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PROLOGUE stereotypes as provocation
How might a literary festival mediate the slippery shuffle of cultural stereotypes between real and phantasmic terrains? Does staging a representation of a certain culture, say of South Asia, in a book, film, or at a festival inevitably open it to the world as an immutable type? How might we think about the collusions, collisions, and transformations that ensue when cultural representations in whatever form seem indistinguishable from stereotypes? What are the conditions under which cultures circulate or congeal globally? What are the ethical responsibilities and political risks that make claiming and disowning stereotypes so crucial to how we read the Anglophone novel today? This book attends to these questions by prying into the stereotype’s perceived flatness, arguing instead that it is the stereotype’s elasticity that makes it indispensable to how global fiction is read. In Stereotype confronts head-on the ambivalent nature of the stereotype, both as a general concept and in its particularly prevalent South Asian iterations. The book theorizes the seductive force of the stereotype as an explanatory mechanism while complicating our understanding of the use and persistent allure of predictable representations of South Asia. One of its core arguments is that the uses and effects of stereotypes must be considered from multiple positionalities. Through an examination of a host of real and imagined stereotypes—hunger, crowdedness, filth, slums, death, migrant flight, terror, outsourcing—In Stereotype makes the case that
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such commonplaces about other worlds are crucial to shaping the ethics of global literature. The book draws on the influential work of Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Michael Ondaatje, Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, and Chetan Bhagat, among others, to show how stereotypes about South Asia offer us insight into the material and psychic investments of contemporary imaginative texts. By probing contexts ranging from the independence of the Indian subcontinent, to poverty tourism, civil war, migration, domestic labor, and terrorist radicalism, this book introduces an interpretive lens for reading the ethics of literary representations of cultural and global difference. Broadly, In Stereotype reevaluates the stakes of a contemporary fascination with transnational novels and films that manufacture global differences even as they stage intersubjective encounters between cultures through the use of stereotypes. Let us turn to the scene of a festival to see how questions about reading and cultural fluency swirl around stereotypes. From its inception in 2006 the Jaipur Literature Festival, which advertizes itself as the “Kumbh Mela [popular pilgrim festival] of Indian and International writing,” has attracted both critical praise and derision.1 Supported by the Sahitya Akademi (the Indian government’s official institute for literary and cultural studies), and with private sponsorships, the festival is held on the resplendent grounds of the Diggi Palace in Jaipur. The festival boasts that over five days in January, it brings together “writers and readers from across India and the wider world: from America, Europe, Africa, and from across the breadth of South Asia” so that they may, for free, indulge audiences in the appreciation of literary and other arts.2 By all reports, the efforts of the festival’s organizers, including William Dalrymple, the British travel writer on India; novelist Namita Gokhale; and the event and entertainment company Teamwork Production, have ensured an ever-burgeoning attendance at this popular literary fete.3 Indeed, the eagerly anticipated festival program each year reads as a veritable “Who’s Who” of contemporary literature. Such writers as J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri, V. S. Naipaul, Orhan Pamuk, Hanif Kureishi, Jamaica Kincaid, Ahdaf Soueif, Ian McEwan, Hari Kunzru, Aminatta Forna, Vikram Seth, and Wole Soyinka have electrified global attention on the event. The festival has also featured some of the best-known and emerging Anglophone writers from India, such as Anuradha Roy, Kiran Desai, Chetan Bhagat, Pico Iyer, Tishani Doshi,
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Jeet Thayil, Indra Sinha, and others. Initially criticized for not including enough Indian-language events, the festival has since 2007 staged panels such as “Translating Bharat” and “On Women, Outcastes, Peasants, Rebels,” and has launched books such as that of the translated anthology of Tamil feminist poetry, Wild Girls, Wicked Words, in an effort to integrate Dalit, subaltern, and vernacular issues. Dalit writers at Jaipur have included Omprakash Valmiki, Chandra Bhan Prasad, and Kancha Ilaiah, while Mahasweta Devi, well known for her feminist fiction on Bengal’s tribals, most recently delivered the keynote address at the literary mela.4 As Rashmi Sadana notes, “In terms of the density of writers from different backgrounds in India, for these few days it [the festival] has become a