepney”, shows “an undisguised hostility … so intimate, that it got under my skin. I stared back at him, getting angry myself …. perhaps he resents me for the privileges implied by my suit and expensive car; perhaps he simply does not like Americans” (Hamid 2008, 76). And yet, Changez imagines he and the driver “shared a sort of Third World sensibility” (Hamid 2008, 76). The anger, quite frequently evoked, seems to be ever present, almost evenly spread and detectable by the Americans, and the more Changez is telling his interlocutor to read the faces of the precariat as being benevolent, the more one notices the brewing anger waiting to erupt into violence. Evoking the change in the Pakistani demographic, and the downward spiral, is seen as the breeding ground of anger, potential resistance and, at the extreme end, radicalism. Radicalism is connected to the conditions of slavery-like daily life: “I see that you have noticed the scar on my forearm, here, where the skin is both darker and smoother than that which surrounds it. I have been told that it looks like a rope burn” (Hamid 2008, 53). The rope burn is of course immediately associative of slavery, even though we know Changez has never done hard labour, but is rather the slave-warrior of the Capitalist enterprise. The reason Changez puts forward this interpretation to the American is that the man interprets the burn as a sign Changez has been in a training camp for terrorists. In Changez’s highly evocative discourse, the two interpretations do not exclude each other; rather there is a realistic connection, an explanation for how things can come to be, but not an excuse. However, the excuse or the justification seems to be the only interpretation for the American. The singularity of interpretation, as I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, is a sign of a fundamentalist attitude. In contrast, Changez always seeks to unfix the meaning, leaving it to the reader to see both potential benevolence and danger: “For we were not always burdened by debt, dependent on foreign aid and handouts; in the stories we tell of ourselves we were not the crazed and destitute radicals you see on your television channels but rather saints and poets and— yes—conquering kings” (Hamid 2008, 115). The consistent emphasis on the way global development affects the world, in particular his beloved Lahore and his Pakistan (including the threat of war with India), seems to

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serve as some form of explanatory model for the brewing anger that Changez himself displays in many scenes and which the American seems to read into the faces of random people in the Anarkali marketplace (mainly male anger).8 The intensity of this cocktail of anger-threat-­ divergence skyrockets when the narrative confronts the reader with scenarios that put all the dichotomy between sympathy and antipathy aside, instead asking for an examination of empathy. Changez says, “I stared as one—and then the other—of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased” (Hamid 2008, 83). Here we have a situation, as readers, where we need to connect to two types of lives, what Butler calls grievable and ungrievable lives. We have the victims of the attack which are, as American lives, grievable by default. Only Changez does not grieve. He smiles. The reader may of course react as the American: “Your disgust is evident; indeed, your large hand has, perhaps without your noticing, clenched into a fist. But please believe me when I tell you that I am no sociopath; I am not indifferent to the suffering of others” (Hamid 2008, 83). Why does Changez immediately say he is not indifferent to the suffering of others? Has he not shown he identifies with the precariat of his homeland as well as the worse-off in the US? Does he not give charity to a beggar while the American is merely suspicious of the beggar? He shows a great deal of empathy for all the suffering Americans, like Erica (and by proxy for America). The entire narrative is permeated with scenes where empathy for the downtrodden is effectuated, and even when he is being arrogant in his work, there is a consciousness of this being unethical: I understand, of course; it is hateful to hear another person gloat over one’s country’s misfortune. But surely you cannot be completely innocent of such feelings yourself. Do you feel no joy at the video clips—so prevalent these days—of American munitions laying waste the structures of your enemies? But you are at war, you say? Yes, you have a point. I was not at war with America. Far from it: I was the product of an American university; I was earning a lucrative American salary; I was infatuated with an American woman. So why did part of me desire to see America harmed? I did not know … and I undertook to hide them as well as I could. … I feigned the same shock and anguish I saw on the faces around me. (Hamid 2008, 83–4)

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Given the amount of effort he makes to show he is a hero in this story, the main explanation for the above question is that, as Butler would see it, he suspects his own life is ungrievable to the American: “Is a Muslim life as valuable as legibly First World lives? … Is our capacity to mourn in global dimensions foreclosed precisely by the failure to conceive of Muslim and Arab lives as lives?” (Butler 2004, 12). We see this right away when Changez is treated differently from others on the way home and when he experiences constant harassment in the post-9/11 period, when his class does not defend him from being racified. He is a Muslim whose life is not conceived of as life by Euro-American regimes and media, and the sentiments of violence that go along are quite prominent. In the US he shows low self-esteem, lack of identity, a stable core, insecurity both physical and psychosocial, and he sees his state as a metonym of the state of Pakistan. Filled with contempt for himself, Changez refuses to rejoin “the army of clean-shaven … coworkers” (Hamid 2008, 148), as always “shorn of hair and dressed in battle fatigues … virtually indistinguishable” (43). By describing the manpower of global capitalism in terms of soldiers, like the machines from “the film Terminator” posing as “heroes” (Hamid 2008, 113), he is putting things in clear terms: the precariat against the machine. The Pakistani (and the world) precariat, whose lives are ungrievable because they are ultimately replaceable, has the right to strike back. Thus, violence is legitimized in principle, which is why he at first smiles at the destruction of the Twin Towers: “the effect of scarcity; one’s rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper” (Butler 2004, 29). Terrorism, be it individual or state, tends to do its utmost to explain and justify itself. Individuals and states do not seek to explain what conditions lead to their exercise of terror the way we see Butler or Roy do, but use the explanatory models to legitimize terror which has ideological and economic grounds. For this reason, we find an absolute refusal, as in the case of America in Butler’s discourse, to consider what may have contributed to, if not directly caused, terrorism. Hamid, much like Butler, creates an entire story which seeks to do both, exploring root causes but divesting these of ethical legitimacy. Speaking of the American response to 9/11 attacks, Butler argues: “it is one matter to suffer violence and quite another to use that fact to ground a framework in which one’s injury authorizes limitless aggression against targets that may or may not be related to the sources of one’s own suffering” (Butler 2004, 4). The suffering is related through “a first-person narrative point of view” that takes at its point of departure the very date:

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“If someone tries to start the story earlier, there are only a few narrative options” (Butler 2004, 5). To investigate the past for possible root causes, by, for instance, looking at Muhammad Atta’s and bin Laden’s personal development, “is interesting to a degree, because it suggests that there is a personal pathology at work. It works as a plausible and engaging narrative in part because it resituates agency in terms of a subject, something we can understand, something that accords with our idea of personal responsibility, or with the theory of charismatic leadership” (Butler 2004, 5). Just as the American in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (TRF) has isolated Changez as the target, Butler claims, “Isolating the individuals involved absolves us of the necessity of coming up with a broader explanation for events” (Butler 2004, 5), and it is this broader explanation that Changez (still not absolutely confirmed as a terrorist) offers. In some way Changez’s undefined character decentres “the narrative ‘I’ within the international political domain” (Butler 2004, 6), and this open wound is felt through the symbolic story of Erica (America) who is constantly reverting to a narrative form whose purpose is to “compensate for the enormous narcissistic wound opened up by the public display of our physical vulnerability” (Butler 2004, 7). Changez seeks to relate the conditions which may have provided the breeding ground for terrorism, if not directly caused it, but this makes the American even more disturbed: As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away. Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only of the rest of humanity, but also in your own. (Hamid 2008, 190)

This is reminiscent of the reactions to the words that Butler relates from President Arroyo of the Philippines (that the best breeding ground for terrorism is poverty) and Arundhati Roy’s claim that bin Laden was “sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid waste by America’s foreign policy” (Butler 2004, 10). As much as he insists on tracing the intricate systematic and abstract patterns that seem to provide the platform for terror, Hamid evokes towards the end a sense of osmosis, that is, an organic development that conditions both terror and intimacy across various ideological divides. The insistence of osmosis is highly attuned to Butler’s

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claim that “something less than a strictly causal explanation is being offered” in Roy’s argument. The spare rib “has, by definition, emerged in a strange and alchemical fashion. It is from waste that this rib is formed, as if the bone belongs to the dead, or is itself the animation of skeletal remains” (Butler 2004, 11). Indeed, what Changez is trying to show is that conditions themselves may not be actors like individuals “but no agent acts without them” (Butler 2004, 11). There seems to exist no doubt in Changez’s mind, as in Butler’s, that US imperialism is a necessary condition for the attacks on the United States, that these attacks would be impossible without the horizon of imperialism within which they occur. But to understand how US imperialism figures here, we have to understand not only how it is experienced by those who understand themselves as its victims, but how it enters into their own formation as acting and deliberating subjects. (Butler 2004, 11)

Although we can read the novel, and this is perhaps the ultimate accomplishment of literature as such, in the public discourse, as Butler puts it, it is not “possible to hear both of these views at the same time because the framework for hearing presumes that the one view nullifies the Other” (Butler 2004, 12). This is what Hamid tries to do: create a framework where a more complex picture can be related without triggering this nullification process. His novel at least partly answers Butler’s question of how the radical Other was formed, which was almost impossible to ask in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and still is to a great extent. In other words, to speak more directly on precarity of the Other globally, and in this case in Southeast Asia, is perceived as a threat to the framework which obscures the continuous creation of precarity globally, a framework in which precarity is not supposed to be seen as part and parcel of any explanatory model. By asking the reader the question whether Changez and the American are both killers, the novel forces us to face the unfaceable and engage in interpretative acts and be responsible for them. During the course of the narrative Changez shows how jittery the American is, how paranoid he is, and much like we find in Butler’s discourse, “political paranoia of this kind is just another articulation of US supremacy” (Butler 2004, 9). At the same time, Changez himself is paranoid, constantly expecting the American to pull out a gun. If this paranoia is not of the same kind, following Butler, then what kind is it? If this is the paranoia of the presumed precariat, then

