PUBLISHERS OF INDIAN FICTION CREATE A NEW ORIENTALISM
(18 April 2006)

According to Houston-based literature academic Anis Shivani, people in the West do not receive their attitudes towards India from news coverage or holidaying there but through the narrow range of fiction that multinational publishing conglomerates have chosen they shall read. It is not because such books are necessarily more authentic or better written than others but because the books and their authors are marketable to western tastes.

English-language authors, such as Amit Chaudhuri, Manil Suri and Pankaj Mishra, convey an exoticised, quaint, traditional and often class-bound view of India which reinforces westerners' impressions of lands untouched by progress or the modern world. This 'boutique multiculturalism' Shivani calls the new Orientalism.

After studying a large number of new novels, their promotional literature and their reviews, he concludes that the fiction being promoted is one that filters the Indian experience so as to give readers in the West a false sense of empathy and participation. This effect is achieved by the new Orientalism's avoidance of everything real and troubling - 'there is little or no sense of politics, history or economics', and certainly no sense of colonialism. Instead, the books focus on the soft edges of identity crises and on the exotic - often with an overemphasis on spicy food!

Shivani is not against all English-language fiction written by Indians and aimed at western readers. He contrasts the works now being sold to the West with more profound and challenging ones such as 'Shame' and 'Midnight's Children' by Salman Rushdie and 'The God of Small Things' by Arundhati Roy.

On the new Orientalism, he concludes: 'Western reviewers and critics ignorant of South Asia appear to take these novels as realistic depictions of contemporary India.' But 'the exotic consumer product known as Indo-Anglian literature is limited in its strangeness by considerations of instant marketability. Western publishers guarantee the success of these books by engaging in massive pre-publication hype, committing huge advances and promotional campaigns and being able to count on flattering reviews.'

ABOUT ANIS SHIVANI

Anis Shivani grew up in Los Angeles, and attended Harvard University, graduating with honors in 1994. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards for social science and humanities research, including Ford and Mellon. He researched public policy in education, labor and development at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a freelance journalist, he has written opinion pieces on a wide range of cultural, economic, and political topics: everything from the WTO and globalization, to impeachment and the Florida recount.

He is the author of two novels, The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist, and screenplays based on these novels. He is a published poet as well, most recently in The Café Review.