fecund literary space . . . [where] substantive discussions do occur.”5 Yet, as most commentators on the festival note, the festival has a flashy, dazzling quality to it that seems to thrive on spectacle. Alongside serious literary conversations are marquee visits by socialites, celebrities, cricket icons, and film stars that alternately fuel buzz, stir controversies, and keep watchers gawking at what sometimes appears to be a theater of the absurd. So, for instance, the event is known as much for its party scenes, banquets, musical interludes, dance performances, and orchestrated celebrity sightings as for its literary meditations. A literary mela in India, it seems, must also feature the exhilaration of a visit by Oprah or Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan, a possible encounter with cricketer Rahul Dravid, soul-making advice doled out by Deepak Chopra, parental counsel given by Amy Chua (of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother fame), and even a spiritual audience with the Dalai Lama. The frivolity of the festival perhaps sparks television personality Barkha Dutt’s fawning question to Oprah about how her first experience of India has been, which in turn yields from Oprah the vacuously obvious reply, “More people than I have ever seen in my life.”6 In tandem during Oprah’s much publicized visit to Jaipur, however, were the fierce protests and resulting controversy that raged about Salman Rushdie’s impending second visit to the festival to discuss his novel Midnight’s Children. What inevitably follows such incongruous juxtapositions of the bizarre and serious are intense disagreements about how the festival coheres, or rather makes incoherent, representations of South Asia on a global stage. Almost uncannily, the festival itself—even as it presents a platform for negotiating representations of the subcontinent—seems to mime a stereotype about South Asia’s fantastic inscrutability.
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Some of these stories veer toward the comedic—such as the many gaffes and cultural insensitivities that Oprah’s attitudes toward India reveal. In episodes of her show on India that aired following her foray to Jaipur, Oprah, as Rajyashree Sen mockingly notes, succeeded in showing “India as Westerners imagine it, one stereotype at a time.”7 If Oprah’s inability to grasp Indian eating habits, arranged marriages, or slum life is easily attributable to gauche stereotypes, questions about Jaipur’s staging of literary and popular culture in South Asia turn weighty in other contexts.8 The festival seems mired in murky debates over the ethics of how cultural authenticity may be staged, the risks of cultural tourism assumed, or the value of free speech and the foibles of literary and intellectual elitism expressed. William Dalrymple, one of the conference principals, and writer Hartosh Singh Bal, for instance, have been embroiled in an ad hominem war of words, accusing each other of failing to understand what it means to be Indian, or to represent India. Bal accuses Dalrymple of enlivening Raj nostalgia, claiming that Dalrymple has appointed himself “the pompous arbiter of literary merit in India.”9 This, Bal claims, reveals how “English mediates our own social hierarchy,” concluding that “if Jaipur matters as a festival, it is because of the writers from Britain it attracts.”10 For Bal, the festival typifies how “to take note of India requires making use of a certain romantic association that stretches back to the Raj.”11 Pointing out that “the British contingent, Brown, Black, and White, make up a minority within the minority of the firangi contingent,” Dalrymple’s retort to Bal is a caustic defense.12 In it, Dalrymple evinces his long and intimate ties to India, including his own body of work; defends the festival’s promotion of Dalit, bhasha, and minority Indian literatures; and accuses his detractor of “reverse racism.” Bal’s ire toward him, Dalrymple writes, is the “literary equivalent of pouring shit through an immigrant’s letterbox.”13 The quarrel between Bal and Dalrymple evidences how quickly trivial concerns that the festival may too easily trade in cultural stereotypes skitter toward truly damming ones. At the heart of Bal’s and Dalrymple’s tussle are the matters of cultural and racial authenticity, past colonial violations and present neocolonial inequities, and ultimately the ethics around how certain representations of South Asia are to be read. If Bal stereotypes Dalrymple and his staging of an Indian spectacle as a colonial hangover, Dalrymple jarringly appropriates for himself a