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how is it different from the implied oppressor? The answer may lie already in the opening which lends itself to several types of readings, in particular political: Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services. (Hamid 2008, 1)

Characters are defined in three basic ways: through the way they perceive themselves, the way they are perceived, and the way they see others. Hamid offers us all three angles already from the beginning. Although we know that the tables will turn a few times during the course of the narration, it is significant to note that the speaker, who narratologically speaking has all agency and effectively silences the interlocutor, puts himself in a position of assistance and service, and immediately we ask whose view this is. It is not clear, at first sight, whether the speaker is using those words as someone who thinks of himself as a good host, and thus on an equal footing with the eminent guest, or someone in a low position vis-a-­ vis the mysterious man. Does he perceive himself as such or is he being ironic? He is exceedingly polite. Is he perceived as dangerous? Does he see the American as dangerous, helpless or something else? This opening is somewhat like a Schrodinger’s box which contains a multitude of opposite options which the reader solidifies in the act of interpretation. In fact, the entire narrative of The Reluctant Fundamentalist seems to remain such a box. The speaker will constantly be both in charge and in a position of servitude vis-a-vis the American. The uncertainty of his position will carry along a sense of danger and hint at precarious life. The second important factor in the opening is the fact of fear. There is an implied violence in the precariat symbolized by Changez and all kinds of people in the market: waiters, walkers, beggars, random merchants and so on. A beggar makes the American “recoil” (Hamid 2008, 45). He is interpreting everyone as being in collusion, somehow synchronized and ready to attack. The proximity of the precariat is read as violence, which Changez seeks to remove by counter-interpreting everything as signifying hospitality. By giving money to the beggar, Changez suggests that acting on trust, even if it can be naivety, is better because it removes the potential for conflict.

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Surely Changez is attempting a protest, and though it is not terrorism, the American sees every kind of protest as violent. The modern discourse, which we see even now as the diverse forms of protest following the murder of George Floyd causing ripples around the world, embodies this fear in/of the precariat of being, or being seen as, violent: I observe, sir, that there continues to be something about our waiter that puts you ill at ease. I will admit that he is an intimidating chap, larger even than you are. But the hardness of his weathered face can readily be accounted for: he hails from our mountainous northwest, where life is far from easy. And if you should sense that he has taken a disliking to you, I would ask you to be so kind as to ignore it; his tribe merely spans both sides of our border with neighboring Afghanistan, and has suffered during offensives conducted by your countrymen. Is he praying, you ask? No, sir, not at all! His recitation—rhythmic, formulaic, from memory, and so, I will concede, not unlike a prayer—is in actuality an attempt to transmit orally our menu, much as in your country one is told the specials. (Hamid 2008, 123–4)

Here we see a man representing the precariat which is to the man obscure, unfamiliar and threatening. It is easy for the man to misinterpret the speech, without bothering to learn it. It is easier to just read into one’s prejudices and act on them as if on truth and authority. To try to understand the speech of the Other, to acknowledge that the precariat can speak and has something worth listening to, is the ground for an ethical stance. Truth, as Butler argued, and what we can see Changez is pushing for, is interdependence: “fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away. No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact” (Butler 2004, xii). I would argue that nearly every scene in the novel at least touches on if not deeply examines the interdependency between people as the condition for perceiving all life as grievable and thus, ultimately, as life. Changez, who only at one point commits the ultimate sin of seeing some loss of life in terms of symbolic rather than real loss and violence, is constantly trying to find a way to connect with his Other across class, race, national and gender boundaries. Although we see that his sympathies inevitably move on a more instinctive level to the precariat of the world, we find a strong desire to establish a connection more generally: between Pakistan and America, Lahore and New  York, the rich and the poor, between men and women.

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The Reluctant Fundamentalist brings in the condition of general vulnerability, which for Butler is “a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt” (Butler 2004, 29). This vulnerability “precedes the formation of ‘I’” (Butler 2004, 31). With an acute sense of vulnerability, “[c]ertain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as ‘grievable’” (Butler 2004, 32). In order to establish his own life, and by proxy all Pakistani life, and even more broadly all Muslim life, Changez is constantly trying to induce in the American a sense of familiarity. He is desperately grasping at straws that consist of feelings, desires and cultural references. According to Michael J. Greig, some familiarity is essential for the very act of communication, especially between globally distant social agents: “The likelihood of two agents interacting is equal to their level of cultural similarity” (Greig 2002, 226). But, as Butler asks, “at what cost do I establish the familiar as the criterion by which a human life is grievable?” (Butler 2004, 38). Let us look at the scene where Changez tries to pack it all up for the American: We have in this country a phenomenon with which you will doubtless be unfamiliar, given the state of plenty that characterizes your homeland. Here—particularly in the winter, when the reservoirs of the great dams are almost dry—we face a shortage of electricity that manifests itself in rolling blackouts. We call this load-shedding, and we keep our homes well-stocked with candles so that it does not unduly disrupt our lives. As a child, during such a time of load-shedding, I grabbed hold of one of these candles, tipped it over, and spilled molten wax on myself. In America, this would have been the start, in all likelihood, of a protracted bout of litigation with the manufacturer for using candle-wax with such a high, and unsafe, melting point; here, it resulted merely in an evening of crying and the rather faint, if oddly linear, scar you see today. (Hamid 2008, 53–4)

The specificity of candles is allegorical of premodernity as well as cosy-ness (e.g. romantic dinners in Greece). Candles symbolize light and guidance but also imply danger, a potential violence if not handled properly. The point about blame is very interesting. By saying that in the US such an accident could result in a lawsuit against the manufacturer, Changez is telling the American that he has the right, according to the American model and logic, to blame capitalism for his country’s misfortune. In

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other words, he should have a legal right to sue, or more generally take revenge on, corporate America. This is another allegorical way of evoking similarity and familiarity and thus a possibility for sympathy, if not empathy.9 As Butler puts it, We perform the recognition by making the claim, and that is surely a very good ethical reason to make the claim. We make the claim, however, precisely because it is not taken for granted, precisely because it is not, in every instance, honored. Vulnerability takes on another meaning at the moment it is recognized, and recognition wields the power to reconstitute vulnerability. (Butler 2004, 43)

We see in the novel that ultimately familiarity is not the right criterion or tool to achieve ethical response-ability. The American is not able to see the beggar as a beggar, but only as a potential conman and a threat. Instead, asking the American to give up “the notion of the world itself as a sovereign entitlement of the United States” (Butler, 40), Changez is asking for the bottom-line recognition of all life as life, all life as grievable life. Such recognition is indeed disturbing to the American, because, as Butler explains, “To ask for recognition … is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other. It is also to stake one’s own being, and one’s own persistence in one’s own being, in the struggle for recognition” (Butler 2004, 44). Indeed, “my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others” (Butler 2004, 46). Changez fights the identification as a terrorist implied in the American’s very presence there, trying to produce himself as “a viable speaking subject and a reasonable opinion within the public domain” (Butler 2004, xix). In the US, he felt he could not really express himself because he did not want to lose his status as a viable speaking being. The first emanations come through visuality in that he wore a kurta to a party and suddenly grew a beard. These are utterances that are not “strictly speaking, linguistic” (Butler 2004, 133). In Lahore, Changez’s discourse famously deprives the American of speech, a gesture which appears oppressive, thus evoking how he felt in the US. This shows that, as Butler puts it: “No one controls the terms by which one is addressed, at least not in the most fundamental way. To be addressed is to be, from the start, deprived of will, and to have that deprivation exist as the basis of one’s situation in discourse” (Butler 2004, 139).

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Indeed, as Butler writes, “the face which is the face of the Other, and so the ethical demand made by the Other-is that vocalization of agony that is not yet language or no longer language, the one by which we are wakened to the precariousness of the Other’s life, the one that rouses at once the temptation to murder and the interdiction against it” (Butler 2004, 139). If everything the anonymous precariat does is potential violence, then precarious life is, once again, not considered life. Changez himself was a form of killer machine, a janissary that hurts businesses and creates the precariat. The janissary metaphor works quite well to make him aware of his position and his character. Only this is not problematic for the American until the same energy is invested for the other side. In The Force of Nonviolence (2020), Butler shows how the experience of being-­ ungrievable impacts the living as well as the dead and their mourners, and that to be grievable is to be “interpellated in such a way that you know your life matters; that the loss of your life would matter; that your body is treated as one that should be able to live and thrive, whose precarity should be minimized” (Butler 2020, 98). Butler calls for an espousal of nonviolence because they believe that violence will lead resistors to become like their oppressors (Butler 2020, 24). Butler argues for a relational ethics of nonviolence, inspired by Gandhi’s satyagraha as “truth force” instead of passive resistance, and they describe nonviolence as aggressive and full of agency. If jihad, defined as struggle, can be both violent and non-­ violent, as A. G. Noorani observes, the Prophet Mohammed declared that “The highest form of jihad is to speak the truth in the face of an unjust ruler” (Noorani 2002, 45). The truth Changez tries to speak to the American is that Muslim lives are grievable, but this truth and this discourse, albeit non-violent as Changez tries to persuade him, is perceived as violent. It may be, according to Butler, aggressive, but it is not per se violent: “criticism, which ought to be central to any democracy, becomes a fugitive and suspect activity” (xx). Here we see the difference again: just as some lives are grievable and some are not, some discourse is seen as aggressive and violent even when it is not, while some is seen as neither even when it is both. While Changez thinks he has finally succeeded in actually having a face of his own, a face not of Chris or a corporate terminator, for the American he becomes faceless like the waiter and the beggar and all the other anonymous people in the market. Butler writes:

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To respond to the face, to understand its meaning, means to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself. This cannot be an awakeness, to use his word, to my own life, and then an extrapolation from an understanding of my own precariousness to an understanding of another's precarious life. It has to be an understanding of the precariousness of the Other. This is what makes the face belong to the sphere of ethics. Levinas writes, ‘the face of the other in its precariousness and defencelessness, is for me at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace, the “You shall not kill.’” (Butler 2004, 134)

Changez may seem to advocate non-violence and presses on to find a resolution that is non-violent until the very end when the story is interrupted at the moment where violence is the most likely probability. This is where the reader is left to his/her own interpretive response-ability. Schrodinger’s box is still not open and there is still a 50% chance the resolution will be peaceful. Only, like in Levinas, this non-violence he seems to promote “does not come from a peaceful place, but rather from a constant tension between the fear of undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence. I could put an end to my fear of my own death by obliterating the other, although I would have to keep obliterating” (Butler 2004, 137). I find that Hamid’s discourse in its decision not to directly represent the precariat as precariat but through the ambiguous subject of Changez who can occupy several positions, one of which being that of a terrorist, resonates with Butler’s notion that “to convey the human, then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure. There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give” (Butler 2004, 144). Following the lessons learned from when he agreed to be a stand-in for Chris in the disturbing sex scene, Changez seems to fear what Butler calls “radical effacement, so that there never was a human, there never was a life, and no murder has, therefore, ever taken place” (Butler 2004, 147). No doubt, “One would need to hear the face as it speaks in something other than language to know the precariousness of life that is at stake” (Butler 2004, 151). In sum, in this chapter I employed Butler’s foundational discourse on precariat and ungrievable lives to show how Mohsin Hamid’s literary project reaches for the ethos of response-ability. Putting the reader in a rather difficult interpretative situation where the meeting between a Pakistani and an American could be anything from a random meeting between a

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native and a tourist to a highly charged and orchestrated scenario between a terrorist leader and a US agent, Hamid is asking the difficult questions about localities and globalization, about root causes of precarity and terrorism, about responses and responsibilities, about ways of being free and ways of communing across geographical, economic and ideological borders. I have argued that Hamid’s way of describing the precariat by proxy shows the double invisibility of those who find themselves in the downward spiral of glocal economic development. The invisibility, facelessness and voicelessness of the precariat enforces a sense of danger and violence embedded in the precariat as such. There is an implied impossibility to address the precariat directly, and instead incredible interpretative aerobics is required with the aid of insinuations, allegories and various types of narrative structures. To face the precariat head-on is, in Changez’s discourse, to see it as nothing but mass, brute force and ultimately violent. A whole set of rhetorical devices is employed to produce what Changez calls the process of osmosis, a way of connecting across ever-widening divides. The open ending of the book leaves the reader with absolute interpretative uncertainty and thus vulnerability. The ending where one can read either a soft goodbye or a violent resolution is meant to evoke the sense of vulnerable precarious life that is always already ungrievable, but must, if proper ethics is to gain the upper hand, be recognized as life. In the end, as Butler writes, “Who ‘am’ I, without you? … Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something” (Butler 2004, 22–23).

Notes 1. Following Mahmood Mamdani, I see fundamentalism as a movement that “harnesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture” but is at its core “a modern ensemble at the service of a modern project” (Mamdani 2002, 767). 2. As the notion of “violence” will figure later in the analysis, I want to emphasize the fact that references to Changez’s drive will continue to be those of violence. He will be described as a shark (80) and a warrior, which will, while he works for the US company, be seen as positive and result in bonuses: “Don’t be ashamed of that. Nurture it. It can take you a long way” (Hamid 2008, 50). In contrast, Juan-Bautista will deem it negative, characterizing him as a modern-day janissary for capitalism. 3. In “To Issue a Firefly’s Glow” (2018) I argue that Hamid questions the notion that globalization is an external factor. Instead, using Eric Sheppard

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and Henry Wai-chung Yeung’s analyses of space and geography I explore how rooted globalization is in everyday life and how unevenly it reshapes space and movement. 4. I also follow Leerom Medovoi to read Hamid in the context of “the emergence of a world-systems literature about US power that is not itself American literature can be read as the textually complex symptom of a world-system in transition, a global hegemon’s empire writing back at the very moment of its destabilization” (Medovoi 2011, 657–8). 5. As Srivastava argues, rather than being the result of a deep, symptomatic reading, “Changez’s almost relentless allegorisation … is an explicit and conscious function of the text” (Srivastava 2012, 176). Indeed, “its allegorical elements … stubbornly refuse to conceal themselves” (Srivastava 2012, 172). 6. Elleke Boehmer, speaking from the postcolonial perspective, calls for an “alternative reading of terror” within the context of global neocolonialism in opposition to the prevalent understanding of terrors as purely “savage and irrational, an irruption of the primitive” (Boehmer 2015, 147). 7. Also to return to the place one left to escape some kind of danger or bad circumstances, to migrate back, is often accompanied by precarity especially for “abject cosmopolitans” and the vulnerable classes suffering the consequences of “negative cosmopolitanism” (Nyers 2003; Kent and Tomsky 2017). 8. Besides a lesson about historical ignorance and amnesia (Behdad 2008, 290), what further puts this small market into perspective, and with it Pakistan–US relations, is also the fact that there are no alcoholic drinks there, but there are familiar “carbonated soft drinks” (70), which signals, to use Ong’s words, that “capitalism is no longer centered in the West but distributed across a number of global arenas” (Ong 1999, 31). 9. Similarly, in Moth Smoke, load-shedding was used to speak of the cooled and “the great uncooled” (126), a class division which the poor rickshaw driver Murad Badshah used “to justify his piracy campaign” against air-conditioned yellow cabs, which represented the elite.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Behdad, Ali. 2008. Critical Historicism. American Literary History 20 (1–2): 286–299. Boehmer, Elleke. 2015. Postcolonial Writing and Terror. In Terror and the Postcolonial, ed. Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, 141–150. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. ———. 2020. The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. London: Verso. Greig, Michael J. 2002. The End of Geography?: Globalization, Communications, and Culture in the International System. The Journal of Conflict Resolution 46 (2): 225–243. Hamid, Mohsin. 2008. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. London: Penguin. Hartnell, Anna. 2010. Moving through America: Race, Place and Resistance in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46 (3–4): 336–348. Kent, Eddy, and Terri Tomsky. 2017. Introduction: Negative Cosmopolitanism. In Negative Cosmopolitanism: Cultures and Politics of World Citizenship After Globalization, ed. Eddy Kent and Terri Tomsky, 3–27. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Mahmutović, Adnan. 2018. Literary Ecologies in Post-9/11 Muslim Fiction. In World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange, ed. Stefan Helgesson, Yvonne Lindqvist, Annike Mörte Alling, and Helena Wulff. Stockholm University Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2002. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism Author(s). American Anthropologist, New Series 104 (3): 766–775. Medovoi, Leerom. 2011. ‘Terminal Crisis?’: From the Worlding of American Literature to World-System Literature. American Literary History 23 (3): 643–659. Morey, Peter. 2011. The Rules of the Game Have Changed: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Post-9/11 Fiction. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47 (2): 135–146. Noorani, A.G. 2002. Islam and Jihad: Prejudice Versus Reality. London: Zed. Nyers, Peter. 2003. Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement. Third World Quarterly 24 (6): 1069–1093. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality. Durham & London: Durham University Press. Srivastava, Neelam. 2012. Reading after Terror: The Reluctant Fundamentalist and First-World Allegory. In Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception, ed. Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson, 171–183. New York: Routledge. Yaqin, Amina. 2008. Mohsin Hamid in Conversation. Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary. Writing 54: 44–49.

