Abstract
Speaking at the 2014 Jaipur literary festival, British novelist Martin Amis made a sweeping comment on the meteoric success of Indian writing in English (IWE): ‘[T]he English novel was parochial in the 80s. Indian writers have given us the colour. We badly needed it.’2 Amis’s claim puts a questionmark on the whole issue of the UK’s reception of IWE as, according to him, IWE was given a warm welcome because of its ability to provide what Graham Huggan has termed ‘exotic’ features and what Francesca Orsini discusses as ‘fantastical’ writings, rather than necessarily being welcomed for its literary merit. Anis Shivani also makes a similar accusation against IWE as it is disseminated in the USA when he says that ‘American conglomerate publishing interests seem to be finding a ready supply of Indian novels in English that enact the commodification of exoticized Orientalism in global capitalist exchange’.3 The same can be applied to contemporary IWE, marketed and circulated throughout the world today. Lisa Lau rightly links this commodification of IWE, catering to Western readers, to the adoption of re-Orientalist4 strategies. The situation in terms of the Western reception of IWE has reached such a state that Tabish Khair even argues that ‘the best thing that can happen to Indian writing in English today is if it runs out of well-meaning British patronage’.5
Indian life is plural, garrulous, rambling, lacking a fixed centre, and the Indian novel must be the same.1
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Notes
Francesca Orsini (2002) ‘India in the mirror of world fiction’, New Left Review, 13(Jan–Feb): 75–88.
Martin Amis (2013) ‘Indian writers make English literature richer’, http://ibnlive.in.com/news/indian-writers-make-english-literature-richer/141639–40-103.html (accessed 10 April 2014).
Anis Shivani (2006) ‘Indo-Anglian fiction: The new Orientalism’, Race & Class, 47(4): 1–25.
See Lisa Lau (2009) ‘Re-Orientalism: The perpetration and development of Orientalism by Orientals’, Modern Asian Studies, 43(2): 571–590.
Tabish Khair (2011) ‘Foreword’, in Om Prakash Dwivedi (ed.), Literature of the Indian Diaspora, New Delhi: Pencraft International, p. vii.
Lisa Lau and Ana Mendes (eds) (2011) Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics: The Oriental Other Within, London: Routledge, p. 28.
Pavithra Narayanan (2013) ‘Transcending borders in publishing: The example of Mallika Sengupta, Bengali woman writer’, in Adele Parker and Stephenie Young (eds), Transnationalism and Resistance: Experience and Experiment in Women’s Writing, New York: Rodopi, p. 267.
Salman Rushdie (1992) Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism1981–1991, London: Penguin, p. 10.
Kwame Anthony Appiah (1995) ‘The postcolonial and the postmodern,’ in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffins (eds), The Post-colonial Studies Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 119–124.
Sarah Brouillette (2007) Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 24.
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© 2014 Om Prakash Dwivedi and Lisa Lau
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Dwivedi, O.P., Lau, L. (2014). Introduction: The Reception of Indian Writing in English (IWE) in the Global Literary Market. In: Dwivedi, O.P., Lau, L. (eds) Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437716_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437716_1
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