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particularly injurious stereotype—that of the ex-colonial immigrant in Britain—abjected through racial violence. In both instances, but particularly the latter, the gap between ground and figure that these stereotypes are supposed to cover is vast. That this dispute invites other disputes— Dalrymple’s claim that he “conceived, co-founded and co-directed” the festival, for example, is hotly contested by Pramod Kumar, who claims to be one of the originators of the event—speaks to the volatility of the stereotypes it engages and energizes.14 In a sense, the festival as a showcase of South Asian literary investments in the global arena is inseparable from the politics of what kinds of representations of the subcontinent are seen as permissible within the public sphere. Unsurprisingly, the most fractious disputes at Jaipur have been over the questions of free speech and religious and caste tolerance. In other words, these controversies have provoked passionate disagreements about whether certain stereotypes that emerge from them reflect the reality of India or its more vitriolic symbolic figurations. In 2012, when Oprah’s visit promised to eclipse the festival, what is known as the Rushdie Affair also threatened to derail it. The fatwa and violence that shadowed the publication of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses may seem a thing of the past, but protest over the author’s attendance revealed how it still simmers as a spectacular flashpoint of cultural contestation. Following protests and death threats, it was widely reported that Rushdie was coerced into cancelling his visit, while four authors—Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Ruchir Joshi, and Jeet Thayil—served as proxies, reading from The Satanic Verses. The fact that they faced legal trouble for doing so sparked numerous commentators to reflect, as Deji Olukotun does for PEN America, that the festival itself “has become a sort of proving ground for free expression” in India, where writers both reflect on human rights questions and directly experience its breach.15 Whether or not this is true, the festival’s staging of literature from, about, and in South Asia provokes deep contentions about what it means to represent the subcontinent. These skirmishes illuminate how stereotypes about India function as synapses that traffic between real and imaginary ways of how India may be read as part of the global literary and cultural marketplace.16 The theater of the stereotype aligned with the Jaipur Literature Festival illustrates the symptoms of stereotyping with which this book is concerned. In literary contexts, stereotypes muddle distinctions between
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real, historical conditions and their surreal aesthetic figurations. Even the staging of the scene of literary conversations, such as that of the festival, necessitates ethical negotiations about how South Asia circulates globally as a sign of a fixed or versatile cultural type. “The sign,” writes Roland Barthes, “is a follower, gregarious; in each sign sleeps that monster: a stereotype.”17 The myriad provocations that have sprung from the Jaipur Literature Festival make the urgency of locating and reading the ethical charge of aesthetic stereotypes all the more pressing. As both gregarious and monstrous signs, stereotypes pose critical questions for how representations of South Asia are generated and fathomed. In a sense, the fact that the festival itself, repeatedly characterized as “chaotic,” and “controversial,” has come to stand in for a certain representation of South Asia speaks to the slipperiness of stereotypes.18 Even when seeming to order a world—the festival as an organized forum for South Asian literature—the festival as stereotype escapes such ordering. The highly charged public arguments—about whether the festival should embrace a conspicuous consumption of literary arts alongside other glitz, whether Anglophone contexts overly dominate native language issues, whether some forms of free speech should be curtailed as hate speech, and the like—reveal instead the vast political and ethical stakes involved in reading the festival itself as a representational window into India. Beyond this, the Jaipur Literature Festival provides an example for what happens in the world of fiction itself, particularly within global Anglophone fiction, when certain works are self-consciously sampled as exemplary of South Asia.19 The difficulties of representing South Asia, apart from stereotypes, are what the festival allows us to glimpse. Speaking at the event, Amit Chaudhuri made the observation that, “if, as an Indian writer today, you write about say a samosa, you’ll be criticized for selling out to the West or deliberately exoticizing India. The Indian imagination, in its current form, has no room for the samosa in samosaness.”20 It is this fluctuation between real and representational South Asia that stereotypes, whether of samosas or something other, track. This book also follows the difficult politics of reading that such representations of South Asia initiate. If one of the problems is that the “real” thing, place, people, milieu, etc., is obscured by the politics that attach to its representation, then the other is the spectacular mobility of such stereotypes. To put it in another way, stereotypes often slide, as this book will reflect, seamlessly from page to