Precarious Cultures: Bangladeshi Novels in English and in English Translation Kaiser Haq

Is it mere coincidence that the Covid-19 pandemic should, so to speak, bring history to a halt just as the latest century of the Common Era prepares to come of age? Is it not, rather, further evidence of the growing relevance of “precarity” as a coinage in the conceptual currency that enables the analytical mind to acquire a purchase on socio-economic, political and cultural configurations in our time? The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Anthropology identifies precarity as “a multi-stranded concept”, a “notion”, that is a “central concern” in twenty-first century discourse (Kasmir 2020). I would like to insist on a distinction between a “concept” and a “notion” and to use the latter in relation to precarity. I follow Hegel in making the distinction; Hegel mediated by Sartre, for sheer convenience: Sartre is at hand while Hegel is in the library, under lockdown because of the Coronavirus. According to Sartre, “We know that, in Hegel’s conception, the notion organizes and fuses together concepts in the organic, living unity of

K. Haq (*) University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1_14

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concrete reality. The Earth, the Renaissance, Colonization in the nineteenth century and Nazism are understood as notions; Being, Light and Essence are abstract concepts. Dialectical enrichment lies in the passage from abstract to concrete, that is to say, from elementary concepts to ever more complex notions” (Sartre, 167). Now, if Modernity and Post-Modernity and even Neo-Liberal Capitalism have become abstract concepts—and one could argue that they have—through a process of attenuation, one can make a case for the necessity of revitalizing them with the help of the notion of precarity. We can move dialectically from those rather abstract concepts towards the concrete notion of precarity, which takes in synthetically essential aspects of our ontological condition, our socio-economic plight, our political anxieties, our broad historical uncertainties, our ecological derangement, and our vulnerability to public health crises, such as at present under the Covid-19 pandemic. Even distinctions like that made between “cosmic” and “official” precarity by Bauman become involved in a dialectical interplay, for how can we regard it as a precise distinction in the context of a situation like that of the present pandemic? Here the cosmic and the official become dialectically and synthetically intertwined in a way that highlights our ontological indigence. This becomes clear from Bauman’s account of these notions in his book Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age (2011). He uses the words “vulnerability”, “uncertainty” and “fear” to talk about precarity, and follows Mikhail Bakhtin in his theorizing: “Cosmic fear … is the trepidation felt in the face of the immeasurably great and immeasurably powerful” (Bauman, 107); and further, “Vulnerability and uncertainty are also the two qualities of the human condition out of which that other fear, the ‘official’ fear—fear of human power, of man-made and man-held power—is moulded. ‘Official fear’ is construed after the pattern of the inhuman fear reflected by (or emanating from) ‘cosmic fear’” (Bauman, 108). That precarity became a key term in socio-economic discourse following the rise of neoliberalism is obviously not happenstance. They are linked by kinship rooted in causality. Neoliberalism has been extensively theorized and historicized, and the consensus seems to be that there was a neoliberal turn in the 1970s. Neoliberalism then flourished under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and became triumphalist with the collapse of the Soviet Union. “The term ‘precarity’,” Niels Springveld declares in his article, “Neoliberalism, Precarity, Precariousness,” “refers to the structural

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financial and existential insecurity brought about by the advent of neoliberalism, the dismantling of welfare state provisions, and the normalization of short-term and intermittent labour” (26). The decline of welfare systems, of course, applies largely to Western capitalism, since Third World countries hardly have any worth mentioning. This caveat aside, common to both Western and Third World neoliberalism are certain readily discernible trends. Work is no longer related to a stable career, with the consequence that workers increasingly are forced to move from one temporary job to another. The entrepreneurial ethos too has changed correspondingly; nowadays, especially in advanced capitalist countries, employers examining the CVs of prospective employees look askance at those who have been working steadily at a single job: this is increasingly interpreted as a lack of dynamism. Bangladesh, like the rest of South Asia, came under the sway of neoliberalism in the 1980s. This brought about a two-pronged change. On the one hand, privatization of formerly state-owned enterprises got under way, while local and foreign entrepreneurs joined hands to initiate a boom in export-oriented industries, chief among them being the readymade garments industry, which positioned the country firmly in the supply chain of Western consumerism. On the other hand, the demand for migrant labour began to rise in the Middle East and affluent countries with rapidly growing economies, such as Malaysia and Singapore, attracting workers from relatively poor countries like Bangladesh, who often resorted to illegal channels of entry if the legal ones were barred. The employment available to unskilled migrant workers is both ill-paid and lacking in the basic security that the long struggle of trade unions had obtained in advanced capitalist countries. A tragic dimension was added to labour migrancy as several states in the Middle Est were plunged into a state of civil war, forcing large numbers to flee and seek asylum. They were joined by economic migrants from countries like Bangladesh, where the motivation to migrate was not necessarily provided by an existential threat, though there are also cases of those fleeing persecution. What mostly drives these economic migrants is the threat of immiseration coupled with the lure of the glamorous West. This is presented with characteristic writerly éclat by Amitav Ghosh in Gun Island, a masterpiece of transnational and translingual literature. What the character Tipu says about the inhabitants of the Indian side of the Sundarbans applies equally to those on the Bangladeshi side: “Where d’you think they learn that they need a better life? Shit, where do you think they even get

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an idea of what a better life is? From their phones of course, that’s where they see pictures of other countries; that’s where they view ads where everything looks fabulous; they see stuff on social media, posted by neighbours who’ve already made the journey” (61). What Tipu calls the “people-­moving industry” is better organized in Bangladesh than in India; and later in Italy, where there is a sizeable Bangladeshi presence, a journalist tells the narrator that “last month Bangladeshis were the second largest group coming into Italy” (146). An interesting radical take on Neoliberalism is provided by the Bangladeshi economist Anu Muhammad in an article in the Socialist journal, the Monthly Review. Titled “Bangladesh—a Model of Neoliberalism”, he deals with “the case of Microfinance and NGOs”, and argues that institutions like the Nobel Prize-winning Grameen Bank and Brac, the world’s largest NGO, far from being a viable alternative to Neoliberalism, are actually supplementary to, and in collusion with, it. The liberal intelligentsia would, of course, regard this view as rather extreme. We must remember, however, that precarity, though the term came into use with neoliberalism, has been with mankind throughout its existence. The notion of precarity operates retroactively to provide critical tools for dealing with culture and literature all the way back to the beginnings of human history. If Krishna in The Mahabharata embodies the cosmic superpower, and the machinations of Duryodhana and Sakuni the complicating official forces, we can then trace the workings of precarity throughout the highly fraught situation of the epic, culminating in tragedy. Thre is no need to labour the point here, but similar analyses can be made in the case of the Ramayana or the Homeric epics, or the even older Babylonian text of Gilgamesh. I cite these venerable seminal texts to underscore the universal validity of the notion of precarity, which can be observed down the ages. The foregoing is presented merely to provide for the present writer a handle on a new analytic approach, as a prelude to applying it to the relatively narrowly circumscribed area of Bangladeshi literary studies. The specificities of the critical endeavour introduce precarity in the initial task of delineating the field of inquiry. What is Bangladesh is a question that can be promptly given an official answer. It is a geopolitical entity, a so-­ called “People’s Republic” that goes by that name and occupies 147,570 square kilometers of territory comprising mainly what used to be East Bengal, together with a district in Assam. The question of what constitutes Bangladeshi literature is less susceptible to a neat formulation.

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The entire literary history of Bangladesh is millennia-old, and it is coterminous for all but recent decades with that of the whole of the Bengali-speaking world. Bangladesh shares with the Bengali-speaking parts of India the thousand-year-old tradition starting with the Buddhist Caryapadas, in archaic Bengali, and gathering strength under the Bengal Sultans and the Mughals to include, on the one hand, the Bhakti lyrics of the Vaishnavites and, on the other, the folk narratives, both secular, like the Mymensingh Geetika, and cultic, like the Mangalkavyas devoted to Manasa, the snake goddess, or Chandi, the demotic version of Durga. British rule and Western education effected a sea-change, ushering in modern Bengali literature, which introduced literary prose and Western genres in both prose and verse, most pertinently the novel, which is our subject. It is this modern tradition that we are concerned with in this chapter. Within this historical-cultural framework, defining Bangladeshi literature is straightforward if we restrict ourselves to present-day geopolitical realities. Accordingly, we can state the following: Bangladeshi literature is literature produced by writers of Bangladeshi origin, whether Bangladeshi citizens or transnationals with a foreign or dual nationality. Their literary language may be Bangla or English or even the language of one of the country’s many ethnic minority communities. Already some fuzziness has crept in. This grows when we consider the decades preceding the country’s independence in 1971. Retroactive appropriation can claim as Bangladeshi writers who belonged to the geographical region that demarcates the country today, e.g. the nineteenth-­ century novelist-playwright Mir Mosharraf Husain (1837–1911) or Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932), but even this principle is threatened with precarity in the era of Partition politics. Writers like Jibanananda Das, Buddhadev Bose or Humayun Kabir, whose ancestral homes are in Bangladeshi territory but who opted for India, are usually classified as Indian writers. Even this might be considered a rational principle of classification if there wasn’t a somewhat strange instance of manipulation at an interstate level. When Bangladesh became independent, it was felt at the state level that the country needed a national poet, and the choice fell on the much-­ admired “Rebel poet” Kazi Nazrul Islam. Yet his ancestral home was in West Bengal, where he and his family lived as Indian citizens. To complicate matters still further, the poet had lost his mental faculties in 1942, and lived in a kind of daze. The problem was easily overcome, thanks to the

