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Chetan Bhagat and the New Provincialism

2015; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/abr.2015.0113

2153-4578

Ulka Anjaria,

South Asian Studies and Conflicts

Chetan Bhagat and the New Provincialism Ulka Anjaria (bio) Chetan Bhagat is one of India's bestselling English-language authors but is virtually unheard of abroad. Together, his six novels have sold seven million copies. His fifth novel, Revolution 2020 (2011), sold one million copies in a mere three months and several of his other books took only a little longer to do the same. He writes in a simple English that is available to a range of education levels and fluencies. His stories are straightforward—they are plot driven, contain mostly flat characters, and eschew the allegorical, magical and metatextual features that had defined Indian English literature in the 1980s and 1990s. For this reason they are disliked by most critics in India, who decry the commercialization and standardization of the Indian novel his works represent. But Bhagat's novels do offer a vision for Indian literature, even as it is one opposed to the cosmopolitan ethos of the Rushdie generation. I call this vision a new provincialism. If Rushdean cosmopolitanism was a modernist celebration of exile and critique of the nation, the new provincialism is skeptical of the west and grounds its ethos in "the people." The new provincialism is thus, based in India's small towns rather than its global megalopolises; it offers an imagination of national futurity that is based in India rather than abroad; and it offers Indian English as thoroughly indigenized into the pragmatic political imaginary of India's massive middle class, rather than as the language of the modernist elite. For several decades the Indian English novel represented the epitome of cosmopolitanism, evident in the works of Indian English novelists from Salman Rushdie to Jhumpa Lahiri—who use English to celebrate difference and heterogeneity—and captured in the excitement with which The New Yorker described the photograph of eleven Indian English novelists featured in its special fiction issue, in June 1997: The photograph…was taken in London on the morning of May 30th. Two weeks earlier, the plan had been to have it taken in New York. In truth, the photograph could have been taken just about anywhere…anywhere, that is, except India. That issue of The New Yorker was published in 1997—the year Arundhati Roy stormed the literary scene with The God of Small Things, and four years after Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) won the Booker of Bookers. In the 1980s and 1990s, Indian English's global reach made it the primary idiom in which to express frustration with the failures of the nation-state to live up to its promise; this was best done in a language slightly at odds with the nationalist imagination. Unlike India's myriad of vernaculars (Hindi, Bengali, and so on), English represented a perspective that contained India but went significantly beyond it; exile, diaspora and migrancy were the privileged terms of the cosmopolitan, Indian English imagination. Since then, however, the Indian English novel has, in a word, returned home. The melancholic critique of nationalism that marked the novel has morphed into a more pragmatic critique of the inefficient state—pragmatic because rather than wishing for an India that never was, it lays out the policies and attitudes that need to change for India to be strong in the future. Indian English is central to this critique—but in its most pared down, de-aestheticized form. Idealism has been replaced with utilitarianism, and consequently, Indian English is now a platform of possibility rather than only of loss. American readers might be most interested in Bhagat's novel One Night @ the Call Center (2005), as it offers a glimpse into the lives of six young people working at night for the call center of an American appliance company. But One Night is the only Bhagat novel set wholly in Delhi; the others are set in smaller or less cosmopolitan towns: Chennai, Patna, Ahmedabad, Varanasi—and that is not by accident. The earlier generation of cosmopolitan writers used Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata as launching pads to locate their otherwise globe-spanning tales: think of Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines (1988), Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988), or Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland (2013). If...