Postcolonial Servitude : Domestic Servants in Global South Asian English Literature

Postcolonial Servitude explores how a new generation of contemporary global, transnational, award-winning writers with origins in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh engages with the complexities of domestic servitude as a problem for the nation and for the novel. Servitude, to be distinguished from slavery, is a distinctive and pervasive phenomenon in South Asia, with a long history. Unprotected by labor laws, subject to exploitation and dehumanization, members of the lower classes provide essential services to employers whose homes become the servants' workplace. South Asian literature has always featured servants, usually as marginal or instrumental. This book focuses on writers who make servants and servitude central, and craft new narrative forms to achieve their goals. Identifying a blind spot in contemporary postcolonial studies, this is the first full-length study to focus on domestic servants in Anglophone postcolonial or South Asian literature and to examine their political, thematic, and formal significance. Offering fresh readings of well-known early to mid-20th-century writers, this book shows how South Asian English fiction conventionally keeps servants in the background, peripheral but necessary to the constitution of an elite or middle class. It analyses closely the formal strategies, interventions, and modes of representation of five younger writers (Daniyal Mueenuddin, Romesh Gunesekera, Aravind Adiga, Thrity Umrigar, and Kiran Desai), who, it argues, pull servants and servitude into the foreground, humanizing servants as protagonists with agency, complex subjectivities, and stories of their own. Postcolonial Servitude reveals a cultural shift in the twenty-first century postcolonial novel, a new attentiveness, self-implication, and ethics, linked with a new poetics. Cover Postcolonial Servitude Copyright Contents Preface Acknowledgments A Note on the Cover Introduction PART ONE 1. Constituting (from) the Background: The South Asian Literary Servant in the Margins, or, Early South Asian English Fiction from Below 2. The Servant(’s) Turn, in the Middle Ground: Rushdie and Transnational Writers After Rushdie PART TWO 3. Foregrounding the Servant: What’s New About Daniyal Mueenuddin’s Interlinked Short Stories 4. From Periphery to Center: The Male Servant as Narrator and Protagonist in Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef 5. In the Driver’s Seat?: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger 6. Sharing Space: Alternating Female Servant-​Employer Narratives in Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us 7. Legacies of Servitude, Global and Local: Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index Domestic servitude is a widespread phenomenon in countries like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, where even lower-middle class homes rely on domestic workers (mostly women and children). While social scientists have begun to study this unregulated and exploitative "informal sector," literary critics have not paid attention to servants in South Asian literatures or examined their political or literary significance. Postcolonial Servitude argues that a new generation of writers has begun to rethink this culture of servitude and to devise new forms of writing designed to prompt change in normalized ways of seeing and being. It is the first to offer a sustained exploration of servitude and servants in South Asian English literature, from the early 20th century to the present.