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cooperation of a friendly Indian government, which permitted the poet and some of his family members to move to Bangladesh, where a grateful nation made him its citizen so that he could fulfill his new function, albeit totally oblivious of all that had transpired. We can therefore regard him as a Bangladeshi writer and include his three novels within the purview of this study. We can also conveniently divide the history of the Bangladeshi novel into three periods: the colonial, i.e. up to the Partition; post-Partition, i.e. from 1947 to 1971; and Post-independence. The first important modern Bengali work of fiction is Mir Mosharraf Hossain’s Bishad Sindhu, translated by Fakrul Alam as Ocean of Sorrow (2016). The three volumes of the original were published between 1885 and 1891. The novel is a historical and mythopoeic epic chronicling deaths foretold. The Prophet Mohammad, after a visitation by the archangel, sadly informs his disciples that the son of one of them will become the bitter enemy of the Prophet’s beloved grandsons Hasan and Huseyn, and will poison the former and slay the latter, events which came to pass at the tragic battle of Karbala. This can be cited as a classic instance of “cosmic” precarity, invoking the awesome presence of an inscrutable divine will. But, as is usually the case, it manifests itself in history through the “official” precarity of political powerplay. Kazi Nazrul Islam is best known as a poet and lyricist-composer whose incendiary political verses landed him in jail in British India. But he also wrote fiction, including three novels, originally published in 1927, 1930 and 1931, which have become available in English translations thanks to the efforts of Professor Niaz Zaman. Zaman, in addition to being a writer-­ translator, has also set up a literary publishing house, Writers Ink, which in some ways is a Bangladeshi equivalent of the late P. Lal’s Writers’ Workshop. The challenges faced by such ventures, one might note in passing, evince an interesting form of cultural precarity. Niaz Zaman translated Nazrul Islam’s first novel as Unfettered (2013) with the help of a team from a reading circle she had organized; the second, her solo effort, as Love and Death in Krishnanagar (2015); and the third, in collaboration with Professor M.  A. Quayum, as The Revolutionary (2016). Written at the height of the independence movement, which had taken a violent turn, the novels reveal Nazrul’s rebellious and revolutionary temperament. Unfettered, the first epistolary novel in Bangla, is based on the author’s experiences as an NCO in the British Indian army, and although romantic entanglements arrest the reader’s attention, the soldier protagonist also

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voices criticism of the colonial army he serves. Love and Death in Krishnanagar features a Communist of Muslim origin; and The Revolutionary, first serialized in 1927, portrays women revolutionaries, antedating the actions of Pritilata Waddedar and Kalpana Dutt in the 1932 Armoury raid. Nazrul’s novels are generally considered the weakest part of his oeuvre but, seen in their historical context, they evince a powerful sense of the precariousness of life in an oppressive colonial order. Humayun Kabir, who has been mentioned above as a writer usually classified as Indian (he was after all India’s Education Minister in Nehru’s cabinet), will be reclassified retroactively as a Bangladeshi writer on the strength of his English novel Men and Rivers (1945). This is set in the heartland of his native East Bengal, and presents a tale of elemental power, about the precarious lives of those dwelling on the banks of the mighty Padma, partly because of having to contend with nature, and partly because of the problems arising from human relations. Events like crocodile hunts and encounters with pirates heighten the precarity. One of the most highly respected Bangladeshi writers in Bangla, Syed Waliullah (1922–1971), also happens to be a pioneer of Anglophone writing in the country. He published his best-known Bangla novel, Lal Shalu (“Red Coverlet”, i.e. the red cloth used to cover the graves of pirs or saints), in 1948; and in 1968 his own augmented English translation (transcreation would be a more apt description) was published under the title Tree without Roots in London by Chatto & Windus in 1967. A Bangladeshi edition appeared in 2004. The novel opens with a brilliant description of the precarious socio-economic situation in a heavily populated district in southwestern Bangladesh: There are too many of them on this land, this piece of raped and ravaged land which yields no more. They know it but what can they do? Every inch of it is ploughed and sown. Three times a year for rice, to make three harvests out of it. Then for jute, the only cash crop, and for a host of other things: sugar cane, linseed, mustard, rape and sesame. The land is ploughed and reploughed, sown and resown all the year round, every season, every day from sunrise to sunset. It has no rest, no peace, and what is worse, nourishment, at least not from these ravenous ones who suck it dry. Silt, the annual excretion of the wide, billowing and flooding rivers, is all the feed it gets. They know it, but there are too many of them, too many mouths to feed and not enough land. (Waliullah, Tree, 3)

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Subsequent passages graphically describe how the endemic poverty drives boys to enroll in madrasas. On passing out they join the precariat of religious professionals who look for jobs as muezzins and Imams of mosques or as dispensers of religious instruction in maktabs (religious schools attached to mosques) or private homes. Interestingly, neither the country which is the setting of the novel, nor the Partition, is mentioned, thus lending the story a timeless quality. The madrasa-educated protagonist, Majeed, fetches up in a remote village in northern Bangladesh, comes across a moss-encrusted old grave and on learning that no one there knows who its long-dead occupant is, awes the villagers with the declaration that they are benighted creatures who have been neglecting the tomb of a great pir. With this bit of inspired fiction Majeed becomes the tomb’s selfappointed caretaker and the spiritual (and indeed even temporal) guide of the villagers. When a flood threatens the village he stays behind in the tomb to safeguard it, an act of existential choice whereby he converts his self-created fiction into an existential reality, rather like Raju, the protagonist of R. K. Narayan’s The Guide. Waliullah also left behind the complete but unpolished manuscript of a novel titled The Ugly Asian, now available from the Bangla Academy, shows it could have turned out to be an engaging expose of Cold War politics, with big powers playing callously with the fate of a newly independent country. The staggering disparity in strength and influence between a big power and a poor country renders the latter’s existence pathetically precarious even as its elite deludes itself into imagining it can play a role in determining the country’s future. Sadly, the Bangladeshi novels published in what was East Pakistan and dealing with the dislocation and trauma of Partition are not in English, and nor are they available in English translations. But the Bangladesh War of Independence of 1971 has turned out to be the pivotal theme of subsequent novels, and a few of them aim at historical comprehensiveness by also taking in the Partition. Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age (2007) is rightly praised as the first novel by a writer of the post-Independence War generation to deal with the war in a way that was based on a broad sense of national solidarity, thus bridging the gap between her parents’ generation and her own. It is also noteworthy that she mentions the trauma of Partition as the necessary historical background to the plight of her family. The narrator describes her mother thus: “Rehana Ali of Calcutta, a young woman from an aristocratic family whose father had lost an immense fortune to bad counsel and even worse luck” (Anam 2007, 6). We find a greater historical span in Arif Anwar’s Storm (2018), a novel riddled with bizarre narrative contrivances and implausibilities, but

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otherwise useful for linking the tragedies of World War II, the Partition and the precarious condition of Bangladesh and present-day transnationality. The way World War II impinged on the eastern frontier of the subcontinent is not a subject commonly seen in Bangladeshi literature, and yet Chittagong (now written as “Chattogram”) was an important base for military operations after the loss of Burma to the Japanese. The chapters centering on the British doctor Captain Claire Drake and the Japanese bomber pilot Lieutenant Washi Ichiro make the most engaging reading in the book, and could, in fact, be extracted to make up a self-standing story. “Official fear” instilled by the militarist Japanese code of honour drives the captured pilot to attempt suicide. Prevented from using the cyanide pill he had been issued by the vigilant Claire, he explains that “There is no greater shame in Japan than that of a soldier who has let himself be captured. Or to have such a soldier as a member of your family. My government has made sure that death and shame are my only options” (Anwar, 220). Claire, who helps him escape, overcomes her “official fear” through realizing, as she puts it quoting Virginia Woolf, that “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world” (Anwar, 206). Through the boatman Hashim, shot dead by a British officer in retribution for taking the Japanese POW back to Burma, the war story is linked to the lives of the seafaring people of the region, both Hindu and Muslim. Among the Hindus are the Jaladasas (literally, slaves of the water), the caste name of the Namasudra fishermen. Rakhi Jaladas, later converted to Islam as Honufa, dies in the 1970 cyclone, the worst in recorded history, and her son Shahryar (Shar) is the novel’s protagonist, having been adopted by the childless Rahim and his wife Zahira, who had exchanged their Calcutta mansion for a zamindar’s estate in Chittagong at the time of the riot-torn Partition. The 1970 storm, also known as the Bhola cyclone, was a terrifying example of “cosmic” precarity, and was followed by the “official” precarity of an inadequate government response. This added fuel to the long-brewing political disaffection of the people of the province so that in the elections at the end of the year the Awami League achieved a landslide victory. Only, instead of taking it to power, the military establishment under General Yahya Khan, in collusion with Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, unleashed a military crackdown, inaugurating the nine-month-­ long Bangladesh War of Independence. Shar’s life in the USA, where he goes as a graduate student, lands him in difficulties. A daughter is born in an unsteady relationship and his failure to land a job forces him to return

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to Bangladesh, where he enters the precarious world of local government politics. While Storm covers pre-Partition Calcutta only episodically, Sharbari Zohra Ahmed’s Dust Under Her Feet (2019) is the only novel by a Bangladeshi writer to explore the great city in all its complexity during the years of World War II. At the novel’s centre is Yasmine, owner of a night club patronized by American soldiers. Her affair with an American officer, the birth of their son, the ordeals of jungle warfare in Burma, the Calcutta and Noakhali riots, a brief sojourn in East Pakistan, and then a reunion of the lovers and their son in America are incidents which, in their transnational and multinational variety, are relatively unknown in our literature. The portrayal in Anwar’s Storm of the Jaladas fisherfolk precariat may prompt theoretically astute readers to echo Gayatri Spivak’s famous question and ask if we find here an acceptable representation of the subaltern. While the readers ponders the question for themselves I can refer them to an authentic subaltern who speaks, Harishankar Jaladas (b. 1953), who hails from the very community in question. He took a doctorate in Bengali literature, and is now a college principal in Chittagong. The author of over a dozen Bangla novels and several story collections, his signature subject is the precariat class he knows intimately. Two of his novels are now available in readable English versions with translations done by Professor Mostaim Billah, and may be briefly discussed here. These are best seen in relation to the sociological theorizing of the Precariat class. As Mike Savage explains in Social Class in the 21st Century: A Pelican Introduction (2015), The term ‘precariat’ was introduced by Guy Standing, who argues that neo-­ liberal policies and institutional changes across the globe are producing growing numbers of people with common enough experiences to be called an emerging class. The precariat … are people living and working precariously, usually in a series of short-term jobs, without recourse to stable occupational identities, social protection or relevant protective regulation. (Savage, 351)