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picture and back as they do from literary to popular cultural consciousness and back, thus gaining a kind of widespread cultural currency. The novelist Amitav Ghosh offers this as his reflection on the uproar over Rushdie’s visit to Jaipur: “But the controversy also raises questions about another issue that touches directly upon writing: this is the way in which literature is coming to be embedded within a wider culture of public spectacles and performances.”21 Ghosh’s point touches upon two very seemingly disparate aspects to the festival that coalesce in the debates over Rushdie and free speech. The first is the manner in which the festival crystallizes all such ethical questions that arise around literary works in the form of social spectacle, or “tamasha,” as he calls it. The festival as a cultural spectacle, he argues, displaces issues central to literary representation itself onto other realms. Thus, the interaction between writerly intention and reader reception foregrounded by the “tamashastan” of the festival’s arena usurp the ethical problem posed by the literary text itself. Ghosh critiques the spectacular stage of the festival as an inadequate and obscuring forum for arbitrating the “deep anxieties about how certain groups are perceived and represented,” a task he sees as intrinsic to books themselves.22 Rather, he says, “books should have lives of their own,” and readers should be able to relate to the world of the book unmitigated by the politics of its presence in such book fairs.23 Although he writes in defense of Rushdie’s right to attend, Ghosh reflects on the larger conditions of the occasion that warrants that books be publicly scrutinized by readers in the presence of authors, who are then held publicly accountable for the worlds they imagine. It is this straightline correspondence between authors, texts, and readers that Ghosh finds most troubling about how festivals market literary consumption. Ghosh’s argument that books should be regarded as speaking for themselves and stripped of festival-style arbitration is important for a few key reasons. It situates the conflicts that rage in public over group representations as a textual one, always in excess of the mediating influences between readers and the author. Further, it allows us to step away from the overly local contexts of how a particular book is presented in its context, to consider a range of its significations across various cultural terrains. And, lastly, it suggests that the type of anxiety a book generates about what it represents may not always be readable in the context of publicly avowed positions. Rather, the ethical quandaries of a text may in fact engage some deeper
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dilemma about how group stereotypes are invoked, function, and transform across aesthetic and cultural spectrums. Indeed, it is interesting to note that the organizers of the Jaipur Literature Festival have themselves become wary of the type into which this event seems increasingly cast. In the aftermath of the festival’s Rushdie Affair, Dalrymple wrote, “Increasingly we have seen ourselves, and the festival we run, caricatured beyond all recognition.”24 It seems here that Dalrymple is recognizing one force of stereotypical rendering into which the festival has fallen. As caricature, the event imagined as a robust contemplation of literary culture in South Asia seems to have morphed into something static and unrecognizable from its ideal form. The solution that he later proposes to this problem is to elevate the level of critical discourse at the event. To do away with the festival’s stereotype as a superficial and warring cultural tour of exotic India, he reveals a new strategy: “I thought I’d sock them with Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha for a year.”25 The entry of postcolonial theory on the scene is precisely how the festival staged itself in 2013. Aside from Mahasweta Devi’s keynote, there were proper literary critics of difference in attendance who might situate the event itself as a version apart from its ready stereotype. Ironically, immediately following Spivak’s panel, which was widely praised as well as dismissed, Spivak in an interview relayed her experience of the exercise thus: “I have never sat in a panel where no one [from the audience] asked me a single question.”26 The failure that Spivak’s comment points to is not about the failure of literary critics such as Spivak and Bhabha to communicate meaningfully about postcolonial literature. Rather, this attempt by the organizers to counterpose proper criticism to popular ones of the festival misses the main problem that haunts it. The variously articulated, often conflicting stereotypical idioms through which South Asia becomes legible in artistic work may be deliberately given to opacity and estrangement. The ethical considerations produced by the alienation effects of stereotypes, in other words, need to be thought beyond what may be hashed out in public conferences even in the presence of revered critics. Hence, the kinds of passionate disagreements that the staging of literary culture in Jaipur has provoked suggest that there are crevasses that cannot be traversed by the artifice of a quick theoretical fix. The festival as stereotype, in other words, conjures phantasms about South Asia whose ghosts cannot easily be laid to rest.