Sons of the Sea (2014), a translation of Jaladas’s first novel, is about the fishing community from which he comes. Authentic ethnographic details, an accurate understanding of the economic constraints of fishermen, and the mechanics of financial exploitation at the hands of moneylenders define the community’s social sphere, haunted by “official fear’, while the

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uncertainties posed by the sea underline their “cosmic fear”. Jaladas is realistic and sparing in his linguistic expression (the original often uses the dialect peculiar to his community), but while he is without any illusions he is not as fatalistic as the characters found in Synge’s Riders to the Sea; instead, a quiet spirit of resistance imbues the novel. Despite the masculinity of the title, the novel’s main character is a woman, Bhuvoneswari. The novel opens with her futile wait for her husband’s return from a fishing expedition. At that time the village is enjoying a recitation of the story of the snake goddess Manasa, the fisherfolk’s chief deity. The actual recitation is preceded by an erotic dance by an attractive crossdresser, who later has to sleep with his patrons by turns. Bhuvoneswari decides to educate her son, Gangapado, so that he may find an alternative to the miserable life of the fisherfolk. The experiment fails as he cannot tolerate the humiliations heaped on him by upper-caste Hindus. He helps his mother in her fishwife’s trade, grows up and gets married, and tries to organize the fisherfolk to oppose the exploitative terms imposed on them by two moneylenders, one Hindu and the other a Muslim. He is strangled to death, and his bereft mother waits for his son to be born, a son whom she wishes to name Banomali, after the saviour god Krishna. This is perhaps symbolic of a frail hope, but her indomitable spirit shines through the tragic ending. The more recent translation, Ramgolam (2019), is of a novel whose eponymous protagonist of is a methar, a hereditary cleaner of lavatories, like Bhakha in Mulk Raj Anand’s classic of social realism, The Untouchable (2014 [1935]). But a sociological sea-change has occurred between the 1930s and the present. Bhakha is not a member of the precariat, but rather a victim of society who has meekly accepted his lowly hereditary role. In Jaladas’ novel the hereditary role of methars is under threat. With the introduction of modern sewage and waste disposal systems, the sanitary workers may be, and often are, recruited from other communities, including poor job-hungry Muslims. This change may be directly linked to the processes of neoliberalism and globalization. Neoliberalism, with its market fundamentalism, has no respect for hereditary rights to a particular occupation. The concomitant globalization has led towards an international standardization of the mode of work of traditional professions. Traditionally, methars were deemed to be scavengers; but in the neoliberal, globalized order, the municipal workers who clean up wear uniforms as in the advanced countries, use modern trucks, and are designated “Parichhannata karamachari” [Cleaning Staff], a description which is free of the demeaning description of the past. This change may be considered

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progress, but it renders the traditional methars’ life more precarious for people outside their community can compete for their jobs, whereas they lack the education or training that would enable them to compete for other jobs. There is rising disaffection among the methars, and attempts at collective action to fight for their rights. Ramgolam, who has been given a hybrid name by his methar chief father (Ram is a Hindu avatar, “golam” is an Arabic word) to foreground the ambiguous status of the community, is not allowed into Hindu temples and is also looked down upon by every other community. Yet he grows up as an activist, only to be implicated (along with his son) in a murder connived at by the city boss. He is jailed, while his son is hanged. But the novel ends on a note of defiance, a tone very different from what we find in Anand. The problems faced by diasporic or transnational Bangladeshis have not received the extensive treatment experienced by Indians in a similar position, e.g. in the works of Bharati Mukherji, Jhumpa Lahiri or Chitra Devkurani. We ought to mention, however, that there is a growing body of Bangladeshi diasporic and transnational writing. The first Bangladeshi-­ origin Anglophone writer to attain international recognition is Monica Ali, whose acclaimed debut novel Brick Lane (2003) features a Bangladeshi immigrant family in London’s East End as it is thrust willy-nilly into the precariat. Manzu Islam, also a Bangladeshi-British writer, in his novel Burrow (2004), focuses on his protagonist Tapan Ali, who has been sent to the UK to pursue higher studies, only to end up an illegal immigrant with his personal life in shambles. The most celebrated Bangladeshi-British novelist is undoubtedly Zia Haider Rahman, whose debut novel, In the Light of what We Know (2015), catapulted him into the Premier League, so to speak, of Anglophone writing and for which he was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The protagonist, Zafar, a war baby from the Bangladesh independence struggle of 1971, is adopted by his uncle and aunt and brought from their native Sylhet district to London. A brilliant student, like his creator, he wins a scholarship to Oxford and achieves a First Class degree in Mathematics, becomes a human rights lawyer and leads a peripatetic existence, spending time in London, New York, Sylhet, Dhaka (where he works for an international NGO), war-torn Afghanistan, Islamabad, and Dubai. The novel’s emotional centre is his long-lasting, but ultimately doomed relationship with an upper-class English contemporary from college, making it a sort of tragedy of transnational upward mobility; and the pivotal event, which, like a Black Hole, cannot be described, is Zafar’s breakdown, which we know has occurred but of

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which we have no details. The novel as a whole is an epic of a world that is dysfunctional at every level, social, political, economic, psychological, thus presenting a comprehensive view of universal precarity. Imdadul Haq Milan, a best-selling author in Bengali, in his recently translated Two Novellas (2017), fictionally explores his own difficult years as a non-resident Bangladeshi in Germany. Among Bangladeshi-Americans, Abeer Y. Hoque, in The Lovers and the Leavers (2014), a sort of loose-leaf novel, presents interconnected stories in Bangladeshi and various foreign settings. Tanwi Nandini Islam, in her debut novel Bright Lines (2015), is a coming-of-age novel about two Bangladeshi-American cousins in Brooklyn, with a finely realized section about a visit to the mother country. The protagonist’s father had been a freedom fighter in the events of 1971, and the account of the Dhaka visit incorporates a portrayal of that landmark year. Sadly, the heroism and supposed idealism of the freedom struggle is belied by the inhumane treatment of the war’s rape victims. It is a hideous irony that they were purportedly honoured with the title of “birangonas”, which is the Bangla for “heroine”: “Shunned by their families, with nowhere to shout they’d been broken” (Tanwi Islam, 232). Similarly, another Bangladeshi-American, Abu Zubair, in The Silent and the Lost (2011), narrates the experiences of a birangona’s son adopted by an American family. In Blame (2015), the Bangladeshi-Swedish author Dilruba Z. Ara gives another disturbing account of the plight of birangonas. Niaz Zaman adds a variation to the theme in her novel A Different Sita (2012). An engaging take on the birangona theme is Shaheen Akhtar’s prize-winning novel, translated as The Search (2018a). In another contribution, the Bangla novel by Rizia Rahman (1939–2019), translated as Letters of Blood (2016), features an educated birangona who in frustration with society’s attitude towards her, becomes the denizen of a brothel in which the story is set. In an “Author’s Note” to the translation, Rizia Rahman frankly avows that the intention behind her well-researched book was to make readers realize that it is “a violation of human rights to force women into this so-called profession” (Rahman, 9), which is undoubtedly one of the ubiquitous examples of a precariat. Whether or not putting birangonas in the picture, the independence war, which exposed a nation of seventy-five million to extreme precariousness, is a recurrent theme in recent Bangladeshi literature. Dealing with the independence war has almost become de rigueur for the Bangladeshi writer. Indeed, the bulk of Bangladeshi fiction would probably bear out Frederic Jameson’s thesis that Third World texts are national allegories.

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There is still scope for a comprehensive study of the typology of the war novels. The very first one was written in the heat of the war, and ended confidently, anticipating victory in a few days. No sooner had the author, Professor Anwar Pasha of the Bengali department at Dhaka University, completed the manuscript than he was picked up, along with a number of other intellectuals and professionals, by a pro-Pakistan killer squad and gunned down in a vacant lot on the city outskirts. The manuscript was not discovered and was published in independent Bangladesh, and later translated as Rifles Bread Women (1994). All but a tiny fraction of Bangladeshi novels are in Bangla, and of these an even tinier fraction has been translated. There are many formulaic war novels, portraying events in simplistic black and white, and only occasionally a work like Mahmudul Haque’s novella, translated as Black Ice (2012), which probes the tricky question of national identity in a sensitive style that does justice to an underlying ambiguity. Other noteworthy Bangla war novels now available in English translation include Syed Shamsul Haq’s Two Novellas (2015), one of which has been made into the film Guerrilla (2011); Moinul Ahsan Saber’s The Mercenary (2016), which focuses on the nefarious role of a traditional stick fighter amidst the occupation army’s atrocities and the amoral world of collaborators; and Anisul Hoque’s Freedom’s Mother (2012), which is based on a true story and highlights the quiet heroism of a mother whose freedom fighter son has been picked up by the army, never to return. Among Anglophone novels to emerge from the war years the first to achieve a degree of renown was Adib Khan’s Seasonal Adjustments (1994), in which the protagonist, like the author, has migrated to Australia. The reason cited by the protagonist Iqbal Choudhary is that he was distressed by the reprisals against the Urdu-speaking Biharis who had supported Pakistan. These were dwarfed by the extent of the massacre perpetrated by the Pakistan Army, but that cannot justify the reprisals; and the novel deserves to be commended for mentioning them, particularly because the plight of the Biharis remains ambiguous and hapless. Pakistan will not accept them, and only fairly recently, in 2008, has the Bangladeshi High Court ruled that the children of stateless Biharis can become Bangladeshi citizens. Most of these live in an overcrowded camp set up by the Red Cross, and survive on insecure employment, a wretched precariat. Ruby Zaman’s Invisible Lines (2011) presents the traumatic plight of a family comprising a Bihari father, a Bengali mother and their daughter. Adib Khan’s Spiral Road (2007) also features a Bangladeshi-Australian, this

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time one who had been a freedom fighter in 1971, on a home visit, only to find that alongside economic growth and greater women’s empowerment there is a disturbing rise in Islamic militancy. In fact, the growth of intolerant religious forces had been going on for a long time throughout the subcontinent; and after the Babri Mosque demolition in India, riots in Bangladesh had prompted Taslima Nasreen to register her disquiet in Lajja (1993; English translation 1997), whose publication brought on her a fatwa and bitter exile. In Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim (2011), a freedom fighter himself turns to religion, albeit not of the militant variety. Her trilogy is completed by The Bones of Grace (2016), which, among other things, shows the dark side of globalization, with the precariat drawn from poor villagers engaged in the dangerous business of ship-breaking. It is worth noting at this point that the transfer of the ship-breaking industry from the First to the Third World came with the rise of Neoliberalism, as a cost-cutting move. It acquired a sinister aspect when ships containing toxic materials were sent for dismantling, rousing both environmental and human rights activists. The cost cutting is possible because of the cheap labour available in countries like Bangladesh; and also because these activities did not require any sophisticated equipment. Apart from the use of blow torches, drills and cranes, the work is done literally with the workers’ bare hands, now and then leading to injuries and fatalities. The most recent war novel in English is Nadeem Zaman’s In the Time of the Others (2018). There will no doubt be many more, for every beginning writer of Bangladeshi origin is more likely than not going to feel the necessity of coming to terms with the country’s foundational event. One could perhaps hypothesize that the continuing popularity of the war as a theme hints at the existence of a collective Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. The difficult initial years of Bangladesh, with the country’s infrastructure and economy in shambles, led to a famine, which was followed within a year by an attempt to institute one-party rule. The country’s founding father was brutally assassinated along with his family in a coup, and for a decade and a half the army called the shots in politics. The early years of independence have been the subject of satirical treatment in Neamat Imam’s Black Coat (2013). Deregulation and globalization have brought high levels of economic growth, but democracy, restored in 1990, has not been able to establish strong roots. Besides, as the Covid-19 pandemic has shown, the global economy can be subjected without warning by unpredictable shocks.

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A military-governed political interregnum from 2007 to 2009 brought students onto the streets, but sadly the hopes raised by the elections in 2009 did not survive for long. Kazi Anis Ahmed’s novel The World in my Hands (2013) satirically fictionalizes the two years of military rule under a civilian cloak. What happened is that “Emergency socially elevated all persons in uniform by at least two ranks. Majors acted like Colonels; Colonels like Generals; and Generals like God” (Ahmed, 15–16). Life in Bangladesh has always been fraught with injustice, disorder, violence, corruption, frustration, and inequality. Shaheen Akhtar’s Beloved Rongomala (2018b) reveals this at length on the basis of an eighteenth-­ century legend from Noakhali. Shazia Omar’s Like a Diamond in the Sky (2009) spins a tale out of the lives of drug-dependent youth. Syed Manzoorul Islam’s Absurd Night (2019) does so in the context of present-­ day Bangladesh in a blackly comic manner. Against the background of an impending apocalyptic cyclone, the lives of a diverse array of characters intersect in the small coastal town of Pathorghata on the Bay of Bengal. A cross-section of society is represented, and the structures of power—governmental, social and institutional—are exposed in a clear-sighted fashion. At the top of the pecking order we have the State Minister for Disaster Management, ensconced in the capital, from where he makes a few irate telephone calls to the Secretary of his ministry. This senior bureaucrat has come to Pathorghata to attend the religious observances for his recently deceased father-in-law. There are two local officials, the UNO (the Sub-­ district officer) and the OC (the Officer in charge of the police station), who are responsible, respectively, for administration and law and order. The Superintendant of Police, stationed at the district headquarters, telephones from time to time to bully the OC. The inhabitants of the town and surrounding villages include a feckless college lecturer, a watch repairman, a small trader, a boatman and his son, a group of drifting prostitutes and a health volunteer. Glamour is added by a film star and a film crew, and a TV crew with an attractive female presenter, all of whom are beset with emotional or personality disorders. The relationship of the subaltern citizens with the guardians of the law is vividly reflected in the attitude of the boatman’s son: “He was afraid of the police. He had somehow gotten the notion that the only job of the police was to beat people up or extort money from them. He had witnessed the police commit many petty crimes at the dock” (46). The social psyche is an unhealthy combination of sexual repression and erethism;

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gender violence is rife, as is the egregious misogyny that paints any woman who does not stick to the straight and narrow with the brush of lurid scandal. The health volunteer is a grassroots-level representative of Foucauldian medical power, which she wields rather callously; she is loose-­tongued and does not respect the medical code of confidentiality, with dire consequences. The story line moves fast, with many twists and turns that defy neat summarizing. Nasreen Jahan’s The Woman who Flew (2012) presents Bangladesh through the life story of a young woman from the mofussil in over-­ congested, economically thriving, socially malignant Dhaka city. Dhaka has entered the phase of expansion fuelled by neoliberal policies when Nasreen Jahan’s protagonist arrives there. The social, emotional and economic tribulations of a young divorcee are described in moving terms. After she lands an office job, a colleague informs her that “Office hours have been extended by thirty minutes in the morning … Now we have to be in at eight, understand? It is a trick: give a little raise, and get it back another way” (328). Numair Atif Choudhury’s Babu Bangladesh (2019), published after the young author tragically drowned while on holiday in Japan, reveals most comprehensively among all Bangladeshi novels how the country’s recent history is a morass from which no escape seems to be possible. The book is an odd mix of straight non-fictional sections that one goes through at a clip, and mythopoeic, phantasmagoric, recondite concoctions that set one puzzling. There is no scope for an adequate analysis in a chapter like this, but the narrative frame deserves attention. The eponymous protagonist’s biography is being written in 2028, some years after his mysterious disappearance after a chequered career in political activism. This surely is the ultimate example of precarity in the modern state. Just a single Google click tells us that according to a human rights organization over 500 have disappeared since 2009. The notion of precarity requires further exploration if we are to better understand the entropic world we inhabit.

References Ahmed, K. Anis. 2013. The World in My Hands. Delhi: Random House. Ahmed, Sharbari Zohra. 2019. Dust Under Her Feet. Chennai: Tranquebar. Akhtar, Shaheen. 2018a. The Search. Delhi: Zubaan. ———. 2018b. Rongomala (Trans. Shabnam Nadiya), Dhaka: Bengal Lights Books (BLB) Anam, Tahmima. 2007. A Golden Age. London: John Murray. ———. 2011. The Good Muslim. Edinburgh: Canongate.

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———. 2016. The Bones of Grace. Edinburgh: Canongate. Anand, Mulk Raj. 2014 [1935]. Untouchable. Delhi: Penguin Classics. Anwar, Arif. 2018. The Storm. Toronto: Harper Collins. Ara, Dilruba Z. 2015. Blame. Dhaka: University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2011. Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity. Choudhury, Numair Atif. 2019. Babu Bangladesh. New Delhi: Fourth Estate. Ghosh, Amitav. 2019. Gun Island. Delhi: Penguin Random House. Haq, Kaiser. 2004. Existentialism in a Bangladeshi Village. The Daily Star (Dhaka). Haq, Syed Shamsul. 2015. Two Novellas (Trans. Saugata Ghosh). Dhaka: BLB. Haq, Kaiser. 2019. The Novel of Bangladesh. In Alex Tickell, ed. The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. X: South and South-East Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoque, Abeer Y. 2014. The Lovers and the Leavers. Dhaka: BLB. Hoque, Anisul. 2012. Freedom’s Mother (Trans. Falguni Ray). Delhi: Palimpsest. Hossain, Mir Mosharraf. 2016. Ocean of Sorrow (Trans. Fakrul Alam). Dhaka: Bangla Academy. Imam, Neamat. 2013. The Black Coat. Delhi: Penguin. Islam, Kazi Nazrul. 2013. Unfettered (Trans. Niaz Zaman, et al.) Dhaka: Nymphea. ———. 2015. Love and Death in Krishnanagar (Trans. Niaz Zaman), Dhaka: Nymphea. ———. 2016. The Revolutionary (Trans. M.A.  Quayum and Niaz Zaman), Dhaka: Nymphea. Islam, Syed Manzoorul. 2019. Absurd Night (Trans. Pushpita Alam), Dhaka: BLB. Jahan, Nasreen. 2012. The Woman Who Flew (Trans. Kaiser Haq). Dehli: Penguin. Jaladas, Harishankar. 2014. Sons of the Sea (Trans. Quazi Mostain Billah). Dhaka: Academic Press and Publishers Library. ———. 2019. Ramgolam (Trans. Quazi Mostain Billah). Chattogram: Baatighar. Kasmir, Sharryn. 2020. Precarity. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/precarity [Last accessed April 20, 2020] Khan, Adib. 1994. Seasonal Adjustments. St. Leonards NSW: Allen & Unwin. ———. 2007. Spiral Road. Sydney: Harper Collins. Milan, Imdadul Haq. 2017. Two Novellas (Trans. Saugata Ghosh). Dhaka: BLB. Muhammad, Anu. 2015. Bangladesh—A Model of Neoliberalism: The Case of Microfinance and NGOs. In Monthly Review, March. Narayan, R.K. 2006. The Guide. Delhi: Penguin Classics. Nasreen, Taslims. 1997. Lajja (Trans. Kankabati Datta). Delhi: Penguin. Omar, Shazia. 2009. Like a Diamond in the Sky. Delhi: Penguin. Pasha, Anwar. 1994. Rifles Bread Women (Trans. Kabir Chowdhury). Dhaka: Bangla Academy. Rahman, Zia Haider. 2015. In the Light of What We Know. London: Picador. Saber, Moinul Ahsan. 2016. The Mercenary (Trans. Shabnam Nadiya). Dhaka: BLB.