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What vision of the global south prevails in our encounters with art— specifically narrative art—that turns on cultural stereotypes? This is the main question that motivates the substance of In Stereotype. As the example of the festival shows, stereotypes of uneven global development circulate freely in global literary texts and contexts alike. They provoke disputes that stem from well-known narratives about civilizational backwardness and progress, about the world divided into dangerous and safe zones. The prevalence of such stereotypes in contemporary literary texts, however, also reflects the vexed position of readers caught in their thickness. They compel consumers of the global novel to confront a set of ethical questions: How does my presence as a reader involve me in these storied images of suffering elsewhere in the world? What attention do these novels call to us as voyeurs into life-worlds mediated by stereotypes? How do representations about the lives of others conjoin phantasmic ideas about cultural otherness with life as it is lived by real people, in real places? Moreover, what kind of an ethical web do portraits of ruptured communities and disavowed lives construct in which we find ourselves so tangled? For as readers must often admit, repelled as they may be with narrative stereotypes, they are often oddly moved by them. It is why global novels about other worlds continue to endure and allure. The encounters between readers and texts, however, always remain singular. Each act of scrutiny remands viewers as individual, meaning-producing witnesses called on to relate to shifting yet set representations influenced by their own singularly differing subjectivities, their sense of self as affective and social beings, their racial, cultural, and gender identifications. This is to say, the most salient understanding about narrative stereotypes may well be that while they seem to project certitudes about the lives of others, they are actually equally about us. These texts offer insight about how stereotypes circulate to mediate the enigma of relations between “self ” and “other,” to gesture to ways in which our ideas of otherness are ultimately reflections of how we see ourselves.27 Hence, our encounters with stereotypes of otherness, this book suggests, is very much about an apprehension of how we see ourselves placed in the world. The debates about literary culture that swirl around Jaipur, and contemporary fictions about South Asia require that we read these fictions with an insertion of ourselves between the frames. As millennial readers
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and consumers of the global novel, we are caught, it seems to me, between competing narrative frames, incongruous chains of signification that force us to contemplate our own truth systems. In each instance, participants and readers must contend with what is being conveyed. Is it that globalized India is draconian and corrupt, in need of desperate reform? That national kinship ties, including all possibility for communal loyalty and love, is undone by squabbles over private property and transnationalized identities? That a brutal discommoning of shared inheritances is under way in India? That life itself is made illegible and unimportant by such conflicts? Or, quite conversely, is it to confront us with the knowledge that narratives of cultural difference are always replete with obdurate and inscrutable stereotypes? The extent to which we commit to one or other interpretive view reflects the extent to which we believe that hyperreal and obviously constructed narratives such as those presented in fiction emit some form of truth. That there is a veracity to them that irreducibly links the representational to the real. That they communicate something more than can be gleaned from seeing them merely as artistic arrangements conditioned by the point of view of a singular artist. That the worlding of stereotypes in this art, however problematic or predictable, also exceptionally reveals our vision, hopes, fears, and fantasies about the world that we inhabit.28 The reason I bring up the literary festival as prologue is to highlight the provocations around literary stereotyping that it offers—provocations that In Stereotype will attempt to address. I extend here the following theses about stereotypes that this book unpacks: 1. Stereotypes in art or literature meld real and fantastic worlds. 2. Stereotypes are both formulaic (repeating the same) and wildly speculative (reproducing difference). 3. Stereotypes move us affectively through insistent repetitions. 4. Stereotypes may seem to be about others but are equally about us. 5. Stereotypes complicate the burden of meaning-making between text and reader, making the witness complicit in the histories that stereotypes signify.