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Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2008. The Revolutionary Myth. In The Aftermath of War (Trans. Chris Turner). Calcutta: Seagull Books. Savage, Mike. 2015. Social Class in the Twenty-first Century. London: Penguin. Springveld, Niels. 2017. Neoliberalism, Precarity, and Precariousness Frame, No. 30.2, December, 25–39. Waliullah, Syed. 2004. Tree Without Roots. Dhaka: Writers. Ink. ———. 2014. The Ugly Asian. Dhaka: Bangla Academy. Zaman, Ruby. 2011. Invisible Lines. Delhi: Harper Collins. Zaman, Niaz. 2012. A Different Sita. Dhaka: Writers. Ink. Zaman, Nadeem. 2018. In the Time of the Others. Delhi: Picador India. Zubair, Abu Bin Mohammed. 2011. The Silent and the Lost. Costa Mesa CA: Pacific Breeze Publishers.

Index1

A Adiga, Aravind, 3, 21, 22, 49–57, 59, 60, 64, 65, 90, 99–102, 111, 117–119, 123, 236n10 Ahmed, K. Anis, 292 Ahmed, Sara, 184 Ahmed, Sharbari Zohra, 286 Akhtar, Shaheen, 289, 292 Ali, Tariq, 198 Amin, Samir, 6, 11 Anam, Tahmima, 200, 284, 291 Anand, Mulk Raj, 134, 287, 288 Appadurai, Arjun, 256 Ara, Dilruba Z., 289 Arendt, Hannah, 160 B Bagul, Baburao, 23, 151, 154, 166

Banki, Susan, 10, 37, 39, 43 Barker, Chris, 232 Barnes, Tom, 89 Basu, Diksha, 107–126 Baudrillard, Jean, 206 Bauman, Zygmunt, 6, 111, 120, 124, 141, 278 Beck, Ulrich, 12 Behdad, Ali, 256, 258 Bernado, Francesco Di, 11 Bhabha, Homi K, 202, 210n10 Bhutto, Fatima, 24, 189–208 Boehmer, Elleke, 15, 20, 43, 71, 193, 275n6 Boo, Katherine, 75 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10, 164 Brouillette, Sarah, 51, 56, 60, 66n6 Brown, Wendy, 5, 6, 144, 145

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 O. P. Dwivedi (ed.), Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06817-1

297

298 

INDEX

Butler, Judith, 4, 9, 10, 22, 23, 25, 50, 56, 84, 85, 134, 144, 161, 190, 191, 193–200, 204, 207, 216, 218, 222, 227, 230, 235, 235n2, 236n8, 236n12, 241, 243–246, 253, 255, 257–259, 264–267, 269–274 C Casas-Cortes, Maribel, 10, 11, 134 Chambers, Claire, 12, 18, 24, 190 Chibber, Vivek, 14 Chowdhury, Siddharth, 88 Connell, Liam, 119 Cooper, Julia, 44, 83 D Dalrymple, William, 73, 74 Dasgupta, Rana, 18, 21, 22, 76, 79–82, 108, 110, 111, 123 Davies, Dominic, 18, 21, 43, 71, 74, 75, 236n9 Dawesar, Abha, 22, 107–126 Dimock, Wai Chee, 15, 16, 19 Du Bois, W.E.B., 166 During, Simon, 5, 42, 222 Dutt, Yashica, 23, 149–153, 158, 159, 162–168, 169n7

Foucault, Michael, 175 Friedman, Milton, 6, 7 G Gidla, Sujata, 150 Giridharadas, Anand, 74 Goel, Ina, 185n4 Gooneratne, Yasmine, 25, 241–253 Gramsci, Antonio, 126 Guattari, Félix, 173 Gupta, Shilpa, 23, 97, 151, 161, 162 Guru, Gopal, 168n1, 169n8 H Hamid, Mohsin, 3, 13, 21, 25, 49–54, 56, 62–65, 109, 111, 127n2, 198, 203, 255–274 Haq, Syed Shamsul, 290 Hardt, Michael, 11, 15 Harvey, David, 6, 7 Hazari, 169n2 Hogg, Emily, 3, 20 Hossain, Adnan, 185n4 Hun, Byung-Chal, 13

E Ettlinger, Nancy, 14, 37, 40, 42–44 EuroMayDay, 10

I International Monetary Fund (IMF), 4 Islam, Kazi Nazrul, 281, 282

F Felicelli, Anita, 41 Felski, Rita, 17 Fineman, Martha Albertson, 2, 18, 19, 134–136

J Jahan, Nasreen, 293 Jaladas, Harishankar, 286, 287 Jameson, Fredric, 8, 83, 289 Jayasuriya, Maryse, 247

 INDEX 

K Kapur, Akash, 74 Kasmir, Sharryn, 107, 108 Khair, Tabish, 3, 6, 8, 16 Korte, Barbara, 218 L Lemke, Sieglinde, 229 Lister, Ruth, 217 Lorey, Isabell, 46n2 M Maitreya, Yogesh, 154 Mamdani, Mahmood, 274n1 Marx, Karl, 12 Mbembe, Achille, 19, 174, 175 McClanahan, Annie, 62, 66n1 McLeod, John, 181, 183 Mehta, Suketu, 21, 22, 52, 76–79, 82, 124, 125 Mekhennet, Souad, 198 Mirza, Maryam, 60 Mishra, Panka, 6, 12, 13 Mishra, Vijay, 245 Moore, Phoebe V, 204, 205 Mukherjee, Neel, 3, 24, 25, 53, 215–235, 235n4, 236n9, 236n13 Munck, Ronaldo, 11, 35, 36, 135 N Naipaul, V. S., 58, 59, 115, 209n10, 220, 221, 223, 236n10 Nanda, Serena, 178, 185n4 Narayan, R. K, 134, 247 Nayar, Pramod K, 15, 18, 23, 135 Negri, Antonio, 11, 15 Nixon, Rob, 217 Noorani, A. G., 200, 272

299

O Ong, Aihwa, 72, 275n8 P Pasha, Anwar, 290 Perera, Sonali, 54, 58, 61, 65, 66 Prakash, Gyan, 74 Pratt, Mary Louise, 4, 247, 248 Puar, Jasbir K, 175, 193, 200 R Reddy, Gayatri, 185n4 Rising Asia, 13, 14, 21, 49–66, 123 Roy, Ananya, 85 Roy, Arundhati, 3, 5–7, 21, 23, 24, 39, 41–45, 52, 103, 109, 111, 134, 135, 171–177, 179–181, 183, 184, 184n1, 247, 266, 267 Rushdie, Salman, 52, 123, 184n1, 207, 247 S Saber, Moinul Ahsan, 290 Sageman, Marc, 198, 202, 203, 205, 207, 210n12 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 153, 157, 159, 277, 278 Sassen, Saskia, 34, 36 Seth, Vikram, 52, 53 Sethi, Aman, 74, 113 Shamsie, Kamila, 3, 195 Shanbhag, Vivek, 107–126 Singh, Khushwant, 185n4, 186n4 Sinha, Indra, 103, 215, 232, 233 South Asian literature, 3, 13–18, 49–66 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 41, 225, 235n4, 250, 286

300 

INDEX

Standing, Guy, 4, 10, 11, 33–37, 39, 46n1, 253n2, 286 Steger, Manfred B., 7 Subramaniam, Ajantha, 163 Swarup, Vikas, 22, 52, 57, 90, 95–98, 104, 123 T Taylor, Charles, 197 Tejpal, Tarun J., 90–95 Thayil, Jeet, 21, 39–45 Tickell, Alex, 5, 15, 180 V Valiyamattam, Rositta Joseph, 90, 95, 96 Valmiki, Omprakash, 66n4, 167, 169n3, 169n6

Varma, Pavan, 74 Vertovec, Steven, 248 W Waliullah, Syed, 283, 284 Wansbrough, Aleks, 6, 9 Warwick Research Collective, 83 Wilson, Janet, 5 Y Yaqin, Amina, 258 Yengde, Suraj, 157, 167, 168 Z Zaman, Niaz, 282, 289 Zizek, Slavoj, 2 Zuboff, Shobana, 204